Some favorite quotes from Zadie Smith's essay Speaking in Tongues:

"... I haven't described Dream City. I'll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin—well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues."

"Throughout his campaign Obama was careful always to say we. He was noticeably wary of I. By speaking so, he wasn't simply avoiding a singularity he didn't feel; he was also drawing us in with him. He had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can't see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. (...) how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn't so strange to them."

"It's amazing how many of our cross-cultural and cross-class encounters are limited not by hate or pride or shame, but by another equally insidious, less-discussed, emotion: embarrassment."

"A hesitation in the face of difference, which leads to caution before difference and ends in fear of it. Before long, the only voice you recognize, the only life you can emphasize with, is your own. (...) I believe that a flexibility in voice leads to a flexibility in all things."

"[Obama] He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation, but rather a proper and decent human harmony."

Speaking in Tongues
Changing My Mind
Zadie Smith

I really enjoyed this essay, as I don't often seek out or read pieces about being multicultural, biracial, w/e. I might start reading more about it, as it was an issue that was stirred in me at PSO.

a quote from the Dalai Lama's autobiography:

"Then at four, tea was served. If there is anyone who drinks more tea than the British, it is the Tibetans. According to one Chinese statistic I came across recently, Tibet imported ten million tons of tea annually from China before the invasion. This cannot possibly be true as it implies that every Tibetan drank almost two tons per year. The figure was obviously invented to try to prove Tibet's economic dependence on China, but it does give a indication of our fondness for tea."

His voice is great to read. At once it is humorous, kind hearted, and objective.
I just finished House of Leaves last week. It was good. It's hard to pin point one or another thing to say about it- eerie, suspenseful, well researched, long. I didn't really have any favorite quotes other than the use of the endearment, "My little eye sack." eww.

I suppose I should watch the Oscars, since I was in Kodak Theater last week anyways.
More to come on roadtrips to L.A.

the call of the wild. jack london. some quotes.

i'm trying to save parts of the books i read because otherwise they quickly become distant memories of something i might have read. plus, i rarely talk about books with people... so it's hard to take away anything if i don't write it down.

"With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. [...] It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery."

London's views on evolution and instinct are interesting. So invested and convinced of these exact theories, that there is no other side. He writes about them in an elementary sense, giving the reader concise and non-reputable examples. Not to say I disagree with him, it's just weird to me that anything should seem definite & unquestionable. Guess that's the point, animals don't question.

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive."

beautiful, complete. London starts this paragraph referencing the call that lures men from cities to the woods, these two impulses chase each other like he says (the need to feel life and then feeling it in absence of all else).

"... the call still sounding in the depths of the forest. [...] Sometimes he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells;"

I like the imagery & how tangible London makes the wilderness in descriptions of moss & earth. Yup, it draws me back to camping & mts.

"I think I concluded that love was not so
much two people laughing together as one
looking funny to the other."
- kim aeran "run, dad!"

some quotes i've liked thus far in the unbearable lightness of being.

"In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak."

i struggle with the division of concepts into dualities, like weak and strong. duality is a way to simplify, to me, and it often isn't simple at all. also, i haven't quiet disarmed all the connotations that "weak" has as relating to the female gender. but anyhow, the female character is weak because of her total dependence on another human being in a foreign country (they emigrated). it's a horrifying situation to come to depend solely on one human for everything (love, empathy, social interaction, whatever else). it's really easy to get that lazy in relationships, etc. the worse part of it is the question of do you stay together or not & why.


"She had the overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women, Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, 'You don't know how happy I am to be with you.' That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."

the difficulty of communication. we can't express what we mean.


"Try as she might to intensify the longing, summon it to her aid, lean on it, the feeling of distaste only grew stronger."

falling out of _____.