Category: Commonplace

Quotes, art, questions, videos, podcasts, music, and whatever else inspires.

Hit Em Where It Hurts

Sunshine, bathe me, lately life’s been crazy
Your Eyes, tell all, we outside with it, your call
Move me, Need Me, care about it, breath deep
You see, what I miss, holdin on to ya with a tight grip
Light Lit, no cap, heart spilled all over the Floor mat
Tongue out, I don’t know how to hold that
Nowadays I don’t really want to hold back

So I hit em where it hurts
So I hit em where it hurts, (Set sail, lighthouse, Search)

Sever the Sightlines

[S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).

— Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Civilization Is Relative

The Invention of Race // Throughline Podcast

“[Franz] Boaz introduced ideas into American life that shape how we think about the world to this day. Race is a construct, culture is relative, Western civilization is not inherently greater. History is not linear, and neither is human progress.”

Controlling Experience

Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””

— Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays