An introduction
Welcome to this peculiar little corner of the internet. My name is Henry. Consider this an assortment of curated pieces reflecting a variety of things, including who I am, who I would like to be and general musings on the nature of existence. Enjoy.
About
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
So you know.
This might be the real one, y’all.
what the hell? i could use some luck *hits reblog*
World Heritage Post
reblogging again… need it bad lol
desperate times call for desperate measures 🙏🏽
I need luck in the form of a really slow and quiet week omg please
ok I don’t know what it is about this post but I just found a job advert that perfectly matches my expertise and it’s paid very decently. aaand it’s 1h drive from where I live now! (rn my office is 2h by flight and I pay taxes in another country so if I want free medical help I have to take plane)
Really need this right now with the phd funding getting all fucked up 🙏🏻
love as recognition
anna gavalda / friedrich nietzsche / clarice lispector / jandy nelson / rebecca perry / mhairi mcfarlane
2024.11.03
I'm trying to find more peace with 'ugly' productivity. I am vulnerable to the allure of perfection, especially the kind encapsulated in pristine layouts, writing and appearance. Alas, images are not a lived reality. This blog is not a lived reality either, but I would like for it to be somewhat accurate to life. On a different note, I'm idly pondering ways of structing my commonplace. It is almost exclusively text, the exception being film stubs, and I dislike the circle indexing system as that doesn't help me easily find specific information. I would keep a running index digitally, but I have just a few too many loose quotes without further context slotted into the book. Very open to suggestions (and general thoughts related to commonplacing).
I am reading a book on Algebraic Geometry (The Rising Sea by Ravi Vakil) along with a group (i am behind on the readings but oh well).
And I am going to dedicate this post to all my favourite quotes from the book.
beginning with the preface:
all time winner:
Brothers in arms [also fighting through Vakil rn]
another one joins the hunt [same here man]
I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.
Okayokayokayokaybut "My hand will wear out but the inscription will remain" is kind of a power line BEFORE you factor in that it is, in fact, over a thousand years old.
It’s always good to spend a few moments, on a quiet day, looking through the Family album.
think that everyone has their own personal theme in life
every nolan film is about time. it winds its way through his filmography; it is fractured in memento, distorted in inception, expanded in interstellar, reversed in tenet.
every hopper painting is about stillness. it is found in every brushstroke; at dusk in automat, at dawn in morning sun, at noon in office in a small city, at night in nighthawks.
i have a friend who orbits ideas of power, another who delights in the prosaic and the plain. one weaves around systems and structures, another returns always to wonder at the sea.
there are other elements of course - our lives cannot be measured by single concepts no matter how large they may be - but time and again i think we return to the things that fascinate, the things that intrigue, the things we cannot quite tear ourselves away from. the themes of our lives.
I read Betsy Lerner’s The Forest for the Trees once years ago and have been carrying this idea she has about writers, form, and subject/themes around in my head ever since (bolding mine):
Finding your form is like finding a mate. You really have to search, and you can’t compromise—unless you can compromise, in which case your misery will be of a different variety. But just as there are probably only one or two people to whom you could commit yourself, there are probably only a few things you can write about, and only one genre, or maybe two, in which you might excel. It’s no coincidence that most authors’ bodies of work hover over two or three basic themes or take a single basic shape. Think of the novels of Trollope, Austen, Dickens, or Hardy; think of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They each revisited the same themes, settings, and conflicts over the course of their writing lives. The James Joyces of the world, those who can move from short story to novel to epic, are rare, but then again, few writers master each form the first time out of the gate.
Even though most writers have a limited literary arsenal, readers find infinite pleasure in watching those gestures change and deepen over time. But if you aren’t yet sure what your themes are or what category you should be writing in, you need to take a full accounting of all the reading and all thewriting you have ever done or wanted to do. If you are one of the many people who dream of writing but have never successfully finished or, perhaps, even started a piece, I suggest you compile a list of everything you’ve read over the past six months or year and try to determine if there is a pattern or common denominator. If you read only literary novels, that should tell you something. If you’ve always kept a diary noting the natural world in all its variety, you might want to try writing nature essays.
It never fails to surprise me, in conversations with writers who seek my advice as to what they should write, how many fail to see before their very eyes the hay that might be gold. Instead of honoring the subjects and forms that invade their dreams and diaries, they concoct some ideas about what’s selling or what agents and editors are looking for as they try to fit their odd-shaped pegs into someone else’s hole. There is nothing more refreshing for an editor than to meet a writer or read a query letter that takes him completely by surprise, that brings him into a world he didn’t know existed or awakens him to a notion that had been there all along but that he had nevermuch noticed.
Some of the most striking and successful books in recent history were clearly born of a writer’s obsession and complete disregard for what, supposedly, sells. Few editors would have gone for a queer book about a little-known murder in Savannah that took its sweet time describing every other quirkof the city and its inhabitants before addressing the crime.Whatever John Berendt was thinking when he set out to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, it couldn’t have been the bestseller list, because almost anyone in the publishing industry would have told him that nobody would care about the story of a gay antiques dealer who languished in jail after shooting a cheap hustler. The book does, however, draw on what most certainly are Berendt’s strengths as a reporter, as a travel writer, and as a southerner with a gothic sensibility and taste for the macabre. Clearly, he was born to write this book, and he worked through whatever ambivalence and uncertainty he might have felt within himself or encountered from others.
Most writers have very little choice in what they write about. Think of any writer’s body of work, and you will see the thematic pattern incorporating voice, structure, and intent. What is in evidence over and over is a certain set of obsessions, a certain vocabulary, a way of approaching the page. The person who can’t focus is not without his own obsessions, vocabulary, and approach. However, either he can’t find his form or he can’t apply the necessary discipline that ultimately separates the published from the unpublished.
a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up
WHY ARE YOU HAUNTED? // ON HAUNTED HOUSES
Frederick Kiesler Inside the Endless House // The Haunting of Hill House (2018) cr. Mike Flanagan // Lisa Robertson Magenta Soul Whip // Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? // V.C. Andrews // Heather Havrileskyb Haunted Womanhood // Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House // The Haunting of Hill House cr. Mike Flanagan // Tracy K. Smith Ash // Anatomy (2016) cr. Kitty Horrorshow
not all of it is bad i think….…. we are going to be okay i think.
20241012
Though I am halfway through the notebook that is my dedicated commonplace book, I'm not exactly sure how to fix it anymore. Removing of structure makes it too messy and makes it impossible as a reference piece, adding even more structure makes it too unwieldy to add entries into. Perhaps the inherent problem is looking for this optimization, instead of just trying to make it work for me. Life is busy, thesis work is busy. I want to document more, to share more but I am unlikely to take photos and feel increasingly uncomfortable with being online, not so much because of the people as it is the corporations and the way the internet is changing (though admittedly, the players do play a role). I want to be seen, but I don't really want to be known.
Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.
Reblog if you're okay with people coming into your DMs with the "you seem really odd and your blog intrigues me, do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters"
May Sarton, from “Contemplation of Poussin”, Letters from Maine
Initiation Well Location: Sintra, Portugal
A pair of wells, called the Initiation Wells, spiral down deep within the earth, like inverted towers. The wells were never used to collect water. Instead, they were part of a mysterious initiation ritual within the Knights of Templar tradition.
