“Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it”
Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit
An ongoing digital archive of 1,364 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.
Category is
Book
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“Men, she suggested, should stop looking at clothes as signifiers of gender and class and just enjoy them.”
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“It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children’s bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears, only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant does not erase.”
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“Do you know what a cliché is? It’s a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.”
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This edition elaborates understandings of the party by considering the hidden, the invisible, and the underground as material and imaginary forces, where partying is not only festive and excessive, but manifests in forms of social and political organizing, cultural and subcultural conversation, the maintenance of safe spaces and the building of parallel structures against established institutional forms.
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“What Elsie Mendl had was something else that’s particularly American—an appreciation of vulgarity. Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”
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“The question is not if design will remain a viable profession in post-industrial societies, but for how long.”
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“I don’t think the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
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“Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.”
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“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive. Some day all of this will have to be will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
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“One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.”
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“You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.”
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“As the garment industry left the United States, it undid the work of industrial feminists like Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman, who had the audacity to demand that intellectual satisfaction was the birthright of every sewing machine operator. This new brand of feminism didn’t care to protect sewing work as good work; rather it scoured the earth to find the cheapest new sources of exploitable, female labor.”
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“But now isn’t simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until—later of sooner—perhaps—no, not perhaps—quite certainly: it will come.”
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“There is a kind of energy born out of shame, formed by and in it, that can act as a force for transformation. This energy finds its expression in a theatricalized identity, in performance, in a love of display or extravagance, in parody. Self-display and theatricality are and have been among the most important means of defying heteronormative hegemony—and this is why they have always been the objects of such virulent attacks.”
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“Most of life is so dull it is not worth discussing, and it is dull at all ages. When we change our brand of cigarette, move to a new neighborhood, subscribe to a different newspaper, fall in and out of love, we are protesting in ways both frivolous and deep against the not to be diluted dullness of day-to-day living.”
