Month: December 2011

reading this hurts less than living it

a principle source of gravity

The bus travels over the Lion’s Gate Bridge and I think, unbidden, of last year, a trip up a mountain, falling down in snow, the beginnings of what turned out to be love. Inside the suddenly knotted fist in my chest, I feel a spike of cold, hateful self betrayal, and my throat pointlessly closes up. “Limbic system,” I recite in my head, “amygdala, the hippocampal neurons that are associated with emotions and memory. Stress response. Low order post-trauma. Fight, flight or engage. Possibly vestigial dopamine, triggering a surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline into the bloodstream.” The words are clinical, chosen for distance, for a way to codify and distract my complicated grief. I want this banished, but the only person that can break the spell keeps me bound. They hide. They give nothing. “A bodily state of anxiety”, I think. “The deadly effects of adrenaline during emotional suffering may be due to a direct attack of adrenaline on the heart.”

What would you do if you only had minutes to live?

Filmography 2011, by Gen Ip

  • Films in order of appearance: http://filmography2011.tumblr.com/
  • The Making of Filmography 2010: An Interview with Vancouver artist Gen Ip.
  • Filmography 2010. (I cannot even begin to accurately unpack just how glad I am that she made another one this year. These make me so happy.)

    • Listen to the song. Read the comic. Kiss some stranger.

    The newest breath-taking treasure from The Secret Knots is Music For Stray Days, a special collaboration with The Impossible Girl AKA Kim Boekbinder!

    The song in the comic, (featuring the violin strings of none other than our favourite fey, Meredith Yayanos), is available to download as a pay-what-you-want.

    don’t you remember how It used to be beautiful

    The Letter
    by Dana Gioia

    And in the end, all that is really left
    Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable—
    That somehow we deserved something better.
    That somewhere along the line things
    Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s
    In charge, which certainly would have set
    Everything straight between us and the world,
    Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.
    Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.
    Or sent by mistake to an old address
    Whose new tenant put it on her dresser
    With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting
    To give it to the landlord to forward.
    And we still wait like children who have sent
    Two weeks’ allowance far away
    To answer an enticing advertisement
    From a crumbling, yellow magazine,
    Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,
    Checking the postbox with impatient faith
    Even on days when mail is never brought.