live | learn

As you might have noticed, I've been thinking lately about why I blog or write. Why bother.

Why spend countless hours shuffling around words on a computer screen and to what end?

What does it mean to focus on my 'personal writing'? Does blogging and writing in my diary count? Should I write only for publications that pay? Or dust off my neglected manuscript?

.....

For now though I want to share a few beautiful lines with you:

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

- M Train by Patti Smith -

Nostalgia is so certain: the sense of familiarity it instills makes us feel like we know ourselves, like we've lived. To get a sense that we have already journeyed through something––survived it, experienced it––is often so much easier and less messy than the task of currently living through something. Though hard to grasp, nostalgia is elating to bask in––temporarily restoring color to the past. It creates a sense memory that momentarily simulates context. Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited; it doesn't require the difficult task of negotiation, the heartache and uncertainty that the present does. 

- Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein -

I've been reading a lot of 'music memoir' lately. 

Out of interest but also because I really, really want to write about music. and well.

Inspired by M Train, I've taken to Polaroids again.

Ah, the magic of film and not knowing how a photo will turn out.

The double-exposed photo happened by accident (result of not pressing button hard enough) while the second photo was taken at twilight. Overexposure taught me to observe light.

Live and learn.

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One last quote:

I have a strange relationship with music. It is strange by virtue of what I need from it. Some days, it's the simple things: distraction, entertainment... Then, sometimes, usually early in the part of the morning that is still night time, most especially lately, I am painfully aware of every single thing that I need from music, embarrassed by what I ask of it. Having developed such a desperate belief in the power of music to salve and heal me, I ask big, over and over again... I want it. I need it. Because all these records, they give me a language to decipher just how fucked I am. Because there is a void in my guts which can only be filled by songs.

- The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper -