Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

Bookmarker tag: project/secret-life (25 notes)

Philosophy and Social Hope
by Richard M. Rorty

Trotsky and the orchids
by Richard M. Rorty

[...] Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me - in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats - 'hold reality and justice in a single vision'. [...]

i think about this a lot

—p.7 | Trotsky and the Wild Orchids | created Aug 27, 2017

The Flamethrowers
by Rachel Kushner

the sky was a vivid, seersucker blue
by Rachel Kushner

Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air. I thought of smashed horse chestnuts on the sidewalks of Reno. The feel of new corduroy. Of course I had a great story to report, and the hopefulness I sensed from the gold-edged leaves above me could have been my own.

I had run an errand for Marvin, dropping off processed film to an address on lower Fifth, and was on my way to meet Sandro. The NYU students loafing around the empty fountain in the park were trying out the fall fashions, the boys in sweaters of wholesome colors, orange, brown, and green. The girls in pleated, brushed-cotton coats and suede clogs or those oxfords with the wavy soles. Lace knee socks and hand-tooled leather purses with a long strap worn crosswise between the breasts. A few berets. In light, dry gusts, the air riffled the leaves, yellow as wax beans, and a few floated softly downward. In such hopefulness, even a beret seemed like a good idea.

—p.136 | created Dec 18, 2019

n+1 Issue 37: Transmission
by n+1

I retreated to my French literature gods
by Francesco Pacifico

All I had were words, but I had no warmth to infuse them with. I felt I had nowhere else to go but satire. Satire shares something with empathy, but it’s a contorted relationship. Maybe they’re stepsiblings. They’re forced to live together, but satire spends all its time bullying empathy. The first version of Class had a big satire problem. Since all I felt was sadness and loneliness, and guilt about the pleasures of traveling and partying, and also about the way literature had provided a way away from my family and that specific church across that specific street, I retreated to my French literature gods—Proust, Maupassant, Zola, Balzac, Flaubert—and chose to make fun of society. Fucking society! I crushed those characters and their mannerisms. I didn’t know what else I could do.

—p.111 | American Dream | created Mar 15, 2021

Happiness: Ten Years of n+1
by n+1

this naked golden light
by Kristin Dombek

I am less interested in zombie stories, though, than I am in this neighborhood’s particular light. The thing I most want to tell you is how the sunlight is here, but I don’t know how to describe it. It’s obviously the same sun that lights the rest of the city, but there is something different about it. Maybe it’s our lack of trees, or the reflection of the river, or the lowness of most of the buildings, or the supersaturated colors, deep reds and greens, the bright wild complicated graffiti. We don’t have the trees of South Brooklyn, the shady corridors of stoops, the tall stately brownstones of Fort Greene or Park Slope. We don’t have cobblestone streets. What we have is this naked golden light. It’s a thin, big-sky light, kind of Western, cinematic. Since the first day I saw it, it has alternately flustered and comforted me. Today its particular quality will have half the people in the neighborhood drinking in the afternoon. By five or six, some of the couples will already be fighting on the streets, one of them wrangling the drunker, more belligerent one home, because there is always a drunker, more belligerent one, and one who needs to feel like he or she is taking care of someone.

At the moment, though, a really tall guy on roller skates is coasting down the long steep slope of the pedestrian walkway with his legs and arms spread wide and the wind in his fingers. He has the biggest satisfied grin on his face. There are always a few people a day who roll like this, on bikes or boards or even just running, arms wide, falling down the bridge into Williamsburg, in the pretty light.

—p.362 | How to Quit | created Sep 12, 2020

The Mars Room
by Rachel Kushner

the light was gold from valley haze
by Rachel Kushner

“Did you ever see the green flash,” she asked him after class, “down at Ocean Beach?”

He had not, he told her. She explained that it was an optical effect at sunset, when rays from the top of the sinking sun turned green. She had never seen it either, she said.

“Are you sure it isn’t a story cooked up by the Irish drunks who live out there?”

She laughed. They were standing outside the school trailer. It was a June evening when the sun sets late. The light was gold from valley haze and low, slanting into her eyes, filling the irises.

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.

“Move it, Hall!” an officer yelled. It was time for evening count. “Move your ass, now! I said go!”

—p.266 | created Jul 25, 2021

MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction
by Chad Harbach

I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas
by Eric Bennett

People at Iowa love to love Prairie Lights, the local independent bookstore. In Prairie Lights I found myself overwhelmed by the literature of the senses and the literature of the quirky sensing voice. I wanted heavy books from a bunch of different disciplines; on hermeneutics, on monetary policy, on string theory, on psychoanalysis, on the Gospels, on the strange war between analytic and continental philosophers, on sexual pathology. I was twenty-three. I knew I wanted to write a novel of ideas, a novel of systems, but one also with characters, and also heart—a novel comprising everything, not just how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt (but that, too). James Wood did not yet loom over everything, but I wanted to make James Wood barf. At Prairie Lights, I would have felt much better buying the work of Nathan Englander (alum) if it had been next to that of Friedrich Engels. I felt there how I feel in bars that serve only wine and beer.

—p.57 | The Pyramid Scheme | created Jan 15, 2022

he has his thing that he does
by Eric Bennett

When I was at Iowa, Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-running successor, did not name the acceptable categories. Instead, he shot down projects by shooting down their influences. He loathed Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme. He had a thing against J. D. Salinger that was hard to explain. To go anywhere near Melville or Nabokov was to ingest the fatal microbes of the obnoxious. Of David Foster Wallace he growled, with a wave of his hand, “He has his thing that he does.”

Conroy hated what he called “cute stuff,” unless it worked, but it tended never to work. Trying to get cute stuff to work before a sneering audience is like trying to get an erection to work before a sneering audience. Conroy’s arsenal of pejoratives was his one indulgence in lavish style. “Cockamamie,” he’d snarl. “Poppycock.” Or “bunk,” “bunkum,” “balderdash.” He could deliver these quaint execrations in tones that made H. L. Mencken sound like Regis Philbin.

some character inspo?

—p.63 | The Pyramid Scheme | created Jan 15, 2022

The Candy House
by Jennifer Egan

time is irrelevant to math
by Jennifer Egan

What! How can so many thoughts and observations possibly have elapsed in so brief a period? An impressionist will answer along the lines of “The distortions inherent in our perception of time,” but to us counters, time is a bore— and not just because too much has been said and written about it. Time is irrelevant to math. [...]

just relevant to this idea i have for SL where she's thinking about how mathematical logic doesn't allow for the passage of time

—p.86 | created Aug 05, 2023

Bad Behavior
by Mary Gaitskill

her life in New York had been erratic
by Mary Gaitskill

Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 A.M. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked.

NYC inspo

—p.93 | Connection | created Apr 20, 2023

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories
by Lucia Berlin

We never did discuss Max
by Lucia Berlin

Well, anyway, after a year we had an affair. It was intense and passionate, a big mess. Jude wouldn’t talk about it. I left him to live by myself with the children. Jude showed up and told me to get into the car. We were going to New York, where Jude would play jazz and we would save our marriage.

We never did discuss Max. We both worked hard in New York. Jude practiced and jammed, played Bronx weddings, strip shows in Jersey until he got into the union. I made children’s clothes that even sold at Bloomingdale’s. We were happy. New York was wonderful then. Allen Ginsberg and Ed Dorn read at the Y. The Mark Rothko show at MoMA, during the big snowstorm. The light was intense from the snow through the skylights; the paintings pulsated. We heard Bill Evans and Scott LaFaro. John Coltrane on soprano sax. Ornette’s first night at the Five Spot.

NYC inspo

—p.255 | So Long | created Dec 20, 2023

Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill

I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty
by Mary Gaitskill

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.

NYC inspo

—p.129 | created Feb 21, 2024

The Maytrees
by Annie Dillard

time to read everything again.
by Annie Dillard

AFTER THEY MARRIED SHE learned to feel their skin as double-sided. They felt a pause. Theirs was too much feeling to push through the crack that led down to the dim world of time and stuff. That world was gone. They held themselves alert only in those few million cells where they touched. She learned from those cells his awareness and his courtesy. Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

cute

—p.31 | created Apr 03, 2024

Inside Story: A novel
by Martin Amis

the first thing it does is stop the clock
by Martin Amis

Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pregnant moment, and afterwards we’ll have a think about that epiphany, and we’ll…But the speeded-up world doesn’t have time for stopped clocks.

Meanwhile the novelists subliminally realised that in their pages the arrow of development, purpose, furtherance, had to be sharpened. And they sharpened it. This wasn’t and isn’t a fad or a fashion (far less a bandwagon). Novelists aren’t mere observers of the speeded-up world; they inhabit it and feel its rhythms and breathe its air. So they adapted; they evolved.

—p.66 | Guideline: The Novel Moves On | created Oct 17, 2024

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov

two golden ladders on the floor
by Vladimir Nabokov

In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.

—p.16 | SOUNDS | created Jan 06, 2025

I interrupted you with my silence
by Vladimir Nabokov

I looked you straight in the face. I looked with all my soul, directly. I collided with you. Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them—the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books. And, for the first time, your voice was limpid too. “You know what I’ve decided? Listen. I cannot live without you. That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’ll give me a divorce right away. And then, say in the fall, we could …”

I interrupted you with my silence. A spot of sunlight slid from your skirt onto the sand as you moved slightly away.

What could I say to you? Could I invoke freedom, captivity, say I did not love you enough? No, that was all wrong.

An instant passed. During that instant, much happened in the world: somewhere a giant steamship went to the bottom, a war was declared, a genius was born. The instant was gone.

—p.23 | SOUNDS | created Jan 06, 2025

our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings
by Vladimir Nabokov

[...] regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all its atoms were recombined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium, which was measured not by the lengthy separations but by those few meetings of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed. And with each new meeting I grew more and more apprehensive; no—I did not experience any inner emotional collapse, the shadow of tragedy did not haunt our revels, my married life remained unimpaired, while on the other hand her eclectic husband ignored her casual affairs although deriving some profit from them in the way of pleasant and useful connections. I grew apprehensive because something lovely, delicate, and unrepeatable was being wasted: something which I abused by snapping off poor bright bits in gross haste while neglecting the modest but true core which perhaps it kept offering me in a pitiful whisper. I was apprehensive because, in the long run, I was somehow accepting Nina’s life, the lies, the futility, the gibberish of that life. Even in the absence of any sentimental discord, I felt myself bound to seek for a rational, if not moral, interpretation of my existence, and this meant choosing between the world in which I sat for my portrait, with my wife, my young daughters, the Doberman pinscher (idyllic garlands, a signet ring, a slender cane), between that happy, wise, and good world … and what? Was there any practical chance of life together with Nina, life I could barely imagine, for it would be penetrated, I knew, with a passionate, intolerable bitterness and every moment of it would be aware of a past, teeming with protean partners. No, the thing was absurd. And moreover was she not chained to her husband by something stronger than love—the staunch friendship between two convicts? Absurd! But then what should I have done with you, Nina, how should I have disposed of the store of sadness that had gradually accumulated as a result of our seemingly carefree, but really hopeless meetings?

aaaahhh

—p.425 | SPRING IN FIALTA | created Jan 08, 2025

No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
by Haley Mlotek

I know I would do it all exactly the same
by Haley Mlotek

Looking back I can see that I always knew what I would have done. I once knew that my husband was so completely mine, and so every choice that followed was only another version of that knowing. I would do it all again, which is not the same as saying I will. When I think about everything I can remember—as many memories as I can hold at once, and then the ones that come up later, surfacing when I least expect them—I know I would do it all exactly the same, with all the same answers. I would say yes, say more, say never, say no.

—p.261 | created Apr 03, 2025

Intermezzo
by Sally Rooney

you have to read a lot of opening theory
by Sally Rooney

I don’t know, he says. The one thing I said to myself in the car was, if she comes inside with you, don’t start talking to her about chess. It takes up too much of my life already, to be quite honest. Like to say the absolute truth, I spend too much time on it, because I’m not even that good. Although it makes me really sad to admit that. You know, a lot of people told me I was letting it take up too much time, and I just thought they didn’t understand. But now I think, maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life. Like when other people were out having fun, getting girlfriends or whatever, I was at home basically reading. You have to read a lot of opening theory – that’s the beginning of a game, the first moves. Which have all been played before, so you just have to learn them. It’s not even that interesting, but it has to be done. So you have all these openings that come from books, and you have all these endgame strategies, which can be honestly kind of formulaic. And you’re learning all this for what? Just to get to an okay position in the middle game and try to play some decent chess. Which most of the time I can’t even do anyway. Sometimes I think, if I could go back to age fifteen, I would just give up. I was already pretty good then, I haven’t gotten much better. And I could have used that time to get more of a social life. I don’t lie in bed every night just thinking about chess, you know. I won’t go into detail on what I do think about, but I can tell you it’s usually not related to chess at all.

except in the case of the SL protagonist she doesnt regret it. she really really doesnt. this is the path she took which made her who she is. it's part of her and she's grateful for it.

—p.46 | created Apr 17, 2025

all as one the birds move together
by Sally Rooney

[...] He was in a good mood, and he wanted to kiss her, and for a while they kissed, and then without talking any more he made love to her again. It was obvious then that it was not going to be enough that he was too young and going through a bereavement. Those were solid sensible ideas, powerful enough for the surface of daily life, but not powerful enough for the hidden life of desire shared between two people. They ate breakfast together afterwards and had the coffee, and now they are walking in the laneway, quiet, contented, and the feeling between them seems good and somehow wholesome. As they turn the corner around the low stone wall, the lane dips down ahead, and rainwater has pooled in the hollow, reflecting the clear blue of the sky, and around the water she can see little birds, drinking and preening themselves. At the sound of the approaching footsteps, the birds lift themselves into the air, and there are more of them, many, starlings, with dark iridescent wings, and they lift themselves in one cloud into the blue air, rising, all together, while Margaret and Ivan both stop and look. All as one the birds move together, a dark cloud beating with the loud muscular sound of wings, ascending towards the overhead telephone wire, and strangely it seems now the cloud parts, one half rising up above the wire and the other half falling below, cut cleanly, and then together the two clouds combine once more into an edgeless and mobile arrangement, which is called a murmuration, Margaret thinks. Wow, says Ivan under his breath. Down by the pool of water a few smaller birds of a different kind are still bathing themselves, little sparrows, or finches. And the pale blue air all around them is still and silent, the leaves of the trees are silent and still. Margaret touches Ivan’s hand and he smiles and they go on walking. The other birds dart off through the air as they draw near. [...]

kinda similar to my scene in SL

—p.121 | created Apr 17, 2025

Splinters
by Leslie Jamison

she helped me write down recipes
by Leslie Jamison

My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.

Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.

She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.

i like this

—p.14 | created Apr 23, 2025

I had no illusions about my own innocence
by Leslie Jamison

Unless you say otherwise, people assume the end of a marriage involves an affair. So I am saying otherwise. This one did not. Just the mistake of two people believing they could make a life together, when in fact they couldn’t. Which is its own betrayal.

My parents’ marriage left me more allergic to affairs than to endings. But I knew there were people who felt otherwise—who believed the worst thing was giving up too soon.

I was certainly capable of infidelity—had inherited some version of my father’s capacity, even as I judged him for it. In the past, I’d cheated on two boyfriends—could still remember waking up in the beds of other men, trapped inside my own body like a rumpled, foul-smelling outfit I could not remove.

For me, cheating had been a way to avoid the work of either fixing a relationship or ending it. This time, with C, I did not want to avoid that work. But I was scared of myself. I had no illusions about my own innocence. Whenever I heard myself saying, I’d never do that, I heard a false promise. We can’t imagine ourselves doing many things until we do them.

—p.62 | created Apr 23, 2025

The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
by Esther Perel

all the while smiling inwardly at my own secret
by Esther Perel

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. “Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,”7 writes journalist Julia Keller. We all know from childhood the glee of hiding and keeping secrets. They make us feel powerful, less vulnerable, and more free. But this dark pleasure is frowned on in adulthood. “I’ve always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person,” says Angela, a punctilious Irish American paralegal who realized, through her affair with a client, that she enjoys sneaking around. “Discovering that I could act in total breach of my own long-held values was both bewildering and exciting at the same time. Once I was speaking with my sister, who was rattling away about the wrongdoing of cheaters, all the while smiling inwardly at my own secret. Little did she know that she was looking into the face of the ‘villain.’”

—p.24 | Defining Infidelity: Is Chatting Cheating? | created May 08, 2025

I have never felt like this before
by Esther Perel

Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another. At the deep end of the spectrum we have the love affair, where the accompanying bouquet of passionate feelings is integral. “I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before” is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because “to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.” For those involved in such an unparalleled love story, the term “affair” is inadequate, for it doesn’t begin to capture the emotional depth of the experience. “When you call it cheating, you reduce it to something vulgar,” Ludo says. “Because she had gone through something similar, Mandy was the first person with whom I’ve ever been able to open up about my father’s abuse. Yes, we had sex, but it was so much more than that.”

—p.29 | Defining Infidelity: Is Chatting Cheating? | created May 08, 2025

what does rebellion represent
by Esther Perel

While for some, breaking the rules is a long-deferred dream, for others, entitlement is a way of life. They simply assume they are above the rules. Their narcissism gives them license to breach all conventions. For them, infidelity is opportunism—they cheat with impunity, simply because they can. Their grandiosity is the master narrative.

All affairs are plots of entitlement, but I am particularly interested in the meaning of entitlement for those who have lived responsible, dutiful, committed lives. What does rebellion represent for these upstanding citizens? What are we to make of the self-contradictory nature of their trespasses, when the constraints they are defying are the very ones they themselves created?

—p.162 | Even Happy People Cheat: Mining the Meanings of Affairs | created May 08, 2025

you reconnected with an energy
by Esther Perel

This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial in helping people to extricate themselves from their affairs. The extramarital excursion will end, but their souvenirs will go on traveling with them. “I don’t expect you to believe me right now, but you can terminate your relationship and keep what it gave you,” I tell her. “You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that some of this also lives inside of you.”

—p.163 | Even Happy People Cheat: Mining the Meanings of Affairs | created May 08, 2025