I’m getting a little lazy about my updates here—I’m going to try to be better for November, though I hope without solving my problem by reading less.

Like The Fortress of Solitude, I heard a lot about this book and got a bunch of recommendations from friends. It was no disappointment. And since I am too busy today to write more about the book, I will point you towards this essay, Middlesex and the Limitations of Myth, from the The Intersex Society of North America (ISNA).

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iness

This book got my heart if anything for the Brooklyn scenery.

Here is a better take on it than I can manage right now.

It’s hard to read a book like this for the first time, after hearing so often what an amazing read it is. I felt kind of disappointed in it until the last few letters, which are just plainly beautiful.

I believe that nearly all our griefs are moments of tension. We perceive them as crippling because we no longer hear signs of life from our estranged emotions. We are alone with the strange thing that has stepped into our presence. For a moment everything intimate and familiar has been taken from us. We stand in the midst of a transition, where we cannot remain standing.

And this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either—it is already in the blood. And we do not find out what it was. One could easily make us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been changed, as a house is changed when a guest has entered it. We cannot say who came; we shall perhaps never known. But many signals affirm that the future has stepped into us in such a way as to change itself into us, and that long before it manifests itself outwardly.

I love what Rilke writes about loneliness as well. I’m sure I’ll return to this again someday.

Since I started taking a black and white photography class, I’ve been going through the bibliography and browsing through the various texts recommended. This one initially gave me this feeling of being entirely amateur about my lack of process but in the end I just tried to extract the info that is helpful to me. We’ll be covering the zone system in class, so I probably didn’t need to start reading this so early.