#feeding on your brain

[odettecarotte]

Louise Glück, NYT

Louise Glück, photo by Charles S. Hertz

b. 1943

The Nobel-winning poet was pitiless to herself, yet fiercely generous toward her students.

By Amy X. Wang The New York Times

She stood barely five feet tall — slight, unassuming, you had to stoop low to kiss her cheek — but whenever Louise Glück stepped into a classroom, she shot a current through it. Students stiffened their spines, though what they feared was not wrath but her searing rigor: Even in her late 70s, after she won the Pulitzer and the National Humanities Medal and the Nobel, she always spoke to young writers with complete seriousness, as if they were her equals. “My first poem, she ripped apart,” says Sun Paik, who took Glück’s poetry class as a Stanford undergraduate. “She’s the first person whom I ever received such a brutal critique from.” Mark Doty, a National Book Award-winning poet who studied under Glück in the 1970s at Goddard College, felt that she “represented total authenticity and complete honesty.” This, he recalls, “pretty much scared me half to death.”

Spare, merciless, laser-precise: Glück’s signature style as a writer. It was there from an early age. Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child, was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, “Firstborn”: “Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.”) In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely.

So she took, in 1971, a teaching job at Goddard College. To her astonishment, being a teacher unwrapped the world — it bloomed anew with possibility. “The minute I started teaching — the minute I had obligations in the world — I started to write again,” Glück would confess in a 2014 interview. Working with young minds quickly became a sort of nourishment. “She was profoundly interested in people,” says Anita Sokolsky, a friend and colleague from Williams College, where Glück began teaching in 1984. “She had a vivid and unstinting interest in others’ lives that teaching helped focus for her. Teaching was very generative to her writing, but it was also a kind of counter to the intensity and isolation of her writing.”

Glück’s own poems became funnier and more colloquial, marrying the control she earlier perfected with a new, unexpected levity (in her 1996 poem “Parable of the Hostages”: “What if war/is just a male version of dressing up”), and it is her later books, like the lauded “The Wild Iris” from 1992, that made her a landmark literary figure. Teaching also coaxed out a new facet in Glück herself: that of a devoutly unselfish mentor, a tutor of unbridled kindness.

A less fastidious writer and thinker may have made their teaching duties rote — proffering uniformly encouraging feedback or reheating a syllabus year after year. Glück, though, threw herself into guiding pupils with the same care and intimacy she gave to her own verses. “There was just this voraciousness, this generosity,” says Sally Ball, who met Glück while studying with her at Williams and remained close with her for the three decades until her death. “Every time I moved, she put me in touch with people in that new place. She enjoyed bringing people to know each other and sharing the things she loved.” And as a teacher, Ball says, “Louise was really clear that you have to make yourself change. You can’t just keep doing the same things over and over again.” In that spirit of boundless self-advancement, Glück also taught herself to love cooking and eating. She once hand-annotated a Marcella Hazan recipe and mailed it to Ball, with sprawling commentary on how best to prepare rosemary. “She’s very beautiful and elegant, right,” Ball says, but “we’d go to Chez Panisse and sit down and she eats with gusto. It’s messy, she’s mopping her hands around on the plate.”

Paik recalls spending hours each week decoding Glück’s dense, cursive comments on her work. “I was 19 or 20,” she says, “writing these scrappy, honestly pretty bad poems, and to have them be received with such care and detail — it pushed me to become a better writer because it set a standard of respect.”

“She was 78, and whenever she talked about poetry, it felt like the first time she’d encountered poetry,” says Shangyang Fang, who met Glück when he was at Stanford on a writing fellowship. Glück offered to edit his first poetry collection, and the pair became close friends. “She would talk about a single word in my poem for 10 minutes with me,” Fang says. Evenings would go late. They cooked for each other sometimes, spending hours talking vegetables and spices, poetry and idle gossip. “By the end, I couldn’t thank her enough, and she said: ‘Stop thanking me! I am a predator, feeding on your brain!’”

[bigfatbreak]

Hello I love your art!!! I was reading through your changeling au and Felix mentions that fae are creatures of mirth. They literally need attention to survive. But what kind of attention? I guess I'm wondering because Adrien has been in the public eye for a while now, but has been personally neglected for even longer. What does that mean for him? Is he starving? Is he in danger of dying? Does he even know it? (I assume not given he doesn't even know he's Fae).

If he is starving / in danger of starving who is the first to realize this?

it depends on the mirth, on the attention, on what it is they seek. Without making things too complicated - I don't like to define everything into neat little boxes after all, there's fun in nuance - Felix is just explaining from his experience, the Fae he was with tended to be "entertained" by certain aspects of their playing, which was the mirth that kept them relevant. Relevancy more than anything is really what keeps their wheels greased.

In Adrien's case though, the reason he's cloying for so many names and to have so many thralls and attendants is because he SHOULD be a more social creature and has been kept woefully alone. He is kinda starving in the way a fae starves - he's relevant, but only in an image his father constructs OF him, which means it isn't REALLY him - and he has no one to play with. No friends, no lovers, and no rivals, makes a very sad fae

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

AGH FASHION DESIGNER SUGURU AND MODEL SATORU W A NEW INTERN DESIGNER UNDER THEIR WING 😞😞☹️ - 🌺

WAHHHH I LOVE THIS 🥺🥺🥺 the pining and flirting and slowburn of it all… model!satoru and his favorite designer suguru geto, both of them undeniably skilled and born with an eye for fashion….. well-known and adored……..

designer!suguru who gets tasked with showing you the ropes, who’s always so patient and kind despite your inexperience. diligent with his teaching but also so laidback, so easy to talk to… he looks intimidating, but he’s so polite that you can’t help but swoon a little. and he admires your enthusiasm so much…… grows fond of you soooo quickly bc you’re just such a breath of fresh air compared to the divas he’s forced to work with all the time. he thinks you’ve got real potential and he wants to nurture it.

and ofc you end up running into model!satoru eventually…. bc he’s always hanging around suguru whenever he gets the chance. and he’s maybe a little jealous that you’re hogging so much of his personal designer’s attention, but… he also thinks you’re so cute . T_T like a little puppy following suguru around… so excited to be apart of what you’ve dreamed of for so many years……… he looks into your eyes and sees the same sparkle he had before he made it big, and it makes his heart race.

yeah . i’m just thinking abt the peaceful coffee breaks with suguru….. how he’d insist on paying for your drink, ”since he’s your senior” (he wants to be your favorite </3)…… and how he’d just be so protective over his little intern. don’t get me started on the close proximity with satoru when you’re taking his measurements, the glance and smile he sends your way during an impromptu shoot… the way he always calls for you with a sweet coo of ”how’s my favorite intern doing today?”

😔😔😔 yeahhhhhh. they make me feel ill.

[lavender-phoenix-flames]

The posts about jc wanting to raise sizhui as his own doesn't only frustrates me but it is also hilarious cuz this man can't even raise jin ling without being physically and verbally abusive, he seethes at the very mention of a wen and you think he will raise wen yuan as his own cuz he like a son to wei wuxian so by your logic he is sizhui's 'uncle' now.

What a cruel joke are playing on a child whose whole family got slaughtered by the very seige lead by jiang cheng and the levels of suffering his Xian gege had to go through cuz of jc. Sizhui is polite but that doesn't mean he would tolerate someone like jc.

[appeypie]

Demise and ghirahim remind me of rose quartz and pearl from Steven universe

DO IT FOR HIM…..

[sea-lanterns]

EHEHHEHE little thief Mouse!Reader being caught in Xilonen’s Workshop

Xilonen who’s usually meticulous about her work seemingly leaving around a few pieces she could get easily because of her reputation afterwards

Mouse Thief falls for the trap every time unfortunately.

Hybrid AU on my mind 24/7 and the new posts on the Genshin Twitter aren’t helping

AWWWW LITTLE THIEF MOUSE READER! 🥺

Xilonen leaving her workshop in disarray because she’s lazy, so ofc she attracts the attention of a certain mouse who snacks on the crumbs and leftover food she leaves lying around. ALSO, idk if you guys know this story, but there’s a video on the news about a mouse cleaning up the clutter in this guy’s workshop and it reminded me of Mouse! Reader and Xilonen…

Imagine Xilonen coming back to her workshop and being confused because why is her cluttered work table suddenly put away and organized? Well, turns out it’s a little mousey who’s rummaging around her workshop and secretly cleaning things for her at night 😭😭 even as a rodent, Mouse Reader can’t believe Xilonen works in this filth.

Xilonen is sure to leave you some extra peanuts and treats for your efforts. Maybe even come up with a plan to trap you so she could meet her mysterious little cleaner 💕

[brewed-pangolin]

A million thank you's to the amazing @temeyes for bringing the enthusiastic menace that is Gym Rat Soap to life.

I can not begin to tell you how much I'm in absolute LOVE with this depiction of him.

I may let loose some very (VERY) NSFW Gym Rat Soap imagines/drabbles that embody Soap MacTavish from the game. But before he graces your screens and steals the spotlight of my inspiration, this is how he appears in my head.

Bouncing around like a madman while I'm trying to maintain some semblance of sanity.

And now he will forever be my snicker (attention) needing gremlin. Powerlifiting his way through the walls of my subconscious until I finally feed him and let him loose onto the unsuspecting Soap Squad.

So much love to you, Tim! 💛

[minnaci]

dreamy sigh... being hypnotized and trained until their commands are well and truly written in your subconscious... being so thoroughly corrupted that all it takes is a certain look or a specific word to make you weak at the knees... but best of all, seeing the love grow in their gaze as they shape and remake you into an object worthy of their affections <3

[idlenight-art]

Sure, Sylas 'the Dark Urge' Morte is officially the party leader. But every choice will be passed by his boyfriend first, just to be sure.

[tiringwritings]

a never ending saga of 📸

[princescar]

i head cannon matsuda to be asexual

Hes just like me fr

[zadralien]

Close close close

Tribute to @paynomindtotheinsanity Your Eyes Are Red on ao3

[sleepnoises]

re your tags on the doorframe post — any chance you remember the title or author of this article? it sounds really interesting

i am away from my laptop and therefore away from the syllabus from 2015 this article was in but am going to set a calendar reminder to check tomorrow at 10am pst. posting this because otherwise i will forget immediately. please tolerate the suspense

[sergle]

There's something about like. A certain genre of posts / Online Opinions about insecurity/depression/misery/complaints that are so unhelpful that they wrap right around to being straight up hilarious. and it's the ones that are more or less written to the tone of "Feeling bad? That's gross!" Like, just so you know, don't voice your insecurities/ have low self esteem, because that's offputting! You're gross and weird. Don't be insecure about that, though. That would be stupid if you felt insecure about people disliking you for being insecure. Not attractive. You should be thinking about being as attractive as possible. You shouldn't make comments about suicide, even if you're suicidal! Keep those thoughts entirely to yourself. Make sure nobody around you knows you're thinking about this. It would Make Them Uncomfortable. It's better to keep these thoughts in your head where they can fester. Don't post OR talk to friends with complaints about you feeling miserable or depressed. Tbh people who are sad/upset a lot? Kinda a red flag! You are probably miserable because you're a bad person and you've brought this on yourself. If you don't have friends, it's because you're awful to be around. Easy! Solved the problem for you. And no, there is no nuance to this, got it? So, make sure to feel bad about feeling bad, but don't feel bad about it, because, well, that's just gross. And annoying! You might've wanted your brain rotted thoughts to be Peer Reviewed, you might have just needed to vent- you might've been hoping for some comfort, to get things off your chest. Well, don't! Don't talk about thoughts or feelings that are negative with your friends, you'd be burdening them and that's only meant for THERAPY. #SponsoredbyBetterHelp #MentalHealth like, DAMN. that's so helpful. you're so good at helping. I um really liked the part where these are all hard and fast rules that encourage keeping feelings bottled up and keeping your friends at arm's length. That's really funny of you.

[fieryrottingham]

Intellect devourer Bingbing is asking for some headpats

[the-lady-hestia]

Pro tip

go for a run

Do you feel like shit? Anxious? Depressed? general emotional muck?

Put on some good shoes, a tee shirt and some pants, go outside, especially if its cold out, and fucking run as fast as you can for as long as you can

Humans are animals. We evolved to fight against things like lions and bears and shit. More specifically we evolved to outrun the bastards. When you run, especially when you kick it into the highest gear, your brain floods your body with adrenaline and endorphins (Da Good Stuff TM). Those chemicals react directly with stress hormones to produce serotonin and dopamine. Bad stuff gets turned into good stuff.

The key here is the running fast bit. Humans evolved into the evolutionary niche of endurance. If a mammoth tried to run away, we chased the thing until it collapsed from exhaustion. HOWEVER those little bits of genetics that say the solution to "problem" is "sprint" are still there and still have a biological reward system attached to them.

So when you're anxious, depressed, etc. use the 2000 BC cheat code of fucking bookin' it and I shit you not it works.

Edit: and for the love of god, hydrate