Laura Mullen Quotes

Quotes about:

• So when we're told to "move on" or "let go," we should take a look at who is saying it and why, and when we see repetition happening it's worth trying to understand it before attempting to shut it down.

  Laura Mullen

  Letting Go, Moving, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• Wherever something is "pinned down" there's a little hole - at least one - more likely many.

  Laura Mullen

  Littles, Holes

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• Given our examination of the behavior of our police forces at this moment the question of protection has an extra resonance, yes?

  Laura Mullen

  Police, Examination, Protection

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The failure of protection, the importance of recognizing the ways in which we influence (and infect) each other - the fact that being an "individual" can't protect you - these are issues I've been thinking about for a while.

  Laura Mullen

  Thinking, Issues, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• And Complicated Grief is a text that announces, from the start, in its citation of influence, dense intertextuality and hybridity, a failure of some apparent or usual protections, and a need to re-examine "identity" in the light of an acknowledgement of our entanglements and interdependence.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Light, Identity

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.

  Laura Mullen

  Years, Gertrude, Syllabus

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• The most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own "complicated grief" in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.

  Laura Mullen

  Ideas, Stories, Shapes

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• "Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.

  Laura Mullen

  Italian, Self, Disease

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Helen Vendler calls this kind of interrogation of a work "roads not taken," suggesting that it's useful, when writing critically, to consider what differences it makes to the work or the encounter with the work if changes are made. It's one way of better understanding your experience, comparing it to other possible experiences you can imagine having.

  Laura Mullen

  Taken, Writing, Differences

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.

  Laura Mullen

  Art, Book, Confusing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• With Complicated Grief I can say that there was a certain simplification in the process. Getting older means less wasted effort, things are clearer earlier. Being young meant flailing around a lot, especially as I was trying to invent new shapes without a ton of models.

  Laura Mullen

  Grief, Mean, Effort

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection!

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Book, Fire

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step.

  Laura Mullen

  Cancer, Thinking, Epidemics

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There's a nice clear difference between real protection (wash your hands, or wear a condom) and the fake protection offered by institutions which often come, finally and sadly, to be much too interested first of all in protecting their own power.

  Laura Mullen

  Real, Nice, Hands

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Book, Fire

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In Frankenstein there is a transfer first of life into death (in the creation and animation of the monster), and then of death into life, as the monster takes his revenge on the father who gave him life but withheld recognition.

  Laura Mullen

  Revenge, Father, Monsters

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Oh my research. Well, I got an English Degree. And I got that degree in a certain time/at a certain place. If you add UC Berkeley + 1984 the other side of the = is "new historian" meaning that I studied with and was influenced by those who were interested in how the personal shaped the political (and literary), how science and literature might interact, and what the body got to do with it.

  Laura Mullen

  Uc Berkeley, Political, Degrees

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?

  Laura Mullen

  Book, Doe, Hey

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I'm interested in finding new and more humane modes of safety, and in exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.

  Laura Mullen

  Safety, Arbitrary, Protection

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Maybe one way to think about it would be in the context of the historical development of germ theory. The problem of childbed fever was not significant until the development of a male-dominated medical establishment made possible the situation in which a professional might move from touching a corpse (for the purposes of study) to putting his unwashed hands up against, or into, a woman in labor.

  Laura Mullen

  Moving, Thinking, Hands Up

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Star Wars film is breaking all previous box office records. (Why might we want to revisit those characters, that narrative, those jokes and tropes again, in this way, right now? I wonder what it will turn out to reveal about the economics and politics of this moment.)

  Laura Mullen

  Stars, War, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Is it possible that where the subject is socially approved (tah tah tah TAH tah, it's war) almost no one thinks we're "stuck," but when we think too much about what no one else wants to think about, as well as when we think without the thoughts evolving, then we're seen as trouble (and / or troubled)?

  Laura Mullen

  War, Thinking, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.

  Laura Mullen

  Song, Effort, Desire

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• In a museum in El Paso, Texas, there's a map that shows all the places the border between the U.S. and Mexico has been (because it shifted) - I find it very clarifying (not confusing) to be reminded that everything we feel like we've really pinned down is transient, arbitrary, and marks the site of a painful if not violent negotiation, one that may not have ended.

  Laura Mullen

  Museums, Texas, Confusing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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