a. natasha joukovsky
extracts blog
After Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, where he tracks allusions to whales and cetology, I keep a running list of references to recursion, innovation, mythology, and glamour.
Thomas Love Peacock | NIGHTMARE ABBEY
"We are most of us like Don Quixote, to whom a windmill was a giant, and Dulcinea a magnificent princess: all more or less the dupes of our own imagination..."
Young the Giant | MIRROR MASTER
“Look in the mirror
Familiar figure
Staring right back at me…”
THE PRINCESS BRIDE
MAN IN BLACK: All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice | EVITA
"And as for fortune and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired..."
Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
"Keen as her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered..."
Geoffrey West | SCALE
"Mandelbrot's insights imply that when viewed through a coarse-grained lens of varying resolution, a hidden simplicity and regularity is revealed underlying the extraordinary complexity and diversity in much of the world around us..."
Jonathan Swift | GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
"So, naturalists observe, a flea,
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum."
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice | EVITA
"I came from the people, they need to adore me
So Christian Dior me from my head to my toes..."
Virginia Woolf | A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Henry James | THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY
'Well, you're not in love with her, I hope.'
'How can that be, when I'm in love with Another?'
'You're in love with yourself, that's the Other!'
George Eliot | MIDDLEMARCH
"Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind."
Arcade Fire | CREATURE COMFORT
"Some boys hate themselves
Spend their lives resenting their fathers
Some girls hate their bodies
Stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback..."
Thomas Love Peacock | HEADLONG HALL
"I think you must at least assent to the following positions: that the many are sacrificed to the few; that ninety-nine in a hundred are occupied in a perpetual struggle..."
Arcade Fire | REFLEKTOR
"I thought, I found a way to enter
It's just a reflektor (It's just a reflektor)
I thought, I found the connector
It's just a reflektor (It's just a reflektor) Just a reflektor..."
Jonathan Franzen | PURITY
"There's that great passage in Proust where Marcel talks about imagining the face of the girl you've only glimpsed from behind. How beautiful the unseen face always is..."