call this exile

“It starts with you volunteering to be collateral damage after men with axes come to the house.” - Maddie C.

[99yikes]

he's had enough

[soncee]

Yuri art for women's month

[jam2go]

I'm going to need you all to trust me on this one and watch Teknolust (2002) Featuring bio-geneticist Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) and her three computer clones (Tilda Swintons) that live in her microwave.

[annori]

Barbara Kingsolver from Demon Copperhead (2022)

[havingapoemwithyou]

Man walking to work by Denis Johnson

[metamorphesque]

— Stolen Moments, Kim Addonizio

[1girl2jesters]

My frens wedding veil… “In this life and the after”

[victusinveritas]

This is a real picture taken by photographer Keinichi Ohno. It's a single photo of a bird standing at the edge of some water with a wall and its reflection creating a fascinating optical illusion.

[cyberfights]

this is an artistic rendition of my irrational fear of a head that attacks only under the cover of the very loud toilet flush in the scary top floor bathroom at the hospital and how i exited the bathroom when i decided to flush and run as opposed to my normal method of flushing and putting my back to a wall

[cyberfights]

took pics today at work to show common attack patterns and defense strategies that i employ

[outraspraias]

[cozyvu]

via yitaisart

[bemusedbibliophile]

I usually tell my students that “close reading” means looking at what is actually on the page, reading the text itself, rather than some idea “behind the text.” It means noticing things in the writing, things in the writing that stand out. To give you some idea of what this means, I’ve made up a list of five sorts of things that a close reading might typically notice: (1) unusual vocabulary, words that surprise either because they are unfamiliar or because they seem to belong to a different context; (2) words that seem unnecessarily repeated, as if the word keeps insisting on being written; (3) images or metaphors, especially ones that are used repeatedly and are somewhat surprising given the context; (4) what is in italics or parentheses; and (5) footnotes that seem too long. This list is far from complete—in fact, no complete list is possible—but the list is meant to begin to give you an idea of what sorts of things we notice when we’re doing close reading.

What all five of my examples have in common is that they are minor elements in the text; they are not main ideas. In fact, your usual practice of reading which focuses on main ideas would dismiss them all as marginal or trivial. Another thing they have in common is that, although they are minor, they are nonetheless conspicuous, eye-catching: they are either surprising or repeated, set off from the text or too long. Close reading pays attention to elements in the text which, although marginal, are nonetheless emphatic, prominent—elements in the text which ought to be quietly subordinate to the main idea, but which textually call attention to themselves.

Most of you have been educated to ignore such elements. You have been taught to seek out and identify the main ideas, dismissing the trivial as you go. This has had to be trained into you: read to a young child sometime, you will notice she has the annoying habit of interrupting the flow of the story to draw attention to some minor thing. Close reading resembles the interruptions of that child. It is a method of undoing the training that keeps us to the straight and narrow path of main ideas. It is a way of learning not to disregard those features of the text that attract our attention, but are not principal ideas.

Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Close Reading: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Vol.16, No.3 (Fall 2000), pg.7-8 (x)

[concupiscience]

Labyrinthine carved blocks for the divination of water or sacrificial blood from the megalithic temple of Malinalco, Mexico

[daweyt]

— Frank Bidart, from “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016; 'Guilty of Dust'”, published c. 2017.

[rotgospels]

Anonymous love letter between two twelfth-century nuns, Translated by Peter Dronke in Medieval Latin and the rise of European Love-Lyric, II.  

[apocryphics]

Steiner

[sacred-portal]