gentillefemme cambrioleuse

formerly arsonlupin icon by @veggiecakeface

[lengthy-artery]

tshirt concept

[oysters-aint-for-me]

there’s a used bookstore in rural western massachusetts (the montague book mill) whose motto is “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find” and i just feel like that summarizes tumblr too

[oysters-aint-for-me]

posts you don’t need on a site you can’t search

[palukoo]

in MY production of ragtime, evelyn nesbit and emma goldman would make out sloppy style and I would initially offer no comment on this frankly wild departure from previous productions so critics and fans would be left to interpret this choice and some would probably think it was a dumb shallow woke left add lesbians to it thing and some people would be trying to take me seriously and be like well it’s a commentary on celebrity and labor movements and how they intersect and like a very wide sweeping application which is would be in some ways but really it would be about how evelyn nesbit and women like her were exploited by the same systems and people who exploited workers and how capitalism is not the only reason for the woes in evelyn nesbit’s life but it did very much create the conditions which enabled the continued abuse of her and how she was discarded by the wealthy people she had depended upon and done things for the benefit of much like workers but also about how as a woman like avenues of financial success were so much more limited and how she was cut off from any sort of solidarity or ability to organize in contrast to unions and labor and how she was supposed to be and framed to be this rags to riches story but ultimately would always be expendable and about how capital and the legal system are so deeply entangled and well really a lot of things and surely a lot more in terms of what it says about emma goldman too but frankly I just know less about her as a person. but it would also be because I just think it would be fun to make them kiss. where would this go in the show??? uh idk next question.

[ot3]

ultimately I think the place where I will never see eye to eye with the "you can do whatever you want forever" people is in the precision of language. I do think it is genuinely important for words to have widely agreed upon definitions that are only flexible to the same degree that the rest of a given language is. a word whose definition is whatever suits the speakers preference and makes them the most comfortable doesn't have any real reason to exist and serves no linguistic function. i support anyone's desire to do whatever they want so long as it's not hurting anyone, but there are always going to be words that accurately describe what they're doing and ones that don't.

[ot3]

[boybeetles]

Hahah every trans person loves [product]. Trans culture is [music by cis people]. I mean [cis person] is soooo trans-coded. To be trans is to like [video game]. Queer culture is pretty much just [product]. Spend money spend money spend money consumerism labubu . Stuff animal . Video game . Generic Pop Star . Celebrity .

[pixkete]

hhhmmm

[sez-sez]

MY THEY IS BACK

[cyanideoreo]

Can you tell I LOVE THEM.

[tropiyas]

weaponized competence

[tropiyas]

learned helpfulness

[b0nkcreat]

i'm your only friend (realizes that's statistically unlikely) i'm not your only friend (considers my positive qualities) but i'm a little glowing friend (suddenly gets cold feet) but really i'm not actually your friend (remembers to be confident in relationships) but i am

[americangirldollwho]

requested by anon

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[anglaised]

60% of ur adult life is just groceries and interior design

[ieatratsyummy]

They could never make me hate you, complex female character whose reaction to trauma was not pretty and digestible like how people think it should be.

[rozzed]

why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? it won't hurt him....

[letterful]

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s. 

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

[letterful]

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

[shadowen]

This is an anti-despair checkpoint! You must share something you're looking forward to before scrolling on.

[aidashakur]

realizing nothing can fill my void other than doing everything i promised myself i would do