[certainrivers]

something fairly cursed about having the kind of sex at like, 30 that one probably ought to have been having at 19. but 19 was a time for Greater Horrors in my sex life so what can u do. except now i have left my earrings at this man's house so am probably going to find myself doing it again like an idiot fml. loneliness makes people do crazy things u know

[selkiese]

wawa

[goresevraq]

there is something perfectly intentional in the way flike managan does his adaptations. it's not like he's careless or stupid or just wants to cash in on name brand recognition. shirley jackson does not have name brand recognition, at least not among his target demographic. he's genuinely in conversation with the texts he adapts, and is making very specific choices, except these choices all live in service of redeeming the name of the nuclear biological family and making sad little tut tut noises at the big mean bigots.

sometimes if you're lucky he'll chuckle and say well yes my dear old mother is a bit racist. but really she's a loving wife so why does it matter. also people of colour are never depicted in his #1 artistic priority (loving marriages with children) but whoops don't look to closely into that!! isn't rahul kohli a smokeshow?

[goresevraq]

anyway this is why it pisses me off when people say "it's good if you watch his shows divorced from the original book!" because. well because they're still soppy, spineless, and only good for the vfx artists to flex their skills. but also it's not just an unrelated story. his adaptation work is bad because he specifically set out to remedy the paranoia of the source material with the power of church weddings and group therapy.

he has not sanded the edges off just for marketability's sake! i really believe that he has a keen and sincere artistic vision which is repelled by the disgusting shit that made henry james and shirley jackson's work so good. his work does not agree that there is violence in a caretaker's total authority. it does not tolerate ambiguity. it is obsessed with innocence and righteous suffering. incidentally, this taming of the screw makes his junk more marketable. but that's just a side effect! he is just a symptom! maybe i hate the environment that let him be successful and not the man himself! and also the monologues fucking suck.

[goresevraq]

despite my flapathy i am forced to acknowledge his new ventures once a year whenever this post picks up a modest few notes. anyway this year i'd like to recommend 'Turning the Screw of Interpretation' by Shoshana Felman, an incredible essay about the relevance of psychoanalysis to literary criticism. I recall the show making allusions to ideas touched on in this essay, but don't ask me where or how. I've since deleted all memory of his work.

but in light of the new adaptation (my condolences.) here's a section about ambiguity in Henry James's work:

[hangsawoman]

therapist: and what do we say when we feel like this?

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

therapist: no

[cyclesofmystery]

Clare Victor Dwiggins, 1908

I was amused by this rather “freaky” bit of Edwardiana, especially since I always got the feeling that Charles Dana Gibson, when drawing the Gibson Girl, was at least partially fantasizing about being stepped on or something.

[certainrivers]

I am in so much trouble, emotionally speaking. Somebody free me!

[certainrivers]

repeatedly making bad and undignified choices in my personal life AS IS MY RIGHT xox

[womenandcats]

Stanislao Lepri, La Chambre De Leonor - Une Fantaisie (1965)

[coffeeandcigarettesv9]

[mybeingthere]

Pieter Bruegel the elder - “I am touchy and out of my senses bull-headed, so I bang my head against a brick wall”, from “Twelve proverbs”, 1558.

[avocado-moon]

Donate to Support Eva Marciano’s Stem Cell Transplant Journey, organized by LIsa Marciano

Our beloved niece, Eva Marciano, has been courageously battling a se… LIsa Marciano needs your support for Support Eva Marciano’s Stem Cell

hello everyone. this is my dear friend's sister. please give if you can and reblog/spread to share either way. thank you

[inanesinlovewithiwtv]

[aerithisms]

the gulf between how genuinely progressive and forward thinking the franchaela storyline is compared to the rest of the show and ESPECIALLY what they're doing with eloise is kind of comical. like one minute we're doing delicately written subtext that sensitively addresses the self-blame a lesbian may feel compounded on top of the self-blame from her infertility issues for not being able to be a wife to a man "the right way" in a storyline that is going to lead to self-acceptance that will come from her liberation from heteropatriarchal norms and the next we're doing a woman who has spent 4 years straight insisting she doesn't want to get married on feminist grounds having her political convictions worn down for choice feminism and The Power Of Love. like what is going on here.

[chantssecrets]

John Singer Sargent - Study for Judgment, c. 1903

[sacred-portal]

[certainrivers]

i'm reading Leonora Carrington's short stories and two cabbages just had a terrible fight. this book rules

[devoutjunk]

"Not long ago an outlet interviewed an author whose book was marketed as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey. I adore retellings, and I’m fascinated by work that examines gender in antiquity. But I felt my hopes fall when the author readily admitted to never having read the epic, dismissing the poem as backward and boring, whereas her tale—of course—was dynamic and new. Well, I thought, that’s not a fucking retelling then, is it? Retellings can and do grapple with or criticize or slyly comment on their source texts, but buried in the premise of the genre or form is an actual, active engagement with the story being retold. This desire for genre’s trappings without any of its rhetorical commitments or risks is not unique to contemporary SFF. How often does a show marketed as a social satire lack the courage to commit to its critique, or a mystery novel make certain promises within its premise that it fails to meet (or creatively subvert)?

Caroline, you might be saying by now, who cares where a book gets shelved at Barnes and Noble or if VampyreBabe98 thinks Anne Rice is committing thought crimes from beyond the grave? And you know what, fair. There is so much to care about, and so much more pressing and dire than any of this bullshit. But I still think we need the tools of genre more than ever, and we need the varied worlds and works genre fiction offers us in all their nuance and complication. Le Guin wrote:

“To describe society since the mid twentieth century— global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked— we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy. García Márquez wrote his histories of his own nation in the fantastic images of magical realism because it was the only way he could do it.”

Fantasy, she claims in the same essay, is our first and oldest kind of fiction, and perhaps that long lineage sometimes allows us to explore in the realm of the fantastic what we cannot off the page or confined by the limits of a more realist lexicon.  There are many great contemporary genre authors following in Márquez’s footsteps, writing their vital histories and futures in the only way they can, with the tools at hand. I hope when those books find their readers, we are ready for them, and we read them with the care and curiosity they deserve."

--Caroline Shea (April Newsletter: New Fiction, Imagined Languages, and Who's Afraid of Genre? (pt. 1000))