easmainns

[easmainns]

what’s up lgbts i’m baaack

[easmainns]

what is and what can be

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a crucial question

if you aren't gay by now are you even trying

[easmainns]

perpetual hiatus

Hello friends.

A few unfortunate things have happened to me over the past few weeks; I have been hurt in ways that I did not know were possible, and I have paid a visit to dark lands I had once hoped I would never again see.  My naïve idealism about the beauty of the internet and its ability to facilitate connections that transcend geographical proximity has been shattered. Tumblr, a place where I had found solace, companionship and - dare I say? - empathy, has now come to represent the anthesis of all of those things.

Thus, I am leaving this website, with my 26,706 likes and my paltry smattering of posts.  I’ve gone quiet for months before, but this time is for good – I won’t be keeping up with my timeline anymore, even if I can’t bring myself to delete this blog.  I won’t be checking my ask box from now on, but there is still a way to contact me if you feel you must.

Goodbye, and thanks.

Update: If you were at one point particularly cozy with me on this website, I have a new, half-hearted attempt at some sort of private journal which I will probably abandon in a month’s time. If you would like to view it, please use the above link to send me a message and I will see to it that you can.

[easmainns]

The history section at Skoob Books, Russell Square, London - December 2014

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Deccan ragini from a Muraqqaʿ, Indian, collected ca. 19th c. x.

[theclubofqueertrades-deactivate]

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood

E.M. Forster on his novel, “Maurice” (via theclubofqueertrades)

[easmainns]

Tumblr user easmainns, please refrain yourself from getting sappy over Renaissance art this is #srs business. Signed: Tumblr user sforzinda, spokesperson for the Society of Renaissance Patrons Acting as Babysitters to Artists.

[easmainns]

In my time? … But what, exactly, does that mean? What, if anything, did one do at Cambridge, that would show the soul worthy of Siegebert of East Anglia—Or, John Cornford! Did one dodge lectures, cut halls, fail to row for the college, fool one’s supervisor, finally, oneself? Read economics, then history, Italian, barely passing one’s exams? Climb the gateway against which one had an unseaman-like aversion, to visit Bill Plantagenet in Sherlock Court, and, clutching the wheel of St. Catherine, feel, for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern? Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me. While oneself lived in a disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots, kept by a cripple, in a hovel near the station yard. Cambridge was the sea reversed; at the same time a horrible regression; in the strictest sense—despite one’s avowed popularity, the godsent opportunity—the most appalling of nightmares, as if a grown man should suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr. Bultitude in Vice Versa, to be confronted, not by the hazards of business, but by the geometry lesson he had failed to prepare thirty years before, and the torments of puberty. Digs and forecastles are where they are in the heart. Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, onto its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, or gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, snobberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged—giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war. It was as though that experience of the sea, also, exaggerated by time, had invested one with the profound inner maladjustment of the sailor who can never be happy on land.

Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)

[c86]

E. M. Forster - Maurice

Cover photograph: Teddie by Adolf Baron de Meyer, 1912

[nuwandaknows]

[easmainns]

Two young men, Crispin van den Broeck (c. 1550) x.

[easmainns]

55 Reading Questions

1. Favorite childhood book?

2. What are you reading right now?

3. What books do you have on request at the library?

4. Bad book habit?

5. What do you currently have checked out at the library?

6. Do you have an e-reader?

7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?

8. Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?

9. Least favourite book you read this year (so far)?

10. Favorite book you’ve read this year?

11. How often do you read out of your comfort zone?

12. What is your reading comfort zone?

13. Can you read on the bus?

14. Favorite place to read?

15. What is your policy on book lending?

16. Do you ever dog-ear books?

17. Do you ever write in the margins of your books?

18. Not even with text books?

19. What is your favourite language to read in?

20. What makes you love a book?

21. What will inspire you to recommend a book?

22. Favorite genre?

23. Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)?

24. Favourite biography?

25. Have you ever read a self-help book?

26. Favourite cookbook?

27. Most inspirational book you’ve read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?

28. Favorite reading snack?

29. Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.

30. How often do you agree with critics about a book?

31. How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?

32. If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you chose?

33. Most intimidating book you’ve ever read?

34. Most intimidating book you’re too nervous to begin?

35. Favorite Poet?

36. How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?

37. How often have you returned books to the library unread?

38. Favorite fictional character?

39. Favourite fictional villain?

40. Books I’m most likely to bring on vacation?

41. The longest I’ve gone without reading.

42. Name a book that you could/would not finish.

43. What distracts you easily when you’re reading?

44. Favorite film adaptation of a novel?

45. Most disappointing film adaptation?

46. The most money I’ve ever spent in the bookstore at one time?

47. How often do you skim a book before reading it?

48. What would cause you to stop reading a book half-way through?

49. Do you like to keep your books organized?

50. Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you’ve read them?

51. Are there any books you’ve been avoiding?

52. Name a book that made you angry.

53. A book you didn’t expect to like but did?

54. A book that you expected to like but didn’t?

55. Favorite guilt-free, pleasure reading?

[easmainns]

Ideal City, attr. Piero Della Francesca (c. 1470) x.

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The Nightingale's Song (excerpt of draft) by Roger Casement [Ruairí Dáithí Mac Easmainn] (ca. 1900-1916) x.

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An Architectural Fantasy, Dirck van Delen (1634) x.

[sword-punk]

To read a work of literature as an expression of heterosexual desire is literary criticism; to read it as an expression of homosexual desire is ‘appropriation’ or ‘prurience.’ Associating it with something in one’s own love life is either ‘conscripting a writer for the cause’ (gay) or ‘demonstrating its universal relevance’ (straight).

Graham Robb telling it like it is in “Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century” (via beeghosts)