[firemoss]

my sideblogs:

@donnahayward1972 (film)

@mtdays ( main !! )

[urgetocreate]

Andrea Calisi (Italian b.1968), The Bridge and the Blue Knight, 2026, Illustration

[theburialofstrawberries]

awesome awesome interview with Emily Wilson

[folklorespring]

Amazing

[ainecdote-remade-deactivated202]

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

[sloppity-bilepiper]

1. Europeans using Egyptian mummies as medicine

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

4. Zombies (which I would class as cannibals, since they were human and need to eat humans to live) have a root in Haitian folklore and represented enslavement.

[vintagedean]

adding that, if you can find it, cannibal culture by deborah root is about exactly this. the way the white western world is a hungry, destructive force that cannibalizes non-white cultures and creates wealth and status through the cannibal colonization of those cultures.

here's the intro

i almost think there's an essay in bell hooks' black looks about this too? yes! just checked, there's an essay called "eating the other"

[ambatya]

[weltenwellen]

On Seatbelts and Sunsets Hanif Abdurraqib

[textid]

text ID: And God, if you are listening, I do worry. God, if you are listening, I count the miles between my body and the body of the person I love and I worry about each of them. God, I worry about the planes we take to each other and the sky that might not hold them. God, I wear seatbelts and visit the graves of my friends in spring to kick away the dirt from winter. God, it is just us talking now, and I worry about everything I can't control. God, can you tell me how much longer I'll get to be alive and in love. God, I am sorry for the times I didn't want to stick around. God, there is a scroll of things I have taken for granted in order to survive this long, and it is endless. And it is maybe too late to want to live forever after everything I've seen and done. But there are freeways between me and the person I love, God. And I don't have enough time to travel all of them. I worry that I can't bend them all into a giant circle from where I begin to where she begins. God, I don't know what I believe in except the shrinking of distance. God, do you worry about the things you can control? I am enough in love to worry about everything that might cast a shadow over it. God, I have touched the living face of a person I love with the same hands I have touched the dying face of someone I love and none of that seems fair.

[likeagrapefruit]

mary oliver already said everything

[sailermoon]

james baldwin was so right when he said “the children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[rozzed]

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

[facelessoldgargoyle]

Jenny Holzer, Living, 1980-82

[noodledesk]

i really liked this essay on why literary fiction is sounding so much Like That these days, especially work by asian american authors:

This entire process selects for homework-doers, personal entrepreneurs, and individualistic bureaucrats. It's why, like I said, the oracular outsiders, the Pauls of the world, who can't conform to society's expectations to check boxes and become legible to the powers that be, aren't in these programs and aren't getting the opportunities that are downstream of them. It's why you end up with tons of fiction about "my white boyfriend" and "everyone online is mad at me" or "anxious strivers in NYC" or "my annoying polycule." These are the obstacles this class encounters. You can't spend time, like Cormac McCarthy did, living in an unheated cabin in the Smokies, or embedding with the Mujahideen like William T. Vollman, or working as a psychotherapist like Olga Tokarczuk. You must move from strength to strength, always turning in your homework on time, and certainly never suffering a psychotic break.

-- Trip, Estragon News, The Oracular Outsiders and the Homework Doers

[symbolicinteractionism]

i quite liked the conclusion to the piece:

Maybe it's because that fiction is being written for the people already bought in. Art that is made for the purpose of institutional legibility and approval is dead on arrival. Writing must stand on the outside, viewing the world at a tilt. Our world is being eaten by word machines that can imitate us perfectly. Unless American letters find the courage to welcome back in the oracular, it will disappear, replaced by machine that can conform to the demands of institutional legibility—really, the demands of capital—better than any human ever could.

[vlindervin7]

perfect poem

[mothcub]

The books await...

[diaryofaphilosopher]

"The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved."

— Justin D. Edwards, "Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas" in Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

[days-of-reading]

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts