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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
@theartofmadeline
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almost home
styofa doing anything
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@hecaeteh
turning feminism from a radical social movement with the capacity to create real change into a fun quirky fandom that you can buy merch for at urban outfitters is one of the worst crimes of late stage capitalism/21st century western individualism. the current state of feminism is damning evidence that there’s no way to kill an activist movement more effectively than commodifying it.
slavic mythology ⇢ forest demonds
“We’re neither pure; nor wise; nor good; we do the best we know.”
— Voltaire
every single one of henry viii’s wives was out of his league and that’s that on that
Masterpost of Free Seafaring Literature & Theory (Gothic Literature) (Romantic Literature)
Pre-1600s The Argonautica by Rhodius Apollonius The Odyssey by Homer The Seafarer The Libelle Of Englyshe Polycye Sir Mortimer by Mary Johnston Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley The Sea-Hawk by Rafael Sabatini 1600s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe & A General History of the Pyrates by Daniel Defoe Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
1700s Fanny Campbell, The Female Pirate Captain: A Tale of The Revolution by Maturin Murray Ballou Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Baron George Gordon Byron The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” by William Hope Hodgson The Pirate by Walter Scott Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Treasure Island & Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Jonathan Swift
1800s The Lighthouse by R. M. Ballantyne The Pathfinder, Or The Inland Sea; The Pilot; The Two Admirals & Afloat ad Ashore by James Fenimore Cooper Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling The Sea-Wolf by Jack London The King’s Own; The Phantom Ship; Mr. Midshipman Easy & Poor Jack by Frederick Marryat Moby-Dick by Herman Melville The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe The Wreck of the Grosvenor & An Ocean Tragedy by William Clark Russell Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne
1900s The Shadow Line: A Confession & Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers Great Sea Stories, ed. Joseph Lewis French (anthology)
Non-Fiction Under the Southern Cross by Maturin Murray Ballou A Voyage to the South Sea & Mutiny on the Bounty by William Bligh Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana White Jacket; Or, The World on a Man-of-War by Herman Melville Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy by H. Taprell Dorling
Academic Theory A topographical approach to re-reading books about Islands in digital literary spaces by J. R. Carpenter (Dis)Integrating Visions: South and Imperial/Colonial Difference in Dickens and Conrad by Luigi Cazzato The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Psychological introspection in A Maritime Journey by Justine Shu-Ting Kao “What if Icarus Hadn’t Hurtled into the Sea?” Some Remarks towards a Theory of Historical Narratology by Martin Klepper Religious Pluralism in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi: A Case of Intertextual Correspondence with Swami Vivekananda’s Religious Philosophy by John Kuriakose The Rebirth of the Musical Author in Recent Fiction Written in English by Carmen Lara-Rallo Arthur Morrison, Criminality, and Late-Victorian Maritime Subculture by Diana Maltz What Does Melville See on the Ocean? by Stipe Grgas
“In films, we are voyeurs, but in novels, we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And this is why sometimes, when we put down a book, we find ourselves slightly altered as human beings. Novels change us from within.”
— Donna Tartt, in this 2013 interview by Laurie Grassi for Chatelaine
a vore kinkster, i see now
I don’t know if you’re new to this blog but on the off chance you are please bear in mind that my often v theatrical and ridiculous levels of excitement in the tags sometimes need to be taken…not literally.
Also while I have no interest in actually consuming another human being let’s not ignore the fact that the endless links and parallels (literary, philosophical, religious) that can be drawn between desire / devotion and consumption are not incredibly varied and fascinating.
Food and love? Intimately linked, literally; from the moment we’re born, our very first meal is an inseparable union of food and love: it is warmth, security, connection, fullness and satiety, all in one gesture. It is our ‘welcome to earth’. It’s a memory that, I think, carries over into everything. Anyone who has spent any time around babies or young children knows (with a great deal of panic) that their primary method of exploration, without fail, is to put literally everything in their mouth. It becomes a way to measure the world.
from Natalia Andrievskikh’s ‘Food Symbolism, Sexuality, and Gender Identity in Fairy Tales and Modern Women’s Bestsellers’
It is also echoed by Levinas:
“This sinking one’s teeth,” he writes “into the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the reality”
Simone Weil:
Hunger is a yardstick. Food is unifying. We make peace by ‘breaking bread’, by sharing a toast. Countless cultures the world over but every single one of them shares that. Eating together is communion. Cooking together an even more intimate communion, taking forkfuls from your own plate to feed someone else? It’s what newlyweds do with the first slice of cake. In Amharic you commonly urge someone to take the food you offer them with “bemote”– if you don’t take this I’ll die. It is, literally, a life-giving gesture. It’s one of the most generous forms of tenderness I know.
Little babies and animals are so cute and impossibly adorable we want to ‘eat them up’ (there’s science behind it: it’s called dimorphus expression, or Cute Aggression. Similar sentiments include: desire to pinch, squash, crush. It’s essential to keeping us balanced–also alive.)
“Oh, please don’t go — we’ll eat you up — we love you so!” say Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things.“Please don’t go, I’ll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you soPlease don’t go, I’ll eat you wholeI love you so, I love you so, I love you so, I love you so” echo alt-j, over and over like an incantation in ‘breezeblocks’
and while we’re on Sendak:
Anne Carson, too
Meaning, in order to be made, must be devoured. We ‘drink in’ words, we ‘digest’ and absorb and ‘savour’ them. Artists, I think, do it almost pathologically. There is hunger - hunger for what? That could be anything, but the point is: the hunger is there - and when the art is true it is fueled by devotion, fueled by near maddening, impossible love.
“My reading a kind of eating,” says Li-Young Lee in ‘The Cleaving’, “My eating a kind of reading.”
and again:
“What is it in me would / devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let / the world be, would eat / not just this fish, / but the one who killed it, / the butcher who / cleaned it. […] would eat it all / to utter it.”
and again:
And as for thee language used to describe sexual desire: the language of hunger, unequivocally: someone’s ‘thirsty’, you ‘eat them out,’ sexual appetite is voracious, insatiable, unquenchable. Anything less feels flat, lukewarm, insincere and, most notably, inaccurate. Love, says Sylvia Plath “gnaws [us] through”.
The list is endless. I don’t want to go on and on; there are others far more talented who have put it far better than I could:
The entirety of Helene Cixous’ ‘Love of the Wolf’ for a start:
“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth.”
and also
and while we’re on that, Simone Weil:
“The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations…Children feel this trouble already, when they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it. It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating the fruit, the opposite attitude looking at the fruit without eating it, should be what is required to save it.”
There is Angela Carter (The Erl-King):
and again:
Han Kang, (The Vegetarian):
“He held her at the waist and stroked the mark, wishing he could share it with her, that it could be seared into his skin like a brand. I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow into my veins.”
Catherynne M. Valente (from Deathless):
see also:
“ I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole.” (from The Bread We Eat in Dreams)
Robin Coste Lewis, (’Plantation’):
Kenneth Rexroth (’When We With Sappho’):
Kim Addonizio’s ‘First Kiss’ in which the topography of hunger and desire is quietly drawn full circle:
Oscar Wilde (Salomé):
Maram al-Massri (Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor):
Maggie Nelson (Bluets, 206):
“[…] it became clear that I would lose you, or that I had already lost you, that you were “etched into my heart”– I may not have known then that “etch” derives from etzen or erzjan–to be eaten–but in the days since I have come to know the full meaning of the root.”
Li-Young Lee (’The City in Which I Love You’):
Food and desire frequently overlap in Shakespeare’s Othello: the language of sexual desire is, as always, the language of the feast – Desdemona is “honey”, “palate of my appetite”, “food [..] luscious as locusts”. According to Iago she will “begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor the Moor.”
there’s Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body):
and Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour):
and this stunning excerpt by Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch):
Andal and religious fervour (from Autobiography of a Goddess):
Simone Weil, again (Waiting for God):
and while we’re on that see also: Catholicism
see also: Hannibal ( @bluebeardsbride collection of posts and analysis on this is simply marvelous)
and keeping with horror, what’s more seductive in Western popular culture than the enduring, insidious excess of the vampire’s hunger? The sheer breadth of the fears and anxieties they contain is endless, but that hunger – transgressive, monstrous and shameless – both fascinates and repels us. You can read so much into the act of biting and draining your victim of blood, but there is an undeniably erotic element to it:
“She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there; the pointed teeth, the bloodstained, voluptuous mouth–which it made one shudder to see–the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance, seeming like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity.” (Bram Stoker, Dracula)
and Nina Cassian (The Young Bat):
This, even with the inherent violence, reads like a sacrament. It is, for better or worse, communion. And so much of love and desire is about some sort of communion. “I don’t want you there, I want you here.” And what’s the most intimate and lasting communion than:
“to be hungered after / to be taken inside another’s warm mouth / to alter his atlas of desire” (Zakia Henderson-Brown)
To me, that is the epitome of ‘I want you here’. At it’s peak the boundaries blur: inside and outside is one and the same. The circle closes. Literally. And once that’s done it’s yours forever.
(Sarah Clear, ‘Dinner For Two: Sexual Desire, Reciprocity, and Cannibalism’): The above is a literal take but for me it really isn’t about that; it is the motivation behind it – the kind of blindingly intense, utterly consumptive (hello) desire that makes you want something that badly. That’s what I’m completely floored by in Georges Bataille’s “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism”.
Hunger is the most primal need. Everything circles back to that, always, whether political or erotic. To be wanted beyond want, to be desired at a level of pure necessity – that is intense asf. Who wouldn’t want that? As Erica Jong says:
saw twelfth night again and all i can think about is duke orsino’s speech:
and viola later responding:
and just like what happens when someone’s hunger is made small or entirely denied by others and how that can eventually cause them to be consumed by an inner decay.
“I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open.”
— Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“Lullaby” from Disintegration, 1989
Victor Frankenstein: I have made a Monster.
Everyone: You fucked up a perfectly good corpse is what you did. Look at it. It’s got anxiety.
Are you sure you want to live like common people You want to see whatever common people see
lets bring back romanticism im tired of trying to be rational. were all dumb and we all want love
If we we’re villains by M L Rio
— Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.
Anton Stankowski
Queen of Peace - Florence + the Machine
Like the stars chase the sun Over the glowing hill, I will conquer Blood is running deep Some things never sleep
criminalise golf
“My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like the ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (via heteroglossia)
