a house built of living light

Before, I was not a witch. But now I am one.

[rosieandthemoon]

Via

[ex0skeletal-undead]

Хтоня by Evgeniy Kosinov

[mournfulroses]

Angela Carter, from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Erl-King,”

[tunemyart]

Okay tumblr, maybe a long shot, but I can’t find anything on the internet (including the University of Pennsylvania Press’ online index) about this book Carmen Maria Machado references in her forward to Carmilla. Can’t find anything on the author either. Has anyone tracked down The Professor and the Vampire by Lucia Trect (2009)?

[leahberman]

sea story; el matador beach, california

instagram

[vijuals-deactivated20160305]

[milfholder]

here’s a twitter thread of charities related to colon cancer that you can donate to in honor of chadwick boseman (x)

here’s a suicide hotline for if any of you are in need of immediate support (x)

please take care of yourselves and your friends tonight everyone

[milfholder]

more from twitter 

here’s a thread of black cancer fundraisers/research fundraising (x)

here’s a thread of fundraisers for black students of the arts (x)

[lamignonette]

[blomkvis]

Chadwick Boseman for Numéro Homme Berlin 2017 photographed by Ronald Dick

[firefox-official]

i went through an entire character arc during quarantine

[firefox-official]

i became more evil if you’re curious

[walks-the-ages]

We're still in quarantine, don't worry, there's time for a redemption arc still!

[firefox-official]

i’m going to get worse on purpose

[ithelpstodream]

Photos of women of color from the Victorian era are hard to come by.

[niktipolos]

Just saw your post on witchcraft and wow, thanks for it. I also wanted to ask: do you have any recommendations for reading about monsters and shit like that? Love your blog btw xx

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (amazon); “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine”: important work on the way in which femininity is constructed as monstrous, abject & other.

Karen F. Stein, “Monsters and Madwomen: Changing Female Gothic” (x).

Donna Haraway’s work branches out from ideas of the “monstrous woman” on the one hand, and hybridity on the other, to discuss the subversive potential of cyborgs: start with “The Promises of Monsters” (x), then “A Cyborg Manifesto” (pdf) and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (pdf); pair with Hari Kunzru’s “You Are Cyborg” (Wired).

Crypto-zoology, a History of Monsters in Fiction:

Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (amazon) / (google): rich & broad historical survey of Western monster folklore, myth and media spanning two thousand years; although a little too much Freud and masculinity.

David D. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (amazon)

David Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (amazon)

W. Scott Poole, Monsters in America (amazon)

Fred Botting, “Frankenstein and the Language of Monstrosity” (article)

Nicholas Seeley, “A Dragon in the Time Machine” (article)

Stephen King, Danse Macabre (amazon): regardless of your view of King’s fiction, his views on writing monsters are valuable.

On Reading Monster-Texts:

Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (amazon): CCs are excellent introductions to an aspect of culture; for monsters,

Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (amazon)

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (amazon); by far the best parts are the “Preface” (pdf) & “Seven Theses” (pdf) (Sign up for Wikispaces to get access).

Marina Lavina (ed.), Monster Culture in the 21st Century (amazon) (google): an eclectic selection of essays, each scrutinising a particular aspect of contemporary culture through the lens of the monstrous.

On The Media, “Monsters We Love“ (podcast): wide-ranging discussion with scholar Diane Winston on monsters in US TV fiction, with a fascinating biblical / apocalyptic slant.

Keep reading

[niktipolos]

Hey, I just wanted to ask you if you had any good reading recommendations for witchcraft/magic? You seem like the kind of person who would, and I'm just fascinated by the topics but overwhelmed by the lit. xx

Hello. So, brace yourself: this is going to be a very long post, though I hope it covers a good range of academic writing, fiction and other forms of literature, not to mention a wide variety of genres.

Theories of Magic.

Owen Davies’ Magic: A Very Short Introduction (x) is brief and broad but it points outward in many directions depending on your area of interest.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic” (x) and Tambiah’s “Magic, Science and Religion (x), both try to draw lines of division between different kinds of “theoretical” or “ideal” belief & practice.

Alan Moore theorises about magic as language / linguistic art.

Histories of Magic & Witchcraft.

If you’re looking for historical inspiration or in-depth exploration of magical beliefs and folklore and practices and the shifting concept of magic in the cultural imagination, you could look at:-

Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (pdf): brilliant wide-ranging exploration of books of spells and how their writings interweave magic and religion, particularly extra-biblical magic (e.g. The American “hex murders” of the early twentieth century, citing malevolent use of the seventh book of mosses to murder unwanted spouses, or a cabal of sorcerers trying to assassinate Louis XIV).

Ogden’s Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (pdf) deals in ancient sorcerers (male and female), shamans and evocators, witches, ghosts and necromancy and the undead, binding spells and curses, erotic magic, kolossoi (Greek equivalent of voodoo dolls), &c.

Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages (pdf) and Forbidden Rites: a Necromancer’s Manual of The Fifteenth Century are both excellent.

Kors & Peters, Witchcraft in Europe 400-1700: the demonisation of folklore and the growing perception that sorcery & witchcraft were the single greatest threat to medieval Christian Europe.

Frances Yates on renaissance hermeticism—The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (pdf) is wonderful.

“Witchcraft and Magic”, a video lecture about belief and superstition and persecution in Tudor & Stuart England; “Science, Magic, and Religion”, a video lecture series.

Tangentially, Carlo Ginsburg’s The Night Battles is about a cult of Benandanti in 16th century Italy who claimed to do spiritual battle with witches at night and it’s completely fascinating.

Yvonne Chireau’s Black Magic: about the conjuring tradition amongst African Americans, the power & stigma attached to its practitioners, its fraught relation to Christian belief.

Ozark Magic and Folklore (pdf): an incredible document of disappearing beliefs in witchcraft and folk magic and monsters and charms and omens.

There are dozens of books on the Salem witch trials; the most evocative and detailed I’ve read are Frances Hill’s A Delusion of Satan and A Storm of Witchcraft.

There’s also the infamous fifteenth century text on witch-hunting, Malleus Maleficarum (the hammer of the witches), pivotal in shaping the modern image of witches and driving hysteria.

Cornell university has a digital witchcraft collection focused on witchcraft as a matter of theology & religious heresy, e.g. manuscripts and books on demonology, the inquisition, court records of witch-trials, depositions from suspected witches given after imprisonment & torture.

For gender and witchcraft, there’s Diane Purkiss’s The Witch in History (pdf), exploring the changing image of English witches between the Tudor/Stuart age and the twentieth century, and Breuer’s Crafting the Witch.

Keep reading

[readyokaygo]

The Palestine Reader

[niktipolos]

The following is a collection of articles, essays, and books on Palestine. These are not introduction texts to the question of Palestine or the Palestinain-Israeli “conflict”. If you need one read The Palestine-Israel Conflict by Gregory Harms and Todd Fery. Further, this is not an “unbiased” or “neutral” readng list. Everything listed below is counter-hegemonic. I feel absolutely no need to provide anything from the Zionist or Israeli point-of-view when that is the dominant narrative. With that said, I believe this provides a diverse, but in no means comprehensive, overview of the discourse on Palestine. A continuously updated page of this list can be found here. (via readyokaygo)

On Theory

Orientalism by Edward Said

Orientalism Reconsidered by Edward Said

The Question of Palestine by Edward Said

Reading Said in Hebrew by Ella Shohat

Notes on the “Post-Colonial” by Ella Shohat

On History

History of Palestine by Dr. Mohsen Mohammed Saleh

Sabra and Shatila: September 1982 by Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout

Peace and its Discontents by Edward Said

On Being Palestinian

What It Means to be Palestinian by Dina Matar

A Narrative of Palestinian Dispossession by Samia Costandi

The Palestinian Exile as Writer by Jabra I. Jabra

My People Shall Live by Leila Khaled

Memoirs, 1948 Part I by Fauzi Al-Qawuqji

Memoirs, 1948 Part II

Palestinian Identity and the Performance of Catastrophe by Ihab Saloul

On Zionism

Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims by Edward Said

Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims by Ella Shohat

Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler

The Invention of the Mizrahim by Ella Shohat

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

Jewish History, Jewish Religion by Israel Shahak

The Ends of Zionism by Joseph Massad

The Persistence of the Palestinian Question by Joseph Massad

On Imperialism and Settler Colonialism in West Asia by Jamil Hilal

The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman

How the Zionists Took Over Palestine by Adel Safty

Imperial Israel and the Palestinians by Nur Masalha

After Zionism by Antony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor

On the Holocaust

Respecting the Holocaust by Howard Zinn

The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons by Boaz Evron

The Victimhood of the Powerful by Jennifer Peto

On Media

Propaganda, Perception, and Reality by William A. Cook

Israeli Cinema an interview with Ella Shohat

Israeli Cinema by Ella Shohat

Palestinian Cinema by Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi

On Al Nakba

The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

The Saga of Deir Yassin

The Fall of Lydda by Spiro Munayyer

Returning to Kafr Bir’im

How Palestine became Israel by Stephen Hallbrook

The Palestinian Exodus of 1948 by Simha Flapan

Why Did the Palestinians Leave by Walid Khalidi

Selected Documents on 1948

The Limits of the New Israeli History by Joel Beinin

On Genocide

Genocide or Erasure of Palestinians by Kathleen and Bill Christison

Israel’s Slow-Motion Genocide in Occupied Palestine by Steve Lendman

Ongoing Palestinian Genocide by Gideon Polya

The Lessons of Violence by Chris Hedges

The Brutal Siege of Gaza Can Only Breed Violence by Karen Koning AbuZayd

The Olive Trees of Palestine Weep by Sonja Karkar

Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust by Richard Falk

Gaza is Dying by Patrick Cockburn

Israeli Immunity for Genocide by Andrea Howard

Palestinian Misery in Perspective by Paul De Rooij

A Slow, Steady Genocide an interview with Tanya Reinhart

Gaza’s Holocaust by Dr. Elias Akleh

Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

The British in Palestine, A Conveniently Forgotten Holocaust by Robert Fisk

European Collusion in Israel’s Slow Genocide by Omar Barghouti

Genocide in Gaza by Ilan Pappe

Genocide Among Us by Curtis F. J. Doebbler

Bleaching the Attrocities of Genocide by Kim Petersen

The Rape of Palestine by William A. Cook

Israel Plots Another Palestinian Exodus by Jonathan Cook

Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing by Uri Avnery

Disappearing Palestine by Jonathan Cook

The Problem With Israel by Jeff Halper

Gaza in Crisis by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe

Drying Out the Palestinians

Israel’s Latest Assault on Gaza by Norman Finkelstein

To Gaza I Did Not Go by Gideon Levy

Gaza, the World’s Largest Open-Air Prison by Noam Chomsky

The Most Humane Little Checkpoint by Amira Hass

On BDS

BDS: Winning Justice for the Palestinian People

Why Boycott Israeli Universities?

The Necessity of Cultural Boycott by Ilan Pappe

Companies Supporting Israeli Occupation

On Solutions

Two-State Illusion by Ian S. Lustick

Relative Humanity: The Essential Obstacle to a One-State Solution by Omar Barghouti

Where Now For Palestine? by Jamil Hilal.

[niktipolos]

Do you have any favourite essays?

Hello. Thank you for the question, and sorry it took so long—as always—to work my way to this. I don’t know about favourite, but the following (off the top of my head) are exquisitely written—searing hot and furious, cool and elegant, intimate and sensuous, clinical, arch, playful…all of them have different voices and rhythms and lives contained with them:—

A Rumbling of Things Unknown, Jacqueline Rose

Let Them Drown, Naomi Klein

On Not Going Home, James Wood

After the Genocide, Philip Gourevitch

Two Kinds of Wilderness, Jeremy Miller

On Self-Respect, After Life, & Some Dreamers of The Golden Dream, Joan Didion

Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag

Where On Earth Are You? Francis Stonor Saunders

Being Sane in Insane Places, David L. Rosenhan 

The Shape of My Impact, Alexis Pauline Gumbs

A Kind of Grace, Hannah Black

Not Knowing, Donald Barthelme

On Optimism And Despair, Zadie Smith

The Brain on Trial, David Eagleman 

Beyond Anger, Martha C. Nussbaum 

‘I Have No Choice But to Keep Looking’, Jennifer Percy

On the Violent Language of The Refugee Crisis, Christina Sharpe

Baghdad, Year Zero, Naomi Klein 

The Opposite of Glamour, Delia Falconer

Woven, Lidia Yuknavitch

The Omega Glory, Michael Chabon

Hunger Makes Me, Jess Zimmerman

The Mark of a Masterpiece, David Grann

Giving Voice to the Women of Syria, Linza Mounzer

The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 

Into the Underworld, & The Last London, Iain Sinclair

The Laugh of the Medusa, Hélène Cixous 

Ghosting, Andrew O’Hagan

Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco

The Megacity, George Packer 

Seeing Faster, James Gleick 

On Not Knowing Greek, Virginia Woolf 

Mythologies, Roland Barthes

I Have Seen The Tops of Clouds, Quinn Norton

The Algebra of Infinite Justice, Arundhati Roy

Speed, Oliver Sacks 

Speaking of Nature, Robin Kimmerer

What History Tells Us About the Refugee Crisis, Lyndsey Stonebridge

Looking for Zora, Alice Walker

Undefeated Despair, John Berger

Phew. There you are. Have a look through to see which ones stick with you. Hope this was helpful.

[antigonick]

“I kept being alive when I should have been burning: I was Joan, I was Lazarus.”

— Louise Glück, excerpt of “Saint-Joan”, in The Seven Ages

[hedgehog-moss]

If you genuinely enjoy being alone, do you ever wonder if it is an inherent part of your character or if it stems from feeling inescapably lonely in the first place until you taught yourself to enjoy the peace and happiness one can find in solitude? what if the reason you now prefer & choose solitude at every turn is because you were a very lonely child, or teenager, not by your own choice, and that’s how you learnt to thrive and grow, so you no longer know if you can do that around people? There might also be an element of personal pride, an unconscious “you can’t fire me I quit” point when your brain decided to switch your feelings about solitude from distress to relief. I often find myself defending my love of being alone, to people who worry that I can’t possibly be happy to live in an isolated house in the woods; I insist that I do! I really do specifically enjoy the isolated factor and chose to live here because of it, but then I wonder how to differentiate an ingrained love of solitude from an acquired ability to thrive off unchosen loneliness, to learn from it and be nourished by it; to what extent it might be a form of contentment built on a bedrock of resignation.