Ya Mum

Looking for a way to gracefully eat a burrito

[touchmycoat]

“Every time [Oedipus] talks about where the killing of his father occurred, he says it is at ‘a parting of three ways.’ And every time anybody else talks about it, they talk about it as a fork in the road. The interesting thing about the difference is that everybody else, without even thinking about it, understands that you only get to the point where the road forks by having come along another road. You can’t be what you are without having a past. […] Except if you’re Oedipus, you somehow treat it as though…you could hover above and choose any of the three ways, that you’re not constituted by already having come down one of them.”

— Professor Michael Davis, The Philosophy of Tragedy Introductory Lecture

[armandeos]

Video essays that make me go “oh, so you’re like smart smart”

Elon Musk and Grimes: A Retrospective

Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos

The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities

Lana Del Rey: the pitfalls of having a persona

we need to talk about Call Me By Your Name

MYTH OF THE AUTEUR: Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Envy

The Commodification of Black Athletes

The Lies Of The Lighthouse

The Green Knight: The Uncanny Horror of Masculinity

Time Loop Nihilism

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games

The Golden Age of Horror Comics - Part 1 (Part 2)

Weighing the Value of Director’s Cuts | Scanline

The True Horror Of Midsommar

Keep reading

[evonannoredars]

Body of Water (Florence Welch) // The Terror

[endophoras-deactivated20200411]

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life. Knowledge is the plague of life, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.

— Emil Cioran, from “On the Heights of Despair” I do understand—and it is terrible.

— Franz Kafka, from a letter

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn’t it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

— Yevgeny Zamyatin, from “We” To be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man’s everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough. 

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “Notes from Underground” I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware. — Sylvia Plath, from “The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath”

[weltenwellen]

An Interview with Jenny Slate, by Sara Black McCulloch

[gatheringbones]

“Part of the dream of queer is that it potentially has no opposite. Straight is the opposite of gay. Queer is a rejection of both. Queer was one of the first words that spoke to me as the dream I needed in order to survive. I don’t know if trans is the same as queer, I mean I know it is and I know it isn’t—I know there can be a gloriousness to the potential of trans as a reimagining beyond conventional gender expectations. If queer laid my foundations, a trans analysis rearranged the structures and gave me the space to breathe again. Transgender: to bend, mend, extend, and transcend.

The explosion of trans identities in the early-2000s challenged my own assumptions, including the assumptions that once felt like challenges, and it wasn’t just the transfeminine spectrum that gave me hope in fluidity. I’d always believed that masculinity could only be the enemy, but then there were the trans fags who showed me something beyond the predetermined, a masculinity negotiated and transformed, a flamboyance through choosing a bodily language of one’s own making. A freedom, but not a freedom from accountability. The meanings of queer and trans are constantly shifting—this is part of the allure. At once identities that declare an end to borders, and identities that constantly build walls, challenging enough to derail conversations and at the same time empty enough to use in the name of a TV show or nonprofit.

One problem with the politics of representation is that often it’s about who is represented, but not what. I’m not saying we don’t ever need an us and them. I know this is how many of us find one another, dance with the scars into arms that might hold not only to harm. I don’t think there always needs to be an invitation to join us, I don’t think this has to be the case, but I do think this should always be an option. I do think a world without borders is a dream we must hold onto—personally, politically, intimately, explosively, expressively.”

There is incredible beauty to the naming and claiming so often found in these worlds, but also there’s a frightening territorialism. I don’t want to become the cops, I want to end policing in all its forms. This is the dream that queer and trans worlds have helped me to imagine.”

mattilda bernstein sycamore, the freezer door

[weltenwellen]

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

[amouthfulloflove]

“I’d show my teeth and tell you I was just hungry for the truth. And I was hungry for the truth. I just couldn’t keep it down.”

— Lord of the Butterflies, ‘Bad at Love’ by Andrea Gibson

[marxisforbros]

Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

[fairywomb]

“So come here. Let me love those bruises out of you. We’ll love like children with a box of bandages- we won’t ask where it hurts. We’ll just kiss all of it.”

— Ashe Vernon, from “Robin’s egg heart(break)” (via drearydoll)

[fillianore-moved]

so metropolitan museum of art has a register of books they’ve published that are out of print and that you can download for free! they’re mostly books on art, archeology, architecture, fashion and history and i just think that’s super useful and interesting so i wanted to share! you can find all of the books available here!

[amourduloup-deactivated20210512]

“In a fundamental way, the cannibal, more than the other monsters, enjoins the question of the distinction between the self and that which is not the self. In the first instance, cannibalism is, theoretically at least, a response to hunger and, as such, suggests other hungers. The close relationship between cannibalism and eroticism - more generally between sex and eating, more specifically between anthropophagism and incest - has long been noted (…). The monstrosity of cannibalism has to do with the same concept as the taboo of incest; the cannibal confuses the structures that function to establish the identity of self and the identity of other through similarity and difference.

The horror inspired by cannibalism attests to the reluctance of the mind to abandon distinction as the basis of being and identity. From the point of view of the victim, cannibalism threatens a greater and more complete annihilation than death, because it involves a kind of metamorphosis into the other. It reaches further than death, deep into the dread of obliteration and nonbeing, because it attacks the very notion of a natural relation between form, identity and life. (…) But the absorption of the body by another suggests a grotesque and perverse postmortem continuation of the self within and as part of another, a monstrosity, not of mixed natures, but of confused existences. Without autonomy, without identity or even consciousness, the formless self continues as an imprisoned particle of the other.”

— David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature

[filmswithoutfaces]

A Cure for Wellness (2017) dir. Gore Verbinski

[chalamet]

21st century horror + “unhinged” female leads

“Perhaps what we’re witnessing in horror right now is not a commentary on a single anxiety, but a culmination of all the anxieties that exist in culture—the shit that’s built up, affecting generation after generation, especially women … who’ve internalized the brunt of trauma for so long and are only now able to channel it. The rage that stems from internalising trauma (while coddling men) … is perfectly visualised by Toni Collette literally crawling up the walls in Hereditary.” — Ryan Bradford

“This is what horror tells us—that in the collective unconscious of all women are psychic wounds so deep and raw that even to brush against them is to become a conduit for their primal violence… We self-censor our every reaction, debating endlessly with ourselves over which thoughts are permitted and which are forbidden or unclean… Perhaps that’s why, after so long spent boiling within us under such terrible and unrelenting pressure, women’s desires hold such power to fascinate and terrify.” — Gretchen Felker-Martin

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Kimon Friar, from Modern Greek Poetry; “Nietzsche,”

[aloneandforsakenbyfateandbyman]

Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, 1978

[beholdingslut]

top 5 poems you've read so far this year!

ada limon, dead stars:

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

bradley trumpfheller, time’s not an arrow, more the place an arrow touches us

Small wonder: we have an entire word for the direction

opposite this grandfather clock’s hoax motion.

paige lewis, when i tell my husband i miss the sun, he knows

We bring the shadow game home and (this is my favorite part) when we

stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled my husband grips his own wrist,

certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.

ilya kaminsky, we lived happily during the war

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was  in my bed, around my bed America

was falling, invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

angie sijun lou, jessica gives me a chill pill

Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else