once i read everything on earth then i think ill be prepared to write
cherry valley forever

titsay

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#extradirty
Today's Document
DEAR READER
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Misplaced Lens Cap
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JBB: An Artblog!
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

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Sweet Seals For You, Always

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@lapassionbeatrice
once i read everything on earth then i think ill be prepared to write
The OBSESSION with identity is so crazy like the view that when you do something it immediately becomes part of your identity and all the parts of you have to click together to become “person who wakes up early” or “person who reads” no you can literally just do something without restructuring your whole performance of personhood around it. I don’t know what to tell you except that you will never be able to have an entirely unfractured view of yourself or that you will be able to rationalize all the complex parts of yourself into the phrase “person who x” like you should just be doing things without performing them. Or aestheticizing them. Just try different things on and keep what works for you. Otherwise you will never learn and grow!
I literally dont remember how I found u probably thru Michelle but i love being mutuals w u you're so cool
theoooo ♡ i think it might've been through some star wars posting (?), but i'm also glad we're mutuals and awww thank you so much 😭🩷
Excerpts from my great grandma Marjorie Olive Dearlove’s scrapbook. She smoked every day until her last and is the origin of my long limbs
in the end it's always me and lawrence's deraa incident against the world
you guys should all go and read carlo michelstaedter #michelstaedtersummer2026
Yasss who else is a kinda lame aimless adult in they mid to late 20s
A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artif
An interesting game where you are presented with 10 artifacts from the MET. You have to place where the artifact is from and what time period it is from. Each artifact scores up to 10,000 points, and you lose points the further away your guess is and how far off in time you are. You can only play once a day. Thanks to @baebeylik for showing this to me.
Today I scored really well. Yesterday ... not so much.
Anthropeum.com · Jun 8 2026 🟩🟦🟦🟩🟩🟩🟥🟦🟦🟩 79,001 · top 3% of players today!
Flora Caressed by Zephyr
Artist: François Gérard (French, 1770-1837)
Date: 1802
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: Museum of Grenoble, Grenoble, France
Description
Ovid tells this myth in Book V of the Fasti; Flora herself explains to the poet who she is, what her attributes and accomplishments are, and justifies the games dedicated to her in Rome. Originally, Flora, or Chloris among the Greeks, is a nymph from the Fortunate Isles known for her great beauty. One spring, Zephyr, god of the West Wind, sees her and immediately falls madly in love with her. He pursues her, then ends up kidnapping her and marrying her. Zephyr then offers his wife, who has become a goddess, the "sovereignty of flowers". Flora tells the poet Ovid that she has set herself the mission of classifying all species of flowers, without succeeding because of their number. Linked to the city of Rome, the goddess is offered every year, between the end of April and the beginning of May, sumptuous festivals that end with games: the Floralia . Associated with spring, with flowers of course, with youth and beauty, the cult of Flora in Rome consists more concretely in the protection of the flowering of agricultural plants.
okay so this is in fact the crux of the problem. i.e. there isn't in fact a problem, but just the perception of one.
it is the choice and extreme availability of the choices which makes it seem like there's only 1 good book in every 1000. in fact, people have already published ABSOLUTE rubbish and indeed since the very earliest days of publishing there have been poor books. badly written, badly spelled, badly conceived, badly plotted, nonsense. they are Immediately forgotten, never got mentioned outside of their little town, etc. the badly written books from the last 10 years, on the other hand, are on a small printrun of 20,000 copies (not 500), and additionally, are still around - e.g. in your local bookstore or charity shop or social media feed - where you can fret about them.
also (1) - you're worried about whether there was a truly life-changingly good book published in 2025? maybe there was a book that would appeal to YOU specifically as Excellent, and it was written in Korean or Telugu or Bulgarian and it didn't get noticed enough to get translated. maybe this Korean masterpiece did get translated, but only into Japanese and Indonesian. anyway, you will never know. but equally, this may have happened in 1834 and you STILL wouldn't know, unless it got re-discovered - but this in itself takes time, and clearly only a very exceptional book will be still praised 100 years later, at home and halfway around the world.
also (2) acting like the 18th-20th centuries were great for novel-writing and that the 21st century isn't, ignores the situation in much of the world. many "smaller" nations and/or colonised nations, had not started writing Novels in earnest before the second half of the 20th century. novels aren't the only means of cultural expression in the literary field, btw; e.g the first Kyrgyz novel is Uzak Jol (The Long Road), by Mukay Elebayev, which was published in 1936. the next major novel from Kyrgyzstan is Jamila Chinghiz Aitmatov, which was published in Russian in 1958. but they had the Epic of Manas, of course; in contrast, today, about 900 novels a year are published in Kyrgyz, about 60% of them in their own language and about 40% of them in Russian. clearly this is a very robust publishing industry, where it wasn't before. but if you are an English reader you can overlook this situation, and many similar ones across the world's 200 countries very easily.
also (3) we have a tendency to collapse the time periods of the more distant past and experience that past as compressed. oh, there are sooo many great 19th century books? okay, but name a specifically excellent book from 1870. hmm ... maybe it wasn't a 'good year' - or maybe world-class books are rare enough that there's only a dozen or so per century, and therefore it's hardly alarming if you, personally, haven't (YET!) read something extraordinarily good published 2016-2026 (for example). but we valorise the 19th century as the epoch of great literature on the basis of perhaps 40 truly incredible (European) books.
also (4) the whole function of 'Classics' is that the filter of 'educated' public taste has latched onto, and remembered, and analysed, and kept in print, those books which were thought to be exceptionally worthwhile. this cultural filtration needs time. especially if you are waiting for literature written in X country to be appraised domestically, and then gain international notice, and then get translated into your native language. of course the average book you are told you Must Read from 1900-1910 will be better than the average book you would pick up if you chose at random from the list of books published (in English) this year.
also (5) lock in and read a bit more, and you will find (if you read exclusively from the 21st century, rather than the 19th + first half of the 20th) that a. you will find great novels you wouldn't've had otherwise but more interestingly, b., you will discover that, when you read 'classics' more or less exclusively, you train yourself to see many superficial elements of these books, such as the language of the time, as hallmarks of quality, whereas (much of the time), the language may be just older - if you attune yourself to a the contemporary time period again, you may find poetic quality in a different style, and grow to appreciate it as well. MONOTONOUS DIET = NOT IDEAL. Tolstoy is beautiful. it is not the only way to write. (correspondingly, if you read enough 19th century prose you'll stop idolising it and realise that some very good books from the 1860s are also written in fairly unremarkable style, which may not be apparent if you persist in the unconscious assumption that older-sounding = better).
also (6) there's nothing ruining books from the 2020s partly because what you're railing against is most of all, mass literary - and the mass visibility of literacy. people will want to read salacious, trivial, and same-y things. it is okay. you're just more aware of it now because they're saying so out loud, on tiktok / tumblr / etc. we're also writing unprecedented amounts of surreal, formally innovative, very politically enlightened, very culturally rigourous books. go and find them.
exercise for the reader: make a list of your top ten favourite books and notice how far apart they are chronologically. are you expecting every book you read to measure up in some way with your top ten? is it particularly likely, statistically, esp. if you avoid newer titles, that the hypothetical 11th book on your list would happen to be from the last three years? out of all of 3 centuries of modern publishing history, and the preceding centuries we have ransacked for things to put in print?
i don't know about other languages, but i like that a common way to call the virgin mary in italian is madonna, bc it has a very medieval and elegant queen-like ring to it that virgin mary doesn't have. in russian you say bogoroditza which is an equivalent of theotokos and is more mythological/archaic in a way for me so it's nice. i also always hear panagia in greek songs, which is 'most holy' (i think?) so appropriately rarefied and almost conceptual (probably a weird association but it almost reminds me of the adoration of shiva in the lingam form)
now that i think about it i actually read a contemporary novel that i really liked recently and it was hildegarda by anne-lise marstrand jorgensen, a danish novel about hildegard of bingen. and it was published in 2022. anything is possible
I am constantly seeing people trying to puzzle out what's "ruining books" and it makes me more and more tired. Read a different book. You have more choice in reading material than at any other point in all of history. No one thing can be ruining ALL of them.
one of these days thinking i can follow along with yoga tutorials for very complicated postures will be the death of me
“Little Soul” by Hadrian, translated from the Latin by W.S. Merwin.
He who firmly wants his life does not make do, fearing to suffer, with that empty pleasure that would screen him from the pain, so that the pain might continue below, blind, mute, elusive; instead, he takes on the persona of that pain and bearing 'the correlative weight of pain' (Sophocles, Electra, 39), affirms himself where others are annihilated by the mystery; for he has the courage to tear away the weave of sweet and cherished things, which coddles one into the future, and he demands real possession of the moment. What is mystery to others because it trascends their power is not mystery to him who has willed it and affirmed himself in it. Thus must he create himself to have individual value, not moving, unlike the things that come and go, but being persuaded in himself.
Carlo Michelstaedter, Persuasion and Rethoric (trans. Valentino, Sartini Blu, Depew)
Harald Moltke Aurores boréales au-dessus de l'Islande , 1899