Odette Carotte

Perverse fascinations. Quote-blogging what I'm reading over breakfast, with inquiry and commentary. 39-year old walking witch.

[odettecarotte]

[odettecarotte]

I love talking to random women on the Internet!!!

[odettecarotte]

Power rarely says no to women directly. It delays, redirects and exhausts them instead.

-- Arundhati Roy

[thevisualvamp]

My birthday month is over

[achillesinhighheels]

Tracee Ellis Ross at her first Mugler show. Spring 1991.

[odettecarotte]

Eileen Myles and Jackie Wang, in conversation about the poetics of the Boston accent, at Harvard in April 2016. Peak Cambridge!

[odettecarotte]

[loving-lucy]

Lucy displayed wisdom and sensitivity when her friend Marcella Rabwin suffered her second miscarriage. Marcella was lying in her hospital bed doubting she would ever have a child when the door opened and in came Lucille. "I was terribly depressed and barely able to talk," Marcella remembered. "She did not say a word, not even hello. She simply started humming burlesque music. She took off her hat, she took off her coat, and did a striptease down to her underwear. She had me screaming and laughing, and then she put on her clothes and went home and never did say one word to me about the whole incident. I was a different person after that."

Happy Birthday, Lucy

[fyeahblackactresses]

Happy birthday to Lena Horne, born June 30, 1917. She is pictured here with jazz pianist and singer, Hazel Scott, in the 1940s.

[stimman3000]

.

[inclines]

This is ‘Clinamen’, by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (it’s an installation artwork). I got to see it in person and it’s stayed with me since.

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

She had quite forgotten the August afternoon only a little more than a year ago, when they had sat alone out on the grass beneath the maples, watching the thunderstorm sweep up the river valley toward them, and death had become the topic. And he had said: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

– Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

[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"

[odettecarotte]

Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism, by Jack D. Forbes

[gojurt]

[odettecarotte]

“For often in order to discover that we are in love, even perhaps in order to fall in love, the day of separation needs to arrive.”

—

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier, p. 472.

The Cat Power CD in my car should tell you that I am already working on getting over our inevitable break-up. I disturb people because if I like you, I imagine our break up right after I imagine our first kiss and if I love you I imagine attending your funeral or you attending mine. 

[odettecarotte]

[achillesinhighheels]

[gennsoup]

I am the gentle comb of breezes on the slope of vines The autumn flush on clustered joy of grapes I am the autumn sacrament, the bond, word, pledge The blood rejuvenated from a dying world I am the life that's trodden by the dance of joy My flesh, my death, my re-birth is the song That rises from men's lips, they know not how.

Wole Soyinka, The Bacchae of Euripides