latinate

as long as it lasts

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false. It is a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight.”

Jorge Luis Borges, quoted by Jay Parini in Borges and Me

[demonprincex]

any thoughts on how to stop feeling deeply alienated through most social interactions?

Lower your expectations, stop trying to make every brief interaction into some big symbol of how accepted you are, and try to have fun with it.

Us socially anxious people tend to be real fucking dour about how we approach socializing even when we think we are trying to seem open and outgoing. The problem is the "trying to seem" part; it reeks of hesitation and discomfort and people respond to that. People do not care what you say or do but the energy with which you say it or do it. They can see when we are uncomfortable and they respect our discomfort by keeping a distance.

To overcome this, you have to actually approach socializing with a bubbly detachment. Make jokes, say things no one understands but dont give a shit that they dont get it, be happy, be sad, allow your genuine emotions to flow through, be playful, experiment, and experience life rather than "try to be" something. i know this is very hard if you are used to making things hard for yourself. but what you have to do is let go and let it be easy. and meaningless. and light. and do it a million times.

[cleaningouttherooms]

I feel like the common literacy advice to "read critically" is very daunting when you first start reading (especially in self study) non fiction or theory and you keep experiencing the common "agree with the last position you heard" problem. this problem persists for much longer than people like to think it does - how are you supposed to question opinions you hear if the thesis of every book you read is the first opinion you ever encountered on a topic? how do you know what to think when everyone tells you they're right? this is just my experience but for me the two things that helped the most were:

to read criticism; reviews of books, someone's 10 note tumblr post, essays that respond to those ideas, twitter threads, your friend who took a class one time, etc. simply put, the more you steal people's opinions, the more you can sharpen your own. this gave me an idea of what the stakes are, how to pick and choose useful and useless aspects of a text, and, metatextually, what kind of aspects of a text can be criticized, a scope that is much much bigger than I initially thought, and:

to focus on a single topic at first. it's seductive to want to read everything because of the way people write those theory essential reading lists but only reading one seminal book on each topic is not a way to develop your understanding. by starting with various books that deal with a specific topic that interests you (for me, 19th century french psychiatry) you can get a better sense of the various approaches to a topic, the way historians contradict and respond to each other, the difference between an academic book, a news article, an anonymous anarchist library essay, and a communist propaganda leaflet on the same topic, and most importantly: you realize, as you accumulate knowledge, that published writings are often wrong and false! and realising the scope of this helps you be more confident in doubting and questioning any piece of writing in a critical way.

[northwindow]

Carrie Fountain, from Instant Winner

[droawsy]

portraits of utility poles

[should-be-sleeping]

My autistic child got so excited upon seeing someone else portraying their special interest. What great art.

Behold: every utility pole from our house to their school.

[violettesiren]

I don’t know when it began, the will to sort moment from moment, to hold on by saying I can’t care about the red maple stripped of color, I choose the rain disappearing at my feet. I choose this friend to love, the deep blacks of summer. Abandon the rest. I am unable to picture anything so whole it doesn’t crush what’s missing. Is it my body across many seasons turning already a little to bone, or the slow stars precisely set in depths so vast the sky is just a dome within falling domes. How is the snowfield scattered with dry leaves already a pavilion of twilight. And my arms just a motion in the great soundlessness of sky. I have traded childhood exuberance for fragile acts. I will slip into corner tables just to watch people speak. I love the way they lean into each other or stretch back with the bluespun languor of an evening, lights strung up on the wood ceiling to mimic the lift of stars. There are no empty hopes. But knowing what to hope for is steady work. What was ever so important to you you left your daily life to heed it? I don’t even know what breathes in the dark hills outside this town. Some mornings the roads almost float, the weeds in the fields wiry fistfuls of sun. What were you looking out for? What did you dismiss along the way. because we live we are granted names, streams, shocks of heat, murmuring summers. All the days you have ever breathed are swallows shooting between trees. When the wind pushes branches in and out of shade it is an opening, as every small gesture toward another person is incomprehensibly alive. Will you be part of the stoneless passage? When life starts to take things away will you grow very still beneath the larch or feel the slow flight of birds across your body. The bright key of morning. The bay fanned with foam.

The Infinities by Joanna Klink

[gatheringbones]

[“We have heard people being labeled as “codependent” when they cannot leave a painful relationship that has no future. Yet if a relationship reconfigures an original bond with our father or mother, leaving it may pose a terrifying threat to our inner security. Then all prospects of change—even for the better—represent a threat. In that instance it will be important to be compassionate toward ourselves for the time it takes to make changes. Taking our time does not have to mean we are cowardly or codependent, only that we are sensitive to pressures and meanings from regions of our psyche still in the grip of an old regime. Our failed and failing bonds have preoccupied us all our lives. To repeat is human; to reframe is healthy. As we replace, however slowly, defensive reactions with different ways of doing things, new capacities open, and new skills come into play in our relationships. It’s not only a matter of breaking out of the enclosing arc of childhood. We humans require the animating sustenance of our fellows. We have to know that an echoing and enthusiastic resonance to our unique existence is available somewhere in this vast and ravaged world. “]

david richo, from how to be an adult in relationships: the five keys to mindful loving, 2002

[boobieteriat]

If you can eat and drink, sleep in a bed, read these words, and have a bank account—you have the power to help. Don’t stay silent. Do something for Gaza today.

The Sameer Project

Dahnoun Mutual Aid

Mona's Initiative

Hussein Team

Water is Life Gaza

[beingharsh]

*flirting with an older man* when i was born you had already attempted suicide once

[beingharsh]

finally someone says something kind of titillating

[maverick-ornithography]

pelcan Mouth perfec t size for put baby in to n\ap! inside very Soft and Comfort baby sleep soundly put baby in Pelican Mouth. Put Baby In Pelican Mouth. no problems ever in peliccan mouth because good Shape and Support for baby neck weak of big baby head. Apelican Mouth yes a place for a baby put baby in pelican mouth can trust pelican for giveing good love to baby. friend pelican

[proustiansleep]

"It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place."

—Gilles Deleuze, On Philosophy

[y2kvictim]

the most infuriating thing about personal growth is that even if someone else did have the answer you needed and conveyed it to you in a precise and effective matter, it won't make sense until you're ready for it. you could hear it every day of your life and it wouldn't matter a fucking bit until it finally clicks. there's very little you can do to influence when that happens, either

[txttletale]

niceys positive anon!! i don't agree with you on everything but you are so clearly like well read and well rounded that you've helped me think through a lot of my own inconsistencies and hypocrises in my own political and social thought, even if i do have slightly different conclusions at times then u (mainly because i believe there's more of a place for idealism and 'mind politics' than u do). anyway this is a preamble to ask if you have recommended reading in the past and if not if you had any recommended reading? there's some obvious like Read Marx but beyond that im always a little lost wading through theory and given you seem well read and i always admire your takes, i wondered about your recs

it's been a while since i've done a big reading list post so--bearing in mind that my specific areas of 'expertise' (i say that in huge quotation marks obvsies i'm just a girlblogger) are imperialism and media studies, here are some books and essays/pamphlets i recommend. the bolded ones are ones that i consider foundational to my politics

BASICS OF MARXISM

friedrich engels, principles of commmunism

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian & scientific

karl marx, the german ideology

karl marx, wage labour & capital

mao zedong, on contradiction

nikolai bukharin, anarchy and scientific communism

rosa luxemburg, reform or revolution?

v.i lenin, left-wing communism: an infantile disorder

v.i. lenin, the state & revolution

v.i. lenin, what is to be done?

IMPERIALISM

aijaz ahmed, iraq, afghanistan, and the imperialism of our time

albert memmi, the colonizer and the colonized

che guevara, on socialism and internationalism (ed. aijaz ahmad)

eduardo galeano, the open veins of latin america

edward said, orientalism

fernando cardoso, dependency and development in latin america

frantz fanon, black skin, white masks

frantz fanon, the wretched of the earth

greg grandin, empire's workshop

kwame nkrumah, neocolonialism, the last stage of imperialism

michael parenti, against empire

naomi klein, the shock doctrine

ruy mauro marini, the dialectics of dependency

v.i. lenin, imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

vincent bevins, the jakarta method

walter rodney, how europe underdeveloped africa

william blum, killing hope

zak cope, divided world divided class

zak cope, the wealth of (some) nations

MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES

antonio gramsci, the prison notebooks

ed. mick gidley, representing others: white views of indigenous peoples

ed. stuart hall, representation: cultural representations and signifying pratices

gilles deleuze & felix guattari, capitalism & schizophrenia

jacques derrida, margins of philosophy

jacques derrida, speech and phenomena

michael parenti, inventing reality

michel foucault, disicipline and punish

michel foucault, the archeology of knowledge

natasha schull, addiction by design

nick snricek, platform capitalism

noam chomsky and edward herman, manufacturing consent

regis tove stella, imagining the other

richard sennett and jonathan cobb, the hidden injuries of class

safiya umoja noble, algoriths of oppression

stuart hall, cultural studies 1983: a theoretical history

theodor adorno and max horkheimer, the culture industry

walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

OTHER

angela davis, women, race, and class

anna louise strong, cash and violence in laos and vietnam

anna louise strong, the soviets expected it

anna louise strong, when serfs stood up in tibet

carrie hamilton, sexual revolutions in cuba

chris chitty, sexual hegemony

christian fuchs, theorizing and analysing digital labor

eds. jules joanne gleeson and elle o'rourke, transgender marxism

elaine scarry, the body in pain

jules joanne gleeson, this infamous proposal

michael parenti, blackshirts & reds

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

peter drucker, warped: gay normality and queer anticapitalism

rosemary hennessy, profit and pleasure

sophie lewis, abolish the family

suzy kim, everyday life in the north korean revolution

walter rodney, the russian revolution: a view from the third world

[bibliomancyoracle]

Dose me with aminoglycocides till I give in, then lay me in your litter. I’m a threat to life.

*

from “TOXIC SONNETS: A CROWN FOR JOHN KEATS” by JOYELLE MCSWEENEY

[metamorphesque]

― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

[lunchboxpoems]

ARIANA REINES

[o-fantasma]

- legna rodríguez iglesias, translated by abigail parry and serafina vick

(spanish original on left, trans on right)