Vanitas Vanitatum

Art historian for a living. Midwesterner in the South. I've been here for too long.

[saltoncity]

can we get anne carson on hot ones

[playwrongs]

ANNE CARSON: The Hot Ones could be the name of a tragedy. Imagine that chorus. Chewing on spiced wings so their tears streamed down the masks and fell to the ground. If a tragic actor was crying from eating hot wings how would you know? The mask doesn't tell you. Only if he cried OTOTOTOI POPOI DA but that is his text. No dividing what is pain from what is pain. According to Aulus Gellius, the actor Polus used the urn that held his son's bones and ashes onstage. He was using grief to play grief. It does away with the problem of feigning. You can't feign spice either. Either your eyes water and you retch or you don't.

SEAN EVANS: So, are you gonna take a bite, or...?

[lesbianshepard]

Hating how Nolan's Odyssey looks on the basis of being into Classics, but chuds have made it a culture war thing, so now I'm fighting for my life arguing that the issue isn't that Nolan cast trans and black people as gods and heroes, it's that he cast those people and then put them in dogshit costumes

[bobdylanyaoi]

“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.

[afroesoteric]

Me

[thepollingstation]

Are you confident you are the only person alive with your full name?

yes

no

other

Voting ended onMay 21

[honeybeeofficial]

everyone say thank you ancient central and south american agricultural heroes for beans

[honeybeeofficial]

everyone say thank you ancient south american agricultural heroes for potato

[kawuli]

everyone say thank you ancient mesoamerican agricultural heroes for maize

[dragongirlteeth]

Also tomato

[funeral]

Accepting the reality that there is no cure for our existential malaise keeps us from wasting our life in chasing the untenable goal of healing our lack. That is, accepting the lack of a definitive cure allows us to direct our attention to endeavors over which we have some control; it frees us to pursue modalities of living that are both realistically attainable and potentially even rewarding—gratifying despite being imperfect. Unfortunately, because the mundane objects that contain the objet a are by necessity mere pale imitations of the Thing-in-itself, it can take prolonged mourning to reconcile ourselves to the reality that these imitations, these faint echoes of the Thing, are the only portion of the Thing that will ever be available to us. Yet I believe that those of us who have managed to make peace with this reality possess the best chances for fashioning a life that feels both rewarding and dynamic.

Mari Ruti, “When the Cure Is that There Is No Cure: Melancholia, Mourning, Creativity” in Meaningless Suffering: Traumatic Marginalisation and Ethical Responsibility

[jagkanbliintetal]

Helen Frankenthaler (American, 1928-2011), Spring Run XVI, 1996. Hand-painted monotype over white-washed lithography proof printed on Arches paper, 102.2 x 80 cm.

[hagnanimous]

Me when I read a book by a famous author that’s a modern classic and everyone says it’s really good and then it’s really good

[kushblazer666]

no no i think it’s extremely cool that you brought your 90 pound working breed with you to this breakfast restaurant while you get atlanta drunk at 11:30am

[diana-andraste]

Cat's head on Bauhaus carpet, Albert Hennig, c. 1930

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

"bosch" doesn't sound like the name of a guy who'd make paintings like that. but when you add "hieronymus" to the mix it starts to make sense

[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

[mawmenny]

[blood-red-roses]

St. Mary Magdalene, Covered by her Hair, c. 1311, Collégiale Notre-Dame d’Ecuis, Eure, France

[jsbj]

Tauba Auerbach

[skarabrae-stone]

[magiclilybean]

I think this might be the most beautiful meme I've ever seen. I just spent five minutes extolling all its virtues to my husband:

It doesn't even mention Julius Caesar or the Ides of March.

It's from a very different segment of the play

It's not even the famous part of that segment that everyone knows by heart

The "I'm just sayin'" attitude of all the Seinfeldians in the screenshot (although if memory serves, what they're actually saying is, "not that there's anything wrong with that")

It just comes at the whole situation in such an oblique fashion

I don't think I've ever seen an Ides of March meme do anything like this before

I love it and I love you for bringing it to me.

[courageinsect]