digital photo diary

[rosieandthemoon]

Fantaghirò, 1991

[a-state-of-bliss]

Anne Marie for Thierry Mugler Spr/Sum 1988

[iamheavymeta-lll]

[onenakedfarmer]

COLM TÓIBÍN Restlessness: A Syllabus

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

Euripides, Medea

Sophocles, Electra

Sophocles, Antigone

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory

Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World

Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata

John McGahern, The Barracks

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse

Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

Béla Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle

Constance Debré, Love Me Tender

[nedlittle]

it drives me bonkers the way people don't know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said "it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative." and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we've become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it's the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century "uranianism" and misogyny. second of all, i'm sorry that oscar wilde didn't include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess...

[apocryphics]

In this short life / that merely lasts an hour / how much — how / little — is / within our / power

[dispactke]

Profound reflection from Chekov's The Cherry Orchard:

"They owned living souls---it's corrupted all of you, honestly, those who lived before and those living now, so that your mother, you, your uncle, no longer notice that you're living in debt, at other people's expense, at the expense of those people whom you wouldn't even let beyond your front hall. We're at least two hundred years behind the times, we've still got absolutely nothing, no definite attitude to the past, we just philosophize, complain of depression, or drink vodka. It's so clear, isn't it, that before we start living in the present, we must first atone for our past, put an end to it, and we can atone for it only through suffering, only through extraordinary, unremitting labor. Understand that, Anya."

[surrealistart]

František Muzika | Three Large Larvae III in Blue (1970) Oil and tempera on canvas, 130 x 160 cm

[aktionist]

[melasmos-blog1]

The Greek Novel Across the Centuries: A Comparison of Chariton and Achilles Tatius

The Greek novel is not a monolithic genre. It can be divided into an Early and Later Period, each with its own authorial characteristics and audience composition. To explore the differences between the first and later novels I will cite Chariton’s Callirhoe (c. 50 CE) and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (c. 110 CE). This exploration will illuminate what the inspirations for the genre were and how broader cultural shifts fundamentally altered, co-opted, and expanded the original functions of the genre.

Keep reading

[weepingwidar]

Selver Yıldırım (Turkish, 1993) - Şebnem Ferah (2025)

[studylatin]

Satyr bestraddled by a winged female figure. Hellenistic.

[helenofnowhere]

Desire, in its narrative form, is generated by distance. According to one ancient etymology (false, it hardly need be said), desire (pothos) pertains not to that which is present, but to that which is elsewhere (allothi pou) and distant (apontos). We might think of Musaeus’s Hero and Leander, with its story of the separation of the two young lovers by the Hellespont. That narrow strait is the physical materialisation of the narrative requirement for distance. But such boundaries are not just physical: they are symbolic too. In Hero and Leander and Achilles’s Leucippe and Clitophon alike, the young female lover is kept separate from others by parental sequestering. It is a social norm, not brute geography, that interposes the gap between the inception and the consummation of desire. In Chariton’s Callirhoe, the fathers of the two lovers are political enemies, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet. In such cases there is no physical barrier, but there are barriers all the same.

[…] In erotic narratives, desire is usually dangerously dislocated: the Greeks spoke of an atopos pothos, an ‘out-of-place yearning.’ What is distinctive about novels, I submit, is that they resist succumbing to the temptation simply to judge and condemn this ‘dirty’ love, and offer instead something more complex, empathic and challenging. In a novel, a figure like the Iliad’s Helen would become a more rounded character than Homer’s ‘cold, evil-contriving dog’ whose union with Paris was responsible for the suffering of male warriors. Certainly, the poetic tradition could offer a more positive, even celebratory account of transgressive passions. Already in Sappho’s lyrics we find a Helen endowed with agency, will and purpose; her pursuit of her own desires is presented as an exemplum for the poet to follow, and thus implicitly legitimised according to the poem’s moral scheme. But the female poet is also aware of how outrageous she is being, and the male lyric tradition quickly reverts to aggressive condemnation of Helen. In tragedy, those experiencing transgressive desires are given room to express themselves, often with sensitivity (e.g., Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus) but all the same, transgressive desires inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes.

— Tim Whitmarsh, “Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel” (2018)

[kairoschant]

"Aristotle writes that a woman looking into a mirror while menstruating could make its clean surface 'bloody dark, like a cloud' because the menstrual blood passed through her eyes onto the mirror" ....... lmao???

(Helen Morales, Vision and Narrative in Achilles' Tatius Leucippe and Clitophon)

[webgraphic]

[velvetkisses28]

!!!!

[ammonitetestpatterns]

james staples, poynts and spots: molecular revolutions, mystical desires, and the pearl-poet, 2019.