[cilly-murphy]

Merlin rewatch | 1x13 “Le Morte d’Arthur”

[riversofgold]

The idea that being recognised in the depths of despair can save your life is something I believe in. During my worst eating-disordered years, I got most of my nutrition through the written word. I copied out fragments of prose and held them like amulets, convinced that a day would dawn when their wisdom would turn a key that restored my health. The loneliness of illness is hard to convey. There is a difference between occasionally feeling alone and the grip of an alienation that makes you question whether you are human in any sense beyond the immediate physical. In this state, meaningful communication is elusive. Everyday conversation can’t hold the SOS that sweats out of you.

Sophie Monks [x]

[bloncos]

I was just passing through. I said to myself, “I wonder if my brother remembers his brother.” Did I do wrong? It doesn’t matter–I’m very happy.

[trewloves]

james acaster: repertoire

[mesogeios]

“Body Horror,” as an official designation, is a term that comes from horror cinema but its literary origins can be traced back as far as Frankenstein. It is a trope that springs from primal fears—from the knowledge of oneself as a physical object and the consciousness of pain—and its roots wind through the Gothic, to the fin de siècle and the birth of science fiction. As a sub-genre, it broadly encompasses the concept of bodily violation, whether that be via mutilation, zombification, possession, or disease, but arguably one of its most pervasive themes is that of transformation. From Ovid to Cronenberg, transformation occupies an anxious corner in so much of film and literature that it more or less forms a tradition all its own. Folklore and myth are littered with metamorphosis—Daphne twisting into a bay tree, Alice in Wonderland with her Eat Me’s and Drink Me’s—and its impact is frequently an unsettling one. It is a fairy-tale punishment, a warning to naughty children, a reminder of the body’s unreliability.

[…] I think that writing about women goes hand in hand with horror writing. The female body is a nexus of pain almost by design, but it is also potentially monstrous—an object traditionally subjugated, both for its presumed weakness and its perceived threat. The mutations and transformations of horror writing are uniquely qualified to evoke this: the difficulty and unreliability of the female body, its duality as an object both to be feared for and to fear.

When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.

— Julia Armfield, “On Body Horror and the Female Body”

[riversofgold]

Books, and sometimes movies... can be mutually appreciated, but the specific reasons for loving them cannot satisfactorily be shared... you can never exactly imitate someone else's love of a movie or book.

John Irving

[henryclervals]

Riz Ahmed giving Edmund’s ‘Stand up for bastards’ speech from King Lear (Act I, Scene II)

[sesiondemadrugada]

Matt Cunningham.

[blackberryshawty]

*me lying to men* oh wow that’s so interesting

[luthienne]

“It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such.”

—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Who hasn’t ever wondered: am I monster or is this what it means to be a person?”

—Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

—Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden

“They say I’m a beast. And feast on it. When all along I thought that’s what a woman was.”

—Sandra Cisneros, Loose Woman

“The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn’t know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, looser, madness, arte, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession.”

—Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time; “Monstrous Mothers”

“I don’t want to be a person. I want to be unbearable.”

—Anne Carson, Decreation

—Louise Glück, “Blue Rotunda”

“How can I teach her / some way of being human / that won’t destroy her?”

—Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“…and what I want to say / is that I am not what I was, I am / a changeling, half-creaturely,”

—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Wild Animals I Have Known”

“People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—”

—Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon

—Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems; “Index of Prohibited Images”

“She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal,”

—Margaret Atwood, Murder in the Dark: Stories; “Women’s Novels”

“…does she wander still, searching human faces / For one who might speak of her / In her own language, look into her eyes / And gentle the wildness once and for all?”

—May Sarton, Letters from Maine: New Poems

“How can she bear the pain of becoming human? The end of exile is the end of being.”

—Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; “The Lady of the House of Love”

—Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

“A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them”

—Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”

“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

—Ocean Vuong, “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”

“Personally, I’m a mess of conflicting impulses—I’m independent and greedy and I also want to belong and share and be a part of the whole. I doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way. It’s the core of monster making, actually. Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable—your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers—and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves. Oh we’re a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We’ve been to the moon and we’re still fighting over Jerusalem. Let me tell you what I do know: I am more than one thing and not all of those things are good. The truth is complicated. It’s two-toned, multi-vocal, bittersweet. I used to think that if I dug deep enough to discover something sad and ugly, I’d know it was something true. Now I’m trying to dig deeper.”

—Richard Siken, Spork’s Editor’s Pages: Black Telephone

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil

“I was driven because I wanted to be like others. / I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.”

—Czeslaw Miłosz, “Account”

“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster?”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?”

—Janice Lee, Daughter

[watchoutforintellect]

Anne Sexton - From Small Wire

[wychelm]

is this something

[memory-is-treachery]

u heard him ladies

[nerdsagainstfandomracism]

Taika Waititi speaks out against racism

[antifamutant]

To liberals, to centrists, to color blind racists, to all the people who thinks silence or laughing about it, or fake satire are harmless, just an opinion, or a bit of nothing in a cycle that started with little things, this is for you.

[engenderandendear]

“When you ask your lover what he is thinking, aren’t you really asking Do I occur to you? do I take place? Sometimes to walk toward anyone is the wilderness.”

— Christina Davis from Border Patrol (via nemophilies)

[themaleinch]

Riz Ahmed photographed by Lorenzo Agius for Telegraph Magazine UK, February 2010

[riversofgold]

Nietzsche suggested a second kind of tourism, whereby we may learn how our societies and identities have been formed by the past and so acquire a sense of continuity and belonging. The person practising this kind of tourism 'looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city'. He can gaze at old buildings and feel 'the happiness of knowing that one is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that one's existence is thus excused and, indeed, justified'.

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel