#also relevant to

[mzannthropy]

[ghost-biird]

I can’t be trusted with a robot coping with having feelings I will stay up way past my bedtime writing fanfiction

[notasapleasure]

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.

- James Baldwin, Sonny's Blues

[chicago-geniza]

What were people reading in the 1920s? Essay by Nicholson Baker

I am reading this right now and would love to read more articles like it - accounts of what people were reading and what was published and what was reviewed where and when!!! This is My Bullshit in the extreme

[achingblvsh]

𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐭 + 𝐚 𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 ; 𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐧 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐭 .

to the daughter who secretly longs for her mother’s affection , lynne shako . // mom, i know we haven’t spoken in a while but , zeena abbas . // please look after mom , trans. Chi-Young Kim , kyung-sook shin . // wildwood , junot diaz . // poplar street , chen chen . // sharp objects , gillian flynn . 

[watchmakermori]

david tennant: breathes

me:

[acityofaquatint]

spend your childhood visiting churches and studying religious art and architecture

[midautumnnightdream]

Marie Bashkirtseff -  La Réunion

Though [Marie Bashkirtseff] trailed an entourage behind her, she did spend days walking the slums of Paris with her notebook in hand, sketching everything she saw, research which would produce numerous paintings, including 1884′s A Meeting, which now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and depicts a group of young street urchins gathered on a street corner. One of them holds a bird’s nest, and shows it off to the others, who lean in with that boyish interest that tries to disguise itself as total indifference.

But she found a way to include herself in the streetscape. To the right of the group of boys, leading down another street, we can see in the background a young girl from behind, braid down her back, walking away, possibly on her own, though it’s difficult to know for sure because the frame cuts of there...

— Lauren Elkin. Flâneuse. Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London