Unclench Yonder Butthole

I get a little overexcited about Victoriana.... [Icon credit to Piranhapunk//tumblr whom I love dearly.]

[pomegranateteeth]

Don We Now Our Grim Apparel ⚰️⚱️☠️

The epic highs and lows of Victorian mourning clothes

This month we are getting grim with it and taking a look at 19th c. mourning costume as I dive into what emo American teaboos were up to in the late 1800s. Come learned about even more arsenic laced fabrics and the oddly oppressive rituals of dressing to honor the dead.

[thecolorblockcurator]

Madame de La Chere, 1843, Marcel-Antoine Verdier

[the1920sinpictures]

1916 c. Young woman graduation picture probably taken by Nathan C. White, Gainesville, Georgia. From Memory Lane Photos, FB.

[knightwithahundredkings]

I really recommend the Táin Bó Cúailnge to anyone looking to get into medieval literature because it's a great story, brilliant poetry (I read the Carson translation, and the way he translates the roscada sections are beautiful) and the backbone of the Ulster Cycle, but it's also just really fucking funny. It has a very slapstick yet dry sense of humor that provides just enough comic relief to make the dramatic moments of the story even more impactful. Genuinely I laugh out loud every few pages. Go read it.

[knightwithahundredkings]

You can't make this shit up

[memories-of-ancients]

Amputation saw with ivory handle, Spain, 17th century

from The Science Museum Group, UK

[fluentisonus]

reading an article abt 19th century american magazines' constant plagiarism of fashion plates from french magazines. life is beautiful

[fluentisonus]

this is so funny. ye old terrible art tracing

[fluentisonus]

this is interesting actually, about how they seemingly 'edited' plates together to put more of an emphasis on motherhood:

the french images above ↑ (a woman facing away from her two children; two women), get 'edited' (or rather like. recomposed) into the american ones below ↓ (two images of women facing their children).

from the article (Americanizing French Fashion Plates: "Godey's" and "Peterson's" Cultural and Socio-Economic Translation of "Les Modes Parisiennes" by Karin J. Bohleke):

In contrast, French mothers in Les Modes Parisiennes are frequently completely disengaged from the children depicted with them: they look elsewhere and even turn their backs (see Figures 1-2). Again, this is a function of the contrived poses necessary to depict certain key stylistic features of garments. However, this is one aspect of French fashion plates that American editors found unacceptable: when the French mother is looking at her children, Peterson's frequently re-engraved the plate in its entirety (see Figures 3-6). But when the mother's pose has her ignoring the very objects that give her life its meaning. Peterson's was more likely to re-engrave the children without this unacceptable mother, or another French fashion plate woman whose gaze was basically in the right direction was substituted (see Figures 7-8). Concerned that French plates might send the wrong message regarding a woman's ultimate role, American editors eliminated the unacceptable depiction. There are consequences to this substitution: French plates depicted appropriate garments in a suitable setting, thereby instructing their readers in the social etiquette of dress through context; American substitutions resulted at times in socially absurd juxtapositions, such as a ball gown on a clifftop boardwalk (see Figures 9-10).

^ emphasis mine bc it made me laugh

[periodinteriors]

Fernand Pelez de Cordova (Spanish, 1820-1899), Bedroom, 1862, watercolor.

[enchantedbook]

'Other Lovers' by Norman Lindsay, 1924

[frostedmagnolias]

Black Lace & Silk Velvet Evening Dress

c. 1906

Augusta Auctions

[pmamtraveller]

Jules Elie Delaunay - Young Woman with Sword

[possumcollege]

"Tits out with weapon," a timeless genre.

[thingsfromthedirt]

from the 1897 Sears Roebuck catalog, based on a poem by Ellen Sturgis Hooper

[fluentisonus]

in tears over "have not polked this season". why is this the funniest thing i've ever seen

[prokopetz]

Standard sword and sorcery fantasy film periodically interrupted by cutaways to an in-universe historian from a notional period hundreds of years after the depicted events explaining the film's various historical inaccuracies. There's a recurring tangent about how the film's protagonist is a conflation of three different guys, all of them much weirder than the end product of that conflation.

[prokopetz]

At one point the historian remarks that the film's principal villain probably never existed, but you can tell from their thousand-yard stare that there's some Poe's Orangutan level discourse about that topic.

[amashelle]

Honestly would love to see a King Arthur movie with this framework.

[amashelle]

Still thinking about this.

Except now I’m envisioning:

Standard King Arthur movie with the usual ‘back in the 6th century…’ establishing blub, which looks a little odd because it started with a specific year, which was crossed off and replaced by another, which was also crossed off and replaced by ‘~6th century, give or take’ along with a few other editorial addendums.

Opens with Uther and Merlin discussing the siege of Tintagel. Things go smoothly until Uther’s name is used, cue the first interruption to explain that Uther was probably an ‘invention’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but then that academic is interrupted by a Geoffrey apologist (possibly yours truly) to defend his work with a complicated spiel that gets interrupted by the actor who plays Merlin insisting ‘we should get back to the story’

What follows slowly unravels into a poorly disguised academic debate mediated by the Merlin actor as the voice of ‘well I was actually There!’ And it slowly becomes clear that not only does he genuinely believe he’s Merlin, but his version of the story is absolutely the most unhinged and least academically supported version and relies largely on the French Romances for some reason*.

*the reason being that this is an accurate representation of many fans, who hold the Romance era as the ‘Cannon’ for King Arthur even knowing it is not the ‘Historical’ or even ‘Original’ narrative.

[beatainfernaluz]

Ange Anatomique (Anatomical Angel) from Myologie Complette en Couleur, Jacques Gautier-D’Agoty, ca. 1746.

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

The Dead Seeking Warmth (1889 / Oil on canvas) - James Ensor

[dailyclassicart]

Antonina Rzhevskaya - "Music" (1903)

[onceuponatown]

Eight women in high hats having tea. They are, as far as is known, not a coven of witches but rather members of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Castle Rising, Norfolk, England.

Ca. 1920.