interlude.

[shadesofinfinityy]

Visit Original Link

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

it’s christmas eve, and that means it’s time for my yearly tradition of reblogging the egg nog post

[kirbyskisses-main-moved-deactiv]

This Thanksgiving remember that the actual story of how Thanksgiving became a holiday is because of one singular old lady writing to the White House for 11 years that there needed to be a day to celebrate coming together as a family in a time of constant war and separation, particularly the middle of the Civil War, until Abraham Lincoln finally got tired of her and gave her the day.

The myth that we usually believe is the “First Thanksgiving,” that being the “congregation” between indigenous people and the Pilgrims of the Mayflower, was only because the leader of the said indigenous group knew the mutual language due to earlier slavery. The Puritans refused to eat with “savage Indians.” They stole their cropping techniques, and then slaughtered them all via internal warfare and intentional smallpox infestation.

The son of the chief had his head put on a pike that stayed in the town square for 50 years afterwards. 

You can see more here: 

So the moral of the story that you should remember for this Thanksgiving:

1. The legacy of colonization of baked into every single aspect of American culture

2. Try to respect the 566 indigenous nations in the United States that are left because they are deprived of rights, American citizenship, and any living history

3. Consistently writing to your local office and federal government might actually make a change

4. The only way to unite a country going through conflict, especially America, it was to make your voice heard, and make sure those in power no the necessity of overcoming prejudice

5. Turkey was not native to the section of America where the Pilgrims landed

Happy Thanksgiving, my people.

[maddiesharafian]

A Blacksmith’s Dream

[urparty]

the reason so much of mainstream lgbt media is about coming out is because thats the only part of being lgbt that directly impacts the cis het people around you, and since mainstream media has to cater to a cis het audience, it has to represent the most palatable part of being lgbt in order to be the most profitable. portraying other experiences of being lgbt that don’t directly involve cis het people is too alienating to them to win their interest and will likely cost you a huge chunk of potential viewership. in this essay i will

[wwxavier]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thecommoncurator]

I just wanna like, build up an international network of queer comrades, multigenerational, with like little stash house in various countries, cashapping those in dire straits, sharing art and signal boosting the voices in need of signal boosting. Educating each other on various topics, building a support system in the face of the capitalist hellworld we live in. that’s *my* gay agenda.

[wwxavier]

this!! this!! let us commune together.

[nevver]

Walt McDougall’s Good Stories for Children, 1902-05

[bogleech]

always reblog good stories for children

[petitetimidgay-deactivated20240]

do you ever have a conversation and think “I am not heterosexual enough for this”

[leslieknope2k44]

a guide to wlw period pieces (tv edition)

[itbelle]

Male Envy and the Empowered Woman

The masculinity that claims to being “brave, strong” can’t deal with a free woman. The envy is not about material things but also about the woman who got what makes us men.

During a conversation with a friend, she told me that she had a shallow relationship, because the guy said that he was nobody next to her. “You are educated, well succeeded, and I? Who Am I? I can’t accept you like that.” Of course, the first thing we thought was: “He is fooling you.” In fact, it’s a trick, but it hiddens a deeper question to man, the male envy of women. We won’t explain psychoanalytic questions about penis, genitals and other things. I’m talking about a specific envy based on sexism. Many of us actually can’t deal with a free woman, and if she is free and well succeeded, it gets worse. We don’t assume that we feel jealous but it shows in the relationships, either avoiding these women, or looking for women who men think are “less” than them. And it shouldn’t be normalized, because this is one of the reasons of violence against a woman. The sexist structure says that well succeeded men are “victims” of opportunist women, and we don’t even have a problem about not being able to get a relationship because of that, but women, yes. This question works as an excuse to men treating a woman like an object, because, if she is well succeeded and empowered, also she doesn’t fit on me, and the emotional responsibility in the relationship disappears.  We, while men, we easily find ways to put ourselves as protagonists but we hardly accept not to be the best in the relationship. Make a relationship into a hard thing with a well succeeded and empowered woman it’s about avoiding at all costs at having a “competitor” at our side. Because of that, many men want sweet women, chaste women, that he thinks they need to be cared for, because they won’t never be in the high places of the competition and they won’t ask questions. The violence is a constitution of gender inequality. Financial violence increases from these questions, the fact of women having lower salaries it’s explained due to these situations. Few women holding leadership positions is also a reason for these circumstances, for example. When you keep a structure made to degrade women, you are not only making an act of violence but also you earn a privilege, many times, to dominate. We accept women in power positions in theory but not in practice, because being well succeeded is a feature of masculinity. “Real Men” are those who have accomplishments in their lives and if a woman does the same, she is not a woman for you anymore. It’s very common for men who have relationships with women who has higher salaries than them hearing from their friends that she is the leader, she is the boss, just because of this value of masculinity. Besides an empowered woman having to lose her image of being a woman in a relationship, in the man’s point of view, she becomes also rude, annoyed and the overreacted, and many offensive sexist words. And this woman won’t be free from any other way of sexism, like put in check of her capacity, slutshame her to anything she is going to do, wanting to explain to her something that she is a professional about, etc. I always say that we all are sexist and the renouncement of sexism is a daily work, because our existence works in the oppression of other men and women. Maybe you will deny it, but the fact is, in some moment of your life, you continued to reinforce this culture. The problem is in our social patterns at being a man and woman, that makes empowered and well succeeded women feels they are wrong at getting their accomplishments, and many times, they think besides any of their accomplishments, they are making a mistake at not having a man at their side, this is psychological violence. Men are raised to define the social rules to women, and this needs to change. Those rules that also affect you. We need to understand that if a woman acquires more than you it does not make you unvalued like a man, and her value is not less because of that. We are far from being minimally respectful in a relationship, to each one man minimally opened, we have ten men using and objectifying a woman, whether she is empowered or not. The male envy is a feature of toxic masculinity that we share. Our existence, our relationship with this world shouldn’t be based on oppression. 

Joao Marques, brazilian therapist, original post from Instagram: [x] | Translation made by me

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

in honour of lithub making a list of ‘best 50 novels under 200 pages’ with a pathetic showing for women of colour… here’s a list excluding whites and men:

adania shibli, touch

shahrnush parsipur, women without men

fae myenne ng, bone

gwendolyn brooks, maud martha

theresa hak kyung cha, dictee

nawal el saadawi, woman at point zero

jamaica kincaid, a small place, lucy, annie john, my brother

mariama ba, so long a letter

maryse conde, i tituba, black witch of salem

kopano matlwa, coconut, evening primrose

suzette mayr, dr edith vane and the hares of crawley hall

tanya tagaq, split tooth

michelle cliff, no telephone to heaven, abeng

buchi emechata, second class citizen, the joys of motherhood

hiromi goto, chorus of mushrooms

tsitsi dangarembga, nervous conditions

yvonne vera, nehanda

emma perez, gulf dreams

etel adnan, sitt marie rose

jaqueline woodson, red at the bone

akwaeke emezi, freshwater

nella larsen, passing

laila lalami, hope and other dangerous pursuits

naomi fontaine, kuessipan

vi khi nao, fish in exile

shay youngbloood, soul kiss

bessie head, a question of power

han suyin, winter love

le thi diem thuy, the gangster we are all looking for

oyinkan braithwaite, my sister the serial killer

zinzi clemmons, what we lose

janet campbell hale, the jailing of cecelia capture

kim thuy, ru

sahar khalifeh, wild thorns

suniti namjoshi, the conversations of cow

gayl jones, corregidora

tamai kobayshi, prairie ostritch

gloria naylor, the women of brewster place

terri de la pena, margins

zen cho, the terracotta bride

[garbji]

“I am trying to write / a poem in which I am neither a monster nor a martyr”

— Kevin Kantor, a cento of poetry from his work created by Megan O’Hern, “You are Not Just Anything,” published in Crab Fat Magazine (via lifeinpoetry)

[kaotic-youth]

When Ursula K. Le Guin said that all the old stories tell us about hunting but really 65% of their diets were foraged, collected and gathered. And the only reason the stories persisted were because they were stories, frightening and heroic. And when Virginia Woolf tried to re-write the English language she wanted to replace the word Heroism with Botulism which is a kind of food poisoning. And heroes all started as men who almost died trying to hunt for food, food that wouldn’t be stored properly. And this idea of heroism started to infect our idea of humanity and how it started. And how Ursula K Le Guin said she wasn’t human if humanity was all about violence and hunting. And when Lillian Smith said that What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization because what history tells us is human is largely the story of men. And the story of men is pointed violent weapons, active things. And the lost history is that of the carrier, the recipient, the weaved basket used to carry grains. And the lost history is that of the women and how they too are carrier, recipients, almost passive holders of all the life they gathered. 

[pclysemia]

“The Welsh language has a unique character which reminds me of the country’s landscapes and history. For example, the Welsh version of describing something as “music to my ears” is “mêl ar fy mysedd,” or “honey on my fingers”. To me that’s so much more poetic and sensual than the English idiom, and it reminds me of Wales’ history of poetry and song, and the fact that living in Wales – with its huge mountains, long beaches and 365-day rain cycle – is often a very sensory experience. There is something ancient about that phrase: when I say it I can almost feel how old the Welsh language is. Perhaps the fact that languages are embodied with so much culture and history is why it feels so poignant to forget them, and so painful.”

— Ellie Mae O'Hagan, Losing my Welsh: what it feels like to forget a language (via mothersofmyheart)

[brella]

good essays i’ve read this year

“the siren song” by nina maclaughlin

“out there: on not finishing” by devin kelly

“illuminating kirinyaga: meaing and knowing in mount kenya’s forests” by tristan mcconnell

“on the igbo art of storytelling” by ikechukwu ogbu

“poetry fills tehran streets as iranians adapt nowruz rituals to corona restrictions” by alex shams

“writing emails to my late father” by krista stevens

“panic is worse than pain: how fiction failed me after trauma” by jenn ashworth

[firstfullmoon]

Octopus?

“once a marine biologist told me octopuses have three hearts” by Denice Frohman

[karina-padilla]

I’m pretty sure this couple saw me filming their hands but they were so in love they probably didn’t mind me at all lol

[anarchist-memes-1]

[chthonic-isabelleadjani-deactiv]

and what is “translate truthful to the time it was written” even supposed to mean like there’s no way a translation now in the US could be read the same way it was a couple thousand years ago in Greece when english didn’t even exist yet

[sinbrook]

Yep, in the original Odyssey, in the scene where Telemachus murders the slaves who were “sullied by” Penelope’s suiters, he refers to them with a word that roughly just means “the female ones”, however most translations will use words like “whores”, “sluts” and “creatures”, these were all choices of the translators. The original text did not refer to them that way. Dr. Wilson refers to them instead as “girls”, to highlight their age and the brutality of the action. She also fixed all the times the previous male translators dodged around the existence of slaves in the text. Where they call slaves anything but slaves (housemaid, nurse, cook, ect.) Dr. Wilson’s translation correctly calls them slaves as in the original texts. It’s really a great translation, it doesn’t soften anything, and lays bare the reality of the story. One thing she did too, was she refused to make the descriptions of the women in the story more palatable to modern western beauty standards. The original text, for example, describes Penelope’s hands as “thick”. Most male translators change this to “steady” but Dr. Wilson’s translation calls them “firm, muscular hands” to correctly portray the original intent, that Penelope, as a character who weaves every day and every night undoes her weavings, has strong hands, as weaving does make one’s hands more muscular, and that was clearly what was originally intended to be said given the context of her character and the weavings. Of Odysseus himself, the original epic calls him “polytropos” poly, meaning many, and tropos, meaning turn. Some male translators used this to say the story itself had twists and turns, other ignored the word completely to write in a way that made Odysseus seem as though a straight up hero, a man “skilled in all ways of contending”, but Dr. Wilson uses it to mean “complicated”, because Odysseus isn’t a straight up hero, he does some really shitty things. So her translation got a lot of men very very mad, because they said that her being a woman has caused her to translate with bias since her translation is so different to others. She pointed out that perhaps people should have suggested that bias in the inaccurate men’s translations. Anyway, go read Dr. Wilson’s version of The Odyssey. It’s very good.

[morganoperandi]

Need to find this translation right now.