[cancerninja]

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

— bell hooks All About Love - New Visions

[6thlovelanguage-deactivated2020]

Callista Buchen, “Taking Care”

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“Life has been extraordinarily kind to me, and, just as extraordinarily, it has robbed me of everything.”

— Sándor Márai, tr. by George Szirtes, from “Esther’s Inheritance,” c. 1939

[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

[danismm]

Eva Zeisel 1950s

[knifeforsale]

PIN-UP GIRL POCKET KNIFE | LISTING

[itchycoil]

Incels are right I love flirting just for the sake of it and I’m not actually giving pussy

[tuliplips]

Scan from “Dessous” - Taschen ICONS - 2001

[razorshapes]

John Schabel - Passengers

“For a period in the 1990s, John Schabel camped out on overpasses near New York airports, peering with a giant telephoto lens into the cabin windows of aircraft waiting, and waiting, for takeoff.”

[artistsbooksandmultiples]

[podencos]

Intellectually humble people tend to possess more knowledge, study finds, Eric W. Dolan

He Got Schizophrenia. He Got Cancer. And Then He Got Cured., Moises Velasquez-Manoff

66 million-year-old deathbed linked to dinosaur-killing meteor, Robert Sanders

The Death of an Adjunct, Adam Harris

The agony of ending a wanted late-term pregnancy: three women speak out, Natalia Megas

Suicide in the medical profession: ‘If we’re not well, how can we look after our patients?’, Kim Arlington

Fiona Alison Duncan Curates Books for Homes, Hotels, and Shops, Adam Robb

I Lied When I Said We Did Everything We Could, Lane Wilson MD

It Was Just a Kayaking Trip. Until It Upended Our Lives., Jon Mooalem

The Mystery Gift at the End of the World, Brian Rea

There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway., Caity Weaver

The Unthinkable Has Happened, Jayson Greene

What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away, Jia Tolentino

Stumbling Into Adulthood, Alongside a Friend, Julie Beck

‘I’m Broke and Mostly Friendless, and I’ve Wasted My Whole Life’, Heather Havrilesky

‘Will Grief Destroy My New Marriage?’, Heather Havrilesky

Grieving the Future I Imagined for My Daughter, Julie Kim

Gifted and Talented Programs Separate Students by Race, Whitney Pirtle

I Can’t Let Go of How Badly My Family Treated Me When My Mom Was Sick, Lori Gottlieb

My Wife Is Pregnant With a Child Neither of Us Wants, Lori Gottlieb

Sea change: the underwater restaurant with a new approach to marine research, Rachel Hall

An Elegy for the Jewish Retirees of Miami Beach, Naomi Fry

Blockbuster Films Keep Getting Longer; How And Why Did We Get Here?, Chris Klimek

Students In Mozambique Are Afraid The Winds Will Blow Them Away, Tendai Marima

Does Taking Time For Compassion Make Doctors Better At Their Jobs?, L. Carol Ritchie

For the past 148 years, Yosemite’s Lyell Glacier has taught us about the Earth — how it was created, where it was going, and now, how it might end., Daniel Duane

The pregnant teen, the villager giving birth far from home, the woman imprisoned for miscarrying: pregnancy in El Salvador, where women can’t choose where, or whether, to give birth, Nadia Shira Cohen

The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret, Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This Was Supposed to Be a Story About a Bizarre Anti-Vaccine Rally and a Sedated Bear. Then It Got Weird., Anna Merlan

Voices On Addiction: They Call It Spirits, Connie Pertuz-Meza

My Mother’s Tongue, Zavi Kang Engles

Lunch Money, Gabrielle Rucker

The man who sailed round the world with a chicken, Emma Beddington

The Man Who’s Going to Save Your Neighborhood Grocery Store, Joe Fassler

A Woman’s Work: The Inside Story, Carolita Johnson

To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time, Matthew Salesses

No Heart, No Moon, Matt Jones

Mothering on the Borders, Yifat Susskind

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, Dylan Landis

Midwesterners Have Seen Themselves As Being in the Center of Everything, Bridey Heing

[kristina100000]

fuck got caught consuming media

[raycastelo]

Untitled, 2017

[luphilippeguilmette]

Beauty Papers glamour issue by Camille Vivier

[endless-unfolding]

“I was born with a knife in one hand and a wound in the other.”

— Gregory Orr, from “Like Any Other Man,” in The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems

[writhe]

Astronauts talking about viewing the earth from the moon, from The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight

[lilcowgirl7-deactivated20210223]

Which articles did you read??

Speaking to No One: Broadcasting on social media is less about communication than making you the audience to yourself

Social media as masochism: Using social media can be a masochistic means of escaping the self

Social Media Is Not Self-Expression: Self-expression is the internalization of social authority, not the externalization of a “true identity”