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LILITH (1964) dir. Robert Rossen

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Cotillion Photo

These young women will last forever, posed like greyhounds, trapped in the silver crust of the frame. You can’t tell one from another, the breed is so pure. They will never run. Each one aloft on a frozen wave of white cotillion lace to resemble marriage, to resemble fate. I remember July sun pouring down in a prickly meadow, and a garter-snake skin aid out like fairy lingerie on a stone wall. This was Connecticut, there would be a stone wall. Crickets were scraping marrow from the day. I was young; I’d been alone for weeks. I painted the meadow morning and afternoon trying to capture the crackling sound with my brush. I was reading “Oedipus Rex.” I understood neither the snake skin nor the play. “Your life is one long night,” said Oedipus to the prophet, Oedipus, who saw nothing. Oak trees rustled in drought. In saffron grass small creatures skittered. There came a day when I said to myself, “I should prefer to sleep.” Small planets tasted dry and bitter on my tongue. And two days later I woke. Alone in the creaking barn at dusk, not knowing what day, what month, what year, but feeling the haul of earth rolling on its way. “It is not your fate that I should be your ruin,” the prophet said. I moved my arms, my legs, I unclenched my hands, and stood up dizzy from the cot. What was to come would come in its own good time outside the frame. The moon was rising above the hill, a shy wind gathered force, and trees, in their black silhouettes, linked arms.

Rosanna Warren, So Forth (W. W. Norton, 2020)

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Vivien Leigh in a 1940 production still from WATERLOO BRIDGE. 

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Seniors at Vassar College, 1895

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i love characters who do the “i worship the myth i make of you” and in turn dehumanize and get wrong the object of their devotion and love. yes project a thing that does not exist onto a pedestal and kneel at it like it is your altar. this will surely not blow up in both of your faces eventually. the higher you place them the greater the fall

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“this class movie is sooo boring, i’m going to play with your hair” but make it eddie and chrissy

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She was at once so resolute and so dreamy, so sensual and so intelligent. She also was intensely private. What she knew best was how it felt to be alone, unique, isolated. She was lacking in the sense of a solid communal life; what bound people together escaped her. What separated them was an object of wonder, delight and despair. She seemed as detached from herself as from everyone else.

Stephen Spender, describing Virginia Woolf

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Baptism in the River, 1950

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"Bran, I promise you, whatever might happen, I will not let this be forgotten."

Something in his tone made Bran even more fearful. "What will you do?" he asked as Theon Greyjoy reined in beside them.

"Theon thinks I should call the banners," Robb said.

"Blood for blood." For once, Greyjoy did not smile. His lean, dark face had a hungry look to it, and black hair fell across his eyes.

"Only the lord can call the banners," Bran said as the snow drifted down around them.

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I’m rereading some of Theon’s POVs in ACOK and the bits about Dagmer in Theon III make me so sad…

Ugly as it was, that smile brought back a hundred memories. Theon had seen it often as a boy, when he’d jumped a horse over a mossy wall, or flung an axe and split a target square. He’d seen it when he blocked a blow from Dagmer’s sword, when he put an arrow through a seagull on the wing, when he took the tiller in hand and guided a longship safely through a snarl of foaming rocks. He gave me more smiles than my father and Eddard Stark together. Even Robb . . . he ought to have won a smile the day he’d saved Bran from that wildling, but instead he’d gotten a scolding, as if he were some cook who’d burned the stew.

a hundred memories… this really gives the impression that Dagmer is the person who’s most proud of Theon — who loves him the most, even. we all know that Theon craves acceptance and to have his own place somewhere above all else and Dagmer is the one who seems to give that to him more than anyone else.

Dagmer was no true uncle, only a sworn man with perhaps a pinch of Greyjoy blood four or five lives back, and that from the wrong side of the blanket. Yet Theon had always called him uncle nonetheless.

calling him uncle, legitimising their relationship like that as a familial one… this just screams CHOSEN FAMILY to me. this feels especially meaningful because Dagmer isn’t just any man, he’s Balon’s best man. he’s been the greatest fighter on the Iron Islands for decades. he’s a little old now to still be considered as such, he says himself that there are younger fighters who are fiercer than him, but the men still fear him the most. Dagmer is respected and trusted and Theon loves him and he loves Theon.

“Nor for his trueborn son?” He hooted. “I know you too well, Theon. I saw you take your first step, helped you bend your first bow. ‘Tis not me who feels wasted.”

he was present for Theon’s first steps?! even in this neomedieval setting, that seems like a big deal. perhaps he just meant it metaphorically, but it still shows that he was there for Theon while he was growing up, which is not something that could likely be said for Theon’s own father.

Dagmer was the one who taught Theon how to use a bow and arrow, which we know to be one of the skills Theon is most proud of. He is just so important to Theon.

“Why do you tell me this?” Dagmer asked. “It was me who put your first sword in your hand. I know you are no craven.”  “Does my father?”  The hoary old warrior looked as if he had bitten into something he did not like the taste of. “It is only . . . Theon, the Boy Wolf is your friend, and these Starks had you for ten years.”

Dagmer validates Theon! more than anyone else ever seems to have done! he understands Theon’s feelings with regards to Balon and he tries to reassure him! this hardened old warrior definitely has a soft spot for the youngest Greyjoy and it just makes me so 🥹

this quote from the beginning of their interaction struck me, too:

“The day is won,” Dagmer called down. “And yet you do not smile, boy. The living should smile, for the dead cannot.”

the fact that Dagmer tells Theon, the boy who’s “smiling, always smiling” to smile, is interesting. is Dagmer the one Theon adopted this habit from?

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Megan Williams, from "There Will Be Bad Days" [ID in ALT]

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May Sarton, from "Mal du Départ" in Halfway to Silence

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"Where did you get that?"

YELLOWJACKETS 106. Saints ➙ 303. Them's The Brakes

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Spirit tintype by A.D. Wells & Fisher Doherty, with a detail of the letter from a client used to summon the spirit.