mortifyingordeal - Tumblr blog

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“What is it that the child has to teach?

The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.

And the child is right.”

— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

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“I am certain that most, if not all, Americans have heard of Hawai’i and have wished, at some time in their lives, to visit my Native land. But I doubt that the history of how Hawai’i came to be territorially incorporated, and economically, politically, and culturally subordinated to the United States is known to most Americans. Nor is it common knowledge that Hawaiians have been struggling for over twenty years to achieve a land base and some form of political sovereignty on the same level as American Indians. Finally, I would imagine that most Americans could not place Hawai’i or any other Pacific island on a map of the Pacific. But despite all this appalling ignorance, five million Americans will vacation in my homeland this year and the next, and so on into the foreseeable capitalist future. Such are the intended privileges of the so-called American standard of living: ignorance of, and yet power over, one’s relations to Native peoples.”

— Haunani Kay-Trask, “Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture

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Anaïs Nin

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from Jews Don't Count by David Baddiel, quoting his own novel, The Secret Purposes

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“How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”

— Annie Dillard

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“What I like about using words is that you don’t have to see everything all the time: if I mention the dress in the window, the reader must construct a visual for the shop; if I mention a white stone hotel, the reader has to conjure the style of its roof, its windows. This level of suggestion can be done when drawing, but it’s more difficult. When I started illustrating, I heard an illustrator—I can’t remember who it was: it might have been Quentin Blake or Michael Foreman—tell a story in a lecture about his old teacher, Edward Ardizzone. The student was having such trouble drawing a horse’s legs that he eventually asked Ardizzone how he would do it. Ardizzone said that he would draw a big rock in front of the difficult bits. I’ve found this sort of thing is more fun to do in writing than illustration, and not just for problem-solving, but as a positive practice: the possibilities for ‘rocks’ of all shapes and sizes, are endless.”

— The Rumpus Interview with Joanna Walsh. 

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You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

oh.......................................

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edward said’s critique of albert camus centres around the latter’s perpetuation, as a descendant of french settlers in occupied algeria, of eurocentrism by using algeria as a backdrop for the philosophical musings on the human condition of europeans while the natives remain faceless and voiceless. while ultimately a poor settler, camus was still against the independence of algeria as a frenchman (”if i had to choose between this justice and my mother, i’d still choose my mother”, “this justice” being the struggle for an independent, decolonised algeria). of course this isn’t a condemnation of people who like his books w/o knowing the colonial and orientalist implications of his writings BUT edward said underlined everything that had been left unsaid about the importance of emphasising the often forgotten or hidden layer of colonialism in the writings of imperial subjects so i invite you to check it out! 

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“Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”    ―      Bonnie Burstow, Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence    

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“House on Fire” by Sarah Anne Johnson, 2009. Dollhouse/mixed media.

My maternal grandmother Velma Orlikow was an unwitting participant in CIA-funded brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in the mid-1950s. As a patient under the care of Dr. Ewen Cameron, she was subjected to invasive treatments such as shock therapy, LSD, and medically-induced sleep. These events traumatized her and rippled down through the family tree. (via the artist’s website)

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“In the last couple years it became a more interesting challenge to be “good” than bad. I started living alone, vacuuming my apartment weekly, saving parmesan rinds for soup, calling to negotiate better rates for utilities. I became a better cook and friend, especially to myself. These specific tasks are not meant to demonstrate adulthood, the inane fantasy of the unrigorous that there is a finite level—based often on what you can afford to own and what that implies—at which no further acquisition of skills or growth is necessary. Rather, it’s to illustrate that I now live my life in a way that suggests I care to be in it. Naturally that desire transfers to other tasks, practices, and ways of relating––what I mean is that it transfers to love.”

— Lucy Morris, “Every Long Letter is a Love Letter” (via exhaled-spirals)

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“[Trickster gods] are the lords of in-between. A trickster does not live near the hearth; he does not live in the halls of justice, the soldier’s tent, the shaman’s hut, the monastery. He passes through each of these when there is a moment of silence, and he enlivens each with mischief, but he is not their guiding spirit. He is the spirit of the doorway leading out, and of the crossroad at the edge of town. […] In short, trickster is a boundary-crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the city and the gates of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish—right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead—and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox. That Trickster is a boundary-crosser is the standard line, but […] there are also cases in which trickster creates a boundary, or brings to the surface a distinction previously hidden from sight. In several mythologies, for example, the gods lived on earth until something trickster did caused them to rise into heaven. Trickster is thus the author of the great distance between heaven and earth. […] Boundary creation and boundary crossing are related to one another, and the best way to describe trickster is to say simply that the boundary is where he will be found—sometimes drawing the line, sometimes crossing it, sometimes erasing or moving it, but always there, the god of the threshold in all its forms.”

— Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art by Lewis Hyde (x)

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““The mannerisms that help define gender - the way in which people walk,swing their hips, gesture with their hands, move their mouths and eyes when they talk, take up space - are all based upon how non disabled people move…The construct of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also on the non disabled body.””

— Eli Clare, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

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Okay I am obsessed with way Shoshana Kneubuehl sculpts cows

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“To write narratively we are encouraged to keep moving, to stay off the grass as it were. Poetry has been more generous; poetry seems to want to build architectures in the grass or of the grass. But, for some of us, when we are in the grass, we miss the road; we want to be on the road and on both sides of the road at the same time. We want to use the road to think about the grass and we want always for there to be grass on the road.”

— Renee Gladman

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“If you’re happy in a dream…does that count? The happiness–does it count?”

— From The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (via rlyrlyugly)

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Louise Bourgeois - from the No series, 1973.