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via pinterest

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Trista Mateer, from a poem featured in her collection titled The Dogs I Have Kissed

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“Art remains permanently tied to the senses. Just as one cannot float colors in space (a painter needs some sort of surface, like a canvas, however neutral and textureless), one cannot have a work of art that does not impinge upon the human sensorium. But it is important to realize that human sensory awareness has not merely a biology but a specific history, each culture placing a premium on certain senses and inhibiting others. (The same is true for the range of primary human emotions.)”

— Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility”

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What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

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Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

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“How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music. I’m fond of flowers”

— Susan Sontag, Death Kit

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heyhegia

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“You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.”

Susan Sontag, from an interview conducted c.October 1979

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You'll notice that I haven't talked about love. Or about happiness. I've talked about becoming - or remaining - the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it's all about. It's not. It's about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

— Susan Sontag, from "Notes on 'Camp'" in "Against Interpretation" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) (via Whiskey River)

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".... the personal is political"

female liberation. feminism.

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Quotes I've saved for some reason #17

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“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

— Bell Hooks

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Nevin Yıldırım - the woman who cleaned her honor. september 6, 2012.

Nevin Yıldırım, a 26-year-old mother of two, lives in a small village in southwestern turkey. she said the man, nurettin gider, began the attacks a few days after her husband left in january for a seasonal job in another town, according to a source close to the case.

he threatened her with a gun and said he would kill her children -ages 2 & 6- if she made any noise. that was the first of repeated rapes over the next eight months. at one point, Yıldırım said he sneaked into her house while she was asleep and took pictures of her- one of the pictures shows her pregnant body. he threatened to publish the pictures if she didn't obey him, the source said.

in small villages like hers, honor is held above all else and women carry the burden of honor for their families. pictures like those would have been devastating for Yıldırım and her family and could have posed a danger.

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on august 28, at least five months pregnant by a man who continued to rape her, Yıldırım said she decided she had enough. he was climbing up the back wall of her house. "i knew he was going to rape me again," she said at her preliminary hearing august 30.

"i chased him," she said. "he fell on the ground and started cussing. i shot his sexual organ this time. he became quiet. i knew he was dead. i then cut his head off."

witnesses described Yıldırım walking into the village square, carrying the man's head by his hair, blood dripping on the ground. "don't talk behind my back, don't play with my honor," Yıldırım said to the men sitting in the coffee house on the square. "here is the head of the man who played with my honor."

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"i thought of reporting him to military police and to the district attorney but this was going to mark me as a scorned woman," Yıldırım said, "since i was going to get a bad reputation i decided to clean my honor and acted on killing him. i thought of suicide a lot but couldn't do it".

Yıldırım said she was worried people would judge her children because of what happened, "now no one can call my children bastards," she said, "i cleaned my honor. everyone will call them the children of the woman who cleaned her honor."

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the source also said Yıldırım went to a health clinic a while ago seeking an abortion but health workers told her she was 14 weeks pregnant and abortion was not an option. in turkey, abortion is allowed during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, after which it is permitted only to save the life or health of the mother or in cases of fetal impairment, human rights watch said. at her hearing, Yıldırım said she doesn't want to keep the baby and that she is ready to die.