#Plantation Plain

[todieforimages]

Plantation Plain House-Fountain Inn, South Carolina

I photographed this I-House, also known as a plantation plain, in August 2020. As I was driving home today and avoiding the interstate, I caught a glimpse of the house and realized it had been lost to fire. The only information I can find on the home is that it was built in the 1880s. I suspect it might be earlier than that. The many trees made the property hard to photograph. Here is a link…

[aldenarmy]

[shisasan]

I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…

Egon Schiele, from a letter to Anton Peschka written 1910

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Greetings!

Any related words to "garden" you might know and would like to share? Thank you.

Hi! Here are some related words for you :)

Garden—a plot of ground where herbs, fruits, flowers, or vegetables are cultivated

Allotment - a small piece of ground in or just outside a town that a person rents for growing vegetables, fruits, or flowers

Arboretum - a large garden where many types of tree are grown, for people to look at and to be studied for scientific purposes

Backyard - a space at the back of a house, usually surrounded by a fence, and covered with grass

Campo - a grassland plain in South America with scattered perennial herbs

Demesne - landed property; estate

Estate - farm, plantation; also: vineyard

Field - an area of cleared enclosed land used for cultivation or pasture

Finca - a rural property, ranch, or farm in Spain or Spanish America

Garth - a small yard or enclosure; close

Grassland - an ecological community in which the characteristic plants are grasses

Greenhouse - a usually permanent climate-controlled structure enclosed (as by glass or multiple layers of plastic) and used usually year-round for the cultivation or protection of tender plants

Greensward - turf that is green with growing grass

Ground - an area used for a particular purpose

Homestead - a tract of land acquired from U.S. public lands by filing a record and living on and cultivating the tract

Hothouse - a greenhouse maintained at a high temperature especially for the culture of tropical plants

Lawn - ground (as around a house or in a garden or park) that is covered with grass and is kept mowed

Lea - grassland, pasture

Meadow - land that is covered or mostly covered with grass

Moor - a boggy area; especially: one that is peaty and dominated by grasses and sedges

Parcel - a tract or plot of land

Park - a piece of ground in or near a city or town kept for ornament and recreation

Pasture - land or a plot of land used for grazing; pastureland; pasturage

Plot - a small area of planted ground

Prairie - a tract of grassland

Savanna - a temperate grassland with scattered trees (such as oaks)

Terrain - a piece of land; ground

Tract - a defined area of land

Turf - grass

Veld - or Veldt; a grassland especially of southern Africa usually with scattered shrubs or trees

Yard - the grounds immediately surrounding a house that are usually covered with grass

Hope this helps! Do tag me, or send me a link to your writing if it does. I'd love to read your work.

Sources: 1 2

[fatehbaz]

In the late 18th century, [...] Lahaina carried such an abundance of water that early explorers reportedly anointed it “Venice of the Pacific”. A glut of natural wetlands nourished breadfruit trees, extensive taro terraces and fishponds that sustained wildlife and generations of Native Hawaiian families.

But more than a century and a half of plantation agriculture, driven by American and European colonists, have depleted Lahaina’s streams and turned biodiverse food forests into tinderboxes. Today, Hawaii spends $3bn a year importing up to 90% of its food. This altered ecology, experts say, gave rise to the 8 August blaze that decimated the historic west Maui town and killed more than 111 people.

“The rise of plantation capital spawned the drying of the west side of Maui,” said Kamana Beamer, a historian and a former member of the Hawaii commission on water resource management [...].

---

[S]ugar and pineapple white magnates began arriving on the islands in the early 1800s. For much of the next two centuries, Maui-based plantation owners like Alexander & Baldwin and Maui Land & Pineapple Company reaped enormous fortunes, uprooting native trees and extracting billions of gallons of water from streams to grow their thirsty crops. (Annual sugar cane production averaged 1m tons until the mid-1980s; a pound of sugar requires 2,000lb of freshwater to produce.)

Invasive plants that were introduced as livestock forage, like guinea grass, now cover a quarter of Hawaii’s surface area. The extensive use of pesticides on Maui’s pineapple fields poisoned nearby water wells. The dawn of large-scale agriculture dramatically changed land practices in Maui, where natural resources no longer served as a mode of food production or a habitat for birds but a means of generating fast cash, said Lucienne de Naie, an east Maui historian [...].

“The land was turned from this fertile plain – with these big healthy trees, wetland taros and dryland crops like banana and breadfruit – to a mass of monoculture: to rows and rows of sugar cane, and rows and rows of pineapple,” she said.

---

The Great Māhele of 1848, a ground-breaking law that legitimized private land ownership, laid the ground for big developers to hoard water for profit, said Jonathan Likeke Scheuer, a water policy consultant and co-author of the book Water and Power in West Maui. [...] [T]he creation of private property allowed agricultural corporations to wield “political and ultimately oligarchic power” over elected officials. In 1893, a group of sugar magnates and capitalists overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Queen Liliuokalani, paving the way for the US to annex Hawaii five years later. Sanford Ballard Dole, a cousin of Dole Plantation’s founder, served as the first governor of Hawaii.

When the last of the sugar companies closed in 2016 [...], Scheuer said, the farms were purchased by large investors for real estate speculation and left fallow, overrun with invasive grasses that became fuel for brush fires. Developers [...] took control of the plantations’ century-old irrigation ditches and diverted water to service its luxury subdivisions. In doing so, it left scraps for Indigenous families who lived downstream. [...] [O]n Maui, 16 of the top 20 water users are resorts, time-shares and short-term condominium rentals equipped with emerald golf courses and glittering pools [...].

---

Text by: Claire Wang. "How 19th-century pineapple plantations turned Maui into a tinderbox". The Guardian. 27 August 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

The exterior of this unique 1969 mid-century modern looks like an art garden in Plantation, Florida, but the interior is of questionable taste. Take special note of the blue door- you'll see why in a minute. 5bds, 4ba $1.350M.

See how the front door matches the living room carpet and art?

Here's a family room. Interesting big round windows.

This room is being used as a pool room. I like the sliding Soji screen doors.

Very large room with a sunken area has a bar and a cool retro red (or rose pink) fireplace. I would call this the rec room.

The kitchen is part of the rec room. It doesn't look red, it looks more of a rosy pink.

All these mirrored walls in the dining room disorient me and I can't even make this out.

Next we have a large blue bath. Soji screens throughout the home give it a Japanese teahouse flair.

This home has so many mirrors. This bedroom has an arch in the mirrored wall that opens to an en-suite bath.

More mirrors. Is this room narrow? The mirrors are so disorienting.

One of the secondary bedrooms. This one, as well as the primary, opens to the patio/pool.

It looks like all of the bedrooms, on both sides of the house, open to the pool. The pool looks very plain and neglected.

On the 2nd level there's this larger bedroom, which I think is the primary bd.

Plus a bath with an unusual tub.

Unused bedroom has a desk and this bath matches the pink in the kitchen. I like that sink.

I thought I saw water thru one of the windows, and here it is. The home has a 1/2 acre of land that is a blank slate.

[parasiticstars]

To Teach an Old Dog: #1

re re re re re re uploaded bc tumblr keeps fucking it up

TW: BBU/pet whump, casual mentions of dehumanization, institutionalized slavery, and suicide idealization, and me being very pretentious

Kavan’s back hurts. Of the numerous things wrong with his situation, this is what he decided to focus on in an attempt to stave off the impeding sensory overload— and this is the only familiar, non-Pet-fuckery problem he has.

The bit was fastened too tight and digs in the corners of his mouth. He can feel drool starting to crust his beard. He’s disused to the shoddy buzzcut his masters captors gave him in an attempt to make him presentable before auction; he'll certainly never take the feeling of hair on his ears for granted again. The ear tag is pulling on already mutilated earlobes, adding to a budding headache just behind his eyes. The concrete floors look and feel like they haven’t been cleaned ever. The auctioneer’s voice is solidly the fourth most irritating sound he’s ever heard in his life.

Alas, nothing Kavan attempts to focus on staves off the visceral, skin-crawling feeling of too much. No matter how many times the man gets shuttled in and out of auctions and captors like a head of livestock, he’ll never truly get used to the non-personhood, the sheer objectification of it all. Nor will he get used to an audience leering and inspecting him and the other Pets people around him like the products they’re advertised and sold as.

Nobody seems to be interested in him, thank god. Kavan’s getting too old for most people’s tastes— even as a labor Pet, being above thirty is automatically considered a liability, as if he’d crumple into dust the second he set foot onto a construction site or a plantation or wherever the hell else. Has he felt close to it? Definitely. But that didn’t mean he would; even though some places, water and breaks weren’t a given.

(Why would they be? Employers and contractors who use Pets rather than workers don’t need to abide by silly things such as OSHA and basic human decency.)

But regardless.

With the slowly increasing amount of times he’s talked about like his expiry date has run out, Kavan wonders when he’s going to just be taken out behind the shed.

He wonders if he’ll do it himself one of these days.

A prod to the small of his back forces him to straighten, making him nearly drop his sign in the process. His attention snaps back to the crowd, all crammed together in this dingy-ass building in those dingy-ass folding chairs betting on dingy-ass people.

Long had Kavan lost the naïvety that Pet owners were this special type of evil, so impossibly cruel and uncaring that they simply couldn’t be human. Regardless, the fact that everyone here is so unassuming still screws with him. He could hypothetically see any one of them, say, at a Starbucks bitching at the barista about their overpriced order, or shopping at Trader Joe’s, or working in their cubicle, or at a PTA meeting. That in particular jars him.

Nobody around them would know that said person was willingly participating in legalized slavery, lacking even the flimsy pretense of “rescuing” their aunt’s-grandma’s-brother’s-husband’s-neighbor’s-girlfriend’s-niece’s Pet or whatever else they’d want to virtue signal on their Facebook wall or status or whatever else.

(Are Facebook statuses still a thing? God, Kavan’s been out of the loop too long. He doesn’t even know how long.)

One woman in particular has set sights on him. Judging by the fine cut yet plain color of her coat, the disgusted-holier-than-thou glances she’d occasionally give whoever she was seated near whenever they did anything particular crude, the brand name Ceilos, she’s probably fuck-off rich trying not to look fuck-off rich. What would someone like her want at a low scale labor pet auction like this? Why is she eyeing him in particular? Why are her irises barely darker than #FFFFF?

Catastrophizing is, it seems, a very time consuming activity. It muffles the rest of the auction, the auctioneer’s droning that would soon settle the man’s fate, the assistant taking away the sign Kavan was holding and tugging at the rope attached to his collar.

He stumbles as he’s led off the platform and into the pen for inspection. Through the buzzing of his ears, the sound of heels clicking follows.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“The rise of plantation capital spawned the drying of the west side of Maui,” said Kamana Beamer, a historian and a former member of the Hawaii commission on water resource management, which is charged with protecting and regulating water resources. “You can see the link between extractive, unfettered capitalism at the expense of our natural resources and the ecosystem.” Drawn to Hawaii’s temperate climate and prodigious rainfall, sugar and pineapple white magnates began arriving on the islands in the early 1800s. For much of the next two centuries, Maui-based plantation owners like Alexander & Baldwin and Maui Land & Pineapple Company reaped enormous fortunes, uprooting native trees and extracting billions of gallons of water from streams to grow their thirsty crops. (Annual sugar cane production averaged 1m tons until the mid-1980s; a pound of sugar requires 2,000lb of freshwater to produce.) Invasive plants that were introduced as livestock forage, like guinea grass, now cover a quarter of Hawaii’s surface area. The extensive use of pesticides on Maui’s pineapple fields poisoned nearby water wells. The dawn of large-scale agriculture dramatically changed land practices in Maui, where natural resources no longer served as a mode of food production or a habitat for birds but a means of generating fast cash, said Lucienne de Naie, an east Maui historian and chair of the Sierra Club Maui group. “The land was turned from this fertile plain – with these big healthy trees, wetland taros and dryland crops like banana and breadfruit – to a mass of monoculture: to rows and rows of sugar cane, and rows and rows of pineapple,” she said.

[...]

In Hawaii, water is held in a public trust controlled by the government for the people. But on Maui, 16 of the top 20 water users are resorts, time-shares and short-term condominium rentals equipped with emerald golf courses and glittering pools, according to a 2020 report from the county’s board of water supply. The 40-acre Grand Wailea resort, the island’s largest water consumer, devoured half a million gallons of water daily – the amount needed to supply more than 1,400 single-family homes.

[unicornsaures]

Post-war redcoat trio lore....

tw // death, overdose(sorry guys)

This is mainly William & Henry focused. I fear theyre more tragic than Charles.

Starting with Charles(the least depressing one I fear) he goes back to Pennsylvania to live with his wife, Charlotte, by 1781. He goes to law school late, but eventually becomes a lawyer, which out of the three, means he stays in touch with Hamilton the easiest. He stays a loyalist despite the wars end, but he doesnt hold it against the colonies or anything. He stays in contact with Henry and William the best he can, but the letter-sending is a hassle and he rarely receives response.(Whether that be because letters are lost or the two are just plain ignoring him who knows.) He eventually has two kids; Charles Gray II and Marceline Gray ^_^! Overall his life post-war is fine and he lives a fulfilling life, which brings us to 1825 when he dies at the age of 72 due to scarlet fever. He was happy overall and he loved life idk what to say, yay charles!

Onto William! He moves to South Carolina with Henry around the same time Charles leaves to go with his wife. They own a small plantation which in truth is closer to a farm if anything; by no means are they rich but theyre not struggling or anything. He attempted to court some women the first couple years back but ultimately gave up and decided it was too much of a hassle and that either way Henry is better company than any women could possibly be. William keeps in contact with Charles the best he can, Hamilton not so much. Though, during the war he'd been shot numerous times, most wounds being left untreated so hes stuck with chronic pain and a weakened immune system. This means for post-war William, his health is kind of shitty and he gets sick more often, leaving him bed ridden for days to weeks at a time. William mostly keeps to himself if he ever has to go out and leaves Henry to do most of the talking because god knows that even if hes "crude," Henry isnt nervous to talk. By late-1794, William catches influenza. His immune system is already awful, but not awful enough he dies quickly. Henry tries his best to care for him but its not enough, and by 1995, at the age of 40, he ends up passing from the illness.

Yeah okay, Henry! This is where the TW comes in. So, I mentioned a lot of his post-war situation in williams paragraph. They move in together, they have a plantation, theyre happy yeah! Woo! Okay, now he does get in a few relationships - the longest being two years from 1785 to 1787 - but none of them last longer. He falls in and out of depression with his constant worrying over Williams health, but its hidden well enough. Speaking of, he becomes rather talented medically-wise with how often hes tasked with caring for the other. He keeps in touch with Hamilton better than William, and he also still speaks with Charles, as is customary. Im just gonna jump to 1794, when williams health starts declining. Obviously, its a stressful period for Henry and he does his hardest to help him but clearly, it doesnt work. He has near run-ins with death for months after Williams death, hes being overall impulsive and acting erratically(as is expected, I suppose.) He drinks, does dumb shit, etc. Eventually, 6 months after William, he dies from an opium overdose at 38 in which is never confirmed if it was suicide or simply an accident. Neither Charles or Hamilton hear of either deaths until months later, when Henrys dad reaches out.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

[todieforimages]

Kimble-Crawley-Davis House-Madison, Georgia

The Kimble-Crawley-Davis House used to be located in Rutledge, Georgia. Once located on Old Mill Road in Rutledge, this plantation plain was moved due to land being purchased for the Rivian manufacturing plant. The home is essentially two homes that were out together. The Kimble family built a one-room house in 1911. The Crawley family built the two-story I house in 1829. John Morgan Davis moved…

[magnetic-rose]

listen i believe that people aren’t obligated to like everything but i think some of the fans against amc’s interview with the vampire are actually kind of weird considering some of the complaints were things like louis not being a slave owner and accusing the show’s explicit gayness of being pandering for views.

which, first of all, i actually think the move to make louis a pimp instead of a slave owner pretty smart on the show’s part. it’s still a bad profession, it still takes advantage of people, it still makes louis feel guilty for what he’s doing to others... but it’s not literal slave owning. it would be very hard, in 2022, to root for a protagonist who owns a plantation. and the fact that some fans think otherwise is weird honestly. 

also the idea that a gothic horror vampire love story with explicit gay sex scenes is just simple pandering when general audiences to this day have a hard accepting even the smallest lgbtq characters is laughable. that some people think that interview with the vampire should be adapted with subtext instead of plain text in this day and age... i mean, whatever man. as someone who’s been a fan of the books and the og movie for over 15 years, i think this particular adaptation is near perfect and the logical next step for adapting these stories.

[shisasan]

Picking a single favourite quote might be an impossible task so which quote (or quotes) do you seem to come back to more often than others?

Picking a single favorite quote might truly be an impossible task because there are so many brilliant writers out there whose words have deeply influenced my life. These extraordinary souls have breathed new life into me when I was ready to give up on everything. Without any particular order, these quotes are not intended to enlighten or educate anyone but offer a brief insight into the words I turn to for comfort, inspiration, or understanding when I'm not at my highest self.

I'll begin with my most dearest Hermann Hesse, whom I like to call my Alpha and Omega. He transformed my life from a young age, opening mysterious portals to other worlds and making me feel deeply understood, embraced, with a true sense of belonging. His writing not only awakened my mind to new realms of thought and emotion but also offered immense solace and companionship through his exploration of the human spirit:

"A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal, and sterile life."

"I have always thirsted for knowledge, I have always been full of questions."

"We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness."

Rainer Maria Rilke, a beautiful and tender infinite soul, whose writings deeply resonate with the complexities of the human condition and the relentless quest for understanding:

"I am dark, I am forest."

"I grow strong in the beauty you behold. And with the silence of stars, I enfold your cities made by time."

"Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Novalis, who occupies a cherished place in my heart for his poetic and deeply insightful exploration of life and love.

"We are eternal because we love each other."

"I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that fate and character are the same conception."

"Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates—hence the deadly frost—the free power of the mind—the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything anymore—the person is alone, like a baleful power—as he has no connection with the rest of the world he consumes himself gradually—and in accordance with his own principle he is—misanthropic and misotheos."

Egon Schiele, whose intense and raw portrayal of human emotion and beauty has deeply moved me, revealing the unfiltered essence of the human experience.

"I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…"

Anaïs Nin, a force of nature and embodiment of feminine strength, whose deep exploration of inner life and boundless creativity has left an indelible impression on me. Her work continues to inspire and challenge me to embrace the fullness of my inner world:

"She was colour, brilliance, strangeness."

"I have the power to multiply myself. I am not one woman."

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."

"I can only connect deeply, or not at all."

Carl Gustav Jung, one of the most brilliant psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, and empiricists in history. Jung's exploration of the collective unconscious and shadow self has offered me invaluable tools for self-awareness and personal development. His legacy continues to inspire and guide those seeking to understand the depths of the mind and the path to self-discovery.

"A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."

"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the maddening genius with profound understanding of human nature and morality:

"If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself."

"People speak sometimes about the 'bestial' cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."

"People. People. Endless noise. And I am so tired. And I would like to sleep under trees; red ones, blue ones, swirling passionate ones."

"I exist. In thousands of agonies—I exist."

"If there is no God, everything is permitted."

Virginia Woolf, a literary giant whose deep introspection and exploration of the human condition have left an indelible mark:

"No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself."

"What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one."

"I want to raise up the magic world all around me and live strongly and quietly there."

"Reality? Reality has never been enough for me."

Mikhail Bulgakov, a masterful writer and playwright, another troubled soul who faced censorship and persecution in his lifetime, with immense talent and a deep soul, fascinated me with his imaginary worlds that blend reality with fantastical elements, feeling both familiar and boundlessly expansive:

"But would you kindly ponder this question: What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. But shadows also come from trees and living beings. Do you want to strip the earth of all trees and living things just because of your fantasy of enjoying naked light?"

"Kindness. The only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You'll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be. That I have maintained, do maintain and always will maintain. People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour – white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system."

"Everything passes away - suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the Earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?"

"There are no evil people in the world, only unhappiness disguised as evil."

And then there is indispensable Franz Kafka. Although I have shifted away from his writing in recent years and no longer resonate with it as much, he was a dear friend and frequent company during my darkest, loneliest, and most challenging times. His work, full of raw honesty and insight, offered a kind of companionship that felt both intimate and enduring:

"The way he can risk everything and risks nothing, because there is nothing but truth in him already, a truth that even in the face of the contradictory impressions of the moment will justify itself as such when the crucial time arrives. The calm self-possession. The slow pace that neglects nothing. The immediate readiness, when it is needed, not sooner, for long in advance he sees everything that is coming."

"I, for the most part silent, had nothing to say; among such people the war doesn’t call forth in me the slightest opinion worth expressing."

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." Of course, there are many more authors who deserve to be on this list, but I chose these because they have touched my life in ways that are both unique and deeply personal. I hope that at least some of you will read to the end and find a bit of inspiration and insight in these quotes, just as they have given me. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. 🌹

[palms-upturned]

Settler colonialism destroys to replace. As Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, observed in his allegorical manifesto/novel, “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.” In a kind of realization that took place half a century later, one-time deputy-mayor of West Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti recalled, “As a member of a pioneering youth movement, I myself ‘made the desert bloom’ by uprooting the ancient olive trees of al-Bassa to clear the ground for a banana grove, as required by the ‘planned farming’ principles of my kibbutz, Rosh Haniqra.”

(…)

Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil. If the government notionally held itself aloof from such disreputable proceedings, however, it was never far away. Consider, for instance, the complicity between bayonet-wielding troops and the “lawless rabble” in this account of events immediately preceding the eastern Cherokee's catastrophic “Trail of Tears,” one of many comparable 1830s removals whereby Indians from the South East were displaced west of the Mississippi to make way for the development of the slave-plantation economy in the Deep South:

“Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade [where they were held prior to the removal itself.] Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: ‘I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.’”

Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” (emphasis mine)

[omgthatdress]

This is Nanea’s Palaka Outfit, and it’s made of palaka, a tough fabric known as “Hawaiian denim.” It was originally worn by Native Hawaiian plantation workers from imported English fabric (the name comes from the pidgin word for “frock”), but soon it was being produced locally in Hawaii.

Nanea’s two-piece playsuit is cute, but the shorts are soooo similar to her Meet outfit. I’d really really really love to see Nanea in a muumuu made out of palaka.

When Protestant missionaries began visiting Hawaii in the 1820s, they told local women, who wore grass skirts and went topless, to cover up. They adapted the plain dresses they wore into two different dresses, the more formal holoku (which I’ll get into later), and the casual muumuu.

[readersmagnet]

"WHY" by Marvin V. Blake is a 19th-century novel that follows the lives of two sisters, one white and one black, born in 1847 on Virginia's Rosewood Plantation. Both sisters were raised in the slave-holding antebellum South, surrounded by harsh rules and laws. The novel explores three co-existing 19th-century American cultures: the privileged world of the South's antebellum White Planter Society, the oppressed communities of black slaves, and the noble nomadic hunter-gatherer society of the Plains Indians. 

What will the other sister, Mandy, choose between her lifelong love for her sibling? Or the love she develops with a Comanche warrior? Visit https://www.booksbymarvinblake2.com/ to learn more.