#essay quote

[words-and-coffee]

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[cupsofsilver]

"Christian imagery is among the most controversial elements of Gothic subcultural style. Crucifixes, rosaries, crosses, angels, and images of Christ are juxtaposed with gargoyles, demons, vampires and satanic images to high affect. Likewise nun's habits and monk's robes may be worn with fishnets and garters, dog collars, chains, and heavy leathers. Though mainstream culture has often taken this imagery at face value and believed Goths to be Satanists, this is not the case. Blasphemy is used as a symbol of rebellion in much the same way that fascist imagery, such as the swastika, was used by the Punks. As forbidden, culturally maligned images they serve to shock, to identify the wearer with dangerous, powerful forces, and as a kind of cultural mirror - as if to say that what society fears and despises most is in fact the essence of itself. Like the omnipresent cross over the grave of the betrayed, 'undead' Giselle in the Romantic (Gothic) ballet of the same name, the ironic reference is a lot of good Christianity did her'."

Tricia Henry Young, Dancing on Bela Lugosi's Grave: The Politics and Aesthetics of Gothic Club Dancing, Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer, 1999), pp. 75-97. Source.

[stubbornvulpixquotes]

Someone has said that it requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.

-Emma Goldman, Anarchy

[soracities]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[mournfulroses]

Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays And Other Writings originally published in 2004

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Susan Sontag wrote that "Depression is melancholy minus its charms." For me, living with depression was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating.

John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed (Harvey)

[independent-fics]

Now, you can take that as a gift, or you can take it as a curse. And that's up to you.

Eliot Spencer and Parker Doing the Things Others Won’t

Leverage (2008-2012)

04x01 The Long Way Down Job

05x09 The Rundown Job

[rapha-reads]

"So with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.” Though, oddly enough, Dasent by “the soup” meant a mishmash of bogus pre-history founded on the early surmises of Comparative Philology; and by “desire to see the bones” he meant a demand to see the workings and the proofs that led to these theories. By “the soup” I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by “the bones” its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup." Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

Gods, I adore Tolkien's writing.

[lucidloving]

@heavensghost // Erin Moran, "940 Main Street" // Jason Schneiderman, "Little Red Riding Wolf" // @mah_hirano on tw // Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" // Richard Siken, Editor's Pages: Black Telephone // Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken my Body: Essays // @loputyn // Mason O'Hern, "You Are Not Just Anything" // Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil

[words-and-coffee]

We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

[cupsofsilver]

“Navidson is "forced to light the cover of the book as well as the spine," causing him to burn his fingers and lose some of the text. Left in the end with one page and one match, Navidson literally consumes and lets be consumed the last remnant of the book: "First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark" (467). What we experience here is an inversion of the postmodern topos of the mise en abyme: stripped of its epistemologically debilitating impact, this episode of Navidson reading the very text in which he figures as a fictional character functions to foreground the equivalence between the two forms of consumption— reading and material destruction— here thematized. The point, then, is to emphasize the absence of any "sacred text"-literally instanced by the destruction of Navidson's copy of House of Leaves— and the primacy of the singular act of reading that forms its necessary correlate.”

Mark B.N. Hansen, The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

[stubbornvulpixquotes]

In its tenacious hold on tradition, the Old has never hesitated to make use of the foulest and cruelest means to stay the advent of the New

-Emma Goldman, Anarchy

[lifeinpoetry]

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light.

— Anne Boyer, from "No," published on the Poetry Foundation blog

[soracities]

obsessed w this ("Dostoevsky as lover", Henrik Karlsson)

[metamorphesque]

a quiet resignation. tathev simonyan

[kitchen-light]

Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.   Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.

Nabil S., from "It Was All Songs: A Letter From Gaza" translated from the Arabic by Sarah Aziza, published in Mizna on February 12th, 2024. You can read the entire essay here.