#medicine as a way to repress women

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English - Le Streghe Siamo Noi - La Salamandra - 1975

[tiredguyswag]

one of those masterposts for Sudan 🇸🇩

Disclaimer: I am not Sudanese, and am in no way an expert on the ongoing crisis. Corrections, if any, are welcome.

LAST UPDATED: 8th October 2024 [Please try to reblog the original post as much as possible]

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So what's going on in Sudan? Sudan was under the rule of the military dictator Omar Al-Bashir for thirty years. He came to power through a military coup in June 1989. His rule saw extreme economic decline, repression, and conflict. In the December of 2018, a democratic revolution began that eventually overthrew the dictatorship on April 11, 2019, and saw the beginning of a military rule by militant parties SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces) and RSF (Rapid Support Forces). This unrest is, of course, funded by western governments.

On the 15th of April, 2023, fighting broke out in Khartoum between the SAF and RSF. Clashes spread across the nation of Sudan, and the civilian populace is still caught in the middle. According to UN officials, Sudan is in “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history."

There is an ongoing war in Sudan, and it's getting worse. There is a health crisis along with the humanitarian crisis as well: around 2/3rds of the population do not have access to healthcare services. Around 15-20 millions suffer from hunger. There are 70 non-operational healthcare facilities in conflict zones. Thousands killed, millions displaced, and a dramatic increase in sexual violence and rape cases.

~

Links for Learning Resources:

Hadhreen: Hadhreen started as an initiative by a small group of Sudanese youth in 2015. Since its inception it continued to work in a variety of sectors, most notably Emergency response, health, and in supporting vulnerable groups.

Talk About Sudan: Learn more about what's happening in Sudan and actions you can take. Also has donation links for those who are able.

Keep Eyes On Sudan: A website run by Sudanese diaspora to amplify the calls of the Sudanese people. Has donation links, actions you can take, upcoming protests and events, resources, FAQs, etc.

#SudanSyllabus.docx: An extensive and well-sourced document, providing English language resources about Sudanese history. It's really long and has got lots of links to books, articles, and more. Curated by Razan Idris.

Human Rights Watch

~

Donation Links:

List of verified charities providing humanitiarian assistance in Sudan

SudanFunds: Like GazaFunds, it is a compilation of GoFundMes for Sudanese individuals in war zones in need of help.

Help Sudan Tarada Initiative: The aim is to deliver emergency basic needs, food and medicine. Funds will be transferred directly to local charities and organization who are managing those shelters to make sure that the funds are well received and is spent on the needs specified.

One Million Sustainable Pads Campaign: Fundraiser to help provide women in IDPs camps with reusable pads

Zubeyda Adam and family (Sudan)

Our home bombarded and destroyed

Help my family escape Sudan's war

Save a transperson in african Refugee camp from starvation [Unsure about the legibility of this one since its not from the person themself, but if someone can verify this for me that would be great]

Hope For Sudan

Darfur Women Action

Doctors Without Borders

Fill A Heart: Financial Assistance to Sudanese Hospitals

Hometax: Sudan Relief

Cairo Sudan Aid

Amal For Women

Sudan Solidarity Collective

Sadagaat

UNICEF

~

These are all the links I have so far. Please spread awareness about Sudan! Let me know if there are any links I should add to the post and I will update it.

[chronicbitchsyndrome]

sometimes, when someone is criticizing the stay-at-home-wife movement being sold to young women by conservatives, it loses focus on the "selling you a repressive and authoritarian worldview" point and slides into... well... implicitly leaving disabled people to die.

and what i mean by that is, it's all well and good to say you should do everything in your power to make sure you're not financially dependent on another person... but what if "everything in your power" is "nothing?"

what if how society is structured means you have absolutely no choice but to be financially dependent on another person? what if it's that, or simply die? this is the choice disabled people are faced with. not even uncommonly... frequently. people who need full-time carers, or who have very expensive medication and assistive tech needs, or people who simply can't work in the current job structure, often have the choice of... well... find someone to be financially dependent on, or face a slow, painful death, usually without housing. even if you're lucky enough to get on a fixed income, it's never enough to even make monthly rent, and that's not counting the extra costs of food, toiletries, medicine...

in fact, a lot of disabled people (certainly notably women, but absolutely not limited to, and in fact i see this happen to trans men over and over again, and i've lost a dear transmasc friend because of this) are funneled into being stay-at-home parents and homemakers, forced to do all of the domestic labor and childcare in exchange for a roof over their head and access to their medications/assistive tech, and isolated in all the same ways tradwives are isolated. in fact, this even happens with leftist partners/parents. all the time, i see disabled people disappear from public life entirely, lose contact with all their friends, and consign themselves to a life of cleaning up after someone while struggling to handle their own health needs, even having their disabilities exacerbated and their lifespans shortened by the amount of domestic labor they're required to do.

but it isn't a choice... it can't be fixed by focusing on academia or work... and it's not due to buying into conservative propaganda. all i ask is, please remember this, and please never leave us out of these discussions.

[innerfare]

Law’s Type 

Summary: A list of headcanons describing Law's ideal type

Genre: Fluff

CW: None // SFW

———

Someone from either the North Blue or a winter island in the Grand Line, someone who likes the cold and is more than content going long periods of time without sunlight. Also, someone who enjoys hot chocolate enough to get it for you both because he really wants to drink it but also doesn’t want to admit that he likes it because he doesn't think it's manly, so if he could claim you forced him to indulge in it, that’d be awesome. Marshmallows are an extra bonus, but he won’t eat them if you call any attention to how much he enjoys them. (I'm imagining Law with his cheeks stuffed full of marshmallows, send help.)  

A nocturnal creature for sure, just like him. Someone who prefers stargazing to cloud watching.

Someone educated, if not in medicine than in another field (this man played it cool but was sweating buckets in the presence of Dr. Nico Robin). Imagining a marine biologist with a rebellious streak joining the Heart Pirates to conduct research in the Grand Line/New World and give the middle finger to the World Government along the way; possibly a devil fruit eater (an algae fruit could be super cool), definitely a source of headaches for Dr. Law. 

The sort of person who says, "yes Captain," or, "of course, Doctor," with a sweet smile only to immediately disobey.

Kind of random but has a low-key thing for women with pretty hands and feet. It’s not a fetish, he just really likes soft hands and dainty feet, especially with well-kept nails (he’s super into blue nail polish, if anyone even cares). Really likes when a girl wears sandals, especially if they have high heels. Also has dreams about a woman slowly removing a glove, tugging it off finger by finger, and placing her bare hand on his cheek. 

More generally, dreams about a woman who's an odd clash of demure and edgy. (Is this about Nico Robin? Hmmm.)

Given that this man is both touch starved and repressed/suffering from severe trust issues, he would need someone who is willing to initiate the lion's share of physical affection, at least in the early stages of the relationship. He wants it so bad but is too scared to ask. When he does initiate, he typically only initiates things you've initiated, matching you. The exception is the first time he caught you by the hand and pressed a warm kiss into your palm; he's such a hand kisser it's unreal.

Would want someone who could cook, not for him but with him. He actually really enjoys planning out what to cook, going to the market and picking out ingredients, and putting it all together. He’s meticulous in his meal planning and wants someone who enjoys doing it with him. Also, someone who can teach him some new recipes. And someone who can make his favorite: onigiri (not the plum kind, though; he hates the plum kind).

Someone who can teach him new things in general. He enjoys learning and is attracted to people who can teach him. And if your passion for that subject shines through while you're teaching it, even better.

Also wants someone who can be sweet, but not in a suffocating sort of way. He really values his independence and would want a person who feels the same. 

Okay, I’m just describing Nico Robin. 

Someone with a slightly morbid sense of humor, someone who doesn’t get squeamish easily. 

And I’m describing Nico Robin again. 

Someone who admires his coin collection and the handful of action figures and comics in his cabin. More specifically, someone who doesn't let him put his own interests down as dumb and/or childish and, in fact, hypes him up, however awkward the positive reinforcement might make him at first. Someone who buys him a new action figure without asking.

Really wants someone who’s neat, organized, and collected, but is also calm like he is, like a very casual type A personality. He isn’t an opposites attract sort of guy, though he’d need someone at least a little more relaxed and open than him or else the entire relationship would probably just be a stalemate. 

It’s not just that he’s not much of a talker, he can get a little overwhelmed by heart-to-hearts, even if you’re the one doing all the talking, so if he met someone who likes to write and receive notes and, God forbid, actual love letters, he’d fall fast and hard. Your relationship initially blooms with the two of you writing notes in the margin of each others' work, which turns into Law drawing cartoons and you leaving dumb little jokes and eventually culminates in love notes.

Also has a thing for pretty handwriting. He probably keeps a box of things you've written because he's so obsessed.

Someone who is friends with Bepo, but more importantly, someone who respects Bepo and doesn’t treat him like a pet (so important!!!). Respect for Bepo might be more important to Law than respect for Law himself.  

He has a low-key competitive streak, and he’d definitely fall for someone who could bring it out. Someone who has a touch of Straw Hat crackhead energy. 

Someone who can be gentle and caring. Someone with a nurturing side. Someone who, weirdly enough, reminds him of Cora. Someone with a strong moral compass despite probably being a pirate.

Finally, someone who is forgiving of his flaws, someone who is patient, someone who is willing to wait for him to open up and get comfortable, someone who doesn’t get annoyed if he spends the week hiding in his office because it’s all a little too much at the moment, someone who doesn’t ask him to put his book down and pay attention (his ideal is you playing with his hair while he reads). Someone who is on his side. 

———

Hope you enjoyed it! If you want more, you can check out my masterlist here!

[aliencatwafers]

Quick Helluva Boss Rewrite since I don’t like Stolas

Discard the Stolas is good episodes and bring it back to IMP and Blitz

Mlre focus on Millie and Moxxie; Millie is a farm girl who’s considered weak in her family while Sallie Mae is the favorite while Moxxie grew up in the mafia and was forced to kill his mom - they meet each other

Keep Stolas as a villain but have him manipulate he audience that he’s good and it’s his wife that’s the issue and daughter who’s bratty but acts two faced towards

Stella is trying to make the marriage work but is pressured by her incestuous brother to stay in the marriage for the family name; include Stella’s relatives too and have them insist marriage is the only way since women don’t have powers in Ars Goetia

They also consider fire powers unwomnaly so Stella was taught to repress them since “there’s nothing dainty about fire”; she also learned about medicine from a butler

Have Stella hire Striker over and over as he hunts IMP down

While stars are cool as hell, Stolas’ powers represent the coldness and isolation of space and distance from warmth - he represents the almighty powers that tear down life and makes living inhospitable

Big showdown as Blitz calls out Striker for hurting his own kind and Striker has an “oh shit” moment

Blitz makes up with Fizz and they start over

Have IMP not know what Stolas is very much raping Blitz each month to get the Grimoire because he doesn’t want to worry them and he knows he doesn’t have an option

Octavia notices something is up and assumes Blitz is tearing the family apart

Striker tells Stella the kill is off because of what Stolas is doing to Blitz

This angers Stella so much - her whole world comes crashing down as she realizes her husband and daughter’s father is a rapist and what he’s doing to Blitz could easily come to Octavia too. Stella loses it and for the first time, she finally gives in. Her powers represent the warmth in life that dares to exist even in the depths of space.

her fire powers go haywire and she is going to burn the shit out of Stolas

Epic battle between IMP, Striker, Stella, Octavia VS Stolas, Andy, the Sins, and Ars Goetia

Epic showdown, lots of injuries, Striker and Blitz are badly injured, Loona nearly died, Millie is in a coma, and Moxxie is taking care of everyone. Stella decides to use her powers to get Asmodeus stones so everyone can cross over to the living world and do their jobs. She also uses her knowledge she learned over the years in secret to gather medicine so everyone recovers with Moxxie’s help

Stella and Octavia inherit Stolas’ fortune since he’s been disgraced for lending his book (the reason Stella didn’t just report Stolas earlier is that Stolas would’ve blamed Blitz for raping him and stealing the book and blamed her for the plot so she couldn’t report it sooner).

IMP is very successful. We have Millie x Moxxie raising a family (since in this story we have Millie with more character with her own issues rather than just wife), Blitz x Strike, and Stella raising her kid alongside Blitz raising Loona.

[orphiclovers]

okay here's my actual orv sexuality headcanons (awful but I actually believe all of this. also this is just for fun don't @ me)

kim dokja - technically bisexual however way too emotionally repressed to connect with another person so functionally aroace. yearns sometimes but denies himself out of some self destructive need to suffer. Any fellas out there who repress their emotions KNOW that it absolutely ruins your love life and makes you undatable

han sooyoung - stra*ght 🤢 I'm so sorry. That one scene where she goes on the date with a random guy gave me SUCH a clear impression of the straight dating life. Finds guys on dating apps but never succeeds in a relationship because all the men are imature rich asshole types and she is too rough around the edges feminist with her own beliefs and doesn't bend or soften her personality for anyone. Asshole men don't like that in a woman. Friends say to just change herself but she ain't doing that so nothing works out (until two certain someones come and match her freak.)

yoo joonghyuk - into women who hurt him and himself exclusively. yes I'm fr I actually believe this. Only normal girlfriend he had was Seolhwa in 0th and that was very clearly a lavander marriage (and I'm saying that as someone not into joongdok. In 0th they could have just as easily written one pragaraph saying 'and as the years passed they fell in passionate love with each other, a sudden romance that did not fade' and I would have been like 'ok' but they did NOT do that. they said 'they were compatible' and 'their personallities matched' and 'they wanted to raise a hundred orphans together' <-all real btw. it SOUNDS like a marriage of convenience, and what's so bad about that?) Actually, lee seolhwa - very very aroace. and autistic (the beach episode arc bfffr)  only cares about her medicine and saving people and not much else. If someone is there who can support her she's like cool stay in my life. Likes the idea of marrying a gay man who's good with children (SHE'S JUST LIKE ME FR THATS THE DREAM!!) and growing old with him.

okay back to yoo joonghyuk - less funny answer is technically bisexual however not currently including men as an option due to trauma 😬 yikes sorry for that. anyway selfcest is the only exception, both actually himself and people who FEEL like himself including anna sooyoung dokja nirvana etc etc all the people he has canonical weird tension with. NOT SP, he doesn't like him very much and SP is very much in cringe unrequited love here. rip my guy

[gatheringbones]

[“It can be difficult for people raised as girls to express rage when we’ve been taught from very early on that it is in our best interest to suppress our anger. It is culturally acceptable for women to be sad, not angry. In one study on gender, anger, and the workplace, the participants conferred higher status to sad female employees than to angry ones. For men the opposite was true. Men, particularly white men, are rewarded and forgiven for their anger, while women are penalized and blamed.

Ceci, the mestiza paralegal, now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, five-year-old son, and twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter. She described herself using the exact language of a woman who was taught by the culture not to value or express her anger: “I’m a people pleaser. I don’t rock the boat. I go along with everything, do what people tell me.” This is the path of being a good girl, a good woman, and eventually a good mother. Lifelong gendered learning teaches people raised to be women to push down anger and any feelings in the “sub-anger” ballpark, such as annoyance, irritation, and frustration. I imagine this emotional push-down like the carnival game whack-a-mole. Each time an uncomfortable or unpleasant anger-related feeling pops up—whack!—women automatically bang it with a big-headed mallet, sending it back beneath the surface.

Like the rage itself, this game of anger whack-a-mole is an international phenomenon for women. In Korea, there is a culture-related anger syndrome called hwa-byung. It translates literally to “illness of fire” and mostly affects working-class middle-aged housewives, who have chronically suppressed anger stemming from strict gender roles, gender-based inequality, and patriarchal family structures. In traditional Latin American folk medicine, it is believed that holding onto certain emotions can cause physical illness. In Northeast Brazil, the term engolir sapos translates to “swallowing frogs,” and is mostly used by women to refer to the suppression of anger and irritation, and the pressure to tolerate unfair treatment without complaint.

Cheryl, the Black civil rights lawyer who internalizes her mom rage, is practiced at playing whack-a-mole with her anger: “I’m good at repressing things. So, a little problem, I repress it, and it gets packed on top of all the other things that make me mad, until there’s no way to untangle it. It’s just this huge tangle of anger that I’m trying to disassociate from all the time.” In our present-day culture of busy, intensive motherhood, stuffing down unpleasant emotions can be a matter of practicality. Minutes are a precious resource, and airing every frustration is a time expense that modern mothers cannot afford. Emails must be sent, dinner needs to get into bellies, and bodies need to snuggle under covers. But the perceived time-saver of the Emotional Whack-a-Mole phase is a mirage. Every time a mom suppresses her angry feelings, as she’s been taught to do her entire life, she is pushing them onto an ever-growing pile of anger inside her. Eventually, the pile will topple.”]

minna dubin, from mom rage: the everyday crisis of modern motherhood, 2023

[dharmafox]

Apropos of recent discussion around whether or not the Medicine Seller fucks, I do see him as very much a sexual being, and I think that part of his nature is significant. I think he embodies sexuality as a primal, generative unity of masculine and feminine, in keeping with the philosophy of yin and yang. He represents sexuality as something sacred - hence maybe the paradoxical impression that he's both highly sexual and also untouchable.

I also think his sexuality relates to the mind-body connection, which is important in Eastern medicine: the idea that the relationship with the body is connected to the relationship with the mind. (This relationship is why physical grounding, usually through focus on the breath, is important in meditation practice: it's as much about reconnecting with the body as it is about reconnecting with the mind.)

The Medicine Seller's work is with the mind, but in Mononoke the body is also a central theme. Especially important in every arc is the way women's bodies are treated. Mononoke explores a world where women's bodies are abused and exploited and their wishes and desires are denied. Their negative experiences of sexuality and with their own bodies are what create all of the mononoke - manifestations of their mental and emotional pain. The zashiki warashi are created by their mothers' pain; the umi bozu is created by Genkei's denial of Oyo; the nopperabou is created by the repression of Ochou's desires; the nue is created from the body of a woman men treated as an object; and both bakeneko arise from extreme violence done to Tamaki and to Setsuko.

Especially for women, I think the Medicine Seller's influence facilitates a healing of their connection to the body and to sexuality. He presents a concept of sexuality that women can experience as positive and that's as much about their desires as it is about men's, and he also presents an image of the feminine as something beautiful and deserving of respect. His presence becomes a grounding force that draws injured women back into contact with their physical experiences along with their mental ones - allowing them to heal their relationships with their bodies by confronting their physical trauma at the same time as it allows them to heal their relationships with their minds by confronting their mental trauma. Both are needed for complete healing, or for exorcism of the mononoke, since they're equally significant aspects of the Form, Truth, and Regret.

[eatmangoesnekkid]

Accidental Post Deletion —4 Parts

Part 1

Ya’ll are asking incredible questions in my inbox which helps me to refine what I write and teach to support other women in the future. I am taking a week or two off these apps but please keep your questions coming mm. For now I leave you with a quote by Nicole Daedone. I just finished two books in her series “The Eros Sutras” —even if you are like me, and are non-hetero—it’s definitely a gate opener no matter your sexual desire. But if you are heterosexual, how lovely, because her books speaks more from that lens. FYI—This is a long post! 

“….This is the type of sex where it feels as if she and her partner are possessed by something deeper from the bowels of the earth, something from her own body and consciousness that comes through with voraciousness and a self-less benevolent agenda. Both parties can let go entirely without feeling like the other can’t fiend for or handle themselves. This is a very uncommon channel for a woman to open but when she can and does, it is a sign that she has built a high level of power.” —Nicole Daedone 

My God. I don’t read books that are similar in coding to my own forthcoming books but decided to pick up her work and read them in two days! Yes Nicole all of this —that’s it ! I highly recommend her books to you loved ones but not because I agree with everything she writes(nor do I need to in order to love it/something) but mmmm I do adore it alll —so good ! 

I speak about sexual desire often because it is the most valuable and powerful resource received from truly living connected to our body that affects our creativity (health and wealth) in clandestine ways that this world wouldn’t dare speak about. And because we live in a female body that contains an organ whose only purpose is to generate pleasure, we were divinely architected to feel arousal energy simply because we feel the warm sun on our face, taste yummy homemade food on our tongue or see our lover walking towards us in the distance. In addition, to live pleasurable everyday lives (which is not to same thing as being pleasure-seeking in a hedonistic way or addicted to peak states from plant medicines) has to include the ability to repair and regenerate our tissues through skillfully mastering the “darker” aspects like our ego, thoughts, beliefs, and unconscious fears, shadows, and triggers, and sexual creative life force energy we were taught to distrust, shun, and repress but actually permits our energy to flow better in brighter healthier thriving ways, from darkness into light. In other words, you will be 80 year olds and deeply self-regenerative and alive and thriving in your tissues, you see.

But I have to give it to you from behind in plain layman’s terms so that you can fully grok what I’m conveying. You should feel the desire to want to fuck for no reason at all even if celibate and going on your morning walk in the sun on a beautiful day and not only feel desire when your lover is sucking your breasts. “Feeling delicious in your female body” not because, but just cause— is the key to winning at this game we are playing. Feeling good, however, doesn’t bypass experiencing denser emotions like yearning, anger, loneliness, or sadness but welcomes them, whatever is true, without you needing to run away and push them down. Regeneration is only possible with the refined skills of alchemy and integration, where base metal turns into gold wings, you see.

Like me, I know many of you are creating your own new body and life narratives, even if they are as simple as waking up on Monday mornings slowly and rested without an alarm clock and doing what the fuck you want to do with your day, no longer pigeonholed into following the status quo outdated script that looks like …..

wake up with an alarm and rush off to work; sit in traffic with a compressed spine; eat crappy cafeteria food at lunch that messes up your digestion (which impacts your mental clarity and ability to merge with quantum information (divine energy) and procure and digest new narratives); come home exhausted because you felt you had to give all your life force in exchange for money to men at the head of a corporation who could care less about your wellness; and unbox a microwave meal because you are too tired to chop for real nutrition (or to make love with your Beloved). Then cap off the night by watching TV until it’s time for bed and do the same thing the next day.

This is the pimp-prostitute archetypal pattern of a typical Western household and as Sylvia Plath alluded to “you can’t feel reality, only a weariness and longing…” where the only solutions are addictions and coping mechanisms to numb your body from feeling and detecting its own lack of fulfillment and accompanying heartbreak. And I want you to know that I have been there before when I worked as a corporate accountant in my 20s —that’s why I can write about it so well. I had the same common, conditioned Westernized struggles. In some way, we all do, until we wake up in this game and get free.

I have lived in a state of constant and deliberate creation since I was in my late 20s and started studying/integrating the mind-biology connection and witnessed how the quality and impact of our future/creations are influenced from the inside out by the quality of our mind and health. It is also why I have lived a quality of life over the last 15 years that most people can’t fathom or believe is possible. If we are to be artists, teachers, dancers, mentors, athletes, entrepreneurs, etc. , we must amplify our sexual energy in order to create in epic ways because this is exactly what billion dollar corporations do when they extract nearly every drop of life force from its employees that not even a six-figure monthly salary could ever make up for. If you do work in a corporation, how lovely but you must also be so strategic and masterful in how you experience your job every single day like a martial artist in order to not get sucked in as a pawn in their system and as a result, too tired and drained to do the magical and miraculous with your own divine-given energy or LIFE or too fearful to consider other possibilities beyond working hard day in and day out for someone until you are 60 years old or become unwell. You must be strategic in not giving all your life force away to the company you work for every single day you log into their system.

What my first book “You Look Like Something Blooming” modeled is that we can create sustainably and live beautifully in atypical ways. We can create imperfectly and even have typos, yet our work/book still massively sells on its own 15 years later without advertisements. And no one really knows our secret sauce because it all happens so calmly, quietly, and humbly through word-of-mouth without our need to track it or shout in order for it to be seen. That’s the level of freedom, resourcefulness and deliberate creation we must stimulate passively in different ways in this new earth.

It is not enough to merely create something —you must create what has its own pulse and heartbeat and can drive and influence this world without you having to exhaust yourself by convincing others to purchase. That means that you have to 1. open up the congestion in your body with care, stretches, yoga, breath and consistency. 2. Hold, amplify, and channel your sexual desire. 2. Reconcile your fear programming around sex and have really passionate sex if you are not celibate or in a period of fasting and channel your sexual energy into higher frequencies as a way of life 3. Then boom —you create soulfully at astronomical levels.

Part 2

There is so much power hidden in the depths of the female body that wants to come through and heal and advance us all and this world. Being in Milano and drinking organic juices, eating fruit and reading The Eros Sutras on relationships and intimacy in warm sun on a balcony with very little blue light screen time has been uplifting and soul-opening. Healing, mental clarity and manifestation are simply the release of deep congestion in the body (often inherited ancestral imprints or religious, cultural, or social conditioning and programming and the accompanying ideas of who we “think” we are). 

Basically it is a ferocious ego death that happens over and over again in different ways and at different times. As the congestion releases in increments overtime, now you start to rebirth and truly feel, sense, intuit, move, inhale deeper and open your hips, back, etc., with a little more ease than before, experience miracles, and create at a higher level in other ways as a result, no matter what that creation looks like for you. As souls living in human bodies, the success we desire in life always begin in the liberation of the female body. Those are my words/sensations I write here that moved through me after reading.

I was a little down in the dumps before coming to Milano. I am spending part of my vacation alone in the quiet doing nothing but reading, feeling, stretching every few hours, and making my homemade purple sea moss and aloe soap topless in panties in 90 degree weather. Even though my preferred state is butt-nakedness, there is a large window the tenants across from me have a clear view to see inside and I refuse to close ‘not narry’ curtain or window. I am also unwinding some old stories I continue to grip hold of but need to let go of as my next step right action. All of this may feel strange and self-indulgent to some people. This says to me that western normative culture is not only difficult to be healthy in but also toxic to how we think, perceive, listen, and create from living in cultures whose neural and structural frameworks are “go go go…just do it…fuck your body and your feelings. ”

I read the other day how women are pulling back from the workforce on average 15 years earlier than men because of their debilitating moon time and menopausal symptoms effecting their hormones, libido, and quality of health. In other words, we either change or the earth forces us. 🫀🫀🫀🫀

part 3

My main critique of Nicole’s work: if I could edit my comment I would say my eros is “not ONLY” about my attraction to same gender but about my embodied relationship to my divine energy.” Gender is so tricky and complicated to me because I have never felt that any of my female lovers have been the same gender as me—two females are far too vast in their frequencies to be the same—we are wholly multidimensional and diverse like our individual gut microbiology. I truly believe it is up to us to clear these kind of flaccid miscalculations and computations on what it means to be a sexually liberated woman and wake up to the erotic power in our hearts, hands/fingers, etc …but I digress 🥰🕯️🤲🏿

Part 4 And lastly but most importantly —you must kill that archaic shame living within your body parts. This was my very first time practicing this choreo and the teacher called me up to be a lead and I accepted without hesitation. What I learned in this class is that I don’t have a lot of shame living within my body parts. I will high-tail myself right on up to the front of a dance class if I am called up there and smile every bit of the way even though I have no idea what I’m doing or what the steps are. This was a liberation dance for me. I hung in there like a prayer flag, smiled my ass off and even sucked my finger because I was feelin’ the light of love from shaking so much! 🕯️💡⚡️ 🤣 —India

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A post shared by India Ameye Author +Female Mentor+ Soft Life Pioneer Since 2009 (@india.ameye)

[skkflower]

Trans Chuuya thoughts I posted on twitter. It got super long so I’m posting it under the cut…

Chuuya realizes he feels “wrong”after post explosion birth and after being socialized by the Sheep…he brushes it off as proof of not being human…as he learns more about society he decides to present himself as a boy because his enemies take him seriously that way (in my head the Sheep were orphans from Suribachi and runaways so there’s probably a pretty big queer community there)…totally ignoring the fact that being called a boy makes him happier.

Basically his logic up until he joins the mafia is “I’m probably a boy, but I have bigger problems” and his dysphoria over being human is stronger than anything really…but I think when he meets the flags (and Kouyou I have a whole section for her), he starts to think more he starts to think more about presentation vs identity (ie learns that women don’t have to dress as men to be taken seriously, gnc Lippmann, insert other flags hcs I have)…Chuuya realizes he is trans…Doc offers to get him HRT and surgery but Chuuya’s really in his “I don’t trust anyone in the Mafia” phase and doesn’t want to really stake his transition on an unstable source/ hates depending on people…so he’s fine with rocking with the masc leaning androgyny…his dysphoria lessens a bit because he now realizes his gender confusion isn’t what makes him not human…

BUT THEN BAM STORMBRINGER JUMPSCARE (the only way to really think about sb actually)… Verlaine is also trans *insert the singularity metaphor thread here* and Chuuya literally watches his past self die in his arms (trauma and trans metaphor two in one combo)…although Chuuya is king of repression…he probably channels all his sb trauma into a complete gender crisis…cuts his hair and starts binding with transtape…wants to start HRT but is still uneasy about doctors and all. But after weaponizing Corruption as Soukoku…he starts getting really bad dysphoria/dysmorphia about his sense of humanity again…which translate over to gender dysphoria and he goes through a bad mental state for a bit, so he ultimately decides staring HRT will be best.

(Kouyou is transfem in my head and she sits him down and is like “you’re clearly suffering right now and we can help you” and they decide to send him abroad to a hormone specialist because he’s a labrat kid lol)

Yes my explanation for why Chuuya is not in dark era is transgenderism…Dazai defects…he gets promoted to Executive…finds out he’s definitely human and starts HRT…gets more confident in his gender identity and starts presenting more gnc again…it was mostly about control for him and having stability in his place in the mafia helped him feel more confident. A lot of his confidence is a mask (autistic chuuya), but he is secure. TransChuuya is so real to me!!!

Bonus Thoughts:

Soukoku was definitely making out/hooking up post SB, but Dazai respecting Chuuya’s boundaries increased their mutual trust and made them such a strong duo…knowing each other inside and out and also respecting (they were never safe enough to say love yet) each other…

Dazai is deffo gender apathetic nonbinary…he also probably has more of a humanity dysphoria there…their gender crisis starts during the 2 year isolation…to quote my partner who hasn’t watched bsd, “dazai to me is those pretransition trans women who look so miserable (dark era) and then when she transitions you can see the light in her eyes and a spring in her step”

Chuuya has not gotten top surgery because of medicinal trauma and also because I said so…

TRANS PEOPLE DO DON’T TRANSITION OR PRESENT OUTWARDLY IN A WAY DEEMED “SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE” ARE SO VALID!!!

Anyway please take this stupid skit of bungo stray woke:

*soukoku arguing during reunion*

Chuuya: you weren’t there for me!!

Dazai: of course not, I left the mafia!!

Chuuya: no I was talking about me starting HRT…

Dazai: oh…WELL YOU WEREN’T THERE WHEN I REALIZED IM NONBINARY

Chuuya: oh congrats

Dazai: yea I use any pronouns now

Chuuya: coolio

Dazai: you look better…more chuuya now…

Chuuya: thanks

*awkard pause*

Chuuya: okay im going back to kicking your ass

Dazai: yea fair enough

[konkuurito]

Character Questionnaire

Full name: jay kuronuma

Generally referred to as: kuronuma-sama, kuronuma-san, wakagashira, the yokai

Appearance.

SEX: cis male

AGE: 27

HEIGHT: 5’7”

BUILD: lean but toned muscular. long legs despite his height.

HAIR: dark brown and usually middle-parted, chin-length.

EYES: dark brown/almost black, long lashes

MOUTH: very straight and white

NOSE: it definitely is one and it's cute.

HANDS: long fingers, calloused fingertips from guitar.

SCARS: huge branding scar in the shape of a lotus on his thigh. many self-harm scars criss-crossing his inner arms/wrists, hard to see because of tattoos.

CLOTHES: generally black and somewhat formal. wears a lot of black coats or black turtlenecks. often wears one leather glove.

[more under the cut]

Speech.

ACCENT: american/californian

LANGUAGE: english, fluent japanese, some korean

ARTICULATION: soft-spoken, curses a lot.

Mannerisms.

FACE: resting bitch face. eyes light up when it's someone he loves.

HANDS: uses his hands a lot when speaking. runs them through his hair or rests his hand on his chin a lot.

LEGS/FEET: sits with hands on his knees a lot.

EMOTIONAL OUTBURSTS: frustrated or snippy outbursts. tries to keep everyone distant as much as possible.

POSTURE: good posture, forces himself not to slouch.

PERSONAL SPACE: needs a lot of it unless he's completely trusting. touch averse to the point where he flinches away. is a lot more affectionate/handsy when he trusts someone.

Health:

DIET: semi-healthy, but really enjoys sweets.

SLEEP: rarely ever sleeps due to nightmares/night terrors. usually ends up passing out in some random place.

EXERCISE: frequent. necessary for his profession.

CLEANLINESS: showers every day

ODOUR: cigarette smoke/coffee.

MEDICINAL DRUGS: none

NARCOTICS: cocaine

ADDICTIONS: cocaine, self-harm, coffee, cigarettes

Personal.

INTROVERT/EXTROVERT?: introvert

OPTIMIST/PESSIMIST: pessimist

SEXUALITY: demi-homosexual

ROMANTIC: homoromantic but can make exceptions for certain women (very very very rarely)

MEMORY: hazy memory. has brain fog due to dissociation/PTSD. has a lot of repressed trauma from his time in the brothel.

PLANNING: he used to be more spontaneous, but he plans way more now. likes to look at a situation.

INTUITION: has a decent intuition but prefers to have facts.

GOALS: get revenge on everyone who hurt him in the brothel.

INSECURITIES: hates being looked at by strangers. scared he'll never be able to truly trust anyone again. scared he's going to end up being as heartless as his father.

ACHIEVEMENTS: having a decent following in his band glass houses.

ANXIETY: fucking constantly. he has a panic disorder and PTSD. is also avoidant.

OVERWHELMED: all the fucking time

COMFORTS: coffee, cigarettes, video games, music

BAD HABITS: cigarettes, cocaine, losing his temper, pushing everyone away

PHILOSOPHY: very nihilistic and hopeless. believes nothing will ever change or get better no matter how hard he tries.

The Past.

PARENTS/GUARDIANS: minato kuronuma--basically showed no interest in him until he was a teenager and left him to fend for himself. samantha lloyd--mother, who had to leave him due to minato when jay was very small. shirai haruka--his trusted bodyguard, who is basically a mother figure to him.

SCHOOL: he's never been enrolled in school, was only taught a little by a few ladies in the clan. didn't know how to read until thirteen.

ADOLESCENCE: made a few close friends by doing music and playing guitar/singing in bands.

LEAVING HOME: he never had a consistent home until adulthood.

FURTHER EDUCATION: none.

FIRST JOB: worked at a music store and taught guitar lessons.

Relationships.

FAMILY: found family from his friends in glass houses--sebastian, josh, and cam. otherwise, he sees haruka as his only family.

FRIENDSHIPS: his friends in glass houses.

STRANGERS: ignores most of them, but is coldly polite when he has to be.

DATING: verse dependent but he's never had a real relationship before, only sexual relationships.

LOVE: verse dependent

WORST ENEMY: ryan

Interactions.

MINGLING: he's very quiet and keeps to himself mostly. it's usually all-business.

PHYSICAL: stay away from him and don't touch him, or get your fingers broken.

GENEROSITY: even despite his icy demeanor, jay is very generous and will help out his men in need through financial means or however he can. he's good to work for usually.

JEALOUSY: extremely jealous. worries constantly his partner will leave them.

TEMPER: very short temper.

EMPATHY: less so than he used to have, but is extremely empathetic still. being cruel makes him feel guilty, but he finds it entirely necessary to keep himself safe.

ETIQUETTE: polite but very icy. constantly puts off a vibe that he wants people to stay away form him.

RESPONSIBILITY: probably takes way too much responsibility.

SELF ESTEEM: dirt.

HONESTY: brutally honest and blunt.

LEADER OR FOLLOWER: leader

PRAISE: praise makes him very weak but he gets very shy accepting it.

EMBARRASSMENT: much more composed than he used to be, so not as easily embarrassed, but definitely still possible.

FLIRTING: flirtatious only when he's interested in someone and he trusts them.

ATTENTION SPAN: hyperfocus as fuck.

Life.

CAREER: yakuza underboss/formerly band frontman.

TECH: he's mostly good with tech when it involves video games specifically.

POLITICS: only matters as far as it benefits the yakuza.

COMBAT SKILLS: very good at hand to hand combat, specifically jiu-jitsu. a very good shot with hand guns and heavier artillery, such as shotguns or rifles.

HOME: organized chaos. his space looks very lived in but it's very hygienic and not dirty at all.

COOKING: surprisingly a very good cook. many people very much love his food.

BUILDING: he can't build anything for shit other than like... some basic shelves. he's mechanically hopeless.

CLEANING: decently clean.

SHOPPING: he actually loves shopping, specifically clothes shopping or buying video games.

DRIVING: he doesn't usually drive himself, but he drives like a fucking maniac when he does. he always goes at least twenty miles over the speed limit.

FINANCES: rich because of his father's money, but he didn't have access to it until he was thirteen. lived in complete squalor and poverty until then.

MARRIAGE: never been married but ideally would want to be.

KIDS: he would love to be a girl dad.

PETS: none, but he loves animals. he's open to having most animals, the only exceptions being any kind of spiders or insects. he loves dogs the most though.

PARTYING: the only parties he will attend are the ones at crackhouses or if it's the party of another yakuza leader.

HOBBIES: video games, playing guitar, singing, getting a fuckton of tattoos, cooking

[haggishlyhagging]

There is no adequate way to convey the contribution that Elizabeth Cady Stanton made: she talked and wrote volumes, and Alice S. Rossi (1974) has said of her that: ‘There was probably not another woman in the nineteenth century who put her tongue and pen to better use than Elizabeth Stanton’ (p. 382). Fundamental to her beliefs was the insistence that women must abandon the mentality of oppression in which they had been socialised; they must learn to value themselves, to insist on their own needs, to repudiate self-effacement and sacrifice, which they could do without jeopardising their strength of being able to provide emotional support.

That women should give up guilt was one of her tenets, that they should learn to express their justifiable anger was another. ‘She was not a woman easily threatened by new experiences’, says Rossi (1974) and among her prescriptions for a healthy womanhood was one she clearly followed herself, but which it would take many decades for medicine and psychiatry to learn. She insightfully put her finger on an important cause of hysteria and illness among the women of her day, in an 1859 letter to a Boston friend: ‘I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression’ (Stanton and Blatch, 1922: 11, 73-74 (Rossi, 1974, p. 381)).

To Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's anger was not only valid, and necessary, but rational: ‘I am at boiling point,’ she once wrote to Susan B. Anthony, and, ‘If I do not find some day the use of my tongue on this question I shall die of an intellectual repression, a woman's rights convulsion’ (Theodore Stanton and Harriet Stanton Blatch, 1922, vol. II, p. 41).

She began her public lecturing (and writing) career in much the same spirited manner in which she was to continue, when, upon hearing that she was preparing to go an a lecture tour, her father came to ask if this were true. She told him that it was: ‘“I hope,” he continued, “You will never do it in my lifetime, for if you do, be assured of one thing, your first lecture will be a very expensive one”’ (for he would disinherit her). She replied: ‘I intend … that it shall be a very profitable one’ (ibid, p. 81). She could not be bought by male approval, or the promise of male rewards in return for good behaviour.

At no stage did she fall into the trap of believing that woman's position was the consequence of ignorance among men and that all that was necessary was for women is to present their case, and men, instantly enlightened, would be won to women's cause. She had no delusions about male justice. She understood that men held the power and that, short of women going off on their own and starting an alternative society (never an option for Stanton although she created her own female enclave from which she drew her emotional support), men had to be confronted, and coerced into giving it up. Because her style was not conciliatory, because she did not seek to persuade men that she was respectable and worthy, because she did not try to convince them that men themselves would be better off when women were enfranchised, and that nothing would change, for women would still continue to be the home-makers, child-rearers, and domestic servants, she was often considered unacceptable not only by men, but by many women who took a more cautious approach. She insisted on delivering her speeches criticising marriage as an institution, she insisted on advocating divorce law reform (despite the fact that she was branded, and discredited as, an advocate of free love), and her outspokenness, and her outrage were often a source of embarrassment to some of the women towards the end of the nineteenth century who were trying to allay and soothe the fears of men - in the hope that, no longer frightened, they would grant women the vote.

-Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them

[arinishi]

Okay I have an analysis of the new page but I am very tired this might be along the wrong lines completely please do share your own thoughts friends✨

While Jekyll is actually attracted to women, this scenario specifically is probably more on the “keeping up heterosexual appearances” side of things, considering that by this point Jekyll is very much sort of repressing his homosexuality. Jekyll has said that he enjoyed the attention from women to a certain degree, but it paled in comparison to how he felt about Lanyon, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s relatively performative here.

Though, Lanyon seems to be perceiving this as “I’m with Jekyll but he’s still flirting with women! He’s playing games with me just like how I did with other boys, ergo this is a taste of my own medicine from the universe.” When in reality it probably just seems that way, but Jekyll’s intentions here are way more to repress his feelings rather than to play with Lanyon’s.

Also they’re cuddling and they’re so adorable and By God I don’t want anything bad to happen to them but I know the cruelties of this comic 😔/d

[leftistfeminista]

“Love and solidarity between women was key to survival”

In the commune of Macul in the city of Santiago de Chile, on the corner of Iran Street and Los Plátanos, is one of the 1,168 detention and torture spaces used during the civil-military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet . Popularly known as La Discotéque, due to the high volume of the music that covered the screams of the detainees, or La Venda Sexy, due to the sexual nature of the torture, it was not until last September 1 that, after the permanent struggle of survivors and human rights organizations, the State recovered the property to convert it into the Iran 3037 Memorial Site.

In 2014, Holzapfel presented, together with a group of former political prisoners, a complaint against the State focused on the recognition of political sexual violence as a specific type of torture . The objective was to differentiate sexual violence from the generalized definition of torture. “We need to emphasize the gender character that the repression towards women assumed, the torture that was generally different from that of male prisoners, even though many of them also suffered political-sexual violence. We face denialist statements that try to make these types of practices invisible, some of them present to this day ,” she says.

Holzapfel was 19 years old when she was detained by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), the secret police of the dictatorship. It was December 1974. She was studying her second year of Veterinary Medicine and was a member of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). At dawn, some men went to look for her at her house just the same night that Beatriz Bataszew , a fellow militancy member, asked her to take refuge there. “The soldiers told my mother to have breakfast prepared for me. That she would return at 7 in the morning,” she remembers.

Those men put her in a truck and blindfolded her. She tried to count the blocks, but she lost count. First they took her to Villa Grimaldi, where she became number 617. “There she was no longer a person.” They stripped her naked and searched all parts of her body in search of any documents. “They sought to completely degrade you as a human being.” She was there five days.

In front of groups of visitors to Iran 3037, the activist always omits the details of the torture; “That side hurts me. You already know everything that happened.” For her, the important thing is what came after her, when she returned from the interrogation room: “Love and solidarity between women was the key to survival. It was so important to love each other, that our colleagues received us with love and affection… With all those women, to this day, we are like sisters . ”

Of her time in Iran 3037, where she estimates she spent about 11 days, Holzapfel also highlights that solidarity and love between colleagues. Since they knew that the torturers did not approach a woman if she had her period, when one of them had her period she left blood-stained papers in the bathroom for the others to put on . “We women were told that our role was to wash, cook and take care of our husbands, not to soldier on the street. And that's why we deserved all that punishment. We were just young people who wanted a better world,” she emphasizes.

Holzapfel was betrayed by her political education professor and member of the MIR central committee, who after suffering continuous torture began to collaborate. “I was on the other side defending him and he was tremendously disappointing, because he idealized him. It took me many years to understand why he had collaborated in that way and I, who was just a militant , was being careful with my colleagues,” she says. The activist still remembers one of the phrases she responded to her torturers when they asked her for information: “Even if there is one companion left, we will be thousands again.”

[oreganosbaby]

Btw how far do you see Shiv's gender/sexual inversion of Roman going anyways? Since obviously it does manifest differently for them for various reasons, the biggest one probably being that female homosexuality is just not treated the same way that male homosexuality is in their world.

I mean, for starters, Shiv isn't alienated from womanhood on that cisnormative genital level the way Roman is from his manhood. Due to the uh, Miracles of Modern Medicine and feminism, she's able to separate cis womanhood from reproduction to the point where she can live her life without this being at the forefront of her mind in all her sexual relationships with cis men. This helps her be able to displace the literal phallus from the idea of "fucking (active, dominant)." At the same time, she still only identifies with her womanhood through her being AFAB, would likely project this onto womanhood at large and sees being impregnated as an act of violence. In the context of cis lesbian sex, the displacement of the phallus would be reflected. Like in the cishet context, it becomes mostly about power dynamics and the active/passive binary; however she's still more repressed than Roman too and the way she fucks is like, so… to the point, y'know. I think it's harder to see sex in such a dry way here because how cis lesbian sex works. (Sorry I don't have a real answer for this). If she somehow got around that, maybe Kendall would sort of get it because he's very "It would be a fuckin' uhhh, honour to eat your pussy, madam," but she would probably think Kendall's doing it wrong because he's eating pussy in a bitchmade way.

Regarding her relationship to women in this context, I think there's this inherent problem that's part her perpetual adolescence which is that on one hand, she is like "Ugh mom. Stop worrying! Just trust me to do what I want! 🙄" but also she needs her to like, keep house or whatever. I mean, it's the same shit with Tom. I don't think she'd feel the same sort of shame but, she would be preoccupied with the way she's seen by others insofar as not wanting her sexuality to define her as that would be an extension of her womanhood defining her. This includes the way she presents herself i.e., not as anything that would "brand" her. Of course, she is judgmental of anyone who does "brand" themselves.

[lligkv]

It's my birthday today, which always feels like a time to take account. The last month or two, I've endeavored to channel spates of low mood into the reasonably productive activity of reading, rather than mere vegetation, and I've had good success. I just finished Mircea Cărtărescu's Solenoid—a long novel about a lonely weirdo in communist Romania reckoning with existential dread. Also finished Susan Taubes's Lament for Julia, a novella paired with various short stories, all with a powerful Freudian bent, Taubes being the daughter of a psychoanalyst and prone to autobiographically inflected fiction. Fathers and daughters are locked in strange relation; men and women antagonize each other; there's much angst around the emergence and forcible repression of sexuality and desire. I also completed a reread of Crime and Punishment (impressive in its structure, if not at the line level; conservative, like much of Dostoevsky, in its premises and sympathies, though not without its points when it comes to the weaknesses that certain modes of thought can have when they're adopted carelessly, as vogues, and in arguing for the necessity of humility against despair when one's despair stems, as Raskolnikov's does, from overweening self-regard). And I read Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet—which was a funny one. Much to love in it, certainly. I also felt a bit of a twang reading, say, Rilke's condemnation of "the unreal half-artistic professions"—among which he includes "almost all of criticism"—"which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art." Oh look, it's the form to which I've apparently pledged my troth, ha ha whoops.

I admit I wasn't blown away by Solenoid as I thought I might be. It offers a slightly banal resolution to existential crisis... That is, that the narrator ultimately meets the horror he spends about six-hundred pages grappling with—of the possibility that he might be trapped within three dimensions when a fourth, superior dimension might exist, meaning (I know this sentence is Going Places, stay with me) a dimension that is not ruled by the determinism by which any dimension is ruled in the eyes of those who can see it from the next dimension on, the same way that the life of, say, a mite might seem determined to us, all unthinking instinct and bound to a terribly specific and minute purpose, given our position as the mite's vast superior—that he counters the tremendous weight of this fear by turning to an abstract love for humanity and the purpose he finds in raising the child he has with his lover, Irina... It reminded me of the commitment to bourgeois normalcy that the protagonist of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight makes, and how that let me down after his Master-and-Margarita-esque path through other, more hallucinatory forms of experience in the first three-quarters of that novel—which promised, I don't know, something more.

But I can understand the turn. And Solenoid does have some terrific setpieces along the way. One is the protest of the "Picketists"—a sect the narrator stumbles upon that stages demonstrations against life's pain and suffering (their signs bear lines like "Down with Death!" "Down with Rotting!" "Down with Accidents!" "NO to Agony!" and "Stop the Massacre!")—before a building in Bucharest that once housed one of the first institutes of forensic medicine, whose cupola bears thirteen statues depicting the soul's dark sides, Sadness, Despair, Fear, Bitterness, Melancholy, Revulsion, Nausea, Mania, Horror, Grief, Nostalgia, Resignation, and Damnation. Most striking is the way that protest ends, with the statue of Damnation—which has come alive, "as alive and slow-moving as soft glass and black as anthracite"—stamping on the lead protestor, Virgil, crushing him, when he asks her whether anything humanity can offer her will ever be enough.

Cărtărescu is also quite skillful at pacing his plot across the novel's 638 pages, as the narrator discovers each of the six solenoids sprinkled across Bucharest—the massive electromagnets that make possible eerie wonders like levitation and serve as engines that, essentially, power the world—and as he endures his own Virgil-like trial among the Picketists at the novel's end. Translator Sean Cotter also deserves a ton of credit, I'm sure. It can't have been easy to translate a narrative like this one, which depends so much on so many references to Bucharest's geography, Romania's history, and the histories of so many figures, so strangely intertwined—the forensic scientist Mina Minovici, who studied death (through, in Cărtărescu's telling, intense bouts of self-strangulation); the psychologist Nicolae Vaschide, who studied dreams, which in the narrator's mind join death as one of two potential means of escape from this world to the next; and the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton, who married Mary Ellen Boole, daughter of mathematician and logician George Boole, whose other daughter, Ethel, married Wilfrid Voynich, famous owner of the Voynich manuscript, which the narrator ultimately comes to possess and, at the novel's end, offers to the goddess Damnation, whereupon its pages somehow morph into a tesseract, the shape that Hinton once theorized as the fourth-dimensional analogue of the cube; the next level of complexity to it, just as the cube is the next-level of the two-dimensional square—thereby permitting the narrator one glimpse, one moment of contact with whatever it is that lies in the fourth dimension, beyond...

So, you know, it's been a time. If you're in the mood for a long novel about an intelligent, sensitive, neurotic thwarted artist confronting the fear that has oppressed his life, that engages whole histories of mathematics, logic, and philosophical thought along the way, you might give Solenoid a shot. Meanwhile, I'll end this with some words from Rilke in his last letter to the young poet, Franz Krappus, when Krappus was twenty-five: "Do you remember how [your] life yearned out of its childhood for the 'great'? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow." Arrange your life, he tells Krappus, according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult. I'm certainly not in my twenties as I write this, but the lines still inspire.