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Fabienne Verdier - Blue Circle, 2006, serigraphy, 11 x 76 cm

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Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. - Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher

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so weird how in english some words are really just used in expressions and not otherwise… like has anyone said “havoc” when not using it in the phrase “wreaking havoc”? same goes for “wreaking” actually…

reply with more, i’m fascinated

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I know writers who take the time to edit their rants before publishing them, and they're all cowards. Fresh off the print, here's my longform view on some of the major takeaways from this presidential election

Shortened, my argument is:

Inflation is the primary explanation for Trump's victory

Joe Biden's initial insistence on running is also important

Third party and write-in voters did not decide this election

The Democrats should stop taking voters of color for granted

"Never Trump Republicans" are not a real voting bloc

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Autumn is a gothic spring where death becomes a masterpiece

Freya Arwen Morgan

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“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

— Howard Zinn, ‘A Power Governments Cannot Suppress’ (via scientificphilosopher)

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on storytelling and repetition

“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

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James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni

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“…the act of thinking about ourselves isn’t necessarily correlated with knowing ourselves. And, in a few cases, they’ve even found the opposite: the more time the participants spend in introspection, the less self-knowledge they have. In other words, we can spend endless amounts of time in self-reflection but emerge with no more self-insight than when we started. In truth, introspection can cloud our self-perceptions and unleash a host of unintended consequences. Sometimes it may surface unproductive and upsetting emotions that can swamp us and impede positive action. Introspection might also lull us into a false sense of certainty that we’ve identified the real issue. The problem with introspection isn’t that it’s categorically ineffective, but that we don’t always do it right. When we examine the causes of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — which we often do by asking ourselves Why? questions — we tend to search for the easiest and most plausible answers At times, asking what instead of why can force us to name our emotions, a process that a strong body of research has shown to be effective. Evidence shows the simple act of translating our emotions into language — versus simply experiencing them — can stop our brains from activating our amygdala, the fight-or-flight command center. This, in turn, seems to help us stay in control.”

— The right way to be introspective (yes, there’s a wrong way), Tasha Erich (via in-tacto)

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Kazuo Shiraga (Japanese, 1924-2008), Shakudei (Burning Mud), 1992. Oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm.

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it’s amazing the entire dashboard is just old things. shakespeare. arthuriana. gargantua. the epic of gilgamesh. the brothers karamazov. beowulf. wuthering heights. medieval mystics. dracula novel discourse. lawrence of arabia 1962. al pacino. die girlies auf tumblr are thriving and having a ball going about as if media stopped happening post 2010

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sorry I say weird shit sometimes I’m just so excited to be alive

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Scanned from 35mm kodachrome slide, England 1950′s || Hardwicke Knight