tangleofrainbows reblogged
tangleofrainbows reblogged
violentwavesofemotion-deactivat
No rest, no refuge, no escape, no pause from awareness.
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955 (via violentwavesofemotion)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend.
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut (via thatkindofwoman)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
You are not lost. You are here. Stop abandoning yourself. Stop repeating this myth about love and success that will land in your lap or evade you forever. Build a humble, flawed life from the rubble, and cherish that. There is nothing more glorious on the face of the earth than someone who refuses to give up, who refuses to give in to their most self-hating, discouraged, disillusioned self, and instead learns, slowly and painfully, how to relish the feeling of building a hut in middle of the suffocating dust.
Ask Polly: Why Should I Keep Going? by Heather Havrilesky (via arabellesicardi)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
For me, as a teenager in the early 80s, having the traditional nuclear annihilation dream at regular intervals – my friends would usually drive past me in a bus while the asphalt melted just behind my fleeing heels – the USSR was not a possible object of admiration, but it was an object of solidity. Its defining feature was its permanence. It was an inevitable part of the planet’s architecture: obsolete but immovable. And then it did move, and when it went its going suddenly disclosed a set of hidden linkages that pulled various aspects of my familiar, home experience away after it. It seemed that my Western socialism – the unbarbarous kind – had had an unsuspected dependence on the existence of the Soviet model. And not just because the USSR was definitionally useful to social democrats, letting us point and say “Not that!” It had also served, it turned out when it was gone, as a sort of massive concrete tentpeg, keeping the Overton Window (not that it was called that, yet) tethered at its lefthand edge in a way that maintained the legitimacy, in western discussion, of all kinds of non-market thinking. When the USSR vanished, so with amazing speed in the 1990s did the entire discourse in which there were any alternatives to capitalism that had to be taken seriously. This was the biggest intellectual change of my lifetime – the replacement of one order of things, which I had just had time to learn and to regard as permanent, with a wholly different one, in radical discontinuity with it. The before/after photographs of my time might as well be pictures of different people, it seemed to me. And once we were in After, Before receded faster in the culture than it did in actual chronology, until the previous edition of the world came to seem not just remote but improbable, an unlikely past for the present to have had.
This seemed a subject worth my while to take as seriously as I could. From this point of view Red Plenty is not a perverse project. It was supposed to be a way of registering the scale of the change narratively, imaginatively, by restoring at least some of the weight of what had vanished. By immersing people in Before, I wanted to remind us of the strangeness of After; to point out that our present looks at least as odd from the vantage point of the past as vice versa.
Francis Spufford on his book Red Plenty (via multiheaded1793)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
…trolling used to be pretty funny and almost entirely harmless. Trolling, despite the modern usage, does not mean “the act of pissing somebody off and laughing about their anger.” It is “the act of pissing somebody off BASED ON SOMETHING COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS and laughing about their MISPLACED anger.” It isn’t considered trolling to leave a comment full of racial epithets and laugh when people “don’t get it.” It is trolling if you leave a comment insisting on the wrong information about something irrelevant – how many runes are on a Stargate, for example (everybody knows its 12) – and wait for the ONE guy that just can’t let the transgression pass. If you start a fake fight with Prof. Stargate, dragging him deeper and deeper until hopefully, finally, even he has to stop and think “wait a minute, this is ridiculous,” that is trolling. That’s the difference: No actual harm is caused, and even the victim can eventually get in on the joke. “Trolling” isn’t referring to hiding behind a fortification and trying to hurt people like the mythical creature. It’s referring to the style of fishing – you drag bait across the bottom hoping to get a rare bite. It’s not ‘bait’ if you’re earnestly spouting your misogynistic beliefs and somebody gets upset. There’s nothing funny about entirely justified anger.
Robert Brockway, http://www.robertbrockway.net/2013/07/18/its-not-a-game-if-you-cant-lose/ (via pelikinesis)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
Way back on the seventies, even before the first Star Wars movie came out, Laura Mulvey, feminist film theorist published her work “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In it, she explained, according to Freudian theory, the two pleasures from cinema come from 1) identifying yourself in the story to forget about life for a while, and 2) enjoy looking at visually appealing images and people. Because the industry was entirely controlled by straight white men, though, they inherently filled the first niche with people like them and the second one with objectified and sexualized women, especially there solely for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
Left without lead characters to identify with, minorities —what an ugly and deceiving word when they amount for the majority of people in the world— had to desperately search for themselves in background characters. A big part of the fandom consists of women, people of color, queer or with disabilities, latching on to the few characters they could find representation in. They get attached to this characters, love them like part of their own family and friends, because they provide something that is so rare to them in mass media: a voice.
One can only imagine what it is like to be a straight white male. To go to the movies, enjoy the story fully, and then leave without the necessity to form any kind of emotional attachment to the characters. Why would they? They will find themselves perfectly represented all over again in the next movie they decide to watch, whichever it might be, and the next one, and the next one. Representation to them is not a luxury, it’s a given right.
Seeing this, it’s no wonder how confused and scared straight white males are, now that they can’t find themselves leading the charge of the new Star Wars franchise. Two movies in a row they’ve had to sit on that theater and face the minority’s reality, facing a situation that is so unlike anything their psyche is used to they react like wounded animals, with a primal fear of being erased from a narrative they are sure to own.
The best part is, for the first time, they are so desperate to find themselves that, like lost children in the dark, they have latched themselves to the one character that has given them a chance at representation: Kylo Ren. They have projected on him their airs of grandeur, blind expectative of an easy redemption and even the misguided self-assurance that, in the end, he will be the ‘true hero’ —instead of the women and people of color who are actually fighting evil in the story. Inadvertently, though, they have willingly chosen to self identify with the most annoying, manipulative, mediocre, unbelievably self-righteous and unbearably whinny fuck-boy this franchise has ever created.
Though, looking at their reactions and comments online, they might not be too far off on that one.
On Star Wars, Representation and Straight White Males (via princessamericachavez)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
Some people survive and talk about it. Some people survive and go silent. Some people survive and create. Everyone deals with unimaginable pain in their own way, and everyone is entitled to that, without judgement. So the next time you look at someone’s life covetously, remember…you may not want to endure what they are enduring right now, at this moment, whilst they sit so quietly before you, looking like a calm ocean on a sunny day. Remember how vast the ocean’s boundaries are. Whilst somewhere the water is calm, in another place in the very same ocean, there is a colossal storm.
People Survive in Different Ways | Nikita Gill (via meanwhilepoetry)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
To see Jane Austen’s writing desk, you have to go to the British Library in London. It’s in a glass case in their Treasures of the British Library display, across from one of Shakespeare’s folios and a few cases away from some Beatles sheet music. It is a very small desk, and foldable, designed to be easily stowed away, which it must have been often; Austen wrote in her parlor and would hide her writing whenever callers stopped by. At the British Library it is open, with very small spectacles pinned to one corner and the tiny notebook that held the first draft of Persuasion lying on top of it, splayed flat so you can see Austen’s fine, precise handwriting. Under the shadow of that desk, the disciplined confinement of her novels acquires visceral force. This much space was she permitted, and no more.
In the display case next to Austen’s desk is Dickens’s first draft of Nicholas Nickelby, in a notebook that dwarfs Austen’s entire desk, with generous margins and looping, scrawly handwriting. It is impossible for me to imagine what Austen might have done with that kind of freedom, that kind of certainty of her own right to take up space.
The Real Mr. Darcy (via ccgwrites)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
wordsnquotes
If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
Source: wordsnquotes.com
tangleofrainbows reblogged
be softer with you.
you are a breathing thing.
a memory to someone.
a home to a life.
nayyirah waheed (via kvtes)
Honestly, I don’t need someone who sees the good in me. I need someone who sees the bad in me and still wants me.
- unknown (via quotelounge)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
For so long everyone has wanted to hold on to the belief that the United States is a class-free society - that anyone who works hard enough can make it to the top. Few people stop to think that in a class- free society there would be no top.
bell hooks (via dead-dog-fred)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
I think about queerness as a community made from the tectonic plates of trauma—from a history/lineage of trauma, as well as formed from people who have sometimes been harmed for being queer. By strangers. By their families. I think about femininity specifically, in regards to queerness. Not only because feminine queerness is an intersection that often faces harm from both sides of homophobia and misogyny (even within queer communities and definitely within older waves of feminism), but also because I read something Elizabeth Marston wrote a few years ago in Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme.
Marston wrote that femmes, or queer folks who fall on the feminine/femme spectrum, are unauthorized copies of femininity. That because of their queerness (gender, orientation, presentation, radicalization—everything queer means universally and individually), they cannot occupy mainstream femininity, but rather an unauthorized copy.
How much I love that, cling to it.
I think that Marston’s concept is dually applicable to friendships between two feminine queer girls—an unauthorized copy of what we think of when we think of intimacy between women. Queer female friendships occupy a space that is not platonic, but is not not platonic. Not romantic, but not not romantic. And there we live, in the space informed by the trauma of queerness (as well as our personal developmental traumas and upbringings), where our friendships accelerate and traverse across boarders and boundaries.
July Westhale (via notyourexrotic)
tangleofrainbows reblogged
Never stop showing your significant other that you love them. Send those cute texts. Surprise them with food, little gifts and random dates. Compliment them. Be there for them when they need you, whether they want to talk or simply need someone to hold them until life seems a little less dark. Tell them how lucky you are that you have them; don’t let them think they’re a burden to you. Make an effort to listen to the music they like. Don’t hold grudges, forgive them. Learn the small things like how they like their coffee. Kiss them when they don’t expect it. Don’t let them go to sleep angry. Most importantly, listen to them. Listen, listen, listen. You can never do enough listening.
Maxwell Diawuoh, “Love them and make sure they know you do.” (via wnq-writers)
Source: wnq-writers.com
tangleofrainbows reblogged
So although grandmothers might not be necessary during good times, many grandchildren cannot survive without them during times of famine.
(via darnhomosexuals)
. . . does anyone else feel like this is implying that eating your grandmothers is the solution to famine?
Source: Wikipedia