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“She [Susan Sontag] mentions Henry James and his long winding sentences that withhold knowing. She maintains that knowing in James arrives only at risk. I would add that “to know” in Henry James’ novels is actually explosive, and that knowing inevitably turns on the sexual, the secret, the beneath, what is finally unspeakable. It is a knowledge that burns with a combination of terror and desire, which is why James’ circuitous style is essential to his material; it is a method of both necessary suppression and gradual, hard-won revelation. Sontag urgently wants her audience to understand why books that appropriate reality too quickly are deficient. They create a “spiritual triviality” that does an injustice to the rich complexities of life itself. She then launches her full-on critique of realism, a form that can create a “too easy sympathy” a “false intimacy” with the reader, an immediate, reassuring access to a text that leaves out mystery, transcendence, otherness, and what D. H. Lawrence called the “it” - that which escapes words.”

— Siri Hustvedt, “Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later” in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

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hangsawoman

when you make a post about how much you want to be loved and someone reblogs it saying they are so happy they are loved like that

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xphaiea

Fiona Moodie, from 'Beauty and the Beast', 1980

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Moonset, over the Cathedral of Linköping Sweden - Johan Kleventoft

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lucyddreamingg

desolationlesbian

Lin-Manuel Miranda is not untalented but he shouldn't be making billion dollar disney movies or whatever. This guy should be in a garage making deeply earnest but unpolished rap opera concept albums and posting them online for a niche fanbase of no more than 100,000 too-online theatre nerds. Hiring him to make forgettable paint-by-numbers radio friendly disney princess pop is trying to raise devil's pupfish in captivity. You have to stop giving him money and let him go make cringe in his natural habitat or you're never going to get anything good.