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— Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair

The fact that ANYONE thinks Jane Eyre is some cheesy old timey novel and not a book that is both METAL and HILARIOUS should be considered a crime. During her childhood Jane is constantly told she’s the woOOOrst (mostly because she’s inquisitive and quite plain). In fact a priest-type dude comes into her house being like “do you know what happens to terrible little girls?” and she says “yeah they go to hell” “so what must you do so you don’t end up there?” and her reply? “I guess I should just not die BITCH”. Jane is 10 when she says this… her power. Then when her aunt scolds her one too many times girl spits out a Shakespeare level monologue/roast about how her aunt is awful™ and is going to be haunted by Jane’s father for being such a royal bitch and her aunt is so freaked out that she literally starts being nice to her for the first time (honestly I think she was legit scared she had accidentaly adopted the Devil and did not want to mess with that shit). Oh you thought it was a soft nice little romance afterwards? Jane meets Rochester🤡 who is fifty shades of batshit. He literally spends chunks of the book fucking with his rich acquaintances just cause and sideeyeing Jane like “Did you see that?? Jane did you notice that? What do you think Jane?? Tell me your thoughts Jane, WASN’T THAT FUNNY???” And the best part is she reacts to every one of his antics with perfect composure so much so that HE freaks out and ends up dressing as a fortune teller to get her to tell him what she actually thinks. This young girl who was told to shut the fuck up at every turn is suddely called again and again to give her opinion and boy does she give it. She calls him ugly TO HIS FACE and he immediately falls in love. She in turn falls for him so hard but is so sure he couldn’t possibly like her that she DRAWS A PORTRAIT OF HERSELF AND THEN A PORTRAIT OF A “BEAUTIFUL” WOMAN AS A VERY PRACTICAL WAY TO REMIND HERSELF THAT SHE’S NOT PRETTY. Gurl 😭 that’s so sad and also way too overdramatic, you guys deserve each other. Meanwhile the house is very obviously haunted but Jane hasn’t noticed which is peak comedy for such a usually observant protagonist. I mean, a man has a chunk of his flesh bitten off and when Rochester says everything’s fine she just accepts it. “Oh but Jane gives it all up for a man see??? She has no agency” When she thinks he’s going to marry another woman but still intends to keep her as a governess she has my favourite dialogue in the entire book where she says: “Just because I am poor and plain it doesn’t mean I’m not still a PERSON WITH FEELINGS. IF I WAS HOT AND RICH I COULD HAVE MADE YOU AS PAINFULLY IN LOVE WITH ME AS I AM WITH YOU. I DO NOT ADRESS YOU FROM THIS MORTAL FLESH BUT IT IS MY SPIRIT ADRESSING YOURS AS THOUGH WE DIED AND STOOD AS EQUALS AT GODS FEET, AS WE ARE”. She’s 18 in this part of the book… HER POWER. She later finds out ON HER WEDDING DAY to Rochester that he is already married to a woman he has locked up in the attic because she’ll attack anything that moves (I mean she very obviously has a mental illness which has caused her to be violent but back at that time there weren’t many or even any humane options for treatment so unpopular opinion but the fact that he kept her in his house and with a maid to take care of her was probably the best he could provide her with in this situation tbh) Jane runs away and wanders the moors all alone because she knows what happened wasn’t right (and this is her rational reaction, i love her and also probably same) and while half dead she finds some people who turn out to be her COUSINS (GASP), she gets a job, inherits a fortune and gets another marriage proposal like a #girlboss. But then she has a “That’s so Raven” vision telling her Rochester is in trouble. Turns out his house burned down and he’s now scarred and blind and his wife is dead. Accurate recreation of their reunion;

Rochester: Am I mad ugly now Jane?

Jane: Oh for sure. But you know, same as always.

Rochester with tears in his eyes: I missed that woman so much

Jane starts the story underappreciated, poor, belittled and unequal to Rochester (in terms of power). She ends the book appreciated, loaded, loved and a true equal to the man she loves. And that’s the most metal thing of all.

artefact of Merlin summer 💔

Each human language has its strengths and weaknesses and, like a musical instrument, is better designed to express certain information, thoughts, and feelings than others. A violin and a trombone have little in common; and though each can be drafted to sound the same melody, the melody will have a different texture and make a quite different impression on the hearer, depending on the instrument employed. Ancient Hebrew is tense and terse, a desert language of spare muscularity, as tightly economical in its movements and effects as a desert nomad, who, because of the constant threat of dehydration, must always think before he moves and think before he speaks, who never uses two words when one will do, who never uses one word when silence can express his meaning. (Not a little of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is contained in its silences.) Ancient Latin is a language ideal for recordkeeping, simple maxims, and obvious subordinations, the perfect language for a tribe of parsimonious farmers who transformed themselves into land-grabbing real estate developers, then into colonial masters, and finally into imperialists who believed the whole world belonged to them by right. Only with immense exertions—by poets like Virgil, studiously imitating Homer—was Latin forged into an instrument fit for the emotional modulations of poetry and the subtleties of thought. With all that, no Latin dramatist ever came close to the Greek achievement; and the unoriginal Latin philosophers were all weak imitators of their Greek forebears.

Though ancient languages are notable for their modest vocabularies (the world still being young and the phenomena to be named far fewer than what we face today), Greek is an exception: the abundance of words in a dictionary of ancient Greek is staggering not only to the student but to the expert. The Spartans, the Achaeans, the Athenians, the Boeotians, the Aetolians, the Euboeans, the Thessalonians, the Macedonians, the Lydians, the Ionians, the speakers who hailed from the various Adriatic and Aegean islands, the colonists of Sicily, southern Italy, and the Black Sea—these and many more contributed their finely shaded regional vocabularies (not unlike their characteristic musical modes) to the whole language, which became like a vast orchestra of diverse instruments, able to produce modulations of extraordinary refinement.

— Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter

underrated character type I actually relate to: hopeless romantic who loves to intellectually spar disguised as an unbearable clown

forgot the queen clown aficionado

"Speak"

"Open up"

"Don't be afraid to tell your truth"

Excuse me but as an oversharing anxiously tilted individual whose thoughts appear sporadically like a fascinatingly evergrowing fungus sometimes ending in me making regretably mean gossiping or useless rumination, what about the power of shuting the fuck up? The art of keeping thoughts to myself? The absolute A ++ of being like, you know what there is nothing to add to this. Who's going to romanticise direct and simple words? Where is my self help guided meditation?

I sit and think about how we’re all just walking our individual paths but sometimes our paths align perfectly with someone else’s and you either walk the rest of your lives together or it’s just for a brief moment in time and you carry on. We’re really all just walking each other home. Life is so magical.

Poor Things (2023) dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

[Image ID: The poem “One Source of Bad Information”, by Robert Bly.  There’s a boy in you about three years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty Thousand Years. Sometime it’s a girl.  The child had to make up its mind How to save you from death. He said things like:  “Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”  You live with this child, but you don’t know it.  You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy  At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy  You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.  Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you. 

/end id]

girlhood never stops we just evolve…

it's funny how most men have associated rationality with being 'superior' because they believe that logic is incompatible with silly things like feelings and emotion. and then you have bella baxter in poor things who approaches the world, and discovers her own mind, with the same logical mindset she saw in godwin, but whose rational conclusions never lead astray from her core beliefs in empathy and compassion... you know.almost like they're trying to tell us something there

Mire Lee (b. 1988 in Seoul; lives and works between Amsterdam and Seoul)

Untitled (My Pittsburgh Sculpture), 2022

Mire Lee employs more robust sculptural materials such as metal, plaster, and concrete alongside glycerin, silicone, and various types of resin, which are often animated by electric motors and pumps. The artist's works sometimes recall the internal systems of the human body — its organ functions, convulsions, failures, fluids, and excretions as a way of probing the depths and outer limits of human behavior and the psyche.

The centerpiece of Lee's new sculpture is a steel and glass decagonal form that contains flexible, kinetic components turning in a viscous fluid. Here, soft internal elements become entangled with each other and come into contact with hard, unforgiving materials. An extension of the artist's exploration of pain, this commission connects with the machinations set in motion in Lee's prior works that mine a vocabulary of the ugly, neglected, strained, vulnerable, and leaky. In this dark sublime, the artist seeks generative and redemptive lessons. She observes: "I've always seen heart-wrenching things as beautiful…. I do not believe we can eliminate violence or toxicity in its entirety from the world, but we can develop responses other than disgust or withdrawal." Taking one step further, Lee asks how we might come to understand and make something of pain, violence, or injustice that is compounded, knotted up, and which has no single source or cause.