'No riches on earth compare to the arts. Tell me - what is it to feel, to express, to take delight, to see oneself reflected, to experience the stories of others?'
'Surely,' I said, 'that is to be alive.'
- From Orphia and Eurdydicius by Elyse John
Men shouted as lawmakers in pillared buildings, and spoke like gods in their own homes. What were women but wives shut away, weavers for the marketplace, and slaves carrying water? If men were the voices of Greece, what did that make us? What were women, if not silence?
- from Orphia and Eudrydicius by Elyse John
Where the sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not, Reepicheep, To find all you seek,
There is the utter east.
I was trying to make sense of the different ways men and women related to Ophelia. Women seemed to invoke her like a patron saint; men seemed mostly interested in fetishizing her flowery, waterlogged corpse. I tried to argue that Ophelia resonated because Shakespeare had made an extraordinary discovery in writing her, though I had trouble articulating the nature of that discovery. I didn’t want to admit that it could be something as simple as recognizing that emotionally unstable teenage girls are human beings.
Source: the-toast.net
I found a precedent for girls like me in the work of confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They represented a respectable compromise between “real literature” and my irrepressible tendency to let the personal creep into my writing. I related intensely to the ferocity and focus in their work, but I soon felt the hinges of a trap closing around me. To identify with Plath and Sexton was to take up the mantle of the mad female poet, madness being what they were chiefly remembered for. Hemingway’s suicide was just a footnote to his biography; Plath and Sexton’s suicides defined them. I wanted more for myself, as a person and an artist. But there were a limited number of luminaries that a young writer in a university English department could safely emulate and still be considered mature and serious about their craft. Plath and Sexton had blazed a trail I felt I could follow. So I began to grapple with women’s “madness”, as both a personal and a literary conceit, trying to discover why it both allured and repelled me.
The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness
B.N. Harrison
Source: the-toast.net
I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing
I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology
’Cause I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King
Florence and the machine, king
We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children
About the world ending and the scale of my ambition
And how much is art really worth
Florence and the machine, king
You live there; I live here:
Other people everywhere
Haunt their houses, and endure
Days and deeds and furniture,
Strange Meetings BY HAROLD MONRO
I don't care why this apartment's always cold
London can try, it'll never swallow me whole
And I swear,
We could be gigantic, everything I need
Ghost in the Land of Skeletons
Christopher Kennedy
If not for flesh's pretty paint, we're just a bunch of skeletons, working hard to deny the fact of bones. Teeth remind me that we die. That's why I never smile, except when looking at a picture of a ghost, captured by a camera lens, in a book about the paranormal. When someone takes a picture of a spirit, it gives me hope. I admire the ones who refuse to go away. Lovers scorned and criminals burned. I love the dead little girl who plays in her yard, a spectral game of hide and seek. It's the fact they don't know they're dead that appeals to me most. Like a man once said to me, Do you ever feel like you're a ghost? Sure, I answered, every day. He laughed at that and disappeared. All I could think was he beat me to it.
Source: poets.org
Your highness, there’s something I must say.”
Hearing him sound so solemn, Xie Lian asked, “What is it?”
“I know you can’t die, and you’re not afraid to die, but no matter how tough you are, don’t think yourself incapable of getting hurt.” Hua Cheng said.
Xie Lian was taken aback. Hua Cheng continued, “Not dying doesn’t mean not getting hurt, and it definitely doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. When you see something strange and dangerous, don’t just touch it. Find me. Let me take care of it.”
Xie Lian suddenly recalled earlier when he touched those skulls covered with corpse poison with his hands, Hua Cheng’s expression instantly turned dark. He wondered inwardly, was Hua Cheng perhaps angry because of this then?
Heavens Official Blessing
You have a sweet room here, Mr. Bingley, and a charming prospect over the gravel walk. I
do not know a place in the country that is equal to Netherfield. You will not think of
quitting it in a hurry, I hope, though you have but a short lease."
"Whatever I do is done in a hurry," replied he; "and therefore if I should resolve to quit
Netherfield, I should probably be off in five minutes. At present, however, I consider
myself as quite fixed here."
"That is exactly what I should have supposed of you," said Elizabeth.
"You begin to comprehend me, do you?" cried he, turning towards her.
"Oh! yes—I understand you perfectly."
"I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am afraid is
pitiful."
"That is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less
estimable than such a one as yours."
"Lizzy," cried her mother, "remember where you are, and do not run on in the wild
manner that you are suffered to do at home."
"I did not know before," continued Bingley immediately, "that you were a studier of
character. It must be an amusing study."
"Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage."
I lived for art, I lived for love,
I never harmed a living soul!
With a discreet hand
I relieved all misfortunes I encountered.
Always with sincere faith
my prayer
rose to the holy tabernacles.
Always with sincere faith
I decorated the altars with flowers.
In this hour of grief,
why, why, Lord,
why do you reward me thus?
I donated jewels to the Madonna's mantle,
and offered songs to the stars and to heaven,
which thus did shine with more beauty.
In this hour of grief,
why, why, Lord,
ah, why do you reward me thus?
SPOILER for the movie 'Girl'.
With her surgery indefinitely on hold, the film ends with Lara — spoiler alert and content warning for self-harm — cutting off her genitals with a pair of scissors. That twist makes no logical sense — it’s hard to imagine a trans person who wants surgery cutting off a body part that’s literally necessary for the procedure — and once again turns a trans body into a subject of grisly violence. Most shockingly, Dhont doesn’t frame the act as a criticism of the healthcare system or even a regrettable tragedy, but depicts Lara castrating herself as an inevitable means of survival. The film randomly jumps to the future to show a smiling Lara happily walking down a sun-dappled street: Ah, now she’s a woman!
Oliver Whitney for the Hollywood Reporter
Ah yes, that lovely idea that the absence of a penis is what makes a woman a woman. -_- We are defined by ‘lack’. Woohoo.
Source: hollywoodreporter.com
...a few years ago, Tanaka met handyman Komamura Yoshikazu. She was there to discuss sento culture, and he had built the stage. The two soon fell in love, married, and today she and Yoshikazu travel up and down Japan as part of a sento painting partnership: she does the painting, and he builds the wooden stages and metal scaffolding where she works.
“I drive, I carry heavy things and I try to support her,” Yoshikazu smiled.
As Tanaka sweeps her brush across the painted valleys on the women’s side of the Taishoyu bathhouse, Yoshikazu has already laid a planked walkway over the pools on the men’s side and readied her paint on a makeshift stand.
<3
Source: bbc.com
In her team's studies, women who slept more than six hours a night seemed to create a buffer of sorts against the cardiovascular harm of trauma. "We need to help women cope with this trauma and protect their health because this is happening on such a wide scale," Thurston said.
Source: chicagotribune.com
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly graded [the lover] the film C, calling it "one more movie that titillates us with the prospect of taking sex seriously and then dampens our interest by taking it too seriously. Why do so many filmmakers insist on staging erotic encounters as if they were some sort of hushed religious ritual? The answer, of course, is that they're trying to dignify sex. But sex isn't dignified — it's messy and playful and abandoned. In The Lover, director Jean-Jacques Annaud gives us the sweating and writhing without the spontaneity and surprise."
A review of ‘The Lover’