Whimsical Fans Are Not Talked About Enough

In contemporary (post-modern) horror, the threat is “not simply among us, but rather part of us, caused by us.” Institutions (like the church and the military) that were once successful in containing the monster and restoring order are at best ineffectual (there is often a lack of closure) and at worst responsible for the monstrous. Contemporary horror also tends to collapse the categories of normal bodies and monstrous bodies; it is said to dispense with the binary opposition of us and them, and to resist the portrayal of the monster as a completely alien Other, characteristic of such 1950s films as The Thing (from Another World) (1951), Them! (1954), and The Blob (1958). This tendency to give the monster a familiar face (the monster is not simply among us, but possibly is us) is tied, in postmodern horror, to the focus on the body as site of the monstrous.

–Lianne McLarty, “Beyond the Veil of the Flesh”: Cronenberg and the Disembodiment of Horror, from The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film

Sleeping Bacchant by Károly Lotz (19th Century)

Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning

hello pauline, greetings from the other side✨ i have been struggling with reading non-fiction for a while, feels like my brain is rotting :( could you please help me out/ recommend things i can start with which are interesting and not that hard to comprehend. thank you so much for you help. love and light to you 🌟

I feel you, I’ve just started reading academic papers for uni again and I hadn’t realized how much I missed reading non-fiction! On this list there are some I’ve read, some I’ve started but haven’t finished and others I’m looking forward to read. I would say all the essay collections and memoirs (except maybe for that of Wojnarowicz) are pretty accessible, maybe the political writings are a bit harder to understand depending on the subject (and I guess level of specificity and/or radicalism as well)

Obligatory readings (so like, my favourites, essays/collections that have shaped who I am): - The Book of Delights by Ross Gay - All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks - The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing - Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver - Conversations with James Baldwin, edited by Fred L. Standley - The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Some very touching/harrowing memoirs: - Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson - Little Weirds by Jenny Slate - The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - Bluets by Maggie Nelson - The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch - In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado - The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria* Marzano-Lesnevich (I think they no longer use that name but it’s the name under which it was published) - The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher - A House Of My Own: Stories From My Life by Sandra Cisneros - The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde - Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration by David Wojnarowicz

More political non-fiction: - The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and I Am Not Your N**** by James Baldwin - Women, Race & Class and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis - Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander - Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire - A Power Governments Cannot Suppress by Howard Zinn - This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Others: - Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke - Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith - What Poetry Is All About by Greg Kuzma - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer - The Crying Book by Heather Christle

Fyodor Dostoevsky ― Crime and Punishment

Cathy de Monchaux: Beyond Thinking (2018)

The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969

A cobra is dangerous only when it is coiled, ready to strike in an instant; when its body is completely erect it is quite harmless. Similarly, the kundalini is dangerous only in its form of the diffuse life energies, which fuel the unillumined person's hankering for sensory and sensual experiences, entangling him or her ever more in worldly karma. When the serpent power is erect, however, it is not poisonous but a source of ambrosia, because it is erect only when it has entered the central pathway leading to liberation and bliss. As Jayaratha explains in his commentary on the Tantra-Aloka (chapter 5, p. 358), when one strikes a serpent it draws itself up and becomes stiff like a rod. Similarly, through the process of "churning" the kundalini stretches upward into the perpendicular pathway of the sushumna, reaching with its head for the topmost psychoenergetic center. Georg Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, Chapter 11: Awakening the Serpent Power.

american sterling silver and enamel eros and psyche relief vesta case, c. 19oo

To all my hoes and nerds out there: what are the best sources for Orphic myth? (@judiejodia?)