To be chosen. To be cared for. To be loved. The sweetest thing. The warmest thing.
Rainy Night at Shinobazu Pond, 笠松 紫浪 Shiro Kasamatsu, 1938
whenever i imagine my dream home, the kitchen is so so important. hand-painted plates, gorgeous mugs and teapots, a ton of cookie cutters to choose from, niche kitchen supplies, anything to make it feel like mine...i want to wake up early in the morning and make breakfast for me and my lover, open windows letting in the sunlight, birds chirping outside. manifesting this now.
i like to think that our blogs are just our own little personal museums of all the things we like, and we can visit each other’s museums and leave nice notes at the reception.
content aside, i think that diversifying your reading also means reading a variety of forms. even if you can burn through novels across genres and moods and subjects—they’re still novels. can you try short stories, a playscript, a book of poems? i think familiarity with these different forms is underrated and offers a lot
Icarus No.1 - personal painting based on the song Icarus by Nic Jones, written by Anne Lister
Owen Gent Here
Source: artemisdreaming
jacayls-deactivated20230529
here it is a very long collection of poems that have squeezed my heart or even held my hand 🤍
“There is, however, a power that is called memory. It should be dear to all the good ones as well as to all lovers. Yes, it may even be so dear to lovers that they almost prefer this whisper of memory to the sight of each other, as when they say, “Do you remember that time, and do you remember that time?””
— Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart: Is To Will One Thing
Body comparison Essential iris atrophy and a black hole
He fell quietly from her arms. He was a king.
i'm @ imjenndove on instagram! I post more regularly there<3
every time i see someone say that we should erase all other languages and make english the 'universal language' I'm reminded how ignorant and culturally insensitive some people are. to not be aware of the historical and cultural significance of a language in most cultures is bizarre. in erasing a language you would thus be erasing years of important history of a culture. i hope these people educate themselves before speaking on something they know nothing about simply because it would 'make their lives easier'. not to mention its so tone-deaf to the people who are fighting for language revitalization due to the historical language suppression of their ancestors.
best poetry writing process just dropped
oh do you guys not know The Poem about this
Trees
BY JOYCE KILMER
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
I want to talk about the history of women's history as a field.
So the thing is, until the mid-to-late 20th century, there was no concept of "women's history". History was history, it was the sequence of names and dates from a time and place, and the relationships between those names and dates. Women were involved if they were powerful enough to influence politics, or if they were legendarily sexual or something like that.
In the middle of the 20th century, historians started to realize that you could analyze history in all kinds of new and interesting ways if you did so through the lenses of different social groups, or by looking at behavior rather than politics. There were also more women in academia, a lot of them second-wave feminists, and they started writing about history specifically in relation to female subjects (although male social historians of the time also discussed women as participants in society and in social structures).
The thing about history as a field is that it's always, always being revised. Historian A writes a broad survey of the history of weaving in Europe. Historian B builds on it to write about the history of weaving in Lancashire. Historian C does an in-depth study of three Lancashire mills and finds that Historian B was using generalizations that Historian A drew from Eastern European weaving centers, because there was actually significant variation.
So early social historians were starting effectively from scratch, and they found that women were actually treated really badly! They were often studying legal documents, which uh were not written by women and were often not written in women's favor or even considering women at all, and came to the conclusion that women were powerless and simply considered property. Then later social historians could look closer and go, "whoa! there's actually a lot of interesting stuff here!" In the Middle Ages there were legal documents pertaining to queens and noblewomen, for instance, that showed their independent financial transactions; there were wills written by women, and court cases that related to women even if women weren't allowed to speak for themselves in court. So people started investigating the agency women actually could use, and yadda yadda yadda women's history is now full of fascinating books that delve into the nuances of women's situations, which were always more complicated than "women were property, not allowed to learn to read, had to sit and do embroidery for hours." There certainly was oppression, but within it there was life. There always is.
On the other hand, you have feminist theory. Feminist theory writing doesn't use historical methods and in general doesn't put much value on keeping up-to-date with history scholarship. (I'm getting blunter as this post gets longer and my ADHD wants me to finish up.) The purpose of history in feminist theory is frequently to provide select backing for and illustration of the philosophical points of the writer. As a result, works of feminist theory are sometimes based on very bad history. On AskHistorians, there is an excellent review of Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, a 2004 feminist theory text, that makes it clear how little attention Federici or her editors paid to contemporary or even decades-old history - because the history doesn't actually matter. What matters is the broader point about powerful male institutions mistreating women, which can be aptly illustrated by presenting witch trials as the male-gendered institution of the church attacking independent women just trying to cure ills with scientific application of herbs.
Where this ties into Present Difficulties is probably pretty clear. People who talk about how corsets and long skirts prevented women from moving or represent embroidery as a brainless task forced on women are coming from the perspective of "I know women were oppressed in the past and are oppressed now, so everything about their lives represents an aspect of that oppression in some way, particularly if I can make a good point with it." Trying to talk about the actual writings and opinions of historians on the subject is seen as problematic, because historians say that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that, and saying there's more nuance is taken as tantamount to saying that women weren't oppressed. It's intellectually dishonest, but it's compelling because of the outrage. Do women's historians now see embroidery as having been considered a form of art that was taught alongside academic subjects? Too bad! It's more rhetorically useful as an unpleasant rote skill girls were forced to do instead of learning or being active!
It's very telling that an actual historian gets dismissed as someone who just likes pretty things because she's familiar with current historical scholarship.
(I know some shit went down yesterday. I was fortunately out from about 8AM to 11PM and have thus seen none of it after my last post, but was given a few hints from friends as to what was happening. Neato!!! Anyway, I'm pretty much ignoring my activity page so as not to accidentally find out more, but if you saw anything that I said or that someone else said that made you go "hmm" and want more info, feel free to send me an ask.)
january is one of those months where you experience every feeling on the human spectrum and you just have to go about your day like that isn't happening
Ellie Grist photographed by Rachell Smith for Glass Magazine February 2022