Just Garland

there will never be another headline that comes close to comparing with this

by David G. Forés

Best fucking thing I’ve ever read.

[The Queen Below - @hynpos]

I. Hera makes ambrosia tea from her keurig for the girls who leave her house each morning, to cleanse all defilement from their lovely flesh. She watches them all leave, like what they’ve done is something to hide, Hera knows anyway. She will wake Zeus later and make black coffee for the both of them, and pretend the young women are just fantasies of a withering god. II. Athena has twenty tabs open in her web browser, monitoring the political climate. Wars are no longer fought on fields of wildflowers, they are held behind screens and in lines of code. She learned the language of code quickly, protecting those who hack valiantly from phishing sites and from a Trojan horse of a whole new kind. Athena’s fingers are no longer calloused, but ice cold hovering above her keyboard. III. Aphrodite smells of expensive perfume and taste like vanilla lattes. She preaches self-love from her mall kiosk, selling bath bombs infused with rose and honey. She watches young girls skip meals and chase men who hurt them, and Aphrodite cries herself to sleep. When she can’t sleep, she takes to the streets– which is far worse. She sees her name abused, used on products of defilement and artificial beauty. IV. Persephone clings tighter to her husband in the cold nights of the winter and fall, knowing their days together are becoming fewer in number as the world’s climate changes. Spring comes too early and summer stays too late, and all she can see is her mother’s hollow smile. There can only be one queen in the warm months, and pomegranates aren’t in season during the summer. Persephone isn’t the only one affected by this arrangement; Hades quivers like a leaf under her first touch each fall.

The gods are dying, what of the goddesses (5/20/17)

In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. […] We engage the presence, the voice of the book. We allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most cover dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. The artist is the uncontrollable force; no western eye, since Van Gogh, looks on a cypress without observing in it the start of a flame. So, and in supreme measure, it is with literature. A man who has read Book XXIV of the Iliad - the night meeting of Priam and Achielles - or the chapter in which Alyosha Karamazov kneels to the stars, who has raid Montaigne’s chapter XX (Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir) and Hamlet’s use of it - and who is not altered, whose apprehension of his own life is unchanged, who does not, in some subtle yet radical manner, look on the room in which he moves, on those that knock at the door, differently - has read only with the blindness of physical sight. […] To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulernable our identity, our self possession. In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream (Dostoyevsky tells of it). One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking backbone sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening. So it should be when we take in hand a major work of literature or philosophy, of imagination or doctrine. It may come to possess us so completely that we go, for a spell, in fear of ourselves and in imperfect recognition. He who has read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

George Steiner, “Humane Literacy” from Language and Silence (via mesogeios)

Accurate representation of me in literally ANY place that sells books.

Artwork belongs to @delusioninabox 👏👏👏

If you tell a boy whose hair is curly and wild and who dresses in faded holey t-shirts that smell like worn cotton and home that he should comb his hair down for you and dress up nicer for you, then you are slowly killing him and replacing him with what you think he should have to be…for you. Do me a favor. Dont. This world needs more boys with wild hair and worn cotton shirts and if you cant appreciate him, let him go, because he does not need to be told that his comfort and style is wrong. He should be loved by someone who thinks that wild hair is beautiful, and that he is stunning in a suit or worn cotton or nothing at all, because that is what love is. Healthy love is accepting them as they came, with all their flaws and problems and quirks. You should not have to “fix” someone you love at all, if they are right for you, you will be able to grow together into better people. They might adapt around you as time goes on, and that is normal, growth and change is good and natural, but forcing change is brutal and mean. He deserves to be loved just the way he came to you, because someone thinks he is beautiful, and if you can’t do that, let him love someone who will.

Thoughts of things  (via burtonbutton)

everyone should read this

This is what I like about photographs. They’re proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.