[ID: Excerpt From The Gender Of Sound, Anne Carson

“The most haunting time at which to see them is at the turn of the moon, when they utter strange wailing cries; but the lagoon is dangerous for mortals then…”

“the mermaids” - marianne boruch // “hylas and the nymphs” - john william waterhouse // “the love song of j. alfred prufrock” - t.s. eliot // “a mermaid” - john william waterhouse // “the siren” john william waterhouse // moby-dick - herman melville // “the knight and the mermaid” - isobel lilian gloag // “the land baby” - john collier // “lamia” - john keats // of “hylas and the water nymphs” - henrietta rae // peter pan // j.m. barrie

1.pat the bunny, I'm not a good person // 2. // 3. mitski, a pearl, art by @hauntedomens // 4.hieu minh nguyen, buffet etiquette // 5.art from pinterest // 6.christa wolf tr. by jan van heurck, cassandra: a novel and four essays // 7.extracurricular (2020) dir.kim jin min // 8.louise bourgeois, destruction of the father/reconstruction of the father: writings and interviews 1923-1997 // 9.alice osman, radio silence // mitski, fireworks, art by uol.art (on insta)

being a woman is thinking ur the ugliest person ever and then coming across a photo of u as a kid when u had already started to hate ur appearance and realizing u were so cute and then u do this every so often for the rest of ur life and u never learn

the female killer in hollywood: a mini essay by silas denver melvin

“Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet? […] No, really, think about it. Think about the little mermaid, who traded in her tail for love, got two legs and two feet, and every step was like walking on knives. And where did it get her? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Then there’s the girl who put on the beautiful red dancing shoes. The woodsman had to chop her feet off with an axe. There are Cinderella’s two stepsisters, who cut off their own toes, and Snow White’s stepmother, who danced to death in red-hot iron slippers. […] There was this one woman who walked east of the sun and then west of the moon, looking for her lover, who had left her because she spilled tallow on his nightshirt. She wore out at least one pair of perfectly good iron shoes before she found him. Take our word for it, he wasn’t worth it. What do you think happened when she forgot to put the fabric softener in the dryer? Laundry is hard, travel is harder.”

— Kelly Link, from “Travels with the Snow Queen”, Stranger Things Happen

what do you think drives lady macbeth's cruelty and do you sympathise with her at all?

This post and this post might be of interest. But I think ‘cruelty’ is the wrong word. Cruelty implies violence for the sake of violence and enjoyment of violence. (See here.) Lady M doesn’t revel in the violence. She doesn’t delight in it the way some of the characters in, say, Titus Andronicus do, or even Margaret in Henry VI does after the murder of Rutland/during the murder of York. For Lady M violence is always a means to an end. “Infirm of purpose” is what she calls her husband when he starts to get faint-hearted. He’s too full of the milk of human kindness “to catch the nearest way.” For her, it’s all about the outcome. The ends justify the means. Like I said in one of those posts, I think her driving force is ambition. She wants more than what she has. 

Interestingly, she never expresses any personal desire to be queen. She does, however, use the singular possessive pronoun ‘my’ when she says “The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements.” She claims the crime as her own, and even though the idea of murder occurs to her and her husband independently, she is the criminal mastermind. She says, “you shall put / This night’s great business into my dispatch; / Which shall to all our nights and days to come / Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.” And at the end of the scene: “Leave all the rest to me.” This regicide is her baby–and I use that word very deliberately. There are a million possible explanations for why Lady Macbeth is so desperate to seize this power for her husband. My guess is it has something to do with that baby she mentions in 1.7 which doesn’t appear in the play. A woman’s function at this point in history was basically to be a baby-making machine and ensure the survival of her husband’s line. She hasn’t been able to do that (for whatever reason) and her husband, at least, is already middle-aged, so that procreation window is rapidly closing, if it’s not closed already. By early modern standards, that’s a huge dynastic failure. My guess is that her power-grabbing is about agency and compensation. Maybe she can’t continue Macbeth’s line, but she can make him king. And she does. 

But here’s the other part of it which I think is really important and often gets overlooked, and it goes back to the fact that Lady M never expresses a personal desire to be queen. She wants her husband to be king, and she thinks he is fully deserving of that office. “Thou wouldst be great;” she says, “Art not without ambition, but without / The illness should attend it.” AND THIS IS SO KEY. Because Lady M is nothing if not full of ambition. What she’s saying here is “You don’t have enough darkness in your soul to do this, so I’m going to do it for you.” Now. Is that somewhat fucked up? Absolutely. However, that is an enormous sacrifice to make. I’m not going to get into this in depth, but there’s a lot of natural law theory floating around in this play. What’s important to know is this: In the protestant ethos of this play, if you commit regicide, you are 100% going to be damned for eternity. There’s no doubt about that. So, in an insane backwards way, this is actually an incredibly loving, selfless thing to do on Lady M’s part. She is willing to sacrifice her own salvation to make her husband king. Let that sink in. That is so much more hardcore than just saying, “I’d take a bullet for you, babe.” She is willing to burn for all time to put him on the throne, and not only is she willing, but it’s her idea, not just something she does with her back against the wall. That is a crazy kind of love. And that’s one of my favorite things about this play. This is not a unanimous opinion by any means, but I firmly believe that even though the Macbeths are terrible tyrannical people, they are desperately, devotedly in love with one another. Their language is incredibly intimate. In his first letter Macbeth addresses his wife as “My dearest partner of greatness,” and throughout the play they are constantly struggling to help and heal one another. Theirs is a relationship built on love and equality, whatever else they do (and however their relationship is also sometimes toxic and fractures through the play). Look at Macbeth’s conversation with the doctor in 5.3 when his wife’s health begins to fail: “If thou couldst, doctor, cast / The water of my land, find her disease, / And purge it to a sound and pristine health, / I would applaud thee to the very echo, / That should applaud again.” That. Is. Love.

So. Why does Lady Macbeth do the terrible things she does? There’s no certain answer. Ambition has a lot to do with it. But I think that ambition is rooted in guilt about what she hasn’t been able to provide her husband with, and a passionate yearning to make up for that, somehow. Leo’s character says in Inception that positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time, and I think that’s true here. Lady M doesn’t orchestrate Duncan’s murder because she’s inherently cruel. She does it for love.

Don’t know who this quote is by but it’s been stuck in my brain like a leech for days

My grandmother told me a story of how after her mother died she had a dream where she was walking through water and her mother told her that she has to leave her behind. She told me she didn't need anyone to interpret it, but she knew that it really was her mother speaking to her.

Funeral, Phoebe Bridgers/La Lune, Jacques Prévert/Dream States, Henrik Uldalen/The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Anderson, illustrated by Helen More/Leviton 3, Quang Ho/Some British Ballads, Arthur Rackham/Hamlet, William Shakespeare

oldest daughters have more de-escalation training than cops do

Aloha from Hell - Richard Kadrey / x / I Can Fly - Lana Del Rey / Alejandro Jodorowsky / Cut - Catherine Lacey / How’d Your Parents Die Again? - Fatimah Asghar / Margaret Atwood / Courtney Love Prays To Oregon - Clementine von Radics / The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore - Tennessee Williams / Vesuvius - Amber Sparks