He’s Your Favorite Marauder’s Favorite Marauder! 💥

“You want to be people? Let’s be people.”

“Yeah, let’s be them for awhile.”

"You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less."

- James Baldwin, The Artist's Struggle for Integrity

BONES AND ALL (2022) dir. Luca Guadagnino

The undeviating existence of the house and in particular its uninhabited rooms, may also be experienced as disturbing. It is as if a house should always be inhabited and that its emptiness is simultaneously eerie and uncanny. Eeriness is often said to be created by the absence of something that ought to be there, but isn't, whereas the uncanny is the opposite, arising from the presence (real or imagined) of something that shouldn't be there, but is there. So the emptiness of the empty house is eerie, and yet at the same time it produces the uncanny sensation that something actually is there; and that must be the house itself—or, of course, a ghost haunting it. It is this contradictory mixture that produces the belief that the house itself is a presence, a being, that it is in some sense if not alive, then at least sentient. In this sense a house may be haunted by itself.

Elizabeth Wilson, Haunted Houses

This is actually a fundamental belief of mine. It’s actually at the core of who I am and how I understand the world.

my sister and i had a debate about the sexuality of vampires and i want it to be known that i was immovable in my conviction that all vampires are queer by nature

I mean surely we all grew up feeling like there was a wrongness inherently deep inside us that will endure for the rest of our lives

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

oomf

sympathetic institution of the museum of jurassic technology