I meant to put this piece—Katharine Smyth: Forgetting Virginia Woolf— with a short little roundup of other things. Instead, I found myself accidentally found myself writing all of these words! ( It's deeply reassuring to see public meditations on the *intoxication* of discovering Virginia Woolf... )
My Wednesday atm is very-much "overgrown child", and it's GREAT. My mother's partner gave me 20$ to go to the comic book store just now, which I did, and bought the first three volumes of Hexwives. And now I am at a bar reading The Animators and drinking a drink by the name of Disco Power, which contains: pisco, aperol, lemon, simple syrup, egg white, and honest to God glitter. It looks like a pink birthday cake with confetti sprinkles. And tastes like strawberries and pisco. In short, it's a delight.
(If I knew how to add images easily, I would, but trust me it's a work of 3rd grade art!)
So: I have this RL history of developmental biology project that I have been exceedingly bad at doing, even though I keep claiming to really care deeply about it; part of my issue is that the research is extremely daunting in a field that I am technically familiar with but not historically so. It's basically developmental biology at the turn of the century through the present day (I say, blithefully, pretending as if > one hundred years of scientific and political history will be totally easy and trivial to learn and then pick apart for societal trends that project into the future as well hmmm).
I am telling myself that I do better when I'm parsing things for an imagined audience (i.e. to learn something teach it to someone else), so, some (exceedingly lightweight) notes on Edmund Beecher Wilson, American father of developmental biology!
( a few general comments about the field of dev bio )
( possibly the footnotes are the things of most general interest )
I have a new icon, and in celebration: a WIP Black Sails fic rec! Under a cut for spoilers.
( look at how bloody yet thoughtful and briefly not-miserable that man is!!! )
Sometimes Mary would talk of her plans for the future while Stephen listened, smiling as she did so.
‘I’ll go into an office, I want to be free.’
‘You’re so little, you’d get mislaid in an office.’
‘I’m five foot five!’
'Are you really, Mary? You feel little somehow.’
'That’s because you’re so tall. I do wish I could grow a bit!’
‘No, don’t wish that, you’re all right as you are — it’s you, Mary.’
-Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
Still working my way through The Well of Loneliness, still crying at Puddle, and so very excited about flirtatious!Stephen. (It's also reassuring for my own forays into early century writing, because this...is a flirtatious conversation I myself have had more than one time. As I suspect most of us have. Should I get new banter? Ehhhh.)
via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sciatrix's wednesday linkspam
this list of "unparliamentary language" that NZ politicians have gotten penalized for using. And there's a Canadian edition here, too.
Strong recommendation to check out Kiwi politicians slinging slurs at each other. Some favorites:
‘…Let’s go for a really long walk, shall we, dear? I’ve been wanting a really long walk now for weeks.’
Liar — most kind and self-sacrificing liar! Puddle hated long walks, especially with Stephen who strode as though wearing seven league boots and whose only idea of a country walk was to take her own line across ditches and hedges — yes, indeed, a most kind and self-sacrificing liar!
The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall
I emote everywhere every single time Puddle enters the narrative (on name alone, among other reasons), and I actually laughed at loud here. Just imagine the sigh you'd heave trying to connect to a 21 year old who thinks nobody understands them! It's a glorious little bit, her self-sacrificing grumbling walking, if wistful—the scene just proceeding is Puddle ruminating on the conspiracy of silence :( One of my narrative things is mentorship, and when I started Well earlier today I was not expecting to find it at all, really. Foolish me, since Part 1 and Part 2 are about, among other things, mentoring relationships succeeding and failing in so many different relationship structures! Is there fic, guys? Am I going to have to write "remembered Puddle/OFC"?
I just finished The Waves (V. Woolf) and cried my way through the entire last section. I am, as usual, struck dumb by her, and thus have no more articulate commentary at this time. I really loved this section, though, and the return of hope and light and beauty after a moment when the soul is erased. I just. I cannot.
How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.
'So the landscape returned to me; so I saw the fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me, but now with this difference; I saw but was not seen. I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that beats back sounds. Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child's words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases--I who have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone with my kind; solitary, I who have always had someone to share the empty grate, or the cupboard with its hanging loop of gold.
You guys, the internet here is SO BAD, and using DW on mobile exclusively is also SO TEDIOUS, god help me. Nevertheless, I persist!
sciatrix wrote a bit about some of their experiences with science mentorship and queer mentorship (or at least that's the box I'm jamming it into, because I have one (1) track in my mind), and it is very much my speed. →"butch, please"
they also link to a delightful & informative history of the femme/butch dichotomy and linguistic develpoment by staranise (which, lol, is itself a link to Tumblr) →here
edit: since it's unlocked, a longer boost for this post re: coming out ≠ dealing with stigma,
which featured (among other very! interesting commentary on identity), alchemistdoctor clueing me into the history of the term "coming out" i.e. how it derived from the debutante tradition of entering a society, and originally carried more community associations as well! From this piece:
instead of implying that someone was no longer hiding a grave secret, "coming out" was about proudly joining a community. Drag balls at the time were often covered in newspapers, so coming out into gay society could also mean coming out about your sexual orientation to the world at large.
And the scene was some Mayan ruins in Belize, and a discussion about the post-apocalyptic experience of the 1,000 Mayan villagers living in the ruins of a city meant for 60,000 at the time of the Spanish arriving. 3,000 continuous years of occupation of this place! The fall of empires, man.And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation's nakedness
Many still consider it an accident that Nazi ideology centered around anti-Semitism and that Nazi policy, consistently and uncompromisingly, aimed at the persecution and finally the extermination of the Jews...their chief interest—persecution of Jews all over the world—have been regarded by public opinion as a pretext for winning the masses or an interesting device of demagogy...
Compared with the events themselves, all explanations of antisemitism look as if they have been hastily and hazardously contrived, to cover up an issue which so gravely threatens our sense of proportion and our hope for sanity.
Impressed by Latour’s dedication, Gaillardet remarked that Latour could have been a scientist. The idea seemed almost too much for him to bear.
“I could have been a scientist,” Latour said with arch gravity. “I’ve wasted my life.”
“Oh, Bru-no!” Gaillardet said, in the way in which one might comfort a wounded bird.
“To produce one fact!” Latour sighed, and pointed a finger in the air, as though to demonstrate its indisputable solidity. There was an ache in his eyes. “Can you imagine the pleasure of producing one fact?”
I think that definition today of love—“you are my everything”—where you really see it, this complete exaltation, is in wedding vows. Have you ever noticed? I mean, it’s, “I will wipe every tear that streams down your face before you even notice it’s going down.” I think a realistic vow is “I will fuck up on a regular basis, and, on occasion, I’ll admit it.”
breathedout-style, but I don't know how to pull out, say, this passage about, uh, scapegoating the Jewish community and retain all of the context. The context feels very important.“You must listen to me, Juana,” her mother says, believing she is speaking metaphorically. “This is the way the story ends, you understand? This is the way it always ends… Vampires are parasites and they’ll take every drop you give them.”
Better that you get the story filtered through the eyes of Juana, who perceives the violence of her household as only a child can: in half understood shadows, the sound of her mother crying, a BANG BANG BANG on the door. “The sound that hits you, as if you yourself were the door.”
Baru is no artist but the anticipation of battle and finality, of action, gives her vision. If she could give it a frame she would call it: The Demon Tain Hu.
And Tain Hu lifts her scarred chin from Baru's grasp; and she says, "Make a wolf bitch with blood in her mouth."
“Hello yourself, imuira.”
(Or, Aurdwynn's Imperial Accountant escapes the city for the country)
The first words of Traitor were “This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.” The first words of Monster are “If something hurts, does that make it true?”
By the time of Hirschfeld’s visit to the Chicago fair [in 1893]. . .[there was] widespread dissemination of racist cartoons, which had begun to circulate in the 1860s and typically conflated “Negro” subjects with apes—even if, as Zakkiyah Jackson has argued, the apparently dehumanizing racist representations and discourses were fueled by the knowledge of the humanity of the enslaved.
This racist visual genre had gained momentum in British, American, and German contexts with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,...At the same time, however, the voices of abolitionist and antiracism campaigners such as [Frederick] Douglass and [Ida B.] Wells, who challenged not just legal and social discrimination but also the popular racism that propped up such practices, were increasingly, and widely, heard. Given the popularity of the abolitionist movement in the United States, Hirschfeld’s silence on the debates about the Chicago World’s Fair is all the more noticeable. It indicates both his own detachment from the abolitionist and antiracism struggle and the more insidious privilege of whiteness, which normalized and made invisible to him the racism of the Chicago World’s Fair and American society more widely. [emphasis mine]
Even if Aurdwynn cannot be ruled, it can be sacrificed. That's the way of many precious things.
3. This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.
Taking hands like children
lost in a six-dimensional
forest, we step across.
The walls of the house fold themselves down,
and the house turns
itself inside out, as a tulip does
in its last full-blown moment, and our candle
flares up and goes out, and the only common
sense that remains to us is touch,
as it will be, later, some other
century, when we will seem to each other
even less what we were.
But that trick is just to hold on
through all appearances; and so we do,
and yes, I know it’s you;
and that is what we will come to, sooner
or later, when it’s even darker
than It is now, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest
and candles are no longer any use to us
and the visibility is zero: Yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you.
timeasmymeasurekrja
