He’s playing snake

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale - Truth or Fiction (n.d.)

The thing is, this painting looks whimsical but the satire goes HARD.

The woman on the left embodies all the “fictions” of womanhood. Society constructed femininity as frail–look at her artificially weak posture, an exaggeration of the “Grecian bend,” a fashionable slouching posture popularized in the Regency era; and her sickly pale and red-flushed face, showing the “consumptive” (i.e., “dying of literal tuberculosis”) look that women were encouraged to imitate. Women were supposed to be passive, childishly helpless, and ornamental–yes, the “sexy baby” trope goes back a loooong way. Notice the pile of toys, and the ridiculous impractical clothing and hairstyle that look like they belong on a doll or a child playing dress-up instead of a functioning adult person.

In contrast, the woman on the right has a naturalistic (still idealized) build and skin tone. She’s nude, but her balanced, upright posture references Classical Greek statues of nude warriors and athletes. And importantly she’s not posing and looking for a viewer’s attention like the “fictional” woman. She’s looking into a mirror.

And here’s the cool thing about the mirror. Traditionally, women were painted looking into mirrors to show how vain they were. (Bitches be so crazy about their hair and makeup, it’s not like their beauty is literally the only way for them to be valued, amirite?) Ironically, the whole genre of “dumb, sexy woman looking at herself in the mirror like a dumb idiot” pretty much existed to give a moral excuse for men to paint sexy naked women for male viewers to ogle at while feeling superior. Therefore, they would always be turned so the viewer can see into the mirror (and the woman’s pleased, preening expression). This put the woman’s face, her gaze, her humanity, at a secondary remove order to trivialize and sneer at it.

But this woman. THIS WOMAN is looking into the mirror and we don’t know what she sees. Her face is hard to read and we’re forced to wonder what thoughts she might be having. And in the late 1800s into the early 1900s (exact date isn’t specified) women were facing major changes to their role, their rights, and their future. This woman is “truth” because she’s a thinking, self-contained subject. We can’t “read” her. We don’t know what she wants or what she’s going to do. She is a grown-ass woman and it’s none of our fucking business.

“what if the house was haunted” what if the house WASNT haunted. what if your continual presence there is what corrupts. what if you are what haunts this house

If you love this concept, I can highly recommend E. F. Benson for turn-of-the-century spooky stories by a gay contemporary of M. R. James. “The Room in the Tower” and “The Step” both come to mind as hauntings where “the call is coming from inside the house”–the dread and blurring of reality originates with the person who’s experiencing it all.

Benson wrote beautifully psychological stories with witty satirical elements and an obsession with the taboos of paganism. His stories often feature important “friendships” between young men. And by that, I mean m/m rescue fantasies, literal princess carry scenes, and intimate emotional moments that feel like Gilded Age romance slash fic.

His stories are all in public domain, so you can read them for free in numerous places. For some of his best homoerotic moments, I recommend “The Man Who Went too Far” and “And No Birds Sing.” I also love the atmospheric readings by Richard Crowest in the podcast audiobook The Ghost Stories of E F Benson.

Plus, you’ve gotta love a writer whose ghost story titles include “The Psychical Mallards” and “Spinach.”

ALT

she gave me a rose

Source: [X]

TL;DR – Twitter thread by a library worker on a news article about a woman who pulled hundreds of books out of a library dumpster and donated them to an underserved school. THOSE BOOKS WERE THROWN OUT FOR A REASON. Like outdated science, racism, and misogyny. #ContextMatters 

Sorry, book burning is ALWAYS bad.

Listen, even if the books are legit crap and promote the most horrible things in the world, I am against burning them. The kids should be able to read these books - with the understanding that these books are flawed and have racism/misogyny within them. And maybe it’s a good opportunity to teach them how to recognize propaganda and misinformation? Or to see how outdated science can evolve?

But book burning is the wrong move. Always will be. Don’t go down this road, it will end up backfiring.

… books being discarded by a library is not equivalent to being burned or banned. To even be considered for removal, books will either be in very bad physical shape or will be ones no one has checked out in several years, or will be replaced by newer editions of the same biok. Copies of these books still exist in archives with the express purpose of being preserved, and can be gotten by the library through inter library loan if someone wants to read them.

Weeding and discard of books are very thorough processes, and as the thread says books in good condition that would be useful elsewhere are donated, or sometimes sold to fundraise for the library. Many libraries will also have a cart of free books for people to take if they want.

If, after all this work, and evaluation, and opportunities for reuse, a book is placed in a dumpster, it’s because it isnt needed or useful anywhere else.

Again, this is not the same thing as banning books or burning them. If that were the case we’d be talking about stuff like trumps autobiographies, not outdated books from the 70s that haven’t been circulating.

I left a similar but longer comment on a different thread of this post but it is in a way fascinating to see what’s come of the education system teaching the concept of book burning as like, the nazis piling up whatever books they could find and lighting them on fire for fun.

Book burning is the specific concentrated effort to eradicate specific information, it’s not just the literal act of destroying a book.

I worked in Conservation at a big university library. I can confirm that a massive number of hours are devoted to repairing aging and damaged books. I’m talking about a highly-trained team of essentially book historians and artisans. It was actually a wild experience but it’s a long story so I’ll put it below the cut.

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omfg i forgot that i never showed tumblr my greatest achievement. my pride and joy, my pi-ass de résistance

you're welcome

if you reblog this i am kissing you on the mouth. no that is not negotiable. we are in love now. we are dating. we are planning the wedding. i will be with you on your wedding night

have you ever seen a swallowtail caterpillar defend itself?

I can't get over how it has Instant Eyebrows

This is called an osmeterium! It’s a defensive organ found in all swallowtails caterpillars. They evert it when disturbed, as you saw above, to either startle their foe or gross them out with the foul-smelling secretions the organ emits :)

What you call given em the ol' stink eye.

The real reason you couldn’t make Airplane! today is that it’s a parody of a type of movie that doesn’t exist anymore in part because Airplane! made fun of it so hard

The 70s-style disaster film was already dying but Airplane becoming, by far, more known, more watched, and more liked than any real example of the genre even though it was the most popular type of movie right up until Star Wars is one of the most magnificent examples of Weird Al-ing something

The jester mocking the court advisor so deftly, the curse on the king breaks because His Majesty realizes that guy does suck.

To quote Daniel Craig: “We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us.”

One unbelievable fact I learned looking for that quote: the Austin Powers sequels outgrossed both of the last two Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies.

Man those Brosnan Bond movies are such a weird transitional moment in pop culture. People tend to analyze that by going “well the Brosnan Bond films were Bond trying to figure things out after the Cold War ended, Craig is post-9/11 Bond” when the actual dividing line is the start of the Austin Powers Era of History

The best satire self destructs.

Satire that lasts 50 years and still elicits “OMG so true"s ain’t worth SHIT to me. If it’s still true after that long, it’s just snark with no bite. Real satire is a knife (or sometimes a scalpel) that dispatches the target of its criticism and in so doing makes itself irrelevant (if not incomprehensible). It’s Jon Stewart getting Crossfire cancelled, it’s Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin so seamlessly that her ticket was unelectable, it’s Duchamp mocking the art scene so hard he irrevocably changed its course.

If satire is still relevant long after its creation, it has failed at its mission. It might be funny, it might be good comedy, but it’s not good satire.

A lot of satire is of its time and one of the better signs of that is how many satirical works just. Outlast what they were parodying and no one knows they’re a parody anymore

Obviously that describes 90% of Weird Al’s songs, but like, Lord of the Flies is a parody of a specific type of British adventure novel (and a specific novel, even) and it’s outlasted it so long that people bring up the satirical aspects of Lord of the Flies to criticize Lord of the Flies.

#Blazing Saddles fucking assassinated the cowboy movie (@dimir-charmer)

My favorite sad/funny anecdote about Blazing Saddles is about the opening theme singer, Frankie Laine, who was already famous for singing epic Western themes. As Mel Brooks tells it:

“You know, what’s so sweet and so sad was that Frankie Laine sang it with all his heart. He didn’t know [the movie] was a comedy. We got Frankie Laine because he’d done all these Western theme songs. With tears in his eyes he said to me, ‘This is a beautiful song.’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to tell him it was funny. He didn’t get it.”

Someone said good enough satire is indistinguishable from sincerity. We usually focus on the cynical side of this, e.g. The Colbert Report. But I think a lot of great film parodies do this in a sort of bittersweet way because they’re made with genuine love and understanding for a genre that has lived out its purpose. Brooks wasn’t contemptuous of Laine’s naive sentimentalism. He saw the sadness of that genre’s passing out of relevance, a chapter of the American dream fading. But that didn’t sway him from his higher ideal of pushing back against racist, colonialist power structures.

Blazing Saddles honored what was beautiful in Westerns: touching homosocial friendships; innocent ideals of justice and community. It also saw how the whole cowboy paradigm would ultimately fail a changing society: its western- and white-centric perspective; romanticizing individualism and vigilantism that underpinned American racism and nationalism. Mel Brooks didn’t assassinate the Western. He put it to rest with the loving but smart and critical eulogy the US needed to process and move on from its loss.