But Our Notebooks Give Us Away, For However Dutifully We Record What We See Around Us, The Common Denominator

"'Will Not Let Die': Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine" in The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar

Four books by Frantz Fanon - Downloadable

The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 2004. Here it is.

Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 2008. Here it is.

A Dying Colonialism. New York, NY: Grove, 2007. Here it is.

Toward the African Revolution. New York, NY: Grove, 1994. Here it is.

If you haven’t read Fanon, now is the time. The zip file password is: archive.

What is your favorite obscure Greek mythological fact

Hm, probably the Orphic fragment that says that Persephone was born with a monstrous appearance (fragment 87 according to Athanassakis, fragment 58 in the translation of Otto Kern’s compilation of fragments at HellenicGods.org):

…"of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλη), whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly Phersephoné and Koré"…

It's so totally different from all other versions that only describe her as very beautiful (as goddesses tend to be). Sometimes I regret that I didn't give my Persephone horns.

Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca.1633-37, detail) Francesco Cairo

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

Lahore (1949)

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

the girl with a pomegranate (1875)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little–have few verbal means. Eloquence–thinking in words–is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”

— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (via the-book-diaries)