Some Of The Short Stories From This Eve That Im Thinking Abt Still... Someone Read Them And Tell Me Ur

James Baldwin.

Manuel Bujados (1889-1954), ''La Esfera'', Vol. 8, #380, 1921 Source

toni morrison, sula // stephanie peters, fire // seneca, medea (trans. a.j. boyle) // david mcconochie, medea // peter russell, night the first // stephanie peters, roaring flame // hozier, arsonist’s lullabye // jackson pollock, the flame

One of the oldest goddesses in the historical record is Inanna of Mesopotamia, who was referred to, among other honorifics, as “She who makes a woman into a man, she who makes a man into a woman.” The power to alter such fundamental categories was evidence of her divine power. Inanna was served by at least half a dozen different types of transgendered priests, and one of her festivals apparently included a public celebration in which men and women exchanged garments. The memory of a liminal third-gender status has been lost, not only in countries dominated by Christian ideology, but also in many circles dedicated to the modern revival of goddess worship. Images of the divine feminine tend to appear alone, in Dianic rites, surrounded only by other women, or the goddess is represented with a male consort, often one with horns and an erect phallus. But it is equally valid to see her as a fag hag and a tranny chaser, attended by men who have sex with other men and people who are, in modern terms, transgendered or intersexed.

— Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex by Patrick Califia

“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)

you might've gotten this question before but I wondered, what are your favorite fairytales/myths? also just wanted to say i love your blog so much, scrolling through it feels like wandering in a magical garden 💚

apologies for answering this 3 days late! thank you so much for asking this, and for loving my blog… how lovely of you! i appreciate it, truly ♡

some fairytales i love:

bluebeard’s bride

death and the nightingale, by hans christian andersen. it’s about an emperor, a nightingale, a clockwork bird, and the grim reaper.

the goose girl

east of the sun, west of the moon -i’m linking a version with kay nielsen’s famous illustrations, because they add a lot to it!

i couldn’t find a text of this, and i know it’s obscure, but there’s this kashmiri folk tale called ‘the chinese princess’ that is about a lamia. i read it in ‘angela carter’s book of fairytales’ and it has stuck with me… i recommend hunting the book down digitally if you can!

my friend doe @rosedaughter once talked of a palestinian version of little red riding hood that i found so delightfully chilling and incredible… here’s the post where she recounts it.

this only loosely counts, but in the silmarillion by jrr tolkien, the creation myths - the music of the ainur, and how that fictional world was created - have stuck with me. i always found it wonderful to read. it’s called the ainulindale, it’s about the length of a chapter, and here is the text of it.

the frame story of 1001 nights - of sheherazade spinning tales every night to a prince and his court.

the crane wife / tsuru no ongaeshi 

the twelve dancing princesses …i really love this one, it always fascinated me.

loosely related to the 12 dancing princesses, there is an anime called ‘princess tutu’ that’s about fairytales and story meta and character trope subversion and it’s incredible and i can’t recommend it enough. and although linking a fic is probably odd, there’s a fanfic for princess tutu that rewrites the story of the 12 dancing princesses in such a stunning way. i believe you can enjoy it even if you don’t know the show. it’s one of my favourite pieces of writing ever, read it here.

the ballad of tam lin! it’s a scottish fairytale that resembles a beauty and the beast-type tale, and i love it very much. here’s the wiki for it, you can read the full text from the link there.

again, this only loosely counts, but the poem ‘goblin market’ by christina rossetti is so beautiful. i love it, it counts to me.

vasilisa the beautiful and her brief encounter with baba yaga.

swan lake, the ballet, in general.

cupid and psyche from greek mythology!

i hope you enjoy these!

As I am reading an aggregation notebook about fairytales, I am reminded of another reason for why there is this change from “folklorist” to “literary” studies of fairytales recently.

As you might know, the “folkloric” studies of fairytales led to typification, classification, catalogues - the famous Aarne-Thompson classification. We identified the “families” of fairytales, the common points they shared, the ingredients of the recipes, the pieces of the puzzle placed together ; we’ve got lists of archetypal characters and the typical scenarios and routines. And don’t get me wrong, this is really good and cool - through this we were able to identify the “untold rules” of fairytales, and the unofficial canons of the genre, and better highlight the unusual or brilliant variations…

But there is a slight problem with those studies. Their “break-down” method might start out or end as a catalogue, but it passes by a system of “molds”, if I dare say so. Basically, to forge types, to classify, to make lists and divided categories, they enforce the stories into a mold, into general archetypes, into “typical behaviors”… And this is where people see things differently nowadays.

The example I can bring forward is how the folklorist studies usually consider an archetype of the story to be the “aggressor”. You know, the typical fairytale villain. And this folklorist approach will often end up basing their categorization on “What does the aggressor does? How does the hero encounters the aggressor? Is the aggressor killed or robbed?”. But who is the aggressor? Anyone and nobody. In the “aggressor” position, they treat the very same way dragons and evil stepmothers, ogres and wicked fairies, witches and lustful kings, greedy knights and devious dwarves. These are all just “costumes”, for some folklorist, placed on an archetypal “fairytale aggressor”, and these “costumes” are just ornaments that are only a secondary, if not tertiary matter.

But… what the “literary studies” are bringing forth nowadays is the question: “Wait… Maybe it does matter. Maybe who or what the aggressor is does matter. Maybe we shouldn’t treat the same way stories that are about dragons and those about evil witches. Maybe there is a reason why the storyteller prefers to talk about a greedy abusive mother rather than an ogre deep in the woods. And the literary studies precisely ask those questions because - unlike the folklorist studies which mostly see fairytales as ancestral plans and outlines, traditional schemas and structure, cultural frameworks and fabrics, the literary studies try to consider the fairytales more as stories first. Stories told by a certain person, in front of a certain audience, crafted a certain way for a certain time and era. 

This is why, while the folklorist studies tend to discard or disregard the “little details” as not so important (because they are searching for the bone structure or “primordial core” of the story), the literary studies rather focus on these details - because it is those details that make the story. The little twists and turns that each storyteller adds to the formula, the specific additions of a man or woman’s own mind and culture. For a folklorist study, it doesn’t matter if the key is made out of gold or bronze - or even if it is a key at all, it might be a magical egg as long as it has to be found by the protagonist to open a magical door. But to the literary study, the implications of changing the key from gold to bronze will be questioned, and having an egg instead of a key will be a BIG deal. 

I don’t know if what I said is clear, but I just wanted to point it out. (With such a big topic as this whole literary VS folklorist debate, one needs to pile up the little crumbs over each other until they make a big pile, because that’s literaly centuries of scholarship, studies and popular culture reception at war here)

“Take my heart and hurl its fragments to the moon, the trees, the beasts, in the air, the dark, the waters, so that nothing returns to me ever again.”

— Anna de Noailles, tr. by Jean Morris, from Poems; “Ariadne’s Lament,”

Cathy de Monchaux: Beyond Thinking (2018)

Whimsical fans are not talked about enough