taxidermy fox

Jonathan Wells, “April Morning”

is goncharov (1973) really that much less real than whatever show the destiel bloggers have been watching with their extrasensory perception for 15 years

my favorite poems ever

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

Barbara Brown Taylor

“Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find…meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that creme caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”

Joan Didion

“At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract and of grace to decay into rigor and peace into tedium.”

Marilynne Robinson

“I think it’s that—of course, we all have problems tidying our homes, but it’s not just that… We all have clutter in our hearts and that’s what needs tidying.”

Marie Kondo, Interview with Stephen Colbert

“Often he was struck by a sensation—which he had experienced at Lispenard street as well—that they were playing house, that he was living some boyhood fantasy of running away from the world and it’s rules with his best friend and living in some unsuitable but perfectly commodious structure (a train car; a tree house) that wasn’t meant to be a home but had become one because of its occupants’ shared conviction to make it so.”

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Domesticity is very sacred to me. Making a home is…it’s just, like, the central thing in my life. When I cannot make a home, even in a hotel room, I feel really lost. Putting everything in a certain place on purpose. Not just, like, throwing shit down. But putting everything in a certain place on purpose and starting to sort of figure out how the trains run, basically. Like, what are the paths? What are the paths in the house that you’re going to take the most and what can you line those paths with? Or, in the hotel room, like, where are you going to put your journal and your book, so that you’re just starting to create little pathways so that you’re just starting to make pathways in this little garden and that they mark that space? I just take it really seriously. it’s sort of like…it’s so sweet, it’s sort of like when you see children playing a game and you know they’re marking out a world. And they’re like ‘this is where the dungeon is! And this is where the kitchen is in the castle! And this is where the-‘ And you can’t see anything but the backyard but they can see everything. That’s what I’m doing and I’m doing it all the time. All the time. And it’s always there. Even when I get into the car, I think about where I’m sitting and how I’m sitting and what I’m touching. And I just try hard to do that.”

Jenny Slate

“He baked cakes with golden syrup, could sew a button by hand, braid hair into tight plaits that wouldn’t come loose and recall a variety of old-fashioned homeopathic cures—cinnamon toast for a stomach ache, a nip of brandy for a cough. He showed me love as an act of daily care; but safety, as my father and [Marilynne] Robinson knew, can’t be assured by domestic rituals. No amount of starch or shoe polish can stop a life from coming apart or guarantee that the ones we love will always stay with us, within an arm’s reach. Yet still we sweep the floors and wash the sheets and hang them out in the sunlight. All this, like a sprinkling of salt around our boundaries, a spell to protect ourselves against abandonment, separation, loss. What else is housekeeping but a kind of magical thinking, a wish against the things we fear the most?”

Madelaine Lucas

Emily Berry, “The Old Fuel”

“When Gilbert came the next afternoon he found Anne waiting for him, fresh as the dawn and fair as a star, after all the gaiety of the preceding night. She wore a green dress—not the one she had worn to the wedding, but an old one which Gilbert had told her at Redmond reception he liked especially. It was just the shade of green that brought out the rich tints of her hair, and the starry gray of her eyes and the iris-like delicacy of her skin. Gilbert, glancing at her sideways as they walked along a shadowy woodpath, thought she had never looked so lovely. Anne, glancing sideways at Gilbert, now and then, thought how much older he looked since his illness. It was as if he had put boyhood behind him forever. […] ‘I have a dream,’ he said slowly. ‘I persist in dreaming it, although it has often seemed to me that it could never come true. I dream of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and dog, the footsteps of friends—and you!’ Anne wanted to speak but she could find no words. Happiness was breaking over her like a wave. It almost frightened her. ‘I asked you a question over two years ago, Anne. If I ask it again today will you give me a different answer?’ Still Anne could not speak. But she lifted her eyes, shining with all the love-rapture of countless generations, and looked into his for a moment. He wanted no other answer.”

– Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery

darling (hatefully homoerotic)

The Impact of Aids on the Artistic Community

September 13, 1987

Transcription under the read-more:

Keep reading

crying

— Rita Wong, from “value chain,” Forage (via lifeinpoetry)

On November 5, 1917, 100 years ago today, Wilfred Owen wrote a gorgeous love letter to fellow gay World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. It continues to be one of my favorite love letters of all time.

despair confession scene but when dean turns around to see the empty materialize he looks into the camera for a single second, pleading

do you ever think about chuck palahniuk writing “we don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression… the great depression is our lives” in the early 1990s as a young gay man living in america at the peak of the aids epidemic

like i know the main thing i’ve seen people talk about is the obvious homoeroticism between the narrator and tyler and, y’know, how a fight club is the epitome of constructing intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men BUT if you think about it in the context of the time palahniuk was living in as a gay man there is SO much more to it than that

he wrote a book that’s all about grappling with death and pain and wanting to take them into your own hands… literally the first line of the book ends with “the first step to eternal life is you have to die.” it’s the narrator visiting all these different support groups for different diseases like cancers and blood parasites as a ~tourist in order to feel healthy and alive and free (note: most people who died of aids didn’t die of the virus itself but of opportunistic infections and aids-related cancers). it’s about how “on a long enough time line, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.” like yes it’s intricate rituals, but it’s very specifically men sharing bodily fluids and blood. it’s about reclaiming death and using it as a symbol.

it’s about feeling abandoned and forgotten and ignored by the establishment and wanting to burn everything down because of that, about an entire generation of gay men trapped in a great spiritual depression, waging a war, a revolution, for their lives but one that was not acknowledged publicly for years while they suffered. it’s about living double lives, becoming someone Different under the cover of darkness, someone Stronger and Braver who could rage against the system the way you never even dreamed of doing in the daylight

it’s about being a member of A Club (where the initiation is a kiss that burns your skin) that exists everywhere and nowhere, and being able to immediately pick out someone else who’s In The Club just by looking at them even though no one around you has a clue, and you just nod at each other and acknowledge your shared experience and save your actual interactions for secret back rooms and basements—except pretty soon other people can tell there’s something Unsavory going on with you because you start exhibiting physical signs that you can’t hide anymore including bloody lesions on your face.

it’s about “only in death will we have our own names since only in death are we no longer part of the effort. In death we become heroes” + david wojnarowicz wearing a jacket in 1988 that said “if i die of aids – forget burial – just drop my body on the steps of the fda”. it’s about “his name is robert paulson and he is fortyeight years old. his name is robert paulson, and robert paulson will be fortyeight years old, forever” + this panel from the AIDS memorial quilt that reads “my name is duane kearns puryear. i was born on december 20, 1964. i was diagnosed with aids on september 7, 1987 at 4:45 pm. i was 22 years old. sometimes, it makes me very sad. i made this panel myself. if you are reading it, i am dead.”

literally every line of this book (and the film) mean More if you read it through this lens. “you aren’t your name. you aren’t your family. … everything you ever love will reject you or die.” taking the sentence “i am the toxic waste byproduct of God’s creation” that is the worst thing anyone could fear about themselves (and like.. it’s literally homophobia. especially re: gay men during the aids crisis) and weaponizing it because it means you have nothing to lose. tyler saying fuck the police and telling the police commissioner that “the people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. we’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. we make your bed. we guard you while you’re asleep.”

anyways it’s not just homoerotic, it’s gay in a very specific way grounded very specifically in the moment in time when it was written and in the generational trauma of the aids crisis thanks for coming to my ted talk

when dean says “last time someone looked at me like that i got laid” he’s being vicious

like. he tells sam that he doesn’t believe in him, tells bobby that he’s not his father. he’s hitting on what hurts most on purpose, and for cas it’s acknowledging this thing between them out in the open in a really vicious way. like. someone has buried a sword in his back and he pulls it through and slices cas open with it, too. they’ve had this really intense relationship and cas has literally and figuratively started falling for dean and they keep dancing around it and talking past each other and fundamentally i think they’re both okay with that, for now. it’s the apocalypse and if they survive - well, who knows. but for now there’s sort of outlined rules of engagement which yeah, do include standing very close and a little staring but certainly does not include explicitly talking about it. and so, the very first time they talk about it explicitly, dean is using it as a weapon to hurt cas. and it works, or it at least pisses him off. because it’s not just what he says, it’s the calculatedly casual way he says it, he’s intentionally cheapening this profound thing. it’s the way they’ve been building to something and they both know it and dean just uses it to try and hurt cas enough to push him away.