Amazon.com: Paleontologist Barbie Doll: Toys & Games
So, yeah, this apparently exists…
I Am Tricking You Into Reading My Tumblr So You Will Write Me
Ok, lately I’m obsessed with letter-writing. And letter-receiving isn’t bad either. (I mean hard copy, paper, USPS letters.) I like to think I write fun letters…
However, I need more people to swap letters with! So I threw a bunch of tags on this post, and if you dig any of the same stuff I tagged, get in touch. You can leave a comment, send me tumblr mail, or email me at erinlyndalmartin at gmail.com.
I confess that I am out of the loop as far as stories about raping sloths go, but this post makes a lot of good points about the way we treat issues like that in larger culture.
rape culture indeed. (tw)
It irritates me on a few levels. First, the joke in this particular tag is not only about sloths, but also the implication that rape can be enjoyable. It’s not just about the incongruity of a raping sloth. It’s a joke in a joke about rape not being “serious.”
It’s not trending anymore so most of the top posts are “this is disgusting, rape is not a joke” (good) and, “Lighten up, slothes can’t rape.” Which misses the point. Here’s an image that comes up on my twitter as a top photo for that hashtag (sorry to only link, it doesn’t let me copy it onto here) it’s an image of a sloth that says, “I do not rape/ I satisfy my needs.” (and many of the photos following it, if you click through, are a lot worse.) That joke has nothing to do with a sloth- it’s perpetuating a type of “It’s not rape if ____” mentality.
And it’s easy to say to ourselves that, “Well, no one actually thinks that.” Maybe not 100% consciously, no, but it feeds and feeds into a collective subconscious of what is and isn’t okay. Keep perpetuating “It isn’t really rape if x, y, z” mentality, the, “Sure a fairly high percentage of people are victims and will end up reading this but lighten up, your experience is our humor fodder, it’s just rape jokes” mentality (would we ever treat victims of tragedies like gun violence in such a callous way??), and not only will you be encouraging rapists to see their actions as “not so bad,” but victims will continue to be afraid to report when they’re surrounded by peers who treat rape and their fears of being assaulted as a joke.
Still from the Yayoi Kusama exhibit Look Now, See Forever. She painted a lot of domestic things white (including the piano you see here) and then gave kids a bunch of brightly colored polka dot stickers. Fun!
Letter from Pablo Neruda to Matilde Urutia
To my beloved wife,
I suffered while I was writing these misnamed “sonnets”; they hurt me and caused me grief, but the happiness I feel in offering them to you is vast as a savanna. When I set this task for myself, I knew very well that down the right sides of sonnets, with elegant discriminating taste, poets of all times have arranged rhymes that sound like silver, or crystal or cannon fire. But—with great humility— I made these sonnets out of wood; I gave them the sound of that opaque pure substance, and that is how they should reach your ears. Walking in forests or on beaches, along hidden lakes, in latitudes sprinkled with ashes, you and I have picked up pieces of pure bark, pieces of wood subject to the comings and goings of water and the weather. Out of such softened relics, then, with hatchet and machete and pocketknife, I built up these lumber piles of love, and with fourteen boards each I built little houses, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing to, might live in them. Now that I have declared the foundations of my love, Isurrender this century to you: wooden sonnets that rise only because you gave them life.
October 1959
Bach stops them every time…
There is a brilliant chapter in Lewis Thomas’ The Medusa and the Snail. This chapter, “The Selves” is about how many selves/lives we all really have. It ends with this breathtaking passage about trying to leave so many selves behind:
The worst times of all have been when I’ve wanted to be just one. Try walking out on the ocean beach at night, looking at stars, thinking. Be one, be one. Doesn’t work, ever. Just when you feel ascension, turning, wheeling, and that whirring sound like a mantel clock getting ready to strike, the other selves begin talking. Whatever you’re thinking, they say, it’s not like that at all.
The only way to quiet them down, get them all to stop, is to play music. That does it. Bach stops them every time, in their tracks, almost as though thats what they’ve been waiting for.
“The Dead” by Mina Loy
We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off
Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars
Curled close in the youngest corpuscle
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams
Fixing the extension of your reactions
Our shadow lengthens
In your fear
You are so old
Born in our immortality
Stuck fast as Life
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness
Having swallowed your irate hungers
Satisfied before bread-breaking
To your dissolution
We splinter into Wholes
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries
In our busy ashbins
Stink the melodies
Of your
So easily reducible
Adolescences
Our tissue is of that which escapes you
Birth-Breaths and orgasms
The shattering tremor of the static
The far-shore of an instant
The unsurpassable openness of the circle
Legerdemain of God
Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours
The mouthed echoes of what
has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear
Of the half that is left inside them.
