They Put Him In Batter......

In 4th grade, my bff was in a death feud over chess with a boy in our class but instead of competing like normal people they decided that the best way to determine who was chess master was for each of them to select one of the two biggest idiots in class and teach them to play chess, My Fair Lady style, and see whose idiot won. We are just now, 22 years later, grappling with the moral implications of this exercise.

I have one more thing to say regarding the projection of modern gender politics onto the Harkers that's just not supported by the text or taking the contemporary context into account - see my previous post, re: Jonathan being over-idealized as progressive - before I move on to other topics, and I'm not going to go into as much detail right now and may re-visit this later, but - I love Mina, and she's a wonderful character and heroine who both rises above her author's biases and her time period AND is constrained by them in a very realistic, complex way, even by modern standards, but fun memes and character appreciation aside, it's really disheartening sometimes to see her very human and multi-layered character with a complex, fraught relationship with feminism in-universe and on a meta level flattened into some kind of flawless superwoman who is single-handedly going to save the day as the novel's only hero bc she is some kind of Exceptional Woman and stereotypical Strong Female Character TM who is a fearless warrior woman action hero and modern-day feminist stuck in the body of a Victorian woman who is going to slamdunk the men with FEMINISM while she also has to babysit them bc they're useless stupid babies who can't stand a strong, independent woman, etc.

Like, I'm being somewhat facetious and exaggerating for effect, and again, memes are fun, but this isn't actually a feminist reading bc it's ironically dehumanizing, does a disservice to her complex character, posits that she can't be truly heroic unless she's punching or shooting people like a traditional male hero (though yes, she should be included, I'm not arguing against that), gets into gender essentialist woman good man bad thinking that's not fair to any character or the text, and reinforces the idea that individualism is superior to collectivism - which completely goes against the surprisingly progressive, humanistic, and hopeful theme of the novel that teamwork and collective action saves the day for the heroes, in contrast to Dracula the ultimate individualist operating alone.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

some little reminders i needed today <3

@lilcowgirl7 \ anaïs nin mirages: the unexpurgated diary: 1939-1947 \ jeanette winterson why be happy when you could be normal? (via @weltenwellen) \ @sunsbleeding \ dante émile it’s winter, i’m not in love yet but i’d like to be \ franz kafka the diaries of franz kafka, 1910-1913: “january 2, 1912” (via @dailykafka) \ sheryl st. germain going home: new orleans \ mary oliver dream work: “wild geese” (via @lesbianherstorian​) \ @inkskinned \ bryan washington visitor (via @typewriter-worries) \ nia vardalos tiny beautiful things (via @julykings​) \ ada limón the hurting kind: “it’s the season i often mistake” (via @firstfullmoon​) \ lev st. valentine there’s this game i play every morning (via @darkerthanerebus​) \ raymond carver rain (via @figtreeification​) \ anis mojgani songs from under the river: “here i am” (via @saintsebastiensbf​)

buy me a chai latte

it's all so tiresome

"You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go." That's some Bluebeard shit.

an incomplete collection of tweets i consider to be short poems

everything is about reaching the ending except for the ending which is about wanting to go back to the start

“do we think maybe a vegetable would cause less despair” still living in my head rent free