Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya (1819-1823), Breezeblocks, Alt-J (2012)
Angel - Sun Yuan & Peng Yu
“The angel, an old woman in a white gown and with featherless wings, is lying face-down on the ground; maybe sleeping, maybe dead, but certainly immobile and frozen into an all too realistic image. The supernatural being, now nothing more than an impotent creature, can neither carry out any supreme will nor be of any help to those believing in its existence. The angel is true but ineffective; dreams and hopes are sincere yet vain.”
every so often the spirit of a sapphic classics professor at oxford consumes me… and today is that day: no bra, a half-buttoned, loose shirt tucked into a pair of tweed trousers, spectacles and dark maenad curls… sprawled on the lawn with the iliad, writing fragmented poetry, dreaming of sapphic love and murder mysteries …
“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how you love. There is courage in that.”
— Bianca Sparacino How To Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing That You Are)
art museum dates are so underrated. I want to take dumb pictures in front of Roman statues and watch her stare in awe of the little ways the sculptor made the stone look as soft as skin. maybe she would pull me over to a painting that reminded her of me and I would get to listen to the way her voice twinkles as she explains her argument, and a glowing smile as I reluctantly agree with her. maybe we could pretend to have a museum heist and almost get kicked out, ending with the both of us in heaps of laughter, falling just a little bit deeper in love. and when I'm asked about which piece of art was my favorite today? darling, you already know the answer.
“A monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”
— Ocean Vuong, from “A Letter To My Mother That She Will Never Read”, published in The New Yorker (via soracities)