June By Kenneth Steven

some delicious excerpts from "How It Feels" by Jenny Zhang (one of my all-time faves, the whole thing is a treat to read and different every time)

Ewald Mataré Landscapes, Watercolor, 1920s

Axiom

by Margaret Atwood

Axiom: you are a sea. Your eye- lids curve over chaos

My hands where they touch you, create small inhabited islands

Soon you will be all earth: a known land, a country.

“Matilde, where are you? Down here I noticed, under my necktie and just above my heart, a certain pang of grief between the ribs, you were gone that quickly. I needed the light of your energy, I looked around, devouring hope. I watched the void without you that is like a house, nothing left but tragic windows. Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens to the fall of the ancient leafless rain, to feathers, to whatever the night imprisoned; so I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache.”

Sonnet LXV, I Wait For You Like A Lonely House — Pablo Neruda.

"The witch, the whore and the monster are all really the same archetype. Dangerous and unpredictable, they defy the archetypes of ideal womanhood that we have encountered throughout this book. They defy Venus with their ageing bodies and menstrual blood. (All things that are suppressed in our images of Venus overflow in our monsters.) They undermine maiden virginity with their unapologetic sexuality. They don't submit themselves to their husbands, nor are they exclusive with their partners. They are either happy in their own liberated independence, or they operate in covens of collective womanhood. Monstrous women know things that others don't, not just facts or magic spells but deep, primeval knowledge about bodies, time, death, and the powers of reproduction. And they age and entropy in a way that mirrors the inevitable flow and decay of all things. They are connected to wild nature in the outdoors, away from the feminised domestic spaces of the house. Most monstrous of all is that they know their power."

excerpt from Women in the Picture: What Culture Does With Female Bodies by Catherine McCormack

Le goût de la musique : le pianiste, Mark Rothko, 1932-33...

oh thats hot as hell. if only sex was real

one hundred love sonnets: XVII by Pablo Neruda tr. Mark Eisner