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Dead Ringers, dir. David Cronenberg, 1988

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Parker Day, ICONS 2015-16

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Rest in Peace David Lynch (1946–2025)

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death needs time like a junky needs junk.

Ah, Pook is Here, 1994. dir. Philip Hunt, writer. William S. Burroughs

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“Flesh Gun” Rick Baker’s original concept Sketches, Videodrome 1982

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Well... Unshelter me.

Walt Whitman, I Sing The Body Electric, 1855 / The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love, 1995, dir. Maria Maggenti.

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i don't really post personal stuff but!!! i added to my greek mythology tattoos yesterday and they're so pretty i had to show them off!!

all done by the incredible @emilyb.tattoos on instagram <333

back: achilles & patroclus, icarus and the maenads

stomach: artemis and apollo

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Robert Pattinson photographed by Eliot Lee Hazel, 2012 | inspired by David Cronenberg's movies, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Scanners

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“Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She’s a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses never stir under the caresses of the foul Humbert Humbert, whom she asks once, ‘how long did [he] think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together…?’ But to reply to your question: no, its success doesn’t annoy me, I am not like Conan Doyle, who out of snobbery or simple stupidity preferred to be known as the author of “The Great Boer War,” which he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes. It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications. Girls of eighteen or more, sidewalk kittens, cheap models, or simple long-legged criminals, are baptized “nymphets” or “Lolitas” in news stories in magazines in Italy, France, Germany, etc; and the covers of translations, Turkish or Arab, reach the height of ineptitude when they feature a young woman with opulent contours and a blonde mane imagined by boobies who have never read my book. In reality Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it’s the abyss between his age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger. Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

— Vladimir Nabokov (tr. Brian Boyd), Apostrophes (1975)

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Parigi, gennaio 1982.

George Whitman, Allen Ginsberg e Lawrence Ferlinghetti davanti l'ingresso della libreria Shakespeare and Company.

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Caesar (Frances Barber) and Brutus (Harriet Walter) slow dancing in Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse, dir. Phyllida Lloyd, 2012.

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My only sweet and dear child,

Notwithstanding of your desiring me not to write yesterday, yet had I written in the evening if, at my coming out of the park, such a drowsiness had come upon me as I was forced to sit and sleep in my chair half an hour. And yet I cannot content myself without sending you this present, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow's life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

King James VI letter to George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham - December 1623

James R.

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"I’ve collaborated with one of my only Idols William Burroughs and I couldn’t feel cooler."

Cobain visiting Burroughs' home in October 1993. / Kurt Cobain, Journals

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back with my weird progression reblog - i am now the president of said society, and i love it and our members with my whole heart, and have made some of my closest friends through the society. i even got to direct a version of Troilus and Cressida that was dramaturged by me with one of my best friends. I'm in my second year of university and studying mostly early modern modules. i have refound my love for theatre and the art of performance, all while studying the thing I love most.

I promise you, things do get better. you will have the freedom to explore the things you love, and you will find people you love to explore them with you. you won't be stuck in your hometown forever, you won't be confined forever. please, just keep holding on.

do i want to join a shakespearean theatre group because i'm an english student who loves shakespeare, yet was forced to give up acting at a young age? or is it because my comfort book is if we were villains?

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It’s true that Joan is only famous because of her relation to the Beat men. I know that when speaking about her I must honor that connection, how much more famous they were, and their significant, culture-shifting literary output. I still bristle at this, though, because William [Burroughs] directed this narrative—through killing Joan, he ensured she wouldn’t live to create a body of work or transcend her addictions. She may never have, but she also may have joined the ranks of Beat women who, later in their lives, wrote memoirs as correctives to their previous erasure. Women like Carolyn Cassady, Diane di Prima, and Hettie Jones.

—On the Disappearing of Joan Vollmer Burroughs by Katie Bennett April 25, 2022

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In 1985, after attending a performance of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart—one of the first dramas dealing with the impact of AIDS on gay life—Robert Giard decided to devote his energies as a photographer to some aspect of the gay and lesbian community. Thus was born his two-decade long project of photographing over 600 gay and lesbian writers—from famous playwrights to emerging novelists to unsung poets and pioneering performance artists. Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay & Lesbian Writers is an extraordinary visual record of the flowering of queer voices in the wake of the Stonewall Rebellion and the AIDS crises, while also paying homage to many earlier 20th Century activists and writers who had urged the creation of a community identity, or otherwise gave public voice to gay and lesbian sensibilities. Particular Voices is a unique record of a cultural moment in American letters.

Allen Ginsberg, with his own portrait of Burroughs, 1986/Alison Bechdel, 1995/Andrea Dworkin, 1992/Vito Russo, 1987/RFD Magazine Managing Editors, 1991/Five Members of "Other Countries", 1987

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"But the Pines, in that era, had also become a graveyard of lost friendships, as gay men far younger than Windham were dying of AIDS at an alarming rate. The decimation of the island's gay community shed light on the fragility of the past, on how easily tales and stories could die with their protagonists. Whether consciously or not, Windham's deep dive into a past he shared with people who were now dead, a gay literary world that had now disappeared, was a political act, at a time when bearing witness and remembering had gained a new urgency."

Donald Windham photographed by Jared French, Fire Island 1942

Fire Island, A Queer History by Jack Parlett