I dive downward into the abyss of my bodily envelopeâs outer reaches. Water rushes in and makes experiential the space between us. Water rushes in and cuts off the air that so invisibly sustains you and me. Water rushes in, gravities shift, and eddies stroke my limbs. I am intrigued by the way we can align biologic and linguistic influences, narrative lines, and sentence structures.Â
This playful engagement drives our ecopoetic inquiry, too, on the edges of science and art. We are not using artistic methods to elucidate and make experiential scientific data. We offer alternative ways of understanding relationality. Ecopoetics: real effects, in real time, in real alignment between living entities. Ecopoetics: drawing upon the web of sustaining effects that shape how we think of being individual, being social, being connected, being responsible. We are conglomerations with islands of stability, self-aware bounded things who are receiving what there is to be received from a particular angle, a particular web or sieve. To me, this poetics of sedimented instabilities, slightly shifted and rearranged through contact, is an ecopoetic framework.Â
Petra Kuppers, Writing with the Salamander: An Ecopoetic Community Performance Project.
The coiner of the model, queercrip writer/artist Petra Kuppers, uses it to look at disability not as a static experience/set of relationships, but instead an ever-changing mosaic of relations-in-progress. for example, there is no static, pre-existing "disabled community" or "disability identity" one gains a pass into at a certain point, or has a set of instructions to perform. instead, disability lives & comes alive in the ways we move/care/live together, and what we understand as disability exists only in the contexts of our relationships.
because the ways our bodyminds touch are ever-shifting, so is disability: imagine our collective crip subjectivity as a ceaseless slide we're tumbling down together, jostling each other, finding new language to describe, but never quite finishing. this collective and ever-changing landscape is what deleuze and guattari (whose concept of "rhizome" she's drawing from) would call an assemblage.
one major implication of this for Kuppers and for me is that disability is an inherently intersubjective experience. it isn't "individual," even if it appears to be local to a certain bodymind. we are all, to go deeper into deleuzian (de?)territory (lmao), perpetually becoming-disabled. in doing so, we constitute what disability "is" ââ iterating disability as a concept into existence.
if this sounds abstract and difficult to pin down - congrats! that's the goal & philosophical upshot of deleuzoguattarian theory. chew on it, swish it around, enjoy the flavor. also, if you want to read Kuppers's whole article on this, i put it on my google drive. it's also available free on academia.edu.
a photomontage from deborah brightâs dream girls series, in which she manually collaged herself into film stills from old hollywood scenes to revisit childhood memories, disrupt heterosexual normativity, and symbolize butch identity. c. 1989-90
âI have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing â their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling â their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses. To sit alone without any electric light is curiously creative. I have my best ideas at dawn or at nightfall, but not if I switch on the lights â then I start thinking about projects, deadlines, demands, and the shadows and shapes of the house become objects, not suggestions, things that need to done, not a background to thought.â
â Why I adore the night, by Jeanette Winterson
(via lostpolaroids)
I have never read anything by Virginia Woolf except the small pieces you post on here. I am planning to add her to my reading list. Which of her books do you think is a decent representation of her emotions and maybe even hints at her value systems? Iâd love any thoughts and direction you might have, thank you!
Iâm sorry I didnât get to this right away! But thank you for asking it and allowing me to procrastinate :P
Iâm not 100% sure I know what you mean by âher emotionsâ and âvalue systems,â but, in general, I usually recommend that those picking up Woolf for the first time start with A Room of Oneâs Own (and her essay âModern Fictionâ) and then move to either Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. And then Jacobâs Room and Orlando. (and on and on and on)
A Room of Oneâs Own was formed out of two lectures Woolf gave and functions as an essay â a piece of nonfiction â but Woolf also uses fiction, narrative, storytelling, metaphor, and literary allusion throughout as rhetorical devices to construct her argument. Thinking about how and for what purpose she uses fiction as a tool, both to bolster her argument and to push the reader toward her ideas about feminism, or a sort of âpost-feminismâ in the later chapters, has always been interesting to me â and helpful in starting to gain an understanding of Woolfâs literary project as a whole (not that I think thatâs something that can or should be fully understood/known). Itâs also fairly short and will give you a taste of her writing style, while also introducing to you to some of her âvaluesâ (e.g., female education, equal access to academic institutions [which she also criticizes], the importance â and burden â of womenâs writing, the necessity of compiling and thinking about a âhistoryâ of womenâs writing, particular aesthetic criteria, etc.).Â
âModern Fictionâ will give you insight into what Woolf sets out for her generation of writers to do â to put an emphasis on the âdark partsâ of the psyche, interiority, perceptions of character (i.e., how a character perceives what is both internal and external):
I think Woolf, in all of her novels, investigates the major philosophical problems the modernist writers are concerned with â how do we know/understand each other? how do we know what we know (what is the basis for our knowledge)? who are we and what is our place in the world? to what degree do memories compose who we are? to what extent can identity be coherent and how do we work with a disparate, fragmented sense of self? if we are all in a constant state of flux (âadrift in language in the sea of modernity,â as my prof once said), can we ever fully know ourselves â or another human being? Which then leads to the modernist perspective that we are all inhibited from any overarching Truthâ˘Â because all we have at our disposal is language (and language is inherently incomplete and therefore limited and fallible).Â
These questions are, arguably, most concentratedly (and beautifully, IMO) pursued in The Waves, but I would definitely hold off on that one until youâve gotten a taste for Woolf and feel comfortable with her writing. Personally, I read A Room first, then To the Lighthouse, and then Mrs. Dalloway on my own â and then I took a class on Woolf and we went in this order: A Room, Jacobâs Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts. Woolf of course wrote more novels (and short stories, essays, letters, diaries, etc. â all of which I recommend checking out!) than those Iâve listed, but they provide a starting point. Itâs entirely subjective, but I think I still find To the Lighthouse to be the most âapproachableâ Woolf text (and I even found this in the class I took; the students who never really warmed up to Woolf and struggled throughout the semester found some relief in ThL) â but that might not be important or relevant for you.Â
I donât have any data to back this up, but I think that Mrs. Dalloway is probably the most commonly taught Woolf novel (like in survey courses or classes that arenât on Woolf specifically) â and that might speak to its comprehensiveness; it can be categorized as an anti-war, an anti-imperialism, and a feminist novel â and a text that offers critiques of the upperclass, of the medical profession (particularly in dealing with mental illness), and of heteronormativity. Its prose is also incredibly beautiful and includes one of my favorite portraits of female agency â of a woman, with a diffuse identity, who is able to coalesce and pull together her disparate parts when she needs to act/be effective (side note â Margaret in Gaskellâs North and South is another excellent example of a woman with these strengths):
This is a novel of an answer! You definitely did not ask for this! Apologies, but I will do almost anything to procrastinate â especially thinking/writing about Woolf. Iâve been starved of Woolf content since the semester started and I had to put my thesis prep on hold, so thanks for this!Â
âFor 35 years, husband and wife team VĂŠronique and Jean-François have been harvesting, drying and selling over fifty varieties of flower on their 7000m² farm in the countryside of Auvergne.â
Arthur Rackham (English, 1867-1939, b. Lambeth, London, England) - The Goddess Freia under a tree of apples with her Cats by her feet from The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie by Richard Wagner, 1910, Paintings: Watercolors, Ink
Hey guys!! The official Moomin Twitter JUST announced (like in the last hour) that they have opened the official Moomin Youtube Channel!
Considering the 90s Moomin cartoon is difficult to find legally (The DVDs were only released in english by the BBC so not in the States and even those are now out of print) this is an EXCELLENT way to watch the 90s cartoon without relying on sketchy streaming sites! They donât have all the episodes yet but I assume they will be uploading more episodes as time goes on. The playlist right now has just under 20 episodes.
They also have several playlists of behind the scenes stuff for the Moominvalley show currently airing.
So if youâve been wanting to check out the 90s show and have been struggling to find it, here you go! And you get to support the actual Moomin people and the Janssons as well!!