chthonic-cassandra

[chthonic-cassandra]

by sare2121

[chthonic-cassandra]

Museum + tea & scones 🩷

[chthonic-cassandra]

18 June 2025

Tea: Ahmad cardamom black tea in the morning; in the afternoon, iced Ahmad mango black tea.

Perfume: White Rabbit (strong black tea and milk with white pepper, ginger, honey and vanilla, spilled over the crisp scent of clean linen)

Reading: Daniel Barban Levin, Slonim Woods 9. This was a memoir of surviving a cult; I had deeply complicated feelings about it in several directions, and also I think was just personally positioned so as to struggle with this text. Probably won't say much more here except that as a memoir I feel like we were missing a piece about what the process of writing and sharing the story publicly means to the author, especially given the considerations around which events he did and did not have access to which he references in the final chapter. Profoundly complicated feelings about that final chapter, which is addressed to his friends who did not leave the cult when he did.

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I am reading a memoir about the author's experience of surviving a cult, and thinking about that edge to the tangle of co-victimhood which is how one can possibly ethically talk or write about it when the experience of witnessing or participating in someone else's victimization is a part of one's own story. I don't know! I don't think there's a simple answer.

There's the possibility of anonymizing the other people one writes about, but that's complicated or perhaps impossible in situations where the violence got a lot of media attention, which is the case for the book I'm reading now and for some other memoirs of co-victimhood I've read in the past. And I don't think identifiability is the only ethical dimension in question.

I'm finding myself uncomfortable with the way this particular author is walking this line, but his own discomfort as a witness is such an important part of his own story and the story he is choosing to tell.

I struggle with this for myself; I do need to talk, and write, about those memories, about these people whose existence often has to be a secret in my life. I think I've found ways of doing it that I feel okay about, in my specific circumstances. But.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Lauren’s Grape poppy. Bought seeds at the Seattle garden show in the 90’s and it has come back every year since.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Myochin Munekazu: A Iron Articulated Model of a Snake,

Japan, late 19th century, Meiji period (1868-1912),

The patinated russet iron snake constructed of close-fitting hammered plates joined inside the body, the head chased and engraved with scales and fitted with a hinged jaw opening to reveal the tongue and two rows of teeth, the eyes gilt, signed MUNEKAZU under the snake’s chin.

Length: 135.5 cm

[chthonic-cassandra]

Hilarious but also somewhat disconcerting that people in the dance company I worked with for many years are spreading a rumor that my partner and I are breaking up.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Still thinking about this and it's also very true of A Zed and Two Noughts. Why isn't everyone making jokes about black and white animals?

Occurs to me to wonder why The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) has not become deeply popular in our circles here. It rather seems like it should be.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Occurs to me to wonder why The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover (1989) has not become deeply popular in our circles here. It rather seems like it should be.

[chthonic-cassandra]

16-17 June 2025

Tea:

- Harney and Sons Paris

- a green and black tea blend with rose

- Harney & Sons Murder on the Orient Express, which I did not actually really want at the time but incoherently thought to myself while sort of half asleep that I should drink because I wasn't actually going to enjoy anything? Don't know what that logic was about.

Perfume:

- Persephone's Ascent (sandalwood-infused vanilla, vines of pale spring blossoms, honeysuckle nectar, and sweet cream)

- Lorrainna (an early 19th-century Italian perfume dabbed on black satin and lace – magnolia blossoms, lilac, orris root, and ambergris accord)

Reading: reread Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine - I had been thinking about this one after putting it on a rec list of pre-2010 fantasy, and wanted to come back to it. I'd remembered it as upsetting, but not nearly as devastating as it actually is, in several directions. I appreciated it a lot, though I do think the second half falls apart a little after an extremely strong build towards the memorable high point in the middle of the novel.

Watching: rewatched DS9 3.26 "The Adversary."

[chthonic-cassandra]

are there any herbal/noncaffeinated summery teas you would recommend? i had a hibiscus situation the other morning that really made my day. i hope you have seen lots of flowers lately!

A hibiscus situation! That sounds exciting.

I have three suggestions for you, which may not be typically summery teas (I don't drink much fruity herbal tea), but all of which I love very much:

One of my favorite herbal teas, which I've probably mentioned before because I love it so much, is just a simple blend of lavender and elderflower, with nothing else. It's maybe more springtime than summery but it's a total delight, and though I got mine as a house blend from a local tea shop I bet you could find similar things elsewhere.

Similarly, if you can get ahold of some dried chrysanthemum flowers you can make a simple chrysanthemum tea, which I find light and lovely and really refreshing iced and lightly sweetened.

"Greek mountain tea," as it's called outside of Greece, is made from ironwort/sideritis, though you'll also find blends for sale which add chamomile and/or oregano. It has a delicate flavor, strongly herbal and slightly floral to my palate, and I find it very summery though really good at any time of year. I also like it both hot and iced.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Feeling pretty depressed about being what [x] has made me into and also about the pervasiveness of violence in the world, but at least there are baby birds, and mist in the morning, and I feel good about my clothing/perfume/hair these days.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Apollo and Daphne! 🍃

Step-by-step tutorials, speedpaints, etc. are available for this piece on my Patreon.

[chthonic-cassandra]

nice pair of characters who trust each other more than anyone else in the whole entire world it would sure be a shame if one of them betrayed that trust for the sake of trying to keep the other alive. it would sure be a shame to love someone so much you destroy them

[chthonic-cassandra]

list of favorite non-fiction books? (on a variety of topics/subjects, your choice)

This is difficult! There are so many. I'm going to give you a semi-arbitrary list, trying to choose books which have had a sustained impact on me over time.

Again semi-arbitrarily I'm excluding books in a few categories: memoirs; books about how to conduct psychotherapy; and literary studies of a specific single text or few texts.

In any case, have a slightly random list of 15 books on varied topics:

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women

Peter Cryle, Geometry in the Budoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative

Samuel Delany, About Writing

Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England

Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy

James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic

Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism

Valerie Kivelson, Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia

Michael Salter, Organised Sexual Abuse

Camilla Townsend, Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico

Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture

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Hi, I just wanted to say that your reading of Tanith Lee and Vivia actually got me into reading her work, and now I'm a huge fan of her and she's an inspiration for me in my writing! I wanted to ask if you had any recommendations for books on body horror and trauma?

That makes me so happy to hear - thank you so much for sharing that with me!

I'm not sure if you're looking for a) nonfiction books which deal with experiences of trauma which involve disruptions one's relationship with one's body b) literary/cultural criticism on how the genre of body horror is related to trauma; or c) body horror fiction which could also function as trauma framework.

But in any case. I am not particularly into body horror as a subgenre, but am going to suggest Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, for Scarry's analysis of extension and the body, which I think could be productive for thinking about body horror as connected with traumatic experience.

[chthonic-cassandra]

Unicorn by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Don Paterson

This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway; its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny, right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love the beast arose, where they had cleared the space; and in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass, then one day walked out and passed into her.