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[ghostofgirl]

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[ghostofgirl]

what if we kissed and one of us had a bloody nose and got blood on both of us. what if we were both girls.

[ghostofgirl]

it is hard to explain without sounding vain or stupid - but the more attractive others find you, the more you're allowed to do. the easier your life is.

i have been on both sides of this. i am queer and cuban. i grew up poor. for a long time i didn't know "how" to dress - and i still don't. i make my sister pick out any important outfits. i have adhd in spades: i was never "cool and quiet", i was the weird kid who didn't understand how "normal" people behave. i was bullied so hard that the "social outcasts" wouldn't even talk to me.

i got my teeth straightened. i cut my hair and learned how to style it. i got into makeup. it didn't matter, at first, if i actually liked what i was doing - it mattered how people responded to it. like a magic trick; the right dress and winged eyeliner and suddenly i was no longer too weird for all of it. i could wear the ugly pokemon shirt and it was just "ironic" or a "cute interest."

when i am seen as pretty, people listen. they laugh at my jokes. they allow me to be weird and a little spacey. i can trust that if i need something, people will generally help me. privilege suddenly rushes in: pretty does buy things. pretty people get treated more gently.

i am the same ugly little girl, is the thing. still odd. still not-quite-fitting-in. still scrambling. still angry and afraid and full of bad things. of course it became my obsession. of course i stopped eating. i had seen, in real time, the exact way it could change my life - simply always be perfect, and things can be easy. people will "overlook" all the other things. i used to have panic attacks at the idea others would see me without makeup - what would they think? even for a simple friend hangout, i'd spend a few hours getting ready. after all, it seemed so obvious to me: these people liked me because i was pretty.

i worry about how much i'm being a bad activist: i understand that "pretty" is determined by white, het, cis, able-bodied hegemonies. if i was really an ally, wouldn't i rally against all of this? recently there's been a "clean girl" trend which copies latinx aesthetics: dark slicked-back hair, hoop earrings. i almost never wear my hair like that; i can hear the middle school guidance counsellor advising me that i might fare better if i toned it down on the culture.

the problem is that i can take pretty on and off. that i have seen how different my life is on a day where i try and a day where i don't. i told my therapist i want to believe the difference is confidence, but it's not. and when you have seen it, you can't unsee it. it lives inside your brain. it rots there; taunting. i get rewarded for following the rules. i am punished for breaking them. end of story.

pretty people can get what they want. pretty people can feel confident without others asking where they got their nerve from. pretty people can be weird and different. pretty people get to have emotions; it's different when they get aggressive, it's pretty when they cry with frustration.

of course people care about this. of course it has crawled into you. of course you want to be seen as attractive. it's not vanity: it's self-preservation.

[ghostofgirl]

kafka only kept a journal bc he didn’t have a tumblr blog

[ghostofgirl]

how do i stop listening to hospice by the antlers. how do i find happiness again

[ghostofgirl]

HOSPICE & IN THE ATTIC OF THE UNIVERSE-- two album art projects for college :) the first one is a redo of a piece i did a few years ago!

[ghostofgirl]

FUCK I LOVE WOMEN I LOVE PAINTINGS OF WOMEN FUCKKK

I like art that depicts women not posing seductively or gracefully but simply existing as human beings.

[ghostofgirl]

SOOOOO SICK OF BEING ONLINE MAYBE I AM AN ADDICT TO MY PHONE MAYBE THE BOOMERS WERE RIGHT!!!!!!!!! please god please please please let me go to an art museum let me lay in the sun and read a book or something oh my god I am going to KILL MY SELF !!!!!!!!!!!!! #ketodiet #indiefilm #cottagecore #style

[ghostofgirl]

thoughts on turning 18

These are my last ten days of being a girl. Woman is horrid, woman is nagging, is prude, is sexual. Woman is scary to me. I do nothing with these days except think of woman. She must be smarter, cleverer, cooler than me. Or else she will fade into herself. Looking at Dubrovnik I think of that letter two years ago. Happy birthday. Of course it was all I could think of- still girl. To be celebrated, to be loved. I ate the bread she gave me and looked around the place. Saint Sophia of Rome- a martyr. I wish I were a martyr sometimes, so that I could die in peace. That symbol I wore was what made me untouchable - not in the sense of fragility-although I was- but in the sense of being too pure and clean and white to be near to, the kind that makes a dirty child disgusted. I suppose the girl in me dies a dirty martyr. I am more woman than I was 2 years ago. I am closer to nothing.

[ghostofgirl]

the “lolita” covers

here’s a question: if vladimir nabokov’s “lolita” is truly the psychological portrait of a messed up dude and not the girl – let alone a sexualized little girl, as all of the sexualization happens inside humbert humbert’s head – then why do all the covers focus on a girl, and usually a sexy aspect of a girl, usually quite young, and none of them feature a portrait of humbert humbert?

here are nabokov’s original instructions for the book cover:

I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. … Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for LOLITA (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.

and yet, the representations of the sexy little girl abound.

i became driven by curiousity. why did this happen? why is this happening?

i am not alone – there’s a book about this, with several essays and artists’ conceptions about the politics and problems of representation surrounding the covers of “lolita.” this new yorker article gives a summary of the book and its ideas, and interviews one of the editors:

Many of the covers guilty of misrepresenting Lolita as a teen seductress feature images from Hollywood movie adaptations of the book— Kubrick’s 1962 version, starring Sue Lyon, and Adrian Lyne’s 1997 one. Are those films primarily to blame for the sexualization of Lolita? As is argued in several of the book’s essays, the promotional image of Sue Lyon in the heart-shaped sunglasses, taken by photographer Bert Stern, is easily the most significant culprit in this regard, much more so than the Kubrick film itself (significantly, neither the sunglasses nor the lollipop ever appears in the film), or the later film by Adrian Lyne. Once this image became associated with “Lolita”—and it’s important to remember that, in the film, Lolita is sixteen years old, not twelve—it really didn’t matter that it was a terribly inaccurate portrait. It became the image of Lolita, and it was ubiquitous. There are other factors that have contributed to the incorrect reading, from the book’s initial publication in Olympia Press’s Traveller’s Series (essentially, a collection of dirty books), to Kubrick’s startlingly unfaithful adaptation. At the heart of all of this seems to be the desire to make the sexual aspect of the novel more palatable.

here’s a couple of kubrick inspired covers:

which very well could have, after tremendous sales, have influenced the following covers:

…straying so far from the intention of nabokov that the phenomenon begins to look more like the symptom of something larger, something sicker.

after a lot of researching covers, it was here, in this sampling of concept covers for the book about the lolita covers, that i found an image that best represents the story to me:

[art by linn olofsdotter – and again, this is not an official cover]

but why aren’t all the covers like that? even the ones published by “legitimate” publishing companies, with full academic credentials, with no intended connection to the film; surely they must have read nabokov’s instructions for the cover. and yet, look at the top row of lolita covers: all legitimate publishing companies, not prone to smut. and yet.

my conclusion is that the lolita complex existed before “lolita” (and of course it did) – a patriarchal society is essentially operating with the same delusions of humbert humbert. nabokov did not produce the sexy girl covers of lolita, and kubrick had only the smallest hand in it. it was what people desired, requested and bought. the image of the sexy girl sells; intrigues; gets the hands on the books.

as elizabeth janeway said in her review in the new york review of books: “Humbert is every man who is driven by desire, wanting his Lolita so badly that it never occurs to him to consider her as a human being, or as anything but a dream-figment made flesh.”

isn’t that our media as a whole? our culture as a whole?

the whole lot of them/us – seeing the world through humbert-tinted glasses, seeing all others as Other and Object, as solipsistic dream-reality. as i scroll through the “lolita” covers i wonder: where’s the humanity in our humanity?

[ghostofgirl]

nobody will ever get me the way john singer sargent does

[ghostofgirl]

Gustav Klimt, Danae, ca. 1907-8

[ghostofgirl]

Love & Other Kinds Of Prayer

this is a poem for @highland-calf my beloved (/p)

[ghostofgirl]

Looking for the Butcher

[ghostofgirl]

reincarnate

identity as revolution.

[ghostofgirl]

First Love / On Haunting

Last night I dreamt a terrible thing and I woke up missing you.

Everyone is telling me to have my first love. I do not know how to tell the truth when I can’t even dream it. Let me tell you something, child: you cannot waste your first love. A fool’s love is a precious thing. Find someone good, someone who will break your foolish heart kindly.

Everyone is telling me to have my first love. I know exactly how to tell the truth, but there is no one to hear it. Before you, I was afraid of bad men like I was afraid of ghosts. Now I see apparitions when I sleep. When I look at a man and want him to hold me, I see your ashy teeth.

There is only that first love for me. Last night I dressed in a way you would have hated. Last night I wore my stomach and my thighs in patches of lamplight. I was going to flirt. I was going to giggle. I was afraid in the abstract— your face was not in the shadows. Your breath was not on my neck. Then: a car, an offer, a noise so loud I swear I could hear your laugh when I flinched. Then: my body is all the things you swore your friends said it was. Then: I am seen and I remember what you taught me about that. I remember why I have not been a free thing. Then: I am haunted all over again.

You can burn the sage. You can call the priest. You can leave your specter-infested walls. Your ghost will not die and he will not rest. How could he? It was you—dead, foolish thing—who invited him in.

Last night you dreamt a terrible thing and you woke up missing him.

[ghostofgirl]

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