200-page paper on language and thought just pulled this thing out. shouldve ended the paper there

Vladimir Nabokov’s note card, c. 1969.

Student explaining to me (after getting 55) that when reading a novel (’Ulysses’ in this case) he likes to skip ‘passages and pages’ so as ‘to get his own idea, you know, about the book and not be influenced by the author’.”

Käthe Kollwitz, Pietà, 1903

Seat Belts Triptyc 1994

passages that make you whisper "oh my god"

Jenny Holzer, Protect Me From What I Want, date unknown

David Lynch, Oh Darling Please Come Home, 2010

cons of pain: you might find god there

“I’ve often thought of a female Christ. David told me there’s one in a church in Montreal. Mostly the world can’t take it. Because of people’s feelings about the delicacy of women and also because of what a meaningless display female suffering simply is. If you belittle us in school, treat us like slaves at home and finally, if you get a woman alone in bed just tell her she’s all wrong, no matter what sex you are… or maybe you just grab one on the street and fuck her real fast– in an alley, or in her own bed. I mean if that’s the way it usually goes for this girl what would be the point in seeing her half nude and nailed up? Where’s the contradiction? could that drive the culture for 2,000 years? No way. Female suffering must be hidden, or nothing can work. It’s a man’s world and a girl on a cross would be like seeing a dead animal in a trap. We like to eat them, or see them stuffed, we even like to wear them, but watch them suffer? Hear them wail? The complaining lines were expunged from Florence Nightingale’s book.” - Eileen Myles, Cool for You