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It’s impossible to overstate how much reviewers hated MacLane and how deeply they held her in contempt, citing her “vulgarity” and calling her book “a revelation of self which is not interesting or sympathetic.” Their insistence on calling her “boring” quickly begins to seem absurd: if she was so boring, why were they so obsessed? Critics also insisted that she was doing the world a disservice by getting attention that they (disingenuously) declared ought to be granted to presumably worthier writers: “Think of the hundreds of poor lonesome girls working away at the making of literature who cannot get their literature printed and published.” When asked to explain MacLane’s popularity, they mostly just threw up their hands in befuddlement: “People go wild over young girls writing slush about themselves,” the author of a MacLane parody “explained” in 1902.

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—	Intrigued? Next Wednesday, Kara Jesella and Normandy Sherwood and I discuss Mary MacLane at BookCourt. Come! (via emilygould)

“To Penelope, men were conquests, attributes, but they were also enemies; they belonged to the species that must never be granted more than the amount of time and attention she considered they deserved. Her tone with such men was flirtatious, mocking, never serious; she spread about her a propaganda of rapid affairs, rapidly consummated, with a laughing lack of commitment on both sides. She seemed to take a pride in in the steady succession of names. She was, Edith saw, accomplished in venery…She considered men to be a contemptible sex, and her eyes would sparkle when she recounted tales of conquest. ‘That dreadful little man,’ she would say dismissively, of someone who did not know the rules of her game.” -?

girl art

elanormcinerney:

Kathy Acker | Devoured by Myths: An Interview with Sylvère Lotringer | Hannibal Lecter, My Father

emilygould:

From a 1903 New York Times review of one of Mary MacLane’s books. “A revelation of self which is not interesting or sympathetic.”

Come hear me, Kara Jesella and Normandy Sherwood discuss Mary’s books, newly republished, and her legacy at BookCourt on 3/20.

emilygould:

karaj:

dudguacamole:

Chris Kraus approves of your tumblr.

thank you for the “I’m looking at you Kara” tag :)

20 years too early is more like it!

For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist. —Taylor Swift

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—	(via mikkipedia)

Let us reject the post-modernist victim hate. Being a victim is not shameful or an insult, neither is it a trait of character. For in an unjust world there will always be victims, there will always be people who have less power and wealth than others, who have less control over the direction in which their lives take. That you are a victim doesn’t mean you won’t find ways of adjusting to the situation you find yourself in, it doesn’t mean that you lack the capacity to think and act rationally. What it does mean is that we live in a world sorely in need of change. By abolishing the victim and by framing all of our actions as an individual choice the post-modernists are mounting nothing other than a reactionary defence of the status-quo.

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—	Article, Prostitution, the abolition of the victim and post-modernism’s defence of the status-quo (via vintagependant)

bunny rogers + marie calloway dual reading/art show

u cant squueezw blood from a shoe

cunny4:

u cant squeeze blood from a stone
other times i will resentment for the same reasons
then again my drug/alcohol use is on the upswing
you cant draw blood from a shoe
or anything that pulls back or spills blood
i dont want a man that can be mean
or find me at the cause of his anger