Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)
There was a theft. That much I am told. I was abandoned. That much I know. I was forced backward. I was forced forward. I was passed hand to hand like a bowl of fruit. Each night I am nailed into place and forget who I am.
(via kali--ma)
"Charcot: Let us press again on the hysterogenic point. Here we go again. Occasionally subjects even bite their tongues, but this would be rare. Look at the arched back, which is so well described in the textbooks.
Patient: Mother, I am frightened.
Charcot: Note the emotional outburst. If we let things go unabated, we will soon return to the epileptoid behaviour. Now we have a bit of tranquility, of resolution, followed by a type of static contracted posture. I consider this latter deformity as an accessory phenomenon to the basic attack. (The patient cries again: “Oh! Mother!”)
Charcot: Again, note these screams. You could say it is a lot of noise over nothing."
TUESDAY 7TH FEBRUARY, 1888
I should also say that in Me Without You, Holly (the “vampired” friend, so to speak) is explicitly writing a “book thing” on the pervasive popularity and generational recurrence of the vampire story. when the girls are dating Daniel, they each begin to adopt the persona and fringements of the other, and Bergman is very precisely namechecked. BOOM, anybody thinking this all seems a little tangential, eg my own brain sometimes, ROASTED.
(Source: braattyb)
"Our chang’d and mingled souls are grown
To such acquaintance now,
That if each would resume their own,
Alas ! we know not how.
We have each other so engrost,
That each is in the union lost.
…
Thus our twin-souls in one shall grow,
And teach the World new love,
Redeem the age and sex, and show
A flame Fate dares not move :
And courting Death to be our friend,
Our lives together too shall end."
from ‘To Mrs. M. A. at Parting’, Katherine Philips (1631-64)
"there’s no me without you!"
Marina to Holly, in the garden. Me Without You, Sandra Goldbacher (2001)
had to break it to myself recently that 6000 words is nowhere near enough space to do justice to all the thinkin’ I’ve put into this hysterical woman business over the past five (eek) years. also maybe I’m just not ready to write it/let go of it all yet. instead for my dissertation I’m going to look at female friendship and themes of vampirism, concentrating on this (my favourite) film, Bergman’s Persona, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, and Lucy and Mina in Stoker’s (maybe also Coppola’s) Dracula (suggestions more than welcome). the idea, I guess, is to try to eventually build this “chapter” into a greater work on gendered interrelationships and vampire lore, all that other stuff I have milling around in my head. whatever whatever.
here: the idea of the vampire as a reflection/completing segment of the self (cf. why vampires don’t bear reflections)
Ingmar Bergman, Persona (1966)
“Teenage girls curl up together like newborn puppies, painting one another’s toes as if they were licking one another’s ears. If you sit long enough in any Starbucks, or loiter outside any high school, you will see girls climbing onto one another’s laps, kissing on the lips. They aren’t hitting on each other, not precisely, though they are in a constant state of arousal that borders on the insane. No other love is like the love of a teenage girl, all passion and fire and endless devotion—at least for a week.”
Emma Straub’s piece on My So-Called Life/Rayanne on the Paris Review blog is so, so great.
“When she was bleaching my hair in her bathtub, we laughed so hard and so loud that her younger sister told us we needed hysterectomies.”
"It’s not my job to make you a better man, and I don’t give a shit if I’ve made you a better man. It’s not a fucking woman’s job to be consumed and invaded and spat out so that some fucking man can evolve."
Jenny, The L Word
(Source: missworld, via nightmarebrunette-deactivated20)
