Gothic Incest…

Often entrenched in murderous, incestuous plots driven by a lust for the heroine, her mother or the familial titles and property belonging to an older brother, the uncle is a shadowy figure within the Gothic that seems representative of the genre itself. An assemblage of motives, desires and drives, a compilation of good and bad, condemned and saved, hideous and handsome, the uncle often acts as the Gothic text: joining together the old and new, the figure of the uncle represents and acts out seemingly oppositional roles. 

Jenny Diplacidi – Gothic Incest: Uncles, Thefts, Violence and Sexual Threats 

handjob

i want to give a pretty boy a handjob, and tell him at the beginning that he can’t come. he can fuck his hips up into my hand, play with himself, do anything he likes, except come. so when the time comes that my baby’s really, really on the edge, he has to beg me to stop so he won’t get punished for going over the edge. he has to tell me to stop playing with his pretty little dick, because he’s so so so close and he doesn’t want to get in any trouble. i want a boy that puts my wishes over his bodily pleasure. and then! hours later when i’ve edged him to the point of crying and begging, i’ll let him come. and then make him come again and again. until he’s begging me to please please stop, because he can’t take anymore. and then, we’ll take a nice warm shower and curl up in bed and cuddle all night long.

NSFW Baby

half as many crimes in and around buildings with trees !

When Kuo and Sullivan began their research here in the mid-1990s, Wells was one of the 12 poorest neighbourhoods in the United States and housed about 5,700 people. Half of the families at Wells were on welfare and unemployment was over 90 percent. When Wells was built in the 1940s, the city planted trees around all the buildings. By the time Kuo and Sullivan arrived, many of these trees had since been pulled out and paved over for maintenance reasons, leaving some yards with trees and others barren.

Kuo and Sullivan ran a number of experiments here. In 2001, they found that residents reported being victim to half as many crimes in and around buildings with trees as around buildings without them. Kuo said that after other factors were excluded, such as the number of people per building, the amount of green cover explained seven to eight percent of the differences in crime between buildings.

“It’s staggeringly high, given you expect it to be zero,” she said of the trees’ effect. “If most mayors could do something to reduce crime by that much, they’d jump at it.”

In fact, the city of Chicago used Kuo and Sullivan’s research in a decision to plant 20,000 trees around the city at a cost of $10 million several years ago.

As to why lush environments had lowered crime rates, Kuo and Sullivan suggest that green spaces draw people outside to enjoy them, and those increased numbers of people deter crime. In fact, they found that 83 percent more people socialized in green spaces at Wells than in barren spaces. And socializing can have long-term effects on crime prevention as well: Neighbours who are outside more form stronger bonds and communities, said Sullivan.

Chris Young – Green Peace, Greater Good Magazine 1^st September 2004

less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs

I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

George Orwell

The Freedom of the Press

This Blog –

Not for the first time, I’ve been asked: “What’s the purpose of your blog, Peedeel?”

I can only counter this with a question of my own: “Must it have a purpose?”

But of course we live in a utilitarian society where everything must have purpose. So my blog is a place where I share my passion, the things that I’m thinking about, the things that fascinate me intellectually and the things that attract me aesthetically and emotionally.

How’s that for an answer?

Literature, poetry, creative writing, all are here: good and bad; mysticism and magic, too, appear; as does art, of course, painting, photography, film and music.

But more than anything, my blog is about LOVE!

Love is the supreme power of this universe, and when we touch that magical, indescribable power, even in the simplest of circumstances, we feel it in every fiber of our being. It is the clockwork mechanism that makes this world go round. It is the source for all inspiration; for all human creativity.

I remember, as if it were only yesterday, my first wide-eyed staring into the face of love. Such a bitter sweet experience it was, too. And as a young boy I learned Love hurts…

Yes, fire burns, it’s true, boys & girls.

Visiting my blog should be like visiting the largest bookshop in the world. Or a huge antiques emporium, you know, one of those places that smells of the musty past, of lives lived long ago, and filled to overflowing with interesting knick-knacks. Things you can pick up and handle – and ask, who owned this? Who touched this before me? What did they use it for? An ancient teddy bear with one eye, threadbare and obviously much loved by some Victorian child; a multi-coloured glass-globe; a tarnished piece of jewelry. Fragments from history; items to browse and wonder on.

I would like to see my blog influence its many visitors – perhaps cause them to seek out those authors or artists they were unaware of and examine more of their work. I would like their visit to be accompanied by a sense of wonder, intrigue, and excitement. I would like them to think hard about spiritual love, and physical, fleshy love – where bodily hormones are raging! It is through good sex, after all, that we feel an expansion of our own human experience. Yes, this would be my ideal. To turn everyone on –

Just like the Beatles song, Day in the Life: “I’d love to turn you on.”

So imagine this great big emporium with shadows lurking in its four corners. Here you will find fetishistic love, bondage, bawdy suggestion, throbbing need. What else? Poetry, of course. There’s a million ways to write poetry. To be a poet implies a change of consciousness. It involves, if you like, the constant practice of spiritual exercises –

Yes, as Shelly said, in his A Defence Of Poetry – Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Just that and nothing more.

P

Translation

“Reading a poem in translation,” wrote Bialek, “is like kissing a woman through a veil”; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.

Anne Michaels
Fugitive Pieces

heroines

I read mythology, folk lore and fairy-tales voraciously, yet certain tales felt inappropriate and even irritating long before I was capable of analysing why that might be. They annoyed me in the same way Barbie dolls did. These were the stories featuring passive girls, usually born or destined to become princesses, like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella. Girls whose physical attractiveness was the sum of their identity; girls who were not so much protagonists as prizes.

I yearned for heroines I could identify with and aspire to be like. Girls who DID things. Who underwent hardship and suffering and overcame the odds by use of their own wit or courage. And I found Gerta in Andersen’s The Snow Queen and the brave sister in the Grimms tale, The Six Swans. I found Gretel in Hansel and Gretel; Janet in Tam Lin; and the redoubtable, splendidly named Molly Whuppie – the female Jack who bests her giant. Molly may marry and disappear into ‘happy-ever-after’, but you know she will go on dominating life just the same.

Ellen Renner
HELPERS, HEROINES AND HAGS

Yes, ‘I’m Happy’

I went looking for someplace to hide
the ocean. Selfish girl.
Trying to shut my eyes in a wave.
Line all the walls with water.

The ceiling keep screaming at me.
Dad too. Who knew
there was a continent called Zealandia
hiding in the Pacific
with a crust thicker than the ocean floor?

We live on top of plates
growing all our bodies and fir.
Blood oranges and hills.
We live like a pack of roads
howling over the earth.

I let my mouth open for language.
Siwihtâkanâpoy. Ocean brine.
Sometimes we pay for the things
we know. Soap in the mouth.
I’ve been told to expect damage.

Here’s an earthquake warning from the government:
Learn the Risks. There’s a 1 in 4 chance
you’ll be happy or shaken.

Selina Boan

Brazilian…?

ugly or grotesque

I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for.

W.B. Yeats
The Celtic Twilight