If you’ve followed me for a while, you know my all-time favorite book is Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Anyone who truly loves this book (or the equally great—albeit different—film) has, at a minimum, become intrigued with one of the settings: the pre-WW2 Libyan Desert. I’m going to start a series of posts that will provide some background information to The English Patient (TEP). This is the first. Also, I should mention that while TEP is a work of fiction, it borrows (steals?) greatly from events and individuals who really existed. The explorers and cartographers of TEP traveled to the Libyan Desert in the early- and late-1930s in search of the “lost oasis” of Zerzura, a mythical city that curiously is said to have existed in one of the harshest stretches of the Libyan Desert. The discovery of an oasis here, in one of the last unexplored regions on earth, was a call to adventure with the promise of historical immortality for any fraternity of explorers who might find it, as with it they would breathe life and certainty into a people and culture that was rumored to have existed for centuries. More to come. Pictured: 1861 edition of Herodotus’ Histories; March 1933 and April 1939 editions of The Geographical Journal, published by the Royal Geographical Society, London.
“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This deserves to be seen by everybody
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Books:
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
The Furies by Kate Lowe
The Raven’s Children by Yulia Yakovleva
And I Darken by Kiersten White
Chinese Cinderella by Adeline Yen Mah
Tell The Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Lajja by Taslima Nasrin
Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Authors:
Jean Rhys
Angela Carter
Julia C. Collins
Ismat Chughtai
Virginia Woolf
The Brontë sisters
Daphne Du Maurier
Flannery O’Connor
Mariama Bâ
Bertha von Suttner
Poets:
Warsan Shire
Raych Jackson
Nazik al-Malaika
Sappho
Jo Shapcott
Christina Rossetti
Emily Dickinson
Nikita Gill
Sujata Bhatt
Maya Angelou
Artists:
Artemisia Gentileschi
Harriet Powers
Klea McKenna
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh
Vivian Maier
Frida Kahlo
Composers:
Clara Schumann
Tania León
Lili and Nadia Boulanger
Missy Mazzoli
Xin Huguang
The world of academia is considered highly male centric despite that the aesthetic seems to be dominated by young queer women. I am not a fan of Donna Tartt so I have collected alternatives from my own collection of books and a few from friends and family. Some of the books may not be exactly “dark academia” or a set academic aesthetic but they all address female experiences and are academically acclaimed.
"Hey so it turns out that the people of earth accidentally did a global experiment to see if every individual could course correct climate change through mass personal change of habits, and it turns out, no! We can't! It was massive corporate activity all along!"
I know that this year's ramadan has been very challenging as mosques were closed and in a month of unity, meeting with friends and family just wasn't possible. I am very sorry you will not be able to celebrate Eid as you usually do because everyone is working hard to maintain social distancing. I heard that many muslims were kindly helping and donating more generously during that holy month, to that, as a citizen of the world going against a global pandemic, I am very thankful. I hope you will keep staying safe and want to tell you that better days will come.
Mimi your friendly ghost 👻💜
from a Guardian article by Arundhati Roy about the covid crisis in India titled ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’. it’s a free read and it’s also an excellent good read for anyone who wants to understand the magnitude of the issue and how deeprooted it is because it isn’t just the virus it’s a number of things that’s wrong with the entire system of government. the leading party is at fault and it has been for multiple years now for more crimes and human rights violations than it’s even possible to imagine. so please take 5 mins out of your day and read it, i promise you it’s worthwhile.
*people choose to kneel during the national anthem to peacefully protest police brutality*
Some People™️: tHat’S uNaCCePtaBLe
*people march in the streets and harass passersby to protest safer-at-home orders*
Some People™️: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that’s their constitutional right
You don’t care about rights; you care about “your side” winning.
Posting on Tumblr is like talking to your cat. You don’t know if they are listening, and you don’t know if they care, but for some reason, it still helps.
White America: “We need to keep our (machine) guns so we can enforce our own rights in the event our government turns on us.”
White America, when people are actually trying to protect their rights: ”Violence is not the answer”