To put the matter theoretically, androcentric literature structures the reading experience differently depending on the gender of the reader. For the male reader, the text serves as the meeting ground of the personal and the universal. Whether or not the text approximates the particularities of his own experience, he is invited to validate the equation of maleness with humanity. The male reader feels his affinity with the universal, with the paradigmatic human being, precisely because he is male. Consider the famous scene of Stephen’s epiphany in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane’s and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft, as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

A man reading this passage is invited to identify with Stephen, to feel “the riot in his blood,” and, thus, to ratify the alleged universality of the experience. Whether or not the sight of a girl on the beach has ever provoked similar emotions in him, the male reader is invited to feel his difference (concretely, from the girl) and to equate that with the universal. Relevant here is Levi-Strauss’s theory that woman functions as currency exchanged between men. The woman in the text converts the text into a woman, and the circulation of this text/woman becomes the central ritual that establishes the bond between the author and his male readers.

The same text affects a woman reader differently. Judith Fetterley gives the most explicit theory to date about the dynamics of the woman reader’s encounter with androcentric literature. According to Fetterley, notwithstanding the prevalence of the castrating bitch stereotype, “the cultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women, but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny.”

The process of immasculation does not impart virile power to the woman reader. On the contrary, it doubles her oppression. She suffers “not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one’s experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly, the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self, the consequence of the invocation to identify as male while being reminded that to be male—to be universal—is to be not female.”

A woman reading Joyce’s novel of artistic awakening, and in particular the passage quoted above, will, like her male counterpart, be invited to identify with Stephen and therefore to ratify the equation of maleness with the universal. Androcentric literature is all the more efficient as an instrument of sexual politics because it does not allow the woman reader to seek refuge in her difference. Instead, it draws her into a process that uses her against herself. It solicits her complicity in the elevation of male difference into universality and, accordingly, the denigration of female difference into otherness without reciprocity. To be sure, misogyny is abundant in the literary canon. It is important, however, that Fetterley’s argument can stand on a weaker premise. Androcentricity is a sufficient condition for the process of immasculation.

—Patrocino P. Schweickart, Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading (1986)

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo…

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"Man, in this earthly life, though capable of many evils, is not capable of them all at once.."

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

full quote;

"Man, in this earthly life, though capable of many evils, is not capable of them all at once, inasmuch as one evil corrects and counteracts another just as one poison frequently corrects another. In hell, on the contrary, one torment, instead of counteracting another, lends it still greater force: and, moreover, as the internal faculties are more perfect than the external senses, so they are more capable of suffering."

—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning. [...]

—You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.

James Joyce (Stephen Dedalus), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (p. 268-269)

when john patrick shanley wrote “all my life i’ve been young.”

and when sylvia plath wrote “like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.”

and when james joyce wrote “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. A wild angel appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.”

and when henry david thoreau wrote “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

Iss shala re

I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

YEEAAASSSS

I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

we should make fun of americans more. why dont their shops include tax in the price tag. like how much does this item cost? its a surprise :)

Uh... I love how creative this world is.

PEOPLE ARE DRAWING MODERN AUS OF PRINCESS MONONOKE? CUTE TEEHEE WE HAVE AN APARTMENT AND TWO DOGS AUS OF PRINCESS MONONOKE? You are insane. San would be in Jail

Bas ho gaya

unstoppable force (wanting to be the kindest version of myself) vs immovable object (all the anger and hatred I have inside myself)

studies at the Musée D’Orsay

Me and who

Source

আর পারছিনা। আমি বাড়ি যাবো। সম্বডি সেভ মী।

Spiders would love to be us. Flies would loce to be us. The more we entangle, the more something disintegrates into ashes, the more we try to hold on, the more it vanishes. Spiders would love to be us. Flies would love to be us. Rat traps got nothing on the threshold beyond an empty hall, nothing on the chokehold of a hand made from burial ashes.

This is gonna hurt as hell.

- Anjana, circa: 2023

Context: Affection can be a traumatic familiar feeling. The same affection that becomes a stale cigarette puff in the 4am graveyard can birth something new. Something new. With strangers you never think would amount to anything, but end up making room for themselves.

I will butcher love in so many ways, I'll give up yet let myself feel it. It's unfair to you otherwise.

You taste like bliss. I knew immediately that this will be a hell harder to crawl out from. I am no Lazarus, or strong willed like Montefeltro, I am but Prufrock. A scaredy ass motherfucker. You know. This is gonna hurt. This is gonna be something best for a while. We'll see.

"There will be time"

"Okay, my Lady Prufrock."

- 14.01.2023

And I knew. Do I dare?

I'm afraid. I do.

Mid twenties smell like a sultry afternoon after a long day at school, when days felt less disgusting yet a pall of dread hung over the line of sweat on the forehead.

Fast-forward to growing up, everyday, there's an exhaustion, there's a piece of you left behind for yesterday to feed on its remains, as it looks up at you, with its hungry eyes, and rabid skeleton, asking for you to feed it, who said demons are scary? Demons are pathetic pitiful creatures, manipulating you with dead beady eyes of yearning and heartbreak.

Heartbreak is a funny word. Heartbreak is a tragicomedy. An ironic and iconic episodes of morbid shedding of childhood skin into a grown up motherfucker, hunched over a book with words, and that's all you'll ever be, until you jump off the chimney, or become an Orpheus like pitiless fool, you look back at life, don't you, you punk ass cosmonaut.

Twenties start the never ending brawl of disgust that keeps coiling itself into a knot, your gut is your attic, of stored memories with apparent rots, you still keep them- pathetic fallacy is your identity, why not drown yourself instead?

- letters to myself everyday I live and leave twenty

To be or not to be

To kill or not to kill

To put it under my tongue or to chew it

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds