Posts tagged things they never taught me
Oscar Wilde & Other Atrocities
Fate is not a factor
also, Dearest Scott, Dearest Zelda has introduced me via footnote to Dolly Wilde, who I cannot believe I never learned about before.
She was Oscar Wilde’s niece, born when he was in prison (so she probably never met him)
She was fucking beautiful
Everybody said she was a witty conversationalist and a brilliant writer (but she didn’t write books, just letters and translations)
She was queer and in an openly polyamorous relationship with Natalie Barney until her death
SHE HIT ON ZELDA FITZGERALD IN PARIS and made Scott mad (and Zelda question her sexuality)
she sometimes dressed up as Oscar in tight pants and a ratty fur coat which could actually plausibly have been Oscar’s famous fur coat that his brother claimed to have pawned
Basically, this woman is everything I want/want to be/want from life, and if you know anything about her please tell me because I need to know.
(Consider Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Oscar’s Unusual Niece already ordered from amazon.)
Reblogged from matrixrefugee.
(Source: amandaonwriting)
A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.
It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.
Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.
Faithfull started dating Mick Jagger in 1966, and her 60s output is generally only discussed in terms of how it relates to that of the Stones… To those closer to the Stones’ circle, she was The Muse— though by her account, her relationship with Jagger was a pretty mutual exchange of ideas, old records, and hallucinogens. Ever the avid reader, a little while prior to the Beggar’s Banquet sessions, Faithfull handed him The Master and Margarita and suggested that this Lucifer guy might make for a good character in a song. She wrote the lyrics to “Sister Morphine”, and cut a shudderingly melancholy version that makes the Stones’ take almost seem like a romp. This was maybe the first big, public hint that Miss X knew more about pain and suffering than a lot of people wanted to assume. When she slipped into the coma that almost killed her— the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia— she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, “Marianne, we thought we’d lost you.” In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”
That’s the thing about pretty faces. We’d much prefer to watch them wilt. We don’t expect them to belong to the fighters— the junkies and monks and cockroaches who’ll survive every atomic bomb and suicide attempt and outlive us all. And we definitely don’t expect them to make songs as gnarled and candid as the ones on Faithfull’s finest record, Broken English, but there you go: the best records are all, in some way or another, the ones that blow a mouthful of smoke in the face of expectation.
(via quigonejinn)
It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.
(Source: silkandmarble, via loverofrocks)
Josephine Baker, later known as ‘Bronze Venus’, ‘Black Pearl’ and ‘Créole Goddess’ was born in America in 1906 and later moved to France to become a singer, dancer, and actress. She was the first African-American woman to star in a major motion picture, and became famous worldwide.
Though she grew up as a maid in wealthy white households she eventually became an exotic dancer in France, famously appearing in next to no clothing, and became a French citizen in 1937.
Ernest Hemingway referred to Baker as ‘the most sensational woman anyone ever saw’ and she received approximately 1500 marriage proposals in her life time. She became a muse for Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Christian Dior. She had a variety of exotic pets including a cheetah named Chiquita, a chimpanzee named Ethel, a pig named Albert, a snake named Kiki, a goat, a parrot, parakeets, fish, three cats, and seven dogs.
When WWII broke out, Baker became a volunteer spy for France, and assisted the French Resistance by smuggling messages written in invisible ink on sheet music. She made great efforts to aid those in danger of enemy attack, sent Christmas presents to French soldiers, and smuggled information she gathered in Spain back to France by pinning notes containing the information on the inside of her underwear. She was awarded the Medal of Resistance with Rosette and later named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
Baker also aided many civil rights movements by refusing to perform to segregated audiences and storming out of a club in Manhattan with actress Grace Kelly after she was refused service. She worked with the NAACP and spoke at a Washington march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. as the only official female speaker. Baker was actually asked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow to take his place as leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, but Baker declined on the grounds her twelve adopted children ‘were too young to lose their mother’.
Baker died in 1975, four days after her final show, attended by such names as Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, and Liza Minnelli.
Oh and she was queer and had a relationship with Frida Kahlo. All around badass.
I wanted to show that most stories of conflict are more complicated than any one side would have you believe. Not that good or evil are impossible to find or define, just that reality is usually a little grayer around the edges.
Katharine Hepburn. 1930’s.
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.” ~Katharine Hepburn.
(via things-with-teeth)
Interesting language and genuine feeling
“The two things I want are interesting language and genuine feeling.
“And one other thing: Years and years ago I knew a very wise woman who was tremendously accomplished and who had excelled at many things, a lifetime achievement for anybody else, and I asked what was her goal now? And she didn’t hesitate for a second. ‘To love deeply.’ A lesson there… ‘Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.’ That was Gordon [Lish] twenty years ago, and that’s what I’m still trying to do.” —Amy Hempel
(Quote from http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/227/the-art-of-fiction-no-176-amy-hempelAnd this from me: I got to crash Amy Hempel’s surprise visit to one of Jim Shepard’s workshop classes, which just about made my life. Someone asked Amy how she avoided being sentimental while writing about many potentially sentimental subjects, in particular dogs. She suggested, for a change, to try writing the most sentimental thing, or something saturated with the thing you usually guard against. “I’m tired of being so careful all the time.” Jim demonstrated (or manifested, if you want to get critical). “Poor blind Fido,“ he crooned, while Amy doubled over laughing. “Only one paw!”)
Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and shag a nun.
(via Feminism)
bisexual opera singer who killed ten men and snuck into a convent to shag a nun.