Still-life With Fruit And Bottle Of Chianti (detail) By Marie Egner  (Austrian Painter,1850–1940) Austrian

I think the people who say “You don’t need to be critical of every piece of media you consume” fundamentally misunderstand what we mean by “critical”.

When we say “be critical of the media you consume” we don’t mean “be negative” as in, find every flaw and pick it apart CinemaSins style.

We mean “examine it”. Like, look at what you are consuming, and in many cases, enjoying, and ask yourself why you are enjoying it. Ask yourself who made it. Ask yourself if you are the target audience. Ask yourself if you are being represented by the characters you see. Ask yourself if the author has biases or political leanings they are trying to include in the story.

Just, ask yourself questions. The answers don’t have to be negative. That’s not what being critical means.

Black Sails + things and places that feel like characters 

Victor Hugo on Talleyrand's death

For @empirearchives who was interested, here's a translation of Victor Hugo's text about Talleyrand's death. My thanks to @microcosme11 for her help <33

Choses Vues, Victor Hugo

1838

Talleyrand

19th of May

In the Rue St-Florentin, there is a palace and a sewer.

The palace, with its noble, rich, and dull architecture, was long called "Hôtel de l'Infuntado"; today, we read on its front door: Hôtel Talleyrand. During the fourty years he lived on this street, the last host of this palace might never have set eyes on this sewer.

He was a stranged, feared, and considerable character: his name was Charles-Maurice de Périgord; he was noble as Machiavel, a priest like Gondi, defrocked like Fouché, witty as Voltaire, and lame as the devil. One could say that everything limped with him: the nobility which he had put to the service of the republic, the priesthood he had dragged on the Champ-de-Mars then threw down the drain, the marriage he had broken by twenty scandals and by a voluntary separation, the wit he dishonoured through vileness. This man, nevertheless, had grandeur.

The splendours of both regimes were mixed together inside of him: he was prince of the old kingdom of France, and prince of the French Empire.

For thirty years, from the depth of his palace, from the depth of his mind, he had just about led Europe. He had let the revolution call him "tu", and had smiled at it, ironically of course; but it had not noticed. He had approached, known, observed, pierced, stirred, upturned, delved into, mocked, intellectually fertilized all the men of his era, all the ideas of his century, and there had been a few minutes in his life when, holding in his hand the four or five fearsome threads that moved the civilized universe, he had had for a puppet Napoleon the First, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Swiss Confederation. Such was the game this man played.

After the Revolution of July, that old race, whose grand chambellan he was, having fallen, he found himself standing on one foot and told the people of 1830, sitting, bare-armed, on a pile of cobbles: Make me your ambassador.

He had received Mirabeau's last confession and Thiers' first confidence. He had said himself he was a great poet and had made a trilogy in three dynasties: Act I, Buonaparte's Empire; Act 2, The House of Bourbon; Act 3, The House of Orleans.

He had done all of this in his palace, and, in this palace, like a spider in its web, he had attracted into it and taken successively heroes, thinkers, great men, conquerors, kings, princes, emperors, Bonaparte, Sieyès, Mme de Staël, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant, Alexander of Russia, Wilhelm of Prussia, Francis of Austria, Louis XVIII, Louis-Philippe, all the golden, shiny flies who buzzed in the history of those last fourty years. The whole sparkling swarm, fascinated by this man's deep eye, had successively passed under the dark door that bore, written on its architrave: Hôtel Talleyrand.

Well, the day before yesterday, 17 March, 1838, that man died. Doctors came and embalmed the corpse. For this, like the Egyptians, they first withdrew the bowels from the belly and the brain from the skull. Once done, after they had transformed the prince de Talleyrand into a mummy, and nailed this mummy in a white satin-lined coffin, they withdrew, leaving upon a table the brain, that brain which thought so many things, inspired so many men, built so many edifices, led two revolutions, fooled twenty kings, contained the world.

Once the doctors were gone, a valet entered, he saw what they had left. Hold on! they forgot this. What to do ? He remembered that there was a sewer in the street, he went there, and threw that brain into this sewer.

Finis rerum.

Cersei & Qyburn’s scene | 5x10 “Mother’s Mercy” Script

fear of life

Razor with ivory handle, it once belonged to Captain Hammond of Mattapoisett, New Bedford, late 19th century 

If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

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Bonsoir! Can you suggest some books on ecofeminism, that you've read or have on your to-read list?

I would suggest:

Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, Vandana Shiva

Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World, Andrea Barnet

Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the “Green Economy”, ed. Wendy Harcourt & Ingrid Nelson

Françoise d’Eaubonne et l’écoféminisme, Caroline Goldblum (I believe Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term “ecofeminism” in her essay Le féminisme ou la mort—one chapter of Carolyn Merchant’s Ecology provides a translation of some of d’Eaubonne’s thoughts)

Small Town, Big Oil: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the Richest Man in the World—And Won, David W. Moore

Ecofeminism, Maria Mies

Women and the Environment: Crisis and Development in the Third World, ed. Sally Sontheimer

Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, Marilyn Waring (the chapter on war and the high economic value men have ascribed to death is particularly good)

Earth follies : coming to feminist terms with the global environmental crisis, Joni Seager

Women Who Dig: Farming, Feminism and the Fight to Feed the World, Trina Moyles

(The bolded links redirect to OpenLibrary for the books that are available there)

On my to-read list:

Eco-Sufficiency and Global Justice: Women Write Political Ecology, Ariel Salleh

Unbowed, Wangari Maathai (I reblogged this article about her the other day, which made me want to check out the memoir she wrote)

Feminism and Ecology, Mary Mellor

Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care, Sherilyn McGregor (I’m interested in her critical discussion of how women caring about the environment is often described in maternal, rather than political, terms)

The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen & Maria Mies

I would also recommend Naomi Klein’s books; although she writes about political ecology rather than ecofeminism, at least she doesn’t forget about women in her books the way male environmentalists often do. Some of the male-authored books on the environment that gave me food for thought lately include Arran Stibbe’s Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By, Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, David Owen’s The Conundrum, and Ozzie Zehner’s Green Illusions, and only the latter took notice of the fact that women’s subjugation is relevant in climate change discussions—his book contains a chapter on women’s rights and he is the only one who points out that one essential factor to create a ‘green’ and sustainable society is giving women and girls power to make decisions—over their own bodies, as well as in social, economic and political spheres. 

I also appreciate that his book revolves around the idea that there is too much of a focus in today’s environmentalism on producing new technology and more (but ‘clean’) energy (wind, solar, biofuels, carbon-sequestrating gadgets…)— when, instead of attempting to create the kind of technology that will get our society-as-it-is through the climate crisis, we ought to create the kind of society that has a better chance of adapting to & mitigating it. In other words, realistic and efficient climate activism should focus on women’s rights, antimilitarism, improving democratic institutions and health care, combating consumerism and wealth disparities—things that often don’t register as climate activism, although they have a better chance of improving environmental issues and helping us face related crises than a fixation on potential scientific or technological miracles. I have found in my reading that it is surprisingly rare to find this holistic approach to environmentalism outside of ecofeminist writings.

• Waistcoats.

Date: 1840's

Medium: Silk and velvet