New Yorker, Woolf

Freshwater

1879 Edward Burne-Jones paints Julia Stephen, V. Woolf's mom, the Virgin Mary in "The Annunciation"

Anne Carson, Freud (1st draft)

Freud spent the summer of 1876 in Trieste
researching hermaphroditism in eels.
In the lab of zoologist Karl Klaus

he dissected
more than a thousand to check whether they had testicles.

"All the eels I have cut open are of the tenderer sex,"
he reported after the first 400.
Meanwhile

the "young goddesses" of Trieste were proving
unapproachable.
"Since

it is not permitted
to dissect human beings I have
in fact nothing to do with them," he confided in a letter.

Sarah Lucas, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Sedgwick, Closet

"We can't possibly know in advance about the Harlem Renaissance, any more than we can about the New England Renaissance or the English or Italian Renaissance, where the limits of a revelatory inquiry are to be set, once we begin to ask--as it is now beginning to be asked about each of these Renaissances--where and how the power in them of gay desires, people, discourses, prohibitions, and energies were manifest. We know enough already, however, to know with certainty that in each of these Renaissances they were central. (No doubt that's how we will learn to recognize a renaissance when we see one.)

Bestiary, Leonardo da Vinci (trns. Eraldo Affinati)

Sadness. Sadness is reminiscent of the crow. When it sees its newborn children are white, it goes away in distress and with great regret abandons them, and does not feed them until it sees that they have some black feathers.

Gratitude. They say that the virtue of gratitude is seen best in those birds which are called magpies. Aware of the benefits of life and nourishment which they have received from their mothers and fathers, when they see them grown old they make nests for them and nurse them and feed them and with their beaks pull out their old and ugly feathers, and with certain herbs restore their appearance and well-being.

Truth. Although partridges steal eggs from each other, the children born from those egg always return to their true mothers.

Chastity. The turtle-dove is never false to its mate, and if one of them dies, the other observes perpetual chastity, and never rests upon a green bough and never drinks pure water.

The stork. This creature drives evil away from itself by drinking salt water. If it finds its mate is unfaithful it forsakes it. And when it is old, its young nurse it and feed it until it dies.

Foresight. The cock does not crow until it has flapped its wings three times. The parrot, when it goes from bough to bough, never places its foot where it has not first placed its beak.

Some Binaries (Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet)

homo/ heterosexual

secrecy/ disclosure
knowledge/ ignorance
private/ public
masculine/ feminine
majority/ minority
innocence/ initiation
natural/ artificial
new/ old
discipline/ terrorism
canonic/ noncanonic
wholeness/ decadence
urbane/ provincial
domestic/ foreign
health/ illness
same/ different
active/ passive
in/ out
cognition/ paranoia
art/ kitsch
utopia/ apocalypse
sincerity/ sentimentality
voluntarity/ addiction

Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood (trns. David McLintock)

"Whereas for most other human beings--today no less than in primitive times--the need for some kind of authority to relay on is so imperative that their world begins to totter if this authority is threatened." -Freud