Illustration For Wuthering Heights By Felix Abel Klaer

Also forever grumbling about the fact that people want to divorce the myth but more specifically the Homeric Hymn to Demeter from its cultic purposes; Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries play a major role in the story and this has a huge effect on the storytelling, and if we divorce all of the themes it imposes on Persephone/Demeter’s storylines from their myth in this adaptation, you lose a significant amount of context and meaning

Sleeping Bacchant by Károly Lotz (19th Century)

What is your favorite obscure Greek mythological fact

Hm, probably the Orphic fragment that says that Persephone was born with a monstrous appearance (fragment 87 according to Athanassakis, fragment 58 in the translation of Otto Kern’s compilation of fragments at HellenicGods.org):

…"of the daughter of Zeus, whom he begat of his mother Rhea; or of Demeter, as having two eyes in the natural order, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as having also horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast (θηλη), whence mystically she is called Athêlâ, but commonly Phersephoné and Koré"…

It's so totally different from all other versions that only describe her as very beautiful (as goddesses tend to be). Sometimes I regret that I didn't give my Persephone horns.

Studies for the Death of Antigone

Albert von Keller

c. 1907

love how kids are always so uncontrollably ravenous for horror. they beg you to tell them spooky stories even when they know it will give them nightmares. every school has gruesome rumours about the kid who fell off their chair or tripped onto a cloakroom peg. we used to stand in the playground of my primary school staring up at the castle looming across from us and swear we could see a ghostly figure wave before plummeting endlessly to the water below…. all of this passion and yet most kid’s horror media is complete shit. what a waste.

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.

Joan Didion, from On Keeping A Notebook in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Cats at the Temple of Philae, Egypt

Source: CatsWithJobs Reddit

Trying to ignore or erase things like racism, patriarchal attitudes towards sexuality, antisemitism, xenophobia, ableism, etc renders a reading experience a lot less meaningful (and less interesting) than actually talking about it and confronting it. If you go into denial the moment you realize that Dracula is loaded with Victorian ethnic and sexual anxieties, what’s even the point? There isn’t much else to the book.

If you’re reading Dracula for the first time and you’re not acquainted with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s book Monster Theory: Reading Culture, try reading this excerpt and seeing how it impacts your reading of Dracula: Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

Manuel Bujados (1889-1954), ''La Esfera'', Vol. 8, #380, 1921 Source