“MY ARROGANCE KNOWS NO BOUNDS AND I WILL MAKE NO PEACE TODAY, AND YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY TO FIND A WOMAN LIKE ME” | Jenny Holzer, “Projections”
Important note : this is a projection by artist Jenny Holzer, but the text comes from a poem by Arab American writer Mohja Kahf, ’Ishtar Awakens in Chicago’. Holzer used Kahf’s work with her full agreement, I believe they’ve collaborated several times, but please check out the full context of the poem below.
My arrogance knows no bounds And I will make no peace today And you shall be so lucky To find a woman like me
Today neither will the East claim me nor the West admit me Today my belly is a well wherein serpents are coiled ready to poison the world, and you should be so lucky.
All I have is my arrogance I will teach it to lean back and smoke a cigarette in your faces, and you should be so lucky
No I will make no peace even though my hands are empty I will talk as big as I please I will be all or nothing And I will jump before the heavy trucks And I will saw off my leg at the thigh before I bend one womanly knee
I am poison And you will drink me And you should be so lucky.
This movie here, is going to be the FIRST MAINSTREAM LESBIAN LOVE STORY of INDIA, ever.
The ban on homosexuality was lifted in India just last year, in September and now we’re going to have this hopefully fabulous movie here which revolves around a small-town girl who falls in love with a girl and eventually comes out to her family.
“A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.”
—
Stephen Scobie, on the Naropa Institute’s 1994 tribute to Allen Ginsberg
Absences of women in history don’t “just happen,” they are made.
butch/femme dating is one thing (a good thing) but I feel like we don’t talk enough about the specific and deeply funny and affectionate nature of friendships between butches and femmes and specifically i love the bonding over not understanding various things that the other is into but not in the mean-spirited way straight people seem to love doing
A research tip from a friendly neighborhood librarian!
I want to introduce you to the wonderful world of subject librarians and Libguides.
I’m sure it’s common knowledge that scholars and writers have academic specialties. The same is true for subject librarians! Most libraries use a tool called Libguides to amass and describe resources on a given topic, course, work, person, etc. (I use them for everything. All hail Libguides.) These resources can include: print and ebooks, databases, journals, full-text collections, films/video, leading scholars, data visualizations, recommended search terms, archival collections, digital collections, reliable web resources, oral histories, and professional organizations.
So, consider that somewhere out there in the world, there may be a librarian with a subject specialty on the topic you’re writing on, and this librarian may have made a libguide for it.
Because you’re searching library collections, you won’t have access to all the content in the guides, and there will probably be some link rot (dead links), but you can still request resources through your own library with interlibrary loan, or even request that your library purchase the resources! Even without the possibility of full-text access, libguides can give you the words, works, people, sites, and collections to improve your research.
Search [your topic] + libguide and see what you get!
This is…amazing. I am angry that I didn’t know about this until now. Now I can ~academically~ indulge my fascination with the 1918 flu pandemic? When I have organic chem homework and a lab report due tomorrow? I both love this and hate this.
Use the libguide community site and search by topic, institution, or even your friendly neighborhood librarian! (If you have a librarian or two who you trust to put you on the right path, you might be able to get that guidance even if you don’t have time to reach out directly!) If their site says “LibGuide” it’ll show up in THAT community somewhere!
Interested in browsing until you find something that catches your attention? Springshare (the vendor that manages LibGuides) curates lists of interesting, amusing, and innovative libguides! (Okay some of these are boring because they’re geared towards UX and data visualization for librarians, but still…)
Interested in seeing the stuff that YOUR local or institutional librarians are trying to promote? Looking for ways to make the most of the resources that are freely available to you just down the road? Libraries from Atlantic City to Saratoga Springs to South Australia are making guides for their various resources, which describe everything from how to search databases to how to read call numbers to how to access online resources like e-books and video subscriptions!
Even major institutions like the New York Public Library have guides, on everything from genealogy to the history of New York neighborhoods!
OP is evil. *disappears into link forest, is never seen again*
