rip bozo 💗

yeehaw

Lambrini Girls - No Homo (Official Video)

I said I liked the way she looked But then I said no homo I tell a lie I’m hypnotised By beauty that bestows her Dressed like a daydream I’ll get down on one knee Ethereal reflection The sun rises just for her I said I liked her company But then I said no homo I tell a lie cos she stops time Around her I’m in slo mo The epitome of everything I’ll tell her how I really feel She’d realise that it’s homo for sure I like your face but not in a gay way No homo I said I liked the way she dressed But then I said no homo Pre raphaelite celestial true painting from Picasso An angel otherworldly trapped in purgatory A test from heaven And I’m straight to hell I said I liked the way she talked But then I said no homo But her eloquence a renesance The softest tone well spoken   The epitome of everything If told her how really I feel Then she’d realise that it’s homo for sure I like your face but not in a gay way No homo You see I’m trying to tell you something I And it’s the opposite of what no homo means But for the sake of full transparency I like your face and it’s in a gay way Homo I like your face but not in a gay way I promise no homo I like your face and it’s in a gay way I promise no homo

Saw a yet another top episode list with “Heaven Sent” as number one and literally no other episode from series 8-9. The pain is neverending.

SHERLOCK HOLMES (1922) dir. Albert Parker

On the Origin of (Phallic) Tree Worship

Picture is text from EMPT which reads: “As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship, and it struck me that the fellow must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby, was a collector of obscure volumes.”

Just casually looked up Victorian tree worship (as you do) and came across this…

“…A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship, published anonymously in 1890. The fourth entry in a ten-volume “Phallic Series” printed privately in limited number…”

Obscure volumes, indeed…

@ghislainem70 oh goodness, true, can’t forget that

I believe Holmes was into Classicism, in another form. “Classicism is a force which is often present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions; however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Enlightenment, when Neoclassicism was an important movement in the visual arts.” Now, we know Doyle was heavily involved with the Enlightenment. “In general, classicism can be defined as a style in literature, visual art, music, or architecture that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome, especially fifth- and fourth-century b.c.e. Athens and late Republican Augustan Rome.” Arthur Conan Doyle was a serious student of Greece and it’s history, and during the time of Augustus, there was the famous Romantic poet, Ovid, a huge influence on Shakespeare. I know Holmes is familiar with Shakespeare but I wanted quotes, and found these. “When Doyle himself wrote a play featuring Holmes he first approached two leading Shakespearian actors, Beerbohm Tree and Henry Irving (who both turned it down) before allowing American actor William Gillette to adapt the play…So did Conan Doyle have Shakespeare in mind when he wrote the character of Holmes? According to Ted Friedman, “Sherlock Holmes is familiar with the writings of William Shakespeare … Holmes quoted Shakespeare from 14 of his plays in various cases”. The most famous Shakespeare quote spoken by Holmes, though, is the brief sentence “The game is afoot” which comes in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, and is from Henry V. It hardly indicates that Shakespeare provided a lot of obvious inspiration for Conan Doyle. Robert Fleissner, though, wrote a serious study that finds many connections between Doyle and Shakespeare in 2003 with Shakespearean and Other Literary investigations with the Master Sleuth (and Conan Doyle) Homing in on Holmes.”

Fantastic commentary. Thanks for the addition! Of course, my own favorite Shakespearean quote Holmes uses is from Twelfth Night, on his return to Watson, though ostensibly addressed to Moran: “Journeys end in lovers’ meetings.”

@marsannay quite right! More classics! Pocket editions needn’t be poetry. I prefer the sonnets because that’s more romantic, but Holmes calls himself an “omnivorous” reader, so it could be either.

Also re: the initial discussion of Mycroft and the Diogenes, club culture wasn’t particularly gay, only very middle/upper class—straight, gay or otherwise. And everyone liked naming things after Greek things. The educated Victorians thought of themselves as the second Roman Empire, which wasn’t too far off the mark. Gay culture drew on majority culture’s love of the classics, not vice versa. The Diogenes COULD have been a gay club—they did exist—but it isn’t obviously one.

@ghislainem70 re: TEH, I never stopped to wonder where he got those books. Do you think they were his or might he have bought them off a corner bookstand on the way to the murder scene? I can imagine he’d enjoy Catullus, but “British Birds” and “The Holy War” sound rather unlike him, “omnivorous” taste in books notwithstanding.

@a-candle-for-sherlock I think it’s a question of why ACD chose those titles. Adding the random “British Birds” and “The Holy War” makes it seem the titles could be random, not something he carried on the hiatus. And yet, Catullus is, and was in ACD’s day, infamous as an explicitly gay, even pornographic text, amongst well-educated Victorian men such as ACD, and Holmes. So it’s a case, in my view, of ACD either deliberately or unconsciously throwing camouflage over an otherwise clearly stated suggestion by Holmes to Watson in TEH that Watson has an empty space (on his bookshelf) that needs filling— with gay pornographic Latin verses.

Or not.:)

OH. Well, that’s notably more interesting than I’d expected.

@a-candle-for-sherlock I’m assuming when discussing ACD’s choice to mention Catullus we’ve all read the pornographic Catullus 16. But there is also the beautiful Catullus 65, “Shall I never see you again, brother dearer to me than life?” Which seems something that Holmes might well have dwelt upon during the Hiatus.

IMO, the queercoding is not in any particular style that Holmes (or Watson) might have preferred, but in a combination of the titles, themes, authors, etc. Rather than use an “atmosphere”, he makes various singular references. The Catullus is so clear an example of this that even Samuel Rosenberg noticed it.

In BBC Sherlock, instead of greeting John with a work by Catullus, Sherlock quotes gay writer Edmund White’s autobiographical novel The Beautiful Room is Empty:

… which is slightly more reasonable in 2014 than an armful of Catullus.

*unprintable language aimed at The Empty Hearse’s ability to break my heart again*

@ghislainem70 FWIW a “pocket Petrarch” (a petrarchino) was a thing, and it was always the Canzoniere. Lovely Andrea del Sarto for you

@marsannay look, re: the pocket Petrarch! @totallysilvergirl knows more about it.

This is such a good post. Cheering you all on here, even with no time to join in.

The Holy War is John Bunyan, it’s about the war for the city of Mansoul - man’s soul, and how ultimately it triumphs against evil.

@artemisastarte Bunyan WAS a rebel against cultural hegemony after Holmes’ own heart, but in rather a different direction. Holmes’ morality is all focused outward, and Bunyan’s mostly inward. But the struggle of good and evil in the world does seem to occupy them both.

@marsannay ooo I like those theories, particularly the idea that “The Holy War” refers to his righteous fight against Moriarty! He is rather a white knight. The idealistic realist, which compound nature seems to create a lot of his own discomfort with the world. He’s so sensitive to the ideals of beauty, justice, truth, the underlying love evident in nature and the peace found in music and the transcendence of courage and decency as found in John Watson, while still so aware of their limited capacity to transform people uninterested by them.

@marsannay I have read Jane Eyre but didn’t remember that was in it—I didn’t realize British Birds was so much a part of the cultural consciousness!

So symbolically, the books Holmes offers Watson in The Emoty House could be:

British Birds—missing England an home;

The Holy War—the struggle Holmes has been through the past two years, the invitation for Watson to join him in the fight again;

Catullus—love and wanting.

@a-candle-for-sherlock @marsannay I first heard of Bewick’s History of British Birds in Francis Spufford’s book I May Be Some Time, which is about the English fascination with the poles. He called the book “an established classic [by 1825] and an ornament to any educated household,” so Holmes and Watson likely already had a copy (or perhaps two) at 221B. What had fascinated Spufford as a child was not the birds themselves, but the backgrounds, which inspired his personal interest in the history of Arctic exploration history. Bewick created incredibly rich, detailed backgrounds to show the context in which his birds lived. His biographer, Jenny Uglow, said this:

And isn’t that Doyle all over? His Holmes and Watson stories are more about what’s going on in the background than about the cases themselves. And what’s going on in the background is often inspired by Doyle’s own life.

Oh, yes. So what we have is three classics Doyle would certainly have read himself: British Birds, containing beautiful pictures that would have fascinated the imagination of the man who was a ship’s doctor in international waters and a lifelong traveler; The Holy War, showing a man’s struggle for control of his own soul, which would have captivated someone with a lifelong hunger for meaning, discipline and spiritual clarity, harboring some frustration over his own basic impulses; and Catullus, containing deeply personal, emotional confessions from an ancient poet who loved men and women—which by my reading of Doyle’s character would have echoed his own loves in a way he couldn’t fully accept, but resonated with all the same. Doyle always wrote of queer love turned physical as a minor madness, but one he empathized with deeply—too deeply for me to think he never tried it, or wanted to, at the least.

I see the use of British Birds as a deeper sort of self-reference – Bewick’s background engraving work is what made him a household name, even among people who simply wanted a book about bird identification. By the time The Empty House was published, the same was true of the Sherlock Holmes stories. What Bewick did with sub-illustration, Doyle did with sub-text: they inspired a mass consumption of autobiography by stealth. On the surface, his detective stories are simple, flawed, repetitive; what keeps people coming back to them is that constant feeling of “There’s something bigger here that I just can’t quite put my finger on.” I think Doyle could have intentionally drawn this parallel with Sherlock Holmes’ return in The Empty House.

With respect to Doyle’s experiences with queer love, my own take is that Doyle was far less conflicted than he appeared, but I think this will continue to be a topic for debate, probably forever.

The Empty House - part 3

-Part One

-Part Two

"I moved my head to look at the cabinet behind me. When I turned again Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a grey mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling after-taste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand. “My dear Watson,” said the well-remembered voice, “I owe you a thousand apologies."

(this is in the Watson's Sketchbook series! but it's also a great standalone to send to your friends to illustrate why sherlock holmes is gay)

also - shoutout to @haedraulics for doing a sketch of mid-hiatus Holmes with long hair that captivated my heart so much I needed to include that idea!

I'm a sucky sapphic. 😭

　2.03

Antarctica in Black & White Germany-based photographer Jan Erik Waider shares beautiful shots taken in Antarctica and the South Shetland Islands during a voyage with the sailing ship Bark Europa.

One aspect of DS9 that doesn't get discussed often is how it actually discusses the history of racism and the lasting effects that still has on future generations existing well past the end of that discrimination. It shows how some people will not care much that historical aesthetics come from a time period deeply entrenched in oppression while others are deeply uncomfortable with the entire prospect of playing pretend in a faux historical setting that never existed.

A lot of Racism is Over Now settings like to either show a black man being blatantly racist to some fantastical being to illustrate how the times have changed or just pretends that the entire generational baggage of racism would simply disappear. Deep Space 9 is one of the few shows I can think of that actually discusses what the lasting impacts of our deeply racist society would mean in a post scarcity world.

my mom is playin fuckn animal crossing in real life

she got this painting for $75 in an old case at an antique market shes been going to for years, and she thought it looks really beautiful, so she sent an email to a local art center to have it appraised

and now she has an art conservator in her emails making a plan to have her come bring it in to be appraised as a genuine Hokusai wood block print from over a hundred of years ago

thats so fucked up to me. my mom went fuckin shopping at Crazy Redd's

no joke, she got it at an antique market. but she didnt even buy the painting. she bought a bag that the painting was in, cuz she's an artist.

when she got home, the bag fell over, and the painting fell out. into the lap of an unsuspecting small town idaho girl (my ma) (that's how she described it).

movie shit.

art.

Republicans: we can just have Elon Musk go to Wisconsin and give everyone money. He'll give them a million dollars. It's all legal as long as we hold power forever and can stop anyone from doing anything to stop us. All of Wisconsin is bribed, nothing can go wrong now

The invincible Susan Crawford:

And if I said this was the hottest adult shauna has ever looked ?

YELLOWJACKETS 106. Saints ➙ 303. Them's The Brakes