Ugh. How is that tool even still around? About that tea cup though… Why wouldn’t he drink from it? It’s a tea cup, made to drink tea out of. (like, it’s not an “art piece” that’s going to be hurt or ruined by tea in it) If I paid 36 million dollars for a tea cup I would sure as hell drink out of it, apologetically. The people complaining about that one need to cut loose and go USE their granny’s dishes or something.
Well…it’s from the 15th century, so not exactly granny’s dishes. There is the potential there for hot liquid, tannins in the tea, or his saliva to damage it; also washing all of those things off could damage it. It’s not likely, but the possibility is there. So like, there was some risk involved in sipping from the cup.
Now, all that being said, it’s still…a teacup. And it’s his teacup, much as I dislike the idea of cultural treasures being private property to do with as the owner pleases. (”Cultural treasure” is a messy discussion to have in itself.) So you know, why shouldn’t he do what he wants with it?
He did it without really thinking about it, which adds a sort of graceless charm to it, really. But as a performance, drinking tea from a $36M antique teacup is a thought-provoking way to spark a discussion about how we value art and why, and why humanity places so much value on the passage of time as it applies to objects.
And it has the advantage of, unlike most artworks designed to “provoke discussion”, not punching down on another human being. He just had a drink of goddamn tea.
spiders will pull their own legs clean off if they get damaged because most of them can regrow legs during molting, which explains why you often see spiders missing a leg but never any missing half a leg?
some remarkably distressing scientists proved this by getting a spider to pull off all of its legs and then feeding its limbless torso for months until it sprouted a full complement of legs again and then hopefully used them to get the fuck out of dodge
baby spiders don’t get lenses until their first molt and before that they just have baby eyes and while this ought not to be any weirder than the concept of baby teeth, welp,
there are so many spiders floating around thousands of metres up in the air that they’re described as “aerial plankton”
The Sky Is Full Of Spiders
there are spider-parasitising spiders but instead of laying eggs in organs or stealing blood or anything like that they just ride on top of bigger spiders and steal snacks when their mighty steed is eating
there are ant-mimicking spiders that use their disguises to raid ant nests and w/e but there are also ant mimics that just. hang out. they make fake ant colonies full of fake ants. sometimes the actual ants that they’re mimicking find their house and live with them. stealth 100
some mother spiders live in communal family nests, where multiple mothers can work together to bring down bigger prey while all their collected babies are cared for by the babysitters
some mother spiders feed their babies mouth to mouth like birds
some mother spiders carry their babies around and i was aware of this but not the fact that if you steal their eggsac they’ll freak out and search for it for hours and sometimes end up adopting anything that’s vaguely the right size, they will carry around empty snail shells for weeks and lovingly dote on them…
guys i am literally about to cry over spider moms
i borrowed the book op cites from the library (biology of spiders by rainer f. foelix) because of this post and my two favourite new spider facts are
-they don’t just have an exoskeleton – they also have a secret partial inside skeleton
and
-you know the guy who gave spiders drugs and took pictures of their fucked up webs? he ended up studying them because his buddy was studying garden spiders and they spin webs at 2-5 am and his buddy was like, Ugh, fuck this, i want to sleep in, do you have anything i can give these spiders to make them spin webs at not two in the morning -and this guy, A Pharmacologist, was like, hell yea, here are some amphetamines for your spiders -and all those did was make the spiders spin some exceptionally weird webs at 2-5am -and i guess his buddy gave up in disgust at these spiders who wouldn’t let him sleep but mr. spider amphetamines was like, you know what, this is cool, i’m gonna keep going with this
Having recently spent time in various retail outlets, I’m reliably informed we’re starting to get in the Halloween spirit. As it happens, I’ve read some great ghost stories, creepy tales, and otherwise spooky stuff this year, so I thought I’d do my part by writing up a little rec list. Many of these are not exactly obscure—Machado is a darling of queer readerly circles, and the Ward won the 2017 National Book Award—but I’m sharing the wealth in case they’re new to you!
Her Body and Other Partiesby Carmen Maria Machado: Queer short stories with an excellent ear for both pop culture (several of these stories are laugh-out-loud funny, in addition to shivering one’s spine) and a sort of X-Files-esque aesthetic of the eerie and the fantastic. Many of these stories have a vibe of dark fairy-tales reworked through queer and feminist lenses (“The Husband Stitch,” “Mothers”). Others play with format in really delightful and effective ways: “Inventory,” for example, takes the form of a list of all the people with whom the author has had sex, and only as the story progresses does a larger, darker narrative begin to peek in at the edges. Likewise, “Especially Heinous” presents us with 272 episode summaries from Law & Order: SVU, which gradually diverge (I ASSUME) from the actual episodes as the story goes along. This is one of the less scary volumes on this list, but it’s still spooky enough to be satisfyingly Halloween-appropriate.
Sing, Unburied, Singby Jesmyn Ward: The ghosts in Ward’s novel are literal—the characters have an everyday, working relationship with the supernatural, including the presences of people who have died—but they’re also figurative. Sing, Unburied, Sing is deeply engaged with the lasting legacy of the US prison system and its various ghosts: the ghosts of the slave plantation that live on in the forced prison labor required disproportionately of Black men; the ghosts of their own past traumas that haunt the formerly-incarcerated; the ghosts of their absent fathers that haunt the children even of still-living prisoners; and the legacy of poverty that this system passes on from one generation to the next. I am probably about the 69238th person to compare this novel to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but the ghosts do work similarly here: they’re both a fact of life for these characters, part of the ingrained fabric of the natural world; and also a way of talking about horrific systemic oppression; and both levels work extremely well. I also appreciated Ward’s ability to maintain empathy for all her point-of-view characters, even when they are making heartbreaking and destructive decisions. The meth-addicted and un-maternal mother Leonie would have been particularly easy to demonize, but Ward resists the temptation, something I very much respect.
Fever Dreamby Samantha Schweblin: This short novel is EXTREMELY CREEPY. Y’all. It creeped me the fuck out. Honestly I don’t even want to say much about it beforehand, since part of the effect depends on immersing yourself in the (literally) fevered, stream-of-consciousness(ish) narration for long enough to figure out what’s happening. I read it all in one sitting of about three hours, and I thought it was incredibly effective: claustrophobic, disorienting, and reminiscent of the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare, in a way that the reader can’t help but share. I especially liked way Schweblin leaves the story very open to several extremely different interpretations of what’s going on—all of which are scary, just in different ways. A seriously well-written and freaky little book.
Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Countryby Chavisa Woods: Those who liked the Machado collection will probably like this one, too. It has a similarly assertive level of queerness (maybe even more so), a similar sort of dry, situational humor, and a similar feel for the eerie and the grotesque—though the fantastical in Woods’s fiction tends less fairy-tale, more Weird Science. Woods’s collection focuses particularly on the experience of growing up extremely poor in extremely rural American towns—her narrator-protagonists are generally adults either returning to, looking back on, or otherwise trying to engage with, the small towns of their childhoods. For my money, the three strongest stories are “How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama” (in which the queer, big-city sister returns to the town of her origin and has a weird, and then weirder, and then TRULY weird night), “Zombie” (in which two pre-adolescent girls befriend the inhabitant of their local graveyard), and “What’s Happening on the News?” (which deals, in multiple ways, with the inculcation of value systems in children—in particular, evangelical Christianity and US military recruitment).
Things We Lost in the Fireby Mariana Enriquez: This collection is the second on this list from Argentina (the first being the Schweblin), so apparently there’s a lot of great literary horror coming out of Buenos Aires right now. Enriquez’s work is more standard scary-story fare than the Schweblin, but these stories are notable for their extremely well-evoked sense of place. One memorable and cheer-worthy story, “Spiderweb,” takes place in the rural north, during a vacation shared by a woman and the unpleasant man she impetuously married, but for most of these stories, “place” means the poorer neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. In a story like “The Dirty Kid,” for example, the rampant poverty becomes a kind of supernatural spectre in its own right, or at least makes it difficult for the narrator to distinguish between everyday cruelty and supernatural darkness. Other stories use Buenos Aires as a covertly post-apocalyptic setting, or past political turmoil as an ominous backdrop for a coming-of-age tale. Overall a very satisfying & well-executed scary-story collection.
The Third Hotelby Laura van den Berg: When I finished this novel I told @greywash that “The film adaptation should be directed by David Lynch… except it’s also outspokenly feminist, so actually, maybe not.” Van den Berg does have a great sense for the kinds of details that make Lynch films enjoyable, though, and The Third Hotel—in which the recently-widowed elevator saleswoman Clare goes to Havana on a film-festival trip originally planned out with her late husband Richard (a film studies professor specializing in horror) only to repeatedly glimpse the supposedly-dead Richard in various places throughout the city—hits most of them: doppelgangers, pseudo-resurrection, people putting on different personae for reasons they themselves don’t entirely understand, travel that gets surreally out of control, nightmarish parties, unexplained interpersonal quirks, the breakdown of domestic life, the spooky underbelly of everyday Americana, and so on. At the same time, van den Berg offers some sharp commentary on the kinds of social burdens and expectations that are placed on women, and how women’s weirdnesses are processed differently to those of men. A highly recommended and super addictive read.
A Scottish factory worker shows off her tattoos. Her right arm bears emblems from her sweetheart’s Royal Navy warship. On her left are the names of friends who died minesweeping the North Sea. July 1917.
Mooncustafer 