#tish

Within neo-colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the black male body continues to be perceived as an embodiment of bestial, violent, penis-as-weapon hypermasculine assertion. Psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure. It has taken contemporary commodification of blackness to teach the world that this perceived threat, whether real or symbolic, can be diffused by a process of fetishization that renders the black masculine ‘menace’ feminine through a process of patriarchal objectification. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#fetishism #objectification #imagination

True the greater part of the Irish people was close to starvation. The numbers of weakened people dying from disease were rising. So few potatoes had been planted that, even if they escaped bight, they would not be enough to feed the poor folk who relied upon them. More and more of those small tenants and cottagers, besides, were being forced off the land and into a condition of helpless destitution. Ireland, that is to say, was a country utterly prostrated. Yet the Famine came to an end. And how was this wonderful thing accomplished? Why, in the simplest way imaginable. The famine was legislated out of existence. It had to be. The Whigs were facing a General Election. ↗

— Edward Rutherfurd

#famine #ireland #potato #whigs #imagination

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge ↗

— John le Carré

#british-intelligence #george-smiley #ian-bannon #ian-richardson #moles

Many mickles make a muckle. ↗

— Ron Chernow

#scottish-adage #life

Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled. She snapped the box closed. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint. There might have been a little crying. But mostly… she danced. ↗

— Cora Carmack

#british #dance #garrick #happy #love

After lunch, we made love like it was the 4th of July. And because it was the 4th of July, it felt exceptionally patriotic. I even wore my British flag t-shirt to commemorate the evening. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#love #patriotic #love

Not the bee upon the blossom, In the pride o' sunny noon; Not the little sporting fairy, All beneath the simmer moon; Not the poet, in the moment Fancy lightens in his e'e, Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture, That thy presence gi'es to me. ↗

— Robert Burns

#scottish #love

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. (James Meek in interview with TMO) ↗

— James Meek

#marcel-proust #peoples-act-of-love #scottish-writers #love

Repress the natural and it comes back even stronger: not everyone can be a fetishist ↗

— Philippe Lejeune

#repression #nature

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water. ↗

— Norman MacCaig

#scottish-poetry #religion