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People talk about the surprise albums from people like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé that drop with zero warning but I have just been existing in this world where every album I've ever heard in my life has been a surprise album because I didn't know that musicians had schedules that we could see

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are you in a good headspace to receive my triple barrage hell nightmare skeleton attack right now.

#unreality

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(guy stuck in a timeloop) fuckkkkk i got yesterday tomorrow

#unreality

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The real reason magnets do that is because they are perverse sexual beasts

#unreality

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one of the funnier moments in pride and prejudice is when elizabeth's only reasonable cogent competent grownup relatives meet darcy for fifteen minutes and immediately conclude that he's in love with her, that she already knows, that the vibe is complex, and that it's none of their business. they shut up and carry on with their own lives until the plot forces them at gunpoint to get involved.

#charlotte also clocks him pretty quickly but she loses points for wildly misunderstanding what elizabeth has going on #austen

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Everybody hates on paywalls but they've saved me from reading so many NYT articles 🫂

#from the bottom of my heart fuck the new york times

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God. I have some kind of brain fungus. The post got reblogged. I reread the post. I had the thought:

''One fun and fucked up thing about this is that if Way Down Hadestown (concept album version) and Chant II (NYTW version where persephone TALKS) are set up in direct conversation, that sets up How Long as a sort of twisted reprise of Hey Little Songbird. In Way Down Hadestown, Orpheus and Eurydice argue, and in Hey Little Songbird the content of that argument is put to the test; we find out whether Eurydice was listening to him, whether she has changed her position, whether she is capable of changing her position. How Long has a similar relationship to Chant II, with Hades in Eurydice's place, with us finding out whether he has been listening to his lover, whether he has moved or even can move.''

And then I had the thought ''Doesn't Hey Little Songbird kinda sound like How Long?'' and because I don't know anything about music, I checked the rhyme and scansion.

Here's some of How Long:

Hades my/ husband, __/ Hades my /light Hades my/ darkness If you had/ heard how he/ sang to/night You’d pity/ poor Orphe/us All of his /sorrow won’t/ fit in his /chest It just burns like a /fire in the/ pit of his/ chest And his heart is a /bird on a /spit in his/ chest How long, how long, how long? How long? Just as/ long as/ Hades is /king Nothing comes of/ wishing on /stars And nothing /comes of the /songs people /sing However/ sorry they /are. Give them a /piece __ and/ they’ll take it /all Show them a /crack, __ they’ll /tear down the wall Lend them an /ear, and the/ kingdom will fall The kingdom will / fall for a /song

[caption: The above quoted lines are divided by slashes into feet (groupings of syllables, each containing one stressed syllable), with each stressed syllable in bold. /end caption.]

Idk what to count as ‘’verse’’ vs ‘’chorus’’ here but: there are two metric structures at play in this song.  

First structure is a 4-line grouping with a loose ABAB rhyme scheme with alternating-length lines of roughly dactylic verse: 3 full dactyls plus a single stressed syllable followed by 2 full dactyls plus a single stressed syllable. Often there’s extraneous unstressed syllables or a syllable stretched to cover two, or a beat of silence in lieu of an unstressed syllable (represented by underscores) but we’re focusing on rhyme scheme and number of feet here. Inconsistent dactyllism is the least important thing going on.

Second structure is also a 4-line grouping of dactyllic lines of verse, but this time with a CCCD rhyme scheme, with three matching 4-foot lines followed by a 3-foot line that breaks the rhyme scheme. The ‘’chorus’’ follows this second structure, but is not the only place that structure is used. The ‘’give them a piece and the kingdom will fall’’ bit uses the second structure as well. Please note that while the C in the CCCD changes with each instance, D is only ever ‘’song’’ and ‘’long.’’ This makes it clear that ‘’the kingdom will fall for a song’’ section is in direct conversation with the chorus.

I also marked up Hey Little Songbird, and initially thought, well, this was a waste of forty five minutes, because Hades is doing a completely different thing in Songbird. He's got 5-line stanzas with an AABBC rhyme scheme, with the AABB lines having 4 feet and the C having 3, and his syllable count is doing whatever it wants. But this is what Eurydice is doing in Hey Little Songbird:

Strange is the /call of this/ strange /man I want to /fly down and /feed at his /hand I want a /nice soft /place to /land I want to/ lie down /forever

Suddenly, /nothing is /as it was Where are you /now, Orphe/us Wasn’t it/ gonna be /the two of/ us Weren’t we /birds of a /feather

[caption: The above quoted lines are broken up into metric feet with stressed syllables bolded, as before. /end caption.]

That's the chorus structure of How Long! That's 3 lines of 4-foot dactyllic verse with the 4th foot being only a single stressed syllable, all ending on the same sound, followed by a 4th line of only 3 feet with a different ending sound, and most importantly, the meter-and-rhyme-breaking 4th line in each of Eurydice's verses in songbird ends with the same sound both times. By the standards of Hadestown's rhymes, ''forever'' and ''feather'' are a pair of rhyming endings. Her verses are talking to each other the way that ''the kingdom will fall for a song'' talks to the chorus in How Long.

Which means How Long is answering Eurydice.

Eurydice is arguably expressing the same core sentiment as the chorus in How Long: she is asking how much longer she can hold out. She's saying something has to give.

What I also find interesting is that in Songbird, both times, Eurydice's 3-foot ending line is overlapped by the start of Hades' next verse; he cuts her off. The rhyme scheme is obviously deliberate and she clearly sings everything she was going to sing, but the effect is that it feels like she has been interrupted; like maybe she would have finished out to a full 4-foot line of verse, maybe even found an ending syllable that matched the rhyme scheme in the rest of her verse, if he'd let her finish. Or at least, maybe she would have held her ending note longer, given space to breathe. This isn't true in How Long. The final syllable of the 3-foot line is strung out each time it is sung, and often there's a beat of silence after it. Hades and Persephone let each other finish, and in the final chorus he joins her.

I just want so badly to be able to See a production where Eurydice sings “everybody sipping ambrosia wine in a gold mine in hadestown” and orpheus looks her right in the eye without missing a chord on his guitar and says “everybody hungry everybody tired everybody slaves by the sweat of his brow the wage is nothing and the work is hard it’s a graveyard in hadestown.” And then they sing the chorus together!

#if anyone has advice on how to make this post more screen reader friendly please tell me #hadestown #long post

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sigh. thanks for dragging this out and making me chase my own tail again. everybody hang on while i scan hey little songbird and how long real quick

I just want so badly to be able to See a production where Eurydice sings “everybody sipping ambrosia wine in a gold mine in hadestown” and orpheus looks her right in the eye without missing a chord on his guitar and says “everybody hungry everybody tired everybody slaves by the sweat of his brow the wage is nothing and the work is hard it’s a graveyard in hadestown.” And then they sing the chorus together!

#hadestown #long post

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tumblr should add a button that lets you not see someone's posts until the election is over

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#from the river to the sea

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this ramadan we pray for peace and aid for the people of palestine. this ramadan we remember the previous ramadans, where thousands of palestinians were massacred. this ramadan we honour palestine, and may we see a free palestine next ramadan

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there are so many things on gods green earth that are not platonic but are also not romantic. the erotic, the familial, the unconditional, weird codependency, weird codependency (hatred edition), etc. let us all broaden our horizons

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a good sumerian inexplicably donated five packs of 500 temporary tattoos to the classroom, each pack featuring identical pictures of a different invasive species of bug

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Thank youuuuuu also: the incredibly specific horror of knowing that the actual majority of people don't hate you--might not understand you, might not believe you, might not help you the way you need to be helped, but will still be your family or your friend or your teacher or your counselor if you do tell them the truth--but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it might be okay to tell someone. It only matters that it might not be. It only matters that you can't know. You can't tell anyone, because if you guess wrong once who it's safe to tell, that's the end of everything, and so you can't find out whether the person sitting next to you would seek your immediate destruction if they learned what you are, and so you can't feel closeness or trust with anyone. The world might be full of other people silently fighting the same battle you're fighting, afraid in the same way that you are, but you can't find that out because you can't ever ask. When you do find out, by accident, you can't do anything to help if it means you might be seen.

There are a couple moments in Animorphs--the infamous oatmeal book comes to mind--where a random person starts to freak out in public in a way that the kids immediately recognize. They immediately all understand what they are looking at--a sudden public expression of a particular trauma that is definitionally hidden from view 98% of the time--and they sit frozen in their seats, afraid even to look at each other because of what that might give away, schooling their faces so that no one can see in their eyes that they know. In what bills itself as a superhero story, the team sits and watches silently as someone is ushered out of the room to be controlled or killed, because if they give up their secret now they can't help anyone ever again. I'm trying to think of any piece of children's media that dealt either that brutally or that compassionately with the way that institutional terrorization deprives children (and people in general) of human connection. and also you're a shapeshifter.

i’m re-reading animorphs, a series i loved when i was a closeted young child, as a queer adult and feeling a little insane over it actually. like ok so. imagine you are just a normal regular kid until one day, a chance encounter with an adult unlike any adult you've ever met before abruptly changes who you are as a person, and suddenly you are not like other kids at all. and now you have to fight a secret battle for survival, but you cannot tell anyone around you about it, because many of the people around you harbor a secret violent hatred for who you are, and if you tell someone without realizing the person you're talking to is one of the people who hates you, that person will either put you through horrific harm to make you like them or just outright kill you. this is true of every single person around you—your parents, your siblings, your friends, your teachers—except for a few other kids who you know share your same secret.

and now you have to try to maintain close relationships with the people you love even though you cannot tell them who you really are, who you spend your time with, who you go to when you're not with them. when you see your secret companions in public, you have to try to pretend you barely know them, because being seen together too often could lead to suspicion. you are enduring consistent ongoing trauma that you cannot talk to anyone about because anyone whose job is to help people through trauma may also be one of the people who wants to kill you. also you're a shapeshifter. like yeah ok i wonder why so many people who were obsessed with animorphs as a kid turned out to be queer

#i need to read the oatmeal book again. is where this is going. #animorphs

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#from the river to the sea

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the grind NEVER starts. i am sleeping