I Feed Her To The Beast And The Beast Is Me by: Jamison Shea
Published by: Macmillan Children’s
Publication Date: 8/29/2023
I’d like to start this review by thanking NetGalley and the publisher. I received this eARC in exchange for an honest review.
BUY THIS BOOK! Last year was a bit much for me so it took me a while to get to this book. Buy it, get it at the library, something! Get this book into your hands and into your eyes or ears! It’s so…
favorite thing ab chatgpt is that if it doesn’t know something it’ll just start fucking lying. like blatantly fucking lying.
my dad teaches english classes and he just got a final paper with this sentence: “In terms of style, both poets are known for their use of imagery, but O'Hara's tends to be more straightforward and concrete, while Stevens' is often more abstract and metaphorical — for example, in O'Hara's poem "The French / Window," he writes: "A cat walks along the garden wall / and the tree waves its branches / The French / windows are blah" (lines 1-4).”
the thing about “The French / Window” is that it is not a poem that exists. at all. like, it was literally just written by chatgpt then inexplicably named as a famous frank o’hara poem. and it’s so. fucking. funny. sooo basically heads up for finals season — those of you who use chatgpt, be warned, because you will quite literally be citing nonexistent texts and your professors will show it to their daughters and together they will laugh at you endlessly and you will deserve it
the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.
capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.
now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.
and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.
and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.
and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".
it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"
writing reader inserts is so funny because it's like. yeah you would NOT say that but now you do and you're gonna enjoy it. it's inevitably pouring a part of you into this fic. it's describing your dissociative daydreams in overly detail to everyone searching specifically for food to feed their dissociative daydreams. it's coming up with a hundred different scenarios on how to get railed by your favorite 2D man and yeah his dick is always big and he wants you so badly. it's playing barbie with Y/N who is like an universal OC at this point. it's going on silly little adventures in my mind and taking you all with me. reader inserts i love you so much.
I based these on the quotes most mentioned in the notes of that post about that telegraph article (btw jkr didn't even win the vote. Dickens did)
edit to show my tags: #i just really love books and want a collection of everyones favorite quotes#feel free to mention quotes that arent in english! it did say world literature
edit 2: I made another poll with non english quotes. And obviously you can make your own version
louise glück was an tremendous poet in her own life and also taught, advised, and nurtured uncountable other poets. her picking richard siken’s crush for the yale younger poets prize is a well known fact, but she selected a number of other poets for publication during her tenure as the contest judge that i think are worth knowing.
peter streckfus, cuckoo (2003)
richard siken, crush (2004)
jay hopler, green squall (2005)
jessica fisher, frail-craft (2006)
fady joudah, the earth in the attic (2007)
arda collins, it is daylight (2008)
ken chen, juvenilia (2009)
katherine larson, radial symmetry (2010)
poetry is a community! read her—and also read the poets she wanted to promote.
"'think of the children' always gets support unless what you're thinking about is leaving them with a better world. Somehow, we never need to think of the children when we're talking about climate change, or preventing pandemic diseases, or anything else that costs money. But here we are." - Unbreakable by Mira Grant.
i'm gonna go one step further and say it's actively good to engage with media you have fundamental ideological disagreements with, especially when you use that as a testing ground to conceptualize your own worldview and help you crystalize your perspective on things