#absorb chinese media as if through osmosis

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I love your book reviews under the banner ‘Treat Your S(h)elf’ - nice play on words. You have such a wide and cultured range of interests that I really learn something new. Do you read poetry? What are your favourite poets? What are you currently reading?

I love reading poetry because as the poet Robert Frost put it succinctly, “Poetry is when emotion has found its thought, and thought has found words”.

Poets are before anything else in the words of W.H. Auden, “a person who is madly in love with language” and language is the bedrock of any culture and society and ultimately civilisation. When you truly think about it, poetry is meaningless when it has been left to gather dust on a piece of paper. It is simply a memory of an idea conjured up by a writer with something to say. Poetry must be read, it needs to be experienced because it keeps these ideas burning. These meaningful concepts about the nature of life, death and everything. Every time a person reads a poem, a new bright spark emerges in that person’s head. A new way of thinking, a new way of understanding. That is exactly why poetry must be read because it is the essence of our language.

The reasons I personally read poetry, you ask? Here are some reasons I can think of from the top of my head others are too personal to reveal:

I read poetry because poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn. And I read poetry because it is what happens when my mind stops working , and for a moment, all I do is feel. This is good therapy for me as I’m not the most openly emotional or prone to displays of emotion in public. It’s just not how I was built. Poetry helps one to feel. So some poems remain so close to my heart.

I remember when I was about to go on my first tour to Afghanistan I was quite calm and cold blooded because that was and is my nature. My father - who served with distinction in uniform like his father and grand father, and great-grandfather before him - was always proud and supportive of me being the black sheep of the family as the only girl in our family going through Sandhurst and now I was off to the last embers of a war in Afghanistan that everyone had forgotten about. He was concerned - like the rest of my family - like any loving parent about what might happen. But he didn’t question my professionalism or my abilities so he didn’t give me that lecture instead he thrust in my hand both classical literature (Thucydides and Homer in particular) and the works of selected poets. He told me poetry will save your life. He wasn’t anxious about my physical safety he was thinking about my soul. For what happens during war and what comes after if and when I come home. Long story short: poetry saved my life.

By nature I am restless to an incredible annoying degree. I fear being bored. I find it hard to sit and be idle. Poetry is my balm for boredom.

I am incredibly busy and I work punishing long hours. Time is premium. People make demands on me and my time. Poems are like super-condensed stories, and are therefore usually short enough to be read over your morning tea/coffee. In this fast-paced world we live in, sometimes poems are a better alternative to reading fully-fledged novels, or even short stories and poetry gives you the chance to continue to expand your literary horizons even during the busiest times in your life. And becoming more widely read is an incredible way to ensure you are continuously growing, and learning, while becoming a more cultured individual at the same time. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you and when I read some of those beautiful pieces of poetry by my favourite poets it's like the paper is filled with the breathings of my heart.

The most frightening thing is people I know stop growing culturally after they leave university and get on with the business of life i.e. careers, marriage and family. Once on that treadmill they don’t or can’t stop. They are unable to step off and take a breath. Poetry gives you a breather and helps you to re-centre your priorities.  The more you read poetry, the greater your quest for knowledge awakens. Doorways will open inside your mind and unlock your hidden potential for a greater understanding of life. Anyone who reads poetry often can connect with this conclusive sentence formation that defines your very questionable outlook on life.

I also believe poetry allows us to be less rigid in our thinking with an authentic, personal touch. When I read poems, nothing is often straightforward. Every poem has a meaning hiding under it, but it is blocked by a myriad of literary devices such as metaphors and symbolism. It is important to be able to think more figuratively because it allows you to understand ideas and perspectives in a more abstract and possibly more meaningful way. Sometimes I find that having a single page of beautifully crafted words can be enough of a distraction to spark a sudden creative leap in my brain. There have been many times where I've miraculously thought of ways to solve a problem (big or small) purely because reading poetry forced me to think differently from the usual day-to-day thoughts required for general life.

Poetry is best read when you’re hidden from the outside world, in a quiet little spot, somewhere away from all the hustle and bustle. It is increasingly hard to do just that. I have so many demands on my time and limited space but I force myself to carve out the time and space to do this - one must try. As a rule I switch off all social media (not that I have many to begin with but most definitely my phone). The best time for me to carve out time is when I’m traveling as I’m able to shut out everything around me. Usually when I’m waiting for a flight in the business class departure lounge it’s quiet and not too many people to distract me and there is usually a delay to the flight. When I check into a hotel I feel a disconnect to the world around me. I feel like an alien. Poetry helps me to connect again. Poetry calms and focuses the mind. With poetry I can almost reset my day because it’s not just a time zone I have to get used to but also a state of mind - and especially if I find myself being unproductive too!

I often escape Paris and go into the countryside. I love going on walks, hikes, mountaineering, and other outdoor pursuits. It allows me the space and time to read poetry and reflect in peace. And of course I snatch time before I go to sleep to read a poem if I am not too tired.

The point is that I need the head space to absorb the poem and take some time to work out the meaning of the full entity. I try not swallow a whole book in one sitting, instead I read a few poems and leave the book until the next day or a few days depending on my schedule. Sometimes, you can read a poem again and you will find other meanings or pick up on information that you couldn’t see before. That’s poetry, you create the film, journey or picture inside your mind from reading the words on the page.

As for my favourite poets this is of course is a very personal choice. I didn’t read English at university but rather my academic interests were Classics and History, so I profess a very paltry poetic palate. Still, I’m grateful to those friends more versed than I to point me to other poets. So I do my best to keep an open mind and try and read poetry recommended by others or some thing that captures my eye when I browse through book stores or read it as a passing reference in a book I am reading. 

Different poets and poems are discovered at one stage of life and where I happened to live in the world and only take on another meaning when re-read them at another stage. So I tend to re-visit poets I used to read as a teen and then see how it resonates now.

The majority of my poetic readings are in my native English and Norwegian languages but because I have varying degrees of fluency in other languages (because I grew up there for instance) I love widening my poetic palate. One of my regrets is not knowing Japanese and Chinese to a sufficient degree to really read poetry in those languages even if I have basic fluency in literature and everyday conversation. So reading Ezra Pound is one way in English to appreciate these Eastern poetic influences. I’m also ashamed to admit that I only know a woeful smattering of words in Scotiish Gaelic - my Anglo-Scots father knows it fairly well but even he struggles - and really I must find time in the future to learn more of it because it’s such a fascinating language (not least because it’s also dying out and that is tragic).

So below is an eclectic and random list from the top of my head and in no real order of preference:

• Homer (Greek) • Sappho (Greek) • Rumi (Farsi) • Mirza Ghalib (Urdu and Farsi) • John Milton • John Donne • William Shakespeare • Dante (Italian) • Robert Burns • William Wordsworth • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • William Blake • John Keats • Emily Dickinson • Christina Rosetti • Gerald Manley Hopkins • Walt Whitman • Oscar Wilde • W.B. Yeats • Rudyard Kipling • Wilfred Owen • Alfred Tennyson • Rainer Maria Rilke (German) • Cavafy (Greek) • T.S. Eliot • Hilda Doolittle • Marianne Moore • Sylvia Plath • W. H. Auden • Olaf H. Hauge (Norwegian) • Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norwegian) • Aslaug Vaa (Norwegian) • Rolf Jacobsen (Norwegian) • Sarojini Naidu (Hindi) • Gulzar (Hindi)

Living in Paris I tend to read more French poetry these days. By osmosis it helps me appreciate the French language and French culture even more.

• Charles Baudelaire. • Paul Verlaine • Jacques Prévert • Arthur Rimbaud • Alphonse de Lamartine • Alfred de Musset • Paul Valéry • Paul Eluard • Jean Genet • Françoise Villon

Poetry is an art that combines the essence of life through the fabrication of reality. Poets challenge and nourish me with their wisdom, philosophy, love and journeys beyond what used to be the limits of my own creative imagination. They push my boundaries ever so more. In doing so they grow my mind for understanding, my heart for empathy, and my soul for wisdom. It would hard to disagree with Robert Frost who sums up what poetry means to me, “a poem begins in delight, and ends in Wisdom”.

Thanks for your question

#ask #question #books #treat your s(h)elf #review #poems #poetry #personal #bio

[anadvanceddegreeinquiet]

What, Me Pandemic? A Boho Crowd Stakes Its Claim (and Claims Its $48 Steaks)

Fricasse Dubois, 21, lamented the decision to pull her latest concrete poem from The Codswalloped Pisspot as she passed one of the whimsical “Maine-ducks-in-flight” mailboxes that serve as newspaper bins for the red-hot downtown rag. But her friend and intern, Banshee Fitzgerald, 33, had made a good point: The Pisspot had been flirting with questionable taste for months now. 

First there was the ironic opera libretto by Steve Bannon, which cast Leo “KIDS” Fitzpatrick as a Muslim refugee in a Copenhagen no-go zone. Then there was the edgy faux-memoir from Terry Richardson, modeled on O.J. Simpson’s unpublished “If I Did It,” and accompanied by a portfolio of Juergen Teller ass-Xeroxes.

But now, the Pisspot hype was growing, and Dubois realized that she might miss the proverbial boat. Interest in the nascent publishing venture was at fever pitch; a SPAC had been formed by laid-off Gagosian and Perrotin directors eager to stage a hostile takeover of the irregularly published ‘zine. 

And a dash of infamy certainly helped—the paper’s co-editor, Stizzy Fugger, had just launched a Tumblr in which she tallied the number of people she had inadvertently infected with Covid-19, updated in real-time (12,617 at press time, if you’re keeping score, more than the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally).

Anyone who has witnessed a “Pisspot drop” in the Dimes Square neighborhood of Manhattan knows to expect pandemonium. But nothing could have prepared this reporter for the foamy-mouthed jubilee and ecstatic violence of the occasion. 

It was 11am on a Tuesday, and the editors appeared at the corner of Seward Park, bearing several cardboard boxes of the paper. They were trailed by the usual suspects: Pimple-necked sadcore rappers, sex-positive Zoom therapists, former Artforum critic’s pickers who now run content for Chipotle, and middle-aged men who really shouldn’t skateboard.  

It’s a truism that an issue of Pisspot isn’t really read so much as it is imbibed, absorbed via the osmosis of social media’s orgiastic frenzy. In fact, the Times had a great deal of difficulty locating anyone who had physically held a copy of the paper in their smooth, unlined hands; many preferred to experience it as a series of fuzzy, thumbnail-sized images posted ironically on MySpace. 

“People used to say they read Playboy for the ads,” said Kit Murano, a fish-eyed, forty-something member of a downtown-based Adderall (™) street team. “Pisspot doesn’t have ads. And no one who knows anything would be caught, like, just sitting there and flipping through the thing. It’s an attitude. It’s an essence. It’s a lifestyle.”

Okay, sure—but what about the actual content actually published in each issue? Imagine an early iteration of Vice cross-pollinated with Tiger Beat, and then add a splash of sexual-harassment-era Paris Review. It’s a bit silly, and a bit loose. Bret Easton Ellis contributes a crossword puzzle in which every answer is just another reason why millennials suck. A party report—‘Reamed & Furred’—diligently transcribes the coke-addled bon mots of the same group of six people all eating at the same restaurant every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening. 

If there’s an ethos gluing all of this together, it’s a passing-of-the-torch from an older bohemian guard to a younger demographic, with their laissez-faire attitudes about sex, drugs, and global pandemics. “It’s, like, we can all still party together, and age isn’t really ‘a thing’,” explains Murano, leaning out the window of a Mini Cooper wrapped in shiny SunGen Pharma adverts.

The entire scene revolves around the lopsided triangle known as “Dimes Square,” which borrows its moniker from the culinary hotspot Dimes. (The name derives from Cockney rhyming slang for ‘elongated pinky nail.’). Every New York story is also, of course, a story about real estate. In this case, that means the Connecticut country houses that this cohort has Airbnbed out while remaining to weather the storm in lower Manhattan. 

Parts of this scene are “white, but probably ambisexual-adjacent; they’re members of the creative class, but they possess enough self-hatred to seem authentic,” says Dash Johnson, a Dimes Square hanger-on who many suspect of running the Steak-Umms social media accounts. “Most of them used to work for galleries, or websites, or Garage magazine, but when those jobs dried up, they woke up one morning and said: Fuck it. Let’s stop pretending. Let’s just tweet.”

One essential element of any good scene is a gossip column to keep track—and to keep score. ArtWet’s “Wet Ass Pigment” plays that role for the Dimes Square cognoscenti. It’s a bleeding-edge social diary written by an anonymous, Gossip Girl-style correspondent who communicates solely via Signal, using a vocal transformer. 

“I was sick of trying to break into this world,” they said. “I was sick of meeting Anthony Haden-Guest at a dinner, for the 387th time, and having him introduce himself all over again, like we hadn’t both thrown up in the same toilet less than three days before. Fuck gatekeepers. I built my own gate, and then I started keeping it.” 

It was a Wet Ass Pigment column, in fact, which broke the season’s buzziest news: semi-disgraced first son Hunter Biden had bought an octoplex apartment directly above Dimes, where he’ll be staying as he prepares for a September solo exhibition that will open concurrently across Andrew Kreps, 56 Henry, Shoot the Lobster, and a pop-up space for Recess CBD seltzer. Unlike the gentle, “meditative” paintings that Biden had been making in recovery, the new work is brash and rudely vulgar—the product of an unexpected friendship Biden had struck up with Bjarne Melgaard and Jordan Wolfson. 

Meanwhile, the group’s literary face remains 29-year-old Katarina Klaus, whose razor-sharp prose skewers her surroundings with the acidic wit of a young Evelyn Waugh. “I’ll be honest, I fucking hate writing,” Klaus admitted, blowing her nose into a Telfar bag. “I’m both super motivated and super lazy. Sometimes I’ll just copy-paste random chunks of Speedboat into a column and no one will even notice.”

So what’s next for this ragtag crew? “Dimes Square will probably be over by the time this fucking article comes out,” Klaus laments. “You’re going to have, like, some TikTok influencer house on the corner of Canal and Essex, and all the coke will have fentanyl in it again because idiots from New Jersey just have no nose. You know what? I’m regretting this already. This is all off the record.”

Meanwhile, Klaus is already rethinking her involvement in Pisspot. With a current print run of 250 copies, the instantly iconic newspaper suddenly seems a bit too exposed. She’s in discussions with a new, unnamed venture that would distribute articles and essays in a serialized format, via fortunes randomly inserted into cookies at various Chinese restaurants within a three-block radius of the Square. “It’s all about ephemerality,” she says, sucking on a DMT vape she brought back from Mexico City. “It’s all about staying relevant.”

This article was lovingly rewritten from the original by Scott Indrisek.

CORRECTION: The above edition of this story mistakenly cites Kit Murano’s age as “forty-something,” based on our reporter’s visual guesstimation. She is actually 19.   

CORRECTION: ‘Dimes’ is in fact Cockney prison rhyming slang for the expression, “a bent knob is straight twice a day.”

CORRECTION: An earlier online version of this story mistakenly identified The Codswalloped Pisspot as The Duct-Taped Shitberg.

CORRECTION: An earlier, subscribers-only post of this story mislabeled the gossip blog Wet Ass Pigment as being a Spotify podcast called Wank ‘n Pose.

CORRECTION: Jordan Wolfson died in 2014. 

CORRECTION: An earlier Google Doc of this story referenced a non-existent ‘hardcore maternity diary’ by Chloe Sevigny, which most likely did not appear in issue 4 of the Codtaped Shitpot. 

CORRECTION: A version of this story that was sent to hapless print subscribers in Texas and Connecticut wrongly identified the geographic boundaries of “Dimes Square” as being East 45th Street, Central Park West, Freeman’s Alley, and Bedford Avenue.

[brewcha]

GET TO KNOW ME BETTER*

*beware, long answers ahead

(copied this from @rafaelafranzen; had some time on my hands so thought i’d bang this long post out. anyhow if y’all wanna do this thing on your blog, if you’re bored and so forth, please feel free. would love to see what you guys wrote!)

ONE / name: gabrielle is the name!

TWO / birthday: october 3

THREE / zodiac sign: libra. (but i’m also a rat, in the chinese zodiac!)

FOUR / height: UMMMMM LAST I CHECKED (and that was a long time ago), 153cm???

FIVE / hobbies: reading, first and foremost. creative writing is next, and drawing? or sketching, because it’s been a long time since i’ve gone beyond pencil scribbles in my various sketchbooks. i also love to bake, and owning a stand mixer is my dream.

(does window-shopping count as a hobby because i could structure a whole day around just wandering through malls and shops just doing that without spending a single penny. it’s fun! particularly if you’re in good company.)

SIX / favourite colour: blue is nice. i like blues.

SEVEN / favourite book: the honest answer is that it’s very hard to choose favourites, my taste in books vary depending on the time and some things i used to be utterly convinced were faves end up being...alright...at a later date?  the last two years i’ve been steadily immersing myself into a lot of SF/F and i tend to adore all of them as a result of getting those reads from woc reviewers.*

in the meantime, here’s my current faves that come to mind without hesitation and with little doubt in hindsight: (literary fiction) frankenstein by mary shelley, never let me go by kazuo ishiguro, (fantasy) the tiger’s daughter by k. arsenault rivera, (sci-fi) the long way to a small angry planet by becky chambers, and finally (fantasy/mythology?) the song of achilles by madeline miller.

*if you’re a queer poc like me who’s gotten a bit picky and cynical about mainstream publishing over the years (partly due to being spoiled by wonderfully written and equally wonderfully free fanfic), woc reviewers usually have the best recommendations.

EIGHT / last song I listened to: under attack by abba

NINE / last film I watched: rocketman. it was awesome! 

TEN / inspiration or muse: there’s some writing out there that just gets those creativity gears running. the kind of writing where you just wanna absorb via osmosis or something because just reading it with my own two eyes isn’t enough. i’m not even saying like good stories kind of writing (although that’s definitely one form of inspiration), i mean like writing style. the turns of phrases that stick to you, choice words that make you feel a great number of things, clever syntax that has you coming back. you could drink it all up.

don’t @ me for saying this: i know there’s a lot of stuff worth critiquing over with john green’s novels, it definitely isn’t for everyone and i totally respect that because i see all the flaws in his books as well, but his writing style is something i quite unabashedly enjoy, for example, because of how dry and direct it is. (which makes me wonder that not nearly enough White Men are dry AND direct: they’re all dry and.....insufferably and intolerably long-winded.) and then there’s madeline miller, k. arsenault rivera, and naomi novik -- fantasy writers that have very atmospheric writing, the kind where you feel the beat of some unsung song in the way their story is told. they’re also my go-tos for when i feel the creative well is all dried up.

ELEVEN / dream job: wanna be...an author...

TWELVE / meaning behind your URL: i used to refer to myself as “bluey” Back In The Day (which is another long story that involves warrior cats), and i had an online friend who lived in japan that nicknamed me “brew” because it was how she pronounced “blue” in her head. the nickname caught on in the community i was in, and i grew quite fond of it myself; figured it was time for a change after a while and went with some combination involving “brew” thereafter with my social media handles (sans my instagram). the “-cha”....well...tea, anyone?

THIRTEEN / top 3 ships: aziraphale/crowley from good omens, chirrut/baze from rogue one, aaand peraltiago from brooklyn nine-nine. some variation of Married™ and two halves of a whole idiot.

FOURTEEN / lipstick or lip balm: lip balm. i do like seeing lipstick on other people more because other people wear lipstick better than i can.

FIFTEEN / currently reading: red, white, and royal blue by casey mcquiston. sign me the heck up for gay ass hate-to-love.

SIXTEEN / work: i’m an english teacher, but i am self-employed on an official capacity since i’m hired through an agency. i have yet to land a permanent job, though i’m starting a masters in creative writing in september. we’ll see how things go.

SEVENTEEN / fiction: most of the things i’ve written for public/semi-public consumption (i.e. submitted as an assignment/project, had it published in a collection, etc) have been just about....people? people as people and people interacting. my most notable(??) piece is a short-short story about a 20-something gay woman’s relationship with her single father, who is also gay and has been in love with his childhood friend the whole time. it’s not a tense story, the father-daughter relationship is a good, strong one; just one where the daughter reflects on Life as she considers coming out to her dad, when it turns out he wants to come out to her too because he’s so inspired by her. i wrote it for a short story class, and imagine how gratified i felt when all my classmates in the workshop kept asking me if the dad + childhood friend get married later!!

but i’ve also done a lot of SF/F in my spare time, some projects i’m experimenting with. there’s one about a girl and a sword from space, there’s another that might as well be good omens fanfic since the characters involved are very aziraphale- and crowley-like, and there’s one completely suuuuper self-indulgent thing involving superheroes. just a lot of stuff i’m exploring and figuring out!

EIGHTEEN / fanfiction: I HAVEN’T WRITTEN FANFICTION IN SO LONG. the last thing i wrote and uploaded was a short chirrut/baze thing. they were played by chinese actors, one of whom’s from hong kong where i live, so it was an au where they (particularly chirrut) grew up in hk. the most fanfic i’ve ever written was during my free! and haikyuu!! days...those were some awesome days not gonna lie.

would love to write good omens fanfic, considering how obsessed i am with it, but there’s something ineffable about them that makes me hesitant to even attempt nailing down their characters in my own writing. like i’m not even worthy of the multitudes they contain. i’ve enjoyed all the fanfic that’s been pouring out of the fandom lately, however. i love me some sweet, sweet tropes.

(remember that project in #17 where the characters are very aziraphale- and crowley-like? sometimes i look at the shorts i’ve written for those ocs, the slice-of-life type of shorts where i’m just playing around with dialogue instead of plot, and think to myself “with some name-changes and tweaking this could be GO fanfic. why not??? WHY NOT????”)

#long post #personal