#because like!!! this poetry is from thousands of years ago and I can still relate to it in the year 2020
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What would your advice for just-starting-out young authors be?
I love new writers! I’ve never known a better way to escape my reality and live a thousand different lives.
I started writing when I was young, maybe 12 or 13 years old. I am now 25, and very much consider myself to be a child, but still, in my 10+ years of personal writing and classes, here are some of the best tips I can give anyone who is new to writing, regardless of age.
Read. Read. Read. Then read some more. The easiest and fastest way to learn how to write is by reading and studying how other people have written their stories. Study their balance of dialogue vs description vs action. Study the words they use and what they’re choosing to describe. Study the scenes that make you feel something, or pull you to the story even more, and dissect it until you understand how to do it.
Daydream. At night, in the morning, before and after school, during school, during work. When people are trying to talk to you, just daydream. Image worlds with populated moons. Imagine worlds with multiple human-like species all living in the same area. Image a boy who goes home and cries to his adoptive vampire parents, and girls who practices knife throwing every night to prepare for the apocalypse that no one sees coming. Dream of everything and anything because that’s how you keep and improve your creativity. Eventually you may even write something with it.
Write for yourself. Always start by writing what you enjoy, and love your characters and your stories. Everything about your first draft should be because you love the story, not what other people like. You will never please everyone, so start with yourself, and build a community with the ones who love your story as much as you do.
Do it on your own timeline. If you want to write a book in a month, edit the next and publish right after, do it. If you want to write the first five chapters of 8 books without finishing, do it. If, like me, you want to write your first novel at 18 years old, and 7 years later still not feel ready to publish, that’s ok! You are not falling behind anyone else, you are exactly where you should be on your own path.
Practice. Your writing will improve with practice, that’s how it works, it’s how it always works. No way to skip right to publishing a first draft and becoming famous for it. Practice and just keep writing, you will improve.
Challenge yourself. While you may love fantasy or romance, or maybe all your story ideas are too big for only one book and they all end up being series’, you need to try new things. Write a mystery short story. Write poetry on how you feel. Write one page on how you could survive a zombie apocalypse as long as you have your coffee in the morning, it doesn’t matter, just try new things.
Trying new things is how I wrote this haiku: Take a deep inhale, Breathe fresh air into my lungs, I savorfreedom.
Is it the greatest haiku ever? No, but it makes me happy, and reminds me that I can write, good or bad, and still be proud of myself.
Keep all your projects. Good or bad. Look back on them years later and think, yeah that was terrible, at least I’m better now. Or maybe think, this wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. It’s a progressive journey. You can take your time. DONT EVER SHAME YOUR YOUNGER SELF FOR THEIR WORK. THEY TRIED THEIR HARDEST AND WROTE AS BEST THEY COULD. WE ARE PROUD OF OURSELVES, NOT EMBARRASSED OR SHAMED. Whether the work is from years ago or days go. Be kind to yourself, no one else owes you that.
Compare. Compare to popular novels, compare to your friends stories or to people online. Compare and see if your character are developed enough, or if your story makes sense, or if it’s relatable.
When comparing however, keep in mind that your written style will be different than all others writers. Your first novel will not be the same as an author’s 10th book that just went viral on TikTok. It takes practice and time. Compare for style, technique, structure and plot. Not for popularity, worth, importance, and don’t feel down thinking that someone writing at a higher grade level makes them better, it doesn’t.
Share your work. If you are embarrassed, use a pen name. That’s perfectly fine. Put your work out there and get feedback. Having one person saying your story is (negative criticism here) is going to happen, don’t freak out. It doesn’t mean your story is flawed and should be tossed. If most people are saying that, then maybe it’s time to revisit the story and plot. Getting feedback from people reading your story is important, you want to ask specific questions so you don’t get generic answers. Get real reviews from real people, the mean voice in your head doesn’t get a say.
Learn the difference between perfect and done. I know, I know. Perfectionists around the world just scoffed and thought ‘I would if I could’. Here’s the thing, it’ll never be perfect. A word won’t be right, you can’t find the right way to convey an emotion, your choice of vocabulary isn’t up to your standards, I get it. You want your work to be absolute perfection so that everyone loves it and no one can say a bad thing about it, but it doesn’t work that way. Instead make it to ‘complete’, then nitpick some details, then it’s done. Done is good, it’s where you want to be.
Self-publishing? Pay for a professional editor and a graphic designer. It makes a difference, I promise.
There’s lots of others, but I would say as a writer-starter-pack, these should get you started, then you will learn lessons all on your own, or find them as you’re writing later on.
Truly, just have fun, and the rest will come with time.
Happy Writing!
#creative writing#novel writing#writing community#writer#writing reminders#writer tips#writing advice#writing resources#writing reference#writers of tumblr#write write write
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Sage and orchid! :)
from this ask game
sage ⇢ what ‘medium’ of art (poetry, music, fiction, paintings, statues etc.) is the most touching to you? why do you think that is?
this is a hard question because I don't like to draw very hard lines between types of art (I am immediately thinking of epic poems that could be chanted/spoken/sung as well as what film would fall into when it combines so many mediums) and the types of art that have touched me the most are across various mediums.
I would probably choose poetry though. Poetry written hundreds or thousands of years ago can still touch me on such a deep level. And poetry is about attention to detail, crafting images through language, putting experiences into words. my choice to become a writer was to put things into words that felt unexplainable. so much of poetry is that.
but it is also close to music and theatre/film/performance art. it's all connected and what is touching me the most depends on the day. and music and fiction fight for how much time i spend with a medium though i think fiction will always win with how my imagination doesn't slow down even when i sleep
sorry for the long answer but it really has me thinking. because with time spent i think i probably spend the most time with other people's art as music. but with my own art it's my fiction because i'm always running stories through my head. but i also look at paintings/drawings every day and am surrounded by art in the design of my everyday household objects since i spent years carefully getting everyday things that are designed beautifully and functionally. and i could talk about this for hours because i am compelled to study how humans relate to art and what ways control of that art is used to shape people and society. i feel like i will be studying this for my phd someday even...
orchid ⇢ what’s a song you consider to be perfect?
I'm going to say UFOF by big thief because it's the only song that's gone to no. 1 song on my spotify in 2 separate years (2020 and 2022). and I can't even begin to express how much the lyrics mean to me. "just like a bad dream, you'll disappear / another map turns blue / mirror on mirror / and i imagine you taking me out of here" it just has that fight against despair feeling. I'll also say
send in the clowns by judy cllins
dancing in the dark by bruce springsteen
buzzcut season by lorde
mad world by tears for fears
king and lionheart by of monsters and men
ada by the national
thank you!!! 🌿🌸
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17/7/22
yeah, i’m tired. i’m tired and my mental condition is at 45%, my physical body condition is at 22%, i’m constantly keeping count and track of it. I think at one point the highest number I ever got to was 72% and i remember that one really well, although I don’t remember when that was: it’s weird because it’s mostly because
I don’t get enough sleep, and the reason for that is i feel there’s never enough time in the day. i don’t feel like there’s enough time in the day - i don’t feel like i have enough time to both work hard and to relax, because the way I’ve developed relaxation habits is to game and gaming takes time - time and mental energy. So in a lot of ways I’ve developed some really, really bad habits.
It makes sense, because running away takes just as much energy as facing it head on, right.
And that’s why I’m doing this! That’s why I’m doing a stream of consciousness instead of doing an actual story.
god I can’t believe I’ve already done five - but I’m genuinely just so low on mental energy that I just cannot do one right now. But matthew dicks:
was right, the number of stories, the moment I’ve seen one, shaped it, they just start to flow, and every day genuinely is more beautiful and more genuine for having stories in them. I still want to tell the story of turning my face to the sun, and I want to tell today’s story, getting to eat a cake I haven’t eaten for at least four years (except for two days ago, but you know - it’s a cake) but it’s not habitual yet,
the crafting of stories, and right now it still takes time for a story to settle in. I can bang out poetry in ten minutes, a short story - even something “easy” to tell still takes me at least two hours. It wasn’t like duplexes, even though I can understand the techniques; I’m just not as much of a prose writer, I haven’t had quite as much practice.
I think - story wise, prose-wise, short-story wise, I think I’m sitting at around.... forty? Give or take? Which is, you know, a bit short of two thousand. and change. Wait. If scripts count, then that count jumps up to about 200, but it’s still... a bit short of two thousand.
It’s odd, but basically... I set out at one point deciding that if I couldn’t put in 10,000 hours to become a master of something I’d just put in 10,000 entries, and that’s why there was 10,000 “poems to go”. I’m so genuinely excited to change the number on my blog description to “8,000 poems to go”, you have no idea.
I also had this hare-brained idea in my mid-20s, let’s call it a million-dollar poem, give me a dollar I give you a poem, let’s do a million of them, and I thought I’d be done quick but you know, fuck, it took me 7 years to write the first thousand and I’m still not done with the second. I thoroughly overestimated my writing capability, let’s be honest. On the other hand... I can write a poem with good form in ten minutes. I can write a pantoum in ten minutes (at one point with Dr. Liang, a screenwriter, she timed it); so I haven’t really walked away with nothing. On the other hand...poetry-wise, I have to make do with form and I have to fucking master form, because comparisons are shit but I feel like, as a poet, hooking someone /
behind the navel and the heart is something I do purely by accident, while the other poets I see do get hundreds of notes and I do feel something when I read them, which means they succeeded in being relatable
but if I do thousands of verses surely a few good gold nuggets will emerge from the dregs, and honestly half of this stuff is the first 10,000 pages of shit, maybe more like 90% of it, and maybe after I’m done with 4,000ish poems I’ll actually start making more good stuff. But you can learn bad habits.... so I’m not sure. Still... these blogs are almost half-diary, maybe more than half, so they still help anyway.
I don’t know. I’m just trying to heal from depression, man, I’m trying to pick myself up but i’m so tired all the time, and so fucking alone.
i’ll get back to the form of storytelling when i’m done with my working week.
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“All men have something in their lives that gives them pleasure:
With me the love of beauty is my constant joy.
I could not change this, even if my body were dismembered;
For how could dismemberment ever hurt my mind?”
— Excerpt from the poem Li Sao by Qu Yuan from The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets
#Qu Yuan#this part made me cry#because like!!! this poetry is from thousands of years ago and I can still relate to it in the year 2020#I am so grateful that I can read this#do you ever just think about how women and lower class people just WERENT ALLOWED TO READ until relatively recently?!?!?#but anyway here I am sitting here reading this ancient poetry and the human experience has hardly changed at all#things like technology has evolved and whatever but the inner human experience and struggle will forever reach across time... culture...etc#this poet Qu Yuan lived and wrote this sooo long ago and I am here from the future also feeling like my biggest joy is seeing beauty in#everything#and I love it!!!#<3
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—chapter one: the beginning of an end
this is a part of my an ode to a broken heart drabble series.
pairing: jeon jungkook/reader
genre: unrequited love, best friends to (?), heavy angst, future smut
word count: 1.4k words
summary: loving jeon jungkook is, above all, the beginning of an end.
previous || next
You’re positive your favourite sound in the whole world is the rhythmic, repetitive sound of your fingers tapping on the keyboard.
Everyone has a different approach when it comes to coping with stress and anxiety. Some people drink away their unwanted emotions, some drown themselves in work, some watch yet another, mediocre Netflix show. But your solution, your little panacea has always been writing.
You’re not the best when it comes to expressing your true feelings. You can struggle with saying ‘I love you’ to your mother and then write a long, affectionate letter for her birthday that makes her eyes turn glossy. You may stutter and tumble on your own words while trying to order coffee and then complete academic essays with ease.
Whenever you feel like you’re overwhelmed, boiled up with mixed emotions, you do exactly what your school counselor told you many years ago: you let it out. She never mentioned any specifics, simply encouraging you to find your own way. And that’s exactly what you did – you picked it up yourself. First, it was writing a diary. No less than two weeks into it, you got bored. Turns out describing in detail every single mundane day of your life was never your forté. You threw away your old notebook, bought a new one and decided to write there whenever you felt like you really wanted to, not out of obligation.
And you continue to do so, these days you opt for a use of modern technology often. You open your laptop and pour your feelings onto a digital sheet of paper. It’s cathartic, in a way. Getting rid of what you feel like is weighing you down.
Jungkook however, your dearest best friend, has always been on the other side of the spectrum. Loud, obnoxious, a life and soul of the party who happened to miraculously befriend the most quiet introvert in class. Sometimes you still wonder how your friendship has managed to survive almost twenty years. You’re two polar opposites. Fire and water. Storm and chilly breeze. A confession screamed in the middle of the night and handwritten love letter.
You’re a dichotomy. Made of the same atoms, pulling in and pulling away. And if the phrase ‘opposites attract’ held any significance, maybe you would’ve ended up together. But in your case, it’s yet another platitude. Something that seems to work out only in books and movies. Because, if that was true, he would never fell in love with a female version of him, just graced with a sprinkle of pure sweetenes Jungkook sometimes lacks.
Soojin is everything you will never be. Polite, outgoing, sociable and so likeable you hate yourself for despising her. Truthfully, there’s nothing bad you could say about her. No wonder he’s fallen head over heels for her, not you.
What’s there to love about you, if you willing chose to pin for a boy that’s so out of your league? It’s actually hilarious to even dream about him returning your feelings.
You stare at the screen with half-lidded eyes. The clock reads quarter past midnight, letters start to blur into nothingness. Yet another chapter of your miserable life is completed as you save the document and slam your laptop shut. You don’t bother to shower or take off your clothes. Sleepiness hits you right when you close your eyes.
You dream of wedding halls and never spoken love confessions.
You read once on Twitter that being an adult means checking your e-mail as a part of your morning social media routine and since then, you haven’t quite related to anything more in your life.
At the very top of your inbox there’s yet another e-mail from your Creative Writing proffesor, Kim Namjoon. He’s a very stubborn man, you decide, as you scroll through the contents of his message. He still wants you to consider what he told you a few days ago after class, it seems.
“Miss ___? Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure.” you replied and awkwardly walked up to his podium.
You might have been madly (and miserablely) in love with your best friend, but Kim Namjoon has never failed to make you feel like a silly teenager with a crush on her older teacher. To say Kim Namjoon was intimidating was an misunderstanding. His presence was thoroughly electrifying. You remembered a very disappointed sigh the girl sitting next you let out when she noticed a ring on his right hand. You couldn’t judge her. His wife had scored probably the finest man on this damn planet.
“I read your latest assignment and I must say, your novelette was outstanding as always. Dare I say the best among others,” Namjoon said. You bowed your head in acknowledgement, praying he wouldn’t notice your rose-colored cheeks. “Regarding that, I actually have a proposition for you.”
At that, your eyes widened. “What kind of proposition, sir?” you asked.
He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and handed it to you. It was a flyer, you realised, and read it through quickly. VARIETÉ Publishing was organising an annual contest for young poets, which you had heard about before. Your English Literature proffesor mentioned it during her lecture a week ago. However, poetry had never been your strong suit. As much as you enjoyed reading it, you weren’t really fond of creating your own poems. So why did Kim Namjoon decide to tell you about this all of a sudden?
“I know what you might be thinking right now, but I’m not actually encouraging you to take part in this competition,” As he smiled, two dimples appeared on each side of his mouth. “Do you know anything about VARIETÉ Publishing?”
Slightly confused, you gave him a nod. “It’s one if the biggest publishing companies in the country.”
“That’s very much true,” Namjoon agreed. “VARIETÉ's vice-chairman, Lee Jongi, is actually my old friend. We used to study together here, at this university. When I chose a teaching career, he got a job in a foreign publishing company, climbed up the ladder until the very top and now he’s vice-chairman and I’m a simple college professor,” He chuckled. You were too stunned to form a coherent response let alone laugh along with him. Lee Jongi and Kim Namjoon being buddies? It was a small world, after all. “Jongi has always been very fond of young, aspiring writers. When I discover a student with huge potential, I send him their works. If he finds them interesting enough, he might even take a risk and propose a publishing deal. This doesn’t happen quite often, but I want you to know that you have a pretty big chance to impress him.”
You stared at him, wide-eyed because holy fucking shit, did he just say he can help you publish your first book?
“I don’t know what to say, sir. I’m shocked.” you responded truthfully. You had heard people complimenting your skills before but this was extraordinary. “Let me just process all of this: you know personally VARIETÉ'S vice-chairman and you want to show him my works?” Even said out loud, it still sounded surreal to you.
“Correct. But of course, I won’t do anything without your consent.” Namjoon said. “That novelette you sent me recently was amazing. I’d love to show it to Lee Jongi one day.”
The task was to incorporate a hidden, symbolic message into a story. You decided to use your favorite flowers, magnolias, and its meaning. They represent eternity, because once they bloom they will continue to bloom for a long time. In your story, a girl gave her best friend magnolia's seeds, wishing her love for him to be everlasting. A day later, she received a pack of seeds from the boy as well. She happily planted them in her garden and when they bloomed, she discovered they were yellow tulips. A symbol of love that will never be reciprocated.
“You make people feel things with your words, ___, and that’s a very rare gift,” You heard Namjoon add. “Promise me you’ll consider my proposition.”
There was thousand thoughts per hour running in your head, but you gave him a curt nod. “I’ll think about it.”
As you’re staring now at the screen, fingers hovering over the keyboard, you think about the girl whose only dream was to be loved by her best friend. Maybe it’s finally time for you to move on. Bury the past and plant a seed of new life. Because, loving Jeon Jungkook is, above all, the beginning of an end.
With shaky hands, you start writing a response to your proffesor.
#jungkook smut#btswritingcafe#ksmutclub#bangtanarmynet#bangtanhq#jungkook angst#jungkook x reader#jungkook fanfic#an ode to a broken heart
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The Lost Girl
Being a reader gives you the opportunity to live several lives. You get to experience different tales, different characters and an ocean of new emotions with every new book you read. It’s magical how a thread of words woven together transports you to a different universe. I believe once you’ve read a book, experienced all the emotions of that character, been there where the protagonist stood made friends and battled with it, you can never undo it. The pieces of that book will stay with you forever. There’s no coming back from that.
One of the Greatest author George R.R Martin quoted “I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves. I have walked on different worlds and seen the end of time.” And I have never related to anything more than this quote. Years ago my father started this habit where he would make me read a book out loud to him every night before bed. He started it because My reading skills were compromised and he thought it would help me rectify that never in ages he could have thought that this would turn into one of my greatest obsessions. From barely reading one page I metamorphosed into a book worm. I started scrutinizing huge novels. Latest publications from renounced authors would be my favourite present for birthdays. The fondness for books took me to poetry and mythology reading clubs in school. I remember highlighting dialogues that would make me feel something; any sentiment specifically the happy ones so that I’d go back to read that whenever I felt low. Honestly, I still do that!!
My most leisured book of all times would be “The Lost Girl” by Sangu Mandanna. It is a fantasy- fiction novel full of drama, romance, battles for life and alot more. The book is about a girl named ‘Eva’.
Eva's destiny does not belong to her. She is an aberration, a creation—an echo. She was created by the Weavers to be a replica of someone else, and if she ever died, she was supposed to be replaced by a girl named Amarra, her "other." Eva analyses what Amarra does, what she eats, what it’s like to kiss her boyfriend, Ray. So when Amarra is killed in a vehicle crash, Eva should be ready. Her fifteen years of education, however, had not prepared her for this. Now she must go to India and convince the world that Amarra is still alive, abandoning everything she's ever known—her guardians, the boy she's forbidden to love. What Eva discovers is a bereaved family, parents who are unsure how to deal with the echo they thought they wanted, and Ray, who knows every aspect and curve of Amarra. And when Eva is dealt a catastrophic blow that will change her life forever, she must choose between staying and living out her years as a copy or leaving and risking all for the chance to be an original. To have the persona of Eva. The fascinating narrative of a child who was always taught what she had to be—until she found the strength to decide for herself—comes from debut novelist Sangu Mandanna.
The author has done so much justice with all the characters portraying every situation in explicit details. It would strongly recommend the book to anybody who loves to read. I’ve read this book several times but still every time I read it am amazed by some new word or some new situations. The evils in the plot also have dimensions to the story being cruel to Eva and still building her character in certain ways. It’s fascinating how a mere girl who is barely a human being, a creature stitched out of dead corpses stolen from cemeteries is trying to bring a revolution, battling for her existence!!
The book beautifully portrays strength and hope in darkest of times.
Here is a link available for the book for anybody who wants to read it: https://books.apple.com/ca/book/the-lost-girl/id508184018
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farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 7-8
- re: romance novel: chapter seven opens with rapunzel defending cass to eugene, including saying that she’s “never been more sure” about anything (except him, added as an afterthought). it feels equal parts aggressive sunny optimism and rapunzel has a serious crush because, it bears repeating, at this point she has exchanged maybe fifty words with this girl. the sum total of their relationship is a chance glimpse of cass in the field and then two stilted conversations cass did her damnedest not to participate in. then she kicks eugene out and passes on their ‘nightly stroll’ so she can meet cass alone lol.
- lagoon eugene continues to have an actual work ethic and ambles off to ‘catch up on’ his readings in diplomacy. when could tts eugene ever,
- i have decided that i lay most of the blame for the ‘cass is emotionally walled off and refuses to communicate at all ever until rapunzel drags her out of her shell’ fanon at the feet of lost lagoon because this is just… ridiculous. tts cass firmly but politely and clearly spells out her boundaries with rapunzel as early as beginnings and emotionally opens up to her within a matter of days. lagoon cass acts like a sulky brat and again does this monosyllabic thing with her and literally sits in dead silence glaring while rapunzel chatters on. but especially in cassunzel circles lagoon is SO popular and has SO thoroughly infiltrated the popular fanon that cass’s normal state of being is so emotionally constipated that she can’t even admit she likes sweets is now the standard assumption. –__–
- unlike the writers of tts howland actually understands what a lady-in-waiting is. good job ms. howland.
- i say this with love. because i too have made historical poems a key plot point in bitter snow which means i have to actually write said poems and i am suffering, so i relate. but this poetry is really quite bad. ⭐ you tried ma’am
- as the self-appointed president of the saporian!cass au club i feel the need to reiterate that it is not canon that cassandra speaks saporian and ‘cass knows saporian in lost lagoon!’ cannot actually be used in support of cass having saporian heritage because she does not, in fact, know or speak saporian. she is able to recognize the second language in the book as saporian, but she can’t read it. she learns saporian over the course of lost lagoon, with materials provided by xavier. there are textual arguments to be made from lost lagoon to support interpreting cassandra as saporian but this is not one of them and i’m tired of seeing ‘cass speaks saporian!’ tossed around as the primary bit of ‘evidence’ that comes up when saporian!cass gets discussed. /pet peeve
like i approve and wholeheartedly support and personally agree with headcanons that cassandra is fluent in saporian for whatever reason, most especially that she is herself saporian, but i think it is important to emphasize that that’s not canon and that lost lagoon directly contradicts this idea.
- anyways,
“Hundreds of years ago, Corona was two different lands—Old Corona and Saporia. The fact that this is written half in Saporian means that this book is genuinely ancient. No one speaks Saporian anymore except a few scholars.”
i’ve ranted at length about how the sudden death of the saporian language in a matter of centuries suggests some very unpleasant things about the ‘unification’ of these two countries and the suppression of saporian culture that likely accompanied it so i won’t get too much into it again. but it is worth noting - while ‘hundreds of years’ is equally as vague as tts’s ‘centuries,’ the (sigh) english portions of this book are written in very modern english, which suggests that the language of Old Corona was quite similar to the language currently spoken, which in turn suggests an upper limit of maybe three hundred years between the unification and now. yes, the worldbuilding is thin enough that howland may well have intended this to be thousands of years in the past and the modern english poetry is just a suspend your disbelief thing, but… i’m not inclined to be that charitable. especially when, if i’m remembering right, this book rapunzel found is said to be an original first edition of the poems which, like, that straight up isn’t possible if it’s supposed to be from many hundreds of years ago.
plus… this is an american book written for an american corporation by an author i can only assume is american, and americans love to pretend that a couple hundred years qualifies something as ‘ancient’ so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
we’re filing this one under ‘clear evidence that corona conquered saporia and then aggressively sanitized that history by calling it a love story’ and just… moving on now.
- cass grabs the book and bounces, fully convinced that the vague poetic ‘directions’ in the poem can guide her to the lost lagoon and the mystical hidden source of power it allegedly conceals. she stays up all night mapping out a path (because it’s inconceivable that the terrain has changed that much since the poem was written: another strong point in favor of the 200-300 year timeline on the corona-saporian war and unification) and then heads out.
- she heads west, which is impossible, because corona is situated on the western coast,
- this is the one bit of the book i’ve read multiple times and fuck me but i still don’t have any idea what this place looks like. cass scales a boulder, which… splits open at the top, with water running between the two halves. then there’s… a gulch? and at the end of that the two halves of the boulder(?) connect again. cass… crabwalks along the gulch or possibly the split halves of the boulder somehow. it’s unclear whether the direction of this gulch/boulder crack/river is perpendicular or parallel to the direction of travel cassandra was moving in when she climbed the boulder in the first place. it’s also described as a ravine but it’s so narrow that cass and rapunzel can both crabwalk along it and the whole thing is contained inside a boulder apparently and it’s so shallow that they can just hop down into the water and i do not understand what is going on with the geography here!!! help
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Dear Whoever,
I’ve randomly decided to start blogging my thoughts, feelings... ect. Poetry is normally my go to, but at this current time in my life, it’s not working out. Don’t get me wrong, it will always be my 1st love... I just want to say more... and not in a poetic manor. I also think there are a lot of other folks out here that can relate. Maybe. - So, why not sit still once or twice a week and just write... write whatever my heart feels. I could be talking to thousands of people or nobody at all, but who cares?
Today, I want to talk about LOVE, and accountability. I know... I know, I let that same sigh out with a heavy ass eye-roll. I guess... I guess I just don’t understand at times. I LOVE love, but for the life of me I can’t seem to figure out why LOVE doesn’t love me. No... don’t do that... don’t leave, please come back. This isn’t some depressing ass blog or a cry for help, I’m legit just spilling my thoughts. It might get sad, but I promise you there’s a silver lining. There’s always a silver lining. <3
So, when I say “love doesn’t love me”, maybe I’m talking about the countless relationships (platonic & romantic) that didn’t work. But, I’ve learned something. I have learned that I, Alexandria has toxic ways. Now wait a damn minutes, you ain’t about to judge me, okay? I’m HEAR to say that everyone, including yourself has a little toxic in them. Just like that one saying “everyone can be a little crazy”. Now, you can be at a point in your life where you aren’t as toxic. & I greatly applaud you for that. I applaud you for growing, for healing & for understanding... cause well, that is the 1st step. Accountability. Not a lot of folks can admit when they are wrong, let alone admit when they are accountable. Trust me, I was one of them. It took me a good while before realizing - BITCH YOU REALLY NEED TO GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!
It was a little over a year ago, when I first realized how toxic I can be. I was rolling around in the front yard of my ex’s place, tussling with her. All because she hurt me, because she cheated, because she lied & continued to fucking lie. & for the longest, I used that as an excuse to go off on her. I used it as an excuse to HURT her. I said mean things to her, things I didn’t mean & I watched my life spiral out of control. & you should NEVER allow somebody to have such an impact on how you react to things.
We have got to start worrying about ourselves, and not others. What do I mean by this? Well, what John does... shouldn’t be any of my concern. I just need to make sure I’m doing my part and being a decent human being. I can’t blame John for being as ass, that’s him. We often blame everyone else. “Well, he cheated on me so-” so nothing. LOOK... we have got to get to a place where we cry, but we walk away. We accept & we heal. --- Our own thoughts is what causes us to react the way we do. & to be honest, it’s a lot of unhealed trauma as well. “But they didn’t have to treat me like that” - STOP! Sorry, just practicing for myself... you know, trying to knock those excuses that are not justified, out of my head.
It’s time we really fall in love with ourselves. It’s time we HEAL from our childhood trauma. -- Hell, it’s time we heal from all trauma... cause baby, love is going to come & it’s going to be so fucking beautiful. Just trust the process.
until next time...
LOVE & LIGHT
-Signed,
a strong black woman doing the work. <3
#self love#qwoc#qwoc love#gay#lgbt#mental#mental health#love#loving yourself#holiday#black girls are magic#bgm#black lives matter#black men#black mental health#poc#blog#blogger#spilled journal#spilled truth#spilled ink#journaling#lets talk
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i'm not christian so i apologize if this is a gross overgeneralization but it's weird how Certain Types of christians seem to exclusively prefer to depict and refer to jesus as a baby or a dying/dead martyr... almost like Alive Adult Jesus might have some opinions that don't gel with their lifestyles lmao
You are definitely not alone in observing this, anon! In fact it’s a perennial discussion both among academic theologians and in the pastoral community.
If you’re into Christian history, there are definitely periodic trends in terms of which aspect(s) of Jesus are most emphasized, and they are unsurprisingly very much related to the social and cultural context of the people “doing theology.”
So for example, I’m personally most familiar with early/classical and early medieval Christian history. The earliest Christology was focused primarily on the resurrection (with Jesus’ death seen as an important step on the road to resurrection, but the emphasis always being on resurrection, not the death in and of itself), and the language used by the early church was explicitly the language of liberation. Salvation meant freedom from sin and death, and crucially, sin included what we might now call “social sin”: that is, the sin of inequality in this life. The first Christians preached resurrection, and as a direct result of that, they also preached communal living and a welfare system that would see every member of the Body of Christ taken care of.
They certainly didn’t get everything right. St. Paul encouraged Christian slave owners to free their Christian slaves and consider them siblings, but he never actually called for an end to the institution of slavery or acknowledged it as inherently evil. But we have historical records of Christian communities where the common social divisions of classical Rome were more or less completely broken down, where slaves and free, men and women, people of different cultural and class backgrounds all interacted as equals. In fact, the oldest versions of Christian baptismal creeds we have (which can be found as quoted bits of poetry in a couple of Paul’s letters) make explicit reference to egalitarianism as the greatest hallmark of Christian life.
And that was what worried the Romans. If you grow up in almost any Christian tradition, you’ll hear stories of the martyrs. Christians love our martyrdom stories, you’re absolutely right about that, anon. But all too often we miss the actual reason for the early martyrs’ deaths. They weren’t killed for being “followers of Christ” in the kind of generic, near-meaningless sense of “belief” that so many American Christians often consider to be “following Christ.” The Roman imperial authority, as a rule, did not particularly care who its subjects worshiped, so long as they paid their taxes, didn’t rebel against Rome, and didn’t rock the social boat. The majority of early Christian martyrs were killed for things like refusing to sacrifice to the emperor (which was seen as a symbolic act of rebellion against Rome, as making sacrifices to the emperor was a pledge of political loyalty), refusing to serve in the Roman military, rejecting the authority of Roman governors, upsetting the social order (with all that egalitarianism), and, in the case of the vast majority of women martyrs, refusing to get married (which is another form of upsetting the social order, and a particularly dangerous one because it represented a statement of female independence, both socially and financially).
In the early church there was a heavy emphasis on the the death and resurrection of Jesus, but that doesn’t actually mean that his life was overlooked. It would be truer to say that, for those early martyrs, his life and teachings were intimately tied up with his death and resurrection.
Because here’s the thing that we American Christians, in particular, often either gloss over or entirely forget: Jesus, too, was killed by the Romans. He lived as a second class non-citizen in an occupied country, and he was killed by the occupying authority because he was seen as a threat to that occupation. That’s a historical fact that gets covered over for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the gospels themselves actively attempt to disguise it. (Why? Because the gospels were written by and for people who were still living under that occupying authority, and who were therefore concerned to make it clear that they were not, in fact, an existential threat to Roman power and did not need to be eliminated.)
And, of course, once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was also in a position to benefit from the privilege of imperial power.
Jesus’ life - and his death - were profoundly anti-imperial. That’s...a really awkward fact for a religion that has become the backbone of empire to reckon with. So the emphasis of Christology changed. The emphasis now was on Christ as heavenly king, conqueror, ruler of a kingdom of God which looked, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a heavenly version of the Roman Empire.
And American Christians are very much in the position of those imperial Roman Christians. America is an empire. We have vast wealth and resources, much of which we’ve obtained through war and colonial exploitation. We are literally a country built on the backs of slaves, and we used the Christian scriptures to justify that slavery. We use it to justify slavery still. We have a thousand metaphorical explanations for what Jesus may have meant by “sell all you have and give it to the poor, then come and follow me,” because we are terrified of taking him literally. We are profoundly concerned with policing sexuality and gender because that early message of Christian egalitarianism, where there is in Christ no slave or free, no male or female, but all are one is every bit as threatening to the American social order as it was to the Roman order two thousand years ago. We don’t like to talk about Jesus’ cry for justice, about his eager anticipation of the toppling of empire, because we are that empire.
But that’s conservative white American theology. The liberation theology of Latin American, the post-colonial theology of Africa, the womanist theology and the poor people’s campaign arising out of the African American experience of Christianity - it’s no accident that these theologies are far more focused on the life and teachings of Jesus. Because any attentive reading of the gospels cannot fail to notice that, more than any other topic - practically to the exclusion of any other topic - Jesus is profoundly concerned with the liberation of the poor and oppressed.
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🙌 Fic Rec Bingo 🙌
Created by @lightveils on Twitter, this sounded like a fun challenge to do - and I’ve managed to fill the whole card with #Malec fics! *In truth, I could’ve used a card for a number of individual writers on their own, but the fics I finally settled on are under the cut! ❤ Enjoy! And show the writers some love! :-))
👇LINKS TO THE 25 FIC RECS BELOW THE CUT 👇
*A FIC YOU LOVE WITHOUT KNOWING THE SOURCE MATERIAL*
✨ Beyond The Sea by @lemonoclefox ✨
Never played BioShock but the underwater city of Rapture was brought to life so vividly here, that it didn’t matter!
*A FIC WITH A PREMISE THAT SHOULDN’T WORK BUT DOES*
✨ How Rare and Beautiful by @glorious-spoon ✨
Having 'our' Malec appear to TWI's Magnus worked wonderfully, thanks to some very clever writing!
* A FIC YOU’VE RE-READ SEVERAL TIMES*
✨ Best Laid Plans by @superficialpeasant ✨
I'll always come back to this DEEPLY satisfying story of intrigue, authority, prejudice, support - and my favourite depiction of bad-ass, hot-as-hell Malec!
*A FIC YOU STILL REMEMBER YEARS LATER*
✨ Home by @otppurefuckingmagic ✨
I read this gem three years ago now, but I still remember the chills I got when the emotional build-up led to a twist that blind-sided me - in the best of ways!
*A COMFORT FIC*
✨ Higher Than The Big Trees by @carmenlire ✨
Getting updates for this lengthy tale, knowing it was only ever going to hit new heights of happiness each time, makes this a real heart-warmer!
*A CATHARTIC FIC*
✨Good Intentions by @alittlebriton ✨
There was only ever one contender for this - an alternative take on what happens after Malec's 3x18 break-up - because chapter 4 had me punching the air over both of them venting their shit!
*A FIC YOU’D PRINT AND PUT ON YOUR BOOKSHELF*
✨ Of Splendour In The Grass by @lecrit ✨
Prejudice, poetry, pining and period Malec, was captured so beautifully here that it deserves to be bound and displayed in pride of place imo!
*A FIC YOU ASSOCIATE WITH A SONG*
✨ Appassionato by @chonideno ✨
Thanks to this fic, I can't hear Liszt's Liebestrume No. 3 in A flat without thinking of Alec hitting all the right notes with his music-loving neighbour!
*A FIC THAT INSPIRES YOU*
✨Thousands Upon Thousands Made An Ocean by @ohlafraise✨
This emotional fic was a lesson in how to have a story pack a punch into less than 800 well-chosen words! Still hurts, even now!
*A FIC THAT BROUGHT YOU ON BOARD A NEW SHIP*
✨Lasă-mă să stau (Let Me Stay) by @superficialpeasant ✨
An absorbing one-shot relating to the writer’s Best Laid Plans fic, this unexpectedly charming love story between Underhill and Hawkstorm (HawkHill) is the canon I will cling to!
*A FIC YOU WISH COULD BE A MOVIE*
✨ A Dream Of Peace by @ketzwrites ✨
There are some fics too epic in scale and splendour for mere imagination to do them justice, and this historical tale of kingdoms and knights deserves to be watched in technicolor glory!
*A FIC THAT LED TO YOU MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE AUTHOR*
✨ Brooklyn Magic by @the-burning-tiger ✨
I've met so many through their work, but I'm singling out the brilliant,Tigs, here because of our ridiculous descent into poetical exchanges in the latter chapters of this fic - one of my earliest Malec reads! Sending cwtches, T! X
*FREE SPACE - A FIC THAT’S WORTH WAITING FOREVER FOR TO GET AN UPDATE - IT’S THAT GOOD!*
✨Working Hard/Hardly Working by @irisadler (on AO3) & @stupidnephilimlove ✨
I'm currently re-reading this sexually-charged getting-to-REALLY-know-you fic which includes relatable temptation, brilliant humour & a soft, sweet centre - believe it or not! Perfect title, btw!
*A FIC YOU’VE GUSHED ABOUT IN REAL LIFE*
✨Your Name For A Capital by @the-prophet-lemonade✨
This time-travelling tale of repeated love and loss was both rich in detail about Magnus' past and devastatingly bittersweet about what lay ahead in Magnus' future! His heartache made me cry!
*A FIC YOU ASSOCIATE WITH A PLACE*
✨Two Halves Of The End Of The World by @la-muerta✨
Batavia was finally brought to life for me, thanks to @tethysea's enviable talent for world-building, with all the scenic detail and historical references that help enrich the story itself!
*A FIC THAT MADE YOU GASP OUT LOUD*
✨The Right Kind Of Love by @onyxmoon (on AO3)✨
I thought the 'betrayal' at the beginning of this fic was hard to take, but Magnus dealing with the aftermath and his own insecurities was even tougher! Malec learning to communicate is always a balm though!
*A FIC YOU FOUND AT THE RIGHT TIME*
✨Free Of Charge by @lorenzobane✨
Magnus being appreciated and protected by his dedicated and devoted Shadowhunter in this short but seriously sweet fic was precisely what I needed after S1!
*A FIC THAT YOU WOULD READ FIC OF*
✨Lead The Way by @clockworkswans✨
Like a black hole, this Doctor/Companion AU sucked me in, and just like the Tenth Doctor, I didn't want to leave! Such a moving and fantastical journey - I'd love to hear more of their adventures!
*A FIC THAT MADE YOU LAUGH OUT LOUD*
✨Don’t You Wanna Stay by @AlxSteele (on AO3)✨
Enemies to Lovers is a fave trope of mine, and when the stubborn denial and seething dislike is burned away with sexy humour and telling gestures, as in this gem, it's great fun to read!
*A FIC WITH A LINE OR TWO YOU’VE MEMORISED BY HEART*
✨You Who Have Come From My Old Country by @poemsfromthealley✨
"Even so, Magnus loved him, loved him, loved him" - very few writers could persuade me to endure a Malec fic that tells of unbearable loss and suffering - but the touching celebration of their legacy is what I take away from this!
*A FIC THAT GAVE YOU BUTTERFLIES*
✨Body Of Memory by @glorious-spoon✨
This memorable fic about amnesia effectively had S1 Alec being confronted with S3 Alec's reality - and I STILL feel Magnus' fear and Alec's confusion in my bones!
*A FIC THAT EMBODIES SOMETHING YOU VALUE IN LIFE*
✨ Magnus Bane’s School For Young Warlocks by @Miasunrise (on AO3)✨
Alec doing whatever it takes to protect his children is definitely something I can relate to, and this cleverly-crafted fic of finding new family gives depth and character to Max and Raphael!
*A FAVOURITE AU*
✨Walkers Of The Winding Path by @poemsfromthealley
The bewitching combination of mythical monsters, supernatural hunters and this writer’s distinctive way with words means I'm completely under this story's spell! I'll walk this path many times, I think!
*A FIC YOU STAYED UP TOO LATE TO FINISH READING*
✨My Body Is A Cage by @unrestrainedlyexcessive✨
This was me dipping my toe into an AU I wasn't convinced I'd enjoy, but thanks to this writer’s compellingly-quirky storytelling, I couldn't rest before knowing what befell these fated lovers!
*A FIC THAT MADE YOU FEEL SEEN*
✨Beautiful Distraction by @unending-happiness✨
Who better to colour my bespoke fic with every shade of me there is, than my parabatai, Brit! Welcome to my favourite pairing - Malec & Pandemonium! LY, B! ❤😘
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
#MyPosts#FicRecBingo#Full card achieved!#Spoilt for choice really!#Malec#FicRec#lightveils#WriterAppreciation#It's important
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BOOKS
The last 10 books I’ve read:
1. Wolf - Jim Harrison
I found this book in one of the little neighbourhood book exchanges that are all around Vancouver. They look like little log cabins and it’s a loose “take a book, leave a book” policy. I’ve liked some of Harrison’s other books as well as some of his poetry so I picked it up. It’s fairly well written but it’s one of the most depraved and depressed characters I’ve read in a long time. It’s like a darker more depraved version of “On The Road”. More misogynistic, more obsessed with sex and completely lacking of anything philosophic. One of the reviewers on the back cover said it was (paraphrasing) a poetic depiction of a joyful life. I guess I must have read a different book.
2. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
The first book of Pynchon’s I’d picked up. This was such an enjoyable read. I’ve steered clear of his books for fear of not being able to understand them. Every time I’ve talked about wanting to read his book “Gravity’s Rainbow”, I’ve been asked if I’ve read anything else by him. As if that’s a requirement. When I bought this book the teller asked me the same question. When I said no, he said “This is a good place to start.” I don’t know why that is, but now I’ve read one of his books and enjoyed it. I’ve eased into the Pynchon. I think I’m allowed to read another one now.
3. Joyland - Stephen King
This was incredibly disappointing. I’ve read a lot of King’s books. They’re often hit or miss but they’re almost always enjoyable as brain candy. Books like, “The Shining”, “Carrie” or “Misery” are well written and suspenseful. It makes sense why he’s heralded as the King of Horror. But this one does not measure up. In fact, it falls very short of the rest of his work that I’ve read. I felt myself cringing at some of his dialogue. It was just so cheesy. Even though it was set in the 70′s, no one’s ever spoken like that. There’s very little suspense and the story itself isn’t very engaging. When you finally get to the action it’s only a couple of pages and then it’s done. It’s a very quick read, but definitely skippable.
4. The Truth About Stories - Thomas King
A friend of mine who loves to read gave me a bag full of books to check out. This was one of them. It’s one of the CBC Massey Lectures and I love that series. I have a bunch of them already so I was excited to check this out. I also have King’s book, “The Inconvenient Indian” on my bookshelf in my “to read” pile. A pile that does nothing but seem to grow. But it’s still a ways down in the pile. So I thought I’d check out this little book because it’s only 5 essays and it would give me a sample of his writing. I’m very glad that I did. It’s so well written. It’s funny, it’s sad, it makes you think. If you care about stories, politics, religion, and the treatment of First Nations people by the US and Canadian governments, you should give this a read. I can’t wait to get to his book.
5. Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
In my last post I mentioned liking Vonnegut a lot and being surprised at how few of his books I’d read. It turns out I’m just very bad at using technology. I keep a Word document of all the books I’ve read to avoid reading the same book twice, accidentally. I’d tried using the “find” function and somehow did it wrong, so only a few Vonnegut titles showed up. As it turns out, this was the ninth book by Vonnegut that I’d read. That makes way more sense to me. I enjoyed this one a lot. It’s pretty funny and pretty sad. A good combination, if you ask me.
6. 69 - Ryu Murakami
One of my favourite local used bookstores offers store credit if you bring in some books and they decide to buy them from you. You can either take cash or store credit. If you choose credit, you have to spend it all before you go. It’s fun. On this particular visit I had about $60 worth of credit. I’d picked the books I wanted and still had $14 left. They recommended this book. i’d never read anything by this Murakami (no relation to Haruki) so I had no idea what to expect but I was excited to check it out. I loved it. It takes place in 1969 and follows the path of some high school students looking to join or start some kind of counter-cultural movement. The two main characters actually reminded me a lot of my own experience in high school. I’ll be checking out more of his writing for sure.
7. Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Good lord. This was a mountain I’d tried to climb once before and failed. To have finally finished this book is no small feat. Standing at the top, looking back down I’m actually amazed I made it all the way through. It’s not that it’s an unenjoyable read. On the contrary. It’s very well written and quite enjoyable. It’s just that it’s over 1100 pages and contains 388 footnotes, many of which are several pages long and some even have footnotes of their own. At times it can feel like you’re reading two or three books at once. Another challenge is that there are at least 3 plots taking place all at once. Each story can jump ahead or backwards in time which can be tricky to track, PLUS there are character’s plot-lines that are introduced in great detail (one that comes to mind takes 11 pages to describe a young man addicted to marijuana anxiously waiting for his dealer to arrive) that are never again revisited. The three main story lines are loosely connected but the book takes its sweet time revealing that fact. All of that, mind you, and we still haven’t even mentioned the deep themes of addiction, suicide and capitalism that run throughout the book. I’m very glad I’ve read it. I usually enjoyed doing so. But if you’re not committed, if you don’t have some serious time to lean in, or if you don’t like his style of writing then perhaps you should steer clear. It’s an uphill climb, for sure.
8. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things - Lafcadio Hearn
This book caught my eye while I was taking my son for a walk. It was in the window of another one of our local bookstores, so I stopped in and checked it out. It’s a book of Japanese ghost stories and myths from hundreds if not thousands of years ago. The stories themselves are sometimes scary, sometimes funny, sometimes very confusing, but always enjoyable. Although the last three chapters completely disregard all things Japanese and consist of the authors philosophical rumination regarding Butterflies and the afterlife, Mosquitoes and the taking of innocent life (even when it seems to serve no purpose), and Ants and their altruistic existence vs our individualistic societies. There are other books in this series and I plan to check out at lease one more. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan so I’ve got a definite bias here, but if you like myths or ghost stories there’s a good chance you’d enjoy this book.
9. Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
I know I’m late to the party on this one, but this is a fantastic book. It’s one that I’ll be recommending for years to come. Its subtitle is: “Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants”. It is all of that and so much more. I truly loved reading this book. I took notes. I underlined. I had to stop to think and reflect. I’d definitely encourage you to do the same.
10. Masters of Atlantis - Charles Portis
This book is hilarious. Very dry, very droll. It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at the people who organize and who believe in secret societies, cults and religion in general. I didn’t know what to expect when I started it. The only other book by Portis that I’ve read was True Grit. This book is absolutely nothing like that. It’s completely it’s own. The only thing it has in common is Portis’ sense of humour. I don’t know that I’ve ever read anything quite so dry as this before. Maybe something by S.J. Perelman or something like that. This book was recommended to me by M.C. Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger so I was pretty confident it would be good. It’s safe to say I would never have picked it up without the recommendation but also, I’m glad that I did.
more soon,
-joshua
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This thread is multi-layered, but I want to add something here for writers to understand:
The reason why Chinese writing styles are full of what we would consider “purple prose” or “over-usage of metaphors” is because they’re not an over-usage of metaphor. They’re quotations of Chinese literature.
China has a millennias-long history of teaching classical Chinese literature to their students. Part of this no doubt stems from their ideograph-based writing system, where there are literal hundreds of thousands of words you have to learn, and you cannot “skip a grade” in native Chinese like a Westerner could “skip a grade” when it comes to English or French or whatever.
But part of it is just the assumption that if you can write, then you must have read those Classics (see above).
If, however, you cannot (correctly) quote the Classics of Chinese Culture...then you’re going to be regarded as someone who is under-educated, ill-mannered, ignorant, and/or unworthy of having your thoughts taken seriously by anyone you’re corresponding with.
It’s very classist in some ways, it’s very culture-ist in others, and it’s very normal in Chinese and similar societies. It’s an assumption that if you’re going to go to all the bother of getting an education, you should use that education, right? And the best way in those cultures is to use those Classic (or classic-styled) idioms, imagery, & memery.
...For writers, if you’re going to set a story in China or in a Chinese-influenced culture (specifically talking literary style influence), then you are going to have to have your characters quoting the classic literature for whatever-that-culture-is. If it’s Chinese culture...a huge chunk of the world’s population is being educated in it, so be very careful with your resources if it’s not your culture.
If it’s merely styled after, then you are going to have to have snippets of those poems & stories, etc, interwoven into your story so the readers can get some context, and/or have Bob The Outlander asking “what does that mean” or have character explaining, “Well, Bob, as you don’t yet know, when I said ‘pear blossoms holding the rain,’ I actually meant a woman weeping, as based on this one poem written 700 years ago by...”
And no, you don’t have to be that heavy-handed about sticking that info into your created cultures. A couple times here and there, yes...but you’re going to have to explain (tell or show) to your readers what these classics of literature are about.
This is where simile comes into play, when metaphor isn’t getting the job done.
Metaphor could be: “Men are dogs and women are cats*!” It doesn’t explain much, but if you swap over to simile, then you can explain it like this: “Men are like dogs because they pant and drool every time they see anything they think might be a treat! And women are like cats because they come to you only when they want to, not when you demand them to!”
In this example, you can use the full simile near the beginning of the story, then just have your characters knowingly eye each other and mutter “Men are dogs; women are cats,” whenever some situation winds up with some guy eager to get a presumed treat or some gal refusing to dance to someone else’s tune.
Doing things this way, you can interject some pretty solid world-building, and quickly define who among your characters would be considered well-read / well-educated in that type of culture, versus someone who might be bright but who grew up with a much more restricted focus (in science fiction, it could be someone who grew up reading engineering manuals, not poetry anthologies, for example), or whatever.
...Lastly, remember this, writers: A classical educations and/or a heavy focus on literary knowledge does not indicate true intelligence.
Your characters could be fully illiterate and still be incredibly intelligent, skilled, knowledgeable, wise, etc. Conversely, they could successfuly quote ALL the Classics of Ancient Civilizations...and still be an idiot when it comes to interpersonal relations. (Most often a “paradox” seen in extremely rude elite-caste members who look down upon “unlettered barbarians” whose kindness & courtesy to all is far more prevalent than the elite’s...but there are other situations & circumstances, too.)
#*Men are NOT dogs and women are NOT cats; they are INDIVIDUALS#This was just an EXAGGERATED example folks!#Also women do NOT have to do whatever we're ordered to do by some loudmouthed jackass#just sayin'
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Dames Done Wrong: Maya Lin
In the predominantly European dudeified world of architecture, Maya Lin always knew that she would stand out. "Technically, legally, I'm not licensed, so I'm a designer," she says carefully, but almost all of her work relates to the earth and structural productions, especially her most famous work, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. If it walks like a duck, it might as well be a duck, and Maya Lin is architect enough for millions of people.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, in the National Mall, Washington, D.C.
For reasons that I don't need to explain, war is such a touchy subject that almost anything you do, as an artist, is "too soon," and Lin's most famous Greatest Hit is no exception whatsoever. It made former Presidential candidate Ross Perot so angry, for example, that he called her an "egg roll."
So why the kerfluffle over this masterpiece? First of all, Lin maintains, she never would have been selected from a list of 1,421 applications for the Memorial if they had known that she is a woman of Chinese descent, because apparently racism toward Asian people, in the minds of many people, was part of honoring our fallen men and women in uniform. Lin would say that these kinds of bizarre reactions were a symptom of our inability, as a people and a country, to face the reality of the pain and tragedy that war causes.
A real heckuva researcher, Lin was influenced by experiences in her youth and adolescence with the Hopewell and Adena burial mounds, near her hometown in the place that we now call Ohio. Archeologists tell lots of stories about the people who built these mounds, but there are so many unknowns that it kinda takes an artist to make sense of them. The Hopewell mounds date from the first century, and the Adena mounds are several hundred years older, and both seem to suggest that the practice of pyramid and earthwork building, as a ceremonial way of mourning and artistic practice, was not at all unique to the Egyptians or Mayans.
When she composed the Veterans Memorial, Lin says, "I basically didn't even realize I was Chinese." Growing up with academic parents and friends of European descent, Lin had no idea that anyone would ever express prejudice against her, she adds. She never expected that plain ol' green envy would take the form of bigotry. Art was art, smarts was smarts, and that was the hermetic, almost sacred mindset in which she developed as an architect and an artist. In some ways, her naïvete, as she describes it, was a sort of advantage, because it allowed her to think about things like form, transcendence, and materials without having to prepare herself for the political storm waiting like a tornado on the other side of success. Her grandfather had some enormously famous, like national hero famous, cousins, named Lin Juemin and Lin Yin Ming, who were among the seventy-two revolutionary martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising, and her parents kept her in the loop, but it didn't seem connected to cushy suburban life in the U.S.
When critics said things like, "there's so much Zen in your work," she'd say, "you're reading into it too much," but when she got a little older and had children, she realized that it was important to "go back and understand the cultural underpinnings of what makes you." She had already been investigating the cultural underpinnings of the U.S., and the Hopewell and Adena mounds, in a brilliant way, influenced her decision to make the Veterans Memorial an earthwork, not just a proud, jutting tower showing valiant warriors and flags flapping in a David-inspired way. In this way, Lin is agreeing with Warhol's saying that land is the most beautiful thing you can own, slipping the V-shaped black granite form of 58,000 names, organized chronologically, into the earth, creating an unresolved tension between the artistic voices of the earth and the human, like the unresolved tension between indigenous peoples, many of whom give their lives in U.S. wars, and millions of immigrants. Another function of making the memorial an earthwork is, she says, to encourage people to cry, to look downwards in mourning, to find a collective catharsis to commemorate such unthinkable losses.
Maybe the thing that makes people upset about Lin, and gives her the mantle of a Dame Done Wrong, is her incisive way of displaying her insights in both her work and her writing, which comes out in her interviews. Aware of the constant contradictions and tensions of life, Lin says, "My work is heavily researched, but then you have to kill off that side of you to find the poetry within the thought." In a similar way, we can draw a causal connection of sorts between Lin's heritage, her childhood, the indigenous mounds, and so on, but she cuts us off at the pass by naming exactly what makes art so special: "I do not think you can find a reason for everything you make." There's a certain miraculous and unknowable quality to life which Lin names and sanctifies in her work.
Eleven Minute Line, Wanas Castle, Knislinge, Sweden
Lin has spent her entire career talking about the Veterans Memorial, so we owe it to her to give some love to her more recent work, such as Eleven Minute Line. Twelve feet high and 1600 feet long, this earthwork makes its home in a cow pasture in Sweden, and, once again, takes its cue from indigenous people, who we speculatively call the Fort Ancient people, almost a thousand years ago. These people made the Serpent Mound, which is such a striking, singular work, that when European settlers first saw it, they convinced themselves that somehow, other Europeans must have traveled there, certainly by jetpack or Star Trek teleportation, constructed the work, and gone back home, all without leaving any record of their Europeanness. This totally likely story forms part of the basis of Lin's discussion of Eleven Minute Line: the settlers imagined that the Serpent Mound was European, because it is sophisticated, so Lin did them a favor by putting a similar earthwork down across the pond. You're welcome, Sweden.
Ready for the waterworks? Put away your tissues—we're looking at Lin's trio of water-based earthworks, partly inspired by Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which features this excerpt from the Book of Amos: "We are not satisfied. We shall not be satisfied until justice—rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Twenty years after her first wavefield work, the emphasis on water is all the more prescient, in the wake of the hard-won legal decision in favor of the Standing Rock Sioux against the would-be builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The first book of Genesis talks about the Creator making the heavens and the earth, but not the waters. Why not? Apparently, it's a secret.
Wave Field, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States.
Like a mother bird feeding her chicks, Lin "regurgitates," in her words, science and mathematics into the earth, making an impression of our mathematical, Apollonian sensibilities on terra firma.
She uses the word "regurgitate" to introduce us to her process of making Storm King Wavefield, the third in the wavefield cycle, which uses nonlinear dynamics, a subfield of math, or maths, if you're British, to create fifteen to eighteen-foot high waves of earth and grass over the surface of an eleven-acre space.
Flutter, Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. Courthouse, Miami, United States
Lin's works tap into the sacredness of water, our best friend who we have to keep a close eye on. Water can be quite turbulent, and it took centuries for people to develop mathematical algorithms capable of simulating water. Still, even today, the most accurate fluid simulations, in Pixar movies and video games, for example, are far from convincing, most of the time, resembling the thick surfaces of jello or the skin on a cup of boiled milk.
Storm King Wavefield, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, United States
Lin's goal is not to simulate water, but to incorporate the Stokes wavefield equations, in which, for example, the flow velocity u can be described as the gradient of a velocity potential Φ, whatever that means. I'd love to know what that means, and that's the most basic introductory part of the Stokes theory, but it's very comforting to know that I don't need to understand it, and I can leave it to other people, geniuses like Lin.
By: Shoshone
#maya lin#5 women artists#female artists#asian american#asian artists#art history#history of art#dames done wrong#serious art history#feminist art history
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5,000 question survey series part--forty-three
4101. What is the most difficult thing you have ever overcome?
One is all the surgeries I had as a kid that required spending months in the hospital. It was just a very difficult, frustrating time.
4102. What is more imporatnt, how much someone has achieved or how far they have come to achieve it?
Uh, I don’t know if either one is more important than the other. Someone who has achieved anything they’re proud of is something to applaud, whether it’s one thing or many things. I think someone who has had to work hard and came a long way is commendable, but I’m not gonna knock someone who maybe didn’t have to work as hard to achieve something either. I want people to succeed and as long as they’re doing something shady to achieve it, then I’m rooting for you.
4103. Have you ever had anything published?
No. I’ve never attempted to have something published either.
4104. Of the following, what kind of person would you be more attracted to (1 is highest, 3 lowest):
I don’t look for that in a guy, like I don’t compare them to myself in that way. Besides, I don’t think I’m attractive so I would always think they were more attractive than me.
less good looking than you?
about as good looking as you?
more good looking than you?
how goodlooking are you?
I’m not.
4105. less inteligent than you? about as intelligent as you? more intelligent than you?
I mean, I think it would be nice to be with someone I thought I was intelligent and I could a lot from. It could also be intimidating, though. I wouldn’t want to feel dumb or like I couldn’t contribute anything to the conversation. As long as they weren’t arrogant or cocky about it or put people down for not knowing something.
how intelligent are you?
Meh. I just feel average.
4106. has less money than you? has about as much money as you? has more money than you?
I don’t care about their money. Like, we both could contribute and take care of each other. And if they did have more money than me, I wouldn’t expect them to be the sole provider. I would still contribute what I could.
How wealthy are you?
I’m not. I’m fortunate that I still live at home and my parents still provide a lot for me financially, but I do contribute what I can towards bills (a couple household bills and my own bills) and whatnot.
4107. less wild and crazy than you? about as wild and crazy as you? more wild and crazy than you?
I’m not wild and/or crazy, ha so I couldn’t handle someone who was. I mean, I could handle some, like a little spontaneity and adventure. Someone like, “Hey, let’s take a drive up to the beach or mountains this weekend!” Something along those lines haha nothing too crazy. I’m really gonna need a guy who is down to chill at home and binge watch shows and movies with me, play board games, get takeout, and just take it easy a lot. Not to say we never go anywhere or do anything, but I couldn’t be with someone who always had to be doing something ya know? I don’t have the energy for that and due to health reasons I rest a lot.
How wild and crazy are you?
I’m not. I’m tame and lame, ha.
4108. Is your bathroom shelf stacked with numorous bottles of lotions and creams?
Our bathroom pantry has a lot of that stuff, as well as the cupboard space under the sink. There’s some stuff on the counter, too.
4109. How do you maintain your body?
Uhh, I’m thin but I’m not in shape or fit. I’ve always been thin and had a fast metabolism, but for the past few years I’ve been too thin/underweight due to health reasons and appetite issues.
4110. Did you ever imagine that objects have a life of their own?
Yeah, ha. I kept stuffed animals and stuff from my childhood because I would feel bad getting rid of them. As though they had feelings or something. I have a hard time getting rid of anything.
4111. What is it like to be an object, do ya think?
It could suck cause they’re just being used by people until they’re not useful anymore, or it could feel loved and important if used often. Or it could be like some things I have that are just sitting on a shelf collecting dust and feeling sad. :X lol.
4112. Do stones, rocks, trees, lamps, water, couches, etc all have some sort of life energy running through them?
Yeah.
4113. Would you ever consider getting romantically involved with:
your teacher?
I’m done with school, but no I never would have considered being involved with any of my teachers, then or now.
your doctor?
Nope.
4114. If ____ asked me for sex, I could NOT refuse. Fill in the blank as if you were speaking.
I would refuse everyone at this time.
4115. What is 'nothing'?
Absence of something?
4116. Would you rather read about how to get better abs or about how thousands of people across the globe are marching for peace?
About how thousands of people across the globe are marching for peace.
4117. Should america make love, not war?
Of course that would be nice.
4118. If you could nominate anyone for sainthood, who ould you and why?
I have no idea.
4119. Can you name one person who is purely good?
Jesus.
4120. How about one person who is completely evil?
Satan.
4121. Is there a book inside of you?
Uhhh.
If yes, what about?
4122. Do you call people more often or get calls more often?
Calls more often out of the two, but it’s not a lot.
4123. What do you wake up to?
Usually just on my own.
4124. If you could get a free subscription to any magazine what would it be?
I wouldn’t. I haven’t read a magazine in several years.
4125. When you wrote letters to santa did you ever ask for stuff that didn't exist?
No.
4126. Make up a new slogan for McDonald's:
Nah.
4127. What kind of people do you like to be associated with (buisness, writers, dark, antisocial, spiritual, happy)?
Chill people that I just vibe with and relate to.
4128. How are you like a toaster?
I let stuff build up until pop!
4129. Do you believe we are really in the matrix?
Nah, man.
4130. There are 2 dolls, a gw Bush doll and a Sadam Hussein doll. You can only afford one. Which do you buy?
I’d have no reason to want either one.
4131. What is a jaberwocky?
The dragon from Alice Through the Looking Glass.
4132. Finish the sentances:
Nah.
I'm speed racer and I drive real fast, I drive real fast:
I'm a big bird and I like to steal, I like to steal and I like to:
I'm a barbie doll and I've got grace, I've got grace but:
4133. What do you think aliens would think of life on earth?
Probably nothing good.
4134. What image do you get fom the words 'urban decay'?
Well, I think of the makeup brand.
4135. Have a ___ day. Fill in the blank with anything but 'nice'
Have a chill day.
4136. Do you own anything with a:
southpark character or logo on it?
No.
greatful dead bear or logo on it?
No.
4137. What is your impression of beatniks?
I don’t know what that is.
4138. What was the last thing you ordered (or watched) on pay-per-view?
I have no idea... that would have been ages ago.
4139. Nails, long or short?
My nails are barely even there. :X
4140. Do you prefer touch lamps, the clapper, or the old-fashioned light switch?
Ha, I think it’d be neat to have the clapper. I could set up the Alexa and get the electronics that are compatible with it and have the same thing.
4141. Can you 'berry talk'?
What?
4142. Do you like vines on old buildings?
Sure.
How about grafitti on old buildings?
Murals are really cool.
4143. When someone says 'it's been one of tose days' what do they mean by 'those days'?
A shitty day.
4144. Have you ever owned those magic markers that could change colors?
Yeah.
4145. It's not easy bein' ____. Fill in the blank as if you were speaking.
Me.
4146. Is there a song that has been stuck in your head since you were a child?
Wow, no not that long. It can be annoying having a song stuck in my head for a few days, I couldn’t imagine having a song stuck in my head since childhood. I mean, I sometimes have songs from my childhood stuck in my head, but that’s obviously different.
4147. Do you own anything plaid?
I have a plaid throw pillow and a plaid pair of leggings.
4148. Do you recycle?
Plastic bottles and cans.
4149. What is your strongest point?
I don’t feel I have one. :/
4150. What is your weakest point?
I have a lot of those.
What are you doing to work on that weakness?
I’m not, that’s the problem.
4151. Paraphrase (rewrite) this sentance without using any of the words currently in it that are more than 2 letters long (except THE you can use THE). If anyone should steal this survey from you they should paraphrase YOUR sentance and so on: “Deep in the heart of turn of the century India a young mongoose is adopted by a british family.”
Long ago a European family took in a baby animal in a foreign country. Ha, I don’t know.
4152. A baby is born witha terminal disese. She will suffer agonizing pain for 5 years and then die. The mother gives the baby a sleeping medicine and it dies. Mom claims it was a mercy killing. Prosecution claims it was murder. You are on the jury. What is your vote?
Jeez, I can’t with these questions.
4153. Why doesn't poetry say outright what it means?
Cause that’s boring.
4154. Read this sentance: “I can’t wait until summer is over.”
Now delete it.
Done?
Now write any sentance you want there instead.
4155. What is your opinion of Orson Welles?
I don’t know who that is.
4156. If you were a lotion, what would your label say?
I don’t know.
4157. What side id your good side?
I don’t have one.
4158. Rewrite that sentance you deleted up there as best you can. Try to get the idea across even if you don't get the exact words right:
Impatiently waiting for this season to end.
4159. What is your favorite work by Edgar Allen Poe?
A Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven.
4160. Of the following short stories which would you be most likly to read (based on titles alone if you aren't familiar with them, 1 is most likely 9 is least likely)??
Just gonna bold which ones I might read instead.
Young Goodman Brown
The Cask of Amontillado
The Story of an Hour
The Metemorphasis
Barn Burning
The Lottery <<< I’ve read this one.
A & P
The Sandkings
Minority Report
4161. What is the differance between a norm and a value?
Values are more general and abstract.
4162. Can you think of a norm in your own culture that is different from a value in your culture?
Cancel culture has become the norm it seems, which differs from values in society like compassion, forgiveness, understanding, empathy.
4163. Who is your favorite star wars character?
My squad: The Child (baby Yoda), C3PO, Chewbacca, Yoda, and R2D2.
4164. Why haven't we begun to colonize the moon?
Because it’s not inhabitable.
4165. What did you think of the shuttle columbia blowing up?
That was absolutely horrific and devastating. Ugh. I feel horrible for those who lost their lives and for the people who witnessed it, especially their loved ones.
4166. What do you remember about the challenger?
That happened before I was born, I just learned about it when I was older.
4167. Is the force with you?
Yep. May the force with be you, too.
4168. What is your favorite spoof movie?
The Scary Movie series.
4169. Would you ever own a(n):
human slave?
Wtf, NO.
robotic slave (where the robot is consiouss of itself)?
I don’t want any type of slave.
trained ape slave?
Nooooooo.
human clone slave?
Nooooooo.
4170. What can no one stop you from doing?
Surveys, ha.
4171. Who would you be bored without?
My family, which includes my doggo.
4172. What is your only hope?
God.
4173. Would you rather visit france or puerto rico and why?
Hmm. I’d be down for either one.
4174. Have you ever corrupted someone or dragged them down?
No.
4175. If you could say/teach one thing to all the youth of america what would it be?
Respect.
4176. Does any part of your body get in yyour way?
No.
4177. Leia or Amidala?
Gotta go with my girl, Princess Leia/General Organa.
4178. Do you trust your feelings?
Usually. Sometimes I think I’m being paranoid and ridiculous, but also I think I’m just being real and logical even if it does seem negative and pessimistic at times. I want to be safe than sorry, ya know. But there are definitely times where I am wrong.
4179. Do you feel empty or passionate most of the time?
Empty. :/ I don’t have a passion and that really worries me. I want that.
4180. What was your monet of triumph?
Ha, I thought “monet of triumph” was a phrase I wasn’t familiar with, but upon Googling I think it’s just a typo. It sounds cool, though. Anyway, my moment of triumph... I mean, not to get dark but being a victim of gun violence at 7 months old and surviving is pretty major. I can’t think of anything else.
4181. Explain what piety is:
Being religious, I think.
4182. In what ways are you a rebel?
“I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”
4183. In what ways are you a conformist?
Uhh. I follow the rules?
4184. Do you likie movie endings that leave you wondering or tie upp all the loose ends?
If there’s going to be another movie in the series then I’m for a cliff hanger, it’s exciting. Even though I am super impatient. Otherwise, I typically don’t like when movies just abruptly end and I have to try and figure out what happened. Like, I need answers.
4185. What movie has the best soundtrack?
Hmm.
4186. What adventure would you liike to undertake?
I don’t know. If we’re ever able to travel again safely, I’d love to do so. I need a fun vacation.
4187. Do you tip gas station attendants when you get full service?
We gotta pump our own gas where I’m from.
4188. Do you own any souvineers; what from where?
I own a lot of souvenirs from various places.
4189. Does your age make you embaressed?
Not the age itself, I just feel embarrassed about where I’m at in life at 31 years old.
4190. Are you the strong and silent type?
I’m not strong, but I’m silent.
4191. What doo your shoes look like?
Which ones, I have several pairs.
4192. Do you ever admire yourself while naked?
Ew, absolutely not. I hate my body, I’m extremely self-conscious. I don’t feel comfortable at all naked. Like literally, as soon I’m done showering I’m throwing clothes back on.
4193. If you could make someone's clothes magically disappear who would you do it to and where?
Uh, I wouldn’t do that to anyone.
4194. Who is more foolish, the fool or the fool that follows the first fool?
They’re all foolish.
4195. A good website for the bored (not a diary one):
YouTube.
4196. Did people REALLY land on the moon?
Yes.
4197. Would you rather live for a month in India or Alaska?
Hmm. Maybe Alaska.
4198. What is one country you ould NEVER visit and why?
I don’t know.
4199. Who is the busiest person you can think of?
My mom.
4200. What is the average length of your relationships?
Ha, what relationships.
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An Overview of Comparative-Historical Chinese Dialectology (II.i): Old Chinese
Let’s imagine a world in which the modern Romance languages are all extant and written in the Latin alphabet; however, Latin is not attested. If you were collecting cognates of the word for “middle” or “medium”, you’d get [mɐi.u] from Portuguese, [mitʃ] from Catalan, [med.dzo] from Italian and so on and so forth. You don’t have any Latin to compare with, but it’s not that difficult to determine that Proto-Romance had a form *mɛdjʊ or something like that.
Now imagine that you dig up a 2700-year-old tablet in southern Italy, and it has the word mefiú on it. It’s clear that it’s pretty close to your Proto-Romance, but it’s not quite the same. Some tokens of /p/ in the tablet-language correspond to *p in Proto-Romance, and some of them correspond to Proto-Romance *kw. On the other hand, it seems to have some distinctions Proto-Romance doesn’t, such as a diphthong ou which seems to fall together with Proto-Romance *u. You can read it, and it’s clear it’s closely related, but it isn’t Proto-Romance.
Imagine a different world. Here, the Romance languages are written with logograms and have been for three millennia. Thus the character 中 is read [mɐi.u] in Portugal, [mitʃ] in Catalonia, [misu] in Sardinia and [med.dzo] in Italy. You can reconstruct a Middle Romance reading *mɛdjʊ for this character.
One day a 2700-year-old tablet is found in southern Italy. The characters have strange, archaic forms and the syntax is really unusual, but it can be read. It includes an early form of the character 中. Is it Latin? Or Oscan?
Keep this analogy in mind as we dive into Old Chinese.
Old Chinese is attested from about 1250 BC in the form of inscriptions on oracle-bone tablets, followed shortly thereafter by longer texts during the Zhou era. Archaeological excavations are turning up lots of texts on wood and bamboo strips from the early and mid-first millennium BC, so we have much more raw material from the Old Chinese period to work with than we did even two or three decades ago.
Here the trouble begins. Every other script from antiquity, with the possible exception of Mayan (whose basic structure I still find entirely inscrutable), includes considerable phonological information: the cuneiform syllabary, Linear B, even Egyptian hieroglyphs. Many of these scripts can be underspecifying to the point of ambiguity for modern scholars, like Linear B or hieroglyphs, but the basic organizing principle is phonemic. If you see wa-na-ka on a Linear B tablet, you have automatically narrowed the reading of the word down to a handful of possible phonemic interpretations.
With Old Chinese, all this goes out the window. Oh, it’s not that there’s no phonological information available to us about the period; there’s plenty if you know where to look. But Old Chinese, and the script in particular, only reveal their phonological secrets through smoke and mirrors. It’s a difference of kind, not of degree, compared with such relative walks-in-the-park as a cuneiform syllabic with two possible readings or an unvocalized scrap of Semitic.
Thus, reconstructing Old Chinese requires drawing on a vast amount of rather disparate evidence, which includes (but is not necessarily limited to):
the phonetic clues in the actual script, particularly the rebus principle used to create phono-semantic compound characters;
rhymes in ancient poetry;
the recoverable historical phonology of the modern varieties of Chinese;
early borrowings into neighboring languages such as Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Hmongic and, to a lesser extent, borrowings into Sinitic from foreign languages such as Tocharian;
comments on “rustic” or “incorrect” forms of speech in early sources;
unusual character usage (before the Han dynasty or so, many words are found written with more than one character, and some characters are used to write multiple words; usually these conflations involved some degree of phonetic similarity)
last and (for the most part) least, evidence from non-Sinitic relatives such as Tibetan and Burmese. This is the most fraught and least reliable source of evidence, because Sinitic doesn’t seem to have any particularly close relatives within Sino-Tibetan and the state of Proto-Sino-Tibetan is still quite hazy.
Now, Baxtar and Sagart conclude that attested Old Chinese is so vanishingly close to the last common ancestor of all attested varieties of Sinitic that “Old Chinese” and “Proto-Sinitic” can be conflated except in the most pedantic and exacting of contexts. It’s tempting, therefore, to assume that we can just throw Min, Mandarin, Cantonese and maybe a few borrowings into Korean into the comparative method and collect Old Chinese as it comes out through the grinder. But this is wrong. Old Chinese was almost identical to, indeed for almost all purposes was, the last common ancestor of attested modern Chinese varieties, but it doesn’t look much like modern varieties of Chinese and the comparative method alone will give you a highly incomplete picture. It should therefore serve as a cautionary tale for overly optimistic comparativists; the comparative method is usually lossy even with a wide range of languages to work with, but in the absence of contemporaneous attestation we simply can’t know what we don’t know.
So what did Old Chinese look like?
First and foremost, no tones. Tones do not begin to develop in Chinese until sometime in the Han period. As far as I know every single modern variety of Chinese is tonal (barring fringe cases like Wutun that have lost tone under the influence of unusual contact situations), and I believe the tonal system of every modern variety can be derived through various twists and turns from the “four-tone” (really three-tone; we’ll get to it later) system of Middle Chinese.
How does this work? Essentially, what’s going on is that the comparative method can reconstruct distinctions and developments that occurred at different times. Tone in Chinese is somewhere around two thousand years old and develops at the very end of the Old Chinese period (you could make a case for its development being the Old Chinese-Middle Chinese boundary). Every single modern variety has it, because it spread across and encompassed the entirety of what must have been the dialect patchwork of Han-dynasty China. But that dialect patchwork was not uniform, and traces of its nature from before the rise of tonal distinctions are still with us. For example, there must have been an allowed Old Chinese coda consonant *-r which merges, in Middle Chinese and in almost all conservative dialect groups such as Min, with *-n. However, a small corner of Shandong has -j for Old Chinese *-r despite the fact that dialects that preserver the *-n/*-r distinction are otherwise completely unexceptional varieties of Mandarin--coda stop loss, tonal and sibilant developments, the whole nine yards. Zhou- and Han-era dialects of Shandong, see footnote at end of post.
Does this mean that we have to revise the phylogeny of Chinese to look like this?
No!
It simply means that “Old Chinese” was not uniform, resembling in important ways the dialect continuum of Iron Age Italy more than the standard Latin of Cicero, and while the Old Chinese patchwork developed as a single unit in important ways (such as tonogenesis) during the transition from Old to Middle Chinese and into modern varieties, there are still glitches in the matrix.
To beat a nearly-dead analogy, we can imagine a variety spoken in a village in Umbria which is mutually intelligible with standard Italian and has undergone identical developments for two thousand years, but which happens to reflect Proto-Italic *f *þ medially as /v/. It would be incorrect to say that this variety is modern Oscan and more separate from its neighbors, to whose speakers it is merely an odd accent, than its neighbors are from Portuguese or French. At the same time, its conservation of a distinction that not even Ciceronian Latin maintains introduces complications into our sense of what “proto-Romance” or “the Romance languages” or “Italian” actually mean. And since, grammatically, this variety has developed along with the Vulgar Latin and Italian dialects that surround it, we would be unable to recover the Latin passive or the case system from it. The “last common ancestor” that maintained all the distinctions of the Romance-languages-plus-Italian-with-Oscan-characteristics was Proto-Italic, but vast swaths of Proto-Italic have still been lost to time, and the comparative method will deliver you a language that was never spoken by anybody (Vulgar Latin, except with a four-way medial distinction *-f-/*-þ-/*-b-/*-d- rather than a two-way *-b-/*-d- distinction).
As a final note on this topic, nobody appears to have noticed that the *-r/*-n distinction was carried on in modern Chinese until Sergei Starostin in 1981, and even he did not identify which dialects had the distinction, only that some did*. This is another reason it’s important to do fieldwork and descriptions of Chinese varieties spoken in rural areas; cities are easier to get to, but they don’t usually have the really unusual varieties that you need access to find distinctions from this. It is possible, for example, that there’s still a corner of Sichuan that speaks Ba-Shu Chinese, an old dialect group that is thought to have been completely replaced by Mandarin during the Ming period and extinct except as a substrate. But we don’t know, because an exhaustive dialect survey of Sichuan has not (to my knowledge) been done.
(This post is long enough to publish at this point and so I’m going to cut it off here and turn Old Chinese into a subseries of posts.)
*It’s not clear on a second reading whether or not Shandong dialects still reflect *-r as -j, because the sources cited are contemporaneous complaints about Shandong speakers. Apparently though the *-ar rhyme is reflected as -i in some Min varieties and “Chǔ-Qú”, which seems to be a group of Wu dialects spoken on the Zhejiang-Fujian border, so the above analogy holds except that it’s Chǔ-Qú Wu that plays the part of Oscan-flavored Italian. I do recall reading somewhere though that there are definitely varieties of “Mandarin” that maintain distinctions not even found in Min, so...
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POPISM: THE WARHOL 60′s
by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett
o-o-o-o-o
In most of his interviews, Andy Warhol wasn't very talkative and came off as hella awkward while simultaneously being kinda snarky, often dicking interviewers around. So it's quite refreshing to be getting his take on things in his own voice. 300 pages of it, no less. Sure, you can bet the actual writing was done by Pat Hacket, but you can be equally sure that the voice behind the writing belongs to no one but Andy Warhol.
"Very few people on the [West] Coast knew or cared about contemporary art, and the press for my show wasn't too good. I always have a laugh, though, when I think of how Hollywood called Pop Art a put-on! Hollywood?? I mean, when you look at the kind of movies they were making then--those were supposed to be real??"
It's also nice to see him recount his transition from his commercial art practice to his early beginning within the gallery circuit-- when he was still not quite sure of himself-- before he became a superstar and way before his studio became the go-to place for every major counter-cultural figure in America.
"By the time Ivan [Karp] (who worked at Leo Castelli Gallery) introduced me to Henry [Geldzahler] (who at the time was a new young 'curatorial-assistant-with-no-specific-duties' at the Met) I was keeping my commercial drawings absolutely buried in another part of the house because one of the people Ivan had brought by before had remembered me from my commercial art days and asked to see some drawings. As soon as I showed them to him, his whole attitude toward me changed. I could actually see him changing his mind about my paintings, so from then on I decided to have a firm no-show policy about the drawings. Even with Henry, it was a couple of months before I was secure enough about his mentality to show them to him."
But if it's the explosive Factory years you're interested in, rest assured there's plenty of that as well. One of the best things about this book though is Warhol's observations about the times. Because that is very much what the book is: a window onto the 1960's through they eyes and words of Andy Warhol. It starts off in 1960 and ends in 1969. By all accounts the 60's was a very special decade in America, and Warhol's retelling definitely drives the point home
"Everything went young in '64. The kids were throwing out all the preppy outfits and the dress-up clothes that made them look like their mothers and fathers, and suddenly everything was reversed--the mothers and fathers were trying to look like their kids."
It gets better:
"Generally speaking, girls were still pretty chubby, but with the new slim clothes coming in, they all went on diets. This was the first year I can remember seeing loads of people drink low-calorie sodas."
And then later:
"Since diet pills are made out of amphetamine, that was one reason speed was as popular with Society as it was with street people. And these Society women would pass out the pills to the whole family, too--to their sons and daughters to help them lose weight, and to their husbands to help them work harder and stay out later. There were so many people from every level on amphetamine, and although it sounds strange, I think a lot of it was because of the new fashions."
So you get interesting anecdotes like that, with associations and theories only someone like Warhol would come up with; Fashion made Speed popular.
He does go on tangents throughout the book, recounting other people's stories instead of his own--which I s'pose you can say is a very Warholian thing to do, isn't it? I can imagine some people getting tired of these long tangents, but I find them to be wonderful additions to Warhol's montage of the decade.
"'I gave Bob Dylan a book of my poems a couple of years ago,' Taylor [Mead] said, 'right after the first time I saw him perform. I thought he was a great poet and I told him so... And now', Taylor started to laugh, 'now when he's a big sensation and everything, he asked me for a free copy of my second book. I said 'but you're rich now--you can afford to buy it!' And he said, 'But I only get paid quarterly.'"
These asides cover a huge roster of characters, from Dylan to Jackson Pollock to Robert Rauschenberg to Jonas Mekas to Dennis Hopper to Edie Sedgwick to Jim Morrison to Lou Reed to Nico to Mick Jagger and on and on. The tone is very conversational and often gosspiy, but it isn't all mere gossip. You learn, for example, how Warhol introduced Henry Geldzahler to a young British painter by the name of David Hockney. This was before Geldzahler became curator of American Art at the Met and way before he became Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York City. And it was really before Andy Warhol himself became anything close to a cult figure, which he would start to become only 1-2 years later.
Hard to imagine the transition when you take into account the initial reception towards his work:
"When Ivan brought Leo Castelli up to my studio, the place was a mass, with the big canvases strewn around the living room--painting was a lot messier than drawing. Leo looked my stuff over, the Dick Tracys and the Nose Jobs in particular, and then said, 'Well, it's unfortunate, the timing, because I just took on Roy Lichtenstein, and the two of you in the same gallery would collide."
And then later:
"Henry Geldzahler was also pounding the pavements for me. He offered me to Sidney Janis, who refused. He begged Robert Elkon. He approached Eleanor Ward, who seemed interested but said she didn't have room. Nobody, but nobody, would take me."
Amidst the stories, the gossip, and observations, there's also the occasional tip.
"To be successful as an artist, you have to have your work shown in a good gallery for the same reason that, say, Dior never sold his originals from a counter in Woolworth's. It's a matter of marketing, among other things. If a guy has, say, a few thousand dollars to spend on a painting, he doesn't wander along the street till he sees something lying around that 'amuses' him. He wants to buy something that's going to go up and up in value, and the only way that can happen is with a good gallery, one that looks out for the artist, promotes him, and sees to it that his work is shown in the right way to the right people."
He finally got his first New York show in the fall of '62 at Eleanor Ward's Stable Gallery (only 3 years before announcing his retirement from painting). By early '63 he'd moved his work studio from his home to an old firehouse on East 87th st, and soon thereafter he hired Gerard Malanga as his assistant, who was also instrumental in keeping Andy plugged into all the cultural happenings.
"Gerard kept up with every arty event and movement in the city--all the things that sent out fliers or advertised in the Voice. He took me to a lot of dank, musty basements where plays were put on, movies screened, poetry read--he was an influence on me in that way."
The more things Warhol was exposed to, the more he soaked up stuff like a sponge, not just for his art, but for his very persona.
"In those days I didn't have a real fashion look yet... Eventually I picked up some style from Wynn [Chamberlain] , who was one of the first to go in for the S & M leather look."
Perhaps some of the most interesting parts in the book is when Warhol recounts some of his efforts in film, which indeed took up the majority of the 60's despite not "bringing home the bacon" in the same way the paintings did. Even today Andy's films have yet to occupy the same place his paintings have, but in reading his retelling it's hard to think that even the most skeptical of skeptics wouldn't be able to see that there's at least a bit of genius in them. In one bit, Warhol even talks about "slow cinema" something that seems to be regaining popularity in recent years.
"That had always fascinated me, the way people could sit by a window or on a porch all day and look out and never be bored, but then if they went to a movie or a play, they suddenly objected to being bored. I always felt that a very slow film could be just as interesting as a porch-sit if you thought about it the same way."
But all in all the greatest thing about the book is that it's such a perceptive account of some of the most interesting aspects of 60's New York. There's lots on Jonas Mekas' Cinematheque, plenty on the changing neighborhoods, how the East Village was becoming all Bohemian, when the Beatles became all the rage and the Stones were having publicity issues, how fashions were quickly evolving year after year ("The masses wanted to look non-conformist, so that meant the non-conformity had to be mass-manufactured").
I find it quite odd that in the wide array of art-related books recommended to me over the years, Andy Warhol's Popism was never mentioned once. In fact, I never even knew of the book's existence, and just happened upon it by sheer coincidence. It strikes me as essential reading to anyone interested in not just Andy Warhol, but New York's art scene in the 60's more generally, arguably the most important decade in American art and culture at large. And actually, art aside, it's an incredible telling account of the decade more generally, with Warhol's keen observations on things like fashion, music, and media. Even with Warhol's shortcomings--his obsessions with things like glamour, fame, and money, all things that come across in this here book--he still manages to do what he's always done best: hold up a mirror right in America's face.
Highly recommended.
[Available on Amazon]
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