read Nowhere near you for my book report for school and holy shit. I literally bought Because You'll never meet me and Nowhere near you cause it was so good! Like UFGiesgbiurwfhgrfueodjfkdsbgiuewfjaknvdbjgefhidbsjfnesdbguesbigbjekbsjj! Almost all the characters are so fucking relatable!
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Day 3 — Loss
the state or feeling of grief when deprived of someone or something of value
I can’t say much about today’s prompt without risking spoilers, but loss, and how people cope with it, are certainly major themes in Leah’s works. She expertly portrays the loss of relationships, of objects, and, frequently, of childhood innocence.
Don’t forget to tag for potential spoilers on anything you post for today!
Question: If you could undo one major loss that occurs in BYNMM or NNY, what would you choose and why? Better yet, explore what sort of divergence from canon may have occurred if the loss in question never happened.
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A series of important facts:
1. Zhu Zanjin has cute tiny dogs
2. He carries them around in unexpected ways
3. Sometimes he puts them in Jin Guangyao’s costume
4. Jin Guangyao was the one who bought Fairy, so he’s canonically not anti-dog (forget the threat to kill her, he was a little stressed that day ok)
5. According to the American Kennel Club, small Pekingese (4-5 pounds) were sometimes called “sleeve dogs” because Chinese nobility would use them as personal guard dogs, hidden in their sleeves
CONCLUSION:
We need a remake of The Untamed that’s exactly the same except for one crucial element
LET JIN GUANGYAO HAVE A PUPPY
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My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.
She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?
(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)
And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.
(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)
But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.
It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.
By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.
And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.
It might be the most human impulse we have.
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