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sprachgitter · 11 months

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on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

#web weaving #quote compilation #shakespeare #romeo and juliet #Hilary Mantel #arundhati roy #valzhyna mort #excerpt #on poetry #on storytelling #god of small things

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cazort · 2 months

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Yeah, this is happening in Germany right now. Jews are being arrested and Palestinians beaten by police, for engaging in any kind of public pro-Palestinian protest.

Zionism has becomes so fanatical and extremist that it is no longer willing to protect Jews, any Jews who question the ideology and speak out against genocide are treated as the enemy.

When are people going to learn from that "first they came for..." poem? History is repeating itself.

#germany #israel #palestine #antisemitism #genocide

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soracities · 10 months

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how do you know when you're getting good at poetry? everybody dunks on halsey and rupi kaur's poetry, and i never really got why and idk if that's what i sound like

Honestly, I don't think there's ever a point at which you "know" you're getting good at poetry--I think "good" and "bad" are kind of vague and amorphous (and distracting) categories that don't do much in helping us understand the feel and impact of certain writing, chiefly because they can also be deeply subjective. How a poet views a particular work and how a reader views it will be very, very different because their relationship to the work is different. I also think "good" is a sort of external category that does not (or should not) carry into the act of writing itself--when you make "is this good?" the chief consideration as you write, you're not actually present in the writing: you're focused on the finished product, not the process, but the process is the most important thing: that's where the poem actually meets you. I think growth, in writing, is less about knowing if you're "good" in this regard, and more about being able to have confidence, or simply just trust, in the writing as it happens.

There's a famous saying somewhere that a work of literature is never "finished"--it just stops. I think skill, when it comes to writing, lies in recognising where this point is, in learning and developing how you navigate what it is you want to say, and how you say it. Some poems, eventually, reach a point where you can take them no further and you know there is nothing more to be said in them or through them. Some poems reach a point where you can take them no further, but there is still something left to be said in them. Those poems get revisited, worked, and reworked again, until they (maybe) get close to the first category: this may mean you work on them for a few weeks, or for years--but either way you are prioritizing the process of making the poem, not how it will be received. "Is this a good poem?" in my view at least, is not really the relevant question--what's relevant is "is this true to what I wanted to say?" Leonard Cohen famously wrote over 100 drafts of "Hallelujah"--I don't know if the central question for him here was just a matter of his skills as a songwriter.

Regarding Halsey and Rupi Kaur, I've only been able to read Halsey's poems through previews on Google Books so I don't know what other people's critiques are--based on what I saw, though, I don't know if it makes sense to criticize their quality as "poems" when she is primarily a songwriter and a lot of those poems wound up as songs. I'm more familiar with Rupi Kaur's writing, though, and others like her (Atticus, Michael Faudet etc), and while I have a personal policy of not getting into Kaur online (there's an ask here which is about as much as I'm willing to say regarding my feelings on her writing)--I can get into this trend or poetry "style" as a whole. And to be honest I think the chief issue here with poetry like this is that poetry, by definition, involves a deep and intimate relationship with language: this holds true regardless of whether the poem is simple, or complex, whether it's 5 lines long or goes on for 50 pages. As I said in that previous ask, it's not something you can reduce to a formula, nor is it a matter of mere reportage or a collection of statements: what makes a poem has nothing to do with line breaks (prose poems exist), but everything to do with how the language moves, how the language of a poem engages with its own content, with itself, and, as a result, with the reader.

The kind of work that proliferates on Instagram does not have that kind of engagement with language--they are, to me, pieces of information more than anything else. They reduce language to a series of stock phrases that act, not as actual words, but as images (and I don't mean this in a visually evocative way). It tries to evoke something that requires a thoughtful and sustained examination in order to be expressed, by surpassing the reality of what that examination actually requires. It tries to ape the effect of a powerful poem without the work that goes into actually being able to make that kind of a poem in the first place: and that work is a sustained encounter and confrontation with the language used and its relationship to what it tries to convey, in understanding that words are not interchangeable blocks you move around willy-nilly but that they have weight and intention, that they interact with each other to build up an idea or a feeling or a landscape in the most accessible way (insofar as language can make anything accessible, at least). But this is rarely, if ever, felt in IG poetry because it refuses to recognize or respect the demands and requirements of the medium it uses.

And because it is lacking in this engagement and recognition, these poems are also, for the most part, lacking sincerity--and this, to me, is one of the most crucial things when it comes to writing. I recall one IG poet whose work was in the same class as someone like Atticus, but I also recall one of his poems which genuinely moved me--and it moved me because, unlike everything else on his account, that poem felt sincere: the structure and the language wasn't any different to anything else he wrote, but in reading it, it was not a question for me of whether it was "bad" or "good"--what made the impact was that it was honest: and the difference showed. You can't come into a poem with ulterior motives. You can't come into it without an understanding, or respect, for the language you use. I'm absolutely not policing what people should or shouldn't read, and I'm not saying people are wrong for liking these poems, either, or that Halsey, Kaur, Atticus et al., are wrong for writing them. Expression is expression, and what speaks to you speaks to you. And to be honest, it is a different kettle of fish when you are writing something purely for yourself (and I think allowing yourself to partake in any kind of artform, without worrying about needing to be good at it, is deeply important for the human spirit)--but because they are putting their work out publicly, if we are going to be evaluating what they write and how they write it, that evaluation has to be rooted in an understanding of the art form they intend their work to be a part of.

For me, these are the main issues I have with these writers and their work and why I just do not like them. But I also want to stress that, ultimately, what you sound like in your own poems, anon, does not matter as much as being sincere to yourself does. As I said, I don' like using terms like "good" and "bad" and I think that often they're fairly reductive (and sometimes outright pointless) categories to use when we talk about and assess poetry--more than anything else, the key to building a robust and informed discernment when it comes to poems is to simply just read--read a lot of it and read widely. The broader and richer your repository of poetry (and literature in general) is, the more informed you are when it comes to all the different ways language can move through a poem, and all the different impacts it can have as a result. It deepens and enriches your understanding of all the different ways of looking at something, questioning something, expressing something. Your vocabularly grows and deepens; your net of associations--visual, linguistic etc--strengthens. And when this understanding grows you are able to place the things you read into a much wider and far more informed context. And this in turn allows you to grow as a reader and a writer. I hope this helps you a little, anon 💕

#ask #anonymous #book talks

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hedgehog-moss · 8 months

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About translation. I remember reading a translated version of the Illiad and the pre-note praised the translator because he had managed to balance making the translation work in Swedish while also keeping the original greek feel. It's often regarded as one of the best translations there is (in Sweden) and it makes me feel as if translating a book/poem/text is an art in itself.

Oh I love when translators do this, when it works—writing with an accent, by echoing the voice of a historical period. Marguerite Yourcenar did something similar with Memoirs of Hadrian—it's not a translation of a classic text but she wrote it in French as if it were, so it would feel authentic as the autobiography of a Roman emperor. Translation was an integral part of it: she would translate her first drafts from French to Latin or Ancient Greek (as Hadrian spoke both), which allowed her to notice phrasings that sounded wrong, too modern, and then she'd edit the French sentences accordingly.

It was translated in English by Marguerite Yourcenar's gal pal life companion Grace Frick, but I've not read the English version. It would be interesting to see how she made the archaisms work, considering English and French haven't preserved the same words from Latin and Greek. (To say nothing of Swedish or other translations!) For example the word "janiteur" appears in the French text to refer to a servant or guard; it comes from Latin ianitor and is meant to sound archaic or odd in French as we don't have this word; but American English does have janitor from Latin so the "classic" feel is lost and you'll have to use a different word and compensate for it elsewhere...

(Yourcenar couldn't predict this but since French has a lot more English loanwords nowadays than when she started writing her book in the 1920s, janiteur now sounds like an anglicism rather than a latinism. I wonder if she'd feel upset or intrigued if she knew that a modern-sounding word has sneaked into her carefully-chiselled text simply because another modern language we often borrow from has kept it alive)

Literary translation is definitely an art and I love that it can be used as a tool to cultivate a unique writing style too :) In her postface describing her writing process, Yourcenar said that translating her French sentences into Latin or Greek made the modern vocabulary, phrasings or even ways of thinking, as visible as plaster on a marble statue. She also compared the process to archaeological excavation, letting the voice of a Roman emperor emerge from under the layers of time and new words and syntax that were keeping it buried.

#ask #language tag #this started out as a quick reply but i can't write about this without going on and on!

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homunculus-argument · 7 months

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Hey i have a question

I see that you are Finnish probably? One of my mutuals has a question about a Finnish phrase that translated literally as "i will read you into a lake" or something similar, but I could not find mentions of this phrase online (they are looking for a particular post). Can you please tell me what it would be in Finnish? Google translate isnt of much help...

Could it perhaps have been "I will sing you into a swamp"? Laulan sinut suohon. Because that is a reference to old finnish folklore. Many old finnish spells, curses and blessings were written down as poetry, but were recited by singing instead of just speaking, in a handful of very specific song forms. Epic poetry and stories were usually also sung, making the tales easier to remember and recite.

While the collection process and end result of the epic poem Kalevala is Problematic™ in ways that I won't bother to go into (I will just get my ass chewed if I don't go out of my way to aknowledge that), the tale features a scene early on in the beginning, where the great wizard demigod Väinämöinen meets a youth named Joukahainen on a narrow road, and neither of them is willing to move out of the way so the other could go first.

It turns out that Joukahainen had been looking for Väinämöinen for some time in order to challenge him in a battle of powers, but he was already down to fight this old man before figuring out that this is actually the demigod he was looking for to begin with. They begin a battle through song-magic, in which Väinämöinen sings Joukahainen's horse into stone, and Joukahainen himself into a swamp.

While the story itself gets pretty grim pretty soon after that, I want to point out how comical this whole scene is, though it's never depicted that way. Imagine walking in on an epic wizard rap battle between an ancient demigod wizard who is literally older than the universe as we know it, and a 15-year-old boy. Ancient powers are commanded through song to reshape the foundations of the Earth over a traffic issue that could have been resolved in 5 seconds, but neither of them is willing to be the bigger person about this.

This conflict escalates to the point where people die over it.

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familyabolisher · 9 months

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haphazard assortment of thoughts on the unwanted guest:

firstly, it really does have to be said—crazy good, probably my favourite of all the tlt short pieces, and i say that as someone who lost my mind over as yet unsent for like a week. excellent conceit and excellent execution, just a really gorgeous piece of writing. the play format of course reminds me of what abigail says to harrow in htn—that the river bubble is a ‘play [she’s] directing’—the inside of one’s head as a stage in which other actors can intervene & whereby mileage can be gotten out of Symbolism as immediately “real,” tangible presences that the kind of realist baggage that a more quotidian prose form would usher in would probably falter in accomplishing. it’s a lot!! i think even if i wasn’t already a tazmuir writing style defender (contra the insistence that she’s yknow homestuck fanfiction serial numbers filed off hack) then this would have had me floored anyway.

the play format also works in the way that muir’s general dexterity in form and willingness to really make use of craft as a technical space where discourse can be generated always works—i’m talking about the ‘fanfictiony’ voice in gtn which manages to say something both about fanfiction and about the text itself, the use of the dramatis personae as a space where atmosphere can be established and plot points hinted towards (thus blurring the lines between what is and is not diegesis), the drastic shifts in style between different close thirds, the shifting from third- to second- to epistolary first-person, the use of poetry both diegetic and not (the noniad, the epigraph poems…), the mimicry of the ‘voice’ of the king james bible in the nona epilogue—she never stays in one place for too long and she never seems to stick to one central style or form, and it really works in her favour. insofar as tlt as a whole is a very ‘patchwork’ kind of work, building itself up from its big big index of references and intertexts and memes with hugely variant levels of ‘prestige’ or legitimacy attached to them, the ‘patchwork’ use of form really works in muir’s favour. however i am also fuming because i was right in the middle of writing a tlt fic which jumps into a play format two-thirds of the way through and now my idea doesn’t look ORIGINAL but ANYWAY—

& i really do need to flag my good friend vee’s mercy/augustine fic, which makes use of a similar conceit and pulls it off masterfully—i am deeply jealous of vee’s talent and i think the unwanted guest makes this piece (from 2021!) shine even more, if anything.

i am DYING to see where muir is going with the use of hamlet, of all things—dulcie quoting it to palamedes immediately catapulted my mind back to abigail’s reference to ‘that undiscovered country’ in htn. obviously muir likes to drop contemporary (or contemporarily canonical) references and turns of phrase all over the place, but the attention drawn to the quote as diegetically referential (“I like that. Is it from something?” / “Yes. It’s complicated.”) has me wondering about a) the survival of ‘pre-res’ literatures ~over the river and like WHY and b) what a thematic interlocking of tlt and hamlet can do, here…….real aveheads remember cytherea ophelia theory where i tried to use ophelia as a point of reference for teasing out some arguments about cytherea and death and aesthetics and white femininity and whatnot. all of which is to say i need to sit with this hamlet reading a lot more but i love it, i am so here for it.

of course ‘kissing or feeding, we can’t be sure’ calls to mind ‘how meat loves meat,’ alecto biting harrow’s mouth by way of a kiss…and the general thematic throughline of, you know, certain practices of love as practices of consumption, naberius later being figured as the ‘meat’ in question contains echoes of this eroticism which ofc guides the contours of the necromancer/cavalier dynamic, eroticism as a currency of power, we know all of this stuff because it’s all over the text but i am just thumbs-upping it from the sidelines

the coffins had me thinking of utena’s black rose arc, which is a fun link to make considering the equivalent moment in the main body of nona is also referencing utena, ie. with the ‘rules’ of the duel being that cam has to get the handkerchief out of ianthe’s pocket as kind of an equivalent to skewering the rose. i feel like the tlt/utena overlap is pretty self-explanatory but it’s just fun to see the fingerprints all over lol

i think a lot of this was treading old ground thematically (erotics of consumption, dog motifs, we’ve seen it already!) but i will say that i did Yell Out Loud over ‘who's she got dawdling behind her but that creature—tugging visibly at her leash like an overeager dog.’ reminded of the other memorable use of ‘leash’—’even the devil bent for god to put a leash around her neck’—and, of course, the endless parade of commonalities between gideon & alecto. anyway there’s not really anything in this line that we didn’t already know about gid as a character, thematically speaking, but i point it out because it inflicted +100 psychic damage when i read it. gideon as a ‘creature’ is particularly slimy, & sort of puts me in mind of ianthe's tendency to talk about what appears to us as 'butch masculinity' (as opposed to the more effete masculinity of augustine or even babs) with a notably derogatory slant (the 'hurtful threats of sexual violence' line comes to mind); i don't know that i have much to say about it here specifically but it's an interesting one that i think informs the kirianthe dynamic pretty heavily (especially when held up against, like, harrianthe ... ianthe has a kind of respect for whatever harrow's gay and stupid gender is Doing (at least insofar as she can mould it to her own desires; i'm thinking of the dios apate forcefemme scene lol) in ways that i don't think she has for kiriona? but this is v off-topic, lol).

i have never been especially taken by dulcie as a character but i think this may finally have forced me to fold and admit that she’s great. her haters!!! her agonies!!! camilla would have to cook!! the balance between levity and sincerity was really well-managed. & i love the double meaning of “unwanted guest” as both palamedes intruding on ianthe’s mind palace and naberius setting up shop inside of her.

i need a week to sit with where this idea of the consumed soul as being literally ‘digested’ such that it can begin to ‘inhabit,’ however immaterially, the host body, or like to alter the characteristics of the host body such that to carry out such a consumption is to kind of kill yourself as well, slots in with lolita theory. or like, i need alecto right now. i am however reminded of chew, a short story that muir wrote in 2013, which also plays with these ideas of sexual assault as a forcing of a part of yourself meaningfully ‘into’ another person, and cannibalism as the reenactment of such a process, figured in the story as kind of a reclamation or at least an assertion of permanence—“I was always going to be in the ground with him in me,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure.”—which the unwanted guest seems to kind of, play with in reverse? i don’t know, but i’m interested—as ever—in where muir wants to take these ideas of rape and consumption and absorption that she’s got in her hands.

i keep returning to…i hesitate to say ‘parallels’ because i think that imposes a narrative onus that i’m not actually that convinced by, but these, like, commonalities between babs and gideon. gideon is played off against so many people (cristabel, loveday, alecto being the big ones) that it feels kind of inane to add another person to the pile, but like…they’re the two who get got in canaan house, they’re both ironically ‘false’ cavaliers and expressions of the ‘truest’ or most paradigmatic form that cavalierhood ‘can’/’should’ take, they both have unconventionally gendered names (‘babs’ is a shortened form of ‘barbara,’ it is a typically feminine name imo) and (by our standards) somewhat unconventional genders (gideon is butch, babs effete)—and of course the unwanted guest places a lot of emphasis on the coercive ‘making’ of cavalierhood (the reference to babs being ‘fixed’ were he to have a disability! ianthe’s glib ‘society really is to blame’ comment—ironic, obviously, but not wholly untrue) not dissimilar to the emphasis that gtn puts on cytherea moulding gideon into the state she comes to be in at the end. babs and gideon as the two possessed corpses in nona, obviously. two wildly diverse but ultimately converging trajectories! a dialectical tension between their fundamental ‘opposition’ (as by-the-book cavalier vs whatever gideon is doing) and their fundamental ‘sameness’ whereby the dialectic is resolved in their mutual deaths. also just, of course, continuing the throughline that muir has had going for a while now, of gender/gendering as a set of coercive enforcements loyal to a hegemonic structuring of the world.

that’s all i’ve got, i think. just. really good everyone say thank you tazmuir

#.txt #tlt #the unwanted guest spoilers #this was originally bullet points but tumblr's formatting is bad and i can't be bothered editing to improve the flow here. so.#rape cw

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sweatermuppet · 9 months

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hi! do you have any advice for editing your poetry? i always write one draft of a poem and never know how to go about improving it

some editing advice by mindy nettifee:

"we have some reservations about editing our poems to death. our intention is to edit them to life."

"the very first thing i do when i want to edit a poem is i read it out loud. if possible, also first put it in a format other than the original (written to typed or vice versa). the act itself of turning the poem into a new object helps you get some much needed objectivity. read out loud, slowly, repeatedly. make notes."

personally i also like to make copies to keep the first draft exactly as it was when first typed/written. that way if there are lines i want to take out, i can always remember what used to be there, & possibly keep that line for use in other application

knowing i will never truly lose a line helps me dive in & just delete what doesn't fit—sometimes it feels daunting to erase a whole line or verse but when you know it's preserved, it makes it easier to start digging around & plugging new stuff in

here's what lauren camp does with her lines:

"William Faulkner said, “Kill your darlings,” a directive almost every writer seems to know. But I want to make the case for holding your darlings. Over the last few decades, I have maintained a Word document—I call it my “Keeps” document—in which I collect phrases that weren’t right for whatever poem they first appeared in yet strike me as worth rescuing. Into this file I paste my “darlings,” margin to margin across the width and length of the page, smooshing them together with other beauties I couldn’t make work. When I’m drafting a new poem and looking for a remarkable verb or a fresh way to describe an action or emotion, I scan the hundreds of words jammed onto those pages of my “Keeps” document. There’s almost always something surprisingly ideal. And when I find that word or phrase that, by serendipity, suits the new poem I’m crafting, it’s exhilarating."

#anonymous #on writing

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himboblackdragon · 18 days

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Catalog of LBFaD drama name origins

Mythology -> book -> drama

Dongfang Qingcang / 东方青苍: The origins of this name are hotly contested, and to be honest the only hypothesis I remember is the Azure Dragon of the East. East being "Dongfang," and the dragon itself being alternatively called "Qing long" and "Cang long." (x)

Haotian Tower / 昊天塔: The tower where DFQC was imprisoned in, in both media. There's no Haotian Tower in mythology, but "Haotian God" is one of the names of the emperor of heaven. (x)

Ninth You / Jiuyou / 九幽: One name for the mythological netherworld, the capital city of the Moon Tribe in the drama. The capital city of the devil tribe in the book. (x)

Sansheng / 三生: The name comes from the "Three Lives Stone" (sansheng shi 三生石), which represents a lot of things in Chinese tradition, but probably the most salient being a rock in the underworld near the Oblivion River. In the novel universe, the rock is graffitied with the names of the ones the dead passing by wished to see most. The stone seems to have transformed into human form in the first book of the series, succinctly titled Sansheng, which tells the love story between Sansheng and Moxi, the novelverse God of War. (x)

Siming / 司命: A folk god, and usually male, who oversees human fates. In the CLJ novel she is responsible for writing the Fate Books. (x)

Xirang / 息壤: Mythological self-expanding-and-growing soil. Although it plays a key role in the book, it only appears in a throwaway line in the drama, when Changheng suggests building XLH a new body out of it. (x)

Mythology/literature/history -> drama

Chengying Sword / 承影剑: One of the ten famous swords of China, in historical and literary tradition. From the Spring and Autumn Period. (x)

Chonghua / 重华: Chonghua is the given name of a legendary emperor of China. (x)

Haotian Matrix / 昊天阵: "Haotian God" is one of the names of the emperor of heaven. (x)

Hellfire / 业火: A Buddhist concept, the fires of karma. (I'm pretty vague on what it actually is and where it exists.) In the book, DFQC's powerful fire is usually just called "raging flames" (lieyan 烈焰), and it's red instead of blue. (x)

Liyuan / 澧沅: Li and Yuan are two of the four big rivers that flow through Hunan. Coincidentally, also the names of two of the four rivers that flow into Shuiyuntian, that flooded when DFQC broke the pearl. (x)

Love Tree / Seven-Emotions Tree / 七情树: The name "seven-emotions tree" comes from the phrase "seven emotions and six desires," (qi qing liu yu 七情六欲). The exact emotions and desires this refers to differ based on school of thought. (x)

Lord Dong / 东君: A deity often paired with Yunzhong-jun as one of the two primordial gods. Seems to be a sun deity. His name literally means "Lord East." (x)

Lord Yunzhong / 云中君: A god from mythology, often paired with Lord Dong as one of the two primordial gods. Sometimes interpreted as a woman. (x)

Oblivion River / Wang Chuan / 忘川: A river in the land of the dead. To cross it, you must first drink a soup that makes you forget your past lives. (x)

Qu Shui / 曲水: Literally "winding waters," the name of Xiao Run's pageboy might come from the upper-class drinking game "Qu Shui Liu Shang" 曲水流觞, in which players "wait by a winding stream and compose poems before their cups full of rice wine float down to reach them." His nickname Ququ'r is phonetically very similar and means cricket. (x x)

Return to Ruin Realm / Guixu Zhi Jing / 归墟之境: "Guixu" was a place far to the east, that every body of water eventually emptied into. The characters break down into "return (to)" and "ruins." The "Zhi Jing" makes it "Region of Guixu" or "Guixu Area." (x)

Tai Sui / 太岁: A folk deity, but not necessarily evil. (x)

Xuanwu God / 古神灵玄武: Xuanwu is a constellation representing a tortoise-snake spirit. (x)

Xunfeng / 巽风: His name most likely comes from the "xun" trigram of the Eight Trigrams, of which the element is wind, or "feng." (x)

Yingzhao / 英招: Legendary creature that has the body of a horse, the face of a man, stripes like a tiger, and wings of a bird. Not like our waddling ball of fur at all. (x)

Yunmeng Lake / 云梦泽: One of the largest lakes in China in ancient times, now mostly nonexistent. (x)

Book -> drama

Bone Orchid / Gu Lan / 骨兰: It has more of a dried-vine aesthetic in the book.

Chidi Nüzi / 赤地女子: The god of war of the heavenly realm, in both media. DFQC's nemesis and the object of A'Hao's obsession.

Dayu Battalion / 大庾兵: Only mentioned once in the drama, along with the Tieyu Battalion 铁羽兵, as forces that Shangque has mobilized in response to Xunfeng's insurrection. Dayu's the name of DFQC's adorable (to me) pet sky/sea serpent.

Destruction of Heaven / Ruins of Ten Thousand Heavens / Wan Tian Zhi Xu / 万天之墟: A formless place where Siming can be found, in both the drama and the book. The book series further specifies that the Destruction of Heaven sits above the Three Realms and the Endless Desolate City (无极慌城 wu ji huang cheng) below.

Dieyi / 蝶衣: Ronghao's loyal right-hand woman is also present in the book.

Fairy Execution Platform / Zhu Xian Tai / 诛仙台: Where Changheng is to be executed after talking back to Yunzhong. In the book this was a platform over a mass of the book equivalent to evil qi/suiqi, which XLH was cast off from, almost getting eaten alive by the evil qi.

Fate Books / Mingbu / 命簿: The combination of these two characters seem to be an invention of the novel, and are records of the destinies of living people collected and administered by the land of the dead.

Fate Tree / Mingge Shu / 命格树: "Mingge," in both the novelverse and in the Love You Seven Times drama, are the stories high immortals (in CLJ's case, Siming) write to direct the fate of mortals. I'm not clear on the distinction between mingbu and mingge in the CLJ book.

Lucheng / 鹿城: In the book, a militarily important city of the Jin Dynasty, although the drama has styled it more into the Tang Dynasty, some thousand-plus years later.

Ronghao / 容昊: In the book, the wheelchair-bound master of the demon commerce city who's later revealed to be Chidi's obsessed student. We're not given the first character of his name in the book; it only ever calls him A'Hao.

Shangque / 觞阙: The name of the prime minister of the devil realm in the book, horrified by DFQC's erratic behavior while his body is being partially controlled by XLH. Show!Shangque's personality likely came from Dayu, Book!DFQC's overpowered flying serpent who follows him around like a loyal dog.

Shuofeng Sword / 朔风剑: "Cold northwest wind" sword, it's Chidi Nüzi's weapon in the book and the drama. It stays in sword form in the book, but becomes a geographical feature and a seal in the show.

Thousand Dreamland / Thousandfold Illusion / 千重幻境: A realm of endless very similar illusions that Ronghao/A'Hao tries to trap DFQC in to prevent him from finding XLH, in both media.

Xiao Lan Hua / Orchid / 小兰花: Our heroine!

Xie Wanqing / 谢惋卿: One of Chidi Nüzi's mortal incarnations in both media. However, in the book she is a general who's betrayed by the man she loves, an ordinary mortal, while XLH and DFQC watch.

Misc

Changheng / 长珩: Changheng's not in the book, but the book does have a troublemaker by the name of Changming 长命 who is DFQC's biggest "love rival" (he's like ten years old), and I wonder if the "Chang" part of Changheng's name comes from Changming.

Flying Fairy Pavilion / Life-Ending Pavilion / 飞仙阁: A reference to Xie Wanqing's real identity as the Fairy God of War. Also a euphemism for death.

Haishi / 海市: Conceptually, comes from the demon/nature sprite city, yaoshi 妖市, in the book. For the drama they got rid of the demon part and called it Haishi, Sea City.

Xiao Run / 萧润: I'm not sure the Run part of his name is a reference to anything, but the Xiao is probably there to make the Xiao-lang wordplay work. (x)

Yannü 盐女 and Cangyan Sea 苍盐海: The "yan" is the same as in "Yannü." Which came first, I wonder? (The "cang" is the same as in Dongfang Qingcang.)

Sans Data

I do not know any special origins of, or was too lazy to look up:

Black Sash 黑杀斩, Bone-Devouring Spikes / Frost-Salt Nails 霜盐钉, Cangyan Sea 苍盐海, Changle Street, Cloud Shadow Mirror 云影镜, Danyin 丹音, Dark Pine Forest 暗松林, Dream of Nine Serenities / Jiuyou Dream 九幽一梦, Eternal Flame 长明火, Evil Qi / Suiqi 祟气, Firefly stone 奇幻流萤石, Fountain Palace 涌泉宫, Four-Water Pearl 四水宝珠, Fuju Cave 弗居洞, Glazefire 琉璃火, Granny Tie 铁婆婆, Green Flame Wine 绿焰酒, Hall of Divine Waters / Shenshui Ting 神水厅, Heart-Hidden Pin 藏心簪, Hidden Treasures Shop 藏珠斋, Jieli 结黎, Jinling, Jingyiya Teahouse 静逸雅轩, Karma Jail / Karma-Spanning Abyss 渡业渊, Liufang Pavilion 留芳阁, Night-Stream Building 夜溪楼, Northern Sea / Beiming 北溟, Primordial spirit 元神, Qingchuan 青川, Ranxi Flower 燃犀花, Shaking Light Peak 摇光峰, Shuiyuntian 水云天, Shuyu Forest 漱玉林, Silent Moon Palace / Jiyue Palace 寂月宫, Silver Lake 银湖, Soul Transformation Cauldron 化魂鼎, Soul Transformation Grounds 化魂墟, Southern Fairyland / Extreme South Fairy Continent 南极仙洲, Spirit Lock Gate 灵锁门, Spirit-Shattering Abyss 碎灵渊, Spirit Stones 灵石, Tianji Mirror 天极镜, Tongyun 彤云, Universe Pills 无极乾坤丹, Wind Prison 风牢, Wind Warriors, Wuqi 巫芑, Wuxian Clan / Witch-Salty Clan 巫咸族, Xilan 息兰, Xingluo, Xishan 息山, Xiyun 息芸, Xuanshuang Whip 玄霜神鞭, Xuanxu Realm / Mysterious Realm 玄虚之境, Yisi year 乙巳年, You Jade Ring 幽玉戒, Yujing 玉京

Much thanks to sassybluee's Reference for Fic Writers.

This is mostly a reference for myself, and is subject to change. Additions, corrections, and discussion welcome.

#love between fairy and devil #circ talks #clj language meta #resource #reference #cang lan jue

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yuri-is-online · 5 months

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You Simple Vile Monstrosity: Rook and the Flowers of Evil

My other two dumb history posts have at least a semblance of fun fact to them, but this is mostly going to be literary analysis and some theory. There's some interesting stuff here sure, but I don't really think it adds much to the overall landscape of twst theories. But it does make Rook make more sense to me so I am making this post anyway.

So without further ado, if you are like me and enjoy reading twst theories, you might know that the beginning lines of Twisted Wonderland are something we have been debating the meaning of since the game came out really. While I think we have been closing in on their true meaning as Chapter 7 progresses along, the phrase "Flowers of Evil" can actually refer to something specific: a french poetry collection of the same name (Les Fleurs du mal in french) by a poet name Charles Baudelaire originally published in 1857. The collection was extremely controversial, but today it is highly lauded and has inspired several other literary works, including a manga series by Shūzō Oshimi of the same name. I found out about the poetry collection while working on this request and finally finished reading it... and another essay by Baudelaire for reasons we can talk about later on in the post. For now let's talk poetry.

Beauté! 100 Points!

I don't speak french, so I read an English translation done by Aaron Poochigian that does contain the original french text in the back half of the book. The Flowers of Evil is split into seven-ish parts: The Flowers of Evil (just containing "To the Reader"), Spleen and the Ideal, Parisian Scenes, Wine, Flowers of Evil (again but with 12 poems this time), Revolt, and then Death. The sections are more or less organized by the subject of the poems, Spleen and the Ideal is the largest with Baudelaire musing over what the ideal concept of beauty is while Wine deals with getting drunk (on wine mostly if you can believe it.) One of the things that jumps out very quickly about Baudelaire's work is that his concept of beauty is almost synonymous with his concept of evil. He writes a lot about maggots eating corpses, about decay, he has a few poems that talk about vampires appearing to be the highest form of beauty but really being husks of rotted flesh; it's all very much about this acceptance that evil is a part of life and human nature, so therefore there must be beauty in it. The concept of "ideal beauty" must by it's nature be divorced from the concept of "morality." When Rook talks about the potential for Leona or Malleus to kill him and how beautiful that would be, I think he means the act of destruction itself would be beautiful. The circumstances surrounding it and the consequences of it are irrelevant to the concept; this is also why while he initially says he cannot find the crimson lotuses in GloMas beautiful Deuce accuses him of doing just that after everything is said and done. He cannot find beauty in Rollo's actions, but the visual and the fight are beautiful because of the effort he and the other students put in to stop them. And perhaps most importantly, it's why he is willing to drink Vil's poison and look upon what is supposedly ultimate ugliness and say "In this moment you are the fairest of them all." Because how could an act born out of such raw and genuine emotion be anything but?

Le Chasseur D'Armour, The Hunter of Love

Baudelaire wasn't just a poet, he fancied himself a critic and wrote multiple essays, the one I read for this post is The Painter of Modern Life. Which is actually a collection of several but they are all related, and I was directed to them by this wordpress post. In it, Baudelaire muses over how things can be both beautiful and ugly, and why:

"Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element... which severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions."

He was talking about fashion plates that depicted outdated costumes, but his point was more or less that if you strictly look at the design of the costume they look ridiculous: ugly. But when you take into account their historical value (these particular plates were all from the around the time of the French revolution) they become exceedingly important: beautiful. He also mentions in this same essay the importance of not just taking into account the opinions of so called "masters" and sneers at people who think they understand what is beautiful just because they have seen a painting done by a professional:

"... to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does not contain the whole secret, and that minor poets too have something good, solid and delightful to offer... that we might love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the sketch of manners."

In chapter 5, while helping Vil judge the auditions for VDC, Rook gives every audition 100 points because, well, in his mind they are all an example of perfect beauty specifically because they are the work of amateurs, and that is no less valuable to him or less worthy of praise that the work of the master. Now granted he clearly does value professional quality (he did have reasons for voting for Neige other than being a massive simp. Valid ones even if loosing does sting) but that's only in the context of strict rules and guidelines. When Rook is asked for his opinion, while he certainly does believe there is an absolute, academic definition beauty, he doesn't place any value on where that beauty comes from. Baudelaire muses over how human life "accidentally" puts mysterious beauty into the world, and the true appreciator of beauty must make himself not strictly a poet but:

"...an observer of life, and only later set himself the task of acquiring the means of expressing it... For most of us... the fantastic reality of life has become singularly diluted. [But he] never ceases to drink it in; his eyes and memories are full of it."

I strongly dislike suggesting in these posts that xyz is "the definitive reason" for why a character acts the way that he does, but I do think it is very interesting how well this describes Rook's ethos. He thinks of himself as a hunter, but in order to do that he needs to observe. Sure he takes it to exceptionally extreme lengths, but it makes him one of the most lively members of the NRC cast. Baudelaire is right, there are a million things about life we miss on a day to day basis wherein true beauty lies, but Rook sees all of it. His eyes, memories, camera, and secret photo albums are fit to burst with it.

My Noble and Beautiful Flower of Evil

I mentioned the opening text at the beginning of this post, and I stand by my interpretation that the phrase "flower of evil" it uses likely is not a specific reference to any of the poems themselves... beyond the obvious note that it is a collection of poems about finding beauty in, well, evil and most of the characters are based off of villains.

But there was something that started gnawing at me when I read the introduction to my translation, which was written by a poet named Dana Gioia. It was a very well written summary of Baudelaire's life and the significance of his work, but it mentioned a connection that I have seen brought up in twst theorizing before: Edgar Allen Poe.

You see, Baudelaire was obsessed with Poe. To the point that (according to the introduction) "He considered Poe a sacred martyr for art and referred to him as 'Saint Edgar.' In his morning devotions, Baudelaire prayed first to God and then to Poe."

I have nothing to say on that (because really what could you) but the point that Gioia wanted to make in that introduction was that Poe had a massive influence on Baudelaire's writing style. He wrote multiple essays on his work and translated them into French because he felt like Poe deserved the recognition, so while Gioia used this to argue that Poe's influence on Baudelaire shouldn't be underestimated...

I can't find the post, but someone was talking about how Malleus's mother's name Meleanor is very similar to "Lenore" and I recall people sort of brushing that connection off. I don't that name is a coincidence. I think the poem "Lenore" might very well have been something thought about when constructing her character, and that the themes in Poe's work might be very relevant to the overall story of Twisted Wonderland.

Something about ravens and telltale hearts just feels like they fit; maybe we have got it all wrong and Yuu's visions aren't coming from the mirror in Ramshackle, but the floorboards.

Semi- Unrelated Fun Facts:

If you read the name Baudelaire and thought to yourself it sounded familiar, you might have be thinking of the Baudelaire children from A Series of Unfortunate Events. This isn't exactly a coincidence as the author of the series admits to his writing being heavily influenced by Charles Baudelaire to the point he actually wrote the afterword to the translation I own.

Dana Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of the state of California, something that deeply confused me. Apparently the Governor of California appoints someone to a 2 year term and they travel around the state to promote poetry and literacy which is apparently something that 46/50 U.S. states and D.C. does to????

My glorious motherland of Pennsylvania is not one of these states, apparently we only ever appointed one, then eliminated the position entirely after he retired, and then started just. Handing out ones to people in individual cities and counties. Which is so par for the course here I don't know why I am surprised.

One of the first things any college level literature course will try to drill into you is that you don't examine the life of an author when examining their work. It might sound silly, but I think Baudelaire is a great example of why that's important. The man was addicted to drugs and sex, refused to get a "real job", lived off his inheritance from his wealthy father and eventually whatever money he could convince his mother to send him his entire adult life, and had her use her political connections to bail him out of legal trouble multiple times.

If I thought too hard about that it would make his lines in "Skeleton Laborers" (Nothingness is treacherous.//Even Death is a deceiver.//Alas, forever and ever,//work may be awaiting us) fall terribly flat, which I think does them a disservice. The man was very talented and I am glad he wrote them because I felt very seen when I read them.

Baudelaire opened his publication with a note to the reader, but he made it a full poem entitled "To the Reader." I liked the ending stanza so much I used a version of it to title my blog, and eventually my current masterlist: (Boredom! Moist-eyed, he dreams, while pulling on//a hookah pipe, of guillotine-cleft necks.//You, reader, know this tender freak of freaks-//hypocrite reader-mirror-man-mytwin!)

Likewise the title of this post is also taken from part of a poem, "Hymn to Beauty" (Beauty, you simple, vile monstrosity,//I cannot care about your origin,//provided that your gaze, smile, feet show me//a sweet infinity I have never known.) I think that fits Rook's ideals rather well, don't you?

#twisted wonderland #twst rook #rook hunt #character analysis #twst theories

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m1d-45 · 1 year

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the wind knows

summary: a series of haikus to ‘imposter’ reader, wherein kazuha knows the truth

word count: ~600

-> warnings: spoilers for inazuma archon quest / kazuha lore? implied violence? imposter au things- it’s implied reader dies, so……

taglist: @samarill || @thenyxsky || @valeriele3 || @shizunxie || @boba-is-a-soup || @yum1x

< masterlist >

many letters were scrapped, left to sit in the trash. when pen finally meets proper page, the sun has long since set. still, the motions are careful and sure, as if it hadn’t taken hours of preparation to bear fruit.

the world has waited

for the brightest star to fall

i have waited too

the faint scent of the sea stains the poem, the wax seal dusted with salt. contained within the envelope is the product of boredom at the docks, impatience vented onto paper.

an ocean between

the trip is bound by man’s speed

you are worth the wait

the high point of the crow’s nest allows for far sight, land appearing on the horizon a precious few moments before anybody below notices. words seem to appear in the mind, bandages staining with ink in the hasty retrieval of paper. once down, it would be transferred to something neater, but that is not the priority.

the geo-filled spires

meet together with crashing water

i hope we meet soon.

words are heard, names are called. even after a day of searching, of following the wind that has never led astray, nothing is found. nobody is found. the captain of the fleet makes a comment that goes unheard, thoughts caught up in new lines. a hand traces them out, even if there’s only air below; it’s never meant to be sent, after all.

liyue is empty

of nothing but what’s needed

where could you have gone?

the next day is just as fruitless, nobody at the docks reporting anything new. the wind brings him a small cluster of torn up pages, the familiar writing of lady ningguang scrawled across them. he can’t catch full phrases, the paper scraps too small, but the very fact that the shredded snow had fallen scares him in a way it shouldn’t. the wind warns, but of what?

rumors cross the streets

the air is taught with tension

please let it rest soon

the harbor bustles with more life than normal. people shout and cry, everybody slowly moving away from the docks and deeper into the city. sailors are confused, having only barely returned, but a flyer hastily shoved into their hands by a vendor makes everything clear. the sharp, commanding voice of the captain reads it out, the letter of execution snatched from her hands as red eyes hope and pray it’s fake.

i hope it’s not you

even as i know it is

how could this happen?

white hair shoves through a crowd, his mind blurred with both the aura of the divine and panic from the jeering people around. bodies press in around him but he forces his way though, managing to catch glimpses of the stage. the tianquan, lazily flipping the pages of her catalyst. the funeral director, star-filled eyes now blank and empty with hatred. and him, him, the one who bears an impossible amount of geo, him who stains the air with ancient names and archaic rituals, him with a spear that shines like pure gold in the sun.

kazuha finally bursts through the crowd, the eyes of the millelith snapping to him as he stumbles on the bricks below. it doesn’t matter. he’s too late.

for the second time, somebody he loved dies at the hands of an unfeeling god.

heretical sin

the world itself cries in pain

how could you leave me?

#genshin impact sagau #sagau #genshin sagau #sagau impostor au #genshin imposter au #sagau kazuha #kazuha x you #sagau x reader #genshin x reader #genshin x you #kazuha #kazuha x reader #angst #sagau angst #kazuha angst #man this was so much fun to write. wholeheartedly enjoyed myself during this one lads #mmm being cryptic on a friday night (it’s monday)#gonna be so embarrassed if i find out i miscounted syllables on one of these. it’s supposed to be 5-7-5 and i’m only 83% confident i did it

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unbidden-yidden · 4 months

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Jewish Song of the Day #32: Miriam Haneviah

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Comments:

Shavua tov! I hope you all had a nice, restful Shabbat and that its sweetness lasts you through the whole week.

I love this song, not just because it's Rabbi Deborah Sacks Mintz, but also because it's a feminist counterpart to Eliyahu Hanavi.

This is Rabbi Sacks Mintz's explanation:

In the 1980s, poet and liturgist Rabbi Leila Gal Berner composed a beautiful poetic midrash on one particular narrative moment we read in Exodus: Miriam’s role in leading the women of her community through the sea from the marginalization and oppression of slavery and into the unknown wilderness of freedom. An exploration of her beautiful poetry must begin with a framing of that very Exodus verse: וַתִּקַּח֩ מִרְיָ֨ם הַנְּבִיאָ֜ה אֲח֧וֹת אַהֲרֹ֛ן אֶת־הַתֹּ֖ף בְּיָדָ֑הּ וַתֵּצֶ֤אןָ כָֽל־הַנָּשִׁים֙ אַחֲרֶ֔יהָ בְּתֻפִּ֖ים וּבִמְחֹלֹֽת׃ “Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels” (Exodus 15:20) Her curiosity with this verse, combined with a desire to see women prophets and leaders recognized more broadly in ritual moments, drove her to compose the poem we today know as Miriam HaNeviah. Written with a rhythmic cadence designed to match the traditional Eliyahu HaNavi melody, her hope was to raise Miriam up in the moment of havdalah. The lyrics to the poem itself highlight Miriam’s leadership as multi-faceted: strengthening the the world’s song through her dance, repairing the world through her song, and ultimately, bringing on the waters of redemption only with the partnership of the broader community. I was deeply inspired by Rabbi Berner, as well as one of my collaborative colleagues Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe, to continue this process of creative midrash by adding to the story R’ Berner began. She wrote a new text to be sung to a traditional melody, and I wrote a new melody to be sung to that very text. R’ Wolpe herself writes feminist poetry exploring the role of Miriam and, through the context of our hevruta studying women ancestral leaders in prayer and song, unearthed this new melody from inside my own heart and soul. From a compositional standpoint, the chorus is the main event of this song. Reading “bimheira b’yameinu” - quickly, in our days - there is an urgency to the hope and prayer embedded in this poem for redemption, and thus the melody itself mirrors that urgency, ascending upwards on the word “bimheira.” Other compositional tactics I used regarding such manners of word-painting, include a dance-like groove underscoring each verse, in recognition of the repetition of the phrase “tirkod itanu - dance with us.” But by far the most essential creative component of this song is that it was recorded exclusively with women. My artistic team for this recording consisted of Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe, who I mentioned above, as well as Chava Mirel and Elana Arian, two of my long time musical partners who themselves have dedicated their lives in service to the Jewish people through composing, performing, and leading new Jewish music around the world - as both ritual leaders and as women, wives, and mothers. We all felt a deep connection to the women who came before us - including Miriam, as well as the women rabbis and musicians who have influenced our work and lives since - and poured this inspiration into the project. The lush harmonies in this recording are designed to be representative of the voices of generations of women in prayer, song, and leadership.

And here are the lyrics:

מִרְיָם הַנְּבִיאָה עֹז וְזִמְרָה בְּיָדָהּ בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵינוּ הִיא תְּבִיאֵנ אֶל מֵי הַיְשׁוּעָה מִרְיָם תִּרְקֹד אִתָּנוּ לְהַגְדִּיל זִמְרַת עוֹלָם מִרְיָם תִּרְקֹד אִתָּנוּ לְתַקֵּן אֶת-הָעוֹלָם בִּמְהֵרָה בְיָמֵינוּ הִיא תְּבִיאֵנוּ אֶל מֵי הַיְשׁוּעָה 𝑀𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑚 𝐻𝑎𝑁𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑎ℎ 𝑜𝑧 𝑣’𝑧𝑖𝑚𝑟𝑎 𝑏’𝑦𝑎𝑑𝑎ℎ (x2) 𝐵𝑖𝑚ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟𝑎 𝑏’𝑦𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑢 ℎ𝑖 𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑢 𝑒𝑙 𝑚𝑒𝑖 ℎ𝑎𝑦𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑢𝑎 (x2) 𝑀𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑚, 𝑡𝑖𝑟𝑘𝑜𝑑 𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑢 𝑙’ℎ𝑎𝑔𝑑𝑖𝑙 𝑧𝑖𝑚𝑟𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑙𝑎𝑚 𝑀𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑚, 𝑡𝑖𝑟𝑘𝑜𝑑 𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑢 𝑙’𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑛 𝑒𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑜𝑙𝑎𝑚 𝐵𝑖𝑚ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟𝑎 𝑏’𝑦𝑎𝑚𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑢 ℎ𝑖 𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑢 𝑒𝑙 𝑚𝑒𝑖 ℎ𝑎𝑦𝑒𝑠ℎ𝑢𝑎 (x2) Miriam, the prophetess strength and song are in her hands Soon, and in our time, she will bring us To the waters of redemption Miriam will dance with us to strengthen the world’s song Miriam will dance with us to heal the world Soon, and in our time, she will bring us To the waters of redemption

[Source: bandcamp]

#jumblr #jewish music #Jewish Song of the Day

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crumblinggothicarchitecture · 4 days

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I'd like to know your opinion on why ts songs are considered so good lyrically by her fans. That one line in cardigan is hailed as the peak writing skill by them. The one that says you drew stars around my scars. Am I missing something or are they just gaslighting me?

Hello- sorry it took me sooooo long to get back to you :) I am a busy little bee these days- but I love chatting with people too! <3

So, the line “you drew stars around my scars / but now I’m bleeding” is perhaps good writing, when we only compare Taylor Swift to her own work. It’s certainly a change from “the players gonna play, play, play,” but it is not somehow a gift to lyricism. I know that swifties tend to use lines like these to say that “look see, she is a talented writer” when the truth is that it’s just a boring metaphor that essentially goes nowhere in the song.

Yeah- They are literally gaslighting you. It’s an alright line- but it’s not genius. The reason swifties think this line is amazing is because of the alliteration between "scars" and "stars." Apparently one alliteration is enough to make someone into literary genius? Just one repetitive sound- and they think she’s pulling off something amazing.

Compare this line to a full narrative arc in an alliterative verse epic poem from early Germanic Literature- and Swift's writing is basically loose change on the dashboard compared to gold bar- lyricism.

So, her line "you drew stars around my scars / but now I'm bleeding" is mostly incoherent. She's honestly saying word salad in most of her songs- with vague rhymes at the end of each phrase- but I digress.

I think you're keying into a thoughtful observation here. Putting aside my comment on its general incoherence, let me first speak to the fact that this line is an attempt at metaphor.

She is saying "you drew stars" in effort to merge the conceptual point of "drawing stars" to someone reaching out- or creating interpersonal connection. She continues "around my scars" to showcase how this new connection sees her past, the “scars,” and is encapsulating it with a drawn star instead of, for instance, marking it out with a black mark or something. The connotative value of the word star, in this case, calls forward the idea of goodness and since it is tied to her connotative value of "scars" as a past hurt- the line ultimately means that some new interpersonal connection is viewing her past and approving of it rather than hating it. It's meant to ring as a redemptive arc- yet nothing in the song actually needs redemption or ever mentions it again. The theme drops immediately after the line finishes.

The line finishes, "but now I'm bleeding" which is meant to mean that the scar is reopened- because the connection she made is no longer interested in her. This analysis, however, requires many leaps in logic. I cannot point to any specific linguistic markers that would denote the connection between "scar" and "bleeding." Though Swift clearly means to interconnect these two points, scars don’t bleed. So, she’s trying to say that the scar has reopened- perhaps because the person who drew the stars is leaving. However, there is nothing in the language itself that suggests this conclusion; rather she relies on audience reception to jump from point "a" to point "b." She never calls it a wound, she mentions "bloodstain" is a later line- but the connection between all the different phrasing is tenuous at best. I mean that there is no storyline within the line itself that is suggestive of the meaning Swift is attempting to lay out.

Beyond this line- nothing in the whole song ever revisits the thematic purpose of the metaphor. She never mentions stars, or scars, and does not revisit the theme of redemptive love. She barely even lays out the idea of redemption in love in the first place- and further drops the imagery by never going back to the same theme again. She conjures up this image just to drop it immediately.

This is a pattern in her work- she writes one thing, and then drops the idea.

I mean it sounds clever- without actually being clever.

#anti taylor swift #taylor swift criticism #literary criticism #taylor swift critical #ex swiftie #metaphor #cardigan

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