shitface54

[shitface54]

Damn does anyone have the archived page?

“I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you “have something to say.” I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.”

— Rebecca Lindenberg, from Why Write Poetry? (via violentwavesofemotion)

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“Becoming a writer in a language that is not yours by birth, though, goes against nature; there is nothing organic in this process, only artifice. There are no linguistic “instincts” to guide you on the path and the language’s guardian angels rarely whisper into your ear; you are truly on your own. Says Cioran: “When I wrote in Romanian, words were not independent of me. As soon as I began to write in French I consciously chose each word. I had them before me, outside of me, each in its place. And I chose them: now I’ll take you, then you.” Many who shift to writing in a second language develop an unusually acute linguistic awareness. In an interview he gave in 1979, some seven years after he moved to the United States from his native Russia, Joseph Brodsky speaks of his ongoing “love affair with the English language.” Language is such an overwhelming presence for these people that it comes to structure their new biographies. “English is the only interesting thing that’s left in my life,” says Brodsky. The need to find le mot juste starts out as a concern, turns into an obsession, and ends up as a way of life. These writers excel at the art of making virtue of necessity: out of a need to understand how the new language works, they turn into linguistic maniacs; out of a concern for correctness, they become compulsive grammarians.”

— Born Again in a Second Language  h/t @playsuits (via cesaire)

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Someone sent this to me but don't forget you also defended the "antisemitism bingo" that explicitly made fun of Palestinian trauma, won't let you forget that <3

Also also here's avi shlaim and Hadar Cohen who both discuss how 'Israel' and zionists directly participated in the expulsion of Arab Jews throughout swana since you make posts that seem to insist that zionists had no hand in the matter.

I thoroughly believe you should stop talking about things you don't understand, yourself, and stop spreading zionist propaganda so enthusiastically.

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beauty/beauty by rebecca perry 

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From the Wikipedia page about the Fermi Paradox: Given the high scientific probability for alien existence, why can we find no evidence of their existence whatsoever?

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i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

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Max Wolf Valerio, Matt Rice and David Harrison (left to right both photos) standing in front of a picture of them all marching in the first ever FTM pride contingent in San Francisco Pride 1994 (July 2023)

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watching reddit go into a full death spiral is like watching the specifically trans equivalent of the library of alexandria go up in flames

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“We have been taught that death is followed by more death. It is simply not so, death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.” 

Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

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🥺🥺🥺

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what are your opinions on stories/works that use passive voice instead of an active voice?

i'm trying to pick up writing as a hobby, then i noticed that i have this habit of writing in passive voice...i'm not really sure if i should change the way i write because whenever i showed it to my friends they seem to receive it well enough (and even praised me), but on every writing blogs that i find they keep saying that using passive voice is a bad thing, so i'm really thinking if i should change before it becomes a (bad?) habit for me.

english isn't my first language so this whole thing ended up being very confusing for me...i do enjoy writing, though! i know that for certain :D

anyway, thanks for reading this ask! i hope your day (or night) finds you well, mim <3

hi lovely! this is a little tricky to answer without knowing your writing or the context the different voices are being used in. i don't think it's necessarily one or the other and i also don't think i've ever come across any piece of writing that is 100% passive or 100% active because both of those play different parts in the text, depending on what you want to express and how you want to express it. in very general terms, passive writing tends to slow the text down (this can create a feeling distance between ourselves and what we read), while active writing keeps it moving (this immerses us very easily in the worlds of the characters, which is why it dominates in fiction)--but one isn't automatically better than the other: both of them still need to be used effectively to read well--that effectiveness isn't always determined by the voice alone, but also by how the sentence is structured and what the writer's intentions are. sometimes you want to create a feeling of urgency or directness in your writing--this will need active voice. but sometimes a writer will deliberately want to slow things down, either to create a sense of unease or to bring the reader's attention to something that isn't the focus of the story for a while.

overall, i don't believe there is a "good" or "bad" in this, because a lot of learning to write is about learning which tools to use and when: so more than anything else i think it may help to understand what passive and active voice do and why they have these effects in some writing. this article here is very short, but i think it does a good job of explaining the different ways of putting an active or passive sentence together and how that impacts the tone of the sentence, and this one goes into a little more detail about the uses of passive voice in fiction. i hope some of these help anon and good luck with your writing💕

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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 💕

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brief primer for the hopeless days, pt. IV

“I felt I should embrace him and tell him not to suffer; that he wasn’t alone, that I was his friend and we were living on the same planet, at the same time, in the same country; that now the two of us were in the same park, on the same bench; that human beings should talk to each other, be aware of each other, and love each other; that each man who passes by offers us the chance for companionship and warmth.”

Josefina Vicens, The Empty Book (tr. David Lauer)

[James Baldwin & Friends, Istanbul. ph. Sedat Pakay]

“On love: always the great gestures, or that it is incompatible with ambition and individuality. Rarely the small gestures, rarely that these make the other accomplishments possible. A work in progress. A chain of kindnesses fashioned a link at a time. Clumsy effort, but effort nonetheless.”

Katie Ward, Girl Reading

Paul Eluard, “Gabriel Péri” tr. Gilbert Brown

[Two old men hand in hand rush for taking place for prayer time in the Yeni Cami mosque in Istanbul. ph. Marco Vacca]

“We find comfort only in another beauty, in others’ music, in the poetry of others. Salvation lies with others, though solitude may taste like opium. Other people aren’t hell if you glimpse them at dawn, when their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.”

Adam Zagajewski, “Another Beauty”, tr. Clare Cavanagh

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other’s opposite and complement.”

Hermann Hesse, Narcissus & Goldmund

“Down the road there is an old man who sits in a chair under the porch of his front door to enjoy the sun. He is very old. In fact, he is dying. And because I know this, every time I pass him I pass the time of day with him. I tell him he is getting brown in the sun. Or he asks me about the price of the vegetables in my shopping bag – once he lived in the country – and I answer him at length and with great warmth. Why do I do this? It is a natural reaction. Soon he will die [and] I want him between now and then, and perhaps even at the moment of dying, to have good thoughts, not of me personally, but of the living, of the world he leaves. I want to give him reason for thinking the best possible thoughts.”

John Berger, A Painter of Our Time

[waves of handprints dating between 7,300 BC & 700 AD, Cueva de las Manos (Cave of Hands), Santa Cruz, Argentina. ph. Pablo A. Gimenez]

“Something strange happens when people are in a small boat, something that rarely happens with people in a car or an elevator, in a train or even a boat large enough to say that you are on it instead of in it. What they experience is the sense of solitude. There are only a few thin boards keeping them from being totally engulfed by the surrounding deep sea. They are lonely, but it’s not an isolated loneliness, because they feel lonesome together, together with others in the boat. This is why a temporary bond forms between people in a small boat. They only have each other, the deep sea is frightening, and small boats are very fragile. Therefore, each one of them becomes the other’s lifebuoy. If you’re not afraid, then neither am I, so we shouldn’t scare each other, and we ought to be nice to each other as long as the water surrounds us.”

Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (Burnt Child), tr. Benjamin Mier-Cruz

[��The Ride Home”, submitted by slyburger13 r/AccidentalRenaissance]

“I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I’m sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by human beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me here in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.”

Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends

[”Pale Blue Dot”: photo of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 space probe]

[anonymous, Jan. 15, 2022]

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love

“A single stranger sleeps next to me and I feel like a whole crowd has come in with him. He hasn’t said anything to me, I haven’t said anything to him, but I feel I have nothing else to say to him, nor to hide from him.”

Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years (tr. Philip Ó Ceallaigh)

[tiktok @ shanrizwan]

Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa

[”A full bottle of wine just rolled out from under a subway seat and now these 2 strangers popped it open & are drinking it. This is peak NYC”, ph. Colleen Hagerty]

“Nobody can claim that humanity is in the process of decay without having observed the same putrid symptoms in himself. Nobody can say that humanity is evil without he himself having been part of evil deeds. There is no such thing as unshackled observation. He who lives is the life-long prisoner of humanity and contributes, willingly or unwillingly, to an increase or decrease of the human inventory of happiness and misfortune, greatness and humiliation, hope and despondence […] the fate of humanity is at stake everywhere and at all times, and the responsibility of one life for another is immeasurable.”

Stig Dagerman, “Do We Have Faith in Humankind?”

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All I care about is art of Fat Women 🌹💘

credits:

The Blue Room, Suzanne Valadon / GOD is coming & is she FAT! / Prehistoric Reproduction of Maltese Venus Figurine, Nigel Bewley / Sinéad O'Dwyer / Yu Xiaodong / Venus of Willendorf / Henri Matisse / Amnesia, Rolf Ohst / Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük / Mujeres con frutas, Francisco Zúñiga

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absolutely enraptured rn

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i sometimes forget that this is everyone’s first time on earth too. like. this is my first time seeing a butterfly this color. but its that little girl’s first time seeing any butterfly, ever. and i accidentally left a bag of groceries at the store after paying and now i’m cursing under my breath and it’s like. there a thousand other people out there who did that today too. and a thousand more from yesterday. and. like. we’re not actually alone. and we’re not actually failing. at least not in a way that a few billion people haven’t before you

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“i liked it before it was cool” well i liked it AFTER it was cool when everyone abandoned it