#blue curtains

[annapolisrose]

Blue

[portrait-paintings]

Madame Charles Maurice de Talleyrand Périgord (1761–1835)

Artist: François Gérard (French, 1770–1837)

Date: c. 1804

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY, United States

Description

Gérard, a student of Jacques Louis David, was official painter to Empress Joséphine; the sitter was a celebrated beauty, captured in Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s youthful portrait from 1783, also at The Met. In 1802, her affair with the statesman Talleyrand was so scandalous that Napoleon demanded they marry; neither was particularly faithful, however, and, by the time this portrait was painted, they had separated. Thus, this is not a pendant to either of the two portraits of Talleyrand at The Met. Gérard’s brush revels in details of the highly fashionable interior: contrasting sun and fire light from the novel chimney installed beneath a window, the diaphanous dress, and the paisley shawl - a modish accessory, but also a nod to the sitter’s birth near Pondicherry, in colonial India.

[getrealprim]

I used to think “The Curtains are Blue” was a valid take but as I’ve gotten older and more interested in media analysis, I’ve changed my mind. Now that I’ve seen someone say that Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird as just a story about some kids having a “wild summer,” I’ve fully changed my mind. Some of you very much need to be strapped into a chair and taught media literacy

[facelessghouldmine]

And I’ll say this much about media literacy and metaphorical drapery:

The curtains may be blue, but that does NOT negate the fact that they’re also velvet. Or that they’re trimmed with fringe. Or that the sash to tie them back is embroidered with golden thread and white glass beads.

Multiple things can be true at once!

[digital-meat]

Media literacy is simple if you care about whether the plot makes sense or follows any sort of logic you're a doodoo head, if you count the numbers to see if they add up you're a doodoo head, and if you don't interpret all of the secret signs and symbols and themes in the perfectly right way to arrive at my predefined political analysis you're also a doodoo head. Hard magic systems are for morons but if you let the gnostic symbolism go over your head you should just die right now.

[justplainsimon]

I knew from the minute of "why didn't steven kill the diamonds" that media literacy was plummeting

[tranquil-slaughterhouse]

OOOOOoooooOOoooOOOoooOOooo I'm a ghost! But not just any ghost, a ghost made of floating blue curtains!

[cowardstiel]

lament with me

[tower-of-hana]

"The curtains are just blue" is a bad ideology but it is extremely funny to apply it to Octavia Butler books.

Your English Teacher: Bloodchild is about the line between a relationship with a power imbalance and r*pe

Octavia Butler: mmm fucked-up mpreg porn

[paigewrites]

Ok I’ve been thinking about death of the author and symbolism and media literacy.

It’s such a trashed that people are losing the ability to think critically about books, art, and films. The curtains are just a boring shade of blue now, and the author cries because they wrote the curtains to be blue for a reason. Not one they could put into words though. Often symbolism is not put into words or defined by the author themselves in a way they can understand or make others understand. The idea just comes out. It is sprung from the skull like Athena from Zeus. The curtains are blue. They’re a backdrop for some scene and they were important enough to write about and the author wrote them down and there was no color they could be but blue.

Now the author can’t explain why, it’s just a truth that has lodged itself in their heart. There’s no other color they could be. Absolutely none. The readers will create the meaning. As the readers pick apart the words and put their interpretations forth, suddenly it becomes clear why the curtains are blue.

I hope to die as an author while I’m still alive. I want the meanings of my characters names explained to me. I want the sails of the pirate ships to be a specific color and I want the importance of their enemy’s colors to be understood by my readers.

I want to see that happen. A readers purpose is to tease out the author’s meaning and put into words what the author cannot.

TLDR media literacy is a dying art and I am a reader/writer who mastered it as a child and I’m sad about it.

[campingwithmonsters]

The more I work on character design, world building, storytelling, story plots, character plots, anything, you name it, the more I come to realize that maybe… maybe the curtains actually weren’t just blue. Maybe those curtains actually did have deeper meaning. Maybe subtlety really does emphasize tone. Maybe we were the ones thinking too much into it. Or maybe we weren’t thinking hard enough.

The curtains were blue, but we were all colorblind.

[mostly-dead]

I was thinking about blue curtains discourse and I think the just blue crowd has a point but it's so annoying to see them become the very thing they swore to destroy because the just blue crowd started as a response to pretentious assholes reading into everything but they've become just as pretentious assholes who refuse to read into anything because sometime the curtains are just blue but sometimes blue is symbolism

[robtopus]

"Maybe the author just meant that the curtains were blue hurr durr"

"Okay, but what does that tell us?"

"That ... the curtains were blue?"

"Yeah, but what does that tell us? Why does the narration mention these blue curtains at this particular time? Are they unexpected or not? Do we have a narrator who is heterodiegetic or homodiegetic or autodiegetic? Are blue curtains the norm or are they surprising to have for whoever owns the window the curtains are hung? Are the curtains drawn or open, what does that tell us of the curtains' owner? What is associated with the color blue in the context of the current narrative; in the culture/discourse surrounding the novel? Do these blue curtains give us a deeper understanding of the characters, fictional world, plot, narrative entity or themes? Of course they do, in some way, because otherwise, they would not be mentioned. It's honestly insulting to think the author would just randomly throw words on there that mean only one singular thing which is the most surface-level one and not put some thoughts into it -- it could be set dressing/scene setting, or a highly complex metaphor, or anything in-between and you don't need to do 'The blue curtains symbolize the war in Eastasia' (even if they maybe do) to engage with literature, and maybe you even did and then some asshole beat it out of you with IT JUST MEANS THEY'RE BLUE LOL and killed your media literacy and your ability to enjoy literature".

[spawnartisticdirections]

If someone can tell me why my mini-essay on the "blue curtains" meme never shows up on searching my blog, despite my reblogging it under various keywords over the years, I will give you a prize 😰

[dinosaurcharcuterie]

Being a teacher's kid, I very much understand the "curtains are just blue sometimes" people.

It's a bit of a long one so:

Starting at... Ninth grade the latest, for a lot of main subjects in school (math, native language, some sciences, second languages that have been taught since grade school...) there is, potentially, more than one solution to a question. It's a stage you reach at some point if you want to get decent-ish college acceptance rates.

A halfway competent teacher recognizes that and either keeps track, or follows/question the logic to see if it holds water. If it does, your method gets the same passing grade as the one they have been teaching you, though occasionally begrudgingly. (To my Latin teacher who forgot to put "explain" behind a 8-point closed question and got called out by me linguistically when my "yes" was deemed inadequate: hi.)

Native language teachers, in my experience, detest this with each grade it becomes more true. Because you're supposed to use what they're teaching you, instead of "feels right, feels wrong", even if "feels right, feels wrong" works more reliably most of the time. You learned 80% of what you need to know in previous grades. You can usually bullshit your way to a passing grade, even if you've not paid a huge amount of attention.

And then comes the time to analyze a novel, usually relatively late after the point where even the math teacher will give credit if you can stump them.

They can do this by asking students to read it at home. How many will? Ehhh. Depends on the class, really. Or teachers can decide to read it in class and analyze as you go.

With either option, this teacher has read that book back to front for years. They've looked at literary scientific analysis. The experts say, the blue curtains symbolize This Thing, and the experts make compelling arguments based on psychological theories (which the students have had little to no exposure to) and previous highbrow works or historical genres (if it's mentioned in different subjects, those teachers might not have gotten to that part of the curriculum yet).

So now there's a class full of kids who are used to independent thought, asked to analyze what is basically art. If they've read the novel entirely before, their teacher can put forward the idea that the curtains in chapter 3 out of 24 are foreshadowing something intangible. And you'll probably get a decent amount of people agreeing with the Experts on vibes alone (because the experts also work on at least 20% vibes alone). If you're reading in class and have to fill an hour or two with baby feeding the concept of things meaning something else, you are more or less forced to ask students if think the curtains mean something. This makes reading even more of a chore than it already is for the people who weren't going to read the novel at home, which will do absolutely nothing for the atmosphere in the room.

And you'll get a lot of wrong answers. You'll also get a lot of answers that, honestly, would probably make a very interesting and valid literary science bachelor's paper.

But without either the rest of the novel to use as a foundation, or previous experience analyzing a text for meaning, they can't argue on the level they need to get credit. So you are winding back the clock to eighth, seventh, sixth, even fifth grade and saying "No, that's wrong, because I say so". And it's on something that feels like that shouldn't be possible: this is a literary work, it's art, you just said it's open to interpretation. So you get teenagers and even adults pushing back defensively that "the author isn't here, you can't know that!"

Citing experts after several years of "experts used to think" in other subjects isn't really effective unless you can provide the work, which most teachers can't due to time constraints, language barriers or paywalls.

There's teachers who can handle directing this almost inevitable situation into an interesting discussion about intention of the author vs. effect of the text--which they were gonna have at a later point in this course anyway. There's also teachers who snap at being argued with and "finally" have something to put their foot down about.

And, in the latter case, the students know a tantrum when they see one. So you've got years of "if my logic is sound, it's correct, if it's not, I'll be told where I went off the rails" meeting a hostile situation missing the second part.

So not only are the curtains blue to the student, there's now a memory of people who disagree being like [insert crotchety 11th grade teacher here] and their explanations not being worth listening to because there is no substance to them. And there are texts where the color of the curtains is, well, window dressing, which will reinforce that bias.

Easiest way to prevent this annual meltdown? Interdisciplinary cooperation. You start spoon feeding kids early not only "experts used to say", but you also sneak in very low stakes literary analysis in other subjects. (And, in return, occasionally shoehorn other subjects into the ones that require literary analysis later)

If you mention homosexual behavior exists in all recorded species in Earth during Bio, you let the 8th graders know a guy writing about randy penguins did so in obscure Greek and ask them what personal feelings might have motivated that choice in a time when English or Latin were the accepted ways to report findings where this guy lived. Usually in the last 10 minutes of class, so that if they take it too far, it's the next teacher's problem

Different scientists disagree about theories? Let the students see the titles to the studies and ask why they read like a conversation when these people were very much not working together, using the other's theories or even living in the same country. Any schism this creates during 9th grade Phys tends to resolve when it turns out they were both wrong, but made some interesting points.

If you've got a personal historian disagreeing with archeological evidence and observations from travelers, you can discuss that in class. You can also point out where there are "interesting" word choices or phrases that suggest even the author being paid his weight in gold and threatened with execution wasn't enough to entirely wipe out the suggestion that Ingo the Inept Dingleberry might have been at least partially responsible for the twelfth famine of his seven year reign.

Is this more work for teachers? Totally. But it also keeps students invested, so it saves them work in trying to convince Stacy and Kenneth to care, if not about Econ, then at least their Econ grade.

By the time you get to blue curtains... Well, students might still not read the novel at home, but at least they'll be more likely to grab the curtains and run with them than throw themselves to the floor and scream that those curtains are just fucking blue.

I'll never understand the "curtains are just blue sometimes" people. I was soooo fucking excited learning about symbolism. You have a story and what the story tells you. Then you have the fact that it was written at all by someone and that's another story. And then there's also hidden extra story info?

[digital-meat]

real life curtains of a specific color likely don't signify your specific mood at a specific moment.

however. fictional curtains could change color at any moment and fictional people could have a tendency to change their curtains up to three times a day despite real life people not doing that. or perhaps our fictional characters travel and, weirdly, most places they visit have curtains in a color matching their mood. or maybe the curtains had the same color throughout the story but the author didn't really mention it earlier, likely because it would be kinda bad writing to describe every single irrelevant detail of the characters' environment, but when the color became relevant, the author mentioned it.

and, "the curtains are just blue" does not only apply to literal curtains that happen to appear in a book. it also applies to any other metaphor that people insist is actually literal and actually bad writing. it's not a phrase exclusive to curtains.

I can accept that nobody's actually talking about curtains, because that seems like a stupid hill to die on anyway.

But you're saying I'm supposed to do a psychological deep dive on every detail of a book, and not care about inconsistency and coincidences? You can't have it both ways.