#but its way more enunciated in spanish which i like

[bingobongobonko]

stupid but changed the spelling of my name to the way my aunt spells it, and it's a little silly and weird but think it's comfy. still pronounced the same, at least to english speakers. but yea its nice? it's nice... also it's more chopped off from my birth name which is nice. so i guess a name change but NOT really. nothing changes, just the spelling.

[cinnabeat]

its really interesting to listen to covers of aimers song bc imo no one really captures the emotion she puts into her singing

[meraki-yao]

RWRB Full-Cast Audiobook Imaginations

So with the sequel on the horizon, we’re not that far from a full-cast re-recording of the audiobook, right?

I listen to the audiobook more than I read the book, mostly because I can listen to it while doing other stuff, and no offence to the original narrator, but while it’s good, it’s not the best. I kind of cringe at his British accent for Henry.

So I have a lot of thoughts.

The thing is with an audiobook, we can get both the wonderful vocal performance of the movie cast, and the iconic book lines, the ones that didn’t, and frankly, could never have made it into the movie due to format restrictions:

Sexy explicit sex scenes

Sexy explicit sex lines “For fuck’s sake, man, you just had my dick in your mouth, you can kiss me good-night”, “I want you to fuck me”, “I’ve been thinking about your mouth on me all well”

Emails in their entirety

Email openings and endings “Huge Raging Heache Prince Henry of Who Cares”, “First Son of Shirking Responsibilities”, “Horrible Revolting Heir”, “First Son of Founding Father Sacrilege”, “Haplessly Romantic Heretic Prince Henry the Utterly Daft”

Email historical quotes “The whole is a mass of fools and knaves; I could almost except you”, “I meet you in every dream”

Swearing and explicit language “fucking shit” “I fucking love you, okay?”

Internal Struggle

Iconic lines that didn’t make it into the movie for adaptation and story purposes “I’m never gonna love anybody in the world like I love you” “I love him on purpose”, “America, he is my choice”

Like, imagine hearing all of this in Taylor, in Nick, in Sarah and Uma and Ellie and Rachel and Thomas and Aneesh and Cfiton etc etc 's voice. Just imagine it!!!

Another thing to add is that to put it in simple terms, the current version of the audiobook does the dialogue lines closer to theatre acting: more enunciated, more inflection, and slower. Which is fine in its own right (I’m a theatre kid). But with the cast audiobook, hopefully, we can get them to do something closer to film acting, i.e. closer to reality, reading the lines as they would if they were to shoot those scenes.

Which is gonna make big moments like sexy times and confrontations a lot of fun :D

And something really entertaining to think about is now that we also know the cast and their dynamic is thinking about how much fun they would have while recording the book, especially when they have scenes together. And it’s not necessarily just Taynick, it’s group scenes with the whole Super Six, like the karaoke scene in chapter seven, or the Texas Holiday Scenes with Firstprince and Junora.

Like, Imagine it, the actors in the same recording studio, maybe even on the same couch:

Taylor and Nick laughing while reading off the insults from the earlier frienemies days of their relationship

Taylor and Nick squirming and playfully hitting each other when recording lines for sexy scenes like the first night, or the tack room, or Wimbledon

The cast shouting and booing (playfully) whenever someone messes up a line in their group scenes

The chaotic fun that is the LA karaoke scene, everybody’s laughing, Ellie gets to be the singular sober person while everyone else acts drunk, Nick singing Don’t Stop Me Now shittier (Nick has the voice of an angel but book Henry can’t sing for shit),

Taylor and Nick giving each other hugs after screaming at each other for the Kensington confrontation

Nick grinning smugly at every book height difference mention (:<

More of Taylor speaking Spanish!!!

Thomas gets to be a proper asshole villain who later turns into awkward older brother who's trying

Ellie gets to do the pie metaphor grief monologue  

Taylor gets to do another speech (he’s really good at delivering speeches)

 I want to quickly reiterate that I am in no way unhappy with what we got in the end for the movie; I love it to pieces. However, as Matthew and Casey said, there are two “canonical” versions of the story now, and since audiobooks are an option, it would be really nice to connect this aspect of the movie verse with the book verse in some sort of middle ground.

So yeah Audible? Amazon? Get on with it!!!

@almightaylor this was the long post I mentioned, I literally started this in July lol

[hobiebrownismygod]

Researching Characters so you don't have to Part 2: Pavitr Prabhakar & His Dialect

NOT MY ART! Click on it for the link! &lt;3

Pavitr Prabhakar's accent is basically non-existent in writing. Its not like Hobie's where you make some letters silent and enunciate specific parts of the words. Indian accents, especially Pav's aren't shown through writing, which is perfectly fine. The difficult part of trying to write Pavitr Prabhakar is his dialect, not his accent.

Like I explained in my last post, dialect and accents aren't the same thing. An accent is the way someone pronounces things while the dialect is an accent along with vocabulary and grammar. Pavitr's dialect would be heavily influenced by Mumbai dialect, considering the fact that he lives in Mumbattan.

First off, Indians speak English. Like if you go to India, I guarantee that 90% of the people there under the age of 40 will speak fairly fluent English. Schools in India teach multiple languages, one of them usually being English, and Indian children are almost fluent in English by the age of 10-13. Its basically a necessity.

So if you're going to write Pav, don't butcher his English and make him sound like he doesn't speak it well, because thats not true. Most Indians speak English really well, and you shouldn't feed into the stereotypes with your writing.

However, he would speak a mixture of languages together. Think of it like Spanglish, where you use English grammar for Spanish words. Its the same thing with Indians. They often toss a couple of English words into a sentence using the grammar of whatever language they're speaking, whether its Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, etc. They would also do it the other way around, tossing Hindi/Marathi/etc phrases into English sentences. So if you're going to write Pav, writing him tossing in Hindi phrases is going to be a lot more accurate than writing broken English or even full English, Especially if you're going to be writing him with his aunt, uncle or Gayatri, because they are all going to be speaking the same, if not a similar language, even if you're going to write them in English.

There's not much else to say, besides the fact that Indians tend to use some English words much more than they do in the west. For example Indians say the word "bro" a lot. Its seen in movies and just in general as well. Teenage boys and young adult men say "bro" almost all the time, usually referring to their friends, classmates, cousins, etc. But, they wouldn't say it to someone older to them or someone they need to be respectful towards, like a boss etc.

Some other phrases (Hindi) that Indians tend to use a lot are:

Bhaiyya (older brother - used to refer to boys older than you)

Achha? (really? - often used sarcastically but can also be used normally)

Arre! (Hey, hey you! - used to call someone, used to get someone's attention)

Yaar (friend - light/friendly slang term for a friend)

Like always, research is going to be your best friend, so if you want to find more of these phrases you can search them up on Google. Hopefully this helped <3

[loverboybrightsideghost]

little vent post re: jacob anderson's amazing work with louis's accents (and also a complaint abt breaking bad)

actually, on the topic of jacob anderson's accent- reminded me of breaking bad. i haven't seen if all the way through, only bits and pieces as my brother watched it. but i know it's a great show, and apparently one thing it's lauded for is its attention to detail (not sure if this is true, i'm assuming yes).

what is. gus fring's accent. he speaks english fine and sounds relatively spanish-y latino accent to my memory, but hearing him actually speak spanish was so so strange every time, and honestly confusing too? his spanish is good, no question, and i know giancarlo esposito isn't latino, but there's a difference between having good spanish and sounding like a native.

my family is mexican and i have lived around primarily spanish speakers my whole life, so while my spanish is not the best, i understand it basically perfectly and know what native speakers sound like. he does not sound like a native! and i'm pretty sure he's supposed to be? in the very least, he's supposed to have spanish as his first language.

i saw a youtube video from an actual chilean who was also saying "hey what's up with his accent?" because chileans have an accent that can apparently sometimes be difficult to understand even from other spanish speakers, but this guy in the video said something like "i know our accent is difficult to understand, but hey this is not that!"

and i've googled it a few times "why does gus fring sound like that when he speaks spanish" but i've never gotten many results other than another post on reddit asking the same question and the aforementioned video. maybe i didn't look hard enough, maybe there's more posts or answers now than last time i looked.

for a show with a reputation like breaking bad, and for an actor i think is as great as giancarlo esposito (i love his enunciation), i'm kinda disappointed that that's what he sounds like in spanish, but i was kind of like oh well i guess there's only so much they can do idk??? i wish they'd cared more, since i'm pretty sure he's a big important character.

but like after that post and also after all of interview with the vampire, with jacob and assad doing amazing work to have their accents reflect their characters at the point they are at in the story- which is many accents for each of them- it's like. just a masterclass in voice work honestly.

so um. idk just a personal little vent post cuz i'm always a little frustrated when i think of the breaking bad thing. idk jacob anderson especially has just exponentially raised my standards as far as actors. 👍🏼

[blueberrywhale123]

That was amazing. Could you compare Leon to Tomas vocally?

I’ll give it a shot! I’m not the best at compare and contrast though so I hope this is intelligible.

First things first, Tomás is a tenor, no doubt in my mind. Not too big of a shock I hope😆, now if one of the characters was a baritone then I’d be shocked.

So as a tenor, his typical range is the same (theoretically) C3-B4. Tomás has a nice and clear tone, his voice is bright and has a very pingy quality when he goes high, pingier (more pingy?) than León. The only way I could really describe his voice is fragile???? I don’t want to say brittle cuz it’s not, so maybe fragile is the closest word I can find and I’ll just fix it later if I find a better word. Possibly thready.

In his songs, Tomás has a very sweet and sensitive tone to his voice. There isn’t too much fullness or power behind the vocals when he sings something like Voy Por Ti so it comes out a bit thready. But that sweet and soft tone does suit his songs. León just has more range with what he can act with his voice then Tomás does.

He’ll sometimes distress his voice which sounds nice. His technique for switching from chest to head is good and his runs are pleasant as well.

He also has a tendency to string his words together and not fully enunciate them. And there are certain songs and styles where this is more acceptable. This is a little problem I always had and my vocal coach once told me that it must mean I was meant to sing jazz😂 It could also be his Spanish accent tho cuz there are some things he pronounces the same as Diego.

Now, to really compare the two, I listened to their Voy Por Ti trio with Violetta ALOT. And Verte De Lejos. A. Lot.

What I can come up with is that while they are both tenors, the strength of their voices is very different. León has more power behind his belting notes and his enunciation is very clear. When they sing Voy Por Ti, It’s obvious. León is practically punching the syllables out of his mouth and Tomás is letting them slid off his tongue. Which I feel is very in character for them. I’d hate to call him a sloppy singer cuz he’s not, he’s using his technique well, its just that at times you can get that impression; perhaps a better term is laidback. They blend well in my opinion.

So in conclusion, León is the more powerful vocally and Tomás is a bit thready but he is no slouch. They’re styles of singing are just very different.

[ofbeautsandbeasts]

You're very welcome @jennyfair7!! 💖 So nice to see the snails again!

I'm surprised it finally got there. I believe I sent it on May 29th...so that's like 40 days in transit! 😮 The way I wrote the address probably delayed it...I didn't realize the back had such a weird format until it was time to write my card. I also didn't realize they required 3 stamps to send an international postcard or I would've saved more room for them.

Anywho, Peru was definitely an enchanting country and I'd highly recommend it to anyone reading this! 😁 5 years of Duolingo helped a lot, especially with reading instructions/signs and ordering food, but I was still pretty useless when people said things to me in Spanish (unless they enunciated and spoke slowly 😅) Fortunately if you stick to touristy areas, most people speak enough English that you can get by.

The main downsides to Peru were having to use bottled water all the time (for drinking and for brushing teeth), not being able to flush toilet paper, having to haggle with vendors (no prices on anything), avoiding iced drinks & salads, having to speak to the customs officer alone (they won't let you go with your s/o 😭), not having reliable hot water in the shower, and getting winded from climbing stairs in high altitude places. And most of the hotels weren't very soundproof, so I'd be woken up around 6am for one reason or another 🙃

Other than that, the ancient sites & works of art were mind-blowing and their culture is wonderful 🥰 They have plenty of interesting traditional foods, such as grilled alpaca, rotisserie chicken with aji amarillo, ceviche, rice with duck, jumbo corn, and chicha morada (I listed my top faves). We tried the guinea pig twice and it was better grilled than fried. In its fried form, it had a strange distinct taste, which I assume is simply guinea pig taste...but it was a bit off-putting. 😅 The Lima Airport has a fantastic food court. Their McDonald's even serves bone-in fried chicken comparable to a good Popeye's 🍗 I strongly recommend Pardo's and La Lucha 🤤

As awesome as Machu Picchu was, I enjoyed Sacsayhuaman even more because there were several remarkable natural rock formations in addition to the man-made stone walls, which are constructed of such huge rocks that it's difficult to fathom how the Incans put them together. It's also great being able to free-roam and not feel as crowded as I did at Machu Picchu. Not to mention, there were a bunch of llamas & alpacas that I could pet and take photos with 🦙

Another excellent place was Manos de la Comunidad, which was a free petting zoo in Cusco where you could feed the llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, and huanacos with long grasses and take photos with them. They also had two Andean Condors in a large enclosure and it was incredible seeing the male spread its wings! At the end of the tour is a huge store with high-quality alpaca & vicuña items. I wanted the vicuña plush made of vicuña fur for $160...but alas, it was simply too much. I settled for a smol alpaca fur bird plush for $15 instead 😆

If you're into erotic art, I'd recommend the Museo Larco in Lima and the Parque de la Fertilidad in Trujillo. The park has scaled-up statues of erotic ceramic vessels from the ancient Moche culture, but if you want to see the actual ceramic vessels, you'll have to go to the Museo Larco. Fascinating times 😂🍆

One last nice thing about Peru is you have sticker relief instead of sticker shock. Souvenirs, hotels, food, and tickets were so much cheaper there! I found the lowest souvenir prices in Cusco and the highest in Aguas Calientes (near Machu Picchu), but still reasonable 😎

Thank you so much for the postcard, @ofbeautsandbeasts ! It was such a nice surprise to receive in the (snail) mail 😁 Your trip to Peru sounds like it was amazing! I’d love to go there, someday 🦙🏔️ What was your favorite part?? Thanks again for thinking of me! 🥰

[fabricated-misslieness]

pairing: bruno madrigal x male reader

req: no | wc: 657 | cw: very lighthearted, perhaps ooc?

summary: You accidentally broke something of his and he’s not particularly ecstatic about it.

a/n: reader knows spanish, they’re also slightly hinted at being husbands. reader is also stated to be taller than bruno, with bruno being an estimated height of 5′ 4″ or 162 cm.

“Bruno,” The aforementioned Madrigal can only turn his head to catch up with you as you walk past him; still, he ends up turning it more than he thinks he would as you come to a stop behind him, not far but not close either. “mi…” You pause, and he finds himself confused. (my...)

He won’t be mad at you. Of course he won’t. He loves you too much for that.

“Tu..?” (Your..?)

“Amor,” You fill in the blank, “mi amor.” (Love, my love.)

Bruno expects you to explain your peculiar behavior afterwards, but you don’t, so he has to prod you further, “Yes?”

“Mi corazón, mi cielo…” He can just about see your hands move, he’d say sporadically, swishing in the air, as you enunciate each pet name. Quite dramatic, if anything. (My heart, my sky...)

“(Y/N).”

You’re pressed against his back now, in a hug, not unlike the lips on the side of his face. Under normal circumstances, he would’ve been the slightest bit flushed from a mere kiss, even if on his cheek; but right now, you were worrying him. “Mi vida.” (My life.)

“Something happened.” He deducts, not that it was rather hard to deduct. Husbands often came upon their… wives, with all the love and care in the world before stating that they did something atrocious. Forget to feed the dog? The kid? Accidentally broke something? You had no dog, no kid either, so it must be the latter.

“El hombre más bello que he visto…” He gives you a look, as best he can from this angle, portraying how tired he was of this drawn-out interaction. It shuts up your ‘masterful’ dodging of the point real quick. “Something happened.” (The most beautiful man I've ever seen...)

“And that is..?” You repeat to yourself: he loves you too much to get angry at you.

“Ay..” Here goes nothing. “I broke one of your sets, your… rat telenovelas, I-” You pause, for a bit, intimidated by Bruno’s increasingly escalating stare, “Lo... siento?” (I'm... sorry?)

“You-” He turns away from you, ripping your arms from their embrace around his torso, and sputters. In this moment, it’s almost like he’s the –albeit smaller– version of himself the town fears: the maniac, here to doom everyone that stands in his way.

His arms reach high in the air, grasping at empty air with a grip that would be crushing if it held onto something, then stiffly back down at his sides still in their vicious grasp of nothingness. His left leg is first to come down with a stomp, then his right. “You did WHAT?!” And he turns back to you, a finger and nail poking at your chest, eyes narrowed and mouth agape.

“Look, mi amor, I’m so sorry-”

“I know you’re sorry, but you’re gonna need a better apology-” You can see the moment an idea pops into his head like a lightbulb suddenly being lit, “Unless you want Hernando to come out.”

“Hernando’s already out, he’s gay-”

“THAT’S IT.” He pulls his ruana over his head, covering his eyes and making him look meaner, at least in his opinion. If it weren’t for the fact he was shorter than you, you would’ve been ‘shaking in your boots’. He grasps your shoulders with a vicious grip, which didn’t turn out to be so vicious after all, and shakes you easily like a baby rattle. “APOLOGIZE… please.”

"Mira, Bruno-" (Look, Bruno-)

"BRUNO Y YO SOMOS DIFERENTES." (BRUNO AND I ARE DIFFERENT)

“See, mi vida, I’ve already done so twice and,” He stares again, with that look showing off how tired he is, which you can decipher even with his ruana pulled over like a hood. “okay, okay, I’m sorry. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix the stage, and I’ll fix the little scene cards, and I’ll feed the rats-”

He cuts you off with a light peck, his ruana back to its normal position, “And you’ll do it alone.”

“Wha- alone? Mi cielo, you made those yourself, I don’t even know where to start-”

“You caused it, you fix it.”

“Mi amor-”

“Bye.”

[dandaelions]

finally some good fcking food aka "empathy" thoughts

I woke up bright and early, got dressed, made some coffee and cut up some peaches, warmed up a croissant that I got from a local bakery yesterday, and sat down to listen with a ksoo-state of mind. then my supervisor suddenly asked me to join a meeting (so much for blocking off my calendar 🙃) aaaaand then I got busy all day lol but now I've finally got some free time to soak this in

rose: a simple acoustic track – more brighter and upbeat than “that’s okay” but still in the same vein. it feels a bit run-of-the-mill if I’m being completely honest, but that's probably just me and the fact that I don’t usually go for acoustic songs like this lol. gosh the lyrics are cute though, songwriter ksoo came through with the romantics 😊🌹💕 can definitely see how they were gunning for widespread listenability with this one. also the mv was so whimsical and fun! it made me laugh in a few places, not to mention ksoo going about his day without a care in the world is all I really care about seeing. the animations were so cool!

I’m gonna love you: less folk, more contemporary pop with that guitar lick in the intro. I had to pause and replay ksoo’s first bit here, I just couldn’t believe that was him! whoa this kinda of pseudo-rapping is quite a different sound from him. his lower register is so smooth omg. oh yeah now that's a beat drop!! LOVE the chorus! not familiar with wonstein but I'm surprised to hear a rap feature on this album, I didn't think that would be something ksoo would go for but it sounds really good here! their little harmonies YAH. also adlibs yesssss!! for those of us hoping for an r&b song, here it is!

my love: he brought the whole soundstage for this one, mmm yes love this chill down-tempo vibe. oh gosh he's mixing just the perfect amount of falsettos and growl into some of these lines here, he's so good at creating those smooth-harsh edges if that makes any sense lol. not to bring bbh into this but I’d really love to see ksoo perform this song as a duet with him!

It’s love: oh man he sounds GOOD good! ooooh wow all those flourishes and accidentals and runs oh my god. THIS is the song for the live lounges! the stripped-back instrumentals let him be front-and-center on this one, oh I really hope he performs this one live!! the hushed strings add that romantic vibe that really makes it feel like he's serenading us 🥰 ooh when he goes down an octave in that last part and then back up again OH MAN

dad: this brought tears to my eyes, what a beautiful and touching tribute 🥺 oh no I looked up the lyric translations and now I'm crying 😭 my dad and I tend butt heads a lot, and growing up I didn't understand why, but as I've grown older I've realized it's because we're so similar, and at the end of the day he's sacrificed so much for me :((( anyways not to get super deep and personal but just hearing the raw emotion in his voice brought up a lot of my own emotions too. I'm sure his dad is very proud of him right now :)

^^me going from "dad" to "I'm fine"

I’m fine: ALRIGHT HERE’S THE RIFF THAT’S BEEN HAUNTING ME FOR THE PAST TWO WEEKS. oh god that intro 💆‍♀️💆‍♀️💆‍♀️!!!! a little darker than the previous tracks – the bass and guitar infuse some latin flavor here. hoo WOWWWWWW the way he weaves his voice (which he sounds just DIVINE here) around those instrumentals, also LOVE the way his enunciating the lyrics, like plucking guitar strings, and is this in a harmonic minor key? the way this ebbs and flows and goes up and down and the way he slips into falsettos oh my god this song alone fed me better than whole albums have this year, I cannot imagine anyone other than ksoo doing this justice. this song just is a big steaming mug of spiced hot chocolate. also can we just give it up for songwriter ksoo I looked up the translation and yeah big hit of sweet melancholia right here. my fave song on the album!

rose (eng ver): oh sheet I don’t know if anything would’ve prepared me for “your lips look so fine and you’re looking so cool” but the damage is done my hp is at -2 🤕 these lyrics are cute too! but I think I prefer his korean lyrics over these :) ofc he sounds like he's been speaking english his whole life adskjfdkj it's so amazing how he preserved all of those vocal details from the korean version

si fueras mia: the spanish ver of “it’s love…I really can’t believe that’s HIM singing this omg what I would give to see a live performace of this. I’m not a spanish speaker (all I have are two years of high school Spanish to my name 😔) but like he's actually blowing the pronunciation out of the water!! absolute mad props for putting a spanish song on his debut ep, that was a bold move and it paid off! if I had to choose, I like this version better. again, so blown away by how he sung this the exact same way as the korean version, that's not an easy feat!!

overall: I mean what more can I say, this is what people have waited YEARS for and it's finally here. in true ksoo form, it doesn't try too hard to impress or demand your attention. its simplicity is its charm, and in a landscape of blaring electronica, it's a warm soothing escape. I'm happy 😊

[thesethingsofours]

Nina Simone, Duende & Pastel Blues

Nina Simone’s Pastel Blues is a true embodiment of duende — the rare depth and darkness that impels her work.

1969 © Jack Robinson / Hulton Archive

Her distinctive warble permeates thousands of movie soundtracks, hip hop samples and advertisements, let alone the countless personal moments by which people demarcate their lives. This omnipresence allows us to forget who Nina Simone was, and the outright value of her music. For the streaming generation, knowledge of such an artist is limited to “top hits”; on some Spotify, Sunday Mood playlist. Or worse, the songs will only wriggle into the brain from various attempts to sell Coca-Cola, Seat Atecas, Renault Clios, Volvo XC90s, Fords, Apple Watches, Chanel №5, Warehouse discount clothes, Virgin Flights, HTC Phones, Jockey underwear and Behr Paint.

Most egregious among these is the Muller Light yoghurt advert, inescapable for anyone sentient in early 2000s UK. It uses her 1968 song I Ain’t Got No, I Got Life, but only the second, I Got Life half; carving it off entirely from its I Ain’t Got No essence. In its truncated form, the song sounds like a free-wheeling celebration of life and limb: Got my hair, got my head / Got my brains, got my ears / Got my eyes, got my nose / Got my mouth, I got my smile. Yet the missing section is a lengthy condemnation of segregated American society, where disenfranchised black people had been given nothing to cling to: Ain’t got no mother, ain’t got no culture / Ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schoolin’ / Ain’t got no love, ain’t got no name /…Ain’t got no god / Hey, what have I got? / Why am I alive, anyway?

Yes, the song contains positivity in tune and verse, but stripping the darkness from Simone’s work also strips away its incandescent light. It would be like taking Rodin’s Gates of Hell and shrouding everything except the seemingly peaceful thinker at the centre; or cutting the lightbulb from the top of Picasso’s Guernica and presenting it as a bright, merry, representative segment. Or a millionaire DJ taking Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech and turning it into a dance track during race protests and a global pandemic. But surely not even David Guetta would do that.

The reduction of such a deliberate and profound artist to commercialised snippets is saddening. In Simone’s case this is particularly true because of the highly unusual, powerful darkness that clutches her music. She has something rare. In Spanish, it is known as duende.

Duende

Rooted in Iberian cultures, duende derives from “duen de casa”, meaning “possessor of a house”. Originally the superstition of a dark, goblin-like spirit, it is now the concept of impassioned, death-endorsing, creative invention; typically associated with the performative aspects of Flamenco. In that context, poet and playwright Federico García Lorca describes its contemporary meaning (in his 1933 Buenos Aries lecture, Theory and Play of the Duende), as the “buried spirit of saddened Spain”. 

As a guitar maestro explained to him, “the duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet”. Lorca quotes others, one, after listening to Paganini’s violin, identified it as, “a mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained”; or another, upon hearing Manuel de Falla perform Nocturno, proposed that, “all that has dark sounds has duende”. In Lorca’s own words:

For every man, every artist called Nietzsche or Cézanne, every step that he climbs in the tower of his perfection is at the expense of the struggle that he undergoes with his duende. Not with an angel, as is often said, nor with his Muse…

…With idea, sound, gesture, the duende delights in struggling freely with the creator on the edge of the pit. Angel and Muse flee, with violin and compasses, and the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work.

Nina Simone embodies duende.

1968 © Hulton Archive

It exists not only within her more explicit protest songs, born of the Civil Rights movement, but is present in everything she did — a ferocity, fragility, sadness and authenticity that claws its way up her throat and flings itself from her open mouth. It’s an otherworldly channelling of something very few can access, but which audiences pray to feel. With music so steeped in darkness, using it to gleefully sell products is a comedy — a joke on the shamelessness naivety of consumers and marketeers — as well as a tragedy.

A Brief History

Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933 and raised in Jim Crow-era North Carolina, Simone was ambitiously desirous of becoming a concert pianist — an uncommon career path for a young black girl at the time. Despite obtaining the ability to do so, she was instead funnelled into performing a mixture of jazz, gospel, soul and folk. And blues, in every shade. Her voice — ostensibly untrained — was burnished in the fire of necessity: if she wanted to earn money in the clubs, she had to sing as well as play piano. She electrified audiences, but remained persistently dissatisfied with how she was received and perceived:

It’s only normal to want acceptance from one’s own country for one’s gifts God has given you. I’m tired of begging for it. It took me 20 years of playing in clubs, in nightclubs, on the concert stage doing all these records to get a decent, real accurate review of my gifts by the New York Times… It was the first time I had been compared to Maria Callas as a diva. All before that I had been labelled a jazz singer, a blues singer, High Priestess of Soul, which… I am not sure what that is. I have studied piano 18 years! So yes I’m tired. I’m too old to keep asking for love from the industry. (Nina Simone, 1984)

Elevated by activists and aficionados alike, yet shunned by the industry at the height of her popularity after vigorously speaking out for black rights (see: Mississippi Goddam), she evolved as an artist in parallel with the revolution of television; first appearing in grainy monochrome and then in saturated technicolour. In the 12-year period between 1959 and 1971, she released 16 studio albums. In the years that followed, before her death in 2003, she released just four more.

Pastel Blues

These days, the idea of albums is virtually defunct, Drakefied to an incoherent heap of songs occasionally “dropped” like laundry, to be worn or discarded at the listeners behest. But as with other great artists, if the extent of Simone’s depth and duende is to be appreciated, it is essential to listen to her albums — the home of her authorship.

Pastel Blues is a nine track, 36-minute LP, mainly of covers and blues standards. It was released in October 1965, eight months after Malcolm X was assassinated, seven months after Bloody Sunday in Selma, and two months after the Voting Rights Act became law. Arguably, it arrived at the height of the movement. Nina Simone was 32. Just imagine.

Although the title suggests something soft and light, underneath the label, the substance is preternatural. As you listen, watch the image on the cover transform from a gentle gaze into a pointed glare; a stare in stereo. Altogether, it is a marvellous enunciation of Nina Simone’s darkness, with which she writhed in body, mind, and soul to give us some of the most memorable artworks of the 20th century. Pastel Blues gives her duende its due.

Listen to Pastel Blues on Apple Music 

Listen to Pastel Blues on Spotify (1965 Live Version)

Listen to Pastel Blues on YouTube

Track-By-Track

Be My Husband

It opens with Be My Husband, featuring lyrics incidentally written by Simone’s own husband (and manager), Andrew Stroud. Slightly off-kilter, echoey, four-beat stamping and clapping, heightened by the tight splash of a high-hat, introduces a languid, yet driving pace. With purity of purpose, Simone’s voice drawls intensely into her opening repeated demand: Be my husband and I’ll be your wife / Love and honour you the rest of your life.

It suggests a woman pleading for the hand of her lover, committing to do all he would expect of a wife: If you want me to cook and sew / Outside of you there is no place to go. In return, she asks him only to curb his wandering eye: Stick the promise man you made me / That you stay away from Rosalie, yeah. This is presumably the intended (somewhat biased) perspective of the lyricist. But the way Simone sings it, with improvised shrieks dropping into deep, bassy groans, something quite different is suggested.

Nina Simone & Andrew Stroud, photographer unknown.

At this point, Simone was four years into an emotionally and physically abusive marriage with Stroud. Knowing this, it has far more resonance to picture her in a kitchen, staring down a boorish, unsatisfactory, and unsatisfying man; stomping on a linoleum floor, and throwing him a powerful, sacred ultimatum — give me what you promised. To imagine it otherwise is to imagine how Ed Sheeran might perform it — with the frivolousness of a millennial wedding on a sunny day in Surrey, and all the stamping, clapping vigour of a gaggle of giggling, inebriated aunts.

Furthermore, Be My Husband is effectively a re-worked chain gang song from the segregated south — a version of Rosie by the Inmates of Parchman Farm Penitentiary recorded in 1947 Mississippi by ethnomusicologist, Alan Lomax (and notoriously sampled by… well, well, well… hello again, David Guetta). The original lyrics ring out: Be my woman, gal, I’ll be your man… Stick to the promise girl that you made me / Won’t got married til’ I go free. Even aside from Simone’s interpretation, its genesis as a song of imprisonment immediately gives it a grimmer tone.

Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out

As it bows to track two, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, the heavy opening of the album is extended. A blues standard written in 1923, it was popularised by Bessie Smith’s 1929 recording and re-introduced to a new audience by Eric Clapton, who performed it throughout his career. Sam Cooke, Otis Reading, Janis Joplin, Bobby Womack, John Lennon, Derek and the Dominos and Duane & Gregg Allman all put their spin on it, with wildly varying degrees of quality, duende and notoriety.

It begins deceptively upbeat: Well once I lived the life of a millionaire / spending my money I didn’t care / Taking my friends out for a mighty good time. Simone’s version is no different as she lightly pads major key piano chords, but what immediately sets her rendition apart is the tremble in her voice. It sounds like she is singing through tears, not least when the song reaches its sobering bridge: Nobody wants you / Nobody needs you.

In Simone’s case, the song became painfully prescient. Following her fall from grace within the music industry, she left for Barbados in 1970, where she had an affair with then Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. Her subsequent divorce from Stroud limited access to her income, which he, as her manager, controlled. Also, due to an arrest warrant for taxes she withheld in protest at the Vietnam War, Simone was unable to return to the US, so ended up first in Liberia, then living across Europe. With little money to live from and few relationships to speak of, for a time, she came to epitomise the song.

End of the Line

The first fully original song on the album, End of the Line is initially carried by another deception of positiveness, this time through its melody; romantic and light despite the lyrics: This is the end of the line / I’ve clearly read every sign / The way you glance at me / Indifferently / And take your hand from mine. Such is the flowing nostalgia of the tune, it is plausible to imagine the same song with all words made positive (e.g. The way you glance at me / So happily / And place your hand in mine).

Divisible into two parts, the first has the feel of Simone sipping a martini in a Rogers & Hammerstein bar (perhaps offering some musical theatrical hope of salvation). The second, however, gives way to resigned sorrow, over a steady, rumba beat. Aside from showcasing Simone’s prodigious classical piano-playing ability — albeit only through twinkling, floral runs — the richness of her vocal tone spills forth, smoothly and lusciously, particularly in the second half. While lyrically it lacks the forcefulness of other tracks, its simplicity opens the door to Simone’s abundant musicality.

Trouble in Mind

Written in 1924, Trouble in Mind is another blues standard, but given its title, after three tracks of despair, it surprisingly brings a degree of levity.

The original lyrics (as sung by Dinah Washington, Janis Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ella Fitzgerald, Marianne Faithful, Johnny Cash and original recording artist Thelma La Vizzo) are far darker than this version. Typically, the singer, wrestling with the irrepressible demons of their psyche, contemplates suicide by train: I’m gonna lay my head / On some lonesome railroad line / Let the 2:19 train / Ease my troubled mind. Yet on Pastel Blues, it never gets that far.

While refrain of the song always concludes: I won’t be blue always / ‘Cause the sun’s gonna shine in my back door someday, Simone’s version leans more heavily on those lyrics than others’ versions; giving it a more hopeful perspective. She also dresses the music with a quicker, cheerier pace. Furthermore, instead of seeking the certainty and finality of a gruesome suicide, she resolves only that: I’m going down to the river / Gonna get me a rocking chair / If the Lord don’t help me / I’m gonna rock away from here. 

Given she was be known to perform the full lyrics on other occasions, it is an interesting choice to uplift them on Pastel Blues. In terms of the album’s full narrative, however, it makes sense to offer a moment of optimism, keeping us on an undulating journey of emotion, rather than wallowing solely in melancholy.

© Ron Kroon

Tell Me More and More and Then Some

The dynamic changes once again in Tell Me More and More and Then Some, as Simone hints towards her unapologetic, simmering, sexuality. Sex is known to have often enthralled her — as she wrote in her diary, “My attitude toward sex was that we should be having it all the time.”

Originally recorded in 1940 by Billie Holiday, Simone tweaks the lyrics to make the titular line more demanding, more desirous: I want more, more and then some. Accompanied by quivering, raunchy harmonica and clanging, insistent piano chords, Simone’s phrasing and emphasis draws lustfulness from the lyrics: You know how I love that stuff / Whisper from now on / To doomsday / But I never no no no no, ooh / I never, no I never, will get enough. It’s an erotic elaboration on Holiday’s already sultry interpretation, loading the request for whispered sweet nothings with a throbbing, sexual overtone.

Chilly Winds Don’t Blow

Chilly Winds Don’t Blow acts as a natural, also largely optimistic companion to Trouble in Mind, making Tell Me More and More and Then Some the bawdy, thick-cut meat between two, forward-looking slices of bread. That said, the song was previously released by Simone as single in 1959, as an even more upbeat spiritual, with denser orchestration and less of her signature vocal style.

On Pastel Blues, however, it is likely sung from a position of matured disappointment towards the unending hostility experienced by black Americans. With a sparser arrangement and greater vocal freedom, the new context is pointedly conveyed: There will be red roses round my door / I’m going where they’ll welcome me for sure, oh baby / Where the chilly winds, they don’t blow. Notably, as her piano rumbles, mimicking the sound of a rolling, cold wind, Simone also refers to her own maturity, as a woman. In this new version, she no longer wants to go where her father waits for her. Instead, it’s her daddy who will be waiting.

1968 © David Redfern

Ain’t No Use

Recorded in 1959 by Joe Williams and Count Basie, Ain’t No Use manifested as a break-up song. In that bright, brassy version, Williams croons at the opening: Ain’t no use of hanging round / Ain’t no use I put you down / There’s no love left / In my heart for you. In Simone’s rendition, the subject of the warning is much more ambiguous. When considered alongside Chilly Winds Don’t Blow and the tracks that follow, Simone instead implies a sense of exasperation, perhaps a desire to withdraw from broken American society, or the increasingly hostile music industry. She opens not with fallen love but accusation and fatigue: Ain’t no use baby / I’m leaving the scene / Ain’t no use baby / You’re too doggone mean / Yes I’m tired of paying dues / Having the blues / Hitting bad news.

To this point, Pastel Blues is a solid, often special, blues album, but here it really begins to soar; marking it apart. The underlying anguish of the blues is of course ingrained in the genre, but with Simone, her duende, fraught personal life, and civil rights activism, a dramatic narrative acceleration begins to emerge in the gap between Ain’t No Use and Strange Fruit (and again between Strange Fruit and Sinnerman). Without realising, tracks one to eight have been quietly coaxing you towards the edge of a cliff. The final two  rip through you, forcing you over the edge before you can pull back. Amidst the silence between the songs, everything that preceded becomes re-contextualised with a deeper, darker tone. Embrace the fall.

Strange Fruit

The majesty of Strange Fruit is well documented — in 1999, Time named it the best song of the century. It was written by Abel Meeropol — a white, Jewish sometime Communist, and real-life MacGuffin, who intersects with numerous historically important features of 20th century America, but never appears at their forefront.

As a student and then teacher at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, he crossed paths with a young James Baldwin and numerous other luminaries of American culture. After seeing a photograph of a lynching, he felt compelled to write; originally penning the words as an anti-lynching poem. Published in a teacher’s union publication, it concisely described the horror he had seen through the sinister metaphor of a seemingly innocuous fruit tree. He later set it to music and presented it to Billie Holiday, who recorded her socially and sonically remarkable version in 1937. In 1945, he gave up teaching to become a full-time songwriter under the pen name Lewis Allen (the first names of his two, tragically stillborn sons), most famously writing Frank Sinatra’s Oscar winning, patriotic short film and accompanying song, The House I Live in. Not only that, but in 1953 he adopted the two sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg — a Jewish couple famously executed for spying on America for the Soviet Union.

Abel Meeropol with sons Michael and Robert Meeropol in 1954, via Robert Meeropol

As for the song itself, if Holiday’s recording is classical — a regretful, tender jazz lament — Simone’s is something more modern, more openly enraged; a cutting, resonant howl; transcending genre. The arrangement is minimal and masterful at once, with often dissonant piano chords treading like distressed steps through fallen leaves towards the horrifying tree at the agonising conclusion. It climaxes with a literal wail as the end nears: Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck / For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck / For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop / Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Its intensity lent itself perfectly to the sample on Kanye West’s scorching rebuke of destructive celebrity relationships, Blood On the Leaves.

Sinnerman

Simone’s Sinnerman is virtually unrecognisable from the first, folky version recorded by the Les Baxter Orchestra in 1956. Baxter adapted (read: plagiarised) the song from On the Judgement Day, by the Sensational Nightingales, which in turn takes elements from the 1924 No Hiding Place Down Here, by the Old South Quartette. But much like Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s similarly spiritual Hallelujah, Simone’s version remains, and will forever remain, the definitive iteration; the most copied, covered, celebrated and recognised; never bettered beyond that point.

As her Sinnerman evolves, it reveals the preceding short, eight tracks to have been little more than an (excellent) overture to this — the epic, operatic finale. At ten and a half minutes, it makes up nearly a third of the entire album. Brace yourself.

After the silent gap following Strange Fruit — another inhale between urgent roars — the first few bars are timeless, perhaps some of the most familiar notes ever recorded. Piano keys clamber over one another, skipping like a broken record. A foot taps out a light beat in the background. The percussion joins: a double-time, racing, hi-hat heart rate, yielding only to the occasional heavy, melodious thump of a double bass. Simone enters, Oh, Sinnerman, where you gonna run to? / Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

1967 © Tony Gale

After Strange Fruit, the question takes on new meaning. Picture Simone in a deep purple Cadillac Deville n hot pursuit of a fleeing lynch mob; hood down, foot down, brow furrowed, engine roaring, steering on the edge of control. This toying with tumbling gives the song its energy. Like running down a steep slope, with the slightest misstep, all would be lost. As the beats impatiently trip over the piano notes, it feels like it’s constantly accelerating; never settling into a regimented pace.

After erupting into a minute-long call and response of: Power!, Sinnerman changes gear. A jangling, twanging guitar breathes heavily in contemplation of the next charge. The music fades, leaving only intimidating clapping, until the piano returns most wonderfully with a couple of pleasingly apparent (yet well-intended) mistakes; three or four notes missed, misplaced, or hesitated over as the tune searches again for its order among the tumult. When found, it resurges with renewed purpose; Simone audibly hyperventilating in anxious anticipation: So I run to the river, it was boiling / I run to the sea, it was boiling / All on that day. Judgement Day has arrived, and the devil is everywhere. 

(Should this masterpiece really ever be used to sell hatchbacks?)

It ends with a pleading prayer, agitated piano chords and chaotic drums: Don’t you know, I need you Lord?, Simone cries. Whether the prayer is answered, we’ll never know, but as the percussion takes over and batters us into a final, frenzied submission, it feels too late.

Exhausted and exhilarated, Pastel Blues is at its end. But within it, Nina Simone’s duende forever persists.

[lampd-intheface]

sanders sides as witches

me: please... write what the people want... my lizard brain: witch au. now.

they all coincidentally live in the same apartment building? mostly becos there’s a ley line right through the building so there’s a lot of magical energy there

the rent is cheap too so that kinda helps

their apartment complex is in a more rural place so there’s a lot of trees and parks and stuff around them too

alongside being witches, the five of them are also just students at a nearby college

i mean, witchcraft brings in the bucks but witches have to have a plan b in this modern world, you kno???

becos they live on top of a ley line, a lot of supernatural trouble comes their way and so they just kind of try to deal with it a much as possible

patton, logan and roman know each other since they’ve been childhood friends and their families have been friends too

virgil and desmond (deceit) are kind of soloing right now which is a surprise becos they’re also helping with the supernatural disasters

i guess just so far??? virgil or desmond will like do something to help with a fae problem or with some wandering lycanthropes while patton/logan/roman had been planning on doing something???

patton: did you... do something about that one problem we talked about?

roman: no... i thought logan did?

logan: it was certainly not me

and it just never occured to the three that there were two other witches there

patton/roman/logan know virgil and desmond

it’s kind of hard to live in the same apartment building and not know each other

but they don’t know that the two are witches

virgil and desmond are kind of aware that patton/logan/roman exists and they kind of know that there’s something magical about them? but they’re not so much aware that each other exists?

which is weird becos virgil and desmond used to be childhood friends that just drfted apart becos of a stupid fight

to virgil’s knowledge, desmond is out in the world doing something

and to desmod’s knowledge, virgil goes to the same college but like... lives... somewhere else?

logan 

a very intellectual witch

he has floor to ceiling bookcases just filled with tomes and scrolls and spellbooks

when he’s in his room, books are hovering everywhere. he’ll waggle a finger and a book gently flies off of a shelf and into the space in front of him. sometimes there are multiple??? books??? at the same time??? in front of him??? and the books’ pages are flipping by themselves???

king of multitasking. he’ll be reading while writing while listening to music? he’ll be going through roman’s notes on a book while reading said book? or he’ll be researching through three or four different books at the same time? his multitasking skills are a type of magic all on its own

all of his books he gets from book sales or antique shops or like estate sales (where old houses’ contents are sold for a low price becos the owners can’t afford the estate anymore). logan kind of makes it a hobby to collect as much accurate magical literature as possible

roman and patton obviously tag along whenever they can, especially to the really fancy estate sales

his favorite kind of witchcraft is arithmancy (the practice of magic using numbers) and astrology (the practice of magic using celestial bodies). the arithmancy is becos he’s really good at it. the astrology is because he just. really loves. stars??? and the night sky??? and space???

like i said, childhood friends with roman and patton. so, patton and roman will oftentimes go to logan if they don’t know something not just becos logan is very intelligent but also becos logan’s room is basically a library of magic?

patton: hey logan--

logan, already levitating a book towards patton: i believe you’re looking for this book?

often, logan will also be found on the rooftop of the apartment building just stargazing and he’ll sometimes bump into virgil when he’s up there. as far as logan knows, virgil is just another student at the college he attends and both of them are just super into stars

he’s very good at spells on knowledge (gaining it or finding it or anything of the sort) 

roman

roman is a very musical kind of witch

he has a lot of instruments in his room, most of which play themselves at times when roman can’t be in more than one place. roman will be playing the violin and his electric piano will be playing at the same exact time, accompanying him

patton, happily: *hears an entire orchestra through the walls* that silly ol’ goober is up to his musical shinanigans again!

logan, slightly irritated: *hears an entire orchestra through the walls* roman...

he has milions of scented candles in his room and he never really lights them unless necessary? he just loves smelling them. the candles he uses for rituals and stuff are usually unscented but they’re in fun shapes (like flowers!) because why not? 

idk he just has a lot of candles around???

he has the kind of voice that’s perfect for spells??? he’s super good at enunciation and just volume and his voice is so pleasant!!! it also kind of helps that he knows a lot of languages (french, italian, spanish, latin) and he’s on his way to learning more

roman has always had a fascination with the way words work and the power behind words. a lot of his spells are spoken and they end up very strong and sturdy

he could literally and metaphorically talk himself out of any situation

whenever logan needs help translating something, usually it’s in latin so roman helps with that a lot. it’s really nice when the two of them are just chilling together quietly, roman translating things while logan reads

roman also loves using magic to levitate, animate and even project things! people can’t physically touch his projections tho (which makes patton sad whenever roman projects a cute lil animal he can’t pet) 

his specialties are incantations and spells that require any drawing of any sort (like runes and spell circles)

patton

whenever anyone needs a potion or some sort of concoction, they go to patton. need a treat for a fae? need some sort of potion for divining? just plain ol’ hungry? patton’s got you covered

his room is very messy but his kitchen is practically immaculate (in a sort of homey comfortable type of way). 

everything is sorted in all of the cupboards (which are overflowing and almost won’t close), the stoves are taken care of, his pots and pans and cauldrons are spotless

he prides himself in the large assortment of glass bottles and containers he owns. he tries to keep all of them clean but, sometimes, he’ll use one and then put it somewhere (not in the sink) and he’ll forget to wash it

it’s difficult for patton to get ingredients but some of it he just grows on his own. it’s not a perfect system but it’s decent. he can do the easy ones like rosemary, basil or mint. anything harder than that and he struggles with it a little. if he can’t grow it, he’ll find it somewhere else

he’s the type to buy those lil potted herbs at wholefoods or whatever and try to grow it but he only has a 50% successful growth rate and he always feels bad when the herbs end up dying

patton enjoys a lot of different magic but nothing gets him happier than mixing and cooking things up! logan and roman don’t understand it but patton just really loves it!

patton’s also a powerful empath so he’s very emotionally intelligent and can really strongly sense how people feel. he’s very good at comforting people too and cheering them up

he doesn’t force them to cheer up with a spell or anything. usually, he just listens and, really, sometimes, that’s all people need.

patton, when someone is upset: my friend distress senses are tingling!

unfortunately, being a powerful empath also means that, when the emotion is strong enough, he doesn’t just sense it. he feels it too. but he’s very good at sensing which emotions are his and which emotions he’s just getting from other people

patton’s specialties are obviously in cooking and in brewing (potions, concoctions, etc)

virgil

virgil is a very quiet witch

he keeps to himself a lot and just does what he needs to do without really asking for anybody else’s help. he’s self sufficient (though it doesn’t mean he’s happy)

virgil loves growing things. he has huge wire shelves in front of all his windows for all of his plants so they can get all the nice sunlight they need!

he’ll grow basically anything he’ll need for everyday potions and spells as well as succulents! he just loves all of his beautiful wonderful succulents! every single one of his plants has a name too!

virgil totally talks to his plants whenever he’s taking care of them and it’ll be just little things like how his day is going or things that are happening around him or how he’s really sorry when he’s pruning them

it’s very rare for a plant to die on him and, when that happens, virgil always knows that there’s something wrong (usually magic related)

virgil has a spell that’s basically a ball of light for those long winter months where his plants won’t get enough sun

herbology aside, virgil is also very talented when it comes to divination

he has a lot of decks of different kinds of cards and a bag of stones with runes on them. he can also read tea leaves and stars 

the reason virgil is alone often is because he believes he’s cursed. he brings bad luck to a lot of people he cares about and nobody ever believes anything he says about the future

that’s the reason he and desmond had a falling out. virgil was always so worried about bringing desmond bad luck that he ended up pushing desmond away

his specialties really are mostly divination (specifically cartomancy or divination using cards) and growing plants

desmond

very talented when it comes to creatures

he’s extremely intelligent and deals with the fae very well. he knows the fae court like the back of his hand and he knows the rules of the fae too

it kind of helps that he’s pretty much just as trickster-y as the fae

he’s very good at riddles too which he kind of has to be because the fae love riddles and rhymes 

desmond runs out of milk and honey on an almost daily basis and he has ingredients for fae porrige at all times just in case. sometimes, he’ll leave his window open and just leave a bowl of something on the window sill

he’ll make his own butter or cream (since the fae don’t really like industrially produced butter/cream) and he tries to buy organic milk and foods. he’s not too picky about it when he’s the one who’s going to eat it

he has two or three bird feeders but only one of them is really for birds. the others are for whatever flying creature wants a quick snack

you know he has a protective ring around the entire apartment building and that he wears iron rings just in case because, yes, he may be friends with the fae but he knows them well enough to know he should never put his guard down

he has two pet snakes (which he’s lovingl named flotsam and jetsam) and a fire salamander. he doesn’t call his fire salamander a pet becos he feels they have a mutually beneficial relationship. 

also there’s a brownie living in his apartment and they’re very good friends (but sometimes desmond will do stupid things and his brownie will get upset)

desmond has a pot he grows lavander in and he has named it virgil (after his dear friend virgil). he cast a spell on the plant so, if virgil is in danger or is hurt, that the plant will start wilting. it’s desmond’s way of keeping tabs on virgil

his specialties really mostly on the fae and how to deal with magical creatures

[helshades]

French prompt! How does one look at être and arrive at fut? (I know "verbs of being" are notoriously unruly, but this was a mystery for me, even though my own language cobbles the tenses from two separate verbs, neither of which have all tenses.) Broader prompt: what used to be the point of passé simple and how did it become "the storybook tense"?

One of my mother’s favourite puns is the following: On ne peut pas naître et avoir été (’One cannot be born and have been’), a play on an old saying, On ne peut pas être et avoir été (’One cannot be and have been’) meaning that one simply cannot live at once in the past and in the present. Grammatically speaking, this isn’t entirely true, though: the French passé composé, like its equivalent the English present perfect, is trying very hard. When you think of it, ‘I have been doing this for the last five minutes’ is telling exactly that: one is performing a continuous action that began some time in the past and is still going at the moment. Every single French pupil learning English was subjected to the example of the vase that one has broken, and is consequently still broken at present. French has one time like this, known as the ‘compound past’, which technically works in the exact same way, except it has come to be used everywhere, replacing even the French equivalent to the preterite, or past simple, to the point that no one uses the French preterite anymore aside from the only people who may get away with reading as highly literary, which isn’t a lot of people nowadays. Children’s books rarely do contain verbs conjugated in the past simple anymore; in (junior) high school, students are only taught the third person of the singular and of the plural for ‘important’ verbs, and a number of people have been pushing for the complete eradication of a tense which they deemed ‘elitist’ for being more complicated than the compound past, which only requires one to know the present-simple forms of auxiliary verb avoir, ‘to have’, plus the past participle of the verb concerned by the action.

Of course, French students used to have no particular difficulty in learning conjugations, no matter how detailed; only, for a few decades now people deeming themselves progressists have imposed new teaching methods based on a supposedly ‘intuitive’ approach to knowledge as well as a downright utilitarian idea of the language itself—what isn’t useful in everyday life will never be of use, and can therefore be dropped altogether. French isn’t taught systemically in French school anymore, grammar rules are generally glossed over and since learning by heart is strongly frowned upon conjugations are more than imperfectly mastered, not to say anything about the basic principles of syntax. Today, it is estimated (by international tests also) that about one third of students enter junior high school (at age 11) without knowing how to read, or write, their own language. Parents usually riot if teachers seek to correct children’s spelling or enunciation, and after each national exam now students take to Twitter to complain about the difficulty of the exceedingly simple tests. In this context, it is very hard to know whether or not the passé simple is meant to fall out of usage definitely—but I suspect it won’t before long, as a matter of fact, as it already serves, along with other grammatical notions, to separate those who do master their own idiom from those who don’t.

In any case, concerning the structure of the simple past and its meaning, I’m reminded of a remark that famous French linguist Émile Benveniste made about the simple past: like narration, in which it is almost exclusively employed, the simple past is non-deictic, whereas discourse as well as the tenses used in it are deictic, meaning they are anchored in the ‘situation of enunciation’, the frame of the dialogue. Being outside the deixis, the simple past operates somewhat remotely from the event which it describes, inducing an impression of temporal and/or spatial distance with it. Quite frankly, it’s hard not to make a parallel here with the postmodern obsession with immediacy and its deep-rooted hatred of the long term...

Speaking of long-term things!

How does one look at être and arrive at fut? Well, that is a splendid question, reaching far into the history of the French language, and in truth all Indo-European languages since they all have the quirky habit of mashing up the conjugations for several verbs expressing slightly different aspects of an action and deciding that they are to be only one verb now—usually, an auxiliary, and the results are just wild. But let’s get a closer look at the conjugation we’re dealing with, here:

You’ll note that I didn’t include (amongst other things) the four tenses of the subjunctive mode, to avoid being too long as I only aim to draw a few explanatory comparisons with Latin, but just in case, I’ll remind you that the present goes que je sois (sois, soit, soyons, soyez, soient) while subjunctive imperfect goes que je fusse (fusses, fût, fussions, fussiez, fussent). And now, hoping you didn’t run away screaming and flailing, I propose a little comparison with the equivalent Latin tenses:

Please fawn over my pedagogical abilities. Once that is over, please note how the conjugation of être was mostly constituted in Old French (from the 9th century onwards), bar a few interesting exceptions, such as the concurrent forms in the future: the older stem, er- or ier-, directly evolved from Latin. Linguists theorised that the stem that ended up in modern French, in ser-, is actually a syntagmatic construction taken from the Latin infinitive (es)sere to which were added special endings borrowed from the conjugation of auxiliary avoir, to have. Romance languages all form their future synthetically. For instance, ‘we will love’, nous aimerons, is literally nous aimer-(av)ons. (Compare to Spanish cantaré, ‘I will sing’, which is cantar + hé.) Where être is concerned, the ser- stem replaced the original infinitive after too many speakers dropped the beginning of infinitive essere, especially in the first person, and a full tense ended up being constituted from that model (hence the ‘syntagmatic construction’ I was mentioning earlier: it didn’t evolve so much as it was reshaped to accommodate usage).

If you know a bit of Latin, you might have frowned upon the infinitive essere, since the classical verb is esse. Esse was a pretty archaic form to begin with, although it was actually conjugated regularly; the -s had mutated to an -r between two vowels in most other verbs pretty early in the evolution of the language, and that is where the French infinitives (-er, -ir, -re) come from. But esse remained unchanged, probably because of its particular role as an auxiliary. On the other hand, in Vulgar Latin, which was Latin as it was spoken by regular people, the strange infinitive got hypercorrected, ‘regularised’, into essere, after getting mistaken for a stem. And since Romance languages are mostly stemming from popular, late-era Latin, rather than the literary language... In Italian, the infinitive is still essere. In Spanish, it evolved into ser. In Occitan, into èser. The t of estre is, as you can see, a French particularity; it’s purely epenthetic, meaning it was only added to ease the pronunciation of the word, in this case after one of the vowels dropped: esre > estre.

The participles of être, however, both in the present (étant) and the past (été, ayant été) don’t come from any version of esse, any more than the imperfect tense, since its Latin equivalent was eram. They come, instead, from an entirely different verb: stare, which evolved into Vulgar Latin estare, which in turn became Old French ester, and which meant ‘to stand, to stay’. Well, it’s actually the origin of verb ‘stay’ in English, which was borrowed from the Old French. In modern French, you’ll find its descendant as rester, ‘to stay, to remain’.

And this is where we come to our strange Latin stem in fui-, and its French equivalence in the simple past. Now where does that come from?! Well, my dear Tatty, it is the last remnant on an archaic verb issued from an Indo-European root °bheu- meaning ‘to grow’, ‘to become’. It’s why the auxiliary in English is ‘to be’, actually! (Proto-Germanic °beuną > Old English bēon > Middle English been). In most languages this Indo-European root gave words beginning in b-. The exceptions are Sanskrit (bh-, with a strong aspiration), Hellenic languages (Ancient Greek φύω, phúô) and Italic languages, where it ended up being pronounced as an f, hence fui. In passing, the original meaning of the Indo-European root, ‘to grow’, has been preserved only in Greek φύσις, phúsis, ‘nature’—hence ‘physics’. Morphologically, though, the root is present everywhere in Indo-European languages, starting with the word ‘future’ itself.

A major difference between Latin (and Greek) and Germanic languages, however, is that fu- in Latin possessed in its meaning the idea of veering towards the completion of an action, but that was expressed differently in the future (participle) and in past-tense narration; eventually, the future aspect was dropped from the language altogether, and all that remained was the stem’s perfective value (the idea of accomplishment, of a done and over thing), which serves to explain how the fu- root came to be specialised in Romance languages as a form destined for the simple past/preterite/perfect tense. (In Germanic languages, the past is defined by the idea of staying in one place, whereas the enunciation is characterised by a general idea of ‘aiming towards’.)

In guise of a conclusion, I heartily recommend the Wikipedia article on the Indo-European copula, which is long and bountiful and makes a few salient points on the topic of this fixture in all Indo-European languages that is a weird, weird little verb corresponding to the English to be, and it tells a lot on the way languages get shaped.

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

Chapter 44: Scrapbooking

Bold italics are trollish.

This story is NOT back on its old weekly update schedule! Chapter 43 was a week late, and I happened to finish this chapter 'on time' and decided to update to match the alternate-Fridays that I wrote on my calendar. The next chapter will be two weeks from now unless it's late again instead.

Becoming The Mask

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Bagdwella had offered the two human girls a seat on the box spring mattress that she had not yet disassembled to get at its bed coils, but Mary and Darci had turned her down. Instead they were sitting back-to-back on the short wooden bench that Bagdwella stood on to reach high shelves. Apparently there were tiny insects that sometimes lived in old mattresses and the humans didn't want to risk the parasites crawling into their clothes.

Each girl was writing something. Sometimes Mary referred to her phone before making notes. Darci would pause and tap her chin with her pen before returning to her papers.

"How do you spell 'divorce'?" Mary asked. They had a dictionary with them, but Darci was using it.

Bagdwella spelled it out, carefully enunciating the runes for the girl to copy down. Mary chirped a quick "Thank you!" and ducked back down over her notebook.

The humans had come earlier that night, asking if they could work on whatever they were doing in Bagdwella's backroom. She suspected it was some kind of assignment from Blinky. Or perhaps a surprise for him, since they weren't working on it in the library.

The silly man had such a dry, academic way of teaching language. Bagdwella simply had to take it upon herself to step in and teach these whelps how to converse like proper trolls. Blinky was a better choice for writing lessons, though, being one of the few people she knew who read for enjoyment.

Oh, she could appreciate good record-keeping, and in a more abstract way she understood the value of collecting knowledge, but stories just felt stilted to her when they were written down instead of spoken.

Why Mary needed that particular word, Bagdwella couldn't fathom – had the human mistranslated something? Should she have asked her what she thought it meant in English?

"What is it you two are up to?" the shopkeeper finally asked.

"Translating stories about our families," said Mary. "This one is about how my parents got divorced and my mother got married again. She was smart, the second time. She insisted they get … premarital counselling. If Mom and Dad had bothered with that, they might have realized they shouldn't get married before they did."

"But then you might not exist," pointed out Darci.

"I'm not saying there wasn't a silver lining."

Bagdwella didn't know what lining something with silver had to do with anything. It didn't have a very appealing flavour, and the shades it developed when tarnished were pretty but not enough to make up for the metal's relative softness, so trolls didn't use it much in food, tools, or decor. It was probably a human saying. She was pretty sure they considered most metals valuable.

"What is premarital counselling?" she asked instead.

"Uh … counselling, before marriage?" Mary explained haltingly. "When people, who want to get married, talk, to … sometimes a leader, an Elder, like Vendel. Sometimes a … therapist … like a medic, but for thoughts and feelings. A person whose job it is, to make sure people who want to get married talk about … the things people should talk about before marriage. Things people who don't talk will fight about because they don't agree but did not know."

Bagdwella nodded thoughtfully. "Your parents did not do this, but your mother and her next spouse did?"

"Yes, exactly."

"That is …" Darci frowned in a way Bagdwella was learning to recognize, the furrow-browed looking-up expression of a human who knew what they wanted to say but didn't know the word for it. "That's kind of heavy, don't you think?" Darci said in English instead. "I write – written – am writing, about my older brother teaching me to drive."

"I need to explain why the divorce. My parents both are good people who learn from their mistakes. They did not divorce because one did something bad."

+=+

Claire knocked once on the nursery door, a hard thump, before entering.

"I need you to check my trollish." She shoved a three-ring binder at the Changeling.

"Uh?" said Enrique, not dropping his human face.

"For the love of," Claire muttered, not specifying what she was invoking the love of. "Fine. You know what, fine. Please check my trollish."

Enrique shapeshifted obligingly and took the binder. "Was that so hard?" he teased. He made a show of examining the angular squiggles, turning the first few pages with a solemn expression, and then handed the book back to her. "Looks troll-y to me."

She rolled her eyes and pushed it towards him again. "I meant see if my grammar's okay and I spelled everything right."

"I'm not much for spelling. And yeh'd have to read it out for the grammar bit."

"… What, you can't read?"

"I'm picking up English and Spanish okay," he said defensively, gesturing to the shelf of storybooks.

"Jim can read trollish."

"Yeah, well, Jim is a madman who thought it was worth the risk, annoying Gunmar's advisor like that. Plus he's had Strickler and the other Mister Six Eyes to keep the lessons up since he left."

"Left? Left where? The Darklands," she answered her own question. "But, wait, I still don't get it. If you guys are supposed to be spies, why didn't anyone teach you to read and write?"

"If we're s'posed to be spying on fleshbags, what'd we need to read in troll for?"

"Ciphers?" she suggested immediately. "I mean, it's still a language so it's still got patterns, but it would take longer for a human to decrypt one if it's not based on a human language."

"… Some of the higher-ups know it. Could be why the rest of us don't." Make it a status thing. Control access to information.

Or maybe Claire was just smarter about spy stuff than Gunmar was.

+=+

"So, we've been thinking about what you said," said Darci to Blinky. "And you're right. We went too fast, suggesting to Vendel that he should let us tell our families about trolls."

"And yet somehow I find myself suspecting that you are not telling me this as a precursor to setting that goal aside."

"We're asking him, all of you really, to trust complete strangers just because we vouch for them. And that wasn't fair. And there's not exactly a way for a troll to get to know a human without secrets coming out."

"Or is there?" said Mary dramatically.

Claire handed Blinky the binder he'd noticed she was holding behind her back. "We've collected some pictures of our families, for putting faces to names, and we're writing down stories about them – you know, anecdotes. Memories. Stuff they've done and that shows what kind of people they are. We're going to get Toby in on it, too. Maybe Jim, if he's got anything that can calm Vendel down about Dr Lake knowing already."

"And once Vendel knows everyone by proxy," continued Mary, "he should be more okay with actually meeting them."

Blinky took the binder cautiously. It wasn't heavy, and the stiff covers closed triangularly around the pages. Perhaps twenty pages, he estimated, which was quite respectable considering these three could only have been working on it for a few days.

It was divided, inside, with tabs to skip directly to any of the families described therein. The first section was Darci's family.

Several pages of photos grinned toothily out at him, captioned with names written in both the humans' Roman alphabet and phonetic trollish transliteration, and sub-captioned with each human's relationship to Darci. Mother, father, older brother; three living grandparents, plus one in a group picture who was noted to be deceased; and a maternal aunt and uncle and two cousins, with a note clarifying that Darci did not expect Vendel to agree to meet her entire family, only that knowing who these four humans were would help the stories make sense.

Blinky restricted himself to skimming only the title of each anecdote, though it was tempting to thoroughly read the one about the driving lesson right away, and move on to the section about Mary's family.

This section followed the same format. Blinky was impressed and proud that they'd managed to write almost the entire thing in trollish. He turned to the section on Claire's family and, three pages in, froze up.

The photo had to be of the Changeling that the humans had taken to calling Not Enrique – yes, that was how the caption identified him – lit by the blueish glow of the crystal staircase. The picture was lower quality than the others, as though the camera weren't as good, or as if it were a close-up of a larger picture.

Blinky already knew the Changeling had gotten into Trollmarket. They hadn't exchanged words yet, but he'd met the boy. And from his interactions with Jim, Blinky had really thought he was at peace with the idea that Changelings could be allies; friends; (perhaps family).

He should not be reacting to this image with the degree of shock and horror that he felt – this sense of no – this sense of wrong.

"I … do not think admitting to Vendel that one of your family members is known to be a Changeling will reassure him that it is safe to trust the rest of your relations."

"But he should take it better if we come clean than if he finds out later, right?" said Claire. "I don't think any of us can pull off acting like he got swapped after we tell our parents what's going on. And Jim said Vendel knows he's a Changeling."

"I honestly can't say what Vendel's reaction will be. But I can say," closing the book firmly, "that this was a highly dangerous picture to bring to Trollmarket." Hard evidence of Changelings amongst them …

Well, very strong circumstantial evidence. One slightly out-of-focus picture of a young troll with a handwritten caption claiming the youngling was a Changeling was hardly a compelling case.

It could still be enough to have Claire imprisoned on suspicion of conspiring with Changelings, since she had brought 'her little brother' to Trollmarket while knowing what he was. And from there, the Trollhunter's identity could be exposed, and even Vendel's protection – Vendel's collusion with the conspiracy to allow a Changeling Trollhunter to live and to operate freely – would likely not be enough to save Jim's life; and probably the best Blinky could hope for himself would be banishment.

"Okay," said Darci, jolting him out of his thoughts. "So what if we took the stuff about Not Enrique out for now, and told Vendel later? Do you think learning more about our families would help convince him?"

"… Possibly," Blinky conceded.

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Previous Chapter (Various characters try to comfort Toby in the aftermath of a nightmare)

Table of Contents

Next Chapter (Barbara finds out Draal has been living in her basement)

You would not believe how long an internal debate I had about whether Enrique would say 'spy stuff' or 'espionage strategy' in his own head. 

On the one hand, inside his head he's got no one to perform for except himself, and so he doesn't need to dumb himself down to remain underestimated. 

On the other hand, speech patterns can affect thought patterns and it sounds weird phrasing it like that when the scene is supposed to be in his voice.

[spanishskulduggery]

Hola! I'm reading the book Todas las hadas del reino at the moment and was wondering-would you happen to know why the word "hada" can take both the masculine and feminine article? Is it "el hada" in the singular and "las hadas" in the plural, or is there something else going on here?? Muchas gracias por la ayuda!

Okay, so hada is one of the words that work like el agua “water”. And I’m going to give you a very in-depth run through of it all, so bear with me because it’s not difficult, exactly, but there’s a lot to explain.

[also if I have typos somewhere in this let me know, it’s a lot of writing and my proofreading skills are terrible]

The rules for this type of noun are as follows:

These are words that begin with A- or HA- [where the H is silent]

These words are actually feminine

These words have their tonic stress on the first syllable

These words take a masculine article in singular, but are feminine in nature

This applies to definite articles [el] and indefinite articles [un], as well as the derivatives of them [algún, ningún] 

In plural, these words will always be feminine plural [las, unas, algunas]

The article or determiner must be before the noun to appear as masculine and this doesn’t apply if the article/determiner is broken up by another word in between

Btw, these are not rules that are ever really stated except for when you see el agua or something and then the dictionary says (f) right near it so you know it’s feminine. They’re just things native speakers know based on what sounds right.

Linguistically, this is something that’s done to create something like a “hiatus” [I don’t know if that’s the correct term for this, but a “hiatus” is a vocal stop/obstacle that makes you fully enunciate all the vowels in a word]

In other words if you had agua which means “water” as “la agua”, the two A’s would run together into one sound. This might sound arbitrary to us, but it impacts Spanish poetry quite a bit. In English “la agua” for example is 3 syllables “la-a-gua”. In Spanish, it would be 2 syllables “laa-gua”.

In Spanish, the same vowel or vowel sounds put together tend to bleed together. If you say something like va a ayudar “he/she is going to help” it is “vaaa-yu-dar” for Spanish counting as 3 syllables here.

The break up of sounds with the addition of a masculine article is done for the sake of pronunciation so the words don’t blend together.

Italian has this same issue except they correct it with an apostrophe, and just allow the sounds to sort of blend so you get “l’acqua”… in pronunciation it runs together, in orthography [writing it out] the L and the apostrophe help mark it as a definite article.

To talk more about this I’ll go over each of the things because it makes more sense in context.

1 - 3: The word must begin with A- or HA-, be feminine, and have the emphasis on the first syllable.

The following words are the most common nouns that follow this example are:

el agua = water

el águila = eagle

el arpa = harp

el ancla = anchor

el ánfora = amphora (a specific type of Greek or Roman vase)

el área = area

el hambre = hunger, famine

el ala = wing

el aula = classroom

el haba = bean [kind of an old-fashioned word, but related to “abacus”, and la habichuela “bean” which is more common today]

el alma = soul

el alba = dawn [there’s also the word el amanecer which is more common]

el hada = fairy

el arma = weapon

el asma = asthma

el habla = manner of speech, diction, way of speaking

el alta = membership (to a club) / discharge (from a hospital)

el arca = ark / large chest, coffer [a very common word used for “treasure chest” in games for example]

el ave = bird (as a species, usually) / fowl

el álgebra = algebra

el alga / las algas = algae

el ascua = ember

el aura = aura

And all of these are feminine, and have their stress on the first syllable.

Consider a word like el árbol which begins in A- and has its stress on the first syllable. It’s also masculine, so it’s el árbol, los árboles. The same problem exists with el álamo “poplar tree”.

Then you have a word like la ayuda “help” which begins in A- and is feminine, but its stressed syllable is the second one [the “yu”] which makes it take the word feminine instead.

The best examples of this duality are:

el ánimo = spirit, cheer, mood / male spirit, animusel ánima  = soul (of the dead), shade, dead person’s spirit / female spirit, anima

el hado / los Hados = fate / the Fates [the women in Greek/Roman mythology who spin the tapestry of fate and measure out people’s lives and end them]el hada / las hadas = fairy / fairies, the fey, feyfolk

While el ánimo and el hado fit two big requirements [beginning with A- or HA-, and having the stressed syllable be the first one], they are both masculine so it doesn’t count.

But el ánima and el hada are both feminine so they fit the bill.

4. They’re masculine but have feminine qualities

This is an important grammatical point to make. Though they have masculine articles, that’s only done for pronunciation and spelling. Their grammatical gender is still feminine, so all the adjectives put on them are feminine:

el águila calva = bald eagle

el agua bendita = holy water

el Hada Madrina = Fairy Godmotherel hada buena = good fairyel hada malvada = evil/wicked fairy

el ave acuática, las aves acuáticas = waterfowl

el arma de fuego, las armas de fuego = firearm, firearmsel arma peligrosa, las armas peligrosas = dangerous weapon, dangerous weapons

el alma perdida = lost soul

el ancla pesada = the heavy anchor 

This also impacts whether you see al or del:

Los Juegos del Hambre = Hunger Games

el ala del águila calva = the bald eagle’s winglas alas de las águilas calvas = the bald eagles’ wings

las sillas del aula = the classroom’s chairslas sillas de las aulas = the classrooms’ chairs

el capit��n / la capitana del arca = the captain of the ark

5. Another grammatical distinction is that these apply to el, un, algún, or ningún but as stated before, they’re still feminine technically:

el aula pequeña = the small classroomun aula pequeña = a small classroomalgún aula pequeña = some small classroomningún aula pequeña = no small classroom

el arma peligrosa = the dangerous weaponun arma peligrosa = a dangerous weaponalgún arma peligrosa = some dangerous weaponningún arma peligrosa = no dangerous weapon

el águila calva = the bald eagleun águila calva = a bald eaglealgún águila calva = some bald eagleningún águila calva = no bald eagle

el hada buena = the good fairyun hada buena = a good fairyalgún hada buena = some good fairyningún hada buena = no good fairy

el hambre verdadera = (the) true hungerun hambre verdadera = a true hungeralgún hambre verdadera = some true hungerningún hambre verdadera = no true hunger

*these are all for the sake of example

6. In plural, they’re all distinctly feminine with feminine articles

las aulas pequeñas = the small classroomsunas aulas pequeñas = a few small classroomsalgunas aulas pequeñas = some small classrooms

las arma peligrosas = the dangerous weaponsunas armas peligrosas = a few dangerous weaponsalgunas armas peligrosas = some dangerous weapons

las águilas calvas = the bald eaglesunas águilas calvas = a few bald eaglesalgunas águilas calvas = some bald eagles

las hadas buenas = the good fairiesunas hadas buenas = a few good fairiesalgunas hadas buenas = some good fairies

*There’s no plural of ningún, ninguno, ninguna. It’s inherently singular since it more literally means “not one”… like no hay ninguna silla is “there are no chairs” in English but literally reads as “there is not a single chair”

7. The article/determiner MUST be right in front of the noun for it to appear as masculine in singular. 

Because this is all done for preserving the A- or HA- sound, the rules no longer apply when a word breaks up the article/determiner and the noun. Usually what breaks up the words is an adjective, or an adverb + adjective combo. 

This is typically more dramatic [since most of the time adjectives go behind nouns in Spanish, so putting it in front is SUPER dramatic]… or it’s one of the adjectives that sort of changes meaning depending on its placement like viejo/a, mismo/a, gran/grande, antiguo/a etc.

When these show up, you get a feminine article/determiner and feminine adjectives:

la gran arma = the great weaponuna gran arma = a great weaponalguna gran arma = some great weaponninguna gran arma = no great weapon

la misma agua = the same waterel agua misma = the water itself

la buena hada = the good fairy [like, “the kind fairy” or “the nice fairy”]el hada buena = the good fairy

la complicada habla = the EXTREMELY complicated way of speaking [reads as, “intricate” or “perplexing” or “ever-so-complicated” instead of just plain old “complicated”]el habla complicada = the complicated way of speaking

la nueva álgebra = new algebra

el hambre grave = serious hungerla grave hambre = serious famine [the word “famine” can either be el hambre (f) or la hambruna]

el ascua ardiente = the burning emberla ardiente ascua = the smoldering ember [more dramatic and poetic]

el ala grande = the big wingla gran ala = the great wing

When you’ve got the article/determiner + the noun, you need the masculine article to create that “hiatus”

When you’ve got the article/determiner + adjective + noun, the adjective already breaks them up and creates its own kind of hiatus. The problem isn’t the noun itself, so you can have la buena hada… the problem is that Spanish decided they wanted to preserve the sound of the article/determiner by switching it to masculine and creating that stop with the L

Also, side note, I have seen people write “la hada” (especially when it’s a female fairy), but that’s technically considered incorrect.

And a further side note: I did use Italian as an example with l’acqua but also note that Italian has further differences with articles depending on certain vowels or consonants so they also do have the same issues and different related issues, but it affects their grammar differently. 

Spanish is a little simpler in that regards since we only have to worry about A- and HA- in singular, and Italian has things like i, gli, lo etc depending on other factors.

We also have something sort of like this in English with our use of “a” vs “an” for vowel sounds. It’s done for the sake of pronunciation, but a different kind of pronunciation… like how “a eagle” or “a hour” sound a bit strange or wrong note, so we say “an eagle” and “an hour”

English is also a bit bizarre in that “a historic” and “an historic” are both considered correct

[firstfootingscotland]

Shuffles at Féis Lochabair

Greetings from Lansing where I am spending a few days before heading to Washington and Oregon for shows with banjo-player Allison de Groot. While Scotland is feeling more and more like home, it's wonderful to pay a visit to the state of Michigan where I grew up for a mouthful of dry cold air and lots and LOTS of snow!

Before returning to the United States I had the pleasure of spending Saturday, February 9 working with step dancers from Fèis Lochabair in Fort William. Fèisean nan Gàidheal have been incredibly supportive partners in the First Footing residency, facilitating interaction with dancers from across their national network. I was eager to get to interact with dancers from this community as I boarded the train from Edinburgh at 7:15am on Saturday morning. 

The trip was quiet until six bearded men in all-weather gear boarded the train an hour into the journey. As big men are wont to do, they straddled the aisle, taking up two tables on the train with backpacks and crampons. Amid their outdoor accoutrement, soon their table was also strewn with cans of Tennents lager and empty crisp bags as they laughed and boisterously chatted to the trolley hostess. They played pipe band renditions of "Amazing Grace" and pop versions of "Caledonia" on repeat on the speaker of their smartphones as we sped northward through the Trossachs, through Rannach, Corrour, and Roy Bridge. Here the men rowdily disembarked, pouring out of the train still singing and I presume in search of hills to walk and bothies to nap in while the rest of the train rode on in silence until we reached Fort William. As I alighted from the train, the sunlight made the snow on the mountains sparkle in the afternoon light. Shortly I was picked up opposite the train station and whisked away by car to work with the dancers of Fèis Lochabair. 

(Snow on the mountains en route to Féis Lochabair)

Dancer and dance teacher Jane Douglas hosted me incredibly warmly, greeting me as the enduring afternoon rays streamed in through the windows of the bright community centre. As the dancers arrived, I felt very lucky indeed to meet such a welcoming group of movers. The first class, specifically for dancers in under the age of eighteen, impressed me with their crisp percussive articulation and their astute timing. After warming up, I led the group through a series of step dance combinations that I hoped would be both stimulating and challenging. I was startled by their verve; they were eager, even willing to execute the steps one at a time in a circle consecutively as we endeavoured to dance as one, each dancer continuing the phrase where the previous left off. "As though we were singing a song or playing a tune together," I told them. Soon we were passing steps back and forth around the circle together, working to maintain a consistent dynamic and tempo.  

(Working with a group of students and their instructor Jane Douglas during my February 9 visit to Féis Lochabair) 

Over the course of the class, I began to get a sense for the patterns of footwork the dancers were familiar with. When teaching I find it takes some time for me to observe and process the specific step conventions the students have previously been exposed to; to gain a sense through of their movement history as we dance together. For me, the goal then is to share material that departs from these physical patterns or builds on them to break physical patterns, proposing new physical possibilities. For example, this group was familiar with the common step dance pre-fix of audibly placing weight on one foot, brushing the opposing foot forwards and backwards striking the floor once in each direction, hopping on the weight-bearing foot, and tapping with toe of the non-weight-bearing foot. "Step, shuffle, hop, tap." The convention of hopping after the shuffle is found throughout many step dance forms and as I watched the practiced ease with which the dancers demonstrated this step, I could tell it was a gesture their bodies were comfortable with from their great work with Jane! 

I hypothesized internally that a similar step convention with a slightly different use of weight would be challenging but also help develop new neural pathways and motor skills among the students. To that end, I suggested the dancers try a step with a similar beginning, again audibly placing weight on one foot, brushing the opposing foot forwards and backwards striking the floor once in each direction, and instead of hopping on the first, weight-bearing foot, rocking back and placing weight on the shuffling foot, then finally stepping again with the first weight-bearing foot. "Step, shuffle-ball, change." While this step enunciates same number of sounds, it uses a slightly different use of weight.... and shifting weight is what step dance is all about! This new step proved to be a challenge but the students took it up swiftly. After a few repetitions, suddenly the class was collectively departing from well-worn physical patterns, using their weight percussively in new ways. 

(My second group of students with their instructor Jane Douglas during my February 9 visit to Féis Lochabair)

The second group of students, all adults this time, smiled encouragingly as I thanked them for attending and for welcoming me so warmly to their community. We began the second workshop by warming up and then working through a series of exercises reconsidering the dynamic possibilities of one particular step dance rudiment: the shuffle. 

(Diagram 11.1 from Flett & Flett’s 1964 book, Traditional Dance in Scotland)

Shown above in a digram from Flett & Flett's 1964 book Traditional Dance in Scotland, this step is comprised of a swinging brush contacting the floor in a forward motion, followed by a retraction, brushing the floor as the foot returns. The shuffle is a two-way exchange of energy directed through the foot, striking the ground twice in action and reaction. 

In my ethnographic work, I've encountered many gestures that employ a similar pendulum-like step dance rudiment with diverse names: Flett & Flett call it a “treeple.” In tap dance they’re called "shuffles," while in Appalachian clogging, they are referred to as "double-toes," "rallies," "trebles," or "batters" in Irish step dance, “látigo” (Spanish for "whip") in flamenco, and “frotté” (in French, literally, "to rub") in Quebecois gigue. 

In addition to its wide geographic dispersions and culturally-specific meanings, this step is also an incredibly malleable rudiment. It can be altered in many ways, including changing which parts of the foot contact the floor, shifting the rhythmic feel of the shuffle, the step's metre, and even its timbre. After discussing, demonstrating, and having the students embody these various axis of variation during Saturday's class, I asked each student to dance two shuffles with the stipulation that could be similar or contrasting) and instructed the group to repeat them. In addition to a few giggles, this exercise also usually yields some really interesting variations in the infinite variability of the step. This workshop was no exception! My hope in sharing the exercise was that the dancers might reconsider the shuffle's many possibilities, identifying their own tacit presuppositions about the step or biases based upon culturally-specific experiences of the different ways the shuffle functions in percussive dance forms. (1) I've found this strategy consistently helps students discover something new in a step they may have known for many years. I was certainly not disappointed as the dancers extemporized new combinations of shuffles that I had never seen!

After the workshop, a quick rest, and a bite to eat, I was one again whisked to the next event, a cèilidh benefiting Fèis Lochabair at the Ben Nevis Distillery. There, musicians from the Fèis Lochabair Cèilidh Trail set up the PA, called the dances, and performed for and with one another as students from Jane's school performed both highland and step dance pieces. Afterwards, I took to the floor myself to perform two short solo sets. (After which one attendee remarked, "that was proper Brechtian theatre with step dance!") 

(Dancers at the February 9 Féis Lochabair cèilidh at the Ben Nevis Distillery)

As I watched dancers sashay through a Virginia Reel at the end of the night, I couldn't help but genuflect on the opportunity to share steps and shapes here. It had been a full, rich day, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. As I sped southward on the train towards Edinburgh the following morning, the sweet sounds of pipes, piano accordion, mandolin and dancing feet ringing in my ears, I was very grateful indeed to have spent a day dancing in the shadow of Ben Nevis among the rich community of Fèis Lochabair. 

First Footing is a collaboration between dancer and dance researcher Nic Gareiss, the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland, University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education, and the School of Scottish Studies with support from Creative Scotland. For engagement opportunities check out the First Footing website.

(1) This method of teaching and creating is largely informed by the work of philosopher Michel Foucault, especially the way that his writing explicates and reveals the power of tacit presuppositions. Here I apply this to step dance pedagogy: What do we presume about a step, about its morphology, its utilization. Once we identify the assumptions we've made, it's possible for us to explore new movement possibilities that critique or work against those presuppositions. For more on this, see Michel Foucault's 1969 book, The Archeology of Knowledge. 

[geraldeppinger]

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