#especially the English teachers

[emwallas176]

Them: Are you a teacher’s pet?

Me: Whaaaa… pfft…

Me (remembering that one time my teacher complimented my work and I felt the biggest sense of validation, a feeling that I’ve been chasing ever since):

[poetrysmackdown]

I'm hater but I just don't believe How to Be A Dog is that good, I hope jakey dies.

yeah no feel free to sow your hater oats. that's what this competition is for

[im-not-a-l0ser]

Richie not really being religious, but participating in Jewish holidays for Pete and Ruth.

[captainlynxx]

30 day torchwood challenge- day 19:

A character I love but others hate:

I quite like Gwen, mostly in COE and Miracle day. I feel the earlier seasons a certain amount of hate is justified but a lot of Gwen hate is rooted in misogyny which is why I chose her.

[alaskan-wallflower]

why are my parents mad that i’m considering not going on the choir trip as if this isn’t my life and i’m almost seventeen and fully capable of knowing what’s best for me

[lae-zels]

i passed my teacher's exam with flying colors because (accidentally, coincidentally) one of the jurors was my old professor at university. i was this teacher's pet, he concidered me one of his best students and said that my activity and interest in his classes made teaching my group absolute joy :)))

[kaurwreck]

The extremely literal approach to interpreting Crime and Punishment in the context of Fyodor's skill is making me gnaw my own leg. The relationship between the Eastern Orthodox eucharist in Crime and Punishment is also reflected in Fyodor's skill and isn't a particularly complicated analysis. It only requires a minimal, Sparks Notes-level of engagement, and y'all won't go beyond the title of the book.

Which, I suppose, is an improvement on the collective refusal to acknowledge bsd's references to the irl Great War, but I'm nevertheless. Tired.

[itspileofgoodthings]

The strategy with which I planned this day off fills me with joy.

[chicago-geniza]

Guy at bar complimented my keffiyeh (coming back from Palestine solidarity protest), we started talking global + local politics, it turned out he was involved with our alder's office, when he found out I was unemployed and disabled he covered my tab, saying "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs." I love Chicago and I love my neighborhood so much

[habbohoteldotdk]

i need people to talk to on Discord. but most people on that platform are weird and vile. so the next best option is habbo hotel

[kellykadesperate]

oh my god i just watched english teacher. spectacular! give me 14 of them right now. like i love when shows really lean into society today in a clever realistic way and not to just sound 'current'

[sorryimananti-romantic]

UM??? You must be tired of hearing this all the time but like how do you constantly put out masterpieces after masterpieces?? Each story you write has such interesting & creative storylines and you’re able to write them so so amazingly and so detailed I don’t even know how tk explain it?? Like 😭 you should be putting out books I would buy them all ong

You were definitely your English teacher’s favorite student LOL

😭😭 that's high praise my friend 😭 i wouldn't call them masterpieces *blushes and giggles in a corner* but thank you so much! i'm glad you think of my fics that way, and i hope i keep on writing even better stuff :'))

i think my fav part about writing is how creative i can get with the plot. there's no limitations, no boundaries, and you get to create your own world, characters and universe like how fun is that :')) i just hope i don't run out of these ideas and creativity 😭 sometimes i think about writing an actual book but then i get scared lol but maybe one day! thank you again, be thinking about this for the rest of the weekend hehe

[chronicillnesscaneffoffplease]

I’ve had a few “whoops this thing I stopped doing is actually helping me” moments recently.

I’ve felt wretched and like I was coming down with the flu recently. It felt more than my normal PEM symptoms, and I was really concerned. And then I realise it’s spring, a bunch of stuff is blooming, and it’s been sooooo windy. And I stopped taking antihistamines and my nasonex sometime last year (antihistamines bc we thought it might have been causing some side effects, nasonex bc I hate the sensation of nasal sprays and need motivation to use it). Pesky hayfever. Needless to say I’m feeling much better having restarted my regimen. I felt a bit silly that I could have avoided feeing miserable though.

I went out for an appointment yesterday in my “knock about the house” shoes that are podiatrist loathed (nil ankle support, nil arch support, worn down), rather than my lace up shoes with my orthotics. After that appointment, I thought I’d check out a new store that’s opened at the shops nearby. I ended up doing a LOT of walking at the shops and today my ankles are sooooo painful and my hips been acting up. I guess it’s good to know that my shoes and orthotics are doing good things in terms of symptom prevention (as well as better longer-term outcomes) but damn do I feel ouchie.

I’m framing it as “yay negative data also tells us important things” because I gotta remember it’s not my fault when these things happen but it is good to try learn from them. And frankly, when there’s so many things going on with your health and condition management as a disabled person, it’s okay when things fall through the cracks. It’s gonna happen. Especially when there’s lots of non-disability stuff going on too. It’s okay.

[apocalyptic-byler]

tone indicators my beloved

[britneyshakespeare]

So yesterday I read "Slimed with Gravy, Ringed by Drink" by Camille Ralphs, an article from the Poetry Foundation on the publication of the First Folio in 1623, a major work without which most of Shakespeare's plays might very well have been lost today, possibly the most influential secular work of literature in the world, you know.

It's a good article overall on the history and mysteries of the Folio. Lots of interesting stuff in there including how Shakespeare has been adapted, the state of many surviving Folios, theories of its accuracy to the text, a really interesting identification of John Milton's own copy currently in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the fascinating annotations that may have influenced Milton's own poetry!!! Do read it. It's not an atrociously long article but there's a lot of thought-provoking information in there.

There's one paragraph in particular I keep coming back to though, so I'm just gonna quote it down here:

...[T]he Play on Shakespeare series, published by ACMRS Press, the publications division of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University... grew out of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s plan to “translate” Shakespeare for the current century, bills itself “a new First Folio for a new era.” The 39 newly-commissioned versions of Shakespeare’s plays were written primarily by contemporary dramatists, who were asked to follow the reasonable principle laid out by series editor Lue Douthit: tamper in the name of clarification but submit to “do no harm.” The project was inspired by something the linguist John McWhorter wrote in 1998: “[the] irony today is that the Russians, the French, and other people in foreign countries possess Shakespeare to a much greater extent than we do … [because] they get to enjoy Shakespeare in the language they speak.”

Mainly it's the John McWhorter thing I keep coming back to. Side note: any of my non-native-English-speaking mutuals who have read Shakespeare, I would love to know your experiences. If you have read him in translation, or in the original English, or a mix of both. It's something I do wonder about! Even as an Anglophone reader, I find my experience varies so much just based on which edition of the text I'm reading and how it's presented. There's just so much variety in how to read literature and I would love to know what forces have shaped your own relationships to the stories. But anyway...

The article then goes on to talk about how the anachronistic language in Shakespeare will only fall more and more out of intelligibility for everyone because of how language evolves and yadda yadda yadda. I'm not going to say that that's wrong but I think it massively overlooks the history of the English language and how modern standard English became modern standard English.

First of all, is Shakespeare's language completely unintelligible to native English speakers today? No. Certain words and grammatical tenses have fallen out of use. Many words have shifted in meaning. But with context aiding a contemporary reader, there are very few lines in Shakespeare where the meaning can be said to be "unknown," and abundant lines that are perfectly comprehensible today. On the other hand, it's worth mentioning how many double entendres are well preserved in modern understanding. And additionally, things like archaic grammar and vocabulary are simply hurdles to get over. Once you get familiarized with your thees and thous, they're no longer likely to trip you up so much.

But it's also doubtful that 400 years from now, as the article suggests, our everyday language will be as hard to understand for twenty-fifth century English speakers to comprehend. The English language has significantly stabilized due to colonialism and the international adoption of English as a lingua franca. There are countless dialects within English, but what we consider to be standard international "correct" English will probably not change so radically, since it is so well and far established. The development and proliferation of modern English took a lot of blood and money from the rest of the world, the legacy of which can never be fully restored.

And this was just barely in sight by the time that Shakespeare died. This is why the language of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is early-modern English. It forms the foundations of modern English, hence why it's mostly intelligible to speakers today, but there are still many antiquated figures within it. Early-modern English was more fluid and liberal. Spelling had not been standardized. Many regions of England still had slight variations in preferences for things like pronouns and verb conjugation. We see this even in works Shakespeare cowrote with the likes of Fletcher and Middleton, as the article points out. Shakespeare's vocabulary may not just reflect style and sentiment, but his Stratford background. His preferences could be deemed more "rustic" than many of his peers reared in London.

Features that make English more consistent now were not formalized yet. That's why Shakespeare sounds so "old." It's not just him being fancy. And there's also the fact that blank verse plays are an entirely neglected art nowadays. Regardless of the comprehensibility of the English, it's still strange for modern audiences uninitiated to Elizabethan literature to sit there and watch a King drop mad poetry about his feelings on stage by himself. The form and style of the entire genre is off.

But that, to me, is why we should read Shakespeare. We SHOULD be challenged. It very much IS within the grasp of a literate adult fluent in English to read one of his plays, in a modern edition with proper assistance and context. It is GOOD to be acquainted with something unfamiliar to us, but within our reach. I'm serious. I do not think I'm so much smarter than everyone else because I read Shakespeare. I don't just read the plain text as it was printed in the First Folio! The scholarship exists which has made Shakespeare accessible to me, and I take advantage of that access for my own pleasure.

This is to say that I disagree with the notion that Shakespeare is better suited to be enjoyed in foreign tongues. I think that's quite a complacent, modern American take. Not to say that the sentiment of McWhorter is wrong; I get what he's saying. And it's quite a beautiful thing that Shakespeare's plays are still so commonly staged, although arguably that comes from a false notion in our culture that Shakespeare is high literature worth preserving, at the expense of the rest of time and history. It is true that his body of work has such a high level of privilege in the so-called Western literary canon that either numerous other writers equally deserve, or no writer ever could possibly deserve.

The effort that goes into making Shakespeare's twenty-first century legacy, though, is a half-assed one. So much illustrious praise and deification of the individual and his works, and yet not as much to understanding the context of his time and place, of his influences, forms, and impacts on the eras which proceeded him. Shakespeare seems to exist in a vacuum with his archaic language, and we read it once or twice in high school when we're forced to, with prosaic translations on the adjoining page. This does not inspire a true appreciation in a culture for Shakespeare but it does reinforce a stereotype that he must be somehow important. It's this shallow stereotype that makes it seem in many minds today that it would be worth it to rip the precise language out of the text of a poet, and spit back out an equivalent "modern translation."

[rainbowangel110]

Staying up late again, but for a different grind

I'm making cards for all my teachers :)