#history literature

[iambecomeafangirl]

Books I’ve read in 2024

FEBRUARY |  Yuval Noah Harari "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" ⚱️🗿🧭🏛

[whimsifae]

the most fun a girl can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, making connections, contemplating

[that-butch-archivist]

"Lesbian Weddings" by Wendy Jill York

source: The Femme Mystique, edited by Lesléa Newman

[i-dont-trust-butterflies]

Please, don't stress about it so much

One day we'll all forget about it, remember?

[landsccape]

[burningvelvet]

a twitter thread that actually killed me

[dndspellgifs]

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

[hovelicher-unsin]

Reading History books

pro: i feel smart, learning about history is important and can be fun, learning about the context in which my old timey texts were written is even more fun

con: reading history books makes me soooo eepy

[cansu-m]

[prokopetz]

"Why does this 19th Century novel have such a boring protagonist" well, for a lot of reasons, really, but one of the big ones is that you're possibly getting the protagonist and the narrator mixed up.

A lot of 19th Century literary critics had this weird hate-boner for omniscient narrators – stories would straight up get criticised as "unrealistic" on the grounds that it was unlikely anyone could have witnessed their events in the manner described, like some sort of proto-CinemaSins bullshit – so authors who didn't want to write their stories from the first-person perspective of one of the participating characters would often go to great lengths to contrive for there to be a Dude present to witness and narrate the story's events.

It's important to understand that the Dude is the viewpoint character, but not the protagonist. His function is to witness stuff, and he only directly participates in the narrative to the extent that's necessary to explain to the satisfaction of persnickety critics why he's present and how he got there. Giving him a personality would defeat the purpose!

(Though lowbrow fiction was unlikely to encounter such criticisms, the device of the elaborately justified diegetic narrator was often present there as well, and was sometimes parodied to great effect – for example, by having the story narrated by a very unlikely party, such as a sapient insect, or by a party whose continued presence is justified in increasingly comical ways.)

[moxrglory]

"you will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

[unleashed-imagination]

I notice that Autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

[owoatmilk]

[that-butch-archivist]

"Dyke March 1994" by Morgan Gwenwald

source: The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love, edited by Beatrix Gates

[charlotlie]

bitches be like “this is the best piece of literature i have ever read” and it’s either a book that took them six weeks to finish or a fanfic they read at 3 AM