#primarily based on classical literature

[brimo5]

Trying to organize all the members I think belong to the House of Hades in a list. What a big family.

[schizoid-hikikomori]

There was more discussion of the schizoid personality in mid 20th century works with the collective fascination with existentialism.

The post-war world inspired art and conversation about what it meant to be alive and be human, whether there is any meaning at all.

Books like No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai and The Stranger by Albert Camus strongly carry the tone of the period of which they were published in. There is no meaning, life is absurd, there is no happy ending.

A book on the schizophrenic personality was published in 1960, titled The Divided Self by R.D. Laing. The schizoid personality at this time and into the 80s when it was added to the DSM was seen as an extension of schizophrenia. Before it was added to the DSM, szpd was considered a broader diagnosis that included conditions described as "nonpsychotic schizophrenia-type illness", consistent with the detachment from the world around you and a flat affect, paired with little emotional expression.

Perhaps most famously, schizoid personality disorder was referenced in a song by King Crimson, released in 1969, titled "21st Century Schizoid Man". The song is about the growing desensitization with violence and war and the idea that people in the future will be schizoid. Not literally, of course, but the overall idea that soon we won't at all be fazed by suffering. Again, another product of the post war world. I also think it's a good song.

The discussion around the schizoid personality both in psychology and in the world has noticeably diminished since then, but it has remained a diagnosis in both the ICD and the DSM.

Because of the lack of discussion it has led to people misunderstanding the disorder, making false equivalences to other disorders, and looking at it only on the surface list of diagnostic criteria.

The DSM diagnostic criteria is primarily based on external observations. This is why individuals with other disorders think they have something when they don't—they either misdiagnose themselves or their professional misdiagnoses them.

There are studies and books that differentiate between these shallow lists, but most people do not spend the time to inform themselves.

Just another reminder of self reflection, and to look at older writing that better resonates with the schizoid experience. I find that more classical and gothic literature speaks to this experience better than most modern writing ever does.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hey, so you seem to be the the All Knowing in terms of twst. With Glorious Masquerade getting a rerun soon, I was looking at the cards.

So what the heck is up with Jamil's freaking hat? I'm sorry but I can't look at it without laughing. It looks so stupid. The closest thing I can think of that matches it is the combined crowns of upper and lower Egypt, but this is the equivalent of France so that can't be it.

While I’m flattered that people come to me with their questions, I want to take a moment to remind everyone that I’m just another TWST fan like you are! ^^ It’s stressful to be considered “all knowing” or a fandom authority 💦 That puts a lot of pressure on me to speak on certain subjects or to interact in a certain way (since people might put too much stock into what I say), and then that ends up detracting from my enjoyment. I’d rather not be put on such a high pedestal, please and thank you.

Now, onto the question!

According to Rollo in 1-13 of Glorious Masquerade, the costumes the NRC students were gifted are “patterned after designs that are over 500 years old.”

If we extrapolate this to real life, the implication is that these costumes have roots in Renaissance era (14th century to 17th century) French fashion. Interestingly, Rollo’s own hat is similar to a tricorne, which was primarily worn in the 18th century… so technically, his hat is more “modern” than what the NRC students wear 😂

So I browsed through records of hats from the indicated period and guess what? I couldn’t find an exact match—though I did find a lot of hat designs that I found way sillier than what the NRC boys have. Like… sorry, what is THAT 😭

Some headwear which bears a vague similarity to Jamil’s hat are the Egyptian combined/double crown (the pschent), which Anon has already mentioned, and the French hood, which was worn by women in the 15th century.

The actual closest match I came across was the mitre, a liturgical headdresses worn by Roman Catholic officials. If you look at it from the front, it doesn’t look like much, but it definitely has the height of Jamil’s hat. But then look closer and you’ll realize the mitre does not have one single flap of fabric, but rather two.

If you take the front flap of a mitre and fold it back, you would probably get something very similar to what Jamil wears. (Note that the black part of the hat is NOT his hair, but is fabric that is part of the hat.)

Considering that Noble Bell College is styled like a cathedral and that the Renaissance era from which the Masquerade Dress clothing derives is characterized by the rediscovery of classical literature, art, and philosophy… perhaps it’s not so strange to see a hat borne of religious associations.

… Why did Jamil specifically get this hat? Not sure, I’m not religious myself so don’t ask me to psychoanalyze him from that angle 😂

The golden part securing the front is unusual and does not appear in French fashion of the time (at least not from what I could tell?). It’s styled like pschent but more likely is meant to be turban-like due to Jamil’s inspiration, Jafar, having the same feather sticking up in the middle of a bulbous hat. You’ll notice Jamil had a “feather” too, albeit metal:

To summarize, I think the design of Masquerade Dress Jamil’s hat borrows from multiple inspirations and not just one/old French fashion. Yana has stated before in a March 2023 interview with the Apple App Store that the cultures of Twisted Wonderland are unique and that the clothing that appears in the game are not “reinterpretations of existing costumes”. She seems to incorporate elements from both high fashion and from a variety of cultures to arrive at the final designs. For example, there are elements of many Nordic cultures in the Apple Pom outfits, and the Pomefiore uniform has a Japanese kimono-like silhouette despite the dorm being based on the the Evil Queen (originating from a German tale). I assume something similar happened when designing the Masquerade Dresses; Yana and co. wanted to combine elements and make something of their own.

Final comment I'll make, the shape of Jamil's hat looks like a kind of dumpling... It makes me hungry.

[see-arcane]

You know, all the jokes about Nosferatu looking like a Bloodborne movie makes me want to see a Soulslike-style game based primarily on 19th century vampire literature and gothic horror.

Idk, something like a game that takes place in a world where Dracula won, and follows a vampiric Mina or Johnathan Harker as they fight through a vampire infested Britain on a quest for vengeance against the Count for a pitch.

To go full Bloodborne I think all the classic undead would need some major Hellsing-level juicing up in their traits. But other than that, I can definitely see a format centered on

1) Tackling a version of England becoming steadily overrun by variations of the undead in a Dracula-ruled terrain and

2) Playing as Jonathan and/or Mina--but not yet undead! That's the ending they're trying to avoid while taking on the monsters. Jonathan is in Cryptid Mode. Mina, perhaps freshly bitten and blood-baptism'd, is running out a timer until she finally expires and rises as one of Dracula's Brides. It would give players a time limit to race against as they struggle to reach and put down Dracula before it's too late for her and for the Count's plans to use England as his colony infection point on the entire world.

And oh man. There would be so many tasty alternate endings to work with.

A) Victory! The day is saved!

B) Too late. Mina turns. Jonathan lets her take him, relinquishing his knife.

C) Too late. Mina turns. Jonathan kills his fellows to protect her from being slain. Dracula thanks him by snapping him up and turning him for himself, full bad ending.

D) Jonathan sacrifices himself to save Mina. Mina, turned already but no longer Dracula's thrall, turns him before he perishes. The vampire Harkers vanish, prepared to go full Blade against the remaining undead.

E) Victory! Baby Quincey flash forward! Everything is fine! ...OR IS IT? Smash cut to X Vampire Boss stalking up to take the throne, etc etc sequel hook, you know the drill.

It'd be so cool~

[vindelllas]

frivolous or fated: buddha and beauty 🧖🏽‍♀️🛀🏽

Disclaimer: this is only part one (my document was too long to include in one post). If you would like for me to post part two, please let me know!

🛁 The predominant attitude towards the beauty of things in the classical texts is one of suspicion and met with usual hostility. Physical beauty, especially that of women historically, is accused of causing attachment and craving. Beauty is deemed as “the nutriment for sensual desire” in mercurial principles and thereby being acclaimed as the source of greed, hate, and delusion too. Enjoyment of one’s beauty, and repulsion at another’s ugliness, is deemed as incompatible with the great virtue of equanimity that enjoins us to be mindful and attain enlightenment without the filtering usage of the prism of worldly subjection. Whereas, worldly beauty is demonized, as it is attributed to distracting the masses from the ubiquity of suffering in this earthly plane. This is why in many buddhist principles, the antithesis to beauty-based seduction is focusing oneself upon bringing awareness to the “ugly”, such as death. Yet in countries like Thailand, beauty is theorized to be rewarded to women who have lived without expressing aggression, perpetuating hatred, and experiencing feelings of resentment in a previous life. Focusing on an object such as a disc (or a yantra in vedic culture), is taking in great beauty and bestowing the onlooker with tranquil meditation abundance. In this post, I will be evaluating what true beauty means in various cultures and how we can incorporate these theories into nuanced conversations about self care and overall beautification of oneself. The following deep dive into primarily eastern literature and spiritual concepts does not mean that these are solely accurate opinions, but it is designed to expand one’s palette to spiritual beautification outside of western ideologies.

🛀🏽 There are several modes of beauty. However, the main three categories of beauty I have stumbled upon are inner beauty, wordly beauty, and physical beauty. Inner beauty is the beauty of one’s character, the beauty of the person’s spirit, or moral beauty. But this inner realm or entity is not exactly disjoined from bodily and physical existence. It is simply the beauty that belongs to a person in virtue of their character, moral qualities, understanding, and experience. In contrast with the beauty of things or the world, there is substantial evidence for the importance of inner beauty in Buddhist knowledge. In the Cakkavatti-Shanda sutta, buddha answers his own question, ‘What is beauty for a monk?’, with a list of qualities such as “right conduct, restraint, perfection in habit, and an awareness of danger in the slightest fault”. In the verses of the female ancestors, who repeatedly celebrate their emancipation from the desire to cultivate physical beauty, there is an interesting reference to one nun, Subh, who it is said “went forth full of faith, beautiful by reason of the true doctrine”. In the Abhidhamma, whole sections are devoted to defining the various forms of beautiful consciousness and beautiful mental factors: including compassion, non-delusion and mindfulness (some of which are present in all the beautiful states of consciousness).

🧼 However these references towards beauty have sparked much debate. The word “beauty” is used to talk about “the inner”, about character and virtues. Translators have begged the question why does Buddha not speak of the restrained, alert, right thinking monk as simply being “good” or “holy”? Why is he described as beautiful? And why was Subh deemed beautiful, rather than just virtuous, by reason of dharma? This literature is explicitly stating there is a lack of connection between inner beauty with the beauty of things as seen, heard or otherwise perceived through the ordinary senses, such as sight and hearing. It is, after all, the domain of sensory/what may be perceptually experienced. As children, we learn the use of words like “beautiful” via connecting the term with what is visible, audible or otherwise available to the senses.

🧴 Prominent aesthetic-based philosophers Immanuel Kant (ashwini surya and revati chandra), Alexander Baumgarten (pushya surya and hasta chandra), and Francis Hutcheson (ashlesha surya and uttara bhadrapada chandra) studied the primacy of the sensorial experience by defining beauty in terms of sensory experience. But it has long been recognized that sensorial beauty was a sign of a more elevated form of beauty. For example, Plato, in Phaedrus, states that true beauty is something that one on the earthly plane may only discern when “reminded by the sight of beauty on earth” and that beauty is apprehended through sight: “the keenest of our physical senses”. The journey towards this appreciation of “true beauty” prescribed to Socrates by Diotima in The Symposium, is through witnessing the sight of beautiful figures (bodies). For Kant and others, it was believed that it is the beauty of God that finally matters. As Abbé Suger stated: “the multi-coloured loveliness of gems has… [transported] me from material to immate- rial things, for our dull mind is incapable of rising to the truth except through that which is material”. According to these ideologies, it is in this manner too that one should interpret Suger’s succinct definition of beauty as what pleases through being seen. This is a concept explicitly explored in the rashi of virgo. In my previous notions on virgo nakshatras, I have stated that the journey through this rashi is the journey towards uncovering the jewels of chitra through the eroticism of uttara phalguni and abstinence of hasta, the material cravings of the flesh have become transmuted into the immaterial learnings all virgo natives crave.

🪒 In Buddhist ideologies of beauty, some writers have proposed certain analogies between inner beauty and that of objects of perceptual experience with the intention of justifying their references to inner beauty. For example, a beautiful mind has been compared to a beautiful garden due to neither being considered wild or disorderly. Additionally, similar to carefully crafted art pieces, the beautiful mind possesses balance, proportion, and rhythm. However, unless such analogies are developed and deepened, suspicion about the merely figurative use of beauty will continue to arise. The mind of a man (note this is only in reference to men and not women in this literature) is controlled via craving/delusion and may be disorderly. However, is this “disorder” comparable to that of an untended garden?

🖼️ Some ancient texts argue the causal connections between moral character and physical beauty, with the potential purpose of inviting a transfer of the vocabulary of beauty from the latter to the former. For example, think of the passages mentioned earlier where Buddha describes physical beauty as a future karmic reward for a virtuous life. However, causal connections like this are insufficient to warrant a transfer of terms from physical beauty to its correlation to a person’s character. If references to inner beauty are to be justified, more intimate connections than ones of analogy and cause and effect need to be established between the inner essence of a person and the primary domain of beauty, things as experienced through the ordinary senses. So let us explore further…

🎀 Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (ashwini surya, conjunct buddha to the exact degree, and uttara bhadrapada chandra) once spoke “the human body is the best picture of the human soul”. As a painting may express the feelings of an artist, so too the body, via gesture, comportment, facial expression, or demeanor, is an expression of a person’s inner reality, their character. Inferring only when the inner finds beautiful expression in the body, there is good reason to speak of inner beauty. Similar to when a person’s attitude is described as cheerful due to their cheerful smile and physical gestures that convey it to other people. In this case, the beautiful soul is “beautiful” because its bodily expression in the world is beautiful. Expression, therefore, is a kind of intimate connection required between the inner and the outer. The virtuous mind and/or character is only beautiful because it finds beautiful expression in and through the body. The idea that virtue, like courage, finds bodily expression is no more difficult and controversial than the idea of bodily expression of feelings, i.e. cheerfulness and sadness. A gesture, for example, is an expression of anger or courage when it is itself angry or courageous, and in a way that presents itself as having such a quality, at least to the mindful observer. So why should virtue find expression in beautiful gestures? Is this a matter of luck?

🧧 This connection is not at all a matter of luck. Beauty that is expressed bodily is the expression of virtue. We recognize and appreciate gestures, facial expressions and so on as beautiful precisely because we experience them as expressions of virtue. A woman’s smile, for example, is found to be beautiful because it is seen to express compassion. A monk’s comportment is deemed to be beautiful because it is experienced as an expression of humility. It may perhaps be that this expression of compassion or humility is faux. But that does not negate from the fact that our reasoning for finding the smile or comportment beautiful is the perception of it as an expression of virtue. Behavior that expresses anger may be feigned, that does not mean that the connection between angry behavior and an angry mood is merely contingent. Nor is the connection between beauty of expression and virtue. This is why bodily altercations for the purpose of increasing one’s beauty is not necessarily warranted for demonization.

🪭 This virtue-based attitude toward bodily beauty was personified by the words of Kant. Kant argues beauty belongs to the human body due to the body’s manifestation of moral virtues. There are similarities to this virtue emphasis in Buddhist texts too. For example, it is implied that it is appropriate to call Subh “beautiful by reason of dharma” because of the ways her holiness is manifested in her personal cleanliness and calm/grace of her comportment. Some testaments to Buddha’s physical beauty are centered around his sexual attractiveness to women who are “overpowered by passion” in his presence. Therefore, it is true that sometimes Buddha is found to be physically beautiful, even by people deemed to possess pure minds, as gentle dispositions are casual for other virtues such as fine countenance and posture to manifest. According to canonical texts, nearly all of which make for masculine physical beauty, include “the torso of a lion” and “straight limbs” of which are aspects of the Buddha’s comportment, such as effortless grace of movement, cleanliness, and calm that are expressions of his virtue. It is not only in Pali and Sanskrit literature that there is evidence of a virtue-based understanding of bodily beauty. In eastern asian Buddhist writings, there are similar understandings and underlying connections. For example, beauty is not merely of appearance, but of the spirit (suggesting both are intertwined). It is this inner quality that possesses beauty precisely because of the way it manifests itself outwards via grand gestures, glances and poise. Thus implying there is no warrant for referring to inner beauty as beautiful unless this beauty is expressed in and through the body.

📿 For a person’s character or inner reality to qualify as beautiful, it must possess magnetism. It must attract the heart. Whether this magnetism or attraction is thought of as a further condition of inner beauty, in addition to bodily expression, or as an aspect of this expression that deserves to be made salient in an account of inner beauty is up to one’s personal spiritual journey. Either way, it is through the body that a person exercises magnetism and attracts the hearts/adoration of others. This beauty must be magnetic and attractive via exerting radiance that draws people to it, is an idea found in the teachings of Plato, Plotinus and a minority of later Christian thinkers such as the pseudo-dionysius. It is this magnetism that distinguishes the beautiful from the good. Certain states of a person can be considered “beautiful” and this is due to the person who exemplifies such beauty embodying or mediating a certain concentration of energy. This energy sustains a certain demeanor and perspective and through this radiation and attraction. It is an energy that is aptly described as an object or form of eros (erotic love). For a person to count as beautiful, it is not enough that their virtue shows up in some way, such as solely via donations that one makes to charities or volunteer work. It must show up in an aesthetically charged way: via gestures, demeanor, style, and presence that draws others, sensitive to the energy being radiated, to the person. For just as there was recognition that inner beauty must be bodily expressed, so there is an acknowledgement in some Buddhist texts that inner beauty must attract.

🔮 Consider once more the texts that attest to Buddha’s personal beauty. Gotama was said to become radiant in the presence of Buddha’s beauty and seeing him there, standing in his beauty, men and women are drawn to devote themselves and offer reverence to him (similar to the powerful mahavidyas discussed in the vedic religion). Contrarily, consider the sequence of verses in the Dhammapada in which the search for perfection is compared to a bee’s search for a beautifully scented flower. In order to possess beauty, the words and actions of one must exude a perfume that attracts others. This perfume of virtue, one verse tells us, “gives joy to the soul”, as the light of wisdom is emitted by a truly enlightened follower of dharma. So too inner beauty exerts the same magnetism on the searcher for perfection as a flower’s scent attracts a bee. This theme of beauty’s magnetism is a persistent one. In the thirteenth century, Dogen observed that the body of a true follower of Buddhism feels at ease and “their actions take on grace”, so that this person’s “appearance attracts others”. In this text, Dogen is drawing upon not only Buddhist principles, but a Daoist and Confucian tradition in which the de (‘virtue’) of “the consummate person” or sage is conceived of in terms of charisma, of an inner goodness that is at power to influence and attract others.

🪔 Beauty’s magnetism is attested to by contemporary Buddhists as well. In “Attracting the Heart”, Samuels examines the aesthetics of the emotions in present day Sri Lankan religious life. Samuels’ research provides a source of Buddhist testimonies, mainly from monks and novices, in relation to the magnetic power of moral beauty. For example, he speaks of how they attempt to go beautifully in order to attract the people’s hearts via their dignified posture, speech, or cleanliness. Stating a monk must be “beautiful to the eye” or to the ear, when reciting verses in order make people feel longing for “the holy life”. As Samuels states, his research confirms that there is value in an aesthetic standard that informs Buddhist practice and invests into a quality of bodily movement, posture, speech, and action. Thus, inducing an aesthetically pleasing transformation. This attempted to justify the notion of inner beauty that several authors attribute to Buddhist thinking. Such a justification is at least intimated in Buddhist texts and testimony. Thus, virtue, in order to constitute beauty of character, must be beautifully expressed in and through the body, in a way moreover that exerts magnetism or attraction. Later on, I explore the possibility that a distinctively Buddhist understanding of beauty in art may be inspired by the Buddhist understanding of inner beauty. Earlier, I spoke of the assertion that awakened experience is an experience of beauty, but it may be right to suggest, immediately afterwards, that through the awareness sought by Buddhists, our appreciation of the arts is also enriched. If this is true, however, it will solely be attributed to the beauty appreciated in art as it is intimately related to the inner beauty previously discussed.

🧘🏽‍♀️ For some Buddhists, the most contrary feature to the religion of the ordinary discourse of beauty is its discrimination, on the basis of subjective experience, between beautiful and non-beautiful things. The “beauty” that simply stands opposed to ugliness is not true beauty… but deemed to be rather a dualistic idea according to Yanagi Soetsu (uttara bhadrapada surya and swati chandra). True beauty, Soetsu describes, is a state of mind, of “freedom from impediment and preoccupation”. For someone who achieves this state of mind, “everything is beautiful”, includ- ing all works of art. These remarks attempt to relate beauty in the world to an inner, ‘true’ beauty of the mind but not without nuance. Yanagi himself makes the very distinctions between beautiful and vulgar (or graceful and garish) artworks which can be contradictory. Whether or not an intelligible concept of beauty, according to which everything is beautiful, can be developed, it is clear that this would not be the ordinary, central concept of beauty. To be told that, in the Buddhist understanding of ‘true beauty’, all art is beautiful is, in effect, to be told that Buddhism has nothing to contribute to the aesthetics of beauty in art.

🎨 The challenge is to work outwards towards a notion of beauty in the world and in art, one that is compatible with discernment between the beautiful and the non-beautiful, from the notion of inner beauty previously spoken about. We have encountered, in effect, a clear-cut, paradigmatic, case of worldly beauty–in the gesture, demeanor, comportment or whatever bestows a beautiful expression to virtue of character, and thereby justifies reference to inner beauty. The body and its actions are in and of the world, their beauty is, in this sense at least, worldly beauty. Crucially, we have also encountered a case where beauty of bodily expression is at the same time a case of beauty in art. Zeami’s view that a certain kind of inner beauty manifests itself outwards in the gestures, glances and poise of an individual. But this individual is an actor, whose beautiful bodily expression therefore belongs to an art form. More generally, in an appropriate context bodily movements and activity may constitute artistic performance, such as a dance. In such contexts, there is no difficulty in seeing that art inherits, via the bodily activity that constitutes it, the inner beauty that it expresses.

🪻 This concept may be applicable to other arts and practices, including many of those that, in East Asia, are called “ways" (Japanese do, as in judo). Not all of these – swordsmanship, for example, or calligraphy (shodo), or the way of tea (chado) – are accepted by the standard Western connotations of ‘the arts’, and certainly not of ‘the fine arts’. But, in Asia, a distinction between arts and crafts, and between these and various other do, is not a definite one. Indeed, it is regarded as an artificial and potentially misleading dualism. Arts or ‘ways’ such as archery, the tea ceremony and gardening differ from dance and mime, typically, in having a practical purpose, such as hitting a target, making tea or creating a garden. That is one reason why these arts require the use of ‘instruments’--a sword, a tea whisk, a hoe–as well as bodily movement. But it is not unnatural to regard these instruments as extensions of the body, as specifically honorary parts of the body. For in none of these practices is the instrument deemed to be a mere tool, to be used in a way dictated solely by a goal. These instruments are to be used with respect and, like one’s hands, with expression. The gardener or tea master is not just clearing away weeds or brewing up a nice cup of tea. They are engaged in a practice that bodies forth the virtues, including compassion, humility, mindfulness, and friendship. In effect, they are concerned with practicing an art or following a way in a beautiful style. Like Zeami’s actor or a dancer in a Buddhist temple, the gardener and tea master via their own and their extended, ‘honorary’ body seek for beautiful physical expression of an inner beauty.

🎭 Many of the Buddhist-inspired arts or ways, the sharp distinction familiar in Western discourse between practice and product, between artistry and artwork, is rejected. It may be an exaggeration to say that, for gardeners, caring for the garden is not a chore, but the very point of having a garden in the first place. But it not only conveys that gardening is not a mere means to an end, the garden itself, but it is a place that depends on a gardener’s continuing care, the garden is not a finished product distinct from the practice of making and maintaining it. To focus, therefore, on the beauty of a practice is not, in the case of many ‘ways’, to ignore the beauty of something, the work, that is separable from the practice. Additionally, even when a distinction is made between a bodily action and its artistic product, many Buddhist artists would refuse to accept that aesthetic attention should exclusively, or even primarily, be devoted to the latter. It is easy enough, of course, to distinguish a calligrapher’s action in drawing with a brush and ink from the characters that are the result of this action. But when it is said of Kobara Sensei, that he and his art “had become one”, the point is to emphasize that the products of an individual’s art are not to be appreciated in isolation from admiration for the individual themself, for the virtues, like kindness, enable their works to look the way they do.

🩰 Kobara’s virtue, his inner beauty, enables his works to look as they do in and through the bodily movements, the physical style, that at once express it and create the characters on the paper. This is an example of the general way in which, for Buddhists, artworks inherit the inner beauty of the people who make them. By giving a sense of the beautiful bodily engagement through which they came into existence, the works themselves body forth the inner beauty of the virtues. Interestingly in twentieth-century Western art criticism, there also developed an appreciation of works as expressive of the bodily activity responsible for them. A significant aspect, for example, of people’s enjoyment of works by Van Gogh, Rodin and Pollock is the palpable sense these works require a certain strength and energy that went into their making. The difference between this occurrence in Western art appreciation and the more abiding Asian tradition is the concern in the latter for the moral beauty that is expressed in an artist’s bodily practice. By extending to art the idea of the body as being beautiful in and through its magnetic expression of inner beauty, it is possible, then, to endorse Batchelor’s beliefs that Buddhism is not just inner experiences. It is known through buildings, gardens, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, poetry and craftwork’ and “present in” the marks and gestures of artists and artisans.

💋 Please do let me know if I should post the second installment of this document! I have been candid to some about my current health struggles and taking a leave of absence from ballet. I am so incredibly touched with everyone’s kind words and appreciate the amount of kindness i have been met with during these vulnerable moments. I love each and everyone of you and am deeply praying for your successes and triumphs. While I spoke of Buddhism in this post, I will talk about Buddha (mercury) and certain nakshatras correlated to this theory soon…

xoxo,

angel 💋

[myfairkatiecat]

as an actual person getting a degree in criticism of english literature, i'd like to say that you are completely entitled to your opinion and i am entirely thrilled to see discussion of literary theory in the kotlc fandom!!!! it's fantastic and i wish everyone engaged with the work like you are!!!

that being said, I do have some questions? problems? smth idk. for you. This is not an attack or anything like that, pure academic camaraderie and engagement. Literary theory shifts entirely based on who, how, and why people engage with it.

You stated in one post that when an author writes their story one way, you as the reader can't really argue against that at all, as you are choosing to engage with the work. For instance, if you hate Sokeefe and it turns you off from reading the series, you can't say that the author was wrong without basing it in some real criticism. My response to this would be, what would that criticism look like? Do you have a good argument for why Sokeefe wouldn't be a good route for the author to take? I am an AVID Sokeefe shipper, and I can think of at least three. But I digress. My main thought here is that an author, at least in my opinion, can be completely wrong in their execution of anything. Just because something is written in a story doesn't necessarily mean that's how it has to be, or how it would best be written!

I genuinely think millions of writers have begun writing things simply because they saw a poorly executed story.

Writing, for me, at least, always seems to be utterly entwined with itself. Story, wording, execution, pacing, it's all combined into the whole it becomes. This is why Twilight is so bad, why KOTLC has isn't classics material, and why, say, Jane Eyre is! It's all combined together into a beautiful flashing collective, and it is when you get excellence across the board that a work of fiction really shines.

However, I don't think one can take the author as the prime example of perfectly executing their own story.

I would write so much of KOTLC completely differently if it were my writing, and I would argue that all of that would make it worlds better, even if some of my choices are primarily based on personal taste, not supported criticism, because I think that I know how to write just as well, if not better than the author does.

It is based in this very same idea, that even if I were operating solely out of personal taste that I could do it better, that I find myself disagreeing with your claim.

I genuinely believe an author can make terrible decisions with their story, and be wrong about how it's carried out, even if it's in the material and published.

Do you have any thoughts on this? Sorry, I know this is kind of long.

Anyways! Thank you so much for bringing up theoretical stuff!!!! I literally LOVE to see it!!!! :D Have a great day!!!

I love this stuff too OMG im going to college next year and I’m majoring in English

Anyway yes!! Most of what you said is actually about the execution of the story, which I totally agree can be objectively better or worse! I like to put all those things like style, pacing, and execution in the family of “writing” and things like plot and scenes and what is actually happening in the universe as “content.”

I think the “writing,” as I loosely defined it above, can be thoroughly criticized at any point, and ABSOLUTELY SHOULD BE! That’s how readers and writers alike learn and grow from other media and nurture their own talent! I can definitely think of some things about Shannon’s writing in kotlc that I would have executed differently, but with kotlc, I mostly try to ignore it since it’s………kotlc 😭 but no you’re absolutely right!

I bristle a little bit at criticism of “content” as I defined it above. I know it’s wrapped up in the writing, but I think things that are actually happening in the universe—such as decisions characters make or big events that affect the plot and characters—are things that are totally up to the author, and therefore can’t be objectively wrong. For example, Sophie deciding to date Keefe is something happening in the universe. Therefore, it can’t be the “wrong” thing, because it’s Shannon’s universe in the first place.

Now, there could be other pathways the story could have taken. The story might be more enjoyable to some people if other pathways were taken. But Shannon isn’t… “incorrect” about her own characters, which is a take I’ve seen implied (and even outright stated somewhere, I’ll have to find that again) since she created them and what she decides to have them do is a part of the story she’s deciding to tell. From an objective standpoint, we can discuss her writing methods and the execution of the story she is telling, but at the end of the day, if someone’s problem isn’t with the execution but with the story itself, their criticism ceases to really be helpful. That’s basically like saying, “I like Harry Potter, but J. K. Rowling really messed up when she made Voldemort a half-blood.” (Which might be a bad example because it was actually a genius narrative choice.) In that statement, you aren’t criticizing Rowling of her execution of the story, you’re criticizing the very story she decided to tell, which is her right as an author.

I think an author can make choices that don’t move their story in a direction that would lend it more literary merit or have more of an impact. But if those decisions are related to the “content” rather than the “writing” (according to the groups I defined above) then I don’t think anyone can objectively say the decision is wrong. That’s the other thing—the use of the word “objective” in situations it has no business being in.

In short, writers can execute things well or poorly, and they can make narrative decisions that don’t lead the work down a road that gives it more meaning, but when coming up with the actual plot of a story, authors can’t be wrong about what should happen in a story that is of their own design! If they think that their character would do X, Y and Z, then they’re right, because they created the character. Even if we, the readers, haven’t been exposed to a single thing about that character that would make them make those decisions, the author is still right about their own character. Now, in that scenario, the writing can be criticized, because a character who would do X, Y and Z should probably show signs of it earlier in the work so that it doesn’t give the readers whiplash and better develops the character, but the author can’t be wrong in their own universe by virtue of having created the universe.

Thanks for stopping by!! I love chatting about this stuff, feel free to reblog and keep it going

[puddlesofwords]

The Future is a Foreign Land Meta Analysis

This was super fun for me to put together. Please enjoy.

The Future is a Foreign Land has allusions to lyrics from the Dead Kennedys, classic literature, and Nazi Germany. It has a more punk aesthetic than the other Papa Nihil songs, which are focused primarily on interpersonal relationships, with a heavy dose of the ubiquitous Satanic imagery the band is known for.  Notably, Satanic imagery is virtually absent from the lyrics of TFiaFL, although interpersonal relationships do still play a role.  

So, let’s dig into the lyrics and music to see if they lead us to any ideas about the future of Ghost, or insights into how the concepts presented in this song might influence the band’s identity.  Please note that while I have researched the lore and read several histories of the band, I am fairly new to this fandom.  I am merely following leads I discovered while binge-listening to this song after seeing RHRN.  Which is to say, if any of my ideas run counter to established fandom theory, I apologize in advance. (I edited this to put in a read more... it's been a hot minute since I've used this platform and forgot my etiquette, please forgive me.)

The conceit of TFiaFL is that Papa Nihil wrote it in 1969.  Taking that into account, the year 1984 does track, mathematics-wise.  However, 1984 is a very culturally significant year.  George Orwell’s novel is immediately brought to mind, with all the baggage contained therein - Thought Police, brainwashing, Big Brother and the loss of privacy, and the fact that the main character’s job is to literally rewrite history at an organization called the Ministry of Truth.

Initially, as a US-based listener of the song, I’m jumping on the anti-fascist underpinnings of that allusion.  That line of thought isn’t wrong, per se, but I think there are factors at work that make the allusion much deeper and even more meaningful.

Since 1812 (Or 1834, depending on your source) Sweden had maintained a stance of neutrality.  This neutrality was baked into their identities - to the point that they didn’t declare for either side in World War II, the Cold War, or any other conflict.  On March 7, 2024 (ah, there’s the 2024 from the song!) Sweden joined NATO, foregoing neutrality for the first time in 200 years.  A large step - and one that was supported by 66% of the population.

Now, as someone who lives in the US, I know exactly how much power and influence 34% of the population can wield if it so chooses.  According to poll after poll, 66% of US Americans support all KINDS of initiatives that would actually make living in this country suck a lot less.  But that last 34%... well.  If you’ve followed US American politics at all in the past 8 years, you know what happened when 34% of the population lost its collective mind.  (Yup, that’s the percentage of US Americans that identify, or routinely vote, as Republican. The percentage is nearly identical to that of Democrats, so let’s not get too overwrought about things just yet.)

The interesting thing is, though, that the anti-NATO movement is supported primarily by young people.  Young people worried that joining NATO will militarize their country.  Worried that collective security does not stop conflicts and may exacerbate them.  I can’t deny that I understand where they’re coming from, that political neutrality gives more freedom of choice to the Swedish government about where and how they get involved in European affairs.  Choosing to be a part of NATO may remove some of that freedom of choice.  On the other hand, you end up selling iron ore to Nazis and training Danish troops at your airbases in the same breath, so… neutrality can also lead to hypocrisy.

But Puddles, I hear you cry, what on EARTH does this history lesson have to do with Ghost?

Well, in the absence of sympathies, won’t you hear me out? 

1969.  The year TFiaFL is supposed to have been written.  Height of the Cold War.  Sweden is still neutral - this time out of concern that if they join NATO, the USSR is going to invade them.  A not-improbable concern, given Finnish history of the era.  And closer along the timeline to 1945 than we are to 1969.  What’s the worry stated in the song?  A Brownshirt Stasi guard is knocking on your door.  A Brownshirt is, of course, one of the Sturmabteilung troops of Nazi Germany.  Stasi is a security officer of East Berlin - the Berlin of the Cold War.

Thus, if we take a small leap of logic and use a Sweden-centric worldview:  If Sweden fails to maintain neutrality, if they give up their freedom of choice, then the world falls to fascism.  (This is the first half of the first verse.  I’m sorry.  Moving on.)

Interestingly, the specific lyric ‘It’s 1984, and knocking on your door’ is a callback to the Dead Kennedys song “California Uber Alles” which was then remade by the band after the 1980 election into “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now.”

Those two songs studied side-by-side are a fascinating study.  The first is about the fascism of the Left - which IS A THING.  It might seem corny or sarcastic to worry about hippies becoming dictators - but the theft of choice, even if that theft feels like comfort, is still theft.  Forced conformity, even if you agree with the premise, is still fascism.

 The second song is, of course, about how everyone who wasn’t WASPy felt about the election of Reagan.  The rise of the yuppie to replace the hippie.  This is definitely more in line with what is traditionally associated with punk and rock music in general.  (I’m also a fan of the fact that “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” is on an album named ‘In God We Trust’ but I think that’s just coincidence.)

To continue the lyric analysis, the song goes on to reference the Kennedys (which is a nice double-whammy - telling us that the previous line is almost certainly related to the Dead Kennedys songs, but ALSO invoking in the next breath the assassination of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, which would have been contemporaneous to the storyline release date of TFiaFL, occurring in 1963 and 1968 respectively.)  As an aside, I find it hilarious that ‘the good ones get shot’ is the next lyric because there is currently ANOTHER Kennedy running for president, with the implied meaning that he’s ‘not good’ because he hasn’t been shot.  I don’t think this was intentional, it’s a very minor point in a pretty complex political landscape, but it makes me chuckle.

“For the minute it takes” in the chorus… definitely a reference to nuclear war.  The ensuing firestorm after a nuclear blast will consume a human body within moments, leaving nothing behind.  This is also likely to be a reference to the Doomsday Clock - which is currently sitting at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to destruction.  Just to give some perspective - the Doomsday Clock was set to 7 minutes to midnight in 1947, right after WWII.  It was 10 minutes to midnight in 1969 and 3 minutes to midnight in 1984.  In 1991, however, the clock had been set back to 17 minutes to midnight, the furthest back it had ever been since its inception.  It has never been set back since.  More esoterically, though, it could be a reference to ts eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.”  The line ‘in a minute there is time/for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’ If this line is an allusion to the poem (there are other lines in other songs that make me think that ts eliot is likely one of Tobias’s poetic influences, tempered by the medium of lyric creation and music) then we can assume the piece is, indeed, referring to Sister Imperator and Papa Nihil. 

The second verse is a bit more obscure - probably because it’s dealing with an actual future prediction, as 2024 is only about half over as of the time of this writing.  There is hope in this verse, but it’s tinged with irony.  ‘The dark fascist regime might be gone’ is bittersweet - the hope of Papa Nihil looking toward the future and seeing that maybe, just maybe there’s a way to defeat fascism for good and knowing, as we do, that it didn’t come to pass and that fascism is, in fact, on the rise globally is a gut-punch.  

The next two lines are interesting.  They could be referring to Sister Imperator, continuing the subplot of their failed relationship.  They could be speaking to the audience - either in reference to some real-life transgression of the lyricist or of the lore-based transgressions of Papa Nihil. Or, perhaps this is asking to be forgiven for some future slight that will occur later.

I’m not going to lie, the bridge is weird.  It’s simultaneously finishing the thought of the previous verse but ALSO giving heavy-handed “All You Need is Love” vibes a la Beatles in 1967.  None of this is in any way meant as a criticism, however.  The bridge works musically as well as lyrically to pull the disparate lines of thought together into something coherent and hopeful.  Also of a tangential but possibly related note - “Revolution” by the Beatles was released in 1968 on The White Album.  And I can’t think of a more boot-licking rock and roll song ever to be penned.  But this is certainly a digression and probably just my brain leapfrogging onto interesting coincidences. 

Ok, fine, the song has some deep roots, but Puddles, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BAND?

I’m so glad you asked.  I find that putting the two Dead Kennedys songs together paints a pretty definite picture for me, and I’m going to lay out what I think is in store based on this juxtaposition and The Future is a Foreign Land generally.

I think our next Papa is going to be a ‘teenage punk’ to put it bluntly.  Cardi was childlike - the tricycle, Papa Nihil and Sister Imperator acting as parents, his antics onstage, the bumbling charm and relative innocence of the character all read as childlike.  Charming, charismatic, certainly able to carry the title, but even the character’s backstory lends itself to a kind of childhood, with Cardi beginning as frontman without the official title of Papa Emeritus.  Cardi has grown up - and now has to face those awkward, angry, tumultuous teens.  And I think that will be reflected in a more punk-inspired sound (where Cardi’s music definitely trended toward pop-inspired).  TFiaFL gives us some of that punk-inspired flavor with the guitar riff and general vibe of the song.  I also think that this next Papa might try to dismantle the Clergy as it's a symbol of authority and conformity - the antithesis of the spirit of punk. I think we got a taste of this direction on IMPERA with the song “Twenties” - which I’ll be doing a deep dive on sooner rather than later, I’m sure.

I’m interested in, but not sold on, the idea that the next Papa will be female (either a new character or Tobias in drag - either works).  I don’t think changing the gender works with the story as I see it progressing.  I do think, however, that the next Papa will be possibly more chaotic and possibly angrier than we’ve seen - and probably more political, if the allusions in this song are any indication.  Whether that politicization is outward-facing toward the world as it is or inward-facing toward the world of the Lore, I’m not sure yet.  I look forward to the new cycle with great eagerness!

TLDR; I want the next Papa to have a mohawk and wear a ripped denim jacket for at least part of the ritual.  Thank you.

[morgenlich]

@iron--and--blood

yep! now, this is not a direct cause and effect situation--i doubt that friedrich and (most) of his contemporaries would have been particularly enthusiastic about the nazis since most of them were very much in favor of creating a unified german state based on the classical Liberal ideas behind the french revolution, so their brand of patriotism can't really be compared 1:1 with national socialism, but the Romantic movement in general--in the various german states as well as france especially--helped pave the way for the nationalism of the 20th century

i could tell you what parts of friedrich's biography appealed to the nazis--the desire for a unified german state, his role in creating a more or less unified German Culture--the fact that he really hated napoleon....but i'm going to point out what aspects of his art the nazis really liked instead

let me start by explaining capital-R Romanticism. Romanticism as a movement has its origins in late 18th/early 19th Century...well, what's today mostly Germany. it started as a literary movement--the word "Romantic" ("Romantik" in German) originates from "Roman", the German word for "novel"--but quickly moved to other media as well. Romantic art and literature is primarily concerned with the Sublime, looking to nature and the past as sort of the idealized state of the world. high drama is also often involved, though friedrich's works display this drama through dramatic landscapes so it comes across as more sublte to some--a good comparison might be the works of french artist theodore gericault, whose paintings usually featured human subjects and were often explicitly political in nature (raft of the medusa, for example). Romanticism in the German states also involved a lot of trying to unify various german cultures, folklore, etc. into a single, National identity. this is when Hochdeutsch begins to be standardized, for example. the Grimms are key figures in that as well as "standardizing" fairy tales.

so, caspar david friedrich. let's use one of his paintings as a quick example for some symbolism

(Abbey in the Oak Forest, 1809-10, now at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin)

the ruins of the abbey--obvious connection to religion and nostalgia

the oak trees--like the remains of the abbey, they reach up into the sky, connecting the earth to heaven

oak trees are also a german national symbol, and they are a recurring presence in friedrich's works. german Romantic landscapes are a bit less obviously nationalistic than US Romantic landscapes, which often played into manifest destiny and the idea of "pristine" nature--but that connection is still there, and it's crucial.

so, the nazis. they liked quite a bit of Romanticism in general--after all, it is in many ways the origin of modern german culture, and german nationalism (in all meanings of the word). you don't have modern german identity without it. friedrich's art expemplifies this on several fronts, as well as fitting their ideals for what art "should" look like (kinda funny in light of the ideals of Neoclassicism, which Romanticism was in part a rebuttal against, but ah well). friedrich was also by then* sort of a national figure when you talk about the history of german art. so the nazis liked to use his stuff a lot and regarded him as sort of an ideal artist.

*he spent most of the 19th century, even in his own lifetime, sort of forgotten about, because public reception of Romanticism has...varied over time lol

the german language wikipedia article on him has some good books mentioned on the topic, as well as some books written by the nazis about him, if you'd like some further reading and you can read german academic stuff lol

[drenvs3000w24]

Blog 7: Music in Nature

Birdsong is one of the most enchanting and ubiquitous forms of music found in nature. Across the globe, birds produce a diverse array of melodies, calls, and chirps, each serving unique purposes in communication, mating rituals, and territorial displays. Here's how bird song fits into the broader context of music in nature.

Birdsong is primarily a form of communication among birds. Different species have distinct songs that they use to attract mates, establish territory boundaries, warn of predators, and coordinate group activities. Through their songs, birds convey information about their species, identity, and intentions to other birds in their vicinity. Birdsong is remarkably complex, often featuring intricate patterns of notes, rhythms, and pitches. Some birds, like the nightingale and mockingbird, are renowned for their ability to mimic the songs of other bird species, as well as environmental sounds such as car alarms or human speech. This complexity has long fascinated musicians and scientists alike, inspiring research into the underlying mechanisms of avian vocalization. Birdsong has deep cultural significance in many human societies. Throughout history, people have incorporated bird motifs and melodies into their music, art, and literature as symbols of freedom, beauty, and the natural world. From ancient myths and folk songs to classical compositions and contemporary music, birdsong continues to inspire human creativity and imagination. Birdsong is an integral part of the natural soundscape, contributing to the rich tapestry of sounds heard in forests, meadows, wetlands, and urban environments. The presence or absence of birdsong can signal changes in habitat quality, ecosystem health, and biodiversity. As such, birdwatchers and ornithologists often use birdsong as an indicator of environmental conditions and species diversity. Soothing melodies of birdsong have been shown to have therapeutic effects on human listeners. Studies have found that listening to birdsong can reduce stress, anxiety, and blood pressure, as well as improve mood and cognitive function. As a result, recordings of birdsong are often used in nature-based relaxation therapies, mindfulness practices, and environmental soundscapes.

In summary, bird song represents a fascinating intersection of biology, communication, culture, and music in nature. Its melodious beauty and ecological significance remind us of the interconnectedness of all living beings and the importance of preserving the natural world for future generations to enjoy.

[speaknahuatl]

What is a Multidialectal Nahuatl Language Class?

What is a dialect?

A form of a language that people speak in a particular part of a country or region, containing some different words and grammar, etc.:

-regional dialect: the various regional dialects are still spoken locally.

-in dialect: The poem is written in northern dialect.

What does multidialectal mean?

Using more than one dialect which is a form of a language that people speak in a particular area.

-a multi-dialectal environment.

-it is difficult for newcomers to adapt to the multilingual and multidialectal nature of Mesoamerican Indigenous Languages.

What is a Multidialectal Nahuatl language class?

A multidialectal approach to learning Nahuatl involves considering and respecting the various dialects spoken across Nahuatl-speaking regions, rather than focusing on just one dialect, such as Classical Nahuatl. This approach is in contrast to older methods that primarily focused on CN (Classical Nahuatl), which is more formal and no longer spoken. For this reason, it is not always applicable to everyday conversations.

What about Classical Nahuatl?

In the past and in the present, people believed and still believe that learning CN was and is the ideal way because it's the language in "its purest form" and that it's the "mother dialect." However, that is far from the truth because CN is a central dialect that was compiled under the authority of Spanish friars for the purpose of evangelization (spreading their beliefs). Furthermore, CN is taught as a classical language, as a dead language and the methods used are only for purposes of reading literature thus can also be called Literary Nahuatl. Because of this, it has limitations, as it is not useful in everyday situations, making it difficult to understand and communicate in informal settings.

Does a multidialectal approach mean learning all dialects at the same time?

No. The multidialectal approach to Nahuatl recognizes the language as a diverse collection of dialects that vary based on social, cultural, and geographic contexts. This approach aims to raise students' awareness of the language's diversity, allowing them to learn various dialects starting from one base dialect. It also incorporates differences in word usage, meanings, and regional variations, acknowledging that each region, city, and town has its own unique version of Nahuatl.

How does the multidialectal approach to learning Nahuatl address classroom concerns and challenges?

Implementing the multidialectal approach involves adhering to these principles, addressing common concerns, and overcoming challenges in the classroom. Overall, it provides a more flexible and practical way to learn Nahuatl, tailored to the diverse needs of Nahuatl-speaking communities, language revitalizers, and individuals seeking to reclaim their own dialects.

What We Do

We are a collective of language workers: learners, teachers and revitalizers. Besides teaching and learning, we work in language revitalization projects and offer trilingual translation services: Nahuatl, English & Spanish. To stay up-to-date with our offerings, please go here: https://linktr.ee/speaknahuatl.

Sources

•https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/multidialectal

• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/dialect

• https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/multidialectal

• https://emmatrentman.com/2022/01/14/does-a-multidialectal-approach-mean-teaching-all-of-the-dialects/

• Teachers at Speaknahuatl.com

Instagram Version: https://www.instagram.com/p/C32ki1Ayw4u/?igsh=Mmxxb3owcDl1c3U5

[ultfreakme]

You must be in a tumblr bubble because how have you never seen posts with thousands notes claiming most classical literature is actually fanfiction of bible and the rest is of mythology. Like, this isn’t a hot take on tumblr, unfortunately.

Probably because I have a life outside of tumblr and curate my experience, but yes, I have seen posts about how Paradise Lost is just Bible fanfic and Dante's Inferno is self-insert fanfiction, but mostly from people who watch OSPD videos and say it as a joke. It's a major simplification of about a dozen concepts but okay, if you look at it from the point of definitions, yeah, Paradise Lost & the Divine Comedy are technically fanfiction; they are based on pre-existing work, with Dante there's irl people in scenarios they've never been in, etc etc.

Although I have never seen anyone saying any particular fanfic is a literary masterpiece that must simply be taught in academic settings, which is what that OP's post was actually implying.

And here's the thing; I think fanfic has the potential to be considered a classic. Because, what makes let's say, the Divine Comedy so important? It's not because it's old, but because it struck a nerve among the masses, it did things against the societal structure no one dared to do before, it transformed the Italian language as we know it, it's this carefully, excruciatingly crafted work in terms of sentence structure and is primarily a theological exploration. Now this stands out also because the og canon content, the Bible, is MASSIVE in influence. That thing STILL shapes social norms, conventions and expectations.

No current fanfiction now will ever come to be seen as a true classic unless the canon thing the fic is based on reaches Bible levels of influence on society, which is going to take centuries. Same can be applied to Greek Myths in general(also in both these cases the canon thing is also tied to social structure and religion which large portions of the world follow). We don't want to equate the term 'fanfiction' to that stuff because it feels like it's beyond that but technically, yeah. It's fanfiction.

But the term fanfiction itself is extremely recent, it was said first in 1939 and therefore carries temporal contexts and definitions. It's why it feels juvenile and uncomfortable assigning such a new, and initially frowned-upon term to classics. Being angry about what is and what isn't fanfiction depends entirely upon how you view the term 'fanfiction'.

For me, it is value-neutral and doesn't immediately denote lowered quality these days because at the most fundamental level, fanfiction is literary work based on pre-existing media. But if you add the current cultural context in which fanfiction is primarily written, ie., posted online by anyone and everyone with a desire to write, mostly to fulfill shipping fantasies or certain character scenarios canon didn't provide, then I can see why people would consider giving the label of fanfiction to the classics an insult or "shooting too high".

Maybe 'fanfiction' isn't fitting because of all the social stigma around it, maybe it doesn't apply because it feels like trying to apply modern story beats and terms to ancient mythology. What specifically, is making someone uncomfortable about the term 'fanfiction' on the classics? What the hell even is "fanfiction" in the first place because you could argue that The Song of Achilles is canon-compliant POV change fanfiction but its advertised as a retelling. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies also counts for fic. I think there's a good discussion to be had on what makes "fanfiction" as we know it now what it is because even I think assigning the term to Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost feels wrong. Maybe it's about intent? The classics are written with the need for social change or to make people see things different; art for life's sake. But most fic these days are purely art for art's sake- it is peak self-indulgence and self-expression.

I'm looking it up and people keep narrowing the definition of "fanfiction" as like

Amateur writing

Based on copyrighted characters

Without permission from og creator

Now that whole "copyright" concept complicates things because Romeo & Juliet? Not originally by Shakespeare. Dude borrowed characters from a different play, pretty sure he changed Juliette's name, and he wrote it when the og was only recently made. The concept of "copyright" and "author permission" is also VERY recent. What even counts as actually "amateur" because Van Gogh is considered a pro now but when he was alive he only sold one painting apparently so back then he could've been classified as "amateur"?

I have fully derailed. I forgot what I wanted to say-- Okay yeah I'm aware people say the classics are fanfiction, and in a way, yeah, it is, depending on how the individual defines "fanfiction".

[warblingandwriting]

Books, Capitalism, and Classic Cinema: Why 'You've Got Mail' Sucks So Much

So, I probably haven't mentioned it on this blog before, but I HATE the film You've Got Mail, it only has two good jokes, it fails as a romance, and it to me it also fails completely as a story. But that's not where the majority of my hatred comes from. For that, I have to go back to my beloved 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, the film that You've Got Mail is based on, and all its horrid, wasted potential. I don't know how a story about love during the depression, found family, and the importance of literature became a capitalist screed about the importance of big box bookstores and giving up your personality for love, but by god am I going to talk about it. I have a lot to say about this one, so feel no obligation to come with me on this journey, but I desperately need a rant, so here it goes.

First, I want to talk about The Shop Around the Corner a movie that, if you enjoy romance, you should undoubtedly watch. I have seen and heard a lot of discussions about You've Got Mail, and weirdly I feel like they hardly ever bring this movie up, so I'm going to now. Based on the play The Parfumerie by Miklós László, (as were a couple other films and musicals) The Shop Around the Corner centers on the employees (and owner) of a perfume shop in the play, and a leather shop in the film. I'll focus primarily on the film, as that is obviously where You've Got Mail takes pretty much all of its inspiration, but I like to acknowledge the originals, and The Parfumerie is also a really fun and enjoyable play if you like that sort of thing as well.

Now, the film does a lot to make the entire shop and its employees important, not just the two leads. The opening involves everyone arriving to work, and we get to see their personalities, how they feel about each other, and basically just understand the dynamic of the shop as it exists. It's a long scene, but I just want to include this great moment wherein everyone is disappointed when the closest thing this movie has to a villain shows up:

I think just this moment shows how great the instant understanding of these characters works. Anyway, the plot is pretty simple, and at base, seems at least somewhat similar to the plot of You've Got Mail, the main character, Alfred Kralik, reveals to one of his fellow employees (and friend) that he has been corresponding via letter with a woman he knows nothing about, except for their shared love of literature. A woman coincidentally arrives in the shop around the same time, and gets off on the very wrong foot with Alfred. She's looking for a job, but as it's the depression he says they don't have any openings. When she manages to sell a new product (that Alfred doesn't like or think they should order more of, but the owner loves) the store owner gives her a job on the spot anyway.

They hate each other at first, and it is revealed first to the audience, and then to Alfred that the woman he hates (in this version called Klara Novak) is in fact the same woman he's been corresponding with, and he spends what is basically the final third of the movie trying to get her to love him as Alfred, so that when he ultimately reveals that he is the letter writer she's been waiting for she doesn't immediately brush him off. There is a lot more going on with the other shop employees as well, but I'll save that for more direct comparison.

What I really think is important to understand about this version is that there isn't really a power imbalance (they're both employees at the same shop, and although Alfred has seniority he doesn't have any power over her position there), their arguments throughout the film are primarily petty and funny, when Alfred gets fired, Klara is genuinely sad for him, and their only 'serious' argument is resolved quite quickly, and their relationship pretty much makes sense. In the little we hear of their letters we know they like the same books, admire the same authors, and connect on a pretty deep level, which is why it makes sense that in spite of their contentious real life relationship, they want to make it work anyway when they discover each other's identities.

Also, it contains the best, most accurate scene about working in customer service I have ever seen:

So, what's the problem with You've Got Mail, then? It's about two people who correspond, don't know who each other are, hate when they do meet, but eventually fall in love. They even work at a book shop, which could tie to the already existing literary themes quite well! Well, if you're familiar with either movie you've probably already guessed, they don't work at a bookstore. They own separate competing bookstores. And this change is one of the film's worst. It's creates a weird power-dynamic wherein the male lead (in this film called Joe) is the magnate heir to a Chapters-esque (or for my non-Canadian readers, Barnes and Noble/Waterstones-esque) book store franchise literally putting Kathleen's small, independent bookstore that she inherited from her mother out of business.

But the power dynamic is not the only problem I have with the change. See, as mentioned before the original play was written, and the film set during the great depression. These people are not upper-class owners of stores, the singular owner in the film owns a small independent store that he shows up to work and sell at, just like the other employees. Therefore, I think this change sort of thematically neuters the story as well. With lines like 'if they're really your friends, they come over after dinner' financial struggle hangs over these characters heads, and while nothing really comes of it in the story (meaning, no one suddenly strikes it rich, although the shop does have particularly good sales around Christmas) it makes the characters feel real and relatable. And I know relatability is not the be all end all of storytelling, but it was something of an anomaly at the time, that made it stand out, and makes it so fun to watch. That 'this could happen to you' feeling that doesn't come out of other films of the era (films like Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story, Born Yesterday, and My Favourite Wife all feature wealthy characters, even if ultimately they conclude that wealth itself is empty).

The film was still selling fantasy, but it selling a fantasy of romance and of and community between the workers, not wealth and power. And perhaps worse, You've Got Mail wants to have it both ways, Joe Fox's aging, lecherous father finds wealth empty until he runs off with a woman, Joe's original girlfriend (who I'll get to a bit later) is considered shallow because of her concerns with wealth. It almost feels like it's setting up an ending wherein Joe relinquishes his ownership of the chain store, and revives Kathleen's mom and pop shop to run it with her... but instead she gets hired on to work at his more corporate store. It feels like you're watching romance about Jeff Bezos that concludes with the love interest deciding to work at an amazon warehouse!

I’ll admit it’s a bit nitpicky, but merely adding wealth to the equation changes the entire tone of the story for me, and undoes a lot of the movie’s truly interesting and unique features, and it breaks my heart a little to see those features gone.

The other dynamic that I’m sad to lose is the camaraderie and community of the other characters. In the 1940 film everyone working at the shop feels real, as I mentioned above. The film’s primary subplot is about the store owner’s wife having an affair, and how that affects him and the dynamic of the shop. In the end it turns out that the guy everyone already hates was having the affair, he gets fired, and things look up for the people in the shop. You’ve Got Mail does sort of try to create a similar plot line with Joe’s father, but it’s just about him having a romance with a much younger woman. Somehow this movie from 1998 is more sexist than its 1940 counterpart.

Really, the only characters who matter in You’ve Got Mail are Joe and Kathleen, which isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself, but I think the basic plot loses a lot of heart when it loses the characters around the leads. The romance itself is actually rather simple, which is part of what makes it so great. So, to fill this void (other than using pointless subplots) You’ve Got Mail complicates things.

You see, unlike a lot of other romantic comedies The Shop Around Corner deftly avoids having the leads in relationships at the beginning of the story. They are two single people who connect via the post, and don’t meet out of nerves, and don’t get together right away (the alleged problem that plagues the modern romcom) because they dislike each other in person. It’s actually a really perfect plot, and one that I think could genuinely be modernized well. But in You’ve Got Mail both of the leads are in other relationships for seemingly no reason (plot-wise). Both have break-ups that pretty much mean nothing, with their partners that it seems like they hate anyway. I want to complain about it, but it feels like such a nothing part of the movie I can’t even really think of any issues with it. It could have been removed and the movie would be pretty much the exact same, so I have no clue why they even bothered including those characters. Their break-ups aren’t at all dramatic (Kathleen’s partner agrees that their break-up has been a long time coming, and Joe’s is so drunk I’m not sure she noticed what happened), and it’s not like the relationships give them a more compelling reason not to meet their online pen-pals, I’d think the dangers of meeting some stranger from the internet would be enough.

And now, finally, what really cinches the issues for me; the romance itself. Unlike in the older film, we actually do get a fair amount of voiceover about what exactly is in these emails. And it’s bad. They don’t seem to like each other over email or in person, making it all the more difficult to get on board with their relationship. I mean, Joe ruins Kathleen’s family business! I try not to focus on that too much because I feel that aspect has kind of been talked to death, but that fact means that their online connection needs to feel incredible, not Kathleen disparaging Joe for making a Godfather reference. It just doesn’t seem strong enough to pull through the anguish he clearly causes her. You know how I mentioned above in the original film basically the entire final third of the movie is Alfred trying to make good with Klara so she won’t outright reject him when he reveals to her that he wrote the letters? The important thing here is that we see them interact, we see them connect in real life. You’ve Got Mail, in adding the competing book businesses plot, I guess just doesn’t have enough time for it, and we see it all in montage. At the end, when Kathleen says ‘I so hoped it was you’ we don’t even know why. Why does she hope it’s this guy who has ruined her life? I would have liked to see them together more, hear what conversations they were actually having while music plays over a restaurant with them laughing, but because of the structure of the story we don’t get that.

Taking out the heart of the shop that they work at together I think means that it becomes necessary to show them falling in love in a different way than in the shop (because it doesn’t exist). And I guess montage was the best they had. We do a get a little dialogue between songs, but their Big Argument is so big it overshadows everything else about the movie, and makes the writers feel out of touch. It’s not just about their built up resentment, as it is in The Shop Around the Corner it’s about a very real problem, a woman losing her job, her livehood, and in a metaphorical way, her mother. It makes the whole thing just a bit too impossible to believe.

And to be clear, I would love to see a modern version of this film, I think it could really work! I actually like the idea of them meeting over the internet, and I think there is new material to be mined from such a fruitful set up. The musical also based on The Shop Around the Corner had a mildly successful revival on broadway in 2016, and I found it really charming and fun. But alas, until someone lets me make my discord-based version about a pretension grad student who works at a small bookstore to fund their studies, and learns from the plucky owner how to appreciate ‘low brow’ literature just as much as the ‘high brow’ stuff they’re studying I’ll probably never see it.

[gourmetpunk]

Just finished reading Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (the whole book) today and it got me thinking some things. I think I was already aware of it, but her articulation of the weird separation between form and content in art and her subsequent quest to try and get critics to conceive of (almost) everything in terms of “style” (in which content is a part of form) has helped me to define some of my own positions on different media a bit better.

Notably, I’ve always talked about how I have pretty radically different tolerances for snobbery depending on the medium of art I’m discussing: I have strong biases towards classical literature and against modern literature, but an even stronger bias towards “modernist/postmodern” literature that tends to fall somewhere in between those two (say between the late 18th and late 20th centuries); by contrast, I have an extreme bias against most forms of classical music, am relatively OK with “classical tradition modernism” and am most interested by far in modern pop music (dating from around 1920 to present). Other biases of mine include a general even appreciation for movies from all different eras and “brows” (though a slight preference toward what might be called more “highbrow”), a much more enthusiastic bias towards “modernist/postmodern” visual art than classical, and a scattershot critical appreciation for video games from different eras (video games are way too new to truly have a “classical” era, of course, and even movies are the same way to an extent - I’ll get to that in a minute).

I think a lot of this can be explained by my own understanding of the form and content (and by extension, “style”) present in each of those mediums. Music, for example, is primarily a formal medium, with content secondary to the form in most cases, if it is prominent or present at all - certainly most classical music is virtually content-free in my view. Not only do I find the form of modern pop music much more interesting (with its effectively accelerated version of the “theme-and-variation” principle in classical and the additional influence of rhythm-based African music), I also note that the second half of the 20th century saw pop music taking on more and more content than classical music ever had, even as it remained secondary to the music. This makes it more interesting and compelling to me than the classical canon in terms of both form and content. The avant-garde that stems from both the “post-/modernist” classical tradition and from jazz (which, remember, is just an extension of pop/folk ideas) interests me mainly because of its breaks from the conventions of classical and pop, though I don’t always find it successfully interesting in these breaks.

My preference for older literature, however, stems partly from the fact that I see both form and content as both ever-present and ever-prominent in literary history and that I see both as stagnating increasingly within the last 40-ish years. Literature has tended to carry a pretty equal weight of form and content (with the balance shifting across different eras, cultures, movements, etc., but I think it comes out fairly even), and so I see it as important for a literary work to pay serious attention to one or both of these aspects. I do, however, tend towards a preference for formal development, and that’s probably why I favor the modernist era especially, which might have been one of the most exciting periods of formal experimentation in literary history (that I’m aware of, at least). So it’s not like it’s a perfect downward trending curve here; I might characterize my interest in (most) literature throughout the ages as slowly ramping up from like early history until the 19th century (a lot of this stuff being more of historical interest to me than genuinely enjoyable), at which point it starts to peak heading into the early 20th century, then crashing at the end of that same century. I hope to be proven wrong on this some day with a burst of either new or previously-unknown-to-me authors managing to revive the artistic spirit of this medium. A couple have been promising so far.

Movies and visual art are things I know much less about in terms of form. I tend to feel incredibly stupid hearing people discuss interpretations of art in these mediums, so whatever opinions I have on them I would advise anyone to take with an even larger grain of salt than my opinions on music and literature. But I suspect my preferences in these mediums come out the way they do has to do with a) my ignorance of them, and b) in the case of visual art in particular, my boredom with classical visual aesthetics that continue to dominate our modern culture in a way that classical literary aesthetics do not (but classical music still does a little bit, which also explains my reaction to it as described above). The content of movies tends to be a lot more obvious to me than of painting as well, and the repetitive (and often obvious) subject matter of a lot of classical painting also does it no favours in my eyes, though I can appreciate the formal variations to an extent.

I probably drift a little towards the “highbrow” in movies for reasons that also might help explain my taste in video games: both media are really too young to have had true “classical periods” in the ways that music, literature and visual art have, and thus the content of both tends towards the obvious, melodramatic and underdeveloped more often than not - both are far more interesting to me in terms of their form than their content. Seeing as “highbrow” movies tend to emphasize formal qualities over those of content, they tend appeal to me slightly more - but only slightly. Because (and I think this is also true of video games) I also see (or think I see - remember, I’m not good at visual aesthetics, so this is kind of just conjecture) a lot of craft being put into the form of non-highbrow movies as well, and thus I can appreciate all kinds of different movies. What this actually means is that a lot of my favourite movies would be considered “middlebrow” - case in point, my favourite of all time remains The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen.

And video games, well, I’ve pretty much said it already: they’re too young to have a classical period to react against and even more immature in movies in terms of content. Unlike music, content is more important alongside form in video games, so I often find myself trying to find at least something to appreciate in that realm if I find a game to be formally compelling - some of the most successful in overall style have been Outer Wilds, Celeste and The Talos Principle. You might note that these are all pretty recent, and I do happen to believe that a lot of the best recent video games are better than the “best” of the older ones; this is partly because video games face a challenge inherent in their medium that almost no other medium faces: the technological barrier. In the time of, say, Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (which, by the way, I do count as being a great game still, more for form than for content - Majora’s Mask is the reverse), something like Outer Wilds was basically unthinkable to create with the technology available then. That being said, this also has something to do with the fact that the democratization of game-making technology and the indie game boom of the 2010s has also helped refine both content and form in games even more than technological advancements; where games’ plots, aesthetics and gameplay previously had to be filtered through several layers or corporate market testing before, rogue developers can now go wild with their most experimental impulses. We have just lived through (and are perhaps still living through) what might have been the second great period of artistic advancement for video games as a medium, and it’s an exciting time! But this doesn’t mean I have no love at all for the “classics”, insofar as they exist as a canon. Some older games, though in need of tweaking to play in an enjoyable form today, have actually held up incredibly well on a formal level, and some were even ahead of their time in content, too. I have many more opinions about the way in which the current trend of “remastering” classic video games often alters these games as individual works of art in a way that is fundamentally different from restoring movies, books, or “remastering” musical albums, but that’s for another essay altogether.

Ironically, I just mentioned that I should read Pierre Bourdieu in my last post, who I know would probably write all of this off as attempts to justify that tastes common to the class I occupy that I have unconsciously reproduced. I’ll have to read that book in full to see if there’s a more nuanced argument there than that, but I suspect I would disagree. That is also, however, a matter for another essay, and I feel like I’ve done enough taste-justification here already. Sorry.

[thebreakfastgenie]

there are people who get real mad at this idea, but shipping IS one of my biggest points of engagement with fandom, and i will almost certainly like something more if i'm invested in either a canonical relationship or something with subtext i can sink my teeth into. it doesn't mean my enjoyment is shallow, it just means that i find the relationships between characters compelling, lol, i don't know why people have started acting like this is weird

My thoughts about this are too complex for an agree or disagree.

I have been, in various fandoms, primarily engaged via shipping, primarily engaged without shipping, and equally engaged in shipping and non-shipping content. I definitely don't need a canonical relationship or something with subtext to get interested, if other things about the material are interesting. I would not say I'm more likely to get interested in something that has shipping potential. But I do really love relationships.

I think shipping-focused enjoyment can be shallow. It most certainly is not always. But, you know, there are people who hop from fandom to fandom, focused exclusively on the popular ship, and, most importantly, the fics are carbon copies. They use the same stock narratives whether it fits the specific characters and dynamic or not. And I think people whose enjoyment is shallow and who don't ship aren't really in fandom spaces. There is definitely also a sense of following the leader; people who get onboard with the popular ship based more on other people's fanworks than on the source material. So the shallow stuff gets associated unfairly with shippers.

I find relationships between characters compelling too, but shipping is something more specific than that. To be clear, I like shipping! But it's a specific way of engaging with media that can be very reductive and limiting if you never look outside of it. I've seen takes that are just... why are people engaging with this piece of media via shipping?? I mean, like, literature, classic movies, etc. And you can even analyze homoerotic subtext without a shipping lens/shipping language.

I would say I disagree that people have started acting like this is weird. My observation has been that when I started fandom when fanfiction was even less socially acceptable than it is now, the outside perception was that it was all about shipping/porn and fandom was pushing back against that. In recent years it seems the tables have turned and now the popular opinion is leaning into "yes, this is all about shipping/porn." That I cannot stand. Shipping is good. Explicit fic is good. There is no shame in these things. But that's not what all of fic is. I like shipping, I also like gen fic and fic that contains ships but isn't shipping focused. I'm sick of unrelatable memes that reduce all of fic to waiting for two characters to kiss. Casefic and gen fic used to be popular categories! I barely see them anymore. Meta used to be a much more popular form of content, too. So any recent pushback against shipping-as-primary-engagement in my opinion is probably reactionary.

Shipping as the default does bug me. Especially when not just shipping, but a particular popular ship becomes the default for an entire fandom. I do make a distinction between canon and non-canon ships here, though. Canon ships are part of the source.

The thing about engaging primarily through shipping is it turns every story into a love story and some stories aren't. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I just want other options. I've been avoiding talking about MASH but I think it's a good example, here. It has, all things considered, very little in the way of romance or ship tease between main characters. The only canon pairings by the end involve side characters. So if all the fic is ship-focused, it seems out of sync with the source material to me, and I look for fic because I want more of the source material.

So I guess the tl;dr is I think there are legitimate criticisms of the way shipping dominates fandoms, but also shipping is popular for a reason and it's fun and I like it, and the problem is not shipping in and of itself or individual fans who like to engage via shipping.

[omniri-photonia]

some more words on Goth,

Contrary to common misconception, Goth isn't just spooky punk. Punk is part aesthetic but mostly ideology. Goth is a cousin fs, but it's primarily aesthetic, not like internet a e s t h e t i c but Aesthetic with a capital A, meaning the philosophical ponderances of what is beauty? what is taste? what does it mean? what can it mean?

and it is a generally music based subculture, but if you don't like Goth music... well, opinions diverge, but, i would say that it's more than music. Like even Johnny Cash is goth-adjacent, but if you are at least historically familiar with Goth music, you can defend yourself when people whine about Real vs Costume Goth, which they have been doing since at least the 90s.

Goth subculture is like if you took a seed of punk influence with a dash of Glam Rock and art-studented it. Goths from the start were more about both drama and theatrics and also Feeling Ways, about Stuff.

Frequently this does lead to antifascist antiracist kinds of ideas, because those are reasonable conclusions of critically engaging with the world, but it's not a flash card with bullet points.

Goths did a lot of critical engagement, and are notorious for challenging gender norms etc. Cultural influences include lots of literature, from Beat shit to classic mythology to philosophy and especially Gothic literature, which is very much concerned with supernatural stuff and the strange and mysterious, and Goth likes to try and find beauty in the strange and mysterious, and the darkness in life and the darkness in ourselves.

It rose out of the club scene, so is no more profound than kids trying to be cool and find connection with one another, and no less profound... and there is much profundity in that.

Most human art is about finding connection, and chasing connection and mystery and may have very well lead us to be explorers searching for whatever is over the next hill.

An emblematic Goth work is Sandman, and i would say @neil-gaiman , is goth-adjacent, but the dread queen of contemporary internet goth is probably @gothiccharmschool Jillian Venters, who has been there for decades of babybats through her work with Gothic Charm School, and she'd probably say there is no right or wrong way to be Goth.

Noted.

[inthemirrordorkly2]

I got the free trial so you don't have to. Here's a paragraph-by-paragraph summary of the article and all included links (some of those links are also paywalled though):

Professor Nicholas Dames has taught Lit Hum (Literature Humanities) at Columbia University since 1998. He notes that in the past decade, his students feel overwhelmed by the prospect of reading multiple books a semester. Other professors have noticed the same.

Dames is shocked when a student tells him that she has never before been required to read an entire book for a class; her high school only assigned excerpts, poetry, and new articles.

Dames realizes that students simply don't know how to approach reading a full book. Link 1, Atlantic article "Why kids aren't falling in love with reading"

Quote from Martha Maxwell “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames acknowledges that it's common for people to go "kids these days?!?!" Are kids today actually worse at reading books?

Dames does think his students are worse at reading, as his students 20 years ago could read long classics like Crime and Punishment and Pride and Prejudice. Students are slower and also struggle to balance paying attention to small details with paying attention to the plot.

There's no data on this trend, but the author has spoken to 33 professors at various universities who corroborate Dames' opinion. One professor says his students struggle to focus on sonnets.

Link 2, Atlantic article "End the Phone-Based Childhood Now" Teenagers are always on their phones and are distracted. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped. (No studies are cited for those statistics)

Link 3, Atlantic article "The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books" Link 4, New York Times article "English Class in Common Core Era: ‘Tom Sawyer’ and Court Opinions" Common Core and No Child Left Behind emphasized standardized test scores, leading more schools to teach to the test; teachers now teach short passages to mimic the style of standardized testing.

There's no way to measure long-form reading stamina; teachers have stopped assigning classic books. Links 5 & 6 of My Antonia and Great Expectations.

Link 7, Education Week article and survey "How to Build Students’ Reading Stamina." Of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. Nearly a quarter say books are not the center of their curricula. Link 8, bookshop link the The Odyssey. More anecdotes from teachers about how students are reading fewer books and more excerpts with other types of media included in the curriculum.

Private schools still read more books, but the shift away from whole texts is happening in private schools as well.

The issue at elite universities is different from the literacy issues at community colleges and nonselective universities. Students can still decide sentences, spell, etc, but they still have short attention span and aren't as ambitious as previous generations of students.

Many college professors have dealt with this by also relaxing their standards and assigning fewer texts. Link 9, bookshop link to The Iliad

An American literature professor at Columbia, Andrew Delbanco, now teaches excerpts and short stories instead of full texts in some of his classes. Links 10 & 11 to bookshop pages for Moby Dick and "Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories"

Columbia has trimmed its reading list, which to be fair, has grown in recent years. The program's chair, Joseph Howley, says he'd rather students focus on reading in depth.

Some professors don't believe that shortening their reading lists will solve the issue, as current students are more focused on their job prospects than in the past.

Both enrollments in the humanities and students' time spent reading are declining, possibly due to the same factors. Link 12, Harvard student life survey. Students spend nearly as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as on academics. Link 13, Harvard 2020-2022 grade report, showing that 79% of grades were As for that school year.

Students today are reading fewer books. Older adults have always read more books than younger adults, but fewer people overall are reading books for fun. Some professors report that students see reading novels as a retro activity.

The economic survival of literary magazines like the Atlantic hinges on people reading, but reading is also important for helping people build empathy for those different than them.

Link 14, NPR article on deep reading. Short form works don't allow for the empathy that long-form works do.

Paragraph OP screenshot; students say their favorite books are Percy Jackson instead of Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. (There are links to all 3 of these but I'm tired and y'all know how to look up books. Maybe I'm the problem with this generation lmao)

Author light-heartedly opines that while the Percy Jackson books have merit, they aren't a replacement for reading all of The Iliad.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/

2. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/nyc-schools-stopped-teaching-books/678675/

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/20/nyregion/english-class-in-common-core-era-nonfiction-joins-the-classics.html

5. https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-antonia-introduction-by-jane-smiley-willa-cather/396405?ean=9780525562863

6. https://bookshop.org/p/books/great-expectations-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition-charles-dickens/11702080?ean=9780143106272

7. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-to-build-students-reading-stamina/2024/01

8. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-odyssey-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition-homer/15509341?ean=9780140268867

9. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-iliad-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition-revised-homer/15279783?ean=9780140275360

10. https://bookshop.org/p/books/moby-dick-or-the-whale-herman-melville/18595562?ean=9780142437247

11. https://bookshop.org/p/books/billy-budd-bartleby-and-other-stories-herman-melville/9364272?ean=9780143107606

12. https://features.thecrimson.com/2023/senior-survey/academics/

13. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/5/faculty-debate-grade-inflation-compression/

14. https://www.npr.org/2024/04/30/1196979151/how-to-practice-deep-reading

Ppl on the other hellsite losing their minds over this in every imaginable direction lmao