#romanticism chats

[lesamis]

hi! I saw your posts about Orra and Joanna Baillie, and after reading her for a class I’m flabbergasted how she hasn’t come up before. Her work in Gothic Terror is fascinating, and I love Orra as a protagonist(I think she would have loved movies, rest in peace :( ). I want to give her a blanket and a nap. I don’t have many coherent thoughts at the moment, but wanted to share the love about this play. I hope you have a great day!

ahh i'm so excited you enjoyed orra! i agree, baillie is not taught nearly enough, her plays are so readable and so current. and i love that you mention movies, because to me baillie always feels like a script writer manquée - so many of her thoughts on drama and emotion would translate well to screen.

thank you for writing in, it's always lovely to hear from people just discovering her! :')

[chicago-geniza]

[Romy Schneider in the 1958 Mädchen in Uniform remake voice] Schiller was closest to Goethe

[blushlyn]

just because something has smut doesn’t make it a romance, enjoying something that contains “red flag” content doesn’t make someone a bad person

praising yourself for only reading “good” queer romances is weird, especially when you put down others who read things with problematic characters/actions

[asterdeer]

thinking about all the verbal (and, at least once in the books, physical) abuse from regis that richard just reacted to, then apparently absorbed and moved on from. and then when he literally sets regis’s entire building on fire — on purpose, for revenge — he still expects regis to go “oh well, i’ll let bygones be bygones, lets get out of here and start over.” which is. not what happens. how conditioned to just…….. getting over abuse do you have to be to set your boss’s building on fire on purpose and then be surprised when he’s angry and vindictive about it

[7weaslesinacoat]

maturing is reading a dark romance book and feeling like someones touching you without consent.

[ureverygirltome]

why am I blushing kicking my feet cuz he said hed really like to see me again 😐 like girl its not that crazy...

[todayisafridaynight]

mine and aoki should be put in a room for ten minutes because i want mine to make it clear he wanted to join the yakuza for brotherhood and Family and i want aoki to seethe and rage and pop a blood vessel

[akindplace]

Hi! About the Taylor album…it’s tongue-in-cheek. Joe Alwyns group chat was called “The Tortured Man Club”, so the album is “The Tortured Poets Department” in reference to egotistical romanticization of the self in that image. It’s not because she’s calling herself a Tortured Poet.

Yes! I wasn't aware of that group chat thing, but I thought it was going to be about how some men she dated have those "tortured artist" vibes, and maybe how some people criticize her for making sad songs about her exes. It feels very obvious but some people just act in bad faith. Thank you for telling me that anon! I like her music, and I have a very broad music taste, and I have a huge distaste over people being overly critical and not letting people enjoy things... it's so 2010 tumblr when people would call each other posers for not being a true fan of an unknown band, instead of, you known, allowing people to enjoy it and get the band more recognition. It's so immature. It's kind of obvious it was going to be tongue-in-cheek as you said, and realizing that is so easy that people don't even have to like her songs to notice it, so that thing was written in bad faith, coming from a biased notion by someone who never left 2010 while at the same time glorifying mental illness and addiction. It's the worst take possible on every artist mentioned... what about their art? their writing? their songs? they lived meaningful lives and changed the world forever, that's what mattered most. Not their deaths. Their lives!

Thank you for the message!

[macfrog]

I would just like to say that clm is one of my top favorite reads on this app ever, and discovering you and your work has been a blessing during this time in my life. I just graduated college and am struggling with feeling so lost, confused, and absolutely bored to tears, but your writing has reignited my own love for writing. I’ve worked on pieces before but I’ve never had the courage to post them, let alone finish them. Because of you, I have actually taken up rewriting a few of my stories. I’m thinking about posting my writing for the first time soon as well :) who knew a fandom could lead to something as magical as this? ily max! keep being amazing <3

wooop congrats on graduating!!! that’s an amazing achievement, and you should be super proud of yourself. i’m proud of ya, kid 😘

the period immediately after graduating is really fucking weird, because you’ve just spent all this time and energy focusing on this one goal, then it’s just…all over and done with. in the blink of an eye. all of a sudden you're pushed off into the world and you have all this potential and all these possibilities and you’re expected to know what to do with it all - instantly. but it’s okay to not know!

try to see it like that scene from night at the museum - you know when ben stiller’s like i have no idea what i’m gonna do tomorrow and robin williams is like how exciting!!!!! like yeah, dude. revel in the confusion. enjoy the freedom of not knowing what to do. lean into the boredom and figure out what you really want, then go fuckin get it. be poetic about it lol

and yay for picking writing back up!!! have fun with it! i hope i see something you’ve written on here sometime soon 🩵

[townofcrosshollow]

The one sided intimacy of zooming in on somebody's artwork and seeing the individual brush strokes, the stippling of the background, the subtle texture you'd never notice that they went to great pains to add. Seeing the pixel size of their pen, which lines are stabilized and which are drawn loose and raw, the little bump where one solid stroke connects to another in an attempt to look seamless. The patches where their shading was detailed and from reference, and the patches where they lapsed into that primal artist's intuition. You see every tiny gap in their lineart and wonder if it was made with a single absentminded stroke of the pen, or if they agonized over that gap. You wonder how much of their time they've given to this creation, and in turn to you.

[lesamis]

Do you have any poems or POC poets you'd recommend that aren't Capital R romantic but very well could be ?

hi anon! sorry for a much longer and less helpful answer than you were likely hoping for: i think this is a pretty difficult question.

if we tried to list all the reasons we think of the romantics as a Movement, as a Moment of Literary History, we might just end up with a lot of cultural markers that are inseperable from, well, from them being white, and often english, and often male individuals who lived in the metropole of the world's most rapidly expanding empire. they wrote about liberty and about the sublime they saw in a gust of wind and about the darker depths of the human soul. i think they did this from a place of genuine curiosity and emotion, but also from a very deep-seated (and, i think, often subliminal) belief in their own superiority - as white men; as englishmen; as men. so it wouldn't be an entirely neutral thing for me to sort poets of colour into this tradition in an uncomplicated way, because it skirts close to erasing the facets of white supremacy that shaped romanticism as we think of it now. but they're important to acknowledge: romantic poetry would not be romantic poetry if it didn't frame the british countryside as the most civilized space in the world, or didn't argue in deeply paternalistic and racist terms for the abolition of slavery.

none of this is to say that there were no writers of colour then (of course there were!) or that there are no writers of colour now who consider romantic poetry an important reference for their own work (of course there are!). of the latter category there are probably an endless number, because british romantic poetry is so overblown in syllabi across the world thanks to colonialism. it's the first kind of poetry in english many of us run into. its influence gets everywhere, which makes it even harder to distill any recommendations for you because it's hard to say where a, like, standard Education Conducted In English ends and a Romantic Influence begins.

sorry for all of the above, anon, this question honestly disjointed me a bit. i'm sorry the answer is such a cop-out. the most recent poem by a poet of colour that made me think of the romantics is Morning Prayer With Rat King by kaveh akbar. it's incredible. i hope you'll like it a lot. whether there's actually romanticism in it or not is for smarter people than me to figure out.

[tokagrem]

I had the realization recently that i might be homoromantic bisexual and its fucked me up real good

[rozecrest]

race as we experience it isn’t one-to-one applicable to any of fatt’s settings (with the exception of bluff city) but good god do the austin walker black npcs hit

[casualclassical]

my mom: I don't really like Polonaises. me: NO! NO!! TAKE THAT BACK!!! NOOOO!!!!!

[chokyolate]

Why do teenagers like to write r@pe fanfics like at my school the younger grades have to write stories currently and i've read some of the ideas, half of them are stories about kidnapping and r@pe. I would rather have 10 year olds in sephora than an army of Colleen Hoovers.

[anaalnathrakhs]

my parents have guests over so we’re going to the restaurant, okay, and there’s whipped cream on my dessert, so i arrange with somebody who already has whipped cream on his that he takes mine, like, i transfer mine to his plate, and his wife just goes like “i’ll help you” and digs HER spoon in and takes some from what’s still in my plate. which. alright okay i guess i wasn’t gonna eat that. but then she goes for seconds with the same spoon she ate from. and later on she goes back for thirds in my vanilla ice cream and goes “oh i thought it was whipped cream” when i politely remind her that this is MY goddamn plate. and like. bitch. i never even said YOU could take the fucking whipped cream or touch my plate with your fucking spoon. stay in your lane. you’re over 60 years old. i’ve seen you for like 48h in my entire life. grow up.