#war and peace my beloved

[queenlucythevaliant]

📚 A song or album you could write a term paper on

I think I could write a fantastic paper on Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 as an adaptation of War and Peace. That would be super fun. A lot of the lyrics are pulled directly from Tolstoy's text, but I have thoughts about which lines are used and which are left behind, who gets what narration, which scenes and characters and details stay, characterization, etc. Also translation thoughts, in spite of the fact that I don't speak Russian. I have read a fair bit about how Tolstoy reads in the original languages and different translation philosophies, and I have Thoughts about how that translates to Dave Malloy's very distinctive style of music.

If you want a specific song, I think it would be cool to write about "No One Else," not only because I sang it for a voice recital once (wearing my fur-edged Tolstoy coat and pearls, yes it was awesome) but also because the passage it pulls from comes a lot earlier in the book than the rest of the events being adapted.

In the book, Andrei is there under the window listening to Natasha exclaim to Sonya about the moon and she doesn't realize that he's listening. Yet it's a really significant night for Andrei in terms of his love for Natasha. I think it's really interesting and beautiful how Malloy weaves text from the window scene into a song about Natasha missing Andrei and the (almost sort of implicit) dimension that it gives to their relationship for those who haven't read the book. I remember explaining/gushing about all of this to my voice teacher while I was preparing the piece, so I definitely think I could get a good ten pages out of "No One Else" alone. Probably a darn thesis on Great Comet as a whole, although I'm never gonna have time/reason/academic position to wrote it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[alicentwhore]

Where is Duty? Where is Sacrifice?

Alicent Hightower & Sonya Rostova

House of the Dragon / War & Peace (1972 TV Series) / War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

[martianbugsbunny]

there's no way Omega didn't eventually spend some time with the ghost crew and their assorted family friends during the rebellion, partly bc the second her and Hera found out each other was fighting they would've burned down the galaxy for some gal pal hours and partly bc the second Rex and Omega found out each other was fighting they would kill to catch up with each other's lives

[lobotomy-jpeg]

Hi there @appleflavoredkitkats 👀

I am your malloysical secret Santa, happy holidays!~ I hope you like this🥺💛

[id: Digital painting of Natasha Rostova fr great comet. She is sitting on a chair, looking at the viewer, wearing her white dress. She is holding an envelope. /end id]

[stevethehairington]

my favorite genre of fic is retired and fixing up a house together

[anotherfandomtrash]

certified yuri post

[barnes-and-noble-official]

Princess Maria Nikolaevna Bolkonskaya they'll never make me hate you

[foolbo]

spencer reid read the entirety war and peace in its original russian in one morning but cant read a pretty simply worded ransom note in russian without someone translating it for him

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Not me out here still craving snuggle comfort vibes after having written it twice XD I need to go to bed, good grief lol

[daisyachain]

Different languages have different structures. Different languages have had their vocabulary assembled by different patterns of trade, migration, economic or political expediency. Within each language there are ways of expressing nuance that are either unique to said language or are at least distinct from other languages/families.

Therefore, you can argue that one type of good prose in any language is prose which uses the full breadth of what that language can offer. Some people, as a counterexample, do believe that good prose is direct and so easily registered that it dissolves the layer between reader and writing. One idea of good prose is that the language presents so little of a barrier that the reader can instantly perceive the events of the narrative and focus on the meaning behind the arrangement of those events as the writing, rather than the transmission of that arrangement.

I believe that good prose is prose that uses a language to its limit. English, for example, is able to communicate with relatively few words compared to a Romance language and with a large variety of correct or near-correct sentence structures. The best English writing, accordingly, is writing which uses this flexibility of structure (the ability to build the same sentence with varying levels of length and complexity) to create a palatable rhythm in the text. Alternately, to use this accordion-like property to vary the pacing of a text. English writers can use long, drawn-out structures to slow down, or gradually transition to a direct and choppy subject-verb-object as suits them.

Wolfe, Jacques, and Pratchett are three examples of this type of prose that I’ll (non-academically) put forth from what I’ve read and what I like.

Wolfe stretches English vocabulary to its limit, drawing on obscure words or words with more varied origins to hide certain elements of his stories from the reader without actually breaking the flow of the text. A ‘destrier’ on Earth is an old war horse. A ‘destrier’ on Urth is a fanged clawed huge and poisonous creature ridden into battle. ‘Destrier’ signals that functions like a horse, while the use of an unfamiliar word also signals that it’s not a horse, otherwise we’d just call it a horse.

Wolfe also used sentence structures to hide information. I can’t call to mind an example right now, but he seems to be fond of garden path sentences that need to be read twice or three times to fully get what’s happened. Right—the old woman in The Wizard Knight. One character refers to an old woman in a scene offhand using a familiar structure (I think it’s a list?) when no old woman was previously mentioned. The list structure begs a third option, to round out two options with ‘and _____’ is a natural form of speaking. The sentence slips by before you notice that it doesn’t add up with the rest of the story. He uses the instinctive form of the language to hide information where it doesn’t immediately jump out.

Jacques’ use of language has a more straightforward explanation: he was originally writing Redwall for children at a school for the blind, so he deliberately integrated sensory imagery that most sighted authors eschew. The evocative style that developed from this initial decision renders the Redwall stories far more intensely than the fairy-tale narrative structure would imply. Where folk stories and fairy tales tend to be told concisely from a distance, summarizing events in a few simple-to-grasp beats, Redwall zooms in on the minor details to produce a feel more in line with epics or chivalric romances. I was about to write a line about how the constant feast descriptions serve a function similar to the ox butchery and sacrifice in the Iliad, but that’s getting off course and into an area I know even less about. Anyway. Redwall plays English to the hilt by constructing scenes from olfactory, gustatory, tactile, auditory elements rather than the visual shorthand we use. These details render its events more relatable and thus more real than the minimal fairy tale narration that we’d expect to use for its events, giving it some extra punch.

Then, Pratchett doesn’t so much play with the limits of English sentence structure as with its specific etymology. The constant puns are reliant wholly on English and specifically English vocab, to the extent where Pratchett translators are considered experts/celebrities/co-authors in their native language. His books are comedies and thus often hinge on British English wordplay jokes—the law/the lore—or cultural references that don’t make much sense outside an Anglophone context.

Another trick of his with English is the use of word pairs outside of common/acceptable/literary uses. I’m thinking of the quotation from Jingo about stars that ‘drill’ down. Anglo (quite probably more widespread than Anglo ) cultural associations with stars are about lightness, brilliance, ethereal. The word ‘drill’ implies weight, grit, industrial grime antithetical to a star—BUT—stars are often compared to diamonds, while diamond-bit drills are a common-knowledge piece of machinery. He connects two seemingly disparate concepts of star and drill with an invisible linkage that wouldn’t be present if any other word than ‘drill’ had been used. ‘Pound’, ‘hammer’, ‘pierce’, ‘nail’, ‘screw’ all would communicate the same idea on the surface, and none of them would achieve the same impact.

With all that said: I like it when authors engage with the history, structure, vocabulary unique to their own language. I think it’s good prose and I think that more authors should at least try it, to see what they can do.

However:

English is also a universal language used for the most functional of communications in business/workplace contexts around the world. I live in an anglophone country where 50% of my direct coworkers speak English at a B/A-level, one of whom is a bit of a cultural aficionado and widely well-read (in Farsi) while also being a guy who has to take some time getting precise technical meaning out of an email written in conversational English.

In the most common everyday written communication, business emails, it does a disservice to the recipient to try and play with words. It wastes your time and the recipient’s by forcing people to jump through arbitrary hoops just to say: please rerun the calculation at +10C and send me the pressure drop results. Plus, if there’s any room for misunderstanding, something could overpressure and blow up. There’s no reason and no excuse to try and execute Prose in the course of your workplace duties. English specifically as an international, interlinguistic standard form of communication needs to be as direct and simplistic as possible.

So then, if it should and must be used in as simple a form as possible to ensure accessibility, where can its lesser-known use cases be brought out or shown off? Idk man. English as a self-contained language with its own identity and English as a colonial lingua franca whose use/elaboration is a constant reminder of the imperialist hierarchy coexist, and I def can’t say how to unpick one from the other

[ukulelegodparent]

Pierre is also just one of the characters ever. Idealistic confused idiot I love him so much. 'I am deeply unhappy and I have a ton of money and I don't see the point in anything so I must join the freemasons.' ok. 'I cannot be asked to leave Moscow for mysterious reasons also I have decided that Napoleon stands for 666 aka the devil and through very trustworthy maths and in a completely lucid state and totally in the first try (trust me bro) I have figured out that my name also stands for 666 aka the devil so this must mean I'm supposed to assassinate Napoleon. Am I in any way qualified to do this? No. Does my non-existing plan have any chance whatsoever of succeeding? Also no.' sure buddy. And of course the glorious introduction 'I will down an entire bottle of vodka whilst standing on a very thin windowsill on the second floor. And afterwards I will physically tie a bear to the back of an officer (?)' 10/10 no notes on that plan

[kaerinio]

@ircnwrought approached her grace (for a sleepy kiss): send 🎲 to generate a kiss! from morgan <3

One blink, then another : weary eyes squint, appraising a room silvered by moonlight, where night has established its dominion. It seems, lips purse, that as she sat ruminating, her mind wandering the planes of the seven kingdoms, time grew hungry and took to devouring the aureate hues of candles once lit. What a sight the chamber had been at evening's advent : with so many flames dancing, their glow licking at the air with such fervor, one would have thought the queen had conjured the very sun. Now, light slumbers. Even the fires beneath the painted table bank, bowing where they once raged, where they once invoked the molten illumination of the realm that ensnared her. Embers flicker and whistle and die ; the map's enchantment is broken.

( Though, truth be told, it never stood a chance of keeping Daenerys past her beloved's arrival. )

Against the dark, beauty shines, like a lantern, attracting her gaze in an instant : oh, she is a vision, ethereal and utterly bewitching, resplendent in a halo of selenic rays, and her hair, a soft inhale, sways like a veil of shimmering shadows, framing the loveliness of her face. “My precious flame,” hers is a breathless whisper, which skims the night as she stands, the shawl falling from her bare shoulders ( only to pool in the elevated seat ) ; on trembling legs, she feels like an ancient thing, burdened by a rigidity that has settled deep in her bones, aching in some places, pricking in others. Duty beckons, demanding her return ——— in vain. She has already begun her heart-driven descent.

Every brush of a bare foot against thermal stone seems to awaken her, if only a little, and she rolls her shoulders, willing more and more of the pulsing atmosphere to seep into her, bidding it to banish the bleariness clouding the outskirts of her vision, beseeching it to peel back the drowsy haze encroaching upon her mind. “I was hoping that, between the two of us, you would be the one to claim a full night of sleep,” her chuckle is hushed when she pauses before Morgan. Tranquility flourishes on her features when she reaches, those fatigued fingers eager to cradle that graceful jaw. On tiptoes, she floats, leaning, leaning, leaning, to capture sweet lips : once, twice, thrice, they press, each kiss dreamy and slow, savoring. “Tell me, dear heart, what has stirred you from slumber? Was it a bad dream?” a murmur against a tender mouth, followed by the slightest of retreats. Concern knits her brows when her eyes meet Morgan's, searching, and a thumb brushes against a smooth cheek. “——— Or does something else plague you?”

[lobotomy-jpeg]

Waking up with you 💛

[id: Digital sketch of Mary and Natasha from Great Comet. They're snoozing in bed, Natasha played on top of Marya, Marya's hand on her back. Marya's hair is in a braid and Natasha's is down. They're both wearing loose, comfortable jumpers. Text on the upper left reads "good morning, my love". /end id]

[istherewifiinhell]

did i ever get around to mentioning that my least favourite era of tf cartoons (2010-2017, all technically in the same 'continuity' even though. their obviously not actually. and also. that real bad comics lore) there is so much messaging around the idea that like "you need to stick up for yourself" but it will always be completely encounter to the way everyone acts, the meanness of the humour used, and that like... you have to stick up for yourself! against your direct superiors! no they are NOT beholden to you 'sticking up for yourself' and have no particular method of account. You just! Have to! and once you do! they will, ofc, due to their good nature, realise the error of their ways and redress.... i mean. maybe. at least until next episode?

do i think this has ANYTHING to do with how propagandist each show is regards to... the government, the military, police or even yeah religion, and or how they characterize their settings with having NO tf civilians/non combatants.... WELL.

[transitofmercury]

thinking about them again

(honestly, when am I not thinking about them???)

[spirngakawening]

W&p 2.3.2 thoughts

More seasonal imagery my beloved (((:

Andrei be like 'why are these girls so gay??'

Acqhkskl Natasha being an absolute mood, Sonya trying to make sure her cousin doesn't fall out the window, Andrei overhearing it all, and all of this happening at like 1am,, yes

Natasha<3<3<3<3<3<3 pure joy my beloved

(': andrei starting the night off angry and restless and not understanding happiness, and still not fully understanding it but finding some in a close experience of someone else's joy

The Moon my beloveddddd