[g0ddamnb0x]

This little scene really highlights why im so insane over the way tlt is written. It is brilliant mix of beautiful prose and stupid stuff. There especially is just Something about how nona feels envious for... not having a mother for Pyrrha to punch of an airlock. Like yeah, not an emotion I have had, but yeahhh girl I understand what you mean. Ough.

[clubconsent]

Gideon has history. She has context. Nona collects old people and doesn't have a lot of time for the tinies. Nona sprang out of nowhere. Nona is hungry for memory.

[beguilingcorpse]

the reason i have not yet written a The Locked Tomb Analytical Essay is because ppl think i’d write it about the eighth but they’re wrong. i would write it about the seventh and their view of chronic illness as beautiful. and then i’d have to talk about how that directly parallels the catholic church’s view of redemptive suffering and the passages of the catechism that speak on illness specifically. and how john’s treatment of cytherea paints himself as the Suffering Christ figure and her as the pious and devoted sick sharing in that suffering by which her illness is made his own. and then i experience an emotional fit so violent that my vision whites out. so i will not be writing all of that

[petrichara]

Love, grief, and magic in the mundane

1- @Bluewmist on Twitter / 2- Roly Poly is Taken on Twitter / 3- About Time (2012) by Richard Curtis, image from Mita Park on Unsplash / 4- Sherri Turner on Twitter / 5- Cold Solace by Anna Belle Kaufman / 6- The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

[weltenwellen]

Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

[beguilingcorpse]

recent alecto news might bring some new people who are interested in finally getting into the locked tomb series - so if you’re a little lost on where to start, here’s what i recommend as the reading order!

1. gideon the ninth

2. two week break. must wait the full two weeks to allow for proper marination. DO NOT wait longer than two weeks

3. first two chapters of harrow the ninth

4. quick skim of gideon the ninth to provide reassurance that you didn’t accidentally forget the whole plot

5. the rest of harrow the ninth

6. as yet unsent

7. two week break

8. gideon the ninth

9. the extras at the end of the gideon the ninth paperback, which you technically skimmed the first time but deemed unimportant and extraneous

10. as yet unsent

11. harrow the ninth

12. the mysterious study of doctor sex, which you just learned exists

13. two week break

14. nona the ninth

15. the unwanted guest

16. the chapter of nona the ninth relevant to the unwanted guest

17. rinse and repeat until alecto the ninth drops

happy reading!

[ololygas]

social skills training, solmaz sharif

[quasi-normalcy]

I think that Xena, for all of its ridiculousness and cheesiness, did a better job of conveying the allure of evil than just about any other series I've ever seen. Like it understands that violence, no matter how justifiably it starts out, is addictive, and that hatred poisons you until you can't feel real joy anymore, and it's strange to me that I've never seen it laid out so simply elsewhere.

[rachandroll]

...so THAT'S what sleeper cell activation feels like. Because yes, YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, because Xena is such an interesting lightning-in-a-bottle-case study! While I would never discount the work done by the writers, Xena as a show is almost perfectly positioned both historically and structurally to consistently explore that theme.

The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.

That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.

If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.

It's fucking rad and interesting.

[canyoufeelthesewords]

I love this dumb book

[softwaring]

[herpsandbirds]

"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."

Arundhati Roy

[oatmealaddiction]

No but like, this is the thing about Sam carrying Frodo and the ring up the mountain. It's a cool scene in the movie, but they don't explain what's happening at all. The ring at this point is so heavy Frodo can't even lift his head. It's like essentially a cinder-block he has to carry around his neck. And finally he gives up and Sam offers to carry him and:

DO YOU GUYS GET IT? THE RING IS A BURDEN, BUT FRODO ISN'T. FRODO DOESN'T WEIGH ANYTHING TO SAM. SAM CAN LIFT HIM EASILY!!!! HE'S NOT A BURDEN AT ALL I —

[thestuffedalligator]

"Um," said the fairy. "Choose something else."

Rosamund hesitated. It was, she had to admit, the first time she had ever been given a wish, so she wasn't an expert with this sort of thing, but she felt that this was not part of the typical script. "Sorry," she said. "Is that not allowed?"

The fairy grimaced. When it spoke, its voice came out pained and stressed. "Y-y-y-e-e-e-no," it sighed at last, dragonfly wings sagging. "No, technically no, it's not not allowed, but-" It suddenly brightened. "How about gold? Can't go wrong with gold. Gold's a good wish."

Rosamund frowned. This was really not going the way she expected at all. "Excuse me-"

"Beauty, that's a good one too, beauty's always popular," it went on. "And if there's a ball nearby tonight I can probably-"

"Excuse me!"

The wand was twiddled in chitinous fingers. "Right," the fairy said, sounding scolded. "Sorry, it's just..." Its voice trailed off.

Her grandmother's clock chimed midnight from the mantelpiece.

Then - "I'm sorry," it said, not daring to look up, "I know it's not fair, but - you know what I am. You know what we do to wishes. If you wished for wealth I'd have to turn your hair into silver, so you’d have to tear every strand out of your head before you could spend it. We can't help it. It's what we do. The cost of a wish is that you get what you want, but you don't get it the easy way.

"So if you wish for a child, it'll be - strange. Twisted, somehow. Made of pine or marzipan or have the head of a hedgehog. That's the cost of a wish-child; you'll get the child you wished for, but it'll never be - right."

Rosamund waited to see if there was anything else. She felt a sting to her pride when she realized there wasn't. "Is that all?" she said. "I wouldn't care what I got-"

"You all say that," the fairy said. "You all say you wouldn't care what you got. You all say it, and you really believe it, until the neighbours sneer at you and your hedgehog child for too long, or your back aches because your thumb-high child can't help you in the fields, or your pine child kicks and bites and won't obey, and then you think, 'This isn't the way it was supposed to be,' and then..."

The fairy stopped and looked into Rosamund’s eyes. It was a beautiful thing, all glittering carapace and iridescent wings, but just for an instant it looked terribly, terribly old.

"I'm sorry," it said. "But I'm tired of making unloved children."

[mournfulroses]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Mrs. Holland, featured in The Letters of Emily Dickinson

[weltenwellen]

Peonies Mary Oliver

[weltenwellen]

Enough Music Dorianne Laux

[alonesomes]

[specialagentartemis]

A lot of us learned certain theory terms--intersectionality, compulsory heterosexuality, Death of the Author--on social media. It's great to be able to discuss them! But it's important to know what you're discussing.

Kimberlé Crenshaw was the Black feminist scholar who coined the term "intersectionality." You can read her initial article coining and describing the theory "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics" (1989), her follow-up article expanding on it "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color" (1991), and a (shorter and easier to read) interview with her about what she meant and what she thinks about it "Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later" (2017).

Adrienne Rich was the lesbian feminist scholar and poet who coined the term "compulsory heterosexuality" in her article "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980).

Roland Barthes was a French literary critic who coined the term "death of the author" in his essay "La mort de l'auteur" (The Death of the Author") (1967). This one is 6 pages long.

These are available on the internet - I highly recommend reading them and going straight to the source of what the authors said, and decide how much you agree with them and the uses they get put to!

[papenathys]

Absolutely insane lines to just drop in the middle of an academic text btw. Feeling so normal about this.

[ A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. 1, Prof. David Daiches, first published in 1960 ]