That Cello Sure Can There @cello-there - Tumblr Blog

Writing tips:

“You feel the bulge in his pants” - implies that you are feeling some guy’s penis, may be sexy depending on context

“You feel the bugle in his pants” - implies that this guy has a military horn in his pants, invites confusing questions like why does he have that and how big are his pockets

maple-seed

Both options convey that he's horny

cleo-fox

How dare you be funnier than me on my own post

ghostinthebathroom

I had a dream about Columbo at a drag show. This is what came from it.

somewhere-south-of-neutral

I'm waiting for him to explain to me how his newfound love of drag allowed him to prove I killed my business partner

bookthiefes

speak your language day asks!

☾ : favourite word from your language ♧ : favourite word from the english language translated in your language ✌ : favourite proverb/saying from your language ☮ : translate the first lines of your favourite song in your language ☆ : give the first lines of a song which is originally in your language ☯ : what do you love about your language? ☪ : what do you hate about your language? ❀ : which language(s) would you like to speak fluently? ♡ : which languages do you speak/have you learned in school? ❁ : which language(s) do you think of as the most beautiful? ✓ : funniest word in your language ϟ : translate a sentence

spyld

THE DAY OF LANGUAGES!!!

This 7th of May, 2026, we use our own language again!

If your language, native or not, is something other than English, on May 7th you're encouraged to speak that language all day!

You’ll blog in your chosen language(s) all day: text posts, replies, tags (except triggers and organisational tags).

Regardless of what language people choose to speak to you, you can answer in your own.

Non-vocal, non-written languages (like sign language and dialects) are more than welcome!

English native speakers can participate in any other language they're studying/have studied/know.

The tag is gonna be #Speak Your Language Day or #spyld for short.

Please submit me some language facts for me to share on this day <3

Pinned post and FAQ

spyld

T O M O R R O W

M O R G E N

D E M A I N

З А В Т Р А

mossyshadows

richard siken new afterword to crush 20th anniversary edition. will text ID it later i just wanted to yoink this from twitter his formatting was ass

pronouncingitwang

[image text:

Afterword

The manuscript was sloppy and I was afraid of it. I had adjusted it many times and sent it to contests every year for nine years. It was a glimmering failure. I sent it out again, feeling like this would probably be the last time I would try. When Louise Glück called, I was on the floor, unpacking boxes. I had just moved from a tiny apartment to a different tiny apartment with better windows. I'm calling to let you know that I've selected your manuscript. We'll publish it as it is, of course, but I have notes if you'd like to consider them. I was uncomfortable. Not because of the notes, but because it was Louise Glück. Of course I wanted the notes. Good, because the manuscript is sloppy. It was not the best in the pile. I was reading manuscripts much better than yours, but while I was reading them I kept thinking about yours, so I knew it had to be the one. I was no longer uncomfortable. This was someone I could work with.

I flew to Cambridge for the weekend. We were going to do a line edit at her kitchen table. I would stay at a B&B around the corner. I expected she would be severe and inscrutable. She expected I would be crazy and dangerous, with blood my mouth. When she opened the door, I realized that she was the same size as my mom, with the same attitude. It turned out that she had a son the same size and 1 age as me, also with a shaved head, also with wire-rimmed glasses. We knew what we were in for.

Yes, we argued. That Saturday we argued for twelve hours. We argued theory and aesthetics and history and intent. I read the poems out loud to her, in order, and she would stop me every time she had something to say, which was often. By the end of the day, we had cut a third of the book. We didn't cut poems, we cut sections. We cut gestures. We were bold. We cut things even if the poems had already been published. The manuscript had been sloppy because I was afraid of it. Every time I said something that scared me, I made a joke or swerved. She wasn't going to put up with it. Once I understood, I wasn't going to put up with it either. She had a keen eye, a perfect ear, and a mind that was diamond-sharp. I had ferocity, a deep commitment to language, and nothing to lose.

Louise was right about 90 percent of the time, and I got pretty good at an- ticipating her objections. I had internalized her concerns. I would read the lines and then stop to interrupt myself. The habit of turning away was systemic. But 10 percent of the time I was right. One line that I fought for, that I insisted wasn't silly and I fought hard for it, for over an hour-is in the middle of "Saying Your Names." After a span of twenty-eight lines addressing the reader, the poem pivots and directly addresses the dead lover with a rising panic that isn't in the rest of the poem. It arrives at the line: "O now we're in the sea of love!" It has the only Romantic "O" in the poem. It has the only exclamation point in the think it's one of the saddest things I've ever written.

poem.

Did we cut too much? I don't think so. There's only one line I would back in. I miss the version of "Visible World" that ended like this:

The light is no mystery,

the mystery is that there is something to keep the light

from passing through

A river gone ice, so that we may walk across.

But cutting things left holes. And there were still glitches and awkward places where I hadn't taken the thought to the uncomfortable place it needed to go for the poem to be fully vulnerable and honest. Smoothing over those places would have made them polished but lifeless, so I would have to return to the moments and relive them, poke at them. Since there was nothing left to cut, we spent that Sunday afternoon in her garden, discussing generative strategies. "Boot Theory" had lost its ending. It was only after getting home and poking at it, over and over, that I found the ending it has now:

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river

but then he's still left

with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away

but then he's still left with his hands.

There are several impulses that poets share when preparing our first books, and they all come from the same place: we feel like we are yelling into the void. We aren't used to being heard, not in this way, and there are so many things to say, so many approaches. It's hard to trust the reader. It's hard to write one book at a time when there's so much to say. We want to include everything-to say all of it, and all at the same time. We worry that this will be our only chance to say it. Instead of trusting the reader, I had filled the poems with blather and mud. Not everyone is listening, but those that are are listening, are listening very closely. Good advice. She also said—and maybe she was joking-Be careful, every first book includes an Adam and Eve poem. She was referring to "You Are Jeff." I was trying to address everything, including the book of Genesis. I cut more parts.

It was lean. Only the beautiful and necessary things remained. I wrote into it, trusting the reader, limiting my focus, speaking earnestly and with vulnerability. And then it was done. It went into the machinery and came out as a hardcover book. The box of my copies arrived in the mail. I waited for the applause, but nothing happened. Reviews did not appear; invitations to read did not arrive. Months passed. A year. Then, when the book started to get attention, the re- sponse surprised me. I didn't anticipate how many people would ask if it was a true story. Did it really happen? When I said it happened, they would pity me. When I said it didn't happen, they would call me a liar. I thought if I refused to answer, they would have to drop the questions about honesty and autobiography and confront the poems directly. I stopped answering. I refused to answer. It be- came a problem.

In fiction, we make the distinction between author and speaker. In poetry, we often conflate the two. The closeness between author and speaker in Crush made people curious. Perhaps the boldness of the poems made people bold with their questions. They wanted to know the story behind the story. It made me uncomfortable. I thought I had framed the poems in a variety of ways that would show they were acts of storytelling. I thought that the overlap and permutations of the characters in "You Are Jeff" would show the shifting nature of identity in the book. I had hoped that the use of the second person in the poems would complicate the speaker, make him multiple-that it would push the identity of the speaker onto the reader and make the reader complicit. But did it really happen? They would ask. They were confusing me with the work.

A high school student emailed me, saying, "My teacher is encouraging us to reach out to a living writer. I need to know 18 facts about your biography so I can understand your poems." I wrote back saying, basically, that if she needed my explanations and my biography to help her understand them-to feel them- then the poems were a failure and I had wasted my life. She wrote back, of course. She said I was rude and that now she was going to get a B. It made me mad. I, personally, was being interrogated rather than the work-and her questions had the undertone of "poetry isn't art" because her teacher refused to, or was unable to, understand that I had made a thing. They didn't see the thing; they only saw me. I started saying, You get the page, I get the rest. It went from motto to manifesto. Everything the reader needs is on the page. It has to be enough. Readers think they want more but really they don't. They don't need everything.

At the bank once, when the teller at the window recognized my name, said, "I love the part where your boyfriend dies and you're really sad. How long were you together?" It seemed unfair. I wanted the freedom to keep some of my damages to myself so I could get through the day without being reminded of them. I wanted to make something that worked even when-especially when―I wasn't there. I liked not being there. I wanted the freedom to wander off, or fall asleep, and still have the poems work without me. And then someone wrote to say that they had used the poem "Scheherazade" at their wedding. And then someone else wrote that his girlfriend had hanged herself the night before and had left the poem "Scheherazade" as her suicide note. And then I got quiet. Having this book that did this thing had spooked me, and I felt a pressure to address it. But I didn't. I wouldn't.

It took ten years to get Crush published, and the world changed in the years between first draft and final manuscript. What I thought the work meant wasn't what the work meant anymore. What was originally a book about AIDS had arrived in a culture filled with vampires. The fear of blood had turned into fetish. The metaphors for blood were no longer focused on contamination and death. Instead, blood was now a conduit for romance, for eternal life. The light on ev- erything had shifted. Crush had landed between cultural moments and it had two distinct audiences one, still reeling from the impact of a devastating virus, the other informed by a culture that was embracing the Twilight movies and the TV shows Supernatural and True Blood. It was fascinating-no, terrifying-to hear what people thought the metaphors implied.

Other changes transformed the book as well. The first versions of the manuscript were printed on a Xerox machine. They were stapled in the corners. Now I have a website with links to all the poems-some in current magazines, some on people's abandoned blogs-and I don't have to pass around poems on paper in coffee shops. But the change in venue produced a change in form. It's hard to replicate line breaks and indentations online if you don't know HTML. And the size of a window changes dynamically, according to your settings, and that rebreaks the lines. The poems were getting greater exposure as people shared them, but people weren't seeing them in their original format. The poems were losing a significant part of their intent and their power.

The reason we break a line is to make a friction between the line and the sentence. We rub two units of meaning against each other. A break allows concurrent interpretations. It changes the emphasis. No other form of writing has this quality. A line break makes a hitch in the breath, a crack in the thought. There's a difference between If you love me, Henry, you don't love me in a way I understand and If you love me, Henry, you don't love me / in a way I understand. Line breaks make shapes, support voice, build architectures. I had an aesthetic, a phi- losophy, that was just as important to me as the content. It was disappearing. Most poetry is left-justified. We read a line and we come all the way back to baseline, then we read the next line and we come all the way back to baseline. The movement of the eye, always returning to the left, is predictable, almost exhausting. It feels like falling down, over and over. I wanted to sustain the mo- mentum and defy gravity, so I indented lines. It was propulsive. The indentations kept the lines hovering in the air. Now they were gone.

Ten more years passed. We got camera phones and Photoshop. We got Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter. Fans were able to reproduce the poems as they appeared in the book, with the line breaks and indentations, but they were now pulling quotes out of context and putting them over pictures of cats or screenshots of their favorite shows. They returned the fidelity of the form to the text but they had abandoned its context. Fandoms embraced Crush, using lines as inspiration, or as text for memes, sometimes even interpolating large sections of the poems into their fan fiction. They championed remix culture and bristled at the idea that an author should be seen as the ultimate authority. People stopped asking me to confess or explain. It didn't matter to them what I thought the work meant or if things actually happened. They had their own ideas, and they were determined to explore them.

My twentieth-century intention had been to make a place where I could articulate my thoughts and feelings. I imagined that it would be a place where the reader and I could meet. That was no longer the way the poems were working. Readers were now enlarging the places I had made so they could include themselves. They were using this larger space to interact with each other without me. It was disconcerting. Some fans altered the male/male dynamic of the poems and posted their new, re-gendered versions. Some used the quotes in contexts that didn't make sense to me. Some misquoted the poems on purpose to suit their needs. I wanted readers to find meaning in the poems, even if that meaning slid away from my intention, but sometimes the revisions slid too far away from the original text. I felt as though my inner life was being translated into something unrecognizable.

It didn't help that the metaphors kept changing. Crush was moving between cultural moments again. Being gay in 2015 was different from being gay in 1995. was still scary and dangerous but it wasn't unheard of; we weren't invisible anymore. The terror and loneliness of being gay that had informed the poems had diminished. The claustrophobic atmosphere of impending violence had been re- framed. The violence was now being seen as a metaphor for personal transfor- mation and not as a denunciation of the culture. The collisions and ruptures of self and other were now being seen as a type of communion. Only the confusion between speaker and author had remained the same. I had published another book by this time. I thought I was being crafty. Instead of talking about myself, I had written fables: I personified everything and played the ventriloquist. The fishsticks pondered and the moon spoke: the characters were animals or figures in paintings. It seemed like a foolproof plan to force a distinction between speaker and author. It didn't work. People still asked, "Is this true?" and it occurred to me that they were really asking, "Can this happen to me?" The answer to that was "Yes."

More years passed. The context kept changing. I wasn't sure which I would prefer: to have a book that was grounded in a moment of time or one that stayed restless and flexible. The idea of alternative facts started to percolate in the mind of the culture, and we swerved again. What good was metaphor in a post- truth world? What good is any of it if you can't trust the context or the source? Some poets turned to satire; others turned to nonfiction and activism. The lyric poets were singing into the voice-notes apps of their phones as they sequestered during the long COVID lockdowns. The quotes from Crush that were getting posted on Twitter were resonating with the dread and isolation of that moment. They were shimmering with it.

And still more years passed. We were creeping up on 2025. It seemed un- real. I had broken the spine on my only hardcover copy and I wanted a new one. I struck a deal with Yale University Press: they would produce a twentieth-anniversary edition of Crush if I would write an afterword. It was the opportunity to provide the backstage passes, to reclaim and recontextualize the work, to explain everything. I tried, at first. I did. But the work didn't belong to me, it never really belonged to me. It belonged to the reader. Similarly, the work wasn't about me either; it was about the reader. I can only comment on the changes I saw and how I felt about them. It sounds unfair until you realize that all the poems in the world that I didn't write belong to me, since I'm their audience.

What will happen over the next ten years? I can make some guesses. The most transgressive parts will become commonplace. The spotlight on the meta- phors for vulnerability, violence, death will shift and illuminate new shades of meaning. Popular culture will introduce new examples of desire. (Vampires have already been replaced by cannibals-love as consumption-and the cannibals will soon be replaced by something else.) The context will continue to change as our focus changes. The interactions between reader and text will find new ex- pressions. The language itself is changing. Having grown up texting, younger poets are currently reconsidering punctuation. Especially the period. It was too final, too absolute. They're abandoning it and turning to the line break and white space to make units of meaning. They read their work from phone screens. In my new book, I have abandoned the line and am trying to make the meaning happen in the space between the sentences. I'm using dictation software to write my poems instead of a notebook. What will remain the same? It's hard to say.

Once, at a reading, during the Q and A, someone in the audience asked what I thought about death. At first, I was put off-I wanted to talk about the poems but these are the questions we expect poets to have the answers to. We expect poets to explore uncomfortable realms and return with secret knowledge. Sometimes we do. At the end of my second book, the speaker says, "I live in someone else's future." It's so obvious, it's terrifying. We document to share with the future. We benefit from the documents of the past. We say, I was in this room once. It is a difficult room. I left this on the table for you. I hope it helps. Whoever you are, reading this it would have been nice to meet you, but I couldn't wait, I had to move on, I am already so far away.

/end ID]

magneatio

#me finding out i probably have genetic muscular issues #and also like half the family lore

re-dracula

Let's help Jonathan Harker pack!

important lawyer papers

photos of mina <3 <3 <3

solicitor outfits

jars of garlic wait why would he need-

extra envelopes for important mail

relevant maps

wooden stakes? how'd those get in

train tickets

crucifix for your mothers sake

Voting ended onMay 4

hollanderthoughts

Wait…. 😳 there’s a way out?

hollanderthoughts

Fuuuuuuck me. It’s through? And that’s the only way? Fuuuuuuuck dude

bludraws094

make chocolate chip cookies

all purpose flour

baking soda

salt

softened butter

granulated sugar

brown sugar

vanilla extract

egg

chocolate chips

gravel from the driveway wait why is this an option wait dont pick this one

Voting ended onApr 30

bludraws094

how long should it bake

+1 minute

-1 minute

Voting ended onMay 2

bludraws094

and at what temperature

+10°f

-10°f

Voting ended onMay 2

feeshstiks

unyieldingsilence

‎ ‎

apolladay

How old is the building you live in?

* less than 10 years old (built after 2016)

* 11-25 years old (built between 2015-2001)

* 25-50 years old (built between 2001-1976)

* 50- 75 years old (built between 1976- 1951)

* 75-100 years old (built between 1951-1926)

* 100-150 years old (built between 1926- 1876)

* 150-200 years old (built between 1876- 1826)

* 200-250 years old (built between 1826-1776)

* 250-300 years old (built between 1776- 1626)

* over 300 years old (built before 1626)

* I don’t know/it’s complicated

* see results

How old is the building you live in?

less than 10 years old (built after 2016)

11-25 years old (built between 2015-2001)

25-50 years old (built between 2001-1976)

50- 75 years old (built between 1976- 1951)

75-100 years old (built between 1951-1926)

100-150 years old (built between 1926- 1876)

150-200 years old (built between 1876- 1826)

200-250 years old (built between 1826-1776)

250-300 years old (built between 1776- 1626)

over 300 years old (built before 1626)

I don’t know/it’s complicated

see results

Voting ended onMay 2

#currently living in one of the oldest buildings in my college #it was opened in 1875

calamitys-child

I always say that the thing which sets Sargent apart as a portrait artist is that he draws/paints literally every subject - no matter their gender, social position, life vs representational drawing etc - like he is right that minute realising he's desperately in love with them. And it rules every single time.

calamitys-child

Examples pulled just from his Wikipedia page most popular works. Absolutely devastating scenes for bisexuals for over a century

shorthistorian

Don't forget the ALLIGATORS. He loves them too.

yourockthebeatofmyheart

I need y'all to watch this clip

yourockthebeatofmyheart

sometiktoksarevalid

alphauke

an angel on letterboxd just dropped a whole playlist of films free on youtube I was filled with so much love and light I had to share with you guys

alphauke

it also includes short films, animated movies, documentaries of every genre, full recordings of live performances. all spanning different decades from different countries. YOU DONT EVEN FUCKING KNOW

anphivenas

there are also websites like worldscinema, solidaritycinema, and rarefilmm hosting incredible obscure world cinema for free! and if you're more inclined towards the esoteric, there's also evilbjork's avant-garde canon playlist on youtube! also important to mention Maya S. Cade's incredible black film archive and the otherness archive, an obscure queer cinema archive! You could always be watching more films !