Fairy tales and other things

[headspace-hotel]

I actually think the real advantage tumblr has over other websites is the ability of "reblogging" to create posts with contributions from multiple users. This allows people to build on others' posts, whether that's derailing them with a terrible joke, drawing the scenario proposed as a comic, answering the question posed originally in lively essay format, or rewriting the previous interaction as a scene in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.

[headspace-hotel]

This is also why Tumblr is hard to make profitable. Individual users have relatively little power to create good content. It's interactions between users that actually creates the good content, and therefore, no one involved in the good stuff on Tumblr can really claim to "own" it or be the "creator."

Posts have to navigate through Tumblr to pick up the people that can add to them in a constructive way, and then when users interact, the whole interaction can spread across the website as a new evolution of the content. There's no way to simplify this process.

Theres a whole ecosystem running here. It's not as simple as Creators and Consumers, and you can't simplify it to that. That's not how ART works, let alone posts. There's symbiosis. The users that do the nitrogen fixation aren't the ones photosynthesizing. The detritivores can't also be the predators. The "rappers doing normal shit blog" has a different niche than the person that asks why Lil Wayne has socks on in the jacuzzi, who has a different niche than the person who says "those are his hooves, you bitch!"

It's like bioavailability, you see. The user that responds "Those are his hooves, you bitch" is like a predator on a high trophic level, unable to directly feed on producers, needing primary consumers to convert the post into a form that makes a punch line possible.

[cannibalcaprine2]

[orange-marzipan]

[ID: A screenshot of the original post with almost every line fully blacked out. The only letters still visible spell out "cocks." End ID]

[mortimermcmirestinks]

Enter THE HOTEL OF THE MINDSCAPE.

HOTEL I think the sole advantage of this place, This hellish, warping, twisted tumbler, Lies buried in collaborative art. When sings again the song, another may The words repeat, and add upon their tale. To make a jest, or illustrate the piece, To answer, mock, or Shakespearificate.

This, too, is why 'tis hard to draw out gold: Thou cannot draw a pail from show'ring rain, Thou cannot catch the desert in a net, And, similar, thou cannot find the source Of so-called "content" when 'tis all around.

When written first, a song begins its life, But not the whole of art it has within -- To breathe the air of life and light and wit It must be shared, improved, attached upon, And then, at last, the multi-headed beast Can reach its full potential in its song.

This place is like a forest, ground to leaf, With bears and fish and bees and trees and worms. 'Tis not the simple "made, and then consumed", For, truly, art 'tis never simply that. There's symbiosis in these darkened woods, There's ebb and flow, the predator and prey: When songs are written of the Little Wayne, And of his hot tub stocking hooves most fine, The gentles here who say "they're hooves, you bitch" Are just as vital as the author's song. Each word in verse is sung by someone new, And in this way, the poem comes to fruit.

For though the wolf who stalks across the heath Takes diff'rent station than the grass beneath, Still, both are needed in this wood we carve, For with no grass for sheep, the wolves would starve.

Enter FALSE PUCHIKO, the CLOWN.

CLOWN 'Tis well and truly said, Madame Hotel, But please consider this riposte: a cock.

[headspace-hotel]

This is a old post and I have never seen this addition. Brilliant.

[the-haiku-bot]

This is a old post

and I have never seen this

addition. Brilliant.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[skelotan]

Maaan. I felt so bad.

[fairytalesteff]

one of my favorite things about the absolute disaster of a book that is Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment is that he’s actually a child psychologist and not a folklorist, so he often says things that are just plain wrong. 

He has this evolutionary idea about folklore that all the folklore stories we know today have been honed to perfection over generations of humanity in order to perfectly satisfy the Oedipal dilemmas of children, without considering that maybe, y’know, just maybe, sometimes the Grimms changed some things when they wrote stories down?

Example—he brings up the fact that Rapunzel has twins out of nowhere in the Grimms’ final version of the tale as evidence for some weird argument about making girls accustomed to motherhood without terrifying them with the childbirth or sexual details. But actually, the reason the twins come out of nowhere is because the Grimms systematically got rid of every sexual reference between their first and last editions. Rapunzel fucks in the first version, and the story makes a whole lot more sense when she does.

[ariel-seagull-wings]

@themousefromfantasyland

[themousefromfantasyland]

This is, in fact, true for virtually ALL psychoanalyses of fairy tales and mythology.

They seem to believe that these stories are immutable and perfect and that the way they are now is the way they have always been, completely ignoring how much they evolved and changed through time.

They seem to be allergic to the idea that the stories, concepts and beliefs that we have are not universal and aren’t static. Time period, culture, class, and race shape how these concepts evolve.

@ariel-seagull-wings @maimoncat @adarkrainbow

[fairytalesteff]

My favorite thing about my Bettelheim post from 3.5 years ago suddenly getting some notes over the weekend is the fact that in that time I think Bettelheim himself has managed to haunt me.

For a couple years he remained the only author whose autograph I had managed to pick up completely by accident in a used book store. Thankfully, Margaret Atwood saved me from that fact a month ago when I found her unmarked autograph in a book.

I will also recommend if anyone happens to be looking for a concise-but-to-the-point takedown of Bettleheim as a work and an author, the introduction to Maria Tatar's Off With Their Heads! essay collection.

[vigilantsycamore]

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit

Self-awareness is knowing that you and the tomato have that in common

[fairytalesteff]

Public relations is naming the tomato both your official state fruit and state vegetable in order to avoid controversy.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "the evidence for that is super flimsy, and significantly more evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[specialagentartemis]

So you know how Trump is trying to make the Smithsonian Museum rewrite history to eliminate anything critical of him or the USA? Someone sure thinks historical misinformation is valuable and powerful.

[reddit-eco-plus]

Dissertation en 3 parties, 3 sous-parties

un deux trois quatre cinq six sept huit neuf

[ichimakesart]

Be wary of little treasures.

There is always a price.

~☆◇Prints◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Commissions◇☆~▪︎~☆◇Kofi◇☆~▪︎~☆◇For inquiries: [email protected]◇☆~

[kolega8]

[libraford]

"Theres waste and fraud in the city council and school board! They make decisions about our live and our childrens lives while they collect a big fat paycheck! They're overpaid and overpowered and need to be gotten rid of!"

I make more as a part-time municipal janitor than I would as a school board member.

If I was a full-time municipal janitor, I would make about the same as a member of our city council.

[fairytalesteff]

Yep. Saw something similar to this in my area (Texas), saying that the state gov would start cracking down on our delinquent Democratic representatives by forcing them to pick up their checks in person. Like, you mean their checks for their annual salary of, uhhhh, $7,200?

[sertralineman]

if i had a nickel every time a prominent slavic person (activist, artist, scientist...), especially a woman, has their slavic origin and identity erased by the western world, i could buy a fucking island and build a giant golden statue of Maria Skłodowska-Curie on it.

[fairytalesteff]

[fairytalesteff]

Really been wanting to eat some people’s hearts in the marketplace lately.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

Sorry for the stupid person question but: I just came from your medialog july 2k25 post and I was wondering, do you really read that many dense, mostly nonfiction books in a month? is that typical for you? have you always read that much? if not, did you have a time where you deliberately worked on rejecting having a mushy internet brain stuck doomscrolling, and trained yourself to read more real shit instead? if yes to the latter, do you have any tips for how to stop being an online dumdum?

Thanks in advance (and thanks in general for sharing your blog and your thoughts and stuff!)

so the answer to your questions about my reading habits is kind of “yes and no.” one thing to note is that i always log books in the month in which i finish them, so this month, for example, the saddam hussein book i definitely started in mid-june, and i spent a solid two months working through moby dick, a novel that made me feel (not in a bad way) like if i took too much of it in at one gulp i would physically explode. i also actually feel like my reading habits have been kind of skewed towards nonfiction more than i would like lately (although that’s partly because, again, i didn’t really want to pick up another novel in the middle of moby dick, and the short stories collection [saul bellow’s collected stories] i’m currently reading is very good but like… not amenable to being dipped in and out of in the middle of a single story and also composed largely of stories that are not all that short, lmao). not all the books were that dense, either, like, strangers to ourselves basically reads like a collection of new yorker pieces. and, finally, july is typically a slow work month for me so i had more time to read than usual (and i almost never work what is considered a full time schedule and have no other real hobbies at the moment lmao.)

all that said, i have overall upped my reading time a lot this year because after several post-quarantine years of being very out of touch with my reading life (which was i think in a pretty good place when stuff shut down in 2020 but which just fell apart with my loss of routine lol) i decided i really wanted to be back in my books era in 2025. (so… another “yes and no” answer here: have i always read this much? there have been times when i read this much before and there have been times when i read much less, across my nearly two decades of adulthood). i’m always wary of advice on this topic because what works for one person might not work for others… but i can share with you some things that happened to work for me:

(1) i set a goal to read 50 books this year. i’m not really that attached to the exact number — like, i won’t feel like a failure if i clock in at 48, especially since i have now read three 500+ range nonfiction tomes and have a couple currently hanging out on my vague to-read list, plus, also, moby dick — but i, personally, have just learned about myself over the years that as a general rule i need to quantify stuff like this if i’m going to make any changes.

(2) i do sometimes try to force myself to read when i don’t really want to lol. if it’s like really not happening focus-wise it’s whatever (again for me in many things it’s important to both have goals and hold them loosely, understanding them as motivational tools rather than ends in their own right), but i suffer from extreme inertia and if i don’t accept that sometimes doing things i want to do means doing them when i don’t want to do them, i will literally never do them. even if i’m not dying to read about barry goldwater right NOW when i finish the book i will be glad to have finished it which means at some point i have to read it. lol.

(3) i redownloaded libby on my phone and got ecards at all three NYPL branches because i am very lucky location-wise but you probably have A Library you can do this with wherever you live. this is key for two reasons: (a) i’ve totally given up on the idea that i will ever not be Constantly Reaching For My Phone out of habit but if i have a book on my phone then i have something i can read that is Good (book) and not Bad (doomscrolling). this is also connected to why i read so much nonfiction btw - as a general rule, i dislike reading very good fiction on my phone and am trying to be picky about the fiction i read although there are things i’ll make exceptions for (there are a couple sci-fi books i want to read for genre education reasons that will… probably by Phone Books lol). (b) the little countdown of how long i have left with the book means i “have” to (i don’t HAVE to do anything but ykwim) keep reading if i want to finish it. i have to read approximately x phone-pages or chapters a day to stay on track. because i am TOTALLY DERANGED sometimes i will make a pinned note in my phone listing what page i need to get to by each of the next 21 days to finish before the library takes it back. i don’t think most people would enjoy operating this way but it works for me. because i live in new york city without a car i also spend a lot of time walking and like 3 pages here 6 pages there on the way to the grocery store or subway adds up! (also… i have become a full ebooks convert for dense nonfiction because of how easy it is to search for a name you know has come up before but can’t recall the previous significance of!!!!)

(4) i’m usually reading at least two, sometimes more books at a time, both so that i can read at any time i want to read (want to as in “want” to or want to as in know it’s a good time to read and want to remain in my books era) without feeling like i’m rushing through books too fast to let them sink in, and so that i have multiple options depending on my mood. in particular like really really Dense stuff i cannot just power through 80 pages at a time and so if i want to do more reading than however long it took me to get through like 20 pages of a really dense theoretical-historical treatment of antebellum blackface performers (s/o eric lott’s love and theft) then i have to have something “lighter” to complement it.

one piece of advice i’ll give is that if you want to just Get Back Into Reading i think it can be helpful to just focus on building the habit by reading “easy” stuff (whatever that means for you - for me decent nonfiction by journalists tends to be the stuff easiest to just plow through, possibly because it’s not THAT different usually from the kind of writing i would read online, lol) and add in the “real” stuff later. i do find - again, not everyone will, but this is true for me - that there is a “virtuous cycle” element here where once i have forced myself to start reading more it starts getting easier to focus and to focus longer (on average - i def have high/lo focus days lol) and i also start to find the internet more boring. like encountering 90000 people’s dumb fucking takes when i could simply open a different app and read a historian who knows stuff trying to teach me things in a nice calm manner… one of those is obviously more appealing and after making myself spend time with it the appeal of the other one really goes way down. now, make no mistake i do still sometimes fall in the habit of scrolling stuff that’s boring but addictive… but, you know, piece by piece, day by day, every little bit helps, etc.

fwiw the only social media i use are tumblr and sometimes reddit (lol @ me) and i deleted twitter after trying it ages ago for like eight months specifically because of how compulsive i found my own habits around it even when i was trying to change them. (i guess i also watch a lot of youtube/podcasts but it’s always in the background while i’m doing work or chores so like Whatever.) i also did a pretty strict internet fast in june because i found myself in that jumpy constant-refresh state of mind and it helped a lot in terms of just resetting some habits. again, you can see where i’m someone who responds to a certain amount of inner “strictness” (in quotes because it’s coupled with, again, holding all this stuff pretty loosely and sort of shrugging it off if i fuck up), and something like the clarity of “no internet for 30 days” is effective for me in a way that “just try to scroll less”... sometimes is but usually isn’t if i’m in a place where i Really Need To Scroll Less, if that makes sense. anecdotally every time i’ve done a month-long internet cleanse the first three days my brain has felt like someone inside it was clawing the walls trying to get out and then it becomes really easy. it’s also a good way (this was sort of new for me this time out) to just reflect on your internet use by thinking “okay, so what do i actually miss?” i would bet for anybody who chooses to undertake this exercise that at least some things you do regularly on the internet are not things you would find yourself missing on an internet break. (and the things you miss don’t have to be like “high value” either… like one of the things i missed was a couple very specific dumb celebrity gossip things lmao.) also in theory i have a no internet before 10 p.m. rule for myself but i’ve been pretty slack on that this summer tbh including in july when i was reading 600 pages about barry goldwater. but at other seasons of my life i’ve found it helpful.

i guess i do think that the principle of “at some level you will have to force yourself to do it before you really ‘want’ to” or even more basically “if you Wanna, unfortunately you simply Gotta” holds true for like any kind of behavioral change. and then i would also say that not everything works for everyone but the only way to find what works for you is to try stuff and if it works cool and if it doesn’t think about why not and how you could modify it or what else might make sense to try. (i don’t consciously think of reading in terms of habit-stacking but my transit reading is kind of that - “when i am in transit i am usually reading” - so you could start with like “i always read after dinner” or whatever works for your schedule; you could try “no doomscrolling until i’ve made it through 5 pages” which i would bet would often result in you realizing 5 pages in that you’d rather keep reading than doomscroll - but if not cool try something else!... you could read the polarizing self-help book atomic habits which i personally found a lot of value in even though of course as with all self-help you have to take it with a grain of salt - but there’s good tips in there IMO if you don’t go in expecting every word to be gospel…) anyway i hope something somewhere in here helps and you read some cool shit soon!!!

ETA PS: i think actually if my experience teaches us anything it's that it's beyond time for us to move past the smart person reading real stuff/online dumdum dichotomy. i am a modern woman and i can have it all!!!!!

[cam1lla]

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

[moonshinemagpie]

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

[cam1lla]

Thank you for this addition!

[ollieofthebeholder]

I did a report on book banning once.

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

You don't have to like the book, or the author, or the topic. But if you're advocating for banning them entirely, you're functionally a conservative.

[professorsparklepants]

Okay. I have a Cinderella variant from Italy that I have been thinking about for the last 24 hours and I need everyone to read for me. Okay? Here it is.

"Emma what is a puzzone medianu?" I am so glad you asked. it is a kind of cheese. The modern name for it is Puzzone di Moena, they make it in Northern Italy. Asking her father to greet someone for her is a typical event in Italian Cinderellas so I just went "huh. a cheese." and moved on. Weird but not as weird as skinning a corpse and wearing it as a disguise (ALSO FOR SOME REASON COMMON IN FAIRY TALES FROM ITALY.)

WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE WHEEL OF CHEESE WAS THE PRINCE SHE GETS MARRIED TO?! WHY WAS HE A WHEEL OF CHEESE. WHY DID HE STOP BEING A WHEEL OF CHEESE. I have so many fucking questions.

[fairytalesteff]

@maimoncat

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

before the storm came out in 2009, which means that it is of course unequivocally impossible for it to have been written with an eye for deliberately highlighting parallels or evoking any particular resonances with the trmp campaign(s)/MAGA movement... which in turn means that the fact that it so often does feel strikingly familiar hits even harder as evidence of the extent to which (as i personally am Literally Always Saying lmao) so much of this is really not nearly as new as The Discourse would have you believe. specifically this has come up for me with:

the fact that for much of the 1964 campaign season, both republicans and democrats are like, "well, obviously goldwater's not gonna be the nominee, that would be crazy, lmao"

relatedly, the general description by observers, including those within the republican party, of goldwater's supporters as basically deranged and of his nomination as the takeover of the party by the lunatic fringe

the fact that goldwater makes fairly minimal concessions to what he "should" say politically and the various insane things he says don't seem to bother his supporters much and in fact his willingness to say them is a part of his appeal (one of his campaign slogans was IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT)

the observation perlstein makes about the fact that his supporters tend to assume he agrees with them, even when he is on record to the contrary

not just his unexpectedly and unsettlingly apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom jeremiad of an acceptance speech at the nomination, but the fact that contemporary commentators responded to that speech by being like, "well that was insane" (see trmp's "american carnage" speech)

the constant juggling act on the part of the campaign to maintain the support of the extreme right but in a way that won't alienate less extreme members, plus the castigation (again, including within the party) for welcoming those extremists

the lengthy history of right wing conspiracism... this is obviously bigger than both goldwater and trmp and is very interesting to me. i'd encountered the john birch society in previous readings as a conservative group, even an extreme conservative group, but i didn't realize until this book that (a) their animating fight was specifically anticommunism and (b) their founder/leader was... like... "eisenhower was a communist agent his entire adult life" levels of totally wack deranged out of touch with reality conspiracist freak. the birchers, obviously, were hugely for goldwater (and again there was kind of a constant balancing act of wanting to take their votes, money, etc. without wanting the campaign to align itself with a group of people popularly understood to be totally bugfuck crazy), and understanding that they were operating not just from extreme values but with a system of what you might call "alternate facts" has made me think that we're probably overstating the novelty of e.g. the alex jones contingent. the spread of the message is obviously more frictionless now because of the internet (and i think the internet/attention economy rewards extremism in a way that i'm not sure had an analog analogue, so to speak)... but this didn't come out of nowhere. the society was founded in 1958. that's... a lot of decades for this way of engaging with the world to have had a home. (i know from g-man that they were also huge hoover fans and he more or less reciprocated their affection lol.)

[fairytalesteff]

I recently read The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter, and I really recommend not just the essay but the whole collection.

He wrote these essays during and in the direct aftermath of Goldwater and also has does some tracing of where their ideas came from in the first place. I think it’s very valuable that he defines these groups primarily by their paranoia.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

ok i do have to get something off my chest re: moby dick which is that i feel.......... SO lied to about the whale sections of the book. the whale sections slap. they fuck supremely. they are the parts where melville is truly just cooking and, i usually don't like to say this about matters of taste but, people who don't like them are literally wrong. they are wrong the way that i was wrong when i was in high school and read watchmen for the first time and thought the tales of the black freighter insets were boring. i felt this way at the time because i did not pick up on the fact that every black freighter excerpt/caption/etc. in watchmen comments on the action of the story as it unfolds, sometimes thematically, sometimes just in the juxtaposition of a sentence with a panel depicting action happening elsewhere, sometimes both at once. when i reread watchmen as an adult and was able to tune into what was going on i was like, wow this fucking rules, alan moore is a genius, and when i was bored about this it was because i was literally wrong about how to read this book.

so too with the whale sections of moby dick: they are absolutely, manifestly NOT herman melville attempting to list out for you all of his incorrect whale facts which he naively believes to be unimpeachably correct because of the primitive state of whale science. they are herman melville fucking flexing as one of the best to ever do it, where "it" is "the english language." if you read them as attempts to communicate knowledge or with an eye towards getting back to "the plot" you will, yes, be bored. if you read them waiting for the next time melville does something so awesome it makes you laugh out loud and/or want to hurl yourself into the sea you will be happy all the time. also they are literally so fucking funny. here, for example, is the infamous - infamous! - proclamation that the whale is a fish:

The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnæus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850, sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnæus’s express edict, were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan.

does this sound to you like a guy uncritically repeating the wrongful classification of the whale as a fish? no. this is a guy writing a character who is saying, "i know the literal father of biological taxonomy said that whales 'are not fish,' but consider: fish live in the ocean; whales live in the ocean; ergo, ummmm checkmate???" he goes on to say:

The grounds upon which Linnæus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: “On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,” and finally, “ex lege naturæ jure meritoque.” I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

literally LITERALLY he's like "who are you going to believe: the father of biological taxonomy, or My Two Friends?" hysterical!!! like i was already feeling the book but it was truly this, the first whale chapter, where i was like, is this maybe the greatest book ever written by anyone ever? and, like, i really think it might be.

[fairytalesteff]

My first encounter with Moby Dick was at the ripe age of 11. In English, we took a computerized literacy test that may have been accurate to my comprehension, but definitely not to my maturity. In any case, the computer spit me out a list of books that were for the most part all incomprehensible to me. I remember being distinctly disappointed that none if the books had Fantasty/Scifi as their listed genre. However, my teacher was insistent that we pick a book off our personalized lists to read next for class, and I chose Moby Dick.

I remember very little of it. I don’t think I ever got to the whale sections, but I think I made it about a third of the way through before I gave up—not because I really wanted to give up on the book, but because kids I didn’t know kept pointing at me and laughing for reading a book that said Dick on the cover.

I’ve harbored a bit of a grudge against Melville ever since (10+ years!) but I recently flipped through a copy and found the language as delightful as you described. I’ll definitely be giving it another much-deserved chance soon.

[thestuffedalligator]

There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

YOOO!!!!!!!!! I love this so much. It's like a folktale wearing the skin of a fairytale, I am so obsessed

I am also deeply into monstrous princesses (as they should be) right now, so this just made my day.