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The Ruin, Anonymous Old English Poem, trans R.M. Liuzza

breaking horses is meant for peacetime. it’s a practice undertaken with patience, gentleness, it promises a future. one doesn’t just break horses to watch them die in battle. which somehow makes the iliad ending on ‘and so they buried hektor, breaker of horses’ even more gutting

ohevoyev

like priam and hecuba aren’t just burying their son.. troy itself is burying its last chance at a time of breaking horses

#greek mythology #the iliad

handweavers

one of the many problems with 'listen to x voices' rhetoric is that in order to be in the diaspora & gain citizenship in the first place your family often has to conform, to some degree, to western policy regarding our home countries & then those are the most plentiful voices in the west who talk about our countries. they will try to convince you that this is "the true voice" of the people of that country but they will gleefully advocate for foreign interventions that result in the widespread destruction and looting of their home country + they will position themselves as the greatest victims in all of this. but they clearly do not view the people back home with any kind of genuine solidarity or kinship only as pawns in their own personal narrative (revenge for an imagined alternative life back home, one where you still owned land or a held position of power there) and an opportunity to seize power for themselves. & then people in the diaspora develop a complex when people back home don't like them and don't agree with them & start claiming that everyone in the home country is brainwashed and the only way to free them is by invading and bombing everyone. they don't even view their cousins and family back home as real people, in this type of person's mindset simply by coming to west you are made real in a way that the rest of the world is not, it's sickening. and i know this song and dance very well like i'm in the western diaspora and the amount of ppl i meet who position themselves as progressive people but on the topic of foreign policy re: the home country sound like they work for radio free asia and are on the cia's payroll and chomping at the bit begging canada and co to bomb their country of origin is completely insane & if you even try to push back against this you're socially ostracized. same people will do land acknowledgements and then shun you for not supporting our government warmongering overseas it's just maddening

#representation

mehreenkasana

Unfortunately for South Asian writing, what the publishing industry has decided is best for Western readers is pandering, cliché-heavy, lunch-buffet fiction that’s easy to digest and doesn’t contain too many weird, foreign ingredients.

“Those books” Thayil refers to are South Asian diaspora novels about the Indian subcontinent. Mangoes, spices, and monsoons. I’ll add saris, bangles, oppressive husbands/fathers, arranged marriages, grains of rice, jasmine, virgins, and a tacky, overproduced Bollywood dance of rejection and obsession with Western culture. The frustration Thayil expresses has been echoed by other South Asian writers and readers who don’t identify with the stories and struggles presented in many of the South Asian novels published in the West from 2000 forward — the era ushered forth by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies and all the copycats that followed. They see nothing of the real India, or the real Pakistan, or the real Bangladesh, or the other real South Asian communities reflected in these novels, which are designed for a primarily white reading public. What they do see are stereotypes — a colonialist “jewel in the crown” version of the subcontinent that includes tall servants named Raj and palm fronds, mosquito nets and teatime and exiles longing to return to their super romantic homeland. In much contemporary literature, South Asians are exotic little creatures fluttering about in glass jars for the bemusement of monocle-clutching Western observers.

[…]

Perhaps this seems a highly cynical position. How can it be that South Asian novels, primarily written by South Asians and published by the intellectual one-percenters in cosmopolitan centers who understand the world and wish, through literature, to edify it for the rest of us, skew the reality of South Asia and its people?

Jabeen Akhtar, Why Am I Brown? South Asian Fiction and Pandering to Western Audiences

#such a good article #essays #literature #desi tag

dogpuppy

mandywondering

I mean, in some very interesting Technically Correct ways, they didn't actually die? Now, they're very much no longer alive. But the forces involved are such that they didn't get any of the usual cellular processes of death, they simply went from biology to physics in less time than it takes a signal to travel down your optic nerve.

dietspam16

if you go from biology to physics without dying first you don’t go to heaven the uber driver went over this already

#death tag

dogpuppy

nineteenyearoldmeblog

im fucking crying

#calvin klein #etc

bobdylanyaoi

hildegard of bingen + speaking in tongues

#words

sabertoothwalrus

I hate the videoification of everything. If I have to hear one more video of someone speaking closely into their shitty mic and I have to have all their yucky wet mouth noises and plosives and nose whistles and throat clearings and sniffles I am going to dig a vertical hole the exact dimensions of my body and I’m going to slither in head first

#etc

wizardarchetypes

i get a $250 million production budget to adapt beowulf into a summer blockbuster and at the end beowulf is contemplating his reign as king in his old age and the passing of time and we hear some kids say something he doesn't quite understand and he says stoically "it's as if the English i speak is becoming old..."

#beowulf

meangirlnurse

fascinating how often men expect women to sympathize with their fears of being perceived as or treated like a woman

meangirlnurse

so much "masculinity" is constructed around the certainty that being gay or being a woman is inherently demeaning. and we're supposed to nod along supportively

meangirlnurse

"male loneliness crisis" ok so like.....what would happen if you started acting like a better friend to other men in your life? what's stopping you? is it the fear of being perceived as one of your inferiors?

meangirlnurse

"men aren't allowed to show emotions" ok so like…..what would happen if you started being more emotionally expressive? what's stopping you? is it the fear of being perceived as one of your inferiors?

#misogyny

mihai-florescu

Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.

#titli :D 🦋🦋🦋#language

casgirl

When a straight ship is like serious girl x goofy guy I’m like oh you think all women have to be buttoned up buzzkill motherwives for overgrown manchildren? Grow up. But then when it’s serious guy x goofy girl I’m like oh you think all women are hapless naive babies who need a brooding powerful man to take care of them? Grow up.

#tropes and concepts #dynamics