REMORSE @gaypher-blog - Tumblr Blog

I think "____ game strong" is AAVE, so don't appropriate it

Oh it is? Okay apologies I’ll go edit them

fed-detector-deactivated2018030

Here’s the problem with this. AAVE is not this completely separate dialect and culture that does not overlap at all with Standard* American English and mainstream American culture. Words, phrases, and styles developed by black American speakers filter and diffuse into the mainstream dialect. If white people weren’t allowed to use AAVE, we’d also have to get rid of words like “cool” and “rock’n’roll”. Do some white people use AAVE to mock and insult black people? Of course, and they’re racist scumfucks and need to be called out when they do it. But to genuinely adopt phrases used by black speakers because you find them useful and enjoyable in your speaking, is not racist or “appropriation.” And furthermore, for the vast majority of words and phrases, this happened naturally, without anyone consciously thinking to themselves “this is AAVE”. They just learned a new word or phrase, found it useful or cool, and started using it. When “hella” spread around the American dialect, very few people consciously thought “Bay Area young people invented this”, They just heard it and started using it, because that’s how language evolves.

laundryandtaxes

Alright here’s the deal. Using bits and pieces of AAVE isn’t cultural appropriation. It just isn’t. First of all, AAVE speakers regularly come into contact with non-AAVE speakers and AAVE leaks its way into mainstream English use. To imply that they don’t is ridiculous. That’s the first problem here.

The second problem here is that “appropriation” is used entirely wrongly and entirely too often on this site. Cultural appropriation should only be used to refer to when one group (usually white people) CLAIMS the creation of another group as its own. That’s it. If it doesn’t fit that definition, it isn’t appropriation. And here’s why!

The third problem, and the reason people need to stop fucking using “appropriation” as a term so loosely on this site is because it allows us to ignore instances of racism by calling them something else- a more technical, academic seeming term. So

If you use another culture’s speaking pattern as a joke, that isn’t cultural appropriation. That’s being a racist. You’re literally making a joke about how other people talk. That’s racism. Not appropriation. RACISM. We have a word for that already.

If you use another culture’s sacred symbology or something like that, it isn’t appropriation. It’s being clueless at best and thoughtless/insensitive at worst. It isn’t appropriation. The basic problem there is not theft of another culture’s items: the basic problem is not participating in a culture on that culture’s terms.

If you use another culture as a prop or a joke, that isn’t appropriation. It’s racism. You’re pointing at a group and laughing. That’s just racism. Let’s not call it something else. Miley Cyrus isn’t appropriating black culture. She’s making fun of it. That’s racism. Easy.

If you use another culture’s symbology inaccurately, again that isn’t appropriation. It’s being thoughtless and inconsiderate but it isn’t appropriation.

If it isn’t one group claiming it created something it isn’t, then it isn’t appropriation.

There are several problems with insisting that white people participating in AAVE even in small portions is appropriation. 1- it lets white people off the hook for instances of actual racism by calling it something else, something which seems less intentional than it really is. 2- it assumes that white people already have a frame of reference for everything and should never have to refer to other cultures for ideas/concepts. That second idea is fucked up because:

It assumes that white/mainstream/Western culture understands everything already. That’s literally just colonialism wrapped up in a nice liberal package people can use to pat themselves on the back.

It ignores the fact that white culture (using that loosely, but I’m sure most people understand what I mean by this) actually doesn’t have a way to express everything. For example, “—— game strong” says more than just “you —— look[s] good.” There is no approximation in standard English. Standard English is not a perfect, all-encompassing language.

TLDR: use of AAVE in bits and pieces is not appropriation, and outside of tumblr I know very few black people who actually consider it to be appropriation. If you use it poorly, you’re just misinformed and will probably be laughed at. If you mock it, you’re just a racist. Stop calling every single instance of two cultures interacting “appropriation” because it allows us to ignore the fact that many times when people on here use it, we are referring to instances of racism and letting the racism itself go unaddressed by not calling it what it is. I only know a few black people ON tumblr who consider use of AAVE phrases to be appropriative or racist, and quite frankly I think that view 1- is simplistic and makes no sense and 2- would be laughed off by most black people who hadn’t been steeped in that narrative.

richarddawkinshateclub

cs-inactive1-deactivated2020060

this is beautiful.

#me

liliesofpur-i-ty

Today I had the privilege of joining Kenneth Haynes of Brown University to discuss a few selected poems of Geoffrey Hill — the collected works of whom Haynes had edited — in a seminar setting. Being wholly unacquainted with this poet, I was surprised to hear of his critical acclaim, but it is for good reason. Whereas the distinct modernist figures of poetry approach the form of their work in a manner of dense classical allusions that might lighten bereavement, Hill, also a martyrologist difficult in style and subject, is skeptical of the prophet in the face of the historical weight of words. In the seminar we focused on a series of eight poems exactly in the center of his collection entitled Canaan and on perhaps his most critically examined poem

"September Song"

born 19.6.32——deported 24.9.42

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries.

(I have made an elegy for myself it is true)

September fattens on the vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Immediately the subject is clear. The first word ‘undesirable’ already carries the connotation of those persecuted in the second world war, but Hill is evoking a specific person — one death — per the epigraph. There is touching without desire, the Hebrew God passed over Egypt at the proper time, Hill conjuring a detached language to describe the suffering — the pun on patent leather boots, etc. — a language detached from the humanity of the events.

There is distance, however, between the events and the poem, the events and the poet, the events and the audience — as of course we expect there to be. The smoke of the fires in which countless people died is ‘harmless,’ September is not only the date which the unnamed subject of the epigraph was deported, it is also the month after armistice. Hill cannot be overly empathetic — that would be indecent — thus the understatement of the last line, though the ‘This’ is emphatically repeated twice. This being the poem, this being the best response to suffering, this being one death. The poem is harmless — harm is not implicated in the imagination — but is it adequate?

We’re drawn to the parenthetical in the middle of the poem as it is constructed differently. We don’t expect the poet to be the subject of the elegy, but this is not a lamentation. Hill is not concerned with pity because pity is the most easily accessible emotion towards the past. I think what Hill is trying to evoke is something more in line with memory — the child was not forgotten at the proper time. The poet is concerned with developing a lens in which to view the moral degradation of history, the poet is concerned with the sensitive weight of words. Language is a struggle against silence.

In Geoffrey Hill’s notebooks around the time he was writing this poem, he had copied a quote from Thomas Mann’s The Genesis of Doctor Faustus: he wrote that one should be “open simultaneously to the criticism of bloody barbarism and bloodless intellectualism.” That is where Hill wants to stand.

gaypher-blog

hey evan

#poames #i went to this thing too

poames

I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow To mend the immense skull plates and clear The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. A blue sky out of the Oresteia Arches above us. O father, all by yourself You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress. Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line. It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum- color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing.

"The Colossus" (1960) by Sylvia Plath (via poames)

#poames

poames

since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry —the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis

ee cummings (via poames)

#poames

poames

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us in announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves but since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective

#poames

thedevouringseason

a conversation that has never happened and maybe won't

gaypher-blog

thedevouringseason:

we are two wolfpacks making

a snowdance and painting the

trees with each other’s innermost. no,

i’m sorry, that’s not it. here;

you a selkie, i drowning. unfair to

you, you say. all right.

i a magpie and you my vanity

laced throughout my wonders

and wires (copper silver bronze: no alchemy yet)

which are pieces of a better earth that

i have taken back and made into something

so like you that you can embody it.

here you say: possessive and proximal. okay.

we lay like nested parentheses on your white

sheet and my breath like the distant sea in your

ear made you forget all the forests fall-faking their

own deaths out the window as winter curls dragonlike

across the mountains.

dissolute and sweet you say but i am beyond listening

i am a druid of night-madness trying on any skin that will

fit me and rising- a cormorant,

you- a thermal

#poames #this is my poems blog now. sorry

must i be disarmed? ... to dispatch myself i want no sword; i need but hold my breath awhile, or strike my head against the wall

cato the younger

ape-of-naples

because a lot of people dont seem to get this:

golems are from jewish folklore. dont treat them like a generic fantasy creature, thats appropriative

kabbalah is a specifically jewish religious tradition. dont practice it if youre not jewish and dont use kabbalah symbolism as generic occult stuff, thats appropriative

for the record if it has hebrew on it and it doesnt have anything to do with judaism its probably appropriative

dont wear a magen david if youre not jewish, its used as a symbol for judaism so wearing it if youre a gentile is appropriative

while im at it heres a rundown of some terms you should know

goy: hebrew and yiddish for non-jewish person, it literally translates as “nation.” the plural form is goyim. goy is not a slur.

gentile: english for non-jewish person

anti-semitism: you probably know what this means but i just want to point out that the word anti-semitism was NOT coined by jews but by a german anti-semite who wanted a more scientific-sounding alternative to “judenhass,” which literally translates to “jew-hatred” so please shut up about how arabs are also semites. we know.

if you’re not jewish you should also avoid using the word “jew” since many jewish people are uncomfortable with it (though i personally am fine with it). use “jewish person” instead if youre a gentile

please reblog this if you’re not jewish, i almost never see gentiles acknowledging cultural appropriation of judaism and anti-semitism on tumblr, even among people who otherwise pay close attention to such issues

willlaren

This performance art piece took a weird turn

3liza

I respond strongly to

the use of red, particularly a certain flush of very saturated carmine, in Twin Peaks. all the other colors in every shot (which are mostly blueish, desaturated greens, the colors of my childhood in the pacific northwest) are just serving that carmine. having only watched season one so far (except the finale, so no spoilers please) I haven’t decided yet if it’s a purely aesthetic choice or if it signals something plot related or if lynch just wants the audience to think it does.

it reminds me of the use of the same color, often stressed against mint green, in Daughters of Darkness, which is probably the most beautiful vampire movie ever filmed and which we watched by accident during Sweatshop one time.

3liza

one of the interesting things about the choice of that color is that it’s the farthest thing from Laura Palmer as she exists within the timeline of the show (that is to say, post-murder). her body is famously and iconically a beautiful (and totally unrealistic) shade of drowned blue, with mica “sequins” that make her look like a ballerina in costume for Midsummer Night’s Dream.

the mica is actually location-accurate; the beaches of the PNW are mostly pebble, and the cliffs surrounding them are made of sandstone shot with veins of mica, a glittery, brittle silicate mineral used to make eyeshadow. the “sand” of beaches in that region is coarse, primary formed of multicolored shell particles, granite with mica spangles, and flat mica flecks from the mica veins crumbling out of the sandstone cliffs. i spent most of my childhood beach hours covered in the same glitter.

carmine being an orangey-red, it forms a complement or near-complement (triadic complement) to laura’s death palette of desaturated blues, within which she “fades into the background” of her environment, literally returning to the earth.