all that is solid melts into air

immaterialboy.carrd.co | writeblr is @frozenstillicide | simblr is @ermitan0

[gladiates]

(new pinned post, feel free to ignore if u already know me!)

welcome to my blog! my name is Ezra (he/him) and I'm a 24 year old university student in the US. I'm majoring in history, and I'm also very interested in world literature and languages. I have one semester left in my undergraduate degree (graduating Dec 2021) and I’m hoping to go to grad school for a master's degree in history, likely focusing on modern South Asian history. Here you'll find language stuff and also some art and writing that I like. I'm currently focusing on learning Hindi, but I've also dedicated a significant amount of time to Spanish, Russian, and French in the past, and I hope to learn Hebrew and possibly other South Asian languages (besides Hindi) eventually.

[alpine-langblr]

- take an ebook in your target language that you wanna read - convert epub to txt - copy txt into unique wordlist maker (http://caerphoto.com/uwc/) - remove words in the list you already know - maybe focus on keeping the high frequency new words - make this list into flashcard deck badda bing badda boom

I did this with my Turkish copy of Animal Farm and pulled 212 new words for my Quizlet deck

[gwendolynlerman]

Genius!

[guerrillatech]

[leaving-this]

i made a 2-part uquiz called Which Shakespeare character are you? and it has 50 possible results.  The first quiz puts you into one of 5 groups and links you to the group quiz that has 10 different characters each. Tag your results. :)

[leaving-this]

the funniest part of this is seeing people in the tags who want to get hamlet and get something from a play they’ve never read and they’re like UMM IM EMO??? i HAVE to be HAMLET idk who Edmund even is and I’m like… sweetie…. you’re Edmund….

[deadreckon-deactivated20230712]

“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck—the places floating, finally legible.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (via luthienne)

[cithaerons]

Leila Chatti, Confession

[turningnumber]

thinking abt transmasc4transfem relationships idk

jesse and jane (breaking bad S2E7) // "cisworld," a speculative essay by torrey peters // meme by tumblr user johnnytruant // audrey and seymour (little shop of horrors) // "the same inside" by anna swir // shotaro kaneda and kei (akira by katsuhiro otomo) // "running up that hill" by kate bush // mako mori and raleigh beckett (pacific rim) // robert eades and his girlfriend lola (southern comfort) // "the kiss" by edvard munch

[gladiates]

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd

[gladiates]

cool russian resource!

I’m getting into learning Russian again and have been reviewing first year university material, and I just remembered that the book I used for an intensive summer course at a university a couple years ago is free (legally!) online. I’m obviously neither fluent nor a native speaker, so I’m not an expert on Russian learning, but I personally thought the material was very useful! It’s designed to be used online, so it’s easier to navigate than a PDF and there are listening exercises as well. It’s called Mezhdu Nami and you can use this link!

[apocryphics]

Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

[aletheyass]

mom come pick me up i'm scared the usamericans think their experiences are universal

[joyexe]

Who's gonna tell them?

THEY LITERALLY ASSUME I KNOW WHAT THAT SHIT IS💀

[seluvian]

Hahaha our government literally designs our school programs to teach us from childhood that our experiences are the standard! We are deliberately taught that we are standard and everywhere that isn't exactly the same is backwards and primitive! We don't get taught that Africa actually has many highly technologically advanced metropolitan cities, no, we get taught it's NOTHING BUT HUTS. We don't get taught about any Asian nations except for Japan (technologically advanced but not as cool as America) and China (evil and gross). We barely learn any history or geography compared to other nations, and what we do learn is filled with lies and misconceptions. This thing where we can stream programs from other nations and talk to people across the world is relatively new! Ten years ago, we wouldn't have had anywhere to do that easily, to see for our own eyes that our goverment and teachers filled our heads with nonsense.

It's a campaign of nationalism and colonialism justification that our goverment makes mandatory and it starts from the moment we step into the school building until the moment we graduate from our final lessons near adulthood.

You're right, we do think our experiences are universal. Because we are deliberately taught that America IS the universe, and to think otherwise is treason. Our government hides the truth from us and we just...we're taught you don't exist. And it is so difficult to find reliable information on what your experiences ARE, what your culture is like, what your country is like. Google is full of all kinds of people saying things, some lies, some true. And we have no way to tell what's what.

By all means, keep making fun of the absolute hellhole that is America. But understand that this ignorance was done to us on purpose. If you know a stupid American, tell them about your culture! Help us be less stupid, if you feel like it!

[ryebreadgf]

wikipedia is literally free

[serbka-deactivated20211120]

we learn literally the same stuff at school, do u think schools around the world are woke or what? whatever happened to personal agency

[gladiates]

Frank Bidart, excerpt from “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” from his collection The Sacrifice

[gladiates]

Frank Bidart, excerpt from “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” from his collection The Sacrifice

[existential-celestial]

Franz Wright, God’s Silence

[gladiates]

Books Read in July 2021

Margaret Atwood- The Blind Assassin (novel, 5/5)

Qiu Miaojin- Last Words from Montmartre (novel, 4/5)

Louise Erdrich- The Round House (novel, 3/5)

Toni Morrison- Beloved (novel, 5/5)

Fumiko Enchi- Masks (novel, 4.5/5)

Anne Carson- Glass, Irony and God (poetry, 4/5)

Kenzaburo Oe- Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids (novel, 3/5)

Sadaat Hasan Manto- The Dog of Tithwal (short stories, 3/5)

Junichiro Tanizaki- Longing and Other Stories (short stories, 4/5)

With the exception of the last two (Manto and Tanizaki), you can find ebooks by clicking on this link! The last two are missing because I received advance copies of them and they haven’t officially been released yet.

[lifeinpoetry]

“he owns all things," 

"doesn’t he?” “He’s invented” “all the shapes” “I’m afraid he’s” “invented mine,” “my very own” “body’ ” (“she was hysterical”) “‘Did he invent me?”

— Alice Notley, from The Descent of Alette

[hyperions-fate]

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality - if only for an instant - by means of creation.

Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950)