[hoppip]

and surprise surprise! i made a new enamel pin of this lil curled up kitty, which is on sale on my website -> www.bykittenrain.com

[sosoft]

call me by your name (2017)

[periklesostrakon]

@impracticallyiffy i’m sorry it only had the peach scene; i know you were more excited about the poo one.

[impracticallyiffy]

...........i can't believe u calling me out like this. and in public??!?! (it was plenty ridiculous regardless, i'm happy we got to see it :D)

[periklesostrakon]

Big bird (it’s a peregrine falcon named Linda) moves in to your balcony to hatch her chicks and in time starts to take care of you as well because you’re a lost bumblebee that drifts through life directionless. 

@impracticallyiffy put  the poster together (thank u).

Pic source (go to the site to see more pics of Linda and her chicks).

[lifetimeinafist]

Shakespeare play endings based on how much he procrastinated:

No Procrastination At All:

King Lear: It’s as good as an ending gets. Sums up the entire story and a good production will make you feel like you’ve cried an ocean’s worth of tears.

Othello: Another really good ending. This play is a study in the slow burn, so it makes sense that it go spectacularly nuclear in its ending.

Hamlet: Hamlet is a mess, plot wise, but it ends with such clarity, such tragic inevitably, it almost makes you forget the play’s imperfections.

Macbeth: It’s a bit haphazard, but there aren’t too many plot drops and MacDuff murdering Mackers is super satisfying.

Romeo and Juliet: DON’T ME TALK ABOUT IT. IT’S TOO SOON. SOMEONE HOLD ME.

Julius Caesar: I love that this ending is chaotic until it’s not. Which is perfect for a play that ends with a war.  Battles end as suddenly as they begin.  And the way the rhetoric picks right back up the second Brutus is dead at Mark Antony’s feet is genius.  

Antony and Cleopatra: Similar to Julius Caesar but twice as sad.

Coriolanus: This ending is rock solid and super straightforward. Exactly the ending this play needs.

Titus Andronicus: It’s brutal, but the whole story is wrapped up in one swift punch to the jugular.

Timon of Athens: I mean the less said about this play, the better. But the ending doesn’t suck.

Richard II: The saddest of all the history play endings, but perhaps the best. It also sets up the entire Henriad AND The War of the Roses which i really something else.

Henry IV: Both of them are really good. Part one avoids the problem most part one endings have in that you feel like you’ve just watched a complete story while certain threads are still open. And then Part II just doubles down and leads us into Henry V feeling awesome.

Henry V: Fuck me it’s good. We so rarely get to see the peace talks in war plays and I think Shakespeare just knocks it out of the park.

Henry VI: All three are super strong. Shakespeare was good at trilogies/sequels

Richard III: Fuck me this is a satisfying ending. The Kevin Spacey/Sam Mendes production had Richard’s dead body hanging over the stage for a solid 20 minutes and it killed me.

Much Ado About Nothing: Unlike a lot of the comedies, Shakespeare slowly resolves the varying plotlines over the course of the fifth act instead of resolving them all in one scene. There are a few big moments to take in with this ending, but Shakespeare doesn’t crowd them with other nonsense. It works beautifully.

Twelfth Night: So I know that this negates everything I just said about Much Ado because the ending of 12th Night resolves every plot line in the last scene, but when you have a play about separated twins, you kind of have to wait for the last moment to bring them back together.  

Comedy of Errors: Similar to 12th Night, you can’t have a play with twins and not have their reunion come at the last possible moment. Also, Comedy is a farce and farces are supposed to have ridiculous, multi-reveal endings. You just have to lean into it.

Love’s Labors Lost: It’s major tonal whiplash but if you pull it off, this ending is SO GOOD

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The expansion and perfection of the play within a play ending. I love it. 

The Tempest: Straightforward, satisfying with a lovely epilogue

The Winter’s Tale: GUH IT’S SO GOOD. You just have to believe in the magic.

Pericles: Literally the only tidy bit of writing in this entire disaster of a play.

Maybe got the play in with a day or two to spare:

Henry VIII

The Merchant of Venice

Troilus and Cressida

The Taming of the Shrew

Wrote it sitting at the back of the Globe while the entire company glared at him:

King John: MURDER. MONKS.

As You Like It: Literally brings a G-d down from the sky to fix the plot knot he wrote his ass into

Measure for Measure: THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING, WILL???

All’s Well That Ends Well: Bertram makes a 180 degree personality change in the space of two lines. Absurd.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona: NOPE.

MOTHERFUCKING CYMBELINE: SEVENTEEN. SINGLE. PLOT. REVEALS. IN. ONE. SCENE.

So there are actually more good endings than bad, but the bad/sloppy ones are just so damn egregious

[16ruedelaverrerie]

Fortinbras has a… really incorrect idea of what went down in Elsinore. Horatio just wants to go back to Wittenberg to write his thesis on the epistemology of loss, but when he gets to the city gates there’s like a throng of Norwegian soldiers blocking his way and refusing to let him leave the country on account of his supposedly being “a bona fide ninja assassin with rad killing skills whose talents should not be squandered at university”

(Technically Laertes does not get skewered to death, but shh it’s just fun to draw!)

[susiephone]

[mccaine]

[aristia]

How to pronounce Celtic words and names

Step 1: Read the word. Step 2: Wrong.

[literary-potato]

A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn” Bláithín - “BLAW-heen” Caoimhe - “KEE-va” Eoghan - Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning) Gráinne - “GRAW-nya” Iarfhlaith - “EER-lah” Méabh - “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh - “NEEV” Oisín - OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith - OR-la Odhrán - O-rawn Sinéad - shi-NAYD Tadhg - TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)

[rubyvroom]

I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG

[breelandwalker]

As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.

[prettyarb]

This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.

[madmaudlingoes]

No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.

The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.

Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse. 

They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.

And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.

My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.

[prettyarb]

I love it when snarky quips lead to real info.

[allthingslinguistic]

And moreover, there are some really good linguistic reasons why the Irish monks picked these particular letter combinations to stand for these particular sounds (note that this is based on a Scottish Gaelic course I took many years ago so bear with me if I get a few details wrong).

Let’s start with <bh>. Now, the Latin alphabet at the time didn’t have a letter for the /v/ sound, but it did have an alternative way of writing the /f/ sound, which was spelled <ph> when it was borrowed from Greek (for other historical reasons). Well, /p/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a burst of air out from behind your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless bilabial stop), and /f/ is a sound that’s produced by letting a small amount of air out from behind your teeth on your lips while your vocal cords aren’t vibrating (it’s a voiceless labiodental fricative). So <ph> is kind of like a more breathy <p> (/h/ is a fricative like /f/). And /b/ is the same as /p/ except your vocal cords ARE vibrating, the exact same way that /v/ is like /f/. 

So <p> is to <ph> as <b> is to <bh>. 

Adding <h> to a consonant to indicate a sound somewhat similar to the base letter was very common in post-Latin Europe: English, Irish, French, German, and many other European languages ended up with <ch>, <sh>, <th>, <gh>, <wh>, and so on. It just happens that some h versions are found in some languages and not others, and pretty much every language uses the h variations to stand for different sounds. (Especially “ch”). 

Now let’s get to vowels. There are two groups of them: /i/ and /e/ are one group, while /u/, /o/ and /a/ are another. The traditional Gaelic (Scottish and Irish) terms for these groups are that /i, e/ are slender and /u, o, a/ are broad, but linguists also split them up, as front and back vowels. 

Front vowels /i/ and /e/ tend to pull consonants along with them, in very many languages, especially /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/. It’s a process called palatalization and there’s a whole Wikipedia article about it. So the <si> in words like “Sinead” is palatalized just like the <si> in Latin-derived words like “precision” (not to mention all the words in “-tion” and rapid speech pronunciations like “didja” and “gotcha”). Palatalization also explains why English has “hard” (=broad=non-palatalized) and “soft” (=slender=palatalized) pronunciations of <c> and <g>, which are split by the same set of vowels – compare “cat” “cot” “cut” with “ceiling” or “cite”. (The pronunciation of <g> is more complicated which is why no one can agree about “gif”.)

And English spelling also retains or adds a silent letter where it would cause palatalization confusion. Think about words like “peaceable”, “placeable”, “changeable”, “salvageable” – normally a silent “e” is dropped before -able (bribable, adorable), but it’s kept here. Or the “k” added in “mimicking”, “frolicking”, “picnicking” despite “mimic, frolic, picnic”.  

Mutation (changing the initial sound of a word for grammatical effect) does seem to be particular to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree, although various kinds of mutations are found in other languages. 

Irish spelling looks weird if you take English as a starting point, but if you take Latin as a starting point (which it was), both Irish and English do different (but sometimes related) weird things.

[impracticallyiffy]

[quotethat]

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost

[beeftea78-deactivated20200113]

I just came across your post about women in Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, and I want to say thank you for taking your time to write that out. I love learning about the relation between literature and history, so that post was a solid 10/10

Thank you! I have a lot of beef with the way literature is taught as I don’t think nearly enough attention is given to the historical context in which works were written. Because yes, you can read something in isolation and still get a lot out of it, but in my humble opinion the best way to understand a piece of fiction is to understand the world in which the author lived and possible social and literary influences on the story. 

One example I like to bring up is the porter scene from Macbeth. After the killing of Duncan, Macduff shows up and starts knocking at the gate, and we have this comedic porter who goes to answer, and starts making quips and jokes. Now, without historical context (and this is what I was taught in high school) this seems like a funny icebreaker after the tense scenes with the Macbeths. It’s a harmless mood change, a quick comedic relief. The porter makes us laugh, we move on.

But WITH historical context - oh man. Ohhhh man. This scene is absolutely LOADED with religious symbolism. The knocking at the gate is meant to echo Jesus’ Harrowing of Hell. In the three days following his death and before his resurrection, Jesus descended into hell and rescued the souls trapped in Limbo. The Harrowing was an extremely important story to Christians in Shakespeare’s time since it represented the climax in God and Satan’s battle for humanity. The motif of knocking at the gate had been used to represent the Harrowing in literature for years, and the audience would have been very familiar with it. Not to mention the way the porter declares he is “porter of hell-gate” and cries “open in the name of Beelzebub!” and adds “this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further.” It is not subtle in the least.

The Porter does break the ice after the tension - but his arrival also tells us that Macbeth has become the devil and made himself the king of hell. And who does the porter admit but Macduff, who will vanquish Macbeth as Jesus did Satan? AND don’t forget Lady Macbeth’s last words: “To bed, to bed! there’s knocking at the gate.”

Without historical context: the porter is a frivolous character who provides comic relief after the murder of the king.

With historical context: By murdering his king, Macbeth has made himself the devil and his castle becomes hell itself; Macduff becomes the hero who will exact divine vengeance and cast him down; Lady Macbeth will die haunted by the knocking at the gate, because she knows she is irreversibly damned. 

[days-of-reading]

There is but one world and its division into disconnected spheres is not due to being as such, but to the organization of human knowledge of being.

Theodor Adorno, Stars Down to Earth

[redescription-deactivated201710]

No one is sure why a pastry was named after lightning.

merriam-webster student dictionary, entry: éclair (via battlestardidactica)

[explore-blog]

The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.

In her cover essay on silencing women in the October 2014 issue of Harper’s, Rebecca Solnit once again proves that she is one of our era’s greatest essayist – further evidence here and here (via malglories)

[shisasan]

[mortisia]

Detail from an advert for Bal a Versailles by Jean Desprez, Paris – at the hall of mirrors, Versailles Ph. Sarah Moon

[girlaltar-a-blog]

anne carson sentence starters.

quotes are all taken from various poems and essays by the queen of aesthetes, anne carson. feel free to change pronouns/add things/etc if needed.

‘ you are not a god. ’

‘ we begin in the dark and birth is the death of us. ’

‘ now you’ve crowned yourself one final perfect time. ’

‘ [ name ] was a monster. everything about him was red. ’

‘ what are we made of but hunger and rage? ’

‘ i finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about. ’

‘ honey is the sleep of the just. ’

‘ it is perilous to live past the end of your myth. ’

‘ you remember too much. ’

‘ when i desire you a part of me is gone. ’

‘ humans in love are terrible. ’

‘ under the seams runs the pain. ’

‘ men know almost nothing about desire. ’

‘ sex is a substitute, like money or language. ’

‘ what is the holiness of conversation? ’

‘ —you burn me. ’

‘ i ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way. ’

‘ sometimes i just want to stop seeing. ’

‘ we’re all mortal, you know. ’

‘ i am the shape you made me. filth teaches filth. ’

‘ why does tragedy exist? ’

‘ you’re a beauty. ’

‘ madness and witchery are conditions commonly associated with the female voice. ’

‘ it made me merciless. ’

‘ desire is no light thing. ’

‘ i do not exist. there is nothing left. ’

‘ gods are stubborn. so am i. ’

‘ we had been seduced into thinking that we were immortal. ’

‘ i am someone who did not die when i should have died. ’

‘ why are you so in love with things unbearable? ’

‘ everything can collapse. ’

‘ someone will remember us. even in another time. ’

‘ my mind is burning. ’

‘ each night, about this time, he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. ’

‘ love does not make me gentle or kind. ’

‘ i can give you reasons not do die. ’

‘ passivity is killing her. ’

‘ they are victims of love, many of them. ’

‘ he is a young god. ’

‘ you touch my soul, you pain my mind. ’

‘ it’s something of a cliché to say that we all think we’re monsters. ’

‘ i fear your sorrows make your tongue grow wild. ’

‘ it’s what they call ‘ecstasy’. ’

‘ a man who can’t die is no tragic hero. ’ 

‘ i want everything. ’

‘ it was like a beautiful dance where your partner turns and stabs you to death. ’

‘ to survive you need an edge. ’

‘ girls are cruelest to themselves. ’

‘ we are dust. ’

bonus! further quotations from award-winning poet and author anne carson:

‘ i am a philosopher of sandwiches. ’

‘ pilgrims were people glad to take off their clothing, which was on fire. ’

‘ english is a bitch. ’

‘ i wish i were two dogs. then i could play with me. ’

[renemagritte-art]

The human condition, 1933

Rene Magritte