Psychic Bric-a-Brac

Three bundles of neuroses in a trench coat

[arinewman7]

The Connoisseur

Norman Rockwell

1962

[argumate]

lol is this how someone who wants to experiment with abstract painting but is shy about it slyly turns it into a pointing soyjack meme

[femmenietzsche]

During an interview with the Smithsonian American Art Museum in conjunction with the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, collector Steven Spielberg said: "The Connoisseur is a fascinating painting for me. ...Rockwell actually had to do a Jackson Pollock. He had to get that drip effect on that canvas. That means he had to completely change the paradigm of his style to accomplish a Jackson Pollack and a very convincing Jackson Pollock, before going back to his sort of conventional human characters. For me that represents how an artist can suddenly change his style and be unrecognizable in one form in another medium and then return to the style that we're familiar with." - Steven Spielberg

[gebo4482]

cardo-de-comer

[m-accost]

"Brother cyclopes hasten to my aid! Ligma is murdering me!"

[m-accost]

Kids these days would rather complain about the lag in their video games than sing Christ lag in Todes Banden

[dgilse]

Been getting into watching vlogs lately actually. It's like if a video essay was honest about being noise.

[dgilse]

Also more entertaining. I don't care about your overlong video with fancy lighting and the weak thesis. Today I'm learning about straight men who wish they were gay.

[dgilse]

"I feel like if I tried to like, show up to the gay community none of them would respect me, because-- I like to think that in the gay community there's like a tier system. And whoever's the most gay wins. You know what I mean, like up here's like alpha gay and then down low... then there's like beta gay, but like then there's like a gamma gay all the way down and imagine I'm in there and I'm just the gamma"

Awesome.

[m-accost]

"Brother cyclopes hasten to my aid! Ligma is murdering me!"

[m-accost]

Americans encapsulate this deep ennui, stemming from a loss of spiritual exemplars, with the phrase "The Three Nos", which is short for "No Bob Hope, no Steve Jobs, and no Johnny Cash"

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[downtroddendeity]

Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:

Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.

Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.

Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.

Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.

Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.

When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.

Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.

[m-accost]

[Explaining a record player to a small child]

"The needle pricks the ghosts imprisoned in the vinyl, making them wail songs of beautiful agony."

[m-accost]

Not My White Ass Seeing Fear in a Handful of Dust

[youzicha]

as an English teacher, I can attest that it is a heck of a thing to come across ["unalived"] in a student’s essay and explain, “This isn’t social media⁠—you can use the word ‘killed’”, only for the student to express discomfort with that (!), having internalized from the censorship algorithms that writing “killed” crosses a line.  I’ve also seen late Zoomers be shocked to find the word “regarded” in a reading assignment, because apparently that has become a euphemism on social media for a Word That Must Not Be Written (which itself started out as a euphemism)

Hm. Meanwhile, my kid (currently in first grade) has somehow been taught in school that "stupid" is a bad word at the same level as "fuck"—the "F-word" and the "S-word". He acts scandalized if I say it.

[discoursedrome]

a lot of these feel highly contextual, but euphemisms for killed are sort of universal, aren't they? The real issue is that saying "unalived" makes you sound like a TikTok influencer, so the teacher should set aside a class to go over the grand history of killing euphemisms and what they connote

[elancholia]

I think what's being noticed is that "kill" is being euphemized in contexts where it would not have been before and by people (or types of people) who wouldn't previously have done so

[m-accost]

As someone whose puritanical mother taught them that "butt" was a bad word, I find the thought of the broader culture being more priggish than most parents profoundly topsy-turvy

[dawatcher]

335986

[dawatcher]

[m-accost]

[Explaining a record player to a small child]

"The needle pricks the ghosts imprisoned in the vinyl, making them wail songs of beautiful agony."

[m-accost]

Sorry I went AFK without warning, the monstrous mass of cancerous tissue that's been roaming the neighborhood yanked me with one of its noisome tendrils and almost drained me of my life-energy. No, I'm fine. I managed to struggle long enough that it sensed a Doordash guy and ate him instead

[kata4a]

been musing on "prose with line breaks" recently, and it seems like there are two ideas that get confused in the discourse, and which I think it's worth being precise about:

first, there's the specific contemporary genre of free verse poetry with artlessly placed line breaks and little in the way of rhetorical flourish. "prose with line breaks," though, crucially, I think a lot of this stuff makes bad prose too

and secondly there's the terminological concern of whether that type of thing can even be correctly termed "poetry," or if (really and) we should restrict the usage of that term to metered writing

to be clear about my own position: I've been known to speak pretty freely and harshly on bad poetry, and I have every intention of continuing to do so. but I don't think that the terminological boundary is really the crux here: the line between prose and poetry is genuinely quite blurry, the use of meter is only one of a variety of linguistic devices which I think is fair to consider under the purview of "poetry," and, crucially, all of this bad poetry is still bad even if you call it prose

[bedupolker]

It feels cool to be "in" on celebrity gossip before anyone else. I ran into Californian Condor V9 and looked her up on the condor lookup website. It says her current mate is dead and she has no kids but I saw her with a new man AND a juvenile.

[taciturn-nerd]

OP I hope you don't mind but I made a tabloid cover out of this

I used two more condor photos by Andrew Orr and Alam Clampitt from peregrinefund.org

Gotta use the skills I learned from making tabloids out of the Jane Austen novels somewhere right?

Great, now I feel like I'm bird shaming. Congrats V9 on your new family!

[animals-with-fan-art]

This is art to me