a chapel of ease

jon. he/him. trans. 32. uk. semi-professional poet.

[maple-salad]

op says we can repost

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[human-pet-they]

COME ONNN

[dreamstars]

[tragbarerpanzrabwehrkomplexfagot]

Albrecht Dürer – Knight on Horseback, 1507

[asofteredge]

hey everyone, just curious:

what is everyone's criteria for blocking people?

[cannibality-deactivated20250227]

knuckle tats say FOUC AULT

[anarchocapitalismkills-deactiva]

knuck tats saying POST, and on the other hand, having transcended the limitations of the form, STRUCTURALIST

[yesornopolls]

do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Do you have any friends that are 4x your age or more?

Yes

No

Remaining time: 2 days 6 hours

[manykinsmen]

buh i’m writing john frusciante fanfiction now. i’m in too deep. help help how do i go back.

[weirdlandtv]

Cartoon by John O'Brien for NEW YORKER magazine, 1991.

[shieldfoss]

[mobydyke]

rosencrantz is dead, guildenstern is dead, and me I feel also not so good

[burarano]

new car🚜

[importantpics]

[guzhufuren]

jesus christ i'm so stressed for him

[serenvde-art]

trans fairy to bless ur dash

[ftmtftm]

I'm gently cupping your face with my hands and looking into your soul with my kind, tired, transgender artist eyes.

The idea that "artists need to make their art more palatable for wider audiences, especially if their work becomes popular, because people are currently media illiterate and it's the artist's social responsibility to make their art digestible for mass audiences" is fascist rhetoric. It is especially fascist rhetoric when you say it about queer art.

You are repeating fascist propaganda about the "function" of art in society that has blatantly worked on you.

You can dislike a piece of art and have criticisms of it or even outright hate it! Those are your opinions. But the idea that it is somehow an artist's responsibility to create with a media illiterate audience in mind is absurd, fascistic, and would literally just contribute to making the literacy crisis worse.