Sing on the funeral pyre

Anne / 30 // J'ai compris que ma tête était dans une impasse //

[speciesbarocus]

Gottfried Semper - Atelierhaus der Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna.

> Photo: Andreas Buschmann (2012).

[icaruspendragon]

[hauntedbystorytelling]

Ruth Page in 'Variations on Euclid', 1933. Dance Coll. Barzel Research Box 54 | src Newberry library

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[wuntrum]

"meanwhile" by sachin teng, gouache on cold press paper, 2018

[wuntrum]

"meanwhile" by sachin teng, gouache on cold press paper, 2018

[planetlipz]

[petaltexturedskies]

Anne Sexton, from The Black Art

[flowerytale]

Anne Sexton, from A Self-Portrait In Letters

[rainbowfic]

But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

[loki-zen]

Posts that remind me to nerd out about the intricacies of historical fiction writing

[jackironsides]

This isn't historical fiction, but period fiction, but I remember having a jarring OH reaction when discovering something that's just a standard part of English now was less than a hundred years old by reading a book. the book was Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, published in 1930, and in the first chapter a judge is speaking:

‘It is not necessary for him, or her, to prove innocence; it is, in the modern slang phrase, “up to” the Crown to prove guilt...’

[allthingslinguistic]

There are several particularly good examples of this in books by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who lived in both the UK and the US and several times depicts characters from those two places encountering each other. For example, The Shuttle was published in 1907 and has this delightful passage of two British characters encountering an American:

“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow—I like him. He does not wish to 'butt in too much.' Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.” His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields. “Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said. “It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be 'butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,'” he added.

And the more I see historical examples of people encountering novel expressions that are utterly unremarkable to us now, the more I think, you know what, I might as well approach language change with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff.

[primulaceas]

Alejandro Zambra, Ways of Going Home (translated by Megan McDowell)

[primulaceas]

Natalie Diaz, “Snake-Light.” Postcolonial Love Poem

[onetwofeb]

Gillian Rose on Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Kierkegaard.

[cloudswamp]

the future of language, saul williams

[puremode]

john berger

[luthienne]

Tony Hoagland, Application for Release from the Dream: Poems; "Crazy Motherfucker Weather" / Jorie Graham, "Scirocco"

[funeral]

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self

[tinyghosts]

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

– Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

[dykemd]

the lack of dykes n more specifically butch dykes in post apocalyptic media is bizarre bc every single lesbian i know is the most prepared person in any room n not even for survivalist reasons we do that shit for fun

[dykemd]

exactly