"What's loved lives." - Diane Duane
Here for my fandoms and a variety of other topics pertaining to social justice. I care a great deal about anti-racism, intersectional feminism, and a whole host of other topics. Sometimes this place gets used as my journal, too. Say hi sometime! I don't bite <3
Writing a novel when you imagine all you stories in film format is hard because there’s really no written equivalent of “lens flare” or “slow motion montage backed by Gregorian choir”
You can get the same effect of a lens flare with close-detail descriptions, combined with breaks to new paragraphs.
Your slow-motion montage backed by a Gregorian choir can be done with a few technques that all involve repetition.
First is epizeuxis, the repeating of a word for emphasis.
Example:
Falling. Falling. Falling. There was nothing to keep Marie from plunging into the rolling river below. She could only hope for a miracle now, that she would come out alive somehow despite a twenty-foot drop into five-foot-deep water.
Then there’s anaphora, where you write a number of phrases with the same words at the beginning.
There were still mages out there living in terror of shining steel armor emblazoned with the Sword of Mercy.
There were still mages out there being forced by desperation into the clutches of demons.
There were mages out there being threatened with Tranquility as punishment for their disobedience, and the threats were being made good upon.
Mages who had attempted to flee, but knew nothing of the outside world and were forced to return to their prison out of need for sustenance and shelter.
Mages who only desired to find the families they were torn from.
Mages who only wanted to see the sun.
This kind of repetition effectively slows the pace of your writing and puts the focus on that small scene. That’s where you get your slow pan. The same repetition also has a subtle musicality to it depending on the words you use. That’s where you get the same vibe as you might get from a Gregorian choir.
For more neat tricks (aka figures of rhetoric) like epizeuxis and anaphora, read THE ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE by Mark Forsyth. It’s both educational and delightful, not to mention overflowing with wry wit. Great book.
i think a big thing that disconcerts adults about learning new skills is that learning as an adult means you are very aware of how bad you are at the beginning in a way children aren’t.
i picked up the saxophone when i was 11 and played until i was about 17. by the end of it i was first chair in our highest ensemble, a district honor band player, etc. but at the beginning – and this is important – i was bad. for the first year or so, i had no rhythm, i couldn’t make my tongue line up with my fingers, i was consistently sharp, etc. etc. other kids actually made fun of me for my lack of skill.
but 11 year old me didn’t care. 11 year old me practiced, but she also thought that being able to play the pink panther made her incredible (i shudder in retrospect). i mean, i was aware i wasn’t a master, but my skill level didn’t deter me from wailing out those notes in a way that i’m sure had my band director questioning his career decisions.
right now, i’m trying to pick up the guitar. it’s a very different instrument from the saxophone, and i struggle a lot with things like strumming patterns and barre chords. and sometimes i don’t want to play, because i know i’m bad at guitar. and sometimes i beat myself up when stumbling through a poor acoustic rendition of Everybody Wants to Rule the World because it’s not how i want it to sound. and it’s made even more frustrating because i can navigate the saxophone so smoothly.
but then i remember that i have to think like a kid. i might not be the best at guitar by any stretch of the imagination, but every little bit of progress is still progress. humility is a big part of learning, but if you treat a practice session like your own private concert, it becomes so much more fun, even if you’re bad like i am. when you’re first picking up a skill, whether it be an instrument, or a language, or a fine art, no one is expecting you to be the yo yo ma of that thing. forget about how little you know about the skill and think instead about how much you have to learn – that’s fun! do your best!!
when they’re cleaning their feets and spread all their little toes out
when they smelled something weird and make a stinky face
when they walk up to you making little chirpy purrs of inquiry
when they get distracted by a noise mid-lick and a tongue blep occurs
when they see a bird and do that ekekekk thing
when they become possessed by the devil and tear around the house with demonic speed and then pause mid-vicious-attack of a scratching pole to whip their head around and fix you with their all-pupil stare of unhinged terror
Because April 1st is coming up, I feel the need to mention that my blog will not contain “screamers” of any sort. No sounds or noises unexpected, no “flashers”, no “jump scares”; none of that nonsense
we’re literally floating on a tiny planet in fucking space why are we surrounded by hatred and misery. why can’t everyone just calm the fuck down and lay on some grass. the sun is a GIANT BURNING ORB why does money exist. fuck everything
Behind the cut is unfiltered pain and ugliness and if you don't know me very well, I would prefer you didn't read it. I am not myself right now and I am struggling. It will not give you a clear image of who I am, only a very distorted reflection.
I thought this would be easier. I knew it'd hurt because a death is never easy, but I couldn't have foreseen how all of this would be compounded. I want to light fire to the entire situation until none of it exists.
My dad died on Valentine’s Day. He's gone. I'm trying to accept that, but he stopped answering my calls back in October, he wouldn't give me his new address or tell me what hospital he was in, he refused to let me meet my grandparents or his new wife.
I've called his parents and his best friend and they won't call me back, the only reason I even had their numbers is because they met my mom once. No one will tell me he is really dead, no one will tell me if there is a memorial, none of these people have ever met me and they hate me so much, so thoroughly that they were going to let me go the rest of my life wondering why my father stopped calling me! No one was going to tell me, no one was going to fucking tell me! I had to hear this down the damn grapevine from his new wife's daughter telling her father who told my mother who thought I should know he's FUCKING DEAD
And I don't UNDERSTAND, I DON'T UNDERSTAND
I didn't do anything, I know people always say that but I swear it's so. I never met them, how could I have done something to make them hate me like this?? I thought that when somebody died, we as a society agreed that their family should know, even the estranged ones. I thought that was just what's done, I thought that was just what's decent, but he doesn't even have an obituary for me to find! And they’re going to cremate him so there will be no body and no grave, there will be nothing!
And so this is all stuck in my mind, swirling around and I can't help but wonder: what if he isn't dead? What if they told his new daughter to lie because he hated me so much that he wanted me to stop calling so he faked his own death, what if they're all in on it? He could have told them anything and no one would be there to contradict them, what if he isn't dead he just hates me that much?
And I know that’s crazy, I know that Occam’s razor states that the simpler explanation is usually correct because the more assumptions you make, the more likely it is you’ve left the realm of fact. I know that the last time we spoke his liver was completely shut down and he was in the hospital on heavy medication. I know that the most likely answer is that he is dead and he kept me isolated away from the rest of his family because he could control the narrative that way - that’s what he did with everyone and everything. He never took calls with someone else in the room. He gave people different answers to the same question so they couldn’t trust each other. He cheated on his wives repeatedly and somehow had them hating each other. The most likely answer is that he died, but told lies about me while he was alive to ensure I couldn’t go behind his back and meet my grandparents.
He was a fucking asshole who abandoned me for 22 years of my life, abandoned me again for another year after I found him, and then stopped answering my calls again in October and he was a narcissistic, bigoted liar and we never saw eye to eye, but I loved him. I wish I didn’t. I wish I didn’t care. But I do.
And between this grief, this abandonment heaped on abandonment, and the utter, crushing silence, and my mind trying to bury me in guilt, I am struggling to believe he is dead, even though this is the simplest and most conclusive answer.
And if this is true, if he is dead and dead and dead, then what I don’t understand is the pure human ugliness that must go into the decision where no one at all will tell me he is dead. No matter what he told them to believe about me, no matter what they think I am, how is it that all of them refuse to just tell me he is gone? What kind of a person do you have to be - or to believe I am - that they can’t even text back to say “yes, he is dead.” I don’t even ask for a voice chat or an invitation to the memorial, I just asked them to pleaase please tell me if he is really dead and no one will answer me and I do not understand
I do not understand
I do not understand
I am in a turmoil and (this is gross body stuff, I am sorry) I am so stressed that I’m bleeding ansd I don’t know why because it isn’t time for my period and that frightens me too
It would be bad enough that my father is dead. That hurts enough. To have all of this extra poison and feuding and baffling ugliness thrown on top of it when - I can’t repeat this enough - they never even met me? It makes it all so, so, so much worse. So much worse.
“ In August, 1968, the country was still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King four months earlier, and the race riots that followed on its heels. Nightly news showed burning cities, white flight, radicals and reactionaries snarling at each other across the cultural divide.
“A brand new children’s show out of Pittsburgh, which had gone national the previous year, took a different approach. Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood introduced Officer Clemmons, a black police officer who was a kindly, responsible authority figure, kept his neighborhood safe, and was Mr. Roger’s equal, colleague and neighbor.
“Around the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, Mr. Rogers invited Officer Clemmons to join him in soaking their tired feet in a plastic wading pool. And there they were, brown feet and pasty white feet, side by side in the water. Silently, contemplatively, without comment.
“25 years later, when the actor playing Officer Clemmons retired, his last scene on the show revisited that same wading pool, this time reminiscing. Officer Clemmons asked Mr. Rogers what he’d been thinking during their silent interlude a quarter century before. Fred Rogers’ answer was that he’d been thinking of the many ways people say “I love you.”
Considering the fraught and painful history of excluding black people from swimming pools in that era, there is no way this wasn’t a very pointed commentary to the people who were being exclusionary. This was a specifically chosen visual.
It’s not a fuck-you. Mr. Rogers didn’t do fuck-yous. But it was a clear, decisive, pointed statement. It was more than just showing inclusion; it was a deliberate response to what was going on in the world. This was him saying “you can do better. We can all do better. What you are doing is wrong.” This was a sweet, simple, and relatable thing to show little kids, to give them a view of a black man as kind and professional and a trusted adult – but also a lovely and strong statement to their parents and to the world.
It could have lost him his show, or at least his national distribution. It could have gotten him attacked both in the news and personally in person, but he did it anyway. I wish I knew if he ever talked about this, and how aware he and the show producers were of the statement this made.
I feel like the key White Pathology that explains Trump is this idea that everything in life is graded on a curve, not just wanting to have good things, but to have MORE of those things than other people. A pathology that’s both the opposite of stronger together and the opposite of the Lake Wobegon Effect. A hypothetical Trump voter (especially the white woman voter who unexpectedly swung Trump) wants her child to go the BEST school. She doesn’t want the schools in Detroit to improve because then her child’s school will be less dramatically BEST. Or the Trump voter who is making a fine amount of money, owns his own business, own his own home, but feels that the success of the Pakistani-American engineer who lives down the street lessens his own success in some way. It might even be more satisfying to see things get worse overall, as long as they get More Worse for other people.
I’m not saying I know how to combat it, but I guess it starts with naming it.
I can personally testify that a lot of people who tend to vote Republican in general have this weird-to-me tendency to fret about the possibility that someone, somewhere might be getting money, resources, or a lucky break that they “don’t deserve.” This is different from the worry that a less “deserving” person might take something away from a more “deserving” person. Even if no one loses anything, and there’s plenty to go around, they’ll get worried and indignant that someone might get more than they “deserve.” It’s even more bizarre that members of this group often have stated theological beliefs that seem completely at odds with that attitude.
this makes me think a lot about Weber and the growth of capitalism-as-ethics in the wake of the Reformation.
for those unfamiliar, Max Weber was an early sociologist who posited that modern capitalism grew out of the psycho-social conditions created in western Europe by the destruction of the pervasive institutions of the Catholic church. his thesis was that prior to the Reformation, people were comfortable in the assurance of their salvation as long as they received the sacraments of the church and acted (more or less) under its authority. but with the security of the Catholic hierarchy and claim to One True Churchness gone, most people did not have a sufficiently developed personal spirituality to feel assured of salvation anymore. this was particularly acute amongst Calvinists because of the belief that God had already predestined who was going to Heaven and who was going to Hell- but there was no formal institution to tell you that you were deffo predestined for Heaven, no worries buddy, so you had to find ways to constantly reassure yourself.
and of course if you were one of God’s Chosen Elect, your life would surely be pretty great, and you’d be rich- or at least better off than those bad awful sinners who were born going to Hell. so you worked hard and made your work a spiritual calling, and you weren’t profligate with your money because you needed it to prove you were living the blessed life of the elect. and eventually accumulating money became an ethical end in itself, intertwined with other aspects of virtue- this was a big thing for Benjamin Franklin, amongst other major figures in the founding history of the USA. this also went hand-in-hand with disdain for the kinds of charitable practices that are central to Catholicism- if a person was poor, it was a sign of their non-electness, and they deserved to stay that way. the whole system requires that some peoples’ lives are shit, because then otherwise how can you be sure who’s going to Heaven?
and the same principles apply to white supremacy. it was easy to be confident and comfortable in your belief in the inherent superiority of white people when you had vast social institutions backing you up. in the Jim Crow south, you could be a poor as shit white person, but at least you got to drink from the ‘whites only’ fountain. but now those institutions are gone or going, and despite every effort against them people of colour are clawing their way to economic and social equality.
there’s nothing left to reassure the white supremacist. they can’t look at the corridors of political power and feel a bit better, because the head of state is a highly-educated black guy. they can’t even go the Calvinist route and pile up a big soothing stack of money, because you can’t tell by looking who’s God’s Deserving Elect, but you sure as hell notice when a black family moves into your suburb and are driving a nicer car than you do.
but if you can fuck yourself over in a way that you can be dead certain is going to fuck over people of colour worse, well, that just proves you were right all along, huh? now you’ve got more money than that black family, even if all of you are worse off.
tl;dr: requiring there to be people worse off than you as proof of your innate superiority is one of the founding socio-ethical principles of the USA and Protestant societies in general, which maps neatly onto the white supremacist need for people innately inferior to you to be worse off.
I think there’s a lot more to be said about Weber, Calvinism, and the development of white supremacy as an ideology, but I am no longer an academic so
On that topic, here’s an excerpt from an article published in the local legal press recently:
Lee is described by The American Lawyer as “one of the country’s top intellectual property litigators.”…
Lee, who is of Chinese descent but whose family has been in the US since 1948, recounted how he was filling his Mercedes-Benz SUV when a man approached him and asked how he could afford such a car. The man also reportedly said Lee was not welcome in the US.
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