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intro
call me pluto
25
i read and write and learn
link to a post sharing resources for and about palestine
not to deconstruct the 2010s john green manic pixie dream girl but actually john green was just writing normal girls . i have a lighters i find on the ground collection . i have a dollar tree journal i use as a scrapbook . i have a small collection of porcelain clown dolls a furby and a polaroid camera . i collect my emergency room hospital bracelets . i have a small collection of wheatback pennies . i read a lot and i have a collection of physical media . my cousin and sister make animal masks and my cousin has a porcelain cat doll in a victorian dress . my sister has a collection of stuffed animals and a porcelain doll . they listen to icp and like going to thrift stores .
misogyny really blinded us to the fact that girls can and do have personalities
i know this is the reading incomprehension website but some of you guys have decided that i somehow am disagreeing with john green because of the manic pixie dream girl thing .
i thought it was obvious but i am clearly agreeing with the man about the whole era of fictional ya books he did . the whole point of the "i have..." section of this post is to exemplify that john green was just writing normal ass girls with personalities which in the 2010s basically automatically made for manic pixie dream girl fodder
john "i wrote books for teenagers with one of the points being the manic pixie dream girl is a myth" green and i are in agreement . the manic pixie dream girl is a myth . the point of this post was that the 2010s was the era of "not like other girls" misogyny and the fact that these books were catered toward teens means that obviously they were misinterpreted half the time
Leila Chatti, “I Too Was Worthy,” in Wildness Before Something Sublime
Come. And Be My Baby, Maya Angelou
Dig, Bryan Borland
In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s.
The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style.
But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.
— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.
What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.
Words by Andrea Gibson
Tracing the modern American Gothic genre through the Scooby Doo franchise
I'd love for this to be a well thought out post with a nice polished conclusion, but it's midnight and I'm rambling instead. Maybe one day I'll publish an article on this or something.
tl;dr I think it's one of the more visible inheritors of the genre from the postwar period onward, and the ways in which it evolves and reflects the various eras where scooby doo media gets made has something to say about the cultural currents that originally gave rise to the subgenre. like, at a very basic level scooby doo is weirdly more in line with the pillars of the genre than... like any recent work of American fiction not named House of Leaves or written by Stephen King?
In that context mystery inc themselves function sort of like audience surrogates, almost voyeuristic in their approach to the gothic world they enter, finding tragedy and turning it to comedy for a children's show, but the basic decay, both physical and social, that defines the genre is definitely pretty consistent.
I’m not an English Literature major either, but I agree. The Castle of Otranto was the first English language novel to call itself a Gothic story, named after an architectural style that developed in France back in 1150CE¹, although it wasn't until 1530CE that it got derided² as barbarous, inelegant, and Gothic like the tribes that sieged Rome until the empire fell.
I'm far less well-versed in American Gothic (Edgar Allan Poe being a prominent figure) although I just got a copy of his Rue Morgue that was supposed to be an early detective fiction piece (along with Bleak House by Charles Dickens and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins³)—I can definitely find echoes of Gothic tropes in Arthur Conan Doyle's “Sherlock Holmes” book series⁴, and in the detective mysteries of Agatha Christie⁵.
The thing is Gothic was a literary sibling/cousin to Romanticism, which emerged as some pushback against the Enlightenment⁶. Science and technology were pretty cool, but human beings were still going to have passion and anxiety and superstition or faith—all that unscientific stuff.
I personally think the detective genre and the meddling kids in it are too logical to be Gothic in the classical sense, but I'm not going to fight The Hex Girls. The Hex Girls are too beautiful; they can do whatever they want forever.
happy sometimes you just want something so hard you have to lie about it so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute monday
yeag
i think there should be more books about haunting your own house . how you can't move from the haunting because the thing doing the haunting is you, maybe literally, maybe metaphorically, maybe it's a version of you from the past or the future or even an alternate but connected timeline . i think the haunting of hill house netflix show did this really well with the bent neck lady . i think house of leaves sort of does this in a way i cant explain . books i've read that are sort of explicitly in this realm include: Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman, We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer, The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
anyway basically I'm wondering if any of u have recommendations that fit into this niche (doesn't have to be exact)
sometimes i open up house of leaves and sit with the
Kake
my uncle was somewhat of a rascal. we were hanging out on the roof of his barn when i was ten, and we saw some shooting stars. he told me they were angels carrying messages from god. then he handed me his old hunting rifle and taught me how to nick one out of the sky, even when it was travelling all fast like that, and how to triangulate its location — taking me out in his rusty truck down dirt roads, unerring and unceasing, until we saw that gleaming lantern. he pocketed the note from god and took me down to a pinboard where he was working on deciphering the language with his friend who was a linguistics major but got kicked out of grad school. after they shook hands, they held on for just a bit too long and i started wondering why my aunt doesn’t live with my uncle anymore, but then my uncle took me back up stairs and taught me how to fry the angel up real nice, halo and all. it was tasty
"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.
That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.
Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.
Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.
In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)
Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.
Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?
Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”
The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.
Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.
Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."
- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
A bit of Moby-Dick oceanography context:
Up until the mid 1870s, it was generally accepted that life could not exist below a depth of 550 meters. This is why some of Ishmael's whale theories are so off and why Ahab pictures the sea floor as a vast wasteland of bones and shipwrecks. 🌊
I mean. Can you blame them
Oh here it is!!!! The most unsettling thing Ahab/Ishmael might’ve believed about the deep sea
So last month I got hit by a car and died right. Which I didn't initially realize until I watched some guy haul my body into his pickup and drive off. Which, being that it's deep in rural Michigan, I assume means my body will make some venison jerky and maybe some wall decoration, and I'll be resigned to being one of hundreds of deer ghosts floating around Saginaw, which is w/e. But then I find out the guy works at a taxidermy shop or something, and he's actually pretty good at stuffing and mounting deer carcasses, which I come to find out when I find myself face to face with my old body in the shop window. So naturally, I figure since ghosts need to possess something to interact with the living world and etc etc etc the most logical thing to do is to possess my own body, since it's basically a statue of myself. And a little surprisingly, it actually fits like a glove. Like, since it's my body, it feels like stepping right back into place. So I get out of town and back to my herd, eventually. And that's where the trouble starts coming into it, because after I get settled again, I don't know how to explain to everyone else what feels so weird. Like since I can move my body and do everything I used to do, it's functionally the same, like nothing happened. Or it SHOULD be, so I don't know how to explain how it's NOT. But it's just hard to explain it to someone who's never been hit by a truck I guess