bracken & sea-shrapnel

Ask me Stuff!

[poetrylesbian]

morally opposed to the met gala in general but i gotta be honest working in the costume institute would be such a dream... i love fashion history... for a while i was considering studying textile conservation...

[poetrylesbian]

thank you for making me aware of this @butchasshole !!

according to the met union instagram: 91% of hourly Met staff in the union earn less than a living wage, 27% of salaried Met staff earn less than a living wage

[fairycosmos]

accidentally got stuck in a compulsive thought loop instead of living any sort of life

[archivedeathdrive]

1981

[kayflapper]

Victorian earrings featuring carved nacre hands (wearing matched turquoise bracelets!), each holding a pendant coral heart between the thumb and forefinger, c. 1880.

[darkcomedies]

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

[darkcomedies]

idk what to tell you except go look at the fishwives

[asecretvice]

I am here to source the quote and give credit to the translator, who did a really lovely job, imo.

This screenshot is from a play, as it happens. Brecht on Brecht: An Improvisation by George Tabori. (Here is a link to the 1967 Samuel French publication on archive.org.) Tabori, originally from Budapest (see wiki), translated a lot of Brecht into English and taught him in the US for a spell.

From what I can glean, this is his own translation. And indeed, it is an abridged excerpt from an (incomplete?) work by Brecht called Der Messingkauf. I came across another English translation of this and I do have a strong preference for Tabori's take.

Der Messingkauf itself is a little more opaque to me given the dearth of info I found via my internet searches, but much or all of it is in dialogue form. One website describes it thus: "Explizit wird diese dialogische Struktur im Messingkauf (GBA 22, 695 – 869), der zentralen Schrift der Brechtschen Theaterästhetik, die er ab 1939 im Exil verfasste und bis kurz vor seinem Tod weiterentwickelte und ergänzte. In vier Nächten sitzen ein Philosoph, ein Dramaturg, ein Schauspieler und eine Schauspielerin zusammen und diskutieren über das Theatermachen und seine Wirkung auf die Zuschauenden." Briefly, this is a text that Brecht worked on for many years, starting in his exile [from Nazi Germany] and returned to shortly before his death. In the piece a philosopher, a dramaturge, an actor, and an actress discuss the craft of theatre, etc. The passage celebrated by this post is spoken by the dramaturge.

Here is another archive.org link I found that contains the original German (should take you right to the passage once you log in and borrow the book). Tabori certainly gives a more poetic bent to the first line, "Man besetzt die Rollen falsch und gedankenlos (People cast plays wrong. And thoughtlessly.)." However, Brecht was himself a poet and Tabori is faithful with the anaphora of the next few lines, "als ob, als ob, als ob (as if, as if, as if)," and of course the line that so many are connecting with - "Too noble? Go look at the fishwives." - is an excellent rendering of the emphatic bent of the German: "Man sehe sich die Fischweiber an!"

Anyway, I love seeing Brecht around here because I enjoy and have learned a lot from the works of his I've read and/or performed. But I would love it more if people gave him and his translators due credit. Though I acknowledge this post sent me on a research jag I'm grateful for, since I now have Tabori's play to read.

I'll leave you with a quote from Tabori in his introduction to Brecht on Brecht, where he says:

The theatre is traditionally the healing art, our oldest priest and clown. Personally, I have found that Brecht is very good for what ails you, and should be taken, in large doses, against timidity, despair, confusion, and the worst of them all, stupidity. The cure need not be solemn or dull.

[redstonedust]

got a lovehate relationship with routine and repetition. yes if you put me in a repetitive situation i will start chewing on myself like a caged animal. but also no if you interrupt my self imposed routines i will start crying. this has made me so super good at being in the workforce #trust

[venea]

Circa 1810. 18k diamond studded enamel skull with a timepiece inside the cranium.

[venea]

[bobakick]

inspired by a post i read yesterday which contained the beautiful the words "Hanya Yanagihara's The Long Game"......

pick an author and a title!

how's the book?

5 stars (a masterpiece)

4 stars (pretty good)

3 stars (meh)

2 stars (pretty bad)

1 star (awful awful awful. Awful)

too insane to even quantify. what the fuck

nuance/results

Voting ended onMar 4

(no "idk" button! if you get a title or an author you don't know enough about to make a judgement, keep rolling until you do!)

[transgayhawkeyepierce]

Everyone reblog with your most unemployable traits

[thegeekgene]

Someone at an old job asked why I wanted to write up the meeting minutes for our team and I said 'i wanna control the narrative' and they were like 'what' and I pointed out that no one was gonna remember what we said in six months and so my interpretation of the meeting would dictate the assumed reality of what happened

"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

That's how several coworkers decided I was a supervillain and how I learned several coworkers didn't understand record keeping as like a CONCEPT

[snarpreplies]

[kingscrown666]

[undeadentropy]

What a highly specific and devastating word

[girljpg]

I just think it's wild how you can work so hard and for so long at something that amounts to no personal satisfaction when it's finally complete. like okay

[venea]

Yes hello I would love to hang out except one of my socks got wet and I wasn't able to change it for more than 20 minutes so I have to go chew my foot off

[anxeious]

[boss-of-armadildos]

[math-is-magic]

#genuinely: this is what further research into the famous 'marshmallow test' showed#it wasn't that kids who were able to delay gratification were more likely to be successful later on#due to intrinsic qualities#it was that kids who had a stable upbringing were more likely to be successful#and ALSO: those kids had trust that their caregivers would keep promises#which is WHY they were willing to give up one marshmallow now for the promise of two marshmallows later#kids who did NOT have trustworthy caregivers#or who were in a fundamentally unstable situation#DID NOT have that trust so they wanted their one marshmallow NOW#same deal here i think#it's not that Gen Z is bratty#it's that they have no trust in the system and no faith that promises will be fulfilled#and frankly i do not blame them -@cicerfics

[venea]

I wish there were a way to be in community without taking psychic damage

[thememedaddy]

[afloweroutofstone]

Doing some deep reading into Cherokee history for the project that I'm working on and I am continually amazed how fucking funny old Cherokee leaders were