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@vespertinamatutina
Can someone just………………. explain French to me?
its spanish but you speak it in cursive
You have 11 letters. You pronounce 4 of them.
Learn to speak spanish. Now learn to speak italian. Now subtract the spanish from italian. You are left with french.
It is surprisingly accurate
It's not even that complicated just take English and subtract the German and all three nights short British words. That's French.
god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do
like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.
but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror.
it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”
or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”
like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:
“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.
and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.
anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.
that’s horror, to me.
@admiraloblivious
This is amazing
This post makes me think of Klaus Pinter’s work:
The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.
I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.
Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. <3
This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out.
Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit. Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.
WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.
Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.
Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!
I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane
Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.
consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years
Eoin Mc Hugh - The Ground Itself is Kind, Black Butter, 2014
Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life
If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.
in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.
I feel like mark danielewski makes extensive use of this idea
this is why you don’t vote third party for gods sake
DO YOU GET IT NOW
3% WOULD HAVE WON 3 FUCKING %
This makes the incorrect assumption that all 3rd party voters would've voted Hilary: libertarians would've either abstained or voted trump, probably. I don't think this is rational, as great as it would've been to not have trump win.
“Icarus. The original myth had two parts. Daedalus said to his son, ‘I fashioned these wings for you. Two rules. Don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax. But, more important, son, don’t fly too low. Because if you fly too low, the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.’ We’ve left out the second part of the myth. We don’t say to people anymore, ‘Don’t fly too low.’ All we do from the time they are 4 years old is warn them against hubris. We have created this industrially led structure that says: How dare you.”
– Seth Godin
I will reblog this every single time I see it
Prefix ’re’ in English, the most beautiful words, beautiful concepts. Resurrection. Return. Revolution. Redesign. Rediscover. Release. Relent. Reconfigure. Reject. To burst forth again after some kind of collapse. To deny the collapse and begin again. The denial that affirms. The Sacred No. The Holy Yes. But we don’t say Relove. One always loves. One stops loving. Even here the prefix has its limits.
It bothers me that half the words aren't examples of re-
“[F]ilms like American Sniper are not meant to be relatable or accurate accounts of war. They are meant to push a particular worldview where America, as a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, “finishes fights” and frees the planet from the “bad guys”. The “bad guys” are, of course, whoever America says they are. No questions permitted. This is called propaganda. And propaganda like American Sniper has debuted with regularity in the maintenance of American imperialism.
Just two years ago Zero Dark Thirty (2012) was all the rave, a film which practically exonerated the CIA’s torture program in the eyes of the American public. But more than that, like American Sniper, it idolized the military exploits of American soldiers — specifically the men of JSoc (Joint Special Operations Command) and their intelligence operatives whom adopted gross disregard for Afghani and Pakistani life in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Arguably the film’s greatest purpose then was not to make money, but rather to anesthetize the public of any objections to the CIA’s blatant human rights violations (torture) and JSoc’s extra-legal operations.
[…] Much like Eastwood’s film, in Zero Dark Thirty we get a picture of Jsoc that suggests patriotism by ALMOST any means necessary. Indiscriminate violence is permissible, so long as it leads to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Since the audience already knew bin Laden inevitably would be killed, it follows therefore that any violence pictured was necessary. The reality, which we are never allowed to see, is Jsoc has engaged in grossly unnecessary and unimaginable crimes. As Jeremy Scahill, co-producer of the film Dirty Wars, explained in the Guardian:
“In Gardez, [Afghanistan], US special operations forces [Jsoc] had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. [On the night of 12 February 2010 Jsoc] raid[ed] the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US.”
Scahill then recounts the testimony of Mohammed Sabir, who watched helplessly as the Jsoc soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown by helicopter to another province, likely to be tortured at a black site — a tactic Zero Dark Thirty unabashedly displayed in theaters. Footage captured from survivors of the ordeal later revealed that the meeting had nothing to do with the Taliban, but was rather a lively celebration of a child’s birth. No charges have ever been filed against Jsoc soldiers for their crimes.
In the same year that Zero Dark Thirty aired, almost as if imperialism were in vogue, at the 2012 Oscars its primary competition was another piece of American propaganda. In this case, however, the CIA was out to save the world from another Muslim “threat” — the specter of Iran. And although Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) was historically centered on the Hostage Crisis of 1979, it conveniently hit theaters during a time when Israel’s beating of the war drums for US-backed intervention against Iran’s nuclear program had reached a head. It was no surprise then that Affleck’s revisionist film completely ignored the Hostage Crisis’ historical trajectory drawn directly from the United States’ overthrow of Iranian democracy in 1953. Accurate political sensitivity there might have told Americans the truth that Iran’s quest for international sovereignty is, to this very day, still a justified response to 1953.
Writing for Counter Punch, Joe Giambrone explained:
“Both films [Zero Dark Thirty and Argo] show wonderful Central Intelligence “heroes” acting to further US interests and take care of imperial problems. TheArgo scenario is a rescue, however, instead of a hit. The problem is that Iran, a country thrown into a bloodthirsty dictatorship after its nascent democracy was murdered by the very same CIA in 1953, is now the bad guy. There are clearly two sides, and the film takes sides with the people who destroyed democracy in Iran and propped up an illegitimate monarch in order to control its oil and its refineries. When this despotic monarch whose secret police disappeared, tortured and murdered the political opposition — with the help and training of the CIA — is overthrown, we are supposed to overlook all that, because America is always good. We rescue our people. We risk our lives, and we come up with elaborate creative plans to help our people. We are heroic and triumphant vs. the inferior wild-eyed Persians and Arabs of the world.”
The patriotism pumping blueprint has been used in other films too: Jarhead 2 (2014) Lone Survivor (2013), Act of Valor (2012), The Hurt Locker (2009),Jarhead (2005), Black Hawk Down (2001), etc. It is not a new concept. Hollywood’s history of supporting US imperialism extends as far back as World War I. But no matter how far back Hollywood and imperialism may go, the crux of the issue is as Giambrone suggested: America is and must ALWAYS be the good guy. Neither context nor details really matter if they corrupt that narrative. And the truth matters least of all if it would break the brittle myth that America is the Sheep Dog of the world.
– American Sniper: The Casualties of War Live Far Beyond the Grave
I feel that anyone who believes Romeo & Juliet is about some kind of Great and Timeless Love TM* needs to see this.
WE WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT THIS TODAY IN MY SHAKESPEARE CLASS.
If you go and actually read what Romeo says to Benvolio in the first scene, you will realize that he is only upset because HE WANTED ROSALINE’S BODY AND SHE SAID NO AND SO ROMEO WAS MOPING AND PITCHING A FIT ABOUT IT. Then, the second he lays eyes on Juliet, he’s basically saying
External image
During the balcony scene, Romeo talks about how he scaled the wall of the garden to see Juliet. That is not romantic. That is disrespectful to her. This is a private area of the Capulet home, and Capulet built the wall around it to protect his daughter. This was a time when a woman’s virtue was the most important thing she owned. If Juliet was found with a man in this very private part of her home, everyone would think she was no longer a virgin, her reputation would be ruined, and it would be much harder, if not impossible, for her father to make a good marriage.
Speaking of good marriages, Count Paris is seen as the bad guy because he “comes between” Romeo and Juliet. Capulet had arranged for Paris to marry Juliet in 2 years time, when she would be 16, in a time when most women were already married and mothers by the time they were Juliet’s age at (almost but not quite) 14. Most fathers would have already had their daughters married by now, but he wants to wait two more years AND PARIS IS OKAY WITH THAT. Not only that, but Paris is young (her father could have had her married to a 60 year old man), titled (he’s a fucking Count), wealthy (again, he’s a count, which means Juliet will have financial stability), and, from what we see of him, he is a very good guy. Capulet could have done a LOT worse in choosing his son-in-law.
Finally, here’s something to consider: Juliet was 13, Romeo was 17. Their relationship lasted 3 days, defied their parents, and ended in the deaths of 6 people.
If I ever hear you say that Romeo and Juliet is the greatest love story ever told, I will bitch slap you.
That is all.
And then, in Shakespeare’s next play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he basically went out of his way to make fun of the people who thought that Romeo and Juliet was so deep and romantic in writing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” sequence performed by a bunch of lousy, middle-aged men who saw too deep into it.
Rejected dude on the rebound initiates a murder-suicide, OMG GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD.
Shake-speared!
Bitch I have a degree in this, so you can fucking try to bitchslap me but I will punch you in the face, because you have serious genuine factual errors and reading comprehension FAIL.
Which is to say, without the nasty attitude, this post is actually wrong about a bunch of stuff.
POINT THE FIRST: Let’s start with the stuff about Juliet and Paris. Let’s also start with this “everything you ‘know’ is actually wrong” problem with the idea that sixteen was a normal marriage age.
It wasn’t. The average age of marriage in Shakespeare’s day and culture was MID-TWENTIES. Marriage of kids younger than that was something the aristocracy did, mostly to secure alliances, and was seen as kind of squicky. Even there, a lot of those young people stayed with their parents until their late teens. It was rare - not Unheard of, but rare - for girls younger than that to be encouraged to have children because, bluntly, IT TENDED TO KILL THEM, and that’s a waste of a good alliance.
Further, Italy was the place where you set stories when you wanted to get away with Ridiculous Edge Cases. You know how, like, _The King and I_ is set in “Siam” so these things can be pushed to their ludicrous and most violent edges? Same with setting shit in Italy. English audiences would go LOL THOSE CRAY ITALIANS AMIRITE and not get hung up on feeling insulted/etc. The fact that Juliet’s thirteen and Paris is going “younger than she are happy mothers made” and her dad’s giving in etc is SUPPOSED to be skeezy as fuck. Paris pushing for her marriage RIGHT AFTER Tybalt dies and, again, her dad giving in is SUPPOSED to look like they’re being assholes, because they ARE. Capulet threatening to throw Juliet out on the street when she doesn’t want to marry Paris isn’t supposed to be “normal”, it’s supposed to make him look like the pride-bound domineering asshole he is.
Same with the whole “walled up young woman” thing: that’s another “those fucking Italians, lol” touch.
Which brings us to POINT THE SECOND: Romeo and Juliet’s love affair didn’t kill no-fucking-body.
THE FEUD killed four people (Mercrutio, Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet) and Paris being a fucking gross and uncompassionate selfrighteous dick killed two more.
SO LET’S TALK ABOUT Mercrutio and Tybalt! The morning after the Capulet party, Tybalt wants to kill Romeo. He wants to kill him, not because of his cousin - as neither he nor anyone else has the FAINTEST IDEA that Romeo and Juliet are in love - but because Romeo showed up at the Capulet party the night before PERIOD.
One: Romeo didn’t even want to go to the party. Mercrutio insisted (and insisted, and insisted) that they gate-crash in masks. Two, Capulet, Tybalt’s uncle and the head of his family and THE GUY IN CHARGE basically told Tybalt to chill out, it’s fine. Tybalt’s devotion to The Feud is so intense that he’s ignoring that because of the ~*insult*~ Romeo has done the Capulets. Three, the Prince just said YESTER-FUCKING-DAY that if he caught anyone feuding again he was going to kill them.
Remember the previous day? When Romeo didn’t know Juliet from Eve nor she from Adam, but we opened the play with servants fantasizing about killing the other sides male servants and raping their female ones? Because of The Feud? Just checking.
Tybalt gives no fucks. Tybalt is going to avenge ~*his family’s honour*~ by at the very least beating the shit out of if not killing Romeo.
And you know what Romeo does *because of his love for and romance with Juliet?*
He refuses to engage. He says no, Tybalt, I know you hate me but I don’t hate you and I’m not going to pay attention to the insults you’re slinging at me, I apologize for wrongs I’ve done, let’s call it all fair. No, I’m still not gonna fight you even if you keep insulting me.
For love of Juliet, Romeo tries like crazy NOT TO FIGHT.
Mercrutio, on the other hand, either can’t stand to see Romeo insulted or thinks because he’s the Prince’s nephew he’s special and the no-brawling rule doesn’t apply to him, pulls out his sword and starts to fight. It’s IRONIC that in trying to stop Tybalt and Mercrutio, Romeo gets in the way of Mercrutio’s parry and gets stabbed, but it’s also Mercrutio’s own damn fault. His “a plague o’both your houses” speech may be very quotable and thunderous, but it’s also hypocritical as hell, considering how DELIGHTED he was to participate in their Feud for his own amusement right up till he got stabbed.
(Watch out for Shakespeare: he likes to do things like that.)
This, really, is the point of the entire prince’s bloodline in this play: they every damn one of them think they can just sort of ignore or deal lightly with the Feud, and the Feud gets them.
So that’s two for the Feud.
Then Juliet fakes her own death. Well, actually, after being told by her father she has no choice but to marry Paris whether she wants to or not, and RIGHT NOW, or he’ll physically throw her out on the streets to starve to death or whore herself, she shows up in Friar Lawrence’s cell saying “fix this or I will fucking kill myself.”
And Friar Lawrence is a coward and fails her. Because here’s the thing: she and Romeo are married. End of story. All Lawrence has to do to FORCE the Prince to get involved and give them protection (or for that matter the local bishops and even the pope) is walk out there and say “they’re married, I witnessed it, we’re done.”
The thing is, this is entirely likely to get the FRIAR into a metric shittonne of trouble. So instead he concocts this huge complicated bullshit plan, and to the appearance of everyone except Lawrence and Juliet, she dies. Then Romeo thinks she’s dead so he kills himself, then she finds him dead and kills HERSELF and wait why was this all a problem in the first place?
OH RIGHT, because of the Feud. (Otherwise frankly the Romeo/Juliet match is fucking AMAZING and would give both families the economic power to dominate Italy. Seriously they’re idiots.)
Now, on his way in to kill himself Romeo also kills Paris and Paris’ servant, in both cases in self-defense. They’re there because despite Juliet rejecting him Paris basically feels a proprietary ownership of her DEAD BODY because her father promised him her living one. Basically.
Just think about that for a while. Think of how GROSS that is. Because it’s really gross.
Those are the only two deaths you can sooooort of blame on the actual romance. I feel they’re more appropriately blamed on patriarchy, but whatever makes you happy.
But. The point is: THIS PLAY IS ABOUT HOW THE FEUD KILLS PEOPLE. Like it literally tells us this in the prologue. “Two households, both alike in dignity/in fair Verona where we lay our scene/from ancient grudge break to new mutiny/where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Aka “so these two idiot families start brawling and killing each other over an old grudge.” The relevance of the children is not that they were in love: it’s that they were BECAUSE of their parents DOOMED. That’s what “star-crossed” means. It means “you are fucked”. It means “fate says you can’t have this.” Their “misadventured, piteous overthrows” - aka their fucked up, incredibly sad efforts - “doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.”
This is a tragedy about how THEIR PARENTS STRIFE killed them. They’re doomed from the start. And you know what Romeo and Juliet’s romance - their “death-marked love”, which is to say “the love that will get THEM killed” - ACTUALLY FUCKING DOES?
It saves Verona.
“The fearful passage of their death-marked love/and the continuance of their parents’ rage/WHICH BUT THEIR CHILDREN’S END, NAUGHT COULD REMOVE/is now the two-hours’ traffic of our stage.”
Again, translating for those who need it: this really sad and fear-inducing story of their totally fucking doomed romance, and how NOTHING BUT THEM DYING would make their parents stop fighting, is what we’re going to show you in the next two hours.”
People were already dying from the feud. They were being injured. Property was being damaged. Brawls were spreading out and killing innocent bystanders. *The Montagues and Capulets were effectively having a gang war.* What Romeo and Juliet did was *make it stop*. Except that everyone involved, the Prince included, had their heads so far up their asses that nothing but their children killing THEMSELVES because of THE PARENTS’ ACTIONS (or in the Prince’s case two of his relatives getting killed along the way) could make them realize oh shit, this is not good, and make peace.
The Prince reiterates this in his closing remarks, in case anyone missed it, even blaming himself: “and I, for winking at your discords, too have lost a brace of kinsmen.”
Modern readers should actually hone in on this pretty well, because we’re still doing this shit. The publicized suicides of queer kids, of girls who were raped, of trans kids - notice how there are all these things a lot of society was fucking ignoring until those happened?
(And actually killing yourself explicitly to bring attention to the wrongs and abuses being done to you that you cannot escape was a cultural norm even then, and can be found behind a ton of ghost stories and revenge stories. Shakespeare knew what he was doing.)
POINT THE THIRD: let’s talk about Romeo and Rosalind vs Romeo and Juliet.
Some context: Shakespeare is not a boy band. Shakespeare is Fall Out Boy. NEVER take anything he’s saying at surface level. His most famous cycle of sonnets is actually a super bleak charting of the failure of love between an older and younger man that sort of devolves into this sordid triangle between Narrator, Golden Youth and Dark Lady, and that whole “my mistress’ eyes” sonnet is nowhere near as complimentary or appearance-positive as people seem to think it is. (The Narrator - who is a character in his own right - is tearing down other women, not elevating his mistress.)
So there was this guy named Petrarch, who popularized the sonnet to HIS format (in Italian) by writing a whole bunch of poems to Laura, who was unobtainable, not interested in him, and eventually dead. THIS BECAME THE FASHION: devoted love and adoration to this woman you couldn’t have, who didn’t want you, and perferrably died chaste so you could idealize her without fear she’d do something human. And Romeo is ABSOLUTELY being a Pining Petrarchan Lover with Rosalind. He’s also writing cliche drivel so cliche it’s MEANT to sound like cliche drivel, to a woman we never even see on-stage.
Then there’s Juliet. And you know what the BIG difference is with Juliet?
Juliet is right there. She’s *PARTICIPANT*. She is matching him passion for passion and lust for lust and, in poetic form, EVEN LINE FOR LINE. Their speech together COMBINES into sonnets - SHAKESPEAREAN sonnets, aka the form Shakespeare made up for himself because he thought Petrarch’s wasn’t as cool. And suddenly cliches are being thrown out. The cliche was the mistress being the moon: fuck it, Romeo says, Juliet is the SUN; the cliche was to swear by the moon, the stars, and Juliet says no don’t do that, swear by YOU. They even get into blasphemy. Juliet is the OPPOSITE of a Petrarchan mistress: she is right there, she is SO right into Romeo right back, she’s alive, and the more he encounters her and the more she’s human and wanting and silly and joking the more he adores her. He loves her MORE after they’ve fucked, after Juliet is manifestly no longer the chaste unachievable idol.
Is it true love? Who knows. They’re both babies, and it’s a play: conventions of the theatre DO allow for people to fall in love at first sight. But whether it’s love or just infatuation, the point is they’re both right there, they’re both feeling it equally and as partners, and Juliet gets to be a living participant with her own desires.
(Like seriously her wedding-night speech before she finds out Tybalt’s dead is pretty damn sexy, guys.)
And whether or not it’s love or infatuation the play and the text very clearly come together to indicate that what’s between Juliet and Romeo is DIFFERENT than that crap with Rosalind.
POINT THE FOURTH: And minor, but still important - R&J and the Dream were almost certainly written more or less at the same time, and it’s of note that the Play Within The Play in this case both STARTS OUT lacking all the other context thats attached to Romeo and Juliet’s story as I laid out above, but that Bottom et al go on to strip it more and more and more of its meaning and context as they go on, rendering it nothing more than silly melodrama. The joke, thus, is rather more complex.
SUMMARY: Romeo and Juliet is a stunningly rich play that is mostly about how feuds fuck people over badly and how if you have to wait until YOUR KIDS OFF THEMSELVES to figure that out you deserve to lose your children. Romeo and Juliet are victims of the feud and its mindless death-lust, not perpetrators of death on others. They’re not supposed to be figures of ridicule OR representatives of True Love: they’re supposed to make the audience go “oh BABIES, no, you’re going to end so badly” and then be sad when they do.
Also common knowledge about social practices of the past is usually wrong. Thank you and good night.
I have been waiting for this rebuttal for ages oh my gods.
This rebuttal is my new favorite post in tumblr.
Seriously, if you read the actual play and not notice in the language how lovingly these kids are treated, how JOYFUL the sex is depicted, how it’s a celebration of love (and yes, Shakespeare could be pretty cynical and gritty about romantic relationships, but not here, not with Romeo and Juliet), and how much Shakespeare was on their side and damning the asshole adults and the gross jerk Paris and mourning for their young people’s deaths, I don’t know what to tell you.
Why Did God Create Atheists?
There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.
One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”
The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”
“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”
ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Mar
I started reading this and was worried it would be something attacking atheists, or bashing religion, but this makes me really, really happy.
imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Yes. YES.
Nothing is more rude to me than seeing someone use slang/AAVE and some acorn asking “what is this in English lolokolololol” Bitch it is English and you live in a society where I KNOW you know what those words mean but everybody gotta say it isn’t English because it isn’t “perfect” by white people standards
The words talmbout, fukumean, ion, and dey are NOT words. Yes ion is a word, but it translates from AAVE to “I don’t know.” What kind of ass backwards bullshit is this? Demanding someone speak actual English is not a white people thing. There is just a need to understand what someone is saying without sounding like a fucking idiot.
It’s called slang you asshat. Fuck you.
Fuck you too. I know what slang is, that doesn’t mean it stops sounding like a retard going over a speed bump.
But you know what all those words mean don’t you? Slang or aave you know. Am I wrong?
How's being a racist twat going for ya bud
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole - oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905. The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece - ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
The day may come when I find this post and do not reblog it, but it is not this day.
Women invented language while men were hunting. I mean…
Friendly reminder from the Gilmore’s that it’s okay not give a 100% all the time and that it’ll be okay!
I thought this was gonna be a penis joke
Y they just flame him lmfao
I ain’t gon lie tho I ain’t never seen white ppl cook someone like this
who knew white ppl had it in them
The economic realities of Baby boomers versus Millennials
that comment has had me thinking for days… like im reblogging this shit a week later from my likes cus its the PERFECT analogy
Don’t talk shit about people’s teeth. Seriously.
Speaking as a major dental hygiene enthusiast…
Great-looking teeth come from two things: luck and money (which is also a function of luck).
Dental procedures tend to be very, very expensive, and are almost never covered by insurance.
Healthy teeth aren’t necessarily big, straight or bright white. Depending on what someone’s natural teeth are like, achieving that look may require a significant downgrade in their dental health; unnecessary crowns and veneers cause damage.
Do not underestimate genetics’ role in determining teeth’s appearance, or how prone teeth are to problems. Genes and early development, i.e. things people get zero control over, can outweigh all else.
A wide range of chronic conditions impact oral health and teeth’s appearance, too, and may contraindicate various types of work or raise procedures’ cost even more.
Finally, for many people and many reasons, celebrity-looking teeth just aren’t a priority (even when they’re attainable; some people might want, y’know, a new car instead).
Regardless, don’t be an asshole. Not even very attractive teeth look good on those.
I’ve NEVER seen a post like this and I’m thrilled TBH because I’m very insecure about my teeth and there is literally one reason they are not nice and that is money so I’m literally down for teeth positivity
I’m just dying while thinking about a hotel employee calmly Googling “How to fold a towel in the shape of an elephant,” and then going out to buy eye stickers.
I think these would guarantee return bookings. Loving the elephant.
I worked in a hotel for a year. Hotel staff LOVE silly requests because otherwise our job is just mundane. It gives the front desk a chance to do something creative.
Speaking as another former hotel owner, this shit would have ABSOLUTELY made my day.
also guys i think it’s time to start spelling ‘small’ right again,, it’s been long enough
see the thing is, at this point, smol isn’t even a “mispelling” of small anymore; it has its own connotations. while small is a regular adjective, smol acts more like a diminutive marker, which English has been lacking
in essence, a smol dog will always be a small dog, but not all small dogs are smol.
what the fuck are you talking about
Linguistic evolution. Accept the smolness into your vocabulary and be cleansed.
@nentindo, assuming you’re asking in good faith & not just trying to dismiss a perfectly accurate analysis, here’s an elaboration of what @princeofdoomrps said:
small and smol mean different things, so they’re different words. smol means something like “small in a cute way” & not just like both small and cute but the two are related. This is what makes smol more like a diminutive marker (c.f. -tje in Dutch, or -let/-ling/-ie [like in kidlet/kidling/kiddie] in some forms of English*)
note that: 1. not all small things are smol. Microbes and electrons? Generally not considered smol.
2. similar-sized things in the same category can be smol or not depending on cuteness. So, a tiny cottage may be a smol house, but an equally tiny tenement room that is an awful place to live? Not smol.
3. smol can refer to youth (e.g. the people I call my “smol frens” are mostly taller than I am but much younger)
4. It also can have implications of fondness/emotional attachment, especially, from what I’ve seen, in fandoms where people call characters things like “my smol son”, which doesn’t have to mean someone who’s actually young, short, or cute at all. Like, IDK if anyone uses that to refer to Hannibal but I wouldn’t be surprised?
So! There are contexts where you could call something/someone small but not smol, and contexts where you could call something/someone smol but not small. This is the textbook definition of “different words”. They are no longer the same word and op, you are very welcome to only use one of them! Anyone is!
Just be aware that pretty much every part of your vocabulary, someone at some point has decried as “wrong” usage and complained about people mangling the language this way, and when you do this thing you’re carrying on a long tradition of pompous silliness.
–
* English isn’t completely lacking in diminutive markers just kinda deficient. And some of those markers have become derisive or dismissive in usage, which i hope never happens to my smol word-child, smol.
[edited for clarity]
This is how we do language. This is language happening.
I’ve seen a lot of curious people wanting to dive into classical music but don’t know where to start, so I have written out a list of pieces to listen to depending on mood. I’ve only put out a few, but please add more if you want to. hope this helps y’all out. :)
stereotypical delightful classical music:
battalia a 10 in d major (biber)
brandenburg concerto no. 5
brandenburg concerto no. 3
symphony no. 45 - “farewell” (haydn)
if you need to chill:
rondo alla turca
fur elise
anitra’s dance
in the steppes of central asia (borodin) (added by viola-ology)
if you need to sleep:
moonlight sonata
swan lake
corral nocturne
if you need to wake up:
morning mood
summer (from the four seasons)
buckaroo holiday (if you’ve played this in orch you might end up screaming instead of waking up joyfully)
if you are feeling very proud:
pomp and circumstance
symphony no. 9 (beethoven; this is where ode to joy came from)
1812 overture
symphony no. 5, finale (tchaikovsky) (added by viola-ology)
american (dvořák)
if you feel really excited:
hoedown (copland)
bacchanale
spring (from the four seasons) (be careful, if you listen to this too much you’ll start hating it)
la gazza ladra
death and the maiden (schubert)
if you are angry and you want to take a baseball bat and start hitting a bush:
dance of the knights (from the romeo and juliet suite by prokofiev)
winter, mvt. 1 (from the four seasons)
symphony no. 10 mvt. 2 (shostakovich)
symphony no. 5 (beethoven)
totentanz (liszt)
quartet no. 8, mvt. 2 (shostakovich) (added by viola-ology)
young person’s guide to the orchestra, fugue (britten) (added by iwillsavemyworld)
if you want to cry for a really long time:
fantasia based on russian themes (rimsky-korsakov)
adagio for strings (barber)
violin concerto in e minor (mendelssohn)
aase’s death
andante festivo
if you want to feel like you’re on an adventure:
an american in paris (gershwin)
if you want chills:
danse macabre
russian easter overture
if you want to study:
eine kleine nachtmusik
bolero (ravel)
serenade for strings (elgar)
scheherazade (rimsky-korsakov) (added by viola-ology)
pines of rome, mvt. 4 (resphigi) (added by viola-ology)
if you really want to dance:
capriccio espagnol (rimsky-korsakov)
blue danube
le cid (massenet) (added by viola-ology)
radetzky march
if you want to start bouncing in your chair:
hopak (mussorgsky)
les toreadors (from carmen suite no.1)
if you’re about to pass out and you need energy:
hungarian dance no. 1
hungarian dance no. 5
if you want to hear suspense within music:
firebird
in the hall of the mountain king
ride of the valkyries
night on bald mountain (mussorgsky) (added by viola-ology)
if you want a jazzy/classical feel:
rhapsody in blue
if you want to feel emotional with no explanation:
introduction and rondo capriccioso
unfinished symphony (schubert)
symphony no. 7, allegretto (beethoven) (added by viola-ology)
canon in d (pachelbel)
if you want to sit back and have a nice cup of tea:
st. paul’s suite
concerto for two violins (vivaldi)
l’arlésienne suite
pieces that don’t really have a valid explanation:
symphony no. 40 (mozart)
cello suite no. 1 (bach)
polovtsian dances
enigma variations (elgar) (added by viola-ology)
perpetuum mobile
pieces that just sound really cool:
scherzo tarantelle
dance of the goblins
caprice no. 24 (paganini)
new world symphony, allegro con fuoco (dvorak) (added by viola-ology)
if you feel like listening to concertos all day (I do not recommend doing that):
concerto for two violins (bach)
concerto for two violins (vivaldi)
violin concerto in a minor (vivaldi)
violin concerto (tchaikovsky) (added by iwillsavemyworld)
cello concerto in c (haydn)
piano concerto, mvt. 1 (pierne) (added by iwillsavemyworld)
harp concerto in E-flat major, mvt. 1 (added by iwillsavemyworld)
and if you really just hate classical music in general:
4′33″ (cage)
a lot of these pieces apply in multiple categories, but I sorted them by which I think they match the most. have fun exploring classical music!
also, thank you to viola-ology and iwillsavemyworld for adding on! if you would like to add on your own suggestions, please reblog and add on or message me so I can give you credit for the suggestion!
Solid list~
