We Are Bard

[seblester]

Sometimes, I Wonder if I Accidentally Bumped Off JD Salinger

This story is true and goes back to 2008 when John Hamilton at Penguin commissioned me to design the book jackets for JD Salinger's entire back catalogue.

Mr. Salinger was alive then, in his early 90s and, by all accounts, a belligerent and grumpy recluse. The chain of command was unusual and went like this. Salinger directed all his feedback via his New York lawyer, who then communicated with his London lawyer, who then communicated with Penguin, who then communicated with me, in my tiny home studio in North London. This process was somewhat intimidating, and went back and forth for weeks. It must have cost him a fucking fortune.

John told me Salinger was a very sensitive and emotional man and had always hated the first book jacket design for 'The Catcher in the Rye', a book which to this day still sells over a million copies a year. He had instructed Penguin to redesign the jackets using lettering only. "No pictures!" Salinger had stated. That's when John thought of me.

I designed three options, and Salinger chose the third — bespoke Inline Roman Capital letterforms with minimal and carefully considered flourishing to add a touch of refined elegance and unify the set. Salinger was shown the designs and signed them off himself, making only one change to the ‘Catcher’ jacket. He wanted the junction on the 'Y' in 'Rye' raised, which he felt made it more legible.

A day later, Salinger died. John said signing off the jackets was probably Salinger's last creative decision.

To this day I sometimes lie in bed at night wondering if the surprise of my stark, graphic and (back then) avant-garde new covers for his life's work tipped the poor fella over the edge. Fuck me, I hope I didn’t accidentally bump off JD Salinger. I just want to get this off my tits after all these years. Rest in Peace, Mr Salinger. What an intense privilege to be involved in a project of such literary magnitude.

[seblester]

Note: A few years later, just as I was coming to terms with this, I designed a cover for Seamus Heaney, and he died immediately afterwards. I no longer take on book commissions.

[paulgadzikowski]

Tonal opposite of Daniel Handler

I tried to link to the source post of my reblog whence I copied these images but apparently that blog's gone now. perhaps i killed them

[tsarina-anadyomene]

Fantasy writers should be more anthropology brained. More theology brained. More wacky intellectual history brained. You should be giving out interesting and novel but believable social structures. Oh they don't have monogamy they have some other thing and they're just as violent about it? Perfect. There should be religions that aren't just gods of x y z. Folio gods are out! And the theology shouldn't fall apart from a moderately intelligent person thinking about it for 4 seconds. Of it falls apart in five econds that's fine. Like just crazy enough to think that a real human society could get down with it. There should be like bizarre new architecture that ye oldifies modernist movements. Oh amd the thing where every city and region is somehow completely homogenous is crazy; do something else. Put people living together with a complicated history. Oh and you can just give them a completely different conceptual scheme for talking about gay and trans people. That would be fun. I should be saying "I never thought of it that way." Make up norms and then think what are all the ways in which this can go wrong. Tell me how people disagree on the interpretation of some doctrine. Create a parodying spectre of some constitutional arrangement. Go crazy

[wearebard]

i am always recommending Seth Dickinson’s article we need worldbuilding

[sleepy-bebby]

Top left clockwise: Keith groover, Jordan Simons, Bret Crow, Harry Hansen

[thriceandonce]

WHAT holy shit that’s wildly cool

[ao3commentoftheday]

memes are fun and relatable and all that, but don't let them discourage you. all of that stuff that doesn't make it into the final product is part of how the final product gets made

[do-you-have-a-flag]

tiktok: christinajulian_91

audio credit: anthony vincent

[abundantchewtoys]

That was not the audio I was expecting

[korixsonder]

i have to reblog this everytime i see it, its too good of a video

[literallyaflame]

love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded

[literallyaflame]

we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up

[hickeyknife]

"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”

And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."

Oskar Eustis on ArtBeat Nation

[canadianwheatpirates]

I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.

This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."

[shimmywhenyoucantbounce]

I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)

Hamlet. There’s a scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying and debates whether to kill him now or wait (because if Claudius dies praying he will automatically go to heaven). The actor playing Hamlet was genuinely asking the audience the questions in the speech, and when he got to “and should I kill him now?” someone in the audience shouted “YES KILL HIM HE NEEDS TO DIE!” Hamlet took the entire rest of the monologue to that person, enumerating his reservations so persuasively that they started to nod in agreement.

Romeo and Juliet. In this production, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt happens in several rounds, of which Mercutio won the first. Mercutio’s actor made the choice, upon his victory, to run down the audience with his hand out for high-fives. He decided this in rehearsal, so he had time to plan for the three responses people would probably give him: a) a high-five back; b) being stunned and not reacting; and c) the old “oops too slow.” What this Mercutio did not prepare for was the audience member who panicked and deposited their handful of M&Ms into his open palm. The way I heard it, Mercutio was still processing this when Benvolio came up beside him and stole the M&Ms out of his hand to eat them.

King Lear. Edmund has a speech in which he asks whether he should marry “Goneril? Regan? Both? Neither?” Again, the actor was legitimately asking the audience, and again he’d prepared for the audience to respond in favor of any of those choices. What makes it even cooler was that the next line is “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive,” which works as a response to any of those options. One night, though, Edmund got his answer as “KILL THEM BOTH AND TAKE THEIR MONEY!” To which he gleefully agreed, “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive!!”

[mmmm-books]

Can’t believe Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 2000s

And in 2015 Emily Brontë released literary clsssic Wuthering Heights

Thank God someone paved the way for them…

[nitrosplicer]

if you think jk was the first woman author, you don’t actually care about women authors.

[syrupie]

Mary Shelley didnt fuck on her parents graves for this level of disrespect

[adrianainthesnow]

Murasaki Shikibu didn’t invent the novel for this.

[steakplissken]

Christine de Pizan did not sit down at her desk and write The Book of the City of Ladies, advocating for women’s education and finding value in women of all social classes and backgrounds, in 1405 for this.

[ailorian]

🎶SHAHARIZADE HAD A THOUSAND TALES🎶

[captainlordauditor]

This……….isn’t even true in 20th century fantasy or childrens books? Pierce, Lackey, Applegate, McCaffrey, Bradley, Butler, whomst?

[amuseoffyre]

Casual reminder that

a woman was the first known author/poet in 2300BC - Enheduanna

the first novel in recorded history was written by a woman in 1010AD - Murasaki Shikibu

the earliest example of science fiction was written by a woman in 1666 - Margaret Cavendish

horror science fiction was popularised by a teenage girl in 1818 - Mary Shelley

a Scotswoman expanded childrens’ stories from moralising tales into anarchic adventures in the mid 1800s, well before it became popular in the early 20th century - Catherine Sinclair

the masked/costumed hero archetype that inspired Batman and Zorro was created by a woman in 1905 - Baroness Emma Orczy

And while she is problematic as all get out, we all know who is to blame for popularising Boarding School fiction (which is a huge inspiration of She Who Must Not Be Named) from the 1930s onwards - Enid Blyton

[khadij-al-kubra]

And do I even need to mention what a badass pioneer Ursula Le Guin was for women author in the fantasy/sci-fi genre?

[impatentpending]

Not to mention Agatha Christie is literally second only to Shakespeare in terms of works sold – 4 billion compared to JKR’s paltry 500 million 

[20xbetterthanu]

Mary Shelly did what

[pineappletheatrekid]

Mary.Shelly.Lost.Her.Virginity.On.Her.Parent’s.Grave.

[draculasstrawhat]

Mary Shelley lost her virginity on her mother’s grave. Her father was still very much alive.

[wuzetianadmirer]

She did what now?

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

We have female authors who published before Rowling here on Tumblr. @dduane, for example! I read her Star Trek novels from the 80s and 90s as a kid/teen.

[sgtpepperoni94]

Octavia E. Butler wrote probably the most accurate dystopian novel in the form of Parable of the Sower.

[fluffmugger]

hey, you know that thing where the white supremacists and their braying donkeys like to pretend they invented culture…

[iconuk01]

Diana Wynne Jones wrote SO many superb and wildly original books based on magic (and science fiction, and mythology, and legend) for kids between 1973 and 2011 including the “Chrestomanci” series, “Howl’s Moving Castle”, to name the merest smattering of them

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[tlbodine]

And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion?

This this this.

This is what drives me so bonkers about media criticism that is concerned with whether characters behaved "correctly" according to the discourse morality of the day, rather than using fiction as a shared language for exploring shit that matters. Like, I do not care whether so-and-so character wins woke points for paying lip service to progressive ideals. I want a story that tells the truth about beautiful and ugly things, that reflects some part of material reality that I've never seen acknowledged, that paints an image so bleak and dark that I can peer into the void without being seen.

If you demand your media be safe, realistic, and "correct" at all times, you're never going to even glimpse the sublime that art is capable of, and we're all the poorer for it.

[kimbureh]

another materialization of this trend is the endless number of "Ending Explained" videos on Youtube.

I get that this could be a worthwhile genre of essay where people present their interpretation of a show/book, but they generally come off bearing The One True Word. And, while there definitely are various readings on a text, more often than not do such "explanation" videos directly contradict the text they claim to be interpreting.

And why do they do that?

That's partly because they dismiss metaphors and treat everything at face value. Suddenly you have video essays wonder whether or not the alien Shimmer in Annihilation has the ability to take over the world. That's not the point of the story! You literally have to ignore 99% of the text to think that's the message of the movie! The Shimmer is

a metaphor

[ahotknife]

oh emily wilson translation of the iliad we’re really in it now

[boykeats]

[ID: text excerpt with all text highlighted in yellow except for the last sentence, reading:

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love with also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

/end ID.]

[wafflewarrior111]

So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

[missroserose]

I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how?  How does he know it?”  Interrogate your witnesses.  Cross-examine them.  Make them explain their reasoning.  It pays dividends.

[heck-in-a-handbasket]

All of this, but also feels/felt. My editor has forbidden me from using those and it’s forced me to stretch my skills.

[ineedthesons]

This is your "show not tell" advice explained!

[infantisimo]

Merritt Tierce on the Defunct Language of Nautical Flags

The poetry of maritime signal flags is obvious: it’s the poetry of code. Meaning: it says ‘that’ which means ‘this’.

"One mind trying to envision everything that could happen, everything that could go wrong, everything that one ship of humans could ever need to say to another. There is something tender about the tendency toward thoroughness. And then something grave about how the language effloresces, absurdly, into such dark specificity."

[exhaustedscreen-deactivated2019]

‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’

- John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

[hamlet-the-dane-official]

my uncle killed my father and married with my mother and now i must *remembers that suicide jokes do nothing for my mental health and wellbeing* put on a play

[savethelifeofmychild]

what's up with folk music being full of faggots, does singing about vietnamese war and drugs turn u into dick/clit sucking machine? so fucking tired of harmonica bisexuals rn

this is the best ask ever. music critics in the mid 1960s:

[grntaire]

HELLLLLL YEAH!!!!!!!

[lladyburd]

THIS PHOTO FROM THE ARTICLE IS INSANE

[wovi]

lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

*

adam phillips, on flirtation

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.