#the poet would also like to endorse doing both
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good afternoon it is 90 degrees and I am dreading having to sit outside for THREE HOURS at work anyway here’s a poetcore meme I thought of while fixing shelf drawers
#the poet would also like to endorse doing both#because as the recipient and someone who does this it sparks a lot of joy#poet’s think thoughts
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Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias
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Catholic social teaching has long recognized that "racism is a sin." I think that many Catholics/Christians are aware of this and even agree with this. But what becomes more difficult to guage is how we experience racism and discrimination in our own society and within ourselves. This becomes very difficult when culturally we accept certain systemic policies that are, by their very nature, discriminatory to a particular race of group.
Systemic racism is a reality here in America. The video above allows us to understand this phenomenon and how it exists within our American society. In 2018 the US Bishops promoted an updated teaching on racism and discrimination called "Open Wide Our Hearts."
We have also seen years of systemic racism working in how resources are allocated to communities that remain de facto segregated. As an example, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, resulted from policy decisions that negatively affected the inhabitants, the majority of whom were African Americans. We could go on, for the instances of discrimination, prejudice, and racism, sadly, are too many.
Calling out systemic racism or discrimination in our society is a very sensitive thing. To many Americans who identify with the former culture this is seen as unpatriotic and sometimes unamerican. As one who is proud of the values of our nation but who is also aware of the deep contradictions that these values have with aspects of its own history I very much want people to know that we can love what our country stands for and push for it to always strive to become a better version of itself. As the poet Langston Hughes said in his poem "Let America be America Again:"
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Carlson's confession
Systemic racism exist deep within the social and cultural fabric of our society. We do not even question it until we can step back from it. As the US bishops stated in their 1979 pastoral "Brothers and Sisters to Us."
The structures of our society are subtly racist, for these structures reflect the values which society upholds. They are geared to the success of the majority and the failure of the minority. Members of both groups give unwitting approval by accepting things as they are. Perhaps no single individual is to blame. The sinfulness is often anonymous but nonetheless real. The sin is social in nature in that each of us, in varying degrees, is responsible. All of us in some measure are accomplices. As our recent pastoral letter on moral values states: "The absence of personal fault for an evil does not absolve one of all responsibility. We must seek to resist and undo injustices we have not ceased, least we become bystanders who tacitly endorse evil and so share in guilt in it."
Tucker Carlson is a famously controversial Fox News correspondent who recently lost his job because of the misinformation and biased perspectives that he shared in recent years. Personally, I really do not like him and could not imagine anything good coming from him and his prejudicial mouth. But America magazine reflected on a recent confession from Carlson that we should all consider. It was a confession of how he felt as a group of men attacked a protestor he didn't like.
Yes, I suddenly found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?
This is the type of reflection that many of should reflect and consider. I am personally ashamed of the fact that I was repelled by this confession because I had judged Carlson's humanity and would not initially accept that he is capable of being a decent human. That is my own bias where I prejudice certain people based on what they say and how they are portrayed. In other words, the insight that Carlson had is one that I, and perhaps many of us, also need to reflect on. Carlson confessed his implicit bias that was deeply woven into the structure and value of his political association. He even went so far as to question this particular bias.
In the TED talk below, Dushaw Hockett walks us through the science of implicit bias and how we can respond to it. I believe, like Dushaw, that identifying our own implicit bias is essential in helping us move this country forward.
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Identifying our own implicit bias is the first step in addressing our own participation with systemic racism. Here is the link to "Project Implicit" and their resources that can assist us along this journey. Self-change is a part of Ignatian spirituality and the Examen is prayer tool that we can use to help us with our own implicit bias. But the tools that Project Implicit may also help us discern this further and help us grow beyond our implicit bias and challenge systemic racism.
I want to also share this UN website with further resources on identifying cultural and systemic racism.
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Anonymous asked: Would you agree with me that Shakespeare is overrated just because the English harp on about him the loudest? I would think someone as cultured as you through your world travels and living in other cultures (you live in France now, correct?) would see that other writers from Moliere to Dante are just as good if not better.
I think the word overrated is overrated. It’s such a lazy and problematic word to be honest. I agree and I also disagree about Shakespeare. Let me explain.
I do have some sympathy with those who say that one of the main reasons for Shakespeare’s celebrity is celebrity itself: At some point, he became literally iconic, with likenesses in stone and bronze now found in parks and squares all around the world. The name of Shakespeare is synonymous with English literature in the way Mona Lisa has come to symbolise art.
There is little objective reason to suppose Shakespeare ‘greater’ than his contemporaries Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe. The same naysayers say that there is less reason still to suppose Shakespeare the greatest English writer of all time because Shakespeare’s work fell spectacularly out of fashion in the century following his death, during the restoration period/early Enlightenment-era.
True, English was not a prestige language in Shakespeare’s time, when it was only just becoming formalised. And so yes, there is some merit in the argument - albeit a cynical one - that there was a need for a recognised ‘English national writer’ grew slowly alongside the growing prestige of English and the British Empire.
As critics rightfully point out, Shakespeare was only ‘rediscovered’ in the mid-to-late 18th Century following much adaptation of the surviving manuscripts by literary luminaries such as Alexander Pope and John Dryden. The late 18th Century period of British Romanticism meant that the most famous actor of the age, David Garrick, was able to rebrand Shakespeare in his own mould using the Romantic trope of ‘the divinely inspired bard’.
Garrick was also the first to realise the potential of Shakespeare as a brand. He was the Paul the fervent missionary to Christ’s Jesus.
For Garrick and late 18th Century audiences, ‘the Shakespeare brand’ was that of the bardic genius, a Romantic-era trope often pictured symbolically as a shepherd playing a lute. Consider that the English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge actively sought the rustic authenticity of country life in the Lake District because they wanted to be bardic - poets in touch with nature.
Ironically, it helped the rebranding that Shakespeare’s own backstory was so vague and his body of work so contested: Shakespeare was the Open source project of English Literature, allowing Garrick and others to adapt and repurpose freely. Similarly, Shakespeare’s fall into obscurity during the previous century was now spun around: His genius had been rediscovered, like a lost treasure.
David Garrick was both a sincere fan and a shrewd businessman. Wherever the line was between the two, Garrick certainly wasn’t afraid to share his love of Shakespeare, unveiling statues, organising festivals and even building a temple in devotion to what he called “the God of our idolatry”. Funnily enough, all this public Shakespeare-worship also had a positive effect on the door at Garrick’s theatre.
Thanks to Garrick’s canny branding, England’s most famous Romantic-era poets in the generation following grew up with the shared sense that Shakespeare was a “transcendent genius” and these endorsements by famous poets helped to cement the idea of Shakespeare as England’s ‘national poet’.
There were plenty who disagreed both with the idolatry and the assumption that Shakespeare - a rather sketchy, anachronistic, plagiarising, ribald Renaissance playwright - should be venerated as England’s literary ambassador in the Age of Englightenment.
But bardolatry had turned into an unstoppable force - so why not put it to the good? Following the French Revolution and a clampdown in England on ‘romantic radicals’, Shakespeare survived the purge as an acceptably safe channel for the sublimation of radical passions.
The British Romantic movement either emigrated to the New World or it dissipated and diverged into Gothic and Realist modes via the novel. The Victorian period saw Britain rise to its imperial height. British culture was now an edifice and English Literature needed a monumental hero: Shakespeare was simply the best-known, most-celebrated, least offensive, most suitably aged candidate. Chaucer? Too old. Milton? Too political. Austen? Too female. The Romantic poets? Too radical. Scott? Too Scottish. Dickens? Too new. Marlowe? Too much like Shakespeare without the iconicism.
It was never in any doubt. As the Victorian project went into full steam, it was just taken for granted that Shakespeare was the national poet and always would be. The idea of Shakespeare as a towering example of English cultural prowess also dovetailed nicely with the historical narrative of the Elizabethan Golden Age, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the beginning of English naval prowess.
Even his fiercest critics will admit that Shakespeare was no slouch. He was commercially successful and celebrated during his time, receiving both popular and Royal acclaim. He is widely and deservedly appreciated today for the humanist qualities of his plays and his witty and wry observations of human behaviour and society. His plays and poems contain some excellent, extremely quotable lines. Shakespeare was a great writer who definitely deserves to be up there with the greats.
Seen through this lens it would be very easy to come to conclusion that Shakespeare is overrated. And yet….
Is Shakespeare overrated? Yes, I would agree with you. Simply on the grounds that it's impossible for so many people to make an apples-to-oranges comparison like "greatest playwright" and not be overstating the case. It is important to stress that this doesn't mean Shakespeare isn't magnificent.
In fact, if there's one good reason for me to simply answer "no" to the question, it would be that some people might take "Shakespeare is overrated" to mean "Well, we'll just skip it then." You can exaggerate even a fantastic thing. Failing to understand why Shakespeare was so great is an even worse mistake than the hyperbole sometimes applied to him.
How do other international writers stack up against Shakespeare? I would say not very well.
If you are asking about French writers that possess the international cachet as well as historical widespread importance and influence, then the answer is probably no one.
The great authors of the seventeenth century (Pierre Corneille, Molière, Racine, Mme de Lafayette, La Fontaine) have not, since the Romantic period, enjoyed the same international acclaim as Shakespeare. That is simply a fact and in my book it does not mean that they are less ‘great’, simply that they are harder for foreigners to appreciate (George Steiner discusses this well in The Death of Tragedy, with particular reference to Racine). Racine’s language is less colourful than Shakespeare’s and it takes some time and effort (including the effort not to keep comparing him with Shakespeare) to appreciate its qualities (to my mind, its emotional appeal is as great as that of Shakespeare’s more varied language).
So even though I have great joy reading them, Molière and Racine and Corneille do not generate the sort of instant veneration that Shakespeare enjoys.
Rabelais is a presence and an influence on many, but he doesn’t enjoy that widespread international cachet that Shakespeare possesses even among the simply literate.
I’m inclined to agree with the great Proust specialist Jean-Yves Tadié that Proust is probably France’s most obvious ‘world’ author. But I would also add two other French writers that are well-known, respected, and have had a wide and deep influence both in France and elsewhere: Michel de Montaigne and Victor Hugo.
Proust’s novel is a huge literary and cultural landmark that impresses and influences to this day. Montaigne’s influence is so subtly pervasive that many people may not even think of him. He is one of my favourite writers.
Victor Hugo is probably of the three the closest France has of a popular world author: of all French authors, he has the most streets named after him in France. He was so acclaimed that even in his lifetime, they gave his name to the street where he lived.
Hugo was a poet, a novelist and a playwright. You may not know about his poetry, but you have probably come across his work in a way or another. Ever heard of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame? Of course you have. Les misérables? I’m sure you saw the musical and bought the T-shirt. The opera Rigoletto? Based on one of his plays. He is pervasive.
But curiously though when referring to the French language, though, the French don’t mention him. They say “la langue de Molière”, as they say “la langue de Shakespeare” for English or “la langue de Goethe” for German.
Historically, there have been a lot of great French poets, from Villon and Ronsard and Bellay through Hugo, Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, Valéry, and Saint-Jean Perse. They are honoured, they are admired, they are read in other countries and exert an influence. But most readers would say, “They aren’t of Shakespeare’s eminence.”
France has had a lot of great novelists, too. Flaubert had a large influence, but “He’s not of Shakespeare’s eminence” either. Balzac and Zola cannot be ignored, but “They are not….” etc. It doesn’t mean that France doesn’t have great writers. Ronsard, Balzac, and Flaubert, for instance, as literary figures of the first rank, are authors that repay a lifetime’s reading and study.
Goethe and Schiller would be Germany’s answer to the Shakespeare question but neither really quite make it to Shakespeare’s level of eminence and visibility. This is obviously not a judgement on their literary greatness but an observation of the limitation of language and the exporting of culture.
My own personal opinion is that only - perhaps - Cervantes and Dante would sit on the summit with Shakespeare.
But what makes Shakespeare so special even if he was overrated? I think partly because that Shakespeare's greatness was so multifaceted that it's easy to see why people fall all over themselves to praise it.
A few years ago before I joined the corporate world (and when I had relatively more free time) I did, over the course of two years, manage to read all 38 plays and some of his sonnets at a steady pace. Nothing about it felt like a chore. Yes, it was hard going sometimes because of the language but I had few trusty guides (the Shakespeare Arden series is fantastic) to help me through some of the more archaic words. I soon found myself immersed in Shakespeare’s world. I was hooked into the story and found myself asking profound questions of life, love, death, fate, and human nature that each of the protagonists had to unwittingly wrestle with. It struck me as I reached the end of my marathon reading just how relevant most of what Shakespeare had written was to our turbulent lives and troubled times.
His use of the English language struck me first. Studies reveal that Shakespeare used 17,677 different words in his writings, less than the typical modern person’s vocabulary. Yet, always searching for variety, he used half of those words only once in his work. And 1700 of them appear in print for the first time in his writings; he actually helped invent modern English. Both Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the later Oxford English Dictionary quote him more than any other author.
Scores of phrases invented by Shakespeare made their way into common usage, many of which we still use today: as luck would have it; bated breath; the be-all and the end-all; break the ice; brave new world; cold comfort; dead as a doornail; the dogs of war; faint-hearted; for goodness sake; foregone conclusion; good riddance; kill with kindness; laughing stock; one fell swoop; wear my heart upon my sleeve; wild-goose chase.
While a master of originality in language, Shakespeare happily borrowed plots from history, Greek myths, the Bible, fables, and legends. The words were the thing. As he wrote about the creative process:
…as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
It is striking how truly creative Shakespeare is not just with his words but his stories too. True creative genius, however, takes place in the mind. I think of Emily Dickinson, who rarely ventured outside her home; or J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who traveled little and wrote their fantasies in book-lined Oxford offices. Shakespeare led a rather provincial life, splitting his time between bustling London and the sleepy village of Stratford-upon-Avon. His lively mind, however, made up for whatever experiences he might have missed.
Though he never traveled widely, somehow Shakespeare had an unmatched grasp of human nature. Reading his plays again, I found myself immersed in a world dominated by ambition, jealousy, pride, violence, honour, sacrifice, love, and betrayal. Shakespeare presented life as it actually is, with no provision for politically-correct “trigger warnings” and no sociological or psychological explanations for human behaviour.
Shakespeare shaped complex characters who behave like living, breathing human beings with distinct behavioural patterns, vices, virtues, strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, he allowed mysteries about them to go unsolved, well knowing that in real life most people do not know all the secrets about their neighbours, their fellow employees, their leaders - or even themselves.
In modern portrayals, rioters riot because economic forces impel them, teens get pregnant because their hormones overpower them, pro-choice women choose abortion because they “have no choice.” The message is clear: we are products of our genes, our families, and our circumstances, nothing more. In striking contrast, Shakespeare’s characters stride like giants across the stage, exuding a sense of personal destiny. They are not automatons or victims, but free individuals making moral choices, some destructive and some noble, for which they bear the consequences.
Shakespeare dared to express his observations about humankind in plain truth, unadorned with political blandishment or obsequious flattery and unencumbered by the dictates of literary tradition.
A. N. Wilson wrote,”This probably explains why, in 1941, Joseph Stalin banned Hamlet. As the U.S. historian Arthur P. Mendel explained, the idea of a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith, and who intently scrutinised life around him to try to separate truth from falsehood without prompting, seemed ‘criminal’ to the Soviet dictator and his thought police.”
In an oft-quoted line, Macbeth describes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare’s own plays serve as a refutation of that modern-style nihilism. Their author had known obscurity and fame, poverty and wealth. Like other great writers - Tolstoy and Dickens come to mind - he rendered paupers and miscreants with as much care as the rich and powerful. In every life, no matter how small, he found meaning and significance.
Shakespeare had this canny understanding of life from cradle to grave that speaks to the human condition. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” says the character Jaques in As You Like It. He goes on to describe the seven stages we pass through: first the infant, “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms,” then the “whining schoolboy…creeping like snail unwillingly to school,” followed by the lover, soldier, career person, and declining adult. Finally, the time comes for letting go: “Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
I realised anew why Shakespeare is regarded as the greatest writer in English. He stuck to the universals. His plots and themes are timeless. The story of the ill-fated love of Romeo and Juliet is just as relevant in the modern world - with its racial, ethnic, and class divisions that set family against family - as it was in Elizabethan England. And because his plots and themes have universal appeal, every culture has a Macbeth, a Lear, and an Othello.
Versions of his plays appear in virtually every language, including Tagalog, Slovene, Icelandic, Romanian, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, Bengali, Esperanto, Interlingua, Korean, Swahili, Estonian, and Ukrainian. As a result, his works have been translated into every major language, and have inspired thousands of paintings and some 20,000 pieces of music as well as countless film versions.
English critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson said Shakespeare was a master at depicting the humanity everyone shares. Johnson wrote: “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature: the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”
Not only has Shakespeare touched other cultures he has also touched other great writers. In assessing Shakespeare’s influence on the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, Rolf Fjelde wrote that "something of Shakespeare" is present in all of Ibsen's works. American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called Shakespeare "inconceivably wise."
Harold Bloom, the late iconic Shakespearian scholar at Yale, defender of the Western Canon, and author of great book ‘Shakespeare: Invention of the Human’ (1998), said Shakespeare "is a system of northern lights, an aurora borealis visible where most of us will never go. Libraries and playhouses (and cinemas) cannot contain him; he has become a spirit or 'spell of light,' almost too vast to apprehend" I wouldn’t go that far in my superlatives but I agree with Bloom. I just doesn’t see another writer that comes close to Shakespeare’s achievement.
And this is before we even consider his poetry. His poetry fits a place in the mind the way a key fits a lock. The fit is so natural and complete (at least at times) that it looks easy, at least until you start looking at the clunky, plodding verse of his contemporaries, even the very good ones. Shakespeare led an explosion in the English language that makes it the most diverse, adaptable, and potent on the planet. He tapped into old stories, gave them his own spin, and made them classics that people tell even today.
But that doesn't mean every word he dripped was perfect. "Would he had blotted a thousand [lines]," said his friend, Ben Jonson. He had his moments of clunkiness, and plenty of them. Many of his plays (such as Pericles) are of interest almost exclusively to experts, who view them to get insights into his much better works. But they do contain those insights, and even if the play as a whole isn't appealing, there are always signs of genius.
Four hundred years have passed, and Shakespeare's plays need to be viewed through that lens. A good performer can help you understand the language, without alteration. But rules of pacing have changed; audience expectations have changed; cultures have changed. Jokes have lost their meanings, and most of the comedies fare badly without radical updating. His plays are often "adapted" to modern culture, losing the language, and most of the time they lose their meanings as well. They're less due to Shakespeare than they are part of the universal well of stories that Shakespeare tapped.
Shakespeare was undoubtedly the greatest coiner of phrases ever, but his gift for new words is exaggerated. He is the first to have written them, but he probably didn't coin all of them. The printing press was still new, and he was popular enough that his books survived. Being the first record isn't the same as coining.
The reason Shakespeare isn't overrated is because he dealt with these issues when no one else did. Others certainly did. Shakespeare is great because he just wrote better than anyone else on these matters - delving more deeply, exploring more nuance, writing more eloquently and movingly than any other playwright then or since.
To put it in a single sentence, Shakespeare was writing, "Behold, the new human." Or as he put it in The Tempest, "O brave new world that has such people in't."
Today the young, new humanity he heralded is mature, if not outright old. But there resides in memory enough of youth to excite. There remains enough of our early character that we can still gain insight and comfort from Shakespeare, the sage of the old new human's youth. It is especially comforting now to think that those words and ideas from our adolescence, which once were challenging, are relevant still - appear still as universals for all time. At a time when we are casting about for new "universals" for all time Shakespeare is as relevant as he ever was.
And so on and so on. There are plenty of ways in which Shakespeare's reputation has been exaggerated. But anybody who turns tragically hip over learning that, dismissing Shakespeare as “overrated” without simultaneously adding "but still unarguably greater than most, and unarguably both great and relevant" is simply being intellectually illiterate and profoundly lazy.
Thanks for your question.
#ask#question#shakespeare#literature#english#language#culture#dante#moliere#hugo#proust#plays#words#books#reading#poetry#icon#playwright
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The Depiction of Women in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley as a Staple of Social Commentary
A/n: As promised, my final piece of uni writing! This landed me a 13.75/20, which means that it is fairly-well substantiated and a valid piece of literary analysis. The main point of critique was that I didn't interact or go into discourse enough with existing sources. Otherwise my essay was deemed "quite inspirational". So instead of uwu fanfiction I'd like to present you this more scientific and academic (maybe even boring) side of myself. Do enjoy!
P.s. My dm's are always open should anyone be interested in going into this a little bit more or should anyone have any questions.
The Depiction of Women in Frankenstein: Mary Shelley as a Staple of Social Commentary
Daughter of two vociferous literary revolutionaries and wife to a renowned poet and activist, societal expectations for Mary Shelley and her work were always set high. Her publication of Frankenstein was nothing short of successful and pivotal in that “Shelley invented modern science fiction” (Sturgis 59). Though the novel was initially presented and perceived as a “ghost story” (Shelley 7) there appeared to be an underlying tone of social commentary present. This, however, is not surprising, as Mary’s mother, Wollstonecraft, was an avid advocate for women’s rights and gender equality. It becomes apparent through the characterisation of women within the text that Shelley seeks to denounce the idealisation of uneducated, objectified and submissive women. In doing this she presented herself, akin to her mother, as an activist for women and their rights.
In this essay I will argue that Shelley condemns the view of women as submissive, passive creatures through the male protagonists’ descriptions of women. I will do this by analysing the stark contrast in depiction and characterisation of several women within the text, through the male protagonists’ eyes. To achieve this, I will primarily focus on three female characters, namely Elizabeth Lavenza, Safie and the female creature. I chose these personalities specifically because they each represent different values and types of women. In addition to this, I will also be touching on Mary Wollstonecraft’s call to the education of women as addressed in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This because Shelley herself plays around with the same ideas and concepts. In doing so I will bring forward Shelley’s own advocation for the education and emancipation of women.
Before I start analysing Shelley’s work I want to introduce Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In her work, which was “the first book on women’s rights published anywhere in the world” (Botting 296), Wollstonecraft called for the education of women as she believed that “if woman isn’t fitted by education to become man’s compassion, she will stop the progress of knowledge” (2). She furthermore argues that education was crucial in women’s understanding so they wouldn’t revolt or rebel against their “duty” (Wollstonecraft 2). On top of this, she condemns the sensibilization of women, stating that “their conduct is unstable because they feel when they should reason: and their opinions are wavering because of contradictory emotions” (Wollstonecraft 42). Here we see that Wollstonecraft disapproves of the emotionalism of women and how she wants to step away from the stereotypical depiction of woman as a sentimental creature. In her work she ultimately claims that due to the lack of reason and plethora of sensation, women are considered to be weak and “fragile in every sense of the word” she also adds that they are therefore “obliged to look up to man for every comfort” (Wollstonecraft 42). This then implies that the emancipation of women is achieved through education and reason.
Continuing on, I would like to shift my focus to Shelley’s novel and its female characters. As stated before, I will be analysing the three figures of Elizabeth, Safie and the female creature. In this part of my essay I will concentrate on Elizabeth Lavenza specifically. I will be analysing her characterisation and portrayal through the eyes of Victor, the main narrator in the book. In the novel, we are introduced to Elizabeth through Victor who describes that she, as a “sweet orphan” (Shelley 35) was taken in by his parents. From the very start she is presented as some sort of object, Frankenstein’s mother even referring to her as “a pretty present for [her] Victor” (Shelley 35). He seems to consolidate this sentiment, describing Elizabeth as “[his]” (Shelley 36), the possessive pronoun reaffirming the objectification. Aside from being seen as a possession, we see that after mother Frankenstein passes away, Elizabeth is appointed the new matriarch of the house. This is especially shown here: “She devoted herself to those whom she had been taught to call her uncle and cousins” (Shelley 44). Here Elizabeth is presented as the nurturing, parental figure and even further along in the story we see that she often intervenes as a nurse or caretaker: “how often have I regretted not being able to perform it myself! I figure to myself that the task of attending on your sick bed has devolved on some mercenary old nurse, who could never guess your wishes, nor minister to them with the care and affection of your poor cousin” (Shelley 64). Examples such as these reinforce the portrayal of the compassionate, caring woman. In terms of her personality, we soon learn that Elizabeth is a very emotional and sensitive woman. A good example would be her reaction to the death of William: “She fainted, and was restored with extreme difficulty. When she again lived, it was only to weep and sigh” (Shelley 72). Remarkable here is that Victor is said to be the “comforter” (Shelley 73) of the family, which coheres with a concept that Wollstonecraft previously introduced: because Elizabeth is so frail and emotional she needs Victor’s support. Wollstonecraft’s sentiment regarding the wavering of rationality and reason due to overwhelming emotionality is furthermore confirmed when Elizabeth is called on as a witness during Justine’s trial. We see here that while “simple and powerful” Elizabeth’s testimony “was excited by her generous interference, and not in favour of poor Justine” (Shelley 85). In other words: her passions and emotions contributed to the conviction of her friend, thus reinforcing the idea that strong emotions are a weakness, as they cancel out any reason. In terms of characterisation, we also see that Elizabeth is often described as a “sweet girl” with “gentleness, and soft looks of compassion” (Shelley 189-190). Throughout his narration it becomes apparent that Victor sees Elizabeth, as the perfect woman, even going so far as to state that he “never saw any woman who excited, as Elizabeth does, [his] warmest admiration and affection” (Shelley 151). We can conclude from this, that Victor deems the emotionally vulnerable, nurturing and motherlike woman the ideal one.
The second character I will be discussing is Safie. Here it is important to mention that unlike Elizabeth and the female creature, this character is observed and narrated from the creature’s point of view. We are introduced to this character in chapter XIII when the monster is in hiding, taking refuge in a local cottage. Very noticeable is that in comparison to Elizabeth, the focus with Safie mostly lies on the woman’s physical features rather than her emotionality. The creature describes her as having “a countenance of angelic beauty and expression” (Shelley 116) and being “charming” (Shelley 121). In terms of her personality, the creature deems the Arabian to be “sweet” as well as “lovely” (Shelley 117). She is furthermore described to be “always gay and happy” (Shelley 118). While these traits are directly worded by the creature, through reading her story we see that Safie is actually a very brave, smart and self-governing woman rather than an overly sentimental one. Her independence and bravery were inspired by her mother who “taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of spirit, forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet” (Shelley 124). Following her mother’s advice, Safie abandons her religion and sets out to Europe as “the prospect of marrying a Christian, and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society, was enchanting to her” (Shelley 124). This reveals to the reader that Safie’s priorities include intelligence and independence, rather than motherhood or love. While Felix is definitely a romantic partner to her, having been referred to as her “lover” (Shelley 127), the marriage is also a sort of leverage, ensuring her freedom as it offers an escape from her repressive and sexist religion, as mentioned in the quote. However during her travels to unite with Felix, Safie’s companion falls ill and passes away, leaving her “unacquainted with the language of the country, and utterly ignorant of the customs of the world” (Shelley 127). Here her true bravery shines through as she keeps pushing forward with the help of an Italian family, despite being alone in a foreign country. Eventually once settled in with the De Laceys, the creature, who is equally “unacquainted” (Shelley 127), informs the reader on their learning process, stating that “she and [him] improved rapidly in the knowledge of language” (Shelley 118). This then also supports the statement that Safie is indeed a smart woman, being capable of learning a new language in a matter of months. When we apply Wollstonecraft’s philosophy to this, we see that Safie closely resembles that new woman considering that she is in touch with both her reason and passion. She furthermore endorses Wollstonecraft’s educational stance as she actively pursues knowledge. In terms of sensibility Safie has only been described to “[appear] affected by different feelings; wiping a few tears from her lovely eyes” (Shelley 117) once, when meeting Felix. We can conclude that in terms of this character we see a healthy balance between emotionality and rationality, therefore introducing a different “type” of woman. It is safe to say that Safie is to be regarded as “the incarnation of Mary Wollstonecraft in the novel” (Mellor 5).
Moving on, the third and final character I would like to discuss is the female creature. It is once again important to note that this part of the story is told from Victor’s perspective and that this creature was never actually brought to life. She was merely an idea and request. We learn that the idea of the female creature is introduced by Frankenstein’s monster, after he fails to find a human counterpart: “I am alone, and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects. This being you must create” (Shelley 144). This request, or demand, is however not well-received by Victor: “Shall I create another like yourself, whose joint wickedness might desolate the world? Begone!” (Shelley 145). However after a lot of contemplation and convincing, Victor agrees: “I consent to your demand, on your solemn oath to quit Europe for ever, and every other place in the neighbourhood of man, as soon as I shall deliver into your hands a female who will accompany you in your exile” (Shelley 148). The task proved easier said than done, as Victor struggles to “overcome [his] repugnance to the task which was enjoined [him]” (Shelley 149). Victor seems to think and overthink his decision until ultimately he decides against it, therefore breaking the agreement. He comes to this conclusion after thoroughly considering what a new creation might bring forward:
I was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man, and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by one of his own species. (Shelley 165)
This revelation brings more to light than meets the eye and requires a more thorough reading. I will start with analysing the female creature’s speculated character. This is speculation because she was never actually brought to life. In other words: this version of the female creature only ever existed in Victor’s inner thoughts. Nonetheless, we see that this female is depicted as malevolent or violent and seemingly emancipated since she might not conform with what her creator, Frankenstein, imposes on her. On the other hand, the creature is also described as “a thinking and reasoning animal” (Shelley 165), which strives from Victor’s ideal woman (cf. Elizabeth) and makes her a threat. Here lies the sexism and Shelley’s critique thereof. She exposes Victor because “he is afraid of an independent female will, afraid that his female creature will have desires and opinions that cannot be controlled by his male creature” (Mellor 6). What we can also deduce from this is that Frankenstein seeks to adhere to the “sexist aesthetic that insists that women be small, delicate, modest, passive, and sexually pleasing – but available only to their lawful husbands” (Mellor 7). We see throughout the story that aesthetics and beauty are important virtues as both Elizabeth and Safie, though perceived by two different protagonists, are praised for their beauty. This is in stark contrast with the female creature, as Frankenstein reasons that the male creature might perceive her as a “greater abhorrence” (Shelley 165). Shelley with this shows the superficial mind of Victor Frankenstein and brings a whole system of sexism in societal standards to light. It is remarkable to see how, despite never even having lived, the female creature becomes one of the most crucial characters in outing her criticisms.
When comparing the three female characters with one another, we notice a sort of spectrum. On the one end there is Elizabeth who is seen as the perfect woman and wife by Victor’s standards and on the other end we have the female creature who is nothing short of horrifying, violent and a threat to him and his standards. Somewhere in the middle we then find Safie, the fictional embodiment of Wollstonecraft and her ideals. Now, what sets Elizabeth apart from these other two women is her objectification. She is often presented as a matriarch and sometimes even an object or something akin to a pet in relation to Victor. She is submissive and for the most part reliant on the men in her life as previously mentioned. The other two women differ in that they strive for emancipation and independence. Furthermore these two women are described as rational creatures, rather than “sensible” or emotional ones, which is exactly what Wollstonecraft was advocating for.
To conclude, while Shelley’s Frankenstein at first glance presents itself as a “ghost story” (Shelley 7), a thorough, more critical read brings to light a sharp piece of social commentary. Shelley masked her criticisms, which were heavily inspired by her mother’s A Vindication for the Rights of Woman, by writing mostly from the perspective of males. These criticisms entailing women and the sexist expectations that society has provided are revealed through the male depiction of three female characters. There are several things to be established surrounding these women. First of all it becomes apparent that Victor favours his Elizabeth, who is the staple of a housewife: submissive, oppressed and dependent on her husband or provider. Then there is the self-governing Safie, who travelled across the continent just to obtain her freedom as a woman. The third and final personality, the female creature, is pivotal in that she is the epitome of Shelley’s critique. Victor Frankenstein fears this female creation as she is rational and will likely have a strong will of her own and can therefore not be controlled by his male creature. He furthermore is appalled by this creature as she does not conform with the stereotypical beauty standard. Throughout this narration Shelley brought to light the intricate and subtle elements of sexism in which Victor, the man, presents himself as superior to women. Shelley’s work went on to inspire and “managed to change the Western world’s conception of women’s rights, human reason, education theory and romantic love” (Sturgis 55). In her work Shelley advocates, as her mother before her, for the education of women and gender equality and seeks to denounce the submissive woman as a whole.
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Works Cited
Botting, Eileen Hunt. “Crossing Borders and Bridging Generations: Wollstonecraft's ‘Rights of Woman’ as the ‘Traveling Feminist’ Classic.” Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 3/4, 2007, pp. 296–301.
Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism. By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. J. Paul Hunter. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by M.K. Joseph, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Sturgis, Amy H. "Feminism, Frankenstein, and Freedom." Reason, vol. 47, no. 2, 2015, pp.54-60, 6.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by J. Bennett, Oxford University Press, 2017.
#uni stuff#literary analysis#mary shelley#frankenstein#mary wollstonecraft#a vindication of the rights of woman
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The Campbell and MacDonald poet-spokesmen each make a unique and identical claim on behalf of their respective clans: to each of them belongs Ceannas nan Gàidheal, the 'headship', leadership and supremacy, of the Gaels. This formal attempt to wrest from Clan Donald their proud, ancient title raises the struggle above the level of any other vendetta in Gaelic history. The MacDonald claim in fact goes back beyond the eponymous Donald: 'The headship of the Gaels to the Seed of Coll'; the genealogy of John of Islay is then traced by this poet through Somerled to Colla Uais, the mythical fourth century ancestor to whose descendants properly belong 'the headship of Ireland and Scotland'. The counter-claim is couched in similar terms: to the Campbells belongs the headship of the Gaels. 'A good charter is the headship of the Gael'. 'The headship of the Gael of the island of Alba'. 'Lord of the Gaels is Gilleasbuig.' In the 1550s Maclean's poet reflects Campbell claims when he says in elegant diplomatic verse that he comes 'with my finished poem to the King of the the Gaels'. Viewed against the background of events from the 1490s onwards the precise words of this Campbell poetry make an illuminating comment: 'A good charter is the headship of the Gael, whoever it be that has a grip of it; a people's might at this time it has exalted; it is the noblest title in Alba. Gilleasbuig, earl of the Gael, has grasped the charter of the headship of his people; in his charter it has ever been of right to rule a willing people without self-seeking.' The use of 'charter' reminds us of a locus classicus in Clan Donald poetry: 'The broadsword's charter is the birthright of that bold people; often without seal's impression do they impose tax and tribute.' It recalls also the bitter and often quoted words of Iain Lom in 1678: 'The sharp stroke of short pens protects Argyll... By falsehood you deprived us of Islay green and lovely and Kintyre with its verdant plains.'
Hostility to Crown charters by those who suffered under the policies they endorsed was real enonugh and the Campbells were justiably regarded as masters of such 'un-Gaelic activities'. The point to note however is that Campbell military and political ambitions are here backed by explicit claims at the diplomatic level of classical bardic exchanges. Mr Ronald Black was shown that this particular Campbell poem was well known to the poets of Clan Donald. He adds '... it exists in two manuscripts... To find a Scottish bardic poem in more than one manuscript is unusual; to find a poem in praise of Mac Cailein Mòr written by two different MacMhuirichs seems on the face of it little short of amazing'. Whatever the MacMhuirichs' reasons for preserving the poem so carefully, the implications of this Campbell demarche would certainly not elude them nor could its language fail to distinguish Campbell policy from that of others whose acceptance of the leadership of Clan Donald might well be less than total. Consequently even the MacKenzies, who frequently played a part in the north comparable with that of the Campbell elsewhere (and who may have begun to pursue a distinctive course as far back as Harlaw) never achieved a commensurate notoriety in the general tradition of the Gaels. It is frequently observed that no feud is as bitter as that between kinsmen. Yet tradition has preserved no memory of the consistently treacherous behaviour, from the Clan Donald point of view, of MacIan of Ardnamurchan who from 1494 until his death c.1518 'never failed to oppose the restoration of the Lordship by MacDonald claimants and throughout... was in close association with the Campbell earls of Argyll.' Except at a private and local level the custodians of MacDonald tradition could not deal with this without making a fundamental shift in historical perspective. A larger ideological framework was required. It is a curious irony in view of the Campbell reputation for double-dealing that their notoriety should have been built up not so much perhaps by Campbell involvement in Scottish state affairs as, at the cultural level, by the plain speaking of the Campbells' poets with regard to the Headship of the Gael.
“Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition”, by John MacInnes in “The Middle Ages in the Highlands” (Inverness Field Club, 1981).
This was a really interesting article in its entirety to be honest, but I was particularly fascinated by the discussion of how both the chiefs of Clan Donald and the earls of Argyll tried to claim to be ‘chief’ of the Gaels. Nonetheless I think there was a bit elsewhere that discussed how bards (who, as a special learned order, were supposed to be treated a little like heralds with diplomatic immunity) might be associated with one clan or another but could still be employed by their rivals on occasion. Then there was further discussion of how each clan created its own identity- the Campbells, for example, linking themselves to the legend of King Arthur and the ancient Britons whereas Clan Donald flaunted a much-mythologised Irish ancestry (though to be fair the Campbells also at one point claimed descent from a relative of Fionn Mac Cumhaill).
Definitely a good read, though probably a bit old now.
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Taylor Swift: Pop Star of the Year
By: Jonathan Dean for The Sunday Times
Date: December 27th 2020
Rather than hunker down, the singer put out two albums in 2020 and won over new audiences. She’s the pop star of the year.
Taylor Swift met Paul McCartney in the autumn for a big interview in Rolling Stone. The two would have headlined Glastonbury this summer. Who knows if they will do that next year. Anyway, both recorded albums in lockdown, working from home like the rest of us. When they spoke, though, Swift had a secret. As well as Folklore, released in July, she had a follow-up record in the pipeline — Evermore, which was released this month.
Swift noted that the former Beatle was still so full of joy. “Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?” he said. “We’re really lucky,” Swift replied. “I can’t believe it’s my job.” And she is right. Being a pop star is an extraordinary way to earn the living she does. But rather than accepting luxury and letting this tough year tumble on, Swift is also keenly aware what music means. Sad songs soothe, happy songs make us dance, but as fans of most artists waited for something — anything — this year, this 31-year-old released two albums that broke chart records, were critically adored and introduced her to people who once thought that she wasn’t for them.
“I’m so exhausted!” she said to the American chat show host Jimmy Kimmel, laughing, a few weeks ago, when asked if she had a third new album planned. “I have nothing left.” In addition to Folklore and Evermore, she filmed a TV special and even started rerecording her back catalogue, after a volatile dispute over who owns her work. By October I’d just about cobbled together my first sourdough loaf.
A decade ago Swift moved firmly into the limelight thanks to a squabble with Kanye West entirely of the rapper’s own making. In 2009, when Swift — then a nascent country music star — won the best female video award at the VMAs, West stormed on stage, grabbed her microphone and said that Beyoncé should have won. Swift was 19 — West was 32 — and she looked scared. This wasn’t just about her biggest moment yet being stolen, but also about her position in the pop hierarchy being questioned, very publicly, from the off. She stood there as that man bullied her. Apparently she left the stage in tears.
Years later West released Famous, with its infamous lyric “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous.” The alt-folk singer Father John Misty also wrote about sleeping with her. Every time that sort of thing happened, a powerful man in Swift’s industry was reducing a successful, talented, younger female to the level of a sex object. It was back-in-your-box belittling — as it was when a TV host groped her. (She successfully sued him.) While Swift herself would retort to West, as her music became less country, more slick pop, such retorts felt forced and gave the rapper too much of her oxygen. A nod to him on Folklore comes with the “Clowns to the West” line, but it is a sideshow now, not a headline.
Not that Swift’s life is entirely her own. She’s been one of the world’s bestselling female artists for a decade, coupled with curiosities such as a well-orchestrated relationship with Tom Hiddleston that kept her in the spotlight. Like many twentysomethings, Swift spent her youth apolitically, only to receive flak for staying silent during the 2016 US election. This year she endorsed Joe Biden, but what if she had wanted to stay quiet? Would the media have let her? She is under so much scrutiny that, after she made an innocuous hand gesture in a recent TV interview, similar to one women make to draw attention to domestic abuse, this headline ran: “Some people think Taylor Swift is secretly asking for help in her latest interview.”
Like many at the start of the pandemic she felt listless. The world we were used to was a wasteland, and we could only find the energy to watch Normal People. Swift’s ennui, though, was, well, swift. Stuck in LA, she emailed Aaron Dessner of the beloved beardy indie band the National to see if he fancied writing with her. No fool, Dessner said yes and, mere weeks later, the duo — with help from Swift’s regular collaborator Jack Antonoff as well as Justin Vernon, from the beloved beardy indie band Bon Iver — released Folklore. The gang just carried on working and, five months later, gave us Evermore.
Creativity is not on tap. Indeed, this year is not one for judging what others may or not have achieved. However, the silence of many big pop stars is striking because they know that even a single would make someone’s day; distract for a while.
Everyone needed to adjust to working from home, but Swift was one of the only musicians who did and, by eschewing the arena pop of recent albums for something more subdued, organic and folky, she gave the sense that she was letting fans in more than ever. She was at home, like us. This is who she is, and the first single from these sessions was so cosy, it was even called Cardigan.
“I just thought, ‘There are no rules any more,’” she told McCartney. “Because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, ‘How will this song sound in a stadium?’ If you take away the parameters, what do you make? I guess Folklore.”
Maybe it is tedious, for a deft writer with a career of varied, brilliant songs — Love Story, I Knew You Were Trouble, Blank Space — to find respect from some people only when artists who appeal to middle-aged men start to work with her. On the other hand, pop has never been particularly welcoming to many until it sounds like something you are used to and, with delicate acoustics and gossamer-like piano, Swift’s two new albums recall, sonically, Nick Drake or Kate Bush. Thematically, lyrics seem to come from anywhere. Daphne du Maurier, for one. Even the Lake District and its poets.
Some songs are personal. She is dating British actor Joe Alwyn, and on one track she sings, “I want to give you a child.” Make of that what you will. But these records’ highlights are not about herself, but others. “There was a point,” she told Zane Lowe on Apple Music, “that I had got to as a writer, [where I was only writing] diaristic songs. That felt unsustainable.” Instead, she does what the best writers do and mixes subjective with objective. The Last American Dynasty is a terrific piece of writing about the socialite Rebekah Harkness, who lived in a Rhode Island house that Swift bought and was, by all accounts, a bit scandalous. Swift tells her story almost with envy. Imagine, she seems to say, that freedom.
“In my anxieties,” she said in Rolling Stone, “I can often control how I am as a person and how normal I act. But I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and if they follow our car and interrupt our lives.”
Then there is Epiphany. The first verse is about her grandfather, who fought in the Second World War; the second about frontline workers in hospitals now. Sung in a high register, it is suitably choral. Marjorie, on Evermore, is even better. It is about her grandmother, an opera singer who died in 2003. “What died didn’t stay dead” is the repeated line, and it is eerie, gorgeous. Swift sings how she thinks Marjorie is singing to her, at which point some vocals from the latter’s recordings waft in. Touching, but the real power is in Swift writing about vague memories of a relative who died when she was young. “I complained the whole way there,” she sings. “I should’ve asked you questions.”
In person she is warm like this, and funny. When Kimmel told her there were far more swearwords on Folklore and Evermore than previous records, she replied: “It’s just been that kind of year.” She is also odder than people realise. In the way pop stars should be. Obsessed by numerology, she wrote, on the eve of her birthday when announcing Evermore: “Ever since I was 13, I’ve been excited about turning 31 because it’s my lucky number backwards.” When I turned 31 I just wished to be 13 again, with all that youth, but then, maybe, she is just joking. “Yes, so until I turn 113 or 131, this will be the highlight of my life,” she said. “The numerology thing? I sort of force it to happen.”
Swift, of course, is far from the first pop star to become public property, or have a close bond with fans. This year, however, she was one of the few to show that such adoration is not one-way. She is, simply, a fan of her fans — from planting secrets in her artwork and lyrics, to recording two albums of new music as a balm for them when real life became too deafening.
“One good thing about music,” sang Bob Marley. “When it hits you, you feel no pain.” The 80.6 million who streamed Folklore on its first day will attest to that idea. So will the four million who bought it. Swift is pop star of the year, no doubt — leaving her peers in her wake, on their sofas, rewatching The Sopranos.
#thanks to anon who brought this to my attention!#🖤#taylor swift#the times#article#about taylor#folklore album#folklore era#evermore album#evermore era#twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1342959069792002050
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If you're interested, I'd have a suggestion for a DP oneshot: it takes place in a classroom, with only Danny and Paulina in it since they're retaking a test they failed. Unfortunately for Paulina, she still doesn't have a clue about the right answers; Danny, on the other hand, having spent a lot of time studying, knows exactly what to do and is almost done. But just as he's about to put his signature, Paulina walks up to him and sweetly asks him what he would like to do since there's still ...
So I know you sent more asks basically giving an entire outline from start to end. However, because I like more freedom when writing, I’ve decided to go with the premise of Danny and Paulina in detention together to get help for a failed test and create my own story. I encourage you to write your full idea yourself if you would like to see it! :)
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“Danny, why are you still here?” asked Sam as she shut her locker. “Lancer’s gonna be mad if you’re late for detention.”
Danny groaned. “You’re right. I’m going.”
“Good luck, dude,” said Tucker. “Text us when you’re done and we’ll meet you at Nasty Burger or something.”
Danny grumbled agreement and headed to Lancer’s classroom. Lancer gave him a dull stare from behind his desk as Danny reached the doorway.
But there was another student sitting at one of the front desks, a student who escalated Danny’s heartbeat.
“Paulina?” Danny stammered. “Am I interrupting something? Should I wait outside?”
“No, Mr. Fenton,” said Lancer. “Miss Sanchez also failed our most recent test, so I’m giving both of you some extra help.”
“Hi, Danny,” greeted Paulina, her voice sweet and sultry.
“Hi.” Danny felt stuck in the doorway but forced himself to walk into the room. “Sorry, I just didn’t expect to see you here.”
Paulina laughed. “Well, I can’t say the same about you. This is exactly where I’d expect to see you.”
Danny took a seat next to Paulina. “I don’t actually get detention that often, you know.”
“Yes, you do, Mr. Fenton,” said Lancer, turning to face the whiteboard and write notes with a fresh blue marker. “You currently hold the record for most detentions received in a semester.”
Danny blushed. Paulina giggled softly.
Lancer began drawling on about some poet who died but Danny could barely pay attention. Oh, he certainly tried, but being so close to the most beautiful girl in school was really hurting his concentration.
He stole glances at her out of the corner of his eye. And one time, he swore he could see her looking at him as well.
After lecturing for some time, Lancer assigned a few independent practice exercises from their textbook and disappeared out into the hall. Danny could hear the voice of another English teacher in the school and knew Lancer would likely be talking to her for a while.
Danny looked down at his textbook. He was supposed to answer questions about poetry devices or some other thing he still didn’t really get. He had no idea why English was such a pain in the ass. He definitely didn’t know why he had to learn all this crap about poetry, like when was that ever going to help him fight ghosts or do anything actually important?
His gaze travelled down the textbook page to his blank sheet of paper and then across and off his desk to Paulina, who was busy writing. She stopped when she caught him staring at her.
“Can I help you with something, Danny?” she asked, her tone snide but kind.
“Sorry.” Danny sucked his teeth. “So, um… You failed the test too, huh?”
Paulina breathed hard out her nose and sat back in her seat. “Yeah. I didn’t really have the time to study, you know? And I guess I didn’t realize it would be as hard as it was.”
“Didn’t have time to study?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I’m not, like, stupid.” Paulina chuckled. “I could’ve passed if I just wasn’t so busy.”
“Busy with what?” asked Danny. “Do you and the A-List hang out a lot?”
“Sure, but that’s not what keeps me busy. Cheerleading, for one. We have to practice all the time, sometimes even in the morning. And the mornings we don’t practice, I’m still getting up early to get in a run and some exercise. I’m the cheerleading captain, you know. I have to keep everyone at their best and motivated. Every day, I’m working out choreography for new routines and figuring out new fundraising ideas.”
“Don’t you have a coach for that?”
“Yeah, of course, but I still do a lot. Cheerleading isn’t just some silly girls’ activity, you know.”
“I—I didn’t say it was—”
“I have to make sure everything and everyone is ready for practice.” Paulina pulled back a finger on one hand as she listed off responsibilities. “I have to text all the girls and let them know about changes in our practice schedule or upcoming events. If any of the girls aren’t getting along, I have to try to keep the peace as much as possible so that we’re still a team. I’m also the one greeting visiting cheer squads during games, making them feel welcome at our school.”
“I didn’t know you did all that,” said Danny.
“The coach manages our time and schedule and makes sure none of the girls are failing in their classes, things like that, but I’m the one really communicating with the girls, you know?” Paulina sighed. “But I wish that was all I had going on.”
“You’re busy with other things?”
“Yeah, being as popular as I am, I’m often being asked by teachers and student clubs to do things. Advertising stuff, endorsing student council candidates, making appearances, giving fashion advice for uniforms. And I never turn anyone down, I always say yes.” Paulina leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “Sometimes I wish I could just say no.”
“Why don’t you?” asked Danny.
“Because it’s expected of me. Being popular means doing things to maintain that popularity. If I start turning people down, they’re gonna think I’m a bitch, you know?”
“But you turn guys down for dates all the time.” Danny smiled and propped his elbow on his desk. “Me being one of them.”
Paulina also smiled. “Personal things like that are okay to turn down. I mean like anything to do with the school and clubs. Of course I can’t just date every guy who asks me out. Can’t give the impression I’m easy either.”
She looked ahead at the whiteboard, her smile vanishing.
“I do get a lot of guys asking me out,” said Paulina. “I know it’s just because I’m pretty. But looking this pretty all the time is work too. I have to eat right and watch my weight and exercise and spend half an hour each night on my skin care routine and an hour each morning on my hair and makeup and then touchups throughout the day. I never know when someone might take a picture of me and send it around. I can’t risk ever looking bad.”
“You have never looked bad,” said Danny. “Like ever.”
Paulina’s smile returned. “Thank you. That’s sweet.” She groaned and stretched out her arms. “But I tell you, Danny. I probably only get three to four hours of sleep a night. I’m running on coffee and energy drinks all day long. This detention is really cutting into my time, too. I’m probably gonna be up late finishing all my other homework.”
She continued to stretch. Danny normally might’ve enjoyed watching her but he was too struck by her words.
She only got three to four hours of sleep a night?
But… That was how much sleep he usually got a night.
And yet she looked amazing every day and he knew he was just a pale haunted mess with dark eyes.
“So what about you, Danny?”
Danny blinked. “Hmm?”
“Why did you fail this test?” asked Paulina.
“Oh. Um.” Danny looked up and to the right. “I was also too busy.”
“Oh, yeah?” Paulina tossed a piece of hair over her shoulder. “You do come to class late a lot. Do you have like some sort of astronomy club meeting in the morning?”
“Astronomy club?”
“Yeah, don’t you like space and stuff?”
“Oh. Yeah! I do. But I’m not in the astronomy club.”
“Really? I would think you’d be their president.” Paulina chuckled. “Well, are you in any school clubs, then?”
Danny thought about the meetings he had with Sam, Tucker, and sometimes Jazz about their ghost-fighting strategies. “Not school clubs, no.”
“Any extracurricular activities at all? I know you don’t play any sports.”
“No…”
Paulina pursed her lips. “Well, then what is it that keeps you too busy to study?”
Danny looked off to the side, humming softly to himself.
“I often see you with Sam and Tucker after school at the Nasty Burger. Or on Saturdays at the mall.”
Danny turned back to her. “Well, yeah, we like to hang out after school to wind down. Don’t you hang out with your friends? You don’t do all that work all the time, do you?”
“Yeah, of course! I’m actually scheduled to hang out with them right after detention.”
“Scheduled?”
“Yeah. It’s important to me to make time for my friends, so I often schedule it to make sure it happens.” She tapped open her calendar on her phone and showed it to him. “I even keep Saturday nights free for possible dates, see?”
Danny stared at the empty slot under Saturday and wondered if this was a hint and if she wanted him to ask her to go out on Saturday.
But no way was he about to risk embarrassing himself by asking.
“So do the three of you do something that keeps you too busy to study?” Paulina put her phone back in her lap. “You, Sam, and Tucker, I mean.”
Danny scratched through his mind, raking for something, anything that wasn’t the truth but also maybe not a complete lie. He couldn’t let Paulina think he was just lazy and hung out with his friends eating burgers or walking around the mall all day.
“We, uh… Yeah.” Danny pretended to cough. “We help my parents out with their research.”
“Research?” Paulina scrunched her mouth. “You mean, like, ghost stuff?”
Danny nodded. “We sometimes test out their inventions.”
“That sounds kind of dangerous. Is it?” Paulina narrowed her eyes, appearing to scrutinize him. “Is that why you so often have injuries? Like that bruise by your collarbone there?”
Danny hastily tugged at his shirt collar. “Oh. You noticed that?”
“Yeah. Of course. A lot of people notice you’re often sporting some new cut or bruise.”
“Oh. Well, that’s, uh—”
“I’ve even heard some teachers say they might need to call CPS.”
Danny’s stomach flopped. “What?”
“Yeah, I hear lots of things teachers say since I’m around the whole school a lot.” Paulina shrugged. “But I’ve noticed Sam and Tucker sometimes have injuries as well. So is it from helping your parents out with their ghost research?”
“No, it’s not like that!” said Danny quickly, almost panting with the effort. “We just sometimes test out their inventions, give feedback, strategize on how to catch certain ghosts. Just stuff like that, nothing huge.”
“Ooh, catch ghosts like the ghost boy?” Paulina’s tone changed to almost a squeal. She held her hands near her chest.
“Uh.” Danny swallowed. “Well—”
“If your parents do ever catch him, you must let me know, okay?”
“I—”
“Because then I can get the A-List together so we can find a way to rescue him!”
Danny stared at her. “You’d really do that?”
“Well, of course! The ghost boy has done so much for all of us. He even saved my life once, you know! I could never just let him be captured.” Paulina lowered her voice. “Oh, but please don’t tell your parents that.”
Danny slowly nodded, holding back a smile. “Oh, sure, I would never tell them that. You have my word.”
“Here. You should have my number.” Paulina ripped off a corner of her notebook paper and scribbled some numbers on it before handing it to him. “Call or text me if they ever catch him, okay? Please?”
Danny took the piece of paper from her, feeling like he was in some sort of trance. Did this just happen? Did Paulina Sanchez, the most gorgeous girl in all of Casper High, just give him her number? To her cell phone? Like her personal cell phone?
He very carefully folded and placed the paper in his pocket. “Sure, absolutely. I’ll definitely call you if they catch him.”
She smiled and hummed, such a cute sound that made his heart flitter. But then her smile faded when her gaze travelled to his collarbone. Danny casually raised his shoulder and pulled his arm across his body to cover the bruise.
“So.” Paulina’s pretty full lips smacked. “If those injuries you keep getting aren’t from helping your parents with their inventions, then where are they from?”
Danny could feel sweat forming behind his ears.
“I mean, you’re not really that clumsy, are you?” Paulina chuckled.
Danny also chuckled, not really sure why except that she was doing it and he had no idea what else to do because he couldn’t tell her the truth and yes he was clumsy but no not that clumsy but what else could he tell her?
What would protect his parents? What would protect him?
Her expression grew warier the longer he stayed quiet.
The classroom door opened. Danny and Paulina promptly faced forward and hunched over their desks.
“Sorry I was gone so long,” said Lancer as he reclaimed his spot at the head of the room. “How are you two understanding everything?”
Paulina looked up and smiled, a secret smile Danny could tell was meant for him even though she never once glanced in his direction. “I think we’re understanding just fine, Mr. Lancer.”
Lancer looked over her notebook page and nodded his approval. Danny had no idea why he even bothered to try covering his completely blank page when Lancer came to look over his work.
“Why am I not surprised,” muttered Lancer. He knelt beside Danny’s desk with a sigh. “All right, Mr. Fenton. Let’s do this first one together to get you started.”
Behind Lancer, Danny could see Paulina flash him a smirk before returning to her own work.
He had always thought he was just busier than other students, had more responsibilities and expectations than everyone else. But he didn’t even have extracurricular activities like most students. Ghost fighting was his extracurricular activity. And somehow Paulina and everyone else still managed to do okay so why couldn’t he?
Maybe he really wasn’t that different from other kids his age after all.
Lancer was trying to talk him through something. Paulina was still wearing a small smile as she did her own work.
Danny nodded to himself and focused. He could do this. He could be like everyone else.
#danny phantom#danny fenton#paulina sanchez#pink astronaut#imekitty writes#imekitty ask#prompt writing#helled-blog
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Do you have a few minutes to talk, one-on-one?
ash’s been facetiming with her sisters at home, wherever home is for her family right now. we get the chance to overhear her sister saying that she saw kaidan in a news vid and that he’s cute, to which we get to raise our eyebrows... unless you’re playing a maleshep, in which case her sister says that you’re the one who’s cute. (naturally, this is the starter for the ashley romance for a mshep.)
ash herself doesn’t think kaidan’s cute - or at the very least, she’s not sweet on him, so we take the chance to ask about her family instead.
Shepard: Did your father serve with the fleet?
Ashley: Yeah. Took any crap posting he could get that offered space time. He worked his ass off trying to get recognised. But he never got above Serviceman Third Class. He was real proud when I made Chief. First thing he did was salute.
Shepard: What about your mother? You haven’t mentioned her.
Ashley: You must know what military wives are like. Strong because they have to be. Able to raise kids while Dad’s away on a six-month cruise. She has a degree in planetary geology. She and Dad both wanted to see new worlds. She gave up her career to raise us, though.
innocuous enough, but it stands out to me that ash’s family is all still hale and healthy. maybe that’s just a byproduct of the final fantasy franchise, where i’ve gotten used to a 99.99% rate of at least one parental death for characters within the series (as an aside, if you can tell me one character who has both parents alive other than zack fair, i’ll publicly endorse you for whatever role you want to lead), but also within the normandy so far. the rest of our crew has either committed patricide, is estranged from one parental unit, or just straight up hasn’t mentioned one or both of them, so a full family unit isn’t exactly something to be sniffed at.
on its own, i don’t need to highlight the parentification that ashley’s been party to for her whole life - she mentions she’s the eldest of four sisters, with the youngest still being in high school. and ash is only 25! she’s had to have worked her absolute ass off to attain that kind of position and be relied on by her parents to help with the other kids, and i just... i respect ashley so much. let’s not forget that first contact only occurred the year before she was born. there’s been a lot of change in her life, both as quick as the digital age upon us in the last decade or two, and slow over her years of growing up.
we get to ask about her sisters in more depth; she says her relationship with the youngest, sarah, was rocky for a while up until the point where sarah got a boyfriend that wanted to go further than she did. her other sisters worried as well, and ashley was posted in the same galaxy, but too far away to make it back quickly if something happened.
Shepard: If he really liked her, he wouldn’t be pushy.
i really like her dialogue here, honestly. it’s a real human response of her! ash definitely feels like the most real of the characters aboard the ship, to me - her responses to things are flawed and shitty, but she’s self aware of it to a degree, and she’s not the kind of person that acts black and white, either end of the morality scale. who among us can really say that they’re the pinnacle of human morals? even the best of us have thought things like this before, in varying contexts - even if we don’t verbalise them. doesn’t make us bad people... just human.
sarah’s boyfriend thought he’d try and persuade her into having sex, and sarah herself threw him into a tree and left him then and there. the williams parents had all their daughters learn some kind of self-defense - ash herself was taught hand-to-hand, sarah learned aikido, the second eldest got pistol training, and the third picked up the sword, which is just. utterly hilarious on a galactic scale considering the setting. i think i love the williams family.
Shepard: Didn’t you call the police?
Ashley: [Sarah] said it wouldn’t solve the real problem. And she and Mike would both become household names. It was a small colony. I said it was her call to make. That we should let her do it her way. Mom was pretty pissed about that.
ash took leave to walk her sister to school and back, and on the last day of her leave, the boy in question was waiting after school.
so this SURE IS A STORY,
and that’s the end of the talk about her sisters. it makes me feel fuzzy that these girls - no matter how not real they are - have the presence of mind to deal with an abuser so calmly, but at the same time... leaves me feeling tired. not that i expect humans to ever really change, especially not in only a hundred odd years, but for this setting to be so expansive, for there to be bigger problems and more people around than anyone could ever have dreamed... and yet entitlement and abuse still runs rampant.
this is its own problem within the universe, that despite everything, a female shepard doesn’t quite have the same footing as a male shepard does in certain situations, but i’ll get to those when i get to it. besides... i suppose there are bigger things happening now in the real world than anyone could ever have dreamed of seeing, and petty problems still win out in terms of importance. doesn’t matter how small your problem is if it’s personal.
we’re not done quite yet, though.
Ashley: Dad always wanted to serve in space. But he wanted us to have real ground under our feet. He’d say, “Space is beautiful, but you can’t raise a family there.”
Ashley: “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees. All times I have enjoy’d greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those that loved me, and alone. For always roaming with a hungry heart. Much have I seen and known. Cities of men, and manners, climates, councils, governments...”
Ashley: “Ulysses” was Dad’s favourite poem. Every time he shipped out, he recorded me reading it. He had a dozen versions when he retired.
Shepard: Does he still like it?
Ashley: I sure hope so. I read it to his grave every time I go home.
Lord Alfred Tennyson was a well known (and still popularised) British poet, best known for his poems The Charge of the Light Brigade, which i studied at school, and Ulysses. his work is still felt today with phrases that became commonplace from his work, like the lines “tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”.
the lines ash quotes specifically are about the restlessness of wanderlust and wanting to live life utterly to the fullest, feeling nostalgic for the times when the subject was doing just that, and the full poem continues and ends with the assertion that the speaker’s goal is to continue living life wholeheartedly until the end, and even beyond.
speaking of the beyond-
Ashley: That’s not a problem with you, is it? That I believe in God?
and we reach out to take the hand of yet another utterly fascinating facet of ashley. we’ve seen religion briefly within the game so far - the preaching hanar on the citadel comes immediately to mind - but there’s always been a feeling within sci-fi that because the universe can now be explored that god isn’t real and that things like faith are tossed to the wayside in favour of scientific exploration and discovery, even though in the grand scheme of things people tend... not to behave like that, on the whole. i vastly, enormously appreciate ashley for keeping her faith, and for it to be really not a huge part of her character. at no point is she reduced to any stereotype of character, whether that be “gun-toting god-fearing soldier babe”, or “i am religious therefore i must preach” - it, like other parts of her personality, are only parts that make up a whole and do not define her.
i love ashley. she’s such a good character.
#ashley williams#mass effect#this turned from analysis into a full blown fucking essay i'm so sorry#mol plays mass effect#squad: ashley
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I'm really curious about your thoughts on Dhalgren. I tried to read it a year ago but didn't quite manage it.
Sorry for the late response. I wanted to read a little further before responding. For reference, I’m about 260 pages in, which is only enough to offer some initial thoughts.
I’ll start with our protagonist and the discursive construction of a subject. He begins an amnesiac, not a totally blank slate as biographical details emerge, but he will be formed largely by his experiences in Bellona. His name is given by others and is variously a common noun (the kid) or a proper noun of uncertain spelling (Kid/Kidd). “Oh, like Captain Kidd or Billy the kid?” remarks one character, so he is perceived by others as a youthful outlaw. This is immediately muddled by his initial refusal of the name and his comment that, while he looks like a teenager, he is 27 (another character remarks that if his birthyear is what he remembers, he’s actually significantly older than that). Race, and the way race and class are interlinked, is a major theme so far and here Kidd is also outside of any comfortable slot - mixed-race, part white part native american, from a middle income background, he’s read by other characters as both poor black youth and fresh-faced white(ish) collegiate. Finally, and what is really striking, the narration is generally third-person, self-effacing but slips into first person during segments and always follows Kidd closely; creating the effect of an unreliable narrator who is simultaneously the focal point of the narrative and attempting to act as an outside observer. This is someone who can slip into all of the existing social groups of Bellona, and who's identity is continually under negotiation.
Bellona itself is a space of alterity accessed only after Kidd has entered a cave and found an initiatory item (a chain of mirrors he wraps around himself) which marks him as different from the outside world but creates a tense kinship with others who have acquired similar objects. There are two moons in the sky, one smaller than the other and, impossibly, in the opposite stage of the lunar cycle (a binary with major/minor hierarchy, the major term of which is a negative reflection of the Sun and the minor term of which is a negative reflection of the reflection). Regular society has broken down and time is in flux. There are still seven days but the ordering changes weekly, months are uncertain and no-one knows what year it is. The city economy is a strange mix of destitution and excess. Services are at best sporadic, no medical care, but two thousand people are picking through a city that previously held two million so a little recreational looting ensures no-one has to work. People band together in experimental social groups - a family living out a ludicrous neurotic attempt to continue a middle american existence; hippies operating a ‘natural’ commune in the park that has reintroduced reactionary gender relations, unnecessary work and a system of ‘mutual aid’ with the scorpions which is thinly veiled extortion; the scorpions themselves as loosely federated gangs of nomadic raiders cloaked in animal holograms; unaffiliated wanderers; poets and journalists. It’s been compared to Joyce, but I’ve never read Joyce so my nearest reference is Dante’s Dis or the urban poetry of Hart Crane - particularly given the polyvocal mix of poetic prose, standard received English and assorted slang variants used by the narrator and residents of Bellona.
Commentary upon the events of the story occurring within the story in the form of Kidd’s journal, the older journal it is printed opposite to, and the newspaper - each offering a contradictory version of events. More space given to discussion of writing itself than in other Delany works. Both giving a post-modern self-reflexivity to the work, with post-structuralist critical assumptions (specifically the Death of the Author and therefore the heightened role of critical readership) being discussed with the observation that this actually predates Modern assumptions about authorial intent and authenticity.
The perpetual deferral and renegotiation of Kidd’s work for the Richards (the only people to go by their title + surnames) illustrating both the absurdity of the Richards’ family myth (How can Mr Richards haggle over pay and say $5/hr is a lot for unskilled labour when there is no labour market - the base his superstructure acts to ideologically justify no longer exists) as well as serving to entice Kidd back into morbid observation of family collapse and mask his own motivations (Why did he take a job when no-one needs to work to survive? What would he even do with $5 in Bellona? What is $5 even worth in this society?)
I’m enjoying it. I’m glad it wasn’t the first Delany I read. Here are some unfocused thoughts (and I haven’t even touched on sexuality, the self-conscious intertextuality of the work or the critical response - though I will briefly say I was not shocked to see Theodore Sturgeon’s endorsement on the cover, but I was pleasantly surprised to see positive response from Frederik Pohl and William Gibson.)
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“The plasticity of the notion of reading meant that it represented the medium through which middle-class Victorian girls passed many hours, but it did not bring a uniform message. Like their parents and advisers, adolescent girls who were writing about reading were of two minds. On the one hand, as William Thayer put it, reading could be a way of demonstrating rectitude and diligence; on the other, it could be a route to indolence and the shirking of responsibilities.
Mary Thomas, away at school in Georgia in 1873, suggested these dual meanings of reading as she imagined a newly virtuous domesticity for herself upon returning home: ‘‘I will sew and read all the time, I am not going out any where, but intend to stay at home and work all the time; no matter how interesting a book may be, I will put it down and do whatever I am asked to do, they shall no longer accuse me of being lazy and good for nothing, I will work all day.’’ In its contrast to engaging in a social whirl of visiting and flirtation, reading, like sewing, represented a becoming and modest domesticity. However, reading might also subvert good intentions, and tempt a girl to inattention to, or even disobedience of, the demands of others or of household work. In any case, reading had a meaning for the self, as well as for the family and the culture.
Reading good books was of course a way of demonstrating virtue. Measured reading of improving texts was part of the regimen of many Victorian girls. As advisers suggested, the reading of history was especially praiseworthy. When Nellie Browne returned home from school in 1859, her mother noted in her diary with pride, ‘‘Nellie begins to read daily Eliot’s History of the United States,’’ a parentally encouraged discipline which would both improve and occupy Nellie now that her school days were over.
Jessie Wendover, the daughter of a prosperous Newark grocer and another regular diarist, recorded a steady diet of history in her journal, justifying her summer vacation in 1888 with the reading of a two-volume History of the Queens of England, as well as doing a little Latin and some arithmetic. The popular British domestic novelist Charlotte Yonge wrote her History of Germany specifically for readers like Jessie Wendover, who began it the following year. What American girl readers took from the history they read is hard to ascertain, because unlike their rapt reports on novels, they recorded their history as achievement rather than illumination.
One can certainly appreciate the irony, though, in encouraging girls to read accounts of national travails, the stories of armies, wars, and dynastic succession, which were ennobled partly by their distance from girls’ real lives. One of the advantages of history seemed to be that girls could be expected to have no worrisome practical interest in it—in marked contrast to the reading of romances or novels.
Victorian girls could build character through a variety of other literary projects, prime among them the memorizing of poetry. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, the publishing industry issued a number of collections of snippets of poetry known as ‘‘memory gems,’’ designed for memorization by schoolchildren. The verse in these anthologies was to serve as ‘‘seed-thoughts’’ for earnest young Victorians aspiring to know the best, and these were the likely sources for many of the couplets which appear in girls’ diaries and scrapbooks.
Margaret Tileston’s daily diary, recorded religiously for her entire life, both fed and celebrated a variety of literary disciplines, including most prominently reading and memorizing poetry. She too read histories during the summer, along with keeping up with her other studies, noting one July day following her graduation from Salem High School that she had ‘‘read my usual portions of Macaulay [a 40-page allotment] and French, but only a few pages of Spencer.’’ Margaret Tileston also read advice literature, such as Mary Livermore’s What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? and two books by Samuel Smiles, Self-Help and Duty. (The latter she described as looking ‘‘quite interesting and full of anecdotes.’’) Margaret Tileston’s diaries suggest a life consumed with the rewards of self-culture.
At fifteen, however, she recorded a brush with another literary genre and mode of striving—a seeking not only for mastery of the will but for beauty itself. Poetry first appeared simply as a verse of romantic poetry copied on the page: ‘‘Why thus longing thus forever sighing, for the far-off, unattained, and dim, while the beautiful, all round thee lying, offers up its low, perpetual hymn.’’ Margaret Tileston was now away at girls’ school, where she had experienced something of an emotional awakening in the intense atmosphere of schoolgirl friendships.
Her turn to poetry seems to reflect the new culture in which she was briefly submerged. That summer, back with her family on vacation on the Massachusetts coast, Tileston again turned to poetry, and to beauty, in an uncharacteristic passage of effusion. ‘‘The moon was perfectly lovely in the sky and its light on the water. We quoted lines of poetry, and it was beautiful.’’ By January of the next year, however, poetry had been incorporated into her disciplines of order and accomplishment. After returning from boarding school, she had moved with her family from the farm where she had spent her formative years to the town of Salem, where she attended the local high school. There she embarked on another campaign of self-improvement, the memorization of poetry, perhaps as a strategy to gain control of alien surroundings.
Two months later she described a new discipline: the daily ritual repetition of all the poems she had learned, of which there were by then 111. On May 25 she reported that her extraordinary ability to memorize poetry was gaining her a reputation. ‘‘Miss Perry asked me if I knew about 250 poems. She said that one of the Goodhue girls had told her I did. I remarked something of the sort to Miss Perkins one day in recess, and somehow it was repeated.’’ By the end of July she noted that she was beginning to have trouble finding new poems to learn because she knew so many already.
Appreciation of the beauty of poetry had dropped out of her journal. Nor did she suggest that the poetry had any meaning to her at all. Yet she very likely gained some of the satisfactions from poetry expressed by Louisa May Alcott, some years before. After disobeying her mother, at the age of eleven, Alcott ‘‘cried, and then I felt better, and said that piece from Mrs. Sigourney, ‘I must not tease my mother.’’’ She went on, ‘‘I get to sleep saying poetry,—I know a great deal.’’ For those feeling guilty, sad, misunderstood, or wronged, repeat- ing lines of elevating poetry had an effect in a secular mode analagous to the saying of ritual Hail Marys. The verses established an alliance with a higher authority and suggested personal participation in a glorious and tragic human struggle.
And in fact, poetry, even more than history, was the prototypical idealist genre. In 1851 the British educational pioneers Maria Grey and Emily Shirreff proposed the reading of poetry rather than fiction, explaining the crucial distancing effect of poetic subjects. ‘‘In a poem, the wildest language of passion, though it may appeal to the feelings, is generally called forth in circumstances remote from the experience of the reader.’’ They suggested that in poetry there was a higher truth than that of superficial realism: ‘‘The grand conceptions of the poet are true in ideal beauty.’’
Writing fifty years later, Harriet Paine too suggested that poetry had generic qualities of elevation. ‘‘After all, in poetry itself what we read is not the important thing. We should read poetry to give us a certain attitude of mind, a habit of thinking of noble things, of keeping our spirit in harmony with beauty and goodness and strength and love.’’ Earlier Paine had commended the memorization of poetry as neces- sary to ‘‘take in the full meaning,’’ suggesting just such a regular regimen of repetition as Tileston had pursued. The spiritual rewards from internalizing poetry were revealed by Paine’s proposal that it take place on the Sabbath: ‘‘Surely we must give a part of every Sunday to such elevating study.’’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning had censured poets for their historical escapism in her 1857 poem Aurora Leigh, arguing Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires. Yet it was in just its remoteness from ‘‘this live, throbbing age,’’ just in the ‘‘togas and the picturesque’’ disparaged by Browning that poetry was considered so appropriate for girl readers.
…If reading presented an opportunity to discover national allies, to demonstrate private virtue, and to suggest the triumph of the will against ennui or boredom, it increasingly endorsed another way of defining life: the excitement and the exercise of the feelings. Girls who read their daily allowance of Macaulay or the Bible with pride and self-satisfaction upbraided themselves for their difficulties in controlling their insatiable appetites for Victorian novels of all kinds. Reading for leisure or for pleasure invariably meant reading for ‘‘sensation,’’ reading for adventure, excitement, identification, titillation. In the process of this kind of reading, Victorian girls ministered to a complex of emotions.
…Perhaps leisure reading can best be defined by what it was not: study, sleep, or sewing. Girls chastised themselves for imperfectly learning their lessons, and sometimes blamed the distractions of leisure reading. Martha Moore, who had just begun to attend school in occupied New Orleans during the Civil War, confessed that she found the schoolwork hard and had had two crying spells before she ‘‘picked up an interesting story and with my old habit of procrastination, thought I would read that first, and then study.’’
She observed the inevitable consequence ‘‘that my lessons are very imperfectly known.’’ And even Margaret Tileston, whose discipline seldom allowed her to swerve from duty, could be seduced by light reading. At the age of fourteen: ‘‘I scarcely studied in my history at all, because I was interested in ‘Sir Gibbie,’ and wanted to finish reading it.’’ At the age of seventeen: ‘‘I undertook to spend the afternoon and evening on my Ancient History, but my thoughts wandered and I spent some time on papers and magazines.’’ At the age of twenty: ‘‘I did not study a great deal in evening, on account of my interest in my novel, but I read over my History lesson.’’
Girls also resolved to prevent reading from interfering with their domestic chores, usually their needlework. Treating reading as recreation, Virginian Agnes Lee observed, ‘‘I really am so idle I must be more industrious but it is so hard when one is reading or playing to stop to practice or sew.’’ Another Virginian, Lucy Breckinridge, set up a similar opposition, noting that she and her sisters had gathered together in her room ‘‘being industrious. I am getting over my unsocial habit of sitting in my room reading all day.’’ For Lucy Breckinridge private reading not only was not industrious, it was also antisocial.”
- Jane H. Hunter, “Reading as the Development of Taste.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood
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Altar Sex (Amos 2:8) [A Guest Card Talk]
Note: this Guest Card Talk is connected to our other card talk on the Book of Amos.
“The closest I ever came to having sex was right after prayer.”
For many young adults, this observation would serve as a catalyst for a more active prayer life, but for us pious young men at a Christian college, this advice from a graduating senior served as a warning. Intimacy is risky and dangerous and, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up in the wrong holy of holies.
Recent examinations of Christianity’s approach to sexuality have been rather damning with their criticism and deconstruction, from extensive exposes on various church-related sexual abuse scandals, to full-throated takedowns of “evangelical purity culture.” Even the patron saint of courtship, Joshua Harris, has kissed “kissing dating goodbye” goodbye.
But despite Christianity’s well-published and long-running anxiety about all things sex, historical records seem to indicate that few religious traditions are exempt from such tension. The sacred and the sexual may be uncomfortable bedfellows, but they sure can’t be accused of not trying. Long before Augustine began ruminating about the sinful superpowers of semen, fertility cults from Baal to Dionysus were planting their seeds in every known religion. Even texts found within the Hebrew Scriptures - such as Song of Songs - have been known to arouse more than pious hearts.
Which brings us to Amos, the lonely shepherd of Tekoa. In Amos 6:1-7, the prophet makes explicit reference to a marzeah, a cultic ritual attested to widely throughout the Fertile Crescent and beyond. While the origins of the term remain a mystery, widespread attestation across cultures paints a rather consistent picture of marzeahs as cultic festivals that centered on feasting and drinking, sexual lasciviousness, and were often connected to funerary rites. Sort of like an ancient Mardi Gras.
The word itself only appears twice in the Hebrew Scriptures—also in Jeremiah 16:5, with possible allusions in Ezekiel 8:7-13 and Isaiah 28:1-6—but also seems to influence Amos’ earlier criticisms of the northern kingdom of Israel in Amos 2:6-8:
Thus says the Lord:
“For three transgressions of Israel,
and, for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals -
those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth
and turn aside the way of the afflicted;
a man and his father go in to the same girl,
so that my holy name is profaned;
they lay themselves down beside every altar
on garments taken in pledge,
and in the house of their God they drink
the wine of those who have been fined.”
There is certainly a temptation here to clutch our pearls at the mere mention of the mingling of altar pieces and body parts. At first blush, Amos’ denunciations wouldn’t seem out of place at a True Love Waits rally. In fact, this passage may even be listed as a Scripture reference on a youth lock-in “covenant agreement.”
Curiously, however, Amos does not seem to condemn such celebrations on their own merits. Rather, Amos’ concerns are primarily with the desecrating division that has devolved religious practice into social exploitation. The ritual has not only superseded the ethical, but been financed by the unethical. In short, the perpetrators have developed a “celebration of discipline” that divorces love of God from love of neighbor (well, some neighbors), a concern most famously expressed in his diatribe against such an unholy division in Amos 5.
Unlike standard prophetic polemics against pagan religious practice, Amos turns his tirade toward Jewish observances specifically endorsed by the Law - festivals (specifically, the hagim prescribed in Exodus 23:15-16), burnt offerings, grain offerings, and fellowship offerings (as prescribed in Leviticus 1-3), and even music. Of particular note is the way the relationship of these ritual practices and acts of justice are structured in relationship to each other. At the foot of Sinai, Moses follows up God’s Greatest Hits (the “10 Commandments”) with a variety of B-sides and album filler material about compensation for knocked-out teeth and singed thorn bushes. Following an extended rumination on property rights, Moses then delivers a robust set of commandments that some Bibles helpfully label as “Social Responsibility” or “Laws of Justice and Mercy,” focusing on the treatment of widows, orphans and aliens, including words that should sound awfully familiar to anyone paying attention to Amos:
“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest. If you take your neighbor’s cloak as a pledge, return it to him by sunset, because his cloak is the only covering he has for his body. What else will he sleep in? When he cries out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22:25-27)
Then, and only then, does Moses finally get around to some brief directives on ritual celebrations. For Moses - followed closely here by Amos—the priority is clear: Justice First. Ritual Second. No Justice, No Peace (Offering). In contrast, Amos only finds people who have become experts in ritual and flunked the final exam of righteousness.
Taken collectively, Amos’ striking denunciations of Israelite practices in chapters 2-6 point directly toward a wealthy class whose conspicuous religious consumption was made possible only through exploitation (which, not surprisingly, appears to have been an attribute of marzeahs in other cultures, as well). In addition to the detailed criticisms listed in 2:6-8 and 6:1-7, notice also the following accusations leveled by Amos:
“They do not know how to do right . . . who hoard plunder and loot in their fortresses.” (3:10)
“You women who oppress the poor and crush the needy / and say to your husbands, ‘Bring us some drinks!’” (4:1)
“You trample on the poor / and force him to give you grain.” (5:11)
As one notable prophet would later observe, the house of prayer had been turned into a den of robbers.
The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry has consistently lamented the way Christianity has divorced spiritual and material realities, reflecting a lively Gnosticism-by-another-name habitating inside America’s pulpits and pews. Most memorable perhaps is the following sentiment expressed in “How to be a Poet”:
“There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.”
Just a wee bit south of Berry, another Appalachian poet was learning this truth in her own characteristically eccentric way. In the tiny Tennessee community of Caton’s Chapel, a young Dolly Parton found “God, music, and sex” coexisting in a small abandoned country church that offered both spiritual and sexual resonance to the developing saint. Between the walls adorned with hand drawn testimonies of youthful sexual escapades and the discarded keys and strings that gave birth to sacred melodies, Parton recalls, she “broke through some sort of spirit wall and found God,” even as she simultaneously experienced an epiphany of sexuality and self-identity. Perhaps taking Berry a step further, Parton offers her witness that even seemingly desecrated places can be sites of sacral revelation.
And none of this would surprise Amos.
Amos does not fear that the sacred has been tainted by the sexual. On the contrary, recognizing the sacredness of both the dwelling of God’s name and the abode of God’s image, what raises the prophet’s ire is that both have been desecrated by the diminishment of the flesh. In the degrading of bodies through exploitation, economic indifference, and greed, Amos writes, what should be a holy celebration has been transformed into a parade of unrighteousness.
To blend the vision of Berry, Parton, and Amos, we might say:
There are no desecrated places;
Only sacred people,
And desecrated people.
Dave McNeely is the Coordinator for the Faith & Justice Scholars Program and an Adjunct Religion Professor at Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City. He is a licensed Baptist minister who spent a decade in youth ministry, and has an undergraduate degree in Religion (Greek minor) from Carson-Newman, an M.Div. with specialization in Christian Education from Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, and additional study in Justice and Peace Studies at Iliff School of Theology. He was a contributor to A Game for Good Christian’s anthology This Present Former Glory and recently co-authored his first book, Chad and Dave Read the Bible, Vol. 1: The Christmas Story.
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Commonplace Book
Hello everyone! This is my first post on this blog, and it is going to be a project for my college English course! Feel free to read through it if you’re interested; if not, that’s okay, this is really just for my professor ^^
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Piece 1: “Big Guns, Small Dicks”
Unfortunately, this piece does not have a specific author or creator; I found it on State Street in Madison last summer. It is an anonymous piece of graffiti that speaks to the movement it was created during. For those who may be less familiar with Madison, Wisconsin, it is considered a very liberal and even leftist city, especially with how frequent and powerful the Black Lives Matter protests were. This was created during those protests, as well as hundreds of other works all along historic State Street. As ACAB - All Cops Are Bastards - protests went hand in hand (usually) with BLM protests, the phrase “Big guns, small dicks” is a jibe at the police and its racist foundations and use of excessive force.
It best relates to class through the conversations about race and equity we’ve had. Our readings have been centered around a diverse cast of authors instead of the one viewpoint of the cisgender, heterosexual white man, which is something the BLM movement also aimed to achieve. In addition, although it has not been a focal topic yet, we have talked about police brutality and how it impacts POC most; another key point of the BLM movement. Lastly, we talked about what mythic America, or the American Dream, really is, and why it is never realized for so many people. The Black Lives Matter movement is all about how the American Dream is something almost no one can truly achieve, and how it leads to othering and a sense of disillusionment with the effectiveness of our society.
Piece 2: Vonnegut’s Slapstick
For my second piece, I chose to utilize a work of a famous satire writer to draw comparisons to our coursework. As for the image, I took a picture of the copy I own and edited it. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slapstick centers around two twins who are geniuses together, but entirely stupid on their own; they are neglected by their parents, who are a family of renown and ashamed of having deformed children. Their parents look at them as if they are to be pitied for the very nature of their existence. They use this to sneak around and live lives of luxury, continuing this ruse of being entirely stupid so that they may live as freely as possible in their circumstances.
In this work, the children are quite literally tossed in a house and locked away to prevent others from seeing them; this is something I personally connect to the concept of silencing, which happened frequently during the BLM movement. Protesters, peaceful or not, were arrested; protests were escalated by cops far more often than by protesters, but that was generally ignored and used as a way to disregard the protests as nothing more than “riots”; large platforms such as Twitter and Instagram incorrectly labelled some posts as “misinformation”. Voices were silenced all over the internet. In addition, some white allies were not using their platforms to actually help/spread information, but were using them to spew white guilt and accomplish very little. As L. Ayu Saraswati says in her textbook Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, “Guilt as a response to...racism...does very little to contribute to efforts toward social change as it recenters whiteness” (page 15), basically saying yes, these folks are speaking their mind and are at least partially aware of their privilege, but their feelings of guilt without taking action are not actually doing anything to help what they feel guilty for.
Piece 3: The Hymn to Demeter
My last selection will be an ancient work known as the Hymn to Demeter, and the version I am using is translated by Gregory Nagy. I am using this statue of Demeter and Persephone as the visual accompaniment to this analysis. This piece was originally written to be performed orally by a poet/performer as praise to Demeter. It details the kidnapping of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, and the subsequent founding of the Cult of Demeter in the city Eleusis.
When Persephone is first kidnapped, it is said that “she cried with a piercing voice, / Calling upon her father, the son of Kronos, the highest and the best. / But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals, / heard her voice” (lines 20-23). To me, this draws clear parallels with the silencing of victims of police brutality and their families. Public outrage did nothing to bring accountability to Breonna Taylor’s killers or the flawed justice system that let them get away with it. The victim’s family was silenced and the movement to convict her killers has died down since it happened almost a year ago.
Additionally, it is later revealed to Demeter through Rhea that this kidnapping was not only endorsed by but planned by Zeus himself. As Greek households were patriarchal, it was not uncommon for a father to arrange a relationship/marriage without informing the daughter or allowing the daughter to meet her betrothed first. This endorsed act of violence can also be paralleled to the actions of the police; their brutality is actively supported by a flawed, racist justice system, just as the actions of Hades were actively supported by the all-powerful Zeus. What’s more, nobody stood up to Zeus or questioned his actions because of all the power he has, which is another perfect example of how this parallel functions.
Lastly, Demeter’s pure rage and grief is reminiscent of the rage and grief of the black mothers who lost their children to police brutality. Last semester, I attended a Theater of War performance known as “Antigone in Ferguson”, and after the performance was over, there was a discussion led by a panel of educators and victims of police brutality. Several of them were mothers who told painful stories of how their children, usually sons, were murdered and how they are still trying to find a way to keep living. Their powerful grief is parallel to Demeter’s; the only difference is that Demeter gets her child back.
A Meta-Commentary
My process in finding these works and deciding which would draw the best parallels was to find a bunch of subjects I thought would work well and then cut down on them. I knew the “big guns, small dicks” would be included for sure, as it was an image I took myself and had good parallels to draw right off the bat. It’s a good way to catch someone’s attention! And the message is powerful. Seeing all the graffiti on State Street last summer was impactful, but this simple phrase stood out to me and was (I believe) the only picture I took out of all the graffiti down there. The Kurt Vonnegut work I included because I like the comparison between how the twins are treated in the book and how folks who were active and open about their opinions were silenced; also, I’d be lying if I failed to mention that part of the reason is because I adore Kurt Vonnegut and wanted to find a way to bring a work of his into this. My third choice, the Hymn to Demeter, was chosen because it’s a cool way to connect one of my other classes to this one. In addition, it’s a good piece to reinterpret as an allegory for how the justice system enables the wrong people and fails the right ones.
Also, although I did not choose many direct quotes, I think the parallels I drew between the content of these works is substantial! I put a lot of thought into how I worded things and what content actually related best to the works of this class, specifically the themes we’ve discovered so far in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. The heaviness of the book relates well to the power behind each of these pieces, especially the first one, as the message is plain and simple but impactful. The prose and structure of Rankine’s work is incredibly unique and not directly paralleled in any of the pieces I chose; however, the Hymn to Demeter is written in a very specific structure that is almost poetry? It’s a very confusing structure, because it does not seem to have any meter or consistency, but is still patterned in a specific way. This may be a result of translation, it may have been intentionally created this way by the original writer (who is not known; the transcript of this hymn was found in a stable in Moscow in 1777), or it could be a byproduct of the format itself as a hymn. The repetition Rankine takes advantage of in Citizen is actually something Vonnegut is known for as well. Several of his works have anaphoric phrases; Slaughterhouse V has both “po-tee-weet” and “and so it goes”, and Slapstick has the comedic “hi-ho”, used as a way to break the tension of the work, as it is supposed to be satire. This repetition and the more casual grammar these authors both share give their works a heavy feeling (cut far more frequently in Vonnegut’s than in Rankine’s) that also works as a conversational element, making both of the works feel like the audience is also in the narrative itself.
Commonplacing is a valuable step in making powerful literature more accessible to people! Providing unique and interesting analysis of a work makes it much easier for people to casually consume! Additionally, using platforms like Tumblr for this analysis makes things even more accessible, as anyone can see it and Tumblr allows posts to be any length! Opening thoughtful literature and analysis to the public like this also allows for good, guided conversation on a variety of subjects, and creates interest for the works in their entirety. This can easily inspire people to pick up a copy of their own of any of these works if someone is interested enough in how these can be interpreted! (If any of you are interested in the Hymn to Demeter, I used the one found at this website , it’s free ^-^)
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A big thank you to any of you who read this all the way through (including you, professor)! I’ll be doing more fun and less serious literary analysis on this account as well, so if that’s something you’re interested in, stay tuned!
#kurt vonnegut#claudia rankine#citizen#slapstick#kurt vonnegut slapstick#claudia rankine citizen#blm2021#acab2021#greek myth#greek mythology#demeter#persephone#zeus#the hymn to demeter#big guns small dicks#literary analysis#yourlocalenglishmajor#madison wisconsin#state street#state street madison wisconsin#hi professor#this is literally just for college you don't have to pay any attention to this lmao
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Poet Scarlett Sabet talks isolation, inspiration and working with her partner, Jimmy Page
Scarlett Sabet’s spoken word album Catalyst grapples with love, politics and isolation – and features production by Jimmy Page
By Thomas Barrie
19 April 2020
Envy Jimmy Page: one of the most compelling, passionate poems of recent years was written about him. It was penned by his partner, the poet Scarlett Sabet, and it appears on Sabet’s latest spoken-word album Catalyst – which Page produced. Seems like a fair deal.
Sabet, who was born in Surrey but now lives in London, has been working with Page since they first met in 2014. She now has four written collections to her name, alongside the album. Her work is often political and, enhanced by Page’s production on the spoken-word tracks, sensual and otherworldly. Sabet names William S Burroughs and the beat poets as influences, and Jack Kerouac in particular – one track on Catalyst is named “For Jack” – though she is just as likely to write about the immigration crisis or the Bataclan massacre as she is to embrace the fluidity and experiential language of the Beats.
GQ spoke to Sabet, who elaborated on Catalyst, her relationship and collaboration with Page and how she has been working during the coronavirus lockdown.
How are you and Jimmy spending time in the pandemic? What’s it like?
Scarlett Sabet: I think, as a writer, I’ve always been a bit of a lone wolf. Social distancing has come naturally to me. From a very young age I would always read my parents’ books; my mother would have a lot of Margaret Atwood. I would kind of dive into my parents’ bookshelf and obviously that has spilled out into writing.
I think with the virus it's different, because there's this unfolding tragedy every day, so it's nothing to be glib about. I get up in the morning, have a green tea and try to meditate. I try to do yoga in the morning, something physical, and I’ve been watching the five or six o'clock news to check in with it. This is the fine line I think everyone's trying to balance at the moment – wanting to know what's going on, because things change by the hour and it's massively life-changing, but I think you need to balance your intake. So I definitely watch the news and then read and write and experiment.
We were scheduled to do a slot at Hay Festival. Jimmy was asked to talk about Catalyst. And then I'd also been asked by Van Morrison to read some of his lyrics – he's got a book of his lyrics coming out. The first one came out in 2016, so I read “The Way Young Lovers Do” at a festival in Belfast in 2016. He was going to do a similar event here as well, so that would have been nice. But I think it's going to be taken to the internet, as it were. I'm recording a video for Van at some point.
How do you keep writing during isolation? Is it hard to find inspiration?
Scarlett Sabet: Sometimes, with writing, I’ve found that discipline works – doing it every day and treating it like a job. I also have had amazing moments of inspiration. One of the poems on Catalyst was called “Fifth Circle Of Hell”. I wrote that here at home and it was about the refugee crisis. I remember seeing a tent in the rain in Calais and thinking, “Jesus.” I wrote a couple of lines down in my Moleskine notebook. And then I remember thinking like, “OK, I'm going to write more about that tomorrow.” The next day, Jimmy had a meeting in the house. So he was in one room and I just went off into a small room and I couldn't go anywhere else in the house. I had a green tea. I was in front of my computer. I typed that one up. And it just came out – it was like a channelling: these images and just a sense of, “What the hell is going on?”
My father was born in Iran, so I'm half-Persian and that made a big impact. I’m very lucky. My parents sent me to a private school and my father was studying architecture in Italy and then the UK, prior to the Iranian Revolution. But nonetheless, that changed his life, and the whole country. On the other side of my family, my great-grandfather was in the French Resistance and his life definitely would have been different if his country hadn’t been occupied by the Nazis. So this is one of the things I was saying to Jimmy: stuff has been cancelled, but it's bigger than us. It's all in perspective. So I'm definitely trying to be positive, keep a routine and check in with friends and family. It's a good time to be grateful for what you do have.
Your work seems very connected to the outside world, though – is it hard to work when you’re stuck indoors?
Scarlett Sabet: I wrote “Rocking Underground” – the first track on Catalyst – on the Tube. My computer broke and it was a deadend Sunday. I grew up in Dorking in Surrey and I love London, but any big city, whether it's New York or London, the effort it takes, sometimes, just to exist is hard. This particular Sunday, I was on the Tube and my computer broke and I just had this “Urgh” feeling. I had Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass in my bag and I was reading that and I had trouble connecting to his world. I thought “This is beautiful, but this is not my reality today.” And so I put down the book and I got out my Moleskine again, and I wrote “Rocking Underground”. There weren't rewrites of that. That's how it came out the first time I wrote it. It was definitely channelling something coming through me.
How has Jimmy influenced your poetry?
Scarlett Sabet: The first poetry reading I ever did was in 2013, at the World’s End Bookshop in Chelsea. I had an apartment in Knightsbridge and Jimmy lived [near] High Street Kensington, so we bumped into each other. We had a mutual friend; we both went to this bookshop. I waitressed for my whole twenties – I only stopped waitressing last August because I knew Catalyst was coming up and I knew we'd be doing stuff for that. So Jimmy came to the first poetry reading, which I organised, and a friend of mine from waitressing, Alice, designed the poster. I just felt compelled to share my work and I invited other people. That was in November 2013. And Jimmy came along. I think that really resonated with him.
And so, our relationship started at the end of August 2014. I self-published my first book in November 2014. I was so young and I was flattered that [a publisher] wanted to publish me – I took that as a good endorsement, but I wasn't quite sure. And I mentioned to Jimmy and said, “What do you think? Do you think I should do it with them?” And he said he thought they were kind of playing me around and he said, “Are you ready to publish?” I said yes. And he said, “Well, then you should self-publish.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” I didn't really think of that. The parallel he used was that he had been in The Yardbirds. He’d been a session musician and when The Yardbirds ended, he went back to being a session musician. He knew he wanted to create a band, but seeing how the record label’s demand for producing hit single, hit single, hit single had broken The Yardbirds, he thought “I'm not going to do that.” Instead of going to a record company and saying, “I would like to write some songs in the studio, please can I have some money?” he produced and paid for Led Zeppelin’s first album – and then went to them and said, “This is what we’ve got and this is what we’re going to do.” So in the spirit of that, I self-published. Waitressing paid for that.
Around the time my first book came out – and this was before people found out Jimmy and I were together – that was when Jimmy first brought up the idea that we might do something together. He said, “We should do that at some point.” Part of Jimmy’s genius is timing. We felt it would be best to announce [our relationship] and release [our collaboration] on the same day. And Jimmy said, “Look, some people are going to love it. Some people are not. But at least that way it could speak for itself.” Instead of there being chatter about it, people could just listen to it, make up their own minds. So we did it that way. And it was really very magical working with Jimmy. He’s really believed in me before anyone else and at times more then I believe in myself.
Tell me about “Possession”, which you’ve read for us from home.
Scarlett Sabet: It seems very sensual and it's about being in love. And it's about the divinity of our passion together and my desire for him. I know, to a lot of people, our relationship looks a certain way on paper, but to me I just can't believe it – it's like we were pulled together and it's been this amazing love and [he’s] this amazing person who's been my mentor as well. “Possession” was written trying to understand what it is that we… As soon as we came together, it was like this collision.
Jimmy didn’t really do anything to it on Catalyst. There are no effects applied to it like there were to “Fifth Circle Of Hell”. It's definitely very intimate. I remember saying I would whisper it to him. There's so much tragedy and death and I just felt like, “You know what? I'm grateful for the love I have.” Let's focus on something loving, as it were, and something a bit more intimate, because the global landscape at the moment is very brutal and sad
Catalyst can be purchased here
#scarlett sabet#jimmy page#jimmy page girlfriend#led zeppelin#catalyst#spoken vinyl#Spoken Word Album#spoken poetry album#GQ#GQ British#rock couple#coronavirus#poet#poetry
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I am from Georgia, so it annoys me so much: the cross on Felixs sweater was the bolnisi cross and the designer was Demna Gvasalia, it was from a collection called the SS19 collection which was inspired by his refugee past. On the sweater you can literally read georgian writing "ერთსულოვნება არხი" on it, which roughly translated to "Lord have mercy on us". So no. It is not an iron cross. Please people, educate yourselves and don't believe everything clickbait media writes. Just google this.
This is a long, long post, so buckle up!
From another anon: Just want to clarify some things about pewdiepie. His recent video wasn’t racist, at least in my eyes. He didn’t make fun of anyone for having coronavirus, all he did was say “corona-chan” or something. His wife’s dog is not named Benito. His wife’s PARENTS named their dog that. Why blame Marzia for something she didn’t even do? Also I’m pretty sure him paying people to do that horrible stuff was to see how far people would go for cash. ALSO what he wore was not mean to be an iron cross. It’s a very significant symbol in fashion for the country of Georgia, and the Nazis stole it. That’s like saying anyone with that Buddhist symbol is a nazi just because they stole that too and turned it into the swastika
From yet another anon: You guys do realize pdp recommended the “Nazis” channel because of an anime review right? That was the only content he watched. The “nazi” things were some - admittetly- bad jokes the guy had on one of his OTHER channels and on his videos from 2 years ago. He also shouted out over 20 other channels that were completely harmless. Like, okay, I get not forgiving him for the shit he has done, but I wish people would do their research for once instead of believing everything tumblr says.
From even another anon: Just a few things about PDP that I want to clear up. First the “Iron cross” he did not wear a Nazi symbol he wore a shirt with a georgian bolnisi cross by a Georgian designer named Demna Gvasalia. People often mistaken it as a Nazi symbol. Secondly the channel shoutout he didn’t go through that creators channel to see if he had any Nazi content all Felix did was talk about that guy who made a video essay of the anime Death Note (I think that was the anime) that was all Felix watched. 1/2 While it was lack of judgement PDP didn’t mean to promote someone with videos from long ago that had Nazi content and so PDP deleted the link to that person’s channel and edited out the parts where PDP was talking about him. Thirdly the origins of Maya I don’t know where Marzia got Maya’s name from I assumed it’s just a girls name considering Maya is a girl. However I do know Edgar is named after the poet EDGAR Allen Poe. That’s all I’ll say for now. 2/2
Another one: I don’t see how a dog marzias parents named is having anything to do with pdp
Another one: Just a precisation…Since I read one of your previous asks about Pewdiepie. Now, I don’t like the guy. I was used to, but now his content is not appealing anymore…He wasn’t wearing a nazi cross. That is a notorious clothing brand and that is a Bolnisi Cross, a national symbol of Georgia. His dog’s name is Edgar. From Edgar Allan Poe and not from Benito Mussolini. The promoted nazi youtuber was a random guy who was doing anime reviews. He didn’t check, but one can’t blame him for this… ..The corona virus joke was about his recent trip in Japan and he was telling his experience about it with and about all the panic because of it. (it was a bad joke? Sure.). The ones on his twitter are nazi people who followed HIM after the shooting thing. Not vice-versa. He stated he do not condone nor agrees with anything those people do in both a video AND on twitter. This guy messed up in past and his jokes are stupid. No doubts about it. But some of these “proofs” were incorrect facts.
Alright! Now that we’ve gotten everything on the table, I’m going address things by each point, the way the original anon did. I’ll use their original words too so it’s simpler to follow.
- paid men to hold up a sign that said death to all Jews: This was to see how far the people on Fiver would go for just five dollars. It was an insensitive joke, and a better one could’ve been made, but Felix likes to brand himself on edgy humor. He wanted to do something that no one would ever conceivably say for five bucks. However, the point still stands. There were better jokes. This was, as the kids say, “not it, chief.”
- paid a man dressed as Jesus to say Hitler did nothing wrong: see previous statement. Again, I understand what he was trying to do, but the way he went about it could’ve been handled better.
- has put Nazi footage in his videos a lot: Sources? No one talked about this in the asks. I’d love to see the videos.
- promoted a fascist author as his favorite author: Sources? No one talked about this in the asks. I’d love to see what you’re talking about.
- worn an iron cross (Nazi symbol): This is the one that’s the most strongly contested. From my understanding, and from what I found on the internet, “The Iron Cross is a famous German military medal dating back to the 19th century. During the 1930s, the Nazi regime in Germany superimposed a swastika on the traditional medal, turning it into a Nazi symbol.” So originally it was not a Nazi symbol. From the anons here, and I’ll use the words of the first anon, “the cross on Felixs sweater was the bolnisi cross and the designer was Demna Gvasalia, it was from a collection called the SS19 collection which was inspired by his refugee past. On the sweater you can literally read georgian writing “ერთსულოვნება არხი” on it, which roughly translated to “Lord have mercy on us”. This is also the national symbol of Georgia, I believe. Does anyone have a picture of the outfit? That would help clear this up. Otherwise, as usual, it’s a lot of speculation.
- promoted a Nazi’s Youtube channel besides antisemitism: Felix did not do his research. I cannot fault him for that as I retracted my blame on Sean for not researching the developers of Wanking Simulator beforehand (man, sometimes I type out these sentences and I have to think, “what the heck am I even writing right now?”). He promoted a video talking about Death Note, and not the Nazi content. Does anyone know which video this is, so I can make my own conclusions? Apparently it’s been deleted and the link to the person has been taken down, so this is all hearsay. The Nazi stuff was about two years ago, so it’d be difficult to find it amongst the 20 other channels he shouted out.
- just recently made a racist video abt coronavirus: The second anon addresses this, saying the video was not racist. They said he only said something like corona-chan. I’m not sure which video this is from, can anyone tell me? His video titles are very clickbaity and I’m never sure which one is relevant to the discussion.
- literally said the n slur: This I’m going to address. I was super disappointed when I found out he had said this, but I was not surprised. For context for anyone who doesn’t know - PDP, while live-streaming a game, was surprised by someone who I believe was using dirty methods to win. Immediately upon seeing the player, PDP said, “what a f*cking (n-word) with a hard “r” at the end. Needless to say, that’s not acceptable. If Mark or Sean had done that, I would’ve unsubscribed right then and there. However at that point, I was already unsubscribed from PDP. It’s unfortunate that he said that and even more unfortunate that it came to him so easily. I’m glad he apologized, but the harshness of what happened was not lost on me.
- his girlfriends dog is named after mussolini: I believe his parents named the dog. Do we have proof he’s named after Mussolini? Benito is quite the common name.
- followed several known alt-righters and racists on his Twitter: Apparently they follow him because of the one shooter that said “subscribe to PDP” or something along those lines. Please correct me if I’m mistaken in that. It was such a worldwide trend to subscribe and do whatever it took to get him more subs. The shooter should not be contributed to PDP as Felix did not endorse him. I’d like to see PDP take measures to block the alt-righters and racists, however with his fan count, I understand that’s difficult and not always feasible.
And that’s that on that! Feel free to continue the discussion. This was a LOT to work through, but it was interesting to see different perspectives! Thank you all for chipping in your two cents, and if you have sources, don’t hesitate to submit them!
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Lunch Buddy: Chapter Two
Masterlist
<<Previous Chapter
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Overall Story Facts:
Fandom: MCU Captain America/Avengers
Story Summary: Steve Rogers makes a friend. A prickly, generally people-averse friend, but they’ll both take what they can get.
Quick Facts: Friendship (/Eventual Romance) – Steve Rogers & Reader (leading to Steve Rogers/Reader) – Female Reader
Story Warnings: Reader-insert that verges on OFC, written in 1st person past tense
Chapter Two: Something New
Chapter Summary: Steve’s new acquaintance gets him to try something different.
Chapter Word Count: 1639
A/N: I really love vignettes and if that wasn't apparent before, it will become so in this chapter. Also author bias pokes out a little bit more; Spotify is the only streaming service I have any familiarity with so that’s what I’m using. I’ve excised most of my musical preferences in this story (it used to make up a fairly big chunk) but my frame of reference will pop up from time to time, as these things tend to do.
Steve Rogers was boring.
“Okay, no.”
He leaned his head to one side. “It’s just a coffee.”
I hadn’t meant to actually blurt that out, but fuck it; I was rolling with it now. “I just mean– you always pick that. Why not try something new?”
“I don’t want to try something new. I want that,” he said and looked at me with a raised eyebrow, like he was scolding me? Fuck that. “You said you’d buy my coffee. That’s my coffee.”
“Come on, I’m paying. This is the point where you pick something you thought about getting but didn’t want to spend your money on.”
“What happens if I don’t like it?”
“Throw it out.”
He made a face. “That’s wasteful.”
Maybe so, but he didn’t want a little change? His face said ‘no’ though so I rolled my eyes and got up. “All right; I’ll buy your boring coffee.”
“You don’t know exactly what I get,” Steve said, craning his neck as I walked away.
“You order the same fucking thing every time. They sure as hell know your order.”
Of course they knew exactly how much cream or sugar he did (mostly did not) want. So I got his drink, and then I got a little something different for myself, with a tiny empty cup on the side. I came back and plopped my stuff down before I could spill, but I handed him his drink properly. “I have to admit, I was a little relieved about the flavoring; I didn’t know you had it in you.”
He stopped just before he could take a drink. “I don’t–…wait.”
I tried to contain my laughter. It shook my body and he gave me a hard look. “Sorry, sorry!” I said and started pouring out a little of my drink into the cup. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“That’s cold,” he said.
“No. This is cold,” I said and gave him his little sample. “Here. It’s something I ordered and it’s just a little bit– enough to taste, not enough to waste.”
“You’re a poet and you didn’t know it,” he quipped as he held the cup.
“I absolutely knew it,” I said, which got him to smile. The drink sample itself was already on very shaky ground by the way he regarded it. He looked hesitant but he sniffed it, very slowly took a sip, and…put it down with a weird look on his face. “That’s okay,” I said and leaned back to toss it before he could worry about it.
“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” he said and took what I assumed was a palate-cleansing sip of his own drink.
“A ringing endorsement,” I said and unwrapped my headphones. I didn’t take it as a loss– there were a lot of good things on that menu board. I’d get him. Eventually.
~
He didn’t show up for a few days. When he came back, he was coming in just as I was leaving and all we did was say “Hi” in passing. I felt a little…not bad, but disappointed. Oddly enough. We didn’t talk all the time, but he was pleasant company to have. He was actually perfect for my not-super-social tastes. It was nice to have someone who I could just sit quietly with.
One day, he was already there with his usual. I picked out something different but warm, and sort of closer to coffee. Might as well ease him into it.
“That’s pretty good,” he admitted and put down the empty tester cup.
“Good,” I said and made a mental note of it.
“Good?” he asked, like he was suspicious.
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “Um…yeah,” I said. “What? I’m not trying to horrify you.”
He lifted one hand and shoulder, like ‘okay.’ “I’m used to people trying to shock me with things.”
“I’m not out to antagonize people. Generally,” I said. “If we’re friends, then yes, that’s completely reasonable. But I just barely met you, so you don’t have to worry. Yet.”
“Yet,” he repeated, his smile leaning to one side.
It was my turn to shrug. “You never know.”
~
Despite the random admirers, Steve was mostly left alone. There was a good handful of regulars and apparently most people wanted so badly to play into the ‘cool, unaffected by anything’ New York image that they’d rather stare longingly at Captain America than approach him. Some did, of course, but I was a bit surprised at how few those were.
“Do you need something?” Steve asked, and I suddenly realized I was staring in his general vicinity.
“Oh, no, sorry,” I said and rested my head on my hand, and fixed my gaze elsewhere. “I’m just staring off into space; don’t mind me.”
His smile looked a little strange, like he kind of wanted to ask why I was so weird. Or maybe I was just projecting. If only he knew that was only barely the tip of the iceberg. He didn’t get the chance to speak though– he suddenly sat a little stiffer and I barely realized why when a couple of young women approached him from behind. I put my head down to my book. How did he do that?
I thought I might ask him, as a conversation piece, but those girls kept talking…and talking…and talking. What they talked about I couldn’t say; it was mostly them fangirling but in a way that made me want to grit my teeth. Steve too, apparently, by how tight that smile was, and how hard he gripped that sketchbook. He hadn’t seemed so badly affected by that girl who had stammered at him for ten minutes, so they must not have been saying anything good. It seemed wrong to just sit back, but…
I had an idea, but I didn’t know if I should step in. I didn’t want to– this had the chance to be humiliating, if Steve didn’t play along. However, I thought he might, just out of politeness? Either way I decided, fuck it, I was going for it. I cleared my throat, but it was only enough to get Steve’s eyes to flick at me. I cleared it louder, and actually got his full attention, which (eventually) got the gaggle to shut up.
I smiled at Steve. “Uh, I found that song I was talking about, but you’ll have to listen to it now. I gotta get back to work soon.”
Steve practically slouched with relief; it was ridiculous that the impromptu fan club didn’t see it for what it was. I did get some dirty looks though, and they only intensified when Steve politely thanked them and sent them on their way. I wiped one of the earbuds and handed it to him, and randomly picked a song I thought he might like.
“It’s a little different from what you might be used to,” I murmured into his free ear. “But it’s pretty chill. A couple songs, okay?”
The look he gave me said ‘thank you’ better than words could. I sat back, navigating the minefield of my music, until I had to go. Apparently done with people, Steve packed up when I did, and we parted ways at the door.
~
“I try not to be…like that too much, you know?”
I looked up at Steve and could not, for the life of me, figure out how we got from “hi” and “hey” and a half hour of utter silence to that. “Uh…what?” I asked.
“Sorry,” he said and looked askance for a moment. “Those girls yesterday. I feel bad for brushing them off– they weren't that rude– I just…didn’t feel like talking much.”
“Oh. Yeah, I get that,” I said and looked back at my book.
“You get that particularly right now?” he asked, but he sounded amused.
“This is the age of multitasking. Get used to it,” I said but I put in my bookmark and shut it. I was close to having to leave anyway; starting a new chapter now would be a bad idea. “I was worried that would be overstepping. So I’m glad it worked out.”
“It wasn’t. I really appreciated it,” he said with a smile that showed it. “I actually liked the songs.”
The way he said it was…well, not intentionally insulting, so I went with it. “Why so surprised?”
“I don’t like a lot of music these days.” He shifted and then shrugged. “Maybe I’m just not used to it.”
That could have been it. Or. “Who’s been exposing you to music?”
“Tony,” he said. “Oh, right– Tony, my friend, is actually Tony S–”
“Tony Stark, yeah, I got that,” I said and he laughed. I rolled my eyes. “Smartass. See if I teach you to appreciate modern music.”
“I’ve been told I’m hopeless,” he said.
“I doubt you actually are, if your music timeline jumps from Bing Crosby to ACDC.” I scoffed at the thought. “That’s like going from Baroque to Blues.” Well. “Okay, maybe not, but hopefully you get the idea.”
Steve stared at me. “You know Bing Crosby?”
He sounded so hopeful, I couldn’t help but rope myself in. “Do you have any music streaming service? Like Spotify or something?”
“I probably could ask Pepper,” he said.
“Cool. Ask them to hook you up.” I scooted over to him. “Here; check this out.” I showed him the basics of Spotify, using Bing Crosby as an example. “The algorithm for some of the playlists can be a little…odd. Just zero in on what you like for now and I’ll figure out some playlists to make you when I have more time.” Speaking of which– I glanced at the clock, cursed, and started packing up. “I gotta go; I’ll see you later.”
“Have a nice day at work,” he said, overly cheerful. I flipped him off and he just laughed.
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#steve rogers x reader#steve rogers & reader#captain america fanfic#avengers fanfic#reader insert#lunch buddy
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Fandoms , fanfiction and fans
Just came across a post on another Tumblr where someone was questioning an older person for being in a fandom.
It made me wonder if this attitude arises from a general belief that fandoms are somehow ‘frivolous’ and that older people should be more ‘mature’ and do ‘serious’ stuff. Like be professors perhaps, or read and write ‘real’ literature which wins Hugo awards or…oh wait !!
Been there done that folks.
The authors of Fangasm, unapologetic Supernatural fans are both Professors. Like for real. And Ao3 got nominated for and WON the Hugo Award 2019.
Here are excerpts from some articles that tell it all !
………………………………….
Fangasm is the brainchild of two university professors and unrepentant fangirls. Lynn Zubernis is a clinical psychologist and professor at West Chester University and Area Chair for Stardom and Fandom for the Southwest Popular Culture Association. Katherine Larsen teaches at George Washington University and is the Area Chair for Fan Theory and Culture for the Popular Culture Association. Kathy is the editor and Lynn on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies.
https://fangasmthebook.com/about/
………………………………………..
Everyone Who Contributed to Fanfiction Site “Archive of Our Own” Is Now a Hugo Award Winner.
2019 will be remembered as the year that fanfiction mothership Archive of Our Own won a Hugo Award. If you have ever contributed a fanwork to the site, you’re a part of this.
Many talented people won at the 2019 Hugos at WorldCon in Dublin
But what set Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, and text chats alight across the world was the news that Archive of Our Own won the Hugo for Best Related Fanwork. This was the Archive’s first time being nominated, news initially treated as somewhat contentious by those who still don’t want to try and understand the vital, ever-growing, incredibly rich and variegated culture of fan-created work.
Archive of Our Own’s win felt like a real victory for millions of us who write and create fanart, videos, podfic, meta essays, and more. It sure is nice to have that shiny rocket statue and acknowledgment from one of the most prestigious award-giving bodies in genre fiction that we are here and crafting wondrous things.
https://www.themarysue.com/archive-of-our-own-hugo-award-winner/
……………………………….
Is Fanfiction a valid form of literature?
It’s so easy to dismiss fanfiction as amusing stories written by those who aren’t quite serious enough to write ‘proper books.’ People who may not engage with fanfiction can easily brush it off as smut-ridden versions of more favorable original books and films. Fanfiction is like the underworld of popular movies and literature- and I feel it is time it stopped being overlooked..
.
The positives of fanfiction should also be considered, such as the voice it provides to marginalized LGBT+ communities. Popular literature often favors the heterosexual, leaving many without a role model or representation in popular works. So this is where fanfiction steps in- to provide the representation that many mainstream writers unfortunately overlook. In this way, fanfiction writers are helping society as a whole, not just small fanbases.
http://www.amreading.com/2016/10/17/is-fanfiction-a-valid-form-of-literature/
…………………………….
Also, WAY before fanfiction was being recognized as a genre, how about Paradise Lost by John Milton? As this article by Charlotte Ahlin explains in 11 classics that are secretly fanfiction:
Long before any fic writers were valiantly trying to defend Snape's honor, Milton was turning Satan himself into tragic hero. Like any good fic, Paradise Lost creates a wholly new perspective on an existing story.
OR
Dante's Inferno (along with the rest of his Divine Comedy) is another Bible fic. But it's also a crossover fic and an author-insert fic, because Inferno is all about Dante himself going on a tour through Hell, and his tour guide is the Roman poet Virgil. Mythology, and the Bible into one brilliant piece of lengthy writing starring himself. And if that's not the spirit of fanfiction, I don't know what is.
OR
Wait for it
ROMEO and JULIET??
He based his story on a poem: The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet. Yeah... he barely even changed their names. But he did insert his own OCs, like Mercutio and Paris; he did completely changed the style of writing; and he did make everyone's sexuality a lot more ambiguous, like any good fanfic writer would do.
Check out the article here:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/159041-11-classics-that-are-secretly-fanfiction
…………..
There are many (many!) students doing PhDs and Masters in Fandoms/ Fanfiction as their topics, endorsed by universities. There are many articles explaining how what Shakespeare wrote was also fanfiction in its own way.
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/shakespeare-wrote-fanfiction-and-so-can-you
The Sherlock BBC series was Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ fanfiction based on ACD’s canon!
These articles are interesting to help re-calibrate the ‘respectability’ of fandoms and fanfiction.
Of course, on the other hand, it may not be worth the effort trying to inform or convert those who can’t see the joy that fandoms bring to everyone with their universality, but it is fun for us in fandoms to read anyway :)
So, enjoy!
#fandom#love is love#age is just a number#fanfiction#fangirl#fanfiction is literature#fandom is life
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