srwestvikwrites

[srwestvikwrites]

Y’all I read a lot of scripts. And the one note I give over and over and over and over to the point that I can pretty much copy and paste it from one review to another…. let your characters lie. Let them omit, stumble, and circumvent. Allow them to be completely unable to express what they’re feeling. Make them unable to admit a truth. Let them sit in silence because they can’t think of anything clever to say! Let them say the exact wrong thing!

Dee Rees talks about it in her BAFTA lecture (which you should ABSOLUTELY WATCH): that what your character actually says should be three degrees of separation away from what they mean to say.

I read script after script after script where characters articulate their needs, desires, and objectives with perfect accuracy off the cuff 24/7 and there is not one single human person on this planet who is actually able to do that. This is the #1 thing that’s going to make your script sound stilted and the #1 thing that’s going to make shit difficult on your actors. Let them shut up, and let them lie.

[srwestvikwrites]

(screaming) you bet i’m going to use this to spill all my second age meta

Númenor Week: November 9-15, 2020

Welcome to Númenor Week!

Thrilled to announce this is the very first week-long event dedicated to the line of Elros. Any content about Númenor, its Kings and their descendants, as well as constructive debates are more than welcome!

You can create fanart, fanfic, gifs, aesthetic moodboards, faceclaims, headcanons, metas, etc. Please remember to tag your posts #numenorweek and @numenorweek or I could skip them!

Everyone is invited to enjoy, participate and share their wonderful fanwork! Happy creating 💛

Schedule and Prompts: These are prompts for each day, but you don’t have to stick to them!

Day One: Elros and the Royal family. Foundation of Númenor, physical geography, culture. Day Two: Aldarion and Erendis. The Guild of Venturers, return to Middle Earth and friendship with Gil-Galad, Battle of the Gwathló. Day Three: Ruling Queens. Tar-Ancalimë, Tar-Telperiën and Tar-Vanimeldë. Day Four: Division. Tar-Ciryatan- Tar-Ancalimon, speaking against the Ban of the Valar, establishment of the King’s Men and the Faithful, banning of Quenya. Day Five: The Faithful, Lords of Andúnië.  Amandil, Tar-Palantir and Elendil, Council of the Sceptre, Nimloth The White Tree, escape from the Downfall. Day Six: Akallabêth. Ar-Pharazôn and Tar-Míriel, marriage, usurpation of the sceptre, Sauron in Númenor, War against the Valar, downfall. Day Seven: Legacy. Isildur and Anárion, Realms in Exile: Foundation of Arnor and Gondor.

For further information, questions or suggestions, feel free to message this blog or @actuallymiriel‘s on her main.

[srwestvikwrites]

‘waltz of the flowers’ by tchaikovsky but played on a gramophone as you and your partner slow dance in your living room. (youtube)

[srwestvikwrites]

Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet 

[srwestvikwrites]

some of you haven’t realized that improving the world is a battle of miserable inches and not something that can be done in a glorious blaze of revolution and it shows

[srwestvikwrites]

J.R.R. Tolkien: Frodo follows one literary convention of heroism, and Sam follows another

the fandom, having elementary school-levels of reading comprehension: Tolkien said Sam’s the true hero

[srwestvikwrites]

some people really need to understand that there’s a difference between saying ‘they’re a good character’ and ‘they’re a good person’

[srwestvikwrites]

i can’t believe this has to be said in 2020, but

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD EMPIRE

there are two kinds of empires: a territorial empire and a hegemonic empire. a territorial empire is one of direct conquest and control with force, and a hegemonic empire is one of indirect conquest but control with power. basically, is a certain nation colonized or conquered? colonizing suggests a “relationship” is to be formed, where the conquering power “pays” the colonized nation, who “has rights”, for what resources their nation has. conquering suggests there is to be no such “relationship” and the peoples of the conquered nation will have no “rights” and won’t be “paid” for their resources. 

so i repeat: 

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GOOD EMPIRE

[srwestvikwrites]

i’ve been having weird angsty bouts of “ughhhh i wanna read a book with THIS EXACT EXTREMELY PARTICULAR VIBE cross-bred with the vibe i got from x movie and y book and z album” and then realizing that the book i want to read is my wip in its final form

[srwestvikwrites]

I don’t even go here but I’m still so angry about what happened to Hunger Games. The CLEAR allegories and political messages that were swept to the side and/or completely ignored in favor of a cool sci-fi dystopia story and a love triangle. The casting of a white adult Katniss. The REMOVAL of all (or nearly all) disabilities from the movies. How every fucking YA book jumped on the hot new trend of Rebel Girl Against Evil Society yet NONE of them managed to grasp that the Hunger Games dystopia wasn’t MADE UP based on some bullshit Hogwarts House sorting type system. And it wasn’t some bullshit teenage wish fulfillment fantasy about being Special and teenagers being The Only Smart Ones but rather Katniss is caught up in a groundswell movement that is so much BIGGER THAN HER. How when the movies came out corporate America started making fashion & beauty “Capitol” lines in a hilariously devastating display of irony. How nobody liked Mockingjay because it was “too dark” as though that wasn’t PRECISELY the point. How Katniss Herself was written off as though she’s just a Mary Sue action hero and she was “annoying” and not uniquely gifted because she had STRUGGLED and STARVED and learned how to survive the hard way and she was ANGRY. It basically inspired a new genre and yet all of these books were so pale and uninspired in comparison and the movies though they largely follow the plot somehow STILL managed to miss the point and the whole message was lost because of both these things.

[srwestvikwrites]

I am tired. These people make me feel I have a hole in the middle of me.

— D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Works; The Plumbed Serpent

[srwestvikwrites]

kinda wanna relationship, kinda wanna stay single my whole life, kinda wanna go on adventures, kinda wanna stay in my bed my whole life 

[srwestvikwrites]

[srwestvikwrites]

[srwestvikwrites]

Annus Mirabilis

A short story

Mama is preparing mushrooms for the egg drop soup. So many types of edible fungi in the world, though these days she can only find the basic white kind. So many inedible, too. The kind that poison, or take root in stagnant flesh and foliage, breaking down matter until it is nothing, and becomes something again, a new thing altogether refracting everything that came before it. Endless, in that wonderful little cycle of existence.

Mama has a lot of questions about existence. It is why she studies what she studies, and why in the last weeks she started praying again. She prays every morning, noon, and night, where before her prayer mat was gathering dust, a relic of a childhood she did and didn’t want to distance herself from. She has come to realise, over the years, some truths. You cannot study nature and marvel at its vastness, and know how small you are, without understanding the laws. Natural laws. Social laws. Lawlessness. Among the strictures and anthems and themes, she has learned that there are two kinds of gods people pray to.

The forgiving yet punitive sort are abundant. They amass the most followers because they extend the most hope. Your sins forgiven. Your place after death affirmed. Just follow this checklist of morals and tasks, variable to the hands and hearts of men. Do good by the letter and not the spirit of the gospel and it is enough to see the gates of paradise, they say.

Then there are the ones who live as people do - as interfering, as involved in their own heads, as desirous of their own intentions. They can gift - if they want. And they can hurt - if they want. And you can favour them, and be in their favour, or insult them, and be in their fury. You can become their lover. You can dedicate your blood to them. 

And the people that don’t pray to any god? They look at the blank white-grey slate of the clouded sky, and they know rain is coming.

Mama puts on Tangled for Baby-child, the little one not so little anymore, swaddling herself in her childhood blanket now too small for her, the flower embroidery pulled, the fabric pilled. Baby-child watches intently, watches the princess in her tower, and Mama knows she is taking note of things to do as she listens to the bright cheery goldenrod singing. She smiles fondly. No doubt tomorrow, she will have to excuse herself from a meeting because there will be a painting going up on the wall behind her, or the strings of grandfather’s guitar will be twanged by an unpracticed hand that knows not what an heirloom is. She smiles fondly because it makes the weight of wonders easier to bear. Baby-child doesn’t say prayers yet. Not in the same way as Mama, anyway. She understands them differently, too. To her they are the same as talking to a friend. They are the manifestation of desperation in the face of a spiralling loss of control. 

For if humankind does not have absolute control, then it is in the hands of nature, and the easiest way to plead its mercy is with the prayers memorised from childhood.

Mama is who she is, she is Mama. She is also Dr. Not the kind of use in a time of wonders. She’s the kind that asks questions of the planetary bodies and the waves of sound and fury and the singularity at the centre of everything. She’s on her way into that singularity, she can feel it. 

She tries to read a King James Bible, a text she has never read before even though she knows this God is also technically her God. She has the time to do it these days. Exodus becomes her favourite book. She runs her fingers over the scritta paper, so thin and fine, so soft, and the hallowed words that cover it. She thinks of whether they will look back on this later, and speak the words true, replacing lamb’s blood with Clorox - we stayed in our homes, and the plague did not enter.

_____________________________________________________

Mama gives the soup to Baby-child, mushrooms and all. Mama is more Mama now than ever. Everything boils down to keeping herself and Baby-child alive, and her doctorate cannot do much of that, except perhaps put money on the table.

Money, money, money. She can feel it coming like a freight train. She can feel the steady approach of the day money will not be enough for what it buys. She has a sudden feeling the electricity is going to go out. Slowly, everything is going to go out. Every life, every light. The lights have gone out before, a hundred years ago. It’s only a matter of time. 

Today Mama puts on a superhero movie for Baby-child. It’s easier to spend money on streaming when you know it can take your mind away from the inevitable unknowns. “When the Earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it,” says the villain, a big bad man made self-replicating progeny. He is made of metal. But Mama thinks, the real villains have no names, except that which we willingly give them, and no body, except that which we unwillingly give them. They do not need names. They are like unto God. I am, they say, tearing through matter like mycelia to set down their roots and siphon off nutrients. I am.

How small humankind is, truly, in the face of these wonders, for they are the true gods. But are they punitive, when in days before they were forgiving? Are they something to be bargained with, where you can sacrifice a little other life for the benefit of your own? Or are they just something that is? 

For what, in the end, is a wonder? It is raising the dead and parting the seas and restoring sight to the blind. It is a plague of locusts and the slaughter of the firstborn. 

Who is to say that nature is wrong, that destruction is a travesty - when really, it is just change? The mushrooms know that to be the fact that it is. After all, whose planet is this anyway? Whose universe? Who are we to say what is and isn’t just according to the barely understood laws that govern us? 

Mama takes a deep breath. She had never thought about the air in her lungs this much. A little, when she passed smokers. A little, when old trucks belched exhaust and she was reminded of the cost of efficiency. But even when the air is clean again, it can kill you.

Did you know that oxygen is slowly killing you? one of her peers had said once, in the second year of her studies. Entropy, she had thought. Everyone knew the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy. And oxygen, it is like the sea, or drums of oil. It sustains us, and then it claims us.

This is a hostile world, Mama thinks, tucking Baby-child in, her poor little eyes exhausted from staring at screens, screens, screens. Hostile to life. It’s a miracle we’ve lived this long. Isn’t it? Baby-child will wear glasses before the year is out, she thinks. Mama already does, so she doesn’t mind switching on the TV again.

“I think that sometimes people try to die to feel alive,” she says on the phone, calling that old classmate, eyes on the prize, the protestors, the numbers and the news, the blue glare screaming into her, so quietly. It is all so quiet. You cannot rage when you are bedridden. You cannot scream when you are locked inside. She thinks of her work, Dr Mama, of what she has studied of how the universe will end. No Ragnarok, no seven-headed monsters in the sea. Chaos, but not the violent kind. It will fall as all empires do. Not with a crash, but with plaintive whimpers and death rattles.

Everything falls in silence.

She has a drink, though she shouldn’t, but in an hour she is not drunk anymore. She tries to touch herself, but it only reminds her how empty she is, how guilty before God for far worse things, for it reminds her of her true shame and she does not want to touch that, not ever. So she has another drink, but doesn’t dare gorge on the snacks she craves though her gut rumbles, because Baby-child will want them in the morning. She has a sudden feeling that she’ll never be full again. No, more than that - never satisfied. No matter what she consumes, with her mouth, or her ears, or her eyes, she shall never be sated, her thirst unslaked. She wonders how long this can go on. Devouring herself until there is nothing left to devour. Letting the outside in to kill her quickly, because it is better - better to open your veins to gods, better to leave your firstborn outside for the Angel, better to breathe until the inevitable collapse. 

She thinks she has an answer to one of her many questions, then, as she heats up the last of the egg drop soup. She’ll wake up early to make more. 

She thinks that this is what is behind it all, this fear of being unfulfilled and left behind, this grave misunderstanding of how it all works - equal and opposite reactions, push and pull, growth and rot. That unwillingness to comprehend, to accept, is so human. Maybe even more than human. Maybe it is the reason why living cannot go on forever, not for anything on earth. 

Except, perhaps, the fungi. 

© Sarah Rachel Westvik, 2020 

[srwestvikwrites]

AND INDITEX (Zara, Bershka, Stradivarius etc.)

Workers can’t even unionise properly to protect their interests (see the recent case of Myanmar, which was Primark and Zara).  

Not to mention that the massive textile industry of the Indian subcontinent prior to colonisation was directly, deliberately decimated by the British, so this exploitation isn’t exactly new either.

hold brands accountable for not paying their workers who are literally the backbone of their successful fast fashion companies. see who make the clothes you wear in your daily lives.

{art credit}

CARRD ON WHAT'S HAPPENING TO BANGLADESHI GARMENT WORKERS (made by @banglatown)

[srwestvikwrites]

On Colourism

Originally published on my Facebook, in response to some tone-deaf folks calling the furore over whitening products “language policing” without trying to understand or empathise with the roots of the distress.

I've seen multiple posts on my timeline today lamenting the backlash against whitening and lightening especially in reference to beauty products. I'm not sure why everything was suddenly circulating today. Rather than argue directly with individual people (exhausting), I'm just going to offer a little perspective because there seems to be a willful misunderstanding of how damaging colourism is.

I'm mixed race, Punjabi on my mum's side. Colourism has a long and painful history in Indian culture, uplifted and reinforced by the caste system developed under British colonial rule and lingering into today. It is a product both of classism and of colonialism. Dark skin is not held as a standard of beauty, wealth, or value. I dare you to find an A-list Bollywood celebrity that actually has dark skin and/or does not promote a line of skin whitening products. Having dark skin can jeopardise job prospects, access to education, and social inclusion. From the get go it is pushed onto us that it is better to be fair.  Now, in my family, from parents to uncles to grandparents, we have a range of skintones, but I am the fairest of face (we've tested it). I'm the resident ang moh. But lo, how many Indian aunties over the years have praised my fairness as a defining feature of my beauty! How is the amount of melanin in my skin any judge of beauty? What kind of subliminal judgement are you passing against those in my family darker than me? My hardworking grandfather? My beautiful, strong mother?

Back home - Singapore, not even India - I have repeatedly had skin whitening products pushed on to me because even outside the community this fairness is upheld as a standard of beauty. Throw in intra-community prejudices against dark skin compounded with existing racism against darker-skinned South Asians in the wider national community, and you can hopefully empathise with my indignation. I once had a saleswoman, who I had trusted after visiting a few times, try and sell me a whitening product. When I declined, saying I was happy with my skintone and did not want to whiten it, she looked visibly shocked, and quickly switched tack by saying the product was "brightening". "How dare you," I wanted to say, but what good would it have done? This is an ingrained mentality. It is not considered normal to not want to have fair skin, white skin, unfreckled skin.

Do you understand how damaging that is? How much money is spent trying to whiten, how much emotional toil is expended agonising over not being white? Darker skinned Indian *children* in my country are bullied in ways those fairer than them are not because they're blackies, apu neh neh. Writing off colourism as a blanket term without actually understanding the cultures and communities worst affected by it is at best, ignorant, and at worst, malignant. This is as much an issue for Western observers as for Asians - in fact, for Asians even more so. There is so much blatant denial in the Indian and wider Asian community, it's sickening. I hate the fact that even as fair as I am, as western looking as I am, I am still not considered "white enough", and that my whiteness is inherent to how my beauty is perceived by other Asians including in my ethnic group. It's disgusting. It's way past time we evaluated how we judge beauty based on skin tone.