#essays and articles

[soracities]

"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

[languagelingers]

“Junio se me derrite entre las manos.”

Trans: [June melts in my hands.]

https://open.substack.com/pub/mejordicho/p/el-verano-de-perder-la-cordura-4?selection=0305672f-b593-4653-9f67-f249b0704a82&r=bimhd&utm_medium=ios

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[soracities]

everybody do yourselves the favour !

joan didion self respect essay joan didion self respect essay joan didion self respect essay

[the-cinnamontography-is-amazing]

So fun reblog game...

What is a meal or a food item that you still desperately crave but cannot get it anymore? Whether it's been discontinued, a place that went out to business, you live far away, etc.

[diddlydootheiconic]

im so sick over them :(

[taradactyls]

Found something interesting for Pride and Prejudice fans relating to Elizabeth's takedown of Mr Darcy's perception of himself a gentleman.

I'm reading Thomas Fuller's 'The Holy State, and the Profane State' (published 1642 but this version republished in 1841 so the views were clearly still applicable) for a research essay, and in the chapter labelled 'The True Gentleman' he states:

He is courteous and affable to his neighbours … the truly generous are most pliant and courteous in their behaviour to their inferiors.

And of course, during the Hunsford proposal, Darcy has just objected to Elizabeth's family, she's called him out, and we get the iconic lines:

"Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?" "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner."

So Elizabeth drops that bomb just after he's been ungenerous and discourteous about her inferior relations... in direct contradiction of one of the rules of true gentlemanly behaviour. No wonder he can't rebut her words at all in the moment, even though Darcy later says "it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice." He might not believe he's got a real problem yet, but there's been examples Elizabeth could call on from even during the course of their conversation too blatant for him to disagree with entirely!

And then later, obviously, he reflects and finds it's true he also hasn't been gentlemanlike in this and other ways in too many aspects of his life.

[literaria-journal]

articles to read instead of doomscrolling #2

The Protagonist Is Never in Control

Walk in these

The existentialist philosophy of Lana Del Rey

On Terror; The Incomprehensible Sublime

An art history lesson from painter Helen Frankenthaler, 60 years later

Between Two Fires: The Music of French and Italian Poetry

An aesthetic little life

Frida Kahlo's Body

Annie Ernaux fixed my disintegrating attention span

No one told me about proust

Our narrative prison

A story of two Pompeii lovers

[harrisonyaoi]

gay beatles slash fanfiction has existed since beatlemania, unsurprisingly. so here's some stuff on that topic

"The most visible rock based BandFic community during this era is The Beatles.   On August 18, 1960, The Beatles started playing under that name for the first time at an event in Hamburg, Germany. (Whelan)  It would be four more long years before the band would make their American debut, an event that occurred on February 7, 1964 when they arrived in New York City for their first American tour. (Whelan)  According to Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs in their essay "Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun," this event marked "the first mass outburst of the sixties to feature women – in this case girls, who would not reach full adulthood until the seventies and the emergence of a genuinely political movement for women’s liberation."  This group, composed primarily of middle class, white teenagers, would form one of the core groups in the nascent bandfic community.  In their adulation of the band, they would create many of their own fan related products including stories, zines and art. The fannish oral tradition that is alive today is implicit in the existence and circulation of fictional stories about band members during the early years of the band's history. Because the audience was young and not connected into a professional or underground movement, much of the material created by this group of fan girls never was published.  The production, in most cases, likely consisted of one to five copies of a story being circulated only among the fan’s immediate peer group. The emergence of The Beatles, their popularity and their fans dedication to creating fan works was helped because of the era in which they appeared. The Beatles were at the forefront for many white, middle class teenage girls in helping them redefine their own definition of sexuality and their own definitions of what it meant to be female. (Ehrenreich)  This was taking place in an era where there was that increased debate on subjects like "birth, a woman's obligation to society, and conception, bringing with it all of the bitterness and acrimony that have long surrounded these issues, beginning with perhaps the most obvious one of them all -- Sexism." (Rowland) Legal gender differences between men and women were beginning to fall. (Rowland) For young, white, middle class female Beatles fans, writing stories about the band was an opportunity to challenge their parents, to revel in the new ideas regarding male sexuality, to explore their own and more.  They could write about marrying Ringo or having children with Paul McCartney.  They could write about being noticed by the George Harrison at a concert and all that followed afterward.  Most fans knew that none of those scenarios were likely to happen. Some deeply resented the idea of a member of the band becoming involved with any woman because it destroyed their own fantasies.  They did not want to see that happen. It is highly probable, that given this and the fact that they were writing fictional stories featuring the Beatles, that some of the Beatles were written as homosexual if only as a way to ensure that the object of the fan's lust, since they could not be hers, would never belong to another female fan.  The idea of writing male on male pairings to cut out other female fans is one that would reappear again and again during the next forty years as new bands were discovered and attracted new groups of young female fans." (X)

[spiltichor]

—   TYPES OF GHOSTS ( ft. my literature textbooks discussions of types of ghosts in narratives.)

[soracities]

obsessed w this ("Dostoevsky as lover", Henrik Karlsson)

[dejwrld]

the topic of colorism within the black community will never be understood until people understand that it's deeper than being bullied in high school and dating preferences.

[notwerewolf]

i miss blaseball every day

[finelythreadedsky]

JSTOR Wrapped: top ten JSTOR articles of 2023

Coo, Lyndsay. “A Tale of Two Sisters: Studies in Sophocles’ Tereus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 143, no. 2 (2013): 349–84.

Finglass, P. J. “A New Fragment of Sophocles’ ‘Tereus.’” Zeitschrift Für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 200 (2016): 61–85.

Foxhall, Lin. “Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.” In Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, 167–82. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Garrison, Elise P. “Eurydice’s Final Exit to Suicide in the ‘Antigone.’” The Classical World 82, no. 6 (1989): 431–35.

Grethlein, Jonas. “Eine Anthropologie Des Essens: Der Essensstreit in Der ‘Ilias’ Und Die Erntemetapher in Il. 19, 221-224.” Hermes 133, no. 3 (2005): 257–79.

McClure, Laura. “Tokens of Identity: Gender and Recognition in Greek Tragedy.” Illinois Classical Studies 40, no. 2 (2015): 219–36.

Purves, Alex C.  “Wind and Time in Homeric Epic.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 140, no. 2 (2010): 323–50.

Richlin, Amy. “Gender and Rhetoric: Producing Manhood in the Schools.” In Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, edited by Mark Golden and Peter Toohey, 202–20. Edinburgh University Press, 2003.

Rood, Naomi. “Four Silences in Sophocles’ ‘Trachiniae.’” Arethusa 43, no. 3 (2010): 345–64.

Zeitlin, Froma I. “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia.” Arethusa 11, no. 1/2 (1978): 149–84.

[literaria-journal]

articles to read instead of doomscrolling.

Demonology

A Question of Free Will: Inside the Final Days of Katherine Mansfield

The Humiliating Act of Falling In Love

How to read a painting

When Horror Is the Truth-teller

Love Is Like Cocaine

Lizzie Siddal: The life of a Pre-Raphaelite supermodel

Joan Didion Against a Performative Life

Women drawing nudes: a history of forbidden bodies

How midlife became a crisis

and more to come!

[falafels]

i think i might actually be too stupid to live. why did this university let me in i told you guys i was stupid at the start