amserastudio

[amserastudio]

strap in kids for the hozier meta that nobody asked for and probably didn’t need

So the first thing you think of when you listen to Hozier’s song Run probably isn’t the colonisation of Ireland. In fact, most of you probably don’t think about Run at all- it’s an album-only bonus track with a 0 popularity score on iTunes. But I’m here today to tell you why that is WRONG and why this song is actually one of the most fascinating and complex tracks on his album. 

So like a lot of Hozier’s songs, Run is overflowing with cryptic allusions and innuendo that are pretty recalcitrant to any attempts to make meaning of them. The song has a total of 2 comments on songmeanings.com, and the interpretations on genius.com are fairly basic and unfocused, which is fair enough because the lyrics aren’t even listed correctly. All of these speculations look at the song as a meditation on forbidden love. A fair interpretation…

Rare is this love, keep it covered I need you to run to me, run to me lover Run until you feel your lungs bleeding

… except that Hozier provides us with plenty of evidence that there is a much more concrete metaphor at work here. He gives us the biggest clue in this video from when he performed the song in Birmingham.

“[James Joyce] famously had a quote about Ireland in which he lovingly said […] that Ireland is the sow that eats its farrow. And so it’s the pig that eats her young, which I think he meant that in a loving way, but this next song is kind of about that, I suppose.” - Hozier 23/1/2015

So now we know the song isn’t about a woman, it’s about Ireland. Someone on songmeanings.com makes an interesting link to James Joyce’s book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where the quote is taken from, and its allusions to the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell and his destructive affair. 

“Parnell and Kitty O'Shea are the love that needs to be covered, because it was an adulterous affair. Which just points to the thrust of the song being the destructive nature of love, if for no other reason than because people aren’t willing to tolerate it.” -teaspill 8/2/2015

This is an interesting idea, which I can’t really comment on because I only wiki’d the book to pass my undergraduate literature class and consequently don’t know too much about it.  What I DO know about is HISTORY. Lets break down the lyrics. 

Oh but the farrow knows Her hungry eyes, her ancient soul It’s carried by the sneering menagerie

Know what it is to grow Beneath her sky, a punishing cold To slowly learn of her ancient misery

So we have the sow consuming her farrow (not pharaoh smh). He brings in the image of this “sneering menagerie”, and we get the sense of this brutal, unforgiving land full of savage animals. He’s setting the scene for us here. (Side note: I like the connection teaspill makes between the consuming of young and the actual disease consumption, which results in bleeding lungs. Nice.)

To be twisted by something  A shame without a sin Like how she twisted the bog man After she married him

Here’s Hozier’s next clue: the bog man. People seem confused by this one- let me lay it down for you guys. Bog bodies are naturally embalmed corpses, sometimes over 3000 years old, that have been discovered in marshy and boggy areas in multiple European countries. Most notably: in Ireland. 

Hozier seems to be referring to a particular bog man who was discovered in Clonycavan Ireland in 2003. 

WARNING: The images of these mummies on the linked National Geographic article are graphic and sometimes very disturbing.

… he was naked, his head wrenched sharply to the left, his legs and lower arms missing, ripped away by the machine that had dug him from a bog… His head and trunk carried marks of deliberate violence, inflicted before he was cast into the mire: His nose had been broken, his skull shattered, his abdomen sliced open. While he lay in the bog, the weight of sodden sphagnum moss had flattened his crushed head, and the dark waters had tanned his skin to leather and dyed his hair orange red… - Karen E. Lange, 7/9/2007

“Twisted”, indeed. Hozier again likens love (in this case, marriage) to consumption, using the image of the bog man consumed by the earth as his metaphor. So what is the song really about? Is it using Ireland as a metaphor for love, or love as a metaphor for Ireland? Let’s dig further. 

But in all the world There is one lover worthy of her With as many souls claimed as she

So now we have a new character, someone who is equally vicious towards their children. But wait- Hozier doesn’t specify just which souls this character has claimed, they might very well be other people’s children.

But for all he’s worth He still shatters always on her earth The cause of every tear she’d ever weep

Rushing ashore to meet her Foaming with loneliness White hands to fondle and beat her To give her his onliness 

So this character has white hands with which he “fondle(s) and beat(s)” Ireland and is the source and cause of all of her troubles. 

I

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland

wonder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_Laws_(Ireland)

who this guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwellian_conquest_of_Ireland

could possibly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_and_contributing_factors

be.

There’s a whooole bunch of evidence that England is represented by the male figure in Hozier’s song. The fact that he rushes to her shore “foaming with loneliness” - another expression that likens sexual desire to England’s drive for colonial expansion, absorbing and consuming the countries of others into its empire like a cancer. “Shatter(ing) on her earth” could mean the violence of invasions and counter-rebellions, or it could refer to the policies enforced upon the Irish that had the effect, among others, of ravaging farmland and eventually contributing to the Great Famine of Ireland: literally breaking her earth. We already know Hozier is interested in colonialism, from his song Foreigner’s God which I may or may not also write a meta for at a later date. What we have now, then, is the story of Ireland’s relationship to England, which is only viewed through the prism of a destructive romantic relationship. 

If this evidence isn’t enough to convince you that this song is about colonialism, then I don’t know what else to tell you, tbh. 

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I don't normally post links and resources on this blog because it was meant to really just be "meddwl yn Gymraeg" — thinking, writing, practising speaking in Welsh. But whatever, it has expanded, and I also just remembered that the archived site for BBC's Catchphrase Cymraeg is a great resource for learning Welsh. It's got grammar, it's got lessons, and wonderfully, the audio clips are still up there, so you get to hear and kind of repeat after actual speakers with pronunciations from like different accents and dialects, which is a lot nicer than having a TTS (as Duolingo does) (SSiW is good for this too, but yeah it is a subscription, so on that front too, this is nice)

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Milkman, Anna Burns // Foreigners God, Hozier // Stations of the West, Seamus Heaney

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[ID: web weaving of 6 pieces of prose, poetry, and art about bog bodies, in a warm color palette.

1: Text from Christine Finn’s article “Bog Bodies and Bog Lands” says, “There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay. Bodies have been found which must have lain in bogs formore than a thousand years, but which, though admittedly somewhat shrunken and brown, are in other respects unchanged (from an ‘old Danish almanac’ in Glob 1965, i).”

2: Kathleen Vaughan’s painting Bog Series 1 is a red and yellow painting that features yellow organic shapes like curled-up human figures, black charcoal figure drawings, and a textured red background that suggests flesh. It is oil, acrylic and encaustic paint; photographic emulsion; xerography on acetate; cheesecloth appliqué; and charcoal pencil; all on three canvas panels.

3: Text from R.C. Connolly’s article “Lindow Man” says, “One thing is certain: he was not alone on Lindow Common on the day he died. Whether he was one of many or just of two is not certain, but he was not alone.” The first sentence is highlighted yellow.

4: Genius lyrics from Hozier’s song “Like Real People Do” say, 
“[Verse 1]
I had a thought, dear, however scary
 About that night, the bugs and the dirt
 Why were you digging? What did you bury 
Before those hands pulled me from the earth?” 
 The first two lines are highlighted brown; the next two are highlighted grey.

5: Text from Anthony Purdy’s article “The Bog Body as Mnemotype” says, 
”For though speculation about how the body came to be in the bog is an integral part of any bog body narrative, it does not in itself define the body’s chronotopic value. Far more important than either the Iron-Age world of the bog people or the modern world of their archaeological reappearance is the very particular way the bodies mediate the relationship between the two. Bog bodies have an extraordinary power to abolish temporal distance, to make the past present. They are not skeletal remains; they have flesh on their bones and that flesh bears the marks of their living and their dying. They have hair and beard stubble and faces with expressions we think we recognize. They have stomachs that still contain the grains and seeds and plants they ate as their last meal. In a word, with their peculiar capacity to compress time, bog bodies are exemplary mnemotopes and speak of a life anchored in an everyday that was then but is also now. To an extraordinary degree, bog bodies allow us to see time.”
 The bolded lines are highlighted golden.

6: Lines from Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Grauballe Man” say, 
“Who will say ‘corpse’ 
to his vivid cast?
 Who will say ‘body’
 to his opaque repose?” /End ID]

[amserastudio]

Miracle

Not the one who takes up his bed and walks

But the ones who have known him all along

And carry him in —

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked

In their backs, the stretcher handles

Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable

and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.

Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,

Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity

To pass, those who had known him all along.

[amserastudio]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Andrew Hozier-Byrne (@hozier)

Bless him for posting the video

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refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

pdfdrive.com

[amserastudio]

Gained a lot of followers recently who I think are mainly here for history/mythology stuff, because I was on a rec list or two, and we're coming up to Christmas so folks might be looking for books to request / buy for others as gifts.... so it seems like a good time to share my Bookshop.org list of "Celtic Mythology" recommendations, i.e. accessible but accurate books about medieval Irish and Welsh literature.

Everything on the list has a little explanation for why it's there (other than Welsh Verse, which doesn't have a blurb because I added it based on a friend's recommendation, and don't have personal experience with it).

Some of them are introductory books that provide an overview, and others are my preferred translations of a few of the big stories. They're all reasonably affordable, i.e. they're at Regular Book prices rather than Academic Book prices, because I know the sinking feeling of looking up something that's super useful and discovering it's £100, it happened to me yesterday. (Why, The Arts of Friendship, why would you hurt me in this way...)

I'm linking it here because I think it will be useful, but also because it is an affiliate list, and if you buy books from it, you're supporting me directly as well as supporting independent bookshops. As an independent scholar, I have no funding, so I appreciate every handful of pennies I can earn from sharing my knowledge! I will never put any of my online content behind a paywall, and if any of my articles aren't open access (like my 7 Maines article), it's because of the journal's policies, not my choice, but I try to make them as easy/cheap to access as possible. But by buying books, you get to help me out so I can keep doing this, AND you get books. Win-win!

[amserastudio]

How to access zlibrary after the ban:

just wanted to share a workaround for the zlibrary ban that is currently working for me:

These are the apps I used.

- use this link to get to zlibrary on the tor browser:

http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion/

- create account on zlibrary website

- get telegram app and search for @firstlibrarybot and start a conversation with it

- go to the menu on the zlibrary website and click on "⚙️ edit profile". scroll down to "link to telegram bot" and copy the link

- paste the link into the telegram chat to link it to your account

- now when you go to zlibrary there's an option to "send to telegram" and it works

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i love zlib not working. i am fine with zlib going down at the time of me trying to figure out my ba thesis. everything is fine and i'm not losing my mind

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𝑇ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑑𝑎𝑦, 24𝑡ℎ 𝑛𝑜𝑣 | the winter blues finally setting in calming me. I have some awaited events coming up such as indigo release but I hope I continue the consistency with my studies, also thinking of taking a dop challenge maybe 👀

🎧: 𝐵𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑀𝑜𝑜𝑛_ 𝑌𝑜𝑜𝐴 | 𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑚

[amserastudio]

[amserastudio]

Hi everyone! So @odd-socks-and-eyebrows asked me to put together some handwriting resources and I am quite late with this, but here it is!

Websites and Blog Posts:

This website has a variety of practice sheets for both print and cursive writing. It’s fairly basic but a really good starting point if you want to improve your handwriting. 

This post has a lot of the most common handwriting styles and some worksheets for each of them. This one is technically geared for teaching young children but I think it’s pretty useful. 

This post is one of my favorites, while technically about relearning cursive writing it is also a mini history lesson and information session about cursive in general. This whole blog is actually dedicated to writing by hand and has some great stuff. It’s no longer active but is still very useful. 

This post is by one of my favorite bullet journaling/lifestyle bloggers, Kara at Boho Berry, (@bohoberry) who is also a fellow fountain pen lover. She actually has an instagram challenge (with the next two bloggers on this list) called #RockYourHandwriting which is pretty fun. 

This post is by Kim at Tiny Ray of Sunshine  (@tinyrayofsun) and includes some great printable worksheets.

This post is by Dee at Decade Thirty who I’ve linked before because of her truly amazing print writing. 

Handwriting Samples:

This one by @academicmind

This one by @stellestudies

This one by @vestiblr

And this one is mine

I know it’s a fairly short list, but I hope this helps!

[amserastudio]

Research on Welsh-language Fanfiction

Hello!

I am a part of a Polish-based research project, which aims to study Welsh-language fanfiction and its community. We are currently searching for both readers and writers of such fanfiction, regardless of their nationality. The only thing that matters is that you have read and/or written fanfiction in Welsh language, and are over 16 years of age.

Readers will be asked to take part in a short survey (approx. 10-15 minutes), which will be compensated with a £5 giftcard to Amazon. (It might take us up to a week to send them out, please be patient!). Also, please know that you count as a reader if you have read just one fanfiction!

Here is the link to the survey (if you managed to fill it until Tuesday, 05.07, it would be most fantastic, but all later answers are welcome as well, it should be open for about a month!): https://forms.gle/ECpFU3zxdBvRRgkn6

Writers will be asked to first take part in a short survey (approx. 5 minutes), and then we would like to conduct an interview with you (compensated with a £50 giftcard to Amazon). It is relevant, though, that your fanfiction must have been published on any social platform before 01.07.2022.

If you happen to be both a reader and a writer, we will be happy to send you the survey and conduct an interview, if you would be interested in that!

If you have any questions or are a writer who is interested in helping with our research, please contact me on Tumblr in DMs/asks, or email me (nikzdu@st.amu.edu.pl).

If you yourself do not read or write Welsh-language fanfiction, then we would be incredibly grateful for sharing this post, since (as you can probably imagine) Welsh-language fandom is rather small and hard to reach.

Thank you all in advance!

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anyways writing tip for introductions and conclusions

first of all call em intros and outros fuck "conclusions" get outta here you bougie dipshit of a word

second: intro format goes Hook, Line, and Sinker. you hook your reader, you line out your topics, you tell em what should sink in by the end. that's three sentences. fucking maybe you can stretch one of those things into two sentences, if you can't don't fucking bother. intro can be short and sweet, the double-spacing of MLA format will do the rest darling

Third: the outro is the reflection of the intro, ergo: Sink, Line, and Hooker. tell 'em what should have sunk in by now, line out your topics one last time, and give 'em a little something something to remember you by. basically copy/paste your intro in reverse order and crack open a thesaurus to rephrase everything. if you reuse your hook from the intro it's called "symmetry" and people love that shit

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this is a breakdown of how i go about doing research for my essays! do keep in mind i am an arts student, so i don’t know how well this method carries over into other disciplines. check out my other guides to writing essays here and here!

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the academic urge to run away in the woods once the realisation of exams approaching hits