biscuitstudies

[biscuitstudies]

Alfa Castaldi - Viviane Fauny Wearing a Outfit by Dorothée Bis (Vogue Italia 1970)

[biscuitstudies]

[biscuitstudies]

Seen this whole interview on yle before, but it's nice having a section with proper English subtitles!

[biscuitstudies]

Woman's Role

Tove Jansson was very critical about the role women played in society. Her own mother Signe “Ham" Hammarsten-Jansson was a devoted homemaker who supported her husband’s work with her own income while also raising her children with love. Victor Jansson had become emotionally reserved after the war, so Ham needed to become the force that kept the family together. Victor would party in his atelier with other men while in the next room, Ham stayed awake guarding asthmatic Per-Olov.

Tove was often sad about all the effort her had to give and also had some grudge against her father who was a demanding patriarch at home. A grown-up Tove often dreamed about taking her mother somewhere far away where she could shelter her. This never happened of course and older Tove admitted that her mother loved her father too much.

Because she grew up witnessing all of this, Tove was almost scared of mothergood and marriage. She knew that to just about all women of her time, marriage meant giving up yourself and becoming a shelter for everyone else. Needs of husbands and children always came before the needs of mothers. And Tove was not sure if she wanted to give up her needs and ambitions like that.

Tove often played with the thought of marriage and admitted that despite her fears, she did have some feminine instinct to settle down. But in all her visions, she always kept her own apartment and continued her career, married or not. This was almost unheard of for a woman at the time.

Eventually, Tove did not end up marrying any man and instead found an equal and respectful relationship with Tuulikki Pietilä. She lived her life as an independent female artist who rebelled against the partiarchal norms through her life choices. That is why she is still considered one of the most important feminist artists in Finland and her example is often praised.

Themes about independence and submission can be found in Moomin books as well. Female characters like Little My and Too-Ticki are fiercely independent, outspoken and defy traditional gender roles most books would use. It is no wonder that Little My is often one of the most important fictive feminist icons in Finland. Snorkmaiden is an example of a more traditional female character but her feminine strength is often admired by everyone around her; even wise male characters like Snufkin admire her nurturing personality and ability to invent small practical solutions to help everyone. Mymble is a happy and fulfilled single mother while The Groke is a surprisingly genderless personification of depression who happens to be female. Moomin books have a fairly balanced gender ratio, especially in later books, and female characters get multiple different portrayals.

And of course, Moominmamma represents the situation of her role model, Ham. While Moominmamma is generally happy and content when she can provide for others and take care of everyone, later Moomin books shed some light into her predicament. Tove explored how hard it is for a wife to support her authoritarian husband at the expense of her own well-being. This sad but tender study is best seen in Moominpappa and the Sea. Part criticism, part admiration.

[biscuitstudies]

Loneliness

Loneliness is one of the key themes in Moomin books. Tove Jansson was very familiar with this experience. Her father had been emotionally damaged by the civil war when Tove was very young and because of this, she spent her entire childhood longing for his affection. In her adulthood Tove experienced another war and had to wait for her brother, lover and friends who were away fighting. All while her friends and family were also mourning and emotionally distant. After the war ended, Tove entered another relationship full of longing and waiting with Atos Wirtanen. Endless waiting only seemed to end when she met Tuulikki Pietilä, who was finally there when Tove needed her most.

Constant waiting is a lonely experience. But Tove was also aware of another kind of loneliness. This kind of loneliness is the kind we seek ourselves. Tove was a very private person even when she became famous and also a dedicated artist who needed peace to work. She spent years trying to find a place where she could isolate herself to work and enjoy her own company.

Loneliness appears as duality in Moomin books. The bad kind of loneliness is represented with various Fillyjonks and sometimes Moomintroll himself, especially when he longs for Snufkin. Fillyjonks are anxious and depressed people who often suffer from sudden feelings of doom. Their unstable minds and efforts to keep up respectable life often end up isolating them in large houses on the beach because their grandmother had supposedly lived there as a child or in neatly decorated parlors with only their own thoughts for company. Fillyjonks long to escape this loneliness. They will reach out for people but they often fail. It seems it’s impossible to be both polite and proper and speak up about your depression at the same time.

Moominvalley in November is a book where loneliness is the main theme. So it is no wonder that a Fillyjonk is among the main characters. This Fillyjonk is tired of being anxious and alone, so she comes to visit Moomin family in hopes of getting caught up in their spontaneous life. When Moomin family appears to be away, she tries to be spontaneous like Moominmamma herself and make people around her feel at home. She fails miserably, because a timid and orderly Fillyjonk cannot be Moominmamma. Her efforts isolate her further until she lets go and starts to be herself but with a happier attitude towards herself. In the end she manages to put together a work party and heads back home with more enthusiasm. She was able to overcome her loneliness when she accepted her limitations and embraced them and others.

Another lonely Fillyjonk appears in Tales from Moominvalley; Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters. This Fillyjonk ends up overcoming her loneliness without other people like the Fillyjonk mentioned above. Instead, she encounters the disaster she was afraid of and turns her loneliness from bad kind to the good kind. This good kind of loneliness means that you can be by yourself and it’s not scary or unpleasant. Snufkin basically lives for this kind of loneliness. He not only enjoys being by himself, he yearns for it and becomes anxious if he does not get to be alone. In a way, his good loneliness is the opposite from Fillyjonk’s bad loneliness. This good kind of loneliness nurtures and gives us strength to be social again. Though eventually even Snufkin realizes that maybe he did not really need to be so much alone, when he was always surrounder by people who understood him.

There is no way to talk about loneliness and healing without talking about the very personification of loneliness; The Groke. The Groke is so cold that everything she touches turns to ice. This isolates her from other people completely. So completely, that they would rather not even mention her name. Whenever she approached their light, they will turn it off and run away. She is almost defiant in her loneliness. “I’m the only Groke. There is no one like me and I will never warm up” she declares in Moominpappa and the Sea. She is bad loneliness given form. But eventually a single act of kindness, Moomintroll coming to see her on the beach, frees the Groke. Moomintroll’s company and caring drive away her loneliness and turn out to be the key to her freedom; The Groke becomes warm. Moomin books always show us characters either freeing themselves from bad loneliness or finding out that limitless amount of good loneliness is not actually a key to happiness.

The truest example of independent and good loneliness is actually Little My. She is capable of finding just the right balance between loneliness and sociality. She is with others when she feels like it and despite being sharp and brutally honest, she is willing to support and nurture them whenever they need it. But she is also capable of running away whenever she feels like it. Little My is free of sentimentality and will not miss people and company. She can enjoy both loneliness and company to equal measure, without ever getting bored or sad.

[biscuitstudies]

Happy Birthday, Tove Jansson

Born 9.8.1914 in Helsinki, Finland.

Tove Jansson was an incredible artist. She was a multitalented painter, writer and illustrator who created many wonderful pieces of art. Her best-known works are Moomin books and illustrations and comics centered around these characters, but she was also a talented painter with a very keen eye for color and technique. She also wrote many books and stories after finishing Moomin books. Tove Jansson was born under the shadow of WWI and grew up during the Finnish Civil War. When she was a young woman, she had to live through WWII and witness all the horrors of the time. This shaped her into a pacifist with strong anti-violence opinions.

Moomin books containt many precious and timeless ideals. Stories have themes like acceptance and loneliness, love for nature and value of freedom. Instead of giving tired morals, Tove delicately talks about things that are necessary but often forgotten. Every little creature has the right to be angry and without getting angry, you will never get your own face. Family and friends should support and love one another, but this also means letting others explore freely and with knowledge that those at home will not worry over them. Even the coldest Groke can turn warm with kindness. The books are suited for both children and adults, no matter the century or millenium. Moomins have been used as icons for environmental campaigns and to promote children’s well-being. They have evolved from children’s characters into cultrual icons of Finland.

Besides being a genius with many talents, Tove Jansson was known as a brave and caring woman. She had very bold and forward-thinking ideas about gender equality and was critical of the role women were given during 1900s. Tove Jansson was never to give up her art and career to settle down. She also defended the rights of Jewish people under the shadow of WWII and often brought attention to the plight civilians faced during wartime.

Tove Jansson was employed by the satire magazine Garm, for which she drew many sharp political caricatures. In her drawings she often criticized fascism and communism around Europe. She was later quoted to have said that mocking Hitler was one of the most satisfying things she got to do in her career. Her work was so critical about war and political figures of the time that she even faces censorship.

Love of her life was Tuulikki Pietilä. Their relationship laster over half a century. Tove never tried to hide her love, even in a time when homosexuality was a crime and later classified as a mental illness. She rebelled against oppressive systems of her time by living against them every day. She and Tuulikki were devoted to one another and their relationship only ended with Tove’s death in 2001. Tove even brought her lover with her to attend Independence Day celebrations in Presidential Palace (note that same-sex couples have faced opposition as lately as 2010s). They shared their work and dreams, settled on an island together and traveled around the world.

Tove Jansson was an incredible woman and everything she left behind will continue to impact lives of many children and adults for years to come.

[biscuitstudies]

What accounts for the popularity of her enigmatic characters? For one thing, Jansson’s intelligent intimacy and humor, which suffuses the books and her letters. She wasn’t drawn to nihilism, like many postwar artists, or to any Freud-inspired movements, with their suggestive, anarchic dreamscapes. In a letter, she deemed Surrealism “seductive but, for me, without potential for development. A gown so sensational one can only wear it for a single season.” Instead, she created a reassuring world with a moral code, and characters with problems much like our own. The Moomins are not so much cute as strangely familiar, as though Jansson happened to look in a new direction and find these tender and serious fellow-creatures, who had been with us all along.

[biscuitstudies]

Tove Jansson painting the fresco Party in the Countryside, Helsinki, 1947

[biscuitstudies]

[biscuitstudies]

ONLINE THINGS THAT HELP ME ON UNIVERSITY, because someone may need it

resoomer.com –> summarizes the text (you can set your native language)

wordcount.com –> counts words in document

speechinminutes.com –> counts how long it will take to read the prepared text (you can also set whether you speak slowly, quickly or normally)

essaytopicgenerator.com –> generates the topic of the essay based on keywords (the field or type of essay can also be included)

researchgate.net –> free texts that can be referred to in the essay

academia.edu –> free texts that can be referred to in the essay

Google Drive / Microsoft OneDrive and Office365 –> free cloud with tools to make slides, documents etc.

sites.google.com –> make free, simple website without any skills

carrd.co –> make free, simple and pretty website without any skills (max. 100 elements)

Online converters –> change file type to different file type

icons8.com –> free icons (for slides, sites etc.)

remove.bg –> remove background from photo

loader.to –> download YouTube video or playlist as video or sound files

forms.google.com –> make simple form/poll/quiz/etc.

quizlet.com –> make flashcards and test yourself (some things are only in pro version now)

Streaming services –> documentary films, educational podcasts etc.

artsandculture.google.com –> explore art, online museum tours etc.

plantsnap.com –> recognizes plants and mushrooms

ecosia.org –> web browser, but they plant trees when you use it

tunemymusic.com –> transfers music playlist (or text song list) to another service

shazam.com –> recognizes songs

slidesgo.com –> slides templates

Darkling Dark Mode –> dark mode for Google Chrome

Darkling Dark Mode –> dark mode for Microsoft Edge

thesaurus.com –> finds synonyms (you can easily find similar websites in your native language)

Apple reminders, google calendar etc. –> help organize

Online libraries –> free books

html-online.com –> write html, css and javascript online

supercook.com –> shows recipes with things you have at home

edx.org –> free courses

academicearth.org –> free courses

[biscuitstudies]

Bronze window by Studio Job 

[biscuitstudies]

from Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

[biscuitstudies]

whether you write or not you should occasionally ask yourself some questions and try to write down the answers. date them. ask those questions again in a few months, in a year and compare the answers.

the questions can be "where am I right now?" "what do I want right now?" "in a year I hope..." "where do I fit my loneliness? (your palms? mouth? in songs?" "what is love? list five things about it" etc. like I'm not someone who has a very pretty journal I just write, but yeah these are some self reflective and hopeful questions which are really tough for me to answer sometimes but also make me think. these aren't the only questions either, feel free to ask yourself about your worst fears and favourite aspects of yourself

[biscuitstudies]

school mindset

essays: make each essay you write better than the last


 small assignments: aim for 100s, expect 100s, get 100s


 homework: pretend they’re assignments


 homework that’s not graded: pretend! they’re! assignments!


 tests: study for 100s, expect less


 long term projects: act like it’s due in four days -even when it’s not- until you’re done with it


 group projects: do not get angry


 presentations: pretend you’re obama

disclaimer: this works for me, it may not work for everybody, do not push yourself too hard!!

[biscuitstudies]

A collection of useful advice from A Mind for Numbers:

Articulating your question is 80 percent of the battle. By the time you’ve figured out what’s confusing, you’re likely to have answered the question yourself.

It’s important to transform distant deadlines into daily ones

Planning your quitting time is as important as planning your working time

Writing appears to help you to more deeply encode (that is, convert into neural memory structures) what you are trying to learn

Memory tips: spaced repetiton + make use of visual and spatial memory systems as well + create meaningful groups + create stories

Transfer—apply what you’ve learned in new contexts

A last important trick is to reframe your focus. One student, for example, is able to get himself up at four thirty each weekday morning, not by thinking about how tired he is when he wakes but about how good breakfast will be.

One constant refrain I hear from students is that putting themselves in new surroundings—such as the quiet section of a library, which has few interrupting cues—works wonders with procrastination. Research has confirmed that a special place devoted just to working is particularly helpful

Being able to toggle your thinking—getting a glimpse of what you are learning before returning later to more fully understand what’s going on, is itself one of the main ideas in the book

In preparation for a test, have your problems and solutions neatly organized so you can go over them quickly. Some students tape handwritten solutions to problems on the relevant pages of their textbook so everything is readily available

Do “active” repetitions. Mentally review key problem steps in your mind while doing something active, such as walking to the library or exercising. You can also use spare minutes to review as you are waiting for a bus, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, or twiddling your thumbs until a professor arrives in the classroom. This type of active rehearsal helps strengthen your ability to recall key ideas when you are solving homework problems or taking a test.

The bottom line is that problem solving in any discipline often involves an exchange between the two fundamentally different modes (focused & diffused)

Multitasking is like constantly pulling up a plant. This kind of constant shifting of your attention means that new ideas and concepts have no chance to take root and flourish.

“Oh yeah, I see why they did that,” then the solution is not really yours—you’ve done almost nothing to knit the concepts into your underlying neurocircuitry. Merely glancing at the solution to a problem and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning

It was the anticipation that was painful. When the mathphobes actually did math, the pain disappeared. Procrastination expert Rita Emmett explains: “The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.

The better you get at something, the more you’ll find you enjoy it.

This is a typical procrastination pattern. You think about something you don’t particularly like, and the pain centres of your brain light up. So you shift and narrow your focus of attention to something more enjoyable. This causes you to feel better, at least temporarily. […] Procrastination is like addiction. It offers temporary excitement and relief from boring reality. It’s easy to delude yourself that the most profitable use of any given moment is surfing the web for information instead of reading the textbook or doing the assigned problems.

Cue > Routine > Reward

When you procrastinate, you are leaving yourself only enough time to do superficial focused-mode learning. You are also increasing your stress level because you know you have to complete what feels like an unpleasant task. The resulting neural patterns will be faint and fragmented and will quickly disappear—you’ll be left with a shaky foundation.

There is a bottom-up chunking process where practice and repetition can help you both build and strengthen each chunk, so you can easily gain access to it when needed. And there is a top-down “big picture” process that allows you to see where what you are learning fits in. Both processes are vital in gaining mastery over the material. Context is where bottom-up and top-down learning meet. To clarify here—chunking may involve your learning how to use a certain problem-solving technique. Context means learning when to use that technique instead of some other technique

Recalling material when you are outside your usual place of study helps you strengthen your grasp of the material by viewing it from a different perspective

Continuing the study or practice after it is well understood is called overlearning. Overlearning can have its place—it can help produce an automaticity that is important when you are executing a serve in tennis or playing a perfect piano concerto.

Diffuse mode (also to be used as a reward after firm focused-mode work): workout, draw/paint, take a bath, shower, listen to music, play piano, pray, sleep, solitary walks, naps, conjugating verbs, cleaning, drive or ride the bus. The key is to do something else until your brain is consciously free of any thought of the problem.

As the days and weeks pass, it’s the distributed practice—the back and forth between focused-mode attention and diffuse-mode relaxation—that does the trick.

Consistency over time is key.

It takes time to move information from working memory to long-term memory. To help with this process, use a technique called spaced repetition

Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning. Once you chunk an idea or concept, you don’t need to remember all the little underlying details; you’ve got the main idea—the chunk—and that’s enough

Chunking: focus your attention on the information you want to chunk, understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk, close the book and test yourself, gain context, practice.

Skimming through a chapter or listening to a very well-organized lecture can allow you to gain a sense of the big picture.

Attempting to recall the material you are trying to learn—retrieval practice—is far more effective than simply rereading the material 

[biscuitstudies]

Japanese Book Publishing Vocabulary

文芸(ぶんげい) - (art and) literature

読書(どくしょ) - reading (books)

ページを捲る（。めく。）- to turn (e.g. the page)

飛ばし読み＋する（と。よ。）- skimming the pages, skipping words, reading quickly (literally “jump reading”)

読書家(どくしょか) - great reader

書店(しょてん) - bookshop, bookstore

書架(しょか) - bookshelf

執筆(しっぴつ) - writing(e.g. as a profession)

書籍(しょせき) - publication, book

出版(しゅっぱん) - publication

出版物(しゅっぱんぶつ) - publication(s)

出版する(しゅっぱん。) - to publish

購読(こうどく) - subscription (e.g. of a magazine)

編集(へんしゅう) - editing, editorial, compilation

営業(えいぎょう) - business, sales, trade 

販売(はんばい) - sales, selling

企画(きかく) - project

*営業企画（えいぎょうきかく）- sales/ operation project

促進(そくしん) - promotion, marketing

児童書(じどうしょ) - children’s book(s)

雑誌(ざっし) - magazine

百科��典（ひゃっかじてん）- encyclopedia

随筆(ずいひつ) - essay, miscellaneous writings, literary jottings

索引(さくいん) - index, indices

目次(もくじ) - table of contents

解説(かいせつ) - explanation, commentary

粗筋(あらすじ) - outline, summary

台詞(せりふ)—>セリフ- one’s line, speech, dialogue in writing (normally written in katakana)

評論(ひょうろん) - criticism, critique

評判(ひょうばん) - fame

傑作(けっさく) - masterpiece

名作(めいさく) - famous piece of work/art

無名(むめい) - unsigned, anonymous; unpopular

Essential verbs:

読む（よ。）- to read

書く（か。）- to write

売る（う。）- to sell

買う（か。）- to buy