#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]

[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

[tarantula-hawk-wasp]

Earth’s hottest day ever recorded by human instruments

Better way to phrase this is : top 3 hottest daily average-global-temperatures ever recorded by human instruments were this week.

[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.

[spiltichor]

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

[nartothelar]

ugh

[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

[soracities]

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

[makzmollpol]

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)

[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.

[revoevokukil]

Reflecting on Andrzej Sapkowski's Thoughts on Le Guin & the Healing of the Waste Land

In re-reading Pirog, or There’s No Gold in the Gray Mountains (1993) by A. Sapkowski—perhaps one of his more well-known essays on the state of fantasy, and the genre’s reception in Poland in particular—I cannot help but get stuck on how he analyses Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series. It resonates with one very particular strand that Sapkowski plucked on at the heart of his own books: the duality of human nature. Good and Evil, yes, but also: male and female. As psychological and symbolic polarities balancing the psyche.

‘Already the Archipelago of Earthsea itself is a deep allegory - islands scattered across the sea are like lonely, alienated people. The inhabitants of Earthsea are isolated, lonely, closed in on themselves. Their state is such, and not otherwise, because they have lost something—for full happiness and peace of mind…’

The loneliness and alienation, the Waste Land of the human heart, is a recurrent motif in The Witcher. Its influence is felt not only in the plot threads of our protagonists, but also in those of such characters as Emhyr var Emreis, Vilgefortz, the Rats, the Alder King, Avallac’h, anonymous elf who burned down Birka, and humanity and elves in toto. It is just that antagonists rarely reveal their hearts to the protagonists (and to the reader)—if only to have a blade struck it through.

‘Ged’s quest is an allegory, it’s eternal goodbyes and partings, eternal loneliness. Ged strives for perfection in constant struggle with himself and fights the final, symbolic battle with himself, winning by uniting with the element of Evil, accepting, as it were, the duality of human nature.’

Le Guin broke out of the Tolkienian mould, in Sapkowski’s words, by focusing on symbolism and allegory; on the inner journey, as a reflection of, and as affecting, the external world. It is in the recognition and healing of the Waste Land that Evil, or potential Evil, could ever possibly be undone.

In The Tombs of Atuan, the allegory takes us into the Labyrinth of the Psyche, which Sapkowski compares with the Labyrinth of Crete. The Minotaur within is not a monstrous beast, it is ‘pure and concentrated Evil, Evil destroying a psyche that is incomplete, imperfect, not prepared for such an encounter.’ Evil gets close to a psyche in conditions of imbalance, loss, alienation, abandonment, incompleteness.

And then Sapkowski gives the entire thing a gendered spin, bringing Le Guin’s writing closer to the archetype he himself uses.

‘And into such a Labyrinth boldly steps Ged, the hero, Theseus. And like Theseus, Ged depends on Ariadne. Tenar is his Ariadne. Because Tenar is what the hero lacks, without which he is incomplete, helpless, lost in the symbolic tangle of corridors, dying of thirst. Ged thirsts allegorically - he's not after H2O, but after the anima - the feminine element, without which the psyche is imperfect and unfinished, helpless in the face of Evil. … he is saved by the touch of Tenar’s hand. Ged follows his anima—because he must. Because he has just found the lost rune of Erreth Akbe. A symbol. The Grail. A woman.’

Be it the loss of the Alder King (Shiadhal) or Avallac’h (Lara), or Emhyr’s (sacrificing his wife Pavetta, and having been sacrificed by his own father), or Vilgefortz’s (abandoned by his mother, falling in love with a sorceress and coming to hate her for the power she held over him via his feelings for her), or the wartime children of contempt (written off and abused by everyone and everything), the wound remains archetypal and notably alike.

(Not to speak of The Witcher’s protagonists into whose hearts we do see, and in whom we witness the transformation of the Waste Land of the heart in ways which eludes—or only with the very first fleeting steps is beginning in—the rest.)

Love is the essence. Love and lovelessness walk hand in hand at the heart of everything in The Witcher, and with them the good and the evil. What matters in the end, as in all good fantasy, is heart—knowing it, seeking it, letting the spirit flourish in its presence. To gentle the heart. To remain human.

As Tenar to Ged, in Sapkowski’s reading of Le Guin, so Ciri to oh, so many characters, in my reading of Sapkowski.

‘Now Tenar grows into a powerful symbol, into a very contemporary and very feminist allegory. An allegory of femininity. … Tenar leads Ged out of the Labyrinth—for herself, exactly as Ariadne did with Theseus. And Ged—like Theseus—can’t appreciate it. … he gives up, although he likes to enjoy the thought that someone is waiting for him, thinking of him and longing on the island of Gont. It pleases him. How ugly male!’ […] ‘After an eighteen-year break, Ms Ursula writes “Tehanu,” … the broken and destroyed Ged crawls to his anima on his knees, and this time she already knows how to keep him, in what role to place him, to become everything for him, the most important meaning and purpose of life, so that the former Archmage and Dragonlord stays by her side until the end of his days…’

---

Marginalia

This motif is universal in how it explores the psyche, but it is also very particular, because Mr Sapkowski’s influences include Bettelheim, Freud, and Jung, as well as Campbell, the Wicca movement, and the feminist current in fantasy. It is evident then, I think, how the balancing between the male and the female is seen as essential for the flourishing in either’s soul.

As seen in ”The World of King Arthur” (1995):

‘The wound of the Fisher King has a symbolic meaning and refers to the beliefs of the Celts - the mutilated king is unable to perform a sexual act, and the Earth he rules cannot be fertilized. If the king is not healed, the Earth will die and turn into La Terre Gaste, the Waste Land. The wounding spear is a phallic symbol, and the healing Grail is the vulva.’

Or as in Joseph Campbell (1988):

'The big moment in the medieval myth is the awakening of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion. That is the whole problem of the Grail stories, compassion for the wounded king. ...the awakening of [the] heart to love and the opening of the way.' [...] '...when the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being, a whole new stage of life in the spirit opens out.'

The word "compassion" means literally "suffering with." Nobody ought to remain alone in suffering. Evil happens so very often as a consequence.

In Excalibur (1981), sick Nature comes alive again when Arthur touches the Grail and wakes from apathy. Of the Grail stories, however, it is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s which speaks to the Witcher’s author’s own sensibilities the most.

‘Let's look for the Grail within ourselves. Because the Grail is nobility, love of neighbor, and the ability to have compassion. True chivalric ideals, towards which it is worth and necessary to look for the right path, break through the wild forest, where, and I quote, "there is neither road nor path." Everyone must find their own path. But it is not true that there is only one path. There are many of them. Infinitely many.’ - Andrzej Sapkowski, The World of King Arthur

Only then does the land bloom again in snow-white blossoming apple trees.

[tetw]

5 Great Essays about AI

The Future Is Too Easy by David Roth - There is something unstable at the most basic level about any space with too much capitalism happening in it

Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth by Jon Gertner - Can the online encyclopedia help teach A.I. chatbots to get their facts right — without destroying itself in the process?

AI Means the End of Internet Search as We’ve Known It by Mat Honan - Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways to summon all the world’s knowledge

AI Has a Hotness Problem by Caroline Mimbs Nyce - In the world of generated imagery, you’re either drop-dead gorgeous or a wrinkled, bug-eyed freak

AI and the American Smile by Jenka Gurfinkel - How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression

And check out our full list of great essays about AI

[awkwardenby]

went from “I wanna run away to the forest forever” to “I wanna make cool patches and crafts for queer and punk people”

[cctinsleybaxter]

I think the tweet about the wedding dress being 'period-inaccurate' is misplaced amongst more valid annoyances/criticisms it's such a cinema sins ding. I don't care that the dress is 'the wrong color,' the problem is that its looking like a 90s/early 00s English wedding dress wasn't a decision made with any thought behind it- fennell (and her production team and costuming dept) read the phrase 'wedding dress' and pictured wedding dresses they'd seen in their own lives; end of train of thought for a shallow incurious group better off making ads than telling stories