Entertaining entry from Claire Clairmont's 1814 journal when she, Percy, and Mary Shelley were on their first trip to the continent — the same trip Mary documented in her first publication (A History of a Six Weeks' Tour, co-authored with P. Shelley):
"Saturday 20th of August. Rose late. After Breakfast wrote my Journal. Next went to take a warm Bath — and so did Shelley and Mary, for we are all in a dirty condition, never having been able to wash more than our hands and our faces since we left Paris: in the wretched hovels we put up at, there were no basons, and we had to wash at the pump as the country people did. On our way to Pontarlier, we came to a clear running shallow stream, and Shelley entreated the Driver to stop while he from under a bank could bathe himself — and he wanted Mary to do the same as the Bank sheltered one from every eye — but Mary would not — first, she said it would be most indecent, and then also she had no towel and could not dry herself — He said he would gather leaves from the trees and she could dry herself with those but she refused and said how could he think of such a thing. The driver always looked at Shelley with a wondering stare as if he thought he was rather crazy — and very likely that was the cause of his being rude to us: and refused to stop so Shelley could not bathe himself in the open air and in the middle of the day — just as if he were Adam in Paradise before his fall. Shelley sets me a task to translate from one of Rousseau's Reveries — so I could not go out and see the town which vexed me much. Shelley and Mary went out to a Bankers and he advanced them £50 upon a note of hand by Shelley. Then they looked out for a Conveyance and they met with a man of the Bureau des Postes, who although they were perfect strangers to him, went about with them for two hours, and got a Voiturier and Carriage and settled all about the price. Mary said he was captivated by Shelley's countenance and manner, for there was a great dificulty of conversing, as Shelley & Mary only know how to read French, but not to converse in it. Indeed Shelley always looks so handsome aimable, and then so fresh and uncommon as if he had landed from Heaven that unless he indulges in some fit of wildness, everybody takes a liking to him."
Source: Shelley & his Circle vol 3 (Pforzheimer)
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Ezra: Wait, wait, wait! Don't you want to take us as prisoners?
Shin: Our orders were to destroy Ezra Bridger and Sabine Wren.
Ezra: Ah, I see the confusion then. I am not Ezra Bridger, my name is Jabba the Hutt.
Sabine: oh no
Shin: ...
Shin: Jabba the Hutt had been dead for seven years.
Ezra: JABBA IS DEAD?!?
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there are a lot of evil people in the world and a lot of darkness in the world and so it’s very important for me to stress that now more than ever is the time to spread kindness and compassion. combat the evil by not only not partaking in it, but actively refuting it. destroy the notion that being compassionate or generous or kind to someone is uncool or embarrassing or even scary. be the change you want to see. start a chain reaction. positivity only breeds more positivity. do an act of kindness for someone so that that person who is too afraid to do it themselves can see you, realize that they’re not alone, and perhaps sheepishly follow your example. and then the next person who is too afraid but sees that person can do the same. when bad news comes out about bad people or horrible atrocities in the world it’s such an easy impulse to despair, and obviously it’s important to feel what you need to feel. grieve. be angry. be sorrowful. be empathetic. but dust off your pants and get up and be a part of a chain reaction that, no matter how small the scale, and spread compassion and love and care. all the reasons why you might not—“it’s hard! it’s scary! people will make fun of me! it’s useless because there’s too much evil!” are all grade A arguments as to why you should. you have no idea how many people you could inspire to do the same. even if it doesn’t get you anyway far, you can at least say you have the nobility of trying. please choose love and please choose life. you are worth loving and you are worth inspiring others to love
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at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
you create because you're greedy.
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