#one of the best literary analyses i've read in my life

[sunriseverse]

A couple posts have floated across my dash lamenting the dearth of female characters. Any thoughts about Wu Xie's mom?

thrilled that you decided i'm the person to ask about this, genuinely. anyway, re: wu xie's mom...........the problem is, it's kind of impossible to separate "wu xie's mom" from "wu xie's parents" as a concept. at least we know wu xie's father's name (wu yiqiong, terrible name but i shan't say more on that), but wu xie doesn't............appear to have a relationship with either of them, really. the first dmbj show (the 2015 web-series) attempts to establish a greater connection via making wu xie write to his parents about the repatriation of archaeological artefacts (or. something to this effect.) and it. doesn't feel in line with novel canon at all, honestly, for so many reasons. but he addresses his mother there first, if i remember correctly, so you could argue he has, in that specific adaptation canon, a closer relationship with his mother, i suppose, but................again, wu xie almost never mentions his parents in canon, to the point where i've run into more than one person who just flat out assumed they were dead because he never talks about them. of wu xie's family, his uncles hold an outsized presence in his life.

i really wish we knew more about wu xie's parents, and that i could theorise on his mother, but there just isn't enough fucking information (this isn't anger at you; npss is the one at fault here) and that frustrates the hell out of me. it's this complicated balance between "is npss making a characterisation choice by making wu xie have parents that he isn't close with, implying some sort of (at the very best benevolent) neglect" and "does npss never talk about wu xie's parents for the sake of keeping the focus on wu xie as the main character, who fulfils a certain literary archetype which inherently lacks parental connections". and fifty other issues!

i'm not going to comment on npss' writing of female characters; i've not read all of canon, nor watched it for that matter (my specialisation is sha hai, as you can probably deduce), so i don't feel equipped to do that in a public setting, because i'd really like to be able to back up my words with sources and citations, and i can't do that at present. i could have sworn there was a post analysing npss' writing of female characters in novel canon that i had saved to my likes, but i can't for the life of me track it down, and that's not what you're asking about here.

i guess..............the tealdeer here is, i wish i could answer your question, but there just. isn't enough canon for me to go off of. and, frankly, i don't think that's likely to change soon. most of the main series novels have been adapted, and they don't go into wu xie's relationship with his parents as a concept, let alone individually. the other novels, as far as i'm aware, definitely don't (i mean, they're not about wu xie in the same way as the main series is; why would they?).

..........i've just realised after i said all of this that you may have been asking about my headcanons about her. in that case, i can step out a bit from my tendency to try and use canon as my main source, and try and draw some extrapolations. based on the wu family's status by the time wu xie's father and uncles are adults, i would guess that she is, at the very least, from an influential family, if not one with business connections. i don't think she's probably from a family in the business, as they say (tomb-robbing) because wu yiqiong, as far as i can tell, made the decision to keep as far away from that side of things as possible—he, as far as i'm aware, leads a "civilian" life. it would make sense to me that wu xie's mother (and, i have to say, it pisses me the hell off that i can't even use her name, because we don't even fucking know it) does so as well. whether she herself has a career, i can't say for sure. the optimist in me says she should; if she married into the wu family, she would have to at least have some sort of prestige. and, after all, even if the wu have an impressive amount of wealth (and, wu erbai's business efforts assured that, i'm certain, even after wu laogou had to flee changsha and seek shelter with xie jiuye, and presumably lost a good deal of what he'd accumulated prior), what little i can glean about wu xie's parents tells me that i don't think that they're relying only on that wealth to live their lives.

i'm realising i'm floundering, not because i don't want to talk, but because—i think it's clear, by now, that i'm someone who relies a lot on canon to extrapolate things; dynamics, characterisation, etc, etc; to not have almost anything to go off of, well. that leaves me in an awkward spot.

you can't see me, but i've sat here typing and retyping this portion of the post and sighing and pinching the bridge of my nose. i just....................i wish i had more to say. i'm sorry that i don't. i can try and come up with something silly, but it wouldn't be earnest, and i don't want to do that. i think it shows in my writing; while i talk a lot about wu xie's relationship with his ershu and how that effects him, i can only think of one time i ever wrote about his parents, and they never had speaking lines.

i wish we knew her name. that's all i have to ask, i guess. i wish npss had given us at least that.

[scotianostra]

November 22nd 1926 saw the publication of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid, one of Scotland's Greatest Twentieth Century poet.

I've lost count of the amount of times I have tried to fight my way through this poem, but I have no patience with it's rambling long verses, it's bloody 2685 lines long!!! The principal aim of the poem is to grapple with 'this root-hewn Scottis soul' and to analyse the nation of Scotland. I've said before here that I like my poems short, give me MacDiarmid's The Little White Rose any day of the week....

The rose of all the world is not for me.

I want for my part

Only the little white rose of Scotland

That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.

But this post is about the one described as his masterpiece, I wonder what Burns would have thought of it, I suspect he would have approved of the words, but the length, am no too sure. I'd rather grab the offerings that stand out in the poem, highlighted by others who have endeavoured to make it through "A drunk man", better men than me, at least I can say I have read wee bits of it, thanks to these folk.

Hugh MacDiarmid (a pen-name adopted by Christopher Murray Grieve) almost single-handedly forged a Scottish Renaissance movement that severed the nation's literary ties with the folksy sentimentality of the 19th century and dragged it into the European mainstream. MacDiarmid chose to write in Scots rather than Gaelic, but saw that it was necessary to improve the capabilities of the language by reviving old Scots words and borrowing freely from Gaelic and other sources. Thus he created a synthetic Scots, later sometimes known as 'Lallans'.

Critics continue to debate the dominant themes in MacDiarmid's poetry and rake through the embers of this awkward genius's life. Perhaps he is best summed up in his own words from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle: 'I'll hae nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur Extremes meet.'

I'll leave you with a few lines of the poem and links to more of it, the Youtube link tells the story how long it is with the time it takes for the man to recite it. two and a half hours! The words in these four lines say it all for me "It's gey and hard wark!..."

I amna fou' sae muckle as tired - deid dune. It's gey and hard wark coupin' gless for gless Wi' Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like, And I'm no' juist as bauld as aince I wes.

[hedgehog-moss]

Can you tell us the name of the book you're reading it sounds really interesting!!!

Yes of course! It's Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. I found it on OpenLibrary, you can borrow it here :)

I'm only halfway through but so far it's one of the best books I've read on Beauvoir; the author is aware of her flaws and not defending them, but she does staunchly defend her against the outrageously sexist criticism Beauvoir received for daring to be a female intellectual and voicing any opinions at all. This is a typical example of a French literary critic discussing Beauvoir:

The author mentions that she wanted to analyse the changing tone of French intellectuals’ reactions to Beauvoir from the 1950s to the 1990s, and to her dismay discovered that the sexism remained essentially identical. In 1979 when Beauvoir received a prestigious literary prize, Figaro Magazine came up with the headline "Simone de Beauvoir, first woman to receive the Austrian Prize for European Literature, owes everything to a man." (Moi does wonder—as do I!—what kind of works Beauvoir might have written if she hadn't been deterred by Sartre from creating her own philosophical project.)

And I am learning a lot about my country's education history, like the fact that the agregation (national competitive exam which Beauvoir sat in 1929 for philosophy) used to be two exams, the normal agregation and a 'feminine agregation' with lower academic standards 'suitable for women'. One (1) woman took (and passed) the masculine agregation in philosophy which resulted in the ministry of education forbidding women from even taking it. (Similarly, once women were finally allowed to sit the exam for secondary school teaching, 8 women made it into the national top 10—with the top men being ranked 4th and 10th—and then the ministry of education suddenly decided that women and men, while still sitting the same exam, would be ranked on separate lists. It reminded me of when I was reading Mariah Burton Nelson’s book on women in sports, in which she said that rifle shooting used to be co-ed, but after a woman tied with a man for first place in the 1976 Olympics, the international shooting federation segregated most events in the sport.)

I also really love the author's contempt for the general opinion that Sartre was a better philosopher than Beauvoir. She quotes a member of the 1929 philosophy agregation jury who said “If Sartre showed obviously qualities, intelligence and culture, everybody agreed that she was Philosophy.” Moi points out that Beauvoir didn't get to study philosophy at the secondary level (girls weren't taught maths nor philosophy, the masculine subjects par excellence) so she was mostly self-taught and had only been studying it for 3 years when she passed the agregation on her first try with flying colours, at age 21, making her one of the youngest agregés in France regardless of sex. In contrast Sartre was 24, had been studying philosophy for 7 years in prestigious boys' preparatory schools and he had to take the exam twice. At one point the author quotes an innocent letter from Sartre in which he says he had the time of his life preparing for the agregation at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and those were "four years of happiness", and you get this polite footnote: