#selected essays

[totheroses]

— Virginia Woolf, from Selected Essays; “Jane Austen”

[theblackestofsuns]

Selected Essays (1967)

William Troy

Rutgers University Press

[a-ramblinrose]

“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.”

― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

[chimaerakitten]

So the Temeraire series doesn’t do the Pern-derived magic/telepathic bond thing, and it’s nice to have some variety on that count since the telepathy thing is pretty widespread. But there’s this passage in crucible of gold that’s like—

Wait, my thriftbooks order arrived, let me go grab the quote

Or, Temeraire thought, he might as easily have gone alone--more easily, in fact; he had to carry Forthing cupped in his talons, and it was not at all convenient to always be looking to make sure he had not dropped out; Temeraire was not aware of him in quite the same way as of Laurence.

(Emphasis mine)

And this combined with the number of times it’s mentioned that (Russians aside) aviators just don’t seem to be capable of fearing their own dragons (and not just aviators who raised the dragons from the egg—it’s the same with inherited dragons) indicates to me that there’s something really interesting psychologically/biologically going on “under the hood,” there, so to speak.

And maybe this is just me and all those anthropology classes I took in college but that actually makes a lot of sense?

The historical record in the series dates the intentional breeding of dragons to a couple thousand years in the past, in china, but there’s a lot of evidence that there’s been a looser symbiotic relationship between humans and dragons a lot longer than that. Namely the domesticated elephants and the dragons in the Americas being the same species and of the same attitudes towards humans as dragons in Eurasia. So that’s likely at least 20 thousand years of symbiosis/mutual domestication, (if we assume they migrated together, which I do because it’s the simplest explanation) and it could well be much longer than that. That’s a long ass time. Like. The spread of IRL lactase persistence took less time than this.

And much like the benefits of being able to drink milk as an adult, the benefits of mutualism with an intelligent dinosaur-sized flying predator would absolutely have selective pressure on human populations. That’s just a given. I would talk about early hominins being third-tier scavengers here and Pleistocene megafauna and the canonical prevention of malaria via dragon proximity as compared to sickle cell anemia, but nobody wants me to regurgitate my entire biological anthropology 215 class in a tumblr post. Just trust me on this one.

Basically, the entire human species in the Temeraire universe will have been under a lot of positive selective pressure to be good symbiosis buddies to the dragons, so it’s no wonder aviator attachment is so intense.

This is likewise true for the dragons. A lot can be put down to intentional breeding in the last couple thousand years, but the foundation of dragons being prosocial with humans would have to be laid before then. Humans have domesticated predators IRL, but dragons are like 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than wolves and it took a long time to get dogs. The romans wouldn’t have had any luck if the dragons weren’t already partially on board. My theory is that this would have started way back. Australopithecus times, way back, because— [Anth 215 sneaks up behind me whilst the jaws theme plays] ANYWAY there’s a few benefits I can guess at for dragons having assistance hunting from small bands of persistence predators on occasion. I also think this would have intensified post-Pleistocene as the megafauna that would have been the dragons’ main prey went extinct and eventually agriculture would be the only way to replace— [Jaws theme intensifies] JUST TRUST ME BRO.

All this to say that humans being able to very quickly lose all instinctive fear of the dinosaur-sized flying predators they spend their time around and said predators developing not only attachment to humans but particular awareness of their humans specifically so as to prevent any possible accidental harm makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary biology perspective. It’s evidence of the same mutualistic relationship biologically shaping both species across the broader time spans that the series hints at.

[feral-ballad]

Maggie Nelson, from Bluets

[Text ID: “Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?”]

[goldensunset]

i made this post before but what’s up with paldeans and destroying the environment. the player character hops on a plane to travel between spain japan and new york whenever they feel like it to run minor errands. the area zero team went into an ancient crater and found this otherworldly paradise and started building a bunch of giant research stations. the professors thought it would be cool to use a huge machine to either bring the dinosaurs back or summon a bunch of murderous robots and let them loose upon the world. the league is using cryptocurrency. geeta please something has to be done

[prolibytherium]

I think "media analysis with the goal of proving something you want to be canon is canon" is usually not good quality analysis because 9 times out of 10 it involves picking and choosing and stringing together bits of information that agree with you and discarding or explaining away the rest. You can make a compelling (or at least coherent) argument out of almost any scraps of information but it doesn't make it good analysis.

[summerongrand]

Bradsen together is comedic gold! Can't wait! Hope Aaron gets the help he needs. Also, peep the 180 Tim does from talking to Wade to talking to Aaron.

There are so many people asking about where's Lucy? in The Rookie's comments and throwing out injury speculations. She doesn't need to be in every single clip. Tim would not be this calm if Lucy was in trouble. And neither would Grey, Harper, et.al.

[incomingalbatross]

I have now. FINALLY. Read Beowulf.

[hexeratii]

A while back I had to create a few thumbnail sketches referencing shots from different movies/TV shows that showed various compositional techniques for school, here are some of my faves.

[accioepiphany]

01. Impossible Germany by Wilco || 02. Port of Call by Beirut || 03. Short and Sweet by Brittany Howard || 04. Into The Red by James Blake ||05. Love Language by SZA || 06. Where's My Love by SYML || 07. Like A Star by Corinne Bailey Rae || 08. Tell Me You Love Me by Sufjan Stevens || 09. Coming Back by James Blake ft. SZA || 10. Couldn't Love You More by John Martyn || 11. Love and Happiness by Al Green || 12. Come Back by Pearl Jam

[soracities]

“We came to an immense room with fifty canvases by Ferdinand Hodler. A gigantic life’s work. Yet in only one of the paintings had he forgotten his accomplishment and could we forget that we were looking at virtuoso pigment. It was a relatively small picture and it showed the painter’s friend, Augustine Dupin, dying in her bed. Augustine was seen. The language, in being used, had opened.”

John Berger, “A Professional Secret”, Selected Essays (emphasis mine)

[thejaymo]

Start Select Reset Zine | The Hows & The Whys

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[a-ramblinrose]

It's lovely to revisit old favorites!

[feral-ballad]

A woman and her imagination are one… It is impossible for me to write about the imagination; it is like asking a fish to describe the sea. I have lived with my imagination, and in my imagination, for so long that I have no memory of any time on earth without it. It is my daimon if ever there was one. “The daimon is a kind of twin that prowls alongside, is most often vivid when things are tough, that pushes you toward the life you signed up to live before you fell into the amnesia of birth and forgot the whole affair.”

Mary Ruefle, from On Imagination

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Last night at sunset. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus . So beautiful.

[Jeff Biege Photography]

* * * * *

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays