#this is also music pedagogy

[caroloftheshells]

the thing is. it is indeed nprcore, and not JUST because of what music the individual tastemakers at npr/tiny desk happened to like at the time, and not JUST because npr is public radio whose money comes from the corporation for public broadcasting + whose member stations are owned by nonprofits w/educational ties, but ALSO because classical instrumentalism and presentational format and no audience noise and Verified Check Mark sound-source mapping and loop pedal grooves and "this performance contains explicit language and may not be suitable for all audiences" and concert black and jeans/flannel and travel mugs and left the camera running but also cut to somebody's hands shredding a flute etc.

[the-music-keeper]

Change of plans. Remember when I said I wanted to look up Harvard information this week? Yeah, we're not going to do that. We're going to look at info for The Ohio State University instead.

[liesonthefloordramatically]

Made a playlist for my Wickedness character! Vibes probably incomprehensible to everyone but me, but sometimes you are The Wild Spirit in the coven and you overextend yourself so much that you accidentally get corrupted by the Underworld and cause a watery apocalypse. :')

[submarinerwrites]

this is going to sound unhinged but whenever i listen to zella day’s “jameson” i always think about fredric jameson and the absolute chokehold the political unconscious had on literary theory for nearly two whole decades. like it’s LITERALLY the darkest of grey when jameson explains. i’m NOT a follower, and i wont follow jameson down.

[akippie]

.

[jeannereames]

While reading stories of Alexander & his friends, it often feels like they could very well be today's youths. Is it because the authors present Alexander's world in a way relatable to the modern reader? Or there are things about youth common in all eras, like teenage crisis, romance, dreams, bold & adventurous spirit? And if I'm not wrong, you mention at one place that you don't "heroize" Alexander. That's interesting, since he's often worshipped a mythical hero. Why did you move away from that?

Alexander and the boys

This query was really two, or at least I want to separate them into two, so I’ll address the matter of heroizing Alexander in a different post.

The reason teen Alexander feels familiar owes to the simple fact biology makes certain aspects of adolescence universal. That said, while all human beings go through (suffer?) adolescence, whether it’s recognized as a “stage of life” depends on place and era. Does X culture have an adolescent moratorium, or time period between childhood and adulthood when teens are not (yet) saddled with the full responsibilities of adulthood?

Ancient Greece did, at least for some classes; they even had a specialized term: ephebe/έφηβος. Later, it came to signifcy a specific military class for training (18-20), but originally, it just meant a teenage boy, although the start age was imagined as later, more like 15+. Up to that, the generic pais (child) was more common. Ephebe has the implication of “starting to look like a man.”

Of more import, they invented what’s become the Western pedagogical system. The word pedagogy is GREEK: pais (child) agōgē (guiding/training): a paidagōgos was a nanny, but also a method of teaching children. The specific Spartan schooling system is referred to as the Agōgē, but the word has a generic meaning too. All of that is related to the Greek word for “work” (agōn) but also “to lead” (egōn).

There’s your Greek lesson for the day.

The Greeks had a pretty firm idea of the proper way to train up boys* and shape young minds. By the Classical era, and arguably the late Archaic, city Greeks were sending boys between the ages of 7 and 12 to school. These were private, so parents paid for the privilege of getting junior out of the house so somebody else could run herd on him. Mom and Dad had work to do. What were boys taught? The Three Rs (reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic) but also phys-ed (PE) and music. Again, the basics of a proper European primary-school education.

At 12, most boys returned home to take up their father’s occupation. So these were not all wealthy boys. Some were what we’d call middle class, but their families had enough money to invest in their education, and then, as now, the pricier the tuition, the better the teachers. But most stopped on the cusp of adolescence and went to work; they had no adolescent moratorium.

Only the wealthiest boys could afford to go on to what amounted to secondary education: lessons with a philosopher in order to prep them for their future careers as politicians, generals, and city leaders. What they learned now were rhetoric, eristics (art of argument), some literature, laws, theory on government, etc.

This higher-level tutoring is what Aristotle was hired for. Alexander (and friends) had already had the basics. A “philosophic education” had been around for over a century by the time Philip called Aristotle to Pella, although it wasn’t as set in form as it would become by the Hellenistic and Roman eras. In some of his more famous works, such as the Politics, Aristotle talks about the importance of education in the formation of a state: specifically in Book 7.18, and most of Book 8. He gets very specific in Book 8. He puts forward a number of common ideas the ancients had about the nature of the child. Most believed character was unchanging, so education would work to curb a person’s vices and elevate their virtues.

The Greeks, btw, did not invent schools themselves. Egyptians and Mesopotamians both had schools for children before the Greeks did. Greeks got the idea from them. But they did create their own notion of what school should include, which is what they passed down to the Romans, then to Europe, and finally, to most school systems in the West.

Anyway, when a culture introduces the adolescent moratorium, it frees up teenagers to, well, do “stupid teen shit.” Schools provide an environment where they create their own society with their own rules. In cultures where they begin adult jobs at 12/13 (or even sooner), they’re integrated and don’t have the chance to create these little sub-societies that percolate with all the drama of wildly pumping hormones.

So, a society that creates an environment where groups of teens regularly congregate in disproportionate numbers to either adults or children, like secondary school, squire/military, maid, or scribal training--or the Macedonian Pages Corps--will feel familiar to modern societies that have high schools.

Put a bunch of teens together, suffering through adolescence, and it’ll produce similar results anywhere, any time.

—————-

*Girls were obviously not included in misogynistic Greece.

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Walter Franklin Anderson

The grandson of formerly enslaved people, Walter Franklin Anderson, classical pianist, organist, composer, jazz musician, community activist, and academician, was born on May 12, 1915, in segregated Zanesville, Ohio. Walter was the sixth of nine children of humble beginnings.

Information regarding his parents is not available. Anderson, a child prodigy, began piano studies at age seven, and by 12, he was playing piano and organ professionally while still in elementary school. He was the only Black student to graduate from William D. Lash High School in Zanesville in 1932. Although a talented musician, Anderson was not a member of any of the school’s music ensembles, including the Glee Club or orchestra. Afterward, he enrolled in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Oberlin, Ohio, 100 miles north of his hometown, and received a Bachelor of Music in piano and organ in 1936. Anderson continued his studies at Berkshire (Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) and the Cleveland Institute of Music in Cleveland, Ohio.

From 1939 to 1942, Anderson taught Applied Piano, Voice Pedagogy, and music theory at the Kentucky State College for Negroes (now Kentucky State University) in Frankfort. In 1943, Anderson married Dorothy Eleanor Ross (Cheeks) from Atlanta, Georgia. They parented two children, Sandra Elaine Anderson Mastin and David Ross Anderson, before the marriage ended in a divorce in 1945.

In 1946, Anderson was appointed the head of the music department at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, thus becoming the first African American named to chair a department outside of the nation’s historically black colleges. Two years later, Anderson was a Rosenwald Fellow in composition from 1948 to 1949, where his variations on the Negro Spiritual, “Lord, Lord, Lord,” was performed by the Cleveland Orchestra. Moreover, John Sebastian, the conductor of the Orchestra, commissioned him to write “Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra” for a performance with the same orchestra. In 1950, Anderson’s composition, “D-Day Prayer Cantata,” for the sixth anniversary of the World War II invasion, was performed on a national CBS telecast. In 1952, Anderson received the equivalent of a doctoral degree as a fellow of the American Guild of Organists. He left his administrative post at Antioch College in 1965.

In 1969, Anderson was named director of music programs at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he created model funding guidelines and pioneered the concept of the challenge grant. In addition, he spearheaded numerous projects and developed ideas at the then-new agency for supporting music creation and performance, specifically for orchestras, operas, jazz, and choral ensembles and conservatories.

Anderson was the recipient of four honorary doctorates in music over his professional career, including one from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 1970. He retired from NEA in 1983. During this period, he became a presidential fellow at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and a recipient of the Cleveland Arts Prize for Distinguished Service to the Arts. In 1993, the American Symphony Orchestra League recognized Anderson as one of 50 people whose talents and efforts significantly touched the lives of numerous musicians and orchestras. He was also a member of the Advisory Council to the Institute of the Black World at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/walter-franklin-anderson-1915-2003/

[marxonculture]

A Quick Note on 'Jewface', Maestro and Oppenheimer

Given that my presence on this platform is filtered specifically through the lens of Jewishness in film, and that I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the Jewish identity of Leonard Bernstein – the subject of Bradley Cooper’s controversial upcoming film, Maestro – I thought I’d weigh in on the current discourse.

For those who are unaware, one of the biggest films due to premier as part of this year’s autumn film festival season is Bradley Cooper’s Maestro. The film is said to be a non-traditional biopic of 20th century American composer Leonard Bernstein, focusing largely on his complex relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Controversy has arisen around the Netflix production due to images from the trailer featuring Bradley Cooper as Bernstein wearing an enlarged prosthetic nose. Voices within and outside Jewish communities have loudly criticised Cooper for caricaturing Jewishness, using the term ‘Jewface’ which describes the act of a goyische (non-Jewish) actor using prosthetics to make themselves look more like a cartoonish, imagined Jew.

While it is true that Bernstein did own a decent sized schnoz, the prosthetic utilised by Cooper is significantly bigger, and more defined than the nose was in reality. From a personal standpoint, I do find the use of this prosthetic to be pretty discomforting, but I think it speaks more to Cooper’s insecurity about the size of his own nose, which is a lot bigger than perhaps he would like to admit (and not too dissimilar to Bernstein’s actual nose!), than it does about his perception of Jews. That being said whether it was his intention to cartoonify Jewishness or not, Cooper has ruffled feathers in a way that is crass rather than substantive. Bernstein’s living relatives have come out in support of Cooper and his decision to use the prosthetic, saying that Bernstein would not have minded, but I think their statement rather misses the point. The nose is not about Bernstein himself, but about highly visible representations of a tiny minority that are stereotypical and incredibly reductive.

Funnily enough, however, Cooper’s use of ‘Jewface’ is the element of Maestro that bothers me the least. I have been fairly vocal since the film’s announcement about how I believe the production as a whole to be a pretty catastrophically bad idea. Leonard Bernstein is my number one creative hero – as a composer, public intellectual and educator, I don’t think there has been a single Jewish figure in American history who has had more of a positive impact on culture.

As I mentioned, I have written extensively about Bernstein in an academic context, and in researching him, it became clear to me just how vitally important his Jewish identity was to him throughout his life. It informed his music (even West Side Story, which was initially conceived as a story about Jews and Catholics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan), and his role as an educator (he often described his pedagogy as rabbinic in nature), and he was deeply, foundationally affected upon learning about the realities of the Holocaust which caused what he described as ‘aporia’, a state of being where he was too overwhelmed to write a single word for years. Bernstein’s complicated relationship to sexuality was also hugely significant in his life. There is still debate to this day about whether, given an open, accepting environment, he would have identified as a gay man or as bisexual. He had significant, passionate relationships with both men and women, and was an early major advocate for HIV/AIDS research.

My problem with Maestro is that I don’t have faith in Bradley Cooper as a writer/director, to sensitively depict these two massive aspects of Bernstein’s identity. Focusing on his most significant straight-passing relationship as the centre of a film called Maestro does not inspire confidence that the film won’t totally whitewash Bernstein’s Jewishness, or reduce his sexuality to the pain it caused his wife (in a similar way to other reductive music biopics like Bohemian Rhapsody or Rocketman). Cooper’s own identity is significant in that he is starting from a place of remove from the identity of his subject, which isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but when there are other filmmakers out there who are far better suited to a project like this, both from an identity perspective and a thematic one, it’s hard to justify why this project exists at all in its current form.

Some have pointed to the involvement of Steven Spielberg as a producer on the project as hope for better representation, but given that Cooper and Martin Scorsese – a filmmaker who I have criticised in the past for the didactic, Christian morality of his movies – are also credited producers, I don’t think it’ll make much difference. I’m more comforted by the involvement of Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post) and his contribution to the screenplay, given his Jewishness and his work on thematically sensitive historical films.

I’m not writing off the film entirely just yet. I had similar worries about Oppenheimer, given the significance of the scientist’s Jewishness in his decision to start work on the bomb in the first place. Nolan and Cillian Murphy, thankfully, proved me wrong in the director’s decision to focus on the differing Jewish identities of Oppenheimer, Lewis Strauss, and I.I. Rabi, and the nuanced ways in which their characters were informed by Jewishness, as well as Murphy’s attention to detail in his performance. It’s certainly possible for non-Jewish filmmakers to consider Jewishness in a valuable way (see Todd Field’s Tar or Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza for a couple of recent examples), but the set-up of this project makes it hard for me to believe that Cooper is one such filmmaker.

To end with a little self-gratifying what-if, I thought I’d lay out what would be my ideal Bernstein biopic: a film centred around the relationship between Bernstein and his fellow queer, Jewish composer and mentor, Aaron Copland, the letters they wrote to one another, and the fallout of their brushes with McCarthyism which had vastly different outcomes. I would keep Cooper as Bernstein (without the prosthetics!) because he can convincingly play the man’s charm, I’d cast Michael Stuhlbarg as Copland, and get Todd Haynes to write and direct. Haynes is Jewish, gay, and has a great deal of experience directing sweeping, romantic, dark, and political films. He knows how to portray music on screen and has several masterful period-pieces under his belt, with Carol in particular as a shining example of complex, historical queer romance in America. Honestly, this would be my dream film project.

[saintchaser]

what do u think all the marauders girls and guys would study in university?

for sirius, i was thinking psychology (i would like to study that too, in the bear future), or something related to arts. also, since i mentioned him being into STEM, i can see him doing something related to that too. however, i don’t see him getting a job related to his area of study.

i know for remus we, as a whole, have widely accepted that he would be into literature, and i agree with that. however, i can also see him going into either theatre and/or pedagogy. he’s a very patient and kind person, so he could excel with younger kids.

i can see james going towards either maths or something science related, or pedagogy. he’s quite patient with younger people and he gets along well with kids; with a few courses, he could do quite well in the field.

for peter i have two, very different ideas; music (i can see him in a high school band or musical before going to university or college, and thoroughly enjoying it), or engineering.

as i said before, lily is absolutely a STEM person, so i think she’d go to the university in that field, too; i am leaning towards a branch of biology. however, i can also see her going into medical school — she likes helping people, and she’s in a field she likes, too.

for dorcas, i’m leaning towards law. she has a very strong sense of justice and morally light/wrong. i can also see her going towards journalism or political science, all fields she likes and is passionate about.

mary would go for either design (and i think she would go for any kind of design, really, whether it’s interior, exterior or fashion). or media, or psychology; she would like to work with people and be able to interact with them, see the behavioural patterns.

thinking one up for marlene was the hardest for me, but i will settle for physical education and sports. i think she was huge on athletics and sports generally speaking, and her high school coach encouraged her to strive towards something along those lines in the future (she got in with a sports scholarship, too)

[bul-bor]

Hetalia Characters as different Teachers (baltics/eastern europe)

based on my experiences as someone in the education field (ALSO doing this in groups so it's not HUGE)

Poland: MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE. i think he can take it and dish it out, like he does not care. he does have a softer spot for the shy kids and tries his best to help them work thru socially anxious moments

Lithuania: he gives me...... AP Euro/world history vibes, definitely coaches basketball. i think his pedagogy is largely based on "every student has the ability to achieve" and holds each of his students to high expectations

Estonia: at first i was like "omg calculus, NERD" but i thought abt it again, he's a music teacher, no doubt. specifically elementary school, and he runs an after school choir program.

Latvia: TOUGH ONE. i think........ i think i see him like....... middle school orchestra. he always gave me cello vibes. he has to work really hard on his classroom management since he practically looks their age

Belarus: girly is middle school math. nothing gets to her. she is made of steel. she definitely comes more alive when she's coaching girls' volleyball

Ukraine: not a teacher, elementary school guidance counselor!! she is very sweet and builds strong relationships with the students she works with

[istherewifiinhell]

okayyyy also. tagged by @joelletwo for 5 topics i could talk about for an hour with no prep.

now. two things. 1. i have infernal podcast dude energy and could say a lot about nothing. weird trait to have if u dont like talking to people? hard to say. 2. GESTURES AT BLOG. im ALREADY. talking at length abt my beloved shit. so im just ruling out turtles, alien robots, trek, etcetcetc all the shit thats been a main blog topic for the last past. 4 years?

I'm gonna say.... western voice actors? not that i could really. Give a lecture so much as. I'm way more familiar with them that than I am live action actors. And I'm kinda just CONSTANTLY like. Oh you know so and so from every cartoon youve ever fucking seen? And FEEL a real. gap. with people when they dont have a same reference point. probably like how ppl feel with me when i dont know their acting guys jhadbgjfga. Like u can name 5 VAs from ur childhood cartoons/animated movies right? And personal interest like, hey btw u know like the entire cast of tng was in disneys gargoyles? U know keith david can SING? And diego luna? Hey you know about Canadian actors who are in all the dubs and video games and yeah cheap shit? You know Scott McNeil right? You know Ian James Corlett? You know. THE IAN. of being Ian. Hello. is this thing still on?

I really like and care about the topics of education, children's rights and pedagogy? Not academically so much as, personal interest. What seeing very clearly that there was a lot of arbitrary rules that involved things like. The Government. and Systems. as a child does to a motherfucker I guess? I'm always INTERESTED in a discussion about it, is how i mean I guess. Like focuses of multiple intelligence and "applied knowledge" (and short comings there of). I mean long and short of it. Kids are full human beings and until u can grapple with that their feelings and opinions um. Actually matter. I hate you? jdhbgjhdb. And Naturally the world being good for kids has the prerequisite of it not sucking ass for adults too....

UHhhh guh. User design/civil engineering? You'll hear it from me until the day I die, crushed under the tires of a ford f1 giga truck with the LED 20million watt bulbs. PROTECTED BIKE LANES. for the love of god. I just know a lot of designers I guess and like engineering, conceptually. But like, u know that famous bridge everyone crashes into. If theres 80million warning signs and people are still crashing... maybe theres. other factors. Or you know ofc like, traffic planning, vehicle accidents, structural disasters. A lot of them are not just. Things happening. Tragedies. There's politics there. Usually a lot of Money stuff. and structural racism. The real reason your fridge is full is that there's a bunch of half empty condiment jars hiding all your forgotten left overs. And widening the roads isnt gonna do shit for traffic.

Jackass entry: Themes and motifs of anyyytthing ive watched with another person or saw, and like they also know it. I realllly like, visual theming and narrative shorthands. Anything that breaks like, maybe people in this setting dont have the same customs, but their gonna do something so you the audience can recognize it. Non literal/accurate use of colour and lighting, for mood and clarity. Breaking the physical shape and scale of things so they can appear and be readable on screen. COSTUMING COSTUMING COSTUMING. A well styled character can do soooo much for your understanding of a work, especially with large casts, and a poorly styled one can take me right out. Well. anyway. yes i love animation u all knew that.

uhhhhh Thatgamecompany/giantsquids studio. im giving myself a free space. lol technically I DO. blog about this. the music. at least. BUT beloved. games. Me and everyone else I guess. Hey speaking of u know its laura bailey and troy baker as the voices in the pathless? And you know how a lot of the games have themes of coming into being/growing/rebirth. And LOTS of environmentalism. And implied cultural world building, and wordless stories. and beautiful metaphor rich otherworldly visuals. and gameplay styles that really connect with the emotional story their going for. and ofc, the music. oh the leit motifs. well. there u go. sword of the sea when?

tagginggg. uh did anyone get @deadgrantaires or @army-of-bee-assassins yet? anyone elseeee who wants to regale me with things they knowww about. id love to know.

[the-music-keeper]

Objectives #9 and #10 are done and the UT Austin row on my spreadsheet is complete!

[strbrymlk]

04/20/2023

hello! ive been mia lol, but it's been really busy! my recital is this saturday and im a little nervous, im not going to lie. I WILL SAY though, that i feel way more prepared then i did last semester, and so i'm very thankful for that.

i had a productive weekend!

finished music history research paper (2000/2000 words HAHA)

finished jazz research paper too! that one was a lot easier

rehearsal with pianist, feeling good!

bought my dress for my recital!

had a REALLY good flute lesson, hoping i can keep up the momentum!

i got so much done this weekend that i've lowkey been chilling in classes, though i do have some stuff i need to get done this weekend too!

linguistics homework #4

catch up on pedagogy assignments

anyway, yeah that's basically it :)

ive been playing switch more as de-stresser and ALSO as a way to prepare for tears of the kingdom (IM SO EXCITED)

i went home for spring break and took this photo, i thought it was neat!

i go to starbucks in the mornings i dont have class to take notes and catch up on busy work mainly, so this is what my set up always looks like

went out with my other flutists in the wind ensemble for a social sectional, and had this gorgeous chai. my friend got a pretty latte :)

[theresa-of-liechtenstein]

SO MY LITTLE COUSIN’S PIANO TEACHER NEVER BOTHERED TO TEACH HIM WHAT A TIME SIGNATURE WAS. NO WONDER HE RUSHES. HE DOESN’T KNOW THAT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF BEATS PER MEASURE. sorry for shouting just WHAT THE HELL? is this a common thing in music pedagogy of children? because i was doing theory pretty much right away when i did piano and it’s not like he’s too young to understand he is TEN and i was doing theory years before him. also why the hell does this teacher let him advance when he CAN’T KEEP A CONSISTENT BEAT? my god. my fucking god

[whetstonefires]

💖🎶🛒

For the fanfic ask meme :3

💖 What made you start writing?

I...okay so there's a dumb literal answer to this I'm going to give first. My sixth grade English class was a two-semester-long creative writing seminar, where we were honestly taught almost nothing; the teacher just. Made us write things. Whatever things. For months.

She was incredibly patient with our baby shit, looking back, although when two of her students started writing execrable sixth grade poetry she set us on each other so we could get feedback without her, and managed not to make it obvious she was trying to escape the horror of sing-song childish scansion and the way kids that age take themselves horribly seriously and you have to not laugh.

Her name was Keely and I owe her, because up to that point I had refused to write my ideas down because if I slowed down enough to get a sentence written out I'd have forgotten all the bits that came after and the story was now dead and stupid and it was the worst, so writing was clearly not for me.

(I couldn't really type at this point, and didn't have reliable computer access anyway, and I'm left-handed, which makes writing longhand slightly slower and more difficult no matter what you do. Also you just don't write fast when you're ten.)

But Keely made me, for months, and it turned out this was a skillset I'd just had to work to acquire, and then I could do it and it wasn't a miserable soul-killing process after all. That's the first time I remember learning that lesson in life, and it's such a useful one. (Technically I went through a similar process with reading several years earlier, but that was partly because some very bad pedagogy put me off it at first, so it was less enlightening.)

Less prosaically, I got stuck on writing because I was a voracious reader and I kept thinking up stories, and writing them down was rewarding.

I find it's a great craft because you can get in all kinds of practice without actually doing it; you can string and edit sentences in your head when you have nothing to do or while doing something boring, and critique fiction you're exposed to, and try to understand literally anything you experience, and it's all applicable. As someone who gets frustrated with 1) materials consumed 2) skill plateaus and 3) having a Thing around after having made it, writing in the era of the word processor and cheap data storage is ideal, because it's both easier to keep my skills growing and harder to notice when they aren't than with most creative outlets, because I can store all the millions of words I've written in an object the size of my thumbnail, and because it's not supposed to do anything useful in the first place. If it does that's a happy bonus but if it doesn't I don't have to feel bad.

Fic is nice because it's got an audience to share the Things with, which makes it even better. And because you get to start at around the complexity level of a third or even fourth draft, skipping a lot of grunt work that I think is honestly overvalued--not that it's not valuable or important skill to have, especially if you want to be a novelist, but also there's a reason people on the whole mostly tell familiar stories over again, but better. The first go will suck in basically any medium. Insisting on starting there every time can lead to subtler skills getting underdeveloped.

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

Occasionally? Most of the time it would just be a distraction I'd have to work through, setting myself up for sensory overload and maybe a migraine.

But when I do it often is a single song on a loop, because the point is that I'm keeping myself suspended in a particular vibe as I pursue a specific scene or character relationship or something. Hasn't happened recently, but I should maybe pull that trick out and see if it helps with any of my stuck pieces.

I seem to recall writing something once to about 19 iterations of Dessa's 'The Lamb?' Oh and several passages of Angels Still Have Faces were written to the Sonata Arctica song I took the title from; it helped me get Angeal to the right state of repressed extreme melodrama.

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

Um. Food? Definitely food, between my strong opinions about subsistence informing social priorities and my personal sense that meals are both a major part of the daily pattern of life and very grounding in a place and body, I come back to it endlessly. 'Two people in a room (or other defined space granting privacy) trying so so hard to communicate' is, you know, pretty common motif but I go embarrassingly hard on it.

I'm a sucker for certain flavors of angst, and for when someone is very hopeless and then someone else gives them support. I think maybe people breaking down and asking for help and then actually getting it? And just how gross and messy it feels to be miserable and how much of it happens in the body.

What else? I feel like a third party would be better able to call me out on my patterns. A lot of them after all are the patterns of my thoughts, to a sufficient extent that I experience the universe in those terms by default and that's why it keeps being there.

When I describe hugs I tend to be very precise about where everyone's arms are because I feel like that's important. I try to be specific about features of nature like the species of a bird or tree or whatever, unless the pov character wouldn't notice such a thing, and even then I often know for the sake of precision. Lots of hand gestures, and putting of one's hands on pieces of scenery and so forth, that's my theater background coming through mostly. A tendency to emphasize the kinetic relationship between objects perhaps a bit more than usual.

If I'm describing a character that has an existing visual form, I drill in on the most distinctive details I can find; this is probably by way of mild face-blindness meaning I care a great deal about whether someone has a crooked eyebrow or distinctive dimpling or something, because I'm not going to learn their face fast enough to get away with not being able to id them and call them by name until then. It usually takes months.

Diana Wynne Jones advised making sure your mental image when you describe something, especially a place, is as precise as possible, so you won't decline into abstraction, and I've found following this advice to reliably net good results. If you only know about the things you actually mention, things get flat real fast.

(The trick then is not getting bogged down in deciding which things to mention.)

I dunno, what would you guys say are my signature moves?

[legobiwan]

lol go back go lesson planning, ur future self will thank you!

ha! Believe it or not, I did actually finish up the majority of my lesson planning for this week. (Would have been easier if I were a lazy Professor Lego and re-used all my homeworks from last year, but noooooo, I have to go and "improve" things. I jest, of course, I literally read academic papers on music pedagogy for fun and ranting opportunities). Anyway, sorry students, do I have some entertaining (for me) musical torture lined up for you this week, muahahahahhaha.

(Now, does this mean I've made any progress whatsoever on the half-semester course I'm teaching both in-person and online in a month and change? No, why prepare now when I can really extract that true sleep-deprivation grit while also drowning in the middle of high season for my other job, meaning I'll be on a plane every weekend? HA! Do I know better? Yes. Do I learn and amend my behavior? Eeeeeehhhhh....)