Old Comic Page I Did, Depicting The Beginning Of Rebirth. Something In Chen Staring Back At Sidestep

2023

One Art - Elizabeth Bishop // October - Louise Gluck // On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German Poetry - Lisel Mueller // Fairy-tale Logic - A. E. Stallings // Introduction to Space Opera - Brian Aldiss // Yellow Glove - Naomi Shihab Nye // Hammond B3 Organ Cistern - Gabrielle Calvocoressi

The Rangers (2010)

| Sunstream | Sentinel | Anathema | Steel | Charge |

Do you ever think about how fucked up it would be if your brother died and came back but now he has someone else's face and all the stupid scars from climbing trees and stuff are gone and he used to be just taller than you but now he's like two inches shorter than you and he still talks the same way but in someone else's voice

the response that gets me is “well i don’t read.” okay. not everybody enjoys reading. but your thought process doesn’t have to stop there! let’s think laterally and apply this question to a form of media you to enjoy and engage with regularly. can you name a black woman who is a…

tv/movie creative?

podcaster?

youtuber?

music artist?

stage actress?

visual artist?

dancer?

there are many many subcategories within each of these, including specialities, genres, and professions, and i promise you there is a black woman doing amazing stuff in every one. maybe even several!

these broad categories, especially tv/movies and music, will have their own big five. if you can name them, try going deeper by naming one in a specific genre you enjoy. how about a genre that a friend of yours enjoys? a genre you want to engage with more than you currently are? talking to people In Real Life and having goals or plans for the media you want to enjoy are also (alongside google) useful tools for combatting passive/unconscious bias.

this is literally such a quality critical thinking skills addition to the original post

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

That new noble, you know, Lord Golden? Well I heard that he and that manservant of his, you know, Tom Badgerlock are…. Well…. Let’s just say that perhaps their chambers only have one bed?

god. i know children are more unflappable about some types of horror elements and white american kids aren’t expected to have much familiarity with the topic, but i can’t believe some of the descriptions of collective punishment of indigenous ppl that i read in gullstruck island at eleven years old. no wonder the specter of this book has hung over me since grade school. this is a cautionary remark but also something positive i am saying about the book.

I needed to do some proper art for Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which has shaken me so so deeply.