Old English Psalms Edited and translated by Patrick P. O’Neill Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 42 The Latin psalms figured prominently in the lives of the Anglo-Saxons, whether sung in the Divine Office by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning by students, or recited in private devotion by lay people. They were also translated into Old English, first in prose and later in verse.…
[ID: A Doofenshmirtz two nickles meme. The first panel is edited with an image of the Dracula Daily icon and says, “If I had a nickel for every time tumblr fixated on a horror story from the late 1800s, I’d have two nickels.”
The second panel shows Dracula’s image faded out with a book cover of The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe replacing it and says, “Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.” End ID]
This is “The Yellow Wallpaper” erasure.
This made me read The Yellow Wallpaper, and yeah, it’s very good.
“The Cask of Amontillado” is from the 1840s, so if we’re including early 1800s we gotta include the mother of SF horror, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and her 1818 masterwork, Frankenstein
English author Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, England, at the age of 65 on this day in British history, 14 January 1898. Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is most remembered for his pair of ‘Alice’ stories, Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandandThrough the Looking-Glass, What Alice Found There. Carroll spent most of his life as a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a gentleman-photographer in some of England’s upper social circles.
Cropped image of medieval-stylized printed text, focused on a line which reads: “This wenche thikke”
/end image description]
Thank you for adding this image description! Just wanted to clarify that it’s not stylised, but actual Middle English. The text is from The Canterbury Tales.
Okay, had to track it down. It’s from the Reeve’s Tale, and it’s a description of a 20yo young woman:
This wenche thikke and wel y-growen was, With camuse nose and yën greye as glas; With buttokes brode and brestes rounde and hye, But right fair was hir heer, I wol nat lye.
In modern English (had to look up “camuse”, so that’s as good as my source, but I know the rest)
This wench was thick and well-grown With a pug nose and eyes grey as glass; With buttocks broad and breasts round and high, But right fair was her hair, I will not lie.
The fact that Chaucer had “big butt” and “I will not lie” within two lines of each other is causing me disproportionate amusement. Also the fact that “this wenche thikke” works equally well in Middle English and in modern slang.
nice to know people have always been fokin hornby for thikke wenches
Oh hey, it’s World Dracula Day (celebrating the 26th May 1897 publication of the novel)! So here’s some Dracula facts!
- Although Bela Lugosi would go on to define Dracula in pop culture after starring in the Universal adaptations of the book, he wasn’t actually the studio’s first choice for the role. with them originally eyeing German actor Conrad Veidt (above), of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari,the Man Who Laughs, and (later) Casablancafame. However, Veidt turned down the role due to a combination of concerns that accepting the role would lead to typecasting, his brief his heavily accented English would be hard for the audience to understand (he predominantly acted in silent movies), and his dislike of director Todd Browning’s drunken, surly attitude. So, the studio went with Bela instead, who had previously played the role in the stage play version of Draculathat they were adapting into a film.
So, amusingly, if Conrad had gotten the part he could have ended up defining both the visual appearance of the Joker (his character from the Man Who Laughs inspired the design of the supervillain several years later) AND that of Dracula too.
- While Draculahas been the subject of some 200 plus films in the times since the novel’s publication, the book wasn’t intiailly a success with readers. Indeed, towards the end of author Bram Stoker’s life he and his wife were having to live on support provided by the Royal Literary Fund, something not helped by Bram’s illness towards the end of his life, which some have guessed may have been syphilis.
The bad financial situation of his widow and literary executor, Florence Balcombe, is why she pursued Nosferatudirector FW Murnau for copyright infringement (the 1922 movie literally just changed the names of the characters in attempt to avoid paying her any money), to the extent that the court ordered every copy of the film be destroyed.
This bad luck continued when she granted some of the American theatrical rights to a Horace Liveright, with the understanding that he pay her some of the money that the production made in the American market. However, he died before he could do so, so when the American play was bought and adapted for film by Universal, she continued to make little to no money from thatproduction either.
As is fairly well known, author Arthur Conan Doyle grew to dislike his creation Sherlock Holmes, and would eventually attempt to kill him off in 1893 story The Adventure of the Final Problem, where the detective seemingly falls to his death fighting his enemy Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.
What is less well known is that Doyle’s mum was actually a fan of Holmes herself, and he would have actually killed off the character years earlier if it wasn’t for her insistance that he not do so.
Regardless, ACD would eventually revive Holmes in the serialised story The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-02), which took place before his supposed death, before properly revealling he was alive in 1903′s the Adventure of the Empty House, where Holmes revealled he faked his death to throw off Moriarty’s henchmen before travelling to Tibet, Persia, and France solving mysteries and such.
The Swiss town of Meiringen, which is located near to Reichenbach Falls, has had a steady flow of tourists over the past century or so due to the Holmes connecting, including a lot of people who dress as the characters and visit locations mentioned in the short story.
Like many smart people, Edgar Allen Poe was a fan of cats. Notably, he had a tortoiseshell who would sit on his shoulder as he wrote, whom he named Catterina, which is a much better cat name than Lovecraft’s.
BONUS FACT! In addition to popularising the short story format (with some even saying that he coined the term “short story”, which I’m in of dubious of, personally), Poe also was one of the first, if not THE first, writers in the detective story genre.
His character C. Auguste Dupin, from the stories Murder of the Rue Morgueandthe Purloined Letter, establishing many elements which would be later adopted by characters such as Sherlock Holmes (who references Dupin several times within his own stories, albeit as a fictional character within Holmes’ universe).
On this day in 1852, American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. Previously published as a serial in the anti-slavery periodical the National Era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells the story of a black slave and recounts the harsh reality of his enslavement. Stowe was an ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery, and wrote the novel in response to the passage of the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Act which was part of the Compromise of 1850. The Act ordered Northern citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves from the South, thus forcing the generally anti-slavery North to become complicit in the continuance of the ‘peculiar institution’. The popular discontent over the slavery issue helped make Uncle Tom’s Cabin the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and saw its translation into sixty languages. The novel helped keep the flames of anti-slavery sentiment alive, and is therefore sometimes attributed with helping start the American Civil War. While still hailed as a great anti-slavery work of its day, the novel falls short of modern expectations with its stereotypical portrayal of African-Americans.
“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” - what, according to legend, Abraham Lincoln said upon meeting Stowe in 1862
I mean maybe it’s not important, but does anyone else wonder what Christian did after writing Satine and his story? Did he publish it? Did he become famous? Was that the only story that he wrote, or did he have other work after? Did he write more plays? Or did his and Satine’s fucking story actually become a play and he got famous from that? Did he ever find love again after Satine? Like, I just wanna know how Christian’s life was after Moulin Rouge ended. I’m genuinely curious and I feel like i’m probably not the only one that’s laid in bed and wondered about Christian.
SinceMoulin Rouge! is so strongly inspired by both Camille(and its opera adaptation La Traviata) and La Boheme, and both of those stories were semi-autobiographical, then maybe look to those two author’s lives for Christian’s most likely possibilities.
Alexandre Dumas fils (the real “Armand” of Camille/”Alfredo” of Traviata) became a massively successful, prolific novelist and playwright, married twice, had two daughters, and eventually died at 71, a good age for the time period.
Henri Murger (the real “Rodolphe” of Bohéme) wasn’t so lucky – he had great success with Bohéme in both book and play form, but none of his other works matched it, he allegedly had flings with various women but never married, and he floundered in and out of poverty until he got sick and died at just 38.
Let’s hope Christian’s life was more like Dumas fils’s.
Exhibit A why parents should have as little input in their children’s education as possible
I’m so glad this was posted in disagreement with these statements because I’m yelling. however I don’t think these people are being generous in their definition of ‘conflict’ at all - studio ghibli films have conflicts, in fact they can have very prominent ones. there is more to conflict than an altercation or a physical fight… mixed feelings is a conflict. helplessness is a conflict. lack of choice is a conflict, too much choice another. not knowing how to proceed… all conflicts lol
I disagree. Things can be interesting and beautiful and worth telling with literally no conflict at all. One of my favourite poems, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Bells, is literally just a description of different types of bells. And it’s gorgeous, it evokes emotion, it’s good.
If a kid wants to write a story with no conflict, I see no issue with it. What, are we going to put rules on creative writing? Gonna tell Edgar Allen Poe that he’s wrong and a bad writer?
The Bells isn’t a *narrative*
It doesn’t have characters, in a setting, doing things. Purely descriptive pieces of writing, like an essay or some kinds of poems, don’t need conflict because they aren’t *narratives*.
But if you’re teaching children the pieces of a *narrative*, then yes, they contain some form of conflict. Conflict, even small internal conflicts, are what create motivations and drive actions.
Context: Matthew Salesses is a Korean American writer and professor who is making a specific critique of Western storytelling’s emphasis on conflict and how this is affecting his daughter. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese narratives often uses change or contrast instead of conflict. His daughter does not deserve to be penalized or “corrected” for her cultural storytelling practices.
So, I’m not an expert on Korean storytelling by any means. I will not pretend otherwise.
However, this feels like we are confusing the more everyday definition of “conflict” for the literary use of the term conflict. The examples in that article *have conflict*- notably internal conflict.
These both have clear internal conflicts. They are more subtle than what a lot of us are used to (which also isn’t unusual for very very short compositions.) But man vs self- grappling with indecision, doubt, grief- these are a form of conflict.
Now, I can see an argument that this form of change or twist falls outside our normal ideas of what constitutes conflict, but I think the brevity also makes the whole narrative fall outside our normal ideas of narrative structure. And that’s very interesting and cool and these are beautiful pieces of writing.
Now, maybe the teacher in question was being very specific about the type of conflict they wanted in this story. Maybe they very clearly wanted an external conflict, or a more pronounced conflict. That isn’t conveyed in these tweets.
But also- on a school assignment, it is perfectly reasonable for a teacher to require that specific features are included if you’ve been learning about that in school.
When my students write an ode, and we’ve been studying figurative language, it’s perfectly reasonable to require them to including some figurative language in their poems. That’s not to say that poetry without figurative language is invalid and lesser. It’s just how writing assignments work. You learn about a technique, then you practice applying the technique.
I think it would be awesome if writing classes incorporated more multicultural approaches to structuring narratives. But “we are learning to identify and analyze conflict in stories. Write a story with a conflict in it” is a very normal writing assignment.
Yeah, conflict doesn’t always mean two or more people fighting; it can mean a single person feeling *conflicted* about something.
It’s helpful to think of “conflict” in this sense as “a problem to be resolved.”
So let’s take The Wind Rises! It’s a purely Japanese story: a semi-biographical story about the man who designed the Zero plane for WWII, told by Hayao Miyazaki.
You might think the conflict here is WWII. But believe it or not, in spite of a couple of glancing references to it, it’s almost not present. No, the conflict in The Wind Rises is “I want to design a wonderful plane that will become legendary, but my time on this earth is finite and Japan is literally still using wooden engines and gliders.”
To resolve this conflict, he learns about modern planes and begins to design. That simple. It’s not a fight. It’s a problem to be solved.
But that’s not uncolonial enough for you, so let’s talk about Anansi. You know, the West African spider god. There’s a story about how he came to be the owner of all the stories in the world, and to do so he had to capture the four most dangerous creatures there were. The conflict is epistolary: Anansi must capture creatures, four times. It’s a slightly different setup than we’d normally expect from a Western story (although structurally it bears some similarities to the Labors of Hercules), but there’s still a conflict.
Conflict is universal.
Except it’s not…
An example of a Kishotenketsu would be:
I went to the park. I met a cat. The cat scratched me. I still like the cat.
Want smaller?
I went to the park. I walked. I returned to find my wife. I was happy.
It’s easy to impose on others what you think is “correct.” But the thing is that the conflict narrative you’re citing came from Percy Lubbock (1921). He was excised from history because, you know, can’t have a gay man, even if he was closeted for most of his life in Literary canon.
So they usually cite the next “safe” person. Kenneth Rowe. Kenneth Rowe was a university Professor and taught Shakespeare and Aristotle, while getting them wrong, and plagiarized most of his book. He’s credited with the 5-act structure and put conflict at the center, but really, do you want to support a Plagiarist?
You see, they have to cite him, and not Joseph Esenwein–Christian and a Reverend to Boot, so would seem like the safe choice, because Esenwein specifically argued that this plot structure was ONLY for short stories, and should not be used for long works like novels.
The thing was, he took and credited Selden Whitcomb, who argued that the structure he used and Esenwein copied was–and get this, an emotional Line for Silas Mariner’s *main* arc. And ONLY for Silas Mariner.
You might think that’s not a big deal, but it is, because you see, at the time Kenneth Rowe was arguing this for film, the longest film was about 18 minutes. So it suited a short story format.
Though not famous, Lajos Egri, who was not credited until the last edition of Syd Field’s work, a Jew, so clearly not safe for the white christian US patriarchy, especially during the Hays codes. (Note that he’s pro child marriage which Jews are not usually, but it makes it into his book, so trigger warning). He took from Freytag (he hated him for his anti-Jew sentiment so alluded to him, but gave no credit), He also alluded to Kenneth Rowe by correcting an Aristotle citation. He added all of the modern-day character demands by adding in
Syd Field took from Lajos Egri.
Now, you might be thinking here: Conflict always existed, otherwise it wouldn’t be interesting. Ah, it’s likely a myth of the 1970′s-1980′s, because none of those books really argue that, oddly enough. Some other myths come from them. Particularly, there is no unique idea comes from Lajos Egri because he was clueless about how people come up with new ideas.
Why the 1970′s-1980′s? The computer revolution. And the sheer amount of official websites stating that likely wrong information was handed down in the 1970′s-1980′s, including wrong quotes.
About here you’re thinking… but before that?
Shakespeare and the Monarchy–Morality, to copy what Aristotle said that the center of plays should be morality.
Then the printing press changed it to Emotion–thus John Locke and the whole sensibility and gothic novel movement.
The Rotary Printing press, all hell broke loose. They started to argue for things like the Morality Tale–John Bede is called that. They argued for emotion. They argued for reality through realism. It was such that figures like John Ruskin chose the center of paintings to be “emotion” and was a huge fan of the Pre-raphalite movement, and liked realism for books. Genres were also not set in stone either. Early sensibility, as argued by Lucy Worsley, became the romance genre eventually. True crime and the advent of Newspapers became mystery, though it wasn’t called that early on.
In the 19th century, everyone could choose whatever they wished to be the story-driver. Some later ones were futurism, but massive trauma, flattened the landscape in the shape of WWI. Up through today, there are still minority groups fighting really really hard for the ability to switch the plot driver around. These are women, queer, PoCs, disability–but historically the people who have fought back against the other story drivers have been white cishet men. You might be wondering how that came to be…
So you see, the reason that Percy Lubbock up there made a treaties about conflict at the center of stories was because he was railing against the Modernists, who were anti-imperialism, especially after WWI. This appealed a lot to marginalized groups domestically within the UK, US and abroad. But this did not lock well with the elite in power. This is why about 100% of those books I mentioned by those authors slam the modernists or mention only the male modernists and fail to mention PoCs, queers or women. The only capacity women are ever mentioned in the books, (because excise PoCs and queers–except maybe Selden Whitcomb up there who was very kind to women and even mentioned the braided form which comes from Indigenous people, though not credited) is to be taught their “superior” story structure.
I’mnot covering Freytag because he’s an asshole. Grade A genocidal asshole. If he’d bothered to study, he’d have liked Kishotenketsu a lot. It’s in fact his ideal story structure. (He argued for emotions at the center of stories, not conflict). Also, he’s a shadow, but no one ever gives him credit, probably because he was a German and Germans weren’t fashionable after WWI.
So you see, the conflict narrative came from a long line of men trying to put down women and other marginalized groups, who were arguing for much, much older story drivers. I suppose when you’re in power, and the minority groups are talking crap about you, morality isn’t fashionable anymore. Nor memory. Nor repetition. Nor emotion. ‘cause then you’d have to question your power base.
Does this mean that conflict as a story driver is unusable? No. There are definitely things that came from bad intentions that can be used well. I think conflict is good for horror, mystery (though I like ones that mix in morality too). What if you changed the Romance story driver to emotion–the highest emotion you could get–or discovery? What if the story driver worked against the plot line to create a new effect? To me, that excites me as a writer. Different story drivers can work in tandem with other story drivers, too, keeping the reader thinking, emoting, etc for longer than a pure conflict narrative. (i.e. why WW1984 failed. It hit all of the beats, to the time stamp, had conflict, had escalating conflict, but completely failed.) Giving oneself the flexibility to realize that discovery is fun–like the center of Spirited Away is 100% about discovery and then maybe memory–getting the highest emotion from cutting away the conflict. (The “ten” part, BTW), gives writers freedom to play and surprise the audience.
In the early 2000′s BTW, conflict has been getting downgraded for a type of discovery argued over and over throughout the 20th century by mostly women: Self-realization. It’s become a part of the story driver too. Some remakes and book adaptations have added elements of it in order to connect with the audience more.
Morality was always a story driver lurking in Star Trek, for example.
Toni Morrison in the 1980′s specifically argued against conflict as the center of her narratives, favoring morality–which has roots back to Griot’s stories.
It’s worth it to decolonize the story driver because, you connect with your audience more, you get a wider audience to read your work, and if your story fails to make the audience feel or think anything, you’ve definitely failed. So why not maximize what your story can do and look at the true history of Eurocentric storytelling? I mean, seriously, when someone brilliant as Virginia Woolf is telling you Percy Lubbock is too reductive, you might want to listen to her. When EM Forster, a gay man is being torn to shreds by straight people, for tearing down Percy Lubbock, but they refuse to mention Percy Lubbock for credit, you might want to listen to him. And why not blow the retconning out of the water and stare into the face of Eudora Welty? Why not give yourself the freedom to read it not as a contemporary person, but also a person of their times and a person of a different country and get into their headspace? I think there is so much more magic to books/stories and poems if you allow yourself the flexibility to read them in different ways. Didn’t you read Ain’t I a woman and how it was edited? And the difference it makes between the versions? Give yourself that freedom and re-enjoy some of your old books in a new light. (I really understand Jane Austen after learning about sensibility v. sense).
And if you seriously want to fail that and want to stick to your whiteness, Lucy Worsley has a really great series on the history of Romance in UK and also about Mysteries, you should check out.
BTW, Conflict narrative was also exported elsewhere, but there are other culprits often at play at the same time.
On This Day in History June 8, 1949: George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is published by Secker & Warburg.
Set in the fictional totalitarian state of Oceania, the book has themes that though written in 1949, are especially relevant today. Such themes are mass surveillance, propaganda, war and danger to basic freedoms.
The tone of the book spawned the term Orwellian to describe a feeling of freedoms lost and the massive restriction of civil and personal rights.
The book was made into the movie “1984” starring John Hurt and Richard Burton that was released in 1984.
Friends saw a different Huxley than critics did. To Sybille Bedford, Aldous was a man transformed; he had developed a godlike assurance, a serenity. He gave a sense of peace and a natural sweetness mixed with an Olympian calm: a saint without the unctuousness. Huxley’s evolution from an agitated pacifist to a calm, clear-minded mystic—[D.H.] Lawrence would have enjoyed this—was noticed by others. When Cyril Connolly interviewed Huxley for Picture Post, he remarked, “What is much more remarkable … is the radiance of serenity and loving-kindness on his features; one no longer feels ‘what a clever man’ but ‘what a good man,’ a man at peace with himself.”
David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood (Bloomsbury, 1989)
