Ari Bach's Blog, page 15

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queerliblib:

bbprincessheather:

on it 🫡 🌈 📚

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Pondering my orbs.

just-horrible-things:

tormentum-ab-intra:

hauntedwhiskers:

Pondering my orbs.

help

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context….

winchysteria:

ossacordis:

crockpotcauldron:

clarenecessities:

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy. 

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

My three published as ebooks as well, though notably a book self published through Lulu is not….

crow-caller:

As you mightve heard there’s a big database of books facebook/meta stole for its ai and yep, all three of mine were harvested

….which does beg a question of how. Good Angel and Bad End are self published. They must have taken it from amazon (unsurprising) or else direct from gumroad or itch.io because they are yknow. Pretty Obscure Indie Shit. They also got my aunts books but happy to report my Oma’s books slipped their nets

My three published as ebooks as well, though notably a book self published through Lulu is not. Maybe we will all get 1/100,000th of a percent of a low settlement someday after we all die. Until then, we can all be happy our works will live on mashed together into a “new flesh” of inept chatbots and useless autofills. The future is now.

Vlatka: Are you done then with your conscientious excogitations?Jeth: What on Earth does that even…

Vlatka: Are you done then with your conscientious excogitations?
Jeth: What on Earth does that even mean?
Vlatka: To say that you’re planning it out very responsibly.
Jeth: Then why not just say “planning responsibly?”
Vlatka: Because “planning responsibly” brings no pleasure to my tongue.
Jeth: So sorry to chasten your tongue.
Vlatka: No apologies needed, you won’t change how I speak.
Jeth: Talk like that all you wish, just don’t be surprised when nobody listens.

Lol imagine if some weirdo wrote a whole novel or three with needlessly large words like that… Nobody would read that…

There are Books… And then there are Books. This is one of the latter.

There are Books… And then there are Books. This is one of the latter.

Well that didn’t go well for anyone involved, geez. Props though to Tanith Lee for the gothiest work…

the-walrus-squad:

the-walrus-squad:

Well that’s kind of them :)

Oh god it was not kind of them. Not at all.

Well that didn’t go well for anyone involved, geez. Props though to Tanith Lee for the gothiest work of gothic fiction possible.

CW for like, everything. Oof.

Tanith Lee, from “Dark Dance,” 1992

Tanith Lee, from “Dark Dance,” 1992

Oh god it was not kind of them. Not at all.

the-walrus-squad:

Well that’s kind of them :)

Oh god it was not kind of them. Not at all.

yanderehiro:mj-says-hey:is lou bega poly though

yanderehiro:

mj-says-hey:

is lou bega poly though