History buff; story-dork and bibliophile; dachshund lover; fanfic writer; erstwhile punk rocker; queer clotheshorse and anti-gastronome. 18+, please; I'm over twice that and I write for adults.
great news, one of the books I was looking for arrived today and it has a whole section on pre french revolution book piracy and the thriving trade in hiding and trafficking banned literature.
people used to mule illegal books through the mountains, and many contraband smugglers refused to carry them because, unlike drugs or guns, if you were caught with proscribed literature you could be executed or (worse) sentenced to hard labour until you died
okay! the hazardous and expensive contraband mule strategy was only for the really hot titles that were considered to promote outright treason or blasphemy. most banned literature at the time was actually sold under the counter by mainstream publishing houses, and was incredibly popular and profitable.
publishers around europe would trade inventories of the books they produced to maintain varied inventories they could sell to clients. e.g. publisher A prints thousands of copies of a hundred french titles, publisher B prints thousands of copies of a hundred german titles, they do swapsies, now they both have a range of 200 titles to trade. this applied to banned books too, and the banned books had higher market values due to the additional complications involved in production and shipping — one proscribed book might be worth 2-4 legal books, depending on the heat and the relationship between the publishers.
this trade was kind of an open secret, mostly conducted using code words and tricks like stuffing a crate with safe books on top and illegal works on the bottom or hidden in the packing materials. clients who ordered banned books from their local booksellers would often include that part of the order as a separate, unsigned slip of paper that could be disposed of after reading. sometimes they would make special requests for discreet packaging — one surviving letter asks for a fake receipt to be made out for legal books, so that the customer could get them past the finance department at work. another fun trick was ‘larding’, where loose leaf pages of the illegal books would be tucked between pages of respectable volumes. one client asked their bookseller to send a quantity of banned pornography larded inside religious texts.
being such a profitable trade, of course there were corrupt inspectors involved too. certain publishers and booksellers had networks of friendly agents who would let their shipments pass through inspection for a cut of the take. this would sometimes mean sending books by weird circuitous routes around europe to make sure they passed through friendly hands and got their stamp of approval before finally making their way back to the client.
I’m still reading on a lot of this and waiting for some other second hand texts to get to me, but every new thing I learn is improving my life and brain x1000
btw the moral you should take from all this is that the modern publishers and institutions who are currently shaking and shivering and peeing as they cut books on race relations and lgbtq+ topics from their catalogues are uniquely craven and pathetic and would be looked upon with scorn and derision by their forebears throughout human history.
fat tummy peeking out from the bottom of someone’s shirt should receive the same appreciation that’s given to tasteful cleavage in a low-cut top or a little bit of asscheek poking out from tiny shorts. this would improve society
i made this post while thinking gay thoughts about my girlfriend’s fat tummy and didn’t expect it to take off, but i am very glad to see that the Has Excellent Taste community on this site is so large
“killing off izzy after he went through all this growth and finally got to be happy means all that healing was for nothing”
goddamn that is a bleak way to look at life. we all die, man. healing is still worth the effort.
Apologies for derailing your OFMD-specific post, OP, but thank you for articulating this. I haven’t watched this season of the show yet so can’t comment on how this particular death was pulled off, but I have multiple partial posts in my drafts folder trying to express in 3000+ words what this post encapsulates in 43. Not only do we all die, but as I get older and deal with more loved ones’ deaths IRL and contemplate my own death in a less theoretical way, I find myself *wanting*, even needing, to engage with media that acknowledges & represents it. Art that helps me think about living well and meaningfully in the presence of death, and about what substantive change & healing means for someone who HAS spent many decades living with bitterness/trauma/maladaptive behaviors and might not have that much life left.
My ex’s mom just started therapy for the first time at 79 years old, and thinking about that makes me feel scared and claustrophobic for reasons I’ve been working on unpacking. On the one hand she pretty obviously has a lot of unexamined trauma as well as undiagnosed OCD, and hopefully treatment can ease some of her suffering. On the other hand, what if she discovers something about herself that totally changes her perception of her entire life up to this point? What if this introduces some profound regret about the way she’s spent the last almost 80 years? What if she learns some joyful and expansive new way of being, and then only gets to practice it for a few more years or even months? Well… I suppose if she gets those few months of joyful expansiveness, it will be better than not having them!
Anyway, thanks for this, I feel like I should print it out & carry it around in my wallet as a ward against death-panic.
“It funny because for many years people thought Goncharov was the main antagonist of the film, after all, he’s the one everyone’s out to get, right? But it seems people are starting to understand that in actual fact, it is time that is the main adversary in this story. There’s never enough of it and that torments a lot of characters, especially Goncharov, because he’s fighting so desperately to find his place in a world that is so keen on keeping him ostracized.”
So my (leftist, pro-queer, awesome) dad has the same name as the new ultra-conservative MAGA Speaker of the House. Not all that surprising as it’s a very common name. But it is adding a real layer of surreality to the influx of texts and emails with subject lines like “What we can do about Mike Johnson” and “Donate now to oppose Mike Johnson.”
I’m not going to do a political analysis deep dive of it, someone else can do a better job of that than I can.
But as someone who has spent their whole life trying to create art, good or bad, and who most loves art when it leaves me confused, joyous, and absolutely devastated, the thing that intrigues me so much about this chart is just how fucking wrong it is.
Several people in the reblogs have said “this person must hate Guernica,” which is just the beginning of it. I happened to have just a day or two ago listened to Ethel Cain’s Preacher’s Daughter, which is a concept album with a story that sounds absolutely fucking insane if you just describe it: the story of an evangelical preacher’s daughter who runs away from home, has a series of shitty abusive boyfriends, becomes a stripper addicted to drugs, and then gets murdered and cannibalized. It is one of the most profound and beautiful works of art that I have listened in a long fucking time, and I am absolutely obsessed with it.
Is it ugly? yes. It makes me feel weird and saps my energy. It doesn’t just mock the idea of the conservative Christian values that she was raised with, it tears them apart and lays them bare. But it ends with a message of love. It neither empowers nor enfeebles life: it recognizes the brutality that life can bring and still, somehow, manages to scrape some hope and beauty out of it.
I research cemeteries when I’m offline, and most of that involves shifting through literally thousands of death certificates, most of which are of people who died at a ripe old age and lived fulfilling, happy lives, but many of which are cruelly short and full of pain. I like to joke that it’s a constant stream of “That’s the most fucked up murder/disease that I’ve ever heard of.”
Recently, when I was sharing research with someone, she mentioned the number of babies buried in her cemetery, and how sad it made her, and she asked me, “How can you stand to do it?” I had no good answer for her other than, “Well you kind of get used to it.”
The truth is you don’t get used to it, sometimes the stories you come across stick with you and haunt you, but it reminds you that you are alive and so were the names here in black ink and white paper.
I keep going back to the line in the final song, “Strangers,” “With my memory restricted to a polaroid in evidence.” A number of years ago, I helped a woman who was kidnapped by a serial killer but convinced him to let her go to research the other women he didn’t set free. So many of them had stories similar to the one in Preacher’s Daughter. Stories of abuse and generational trauma and drug addiction that all end with one man, and then go on.
One woman escaped an uncle who molested her only to end up working at a massage parlor. One woman’s step-father said “That’s what happens when you’re a hooker." One woman was a heroin addict who was trying to regain custody of her young daughter. Twenty years later, said daughter died of a heroin overdose, possibly administered on purpose by her boyfriend. One woman had no known family, no friends, no story, only a pimp who was thinking about moving out west. The only photographs we ever found of her were a mug shot and photos of her desiccated corpse after it had been decomposing in a ditch for a month.
These are the women whose lives are deemed worthless under fascism. Of course fascist art will never seek to humanize or understand them. It would be celebrating ugliness.
Listening to Preacher’s Daughter, I am reminded that they had lives, that they mattered, and I cry for them, and I wish fate could have been kinder to them. I think about my own trauma and disappointments and generational scars and I know that life is cruel but love still exists. I feel connected to these women and I feel love for them.
The term that often gets thrown about when discussing the meaning of art is catharsis, that is, purification through pain. You listen to stories of tragedy and songs of lament to feel your own pain more clearly, and learn to appreciate it and find beauty in it. But of course, the fundamentalist and fascist mindset allows no room for pain, doubt, empathy, or obscurity. It demands only the beautiful and perfect and happy, and anything that does not meet their ideal is unworthy.
What a limited view of art. What a limited view of life. How unrealistic. How false.
a better version of my response to the fascist art analysis chart
"These are the women whose lives are deemed worthless under fascism. Of course fascist art will never seek to humanize or understand them.”
The difficulty with the notion of what one ‘really really’ wants - finding that out, and bringing it, as if it were an object, to sex - is not just that one has to start somewhere with sex: there is a first time for everything, sexually, and it is necessarily unknown and full of uncertainty. It is also that every sexual encounter is unique, and has a powerful indeterminacy to it; we never know what is going to happen in any given sexual experience, or how we will feel about it - regardless of what we have done and liked before. And this is the power of the erotic.
This also very much applies to fanfics. Some people need to take a step back and think before they make straight fools out of themselves.
listennnnn, please say it louder for the folks in the back.
y’all gotta learn to be ok when things aren’t about you/catering to your wants. and if you can’t learn to be ok, just don’t subject artists and writers to your whining.
Could this be related to the fact that so many people get their content algorithmically curated for them personally, that when they see something that isn’t about them personally, they are confused?
Or do people follow algorithmic curation because they are afraid of encountering stuff that might not be catered at them specifically?
The reason most people are bad at offering cogent criticisms of other people’s work is because they’re evaluating those works on the basis of The Thing They Would Make, not The Thing You Would Make. Indeed, a great many people don’t understand that those are different things, interpreting The Thing You Would Make as a defective or incomplete version of The Thing They Would Make.
This gulf of understanding is not an impassable one. Learning to correctly identify the author’s creative goals with respect to a particular work, and to formulate criticism in terms of how best to achieve those goals, is a skill which can be cultivated. In its proper place, it can be a hugely valuable skill – there’s a reason many authors will tell you that a good editor is worth their weight in gold.
Unfortunately, developing this skill will not make you any less prone to being a hater. Learning how to correctly identify other people’s creative goals simply means that you’ll graduate from picking at specific choices to saying: “I understand this work’s goals, and those goals fucking suck. I hate everything that this chooses to be.”
