Tag: quotes

I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)

this passage planted itself in my consciousness when i was 24, and 10 years later, it informs so much of my approach to living, thinking, creating.

(via quantumcorean)

That storyline cuts pretty close to the id, you know? And it’s just one of a large number of similarly… charged storylines (soul bonds, every fuck-or-die scenario ever written…) that you see very very often in fanfic, and from time to time in profic as well.

And the profic? Almost uniformly sucks.

Because pro writers either have some shame, and relegate the purest, most cracklicious iterations of those stories to drawerfic that their workshop buddies will never see, or else they’re shameless. But they usually have to be shameless alone– and so their versions are written so solitarily that they don’t have any voice of restraint, to pull them back from the Event Horizon of the Id Vortex when it starts warping their story mechanics.

But in fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material– not all of it, and not for everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (At least in matters of content. Grammar has displaced sex as a locus of shame. Discuss.)

And so we’ve got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we’ve got genres. We’ve got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.

We have a toolbox for writing this sort of thing really, really well, for making these 3 A.M. fantasies work as story and work as literature without having to draw back from the Id Vortex to do it.

Ellen Fremedon, “Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec” [aka The Id-Vortex Post], 12/2/2004

a friend was asking, in light of me promoting @iddyiddybangbang about the use of the word “id”. This post really helped fandom define the term for itself.

I used to be such an uptight miserable jackass that I *hated* this concept for a while (even while I was writing werewolf porn, idk). NOT ANY MORE.

(via spaceoperafeerie)

Reblogging with the correct link post LJ-implosion:  “Slash shock, shamelessness, and a rec”

https://ellen-fremedon.dreamwidth.org/408832.html

(via cesperanza)

*squeaking noises*

Ellen Fremedon will ever have my attention as the author of one of the best, most improbably fanfics I’ve ever read. 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/165017

If you have a passing familiarity with who Jack Harkness is and that Star Trek exists, you’ll be able to follow this one. Aka, Horta Bangs A Who.

Says Ellen of her inspiration: “… this started when I thought of how Naraht was totally Jack’s type except for being a large acid-secreting rock with no recognizable genitals.

“And then I thought, this is Jack. He’s not going to let a little thing like that stop him :-D.”

(via moontyger)

Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it

Henry Jenkins (via jbaillier)

I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue (via librarianbyday)

My father, an activist and artist, told me I wouldn’t be able to be an artist when I had kids, because I would have to give all my time and energy to them.

This was said in 2005 when I was pregnant with my first child. 

And I have also been told on this very site that I had no right to have opinion, outside interests, or write because I should be taking care of my children. This was said, most recently, in November 2016, by a woman who claims to be interested in the rights of women. 

Let’s think about what that means.

(via toospoopyformyshirt)

TIME IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.

(via springsnotfail)

The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph – not because they are better armed but because Providence is on their side.
Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.

“Let There Be Dragons” (1993), Terry Pratchett.

(via

serkershit

)

cambriancrew:

Nita: “I never thought goodness could be so tough. So strong. But then again, I guess goodness isn’t something I’d think about a whole lot, anyway. Nobody uses the word much unless it’s in a commercial, and then they’re just trying to convince you that something has a lot of milk in it.”

Carl: “Virtue. The real thing. It’s not some kind of cuddly teddy bear you can keep on the shelf until you need a hug. It’s dangerous, which is why it makes people so nervous. Virtue has its own agenda, and believe me, it’s not always yours. The word itself means strength, power. And when it gets loose, you’d better watch out.”

Nita: “Something bad might happen…?”

Carl: “Impossible. But possibly something painful.”

~Good is not always nice or pleasant. But it is strong.~

Some writing doesn’t brush up against sentimentality as often as other writing. But whatever ‘bad’ edge your writing brushes up against, I think it’s important to touch it. You can always pull back from it, but at least you know where it is. It’s like when I was a dancer, we were always encouraged to fall in rehearsal, so that you could know what the tipping point of any given movement was. That way, when you did it on the stage, you could be sure you were taking it to the edge without falling on your face. It sounds like a cliché, but really it’s just physics — if you don’t touch the fulcrum, you’ll never gain a felt sense of it, and your movement will be impoverished for it.

Maggie Nelson, in response to ‘Is it important to risk sentimentality?’ in an interview with Genevieve Hudson for Bookslut (via bostonpoetryslam)

Sometimes I get SO EMBARRASSED writing about feelings!

But I love it. I mean, just look at that last sentence: I love it. That’s why I do it. I love to write about people (who are not real, but I love them, and they love each other, or hate each other, or both). Writing about feelings is a confession in itself, shameful and sincere. 

(via wildehacked)

[The older generation of writers who had established the rules for modern fiction under the assumption that their experience was “universal”] gained the ability to write stories where they could “show” and not “tell" … They had this ability not because they were masterful stylists of language or because they dripped with innate talent. The power to “show, not tell” stemmed from the writing for an audience that shared so many assumptions with them that the audience would feel that those settings and stories were “universal.” (It’s the same hubris that led the white Western establishment to assume its medicine, science, and values superior to all other cultures …)

Look at the literary fiction techniques that are supposedly the hallmarks of good writing: nearly all of them rely not on what was said, but on what is left unsaid. Always come at things sideways; don’t be too direct, too pat, or too slick. Lead the reader in a direction but allow them to come to the conclusion. Ask the question but don’t state the answer too baldly. Leave things open to interpretation… but not too open, of course, or you have chaos. Make allusions and references to the works of the literary canon, the Bible, and familiar events of history to add a layer of evocation—but don’t make it too obvious or you’re copycatting. These are the do’s and don’ts of MFA programs everywhere. They rely on a shared pool of knowledge and cultural assumptions so that the words left unsaid are powerfully communicated. I am not saying this is not a worthwhile experience as reader or writer, but I am saying anointing it the pinnacle of “craft” leaves out any voice, genre, or experience that falls outside the status quo. The inverse is also true, then: writing about any experience that is “foreign” to that body of shared knowledge is too often deemed less worthy because to make it understandable to the mainstream takes a lot of explanation. Which we’ve been taught is bad writing!

Cecilia Tan, from Uncanny Magainze 18 (via violetephemera)