A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?
Have you ever met a rich capitalist
Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?
Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me
That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”
Charlie Dickens knew what was up.
Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.
The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that
at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion.Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.
So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family. And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it. And gave it to friends.
Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.
That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.
I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!
The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’
He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.
A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’
Tag: stories matter
I think one of my major problems with media that deals heavily in themes of good and evil is that my formative years contained Terry Pratchett’s work which just blew my head clean off and put it back on my shoulders a little more firmly and then told me “there are no heroes, no legends, no miracles, just you. It’s you against the darkness and the metaphorical wolves at the door…better bloody do something about that then, hadn’t we”.
And don’t put your faith in revolutions – they always come around again.
And being good isn’t an innate quality – it’s an action that requires doing good for other people even and especially if you don’t like them, it’s hard work and you don’t want to. Bad impulses, bad thoughts don’t matter if you recognize them for what they are and turn them into positive action.
And the duty of the police should be to protect the people, not the power structure.
And we, as people, make our own gods, our own stories, our own creeds, not the other way around, which means we can change those stories and thus change our world, because nothing is more powerful than a story.
dedicated to anon
To all the dear creators out there! You are making my heart sing and dance – making art is sharing love and happiness!!!💝
Endless thanks for all the hard work 😘
We’re Ready
I was presenting an assembly for kids grades 3-8 while on book tour for the third PRINCESS ACADEMY book.
Me: “So many teachers have told me the same thing. They say, ‘When I told my students we were reading a book called PRINCESS ACADEMY, the girls said—’”
I gesture to the kids and wait. They anticipate what I’m expecting, and in unison, the girls scream, “YAY!”
Me: “’And the boys said—”
I gesture and wait. The boys know just what to do. They always do, no matter their age or the state they live in.
In unison, the boys shout, “BOOOOO!”
Me: “And then the teachers tell me that after reading the book, the boys like it as much or sometimes even more than the girls do.”
Audible gasp. They weren’t expecting that.
Me: “So it’s not the story itself boys don’t like, it’s what?”
The kids shout, “The name! The title!”Me: “And why don’t they like the title?”
As usual, kids call out, “Princess!”
But this time, a smallish 3rd grade boy on the first row, who I find out later is named Logan, shouts at me, “Because it’s GIRLY!”
The way Logan said “girly"…so much hatred from someone so small. So much distain. This is my 200-300th assembly, I’ve asked these same questions dozens of times with the same answers, but the way he says “girly” literally makes me take a step back. I am briefly speechless, chilled by his hostility.
Then I pull it together and continue as I usually do.
“Boys, I have to ask you a question. Why are you so afraid of princesses? Did a princess steal your dog? Did a princess kidnap your parents? Does a princess live under your bed and sneak out at night to try to suck your eyeballs out of your skull?”
The kids laugh and shout “No!” and laugh some more. We talk about how girls get to read any book they want but some people try to tell boys that they can only read half the books. I say that this isn’t fair. I can see that they’re thinking about it in their own way.
But little Logan is skeptical. He’s sure he knows why boys won’t read a book about a princess. Because a princess is a girl—a girl to the extreme. And girls are bad. Shameful. A boy should be embarrassed to read a book about a girl. To care about a girl. To empathize with a girl.
Where did Logan learn that? What does believing that do to him? And how will that belief affect all the girls and women he will deal with for the rest of his life?
At the end of my presentation, I read aloud the first few chapters of THE PRINCESS IN BLACK. After, Logan was the only boy who stayed behind while I signed books. He didn’t have a book for me to sign, he had a question, but he didn’t want to ask me in front of others. He waited till everyone but a couple of adults had left. Then, trembling with nervousness, he whispered in my ear, “Do you have a copy of that black princess book?”
He wanted to know what happened next in her story. But he was ashamed to want to know.
Who did this to him? How will this affect how he feels about himself? How will this affect how he treats fellow humans his entire life?
We already know that misogyny is toxic and damaging to women and girls, but often we assume it doesn’t harm boys or mens a lick. We think we’re asking them to go against their best interest in the name of fairness or love. But that hatred, that animosity, that fear in little Logan, that isn’t in his best interest. The oppressor is always damaged by believing and treating others as less than fully human. Always. Nobody wins. Everybody loses.
We humans have a peculiar tendency to assume either/or scenarios despite all logic. Obviously it’s NOT “either men matter OR women do.” It’s NOT “we can give boys books about boys OR books about girls.” It’s NOT “men are important to this industry OR women are.“
It’s not either/or. It’s AND.
We can celebrate boys AND girls. We can read about boys AND girls. We can listen to women AND men. We can honor and respect women AND men. And And And. I know this seems obvious and simplistic, but how often have you assumed that a boy reader would only read a book about boys? I have. Have you preselected books for a boy and only offered him books about boys? I’ve done that in the past. And if not, I’ve caught myself and others kind of apologizing about it. “I think you’ll enjoy this book EVEN THOUGH it’s about a girl!” They hear that even though. They know what we mean. And they absorb it as truth.
I met little Logan at the same assembly where I noticed that all the 7th and 8th graders were girls. Later, a teacher told me that the administration only invited the middle school girls to my assembly. Because I’m a woman. I asked, and when they’d had a male author, all the kids were invited. Again reinforcing the falsehood that what men say is universally important but what women say only applies to girls.
One 8th grade boy was a big fan of one of my books and had wanted to come, so the teacher had gotten special permission for him to attend, but by then he was too embarrassed. Ashamed to want to hear a woman speak. Ashamed to care about the thoughts of a girl.
A few days later, I tweeted about how the school didn’t invite the middle school boys. And to my surprise, twitter responded. Twitter was outraged. I was blown away. I’ve been talking about these issues for over a decade, and to be honest, after a while you feel like no one cares.
But for whatever reason, this time people were ready. I wrote a post explaining what happened, and tens of thousands of people read it. National media outlets interviewed me. People who hadn’t thought about gendered reading before were talking, comparing notes, questioning what had seemed normal. Finally, finally, finally.
And that’s the other thing that stood out to me about Logan—he was so ready to change. Eager for it. So open that he’d started the hour expressing disgust at all things “girly” and ended it by whispering an anxious hope to be a part of that story after all.
The girls are ready. Boy howdy, we’ve been ready for a painful long time. But the boys, they’re ready too. Are you?
I’ve spoken with many groups about gendered reading in the last few years. Here are some things that I hear:
A librarian, introducing me before my presentation: “Girls, you’re in for a real treat. You’re going to love Shannon Hale’s books. Boys, I expect you to behave anyway.”
A book festival committee member: “Last week we met to choose a keynote speaker for next year. I suggested you, but another member said, ‘What about the boys?’ so we chose a male author instead.”
A parent: “My son read your book and he ACTUALLY liked it!”
A teacher: “I never noticed before, but for read aloud I tend to choose books about boys because I assume those are the only books the boys will like.”
A mom: “My son asked me to read him The Princess in Black, and I said, ‘No, that’s for your sister,’ without even thinking about it.”
A bookseller: “I’ve stopped asking people if they’re shopping for a boy or a girl and instead asking them what kind of story the child likes.”
Like the bookseller, when I do signings, I frequently ask each kid, “What kind of books do you like?” I hear what you’d expect: funny books, adventure stories, fantasy, graphic novels. I’ve never, ever, EVER had a kid say, “I only like books about boys.” Adults are the ones with the weird bias. We’re the ones with the hangups, because we were raised to believe thinking that way is normal. And we pass it along to the kids in sometimes overt (“Put that back! That’s a girl book!”) but usually in subtle ways we barely notice ourselves.
But we are ready now. We’re ready to notice and to analyze. We’re ready to be thoughtful. We’re ready for change. The girls are ready, the boys are ready, the non-binary kids are ready. The parents, librarians, booksellers, authors, readers are ready. Time’s up. Let’s make a change.
Am I the only one that’s a just a tiny bit pissed off that this is still an issue?
The Original Series wasn’t even in the general VICINITY of fucking around yo
How many shows these days would do this, and do it this way? These days, it would be all, “Ohh, we have to be sensitive and show the nuances of each side” and try not to make either side seem wrong. It wouldn’t be clearly spelled out, “pro-choice is right, if you’re against it you’re the bad guys.”
Jim Kirk is not here for your anti-birth-control, anti-choice, pro-death-penalty BS
James Tiberius Kirk was written and portrayed as a feminist and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Yep. That episode is exactly what you think it is: pro-birth control, pro-population control, pro-choice, and pro-women’s right to choose. And yes, Kirk, the supposed playboy of the spaceways, is in favor of all of the above.
It was written and aired in 1969.
It probably couldn’t air today.
THINK ABOUT THAT.
Also LMAO at all the sad whiny geek boys who are like “I miss the GOOD OLD DAYS of SCI-FI when it wasn’t all about SOCIAL ISSUES and instead it was just about MEN HAVING FUN IN SPACE. Like Star Trek! Star Trek wouldn’t put up with all this SOCIAL JUSTICE FEMINISM IN SCI FI bullshit!” And meanwhile I’m just over here like “…did you actually watch the show?”
It’s also important to bear in mind that the Original Series had a predominantly female fanbase, and during its initial run, was widely mocked and dismissed by mainstream (i.e., male) science fiction fans as being fake sci-fi for girls. It’s difficult to overstate the influence women had on the franchise in its early days; most of the early Star Trek conventions were organised by and for women, and indeed, those same organisers were primarily responsible for the massive letter-writing campaign that prevented the show from being cancelled after the 1968 season. Without that campaign, the episode pictured in this post would never have been made.
The popular image of James Kirk as a sleazy womaniser is part of a conscious effort to erase that history and render the franchise’s roots palatable to the misogynistic geekboys of the modern SF/F fandom.
GoFundMe for the 1st Navajo-English Children’s Educational Show!
My local news covered this and I have yet to see it get any sort of larger attention, but this exactly what the media landscape for kids needs.
A show for children that features Navajo characters and teaches the language at the same time, it was developed by two Navajo women, Dr. Shawna Begay and Charmaine Jackson, and was originated “by a team of Navajo filmmakers, writers, producers and artists”.
They’re seeking funding to make more episodes and develop new characters, and we can help them out!
i am eternally aggreived on behalf of people who were clearly never taught what literary analysis can be. people who were never shown the incredible satisfaction when you see something in a piece of literature and you can /prove/ it’s there, the slow and careful tugging at an image, at chasing implication and meaning, at pushing and pushing until it all falls into place.
sometimes that looks like catching a “throwaway” line in a novel (“[the drawings] remembered Beardsley”) and chasing that single image until you have five thousand words about attempted freedom, conformity, and inescapability.
sometimes that looks like noticing a motif of reused roman ruins and going through and through until you can argue about colonising gaze and welsh devolution.
sometimes that means reading a novel where every chapter tells a story of someone telling a story and proving that that is an attempt at catharsis that fails.
it’s not all “the curtains are blue therefore the character is sad”
and besides, that’s actually “this character seems sad but the author never says so > how does the author create that? > oh hey there sure are a lot of washed out or cool colours in this scene > wait hold on the furnishings are almost obsessively described > does that say something about material culture? can i parallel that against appearances vs reality? > “in this essay i will argue that this short story interrogates arts and crafts aesthetic ideals by portraying an obsession with furnishings that ultimately leads the main character into despair. In order to do so let me first demonstate the connection between the furnishings and the emotional state of the main character”
If I may add on to this: I study English lit at uni, and I struggled with it for a little while because I didn’t truly understand what I was writing about. There would be little glimmers of things that caught my eye and excited me in my essays, but a lot of it was just regurgitating other people’s arguments. And a lot of my class felt the same way, they kept saying that they couldn’t have their own opinions because they had to back everything up with sources, and how everything felt like a reach. And I will admit i did, and sometimes still do, refer to essay writing as the academic circlejerk. It seemed like everything was just grasping at circumstantial evidence to back up an argument made in the 70s!
But THEN, I think the moment it really clicked for me was last semester. I was taking a class on gothic literature which I was really excited about, and I pushed myself to read all the extra material, which was really easy because I actually enjoyed it and engaged with it! I was chewing through heavy theories and as I read then I was making connections back to my notes and actually really enjoying the process. I would show up to class like a conspiracy theorist with red string links between x theory and y text and z cultural phenomenon. So when it came to writing my essays I already had things that fascinated me enough to dig into.
I wrote about how Kristeva’s theories of abjection (how horror can be created by transcending physical boundaries, and how the (cis) female form is inherently abject due to its childbirth abilities) permeated the female driven narratives of the texts we studied. How it intertwined with theories of the grotesque and reinforced the otherness of the characters. How the stories reinforce or subvert the marginalisation of these women through these devices.
I spent months of that class arguing with my teacher and my class about the way witchcraft is represented in british folk horror, and so I took that frustration and I turned it into another essay. I wrote about the way witchcraft is used as an easy signpost for evilness and otherness in these stories, and how it is often removed from its historical context and yet irrevocably linked to it, so by showing witchcraft as a simple force of evil which threatens rational peoples despite the fact that it was a way to oppress marginalised groups, we reinforce that cultural knee jerk response to otherness, prioritise ‘British rationality’ which is constructed through stories like these, and never challenge the preconceptions of the readership. ‘Why should we fear otherness?’ I ranted, backed up with academic sources, ‘look at the society we have created through this mentality’.
I ended up getting some of the best grades of my life that semester. Every assignment I did across the board got a 1st degree grade. That’s not a brag, it was a breakthrough for me, realising that if I let myself enjoy the process and get experimental and write about things I cared about, then that would be reflected in the work I was producing.
It has opened my eyes as well, and I see these connections in everything I read. Some people say it ruins books to read them like this, but it makes them all the more wonderful to me. Critical analysis of text trains your brain to make connections and unearth meaning, and it helps you reassess or reinforce the way you look at the world. The way literature shapes it and reflects it. For two and a half years I thought my classes were just a fun piss take, and I’m so sad that I didn’t appreciate them more and sooner.
Tl;dr – listen to your English teachers!
As a recovering English major, I endorse this post.
Also: The kind thought this process primes your brain for is one of the most undervalued skills in our society today. We laugh at English majors and Art history majors, because poetry and novels and paintings are “merely decorative,” and have no bearing on The Market – like Statistics and Engineering do.
But once you learn how to follow the thread of an idea through a story (or multiple stories), and articulate its political implications in the culture at large, then you can use those same skills on politicians’ speeches, and advertising, and all the other ways language is used to leverage power.
There’s a reason “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword” is a truism.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
This includes things like Science and Engineering: they turn numbers into stories.
Understanding how the human mind creates narratives will help you understand how scientific theories are developed – and the hidden assumptions they contain. It will help you understand how and why structures and systems are designed, and heir failure modes.
Everything We Do Is A Narrative.
Precisely.
Here’s an excerpt of an essay I wrote on Storytelling some 20-ish years ago (edited to fix spelling errors, and to bold my thesis statement):
Humans are the only [creatures] I’ve
seen who gather in large groups and focus all their attention on one
among them, who, alone, does all the speaking. The crowd falls silent.
Their eyes get wide. Their jaws go slack. And, except for inching
forward to the edge of their seats, they remain motionless. In other
words, humans are the only creatures I’ve seen that engage in storytelling.
Even babies and toddlers who have not yet mastered speech sit still
longer for a story than for other activities. It’s not a phase we
outgrow, either – to our dying day, we find joy in telling and
listening to stories. And, just as there is no time in our individual
lives when stories do not move us, there is no human culture on Earth
without its own, unique body of stories. Since it is both unique to,
and universal among, humans, I cannot help but think that is
storytelling, rather than language, per se, that separates us from other animals. Perhaps our languages became so complex and varied because we needed
them to be in order to tell better stories. You can tell simple
stories, after all, without any language, by acting them out, or drawing
a picture. But with language, you have the tools of metaphor, idiom,
inflection and rhythm – all features that give each language on Earth
its own distinct beauty, and all features which draw in an audience’s
attention and holds it.When we gather for a story (whether
literally, as around a campfire, or figuratively, as when we go to the
movies, watch T.V. or buy a book), we surrender our imaginations to the storyteller’s control.
We abandon, for a while, our private worries, speculations, and
daydreams, to experience a vision created by someone else. A skilled
storyteller can hold and shape our attention, knowing when to fan the
flames of our emotion, and when to let them die down, until the balance
of energy is just right, until that focused energy is released with the
final word. This ability to share our visions, to hold and guide the
attention of our comrades must have helped us hunt animals bigger
and stronger than ourselves, to plant and gather our crops, and to
build our shining cities. The world we live in today has been shaped by
the stories told in our past. And the world of our future is being
shaped by the stories of today.I was quite glad to receive this post in my dash because for the past three weeks of 11th grade I’ve come to realize how random English in is taught in America. In my AP English Language class, half of the students who had this one teacher in 10th grade, knew grammar really well, while the other half were absolutely lost. However, above all, the number one problem for everyone was that no one could really say that they knew how to write an essay or analyze text. For years of my life, my english classes were always repetitively, memorize vocabulary, read a book, take a test on vocabulary, take a test on the reading, random essay here and there, every single year. I don’t remember ever once understanding how to truly write an essay. An essay that is more than just words in a sentence on paper, but one that can grasp my reader. I don’t ever remember really understanding the complexity and the depth of the words of the author. We were always thrown into doing all of these things without ever being taught how to do it in the first place. Similarly to what is said above, I do not understand what I am arguing for when I write an essay. I’ve come to realize how inept I am when it comes to creative writing, especially after realizing that I want to make a comic. This is partly due to the fact that for years it was always academic writing only. No room for creativity. No room to explore. None. After finding my newfound passion for story telling, I’ve found many more topics that I’ve become interested for the sake of story telling. I want to learn creative writing. I want to learn how to improve my writing. I want to learn the skill of literary analysis. If anyone has tips, advice, or materials/sources to recommend to me please freely message me.
Underlined PSA
Figment, the recently closed writing website, has just launched (after a long delay) their long-awaited successor to figment known as Underlined, where users can post their work and receive feedback, supposedly.
DO NOT USE UNDERLINED. DO NOT POST YOUR WORK ON UNDERLINED.
Underlined’s terms and conditions contains a clause stating that the rights to all your work that you post on their website belongs to them!!!!
Underlined belongs to Penguin Random House. This is an extremely dirty trick for them to play on writers, especially young writers and children, who come to the internet to get feedback and will lose the rights to their work. Please boost!!!
For my writing friends looking for an online writing community, DO NOT USE Underlined.
I went to confirm @greater-than-the-sword‘s post, because seriously publishers are still pulling this garbage? And yes, they are. If you want to check out the full terms and conditions, have at it. They are full of writers’ nightmares, a few of which I’ll highlight under the cut.
Be aware guys
As someone who used to use Figment, I would really strongly recommend NOT using Underlined. DO NOT USE Underlined.
@thebibliosphere signal boost for writers
Ugh, how is this still a thing.
Queer Fiction Writer 