The Perfect Explanation Of Privilege – In One Powerful Punchline

the "canon isn't real we make our own rules" to "i am begging you people to revisit the source material" pipeline

Ever since I learned that the people at Bunnings recognise my name due to my frequent delivery orders I've wondered what they think of said orders. Do they have theories on what I've used the well over a hundred 0.9m run of the mill pine shorts that I regularly buy in batches of 20-30 for. Do they wonder why I need quite so many metal brackets. When I stopped buying tiles and grout in small batches at random intervals, did they have feelings on the fact that I'd obviously finished my tiling project.

thinking about how the world would be better if more people understood the differences between 'the author failed to tell the story they wanted to tell' and 'the author told the story they wanted to tell, but they told it badly' and 'the author told the story they wanted to, and they told it well, but it wasn't the story I wanted to read'

here are some interesting surnames I have seen on old graves:

*they’re not inherently “weird” or “rare”, they’re just names I noted for possible future use in my writing

I am constantly dragging my sister into long-ass phone calls and cornering her at family dinners.

She is the wall at which I throw things to see what sticks or, even better, what bounces back with improvements made

the most powerful writing tool is actually Brainstorming With The Girls

Between Cait Corrain and James Somerton, I’m becoming really fucking sick of people using neurodiversity and mental health struggles as excuses to do shitty things.

Autism didn’t make you racist and adhd didn’t make you plagiarize.

You’re just a shitty person.

Procrastination!

I’m trying to do my homework, but I keep looking at the syllabus and going, “UGH, HEMINGWAY!” and then retreating to Tumblr. So. Gonna blather about POV a bit more here instead of reading “Hills Like White Elephants” for the eleventy-billionth time.

sheffiesharpe said: Oh. Hell. Yes. Keep talking point of view. I wish you’d been in my classes. Have you read Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds? Her discussion of point of view, particularly free-indirect discourse (more or less limited 3rd), rocked my world pretty hard.

I haven’t, but I’ve added it to my Amazon wishlist. Mmm, craft books. Third person is one of my weak points, so I’d love to get another perspective on it! (Outside of fanfic, I usually default to first person; in fanfic, I use third person but always feel a little clunky with it.)

So, here’s a thought that I’ve been mulling over: In class last week, my prof pointed out that inserting a character’s thoughts in italics is a POV switch and, in general, is kind of a lazy trick. Any time you switch POVs, she’s been telling us all semester, your reader notices and you risk pulling them out of the story - so only switch POVs for a good damn reason. Suddenly listening in on a character’s thoughts directly when the rest of the story is told from outside their head? Not a good idea.

My gut reaction was “WHAT? NO” because I do that a lot and some of my favorite stories do as well. I always like to be inside a character’s head and know what they’re thinking - I’m a very character-oriented reader and writer, and I love that narrative intimacy. So something like this:

Good god, look at that arse, he thought, eyeing Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. 

…reads as a neat little porthole into the character’s inner workings. But my professor’s right in that, if the rest of the story has a POV that’s a bit more distant, it doesn’t read as well. Something like this would work better:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat, admiring one of his few consistently charming assets.

(For some reason I read this in Karen Eiffel’s voice. Oh, Sherlock/Stranger Than Fiction fusion, someday I’ll get around to you!)

Meanwhile, if the POV is closer, right up in the character’s head anyway, you can get a similar effect by just ditching the italics and thought tags:

He eyed Sherlock from behind as they left the flat. Good god, look at that arse. 

…Which reads more fluidly to me than the original example. There may be something to this. 

I went looking through the fic I’ve always felt was my best example of a successful third person POV, The Apocrypha of Chuck, and figured out that I’d been doing that very thing for much if not all of that fic. The narrative distance between Chuck and the narrator is so close that the narrator may as well be munching on popcorn in a viewing room in the back of his head. There’s no need for the “he thought” tags because the narrator is just spouting verbatim what Chuck’s feeling, pop culture references and all:

Chuck was frozen. His head rang like someone had pounded it on the inside of the Liberty Bell, and it was starting to ache. He wanted to ask aloud, “What do I do?” but the last time he asked that, Dickface told him to write. Chuck was pretty sure that writing wasn’t the proper response to a dead angel on the floor. He was also pretty sure that doing a “Replace All” in The Winchester Gospel to substitute “Dickface” for Zachariah’s name wasn’t the proper response to being told he was Heaven’s butt monkey, but hey, everybody copes differently with stress.

This could’ve easily drifted into internal monologue territory, but the narrator said everything Chuck could’ve, in his own dialect, using the references Chuck himself would’ve used. But this narrator, while being sympathetic to Chuck and sharing all of his pop culture references, has the ability to put Chuck’s thoughts into words when Chuck himself can’t - generally at dramatically appropriate moments.  

That’s the really cool thing about third person narrators: they can carry on telling the story coherently even when your POV character is too overwrought to explain what’s happening. I love my first-person narrators and all, but they take a kick in the ass to explain what’s happening sometimes. 

I’m just rambling at this point and have no good conclusiony point to make, so I’ll just leave this here:

It’s uncanny how similar Trump is acting like Hitler. People are now doing the Nazi salute. They’re drawing the symbol. The KKK was seen in Kentucky asking people to join them. ICE has been ripping families apart. Companies have pulled back Diversity Initiatives. We’re no longer part of WHO and there won’t be any communication from the CDC at least until February 1st. We’re being censored and the news can’t be trusted. Thousands of Americans didn’t know there were protests against Trump yesterday outside the U.S. Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Frank have been compared to what’s going on right now.

According to The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention the U.S. has officially been given a red flag alert for Genocide.

I’m exhausted but I will never stop being angry.

Recommendations for media about translation, interpreting, and foreign languages

Movies and TV

Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020) The Interpreter (2005) The Last Stage (1948)

Books

Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri The Interpreter by Suki Kim Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok Translation Nation by Héctor Tobar Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip Translation State by Ann Leckie

Other Important Topics and Subjects

La Malinche The Rosetta Stone The Tower of Babel The Adamic Language Esperanto Philology Goethean World Literature

Documentaries and History

The Interpreters: A Historical Perspective The Nuremberg Trials Biblical Translation St. Jerome - patron saint of translators Shu-ilishu's Seal (first depiction of an interpreter)