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@stubbornandloves2eat / stubbornandloves2eat.tumblr.com

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purronronner
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catominor

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

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literaryreference

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

  1. I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
  2. When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.
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aqueerkettleofish

And the further back we go, the more of a problem it is, because even stuff that's known to scholars isn't known to the general public.

Big Example: Shakespeare. Start with the fact that scholars know very little about the man, and some of what the general public knows about him is incorrect. That picture you see of him? There is no actual reason to believe that it's him. There are no known portraits of Shakespeare done by anyone who laid eyes on the man. Also, there is no record of him ever spelling his name "Shakespeare". We have seventeen examples of him signing his name with multiple spellings, and none of them were the one we use.

But the fact is, we have Shakespeare only because his friends decided his work was too good to be lost (Most of it. There are at least two plays that we know existed but don't have the text. And there's some question about whether some of the work was "enhanced"), and shelled out the money for publication. And since publication back then producer fewer and less durable products than today, additional care was required for those folios to last long enough to be reproduced in other, longer lasting formats. (Plenty of work was published in that time that we don't even know about, because there are no physical copies remaining.)

It is impossible to know how much of the Bard's immortality can be attributed to "he was just that good" (and he was, make no mistake, he was recognized as such in his lifetime) versus "he got reblogged, not just liked".

Part of that immortality is because of his pivotal position in the history of the English language. There's a saying, "Shakespeare was born in Latin, but buried in English", referring to the fact that the English language wasn't the official language, and was in fact considered hickspeak until Shakespeare's lifetime, and not a small part of the credit goes to the Bard himself for doing such wonderful things with it-- even though we know that many of his plots were adaptations of other work. ("Plagiarism" wasn't a concept back then, and in fact several plays of that era survived only because someone went into the audience and copied down the dialogue for the purpose of putting the play on themselves. I could be wrong, but I think one of Shakespeare's plays was saved this way.)

And there's a darker aspect of this, as well.

How much fiction was lost, never to be recovered, due to book burnings? Think about the purges of fanfiction.net, livejournal, and tumblr, and apply that to history.

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dyke2watchout4
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heedra

fuck "girl lunch" fuck "girl math" a woman is a hairy animal who sweats and grunts and excretes and hungers and gets wrinkly and dies eventually. you have to love that.

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heedra

ppl are tagging this post with things like 'ooh i want to meet a woman like this' or with specific characters which kind of misses the point i was trying to make. ALL WOMEN ARE LIKE THIS. IT STANDS IN CONTRAST TO NOTHING. WRAP YOUR ARMS AROUND IT.

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suburbanwildernessdeity
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toskarin

guy who is definitely not about to fall into a surprise midday nap with an aftermath worse than a hangover: it seems like a really good idea to lay in bed and get cozy under the blanket as part of my plan not to fall asleep. I do not know why.

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