the silmarillion, “of beren and lúthien,” j.r.r. tolkien // hadestown, “come home with me (reprise),” anaïs mitchell // to noise making (sing), hozier // the return of the king, j.r.r. tolkien // hadestown, “doubt comes in,” anaïs mitchell // the svenborg poems, bertolt brecht // the silmarillion, “of the return of the noldor,” j.r.r. tolkien
“it’s not queer fiction unless the queerness is explicitly declared in the text according to currently accepted terminology and in a way that meets the approval of the entire audience” I mean follow your heart I guess but I trust myself as a queer person to recognise queer themes
“but doesn’t this risk giving the author undue credit for queer representation” I do not care about the author
My old friend (and for almost thirty years my family’s doctor) Dan Johnson has a charity he started in memory of his son, Alec, who was drowned in 2014. One of the projects they are supporting is helping a couple who work in Haiti with abandoned children (and aren’t part of the Haitian “orphanage industry”). The couple are raising funds to buy the compound they and the children are in, and I’m helping Dan by linking to
Following a lot of classicists who are understandably mad at retellings of hades and persephone as this wholesome power couple being framed as the pinnacle of feminism and so I would like to suggest an opposite retelling wherein persephone ritually murders her husband each year and ascends to the queen of the underworld, reigning over it for all of winter until she cedes her crown to journey back and usher in the season of spring. I think this would make nobody happy and everything worse.
I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together
Examples:
- guy at work “Yes, and -” ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff
- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the “- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*” as loud as possible
- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names
- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change
- very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler’s questions like we were on Letterman
The three pillars of humanity, in no particular order, are Joy, Absurdity, and Sharing
learning that self depreciation isnt cool and just makes the people around you uncomfortable unironically improved my mental health a lot. like if you just stop saying negative shit about yourself you will genuinely like yourself more and other people wont be repulsed by your attitude and you will have more friends. it’s true.
