2019.01.08 00:52 KerriFL r/StressFreeSeason - No Stress Needed!
2013.01.16 09:36 trotsak Learning Russian with Russians
2011.09.27 04:58 k2cougar Handwriting
2024.06.06 16:44 EvenContact1220 Do they focus on handwriting in school anymore?
2024.06.05 19:59 gosellyourowndvds Writing an s after upper connectors
Hi! This is for u/pigs_at_a_banquet since we can't put pics in comments. Oh.... How do I make the username a reference....? đ€ŠđŒââïž submitted by gosellyourowndvds to Handwriting [link] [comments] |
2024.06.05 19:40 LearnHebrew Which one is your favorite?
submitted by LearnHebrew to jewish_hebrewbyinbal [link] [comments] |
2024.06.05 07:30 Just_Scratch1557 Homeschooling Has Been A Blessing For Our Family
2024.06.05 04:45 toko10 The Power of the Pen: Why Cursive Handwriting Trumps Typing for Learning
2024.06.04 20:57 Suspicious_Plane1333 Cursive progress
2024.06.04 18:02 Just_Scratch1557 Homeschool Parents Logic
2024.06.03 21:34 bkultimateGaming How readable is this text? I started practicing today cursive old german by copying from letter sheets. Any tips on how to improve?
submitted by bkultimateGaming to germany [link] [comments] |
2024.06.03 17:51 XGAMER209 Cursive after a week of practice
submitted by XGAMER209 to Handwriting [link] [comments] |
2024.06.01 15:49 Carrots-1975 Kids donât know basic phone etiquette- was our generation the last?
2024.05.30 21:18 chonkshonk RESPONSE: Refutation a moderator from 'AcademicQuran' makes an enormous blunder
The abundance of written records in Arabia suggests that writing was widespread among both settled people and nomads (Figure 7.2); however, its function among both groups was quite different. Macdonald (2009: vol. 1; 2010) established an important distinction between literate societies and non-literate societies based on the role of writing for the functioning of society. Ancient South Arabia exemplifies a literate society. Its officials set up thousands of public inscriptions, recording their deeds, dedications to deities, legal decrees, and so on. The existence of public inscriptions, however, cannot stand as witness to widespread literacy among the general population, as they reflect the work of professional scribes and highly skilled masons. As Stein has pointed out, the wording of even the most personal letters suggests that the sender did not compose the text himself himself, and that recipients were not expected to read them. To explain this, he hypothesized the existence of scribal centres where documents were composed on the behalf of their authors. On the other hand, Macdonald draws our attention to another category of inscriptions in South Arabia that intimates widespread knowledge of reading and writing graffiti. Unlike commissioned inscriptions, graffiti are informal works of individual expression, and as such, must be carved by the author. The existence of thousands of graffiti in South Arabia, always composed in the monumental and only rarely the minuscule script, suggests that a sizable segment of the population could employ writing for informal purposes. The use of the monumental script rather than the day-to-day script of the wooden sticks could have been symptomatic of the medium and need not imply that knowledge of the minuscule hand was more restricted. The evidence for the major oasis towns of North and West Arabia is not as plentiful. Nevertheless, after a close and skillful analysis of the material, focusing mainly on the appearance of inforrmal letter forms and ligatures in the inscriptions, Macdonald concluded that the settled populations of these areas also belonged to literate societies and, as in South Arabia, large segments of the population knew how to write, and presumably, read (2010: 9 â15). (Al-Jallad, "The Linguistic Landscape of Pre-Islamic Arabia," pp. 116â117)Takeaways:
a number of idiosyncrasies ... all point to a single conclusion: Not only has the Arabic script had a long and storied history, it is clear that there was a formalized system of scribal practice with significant sophistication and idiosyncrasy that must have been present and developed already in the pre-Islamic period. This challenges the notion that the pre-Islamic Hijaz was a ânon-literateâ society as for example Stephen Shoemaker would have it.â·â° Neither the Quran, nor the pre-Islamic inscriptions of the centuries leading up to the rise of Islam, show the kind of ad hoc non-literate literacy as one sees among the Tuareg or may hypothesize for the nomadic pre-Islamic Arabic writers that employed the Safaitic script. Instead, there was a formalized scribal practice that required formal education to properly execute according to the existing norms.â·Âč (pp. 125-126)So Van Putten finds that the late pre-Islamic Hijaz was literate and Van Putten is clear that his conclusion is meant in terms of MacDonald's categorization of a literate society and not just widespread ability to write but only employed for informal purposes like with the Tuareg tribe. Van Putten goes on in fn. 70: "[Shoemaker] cites Michael Macdonald to make this point. But one must stress that Macdonald is not talking about the Hijaz of the 6th century but rather the Nomadic writers in the South Arabian scripts. See Macdonald 2010: 5â28; Shoemaker 2022: 125." In other words, the Tuareg analogy is irrelevant and at best concern nomadic Arab tribes until the 4th century.
One may further note Petra Sijpesteijnâs observation that early Islamic Arabic administrative formulae from the very beginning of Islam are distinct from the Greek ones (even in bilinguals) and are not calques. This seems to suggest an already established administrative practice. See Sijpesteijn 2020: 468.Al-Jallad similarly says:
Thus, the growing body of pre- Islamic evidence strongly indicates that the use of Arabic for administration in the early Islamic period does not reflect an ad hoc invention, but the continuation of an established tradition of administration in Arabic which must have its origins in North Arabian and Syrian scribal practices. ("The Linguistic Landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia," pg. 119)From the recent AMA event this subreddit has had with Hythem Sidky, we have the opinion on this subject now by yet another significant expert. I asked Sidky: "What are your thoughts about literacy in the pre-Islamic Hijaz?" Sidky responded:
It's hard to put concrete numbers on it. But based on both the cursive nature of the script itself and the inscriptions, they were literate in the ways the matter. Also, Quranic codices don't strike me as that community's first attempt and producing a book. And if you look at the text of the Quran itself (in contrast to hadith), there are verses that strongly suggest we're looking at a sufficiently literate culture. Emphasis on writing down deeds and contracts, etc..In another comment, Sidky also wrote: "I think the Meccans had a scribal school."
2024.05.30 04:55 Kride46 26M US (kinda)
2024.05.30 04:08 Accetyl_ Just started practicing my handwriting!
I've been practicing a little and sporadically my handwriting, specially my cursive letters, since I don't use it for a lot of years. I noticed my print letter started to scramble with cursive since I started, G and F mostly and writing in cursive some syllables like "of", that's why I wrote almost 3 different ways for each letter. submitted by Accetyl_ to Handwriting [link] [comments] |
2024.05.30 03:26 Typewriterpenpal 28M (US) looking for penpals from anywhere in the world.
2024.05.28 12:19 kkanaaaa Is the art of fcing maps dead?
2024.05.27 12:38 AllPinkInside95 About once a year, I practice writing out my ABCs like we did in our writing tests in elementary school. As a scientist/mathematician with astigmatism who likes to save paper when possible, clarity remains a must; hence the cursive for some common variable characters. Thanks for viewing.
submitted by AllPinkInside95 to PenmanshipPorn [link] [comments] |
2024.05.27 05:10 starting_to_learn Taylor Swift and the Confessional Poets Department: An Anti-Hero's Confessional Journey from Midnights to TTPD
Taylor Swiftâs music has long been branded âconfessional.â When people call Taylorâs work âconfessional,â they might mean that her music is emotionally confessional. But when it comes to Taylor Swift, this belief that her music is emotionally confessional is closely tied to the belief that she is delivering an autobiographical accounting of her life through her lyrics. Her music is perceived as grounded in real events and real people, peppered with âcluesâ that, if followed, will lead you to the True Story she is telling. submitted by starting_to_learn to GaylorSwift [link] [comments] Interesting to consider in light of TTPD, the term âconfessionalâ as applied to art actually has its roots in poetry. The confessional poets were a small group in the late 1950s-1960s who changed the face of American poetry, shifting towards a much more personal, autobiographical style. They included Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and most well-known today, Sylvia Plath - amongst others. The central breakthrough of their work was in âremoving the maskâ that had previously hidden the poet from view in their work. The confessional poets grounded their work in their own personal experiences and laid bare the most intimate details of their inner lives, delving into âtabooâ subjects like mental illness and childhood trauma. This was seen as a major change for poetry to be so grounded in the poetâs interior life and personal history as the explicit subject. These poets became literary celebrities with much attention paid to the details of their personal lives - or in Plathâs case, her death. After falling down a rabbit hole learning about the confessional poets, I believe that Taylor drew inspiration from this group on TTPD and crafted the album, at least in part, as a meditation on the concept of âconfession.â I think her treatment of confession on TTPD is multi-layered - simultaneously pulling back the curtain towards a sincere unveiling of inner truth, while also, on a more meta level, examining what it means to create confessional art and, more broadly, what it means to confess. Iâd argue that TTPD is all at once a personal act of confession, a performance of confession complete with a clue package so on-the-nose People Magazine only needed a day to crack it, and - if youâre keeping an ear out for those red herrings - a subversion of the expectations for confessional art. Which, as it turns out, is not so different from what the confessional poets themselves did. After examining TTPD through this lens, I also revisited Midnights - and I hear the beginnings of this confessional journey stirring on that album, laying the groundwork for TTPD. Within the 321 âexile endsâ countdown theory, this means that she began this confessional journey at 3 (Midnights) and ramped it up at 2 (TTPD). Where do we go from here? She just might be on the road to confessing her truth in swooping, sloping, cursive letters. So, my fellow Gaylors, if youâd like to join me down this rabbit hole - I stand before you with a Disclaimers:
What is confessional poetry?The term "confessional" was first used to describe Robert Lowell's Life Studies, which was considered a "tell-all" on his troubled youth and ongoing mental health struggles. In his review of Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal defined confession as an act of âremoving the mask.â He wrote, â[Lowellâs] speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.â (Source)Robert Lowell became the top literary celebrity of his time, and the confessional genre the most popular genre of poetry. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were Lowellâs students at Boston University and this group all drew inspiration from one another. While the trope of the tortured artist certainly predates this group, itâs notable that, for these poets, âtorturedâ was and is a central part of how the public understood their identities as artists. Interestingly, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton were all hospitalized (repeatedly) at the same psychiatric hospital, McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, and wrote about their experiences. Plath wrote of her experiences there in her famous novel The Bell Jar. One of Lowellâs most famous poems, Waking in the Blue, was written based on his experience at McLean. McLean was described as âAmericaâs most literary hospitalâ in this article from The Atlantic titled "The Mad Poets Society." There is a complicated legacy to the term âconfessionalâ in art, beginning with these poets. Most of them absolutely hated the term. There was a sense that it reduced their art to a mere regurgitation of feelings without craft. There was a tendency to treat their work as very literal autobiography, to reduce it to a reporting of facts, though these poets themselves repeatedly said that, while their work was grounded in personal truths, it was not necessarily always literally factual. There came to be a mythos around these artists - not on the same scale as the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe, but the parallels are there. At the same time as artists resisted the word, the public is undoubtedly hungry for these personal confessions. Today, we need only look at Taylor Swiftâs massive star power to see the draw of so-called confessional art. Note before we move on: Iâm going to use the word âconfessionalâ throughout this post because, right or wrong, itâs the word that is commonly used to describe this type of art, and I also think Taylor is specifically playing with different meanings of the word. I donât mean any disrespect towards the poets who didnât like the term. What Makes Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department Confessional WorksMIDNIGHTS: "Meet Me At Midnight"A return to autobiographical writing was a central part of the sales pitch for Midnights. She wove this message into promotional appearances, for example the Jimmy Fallon interview where she describes Midnights as her âfirst directly autobiographical work in a while.â The album announcement branded Midnights âthe story of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life.â She closes the announcement with âMeet me at midnight.â This return to direct, explicit autobiography, combined with the promise of personal revelations implied in âMeet me at midnight,â places us squarely within the confessional mode. This messaging is especially interesting when we consider that Taylorâs previous work, with the exception of folklore/evermore, is widely considered to be a faithful autobiographical recounting of events from her life. Fans receiving this invitation to meet her at midnight might ask themselves: But havenât we already met you? Havenât you already revealed your innermost feelings and the private details of your life in your songwriting for years? The implication seems to be: no, you havenât met me yet, but you will. The implication is that she is on the road to revealing herself in some new way that will invite us to truly meet her. This calls to mind the imagery of âremoving the maskâ from Rosenthalâs review of Life Studies, pulling back the veneer to reveal what is underneath. Pulling back the curtain, perhaps? https://preview.redd.it/r0r6jwo3nv2d1.png?width=1018&format=png&auto=webp&s=56932d70204cb7f85bf9ecb964736595fd44c007 Importantly, itâs not just us, the public, who are implied to have not met Taylor. Itâs also implied that she is estranged from herself: âFor all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve, weâll meet ourselves.â Midnights represents her first step down the road towards meeting herself - and an invitation for us to join her. While we did not meet her on Midnights, the songs on this album did begin to pull back the curtain. The entire concept of this album, exploring things that keep her up in the middle of the night, suggests a new kind of vulnerability. Taylor herself said of Anti-Hero: âI donât think Iâve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail beforeâŠthis song is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myselfâŠI like Anti-Hero a lot because I think itâs really honest.â (Source) We also have Maroon and Hits Different - the two most obviously sapphic songs sheâs released that she herself classified as âautobiography.â We have Wouldâve, Couldâve, Shouldâve, a searing exploration of lost girlhood. Towards the end of the album and into the 3AM edition, she starts to explicitly grapple with the concept of confession. Interestingly, Taylor has not used the word âconfessâ that often in her discography. Midnights contains two mentions of the word, the most of any TS album at the time of release. The first mention comes in Mastermind when she says: âNo one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So Iâve been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it seem effortless / This is the first time Iâve felt the need to confess.â Mastermind closes the standard edition of Midnights on this note - that this is the first time sheâs felt the need to confess, signaling a new type of revelation. In this context, she is playing with legal imagery. Sheâs been scheming like a criminal, and now she is confessing to the âcrimeâ of masterminding her career to make everyone love her. Then we transition into the 3AM edition, which contains even more themes of confession. We get our second use of the word on Paris, where she longs to confess her truth: âI want to transport you to somewhere the cultureâs clever / Confess my truth in swooping, sloping cursive letters.â Finally, the 3AM edition closes on Dear Reader. While she does not explicitly use the word âconfessâ here, she is very much operating in the confessional mode. The bridge, in particular, recontextualizes the entire album as an act of confession. She describes the songs on Midnights (âthese nightsâ that she wanders through) as the âdesperate prayers of a cursed man spilling out to you for free.â She is spilling confessions out to us on this album in the form of desperate prayers. And then she makes a further confession - âyou wouldnât take my word for it if you knew who was talking.â She begs her audience not to take her at her word, to instead hear her âdesperate prayersâ and see what she is âhiding in plain sight.â Dear Reader is arguably the most confessional song on the album - and it tees us up perfectly for TTPD, where she will take these confessions even further. THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT âConfessionâ is a word with several meanings. I believe that Taylor is exploring all these different meanings of the word on TTPD:
Iâm going to focus below mainly on how TTPD is exploring these different facets of confession. There are layers to the treatment of confession on this album. I would argue that TTPD is all at once a sincere act of confession; a performance of confession, targeted to the public; and a subversion of that performance in the form of âred herrings.â She is so productive, itâs an art! Letâs dive in. CONFESSION AS âREMOVING THE MASKâ The confessional poets pushed the boundaries of what you could say in a poem. Particularly at the time, the topics they were known for writing about were considered quite taboo and improper - and this was part of what made this âbreakthroughâ new and exciting. Consider this quote from Sylvia Plath, then an up-and-coming poet, and how she describes Lowell and Sextonâs work: I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjectsâŠI think particularly the poetess Anne Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsmanlike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting. (Source)On TTPD, Taylor is similarly pushing the boundaries of what you can say in a song - and she is certainly pushing the boundaries past what she has previously said in a song. She is delving deeper into the most intimate and painful elements of her interior life, evoking imagery and subject matters the confessional poets are known for with lyrics like:
https://preview.redd.it/pzhrg40qov2d1.png?width=1266&format=png&auto=webp&s=e68932f37b34ff6acadbceea64f18f9c9ca05536 CONFESSION AS A RELIGIOUS SACRAMENT Art as a Sacred Catharsis: âThis writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all thatâs left behind is the tortured poetry.â The word âconfessionâ calls to mind the religious confessional, where one confesses their sins to be absolved of them. In the Catholic tradition, itâs only through confession that one can be free of their sins, achieve holiness, and re-establish communion with God. Sin constitutes a separation from God; confession allows for âwholeness.â The above excerpt from Taylorâs post about TTPD evokes this religious imagery, where writing music is the act of confession. Our tears become holy when we shed them as ink on a page; when we confess our saddest story, we are free of it. TTPD is that act of confession - a sacred catharsis. She spells this out on the albumâs concluding track, The Manuscript, where she describes the catharsis of channeling agony into art. Once sheâs confessed this story, she is free of it. It isnât hers anymore. https://preview.redd.it/ffv5cjn0pv2d1.png?width=1016&format=png&auto=webp&s=5d8389c1d504110b3e2a110555a86f49c25e57fb In this religious context, TTPD as an act of confession implies the existence of a sin to be confessed. She explores this theme heavily on the album - what it means to be guilty as sin and what it means to be holy. Love as Holiness: âWhat if the way you hold me is actually whatâs holy?â The true nature of holiness and sin is a major theme on TTPD - contrasting traditional notions of holiness and sin against how the author defines these words for herself. While this theme is absolutely rampant on TTPD, itâs not the first time a TS album has asked these questions. This theme blossomed on Lover before reaching new heights on TTPD. On Lover, her love is positioned as sacred. She sings on Cornelia Street: âSacred new beginnings that became my religion.â False God expands on this theme by drawing a contrast between this sacred love and the concept of a âfalse godâ - an act of idolatry, a sin. She seems to say: even if they consider this love to be a sin, WE will still worship this love. We will still make this love our religion. âConfessionâ on False God is the act of making amends with her lover, re-establishing communion between them. âGot the wine for youâ calls to mind the act of receiving holy communion, the body and blood of Christ - which, according to Catholic tradition, you are not allowed to receive when in a state of mortal sin. You must first receive the sacrament of confession before you can partake in communion. On False God, this love is her God - and they make confessions to break down the separation between them and achieve oneness. This contrast from False God - between how others perceive her love as sinful, while she considers it her true religion - carries forward onto TTPD. On Guilty as Sin, she contrasts the âlong-suffering proprietyâ they want from her with âthe way you hold meâ - and she insists this is actually whatâs holy. She takes it a step further on But Daddy I Love Him. Here, she points an accusing finger back at those who would accuse her of sinfulness. She casts the Sarahs and Hannahs as the guilty ones - guilty of hatred, raising you to cage you, âvipers in empathsâ clothing.â They donât need to pray for her because she is not the sinner. They are. This condemnation carries forward onto Cassandra, where she castigates the pure greed of the âChristian chorus lineâ who ânever spared a prayer for [her] soul.â On The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, this man wears a âJehovahâs Witness suitâ - a predator peddling a false idea of holiness. What began on Lover as honoring the holiness of her love transforms on TTPD into a castigation of those who would say itâs a sin. Lover is reverence; TTPD is a righteous fire of judgment sent to engulf a fallen world, a la the End Times. https://preview.redd.it/zj1i5kefpv2d1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&s=78d67df8d85929f3f464bd3e8dfdcd329fe30c4a So, we know what TTPD doesnât consider to be her sin. The question remains - if she is confessing, then what is she confessing to? What sin is she seeking absolution for? The Original Sin: âForgive me, Peter.â Peter is the only song on the album where we hear her ask for forgiveness: âForgive me, Peter.â This evokes the words you would say in a confessional: âForgive me, Father, for I have sinned.â What is her sin? Leaving Peter behind - her âlost fearless leader in closets like cedar.â Preserved in the closet where she left him. She asks Peter to forgive her because she didnât truly want to leave him there: âI didnât want to come down / I thought it was just goodbye for now.â She believed that Peter would grow up and come find her, that they would be reunited - but it hasnât happened. The second and final time she asks Peter for forgiveness comes at the end of the song. She asks his forgiveness for turning out the light: âForgive me, Peter / Please know that I tried to hold on to the days when you were mine / But the woman who waits by the window has turned out the light.â Here, turning out the light symbolizes giving up hope for Peterâs return. Her sin, then, is two-fold: leaving Peter behind and then giving up hope that they could be reunited. And Iâd argue that this is no ordinary sin - this separation from Peter is the original sin of the TTPD universe, akin to the original sin of Adam and Eve that separates mankind from God - the root of all suffering. On Peter, she compares herself to Adam, missing a rib: âThe goddess of timing once found us beguiling / She said she was trying / Peter, was she lying? / My ribs get the feeling she did.â The implication is that Peter is the Eve to her Adam, carved out from her rib - and, in their separation, she feels the hollowness of this missing part of her. The Prophecy evokes this same Adam and Eve imagery: âI got cursed like Eve got bitten. Was it punishment?â This is a direct reference to the concept of original sin and the punishment that followed. The punishment is exile - being cast out of the garden. She can only return there in her mind (âsecret gardens in my mindâ). This all gets very interesting and poignant if we posit that she is singing to a lost part of herself on Peter - that she is in exile from herself. (There have been a number of great analyses of this song through that lens; i.e., this one.) Her original sin of denying herself created this rift within her, which caused her suffering. She confesses in order to return to communion with herself. To become whole again. âForgive me, Peter.â This calls back to the Midnights foreword, the sense of estrangement from herself and the search to find herself: âFor all of us who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching - hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve, weâll meet ourselves.â Importantly, in the Christian tradition, the crucifixion/resurrection was Godâs answer to original sin, building a bridge for humanity to once again be one with God. So, these lyrics from Guilty as Sin are quite relevant here: âWhat if I roll the stone away? Theyâre gonna crucify me anyway.â The willingness to be crucified in the name of rolling the stone away - revealing this reborn version of herself - is the answer to original sin. Rolling the stone away is how she meets herself. And, in this context, rolling the stone away is, in essence, confession. Itâs removing the mask, revealing what lies underneath. Itâs exiting her tomb of silence. Is TTPD the act of confession that will bring her back to herself and allow her to return to the garden? God, I hope so. CONFESSION AS A LEGAL STATEMENT I said earlier that while I think TTPD is a sincere piece of confessional art, I also think that it is intentionally crafted as a performance of confession. By this I mean - TTPD is crafted to give the people what they want and expect from confessional art, particularly Taylor Swiftâs confessional art. And what do the people want? They want the scoop. The gory details of her personal life. They want her to name names and tell them exactly what went down. In other words, they want to trace the evidence. The performance of confession on TTPD hinges on the evidence she feeds the audience and how she directs us to use it. To understand this performance, we have to explore how TTPD navigates the third definition of the word âconfession.â Itâs time to go to court. The Hearing: âAt this hearing, I stand before my fellow members of The Tortured Poets Department with a summary of my findings.â Since announcing TTPD, Taylor has been teasing the concept of this album as a hearing. She spoke of âentering into evidence.â She presented the artifacts. And now here she is, standing before the public, making a âplea of temporary insanity.â https://preview.redd.it/v7fuuh2rqv2d1.png?width=532&format=png&auto=webp&s=90e3c98b43f02dfd592c21f6fa664fdcb443d689 This imagery introduces yet another layer to the concept of this album as âconfessional.â Here, we are in a courtroom, and she is confessing to a crime. She is presenting us with the evidence to support her plea. I think there are two layers to the courtroom imagery. The first is the defendant herself trying to make sense of the losses she has sustained, sorting through the evidence. Hits Different off Midnights introduces this language: âI trace the evidence, make it make some sense why the wound is still bleeding.â This language continues onto TTPD - i.e., in So Long London, she asks, âYou swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?â This is in line with how Taylor has spoken about using music to make sense of her life. But the second layer is that this isnât just Taylor trying to make sense of things on her own. She is confessing directly to an audience - her fellow members of the tortured poets department, the public. She is again breaking the fourth wall, like on Dear Reader. Importantly, this courtroom imagery bookends the listenerâs experience of the album. It served as the audienceâs first introduction to the album at the start of the promotional cycle. And she closes the album with this imagery via the epilogue poem. The whole album is framed as a court hearing. This is fascinating within the context of the Taylor-verse because this framing directly parallels the way the public engages with her music. Her lyrics are treated as a factual, autobiographical accounting of her life (particularly her love life), which the public scours for evidence in an investigative mission to uncover the True Story she is telling vis-a-vis what we know of her personal life. And her music is, in fact, often reduced to an investigation into her love life. To most media outlets and fans, analysis of a Taylor Swift song seems to mean examining which man the song is about. The lyrics serve as evidence, rather than art. So, when Taylor tells her audience that she is entering something into evidence, we are primed; we know what to do. Time to pull out the magnifying glass and every pap photo of Taylor taken in the last two years. Itâs interesting, isnât it, that she gave us so much âevidenceâ to work with over the course of the last year? So many public sightings of her to expertly match up with the lyrics on TTPD. Not to mention the Eras Tour as an opportunity for non-stop Easter egging. She presented her information-hungry audience with a veritable buffet of evidence to pick through and match up with the album. And the album itself is chock-full of âcluesâ linking lyrics back to real-life figures in the TSCU. She already knows that her audience will follow those clues; itâs what happens every album cycle. But this time she doesnât just lay the bait and wait for everyone to take it. She lays the bait and tells us to take it. She says that she is entering this evidence for us to review. She stands before us with a summary of her findings. She directs us to conduct the post-mortem. When was the last time she so brazenly invited speculation? Iâd argue that this brings us right back to the beginning of her career, hiding secret messages in the liner notes and directing her audience to decode the messages to find out who or what the song was about. She said she wanted people to read her lyrics. But the end result was that people read her lyrics without really reading them. Her lyrics that she was so proud of were not treated as art. They were reduced to clues, evidence linking the song to this man or that. And we need only read the Reputation prologue to know how she came to feel about that: https://preview.redd.it/0opkr8marv2d1.png?width=394&format=png&auto=webp&s=4fc76f89e5394b97875169984579eafa2c5bc958 So, it begs the question - Why is she directing her audience to follow the trail of evidence she laid out? Why evoke the language of the courtroom if she doesnât want her music to be paternity tested in the court of public opinion? Why enact this performance of confession that seems to play directly into the publicâs worst impulses? Well, you know what they say: if it feels like a trap, youâre already in one. Red Herrings: âAnd so I enter into evidence my tarnished coat of arms; my muses, acquired like bruisesâŠâ Along with teasing the concept of TTPD as a court hearing from the very beginning, Taylor also introduced the suggestion of âred herringsâ the same day she announced the album. This is no coincidence. A âred herringâ is both a literary device AND a rhetorical device used in legal settings to distract or divert attention away from the main issues of the case. (Source) So, red herrings are a perfect fit for an album that centers on confession, playing in sandboxes both literary and legal. https://preview.redd.it/lvabm4tqrv2d1.png?width=444&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2a7e65afb36575e2525cc726445c9a1e33b91dc If youâre in this corner of the internet, you likely believe that Taylor has been using red herrings in her work for quite some time as a tool to obscure and distract from her real-life muses. Naming a song âStyleâ is a perfect example of how she might very overtly hint at a public-facing muse in order to distract from the true inspiration. But, importantly, no matter how obvious we think these past red herrings were, TTPD marks a first: the first time she has explicitly pointed to red herrings in an album as part of the promotional cycle. The Rep prologue took us halfway there with the assertion that everyone who tried to paternity test the songs would be wrong. But now sheâs saying: I am entering this evidence for you to review, but the evidence itself contains red herrings. I am planting evidence that is going to lead you to the wrong conclusion. Again: If it feels like a trap, youâre already in one. Why do this? Why intentionally misdirect and then TELL us thatâs what sheâs doing? I can only assume that she wants us to see it. If she directs her audience to trace the evidence and tells us there are red herrings - well, then we will look for the red herrings. Or at least some of us will. And if we look closely enough, weâll find them. thanK you aIMee is a perfect example. There are three layers here: First, we have the subject of the song identified as Aimee. Then we have an old-school Taylor âhidden clueâ in the title of the song - capitalizing letters to spell out Kim. Everyone sees that very obvious âclueâ and pats themselves on the back for âsolving the caseâ: the song is about Kim Kardashian. But then we have this line in the song: âI changed your name and any real defining clues / and one day, your kid comes home singinâ / a song that only us two is gonna know is about you.â Seems a bit contradictory, huh? She says she changed any real defining clues, but surely capitalizing letters in the song title to spell out someoneâs name is a pretty defining clue. I smell a red herring. It could be that the capitalized letters are a red herring. It could be that the line in the song about not leaving any defining clues is a cheeky misdirection meant to cast doubt on the âclueâ she left. Iâd argue itâs probably both. Either way, the obvious contradiction built into this particular song serves to cast doubt on the history of Easter egging song subjects in the TSCU. This song takes us right back to the early days of Easter egging, capitalizing letters in lyric books to spell out secret messages. If this is a misdirection, who's to say there weren't misdirections built into the Easter eggs from the beginning? The Alchemy is another example. This song falls near the end of the album, the final âmuse-codedâ song of the standard edition of TTPD. And if youâve been tracing the evidence through the songs up until now, youâll find matching âcluesâ in this song that seem to point at Matty Healy: themes of returning to a lost love, drug references in âheroin but this time with an E.â But wait - now sheâs using a bunch of football references? Thereâs beer sticking to the floor while your friends lift you up over their heads because you just won the big game? The football imagery is so heavy-handed that it took very little time for every entertainment media outlet in creation to post a carousel of TayloTravis images along with lyrics to the song. But if you can keep yourself from getting distracted by the âTayvisâ fanfare, you might ask yourself - what the heck is going on in this song? Is it about Matty or Travis? Is it about both of them? The inherent contradictions point to another red herring, âcluesâ planted to mislead. And, well, if there are misdirections about the identities of her romantic muses built into this songâŠthen whoâs to say there arenât misdirections built into the others? Whoâs to say that anything you think you âknowâ about the identities of her muses is true, even if sheâs the one who planted the evidence? Whoâs to say that she is telling you the truth? This line of questioning cracks open the entire foundation of muse-driven Easter egging in the TSCU. Following the trail of evidence to the red herrings she planted about muse identities will lead you to question the entire enterprise of following the evidence in the first place. And I think thatâs precisely the point. Youâre in a trap, and she wants you to know it. Because this practice of attaching public-facing male muses to all of her work has Taylor in a trap, too. As she says in Mastermind, sheâs spent her whole career âscheming like a criminal to make them love [her] and make it seem effortless.â This is the first time sheâs felt the need to confess. Sheâs copping to the scheming, pointing us to the red herrings. Sheâs asking us to accept her plea of temporary insanity on account of her restricted humanity. Asking that we understand the plight of the caged beast, driven to do the most curious things. And if weâre going to understand, then we must understand this: weâre all in a trap. If her fans are going to embrace her rolling the stone away, they have to first see that tomb of silence for what it was: a trap ensnaring us all, limiting her artistic expression, and preventing her audience from hearing the core truth in her music. https://preview.redd.it/exlv6veusv2d1.png?width=518&format=png&auto=webp&s=660f3e680f1a8403a6406205f9e346e19c63abd1 Confessional Art: How much is confession? How much is art?So, weâve established these core precepts of the TTPD Universe: TTPD is a sincerely confessional album, representing a continuation of our anti-heroâs journey towards âmeet me at midnight.â At the same time, TTPD is not necessarily based in literal, factual truths - and Dr. Swift has confessed that to us, too.Is that a contradiction? Do the red herrings she planted exist in opposition to confessional art? I would argue, no, they do not. The publicâs foundational understanding of confessional art is that it is faithfully, literally autobiographical. It tells us the factual truth about the author. But just how true is that? For the confessional poets, when it came to truth in art, facts were besides the point. Consider this quote from Robert Lowell about his artistic process (emphasis mine): âThey're not always factually true. There's a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete flux. I've invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of the poem was something invented. So there's a lot of artistry, I hope, in the poems. Yet there's this thing: if a poem is autobiographicalâand this is true of any kind of autobiographical writing and of historical writing, you want the reader to say, âThis is true.â In something like Macaulay's History of England, you think you're really getting William III. That's as good as a good plot in a novel. And so there was always that standard of truth which you wouldn't ordinarily have in poetryâthe reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert Lowell.â (Source)Here, Lowell seems to say that a core part of his artistic mission was to write poetry that would be experienced as true. He crafted his poems to deliver the experience and impression of the âreal Robert Lowell.â And this is separate and distinct from delivering factual truth. In fact, he âtinkered with factâ as part of this artistic choice - to create a poem that would be experienced as true, even if it technically was not in the strictest sense of the term. Anne Sexton made similar comments about her poems - that she did not always adhere to literal facts. In one interview, she described these untruths as âlittle escape hatchesâ so she would âalways have an out.â She goes on to say: âI can tell more truth than I have to admit to because I can tell the truth and say, after all, âThis was a lieâ or âOf course not all of my poems are true.ââ These escape hatches, then, opened up room for her to tell more truth. Perhaps not always the literal kind, but the sincere core truth that audiences recognize and respond to as âtrue.â The use of âred herrings,â then, is not in opposition to the confessional mode. Red herrings can actually enhance confessional art when changing factual details allows room for the author to share pieces of themselves that they otherwise would not. And, further, the experience of truth for the audience does not hinge on strict adherence to literal facts. The audience needs to feel that they are getting the real Robert Lowell. The real Taylor Swift. Maybe we haven't met the real Taylor Swift yet. But I think TTPD brought us several steps closer. |
2024.05.27 03:27 budgetmarziapan Handwriting for Exams
2024.05.25 19:13 literallyinlimbo [thank you] embarrassingly overdue thank yous
2024.05.24 17:48 gosellyourowndvds I got some new pens today!
This was really fun to do. submitted by gosellyourowndvds to Handwriting [link] [comments] |
2024.05.24 04:26 BillyBurl1998 2 months of progress in improving my penmanship!
Just wanted to share with everyone who has shitty handwriting like I do. It can get better! But it definitely takes time. I've been spending 15 to 30 minutes every night, and looking for every excuse to put pen (or pencil) to paper at work. The second biggest thing that's help is slowing down and practicing individual letters. I also relearned cursive, and it's become my primary form of writing! Overall I'm very happy to have found this sub. Thx for all the advice yall give and any for mine is welcome. submitted by BillyBurl1998 to Handwriting [link] [comments] |
2024.05.23 16:31 Thedog8202 Does anyone have any good practice sentences for cursive handwriting
submitted by Thedog8202 to russian [link] [comments]