I did not entirely intend to end up this deep down a rabbit hole, but here we are!

The other night after reading the wonderful The Eras Tour Follies post-GO READ THAT POST, everything in there relates to ALL of this as Loie Fuller was a modernist choreographer and so her art relates strongly to everything I will be discussing. Pretty much everything I present here emphasizes the idea that Taylor is leaning into a very specific type of performance art. Anyway, after reading that, facebook suggested to me a post from a page with follies in the name and between that and the line “my swift imagination”, my attention was captured. From the post-
“‘You shall not prison, shall not grammarise / my swift imagination.’ So declares a poem Nancy Cunard wrote in 1919, at the age of twenty-three. The speaker of “In Answer to a Reproof” casts herself as “the perfect stranger / outcast and outlaw from the rules of life”. Conveying something of Cunard’s defiance of social norms, the poem seems to prophesy her later cutting of ties to both her mother and her country. For Jane Marcus, it constitutes “the declaration of independence of female modernism”.Cunard began her writing career as a poet, and her long poem Parallax was published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925.”
Jane Marcus wrote a book called Nancy Cunard: Perfect Strangers which was released in 2020 (post-humuously, the book was finished by her research assistant.) It seems like it was a small university press type deal and not widely available in print, though it seems sites like jstor may have it available in its entirity. The book summary-
“Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger reshapes our understanding of a woman whose role in key historical, political, and cultural moments of the 20th century was either dismissed and attacked, or undervalued. Here, Jane Marcus, who was one of the most insightful critics of modernism and a pioneering feminist scholar, is unafraid and unapologetic in addressing and contesting Nancy Cunard’s reputation and reception as a spoiled heiress and “sexually dangerous New Woman.” Instead, with her characteristic provocative and energetic writing style, Marcus insists we reconsider issues of gender, race, and class in relation to the accusations, stereotypes, and scandal, which have dominated, and continue to dominate, our perception of Cunard in the public record. In the wake of inadequate histories of radical writing and activism, Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger brings its subject into the 21st century, offering a bold and innovative portrait of a woman we all thought we knew.”
I was mostly going to get into her poem Parallax, but after having looked up the entirety of “In Answer to a Reproof”, I HAVE to bring that up as well. Her work isn’t super widely available online, but I did find this weird little poorly formatted archival site that seems to have the full text of her collected poetry . I haven’t read it all (yet), but to start with I’d direct you towards the poems “Outlaws”, “Monkery” and “The Love Story”, but when I read the opening lines to “In Answer to a Reproof” my jaw DROPPED.
“Let my impatience guide you now, I feel
You have not known that glorious discontent
That leads me on : the wandering after dreams
And the long chasing in the labyrinth
Of fancy, and the reckless flight of moods —
You shall not prison, shall not grammarise
My swift imagination, nor tie down
My laughing words, my serious words, old thoughts
I may have led you on with, baffling you
Into a pompous state of great confusion.”
“The long chasing in the labyrinth” “shall not grammarise my swift imagination” (grammarise or gramarize can mean to analyze or describe), are both lines and ideas resonate a lot with what we know about Taylor and her work. The poem is saying, "you will not hold me to these interpretations you have of me, even if I was the one using my words to lead you on and confuse you.”
“...I have concluded we are justified
Each in his scheming ; is this not a world
Proportioned large enough for enemies
Of our calibre ? Shall we always meet
In endless conflict ? I have realised
That I shall burn in my own hell alone
And solitarily escape from death”
The burning imagery, the implications of a deep emotional rift between enemies who might be lovers? This poem, and honestly a lot of her others, have that sort of vibe. This part is justifying the need of enemies in the world and bringing attention to the role of destiny in the fate of two such adversaries. The poem text is available the collected poems I linked above, there is also this handwritten original from Yale’s archives on Nancy Cunard (had to go to the original to figure out what word she was using for solitarily because the formatting was so wonky on the other, lol)
Let’s move on to Parallax! As mentioned above, the poem was originally published by Virgina Woolf’s literary press. It is a long form poem based on the The Waste Land, also a long form poem by T. S. Eliot. This is from the wiki page on The Waste Land-
“widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry…The Waste Land does not follow a single narrative or feature a consistent style or structure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.”
These ideas are all VERY important in modernism. And modernism is VERY relevant to the idea of what Taylor does, but ESPECIALLY what she is currently doing with TTPD.
Modernism was about rejecting the old ideas of things, and trying to rebuild, especially in the aftermath of WW1. Artists,writers, and musicians strongly embraced the idea of the visibility of the artist in their work. They no longer felt compelled to uphold the status quo and traditional methods (of poetry, of painting, of music, of literature, of architecture), they experimented with forms and processes that would be visible to the viewer in ways that had not been common or fashionable in the art world in the past.
Stream of consciousness writing, unreliable narrators, and multiple points of views were new things being explored, especially in writing (A Room of One’s Own by Virgina Woolf being a great and relevant example of this, also go check out the first edition cover-Midnights much…). The artists wanted to invite deeper thought about what was being said and by whom.The way modernism referenced the past was also very relevant. Modernism was known for creating entirely new interpretations of traditional works. Rewriting traditional narratives, creating parodies, satire, incorporating aspects from many other sources and being referential to those sources (the idea of artistic collages, and incorporating old media into new works was being heavily explored).
The definition of Parallax is “the apparent displacement or the difference in apparent direction of an object as seen from two different points not on a straight line with the object”especially : the angular difference in direction of a celestial body as measured from two points on the earth's orbit.”
Okay so I honestly have a hard time wrapping my head around this, but…put your finger in front of your eyes, look beyond your finger, and then alternate closing one eye at a time. The way your finger appears to jump? That is an example of parallax. The closer an object is, the more drastically it appears to move when observed from different places. The further the object, the less it moves. (I find it interesting that Taylor’s shows have been speeding up and going faster? Almost like as she gets closer to…whatever she’s heading towards, the faster, the more drastic the change?)
These are typical visual representations of parallax
https://preview.redd.it/qk5mz85a8b1d1.png?width=1141&format=png&auto=webp&s=22232367790ba25ca7bbab72a39fdffe9e96d703
https://preview.redd.it/ry2565v38b1d1.png?width=733&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c820f59ffcf5307910723217a64dd3e54b986a6
Which majorly reminds me of this.
https://preview.redd.it/jzdd6h4e8b1d1.png?width=1892&format=png&auto=webp&s=613b0265f22a95ddbde729ea23907dabd395f3f3
And I know that there’s only so much one can do with lights on a stage, but I find the visual parallels and the different perspectives during the TTPD set interesting.
https://preview.redd.it/hdepna4h8b1d1.png?width=2134&format=png&auto=webp&s=9fcd00f1e7bd6f72918634100b8cf32bd4e7a9a2
https://preview.redd.it/kmedb1di8b1d1.png?width=1793&format=png&auto=webp&s=a03fe6fbb2e238d15c4858f3f797a7602a9d94de
https://preview.redd.it/7zm1varj8b1d1.png?width=2091&format=png&auto=webp&s=1d3797ec39235a046429f5164e7d995af4fe53e5
And from the lyric video of “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart”
https://preview.redd.it/98d87po19b1d1.png?width=1886&format=png&auto=webp&s=43d6f598c1493d88f2a3cf94f30dbb25a15cff21
https://preview.redd.it/ex2ew8349b1d1.png?width=1888&format=png&auto=webp&s=7069f52988b92e60edd03f76ff8ffe812c1ff7c7
Let’s get back to the poem!
Here is Parallax by Nancy Cunard
Scan from google books of the original printing of the book.
A website with an easy to read full text version.
It's long, but it's WELL worth reading. Very very rich imagery and themes which seems to go along with Taylor's use of similar themes and images
“Provisioning of various appetite.
Midnights have heard the wine’s philosophy
Spill from glass he holds, defiant tomorrows
Pushed back.”
\*
“Think now how friends grow old—
Their diverse brains, hearts, faces, modify;
Each candle wasting at both ends, the sly
Disguise of its treacherous flame . . .
Am I the same?”
\*
"Without prompter for the love-scene or the anger-scene.
And . . . You and I,
Propelled, controlled by need only,
Forced by dark appetites;
Lovers, friends, rivals for a time,
thinking to choose,
And having chosen, losing."
Again, long but well worth reading.
For a couple years, Nancy had a relationship with a man named Lois Aragon. I found this research paper about Aragon’s personal interest in fairy tales and in the author Lewis Carol. Cunard was instrumental in assisting Aragon to create a printed French translation of the Lewis Carol nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark. The paper includes this bit, (part of?) a poem Aragon wrote for Cunard during their first trip together-to London. It is a love poem which uses ideas and imagery from Alice in Wonderland (the pdf of this pastes to nonsense so, screenshot.)
https://preview.redd.it/s2fc5indab1d1.png?width=944&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb1970d7e6a9ae102351ade13bff00e321c9f2b5
So as interesting as I found all of these connections, I did at many points wonder if I was in fact thinking about all of this way too much.
BUT THEN.
BUT THEN.
I decide, I’m just…gonna google Nancy Cunard and Taylor Swift. See if anything, at all, comes up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11956353/Taylor-Swift-films-new-bank-robbery-themed-music-video-Cunard-Building-Liverpool.html
The Cunard Building. She filmed the video for I Can See You. In. The. Cunard. Building. The Cunard Building, which was built for the Cunard Steamship Company. Nancy Cunard’s family.
So now I officially feel like I’ve lost my mind, but I am even more interested in…where this is going and what is the POINT of it all? All of this suggests to me that TTPD has been HIGHLY HIGHLY staged and planned and executed in ways which seem to encompass all of the ideas of modernism, while making reference to modernists and their work (Louie Fuller, Virginia Woolf). She is using herself and her life, as well as them and their works, as the references for the writing. Leaning into the unreliability of her narration, the parody, and the multiple points of views from switching narrators.
And that concludes my post on...introducing Nancy Cunard as a highly probable (in my opinion anyway) inspiration for Taylor's work and life, as well as giving even more context and understanding to what we already knew-she's performing. But trying to be sophisticated about it? And trying to point at a lot of references in order to make us think about the deeper meaning.
I'm EXHAUSTED. And so happy I've finished this. Thank you thank you to this sub for the assistance, moral support, brilliant information, and incredible connections that make us all more knowledgable and better critical thinkers. <3 <3 <3

Good night music lovers. Im here after 5 months of progress (i have posted a 3 weeks progress here too). After my first video i could not stay so focused in the theory and stop the online course that a have start (my house is under renovation and i don’t t have any good space to keep a screen with the course and the piano). So i just stay playing with the sheets with some difficult to read. I have learned one another music before that one, but I believe this one could better show my progress.
I've been dealing with depression for a few years now, and the piano has been the best thing in my day, even though I don't practice sometimes
Any advice is gonna be welcome :)
(Sorry for my English)

Back in February when i drove to Gunma, i found out there was a museum dedicated to Initial D called D’z Racing Cafe Garage. They had different car replicas of the show and the child in me came out when i saw the 86. I wanted to show you guys the experience and hopefully any of you get to visit it.
I tried going to the Akina pass but the whole road was covered in snow. I almost made it to the top but i borrowed a friends car to go there and didnt have the right tires for it so i slid a lot uphill, had to drift a bit with a soccer mom van all the way downhill to even make it, didnt have the chance to play any eurobeat while i was drifing 😂 Sorry i couldnt get pictures or videos of the mountain pass.

Hi there! I have uploaded a couple of new videos to my channel (https://www.youtube.com/@SolarTrails). In these videos I try to demonstrate the viability of autonomous solar ebikepacking. In order to do that, I show as many data as I can: distance, consumption, charging times, altitude gains to provide some kind of guidance to others who want to embark on similar journeys.
If you're into this topic, please subscribe and drop your questions in the comments—I'll gladly answer them.
I'm sharing this in a few like-minded groups, so apologies if you come across it multiple times.
https://preview.redd.it/1to5hpmlbb1d1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a0bf1856cb7d93531db544977b9d78757ea7344e