Pat Barker’s Degeneration

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies.

The most basic, fundamental, inescapable consequences in life are those that come from how we all choose to spend our limited time. You get good at the things you do a lot. If there are things you want to be good at, you need to put time and effort into practicing them, or you will become bad at them. That is just how things work.

You want to be good at communicating with people? Be thoughtful and focused when you talk with people or when you write messages to them.

You want to be good at reasoning, thinking, and reflecting so that you're... I dunno... competent and not so easy to scam or dupe? You're going to have to put persistent time and effort into practicing those skills.

my fav thing about sunrise on the reaping was when haymitch was like yeah caeser i'm a lone wolf 😏 i'm with the newcomers but i'm not WITH the newcomers, yknow? they call me a rascal. a rebel against the gamemasters. I scored a ONE and that is a THREAT. you do not want to mess with me 🙅

cut to him with like 20 kids following him around like ducklings, him hiding in his t-shirt, him letting a bunny guide him to safety because it reminded him of his girlfriend, and him making nightlights out of potatoes.

Haymitch and his ducklings

Schalcken the Painter (1979), director Leslie Megahey

A close up of the Blanket Octopus during a blackwater dive with The Three P diving club , Romblon Island, Philippines. Credit: Joseph Elayani

krater decorated with ganymede | c. 500 - 490 BCE | berlin painter, athenian. found in central italy.

in the louvre collection

me trying to do everything during a bad dream where i've forgotten my pants.

Thanatos (1899) by Jacek Malczewski

I keep a list of poets I need to check up on now and again on my phone

in times of stress you see

and every now and again I get bodied once more.

maybe life is worth living!

one of the blorbos in my notes has a book coming out and I checked just when the preorder became available ✨✨✨✨

Edouard Rosset-Granger - Femme à la bulle de savon, décor japonisant (1898)

how come you'll say tragedy is your favorite genre and then 100 thousand million people will be like "you should check out this adaptation of this famous tragedy but the twist is there's a happy ending this time." GET THAT AWAY FROM ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

nobody ever tells me to check out a Hamlet adaptation where things go even worse for him

Imo Dumas' French translation is a worse bad ending AU!

The facts of the case as I understand them.

Winter is a bit of a stretch- where did she get all the flowers then? Apart from that, the circumstances remain dubious.

Here's what Gertrude says, as the person who reports the death. She/Shakespeare never say she was actually there. The Queen could be reporting what someone said to her, or everyone could be surmising what happened based on the body they found.

-Ophelia is climbing a tree which hangs "askant" over a brook -a load-bearing branch cracks underneath her and she falls in. -Ophelia doesn't understand that she's in danger- in her state, she's "incapable of her own distress". This is important. -she stays in the drink until her clothes get too heavy for her to swim, and she's pulled down.

Even though Horatio was previously told to keep a good watch on her, we're meant to believe Ophelia was alone when she drowned, or else in too precarious of a situation for someone to help her. We know Horatio wasn't there because he's (presumably) just as surprised as Hamlet when they see her getting buried later on. He was too distracted by Hamlet's letter to keep a good watch. I am 50/50 on whether Gertrude saw any of this, or if she's starting the cover up of a suicide so Ophelia can still be buried on holy ground by insisting Ophelia could not have been capable of willful self harm because of her mental state. The gravedigger says her death is "doubtful" so there's enough ambiguity around the incident that she could have been buried somewhere else, probably because nobody saw it... Or because Gertrude tells a "muddy" enough story that suicide is inferred and Ophelia's burial seems like a big favour to Laertes, who is going through it and just needs one more thing to kill Hamlet. Claudius very archly tells her after that he spent a lot of time trying to calm Polonius Jr. down and now they're back to square one. What makes the most sense to me: - Ophelia is capable of her own distress. Though she's distraught, she recognizes people and danger, and she makes associations. She was vital and energetic. - People tell Gertrude a lot of different stories and she believes them. Especially Claudius. Especially about murder. She could be reporting something someone told her. I usually don't think she saw/was a part of this death because the way she describes how Polonius dies (a death she did witness) is very different. How she reacted to that death was very proactive; I don't think she would have let Ophelia drown without trying to help. - Usually reliable, Horatio left her alone at a crucial time. Was he distracted/stage managed so she would be alone near the creek? Possible. - Lots of people are happy to do the King's bidding, and he surrounds himself with sycophants. I think he ordered the death because her behaviour made him paranoid the way Hamlet's behaviour did. Then he felt his usual remorse, and overcompensated by interfering in the manner of her burial and making Laertes something of a favourite. Just like when he killed Hamlet's dad and felt bad enough about it to declare him his heir. He just operates this way; this is Claudius' murder through and through.

#fascinating#I like the take that Gertrude is misconstruing the suicide so she can be buried on holy grounds#that feels fitting with the continuity of the story

Prev this is one of my favourite interpretations for Gertrude, and has definitely been the way a lot of actors I've seen play it. As a person who is practical before she's spiritual, she knows a burial on unconsecrated ground hurts the living family even if she doesn't believe in an afterlife and unsettled ghosts (and if she does believe in unsettled ghosts, then maybe this is her way of making sure she doesn't see Ophelia anymore)

isabelle adjani in costume for “l'ecole des femmes”