@comradeocean / comradeocean.tumblr.com
favourite movie list lets go!!
mercilessly ordered bc I'm that sorta freak. also I feel like once I start straying out of the IMDb 250 or letterbox 100 or tumblr 101 or whatever, the choices are like extremely and uncomfortably revealing. like, if you've watched more than idk 40 of these movies I'm way worried abt Being Known yknow? ANYWAY
Chen Xianfa, translated by Tammy Ho
Better to discuss bodies squeezed dry than waste words on old clothing. He said, writings that speak of violence often mask themselves with sophisticated language. When I first read the book, I was a child, accompanying my father fishing at the creek. The old Party member rubbed his hands and threw dirty bait into the pond. I, in the canoe, or amidst a bed of collapsing canola flowers slept till my heart seemed to stop beating. Under the sunlight, I was momentarily revived and remembered a bunch of angry phrases.
To my family, this is an unspeakable legacy. My grandmother believed in Buddhism, while my father, a reckless tractor driver, would have wanted to burn all nineteen provinces. He believed that something new could be born from ashes. The two of them fought. They begged, they wrestled, and deep in the evening, they cried in the corridor. Grandma wrapped the statues of temple gods and goddesses in a white cloth and hid them under her bed. In the end, she starved herself to death to fulfill the bodhisattvas' teachings. My father, now, also sleeps among the mountains. Over there, "exploitation" is still a word. "universal economic equality" is still a dream. The tomb's hardwood, battered by mocking rain, is evergreen.
To die because of an old book is exactly the way things should be. All these years, I've had a fetish for writing history through the camera's lens. But I cannot ascertain how the nooses on innocent ghosts can dissolve into the rhythmic pattern of empty mountains and new rain. Because the castle that hung a flag as bait is long gone. Death's ashes should remain undisturbed, but that doesn't stop me from re-reading Marx. Those two or three epiphanic birdcalls from my first reading are still there. It's as though the pond collects bubbles to finally depart. The level of danger tends towards the end of aesthetics.
再读《资本论》札记 作: 陈先发
奢谈一件旧衣服， 不如去谈被榨干的身体。 他说，凡讲暴力的著作常以深嵌的呓语为封面。 第一次枕着它， 是小时候陪父亲溪头垂钓。 老党员搓着手， 把肮脏的诱饵撒向池塘。 我在独木舟上，在大片崩溃的油菜花地里 睡到心跳停止。 日冕之下，偶尔复活过来 记得书中一大堆怒气冲冲的单词
对家族，这是份难以启齿的遗产。 祖母信佛， 而父亲宁愿一把火烧掉十九个州县。 这个莽撞的拖拉机手相信， 灰烬能铸成一张崭新的脸。 他们争吵， 相互乞求，搏斗， 又在深夜的走廊上抱头大哭。 祖母用白手帕将寺庙和诸神包起来， 藏在日日远去的床底下， 她最终饿死以完成菩萨们泥塑的假托。 而父亲如今也长眠山中， 在那里， “剥削”仍是一个词。 “均贫富”仍是一个梦想。 坟头杂木被反讽的雨水灌得年年常青
为一本旧书死去， 正是我们应有的方式。 多年以来，我有持镜头写史的怪癖。 只是我不能确知冤魂项上的绞索， 如何溶入 那淅淅沥沥的空山新雨。 因为以旗为饵的城堡早已不复存在。 理当不受惊扰的骨灰， 终不能免于我的再读。 初识时， 那三、两下醒悟的鸟鸣仍在。 像池塘在积攒泡沫只求最终一别。 而危险的尺度正趋于审美的末端
Well, I figure there can never be enough translations of poems. . . here's one by me! All intentional line breaks are capitalized, others are from running over the tumblr post line length. Feel free to offer corrections or ask about my decisions.
Rereading “Das Capital” Notes
Excessive to discuss an article of old clothing, Better to discuss a wrung-dry body. He said, writings on violence are often embedded under the cover of sleep talk. The first time I used it as a pillow, Was in my childhood when I accompanied my father to the creek to fish. The old Party member rubbed his hands, And scattered the dirty bait in the pool. In the canoe, within the collapsing plain of canola flowers, I slept until my heartbeat stopped. Under the sun, I’d occasionally come back to life And remember a bunch of the book’s spitting hot phrases.
To my family, this is a disgraceful inheritance. My grandmother was a Buddhist, But my father would rather a fire burned away the nineteen provinces. That reckless tractor driver believed, That from the ashes could be forged a brand new face. They argued, Mutually begged, struggled, And in the hallway in deep night held their hands to their heads and cried. Grandmother used a white handkerchief to wrap up her shrines and various gods, To hide beneath the bed which day by day drifted away. In the end she starved to death to complete her emulation of her clay bodhisattvas. Father too now rests forever in the mountainside, In that place, “Exploitation” remains a phrase. “Economic equality” remains a dream. The burial mound’s various trees, irrigated by the mocking rain, year by year grow evergreen.
Dying for an old book, Is precisely in the manner which we deserve. For these many years, I’ve had the peculiarity of using the camera lens to write history. But I still can’t be certain of how the nooses fastened to the necks of wronged ghosts Can be dissolved Into the pittering pattering of new rain on the empty mountain. Because the castle that used the flag as bait has long since ceased to exist. I shouldn’t be startling the cremains, But still, I can’t be exempted from my reread. The first time’s Three or two awakening birdcalls are still there. Like the pool is accumulating bubbles only to beg a final farewell, And the scale of danger now tips towards the endpoint of aesthetics.
whoa!! I'm very curious about the last few lines (last stanza in general) and I'd love to join this relay and try a translation as well, but I've got some stuff going on and won't have much free time until late next week. very coooool
Chen Xianfa, translated by Tammy Ho
Better to discuss bodies squeezed dry than waste words on old clothing. He said, writings that speak of violence often mask themselves with sophisticated language. When I first read the book, I was a child, accompanying my father fishing at the creek. The old Party member rubbed his hands and threw dirty bait into the pond. I, in the canoe, or amidst a bed of collapsing canola flowers slept till my heart seemed to stop beating. Under the sunlight, I was momentarily revived and remembered a bunch of angry phrases.
To my family, this is an unspeakable legacy. My grandmother believed in Buddhism, while my father, a reckless tractor driver, would have wanted to burn all nineteen provinces. He believed that something new could be born from ashes. The two of them fought. They begged, they wrestled, and deep in the evening, they cried in the corridor. Grandma wrapped the statues of temple gods and goddesses in a white cloth and hid them under her bed. In the end, she starved herself to death to fulfill the bodhisattvas' teachings. My father, now, also sleeps among the mountains. Over there, "exploitation" is still a word. "universal economic equality" is still a dream. The tomb's hardwood, battered by mocking rain, is evergreen.
To die because of an old book is exactly the way things should be. All these years, I've had a fetish for writing history through the camera's lens. But I cannot ascertain how the nooses on innocent ghosts can dissolve into the rhythmic pattern of empty mountains and new rain. Because the castle that hung a flag as bait is long gone. Death's ashes should remain undisturbed, but that doesn't stop me from re-reading Marx. Those two or three epiphanic birdcalls from my first reading are still there. It's as though the pond collects bubbles to finally depart. The level of danger tends towards the end of aesthetics.
continuing to douse myself in as-am autofiction out of some kind of masochism and I am so secondary character coded it's unnerving. you know the dour stodgy judgmental anti conformist NERD AZN foil for the boy-crazy make-up loving self-hating cool kid ARTS AZN main character
I feel it's very much faildaughter stealing valour bc my archetype characters are always successful and rich and put together compared to the woe is me messed up rebel while I literally do not know a single AZN person I grew up w or anywhere remotely in my circle of acquaintance who has less educational attainment and stable work experience than me. like I have literally never managed to get a salaried job bc you usually need a bachelor for that lol
also these accounts tend to portrayal the Asian Parents as Unknowable Mysteries whose internal lives are a complete black box when by the time we emigrated I already knew so many things abt my parents and other extended family that no six year old had any business knowing and this Knowing has formed the basis of the relationship I've had w my family since then
continuing to douse myself in as-am autofiction out of some kind of masochism and I am so secondary character coded it's unnerving. you know the dour stodgy judgmental anti conformist NERD AZN foil for the boy-crazy make-up loving self-hating cool kid ARTS AZN main character
I feel it's very much faildaughter stealing valour bc my archetype characters are always successful and rich and put together compared to the woe is me messed up rebel while I literally do not know a single AZN person I grew up w or anywhere remotely in my circle of acquaintance who has less educational attainment and stable work experience than me. like I have literally never managed to get a salaried job bc you usually need a bachelor for that lol
Ling Ma's Peking Duck is v v funny. more than anything, I would describe it as humourous. and maybe as a result I've found most reviews of it also (unintentionally) hilarious. eg, the jacobin review. and every single one that uses the adjective "tender"
I've read 5 stories out of the 8 in the collection and I have to say this (italics mine)
AS: Hmmmm. Maybe a disinclination to appear to disagree with each other, or an anxiety about potentially undercutting different kinds of work? I think, or at least choose to operate, from the assumption that there is a lot of space in publishing for all different kinds of Asian American narratives—but that wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t the case for a long time, so it makes sense that there would be a scarcity mindset around this. Does that make sense? LM: Yes, I was also thinking along those same lines. There is a pressure to give the appearance of solidarity, partly due to the historic scarcity of representation. For a time, there was some movie interest in “G,” and I sat in on some meetings with production companies. (Long story short, it didn’t turn out.) I just remember during one meeting, an executive asked me, “What do you think this story says about women?” But that wasn’t the question she was really asking. The real question was, “What do you think this story says about Asian American women?” And of course “G,” which is about two Chinese American girls, one who sabotages the other, is not exactly a heartwarming tale of friendship. Because of the scarcity of representation, there was this pressure to put out a positive portrayal. But then you end up flattening characters and putting out a PSA. Anyway, in “Peking Duck,” I think both the narrator and Matthew are laboring under this burden of representation. They’re both frustrated by it and, in this case, he kind of takes it out on her.
is completely disingenuous/marketing/wrong. It makes me think even less of the other Bliss Montage stories I read and really takes the sheen off of that scene with Matthew, which had been one of my favourite parts of Peking Duck. It makes me want to assume the most of the best parts of Peking Duck were probably straight up transcription.
99 out of 100 depictions of racial sisterhood in Chinese American lit is precisely comprised of sabotage, competition, and resentment. Let's not delude ourselves. ~ heartwarming tales of friendship ~ between Chinese (American) women do not get written. I felt like I read 5 - 8 similar versions of G at this point in my life. The last time anyone had anything interesting to say about representation was probably in 1983. Pack it up. Go home.
And please, please, please, no more autofiction, please.
the problem being I was told it was going to be surrealist near future science fiction horror and what I was met w were the agonies of the couple/pair form, usually with white men comprising the other half.
I know my whole thing was about not picking up autofiction again for a while but I read some excerpts of Xiaolu Guo's work today and I will probably hate it too if I were to actually read something in its entirety but I think the conceit she's going for is that her fiction is ostensibly about romantic love but is in fact almost about everything else BUT that. this inverse I find much more palatable and interesting. the other notable thing is the way she depicts the appearances of communism/socialism in post-high socialist (so 80s, 90s, 2000s) China not as cynical exercises of formalism, but as genuinely held beliefs and practices. I appreciate it so much bc it's one of my major projects.
Ling Ma's Peking Duck is v v funny. more than anything, I would describe it as humourous. and maybe as a result I've found most reviews of it also (unintentionally) hilarious. eg, the jacobin review. and every single one that uses the adjective "tender"
I've read 5 stories out of the 8 in the collection and I have to say this (italics mine)
AS: Hmmmm. Maybe a disinclination to appear to disagree with each other, or an anxiety about potentially undercutting different kinds of work? I think, or at least choose to operate, from the assumption that there is a lot of space in publishing for all different kinds of Asian American narratives—but that wasn’t always the case, and it wasn’t the case for a long time, so it makes sense that there would be a scarcity mindset around this. Does that make sense? LM: Yes, I was also thinking along those same lines. There is a pressure to give the appearance of solidarity, partly due to the historic scarcity of representation. For a time, there was some movie interest in “G,” and I sat in on some meetings with production companies. (Long story short, it didn’t turn out.) I just remember during one meeting, an executive asked me, “What do you think this story says about women?” But that wasn’t the question she was really asking. The real question was, “What do you think this story says about Asian American women?” And of course “G,” which is about two Chinese American girls, one who sabotages the other, is not exactly a heartwarming tale of friendship. Because of the scarcity of representation, there was this pressure to put out a positive portrayal. But then you end up flattening characters and putting out a PSA. Anyway, in “Peking Duck,” I think both the narrator and Matthew are laboring under this burden of representation. They’re both frustrated by it and, in this case, he kind of takes it out on her.
is completely disingenuous/marketing/wrong. It makes me think even less of the other Bliss Montage stories I read and really takes the sheen off of that scene with Matthew, which had been one of my favourite parts of Peking Duck. It makes me want to assume the most of the best parts of Peking Duck were probably straight up transcription.
99 out of 100 depictions of racial sisterhood in Chinese American lit is precisely comprised of sabotage, competition, and resentment. Let's not delude ourselves. ~ heartwarming tales of friendship ~ between Chinese (American) women do not get written. I felt like I read 5 - 8 similar versions of G at this point in my life. The last time anyone had anything interesting to say about representation was probably in 1983. Pack it up. Go home.
And please, please, please, no more autofiction, please.
I'm still fucking thinking about people advocating neo-Confucian ~extended family~ as a better alternative to western nuclear family. like girl i know there's that assumption that everyone is a white yankee but have you literally never talked to anyone who grew up in a family like that?
our barbarous system where children are the property of their parents vs their glorious system where children are the property of their parents (mystical oriental)
it's like that broader thing where people try and thin down a criticism like "you mean organised religion", "white western nuclear family", "this is such a white people thing" etc to try and weasel their way out of association with an issue.
Misogyny is not a western invention lol, the way it manifests in a lot of societies is a product of certain cultural manifestations of misogyny being exported elsewhere, but the control and ownership of women is not a "white people thing" or a western thing.
the issues of the family are not limited to the anglo saxon protestant yankee middle class nuclear family, misogyny is not unique to one group of people, racism is not unique to one group of people, homophobia is not unique to one group of people, terfs are not all middle class white women, etc etc etc etc
it's just so frustrating and kills any fucking attempt to actually talk about issues because they get drowned out with people appending on specific identities as if that issue is unique to one fucking group of people and the rest of the world is sunshine and rainbows.
the only reason Chinese society is even slightly bearable is bc of the communist revolution. if you think otherwise you prob don't consider women as fully human. THAT SAID, it feels pointless to post this on tumblr bc here is not where the "you"s being addressed generally like to hang and instead the main audience from a quick skim of the tags are those with a vicarious investment in slamming down hurf durf those dummies think capitalism invented misogyny everything is always the fault of evil western inperialism WHEN social relations in present day PRC (to take the specific example I'm running on) has everything to do w the (partial? opinions differ on this, for me, too soon to tell) restoration of capitalism and rapprochement w the West, a condition that is universally the case under our current world system something so obvious that it might as well be a truism yet how do so many ppl get off assuming this is a golden opportunity to indulge in some whataboutism and box the shadows from 8 yrs ago that made them feel it was a moral failing they didn't sufficiently criticize colonialism once or something idk just judging by the tone of some reblog tags
i feel like i've seen you mention this somewhere in one of your posts? but i was curious what you meant by ao3 house style, if you could describe it etc. i feel like i kind of know what you mean but i'm not sure
well, its a bit hard to describe, is the thing, but if you've been in any major slash fandom, you've definitely encountered it. from my own past fic, i think there are multiple examples that are standout examples of "ao3 house style" - this fic, for example, and this one. (for more of the angst(ier) front, there's this and this). lots of present tense, lots of "the thing is" or "here is the thing", a lot of these trite declarative statements that stand in for depth, interiority without interiority, too many self-deprecatory and wry asides, all the characters sound uniformly the same.
the sex is usually written in a very formulaic present tense register that's meant to capture the consciousness of being turned on, which reads better than "x did y and then z", but ultimately becomes very samey after a while. or else there's too much consciousness and emotions in the sex, but very little grounding in the bodily.
in the "angstier" or more "serious" fics, you get attempted symbolism or motifs but the interpretation of these has a faux-depth to them and the only possible reading is very shallow (there was this one padma & parvati patil fic where bangles was a recurring motif and it was like reading someone having successfully emulated a chitra banerjee devakaruni story but somehow with even less depth in the "indian" motifs present); a lot of characters trying to elide what they mean but in a way that makes the conversation artificial rather than striking a realist note; repetition of phrases that are thought to be serious/profound/heavyweight to the point of excess.
basically a lot of rudimentary use of literary technique - but its a bit surface level and can feel intrusive because of how often it draws attention to itself (e.g. the repetition technique, or these symbols & motifs that don't quite go anywhere because their presence is largely confined to a very surface level meaning/interpretation, or an attempt to capture stream of consciousness while actually avoiding the way that consciousness often sprawls, an attempt to use present tense to foster immediacy).
i mean also, some of this varies from fandom to fandom. some of it is to the point where like, you can pick up a novel without having the first idea about its author and immediately your sixth sense tells you that this person was in x fandom once upon a time (e.g. reading in memoriam and wondering who was meant to be which HP character, till a mutual informed me the author was ex-drarry and a lot of things made sense about it; reading RWRB and immediately knowing the author was definitely in one of the big 2009-2011 slash fandoms - the styles are totally dissimilar, but both of them come from strains of writing style that are distinct to LJ/ao3-based fandom).
its not necessarily a bad thing. it just can be frustrating when its the only thing you get and also when people begin emulating these styles because they think its the right or only way to write fanfic - or even worse, pass around as "writing advice" something that would essentially get people writing in purely ao3 house style (there was a post i saw abt a week ago about how to write sex scenes that essentially would have pushed authors from attempting anything interesting or unique to their voice/thinking/story into a formulaic "you set the tone for the act, then you get into the psychological depths, and you stay there and come out only when people are coming" kind of sex scene). its also frustrating when people treat this as a super elevated and superior style to other kinds of writing. its not lmao.
not to be a vain self centred self hating narcissist or anything but I THINK I WROTE THAT PATIL TWINS BANGLE FIC
it was the first fic I'd ever written! back in 2007 when I was fresh out of a high school literary arts program having bulldozed my way through a pile of Rohinton Mistrys, Desais (Anita and Kiran, of no relation), Ondaatjes, Lahiris, and of course God of Small Things, before ao3 even existed. (we had stacks of Anil's Ghost and Fall on Your Knees lying around the classroom. none of it was compulsory reading. you had to have been there — pre-Austerity alt Ontario curriculum carve-outs, so very missed!)
beside the shitton of middlebrow* diaspora lit that the market was flooded with at that time, I was also about three years or so into reading and loving wannabe litfic fandom style on lj and ready to try my hand at it. I remember what I really wanted to write about was Padma joining Voldemort's faction and using the third unborn triplet's magic in horrible family betraying ways**, but I could not plot to save my life (still can't, it's still all vibes vibes vibes w me), and the person I was writing for in the fic exchange wanted something exploring Parvati's British-Indian heritage. Bangles Fic was what came out of that churn.
speaking from the experience of having produced an exemplar of that early ao3 house style (I wanna say (post) 2nd wave; there's prob something to splitting mid/late 90s webring newsgroup fanfic writing with more idiosyncratic influences and much heavier genre SFF subcultural affiliation from the fanfiction.net/lj mass popularization and consolidation of the conventions), the crutches I leaned on were downstream from a desire to evoke certain feelings or modes of feeling (Sweeping Tragedy) before having managed anything close to a scaffold (events, coherent social history) such feelings might belong to. there's no there, there. I might have devoured poco airport reads, felt lots of things about emigrating from my [watch out racefail 08 buzzword incoming!!!] sourceland (full disclosure: not South Asia), but had only the blurriest sense even at the vibes level of the social relations that would populate such a setting, and an absolute deficit of plot which I tried to remedy through a succession (montage?) of incidents (scenes?) whose possible meanings and connections to the storyline I wanted to write (Padma and Parvati fighting the second Wizarding War on opposite sides) slipped further and further from my grasp until I missed several check-in deadlines long having gone over the 1000 word minimum without even making it to 1995 in the timeline and so slapped together a few concluding lines and gave up.
anyway, enough about me and the mash I made (maybe a good example of the ao3 house style, but definitely not an example that is good would be my honest self-crit), I also wanna jump on the hateration in a slightly different direction. I tend to consider the very early lj purveyors more kindly, even if they are, in a way, more ultimately culpable. like, I have a real soft spot especially for fics back then that took a self-conscious stab towards literary pretension, where the seams are showing. maybe out of over identification? ppl were just trying things out, man. they'd read some book that blew their minds and thought, why not add all my new favourite stylistic tics???
like, before fanfiction as a cult of amateur writing was fully hegemonic, I think there is a possibility of granting its earliest practitioners more of a reprieve from the implications of defaulting to this house style, even as it was structurally easier not to do this. wait, that sounds like a tautology; they can't be accused of 'defaulting' to anything if they were amidst the very construction of this default. ok, nevertheless, these structural aspects and how they afflict the lit landscape these days are extremely aggravating to me!
I noticed my personal evocation of the present tense is highly correlated with a short-cut not just for immediacy, but one that is particularly constrained as the result of situational or social conditions. I don't have enough of a sample for myself bc I don't write often, but I think the lure of the present tense come from its ability to bracket off instances of individual turmoil and its demonstrations without having to do much work colouring in the explanatory aspects of the backdrop necessary to provoke not only these emotional/psychological states but also their intensity (or conspicuous lack thereof). It's almost second nature with fanfic anyway, bc we're reading and writing on top of, through, the emotional resonances of the source text. We all know where we are; the sand castles come from sand in an assumed sandlot whose features always already exist for the recipient, who, having internalized the canon universe once, only need minimal activation to access its pathos. No personal experience or the obsessive level of interest necessary to pursue the level of research that makes a work read as one that inhabits its setting? Not a big problem. Using first person I to be a direct line that accesses the state of Being Tortured/in our feels is gauche, unavoidable, vulgar. Present tense 3rd pers limited is just the camera/continuation of a canon whose depths we're plumbing midstream.
I don't mind this for fic. I mean, I really really appreciate writers who try to go for something different, even when it doesn't work, and there are other conventions I cannot stand (cough therapyspeak), but I generally give stylistic features of fic a pass. what is absolutely unforgivable is the way it's crept into published fiction. like, god, it sucks so very extremely much that genre lit from the last decade is basically unreadable and I used to love indie-ish SFF. (the most recent one I bounced hard off of was A Memory Called Empire. fucking hated it.)
fic gets a pass because we're all in on the conceit of no-scene-setting-needed. original works do not get that luxury, and what's more damning is the general lack of effort to even meet readers half way. at this point I 100% use fic/fandom to appease my socio-politico-psycho-sexual hangups so I'm gonna go out of my way to impute specific readings onto cw trash tier franchises that's half collapsing under the weight of that baggage, and you, published darling of niche 'progressive' lit scenes, find wallowing in endless, restless interiority appealing and sufficient????! vignette-like writing without interruption and not even as vignette-writing enough in itself to approach interestingly experimental?????! I'm overstating the conflation and being a bit deterministic about it all — stylistic choices, grain of socio-cultural perspective, level of plot, but it's so hard not to lump it together
to jump back into the genre the Bangles Fic was an ill-fitting pastiche of, say what you will about the (diaspora) writers of that generation, they'd at least lived through a time before the end of history. even if the flag they ended flying was Iowa Writers workshop and adjacent literary fiction, they'd lived through enough of the contestations to for the most part ably reproduce a lifeworld reminiscent of that tumult. I know I have a bad habit of reducing most ills of our current situation on the fall of the USSR so this is entirely confirmation bias on my part, but I trust family saga cultural epics written by authors who experienced some measure of adulthood before the 1990s to have a heft that I basically automatically write off younger authors for not having a hope of achieving.
and then to take it to the nadir of genre, where a large contingent of its most celebrated new writers don't even seem to have the aim of trying! if the lj/ao3 house style arose from the reheated leftovers of middlebrow lit fic, the published version is like being asked to subsist on leftovers of leftovers! is it not soul-destroying to be able to pinpoint with exacting accuracy Oh This writer has probably read lot of fanfic, and, somehow worse, the only other writers they have read are also those who have read a lot of fanfic? is this what we must be consigned to????
sorry, rant over, kind of went off the rails bc turned out I had a lot to get off my chest
*funny aside: I kept typing middlebrown instead of middlebrow **Arundhati Roy made me publicly weep on a bus in grade 10. so actually everything is her fault
oh NO, I feel horribly mortified, I'm so sorry for having put your fic on blast!!! and thank you for being so sporting about it, i really do appreciate it 🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹 FWIW, I am also just... extremely picky & hypercritical about indian lit of any kind for many... idiosyncratic personal reasons (and unfortunately have a largely hate relationship with the diaspora genre in pubbed litfic, which i find very hindu and upper caste for the most part) and some of that got transferred over to the patils fic unfortunately 😬😬
i also really appreciate your willingness to engage with the crit in good faith and explain some of the background to it. (i honestly didn't know it was an exchange fic - and the constraints re. exploration of british indian heritage definitely shift some of the interpretation/reaction) i think i stand by my final assessment re. "ao3 house style" in this post as something that reflects both a) the limitations of a rookie writer and b) emulation of certain forms of writing as good writing, without necessarily having a strong understanding of why a piece of writing might work well or not. i also think the discussion of "the cinematic mode" in the essay linked in that post is very effective at describing both the strengths and limitations of the ao3 house style, albeit from another angle, including using technique such as present tense to stand in for substance - which might be more of a generic beginner writer problem than one specific to authors growing out of ao3, though
anyway, what you've described here, i think, fits with that re. someone trying to experiment with literary forms as a baby writer and not necessarily being able to bring all the elements together, which i also stand by my assertion, is something that comes with practice. (i cannot, as well, revisit some of my older HP fic posted on another tumblr blog because rereading it gives me the anxiety of an older writer looking over raw drafts riddled with various tumblr-isms in style and content and itching to edit it; presumably some other indian kid out there is reading a patil sisters fic i've written and cringing at the sentiments worked into it and the style its expressed in (its me, i'm that indian kid))
i also feel compelled to say that plot is not necessarily the most important ingredient there tbh - like, i do want to stake out a claim and say going from incident to incident in a vibes based fashion is a perfectly cromulent authorial choice and what ultimately matters is more the scaffolding you mention, especially the broader question of social history and where to situate the characters within that and to lend them a specificity that makes them feel immersed in that world. i think that's also where fic authors making the leap to pro-fic stumble, bc a lot of that specific scaffolding is already built up for them and they don't necessarily need to do that work while writing fic; whereas even if you're writing litfic and not genre, you're still making decisions about what aspects of the "real" world govern your character's life, what to foreground, what to put in the background and what that means in practical terms for the character's consciousness/ways of thinking and therefore operating. to me that's usually the first giveaway outside of obvious stylistic tics that pings my "this is a fic author" radar. which again, is something that grows the more you write, but which there really is no incentive to develop one's skills in as a fic writer just by the nature of the medium we're writing in.
i was, at best a lurker in the 2008-2011 LJ era but hmmm. i don't know if it makes sense to talk about culpability per se? to me i think it makes sense to think of this as much as a literary school in itself, in the same way that alt-lit is a literary school in itself emerging from a very different internet subculture? its easy to use "ao3 house style" with disdain, but i would much rather think of it as a kind of cultural norm that got ingrained over the years through feedback mechanisms - if certain bnfs are writing in a certain style and receiving a lot of positive feedback for it (and which came first: popularity or style, is a very pertinent question here lol), people are going to emulate it, receive positive feedback and eventually you have a space like ao3, where in certain fandoms this style is entrenched. (which is also why i said slash fandoms, lol, because the silmarillion fandom, for example, which has a far more silo'd fandom experience in terms of fan trajectories and entry points into the fandom not necessarily passing thru the "big" or "classic" ao3 fandoms, has a very different style of fic and certainly a greater multiplicity of styles). its the same principle, i would say, as ffnet having more of an SFF genfic kind of style.
100% cosigned & agreed re. published fiction. i don't read much SFF for, um, the same reason you mention. that said, i've noticed its also a similar stylistic problem in a lot of litfic that makes it on to most anticipated style lists and i suspect that its all down to the rookie writer problem - there's also the moneyed aspect to it re. hoping a debut novelist can take off and make mint, which is why they get described in hyperbole, while the actual texts often have a certain samey-ness and limitation re. inventiveness and depth. its probably only a matter of time before "here is the thing" makes its appearance in published litfic - i spotted barely disguised variants of it in a recent novel that was otherwise quite good - though i think SFF and romance are a little more far gone down that part.
i will say that for all i laughed at recognising some HP fic stylistic tics in in memoriam i did...find it...iddishly...compelling... like i said its not necessarily bad. its just that sometimes you can tell when there's a source canon in there somewhere and its not always a bad thing. its bad when it ends up being a tropey rehash without a there there. (i think in memoriam had a there there; its just that i've also read that specific remus/sirius fic before, but that's such a niche experience on the internet/in the world, who was going to tell lol?) i think it veers from cute into soul-destroying at the point where the novel is being sold to you as something that is deep and profound and thoughtful, only for you to look and find that well, your favourite fic author did it better first and with a) far more joy and b) much more of an iddishly compelling concept (and invariably c) more actual graphic gay sex). which is, ultimately, my grouse with some of the folks writing in ao3 house style - the point at which it moves from a style you like to write/read, to where you think you're doing it better than others, or that you're somehow more sophisticated or profound than average, is the point at which i think some level of judgement is invited (esp. when its professing to touch on some serious issue, versus just being thinly veiled idfic someone is publishing as lit)
the world is pretty small sometimes! I think I followed you in 2023 while briefly dipping back into tumblr for r/s, and have only sporadically logged back in since then, maybe a few times a year. what are the chances, right?
some further free association in response to yr reply
"Academic Attempt to Make History, a letter* It is not very often that events of major historical significance find their way into the publishing world of East Africa and Third World. It was with great satisfaction, therefore, that I read Dr. Omwony-Ojwok's review (Daily News, 11/2/78) of Professor Nabudere's book, announcing its publication. He said that this was an "event of major historical significance for the people of East Africa and the Third World." Presuamably, the second "event of major historical significance for people in East Africa and the Third World" must be the pubication of Omwony-Ojwok's review itself. Generally speaking, the academics of the metropolitan world never thought that the peoples of the third World had any role to play in history and therefore they took it upon themselves to decide what was of great historical significance for them. We can now see that this fine tradition is being carried over by the academics of the Third World itself. So, while the people of the Third World carry the heavy burden of oppression, its academics carry the equally heavy burden of deciding which of their publications is of major historical significance. It is a neat division of labour where the people are put in their right place. No doubt, this neatness will continue until such time when the people themselves will decide what events are of major historical signifiance for them. That time has yet to come, and then, probably the gratuitous services of Professor Nabudere and his fellow academics would become redundant." * This letter appeared in the Daily News (1978) under a pseudonym.
i feel like i've seen you mention this somewhere in one of your posts? but i was curious what you meant by ao3 house style, if you could describe it etc. i feel like i kind of know what you mean but i'm not sure
well, its a bit hard to describe, is the thing, but if you've been in any major slash fandom, you've definitely encountered it. from my own past fic, i think there are multiple examples that are standout examples of "ao3 house style" - this fic, for example, and this one. (for more of the angst(ier) front, there's this and this). lots of present tense, lots of "the thing is" or "here is the thing", a lot of these trite declarative statements that stand in for depth, interiority without interiority, too many self-deprecatory and wry asides, all the characters sound uniformly the same.
the sex is usually written in a very formulaic present tense register that's meant to capture the consciousness of being turned on, which reads better than "x did y and then z", but ultimately becomes very samey after a while. or else there's too much consciousness and emotions in the sex, but very little grounding in the bodily.
in the "angstier" or more "serious" fics, you get attempted symbolism or motifs but the interpretation of these has a faux-depth to them and the only possible reading is very shallow (there was this one padma & parvati patil fic where bangles was a recurring motif and it was like reading someone having successfully emulated a chitra banerjee devakaruni story but somehow with even less depth in the "indian" motifs present); a lot of characters trying to elide what they mean but in a way that makes the conversation artificial rather than striking a realist note; repetition of phrases that are thought to be serious/profound/heavyweight to the point of excess.
basically a lot of rudimentary use of literary technique - but its a bit surface level and can feel intrusive because of how often it draws attention to itself (e.g. the repetition technique, or these symbols & motifs that don't quite go anywhere because their presence is largely confined to a very surface level meaning/interpretation, or an attempt to capture stream of consciousness while actually avoiding the way that consciousness often sprawls, an attempt to use present tense to foster immediacy).
i mean also, some of this varies from fandom to fandom. some of it is to the point where like, you can pick up a novel without having the first idea about its author and immediately your sixth sense tells you that this person was in x fandom once upon a time (e.g. reading in memoriam and wondering who was meant to be which HP character, till a mutual informed me the author was ex-drarry and a lot of things made sense about it; reading RWRB and immediately knowing the author was definitely in one of the big 2009-2011 slash fandoms - the styles are totally dissimilar, but both of them come from strains of writing style that are distinct to LJ/ao3-based fandom).
its not necessarily a bad thing. it just can be frustrating when its the only thing you get and also when people begin emulating these styles because they think its the right or only way to write fanfic - or even worse, pass around as "writing advice" something that would essentially get people writing in purely ao3 house style (there was a post i saw abt a week ago about how to write sex scenes that essentially would have pushed authors from attempting anything interesting or unique to their voice/thinking/story into a formulaic "you set the tone for the act, then you get into the psychological depths, and you stay there and come out only when people are coming" kind of sex scene). its also frustrating when people treat this as a super elevated and superior style to other kinds of writing. its not lmao.
not to be a vain self centred self hating narcissist or anything but I THINK I WROTE THAT PATIL TWINS BANGLE FIC
it was the first fic I'd ever written! back in 2007 when I was fresh out of a high school literary arts program having bulldozed my way through a pile of Rohinton Mistrys, Desais (Anita and Kiran, of no relation), Ondaatjes, Lahiris, and of course God of Small Things, before ao3 even existed. (we had stacks of Anil's Ghost and Fall on Your Knees lying around the classroom. none of it was compulsory reading. you had to have been there — pre-Austerity alt Ontario curriculum carve-outs, so very missed!)
beside the shitton of middlebrow* diaspora lit that the market was flooded with at that time, I was also about three years or so into reading and loving wannabe litfic fandom style on lj and ready to try my hand at it. I remember what I really wanted to write about was Padma joining Voldemort's faction and using the third unborn triplet's magic in horrible family betraying ways**, but I could not plot to save my life (still can't, it's still all vibes vibes vibes w me), and the person I was writing for in the fic exchange wanted something exploring Parvati's British-Indian heritage. Bangles Fic was what came out of that churn.
speaking from the experience of having produced an exemplar of that early ao3 house style (I wanna say (post) 2nd wave; there's prob something to splitting mid/late 90s webring newsgroup fanfic writing with more idiosyncratic influences and much heavier genre SFF subcultural affiliation from the fanfiction.net/lj mass popularization and consolidation of the conventions), the crutches I leaned on were downstream from a desire to evoke certain feelings or modes of feeling (Sweeping Tragedy) before having managed anything close to a scaffold (events, coherent social history) such feelings might belong to. there's no there, there. I might have devoured poco airport reads, felt lots of things about emigrating from my [watch out racefail 08 buzzword incoming!!!] sourceland (full disclosure: not South Asia), but had only the blurriest sense even at the vibes level of the social relations that would populate such a setting, and an absolute deficit of plot which I tried to remedy through a succession (montage?) of incidents (scenes?) whose possible meanings and connections to the storyline I wanted to write (Padma and Parvati fighting the second Wizarding War on opposite sides) slipped further and further from my grasp until I missed several check-in deadlines long having gone over the 1000 word minimum without even making it to 1995 in the timeline and so slapped together a few concluding lines and gave up.
anyway, enough about me and the mash I made (maybe a good example of the ao3 house style, but definitely not an example that is good would be my honest self-crit), I also wanna jump on the hateration in a slightly different direction. I tend to consider the very early lj purveyors more kindly, even if they are, in a way, more ultimately culpable. like, I have a real soft spot especially for fics back then that took a self-conscious stab towards literary pretension, where the seams are showing. maybe out of over identification? ppl were just trying things out, man. they'd read some book that blew their minds and thought, why not add all my new favourite stylistic tics???
like, before fanfiction as a cult of amateur writing was fully hegemonic, I think there is a possibility of granting its earliest practitioners more of a reprieve from the implications of defaulting to this house style, even as it was structurally easier not to do this. wait, that sounds like a tautology; they can't be accused of 'defaulting' to anything if they were amidst the very construction of this default. ok, nevertheless, these structural aspects and how they afflict the lit landscape these days are extremely aggravating to me!
I noticed my personal evocation of the present tense is highly correlated with a short-cut not just for immediacy, but one that is particularly constrained as the result of situational or social conditions. I don't have enough of a sample for myself bc I don't write often, but I think the lure of the present tense come from its ability to bracket off instances of individual turmoil and its demonstrations without having to do much work colouring in the explanatory aspects of the backdrop necessary to provoke not only these emotional/psychological states but also their intensity (or conspicuous lack thereof). It's almost second nature with fanfic anyway, bc we're reading and writing on top of, through, the emotional resonances of the source text. We all know where we are; the sand castles come from sand in an assumed sandlot whose features always already exist for the recipient, who, having internalized the canon universe once, only need minimal activation to access its pathos. No personal experience or the obsessive level of interest necessary to pursue the level of research that makes a work read as one that inhabits its setting? Not a big problem. Using first person I to be a direct line that accesses the state of Being Tortured/in our feels is gauche, unavoidable, vulgar. Present tense 3rd pers limited is just the camera/continuation of a canon whose depths we're plumbing midstream.
I don't mind this for fic. I mean, I really really appreciate writers who try to go for something different, even when it doesn't work, and there are other conventions I cannot stand (cough therapyspeak), but I generally give stylistic features of fic a pass. what is absolutely unforgivable is the way it's crept into published fiction. like, god, it sucks so very extremely much that genre lit from the last decade is basically unreadable and I used to love indie-ish SFF. (the most recent one I bounced hard off of was A Memory Called Empire. fucking hated it.)
fic gets a pass because we're all in on the conceit of no-scene-setting-needed. original works do not get that luxury, and what's more damning is the general lack of effort to even meet readers half way. at this point I 100% use fic/fandom to appease my socio-politico-psycho-sexual hangups so I'm gonna go out of my way to impute specific readings onto cw trash tier franchises that's half collapsing under the weight of that baggage, and you, published darling of niche 'progressive' lit scenes, find wallowing in endless, restless interiority appealing and sufficient????! vignette-like writing without interruption and not even as vignette-writing enough in itself to approach interestingly experimental?????! I'm overstating the conflation and being a bit deterministic about it all — stylistic choices, grain of socio-cultural perspective, level of plot, but it's so hard not to lump it together
to jump back into the genre the Bangles Fic was an ill-fitting pastiche of, say what you will about the (diaspora) writers of that generation, they'd at least lived through a time before the end of history. even if the flag they ended flying was Iowa Writers workshop and adjacent literary fiction, they'd lived through enough of the contestations to for the most part ably reproduce a lifeworld reminiscent of that tumult. I know I have a bad habit of reducing most ills of our current situation on the fall of the USSR so this is entirely confirmation bias on my part, but I trust family saga cultural epics written by authors who experienced some measure of adulthood before the 1990s to have a heft that I basically automatically write off younger authors for not having a hope of achieving.
and then to take it to the nadir of genre, where a large contingent of its most celebrated new writers don't even seem to have the aim of trying! if the lj/ao3 house style arose from the reheated leftovers of middlebrow lit fic, the published version is like being asked to subsist on leftovers of leftovers! is it not soul-destroying to be able to pinpoint with exacting accuracy Oh This writer has probably read lot of fanfic, and, somehow worse, the only other writers they have read are also those who have read a lot of fanfic? is this what we must be consigned to????
sorry, rant over, kind of went off the rails bc turned out I had a lot to get off my chest
*funny aside: I kept typing middlebrown instead of middlebrow **Arundhati Roy made me publicly weep on a bus in grade 10. so actually everything is her fault
2. have you seen the “caged animal” interview where he talked about the hotel rooms? isabel once posted that the difference between them and britney was at least they had each other. come to find out they were locking them in hotel rooms alone
!!!!!!!!!!
Liam stability porn Payne has let slip some absolutely off the wall things as he'd been trying to make sense of post 1d life.
eg "I'm like the antichrist version, to his christness" in 2020 re him vs Harry
eg "the last thing the world needs is more of me" re his son following in his footsteps
eg that there's always the messed up member it's just the way it is that the role fell to him and he's happy the other boys are out in the world doing exciting things, instead of stuck inside doing instagram lives and he's just glad they've never said anything mean about him despite all the messed up things he'd said about them
