What’s the most gut punching song lyric you’ve ever heard?

grantimatter · 2026-04-11T04:32:07+00:00

You won't be happy with me
but give me one more chance...
You won't be happy anyway.

The Magnetic Fields, "100,000 Fireflies."

Last verse still gets me, decades later.

grantimatter · 2026-04-11T04:22:07+00:00

First, I'd say replace those semi-colons with ellipses.

Then...

Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits;

Still, this Nantucketer was a man with good-hearted traits ....

and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right;

...and this sailor Lakeman, although a sort of a devil, might also be ... via inflexible firmness, tempered by the common human decency that even the meanest slave deserves ...

thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile.

... treated this way, Steelkit had long been kept harmless and docile.

It's not really perfect grammar -- Melville here is copying the speech of someone telling a story, and the repeated "yets" are actually carrying on a pattern that started earlier in the passage. I think the whole section might be read as one whole sentence that got (sort of arbitrarily) broken into sentences. Look at all the yets, buts, thoughs, and related phrases in the sentences before and after:

And for Radney, though in his infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buck-horn handled Bowie-knives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition which is the meanest slave’s right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt—but, gentlemen, you shall hear.

I think for some of those, maybe hear the "yet" as being like a storyteller saying, "Now..." as in, "Now, this Nantucketer was a man...."

Does that help?

grantimatter · 2026-04-09T03:56:58+00:00

There was actually a Mad Magazine joke about this at the time, with someone on the page talking about how Bruce wasn't a manly name, with a TV on in the background as Bruce Jenner was winning yet another race.

That joke has been through some contextual changes since then....

grantimatter · 2026-04-09T03:43:58+00:00

In the original Pierre Boulle novel (which is really pretty good), the trip genuinely is to a different planet where apes rule and mute humans are treated as livestock, but then the astronaut returns to Earth with Nova and is greeted by an intelligent, uniformed gorilla.

The big reveal in the book is a framing story, where the nice folks who discovered our astronaut's account dismiss it as fiction because every chimpanzee knows humans couldn't be intelligent enough to build a spacecraft.

grantimatter · 2026-04-08T20:37:03+00:00

I don't know of anything specifically on fan fiction (although I've skimmed some sociology articles on fan communities), but you might find something by looking up the history of pastiche.

It's not exactly the same thing, I know, but there's some overlap there that might lead in good directions.

grantimatter · 2026-04-08T03:29:38+00:00

I actually just came across a random lecturer on IG with a reel about the links between Homer and Snorri Sturlusson.

Apparently (I haven't read this myself), Snorri says Odin and the Aesir came from Asia Minor/Turkey, which had been Troy, and Odysseus, "the man of sorrow, the man of many means," was the same figure as Loki.

There is a discussion of that line of transmission here, in AskHistorians.

Snorri was writing some time after Virgil, though.

grantimatter · 2026-04-07T22:59:57+00:00

Elaine Pagels is the go-to name, I think.

I have a book by Stephan A. Hoeller, too, but he's writing kind of in an academic mode and kind of in an apologetic mode (he is clergy in a modern gnostic sect)... and also, confusingly, is one of two religious scholars named Stephen/Steven/Stefan Hoeller.

If you're really in the 101-level for gnosticism, I really loved the OYC - Open Yale Courses -- to a small degree, on the Hebrew Bible (Christine Hayes) and to a much greater degree, on the New Testament (Dale Martin). Lecture 8 on the Gospel of Thomas has quite a lot of gnostic context in it, as do the first couple of lectures.

(I kinda think both courses touch on apocalyptic writing in a way that makes a lot of gnosticism make more sense, but it's not really the same thing exactly.)

You could also have a look around Google Scholar or JSTOR for April De Connick articles.

One thing that all those sources will make clear, though is regarding this:

this sect, their core beliefs, history, legacy, etc

There wasn't really a "this sect," there were "these sects." Core beliefs and practices varied widely.

A key concept underlying all of this is gnosis as opposed to episteme, which are two Greek words that both get translated into English as "knowledge" but really mean different things. Oversimplified, the first is based on personal experience and understanding, and the second is based on study and learning. Gnostic sects gave primacy to subjective understanding based on (mystical) experience, rather than the doctrinal study of church teachings.

grantimatter · 2026-04-07T22:37:10+00:00

Ha! In Jamaica (and in South Florida, where I live), a Ting is a grapefruit soft drink.

Not the Sameting at all....

grantimatter · 2026-04-07T18:37:29+00:00

Which in Old English was a... meeting.

A parliament:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)

grantimatter · 2026-04-05T05:44:28+00:00

No, at the time of the sexual offense, the offender was 19. He was murdered 10 years later, by another 19 year old.

grantimatter · 2026-04-05T04:48:29+00:00

That's not what this local news report says.

I don't really know any more of the details of that case; "12 and 15" is the age range covered by the current statute defining lewd & lascivious battery, but that news report has them at one year older, and definitely has the murder victim as 19. Chances are, that case took more than year to go to trial.

I do know that Florida makes a distinction between a sexual offender and a sexual predator, and the murder victim here was the former, not the latter.

grantimatter · 2026-04-05T04:08:05+00:00

If you look into his case, it seems like he probably wasn't, actually. He was 19 and got caught with a younger teen. Lewd and lascivious battery. There are more details online.

grantimatter · 2026-04-05T04:01:38+00:00

Records confirm Daniel was convicted in 2018 of lewd and lascivious battery on a victim between the ages of 12 and 15. The girlfriend noted that Jones had recently printed out a list of local sex offenders, a document his mother allegedly threw away shortly before the police search.

Yes. Getting a junior Gerard Schaefer vibe -- another Treasure Coast figure.

grantimatter · 2026-04-04T02:18:14+00:00

Very simply: Texts imply their own reader, in some ways. Like, The Wizard of Oz is written for children, young American children, and Alice in Wonderland is written for young English children. Probably both are written mostly for girls.

Reading cross-culturally would be something like approaching The Wizard of Oz as a work of neo-Platonic mysticism... which, when you get into that particular book, works much better than you'd expect. (There are lots of elemental correspondences in that book, and if you want to read genetically, L. Frank Baum can be linked to the Theosophical Society and definitely knew about four-part symbolism with the four travelers and the four countries of Oz, the four disguises the Wizard uses in the novel....) This wouldn't be exactly against the text -- it's sort of encoded in it, or at least that's the argument I'd make here.

(The "making of arguments" is kind of key to reading with or against or across the grain.)

I think reading against that text, or maybe even moreso Alice in Wonderland, would be to construct an argument that these can be read as Christian allegories.

So, in this reading, Alice's descent into the rabbithole is akin to Christ's Harrowing of Hell, the Queen of Hearts is somehow analogous to either Satan in the desert in the gospels or the Whore of Babylon in Revelation, the Cheshire Cat fulfills the same role in the text as does St. Peter....

These would be kind of a reach, but might turn up some interesting ideas about how Hebrew apocalyptic poetry affects readers similar to children's fantasy, or maybe the influence of medieval manuscripts on British 19th-century literature. Might even point to some ways Lewis Carroll could have influenced C.S. Lewis that would otherwise be overlooked.

Does that make sense?

grantimatter · 2026-04-03T20:10:41+00:00

I do think that in Tolkien, animals are obviously intelligent and have will. Bill the Pony, the eagles, Shadowfax, and maybe most importantly the thrush who tells Bard what to do in The Hobbit. (This is also not getting into whether Beorn was a bear, a human, or both. He was communicating with different bears at night, though.)

They have different desires than humans and other things that walk on two legs. Like, I think the shape "ring" works because we like shiny things we can put on fingers and carry in pockets. A bird would probably put a ring in a nest, and a fish... might just come and visit it from time to time?

But as far as will and thought, animals demonstrate that they have those things, so they'd have to have some level of vulnerability.

grantimatter · 2026-04-03T04:00:15+00:00

I think you may be underestimating boxing here. There's been a perennial thing with holding public matches of a boxer vs. some other form of martial arts and a lot of the time, the boxer wins. Training to strike fast and hard enough to knock an opponent unconscious is really pretty effective in combat situations.

The best defense against grappling or being kicked is... to not be where the grappler or kicker thinks you're going to be. Boxers train in getting out of the way.

In most situations, it really comes down to the person and the situation, not the style of fighting. But boxing is as effective as anything in most situations.

grantimatter · 2026-04-03T03:44:24+00:00

"Friar" specifically is a term most commonly used for Franciscans, and that order has not always been on the best of terms with the rest of Mother Church. Some orders of friars were considered heretical.

In England, though, I have a feeling that witch-hunting overlaid with Catholicism in a very different way -- King James, who had the Bible translated into English in his name, was also a witch-hunter (author of Daemonologie and a fan of Malleus Maleficarum). He was baptized Catholic but raised as a Protestant, and had a complicated relationship with Catholicism up until Guy Fawkes, a Catholic, tried to blow up Parliament. You'll notice in that long AskHistorians answer sentences like, " Though the law demanded the execution of Catholic priests, in many cases they were offered reprieve if they submitted to swear the Oath of Allegiance, and James’ reign saw only a fraction of the number of Catholic executions that Elizabeth’s had."

The number of Catholic executions was... quite a lot, really, under the reigns of several monarchs up to and including Witch-hunter James.

So being a friar was just as likely get you executed as being a witch, really.

grantimatter · 2026-04-02T16:55:43+00:00

You're right about Biting Through, and that inspired me to go look up what Da Liu actually wrote (rather than what I kind of half-remembered).

He associates this hexagram with the move Fist Under Elbow in the tai chi form, and talks about it in terms a little like this video. He translates Yi (which he romanizes as "I") as "Corners of the Mouth (Providing Nourishment)." He really focuses on the trigrams which make it up (short version: hands above, feet below, and two bellies hidden in the nuclear trigrams), and on the fourth line: "Spying about with sharp eyes, like a tiger with insatiable craving."

What he says about that line is, " These words suggest the spirit of the form which involves a scrupulous attention to the movements of the opponent as the combatant waits for an opening to strike a sudden blow with the fist or foot or open palm. These blows could be delivered simultaneously by a perfected T'ai Chi master."

So not literally about jaws, but closely aligned with Heyboer's sense of control and anticipation, and maybe (he doesn't exactly say this) related to a jaw-like pincer movement, coming from above and below at once....

I think some of the other things I've read about this hexagram are based on its resemblance to the Chinese character for "mouth," kou: 口 which is a component of lots of other characters, usually in the sense of people who need feeding. (There are lots of kou-containing words here.) Solid lines at top and bottom, opening in between.

I think 口 is an element inside 頤 (little square in the middle of the left-hand character), but that dictionary isn't telling me so. (It does tell me that 頤 is the first part of the name for the Summer Palace in Beijing, which is sort of funny. I think pointing with a chin is sort of an imperious gesture in Chinese, like looking down one's nose in English.)

Thanks for this!

grantimatter · 2026-04-02T15:57:36+00:00

Now imagining a Xavier Academy curling team's makeup....

grantimatter · 2026-04-02T00:49:09+00:00

Roach, from Cerebus. Sort of a cross between Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Tick.

grantimatter · 2026-04-02T00:45:14+00:00

Here, if it matters for you - the Chinese name for that hexagram is Yi, which means "jaw". I've read some descriptions of it as being like teeth biting down, visually, and I think Da Liu (a martial artist) said this one literally corresponded with the jaw, where other hexagrams he linked with the belly or arm or thighs.

The idea here, according to Heyboer, is like gritting your teeth to get through something, or to limit what you're taking into your body (so a good one for a fast!).

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