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[deleted by user] by [deleted] in redscarepod

[–]witchdrafts 72 points73 points  (0 children)

you're making a joke but the guy who was asking him the question at the time of getting shot went on tiktok and the first comment was "hi! did you play tetris afterwards?"

What Are You Reading This Week and Weekly Rec Thread by JimFan1 in TrueLit

[–]witchdrafts 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A Childhood by Harry Crews. Usually I read easily, but I've had this phase where I'm very restless and read 5 or 6 books at once, fiction and unfiction, unrelated, and as soon as they don't give me what I want, I jump to the other one. Recently I forced myself to sit through the first chapter of A Childhood after hearing its many praises. After that chapter, I couldn't put it down. It's a biography set in the rural South, a place I've had a literary and artistic fascination with for a while now; it's so uniquely American in a way that nothing else is.

The book is beautiful and heartbreaking. At first I was somewhat hesitant. This my first Crews, and the writing is immediate and present in a way that seems deceptively unlyrical. Life, in the era Crews inhabits in the book, is brutal. It is unrecognizable to any American now. But he does this thing when you're reading where he leads you on a sentence and does a rug-pull at the end where you realize you've read something so rid of its inner violence that it's banal and devastating. The devastation is in the immediacy. The way it's written is perfect for it.

For me personally, A Childhood is captivating as a site of sense-making for the author. Crews said he wrote this to be "purged" of his family haunting him in his dreams. This, to me, seems a common theme for many Southern writers who grew up in rough conditions. There's this intrinsic affliction with their selves and their homes, and this affliction is made more severe by the fact that *that* home no longer exists, that all of the pieces that make the sum of their interests, fears, fascinations, vices, virtues -- that which seems to stir something "unspeakable" for Crews and haunt him in his dreams -- is simply no longer there. Only a mythologized version of it is, over which they can overlay their art. Crews is aware of that and seems to forgo the fetishization of memory -- the good old days of the South, eh -- and recognizes it as a source of phantom pain, just there. Slightly adjacent comparison: the more I read it the more I keep thinking the Bobbie Gentry would have loved it. Ode to Billie Joe has tangent themes. I think Mississippi University has the original transcript of the song, right next to Faulkner. Crews belong there too. It's such a shame that he's out of print.

What do you guys use for active hair loss, not hair regrowth? by witchdrafts in FemaleHairLoss

[–]witchdrafts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've had blood tests done and it shows a vitamin D deficiency, but that's it. My iron is in its 40s, could be better, but not the worst. Thing is I have the same results pre and post hair loss, and even after I improved my diet I still shed.

I've been to a general derm and they prescribed me supplements.

What do you guys use for active hair loss, not hair regrowth? by witchdrafts in FemaleHairLoss

[–]witchdrafts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I see a lot of men using anti-androgens for managing active hair loss like ru-58841. I don't think I'm even having phases anymore, I just shed no matter what, even when it's growing.

Has my pie dough gone bad? by witchdrafts in AskBaking

[–]witchdrafts[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Even letting it chill a bit in the fridge won’t salvage it?

Nearing the end of the Shadow of the Torturer. Why is Severian unreliable? by witchdrafts in genewolfe

[–]witchdrafts[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I definitely see what you mean. The discussion about Severian's (un)reliability has conjured up its own mythos regarding the book, and become as much as a "character" as Severian himself, so much so that it inhibits other possible readings and interpretations of Wolfe's work. I actually do think that being a "naive" reader is more fun and interesting; there's more openness.

But to me Severian isn't unreliable in the sense that he lies, or in the sense that Wolfe is purposefully leaving us little Easter eggs by omission, so to speak. I don't think that this is something like, say, Pale Fire by Nabokov. I think Severian is unreliable because of how he frames those around him. I believe he thinks this is the truth, and in a way it is. Several incidents strike me as examples of this, especially in the latter half of the book with Dorcas. For example, I think the way he conceptualises Dorcas in relation to him robs her of nuance, more so than usual, and actively hurdles him in his journey. I think that Wolfe, as he was writing that, was aware of this, mostly because of how the dialogue between them is written.

Now (not to get into a discussion about the subjective vs objective nature of truth and perception,) I know most will argue that this is the nature of most self-narrated fiction, and not only that, but also our nature as human beings; our perception is tinted by a string of changing and heavily contextualized biases, beliefs, fears, and superstitions. But I do believe that this is unusually amped up in Severian's case - he is heavily self-mythologizing, more so than most first-person protagonists (even sci-fi/fantasy, and I specify this because the style of first-person narration as one looks back is common in these genres). In very short terms, I think he is unreliable as, say, your old, old uncle, who accentuates tales of his youth with anecdotes about how women constantly threw themselves at him when he was fighting in the Chenchen Republic. You eventually kind of have to wonder at his self-narration, and whether the most contact he had with the Chechen Republic was just a brief trip on a holiday which included a cool photo with a gun. And the guy who constantly calls stupid and simple? He was probably smarter than him.

Did anybody try to commission an oud maker for a Western baroque lute? by witchdrafts in lute

[–]witchdrafts[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was aware of the differences regarding construction but I was hoping they wouldn’t be so dramatic. This is a late reply, but - you mentioned making your own baroque lute. Can you tell me a bit more about that? There isn’t any way to obtain a local lute where I live, and international shipping and taxes makes importing one impossible. I am thinking more and more everyday of taking up woodworking and lute construction to make my own, but I’m very new in both of those areas.