pilfered_words

I finally changed my URL! I was really, really sick of being bluejayfic.

Why pilfered-words? Because in this as in other situations, my first port of call was finding a fitting quotation. I steal words like magpies steal shiny things, I hoard my quotes like a particularly well-read dragon. Writing is hard. Quoting is easy and natural.

" …После этого океана грязи, измен, лжи, равнодушия друзей и просто глупости полетик и не-полетик, родственничков Строгановых, идиотов-кавалергардов, сделавших из дантесовской истории une affaire de regiment (вопрос чести полка), ханжеских салонов Нессельроде и пр., высочайшего двора, заглядывавшего во все замочные скважины, величавых тайных советников - членов Государственного совета, не постеснявшихся установить тайный полицейский надзор над гениальным поэтом,- после всего этого как торжественно и прекрасно увидеть, как этот чопорный, бессердечный (“свинский”, как говаривал сам Александр Сергеевич) и уж, конечно, безграмотный Петербург стал свидетелем того, что, услышав роковую весть, тысячи людей бросились к дому поэта и навсегда вместе со всей Россией там остались.

“II faut que j'arrange ma maison (Мне надо привести в порядок мой дом)”, - сказал умирающий Пушкин.

Через два дня его дом стал святыней для его Родины, и более полной, более лучезарной победы свет не видел.

Вся эпоха (не без скрипа, конечно) мало-помалу стала называться пушкинской. Все красавицы, фрейлины, хозяйки салонов, кавалерственные дамы, члены высочайшего двора, министры, аншефы и не-аншефы постепенно начали именоваться пушкинскими современниками, а затем просто опочили в картотеках и именных указателях (с перевранными датами рождения и смерти) пушкинских изданий.

Он победил и время и пространство.

Говорят: пушкинская эпоха, пушкинский Петербург. И это уже к литературе прямого отношения не имеет, это что-то совсем другое. В дворцовых залах, где они танцевали и сплетничали о поэте, висят его портреты и хранятся его книги, а их бедные тени изгнаны оттуда навсегда. Про их великолепные дворцы и особняки говорят: здесь бывал Пушкин, или: здесь не бывал Пушкин. Все остальное никому не интересно. Государь император Николай Павлович в белых лосинах очень величественно красуется на стене Пушкинского музея; рукописи, дневники и письма начинают цениться, если там появляется магическое слово “Пушкин”, и, что самое для них страшное,- они могли бы услышать от поэта:

За меня не будете в ответе,

Можете пока спокойно спать.

Сила - право, только ваши дети

За меня вас будут проклинать.

И напрасно люди думают, что десятки рукотворных памятников могут заменить тот один нерукотворный aere perennius."

- Анна Ахматова, “Слово о Пушкине”

(Responding to the Attolian Archives episode about the Thief, Chapter 11)

1) Pushy? I love you guys

2) Gen is really starting to show his hand here. Not enough to give the game away to people not in the know, of course, but enough that when the reveal comes, it doesn’t feel cheap.

3) One thing you guys didn’t mention: among the voices arguing about Gen are “the king of Sounis and the queen of Eddis” - and the question you don’t ask on the first read is, how does Gen know what the queen of Eddis sounds like?!

4) Gen’s life being stretched out between him and the sword is such a vivid image. It’s so great.

5) “His wife died in the winter. His three children live with their aunt in Eia.”

6) Re: bump at the base of Gen’s skull: I noticed it on my first read, but assumed it was an injury that he was hiding from the magus.

7) Re: Gen’s sigh of relief: the assumption on my first read was, I think, that he was relieved the river wasn’t actually flowing the wrong way. And I’m still not sure that’s wrong! I love these little double-edged moments.

8) Re: “if you could be anywhere”: I can’t reread this without thinking of the way it comes up in CoK.

9) It is indeed completely ridiculous that the “There will be no Sounis, no Attolia, no Eddis, only Mede” line wasn’t initially meant to set up the entire plot as we know it.

10) “A thief never makes a noise by accident” - that just comes up, over and over and over, doesn’t it.

11) The last sentence of this chapter still makes me have a mini-heart attack every time I read it.

(responding to this prokopetz post about the False Dmitries)

This is called the Time of Troubles, and it was a catastrophe.

The thing is, after Ivan the Terrible and his elder son Feodor both died, there was no one left with a reasonable claim to the throne. Literally no one. Feodor’s brother-in-law, Boris Godunov was crowned Tsar, largely because he was already the power behind the throne under Feodor, and it was relatively easy for him to seize power.

Dmitry died in 1591, when Feodor was still alive. The investigation into his death found that it was an accident, that he was playing with a knife and had an epileptic seizure; the accepted narrative for centuries was that Godunov had him murdered and covered it up; these days, we have no idea, both narratives sound plausible.

Unfortunately for Godunov, False Dmitry I was super convincing. He managed to convince a whole army, and when Boris Godunov suddenly died mid-war, he took Moscow, killed Godunov’s wife and son, raped his daughter, and crowned himself Tsar.

After which he was promptly deposed by Vasily Shuisky, a prominent nobleman descended from Grand Princes of Moscow before they were Tsars; Shuisky was in turn deposed by a coalition known as the Seven Boyars, who looked at False Dmitry II and at the Polish army that was, by now, outside their doorstep and agreed to crown the Polish Prince Władysław; the Polish army tried to forcibly convert the whole country to Catholicism, the country rose in revolt in response, Sweden invaded, False Dmitry III declared himself, was captured and killed, and eventually the resistance kicked the Poles out of Moscow.

Once the Poles retreated, the nobles decided to crown one of their own - Mikhail Romanov. He was the great-nephew of Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, but more importantly, he came from a reasonably prominent noble family, he was Russian, and he was young and easy to influence. Which is how the Romanov dynasty first came to power.

By the time things settled down, a third of the population was dead, Moscow was in ruins, and a bunch of land had been annexed by various neighbors.

Like I said. Catastrophe.

(Responding to the Attolian Archives episode about the Thief, Chapter 9)

Another excellent episode! You guys rock!

…Boston ThiefCon, anyone?

A note about the emerald ring: it’s a reference to The Eagle of the Ninth. Compare the descriptions:

The Thief:

I looked down at the ring still hung around my left thumb. He looked as well and whistled. In the sunlight I could see that the emerald was flawed, milky white on one side. The seal engraved in it was a curving fish, maybe a dolphin. The white flaw was a breaking wave.

The magus leaned over me to lift it off my thumb. “The writing on the ring itself is in the old style, pre-invader. Whoever wore it here must have had it in his family for many generations."

The Eagle of the Ninth:

A ring swung on the end of the thong, sparkling faintly with green fire in the torch-light. Marcus took it from him and bent his head to examine it. It was a heavy signet-ring; and on the flawed emerald which formed the bezel was engraved the dolphin badge of his own family.

(And of course, after Marcus, the ring passes to his descendants, for “many generations” indeed.)

(Responding to this post about the “Learning Zone Model”)

This is also (usually?) known as the zone of proximal development, or ZPD, first developed by Vygotsky in the 30s. If you undershoot it, you won’t learn anything. If you overshoot it, you’ll get confused and overwhelmed and also won’t learn anything.

I saw this all the time when I was teaching. There was a band, sometimes very narrow, where my students would visibly, obviously be thinking and learning. If I twitched wrong, at that point, if I gave them a problem very slightly harder than what they were prepared for, their eyes would glaze over and they would freeze like a deer in the headlights.

(And then I would backpedal and give them something halfway there, that didn’t push them over that line.)

I think people know this instinctively when teaching someone else, but magically forget it when they’re the person in question. And even with someone else, it works best if it’s an academic subject. There are plenty of things that aren’t seen as something you need to learn to do, just as something you need to start doing, even though learning is clearly the thing happening.

(Responding to this post about Eugenides copying the scroll for Kamet)

QoA:

He had to open the ink bottle with his teeth. The paper slid on the desk and needed to be held in place. If he used his stump, the bandages didn’t give him any purchase unless he pressed down quite firmly. The stump was tender, and it hurt. If he used his forearm, he not only covered up most of the paper he was trying to write on, he covered the top part of it - meaning that as he wrote, he would smear what he’d written.

TaT:
The handwriting had been atrocious - I could see why the scribes hadn’t let him work with the rest of the queen’s indentured - but the text had been by Enoclitus, and I’d never seen it before.

(Responding to this post about Elrond's "small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere" line)

Luthien. He’s talking about Luthien. The great armies of Elves and Men could not so much as contain Morgoth in the end, but Luthien and Beren manage to take a Silmaril from his crown.

You can say, “Luthien wasn’t one of the small people, she was half-Maia and a powerful magic-user,” and you will have a point, but Tolkien didn’t conceptualize it that way. Luthien wasn’t trained in arms, she had no army, nothing but her voice and Beren. And magic in Middle-Earth isn’t all that formalized, much of it appears to rely on the wielder’s conviction, not practice or inherent skill.

While we’re talking about Elven princesses who married Men, let’s not forget it was Idril who saved the remnant of Gondolin by preparing for the day it would fall. Does that count as a deed done by small hands? I don’t know, it’s kind of debatable. But it’s plausible as something that would have been on Elrond’s mind.

And, of course, Elwing and Eärendil could arguably be said to have won the War against Morgoth by getting the Valar to step in. Sailing into darkness with a treasure, stolen and taken from the Enemy and re-stolen and inherited, fleeing from their enemies, carrying a fool’s hope. Sound familiar?

(#I love the leaders of the great armies #but Tolkien sets them up to fail)

(Responding to this post about writing education)

From what I’ve seen, nuance gets more acceptable at higher levels of education. In middle school, any attempt to introduce nuance was met with the question, “How does this support your thesis?” By the end of high school, some nuance was acceptable, as long as you had a strong thesis and proved it. Discussing an issue from several sides was not acceptable; you were necessarily convincing your audience of something. (Two sentence theses were only acceptable in senior year of high school; before that, the main thought of your essay had to be something you could say in one sentence.)

I didn’t go to college, but I’ve read essays written by college students. It seems plausible to me that humanities majors learn to write actually nuanced pieces, and everyone else permanently stays at their high school level.

I don’t think saying “nuance is for scholars, what normal people need is the ability to make a bold statement,” is a good idea.

Open the back door of the restaurant.
Step over two sleeping kittens.
Use the bathroom.
Step over three sleeping kittens.
Go back inside the restaurant.

(#adventures in italy#this was like a week ago#I'm still in Italy#but not in Venice anymore)

Item #432 on the blacklist, because I never want to see another post with it again: “please die”

my sister, watching Black Panther: Hey! Hey you, in the fur crop-top!

I’ve had this tumblr for almost 4 years. Apparently, 1/7 of the posts I’ve made in that time were made in the last month.

…oops? :P

Anyway, since I’ve gotten so active. Turns out, I’m kind of tired of being bluejayfic? I’ve used variations on “bluejay” as my username everywhere since I was 11, making my first account on the Sheroes forum to discuss Tamora Pierce.

I haven’t quite decided what my new URL should be, but I’m leaning towards “pilfered-words”. Unless I think of a clever pun on “Manya”, then I’ll use that.

A submission of mine to the incorrectqueensthiefquotes blog:

I have been dealing with political intrigue since I was a young girl. A fact you might have researched. Did you think you were dealing with an amateur?

- Attolia to Nahuseresh

A submission of mine to the incorrectqueensthiefquotes blog:

Someday, Gen, the magus of Sounis had once said to him, I hope you live to have a dozen subordinates just like you. Eugenides hadn’t realized till now that had been a formal curse on the magus’s part.

Stolen from @edenfalling (from here).

So here’s the last thing I’ll tell you: on the way to the stake, watch your feet - don’t push an old woman, don’t trip a child, don’t step on a dog’s paw…

(I’m not going to tag people. If you want to do the meme go ahead and do it, I guess.)

(Responding to this post about Gen wanting to steal an elephant)

This is another piece of evidence that Gen and Miles Vorkosigan are secretly the same person.

(”It was before your time, or you know who would have been the first man I’d have thought of,“ says Illyan on the subject of acquiring an elephant...)

https://vk.com/wall-147791_55870

(Responding to the Attolian Archives episode about the Thief, Chapter 9)

(The problem with listening to this in the car on my way from work is that I can’t respond right away. Let’s see if I can collect my thoughts enough.)

The most hilarious part of this chapter on rereads is “I said, “Gen.” He wasn’t interested in the rest.”

Other highlights:

“ The magus shook his head. “You don’t pretend well.” I opened my mouth to say something I shouldn’t have“ - as in, something that would piss off the magus, or something that would hint at just how good he is at pretending?

“My uncle used to keep that much under his bed and count it every night.“ - this is probably not literally true. Probably. I definitely did not just spend a while imagining the late king of Eddis counting a sack of gold coins. (Does Gen have other uncles, come to think of it? I think so, there’s definitely a lot of cousins and uncles might have been mentioned? Maybe?)

The age thing: I think of Gen as ~16, yeah. (I’m 26, for reference.) QoA narrows it down a whole lot, of course, you know he’s young enough to be growing and old enough to count as a man, not a boy, whatever Attolia may say on the subject.

The religion thing: I think all three countries, Sounis, Attolia, and even Eddis, don’t engage particularly deeply with their religions. They pray in the temples, give offerings occasionally, and mostly live their lives without thinking of the gods at all. There are some true believers, and I think Gen starts out on the cynical end even so, but in general, they all want the gods to stay safely inside their temples. Remember that part of CoK? Even to Helen and Sophos, who have seen the gods, they are not quite real, “a memory of a dream you can’t quite remember”, eventually. For everyone else? They might say they believe, but it’s mostly empty words.

Accidental all-nighters are the worst.

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