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orsuliya · 3 years

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I love everything about this. Not only do they hold hands to walk twenty meters or so, all dignity be damned, it’s also clear that this is no planned and carefully rehearsed action. If if was, we’d see a perfectly regal entrance and then a tense stand-off, brother or no brother. But no, let’s have a family reunion! And you know what? This should make every single noble in the capital even more afraid. Calculated grandstanding is not that difficult to deal with: there are clear lines to be had, it’s a great starting point for negotiations and - although not in every case - it may mean there’s some weakness hidden under all that posturing.

This relaxed approach with no intimidating perfectly synchronized troops snapping to attention? Where smiles and hugs are perfectly permissible and there’s no need for a rehearsed entrance? This means all cards are on the table, no bluffing necessary. Very in style for Xiao Qi, who emanates the same kind of complete yet quiet confidence in everything he does. It also means that Xiao Qi may not care about his image and pride all that much, ergo, he will be hellishly difficult to provoke. Okay, everybody should already know that, but we’ve established that all those nobles don’t know him at all.

Turnip Wang is pretty apologetic for what’s about to happen. Because, you know, he has a brain (or rather a direct uplink to Daddy Wang), so he knows this particular imperial edict is a Very Bad Idea. Also, I think he must be feeling pretty grateful that Awu is right there; even so he still feels the need to stress that he’s not doing this out of his own will. Is he expecting his supremely self-controlled brother-in-law to go Sephiroth-on-Nibelheim on his ass? He’s not completely excluding that possibility, let’s say that.

But Xiao Qi is not the type to go Sephiroth-on-Nibelheim willy-nilly and he’s no longer holding back on psychological warfare, so...

Now, all this kneeling and bowing matters. For all that most nobles do it purely out of habit, it really does mean something even for them and it means everything when it comes to common people. You might think that the Emperor is the biggest cunt under the sun, you bow; you may be planning to tear him down in about five minutes, you bow; you haven’t seen him in your life and wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire, you kowtow. The very act of bowing means admitting that no matter what, he IS the Emperor, rightfully anointed, crowned, enthroned - so better, higher-situated, worthy of respect by the very fact of his existence. Bowing before an imperial edict? The exact same thing. Most people will never see an Emperor in their lives; such an edict is an extension of his will and thus is automatically due the same respect.

That Awu goes to her knees is perfectly natural. She’s been raised at court, she’s been bowing five times a day starting from the time she could barely walk. At this point it’s not something she even needs to think about. You know, I don’t think Xiao Qi was expecting her to immediately go to her knees, otherwise he would have caught her earlier (as he will once Zitan enters the scene). But then what would he know about ingrained habits of Cheng aristocracy?

Note who does not move a muscle. There’s no ingrained reaction in Ningshuo soldiers, but still, there should be something to see. For an average peasant the very fact of being in presence of an imperial edict would be enough; sheer fear and awe would do the trick. I don’t even think they’re taking cues from Xiao Qi? I believe that any respect for the throne those guys might have had is gone. And not just because of the Hunt of Doom and it’s repercussions. Those soldiers just spent six months fighting their way across the country, seeing all kinds of misfortune and horror. Where was the Emperor then? They were the ones to bring peace and order; they take hard-earned pride and honor in themselves (and Xiao Qi), humble peasants no more. If they acted on imperial orders, there might have been a chance to save the existing hierarchy, but now that they’ve been empowered? No kneeling, n way, no how. Not for anybody who has not earn their respect and especially not for an Emperor who is pretty much a joke.

Xiao Qi did not order them to stay on their feet. If he knelt himself, they might have done too, but I bet it would have been nowhere near instantaneous. Oh my, I think we have our new social order! Because this stand-off? It’s going to be the hottest piece of news all over the country. And everyone who hears about it will start thinking if they themselves would go to their knees. Hmm, I wonder what the common consensus will be?

Anyway, Turnip Wang has just seen a ghost of his noble privilege swoosh by. He certainly looks like he did. Poor thing, he’s got no idea what to do. And then his scary brother-in-law calmly saunters closer...

...and plucks the sacred edict out of Turnip’s hands. My favourite part?

Ningshuo soldiers immediately perk up. They’re ready and even eager for the show! And a show they will get. Pang Gui the Inept Ninja acts more shell-shocked than eager, but he also didn’t go to his knees. Hey, do you think he might have gotten some lessons in those six months? I sure do hope so!

Xiao Qi reads the edict out pretty matter-of-factly, no obvious gloating or additional commentary needed. It’s so bad and idiotic it speaks for itself. Xiao Qi, the man with the Biggest Baddest Army in town, is graciously allowed to enter the capital and to live in his own house. But he gets none of his titles back, no official post, no nothing. In fact he’s still technically a criminal until Zitan says otherwise. Which he might. Or might not. Xiao Qi has no way to influence the outcome either way. That’s it for the theory.

It’s basically a very unfunny joke. One that would have ended very badly if Xiao Qi was an actual traitor. Or if he had any less authority among his soldiers.

Yup, they are not happy. This is Zitan spitting in all of their faces. Xiao Qi shows anything more that quiet irritation and they may just decide to stuff that spit back down Zitan’s throat. Xiao Qi, being who he is, remains utterly reasonable, showing open anger only when remembering his dead soldiers. Other that that? He lays down the law: he needs the truth. That’s it. Give him that, give him justice, he’ll go away.

He’s all about the truth; what’s more, he has a pretty good guess who is guilty - he’s not shy about it either - and every second the investigation is stalled confirms his suspicions further. Nobody is very surprised, not Awu, not Turnip and not Ningshuo men. This insulting edict may have as well read: WE HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE. SIGNED: EMPEROR ZITAN.

#the rebel princess #monarch industry #episode 61

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jeannereames · 3 years

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What Genre IS Dancing with the Lion?

(N.B.: This post should not make anyone feel guilty for mislabeling the novels; I’m posting it because there seems to be some confusion.)

One of the most important parts of selling a book is getting it into the right hands: that is, to the readers most likely to enjoy it. And that involves labeling it correctly.

If you picked up Dancing with the Lion because you’re a fan of Alexander the Great or ancient Greece, the book’s genre probably matters little. I’ve read novels about Alexander in everything from lit mainstream to SFF to mystery to old-school Romance.

Yet such readers are a fraction of potential readership. For those with no particular inclination to a book about Alexander the Great, naming the genre matters. Will it meet reader expectations and appeal, or frustrate and annoy? That’s why authors worry about genre labels.

So, to answer the question: Dancing with the Lion is a mainstream historical coming-of-age novel with touches of magical realism and queer themes.

Below, I’ll explain in brief why it’s some labels and not others. But I want to stress that getting a book correctly labeled is NOT a diss at genres it isn’t. Again, it’s about getting it into the right hands so readers like it instead of hate it.

Novel: At root, two basic story types exist—those that focus on plot (romance, small /r/ = adventure story) and those that focus on characters (novel). I write both, incidentally; my current WIP is an historical fantasy adventure series. But DwtL is a novel. Characterization IS the plot, rather than characters moving the plot along.

Mainstream: Just means the book doesn’t fit into the plot conventions of commercial genre fiction. Saying something is “mainstream” therefore says mostly what it is not: not mystery, not horror, not Romance, not fantasy, etc. Some folks will subdivide it further into “literary” mainstream versus commercial mainstream with the distinction that the latter sells better and/or the former is more artsy.

Historical: A subcategory of several genres, including mainstream. Readers of historicals tolerate more historical detail and unusual names, although genre historicals can alter that. Too much historical detail in an historical Romance that slows down the love story can get an author in trouble. Mainstream historicals may include glossaries, character stemma, timelines of historical events, or other reader guides. Afficionados of historical novels are reading for that detail, not in spite of it.

Coming-of-Age: as the name suggests, this very old story archetype is all about the characters growing up. In DwtL, three characters have coming-of-age arcs: Alexandros, Hephaistion, and Kleopatra.

Magical Realism: Unlike genre fantasy, magical realism combines realistic/non-magical elements with supernatural ones. They also take place in this world, not a different fantasy world in which magic works. Yet the line between historical fantasy and historical magical realism can be fine because, in the past, people did assume magic worked, and the better authors of historical fantasy employ magical systems appropriate to that place and time. The biggest difference is that magical realism is subtler, and the supernatural elements may not be perceived by all, or even most characters. (So while Alexandros sees Dionysos, no one else does.)

Queer Themes: This is more than just Alexandros and Hephaistion as lovers. Especially in Rise, one sub-plot for Hephaistion’s coming-of-age is his own growing awareness that the way he experiences desire does not conform to the expectations of his society. He is what we, in the modern world, would call gay. I wanted to explore how it might feel for someone to be gay in a world that doesn’t have that label, and which might, on the face of it, seem more accepting…but really isn’t.

Now, for the genres it’s not, and why:

Not Romance: Capital /R/, Romance the genre has fairly locked-in plot arc expectations. The Hero and Hero (if it’s m/m) meet, go through trials and tribulations, then finally hook up in some sort of permanent way to live happily-ever-after (HEA) or at least happily-for-now (HFN). The focus of the novel must remain firmly on the Hero and Hero and their relationship. Other relationships and events should serve to frame the main one, never distract from it.

DwtL: Becoming simulates some of those things. The book does begin when the boys meet, and they go through a friends-to-more plot arc, but there’s too much Other Stuff, and in Rise, the story just keeps going even after they get together. Furthermore, Rise is not a Romance plot arc, even loosely. It’s all about Alexandros and Hephaistion entering the adult world of politics and war, and the larger theme (of the whole series, not just these books) asks what it means to be a moral/ethical sovereign?

Not YA (Young Adult): Although YA novels should have an adolescent protagonist and will often be a coming-of-age story, not all novels with an adolescent protagonist or coming-of-age story are YA. So what’s the difference? The themes and the language employed.

The plot of YA should focus on things important to that age group (13-18), not necessarily what could equally matter to someone in their 50s. That doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy YA stories; about 55% of YA books are purchased by adults. Another aspect of YA is the vocabulary used and complexity of ideas. Sometimes adult coming-of-age stories are called more “sophisticated,” which isn’t a term I like. Intricate might be better, in characterization and theme.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and J.D. Salinger’s A Catcher in the Rye are all coming-of-age novels, and some are even assigned in high school English classes. But they aren’t commercial YA in language or theme. In contrast to, say, Madeline L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time, Jane Yolen’s Pit Dragon trilogy, or Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Yet I don’t think anyone would call those latter three “unsophisticated.”

In short, a teen protagonist and/or coming-of-age story does not qualify a book as YA.

Finally, most YA treats sex gingerly as they must be appropriate for readers as young as 13, 14, 15. They may have some romance or none at all, and they may have elided sexual situations light on description. It shouldn’t be shocking, but age-appropriate to adolescent curiosity about sex. (By contrast, the category of New Adult [18-25 readership] may have quite a lot of graphic sex in it, although in other ways NA resembles YA.)

When I wrote Dancing with the Lion, despite the age of the main protagonists, I made no attempt to moderate the language. There are also POV scenes from adults, and three of the chief thematic concerns—what does it mean to be a moral king [Alex], how does one support the powerful without losing one’s self in the process [Hephaistion], and how to exercise personal agency when one has none legally [Kleopatra]—are themes that can apply to any age group. Last, the sex scenes have no stop on them. If two are over fairly quickly with general/poetic description, the third is graphic because it needs to be as what they are doing matters very much to Hephaistion’s character arc. There is also reference to the rape of women and children in war; only the aftermath is shown, but still. While I realize emotional maturity can vary wildly, I wouldn’t recommend the second novel for readers under 15/16. (I told my niece not to let my great-niece read it yet.)

That’s why I’m concerned about Dancing with the Lion being labeled YA. An unsuspecting parent might buy it for their early teen child, only for that child to get a textual eyeful in book 2!

Also, readers who pick it up thinking it’s ___, get angry when it’s not. E.g., in an otherwise fairly positive review, at least one reader wrote:

“Because the western spellings/pronunciation are so ingrained using the stranger sounding Greek slows the pace even further and seems to over complicate things merely for the sake of it. This is clearly aimed at a YA audience and so I find the choice doubly baffling - Because you want to encourage teens reading not put them off by making this harder than it needs to be.”

But it’s not YA, was never meant to be YA, nor marketed or labeled as YA on the cover. Apparently, some folks on Goodreads labeled it that in their tags, so now “Young Adult” shows up as one of its genres…and I can’t get rid of it because I don’t set those tags (nor does my publisher).

In the above case, the reader mostly enjoyed it, but her perceptions affected how she reviewed it. Authors can’t always control those perceptions and expectations, but as we really do want readers to like the book (not feel deceived), we endeavor to use the right labels on them.

#Dancing with the Lion #DwtL #Alexander the Great #historical fiction #ancient Greek historical fiction #labeling fiction #coming-of-age #mainstream #queer themed fiction #magical realism #genre Romance #commercial YA #Jeanne Reames #don't want to annoy the readers

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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Could you expand a bit on the "death of expertise"? It's something I think about A LOT as an artist, because there are so many problems with people who think it isn't a real job, and the severe undercutting of prices that happens because people think hobbyists and professionals are the same. At the same time, I also really want people to feel free to be able to make art if they want, with no gatekeeping or elitism, and I usually spin myself in circles mentally thinking about it. So.

I have been secretly hoping someone would ask this question, nonny. Bless you. I have a lot (a LOT) of thoughts on this topic, which I will try to keep somewhat concise and presented in a semi-organized fashion, but yes.

I can mostly speak about this in regard to academia, especially the bad, bad, BAD takes in my field (history) that have dominated the news in recent weeks and which constitute most of the recent posts on my blog. (I know, I know, Old Man Yells At Cloud when attempting to educate the internet on actual history, but I gotta do SOMETHING.) But this isn’t a new phenemenon, and is linked to the avalanche of “fake news” that we’ve all heard about and experienced in the last few years, especially in the run-up and then after the election of You Know Who, who has made fake news his personal brand (if not in the way he thinks). It also has to do with the way Americans persistently misunderstand the concept of free speech as “I should be able to say whatever I want and nobody can correct or criticize me,” which ties into the poisonous extreme-libertarian ethos of “I can do what I want with no regard for others and nobody can correct me,” which has seeped its way into the American mainstream and is basically the center of the modern Republican party. (Basically: all for me, all the time, and caring about others is a weak liberal pussy thing to do.)

This, however, is not just an issue of partisan politics, because the left is just as guilty, even if its efforts take a different shape. One of the reason I got so utterly exasperated with strident online leftists, especially around primary season and the hardcore breed of Bernie Bros, is just that they don’t do anything except shout loud and incorrect information on the internet (and then transmogrify that into a twisted ideology of moral purity which makes a sin out of actually voting for a flawed candidate, even if the alternative is Donald Goddamn Trump). I can’t count how many people from both sides of the right/left divide get their political information from like-minded people on social media, and never bother to experience or verify or venture outside their comforting bubbles that will only provide them with “facts” that they already know. Social media has done a lot of good things, sure, but it’s also made it unprecedently easy to just say whatever insane bullshit you want, have it go viral, and then have you treated as an authority on the topic or someone whose voice “has to be included” out of some absurd principle of both-siderism. This is also a tenet of the mainstream corporate media: “both sides” have to be included, to create the illusion of “objectivity,” and to keep the largest number of paying subscribers happy. (Yes, of course this has deep, deep roots in the collapse of late-stage capitalism.) Even if one side is absolutely batshit crazy, the rules of this distorted social contract stipulate that their proposals and their flaws have to be treated as equal with the others, and if you point out that they are batshit crazy, you have to qualify with some criticism of the other side.

This is where you get white people posting “Neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter are the same!!!1” on facebook. They are a) often racist, let’s be real, and b) have been force-fed a constant narrative where Both Sides Are Equally Bad. Even if one is a historical system of violent oppression that has made a good go at total racial and ethnic genocide and rests on hatred, and the other is the response to not just that but the centuries of systemic and small-scale racism that has been built up every day, the white people of the world insist on treating them as morally equivalent (related to a superior notion that Violence is Always Bad, which.... uh... have you even seen constant and overwhelming state-sponsored violence the West dishes out? But it’s only bad when the other side does it. Especially if those people can be at all labeled “fanatics.”)

I have complained many, many times, and will probably complain many times more, about how hard it is to deconstruct people’s absolutely ingrained ideas of history and the past. History is a very fragile thing; it’s really only equivalent to the length of a human lifespan, and sometimes not even that. It’s what people want to remember and what is convenient for them to remember, which is why we still have some living Holocaust survivors and yet a growing movement of Holocaust denial, among other extremist conspiracy theories (9/11, Sandy Hook, chemtrails, flat-earthing, etc etc). There is likewise no organized effort to teach honest history in Western public schools, not least since the West likes its self-appointed role as guardians of freedom and liberty and democracy in the world and doesn’t really want anyone digging into all that messy slavery and genocide and imperialism and colonialism business. As a result, you have deliberately under- or un-educated citizens, who have had a couple of courses on American/British/etc history in grade school focusing on the greatest-hit reel, and all from an overwhelmingly triumphalist white perspective. You have to like history, from what you get out of it in public school, to want to go on to study it as a career, while knowing that there are few jobs available, universities are cutting or shuttering humanities departments, and you’ll never make much money. There is... not a whole lot of outside incentive there.

I’ve written before about how the humanities are always the first targeted, and the first defunded, and the first to be labeled as “worthless degrees,” because a) they are less valuable to late-stage capitalism and its emphasis on Material Production, and b) they often focus on teaching students the critical thinking skills that critique and challenge that dominant system. There’s a reason that there is a stereotype of artists as social revolutionaries: they have often taken a look around, gone, “Hey, what the hell is this?” and tried to do something about it, because the creative and free-thinking impulse helps to cultivate the tools necessary to question what has become received and dominant wisdom. Of course, that can then be taken too far into the “I’ll create my own reality and reject absolutely everything that doesn’t fit that narrative,” and we end up at something like the current death of expertise.

This year is particularly fertile for these kinds of misinformation efforts: a plague without a vaccine or a known cure, an election year in a turbulently polarized country, race unrest in a deeply racist country spreading to other racist countries around the world and the challenging of a particularly important system (white supremacy), etc etc. People are scared and defensive and reactive, and in that case, they’re especially less motivated to challenge or want to encounter information that scares them. They need their pre-set beliefs to comfort them or provide steadiness in a rocky and uncertain world, and (thanks once again to social media) it’s easy to launch blistering ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with you, who are categorized as a faceless evil mass and who you will never have to meet or negotiate with in real life. This is the environment in which all the world’s distinguished scientists, who have spent decades studying infectious diseases, have to fight for airtime and authority (and often lose) over random conspiracy theorists who make a YouTube video. The public has been trained to see them as “both the same” and then accept which side they like the best, regardless of actual factual or real-world qualifications. They just assume the maniac on YouTube is just as trustworthy as the scientists with PhDs from real universities.

Obviously, academia is racist, elitist, classist, sexist, on and on. Most human institutions are. But training people to see all academics as the enemy is not the answer. You’ve seen the Online Left (tm) also do this constantly, where they attack “the establishment” for never talking about anything, or academics for supposedly erasing and covering up all of non-white history, while apparently never bothering to open a book or familiarize themselves with a single piece of research that actual historians are working on. You may have noticed that historians have been leading the charge against the “don’t erase history!!!1″ defenders of racist monuments, and explaining in stinging detail exactly why this is neither preserving history or being truthful about it. Tumblr likes to confuse the mechanism that has created the history and the people who are studying and analyzing that history, and lump them together as one mass of Evil And Lying To You. Academics are here because we want to critically examine the world and tell you things about it that our nonsense system has required years and years of effort, thousands of dollars in tuition, and other gatekeeping barriers to learn. You can just ask one of us. We’re here, we usually love to talk, and we’re a lot cheaper. I think that’s pretty cool.

As a historian, I have been trained in a certain skill set: finding, reading, analyzing, using, and criticizing primary sources, ditto for secondary sources, academic form and style, technical skills like languages, paleography, presentation, familiarity with the professional mechanisms for reviewing and sharing work (journals, conferences, peer review, etc), and how to assemble this all into an extended piece of work and to use it in conversation with other historians. That means my expertise in history outweighs some rando who rolls up with an unsourced or misleading Twitter thread. If a professor has been handed a carefully crafted essay and then a piece of paper scribbled with crayon, she is not obliged to treat them as essentially the same or having the same critical weight, even if the essay has flaws. One has made an effort to follow the rules of the game, and the other is... well, I did read a few like that when teaching undergraduates. They did not get the same grade.

This also means that my expertise is not universal. I might know something about adjacent subjects that I’ve also studied, like political science or English or whatever, but someone who is a career academic with a degree directly in that field will know more than me. I should listen to them, even if I should retain my independent ability and critical thinking skillset. And I definitely should not be listened to over people whose field of expertise is in a completely different realm. Take the recent rocket launch, for example. I’m guessing that nobody thought some bum who walked in off the street to Kennedy Space Center should be listened to in preference of the actual scientists with degrees and experience at NASA and knowledge of math and orbital mechanics and whatever else you need to get a rocket into orbit. I definitely can’t speak on that and I wouldn’t do it anyway, so it’s frustrating to see it happen with history. Everybody “knows” things about history that inevitably turn out to be wildly wrong, and seem to assume that they can do the same kind of job or state their conclusions with just as much authority. (Nobody seems to listen to the scientists on global warming or coronavirus either, because their information is actively inconvenient for our entrenched way of life and people don’t want to change.) Once again, my point here is not to be a snobbish elitist looking down at The Little People, but to remark that if there’s someone in a field who has, you know, actually studied that subject and is speaking from that place of authority, maybe we can do better than “well, I saw a YouTube video and liked it better, so there.” (Americans hate authority and don’t trust smart people, which is a related problem and goes back far beyond Trump, but there you are.)

As for art: it’s funny how people devalue it constantly until they need it to survive. Ask anyone how they spent their time in lockdown. Did they listen to music? Did they watch movies or TV? Did they read a book? Did they look at photography or pictures? Did they try to learn a skill, like drawing or writing or painting, and realize it was hard? Did they have a preference for the art that was better, more professionally produced, had more awareness of the rules of its craft, and therefore was more enjoyable to consume? If anyone wants to tell anyone that art is worthless, I invite you to challenge them on the spot to go without all of the above items during the (inevitable, at this rate) second coronavirus lockdown. No music. No films. No books. Not even a video or a meme or anything else that has been made for fun, for creativity, or anything outside the basic demands of Compensated Economic Production. It’s then that you’ll discover that, just as with the underpaid essential workers who suffered the most, we know these jobs need to get done. We just still don’t want to pay anyone fairly for doing them, due to our twisted late-capitalist idea of “value.”

Anyway, since this has gotten long enough and I should probably wrap up: as you say, the difference between “professional” and “hobbyist” has been almost completely erased, so that people think the opinion of one is as good as the other, or in your case, that the hobbyist should present their work for free or refuse to be seen as a professional entitled to fair compensation for their skill. That has larger and more insidious effects in a global marketplace of ideas that has been almost entirely reduced to who can say their opinion the loudest to the largest group of people. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but at least I can try to point it out and to avoid being part of it, and to recognize where I need to speak and where I need to shut up. My job, and that of every single white person in America right now, is to shut up and let black people (and Native people, and Latinx people, and Muslim people, and etc...) tell me what it’s really like to live here with that identity. I have obviously done a ton of research on the subject and consider myself reasonably educated, but here’s the thing: my expertise still doesn’t outweigh theirs, no matter what degrees they have or don’t have. I then am required to boost their ideas, views, experiences, and needs, rather than writing them over or erasing them, and to try to explain to people how the roots of these ideas interlock and interact where I can. That is -- hopefully -- putting my history expertise to use in a good way to support what they’re saying, rather than silence it. I try, at any rate, and I am constantly conscious of learning to do better.

I hope that was helpful for you. Thanks for letting me talk about it.

#history #long post #anonymous #ask

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beauty-in-love · 4 years

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Listen to the mind of God video with lyrics by Leonard Cohen, one of my favorite videos I made on Christmas eve 2020.

When I made this video, I was only interested in one question - the question of religion and some thoughts about the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Bible is a fascinating book that provides more questions than answers. If through this book, you try to understand the purpose of creation or God (if you are a believer), then most likely you will break your brains and at best end up in a psycho-nerve clinic. And in the worst case, as it happened to me, you will be closed from the outside world in a City Mental hospital with a severe schizo-type mental disorder-a disease that threatens you with very unpleasant consequences for your health, up to a fatal outcome. There are things in the world that we ordinary people, at this stage of human evolution, are not given to understand. No matter how many times I asked various clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church about the plan and creation of God, I heard only silence in response. I mean, I didn't hear anything. Based on these answers, I have the right to believe that neither the Pope or Patriarch Kirill or the leaders of any other religions themselves know the answer to this question. Therefore, I made a conclusion for myself and some compromise way out of my situation to understand God from the point of view of morality. There is an easier book to read that is part of the Bible - the New Testament. I decided for myself that it doesn't matter if there was such a person named Jesus 20 years ago. It also doesn't matter to me whether there were any miracles associated with the resurrection of the dead and the healing of the sick. Nor does it matter to me whether it is fiction or truth, or whether Jesus was a God or a man. After reading the New Testament several times, I came to a conclusion. That, suppose I read a fairy tale and in it a man named Jesus says very simple and understandable things from the point of view of common sense, it would seem that everyone should understand. Don't kill, don't lie, don't steal, don't commit adultery (i.e., don't cheat on your wife or your husband) , etc. Seven capital truths + the sermon on the mount-the meaning of both is to be friends with common sense, so that you and the people around you do not perish, but thrive. And it doesn't matter to me whether there was a person like Jesus or not. What matters to me is that what he said is actually right from the point of view of common sense.

A little bit about the Russian Orthodox Church and why our country lives in poverty, in diseases, in a low quality of life, in unemployment and all the outrages that we are seeing now at the moment. For all this grief, we are not responsible, not God (who allegedly allows people to believe in him, as the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church like to say), not the political elite-the top led by Putin and his associates. The Russian Clergy, from the Patriarch to the smallest Clerk, are responsible for all this. All those who graduated from the Seminary and decided to devote their lives to the service of God. The problem is that it is not enough to graduate from a Seminary to see, and if they do, they are deprived of the word. Fear is ingrained in them and they don't have the willpower to carry out their mission the way real clergy should. Who allowed such immoral people and still allows (I'm talking about the political elite) to rule such a huge country with the largest reserves of natural resources? Who is silent when there is an unfair trial of the innocent? Who hides behind a mask of humility and distributes them to other people, thereby taking away their freedom and making us passive in all areas of life except buying candles for the fence for the Church? Who, hiding behind the Holy gospel and the vociferous baritone of his voice, with prayers from books, and not from the heart, inspires the simple ordinary person with a sense of guilt because he does not worship or pray correctly, or because he does not attend the Liturgy very often, because he does not repent of his sins or receive communion too often. They will find a million reasons to make the common people feel guilty, and they will not find a single reason to say their word to the elite, who really need the criticism and guidance of the clergy. Their fear is rooted in our elite, not in God, which means they have neither the truth nor the Holy spirit, as they like to say.

When the soldiers come, or famine, or all sorts of coronaviruses, or AIDS, as the punishment of heaven for gays or any other disasters, first of all they will blame everything on our sins and say that this is God's punishment for our immoral acts and disobedience. Do not be Deceived when they tell you this kind of ridiculous nonsense. There is no divine punishment. There is connivance, fear and moral degradation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which allowed all this through its humble silence in front of those who really deserve criticism, preaching, instructions and instilling a sense of guilt and fear of God. Because it is politicians who are at the helm of all state processes that directly affect our lives. Russian Russian Orthodox Church has proved its arrogance before the ordinary Russian people long ago, at least by that ridiculous law, which it willingly approved, in order to protect itself from the truth within the framework of the Constitution, I am now talking about the law "on insulting the feelings of believers" that is, on insulting them.

This Listen to the mind of God video contains my favorite lines of poetry by Leonard Cohen

Listen to the mind of God Don't listen to me

Despite the fact that Leonard Cohen was very well versed in many religions of the world, he tells us the following lines - do not listen to me, listen to the voice of your conscience.

#god religion love jesus spirit

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mrsbeef · 7 years

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THIS IS INCREDIBLY LONG

AND FULL OF EGREGIOUS HYPERBOLE AND GENERALISATIONS. It is my attempt to write a paper on Chinese Communist cinema as a tumblr post so it feels less scary. If you’re interested in this sort of thing then I am concerned for you read on.

Content warning for violence, misogyny, Nazis, antisemitism, seemingly unavoidable gender binarism, sex, Chairman Mao, Hitler, Stalin, and Freud.

Behold the gateway to a bright Communist future!

Anyone heard of visual pleasure in cinema? Specifically the theory that Laura Mulvey was talking about? For anyone who needs context, Laura Mulvey’s theory is based on Freudian psychoanalysis, and it basically states that the spectator identifies with the male hero, and is always in a masculine position compared to the objectified women on screen, and gets a kind of sadistic pleasure from that power. And moreover, she says scenes of women bring the narrative screeching to a halt, because the cheesecake scenes of their fragmented and objectified bodies freeze the action so the audience can have those sweet, sweet phallic fantasies. For the purposes of argument, I’m lumping ‘torture porn’ of the Game of Thrones variety under ‘cheesecake’. Sick, I know, but we’re going to get into some sicker shit later.

Now this theory definitely has some problems, but let’s stick with it for the time being. We can see that parts of it manifest in totalitarian cinema. Let’s take the USSR under Stalin and Germany under Hitler as two examples. There’s a propaganda film from 1936 called The Party Card (партийный билет) where a good Communist party member has her party card stolen, and the audience gets to internally crow over her loss of power. This is most obvious in the scene of the disciplinary hearing, which our heroine Anna has to attend because she allowed someone to steal her card and demonstrated a lack of vigilance. If you look at the way this was filmed, it is so voyeuristic that you can almost sense the director or someone jacking off a bit; imagine all these important mostly male politicos all talking down to this one poor guilty cringing woman. This movie came out just before Stalin started the major purges, and it was intended to caution party members to keep their documents safe from the enemy at all times. And they got the message.

Meanwhile, in Nazi Germany (a horrible phrase, I know), the propaganda film Hitlerjunge Quex (1933) was casting the Nazis in a positive light by contrasting their bodily vigour and healthy lifestyles with the exaggerated degeneracy of the German Communists. Scenes of Communists drinking, smoking, gambling and canoodling with loose (probably Jewish) women were meant to make the collective monocle of German society pop off, at a time when the disenfranchised working class was still warming to the whole Nazi thing. And of course it’s loose Jewish women who are used to make this point; women with all the icky sex bits, so when you’re revolted by them you have your masculine spectatorial power reinforced (and on some level it can start to make you feel kind of okay with these women getting hurt or killed). Nazi ideology was pretty open about its misogyny; pure Aryan women gotta produce them master race babies yo. And arguably fascism begins with gender hierarchy (if you believe some authors). So the film makes sure to have a nice pure, sexless blonde girl (the kind Klaus Theweleit calls “the White woman”, as opposed to the Jewy Jezebel “Red woman”) for a contrast.

If you look at it this way, these examples of totalitarian cinema seem to be using structures of visual pleasure to produce a kind of revulsion mixed with sexual arousal, so that the audience will orient themselves properly towards the correct ideology, whatever that happens to be at the time. Karsten Witte argues that Nazi cinema goes a step further by trying to bleed the visual pleasure out of film so that the audience is left in perpetual frustration-- good for breeding violence, maybe. He’s specifically talking about revues, the Busby Berkeley-type ones with the kicking legs and crazy stage setups. Apparently Nazis were capable of making even that shit unexciting by making all the choreography monotonous and lifeless, and filming a huge wide shot to show the whole stage and some of the seats; it’s like ZE CAMERA VILL NEVER MOVE DOWNSTAGE ON PAIN OF DEATH.

Anyway, in all this discussion, doesn’t it seem like something’s missing from Mulvey’s theory? A couple things, actually. Why so binary? Why so essentialist and ahistorical? What happens to this theory outside of the West? Isn’t this theory based in capitalism? What about class differences? Where is the female spectator/the female hero?* This is my big problem with anything that has Freud’s name on it, but I’ll keep my personal loathing out of this post as far as possible. So far, all anyone’s been talking about with this visual pleasure thing is looking at sexy girls.

So let’s try taking this visual pleasure thing and transplanting it to somewhere really different: COMMUNIST CHINA IN THE 60′S. Think about it! You’ve got a communist political system and collectivist culture, different standards and signifiers of beauty, and radically different forms of gender expression mixed up with class struggle, thanks to a government that officially came out and said “men and women are the same”. Of course that was complete bullshit in practice, but it was the ideal, and movies are all about ideal. Chinese Communist propaganda movies were good for teaching women how to be good socialists. And in contrast with stuff like Party Card, revolutionary Chinese films had a lot of female characters who were actually heroic. They were revolutionary soldiers and workers and peasant militiawomen, and they were ideal models for real women to emulate. This naturally means that revolutionary films were being made with a mixed gender audience in mind, and not just to appeal to a certain gender demographic. Of course in traditional Confucian culture women’s social position was lower than dirt (not accounting for class difference), but all that was supposed to be over now. Now women can be heroic revolutionaries too! They too can approach the sublime ideal of the hypermasculine, vigorous Communist fighter who makes history with his own hands! Not actually reach, though. Only approach. See, this view of gender equality took hypermasculinity as the standard everyone was meant to aspire to. So anything ‘feminine’-- like long hair, bright colours, or sentimentality-- became icky gross and bourgeois. Nobody wants to be a woman, ewww. Revolutionary films offered women and girls a way to fantasise about being that hero in a kind of utopia where family/marital obligations and culturally ingrained sexism didn’t exist, unlike irl. With women and men supposedly being equal (on men’s terms), there also was less room for overt titillating sexiness on the cinema screen, and audiences could derive strong visual pleasure based on class differentials rather than sexual ones (more on this later). Sexiness did sort of find its way back in sometimes, though. And not just through subversive watching either.

I can’t really speak for Nazi Germany or the USSR as those aren’t my specialities, but Chinese political culture seemed particularly receptive to the bleeding together of aesthetics and ideology. Ban Wang calls it “aestheticised politics”; it’s essentially a totalitarian wet dream. They can get inside your head and reorient your tastes and desires so that everything that is ideologically correct seems beautiful and everything that’s taboo is ugly. Imagine that the government could influence what you think is sexy :O (I mean, it probably does in some way already, but that’s off topic) The aesthetics of the revolutionary film could concentrate the spectators’ visual pleasure in a way that benefits the state. You can accomplish this with visual cues, camera tricks, etc. And so the Chinese government may have indirectly produced a generation of young men (and likely some women) who enjoyed beating off furiously to female guerrilla fighters in shorts.

Case in point: the 1971 filmed revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women (《红色娘子军》). It’s well known for causing a flood of jizz sexual awakening for a good many young men in the Cultural Revolution. It was part of a canon of ‘model theatre’ works made for the purpose of exemplifying proper socialist aesthetics, in accordance with Mao’s weirdly well-formed ideas about exactly what those should look like. Plot-wise it’s a pretty standard revolutionary fable: peasant girl meets manly Communist Party official, evil and somewhat effeminate landlord is vanquished. Gotta love those gender dynamics getting mapped onto class antagonisms. But this is a ballet. Ballet is an inherently sensual art form, even if you take away all the tutus and rewrite all the romance scenes. And now that sensuality in ballet gets to blend with the martiality of the revolution! Excellent example: the classic pas de deux in romance scenes has now been repurposed (with added kung fu flavour!) for fight scenes! Can you say SEXY COMMUNISM???

It’s also an art form that relies on dance and music to appeal strongly to the emotions. So when they show us wonderful scenes of the army and the villagers getting along, we’re supposed to feel a warm fuzzy feeling of togetherness with our comrades. When they show us a heroic character being physically punished or martyred, we’re supposed to burn with class hatred, and maybe even get flashbacks to similar abuse we endured at the hands of the enemy. Maybe you might even be so full of rage you might form a mob with your friends and go yank the town ‘capitalist’ out of his home and beat him up. And when we see the inevitable triumph of Communist ideology, we’re supposed to overflow with excitement and hope about the future that we can build for ourselves! All this represents the pleasure people were intended to get out of watching these shows, and all the outcomes are very positive as far as the state is concerned. Noteworthy is that hardly ever are we as spectators put in a position of power over any heroic central female character. That’s not where the pleasure comes from. There is a scene where the peasant-turned-soldier Qionghua is reprimanded for seeking personal revenge, but it isn’t wank material; it’s just a stepping stone to her political maturation. She, like us in the audience, needs to learn that the collective comes first.

All this is well and good, but the famously prudish** Communist ideology also kind of shoots itself in the foot by using the ballet form. It necessitates form-fitting costumes, hence the famous shorts worn by the women soldiers.The moves they perform don’t help either. And neither does the camera, which moves through the complete depth of the stage and lets us get closer to the sweet leg-kicking action than we ever could in a theatre. Also the costuming contains little callbacks to traditional Chinese notions of sexy: check out Qionghua’s red suit (it ain’t just for Communism anymore), and the army uniforms themselves (crossdressing a la Mulan was considered hot). It’s been said that ballet takes place in a secret fourth dimension of the imagination, and some people’s imaginations*** were very fired up. There’s a reason performance stills from Red Detachment were so popular.

Basically the point here is that Chinese revolutionary films had a way different relationship to gender and politics than Western films. Maybe they were both just as illusory. But maybe there’s also something to be said for chasing your own fake fantasy as opposed to just being stuck being somebody else’s?****

* I’m using ‘female hero’ here because whenever these film people say ‘heroine’ they usually mean female romantic lead, and I am talking about something completely different.

** Sexy is fine only when we get to decide what you like.

*** In quite a few cases this would mean ‘genitals’.

**** This has to be the most unfocused piece of shit I’ve ever written.

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dalepwithchari · 6 years

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‘The end of my VC career’ — Stefan Glaenzer quits Passion Capital to clear way for third fund

Buy some great High Tech products from WithCharity.org #All Profits go to Charity

Stefan Glaenzer, the prominent European VC and former chairman of Last.fm and founder of Ricardo.de, has quit his role as Partner at Passion Capital. He co-founded the London-based early-stage firm seven years ago with partners Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero.

The decision to resign, which the firm’s staff and Limited Partners were informed of last Thursday, is linked to Glaenzer’s arrest and subsequent conviction in 2012 when he pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a woman on the London Underground Tube network. He claimed to be high on cannabis at the time and was given a suspended prison sentence and a fine, banned from using the Tube for 18 months, and placed on the U.K.’s sex offender registry.

Passion Capital is in the midst of fundraising and Glaenzer’s conviction has become an obstacle to some LPs backing a third fund. This contrasts with 2015 when the London VC firm successfully raised £45 million for fund two, including £17.5 million coming from the U.K. taxpayer via the British Business Bank. In 2012, following Glaenzer’s sexual assault conviction, existing LPs and Passion Capital partners also unanimously voted that he should remain in his role at the firm.

In an interview offered to TechCrunch — which at first I was hesitant to accept until it became clear there was a legitimate news angle — I sat down with Glaenzer to discuss the events that led to his resignation and put questions to him that have persisted over the years within the London investment and technology startup community and have become ever louder following high-profile cases of alleged sexual harassment in Silicon Valley and the wider #metoo movement.

They include why he wasn’t fired from his job at the time of the sexual assault conviction, why he didn’t resign earlier, and how Passion Capital and its investors dealt internally with the incident. I also wanted to understand what changed in 2018. The only red line was that he didn’t want to talk about how it impacted his private life and family.

German-born Glaenzer — a multimillionaire twice over through the sale of Ricardo.de to QXL in 2000 and Last.fm to CBS in 2007 — says Thursday 16th of November 2017 was the day he “instinctively knew” his VC career was over. He and Passion’s two other partners, Burbidge and Dighero, were meeting with an institutional investor who had been lined up as a cornerstone LP in fund three. Quite far along in the due diligence process and with the outcome looking positive, the conference room had been booked for 2.5 hours in preparation for an intense final round of negotiations. Thirty minutes in, however, the meeting was over. The operational team had passed the deal to the investment firm’s compliance department and Glaenzer had turned from key person to “headline risk”.

“It was clear, we banked on them as our cornerstone, everything was positive, and after four or five months they said no and we knew we needed to restart,” he says. “I knew that this chapter was over”.

What that “headline risk” is was never explicitly stated, says Glaenzer, who didn’t think to ask, but it seems almost certainly the reputational damage that could be inflicted on any investor associated with Passion Capital if Glaenzer remained involved and should his conviction resurface in the media. Optics matter more than ever in 2018.

That is precisely what happened two months prior to the investor meeting when Bloomberg news ran a story asking: ‘Will Britain Keep Investing in a Sex Offender’s Venture Fund?’. The article placed Glaenzer’s conviction in the context of a wider debate about the role LPs should play in policing bad behaviour by VCs, even if his conviction was for something that happened outside of work.

“In the end the institution made the right call,” says Glaenzer. “I think, luckily, in some societies we have made sure that compliance has a big function. Over the last ten years this has become more ingrained”.

But if it was the right call not to invest in Glaenzer in 2018, shouldn’t the same call have been made in either 2012 or later in 2015. He says the sentiment has changed a lot since then and that, more broadly, the ecosystem is “stunningly different” today.

“I think all participants agreed on the view there’s a difference between what happens in private and what happens in business.

“There wasn’t this thinking or discussion about it. It was just, with these conditions — they were concerned about drug use or another incident, and we clearly defined consequences for this — people accepted”.

(Glaenzer declined to specify what those conditions were as he says they were private matters, although one was that he undergo regular drug testing for two years.)

He says that everybody legally involved in Passion Capital’s first fund voted that he should remain a Partner. “There was not a single against vote,” he says.

But why didn’t he just resign at the time of the incident?

“In 2002, when I was on my break doing nothing, I watched 62 out of the 64 games in the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Germany had a terrible team, it was a disaster, other than [goalkeeper] Oli Kahn, who brought us into the final. And this man made a mistake in the 66th minute and we lost the game. And we or rather he didn’t win the trophy. He said after the game, ‘and continue’. You have to accept that you made a mistake and you have to take the consequences. Don’t run away. And that is my fundamental belief”.

I suggest that by remaining in his position he took very few consequences, and that in almost any other walk of life a person with less privilege would automatically lose their job after being convicted of sexual assault.

“I’m struggling to find a correlation between having done a private mistake, where we all agreed this was not business related, this was in no way using power or money,” says Glaenzer. “It was a personal mistake which I on the spot acknowledged and accepted and apologised [for]. And I said from day one to my partners and the CFE [now the BBB], it is not my decision, I want to carry on doing this, but I will of course accept any decision. If people have a different opinion, I do understand”.

Glaenzer is almost certain that Passion Capital would not have survived had he quit in 2012 and says that doing so would have let his partners and investors down. With two multimillion dollar exits behind him and regarded as a dot-com poster child back in Germany, he was indisputably the biggest draw for Passion Capital’s original LPs.

“Do you run away or do you accept… and continue what you promised to your partners and to your investors? I went to families, I went to people and said, you know what, this is what I want to do, there’s going to be money, we are aiming for [and] have our own expectations of what sort of return a small venture fund should deliver, and then run away? No. I can understand why people think differently, of course. But I personally, in my value system, I can not.”

That’s not to say there weren’t business consequences for Passion Capital and on Glaenzer’s ability to carry out his job, which he says he “100 percent” underestimated. “I was not even thinking about business consequences. It was more about the private…” he says.

The fund was suspended for five weeks after the incident, as per the LP agreement and so a decision about his future could be voted on. His conviction and details of the sexual assault were widely reported in the British media and he says the perception of him understandably changed amongst some people in the tech industry. This resulted in a halt to public appearances and networking and he says he initially saw a 70-80 percent reduction in unsolicited pitches. Passion also lost at least one deal due to Glaenzer’s conviction.

“With every deal there was this awkward situation,” he says. “We always disclosed this to our founders before we signed the deal, and that is, on many levels, a very awkward situation. For founders and [for] us”.

From the outside, at least, I say that it feels as though Passion Capital quickly underwent a re-branding post-incident that saw partner Burbidge replace Glaenzer as the more visible face of the VC firm, which otherwise has always made a virtue of its openness, pushing initiatives like its ‘Plain English Term Sheet’ and making its investment terms public.

“It was a 180 degree change,” says Glaenzer. A change, nonetheless, that he says would have happened over time anyway.

“We used our respective strengths. The respective strength of Eileen [Burbidge] has been [there] from day one, even though I was probably doing more of the visible media. She was organising every single thing; she should become the face of the company… It was very, very clear because she is way more talented than I will ever be. It was known”.

So what’s next for Glaenzer? He gives little away but says he has spent the last few months quietly working on a couple of MVPs, including one idea he has fallen in love with. “My fundamental goal is I don’t want to have my kids being solely educated from American media and digital platforms,” he says.

More than anything Glaenzer says he is ready to embrace change: admitting that he had become increasingly unhappy working in early-stage venture and now very clearly a burden on Passion, he doesn’t dispute that a simple version of this story is that the events of 2012 have finally caught up with him.

On several occasions during the interview Glaenzer quotes a passage from the poem “Steps” by the German poet Hermann Hesse, which he’s handwritten across several sheets of plain white paper, revealing each line one page at a time.

He says he used the same poem to explain his resignation to members of the Passion team last week and also when he quit Recardo.de in 2000.

“‘A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live’,” he reads. “It’s a fundamental belief that this magic is in new beginnings.”

[Read More …]

‘The end of my VC career’ — Stefan Glaenzer quits Passion Capital to clear way for third fund

#HotTrendsWithCharity.com #‘The end of my VC career’ — Stefan Glaenzer quits Passion Capital to clear

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1nebest · 6 years

Link

“I think all participants agreed on the view there’s a difference between what happens in private and what happens in business.

(Glaenzer declined to specify what those conditions were as he says they were private matters, although one was that he undergo regular drug testing for two years).

He says that everybody legally involved in Passion Capital’s first fund voted that he should remain a Partner. “There was not a single against vote,” he says.

But why didn’t he just resign at the time of the incident?

“It was a 180 degree change,” says Glaenzer. A change, nonetheless, that he says would have happened over time anyway.

He says he used the same poem to explain his resignation to members of the Passion team last week and also when he quit Recardo.de in 2000.

“‘A magic dwells in each beginning, protecting us, telling us how to live’,” he reads. “It’s a fundamental belief that this magic is in new beginnings.”

0 notes