Tag: fic inspiration

garden-ghoul:

““There is a kind of uranium [uran] around here,” a prominent hunter from Ulaan-Uul told me. “Nature contains it, and the flowers and wild animals receive it and pass it on to humans. For example, a mountain goat may have the uran and rest where the blueberries are growing. The blueberries receive the uran, and their taste and color become extremely nice. So people eat them and receive the harmful things. Their eyes become light blue and their eyesight turns bad. I think if we could avoid this influence from nature, Darhads would live for two hundred years. We are different because nature is different here. We receive many things from it–too many different things– and this makes our minds powerful and strange. What are these things? They are many different things of nature which influence people’s minds. This is why we have shamans and the ability to curse. Some people will not admit this, but they really should, for it is part of them. Generally, people who have left here have had success; their heads work very well. During their time here, they received enough energy for the rest of their life. But those of us who stayed behind don’t have good lives: we have received too much energy. So why don’t we leave? We can’t. Something is pulling us.””

—

Morton Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia 

there’s a lot in this quote that strikes me: the use of the Russian loanword “uranium” to describe some diffuse and possibly mystical force that exists in the landscape; the idea of a connection to a rural area that’s TOO strong, intoxicating or irradiating and therefore harmful even though it’s powerfully beneficial at smaller doses. It speaks to me. It feels true

penfairy:

I’m reading this Jacobean pamphlet called (and bear with me here) Hic Mulier; or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to cure the Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of our Times, and it’s basically this anonymous author losing his shit over the fashion trend of women dressing ‘masculine’ in early 1600s London. 

I imagined that these costumes would be rather Shakespearean in style, where women just cross-dressed and adopted men’s clothing, but the real fashion is much better. The author describes women in broad-brimmed hats with jaunty feathers in them, French doublets unbuttoned to reveal naked breasts (!), bobbed hair, and a sword. Sometimes he speaks of skirts, sometimes breeches – trousers are optional in this ‘masculine’ ensemble, and ruffs could also be worn. 

It seems odd to me that a woman can have her tiddies out and wear skirts but still be considered unnaturally masculine, but it seems part of the horror came from their attitudes. These weren’t fainting modest maidens – these were armed, uncompromising women, carrying daggers or swords as they pleased, and wearing whatever the hell they wanted. O these times! O these customs! How will we recover from this wanton degeneracy, our author cries! Back in MY DAY women were MODEST. Men were men and women were women! What’s to become of this sinful generation! (Interestingly, there’s a follow-up pamphlet called the Haec Vir which addresses the phenomenon of foppish or feminine men, but I haven’t read that yet.) 

So there you go. In Jacobean London, armed women were walking the streets with their tiddies out, sometimes rocking skirts, sometimes breeches, and with feathers bouncing in their big ol’ hats. The sword lesbians of yesteryear, I’m almost tempted to say. That’s one fashion I’d bring back.

Tûr groweth sea-hungry – his song to Eärendel. One evening he calls to Eärendel and they go to the shore. There is a skiff. Tûr bids farewell to Eärendel and bids him thrust it off – the skiff fares away into the West. Eärendel hears a great song swelling from the sea as Tûr’s skiff dips over the world’s rim. His passion of tears upon the shore. The lament of Idril.
 
The building of Earum. The coming of Elwing. Eärendel’s reluctance. The whetting of Idril. The voyage and foundering of Earum in the North, and the vanishing of Idril. How the seamaids rescued Eärendel, and brought him to Tûr’s bay. His coastwise journey.
 
The rape of Elwing. Eärendel discovers the ravaging of Sirion’s mouth.
 
The building of Wingelot. He searches for Elwing and is blown far to the South. Wirilómë. He escapes eastward. He goes back westward; he descries the Bay of Faëry. The Tower of Pearl, the magic isles, the great shadows. He finds Kôr empty; he sails back, crusted with dust and his face afire. He learns of Elwing’s foundering. He sitteth on the Isle of Seabirds. Elwing as a seamew comes to him. He sets sail over the margent of the world.

From the notes (Scheme E) of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Book of Lost Tales II, “The Tale of Eärendel”