Chalk Revelations

I have just found out that one of my favourite Ukrainian comedians was killed by russians.

And in the very same breath — five or so fandom people, my friends included, reposting and promoting a russian artist on Instagram.

Ukrainian artists die every day. It's not really a joke, it is true. Ukrainian lives are cut short every single day just because they're Ukrainian.

And for all I know, one day I might be amongst them. It's a scary thought, one that I usually don't voice and chase away from myself as much as I can. But it's true. One day I, a Ukrainian artist, as mid and inexperienced as I may be, with all my dreams and hopes and ambitions, might cease to exist for the sole reason of me being Ukrainian. Some of us already have.

And the world will move on. No, not just move on — it will continue promoting russian narratives, russian artists, it will watch and praise russian sports, movies and content about russia and russians.

Because it's not political, is it? Because people would rather find a thousand reasons to blame Ukrainians than one reason to boycott russian content. The reason being the genocide of Ukrainians and the collective responsibility over said genocide.

I can't help but think, if I died from a russian attack during the Easter vacation, all those people who smile at me, reblog my art, respond to my comments, would they stop to think that the russians are at fault? From the smallest artist to the politician to the member of the russian army — the people who have built and supported the society where genocide has become an acceptable thing?

I don't think so.

I think it would, like many Ukrainian deaths, exist in a hypothetical vacuum.

Oh, how sad. What a tragedy.

I won't quote this bullshit fully. Of course, they also assumed I understood russian, which I unfortunately do, but that's very telling. Instantly blocked, but I wanted to talk about something here, for those that aren't hopeless and are willing to listen.

What's also telling is the fact that they said "someone died". Not even the impersonal "someone got killed".

"Someone died."

Yeah, because Ukrainians dropping dead all of a sudden has become the norm and russia is definitely not murdering thousands of people in my country.

No, someone did not "die". Your shitty-ass country killed him and many other talented Ukrainians, because you don't believe we have a right to exist as our own, separate, sovereign nation.

Using the US crimes as justification does not make yours in any way justifiable.

There's only one thing I agree with in that comment. We should've done something about the russian culture long before the current russian genocide of Ukrainians.

Probably the moment it suddenly became "great". Because no culture is "great", in a sense of greater than the others, but russian is.

Here is just one example of what russians do to Ukrainian artists.

This Ukrainian artist on Instagram had their house destroyed by russians very recently. Fortunately, they've received support from many Ukrainians and their friends abroad. Unfortunately, many people in such situations don't.

russia has murdered, harmed and tortured so many Ukrainian artists, athletes, writers, teachers, doctors, scientists; it has destroyed Ukrainian printing houses, galleries, museums, churches, hospitals and fucking playing yards; they've stolen art from us, diminishing and ruining the lives of my people for generations. Tell me, why shouldn't we boycott russian culture in order to finally, finally hear the noises of the cultures they've been destroying for centuries?

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For a while now I have observed that a lot of people, even people who read a lot, struggle to talk about what they read on anything except the content level. This includes students in my undergraduate lit studies classes! They can tell me what happens in a story and maybe how it made them feel, but if I ask them why they feel a certain way, they can't point to it. It blows their minds when I go through a couple of examples of how words make you feel things (like the difference between "red drops" and "crimson spatters"). They are not paying attention to conventions or formats or narrative techniques and they struggle to comprehend the function of those things.

The extension of this is that most people don't know what "good writing" is. They just don't. This has always been the case to some degree because most people only care about whether or not they like a book they're reading, although of course "good writing" usually makes a book more enjoyable to read. But it also appears that a lot of people "read" without really taking in or paying attention to the actual words on the page beyond what they need to imagine the scenes. This is why some of the most popular/successful published writers out there have incredibly dull prose: people prefer straightforward writing that doesn't distract or confuse you with complexity of language.

The unfortunate consequence of the increasing literacy crisis is that the standards for what is considered "enjoyable" keeps dropping. Readers have lower standards for what they will rate 5 stars on Goodreads and that's all publishers care about, so they can get away with putting less effort into their output, so the overall quality keeps dropping too.

There's this idea in literary studies called "the affect" which bluntly put just refers to the physical and emotional reaction like when you watch a scary movie and your body reacts as if you really are being hunted by an axe murderer. The affect is a huge factor for why most people engage with media: they want to feel something and the more intense the feeling, the better. The thing is that the human mind and body are not that complicated and the buttons to make you feel Sad or Happy or Horny are very big and easily pushed, which is why there are cute puppies in commercials and why some writers try to make every single sentence some kind of climax. Increasingly, people appear to mean "it made me feel things" when they say "it's so well-written."

So the best way to make people respond positively to your writing is to make them Feel Things and you don't need to be subtle or clever about it. In fact, it's better if you aren't. If you can make them Feel Things strongly and also repeatedly, even better. In a fanfiction context, that means readers as a demographic prefer frequent updates with a high density of humour, sex, or intense emotional scenes and they don't really know whether it's well-written or not.

and this mentality was carried by white people everywhere they colonized—seeing any animals thats mildly challenging to humans as something thats degraded, unpersoned and killed off or contained in the deep wilds.

This post made me ponder when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe, and what where the factors behind its development. Can i ask for your opinion as a medievalist and historian in this subject?

...Well. For starters, the linked post is just, uh. Wrong. On several levels. In several ways. Before I get to its facts, falsehoods, and assumptions, let's start with one of the problems involved in citing it as a source on history: it's written by a retired veterinary nurse. I'm sure that Debbie Graham (retired veterinary nurse) has done many wonderful things in her career. I'm reasonably sure that we'd be in sympathy politically, and would get along if we found ourselves on the same protest line or weekend hike. But uh. As a set of historical claims, this is egregious.

For one thing, it is either disingenuous or breathtakingly stupid to take the wolf as a stand-in for "the environment," full stop. The wolf is the most culturally iconic predator of the western world. At the risk of seeming flippant: the wolf, which lives in a cave and eats 10,000 sheep per year, is an outlier adn should not have been counted. There are good essays about what is going on with the wolf in literature and culture, both in the Middle Ages and beyond, in this book, via @jstor.

Was there hostility toward wolves in the European Middle Ages? Sure. Arnaud, a fourteenth-century French peasant, is famously on record as a heretic because he concluded that wolves were not created by God. (But... everything is created by God, said a presumably very frazzled member of the clergy. That's kind of a big deal.) Arnaud, however, was a shepherd, and he stuck to his story: God was good, wolves did nothing but eat sheep and lie. Evil. Therefore of the devil. QED. Arnaud eventually conceded that the devil could not create things and that even wolves were created by the Almighty.

Anyway. There are just a shocking number of fallacies and errors in that article. It wants to claim that wolves were hunted to near-extinction by the Normans, while also pointing out the ways in which the Normans placed limits on hunting. The article also conflates the rhetorical/literary wolf (enemy of sheep, humans, Good Things Generally) with the actual wolf, and claims that "This twaddle, when babbled from every pulpit, ensured that people believed that stabbing, beating, flaying, burning and poisoning wolves was good." From the bottom of my heart: what the fuck. I know what was "babbled from every pulpit" in medieval England. Greatest hits include:

the Virgin Mary has your back

pray regularly

do not play dice in the cemetery / in church / with money you don't have

be nice to your neighbor

consider that you are, in fact, sinful

do not be too anxious about your soul, though

yay, saints

do not have sex during Lent

...no seriously, we mean it, no sex during Lent

Anyway: there's not some weird pulpit-thumping anti-wolf brigade. The article claims that church and civic law permitted and rewarded killing of wolves. Common law in England? yes. Church law... I have never heard of such a thing, nor can I imagine any document saying "40 days off purgatory if you -- with the right spirit in your heart -- come hear a sermon, donate to the roof repair fund, or kill a wolf." In the immortal words of Benoit Blanc, it makes no damn sense.

The linked article writes of "things called fields, impounded [sic; not actually what that word means] by structures such as fences or hedges." I think the enclosure movement of the 14th-17th centuries (late medieval/early modern) can certainly be viewed as bad for the ecosystem of England. But that's about pasturage, not arable fields. Not coincidentally, it helped to fuel Robin Hood legends. Moreover, one can also find fenced-in fields in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, etc. Fields are not inherently colonialist.

You say you are pondering "when this type of mentality was developed in pre-modern Europe." My answer would be: it wasn't. A recent overview of environmental history in medieval Europe is this, examining sustainable practices and norms:

Also via @jstor, there's the open-access book The Green Middle Ages, which argues that "the green earth was a generally treasured, indispensable and integrated component of life." It makes its argument, in my view, cogently and well. Full book here.