Maria Writes Things

I ask because Captain Marvel, The Marvels, and Supergirl all pit their cosmic-powered planet-crushing infinity protagonists against Bob from the office, Bob's supervisor Sarah, and a local gang leader respectively, while coming up with ways to tie the protagonists' arms behind their backs through most of the movie in order to drag them down to a level where they might be challenged by their relatively pathetic foes.

And I want to say that this is a gender thing, that we keep handicapping female superheroes specifically instead of letting them get into punch-ups with the kinds of genuinely powerful threats that their male contemporaries get to fight.

if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

When reading analyses it's important to understand the role synthesis¹ plays within the process. Due to empirical uncertainty² and a corresponding optimisation in reasoning, the mind always takes shortcuts when forming conclusions. In social systems, performing the necessary observations for adequate certainty typically takes too long (and in some cases is impossible due to lack of information), so intuition is employed to gain a good enough result at the expense of a higher degree of uncertainty.

Nowhere is this more true than in poetry. Poetry is a medium designed to use our intuition to compress a large message³ into a small text. This is the world of metaphors and implication. The text of the original post is extremely short, all of 18 syllables, as a helpful author has pointed out, but, as you can see, the messages³ that may be received from it are extremely complex indeed.

This is because of synthesis. As you will have noticed, the analyses posted above are each slightly different, their foci are not aligned and in parts they border on the contradictory. Synthesis occurs naturally due to the ambiguous nature of natural language⁴ and grows significantly as the compression factor of a message is increased. Synthesis occurs because compression via implication relies on the mind of the recipient being similar to the mind of the sender. When those minds differ enough (e.g. through separation in time, different state of education, how many drugs have been taken, etc. etc.), the result is noticeable synthesis.

In this instance the compression factor of the message was not very high at all, but as the compression factor is not marked anywhere, it can easily be misidentified and cause what we see here: the shortcut paths of literature students, trained to find implications, trigger when faced with a sentence that looks very much like poetry and produce a delightful and expansive interpretation of what is, hands down, two sentences describing gay sex.

The point of this post is not to discredit these interpretations. It is an error to assume that simply because an analysis does not represent an author's intent, it is not valuable or interesting. Indeed quite often the analysis can be more interesting than the original material! Something need not be true to have value because the true value of an analysis lies in its novelty and its ideas. An analysis of the Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that is mostly the same as all modern treatisies on the ballad may very well be accurate, but it is not novel and it is certainly not interesting. And yet questions-within-questions' remark that there is no space for the husband in the marital bed is a fascinating insight that made me audibly say "ohh yeah!", even though – and one may not be able to stress this enough – it is about gay sex.

There is no conclusion to this. Congratulations for reading to the end. Have this cookie: 🍪 and this heart as a token of my appreciation: 🩷

Footnotes:

¹ synthesis being the creation of some new thing and in this case is to be understood as the addition of new information that was not part of the original message.

² empirical uncertainty is the uncertainty that naturally arises out of insufficient data in the empirical process. That is, the process of drawing conclusions from observations. As we can only perform a finite number of observations, there will always be a valid conclusion that conforms to all observations, but does not match the result of the empirical process. Consider a boy confined to a windowless house, raised solely by men, who never speak about the outside world. This boy would naturally assume that there is no such thing as women. This is empirical uncertainty. At best, limited by the statistical error in your dataset, at worst it is due to a systemic fault.

³ defined here linguistically, not information sciencey. A message is what is intended to be understood and thought upon processing of the text, which is the literal transported form and could be considered an encoding of the message.

And like there was no permanent cast, all these celebrities seem to have gotten a scene or part of a scene to do (i’m not sure exactly, I did not ever watch Quibi and thus haven’t seen this yet), and then they just… recreated it as best they could. At home. Under quarantine.

So like, you had Jennifer Garner in a blanket cape playing Princess Buttercup AND the Booing Old Woman with a crowd comprised entirely of stuffed animals:

Or Taika Waititi paying Westley off a badly-drawn Inigo on a piece of cardboard held in front of someone’s face:

And it’s all just delightful.

But my absolute favorite part of this thing that I’ve sadly never seen but assume is probably absolutely hilarious and a treasure and I want to find it some day and watch the whole thing… is that Carey Elwes is in it.

As Prince Fucking Humperdink.

Here ya go

At the end of summer, when Covid numbers were at a lower point, I took the risk to visit her in her new apartment and I quickly realized that, unlike when I’d spent the night at her house before, the couch wasn’t made up like a bed. She explained that since her new couch was so fancy and pink, I couldn’t possibly sleep on it, and so I needed to sleep in the bed with her. You know, out of necessity. I woke up with her snuggled around me in the middle of the night.

We’re dating now, and I genuinely think I’m going to marry her. Just the other day, though, I mentioned that if she hadn’t been weird about her fancy couch, I probably never would have like confessed my feelings. AND THEN she stood up, took the cushions off the fancy couch, UNFOLDED IT INTO A HIDE-A-BED, and said “I KNOW.”

there was only one bed

Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!

An amorphous black blob thingy that shape-shifts into any hazard related thing.