firmamento mori

For context, Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day- March 5, 1953. Because Stalin's funeral was such a major event in the Soviet Union, Prokofiev's was largely overlooked, despite the fact he was one of the leading Soviet composers of his day. Relatively few people attended his funeral, Shostakovich among them.

Shostakovich and Prokofiev were not particularly close, and had a thorny professional relationship- much of the correspondence between them that I've been able to find appears to be formal criticism of each other's works. As Prokofiev was from an older generation- he was born in 1891, while Shostakovich was born in 1906- they did not always see eye-to-eye musically; Shostakovich experimented with the avant-garde when possible, perhaps in part due to his musical maturation during the socially-liberal NEP era, while Prokofiev's style tended to be more conservative and neoclassical- picking up more influence from Imperial-age composers and fellow emigres to the west (he lived in France and the United States before returning to the Soviet Union in 1936). Their generational difference also partially accounted for how they responded to harsh government criticism- Shostakovich was impacted by the consequences of his 1936 denunciation all his life and, while he suffered greatly during his second denunciation in 1948, was able to develop public and private personas, in both the musical and ideological spheres, to preserve himself and his artistry. However devastating as it was for Shostakovich, the 1948 denunciations took a greater toll on many other composers, Prokofiev included. As Prokofiev did not believe he would be harshly denounced as Shostakovich had been in 1936, he was far less prepared for the censorship and attacks he faced in 1948. As a result of the denunciations, combined with his declining health, his artistic productivity decreased, and he largely regulated himself to writing basic ideological works towards the end of his life.

This is a letter Shostakovich wrote to Prokofiev on the subject of his Seventh (and last) Symphony:

There's speculation as to whether or not Shostakovich was actually impressed by Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony. As Prokofiev was in decline at the time of writing it, the symphony has been criticized for being banal and not being particularly innovative; Rostropovich even claimed that Prokofiev added in its final flourish not for artistic purposes, but to have the piece nominated for a Stalin Prize, which would have meant money and a boost to his reputation after it suffered in 1948. (The Stalin Prize has its own complicated history in its role in Soviet music, and although it was the highest award a Soviet composer could earn, it could sometimes be awarded as a sort of backhanded punishment- an encouragement for composers to write the "right" sort of music, especially after they had been criticized for "formalism." Nonetheless, winning it after suffering a denunciation could mean financial and political security.) Did Shostakovich- who had often traded criticisms with Prokofiev over music- actually like this piece, or was this an effort to encourage a fellow artist to keep composing after suffering mental and physical ailments? This was a private letter and not a public statement, and Shostakovich was typically very straightforward about critiques, so if the entirely positive sentiment for the piece wasn't genuine (the only critique here is that Shostakovich says he wishes the entire symphony was encored!), the letter may have come from a place of concern.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

Tachiginnnn if it was razexdenji….

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”

we do not need to correct or expand how ''female sex'' and "male sex" is defined. we need to decouple all physical traits from their sexgender categorization.

when people are faced with the artificiality of "sex," many people fail to actually deconstruct it and instead covertly maintain their belief in a binary by invoking a spectrum model instead.

"sex isn't binary, it's a spectrum" is not accurate, and it does not constitute deconstruction of sex. this conceptual model envisions sex as a sliding scale between two "real" sexes at either end, where one can either move "towards" male or female.

as eckert explains in intersexualization: the clinic and the colony, this bi-directional spectrum model is foundational to the creation of intersex subjectivity. "intersex" is envisioned as a "mixture" of sexes, which inherently constructs male and female as "pure" and anything outside of them as "impure." the intersex body is envisioned as inherently more complicated or complex than the "pure female" and "pure male" body. and reliance on the fixed points of "male" and "female" on either end of this "spectrum" does the work of naturalizing these categories and, by doing so, necessarily also enshrines the sexgender hierarchy they exist to define.

"Therefore, I do see problems with using it because the references it combines reaffirm the two entities, which are supposedly more ‘pure’ and then merge into the hybrid. The notion of the hybrid in itself implies that there is such a thing as purity, whether it is in relation to identity, gender, body, nationality, ethnicity, or origin in general. Moreover, whenever there is a third (no matter if it is an identity, a body, or a space) the first two are implicit and are thought of and listed according to a specific hierarchy. This hierarchy makes one of the two entities the more dominant, hegemonically more justified, debatably more important part and the second one less influential, less important, and more likely to be disregarded. The Third is always based on a first and a second and these are not free from their hierarchical reference system" (pg 193-194).

to deconstruct "sex" we have to actually do the work of challenging the grouping of traits together within gendered categorization. there is no "male" or "female" or "intersex" body outside of these medical labels being forced upon us.

our bodies have a whole bunch of various characteristics, and we can influence these characteristics through learning how they develop and age over time and what factors influence that development in what ways. some are influenced by overlapping factors and some are not.

some of our characteristics are captured under "sex" (determined to constitute sex, or to be part of this collection of traits associated through sex categorization, or to be imbued with gendered meaning) and others are not.

every new trait that becomes "sexed" leads to less bodily autonomy. "sex" is an expanding naturalization project that captures more and more of our bodies for restriction under sexgender enforcement.