‘Haha and hehe denote laughter in both Latin and English, and they sound like laughing when you say them.’ So says my favourite part of the grammar textbook by Ælfric (d. c 1010), Old English author + teacher (Harley MS 3271, f. 90r). –A V Hudson on twitter
If you want to actually go read the thing (because there are other interjections and it’s fun), it’s actually on Harley MS 3271 f.85r
Appreciate the silence. You feel it in your ears. Il te remplit les oreilles, jusqu’au plus profond de tes os. Il est là, reposant…présent. Tel un sinueux cours d’eau frais et tiède sus le soleil. Bzzz… It buzzes in your ears. Hhh, Hhh, silence is there! Silence is there! Silence is…! Partout. Uniforme De coton. autour de tes membres et de ta tête. Dooooooooom… You flicker your fingers at your left ear – mais sa chape se referme aussitôt. You try counting the beatings of your heart! Squish your ears, shakes your head, cry a little! … mais rien ne s’entend. Heaving,
You Feel The Panic,
il te bâillonne,
il t’enserre,
il te pénètre,
il te transperce!
.
Your hands creep towards the light, you clutch your only salvation and bring it to your ears. The familiar shine of the screen hurts your eyes. You click on the song.
Her magnificent voice pierces through you, sadness embraces you strongly and surely. It saves you – mais ce ne sera qu’un court instant de jouissance durant ta pénible nuit d’isolation et de désarroi.
I always await the Sun but can never live under His light without wishing I could fall back into the Paradis Sombre of the night.
Your soul is hunting me and telling me That everything is fine But I wish I was dead
Every time I close my eyes It’s like a dark paradise Lana Del Rey – Dark Paradise
The grave of Marie Taglioni, a ballerina who pioneered the en pointe style of dance. Young dancers often leave their dancing shoes on her grave.
to some of the comments I’ve seen on this—
Marie Taglioni had a different body from other dancers. Modern ballet dancers end up with ‘bad backs’ because we’re trying to reshape ourselves like her but we don’t talk about it.
Looking at that photo, you can see her sloped shoulders and bent-backwards posture. Her head and upper body look pretty relaxed, but if you try to draw a line down to her feet, there would have to be a deep bend in her lower back. That’s something she’s doing intentionally.
It’s unclear at this point whether Taglioni had scoliosis or some other atypical bone structure. It’s clear from portraits that she always had those rounded shoulders and when she stood naturally, the curve of her spine made her lean forward quite a bit, suggesting kyphosis. Although she came from a major ballet family, as a young woman she was repeated rejected by ballet teachers, who referred to her (apparently to her face) as “that little hunchback”.
Training on her own with her father, she developed a way to tuck in her lower back, raising her arms above her head, which lifted up her ribcage so she looked…kind of more like a typically-bodied person.
But it didn’t really make her look like everybody else. Apparently, the posture (and the hours a day, every day, she spent building the strength to hold it with ease) made her look eerily weightless compared to other dancers at the time. To add to the effect, she built up her calf and ankle strength until she could dance for long periods en pointe, which had previously been a very occasional stunt (which involved a lot of arm-flapping, trying to balance. Her statuesque still arms and sheer strength made it look good for the first time).
Her father choreographed the first Romantic ballets, all about faeries and ghostly maidens, to showcase her floating look. She wore knee-length skirts to showcase her gnarly calves and awesome footwork.
When La Sylphide debuted in the spring of 1832, Paris was boiling up toward the June Rebellion (you know, all that in Les Mis). Her scandalous skirts and the dark, haunting sentiment of her dances spoke to the wonder and grandeur and fear Parisians were feeling as they questioned the fundamental order of their world. (She made Parisian teens feel like you feel when you listen to Les Mis.) She was a big fuckin’ hit, performing in the same Paris Opéra that had refused to enroll her as a student.
You know that most basic image of what a “ballerina” is? Arms up high in that pretty frame that starts to hurt real quick and your butt tucked in and your hips all weird? That position wasn’t part of the ballet canon before Taglioni.That’s us trying to make our bodies look like what Marie Taglioni made with her body because people were assholes to her.
Dancers started leaving shoes for her blessing, in a way asking how they can struggle to do what she made seem natural.
That’s us still telling most people they don’t have “the right body for ballet” while we tell the few people who do that they still aren’t enough, because we want people to look perfectly aesthetically able-bodied while doing the thing that a non-normatively bodied woman created for herself.
I’m not saying able-bodied people can’t dance! But hey, maybe we should think about it before we tell anyone they have to dance or be shaped one way.
(In case you’re wondering, it’s not clear if she’s really buried at the be-shoed grave in Montmartre or if that’s her mama. So that’s one of a couple reasons we can’t figure out whether she had a particular condition.)
Sooo…about that grave in Montmartre… After some researches, I can now say that we are totally sure she is not buried here. We know this because she was primarily buried in Marseilles – and got her mother buried in Montmartre. There is still a gravestone for her in the Saint-Pierre cemetery in Marseilles – however, she is not there anymore!
So I wondered where she could be now, and, surprise, surprise, she’s in the Père Lachaise! Apparently her grandson moved everyone there at some point… That’s so interesting, if I get time I’ll go take pictures of both the Montmartre memorial and the actual family grave in the Père Lachaise… Meanwhile, you can have a look at them on this link, which also recaps about everything I said above but in French…
So if you got a little dancer in your family/friends/acquaintances, please show them the right grave! It would be so nice to see more ballet shoes on it…
I’m going through my early blogging days and…this was the first Yuri on Ice thing I ever reblogged… I did not even know the complete name cause I can’t read Japanese at all!! I tagged it with “soon”, “patinage artistique” and “so impatient”… I’m not even sure I knew how to say figure skating in English at that point (I always watched it on the French TV)…
And wow, how far we’ve gone!! I would have NEVER expected that, NEVER! I was just impatient because I love sport anime and figure skating and the animation looked gorgeous.
For the first four weeks I did not even register it was out, and then I binged on it…and had to wait for all the other episodes. That’s how I spent my November and December months, always eagerly waiting on Thursday (the day I watched it), literally bouncing and running out of uni to go scream at my screen for a few hours. Yes, hours, because my Internet was hell back then and one episode took way too much time to lead. Also hours because I would scream and laugh and cry and take screenshots and tire all my patient friends out…
The last months of the year are always very complicated for me, because my depression gets really bad when the days grow shorter. For 2016 at least, this hardship was made sweeter thanks to this amazing show. It made me hang on week after week and gave me feelings, real feelings, not just tiredness, sadness, emptiness… I would fall in bed giggling to myself, clutching my heart in happiness, and boy did I cry during episode 7…
So yes, I get what people mean when they say the show has issues, the creators are not perfect, some parts of the fandom are vile… But just like Free!, YOI is another anime which helped brighten many dark days Just like Free!, the heartfelt music/songs and passionate characters made me have another look on my own life. If Rei helped me understand the beauty in everything and the value of trying, doing, even if you’re bad at what your heart wants, Yuuri proved me, again, that despite shortcomings and anxiety there may be a path in life for me.
These things will never go to waste, even if Free! is basically fanservice and YOI may well be queer-baiting, I found so many precious things in them that to me, they’ll remain Priceless.
Victor Noir is more famous for his death and his grave than for his life. He was a journalist who was shot dead. To mark his grave, a bronze statue of the man lying down as if just shot was erected. This statue has since become something of a fertility symbol.
Due to the naturalistic style of the sculpture there is a fold in Noir’s trousers which make him appear to be aroused. Myth says that placing a flower in the top hat after kissing the statue on the lips and rubbing its genital area will enhance fertility, bring a blissful sex life, or, in some versions, a husband within the year. This is located at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris
“Honey our pregnancy test came back negative we have to go rub the statue’s dick again”
I came to visit him last summer and YES people DO touch it! One lady even asked me to take a picture for her, you can see her hand there. I found it sad there were no flowers in the hat in the pictures above so I added one. Also some people also like touching his foot, as you can see on the last picture!
If you ever come to Paris please visit our cemeteries, they are so beautiful!! You’ll find the plans on the Internet for the Père Lachaise 😉 and the guardians or locals are very friendly!
Plume de Lynx 