New Renaissance By KOTY2

Luo Li Rong

I may not be a pastor to replenish and cleanse your sins, but should you have any unresolved resolutions and need to vent, then I am here to bless you.

A new begining shall occur, and we must drop the weights we bring from yesterday so that tomorrow can be anew.

12. why the 1880s?

something about this decade really sings to me. I find in particular, nearing the end of the nineteenth century, so much was happening on around the world in terms of arts, politics, technology, colonization. world events and global news don’t personally reach the day-to-day lives of the everyday folk, but they are an important part in gauging what life, thought, and society was about—what things were important then and now?

basically for myself, reminding me of notable things that occured during the 1880s—some thematic, some of relevance to context and characters, and the rest just ?? interesting and/or wild?

cocaine is a hot new cure for everything and anything. perscribed, sold in foods and more. heroine introduced as a lesser-addictive substitute for morphine…

lots of developments in fields of psychology; many experiments and happenings; Freud starts his work 1886.

1880-1914 had +twenty million immigrants to the United States: Germany, Ireland, England, China had the most arrivals.

William Dorsey Swann, the first self-proclaimed drag queen, organizes a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. 1880-1890s.

Jack the Ripper claims his “first” victim in 1888 White Chapel, London. big scare.

Sherlock Holmes first appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet as part of the British magazine’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is published in 1886. Gothic fiction, drawing from emerging fields of science and psychology. & Treasure Island was published earlier in 1883 by him too!

Mark Twain drops The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant’s second novel is published in 1885. about a man who seduces and manipulates high society French women in the French colonies for power and wealth. MOVIE WAS ADAPTED IN 2012 STARTING ROBERT PATTINSON LOL

western European art movements very romantic and swirly and pretty: Monet, Debussy xoxo.

meanwhile, African American ragtime music becomes the “pop” music across the pond here.

North Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Montana (1889), Washington (1889) become states.

train segregation laws flag beginning of Jim Crow; Civil Rights Movement of 1875 voided, making discrimination in private is not illegal, and prohibiting state intervention to personal or commercial segregation. l*nching continues throughout the south. slavery may be over on paper, but indentured labour is legal.

1882 infamous O.K Corral gunfight.

Gold Rush continues, all over the world—South Africa, to British Columbia, to California, to Argentina, to Russia-China borders.

centuries of American “Indian” wars continue.

American Dawes Act of 1887 granted American government authorization to regulate indigenous lands, including creating and assigning and enforcing reservations.

Sitting Bull’s 1883 speech of the atrocities experienced at the hands of white American settler colonists.

Canadian Pacific Railway 1881-1885. foreign labourers were hired to do a lot of heavy, dangerous, unwanted work. in America, more than 100,000km of tracks were laid by majority Chinese, Irish, Scandinavian workers.

America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 was officiated, enforcing law of a Head Tax to be paid for every Chinese person entering North America. over the course of the next couple of decades, the fee of $1,500 was doubled to $5,000 was increased 500% to $25,000 in today’s currency—per person. this had devastating and lasting impacts on generations and societies of Chinese living both overseas and already in North America. propaganda at this time created many racist myths that persist today: there are too many Asians, they are taking our jobs, (the men) are gross and effeminate and a threat to (white) women, they shady and scheming people. these were the first and only major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a specific nationality in American and Canadian history. (I study Asian Canadian history, I can go on about this all day)

Tong Wars (1883-1913) had Chinatown gangs and factions in violent street wars across America, San Fransisco to New York.

large, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting (pogorm) and antisemitism rampant throughout Imperial Russia, 1881-1882 had more than two hundred anti-Jewish events alone. Jews continue to be racialized and othered.

fuck ton of colonization happening in Africa and the Middle East, Southeast Asia. Berlin conference 1884-1885 literally chopped up Africa to distribute to European powers.

Irish nationalist efforts to push forth Home Rule bill of sovereignty is defeated in British Parliament. Irish are not “white”, they are “othered” in Europe and in Americas.

use of photographic film pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing film. his first camera (Kodak) was ready for sale in 1888.

Thomas Edison gets lit in New York 1883 with first electrical power station. next several year sees major cities being lit up with street lamps and public lighting with the science and works of a Nikolas Tesla (1886-1893).

hell of a lot more inventions in the works and patents being claimed. Hertz and radiowaves, Bell for telephone services.

“Between the years of 1850–1900, women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways the male society did not agree with”

way too much history to cram, obviously. here are some keywords for further research oki

prison industry / spiritualism / opium epidemic / irregular and uneven “modernizations” in rural vs. urban areas / class and poverty gaps / morality scares, checks, comparisons, gaps / new businesses and gadgets, products, tech to help with anything / fascination of the (colonial) Other; side shows, “freak shows” and other human zoos

just minded my own business reading about asparagus on Wikipedia when I suddenly encounter This

u werent “born gay” u decided to be overly enthusiastic about hamlet in highschool english and that’s why you are the way u are

Few quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

ah, the eternal struggle of maintaining the balance of apollonian and dionysian in oneself

Paris mornings

Our Wish for the End, Me, Digital Collage, 2020

comprehensive list of books that will make you think a lot

at the request of @uglydumbbitchdotcom and @dreamingmappist (just to let you know, most of this is european and pre-1930 so if you're looking for literature from other continents this is not the list to go to. i wish i knew more about african, asian, and latin american literature, but alas - i do not.)

a portrait of the artist as a young man and dubliners: short stories of a city by james joyce

anything by fyodor dostoevsky (specifically crime and punishment, demons, notes from underground, but really anything will do and i'm not going to list his complete works on here)

the goldfinch and the secret history by donna tartt

frankenstein by mary shelley

fathers and sons by ivan turgenev

station eleven by emily st. john mandel

the death of ivan ilyich by leo tolstoy

in the first circle by aleksandr solzhenitsyn

paradise lost and paradise regained by john milton

till we have faces and that hideous strength by c.s. lewis

ninety-three and the man who laughs by victor hugo

faust, pt. 1 by goethe

the ulster cycle and an táin bó cúailnge

the a wrinkle in time quartet by madeleine l'engle

grace by paul lynch (this might be sort of an odd addition but he's one of the authors who follows in the joyce tradition and this is a beautiful book with a fascinating plot set during the great hunger so it deserves a place here)

a streetcar named desire by tennessee williams

the plough and the stars by sean o'casey

the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck

common sense by thomas paine

macbeth and henry v by william shakespeare

a room of one's own by virginia woolf

beowulf

say nothing by patrick radden keefe

one hundred years of solitude and the general in his labyrinth by gabriel garcia marquez

the underground railroad by william still

the letters of vincent van gogh

my god, there is a lot of russian literature on there. anyway, here are the books that made me think the most and hardest out of anything i've read