on poetry & being human

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on weak similes

& round-up

Despy Boutris
Jan 17
2
Share this post
on weak similes
despyboutris.substack.com

Happy Monday, folks.

Here’s what I have for you today:

  • Housekeeping

  • What I’m reading

  • Quotations

  • On weak similes

  • Tweets


Housekeeping:

I’m selling 10 zines for $30. Whoop whoop!

Twitter avatar for @itsdboutsDespy Boutris @itsdbouts
hiii. just popping on to let u know u can now get all 10 of my zines for $30. ok bye !
bit.ly/33L2gpC
Image

January 16th 2022

4 Retweets29 Likes

buy these zines


What I’m reading:

  • Student Attacks Against Teachers: The Revolution of 1966

  • Dear Memory, Victoria Chang


Quotations:

The missing link between the compelling social science studies on the contagion of violence and the model of such contagion as an infectious disease is a biologically grounded mechanism. A recent neuroscience discovery, a type of brain cell called mirror neuron, may provide such a missing link.

-Marco Iacoboni, “The Potential Role of Mirror Neurons in the Contagion of Violence”


I am trying to make birds out of silence.

-Victoria Chang


Perhaps there’s no truth. Just memory and words.

-Victoria Chang


How we perpetuate our own stereotypes, our own vanishing.

-Victoria Chang


Harm is rarely about intention.

-Victoria Chang


You were from another city. I didn’t know there were other cities until you came.

-Victoria Chang


My dreams are still filled with earthquakes.

-Victoria Chang


Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.

-Victoria Chang


For me, writing felt like an act of identity-making. Each word, a clavicle, a femur, each sentence, an organ.

-Victoria Chang


On weak similes:

As some of you may recall, my first newsletter was about the art of the simile. In it, I catalogued a number of similes I’ve read & liked enough to jot down.

As you know, similes are a form of figurative language wherein a writer can say something is like something else. Similes can be strong, and surprising, and palpable—but they can also be weak & cloudy.

Here are a few similes that I deem “weak,” not operating as we hope one will. These similes aren’t illustrative, or they don’t compare two unlike things.

First:

Frost rests like silt in the morning.

-Benjamin Kaja

What makes this simile weak?

Again, similes are strong when they make a sort of surprising comparison. “The raspberries glowed like strawberries,” for instance, is weak—because raspberries and strawberries already have so much in common. The same is true of “frost” and “silt”—both are natural, both can rest on the surfaces of things so…this really doesn’t feel like much of a revelation.

Google defines a simile, first and foremost, as:

a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind.


Second:

my grief, like a migraine, / strangling my hope.

-Fariha Róisín

What makes this simile weak?

This simile is weak because it doesn’t exactly make sense. Reordered, this nonsensicalness becomes clear:

my grief strangles my hope like a migraine.

In other words, grief is operating like a migraine, because both strangle hope. But, in fact, I don’t think it’s a ~~known understanding~~ that “migraines strangle hope.” Migraines are painful, sure, but I don’t usually associate them with hope or the lack thereof. In turn, this simile—though certainly catchy in its rhythm & diction—doesn’t actually communicate any meaning.


Third:

Perspective creeps, like wisdom, but can feel sudden.

-Victoria Chang

What makes this simile weak?

Like the first example, this simile compares two like things—rather than two unlike things—and thus doesn’t operate the way similes are intended to. What I mean is: “perspective” and “wisdom” often go hand-in-hand—or at the very least often coexist—so there’s no sense of surprise to this simile. Again, a simile is “a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind.”

There’s also the fact that this simile is purely made up of abstractions. Perspective. Wisdom. Suddenness.

Here is Google’s definition of a simile in full:

a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.

In this example, the simile is in no way “emphatic” or “vivid.” Rather, it’s abstract, overdetermined. Thus: a weak simile.


If you have any interest in seeing strong similes,

you can read them here


Tweets:

Twitter avatar for @isawkenrelax guys, its just ken @isawken
ohhhhh my god you’re an attractive white queer and you don’t shave your armpits?? you’re doing it to reject patriarchal beauty norms??? should we tell everyone? should we invite grimes

January 16th 2022

729 Retweets12,672 Likes
Twitter avatar for @cloudy_girIc l o u d y @cloudy_girI
Image

January 16th 2022

1,828 Retweets11,429 Likes
Twitter avatar for @lefthandedhaterグッドボーイ(afro-krakoan) @lefthandedhater
twitter is so fun until ur tweets leave ur target audience

January 16th 2022

18,201 Retweets205,739 Likes
Twitter avatar for @mattxivmatt @mattxiv
the most realistic part of the euphoria cinematic universe is that they are all somewhat gay

January 17th 2022

231 Retweets4,718 Likes
Twitter avatar for @beautykvller𝕭𝖗𝖊 ⭒ @beautykvller
being gay u really just gotta accept that all these bitches are insane. just pick ya favorite.

January 14th 2022

2,215 Retweets8,858 Likes

That’s all I’ve got for you today. I hope you have a great week.

-Despy Boutris

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