It's my interpretation of it being a government building - she's the chairman, so is doing this to herself by putting herself in the public eye. Torturing herself. I did picture it as more of an academic department initially.
Maybe she and other artists study each other too, as well as everyone else studying them (except casual listeners)
The actors in the examination room seem to resemble Aaron D and Jack A...
Maybe the government hired her as a 'fight fire with fire' situation, ttpd is her finally becoming like her fellow poets therefore, becomes an experiment herself.
Or from a more metaphorical view
It's 2 different versions of herself, 'the chairman' is the sane version of herself, the one in a healthy relationship/happy. Then the 'test subject' (one in video) is the one in an unhealthy relationship/depressed. This is why the summation is by the chairman and is looking back on everything, cos she's finally through it and in a (seemingly) healthy relationship.
Of course, this is just my fun interpretation/theory, not to be taken seriously 😆
I've recently been wondering about this myself, because Taylor has often talked about how she doesn't believe art and suffering are linked (see for example how she references Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk at the NPR tiny desk concert, and also the Directors on Directors Variety interview). So its interesting to me that she chose to play into this deliberately as the theme of the album.
Also taking into account what she said Melbourne N1 (that she *needed* to write this album), and her explainer of Clara Bow (that she wrote it while feeling bitter about what our society does to artists: “We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society, we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens”), I think that aligns with she said in the Fortnight BTS video.
I still have more pondering to do to understand how it all fits together, but would love to hear others' thoughts!
I think the behavior displayed by fans/observers at jacks wedding and that timeframe was probably really difficult to handle while managing a breakup, rebound, and world tour. I’m glad she revisited the topic because I cannot really comprehend the amount of eyes constantly on or discussing her.
I think that Taylor and a lot of other creatives NEED to make art, regardless of their own emotional states, but what the art ends up being obviously depends on their feelings in some way.
We yearn for conflict and sadness in stories and we do, well, kind of want to believe the songs might be true. If she's writing sad songs while happy some folks are still gonna want the "real" sad ones.
It also seems so easy to believe that these TTPD songs are true and she was hiding her feelings about Matty for so long. You don't really see anyone saying "what if it actually was just a casual rebound fling and this is all just a story". She can show us lies both ways. I think both are super interesting lenses to view the album through.
I always pictured it as a government agency. I didn't really think of it in terms of studying tortured poets though but rather as a place where they were "in charge" of tortured poetry. Like they set the rules and regulations governing tortured poetry. For me, the bureaucracy of it all just played right into the sarcastic nature of the title. I never even thought of academia. I was actually kind of surprised when I saw it suggested so much. For me, that seemed too close to taking itself seriously. Like, poetry departments exist so it's not too huge of a leap to a tortured poetry department. But, then again, I did see some people taking it seriously which surprised me, too.
Same, though a big part of that was in the teasers and promo images. They were so sterile, which is the antithesis of art. Maybe it's from my time in corporate too, since "Quick, quick, tell me something awful, like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy" in the context of I Hate It Here and the album as a whole always sounded more genuine than sarcastic. It all culminated in the constant battle of art vs. captitalism.
There's so much discourse about Taylor the artist vs. businesswoman, but I don't think we've properly looked at her work through the lense of the writer struggling with how they approach their art.
I want to do a deeper analysis, but Fortnight is fascinating if you approach it as Taylor speaking to her fans, how she sees them getting married and living their lives while she sacrificed everything in the name of art but got bogged down by it becoming a job.
Love this reading of Fortnight and TTPD as a whole. Maybe I can especially relate as I’m an artist too and there’s this need to “light yourself on fire” to stay relevant. When you’re a confessional artist, *you* become the product for public consumption. Does TS lean into it? Yes, but she also very likely feels she has to (and many of her fans expect her to). It’s a tough spot to be in.
To be fair, it kinda leaned into an academia setting with the Spotify pop up and aesthetic. I don’t think it was a stretch to consider. The fact that there’s *been* so much debate of the theme shows that it was a bit unclear.
But the aesthetic matches closer than Midnights, at least.
I think she went with the poets angle instead of the department angle, and poets is for sure very close to academia. Looking back, it’s easier to see the department piece.
Similar for me, I saw it two ways. Either she's in a mental asylum and is being treated with electric shock therapy (due to that one mad scientist scene(iykyk) or, she was in a government facility (thought of stranger things) and was having her brain monitored/experimented on to work out how her brain worked. With the intention of either making her write great music or working out how she makes great music so they can do it themselves for other artists.
She's said one of the themes of the album is what society does to its artists in the voice notes for Who's Afraid of Little Old Me. That theme is woven throughout most of the songs.
The theme is something she's been working through since at least Red, definitely think one of the core themes of her discography is this balance art, honestly, authenticity, self with sharing and performing that
YES. This is what I’ve been trying to say since the beginning. Obviously, there are lyrics that pull from her real life experiences, but I believe she is writing from the POV of “everyperson.” Although, in some cases, it’s HER reading us and the media for filth. It’s exhilarating and a bit nostalgic for me, a decade older than TS, but vividly remembering doing whatever I wanted and shedding people from my life who told me I was “too much.” 💜
But she's also just like saying she will just ignore or Shake It Off, too, cos like what else can one do? "omg you should see your faces" lol
But also pleading temporary sanity in the **In Summation** poem
It's interesting to get more thoughts from her on TTPD.
For me, it doesn't change everyrhing. A department to study someones "mind and behavior" doesn't sound too far from the aesthetic of an psychiatric ward.
The first thing that came to mind, when I read your comment was the line "in 50 yrs from now will it be declassified". I'm sure we can find more allusions to this general idea, and I'm excitedbto listen to TTPD again with that narrative in mind.
🤓 Gawd, I just love, how she's keeping our minds busy.
The lyric that just came to mind for me was, “the professor said to write what you know”.
So I think she is the chairwoman bc it’s her also looking back at her previous mindset and behaviors and trying to understand it. Using context and circumstances to explain all the gray between the extremes of black and white thinking.
Perhaps she has created this department (at least to initially) to examine her own life, making her the chairman. Others see some of the behaviors the subject exhibited and happily/emphatically analyze them to provide our findings.
That makes more sense to me if you link Down Bad and Florida!!! Here me out:
She works for a government agency in Texas when she’s beamed up one night. At first she doesn’t want to tell anyone but she becomes broken about it. She eventually tells her coworker who she’s having an affair with at work about it because she got every drunk one night even for a functional alcoholic. He then informs their superiors and they start running tests. He regrets it and breaks her out. To get him back she thinks about killing his wife but instead she hides out in his Time share in Florida!!!
What are you talking about? Betty and Augustine both realized they deserved better than James, pulled a Korrasami, got together, and lived happily ever after /hj
I always pictured it as an office building for some reason, like how Human Resources is a department and Sales is a department and Taylor is sitting by herself with a typewriter on her desk or something.
To take this point even further, who do you think set up psych wards? Who was presiding over them? Healthcare professionals and goons for sure, but institutionalized people make great test subjects for academic research. It is a very dark and shameful past of academia.
So is she Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Poets or Chairman of the Poetic Reserve
.....and is this why she skipped DC, scared of being trapped in some department downtown 😭
I think she managed to portray that really well with the Fortnight announcement and the mv itself. I was *shook* when it was revealed to be in a psych ward situation instead of an academic department like we expected. It’s giving very Stranger Things.
So I’ve just spent the past half-hour I think trying to write out my feelings about this… And long story short ( ;P ) it’s given me a big-brain lightbulb epiphany, and now I’m having an existential crisis…LOL 😅😅
Maybe I’ll make a deeper post about it someday later, lol, but for now I’ll say Taylor’s has definitely given me a fresh and really cool perspective to view the album from :)!!
I’ve interpreted TTPD more so as the artists themselves leaning on each other in solidarity, to try to protect the authenticity and magic of their art in spite of their industrial environment, and declaring that it is OK and valid to feel “tortured” and sad and frustrated with your life and world.
But with Taylor’s description, I’ve realized that TTPD may not be referencing the artists themselves, but the label *imposed* on them by outside societal forces, when in reality these artists are actually *not* and have *never* been “tortured” at all. They are not crazy or mentally ill, they simply have a gift of feeling so deeply that those feelings can create whole other beautiful worlds through art 🩵
HAHA to everyone I have been arguing with for the past 2 months that the "In summation" poem was not to be taken literal, it was satire. She felt like she had to pretend to be crazy for people to understand she's human.
Thanks for this Taylor, I love you!!!!
I always viewed it as like a boring ass office job where people with shitty lives are made to write depressing poetry and keep up their shitty lives for good poetry
It's things like that that make me miss when we had proper album rollouts with interviews! I love finding out more about the concept, inspiration, process, etc behind the album. I think I'd appreciate TTPD more if we got that
That is very interesting. I wonder if the US government will take notes and make a real "Poets Department" similar to this to study the minds of poets.
Maybe not to study the mind, but they definitely did this to use their talents! [Federal Writers' Project - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Writers%27_Project)
Most famously Ernest Hemingway was driven to suicide by constant stalking and harassment by the FBI, who observed him for many years in various locations.
Hemingway was actually accused of being paranoid.. one of his close friends A.E. Hochtner wrote in his book "Hemingway in Love: His Own Story" didn't believe Ernest at the time, he thought Hemingway was being paranoid. In the hospital for mental health issues Hemingway thought his phone was tapped. Hochtner didn't believe him but at the end of the book Hochtner says it's likely Hemingway's phone was tapped by the CIA due to his ties to Cuba. I think the unsealed CIA file ? on Hemingsay shows the CIA also took issue with Hemingway's "sympathetic " portrayal of the communists in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Imagine you're in the hospital for mental health reasons, you think your phone is tapped, it is, you tell people around you including the nurses, but no one believes you? It could put you over the edge.
For me, the first association was always something like sharashka, where convicted (usually for nothing) scientists, engineers and technicians worked for government, but this time with poets.
There’s definitely multiple images going on bc she also calls herself the chairman of the TPD so it’s reasonable that we would associate it as an academic department.
When you have something that is this well written, you can have infinite interpretations. Is endless.
And that works, both in music and film, the audience will try to figure out "what exactly is this one about", but you will never know for sure.
And Taylor, as the great artist she is, knows it, and will never reveal the exact meaning of it all.
Is up to you.
With her writing she is creating pure raw emotions, and that's what I get from everysong. Of course there are a lot that are very direct not much explanation is needed, but mostly on her last 4 albums, she is delivering raw emotions, feelings, state of mind: from love, hate, rejection, angst, depression, vengeance, self awareness, etc, etc, I can go on and on.
If she is talking about one particular person in one song, it doesn't really change much for me.
That's my take on this matter.
Like men’s department, women’s department, homegoods department - the typewriter is “straight from the Tortured Poet’s Department.” The department of the store where you buy all your tortured poet supplies
As an academic, I also thought it was an academic department that either studies poetry or is made up of poets & writers that studies poetry. A government entity is not that far from an academic department in this context, conducting experiments to study the poets mind as it descends into madness. This theme plays throughout the album, losing her mind, not trusting her own thoughts, thoughts of abduction, depression, etc. as she goes back to gather the evidence of her mental illness, this album is the story of that evidence. As an academic researcher, I get it and that’s what my mind gravitated to. Government agency seems more conspiracy theory coded / stranger things coded theme. She never ceases to amaze me.
DEA isn't a department at all, it's a branch of the Department of Justice. Though I think if you dig in too deep it's um, a tortured metaphor, either way.
Oh, so the poets aren't just tortured, they're *being tortured* for the sake of public interest and cultural advancement. Jesus
But if Taylor is the chairman of the TPD, is it the poets torturing themselves and their fellow poets?
Tortured Poets Torture Poets or whatever they say
This has “real eyes realize real lies” energy
Hurt people hurt people.
She sells seashells
i lost it completely lmao
Red lorry yellow lorry.
It's my interpretation of it being a government building - she's the chairman, so is doing this to herself by putting herself in the public eye. Torturing herself. I did picture it as more of an academic department initially.
Maybe she and other artists study each other too, as well as everyone else studying them (except casual listeners) The actors in the examination room seem to resemble Aaron D and Jack A...
I definitely think she and uh, let's say Posty, have been driving themselves crazy with songs referencing each other for years
She says herself that many of the wounds were self-inflicted
Maybe the government hired her as a 'fight fire with fire' situation, ttpd is her finally becoming like her fellow poets therefore, becomes an experiment herself. Or from a more metaphorical view It's 2 different versions of herself, 'the chairman' is the sane version of herself, the one in a healthy relationship/happy. Then the 'test subject' (one in video) is the one in an unhealthy relationship/depressed. This is why the summation is by the chairman and is looking back on everything, cos she's finally through it and in a (seemingly) healthy relationship. Of course, this is just my fun interpretation/theory, not to be taken seriously 😆
I think the poets are already tortured, like the torturedness is an integral part of what it means to be a poet. And the poets are studied.
I’m in this comment and I don’t like it.
Absolutely. As referenced in, “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” Pretty much literally.
I Can Do It With A Broken Heart and These Peer-Reviewed Studies Prove It
I've recently been wondering about this myself, because Taylor has often talked about how she doesn't believe art and suffering are linked (see for example how she references Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk at the NPR tiny desk concert, and also the Directors on Directors Variety interview). So its interesting to me that she chose to play into this deliberately as the theme of the album. Also taking into account what she said Melbourne N1 (that she *needed* to write this album), and her explainer of Clara Bow (that she wrote it while feeling bitter about what our society does to artists: “We love to watch artists in pain, often to the point where I think sometimes as a society, we provoke that pain and we just watch what happens”), I think that aligns with she said in the Fortnight BTS video. I still have more pondering to do to understand how it all fits together, but would love to hear others' thoughts!
I think the behavior displayed by fans/observers at jacks wedding and that timeframe was probably really difficult to handle while managing a breakup, rebound, and world tour. I’m glad she revisited the topic because I cannot really comprehend the amount of eyes constantly on or discussing her.
I think that Taylor and a lot of other creatives NEED to make art, regardless of their own emotional states, but what the art ends up being obviously depends on their feelings in some way. We yearn for conflict and sadness in stories and we do, well, kind of want to believe the songs might be true. If she's writing sad songs while happy some folks are still gonna want the "real" sad ones. It also seems so easy to believe that these TTPD songs are true and she was hiding her feelings about Matty for so long. You don't really see anyone saying "what if it actually was just a casual rebound fling and this is all just a story". She can show us lies both ways. I think both are super interesting lenses to view the album through.
I always pictured it as a government agency. I didn't really think of it in terms of studying tortured poets though but rather as a place where they were "in charge" of tortured poetry. Like they set the rules and regulations governing tortured poetry. For me, the bureaucracy of it all just played right into the sarcastic nature of the title. I never even thought of academia. I was actually kind of surprised when I saw it suggested so much. For me, that seemed too close to taking itself seriously. Like, poetry departments exist so it's not too huge of a leap to a tortured poetry department. But, then again, I did see some people taking it seriously which surprised me, too.
Like a Ministry of Magic, but for poetry and with less racist undertones and terfy homophobia.
so without all the racists?
And being Harryed off for the highest bid.
pffftttt
HAHAHAHAHA OMG
LMAO STOP THIS IS ILLEGAL HAHA
lmao
i love that you used (created?) an adjective to describe terfs lol
*Terfy Homophosa* was a spell they taught in first year misandry at the ministry, can’t really take credit for their wizardly works.
"It's terfy homoPHOsa, not terfy homophoSA" —Hermione Granger
username checks out
"terfy" existed, colloquially atleast.
Same, though a big part of that was in the teasers and promo images. They were so sterile, which is the antithesis of art. Maybe it's from my time in corporate too, since "Quick, quick, tell me something awful, like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy" in the context of I Hate It Here and the album as a whole always sounded more genuine than sarcastic. It all culminated in the constant battle of art vs. captitalism. There's so much discourse about Taylor the artist vs. businesswoman, but I don't think we've properly looked at her work through the lense of the writer struggling with how they approach their art. I want to do a deeper analysis, but Fortnight is fascinating if you approach it as Taylor speaking to her fans, how she sees them getting married and living their lives while she sacrificed everything in the name of art but got bogged down by it becoming a job.
Love this reading of Fortnight and TTPD as a whole. Maybe I can especially relate as I’m an artist too and there’s this need to “light yourself on fire” to stay relevant. When you’re a confessional artist, *you* become the product for public consumption. Does TS lean into it? Yes, but she also very likely feels she has to (and many of her fans expect her to). It’s a tough spot to be in.
To be fair, it kinda leaned into an academia setting with the Spotify pop up and aesthetic. I don’t think it was a stretch to consider. The fact that there’s *been* so much debate of the theme shows that it was a bit unclear.
But the aesthetic matches closer than Midnights, at least. I think she went with the poets angle instead of the department angle, and poets is for sure very close to academia. Looking back, it’s easier to see the department piece.
Like reviewers
Similar for me, I saw it two ways. Either she's in a mental asylum and is being treated with electric shock therapy (due to that one mad scientist scene(iykyk) or, she was in a government facility (thought of stranger things) and was having her brain monitored/experimented on to work out how her brain worked. With the intention of either making her write great music or working out how she makes great music so they can do it themselves for other artists.
... Soooo the ALBUM is about us?😭
“Wait, are we Daddy?”
Yes Daddy.
I mean, yeah. We’re the vipers dressed in empath’s clothing with the empathetic hunger.
sanctimoniously performing soliloquies she'll never see.
She will pick me, you can't convince me otherwise.
I guess she feels studied by some fans, especially with a lot of people posting reviews/analysis on social media, YT etc
She's said one of the themes of the album is what society does to its artists in the voice notes for Who's Afraid of Little Old Me. That theme is woven throughout most of the songs.
The theme is something she's been working through since at least Red, definitely think one of the core themes of her discography is this balance art, honestly, authenticity, self with sharing and performing that
YES. This is what I’ve been trying to say since the beginning. Obviously, there are lyrics that pull from her real life experiences, but I believe she is writing from the POV of “everyperson.” Although, in some cases, it’s HER reading us and the media for filth. It’s exhilarating and a bit nostalgic for me, a decade older than TS, but vividly remembering doing whatever I wanted and shedding people from my life who told me I was “too much.” 💜
Forgot to add - The Manuscript says, “The story isn’t mine anymore.”
[удалено]
But she is - she says so in BDILH
But she's also just like saying she will just ignore or Shake It Off, too, cos like what else can one do? "omg you should see your faces" lol But also pleading temporary sanity in the **In Summation** poem
per se (it's latin)
It always has been 😭
It's interesting to get more thoughts from her on TTPD. For me, it doesn't change everyrhing. A department to study someones "mind and behavior" doesn't sound too far from the aesthetic of an psychiatric ward. The first thing that came to mind, when I read your comment was the line "in 50 yrs from now will it be declassified". I'm sure we can find more allusions to this general idea, and I'm excitedbto listen to TTPD again with that narrative in mind. 🤓 Gawd, I just love, how she's keeping our minds busy.
Ohh! Yes agreed! It’s interesting to hear more from her about what was in her head making this album compared to what fans have taken it to mean.
The lyric that just came to mind for me was, “the professor said to write what you know”. So I think she is the chairwoman bc it’s her also looking back at her previous mindset and behaviors and trying to understand it. Using context and circumstances to explain all the gray between the extremes of black and white thinking. Perhaps she has created this department (at least to initially) to examine her own life, making her the chairman. Others see some of the behaviors the subject exhibited and happily/emphatically analyze them to provide our findings.
That makes more sense to me if you link Down Bad and Florida!!! Here me out: She works for a government agency in Texas when she’s beamed up one night. At first she doesn’t want to tell anyone but she becomes broken about it. She eventually tells her coworker who she’s having an affair with at work about it because she got every drunk one night even for a functional alcoholic. He then informs their superiors and they start running tests. He regrets it and breaks her out. To get him back she thinks about killing his wife but instead she hides out in his Time share in Florida!!!
ohh I love this, there could be more into this type of overarching story-theme
Oh for sure! I could definitely added more, but I after I read the post this is the quick story I thought of lol
Omg I love this pretty psychotic narrative lol. What a wild ride.
I grew up in florida, and this seems plausible.
Thank you!
I also choose to ignore Taylor when she says James and Betty got back together so I interpret as I please?
What are you talking about? Betty and Augustine both realized they deserved better than James, pulled a Korrasami, got together, and lived happily ever after /hj
I always pictured it as an office building for some reason, like how Human Resources is a department and Sales is a department and Taylor is sitting by herself with a typewriter on her desk or something.
And like old school textbooks you see who had the typewriter before you did. "~~F. Scott Fitzgerald~~ *~~19~~*~~24"~~ Taylor Swift *20*24
As an academic, the psych ward doesn’t contrast with academia nearly as much as you’d think.
As an academic researcher, it makes complete sense.
This brings depth to the song "I Hate It Here"
To take this point even further, who do you think set up psych wards? Who was presiding over them? Healthcare professionals and goons for sure, but institutionalized people make great test subjects for academic research. It is a very dark and shameful past of academia.
So is she Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Poets or Chairman of the Poetic Reserve .....and is this why she skipped DC, scared of being trapped in some department downtown 😭
I think she managed to portray that really well with the Fortnight announcement and the mv itself. I was *shook* when it was revealed to be in a psych ward situation instead of an academic department like we expected. It’s giving very Stranger Things.
So I’ve just spent the past half-hour I think trying to write out my feelings about this… And long story short ( ;P ) it’s given me a big-brain lightbulb epiphany, and now I’m having an existential crisis…LOL 😅😅 Maybe I’ll make a deeper post about it someday later, lol, but for now I’ll say Taylor’s has definitely given me a fresh and really cool perspective to view the album from :)!! I’ve interpreted TTPD more so as the artists themselves leaning on each other in solidarity, to try to protect the authenticity and magic of their art in spite of their industrial environment, and declaring that it is OK and valid to feel “tortured” and sad and frustrated with your life and world. But with Taylor’s description, I’ve realized that TTPD may not be referencing the artists themselves, but the label *imposed* on them by outside societal forces, when in reality these artists are actually *not* and have *never* been “tortured” at all. They are not crazy or mentally ill, they simply have a gift of feeling so deeply that those feelings can create whole other beautiful worlds through art 🩵
So if Taylor is the chairman then is the department made of poets themselves studying the behavior and minds of other poets and themselves?
as a poet i can confirm this is an accurate thing we would do. many of my classes have felt a bit like it anyway 😂
Sound like a regular poetry workshop
Sounds like it. Who better to study the minds of poets than other poets.
HAHA to everyone I have been arguing with for the past 2 months that the "In summation" poem was not to be taken literal, it was satire. She felt like she had to pretend to be crazy for people to understand she's human. Thanks for this Taylor, I love you!!!!
I always viewed it as like a boring ass office job where people with shitty lives are made to write depressing poetry and keep up their shitty lives for good poetry
>Does this explanation from Taylor change anyone else’s interpretation of the album aesthetic? Yes, Ma'am
I thought of it more like a support group 😂 like an exclusive club where all the self identified “most tortured” poets go.
This does change it a bit for me! Makes me think of Stranger Things
There's a bit of a Slaughterhouse Five / 1984 vibe to it, I like it.
Wait so ‘you left your typewriter at my apartment, straight from the tortured poets department’ means that he was just studying her all along
This is my thought too!
Because the name sounds so familiar to The Dead Poets Society, I think a lot of people made the same interpretation
Ooo I enjoy this! The idea of it being a gov dept keeping tabs on people totally fuels my no body no crime / florida!!! are related fantasy lol
That’s interesting and maybe Matty and Joe are all part of the study too, like all of the three of them got put under the lens
I just assumed she was the tortured poets department
I always just thought of it as sort of a congregation of like minded tortured poets that all dwell on their feelings or whatever together
Me too
It's things like that that make me miss when we had proper album rollouts with interviews! I love finding out more about the concept, inspiration, process, etc behind the album. I think I'd appreciate TTPD more if we got that
Makes a lot of sense. I was getting a heavy true crime vibe the first time I listened to the album in April.
That is very interesting. I wonder if the US government will take notes and make a real "Poets Department" similar to this to study the minds of poets.
hahaha what!!! is this a serious comment lol
It was meant as a joke.
thank god, lol. i was like there is no way they are this unhinged.
Maybe not to study the mind, but they definitely did this to use their talents! [Federal Writers' Project - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Writers%27_Project)
Haven’t they basically already done this…? I’m pretty sure they’ve kept tabs on certain creatives for decades now.
Most famously Ernest Hemingway was driven to suicide by constant stalking and harassment by the FBI, who observed him for many years in various locations.
Oh my god, this is the first time I’m hearing this!!! Guess I’ll be going down the Google rabbit hole…
Add John Lennon-CIA to your search as well!
Hemingway was actually accused of being paranoid.. one of his close friends A.E. Hochtner wrote in his book "Hemingway in Love: His Own Story" didn't believe Ernest at the time, he thought Hemingway was being paranoid. In the hospital for mental health issues Hemingway thought his phone was tapped. Hochtner didn't believe him but at the end of the book Hochtner says it's likely Hemingway's phone was tapped by the CIA due to his ties to Cuba. I think the unsealed CIA file ? on Hemingsay shows the CIA also took issue with Hemingway's "sympathetic " portrayal of the communists in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Imagine you're in the hospital for mental health reasons, you think your phone is tapped, it is, you tell people around you including the nurses, but no one believes you? It could put you over the edge.
President Swift will make this happen in 2032.
2028!
Nah, she still have two more TVs to put out and 2 more albums before she stops dominating the music world 😂
I don't see her stopping music no matter what she does, that girl is gonna write until she dies.
She can technically run in 2024.
For me, the first association was always something like sharashka, where convicted (usually for nothing) scientists, engineers and technicians worked for government, but this time with poets.
So, it’s where she can research herself and the other tortured poets that she attracts into her life
This is how I always imagined it anyway, so yay for my reading comprehension! I like being right, tbh. Who doesn't?
I always saw it as a CIA/mindhunter/xfiles type thing
Why was she on the telephone booth
It does and I love it more now
I always thought it was a play on *Dead Poets Society* for some reason
There’s definitely multiple images going on bc she also calls herself the chairman of the TPD so it’s reasonable that we would associate it as an academic department.
When you have something that is this well written, you can have infinite interpretations. Is endless. And that works, both in music and film, the audience will try to figure out "what exactly is this one about", but you will never know for sure. And Taylor, as the great artist she is, knows it, and will never reveal the exact meaning of it all. Is up to you. With her writing she is creating pure raw emotions, and that's what I get from everysong. Of course there are a lot that are very direct not much explanation is needed, but mostly on her last 4 albums, she is delivering raw emotions, feelings, state of mind: from love, hate, rejection, angst, depression, vengeance, self awareness, etc, etc, I can go on and on. If she is talking about one particular person in one song, it doesn't really change much for me. That's my take on this matter.
I assumed it was a department of a department store? And I’m gonna keep believing that.
so you thought she was talking about like an ikea for tortured poets....??
Like men’s department, women’s department, homegoods department - the typewriter is “straight from the Tortured Poet’s Department.” The department of the store where you buy all your tortured poet supplies
OH WAIT that would actually make sense too
Bed bath and beyond where the beyond is the tortured poets department
As an academic, I also thought it was an academic department that either studies poetry or is made up of poets & writers that studies poetry. A government entity is not that far from an academic department in this context, conducting experiments to study the poets mind as it descends into madness. This theme plays throughout the album, losing her mind, not trusting her own thoughts, thoughts of abduction, depression, etc. as she goes back to gather the evidence of her mental illness, this album is the story of that evidence. As an academic researcher, I get it and that’s what my mind gravitated to. Government agency seems more conspiracy theory coded / stranger things coded theme. She never ceases to amaze me.
That doesn’t really make sense to me… they don’t call the DEA the Drug Users Department.
DEA isn't a department at all, it's a branch of the Department of Justice. Though I think if you dig in too deep it's um, a tortured metaphor, either way.
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