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whimsicaldragonette · 1 year

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Best Books of 2022 -- In Which I Fail Spectacularly to Compile a "Top Ten" List.

Image: Goodreads Year in Books 2022 - 166 Books read.

I read 166 books in 2022. Yes, some of them were shorter books: several middle-grade books and a few advance review copies of picture books. Most were novels, though few were truly giant tomes. I really enjoyed most of them. Which is to say, trying to pick the "top ten" was excruciating and an exercise doomed to failure. So... I cheated. Or rather, I modified the goal. Thus I present to you... my top 10 42 books read in 2022 (and even that is fudging things a bit as there are a few instances here of me using a single book to stand in for the entire series if I read the entire series in 2022 and didn't want my list to balloon uncontrollably) organized like so:

Top 18 (Non-Romance) Books read 2022

Top 9 Romances read 2022

Top 9 Nonfiction Books Read With Kiddo 2022

Top 6 Fiction Books Read With Kiddo 2022

And just for funsies:

Song of the Year 2022

I have linked to the goodreads page for each book (and the youtube page for the song). Obviously these are all recommendations as well.

Best (Non-Romance) Books read 2022 (Part 1)

Siren Queen by Nghi Vo

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire

What Souls are Made of by Tasha Suri

Sabriel (trilogy) by Garth Nix

Not Good for Maidens by Tori Bovalino

Vows of Empire by Emily Skrutski

Valiant Ladies by Melissa Grey

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk

Best (Non-Romance) Books read 2022 (Part 2)

A Consuming Fire by Laura E. Weymouth

The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard

Of Charms, Ghosts, and Grievances by Aliette de Bodard

A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

Into the Riverlands (trilogy) by Nghi Vo

Fraternity by Andy Mientus

The Thousand Eyes by A.K. Larkwood

One for All by Lillie Lainoff

Best Romances read 2022

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

The League of Gentlewomen Witches by India Holton

Nobody’s Princess by Erica Ridley

Something Fabulous by Alexis Hall

The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian

Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood

Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake

Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble by Alexis Hall

Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly

Best Nonfiction Books Read With Kiddo (8) 2022

The Incredible yet True Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt: The Greatest Inventor-Naturalist-Scientist-Explorer Who Ever Lived by Volker Mehnert, Becky L. Cook (Translator)

All in a Drop: How Antony van Leeuwenhoek Discovered an Invisible World by Lori Alexander

Jane Goodall by Libby Romero

Can You Hear the Trees Talking? by Peter Wohlleben

Tree Beings by Raymond Huber

Explorers: Amazing Tales of the World's Greatest Adventurers by Nellie Huang

The Mysteries of the Universe by Will Gater

Darwin’s Rival: Alfred Russel Wallace and the Search for Evolution by Christiane Dorion

When Darwin Sailed the Sea by David Long

Best Fiction Books Read With Kiddo (8) 2022

Upside-Down Magic (series) by Sarah Mlynowski, Lauren Myracle, Emily Jenkins

Fortunately the Milk by Neil Gaiman

The Girl Who Could Not Dream by Sarah Beth Durst

The Ship of Shadows by Maria Kuzniar

The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman

The Golden Swift by Lev Grossman

And finally...

Song of the Year 2022

"Wild Flower (with Youjeen)" by RM of BTS

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accuratepicuresofanthropologists · 3 years

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Adolf Bastian, via the Bibliothèque National de France. Bastian was not really an anthropologist in the modern sense of the word, and belonged to an older tradition of ethnology (to make a long story short). He was an influence on Franz Boas. I am excited to read a new book, centered on Bastian but about more than just him, entitled In Humboldt’s Shadow by H. Glenn Penny, coming in the (boreal) spring from PUP.

#Adolph Bastian #anthropology #In Humboldt's Shadow (book)#H. Glenn Penny #bibliothèque nationale de france

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sbh-md · 3 years

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who: steph & @eureka-starters when: morning where: humboldt botanical garden

The last few weeks had felt like a blur to Steph. All the fighting, the confrontations, the questions left unanswered had left her desperate for alone time. She was thankful for her work schedule for keeping her busy, while also loving the fact that her new house had proven to be a bit of a fixer-upper in some places. After her mistake of hooking up with Wyatt the last time she had asked for his help, Steph had instead turned to her brother and other friends to help her paint and replace old carpeting. Some evenings her home was bustling with music, beer, and pizza. Other nights she relished in the silence as the paint roller erased white paint in the matter of a few strokes. Steph couldn’t have told you the last time she had truly been alone with her thoughts and felt comfortable. College maybe? High school? It was refreshingly easy to slip back into the person she once was.

Packing a lunch, a blanket, and a book, Steph found the perfect spot to sit and relax at the Botanical Garden. While she had been here so many times over the course of her life, Steph always prided herself on finding some of the most tucked away portions of the gardens. The views seemed to settle her in ways that nothing else could. Just as she picked up her newest Book of the Month novel, Steph felt a shadow cross over her. Sighing heavily, she looked up at the person standing in front of her, slightly hoping her day wasn’t about to get rained on.

#eurekastart #//assume connects or just message me!

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redbritishsniper · 3 years

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Bold the muse’s aesthetic (spooky edition)

bold all of the themes that apply to your muse’s aesthetic or mood as a character.

Tagged by: @sebastian-humboldt

Tagging: @running-in-blind, @brutalistsniper, @ruinouss, @monmuses, and whoever wanna steal this lol

#aesthetic meme

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roaringgirl · 3 years

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Book club - March

Once again didn’t read anything published before 1900, but did read more non-fiction and finished a couple of books I’d been putting off. In April I will, finally, read the Mill on the Floss.

1. Daniel Kehlmann - Tyll (2017): Linked short stories set during the Thirty Years’ War, partly based on tales about Till Eulenspiegel. Thought this was quite good - not all of the stories are successful, but he certainly gets across a certain sweeping brutality and tragedy with a fair amount of wit.

2. Francine Toon - Pine (2020): A crime and ghost novel set in rural Scotland - the denouement doesn’t live up to the set-up, but it’s very readable and for about the first three-quarters suspenseful and claustrophobic.

3. Robert Massie - Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (2011): Exactly what I wanted, which is a popular, non-academic biography of Catherine the Great.

4. Nell Zink - Nicotine (2016): Love Zink’s prose even when I sometimes find her plots exhausting. This was a little more laboured than her best work, I think.

5. Daniel Kehlmann - Measuring the World (2005): Also quite good. Literary imagining of Gauss and Humboldt - exactly the kind of not-too-taxing historical fiction with pleasant literary pretensions I’ve been enjoying.

6. Erika Fatland - Sovietistan (2020): Travel writing about the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. Really excellent, and alive to what it’s like to be a woman doing this kind of traveling (or living in these places).

7. Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth (1961): Reread in a fit of nostalgia. I love this book; associate it strongly with sitting in my grandmother’s living room in Cairo, bored out of my mind because I don’t speak Arabic.

8. Barbara Comyns - Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954): Enjoyed this very much. Apocalyptic flood and poisoning in an English village. Comyns seems to me like Nancy Mitford’s shadow self, or lunatic cousin.

9. Barbara Comyns - The Vet’s Daughter (1959): A fit of enthusiasm which is now languishing a bit since I’m stuck on Sisters By a River. I don’t think the magical realist or fantastical elements here really work; it’s definitely less securely handled than WWCaWWD, so the distinctive nightmarishness doesn’t shine as much.

10. Barbara Pym - Excellent Women (1952)

11. Barbara Pym - A Glass of Blessings (1958)

12. Anita Brookner - The Rules of Engagement (2003). Am treating these three together because these sorts of middlebrow novels do tend to blur in my mind. Enjoyed the Pym - never read her before - but can’t see myself becoming a cultish devotee. Don’t think the Brookner is her best work.

13. Thomas Bernhard - The Loser (1983). Narrator’s recollections of the relationship between him, his friend Wertheimer, and their friend Glenn Gould. I’m glad I read it - at times I felt like I was slogging through it but then there’d be these lunatic, wonderful, excoriating paragraphs and lines. Subject for further study.

14. Barbara W. Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978): Unfortunately, too academic to be good popular history and way too generalist to be of much use to a specialist, I assume. I do often like these big, baggy, non-specialist treatments touching on the history of ideas that sometimes annoy actual historians, not being one myself (I very much like Huizinga, Ginzburg, Darnton) but this book was... rarely as interesting as that.

15. Diarmaid McCulloch - Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999): Pleasantly surprised by how readable this was, although it probably wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense if you didn’t already have a decent grip on the period.

16. Keith Roberts - Pavane (1968): Linked short stories in an alternate universe where Protestantism was destroyed after Elizabeth I was assassinated in 1588, so the Industrial Revolution has yet to really get going, etc. This was fine! I like 60s science fiction.

17. Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood (1984): Concept (a wood populated by memories and myths generated from the collective human subconscious) more interesting than execution.

18. E. L. Doctorow - Billy Bathgate (1989): Excellent. Set in the 1930s, New York gangsters.

19. Nell Zink - Doxology (2019): As with Nicotine, mostly just made me want to read Mislaid again. Although I’m always envious of how effortlessly exciting and sharp a writer Zink is.

#book club

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hwaryungrp · 5 years

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SPOTTED! KIM RAIZEL . 28.

Looks like they’ve been wandering around Hwaryung! You can find them living at HOUSE #1107 IN BYEONGRO or if they’re not home they’re probably working at the BANK OF BERLIN AS THE CEO. If you can’t find them offline, feel free to message them @kimraizel.

BIOGRAPHY

tw violence, blood, mentions of gore

WINTER

winter’s child, born into a line of royalty, wealth penetrating the walls of their manor, ceilings meters too high for the tips of his fingers to gently scrape by. small hands lifting from the clutches of his mother, a woman who devoted her life to please the man that stood beside her, the backs of his fingers lingering lightly by his cheek.

he was too young to note the responsibilities that came staggering his way, too young to be balancing books on the tops of his head, as if royalty were a joke he would toss them aside and allow the gentle flips of his fingertips to graze the pages as he empties out the words. his father, the current ceo of the bank of berlin, a company that the kang’s had taken over, almost a century prior, almost four generations of hardwork contributing to a singular name of kang cadis di raizel, german royalty. the success that his family had garnered in their country meant that they were under constant scrutiny and analysis. their every action recorded and documented amongst the grey papers on the shelves, collected by their butlers and maids.

and he was trained, tutored and forced to be shaped into a mould that pleased his parents. an expectation that was placed on him as heavily as any other, like breathing he was expected to be master the numerical geniuses of the data that lay sprawled on his desk. and as school begun, all that he had prepared for was paid off by the ranks of his distinguished first place.

SPRING

a younger sister was welcomed into his world. kang kenesis di nari, a girl he had sworn to protect and love for the rest of his life. she too, was expected to meet the standards of himself, the pressure that he had inadvertently placed upon her, caused him a great deal of regret, sorrow and endless apologetic rants that would always end with her smiling… smiling so sincerely that for a second, he forgets about his own responsibilities.

his father runs for the governing mayor of berlin, resulting in the constant flashes of the media residing everywhere they went. interviews came in more frequent, and he was expected to smile, to speak, to put up a facade of a poised, professional and interesting young man who wishes for nothing but his father’s success. a young man who wishes to be in the shoes of his father in the future, a younger man who aspires to be successful, to contribute with everything he has for the people of berlin. something he soon realised… was not him.

SUMMER

his father succeeds and is now the governing mayor of berlin. his sister and himself, told on the daily to not get yourselves in any trouble that could potential cost their father his position, and their family their status and rank. and to that, they could only nod in agreement.

months later, and the horrific news of his sister’s kidnapping arrives at their doorstep. a ransom attached. his own father refusing to pay, for the exchange of his own daughter’s life. small gaps of light, peering through the thinly veiled flesh of his father, a tainted smokey substance portrayed as a caring father… broken. an entire world, unbeknownst to him, so foreign, so horrendous that even his own fingers would curl, digging the palms of his hands. nail marks that buried the bloodied flesh that would leak from his own limbs. the snake nest, and his father the snake king, tongue so poisonous that he could taste it as the other spoke. a man of great power, exuding greater confidence.

an anger that lacerated at his skin, urges him to cut his own father down, and he does. blinded by anger, he slashes his own father across his face, barely grazing him, wavering for a moment in absolute shock as he falls back, his mother lunging forward to separate the two only to hear the agonising scream of her own son piercing through their manor as his father slices open his forearm. blood, nothing but blood cascades from his white sleeve… drenched.

three days later, the news of his sister’s death arrives, this time in the shape of her head. a box, drenched in blood. and again, his father does nothing but simply order it to be tossed into their kitchen trash.

AUTUMN

he falls into the wrong crowd, finds himself wondering the streets of seoul, straying far from his home in berlin.

but it doesn’t end there. he meets a girl, someone special… though only momentarily. it felt like love… but was it so? and only months later had a video been leaked, surfacing and again… he finds his father making excuses on the media for his pathetic son’s erratic behaviour. his father gives him an ultimatum, to either marry the daughter of the kim family, to cover the media of his mistakes. or, to lose his life and be cut off. and, perhaps that was when the realisation that his father was more powerful than anyone he could have imagined came to light, a monster that lurked in the shadows, holding his own name over the heads of his own family.

a few days later, he finds himself married. and a year later his own daughter arrives. and in that time, he grew accustomed to his father’s capo lifestyle. his skills honed to perfection.

WINTER AGAIN

he finally graduates from humboldt university of berlin, within his grasp a qualification for him to stand in the shoes of his father for the future. and immediately he is taken into the bank of berlin by his father, expected to fulfil the his shoes.

his father’s trust in him improves, reaching its peak as he hands down the company seat to his son. raizel iv taking it without hesitation. the snake nest close behind him, as if monitoring his every action, afraid of a sudden betrayal.

months later, seemingly out of nowhere, his wife is involved in a car accident that ended her life, leaving him by himself to raise their daughter. the news ravaging their family almost insanely heavily, that he felt his own heart being pierced.

winter again, and he finds himself back on the streets, this time in hwaryung. however this time, he’s watching over their family company and swears his allegiance to no one.

PERSONALITY

( + ) resolute, decorous, adaptive ( - ) beguiling, callous, taciturn

#HR;FOLLOW

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astreetsussserenade · 2 years

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Epistemic Love Poem

By Jaswinder Bolina

If there were a verb meaning “to believe falsely,” it would not have any significant first-person present indicative. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In Crimea now the larks might be muzzled by artillery and crap weather, how should I know? In Haifa now the guns must be running, I have no idea. In Kobani, a boy is waxing a Kalashnikov. A boy is waning in a blood puddle, I don’t know. I’m not in Missouri. I’m not in Humboldt Park or Harlem. I’m here with you, wrought simple and plain happy. The only city I know is your city, is your city block, your boulevard between the German bar and the orthodontist’s. The only city I know is the square of sidewalk your shadow paints. Everywhere else is switched off now, every current stilled, the Gulf Stream is in sleep mode, its porpoises unplugged, its seagulls powered down now dangling from clouds that are stuck static in their full upright and locked positions. No carbon is there baking the human sky, no Ebola, no typhoon churning. No Obama is there in his white office, no Mitch McConnell in the garret of his own braincase, no pope infallible, no lama enlightened, no ayatollah knows what I know now I know you, and no, I don’t call you darling. I don’t call you honey or sugar or babe, those names made for other bodies, those noises made lame by other people, and the other bodies are switched off now slack mannequins on trolley cars, in Hondas, in jets stopped over Crimea, over Kobani and Haifa, everyone dumbstruck everywhere still as a book on a shelf. If it isn’t written by you, I won’t read it. If it isn’t about you, I won’t know it, and I won’t call you bunny or sweetheart or pumpkin now I know you are my wild earthquake, my ontological kazoo, my dizzy robin of ghost feathers, your voice is a brontosaur. It’s bigger than everything. Your mind is bigger than mine, it frightens me, but I kiss your shins and shoulders now, I kiss your hips, it’s like kissing rainwater though I know now no rain exists if it isn’t kissing your face. I’m being ridiculous, I know! But my chest is a rowboat rolled over and over. My chest is a boulder, the boulder crashed through the floodlight of my chest, and I believe falsely now no horror exists. I believe falsely no other joy exists. I believe now in every love song. Every love song is wrong that doesn’t know you, my transcendental tea cup, my butter knife in a light socket, you are my space plane, my only space plane. I do dare to eat a peach. I do dare disturb the universe, and if the universe turns out to be a simulation, if the universe is a false front or a figment of a dog’s eye in another universe, I don’t need to know now I know you I don’t know and I don’t need know.

#april is national poetry month #literature nerdery

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the-hunter-of-teufort-rp · 3 years

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Bold the muse’s aesthetic (spooky edition)

bold all of the themes that apply to your muse’s aesthetic or mood as a character.

Tagging: @sleightlyoffhand @grimmmedic @knox-the-sniper @redgentleengie @southern-heavyweight @sebastian-humboldt @spybleu @marcy-the-tentaspy @orphans-of-coldfront @lugarthespy

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nbrunell · 3 years

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Passing By

Exile

Lenny stands in the garden, once again, facing towards the city. The large shadow cast by the neighboring building covers the entire House and its surroundings. He would like to sit, but the sunless afternoon makes it too cold for him. He thinks about his first time there, on a similar day, how he had been underwhelmed by the banal garden when passing the walls, and how unwelcome he had felt by the cold pure white house upon reaching the front door. He cannot remember how long ago; was it weeks? Months already? Could it be years?

-How much time gone to waste! [1]

He misses his long contemplative walks in the lush, warm and calm gardens of Rome. In Vienna the garden does not allow him to walk long enough to finish half a thought. There is no docile ear to listen when he wishes to speak, to be heard. The city seems to be pushing against the walls, shrinking the garden bit by bit, applying pressure, ready to crush him.

- How does death feel?… How does death feel?... [2]

Lenny suddenly turns on his feet and heads towards the house. He does not fear death; he fears the thought of death. [3]

The most whimsical idea was, that not believing in hell, he was firmly persuaded of the reality of purgatory. [4] Was this it? But how did he get here? He should listen only to his own zeal and should bear his exile without a murmur; that exile is one of his duties. [5] But what homeland do those seek to whom this entire world is a place of exile? [6] An exile, of which every one is more ashamed than the sufferer, is not exile at all. [7]

He reaches the door, pushes the handle and steps inside.

Memory

Lenny stands still and looks around him. He suddenly feels very light. The room is bathed in warm sunshine and he can see dust floating in the air. The walls are covered with shelves that contain books and picture frames. The entire surface of the room is occupied by small tables and pedestals, presenting countless other objects. Lenny picks up a book, but doesn’t recognize the language in which it is written. He looks at the frames, but they are all empty. None of the objects seem to be of use for anything to him. He walks around, trying to find something that he recognizes. Nothing. He thinks to himself:

- You’re too tied to the past. [8] None of this matters. The past is an enormous place, with all sorts of things inside. Not so with the present. The present is merely a narrow opening with room for only one pair of eyes. Mine.[9]

Lenny’s thoughts are interrupted by a distant sound. He can make out a quiet, rhythmic thump, emanating from the big empty white wall at the very end of the room. It is free of objects and coverings. [10] Is there someone else in the house? He exits the room to try and get to the other side of the wall. He guides himself by sound. [11] He searches and searches, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of getting there. He returns to the bright room and looks at the empty wall. The quiet thump continues.

- The future is hidden from me. [12] Is eternal life not as enigmatic as the present one? [13]

Lenny’s frustration grows with every thump. He starts kicking the wall, hitting it with various objects. Noise against noise. [14] White flakes of plaster and wood fly into the air, joining the dust before hitting the ground as he gradually destroys the wall, creating an opening just big enough for him to see through. Lenny looks inside but cannot make anything out in the dark space. He can hear the sound more clearly now, resonating. Lenny keeps going. Hitting, thrashing. The hole is now large enough, letting some light in and allowing him to crawl inside. The darkness embraces him lovingly. [15]

Malaise

As the dust settles, Lenny finds himself in a dimly lit space of strange proportions, much higher than it is wide. Vast. And silent. There is no more thumping. Here nothing but darkness and chilling moisture. [16]

There is however another monument of this dynasty. The celebrated Labyrinth, which must now be passed over entirely in silence. [17] Lenny advances in the only possible direction. The seemingly random movement of the endless walls forces him forward. He loses sense of time, and space seems to curve. He wonders if he really has a choice in navigating this artificial infinity. [18] He knows that his freedom of will consists in the fact that his future actions cannot be known now. [19]

He advances further. Gradually the ceiling becomes visible as it lowers above his head and the space straightens in front of him. For the first time since entering, he sees behind the vertical horizon of the walls. Clarity instead of vagueness. [20] At the end, a heavy door, filling the entire space between ground, walls and ceiling.

Lenny thinks about going back, but the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills him with dread. [21] He takes a few more steps until he notices on the door, written with golden letters: « The Abode of Beauty ». [22] Lenny erupts.

- Open the door! Open the door, I said! [23]

The door bursts open. [24] He thinks to himself.

- A door opening to the unknown, discoverer of the new, maker of the new, maker of life. [25]

Lenny stands in the threshold. A door between two rooms is in both of them. [26] He steps forward and closes it behind him. His eyes slowly adapt to the bright warm light.

Sisyphus

Lenny stares in disbelief. In front of him he recognizes the unknown objects, strange books, empty pictures. And in the back, a cold, empty white wall.

He falls to his knees.

- My God, my god why have you forsaken me, I say to you now. [27] I came because I’ve never felt so alone and in despair in all my life. [28]

God’s infinite silence… God’s infinite silence… God’s infinite silence. [29] More cruel than the silence of prisons, that kind of silence is in itself a prison. [30]

Lenny screams and runs to the main entrance of the House.

He skids out, slamming the door. [31]

Other forces would have had to intervene […] to allow architecture to come in for a modest share in the great human revolt. [32] The House is capricious. One can struggle against it and hold back what has to be; then one becomes the person in revolt. [33]

Lenny steps into the cold afternoon light. He walks into the garden. The air was calm, and the sky unclouded, [34] but the Sun is hidden behind a skyscraper.

[1] Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[2] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[3] Seneca, Complete Works

[4] Rousseau, Collected Works

[5] Rousseau, Collected Works

[6] Erasmus, Paraphrases

[7] Seneca, Complete Works

[8] Sorentino, The Young Pope

[9] Sorentino, The Young Pope

[10] Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture

[11] Serres, The Parasite

[12] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

[13] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

[14] Serres, Genesis

[15] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[16] Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections

[17] Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art

[18] Frankl, The Gothic

[19] Wittgenstein, Tractatus

[20] Benton Sharp, Form and Function

[21] Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[22] Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[23] Borges, Collected Fictions

[24] Hovestadt Buehlmann, Quantum City

[25] Bergdoll Oechslin, Fragments Architecture and the Unfinished

[26] Russell Norvig, Artificial Intelligence

[27] Sorentino, The Young Pope

[28] Sorentino, The Young Pope

[29] Sorentino, The Young Pope

[30] Proust, In Search of Lost Time

[31] Rand, The Fountainhead

[32] Ockmann, Architecture Culture 1943 1968

[33] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

[34] Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America

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meteorajulie · 3 years

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Creation is unlimited.

The creation of the world, the creation of order, the creation of life, the transformational motor, and the informational motor are all operations of coding.[1]

But we must proceed with care here [2]. Creation and destruction irrevocably interlocked, endlessly re-enacted.[3]

Has her children left and she separated from her former husband, Elisabeth feel the loss of self and urge for survival[4]

For Elisabeth being a mother will never mean the same to her for now on.

Creation resists death, by reinventing life: that is called resurrection.[5]

She will have the satisfaction a mother gets from giving the child care and attention in seeing that she has m fact been successful.[6] By getting all of what have been created here.

Accommodations: One Hotel[10]

The hotel, the hostel, the master’s house is open to the frozen passer-by[11]. My work is to design a hotel for Elisabeth.

But it won’t be only a place of rest or unsignificant stay. It will be a place where people seek a certain level of spirituality, we are gonna make it a place for giving birth by being a place for intellectual exercise.

“The Monastery as a Restorative Environment.[12]This hotel, like, have any cloister within the city, be it for women or for men, sited in the healthiest possible place, lest emaciation of the body and sleeplessness prevent the inmates from attending fully to their minds, and lest illness make their lives harsher than usual.[13]

People are intentionally gathered in the city centre, its heart, to share. [14] and to explore the city they are in.

People are taking great pleasure in urban life. For them, cinemas, theatres and bars are living rooms, restaurants are dining rooms, and the pools and saunas in gyms are luxurious gardens and bathrooms. Boutique stores are their wardrobes, coin laundries their washing machines. For them, all urban spaces may be inhabited. [15]

The river, Seine, was a natural highway.[16] Which would the road to go discover the city.

ENTRY

And now begins the dynasty of dreams.[17]

Going down and along a tunnel before being brought into the light again[18], coming out of the tunnel of green branches.[19] This transformation gives rise to a new world, to new texts, to another form of thought. This was how the new world came to visit, a cosy shelter for fragile skins. [20]

THE GARDEN OF VENUS[21]

Venus, it is said, was born in the past from the waters, and being reborn over the waves[22]

For the garden in the centre [Elisabeth] selects indigenous plant material so that her planned landscapes will flourish.[23] Inspired by Monet’s house who finds itself endlessly caught up by the plant forces of an unrestrained garden, a cosmos of roses.[24] It is also a place for cultivation, once it was truly a garden, filled with herbs and fruit which seem uncannily to anticipate their later profusion on the same spot.[25]

And if one thinks more deeply about even that, the first beginnings of production are also outside: for the inner juices of the tree are sucked up by the roots from the earth which nourishes the plant.[26]

This garden would been used in the healing process, such as the Japanese Zen garden or the monastic cloister garden.[27] The Cloister is a covered walk in a convent, monastery, college, or cathedral, typically with a colonnade around a garden and in both its public and private form is a constant element in the life of men in cities.[28] And When evening descends and the air becomes brisk, a warm glow washes across the garden in stripes of light.[29]

THE STUDIO

The health of the human race: Plants are fashioned by cultivation, and men by education.[30]

This place would be a for learning, but also processing that information in order to create something new in a room with lots of natural light, the overall light is warm.[31] The quality of the light is like nothing else, anywhere—certainly not in any regular vanilla "universal space" type of gallery [32]

In production art the distinction between artist and engineer was to be eliminated and the artist was to become a designer or craftsman for machine production.[33] Coming out of her shell.[34] This shell comes to combine the structural and formal elements![35]

Variation in brightness, colour of sunlight, the angle of light entering a space, the colour of the sky, temperatures, air movement, and sounds vary from morning to night, starting with quietness in the morning, activity during the day, and quietness again at night as nature settles down.[36]

It is a challenging intellectual exercise[37] of a space.

In his laboratory, or rather in his studio, the anthropologist too uses this dream, as one weapon or instrument among others.[38]

BEDROOMS:

Within the house, the bedroom encloses a box within a box.[39] In this box, a bed and a window, View to the outside [40]

Care-Inn offer different type of chamber:

THE CITY ROOM:

At night, the structure glows jewel like on the city street; the roof, facets of light against a dark sky.[41] But out of the darkness, rich colours glow, and mysterious, complex forms create an unforgettable atmosphere.[42]

In the best chambers of this and other houses, elegant neoclassical ornamentation frames window and door openings and light beads trim summer beams, yet the absence of any ceiling gives view directly through to the underside of shingles.[43]

For madness unleashes its fury in the space of pure vision.[44]

THE GREEN ROOM:

The peace of the Garden, its tranquil serenity, is called “ataraxia.” [45] and produce an unforgettable aura in this room. You will be able to geta substantial body of horticultural knowledge; that is to say, not only practical botanical knowledge, but also the eye and the manual skill the gardener requires to deal with the vegetable kingdom.[46]The gardener has only his body and the extensions of his body and is lost in this profusion of gardens. [47]

THE DARK ROOM:

‘How much light do people need in order to live?’ asks Zumthor, ‘And how much darkness? … Are there some things we can experience only in dark, shaded places, in the darkness of night?’[48] Before the dawn of morning, before this river wakes to the first glimpse of day light.[49]It was impossible to ascertain the species of these plants, their form, colour, and aspect having been changed by the absence of light.[50]

[1] Serres, Hermes Literature Science Philosophy

[2] Foucault, History of Madness

[3] Koolhaas, Delirious New York

[4] Hovestadt Buehlmann, Quantum City

[5] Serres, Troubadour of Knowledge

[6] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics

[7] Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics

[8] Gartman, From Autos to Architecture Fordism and Architecture

[9] Goldsmith, Capital New York Capital of the 20th Century

[10] Kipen, San Francisco in the 1930s The WPA Guide to the C

[11] Serres, The Parasite

[12] Kellert, Biophilic Design, The Theory Science and Practice

[13] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988

[14] Maniscalco, Public Spaces Marketplaces and the Constitution

[15] DISMANTLING AND RECONSTITUTING THE ‘HOUSE’ IN A DISORDERED CITY (1988) by Tyo Ito

[16] Borges, Collected Fictions

[17] Foucault, History of Madness

[18] Harrison Wood Gaiger, Art in Theory 1648 1815

[19] Serres, The Five Senses

[20] Serres, The Five Senses

[21] Serres, The Parasite

[22] Serres, Hominescence

[23] Deitz, Of Gardens Selected Essays Penn Studies in Lands

[24] Deleuze Guattari, What Is Philosophy

[25] Ackroyd, London A Biography

[26] Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings

[27] Deviren, The Greening of Architecture A Critical History a

[28] Miller, The Culture of Cities

[29] Deitz, Of Gardens Selected Essays Penn Studies in Lands

[30] Derrida, Of Grammatology

[31] Alexander, A Pattern Language

[32] Banham, Critic Writes

[33] Chilvers, A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art Oxford

[34] Joyce, Ulysses

[35] Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics

[36] Kellert, Biophilic Design The Theory Science and Practice

[37] Lubar, Inside the Lost Museum Curating Past and Present

[38] Derrida, Of Grammatology

[39] Serres, The Five Senses

[40] Alexander, A Pattern Language

[41] Deitz, Of Gardens Selected Essays Penn Studies in Lands

[42] Matthews, Kirtland Cutter Architect in the Land of Promise

[43] Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica

[44] Foucault, History of Madness

[45] Serres, Hermes Literature Science Philosophy

[46] Serres, History of Scientific Thought

[47] Serres, The Parasite

[48] Kite, ShadowMakers A Cultural History of Shadows in Architecture

[49] Dickens, Oliver Twist

[50] Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America

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thepoemeater-blog · 7 years

Text

By accident my heart lifted with a rush. Gone for weeks, finally home on a darkish day of blustery wind, napped, waking in a few minutes and the sun had come clean and crept around the house, this light from one of trillions of stars falling through the window skeined by the willow’s greenish bright yellow leaves so that my half-asleep head opened wide for the first time in many months, a cold sunstroke, so yellow-gold, so gold-yellow, yellow-gold, this eye beyond age bathed in yellow light.

* * *

Seventy days on the river with a confusion between river turbulence and human tribulation. We are here to be curious not consoled. The gift of the gods is consciousness not my forlorn bleating prayers for equilibrium, the self dog-paddling in circles on its own alga-lidded pond. Emily Walter wrote: “We are given rivers so we know our hearts can break, but still keep us breathing.”

* * *

When you run through the woods blindfolded you’re liable to collide with trees, I thought one hot afternoon on the river. You can’t drown yourself if you swim well. We saw some plovers and then a few yellow legs with their peculiar cries, and I remembered a very cold, windy September day with Matthiessen and Danny when the birds lifted me far out of myself. It was so cold and blustery the avian world descended into the river valley and while fishing we saw a golden eagle, two immature and two adult bald eagles, two prairie falcons, two peregrines, Cooper’s hawks, two Swainson’s, a sharp-shinned, a rough-legged, a harrier, five turkey vultures, three ospreys, and also saw buffleheads, widgeon, teal, mallards, morning doves, kingfishers, ring-billed gulls, killdeer, spotted plovers, sandpipers and sandhill cranes. They also saw us. If a peregrine sees fifty times better than we, what do we look like to them? Unanswerable.

* * *

Nearing seventy there is a tinge of the usually unseen miraculous when you wake up alive from a night’s sleep or a nap. We always rise in the terrifying posture of the living. Some days the river is incomprehensible. No, not the posture, but that a terrifying beauty is born within us. I think of the 20-acre thicket my mother planted after the deaths 40 years ago, the thicket now nearly impenetrable as its own beauty. Across the small pond the green heron looked at me quizzically— who is this? I said I wasn’t sure at that moment wondering if the green heron could be Mother.

* * *

Now back in the Absarokas I’m awake to these diffuse corridors of light. The grizzlies have buried themselves below that light cast down across the mountain meadow, following a canyon to the valley floor where the rattlesnakes will also sleep until mid-April. Meanwhile we’ll travel toward the border with the birds. The moon is swollen tonight and the mountain this summer I saw bathed in a thunderstorm now bathes itself in a mist of snow.

* * *

Rushing, turbulent water and light, convinced by animals and rivers that nature only leads us to herself, so openly female through the window of my single eye. For half a year my alphabet blinded me to beauty, forgetting my nature which came from the boy lost comfortably in the woods, how and why he suspected home, this overmade world where old paths are submerged in metal and cement.

* * *

This morning in the first clear sunlight making its way over the mountains, the earth covered with crunchy frost, I walked the dogs past Weber’s sheep pasture where a ram was covering a ewe who continued eating, a wise and experienced woman. I headed due west up the slope toward Antelope Butte in the delicious cold still air, turning at the irrigation ditch hearing the staccato howl of sandhill cranes behind me, a couple of hundred rising a mile away from Cargill’s alfalfa, floating up into the white mist rising from the frost, and moving north in what I judge is the wrong direction for this weather. Birds make mistakes, so many dying against windows and phone wires. I continued west toward the snake den to try to catch the spirit of the place when it’s asleep, the sheer otherness of hundreds of rattlesnakes sleeping in a big ball deep in the rocky earth beneath my feet. The dogs, having been snake trained, are frightened of this place. So am I. So much protective malevolence. I fled. Back home in the studio, a man-made wonder. We planted a chokecherry tree near the window and now through cream- colored blinds the precise silhouette of the bare branches, gently but firmly lifting my head, a Chinese screen that no one made which I accept from the nature of light.

* * *

I think of Mother’s thicket as her bird garden. How obsessed she was with these creatures. When I told her a schizophrenic in Kentucky wrote, “Birds are holes in heaven through which a man must pass,” her eyes teared. She lost husband and daughter to the violence of the road and I see their spirits in the bird garden. On our last night a few years ago she asked me, “Are we the same species as God?” At eighty-five she was angry that the New Testament wasn’t fair to women and then she said, “During the Great Depression we had plenty to eat,” meaning at the farmhouse, barn and chicken coop a hundred yards to the north that are no longer there, disappeared with the inhabitants. The child is also the mother of the man.

* * *

In the U.P. in the vast place southeast of the river I found my way home by following the path where my shadow was the tallest which led to the trail which led to another trail which led to the road home to the cabin where I wrote to her: “Found two dead redtail hawks, missing their breasts, doubtless a goshawk took them as one nests just north of here a half mile in a tall hemlock on the bend of the river.”

* * *

With only one eye I’ve learned to celebrate vision, the eye a painter, the eye a monstrous fleshy camera which can’t stop itself in the dark where it sees its private imagination. The tiny eye that sees the cosmos overhead.

* * *

Last winter I lost heart between each of seven cities. Planes never land with the same people who boarded.

* * *

Walking Mary and Zilpha every morning I wonder how many dogs are bound by regret because they are captured by our imaginations and affixed there by our need to have them do as we wish when their hearts are quite otherwise.

* * *

I hope to define my life, whatever is left, by migrations, south and north with the birds and far from the metallic fever of clocks, the self staring at the clock saying, “I must do this.” I can’t tell the time on the tongue of the river in the cool morning air, the smell of the ferment of greenery, the dust off the canyon’s rock walls, the swallows swooping above the scent of raw water.

* * *

Maybe we’re not meant to wake up completely. I’m trying to think of what I can’t remember. Last week in France I read that the Ainu in Japan receive messages from the gods through willow trees so I’m not the only one. I looked down into the garden of Matignon and wondered at the car trip the week before where at twilight in Narbonne 27,000 blackbirds swirled and that night from the window it was eerie with a slip of the waning moon off the right shoulder of the Romanesque cathedral with Venus sparkling shamelessly above the moon, Venus over whom the church never had any power. Who sees? Whose eye is this? A day later in Collioure from the Hermitage among vineyards in the mountains I could look down steep canyons still slightly green from the oaks in November to the startling blue of the Mediterranean, storm-wracked from the mistral’s seventy knot winds, huge lumpy white caps, their crests looking toward Africa.

* * *

I always feared losing my remaining eye, my singular window to the world. When closed it sees the thousands of conscious photos I’ve taken with it, impressionist rather than crystalline, from a lion’s mouth in the Serengeti in 1972 to a whale’s eye in the Humboldt current, the mountain sun gorged with the color of forest fires followed by a moon orange as a simple orange, a thousand girls and women I’ve seen but never met, the countless birds I adopted since losing the eye in 1945 including an albino grouse creamy as that goshawk’s breast that came within feet of Mother in our back pasture, the female trogon that appeared when Dalva decided to die, and the thousands of books out of whose print vision is created in the mind’s eye, as real as any garden at dawn.

* * *

No rhapsodies today. Home from France and the cold wind and a foot of snow have destroyed my golden window, but then the memory has always been more vivid than the life. The memory is the not-quite-living museum of our lives. Sometimes its doors are insufferably wide open with black stars in a grey sky, and horses clattering in and out, our dead animals resting here and there but often willing to come to life again to greet us, parents and brothers and sisters sit at the August table laughing while they eat twelve fresh vegetables from the garden. Rivers, creeks, lakes over which birds funnel like massive schools of minnows. In memory the clocks have drowned themselves, leaving time to the life spans of trees. The world of our lives comes unbidden as night.

- Jim Harrison, The Golden Window

#Jim Harrison #The golden window #sight #backpacking #nature #birds #river #river rafting #home #light #that certain slant of light #bear

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wordacrosstime · 5 years

Text

Runaway

[Runaway. Alice Munro. 2004. Vintage Books. ISBN 1400077915]

Alice Munro is a Canadian writer who specializes in the short-story form. She has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. She has been compared favorably to Russian writer Anton Chekov, and her selection of subject matter for her stories plays a large role in that characterization (see below). She writes in an elegant yet uncomplicated prose style that makes her writing very accessible to most readers.

This collection of stories – eight in all, beginning with the eponymous Runaway – features strong, independent female protagonists at the heart of each of them. Each story tantalizes quite literally from the first word, the title of each story being only a single word in length. It is not difficult to tease out the meaning of each title, but it is not typically evident until well into the story itself. I chose to read this collection in pursuit of my efforts to read the writing of world-class minds. My litmus test for a world-class mind is that the person shall have won a Nobel Prize (or, in the case of mathematics, the Fields Medal) in their particular discipline. My elder daughter, who is a serious student of English, especially the creative writing form, recommended Alice Munro to me.

I have read other Nobel laureates in Literature – Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Kazuo Ishiguro, for example. I remember reading Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow some years ago, and being very disappointed at the “high” style of writing he espoused – oh so clever and precious – and being immediately turned off by it. Alice Munro’s style of writing is the virtual antithesis to Bellow’s hyper-perspicacious, bombastic approach. This is reason enough to recommend her to anyone who enjoys serious fiction without feeling as if they have to study it to get it.

But Munro’s stories aren’t dumbed down or even stripped down. They are fully-fleshed tales of ordinary people who wrestle with extraordinary circumstances across the arch of time, hope, and despair. As with Chekov, no one in her stories is on a path to be a world-beater; they are living their lives in as simple a fashion as they can manage. And yet random interlopers – people, events, misfortune – conspire at every turn to thwart their purposes. Having said that, I cannot say that her stories are tragedies, as much of great literary fiction tends to be, but they do evince tragic elements in near-equal quantities of those wrought by character foibles and those wrought by God or Fate.

It is as if her characters are like the prismatic spray of bright light through hand-cut crystal. No matter how much care was given to the cutting of the crystal, each facet is imbued with its own unique character and quality. And as the crystal is turned, cross-cast reflections and refractions of that light appear and dissolve with reckless abandon. So too do Munro’s characters weave their sinuous paths through life, intersecting and cleaving with one another and with their own personal shadows. And in this incredibly rich interplay and dynamism arises the motive force of each story – stories that could involve any reader directly or implicitly.

But what strikes me most about these stories, being a relatively nonliterate person, is there is such an astonishing degree of familiarity embedded in each one. It’s as if Munro is saying to us, “Do you have an hour or two to spare? Let me tell you a story I once heard from a neighbor.” The reader of Alice Munro’s work can settle in with this collection, turn the reading lamp on, and disappear into the fabric of each tale.

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

22 May 2019

wordsacrosstime

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kasawi1 · 5 years

Text

How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

By Maria Fox

While behavioral and applied psychology has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that environment and surroundings can effect behavior, there is a new book which proves behavior can be based on the subconscious. Subliminal: how your subconscious mind rules your behavior, written by Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist, is the first book to examine this new discovery in the field of psychology. Mlodinow has been recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics. In addition, the author has a passion for making scientific fact and science available to the general public. With five books on the New York Times list of best sellers including two which were co-authored with Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra, Mlodinow has already become one of the most successful authors and physicists in history. In addition to these publications, the author's work can also be found in a number of periodicals, newspapers, journals and webzines. Mlodinow has also lectured at universities and other locations around the world. More recently, Mlodinow has appeared on several talk shows on cable, radio, satellite and television including an appearance on ABC's Nightline in which the physicist debated spiritual guru Deepak Chopra. Leonard was born to holocaust survivors, a father who spent time in a concentration camp and a mother who was housed in a labor camp. General Patton liberated Mlodinow's father in 1945, though it is unclear as to how Leonard's mother was liberated from the labor camp. While the two never knew one another during the holocaust, the couple met in Brooklyn, New York in 1948, fell in love and were married the same year. Initially having attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Leonard dropped out of college in 1972. Upon doing so, Mlodinow traveled to Israel on a work kibbutz. At which time, the young worker and student fell in love with physics. A love which most likely came to pass after having read several books by infamous author and physicist Richard Feyman. For, Feyman's books were the only books in the kibbutz library which were written in the English language. Upon returning home from Israel, Leonard added physics to a double major of chemistry and math and began work towards a doctoral degree in physics at University California Berkeley. In the process, Mlodinow in preparing a final thesis, worked with Nikos Papanicolaou to develop a new application for problem solving in infinite dimensions. After which, the two discovered that corrections were necessary in order to prove that the world in which humans live is a three dimensional one. Upon graduating from Berkeley, Mlodinow acquired a faculty position at Caltech, becoming a Bantrell Fellow in theoretical physics. It is most likely that fellowship which resulted in Leonard's traveling to Germany, where the young author and physicist attended the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. While at the institute, Mlodinow received a second fellowship, becoming an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow before returning home to America in 2005. After returning home, the physicist and author returned to the faculty at California Institute of Technology teaching math and physics. After which, Mlodinow continued writing books while teaching until 2013, when the author left the institute to write full time. Since that time, Leonard has released two other books, The Upright Thinkers in 2015 and Elastic in 2018, while continuing to lecture, travel and write on a regular basis.

About the Author:

Discover how your subconscious mind rules your behavior by reading the informative posts that are published by our therapist at http://bit.ly/2tlW2H0.

How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior via http://bit.ly/1pVxpX4

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redabiz2 · 5 years

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Discovering How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

By Maria Fox

While behavioral and applied psychology has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that environment and surroundings can effect behavior, there is a new book which proves behavior can be based on the subconscious. Subliminal: how your subconscious mind rules your behavior, written by Leonard Mlodinow, a theoretical physicist, is the first book to examine this new discovery in the field of psychology. Mlodinow has been recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in math and physics. In addition, the author has a passion for making scientific fact and science available to the general public. With five books on the New York Times list of best sellers including two which were co-authored with Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra, Mlodinow has already become one of the most successful authors and physicists in history. In addition to these major publications, Leonard has also contributed to a number of journals, newspapers and periodicals. Whereas, the author has appeared on media programs such as Morning Joe, ABC's Nightline and Through the Wormhole to name a few. In addition, to writing self-help books, Mlodinow has also written for television which included scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation an MacGyver. Leonard was born to holocaust survivors, a father who spent time in a concentration camp and a mother who was housed in a labor camp. General Patton liberated Mlodinow's father in 1945, though it is unclear as to how Leonard's mother was liberated from the labor camp. While the two never knew one another during the holocaust, the couple met in Brooklyn, New York in 1948, fell in love and were married the same year. Initially having attended Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Leonard dropped out of college in 1972. Upon doing so, Mlodinow traveled to Israel on a work kibbutz. At which time, the young worker and student fell in love with physics. A love which most likely came to pass after having read several books by infamous author and physicist Richard Feyman. For, Feyman's books were the only books in the kibbutz library which were written in the English language. Upon returning home from Israel, Leonard added physics to a double major of chemistry and math and began work towards a doctoral degree in physics at University California Berkeley. In the process, Mlodinow in preparing a final thesis, worked with Nikos Papanicolaou to develop a new application for problem solving in infinite dimensions. After which, the two discovered that corrections were necessary in order to prove that the world in which humans live is a three dimensional one. Upon graduating from Berkeley, Mlodinow acquired a faculty position at Caltech, becoming a Bantrell Fellow in theoretical physics. It is most likely that fellowship which resulted in Leonard's traveling to Germany, where the young author and physicist attended the Max-Planck-Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. While at the institute, Mlodinow received a second fellowship, becoming an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow before returning home to America in 2005. After returning home, the physicist and author returned to the faculty at California Institute of Technology teaching math and physics. After which, Mlodinow continued writing books while teaching until 2013, when the author left the institute to write full time. Since that time, Leonard has released two other books, The Upright Thinkers in 2015 and Elastic in 2018, while continuing to lecture, travel and write on a regular basis.

About the Author:

Discover how your subconscious mind rules your behavior by reading the informative posts that are published by our therapist at http://bit.ly/2tlW2H0.

Discovering How Your Subconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior via Lose weight with REDA http://bit.ly/2GnZqHo

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sending-the-message · 6 years

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Incredible Body Hocus Pocus by darthvarda

I saw the bitch almost a week ago, near midnight, sauntering down the path in Cheeseman Park wearing only an oversized Dio shirt.

The light of the moon was sullied by clouds, but, even so, I could still see that her feet were bare and blackened from dirt and blood. She looked pissed. I wondered for a moment if she was homeless, or hurt, or worse.

Then my thoughts took me further: what could a girl like that possibly doing out, alone, on a night like this? Was she looking for something? For someone? Would she even entertain the idea of being with a guy like me? I needed to know. No. I was entitled to know.

“Hey,” I called out to her, doubling back. “Hey, sweetheart, you okay?” But she kept walking, it looked like she was in a complete daze. Or was purposefully ignoring me. The bitch.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I could feel the anger, the resentment, building up inside me. Here we go again, I thought to myself, pumping myself up. Even this dirty homeless slut won’t even spare me a passing glance.

“Hey,” I repeated, jogging to catch up and reaching out with my left hand. I placed it gently on her shoulder and tugged, trying to stop her. “Do you need help?”

She stopped abruptly, shrugged my hand off, and sighed before turning around to face me. And the way she looked at me, with her eyes narrowed, and her teeth bared in a snarl, well, she reminded me of a predator—a wolf.

It was cute.

She was cute.

I made my shock at her attraction known in the most obvious way possible; I looked her up. From the blackened, bloody depths of her feet all, all, all the way up to the top of her head, where her longish, lightish hair was tied.

She rolled her eyes and made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and said, “I’m fucking fine.”

“Are you sure? I can buy you some food or something, it’s the very least I can do.”

“Steak?”

“What?”

“Tenderloin. Ribeye. Porterhouse. New York Strip. Meat. Bloody. Fresh.” She licked her lips.

A beat passed between us. The wind blew from the east, carrying dozens of puffy clouds with it. They danced across the face of the moon which was rounded, full, and bright in the brief moments between them.

“Uh, I mean, I can get you a burger or something.”

She shook her head and made a face. “Thanks, but no thanks.” Then she turned away from me and started walking again.

“You need a place to stay?” I yelled after her halfheartedly, half hopeful. I followed her with my eyes, watching the way her figure moved underneath the shirt, wondering if that’s all she had on.

“Nope.”

“Hey, I was only trying to help! You don’t have to be a bitch.”

Her laughter tinkled back towards me, at me. She was laughing at me, at the fact I wasn’t good enough for her, tall enough for her, that my wrists weren’t thick enough.

I was pissed.

I watched her for a moment, then took two steps forward, then three, and soon was following her.

In the darkness, in the silence, I heard her sigh again. “Stop following me, creep.”

“Hey, bitch, I was just trying to help.” I repeated. “You shouldn’t be walking home alone at night, wearing that, anyway. You’re just asking for it.”

“For what? The attention of a fucking creepy ass stalker borderline rapist asshole mother fucker who’s just asking for it?”

It was my turn to laugh. Boy, she had a mouth on her. I wondered what it felt like. And I enjoyed riling her up, making her fear me. It made me feel powerful. Alive.

“Asking for what, baby? This?” I jogged up next to her and grabbed my cock. But she didn’t even look over, didn’t even acknowledge me, and just kept walking.

“Death.”

“What?”

“Oh, you heard me, you goddamn cunt.”

“Are you threatening me? Bitch, I’ll show you who’s boss.”

She laughed again. Louder. More wildly. Like an animal gone mad.

I grabbed her arm, hard, and swung her around to face me. My blood was boiling, my heart pounding. I wanted her to feel me, to know that I was powerful and in charge and that she needed to respect me, to obey me.

She looked down at my hand on her arm, then back up at me, and smiled wide, like she was trying to show all her teeth at once.

“Why are you smiling, whore? You lookin’ forward to this?”

“I don’t think you understand. I don’t need help, but you might.”

“What do you mean by that?” I looked around, realizing that there was not a single soul around us. And, beyond the trees, most of the buildings were dark with sleep or silence.

Good for me.

Bad for her.

I smiled back.

Above us, the wind had finally dispersed all the clouds, leaving the moon bare and bright and beautiful. The light of it gilded the area around us silver and casted deep, deep shadows across the grass.

She pulled against my arm and I let go wanting to see what she’d do next. She swung her arms down and lifted the Dio shirt up and off her body then threw it unceremoniously onto the grass next to the path.

She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. And felt a smile grow, and something else grow besides. “Now, that’s more like—”

And then it happened.

And then she morphed

It was some Wes Craven bullshit, y’all.

Except, you know how in all the movies, all the books, when people transform it’s painful?

This didn’t look painful, she didn’t look hurt.

In fact, it looked enjoyable, fun, like she was putting on a plush, comfy robe after a long, long day.

What happened was impossible, indescribable, but I’ll try the best I can.

It started with her arms; they began to snap and twist and I quickly stepped back a few paces, shocked and afraid. I could see now, in the moonlight, that the whole of her had frozen up, but was vibrating, like she was having some sort of seizure. And yet, she was smiling, no, grinning with pleasure.

A froth was forming at her mouth and her eyes were growing darker and darker and darker and her face elongated out, out into a muzzle lined with absurdly long teeth. And the popping noise from her bones breaking or shifting or whatever was sickening and loud.

She fell on all fours and shook herself like a dog and, as I watched—mouth open in a silent scream—I saw fur, thick and shaggy, erupt all over her body. A disgusting ripping noise rent the air and tail, long and languid, popped out from her ass. It would’ve been hot if it wasn’t horrific.

To say it simply, the bitch morphed. She morphed into a fucking monster. She had turned into some sort of hellhound—huge, hulking, horrific.

I stood stock still, too afraid to move, too afraid to even look away.

“You…you fucking bitch,” I muttered to myself backing away. “Fuck you. Fuck this.”

She—it—growled and took a few steps towards me. A thin line of drool threaded down from one of its too long teeth, all the way down on the ground. And the way she looked at me, with her eyes narrowed, teeth slightly bared—well, it reminded me of that girl, that bitch.

She licked her lips.

And then it—she—leapt. Right onto me, knocking me down. My head hit the pavement of the path, hard, and I saw stars burst up into my eyes. It took me a moment to realize what was happening.

I was moving. She was pulling me. There was pain.

Her mouth was latched onto my right arm, pulling and pulling and pulling. I felt it pop out of its socket and something else break with excruciating pain deep inside my forearm.

But, despite her strength, she didn’t seem to want to bite down, taste my blood, and her teeth didn’t break the skin. She broke something else though, besides my arm—my ego.

And, as I screamed out, helpless, hopeless, I heard myself—high pitched, wailing, feminine—I sounded like a fucking whore being fondled by too many men.

“P-p-please,” I said. I’m not proud of begging a female, but I did. “Please don’t hurt me. Please. I didn’t mean anything.”

But the beast didn’t stop. Didn’t even make like it heard me, but kept pulling me deeper into the park, away from the houses and the roads. I think she was trying to get me into the shadows to feast on my fucking fear and my flesh.

Then I heard it—

A sound, faint at first, but then growing louder, louder—an engine. A cop! Or someone, anyone, driving down Humboldt. I screamed again, higher this time, louder, and pushed weakly against the beast dragging me.

The beast stopped, and, at first, I thought it was because of my efforts, but then I saw that it had perked up and was listening intently, its head tilted slightly to one side.

Suddenly, faster than I could blink, she turned tail and fled into the shadows which obscured her wholly. The sound of the engine cut, leaving me in astoundingly loud silence.

“Hey!”

I knocked my head up, trying to see through the blood dripping down my face from the wound on my head, clutching my right arm, the one she had dragged me with, in my left. It felt broken in ten places.

“Hey!” The voice said again and then someone ran out of the shadows. “Where’d she go?”

It was a guy. He was wearing all black, like he thought he was some tactical, military badass, when really, I thought it just made him look like a tool, a fucking fool. He saw me immediately, lying there, bleeding, and jogged over, stopping only momentarily top pick something up—the fucking Dio shirt—which he slung over his shoulder like some goddamn gym towel.

Finally, he got to me and knelt down before looking me deeply in the eyes. Either he was gay or was checking me for a concussion, either way, I didn’t like it, didn’t like him.

“What? That fucking roastie monster? Fuck if I know, man. She fucking ripped me apart, almost murdered me. Fucking bitch. I’ll fucking get her.”

The man gazed at me with something I guess I’d classify as hatred, but it could’ve been frustration or even fear. A dog barked in the distance and he looked up suddenly, into the distance. I cowered, shrinking minutely towards him, then balked at my own insecurity.

I glanced back at the man, looking him up and down, noting his height, his build, his face. “What are you like her Chad or something?”

He looked back down at me, clearly confused. “Chad?”

“You look like a Chad.”

“No idea what you’re even talking about, buddy. You okay?”

“Yeah, man, I’m fucking fine.”

The man nodded once. “Good,” he said with finality. “You know, I should probably kill you, but seeing as she didn’t actually break the skin, I think this will do.” And before I could even ask what the fuck he was talking about, he cocked his arm back and punched me straight in the face.

It hurt.

A lot.

And I blacked out.

Woke up hours later, alone, in the semi-darkness that indicated the sun was just coming up. Woke up because a dog was pissing on me, on my fucking leg. I kicked it away, got up, and went home.

Mom nearly had a heart attack and insisted we go to the hospital. I agreed on the terms that she would pay.

So, I mean, yeah, getting mauled by a she-demon hound from hell and then knocked out by her pimp or handler or whatever is scary as shit, but after all’s said and done, what’s the true horror story?

The weird fucking bitch I saw transforming into some horrific, hellish beast?

Or the simple, sorry fact that a guy as nice as me can’t get laid?

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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cookiesandcreame1983-blog · 7 years

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Quotes for Tuesday March 14,2017

Faith quotes Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted.--Albert Pike Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.--Voltaire Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the window which hope has opened.--Charles Spurgeon Faith is a continuation of reason.--William Adams ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Life quotes Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. John Lennon Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine. Ralph Waldo Emerson As one goes through life, one learns that if you don't paddle your own canoe, you don't move. Katherine Hepburn We must be willing to relinquish the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. Joseph Campbell Life, in all ranks and situations, is an outward occupation, an actual and active work. W. Humboldt Everything that happens to us leaves some trace behind; everything contributes imperceptibly to make us what we are. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forgiveness quotes Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past.—Lama Surya Das Forgiveness means letting go of the past.--Gerald Jampolsky Forgiving is not forgetting; its actually remembering — remembering and not using your right to hit back. Its a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you dont want to repeat what happened.--Desmond Tutu The forgiving state of mind is a magnetic power for attracting good.--Catherine Ponder Forgiving those who hurt us is the key to personal peace.--G. Weatherly Life is an adventure in forgiveness.--Norman Cousins ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Wisdom quotes Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.-- Jimi Hendrix Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.-- Japanese Proverb The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.-- M. Scott Peck A loving heart is the truest wisdom.--Charles Dickens ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gratitude quotes God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you?"--William A. Ward God has need for our worship. It is we who need to show our gratitude for what we have received.--Thomas Aquinas A grateful thought toward Heaven is itself a prayer.--Rudolph Block Gratefulness is the poor man's payment.--English Proverb Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.--Cicero Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul and the heart of man knoweth none more fragrant.--Hosea Ballou Gratitude is the memory of the heart.--Massieu

#Faith quotes #life quotes #forgiveness quotes #wisdom quotes #gratitude quotes

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