#capital-L Literature

[fantasticait]

Just as we were all getting back into the mainland domestic groove, somebody started in with dragons and crop blights from across the North Sea. Now bitter winds were screaming in from the west, searing the land and ripping the grass from the soil. I tried to put these things out of my mind. On summer evenings my young wife and I would sit out front, high on potato wine, and watch the sun stitch its orange skirt across the horizon. At times such as these, you get a good, humble feeling, like the gods made this place, this moment, first and concocted you as an afterthought just to be there to enjoy it. But I knew what it meant when I heard those flint-edged winds howling past the house. Some individuals three weeks’ boat ride off were messing up our summer and would probably need their asses whipped over it.

Djarf, whose wife was a sour, carp-mouthed thing and little argument for staying home, was agitating to hop back in the ship and go straighten things out in Northumbria. My buddy Gnut, who lived just over the stony moraine our wheat field backed up on, came down the hill one day and admitted that he, too, was giving it some thought. Like me, he wasn’t big on warrioring. He was just crazy for boat. He’d have rowed from his shack to his shithouse if somebody would invent a ship whose prow could cut sod. His wife had passed years ago, dead from bad milk, and now that she was gone, the part of Gnut that felt peaceful in a place that didn’t move beneath him had sickened and died as well.

Gnut’s wool coat was stiff with filth and his long hair so heavy and unclean that even the raw wind was having a hard time getting it to move. He had a good crust of snot going in his mustache, not a pleasant thing to look at, but then, he had no one around to find it disagreeable. He tore a sprig of heather from the ground and chewed at its sweet roots.

“Djarf get at you yet?” he asked.

“No, not yet, but I’m not worried he’ll forget.”

He took the sprig from his teeth and briefly jammed it into his ear before tossing it away. “You gonna go?”

“Not until I hear the particulars, I won’t.”

“You can bet I’m going. A hydra flew in last night and ran off Rolf Hierdal’s sheep. We can’t be putting up with this shit. It comes down to pride, is what it comes down to.”

I wished Gnut would go ahead and own up to the fact that his life out here was making him lonely and miserable instead of laying on with this warrior-man routine. I could tell just to look at him that most days he was thinking of walking into the water and not bothering to turn back. It wasn’t combat he was after. He wanted back on the boat among company.

The clouds were spilling out low across the sky when we shoved off. Thirty of us on board, Gnut rowing with me at the bow and behind us a lot of other men I’d been in some shit with before.

Gnut was overjoyed. He laughed and sang and put a lot of muscle into the oar, me just holding my hands on it to keep up appearances. I was missing Pila already. She hadn’t come down to see me off, too mad and sad about me leaving to get up out of bed. But I looked for her anyway, the land scooting away with every jerk of the oars. If Gnut knew I was hurting, he didn’t say so. He nudged me and joked, and kept up a steady flow of dull, merry chatter, as though this whole thing was a private vacation the two of us had cooked up together.

Thanks to the easy wind bellying our sails, we crossed fast and sighted the island six days early. One of the hockchoppers spotted it first, and when he did, he let everyone know it by cutting loose with a long, obnoxious battle howl. He drew his sword and swung it in figure eights above his head, causing the men around him to scatter under the gunwales. This boy was a nasty item, with a face like a buzzard’s, his cheeks showing more boils than beard. I’d seen him around at home. He had three blackened, chopped-off thumbs reefed to his belt.

Haakon Gokstad glanced up from his seat in the stern and shot the boy a baleful look. Haakon had been on more raids and runs than the bunch of us put together. He was old and achy and worked the rudder, partly because he could read the tides by how the blood moved through his hands, and also because those old arms were poor for pulling oars. “Put your ass on that bench, young man,” Haakon said to the boy. “We got twelve hours’ work between here and there.”

You could say that those people on Lindisfarne were fools, living out there on a tiny island without high cliffs or decent natural defenses, and so close to us and also the Swedes and the Norwegians, how we saw it, we couldn’t afford not to come by and sack every now and again. But when we came into the bright little bay, a quiet fell over all of us. The place was wild with fields of purple thistle, and when the wind blew, it twitched and rolled, like the hide of some fantastic animal shrugging in its sleep. Wildflowers spurted on the hills in fat red gouts. Apple trees lined the shore, and there was something sorrowful in how they hung so low with fruit. We could see a man making his way toward a clump of white-walled cottages, his donkey loping along behind him with a load. On the far hill, I could make out the silhouette of the monastery, which still lacked a roof from when we’d burned it last. It was a lovely place, and I hoped there would still be something left to enjoy after we got off the ship and wrecked it up.

We gathered on the beach, and already Djarf was in a lather. He did a few deep knee bends, got down in front of all of us and ran through some poses, cracking his bones and drawing out the knots in his muscles.

Gnut smiled and squinted up at the sky. “My God, it’s a fine day. Let’s go up the hill and see if we can’t scratch up a bite to eat.”

We hiked to the little settlement on the hill. Some ways over, where the monastery was, the young men were on a real binge. They’d dragged out a half-dozen monks, hanged them from a tree, and then set the tree on fire.

Our hands were stiff and raw from the row over, and we paused at a well in the center of the village to wet our palms and have a drink. We were surprised to see the kid with the thumbs in his belt bust forth from a stand of ash trees, yanking some poor half-dead citizen along behind him. He walked over to where we were standing and let his victim collapse in the dusty boulevard.

“This is nice,” he said to us. “You’d make good chieftains, standing around like this, watching other people work.”

“Why, you little turd,” Haakon said, and backhanded the boy across the mouth. The fellow lying there in the dust looked up and chuckled. The boy flushed. He plucked a dagger from his hip scabbard and stabbed Haakon in the stomach. There was a still moment. Haakon gazed down at the ruby stain spreading across his tunic. He looked greatly vexed.

As the young man realized what he’d done, his features fretted up like a child trying to pout his way out of a spanking. He was still looking that way when Haakon cleaved his head across the eyebrows with one crisp stroke.

Haakon cleaned his sword and looked again at his stomach. “Sumbitch,” he said, probing the wound with his pinky. “It’s deep. I believe I’m in a fix.”

“Nonsense,” said Gnut. “Just need to lay you down and stitch you up.”

Ørl, who was softhearted, went over to the man the youngster had left. He propped him up against the well and gave him the bucket to sip at.

Across the road, an old dried-up farmer had come out of his house. He stared off at the smoke from the monastery rolling down across the bay. He nodded at us. We walked over.

He pointed at Haakon, who was leaning on Gnut and looking pretty spent. “Looks like your friend’s got a problem. Unless you’d like to watch him die, why don’t you bring him inside? Got a daughter who’s hell’s own seamstress.”

The man, who was called Bruce, had a cozy little place. We all filed in. His daughter was standing by the stove. She gave a nervous little cry when we came through the door. She had a head full of thick black hair, and a thin face, pale as sugar— a pretty girl. So pretty, in fact, that you didn’t notice right off that she was missing an arm. We all balked and had a good stare at her. But Gnut, you could tell, was truly smitten. The way he looked, blanched and wide-eyed, he could have been facing a wild dog instead of a good-looking woman. He rucked his hands through his hair and tried to lick the crust off his lips. Then he nodded and uttered a solemn “Hullo.”

“Mary,” Bruce said, “this man has developed a hole in his stomach. I said we’d help fix him up.” Mary looked at Haakon. “Aha,” she said. She lifted his tunic and surveyed the wound.

“Water,” she said to Ørl, who was looking on. Gnut eyed him jealously as he left for the well. Then Gnut cleared his throat. “I’d like to pitch in,” he said. Mary directed him to a little sack of onions in the corner and told him to chop. Bruce got a fire going in the stove. Mary set the water on and shook in some dry porridge. Haakon, who had grown rather waxen, crawled up on the table and lay still. “I don’t feel like no porridge,” he said.

“Don’t worry about that,” Bruce said. “The porridge is just for the onions to ride in on.”

Gnut kept an eye on Mary as he bent over a small table and overdid it on the onions. He chopped and chopped, and when he’d chopped all they had, he started chopping the chopped-up ones over again.

Finally, Mary looked over and told him, “That’s fine, thank you,” and Gnut laid the knife down. When the porridge was cooked, Mary threw in a few handfuls of onion and took the concoction over to Haakon. He regarded her warily, but when she held the wooden spoon out to him, he opened his mouth like a baby bird. He chewed and swallowed. “Doesn’t taste very good,” he said, but he kept eating anyway.

A minute passed, and then a peculiar thing occurred. Mary lifted Haakon’s tunic again, put her face to the wound, and sniffed at it. She paused a second and then did it again.

“What in the world is this?” I asked.

“Gotta do this with a wound like that,” Bruce said. “See if he’s got the porridge illness.”

“He doesn’t have any porridge illness,” I said. “At least, he didn’t before now. What he’s got is a stab hole in his stomach. Now stitch the man up.”

“Won’t do any good if you smell onions coming out of that hole. Means he’s got the porridge illness and he’s done for.”

Haakon looked up. “Talking about a pierced bowel? Can’t believe it’s as bad as all that.”

Mary had another sniff. The wound didn’t smell like onions. She cleaned Haakon with hot water and stitched the hole to a tight pucker.

Haakon fingered the stitches, and, satisfied, passed out. The five of us stood around, and no one could think of anything to say.

“So,” Gnut said in an offhand way. “Were you born like that?”

“Like what?” Mary said.

“Without both arms, I mean. Is that how you came out?”

“Sir, that’s fine a thing to ask my daughter,” Bruce said. “It was your people that did it to her.”

Gnut said, “Oh.” And then he said it again, and then really no one could think of anything to say.

Then Mary spoke. “It wasn’t you who did it,” she said. “But the man who did, I think I’d like to kill him.”

Gnut told her that if she would please let him know who it was, he’d consider it a favor if she’d let him intervene on her behalf.

Ørl opened up his wineskin, and we all had a dose. It was sweet and potent and we drank and laughed and carried on. Haakon came to. His ordeal had put him in a mawkish bent of mind, and he raised a toast to his pretty surgeon, and to the splendid day, and how much it pleased him that he’d get to see the end of it. Bruce and Mary loosened up and we all talked like old friends. Mary told a lewd story about an apothecary who lived down the road. She was having a good time and did not seem to mind how close Gnut was standing. No one looking in on us would have known we were the reason this girl was missing an arm, and also the reason, probably, that nobody asked where Bruce’s wife had gone.

It was not long before we heard somebody causing a commotion at the well. Me and Gnut and Ørl stepped outside. Djarf had stripped to his waist, and his face and arms and pants looked about how you’d figure. He was hauling up buckets of cold water, dumping it over his head, and shrieking with delight. The blood ran off him pink and watery. He saw us and came over.

“Hoo,” he said, shaking water from his hair. He jogged in place for a minute, shivered, and then straightened up. “Mercy, that was a spree. Not much loot to speak of, but a hell of a goddamn spree.” He massaged his thighs and spat a few times. Then he said, “So, you do much killing?”

“Nah,” I said. “Haakon killed that little what’s-his-name lying over there, but no, we’ve just been sort of taking it easy.”

“Hm. What about in there?” he asked, indicating Bruce’s cottage. “Who lives there? You kill them?”

“No, we didn’t,” Ørl said. “They helped put Haakon back together and everything. Seem like good folks.”

“Nobody’s killing them,” Gnut said.

“So everybody’s back at the monastery, then?” I asked.

“Well, most of them. Those young men had a disagreement over some damn thing and fell to cutting each other. Gonna make for a tough row out of here. Pray for wind, I guess.”

Brown smoke was heavy in the sky, and I could hear dim sounds of people screaming.

Gnut didn’t come down to the feast. He said he needed to stay at Bruce and Mary’s to look after Haakon. Bullshit, of course, seeing as Haakon made it down the hill by himself and crammed his tender stomach with about nine tough steaks. When the dusk started going black and still no Gnut, I legged it back up to Bruce’s to see about him. Gnut was sitting on a hollow log outside the cottage, flicking gravel into the weeds.

“She’s coming with me,” he said.

“Mary?”

He nodded gravely. “I’m taking her home with me to be my wife. She’s in there talking it over with Bruce.”

“This a voluntary thing, or an abduction-type deal?”

Gnut looked off toward the bay as though he hadn’t heard the question. “She’s coming with me.”

We sat a minute and watched the sparks rising from the bonfire on the beach. The warm evening wind carried smells of blossoms and wood smoke, and I was overcome with calm. We walked into Bruce’s, where only a single suet candle was going. Mary stood by the window with her one arm across her chest. Bruce was worked up. When we came in, he moved to block the door. “You get out of my house,” he said. “You just can’t take her, what little I’ve got.”

Gnut did not look happy, but he shouldered past and knocked Bruce on his ass. I went and put a hand on the old farmer, who was quaking with rage.

Mary did not hold her hand out to Gnut. But she didn’t protest when he put his arm around her and moved her toward the door. The look she gave her father was a wretched thing, but still she went easy. With just one arm like that, what could she do? What other man would have her?

Their backs were to us when Bruce grabbed up an awl from the table and made for Gnut. I stepped in front of him and broke a chair on his face, but still he kept coming, scrabbling at my sword, trying to snatch up something he could use to keep his daughter from going away. I had to hold him steady and run my knife into his cheek. I held it there like a horse’s bit, and then he didn’t want to move. When I got up off him he was crying quietly. As I was leaving, he threw something at me and knocked the candle out.

And you might think it was a good thing, that Gnut had found a woman who would let him love her, and if she didn’t exactly love him back, at least she would, in time, get to feeling something for him that wasn’t so far from it. But what would you say about that crossing, when the winds went slack and it was five long weeks before we finally fetched up home? Gnut didn’t hardly say a word to anybody, just held Mary close to him, trying to keep her soothed and safe from all of us, his friends. He wouldn’t look me in the face, stricken as he was by the awful fear that comes with getting hold of something you can’t afford to lose.

After that trip, things changed. It seemed to me that all of us were leaving the high and easy time of life and heading into deeper waters. Not long after we got back, Djarf had a worm crawl up a hole in his foot and had to give up raiding. Gnut turned to homesteading full-time, and I saw less of him. Just catching up over a jar turned into a hassle you had to plan two weeks in advance. And when we did get together, he would laugh and jaw with me a little bit, but you could see he had his mind on other things. He’d gotten what he wanted, but he didn’t seem too happy about it, just worried all the time.

It didn’t make much sense to me then, what Gnut was going through, but after Pila and me had our little twins, and we put a family together, I got an understanding of how terrible love can be. You wish you hated those people, your wife and children, because you know the things the world will do to them, because you have done some of those things yourself. It’s crazy-making, yet you cling to them with everything and close your eyes against the rest of it. But still you wake up late at night and lie there listening for the creak and splash of oars, the clank of steel, the sounds of men rowing toward your home.

_______ Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. Story Abridged. Buy his book here.

#literature #capital-L Literature #favorite books #book recommendations #short story #Wells Tower #vikings #abridged #the unabridged story has more blood though #April 1805. Napoleon is master of Europe. Only the British fleet stands before him. Oceans are now battlefields.

[isdalinarhot]

me signing up for my science fiction and fantasy class last fall: lmaooo imagine if i got to write an essay about my cosmere hot takes for this class. of course this could never happen because the cosmere is Books For Reading For Fun and not Books For Reading For School

the syllabus: during week 10 we will be reading hugo award winning novella The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson

me:

#I ALWAYS FORGET THAT THE EMPERORS SOUL IS LIKE. LEGITIMATE CAPITAL L LITERATURE #BECAUSE FUCKING SHAI WAS IN THE LOST METAL. A BOOK THAT IS CERTAINLY NOT CAPITAL L LITERATURE #oh my god. the professor can be normal about this book but i cant #like. i can. i can write a normal analysis of the themes within like an english student should #but im gonna be sitting there the whole time like. they dont know shai becomes an agent of fantasy jesus #they dont know about marashai femslash february. they have no fucking idea. #luke.txt #SHE LIVES IN THE SAME UNIVERSE AS DALINAR AND I HAVE TO READ ABOUT HER IN ENGLISH CLASS

[geekeryisafoot]

psst, hey kid *I slink out of the shadows from an alley you don't remember being there and open my trench coat, revealing manga volumes* Read Blue Flag. It's a gotdamn pinnacle of the graphic narrative medium. Some capital L literature. The way that Kaito fellow wordlessly expresses interiority and queer experiences through body language and paneling? Unparalleled. I swear it on me grandmamas' graves. Ya won't regret it, kid *I slink back into the shadows. You look down and volume 1 is in your hands*

#blue flag #ao no flag #mineminemine #no but like for real. I put Blue Flag in the same unreachable tier as A Bride's Story #this is some high fucking art. Capital L literature. All sequential artists should study it to improve their craft

[terrainofheartfelt]

Wifeguy Han Organa

#aint no disney film gonna make me forget the truth! #yes I took a break from Literature with a capital L to reread something truly silly #give me the thrawn trilogy over the sequel trilogy any day #heir to the empire #timothy zahn #star wars #han solo #truly one of my fave things about the eu novels is han (and later) luke being absolute simps for their wives. as they SHOULD. #i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again #nobody does enemies to lovers like mara jade and luke skywalker #liz reads

[wynsnerdyrambles]

It genuinely baffles me how maligned "cheesy" media is. Like, have they never tasted cheese? Like, yeah sometimes you're not in the mood for it, but that certainly does not make it bad, not by any stretch of the imagination!

Embrace the cheese! Embrace genuine expressions of emotion! Embrace the power of love and friendship! Just because something is not #SeriousandImportant does not diminish its value as a work of art.

#storytelling #art #This isn't about any story in particular #But it is a little about capital L Literature

[thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl]

I just saw the take with my own two eyeballs that reading 365 books in a year is antithetical to enjoying and appreciating books "properly" and clearly the only way to do so is to read "trash" instead of "real books," once again proving my point that the venn diagram of people who like Literature and people who like reading for fun is two entirely separate circles on opposite sides of the room.

#books #reading #if the way you derive enjoyment from reading is to slowly slog your way through a punishing read you don't find 'fun' like you do you #you guys just sound like you're doing an alarming amount of suffering over there? #anyway i think most capital L literature is garbage #so at least we can mutually believe the the other has garbage taste #i wish i had the mental fortitude to read 365 books in a year! #anywho as ever i do recommend trying to read literally anything other than a book written by a dead cishet white man from the western canon #allison rambles

[reaperkaneki]

was thinking about jj again and looked up the translations of the songs bc they are frustratingly inaccessible in-game, and discovered someone did a full retranslation of one of the songs bc apparently ishida put a ridiculous amount of nuance/extremely difficult to translate phrases/obscure references into it, that for various, probably user-friendly, reasons was not conveyed in the official translation. which like, an official translation of ishidas work leaves out nuance??? color me surprised.

#not to be pretentious but if you aren’t at least passingly familiar with stuff ishida references in his works youre missing out #<- hates most people who claim to like tg but have never read any capital L Literature. at least read metamorphosis its short!

[kyliaquilor]

I mean, yes, but also 

1) it’s a class assignment, you need to read more than 30 pages

2) your presentation of your argument lacked sources and proper argumentation on the *why* behind it

3) As much as I agree with you that the shit you usually have to read in a HS English Class is terrible and bad, “I hated it” is not actually an analysis that you can present in an English Lit class.

#Grumping #There is Such a Thing as Being Too Woke #And those people on that post mostly are #Rolling My Eyes #American Education #education #Anti-English Lit Class #Anti-The Very Concept of Literature with a Capital L

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #19 – Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the third book I’ve picked up as part of my whole aspirational ‘read a piece of non-SFF capital-l Literature every month’ New Years resolution. Of those three, it is the second I opened only to discover it actually is science fiction and/or fantasy after all. Which is just a very funny thing to happen twice, and also meant the book was significantly less outside my comfort zone than I’d expected. Which did make it quite a pleasant read.

The story follows Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend, a companion robot for children) in a broadly sketched and mildly dystopian future America. At first it just follows her life in the shop where she’s kept, observing the world around her and interacting with the store manager and the other AFs, but the meat of the book is her life with the family who buys her. Over time you learn that Josie, her child, suffers from severe and increasing health issues as a consequence of being ‘lifted’ (genetically enhanced, in some unclear way) in the womb. Klara, being solar-powered and having quietly developed a one-robot religion underpinned by a firm belief in the power and benevolence of Mr. Sun (and a moral opposition to Pollution, which obscures and drives him away) does her best to invoke his help in nourishing and restoring Josie. At the same time, she learns that her job is not just to comfort Josie but, should she die, to be her mother’s replacement goldfish and imitate her perfectly.

The setting is broadly sketched and never really exposited upon – it’s just not something Klara is particularly interested in – but it’s a very modern sort of dystopia. Much of the populace, even among the American professional elite, have been left ‘post-employed’ by robotic automation. The remaining meritocratic elite have embraced novel and risky genetic enhancements for their children, as the only possible way of ensuring they get into a good school and one of the few good careers left. There are fascist militia compounds off in the distance somewhere. The overall feeling is that of a society dimly aware it’s midway through collapsing, but with no ideas of how to arrest its fall. But since Klara has no interest at all in either politics or economics, we only see this as it directly intrudes upon the story, with nary a lecture or manifesto to be seen.

I’ve only ever read one other book by Ishiguro, so I really don’t know how much this generalizes, but the similarities to Never Let Me Go really were striking. Both books are set in really rather horrifying societies, but portrayed in an utterly normalized way by someone who never even thinks to question the real rules they live under. Which is even more striking because in both cases the protagonist is seen by society as only quasi-human – like a person, but existing only in relation to and for the benefit of the people who really matter. And in both cases the story follows the protagonist who lives their life moving through the role they were made for without ever really resisting it, let alone changing it. Not that the roles of ‘friend to sick child’ and ‘mandatory organ donor’ are exactly comparable but, you know.

A definition I’ve always kind of liked for what makes literary fiction, well, literary is that it’s as or more concerned with the beauty and presentation of its prose than it is on the information the prose is conveying. Not at all true in terms of how the term’s actually used (genre is marketing), but it works for me, and lets this book count as literature quite handily. The whole story is told quite tightly from Klara’s point of view, and it’s a pleasure to read. Even if it took me more than a few pages to really understand how she described scenes, always foregrounding the ways they were divided by grids or patterns of the sun’s light.

Portraying the normal human society through the eyes of a naive and somewhat alien narrator to get away without explaining everything is a classic sci fi trope for a reason, but it’s overall used really well here as well.

I’m still not entirely sure how to interpret the sudden intrusion of magical realism with the ending. But otherwise, really quite a good read.

#book review #klara amd the sun #kazuo ishiguro #sff #literature

[greenbloods]

Ok i need to know what yall think of this because i have Thoughts

By capital-L Literature, I'm talking about some line-in-the-sand division of books where one side has Shakespeare and Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment and the Iliad, while the other side has whatevers on the shelf now, books that may be popular for a time but will be forgotten in 50 years, or even books that may be classics now but not two centuries from now. Not a measure of whether it's good necessarily, but whether it is Great.

#obv its important to deconstruct the premise that some books are Great and others not but indulge me for a moment #i think this view is unpopular and makes me look kookoo even within fandom but i think its up there with like classic works of epic poetry #i have a lot of thoughts about this #asoiaf #asoiaf polls #valyrianscrolls #valyrian scrolls

[miraculouslycool]

no. i don't love christmas. haven't celebrated it genuinely in over 10 years because i was a minor for 7 of those years and had no choice.

yes. the christmas carol by charles dickens is Literature with a capital L. not because i relate to scrooge, or because i think he was "right", he was a selfish, miserly dickwad who needed that huge intervention to learn to be a good person.

its because reading it makes me believe that one day i will find it in me to enjoy christmas on my own terms too. that there will one day be a christmas season where i dont have to sit through 3 hour dinners of people picking on me, body-shaming me and bullying me for my life choices. not one where i have to pretend i'm not an atheist and the concept of organised religion doesn't disgust me. one where i'll just be at peace, i don't even need to be overtaken by this so called christmas spirit. not today or this year obviously. but someday.

if it can happen to an idiot like scrooge, why can't it happen to people who just don't want to feel empty and hollow every year when december rolls around?

#rae speaks #the christmas carol

[just-a-carrot]

hmmmm I Am Curious what are the characters who enjoy reading's favorite genres.

I would put 'who do read' but that would potentially count the eyeball from OFW (because of the programming book) and I don't think I'm ready for knowing what it likes... unless the eyeball enjoys reading in which case I am questioning reality as we speak.

hmmm.......

i think iggy would most like fantasy and steampunk

gidget enjoys romance and reads a lot of fanfiction probably

orlam used to read a ton of classics growing up, though doesn't read much anymore

the others i can't say particularly read a lot. when genzou does listen to audio books, it's probably like crime thrillers maybe? but i feel he would get rather restless and would find it hard to make it through a whole book. i think bucks is more the type to binge-watch shows or listen to podcasts than read

hunar reads literally everything and also writes short stories and novels (like... Literature with a capital L type lol)

#ow: asks #char info asks

[denimbex1986]

For many of her contemporaries, Patricia Highsmith was too strong a poison. When I was researching my biography of her, the English crime writer HRF Keating told me that when the woman he knew as Pat was invited to join the Detection Club — formed by writers including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers in 1930 — one member was so outraged they told him, “If she’s in, I leave.”

And when Highsmith published The Talented Mr Ripley in 1955, the first of five Ripley books, readers were shocked by its amorality. Her central character was a charming psychopath, a murderer who evades punishment.

That first novel is a story many of us know from Anthony Minghella’s sumptuous 1999 film: Ripley, a young man with a shadowy past (played in Minghella’s version by Matt Damon), is tasked by the shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf to persuade his estranged son, Dickie (Jude Law), to return from Italy to New York. But a complex web of desires prompts Ripley to commit murder and assume Dickie’s identity.

As a character he is an extraordinary creation, one who has also been played on screen by Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper and John Malkovich. Now, in an eight-part Netflix series, it’s the turn of Andrew Scott to step into his polished Ferragamos.

Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, in her adopted home of Locarno, Switzerland, and was never a huge seller in America. Her US editor Otto Penzler, who published Highsmith in the 1980s, told me that Americans found her fictional world hard to navigate: “There’s a certain repellent quality to her books. The Ripley novels are so amoral that a lot of people are simply uncomfortable, because they don’t have a guidepost.” Others found that discomfort compelling: in 2008, the Times nominated Highsmith as the greatest-ever crime writer.

The transgressive nature of Ripley has its roots in her life. Before Highsmith was born (in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921), her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. As a small child she hated her stepfather, Stanley, with such a passion that she fantasised about killing him. When she was 14 her mother asked her, “Are you a les? You are beginning to make noises like one.”

Highsmith later recalled in a letter how worthless this remark had made her feel. “It reminds one of ‘Look at that hunchback, isn’t he funny’ on the street,” she said. These childhood experiences — she once said she was born under “a sickly star” — fed her dark imagination. “All this probably caused my propensity to write bloodthirsty stories of murder and violence,” she told a journalist.

When Highsmith sat down to write The Talented Mr Ripley in 1954, she had already published three novels: Strangers on a Train (1950), The Price of Salt (in 1952, under a pseudonym, and later republished as Carol) and The Blunderer (1954).

She first had the inspiration for Ripley in 1952, while staying at a hotel in Positano on the Amalfi coast. It was early one morning and as she stepped on to the balcony overlooking the sea, she spotted a solitary man walking along the beach. “I could just see that his hair was straight and darkish,” she later wrote. “There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease.”

She dashed off the novel at speed, over six months, while living in a rented cottage in Lenox, Massachusetts. “It felt like Ripley was writing it, it just came out,” she said. As she was working out the plot, she wrote in her notebook the word “EVIL” in capital letters next to the heading “Subject”.

Early titles for the book included The Thrill Boys and Business Is My Pleasure before she settled on The Talented Mr Ripley. “What I predicted I would once do, I am doing already in this very book,” she scribbled in her notebook. “That is, showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too. Thus the subconscious always proceeds the consciousness, or reality, as in dreams.”

Although there had been villains of this sort before — think Iago in Othello — none inhabited a universe in which they not only survived at the end but positively thrived. “I have a lurking liking for those that flout the law,” Highsmith told one interviewer.

By Ripley Under Ground (1970), the second novel in the series, Tom has become a serious collector of art, owning works by Van Gogh, Magritte and Picasso. With his wife, Heloise, he lives in a house outside Fontainebleau, their lifestyle financed by art fraud. In the course of the remaining books Ripley goes into battle with the mafia; garrottes someone on a train; and hits the nightclubs of Berlin dressed in drag.

The character of Ripley, shaped not so much by crime fiction as by existentialist literature — Highsmith was a keen student of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Camus — continues to cast his shadow over culture. There are traces of him in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman (American Psycho), Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter Morgan, and Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) in Saltburn.

Seventy years after Highsmith created her calculating killer, will Netflix give us the real Ripley? Other film versions have struggled with his talent for getting away with murder.

In René Clément’s 1960 Plein soleil, an adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley, Delon is arrested, an ending that Highsmith described as “a terrible concession to so-called public morality”. In Minghella’s take, the killer is given the gestation of a conscience. “There’s so much nihilism in film right now,” the director told The New York Times. “If I’m going to tell a story that’s so bleak and so much a journey of a soul, if in the end Ripley was just going about his business, what’s the journey?”

Steven Zaillian, writer and director of the Netflix series, has said that he tried to imagine how Highsmith herself would adapt the novels if she were alive today. The fact that he had the luxury of eight episodes meant he could be “faithful to the story, tone and subtleties of her work”. He won an Oscar for his screenplay of Schindler’s List and hopes to film all five Ripley books.

Certainly, his adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley is the most faithful I have seen. Scott captures Ripley’s strange blankness, his slippery quality, his moral emptiness. Throughout the series — shot in black and white on location in Italy and New York — various characters seek the truth about his identity. “May I ask you to describe Thomas Ripley?” an Italian detective asks Marge Sherwood (played by Dakota Fanning, opposite Johnny Flynn as Dickie). It’s a question that Ripley himself can’t quite answer.

In a conversation published in Interview magazine, Scott recently told his fellow actor Ben Whishaw why this inscrutability appealed to him: “There’s a trend in drama at the moment to make the characters accessible: ‘What’s their backstory?’ What’s wonderful about Tom Ripley is that you have no idea.’’’

In fact, we do know a few things from the 1955 novel: for instance, that Ripley’s parents drowned in Boston Harbour and that he was raised by an aunt. But when Ripley describes his background to Herbert Greenleaf he feels uneasy, Highsmith writes, “the way he might have felt if he had been lying, yet it had been practically the only thing he had said that was true”.

And what about his sexuality? In the novel Ripley describes homosexuals as “perverts”. He tells Dickie that he’s not “queer”, and jokes that, since he can’t make up his mind whether he likes men or women, he’s thinking of giving up both. “As a matter of fact, there was a lot of truth in it,” Highsmith writes in The Talented Mr Ripley. “As people went, he was one of the most innocent and clean-minded he had ever known.”

The casting of a gay actor in the new series adds another level of ambiguity. “If Tom Ripley was in a gay bar, I’m not sure that he would fit in there,” Scott told Interview. “Nor do I think he’s a straight character. I think he’s a queer character, in the sense that he’s very ‘other’.”

So fully did Highsmith imagine Ripley that at times he was almost real to her. When an award certificate she had been given for The Talented Mr Ripley became mildewed, she took it out of its frame, cleaned it and scribbled “Mr Ripley and” before her name; he deserved the honour as much as her, she said. She sometimes signed letters “Pat H, alias Ripley” and in a copy of Ripley Under Ground given to a friend, she added the inscription “For Charles with love … from Tom (Pat)”.

While researching Highsmith’s biography, I discovered that in many ways Ripley was the author’s alter ego. Like him, she was a mass of contradictions: a gay woman who could be misogynistic; an individual who held extreme and at times highly offensive views, but who could be a kind and loyal friend; a figure who had many identities. “With every person she knew, she was always a different Pat,” one of her friends told me. “That’s why it is so difficult to define her character. She had many facets, many different projections.”

Ripley is the ultimate disrupter: a man who reinvents himself with the ease of a quick change of clothes; a possible psychopath who has a taste for the finer things in life; an outsider determined to forge a better future for himself; a ruthless killer who cries at Keats’s grave.

He is that very current figure: the consummate self-reinventor, a modern-day everyman who will do whatever it takes to survive. And we, as readers, and soon as viewers again, are encouraged to cheer him along.'

#Andrew Scott #Ripley #Netflix #Patricia Highsmith #Ben Whishaw #Steven Zaillian #Matt Damon #Alain Delon #John Malkovich #Dennis Hopper #The Talented Mr Ripley #Jude Law #Anthony Minghella

[voxtism]

instead of doing my summer homework, which is reading the bible (a hell I have brought upon myself by choosing it for my assignment that was to read a capital-L Literature book and also a regular ass book and I picked the Bible for BOTH so I wouldnt have to embarrass myself with a regular book choice.) anyway instead of doing THAT I am going to rewatch the sonic movies bc I have autism :3

[honeyhotteoks]

hi! a bit of a weird question, i hope you don't mind! i saw in a different ask that you didn't always write for kpop or things regarding real people - how was that shift for you? i'm only just now starting to write for kpop but i feel weirdly. shamed or embarrassed to openly slap that label on, say, an anime blog or something, but at the same time i also feel like i should not care? weird cross roads! i am cringe but free(? lol)

this is such a great question and not weird at all! to be honest with you..... i totally used to be one of those people who rolled my eyes at kpop. i feel shitty about that now because honestly.... why in the world should any hobby or thing that brings people joy be shamed - but i won't lie. i used to be a bit of a stuffy academic, reading only capital "L" literature and listening to only "meaningful" music and watching arthouse films but honestly none of that shit made me that happy, it just made me feel self important.

i would read and write fanfic completely privately, and i had packed away a lot of shame about even that. so you can imagine how shifting into kpop was a weird change for me. i had a friend in the kpop space for months that i just didn't tell about aurora until finally i was like "haha by the way..........." and being honest about that was a huge shift. i made so many other friends after that, and i'm glad i was just 100% myself and honest for that one second.

i explain all of this to say, i completely get the feelings of internalized shame and embarrassment. for decades we've been watching content making fun of women and young girls who get excited over boy bands or fandom experience, and there's no way that type of internalized misogyny doesn't seep into your mind. i don't know if you identify as a woman, i'm just speaking from my own experience here, but i think maybe you can see what i mean regardless.

at the end of the day..... the way i decided to stop caring was to make friends in the space that brought me joy. i talk about kpop in "real life" but not as much, and that feels like a good safe middle for me personally. when people side eye the hobby or say something out of pocket, my reply is typically "i just don't believe in yucking other peoples yums". it's a quick way to push a bit of that shame back on the person. what are they judging for? they should probably take a look in the mirror and stop commenting on other people's lives.

hopefully this helps, but at the end of the day, live your life, no one else is going to live it for you. if other people don't vibe with your choices, that's really on them.

#answered anon

[wooahaes]

lonely hearts club [preview]

pairing: non-idol!wonwoo x chubby!fem!reader

word count: 0.6k~

warnings: n/a

daisy’s notes: have a preview for an upcoming project that will be posted as a multi-part fic. if you’re reading this before the masterlist gets posted--it’ll be up shortly.

Wonwoo had a problem.

See... it wasn’t something he could easily handle. Either he could not act on his feelings and let graduation separate him from someone he’d been crushing on pretty hard for a while (years of classes together did that to him--meaning this wasn’t simple in the slightest), or he could potentially make a fool of himself and step out of his shell for once. It wasn’t that he hadn’t dated before, because he had. He’d dated two girls over the past four years, both relationships ending within a few months. Despite the offers from his friends to set him up, Wonwoo knew who he harbored feelings for. He knew that they had been built up from conversations in his classes, all interactions making him realize just how he felt about the pretty girl who sat across from him in one of the final literature classes he’d be taking at this school. The one who he could get lost staring at sometimes, just studying the pretty way her eyes lit up when she spoke. Her friend was more outspoken than she was (Jiyoung, he knew--she’d been partnered with him and Minghao for a presentation maybe a year ago and they’d had a fun discussion about color symbolism that she took charge in), sure, but Wonwoo wasn’t too attached to that. He wanted someone he could connect with, and the soft woman who he’d fallen for after so many discussions about books that went deeper than he thought they’d be was... close to that, if not it.

Wonwoo didn’t believe in soulmates. He didn’t believe in love at first sight. He believed he could easily fall in love, though, if he could just take that first step. But he never did. Whether you called it cowardice or caution, there was a part of him that would get choked up every time he thought about what he could invite someone to do. Sometimes it’d also be the pretty sunflower dress that made his heart race because it was cute and watching his crush wear something so pretty only made her more radiant in his eyes. Minghao would roll his eyes and tell him to just go and come up with some sort of greeting. Wonwoo preferred to figure out a different way to build up his confidence in approaching someone who he’d already started falling for.

That brought him to one single Twitter account: lonelyhartsclub.

The thing is, Wonwoo knew how he felt. He knew it was something akin to love, even though it wasn’t capital-L Love yet. But he was pining hard enough for it to hurt, and he could only go to Mingyu or Minghao or Soonyoung so many times and hear the same-old “talk to her” pep talk. “Lonely Hearts Club” was an account for people like him who were pining hard. Whoever moderated it gave people a place to speak their dues, and eventually they were given a chance to have their feelings anonymously posted with no names attached whatsoever.

He’d opened the DM ten minutes ago and was just staring at the little blinking line, deciding on how to begin this. Going in and immediately venting his feelings felt wrong. Whoever was behind this account, they were a person, too. It felt weird to just... go in blazing hot and confess everything he felt toward someone he’d never spoken to outside of class. The group chat was alight with talk of plans for next Saturday, something about dinner, and all Wonwoo could focus on was what he needed to say first.

So he took a deep breath, and went for something simple.

jeonwonwoo to lonelyhartsclub: hello?

#wooahaes.fic #seventeen imagine #seventeen x reader #seventeen x you #svt x reader #svt imagine #svt x you #wonwoo x reader #wonwoo x y/n #jeon wonwoo x reader #jeon wonwoo x you #wooahaes.lhc