chromaticjester

[chromaticjester]

Just occurred to me that some poor souls out there might not know that the Polish translation of 1984 translates Big Brother not as Starszy Brat (big as in older), or for that matter Duży Brat (big as in big) but as Wielki Brat which I could only describe as Great Brother.

That's on top of watching being translated to patrzy, closer to looks. Great Brother Looks, lovingly shortened to Gr8 Bro Looks sounds like a clothing stored aimed exclusively at frat members and business students on off hours.

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Timothy G. Jones - The Canniness of the Gothic

No context fragment of my reading for class

The phrase 'These are valid re-readings, but happen to coincide with the rising popularity of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles (1976-2003)' absolutely fucking kills e

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Oh my god. Vampire Sam(uel) really made the vampire version of Waiting for Godot. Fucking. Amazing.

[chromaticjester]

Bad childrearing adventures in literary comparison part two: post apocalyptic boogaloo

This week we've got Cormac Mccarthy's The Road (2006) and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884). While both are for once tied when it comes to number of murders on page, they've got one thing in common I really did not expect: neither of this men can write a child's experience of trauma to save his life. Yes, Twain does acknowledge that Finn's treatment by his father is very fucked up, making his death the happy reveal at the end of the book, but, Mark, my dude, for a book about realistic childhood experiences that sure is a lot of nothing that child feels when it comes to a lot of abuse... is what I thought, right until I reached for Cormac. Turns out, I am willing to accept a lot of narrator unreliability in the form of child's own writings and machismo within it, when the point of comparison is that goddamn disaster. Oh, yes, papa, I too am scared of travelling this post apocalyptic wasteland, but I at least have more than one emotion and two dialogue lines to express it. Sir, Dickens called and asked for his angelic children.

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Straight up lost it

And by it well, let's say, the couch

[chromaticjester]

For some unholy fucking reason this week I finished both Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (never read it properly as a kid, sue me) and Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. Really fun in a way to contrast the shifting views on childhood/adolescence over the years but man, if you had me guessing which of those would contain more scenes of gruesome murder I would have been very wrong

[chromaticjester]

Weird Book Recommendation Time - Confessions of the Mask by Yukio Mishima

So, we all like older queer lit, right? Right. Well, this might not be that old (1949) but what it lacks in age it more than makes up in how much it had me slow blinking at the page in disbelief. We've got all the hot standars, coming of age, autobiography, development of sexuality, kink and even catholic guilt, all set in WWII Japan. It's juicy. It's good. It's well translated.

...just don't google the author's name nor the fact he died trying to stage a far right nationalist coup.

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I hate the way worship of literary high cannon literature makes it impossible to be sure you are hating the book right. Case in point:

Fact 1 The majority of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is overdramatic, cliche and looks like it was written by an edgy teenager who can't recognise women as people rather than objects of weird lust

Fact 2 Joyce was in his twenties when writing this book and although he published it later, the main editing was done by cutting down on the preexisting manuscript

Everything inside me whispers that 2+2=4 and therefor maybe this is not the bestest and most profound of books out there and, while still having its merit, deserves to be recognised as immature in style and just kinda tiring. And I would love to say that, if not for the constant screaming of the ghost of Sam, my Modernism professor, who would delight in telling me this was in fact all Done on Purpose and Already Planned

[chromaticjester]

Finished up Song of Achilles, love when reading a book you can just tell the writer has academic background in the subject and is not afraid to use it

Like, Yes, this was a perfectly lovely retelling of the Iliad from Patroclus's POV and a pretty layering of phatum, prophecy, futility of resistance and hubris in style of a traditional tragic play, but surely there is no way to enjoy all that without side tangents on period-typical architecture, rites and linguistics

Victor Hugo would be proud

[chromaticjester]

Quick personal update, AO3 writer style.

Woke up from my coma - no brain damage!

Kudos to my partner who visited me everyday of the week I was asleep and does not hold me going fully delusion violence while he called ambulance on me with meningitis against them

Get your shots kids, no one needs this bullshit

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In an airport, and I have committed. A mistake.

There are only 30 pages left in my book. Boarding is in half an hour. Im gonna finish this fucking book before the plane starts. I have nothing to read beyond the second, secret book

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Found this fucker in my local bookshop, let's go gays

[chromaticjester]

okay so having finished Mary Poppins i have thoughts. If we skip the soundtrack and the cheerfulness, this is a psychodelic horror ending with possible apocalypse. Hear me out

- you have a trad british family, high ranking father in a royal bank, suffragette leader mother and two terrifyingly well-trained kids. their nanny is a bit of a dick, loses the kids in the park, and leaves the post

- the kids write an ad for a new nanny which a father tears to shreds. instead he publishes his own ad, to which a crowd of women comes in a response

- the demon arrives. she summons the hurricane to banish the other women, and tricks the father into signing a contract with her

- she shows her magic at first to children only, enthralling them, before kidnapping them to another dimension pied piper style, on the way there introducing her minion/lover/familiar?? the musical man with a thousand jobs

-the children returned from the magical dimension mind controlled, she then gaslights them that it never happened. when they get upset she forcefully puts them to sleep

-by the morning, the mother (from this moment on she never again shows personality or political ambition, instead channeling the demon's agenda) and all the servants are mind controlled by the demon's spell

- demon takes kids out on errands, but instead heads over to the house of her trapped, cursed victim, who cannot leave the house and instead is forced into feats of unstoppable, manic laughter. the children, mind-controlled, help her and the familiar torment him

- on their return home father confronts demon, unsuccesfully, she refuses to leave and instead manipulates him into taking the kids, her minions, along with him to the bank

- before they go there, she gives them instructions (weird, gothic catholic imagery here in the context of st paul)

- at the bank the children act as instructed, go against the father, cause a massive financial crisis on national scale, said to tank the stock worse than the boston tea party did, after father gets angry they run away

- familiar finds the children. he takes them on the rooftops where demon finds them, there is a hellish sequence as they watch london on fire and she manipulates the smoke and ash of air polution, mind-controlling the army of chimney-sweeps that the familiar has been infiltrating

- the army, including the children, invades the father's house. they almost destroy everything and he barely manages to stop his kids from leaving with them. he gets summoned to the bank

- at the bank he is about to get fired when the demon's insanity reveals itself in him. he falls mad, laughing madly and infects the chairman with the laughing-man's curse from earlier. the man is later revealed to have died

-father returns home, feared to have committed suicide on the way back but ultimately succumbing to the insanity. he is revealed to be permanently lost in the demon's scheme and gets reappointed in control of the now demonic bank. the demon reveals that she owns the local police and was the one to orchestrate the first nanny's leaving. she leaves, chaos succesfully sawed

[chromaticjester]

As i Lay Dying by William Faulkner is a very gloomy and serious book TM, riiight until the moment you realise that if anyone else wrote it it would be slapstick. Not saying good, or tasteful slapstick mind you, but:

Family of 6 carrying a heavy object that progressivelly smells worse (sorry Addie) on an extended adventure?

Travelling difficulties and shenanigans?

A depressive sitcoms set of characters including a stingy conman dad, wholesome son who suffers, angry son who suffers and a child that should not be left alone with most of these people?

Shitty comedy movies have been done on less

[chromaticjester]

fuck it. post gustave doré octopus blowjob

[chromaticjester]

Okay, so there has been a lot this episode, but the most important:

Celia almost definitely confirmed as timeline hopper?!

Hilltop Centre - now, I could be wrong here, but one of the people forwarding the e-mail at the begining of the statement was named Ray. Like Raymon Fielding, who ran original Hilltop Orphanage. Meaning we've got a link

Heavyset man in black who set supernatural things on fire - connection with Gerry, Abelard and Gertrude! Or alternatively the desolation?

E-mail from Jon

Attempted brutal pipe murder - not just that, but Klaus disappeared before, meaning his name and accent might be a false one. We do not know who that is