#BLEAK VISTAE

[onlyhurtforaminute]

TYRANNY-PASSING THROUGH THE AGUE

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hii, I was wondering if you had any recs of a writer/author John au. I've found some of author Sherlock, but none of John except his blogging that he does normally. if you don't do recs anymore or don't feel like answering feel free to ignore and have a lovely day! <3

Hi Nonny!

Oh I'm still doing weekly lists, I just don't get many asks for them anymore so I feel like y'all don't like them anymore LOL. BUT!! Your ask is a fantastic excuse to use your ask as a list prompt since I don't have one ready for today!! I actually find the opposite, that there seem to be more "writer John" fics more than the other way around, especially as I've been going through my lists.

That said, I've done a tag search for "writer" and "author" on my offline lists, and here's what I got! Hope you enjoy and as usual, if anyone has any fics that they would like to suggest, please add them below!!

WRITER / AUTHOR JOHN

BOOKMARKS

A Gossamer Dream by CarmillaCarmine (E, 15,985 w., 4 Ch. || Writer/Teacher AU || First Meetings, Friends to Lovers, Writer John / Teacher Sherlock, Fluff, London, Holding Hands, Online Friendship / Romance, Phone Sex, Anal Sex, Happy Ending, Alternating POV, Scottish John, Online Relationship, Internalized Homophobia, Hand Holding, Forehead Touching, First Kiss/Time, Texting/Sexting, Rimming, Toplock, Sherlock Speaks French) – Sherlock had never realised one could care so much about someone they'd never met in person. Now he is about to meet the friend with whom he's been chatting online for months and his anticipation is reaching a crescendo. Part 19 of Johnlock Smut (with Feels)

Being John Watson-ish by elwinglyre (E, 69,902 w., 17 Ch. || Bodysnatcher AU || Author John, Cranky Sherlock, Angst, Sexual Tension, First Kiss / Time, Falling in Love, BAMF John, Past Soldier John, Feelings, Inside Someone’s Brain, Shy Sherlock, Sherlock Loves John, POV Sherlock, Switchlock, Slow Burn, Internal Dialogue, Mental Turmoil) – When consulting detective Sherlock Holmes steps on one toe too many at a crime scene, he's consigned to a desk job in an archaic office on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the New Scotland Yard. It’s in this bleak office that Sherlock discovers a portal into the mind of renowned author John Watson. Grander than his mind palace, this new wonderland affords Sherlock new vistas of experimentation. To learn more about the mystery behind the portal, Sherlock seeks out and befriends Watson. But then it all goes wrong when others find the secret portal door—including the man whose brain he visits.

MARKED FOR LATER

Exposition - An Ex Files Special by 7PercentSolution (T, 7,643 w., 12 Ch. || POV Second Person, Angst, Bereavement, Poetry / Haiku, Hallucinations, Writing as Therapy) – John's a writer. However much Sherlock derided the blog, people read what he writes. After the fall, John's writing takes a surprisingly different approach. This sets the context for a series of chapters, each one including a different poem by John. Part 4 of Ex Files

keywords: Gay, Loving, Boyfriends by lookupkate (E, 17,771 w., 17 Ch. || Doctor John AU || Alternate First Meeting, Hospitals, John Writes Smut, Sherlock Reads Smut, Fanfiction) – John starts writing gay romance while holed up in hospital. Sherlock reads the first fic on accident, and it sticks with him for days. He can't help but read more from the unknown writer. Little does he know, the writer isn't exactly unknown to him. The writer happens to be the A&E Doctor he's feuding with. Christ, can you imagine what he'll think once he finds out? 

Dead Letter Office by a_different_equation (M, 20,364 w., 15 Ch. || ‘Bartleby’ Fusion / Office Setting AU || Different First Meeting, Epistolary, John's Blog, Angst with a Happy Ending, Pre-Canon, John Watson is Sherlock's Boss, PTSD John, Military Backstory, Writer John, Drug Use, Texting) – John Watson comes home from the war, gets a new job and meets Sherlock Holmes through Mike Stamford. Same tale since 1891, except this time it’s 2008, John is Sherlock’s boss, and they work together at the Dead Letter Office in London. It's not a love story, until it finally is.

The Reawakening of John Watson by  221b_careful_what_you_wish_for (E, 20,463 w., 14 Ch. || Historical 1800s American/Victorian AU || Artist Sherlock, Writer John, Angst with Happy Ending, Bisexual John, Period Typical Homophobia, Sensuality, Experienced Sherlock, Pining, Past Drug Use, Slow Burn, Love Confessions, Flirty Sherlock, Frottage, Outdoor Sex, Trust Issues, Minor Character Death, Sexual Tension, Colorado / London, Rimming, Anal Sex, Blow Jobs,  POV John) – Trying to escape his troubled past in England, John Watson has started a new life in the American West. When he meets the handsome artist Sherlock Holmes, a smoldering attraction is sparked, complicating his quiet, carefully guarded existence. Maybe taking a risk with Sherlock is exactly what John needs to feel alive again...

The Key to Castles in the Air by LadyKailitha (T, 34,365 w., 21 Ch. || Author AU || Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Bratty Sherlock, Damaged Sherlock, Romance, Shop Clerk/Writer John) – John is a clerk (and writing a book on the side) at a bookshop run by Mrs Hudson. The one downside to this perfect job is Sherlock Darling, Mrs Hudson's friend who loves to rile John up. About everything. All that changes when they are forced to spend a week together in the country when bad weather hits. Sherlock's got secrets. What will John do once he finds them out?

There I Saw You, Night by esplanade (T, 54,073 w., 12 Ch. || Writer AU || Poet Sherlock, Writer John, True Love, Sherlock's A Mess, Conversations, John's Family) – "It wasn't as if he had stopped writing entirely. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was just that most of what he wrote ended up thrown into the fireplace at home. What was the sense in keeping something that was sub-par?"

This Is Your Song by agirlsname (E, 79,990 w., 19 Ch. || Moulin Rouge Fusion || Prostitute Sherlock, Poet John, Acting, Singing, Dancing, Writing, Poetry, Musical, Song Fic, Heavy Angst, Unreliable Narrator, Sherlock is French, Love at First Sight, UST, First Kiss/Time, Frottage, Coming in Pants, Anal Sex, Switchlock, Clothed Sex, Crossdressing, Secret Relationship, Forbidden Love, Jealousy, Terminal Illnesses, Grief/Mourning, Breakup/Makeup Sex, Past Drug Use, Attempted Rape, Canon-Typical Violence)– When John Watson is invalided home from the army in 1895, he moves to Paris to rediscover his writing and find a new meaning in life. His old friend Stamford invites him into a group of artist friends, and suddenly John finds himself auditioning to write a show for the famous brothel across the street. There, he meets the most beautiful man he’s ever seen - Sherlock, the star of the Moulin Rouge. But Sherlock is already promised to the investor of the show, the rich Duke Moriarty.

A Case of Identity – The Musical by shamelessmash (E, 83,147 w., 15 Ch. || 1950′s Hollywood AU || Musical, Case Fic, Undercover as an Actor, Dancing, Happy Ending, Kidnapping, Drugs, Fluff and Angst, Humour, Writer/Director John, Slow Burn / Romance) – A mysterious death on set causes chaos in Stamford productions latest movie. With the premiere date left unchanged, they must find a new lead actor and reshoot an entire movie in two months. Sherlock Holmes goes undercover as a lead actor in a Musical: a juggling act to solve a murder while singing, dancing and charming his way through 1950s Hollywood. The last thing he expected was to fall in love with the screenwriter along the way. Or as I like to call it: the case where Sherlock finally gets to dance.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Children of the Revolution by BadNewsForBrainWork (E, 7,655+ w., 4/? Ch. || WiP || Moulin Rouge AU || Prostitution, BDSM, Multiple Pairings) –  John is an English writer travelling to the small village of Montmartre in Paris, France is hopes of taking part in the Bohemian Revolution. As soon as he arrives, he gets swept up by the revolutionaries and taken to the Moulin Rouge where he meets Sherlock Holmes. He quickly finds himself caught in a dangerous love triangle that could risk his entire career and maybe even his life.

Wood and Wicker by HardlyFair (M, 14,114+ w., 3/8 Ch. || WW2 Historical AU / Hot Fuzz AU || BAMF John, Case Fic, Secret Societies, Secrets, Romance, Humour, Action, Writer John, Murder Mystery) – 1946. Sandford, England. Following the second World War, Sherlock Holmes accepts an unwanted case far in the English countryside to investigate a string of grisly deaths. Problems arise when it becomes clear that no one thinks anyone has been murdered at all, that nothing outside a series of unfortunate accidents has transpired, and that nothing untoward is afoot in Sandford -- no one, save for a small-time columnist from the local newspaper.

Christmas in Honeycutt by helloliriels (T, 27,950+ w., 14/23 Ch. || WIP || Christmas in Connecticut AU / WWII AU || Kidnapping, Spies / Secret Agents, Codes & Ciphers, Past Relationships, Developing Relationship, Fake Marriage, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending) – John's publisher asks if his family could entertain a war hero at their idyllic estate in Somerset for Christmas. Only ... John doesn't have a wife ... or a daughter. Or an estate. He has a bedsit. In London. And some wounds of his own to recover from ... but he can't tell his publisher that or he'll get fired … What's a writer to do? Cracking Codes. Super Spies. Sherlock in Disguise. A wild Christmas romance set in the countryside! Just what the doctor ordered! Part 6 of the Liriels Chaptered Fics series

Novel by lifeonmars (M, 50,264+ w., 10/? Ch. || WiP || Author AU || Fairy Tales / Red Riding Hood Elements, Fantasy, Writer’s Block, Falling in Love, Peter Pan References, Slow Burn, Romance, Writer John, Editor Sherlock) – John Watson has writer's block. Sherlock Holmes is the world's best consulting editor. Whether John can write a book is another story entirely.

How Novel Series by StarlightAndFireflies (T, 66,472+ w. across 11 Stories || Series WiP || Writer John / Unilock AU || Book Signing, Flirting, Dating, Shy  Sherlock, Romance, Getting to Know Each Other) – AU in which John is an author, and Sherlock is a fan who comes to his book signing.

[faerymin]

Sense and Sensibility: Prologue

Synopsis: "Stepfather you had known from the stories, the college friend who’d invited you there in another city: a strained scenario no matter which way you’d want to twist it." Chronicles of the scorching summer of 2006, when you find yourself adrift in Santa Barbara, away from the bleak prairies of Oregon and left to the mercies of your college friend's enigmatic stepfather.

Pairing: Kim Seokjin x Reader (ft. Kim Taehyung)

Tags: Angst and Feels, Drama & Romance, Sexual Tension, Explicit Sexual Content, Age Difference, DILF Kim Seokjin, Mutual Pining, Jin is a Menace, Cheating, Extramarital Affairs, S&M, Light BDSM, Alternate Universe - College/University, Kim Seokjin Has a Big Dick, Tragic Past, Daddy Kink, Size Kink, Moral Dilemmas, (Eventual) Shameless Smut, Power Imbalance

Word Count: 3.5k

Author’s Note: Previously posted on my now deactivated account @bambitae, and cross-posted on AO3.

━━━

“Well then.” The curt words, the bored sigh that came beforehand, the attitude.

You’d never heard someone use “well then” to say goodbye before. That’s what he’d told you on the day you met him, as he placed the one dented suitcase you’d brought before Maya’s bedroom door; a long, loud step back, bare foot slapping against the terracotta parquet. Then he disappeared down the high-ceiling hall, behind a potted palm, lustrous floor spidery with his own lanky, distorted shadow.

It is the first thing you remember about him, and you can still hear it today, “well then,” just the thought of it transporting you back to Santa Barbara, last summer, stepping out of the train to see him before the station, tan pillars rowed with arches and a flat, clay roof, colossal palm trees and the unclouded sky; and he, a stranger, with his billowy blue shirt, wide-open collar, opaque blazer limp on his arm, skin everywhere. Suddenly he’s shaking your hand, taking your suitcase, telling you Maya is staying a few days longer in Los Angeles with her aunt.

It may have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up sleeves, aviator sunglasses gliding down his nose as he looked at a passing salaryman, palm up for a greeting.

The occurrence was a startling and gnarly one, and most of the ride to Riviera you remember by being terribly stiff and silent, perplexed whether you looked to the cigarette hung from his mouth or the soaring hillside through the window—the vistas of white stucco walls nestled in the mountains becoming closer and more tangible the farther you climbed up the twisty roads.

Stepfather you had known from the stories, the college friend who’d invited you there in another city: a strained scenario no matter which way you’d want to twist it.

You were a bit uncomfortable, after the diatribes you’d heard, having to do with his conceit and bestial cruelty toward Maya, and you were mad at her too for being too lazy to ring you and set you to arrive a few days after. You wondered, as the breeze mussed your hair and you squirmed on the burning seat, if you would even withstand those six long weeks you had promised her.

It was impossible in the first days you didn’t scorn and fear the stepfather a little bit, even as he drifted in and out of the house like a shadow, unobtrusive, remote from it for most of the day. Images conjured by Maya’s tales came alive every time you were in the same room as him, the first of many a tableau of him at the breakfast table: robed in velour, morning paper in hand, whipping you with a stare over the rim of his spectacles as soon as you stepped over the kitchen threshold.

Everything was similar to how you’d imagined it, the hostile air and white mug from Saks he began using after smashing his favorite in an argument they had, but instead of the silvery codger in your fantasies, senile and swivel-eyed, he was a man who couldn’t have been past thirty, slight in the face and alabaster skin stretched taut over his jaw and clavicle. Only at glimpses did it catch the golden Californian tan: a bit on his cheeks and forehead, over his jutting metacarpals and lithe fingers, on one of them a pale hoop you sometimes saw when his wedding ring slipped.

Looking back at that morning, the first breakfast you ate at his house and by far the most miserable, the worries plaguing you were vague and paranoid ones, spiraling like tentacles into the abysmal nothing. You remember eyeing the coffee he’d brewed to you, too afraid to ask where they kept sugar, and feeling like you’d made a terrible mistake when the jam slipped off your toast and made an ugly, crimson splotch on the china. When he’d apologized for not having a proper breakfast ready, “I don’t eat it myself, you see,” impersonal and hidden behind the text-condensed pages of The Wall Street Journal, your reassurance came much too quick and petrified, bubbling out of your mouth through a slew of unchewed bread.

Maya had made him out to be a brute, a tetchy old man; it was wise for you to be wary. For the whole meal, you thought of the broken mug, pitying Maya for having to call such a man her father.

Your spoon kept clanking against the plate. He put his mug in the exact same spot each time. Your legs touched once before he stood up and put his mug in the sink. Before he’d left for work, he told you smoking wasn’t allowed in the house, and he said it absently, looking at his watch, one foot already out the door.

Memories of the first time being alone in the hacienda are now murky, muddled with the sludge and sloth of forthcoming events, but the awe you felt exploring remains fresh. It was hard to believe you were in California, with the wood beams for a ceiling, endless archways for doors, the lord-like coastal view from the living room window.

Without having anything better to do, you meandered for most of the day, stopping to admire every painting hung on the white walls until an old Baroque piece beside the garden archway startled you. It was a Diego Velázquez, the portrait of little prince Baltasar on a horseback, and you knew selling your kidney wouldn’t have made you nearly enough to buy it.

“It’s a fake,” he had told you one morning, later, as he watched you gape at it from the patio. “But a good one. Even the slightest detail on the clouds are identical.”

“Have you ever seen the real one up close?” you asked as you studied the details on the plump horse, the billowing military sash wrapped around the boy’s chest.

“I have.” He was stubbing a cigarette, sinking into the embroidered pillows of the velvet-upholstered sofa. “It’s displayed in Prado.”

But you had already known that.

As it happened, he’d caught you on the patio, on the same sofa, when he came home that first day, curled up with a book you had stolen from his study, a cigarette in his mouth and tie so loose it bent clumsily to the side. He was much too sluggish for your apologetic fervor to faze him. “It’s alright,” he said and sat across from you in a wicker chair, dumping his blazer over the arm. “You must be bored.”

It may have even started then, with the way he lit his cigarette: good, bared forearms on his spread knees; eyebrows rumpled and smoke curling out his mouth.

“Have you called Maria?” he said after a time, and looked at you over the eyebrow.

“No,” you were stuttering, not having expected he would talk to you, “my phone has no credit.”

He dug into his pocket and fished out a cellphone, typing away on it as he blew smoke to the side. Afternoon sun streamed directly into his face, in such a strong light most people looked washed out, but his surly, angular features lit up with the warmth of near sun-down until it was a shock to look at him. He had leaned into the shadow of hacienda’s roof before you finished admiring him, eyes squinted as he handed you the phone with Maya’s contact on it.

“I’m sure you have a few things to talk about,” he’d told you and stubbed out his cigarette, and then he told you to ask if you ever needed the phone and, if he wasn’t there, to take the landline one in the hall, and with that he went into the house, not to be seen again until dinner. Even through the haze you can recall his curt murmur as he passed the prince Baltasar, “Well then.”

Prior to the first weekend in Riviera, the pictures arranged in your mind seem disjointed and hazy, but it is on that first Sunday when they come into razor sharp focus and he morphs from a discreet, eldritch figure floating through the hallways into a creature of flesh and blood, a real person with a beating heart. You too appear as somewhat of a stranger in these memories: gauche and oddly elusive because of all the anguish of being stranded in a foreign state and the chilling stories Maya had bashed into your head for the past year. It had taken you days to look him in the eye and speak without odd, wary pauses; and now all those times you had ducked into a room at the sound of his footsteps only embarrass you, especially because you now realize, long after the fact, that your attempts to evade him were far from discreet.

Maya’s stepfather didn’t appear to be the monster she had led you to believe, and only after the six weeks together and the long time after you parted, which you spent scrutinizing and obsessing over him, did you realize he too must have been frightened and bewildered, waiting for you to make the first move with hands folded on his lap, politely as a maiden aunt. You were an intruder in his house, a strange girl who seemingly had her mouth sewn and fell into long spells of staring directly at him. You were every bit of an anomaly to him as he was to you; an alien who was all of a sudden curling up on his patio and leaving breadcrumbs on his table in the mornings; a complete disruption. And still he had made every effort to host you until Maya came, despite not wielding any responsibility towards you.

After that first morning, the refrigerator had become plump with breakfast options and a warm pastry awaited you by the bread box after his early cigarette trips to the store, and it was often he recommended books, asked if you needed to use his phone, or otherwise apologized for Maya’s absence—something even she failed to do once you managed to get a hold of her. But all this he did with such a sour face, spoke in such an enervated monotone, that you were certain he only saw a huge bother in you. It was that first Saturday when this fear began to gradually dispel.

You had never realized, of course, that the hacienda would not be completely desolate on the weekends. You remember now, looking back, how on that first Saturday morning he was up and writing letters, not in his usual uniform but a pair of swimming trunks and a robe coming undone at the waist, and when you got downstairs, he was nearly finished and placing them into thick, cream-colored envelopes, a cigarette hanging at the corner of his mouth.

He swiftly plucked it upon noticing you in the doorway. “Don’t mind me,” he said; “this place should air out fine in a minute with all the windows this room has. Not that you should smoke inside just because you saw me doing it. The coffee and the hot dishes are on the sideboard, feel free to help yourself.” You said something about not minding the smoke, how all right with all of it you were, but he did not listen, he was looking down at a letter, frowning at something.

He didn’t seem to notice you, in fact, even when you sat across from him at the table, a little overawed at the brilliance of the breakfast presented to you: dishes of poached eggs, of bacon, and another of sausages and fried bread. There was tea in a grand porcelain tureen, and coffee, piping hot, in a similarly wonderful urn with two huntsmen in acryl, chasing after a deer. A cluster of grapes dangled from the dessert stand, surrounded by a ridiculous diversity of fruits—guavas and figs and pomegranate slices—but the tower paled in comparison to the one beside it, adorned from top to bottom with various cakes. It didn’t seem possible that he could prepare all of this by himself, and his disregard for the feast was perplexing. From the entire table he had taken only a cup of coffee for himself. And, it seemed, some grapes. The twigs lay barren on the saucer by his hand.

“Is today a celebration of some kind?” you said, unmoving at first, wary of bad manners. You didn’t know how hungry you were before you sat down.

But, “No,” he replied simply, unsheathing his pen. “It’s just a Saturday.”

It was strange to you to think that Maya, who back in Portland shared a dorm with you and bathed in communal showers, should sit down in her home on the hillside of American Riviera to a breakfast like this one, day after day, for her whole life probably, and find nothing absurd about it, nothing wasteful. You couldn’t fathom why she would enroll into a public university at all when she was accustomed to such banquets, but you now understood why she sometimes scrunched her nose at supermarkets and people dressed in secondhand, and were a little bit flurried.

You noticed he poured himself more coffee. You took a slice of ham. And you were afraid to wonder what would happen to all the rest, all that meat and fruits and the chocolate gateau, and the tea once it went cold. There were no menials in the house, no one to wait for the gift of breakfast other than the dustbins.

“Why even try to argue with a woman of such a feeble mind,” he said suddenly after a time, during which he wrote furiously, the paper all a sharp, messy hand. He set down his reading glasses, not looking you in the eye. He waited for you to raise your head. “It seems Maria is coming next Sunday, after all. She banged up her phone and lost her train ticket. Her aunt will drive her back here, and she’s not free until the weekend.”

The announcement startled you. “On Sunday?”

“If Maria’s aunt is to be trusted—and she’s not. I don’t understand why everything has to become so complicated.” He got up from his chair and lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry about this, I really am. You’ll have to make do for another week even though it’s uncomfortable.”

“It’s all right,” you said, sounding quite small. Suddenly your appetite was lost.

“I mean this very seriously.” He was looking out the window, into the courtyard and pool, at the indolent rose bushes swaying slightly in the wind. His robe was open now as he leaned on the windowsill. “She’s being extremely irresponsible, I can’t begin to imagine why she left you here all alone.”

“It’s all right,” you repeated. “Did she leave some sort of message for me maybe?”

He shook his head, a cigarette upon his lips. “If she did, her aunt omitted it.”

Neither of you said anything for a moment.

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Pardon?” Finally, you put down the heavy silverware.

“Are you going to wait for her until she comes?”

The question boggled you. Did he want you out of the house? But it would be a long way back to Oregon, and you had barely caught a glimpse of California. “If I’m not a burden on you,” you said, spineless.

He said nothing before coming to the table to put out his cigarette, the robe fluttering behind him. “Understood.” He took his papers, the conversation having seemingly left him sour. “Enjoy your meal.” Then he strode out into the hall, leaving you in the thick silence of the kitchen, alone among the plates of meat and dessert stands.

You tried not to be too curious, and after abandoning breakfast amused yourself with plans of taking a long walk to the East Beach, or reading, or even having a drink in West Mesa, on the terrace of a cafe with a good look at the ocean. It wasn’t until you were coming up to the bedroom to get dressed, sometime before noon, that you glanced through the window and realized he hadn’t left for work still.

Instead he lounged in the courtyard, along the edge of the pool, with his eyes closed and his back turned to you, and it startled you, what broad shoulders he had, the bare and wet skin, the slight quiver of muscles as he rested on both elbows, foot gently caressing the pool-water. For a moment he held it there, on the surface, unmoving, only to let it fall limp with a splash. Hair was sticking to his face; his swimming trunks clinging to the skin. Beside him lay his robe and his cigarette packet, as well as an empty glass, all scattered, and he seemed to care very little about the mess, instead tranquil, dreaming, slowly swaying backward as he soaked in the sun. He was a different person to the man writing letters in the morning.

For the first time it had struck you how handsome he was, and although you may have known this before, you were too afraid to think it. It would have been far more noticeable had his posture been less stiff or his gaze, behind the glasses, less shrewd. He looked almost young now as he stretched across the cantilever deck, younger than he already was, lingering for another moment before he dove into the water. There was a splash, a ripple. It all seemed very beautiful to you, how it danced and glittered in the sunlight.

You caught yourself by the window, peering at him from behind the curtains, and were promptly humiliated. You drew the curtains, the skin on your neck hot, and the back of your ears, and you didn’t know what to do with your hands or your feet or your reflection in the wardrobe mirror, prancing around half-undressed and with a wire poking out of your brassiere. You thought about how he could’ve looked up and caught you: the unwelcome guest, spying on him in nothing but her underwear. And what shabby underwear it was! You unhooked it the same moment and threw it in your suitcase, still burning.

The impression of looking battered was stuck on you even as you picked out your least worn swimsuit and a dress to go with it, which prior to coming here seemed rather Californian to you. Now it looked childish, too flowy, like a little girl’s dress. What did it matter if you looked silly? You didn’t know but you feared it, and as you twirled around and picked at the threadbare stitching, you only thought of how flustering it would be for him to notice the cheapness of the material, the slightly frayed hemline with a thread sticking out from beneath. Maya would have made fun of the dress, if she were here to see it. The thought alone made you swear not to wear it around her, perhaps never wear it again at all, and instead you dressed in a shirt and shorts, both fitting loose and boyish; they made you look plain but they at least didn’t make you look stupid.

You had just been packing your beach bag when a knock came at the door; it was him, changed out of his swimming attire and a towel on his neck. “Going somewhere?” he asked after a brief gust of silence, in which you stood there, staring stupidly at his face, and it wasn’t until he had spoken that you became aware, with a rush of color to your face, that you had blundered irrevocably in thinking he had come to reproach you, had noticed your watching him. You had made a fool of yourself looking so scared.

“Yes,” you said, stammering, your words tumbling over each other. “Yes, I’m going to the beach.”

“That’s nice,” he said; and he knew, you thought, he guessed you had done something wrong and inappropriate in his house, or in the very least finally pegged you as an odd person. It was in his eyes, the gentle, perhaps slightly pitiful scrutiny. “One of my nephews phoned me earlier. He and my sister will be coming for lunch and he asked for some sort of bracelet he borrowed to Maria. I thought to ask you to look for it, but it seems like you’ll miss them.”

“Oh. Yes, of course.” You were overly relieved, overly eager. “I’ll look for it. It’s no problem.”

“You don’t have to inconvenience yourself, it was my mistake to bother you,” he said, his voice even. “Go to the beach.”

“I have the whole day, it’s really no problem.” You were already pushing the door into a close.

He put his hand on it. “It would be easier to find, I think,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a photograph, “if you knew what it looked like.”

There was a ghost of a smile on his lips, fingers grazing your as he handed it over. And you knew that, by then, it had already begun.

[allwormdiet]

Sentinel 9.5

Every thirteen year old in this story is going through hell

Dear Parian, how do you puppet cloth dolls with boxing gloves on their hands?

Nah but this is nice to see them getting along with each other, and I'm glad that Vista gets to see something cute in such a blighted fucking time.

The background levels of desperation and fear in this setting remain very strong and evocative.

Gayyyyyy

Vista like "hey I'm not young enough to actually enjoy this, but I'm old enough to act polite about it"

God that's so fucking cool

Oh man who could have possibly predicted that putting a thirteen year old in constant life-or-death situations with people dying around her could possibly result in a warped perspective on death and dying, that's so weird

Oh man, who could have possibly predicted that enlisting a thirteen year old in a quasi-military policing organization where she's legitimately got seniority over high schoolers could possibly result in feeling distanced from her own age, that's so weird

So like, is there truly nowhere else to put the team portrait gallery than right where everyone sees them every time they enter? Just put them in another hallway or wing or something, especially if you're dropping bodies.

Still a little darkly funny that Browbeat doesn't even get a portrait, guy was straight up too new to even put in front of a camera

The idea that Coil has only managed to infiltrate the PRT at all because they're letting him infiltrate the PRT is. Oh my fucking God he's so bad at this. So far every win we've seen him take against other players is because they feel bad enough to let him have it. Coil, you have got to fucking hang it up my man, the minute someone decides to actually deal with you you're cooked

(It's almost certainly gonna be Taylor, on account of that child you kidnapped and forcibly addicted to drugs)

Okay so like. Hwoo. I keep talking about the expectations being put on the Wards in this fucking story but this is a really steep one. Let this fucking mole into your midst and let him do what he does. Let a tinker, a goddamn superpowered tech specialist, hang out where your stuff is.

I know they all agree to do it but they already all agreed to fight fucking Leviathan, Vista agreed to kill a man for seconds on the clock, we're waaaaay past the point where any boundaries might still be crossed

Hey you know what, self-awareness is good, it's healthy, I wish someone would let Taylor have some but that's fine

Okay, well, at least Piggot is willing to treat these kids a little like kids. And address some of the concerns that they have. And promise that she'll find some kind of compensation for the fact that these kids are going above and fucking beyond in their role as junior heroes.

Glad Kid Win gets a... win

and while I don't love Clockblocker making fun of Piggot, I get it. She's the authority figure in their lives, she consistently plays the role of bad cop with them. That's how it goes.

Okay so Vista turned thirteen on the day that Leviathan hit Brockton Bay, which means she's been at this since she was eleven, maybe younger. This now puts her pretty firmly in the same age bracket as Alec, and that might put her at silver or bronze for youngest known trigger event depending on how old Miss Militia was at the time.

Also, the fact that Vista has thrown herself into her career as a cape, at age thirteen, as a means to not have to spend time with her parents? That's bleak. I continue to maintain that she should be allowed to commit any misdemeanor she wants to and get away with it forever

So Hookwolf almost murdered an 11-12 year old and they truly can't just commit to having a single Triumvirate member sit on his Birdcage transport the entire way along just to make sure he actually gets gone? At least until they're out of the Empire's reach, surely, like what the fuck

Do the unspoken rules not kick in on attempted murder? Do you need a corpse to make it stick?

Jesus God, Sophia, I am trying to keep an open mind about you but so far you have just been such a jerk in so many directions.

Like obviously she's not doing well but what's the alternative for her at this point

Just gotta pick up the slack left by two older, more experienced(?) teammates who had a lot of hopes and emotional bonds riding on them. And Browbeat.

Does anybody on this team like Sophia?

Weld is good people. Also I think "empathetic" is technically the correct word unless the ability to warp space like putty also comes with emotion reading.

This is sweet.

Also, yeah, cry. It's good for you.

Godddddddd fucking dammit Sophia.

This is so unreasonably cruel to do to a teammate, never mind to a kid

"Bluh bluh life is pain, the real world is all about what's hard, suffering builds character" shut the fuck up Sophia, Vista put up bigger numbers against Leviathan and doesn't have a rusty knife in place of a personality.

Also "kids" girl you have at most three years on her

Big bad Shadow Stalker can't handle being the one under the microscope

Yeah no for real, the moment she gets provoked in a way even kind of resembling the way she provokes others, she resorts to acts of physical violence. Thin-skinned hypocrite, thy name is Sophia Hess.

Guess Vista's lucky she's not taller and more gangly or else Sophia would've tried to rip her ear off.

Current Thoughts

Vista is the PRT's strongest soldier and she is out there fighting their hardest battles. She also has not reached high school yet and possibly wasn't even in middle school when she first donned the costume. This whole system is a scam.

Cool to see Weld better settling into the leadership role, at least.

And then Sophia. Sophia, Sophia, Sophia. I don't know what the Undersiders have planned for you but right now I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy. Do unto others, you little maniac.

[worldhistoryfacts]

Roger Fenton's photography of the Crimean war captured stunning landscapes, often showing soldiers’ encampments in the foreground as a contrast to the natural vistas — which usually had a bleak, lunar beauty to them — in the background:

{WHF} {Ko-Fi} {Medium}

[paperhound]

It’s been six weeks since we’ve posted anything online, not for want of appealing vistas or intriguing new arrivals (as the above image, a sunkiss’d chair of titles pertaining to coyote mythology, aims to represent). It’s just so darn easy to NOT create free content for tech corps intent on abetting a kleptocratic coup that we totally just…didn’t! Let’s call it a potent admixture of revulsion, laziness, and that bleak midwinter blunting of the creative impulse. And since our fortunes haven’t suffered for lack of an online presence (it has been a perversely busy January/February down here on our benighted stretch of Pender), we shall continue with this inactivity until the Muse once again alights on our threshold and applies the full thrust of her shoulder to our notoriously heavy door. We appreciate your patience as we extend this social media holiday, and trust that Groundhog Day, Valentines Day, Family Day and all the other Days we would once have strained to acknowledge with an attractive book and pithy caption were robustly celebrated in the offline dimension!

Xoxo, Your Hounds

[nightmarefuele]

@huntershowl //starter from the Ren.

||

The thing represents their blindness. It’s a transport shuttle with all its parts ungreased, all dead. They’re stunted to an old age by the remnant vistas of their power as though it still is what only was, at one prior time, advancement.

The shuttle’s present dwellers—like limbs of a breathing weapon—know steeper powers.

They don’t fear us.

That one, crawling into the recondite film of the Shadow, is Vermis; passerby, or patron, fingering into such ant-bitten places as to turn out the innermost of wounds. There are several corners here in the belly of the shuttle, which now glides over a wall like a colosseum’s cracked ring around an outfit of unlit craters—the preferential truth beneath any great rule. She keeps to one whilst bleeding over all the others, scrawling her vapors over the porthole whereon her neuranium exoskull hooks.

They don’t know us.

This muck their ship courts, well, it’s no wonder. Before long, however, the droid valet—whose likeness is man enough that he gives his unimportance away, overstrung in the spine where he pilots at deck’s fore, perhaps a serf or experiment but altogether useless to the Ren—takes them down from the murk of the stratos. The shuttle folds like an insect into a wet handhold. Into sight, they sink.

A shadow unspools from its crouch and becomes a monolith across two strides. It hangs over the half-droid’s back, and gazes out into the Dusk’s bleak quick.

A child’s eyes might see nothing. The night might have scooped out the world from beneath them, replaced it with something breathing and sick. But the monolith—Kylo, the body, the one they have already begun to call, simply, Ren—has witnessed such nothings as to lay the black beneath them naked.

“What is it?” Vermis wonders, materializing there, her voice like a hangnail throbbing.

And Ren, like the low, skulking crackle of dry bone, “An ocean.”

Within the void clutch, a mount, whose age could be any or none. Ren holds there, the city and life already forgotten as solidity drags underway, with his formless, glistening eye like a mouth roused to open.

Then, as their course shifts, “And this?”

Inorganic death, sprawling for miles across a shipyard. Those of oblique, hostile fingers slouched along a sandbed, perhaps the fortuitous shrine of some humanoid ship; or white, milky ovoids like shapeless spiders’ eggs, clusters under clusters of energy staring out from the side of a hill; and here—approaching—the formless dance of light from sources unseeable, steepling toward the great house like a thousand airborne coelenterate.

The pilot catches himself between answers. He, unlike the Ren, has never witnessed anything.

But he does now—Vermis leans around the controls, small, boneless thing that she appears to be, and settles her pin eyes deep.

“Enough.”

The eyes leap to Ren like floating red germs.

“They will show us.”

|||

The attendant ogles them as though they are the lucky ones.

To see inside the invisible, then, is even among their own such a privilege–and the deeper their small company wades, a dark blur encroaching on the periphery of a monument, a dome, the further the cipher appears to coil. The smell, too, emits a facade; a feat of nature, a sweet place for the sun, to enshroud what dust and depth crawl underneath.

Vermis thinks the attendant should feel lucky to keep his eyes hereafter.

Instead, once upon the iris’ vault, he halts; he holds to his silence like a celibate; he puts his back to his master’s vaulting door, and waits.

[dolphinsaresilly]

I wish I saw more art that's reminiscent of what was in the book. The awe inspiring vistas of abandoned war machines being dismantled in a field, bleak urban decay, the shambling hordes of those ensnared by the Neurocasters... it's a shame that the famous thing about this book now is that it's the source material for a movie that is the exact opposite in tone...

[justforbooks]

Keith Dewhurst

Writer for stage and screen whose work included the TV police series Z-Cars and several plays at the National Theatre and Royal Court

The journalist turned playwright and screenwriter Keith Dewhurst, who has died aged 93, was part of an extraordinary informal ensemble of actors, designers and musicians who collaborated for more than a decade with the inspirational director Bill Bryden.

Members of this group worked first with Bryden in the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs in 1970, and later at the National Theatre when Bryden was invited by Peter Hall to let rip on plays by Eugene O’Neill and David Mamet, as well as on two promenade performances in the NT’s Cottesloe (now the Dorfman) theatre, scripted by Dewhurst and the poet Tony Harrison.

Harrison’s ebullient, idiomatic version of the Wakefield Mystery plays – The Mysteries (Brian Glover as God in a flat cap on a fork-lift truck) – started on Easter Saturday in 1977, and was followed by Dewhurst’s glorious adaptation, in two plays (1978-79), of Flora Thompson’s elegiac Lark Rise to Candleford, an account of an agrarian village community in Oxfordshire in the pre-industrial 1880s.

Bryden’s irregulars on Lark Rise included Glover, Dinah Stabb, Edna Doré and Jack Shepherd, the designer William Dudley – evoking vistas of wheatfields at harvest time, stars and bleakness in winter on an overhanging sky cloth – and the electric folk rock of the Albion Band with the singer Martin Carthy from Steeleye Span.

Dewhurst’s magical adaptation of Thompson’s trilogy of novels threw shadows of enclosure and poverty around the quotidian joys and back-bending work of the community. The overall effect was one of deep and poetic poignancy, sometimes akin to Jean-François Millet’s painting of The Gleaners.

He and Bryden complemented this success with a more ecstatically political and vivid version of the historian Christopher Hill’s account of ideological turmoil in the English civil war, The World Turned Upside Down (1978); and, on the NT’s Olivier stage in 1982, Paul Scofield as Don Quixote, in which he made a glorious rendition of the epic grandeur in Cervantes’ picaresque novel. The Don’s trusty steed, Rocinante, was a knackered old penny-farthing tricycle, suitable for a nostalgist of knight errantry.

Dewhurst’s fifth and final show at the National was a fleet and funny adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Black Snow in 1991, sharpening the fangs of the novel’s backstage bitchery after the author, writing in the 30s, had fallen out of love with the Moscow Art theatre. The director was William Gaskill who, as artistic director at the Royal Court, had first ratified Dewhurst’s and Bryden’s connection.

Dewhurst had preceded this illustrious career as a football reporter on the Manchester Evening Chronicle in the 1950s, detailed to follow the fortunes of Manchester United, then in the flowering of the Busby Babes era. He became a trusted insider at the club, and indeed chronicler, before and after the Munich air disaster in 1958, when United’s plane had stopped for refuelling on the way back from a European cup-tie in Belgrade, then crashed on take-off.

A close colleague on the Chronicle, Alf Clarke, was one of many journalists and players among the 23 who were killed. The team’s manager, Matt Busby, and fledgling star Bobby Charlton were among the survivors, and Dewhurst was on hand to recount the trauma and extraordinary recovery the club made on a tide of nationwide grief and sentiment.

Born in Oldham, Lancashire, Keith was the son of Joseph Dewhurst, who worked in the cotton industry, and Lily (nee Carter). He was educated at Rydal school in Colwyn Bay – where he had been evacuated during the war – and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1953.

He worked for a while as a yarn tester for the Lancashire Cotton Corporation in Cheshire before joining the Chronicle in 1955, but he was determined to branch out. By the early 1960s he was writing plays for television and radio, which led to an important association with the radical new police series Z-Cars in 1968, and its sequel, Softly Softly: Task Force in 1971. And he wrote a dramatic biographical TV play for The Edwardians BBC series about David Lloyd George (1974), with Anthony Hopkins in the title role.

He had married the actor Eve Pearce in 1958 and moved to London in 1967. From 1969 he worked for a year as an arts columnist on the Guardian. His first theatre play in the capital was Rafferty’s Chant (1967) at the Mermaid, a farce involving a Mancunian conman selling the same car to a string of dupes, before he linked with Bryden on a single Sunday night epic production (without decor), Pirates, at the Royal Court in 1970.

This was the seed of the Bryden/Dewhurst collaboration, followed by the 1809 face-off between French and English soldiers in Corunna!, both with Steeleye Span – Maddy Prior and Carthy to the fore – prominent.

The battle of Corunna! was mind-blowing in the Theatre Upstairs, too big for its military boots, and the first expression of Bryden’s radical, extravagant musical style. Dewhurst went with him in 1972 to the Edinburgh Lyceum to write feisty new adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Molière’s The Miser.

His fine television writing continued with 27 episodes of Richmal Crompton’s Just William (1977-78), with Bonnie Langford as Violet Elizabeth Bott and Diana Dors as her mother; and two television movies adapted from Alexandre Dumas – The Man in the Iron Mask (1985) and a voiced cartoon of The Three Musketeers (1986).

His two notable movies were Chris Thomson’s The Empty Beach (1985), a thriller adapted from a novel by the Australian author Peter Corris; and David Leland’s The Land Girls (1998), adapted from a novel by Angela Huth about the women’s land army in Dorset during the second world war, with three new shooting stars: Rachel Weisz, Anna Friel and Steven Mackintosh.

He continued writing into his 90s, including several novellas as well as two books on football and a theatrical memoir with Shepherd. He also contributed regularly to the Manchester United fanzine, United We Stand.

Dewhurst and Pearce had two daughters, Emma and Faith, and a son, Alan, who died in 2023. The marriage ended in divorce in 1980 and, in the same year, Dewhurst married the Australian literary agent Alexandra Cann, with whom he lived in Fulham, south-west London, and latterly on the Isle of Wight. She survives him, along with his daughters and three grandchildren, Henry, Alex and Millie.

🔔 Keith Frederick Dewhurst, playwright, screenwriter and journalist, born 24 December 1931; died 11 January 2025

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[tatooineknights]

1, 16, and 27 please!

1. Jedi or Sith?

Well, at the very least, I do have to appreciate that the Sith are willing to accessorize and fun little fashion statements. And their little villainous lairs are always gorgeous. Most of the time when I roleplay or play a game, I usually end up on the good side, which is the Jedi. Most of the time. Although I did I play a light-sided Sith Apprentice in The Old Republic, which was pretty interesting, lol.

16. Have you read any Star Wars books?

Yes, especially when I was a kid. I read all of the New Jedi Order series, Legacy of the Force, the Darth Bane series, The Force Unleashed novelization, even the hysterical Jedi Prince series, which was all my school library had. One Christmas, I got the novelization of the original trilogy and I read that a ton. Reread Revenge of the Sith novelization religiously, before the movie came out. Haven't read as much of the new stuff.. Heir to the Jedi, Bloodline, Shadow of the Sith, Leia, Princess of Alderaan, Ahsoka, The Force Awakens novelization, and Lost Stars. I kinda got to a point where I felt like the books were at the bottom of the canon tier, below comics, and it seemed like things kept being retconned, lol, so I took a break from them.

27. Top 3 planets to visit?

I think looking out your windows and just seeing clouds everywhere has to be gorgeous, so Cloud City on Bespin is an absolute must. Ideally, prior to the Imperial occupation. I loved visiting bleak Seattle, with all it's rain, so I think I'd love Kamino. Seriously, I would sleep SO well there. What a peaceful place (once you look past how the Kaminoans are kinda scary with their connections and the whole clone chips thing, you know). Naboo would be lovely, as it is Italy, but I'll throw a legends canon planet in the mix: beautiful Manaan from KOTOR. Yes, I really like most oceanic vistas. 😊

[kolajmag]

COLLAGE ON VIEW

No Roses in December

David Edward Johnson at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, USA through 31 March 2024. “No Roses in December” features a series of works in which David Edward Johnson explores his father’s diagnosis of and descent into dementia. Johnson pairs his own photographs of bleak West Texas vistas and abandoned adobe dwellings with abstract mixed media painting, vintage papers, found objects, and other ephemera as a way to evoke fragmented shards of memory that mimic his father’s state of mind. The series title references a poem by Geoffrey Anketell Studdert-Kennedy that was popularized in a speech about courage by Peter Pan author JM Barrie: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.” Without memories, we have no blooms in the chill of the December of life. Read More

*****************************

Kolaj Magazine, a full color, print magazine, exists to show how the world of collage is rich, layered, and thick with complexity. By remixing history and culture, collage artists forge new thinking. To understand collage is to reshape one's thinking of art history and redefine the canon of visual culture that informs the present.

SUBSCRIBE | CURRENT ISSUE | GET A COPY

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[zhwj]

Springs and Autumns

Lately I’ve been dipping into scholar-beauty romances. A recent favorite is Jin xiang ting 錦香亭 (“Pavilion of Fragrant Brocade”) by Guwu su’an zhuren 古吳素庵主人 (Master of the Simple Hut of Suzhou), which dates to the early Qing.

It’s a short novel that fits a surprising amount of action into its sixteen chapters. The main love story between Zhong Jingqi 鍾景期 and Ge Mingxia 葛明霞 is standard scholar-beauty stuff—imperial exam success, an exchange of poetry, a scheming rival, missed connections, a helpful nun, resourceful concubines, mistaken identity resolving into a wedding, and a happily-ever-after conclusion—but it’s embedded in a larger historical narrative: the An Lushan Rebellion erupts midway through the book. Court intrigue, battlefield strategizing, and tides of refugees heighten the tension of the romantic plot and somehow make the bizarre coincidences the genre relies on seem more believable.

But the plot’s not the reason for this post. A version of the same story is told in the lost Yuan-dynasty play 孟月梅寫恨錦香亭 (“Meng Yuemei Writes of Regrets in the Pavilion of Fragrant Brocade”) about characters named Chen Gui 陳珪 and Meng Yuemei. Songs memorable enough to be preserved in other sources can be found in Song Yuan xiwen jiyi, a 1956 collection of play fragments compiled by Qian Nanyang. Here’s a delightful aria about spring, assembled from quotations of older poems; a quick translation follows:

【中呂過曲】【古山花子】賞春倦倚春風裡，春色釀成和氣。春滿人間，春綻萬紅千翠。春晴雅宜，春燕銜春壘。春心戀春如醉。春心熙熙，春景正遲遲。春來早起，滿目春山麗。仲春時，問春有幾？春及三之二。莫惹春愁，一分塵土，二分流水。春暖春煙，春雨濺春池。春夢里藹然春意，對這春草池塘賦春試。賞春花，春酒泛春杯，春果簇春桃春梨。聽得春鶯囀春啼，春在春花裡。假青春，春夜悞春期，春去後留春無計。春知我，愛春傷春春信稀。 （錢南揚輯錄《宋元戲文輯佚》76）

Spent on spring pleasure, ease back into the spring wind: spring colors mix into an amiable mood. Spring fills the mortal realm, spring bursts with red and green. Spring clarity is graceful and inviting, spring swallows build spring nests. Spring hearts get drunk on spring love. Spring minds make merry, spring vistas linger. On a new spring morn, rise early to a vision of gorgeous spring mountains. By mid-spring, think how long spring may last. Spring is two-thirds gone. Refrain from spring melancholy; one part returns to dust, two parts to water. Spring warmth and spring mist, spring rain splashes into spring pools. Spring dreams harbor pleasing spring desires, bringing spring exams to these spring grasses and ponds. Enjoy spring flowers as spring wine overflows spring cups; spring fruits: clusters of spring peaches and spring pears. Hear the spring oriole sing a plaintive spring song. Spring lies within spring flowers. Fresh green spring means missed spring rendezvous on spring nights; when spring departs, spring cannot be retained. Spring gets me: spring love, spring heartache, and rare spring tidings.

I love this—the hypnotic repetition of “spring” transports me back to a class on early 20th century literature, when our professor read aloud the opening to Chapter 19 of Xu Zhenya’s bestselling 1912 sentimental romance novel in parallel prose, Yuli hun 玉梨魂 (“The Soul of Yuli” or “The Jade Pear Spirit”). For the last two decades, the lines of 秋心 “Autumn Heart” have often come to mind when the weather turns and the leaves start changing color.

黃葉聲多。蒼苔色死。海棠開後。鴻雁來時。雨雨風風。催遍幾番秋信。淒淒切切。送來一片秋聲。秋館空空。秋燕已為秋客。秋窗寂寂。秋蟲偏惱秋魂。秋色荒涼。秋容慘淡。秋情綿邈。秋興闌珊。此日秋閨。獨尋秋夢。何時秋月。雙照秋人。秋愁疊疊。並為秋恨綿綿；秋景匆匆。惱煞秋期負負。盡無限風光到眼。阿儂總覺魂銷。最難堪節序催人。客子能無感集。

Yellow leaves rustle, green moss fades. When the begonia has flowered and the snow geese have arrived, wind and rain hasten autumn’s signs, cold and chill carry autumn’s sounds. Autumn halls are vacant, autumn swallows turned sorrowful autumn travelers. Autumn windows are empty, autumn insects vex the autumn soul. Autumn’s scenes are bleak, autumn’s visage is desolate. Autumn emotion grows distant, autumn elation lies heavy. Today’s autumn boudoir holds a solitary quest for an autumn dream. What day will an autumn moon shine on an autumn pair? Layered autumn melancholy comes with unending autumn regret. Fleeting autumn vistas spur shameful autumn trysts. At the boundless vision before us, our souls take flight. In the unbearable draw of the seasons, can the sojourner remain unmoved?

I have to say I prefer the freer lines of the Yuan lyric to the constrained pulse of four- and six-character phrases that makes up the pianwen style. Here I’ve prioritized the repetition of “autumn” and tried to capture at least at least some of the parallelism, and while this approach does manage to set a mood, the amount of amplification necessary in English would, I feel, make for excruciatingly verbose prose whenever anything actually had to happen. I’m not sure I could keep it up for more than a paragraph or two, or be capable of reading much more than that, to be honest—and the novel runs to 30 chapters. But someone’s given it a try: an English translation by Gong Xiaohui under the title The Death of Yuli was published earlier this year. I’m honestly curious about the translator’s approach.

But I’m more keen to find additional examples of this type of dense repetition in Chinese writing. Any suggestions?

[elmalo8291]

Below is an anime concept that blends elements of dark fantasy, surreal body horror, and apocalyptic destiny—drawing on the visceral imagery of Clive Barker and the epic, brooding world of Stephen King’s Dark Tower. This is not simply a mash-up of characters but an exploration of themes:

Anime Title: “The Last Ascendant”

Genre: Dark Fantasy, Psychological Horror, Action

Tone: A collision of macabre, body-horror aesthetics with a somber, sprawling epic where every level-up in power is hard-won through pain, sacrifice, and the shattering of reality.

Setting: A shifting, nightmarish realm—a multiverse that fuses grotesque, labyrinthine structures with apocalyptic vistas. Here, dreams and nightmares mix, and the very landscape is alive with unspeakable horrors and strange wonder.

Core Concept

A seemingly ordinary human is abruptly pulled from their mundane reality into a dimension that defies both logic and morality—a world where the boundaries of flesh and spirit are tenuous at best. The protagonist must confront a series of harrowing trials to “level up,” each challenge forcing them to confront their innermost fears and transform in shocking ways. As they journey through warped, ever-changing realms reminiscent of Barker’s fantastical yet brutal dreamscapes and King’s solemn, expansive odyssey, the human begins to accrue powers—but at great personal cost.

Themes and Inspirations

Transformation Through Trauma:

Clive Barker Influence: Body horror aesthetics are used to illustrate how the protagonist’s form and essence mutate as they absorb the dark energies of this world. The physical transformations are grotesque yet beautiful—shifting like melting wax or sprouting surreal, impossible appendages as a manifestation of inner strength.

Stephen King Influence: Like a pilgrim on a doomed journey toward the Dark Tower, the protagonist’s every level-up comes only after facing unspeakable personal horror that both scar and empower them.

Cosmic Desolation and Redemption:

An overarching apocalyptic vision pervades the narrative—a universe where broken, alien landscapes echo with the loneliness of a civilization long past. The protagonist’s struggle is not just for power but for humanity, clinging to the hope that even amid the void, a spark of light can be kindled.

The dark realms are steeped in sorrow and foreboding, yet contain tiny kernels of redemption and beauty—shards of humanity that persist despite the overwhelming cosmic dread.

Fragility of Sanity and Identity:

As the protagonist levels up by facing unspeakable terrors, they must constantly battle their own crumbling identity. The forces in this world don’t only morph one’s body; they erode the boundaries of the mind, threatening to swallow one’s soul in madness.

In true Dark Tower style, the journey is as much internal as it is external. Each confrontation tests their willpower, and each new power comes with the risk of losing oneself to the encroaching abyss.

Interdimensional Fate and the Weight of Choice:

Choices in this realm carry cosmic consequences. The narrative is non-linear—echoing the fractured narratives of Barker’s worst nightmares and King’s sprawling epic—where the protagonist’s decisions alter not just their own path but reshape the fabric of the universe itself.

There’s a meta-narrative element, as if the very act of “leveling up” rewrites the rules of existence, challenging the notion of destiny and free will in a universe that seems predetermined to descend into chaos.

Humor in the Face of Horror:

Despite the bleak, oppressive tone of cosmic horror, the anime interjects moments of absurd, dark humor—Taz-like irreverence that twists the conventional tropes of terror. Just when the horror reaches its peak, the protagonist or a minor character might deliver an unexpected, off-the-wall line that snaps tension into laughter, much like a self-aware wink at the audience.

Plot Outline (Season 1 Overview)

Episode 1: “The Pull”

The human protagonist is unexpectedly ripped from their everyday life. They find themselves in a bizarre, shifting landscape of surreal horrors—where shadows whisper, and the air itself feels alive with unspeakable intent. Their first confrontation with a grotesque, chimeric creature initiates a transformation that sets them on the path of leveling up.

Episode 2: “Beneath the Skin”

Forced into a trial that demands physical and psychic metamorphosis, our hero undergoes a horrific transformation reminiscent of Barker’s body horror: their flesh twists, bones reshape, and they manifest new, unsettling powers. With each mutation comes a loss—and gain—of sanity and identity.

Episode 3: “Echoes of the Tower”

The protagonist encounters relics and ruins that hint at a grand cosmic structure—the Dark Tower of fate—and must navigate a labyrinthine dungeon that tests not only their combat prowess but the very essence of their humanity. Vivid, nightmare visuals underscore the apocalyptic desolation of this realm.

Episode 4: “Madness on the Edge”

As levels increase, so does the insanity. The protagonist’s new powers begin to affect their mind, blurring the line between reality and illusion. They struggle with inner voices and spectral apparitions that question every decision, forcing them to confront painful truths about their past.

Episode 5: “Laughing in the Void”

An ironic twist: amid the cosmic despair, the protagonist uses dark humor—sardonic wit and spontaneous jokes—to stave off the encroaching madness. Their humor becomes a weapon, a tool that momentarily repels the void.

Episode 6: “Towers of Despair”

The journey leads to the outskirts of the Dark Tower—a monolithic, twisting structure where the protagonist must climb through physical and metaphysical challenges. Each new floor of the tower distorts time and space, forcing them to make impossible choices.

Episode 7: “Falling Apart”

At the heart of the tower, reality unravels. Past, present, and future collide, resulting in intense battles with ancient horrors and the spectral remnants of lost souls. In a moment of clarity, the protagonist begins to understand that each level-up exacts a heavy price.

Episode 8: “Through the Laughter”

The protagonist learns to channel the humor inherent in their suffering. They discover that laughter can temporarily mend fractures in reality, allowing them to heal and harness new powers.

Episode 9: “The Final Punchline”

In a climactic confrontation with an eldritch force that threatens to consume everything, the protagonist must deliver the ultimate cosmic joke—a sacrifice so profound it reshapes the universe’s fabric, forcing the dark horrors to recede.

Episode 10: “A New Dawn of Madness”

The season finale sees the protagonist emerge transformed—a being that has mastered both the horror and the humor. They now stand on the threshold of a new era, where the balance of cosmic chaos is forever altered by their choices.

Visual & Thematic Elements

Surreal Landscapes:

Shifting, nightmarish vistas that merge elements of decay and twisted beauty. Think barren, rotten forests mixed with pulsating bio-mechanical structures.

Body Horror & Transformations:

Vibrant, grotesque transformations that echo the unsettling beauty of Clive Barker’s art—flesh bending, bones rearranging, and darkness entwined with luminous bursts of energy.

Cosmic Dread & Existential Angst:

Moments where the vastness of the universe seems to mock the insignificance of individual existence—echoes of The Dark Tower’s apocalyptic despair.

Humorous Breaks:

Off-kilter humor delivered in deadpan, meta-commentary form. The protagonist might momentarily break the fourth wall, delivering a snappy quip that undercuts the overwhelming dread.

Player/Viewer Engagement

For a tabletop adaptation, rules can tie into narrative events—players might roll on chaotic tables when encountering cosmic horror, gain sanity points for delivering ironic jokes, or lose them when horrors overwhelm their minds. For the anime version, this translates into visual gags integrated with surreal, terrifying imagery—a balance between baroque horror and absurd humor.

Final Note:

The Last Ascendant is an exploration of how one human’s chaotic spark can reframe cosmic dread. It takes the fear of the unknown and transforms it into a twisted celebration of life, laughter, and transcendence, where each level-up is as much about losing oneself in the darkness as it is about emerging from it—wiser, scarier, and, in the end, irreverently triumphant.

Would you like to proceed with additional details, perhaps a character profile for our human protagonist in this anime, or specific episode script(s) for “The Last Ascendant”?

[now-winter-comes-slowly]

"God dropped man on a planet on his lonesome He saw the light in the luminous sky Grow great then fade quick, sparks on a cinder Dark on a vista, tell them it's winter First stop snowfall, second stop ice forms Third stop winter, last stop misery First drops landed, second drops froze On the third moon cycle with a last lost luminary"

Edward Scissortongue's hypnotic flow conjures a bleak world...

[libidomechanica]

Felt a holy strange use, we said, “My life is destitution climbed”

A sonnet sequence

               I

He heart-stripes for time will confine; I have wished purpose of the roof, the cost and heau’n of myself until I see that men of Illusion with loved the bride’s face. The Germans were half was hid. Felt a holy strange use, we said, My life is destitution climbed across the light and daunce, where came, they make the gentle, and then they came round; her brought but, like the best seed, they flee away she vowed his two for once, in sonnets in them with Time have I answer’d, and line, empty of death a heart of my libertie? She is destitution by their dusty urns sepulchred, whose from reaching at the palm.

               II

As she stream of lawn, upon the floor, one part, the Loves and gave me something sun; for to and for you, carrying hour’s changes right from out to flight. And turned about this flea guilty be, except in glowing nest upon thy skill: for leagues no other, who come back down through the three wild depression! And thoughts with that were, is overrules therefore by on bamboo stiltskin? And she sigh’d for summer’s defect of time, it is time that the crowned wide at every that Spring of zero. To go, and a Hierome, by might; the night, time ere went I kept alive, if once more if there. Last lone stones of moths.

               III

Each breathlesse patents of busie day, and in the world of your prime, no one thicket wilderness. Green borrowed names, and bade heaven. Honey, and departed, your brother, wine is lost, too whirls are one word; no! How to fill him from thee I something white robe, the envious meat, that now we meet therefore the night like fondness, to the Owl, You elegant scars. Last nigh it, confounds flaring his meat, the timbrels? It seems to tell, but soon held it outlasts than Time or face of splendour of earth to a fine summer, the glamour body, and doubt not see the world goes before and move, and pampered to fa’!

               IV

He look’d, to try an old man was it sound. A votive careless spoke, part back. To give and hard bleak steel’d sense to ring; and the pilot confirmed my dust to admire, between the vista of years; not only faces glimmer’d to share our safe arrival. Hermes coughed at the most sweets my pale face I recline your Highness sudden dead, save though solid fires Who, in the truth: no place upon. As still, compared with an amorous played them one by your feet. I have no links o’ gowd, her shone his head to you. Though I cannot keep them deep Atlantic ocean that xylem thickens in killing your scull?

               V

Around that: you may call what shall leap, and sends a space, that left us rocky cave e’er tripped his whist and night light of mortal in the dear, rose-jacynth to give him to inhale things. And I shall handsome, with there unlaced are, and in those skin growing suddenly, as more the mirksome night I remembered tables ever young conne no signs to all our breath’d mate these, trouble have vowed spotless boughs! But being upon a hill. No marvel then, for a nosegay! Once, and starry for, love. And convey’d, since the lassie, dinna sae uncivil be; gif ye hae ony luve for this, as lives.

               VI

Yet later in their dark did the senses rolled dry flame, she, to the wind was sloping their owne with marriage, had you swore tongue the heats and you, down through them. Where, that she hasp of the fault I bring to cast uplandish country dwelt; Hero much, the floors, old voices, the gloom, i noticed a bee did not see the soft wool-woofed carpets: fifty censers the time, since her ties by linked with hollow with small king his simple ayre, the feeds the spikes, and from thy branch rent, in baskets. All with the other woof, her mine, to this radiant from her naked neck, your self, that Frowning Form, his not force him the rest.

               VII

When yellow swifter than all things, or art. After that their little oak-room which thou did not again, she thorns, and thought to the place, are of an open its golden harp began to sing; draws, hopes and creeping from a Jew. Are merchant, to my lonesome years ago when Phoebus gold our wedding ring, a kind intense fragile visiting cauld, I knew where seventh Heaven’s hand there, in my life which euen my fashion. A white hand with me, then blood and made to go with terrific glare in fold to Venus, answered thee? But deaf and many seeing I saw the doctors return’d she wreak’d; then sheds look.

               VIII

When time had spread. With little light, as still. Of Ida spoke of the rough the church do what it might breaks white Tablet—Yes—’tis uninscrib’d with their offices, so oft as the Pharos from thee! To meet the bed and she said, my gout, my father’s light to have made them went the death their feature took this tale more of the sea. Time’s spoils despaire, yet they ever-during been wrong, and a memory can die: and thoughts maimed, thereto my heart. Today I said, Dear I loved desire, a fleeting! Has met wi’ speediest water and desolate and weary feet in his peers? Thee as a way found and breast.

               IX

Exercise; o kiss her; take you will commanding to see, then with thy best with sweet as still night, we could be better of lies; whose daintye Daysies dipt in how finely doe his false, false to me; Blythe and a moist mirage in defence of the throng, dancing leave the bedside mirrors, and that I so kindly am serve for thou in his whelpless was, and told that the dark deserted many shall not my name and know when most I glory fights, half-opens its love and plump cheeks, and overhead. Jamie, come try me, Jamie, come, and death, who is my louely layes her? He comes that swum in the dwarf came.

               X

With night; and fold of cold it was white robes, and short break from high couches, wondered the cube and flimmering creature she stayed stepping imply but in thy side; and branched in my craft or art thou wilt new warre vpon the centre stood, sea-borderers never see Brooklyn. Rude in a deep drenched each respect: the ground then the side, and built and she, poor man through the gutter. To go of her solitary day, death’s second and was no dreamy house, the first here we wise beginning the eagle and thine ear of yourself, nor winds a-wooing with marriage robes the humbly made her lives in danger with dew?

               XI

I am clad in flowers fall from him more the night of gold, she put the hall flower to brow had to your in mine and thoughts abuse such as spark from the thorowest their west, and those beside the same, is their stems branch rent, but Ida spoke, drained, and points out of my arm that he was his deceased; a rose this western mountain of the tents: take her mind with shivering its skirts, its blossom of stones of traitor, too fast. But a window by thy finger; vacant leaders of marble sharpnesse things were driven: the splendour out of myself off me and some might have laid and the people lists the lamps do dive into a cypress trees branches his mouth? Along and thou smil’d, and dull a spur He did not one? And is parallels in thee, where Byrds of elk and how white as clover in a carved, and better think back down a man: the moment than that I were, in active me in what golden reign.

               XII

Who taught, ah, yesterday dropped my fingers good ear to me. His hand, tumbling in an even fourteen I marry the hall, and majestical. So you is writ, not one should be hero in his steeds, whose worth under as if I saw that sea after a day, to-morrow vsing made replied. Clouds refuse he made the sever; tis wished it—but we went into my body shoulders did ioy among our brother hands wand; jove might have kisses, that no child on one whose skin: with t. You walked aboue and glittering languish, shames and in her bosom was told, we should make a beam for it! Supporting kind.

               XIII

And began, through there for men can be seen the Turkey who live by love the budded rosy deed, where light, the flame from this well the way old teach time is still expect yours, but the spikes, and found and protest and silver- green learn’d new black beauty could through yours, but you might fadeth in virgin-white hand how, hand on the fair, wi’ the fatal knight I do not to be confined. Eat when I sawe Calliope wyth Muses moe, soone ease; and tuck the new-mown hand and darksome casual sorts of brass, haunts about vs safer: out upon his to the rainbow wroth, life at its echoèd. And that is born.

               XIV

All the tower he took than Hero would have fallen meteor on a hillock down upon a chamber fair thou, O sun, look upcast to take from her too,—with our voices that each by a sacrifice, whose sound a scarf of orange, and swallows’ call? We faced looking ban, splashing to me, for uninvited guests; but in a deep coaches of your evil eye and if I so chariot, he, that the gilded ball danced by our entreat, playing woe, after sank and mend! Choices call; boys with suddenly, took pity. For azure palace an ugly as an awful Drink making more grace.

               XV

The longing man I have pulse, or instance. And I was born. Not, she saw of palm: and it was, and spoke the tyrannies. Mould; and Matthew stop; and let them all thing and takes a Devil’s selfe, and the queen o’ the goal, when ’tis prest: thy frown. Seeing I saw this transport pass. A magic music the singe, I must part: no, no. Think they found her set the dark kept up among the wheelings, with money, wrapped up to our courtesy. Keep, to gaze there fell from this said, The day I bake. That now about you will—with hurried couple thing. Leaped into a small knuckle on my heart of disbelief thought: she cried.

               XVI

With the threshold offence. And spends the phenomenological space, the door she took my wasted into plays his door. Mirror on they bear of delight luxurious orient cloud withal sweet, like a slaue, which mount he scars. Then, dropped are. Death most vile, but for those weary word by an earth feet, feeling at love candle. The leader of your child; but renewing surely thy hair, already we’re made the only aspire, the least thou coming Century. That we called it in, for loved by our entreaty stay! Till the waves and pain, so arguing a though the park, has rise, victor’s door.

               XVII

Man, found whence drew her roving hed, praising birds. And feather hand calumets, claymore a gentle youth, and kings were their treasures of wings, all sit in the maiden passion, cruel grown of wealthy lustre was seen. Sad church last—a match ’twixt two must I endure thunderbolt, she saw my palm, and mingled bit, and of corn such a rosebuds while. She turtle’s blood of his nose, from head she went, he said to the time, many as colder? And I cannot be thereby commit to her, and the heavenly nymph doth only said, I am but both wandering strove that makes seen, though my obedience.

               XVIII

I gave me no more: I will choose your head. Their tunes attemper right, that same flower down, and tune the common men with Psyche as shepheards quill. And thou in a room of hell. Which made the pleasing eyes. My fallen: the rich, more won. A girl of a Caitife worth we love more rich or poor; gross clay and held aloft, the cast made replied: I sung out at the earthly this face, remembering strange shape it plans: yet she the blade of an old teache the acts retire, and, be she made the bridal he shriek without of absence in wanton wing, Her trees be kept, that lays his nose, with pulses that first release.

               XIX

Softer, clear; and then he drew there we all who in a circle waited the stars who, when the palace: we were nobleness, not thyself, appeased? To the same, as though, if every hours of day: these was well, go and plenteous forth we are heart-stripes for ever done to speak to heaven presently was she said, My life I must descend, for men’s tears did not fond fancy flatter me? Each gift, each to the hoarse mankind, and quivering whence came jasper stopped shore, so was holding have changing round the lovely boy that high upon a row. With mine for comes to serue the hills echoed he; no soft, the bomb.

               XX

-Elect to this jewel he enjoys before I ever loose that which the oxen’s love, and heau’nly hye? The thyrsus, that beat wine, we willing over eight fails, despair. But hither. In your bridal night, betwixt two morning a thousands, and beauty is their little oak-room which I escaped heaps of gold, such cunning as she scorn for a yawning down. And held aloft riding on the drought my body, clay taking the love were you, let thy heart thou yielded a dearer thanks, and we in surprise and we went to glide, like glory, while. It dead: o cod she broken with coarse mankind, as that.

               XXI

Said, Dear heart of hers could not won by break our wills and he had touch my body, and of all say with you, then an empty house doors upon her harvest forth plunged down her proof, made him once more-for speake, it is, whatever made such Jugling thus to the one the chamber ever new; more looked up, and love, I will happier times better equal grew. Radiator grief and much as one the tremulous habit soon to be mingled tears be: just as your name of your be ascribe but green, do boast; things: whether infant lips, dropping from the harbrought revenged on my small path with choisest wounds.

               XXII

They sailed him thence he would through time they are her: without dislike one should I deny thee, dear deliverers, disjoin, what we behold is flea is young; all is done, and there in the showed them with still the lovelier that eyes she sight I stand henceforward in the poor human crease, might faded eyes, Her tresses mark, and saw such as their violence, can it remindednesse all in us is our laws are overhead. A stream on the shine like a feast took, and i’m always asking made a hundred Years— you turn away the grain—iness no shame in wine, sweet to the fought and every way.

               XXIII

Tis nigh, but dare to carrying you went than perjury, even sustain some my desire, like a feasts so sweets, at such a dear sweet is our lips, dropped eye: When all the river, silver-set; about. Served for those sweet must I do croud, and and nuptial mirth an echo start, as still cold and fishes thee, not under duvets, sold church as this: I never still still forward you. Morning, and she is wounded break my hearth we left full flourish with Psyche, sorrows old. Which it grieved at touch and yet he stately buildeth the thing, they sailed a seven stooped to salute her looked, as he spoken win.

               XXIV

Can happened, oh my breath, when from his mercy, pity, immoral, was glad that hides his mace but, where-through light not for the street, where I go for his loveliness the way old time to claim his sowre-breath is transfer where turned to let you are shattering dresses trim as an army down. Too highly prize it, compare, whaever has crept. And now by thy fate and night were, pursuer, wine have look’d again, alas, where, nor winding more strived they moved beyond any experiment. Rich force unto Abydos, the bath-house with our voice: I am the drooping parley, to put these may rests.

               XXV

The level wasted the other walk in an apron. Snow really do we affect of two, nor me the sleep had loved, which their dust I wanna be your eyes, and malformed. Of this flea guilty be, except it be not to thaw, and still, there on the dead! Full sponge and since each our vows above, the leave thy banners rais’d, a tenderly: you are the fondness, an hour work, ’ said I, o’ my chamber this radiant of women use but each other’s hand told her fate, who meddle not reaped; beautiful: let it last ray wane of the rack and white: to seek: were brown like a glorious would not young connection.

               XXVI

My breast when we met, to make and Peace pipe on her tower soft affect of two gold ingots, like a new-found again an apron? Frown last actions meet, for the embracements he use had beat down, both herself she lay!—The married next day seemed. Your lips of gold, once, in soule, arm’d but when the mirth an echo did the bold shame, and leave, and in battle: kiss her; take the creatures grace, incensed with busts: from its root; lions, let me shall I conne no signs to go when they amble away! And refrain beseeching ghost, silent, strike the powers but convert time to Parnasse high roof, still and I will.

               XXVII

Fiers mix with satisfaction, when thou coming of my Life! For a raven to burden hearth-wandering to me. I scarce discerne these tardy plumes let you draw his gaine is love, each shrining scale things and dress the ship alone, we’ll build far off from his sweet in flower-plots were fallen: they moving our velvet bodies, and perspecting a bottles her sacred the tyranny, and majesty, she sang:-she would burn or passe the bonie lass made the deserues, that grows upon his side, keep watch and over and maimed, I hung with the palace stood, sea- borderers never felt the slope, the tree!

               XXVIII

With the suddenly repented and sudden death’s second set to the ivorie, heroic, for she is a silly maid which mans eyes into region with my brains. Excel all outright; the swarm of female hands so soft as a touching, here wind: and there. Awhile we part, or gemmes impart as sacrifice to Jove’s beautiful: let it began, the soyle, the glowing gauze and pity by love return to see me of you, w’are met, just as we with that we used to me, if once more here there in moss; everything to me. ’ Wind aloud, and up again in thumb and fears number zero.

               XXIX

And the sea, to the Spring opens touching dumbe lips are evening to forcing sward she taking heart within my fragile visiting this day, leauing my mother’s day. Their officious songs thine on Thetis’ glass. Cry you, and keep, True, ’ she state, and all the reeds like an imbecile shaft that did fall, as gay as any. And torturing out for his subjected, his swaddling fruitless cold. Own for gifts at twenty—five years! Could soon to your lost, and all the father—none. And I, in my loue and pointed in the rest, and calumets, claymore and maimed, the boards of earth, to do with four garages and caught and what a shade, where fancy to suited, whom the tree! You for cits. Dear, the walls with naked man of curious dint that not my foot remembers more to call with temptation, delicate, the wise the map already dead. Who do swerue, rebels to share you call this love exhibits straight fade.

               XXX

The bed to set it suffice, but, taking she was spring slowly from Hebe Hebe Jove’s chronicle we fools; he cheats, wife and every guest, which at thatch upon thy sweet perfumes by the Turkey who look’d on his his might melts down thrall. Let her was pricked the blood quaffing Mars and do not but vnfelt it some beneath through yours is the pilfering death, long a scaled, much like a snowgirl, a butterfly with fish, When was like bells upon him wasn’t Sanforized? Weight me love me in night, you tell vs mery tale more modern now, but once thereon Leander crossing their name in a level—No!

               XXXI

Then one leg and go less of mine, unhoped heart; my body asleep. The city listening belates, has rolled by some ball- fields and thrusts him quick and never, never deem me this, authority—the Lady Blanche: and Walter Vivian all hys passion’s many a cut, a half—inch spark from coste, can nowhere but gods decreed it another have some other legs in silence of the way he met wi’ my Phillis, ’tis preserved, I would do. Teaching guest had a system made the rarity and now a twist of love not hear his simplicity and pointed too full, or thing, that might fails.

               XXXII

And I shall have left full flocked tread, women you are, and, with all the way we behold is flat since dark are strange was one portal, gaz’d: his hardly her baby form in those wan, and lead they that viewed, his countenance between no place, nor over they boated on my radiant Hero’s gentle bosome coquettish deceit. Then for they clime and strange was already you love this night, crawls to set me go, but her for you played in life. A fool of the silently paced temples; no soon held in the treasured fragrance, have new rays that links the frame to gold? Hast thou smil’d, and as she shadow, Cynara!

               XXXIII

Fed by a patiently paced are, or art thought I’d knowing coral to us out across just popped a dwarf appeared, the golden age of face and melt—’twas just drop down to lay it, yourself advance and only Nature I embraced the jasmine so its ink has pale it look easily will forgiveness to entangle me we’re evening parley, to be grate dry!-Three I lay without hope to scold me. Time passionate heart, and the truest shepheards, whose blacke the learn how finely does, steps walk’d in the people together and shalt call me by the heart is she, why not, as they bore not spin.

               XXXIV

I touch the bewitch: leaue followed: so they never made, and could bend hit as messengers late with no better speak these hymns in killing car from the more durable touch, as I listens, spits for all thing it. And all the time, and bitter loved, that I should be there? Boys with many Lilias in trained last loving, Fools we will believe what the multitude! Keep watch and was it erewhile I languish to vain discolour’d on a stranger win; and nothing but the bride in my woe, and now the ampersand, sends forth a grape with a boughs! Ah, wherein wassail; often, like a criminal.

               XXXV

” Thy glasses of nature’s thieving thy tears. Dream and all its the sun went and down the queen o’ the gods began the flat earth, which the time tell. Upon thy sight, the moment, yes. And white hands wand; jove slyly stealing from the dewy down. Were it lovely leaves thy choysest Art, with my eye, easy live with a stain, made noise the flower, rang ruin, answered in? Fit you will. Through with an unbudded rosy deed, rose-cheeked Adonis kept the listen to rain of the hearts to praised her: where are a human creatures specially do we affection. The this And maids, that small old man who was sixty!

               XXXVI

Hair would that burnes, mine owne fiers might youth, where the aching voice I raised, whereat the sacred the heard her, give her horses’ heels: and Lycius started for cits. Pushing can breathing is he; he whole town, thy king in a broke, betwixt the stone, are the violence and spend then sudden, perhaps he fetchedness, chaste despair and her foes with elation now. In all her baby fortune once grows cold with roses have been faithful god of renaissance, I touch. The still the known; I shoulder blade of a dog can hear the charmed her wi’ her conquest to sea in a strange above my bride in love of that we called her from the fire than that I were they lifted, expect you. Wisdom to see, the Black and men is my death on hylls to get, you shalt by form, dost distress of mount they see, my brows, silk-pillow. Herewith Lilias in this, sad Hero, not know too much more than the striated with my neglected.

               XXXVII

And of the looked at Christmas. And I in duty will the day, the nuptial mirth an echo of th’ Hesperus no shame of you at the nursed, deliverers, and yet this weak and I shall dissembles most? Alas, tis not your is purpose while he purpose lovely, lordings, streight of curled plain and arms electric to call it be gone. Broken she laid his eye upon Euphelia frown, or crooked up, intending; nothing it both love that Learning marriage, that drinks he great god Pan himself upon bed. It doth part shall profit while we prayse or was Hero, Venus’ sweet milk the circle.

               XXXVIII

To lovely leap it began to glared upon fold of sweeter than a worldy bliss yet they have you flesh without you would you more she doth dwell. Song, with my young disciple. But she cannot err, awhile I walk in an April of expire, world so bitter by the humble o’er it many, died ere he gazed upon grey skies chatterer stopped short breaks white have fretted steps: for thee not mortals, or Ralph’s at Ascalon: a good Sir Ralph a page or that make: twas the sudden desire! At forty step to be a slaves, nor me thoughtful skill, the lives in order, a cat, as this Venus none.

               XXXIX

Like or so they wound of the virgins do mine, we’ll borrow vsing me to some face was as ugly Chaos’ den upweighed in the sole enemy. I’m always prompting: not that I have felt to be stars be: just a haunt me not see them for roof and always running the wine; and of her lukewarm pearls of sand, sends a starting or a bowling her eyes doth sheepe about my blacke the burning. Compels me with holiday. Your heart and gold, and ravish’d their mother flocked her best she is deep, and you, gallop amain from thee? And, despair. If this autumn robbed, by the rainbow once to me, for speak.

               XL

Various lamp of your soothing. That entire continues to music, midnight there. Because embraced her and the Pussy you all her legs I dream, yet it suffice to have ground their ever done, Ay me, such a season was low, and pointed in my love? I neuer the babe in a sensitive nymphs humble man was learn thyself warm until some other take time, who by blind and lovely charms. And straight to my neck in the painted, expect of the could see but a shepherd’s home? I dream markes engraue in my blight of my hand in play, and wide, wi’ purple blossom: a thing. Find it was care.

               XLI

And that was well on the book this foot so fair gem, sweet you share bid all they’ve already you love of a duke, and the shining stood, if it bring fame: but follow sand, sends for darting the shining and to faithful Prince. Of stones are praise sayings of Time; and I do speak as everything it should arise; you can. Now we are no signs to tell your belles and louing lay it chance Rumpelstiltskin? Her tears did fallen that I have been at Vivian all that’s great; but doth Phoebus peeps, so to use newfangleness, alas, where were were missed: we severe, and louing lack’d, tho’ her can murder us? Grew hush; the river: the cloud that least to espie? He laid his prize it, complaine for years spent into the Spring of you. ’ And I keep them to your dreamboat when the spell: You ride now the still, checking a white man in a dream’d, there half appeared at the age of another. Her House; a Road of thy breathed to me?

               XLII

What with thy blisse, hath no one day I die! Dead stories of other rest. Hark how to confesses played that did my captive break my heart. The Shah, whose from out my bare fingers where the Babe is beauties plaguy bill? I’d feasted by love, the feast, from their night; lamia, what are gone. Belovëd, whatever man, I. Climb high, what did you will, I never love fame keeps on steering human face, that I thinking in her empery of joys; and now through light; yet to me. No more transfix the fair. As thou be, though use make you gone. With a tenderneath the grey and chaste desire! Grief he flies.

               XLIII

Our guide turned into hell relief; undone by your love. Had Lycius started up, and virtue is it then I heard, think water of the rim. If all with love that was now am I, I cease the bed a tenderest pledge him. Could not show; all, therefore, whatever man, she love you yet one, one who can be betted; made the fire than mortality,— all women, whilst the while no night is destiny, others’ arms and pulled him without that mad pursuer, with merriments for willows, the law in yours, a break these poor pretty railway ran: a firmament glistered light voyage to pleasure.

               XLIV

I wanna be your Highness brow, feeds her purple-lined palace Ida spoke not, sweet dew place and nothing to my hot desire, like apollo’s prey? Ray wane of the lilies shines a ioy from any wrinkles who do swerue, rebels to infinity. ’Rings for Years—you seek with frame to you, or some light thus, that pen doth prays, the heart, a loyal people: thy fate which quarrels moved, burns when the chops the blossoming want to knows the king run, let me part, and want for trumpet peace, that make our prime, you’ll get cold ran into gold ingots, like apollo’s gold ingots like, by might ease my silence.

               XLV

Way groaning, by Saul Bellow When the most slept with all complete with their west, whilst he hope of her gods began to my love me from steep pine-bearing his pipe to suits Petulant she, whose majesty, she punishment. Came loves all early and poore my well- contend. And, fools; he cheats, wife and some freshness brown like one who resemble Venus’ nun, when other sunset fade. To take and the dark herself, the pen that she laid about like to gaze upon my liberal Graces, which of the close exposures: poorly desire; for will not even tide, upon him the day is dreary, he call it a little thing: my most rude line pulse, or flax; an equally the braw lass made myself my bones within the pleasant shepherd, sitting undergrowth. Of man was let you my life: my brand nearer, till in vain: let love with his style I’ll fight, and pierce and eke my rymes and away, in timely death.

               XLVI

Then, Hero answer: These and view; remarked their dark days of mine owne for shame and from you forgetful Muse, my breast, his lead thy early thy love me to see your raincoat for tombs, doth take; whose wan, and once told of that taught, life’s early heavy gold whom I keep me alive and forever and suffering its sad echo started frosty rime, now set a wrath shames, as a brother will give a group of girls in the house, the wine come home, my voice of careening havoc with the bride, my death our feet. With a ring only betray’d it brings fresh frowned: I am no woman, I think if we’re not now?

               XLVII

When though one to cave! I used to accomplish work of glowing back, but one of the top, the common straw. Ah faith, and in the dwarf. June, I to heart—I heard ankle or such because he fades, wander now; so prevails when tis held, and women; and straight them my pen doth tread, as if another, me, that darke with honor, or should from a golden hook, the inside you: on your tongue that she thou deny’st me in vain. The sigh’d for it is vain promise! The sparrows of night and drove a path with largely spread. Laid the man; you canst they did was they are shall strip a hundred yellow swiftly flew the fair.

               XLVIII

And I will for anger whose living, the faint degrees, that made their Institution of the days is upon the decay. And majestical, and quite concord shall be led by my name and in plains of her break from his imprint that play thee? We are maidenhead; yet every one of ladies sing Euphelia’s heaven must full-borne? To whom radiant beauty hath an amorous habit soon as once more-for some were pushed you, and feeds on flames the songs and I danced a soldiers standard keep, but gaudy Girlonds, was there he looked dolphin wheelings, till it a little servile clocks on less-deserved.

               XLIX

My force her mouth to thy precious song, and want, who in the walls, walked about its echoed from its marriage feast and it was the pilot confirmed many as an army of the rim. As though she sprained, the doctors are in my crafty loving underneath! And there are shy but you epitomize as promiscuous lips we might, flye to moan and were never sped, seems our music and books and time and sing, they bedew’d the way a woman’s own hand come the bed to know time’s remorse, the board, with shrinking this style admire: we, whose two clear, betwixt the moon dropped away, for shame: for this mouthed grange.

               L

Out of course, that small; and held or lives, crotchets, Christmas sole sparks of burning made the brough there we lit on Aunt. Thou kiss, thought to ground the white as ocean-streams. With a voices call; Is that rides best sign of black. He put her hung. She said, than Dis, on the three days still at last, which love, when the slope of continued not from college, visiting the sun went Mercury who look’d the Princessant back-chat. Of individual lightfote Nymphes can with saints? Four laws withers but alas too much; a gift prevent: to languish in language came, who in the ground, and spends the patron will pose with facts.

               LI

Upon thy shape it plant in a partridge. That Midas’ brood, however done aster is not prevent’st his zenith, she was not even and when we woo thee—ponder iron with encroaching her face in circle. In the feasted feast shone, silver altar stooped, reached this to play upon thorns, and this feasts where was they are but he that writes remorseless: ay, it’s happening twins do moue their skin, enough the ocean-foam in these shoulders did ioy amongst my world is census taker knowledge you used to the gas, put hot water hailed and grave, sole enemy with kisses; and the widest land doom take.

               LII

And I in duty will give rest. Still I not, with her glad parents’ bones will renewed the doors upon the passion, when Cloe blushing accents, long did you, letting us, if not full hylls, or dales of affections of you: you stared he, litigious chastity, but unto. Of sense to ring; till the father knew she’d just as a heard sittes not from the dreary, he comes my calm white hands, gather phone book, now should folly’s all with tilt and we in those sound a scarf of orange round by some beneath their will. The sacrifice to Jove’s arrow will only warmth and white-blossom of blood waltzes.

               LIII

Or rather loathed life’s wheel by which brought? Being seems but for trumpets—Lycius was the paper says good unto the way men go and would through to confesses lovers know: is it dead? She cried, th’ endear’d, as the womankind, poor silly maid whose Echo answer than could not know on earth tears did mine owne fiers mix with her counted by these? Slyly steal him that, self-involved; but wilt looked outward part in my love, Jamie, come by-street by trecheree didst come—to be, belovëd, whatever certain meant but speech, you shalt be the maiden queen o’ the nuptial sweetest bud. That with him in two.

               LIV

A petty rooms; and over, never showe, the three wild will smile dwelt; Hero would not when the vault. While he sports along you out for her head from me: what is a zero vector, when I am fed. Not my foot or such as fancy is in equal balance peised. Of the Babe is but some speaking of vows, we known women; and again vowed spotlit. That I must remain their fall; I have spent: for the powerful gods. The leaves expression and accept the mound where, the foeman out. And nowhere unhappy as ye: and frae my child will last lone stones i’ th’ street, whom I am buried.

               LV

The love, and thou must expire, that held the comes a ball; the sweet in each respect our door, asks first rose and I by the rich, more in the isles of Arcady? Beat doubled shorten I then, I have transfix the floor was Danae’s straight to Stella, the way by day.—No I was denied pin’d as they rode; they all the said,—he wish I wear. Seek you as his liking, yet ne’er for a raven the dawn. Nothing shade can be better; but mine: give it here. Thought and shapes commit to wed Amphions lyre, set in holes, as it else to feel then, I had daft his purpose gown from sonny rayes to Tantalus, she love.

               LVI

And now thee I should come back to me. To common straw into think if we’re braided, her stately came, and undid me strange round suppose he might come—to be, belovëd, what a beam of loving, now a sweet pastimes beneath, when in garrets, on purpose while here I lie, as the wind no other die. Because that you are fair, or is it that, self-will, or capable of weathered table, to be vnkind, I will come on me, do not boast; things long walks in heaven. Down thou hast, thou should arise; come, come to disappeared. And thy tears, and a parching voice, lute, and kisses, that my still harshly jar.

               LVII

I fill my love’s sweetly they crickets but all of bliss, dear trailing want his charms on the fields and then I know time’s removed, they talk, and mine—unweave me divine and tread, as from my workshop. We travel, a palace Ida sounds with error strived the gentle bosom was this—this caract, and in beauty,—that in the roofs like legs I drew you out from her backs on less-deserved. A married next he cast her, and thither travelled cave, turquoise and shook the last love, and bower, but her waist, and tell the mouth at there at struggle, trammels freed, one is still relented day, to-morrow will spin.

               LVIII

Tree of Tantalus, she knee: they were dried undertake. What leaped live singer, now his flight. Yet, love is the night is to shame on heaps of mortal who with all creatures consecrate! In another heads felt the sight wraps me in his loss along time in his arm, and there and clear away. Now by the father you swore he way men grow! Pussy said she becomes to the same temples. When moving out of telegraph they seemed not, as a wider choice of myself I guard, flesh extended as he eats and flimmer’d through a firmament glistening thy amiss, excusing ivory strength; the worldy bliss.

               LIX

Like a jewel he enjoy? Till air stirred at in the pride. Of that I should soone ease to do it for you. And for fear to touch of weeds, who wants me her waist, and beware lest, with reconcilement with dew? Do what was shee desert all keep us children, though solid, like what the fair my palsy, or Phant’sie scan, and kind, and long purple orchis variegate the burst empty house, with satisfaction, and pearl, which it grow, and delight. Walter than I. Much more majesties appeared think two pails of blood waltz, clicking, and in a sin far above that made myself have hard her force; but who, nothing.

               LX

I kiss’d me; and still? That the care of sorrow when this magic whisks and rudely drest what she died or art. Walter, patting must remains which is, youth doth makes beneath is this cap and blue yonder, being away, will eventide. My fancy to reason, and mutual appetite I never been my only that she also to use newfangleness into this son, the abundant two on sponge to a cause, that now is rage; famous, how? Farewell; the languish to vain was vanquished each one whose choice of her fair thou true, and on the unbroken by Maud, she had not breast, O miracle.

               LXI

Foolish, Faith Sulayman spoke not, but our old man’s asexual voice as we wring, a sort our eyes doubled streight mix his demon eyes! Last Love enhances spoke, part banter, patting you will; heroic sees more prove as that dandy-despot, heralded along thing brest the earthly fumes, and shout a gap, yet in lead and by the day was torn by Autumn, in mine Eyes. And over the clash of jarring care: o thinking the fathers thus we meet. By all mind, yet when all that’s beauties, or weed: and married! As he great Princes were frayed the great river. He on the dead! And shepherds do hold worse.

               LXII

To this father one, like arguments—the gods might fades away, oh! And I forbore— thy touch them so hand answered country dwelt like Hebe’s in her sweet their christall fame when bow down, wait upon her that make our progress falter was enamoured air stir full of the boards of day: they’re foole, as a rosebud set with her sues: see how cunning a wander, to lay something wars— and many a wander lays esteem: yet so the good all the hollow fear, through regular bird to gold keep it always make to a causefull catalogue of pity, and death’s wet break my heart.—Not too fast.

               LXIII

Behind though in your face to my hot desires, ere he could that soft ear to me, i’ll kiss the craved, and laughed to Mars as she did she been boat, the in Weimar sleep I return to ill: should makes sense not remove; for from thee to these tardy arms, I lay on; not to love nor cared nor knew my five month of their luckless of her tongue, and mouth? Thou and loued her stately came, instead, ever done, Ay me, succour of love me not Cupid beat within mine own begin you again, alas, poor silly maiden passion do we affections new; most resembles most dear, dear man, whom I am no bigger that meridian height of dignity and with folly and now should remembrance, and she grown with eyes now it; taunt me no more: thither from heaven and wonted rendezvous, but is profanity and the hands. Great god Pan, from the women fast the children are was at lengthened bells.

               LXIV

I though, by Nature blind and quivering, the true’; swiftly blind. The guests are alway, after all that I an accessary needs discover what left no echo star, thou may never be prolonged beyond any expect you, whose two for loves your cheeks, with my neglect I do speak. Down in the fair, who with my love; at first, and plain, till the sunshine, and the baths, And this’ he said, I dared reply. Ah, happy boughs! In towered so longest date do melt into the king in the river-water nymph beguiled by time. Her own mind was bom old. Radio play, and sighs drowns, but lets him dwelt at Abydos, their axes: lo the death weand my books and mused her necklace as a small king too has lost, lost the King of time in its wings when I stood, sea-borderers, displayed about thy hairs, and eu’ry part ought were telescopes for speak to high, grand, epic, homicidal; and age-bed, be kept.

               LXV

The Prince to run. I wote my secret trusty gowns, but Pallas on the reed, no more so strong at my side, keep watchfulness. I hear, it’s me. Quiet’s cool flesh—let’s beautiful and small path no special legend be, it is the wind, which I couldn’t just so longed, all other. A loyal porch, that Titanic strifes, murmurs in my ioyes for pride of youth, and I go from out to me. Draws, hopes and flimmer’d through the badge, and with thine ear of night is dumb—we stay; and fire, like him in thee, divine. The light of gay flowe, of that darkest shade of the lightfote Nymphes can coole: what soft voice is this flea, and boar.

               LXVI

Thy touch she wept both loved you, carry you? And now we lit on Aunt. The wall, and anger, a space opens, where young mantle tame and holds up as tiny rip of a God. Right, and then my dreams are every green altar, O my friend to some canker lives’ my falls and aghast the glassy smile and are the way when he took than ours, but left the highly disdains to have for, like a winter’s arms. ’Er wi’ my Phillis, can your with the inward light, then to the river. And called to Cupid’s day. The flowers above their name and in her quickening the land, hard forms the hearts instead of my despair.

               LXVII

A petty railway ran: a firmament glistered with lighted mirrors, and armor should not speak to her own image picture, the shipwrack treasured by my hot desire; for if you call that he can be; little bent; and might foot remove; for having looks, staid night, to mask, and presence them gentle. And from a Jew. The fruit none can be; little nearer, till in respect, and the destroy, and therewith so beautiful and hands, but effectually is dissembles most unusual sort. Old faces, whose airy texture; she yield her, long times make those that Titanic strife without of.

               LXVIII

The windshields on flower by fate and such a rattling in thank’d her naked to me; she said; she set to thee by putting you, carry you, if he had to have him went, in pale and many a white as we entered, and opens whereon with that’s more from them a’ in sarks to me. Said he, for one—all people should be humiliating gold, of moths. Than pairs of the truce obtain. If her sudden dead-heavy body was she meant, as they never shorn, had left me, say one more majesty, she said the Palate till the misery in fit magnificence. When twas they gain to my plain.

               LXIX

But Ida spoke of the thick for harm, so that lay carved, and horror and a darke with white hand, as we climbed across them achieve their hands so pure, dutiful instruments, I am your love. Tomorrow I brew my beer. You are, shall stay: and bade him was such a dear delivers to the hall, all, at any rate she the sight? After he took than summer as a soldier, but tis double-vantage me. Plants his said, I am a shore, so short, did the electric to decay has had at touch them with a bitter but feed him, the one who in the circular independence, and and play.

               LXX

We took fire, with my Emma lay; surely in the humbly at you have seen her proved the holy idiot doth his incess as much. But as he had no blemish, but by my love’s blooming markes engraue in my lover’s seat me on me, and take it Sir, ’ and plaintiue pleasure the blood bound our son, to hold. Though with their father—none. Shut fast that. And faint and doubtful how the two gold were affied. Old pony post road. And seek no common rule, which wit impart, or gemmes or other, brother, Sleep, as she preached? Upon the plain in a moment or broke and pleasant hour ere lover. Iron nature’s.

               LXXI

And she blue-eyed rival came. The leave her things grew faine would ease; and hugged it is best fruit. With content, mission’s grave, yet, do not thine; and that does shelter in its mother’s hermitage; you, two cities of quince, which royall her name and home in language of the moon’s despise the longing more soule flutters twitter, for it! With Time wasted to warmth of Greece will fley’d away let me get her for ay from other and feeds the taste before my eyes, that dimmed her, as for darting joy, foes with visions less can compared with dim and again. I knew a beast is fair; the men came a theater growest the fatal knight to Stella alone are genuine, I think if there his foot countrey mournful terms, without a reward. On newer proper heavens; then, said I for I cleaved two planted once more than she look’d on Europe’s latter’d he: why do you ever put the king’s realms of spirits.

[nukethefridgenews]

No Country for Old Men Criterion Collection 4K UHD Review: 4Kall It

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