#Essays

[suchawrathfullamb]

The Allure of The Beast: Female Sexuality Through The Devil's Brides in Cinema (Including Will Graham, a male character): an essay,

[mournfulroses]

Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays And Other Writings originally published in 2004

[soracities]

absolutely enraptured rn

[joytri]

[luthienne]

Arundhati Roy, ‘Our country has lost its moral compass’

[lucidloving]

@heavensghost // Erin Moran, "940 Main Street" // Jason Schneiderman, "Little Red Riding Wolf" // @mah_hirano on tw // Adrienne Rich, "Planetarium" // Richard Siken, Editor's Pages: Black Telephone // Molly McCully Brown, Places I've Taken my Body: Essays // @loputyn // Mason O'Hern, "You Are Not Just Anything" // Friedrich Nietzsche, Good and Evil

[writer-logbook]

How to improve your writing style : a 5-steps guide.

Intro : I love the 5-steps format, don’t mind me. Again, this essay is based on my personal experience.

Read in different genres. Ok, I know you’ve probably heard this advice more than you can count but did you ask yourself why it is so important ? You probably wonder ‘‘How reading some historical fiction will help me writing my sci-fi novel ?’’ For that simple reason my friend : they meet different purposes. You don’t know how to describe a castle ? It’s okay, historical fiction got your back. Because it aims at something more realistic and accurate, it would tend to be more specific and detailed when it comes to describing clothes, furniture, places and so on. Why ? Because, most of the time, THEY ACTUALLY EXISTED. Take a closer look at how it is done and draw your inspiration from it (but please avoid plagiarism it’s bad - and illegal)

Take notes and CLASSIFY them. To make reading somehow useful, you have to actually make it concious, which means you have to write things down to remember them. When I come across a description I like, I tend to takes notes of the figures of speech that are used and class them, so when I have to write a similar scene, I have an idea of what have been already used, and weither or not it achieved its goal. I am NOT talking about COPY another author’s style !!!! It’s about finding inspiration and new approaches. I also tend to take notes of the new words I wish to incoporate into my writing. The thesaurus is my new bestie.

Rewrite the same scene from different POVs. First of all, it’s fun. And it’s a really good way to spot quirky formulations. For instance, if you describe a ship, the captain’s POV should be different from that of a simple observer. The first one would be naming each part princisely whereas the other would only be admiring the surface without knowing anything. If the caption is the same for both POVs, maybe you should consider write your passage again (or have a good reason, like a strong amateurism for the mere observer). It’s go hand in hand with coherence - but it would be an essay for another time (maybe).

Read your text aloud. I put major emphasis on that one because it’s as underated as reading books for various genres. You have no idea how much we DON’T speak the way we write. Even dialogues are crafted in our stories - so make sure to give them proper attention. (i even read my email aloud but-). I KNOW how cringey it might be as I am doing it MYSELF but the benefits are worth the 35-minutes shame I endure from my own mess. Before you can shine, you have to polish (shout out to the one who said that first if it’s not me).

Take a step back. I strongly advice you to let some time pass before reading your text again and profreading it. It will cast a new light upon your work and with fresh eyes you’d be more likely able to spot what needs to be erased or rephrased.

That’s all for me today. Since I would be entering my proofreading phase for my writing contest, the next essay would probably about proofreading (with examples from my own novel ?). Unless someone wants me to write on a specific subject first.

Gentle reminder that I’m still French and not a native so please forgive my dubious grammar and outrageous mispellings.

[shitpostingkats]

An Asexual's love letter to Good Omens 2

There's an infamous quote by Neil Gaiman going around, regarding the general vibe of season 2, and many people (I believe humorously) yelling that it could not be further from the truth. Particularly in the last episode, where that happens.

I disagree.

The final episode of season 2 was deeply, deeply comforting to me. 

I am asexual. Have been my whole life. Even before I had the words to describe what that was, child-me had this feeling in their gut of being an outlier, that everyone was exaggerating, or in on some joke, that I wasn’t privy to. Because I was bombarded on all sides by shows and movies and books, telling the same story of love, again, and again, and AGAIN. It’s drilled into our brains with the same fervor as the days of the week, or the quadratic formula. Meet-cute -> misunderstanding ->declaration of feelings ->kiss. More or less steps can be added to account for runtime or complexity of narrative, but that’s the basic structure that a relationship follows. It MUST be, because that’s the formula every character who's ever been in a story goes through, often times when it even feels like an add-on, like it’s only there because this is a story, there HAS to be a romance. And it has to follow the steps.

For a long time, I felt love wasn’t for me, because if there’s only one way to be in love, I sure as hell wasn’t feeling it. 

Instead, the relationship I ended up in looked a lot like what Beezlebub and Gabriel go through. Meeting someone routinely until it starts to feel comfortable. Getting to know them and slowly growing more attached. Eating chips and listening to music.

We like to joke whenever someone asks us how long we’ve been together, because the answer is we just sort of slowly fell into it, and we honestly don’t know when the line got blurred between ‘friends’ and ‘partners’. And, at least for me, a good deal of that confusion, that hesitancy to label, came from the fact that what I was feeling, what we were, couldn’t be love. It couldn’t be romantic. 

We were just quiet and gentle.

And that wasn’t love.

Because it was slow, because it wasn’t physical, because there was no structure aside from consistency and companionship. Because it didn’t follow the Rules.

Then I found myself in stories, and it felt like a revelation.

Beelzebub and Gabriel aren’t the first time I’ve seen a love like I feel represented in a narrative, but it never stops feeling special. And I don’t know if I’ll ever stop celebrating it.

Throughout the sequence in the pub, I kept expecting them to “confirm” Gabriel and Beelzebub. A dramatic line, a kiss, a whatever. That’s what I’ve been taught to expect, after all, that’s the only way a relationship is “real”. Of course, this doesn't mean Crowley and Aziraphale sharing a dramatic kiss is wrong, or that I can’t see why it resonated with so many people, but for me. Those moments in the pub are worth so much more.The last scene might have been literally showstopping, but those handful of moments between the duke of hell and an archangel were the beating heart of the season for me. A simple love story in four scenes. No kisses. No ‘I love you’s. Not even any definition of what. The love Gabriel and Beelzebub have is strong enough for them to both want to shatter their worlds and flee their lives and it's just. 

It's just that. 

Two people in a pub, playing the other's favorite song, giving a little gift, buying a packet of crisps. 

That sequence means far more to me than any kiss ever could.

Love isn’t only real when it's hot and sudden and ephemeral, it can also be

Quiet.

And gentle.

And still romantic.

Still real.

[kitchen-light]

Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.   Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.

Nabil S., from "It Was All Songs: A Letter From Gaza" translated from the Arabic by Sarah Aziza, published in Mizna on February 12th, 2024. You can read the entire essay here.

[longreads]

“The most important part of my job is to make the library a safe space. One where kids burst through the door and go running with glee to the children’s area so they can say hello to whoever is at the desk. One where a patron can have a full metal meltdown about the state of the world and still be given resources to find housing, a shower, a meal. One where someone can come in blasted high for years and then return the next day sober and clean, ensconcing themselves in the safety of the books to stay that way.”

Lisa Bubert’s Instagram bio reads "Public librarian who has seen some 💩," and her latest piece makes clear just how much “some” is. When so much of our society has seemingly turned its back on its neediest members, public libraries have never been more important. To read “Safety Net,” head to Longreads.

[doubledaybooks]

The animal kingdom is more surprising and magical than we know! VANISHING TREASURES by Katherine Rundell shares 23 essays on unique and endangered animals that we share the world with---plus! Each chapter begins with an illustration, making it the perfect gift for animal lovers.

The lemur lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

[lottiestudying]

04.10.2024—actually working from a desk for a change. wild. thanks for 13.8k!!

[soracities]

Does it matter why Lot's wife looked back? She looked back because she loved her daughters. She looked back because she loved her home. She looked back because she loved the past. She looked back because she loved the world. Remember Lot’s wife: it's intended as a warning, but I have adopted it as a creed. When the world burns, I will fill my eyes with as much of it as I possibly can. I can think of no greater honor than to remain on the earth. You are worth turning around for. You are worth transformation. You are the heat that lights the match that lights the hearth that warms me. You are everything.

Amelia K., “I: Vision - Eurydice, Mangan’s Sister, & Lot’s Wife”

[that-butch-archivist]

"Femmes, through a reshaped femininity, exhibit an assertive sexuality that does not conflate desire with political practice. This very assertiveness can be politically empowering for femmes who like to play with the idea of power but are not disempowered by this play. For example, femmes with a bottom identification can renegotiate the dynamics of passivity/activity such that their feminine position is one of receiving pleasure rather than of being receptive solely for someone else's pleasure. What seems to be passivity is actually activity: she allows the butch to control her pleasure, but this control and the pleasure are exactly what the femme has demanded. For the bottom femme as for other varieties of femme sexuality--top, s/m, bisexual, or others--her own female sexual agency is paramount. The femme who plays with power provides a model that negotiates rather than ignores power differentials in relationships. [...] In many ways, femmes' chosen pleasures rather than politically prescribed pleasures are radically feminist."

-- "An Introduction to Sustaining Femme Gender," written by Laura Harris & Liz Crocker. (Emphasis in bold mine.)

[luthienne]

Fady Joudah, from A Palestinian Meditation in a Time of Annihilation