#Kafka the house wife

[kairunatic]

[pearlywritings]

In father’s embrace

synopsis: HSR men as dads and what your family dynamic is like.

pairings: Blade, Gepard, Loucha, Sampo, Jing Yuan x fem!reader (separately)

tw: fluff, established relationship, implied initial mortal x immortal in Blade’s

word count: 5.2k words

a/n: Luofu Xianzhou timeline is hell, so Blade’s one is quite vague. Here’s the Genshin version!

Blade

Blade tends to say that he has no connection to his past, but that is not true and very few (mostly Kafka) know he is lying. Even with his life and death fucked up he can't simply let go of someone his heart has been always full with, of someone who he promised himself to by the altar, even if under another name, of someone, who gifted him the joy of both his previous and current life - your daughter.

The blade - a cold weapon with no feelings - should not experience being lucky, but that’s what he was, when you clutched him in your arms the first time after his return from the dead and sobbed in his chest, telling him how much you missed him, how much his little angel missed him.

Back then he should've left without a trace, maybe even coming to you in the first place was a mistake, but he just couldn't. And his resolve crumbled completely when a white-haired toddler in your arms gazed at him with the same soft eyes as yours and reached out to his face, hesitantly asking "dada?".

As much as Blade is capable - he loves you and your daughter. He is quite absent due to his involvement with the Stellaron Hunters, but you understand how important that magenta-haired woman's ability is when it comes to restraining the mara in his body. After all that's the reason why he can visit without fear of hurting you or his little girl.

Some other sacrifices had to be made - one of them was moving from the Lofu Xianzhou, but that was alright and your daughter loved her new environment. Besides, dada has been visiting more often ever since you moved! And no one really bothered or chased after you (after all, you are still registered as his wife and higher ups of Lofu know), which, you assumed, was somehow connected with a young girl that once came with Blade.

Kafka once brought up a proposition of moving you two to the Stellaron Hunters' base for Blade's easier access, but he declined. At least his loved ones should have a peaceful everyday life.

With a tired sigh the black-haired man lowers himself on a sofa in the living room of the house you two purchased to start a seemingly new life. The red-hot iron in his eyes disappears behind the heavy eyelids and for a moment Blade allows himself to relax. The little wonder, that is his daughter, ran to your bedroom to fetch some hair accessories, after you encouraged your husband to let her style his long locks.

He doesn’t move when you sit next to him, hip to hip and heart to heart. He welcomes your sneaking fingers, curling his, creating a secure lock of hands. The weight of your head resting on his shoulder is grounding and he can’t help but press his cheek against it.

It’s soothingly silent.

It almost reminds him of the past.

“For how long will you be staying this time?

Even your question, spoken in a tender, understanding voice, is familiar. You used to ask him the same thing in-between his Cloud Quintet-related missions. 

These days it’s difficult to sneak and see you during breaks though.

“Fifteen days,” his breath is even, and eyes are still shut, but he senses a smile that tugs on the corners of your lips.

“That’s a lot. She will be so happy,” and he knows that you are as well.

The rapid stomping of little feet bursts into your peaceful serenity, and you simultaneously glance at the doorway. Low and behold - the soon-to-be hair stylist is proudly running into the room, tightly clutching your jewelry box with various hair pins inside.

“Dad, I practiced! Mom says I’ve been making huuuuuuge progress!”

A tiny smile touches his pale lips - it’s such a miracle that a monster like him is blessed to have the most adorable child in the whole universe. With her and you by his side, this life gets more and more bearable.

“If mom says you’ve been, then it must be the truth,” he nods, letting go of your hand - but not before giving it a little affectionate stroke with his thumb, - sliding down and onto the floor, turning his back to the girl.

Giggling excitedly, she gives you the box, which you quickly unlock, and starts looking through the many intricate pieces of jewelry (many are your beloved’s presents), until finding the perfect one.

Having his hair being touched is weird. He was aware that the white luscious locks used to draw attention, but only you were honored to run your fingers through them, and only his baby was allowed to tug on them, making her father wince. Now it’s different - she is oh so careful, brushing, collecting stray locks and braiding, not once causing him pain.

Blade sighs again, but looks at you from the corner of his eye, catching you snickering in your palm upon gazing at something that your daughter is turning his hair into. Well, that’s concerning.

But at this very moment he can’t bring himself to care. If he gets fifteen whole days before his next mission, he is going to savor this time with his family - no matter how disastrous he’s going to look by the end of it.

Gepard

A family man. So no one was surprised when in the end the leader of the Silvermane Guards ended up with three kids - two sons and a daughter. Partly it was dictated by the rules of nobles and his family among them, but ultimately it was your mutual sincere decision.

It’s obvious he is not there for many of his kids’ first times, as sometimes his duties prevail and even the Supreme Guardian cannot help it, but he really-really tries to be there as much as possible. He appreciates the videos you send him, has every single one stored in his phone’s memory and sometimes, when there is no communication, in his spare moment he replays them to remind himself that soon he’ll return home and see his kids and you.

Only one time he really fucked up because of work - during your first pregnancy you both underestimated the soon arrival of your due date and he left on a mission with his troops, reassured that he’ll be back before the day you go into labor. The snowstorm was severe and the connection was cut, so the message Serval sent him when your water broke was not delivered. His soldiers would bring to their graves the image of a deathly pale Gepard, when many hours later he checked his phone back at the base and nearly broke the screen, trying to type his sister’s number.

After that he started taking paternity leave seriously.

You do not keep in touch with his parents a lot - there were instances where they disapproved of you, but all of his siblings are always welcomed in your house and to see their nephews and niece, because they supported your relationship from the moment they met you in flesh.

Serval is an enormous help when it comes to babysitting. It’s like her part-time job honestly - you even offered to pay her, but she declined, suggesting offering her a helping hand whenever she’d need instead. Oh, and to be the first one out of all the Landau siblings (after her brother, of course) to know about the latest updates on your kids.

The kids that are adorable. All three won the ‘blue eyes’ lottery, which, given the previous generations of Landau, is not a big surprise; both boys look like Gepard, while the girl took more after you in appearance. The man really doesn’t want to play favorites, but sometimes he is just too weak for his little princess, who looks just like her mom. She is the youngest too with a pretty big age gap between her and her brothers, who were born a year apart, so there is literally no jealousy, because your sons took their father’s example and became her protectors.

Even from a 'big bad dragon' that is their aunt…

When you step inside your house and hear the kids still fussing somewhere in the rooms, involuntarily your gaze falls to the old grandfather’s clock in the foye. Almost midnight. All three should be long asleep with Serval sending you a notification of her success. Which you didn’t receive and for that reason had to cut your date short and hurry back home.

Your husband looks as concerned as you are, locking the door and straining his ears to determine what’s going on. With both your coats abandoned, you carefully step further into the house, making your way to the line of light coming from under one of the doors.

Two jaws almost kiss the floor when you see Serval lying on the floor tied and gagged with a scarf. Alone. For a moment you fear the worst.

Rushing inside, you let Gepard search the other rooms for intruders. Helping your sister-in-law to sit is no problem, but the knot behind her head is awfully tightened. In the end you manage to yank it down to free her mouth, quickly switching to the rope constricting her hands.

“Y/n, oh my god,” she gasps, finally able to speak. “Who taught your sons to tie knots like this!? I didn’t know a sixteen- and fifteen-year olds can be so strong-”

“Come again?” Stunned, you stop untying her wrists, looking at the woman with widened eyes. Your boys did what?

“My precious nephews - whom I really do not want to strangle - took the game of knights too seriously, and when - maybe a half an hour ago? - I decided to play the dragon who was stealing the princess - my niece of three years, - they attacked and tied me!”

“Huh…” is all you can say, feeling relief wash over you. At least there are no burglars or kidnappers and your kids are safe.

When, listening Serval’s huffs of complaints, you move to untie her legs, the heavy steps of your husband are heard in the hallway, accompanied by the boys whining and begging their dad not to come to the living room, because the dragon would eat their sister.

His tall figure appears in the doorway, with your daughter in his arms, looking very sleepy, and two almost carbon copies of their dad pulling at his jacket to give them their sister back.

“Serval, what in blazes have you told them?” The judging tone and the squint of his blue eyes are directed at his elder sibling.

“It was just a game, Geppie! A silly game they turned into reality.”

“Aunt said she’d eat her,” your oldest pouts, eyeing her cautiously. “And she told us stories about the cannibals the other night-”

“Serval, you what?”

“Hey, they asked me to! Oh, thanks, Y/n,” she shrugs the loosened rope off of her. “Where did you even get this?”

“Aunt Lynx gave us,” the second son chirps, hugging Gepard’s side. “She showed us how to do knots.”

“This little-”

Suddenly you feel a headache coming. With big family come big challenges, but something of this caliber hasn’t happened in a while. It makes you smile though - you almost forgot what it was like - to raise two boys. Seems like your girl brings the borderline naughtiest out of them.

Loucha

To begin with it's worth mentioning that your and Loucha's marriage started as an unpredictable necessity. You both needed to enter the world that allowed only married foreigners' access. So, quickly figuring that your goal matches, you got married on a neighboring planet, spent a month there to make the marriage more believable in the sense of its duration and learning more about each other. Yeah, all of that just to fulfill your respectful jobs. You invented and rehearsed all the possible answers to the questions, perfected your affectionate act and were actually feeling quite comfortable around each other.

It was almost funny, when on the 'how many kids do you plan to have?' Loucha confidently answered 'two', and a couple of years later your first son was born, and then, after 7 more years, another one was too.

Admittedly, the oldest one was kind of unplanned, but at that point you traveled so much together, shared so many memories, even ended up caring for each other on a lover-like level, that you decided to give it a shot, just like you did with the continuation of your marriage.

And Loucha couldn't be more pleased. Surprisingly, he found the peace of those first years he spent settled down to raise your boy delightful. And there was something exciting about having a little wonder with a perfect mix of both of your features in your arms, as your husband's hand is resting on the small of your back, leading you through the crowds of the new planet's lively market, as the child's eyes shine with marvel, taking in his surroundings.

When Loucha suggested having another one it simply felt right.

Your sons are so lucky in the sense of seeing the universe, because their father is a traveling merchant. Sure, he doesn't always take you and your two boys with him, but whenever his deal allows him enough freedom and your kids are doing great in school and can be taken on a little vacation - you three are going with him.

Usually he gets to take care of the youngest one, since only Loucha's vast knowledge can satisfy his curiosity, while the oldest one calmly walks hand in hand with you, content with listening to their conversation and pointing out to you the things he already knows himself, receiving a soft praise from you and an approving nod from his father.

Back home the roles reverse - the oldest is spending most of his time with Loucha to learn all about medicine and healing techniques, while the youngest is more interested in sharing your hobbies. 

The two hardly ever quarrel as siblings tend to do, and it must be because of the overall serene atmosphere of your family dynamic, your soft nature and your husband's tranquil behavior. 

More than a decade ago Loucha wouldn't have imagined himself with a wife and kids. Nowadays, however, he doesn't like the thought of not having the three of you by his side.

It is a quiet afternoon. A little house you rented for a little vacation has a nice yard - perfect for the kids to have fun outside. You occasionally glance at them from the window of the kitchen to make sure everything is fine, while your hands never stop moving - washing, cutting, stirring.

At some point you are so caught in the moment of tranquility, that you do not hear your husband walking in, until he softly hums to alert you of his presence, and puts his palms on your waist.

“Smells delicious,” you smile, feeling his chin on your shoulder, and grab a piece of a tangerine you are meaning to use for dessert, offering it to him.

“Mhm, I am trying to cook what we had yesterday at that restaurant.”

Ah, right, the restaurant the kids enjoyed. He remembers how you sneaked to the kitchen and came back with a little less credits, but with new recipes and an excited smile on your face.

“Hopefully my rendition will be to our boys’ liking. And don’t think I forgot about you - those Loufu Xianzhou-style noodles are already on their way!”

“So thoughtful of you, darling,” his silky voice caresses your ear and not a second later a kiss is pressed to your cheek. “Do you need any help?”

“Weren’t you busy?” You decide to clarify, clearly recounting how he locked himself in one of the rooms earlier that day to test something. To your question Loucha shakes his head.

“All done already. And I missed you and the kids.”

“Then go and play with them,” you urge, turning to face him to offer a sweet smile. “I’ll handle it here, but the boys could use some quality time with their father.”

“You say that as if they didn’t drag us all around the city yesterday and then climb into our bed and refuse to leave.”

“I mean, it’s the first time in two months they properly see you. That last deal of yours was exceptionally time-consuming.”

“You kept me updated on them so well and those video calls we had… it didn’t even feel like I ever left.”

You only huff and return your gaze to the stove, yet leaning into his chest a little. For a minute it’s quiet, and the man is taking his time before parting from you. That is until he takes a deep inhale and nuzzles his face in your neck.

“Thank you, Y/n.”

“What for, handsome?” There is that teasing lilt in your voice he came to love. Over the course of your lives together he discovered many things to love you for, and if not for that desperate decision to get married - he thinks he’d hardly ever feel the same about his life.

“For everything.”

He leaves your side with a kiss on your shoulder and the next time you glance out of the window again - he is already there, hoisting his youngest in one arm and chasing after the oldest one with his hair swaying in the gentle wind. And your heart is at peace. 

Sampo

In all his life Sampo has managed to never impregnate a single woman and he considers that a success. For all the crap people speak about him Sampo is not an idiot, even though he acts like a fool at times. He is extremely self-aware and bringing a child to this world is probably the last thing on his list.

But no one said anything about someone else’s child, right?

Your and Sampo’s relationship is… strange, not going to lie. One evening you happened to help a scared woman to escape from some drunkards (whom you lately found out were the Silvermane Guards, sober and on duty), only for the long wig to slip and the heavy coat to slide down, revealing shortly cut but nicely styled hair and obviously male broad shoulders. The only thing the man managed to get out was a sheepish “hehe”.

And boy did that “hehe” change your life.

That day Sampo Koski got off the hook, since you didn’t comment anyhow and just let him go, which, given you were an overworlder, he found intriguing. So he dug a little bit, out of pure curiosity. Besides, this man didn't like staying in debt to someone and he needed information to see how he could pay you back.

That’s when he found out you were a single mother. An opera singer, but divorced and with full custody over a six-year old daughter.

And honestly, he didn’t give it much thought at first. He simply arranged a nice bouquet of red roses for you, paid Natasha a little for a handmade plushie and left it all at the door steps with a ‘thank you’ note.

Until a couple of weeks ago, disguised again, he didn’t stumble into a group of kids obviously bullying a little girl, mocking her for not having a father, and throwing something among themselves that she tried to catch. And he recognized the toy. And one glance was enough to see how much she looked like the woman he met only once. And against his better judgment Sampo walked to the children, easily snatching the toy and effectively scaring everyone off. Only with that little girl still being there, eyes full of unshed tears and fingers digging in the skirt of her pretty dress.

That tiny ‘thank you’ when he handed the plushie back to her and she hugged it tightly to her chest made the conman’s heart clench, and for the second time that day he sent his plans to hell, keeping her company near the house you lived in until you arrived from work.

That day he learned many things - how much your daughter loved the toy and what a sweet little thing she was, how tired a person can look and how much a throat can hurt from the whole day of singing during rehearsals, how nice a home-made dinner can be once you are invited, but most importantly - how even such a damned man like him can be gazed upon with gratitude and not from one, but two people.

From that day many other instances happened, but in the end he just stuck around. It was strange, it was new, but in a sense it was comforting, especially when you would come home - on Friday, for example, - and he’d be there, entertaining your daughter and then greeting you with a smile and a silly wave of his hand.

You don’t have a husband, and your daughter doesn’t have a father - but with his presence Sampo Koski manages to fill those voids even if a little bit.

Aeons you love days off. A morning to finally sleep in and do not run around like crazy in attempts to get yourself and your kid ready. Even breakfast wasn’t on you today, because the ‘silly man’ stayed the night and told you to get your sleep, assuring you with that confident puff of his chest that the Sampo Koski would offer you his best service, which effectively made you giggle.

Tonight he even cuddled with you, letting you bury your face in his neck and be a little vulnerable in the arms of a man with whom you had the most peculiar relationship ever. But after such equally peculiar moments you really start thinking of suggesting moving from the couch in the living room to your bedroom permanently. It’s been months already, who would’ve thought.

Barefoot and not even glancing at the robe on the chair near the window you leave the room, rubbing at your eyes and brushing your hair away from your face. You are craving the cup of your morning drink, and so you let your legs carry you to the kitchen at first. However two voices coming from your wardrobe room instantly peak your interest and make you halt in your walking. What on earth could your daughter and your clown of a man be doing there?

And soon enough you find it out.

“Sit still, please!” The girl begs with an eye shadow palette in one tiny hand and a huge brush in the other. “It’ll smudge if you keep turning to the mirror!”

“Just can’t wait to see how beautiful I am, princess, ‘s all~”

There, on the floor among the rows of your clothes and shelves with beauty products and accessories, none other than Sampo is sitting, willingly offering his face to your daughter’s practice of applying makeup. And gods he looks absolutely hilarious.

But that’s not what exactly concerns you.

“Is that my dress?” You point at the red shimmery thing snuggly sitting on the man in front of you and that’s when the two notice you.

“Yes, mommy!”

“Say I pulled it off, right?” With a smirk the green-eyed menace winks at you and it looks even worse with poorly done lashes. You have to stifle your laughter. “Though I must admit, we had to keep it unzipped - my chest appeared to be bigger than yours-”

And that’s when you regret not bringing slippers with you - one flying in his head would be of great help.

“Sometimes I really hate you.”

“Nuh, sweet thing, you love me!”

“Well,” you step closer, grabbing a tissue to try and fix at least the overly bright blush on his cheeks, “maybe. Maybe I actually do.”

Suddenly Sampo is tongue-tied and silent, trying very hard to fight off the stupid grin forcing its way onto his face. But with thoroughly smeared red lipstick on his mouth it looks so damn comical.

“Mom, do you think pa looks pretty?” Your daughter hopefully asks, putting aside her tools, and that little two-letter word doesn’t go unnoticed by either of you. You feel a real blush burning under your deft fingers.

“Yes, sweety, Pa-mpo looks very pretty,” his head whips in your direction like you’ve just told him to go and surrender to the Belobog’s esteemed order keepers.

“...Pa-mpo?”

“Would you prefer Da-mpo instead?” Cocking your head in question, you smirk at him, relishing in the pout he is wearing at the moment. “Or maybe Sam-pa?”

“No, thank you very much,” he huffs. “Little princess called me ‘pa’, so be nice and respect it.”

And now it is you who is surprised. You haven’t really discussed with Sampo who he was to your daughter, and who she was to him - but if he is making this step of acknowledging the matter, then who are you to spoil it? Who knows, maybe things will work out quite pleasantly in the end.

“Alright, pa, I will respect that.”

“Hey! For you I am your precious popo baby, a koskiss to your lips, the love of your-”

“Don’t even dream of it.”

Jing Yuan

Yanqing would be enough of an answer to the kid question, but it is not. Sure, his young disciple is practically a son to the General, but it doesn't mean the man doesn't want his own children.

He does and he has. On multiple occasions Jing Yuan's subordinates walked in on him with a small figure sitting in his lap or perched on his strong arm, observing what the dad's been up to with his plans and documents. You scolded your husband for this many times, but the bastard only smiles and keeps stealing his daughter to work to keep him company. Or she sneaks on her own - that caused you many almost heart attacks when she was no older than a couple of decades.

For Jing Yuan it’s all good though - he gets to spend time with his baby and have you inevitably join him in search for your adventurous child.

The General has a separate folder for all the pictures of his daughter on his phone - every single one he takes and every single one you send him when he couldn’t bring his girl to some of his meetings (yet he really tried, until you put your foot down and saved many of his subordinates from the prolonging of said meetings). Even the background, hidden from prying eyes behind the passcode of your and her birthdays, is his little one, cradled in your arms, as the two of you are watching kites flying in the sky.

Yanqing at first was set on treating her with the same respect he does his mentor and you, his wife, but you quickly put an end to it, basically turning the boy into her older brother. He didn’t mind at all - if anything he is sometimes way too eager to push the two of you to go on a date so he can babysit. Often you would return to the two fast asleep either on the girl’s bed or cuddled to Mimi with toys scattered and at least two books lying on the floor. The huge lion adores the girl - sometimes you feel like it thinks of her as its own cub, and the thick mane of hair your daughter got from her father does not help.

And it appeared to be as eager to steal your daughter from you as your husband is…

“Y/n!” You practically jump when the doors to your bedroom fly open and Jing Yuan bursts inside. Immediately you notice his disheveled state - hair down and a mess, the robe he wore this morning for comfortable work in his home office is falling off one of his shoulders and a shoe is missing from his foot.

“Aeons, Yuan, don’t scare me like that,” you put a comb down on your vanity table and fully turn to face him. “What happened?”

“Is our precious baby with you?” He steps further into the room and starts looking around frantically. Okay, now that got worrisome.

“No? You took her earlier this afternoon after lunch to play in your study while you work. Have you really forgotten that? My love, you are getting old.”

You hear clearly as he curses under his breath, raking thick fingers through his hair. The golden eyes look at you and in them you spot a flicker of anxiety.

“...Jing Yuan, don’t tell me that you managed to lose our daughter.”

“I didn’t, I swear,” he winces at the full name usage, watching you rise from your seat and quickly approach him. “She was right by my side, watching the animal videos on my phone, but then I got immersed in the latest reports from the Sky-Faring Commission and when I finished whose - she was gone!”

“Uh, want me to call your phone? Maybe she still has it.”

To that he puts a hand in the robe’s pocket and brings out his device. Oh god.

“It was lying on the floor, still playing videos.”

“Okay, deep breaths,” you are not sure if you are telling it to him or to yourself, but you too take an inhale, meanwhile busying your hands with adjusting his clothes. “Even buried in work you’d still notice if a human sneaked in, right?” He nods. “And you’d notice if she left - she would’ve warned you about that.” He nods again, lips pursed and eyes staring at one point. “Yanqing is not as skilled to come unannounced and take her, and he wouldn’t do it without your permission, so-”

“Wait,” his hand catches yours and realization flashes in his features. “Mimi came.”

“...Mimi?” Before you can ask him to elaborate, your husband turns around and rushes out of the bedroom. Concerned and a little bit intrigued, you quickly follow.

In one of the rooms of your huge house the two of you finally find the lion, and Jing Yuan almost drops on the floor in relief when his girl is spotted in the animal’s embrace. 

“Is she…sleeping?” You ask, glancing from behind his broad back.

“It appears so. Hey, Mimi,” the maned head lifts, two ambers taking in your appearances and a pleased huff is let out through the nose upon recognition.

“Well, my dear,” you pat his shoulder, shaking your head, “it appears that people were right - like the owner, like the pet. Congratulations, your lion took your habit of stealing our daughter to heart. Good luck prying her from it.”

“You say it like it’s something hard to do,” there it is, a confident smile is back on his face as he strides closer to the animal, ready to bend down and get his girl. Only for that lift of the corners of his lips to be gone when Mimi growls at him in a warning and shields your daughter’s little body with its head.

You only smirk and leave the scene to go and get your phone - there is no way you are not filming your husband dealing with the consequences of his own behavior.

[idyllic-affections]

Would u please do Arlecchino adopting a reader? I just want to be adopted by our dearest Arlecchino

warmth.

summary. arlecchino's warmth is quite an effective repellent for snezhnaya's everlasting cold.

trigger & content warnings. home invasion, gunshots are mentioned, a bit of violence in general, reader's parents are murdered (not by arlecchino) but it is non-descriptive and reader does not witness it.

tropes, pairings, fic length, & other notes. hurt/comfort, found family-ish. arlecchino & child!reader. 1.1k words. they/them pronouns used for reader.

author's thoughts. hehehehehe arle <3 i was supposed to write a fic featuring kafka (hsr) today in celebration of her coming home. Erm. yeah. That did not happen! clearly. /lh

       It happened all too quickly.

       It truly was a peaceful night, just like any other. The fire crackled on soothingly in the background, shadows dancing on the walls, and the warmth staving off the frigid cold that was all but characteristic of Snezhnaya's nights. Peering out the window would reveal the light, steady snowfall; typically, more blizzard-like conditions would be present, but perhaps the Tsaritsa was in quite a good mood that night in particular, for the snow was gentle in its falling and the winds did not rage on cruelly, biting and nipping angrily at any unfortunate person caught out in the middle of the storm.

       Their mother hummed a soft lullaby to them as her calloused fingers, all thanks to years of sewing and hunting combined, rubbed up and down their back. Their father had been in the kitchen—cooking was a responsibility shared between their parents (and really, how could he have asked his wife to move when their beloved, sweet child was half-asleep on her lap? That was a /far/ too wicked request. No, he would not dare disturb theirs and their mother's peace).

       ...And in a split second, it had all come crumbling down.

       Someone's weight was thrown against the door, causing a loud slam! to resonate within the walls.

       Once, and their mother sprung up, jerking them awake with her motions. In their half-asleep state, they hardly understood what was going on as their father rushed defensively out of the kitchen with an axe.

       Twice, and their mother gathered them in her arms before darting towards the back of the house—the absolute farthest end—at her husband's command. She rushed into one of the bedrooms, swiftly ripping the closet door open and pushing them in, insisting quietly that they hid among the pile of thick winter coats where they would not be seen.

       "You just have to hide for a little, okay?" she murmured softly, deft hands pulling coats over their little body and face. "And remember—stay quiet, okay? Shh."

       At the end of her sentence, she made a shushing motion with a shaky, trembling smile.

       Perhaps it was her attempt at soothing them, but children are often not so easily fooled. The gesture did naught to calm their pounding heart. She had done her best to look certain and reassuring, but all it did was make them all the more terrified.

       Their mother stood up, closing the closet door only slightly; it may look suspicious if it had been closed completely, she thought.

       Then, she was gone, and they were left only with the company of their thoughts.

       It was mostly quiet for a few minutes. They could vaguely make out the muffled sounds of talking—fighting, more accurately. It sounded angry. As if these invasive strangers were demanding something.

       They choked back a sob as the walls shook around them due to the noise. A scream, then a gunshot, then another, and then silence.

       Through the silence, they could discern the sound of wet slicing. Their heart dropped further into the endless pit of their stomach as they tried their best to curl further into themselves and the pile of coats.

       Click, click, click...

       Heels, gradually getting louder as their wearer approached. Someone was coming. Someone was going to find them.

       It all happened far too quickly.

       ...And now, before them, none other than the Fourth of the Fatui Harbingers was kneeled. It was not hard for her to find them, not with all their shuffling and shaking and heavy, anxious breathing.

       Interestingly, she was far less threatening than what they thought she might be. They didn't doubt that she had the capacity to be absolutely horrifying, but with them...

       "You can come out now," she encouraged. Her tone could hardly be described as forceful; if anything, she was... suprisingly gentle. Patient, even, as she held out her hand invitingly. It was as if she were coaxing a frightened animal out from its hiding place. "There is no longer anything to be afraid of."

       Still, they hesitated. "Where—" Their throat was dry with terror and their little voice trembled as it came out. With shaking hands, they moved some of the coats off of them. The Knave did note, however, that they clung to one particlar coat; it must have belonged to one of their parents, if she had to guess. Children clung onto sentimental items like that. They swallowed and tried again: "Where are my parents?"

       "They are no longer with us. I am sincerely sorry. Had I arrived sooner, they might have lived."

       A tremble shook their whole body—whether it was from the cold seeping into their house through the open front door (though the room they were in was a few twists and turns in a hallway away, the Snezhnayan cold was a unique beast in that it could turn a house frigid in a matter of seconds) or from grief, they could not be sure.

       "Where..." They sniffled, hands balled into small fists as they tried to rub away the tears gathering in their eyes. "What do I do? I don't wanna be alone..."

       "You won't be," Arlecchino said. "You will come with me. You will never be alone again."

       All they could do was stumble out of the closet, coat held firmly in their hands and nod. Where else were they supposed to go? Furthermore, how were they meant to say no to a Fatui Harbinger? She was kind enough to offer to take them somewher, and truly, anywhere would have been better than the cold and lonely house in which their parents were killed.

       Though, it was greatly debatable whether the Fourth was being kind or opportunistic.

       At their young age, they couldn't wrap their mind around any ulterior motives she may have had. They could not so much as consider such a thing, not when she so kindly and tenderly took the coat from their hands, wrapped it around their shivering body, and hoisted them up into her arms. She radiated a warmth that they could not help but lean into, head coming to rest on her squared and confident shoulder. It was not so unbearbly cold when they were in her arms.

       One might regard her mannerisms... parental, as if she had great experience with young children and their needs. It surely seemed so, considering how effortlessly and fluidly she handled them. It was like she had done it a million times before.

       Indeed, it would not be surprising if that were the case.

       Arlecchino hummed, adjusting their weight in her arms slightly.

       Then, her nails softly raked over their head and through their hair. Her smooth, self-assured voice reached their ears with a command they could not deny or resist:

       "Rest for now, little one."

please consider reblogging with kind tags or comments, it helps me out quite a lot!

[viktorxsheep]

HI! i apologize for any mistakes, i dont send requests to often :,)

I was wondering if you could do the Star Rail boys and Fem! Reader with a pucca dynamic? Like she's over here tracking them down just to give them kisses and stuff, and gets jealous pretty easily. If all of them are too much just Blade and/dan heng! :))

hi!! thanks for the request! i loved this show so much when i was younger haha. thankyou for allowing me to indulge in my dan heng and welt yang love teehee. (no mistakes by the way!! :>>)

dan heng, welt yang, blade, jing yuan, gepard x fem! reader

___

dan heng

Dan Heng liked his peace. He liked his days in his room, looking through the archives as he sorted through every single data that he had jotted down in his notebook.

Ofcourse, he also knew to always expect you. Disrupting the perfect peace that he made for himself. He always acted annoyed and a little bit grumpy whenever you bursted through his doors, but he genuinely did like it. He loved your kisses, he could drown in them and he would reincarnate just so he could open his arms and allow you to ram into them.

As your relationship grew, he started getting a bit more flustered at your strong declarations of love. Your jealousy, your passion- he’s never experienced a love this strong and this good. All he wants to do now is to return it tenfold…r he’s still a little bit shy.

So when he can finally rest beside you, you sleeping in his arms, he can kiss your forehead as he hums a soft tune from his past. He didn’t expect that he’d love you this much, but now he even gets a little grumpy if you don’t kiss him all over the face in the morning, or go and tightly hug him. He still has nightmares..but now, he can atleast envision your body dashing to his to kiss him when he wakes up instead of the fear and the hurt.

blade

Blade was a little different from Dan Heng. Where Dan Heng was shy and a little bit unsure on how to repay your affections, Blade embraced this wholeheartedly. He relished in the affection, it made him happy.

But a small pet of him wondered if this was alright, if he even deserved this. From all of his past actions, the mistakes he would most definitely make in the future- did he deserve you running to him and toppling him over for kisses? He doesn’t want to dwell, instead, he hopes you let him love you the same way.

If ever you are jealous, he will sit you on his lap (albeit a little awkwardly at first) and he will comfort your insecurities. Are his comforting words not exactly very comforting? sure, but he tries. “You must be sick if you believe I do not love you, don’t be silly.”

Although he really hopes you would stop trying to chase after him during missions for affection, you could get hurt and it’s a bit annoying being teased by Kafka (well, he’d go through it if it’s you at the very least).

welt yang

He is such an old man. Stop giving him heart attacks as you go and kiss him every morning! atleast let him brush his teeth, but he has a feeling you don’t really mind that much. Welt always wakes up earlier than you do, smiling as he watches you excitedly open your eyes to meet his loving embrace.

You may be overexcited and very in love, but Welt can almost beat you in one thing…being the greatest male wife house husband figure you could think of. For every gift, kiss you shower him with, hugs- he surprises you with homemade cooking, clothes that he patched up, flowers and chocolates (that he made himself).

Whenever you get jealous, he can’t help but stifle a small laugh. You were so cute- though he really does not want you to feel insecure. When he knows you’re getting jealous (because he can read you like an open book) he calmly sets you aside and kisses your forehead, assuring you that his love and his heart lies only with you. He couldn’t imagine his life without you in it, so tell him if ever you feel insecure or jealous, he will always listen.

jing yuan

The fearsome leader of the cloud knights believed he was prepared for any sort of challenge. Some fearsome and formidable foes? no matter, stellaron hunters? he will ensure the safety of everyone he can. But who knew he would be so soft and fall victim to-

you. Wonderful, amazing, beautiful you. You in all of your glory, your soft kisses and excited smiles. He could sleep all day just to see you in his dreams, but he loves you even better in real life. He will get flustered (and never show it), and he will always feel bad when he’s forced to ask you to wait outside a meeting room due to the confidential information being shared.

He will ease your worries, he will hold your hand. He wants you to be as safe and as happy as possible, so how could he not indulge you? whatever kisses you’d like the give him, you may. While he can’t always let you bulldoze over to him just to kiss, he will always make it up to you after the moment you two get home.

gepard

You wanted to kill him.

He was sure.

Fearsome, strong, loyal knight captain. That was who he was and how his reputation was…atleast until his underlings saw the red hot blush on his face as you somehow got through the silver mane guards just to kiss and hug him. While he always scolds you (always with a small stutter due to the shock and flusteredness) to not follow him while he went away, he always held you in his arms and let you do as you pleased.

He would walk you back to the safer areas in the administrative district of Belobog, letting you get your fill in of as much hugs and kisses you want before he’s forced to rip himself and his tomato red face away from you.

You being jealous was the most shocking for him. You’re jealous? why? he may be a knight captain, but you were infinitely more beautiful and amazing and- if this line were to continue on, it would fill pages and pages of writing. An entire novel dedicated to every affection you’d offer and how he would call you.

[l0z14]

Young Alicent

House of The Dragon

Wife-Mitski/HOTD 1x04/SK/HOTD 1x05/HOTD 1x03/Unknown/Youthful Writings-Albert Camus/Diaries-Franz Kafka/Ophelia-John Everett Millais/HOTD 2x07/Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God-Rainer Maria Rilke/HOTD 1x01/HOTD 1x03/The Brothers Karamazov-Fyodor Dostoevsky/HOTD 1x03/Call My Name-Melissa Febos.

[goodluckclove]

Eulogy for Kafka

Hey, friends.

So at this point I've accepted that my thirteen year old tabby Kafka is likely dead. She was the king of our household, a noble individual who loved me, my wife, and no one else, and in tribute I'd like to talk about her. Join me under the read more to say goodbye to my best friend for so much of my life.

I was told you were on the verge of death when they found you. Half-starved in a field in Gilroy, California, you were nursed back to health and then adopted by my parents from the shelter as a replacement for the cat that fell before you. You were small, fully-matured yet looking still akin to an older kitten. I named you Kafka - both after the writer, and after a cat from a failed young adult novel I wrote a few years beforehand.

Kafka, your hobbies included knocking the books out of my bookshelves, scratching up my records, and at one point pulling cords from their sockets. You screamed constantly whenever I left my bedroom, to the point where I questioned whether I'd ever be able to move.

But I did move. I took you with me to Portland, Oregon, on a long car ride where you smushed your face up against the netting of your carrier. And then I brought you a few miles from that first apartment into a studio of our very own, where you ruled over the domain and once slept by my clawfoot tub as I cried in the bath. After that it was to the apartment of my now-wife, who you hesitated around the proximity of before falling fully in love.

We were hoping the house we bought together would be your final stop on this road trip. But you had other plans. After refusing to step outside your home for thirteen years, you ducked out when we weren't looking and were set loose in the suburban streets of Portland.

This hurt me at first. i wept imagining you cold and scared and alone, huddled under some bush and wishing things were different. Then something in me changed. Because you refused to go outside as a matter of principle, didn't you? I'd carry you in my arms and step out into the parking lot as a goof and you'd let out that familiar low-tone grumble.

You started peeking by the open doorway when I brought my bike in, and I'd laugh. Where do you think you're going? I'd say, almost tauntingly.

Now? You might've been thinking. No no, not now.

Wife told me last night they were giving you scratches and pets, and for the first time since I moved in, you started purring loudly. They said this a few time, suggesting they were moved and haunted by the moment.

Now, you might've decided then. Now it's okay.

I used to say you were once feral - since rehabilitated and reformed. But that was never true. You were always a feral cat, Kafka. You just found two people that you loved enough to protect and a home you felt fit to reign over. But in the moments when your biological clock told you things were ending, you did not die the king you were in life. No, you dove bac out into the wild and pitter-pattered across the damp grass and sidewalk. A beast. A warrior.

You might've ended up cold and wet, but I bet after a life of warmth and comfort that must've thrilled you. You understood the dirt, the dirt you almost died in, and maybe a part of you was certain that you would be best suited to end your time here in the arms of the earth that birthed you.

For thirteen years I was your parent. I cried into your fur. You licked your tongue across my cheek until the skin was raw. I held you up by the arm pits and made you do a little dance. You slept on my pillow and took up two-thirds of that pillow.

You saw me out of my abusive household. You saw me through terrible relationships and lonely night after lonely night. And, ultimately, you saw me to my wife.

You met my wife. You considered them. You sat on their chest and hissed when they tried to move you to get up. And gradually you understood that they were safe. The brought you toys and you actually played with them. We would go to bed at two in the morning and hear you shouting at your mouse friend Carl for upwards of twenty minutes.

If one of us came out you would look up at us so innocently. Proudly, almost. We'd congratulate you on a good hunt, because you are at your core a feral creature.

I trust you waited to leave until you knew we would be okay. You would always keep us company whenever we were upset - we'd call it Spaghetti Time, although I don't know why. And I do think we'll be okay.

For now it hurts. I wish I could've been there. I wanted you to choose ultimately, but I wanted you to choose to be with me. I'm selfish in that way, I guess.

I don't hold faith in ghosts, but I'm confident your presence will stick around our family. Based on how insistent you were on always sitting on my lap, grumbling anytime I moved too much, I don't believe you have much interest in crossing over as they say.

Bob and Nipsy will be housecats now. I bet you told them about sunbeams, and maybe the joys of hiding in cabinets. You did a great job teaching Bob on how to be a proper tabby cat. He lounged in between Riley and myself this morning, calm and sweet. Almost like he knew.

I'm going to circle the neighborhood soon to see if I can find any sign of you. If not, when we get a house the first thing we do is going to be to plant a tree in the yard in your honor. Something that flowers. I was thinking dogwood.

Thank you, Kafka. Thank you for loving me unconditionally for twelve years of my life. I will do everything I can to live in a way that respects and honors the effort you put into keeping me going.

I will love you so completely for the rest of my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[elektrischemaidchen]

Advent Calender #5: Alle meine Boyfriends sind tot

All good things come to an end. This little poison cabinet advent calendar (and we hope we'll be able to contribute a little something to @franzliszt-official 's calendar ;)), as well as our Horus cycle.

And yes, the ‘Gothic Tina Belchers’ (thanks for that, guys!) have decided not to put the title track ‘Alle meine Boyfriends sind tot’ on tomorrow's album of the same name. Our 2 ½ hardcore listeners may forgive us.

Why? Because we are sure that nobody could follow us mentally anymore. I mean:

Do you remember that we got this time machine from the professor and instead of saving the world, we did the young Franz Liszt? Then we locked him and all the other Horus donors in our cellar to sew them all into the perfect man? Then there was this story about the rendezvous with this guy who liked @chopinski-official but couldn't get his head round the fact that the real Chopin was already sitting in our house gagged, without his hands. (There's actually a song in between in which I tell my Polish grandma that we have Chopin in the cellar, but she thinks it's stupid because artists couldn't feed a family. It'll be on the next album). And then we made a film evening with the Horus with Frankenstein and Lilo and Stitch, then he had an existential crisis while we just wanted to do dirty stuff. After that he mutated into the Beach Horus, who was only interested in lower-class crap. Then he built himself a perfect second wife out of dumb models and then, unfortunately, we had to get rid of him. And this song is just about how we go down to the basement after disposing of Horus and all our Horus donors are comforted, even though they're missing so many body parts, but we all love each other anyway.... and then we all move upstairs and practice polygamy. (They'll get their limbs back, though, I promise. Franz without a face, c'mon.) The mistake, by the way, was to take something from Byron. We'll have to do it differently for the next Horus.

Apart from the fact that we desperately need therapy, it's a concept that's rather...unwieldy?...you know. So, tomorrow on the album you'll get Horus III (Beach-Horus) and today Horus IV. ;) And, guys, just the fact that there are real people out there who listen to songs like this makes us love you all even more. <3

I look down into the cellar to cry There it sits, my Horus starter pack They ask me What happened? I dumped my Horus I knew it, says Kafka quietly Then I guess he wasn't so keen after all Chopin hugs me with his stumps Well, they don't let themselves go with pity All my boyfriends are dead Well almost They are the saviours in my time of need No one can hold a candle to them All others must give way to them I prophesied it, says Novalis He's really not sorry for anything without a heart Will I get my bum back now? Rossetti asks, half bent over I look at Liszt, without a face He'd be prettier with it, I think Rasputin shouts all the time something in Russian, I don't feel sorry for him All my boyfriends are dead Well, almost They're the saviours in my time of need No one can hold a candle to them All others must give way to them Blind Byron leans back Says you've got your luck here One being out of all of us is really too much How exhausting, such rubbish Why don't we all live upstairs And can try out polygamy? We're all hot in our own way And apart from Rasputin, we're all quiet And Schiller can't do anything anyway He just runs around like a headless chicken It would just be nice if Liszt could get his face back It's really not mundane without it And then we'll all move in with you There's bohemia and there's red wine And I hug them, they're right Our love, it's still real But on the inside I take out a tape measure And figure out my next Horus

[victorjbanisfamilyfoundation]

Abridged version of when Victor J. Banis was indicted for obscenity charges, from his memoir 'Spine Intact, Some Creases' (it hops around from chapter to further along chapter). Seemed relevant right now, especially what he decided to do in the end.

Alt Text:

Curiouser and Curiouser. I kept the appointment as arranged and found that I was to be charged, along with ten others, with Conspiracy to Distribute Obscene Material. I met my fellow conspirators – Milt Luros and his wife, Bea, the owners of Brandon House and a number of other publishing operations; Mel Friedman, of course; Bernie Abramson, who headed their shipping department; Stanley Sohler, Harold Straubing and Paul Wisner, who were editors; Elmer Batters, a free lance photographer; and two other free lance writers besides myself – Sam Merwin and Richard Geis. The others were each of them hit with a variety of charges but I was included only in the first, blanket conspiracy charge, a fact which would ultimately prove significant.

Conspiracy? Didn’t that require some form of communication among the conspirators? I had never met any of these people before, nor communicated with them in any manner. Indeed, until we met at the Federal Building, I had never even heard their names. The only person from the Luros publishing business with whom I had communicated – except for the call the day before from Mel Friedman – was the editor who had written regarding my book, and his only suggestion had been to expand its length. There had been no suggestions, veiled or otherwise, to ‘spice up’ the book in any way, as would later be suggested in court, or to address myself to anyone’s prurient interests. Gloria’s melons were entirely my own. Anyway, that editor wasn’t among my indicted co-conspirators.

It was all a bit Kafka-esque. The more so when, as we were leaving the courtroom, I was met by a man who introduced himself as Donald Schoof, Chief Postal Inspector for the Los Angeles area. I later learned that it was Mister Schoof who had headed the so-called investigation and brought the charges against us. Mister Schoof asked to speak with me alone; apparently the others were all known to him but I was a paperback virgin, so to speak. Or almost, anyway, which I have always thought ought to count in those matters. Mister Schoof muttered (muttered, I swear it, just like a bad gangster movie) that he could make things easier for me if I would care to switch sides and cooperate with the government.

Now, at the time, I had no problems with cooperating with the government. I had always considered myself a good citizen, if not a model one, and had never set out to commit any crime. Up until now my only courtroom experience was in Dayton, Ohio in 1956, when an angry wife named me as co-respondent in a divorce case.

But it did seem to me that if this Mister Schoof’s interest was in making things easier for me, the best time to have approached me might have been before I was charged with a crime of which I was so patently innocent. I have always been a devout coward. And after that debacle in the divorce court I certainly wanted no more legal entanglements. To be honest, had someone taken the trouble to romance me beforehand (candlelight and soft music are givens in this scenario) I would probably in the afterglow of consummation have blabbed everything I knew about Milt Luros – which was of course absolutely nothing. But didn’t they already know that? Looking back, I can see that what I was really guilty of was criminal innocence. I hadn’t a clue. In my defense, I might point out that I had not bought those initial paperbacks from ‘under the counter;’ no plain brown wrappers, no hasty swaps in darkened doorways. I had walked into a store in broad daylight, had taken them directly from the racks on the walls, and forked over my money. How could I have guessed that forking so openly might involve anything illegal?

I scorned Mister Schoof’s advances. Anyway, his approach struck me as a bit too ‘after the fact.’ I was indignant at being so falsely charged, and kiss me where he might, Mister Schoof was not going to have me on his mattress willingly. I thought then – and think still – that if they had done a sufficient investigation to bring all these charges against all these people, they must certainly have known that this was a first time effort from me and that I had never met with – let alone conspired with – any of these people.

Besides, when I went home and reread Gloria, I was convinced that someone from the other camp had only to get around to reading this lovely book to realize at once what a mistake had been made.

As I said before, Milt Luros’ critics dubbed him the ‘King of Pornography.’ Actually he was one of the nicest people I had ever met, a soft spoken New Yorker and a true gentleman in the most old fashioned sense of the word. An artist himself, Milt had set out to print quality art books. In short time he found art books entirely unprofitable – but he was able to make money printing sexually related material – initially for others but eventually for his own companies. The Federal Government did not like the material he printed. It seemed that manhood and melon breasts were corrupting society. And as I said earlier, federal law allowed charges to be brought not only where the material was shipped from or to, but anywhere it was shipped through. In our case the charges had been brought and the trial would be held in Sioux City, Iowa, even though none of the material involved was ever available in Sioux City, Iowa. I can say for a fact that my Gloria would not have been found dead in Sioux City. I myself went with the greatest reluctance. The idea apparently was not so much that the government thought they might get convictions on these charges but that by bringing repeated charges and forcing Luros to defend himself over and over again in small towns and cities around the country (at that time, there were trials pending in two other locations, one in Texas and I have forgotten the other) they could bankrupt him – or convince him to give up the business.

The trials were expensive. Including people like myself and the other writers and freelancers who came to Sioux City made it all the more expensive. Partly for his own protection and partly because it was his nature, Milt picked up the tab for everyone and did so in the grand manner. The ‘best’ hotel in Sioux City was only a Holiday Inn but that was where Milt stayed and that was where we all stayed. We ate in the same restaurants, flew the same flights back and forth when he did – there was no attempt to save pennies by limiting our share of the expenses. It was generous indeed of Milt – and costly. By the time I got to Sioux City I had come to realize that my indictment had really nothing much to do with me or with Gloria or the desire of the U.S. Authorities to see me in prison, though that might well have been the result. The real reason I was there was to help run up the tab.

All of the pulp publishers of the time had their own attorneys however, who performed the same sort of service. In time I came to see that virtually everything these publishers did was done with one eye on the legal arena. As more and more charges were brought and more material defended in courtrooms, the Courts – particularly the U.S. Supreme Court – struggled to find a coherent legal definition for obscenity. The legal stratagems advised by the publishers’ attorneys changed and developed accordingly.

Two of the key elements handed down by the Supreme Court during this time were that (in order to be considered obscene) the material must, ‘taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest of the reader,’ and that it must be ‘utterly without redeeming social value.’ By the mid-sixties it was common for paperback novels to include on their covers or front page blurbs quoting various authorities or ‘experts’ on sexual behavior. So my Stranger at the Door from Greenleaf in 1967 quoted at length Alex Comfort’s book, Sex in Society (1963): ‘Forms of behavior have to be considered in the light of their unconscious origin, in the light of what is customary or tolerated in a given culture, and in the light of the part they play in the individual’s mental economy – of who does what and when and where. It is disproportionate, if we are interested in the social effects, to lay much emphasis on the kind of physical variation or deviation in behavior…’ The actual quote was considerably longer and much in the same vein. I’m not sure that it had any particular relevance to the novel that followed, but it could be seen to supply redeeming social value.

In the late sixties, when ‘case history’ types of non-fiction began to proliferate, these books invariably included an authoritative forward or introduction written by some ‘expert’ – nearly always a Ph.D., though the degree often had nothing at all to do with this field of interest.

In the seventies, books began to appear with out-and-out hardcore photographs. The text that accompanied these action photos addressed psychological and (sometimes peripheral) medical issues and was deliberately written in a dry, scholarly style. It was thought that it would be difficult, hopefully impossible, for a jury considering the work ‘as a whole’ to find this text obscene, whatever they might think of the photographs.

At the time of Gloria, however, and the Sioux City trial, much of that strategy was still in the future. The Affairs of Gloria did have some rather crude drawings, but the sexual element was only vaguely suggested and the people in them were clothed, if sometimes a bit scantily.

Watching these two pros at work was fascinating. And, at least to start, I wasn’t too worried. At this time I still believed that somewhere along the way, someone would look at Gloria and realize a mistake had been made.

And I was a celebrity, if only of a minor sort. Flashbulbs flashed and reporters barked when we arrived at airports, and we made the New York Times (though not the front page). For the record, they had no shortage of words with which to describe us. In Sioux City we were shunned in the manner that every queen comes to recognize and in a perverse way enjoy. We were lepers, but lepers who were the focus of everyone’s attention.

Notwithstanding the interesting companions or circumstances, however, there were ten years in Federal prison hanging over my head. I was young, blond, not unattractive and a bit effeminate. I thought it safe to suppose that, should prison be the outcome, those would not be the cheeriest of years for me.

And that possibility loomed larger as the weeks passed in the courtroom in Sioux City. Besides books the charges involved a handful of nudist magazines as well. Not the hardcore action pics that you can buy in gift shops today, nor even the bare beavers of Hustler or Penthouse. These were more the Sunshine & Health sort of thing – people in the buff playing volley ball, with the occasional limp appendage bouncing about. I suppose someone might have been sexually aroused by the pictures – but then I know people who get turned on looking at pictures of trolleys.

By the by, none of these magazines were sold in Sioux City. Indeed, there was only one shop that sold Playboy, under the counter. You had to ask for it and it came in the proverbial plain brown wrapper. So it was worrisome to watch jurors, charged with determining if this material was obscene, pass magazines from one to another without a glance at them, holding them gingerly by their fingertips as it fearing contamination. Had they even read Gloria, I wondered? I doubted it. More to the point, the indictment named me in a conspiracy charge with all the other defendants so that, though I had nothing at all to do with these magazines – heck, I hadn’t even seen some of them, and never got to – the finding that they were obscene could send me to prison.

I got more nervous still when government witnesses, former employees of the Luroses, testified under oath about my connections with the other defendants – meetings I allegedly attended, phone calls, letters – all fictitious. I could only imagine what threats or promises the Federal prosecutors must have made to get this sort of perjured testimony from frightened witnesses. What if I had accepted Mister Schoof’s invitation to testify against Luros? I knew nothing at all about Luros or his operations and so there was nothing in truth I could have said. But would Schoof and the prosecutors have found a way to force me to say what they wanted said, truth or not? I like to think not but clearly they had accomplished just that feat with other witnesses.

I was soon enough aware that they were not shy about intimidation. The trial hadn’t even begun before my first class mail began to arrive opened (yes, Virginia, it is illegal). Manuscripts were routinely left at my doorstep atop their envelopes, in case I had any doubts that they were being perused.

Was I paranoid or was my Sioux City motel room really bugged? An employee of the motel whispered to me that it was. I don’t know why he would have made up such a story. And Stanley Fleishman, without saying so directly, gave me to understand that it was safest to make that assumption.

So much for justice and the American way. The foreplay was over. The federal government and Mister Schoof had me on the bed and they weren’t going to let me up until they had their vile ways with me. The trial went on. And on. It became less interesting to sit and listen to testimony I knew to be false. At the beginning we had buoyed ourselves with the hope that the Judge would quickly dismiss the case or that the prosecution’s case would prove brief and we would soon be done with it. The indictments had come down in March of 1965. The trial began in October. We hoped to be home by Halloween. Then Thanksgiving. Christmas loomed.

At last in late December the government rested its case. Our side rested its case without presenting one. Fleishman and Foreman were convinced that the charges had not been proven but there was more to their strategy than that. Experience had shown that these cases often went to the appeals courts. That was actually better for the publisher – the results of a local district trial had little impact on the actions of other courts but a ruling by the appeals court was binding on all Federal courts within that district unless overturned by the Supreme Court – in other words, a ruling at the appellate level could work to Luros’ benefit in other courtrooms and to the benefit of other publishers as well.

In a sense, then, offering no defense was virtually asking for a move to the appellate court – and at the same time giving the government no goofs in the defense case to seize upon and use to argue against an appeal.

All well and good, of course. The strategy was a sound one. But I had been abused and misused for four months; and it left us heading home for a Christmas recess with the outcome still unresolved. Not a very merry Christmas present.

Needless to say we did finally get to the ground intact, if not unsoiled. I vowed that I would never again set foot in an airplane. We arrived at the Federal Courthouse only a few minutes late – and within a few minutes more the judge had dismissed the conspiracy count of the indictment. Which meant effectively that he had dismissed me. Acquitted, I was free to go – to spend several days returning back to Los Angeles by bus or train, or renege on my vow and hop a plane.

Still I was free. My co-defendants proved not so lucky. They were convicted by the Sioux City jury, those uptight – sorry, I meant upright – men and women who had declined even to look at the evidence presented to them. In time those convictions were overturned on appeal, as our attorneys had foreseen, but my co-defendants would spend the intervening time wondering if they were on their way to prison and live out their lives with the stigma of a federal conviction. Was Justice served, I asked?

‘Justice was served,’ Dick Geis answered me with understandable bitterness. ‘She was served her head on a platter.’

For me, the bottom line was that my innocence was gone forever. I had been screwed in no uncertain terms. And we all know what that means for your virginity. I felt sore and violated. I came home from Sioux City with a burning resentment for the callous disregard that the government had displayed for what I considered some pretty fundamental rights I thought guaranteed by our constitution. There’s a reason that the founding fathers put freedom of speech right up there at the beginning. Without that, the rest doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, does it?

And it had all been for naught, as I saw it. It can be a mistake attempting to explain the thought processes of others, but one would have to suppose that in part, at least, the governmental individuals involved in indicting me must have assumed that they could discourage me from any further activity in the paperback business. Ironically, the result was exactly the opposite.

Under other circumstances, I’m not sure that I would have had much interest in pursuing a paperback writing career; Gloria had been fun but a whim, really. Certainly I had no interest in a career writing of faux lesbians.

I was still hurting, however, and I felt practically compelled to write at least one or two more books, to show the Federales (and myself) that I had not been intimidated. Well, if I am going to be entirely honest, I have to mention that I quickly discovered that the books were easy to do, for me at any rate. And they paid money.

The only problem was, I had decided I wanted to write gay books, and if lesbians incited government censors to action, writing about gay males doing the deed was like waving red panties in front of a horny bull. The postal authorities and the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, had already proclaimed that sort of dalliance a no-no. Two men holding hands was enough to render a book obscene, as these folks saw it. Holding anything else was blasphemy, at the very least.

I continued to write for Brandon House Books, heterosexual and lesbian-bisexual novels; none, I’m sure, of any real merit. Not even out of respect for our common travail, however, would Milt Luros venture into homosexual waters, nor was I able to generate any interest among the other paperback publishers of the day. By now they all knew who I was. Paperback publishing in those days was a small town and I had paid my dues by taking my lumps along with Luros and company. Everyone was eager to see something from me in the heterosexual or lesbian vein, but even the bravest of them were convinced gay books would be like dropping their pants with little hope of satisfaction.

Well, as everyone knows, when a guy gets really hot for something he isn’t usually much inclined to be discouraged. I remained stubbornly convinced that there was a large and largely untapped market for gay books. The Stonewall uprising wouldn’t happen until 1969, but already by 1965 gays were coming out of their closets.

In 1965 I wrote my first gay novel, The Why Not. The Why Not of the title was a bar my friends and I frequented, actually called The Castaways but dubbed The Why Not by my secretary, Lady Agatha, because the usual conversation on a weekend was, ‘Are you coming to the bar tonight?’, ‘Why not?’ The book was essentially a collection of vignettes describing my experiences with the bar and its habitués.

[evita-shelby]

Twelfth Night

Or during the Riley Clan's celebration of the Day of the Three Wise Kings at their new mansion, Tommy discovers Franz Kafka.

Mentions of accidental violence, and Tommy’s insecurities and also Kafka’s writing

1923

Tommy had been curious about the traditions Eva’s country had about the twelfth night.

He had introduced her to the English ones on her first time celebrating it by making sure she got the pea in the Twelfth so she could have the paper crown John’s children made for even if he got the clove instead of the bean. Tommy had also played a harmless little prank on her the following morning which resulted in her reacting with her fist right on the kisser.

They laughed about it then ---well he did to make her feel less guilty for punching him--- and laugh about it now as they take a holiday to America to see her family.

They’d bought a mansion in the country, the second largest home in all of fucking America to be exact and would be hosting the entire family now that they had a place more than large enough to accommodate them.

Arrow House as an estate was about twice the size in terms of land, and quite large too, but it looked like a modest row house in comparison to the 19th century castle the Rileys had acquired.

It was a status symbol as well as a home just as much as Arrow House was.

But strangely enough, the Rileys treated the cavernous hall as anyone would treat their home while Tommy still felt a stranger in the bed he and his wife had bought.

Children laugh and play with their parents and nannies, servants bustle about preparing for tonight with the members of the family helping out and while everyone treats him well, Tommy feels as if he stepped through the looking glass.

“I didn’t want to interrupt, but I wanted to check on you before dinner,” she said softly as he hid in the library reading Robert Frost. He’d read Kafka’s short stories and when that made his feeling of otherness worse, Tommy decided to turn to poetry and the whiskey in the crystal decanter.

“If you’d come minutes ago, I would’ve asked you if you’d love me if I turned into a cockroach.” He tries to shove his discomfort away and remembers Eva hardly ever saw her family and they’d be home by next week.

“Kafka is definitely worth learning German for, even if his work is rather dark.” The witch smiled as she joined him on the sofa. She smelled of pastries, even in her fine clothes she was found in the kitchen with the staff.

Hates being idle, a trait that seems to be as common as brown eyes in her family.

If she wasn’t helping about, she was taking care of Charlie and taking him to explore the nearby town or the unending grounds.

“So, would you?” he asks shifting to get comfortable with her, with the army of servants and relatives willing to take one year old Charlie off their hands, it was nice to have her all to himself for a while.

Even with so many roaming about, Tommy and Eva still had quite a lot of privacy.

“I’d find a way to turn you back, and in the meantime, I suppose I’d let you roam Arrow House and eat all the rotten food you want.” Eva answered as if she was powerful enough to undo even something as strange as Kafka’s metamorphosis. “Just imagine the stories of Thomas Shelby, the successful businessman and giant fucking cockroach.”

He laughs at her words and wished they could skip dinner, but formal gatherings came with the life he’s made for himself and Eva’s family was a good place to start.

“Anything I should know before your cockroach husband sits down to dinner with your family?” he asks hoping he is all caught up.

“No matter what I tried to stop it, the tiny Jesus figurine is in your slice of rosca. I’m afraid we’ll be hosting my darling family next year. Or have another baby, depending on who you ask.”

And sure enough, on January 1924 he hosts the Rileys at his home on the condition the tiny Jesus isn't on his slice of cake and convinces his wife to have a second child.

Rockwood Hall was the second largest home in America, remodeled and owned by JD Rockefeller until his death in 1922 and then demolished in the 1940s. It had over 204 rooms and spanned 1k acres. Surprisingly Arley Hall, which is used as Arrow House has 2k acres but the house is smaller.

Kafka’s The Sons ,a collection of short stories that features the Metamorphosis was published in german in 1915. Tommy in this fic can understand German as the translation to English wasn’t made until 1930.

[sonicasura]

Thank you. Here I go.

So the last few asks was in essentially how they discovered about Kafka's unique bloodline and a bit about his parents. Well, heres some more and how 9 discovered the trurth as well.

Remember the part where Mina took Kafka away from a few weeks, well there are good reasons as to why. Mina and Kafka was going to the only person who could give any clear answers on what was going on. Kafka's dad Takibi.

See shortly after Kafka became a adult and had the means to move out to his own place, Takibi moved to were his wife used to live. A small viliage in a rather remote area. Wether this be in a moutian viliage or somewhere along the sea is still something I'm working out.

There, things get clearificed and becomes more confusing as well, once the pair are there and meet said man, who is quite surprised at the visit but happy to see them none the less.

Then things gets, strange or awkward is not the right words but they kinda fit for now. For once, Kafka has a seriousness about him that has Takibi a little on edge and when Kafka says they need to talk about mom things become clear quickly for the aging father.

It is made even more clear, once in the house, when Kafka transforms and Takibi goes "Ah son, you really inherit her gift." Shortly he comes clean about Kafka's heritage on his mother's side.

It was a long few weeks in the Hibino house hold from there. Takibi answered all he could, from how he meets his mother to how his grandparents meet. And then some. And offer the comfort Kafka badly needs from his father through it all.

In turn, as both Kafka and Mina sees it as more than fair, Takibi is informed on what has been going on the past few months. From how Kafka transforemed to how they found out about the truth of his mother. Takibi comes along on the trip back, as not only is he needed to help Kafka on so many levels. Inlcuding on what to do with his wife's corpse.

But the man has certain secrets about Kafka's kaiju grandparent that the aging man needs to disclose in a safe place.

Kafka gets the needed hugs and reassurance cause let's be honest with ourselves here. This man is still iffy about his kaiju powers. Also Takibi definitely gonna cry upon seeing his wife's corpse.

The feels are getting hit hard.

[justforbooks]

César Aira

He has published more than 100 novels, gives his work away, and his surrealist books have a massive cult following. Now Argentina’s favourite rule-breaker is tipped for the Nobel prize

Afew years ago when Patti Smith played at a cultural festival in Denmark, she told the crowd that she was happy to be playing in the presence of one of her favourite authors. It was said she had only agreed to play the festival because the author, César Aira, would be in the audience. Aira, although celebrated in his home country, Argentina, was little known outside Latin America until he was discovered in 2002 by the Berlin-based literary agent Michael Gaeb, who was enchanted by his unconventional, surrealist books, which shift atmosphere, and even genre, from one page to another.

At first it proved difficult to sell Aira’s novels to a wider audience. “The fundamental problem when promoting César’s work is that the editor always asks: ‘What is the novel about?’” Gaeb told me. “And in the case of César, it’s not easy to answer that question.”

Gaeb has since sold Aira’s books in 37 languages. At the start of October last year, the English betting site Nicer Odds named Aira as a favourite for the Nobel prize in literature, slightly ahead of candidates such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie, who have appeared more regularly on such lists.

“I already know that every October, until my death, I’m going to have to put up with that.” Said by any other writer, this would come across as a humble brag. But Aira doesn’t seem to be the kind of person who appreciates disrupting events. “Sometimes the candidacy is useful to me,” he said, laughing. “For instance, now we live in a more luxurious apartment, one a little beyond my circumstances. And they rent to me because they see that I am a candidate for the Nobel.”

His apartment is located just five blocks from his office, which in its turn was the house where he lived for more than 40 years with his two children and his wife, Liliana Ponce, a poet and a scholar of Japanese literature. The recent move took place because Ponce has an illness that affects her mobility, and the new building has an elevator.

Aira, who does not speak to the local press and whose interviews with foreign media are usually short and conducted via email, rarely leaves Flores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood that’s best known today as a textile hub for the clothing stores in wealthier areas of the city. Early in his career, Aira developed a method called the fuga hacia adelante (something like “forward flight”), which consists of writing a few hours a day and never looking back to edit until he reaches the end of a tale. “I revise much more than I did before,” casually demystifying what is perhaps the fact most repeated about his work. “I think that I’ve become more demanding. Or else I’m writing worse than before.”

The novels were – and sometimes still are – written in neighbourhood bars, cafes and even fast-food joints, such as McDonald’s or Pumper Nic, a now-extinct Buenos Aires chain. “It began when my children were small,” he said. “If I had a bit of time, I escaped, and I went to write. But after the pandemic, the bars and cafes started to fill up a lot. And there’s the issue of the telephones. If at a neighbouring table two people are conversing, it’s possible to ignore them. But if there’s just one person talking on the phone, it’s as if they’re speaking with you. It’s horrible!”

Aira was born in Coronel Pringles, in a small town in the south of the province, 300 miles from the capital. “I was thinking just now of my first memories of childhood because they are of the revolution of 1955,” he said – the year Juan Perón was removed from power by a coup for the first time. There was only one cinema, and television had not yet caught on. But the town had two well-stocked public libraries. “When I was still a teenager, I was already reading Joyce, Proust and Kafka,” Aira said. His precocity was also stimulated by an amateur public education in which classes were taught not by specialised professors but by volunteers with gigantic private collections of books. There were doctors who taught philosophy classes (“in those days, doctors were humanists”) and lawyers who taught history. “I didn’t have that kind of bureaucratic education where the teacher knows more,” he said. “It was something a lot freer.”

When he was about 14 years old, Aira met Arturo Carrera, a friend who, like him, would become a nationally recognised writer. Aira dedicated himself to prose; Carrera, poetry. The friends tried to stay up to date with the literary world by getting hold of magazines that were based in the capital. One of those publications, Testigo (Witness), held a contest. Carrera sent a few poems, and Aira sent a story. They both came out winners.

At the time, the majority of promising secondary school students in Coronel Pringles continued their university studies in Bahía Blanca, a city 75 miles away. “Law was the only graduate course they didn’t have,” Aira said. He told his parents he was interested in a law degree and moved to the capital. “I wanted to come for the art galleries, the cinemas,” he said. For two years, he studied law at the University of Buenos Aires, and then he transferred to the department of literature.

Testigo folded before it could publish Aira’s winning story. But one of the judges of the award, the novelist Abelardo Arias, wrote to congratulate him. Aira and Arias began a correspondence, and soon Aira showed Arias a manuscript. Arias loved it and passed it on to the publisher Galerna, which agreed to print it.

“It was a big thing, even more so for a young person of that age,” Aira said.

One day, walking aimlessly through the streets of the city with a friend, he came across a building he knew. “Here, in this building, an editor wants to publish a novel of mine,” he told her. “Let’s go up.” When he arrived, he asked to speak with the person responsible for his book. Then he asked for the manuscript back: “I don’t want to publish it any more.” The editor was astonished.

I asked Aira why he’d acted like that. “Just because,” he said. He shrugged and laughed. “I wanted to impress her.”

To write all day long without revising until you reach the end of a story produces an obscene quantity of books. Nobody I met in Buenos Aires ventured to pin down exactly how many volumes Aira has published. César Aira, un catálogo (César Aira: A Catalogue), organised by the writer and lawyer Ricardo Strafacce, is the most notable effort to itemise his work. Launched in 2018 with the aim of helping the uninitiated, the catalogue reprints one page from each of Aira’s books. The catalogue was commissioned by his publisher in part to commemorate his 100th book (Aira likes round numbers), but in the time the catalogue took to reach the printer, Aira had already written two more.

When I sat with Strafacce in the Varela-Varelita bar in Buenos Aires at the end of a November afternoon, he was still indignant with the catalogue’s publisher, who he said had made changes without telling him. For instance, the publisher had edited the date of publication for the Aira story El hornero (The Ovenbird). “I’m furious,” he said. “You can talk to [the editor]. I don’t give a shit.” He complained about another small modification: in the biographical information for one of the titles, to his mention of Madrid, the editor had added “Spain”. In Strafacce’s eyes, the detail made him seem like an idiot, a “boludo”.

“Don’t writers get worked up about the most incredible minutiae?” said Francisco Garamona, the editor in question. With a cigarette in one hand and a glass of soda in the other, he explained that he’d merely used the version of El hornero that Aira himself had authorised, rather than the one in circulation, which was pirated. He was sitting on a sofa in La Internacional Argentina, his bookshop, where he also operates his publishing house, Mansalva. Today, Mansalva probably publishes the most titles by Aira. “There he is, and here are more, here’s another, and here,” Garamona said as he counted the shelves in the bookshop. “One, two, three … seven. Seven niches of just Aira.”

In a way, the decor reflected Garamona’s multifaceted career; in addition to being an editor and a bookshop owner, he is a musician, a film-maker, a poet and the former owner of an art gallery. Today he is also one of two editors whom Aira defined for me as “official”. The other is Damián Ríos, from the publisher Blatt & Ríos.

The honour of “official” editors must inspire some pride in Ríos and Garamona, because Aira has worked with more than a few. His extensive body of work is decentralised in dozens of editorial houses, the vast majority of them tiny, which makes him an author at once ubiquitous and elusive. In this context, it’s not difficult to understand how a controversy like the one with El hornero came about. Aira must be one of the few writers in the world, maybe the only one, to sell 25,000 copies of one title and at the same time launch other titles in much smaller print runs. He has never charged royalties or advances for the small publishing houses in Argentina. “That was the agreement I made with Michael [Gaeb],” Aira said. “I don’t meddle with the world. And he doesn’t meddle with Argentina. In Argentina, everything is free.”

Aira’s strong cultural presence today conceals the stuttering start of his career. “For many years, this was the only proof I was a writer,” he said, showing a handful of yellowing pages, the nucleus of a book without a cover. His voice shook, this time, emotion had truly moved him. In his hands was a copy of Moreira, considered by some to be his first published novel. In the background, an atmospheric combination of dissonant chords and piano notes faded away. “I only listen to Morton Feldman these days,” Aira said. He added that he’d recently made an exception to listen to Now and Then, a “new” song by the Beatles completed thanks to help from artificial intelligence.

After going up to the office of the publishing house Galerna in 1969, in that half-impulsive gesture to ask for his manuscript back, some years went by before Aira had a chance to publish again. Moreira was supposed to come out in 1975, but was delayed. The editor of the book was Aira’s friend Horacio Achával, owner of the publishing house Achával Solo. In 1976, there was another military coup in Argentina. “Horacio was a political militant and had to go away,” Aira said. “He took off. He went to Uruguay.” The copies of Moreira, still without a cover, were left stranded in a warehouse. Years later, Achával returned to the country and finalised the cover. The book was officially launched in December 1981, just weeks after Ema, la cautiva (Ema, the Captive), which came out from another publishing house in November 1981 and today disputes with Moreira the title of Aira’s official debut.

Strafacce told a different story. “Moreira was printed in June 1975,” he said. “The money ran out, and there wasn’t enough to print the cover because in the same month, there was a financial crisis and a bank run here in Argentina.”

Aira published a few books in the 80s, but according to Sandra Contreras, who founded a small publishing house that published him throughout the 90s and 2000s, it was not until 1990’s Los fantasmas (Ghosts) that he accelerated his production. At the time, she said, he also spoke more explicitly of a new phase, “the beginning of the regular publication of his novelas and novelitas”. Aira was the first author to be published not only by Contreras’s publishing house but also by Mansalva and Blatt & Ríos in the early 00s.

In the 90s, small publishers like these were rare. Garamona said that this began to change in 2001, when after almost a decade of one-to-one parity between the Argentine peso and the US dollar, the local economy went through one of the worst recessions in Latin American history. Importing books became expensive. And so, after spending years favouring authors from Spain, local bookshop owners finally had eyes for Argentine literature.

When Gaeb first encountered Aira’s work in Guadalajara, in 2002, Aira had already begun to occupy his paradoxical central position at the margins of the culture. “He is a writer who exists in different fields, at different levels,” the fiction writer and critic Alan Pauls says, from his Berlin study, in a conversation over Zoom. “On the one hand, he has quite a lot of popularity. And on the other, he remains a niche writer, a cult writer. We still think of him as a writer of the avant garde, a manufacturer of very sophisticated objects. He’s someone who occupies the centre to his regret, not because he looked for it.”

To get hold of Moreira today isn’t easy – on the site Mercado Libre Argentina, in mid-December, there was a copy going for about $1,200 (£950). On the cover that for years remained unfinished, there is a monstrous, saturnine figure riding a yellow horse. Beneath the image, the first sentence of the novel prominently appears: Un día, de madrugada, por las lomas inmóviles del Pensamiento bajaba montado en potro amarillo un horrible gaucho (“One day at dawn, through the unmoving hills of Thought, mounted upon a yellow colt, there descended a horrible gaucho”).

In Spanish, El Pensamiento can refer to both the abstract noun, and the village close to where Aira was born and spent his childhood. The phrase gives a taste of the kind of mixture harboured within the novel. Evoking Juan Moreira, a folkloric knife-fighting hero of the Argentine Pampas, the book narrates a gaucho-esque pantomime, shot through with philosophical allusions and images from dreams. In Moreira, one can already recognise the multifaceted and frenetically imaginative style for which Aira would later be known. But the Airean machine still seems to just be getting started: there is a heavy self-consciousness that is absent from the books that follow. In these later works, his prose is limpid and inviting. Here is the start of El mago (The Magician), published almost exactly 20 years after Moreira:

In March this year, the Argentine magician Hans Chans (his real name was Pedro María Gregorini) participated in a convention of illusionists in Panamá; the event, just as the invitation and promotional leaflet described, was a regional meeting of prestigious professionals, a preparation for the great world congress the following year, which was celebrated every 10 years and this time would take place in Hong Kong. The previous one had been in Chicago, and he had not gone. Now he planned not only to participate, but also to establish himself as Best Magician in the World. The idea was not crazy or megalomaniacal. It had a foundation as reasonable as it was curious: Hans Chans was a genuine magician.

Aira takes this magical premise seriously, drawing from the dilemma a tale both comic and – in its exploration of the complex relations between being and seeming – densely philosophical. Hans Chans has the gift to be an illusionist, but not the vocation. He is too self-indulgent to dedicate himself to the profession. The narrator writes: “Maybe, paradoxically, the advantage he had played against him and condemned him to mediocrity.” Without patience for the theatre of magic, Chans limits himself to drawing handkerchiefs from wine glasses, and things of that sort.

It would not be unfair to read El mago as an allegory for the career of Aira himself: of someone who has the gift of writing but for whom the most deeply rooted conventions of the profession seem meaningless. Just like Hans Chans, the author is aware of his gift. Aira is affable and courteous, but he is far from being modest. (Modesty, faked or not, is another convention of the profession.) About the manuscript he asked to take back from Galerna in 1969, he said: “It was better than anything else that was published at the time.”

He has never been afraid to throw darts at other writers. When we spoke, he was disdainful of Roberto Bolaño, saying he had read only one novel by the Chilean author, which he found “terrible”. Aira also said that the great Argentine novelist Juan José Saer had once warmed to him, when he was young and starting out, but then became envious when Aira started getting more attention. In 1981, shortly before Moreira was finally published, Aira wrote an essay titled Novela argentina: nada más que una idea (The Argentine Novel: Nothing But an Idea), which mounts a general attack on literature of the period. The essay begins:

The current Argentine novel, beyond a doubt, is a stunted, ill-fated species. In general terms, what defines a poor novelistic product is the poor use, crude and opportunistic, of the available mythical-social material. In other words, the meanings that dictate how a society lives at a given historical moment. But the literary transposition of a reality demands the existence of a very exact passion: that of literature. And a rapid, provisional survey, not at all exhaustive, of Argentine novelists reveals that they have not read deeply, and show a complete absence of that passion along with its epiphenomenon, talent.

Aira, who had not even published a novel at that time, sticks his scalpel swiftly and mercilessly into a series of authors, most of whom have been more or less forgotten. The essay, though, is remembered these days for Aira’s attack on Ricardo Piglia, who, until his death in 2017, was a kind of public rival to Aira, at least in terms of the very different literary forms they espoused.

Pauls linked Aira’s attacks at the start of his career to his ambition to reconfigure the Argentine novel. “When he emerges in the literary environment, he knows perfectly well the writers he has to tussle with,” he said. For Pauls, Aira disturbed the paradigm of a certain progressive Argentinian literature, a literature of the left, very masculine and politically committed. “Something that literary school could not stand, for example, was a certain kind of work with frivolity, with the banal, with the superficial,” Pauls said.

Aira’s style crystallised very early on. Even if Moreira is not at the level of his next books, there is no clear sense of progression in Aira’s trajectory. Maybe for that reason, none of the readers could point to a favourite work.

Aira said he will have two new novelitas ready soon. He said he plans to give one to Ríos and the other to Garamona. “And now I’ve been thinking, because one of them came out better than the other, more imaginative – who will I give that one to?” he said, laughing.

Aira rejects great theorising about his decision to give away books free or publish the majority with small publishing houses. “His form of publishing is part of his poetics, his resistance to editorial capitalism, his punk attitude,” Gaeb said.

Contreras classified the hyperproduction of little books for small publishers as an aesthetic decision. “Something like: it’s enough for a tale to be imagined to make it necessary to publish,” she said. “There is also a fascination for the book as a unique object.”

Pauls said he interprets this decision as an avant garde way of thinking: “If the kind of literature I make is never going to have hundreds of thousands of readers, what happens if I inundate the market with books?”

When Aira was asked if he was edited nowadays, first he said that “nobody revises anything”. Then he conceded that Ríos sometimes makes one comment or another. Ríos corroborated this, but found it hard to define the exact nature of his comments, and he made it clear that they weren’t about anything structural. Contreras said that in her day, she at most corrected the odd typo.

Garamona laughed at the notion of editing or revising a text by Aira. “He has written since he was a teenager without stopping, and has such a mastery of form and content that in the end there isn’t much left to do,” he said. “You just have to pick it up, make a good cover with a pretty design, correct two or three errata.”

Los hombrecitos con sobretodo (The Little Men in Overcoats) is the title of the novel Aira defined as the most imaginative of the two he recently finished. “What happens is that here in the neighbourhood, two blocks away, where the fire station is located, men pop out at night,” he said. “At midnight they come popping out of the ceiling. Little men suddenly appear like that, really tiny men, they all wear overcoats. And at night, I go and watch them.”

He spoke as if he were beginning a fairytale. The low, tremulous voice transiting between fine irony and rapture; the sense of humour; the erudition; the sedentary life in a dark house in the neighbourhood where he’d lived for decades, from which he generates cosmopolitan, compact stories full of metafictional layers – all of it reminds us a bit of Jorge Luis Borges.

For an Argentinian, to say a great local writer seems like or is influenced by Borges must sound absurdly lazy. But both authors start their brief, densely packed books with literary anecdotes or memories written in crisp prose. In the works of both, there are frequent essayistic digressions. Both persistently turn to the literary technique of ekphrasis. There are metafictional and metaliterary games, references to other works.

The main difference is perhaps in the intensity and direction of the narrative swerves, and Aira’s greater comfort with pop culture and genre literature. Whereas a story by Borges might take up a lost 19th-century Persian manuscript, a novel by Aira might locate it behind the balcony of a McDonald’s in Flores, pored over by an adolescent with an acne problem.

Borges was almost infantile in his complete dedication as a reader, distant from the mundane hustle and bustle of the world. Nobody had anything substantial to say about Aira’s private life either. “He likes to drink coffee and talk about literature,” Ríos said. Gaeb said that Aira sometimes seems to get along better with children. (In fact, the person about whom Aira spoke with the greatest passion, albeit briefly, was Arturito, his only grandson.)

Strafacce, his friend for more than 20 years, said he found it easier to explain what Aira doesn’t talk about. “We’re used to not speaking about politics because I’m Trotskyist,” he said. “And César is not.”

It was the week of the second round of the presidential election. A few days later, the Peronist Sergio Massa, a member of the centre-left governing coalition at the time, would be defeated by the far-right Javier Milei. “Milei is worse than Bolsonaro,” said Aira, in his only comment about politics.

That day, before going to the cafe, Aira passed through the Museo Barrio de Flores. Earlier, he had been irritated at a package from one of his foreign publishers: a box containing copies of one of his novels in Dutch translation. “They keep sending me those here,” he complained, as if sending books to the author himself were a kind of gaffe. Aira handles books with the avidity of a collector. He was mesmerised for a good while that afternoon by an edition of the French author Raymond Roussel, one of his surrealist idols, and he showed us a little purple box the size of a pack of cigarettes: a tiny special edition the Biblioteca Nacional had made of El ilustre mago (The Famous Magician), another novel of his. But for some reason, he wanted to rid himself of the box with the Dutch edition.

The Museo Barrio de Flores does exactly what its name suggests, displaying all kinds of memorabilia – old calculators and radios, paintings, newspaper clippings, political propaganda – related in some way to famous inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The definition of “famous” is broad, ranging from Perón – who lived there with his first wife – to the two preteen nieces of the museum’s director, who created a children’s library during the pandemic and appeared on the front page of the newspaper Clarín. Aira seemed at ease there. His name occupies one of the steps on the staircase by the front door. On the step above is the name of the great writer Roberto Arlt; on the one below, an advertisement for a real-estate broker.

Aira left the box of books with an employee and continued through the museum. At one point he dwelt on a framed letter written by Pope Francis, another former inhabitant of the neighbourhood. “Did you see how pretty the pope’s handwriting is? They don’t teach that in school any more, no.” He went to another room, where there was a showcase with some of Aira’s books.

When he opened the door, there was a group of ladies sitting around a big table. A class was in session. They all smiled pleasantly, focusing their attention on the author. Only the instructor of the course seemed to be younger than 65.

“What is the name of the little plane that flies near the ground?” one of the ladies asked.

“The what?” said Aira.

“The little plane,” the lady repeated, with a certain impatience, lowering her open palm toward the floor. “The one that flies near the ground.”

For a while, everyone stared at Aira, waiting for an answer. “An unexpected question,” joked the instructor awkwardly.

Aira shrugged, and we went to the corner to look at his showcase.

✔ This is an edited version of César Aira’s Magic, published in the Dial. The article originally appeared in the Brazilian magazine Piauí

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

[tradingmaps]

100 Novel Opening Lines

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)

14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)

15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)

16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)

19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767)

20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)

21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)

25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)

28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)

29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)

30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)

32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)

33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.” —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)

34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)

35. It was like so, but wasn’t. —Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)

36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975)

37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)

40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)

41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)

42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)

43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)

46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)

47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)

48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)

50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)

52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)

53. It was a pleasure to burn. —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)

55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)

56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)

58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. —George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)

59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)

60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (1944)

62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)

63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)

67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)

68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)

69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)

70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)

71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)

72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)

73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)

74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)

75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)

76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. —Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. —Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

97. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

[ghanjrho]

Okay, so you know how some people have an inflation fetish because they watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at the wrong age? Well, this dude’s Wonka was Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Yes, the one where the guy wakes up having turned into a cockroach abomination. He has created a whole world in his mind, one where a race of super-intelligent giant cockroaches coexist with humanity. One of whom is Ogtha.

Ogtha started as a fantasy. And then he got really into it. He started imagining that he was having sex with Ogtha, while he was having sex with his girlfriend. And then he told his girlfriend this. Then she broke up with him.

It gets worse. After a while, he decides that it doesn’t matter that Ogtha is imaginary, the love is real and that’s what counts! Ogtha is now his wife. They have a beautiful ceremony in his living room, and a week-long honeymoon in New Orleans. Then he accidentally mentions “his wife” at work. People want to know about his wife. So he tells them. It does not go well. He’s a pariah, his boss thinks he’s insane, and medieval lepers now get more social interaction.

And if you thought it was bad now, it gets better! He discovers r/tulpa. To those that believe in them, a tulpa is basically a sentient imaginary friend, housed within your brain. R/tulpa gives him vocabulary to describe how not-crazy he is, and armed with this, he tells his parents. During this conversation, he lets Ogtha take the wheel and speak directly to his parents. Parents are shocked and horrified, demand he seeks therapy.

i wish i could see this picture for the first time again

[lovepctions]

closed starter for @writtn !! muse: luis aguilar , portrayed by david castañeda . high school english teacher . a sad sad sad man , personality is reading kafka , bisexual , mid-to-late 30s

"my therapist said i should get a dog, so that's why i'm here." luis stands in the kennel, arms crossed, surrounded by the cacophony of barking that feels almost overwhelming. deciding on just one to adopt is harder than he anticipated; if he had the space, he’d take them all. but since he let his ex-wife keep the house and moved into a small one-bedroom, he knows just one will have to do. he turns to his companion, "and i don't know which one to choose. so that's why you're here."

[goodluckclove]

"literary junk food" reminder?

mm FUCK YOU'RE RIGHT.

Okay so like. I'm calmer now. I woke up, made a green tea, and had my daily Weekend Wife Look (That's when I look at my wife while they're still sleeping and think about how much I like my wife). But yes, I saw something on the internet that upset me yesterday and for some reason I've decided I need to talk about it.

Under the read more, though. I got. Rambly.

First off I should clarify a few things, as this is something I can see a certain type of person using as a way to dub me "anti-intellectual". I am not an anti-intellectual. I consider myself decently intelligent and above the norm in terms of the amount and variety of literature I've read. I won't call myself well-read because that's another label I do think is mostly bullshit. But I've read a lot of the "Smart Person" authors like Kafka and Vonnegut and Camus and Calvino. I tried reading James Joyce's Ulysses like three times and it sounds like something I'd love, but for some reason I can never get past the first 60 pages. I can enjoy shit like Naked Lunch and The Sound and the Fury fine but Joyce consistently exhausts me with his particular brand of Irish Incoherence.

What I mean to say is that I regularly enjoy the type of books - and culture as a whole, really - that on several occasions forced me into conversation with A Certain Type of Person. The kind of person who treats their tastes in art as a moral virtue. Who thinks the failings of society are at least partially due to the fact that not enough people have read and appreciated "The Classics". I actually was pushed towards dropping out of college by an interaction I had with a guy who was in the Master's program I was working towards. He saw I was reading J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey (I like it! I wish Salinger wrote more women) and took it as an opportunity to start raving about his opinions on Catcher in the Rye, a completely separate book I did not bring up at all.

People who do this make me unreasonably angry.

So the thing I saw was using "literary junk food" to talk about people who only read Young Adult fiction. I have so many issues with this that I don't know where to start. Because it plays into a bigger issue, I think. I see people on Youtube talk about the BookTok influencers who say they only read the dialogue in their books, or who complain about how a book has "so much text". They scoff at these people. Laugh at their inability to properly appreciate literature. These people are the problem.

And like. No? No. No, they're not. Some of them might be a reflection of a problem, sure. If a person of a certain age genuinely struggles with a dense book of a certain length, or if they only read books far below their age level, that could be an issue. But it's 100% not an issue with the reader. Much like how in the rising rates of younger people who struggle with fundamental reading skills, we shouldn't blame or make fun of the fucking kids, you weirdos. What? What are you doing? That's so weird. Stop it.

Most people aren't born with an innate love of reading. There are so many factors that can make developing that kind of passion incredibly difficult. Maybe they didn't grow up in a house with books and they weren't read to as kids. Maybe they're dyslexic or something and the fonts of most paperbacks are legitimately difficult to read. Maybe they were never exposed to the kinds of genres and authors they'd really enjoy. Maybe they saw some stupid fucking argument on the internet (Audiobooks aren't real reading! YA and comics aren't real reading! Mmm paperbacks are soo much better than e-readers I just want to shove them in my mouth yummy yummy I am so cool and smart) and decided they'd rather stay away from all of that entirely.

"Oh," the strawman I invent for this hypothetical exclaims, "but the internet exists! You can just look up more appropriate books to read! There's no excuse!"

Hey, Scarecrow I Reanimated Through the Dark Magic of my Rage? Do me a favor and try what you just suggested. I Googled "books for people moving past YA" and found a few lists on the subject, and the books were mainly:

modern novels I haven't read and might be fine

way-old classics that seem thrown in so people would think there was "variety"

some wack shit i'm very confused why people would suggest to those branching out from YA (Dune? The Martian? That's crazy, right? That's crazy to me.)

I was overwhelmed. I imagine if someone was only exposed to YA and saw a bunch of lists like these they'd could easily be discouraged. That is, if they weren't already discouraged by the dipshits online implying they're wronging themselves by enjoying the books they enjoy.

The thing that pisses me off is that Those People who say that aren't entirely incorrect. If someone only consumes one type of art, they are denying themselves a bunch of styles and stories and perspectives that might profoundly change the way they look at the world and at themselves. This applies to the person who only reads dystopian trilogies and romantasy epics, and it also applies to the person who only reads fucking Tolstoy or whatever. It applies to me, as a majority of the fiction I read up until like five years ago was written by men during like the 40s-90's (I don't know why but that ended up being my Era of Choice).

Variety in art is cool and good. If someone feels like they don't have the option to explore different stories, that belief is the issue. The person is not the one at fault, even if their reasoning for not branching out is incorrect. Yes, there are more adult-orientated writers who aren't old white straight men. There are adult-orientated writers that might be more engaging then the ones from the 19th and early 20th century. Not every adult-orientated book is Ripe With Ideas and Philosophical Concepts. There are fiction books written for adults in mind that make their prose as accessible as their dialogue. There are nonfiction books, even, that are written by intelligent authorities with a genuine love for their subject that makes their writing super enjoyable to read and not at all like a textbook.

But also it's not a bad thing if your main genre is young adult fiction. My main genre is probably post-modernism. The only difference between us is that post-modernism sounds esoteric enough that a lot of people won't question it, where as a ton of people feel super comfortable assuming a YA book is lesser. These are usually the same people who assume young adults are inherently unable to grasp complex ideas.

I don't read a ton of YA. At the same time, I will never go as far as to claim the entire genre has nothing to offer adults, because that's an absolutely insane take. That's nonsense. I've read fucking picture books as an adult that touched my heart (Has anyone read The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds? Oh god I teared up.). Cynthia Voigt's book Homecoming was an early step in me realizing my mom was abusive. I'm pretty sure Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events played a huge part in my want to become a writer.

"But you moved on," the Scarecrow breathes, voice weakening as the dark magic seeps out from the thin veil of hay and burlap, "adults are supposed to move on and read Grown-Up books."

Yeah man, maybe. There's a lot of shit that adults should be able to do, and people are so satisfied with those milestones of Adult Development that they sometimes forget that age is not the only factor in those things happening. If other reading options aren't presented in a way that seems welcoming and engaging, what are they supposed to do? Just walk to a library and grab the most boring looking book because that might be their only frame of reference for a "grown-up" book? Slog through it like they're in high school again? All to feel worthy in the eyes of someone who publicly condescends what might be the only type of literature they've enjoyed and connected to so far?

Why? Why would they want do that?

Anyways I'm getting hungry and the scarecrow I enchanted has lost its sentience, so I'll cut it short. There are a lot of intellectual pursuits - brilliant artists in a variety of mediums - that I am consistently bummed out that people feel like they can't get into. But I also understand, because a lot of people who like Adult Books or Abstract Art or Improvisational Jazz or Experimental Theater tend to not like the art itself as much as they really enjoy being perceived as a person who likes those kinds of things. And ultimately that's - fine.

That's a fine way to live, Scarecrow Corpse. You're allowed to base a majority of your identity out of truly understanding Infinite Jest or Koyaanisqatsi or Derek Jarman's Blue. But like don't expect that to change or improve the lack of culture you claim to hate so much.

[thelastpresidentprincejosephius]

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ks104

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