#On this day in 1999 Twilight of the Gods came out which was the final Virgin New Adventure

[doctorwho2022]

Doctor Who episodes that aired on the 2nd of December…

In 1967, The Ice Warriors Four

In 1978, The Androids of Tara Part Two

In 2018, It Takes You Away

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

[timelesshonesttrailer]

The bane of many writers is that once you have birthed a story, taken the time to write, erase, rewrite, edit, scream at, and finally accept the words that you have written… you have to name it. 

Like people, or businesses, the name is everything. It’s one of the first things people see. It’s what they will use to communicate the story to others. So picking a good title is vital, which makes it all the more daunting. But like most things in life, once you break it down and examine its parts, see how it works, it becomes a lot less scary and a lot more manageable.

This is how I got pretty good at making titles, not only for my own works, but for others. And I want to share with you what I learned, and hopefully make the task of titling your stories a lot less terrifying.

To create a good title, you have to focus on two things: Structure and Meaning.

Structure

Quick, think of all your favorite books, shows, and movies. Now think of popular franchises that are household names. What do they have in common, title wise? They are short and to the point.

On average, these titles are one to two words long. This does not include articles or connecting words like “the,” “of,” “or,” etc, because they pretty much disappear.

The titles also average few syllables, about two or three. You don’t really want to go above four. English is a very lazy language and we like to keep things short. This is why a lot of titles get shortened anyway.

Examples of Titles (remember, articles/connectors don’t count):

Friends – One word, one syllable.

Cheers – One word, one syllable.

Lost – One word, one syllable.

Dune – One word, one syllable.

Timeless – One word, two syllables.

ER – One word, two syllables.

Twilight – One word, two syllables. Can refer to the entire series.

The Mummy (1999) – One word, three syllables.

The Simpsons – One word, three syllables.

Parasite – One word, three syllables.

Titanic – One word, three syllables.

Hamilton – One word, three syllables.

The X-Files – One word, three syllables. Though it’s debatable if X-Files is one word or two.

CSI – One word (standing in for three), three syllables (standing in for seven).

Star Wars – Two words, two syllables.

Good Omens – Two words, three syllables.

Game of Thrones – Two words, three syllables. Often verbally shortened to Thrones.

Lord of the Rings – Two words, four syllables.

I can keep going, but you see the trend.

But what about titles like the Harry Potter books? The answer is in the question. Each book/movie title starts with Harry Potter and then has a modifier. Harry Potter itself is only two words and four syllables. Then if someone talks about a specific novel, they typically would not say the whole title, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, they would simply say Azkaban. The same is done in other series. Percy Jackson for example.

There are, of course, exceptions.

Elementary is a one word, but five syllables. It’s also a very common phrase in both the genre and in everyday life. Use of common phrases is a way to get around the above formula because we’re already used to saying them, thinking them, etc. One Day at a Time is another good example. Three words, five syllables, but doesn’t feel any longer than Lord of the Rings. 

But the longer the title, the more likely it will somehow get shortened. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep was changed to three syllable Blade Runner. My favorite book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has a very long title. Technically it’s three words when you remove articles/connectors, but the syllable count is a whopping ten. It gets away with it because for one, it’s a rift on an already common phrase, and two, fans can call it Hitchhiker’s Guide which is only four syllables. 

Now, once you know the structure of a title, you can work on choosing one.

Meaning

The title of your story has to give the reader an idea about what they’re getting into. It does this by focusing on one of the following:

A literal Person/Place/Thing –  Percy Jackson, Cheers, The X-Files

The Subject Matter – Friends, Law & Order, The Sixth Sense, CSI

The Genre – Twilight, Star Wars, Friday the 13th, Altered Carbon

The Overall Metaphor/Concept – Game of Thrones, Parasite, Pride and Prejudice

Many of these cross over. The Sixth Sense and CSI could also be considered a literal thing as well as a genre marker. If your title fulfills more than one slot, that is neat, but not a necessity. You might feel like you have to come up with some complex title, but sometimes it’s really just as simple as it’s a show about friends and their relationships with each other.

Take the title Catch-22. The term Catch-22 is a major metaphor and concept that is universally known today. But when Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22, no one called that concept a Catch-22. The title was simply naming the military rule (a thing), which created the situation and therefore drove the narrative. People later co-opted the title to quickly express the concept that the book so masterfully discusses.

Whatever you chose, the title should match the feel of the story you’re trying to tell. It’s part of your promise to the reader, and must make sense by the time they get to the end of the story.  

But how to pick a title when you have persons, places, things, subject matter, genre, and metaphors in your story? You simply work backwards. Ask yourself what your story is really about.

What is the driving force of the narrative?

What do you want your readers to get out of the story?

Is it a story about a person?

Or about the people of a specific group?

Is the story a one-shot or the beginning of a trilogy/series?

Is there a specific name or line of text that sums up your story neatly?

Somewhere in the answers to those questions is your title.

Now, I can make guesses on how some of the above mentioned titles came to be. Cheers takes place in the bar of the same name, and it’s about the patrons of said bar, so it’s the story about a place named Cheers. But I can’t speak for the creators and what thought processes they might have went through in order to choose their titles. So, instead, I am going to give you some of the titles I have come up with and explain how I got there.

Copper and Gold Two words, four syllables. Genre: Urban Fantasy This is the first book of a series based around a singular character, Minni Masterson, whose motif is copper, which plays a large role in the story. Since it’s a series, I need a title that could be formulaic across each one. In the first novel, the “guest character” is a gold dragon (Aiden Drake). So when I say Copper and Gold, I’m really saying Minni and Drake. And in the second book, when I say Copper and Cobalt, I am saying Minni and the Kobolds. Copper and Mercury is Minni and the Werewolves. Etc.

Emperor’s Shadow Two words, five syllables. Genre: Star Wars fan fiction/Mystery/Character Study The story is about Mara Jade who was an Emperor’s Hand. It’s about her coming to terms with the shadow that looms over her from her past and what Palpatine did to her. Instead of going with something much bulkier like In the Shadow of the Empire, I merged her past (Emperor’s Hand) with her current conflict.

The Serpent and the Liar Two words, seven syllables. (This format of “The X and the X” is one that is an exception to the rule, so long as the syllables belonging to X remain low) Genre: Marvel!Loki fan fiction/Pre-Movies Canon Compliant The story is about Loki and the events leading up to the first Thor movie. It also brings in Sigyn to explore that ship, along with some Norse myths, and to explain why she isn’t in the movie. Loki, of course, is known for his serpent motif and as the god of lies. I play on this, giving Sigyn a serpent motif, something to match her with Loki. But on several occasions, I raise the question of who is actually the serpent, and who is the liar? Because the best way to lie, is to tell the truth. So, like Copper and Gold, I’m really just calling the story Loki and Sigyn, I mean, Sigyn and Loki?

Amehrana One word, four syllables. Genre: Timeless Food Truck AU/Garcy Slow Burn The story is about Flynn and Lucy, and the rest of the team, in an AU setting. I named Flynn’s food truck Amehrana because it’s a mix of the word American and Hrana, which is Croatian for food. So the title is both a thing (the food truck) but also another word for Flynn and Lucy because he’s Croat and she’s American. But unlike Copper and Gold and The Serpent and the Liar, there is the added symbolism here of Flynn and Lucy coming together.

Frankenstein’s Monster Two words, five syllables Genre: Timeless Mission Fic for Proposed Season 3 (non-movie compliant) The mission is Mary Shelley, but that doesn’t mean there *has* to be a Frankenstein reference. But you have Flynn who thinks he’s a monster, one created by Rittenhouse. I also go deeper and hint at Lucy herself being a Frankenstein Monster, i.e. created by Rittenhouse for a purpose she doesn’t want any part of. Once again, my title is basically just another name for my main characters.

I want to interject for a moment and point out that we all have our preferences in our writing styles, and titles are no different. If you realized you tend to do most of your titles a specific way, then own it. It’s part of what makes you unique as an artist. And if you occasionally decide you want to go a completely opposite direction for one story, then go for it.

Case in point.

No Accounting for Heroes Three words, seven syllables Genre: Canon Compliant account of the Fall of SHIELD and its aftermath This fic really takes a hard look at what happens to those living in a world with superheroes. The main character, an accountant named Rani, is giving an account of events. My cowriter suggested putting “accounting” in the title which made me think of the common phrase, “no accounting for taste,” which is a concept about how different people like/need different things, and applied it to the story. No Accounting for Heroes means that we all need a hero, but maybe not the heroes we think we do, and we can all be heroes in some way, to someone in need. But also, there is that underlying current that heroes are not held accountable for the destruction that follows in their wake. 

Never be afraid to ask for help with titles. And don’t be afraid to reject titles if they don’t fit. And definitely don’t be afraid to take the suggestion, turn it over, season it, put it in a waffle iron, and see if what comes out is edible.

I have helped others name their stories, and here are three examples:

Remember, Remember Two words, six syllables. Genre: Timeless Garcy Canon Divergent/Angst/Mission Fic The story is about Lucy trying to save Flynn after he goes back to 2012. Emma saves him instead. Eventually Lucy runs into him and she discovers he doesn’t remember her and only knows what Emma has told him. At the end of the story, they have a final confrontation during the Gunpowder Plot. When the author asked my thoughts on a title, well, the Gunpowder Plot has the very famous saying “Remember, Remember, the 5th of November” and the whole story is Lucy trying to get Flynn to remember…

Disavowed One word, three syllables. Genre: Timeless Luciana Canon Divergent/Angst In this Twitter story, Flynn is blocked from returning to the US from Canada because they still think he’s a terrorist. Basically, his own country, whom he helped save, rejected him. When asked for a title, I focused on the idea that this story is about Flynn being rejected/denied entry/etc. I basically flipped through synonyms for rejected until I came across disavowed which is a term often used in spy craft. It’s a heavy word which paired well with the angst of the story.

Only Our Stories Three words, five syllables. Genre: Timeless Movie Canon Compliant-adjacent/Angst/Mission Fic The phrase “only our stories” is said in the fic itself. Future-Lucy writes it down towards the beginning, once she’s returned from dropping off the journal post-Chinatown. All that she has left of Flynn is only their stories, which she writes in the journal. She is eventually able to change things to get Flynn back, but he doesn’t remember her. There is still a connection though… their stories.

Never be afraid to take a line from your story to use as your title, so long as you follow the structure guidelines from the first section. 

At the end of the day, coming up with titles is just as much a skill as any other part of writing. We suck at first, then we figure out what's good, what's bad, and look at the world around us to figure out how to make it better. And don’t be afraid to edit it as much as you edit your novel. Until you publish, no title is set in stone, so it doesn’t have be right the first time.

And now here is where I close out this reference guide by saying something inspirational. Instead, I’m going to name this piece. While I wrote it, the temp file name was “Creating a Title” which is technically accurate but has no umph or style. This guide is meant to be helpful so the title should inspire confidence that I know what I’m talking about. But I don’t want it to sound too clinical either. 

A synonym for “name” is designation which I like but too many syllables because I’ll have to add to it. Synonym’s for “title” don’t give me much either. Instead, I should focus on the concept of the guide rather than its direct contents. Using something like “What’s in a Name?” would be too cliché. “I Suck at Titles” is funny, at first, with it being the exact opposite, but my genre is more educational than satire.

Wait, if I’m not going to reveal the title until the end, as a way to show you the thought process in creating a title, then to the reader, the title both does and doesn’t exist at the same time. It’s what you might call a…

Schrodinger’s Title: A Guide to Naming

[tipsycad147]

Island Magee Witches

Island Magee Witches The last witch trial to occur in Ireland took place in 1711 and involved the mysterious death of a widow, poltergeist activities and the bizarre possessionof a serving girl. The accused witches were not executed but sentenced to a much milder punishment of imprisonment and public ridicule.

The incidents leading to the trial began in September 1710. Anne Hattridge (or Haltridge), widow of the Presbyterian minister at Island magee, visited the home of her son, James, and his wife. The widow was plagued every night by some unseen force which hurled stones and turf onto her bed (see Lithoboly), blew open the curtains, stripped off her nightclothes and snatched the pillows from under her head. Frightened, mrs. Hattridge finally moved to another room.

But the mysterious activities continued in other forms. On December 11, as mrs. Hattridge sat by the fire at about twilight, a strange little boy about 12 years old appeared suddenly and sat down beside her. She couldn’t see his face, because he kept it covered with a worn blanket, but she observed that he had short black hair and was dressed in dirty and torn clothing. He didn’t answer her questions as to who he was or where he’d come from but danced “very nimbly” around the kitchen and then ran out of the house and into the cow shed. The servants attempted to catch him, but the boy had vanished as suddenly as he had appeared.

The apparition did not manifest again until February 11, 1711, when it apparently took a book of sermons that mrs. Hattridge had been reading. The next day, the boy appeared outside the house, thrust his hand through a glass window and held out the book to one of the servants. He declared mrs. Hattridge would never get the book back and that the Devilhad taught him how to read.

The servant, named Margaret Spear, exclaimed, “The Lord bless me from thee!” But the boy laughed and produced a sword, threatening to kill all the occupants of the house. They couldn’t prevent him from entering, he said, because the Devil could make him any size or creature he pleased (see metamorphosis). He threw a stone through the window. When the frightened girl next looked out, she saw the boy catching a turkey cock and making off with it into the woods. The bird managed to escape his grasp.

Then the girl saw the boy begin to dig in the ground with his sword. He announced that he was “making a grave for a corpse which will come out of this house very soon.” He flew off into the air (see Flying).

All was quiet in the Hattridge household until February 15, when mrs. Hattridge’s clothes were moved about her room and then were found laid out on the bed like a corpse. By this time, the news of the supernatural activities had spread throughout town, and numerous people, including the new Presbyterian minister, had come to the house to investigate. No one was able to help. One night, mrs. Hattridge awoke at midnight complaining of a great pain in her back, as though she’d been stabbed with a knife. The pain persisted and mrs. Hattridge’s condition began to deteriorate, until she died on February 22. During her last days, her clothing continued to be moved mysteriously about various rooms in the house. The townspeople gossiped that mrs. Hattridge had been bewitched to death.

On February 27 a servant girl named Mary Dunbar came to stay at the house to keep the younger mrs. Hattridge company. The night she arrived, Dunbar was plagued by supernatural trouble. She found her clothing scattered about and one of her aprons tied into five knots (see knots). She undid them and found a flannel cap that had belonged to the deceased mrs. Hattridge. On the following day she was suddenly seized with a violent pain in her thigh and suffered fits and ravings.

Dunbar exclaimed that several women were bewitching her; she described them during two fits and gave their names: Janet Liston, Elizabeth Seller, kate m’Calmond, Janet Carson, Janet mean, Janet Latimer and “mrs. Ann.” Accordingly, the suspects were arrested and brought to trial. Whenever one of them was brought near Dunbar (usually without Dunbar’s knowledge), the young girl fell into fits, hearing and seeing visions of her tormentors and vomiting up great quantities of feathers, cotton, yarn, pins and buttons (see AllotrIophAgy). She would repeat her conversations with the alleged witches and thrash about so violently that it took three strong men to hold her down. According to testimony by rev. Dr. Tisdall, vicar of Belfast:

In her fits she often had her tongue thrust into her windpipe in such a manner than she was like to choak, and the root seemed pulled up into her mouth.

Dunbar claimed her tormentors prohibited her from leaving her room. Whenever she attempted to do so for a while, she fell into fits. One witness claimed he saw a knotted bracelet of yarn appear mysteriously around her wrist. Dunbar also said her tormentors told her she would not be able to give evidence against them in court. During the entire trial, she was struck dumb and sat senseless as though in a trance. Later, Dunbar said she had been possessed by three of the accused witches throughout the proceedings.

According to an account of the trial in macSkimin’s History of Carrickfergus:

It was also deposed that strange noises, as of whistling, scratching, etc., were heard in the house, and that a sulphureous [sic] smell was observed in the rooms; that stones, turf, and the like were thrown about the house, and the coverlets, etc., frequently taken off the beds and made up in the shape of a corpse; and that a bolster [ghost] once walked out of a room into the kitchen with a nightgown about it!

The defendants, none of whom had a lawyer, all denied the charges of witchcraft, and the “one with the worst looks, and therefore the greatest suspect, called God to witness she was wronged.”

According to court records,

Their characters were inquired into, and some were reported unfavorably of, which seemed to be rather due to their ill appearance than to any facts provided against them. It was made to appear on oath that most of them had received the Communion, some of them very lately, that several of them had been laborious, industrious people, and had frequently been known to pray with their families, both publickly and privately; most of them could say the Lord’s Prayer . . . they being every one Presbyterians.

The trial was short, lasting from six o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon. In Judge Upton’s opinion, there was insufficient evidence to convict the defendants. He had no doubt that Dunbar’s affliction was “preternatural and diabolical,” but if the defendants really were witches in compact with the Devil, “it could hardly be presumed that they should be such constant attenders upon Divine Service, both in public and private.” He instructed the jury that they could not reach a guilty verdict “upon the sole testimony of the afflicted person’s visionary images.”

The jury felt differently, however, and declared a guilty verdict for all defendants. They were sentenced to a year in jail and to stand in a pillory four times during their incarceration. While pilloried, the “unfortunate wretches” were pelted with eggs and cabbage stalks; one of them was blinded in one eye.

FURTHER READING :

Seymour, St. John D. Irish Witchcraft and Demonology. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co., 1913.

Taken from : The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca – written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley – Copyright © 1989, 1999, 2008 by Visionary Living, Inc.

http://occult-world.com/witch-trials-witch-hunts/island-magee-witches/

[lizmckague-blog]

Rimbaud the Son, by Pierre Michon

Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays

Yale University Press, 2013

If you’re going to single out the agony of “the gift”, the iron in irony, the embodiment of the tormented artist, the lost son of all sons, it would be Rimbaud.

It would be human and masculine.

It would be what is recovered

                                                   L’éternité.

It would be what is pure

                                                  La mer mêlée au soleil.

“History is all about fathers, sons and whores.”

                                                                   -Duncan McNaughton

Or the dark well of a single mother who can’t, just can’t- because the farm in Charleville is a daydream surfacing only in the sallow yellow sunbeam that comes out from the attic window like a church bell on Sunday when everything is hideous and you’re supposed to remember.

Remember what?

                                  Infamy and alchemy, perhaps.

Yet the ‘Carabosse’ (mommy) can’t breathe, so fades into the shadow of her dark fingers, like Eurydice, gripping the edge of the bowl of the dark well, lined with wild forget-me-nots.

Whether rebellion is a curse or a blessing, it’s still poetry.

So he walked. Back and forth from the future into the past and back again from 1854 to 1891.

Crossed the Alps on foot. In Italy (if I remember correctly)- walking, walking, walking until his ribs cut into his Siddhartha stomach lining.

Burst!

He wanted to burst from the very first time he watched a spider.

He became a saint behind the closed shutters in Camden Town, perching like a peacock in the presence of a devil.

Drown in the green fairy and rise out of the lake like a Lancelot with a sword wound by violets whose roots are stronger than your thin wrist.

So after the offenses and defenses, after the crime of the enfant terrible, and all along the solitude, the one thing that loved you- solitude, you plunged, like Eurydice, back into the dark, fecund pantomime of the earth below the earth

And in Abyssinia, illegally exported guns.

Maybe once upon a dream you remembered your boyhood with three sisters, an older brother, the haystacks, the color of each letter of the alphabet and the lapis-lazuli chunks of sky blinding the pillows of clouds where you chose to hide

                                                                                                      Your wings.

Until the day you took the train

Without a ticket

To the Gods.

Michon thinks you were nervous before the steps to Zeus’s Palace.

I do not.

Zeus doesn’t give a crap about peonies and the prodigal son has eyes like Novalis’ blue flower

and a body protected by thorns.

You were sixteen.

You wanted the hue of that vast, endless sky

Seen from the well of the soul

                                                     It’s not a good view.

But it’s focused in a circle that is beyond you.

Was it at nineteen, or in Cypress, or in Africa, when you finally understood how freedom spoiled you? Surrender, surrender to the sands of the line, to the banks of Lethe. And plaster your fasting with a belt made of gold.

She was as black as the country wife’s fingers.

She emerged from the dead cavern of Verlaine and the blood of the lonesome soldier in the meadow and the invisible city of the barracks across oceans.

Once it stopped

There was beauty.

That spider crawling in the attic, in the sallow yellow sunbeam, is a messenger from Izambard, the ferryman, telling you to give him a penny

but instead you knocked on the door and had your photograph taken.

Who gives a fuck about the crooked bow tie? It was brown, the color of shit. Not your own shit, or Paul’s, or Banville’s, or Hugo’s, or your mother’s or father’s or sisters’ or brother’s, or even Monsieur Carjat in the black hood over the plate of silver nitrate… The bow tie in the black and white photograph is the color of Jesus’s shit.

Carjat wanted to touch it (the crooked bow tie), to adjust it-

But dude, if you were in front of Jesus’s shit would you adjust it?

(Touch it, maybe, but adjust it?)

You were hung over. Then you were drunk and then you were hung over. Fuck Virgil, fuck Dante, fuck Shakespeare, fuck Hugo, fuck Mallarme, fuck Baudelaire…

No, not Baudelaire, he’s my baby.

History is reversed. I’m the first.

A charcoal sky over Paris, day after day. They all want me. They are hungry. I am not. So I stay. Their soup is spiced with my piss, their lips are parched by my invisible sun. They laugh, imagining how my white ass must be luminous as the moon.

I wanted grace. I didn’t know it then, but I wanted it.

Books were gentle. The pages were silky. The bindings were hard. They smelled like History. They smelled like the well.

I saw the sea, remembered love and learned how to bring it against me.

Wave after wave after wave…

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin

Three volumes, 1107 pages, Vintage, New York, 1982

My friend Miles Bellamy’s father, Dick Bellamy, owner of the once rather notorious Oil & Steel art gallery on the Hudson river in New York, died with the first volume of A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu open in his hands. The portrait here being that dear Dick, knowing he was taking his last breaths, remembered that the one thing he had yet to accomplish in life was… well, you get it. Unfortunately poor Dick never read did the whole thing, all 1,267,064 words, but I did. And before I die, I might attempt to do so again.

When I did finish this monumental work, I vowed that it must be the greatest book of time… and then I read Jean Santeuil (see below), yet still say yes, it’s the greatest work of all time. It’s the delicacy of feeling, the stamina of that delicacy, the persistence… days turning into years of sunlight scattered through clouds.

If asked what this novel is about, I’d answer, “The end of the aristocracy in France.” Simple. But it’s about everything not only ending, but spreading out and folding back on itself. It’s about love. It’s about mysticism.

The famous madeleine dipped in tea in the beginning opens up the space for, well, enlightenment really, and when Marcel accidently trips on uneven stones in the path to the Guermantes mansion in the end, that very path is raised into another, higher dimension and you go there too… bursting through clouds, transformed.

It’s hard to say what actually happens in this moment but one is undeniably transformed. *

James, a co-worker of mine at a used bookstore, (way back when- when there was a happy abundance of used bookstores)- came into work one day kind of glowing, radiating and outside of himself, almost floating. He said, “I just finished reading Proust,” then added, “sitting on the stone steps of a church.” I don’t remember where I was when I finished it, probably in my garden in the darkening twilight, unable to move until the end of the last page, or more likely, propped up against pillows in my bed at four in the morning or something, nothing as romantic as the steps of a church, or a chair in a room on the Hudson River in the glow of lamp, but I do remember that when I did finish it, yeah- I was in some kind of nebula, my perspective of the mundane egg (as Blake terms our world)- changed and I was stronger. Inside, there was this new strength of fragility, my own and every one else’s, even strangers, even the dead… perhaps, thinking back on it now, especially the dead…

This has stayed with me, this joy of (at the risk of being cliché)- an inner knowledge that was had, and could only be had, by reading A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu.                                                                                                                          

Of course I am familiar with a book entitled “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, I’ve never read it and never will because the title alone is so pretentious it makes me nauseous and the fact that someone would write a book for the sole purpose of self-propaganda really makes me want to puke.

Looking for St. Loop

by Elizabeth McKague (1999)

“I thought I saw in his eyes that thirst for more sublime happiness, that un-avowed melancholy which aspires to something better than we can know here below, and which, for the romantic soul, however placed by chance or revolution,

“still prompts the celestial sight,

for which we wish to live, or dare to die.”

(Ultima lettera di Bianca a sua madre. Forli, 1817)

-Stendhal, “On Love”

Looking for St. Loup

I.

The gallant boy ran across the tables

like Holderlin’s comet through a mad sky.

There is no system for this.

Monsieur Melandrine came from the theater

to the Place de Clichy in work pants on a scooter.

We ate oysters and drank champagne

in the same corner where Baudelaire

sank into reverie, after a shoe shine.

The gentlemen arrive, all in black, from the Garden

and wish to enter the dark forest

yet wily nymphs hold them back.

No one believes it, although you were right

about the Minotaur-  now he’s using a cane.

It’s time for change when the familiar

becomes a loneliness one can not breathe.

Leopardi said Slyia reached out to her own grave.

His red cloak flying over their heads-

He seemed to be swinging from a garland of bells!

I must find invitations to better dramas.

Philosophy, the kiss, your paint box even

that has been emptied into this night

are lost so quickly, I can’t stand, I can’t walk,

I want to limp.

I gazed over the shoulders of so many others

as he leapt past an orgy of apocalyptic monsters

made by the shadows of coats and hats on racks

behind the French double doors.

He gathered his whole life into his arms to bring,

dashing, that fearless taste of the fruit-

blind to all but Surrender, to the approach

of a movement where feeling becomes a circle of light

drifting you upwards s that your heels

are actually rising from the small,

round, marble faces, arranged for reflection

against the great window, like a sliced up moon.

II.

He wants

the word

one word

from the

beginning

to     after

the end.

Some temperance

and arrangement

of the muscles

like flowers

in a vase.

Young Werther spoke of a kind of horse

that would bite open it’s own vein to relieve a fever.

Di te mi dole: Tu me manques.

A posture of Spring time in the cultured rows of sailboats.

The secret gathering is to live

as foreigners forced by the archer

to almost touch the shore.

marked obscura. The phantom swooped into the realm.

I revealed my dream.

“You mean, you actually want them t put you in the ground?”

Bones. Maybe. And daughters leaving azaleas.

My favorite part was when he drove up alone

and stepped out in front of the hotel.

How the sun carried him then, how

he lingered inside it

even as he entered the mulberry carpeted lounge.

Sultry wives, embarrassed by the heat, heaved out loud.

Bellhops hopped and stray men snatched

a second mind from the ice bucket

to place atop their usual, girdles of ennui.

She’ll torture herself with those pink hawthorns

a few hundred years from now.

Some erziehungsroman left in a box unfinished

in the closet and pithoi and stone cellar where

Thomas Aquinas once lived across the street

When once the body, the earth listened and

men walked where ever they found

an arresting feeling waiting in the distance.

It is necessary.

III.

As he watched the fawn

climb from the thicket

through unsteady branches

black with a melting frost

Play of time

the clouds bore down

another spirit upon

his wounded mind.

IV.

I’ll rent a studio where the river

becomes a dragon at the end of May.

Read Giuseppe Ungaretti at the round cafe

in the Piazza Giuseppe Poggi there is

a piece of shade shaped like an angel

from one certain elm.

If I asked you to read the palm on the hill.

You could be anybody reaching

the purple turrets in a limehaze.

I can see a missing chapter

in the prow of your hands,

mouth at the edge of a miracle.

It has been too long now not to know what to believe.

A shock went through the back of his neck.

A marching band stepped on the train.

He sat with a silent

tuba in his ear.

Another espresso in Rome.

Best one he ever had.

She walked through the Piazza della Repubblica

guitar on her back with a

pineapple and an eggplant, one in each arm.

The street musicians wondered,

“Must be some kinda California minestrone.”

She left her letters in the Hotel Vienne, 1814.

The unfinished dawn bleeding through crepe de che curtains and

the boys in stone statues across the Rue Raspail

when everything has happened in the presence of desire

and the Saints came in after kissing the trees-

She knew she could see across the expanse

but how could she scramble such love into the margins?

The sky moved closer, became charcoal and smoked.

V.

They pierced the continual sky with an auger,

threw loops up to heaven

and hung down like acrobats.

Sprung from a doubtless tube of royalty; he owned up

and saw truth as a visible object, a kind of crystal ball

in which nothing was false but the tints

of lavender in the hair and cheeks of so many Duchesses,

Princesses and Marquises’.

St. Loup laughed to cheer others.

In the hearth he burnt only the finest timber

to keep you warmer, longer.

He would soon ride again.

She escaped out under the trellises where

the quiet, gold days waiting for the post

spread out like tea with lemon.

On his own orders, later, after the pride

turned to pain (for no particular reason);

he went to the Front of the Line, crossed

the bloody battlefield in Auverres.

Endymion fought the jackals then rested his sword between her breast.

Tristan turned into Hermes when suddenly

everything on his back moved over his neck like a breeze.

It was always a trust.

In his last years he visited homosexual brothels.

His alienation pulsed. After all the gifts, still it was

like a bonfire all the way down the Champs Elysees,

it was like the dried figs at Christmas-

Perhaps there’d been too many sensations outside of himself,

he could no longer measure the end.

Perhaps it had past.

Perhaps he missed it.

You ask why it is a question of wandering?

Because somewhere the last line contains

a horizon  of Nobility.

VI.

I’m in that painting; rushed through the Vatican.

Justine taught me the eye trick how when you focus

on Hell then move slowly up and above

it’s all buoyancy and heavy globes.

I found my ecstatic consciousness on the map.

What a relief. (I was getting weaker from surviving

on the nebula of the dead).

T’was not I who wrote bitterness into the third novel.

Monmartre mattresscake on bare stone and gazing

naked into the long dawn and ashes of Chesterfields.

“Comme un paysage après l’orage, attention a la mélancolie,

c’est la plus belle mélodie de l’amour

c’est aussi la plus cruel et plus difficile.

Soit prudent avec ton coeur et rendre un peu triste.”

Someday, I’m going to the

top of the hill to live

with the Capuchin sisters.

I wanted the stillness to come and last, beside some one.

It speaks when we are children as a form of protection-

to find placement amongst that which is sensual.

Each memory in its own making like a sun

surrounded by a sun, surrounded by a sun... and so on;

if you can believe such a thing.

They say it all began with the Danube,

from the Black Sea to 1001 night’s heads resting on jewels in the great net covering all.

Then Calvalcanti came in with the key and the Pieta, the Pieta and the Pieta danced

all night out back of Hamlet’s Mill.            He just wanted to prove that it’s real-

that everything touches it, that it feels like Rouen blue

and haunted by crimson,

                         corrosive moss

         that took the mouths of gargoyles.

He distinguished a solitude far beyond the waves and valleys of reason.

His precipice divided the elliptic and he finally slept when the moon left Paris,

was carried off to Asia where he studied new characters; hieroglyphs of lover’s

limbs.

No, see

               MIND                              Body

                                                                               is the first

and second half

                                            of attention.

Then habit oppresses

soluble links to the night.

The machinery itself looks dangerous.

I wanted to tell you

how nice it would have been

when it was                possible

to escape.

And now,  there’s      that.

That it affected you so much.

Maybe it could have been more

than these pall books to carry us,

to weave the way in.

VII.

He walked along the shore, throwing each thought that started

in his groin and moved North over his shoulders

back in to the water.

I               have married many shepherds.

It was too orange- that light

in his North Beach hotel room.

Now he’s making violins for Carnagie Hall.

We’d watched the sun like we planted it,

even the noise of traffic and Ave Marias

from the laundromat below his rotting window, drowned.

Nobody talks about the Upyia Gallery anymore,

sometimes, a siren brings the needles and trumpets back into your brain.

Then the stranger appears, feeding the birds.

I couldn’t make anything new anymore, I wanted

to give it all away. Forgive me,

the East is precious, but, forgive me.

St. Loup is an archetype

the misunderstood troubadour

and the violence of another world.

Ternion in chains in the Caucasus Mountains,

no one can find you there.

the monsters come, the monsters go...

He’d never say her name in writing.

It meant house. House of peaches.

VIII.

St. Loup surrounded himself with the resistless type.

He liked to tame them. But you were the one

he appreciated. You were the dark self, the delicate solitaire.

Conversation was pure.         It was only a favor. So,

he traveled to her hiding place

and learned she had died.

He told you by telegram, “I’m sorry.

She went horse riding in the planets.”

He rarely slept in the barracks.

When the Great War came he went in barefoot

and lonely, following demons for secrets

and no one to save.

He never had a photograph taken of himself.

Leave, was three days in Nueilly-

But you’d been salvaged

into the asylum.

I’m not going to be calm about this.

I believe there’s an answer.

If I could say, “Tonight, my love...”

but my voice is fainter, transient,

like a sliver of ice.

You must be brave. learn to balance

the antiquity of character with laughter.

The shetayan who is wise never returns-

you go there- in the periphery of the campfire.

Each bridge in Prague is like the bow of a violin.

For every two French people there is only one mirror.

Proust and Stendhal differ on the idea of love.

What    idea?

Friends have run off to Nederland, Colorado.

Dreadlocks in Switzerland.

The Trenitalia are always right on time, to the second.

and mothers and grooms waving good-bye.

I’m concerned about the lighting (not too dark, not too cold...)

the Byzantine painter, who is eccentric, is coming.

“If you impress them too much they’ll end up thinking

you’re a survivor.”

Gray, gray, the color of storm

and that soft, yellow patch,

and the chimes, and the albatross.

The carriage waited. The shadowy lamplighter alone,

walking down the Boulevard de Batignolles in a mist.

St. Loup entertained his table until midnight.

Who are you looking at?

Let’s have another round.

His red cloak hanging on the back of his chair like Shelley’s ghosts.

The underpainting the color of brown glass

then Mediterranean light and a tiny bottle of arsenic.

Chatterton as Icarus on the bed in the attic.

You were right, about culture, how it’s all about

fathers, sons, and whores.

Monsieur Melandrine had such a fucking

intelligent looking upper lip. He abandoned

everything to position himself between feeling what is illusion and what is manifest.

I pictured his boyhood,

tangerines and linden trees, imagination at Fontainebleau.

It was the last time.

I watched an old man pour soapy water on the steps,

then sweep it away with a broom.

IX.

The sullen wind

cherry blossom snow

it is Spring.

I still have your banjo. I threw away the case.

It looked like Rimbaud’s passport.

She wrapped the souvenirs in the pretty printed paper from the confiserie

and left them in the front zipper pocket of her suitcase

when she got home, unpacking.

Forever that midnight.

He did look a bit surprised when she lay down

on the floor of pine needles in the spreading moonlight,

beyond the red stones, over the wall, out back of someone

unknown’s villa, through the dewy meadow

in an atrium of skinny trees

where Dvorak had the inspiration to compose his-

“So did you get those cool sandals...?”

“At the bazaar, in Cairo.”

Allegro ma non troppo.

St. Loup was killed in battle.

Blown up and scattered.

No one knew, but himself, then-

at that very moment,

that he really wished

for truth and freedom,

that he had plans,

that he wanted to continue

the task that

in this little globe

one can still find

some definition

of virtue.

2005

Jean Santeuil by Marcel Proust,

Translated by Gerald Hopkins

Simon & Shuster, New York, 1956, 2nd printing, first printing 1955

Bernard de Fallios, a young Proust scholar, found several boxes of torn manuscript pages and seventy notebooks in Marcel’s cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Written, and obviously abandoned, when Proust was around 25, these pages were carefully reassembled by Fallios and published in Paris as the novel, “Jean Santeuil” in 1952.

This probably my foremost favorite novel, although Le Recherche is absolutely a greater work, Jean is… well, it’s like a raindrop. (And the dated, pale pink cover is really cool!)

It is the tender story of a poet. An indulgence in sentimentality. A bath of isolated sensuality. Lonesomeness. Illness. Growth. The humor of adolescence, hypersensitivity, innocence, natural voyeurism, connection points into the center of sexuality, naiveté and intelligence merged by poetic vision into the beauty of windows out onto the ‘health’ of society when one is so young and so ill. Jean Santeuil is the beacon on the lighthouse. Portrait of an artist as a lover alone. (Yet, aren’t all artists lovers alone?) It’s a bout a boy taking the boy into the man no matter what…

From page 369, when Jean’s mother calls him while he is away from her for the first time (if I remember correctly): And also, the telephone is a new invention at this time in history:

“Quickly, he put the receiver to his ear… then, all of a sudden, as if everyone had left the room and he was throwing himself into his mother’s arms- he was aware, close beside him, gentle, fragile, delicate, so clear, so melting, like a tiny scrap of broken ice- of her voice.”

The mature Marcel (see above) finds strength in fragility. Jean Santeuil creates, fashions out of clay, strength out of weakness. Strength to accept death (at such a young age!) and the weakness to love life. Hope.

The tendons of language are bruised.

The sky is grey, the ocean green, girls wear white, boys wear blue and in between, the lover, the lighthouse, fearlessly feels the world through his window, the window of all the lost time of youth that has been emptied into his shining soul.

from page 743:

“For death in a man journeys into the infinite and into nothingness. For no matter how obscure he may be, no matter how limited his intelligence, the thought of death, the coming of death, opens for him a window on the mysteries of eternity.”