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queer-ragnelle · 2 months ago

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All three! Apologies. I want to learn as much as I can about him.

You got it!

The first text that Galahad appears in is the Vulgate. His predecessors and legacy are first described in The History of the Grail; then he’s conceived, born, and raised during the Lancelot books; finally in Post-Vulgate he’s a knight on Grail Quest where he achieves his life’s purpose and passes away. Additionally, here’s A Companion to The Lancelot-Grail Cycle which may help you navigate the text.

Another book I suggest for your Galahad research is The Legend of the Grail by Nigel Bryant and Norris J. Lacy. It’s got a lengthy introduction about the history of the Grail story and touches on all the characters who’ve achieved it throughout Arthurian literary history including Perceval, Gawain, and of course, Galahad. Each chapter is taken from a different text and newly translated by Nigel Bryant for this publication. It’ll give you an idea of the progression of the Grail story which eventually led to Galahad and introduce you to some adjacent texts that may be of interest.

The next medieval text that includes Galahad is La Tavola Ritonda. It’s mostly a Prose Tristan story, but does cover the whole Grail Quest with a fun Italian Galahad named Galeazzo/Galasso. I enjoy this one a lot! Regarding Galasso specifically, it’s an interesting take on the character—he’s described as very gracious and he wields a cool named sword. Plus his purity grants him necromancy powers—at one point he convenes with the dead and doesn’t bat an eye. Just keeps on adventuring. Focused. In his lane. Pretty neat!

After that comes probably the best known Arthurian text, Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. I’ve attached the version of this story abridged by Keith Baines. It’s much easier to read with proper formatting to add quotation marks to dialogue and tighten up the prose. This one also comes with A Companion to Malory which I found exceedingly helpful in breaking down the sometimes convoluted plot threads and character dynamics present in Malory’s story. Many of the essays I’ve attached below relate to this text specifically.

Lastly I would be remiss to exclude The Arthurian Handbook by the goats Norris J. Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe. This volume not only covers medieval texts, but much of the art history that goes hand in hand with Arthurian literature too. There are many paintings, tapestries, stained glass windows, and murals featuring Galahad highlighted in this book. It also includes family trees, heraldry, and maps which can help you conceptualize things detailed in writing throughout the Vulgate.

Now I’m going to list essays without descriptions since there are so many and the titles are pretty self explanatory.

Absent Fathers, Unexpected Sons: Paternity in Malory’s Morte Darthur by Cory Rushton

Born-Again Virgins and Holy Bastards: Bors and Elyne and Lancelot and Galahad by Karen Cherwatuk

Constructing Spiritual Hierarchy through Mass Attendance in the Morte Darthur by David Eugene Clark

Disarming Lancelot by Elizabeth Scala

Galahad, Percival, and Bors: Grail Knights and the Quest for Spiritual Friendship by Richard Sévère

'A Mayde, and Last of Youre Blood': Galahad's Asexuality and its Significance in Le Morte Darthur by Megan Arkenberg

Gender and the Grail by Maureen Fries

Malory and Rape by Catherine Batt

Mothers in the Grail Quest: Desire, Pleasure, and Conception by Peggy McCracken

Seeing Is Believing and Achieving: Viewing the Eucharist in Malory's 'Sankgreal' by Sarah B. Rude

Wounded Masculinity: Injury and Gender in Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte Darthur" by Kenneth Hodges

And that about covers it! This should give you plenty to work with. Beyond these, we’re left with literature outside the medieval era, which is a different conversation. No doubt Alfred Lord Tennyson had a huge influence on how Galahad is perceived today, but that’s irrelevant to a discussion regarding medieval source material, and a topic for another time. Hope this helps you out and you learn all you want to about Galahad!

Take care!

#arthuriana #arthurian legend #arthurian mythology #arthurian literature #sir galahad #galahad #resource #ask #anonymous

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gawrkin · 3 months ago

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Arthur's Affairs by Peggy McCracken

(Found in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, by Elizabeth Archibald)

Courtly Love in Action, for Arthur this time...

[...]

Ms. McCracken asking the real questions here

#the affairs of king arthur #that last line about arthur's affairs should put in perspective about how we view courtly love as "something for women”#courtly love #fin amor #king arthur #queen guinevere #sir lancelot #camille #false guinevere #gwenhwyfach #vulgate cycle #lancelot grail #arthuriana #arthurian mythology #arthurian legend #arthurian legends

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bleachbleachbleach · 5 months ago

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Reading Update

Not Bleach-related, but since this is where I've been putting my writing updates, in my mind it's also where my reading ones should go. I basically only get to read things May-August, so I've been on a tear. But I keep reading things I don't end up liking? Which, HELP. WHY.

It makes me feel like such a hater, or someone who's too closed-off to things outside of my expectations that I automatically, anti-intellectually hate it, but then I'm like, okay, but I have not picked up a single fanfic this year that I did not think was brilliant. I have seen three movies this year I thought were brilliant (Fancy Dance, Evil Does Not Exist, and the Haikyuu movie, the last of which is definitely 100% like the other two)! I have read a lot of really fantastic article-length creative nonfiction that I also found brilliant!

MAYBE I JUST DON'T LIKE BOOKS.

Books I Really Liked

The Souvenir Museum - Elizabeth McCracken

Flux - Jinwoo Chong

Run Me To Earth - Paul Yoon

Shadow Life - Hiromi Goto

I know I just said "not Bleach-related," I actually think some Bleach folks would be into a lot of these, depending on where your specific interests within Bleach lie.

The Souvenir Museum had fabulous character work, and I love what I'm beginning to feel is something signature about McCracken, in that most of these stories were realist New England fiction and then out of the blue she slid one in there that was sorta-supernatural and also about cannibalism. Love that for her! Love that for me.

Flux is a speculative time travel thriller, but where it stands out is how much trust it places in its audience to follow along and hop in medias res with all these characters and premises. There's no extraneous exposition or explainers; it just drops you in the deep end and it's so much fun. There's also a lot in this book that is about TV and fandom and while I usually find it hard to buy into depictions of these things this book gets it so, so right for me. And the dialogue is fantastically tight and snappy and so full of life--I loved Part 1 in particular, and the book is worth it just for that!

Run Me To Earth is beautiful. Trenchant, haunting. Each character feels like a small poem, living and breathing and doing their best to avoid unexploded ordinances while riding a motorbike. And bonus Inuzuri vibes for me

(And Shadow Life I already talked about here. That's the one where a lady traps Death inside of her vacuum cleaner.)

Books I Am Actively Annoyed By

All That’s Left Unsaid - Tracey Lien

Your Driver is Waiting - Priya Guns

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu - Tom Lin

AKA "maybe I just don't like genre fiction." These were a mystery, lesbian thriller, and western, respectively, and the whole time I was basically like, "we're really just doing this, huh?" In each of these, the character work wasn't strong enough to make the story, and I guess from each I expected more critical engagement with the genre? And not "we're going to un-self-consciously depict and then slaughter a bunch of bloodthirsty Indians because THAT'S WHAT WESTERNS DO." These were all books that sounded theoretically interesting to me but in practice were very not.

Nonfiction That I Wish Had Been Better

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Dear Elia - Mimi Khuc

What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape - Sohaila Abdulali

Mott Street - Ava Chin

How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo

Eating Wildly - Ava Chin [DNF]

I think I'm just a pop nonfiction hater, because my issue with all of these is that they often felt like too-superficial treatments of their subject or seemed extremely (sometimes intentionally) undercited. Multiple of these kept making assertions about having developed an original thesis/practice or never having seen X in the world, when that's simply not true. These just make me think about all of the stylistically brilliant, incredibly thoughtful creative nonfiction being published online/in magazines, and how pale these book-length treatments feel in comparison.

(Almost) Everything Else

River East, River West - Aub Rey Lescure (this is the Naruto hentai book)

Our Missing Hearts - Celeste Ng

I Would Meet You Anywhere - Susan Ito

Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties - Kevin Gascoyne

Bowlaway - Elizabeth McCracken

Book I Could Not Physically Read Because I Hated it So Much I Couldn't Stand It

The Leftover Woman, Jean Kwok

Future Reads

Four Treasures of the Sky - Jenny Zhang

Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov

Miko Kings, LeAnne Howe

A Bestiary - Lily Hoang

#no brain not bleach

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therumpus · 11 days ago

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The Strangeness of Fiction: A Conversation with Scott Guild

By Elizabeth McCracken

When I first spoke to Scott Guild on the phone, it was in the wake of a terrorist attack: I was calling to offer him a spot at the New Writers Project, and it happened to be the day that the whole of Greater Boston—where he then lived—was shut down while police looked for the Tsarnaev Brothers after the Boston Marathon Bombing. I was delivering good news at this strange time; we joked a little but also talked about the utter strangeness of the moment. That conversation now seems from the world of Scott’s fiction: surreal, terrifying, full of suspense, thousands of people in their homes holding their breath.

As a person, Guild is modest and self-deprecating—knowingly, comically self-deprecating—but as an artist he’s astonishingly ambitious, a virtuoso. Plastic (Pantheon Books, 2024) is a book, an album, a project like no other. How can a book be about plastic figures, sentient waffles, and a miniature Jesus who comes off His crucifix to be a song-and-dance man be so deeply human and humane?

Scott Guild is a musician, writer, and teacher whose first novel and first album—both called Plastic—were released this year. He’s a professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, and for many years has been an advocate for prison reform. Though Scott and I have had many conversations over the years in person and on the phone, including in front of audiences and over guacamole salad, we conducted this interview over email.

***

The Rumpus: Plastic is both a high-concept novel, and profound, so intricate and strange that I find it hard to describe. I just want to insist that people read it. It's full of strange concepts and yet it's not about them. I guess I mean that largely the characters are plastic, but the novel doesn't stay with that initial question, “What if plastic figurines were sentient?” (Let's call it The Toy Story level.) It's interested in much more complicated questions. How do you describe the book to people? And what do you think it's about?

Scott Guild: You make an excellent point here, which is that the characters never discuss the fact that they’re plastic figurines—this is just their normal reality, walking around with their hinges and hollow bodies. Unlike Toy Story, there’s not a world of flesh-and-blood humans in contrast to them. I think this gets at a part of the book’s meaning: We all live such strange lives now, immersed in our technologies while the natural world crumbles around us, but more and more this just feels normal, the state of existence we’ve all accepted.

I wouldn’t want to define what it “means” that the characters are plastic figurines: I’d love for readers to interpret that for themselves, and it’s meant different things even to me in the years of writing the book. But when I look at the way we live now, and then think about how we would appear to people from a century or two ago, we probably would seem as alien to them as plastic figurines, at least in some ways—living so far from nature, completely surrounded by our inventions and the narratives they give us.

In writing the book, a main goal was to capture something of what it feels like to be alive right now, and—at least for this novel—I couldn’t seem to do that with more traditional narrative forms, which seemed rooted in a different era and type of cognition. The form of my book had to take on the story’s themes; it had to inflect how the story itself was told. I tried writing Erin’s story with a limited third person voice, then with a first-person voice, but this always fell short of what I hoped to evoke. The novel only started to work when it was written as a TV show, when we saw Erin’s life through the filter of the media to which she’s addicted. Similarly, it was only when I gave the characters plastic bodies that their world felt right to me.

All that being said, this isn’t how I describe the novel when someone first asks! I mention that it’s set in a world of plastic figurines, but then also that it’s a love story, and a story of a person trying to reclaim her humanity in a violent, chaotic world. Erin exists inside many layers of alienation, but her personhood and spiritual growth always feel like the heart of the book to me (even if her chest is technically hollow).

Rumpus: I feel like you and I have talked over the years a lot about the uses of strangeness in fiction. You talk about it a little here from the point of view of a writer—by making the world stranger, you can also write about our own world, a kind of pinhole camera—and I wonder if you can talk about what strangeness means to you.

Guild: This is such a fascinating question, and it gets me thinking about what strangeness is in art. When something is "strange," this means it has swerved from our expectations, that it has somehow defied a normal or typical pattern in its genre. It's funny, because there are whole genres—like surrealist fiction, which I write—where strangeness itself is the expected pattern, and therefore not "strange" at all!

To be truly strange in surrealist fiction, with all its genre expectations, I think you need to zag at times in the opposite direction, to go for realism when the reader expects the bizarre. This was part of my hope with Plastic: to write a surrealist novel that also has the intimate, personal stakes of traditional literary fiction, so that the two different genre patterns would keep subverting each other, creating a tension that matches the tensions in Erin's world. Just when you think you're in this zany, wacky metafiction novel where the characters get "Brad Pitt's Disease," here comes the section where Erin cares for her father as he dies of BPD—far more Alice Munro than Thomas Pynchon.

This connects to what I was saying in the last question: my desire to capture something of what life feels like right now. Seeing Trump high in the polls, seeing our eco-crisis ignored, seeing a global rise of fascism, many of us feel like we're trapped inside a satirical metafiction novel (and not a particularly well-written one!). But this doesn't change the depth of our connections to each other, or the inner depth of our emotional and spiritual lives.

And this leads to another thought: what is the point of strangeness in fiction? Why seek it at all, as a writer or reader? To my mind, when something is truly strange—and strange in a way that's satisfying—it's because it finds a new way to render experience, a shift in form that gives a new window onto our personal or collective existence. In the 1740s, when Samuel Richardson pioneered detailed character interiority in Pamela, this gave readers a very strange and new literary experience, but one deeply rooted in their own personhood. Three centuries later, nothing could be more expected in a literary fiction novel—detailed inner lives are the definition of normal. Though a little less common, the same point can be made about Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness or Kafka's dream logic narratives: innovations become widely-used craft techniques, and these techniques no longer startle us. But these formal innovations were effective at the time, and continue to be effective now, because they train their gaze on something crucial about the human experience and can still speak to us centuries after their strangeness has worn off.

Rumpus: I love this answer so much, from Pamela to notes of Alice Munro in Plastic. I wanted to ask you about the visual in the book. One of the things that struck me is how clearly I saw some of the things in the book (things that don't exist in our world, like sentient anthropomorphic waffles), while at other times I didn't need to see things in great detail because I was so busy listening: to monologues, song and dance numbers, et cetera. Even though I read the book on the page, it's somehow a real multimedia experience. Maybe my question is just, “How'd you do that? And what do you see when you write?”

Guild: This is all so wonderful to hear. In many ways, the true setting of the novel is Erin's mind, and it's a mind immersed in visual media—particularly television, which she uses to escape her traumas. When Erin looks out on the world, she sees it as close-ups and wide shots, as scenes in front of an imaginary audience; her own thoughts feel to her like a confessional to a camera in Reality TV. Like so many of us today, she's deeply disassociated from reality—all of life feels like a screen—and I wanted this type of cognition to come through in the form of the book, to immerse the reader in this space as well.

In the early drafts of Plastic, when I was writing in limited third person, I always felt like I was telling the reader about Erin's mental state, from the safe remove of a more traditional narrative form. When I began to write the book as a TV show, suddenly I could see the plastic world through her eyes and the distance between us vanished. It's incredible how evocative language is: When I'd write, "the camera zooms in on Jacob's face," or, "the camera pans across the room," it felt like this whole other visual part of my brain switched on, and I could write (and see!) the setting in much more detail. And I had to admit how steeped I am in this media myself, that a few phrases about a camera could do this!

I didn't realize it until later, but I think I cribbed some of my formal approach from Joyce's Ulysses—I should give credit where it's due! So much of Ulysses is told through the lens of his era's dominant media—as a play, as a series of newspaper stories, as an academic text, depending on the section—and Joyce wants us to remember that we receive our whole sense of the world through these rhetorical structures, that there's really no such thing as "objective" perception. But the experience of Ulysses is one of continuous fragmentation—a major Modernist theme—and I wanted the form of Plastic to feel fluid and seamless, in the fluid way that visual media tries to present the world.

Rumpus: You are also a musician, and have released Plastic, the album. Is it a companion piece? An essential part of the experience?

Guild: Thanks for asking about the music! I do think of it as essential to the experience because it takes you directly to one of Erin's most important mental spaces: a space of song. Erin slips into surreal musical numbers throughout the novel—usually at her times of peak emotion—and the album is a way to experience these moments in full, with melody and arrangements for her lyrics in the book. The songs on the album are also chronological, so you can experience the whole story in about 40 minutes of music.

The album didn't feel like an "adaptation" of Plastic—the way a movie or a musical would—but an expansion of a space already in the book. It lets Erin step from the pages and continue her story in a different narrative structure, with the amazing singer, Stranger Cat, giving her voice. I love the music videos we made as well, and what these add to the storytelling experience.

Rumpus: I know that you worked on this book over years—I saw some early iterations and was always surprised by how much changed from draft to draft. You ended up with a book that was both different in nearly all its particulars and yet at its heart, the same book, undeniably. The same in its soul, and its ambitions, and life force. How did you keep the book from seizing up as you worked on it? I suppose this is another way of saying, “How did you keep it alive, and yourself interested? How does it feels to have it out in the world and done?”

Guild: I suppose the easy answer to this is Erin herself—staying close to her as a person through the years. (It’s been a long time since I thought of her as “fictional,” though I suppose she’s technically not alive!). With each new draft, I felt like I was coming to know Erin better, slipping more fully into her world.

Everyone writes and develops their fiction differently—there’s no one correct way—but I usually need a feeling of discovery as I work, a sense that I’m arriving at the truth of the characters and the world, rather than “making things up.” Learning that Erin is plastic, that she breaks into musical numbers, that she gave her father hospice care, that her sister is a terrorist—all these were discoveries while I was deep in the drafting process, and then I’d get excited and start reshaping the book around them. It would take months, or in some cases, years, and I was lucky enough to have brilliant readers like you giving me feedback and guidance along the way. But it was always grounded in Erin, and in becoming more in touch with her mind and heart and world. That often changed the book formally as well, which was a fun surprise of its own—as I mentioned before, her story only made sense to me when it was written as a TV show.

I made the album for many reasons, and I can see now that a major one was spending more time with her! We’d been together for so many years, and I wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet: I started to work full-time on the songs once the book was completed. Now that the book and album are out in the world, and people are reading her story and hearing her songs—it’s a feeling beyond words, letting go of the person who meant so much to me all those years, seeing her leave and have a life with others. In some ways it’s very fulfilling, but I also miss her! Luckily, we still get to bring her alive at all the book-and-music events around the country.

#lit #interviews #the rumpus #writeblr #creative writing

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czolgosz · 5 months ago

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i went to a used book sale today... procured:

railroad color history: new york central railroad (brian solomon & mike schafer) — i'm not actually that into trains but it appealed to me.

the complete guide to the soviet union (jennifer louis & victor louis) — travel guide from 1980

an anthology including the big sleep (raymond chandler), "the undignified melodrama of the bone of contention" (dorothy l. sayers), "the arrow of god" (leslie charteris), "i can find my way out" (ngaio marsh), instead of evidence (rex stout), "rift in the loot" (stuart palmer & craig rice), "the man who explained miracles" (john dickson carr), & rebecca (daphne du maurier) (i already have this one..) — it's volume 2 of something (a treasury of great mysteries) which annoys me but whatever

an anthology including "godmother tea" (selena anderson), "the apartment" (t. c. boyle), "a faithful but melancholy account of several barbarities lately committed" (jason brown), "sibling rivalry" (michael byers), "the nanny" (emma cline), "halloween" (mariah crotty), "something street" (carolyn ferrell), "this is pleasure" (mary gaitskill), "in the event" (meng jin), "the children" (andrea lee), "rubberdust" (sarah thankam mathews), "it's not you" (elizabeth mccracken), "liberté" (scott nandelson), "howl palace" (leigh newman), "the nine-tailed fox explains" (jane pek), "the hands of dirty children" (alejandro puyana), "octopus vii" (anna reeser), "enlightenment" (william pei shih), "kennedy" (kevin wilson), & "the special world" (tiphanie yanique) — i guess they're all short stories published in 2020 by usamerican/canadian authors

an anthology including the death of ivan ilyich (leo tolstoy) (i have already read this one..), the beast in the jungle (henry james), heart of darkness (joseph conrad), seven who were hanged (leonid andreyev), abel sánchez (miguel de unamuno), the pastoral symphony (andré gide), mario and the magician (thomas mann), the old man (william faulkner), the stranger (albert camus), & agostino (alberto moravia)

the ambassadors (henry james)

the world book desk reference set: book of nations — it's from 1983 so this is kind of a history book...

yet another fiction anthology......... including the general's ring (selma lagerlöf), "mowgli's brothers" (rudyard kipling), "the gift of the magi" (o. henry) (i have already read this one..), "lord mountdrago" (w. somerset maugham), "music on the muscatatuck" (jessamyn west), "the pacing goose" (jessamyn west), "the birds" (daphne du maurier), "the man who lived four thousand years" (alexandre dumas), "the pope's mule" (alphonse daudet), "the story of the late mr. elvesham" (h. g. wells), "the blue cross" (g. k. chesterton), portrait of jennie (robert nathan), "la grande bretèche" (honoré de balzac), "love's conundrum" (anthony hope), "the great stone face" (nathaniel hawthorne), "germelshausen" (friedrich gerstäcker), "i am born" (charles dickens), "the legend of sleepy hollow" (washington irving), "the age of miracles" (melville davisson post), "the long rifle" (stewart edward white), "the fall of the house of usher" (edgar allan poe) (i have already read this one..), the voice of bugle ann (mackinlay kantor), the bridge of san luis rey (thornton wilder), "basquerie" (eleanor mercein kelly), "judith" (a. e. coppard), "a mother in mannville" (marjorie kinnan rawlings), "kerfol" (edith wharton), "the last leaf" (o. henry), "the bloodhound" (arthur train), "what the old man does is always right" (hans christian anderson), the sea of grass (conrad richter), "the sire de malétroit's door" (robert louis stevenson), "the necklace" (guy de maupassant) (i have already read this one..), "by the waters of babylon" (stephen vincent benét), a. v. laider (max beerbohm), "the pillar of fire" (percival wilde), "the strange will" (edmond about), "the hand at the window" (emily brontë) (i have already read this one..), & "national velvet" (enid bagnold) — why are seven of these chapters of novels....? anyway fun fact one of the compilers here also worked on the aforementioned mystery anthology. also anyway Why did i bother to write all that ☹��

fundamental problems of marxism (georgi plekhanov) — book about dialectical/historical materialism which is published here as the first volume of something (marxist library) which is kind of odd to me tbh

one last (thankfully tiny) anthology including le père goriot (honoré de balzac) & eugénie grandet (honoré de balzac)

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