#girl meets boy: the myth of iphis

[burner-of-ships]

have i shown off my bookshelves here yet? i don’t think i have. i should.

i’ve got my Homer and Virgil (i can’t wait for Emily Wilson’s Iliad to add to the collection)

then my other translations and semi-academic books like biographies or analyses.

then my retellings. i have so many, not because i love retellings, but because i actually take issue with so many of them but love to compare them to the originals and to each other. they’re in my best approximation of chronological order. if you want to know the ones i do like: Medusa by Jessie Burton, Helen Of Troy by Margaret George, Lavinia by Ursula Le Guin and anything by Natalie Haynes and Stephen Fry.)

ancient historical fiction and loose retellings (The Wolf Den books are set in ancient Pompeii, Lies We Sing To The Sea follows on from The Odyssey, The Just City is about Plato’s Republic and features Apollo, Athena and various historical figures as characters, Watership Down is The Aeneid if Cassandra was there and they were rabbits, Home Fire is Antigone in modern day England, and Girl Meets Boy is Iphis and Ianthe in modern day Scotland)

then my altars (to Psyche, Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis)

my greek vases, all found in charity shops

and finally my collage wall right beside my shelf, which has a bunch of myth related prints (as well as some fandom ones)

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

If you were after more details on the angel who transes your gender, @crazy-pages - there's three different stories where that happens (as a way to maintain the status quo of man + woman). I'm copy/pasting this from another post so the format's a little weird 😅

(also, sorry about the gendered language. Trying to balance between how medieval people understood things and how we do is hard without changing the meaning of the original texts too much AND without getting super wordy)

Yde et Olive (15th Cent) - to avoid being married to their own father, Yde disguises themselves as a man and becomes a knight. They end up in Rome, where the king marries them to their daughter, Olive. After a couple of weeks, Yde tells Olive about their "true gender", but the conversation is overheard. The King demands Yde bathe with him to prove they are a man. An angel intervenes and transforms Yde into a man.

Iphis and Ianthe (Greek/Roman myth, but also in Ovid's Metamorphois, which first came to England in the 15th Cent) - Telethusa is due to give birth, but her husband tells her that if the baby is a girl he'll have it killed. When she gives birth to a girl, she names them Iphis and disguises them as a boy. Eventually, Iphis is engaged to Ianthe. (Incidentally, this is also a really early example of same-sex romance, as Iphis struggles with their love for Ianthe "as a woman"). Before the wedding, Iphis and Telethusa pray at the temple of Isis, who transforms Iphis into a man.

Tristan de Nanteuil (11th/12th Cent) - from the Chanson de geste, after his alleged death, Tristan's wife, Blanchandin/e, disguises themself as a Knight. Clarinde, a sultan's daughter, falls in love with them. Blanchandin manages to hide their "true sex", but when Clarinde demands they bathe with her to prove they are a man they flee into the woods. There, they meet an angel who asks if they want to be transformed into a man. Blanchandin accepts and he is turned into a man for the rest of the poem. (Incidentally the angel gives him a giant cock. Yes, the text specifies this).

the great thing about medieval literature is that it returns us to a time when men were men and women were women, *insert gritty realism gif here*, featuring such important and eternal gendered characteristics such as

(M) Why Would I Learn To Think Critically When I Could Find a Random Damsel In The Woods To Tell Me What To Do

(F) Demands To Be Brought The Heads Of Her Enemies

(M, to F) Be Mean To Me, No, Meaner Than That

(F) Meticulous Maintenance Of Social Connections And Alliances Via Writing Letters

(M) Crying

(M) More Crying

(M) Even More Crying, While Being Held Tenderly By Brother In Arms

(F) Necromancy

(M) Meticulous Maintenance Of Social Connections And Alliances Via Mistaking Friend’s Identity, Attacking Him, Then Kissing And Making Up

(F) Expert Medical Practitioner

(M) Self-Care By Episodes Of Madness In The Woods

(F) Owner Of Haunted Castle

[be-harmony]

“I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society, I said, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making? Do companies sell their water etc by telling us the right kind of persuasive myth? Is that why people who really don’t need to buy something that’s practically free still go out and buy bottles of it? Will they soon be thinking up a myth to sell us air?”

- Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

[soracities]

early loves, a primer 💌

“In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

— Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nouva

“When I first met you, that’s what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I’m going to love this person because even the sky looks different.”

— Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Chaos

“We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years.”

— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

— The Beatles, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”

“Just by existing and by letting me speak to you, you give me an immense amount. You are infinitely rich where I am concerned; entirely clear and captivating. I love you extremely and how it eases my heart to be able to say so.”

— Iris Murdoch, in a letter to Michael Oakeshott

“I feel met by you, he says afterwards. It’s weird. (That’s exactly what it feels like. I felt met by him the first time I saw him. I felt met by him all the times we weren’t even able to meet each other’s eyes.)” 

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis)

“How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours–with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it–and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret–so sharp!–that we haven’t lived through it together–whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissable–or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road–you see what I mean, my happiness?”

— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra

— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. / I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince.”

— Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door

“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought–and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”

— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra 

— Lorde, “400 Lux”

“You know, when I start telling you something by saying, ‘I was thinking about what you said about … ,’ it always gives me pleasure to say that, to let you know that I was brooding on your words. And I think the pleasure is … well, I know how much I love it when you say ‘I was thinking about what you said about …’ It’s somehow as though the part of you that’s in me will be able to nourish the part of me that’s in you, or-something-I don’t know how to put it. But that there’s some circuit of reciprocity between these holding relations: your ability to hold me inside you, and mine to hold you inside me.”

— Eve Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love

“There wasn’t anything mean about him. I don’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”

— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”

— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West

“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”

— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing but to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once?”

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

— Laura Marris, “Tell Me Gently”

“The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe  had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they feel like they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves? Yes, Robin said. All of that. And more.”

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

“You are all the colours in one, at full brightness.”

— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Arwen: Do you remember when we first met? Aragorn: I thought I had wandered into a dream.”

— Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

— Labi Siffre, “Bless the Telephone”

“This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

”When I am with you, there is nowhere else I’d rather be. And I am a person who always wants to be somewhere else.”

— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories

“[Bridge:] But we're both a long way from home We got the windows down, the radio's on, always [Verse 2:] I wrote a letter to the sky saying maybe one day you'll get to kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. My girl found it in the car and said baby why you trying to diss me, diss me, diss me? Cause you know you're my baby, you know you're my baby, ooh I'm not just in it for the pride, in it for the ride, yeah...”

— Frank Ocean, “Acura Integurl”

— Cat Power, “Sea of Love”

[wellbelesbian]

If anyone wants to partake in the @comythcollection but is stuck on which myth to rewrite (let’s be honest, Orpheus and Eurydice is a bit overdone by now) I have a few suggestions of lesser known myths:

small myths:

• Aristophanes’s myth of love- essentially a soulmate myth, humans used to be beings with 4 arms, 4 legs and 2 faces, but the gods split them in half for their hubris, leaving all of us searching for our other half. This myth includes gay men, lesbians, and heterosexuals, so it can apply to any ship! Also, recognising lesbians is really progressive for ancient Athens, thanks Plato.

• Pyramus and Thisbe- a greek form of Romeo and Juliet. Pyramus and Thisbe are neighbours whose families hate even other. they speak through a crack in their shared wall and eventually plan to meet, but things don’t go to plan and Pyramus, believing Thisbe to have been killed by a lion, stabs himself. when she finds his body, she stabs herself with the same sword. Simon and Baz would work well for this, and remember you don’t have to give them the typical tragic ending.

• Iphis- this is technically an egyptian myth, but it was retold and made Roman by Ovid, so i think it’s okay. A poor couple expecting a baby in Rome cannot afford a dowry if they have a daughter, so the father decides he must kill the child if it’s a girl. When the child is born, they are indeed female, so the mother disguises them as a boy, and the baby is named Iphis. Iphis grows up and falls in love with Ianthe. they are set to marry, but Iphis doesn’t want to go through with it in their current body, so they pray to Isis, who transforms them into a man (i use they pronouns for simplicity’s sake). Headcanon a character as trans? Try this myth!

UPDATE: i just discovered there’s a greek version of this myth, the myth of Leucippus! The only difference is that Leucippus prayed to Leto to be transformed into a man in order to avoid going through female puberty, rather than to marry.

larger myths:

• Jason and Medea- in his quest for the golden fleece, Jason must complete 2 tasks set by Aeëtes, the god who currently possesses it- yoking two mechanical fire-breathing bulls and ploughing a field, then sowing dragon’s teeth in place of seeds. Aeëtes’s mortal daughter, Medea, falls in love with Jason. Knowing the tasks are a trap, as the dragon teeth will grow into soldiers who will try to kill him, she gives him advice and uses her magic to help him. When her father still refuses to hand over the fleece, Medea helps Jason steal it and they run away together. Unless you want to make this dark, I would avoid the rest of the story, as Medea gets pretty murdery. This could work with any couple, but Simon is the typical hero archetype. You could also make it non-romantic and cast Penelope as the intelligent problem-solving sorceress Medea.

• Medusa, Perseus, and Andromeda. You could take this myth many ways- humanise Medusa and explain her side of the story, tell the story of Perseus’s quest to slay Medusa, or tell the story if Perseus saving Andromeda from the Kraken/Cetus. of course, you can always subvert this myth even more. what if Agatha, cast in the role of Andromeda, saves herself?

of course, there are many more myths to choose from, but these are just some that i would love to see reimagined with Carry On characters, but may not have time to write as I already have two other ideas.

remember, out of respect to those who worship them, any gods appearing in these myths should not be changed into other characters. Isis remains Isis, Aeëtes remains Aeëtes, etc.

Have fun!

[ofthewinedarksea]

After talking to a friend yesterday about our mutual love of TSOA and how she wished there were more classics-y fiction type books, I’m here to relay the good news that there are!

So here’s a list of books that retell classical stories from different (and potentially feminist!!) perspectives.

1. Circe- Madeline Miller

- the life of Circe, the witch from the Osyssey and the Aeneid, told in her own words

2. The silence of the girls- Pat Barker

- a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, a priestess of Apollo.

3. Lavinia- Ursula K. Le Guin

- a retelling of the Aeneid through the eyes of Lavinia, the daughter of the kind of Latium

4. The children of Jocasta- Natalie Haynes

- a retelling of the Oedipus and Antigone myth with a focus on Jocasta and Ismene

5. Autobiography of Red- Anne Carson

- slightly different to the rest, more of a reimagination than an interpretation of the relationship between Hercules and Geryon in poetry.

6. For the winner- Emily Hauser

- a retelling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, with an added appearance from our girl Atlanta.

7. A thousand ships - Natalie Haynes

- a retelling of the Trojan war from a female perspective. Also gives one of the most underappreciated women of the Aeneid, Creusa, a voice!

8. For the immortal- Emily Hauser

- a retelling of Hercules’ 9th labour in which he’s accompanied by Admete, daughter of the king of Tiryns

9. Galatea- Madeline Miller

- a short story retelling the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea

10. For the most beautiful- Emily Hauser

- similar to ‘The silence of the girls’ this book retells the Trojan war through the stories of Krisayis and Briseis

11. The Penelopiad- Margaret Atwood

- a retelling of the Odyssey focusing on the story of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife

12. The horror of the Helmet- Victor Pelevin

- a radical reinvention of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur presented through modern internet exchanges.

13. Girl meets boy- Ali Smith

- a modern reinvention of the story of Iphis, taken from Ovid’s metamorphoses.

14. Weight- Jeannette Winterson

- a modern retelling of the myth of Atlas and Hercules. An examination of choice and coercion.

15. Where three roads meet- Sally Vickers

- Set partly in pre-war London and partly in Ancient Greece feauturing Sigmund Freud as Oedipus and a stranger as Tiresias. A complete reimagination of the Greek myth of Oedipus and Freud’s Oedipus complex.

16. The fire gospel- Michel Faber

- more of an analogy for the myth of Prometheus than a retelling but still excellent.

17. The memoirs of Helen of Troy- Amanda Elyot

- our girl Helen finally given a voice in this exploration of the events leading up to the Trojan war

18. XO Orpheus: fifty new myths- Kate Bernheimer

- a collection of short retellings of myths, very similar to Galatea by Madeline Miller (which is feautured in the book)

19. Home fire- Kamila Shamsie

- a modern retelling of the story of Antigone that centres around an immigrant family. A modern Greek Tragedy.

20. For her dark skin- Percival Everett

- super funny retelling of the myth of Jason and Medea. Out of print so copies are insanely expensive but you can get it on kindle for £6 :)

21. House of names- Colm Tóibín

- an exploration of the story of the house of Atreus from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the murder of Clytemnestra

22. The autobiography of Cassandra, princess and prophetess of Troy- Ursule Molinaro

- retelling of the story of Troy through the eyes of Cassandra

I’ll be adding to this list the more I find but feel free to add your own x

[windexinmymouth]

Hello!

     I’m announcing my most current WIP. It is a retelling of Iphis and Ianthe, a greco-roman myth solidified in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (book IX) that is set in 18th century Manchester, England. I’m planning on publishing it sometime this year as a free PDF, as well as on my AO3 as an original work.

     It won’t be a perfect reinvention of the myth. the major differences are thus: My Iphis character is disguised as a man, but rather than physically turning into one, she essentially gets outed as a woman; the names of one of the main and all of the secondary characters are not parallel; Ianthe is the one with a creepy dad; Iphis is from Goa, India; Ianthe is Irish as fuck.

     My Iphis character is named Satvi. She is a baker and a Goan Muslim, she stowed away on an East India Company ship to arrive in England, and  she is very much a lesbian.

     My Ianthe character keeps her name. She’s a half-Irish bookworm pseudo-feminist bisexual wonder who I would literally die for.

     I’m going for a ‘Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue’ meets ‘Twelfth Night’ sort of very Shakespearean vibe in my plot. I’m excited to get this out into the world, because as far as I know there’s really only one retelling of this myth (Boy meets Girl by Ali Smith, 10/10 would recommend)

The title is ‘Where The World Has Gone’, so i’ll refer to it as WTWHG from here onward. I hope to track my writing here to keep myself motivated.

an excerpt from the first draft of the third chapter:

     She meets Ianthe at the the tiny bookshop she works at. The shop has been there for as long as Satvi can remember, persisting through war preparations and annoying English children with their little readers. It smells of old books and brewed tea, and has a floor coated with Oriental carpets and piled high with bookshelves and many a tower of books. The little shop’s space is so very warm and comforting.  It’s all reds and oranges and browns, dark colors that increase the claustrophobia of the space as well as the rather ironic calming effect. For years it’s had a little sign on the front that just reads ‘bookshop,’ for bookshop it is.      Ianthe sits at the table crammed into the front corner of the room, surrounded with baskets of coins demonstrating the store’s strange and somewhat primitive monetary system. She’s got her hair in a simple plait and wears a olive green cotton dress with a brown shawl about her shoulders. At first, she doesn’t hear Satvi come in because she’s bent over some papers and writing away at a breakneck pace.      Satvi clears her throat. “Ianthe, hello,” Ianthe looks up at her, a startled expression on her face. “It’s Sunday, you know, so I thought I’d drop in here early.”      Ianthe shakes her head. “No, no. It’s good to see you. We’ve just had someone drop off a Sophocles play, if you’re interested in that.”      “I don’t think so,” Satvi shakes her head in kind, “I prefer prose to poetry and play. Not to say the old Greek men aren’t good, they’re just not my type. Too bloody tragic.”      “That’s fine. I’ve got a bunch of books over there that might be more your type. Miss Mary will be dropping in soon to help, so you can say hello to her. She told me once that she wanted some pastry. Just do you know.”      “Miss Mary will soon lose her life if she insists on only consuming sugar, you know. Then you’ll be out of a job,” Satvi says as she wanders towards the collection of very old stinky books, as she has so chosen to label it.

[naqaabdulbaser14]

She made me want to rove the world writing our names on every tree. I had simply never found anyone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak. Sometimes when I looked at her, I had to look away. Already she was like no one else to me.

© Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

📷 Lương Đức Dũng

[vibrantbloom]

HI I loved you jumping in sooooo would you wanna do a book rec please? 😇💕

of course, thanks for giving me a reason to put my never without a book nature to use!! sorry I got a little excessive, I just had to force myself not to add any more. Some of these are a little heavy so feel free to ask if you’re worried about reading any of them!

Fiction

Brideshead Revisited - this book is the love of my life okay, I care about very few people as much as I care about these two idiots who love each other (possibly should be in classics but idk)

Brave New World - pretty dark dystopian world, definitely worth reading if you liked 1984

Misery - need to throw in a horror, this is bleak but great! please watch the kathy bates film after because what a terrifying performance, only for people who are into creepy things through especially psychological stuff

Birdsong - I wouldn’t rec this as one people would def enjoy but if you like war related stuff it’s great and I just think the writing is stunning

An Untamed State - this book would be v triggering for some people so I don’t rec it lights but honestly I will happily rec any single piece of writing that roxane gay has put out into to world

Gone Girl - you all know what this is about, shamelessly love it

Neverwhere - my favouite of neil gaiman’s stuff, also very worth listening to the radio play version if you can get your hands on it

The Raven Cycle - if you’re looking for good YA with supernatural tones, this is my fave

LGBT

The Song of Achilles - my joint fave with brideshead, this book means the world to me. I never go more than a few months without reading, especially if you’re into mythology this is for you

The Gentlemen’s Guide to Vice and Virtue - I only read this last week and it’s instantly one of my faves, it’s everything I wanted: pining! sweet boys in love! aristocratic tones! adventure!

The Price of Salt - the book that carol is based on (also watch carol)

Girl Meets Boy - another mythological reinterpretation, this time of the myth of iphis

Angels in America - play in two parts set during the AIDS crisis, also my favourite play of all time

Bent - okay pals this is simultaneously a rec and a brace yourself, this is a play about being gay in a german concentration camp so not a good time but I cried and cried over it (disclaimer that I just finished it so I might be biased)

The Normal Heart - man I love a sad gay play, also set in the 80s and watch the film after

A Single Man - book of the colin firth film, every bit as stunning (upsetting at times, feel free to message me about any of these)

Maurice - I expected this one to be heartbreaking bc gay book written in the early 1900s but surprisingly not

Tipping the Velvet - classic lesbian read, probably one of my first lesbian books so I’m attached to it

Classics

Pride and Prejudice - listen if you like a romcom or a period piece and you haven’t read this, what are you waiting for

The Picture of Dorian Gray - wonderful original gothic horror, also arguably belongs in the LGBT category

Rebecca - also gothic horror, prob in my top five books bc I’ve read it so many times

Wuthering Heights - as I said to eline the people are so volatile but it’s a fascinating read, especially as a character study

Jane Eyre - there are some terrible tropes in this book but it’s gorgeously writen and as I mentioned, it’s particularly interesting if you pair it with Wide Sargasso Sea

Tess of the d’Urbervilles - listen I’m not advocating for this book, it’s objectively fucked but if I’m making a list of books that struck me I couldn’t stop thinking about it and rereading passages for like a year

The Importance of Being Earnest - pals if you shy away from classics, read this play! I’ve probably read it 20 times because it’s genuinely like watching a comedy for me, it’s so so funny

[witharsenicsauce]

I HIGHLY recommend Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith! I read it in my “Greek Mythology Through a Queer Lens” class a couple years ago and fell absolutely in love with it. It takes inspiration from the Greek myth of Iphis and Ianthe but also calls upon Scottish mythology as well. And it’s very gay.

Is anyone reading anything special for pride month? 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

[inhalingwords]

Book Discussion Challenge || Feb 9 || Mythology

I absolutely love anything to do with the idea of repeating, retelling and remixing stories. It’s fascinating to see how people adapt old stories and what type of changes they introduce to them.

Here are a couple of recommendations of books that remix mythology:

Hal Duncan: The Book of All Hours (Vellum and Ink) (yes these two again so SUE ME i love these books to death) -- The first half of the first novel is built around Sumerian mythology (Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, Tammuz/Dumuzid), the second half around the Prometheus myth. There are also several classical texts that get featured heavily in the two books (Euripides’s The Bacchae, Virgil), and the entire duology is sprinkled with allusions and references to other stores, history, the Bible, archetypes, and mythical characters.

Francesca Lia Block: Love in the Time of Global Warming -- A beautiful retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles with a queer female protagonist. There’s also a sequel, which I have not yet read(!), The Island of Excess Love (which, I believe, is a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid).

Ali Smith: Girl Meets Boy -- A poetic, political remix of Ovid’s myth of Iphis. “A story about the kind of fluidity that can’t be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.”

Do you like reading remixed myths? What are your favourite retellings of myths? What myth would you like to see retold?

[soracities]

You sit and read your way through a book then close the book and put it on the shelf, and maybe, life being so short, you’ll die before you ever open that book again and its pages, the single pages, shut in the book on the shelf, will maybe never see light again, which is why I had to leave the shop, because the man who owned it was looking at me oddly, because I was doing the thing I find myself doing in all bookshops because of that maddening poem—taking a book off a shelf and fanning it open so that each page sees some light.

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

[soracities]

💓 💖

portraits of love, for @581d00​

— Saša Stanišić, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

“Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand Through much of what she would not understand; And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.”

— Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters”

“The egg is warm as my insides, he thinks. It’s an old remedy. “The egg, it heals even the worst bruises,” says his grandma. She works on the violet lump shining, like a plum, on the boy’s face. As the egg circled, its smooth pressure on the bruise, the boy watched, under a puffed lid, his grandma’s lips crease with focus as she worked. Years later, as a young man, when all that remains of the grandma is a face etched in his mind, the boy will remember that crease between her lips while breaking open a hard-boiled egg on his desk on a winter night in New York. Short on rent, it would be eggs for dinner for the rest of the week. They would not be warm, but cold in his palm, having been boiled by the dozen earlier that morning.

At his desk, drifting, he’ll roll the moist egg across his cheek. Without speaking, he will say Thank you. He’ll keep saying it until the egg grows warm with himself.

“Thank you, Grandma,” says the boy, squinting.

“You fine now, Little Dog.” She lifts the pearly orb, and places it gently to his lips. “Eat,” she says. “Swallow. Your bruises are inside it now. Swallow and it won’t hurt anymore.” And so he eats. He is eating still.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

— Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Vol. I

“My sweet fierce cynical heart, our grandfather says. You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there’ll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren [...]

Our grandmother stands up.

Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.

Just the important ones, our grandfather says. Just the ones that need the telling. Some stories always need telling more than others. Right, Anthea?

Right, Grandad, I say.”

— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

— Professor Richard Muller, on his granddaughter (x)

“I have and have had many names. Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that’s who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

— post by @dulcedenaranjas​

“Back in the day, my grandmother would dry meat in the sun to save for winter so that no child would go without thick stew in Februaries as cold as this.”

— Shinji Moon, “One night a month flew into the candle”

“My grandmother had ten daughters and she would visit them in turn, leaving exactly the same number of days between each visit. If she was late to visit one of her daughters, she would delay the next visit to the other one. When she took me with her, she would sit me on her lap and wrap me up with the edges of her long and wide black robe. I never saw her wearing colors or any other style of clothing. She told me those were her clothes for mourning her daughter (my eldest aunt), and that it would have to accompany her to the grave.

Like a baby kangaroo inside her pouch, I would turn my head toward whoever was speaking, and when I got bored, I’d pull the edge of her robe to cover my head with it. She would pull it back, and I’d cover my eyes with my hands. “When are we leaving?” I’d ask her. I couldn’t wait for the bedtime stories she would tell me when we went to sleep on the roof of our house. Every night she told me animal tales with a moral at the end of the story. I wanted to have that book, to read it by myself and look at the pictures, but she would always repeat, “There is no book. These are stories we pass down from generation to generation.” I would fall asleep to her voice, and the animals would come, sometimes in different roles — the ant might leave behind her grains that she should have stored for winter, and hang out with the grasshopper in the fields instead. In the morning I would be awoken by flies and the blaring sun; I would go downstairs to write the stories down in my notebook and draw them however I wished.”

— Dunya Mikhail, “When War Destroyed My Grandmother’s Grave”

— Paul Martínez Pompa, “The Abuelita Poem”

“I asked her what she was thinking. As if waking from a sleepless dream, she answered in a gutted monotone. “I used to be a girl, Little Dog. You know?” 

“Okay, Grandma, I know—” But she wasn’t listening.

“I used to put a flower in my hair and walk in the sun. After big rain, I walk in the sun. The flower I put on my ear. So wet, so cool.” Her eyes drifted from me. “It’s a stupid thing.” She shook her head. “Stupid thing. To be a girl.” After a while, she turned back to me as if remembering I was there. “You eat yet?”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel

“[Berger] turns [the book] over in his hands in delighted surprise. “That is a drawing by Melina,” he exclaims, surveying the flowers with spindly stems on the cover, “my granddaughter.” He gets up from the table and returns with an oil portrait, the size of a sheet of A4 paper. It is of an ageless face and yet Melina is only 13. (Berger has three children – Katya, Jacob and Yves – and five grandchildren.) He props it next to us and we look at her, as if she had joined us for lunch. “If you ask me who I am,” Berger says, “I’d like to see myself through her eyes, in the way she looks at me.””

— John Berger on his granddaughter Melina, in an interview with Kate Kellaway (x)

— Learning to Cook From Grandmas Around the World

[soracities]

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

[Text ID: “But I stared at my grandparents in their photo, with their arms round each other and their heads together, and I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.”

[soracities]

I never had to do anything, I said. I’m lucky. I was born mythless. I grew up mythless. No you didn’t. Nobody grows up mythless, Robin said. It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis