#great literary beefs of history

[annamariehamilton-unofficial]

Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen: Best Frenemies

Not a hot take this time, more of a fun fact.

So apparently, the two most famous literary Danes, fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen and Christian existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, were best frenemies in real life.

Andersen parodied Kierkegaard as a yapping parrot repeating the pseudo-philosphical platitude "let us be men!" in his 1838 fable "The Galoshes of Fortune". Later that year, Kierkegaard returned the favor by writing an essay in which he accused Andersen of lacking any kind of coherent worldview, insinuating that Andersen "from an involuntary overflow of cleverness in the personality ... totally forgetting the landscape, go[es] on to paint [himself] elaborately in [his] own vain Solomonic pomp and glory, which suits flowers, but not people."

Apparently they made up, because 10 years later, they exchanged fancy first-printing hardcover volumes of one another's most recent work with friendly greetings.

I think it is not much of a literary hot take to say that Andersen is a LOT more readable than Kierkegaard, which is probably why, according to Andersen at least, the only people who actually *read* Kierkegaard's little rant were Kierkegaard and Andersen themselves.

[deadpanwalking]

ooh! i am Not Like Those Other Anons, but if you're still feeling generous-- ldo you have anything about, say, the technological and social advancements in 19th century london-- i'm thinking bazalgette and john snow and building the london underground, henry mahew and london labor and the london poor, shit like that, maybe as a gestalt or the zeitgeist or what have you?

I love the specificity! I hope it's not a cop out, but if it's zeitgeist and/or gestalt ye be wanting, I want to recommend an author instead of a book: Peter Ackroyd.

My first introduction to Ackroyd was through a literary biography of T.S. Eliot, which he wrote during a time when Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot (in accordance to his wishes not to be the subject of a biography) refused almost all applications to quote from Eliot's published work outside of a literary context, or to quote at all from unpublished work and correspondence. Ackroyd, who had managed to track down an enormous amount of unpublished material during the course of his research, tried to argue his case with Mrs. Eliot, but she didn't budge—however Ackroyd was confident that the material could still be useful, and went ahead, opting to paraphrase.

T.S. Eliot: A Life was considered the definitive biography of Eliot for decades despite the unavoidable awkwardness of the paraphrasing. “The lines of Eliot’s life are well-known, and Ackroyd does not effect, or seek to effect, any radical re-limning of them. [Ackroyd's] strength,” Eliot scholar and absolute lad Christopher Ricks writes, “is local detail, patience, circumstantiality, respect. [...] He eschews psychobiographical plunges, and this makes the book at once more satisfactory to the hungry and less satisfying to the greedy.”

The reason for this tangent (aside from Eliot monomania and the fact that Pyotr's vet seems to have forgotten us in the exam room) is because I wanted to give you a sense of how resourceful Ackroyd can be when he approaches his subjects from a distance, without scaling down his ambition or using sensationalism to force the impression of intimacy.

In addition to literary biographies, Ackroyd has written (and is still writing 🥳) a lot of books about London and Londoners—I've only read two: London: A Biography and London: Under. I know historical sociology isn't always the best approach and constantly undermines its own credibility by oversimplifying some aspects of a complicated subject at the expense of others—but when it comes to writing about an era, you can't get more zeitgeistian than psychogeographical writing that focuses on everyday life. You cannot. You'd die trying.

The title of London: A Biography is straightforward: London lives, so it makes sense to approach it the way a biographer would. It doesn't quite fit the limitations you set (19th century) because it begins in the Late Jurassic period. Nevertheless, you might appreciate it because—despite its insane scope and breadth—it does something really great, which I can't describe better than Patrick McGrath did in the NYT blurb:

This, then, is an unorthodox history of London that is fascinating not only for what Ackroyd selects but also for what he ignores. There is barely an aristocrat to be seen in these pages. The Earl of Sandwich appears when, unable to tear himself away from the gaming table for 24 hours straight, he puts a piece of beef between two slices of bread and invents one of England's few enduring contributions to world cuisine. The House of Commons is mentioned only because it burned in 1834, ''which provoked some of the most picturesque London paintings,'' including works by Constable and Turner. ''These artists recognized,'' Ackroyd writes, ''that in the heart of the flame they might also evoke the spirit and presence of the city itself.'' The great statesman Pitt the Younger appears only once, in connection with the ''Bog House Miscellany.''

The other book, London: Under, is going to fit you like a glove, but it's more of a companion piece than a stand-alone book, despite being well-written—Ackroyd doesn't start in the Late Jurassic period, but definitely takes the scenic route from Roman Britain to get to Bazalgette's sewers, and Pearson's Metropolitan Railway. One of the reasons I'm recommending it now is because I always pore through bibliographies and references to poach for more books to read, and I distinctly remember that Ackroyd's bibliography contained some fascinating titles that I will, realistically-speaking, never get to because my own interests and priorities tend toward the literary. RIP to me, but you're different!

[pickafandomanyfandom]

It’s 2 am and I’m on a tangent so please please bear with me.

I’ve noticed something about the color choices in young royals, specifically regarding simons clothing and I need to put it somewhere.

As we know he has worn many colors and they have all looked amazing

However I find 2 incredibly intriguing color choices from a literary standpoint. ( I had a middle school teacher who would relentlessly give us symbolism lectures, so me and my friends fell down a rabbit hole of color symbolism badda bing badda boom, anyways ) the colors I’m intrigued with are purple and yellow, pls keep reading 😭😭

1. Purple

Someone on TikTok brought it to my attention that Omar Rudberg ( simon ), who obviously wears a lot of purple on the show, but also makes it a point to wear it to almost every if not all young royals events. This is intriguing to me because ur was not an accident/ coincidence, and only the director and/ or costume director can change my mind. Purple throughout history has been a “royal color” as early adaptations were rare due to it being rarely found in nature blah blah. If this isn’t an obvious reference to ohh idk, HIS LOVW INTREST, or perhaps and hopefully foreshadowing to his future career… idk.

Purple also symbolizes traits of creativity, royalty ( 🫨🫨🫨 ), and ambition. All of these traits are ones we have explicitly seen from Simon throughout both seasons.

Bonus: in the last scene of S2 ( spoilers ) when Sara is in the phone with the cops she is wearing purple and white. Colors that symbolize power (purple) and naïveté (white). I think both track as she has the power to ruin something beautiful, and has that power with such little understanding of the situation. Idk that’s just what I noticed tho

2. Yellow

Yellow is a color I have beef with when it comes to symbols, so ima say 2 things. 1) Yellow represents both happiness and warmth, while also being a symbol for death and warnings of danger. 2) I belive both are present in the show.

1) happiness

Exhibit this beautiful fucking scene

2) danger

In the last episode simon wears a yellow sweatshirt, instead of purple, when confronting august. I think this may be hinting at the fact that if he goes to the cops he’s fucked, but there’s still an impending danger ahead he doesn’t know about yet. We also get hints of yellow throughout scenes such as when Wille makes the statement abt the video, when he meets with Wille in lockers after the video, when he finds the schools invoice.

The difference I notice is the yellows are different shades, the yellows I find to represent danger are darker, and the yellows shown in happy scenes seemingly not only lighter, but more fluid. The sunlight flows around Wilhelms room and covers then entirely, it just fits perfectly. However, the yellow in this scenes sticks out in the world around him. In the blue curtain, in the green jacket, it even contrasts with the gray plaid pant he wears.

I’m 1000% sure I’m overthinking it, but I need someone to at least read it, even if it’s to tell me to stfu and stop obsessing over clothing choices. Anyways gn, have a great day

[staliamazing]

tag game TEHEH

name: sarah !!!! c'est moi

age: twenty, to be twenty-one soon-ish. i am planning a party. will i go through with it? who's to say.

star sign: taurus sun, capricorn rising, gemini moon. i have beef with geminis so the last one deeply upsets me.

first language: english

second language: je parle français !!

i was near fluent and have my B2 but don't practice anymore. i am considering getting back into it because i feel i need more hobbies and highly regret throwing out all my textbooks and notes. (that's a whole other story i LOVED school and threw out all my damn notes and stuff?!?!? sarah you dumb dumb)

favorite lip product: that lush lip scrub! i've lost my peppermint tub but anticipate it turning up when i least expect it. my lips always has excess skin peeling off for some reason so its great to feel exfoliated!

the best food dish you can make without a recipe? um. pizza bread! pizza, pizza sauce, cheese. eat up friends!

if you drink tea, what kind? none, get away from me. SOMETIMES lipton peach iced tea but only if im at mad mex.

if you drink coffee, what roast do you usually get? see last answer. i get the jitters.

favorite thing to watch on youtube right now: THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL. i;ve been watching upwards of two episodes every night in bed.

favorite thing to watch on youtube in 2012: for sure mormon family vloggers. pick a channel i probably watched them. i have no fucking clue why!

favorite item of clothing right now: new graphic tee! the alice oseman x everpress collab with this gorg patchwork design and all little queer and trans doodles over it! the proceeds went to LGBTQIA+ refugees <3 i fucking love graphic tees holy shit

favorite item of clothing in 2012: some form of graphic leggings im certain.

fandom -

three movies you recommend: the half of it on netflix - watched recently and was confused but pleasantly surprised

your favorite concert: either one i went to with my gf! they were both great experiences even though i was shitting myself before both because i have a lot of sound and crowd sensitiivities ( # actually autistic). i loved being in the pit for ATL despite not knowing any songs and i like how you can feel the music inside you.

have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion? no i've actually followed someone because i love getting mad <3 over time i have grown to really respect them and where their views come from which im proud of because i can be a bit close-minded.

the best tv show you watched last year: i watch a lot of shows! recently though i watched euphoria and understood the hype. couldn't rewatch though. it felt like a disservice to the shock factor i feel like the show really feeds off.

do you have a fancasting you just can’t let go of? don't pay much attention to fancasts!

a ship you’ve abandoned: im so sorry amy and rory from doctor who... i legit met them too. it just doesnt hit the same and im glad they divorced. amy was too swept up in the doctor and rory is a damn sweetheart who honestly deserves better. ALSO maya and lucas from girl meets world - bit random honestly why did they do that. lucas and riley from day one. maya and zay!

on a scale of 1-10 how willing are you to share your ao3 history? 7? depends on who to! anyone on here sure. not real people they'd be like "what do you mean you like fics where that little thug man wears short skirts" they just wouldnt UNDERSTAND

what fandom do you wish was bigger? tori spring fandom! maybe it is and i just dont know but.

do you have a fandom tattoo? yah, the fandom of my high school english teacher! most of my tats are literary inspired and specifically books i read in school for the curriculum.

my others are - phoebe bridgers related

gf related (she tattooed me) (fave fandom) (she's the best)

has a finale ever ruined a show for you? definitely i just can't remember which lmao im sorry

have you…

swam in an ocean? yep! swam is a strong word though. i've been in and bobbed up and down! i usually run from the tide.

been vegan/vegetarian? both! at different times. it was very much part of my friend and family culture growing up.

gone skinny dipping? yes, in my exs best friends dads girlfriends dead uncles pool :) honestly 10/10 swimming with clothes on is so random? i think its so beautiful how people look under the blue wavy water of the pool.

gone skiing? no i am scared of the snow since learning about crevasses in year 4 and almost falling off a ski lift at a very young age. i do love the cold and the ski lodge episode of gmw though.

thanks for the tag @iansw0rld, these are fun :)

[edisonblog]

Burdened by fame

——Du Fu’s Death Shape

"Where can I find the Prime Minister's ancestral hall? There are many trees outside Jinguan City.

The green grass reflects the spring color on the steps, and the oriole sounds good in the sky through the leaves.

Three visits frequently troubled the world's plans, and two dynasties opened the hearts of veterans.

He died before leaving the army, which made the hero burst into tears. "

Du Fu wrote the poem "The Prime Minister of Shu".

In AD 760, the first year of Emperor Suzong's reign in the Tang Dynasty, Du Fu came to the bank of Huanhua Creek in Chengdu, Sichuan. It happened to be spring, and he planned to stay here forever. It was around this time that Du Fu wrote the poem "The Prime Minister of Shu".

It is true that there is only one Zhuge Liang in history. After that era, there will never be another one. However, people still believe that no matter what era they are in, the spirit is always there. Du Fu paid tribute to Zhuge Liang because he admired his value, perseverance and spirit as a human being. But the lovely thing about Du Fu is that even in such a serious mood, he can still find time to listen to the chirping birds in the cypress trees and feel the fragrance of nature. As for Zhuge Liang's death, he still had something to say: This was a life-long ambition that came to an abrupt end with the end of life. The ideal became a bubble and could no longer be practiced. All those with ambitions should cry together for this. The meaning of Zhuge Liang's death is different from that of ordinary people.

What about the death of Du Fu himself? At present, it seems that everyone is very interested in discussing this issue! After sorting and summarizing, it was found that the cause of his death was not simple. There were five theories in total:

The first theory is that Du Fu died of illness. When he left, we who love literature watched as if a huge meteor flashed by. But the real situation is that no one understands his pain and illness. He went through the last stage of his life alone while silently enduring loneliness and illness. Secondly, some people pointed out that Du Fu fell into the water and died because the water level suddenly rose at that time. But I think the emergence of "Sinking Water Theory" may be to compare his image to Qu Yuan and Li Bai. The three of them can be said to be the three most important poets in the history of Chinese literature. The discussion and structure of death tie them together here, and they also have a certain shaping power and significance.

As for the fourth kind of death writing, it is more pragmatic, rather than a literary supplement and color. This theory refers to Du Fu's death from food poisoning. Moreover, the so-called unclean food is wine and beef. In the hot weather, food is easy to spoil. Therefore, unfortunately, Du Fu was affected and did not live forever. However, this statement described Du Fu as a gluttonous person, which actually did great harm to his image. Therefore, there is a fifth theory. It turns out that Du Fu had been hungry for nearly ten days, and the county magistrate sent someone to urgently deliver food to him. Unexpectedly, after being hungry for a long time, he suddenly ate a large amount of food, which made him feel uncomfortable, and he died as a result.

With such additions, it seems to make up for Du Fu's almost damaged image. However, in addition to the multiple causes of death, he also has eight tombs, namely: Pingjiang and Leiyang in Hunan, Xiangyang in Hubei, Luoyang in Henan and Gongyi, Du Fu's birthplace, Yanzhou and Huazhou in Shaanxi, and Sichuan Chengdu.

There are five ways to die and eight cemeteries for a person. We can only say that Du Fu was so burdened by his fame that future generations continued to add information about him. Now I just want to remember his poem: "Died before leaving the army, which makes the hero burst into tears." Du Fu knew it underground, and maybe he hopes that future generations of poets will also respect him like Zhuge Liang and create meaning for his death. Remember His spirit inherits his value, rather than creating all kinds of incredible possibilities based on speculation.

#edisonmariotti @edisonblog

.br

Du Fu escreveu o poema "O Primeiro Ministro de Shu".

Em 760 DC, o primeiro ano do reinado do imperador Suzong na Dinastia Tang, Du Fu chegou à margem do riacho Huanhua em Chengdu, Sichuan. Acontece que era primavera e ele planejava ficar aqui para sempre. Foi nessa época que Du Fu escreveu o poema "O Primeiro Ministro de Shu".

É verdade que só existe um Zhuge Liang na história. Depois dessa era, nunca haverá outra. No entanto, as pessoas ainda acreditam que não importa em que época estejam, o espírito está sempre lá. Du Fu prestou homenagem a Zhuge Liang porque admirava seu valor, perseverança e espírito como ser humano. Mas o que há de adorável em Du Fu é que mesmo com um humor tão sério, ele ainda consegue encontrar tempo para ouvir o chilrear dos pássaros nos ciprestes e sentir a fragrância da natureza. Quanto à morte de Zhuge Liang, ele ainda tinha algo a dizer: esta foi uma ambição para toda a vida que terminou abruptamente com o fim da vida. O ideal virou uma bolha e não pôde mais ser praticado. Todos aqueles com ambições deveriam chorar juntos por isso. O significado da morte de Zhuge Liang é diferente daquele das pessoas comuns.

E a morte do próprio Du Fu? Atualmente, parece que todos estão muito interessados em discutir esse assunto! Após triagem e resumo, constatou-se que a causa de sua morte não foi simples. Havia cinco teorias no total:

A primeira teoria é que Du Fu morreu de doença. Quando ele partiu, nós, que amamos a literatura, vimos como se um enorme meteoro passasse. Mas a verdadeira situação é que ninguém entende a sua dor e doença. Ele passou pela última fase de sua vida sozinho, enquanto suportava silenciosamente a solidão e a doença. Em segundo lugar, algumas pessoas apontaram que Du Fu caiu na água e morreu porque o nível da água subiu repentinamente naquele momento. Mas acho que o surgimento da "Teoria da Água Afundada" pode ser uma comparação de sua imagem com Qu Yuan e Li Bai. Pode-se dizer que os três são os três poetas mais importantes da história da literatura chinesa. A discussão e a estrutura da morte os unem aqui, e eles também têm um certo poder e significado modelador.

Quanto ao quarto tipo de escrita sobre a morte, é mais pragmático, em vez de um suplemento literário e colorido. Esta teoria refere-se à morte de Du Fu por intoxicação alimentar. Além disso, os chamados alimentos impuros são o vinho e a carne bovina. No tempo quente, a comida estraga facilmente. Portanto, infelizmente, Du Fu foi afetado e não viveu para sempre. No entanto, esta declaração descreveu Du Fu como uma pessoa gulosa, o que na verdade causou grandes danos à sua imagem. Portanto, existe uma quinta teoria. Acontece que Du Fu estava com fome há quase dez dias e o magistrado do condado enviou alguém para entregar-lhe comida com urgência. Inesperadamente, depois de passar muito tempo com fome, de repente ele comeu uma grande quantidade de comida, o que o incomodou e, como resultado, morreu.

Com tais acréscimos, parece compensar a imagem quase danificada de Du Fu. No entanto, para além das múltiplas causas de morte, tem também oito túmulos, nomeadamente: Pingjiang e Leiyang em Hunan, Xiangyang em Hubei, Luoyang em Henan e Gongyi, local de nascimento de Du Fu, Yanzhou e Huazhou em Shaanxi, e Sichuan Chengdu.

Existem cinco maneiras de morrer e oito cemitérios para uma pessoa. Só podemos dizer que Du Fu ficou tão sobrecarregado com sua fama que as gerações futuras continuaram a acrescentar informações sobre ele. Agora só quero relembrar seu poema: “Morreu antes de deixar o exército, o que faz o herói chorar”. Du Fu sabia disso no subsolo e talvez espere que as futuras gerações de poetas também o respeitem como Zhuge Liang e criem um significado para sua morte. Lembre-se de que Seu espírito herda seu valor, em vez de criar todos os tipos de possibilidades incríveis baseadas em especulação.

@edisonblog

[daimonclub]

Thoughts, ideas and reflections on food

Food pyramid Thoughts, ideas and reflections on food. A text with some good opinions and meditations on food, the art of eating well and useful links to various resources on the topic. An anonymous man from the 16th century always used to say: "There are many important things in life, the first is eating, I don't know the others." Evidently the food and sexual isotopy seems clearly obvious to me, but perhaps not even that much. Carl William Brown A special memory is then obligatory for the great Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911) who was the author of the famous Italian cookbook "The science of cooking and the art of eating well". Artusi was born in Forlimpopoli, a town near Forlì, and made his fortune as a silk trader, but after retiring he dedicated himself to fine cuisine. Artusi was the first to include recipes from all the different regions of Italy in a single recipe book. He is often credited with having established a truly national Italian cuisine for the first time. Even today his main literary work has a large number of editions and widespread diffusion. The text collects 790 recipes, from broths to liqueurs, through soups, appetizers (or starters), second courses and desserts. The approach is didactic, the receipts are followed by reflections and anecdotes from the author, who writes with a witty style. The science of cooking and the art of eating well constituted a real borderline in the gastronomic culture of the time. Carl William Brown School is made to get a diploma. And the diploma? The diploma is made to get the job. And the place? The place is made to make money. And earn? It is made for eating. Eating cannot be an end in itself, that is, an ideal. Except in those whose aim is drinking. Giuseppe Prezzolini If you don't have the ambition to become a canopy chef, I don't think it's necessary to succeed, to be born with a saucepan in your head, all you need is passion, a lot of attention and precise training: then always choose the finest stuff for raw materials, that this will make you look. Pellegrino Artusi Roast Beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things a la though you know that Roast Beef, medium, is safe and sane, and sure. Edna Ferber

Reflections on food In a system, as the level of organization of the structure increases, the elements that compose it lose the capacity for individual projects, precisely because they find themselves inserted in an integrated system that moves with other logics. This means that the structure becomes something different than the sum of its individual components. And so all of us poor men are nothing but food for worms. Carl William Brown That food has always been, and will continue to be, the basis for one of our greater snobbism does not explain the fact that the attitude toward the food choice of others is becoming more and more heatedly exclusive until it may well turn into one of those forms of bigotry against which gallant little committees are constantly planning campaigns in the cause of justice and decency. Cornelia Otis Skinner Food is "everyday"- it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting, working, and fighting to obtain it, than we have in any other pursuit. As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilize ourselves. Margaret Visser Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food. Jean Baudrillard In a world where even life is worth nothing, it is pathetic to see that there are people who, for profit, still believe and hope in the increasingly cleansing power of a soap or in the shine that a shampoo can give. It so happens that in the face of the benefits promised by anti-cellulite creams or the non-existent taste of disgusting frozen food, even the worst crime becomes an act of healthy and genuine vindictive justice. Carl William Brown Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhill. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received. Walter Benjamin

Thoughts and opinions on food We need a quarter of the food we eat to live, the rest is used to fatten industrialists, advertisers, doctors and undertakers. (obviously for those dying of hunger the situation changes.) Carl William Brown Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher. Bill Bryson I love simple food. I like to serve the entire animal, not only because it somehow provokes a customer to think about it, but also because to honor of the animal that has been killed for us to eat, you have to eat the whole thing. It would be silly to just eat the chops and throw everything else away. Mario Batali It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it. There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes. Alistair Cooke In his modest proposal, in order to eliminate the problems of the poor Irish, Swift suggested cooking their children, which in this way, in addition to relieving them of expensive maintenance, would at the same time provide delicious food for the rich. It is obvious that over time and in the event of severe famines, the recipe could also be extended to adolescents and not just Irish ones. Carl William Brown Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat's cheese...get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle. Barbara Ehrenreich Between the desire for food and the lust for power there is a strange isotopy; it's true that appetite comes with eating, but then at least you get satisfied, whereas those who start chewing on power never get satisfied and in the end inevitably suffer from indigestion, thus spewing out a lot of rubbish and cruelty. Carl William Brown Once you become an elaborate and well-developed culture, anything from Rome or the Etruscans, for that matter, the food starts to become a representation of what the culture is. When the food can transcend being just fuel, that's when you start to see these different permutations. Mario Batali

A good Italian recipe Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war? Georg C. Lichtenberg Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres. Hector Hugh Munro Television, or rather the "stupid box" as some have defined it, knows very well that whoever endures wins and that is why it persists in its proselytizing work; he practically wants to convert everyone to his verb, to the verb of imbecility. Television knows very well that it has enormous power, to which ordinary man must succumb. For these reasons, the spectator is continually bombarded and therefore conditioned by (Pavlov teaches) a flood of alluring advice, by fantastic or atrocious news, by enormous political and theatrical deceptions, as well as by splendid and bewitching images. Television fulfills his mission perfectly, which is to prepare food for power. Carl William Brown Avoid fresh meats, which angry up the blood. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move. Go very light in the vices such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful. Don't look back. Someone might be gaining on you. Leroy Satchel Paige It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions. St. Francis De Sales Find out more visiting these links: Good food for your diet (With Videos) Vegetarian food diets (With Videos) Quotes and aphorisms on food Aforismi e citazioni sul cibo International and Italian recipes Enogastronomia e turismo Italian recipes, fashion and travels https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/collection/easy https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes http://allrecipes.com/recipes/1947/everyday-cooking/quick-and-easy/ http://www.sjana.com/blogs/lifestyle/food-for-the-soul Cooking traditions in Lombardy, Italy Read the full article

[reimenaashelyee]

Tonight I am copying my Tumblr ask archives to my blog when I reached 'December 2018' and remembered that this year is the 5th anniversary of when I made Alexander Comic public. (Is it 5 years already??? Goodness)

My first encounter with Alexander was in 2017. We met in a little bookshop in Melbourne, Australia by accident, coincidentally, without intention.

He came hidden in between the pages of Kanishk Tharoor’s short story collection Swimmer Among the Stars; a book I picked up mainly because of the pretty cover and the whimsical premise of each of the short stories. One of those premises was a series of retellings about the Persian face of Alexander, Iskander, and how he built the first lighthouse, defeated the fairies, explored the sea in a submarine, and other strange anecdotes.

At the time, I had no real knowledge of Alexander (except that he was an ancient Greek conquerer, one of those Great Men in history I couldn’t be bothered with) so I was surprised to see that 1) he could be a character of such imaginative adventures, and; 2) this isn’t just Tharoor’s authorial whimsy - he was actually engaging in a centuries old literary tradition, the Alexander Romance.

This was how Alexander introduced himself to me — as a legendary literary figure who travelled across cultures, faith traditions and time periods. That impression stayed, biding its time, distilled in the single image of Alexander riding on the back of Bucephalus with the Servant by his side.

It was not until the end of 2018 — after several life-changing shifts and despite announcing my brief retirement from historical comics — that I decided that the calling I felt for the Alexander Romance was truly serious.

So with trembling hands and an open heart, I accepted Alexander’s invitation to join this quest for the Water of Life.

Some questions to answer since I am here

When is Alexander Book 2 happening / When is the comic coming back?

It's in progress!! Books 2 and 3 are my most challenging writing projects yet - not so much because of the content, but how the content should be framed. It also doesn't help that since Book 1 ended in July 2022, I fell into this endless void of Real Life Stress, Dayjob Stress and Masters Stress, and I severely overestimated my ability to juggle all these things in addition to maintaining my art career.

Now that school is on summer break I've been getting back onto the horse. Alexander Comic is happening. But I cannot tell you when exactly Book 2 will drop because I still need to finish the script.

Where can I buy a print/digital copy of this?

I have a whole store here.

Where can I read this (for free)?

Webcomics rock. Alexander Comic is a webcomic first and foremost. Forever 5ever.

What do you think of the new Alexander docuseries that Netflix announced today?

Lol lmao haha. Ok so I had been anticipating an Alexander cinematic revival after over a decade of complete silence, and it looks like it's coming soon. Generally I am curious to see how they would depict his campaigns, but I am not expecting the docuseries to go beyond stereotypical depictions of ancient Greece made by Anglocentric productions. I mean, costume-wise and aesthetic-wise, it doesn't even beat Oliver Stone's movie.

Personal beef wise: Alexander is even thinner now in this casting??? (He doesn't even have his classic long hair wth they gave him a Roman bowl cut if I am looking at it correctly) Persia and Egypt are so bland and dry and STILL in that horrible yellow filter they assign to MENA countries?

I wonder if my consultant will be featured in that docuseries. I wonder if they will mention the Alexander Romance at all.

Earlier this year I told myself I’m done with historical graphic novel epics but here I am again, finally figured out the design for Alexander the Great (on the second pass!!). Me hype!!

These design notes are based on cursory Greecian sources (Plutarch etc), but mainly Lysippos’ sculptures, which Alexander personally endorsed. So I’m gonna trust the man himself over some guys writing bout him 100 years later kthx.

[mentalthisone]

YOOO OMG CONGRATS ON 500 U DESERVE IT!!! i'll be having 📍 for the celebration and the fandom is dps!! here's the description:

i'm around 5 feet tall, with shoulder-length straight dark hair, brown eyes, and glasses. my fashion style doesn't have a specific aesthetic but it's closest to retro!! i usually bring a red sling bag with me. i like to write (usually poetry, and sometimes novels), draw, and analyze literary works! i really like 80s/90s films, poetry, summer, amusement parks, sitcoms, and history. i also like spending time with nature and love interacting with animals. i like all types of drinks, but like juice or frappe the most. for food, i love all cuisines, and my favorite foods are pizza, cheeseburgers, corned beef, sushi, and tteok-bokki! i'm a pretty introverted person but i'm very chaotic and open to my friends. i share my works to my closest ones, have heart to heart talks with them, or usually, just argue and heartily insult each other. i can be very descriptive and poetic about how i feel and always try to make loved ones feel great. that's all :))

THANK YOU BESTIE

Sorry for taking so long but here it is:

Your platonic soulmate is...

Neil Perry!!

He probably went to talk to you after the teacher compliments one of your poems or analysis of a book

He is freaking curious because he didn't know you write as an hobby people for god sake don't read this in a mean way

He won't get much lucky seeing your work at first but little by little you became closer.

The first day he gets to see is one time you're a little stuck and went for the woods to find some inspiration

He was training lines there and when he sees you to ask you if you need any help

You let him represent your novel so it would be easier to imagine what comes next

You end up laughing and sharing a lot of interests

He is your private actor always free to act your works

You two are fanatic for vintage movies and it's tradition to see one every Saturday night

You're the first to know that he has a crush on Todd and them together is the best source of ideas to your works

You two are just amazing and I'm jealous of my own creation

Hope you have liked!!

Hoping you're having a nice day!!

[silentauroriamthereal]

So, a question about Mary inspired by your recent post. I know you hate her (I think she is horrible too), but is she a character that you love to hate? Do you think she is an interesting character? Does she fit a role she is written to play? There are many characters who are terrible people, but are still great characters in all their hateful glory (I think Moriarty was like that until he got turned into a caricature). Is Mary one of those for you or not?

Interesting question. I would have to say no, though. For me, what makes me appreciate a character in any respect is a combination of things, such as how interesting I find them, whether or not their motivations feel clear and well-founded, consistency, continuity in writing/characterization. Sometimes other factors, like how sympathetic I find them, or how likeable or admirable I find them in spite of agreeing wholeheartedly that the character is a terrible person from every moral standpoint. Some of these things are more subjective than others. From where I’m standing, the BBC version of Mary Morstan is severely lacking in a lot of these areas, but most sorely in having well-founded motivations and consistency/continuity. I don’t find her to be a well-written character, at all. Let me break this down a bit.

1. Do I find the character likeable in spite of moral flaws (and is this important)? No, to both. There are definitely villains that I do find likeable in spite of obvious moral failings. The obvious comparison in the BBC Sherlock world would be Moriarty. He’s obvious a terrible human being - a literal terrorist - but he’s so damned charming about it that you almost can’t help but root for him, in a way. Loki in the MCU universe is rather like that. Other villains, like Benedict’s Khan, are sympathetic not because they’re charming, but they’re intelligent and have genuinely understandable motivations (the safeguarding of his crew, for instance). Does a villain have to be likeable to be a well-written villain? Absolutely not. To use two other examples in the BBC Sherlock universe, I would cite both Magnussen and Culverton Smith. Horrible men. Good consistency of writing. Not charming or sympathetic in any way, but solidly written characters. Do I love them/love to hate them? No. I just dislike them, full stop. 

2. Do I find her motivations well-founded or sympathetic? No, neither. Mary is a character who, canonically (aka this bit is not subjective to my personal opinion): 

lied about her name, background, personal history, all of it, to the man she claims to love, never apologized for it or demonstrated any manner of remorse

is canonically someone who kills people and destabilizes governments (at the very least) for personal gain, never faced any consequences in terms of criminal justice or retribution for these crimes or indicated any manner of remorse for them 

attacked her own maid of honour - a person whom she befriended for the sole reason of gaining access to her boss’s office - and left her bleeding on the floor, never demonstrated any manner of remorse for this, either

her motivations are weirdly unfounded. The best example of this is her choice to shoot Sherlock rather than Magnussen that night. Her initial motivation was to ensure Magnussen’s silence so that John wouldn’t find out who she really was/so that she wouldn’t be forced to face justice for her criminal history. Shooting Sherlock did nothing to ensure Magnussen’s silence. If she intended Sherlock to die, it would have ensured HIS silence, but not Magnussen’s. If she didn’t intend Sherlock to die, then I’m not sure what it accomplished, since the very first thing he did once he was physically able was to tell John - exactly what she didn’t want. And it still did nothing to ensure Magnussen’s silence. She just left that wide open and instead made the extremely overboard choice to shoot the best man at her own wedding (not hugely worse than attacking the maid of honour, but still). She could have tried appealing for his help, using compassion for John as a persuading factor. She could have tried threatening HIM at gunpoint to guarantee his ongoing silence. Instead she went straight for the heart, quite literally. Unfounded and ineffective - a really irritating combination! 

3. Do I find the character consistently written with solid continuity? NO. This is probably my biggest beef with the character. The worst, I find, is being sold a crock of horseshit about Mary having had some sort of redemption “arc”. An arc, by definition, is a shape that has a beginning, a peak, and an end. There was no lead-up to this “peak” moment of Mary suddenly discovering remorse for having shot Sherlock - that, and nothing else. There was nothing in the writing or in her characterization to support such an out-of-left-field move. There was no gradual shift in her motivations, which were consistently to that point nothing more than self-preservation, protecting her own interests: keep John in the dark so that he couldn’t make an informed decision for himself, tell any lie to keep what she wants (John, albeit an ignorant version of him), run away/protect herself. She deserted her AGRA teammates, leaving literally half of them behind to suffer torture and/or death without even confirming that they were beyond rescue, then repeated her pattern, attacking Sherlock (AGAIN) and running off to leave John and her own child behind. Her lack of remorse for any of this was consistent as well - she clearly felt wholly justified in all of these actions, that she had nothing to apologize for. That JOHN was the one in the wrong by not speaking to her for “months of silence” after she shot his best friend in the heart, that she had every right to dictate what John could or could not do, that he had no right to have a say in naming their child, that she somehow “had” to shoot Sherlock, that John and Sherlock were so much less intelligent than she was that she couldn’t have them “hanging off her gun arm” - when in fact, it was John who outsmarted her by planting the tracking device in the USB key that he already knew she would attack Sherlock over and steal. 

4. Do I find the character admirable, if not likeable? No. Mary is a coward, interested in nothing beyond what she wants. She has no noble, greater motivations than personal gain. She doesn’t care about what consequences her actions have, least of all on the man she supposedly “loves”, or on her own infant that she left behind. She commits crimes for money, not out of some need to defend the innocent, patriotic reasons (which I personally don’t subscribe to anyway, but others do), self-defense, even - just money. I find that so completely gross. Money =/= an admirable motivation, especially not when it’s gained through literal murder. I admire honesty, courage, self-sacrifice, real love, which puts the needs and wants and health of the beloved above one’s own. Mary demonstrates absolutely none of these things. She wants for herself and no one else, and I have never once swallowed this notion that she’s somehow smarter than Sherlock, Mycroft, and John combined. Not only did John himself outwit her with ease, but it felt like transparent pandering to Amanda Abbington as recompense for them writing her out of the show. And then they doubled down on it with creating some ghost version of Mary that John needs some SERIOUS therapy to deal with that actually bore no resemblance to Mary as she actually was, then gave her that gross voiceover that reasonlessly granted her credit for having created one of the greatest friendships in English literary history. That, at least, is consistent with the writers having had Mary set herself up as the broker of John and Sherlock’s friendship in TEH, which I also never bought. They didn’t need her help; John just needed time to cool down and come to understand - he couldn’t even last 24 hours without going to find Sherlock of his own accord. They didn’t need her “help” and she certainly didn’t “create” them. 

So yeah, no: I hate the character, hate the inconsistency even more, wish they had followed through with the solid villain arc they actually wrote. I don’t think that Mary is “strong” or “interesting” just because she uses violence for personal gain. I don’t think she’s a good role model or an interesting character - I just see selfishness, greed, and cowardice. 

[sephiroths-stuff]

Hi. I had a really upsetting but eye opening experience on Facebook I'd like to share with some of you guys.

As many know I'm Chinese. I was adopted from a poor town in South Central China. It is a fishing and rice town. I have Chinese relatives in the US, not biological, but adopted immigrants who've married into my family. Through them and through attending Chinese church as a kid and a Chinese language class and through visiting China later in life and by visiting places with a large Chinese population (such as Australia) and of course by a lot of research through a variety of sources, I've learned a lot about China by both talking to people and reading.

China is a beautiful country with an ancient culture and rich history. It predates many civilizations, is rumored to be Italy's rival in noodle invention, created paper and gunpowder, has an amazing cuisine, and is a frontrunner in many industries while holding dear many lovely traditions, mythologies, and festivals.

But it has many skeletons. In the bloody aftermath of World War 2, my home country was revolutionized by Mao and in his attempt to make China an economical leader, he seized farmland from a nation of people that for years had been an agrarian leader in many regions (rice in the south and barley and wheat in the north, among many fruits and vegetables and poultry and beef), and converted it to land for industrialization and factories. Between 1959 and 1961, insects, typhoons, floods, as well as a drought plagued the land. These disasters had occurred before. China is a biodiverse landmass, larger than the main United States, and covering more climate regions, going from borderline sub-arctic in the northernmost provinces to tropical in Guangdong and Hainan Island and semi arid in the west. Famines are bound to happen. Over a 2000 or so year period from 108 BCE to 1911 CE 1828 famines occurred. But none of them hit the catastrophic levels or happened as rapidly as this one did. In two short years, low estimates say 30 and high say 55, and averages come to around 42.5 million Chinese perished in the Great Famine.

This, of course was not due to just climate occasion. The Chinese were industrious, adaptable people, used to weathering the harshness of the land, harvesting crops near the tumultuous Yangtze and Yellow Rivers and weathering the South China Sea monsoons/typhoons. No, the famine of 1959-1961 was a result of Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which he deprived farms of their caretakers and relegated them to factories, meaning no one harvested crops. No one could feed their families. No one could provide for villages. Tens of millions died.

This is awful, Alex! But... Why are you saying this?

Well, it's because there's a trend in certain spaces online that seems to be going around in this political clime. Many people in the far far left, as in the Marxist left, are praising certain Communist regimes and revolutions, and Mao's is one. I want it to be known that if anyone on my page is a Mao supporter they need to get right out of here. China did not need Mao to recover. China did not need for forty million plus of her people to suffer and die in abject poverty to catch up with the world. Were they struggling after the World War? Yes. But they did not deserve a dictator to take over and destroy the freedoms of their people.

What you see now in China is an authoritarian regime. They do not have freedom of speech. They do not have the ability to research online or in what books they choose. They cannot protest if they are unhappy. They cannot worship freely. They cannot love freely. Is this the regime you praise? Is this your God, Communists? Because this is what Mao started with his "glorious" revolution. I have friends my age from China, and they have told me it is terrifying there. They deny Tianamen Square, and the hauling away of people in cars is common. Phones are tracked, and the internet is censored. This is the future in an authoritarian regime.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have learned something.

Please DM me for literary citations. A lot of this I just know off the top of my head because as a kid I liked to memorize statistics about natural disasters and death tolls.

[dateamonster]

continued

power heist

if headmistress bloodgood doesnt show up in 15 minutes we all get to go home

the yuri potential of "your mom had beef with my mom and you have beef with me but we can break the cycle and then maybe make out silly style while were at it". tbqh.

HAHA BALD HEATH MOMENT

deuces sisters 👀❓are we gonna get a viperine i wonder? i know in g1 shes his cousin but like. perhaps.

i... would not object to a g3 draculaura/claude redux

toraleis mom is next level crazy like i rly thought she was just gonna be the mean high expectations neglectful mom archetype to toraleis meangirl with a troubled background but she is straight up manipulating this CHILD for no reason

clawdeen being the only one willing to trust toralei 🥺 all her friends ready to back her up 🥺 the shovel talk is gonna be unreal

this cthulu lookin waiter rules btw love the squiddy eyes

the fact that their teacher is right over at the next table and not even looking up

i love the gang heisting together thats soo fun

OK BUT as much as its framed as a funny gag toralei knowing her mom would burn the diary because she has a history of burning things to express anger feels like a cfs worthy red flag catarina if i see you its ON SIGHT

i like how lagoona was the only one who essentially didnt do shit on this heist lol she is just hanging out and looking cute

speaking of lagoona tbh it would be kinda nice if this ep was like the first step to her and toralei repairing their friendship. like obvi toralei has a lot of growing and apologizing to do first but idk id like to see it.

and i do appreciate draculaura making it very clear that while this was a step, shes not entirely ready to forgive toralei. shes entitled to that. good on u girl.

finnegans parents on a date <3

i do not want to think abt the implications of a monster declaration of independence.

let her steal!!!!!!

monster midterms

two two-parters back to back is crazy i just wanna say

draculaura is such a goodie goodie im starting to understand why toralei had beef. the rare intersection of goth-prep.

we love you the midterm fairyyy

HABBEY CRUMBS YUMYUMYUMYUM ILL TAKE IT

oo the twins are here yayy!! and theyre hip to toradeen i see. very nice.

MOUSCEDES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"skunkratese is my goverment name" hell yea the next generation of transgender furries abt to go wild over this one

oh AND hes emo thank god honestly

in LOVE with this griffon (?) woman!! once again, really great body diversity in the side characters. would looove to see that translate to some of the mains pleeease

i rly enjoy it when there are hints to specific monster schools outside of monster high that cater to one kind of monster. i couldnt quite makeout what the twins were saying but it sounded like "meowton academy"? i remember in g1 there was some stuff abt dracula wanting to send draculaura to a vampire specific academy iirc. i like details like that because like for one thing i like knowing there are other academic options in the monster world besides this one school, plus it sorta established monster high as a place thats notable for its inclusion of multiple different species learning together under one roof which feels in line with like the core messaging of the series and would both make sense for why young monsters might want to go there over other schools, as well as for why older monsters more set in their ways might be antsy about sending their kids there if they hadnt graduated from there themselves.

dracula bat looks dumb as hell lmao

ALLY DADULA TIME HELL YEA

"I AM LITERALLY A LITERARY CLASSIC"

classic skull-mouth cave booby trap moments rip romulus 😔

mouscedes my beloved my beloved my belov- WAIT THE HUMANATI???? PLEASE BE REAL ACTUALLY I WANT A WHOLE SEASON DEDICATED TO THAT

obsessed with mouscedes being like ohhh im just a widdle mousey umm cheesed to meet u too girl <3333

toradeen truthers stay winninggggg

omg mr clopman.. a golem character at monster high aaaaaa <3333

dot! dot! dot!

catching up on monster high notes!

spell the beans

looooove clawdeens dad joining the parents association he is involved in his childrens education :3 he is making cookies and making friends :3

momdusa is so milfy i could die the gays stay winning once again

dracula is soooo silly hes winning me over i fear

!! momdusa never moved on from high school and falls over so much and loves her wife wow she is the perfect woman actually

its not my dream dad its YOURS

obsessed w everyone wanting to eat clawdeens dad

THANK YOU for explaining the camera/mirror thing with vampires i was wondering abt that

mr wolf and dracula friendship moment 🥺

EXPELBEAST!! i love when they do something fun and goofy with the mh lore

idk if those were lagoonas parents in the mpa but i wish we got more of them there looked so cute

growing up ghoulia

mothman!!!!!!!!!!!

some of these side characters have such interesting designs the purple dragon girl sitting in front of ghoulia was soo cute

MONSTER GSA LETS GOOO

i loove when mh does some classic monster movie stuff. ghoulia clone zombie attack rules.

not to be a broken record but i feel like ghoulias ep here would be more meaningful if she was still more noticeably zombie-like. like she says she moves slower than other monsters but i dont like. see that. let her lurch!

casketball jinx

im so happy to see howleen!!

kaiju girlie is such a queen we love to see it

tbqh i think howleen was right for this one

clawdeen both being on the team and being a cheerleader seems like soo much take a rest bestie 😭

do u think clawdeen had a wolf fursona before she found out she was a werewolf? i think so.

[arcticdementor]

Something strange happened to the news over the past four years. The dominant stories all resembled the scripts of bad movies—sequels and reboots. The Kavanaugh hearings were a sequel to the Clarence Thomas hearings, and Russian collusion was rebooted as Ukrainian impeachment. Journalists are supposed to hunt for good scoops, but in January, as the coronavirus spread, they focused on the impeachment reality show instead of a real story.

It’s not just journalists. The so-called second golden era of televi­sion was a decade ago, and many of those shows relied on cliff-hangers and gratuitous nudity to hold audience attention. Across TV, movies, and novels it is increasingly difficult to find a compelling story that doesn’t rely on gimmicks. Even foundational stories like liberalism, equality, and meritocracy are failing; the resulting woke phenomenon is the greatest shark jump in history.

Storytelling is central to any civilization, so its sudden failure across society should set off alarm bells. Culture inevitably reflects the selection process that sorts people into the upper class, and today’s insipid stories suggest a profound failure of this sorting mech­anism.

…

Culture is larger than pop culture, or even just art. It encompasses class, architecture, cuisine, education, manners, philosophy, politics, religion, and more. T. S. Eliot charted the vastness of this word in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and he warned that technocratic rule narrowed our view of culture. Eliot insisted that it’s impossible to easily define such a broad concept, yet smack in the middle of the book he slips in a succinct explanation: “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.” This highlights why the increase in “deaths of despair” is such a strong condemnation of our dysfunction. In a fundamental way, our culture only exists to serve a certain class. Eliot predicted this when he cri­tiqued elites selected through education: “Any educational system aiming at a complete adjustment between education and society will tend to restrict education to what will lead to success in the world, and to restrict success in the world to those persons who have been good pupils of the system.”

This professional managerial class has a distinct culture that often sets the tone for all of American culture. It may be possible to separate the professional managerial class from the ruling elite, or plutocracy, but there is no cultural distinction. Any commentary on an entire class will stumble in the way all generalizations stumble, yet this culture is most distinct at the highest tiers, and the fuzzy edges often emulate those on the top. At its broadest, these are college-educated, white-collar workers whose income comes from labor, who are huddled in America’s cities, and who rise to power through existing bureaucracies. Bureaucracies, whether corporate or government, are systems that reward specific traits, and so the culture of this class coalesces towards an archetype: the striving bureaucrat, whose values are defined by the skills needed to maneuver through a bureau­cracy. And from the very beginning, the striving bureaucrat succeeds precisely by disregarding good storytelling.

…

Professionals today would never self-identify as bureaucrats. Product managers at Google might have sleeve tattoos or purple hair. They might describe themselves as “creators” or “creatives.” They might characterize their hobbies as entrepreneurial “side hustles.” But their actual day-in, day-out work involves the coordination of various teams and resources across a large organization based on established administrative procedures. That’s a bureaucrat. The entire professional culture is almost an attempt to invert the connotations and expecta­tions of the word—which is what underlies this class’s tension with storytelling. Conformity is draped in the dead symbols of a prior generation’s counterculture.

…

When high school students read novels, they are asked to identify the theme, or moral, of a story. This teaches them to view texts through an instrumental lens. Novelist Robert Olen Butler wrote that we treat artists like idiot savants who “really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can’t quite make themselves do it.” The purpose of a story becomes the process of translating it into ideas or analysis. This is instrumental reading. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent years meticulously outlining and structuring numerous rewrites of The Great Gatsby, but every year high school students reduce the book to a bumper sticker on the American dream. A story is an experience in and of itself. When you abstract a message, you lose part of that experience. Analysis is not inherently bad; it’s just an ancillary mode that should not define the reader’s disposition.

Propaganda is ubiquitous because we’ve been taught to view it as the final purpose of art. Instrumental reading also causes people to assume overly abstract or obscure works are inherently profound. When the reader’s job is to decode meaning, then the storyteller is judged by the difficulty of that process. It’s a novel about a corn beef sandwich who sings the Book of Malachi. Ah yes, a profound critique of late capitalism. An artist! Overall, instrumental reading teaches striving students to disregard stories. Cut to the chase, and give us the message. Diversity is our strength? Got it. Throw the book out. This reductionist view perhaps makes it difficult for people to see how incoherent the higher education experience has become.

…

“Decadence” sounds incorrect since the word elicits extravagant and glamorous vices, while we have Lizzo—an obese antifertility priestess for affluent women. All our decadence becomes boring, cringe-inducing, and filled with HR-approved jargon. “For my Ful­bright, I studied conflict resolution in nonmonogamous throuples.” Campus dynamics may partially explain this phenomenon. Camille Paglia has argued that many of the brightest left-wing thinkers in the 1960s fried their brains with too much LSD, and this created an opportunity for the rise of corporate academics who never participated in the ’60s but used its values to signal status. What if this dropout process repeats every generation?

…

The professional class tells a variety of genre stories about their jobs: TED Talker, “entrepreneur,” “innovator,” “doing well by doing good.” One of the most popular today is corporate feminism. This familiar story is about a young woman who lands a prestigious job in Manhattan, where she guns for the corner office while also fulfilling her trendy Sex and the City dreams. Her day-in, day-out life is blessed by the mothers and grandmothers who fought for equality—with the ghost of Susan B. Anthony lingering Mufasa-like over America’s cubicles. Yet, like other corporate genre stories, girl-boss feminism is a celebration of bureaucratic life, including its hierarchy. Isn’t that weird?

There are few positive literary representations of life in corporate America. The common story holds that bureaucratic life is soul-crushing. At its worst, this indulges in a pedestrian Romanticism where reality is measured against a daydream, and, as Irving Babbitt warned, “in comparison . . . actual life seems a hard and cramping routine.” Drudgery is constitutive of the human condition. Yet even while admitting that toil is inescapable, it is still obvious that most white-collar work today is particularly bleak and meaningless. Office life increasingly resembles a mental factory line. The podcast is just talk radio for white-collar workers, and its popularity is evidence of how mind-numbing work has become for most.

Forty years ago, Christopher Lasch wrote that “modern industry condemns people to jobs that insult their intelligence,” and today employers rub this insult in workers’ faces with a hideously infantilizing work culture that turns the office into a permanent kindergarten classroom. Blue-chip companies reward their employees with balloons, stuffed animals, and gold stars, and an exposé detailing the stringent communication rules of the luxury brand Away Luggage revealed how many start-ups are just “live, laugh, love” sweatshops. This humiliating culture dominates America’s companies because few engage in truly productive or necessary work. Professional genre fiction, such as corporate feminism, is thus often told as a way to cope with the underwhelming reality of working a job that doesn’t con­tribute anything to the world.

There is another way to tell the story of the young career woman, however. Her commute includes inspiring podcasts about Ugandan entrepreneurs, but also a subway stranger breathing an egg sandwich into her face. Her job title is “Senior Analyst—Global Trends,” but her job is just copying and pasting between spreadsheets for ten hours. Despite all the “doing well by doing good” seminars, the closest thing she knows to a community is spin class, where a hundred similar women, and one intense man in sports goggles, listen to a spaz scream Hallmark card affirmations.

…

The bureaucrat even describes the process of rising through fraud­ulence as “playing the game.” The book The Organization Man criticized professionals in the 1950s for confusing their own interests with those of their employers, imagining, for example, that moving across the country was good for them simply because they were transferred. “Playing the game” is almost like an overlay on top of this attitude. The idea is that personal ambition puts the bureaucrat in charge. Bureaucrats always feel that they are “in on the game,” and so develop a false sense of certainty about the world, which sorts them into two groups: the cynics and the neurotics. Cynics recognize the nonsense, but think it’s necessary for power. The neurotics, by con­trast, are earnest go-getters who confuse the nonsense with actual work. They begin to feel like they’re the only ones faking it and become so insecure they have to binge-watch TED Talks on “im­poster syndrome.”

These two dispositions help explain why journalists focus on things like impeachment rather than medical supply chains. One group cynically condescends to American intelligence, while neurotics shriek about the “norms of our democracy.” Both are undergirded by a false certainty about what’s possible. Professional elites vastly overestimate their own intelligence in comparison with the average American, and today there is nothing so common as being an elitist. Meanwhile, public discourse gets dumber and dumber as elitists spend all their time explaining hastily memorized Wikipedia entries to those they deem rubes.

…

The entire phenomenon of the nonconformist bureaucrat can be seen as genre inversion. Everyone today grew up with pop culture stories about evil corporations and corporate America’s soul-sucking culture, and so the “creatives” have fashioned a self-image defined against this genre. These stories have been internalized and inverted by corporate America itself, so now corporate America has mandatory fun events and mandatory displays of creativity.

In other words, past countercultures have been absorbed into corporate America’s conception of itself. David Solomon isn’t your father’s stuffy investment banker. He’s a DJ! And Goldman Sachs isn’t like the stuffy corporations you heard about growing up. They fly a transgender flag outside their headquarters, list sex-change tran­sitions as a benefit on their career site, and refuse to underwrite an IPO if the company is run by white men. This isn’t just posturing. Wokeness is a cult of power that maintains its authority by pretending it’s perpetually marching against authority. As long it does so, its sectaries can avoid acknowledging how they strengthen managerial America’s stranglehold on life by empowering administrators to en­force ever-expanding bureaucratic technicalities.

…

Moreover, it is shocking that no one in the 2020 campaign seems to have reacted to the dramatic change that happened in 2016. Good storytellers are attuned to audience sophistication, and must understand when audiences have grown past their techniques. Everyone has seen hundreds of movies, and read hundreds of books, and so we intuitively understand the shape of a good story. Once audiences can recognize a storytelling technique as a technique, it ceases to function because it draws attention to the artifice. This creates distance be­tween the intended emotion and the audience reaction. For instance, a romantic comedy follows a couple as they fall in love and come together, and so the act two low point will often see the couple breaking up over miscommunication. Audiences recognize this as a technique, and so, even though miscommunication often causes fights, it seems fake.

Similarly, today’s voters are sophisticated enough to recognize the standard political techniques, and so their reactions are no longer easily predictable. Voters intuitively recognize that candidate “de­bates” are just media events, and prewritten zingers do not help politicians when everyone recognizes them as prewritten. The literary critic Wayne Booth wrote that “the hack is, by definition, the man who asks for responses he cannot himself respect,” and our politicians are always asking us to buy into nonsense that they couldn’t possibly believe. Inane political tropes operate just like inane business jargon and continue because everyone thinks they’re on the inside, and this blinds them to obvious developments in how audiences of voters relate to political tropes. Trump often plays in this neglected space.

The artistic development of the sitcom can be seen as the process of incorporating its own artifice into the story. There is a direct creative lineage from The Dick Van Dyke Show, a sitcom about television comedy writers, to The Office, a show about office workers being filmed for television. Similarly, Trump often succeeds because he incorporates the artifice of political tropes. When Trump points out that the debate audiences are all donors, or that Nancy Pelosi doesn’t actually pray for him, he’s just pointing out what everyone already knows. This makes it difficult for other politicians to “play the game,” because their standard tropes reinforce Trump’s message. If the debates are just media spectacle events for donors, then ap­plause lines work against you. It’s similar to breaking the fourth wall, while the rest of the cast nervously tries to continue with their lines. Trump’s success is evidence that the television era of political theater is ending, because its storytelling formats are dead.

In fact, the (often legitimate) criticism that Trump does not act “presidential” is the same as saying that he’s not acting professional—that he is ignoring the rules of bureaucratic advancement. Could you imagine Trump’s year-end review? “In 2020, we invite Donald to stop sending Outlook reminders that just say ‘get schlonged.’” Trump’s antics are indicative of his different route to power. Forget everything else about him: how would you act if you never had a job outside a company with your name on the building? The world of the professional managerial class doesn’t contain many characters, and so they associate eccentricity with bohemianism or ineptitude. But it’s also reliably found somewhere else.

Small business owners are often loons, wackos, and general nut­jobs. Unlike the professional class, their personalities vary because their job isn’t dependent on how others view them. Even when they’re wealthy or successful, they often don’t act “professional.” It requires tremendous grit and courage to own a business. They are perhaps the only people today who embody what Pericles meant when he said that the “secret to freedom is courage.” In the wake of coronavirus, small businesses owners stoically shuttered their stores and faced financial ruin, while politicians with camera-ready personas and ratlike souls tried to increase seasonal worker visas.

…

Ever since Star Wars, screenwriters have used Joseph Campbell’s monomyth to measure a successful story, and an essential act one feature is the refusal of adventure. For a moment, the universe opens up and shows the hero an unknown world of possibility, but the hero backs away. For four years, our nation has refused adventure, yet fate cannot be ignored. The coronavirus forces our nation to confront adventure. With eerie precision, this global plague tore down the false stories that veiled our true situation. The experts are incompetent. The institutions told us we were racist for caring about the virus, and then called for arresting paddleboarders in the middle of the ocean. Our business regulations make it difficult to create face masks in a crisis, while rewarding those who outsource the manufacturing of lifesaving drugs to our rival. The new civic religion of wokeness is a dangerous antihuman cult that distorts priorities. Even our Hollywood stars turn out to be ugly without makeup.

[polygarnstars]

part 1: 4, 12, 15, 18, and 19

If you think I’m going to have common sense and not answer all of these in a single post, I have Bad News lmao

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you? Smart, mostly. “Gifted”. This very much Did Not Last lmaoooo

12. name of your favorite playlist? I literally never make playlists I’m a stupid fuck who uses their spotify premium to skip freely through all my thousands of liked songs on shuffle until I find something I want to listen to lmaooooo (Having said that: Rey and I put together a playlist for some characters we were entering a contest to win last fall which I titled Story and Song after the TAZ arc and also because we wrote Way Too Much for it and I’m Very Proud Of That)

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment? Okay upon reading this I initially genuinely couldn’t remember any of the books I read in school because for the last several years of my schooling I just fuckin Sparknotes and TV Tropes-ed everything lmao... having said that, I do remember enjoying Maus! It was neat having a graphic novel assigned amongst all the “literary classics” that I couldn’t sit through a sitting of without falling asleep, and it may be the furry in me but the depiction of the characters/people as animals was Good :0c See, if all history was depicted with methods like this, I’d maybe actually be able to remember it ghfdjhgjfkdl

18. ideal weather? Depends on the day, but generally: Between like 65-80°F, not humid, not a lot of wind, and either sunny, partly cloudy, or drizzly but not outright storming. Basically decent temperatures without feeling like I’m walking through soup because of the humidity and weather that’s not completely gray and boring. Aka what Maine basically never is lmaoooo

19. sleeping position? I change positions every five minutes I swear to god (don’t take that out of context gfhdjbhvjd). Usually with at least one arm draped over a pillow that is Definitely Not Being Mentally Portrayed As A Character I Like To Supplement The Fact That I Did Not Get Enough Affection To Be A Functional Adult As A Child ghfdjknbhgfjdk

21. obsession from childhood? bold of you to assume i don’t still obsess over nintendo games (and just video games in general tbh)

23. strange habits? OKAY I COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING FOR THIS AT FIRST BUT I HAVE ONE NOW: MIDNIGHT FRIES

28. five songs to describe you? Speeding - LightsDaydreaming - ParamoreMusic - Mystery SkullsNo Lullaby - SIAMÉSLonely Dance - Set If Off+Bonus because it came up on Spotify while I was shuffling for songs for this and it’s a Mood: Pineapples Do Not Belong on a Pizza - Vargskelethor

29. best way to bond with you? I don’t know I usually just scream about ocs or video games with people and suddenly it’s been a year??? @riskreyes how has it been a year since we started talking but also how has it only been a year??? Wild bvhfdjkbhvgfjdk

30. places that you find sacred? Lmao I’ve never had anywhere like that really. Need a goddamn lock on my door :p I guess... the woods by my house? As a little kid before things got shitty my neighbor’s cousin or niece or something would go out there wandering around catching frogs and stuff in the spring or almost falling into the frozen streams during winter. When things started to go to shit in my life as a teenager I would hide out there to get away and nobody would find me. I haven’t been recently but the last time I did my friend and I walked along the train tracks and dove off into the woods by the side to avoid the amtrak coming by, it was great lmao. Uhh, other than that... I dunno, Boston and New York and New London all make me feel good to visit. Probably mostly because during those trips I don’t feel trapped in a dying land like Maine feels like bgvhfdjkhvgfjd

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names? ......my entire wardrobe is my work outfit, excessive graphic tees, and jeans. So uhh... I dunno. I guess my NWTB shirts are pretty rad, I’d kick a dude’s ass wearing Nate’s merch

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head? if i have to see another ad for some fuckin branch of the us military while i’m just out here trying to watch people play video games i swear to god-

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school? Oh boy I don’t know how weird these are but do you want a list??? I can give you a list hang on- In 4th grade we had a day of class where we all just had a party and ate chips and salsa and stuff because the pats won the super bowl and our teacher was Obsessed- In middle school my math class started working out of college textbooks, which is a bit much when you’re 11, advanced classes or no. Yet somehow none of the other students had any problems with this- Also in middle school, the school counselor really wasn’t very Good at his job so I usually just ended up playing Rock Band in his office instead of talking out any of my Many, Many Problems. I played the drums, for the record- Also in middle school, one time I straight up fell down a flight of stairs? Like, a full flight of stairs. Fuckin somersaulting down the stairs. The binder I was carrying broke open, papers went everywhere, my arm got cut open somewhere along the way and started bleeding. I get to the bottom, the other students are staring at me in horror, aforementioned counselor fuckin steps out of his office which is, of course, right at the bottom of the stairs, all concerned because what the fuck a kid just fell down the stairs, right? And so I, laying on the floor disoriented and laughing, declare, and I quote: “That was fun, let’s do it again!”- THE MOTHERFUCKING MAC AND CHEESE MUFFINS IN HIGH SCHOOL. Macaroni and cheese baked into the sweet batter of a muffin. I refused to touch the stuff but a friend of my did and it was bad enough he had to go to the trash can and fucking empty his stomach in it.- SAID FRIEND ALSO MANAGED TO GET A CARTON OF MILK THAT EXPIRED A MONTH BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED AT THE START OF ONE OF OUR YEARS IN HIGH SCHOOL and if I didn’t trust cafeteria food before that sealed the deal on me Never Trusting It Again- OH BUT SPEAKING OF CAFETERIA FOOD one time in the old school before the renovation, in like freshman year I think? I laughed so hard a piece of spicy chicken strip flew up my windpipe and got stuck in my nose and it was too big for me to snort out so I had to suck it back down and for the rest of the day all I could smell was burning- ON ANOTHER FOOD RELATED TOPIC down in the library I was on my iPad and 3DS because I had Long Since Given Up On School and some asshole dudes threw a rotting orange at me and it splattered all over the screens of both? So I picked up the remains and chucked it back at them and yelled “Do you wanna fucking NOT?” and they all ran off. The librarian heard me yell and saw me throw the orange back at them and she just didn’t give a fuck lmao- The librarians at my school were cool as shit really during one of our years we had to do x hours of volunteer work so I did some adjustments to the library catalogue for mine but the thing is I was fast enough at it that there really wasn’t enough to fill up my required hours so instead of giving me more to do they just sort of let me and my friends hang out playing Yu-Gi-Oh and called that good lmao. (For the record I only had one starter deck so I let my friend pick half of the cards and I would use the half she didn’t want. I managed to fuckin WRECK her with throwaways it was Iconicque)- OKAY ONE LAST LIBRARY STORY on the last day of finals I was hanging out in one of the smart tv rooms in the library right? My last finals weren’t for a few hours and lord knows I wasn’t gonna study, ADHD ass couldn’t do that and I’d already given up on school lmao. So I fucking... I brought my Wii U to school, hooked it up to the smart tv, and just started playing Splatoon there in the library. One of the librarians walked past to check on everyone, stopped at my room, watched me play for a minute (I noticed her and just sort of nodded and waved like ‘Sup’ so she Knew what was going on), and then just LEFT. Like, she didn’t give a fuck. Shoutout to the librarians, the Chillest- ALRIGHT LAST STORY LAST STORY I straight up never got all the credits I needed to graduate lmao. I was missing half a credit but they let me go anyway and to this day I cite the reason as being my high scores on the SAT/PSAT? I was the first student at the school in like, a decade, to have gotten an award from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for my performance on them, and I guess they must have thought that me failing to graduate on time would look bad on them because, uh, yeah, it would, if people found out their teachers couldn’t handle a ~smart kid~ to the point that they did poorly enough to not even graduate with the rest of their class nobody would be willing to send their kids there lmao. And that’s the story of how I graduated when I wasn’t technically supposed to!!!

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have? That’s a good fuckin question hey shit memory what was that thing that made us laugh so hard we couldn’t breathe again?...Don’t remember? Yeah I thought so lmaoI dunno, probably a joke in some let’s play? Or... god. Now that I think about it was probably the Slicer of T’pire Weir Isles moment actually. Holy shit, that was good.

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried? That I’ve ever tried? Jesus, I dunno, I have issues with texture more than flavor. I Refuse to eat my mother’s stuffing because it’s literally just soggy ass bread. In terms of pure flavor alone? Her shepherds pie. It’s just... there is no flavor. It’s like eating cardboard. I’m begging you, De, use seasoning. If I ever have to eat shepherds pie that just tastes like tin from canned peas and vague hints of unseasoned beef again I’m going to go on a murderous rampage.That said? F in the chat to Cameron for that mac and cheese muffin. Rest in pieces

73. favorite weird flavor combo? GVFHDJBVDN JUST GONNA MAKE ME SHARE THE DILL PICKLE/CHOCOLATE PUDDING PACK COMBO FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE HUH

93. nicknames? Gar, Garn, Lane, Bill, Master, Pants, Shortpants. The first three are self-explanatory, first two are shortenings of my name and then my masc/surname. The latter four come from usernames of mine - Bill from Bill Ciforce (If you stack a Bill Cipher on top of two other Bill Ciphers, you get the Ciforce), Master, Pants, and Shortpants from MasterShortpants in reference to one of Link’s nicknames in Skyward Sword

95. favorite app on your phone? Does the internet app count? No? Lmao. Spotify I guess :p Need me some Tunes

[thebristolboard]

Best Comics of 2018

Here’s my contribution to The Comics Journal’s annual roundup. There’s lots of great lists. You should click over and read them all.

Berlin by Jason Lutes – a towering masterpiece 22-years in the making, Berlin is a high watermark for alternative literary comics and its completion feels like a significant milestone for the generation of post-Love and Rockets creators and fans who came of age in the ‘90s.

The Goat Getters by Eddie Campbell – Meticulously-researched and beautifully-designed, this is an important work of comics archaeology. Campbell sifts through the medium’s pre-history, focusing on “the missing link” between early sports cartooning and newspaper comic strips. He carefully traces this evolution, including detailed biographies of the major cartoonists (Swinnerton, Dorgan, Herriman, Fisher, Goldberg, etc.) and a lot of historical context. Not a light read, but definitely worth the effort.

The Troublemakers by Baron Yoshimoto, edited by Ryan Holmberg – If you aren’t following Ryan Holmberg’s work, you’re missing out on one of the best critic/historians in the game. Holmberg is an expert in alt-manga and his translation projects are always worth looking at. This year he edited or otherwise contributed to four collections with several different publishers. I still haven’t read Slum Wolf but of the other three (including Fukushima Devil Fish and Vérité 01), this was the standout, with six short stories from the ‘70s and ‘80s by Yoshimoto, a manga master I was previously unfamiliar with. Holmberg’s books also include insightful essays focused on the artist which adds to the appreciation and understanding of the works reproduced.

Frontier #17 by Lauren Weinstein – This memoir about pregnancy and childbirth is simply a beautiful comic, unflinchingly honest. Weinstein is not afraid to be naked on the page, both literally and figuratively, and never shies away from baring her soul. It’s definitely the best issue of Frontier to date and ranks high among Weinstein’s best works.

Hieronymus & Bosch by Paul Kirchner – From the creator of High Times’s “Dope Rider” and Heavy Metal’s “The Bus” strips, this latest book is a collection of silent comics set in Hell. Perfectly timed gags, often ending in the protagonist’s torment, are mixed with a healthy dose of dark humor. This is perhaps Kirchner’s best work. Plus it’s full color!

Blammo #10 and One Dirty Tree by Noah Van Sciver – Van Sciver’s work turned more personal this past year, revealing intimate details about his family life, relationships, and Mormon upbringing. At the same time, his storytelling, artwork, and especially his use of color have grown more confident and attractive. 

Mort Cinder by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia – Following Fantagraphics’ translation of Oesterheld and Solano López’s masterpiece, The Eternaut, a few years ago, this gorgeously reproduced translation of one of the greatest Argentinian comics ever is the first of several planned volumes in the Breccia Library. Breccia’s chiaroscuro brushwork is exquisite throughout as he dissects various historical eras from ancient Greece to World War I.

Coin-Op Comics Anthology by Peter and Maria Hoey – You don’t usually hear comics described as aerodynamic but this collection of short strips by the brother and sister duo is filled with sharp angles and sleek curves. The comics draw heavily on the siblings’ graphic design experience, giving the entire book a glossy magazine-like quality, but each strip is filled with clever film-inspired visual experiments.

Flem by Rebecca Rosen – An impressive debut graphic novel about assisted suicide and mother/daughter relationships. Rosen’s art has some similarities with Dash Shaw’s work, but her creative page layouts and expressive coloring portend great things to come. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on.

Ice Cream Man by W. Maxwell Prince and Martín Morazzo – One of my favorite Image books in a long time. Each issue of this series is a loosely-connected one-off tale of suburban horror. Martín Morazzo’s style is reminiscent of Frank Quitely and Prince’s scripts are sparse, thought-provoking gems.

Honorable mentions: Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, The Beef by David Hine and Shaky Kane, X-Men: Grand Design and Second Genesis by Ed Piskor, Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brian Stelfreeze, et al., All the Sad Songs by Summer Pierre, Tongues by Anders Nilsen, Ensemble by Maxime Gérin, Amnesia by Al Columbia, and The Nib #1, the first print edition of the popular web-comic.

Finally, because nobody should limit themselves to new stuff only, here’s the ten best older comics and related stuff I read in 2018:

The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu – a fantastic and well-researched look back at the history of censorship and fetishism in early comics that led up to Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent.

Hostage by Guy Delisle – Delisle’s best maybe ever, certainly since Pyongyang. This should have been on my best of list last year.

March Books 1-3 by John Lewis and Nate Powell – I read all three books to my 6th grade son this year and we were both blown away. John Lewis is a true American hero and I’m grateful that he chose to write his memoirs in graphic novel form.

Annie Sullivan and the Trials of Helen Keller by Joe Lambert – this was the third time I read this one and it’s still great; one of the most under-rated graphic novels in recent memory.

Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm by Percy Carey and Ron Wimberly – I had the pleasure of interviewing Ron on a panel at SPX this year and it was the perfect excuse to revisit this outstanding memoir about hip hop and gang culture.

Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes – I re-read this after finishing Berlin. It remains one of my all-time favorite graphic novels.

The Eternaut by F. Solano Lopez and Héctor Germán Oesterheld – I actually like this book better than Mort Cinder, but both are masterpieces. And Fantagraphics hit it out of the park on the design and slipcase packaging. Arsene Schrauwen by Olivier Schrauwen – I missed the boat on this book when it came out, but I’m really glad I went back and read it. Outstanding art with a creepy dreamlike story. I’m looking forward to checking out Parallel Lives soon.

2001 Nights by Yukinobu Hoshino – I love this hard sci-fi manga series so much, I wrote an appreciation for The Comics Journal about it.

Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne vol. 3-6 – I collected these off the stands back in the ‘80s and am amazed how well they hold up. I think this is Byrne’s best work for Marvel, even surpassing his X-Men run (and let’s also not forget Namor).

[rkulikowski-blog]

Two Days in One

When we arrived in Dublin it was 5:30 am— but felt like midnight to us. We knew we couldn’t just hit the day running (there were 8 babies on the flight!) so we decided to book the hotel from the previous day so we could use room early. Best decision ever -as we never could have missed a night’s sleep and then tried to take in the beautiful, hopping town of Dublin! The Westbury hotel is right in the heart of the city and many of the sites are within walking distance. The Book of Kells was amazing to see at Trinity College. Some of the actual written manuscripts from the New Testament are here for the public to view! Of course we had to start our eating here by having traditional pub food at Harry Lemons. The Shepard’s pie, beef stew and brown bread did not disappoint! The highlight of the day had to be the literary bar crawl. We met with about 30-40 people and two actors who love Irish literature. They would quote or perform a scene from the works of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan in a very entertaining way!! We visited 4 pubs that the authors frequented, and got some Irish history lessons along the way. Although Dennis could match the author with the scene/quotes— I apparently was not paying attention in English classes on the days these great men were discussed. ( I was focused on the their, there, they’re lessons however!) Luckily it was not necessary to know these authors intimately to enjoy the experience! Dublin is a charming old city that really hops! There is a lot to do and see and one can easily get to places by walking. Many of the streets are pedestrian/taxi only and there are people from all over the world visiting. Music is EVERYWHERE in the streets! And yes there are A LOT of pubs! The beer is delicious and I’m not much of a beer drinker. Some of the following pictures were taken around 9:30 -still very light out as it is so far north!

[honeylikewords]

Ah, that's the thing, I too, normally hate romances, and this is great. Why do you hate them? Because there seems to be very little romance in the romances?

Well, that’s an interesting question, but one which I’d have to give a long, thorough, essay-length response to in order to fully answer, because the issue is complex, given that the history and nature of the “romance novel” itself is deeply entwined with many other issues (such as female authorship, the validity of female wish-fulfillment fantasies, Western concepts of “romance”, censorship, sexual liberation, “what makes a book good” [which is a VERY big question], et cetera).

So, to avoid unnecessary essaying and avoid boring you (and anyone else who might read this in passing), I’ll try to give a slightly less expansive answer, or at least a partial answer which can be a little more readable.

My most surface-level complaint with most romances are just... kinda boring.

I should also add that I never said I hate them, merely that I don’t read them. That being said... I don’t read them because they’re often very formulaic, they spend a lot of time dramatizing something very boring (romantic relationships, surprisingly enough, do not have to be Sweeping and Theatric in order to be meaningful, healthy, or enjoyable), and often serve only as vessels of wish-fulfillment for a very specific demographic rather than as conveyance for meaningful notes, experiences or discourse about the human condition. Romances are very often built off of the assumed structure that a romantic relationship is the most important and deep kind of human interpersonal relationship, and they’re often very forced and rushed for the sake of the narrative and, as such, don’t feel organic, deep, or meaningful.

That, and I don’t like a lot of media-- be it film, television, or literature-- that’s more of a “turn your brain off and enjoy the puff piece” kind of thing. Sure, it can be fun sometimes in movies or TV, but only sometimes, and only if it’s the right kind of indulgence. But I think the reason I’m harder on the literature side of it is that, well, literature takes time. You have to read and digest it over a longer period of time, and I feel like something that requires that must time ought to also give some substance and sustenance along the way.

But romances don’t, for me.

I think another, more difficult to place (and explain) thing that keeps me from Feeling The Draw Of The Romance is that it’s because I think that real love kind of isn’t all that romantic at all.

I think real love is something much more subdued and quiet and long term, something less flashy and less sensational and less sweeping and more internal, quiet, unstated. Real love is something between people who want each other not just to be happy, but to be healthy and safe and prosperous. 

Real love isn’t about being consumed by the desire to be with this one person or else you’ll go mad. It’s about having time apart, doing separate things, being different and separate people who also are two parts of a whole, a working unit. It’s not about being so maddeningly attracted to someone that you Must Have Them All To Yourself, it’s about loving them as a person and a body second, because the body fades and beauty ebbs but who a person is inside always remains. 

Real love can’t really ever fit inside a book, because it just isn’t always something to write a narrative around. Sometimes, it’s just not the flashy excitement people wanna gobble up. Real love shows up more often in silent, simple, uninteresting or unnoticeable things, because love isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice. It’s work. It’s hard. It’s effort. It’s not just a big, bright, bubbly sensation, nor a raging, passionate fire. It is a commitment. It is a job. It is a lifetime occupation.

And, frankly, sometimes, love is boring, and I think that’s a very wonderful thing.

I dunno, all of this is loosey-goosey (it’s nearly 2 am, here) and, of course, this is not a perfect blanket statement condemning all romances and all forms of it, but rather some of my more surface-level beefs with the genre as it appears in literature. 

On the flip side of this, I could also make arguments for why romance-based literature is important and good and can be incredibly fulfilling and valuable, because it’s a complex issue that I have feelings about. I mean, I write about love on this blog nearly exclusively! And there are good, tasteful, intelligent uses of romance in literature!

But, at the same time, I really can’t be fully congratulatory nor supportive of the genre as it stands. ‘Cause it really sucks. A lot.

What can I say? I have a degree in English. I get feelings about stuff. 

(d/o/n’t re/b/lo/g; this is not a New Yorker Op-Ed Piece for Discussing Literary Value, it’s just Me Onion(TM).)