#i cannot find enough references for his specific nose shape.... so like... maybe i can make it out of clay to reference in 3D space

[dandyshucks]

off topic from this blog but my desk is almost a little embarrassing bc I'm such a trinket hound... such a sucker for lil guys...

like there rly is just an entire lineup of lil critters across the back of my desk fjdksl it's getting a little ridiculous LOL

unfortunately for my desk-space, i simply love to collect little fellas and love to make them (all the n.eedlefelted ones on the right are made by me :3) !!!

ANYWAYS. I'm trying to find ways to incorporate a little bit of G.uzma into the decor here ... i should just make another Guz plush perhaps fjdkdl

[cyanpeacock]

SO wow okay about my absence without leave and also Mark

i have been have ONE HUGE MANIC EPISODE with a Whole Bunch of like... screaming-in-the-street psychoses. i am “getting better” as in, not SO manic, and not actively psychotic, but uh, yeah, in the words of that cunt morrisey, i’m Still Ill. 

mark is a recurring voice/face? he has DEFINITELY been around before, since like, god, since i was in secondary school. earlier probably. used to be called marcell but like, he prefers mark now. “marcell is some pretentious french shit.” he isn’t even french! he sounds, like, american, sort of? like he learned to /speak/ english from the anglo-american side of the internet. how does that work? i don’t know. and the fucker HIDES! he hides for AGES. i thought he was fcking gone but this is the SAME guy. SAME guy. how does he do that??! where did the bastard GO for all that time. still in the process of accepting uh, okay, wow, yes, i HAVE seen you before, weirdly handsome but very rude man. i have seen you before. fucker.

but like shit I’ve tried to draw the guy but just like a living person I can never get his damn face right! and uh, internal conversations are happening, internally? i’m struggling to believe it but this is mark. thiiiis is that guy with the strange name. that’s marcell. that’s marc. that is mark. he’s Back. fucker!!! how complicated. god. i’d dance to jamiroquai with that man. i refuse to call him a gentleman. fucking aeiou!!!! fucking Aeiou!!!!!!! 

THIS IS LIKE... okay, i guess it means i’m integrating traumas? confusing process. i’m trying not to think about it too hard? all the facets/splinters/kind-of-mes are coming together more the further away in time and space I get from the people that really fucking wounded me, and mark is, well... still mark, when he’s around, just WAY calmer. if i ask him about talking to other people and systems he’s like “maybe later,” meaning, there are a couple of people he is Likely to pop up to again, infrequently, when he is Good and Ready. and yeah he says (paraphrased) that’s enough now. 

the grant and asher thing was. not part of the dissociative stuff. that was the onset of a fucking HILARIOUS psychosis. picture the camerata in grant’s bathroom. royce is lying down in the tub off his top surgery on ketamine. asher is on the bathroom floor smoking cigarettes through his nose. sybil is perched on the window-shelf huffing deodorant, specifically Right Guard. grant is crouched on the bathmat on 0 drugs making sure none of them die. i was in my apartment doing All the voices for this scenario. it was bonkers. @supergiant games: im sorry. never hire me.

so yhhhhhh i’m not Better(tm) but i’m doing better? up in like, a temporary room in halls the uni is paying for, and they’re helpin me buy food, and they’re also arranging a case review for me bc the NHS have done very little but fuck me about and keep me barely surviving for the last four years.

i am pretty goddamn sure my mood fuckery qualifies as bipolar disorder because, uh, well. mania (with mixed features) and psychosis from cannabis withdrawal? i cannot find ANY papers or serious medical literature referring to that, only to mania/psychosis from active use, and a handful of like, reddit posts from people who either used heavily for over a decade or had an existing family history of bipolar. 

i can also only find a single report of mania associated with withdrawal from the antidepressant TWO emergency psychs agreed to take me off with no taper - and the AD i was on is a relatively safe one! better safety profile than the SSRIs CAMHS gave me. those things sent me straight up like a fucking arrow then back down like it flipped in the air and shot the archer in the eye. i refused to take them any more pretty quickly. like, is this not shaping up to be a fairly classic misdiagnosed bipolar presentation? four different ADs all with the WRONG effects on my depression?

this is such a fucking joke man. i was saying “i think i have bipolar?” when i was like 16. been saying “i think i need to try a mood stabilizer” since like, 17 or 18. all i fucking want is to try lithium!!! i’ll stay out of the sun!!! i’ll drink water!!!! whatever you say!!!! just let me try a REAL mood stabiliser!!!!!!!!

ok it is midnight and i DO still need sleep and blue screens DO keep me awake. im going for cigs and then im going to fucking sleep. and there will be NO screaming kids or endless film reels of frightening places and faces in my head tonight. thanks!!!! goodnight!!!!!!!

[goblinfruit]

This blog post talks about medieval precedents for Beauty and the Beast, which is cool. The precedents, I mean. Actually, I saw Beauty and the Beast and I… liked it. Gah. I blame my six or seven year old self who still has a very strong hold over me. 

But 85% of the reason why I liked Beauty and the Beast so much is that my inner fairy tale nerd was having a party. Since it’s a literary fairy tale, there is so much fun stuff to discuss about literary traditions as well as typical story archetypes. Below the readmore: an undergrad English major’s ramble about Bisclavret, beast stories, and Beauty and the Beast

The medieval texts/authors the above linked blog mentions are about Women Who Read and also *drumroll* …Marie de France! Specifically, her lai Bisclavret which is my favorite story I had to read for Medieval Celtic Literature. 

The post above provides a very brief, sparknotes summary of Marie de France (in short, we don’t know much aside from that she lived in the 12th century, she wrote translations, she was probably a nerd) and her werewolf tale:  

“ This lai is called Bisclavret (or The Werewolf), and tells of a baron who shape-shifts weekly into a wolf. He disappears from his home for three days, and then reverts to his human form by putting his clothes back on. When his wife discovers his secret, she decides to get rid of him by sending a knight, her suitor, to steal his clothes after his next transformation. Bisclavret, unable to return to his human form, is forced to spend the rest of his life roaming the woods. His luck changes, however, when the king finds him and adopts him as a pet. But the story unravels when the king takes him on a visit to his former lands, now governed by his wife and her suitor. Seeing his wife, Bisclavret goes into a rage, attacks her and rips off her nose. She then confesses her deeds and returns the stolen clothes, enabling Bisclavret to change back to his human form and regain his lands. This is, of course, a much darker version than Disney’s joyful adapatation.”

No kidding, medieval manuscripts blog. What I love about this story is that the beginning very much sets this story up as a typical monster story, ooh there’s a werewolf man and the wife must find out his secret! The reader expects something similar to Bluebeard or the Robber Bridegroom to unfold, but no. When the wife betrays Bisclavret, the story shifts - we follow Bisclavret in his plight. He is referred to consistently as “Bisclavret,” the baron is the werewolf and the werewolf is the baron. When he’s a wolf he cannot speak but he has the mental power to supplicate the king and not bite people, for the most part. His mind is always that of a man, or at least retains a man’s chivalry. 

His only violent act is coded with human emotion: revenge, justice, a moral lesson, what have you. In the lai, the audience is told that the wife will forever be nose-less and that her children and their children will also be nose-less. They are not kicked out of the court, but kept around. When my class discussed this, it was suggested that maybe this means she was the monster all along or that Bisclavret transformed her into a monster with a werewolf’s “bite.” (There’s also an article called “Metamorphosis and Language in the Lay of Bisclavret” by Kathryn Holten that discusses this AND gives some pretty stellar background/analysis of the werewolf literary traditions of Marie de France’s time. If you can find it and read it, you should). I’m inclined to disagree, though. I think the intersection of humanity/beast in Bisclavret is super interesting and makes heavy suggestions about the nature of each concept, and/or how they should interact. The wife can’t be a wolf if she doesn’t have a nose, come on! 

There’s also a super interesting point of discussion regarding shape-shifters and their relationship to clothes. I read one of the oldest written werewolf stories in my Latin classes and that werewolf’s shape-shifting was also bound by his access to clothes. But that’s a whole other ramble.

And yes, the post I linked to was supposed to be about Beauty and the Beast. The fact that they referenced Bisclavret as a precedent to BatB really struck me. One, I think Bisclavret could be claimed as a precedent to any Western beastly story. Two, I like Bisclavret better than BatB because even though it’s a 12th century tale, its commentary on man’s beastly nature feels… more modern? Or at least sidesteps the bestiality/furry pitfall. I’ve seen beautiful art floating around tumblr that has the Beast as a quadruped (there was one artist that switched the genders - their lady!Beast was like a gryphon, it was neat). I think that’s better! Having a Beast that is for all intents and purposes a man just with a hair problem and sharp pointy teeth seems like a cop out to me. Make him a pants-wetting terrifying monster or get out of my house.

Also, Bisclavret’s commentary on the court reminds me more of the original Beauty and the Beast’s context, of the 17th and 18th century French salon women writers who wrote fairy tales as social commentary. Despite myself I enjoy Disney’s version. I’m not writing this post to say it’s terrible, but Beauty and the Beast and all of the concepts and traditions it plays with are more interesting than just “outsiders, bestiality, chicks who read, lol.” The Disney movie works great as a kid's movie, but that isn't all we should think of when we think of the tale. The original tale has an older version! It was sanitized even in the 18th century! Yes, I am pulling this from Wikipedia but bear with me:

“Villeneuve’s original tale includes several elements that Beaumont’s omits. Chiefly, the back-story of both Beauty and the Beast is given. The Beast was a prince who lost his father at a young age, and whose mother had to wage war to defend his kingdom. The queen left him in care of an evil fairy, who tried to seduce him when he became an adult; when he refused, she transformed him into a beast. Beauty’s story reveals that she is not really a merchant’s daughter but the offspring of a king and a good fairy. The wicked fairy had tried to murder Beauty so she could marry her father the king, and Beauty was put in the place of the merchant’s dead daughter to protect her. She also gave the castle elaborate magic, which obscured the more vital pieces of it. Beaumont greatly pared down the cast of characters and simplified the tale to an almost archetypal simplicity.”

I haven’t read the older version yet but I want to and need to. Also, I skimmed As Old As Time: a Twisted Tale when I was at Barnes&Noble, since “twisted tale” is a catnip phrase for me and I wanted to see what Disney would do with it in book form. What’s hilarious (to me) is that they have Belle’s mother BE THE ENCHANTRESS, who was married to Maurice back in the day. As backstory to the 1991 cartoon, that reads absurdly to me but it actually holds true to the oldest literary version of BatB. (I wouldn’t recommend the novel. This was the only thing that held my interest.)

In short: curse stories are great, animal bridegroom stories are great, fairy tales are nowhere near as cloying as we think despite the sparkles and happy endings, and I want more (and more clever) adaptations that play with older source material.

[Here is a link to an online pdf of Bisclavret, not the awesome translation I read for class but good enough I guess.] 

[BatB fairy tale Wikipedia page] 

[Here is a blog post that discusses the 17th century French salon women fairy tale writers]