#its a good source of poetic prose but i still have to live it and i cant hold him the way i want nor can he hold me

[theinfernalcalypso]

📌

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

I’d like to add to the Mondstadt thing that like?? You mention it’s the USA of Teyvat and like. Yeah. Remember the Eula thing? Girl wasn’t even allowed to buy her own groceries, good hunter and the general goods store refused her service because of the Lawrence thing. Homophobic bakery vibes fr.

god you're so right............. mondstadt why are you consistently built like this...... you're rivaling sumeru in terms of fucked-up-ness...

another thing that i find very funny about the entire mondstadt situation is decarabian, and the whole misunderstanding surrounding him. like there are so very few accounts of what happened back then and so many are either entirely biased on the rebellion's side or far too divorced from what happened that it's hard to fully accept it as fact (especially given the way genshin has always presented its lore via multiple unreliable narrators).

like all the sources we have are: - a tidbit from alice, but she sounds more like she's quoting local legend than speaking from experience, so idk how much she counts. she also purposefully fucked up the ruins so like. i don't trust her when it comes to keeping a truthful record of the past LMAO - amos' very poetic very small blurb on amos' bow - weapon materials that take a more descriptive/impartial tone in describing decarabian and boreas' feud, which wasn't even like- i don't think it's ever stated who shot first beyond boreas declaring war (which could've been bc of something decarabian did but we just don't know) - venti

the only one there that even remotely suggests there was any attempt at speaking with decarabian about letting them out is amos' account, and even then you have to assume that's what's happening. from the way it's worded it sounds more to me like she's simply giving decarabian hints that she wants out by telling him she dreams of the outside, but like. girl. and even if that's just flowery prose to tell us she did actually try to ask him to let them out, that leads to another pair of problems, which are,

we don't fucking know when boreas died, so for all we know, decarabian could've still had a very good reason to keep them all in the wind barrier. bc y'know it was fucking frigid and inhospitable outside and they were all likely going to suffer massive casualties and he very much wanted to keep them safe. like the teaser implies the skies were clear when the barrier came down?? but i'm not sure that we have a confirmation of what that means (could've just been a clear day, the barrier could've been keeping that area clear, etc). and even if boreas had already died by the time the rebellion started, we still don't know if decarabian knew that, so like. in his mind, he still had to keep his people safe. and yes his idea of keeping them safe was keeping them trapped in there and very organized to the point of micromanagement but you gotta keep in mind that, 1. if it was so horrible outside that sal vindagnyr was founded entirely because of how shit to live in mondstadt it was, then of course keeping them trapped is the more sensible option. like if you complain about that, i'm not going to say you have no right nor reason to complain, but you *are* going to come across as a bit of a naive child 2. they had limited space to live and so of course you'd want to keep things as orderly as possible through micromanaging. and yes it likely came across as dictatorial and controlling but also, 3. we have no clue what the fuck decarabian was. i'm asuming not fully human. regardless, we know he didn't have the same perception of things as humans had. the more impartial accounts from the weapon materials all say decarabian did love his people, it's just his love for his people was not really understood *as love* by his people. like the way he saw the world was just Different. like elynas. it's literally just elynas all over again. this also makes the possibility that amos never said let us out outright and instead tried to just hint at it even worse, because if he's not even capable of perceiving emotions and reality and seeing things the way humans see them, how is this man going to catch your hints????? girl. nothing against amos i just find it very odd that she was dating a non-human being and didn't think there was a possiblity that he wouldn't have human-like feelings. like that sounds a bit... yikes, at that point.

so ultimately it all just seems to come down to people wanting out (even though there's a good chance it was still death and desolation out there) and having a fundamentally different worldview from decarabian. and again, i can't really blame the old mondstadters for wanting out (again, ignoring they would've possibly wanted out in that fucking hail storm), but i can blame them for seemingly never attemption to talk some sense into decarabian. like is that ever mentioned, outside of amos? i feel like i'm going crazy over this. it has to be somewhere and i can't just find it, i have to be missing something, bc are you going to tell me that venti saw a fellow non-human isolated from his people in a tower doing things in a way that his people found Not Correct (and yet not horrible either, like beyond being a bit of a micromanager and having them in the storm barrier, it's never stated that decarabian did anything tyranical) and instead of saying, oh maybe he just doesn't realize he's hurting us by holding too tight bc y'know he's not human- he just went yeah let's kill him????????????????????? without talking to him first??????????? are you fr?????? i could understand the humans assuming things bc humans dumb yada yada but VENTI?????? a NON HUMAN?????? bruh

there's also this weird bit with the gunnhildr clan that- left???? at some point???? before the barrier came down?? so like- did decarabian let them leave bc they asked nicely? did they manage to sneak out?? if it was the former all the more shame to literally everyone else for killing the guy in the first place, but it seems unlikely. and if it was the later then why were they the only ones to leave. again, if it was possible to just fuck off, why the need to kill decarabian. it just does not make sense, and it gets worse the more you think about it. even moreso bc i think we know that the gunnhildr clan must've participated in the rebellion???? so they came back???????????

if boreas had died before this all went down then it would make sense if the gunnhildr clan left, saw there was no blizzard and snowstorm and that the outside wasn't entirely fucked up, and returned and told the others this discovery. and so the rebels were like 'they why tf are we still trapped in here???' and they'd have been right to be angry about it but like,

again.

if the gunnhildr did leave (and it seems they did), then any method they used to get out could've been used for the others to leave as well, no?? like- again, if decarbian let them leave, why not ask again and tell him hey, it's not fucking frigid outside anymore?? and if they sneaked out, why not sneak out too??

if it was some other mysterious reason, like they abused a window of oportunity that just- vanished. ....and then reappeared for them to return and vanished again (what??????), that still doesn't explain why nobody gave a fuck about talking sense into decarabian.

like yes yes amos could've been trying to talk sense into him but amos is literally one (1) person!!!!!! that seems so fucked.

no matter how i spin it i've just never been able to justify how the rebels went about it, based on the information we have rn. like if you want to tell me they started their rebellion n so decarabian got mad and tried to kill them, that's like.... doesn't sound in-character for a guy we know loved his people and that has never been stated to have ever actually tried to harm them. plus the entire thing of their rebellion was how it was all planned out in secret until they striked?? so decarabian wouldn't have known until amos was literally trying to shoot him?????????

and if you want to say that they did talk to him- first off, why would miyoho not mention that. that seems like a pretty important detail to just not mention anywhere. and again- the way the rebelion is worded implies they did it all in secret in order not to alert decarabian. having tried to talk to him about it and pretending he got mad over it doesn't fit with that idea.

so yeah! mondstadt's citizens have been fucked since before venti set them loose on the world LMAO

[dailydemonspotlight]

Norn - Day 70

Race: Megami

Alignment: Light-Law

Arcana: Fortune

July 12th, 2024

Fate is a fickle thing. Concepts of fate have existed throughout many world religions, mythologies, and superstitions- walk under a ladder, and fate may bring you ill fortune, after all- or perhaps, a black cat will bring bad luck. Most mythologies have specific deities or beings dedicated to fate, or one's own life- take, for example, the Greek Moirai sisters, or today's Demon of the Day, a Nordic subset of deities who spin the wheel of fate and measure one's own time left to live, the Norns, A set of three Jötunn who paint pictures of one's fate and judge them to see how their life shall go.

Depicted in the Völuspá, the most famous poem in the Poetic Edda, the sisters Norn are depicted as caretakers of the great tree Yggdrasil, as said in the passage below. The Poetic Edda is, of course, an intense and long story, and while the Norns aren't given many mentions, their role is still as important as any other deity- that being to take care of the tree of life, keep it alive, and keep humanity and the Æsir alive in tow. As described as well, the poem also goes over their role in fate. To quote,

I know an ash tree, named Yggdrasil: Sparkling showers are shed on its leaves That drip dew, into the dales below, By Urd's well it waves evergreen, Stands over that still pool, Near it a bower whence now there come The Fate Maidens, first Urd, Skuld second, scorer of runes, Then Verdandi, third of the Norns: The laws that determine the lives of men They fixed forever and their fate sealed.

The well they drew this water from, Urðarbrunnr, named so after one of the Norns themselves, contained sacred water that could wash away the rot gnawing at the tree's roots, nourishing the grand tree and keeping it from bringing about the death of the realms riding upon it. Beyond just this, though, what's the deal with the fate imagery? Well, it's complicated. The three Norns are, in effect, the 'Primary' Norns- there were attestations by Snorri Sturluson, the primary compiler of the Poetic Edda, that there were far more that watched over the fates of man themselves. As stated by pre-Christian Scandinavian sources, and later recalled by Snorri in the Prose Edda's first book, there were good and evil Norns. To quote,

"If the Norns determine the weirds of men, then they apportion exceeding unevenly, seeing that some have a pleasant and luxurious life, but others have little worldly goods or fame; some have long life, others short." Hárr said: "Good norns and of honorable race appoint good life; but those men that suffer evil fortunes are governed by evil norns."

As implied, it's said that Norns were different from just being three fates- they were, in effect, guardian angels, those who watched over others and ensured their fates. I personally find it interesting that this is one of the only major differences between the Norns and the Sisters Moirai, as the three main Norns do not govern the fate of everyone; everyone instead has their own Norn to govern them and their time. The main three, Urd, Skuld, and Verdandi, seem to simply be major Norn figures who protected the fate of all of life itself through their attending of Yggdrasil.

Looking at the design of the Norn in SMT, I believe it's less meant to represent the three sisters, and more of the overall concept of them as guardians who represent fate. The three Norn surrounding the clock do appear to be allusions to Urd, Skuld, and Verdandi, but the clock itself seems to be drawing comparison to the concept of fate- the idea that, when the clock ends, the one they watch over shall die.

To completely swerve topics, @averagefungus was the one who got the easter egg in the Alice DDS first! Congratulations! To answer what it was, if you look at the first letter of each paragraph, it spells out DIE FOR ME!

[limelocked]

yesterday i had that thought that comes to me every week without fail

did loki actually kill balder or is that just bullshit?

because you see first of all snorre and the prose edda can go straight to hell, i put it in the garbage and thats where it shall stay, its a cool piece of writing but based on snorre being a politician and it being an attempt to make a whole belief system Make Sense (something a belief system should never do, just look how it worked out for christianity and ye ol schism) it has no worth to me

so we’re looking at the poetic edda here, a mess of a book if you’re looking for a bible (asatro edition) but its what we got so anyways i have my very annotated physical copy in swedish and i read through it (im not done, its the size of stephen kings It and im no good at reading, specially not some of the archaic shit this book has to offer me) and i notice that nowhere does it say that loki killed balder

so i go on wiki ca months ago and the english wiki cites two stanzas as proof that loki killed him because in the lokasenna he literally confesses to the crime! (st 28) 

now i thought that was weird as hell so i take out my translation and instead of saying “after all im the one who made it so that balder will never ride home again” it says “i will make it so youll never see your son in the hall” which isnt an admittion of guilt, its a threat! and freja in the very next line backs that up with “senseless are you loki who willingly brag about your evil intentions” so its not a thing hes done yet and lest i forget to mention but at the end of this story loki gets captured and put under snake torture for the rest of non-ragnarök

so anyways this is all shit ive said before but yesterday id had EnoughTM so i went to check on the icelandic source

1: i will never again trust icelandic people to make a wiki page, lokis page doesnt have a single reference or citation mark 2: i found on archive.org, the website that makes the internet redeemable, that the university of michigan had digitized the poetic edda in icelandic so i went to look at the appropriate bit

“Enn vill þú Frigg, at fleiri teljak mína meinstafi, ek því ræð, es ríða sérat síðan Baldr at sölum.” is what it says

now

i dont know icelandic 

but im south enough to understand some danish which like... its closer to icelandic than northern swedish is at least, so with that, frantic googling after dictionaries (hard to find), guessing, and unhelpful glances at google translate

i got “do you still want frigg, to judge/doubt my character(this is the bit im least confident about), im not bothered, if balder then rides to the halls”

WHICH STILL SOUNDS MORE LIKE A THREAT THAN ADMITION OF GUILT

like i am Desperate to know how the hell that translation got an admition of guilt out of this threat in a poem thats full of threats, in a book thats even fuller of threats

cant fucking believe loki only killed balder in the english dub and the live action reboot

like in every other story its like yeah höder (balders blind brother) was the dude that killed him and it somehow involved mistletoe like my man could literally just have brought balder into the field left of asgard and gotten him killed on pure accident

lokasenna is literally just loki talking shit about everyone then being tied up to be tortured for the next forever my man was a bastard not a killer

[stubbornjerk]

2020 Fanfiction Review

tagged by @northisnotup. i. thanks, dad.

i... am horrified of having to round all this up because 2020 feels like it’s like 7 years crammed into 1 but here we go.

Fics Written This Year:

I wrote a lot in 2020 before quarantine. I transitioned between fandoms too, which is expected since I’ve been doing that consistently for the past five years since I began writing as a hobby. So from Good Omens (of which I wrote half of my stuff for this year) , I transferred onto Penumbra (which has monopolized most of my writing stuff this year and shall remain so until I see fit).

This year alone I published fifteen (15) things, two of which were poems (one poem I didn’t count because I wrote that in 2017). There’d be a lot more but we don’t talk about that.

According to AO3 (minus the collabs where I was the artist or voice for something), I wrote around 145.7k words this year, ignoring the 57k I have discontinued and deleted and will remain in my laptop’s memory drive until the heat death of the universe.

Takeaways from your kick-ass writing, or kick-ass lack of writing, during a year more focused on survival than perhaps any other:

Well, I was fortunate enough to have no significant struggle with the quarantine since where I live, it’s illegal for me to get out of the house at my age without a pass. I did still have school to do despite that. I did as much writing this year as I did in 2015-2018, when I was still in junior high, which is mostly because apart from picking up art as a hobby to healthily space out my writing time, I also gave myself a rigid schedule to work around. Well, for the most part. 

Like, while I was writing halcyon days, I was also writing and drawing for the TNA minibang that I did with Ger and Jeans at the same time, while also writing some fluff on the side like the Andromeda piece I did for Stes on the earlier days of halcyon days, while also still taking time to draw something indulgent and dumb between everything. So, take my “rigid schedule” with a grain of salt. I find that I like to be busy so that I’m barely conscious of the progress that i have for most projects. 

Otherwise, I start doubting if it’s even something people would read. 

[long and haunted stare at all 57k of my unpublished work]

Most surprising fic you wrote this year:

I don’t think I have one specific thing I’m surprised I wrote this year? It all feels like something I would have wanted to read or write as a challenge, or something I expected to have come from me specifically. 

I think in terms of structure, the most surprising thing I wrote this year would be my poem, three doors | tatlong pinto, which isn’t really fic because it’s a poem but I digress. I never really thought I would be publishing poetry for anything fannish.

In terms of actual fic, I think it’d be my birthday fic bridges to burn, because I’ve never really tried to blend both my art and fic before? I wrote most of the fic around the illustrations I already made beforehand, then decided that they’d illustrate the fic itself instead. It was an interesting experiment, to say the least.

How you grew as a writer this year:

I would like to think that I was as poetic in my prose as I used to be but I know that’s not true. Some of my more recent writing is very poetically structured and I think that’s due in large part to how I wrote halcyon days, which had to be poetic because of the nature of the AU source material, Hadestown. 

Well, that and the fact that for some reason people have grown to like my simplistic poetic prose? So I’ve been trying to develop that further.

What’s coming in 2021:

I have three to four things definitively lined up for 2021 and, since I’m in like, two events, it’s gonna be a doozy.

My bang fic is the one I’m most apprehensive of since it’s very personal to me and I kinda want people to receive it well but I also feel like that’s hoping for too much because it’s a) self-indulgent, and b) so incredibly niche and not really serving much for the current state of TPP fan content that I don’t see it going over well. But we’ll see.

I have maybe two completely new VesBud things I’m planning? Depending on how I’ll be handling the first two months of 2021, I will have to see how I’m going to fit that in my timeframes.

I have one JuPeter one I’m planning for an upcoming birthday that I’m very excited to work on. It’ll come out on February, keep an eye out for it.

And the last actual thing lined up is going to be the sequel to Vespa Ilkay and the Case of the Murderous Mask, which will have its own two-parter podfic as well, if we can help it. So if you liked our little VesBud-centric reverse AU, that’d be something to look forward to!

I... don’t really have that many people I can tag on tumblr for this kjshfd most of the writers I know and are mutuals with are on twitter so.... if you wanna do this, i’m tagging you? you, who is currently reading this? whatever

[ayearinfaith]

𝗔 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵, 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝟰𝟵: 𝗘𝗹𝗳

Elves are a supernatural race of human-like creatures from Germanic mythology. They have become very popular in the modern era, even outside of Western cultures, as a staple figure of the “high fantasy” genre largely thanks to the influence of 𝘓𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 author J.R.R. Tolkien.

𝗣𝗿𝗲-𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻

Though the Germanic speaking peoples of Central and Northern Europe had written language, they were never as prolific as the Greeks and Romans and preferred to pass on culture through an oral bardic tradition. By the time they did start writing their own histories, they were already Christian. This puts Elves in an interesting position: we know they were widely believed in and significant cultural features for centuries but their remains incredibly sparse attestation as to what those beliefs actually were. We know elves were popular and common across Germanic peoples for a variety of reasons, one of the easiest being their frequency as a part of names. The record of North, West, and even extinct East Germanic languages all contain many elf-names. The most common one in modern English is “Alfred” literally “Elf-council”. Aside from this, we can only infer. The word “Elf” comes from a Proto-Indo-European word for the color white. Likely this was a reference to a pale complexion. We do know that Elves were supposed to be beautiful, and fair skin is a very common standard for beauty in traditional Germanic cultures. Icelandic poetry tells of an autumn-time ritual called “Álfablót” i.e. “Elf sacrifice” which was celebrated privately. Elves are mentioned sparingly in both the Poetic Edda, a collection of more or less authentic Norse pagan poetry, and the Prose Edda, a 13th century tome written by the Christian Icelander Snorri Sturluson, which together serve as the primary sources of modern knowledge on Germanic mythology. Elves are said to live in Alfheim, which is a heavenly realm alongside Asgard, where most of the Norse gods live. They are particularly associated with the god Frey, a god of kingship, peace, and the harvest. In one poem dominion of Alfheim is given to Frey and his right-hand man, Skirnir, may have been an Elf though it is never explicitly stated. Its possible that Elves in general may have had a close relationship to the class of Norse gods called “Vanir”, of which Frey was one. Because of the sparse attestation of the term Vanir outside of the Eddas it is even possible that the Elves and Vanir are the same, though at this point we are thoroughly in the realm of conjecture. It is also possible that Elves were a generic term for smaller divinities, as later Germanic academics would use the word to translate the Western European “Nymph” a broad class of feminine nature spirits.

𝗟𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗘𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀, 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗘𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀, 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗮𝘀 𝗘𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀

Belief in Elves changed under Christianization, but it did not die. Christianity is typically dualistic, portraying the earth as a spiritual battleground between good and evil. Germanic paganism lacked this division, and as such Elves did not fall neatly into Christian cosmology. Snorri Sturluson seems to have split the line of Elves into two groups for this purpose: Light Elves (“Ljósálfar”) and Dark/Black Elves (“Dökkálfar” and “Svartálfar”). Snorri’s Light Elves were in-line with what we know of Elves outside of the Prose Edda: Beautiful inhabitants of the heavens. By contrast the Dark Elves lived underground and have unpleasant dark complexions. Its worth noting that its unknown whether or not these Dark Elves were supposed to have dark skin, like humans of African descent, or if it was a more supernatural or corpse-like coloring: the color term most commonly used for African skin tones in the Viking Age was actually “blue”. Regardless, there is no evidence for this distinction amongst Elves outside of the Prose Edda, and it is also possible that Snorri was using “Dark Elf” as an alternate name for another Germanic supernatural race: Dwarves. If this was the case, it would give more credence to the idea of “Elf” as a generic term. In fact, if not the case in pagan times it certainly became the case later, as in the British Isles Germanic Elves and Celtic Aos Sí would syncretize into Fairies, a term that almost completely replaced the word “Elf” in English from Chaucer until Shakespeare. With this syncretism the perception of Elves also changed. While Snorri’s Elves were still human-sized and supernaturally beautiful, Medieval elves became diminutive and funny looking. Negative associations, primarily with mental illness, developed. The modern word for a nightmare in German is “Albtraum”, literally an “Elf-dream”, showing how Elves came to include the Germanic embodiment of sleep paralysis, the Mara (from which the English “nightmare” is derived). With the coming of the modern age, folk beliefs started to lose weight, and fear of Elves or Fairies was replaced with interest and delight. Thus, the arbitrary use of Elf instead of Fairy in notable Christmas poems (ex. 𝘛𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘉𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘊𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘢𝘴) led to the codification of Santa’s helpers, and other similar crafty spirits, as Elves.

𝗠𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗘𝗹𝘃𝗲𝘀

I have alluded to Tolkien several times in this post as the source of modern conceptions of Elves. It should be noted that he was not the first to re-introduce more “authentic” Elves of Germanic paganism to modern fantasy. 13 years prior to 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘣𝘣𝘪𝘵, Lord Dunsay’s 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘌𝘭𝘧𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥’𝘴 𝘋𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘳 featured human sized beautiful and magical Elves, even including the term “Elfland” as an equivalent to the Norse Alfheim. That said, it is definitely Tolkien’s works that directly inspired the subsequent resurgence in Elf popularity. Even the spelling of words like “Elvish” instead of “Elfish” are Tolkien constructions, a choice made to make the word seem more authentically Anglo-Saxon. Though there are some instances of Victorian depictions of Fairies/Elves with pointed ears it’s uncertain if this was why Tolkien described his Elves as having “leaf-shaped” ears. Regardless, this feature has easily become their most distinctive. Curiously, this is particularly pronounced in the art of modern Korea and Japan, where Elves are commonly drawn with ears that are pointed, much longer, and angled away from the head more than human ears. The star Elf of Tolkien’s 𝘓𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴, Legolas, is specifically responsible for the association of Elves and archery and forestry, even though these features were specific to him as a woodland ranger, not to Tolkien Elves in general. The role-playing game 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘴 further expanded Tolkien tropes, and borrowed Snorri’s Light Elves and Dark Elves to create subdivisions that mirrored distinctive fantasy tropes: Elves as near-divine magicians (High Elves), Elves as woodland Fairies (Wood Elves), Elves as tricksters and maladies (Dark Elves). Between Tolkien’s influence on fantasy novels and 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘰𝘯𝘴 impact on games, both video and analog, the long lived and long eared Elf is now a staple of even non-Western fantasy and are increasingly viewed more distinctly from Fairies. Ironically, though much of modern Elf tropes are modern inventions, they have become much more similar to the pagan Elves of Central and Northern Europe than the Elves of the Medieval ages, successfully distilled from centuries of syncretism.

Image Credit: Art from 𝘔𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 card 𝘞𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘌𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴, by Rebecca Guay, 1997

[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (13/04/20 - 18/04/20) 🎺🐝

(Disclosure: I know one of the writers (Annie Dobson) I’m featuring in the current-reads this week through Writing Squad. I also know Tom Bland who runs Spontaneous Poetics but I don’t personally know the two writers whose work I’ve enjoyed on the zine. And I don’t know anybody else sadly, probably because I’m a loner and a loser). 

Here’s the standard preface: every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, sometimes it’s a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, sometimes it’s something I saw on social media, etc. Sometimes I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. C’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source... or shopping basket. 

Anyway I’m just gonna get right into it. 

So this week I’ve been reading C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’s Lockdown Life and Charles Theonia’s Two Poems on Queen Mob’s Teahouse, I’ve read Haibun/Uncertainty/A Promise To Your Clothes from Jane Burns on Spontaneous Poetics and I flipped right back to September 2019 and re-read E.A.B’s have a wank because it’s fitting advice for our current predicament. I’ve returned to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and I’ve been falling in love with Ariana Reines’s The Cow all over again, (whose new collection, A Sand Book, I’ll be reviewing in a few weeks time). Also been reading Annie Dobson’s Before The Ghost Town on the Writing Squad’s Staying Home series which boasts brilliant work. I can never get over how many amazing writers there are in the world. I’ve also discovered a new photographer with a brand new book out from Palm* Studios, Molly Matalon’s When a Man Loves a Woman. 

***

E.A.B’s have a wank, Spontaneous Poetics (21/09/2019): I keep going back to this specific piece because this poem makes you feel like you’re stood outside the John Snow in Soho, completely wasted, having a cig with a friend who’s also pissed up too. That’s the feeling I get from E.A.B’s work. She’s memorable and familiar and probably has a decent right hook. This poem is short, succinct, and means exactly what it means. I love work that is entitled quite plainly, in a way doesn’t subvert expectation—it’s tongue-in-cheek and funny. It’s also pretty good advice for when you’re in the midst of a global pandemic... or a personal crisis, I’m not sure what the difference is anymore. She also has another one up on Spontaneous Poetics, which is equally brilliant, blue balls at the end of humanity. 

Jane Burn’s Haibun/Uncertainty/A Promise To Your Clothes, Spontaneous Poetics (17/04/2020): This is a deeply sad poem eclipsed by grief and time’s relentless push and pull. It also has some absolutely beautiful personification, and it’s in the description of these vernacular objects that you really feel the subject’s hurting. ‘You’ is so empowering here, because it attempts to universalise the reader’s accessibility to the ardour of experience in this work, but is equally an attempt to sever the writer’s ‘You’ from themselves as ‘I’. This poem tells us that some pain is so painful, we can never fully accept that it has been ours to bear. 

Annie Dobson’s Before The Ghost Town, Staying Home from The Writing Squad (RECOMMEND): I’m not saying this just to be kind, all of the work on Staying Home is absolutely brilliant (discluding my own work, I promise I’m not that full of it) but Annie’s piece happened to be one of the first I read and I still think about it. Annie probably doesn’t know this but I stalk her writing. I’m her big fat secret admirer. Quintessentially British, her work smacks of kitchen-sink realism and cherry chapsticks you get in the chemist’s. I always get a noughties vibe from Annie’s writing, I always know what she’s on about. She doesn’t make the banality of life mystical, she treats the ordinary as well, just ordinary, and that’s magical enough anyway. Before The Ghost Town is a mish-mash of genres, it’s an essay but it’s a thought piece but it reads like a diary-entry and is formatted like poetry in some places. More than anything it’s a document on civilisation in Lewisham during the Covid-19 pandemic, and how full the world is still despite the reductive effects of a worldwide crisis. It’s a political critique on how fucked the UK government is, and how community is still one of the most valuable things we have in a world that is trying to make you fight over the last bag of fucking bread flour. It’s honest and sad and retrospective. It’s also filled with promise. I absolutely loved it. 

Molly Matalon, When a Man Loves a Woman: For a long time I shot pictures of men on 35mm to 120mm. I often felt strange doing it. I was used to the dogma of typical male politics; boys don’t cry, having a tough dad, penis envy, etc. It didn’t interest me anymore; the object of masculinity in its most vulnerable, in its deepest sensitivities was the impetus behind my desire to photograph men. Molly Matalon takes pictures of men I wish I had taken. But I don’t think she reverses the power dynamics, per se, although you can absolutely make the case for this, even argue her work is a case for the female gaze. But for me, she strips away these typical power dynamics, she doesn’t polarise herself as the subject, or the object. I don’t see tensions between sexes in these images. I see vulnerability, I see trust, I see relationships. I see men just as worthy of depiction as flowers, as fruits. I feel softness, I feel curves. The photographs in When a Man Loves a Woman are works of of idealisation of woman is implied by man, man as woman, woman as man, the fragile unity in these two creatures, and their reciprocations. She’s absolutely one to watch. 

Ariana Reines, The Cow (RECOMMEND): Ariana Reines is a writer so dear to me, that I can’t really contain in words just how much impact she’s had on me. I salute Elizabeth Ellen (a wonderful writer, and an editor at HOBART magazine in Los Angeles) who, one day, was moving apartments and very generously sent me a box of books all the way from the USA to my parents’ house in Manchester. In that box amongst many books lay Tiqqun’s Theory of the Young-Girl translated by Ariana Reines, and her debut collection, The Cow. So if it wasn’t for Elizabeth, I wouldn’t have read any Ariana Reines until probably much later on in life. At least, I’d like to think I’d have come across Ariana at some point anyway. 

The Cow was published in 2006 by my all-time fav magazine/publisher, Fence. The Cow isn’t poetry, isn’t prose, it’s not an essay, it’s just not any genre at all. And the fact you can’t categorise it is just really is emblematic of Ariana Reines as a writer, because she doesn’t redefine the dimensions of genres, she fucking blitzes them up in a big genre-food-processor. The Cow is the mythologisation and de-mythologisation of the woman as cow. It is the consumption and defecation of woman as cow. It is a lamentation. It is raw. It is beastly. It is thoughts and statistics and menstruation and abbattoirs. It is a dark work of art, and it’s one of the most beautiful, angry and strong texts I’ve ever read. It’s one of those books I think about often. I’d be engrossed on London tubes re-reading this over and over. It’s absolutely everything. 

Patrick Süskind, Perfume (RECOMMEND): Ah, the mothership. Patrick Süskind is... one of a kind. I borrowed the book from my best friend James and after reading it, I read it again. I still haven’t given back James’s copy (which I really need to), and I recently bought a UK first-edition of Perfume so now I can say it’s on my bookshelf. Reading Perfume is an intoxicating experience... I guess it’s because of the way Süskind writes about smell, and he writes about it so vividly that, for me at least, it can induce olfactory hallucinations. It’s not just about the story of a murderer with a superhuman power for scent, it’s about our relationship with different smells we come across throughout our life, their pungency and their ability to kind of tattoo our memory. You can recall scents in a way that you might not be able to with sounds. I don’t remember fully the way my maternal grandmother sounded, she passed when I was a little girl, but I still know her smell. It’s Youth Dew and sweets. Perfume induces sensations and memories in me. It’s a text I go back to time and time again. 

C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’s Lockdown Life, Queen Mob’s Tea House (03/04/2020): Queen Mob’s Tea House is a new fav of mine and their zine kind of reminds me of the Richmond Tea Rooms in Manchester’s Gay Village. They’re a bit Alice in Wonderland, a bit occult, a bit down-the-rabbit-hole, pink and sparkly, with black lace. If that description of the zine borders on pretension then, sorry. I have zine synaethesia. So these poems from ‘C.C. Hannett / kmwgh’ (I’m not sure I understand the name) were awesome little tidbits on living through a global pandemic. An ellision of pop culture, absurdity and tenderness. A reminder that we will never get this time back, and that if you’ve got the luxury of being with your loved ones right now, cherish it. I also really loved the last line of this guy’s bio, no social media handles or website, just: “You can find him if you want to.” Lol. 

Charles Theonia, Two Poems, Queen Mob’s Tea House (24/05/2017) (RECOMMEND): I loved both of these poems but I mostly wanted to talk about ‘shame’. I enjoyed ‘shame’ for its density—it’s a single block paragraph—the format has a weight to it, like that of feeling shame. I know this was published in 2017, basically I was just surfing the zine’s website and clicked on Queen of Pentacles (I was intrigued bc I read Tarot) and this was the  latest entry on there. I enjoy the bluntness and conversational-ism of these two pieces, but I particularly loved ‘shame’ for the way it unpacks shame as a multi-faceted, festering spawn that drags you under, and under, and under. Its resonance is powerful. 

*** Anyway that is enough from me zis week. Next Friday I’m reviewing Charlotte Geater’s poems for my fbi agent which is again from Bad Betty Press. Stay safe, eat cake. xxxxxx

[winkyjinki]

author asks 1-30 GO!

WHEW OK STRAP IN BUCKO (I already answered 1&29 uwu)

2. When you’re writing a new story, what is the one thing you need to know before you can start?

This is gonna sound so like “duh bitch” but I always need to know AT LEAST how I want it to end. Or like the almost-end. Bc it’s like if you know where you want to go then you can figure out how to build up to that moment. 

They always say it’s not abt the destination, but the journey. But like in this case, you need to know the destination to figure out the journey oop--

3. How do you know when a scene is “done”?

This is gonna sound so vague but like... when I feel like it’s complete? Like when I think it’s served its purpose in the fic.

In theatre, every single scene has a purpose in building up to the climax & resolution, so I always try to make sure that each scene has served its purpose in moving the plot along/gives you something for a later plot point.

4. How do you know when a chapter is “done”?

Ummm... I try to end it at a good point. Honestly this is the hardest for me because I always want to end it at a good point but also where it feels like the equivalent of a half-cadence in music (it doesn’t feel complete).

That’s like my best explanation.

5. How do you know when a story is “done”?

I think my story is done when I’ve neatly wrapped up the plot to my liking while also leaving as little loose ends as possible.

This is a boring answer lmao but it’s really my best explanation.

6. Where do your titles come from?

Most of my titles come from songs that my fics remind me of. I try to make it be like ~poetic~ bc I can’t come up w titles from the pits of my brain but I can def try to find the perfect song lyric LOL

7. How do you feel about prologues?

I feel like it’s really useful for setting some background info that you want to reference but don’t actually want to explain in the main story LOL but it’s def not necessary

8. How do you feel about epilogues?

Another thing that I feel is def not necessary but sometimes you want a little “what happens next?”...as a treat

9. Do you tend to have an external narrator or use one of the characters?

I like the idea of using a limited POV, so I like to use one of the characters for narration. Bc in my opinion it’s a little much when you’re like spending so much time being ~omniscient~ but that’s just my opinion.

10. Does your narrator move from character to character? 

Ummm honestly it depends for me. Like for me it’s like...if the story calls for it in my heart. 

I usually like to keep it to one character unless I’m planning a more complex story that calls for a lot of different POVs!

11. What punctuation do you love too much?

Bruh... Commas, semicolons and this bitch (–) are my holy grail I feel like I’m the queen of run-on sentences.

12. What punctuation do you hate with a passion?

Okay I don’t HATE them but I really don’t like the overuse!!!!! of exclamation points!!!!!! I use them a lot when I’m just posting about stuff I’m really passionate about like that’s cute I just am not too crazy about that in like prose & creative writing. I wouldn’t say it’s a pet peeve, per se, but it’s just not my cup of tea :/

13. What grammar tends to cause problems when you’re writing?

Idek what this means but like I guess I struggle with writing verbs in the right POV bc, like I said, I'm the queen of run on sentences so I tend to lose focus on what’s the subject of the sentence.

14. What’s the one word you can never spell/use properly, no matter how hard you try?

I am actually illiterate so I always end up misspelling words ALL the time just bc like my brain will turn off. I used to use the word “futile” incorrectly all the time but once I like actually found out how to use it correctly, I’ve been pretty good :0

15. How do you write a really good metaphor?

Bro when I figure it out I will SHARE

I don’t have a strategy--sometimes I just write good ones and idek how it happened oof--

16. What is your best piece of advice for writing angst scenes?

If you are HURTING by the time you’re done with it, you did it right. When I write angst, I know it’s good if my heart hurts by the end of it LOL

17. What is your best piece of advice for writing hurt/comfort scenes?

Kinda the same as 16, like it hurts but in a better way. This will probably also be the same as my answer for 22, but if it just makes you soft, you’re doing well.

Soft & hurt is the combo you need for that.

18. What is your best piece of advice for writing comedy scenes?

I like to share these scenes with people (beta readers, friends, etc.) and see how they receive them. Even if they don’t laugh like SUPER HARD, I think it’s worth keeping if they make positive comments and they say stuff like “That’s a mood.” or “I related to that hard.” bc in my humble opinion that’s good enough for me.

I’m working on a Trashmouth comedy special series, and I literally just read the skits to my friends and see what lands and what doesn’t.

I just like to treat any comedy scene as a comedy skit. Just see what lands !

19. What is your best piece of advice for writing action scenes?

Oh man, I don’t do a lot of those, so I don’t really have much advice for that :( maybe in like a year I’ll have something for that lollll

20. What is your best piece of advice for writing smut scenes?

Now I’m no expert on doing the dirty, but I did read up on how to write like...good sex scenes....and a lot of the sources say to (in my own words) overload on thought and emotion. 

Like honestly I don’t read smut for the sex (I mean like.... I get hype when my ship gets nasty but that’s beside the point), I read it to see how someone comes undone for their lover and I think that’s IMPORTANT. Tbh anyone can write sex, but like I need that connection.

21. What is your best piece of advice for writing romance scenes?

Overload on that thought and emotion, dude. Make your heart THROB. I like to make this a matter of building tension and setting the release. Like no I will not be giving you that kiss yet bc that’s too easy. Build it up a little bit.

Talk about slow burn

22. What is your best piece of advice for writing fluff scenes?

If you read it and you feel like you might explode from how much these characters love each other, you are doing amazing, sweetie.

23. How do you balance your characters in an ensemble story?

I like to list out the primary, secondary, and side characters and figure out where they come in the story, what the relationships are, what purpose they serve the plot, stuff like that.

In a theatre standpoint (obviously), any character in a play has their own purpose and without even one of them, you can’t wrap that story up neatly. Like in Ancient Greek plays, even the smallest part played an integral part in moving the plot along.

24. How do you balance your characters when there are only a two or three in a story?

I like to think about what purpose each character serves in the story. I also like to think about whether this story revolves around one character, or if it delves into each character’s story and they kind of intertwine. Maybe they’re family or a team or roommates, or maybe they’re strangers whose lives are connected in some way if you wanna take that route.

I think when there are so little characters, you get more room to make them their own people. And you have that possibility of making it a collection of stories that come together without making it so confusing.

I think about that in, like, a theatre standpoint obviously.

25. How do you create an original character?

AAA I’ve never really made an OC but honestly I like to think it’s like making a sim LOL I’m so sorry to EVERYONE who’s ever made an OC.

I don’t even remember was my OC building process was like when I wrote original stories in, like, middle school.

26. How do you go about world building?

Oof ok I’ve been writing fanfic for as long as I can remember so that’s kinda cheating a little bit LOL it’s self explanatory.

But in the few original stories I’ve written (and honestly even when I write for some AUs), I base a lot of things on my own reality. So like people I know, places I like to go to, events that have taken place in my lifetime, they’re like the template, and depending on the nature of this world (realistic, fantasy, modern, futuristic, etc), that’s like how I’ll mold it to be part of that world.

27. Do you try to do most of your research ahead of writing (when research is necessary) or do you do it as things come up?

Honestly, I research things as they come up because things are always gonna come up. I’m constantly coming up with little things I can add into my fics, and I like to try all my ideas to see if they work with the story. I don’t want to scrap an idea just bc it’s not in my archive of research.

I also think when you get too wrapped up in technicalities, you lose focus of the actual story, so I like to jump in and do all my fact-checking as I go along!

28. How do you make sure your plot points are there while also making them blend in with the story?

This is something that I’m still figuring out because I’m just now getting back into writing longer fics, but I think as long as you make them fit in a way that they serve the plot or they play into one of your characters’ motives then it’s a good plot point!

30. How do you edit your stories?

This is gonna sound so extra, but I rewrite ALL OF IT from the beginning. When I do this, it really helps me figure out how to write thing in a more efficient and effective manner.

And I cannot stress this enough, beta readers are SO useful. You can do all of the proofreading you want, but someone who’s reading your writing will probably catch more spelling and grammar mistakes honestly. Also, they can give you insight on what might need more development, what might not make as much sense, and what really isn’t that necessary.

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) Not your minute turns from the blueprint: Body Work, by Tom Betteridge (SAD Press, 2018)

Denise Bonetti <denise.spamzine@gmail.com> Mon, 10 Dec 2018, 20:21 to maria.spamzine Hey Maria, Hope life’s good :) I’m just writing to see you if you’ve read Tom B’s new Body Work? There’s a paper I should be writing, but have been reading and rereading that pamphlet instead, or more like dipping in and out really, cause it's so beautifully layered and expanding that you can only take so much at a time. Don’t you think Tom’s poetry has this strange earworm quality to it? (I think he’d like the annelid comparison.) The way he choreographs words (I don’t want to use the word 'images’) makes its way into my brain and never wants to leave. He draws these, like, lateral paths of meaning so clearly that the weeds never grow back.Tom Raworth has this bit in 'Writers / Riders / Rioters' that goes:

the present is surrounded  with the ringing of ings which words have moss on the northside

like, words naturally arrange themselves into a system of semantic habit, which is so stable and stale that makes them grow moss, but also so rich and vibrant when it's exploited productively. Obviously this is Raworth so it probably also means the opposite of this and so much more, but it kinda makes me want to say that the present (poem) makes the ringing of ings deviate so well that the moss can never grow again. I’d say that his poems behave like sophisticated lines in the sand, but they're more like brutal carvings on a rock. He had a couple poems in Blackbox Manifold ages ago (I think) and there was this one bit

‘nerve truffled plume lead pickled breast’

I think about all the time (especially when I cook). It’s so smooth. Why can I not stop thinking about it. It’s cause it’s so shameless, it wants it all - the feather-light and the corpse-heavy, never perturbed, so lucid. It plays at tasting good, but it tastes of an unrealistically blank texture. A-ha! Anyway the new pamphlet is gr8, if you haven’t read it yet look at the first poem pls - ‘OCCAM OCEAN’ (sounds like an anagram or palindrome)

It all dwells in systematic abstraction but flies so close to materiality, like a mosquito buzzing around the ear ('Not your minute turns from the blueprint'). I love that ‘plate’ in the first phrase, too: it behaves like an adjective but feels nothing like it. I can't help but think it's the subject of the sentence in a parallel universe that's created by scrambling syntax. It makes me think this is the way language should always work, and that we're the fkn idiots living in the parallel universe in which syntax is scrambled in ordered to be as boring as possible. Idk - it's late and I need to go back to writing boring essay syntax 'bound to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Lemme know ur thoughts you smart queen D xxx

Maria Sledmere <maria.spamzine@gmail.com> Wed, 12 Dec 2018, 17:30 to denise.spamzine

Dearest Denise,

Life is good thanks. I'm sitting in the attic of the law building and I can hear the construction work going on and every time I leave I look out at the skyline and slivers of infrastructural alteration. I was walking along the road earlier because the pavement was closed off for construction and cba crossing and the high-vis guy was like, 'you'll not see Christmas walking on the road like that', but I guess I misheard him saying something else because I was really engrossed in this old Slowdive album, so I just smiled sweetly. Anyway, that got me thinking back to the question of erasure, which I think is pretty vital to Body Work.Have been carrying this pamphlet in my bag for so long that the cover has started to peel and revealing speckles of white underneath, like the text itself is ready to reveal itself, and yes I was thinking Barthes and strip-tease and paratextual enticement.

So I had to google the word annelid and now can't get the phrase 'segmented worm' out of my ear/head/throat (gross!). I was thinking about what sort of stains are on the cover of this book, you know, with Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir's gouache/pencil work. A stain is one thing stuck to another. Gouache is a funny kinda substance that is half watery gauze, half binding, thick, gummy akin to acrylic. Wet, it will easily smudge. My thumb keeps bleeding where the skin thins, hardens, peels and sloughs off. Tom's poems are kinda mucilaginous in parts (v. insecty, molluscky, sap emission; but also they have a crispness and precision, like cuts of leaf). Things that smudge or fall in flakes. Bodies are maybe whatever we leave behind. I didn't want to mention Hookworms the band because of the singer's sexual abuse scandal BUT it seems significant that a group named after an earworm/type of parasitic larvae would have a song called 'Negative Space'. Like what we eat into in the process of making, existing, remixing. Is language a rash, the result of these parasitic inf(l)ections?

I've been to a couple of reading groups on microbiomes lately, and we were thinking through this idea of how acknowledging your bodily composition in terms of myriad genes and organisms challenges conventional, bounded notions of 'self'. What kinds of affects does this produce? There's a weirdness to that, in Mark Fisher's sense of the weird as 'that which does not belong', that which 'brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the "homely" (even as its negation)'. Fisher suggests that the form most conducive to rendering the weird might be montage. So I was thinking about how montage involves splicings, gaps, juxtapositions, cuts and suddenness. I mean you open the very first poem of Body Work, 'Occam Ocean', and see that its prose-poetic paragraph compacting is split in the middle by the juncture of line break and indent. And ofc the title recalling Occam's razor, the philosophic principle by which in the case of two explanations for an occurrence, it's best to go with the one that requires least speculation. Razor things down and erase speculation? What are we left with, more of the Rreal? Lately I've been hankering for cleaner prose, crisp lines, simpler solutions. The Anthropocene is all of a goddamn tangle. Do I want to follow the myriad threads or just cut cut cut -- who gets to do that?

Did you ever cut a worm in two as a kid?

Okay so I love how 'Occam Ocean' might promise, title-wise, this clean prosaic expanse (like the oxymoron of expanding ocean and occam's, which requires surely a condensing), but what we get is clustering, motion, shiver, containment. The sensual trash magickk of P. Manson! The little syncope of this thing or that, the 'maple neck', vibrating canes, 'chambered breath bowed into the driest soundboard'. These aren't like 'Latour litanies' because they are not like concrete OOO segments of things; idk, they are more about processes and mutable assemblages, emphasis on action and change, sometimes transmission, things inside things. Lynn Margulis and symbiogenesis. How things interact, communicate up close; all of a mutable, prose-poetic swallow. It's actually an incredible intimate pamphlet, don't you think? I feel inside a thing inside a thing inside a thing. I feel a vague ecological sorrow, which gnaws at introspective tendency. The clue to that, you might see, is the cutaway phrase, 'emo      Chord' in 'String Growth'. 

'Collapse all tears allowing echo retreat'; these lyric lines of 'Glissando' expression, smoothing and shimmering over cuts and junctures: a slide between notes. I used to play trombone and I wish I cld articulate linguistically what kinds of lip vibration occur when you attempt a glissando and feel it slide down your arm muscle but then also through your chest as you try to sustain a sound. It's maybe the way you glide through a scattered poem, with your eye, which is different ofc to the spikier way you'd have to read it aloud, stuck on the vowels. Stuttering. I would love to hear Nat Raha perform these poems, because she does such wonderful things with punctuation and bodily performance, a kind of grammar of breath and cough and click. Reading over the more field erasure poems like 'O--NE' and 'String Growth', it's easy to say something like ~vibrant materialism~ here, but as usual I reach for Steven Connor on noise. Return to the ear, which is 'vulnerable' and 'resembles the skin in being the organ of exposure and reception'. I love what Connor says about Levinas' perspective on 'the awareness of the vacant anonymity of being, of an abstract, encompassing sense that "there is"' being 'an experience of noise'. <3 Acknowledging that breath in the void, that is not nothing but a sparkling something, entails a sense of noise. I am here in the attic of the law building, listening to construction, the type of my fingers on the keys. Someone is murmuring of their distress. What is the difference between living and existing, and being and nothing?

Karen Barad:

'Suppose we had a finely tuned, ultrasensitive instrument that we could use to zoom in on and tune in to the nuances and subtleties of nothingness. But what would it mean to zoom in on nothingness, to look and listen with ever-increasing sensitivity and acuity, to move to finer and finer scales of detail of...?'

When she asks, 'What is the measure of nothingness?' I think surely it is a bodily measure, as everything is: 'bound', as Tom puts it, 'to decision and the pursuit of what follows'. Of course 'what follows' recalls Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', where he's just out the shower and watching his cat watching his phallus, etc. What kinds of dislocation occur. But I mean in all that grandeur of encounter, there's still anthropocentricism. Tom gives you this cinematic CUT, like the instructive 'keen SNAP' that occurs in 'Occam Ocean' to dramatise 'Still, pondsnails whir and blindly source [...] a working leaf shutter'. Soever the language enacts the slurs of the snails up close. We look for the answer to the question of ellipsis, the more to follow [what follows]: inevitable, a question. Sometimes Tom is writing about silence ('then silence confronts an earful underhand') but the music of his language does all the noise, so we just can't have nothingness: there is always a vibrational residue that speaks of something in miniature, atomic, happening.

Ofc with the ear again I am thinking of the ear at the start of Lynch's Blue Velvet and how it's covered in rasping wee insects whose hum is a sort of white noise of trauma that runs through Lumberton's suburban idyllicism.

And so what happens next is I flip open to the following page of Body Work and there is 'String Growth', one of Tom's sprawling erasure poems, which for more than a split-second resembles hundreds of crawling, shimmering ants. I actually think my earliest childhood memory is of looking down at my bare feet on the patio of our old house in Hertfordshire and seeing red ants run over my toes. Then looking up to a greying, English sky. Constantly struck by the cinematic image of that, its splicing out of time: the vividness of insects on human flesh, then milky smog of skyward nothingness. 'String Growth', the accompanying notes to Body Work tell me, is an erasure poem of the Chordoma Foundation's 'Understanding Chordoma' information page.

Erasure can expose sequences of nightmare at work in the lexis and syntax of the text on which it parasitically feeds. I am scared to go on the Chordoma Foundation's website, for fear that just reading or saying the word 'tumour' will activate some kind of malignant growth in my body. And so something of the word chord as a sonorous relation between materials (bodily, textual; textural, cellular). Chordomas are tumours often located in the spine and so I find myself looking for the undulating shape of a spine in the scatter-text of Tom's poem. My eyes cascade down textual spines. Why is it sometimes I otherwise latch upon a 'keystone' word which then extends with adjacent resonance? Musical abnormalities accumulate. Thought swells.

And yea I wonder how this fits into what you say about the poems being 'so smooth'. Like Lynch's waxen silicone ear. Because even though fragmentation makes me think of bits and jaggedness etc, there's this sheen of aestheticism to Tom's work that makes me think of gloopiness, fullness, thereness but also the glaze of potential nothingness. Like in Barad's sense, or miniaturised ecological window shopping - a la Morton's Romantic consumerism? Or do we get into the things themselves? What are your thoughts on the question of recalcitrance? Maybe cos he named a previous pamphlet Pedicure I've just got varnish on my mind. Things an insect might stick to, and be amberized in. Mm.

'[...] Phosphorus crystals may be white, red, burgundyor alight as urine passes'

I keep a stone of citrine under my pillow sometimes. It is supposed to alleviate nightmares and 'manifest abundance'. It is the colour of a rich, dehydrated piss and sometimes when I come back to bed after peeing in the night I think it's some kind of organ lain on my bedsheets, hopped out of my body, and I have to stop my heart and breathe. Is that syncope?

On the <topic of piss>, isn't there a sort of caustic quality, even to the smoothness? Like it is working at making a brittleness of its sheen? And that is what poetry is, cracking the veneer of language or something? Punctuational insects dwelling in splits and fissures? It is nice and cool in Tom's poetry, a place for thinning the self and dwelling. Even though the lexis is so rich and dense, it still seems slender somehow; there's a suppleness. Tease threads of your silk(worm).  

Was thinking about what Lisa Robertson says about 'commodiousness' in poetry and what kinds of space there are for the reader here, because I don't think there is much space at all, in the conventional humanly readerly sense. Maybe what I mean by (straw man: Romantic) lyric, which requires something of declarative expansiveness? The density and clutter of specialist language in Body Work makes me feel like a worm, trying to hook my way lusciously into a line: 'espalier's / strains unfinished by the scarp trellis' ('Body Work'), 'rooted to a middle-ground / no more than motion defibrillates'. And I become a parasite on the body of the text, which is a parasite on the body, which is made up of millions of (para)sites. Para ofc meaning side by side, which made me think of Haraway's sympoeisis (making-with) but also, admittedly, Limmy's madeup psychic show, Paraside (lalalol what you were saying about the scrambling parallel universe maybe, is that a lalaLacian Real which necessitates ululation, stammering? Complex remixing musicality of language throughout Body Work as summoning?). Going back to my incidental Slowdive reference earlier, maybe there's a shoegaze thing here, like setting up these 'noise-worlds' which shimmer indiscriminately behind/inside/through the semiotic oscillations of lyric? Is shoegaze a form of sonic gouache? Well it is certainly an ontic form of seduction, where I can't pick out the instruments of expression but I look for them hungrily in the haze. And the idea that transmission between worlds (the living/dead, human/nonhuman) might require a strain of humour (like haha but also meant in the sense of bodily humours?). For instance, shoegaze is decidedly not a humorous genre, but it sort of works on bodily humours, sometimes giving me the bends, or the blurry spaced-out feeling of having one's pleasure receptor's caressed by sound. Was wondering how YOU experienced the space and physicality of the poems -- was there anything u found FUNNY or sufficiently sultry as to produce a long and gorgeous sigh?

Mm and aren't there these tasty, cute moments of wow like 'tropic      glut' ('O--NE') and 'prism arousal' ('Body Work') and 'clamour to emboss' ('Sapling').

Come to think of it, there are quite a lot of trees in Body Work, at the very least between 'Sapling' and 'Copsing', but also resonance in 'Awning', 'Annual' (which mentions 'yield', 'Thicket', 'sky-light muddle' etc) and 'Georgel' (georgics, idk?). Something about sprawl and thread: like the action of branches as arboreal mirror for threads of viruses, threads of code?

Side note: Can a person in a crowd of people experience canopy-shyness? Emily Berry has this lovely poem about crying and canopies and language.

Ways to dwell in inertia, violence, suspense ('Poem for July') as a 'clearing' within the pamphlet? Body Work as a title seems to combine two distinct fields: car repair and alternative medicine (hence mention of plants, cancers and crystals). The question of holistic approach, therapeutics, restoration. The sheen of metal, the sheen of health. O wise one of la letteratura del contemporaneo, pray tell your thoughts on possible Ballardian comparisons? Like obv v. different but I was struck by something to do with the cut-up structures of The Atrocity Exhibition and the way erasure works in Tom's work (probably in a more precise, attentive way, like the specialist's collage of tiny skins and digits, as opposed to grander themes of mediation that explode all over Ballard's work? -- generalising for the sake of interest obv).

Longing for a 'carvery [of] / uncommoning / rave'. Some kind of party you'd give up your skin for (is skin mere synecdoche of identity here?). Maybe the rave is what you were saying about scrambling.

Anyway, I hope your essay is going well. I must go read Hillis Miller's thoughts on Ariadne's thread, maybe make a tea. I've been getting these headaches lately, dawn to dusk & beyond, like the kind you get after being swimming (chlorine headache) or after crying (hormone headache). Pressurisation. I wonder if I have a parasite in my brain? So tonite I will probs lie awake, sleepless, listening for tinnitus :(

With warmth, Maria xxxxxxx

p.s.

Of course, by the time I get to the end of rereading I realise that it's only white marks being revealed underneath because literal holes have appeared in the Body Work cover, like some kind of fungus has been eating away at the book, performing another erasure.

Denise Bonetti <denise.spamzine@gmail.com> Fri, 1 Feb, 12:15  to maria.spamzine Dear Maria, Once again my legendary inability to reply to personal emails within a reasonable 1-month window manifests itself. Invoke my Scorpio moon (?) etc. I love it when people are like 'RIGHT - enough Facebook for me, email me if you want to talk etc', because that sounds like a nightmare to me. Long live IM! Long live the short form! (quite rich coming from someone whose job at the moment, I guess, is to churn out a dissertation?)

But then you know what I was thinking - someone like Clark Coolidge, for example, can get away with long form, intense long form. Not only get away, but own that long form. That long form I'm into. Clark Coolidge drown me in words and I'm fine with it, because he never dilutes, there's never any stagnation, you know what I mean, he just goes and goes and goes and you're like !!? YES!! HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS!? He just never runs out of steam. And I'm thinking of Coolidge because you mentioned crystals as agents in Tom B. (cf. The Crystal Text, how would the crystal speak etc), and of course because both Tom B. and Clark C. are just doing mad things with language, bold things and exciting things... They are like scientists you're friends with but who (maybe) don't like to talk about their work, then one day they decide to let into their basement lab where they've been secretly working on the most complex, organic, project for years, and they're like, don't freak out, here it is:

(Sorry for terrible quality [#postinternet] First is Tom B., second is Clark C.) Body Work looks quite controlled in form, visually speaking, with its vaguely justified lines, BIG symmetrical margins.. even the scattered pages look orderly! Like the bit of 'STRING WORTH' you sent. Which going back to your erasure thing, it makes me feel like Tom B. is giving us an OXO cube of his writing, all concentrated and delicious. But then my response is - show us more!!! Which rarely happens because I am scared of long form. And email. And dissertations. I also LOVE what you said about how Body Work combines car repair and alternative medicine!! That is absolutely spot on. Like the material, pragmatic tinkering motions of his writing, the referral to structures and the intention of like, see how far we can bend them and push them, but then it is never as dry as that! Very sweet motor oil. It's very kind poetry... generous! (A word that my friend Phoebe used to describe a certain type of poetry at a party last week and I thought, very interesting). Linguistically generous because it offers so many networks of reading, but then also.. approachable? As approachable as experimental poetry of this kind can be. I'm sure like, DANIEL would not think this is approachable lol (#COYBIG #romance). Which, fair enough. But if you're a nerd for this kind of poetry, then yeah. Like this bit from 'ANNUAL'??

*Cries!!! This is like you said, healing!! I feel looked after! 'Stomach prefers sound to day-to-day camphor'!!! Honestly what is this! So touching, so simple! 

(Btw, I started experimenting with aromatherapy in my tiny room lol, do you know how to stop the water from boiling in the oil burner??) 

Thanks for sending such interesting ideas over, I have to shoot to a seminar ! PPS: I saw Steven Connor in the English library yesterday (Oliver pointed at him silently like !!!!!!!!!!) so I kind of followed him to see what his approach to book browsing is.. very natural-looking and orderly? Surprised. Love the guy. *bubble sounds*

Lots of love Maria  ‘let’s see where the spirits take us’ ur the best 

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Maria Sledmere <maria.spamzine@gmail.com> 6 Feb 2019, 23:19  to denise.spamzine Dear Denise,

Makes so much sense to map your message sensibilities onto your taste in poetry! I am so torn between the percolated richness of the email, its classic deferral (omg hun I owe you a million emails!) through a sort of quantum dimension of procrastination, and in opposition the sugar rush nowness of IM. I am such a frantic typist that often I send the wrong messages or cross my wires or just gush too much, so email is probably a safe option for me. There is all too much blue in my Messenger windows...Temptation of x's and endless emojis. But such a beauty to IM and texts out of context, like I wonder how many people read your probs too late 4 a snog now :'((( as micro-fictions, versus poems. I have a whole folder of screenshots on my computer from things that happened on Facebook that I have no memory of. Something about the Romantic fragment, accumulating ruin. 

(btw) I feel like these extracts also shed light upon Body Work somehow. Biodegradables versus hard minerals and synthetic matter. Inner/outer. Flush. Tbh I think the middle one was from you?

Yes the dissertation, the dissertation as labour; it's like you have to find your scaffold first. Sometimes I feel like the scaffold in that wonderful Sophie Collins poem, 'Healers', and I write and don't notice myself and suddenly I'm so there, but the scaffold is secretly taking her bolt pins out the more I write around her. You can only be so respectful to your scaffold when she's so in the way. Gemini problems?Duality; structure/content. What is it Tom McCarthy says: 'structure is content, geometry is everything'. I want to be a wee fractal in a sequence of massive refraction. Is that how it works? Back to scaffolds, maybe we need to find the kindest mode of dismantling, and that's when you work into a form or something. And then also the more organic structures! So for CC it's the whole crystal thing, and working out of crystal logic. And then you just go and go and it's wonderful, much extravagant fractality, almost like poetry as virus, replicate replicate, grow, change. Mm, it's so good. My friend Kirsty did this mad poem about a tree, I couldn't tell if it was a story or poem, it was just branching out in a way that seemed hungry, necessary, spreading its roots. She said she wrote it in a rush! As if trees could rush! I like to think she inhabited a concentrated moment of becoming-tree, like she was a myriad in the roots or leaves. I don't think it could have happened without the tree, you know? But also the tree was almost entirely absent, it was like a ghost of form. Maybe I forgot how it goes. The lines looked like branches or something. Can you have long-form concrete? Concrete I guess by necessity is long-form. It takes a lot of energy to make. People are building houses out of mycelium instead, which is rad. Talking of roots and that, I just wrote 26k words on ecopoetics & t h r e a d s over the past fortnight and it was kind of that process, like letting a sort of tapestry take hold and I was maybe just one more thread, I was hardly doing the weaving, everything was moving around me and I wanted to wriggle into more and more gaps. Becoming-thread, perhaps. The next step is to slack and cut, which is exciting. Where to even start? 

Your description of the complex, organic project is so gorgeous. Poems slow-cooked in a lab with tender organic care. My two scientist PhD pals are always gramming these beautiful pictures of crystals they're growing or mad wave patterns on screens. And we go for lunch and I'm like what you doing this afternoon and they're like, Oh just shooting photons. And is that much different from spending your afternoon writing poems? (Yes, they'd groan). I'm just chasing bits of light. Reading Tom B's work it's this whole precision thing, the actual inhabitation of process as such, so you see the energy buzz between things. I don't mean to say simply this is atomic poetry or poetry as tool analysis. It's more a betweening. 

Isn't it super difficult to write non-anthropocentrically and really inhabit micro-relationality and also sound interesting and sexy in the way Claire Colebrook (she has that great essay in Tom Cohen's Telemorphosis) describes as 'sexual indifference', i.e. that threat to heteronormative reproduction that 'has always been warded off precisely because it opens the human organism to mutation, production, lines of descent and annihilation beyond that of its own intentionality'? Well anyway Body Work really works this way for me, it's like a poetics of sexual indifference that is nevertheless charged with desire you can't really predict, it's something in the frisson between objects and lines and coils of form. I think of crystal charge, iPhone battery (mine's always dying, Gemini trait 100%), engines. Neat miniaturisations of entropy, surge, spike and flux. When the 'I' comes in I'm like hey, what flow are you? It's actually so satisfying to quote these poems as fragments btw, they can do so much on their own as much as in poems and pamphlets, I wonder if that goes back to the accessibility thing. Like the absolute charm of a line as auto-affection: 

This bit is from 'Temper' and I go back to my point about the flush/fluster! Globe of air/your *bubble sounds*. Isn't everything held so neatly, and yet it never feels neat, it just feels sharp and sparking, this 'technical glossy finish' like a really nice car, the body paint of a poem, its prosody so tightly held it feels more surface, a selection of hues and textures. And the erotics of the text or at the very least its pleasure is the shift between bodies, synecdoche, yes you could say bodies without organs but things in themselves are also important. Maybe another poet who does this is Sylvia Legris, she writes these apparently impersonal poems filled to the seams with specialist lexis (you have to have like twelve tabs open per poem to get it), but there's an affirmative humour and energy that feels v much a personal sensibility, a deliberated skewing of world that splices the poet's agency among items, artefacts, language. I mean how nice are these poemsshe published in Granta. I feel like I want cutlery to read them with, if that makes sense. Maybe a scalpel, for the succulence. The appearance of an ear again! 

And then the beautiful metallurgy of this line from Tom, like somebody pierced my ears with perfect silver and it let all the demons out: 

I am worried about what a certain seizure would look like. When we talk about vitality is it a willing naivety towards matter qua matter, as if we could just step out of correlationism? Such thoughts for 11pm of a Wednesday night. I can't help but think of the body image that Elizabeth Grosz describes in Volatile Bodies, kind of riffing off Paul Schilder: 'What psychoanalytic theory makes clear is that the body is literally written on, inscribed, by desire and signification, at the anatomical, physiological, and neurological levels'. And yeah, cool, what about the nonhuman body also? Has anyone done a really good psychoanalysis of the object. Parsed its psychic striations (traumatic or pleasurable residues of every microbial, huh?). In fact, what about the psychodynamic model of actual icebergs? Time we started literalising the matter of metaphors, absenting 'real cultural / medium' and filling with meltwater, fire and flow. Maybe it comes down to a bead of ink, the 'intimate concentrate' which is Lucozade, hangover piss, sick pH levels. So yeah, Body Work for me is this totally seductiveintersubjective space which actually works out pretty visceral states, sometimes disembodying me into a more fractal, mineral or bacterial being. I could start talking Kathryn Yusoff and geomorphism too, but maybe enough strata for one email? Plus I'm mixing my metaphors, I'm sure, mostly because I'm still morphing, dissolving inside those lines. I think I ate too many OXO cubes.

As for your oil burner boiling, sounds like you have an overactive candle? Maybe try a cooler tealight, nestle it to the back a little to redirect the strength of the flame? I like rosemary oil for remembrance, cranberry for comfort, ginger for energy. That line about resin is so nice. I was in Crianlarich at the weekend and my friend Patrick found this massive log and he carried it for so long that you could smell the resin on his skin, it was amazing. I keep thinking about the word 'pitch' and lush tree-ness, and the Log Lady in Twin Peaks and poetry you can chew like new molasses, prior to melt. Is that how it works?

Somebody is smashing glass into a bin in my garden and probably I should just close the pamphlet...

...but it's like a delicious pdf that gives infinities...

Yours in multiples & cherryish flusters,

Maria xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxox

[justforbooks]

Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile.

From school prizes to writing his own novels, the author reflects on his lifelong bibliomania and explains why, despite e-readers and Amazon, he believes the physical book and bookshops will survive.

I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head. I was perhaps lucky that for the first 10 years of my life there was no competition from television; and when one finally arrived in the household, it was under the strict control of my parents. They were both schoolteachers, so respect for the book and what it contained were implicit. We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library.

My maternal grandparents were also teachers. Grandpa had a mail-order set of Dickens and a Nelson's Cyclopaedia in about 30 small red volumes. My parents had classier and more varied books, and in later life became members of the Folio Society. I grew up assuming that all homes contained books; that this was normal. It was normal, too, that they were valued for their usefulness: to learn from at school, to dispense and verify information, and to entertain during the holidays. My father had collections of Times Fourth Leaders; my mother might enjoy a Nancy Mitford. Their shelves also contained the leather-bound prizes my father had won at Ilkeston County School between 1921 and 1925, for "General Proficiency" or "General Excellence": The Pageant of English Prose, Goldsmith's Poetical Works, Cary's Dante, Lytton's Last of the Barons, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth.

None of these works excited me as a boy. I first started investigating my parents' shelves (and those of my grandparents, and of my older brother) when awareness of sex dawned. Grandpa's library contained little lubricity except a scene or two in John Masters's Bhowani Junction; my parents had William Orpen's History of Art with several important black-and-white illustrations; but my brother owned a copy of Petronius's Satyricon, which was the hottest book by far on the home shelves. The Romans definitely led a more riotous life than the one I witnessed around me in Northwood, Middlesex. Banquets, slave girls, orgies, all sorts of stuff. I wonder if my brother noticed that after a while some of the pages of his Satyricon were almost falling from the spine. Foolishly, I assumed all his ancient classics must have similar erotic content. I spent many a dull day with his Hesiod before concluding that this wasn't the case.

The local high street included an establishment we referred to as "the bookshop". In fact, it was a fancy-goods store plus stationer's with a downstairs room, about half of which was given over to books. Some of them were quite respectable – Penguin classics, Penguin and Pan fiction. Part of me assumed that these were all the books that there were. I mean, I knew there were different books in the public library, and there were school books, which were again different; but in terms of the wider world of books, I assumed this tiny sample was somehow representative. Occasionally, in another suburb or town, we might visit a "real" bookshop, which usually turned out to be a branch of WH Smith.

The only variant book-source came if you won a school prize (I was at City of London, then on Victoria Embankment next to Blackfriars Bridge). Winners were allowed to choose their own books, usually under parental supervision. But again, this was somehow a narrowing rather than a broadening exercise. You could choose them only from a selection available at a private showroom in an office block on the South Bank: a place both slightly mysterious and utterly functional. It was, I later discovered, yet another part of WH Smith. Here were books of weight and worthiness, the sort to be admired rather than perhaps ever read. Your school prize would have a particular value, you chose a book for up to that amount, whereupon it vanished from your sight, to reappear on Lord Mayor's prize day, when the Lord Mayor of London, in full regalia, would personally hand it over to you. Now it would contain a pasted-in page on the front end-paper describing your achievement, while the cloth cover bore the gilt-embossed school arms. I can remember little of what I obediently chose when guided by my parents. But in 1963 I won the Mortimer English prize and, being now 17, must have gone by myself to that depository of seriousness, where I found (whose slip-up could it have been?) a copy of Ulysses. I can still see the disapproving face of the Lord Mayor as his protectively gloved hand passed over to me this notoriously filthy novel.

By now, I was beginning to view books as more than just utilitarian, sources of information, instruction, delight or titillation. First there was the excitement and meaning of possession. To own a certain book – one you had chosen yourself – was to define yourself. And that self-definition had to be protected, physically. So I would cover my favourite books (paperbacks, inevitably, out of financial constraint) with transparent Fablon. First, though, I would write my name – in a recently acquired italic hand, in blue ink, underlined with red – on the edge of the inside cover. The Fablon would then be cut and fitted so that it also protected the ownership signature. Some of these books – for instance, David Magarshack's Penguin translations of the Russian classics – are still on my shelves.

Self-definition was one kind of magic. And then I was slowly introduced to another kind: that of the old, the secondhand, the non-new book. I remember a line of Auden first editions in the glass-fronted bookcase of a neighbour: a man, moreover, who had actually known Auden decades previously, and even played cricket with him. These facts seemed to me astonishing. I had never set eyes on a writer, or known anyone who had known a writer. I might have heard one or two on the wireless, seen one or two on television in a Face to Face interview with John Freeman. But our family's nearest connection to literature was the fact that my father had read modern languages at Nottingham University, where the professor was Ernest Weekley, whose wife had run off with DH Lawrence. Oh, and my mother had once seen RD Smith, husband of Olivia Manning, on a Birmingham station platform. Yet here were the ownership copies of someone who had known one of the country's most famous living poets. Further, these books contained Auden's still-echoing words in the form in which they had first come into the world. I sensed this magic sharply, and wanted part of it. So, from my student years, I became a book-collector as well as a book-user, and discovered that bookshops weren't all owned by WH Smith.

Over the next decade or so – from the late 1960s to the late 70s – I became a tireless book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate that far exceeded any possible reading speed. This was a time when most towns of reasonable size had at least one large, long-established secondhand bookshop, often found within the shadow of the cathedral or city church; as I remember, you could usually park right outside for as long as you wanted. Without exception these would be independently owned shops – sometimes with a selection of new books at the front – and I immediately felt at home in them. The atmosphere, for a start, was so different. Here books seemed to be valued, and to form part of a continuing culture.

By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as "previously owned"; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it. Old books showed their age: they had fox marks the way old people had liver spots. They also smelt good – even when they reeked of cigarettes and (occasionally) cigars. And many might disgorge pungent ephemera: ancient publishers' announcements and old bookmarks - often for insurance companies or Sunlight soap.

So I would drive to Salisbury, Petersfield, Aylesbury, Southport, Cheltenham, Guildford, getting into back rooms and locked warehouses and storesheds whenever I could. I was much less at ease in places that smelt of fine bindings, or that knew all too well the value of each item of stock. I preferred the democratic clutter of a shop whose stock was roughly ordered and where bargains were possible. In those days, even in shops selling new books, there was none of the ferociously fast stock turnaround that modern central management imposes. Nowadays, the average shelf-life of a new hardback novel – assuming it can reach a shelf in the first place – is four months. Then, books would stay on the shelves until someone bought them, or they might be reluctantly put into a special sale, or moved to the secondhand department, where they might rest for years on end. That book you couldn't afford, or weren't sure you really wanted, would often still be there on your return trip the following year. Secondhand shops also taught the lesson of the writer who has gone out of fashion. Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole, Dornford Yates, Lord Lytton, Mrs Henry Wood – there would be yards and yards of them out there, waiting for fashion to turn again. It rarely did.

I bought with a hunger that I recognise, looking back, was a kind of neediness: well, bibliomania is a known condition. Book-buying certainly consumed more than half of my disposable income. I bought first editions of the writers I most admired: Waugh, Greene, Huxley, Durrell, Betjeman. I bought first editions of Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Browning (neither of whom I had read) because they seemed astonishingly cheap. The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date was rarely distinct.

I collected King Penguins, Batsford books on the countryside, and the Britain in Pictures series produced by Collins in the 1940s and 50s. I bought poetry pamphlets and leather-backed French encyclopaedias published by Larousse; cartoon books and Victorian keepsakes; out-of-date dictionaries and bound copies of magazines from the Cornhill to the Strand. I bought a copy of Sensation!, the first Belgian edition of Waugh's Scoop. I even made up a category called Odd Books, used to justify eccentric purchases such as Sir Robert Baden-Powell's Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting, Bombadier Billy Wells's Physical Energy, Cheiro's Guide to the Hand and Tap-Dancing Made Easy by "Isolde". All are still on my shelves, if rarely consulted. I also bought books it made no sense to buy, either at the time or in retrospect – like all three volumes (in first edition, with dust-wrappers, and definitely unread by the previous owner) of Sir Anthony Eden's memoirs. Where was the sense in that?

My case was made worse by the fact that I was, in the jargon of the trade, a completist. So, for instance, because I had admired the few plays of Shaw that I'd seen, I ended up with several feet of his work, even down to obscure pamphlets about vegetarianism. Since Shaw was so popular, and his print-runs accordingly vast, I never paid much for any of this collection. Which also meant that when, 30 years later, having become less keen on Shaw's didacticism and self-conscious wit, I decided to sell out, a clear minus profit was made.

Occasionally, there were thrilling discoveries. In the back warehouse of F Weatherhead & Son of Aylesbury, I found a copy of the first two cantos of Byron's Don Juan, published without the author's name in 1819. This rare first edition, bound in blue cloth, cost me 12/6d (or 62.5p). I would like to pretend (as I occasionally used to) that it was my specialist knowledge of Byronic bibliography that led me to spot it. But this would have been to ignore the full pencil note from the bookseller inside the front cover ("Cantos I and II appeared in London in July 1819 without the name of either author or bookseller in a thin quarto"). The price of 12/6d therefore couldn't have been an oversight; more likely, it was an indication that the book had been on the shelves for decades.

Just as often, however, I would make serious mistakes. Why, for instance, did I buy, from DM Beach of Salisbury, Oliver Twist in its original monthly parts, as first issued by Bentley's Miscellany? It was a good idea because they were in perfect condition, with fine plates, covers and advertisements. It was a bad idea because one of the parts (either the first or last) was missing – hence the set's near-affordability. It was an optimistic idea because I was sure I would be able to track down the missing part at some moment in my collecting life. Needless to say, I never did, and this idiocy rebuked me from my shelves for many years.

Then there were moments when I realised that the world of books and book-collecting was not exactly as I'd imagined it. While I was familiar with famous cases of book forgery, I always assumed that collectors were honest and straightforward folk (I used to think the same about gardeners, too). Then, one day, I found myself at the Lilies in Weedon, Bucks – "by appointment only" – a 35-room Victorian mansion so stuffed with books that a visit occupied most of the day. Among its first edition section I found a book I had been chasing for years: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It lacked a dustwrapper (which was normal – few early Waugh-buyers failed to discard the jackets), but was in pristine condition. The price was … astonishingly low. Then I read a little pencilled note which explained why. It was in the handwriting, and with the signature, of Roger Senhouse, the Bloomsburyite publisher who was Lytton Strachey's last lover. It read – and I quote from memory – "This second impression was left on my shelves in the place of my own first edition." I was deeply shocked. Clearly, it had not been a spur-of-the- moment act. The culprit must have arrived chez Senhouse with this copy concealed about him – I assumed it was a he not a she – then managed the switch when no one was in the room. Who could it have been? Might I ever be tempted to such action? (Yes, I subsequently was – tempted, that is.) And might someone do that to me and my collection one day? (Not as far as I know.)

More recently, I heard another version of this story, from a different point of view. A reader sent a rather famous living author a copy of an early novel of his (one whose first print-run was under a thousand copies), asking for a signature and enclosing return postage. After a while, a parcel arrived containing the novel, duly signed by the author – except that he had retained the valuable first edition and sent a second impression instead.

Back then, book-hunting involved high mileage, slow accumulation and frequent frustration; the side-effect was a tendency, when you failed to find what you wanted, to buy a scattershot array of stuff to prove that your journey hadn't been wasted. This manner of acquisition is no longer possible, or no longer makes sense. All those old, rambling, beautifully-sited shops have gone. Here is Roy Harley Lewis's The Book-Browser's Guide to Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops (second edition, 1982) on DM Beach of Salisbury: "There are a number of bookshops on sites so valuable that the proprietors could realise a small fortune by selling up and working from home … While property prices in Wiltshire cannot compare with (say) London, this marvellous corner site in the High Street is an enormous overhead for any bookshop." Beach's closed in 1999; Weatherhead's (which had its own printed paper bag) in 1998; the Lilies – which was full of stray exhibits such as John Cowper Powys's death-mask and "the clock that belonged to the people who put the engine in the boat that Shelley drowned in" – is no more. The bigger, and the more general, the more vulnerable, seems to have been the rule.

Collecting has also been changed utterly by the internet. It took me perhaps a dozen years to find a first edition of Vile Bodies for about £25. Today, 30 seconds with abebooks.co.uk will turn up two dozen first editions of varied condition and prices (the most expensive, with that rarest of Waugh dustwrappers, run from $15,000 to $28,000). When the great English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald died, I decided as homage to buy first editions (with dustwrappers) of her last four novels – the four that established her greatness. This all took less time than it would to find a parking space nowadays near the spot where Beach's bookshop used to exist. And while I could go on about the "romance" and "serendipity of discovery" – and yes, there was romance – the old system was neither time- nor cost-effective.

I became a bit less of a book-collector (or, perhaps, book-fetishist) after I published my first novel. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, I decided that since I was now producing my own first editions, I needed other people's less. I even started to sell books, which once would have seemed inconceivable. Not that this slowed my rate of acquisition: I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

The current pressures on both are enormous. My last novel would have cost you £12.99 in a bookshop, about half that (plus postage) online, and a mere £4.79 as a Kindle download. The economics seem unanswerable. Yet, fortunately, economics have never entirely controlled either reading or book-buying. John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:

For who, in that unthinkable future When I am dead, will read? The printed page Was just a half-millennium's brief wonder …

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a "smell" function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).

Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father's school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, 90 years after he first won them. I'd rather read Goldsmith's poems in this form than online.

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: "Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading." When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it – as I do many aphorisms – a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between "perfection of the life, or of the work"). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

• A Life with Books (£1.99) is a pamphlet published by Jonathan Cape to celebrate Independent Booksellers Week and is available exclusively in independent bookshops.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[ktaebwi]

You know the twitter account that screenshotted your stuff and posted without credit. Yeah she's like that. I legit got into a feud a couple of weeks ago about her screenshotting stuff from here and not giving credits. I blocked her on twitter. Don't need those people on my timeline feeding off other people's hard work

if i were to be very honest, their response gave me the feeling that they just brushed off their mistake by blaming it on ‘forgetting to credit’. i mean, how can you even forget to credit? .______. i don’t think they are aware of the fact that with that amount of followers, they’re no longer just a normal account, people will consider their account as a source of information and repost from them again. i don’t know if anyone knows how it feels when you just randomly scroll through weibo and you see your translation re-translated into chinese, but instead of your name in the credit, it’s the person who reposted. furthermore i don’t really like it when they screenshot and crop out my url, there are ways to keep the url of the original poster on screenshots and other people managed to do it before, but they just ;_; 

Anonymous said: I saw your tags on the vmin post, how tall are you? :D

i’m 165cm or 5′5′’ (•ㅅ•)

Anonymous said: So I'm learning Korean and I was wondering if you have any website , app or just any way to help me. Any tips ? If you do help me out thank you very much! No pressure!

i don’t use any app other than the naver dictionary app, but if you’re interested, i answered an ask about how i learned korean somewhere in the /reg tag!

Anonymous said: Did you learn all the languages on your own? Did you learn just for fun?

for chinese and english, they were compulsory subjects at my school so i had no choice but to learn it, just the basics tho haha. for korean (and japanese, i’m taking baby steps towards japanese ;;), i learned for fun and also because i want to realize my goal of knowing at least 7 languages before i turn 30. for all of the languages i learn except japanese, i learn the basics with some kind of guidance (like teachers at school or a tutor) but improve later on by myself.

Anonymous said: I'm still too awkward to send you anything publicly lol but my english has improved a lot after reading Oscar Wilde's essays, fairy tales, plays etc. His english is old but descriptive, a little bit poetic and sometimes, or well quite often, he uses words that I have never heard of. It still was worth of reading ! Now writing english feels easier and I even think that my level is good enough compared to the fact I have only studied english nine years haha :'-)

noted! i’m currently reading oscar wilde’s prose collection hehe

Anonymous said: Are you satisfied with the subs of bon voyage season 2? I really can't understand a single hangul so asking an expert about it make me feel secured? I mean even though i pay for 800 coins in vlive if the subs are not to its fullest i will still watch an uploaded video with eng sub of the uploader just to know the full story ofwhat are they talking and laughing about. I really trust you and if you say you don't, i will really watch it though it quite aches to see anuploaded one coz i paid for it.

i don’t watch engsubs, especially vlive’s engsubs haha. i feel like vlive’s subs make the gist and the fun of their dialogues, sometimes even incorrect ;_; like with joon’s ynwa behind story live, i turned on the engsubs the other day to get some inspiration on how to translate but eventually had to turn off after 5 mins because of how much mistranslations there were. vlive’s subs are quite full tho, if you’re not too strict about the quality of the subs it should be enough to understand what they’re talking about. by the way, the reuploaded ones have vlive’s subs too. no one does separate engsubs for bon voyage

[jam2289]

On the Path to Story Analysis, Scene Analysis, and Sentence Analysis

Science is a test of facts. Art is an exploration of values. They are different realms of experience, knowledge, and insight. Writing fiction is an art. Creating stories is the most important art. It's infinitely complex. We need a framework to understand both the meaning that we can pull from existent stories and how to create new stories. I've studied many, and like all conceptual frameworks, I've found that I need to build my own.

I think there are three important levels to focus on if you're writing stories: sentence, scene, and story. I am going to briefly introduce three sources for each of these that I'm trying to integrate and adapt into my own system.

Do we want to start at the top or bottom? Let's start at the top, with story, and we'll work our way down. Remember, this is a general overview so all of these books will contain a lot of good info that I'm not going to cover.

There is a great little ebook by Martin Turner called "The One Basic Plot". It's been on my most liked books list for years. That list is linked on my about page. I just emailed with Martin today to clarify something. He responded right away. Good guy.

The basic idea is that a compelling story is a double reversal. A story without a reversal is like someone tries to do something and they do it. That's boring. A story with a single reversal is like a person tries to do something. They get close, but they fail. That's a tragedy, it could go the other way too. A double reversal is when someone is trying to do something, they are getting close, then it looks like they are going to lose everything, then they win. This can play out over a long story and out in smaller sections in a story.

Another great idea from Turner's book is of colliding narratives. That's where you have two stories that aren't compatible with each other. This is often the hero and the villain, but it can take different variations.

I have some adaptations of this, which is one of the great things about it. Turner made an incredibly flexible framework to work within that you can layer more complexity into, which is what my adaptation does.

That's entirely oversimplified, but let's move to the next book about story structure.

Jordan Peterson is my favorite living psychologist. "Maps of Meaning" is one of five books on this list that I haven't read straight through. When I was a kid I always started at the beginning and read every book straight through. Now, I read what I want when I want to, in the way that I want to. When you're reading non-fiction, find what you need. You can also take Peterson's entire Maps of Meaning course at the University of Toronto for free online, right on Youtube.

The basic idea here is that there is a part of the world that is known and a part of the world that is unknown to a knower. Those are the three elements: knower, known, unknown. The knower seeks to extract order from chaos. That's the job of the hero for society.

I combine this with my own conception of the true essence of a story. I did a deep dive into that in my article "What Is a Story?" here: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/04/what-is-story.html

and followed it up with "Story, Drama, Conflict, and Suspense" here: http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/2019/04/story-drama-conflict-and-suspense.html

My two useful insights were:

- - - - - - -

A story is the representation of a change, or set of changes, resulting in a steady state.

Drama is the potential or actual change to a thing of value, in its value.

- - - - - - -

If we work on pulling my definition of story and Peterson's ideas about chaos and order together we get something like a story telling about a dramatic change from a state of order, to chaos, to a new order. Notice that I'm just including Turner's idea about the double reversal here rather than exploring single reversals like order to chaos or chaos to order.

But, what is order and chaos. I think the perspective needs to be from the point of view of the knower. From the knower's point of view order is when predictions and expectations are fairly accurate over time. Chaos is when predictions and expectations are inaccurate, false, wrong, pointless, etc. So we move from a state of predictable order with accurate expectations, to unpredictable chaos with inaccurate expectations, to a new state of predictable order with accurate expectations.

That's interesting stuff.

Next, we have "The Story Grid" by Shawn Coyne. There is a lot in that book. It's an entire system in itself. Coyne is the only person with two books on this list, and he really only has two books. The key insight that I'm referencing here is his emphasis on genre conventions and obligatory scenes.

Basically, when someone picks up a murder mystery there has to be certain things. These are things that people are expecting. If you don't include them you will violate their expectations and they won't like it. There has to be a scene where they find a murder victim. There has to be a red herring where you follow a false lead because a clue leads you in that direction. There has to be a scene where the murderer is revealed. And a number of other things. And this is different for the different genres. The importance of expectations in all areas of life is hard to overstate.

Alright. Those are the three books covering story structure. It's both a lot and not very much. Mostly, not very much since I skipped most of the stuff in all three of those books, and it's only three books out of a countless number. I'm trying to whittle down to the key insights that I can use, combine, and adapt to create something better. So we don't need to cover everything, especially since this article is just the beginning of a lifetime pursuit.

Next, let's look at scenes. A scene is a unit of story. Exact definitions of scenes are hard to find. It's only a slightly fuzzy concept. It's something like a unit of story connected by space/time where there's a set of connected actions that result in a value change. That's the best idea I have off the top of my head. People mostly determine what a scene is by feel. I'll probably work on creating a better definition in the future, but that's not the task right now.

"A Practical Handbook for the Actor" has six authors: Melissa Bruder, Lee Michael, Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler. Oddly enough, it's a small book, less than 100 pages. It's based on a seminar put on by David Mamet, W. H. Macy, and Gregory Mosher.

They use a three step scene analysis method that I like. I think it might even be useful for life.

- - - - - - -

1. What is the character literally doing?

2. What is the essential action of what the character is doing in this scene?

3. What is that action like to me? It's as if...

- - - - - - -

Now we'll look at how Rober McKee does scene analysis from his book "Story". I'll include a couple of quotes to define and explain things a bit.

- - - - - - -

Step One: Define Conflict

First ask, who drives the scene, motivates it, and makes it happen?

What does he (or it) want?

What forces of antagonism block this desire?

What do the forces of antagonism want?

(Use the infinitive for the verb.)

Step Two: Note Opening Value

Identify the value at stake in the scene and note its charge, positive or negative, at the opening of the scene.

Step Three: Break the Scene into Beats

A beat is an exchange of action/reaction in character behavior. Look carefully at the scene's first action on two levels: outwardly, in terms of what the character seems to be doing, and, more important, look beneath the surface to what he is actually doing.

(Use a gerund for the verb.)

Step Four: Note Closing Value and Compare with Opening Value

At the end of the scene, examine the value-charged condition of the character's situation and describe it in positive/negative terms.

Step Five: Survey Beats and Locate Turning Point

...locate the moment when the major gap opens between expectation and result, turning the scene to its changed end values.

- - - - - - -

In "Pride and Prejudice: The Story Grid Edition" Shawn Coyne does his scene analysis 61 times. Here's the basic idea.

- - - - - - -

A story event is an active change of life value for one or more characters as a result of conflict (one character's desires clash with another's).

A working scene contains at least one story event.

1. What are the characters literally doing?

2. What is the essential action of what the characters are doing in this scene?

3. What life value has changed for one or more of the characters in the scene?

4. Which life value should I highlight on my story grid spreadsheet?

Highlight the value that best tracks the scene-by-scene progress of the global value at stake.

- - - - - - -

You can see how Coyne has used ideas from both of the previous books.

The last subject for this article, sentences. Don't worry, we are just going to skim lightly over this area for now.

"The Brilliance Breakthrough" by Eugene Schwartz is an odd book. He throws out all of grammar and then recreates his own system based on image words and connecting words. It's a different way of thinking about language. It goes well with my idea of the semantic square, which I still haven't written an article about yet. The focus is on communication rather than language.

"The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker is a fairly classic take on linguistics, probably the best modern take. His chapter on arcs of coherence seems like it might be useful to dive into and explore with experimentation.

Technically, this idea comes from Tzvetan Todorov in his book "The Poetics of Prose", but the genius Jerome Bruner made it better in his book "Actual Minds, Possible Worlds". The general idea is that you can transform a sentence from a simple statement to being psychologically active in six basic ways, and six more complex ways. I am just going to list examples here based on the statement: x commits a crime. The possibilities are much greater than these examples.

- - - - - - -

Mode: x must commit a crime.

Intention: x plans to commit a crime.

Result: x succeeds in committing a crime.

Manner: x is keen to commit a crime.

Aspect: x is beginning to commit a crime.

Status: x is not committing a crime.

Appearance: x pretends he has committed a crime.

Knowledge: x learns y has committed a crime.

Supposition: x foresees he will commit a crime.

Description: x reports he has committed a crime.

Subjectification: x thinks he has committed a crime.

Attitude: x enjoys committing a crime.

- - - - - - -

I definitely need to explore that more.

That's the idea, if you can write good sentences that make good scenes that make good stories then you have mastered writing. It's a process that would take the rest of an immortal's life.

I will need to take these things and apply them to digging into a story. Then I'll need to try to use them in adjusting my own writing.

The story that I apply them to needs to be short, or it will take a long time to go through each iteration. The more iterations I can go through the faster my learning curve will be. Jerome Bruner used the short stories from James Joyce's collection "Dubliners". I'm thinking about using "Cain and Able" first. It's short, powerful, and ancient. Then maybe "There's No Such Thing as a Dragon" by Jack Kent because it's amazing and short, and fun.

For my own writing, when I play with these ideas I could do a completely original story, or I could play with something like a fairytale. You can write a fairytale in a lot of different ways. I can't remember which writer recommended it, but some famous one. They recommended doing it to get a feel for the genres. For instance, take "The Three Little Pigs" and write it as an action story, then a murder mystery, then a romance (somehow?), then a western, etc. It's a cool idea.

That's a project for a different day.

________________________________________________

Read more of what Jeff deems worthy of attention at: http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[fjorn-wanders]

Concerning Baldr.

Komiði sæl og blessuð, vinir mínir, (Come happy and blessed, my friends,)

Since yesterday, I have been thinking about Baldr quite a bit. I have been thinking about the way he is treated by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda, and how revered Baldr is. I have begun to get the impression that Baldr represents and stands for the ideals of peace, kindness, and mercy. His description by Snorri makes me think this, although it takes some work to get there, I suppose, so here is the passage for reference:

“Odin’s second son is Baldr, and there is good to be told of him. He is best and all praise him. He is so fair in appearance and so bright that light shines from him, and there is a plant so white (in terms of light) that is is called after Baldr’s eyelash. It is the whitest (again, in terms of light) of all plants, and from this you can tell his beauty both of hair and body (thus comparing Baldr to everything light and bright). He is the wisest of the Æsir and most beautifully spoken and most merciful, but it is one of his characteristics that none of his decisions can be fulfilled.”

One thing that really stands out to me is the constant comparison Snorri makes to light. The Poetic Edda does not seem to emphasize this quality of him as much as Snorri does here. I may be wrong, but the Poetic Edda primarily focuses on his death, rather than his appearance or likenesses. Regardless, Snorri introduces Baldr as if he were light itself (but still in a very symbolic way meant for comparison), which is very important considering that Ragnarök, the end of times, begins after his death. The two sources of light in the world must vanish before Ragnarök can begin: Sol, the literal sun that warms the worlds, and Baldr, the symbolic light within each living soul. To think these references to be to anything other than light ruins the symbolic role that Baldr plays.

I would also like to single out the ending of the quotation:

…it is one of his characteristic that none of his decisions can be fulfilled.”

If Baldr is so wise and so good, why do none of his decisions end up fulfilled? Perhaps it is because he, representing ‘good nature’, is often consumed by hatred and cruelty. Think about Ragnarök again. When the world ends, ‘evil’ forces consume the world because ‘good’ itself has perished. The situation is more complicated than that, though, because determining what is evil and what is not is in itself a complicated matter. Thinking only in the way that Snorri depicts these events, though, it is evil that brings the world to its end.

I also cannot help myself but notice the concepts of Christianity that are imbedded into Baldr’s image, especially in the Prose Edda. Think about it. Baldr is as pure as light, he is the most merciful, and his death is almost like that of a martyr. Not to mention his pacifist nature (he gets attacked, but does not fight back). Furthermore, although he is not the only one to return after Ragnarök, he does indeed return from the dead. This is peculiar because the world is now a perfect, peaceful place; it is no surprise, then, that Baldr returns and fills it with his goodness once again. (All of this should also sound a bit Jesus-like, but maybe it is just me).

I find Baldr to be goodness itself. He is an ideal that we should try to achieve and admire. After all, he is so highly spoken of, and all of the Æsir lament his loss. Their rage towards Loki seems to be more out of despair for Baldr’s death than an actual hatred for Loki (or is it?). Their actions show how difficult it is to show mercy and kindness to others, especially when in despair. Even after Baldr’s death, the Æsir show no mercy to Loki. Baldr was the merciful god.

Without mercy and kindness, the world will fall in turmoil; Ragnarök will come. Evil will arise from neglect and abuse. Loki was not shown mercy nor kindness; he was treated terribly. Loki resented Baldr because he was an ideal that the rest of the gods pretty much worshipped. Loki resented Baldr because Loki represents our imperfections (which is very human and not mean too be demeaning). We struggle to reach these ideals of kindness and mercy; we struggle to reach to Baldr’s heights. After all, even the gods could not live up to these ideals that Baldr symbolized. 

But perhaps some of us can still learn from their troubles and embrace the kindness and mercy of Baldr. We must not simply revere Baldr’s perfections and ideals, for that will only bring resentment and hurtfulness. The real problem, then, is when we have standards that are too high. If we constantly judge others based off of such high standards, it will be painful and difficult for those struggling to reach those ideals. Therefore, we must try to kept Baldr in mind and in heart, rather than force others to be in his image. We must show kindness and mercy to others so that we may quell the anger and resentment of this world. It is the act, not the appearance or complete likeness, of Baldr that we must emit. We must make our ideals reality, rather than using them to cast judgement upon others.

Then again, I’m just a rambling wanderer.

Let me know what your thoughts are, if you want to! I can’t be the only person who understands Baldr in such a way.

Með vinsemd og virðingu, (With friendliness and respect,) Fjörn

[wendyimmiller]

The Randomness of Branches

Ever look up at a grand old tree and marvel at the randomness of its branches? They dodge and weave. They angle off. They roam this way and that. The complexity is a wonder to look at. Exhilarating, sometimes. And the sum of these parts makes for a living thing that defies gravity, shakes off weather, and mocks time.

I am not an organized person. Describing my life as “a reign of random” might understate the case. And this has caused me untold stress. You see, I’m mostly of German heritage. Some fragment is Irish, and, somehow, inexplicably, this tiny genetic minority has made itself dominant, dragging my poor frustrated autocratic, goose stepping, timetable-oriented German side into whatever unplanned and unbudgeted “shiny object” direction my Irish eyes catch a sideways glimpse of. And, so of course there are no records of any of my adventures in gardening. Cultivar names, when plants were acquired, and where they got planted, all left to a construction-grade memory corrupted by time (too little at any given moment; too much overall), maybe an electrical surge or two, and, of course, plenty of Guinness. My inner Patrick shrugs and wonders why anyone would worry about any of this when the result has been a green and growing garden in which one can wax poetic over a pint or two, while my inner Wilhelm storms off to holler at the dog.

The work space of a disorganized person.

Always within arm’s reach!

So it was with great joy that I recently exhumed a forgotten bucket of plant tags that I had squirreled away over several of my formative years. The result: a warm, pleasant immersion into nostalgia. Who remembers Etera? The name means what? To me, it sounded like an evil plot concocted by a Bond villain. But I bought a bunch of their reasonably priced plants. Came with steel name stakes that lasted in the garden–I still unearth them on occasion–and each plant came with its own little booklet with cultural information. Of course with so much front loaded expense, Etera was doomed from the start, but a good way to load up on plants while they lasted.

A tag from Eco Gardens reminded me of a story regarding that mail-order nursery. It was the nursery of legendary plantsman Don Jacobs. A friend and I combined on an order, but somehow, between us, we managed to drop the ball on payment for several months. Eventually this resulted in a card written in the shakey, elderly hand of Don himself pleading with us to pay. “Achtung!”shouted Wilhelm. Patrick immediately wrote a check, including an apologetic note full of silky words, flowery passages, and an at once lyrical and perplexing side narrative about potatoes. Meant to keep the card–it was, after all, an autograph of sorts–but, of course, one of us lost it.

Don Jacobs. Photo taken from the jacket of his book on Trillium.

Heronswood Nursery. I say the words with reverence. I bought so many plants from there. I might have one left. But I loved Heronswood, and, like so many others, took perverse pride in the number of my Heronswood failures. I went on a dream trip there for an open house with my friend Pete Zale back in the early 2000s. Dammit, I miss my friend Peter. We were best buds once. Both of us nobodies. Actually, I was a nobody. Him? He was a younger, better-looking nobody with a mind that could potentially make him a somebody. Why does time happen? Why do people move on? Now he has a PhD, travels the world tracking down plants, works for Longwood. Actually, I think he’s the owner of Longwood. Not sure though. He’s still a good friend. Usually answers my calls. But neither of us are really any good at staying in touch.

Peter Zale (far right), pre-PhD, at the gardens of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Now Newfields).

The potager garden at Heronswood. Not really representative of the place, but the best and most accessible picture I have from that pre-digital age.

Anyway, Heronswood was the finest garden I’d ever seen, and I still count it as one of the best. But Hinkley moved on. Mail-order nurseries burn people out. The nursery mercifully closed pretty quickly after that. Without Dan’s guiding hand and beautifully written catalogs that introduced us to new, exotic, and oh-so tantalizing rare plants along with tales of the epic adventures that found them, the magic just disappeared. His prose was why everyone gambled on these gems. No one cared if they lost a plant from the mountains of Vietnam to an Ohio winter. Dependable garden performance was never the point. Thankfully, Heronswood, the garden, was eventually bought and resurrected by a non-profit.

Heronswood catalogs cost $5 and were the top selling item for the nursery. Used copies can be found on Ebay at around $80.

At the other end of the catalog-writing spectrum was (the late) Bob Stewart from Arrowhead Alpines in Michigan. Grammar? Spelling? Hell. His catalogs read like a loner’s manifesto. Rambling, opinionated, offensive, and, yet, for those of open mind, intelligence, and maybe a dash of imagination, informative and hilarious. In a completely different way these catalogs inspired gardeners to try things they otherwise wouldn’t. I killed a bunch of Daphnes because of him. I miss each and every one of them. And Bob.

Bob and Brigitta Stewart, photo taken from: http://greenstreettree.com/in-memory-of-bob-stewart-genius-behind-arrowhead-alpines-in-fowlerville-2/

I met Bob and Brigitta on the second of two trips to the nursery. Because I’d read his catalogs, I was nervous, but they couldn’t have been more gracious! Spent so much time with my father and me. The ride home, however, was starkly unpleasant. My German side was just giving living hell to my Irish side. “We went to Arrowhead,” he shouted over and over, “and you bought a boxelder!” In fact, I had. It had beautiful blue bark. But the scolding quickly ended when my truck’s transmission burned up, and we–my father, a trailer-load of not hardened off plants, and both Patrick and Wilhelm–coasted to a stop at a forlorn and freezing exit outside of Piqua Ohio. The whole fam damily was mobilized in multiple sorties to eventually get us all home.

More tags from Woodlanders, Plant Delights, Oikos, Arbor Village, Roslyn, Forest Farm, Greer, and others reminded me of what a blessing it is for gardeners to have sources of rare and cool plants, and how much better we need to support these companies. They give us possibilities. They lure us into trying things we otherwise wouldn’t. This is–I’ll argue–for the greater good. Expanding ourselves is important, and certainly better than the alternative.

All this remembering and reflecting eventually got me thinking about my gardening journey. On the surface, so spontaneous, random, and Irish. So many different phases that got me from there to here—organic veggies, heirloom roses, alpines, Irises, natives, Asian maples, and more. Travels to great gardens and nurseries, drifting into new ideas, old friends, new friends, new associations, nights spent in questionable places, and nights at home poring over catalogs and websites. I’m so glad my Irish DNA dragged my German side into a forever meandering and widening delta of experiences.

Reminds me of tree branches in a way.  So remarkably random when you’re amongst them, but from a distance, a place of perspective, you can see they’re really not random at all. They have but one purpose: aim towards the light. And because they do, there’s growth.

This post is a re-write of a column that first appeared in Ohio Gardener Magazine in 2017. 

  The Randomness of Branches originally appeared on GardenRant on July 17, 2019.

from Gardening https://www.gardenrant.com/2019/07/the-randomness-of-branches.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[turfandlawncare]

The Randomness of Branches

Ever look up at a grand old tree and marvel at the randomness of its branches? They dodge and weave. They angle off. They roam this way and that. The complexity is a wonder to look at. Exhilarating, sometimes. And the sum of these parts makes for a living thing that defies gravity, shakes off weather, and mocks time.

I am not an organized person. Describing my life as “a reign of random” might understate the case. And this has caused me untold stress. You see, I’m mostly of German heritage. Some fragment is Irish, and, somehow, inexplicably, this tiny genetic minority has made itself dominant, dragging my poor frustrated autocratic, goose stepping, timetable-oriented German side into whatever unplanned and unbudgeted “shiny object” direction my Irish eyes catch a sideways glimpse of. And, so of course there are no records of any of my adventures in gardening. Cultivar names, when plants were acquired, and where they got planted, all left to a construction-grade memory corrupted by time (too little at any given moment; too much overall), maybe an electrical surge or two, and, of course, plenty of Guinness. My inner Patrick shrugs and wonders why anyone would worry about any of this when the result has been a green and growing garden in which one can wax poetic over a pint or two, while my inner Wilhelm storms off to holler at the dog.

The work space of a disorganized person.

Always within arm’s reach!

So it was with great joy that I recently exhumed a forgotten bucket of plant tags that I had squirreled away over several of my formative years. The result: a warm, pleasant immersion into nostalgia. Who remembers Etera? The name means what? To me, it sounded like an evil plot concocted by a Bond villain. But I bought a bunch of their reasonably priced plants. Came with steel name stakes that lasted in the garden–I still unearth them on occasion–and each plant came with its own little booklet with cultural information. Of course with so much front loaded expense, Etera was doomed from the start, but a good way to load up on plants while they lasted.

A tag from Eco Gardens reminded me of a story regarding that mail-order nursery. It was the nursery of legendary plantsman Don Jacobs. A friend and I combined on an order, but somehow, between us, we managed to drop the ball on payment for several months. Eventually this resulted in a card written in the shakey, elderly hand of Don himself pleading with us to pay. “Achtung!”shouted Wilhelm. Patrick immediately wrote a check, including an apologetic note full of silky words, flowery passages, and an at once lyrical and perplexing side narrative about potatoes. Meant to keep the card–it was, after all, an autograph of sorts–but, of course, one of us lost it.

Don Jacobs. Photo taken from the jacket of his book on Trillium.

Heronswood Nursery. I say the words with reverence. I bought so many plants from there. I might have one left. But I loved Heronswood, and, like so many others, took perverse pride in the number of my Heronswood failures. I went on a dream trip there for an open house with my friend Pete Zale back in the early 2000s. Dammit, I miss my friend Peter. We were best buds once. Both of us nobodies. Actually, I was a nobody. Him? He was a younger, better-looking nobody with a mind that could potentially make him a somebody. Why does time happen? Why do people move on? Now he has a PhD, travels the world tracking down plants, works for Longwood. Actually, I think he’s the owner of Longwood. Not sure though. He’s still a good friend. Usually answers my calls. But neither of us are really any good at staying in touch.

Peter Zale (far right), pre-PhD, at the gardens of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (Now Newfields).

The potager garden at Heronswood. Not really representative of the place, but the best and most accessible picture I have from that pre-digital age.

Anyway, Heronswood was the finest garden I’d ever seen, and I still count it as one of the best. But Hinkley moved on. Mail-order nurseries burn people out. The nursery mercifully closed pretty quickly after that. Without Dan’s guiding hand and beautifully written catalogs that introduced us to new, exotic, and oh-so tantalizing rare plants along with tales of the epic adventures that found them, the magic just disappeared. His prose was why everyone gambled on these gems. No one cared if they lost a plant from the mountains of Vietnam to an Ohio winter. Dependable garden performance was never the point. Thankfully, Heronswood, the garden, was eventually bought and resurrected by a non-profit.

Heronswood catalogs cost $5 and were the top selling item for the nursery. Used copies can be found on Ebay at around $80.

At the other end of the catalog-writing spectrum was (the late) Bob Stewart from Arrowhead Alpines in Michigan. Grammar? Spelling? Hell. His catalogs read like a loner’s manifesto. Rambling, opinionated, offensive, and, yet, for those of open mind, intelligence, and maybe a dash of imagination, informative and hilarious. In a completely different way these catalogs inspired gardeners to try things they otherwise wouldn’t. I killed a bunch of Daphnes because of him. I miss each and every one of them. And Bob.

Bob and Brigitta Stewart, photo taken from: https://ift.tt/2O0Aw7X

I met Bob and Brigitta on the second of two trips to the nursery. Because I’d read his catalogs, I was nervous, but they couldn’t have been more gracious! Spent so much time with my father and me. The ride home, however, was starkly unpleasant. My German side was just giving living hell to my Irish side. “We went to Arrowhead,” he shouted over and over, “and you bought a boxelder!” In fact, I had. It had beautiful blue bark. But the scolding quickly ended when my truck’s transmission burned up, and we–my father, a trailer-load of not hardened off plants, and both Patrick and Wilhelm–coasted to a stop at a forlorn and freezing exit outside of Piqua Ohio. The whole fam damily was mobilized in multiple sorties to eventually get us all home.

More tags from Woodlanders, Plant Delights, Oikos, Arbor Village, Roslyn, Forest Farm, Greer, and others reminded me of what a blessing it is for gardeners to have sources of rare and cool plants, and how much better we need to support these companies. They give us possibilities. They lure us into trying things we otherwise wouldn’t. This is–I’ll argue–for the greater good. Expanding ourselves is important, and certainly better than the alternative.

All this remembering and reflecting eventually got me thinking about my gardening journey. On the surface, so spontaneous, random, and Irish. So many different phases that got me from there to here—organic veggies, heirloom roses, alpines, Irises, natives, Asian maples, and more. Travels to great gardens and nurseries, drifting into new ideas, old friends, new friends, new associations, nights spent in questionable places, and nights at home poring over catalogs and websites. I’m so glad my Irish DNA dragged my German side into a forever meandering and widening delta of experiences.

Reminds me of tree branches in a way.  So remarkably random when you’re amongst them, but from a distance, a place of perspective, you can see they’re really not random at all. They have but one purpose: aim towards the light. And because they do, there’s growth.

This post is a re-write of a column that first appeared in Ohio Gardener Magazine in 2017. 

  The Randomness of Branches originally appeared on GardenRant on July 17, 2019.

from GardenRant https://ift.tt/32o5zxA

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interview

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Isabel del Rio

is a bilingual writer and linguist.  She was born in Madrid but has spent most of her life in London.  She has published fiction and poetry in both English and Spanish. Her books include La duda, shortlisted for two literary awards, and the bilingual Zero Negative–Cero negativo.  Her latest collections of short stories are Paradise & Hell and Una muerte incidental.  Among her poetry books are The Moon at the End of my Street and Ataraxy.  Her novels include Dissent, part of the trilogy Planet in Peril and El tiempo que falta.  She has worked as a full-time journalist and broadcaster for the BBC World Service, and as a full-time linguist for a UN agency in London.  Her poems have appeared in printed and online magazines, and her short stories have been translated.  She regularly takes part in poetry/prose readings and is an established performance and visual poet.  She is the co-founder of a new independent publishing venture, Friends of Alice Publishing.  Her website is:  http://www.isabeldelrio.com (it includes a selection of stories and poems in English and Spanish under the dropdowns ‘Stories’ and ‘Poetry’)

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

I started reading and writing at an early age.  I was especially encouraged when I realised what the purpose of writing was:  to be read.  My parents would read us all these wonderful tales when we were children −my father sometimes made stories up on the spot, something which I would later do with my own children.   I was also good at drawing, so I would write little stories and illustrate them.

My first serious poem was dedicated to my mother after her death.  I was barely an adolescent, and what I wrote was unbearably long and terribly sad.  Love lost, nostalgia, remembrance, darkness, tragedy were my subjects back then… and I suppose they still are now.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

I was exposed to poetry in two languages, English and Spanish, and I could not help but continuously compare the two.  I was always trying to establish the difference between what was poetic in English and what was poetic in Spanish, and would think about the different  rhythms, the distinctive subjects in each language, and so on.  As children, our mother would make us recite poetry and plays (mostly from the Golden Age of Spanish literature, i.e. 17th century).  Also, my grandmother knew many popular poems and songs and she would recite or sing them to us.  And then there were nursery rhymes at school, as well as reciting and singing with friends.

But I also loved to listen to people’s stories, which I found to be even more impactful because they were for real.  Most don’t realise that they sometimes say rather poetic things, and I was always on the look-out for an exciting line or a good story.  I remember when I was a young child and we went to visit a beautiful lake.  It was a group of parents and children.  We were standing in front of the lake, contemplating its beauty, and it suddenly became very quiet.  There was absolutely no sound coming from anywhere, the water was perfectly still, and no birds or insects could be heard.  And one of parents said: “Can you hear the silence?”  In my child’s mind I found that question to be both perplexing and beautiful, and I was entranced.  That sense of wonderment is most probably the source of all poetry, and we must never lose that sense.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

I do not consider older poets dominating literature so much as dominating language itself.  If you are to write, start at the beginning −find out how language was used by those who had no other medium but the written page to give expression to their thoughts and ideas.  In the case of contemporary poets, we have to be very familiar with the language of today:  social media, online publications, blogs and wikis, as well as all the visual incentives to express our views.  Technology has changed how we do it, yet we are not that different from poets and writers from long ago in what we do.  The sentiments are the same as those from centuries back.  Indeed, we have more words, more concepts, more innovations.  But back then, the richness of language, the complexity of expressions, the long and detailed descriptions were all unique, and young writers should resort to the classics to find out how it was done.  Recently I re-read two “classics” to refresh my memory (reading the classics truly puts you in your place!):  Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, with descriptions that stir universes as nothing today can;  and Frankenstein, in which despite its narrative flaws (let’s not forget that Mary Shelley was but 20 when she wrote it, though possibly aided by Shelley himself) the intricacies of the language are matchless.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

As a full-time writer, I normally work 3-4 hours in the morning and 4-5 hours in the afternoon.  I have been known to write late into the night, but I avoid that sort of thing because I need regularity for my sleep.  I wake up very early, at around 5 a.m., and read online papers (I am a news junkie!) and begin to get my ideas in order, or come up a few ideas for further development.  If I am in the middle of a story (which is usually the case), I think of speech or descriptions that I will type into Notes on my iPhone, or simply write on a post-it.

When I was working full-time as a linguist (for decades and until only a few years ago), I only had evenings and weekends and holidays to write, and yet I managed to do it regularly and produce a considerable amount of work.  Throughout the day I would send emails to my private email address if I had any ideas worth saving.  Even with a full-time job I was able to write.  You must want to write above all else!

But writing is not only about putting pen to paper.  Writers are involved in so many activities nowadays: readings, performances, presentations, launches, keeping up with their social media presence, and so on.  As a writer in two languages, I am also involved in Spanish-speaking literary groups, so I am extremely busy.  I translate literature as well, mostly poetry.  And I also run a small publishing company.  And let’s not forget that certain hours of the day have to be dedicated to living!

5. What motivates you to write?

I am motivated by a love of words, and the feats you can achieve solely with words.  But I am also pushed by the need to say what has to be said, especially at such volatile and uncertain times.  In a way, my life has been dedicated to words, and  I consider myself a language practitioner as I have worked in most language-related fields: broadcasting and journalism; writing, scriptwriting and screenwriting; literary and technical translation; lexicography and terminology; tutoring in writing and translation.

I certainly consider words to be sacred and they must not be taken lightly.  I use them sparingly and carefully, both in my writing and in everyday life.  There is also an element of plasticity in words: not only must words say exactly what you mean, but they must look good on the page.  Words are ultimately an art form.

6. What is your work ethic?

Persistence, dedication, commitment, sacrifice, keeping at it and never looking back despite setbacks, defying adversity, dealing with rejection (it took me a year to recover from my first rejection!), coping with the lack of interest by others.

As a writer you are always an outsider, and even fellow poets and writers do not always provide the support you need.  As to non-writers, many are not remotely interested in what poets have to go through nor in the sensitivity poets require in order to feel what is happening around them and not only see it.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

As both a poet and a fiction writer, my first serious fiction readings were of Guy de Maupassant’s stories, and in poetry I very much admired (and still do) Antonio Machado.  The list of writers that influenced me when young would be too long to mention.   When I write, I always have in my heart the first writers I ever read, and I must not forget that they were also my first teachers.

Also, I think one ultimately never changes.  Or let’s rephrase that, your sensitivity, largely responsible for your poetry, never changes.  As an example, I still consider my best poems to be those I wrote when very young.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

Again, it would be an endless list, and it would depend on the subject, genre, historical period and so on.  Let me just mention one poet: Don Paterson.   I find his aphorisms, for example, quite magnificent, the formal effortlessness concealing reflective complexity.   And one fiction writer:  Jorge Luis Borges, the master of short stories, as well as an exceptional poet.  In both cases, the philosophical content of the writing is as fundamental as the stories or the poems themselves.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

It has chosen me, I suppose.  Would I have chosen writing?  I probably would, but that’s because I can somehow and stubbornly deal with the struggles that come with the job −at least most of the time!

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

You need a good toolkit.  Words are your bricks, grammar is your mortar, you require a decent floor plan to know where you are going, and any embellishments will come from reading anything you can get your hands on.  And of course, you need an idea to write about.  And where do ideas come from?  Well, that remains a mystery, for they can crop up any time from places unknown.

And remember that  there is no such thing as inspiration, only hard work (and the sweat and tears that come with it!).

Writing is a simple enough recipe:  sit and write; then get up and walk around; then sit again and read what you have written;  do this twice, three times, or as many times as necessary until you get the required taste, look and feel;  stir and serve especially cold.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I am working on an autobiographical book of poems.  A bilingual memoir.  A spy novella.  And as always, lots and lots of short stories.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Isabel del Rio Wombwell Rainbow Interview I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.