whatwakes

[whatwakes]

1 wife/1 scene/1 episode → Katherine Of Aragon (Episode 3, Season 1)

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me gazing out into the ocean: sure is some scary soup

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you’re fine as long as you pretend they’re not there

ig // ko-fi

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monstricidal replied to your post: Kitty Valentine thanks you for being a...

Kitty Valentine would also like to emphasize her pointy monster teeth and her sharp murder claws and the fact that she occasionally RUNS ON ALL FOURS, KAREN.

[whatwakes]

Kitty Valentine thanks you for being a monsterfucker.

          “You’re always trying to convince me you’re something you’re not, Kitty. A dog, a monster. I think I’m going to have to stop listening to you.”

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there are only two genders: monster fuckers and cowards

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it calls to you from the vacant lot

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take the test as your muse repost, don’t reblog

Warmth      ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||      86% Intellect      |||||||||||||||||||||      66% Emotional Stability      |||||||||||||||||||||      66% Aggressiveness      |||||||||||||||      42% Liveliness      |||||||||      26% Dutifulness      |||||||||||||||      46% Social Assertiveness      |||||||||||||||||||||      62% Sensitivity      ||||||||||||||||||||||||      74% Paranoia      |||||||||||||||     50% Abstractness      |||||||||||||||||||||      66% Introversion      ||||||||||||||||||      58% Anxiety      |||||||||||||||||||||      70% Openmindedness      |||||||||||||||||||||      66% Independence      |||||||||||||||      50% Perfectionism      ||||||||||||||||||      58% Tension      |||||||||||||||      50%

tagged by: stolen from @dykeanthrope tagging: Steal. The. Meme.

[whatwakes]

Dublin actress Maria Doyle Kennedy is back on RTE screens and ready to make her mark on legal drama Striking Out as a criminal solicitor with a “sharp mind” and “even sharper tongue”.

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me at HPL constantly: what the fuck is UP, howard. step the FUCK UP,

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The dramatic tension which Lovecraft creates and sustains through his careful balancing of the implications for human beings of pursuing to the extreme either of these two responses is a major factor in the success of these stories. On the one hand, those who seek to be “as the Great Old Ones” are shown to be deluded, barbaric, depraved--less than human in all respects save one: the superhuman transports of emotional delight in which their delusion enables them to indulge together. Those who, by contrast, have “looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror” with unblinking clarity are by virtue of their extraordinary perception set intellectually far above the ignorant mass of humanity, and stand nobly at the forefront of the forces of civlisation: yet their knowledge tends to render them emotional cripples, estranged from their fellows, suicidally depressed and nervously debilitated to the point of insanity. While the “cultist” sacrifices integrity of mind to a collective delusion, trading his sense of discrete identity for participation in an ecstatic dream, the “investigator” preserves integrity of mind by independently renouncing all sense of belonging in the cosmos, holding fast to an understanding of his place in the scheme of things whose price is alienation from a reality more starkly unsympathetic than his fellows can comprehend. Either the intellect or the emotions must be denied; the individual is either devoured utterly by dream, or exiled eternally from it.

Simon MacCulloch, “Lovecraft Waits Dreaming.” In Dissecting Cthulhu: Essays on the Cthulhu Mythos, ed. S.T. Joshi, Miskatonic River Press, 2011.

[whatwakes]

the book of essays i received for christmas was dissecting cthulhu: essays on the cthulhu mythos, ed. s.t. joshi, miskatonic river press, 2011. i’ll say this for it... it sure Does What The Title Says. a good portion of the book is devoted to seminal essays from previous decades of lovecraft scholarship, specifically those debunking the work of august derleth, the man who congealed lovecraft’s disparate scraps of worldbuilding into a single mass, slapped a lame christian analogy onto it, and named it the “cthulhu mythos”--then quite successfully passed his own sloppy pastiche off as the work of Howard Poward himself.

the majority of essays collected in the book are, i’d say, interesting or worthwhile reads. especially fun to read are the Brutal Takedowns of derleth and other pretenders to the HPL throne--never, for example, have i read a more thrilling assessment of massachusetts geography than in robert d. marten’s “arkham country: in rescue of the lost searchers,” an article specifically written to academically suplex a wannabe lovecraft country geographer. there are, as in any collection of works, disappointments--jason c. eckhardt’s “cthulhu’s scald: lovecraft and the nordic tradition” felt a bit, how you say... Weaksauce to me, especially since it’s one of the very few essays in the book that attempts to argue for a coherent lovecraft mythos (in this case, one that parallels nordic mythology). considering how unbelievably slight the actual presence of such beings as cthulhu, etc. is in lovecraft’s authentic works, i’m not sure how you could argue that Octopus Man is a deliberately crafted parallel to odin.

the book also has a generally blind eye to... pretty much every single one of HPL’s faults. if you’re familiar with any other work involving s.t. joshi’s scholarship then U Know How It Is. i have to say it got pretty tiring to read fawning lines about lovecraft’s genius without a single word about how heavily his conception of the world, as put forth in his work, relied on racism and xenophobia. similarly there isn’t an ounce of critique about his highly questionable treatment of gender--not even a single one of those fake asides scholars will use to briefly acknowledge and then brush away problematic elements in their material so they don’t have to deal with it. in none of the essays! there are 22 of them! plus an introduction!

part of it may be the homogeneity of the material. it may just be the (i would imagine) small size of the scholarly lovecraft community, but there are several authors with multiple essays included--i count 5 by robert m. price (almost 1/4th of the total essays in the book!), 3 by will murray, and other repeats. if you choose writers that aren’t interested in criticizing their chosen material on the lines of gender or race, and then collect multiple of their works in one volume, well. not a single anti-racist critique will be had. And No One Was Shocked.

for $20, is it the worst piece of garbage on my shelf? absolutely not. and if you’re into lovecraft criticism, i’d say Go To Town--even after reaching what i thought was my Limit on new insights into the ol Providence Gentlenerd himself, many of these essays made analytical points that surprised and intrigued me. but just be aware that this is definitely a first step into lovecraft criticism, and not the only step you should take.

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to do list

review book i got for christmas because apparently now im your local source for Howard Poward Criticism i just decided

post compelling excerpts from said book

fuck around

be gay

drink some water

      roleplay  maybe ? :\ is this a roleplay blog?

[whatwakes]

godblooded.

What she wishes to say is I hate being like this. What she wishes to say is I must be punished for the things I’ve done. What she wishes to say is You may hate it, but I deserve it. I just wish there was a way to make it stop. There is not. She must suffer for what she’s done. For what she has been. She must always suffer for these things, because they are the things that MAKE HER WHO SHE HAS BEEN. It makes no difference whether or not she has chosen this.

Kitty loves with such horrible ease, but the word itself is terrible and she will not use it. To be loved by her is to be damned, she knows this. She opens her mouth to consider words.

“Am an aminal,” She says, quite calmly, and fingertips, gloved and soft, brush just beneath a chin, “Gotta be punished f’r what I do same way y’discipline’uh dog.”

As though she, herself, would ever do such a thing.

(She would not.)

“Ain’t im-por-tant,” Her voice is soft when she traces along a jaw, “dun’t even hurt.”

          This feels like the worst. Of all the things Karen has seen and heard, she can finally say that she knows--this is the worst of them all.

          “Oh, Kitty,” she says. “Oh, no.” She blinks and the tears hovering on her lashes spill over. “No, that’s not true.” She reaches for her gloved hand and squeezes it between her own, tighter than she would if she could stop herself, searching Kitty’s gaze, looking into those black-seeming eyes, black-seeming but not: they’re forest eyes, eyes like moss, like deep, rich, algal ponds which shimmer dark and green and alive. It doesn’t seem impossible to Karen--more than that, it seems more possible than anything, more true than anything--that like those black pools, which veil their real color, Kitty might be veiled, too--might be hidden enough to fool you--even to fool herself: on the outside, terrible, violent... An animal. But on the inside? Karen knows she’s a person. She knows Kitty deserves so much more.

          (And because it’s Karen, she will never, ever think that the reverse might be true. That the outside, the veil, the disguise, is the person; that inside, where the truth is, is the animal.)

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You sell your soul to God. Instead of having bliss in life and then damnation, you life a life of utter misery and then go to Heaven when you die.

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         Karen loves so easily, and she hates herself for it. She loves at a word, a touch, a glance; loves instantly, passionately, even the things that cannot or will not love her back.

         She’s scared to learn which of those Kitty might be, so she doesn’t talk about love. Doesn’t talk about her own feelings much, if at all. Everything she feels she squirrels away to feed on later, in moments of loneliness, when the time has to come that Kitty leaves her, too. She’ll relish the sweetness of her unspoken tenderness. She’ll make sure unspoken is how it always stays.

         But Karen is as opaque as a window and forgets that feelings don’t need words to be expressed. See how her eyes fill with tears instantly at the sight of the wound in Kitty’s belly; how even as she moves back and forth across the kitchen of the farmhouse, her watery gaze keeps darting to the healing cut, as though there were anything she could do to fix it, as if it weren’t already fixing itself.

         She can’t help it. Before long, she kneels to Kitty, as she might to a hurt child. She has a coffee cup, too, steaming to coldness on the table--forgotten. Everything forgotten. “What can I do?” She’s painfully earnest. “I hate seeing you like this.”

@whatwakes

She will always come to you in pieces. It is a promise the universe tells itself, a story that is UTTERED over and over with the concrete understanding that this is who she is. Today she will come to you in one part, torn asunder at the midsection, a hard rending straight across her belly. It heals, closes, is closing. The line is long, jagged, looks as serrated as it feels. But she could move like she DOES NOT FEEL IT AT ALL. What concern is it? What does it matter?

This soft black shirt, gentle to the touch, worn, spattered with blood. It’s old as an age itself. Worn denim, ripped at the knees, the thighs, black as everything else on her. A splotch of a bruise splattered across her right cheek. She looks up from her mug of coffee, the one she drinks without purpose. The deep SLICE across her midriff falls in shadow when she leans, bloodied at the edges.

Her eyes stay up, follow Karen as she moves.