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Rob @bobbimac.

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underrated threesome dynamic of herding dog x lamb x wolf

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one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction, particularly historical fiction, is when a girl/woman can defend herself against all period-accurate misogyny with only the power of her Sassy Quips. men sexually harassing you? No problem! Throw out a Sassy Quip and they'll be so Mindboggled that they'll stand there slack-jawed and let you skip on your merry way. yes this is definitely how it works IRL lol, men definitely care what you have to say and never resort to physical violence to exert power

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No no no, not a modern au, a modernist au. Your favourite characters are hanging around Tammany Hall, getting coked up in Weimar Berlin, and dying as martyrs for socialism on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War. They write stream of consciousness novels, direct avant garde cinema, and debate the merits of social criticism as a mode of revolutionary thought. Progress is celebrated, industry is glorified, and art is politicized. History becomes the titanic struggle between nations, races, or classes. Everywhere they go, everyone knows that a war of apocalyptic magnitude is coming but no one is willing to admit it. Worse still, the most prescient among them know that the conflagration on the horizon isn’t truly going to be the end. War will come and war will go, but the ideas and behaviours that make it inevitable will remain etched in the hearts of men who’ve killed the divine and constructed themselves as its replacement. They warn and no one will listen. The band will strike a jaunty tune and your faves will dance and drink and die. The coffee shops and florists and offices will become symbols of an ideology that strains under its own imperial ambitions until it breaks against the shore of history. In the modernist au, framing alone damns your blorbos to either be Kassandra or Agamemnon. Whether knowing or ignorant, the spectre of death looms over them regardless. You cannot write a happy ending to the modernist au because everyone already knows where modernism ends.

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there is a level of seduction that exists beyond the body. something less tangible, and perhaps more potent. anais nin understood this idea about how desire does not begin with touch but with language, perception, and the sharp electric pull of a mind that challenges and excites you. in her journals, desire is not just a physical hunger but a hunger of the intellect, an unraveling of thought before an unraveling of the body. to be drawn into someone’s mind, to feel their thoughts press against your own, can be more intoxicating than any physical closeness.

—Caitlyn Richardson, 'can intellectual intimacy replace physical desire?', in milk fed

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just sitting by myself thinking about his silver white beard stained with her menstrual blood

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Spike&Drusilla in Crush

“This is Drusilla, girl! Do you have the slightest idea what she means to me? It’s the face of my salvation. She delivered me from mediocrity. For over a century, we cut a swath through continents. A hundred years, she never stopped surprising me. Never stopped taking me to new depths. I was a lucky bloke. Just to touch such a black beauty.”

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Appetite.*｡⁠*ﾟ⁠+*⁠.⁠✧

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July Reading

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin ☆☆☆☆ Plays and Petersburg Tales, Nikolai Gogol ☆☆☆☆ Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev ☆☆☆☆ Just the Plague, Lyudmila Ulitskaya ☆☆ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ☆☆☆☆ War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy ☆☆☆☆ Moscow Stations, Venedikt Erofeev ☆☆

Hey, remember when I said I was going to finish off my Russian lit streak with War and Peace? That was a lieeeee

Thoughts below, full reviews on my goodreads

We, Yevgeny Zamyatin ☆☆☆☆

Genuinely kind of appalling that Orwell’s 1984 gets all the credit when We got there first. Gorgeous prose, a genuine treatment of totalitarian living that far surpasses its many more weaker descendants.

Plays and Petersburg Tales, Nikolai Gogol ☆☆☆☆

Well, it’s Gogol, what can you say? I’m not big on short stories or reading plays so this wasn’t my favourite reading experience, but these provide deeply clever and funny satires on Petersburg life.

Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev ☆☆☆☆

Enjoyed this far more than the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy I've read recently. Vivid characters making vividly stupid decisions, and I love them for it.

Just the Plague, Lyudmila Ulitskaya ☆☆

Honestly feel kind of scammed by this one? Presented as a “fiction” but it turns out it’s not a novel but a screenplay in prose form. And it’s not very good. Two stars because there are a couple of super promising ideas in this but nothing is developed. This was obviously published to cash in on the pandemic and should have stayed in a drawer.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ☆☆☆☆

I can’t meaningfully critique stories of intense suffering based on real life experiences. This never hurt me the way that Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man did, but that’s high competition. Important work.

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy ☆☆☆☆

It’s Okay I Guess. Yes, it's astoundingly ambitious. There are a few striking passages. It rarely touched me emotionally. I need to return to AK and remind myself why I like Tolstoy.

Moscow Stations, Venedikt Erofeev ☆☆

This novel has a strong conceit and I was hooked for the first few pages, but it shows its cards too soon and then doesn’t have much else to do. This would be three stars if I found the jokes funny but it’s just not my style of humour.

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not allowed to say Harry Potter, but what was your book series obsession as a teen

mine was definitely Eragon

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trenzo mis pensamientos para que el viento no se los lleve; que de mis raíces nacen zarzas, no flores

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One of the things I love about post-canon eversnow living-in-isolation scenarios is what happens to this poor teenage girl who had to be so self-reliant and callous in order to survive. A girl who has starved and fought and lived in desperation for years. And finally she's free of all responsibility. Now she's got this weird old man who looks after her. So she can finally relax. Take up reading fantasy novels. Watch trashy TV. Sleep in late and swim and sunbathe for hours. She can finally live the life of an almost-carefree young girl, the life she was so long denied (by him).

And the funny other half of this is that President Snow, the man who became infatuated with a violent Joan d'Arc who wanted to kill him, is now just kind of stuck babysitting this normal happy teenager. And he's still utterly in love.

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Feminism isn't about doing whatever feels good and fuels your specific personal interests btw sometimes you do in fact have to change how you think and behave

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ok this is a really cute expression tho

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GAME OF THRONES, 2.07 "A Man Without Honor"

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Currently reading: The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

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my love language is a violent immortal with no soul falling so in love with me that he completely changes himself for the better and worships the ground i walk on