#Extracts

[zzzzzzen]

- Franz kafka, letters to milena ( November, 1920 )

[serratedpens]

Alex Bortell, "Jacob Wrestles with the Angel"

[sekaidoripng]

[theholmwoodfoundation]

INCIDENT REPORT Document Number HF-97-0211 Dated August 5th 1997 RESEARCHER’S NOTE: The below document has been altered to accurately describe the persons’ involved current identities. On the request of upper management, names have also been redacted, due to the severity of the incident.

What are you reporting?: Injury to Civilians, Damage to Property, Containment Breach. When did it happen?  Afternoon of August 4th. Where did it happen: LWB. Basement Level. Cold Storage. Witnesses:  JH and PVH did not witness all of the event, but did arrive near the end to stop the breach with the Extraction Team. Who was involved:  Two children, 15 and 11. What happened: Two children entered the Cold Storage area, which is off limits to all civilians. [REDACTED] knocked into one of the Asset Containment Pods, waking Asset Six from her comatose state and causing her to break out of her containment. She attacked both children. This event was caught on CCTV, and an Extraction Team was able to intervene before she could cause any further damage to the room, or to the children. The youngest, [REDACTED], reports that he became lost in the building, that [REDACTED] went looking for him, and that it was his fault the incident occurred. However, [REDACTED] has been made aware on multiple occasions that Cold Storage is off limits and should not have allowed his younger cousin to indulge in exploring the Westenra building. Was there any injury to account for: [REDACTED]’s chest was severely lacerated. He was taken to hospital for assessment, but the damage is mostly cosmetic. [REDACTED] sustained a large cut across his right arm, which has been tended to by one of our medics on standby. Actions going forward: -THF will cover any private medical costs for [REDACTED], with the proviso that he is never allowed to enter the Westenra building again. -The Asset Pods will be evaluated for any future sleep disturbance.  -All Asset Containment Pods will be assessed for further ‘wear and tear’. - This will not be allowed to happen again.  Form completed by: JH

[2x55]

[marejadilla]

“… To be alive, yes, alive, but not be able to live. Ay that's the rub. I am like a stone that lives… locked outside of all that's real… … to talk behind a gray foggy wall, to live but to not reach or to reach wrong . . . to do it all wrong ... believe me, (can you?)... what's wrong…” ― Anne Sexton, "A Self-Portrait in Letters", (extracts)

[somerabbitholes]

Take My Name But Say It Slow, Thomas Dai

[daurnut]

My roman empire is that no one is perfect. That everyone is too busy dealing with their own insecurity to notice yours. That person who you think is perfect is equally battling his own demons and is just as insecure as you are.

There's comfort in knowing that you're not alone, that everyone is just trying to survive too

[justforbooks]

‘Books picked me up on bad days’: how reading romance helped Lucy Mangan through grief

After the death of her father, the writer took refuge in the kinds of stories she had once written off – discovering a comforting world of funny heroines and happy endings

Grief is an intensifier. It doesn’t often – despite what films and television would have you believe – cause you to act massively out of character. Like motherhood or any other huge life upheaval, its actual effect is to strip away the nonsense and leave your essential nature, your core, not just intact but now unobscured by everyday concerns and frivolities.

So it was no real surprise to find myself, in the immediate weeks after the death of my beloved dad in 2023, flinging myself into books. I would have done so literally, if I could. I wanted to gather my physical books into a wall – or better yet, a cave – around me that would both protect me from this new reality and let me cry in peace within it. Failing that, I took mental refuge in them instead.

I read like I had never read before. I read like a chain smoker smokes, turning the last page of one book and immediately opening up the cover of another. I had books lined up before me to make sure I didn’t go a moment without. None of my usual leisurely picking and choosing, reading blurbs and reviews, feeling my way into what would best suit my mood. Because my mood was simple, uniform and deeply miserable, and what I needed was new stories and characters ceaselessly streaming into my cortex and banishing, for as many seconds at a time as they could, the fact that outside those pages the unforgiving real world no longer had the gentle, wry, witty form of my dad in it.

Every moment that I was not inescapably occupied (with work, with Mum, with making sure life carried on as normally as possible for my son), I was reading. And when I was vitally occupied, I was longing to read, burning to in a way I hadn’t properly felt since I was a child. It felt so odd to have arrived at the same place via sorrow, rather than joy. Adulthood sure can be the pits sometimes.

Anyway it was all odd, and difficult, and my heart goes out to people grieving harder and more complicated losses than that of an elderly father who went peacefully, and on his own terms, when it was absolutely time to go.

The retreat from the world didn’t last as long as I had expected. I felt at first like I would be floored for ever. But now – and I’m writing this six months later – I spend a lot of the time feeling bad that I don’t feel worse in the absence of this man whom I, quietly but unreservedly, loved so much, who knew me so well and who loved me, even more quietly but just as unreservedly, right back. But it’s because I still feel him with me – which, as someone with no religious faith and no goddamn spiritual side either, I really did not expect. But he’s there. Or it’s there; or something’s there anyway. I do really feel, as the poem has it, that he has only gone into the next room. Mum says it’s because we are so much alike. This evolution of the exasperated cry “You’re exactly like your father!”, when she found me next to some set chore abandoned because I’d been distracted by a book, which pursued me throughout my childhood, both charms and aggrieves me. But I hold on to the idea that it’s true.

And I have discovered romance. Not in real life, obviously. Yuck. But the genre, once forsworn, is now very necessary to me. Once I stopped feeling quite like I would be floored for ever, I started being drawn towards books with light, bright covers that promised distraction, an uplift and – above all – a happy ending. I realise this is not a psychologically complex phenomenon. But however obvious the route, the comfort they offered was real and wonderful. Especially as the first three I came across – Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, Stephanie Butland’s Lost for Words and Harriet Evans’s Happily Ever After – were all about the world of books, bookworms and bookshops, and formed the perfect bridge to cross into this new, unexplored region.

There also seemed to have been, in the 20-odd years since I had last surveyed the landscape, a move away from the ditsy/hot-mess heroines that sprang up post-Bridget Jones. The new generation of protagonists all had their problems – particularly Loveday Cardew, whose emotional withdrawal after her repeated battering by life is carefully and compassionately depicted by Butland and further explored, with great consistency and credibility, in the sequel Found in a Bookshop – but they weren’t chaotic collections of neediness and neuroses held together by the offices of devoted friends, who in real life would have been well within their rights to have deleted these succubi from their phones years ago. They were properly funny, properly thoughtful, capable – often even maintaining professional standards day in, day out at the office! – and generally life-affirming, rather than life-depleting, people to hang out with. I felt like introducing them to some of the longsuffering best friends in earlier books. “Look, this is what you deserve! Enjoy!”

It was a reminder – though I do try to stay aware of it anyway – never to write off any field, any genre, for ever, for the simple reason that even if it doesn’t evolve (and sometimes, as with the hot messes above, it does), you do. You toughen up a bit here, break down a bit there, learn this, rediscover that, have children, have cancer, move jobs, move countries, are opened up to more experiences, more possibilities, live through more world events, governments, relationships, McDonald’s menus, Kardashian exploits and iterations of the Strictly Come Dancing panel – all these things change you and change what you need, what you want and what you bring to previously discarded books, when you pick them up again.

Romantic/popular/commercial fiction, whatever you want to call it, picked me up on bad days, brushed me down and sent me off again with a loving pat to get through the next few hours, days, weeks until I collapsed back into its arms. It’s a trust fall. The writers of commercial fiction know their audience, are often part of that audience (Evans is a lifelong fan of Georgette Heyer, for example, and I suspect none has come to the job without an early affinity with the genre and an absorption of its rules, both the obvious and the ineffable, into their bones) and consider it their duty to deliver. I think of them now like a quieter, more studious version of the A-Team, except that if you have a problem, if no one else can help (or if you have soaked all the available shoulders with tears and need to give them a bit of time to dry out), you can always find them, these soldiers of romantic fortune.

And when I need further bolstering – when, for example, I reach that stage of grief everyone passes through at some point, where it starts to feel absolutely infuriating that your loved one is still dead, when you have missed them quite enough, they have proved that their absence really is a bad thing and it really is time that they came back, because carrying on like this is too hard, really beyond a joke – I stop buying new books and look to my library shelves. Not just the children’s section, though of course that is where any number of my strongest and favourite memories of Dad reside.

But Dad is there in adult books too. Murphy’s Boy by Torey Hayden was my first ever true-life tale. I tried to buy it after seeing the film based on it (Trapped in Silence, starring Marsha Mason and a very young Kiefer Sutherland, fact-fans), about a neglected child who refused to speak or communicate via other means in the wake of his abuse and was eventually “saved” by psychologist Hayden, who specialised in the phenomenon of elective mutism. It could be seen as a forerunner of the misery memoir, but, like most forerunners of popular trends, it is much better than the thing it became. It wasn’t available in England at the time, so Dad asked one of his American friends to buy it for me and, when she handed it over next time she visited, I literally could not believe it.

There’s also Grace Metalious’s proto-bonkbuster Peyton Place, reminding me of when I was seven or eight and first heard Jeannie C Reilly sing Harper Valley PTA. I had to take the line “Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and you’re all Harper Valley hypocrites” to Dad for elucidation, and he told me all about this very famous and bestselling book, which I pledged to myself I would read as soon as I was old enough. I forgot about it until I came across a battered copy in The Brazen Head bookshop in Norfolk and pounced. It was even better than the song.

The run of Philip Roth reminds me of one of our rare disagreements. I was home for the university holiday and Dad came across me reading the newly published American Pastoral. This was just after he had read Claire Bloom’s memoir Leaving a Doll’s House, in which she details her long relationship with the volatile, controlling and verbally abusive author. Dad felt that, at the very least, I should read his books in the light of this knowledge; or, maybe, choose not to read them at all. I, at 20, felt that I could – and should – separate the man from the art.

More upliftingly, I spy Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent – a complex, gentle, yet sinuous story about a woman freed by her violent older husband’s death to start life anew. She moves to the Essex marshes to follow her long-denied interest in palaeontology and give her autistic son the peace and freedom he needs. Her scientific mind finds a strange resonance with the local rector’s attempts to stop the village community turning from God to the supernatural when it appears that the monstrous folkloric serpent has returned to the marshes. I read it, loved it and passed it to Dad. It’s a book about all the different forms of love there can be, and how they enrich a life in different ways. When he returned it, he said he had thought it as wonderful as I did. I told him that some reviewers – perhaps because you don’t at any point actually get a scene in which a giant sea monster rises out of the waters and lays waste to a village – had dismissed it as a bit of a book about nothing. “But,” he said, frowning, “it’s about everything.” And that is why I loved him, and that is how he enriched my life too.

🔴 This is an extract from Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan, published by Square Peg on 13 March.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[zzzzzzen]

Suck it up, suck it up Give up the rest to be the best

- zzzzzzen

[serratedpens]

"Ancestors" by Ekhmetjan Osman, translated by Joshua L. Freeman

[sekaidoripng]

Project Sekai: The Movie! x 25-ji nightcord, de. @sekaitransparents

[theholmwoodfoundation]

LETTER Letter from Mina Harker to Arthur Holmwood.  12th June 1899

Dearest Arthur,  I understand this must be one of a hundred different letters you have received and are expected to read today. You need not send a reply, as I am sure we will correspond again very soon. Final preparations are under way in Whitby, and I believe with all fullness that our new guest – “Asset One” as I believe the technicians have named her, a moniker I am only half-heartedly allowing until we discover her true name– can be properly monitored and cared for without our facility.  Now we know we are capable of finding and containing these poor souls, I wish to have it down in writing my intentions for them, and for our Foundation. We must treat every vampire we acquire with kindness. That alone is my utmost priority. I believe that you, Arthur, will understand this better than anyone.  These…creatures, if we must call them such, were once human beings. With work and greater understanding, they may be returned to their state of humanity, as indeed such grace was extended to myself before it was too late. If this is proven impossible, then we may keep them contained and safe, well cared for as long as we and our Foundation are able. With our combined efforts, we have been granted the greatest of opportunities, Arthur; to right the wrongs inflicted upon both ourselves and our loved ones. We may not have been able to save Mr Morris, Lucy, or my poor Jonathan, but we can strive with all we have to save these unfortunate souls.  That is the most we can do, with the precious time we have left in this world.  All my love,  Mina

Letter transcribed, stored in the Godalming Archives, London

[entailglobal]

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[marejadilla]

"I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it. I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor. I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. (…) The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate. I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant. I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people. Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it. For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror.” ― Robert Crumb, "The litany of hatred", (The R. Crumb Handbook) (Extracts) ---->Full text