apenchantforpedantry

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I pray that they are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, crying for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber…

Finished illustrations (and full page spread) for The Bloody Chamber. More illustrations for stories out of the anthology coming soon!

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If you'd still like questions, can you recommend me a reading order for Angela Carter's books? Are there any you particularly like? I've never read any of them and am not quite sure where to start!

I love this question, because it gives me an opportunity to complain about Angela Carter being reduced in popular knowledge to being only the author of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. I love The Bloody Chamber as much as the next gothy woman, and I do think in many cases it is a good entry point into her work, but it’s not the only thing she did, nor is especially representative. 

So you end up with Carter getting referred to as primarily a horror writer, or primarily an author who worked with fairy tales, when...if you’re saying that, you’re really just talking about The Bloody Chamber and that’s it.

In any case, with that brief rant out of the way - what I would suggest as a Carter entry point for you in particular is Wise Children, her final novel, which is about two elderly sisters, former showgirls, looking back on their lives in the theater and out of it. It is playful, triumphant, and densely fully of Shakespeare references. I think you’d love it.

The other two Carter novels which I think work well as entry points are:

The Magic Toyshop - Hoffman-esque Bildungsroman about a teenage girl getting tangled up in the machinations of a sinister puppeteer. This is the Carter novel which perhaps accords best with her Bloody Chamber-based reputation - it’s fantastical in a fairy tale-inspired way (though, again, much more Hoffman than Grimm) and about a young woman’s coming of age and trying to figure out her sexuality in a patriarchal world.

Nights at the Circus - a woman with wings performs in the circus, and a young reporter becomes obsessed with figuring out whether she is ‘real’ or ‘fake.’ Plays with unreliable narrators, constructing an identity, and gender as performative. A picaresque, but not so aggressively so as some of Carter’s earlier and more challenging to get into novels.

For people who have a lot of resistance to overtly fantastical elements, I might suggest Shadow Dance or Several Perceptions, but I think those readers are rare among people who are interested in engaging with Carter.

I love all the Carter works for different reasons, even the ones which with I have complicated engagements (hi Infernal Desire Machines and Passion of New Eve - also, I would not recommend starting with either of those). 

The ones I have particularly claimed as my favorites to privately champion are relatively unpopular - Heroes and Villains, a mid-period semi dystopian novel that is writing against anthropology in general and Claude Levi-Strauss in particular, dissecting ideas about civilization, ritual, and authenticity, and her very late and nearly unknown short story “The Scarlet House,” which is her most direct fictional engagement with Sade, about trauma and the dissolution of the self through the story of a young woman captive in a tarot-inspired libertine prison where she is losing her memory. Both of these have very substantial sexual violence content in particularly Carterian ways, and I don’t think they’d be the best entry points.

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Given all the Shakespeare references in Pale Fire, I can’t help wondering whether Nabokov meant to allude to Richard II in some of Kinbote’s narrative. In the note to Line 62, we have:

“…two Queens, three Kings, and fourteen pretenders died violent deaths, strangled, stabbed, poisoned…”

Cf. R2 3.2:

“For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground

And tell sad stories of the death of kings:

How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,

Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,

All murdered.”

Later in the same note: “…the relentlessly advancing assassins who were in me, in my eardrums, in my pulse, in my skull, rather than on that constant highway looping up over me and around my heart…”

Cf. R2 3.2 again:

“…for within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp…”

And also 3.3:

“Or I’ll be buried in the king’s high way,

Some way of common trade, where subjects’ feet

May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;

For on my heart they tread now whilst I live…”

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Have I ever shown you guys these weird late 80s Soviet Lord Of The Rings illustrations?

They were made by Sergei Iukhimov, who’s virtually unknown otherwise.

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For recs: could you list favourite fantasy novels published more than 15 years ago?

Was curious to see what happened if I limited this to stand-alone novels, so here's that list first:

Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Pamela Dean, Tam Lin

Jane Candas Dorsey, Black Wine

Greer Gilman, Cloud & Ashes

Angélica Gorodischer, Kalpa Imperial

Ellen Kushner, Thomas the Rhymer

Tanith Lee, Vivia

Tanith Lee, Volkhavaar

Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake

Patricia A. McKillip, The Tower at Stony Wood (a different McKillip might actually better belong here, but give me some time to reread some more of them. Her quality is really quite consistent, though)

Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide

Then series with all existing volumes published more than 15 years ago:

Lloyd Alexander, The Chronicles of Prydain

Octavia Butler, Patternmaster

Samuel R. Delaney, Return to Nevérÿon

Rosemary Kirstein, The Steerswoman

Tanith Lee, Tales from the Flat Earth

Tamora Pierce, The Circle of Magic

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

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"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

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i dont like to comment or respond to people/posts that i find annoying or stupid because i enjoy having a good time on the internet that i have carefully and painstakingly curated but also because my instinctive response to them are kys right now and i think that’s bad and unbecoming of me

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i feel like 90% of adaptations don't justify their own existence. And the types of adaptations that fans of the source material like and the types of adaptations that production companies like to make are both some of the worst most pointless ones imaginable

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JSTOR for those of us who stupidly forgot to use your resources for personal research while enrolled in college classes, what can we do??? Google isn’t enough especially with the en 💩 ification of the 2020s

Here are a few options!

Check with your school's library to determine whether or not they offer alumni access.

Check with your local public library to see if they offer JSTOR access. Sometimes they offer on-site access, sometimes remote.

If you register for a personal account, you can read a limited number of articles per month for free!

We offer individual subscriptions under JPASS, with monthly or annual plans.

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at the end of the day i think the online digital artist community has for a very long time operated on a set of like unspoken handshake rules generally enforced by social pressure which (despite being positioned on a moral & pseudolegal plane) have very little overlap with what is legal or illegal (de facto or de jure) but which have Everything to do with figuring The Artist as a universal would-be petit bourgeois auteur, reflected through these rules' emphasis on (1) the moral necessity of The Artist's unwavering & eternal power over their own art (& its reception) as articulated via informal pseudo-IP mechanisms (no reposting, dont tag as me/kin/id, dont use as your pfp, dont draw my oc), (2) the moral mandate toward Constant Self-Improvement (generally meaning adopting more of the conventional signifiers of "Good Art" eg realism) (admonition of "tracing" even for practice, artists who do things that are "not conducive to improvement" being fair game for mockery), & (3) attempting to induce in observers (often through guilt) a social pressure to further the ambitions of such artists ("you need to reblog/share, not just like", "you MUST commission 1 million artists immediately", "it's rude to express anything other than praise for any piece of art")

like these all (in tandem with SEO etc) boil down to attempting to lay the groundwork for an imagined future state of self-employment emanating out of one's (semi-)hobbyist artistry (& to obstruct anything perceived as interfering with that fantasy or its actuation). it's sort of like hiring a team of accountants on the assumption that youre going to win the lottery someday, like if it were in another context we'd effortlessly recognize it for the meritocratic grindset shit that it is. & none of this is even remotely conducive to the production of good art lmao

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caught up with witch hat atelier today and cried like, every other panel. im so damn unwell about this manga.

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anyway I think “saving chloe” is the wrong/bad ending because it contradicts the entire story of LiS.

LIS for me is “what if you love someone so much you invented time reversal to save them and you do it again and again until you realize that you cannot play god forever and delude yourself into thinking you’re good and noble for that, because in the midst of your selfish, destructive grief you’ve hurt and violated a lot of people even with the best of intentions. so when the time comes and you understand your (lack of) power you look at the ghost that is Chloe (because chloe has been dead all along, she is just haunting the narrative) and you let her go. because some people, no matter how wonderful they are, no matter how much you love them, belong in the past”

saving Chloe just negates all of that for me 🤷‍♀️ it’s not really about Arcadia bay it just makes narrative sense for Max as a character and the story in general.

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Recently unlocked a chicken sandwich recipe so good that when I said I'd make it for lunch today my gf responded by making out with me passionately

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a lord and his knight

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look. look at this beautiful sword meme. i’m going to cry

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I made this Icelandic home cooking thing yesterday for the first time that is just called "bread meal" and jesus it is OBSCENELY GOOD because it is just Bread and soft cheese

350g bread

onion

vegetable: I used about 1.5 cups of miscellaneous mixed frozen vegetables, plus the same of little peppers, mushrooms, whatever

leek

ham or bacon or another fatty meat

250 ml heavy cream

idk if other countries have "spreading cheese" but I am sure a typical block of cream cheese would work, that or camembert

another type of cheese that you enjoy eating partially melted

can of asparagus

crushed crackers and/or shredded cheese

preheat oven to 180c/350. cook onions until translucent, take off heat. you can either fry the leek/cook down the mushrooms or put them in with the cheese sauce, depends on how squishy you want things. fry off meat if that's what you want (you can use deli ham for this which you don't need to cook). chop vegetables. pour the heavy cream in the same pot as cream cheese and stir over medium heat until the cream cheese is kinda melted a little, enough to move with a spatula but not thin. add the vegetables for a few minutes so they're at least defrosted and softened. take off heat. cut your secondary cheese into thin chunks or strips. tear up the bread into bite-sized chunks and stir into the melted cream cheese. add secondary cheese and meat. toss until the bread has soaked up the majority of the cheese sauce. place in casserole dish or if you are like me and forgot that your former roommates technically owned the casserole dish and you have been needing to get one for months, a springform pan. half-drain the can of asparagus and pour over the bread, evening out as necessary. spread the crushed crackers and/or shredded cheese over the top. bake for 30ish minutes or until the bread is toasted to your liking. snarf. you can add whatever savory Flavors you want and i'm sure this would be good with, like, dried cranberries, i just did black pepper because i was afraid of fucking it up

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All of my main 4 bordered prints