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still listening to The Secret History audiobook. If I took a shot every time I heard the exact phrase “lit a cigarette,” I’d be even more of an alcoholic than most of the characters.

little dark academia dark humor for you.

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The Secret History Theory: The Wasp at Bunny's Funeral

okay so when I read The Secret History for the first time, one of the images that stood out to me most was the wasp at Bunny's funeral. There's a wasp buzzing near Richard, Charles, and Camilla at the service, which Charles ends up smashing with a prayer book. Donna Tartt makes such a point of describing this moment, particular the buzzing sound of the wasp, that I felt it had to carry some significance but I was puzzled as to what. There's a line afterwards about Bunny being good at k*lling flies and bugs, but I didn't think that was just it. I had two initial theories...

This is just another moment that illustrates the characters' comfort with m*rder and violence, even with a small and relatively harmless creature (ie, the wasp poses a minute threat but not extreme and they k*ll it anyway, slightly disrupting the service).

This is a pun or a play on words with wasp/WASP - as in, wasp the insect vs the abbreviation of White Anglo Saxon Protestant, which all textual evidence seems to indicate Bunny is. They've k*lled a wasp...after just k*lling a WASP. (Hopefully it goes without saying that this observation is not an insult to anyone's religious or ethnic background - just going on the book.)

But neither of these felt as powerful as other symbols or recurring themes in the book. But then, recently, I was listening to TSH audio book, narrated by Tartt. During Richard's first few days at Hampden, he offers many lush descriptions of the college's scenery - the dorms, the students, the twilight. And suddenly I was struck by the line, "Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them." And then it clicked -

Richard and the Greek class are rotting. The wasp is there to show they're just like the fruit: once ripe and promising but now they're fallen, corrupted, and the consequences of their actions are destroying them like fruit rots. It's almost too fitting for the old saying about bad apples. The wasp is there as a callback and a symbol...but this time, it's moral decay to which it is drawn.

Maybe other people grasped this sooner than I did, but just wanted to share! Always love revisiting this novel and wondering what new questions and answers I'm going to stumble upon each time.

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Orson Welles signing his contract from RKO at the delicate age of 23 with no directing experience but complete and total creative freedom:

credits to op!

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never had a doubt in my mind she was taking home best new artist. the future is Roan.

pink pony club full performance at grammys 2025

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Emma Woodhouse and Jane Fairfax worked it out on the remix.

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victor frankenstein wasn't even a doctor he was a college student why the hell do we even call him that

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me before ttpd vs me after ttpd

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the unsolved swiftie mystery that will drive me to insanity is when this photo of Taylor in the studio came out before Midnights was released and there was a TINY Top Gun poster in the background.

why was that there??? everything in this woman's life is an easter egg so i can't help but notice it. what song did this inspire?? was she supposed to be on the soundtrack for Maverick?? this is even more maddening than the upside down phones...

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dead poets society fandom. we know many of the poets were rich/privileged, meaning that they likely grew up in households with hired help, to include cooks, which means they probably don't know much about preparing food or cooking. my proposal: one of them definitely cuts cucumbers like Kendall Jenner. but which one is it.

Neil's family wasn't rich enough for this. Todd's too anxious. my money's on Knox. lmk.

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currently reading The Secret History and watching the Percy Jackson series. elite combination of violently opposite interpretations of Greek mythology.

also hiiiii Tumblr did you miss me? first semester of college didn't kill me >:D

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In the club reading poetryfoundation.com

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Mr. Darcy in a nutshell:

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At a social gathering:

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soooo pretty!!

SewBeautifulx on Etsy

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this Barbie wants to go to the woods because she wishes to live deliberately

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don't know if this counts as moving from worldbuilding to writing, but something that always helps my productivity is casting my characters - like, with actual actors. having concrete images of the horde of problem children inside my brain makes envisioning their plot so much easier.

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bless you, today on tumblr. and happy day to all my fellow poets! we are something extraordinary.

Tuesday March 21.

World Poetry Day.

Today is a celebration—but perhaps, like all celebrations, just what we are commemorating is something that we must treasure each and every day. Poetry, some might say, is just that: the treasure that artists mine from the sham and drudgery of day-to-day life. For the poet, their art is found not by searching for the exotic, mysterious, glamourous, or seductive, but by what they find before them. What is mundane and routine is as much material to be mined as life's intensities or spectacles. For the poet, the world really is their oyster. And for the rest of us, the work they produce is that very pearl. And every shade of experience, whether joy, grief, banality, intrigue, and beauty, are encapsulated in words, spaces, silence, images, and form. Whether by skill, or by chance, no one really knows, but perhaps the mess and the mystery are one and the same as its profundity. With that in mind, let's celebrate a good thing. And a good thing that is ours each and every day. It's #world poetry day.

With that in mind, we invite you to mark the day here on Tumblr. After all, there is simply no better community of poets and artists who make up this creative sphere, and the evergreen world of all things poetry is, well, your world. 

And when all is said and done, you better get writing x