soundandfire - Tumblr blog

[soundandfire]

Hypothetical dark academia novel in which instead of the crazed obsession being death, it is birth. Imagine a group of teenage girls drunk on the power they have to create life. They consider themselves gods. They drink wine, have bacchanals, and eat fruit in mossy caves on Sunday mornings. They gather every day before school to review the latest scientific discoveries over orange-peel tea. They write plays and raise their voices in excitement over new plot devices and marvel at the endless possibilities they have. The girls are avid feminists; they write essays and speeches about femininity and gender roles. They romanticize Renaissance women. They show up to school in all black, dress shirts rolled up to the elbow, hair in elaborate braids. Imagine the romances, the scheming, the poetry, the art, the speeches, the projects, the philosophical ramblings, the wide-eyed wonder and subsequent ambition.

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Hello M. You once mentioned that you felt that a male narrator is more suitable for Villains than a female one. Why exactly?

This is a question I get a lot, and people are rarely satisfied with the answer–which is frustrating not only because it’s the truth but because this is one of those things male authors are never made to justify. (Something to keep in mind when talking to female writers about their work.) Anyway: I wrote a male narrator because it just made sense for the story. If you’ve read the book it should be obvious why. If not, I’ll just say it had to do with the source material. Shakespeare’s plays are a fascinating case study in how intimate and how toxic homosocial power dynamics can be and how thin the line between homosocial and homoerotic often is, and that was something I wanted to explore. Furthermore, for the mechanics of the story to work I needed my narrator engaged in a very specific kind of competitive (violent) conflict which does not typically arise between women and girls. That’s why he’s male. But the decision to write a male narrator was hardly that logical. It was simply what felt right for this particular story. It was what worked with the group dynamics. It just fit. However, I also wanted to avoid the common campus novel problem of having one or no significant female characters–so even though the narrator is male, I made a very conscious effort to be sure that the female characters were equally complex, important, and active in the story. 

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Possibly unpopular opinion? There’s a thin line between anti-elitism-in-academia and anti-intellectualism, and tumblr really walks it sometimes.

Anti-elitism:

Criticizing class barriers to getting into academia

Criticizing lack of resources to help students with physical or mental health issues

Calling out racism and sexism in academia

Calling out people who treat others badly for being less educated

Calling out people who believe academia is the only way to gain knowledge

Anti-intellectualism:

Being opposed to academia as an institution

Acting like everyone in academia is a rich and privileged white man

Acting like their opinions shouldn’t matter because of this

Assuming that any specialised language exists only to make things difficult for a layperson to understand and couldn’t possibly be necessary in order to explain a complicated topic

Assuming that if a specialist can’t explain what they’re doing to a non-specialist in five minutes then what they do is nonsense

Shaming people for taking pride in their academic and intellectual achievements

Am I crazy for thinking that tumblr sometimes veers towards the second?

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most people write out of spite or horniness, I write because “novelist” is a delightfully quirky and whimsical little word and I want to claim it for myself

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Hi my name is Dorian Inno’cence Beauty Raven Gray and I have lustrous curly golden hair (despite my name) with purple streaks and red tips that sway slightly in the breeze and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Narcissus (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!) [[I may actually be related to Anchetil de Greye and I’m glad because he’s the ancestor of the noble House of Grey. I’m an immortal but my portrait is depraved and vile. I have pale white skin. I’m also a dandy and I live in a city called London (I’m thirty-eight). I’m an aesthete (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. I love Harrods and I buy all my clothes from there. For example today I was wearing black trousers with a matching jacket, a red cummerbund, and polished leather boots. My portrait was wearing white trousers, a tan jacket, gold cummerbund, and kid leather boots. I was walking outside Whitechapel. It was snowing and raining so there was no sun, which I was very happy about. James Vane stared at me. I put up my middle finger at him. 

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you are not just you

you are a collection of the stories you've read and the night skies you've admired. you are the smiles you've given to strangers and the tears you've lost on your pillows. you are the lives you've touched. you are a mixture of cosmic stardust and earth. you are a descendent of nomads and sailors. you are the flowers you've received and the plants you've watered. you are the adventures you've had and will have. you are your imagination and anticipation. you are not simple. you are a complex yet magnificent product of the life you have lived so far.

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donna tartt: *writes an entire cautionary book about the hubris of characters throwing a bacchanal and then going crazy, losing their friendships, falling apart and destroying the rest of their lives as a result of this decision*

me, immune to critical analysis: i want to throw a bacchanal

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irish dark academia (gaelic revival period)

learn middle irish

translate medieval texts

sit and study with your secret lover over a bottle of whiskey in the library

everyone knows something. nobody knows everything. you are all suspicious of one another.

scrawl lines from yeats in the margins of your mythology textbook

you dream of cú chulainn in the night and you hear the echo of dierdre's lament in the daytime

somewhere, a group of mourners is humming the parting glass

you attend the theatre every night. one night right after the play you are spoken to by a man with a green ribbon on his jacket and you realize there is a double meaning behind each of his words

write nature poetry

a smell of gunpowder from the school's basement. you don't ask, but you smile to yourself

a conspiracy of poets and writers and researchers and all the dreamers of the intellectual underworld

you think maybe you saw a gun in the teacher's desk. you smile to yourself

rebellion? someday

you hear about farm raids in munster and connaught. you discuss it with your friends. no one is surprised.

i have spoken with god upon his holy hill

[soundandfire]

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt, 2013 / A separate peace - John Knowles, 1959 / Kill your darlings - John Krokidas, 2013 / The ballad of Reading gaol - Oscar Wilde, 1898

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Uhh zodiac signs as grey academics?

ok gotta admit, this one was the most fun to do (these are mostly satirical)

aries - says that everything they like is claimed by the gays and no they will not take constructive criticism

taurus - makes new years resolutions in june because they fucked up their resolutions from january but time is a flat circle who cares

gemini - posts discourse on main but is considerate enough to tag it

cancer - criticized dark academia once and is now their poster child for “whiny grey academia sjw who thinks everything is problematic”

leo - BE GAY DO CRIME

virgo - puts links to useful information in their posts/cites their sources even when they know that no one is going to actually read them

libra - someone please tell them not to lick the rocks

scorpio - [commits a crime] “that’s praxis babe!”

sagittarius - yells “SILENCE BRAND” at every advertisement they see

capricorn -  noise cancelling headphones to cancel out the haters

aquarius - has never worn a coordinated outfit ever, in their entire life, and they’re proud of it

pisces - cuts tension with john mulaney quotes

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portrait of a lady on fire, dir. céline sciamma // doubt comes in, hadestown // eurydice, sarah ruhl // metamorphoses: book x, ovid trans. anthony kline // “eurydice”, ocean vuong // talk, hozier

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Can we please stop associating being a good person with how much you're willing to suffer in silence for other people? You can be a kind person and still say "no, I don't have the time/energy to help you with that." You can be a kind person and still say "this makes me uncomfortable, please stop." You can be a kind person and still say "I disagree and here's why." You can be kind and still say "I'm not okay with this." Being kind is about treating people with kindness and respect, not about being the human equivalent of a doormat!

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Here’s the thing. I’m poor. I’m always gonna be poor, barring a sudden demand for allusion heavy folk punk music . And even then, I’m always going to have been poor which is definitive and intrinsic and doesn’t change. So, I’m poor. I live in a decaying old apartment with thin walls and I wear clothes that were manufactured in sweatshops and that I patch to the best of my ability and I eat pretty good but my strawberries have pesticides in them and there’s HFCS in everything and the bus driver knows my name and I miss qualifying for food stamps by something ridiculous like 40 dollars a month.

BUT, by some quirk of timing and technology and ability and geography, I have very nearly the entirety of human culture available to me. Barring the specific choreography of some Broadway shows and particular shades of colors used in certain paintings I’ve got it all. I’ve got Rumi and Byron and Shakespeare and Poe. I’ve got orchestras and operas at my beck and call. I’ve got limited press punk singles kids from the late 70′s would kill for and they come up automatically when the video I was watching on youtube ends. I’ve got books and books and books and books and books. Some of it’s pirated and some of it’s bootleg and some of it’s technically illegal to own but, except in circumstances so rare that it’s actually an enjoyable challenge, my ability to experience art is limited solely by my awareness that such art exists.

I’m not saying this in a ‘you kids don’t appreciate technology kind of way’. I’m seeking to define a motivating factor in my, and possibly your, life. I am trying to express a possibility, an opportunity, for a subculture, a movement, a radical shift in the human experience. I am making a declaration; I will revel in this and you cannot stop me.

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love the sin hate the sinner

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Hamlet

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ancient authors ranked by their validity

homer: the OG greek literature. so valid that the greeks sometimes deified him. had some extremely sexy hexameter verse but does lose points on account of probably not being a real person. 8/10

sappho: EXTREMELY gay and valid. writes beautiful poetry but it is in like, the worst dialect of greek. loses some points because of largely not surviving to the modern day tho. 9/10

aristotle: some kind of misogynist bastard who doesn’t know shit about anything. student of plato which is about the least amount of valid you can be. get fucked 0/10

catullus: just a bisexual disaster trying to live his life and get laid 10/10

caesar: a war criminal and bastard -5/10

cicero: did his best which is very valid but also never shuts up about how cool he is which kinda puts a damper on it. 7/10

vergil: gays? bees? the countryside? this dude’s got it all and more. also has extreme social anxiety for bonus Relatability points 11/10

seneca the younger: stoicism isn’t valid 0/10

petronius: hated nero so much that he not only made fun of nero in his book but he also included a letter about how much he hated nero in his will when nero forced him to commit suicide and that’s pretty sexy 15/10