#Wertherian

[my-deer-friend]

Reading about Bonstetten's supposed suicide attempt and thinking "damn this guy invented being Young Werther before that was a thing" only to read in the next paragraph that Thomas Gray's editor had the literal same thought – "de Bonstetten was a Wertherian before Werther was invented".

[pissmd]

Malignly serenaded by Vaughan, Domino’s, & Latin creditor, plus of course no stranger to obsession since his corporate displacement & Lucifer-like fall into what had started as mere recreation, R. Ecko of Venice was ripe for metamorphosis into that most dread of the fluorescent basin’s BC monsters: the lunatic stalker-type fan. What little psyche did remain to him was in a twinkling consumed & possessed by the image of what he saw lying there passive on Latmus before him. He began to live all & only for the reappearance of Beach Blanket Endymion every morning at 4–5 PT, at the same time that he began to see the cathode screen itself as the dimensional barrier that prevented his 3-D union with Sissee Nar’s much-Enhanced 2-D image. He kept breaking his Sony in rages & then running out to buy another. Your standard lunatic love-hate thing. He wrote creepy unpunctuated letters to S-NN & Tri-Stan (red crayon), made supplicating/belligerent calls. The creepy letters he even more creepily signed ‘Your Actæon The Huntsman.’ He used his alkaloid plenty to lure & debrief those young Adoni with whom S. Nar’d consorted on her path to recombinant stardom. Plus he began keeping the rambling clinical diary expected of your classic stalker-type fan. In it he represents himself as an Errant Knight displaced from his proper place & time & embarked on your basic daemonic love-quest of chivalric Yore, yet also tormented by his post-Romantic awareness of the quest’s chimeracity: he knew full well his trans-dimensional love to be daemonic, unreal, puerile, compensatory, Wertherian—i.e. ‘about FICTION not FRICTION’ in his vulgate phrase—but he was helpless, driven, possessed, as if impotioned, & for this bewitchment he did blame both Nars, pater et filia duae: they had created, for him, in the Sissee of B.B.E., the Ultimate Erotic Object of the contemporary industry: ideally proportioned, aesthetically flawless, sartorially hermaphroditic, rapturously passive, &, most bewitching yet, in every way 2-D, dimensionally unattainable, ergo a blank screen for the agelessly projected fantasies of every man with a red car & shades & a ’tude behind which bulged a heart just starving to be allowed to buy w/o reservation into what it was far too late anymore to truly believe in.

— David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

[thebluesthour]

“In the distance, she beckons me with her blue silence. (She is my Wertherian Charlotte. My Lotte. Lottchen) Her mask perversely insures that she cannot speak. She is as wordless as [the rhinoceros]. She is even more mute than [the rhinoceros]. While the other masked figures in the front row are wearing the bauta, this blue woman wears the domino: an oval black mask kept in place by a button held between the teeth, an arrangement which rendered its wearer temporarily speechless. Her face becomes a single surreal eye and a huge open mouth, like a Francis Bacon silent scream”

(Carol Mavor on Pietro Longhi’s Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751), Blue Mythologies)

[juanulove]

im very wertherian and i will always be. no matter how embarrasing and pathetic it can seem. i dont care if the incels cooped him. that is my father and i will always carry a part of him in me. I embody the wertherian through my melancholy, awareness of the world, and mystical belief in the power of love.