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james-joyces-right-eyeball · 3 years

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Absolute Favorite Books I’d Recommend to Anyone

This is a list of my top-tier favorite books that I would recommend/talk about endlessly to pretty much anyone (in no particular order). I know people probably don’t care but I just like talking about books I love so here we are.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

~ Based off the real story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who escaped slavery and when captured killed her child in order to prevent them from ever being enslaved again, Beloved tells the story of a mother named Sethe, born in slavery who eventually escaped and is haunted by the figurative demons of her trauma and the literal (arguably) ghost of her dead daughter, who she herself killed. It is an excellent exploration of the horrors of slavery and of the haunting legacy of the institution for those who were subjected to it.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

~ If you’ve been on Tumblr for a while, you probably know what Lolita is. The story of the predatory Humbert Humbert who lusts after, rapes, and kidnaps the “nymphet” Dolores Haze. An excellent construction of how predators, unreliable narrators in their own right, hide behind fabrications, almost-believable excuses, and pretty words to make their actions seem maybe not so bad. In the words of the book itself, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Ulysses - James Joyce

~ Notoriously one of the most difficult books in the English language, Ulysses lifts its structure from Homer’s Odyssey to tell the story of a common man, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day. Yes, this book takes place over the course of only one day. We follow Bloom as well as Joyce’s literary counterpart Stephen Daedalus through their thoughts and actions, gathering details of their lives previous throughout. It’s a book that, in my own words, “is life”. It is sad, funny, strange, vulgar, disgusting, beautiful, revelatory, sensual, and nonsensical all at once. Joyce aimed to create a reflection of life through his stream-of-consciousness style which some people might find confusing, but I personally find absolutely beautiful and honest and realistic. The prose is also gorgeous, but that could be applied to everything Joyce wrote.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

~ The classic gothic book that tells the tale of Heathcliff and his ultimately destructive love of Catherine Earnshaw, whose eventual marriage to someone else and the general mistreatment of him by her family drives Heathcliff insane and he spends the rest of his life trying to take revenge by abusing and torturing the next Earnshaw and Linton (the family into which Catherine marries) generations. If I’m being honest, I like this book mostly because of how wild and dark it is, but the writing is also genius and beautiful. I think the book also carries an interesting view of the destructive nature of revenge, overzealous love, and othering.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

~ A coming-of-age story at the turn of the century that tells the story of Francie Nolan, a young bookish girl growing up in a lower class family in New York City. It tells about her father’s struggles with alcoholism as well as her mother’s struggles to deal with that and at the same time raise Francie and her brother. Francie is confronted with a strange, uncertain world as a young girl, but tries to face it with bravery throughout childhood

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

~ Another coming-of-age story, this time about four young sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. You are probably familiar with this book already; it’s had more movie adaptations then I can possibly remember off the top of my head. It’s the story of four sisters as they try to navigate growing up, love, and loss during the mid to late 1800s.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

~ A novel that tells the story of Celie, a young black woman who is raped and then married young to a man who will go on to use and abuse her, through her letters to God. Throughout the novel she meets Shug Avery, a woman with whom she eventually falls in love and begins a relationship with. Through this and her eventual freedom from her abusive husband, she is able to gain at last her own sense of self and take back control over her life, a life no longer ruled by the abusive men around her.

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

~ The tragic story of young black girl Pecola Breedlove, who wants nothing more than to have blonde hair and blue eyes just like the women she sees in the movies. Both a deconstruction of the whiteness of beauty standards as well as how these standards can utterly destroy vulnerable young girls, it is also an exploration of the people who allow these sorts of things to happen, including Pecola’s mother and father. The Bluest Eye, I think, showcases one of the aspects of Toni Morrison that I like the most, that I aspire to the most: her ability to enter the minds of all people, even people who you might despise at first. Her characters, especially Cholly in The Bluest Eye, are ones you might not entirely sympathize with, but they will always be ones you understand.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

~ Based off of the author’s own experiences as a young college student, The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, whose depression over her place as a woman in a patriarchal society as well as her inability to choose a life path for herself leads to a suicide attempt and a subsequent stay in a mental hospital. A very nuanced portrayal of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, The Bell Jar is an extremely moving and relatable story for me and clearly is as well for others. It is a classic for a reason.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

~ A memoir of Angelou’s childhood, this book tells the story of her experiences living as a black girl in the south with her grandmother and brother as well as her later years living with her mother. It also tells of how she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was around eight or nine, and how she struggled to live with that and find her voice, both literally and figuratively. A wonderful book about overcoming struggles and the power of words and literature in such times.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

~ Ellison’s novel tells the story of a young black man, never getting a name in the text, and his feelings of invisibility and his struggles to find a place in society to belong. His struggles only lead him further into despair, until he decides to “become invisible” as people seem not to see him as a person anyway. Invisible Man is an exploration of American mid-century racism and the isolation it causes to those subjected to it. Not only that, but it is surprisingly relevant to our times now, especially on the subject of police violence. (Personal anecdote: When I first read this book, when I got to the aforementioned police violence part it was right in the middle of the BLM resurgence last summer and I cried for a good twenty minutes while reading that chapter over how nothing had changed and it still hurts me to think about it. Embarrassingly, my dad walked in on me while I was crying, and I had to quickly explain it away.)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

~ The title basically says it all lol. This book tells of the coming-of-age of Stephen Daedalus (the same one from the later-written Ulysses). His sensitive childhood, his awkward and lustful adolescence, his feelings of Irish nationality and Catholic guilt, and his struggles to fully realize himself, both as an artist and a human being. It is a very hopeful story, and one that I love mostly because I relate so much to Stephen Daedalus as an artist and as a person.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

~ A magical-realist intergenerational family drama, Marquez’s book traces the various lives and loves of the Buendia family over the course of (you guessed it!) one hundred years. A beautifully written, at times extremely emotionally moving and chilling masterpiece, Marquez in a way retells the history of Colombia, of its colonization and exploitation.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

~ A classic Russian novel of society and love, Tolstoy tells the story of Anna Karenina, married, wealthy woman with a child she adores. However, she falls in love with another man, Count Vronsky, and comes to a tragic end for her love. The parallel story of the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy landowner who also struggles to find fulfillment in his life and understand his place in society.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

~ A novel that features an entire family of unreliable narrators, The Sound and the Fury details the fall of a once-prominent southern Compson family and always-present place of the past. There are four different narratives: Benjy Compson, a mentally disabled man who is unsure of his surroundings and of time and only knows that he misses his older sister Caddy; Quintin Compson, the eldest son and a Harvard man both obsessed with his sister retaining her “purity” and the fact that she failed to do so and had a baby out of wedlock, going as far to claim it is his baby in an attempt to preserve something of the family reputation; Jason Compson, who is the caretaker of Caddy’s daughter and believes her to be going down her mother’s “sinful” path; and Dilsey, the black maid of the Compson’s who unlike the people she cares for is not weighed down by their history. The narratives take place in different time periods and is in a stream-of-consciousness style. It’s a deeply dark and disturbing novel about the haunting nature of the past, a common theme in Faulkner’s work (see Absalom, Absalom! for more of this).

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

~ It is the story of Milkman Dead, a young black man growing up in the south and his relationship with his very complicated family. To say anymore would be to spoil the novel, but I will say that it is an excellent book about family, self-fulfillment in a world that tries to deny you that, and, like The Bluest Eye, exhibits Morrison’s excellent character work.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

~ A play which takes place on the patriarch of a family’s birthday in the oppressive heat of the midsummer south, Williams’ play explores lies, secrets, and how repression only results in anger, frustration, and sadness. It’s a tragic but brilliant play that I think was very ahead of its time. If you’ve read it (or do read it) then you know what I mean.

Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin

~ This book tells the story of a young man and his love of another man named Giovanni while he is in Paris. It is a book about love, queer guilt, and has what I would call an ambiguous ending. There is uncertainty at the end, but there does seem to be some kind of acceptance. It is a bit of a coming-out story, but more than that it is a story of personal acceptance and at the same time a sad, tragic love story.

HERmione - H.D.

~ An underrated modernist masterpiece, HERmione is a somewhat fictionalized account of the author, Hilda Doolittle’s, experience as a young aspiring poet dating another poet (in real life Ezra Pound in this book named George Lowndes) who is a threat to her both physically and emotionally. It explores her own mental state, as she considers herself a failure and falls in love with a woman for the first time (Fayne Rabb in the book, Frances Gregg in real life).

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

~ People think about going to a lighthouse. They do not. A couple years and a war passes then they do. That may seem like a boring plot, and you may be right. However, To the Lighthouse is not much about plot. It is more about the inner lives of its characters, a family and their friends, on two different occasions of their lives: one before WWI and one after WWI. Woolf explores in this novel the trauma that results from such a massive loss of life and security. Not only that, she also explores the nature of art (especially in female artists) in the character of Lily Briscoe and her struggles to complete a painting. It’s a short novel, but it contains so much about life, love, and loss within these few pages.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

~ A southern gothic novel about isolation and loneliness in a small town. Every character has something to separate them from wider society, and often find solace and companionship in a deaf man, John Singer, who himself experiences a loneliness that they cannot understand. There are various forms of social isolation explored in this novel: by race, disability, age, gender, etc. A wonderful, heart-wrenching book about loneliness and the depths it can potentially drag people to.

The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot

~ A modernist masterpiece of a poem, Eliot describes feeling emptiness and isolation. The brilliance of it can only be shown by an excerpt:

“Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

“The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. “

(My personal favorite line from this poem is, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”)

The Trial - Franz Kafka

~ The protagonist of the novel, Josef K., wakes up one morning to find that he has been placed under arrest for reasons that are kept from him. Kafka creates throughout the novel a scathing satire of bureaucracy, as K. tries to find out more about his case, more about his trial, but only becomes more confused as he digs deeper. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the world he lives in, and the more tries to explain it the further the more that proves to be the case. An excellently constructed novel and a great one to read if you would like to be depressed about the state of the world because, though Kafka’s work is a satire, like a lot of his other work, it manages to strike a strangely real note.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

~ An absurdist play that is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who in the broad overview of the original play, do not matter. Throughout the play, they question their existence and the purpose of it and through that Stoppard dissects not only the absurdity of life, but how fiction and theater reflect that absurdity inadvertently.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

~ The novel details the journey the Bundren family makes after the death of the family matriarch, Addie, to bury her. Each chapter offers a different narrative from the family members and those who surround them, revealing some ulterior motives to them “going to town” to bury Addie. The patriarch Anse desires a pair of false teeth, and the daughter Dewey Dell is pregnant and needs an abortion, as there is no way for her or her family to support it. It’s about the powerlessness of people in the impoverished south. The Bundrens are constantly subject to forces beyond their control, struggles which would be easily solved if they had the money to spare for it. There is more to the book, but that is my favorite reading of it, that of class. Faulkner’s ability to create distinct voices for every one of his characters shines through here.

And, last but not least:

The Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath

~ All the poems Plath wrote during her tragically short lifetime. The best way to demonstrate or summarize the book’s brilliance is just to show you. This is her poem “Edge”, which appears in the book:

“The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.”

HOPE YOU ENJOYED! HAPPY READING TO ALL!

#dark academia #books and literature #toni morrison #james joyce #tennessee williams #virginia woolf #william faulkner #sylvia plath #plays #poetry #can you tell i like southern and modernist lit lol?

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justthehiddleswrites · 4 years

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Follow My Lead | Tom Hiddleston x OFC | Chapter 4 | I don’t think you are supposed to giggle at Tolstoy.

A/N: This will update every Thursday. There are 13 chapters. There are all sorts of kinds of D/s relationships. This is the one I choose to write this time.

MASTERLIST HERE

Pairing: Tom Hiddleston x OFC (Vivian Swann)

Summary: Tom and Vivian have both been unlucky in love, searching for something outside of the bounds of a typical relationship. When the two of them connect via a dating app, Tom is introduced to the idea of being submissive to Vivian. Which is the one thing he never knew he needed. Under the firm hand of Vivian, Tom learns what it means to submit and Vivian learns what it means to be in a loving dominant relationship. But not everyone seems to understand what they have and the best intentions can destroy the strongest relationship.

Warnings for story: Dominant/submissive relationship (sub!Tom), lots of smut including but not limited to: vaginal sex, oral sex (male and female receiving), edging, denial, teasing, use of restraints, spanking, multiple orgasm, anal play, use of toys.

Tag Lists Are Open! Let me know if you want to be added. Thank you for reading!

Tom slept like a rock that night. The best night’s sleep in a long time. He dreamed of Vivian, kneeling on his chest, kissing him, teasing him, biting him. And he woke that morning with his cock hard and leaking. He stroked himself as he thought about Vivian. But not in the way he usually did. Instead of fantasizing of her touching him, sucking his cock, jerking him off, Tom closed his eyes and imagined his lips on Vivian’s folds and clit. Her hands in his hair tugging his head where she wants it. Vivian moaning in response to his touch, his tongue. As her pleasure increases, Tom’s motions in real life increased. Tom came with a soft gasp, spurting along his torso. He panted, trying to catch his breath. Once he regained his composure, he headed to the shower to clean himself up and go for a jog.

Vivian rapped her nails on the desk in her flat. Her email open on the screen. She was drafting the proposed protocols for Saturday to Tom, and she contemplated on how far to push him. So far, Tom exceeded all Vivian’s expectations. Which worried her. In the past, all men have been eager to please, at first. But once the shiny new wore off, and the men realized the relationship wasn’t about her fulfilling their fantasies of kinky sex and it was about surrendering to her authority, they ran. Sometimes without further word. It wasn’t the incompatibility that bothered Vivian, but the coldness in which they communicated it. As though she was without feeling or emotion. This caused her to assign the reading at the beginning, to move more cautiously. And she wasn’t sure if her heart could handle a rejection from Tom.

With a sigh, she typed out to Tom:

This is a date for the sole purpose of kissing. No food, no drink, no chitchat, no reading, no hanging out.

In short: Kissing, petting, stroking and all the things come along with that- yes. Talking, sex, orgasms- no.

Here is a list of what may happen, not what will happen. If anything bothers you or off limits, let me know.

- Kissing, obviously. Let me know of any spots that are off limits.

- Shirt off

- Pants off (underwear on)

-Nudity (you, not me)

- Kneeling

- Blindfold

- Light bondage (cuffs- both wrists and ankles, tied to the bed)

- Biting

-Bruises on your body (both in places normally covered by clothing and places it would be visible such as the neck)

- All over body touching (let me know of body parts off limits)

- All over body licking (same as above)

- Roles reversed (you touching/licking me)

- Hands around your throat (gentle not choking)

- Hair pulling

- Fingers in your mouth (not gagging)

- Body-slapping

- Pinching

And I think I covered everything. Wear a button-down (I like when you undo the top few buttons) and jeans or slacks. Send me a photo of what your current underwear options are. I will send you your address that morning. I expect you at 7.

Vivian

She smiled as she re-read the email. She buzzed with anticipation at the possibilities of Saturday night. Vivian was certain she would cuff and restrain Tom, and not just because he had the tendency to squirm underneath her. She suspected it would push a button and was eager to test her theory. She hit click and headed off to work.

Tom was eating breakfast, having finished his morning run when his phone dinged with a new email from Vivian. He read through her email and swallowed hard. The list was extensive. He re-read before finishing up breakfast and heading upstairs and digging through his underwear drawer. Tom had three options laid out on the bed. He snapped a photo of them laid out on the bed. He examined the photo, unhappy.

“Might as well.” he commented to himself as he stripped down and pulled on the first pair, navy boxers.

Tom stood in front of the full-length mirror in the closet and snapped a photo. He hated to admit he may have flexed a bit in the photo. He repeated the process with the white underwear briefs, and the black Calvin Klein boxer briefs. Pleased with the photos, Tom typed back to Vivian.

Wow, that is quite the comprehensive list. I appreciate the thoroughness and the bullet points. I am not scheduled for any meetings until Wednesday, so any marks will have faded by then. My feet are ticklish. Probably shouldn’t tell you that. ;) And I would rather not have my armpits or the inside of my ears licked. Otherwise, I am game for whatever you want.

I have attached photos of the underwear, per your request. And if there is anything else I can do to be of service, please let me know, ma’am.

Your sunshine boy,

Tom

He attached the photos and sent the email and then returned to dressing for the day, flopping on the bed to return the last two books on his list before starting his essay.

Vivian was pleased Tom modeled the underwear rather than just lay them out of the bed. She probably would have directed him to model them. She wrinkled her nose at the first pic and flicking through the rest.

Black boxer briefs. Burn or throw away the tighty whities. If I find a pair in your home, I will punish you. Let’s change our night time call to 9:00 p.m. from now on. I hate keeping you up so late.

She placed the phone down on her desk. It buzzed almost immediately.

Consider them burned. 9 p.m. works for me, although I don’t mind waiting up if it means I get to hear your voice. :) I shall wait with bated breath until Saturday.

The rest of the day seemed to fly by for both of them and before long, Tom was settled into bed with both his books of collected poetry and Anna Karenina. He called on time and Vivian asked for him to read more of Tolstoy. He started doing voices of the characters, in particular an exaggerated Russian accent for Levin and Vronsky.

“I don’t think you are supposed to giggle at Tolstoy.” Vivian commented after one particularly dramatic passage.

“I’m a full service entertainer. Comedy, drama, action, romance.” Tom teased back.

“What about erotica?” she teased right back, her voice low.

Tom paused. “For you? Without question.” She could hear the hesitation, fear, and excitement in his voice. She hoped it would remain.

Vivian sighed. “I think it is enough reading for tonight. I want you to get a good night’s rest for tomorrow.”

“Yes ma’am.” he responded.

“Goodnight, Tom, my sunshine.”

“Goodnight, Vivian.”

They ended the call, and both drifted off to sleep.

Vivian attended her weekly blowout appointment, not realizing Tom spent the day as a bundle of nerves. He ran ten miles hoping to burn off excess energy. It didn’t work. The only thing he did was finish the last of the books from Vivian’s list. The fastest ever read through anything in some time. He was too distracted to write his essay, thought swirling in his brain. Tom wants it to be perfect. He wants everything to be perfect for Vivian.

Tom must have tried on at least six different shirts, each discarded on the bed as unsuitable. He settles on a soft, well worn light blue shirt. One of his favorites. The collar is fraying at the corners, which is why he doesn’t wear out as much anymore, favoring instead newer but less comfortable shirts. He grabbed a pair of jeans only to notice a hole on the inside of the thigh and discarded them also on the bed, grabbing a different pair. Tom left the top two buttons undone, a calculated air of casual. A quick dab of cologne and then he waited, not wanting to arrive too early.

After her morning errands, Vivian ate a light lunch and set about preparing her flat for Tom. She made up the bed with fresh linens and double checked the restraint points on the posts. She hadn’t decided on a leg position, so Vivian placed straps on all the corners as well as the point in the middle. Vivian opened the nightstand and retrieved the cuffs, adjusting them and placing them prominently in the foyer on a table. Cuffing Tom would be among the first things she did that night. In addition, she laid out a blindfold on the nightstand and put a bottle of water there too. After bathing, she slipped into a simple silk tank and striped shorts. She wore the same wedges as before. Vivian enjoyed looking Tom in the eye while standing and kissing. A quick dab of perfume behind the ears and settled on the couch, watching some TV waiting for Tom.

He knocked on her door, ten minutes early. Acceptably early without fear of being so early that he disturbed preparations.

“I couldn’t wait any longer.” Tom commented.

Vivian giggled. His eagerness was endearing. “I’ll allow it. Come in.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stepped into her flat, looking around in wonder. Vivian grabbed him by the chin and kissed him hard.

“Do you still remember your word, sunshine?”

“Yes.” Tom is already breathing hard. “Sushi.”

She smiled and slid her hand down around Tom’s neck. His Adam’s apple moving underneath her palm. His eyes widened in fear. Vivian kissed him again. He leaned forward when she stepped back. She walked around him, fingers tracing the planes of his body, his broad shoulders, defined pecs and abs. Vivian gave his ass a playful swat. Tom yelped and staggered forward.

“Such a nice ass, sunshine.” She growled in his ear, grabbing it with her nails.

“Thank you, ma’am.” his voice shook. He wasn’t used to being manhandled, and his cock appreciated the rough touch.

“Shirt and pants off.” She stepped back to watch him undressed.

Tom’s cheeks blushed. He had been nearly nude in a room of strangers before, but under Vivian’s glare, he never felt so exposed. Tom tugged his shirt over his head, not bothering to undo the buttons this time. He folded the shirt, placing it on the nearby table while he slipped his shoes and socks off, and slipping his jeans down his lean legs. Vivian licked her lips at Tom in his underwear. While the man appeared fit clothed, he was something carved from marble without the clothes. He flashed a lopsided smile as he placed his jeans on top of his shirt and folding his hands in front of him, obscuring his crotch.

“God, you are beautiful.” Vivian hissed as she stepped forward to kiss him again. Tom hummed back at the praise, his body growing warm. She nipped at his lower lip, nibbling rather than biting, sending shocks through his body. “Wrists, please.”

Vivian moved to the table. Tom’s arms shot out. She grabbed the leather cuffs and put them on. Tom jerked back his arms.

“What are those?” His brows furrowed.

“Cuffs. Wrists.” Her tone sharp. Tom hesitated, his mouth opening to protest. “Sunshine, wrists.” she snapped.

“Yes, ma’am.” He reluctantly held out his wrists. She tightened the cuffs, making sure they wouldn’t chafe.

Tom twisted his wrists back and forth, testing out the weight and listening to the rings thudding against the thick leather. Vivian kissed him again, hands sliding down his torso. His cock jumped. She grabbed the back of his neck and led him towards the bedroom. Tom gulped at the blindfold and straps.

“Ah…” he started before being cut off by Vivian’s lips on his neck. “Oh!” he moaned. She laved and sucked hard, removing her lips with a pop, satisfied at the dark mark already formed.

“On the bed, sunshine. On your back.” Tom scrambled onto the bed, lying flat on his back. As Vivian slipped the cuffs on Tom’s ankles, he jerked back. She raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, ma’am.”

“Good boy.”

She slipped her shoes off and then hooked his ankle cuffs to the straps in the middle of the bed. As Vivian strolled to the head of the bed, she ran a nail up Tom’s leg. He jerked against the restraints. She grabbed his arm and clipped it onto the strap before crawling onto the bed, reaching over to clip in the other side, her breasts grazing Tom’s body. His hips bucked.

“So squirmy, sunshine. Best I did tie you up.” Vivian straddled his chest, pushing him into the mattress. “I can’t let you get away just yet.” She pressed against his lips softly, earning a sigh. Her teeth worried his lower lip.

“Ow.” he mock protested.

Nevertheless, Vivian let go of his lip and trailed down his neck. She licked the bruise from earlier before moving down to his collarbone. Vivian sucked and nipped, leaving the twin to the neck’s bruise there. She smiled at her handiwork. Tom struggled against the restraints.

“They have held stronger men than you, sunshine.” Vivian dragged her nails down his sides, leaving faint lines. As she settled by his hips, Tom’s cock pressed against her. Tom huffed and puffed as she kissed his Adonis belt, scraping her teeth along his skin from time to time. Her hands stroked along his thighs and he flexed under her touch.

She slid off of Tom’s body, and he whined at the lack of contact. Vivian rolled back on top of Tom, lying along his full body like a blanket. Tom sighed at the weight and contact. She pressed her cheek to his chest, listening to his heart race. She snaked a hand to the back of his head and jerked his head sideways before kissing him. Tom met her lips with hunger and he whimpered each time she pulled away, only to tug him towards her again. He strained against the restraints, desperate to touch her, to pull her tight against him and rut against her. His tongue slipped into her mouth, needy, exploring every inch. He moaned as Vivian’s grip tightened on his hair, hurting, but he wanted more.

Vivian could sense Tom coming close to overheating, making a mess and complicating the hell out of this. His cock strained, hard and weeping. She pulled away, holding his lower lip between her teeth as long as possible, stretching it.

“Ow.” Tom muttered.

Vivian slid down to press against Tom’s side. She cupped her cheek before gently kissing behind Tom’s ear. Tom moaned softly from the back of his throat. Her fingers twisted into his hair and she massaged his scalp. Tom’s shoulders relaxed and his hands loosened from the fists. As she scratched and petted him, he leaned into her touch, his breath slowing to a deep and even pace. He closed his eyes, enjoying the soft touch.

“You are so beautiful, my sunshine.” She cooed at him. Her other finger tracing his jaw and cheekbone. “So pretty.” She kissed his cheek and stroked his chest.

“Thank you, ma’am.” His voice breathy and floaty.

Vivian reached over and unhooked Tom’s wrist. She turned and unhooked his other wrist. Tom didn’t move. She stood to unhook his ankles.

“Legs up, please.” Tom lifted his legs into the air. Vivian undid the cuffs, rubbing the skin and massaging it. She kissed the top of his feet and Tom giggled and squirmed. “You weren’t joking about being ticklish.”

“No, ma’am.” He slowly floated back to reality.

“Sit up, please.” Tom rocked up, his hair a rumpled mess, and held out his wrists. Vivian smoothed out his hair and held the back of his neck while she kissed his cheek and lips a few more times. She released him and unbuckled the wrist cuffs, rubbing his wrists and kissing each one and placed them on the nightstand and grabbed the water bottle, handing it to Tom.

“Thank you.” He opened the bottle and took a large swig. Vivian smoothed his hair back one more time.

“Let’s go get dressed, sunshine.” He sighed, taking another swig of water before standing. Vivian slipped her wedges back on and walked beside Tom, rubbing his neck the entire time. “I was a bit rough on you. Are you okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.” His voice quiet while he grabbed his jeans and tugged them on before pulling on his shirt, tucking it and zipping up.

“How did it feel? I imagine you are used to being treated with kid gloves.”

Tom pulled on his socks and shoes, working on finding the right words.

“I don’t quite know how it felt.” Tom replied, a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “But I know I didn’t want it to stop. I didn’t mind the pain. I wanted to touch you and make you feel as good as you made me feel.”

Vivian smiled and pulled him into a hug, squeezing him tight. “Sunshine, I feel good. I received great pleasure at teasing you.” She kissed him. “With my mouth. And watching you squirm and hearing you purr.” She petted the back of his head. “But I appreciate your desire to please me physically. And you will when the time comes.”

Tom stared at her with his endless blue eyes. “When will that be, ma’am?”

“When you’re ready, Sunshine.” She kissed his cheek. “You still haven’t finished your homework first.”

Tom’s hands fidgeted, twisting in front of him. “I finished all the books. I plan on starting the essay tomorrow.” He stared at the floor. “I want it to be perfect.”

“As long as it is from your heart it will be, my sunshine boy.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “I don’t ask for perfection, just effort.”

Tom nodded and squeezed her hand back. “Yes, ma’am.”

She walked him to the door, kissing him one more time. “Call me in the morning when you wake up.”

Tom nodded. “Thank you for tonight.”

“You are welcome. The pleasure was mine.”

Tom smiled and kissed Vivian’s cheek and headed out. She clicked the door shut and set about cleaning up the place. Tom came home and ate a sandwich before turning in early that evening, his brain still fuzzy.

As requested, Tom called in the morning, still in bed, to check in with Vivian. It pleased her that outside of the marks on his neck and collarbone, Tom was no worse for wear. Tom left out the part of the dreams he had or the fact he woke up with a raging hard on which Tom took care of in the shower, skipping his run for thirty minutes on his long neglected rowing machine.

Tom lazed about for most of the morning, having something akin to a hangover without the benefit of being drunk beforehand. As he sat down at this computer to start his essay for Vivian, there was a knock on the door. He groaned as he trudged to see who would dare disturb his lazy Sunday.

A smiling Benedict greeted him at the door. When he saw Tom in workout gear, he frowned.

“You’re not dressed!” he complained.

“For what?” Tom blinked back at him. He didn’t recall making plans.

“Lunch!” Benedict stepped in the foyer. “We made plans weeks ago. I’ll wait for you to change.”

Tom was ready to protest, but Ben crossed his arms and it was clear he wasn’t leaving without Tom. With a huff, Tom discarded his clothes into the bedroom which now had a small pile of discarded and dirty clothes, and grabbed an old gray v neck t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Shoving his feet into a pair of boots, Tom stomped back to Ben, pushing past him.

“Let’s go.” Tom grumbled.

Tom’s mood improved once he ordered some food and got half a pint into his system. Benedict stared at him, squinting.

“What?” Tom asked, still irritated.

“What is that on your neck?” He pointed at Tom’s neck. Tom twisted it, and then Ben spied the second mark on his collarbone. “And your chest? Were you attacked?”

Tom touched his collarbone and remembered. He blushed. “It’s nothing. Forget it.” He gulped down the other half of his pint and stood. “Let me go get another round.”

Benedict held out his arm to stop Tom. “It’s like you were bitten by someth… Oh… OH!” The lightbulb went off. “Things going well with Vivian?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “Yes.” He sidestepped Ben’s arm and grabbed another pint before returning to the table.

“Care to share?” He prodded.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Moving on.” Tom grew more homicidal by the second.

Benedict clapped his hands together. “Remember how Sophie wrangled me into serving on the children’s hospital charity board?”

“Yes.” Tom saw the Cheshire Cat grin on Ben’s face. “No. No! I went last year and got cornered by that old lady who kept calling me ‘Henry’.”

“It was endearing.”

“It was ridiculous.”

“There’s an open bar.”

“Hard pass.”

“I have two tickets. You can bring Vivian.”

Tom stared at his friend. “I am not introducing you to Vivian.”

“Why not?”

“Because I like her and I’m afraid you will scare her off.”

Benedict scoffed. “I have never…” He clutched his chest in dramatic fashion. “… never scared anyone off.”

“Alice, Catherine, Eva…” Tom counted off on his fingers. “… I can go on.”

“None of them met my high standards. Please come.” he begged. “Sophie will kill me if you don’t come.”

“The thought of your death is tempting.”

The waiter set the food down.

“Tom…” Benedict dropped all pretense. “… please come. I promise I will be on my best behavior.”

Tom’s head dropped. “Give me the details. I will check with Vivian tonight when I call her.”

Benedict’s lips pursed. “Really? I can’t wait to meet her. Especially someone who leaves marks like that on you. Sounds like she is yours for the taking.”

“Yeah.” Tom mumbled as he took a bite of his food.

Tom called her at 9 p.m. like always.

“Sunshine, how was your Sunday?” she asked.

“Speaking of that…” Tom started, and she noticed the nerves in his voice. “What are you doing next Friday evening?”

She thought about it for a moment. “I believe I’m free. Do you have any ideas?”

Tom exhaled sharply. “I’ve been invited to a charity event by Benedict and I have two tickets, and I was wondering if you would like to come with me.” He blurted it all out in one big run-on sentence.

Vivian paused before laughing. “Wow, you were really nervous about that, weren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am. Everything is still so new and I don’t… I don’t want to mess this up.”

“You are just the sweetest, sunshine. You know that right? Beautiful and sweet. Yes, I will go with you.”

Tom beamed. “How would everything work?”

“Like any date would. We go, we drink, we dance and mingle.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, darling. We can set some rules that work for both of us. okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, read to me please.”

Tom grabbed the book.

Tom and Vivian agreed he would pick out three outfit options, but Vivian would come over ahead of time and make the final choice. They would not use pet names and instead would do what is natural. Tom asked that she still rub the back of his neck.

“It calms me down.” he commented.

“Of course, sunshine. I like when you are calm. You are more attentive that way.”

It was now the day of the event and Vivian sat on Tom’s bed, noticing the clutter. Tom was modeling the second outfit.

“I don’t like the tie. Let’s see the last one.”

Tom undid the tie and shirt and grabbed the last option. It was a double-breasted blue pinstripe suit with a blue shirt and navy tie. He did a little spin.

“That one.” Vivian stood and straightened his tie and petted his neck before squeezing his ass. “Your ass looks amazing in those trousers.”

Tom blushed again. “Thank you, ma’am.”

She kissed his cheek, wiping away her gloss. “Remember, no names, now let’s go.”

Tom was more at ease with Vivian by his side. Her reassuring touch at the back of his neck or even his shoulder grounded him. Not to mention, she dazzled everyone she met. Now for the big test.

“Benedict, Sophie, meet Vivian Swann. Vivian meet Benedict Cumberbatch, notorious troublemaker, and his queen of a wife, Sophie Hunter.”

Vivian shook each of their hands, holding tight to Tom’s but leaning in for a kiss on the cheek by Ben. Tom tightened his grip. She suppressed a giggle.

“Charmed. Thank you so much for inviting me. I have been looking into getting the firm involved in more charity work and the children’s ward is an enticing option.”

“Firm?” Sophie questioned.

“Watkins, Price, and Forbes. I work in their corporate law division.”

Benedict let loose a low whistle.

“Tom, you didn’t tell me you were dating a pit bull.” Sophie commented. “Impressive.”

Vivian smiled. “I prefer the term ‘velvet hammer’ but pit bull works. “

“How did you and Tom meet?” Ben interjected.

Tom paled, but Vivian didn’t miss a beat.

“The Bloomsbury Club. We bonded over a shared loved for Macallan 18-year-old aged whisky.”

Tom cleared his throat. “Right. Why don’t we take a seat?” He gestured at their reserved table.

“Your feet must be killing you in those shoes, Vivian. After having kids, I just can’t stand wearing them, but if I want to see eye to eye with this one.” She gestured at Benedict.

“Guilty.” He shrugged. “Although not as tall as the Frost Giant over there.”

Tom paused as he pulled out Vivian’s chair for her.

“I don’t mind the heels.” Vivian responded. “It is all what you get used to. Besides, I enjoy towering over people.” she giggled.

“Champagne?” the waiter offered.

“No, it makes her sneeze.” Tom commented.

“Get me a glass of white wine, please?” Vivian gazed up at him.

Tom smiled down and kissed her cheek. “Yes, of course, darling.”

“Sophie?”

Benedict and Sophie blinked at the two of them.

“Uh… yes a white wine sounds fantastic. Thank you, Tom.”

Tom nodded and headed off to the bar. Sophie elbowed Benedict in the ribs. He shuffled to his feet.

“Tom, let me help you with that!” He called after his friend.

Sophie waited until both men were out of earshot.

“How did you… I don’t want to know. You’re not like Tom’s other girlfriends, Miss Vivian Swann.”

She smiled. “I’m not sure if that is a compliment or an insult. So I will say thank you.”

“Definitely a compliment. There is something different about Tom when he is around you. He seems…”

“… happy?”

“Yes, but the word is content.” Sophie added. “Content, at peace. After that last nasty breakup, the man could use a little peace and quiet.”

“Hopefully not too quiet.” Vivian smirked.

“Are you two gossiping about us?” Benedict teased.

“I was just telling Vivian how happy and content our dear Thomas looks with her.” Sophie quipped.

Tom blushed as Vivian smiled and reached out to rub his neck. “I am. Thank you for noticing Sophie.”

The evening wound down. Tom for once enjoyed the event. Vivian won over Benedict and Sophie, so much so that Sophie invited her to go shopping tomorrow afternoon while she wrangled Benedict and Tom in tearing down a shed in Ben’s yard.

“Leave them to grunt work while we shop.”

“I would love to.” Vivian sipped at her wine.

The two couples said goodbye while waiting for the valet. Benedict hugged Vivian tight and kissed her cheek. While Sophie and her exchanged numbers. Benedict pulled Tom to the side.

“There’s something different about you, man.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m still me.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“No,” Ben folded his hands in front of his face. “there is definitely a change. And I think it has something to do with that enchanting woman over there, who I am sure is being tortured with baby pictures by my wife.”

“Perhaps.” Tom replied cryptically.

“Don’t fuck it up man. You will never find another girl…”

“Woman.” he corrected his friend.

“… Woman like her. You deserved a little happiness.”

“Tom?” Vivian placed her hand on his back. “The car’s here.”

“Of course. Ben.” He shook his friend’s hand and then hugged Sophie before opening the door for Vivian and then getting in and driving off.

“I’m going to head home.” Vivian stated when they got back to Tom’s home.

“Okay. I had a lot of fun tonight. It wasn’t nearly as dreadful with you there.”

“Your friends are a delight. They really do want the best for you, sunshine.”

Tom smiled at the name. “Yes, ma’am.” He fell back into the old pattern.

She grabbed the back of his head and tugged him into a kiss. Tom wrapped his arms around her and did his best to hold her tight. She pulled away, and he whined.

“I’m ready to take this to the next step, Vivian. I want to please you.” His hands ghosted over his shoulders. “In all ways.”

She smiled. “Send me the essay and we will talk. How about lunch tomorrow?”

“I will send it as soon as I step inside. I could cook you lunch here.”

“I would like that, sunshine.” She kissed him one more time. “Sleep well.”

“Yes, ma’am. You too.”

She smiled and walked to her car to head home. Tom stepped inside and rushed to his computer. He did a quick spell check on the essay he had been tweaking over the last week and clicked send.

“There.”

Vivian laughed as her phone beeped before she even left Tom’s driveway, knowing it was Tom’s homework.

“So eager. I like that.”

#tom hiddleston #tom hiddleston fanfiction #tom hiddleston fanfic #tom hiddleston x ofc #tom hiddleston imagine #tom hiddleston fluff #tom hiddleston smut #hiddlesfic #tom hiddleston series #follow my lead

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momo-de-avis · 3 years

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what are 2 books you feel you should be financially compensated for reading (beyond reimbursement for purchasing them)?

hard mode: nothing by zuzas.

now those are high stakes

first of all, this is hard for me to answer because I genuinely cannot read a book through to the end if I don't like it. I won't go past fifty pages if it's annoying me. So there are only a handful of books I can say I hated because I wasted time reading them, and even those I didn't finish.

But there are two, and one of them I actually talk about it all the time

First of all, fuck you, Flaubert. Fuck Emma Bovary. Fuck that book. Not only financial compensation, but emotional of some sort, cause you go through the 7 stages of grief reading that piece of garbage. Not after, during.

Like, every time I try to explain why I hate Madame Bovary so much I tell this little anecdote about my life. It was probably 2AM, I was still living with my mom, and I was in the living room. Back then, the History Channel---before it became exclusively devoted to Aliens, Hitler, and World War II---had a super interesting show called, I believe it was, Great Books. I caught only a few episodes, there was one on Janes Austen, another on Dostoevsky---and yes, one for Madame Bovary. Which was the one I saw that night.

And on that night, I was just chilling on my ass, and there was this expert on Flaubert explaining how the guy came up with the idea for the book. This woman had a PhD in literature. She studied Flaubert's life and history down to the letters and his intimacy. And I chuckled to myself, completely alone---and listen, you're free to believe whatever the hell yall want, but I swear on my cat this shit is true---and said to myself: "I bet this guy ran away to a cabin and dressed himself as woman to write this book." In fact, I hate Madame Bovary SO MUCH I've making this joke for YEARS, and it's why I call that pile of regurgitated french trash "literary transvesty" because it is literally a man playing dress up with no counter-balance to the absolute derailment of this woman's down-spiral. It's just the story of Emma Bovary going off her rockers, and there's no point where there might a slight indication of societal criticism. She's just a piece of shit. You know, at LEAST Tolstoi gave us Kittie and Levine as a counter-point. At LEAST Tolstoi built-up an immense backdrop with Stepane's adultery to understand the horrid treatment Anna is subjected to. At LEAST we are given a good characterisation of Karenine enough, whereas Charles Bovary is limper than a soggy sock. The only Ken doll I owned as a child had more charisma, and that bitch had no clothes.

And AT THAT POINT in the documentary, that lady expert with a whole PhD says something to this effect: APPARENTLY, Flaubert DID run off into a cabin in the fucking woods or some shit, and he did so with a locket, and what was in that locket? The hairs of his lover. Like, oh my God, I hate you so fucking much.

What I hate THE MOST about Madame Bovary is that despite being a shit book and shit story, and having been written by a guy who purposefully isolated himself from the woman he loved in the ass of the world, with a piece of her hair, as he dead ass attempted to "become a woman", whatever the hell that meant (but then again, so did every romantic writer back in the 19th century), this motherfucker was trialled in a court of law for this book (because adultery, women are frail, scandal, blah blah blah), and his defense was so amazing he actually coined a very important term in writing called Indirect Free Speech. Like, I genuinely hate this motherfucker but this absolute genius final take on his shit book just makes me hate him more. (For reference, this is where I learned this, Hans Robert Jauss explains this in his book Reception Theory)

The second book I think I deserve financial compensation for wasting the like, 3 days I wasted reading those first 100 pages or so, was Juliet Marillier's Daughter of the Forest. Oh my God. Listen, back in the day, like every teenage girl in the early/late 2000s, I was discovering paganism and that kind of crap, so I had a lot of wiccan friends. And there was Charmed. Not the rebooted crap, the OG Charmed, when Rose McGowan was closeted terf and we believed she was cool. Everyone loved Charmed. And everyone who bought into the new-pagan stuff and wiccan stuff, they were all introduced by one of two ways: either it was Charmed, or The Mists of Avalon. Either or. No other way. At least around my circle, that is.

So I had a lot of friends squealing over this one book from Marillier. I was absolutely obsessed with Arthuriana because of Mists of Avalon, and my wiccan/goth friends were all over me telling me "OH you GOTTA read Daughter of the Forest if you love Mists of Avalon". It's comforting to know the one wiccan friend who persisted with that crap went wacko and literally vanished into the horizon because I wanted to smack her in the face with that stupid book.

Basically, at the time, I was balls deep into Irish Mythology. And as I read it, I thought it was EERILY SIMILAR to the Children of Lir. Evil stepmother transforming her step-children into swans? Hm? The one thing that threw me off was that, in the story, the hero had to sew these shirts from some godawful plant that fucked up her hands, and that ISN'T in the original Children of Lir story. Then again, Children of Lir is genuinely not a compelling story. Of all Irish myths, it might be the least compelling.

However, I recently learned that IT IS the same tale, despite what Marillier sold as being "inspired by the Brother Grimm". It turns out the Children of Lir is a tale known throughout Europe, spanning from Spain to Ireland, with some variations, and it exists in Germany, where the sewing of the shirts with that weird plant is a plot point. So I guess that was a determent, considering the story is set in Ireland. Also, you can tell the story was written by a herbalist because, oh my god she goes off about plants all the time.

I basically stopped reading because the heroine is a bit obnoxious and it felt like the plot was going nowhere. And at some point, it was literally a book about plants. Like, Marion Zimmer Bradley's books can be boring (take the Forst House, which is one of my favourites, there's gotta be like 100 pages in there about Eilan's boring life picking flowers, but it builds up to her character, at least). But this one, it was going nowhere, while at the same time, Bretons were landing in Ireland? What? My anger came from when I checked the wikipedia page before I gave up because I wanted to see if there was something redeemable in that shit, like, come on, motivate me. And when I read that there's a fucking rape plot thrown in there that bears no relevance for no other reason than... I don't know, fear of men? I gave up. That was definitely when I stopped reading and decided to set it aside. It's weird cause, from what I remember, I think the author wanted to write it in pagan Ireland, but I don't remember a single mention of a pagan god? It was so convoluted, man.

And why the Children of Lir??? I 100% share the opinion of Sorcha Hegarty from Candlelit Tales regarding the Children of Lir: it is THE LEAST interesting tale in Irish Myth, and also---and these are her words, not mine---the least Irish lmao

Honourable mention: Thérèse Raquin by Zola is another one that made me SO FUCKING PISSED OFF that piece of shit book REQUIRES psychological counseling. Like, financial compensation isn't even enough to go through that crap.

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creativity-is-rebellion · 4 years

Text

Top 10 Favourite Books I Have Read (So Far)

As a writer myself, I can’t help but look back at the novels that have shaped the sort of writer I have become today, and helped me find my own unique voice. A good novel captivates, puts it’s twists in all the right places, and makes you think about the story long after you have finished reading it. It makes you contemplate what it is to be human. It hits you hard and leaves a lasting impression. I thought I could share a few of them with all of you. Without further ado, here goes:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (1873)

It's a story as old as time; someone, bored with their life, risks it all to have an affair; but this one is special for a number of reasons. First, it serves as a commentary about 19th century upper-class Russia, a time when it wasn't necessarily scandalous to have an affair, but it was scandalous to leave your husband or wife because of it. Many people conducted their affairs in secret, but the passion Anna felt for Vronsky spilled over into her everyday life, and because she had suppressed feeling any kind of emotion for so long, the passion she felt was obsessive and all-consuming, even though in the end it sours and she blames Vronsky for her fall from grace, which is so devastating (she is cut off from seeing her son Seroyzha that she had with Count Alexei Karenin) that in the end she ends her life. It is made all the more ironic that the novel starts with her convincing Dolly, her sister-in-law, to stay with her two-timing brother, Stepan, as “family is all that matters.” The elements of the complexity of families is also makes this tale so unique. Secondly, it could be argued that Anna is not the protagonist of the story at all, but that Levin is, because his upward trajectory is juxtaposed with Anna's fall from grace. He starts off an awkward and gruff loner, and moves toward being a content and happy family man, with a wife Kitty whom he truly loves. His skepticism and malcontent drifts away as the novel wears on. It is said that Levin is actually a representation of Tolstoy himself, but the book was actually a labor of guilt for cheating on his own wife. The novel ends with a broken-hearted Vronsky enlisting for a battle that he hopes not to come back from alive. I love how rich and evolved each character we are introduced to is. As I also have a love affair with Mother Russia myself ever since I studied Russian history in high school, this novel is truly my favorite classic.

On Writing, Stephen King (2000)

This book is the most straightforward account of what it is like to be a writer from one of the great (if not greatest) modern novelists of our time. It also offers invaluable advice to aspiring and new writers who are looking to hone their craft, but without the flowery, navel-gazing musings so often found in books of a similar ilk. King's real-life descriptions of his struggles with addiction, his pre-writer life, the early days of his success, and his recovery after a horrific accident where he nearly lost his life are related back to his craft so masterfully, and, as such , I cannot recommend this book more to those who are either interested in the mechanisms behind being a writer, or want to be writers themselves. It also serves as a great book to refer back to after you become a writer to make sure you don't get bogged down in common writing mistakes that inadvertently make your work clunky or uninteresting. To paraphrase, King states, to become a writer, talent is essential, but if you don't have the right toolbox to use when writing your masterpiece, its going to look sloppy. King's toolkit, which he elaborates on in his book, is guaranteed to prevent this from happening.

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffery Eugenides (1993)

I read this novel after I saw the movie of the same name, which was Sofia Coppola's directorial debut. Like most book-to-movie adaptations, this novel contains slight deviations and more character development than the movie, but is still a deeply fascinating examination of both the psyche of the Lisbon sisters, the minds of the neighborhood boys who were obsessed with them, the paranoia of suburbia, parental oppression, and neighborhood carelessness. I remember that this movie came out when I was 16, but we had to wait until it came out on DVD to see it, because, as the movie dealt with teenage suicide, and the place I lived at at the time had one of the highest youth suicide rates in the state, it was banned in local cinemas. The most interesting character in both the book and the movie was 14-year-old Lux Lisbon, primarily because of her rebelliousness toward her parents' overbearing protectiveness (mostly from her mother, but the spineless dad is definitely an enabler) which borders on abuse. This is perfectly juxtaposed with her inherent need to be an ordinary teenage girl in an abnormal household, and the oppression of this need leading to unbridled promiscuity. The accounting of the Lisbon sisters' story in both the movie and the novel, however, is unreliable, as it is never told from the point-of-view of the sisters themselves, but from the grown-up versions of the neighborhood boys who we were in love with them, and continued to be so after their deaths. The passing of the Lisbon sisters left a lasting impression on each of the boys, and still haunts them in the present. Decay in both the novel and the movie in the form of the diseased neighborhood trees and the decline of the local auto industry, are used as both foreshadowing of worst things to come, as well as an allegory of the Lisbon's family life. Finally, the accountability of the neighborhood and neighbors, and their willingness to turn a blind eye as to what was happening in the Lisbon household is also examined. Their fleeting, off-the-cuff and detached observations, as well as the (mostly) silent monitoring of the girls by the boys, is an excellent example of the damaging consequences of the bystander effect, which all to often leads to disastrous ends. the accountability of the neighborhood and neighbors, and their willingness to turn a blind eye as to what was happening in the Lisbon household is also examined. Their fleeting, off-the-cuff and detached observations, as well as the (mostly) silent monitoring of the girls by the boys, is an excellent example of the damaging consequences of the bystander effect, which all to often leads to disastrous ends. the accountability of the neighborhood and neighbors, and their willingness to turn a blind eye as to what was happening in the Lisbon household is also examined. Their fleeting, off-the-cuff and detached observations, as well as the (mostly) silent monitoring of the girls by the boys, is an excellent example of the damaging consequences of the bystander effect, which all to often leads to disastrous ends.

Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (1831)

As opposed to the entry above, I read the novel before I saw the movie, which did a pretty good job, considering the novel was written entirely in prose. 230-odd pages of verse penned by one of the greatest Russian poets of the 19th century may seem like a big ask to read, but I can assure you, it is entirely worth it. It tells the tale of an uppity lothario named Eugene Onegin, who, bored with St. Petersburg society, decide to move to his recently-deceased uncle's country estate. This move ultimately leads to Onegin leaving a trail of destruction in his wake, including ruining a woman's reputation, killing her fiance after he challenges Onegin to a duel to defend her honor, and spurning the advances of local provincial beauty Tatiana. Onegin then flees back to St. Petersburg, and after several years, crosses paths once again with Tatiana, Who is now married to a high-ranking general and is a permanent fixture of the St. Petersburg high-society set. When Tatiana shows a grace she never possessed before, and treats him with a cold distain whenever they cross paths, Onegin decides that he loves her, and pursues her doggedly, leading to a show-down between the two would-be lovers, but not in the way you would think. His chance at redemption is alt for nought. Although Tatiana admits her love for Onegin, she also tells him that she would never betray her now-husband to be with him. It is a scintillating slow-burn of a tale of love, loss and propriety in a way that can only be recounted by Pushkin. Interestingly, Pushkin himself was fatally wounded in 1837 after he challenged his brother-in-law, Georges-Charles de Heeckeren d'Anthes, also known as Dantes-Gekkern, a French officer serving with the Chevalier Guard Regiment, to a duel, as he had attempted to seduce the poet's wife, Natalia Pushkina. In some cases, life really does imitate art.

The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak (2005)

I like the voyeuristic feel of this novel, even if this sounds a little strange. The special interest that Death himself takes in the main character, Liesel Meminger (who is The Book Thief in question) is perfectly juxtaposed over the horrors of living in WW2 Germany. It’s a charming story, recounted by Death himself, all the way up to the main character’s death many years later. It gives us special insights into all the characters and they way they think and act, with no-holds-barred. A unique and truly good read.

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler (1939)

This is hands-down the best noir detective novel ever written, a point I regrettably missed when I first had to read it for Advanced English in Year 11 at school. It has all of the grit expected of the genre and follows Chandler’s mainlining private detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a rich family to deal with a blackmailer, Arthur Geiger. His life takes an unexpected turn as he pursues the case and Arthur is found dead.It is both a good detective mystery and a perfect layout for a by-the-numbers look at how this genre should be written. Cool side fact: The Big Sleep is a euphemism for dying.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Series, Stieg Larsson

Lisbeth Salander is still the best kick-arse anti-heroine around, a fact that is evident from her character being re-imagined by David Lagercrantz in further novels in the Millenium series after Steig Larsson’s untimely death. At the time these novels came out, I remember everyone on the beach reading a copy, and I especially enjoy the first entry in this series, which explores a missing woman, the demise and rise of journalist Mikael Blomkvist, the back-story and growth of Lisbeth Salander, female sex-trafficking, and feminist themes. On top of being a missing-person story, it is also a murder mystery, and has an awesome twist at the novel’s denouement. A thrilling, wild-ride of a read.I think I especially enjoyed it because I like reading novels situated around serial killers. That’s all I’ll say. Read the book.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver (2003)

This book is just brutal and a no-holds-barred look at whether killers are born or made.It is told by Eva Khatchadourian in a series of letters to her husband, Franklin, which discuss their son, Kevin, and his behaviour growing up, as well as her reactions to said behaviour, which ultimately lead to a thrilling, if unnerving, conclusion.

IT, Stephen King (1985)

Although it is a gigantic read at 1,128 pages, IT is worth every page. Stephen King's novel about a demonic, otherworldly entity that preys and feasts on the children of Derry, Maine every 27-odd years is a masterpiece second only to his equally weighty saga The Stand. It tells the story of childhood friendship, and the strength one can have when standing together with friends. It is a perfect tale of good triumphing over evil, which is a familiar theme in King’s books which tends to get overlooked in favour of the more horror-like elements. Be warned, it does jump back-and-forth in time, and there are a few awkward parts of the book that the movie thankfully skipped, but they don’t really feel out of place in the novel. This “clown” will give you nightmares, but the ultimate triumph of The Loser’s Club is worth hanging in for.

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (2002)

I've gotta admit, the ending was unsatisfying, but is probably a more realistic account of what usually happens in unsolved cases such as Susie Salmon's. There is a karmic vibe, and at least the killer is disposed of in an unceremoniously undignified way. It’s ultimately a tale of how grief can keep you stuck, and how acceptance is part of moving on. Totally skip the movie and just read the book.

I just realised, all but one of these books has been made into a movie, whether it be a box-office hit or Indie, which I suppose really just attests to how good they are. I’ll be back with another top 10 favourite books soon no doubt. See you on the flip-side.

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patheticphallacy · 5 years

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This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up.

Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away. He was only 50 years old. I won’t go into details because of how personal it is, but he was in hospital a majority of the month before he passed. I’ve taken a year suspension from University for the time being.

It has been a really difficult time for myself and my family. I’ve turned a lot to books and blogging to offer a way to occupy my mind which is why so many things still seem to be coming out, but I cannot say that this will hold up after the funeral.

As I schedule so many posts, a lot of what came out this month has been written since around mid August and I did not find the time to stop the University posts before they were released. I won’t be deleting them.

I hope you’ll all understand.

THINGS I’VE READ

An Inspector Calls by J.B. Priestley– My sister gave me her copy she used for her GCSE’s. Such a great play with revelation after revelation, left me on the edge of my seat. While I knew the core plot twist, I didn’t predict that ending.

Mob Psycho 100 Volume 1 by One– This was kind of meh. It’s one of my best friend’s favourites, so I’ll carry it on eventually, but I don’t really feel the urge to pick volume two up just yet. I will say I like how the anime tackles the same events in a different order to save major revelations for backstory– that was really interesting to pick up on.

I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn– I really didn’t like this! Lacklustre and very cliched, feel like it doesn’t really offer anything other than annoying ending and characters who go through absolutely no development at all.

Kissing Tolstoy by Penny Reid– An OK romance that actually has discussions surrounding reading and books that don’t feel forced. I found this easy to read even though I’ve never read any Russian Lit, and I actually want to read it more now. Like that it discusses age gaps and issues of the power dynamic too.

Seven Tears at High Tide by C.B. Lee– Finally finished this one, and it only took me 3 months. A very cute and heartwarming story about a boy who makes a wish and falls in love with a Selkie. Does get ridiculous at the end, I must say, but I was happy with the payoff.

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill– Katie O’Neill creates such amazing narratives that have wonderful messages about society and being true to yourself and your wishes, pursuing something that you love and encouraging others to do the same.

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin– How can I ever trust a single man or old person after this book? Tell me.

Please Undo This Hurt by Seth Dickinson– Don’t really rate this short story. It bored me and I hated the main characters, not even in a good way. Just perpetuates the ‘I can save you from your mental illness’ narrative that is dull and overdone by this point.

My Hero Academia Volume 20 by Kohei Horikoshi– Gentle Criminal and La Brava was so boring, the School Festival arc was fabulous, and Endeavor finally got his ass kicked! Yay!

Aphrodite Made Me Do It by Trista Mateer– I have a review of this coming out soon for National Poetry Day in the UK, but if you don’t want to wait, I have a review here!

The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca– I read this after watching the trailer for Antlers, and I thought it was pretty neat! Very thrilling, although I’m bothered by changes being made in the film that I feel could detract from having Julia as one of the main characters in the film.

I Am Not Your Final Girl by Claire C. Holland– A collection of poetry centring around fictional women from horror films, exploring their empowerment and agency in a genre and a wider culture and society that seems willing to beat them down until they break.

Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink– I have a review of this linked later this post! Full of body horror and emotional trauma, this is a really solid read great for fans of the podcast and Welcome to Night Vale.

In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant– I love this terrible cover! Keep an eye out for my review of this, it’s coming out soon.

The World’s Greatest First Love Volume 1 by Shungiku Nakamura– The publishing elements and the main character were GREAT, but there is prevalent sexual assault in this that is never addressed and is incredibly insensitive in its treatment, so I don’t recommend this manga.

Dead Voices by Katherine Arden– I didn’t enjoy this one as much as Small Spaces, but it’s still really freaky and a great middle grade read. I love that Coco gets her own POV in this, too, and that it doesn’t take stereotypical routes with some of its plotlines.

No One Is Too Small To Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg– This is a collection of speeches Greta Thunberg has made addressing climate change, as well as her own position as an advocate for the cause. Moving and a must read, in my opinion. It’s only £3 in Waterstones at the moment for anyone who wants to pick it up!

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury– A fascinating collection of essays written by Bradbury about his writing process and some of the more popular works he’s published. I honestly felt really inspired and motivated after reading this, I highly recommend it especially for creative writers, but just be warned it is very oriented around the white male experience.

Heartstopper Volume 2 by Alice Oseman– I adore Heartstopper and I love this second volume. Great progression in the relationship between Nick and Charlie, and we’re getting to see more outside of their relationship and into their friendships and family dynamics, too. I still love Tori Spring!

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle– Finally got a hold of the MASSIVE audiobook where Stephen Fry narrates all the Holmes stories, and it honestly made the experience so much more enjoyable. I think Doyle’s skill lies more in shorter fiction than longer fiction, I think there’s less opportunity for… not useless, per se, just unneeded waffling.

Giant Days Volume 9 and 10 by John Allison– These two volumes take place around the tailend of the girl’s second years and follows their accommodation location, the progression (and breakdown) of relationships, and them finally making it to third year intact. I honestly can’t believe there’s only three or four volumes left in this series, its been a constant companion for me since 2016 when I first started and I really don’t want to let it go.

No Touching At All and Even So, I Will Love You Tenderly by Kou Yoneda– Of the ‘older’ manga I’ve read that focus on the relationships between two men, these two are definitely in the ‘recommend’ pile. Other than the beautiful names for the volumes and the artwork being really pretty, I really enjoyed the developing relationships and the conversations had about workplace homophobia and ostracization in Japan, although that wasn’t the main focus. They do include some questionable attitudes towards identification of sexuality– two characters in both volumes are probably bisexual or on that spectrum, but are referred to as straight more than once for liking women and only the man they enter the relationship with. It’s complicated, but nothing in either volumes ever feels targeted or hateful, just lacking education on the nuances of sexuality.

Articles

I found this article about Friends great as it breaks down issues I’ve had with the show for years. I don’t have a lot of attachment to it, honestly, I mostly just put it on in the background, but I think I’ll stop now. I’ve always found the handling of gender and sexuality damaging in Friends, as well as the overwhelming fatphobia.

I really enjoyed looking through this list The Guardian did of the 100 best books of the 21st century. I don’t know why, I’m just a big fan of lists!

Before reading this article, I can honestly tell you I knew nothing about Susan Sontag beyond her name. It’s deconstructing her queerness and how her aversion to accepting her own sexuality ultimately ruled a lot of the work she produced in her life.

God, this article was fascinating. I can’t even tell you what it’s about, really, other than that it’s an interview with Christeene, a punk drag artist who is just really cool, honestly. There are some buttholes for anyone who… wants to avoid butts? Or reading this at work?

There was a massive conversation in August that carried into September regarding the rise in men adopting pseudonyms to get their thriller novels published. This Atlantic article particularly captured the issues I have with men who do this, who are almost trying to fool an audience of women who trust women writers to not approach the suffering of women through a misogynistic lens, as is so common in modern society.

An older article by The New Inquiry, Coming out of the Coffin offers an insight into the fraught relationship between Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde. A really interesting read, I’m just sad I discovered it 7 years after its release!

THINGS I WATCHED

I don’t do music sections on these wrap ups anymore, so I’ll put this here: the GRAACE cover of ‘Complicated’ by Avril Lavigne completely transforms the song and adds such an amazing depth to it

I decided to binge watch Fleabag and it’s most definitely the best decision I’ve made all year. Fleabag follows the titular woman as she navigates her life as a thirty year old woman whose entire life is in flux, and has been since the death of her mother. There’s a lot I could say about this show, honestly. What really stood out to me was how much I could relate specifically to the emotions Fleabag and her older sister Claire feel in relation to each other, and their grief. Seeing them still come back together even after such a significant loss, their dependency, really gives me strength to get through what I’m experiencing at the moment, so Fleabag has been something I can relate to and look at as hope for a future where I can begin to wrap my head around the terrible things going on around me.

THINGS I POSTED

August Wrap Up

TTT: Books Outside My Comfort Zone

50 Bookish Questions Tag

Music I Enjoyed This Summer

Connie’s Personal 101 Guide For Personal Survival of University

Bookshelf Tour Part 3: TBR & More Manga/Comics

Book Review: I Call Upon Thee by Ania Ahlborn

TTT: Books on my Fall TBR

Book Review: Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink

Bookshelf Tour Part 4: CDs&DVDs

If you liked this post, consider buying me a coffee? Ko-Fi.

Goodreads|Twitter|Instagram|Letterboxd

September Wrap Up This is going to be a really difficult introduction to my wrap up. Unfortunately, on September 18th my dad passed away.

#2019 #articles #book review #film #music #reading wrap up #tv

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loneberry · 6 years

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THE LOST GIRL’S HOME IS IN BOOKS: spring leisure reading

Girl Reading (1850), oil on canvas, Andre Fontaine

Writing on my phone. On the train. Woke with a sore throat. Snow outside the Manhattan window turning to sludge and then puddles. In the morning Alex and I made our way to Tisch to pick up books from Wendy and sit in on Fred Moten’s class. He spoke for three hours about a paragraph in Zalamea’s Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, constellating the Isley Brothers with quantum physics with the history of slavery with Solange with financialization with the spatio-temporal dimensions of Judaism with critiques of the individuated liberal subject. In Fred’s presence I’m always in awe. When he says the stream of thought will go where it goes, I know what he means, what it feels like, to want to read everything. To have no filters. To be a being who is…interested. “You know, it’s like a river that winds through all these different terrains, and part of it winds through the history of science, and part of it winds through category theory and general topology, and part of it winds through Russian cinema—I’m just interested.” (Moten) Would like to linger more on the things I read and not just mark passages to return to…later. Has grad school de-skilled me? Has the process of becoming a “historian”—of having to read thousands of pages per class in grad seminars destroyed my ability to read slowly? Poetry is becoming harder to read. It demands a kind of attention other than the kind of attention I have become accustomed to—the temporality forced into me by the academic grind. Last semester I did my comprehensive exams. For two hours I was quizzed by 4 professors on the contents of ~400 books. My fields were: Prisons and Police; History and Political Economy of Race in America; Social and Political Theory (Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, Frankfurt School, feminist/queer theory, post-structuralism); and Black Literature, Theory and Cultural Studies. “Studying” for my exams hardly felt like studying at all—I was just doing what I’ve always done: read. But the thing about being in academia is…you can’t just read what you want to read (unless you’re Fred!), you’re supposed to specialize. Your supposed to read within your discipline, to be monogamous with your dissertation topic. But sometimes…my mind needs ventilation. I need to let my mind wander. So this spring break I went on a kind of “retreat”—I rented a little eco-bungalow on a mountain overlooking the ocean in Deshaies, Guadalupe, with the intention to do nothing except read, journal & spend time in nature. It’s weird to now have a life where I have to schedule in these compressed snatches of leisure. Between my academic life and artist/public intellectual life all life is becoming work work work. Constant travel, mountains of assignments to grade, grant applications, bureaucracy, student emails, assigned readings, lesson planning, talks—in psychoanalysis I am sometimes too fatigued to finish my sentences. What was it? “The disquieting feeling that we don’t own ourselves.” My poor journal, neglected since last semester. Turned inside-out and called into presence by the Pavlovian PING of the push notification. Life becomes the work of feeding the avatar. It’s nothing new. It’s the same ole subject formation, in overdrive. The you of I (alienated Lacanian subject) — identification with an image of self that circulates as…I-am-that. When the avatar takes over your life, when you become what the public makes you…how can you find a way to re-inhabit your life as you? Quiet. Unplug. Has busyness evacuated my inner life? I’m still me. But look at how much my situation has changed…

Here are my notes on the books I read over spring break (some finished the week after I returned…)

Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

My skin takes it in. Ghosts enter and leave this vessel, Sunship Earth. Body, too, will become a ruined beach house covered in pale violet morning glory vines, its shutters still hinged shut. Now Nabokov is analyzing the varied march of time in Tolstoy—there is something like a moral in Kitty and Levin’s slow dance, against the locomotive thrust of Anna and Vronsky. A road—to where? The bull in the clearing, the smell of the tiny yellow flowers and the fade, the gloaming, the wall of water, peach-haloed in the sunset. The dimming, the peep of the first cicada, the crushed cicada that lost its way, the dream that wrote her destiny, the dirty peasant rooting around in the sack—the man split by the wheels of the locomotive. A force that nothing, no one escapes. [Holy shit. As I type these notes from my journal my train has been stopped in Providence because the train ahead of us hit someone]. Yes, I have had the dream of the man with his hand in my sack [“It was crowded in the market. I was trying to photograph the flowers but the image was distorted because a man had his hand in my backpack”]. Can a sudden silence wake a sleeping body? I think, as I wake, that I have caught the day in the precise moment of transition. What crossed over then, the wind swept the island clean. Like Anna Karenina I have been under the spell of the dream: what I now no longer know if I can trust. Nothing could have saved Anna the terrible omen flashing above her life…

Nabokov - Lectures on Russian Literature

Freud and Baldwin love Dostoyevsky. Nabokov loathes him. What does that tell you about the kinds of people who love and hate Dostoyevsky? Lovers of Dostoyevsky: hysterics, neurotics, fringe-dwellers, madmen. Dostoyevsky is to literature what Zulawski is to cinema (emotional excess–which is why teens also love Dostoyevsky). This whole book is an argument for Tolstoy and against Dostoyevsky. Lovers of Tolstoy: the good, the moral, the erudite, Oprah. Nabokov is a snob à la Adorno, but his lectures on Tolstoy are damn good (skip the ones on Dostoyevsky), especially the ones on dreams and time in Anna K.

Nabokov and Barabtarlo - Insomnia Dreams

This book is pretty fucking cool. It is an inventory of Nabokov’s proleptic dreams, which he wrote down on notecards after reading J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. Dunne was an aeronautical engineer and crackpot philosopher who developed what I sometimes call stoner dream theory. He believed that past-present-future exist simultaneously and that the experience of time as an arrow moving forward is an effect of waking consciousness. In dreams we are unhitched from normative time and can access the future–are touched by future events.

Notebook notes: Dunne and Nabokov dream to know time in every direction. So future events loop back to pierce our sleeping heads. Did I believe—the future is making contact with me. What did the dream corrupt? I could not outrun it. Nabokov dreaming of South Station [strange, that’s where I’m headed as I type up these notes…]. Dreams of the lepidopterist: chasing the butterflies with a giant spoon instead of a net. Sometimes he’s an insufferable pedant. But even pedants can have a compelling dream life…

Lemov - Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity

Professor Lemov teaches in the History of Science department at Harvard. She is currently a faculty fellow in a year-long Crime and Punishment seminar at Harvard that I am also a part of. I first got interested in her work after she presented an excellent paper on the history of Cold War behaviorist experiments (many of which were conducted on prisoners, including the practice of “psychosurgery”) and early efforts to use data to construct psychological theories of deviance. When I found out she wrote a history of a dream database, I knew I had to read it.

This book is a history of Bert Kaplan’s ambitious mid-20th century quest to create a database of dreams and psychological data (called the Primary Records in Culture and Personality), which consists of a collection of the raw notes of the thoughts, feelings, and dreams of people from around the world, stored on the now-obsolete technology of the Microcard. It is at once a history of: microfilm technologies, data science, the information storage ambitions of postwar social scientists and anthropologists, and psychologists’ obsession with the dreams and unconscious thoughts of ethnic “others.” The story of the database is fascinating in itself…but I wanted to know more about what was in the repository. Sometimes the unconscious speaks:

“A man named Birch Tree told of a dying young man of his acquaintance who had dreamed too ambitiously: one night, he was able to see ‘every leaf in the whole world’ and perished soon after, like the leaves that fall from the trees each year.”

“dream #19, in which he was shooting birds, surrounded by sunflowers as big as evergreen trees”

“Dreams were “palimpsests for understanding what could be called ‘not-self,’ the place at which the self begins to shade away into nothingness or something else.”

“If you sat in a library looking at someone’s dreams, what were you seeing?”

The database of dreams was dead on arrival.

But there’s another living database of dreams assembled by oneirologist Kelly Bulkeley: http://sleepanddreamdatabase.org/ – have read and enjoyed several of Bulkeley’s books too. The convocation of the oneirologists…

Sliwinski - Mandela’s Dark Years

How strange, I read this two days before the death of Winnie Mandela. Did Nelson dream of Winnie while in prison? There is a lot to chew on in this little book. I keep returning to the dream that is circled in the text, Nelson Mandela’s dream from prison:

I had one recurring nightmare. In the dream, I had just been released from prison—only it was not Robben Island, but a jail in Johannesburg. I walked outside the gates into the city and found no one there to meet me. In fact, there was no one there at all, no people, no cars, no taxis. I would then set out on foot toward Soweto. I walked for many hours before arriving in Orlando West, and then turned the corner toward 8115. Finally, I would see my home, but it turned out to be empty, a ghost house, with all the doors and windows open, but no one at all there.

The subject in absentia dreams their erasure while in prison, the experience of becoming-ghost. (Mandela’s recurring nightmare. How apartheid structures the geography of the unconscious…)

Szabó - The Door

“If there was [an] article about what to read once you’ve finished Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, The Door—though it lacks the scope of those books—might top the list.” I read no such list but did finish the Neapolitan novels last year. I read The Door after it was recommended by 3 of my feminist friends.

To say what this book is about would fail to get at the experience of reading this book. It’s deeply disturbing and all the more so because Emerence, the narrator’s housekeeper, is the exact likeness of my aunt Helen. They are women for whom every emotional door has been sealed shut. They both had dogs that were passionately attached to them. Under what conditions does the wound grow into an impenetrable shell? Grow into the pride of self-sufficiency…

Notes: The book is bookended by a recurring nightmare of a door that won’t open. An ambulance outside, and the silhouettes of paramedics seen through glass. Most of my dreams are about the absence of shelter, porous structures, rooms that are always open to invaders. But here is a nightmare about being trapped inside with someone in need of help. Ferrante’s Days of Abandonment resonates too.

Resonances. Lightning strikes the two babes Emerence was fleeing with. In Anna Karenina, lightning missed Kitty and child. The plots of two novels are crossed. What characters evade in one novel befalls characters in another. It’s like the books are talking to each other through the body of me.

Schmitt - Political Theology

We should discuss this book in person. My thoughts are too sprawling to give shape to them here. People on the left read Schmitt for his critique of liberalism and though there are parts of it I find compelling (I’ve elaborated the concept of a “financial state of exception” in my book Carceral Capitalism), the part about liberal democracy lacking decisionism because it’s weighed down by a Weberian bureaucracy is, I think, wrong. Well, that’s what I felt while reading McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century immediately following Political Theology.

McCoy - In the Shadows of the American Century

This book is part of an ever-growing body of literature on the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China as a global superpower. But what this book adds to the analysis is a thought-provoking discussion of the changing nature of geopolitical struggles–from a navel-based strategy to a land-based strategy. McCoy unpacks the influence of Halford Mackinder’s theory of the Geographical Pivot of History, which posits that the future belongs to whoever controls the Eurasian landmass (the World-Island). During the Cold War the US has maintained its hegemony by controlling key axial points–through NATO in western Europe (on the west side of the World-Island), and the strategic positioning of military/naval bases around the Pacific, and the forging of political and economic alliances with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, etc. This book is a good overview of how the US built and maintained its empire, and offers possible blueprints for its decline (McCoy’s analysis of Obama’s attempts to salvage US hegemony through his “pivot toward Asia” and Trump’s acceleration of the decline of US hegemony was interesting…). After reading about the CIA’s covert operations in Latin America I felt that liberal democracy is not at all lacking decisionism, as Schmitt says, but like all states it maintains its power through brute force (militarism/war), international diplomacy, strategic alliances, soft power, proxy warfare and covert operations, international trade agreements, technological prowess, surveillance, etc.

Saterstrom - Ideal Suggestions

What is the relationship between what is seen and unseen?

Saterstrom’s poetics can be summed up by her line: “dust mote footing the invisible”–the “thing” itself is often absent, even as it mutates everything present, but there are ways to access ghosts, traces, invisible forces, and the disappeared. Like a projection that flashes when it catches smoke in the phantasmagoria–you can catch it in the transition.

The form of the book is satisfying. I enjoy the way it alternates between ars poetica and the enactment of the poetics it is trying to sketch.

Notes:

“In the other world everything also exists. But in versions complicated by the softness that dissolution makes.”

“what happens between women when the center of female triangulation is scarcity and lack?”

Simone Weil: “When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.”

divinatory poetics as a way to bear “the absurdity and enchantment of human experience”

to write from “within the membranous precincts between our multiple bodies in the larger rhizomatic field of resonances, where much is sounding and is also unsounded.”

Christian Hawkey: “the holes in our bodies and skulls are voice chambers, sound chambers, wherein our own voiced selves and the voiced selves of others constantly enter and exit, and are changed by our bodies upon entrance, exit. Consciousness…is less a vehicle for “self-presence” than a void, a blank space at the site of intersection.”

“the friendship of our ghosts”

“A raw garnet dug up from earth appears as a piece of burned glass and smells of warm dirt. How did this garnet come to rest here, pinned between sky and sea, a mineral between the here and hereafter? Lines made through the absenting of lines, they suggest their phantom shapes into calligraphy. And someone arrives, a dead poet, she writes in an elegant script a poem about geese. It is a melancholic poem featuring geese, a landscape, and reflections about death. How do the deceased live within the blurred calligraphic strokes dependent upon whatever it was we erased? Who was here first? The process of being read, truly read. One day our lines appear in some other’s erasure.”

Where Freedom Starts (an anthology of essays on #MeToo)

This is an excellent collection of essays on #MeToo that captures the spectrum of feminist responses to the nascent movement. It includes black feminist critiques of carceral feminism, a discussion of black and Latinx vulnerability to sexual violence in the sphere of domestic labor, queer critiques of moral sex panics, feminist analyses of social reproduction, analyses of how undocumented women are hyper-vulnerable to sexual assault in the workplace (and at risk of deportation if they report sexual abuse), and more. I appreciate that many of these essays attempt to grapple with the emotionally and politically messy aspects of sexual violence–How do we determine the category or degree of the harm done? What you do when you feel ambivalence toward your rapist and internalize blame? How is victimhood constructed? I plan to return to these topics and questions in an essay I hope to write in May.

**This ebook is free from Verso.** Get it here.

Marina Van Zuylen - The Plentitude of Distraction

If I ever teach my Lost Girls class on the poetics of wandering, I would definitely include this book!! So, so good. Yes, the poet needs to give herself over to her reveries. To luxuriate in the waywardness of experience–the soul cut loose.

Notes: Darwin’s great regret: “Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds … gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music…. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive…. If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Discussed this Darwin passage with my analyst for some time. I don’t want to become a work machine! Give me “delicious idleness”!

“stop measuring your days by what you can report to your boss or to your conscience”

waywardness: “reveries unfasten him from his constructed social persona, eventually converting dispersal into a gathering of self-hood”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées: “The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads is imperceptibly to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.”

“the pure pleasure of a contemplative experience”

“It is not too late to side with some of the great propagandists of wasted time, with the practitioners of reverie, and cultivate the pleasures and pains of mental mayhem.”

Marx - Capital Vol 1

It’s always a good time to re-read Marx. In December I started a Capital reading group with my comrades LaKeyma and Joohyun. Marx is best read with your women of color crew!

Sithole - Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness

Did an event with the incredible Tendayi Sithole at NYU (moderated by Fred Moten and Wendy Lotterman), so I wanted to read Tendayi’s work on Biko before the event. Many parts of the book draw on Afropessimism to analyze Biko’s liberatory political philosophy. We had a long discussion (privately and during the panel) about Afropessimism’s reception in South Africa (”it’s given us a language to understand our predicament,” says Tendayi). Such good work, and such a wonderful person and poet too!! During the reading Fred said Tendayi and I “became a band.”

McGuckian - The Flower Master

Re-read this at the Deshaies botanical gardens in Guadalupe. Unfuckwithable. McGuckian is one of my favorite poets of all time. Also read the parts about McGuckian in Northern Irish Poetry and the Russian Turn. Had no idea McGuckian draws so heavily from Russian literature, and that she feels there is a natural kinship between Russians and the Irish due to their historical predicaments…

Harford - Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy

Pop economic/business and tech history. Replete with compelling stories and fun facts about underappreciated inventions. The chapters I was most interested in were the ones about inventions that fundamentally transformed gendered labor (TV dinners, infant formula, the birth control pill). After a while this books started to annoy me because the novelty wore off and I can only handle so much praise of the so-called wonders of capitalism.

Brogaard and Marlow - The Superhuman Mind

I don’t think I’m any smarter after having read this book. It’s somewhere between pop science (in the style of Oliver Sacks) and self-improvement literature. The book tries to give you mental “hacks”–mnemonics and algorithmic mental shortcuts. Most of the the book describes case studies of people who have accidentally unlocked superhuman mental capacities as a result of a brain injury, stroke, etc…or they were just born neurologically atypical. Synesthetes have good memories. If you’ve ready any of the pop sci books on memory you already know these tricks… the Greeks have known about the Memory Room for a while too…

Still reading:

Moten’s Black and Blur

Anne Boyer’s A Handbook of Disappointed Fate

Doudna and Sternberg’s A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Frank Stanford - The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You

#books #leisure reading #reading

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drxeric-blog · 7 years

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Anna Karenina (2012) Film Review

TL;DR: Skip it (unless you are aching to see a dysfunctional film adaption); 4/10.

Background

Unlike my previous review, this one is taking us back to a film from a few years ago.

I hold a lot of value for reading a book before watching it's adaption, but unfortunately that doesn't happen nearly often enough with me—especially when the book is made of EIGHT substantial parts (!)—as is the case with Anna Karenina. It's a sizable book, and one I would still love to read. I've also not seen any of the other film adaptions of this story.

Anna Karenina traces the love lives of two characters, Anna and Levin, wherein Anna is the more prominent protagonist. The story shows Anna trying—poorly—to navigate an extra-marital affair (with Vronsky) and the aftermath, while Levin experiences failure, but still holds hope, in his desire to marry the girl of his dreams (Kitty). The theme of the story is broadly love and infidelity. A large number of family and friends are intricately involved with the complicated processes for better and for worse.

Other than this, the following review is spoiler free. As will be the norm with my reviews, I've organized it into Pros/Cons/Mixed then summarized my thoughts and rating at the end.

I should also make a little disclaimer of sorts: I was seriously thinking of seeing Coco in the theater for the first time instead of Anna Karenina (on Netflix), but as the Knight of the Holy Grail said, "He choose poorly." Hopefully this error will be rectified soon. :)

Pros

THE KARENINS Alexei Karenin (Jude Law) and Anna Karenina (Kiera Knightly) had a perfect "anti-chemistry" for lack of a better term. I could hardly remember that it was Jude Law playing the bookish, hardline, and exacting Karenin against Kiera's free-spirited Anna. They did very well expressing the hard conflicts arising over their tragic predicaments.

LEVIN AND KITTY Konstantin Levin (Domhnall Gleeson) and Ekaterina "Kitty" Shcherbatskaya (Alicia Vikander) were very good. They had a strong chemistry, such that I can understand why they were chosen to work together again in Ex Machina. Levin was a good, sympathetic character and Kitty's kindly, doll-like youth was perfectly embodied by Vikander.

(It makes me all the more annoyed seeing Gleeson nail a wonderful, serious role that The Last Jedi went and threw his General Hux into the dust-bin of total caricature. But I digress—that is for a later date!)

OTHER CAST Most (save one) of the other casting choices were pretty well done, and the actors executed their given roles effectively, as far as I could tell.

Cons

It's tricky to separate where this film goes wrong because each issue is interconnected with the others.

ADAPTION Overall, I don't understand at all what the film makers were trying to do with this film. I don't get numerous things: Why was the tone so strange? Why were there so many scene transitions with mixed continuity where it felt like the audience is just being rushed about? Why did they have to take the religious aspects of the story so flippantly when Tolstoy was very sincere in his writing about such matters? What were the film-makers really trying to say about the toxic way marriage was enforced socially at that time? What was with the characters randomly showing up on actual stages here and there throughout the movie? (Was it some kind of allegorical device? If so, it didn't work very well.) The film sends very mixed and ambiguous signals; something I suspect the original story is more clear on.

In a story that is about the topics of love and infidelity I couldn't figure at all what kind of perspectives this film was trying to suggest.

VRONSKY The one acting choice which I don't understand was for Alexei Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). He and Kiera didn't mesh very well. He was stiff and lacked warmth. It was impossible to understand why Anna would go out of her way to be with him.

CONNECTION But that also leads to the issue of how we have no time, nor does the framing of the film allow us, to become emotionally invested in any particular characters. I felt very little for Anna's anguish, Karenin's conundrums, and Levin's lovesickness. It all just happened, and it was awkward for people, and that's that. As part of the problem, there was poor buildup and foreshadowing with things just moving along.

VISUAL/AUDIO AESTHETICS Also interfering with empathy was the framing of the story itself in the visual experience. While there are some scenes which are beautiful both visually and auditory, there were so many scenes which where quite the opposite and, as far as I could tell, needlessly so. It was bad enough in several scenes that the visual/audio experience was like staring at a chalk board while someone slowly screeched their fingernails along it.

I think the film makers went more for spectacle and less for depth. Lots of flashiness, or running around, or gritty stuff, but few scenes getting the audience to connect. Also, this general framing issue made the film visually confusing.

Mixed

OBLONSKY Stepan "Stiva" Oblonsky (Matthew McFadden) was a bit odd to me. It was cool to see McFadden take on a VERY different role from his somber Mr. Darcy. I liked Stiva a fair bit, but I feel like they made him over-the-top in a comedic way that didn't entirely work.

LEVIN'S SECONDARY PLOT For a 2 hour adaption of such a large story, we really don't get enough depth with either of the two main love stories. I see how they couldn't really cut out the Levin plot, but the film felt fragmented with going back and forth to the nearly independent secondary love story. This story line does not work harmoniously enough off the central Anna plot for it to enhance the story the way it's probably meant to. Levin's arc, though, has to stay in to show an example of true love, and it would be an admirable example if it had been executed better.

R-RATING I find it strange that Anna Karenina got an R rating. The portrayal of the violent deaths of two characters seemed basically PG-13; the same holds for the sex scenes, and the drug use was understated enough. "Language" wasn't an issue at all. I guess it was just the totality of all three things, but to me this was a PG-13 film.

Summary

I suspect that this story is WAY more than what came across on screen: A dystopian Jane Austen novel with a Scarlet Letter theme set in Imperial Russia. But Anna Karenina was itself a genre defining work, yet this film does not make the story seem groundbreaking at all!

I was hoping to at least _like_ the movie and maybe it'd get a 6/10. After all, I was forewarned that it was confusing. Honestly, it wasn't THAT confusing, though, but it was very unenjoyable and uncompelling. It's fairly rare that I can say that I did not like a movie. How a film can take a great cast and a classic story, and make something this bad is beyond me!

For it's overall effect, I'd almost stoop so low as to give it a 2/10, but it is rescued to a generous 4/10 by the top-notch character delivery by high-caliber actors.

Unless you are begging to see another Kiera Knightly movie or are required to watch an example of a poorly executed film adaption, don't waste your time with Anna Karenina 2012.

#anna karenina #leo tolstoy #film review #kiera knightley #jude law #alicia vikander #domnhall gleeson #bad adaption

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copiegrandeurnature · 4 years

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Imagining our alternate selves can be fuel for fantasy or fodder for regret. Most of us aren’t haunted so acutely by the people we might have been. But, perhaps for a morning or a month, our lives can still thrum with the knowledge that it could have been otherwise.

“The thought that I might have become someone else is so bland that dwelling on it sometimes seems fatuous,” the literary scholar Andrew H. Miller writes, in “On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives” (Harvard). Still, phrased the right way, the thought has an insistent, uncanny magnetism. Miller’s book is, among other things, a compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been. Miller quotes Clifford Geertz, who, in “The Interpretation of Cultures,” wrote that “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.” We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time. “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes. “Plural possibilities simmer down.” This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical. Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

“You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife,” David Byrne sings, in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.” “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’ ” Maybe you feel suddenly pushed around by your life, and wonder if you could have willed it into a different shape. Perhaps you suddenly remember, as Hilary Mantel did, that you have another self “filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that wouldn’t work after the opening lines.” Today, your life is irritating, like an ill-fitting garment; you can’t forget it’s there. “You may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house. . . . This is not my beautiful wife,’ ” Byrne sings. Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or for ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities; they may even, through their persistence, shape us. Practitioners of mindfulness tell us that we should look away, returning our gaze to the actual, the here and now. But we might have the opposite impulse, as Miller does. He wants us to wander in the hall of mirrors—to let our imagined selves “linger longer and say more.” What can our unreal selves say about our real ones?

It’s likely, Miller thinks, that capitalism, “with its isolation of individuals and its accelerating generation of choices and chances,” has increased the number of our unlived lives. “The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the review of the past to improve future outcomes”—all these “feed the people we’re not.” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves, even though there’s only one life to live: it’s “yolo + fomo,” a friend tells Miller, summing up the situation nicely. The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.

Historic events generate unlived lives. Years from now, we may wonder where we would be if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t shifted us onto new courses. Sometimes we can see another life opening out to one side, like a freeway exit. Miller recounts the sad history of Jack and Ennis, the cowboys in Annie Proulx’s story “Brokeback Mountain,” who are in love but live in Wyoming in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and so must hide it. They disagree about how to understand their predicament. Ennis has no “serious hard feelings,” Proulx tells us. “Just a vague sense of getting short-changed.” But Jack, Miller writes, “is haunted by the lives they might have led together, running a little ranch or living in Mexico, somewhere away from civilization and its systematic and personal violence.” Jack tells Ennis, “We could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life.” The existence he has is spoiled by the one he doesn’t.

It makes sense for Jack to dwell on how things might have turned out in a better world. And yet we can have the same kinds of thoughts even when we’re basically happy with our lives. The philosopher Charles Taylor, who has written much about the history of selfhood, has a theory about why we can’t just accept the way things are: he thinks that sometime toward the end of the eighteenth century two big trends in our self-understanding converged. We learned to think of ourselves as “deep” individuals, with hidden wellsprings of feeling and talent that we owed it to ourselves to find. At the same time, we came to see ourselves objectively—as somewhat interchangeable members of the same species and of a competitive mass society. Subjectivity and objectivity both grew more intense. We came to feel that our lives, pictured from the outside, failed to reflect the vibrancy within.

A whole art form—the novel—has been dedicated to exploring this dynamic. Novelists often show us people who, trapped by circumstances, struggle to live their “real” lives. Such a struggle can be Escher-like; a “real” life is one in which a person no longer yearns to find herself, and yet the work of finding oneself is itself a source of meaning. In Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” Anna, caught in a boring marriage, destroys her life in an attempt to build a more passionate, authentic one with Count Vronsky. All the while, Levin, the novel’s other hero, is so confused about how to live that he longs for the kind of boring, automatic life that Anna left behind. Part of the work of being a modern person seems to be dreaming of alternate lives in which you don’t have to dream of alternate lives. We long to stop longing, but we also wring purpose from that desire.

An “unled” life sounds like one we might wish to lead—shoulda, coulda, woulda. But, while I’m conscious of my unlived lives, I don’t wish to have led one. In fact, as the father of a two-year-old, I find the prospect frightening. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide,” the philosopher Kieran Setiya points out that, thanks to the “butterfly effect,” even minor alterations to our pasts would likely have major effects on our presents.

Sartre thought we should focus on what we have done and will do, rather than on what we might have done or could do. He pointed out that we often take too narrow a census of our actions. An artist, he maintains, is not to be “judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things also help to define him.” We do more than we give ourselves credit for; our real lives are richer than we think. This is why, if you keep a diary, you may feel more satisfied with the life you live. And yet you may still wonder at the particular shape of that life; all stories have turning points, and it’s hard not to fixate on them.

Miller quotes the poem “Veracruz,” by George Stanley, in full. It opens by the sea in Mexico, where Stanley is walking on an esplanade. He thinks of how his father once walked on a similar esplanade in Cuba. Step by step, he imagines alternative lives for his father and for himself. What if his dad had moved to San Francisco and “married / not my mother, but her brother, whom he truly loved”? What if his father had transformed himself into a woman, and Stanley had been the child of his father and his uncle? Maybe he would have been born female, and “grown up in San Francisco as a girl, / a tall, serious girl.” If all that had happened, then today, walking by the sea in Mexico, he might be able to meet a sailor, have an affair, and “give birth at last to my son—the boy / I love.”

“Veracruz” reminds me of the people I know who believe in past lives, and of stories like the one David Lynch tells in “Twin Peaks,” in which people seem to step between alternate lives without knowing it. Such stories satisfy us deeply because they reconcile contrary ideas we have about ourselves and our souls. On the one hand, we understand that we could have turned out any number of ways; we know that we aren’t the only possible versions of ourselves. But, on the other, we feel that there is some fundamental light within us—a filament that burns, with its own special character, from birth to death. We want to think that, whoever we might have been, we would have burned with the same light. At the end of “Veracruz,” the poet comes home to the same son.

As Sartre says, we are who we are. But isn’t the negative space in a portrait part of that portrait? In the sense that our unled lives have been imagined by us, and are part of us, they are real; to know what someone isn’t—what she might have been, what she’s dreamed of being—this is to know someone intimately. When we first meet people, we know them as they are, but, with time, we perceive the auras of possibility that surround them. Miller describes the emotion this experience evokes as “beauty and heartbreak together.”

The novel I think of whenever I have this feeling is Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” Mrs. Ramsay, its central character, is the mother of eight children; the linchpin of her family, she is immersed in the practicalities of her crowded, communal life. Still, even as she attends to the particulars—the morning’s excursion, the evening’s dinner—she senses that they are only placeholders, or handles with which she can grasp something bigger. The details of life seem to her both worthy of attention and somehow arbitrary; the meaning of the whole feels tied up in its elusiveness. One night, she is sitting at dinner, surrounded by her children and her guests. She listens to her husband talking about poetry and philosophy; she watches her children whisper some private joke. (She can’t know that two of them will die: a daughter in childbirth, a son in the First World War.) Then she softens her focus. “She looked at the window in which the candle flames burnt brighter now that the panes were black,” Woolf writes, “and looking at that outside the voices came to her very strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral.” In this inner quiet, lines of poetry sound:

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be Are full of trees and changing leaves.

Mrs. Ramsay isn’t quite sure what these lines mean, and doesn’t know if she invented them, has just heard them, or is remembering them. Still, Woolf writes, “like music, the words seemed to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said different things.” We all dwell in the here and now; we all have actual selves, actual lives. But what are they? Selves and lives have penumbras and possibilities—that’s what’s unique about them. They are always changing, and so are always new; they refuse to stand still. We live in anticipation of their meaning, which will inevitably exceed what can be known or said. Much must be left unsaid, unseen, unlived.

Excerpt from: Joshua Rothman, ‘What If You Could Do It All Over? The uncanny allure of our unlived lives’, in: The New Yorker (December 14, 2020).

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cracktheglasses · 7 years

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Would you mind telling us more about your Tolstoy hate?

Sure, nonnie!

FYI, I’m not even remotely an academic, so this isn’t going to be a well-crafted analysis, but I’ve read a lot of Tolstoy in my life. He’s arguably the Russian literary maître, or at least, up at the top with a select few, and his works are widely read in schools, beginning with his children’s books and ending with the big ones, usually The Kreutzer Sonata, Anna Karenina, and War and Peace.

Basically, I want to talk about three things, but I suspect it’ll be WAY too much and I’ll probably need to stop:

the characters of Natasha Rostova (from War and Peace) and Kitty (from Anna Karenina) and my belief that Tolstoy was not capable of writing women as people. I’d talk about Anna, too, but it’s gonna be a lot

his appalling treatment of his wife, Sophia (it’s very easy to be a faux ascetic back-to-the-earth, living the simple life, sex-is-bad recluse telling others how to live properly, when your wife hand-copies and edits your manuscripts, feeds you, clothes you, and takes care of your thirteen children, wrangles publishers for you, puts up with your sex-is-bad-but-i-still-need-it-so-be-a-good-wife ways, and really, I can probably stop there, but I’ll add some more below)

and, finally, the character of Levin, the “nice guy” fuckboy self-insert Gary Stu (see “back-to-the-earth” “living the simple life with the peasants” and writing treatises on philosophy while wife deals with actual mundane problems)

Note: I haven’t read much Tolstoy in English translation, only in Russian (I don’t usually like Russian classics in translation, with few exceptions), so anything I’m quoting or paraphrasing below is going to be my own translation/memory (easily verifiable with an English edition I’m sure; I can provide links to the Russian text online). I’m not a professional literary translator, so the translations will be accurate, but they’ll also be shitty writing.

When I first read Tolstoy, I was a bookish, confused, angry kid, reconciling myself to a frustrating, ill-fitting girlhood. I read a lot, I read all the time, and I was usually drawn to the male characters, I identified much more with them, I wanted their realities – but I knew/was told that I should model myself more after Natasha Rostova or Wendy Darling than D’Artagnan. That my reality, and eventual choices, would have to be about growing up female, whatever that meant, aside from eventually stopping running around in the woods with my bow and arrows, and embracing princess gowns. I remember wanting to dress up as Cardinal Richelieu for a costume-guessing game at a fifth grade recital, but was kindly, yet firmly steered to Anne of Austria, instead. My grandparents wanted me to be a better girl, not an irresponsible delinquent like my cousin, but the eventual valedictorian cum successful mother and wife with a respectable career (funny how that goes: my juvenile delinquent cousin ended up all of the above, but I digress). My grandfather, who had made the bow and arrows for me, didn’t actually discourage me running around in the woods, but he did hope I’d grow out of it, and held up Natasha Rostova as the graceful ideal, the girl to emulate, and I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.

Natasha is Tolstoy’s ideal woman; at the start of the novel, a 13-year-old girl, smiling, pink-cheeked, “that delightful age where a girl is no longer a child but not yet a young woman”, thin, fresh-faced and curious. We see her next at her first ball, at 16, charming, waifish, well-behaved, a graceful dancer. She is already named a woman here, at 16, a “proper countess”. She is beautiful but doesn’t know it (oh, that trope, when will it end), and described largely via the opinions of other men at the ball, which continues as she ages. She’s 20 and Pierre Bezukhov talks her physical qualities up to Andrei Bolkonski, they discuss her: “she’s a lovely treasure, don’t overthink it, what is there to think about, marry her, my friend, marry her” – “she’s a special sort of girl, a rarity here, she’ll dance here for less than a month and skip off into a marriage.”

Natasha is flighty, she’s a bit boy-crazy, which Tolstoy describes in this indulgent manner, you know, that’s how young women are, lovely and a little flighty and obsessed with their young woman obsessions – and this would have bothered me less if Kitty in Anna Karenina wasn’t described much in the same way, this slightly silly delightful creature, happy to be noticed. This, then, was the right way to be a girl – cute and happy and exciting and available – but not too exciting or too available, because, of course, there are too many Bad Boy Vronskys and not enough Nice Guy Levins for all. Natasha sings, she plays guitar, she hunts (several comparisons to Diana the Huntress come up), she is passionate about her interests – but her passion is frequently presented as “in her nature”, she’s got that woman’s passionate nature when she jumps into a new venture, be it dancing or hunting.

So, we have this idealized lovely girl, much like Kitty; much like Kitty, she makes a mistake, falls for the wrong man, the bad boy: Anatole. Anatole, unlike Karenina’s Vronsky, who is interested in Anna, not Kitty, takes full advantage; he is already married, but Natasha is planning to elope with him, and breaks off her engagement to Bolkonsky. She knows she is doing the wrong thing, but she can’t stop herself, and has to make up for this transgression later in the narrative by nursing the wounded Bolkonsky until his death. This is all before she is 21; she is married at 21, to her childhood friend, Pierre Bezukhov, who has already been married, who forgives her for these transgressions as if it were his place – and then, when she is finally wife, the descriptions change. There is one particular description that struck me and stuck with me, the first time I read it, this “what the fuck”:

“… by 1820, she had three daughters and a desperately (note – Tolstoy uses ‘passionately’ as the verb here, because that is Natasha’s thing) wanted son, whom she was breastfeeding (Tolstoy emphasizes that she’s feeding him herself). She had gotten thicker, wider; it was hard to recognize the former spry, waifish Natasha in this strong mother. Her facial features had settled into a clear calm. There was no longer that fierce, perpetual fire that had been her beauty. Her soul was no longer visible, only her face and her body. Only the strong, beautiful, fertile female animal.”

Specifically, the word “самка“, which Tolstoy uses for Natasha, is sort of like saying “the female of the species”, but not quite. There is a more clinical and less reductive way to say that about a person rather than an actual animal. Specifically, that word emphasizes her fertility, reduces her to reproductive capabilities. I remember reading that and being absolutely crushed – that this already awkwardly idealized girl was suddenly not even worth that original pedestal, however shitty that had been. That her entire purpose was to become a wife and mother – and then be derided and chided for fulfilling it. You see, now married with children, she has no time, she is slovenly, she is no longer attractive:

“…Natasha had left behind all her charms, the loveliest of which had been her singing…”

“… Natasha stopped taking care with her manners, with speaking properly, with showing herself off to her husband in flattering poses or dresses…”

“…she stopped singing, she didn’t think much before she spoke… it’s as if she had no time to take care of these things…”

“The only subject that occupied her now was family – her husband, needing to be kept so he would belong to her and the home – and the children, who needed to be birthed, nursed, raised…”

This transformation is much the same in Kitty, when she marries Levin. In juxtaposition to the divorce of Karenin and Anna, and Anna’s involvement with Vronsky, Levin and Kitty marry for love, a pure and profound feeling, devoid of banal passion; an entire chapter describes their awkward, endearing wedding ceremony. Levin, who is not religious, expects the process to be ridiculous, farcical, but instead, both he and Kitty are touched by the words, they mix up the rings, they smile at each other, they feel uplifted, and like they’re meeting each other for the first wonderful time. But it’s telling that the final line of the chapter is the reaction of the casual observers outside of the church and at the ceremony, specifically the townswomen: “What a darling the bride is, like a dressed lamb. And yet, what a pity for our sister.”

Before the wedding, Levin gives Kitty his diaries, where he has detailed his sexual relationships with other women. Kitty is disgusted, appalled -- she doesn’t want to know these things about him, and yet he insists that she needs to forgive and accept him for this, while simultaneously thinking that he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness, that she is too pure. She cries, and says she forgives him, though what she’s read was horrible; this makes Levin even surer that she is too pure, too good, and he doesn’t deserve her.

This scene is lifted entirely from Tolstoy’s own experience. When Tolstoy and Sophia married, he was in his mid-thirties, worldly, sexually experienced; she was 18, having been brought up the way girls from good families were brought up. After reading his diaries, where he detailed his relationships with sex workers in particular, she was appalled, yet couldn’t do anything about it. Her subsequent sexual relationship with Tolstoy, based on her own diaries, was viewed by her as largely non-consensual.

A few chapters after Kitty and Levin’s wedding, we see that

“Levin had been married for three months… he was happy, but not in the way he had expected to be. In every step, he found a new disappointment. He was happy, but family life was not at all what he had imagined…”

“…he was surprised that the poetic, lovely Kitty was… able to remember and fret about the tablecloths, about furniture, about beds for guests, about serving trays, about dinners…”

“…homemaking irrevocably pulled her in.”

“During this time, he could feel the straining chain connecting them particularly strongly, the pull of it from side to side. The honeymoon, that first month after the wedding, from which he had expected so much, was not so honeyed as it was the most difficult and humiliating period of their lives. In their subsequent days, they tried to strike from their memories the ugly, shameful events of this unhealthy time, when neither of them were in a normal mood, and rarely felt like themselves at all.”

After three months, Levin is displeased at the idleness of their existence, and blames Kitty:

“... he knew it was not her fault, but perhaps it was the fault of her shallow, inadequate, too frivolous education...”

“...aside from an interest in homemaking (and that she had in spades), she had no other interests... she does nothing, and is absolutely happy...”

Kitty decides she will go with Levin when he receives news that his brother is dying; Levin interprets this as Kitty being bored and wanting a change of scenery. She cries, trying to convince him that she is going as a show of support for him, and Levin finally agrees to take her along, but is displeased at having given in, and thinks of himself as enslaved to her whims. In addition, he doesn’t want pure, proper Kitty to associate with “his brother’s woman”, mistress rather than wife; “the very idea of his Kitty being in the same room with the woman made him cringe in disgust and terror.”

After Kitty gives birth, Levin feels nothing but revulsion for the baby, and watches Kitty and the baby with distaste. He begins thinking about the meaning of life, about the role of religion, about faith, and every time he thinks of sharing these thoughts with Kitty, he is interrupted by the mundane tasks that Kitty has to perform -- bathing and feeding the baby, arranging for rooms for visiting family, and the like. Kitty makes sure that Tolstoy, I mean, Levin, is able to live his largely unchanged life -- philosophizing, working with his peasants, going to concerts, working on a manuscript -- while she takes care of all the banal, earthly things. Of course, she doesn’t do this by herself, as they are nobility, wealthy landowners, but still, Levin judges her for her work, for her inability to understand him, though he decides that this sort of suffering may very well be part of happiness.

The novel ends before Kitty and Levin have any more children, however, Tolstoy insisted that he needed to have as many as possible, while Sophia was still able to carry them. He believed that breastfeeding by the mother was the most natural, best option, and so prevented her from hiring wet-nurses for any of the children -- I repeat, 13 in total -- Tolstoy was a wealthy count; they could most certainly afford the assistance. Sophia was his editor, his secretary, she put up with what she viewed as a series of rapes, she spent 13 years of her life nursing, over a decade pregnant. He spent years trying to convince her to get rid of all their possessions, to lead a Walden-esque life on the land with their peasants and his students; when she resisted, he tried to put the plan into place for himself, though, much like Levin, he still had all of the comforts and privileges afforded to him by his station. He chose to leave the rights to his literary works to his students, adherents to his philosophies, “Tolstoyans”, rather than to Sophia; she had to fight for these in court after his death.

I would really like to talk more about the character of Anna Karenina, because Tolstoy doesn’t even subscribe evenly to the madonna/whore dichotomy there; Anna is sort of both, sort of something else entirely. However, her sister-in-law, Dolly, is described by Levin as an uglier, older, more pathetic version of Kitty. She is interested only in her children, while her husband has affairs and spends all their money. He is disgusted by her, because her quietly putting up with her husband’s ways is clearly repulsive, fake, subservient -- not a sign of true love, as in his own home.

I haven’t covered everything I wanted to, but I am running out of room and steam here, nonnie, so I’m wrapping this up. Please feel free to ask for my opinions on Jonathan Franzen next week!

#leo tolstoy #natasha rostova #kitty scherbatsky #i fucking hate tolstoy #levin is a fuckboy #nerdery #cor has opinions #cor's stuff

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90 Helpful Death Quotes On The Ways We Grieve (2019)

Looking for helpful death quotes that will bring you calm? These quotes about death will help remind you that each and everyone of us grieves in a different way.

Death is one of the most difficult things that any of us will have to deal with in our lives.

It is personal, unique, and very different from person to person.

Often times, people will judge the way someone else grieves because it is not the same as the way that they would personally mourn.

Some folks even go as far as to assume that someone is NOT anguished (by their definition), because they do not show it in a way that fits into this individual’s view of what grief should look like.

Here are some thoughts and quotes about death, as well as the unique view we each take of it.

Inspirational Death Quotes About Mourning

1.) “Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion to death.”- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

2.) “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news.

They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” – Anne Lamott

3.) “There is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”- Winnie the Pooh

4.) “If I can see pain in your eyes, then share with me your tears. If I can see joy in your eyes, then share with me your smile.” – Santosh Kalwar

5.) “Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place.

But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

6.) “And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief.” – William Cullen Bryant

7.) “There is an hour, a minute – you will remember it forever – when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong.

You don’t know – can’t know – that it is the first of a series of “wrongful” events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.”- Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story

8.) “When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail’s response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, ‘My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.’” – David McCullough

9.) “A feeling of pleasure or solace can be so hard to find when you are in the depths of your grief. Sometimes it’s the little things that help get you through the day.

You may think your comforts sound ridiculous to others, but there is nothing ridiculous about finding one little thing to help you feel good in the midst of pain and sorrow!” – Elizabeth Berrien, Creative Grieving: A Hip Chick’s Path from Loss to Hope

Beautiful Yet Profound Sayings and Quotes about Death

10.) “When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity. When your love touches someone’s pain, it becomes compassion.” – Stephen Levine

11.) “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.

The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”- Fred Rogers

12.) “The reality is that we don’t forget, move on, and have closure. But rather we honor, we remember, and incorporate our deceased children and siblings into our lives in a new way. In fact, keeping memories of your loved one alive in your mind and heart is an important part of your healing journey.” – Harriet Schiff, author of The Bereaved Parent

13.) “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller

14.) “She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.” – George Eliot

15.) “Three things in human life are important: The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” – Henry James

16.) “We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don’t deny it, don’t be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there.” – Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough

17.) “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” – Leo Tolstoy

18.) “Honest listening is one of the best medicines we can offer the dying and the bereaved.” – Jean Cameron (dying of cancer)

Helpful Quotes About Death of A Loved One

19.) “When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.” ― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

20.) “But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going into every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.” ― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

21.) “Sadly enough, the most painful goodbyes are the ones that are left unsaid and never explained.” ― Jonathan Harnisch, Freak

22.) “The death of a beloved is an amputation.” — C. S. Lewis

23.) “For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms. “— Lurlene McDaniel

24.) “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.” —James O’Barr

25.) “When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.“ – Kahlil Gibran

26.) “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.” – Emily Dickinson

27.) “Perhaps they are not the stars, but rather openings in Heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.” – Unknown

28.) “What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness.” – Thomas Bailey

More Uplifting Death Quotes

29.) “You give yourself permission to grieve by recognizing the need for grieving. Grieving is the natural way of working through the loss of a love. Grieving is not weakness nor absence of faith. Grieving is as natural as crying when you are hurt, sleeping when you are tired or sneezing when your nose itches. It is nature’s way of healing a broken heart.” – Doug Manning

30.) “For some moments in life there are no words.”- David Seltzer, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971 film adaptation)

30.) “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” – Norman Cousins

31.) “One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it’s worth watching.” – Unknown

32.) “Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.” – Henry van Dyke

33.) “It is as natural to die as it is to be born.” – Francis Bacon

34.) “All men think that all men are mortal but themselves.” – Edward Young

35.) “To fear death is to misunderstand life.” – Unknown

Comforting quotes about death

36.) “Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?”—Epicurus

37.) “If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death”—Samuel Butler

38.) “Death can come at any age, but the pride of life fools a person into thinking that day is far away.” – John Buttrick

39.) “None of us knows the day of our death. However, if we knew that death is actually our acquisition, we would remove the fear of death from our lives.” – Sunday Adelaja

40.) “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.) “Death is but a door, time is but a window. I’ll be back!”—Ghostbusters II

42.) “Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘Your table is ready.’”— Robin Williams

43.) “Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.” – William Mitford

44.) “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”— Mark Twain

45.) “The truth I have been seeking — this truth is Death. Yet Death is also a seeker. Forever seeking me. So — we have met at last. And I am prepared. I am at peace.”— Bruce Lee

Quotes about death of a friend

46.) “We go to the grave of a friend saying, “A man is dead,” but angels throng about him saying, “A man is born.” – Henry Ward Beecher

47.) “The death of a friend is equivalent to the loss of a limb.” – German Proverb

48.) “Those we love never truly leave us, Harry. There are things that death cannot touch.” ― Jack Thorne

49.) “But fate ordains that dearest friends must part.” – Edward Young

50.) “This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad.” – William Shakespeare

51.) “Even the best of friends cannot attend each other’s funeral.” – Kehlog Albran

52.) “You cannot stop loving your friend because he’s dead, especially if he was better than anyone alive, you know?”-Jerome Salinger

53.) “When our friends are alive, we see the good qualities they lack; dead, we remember only those they possessed.” – Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

Inspirational quotes about death

54.) “If you ever lose someone dear to you, never say the words they’re gone. They’ll come back.” ― Prince

55.) “How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?”—Carson McCullers

56.) “Death is a challenge. It tells us not to waste time. It tells us to tell each other right now that we love each other.” Leo Buscaglia

57.) “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”— Chuck Palahniuk

58.) “I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”— Winston Churchill

59.) “Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace.”— Nelson Mandela

60.) “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”— Steve Jobs

Quotes about death to bring you calm

61.) “No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.” – Martin Luther King Jr

62.) “I’m not afraid of death because I don’t believe in it. It’s just getting out of one car, and into another.” – John Lennon

63.) “A fact of life we all die. But the positive impact you have on others will be a living legacy.” – Catherine Pulsifer

64.) “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.” – George Bernard Shaw

65.) “No one here gets out alive.” – Jim Morrison

66.) “Death is an ending. Death is a closing. Death is idle words in the ebb and flow of life.”- Elizabeth Edwards

67.) “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.” – Thomas Campbell

68.) “Life asked death, ‘Why do people love me but hate you?’ Death responded, ‘Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.”—Author unknown

69.) “I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.” –Corazon Aquino

70.) “I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” – Woody Allen

Death quotes to calm you

71.) “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” – Leonardo da Vinci

72.) “Death is not the end of life; it is the beginning of an eternal journey.” – Debasish Mridha

73.) “Not only is death inevitable; death is necessary for us to inherit the new life we are to enjoy in Christ.” – Max Lucado

74.) “Death is nothing else but going home to God, the bond of love will be unbroken for all eternity.” – Mother Teresa

75.) “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” – Peter Pan

76.) “Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you”—Welcome to Night Vale

77.) “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and the other begins?”—Edgar Allan Poe

78.) “Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.” –Napoleon Bonaparte

79.) “Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.” – Langston Hughes

80.) “Good men must die, but death cannot kill their names.” – Proverb

Other profound death quotes for loved ones

81.) “The idea is to die young as late as possible.” – Ashley Montagu

82.) “Life is like a very short visit to a toy shop between birth and death.” – Desmond Morris

83.) “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” – Victor Hugo

84.) “The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.” – Seneca

85.) “As soon as you’ll realize that it was a gift, you’ll be free.” – Maxime Lagacé

86.) “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive – the risk to be alive and express what we really are.” – Miguel Angel Ruiz

87.) “There is only one god and his name is Death, and there is only one thing we say to Death: ‘Not today’.” – Syrio Forel

89.) “After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.” – Arthur Schopenhauer

90.) “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” – Mitch Albom

What do you think about these quotes about death?

Something we should all remember is that each and everyone of us grieves in a different way.

Each one of us has a different memory and relationship with the person who has passed away.

While some grieve openly, (others keep it to themselves) and put on a stoic face.

The important lesson to learn is that death and grief are very unique and individual processes. What is right for us may not fit another.

Hopefully, these quotes about death will help you embrace and grieve as you need to, and let others do the same.

What do you think about these death quotes? Do you have any other inspirational quotes to add? Let us know in the comment section below.

#2019 #90 #Death #Grieve #Helpful #movie quotes #Quotes #Ways

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