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sunflower-brittany · 3 years

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In case anyone's wondering whats on my book wishlist these days (any first books missing from series i already own):

[ ] Lore (Alexandra Bracken)

[ ✅️] To Kill A Kingdom (Alexandra Christo)

[ ✅️] A House of Salt and Sorrows (Erin A. Craig)

[ ] This Poison Heart (Kalynn Bayron)

Immortals Series (Alyson Noel):

[ ] Dark Flame

[ ] Night Star

[ ] Everlasting

Beautiful Darkness Series (Kami Garacia):

[ ✅️] Beautiful Darkness

[ ] Dangerous Creatures

[ ] Dangerous Deception

[ ] All The Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr)

[ ] Wilder Girls (Rory Power)

A Court of Thorns and Roses (Sarah J Maas)

[ ✅️ ] A Court of Thorns and Roses

[ ] A Court of Mist and Fury

[ ] A Court of Wings and Ruins

[ ] A Court of Frost and Starlight

[ ✅️] A Court of Silver Flames

[ ✅️] The Queens Resistance (Rebecca Ross)

The Handmaids Tale Series (Margaret Atwood):

[ ✅️] The Handmaids Tale

[✅️ ] The Testaments

Red Queen Series (Victoria Aveyard):

[ ] Red Queen

[ ] Glass Sword

[ ] Kings Cage

[ ] War Storm

From Blood and Ash Series (Jennifer L Armentrout):

[ ] A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

[ ] The Crown of Gilded Bones

[ ] The War of Two Queens

Fallen Series (Lauren Kate):

[ ] Fallen

[ ] Torment

[ ] Passion

[ ] Rapture

[ ] Unforgiven

[ ] Fallen in Love

The After Collection (Anna Todd):

[ ] After

[ ] After We Collided

[ ] After We Fell

[ ] After Ever After

[ ] Before

Ash Princess Series (Laura Sebastian):

[ ] Ash Princess

[ ] Ember Queen

[ ] Lady Smoke

Shiver Series (Maggie Stiefvater):

[ ] Shiver

[ ] Linger

[ ] Forever

[ ] Sinner

Fable Series (Adrienne Young):

[ ✅️] Fable

[ ✅️] Namesake

Throne Of Glass Series (Sarah J Maas):

[ ] Assassins Blade

[ ✅️ ] Throne of Glass

[ ] Crown of Midnight

[ ] Heir of Fire

[ ] Queen of Shadows

[ ] Empire of Storms

[ ] Tower of Dawn

[ ] Kingdom of Ash

Dark Secrets Series (Elizabeth Chandler):

[ ] Dark Secrets 1

[ ] Dark Secrets 2

Ready Player One Series (Ernest Cline):

[ ] Ready Player One

[ ] Ready Player Two

Crescent City Series (Sarah J Maas)

[ ] House of Earth and Blood

[ ] House of Sky and Breath

A Touch of Darkness Series (Scarlett St Clair):

[✅️ ] A Touch of Darkness

[ ] Where The Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens)

[ ] Shadow and Vines (C.D Britt)

[ ] Lovely War (Julie Berry)

[ ] The Henna Artist (Alka Joshi)

[ ] The Nature of Witches (Rachel Griffin)

Supernatural Series (Various Authors):

[ ] Rite of Passage

[ ] One Year Gone

[ ] Witch's Canyon

[ ] Nevermore

[ ] War of Sons

[ ] Bone Key

[ ] Night Terror

[ ] The Usual Sacrifices

[ ] Coyotes Kiss

A Curse so Dark and Lonely Series (Brigid Kemmerer):

[ ] A Curse so Dark and Lonely

[ ] A Heart so Fierce and Broken

[ ] A Vow so Bold amd Deadly

These Violent Delights Series (Chloe Gong):

[ ✅️ ] These Violent Delights

[ ] Our Violent Ends

Disney Twisted Tales Series (Various Authors):

[ ] Part of Your World

[ ] Unbirthday

[ ] Straight on Till Morning

[ ] Go the Distance

[ ] Mirror Mirror

Shadow and Bone Series (Leigh Bardugo):

[ ] Siege and Storm

[ ] Ruin and Rising

A Discovery of Witches Series (Deborah Harkness):

[ ✅️ ] A Discovery of Witches

[✅️ ] Shadow of Night

[ ✅️] The Book of Life

[ ] Time's Convert

Alice in Zombieland Series (Gena Showalter)

[ ] Alice in Zombieland

[ ] Through the Zombie Glass

[ ] A Mad Zombie Party

[ ] The Queen of Zombie Hearts

And I Darken Series (Kiersten White):

[ ] And I Darken

[ ] Now I Rise

[ ] Bright We Burn

Crave Series (Tracy Wolff):

[✅️ ] Crave

[ ✅️ ] Crush

[ ] Covet

[ ] Court

The War of Lost Hearts Series (Carissa Broadbent):

[ ] Daughter of No Worlds

[ ] Children of Fallen Gods

[ ] Mother of Death and Dawn

[ ] The Cursed Crown (May Sage Alexi Blake)

The Cruel Prince Series (Holly Black):

[ ✅️] The Cruel Prince

[ ] The Lost Sisters

[ ] The Wicked King

[ ] The Queen of Nothing

[ ] How The King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

The Selection Series (Kiera Cass)

[ ] The Selection

[ ] The Elite

[ ] The One

[ ] The Heir

[ ] The Crown

[✅️ ] We Were Liars (E. Lockhart)

The Witcher Series:

[ ] Sword of Destiny

[ ] Blood Elves

[ ] Time of Contempt

[ ] Baptism of Fire

[ ] The Tower of the Shallow

[ ] The Lady of the Lake

[ ] Seasons of Storms

Stephen King Novels:

[ ] The Institute

[ ] Different Seasons

[ ] Sorcery of Thorns (Margaret Rogerson)

Shadow and Frost Series (Coco Ma):

[ ] Shadow and Frost

[ ] God Storm

Three Dark Crowns Series (Kendare Blake):

[ ] Three Dark Crowns

[ ] One Dark Throne

[ ] The Oracle Queen

[ ] Two Dark Reigns

[ ] Five Dark Fates

[ ] The Secret Keeper of Jaipur (Alka Joshi)

The Poppy War Series (R.F. Kuang):

[ ] The Poppy War

[ ] The Dragon Republic

[ ] The Burning God

[ ] Once Upon a Broken Heart (Stephanie Garber)

Caraval Series (Stephanie Garber):

[ ] Legendary

[ ] Finale

Serpent and Dove Series (Shelby Mahurin):

[ ] Blood and Honey

[ ] Gods and Monsters

Legendborn Series (Tracy Deonn)

[ ] Legendborn

[ ] Bloodmarked

Souls Series (Harley Laroux):

[ ] Her Soul to Take

[ ] Her Soul for Revenge

A Dark and Hollow Star Series (Ashley Shuttleworth):

[ ] A Dark and Hollow Star

[ ] A Cruel and Fated Light

[ ] Den of Vipers (K.A. Knight)

[ ] Spellbook of the Lost and Found (Moira Doyle)

[ ] The Accident Season (Moira Doyle)

[ ] All The Bad Apples (Moira Doyle

[ ] Long Live the Pumpkin Queen (Tim Burton)

Six of Crows Series (Leigh Bardugo):

[ ] Crooked Kingdom

Legacy of the Nine Realms Series (Amelia Hutchins):

[ ] Flames of Chaos

[ ] Ashes of Chaos

[ ] Ruins of Chaos

[ ] Crown of Chaos

Shatter Me Series (Tahereh Mafi)

[ ] Shatter Me

[ ] Destroy Me [(1.5) - Unite Me]

[ ] Unravel Me

[ ] Fracture Me [(2.5) - Unite Me]

[ ] Ignite Me

[ ] Restore Me

[ ] Shadow Me [(4.5) - Find Me]

[ ] Defy Me

[ ] Reveal Me [(5.5) - Find Me]

[ ] Imagine Me

[ ] Believe Me

An Ember in the Ashes Series (Sabaa Tahir):

[ ] A Torch Against the Night

[ ] A Reaper at the Gates

[ ] A Sky Beyond the Storm

[ ] The Shadows Between Us (Tricia Levenseller)

A Ruin of Roses Series (K.F Breene)

[ ✅️] A Ruin of Roses

[✅️ ] A Throne of Ruin

[ ] A Kingdom of Ruin

[ ] A Queen of Ruin

Flame in the Mist Series (Renée Ahdieh):

[ ] Flame in the Mist

[ ] Smoke in the Sun

Sherrilyn Kenyon Books:

[ ] Styxx

[ ] Stygian

[ ] The Girl Who Belonged to the Sea (Katherine Quinn)

Shadows and Crowns Series (S.M Gaither):

[ ] The Song of the Marked

Gild Series (Raven Kennedy):

[ ] Gild

[ ] A Kingdom od Iron and Wine (Candace Osmond)

[ ] The Savage and the Swan (Ella Fields)

#bookaholic #booklr #i will update this as i find more books #i will check off books i have read #books & libraries #bookworld #book blog #books #bookaddict #book lover #book wishlist #book worm #book and literature #book blurb #book challenge #book fandom #book genres #fantasy novel

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tjerra14 · 3 years

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I have been told that it still is, in fact, Wednesday somewhere, and time is a construct anyway, so watch me fling out entirely too many words of the syrup I'm currently wading through with varying amounts of enthusiasm (but apparently still enthusiastic enough to share).

Grey morning light spilling into the cave. Embers giving off a last measure of warmth, barely keeping the relentless frost at bay but they don’t mind, not yet. Their entwined bodies trap heat well enough. Ikrie’s head rests on her shoulder, her hair dishevelled from sleep and passion tickling at her chin, and Aloy’s words fill what little distance is left between them. She talks about ruins and robots, the people that created them, lived and died to stop them. That is the easier truth, one she has shared in bits before, and as the sun rises and drapes them in fire, the harder follows: the legacy, the choice they left with her. The West. Then, her fingers come to an abrupt halt on the small of Ikrie’s back, cease their anxious trailing along her spine, and Aloy asks, uncertain and afraid, will you come with me?

That dawn and the decision it came with are etched into her memory, breaking again whenever she sees Ikrie somewhere she hasn’t dared to imagine her before—running a gloved hand over frozen metal, dwarfed by the coils of the Horus atop the Grave-Hoard; climbing the cliffs of Red Echoes to get a better view of the crumbling expanse of steel and concrete the Old Ones called their home; besting Gera in an arm-wrestling match and having decidedly too much of Kendert’s horrendous brew in celebration. Sprawled out on her bedroll now underneath the endless sky, so close to the Sundom she can taste its dust on the wind. Her wonder at this new wilderness is Aloy’s, and for a moment or two she allows herself to forget. Leaves the darkness, both past and future, to be brightened by the spark in Ikrie’s eyes, her laughter, the paths away from loneliness she traces on her skin in wordless confirmation of her answer, again and again and again: Yes. Yes, I’ll come with you.

And yet, doubts cling to Aloy wherever she goes. Who is she to impose that choice on someone else, and Ikrie of all people? Follow me or you might never see me again. She thinks of the happiness of others, how it had ended—Avad tortured and torn between hope and hopelessness, Elida’s luck turned to misery in the ashes of a signal fire—and suddenly wishes she had never asked and said goodbye instead. Ikrie is here, with her, for her, and out there are dangers both can’t imagine. They were selfish reasons, were they not? She can’t even tell her; explain why she wants her at her side in the first place. Aloy has tried, staring at her wide-eyed reflection in the water, but the words were all wrong: I like you wasn’t strong enough, I care for you, like she told Rost, was better but not precise—her caring comes in many layers. The love she holds for her friends is no less grand, but different. It’s calm, quiet, a hearth to rest at compared to the wildfire that ravages her mind whenever it strays to Ikrie. One promises safety and comfort, the other the thrill of the unknown, terrifying and yet reassuring that she won’t be alone in it, and she immerses herself in the warmth of both.

Love.

The right words are always there, lingering at the back of her throat, but how can she share them if they slip from her tongue even when she only practises them to her own face? They seem simple enough, yet banded together they threaten to strangle her, and what should be natural becomes an impossible task.

One day, Aloy promises in silence and gently brushes the loose strand of hair from Ikrie's forehead, smiling at her sleep-drunken, unintelligible response, one day I’ll tell you. I’ll find a way.

Mandatory @foibles-fables tag (and thanks again for the murder, DAMN. What a great way to go.)

#horizon zero dawn #hzd #hzd fanfic #brain doesn't allow for syrup to be exclusively syrup so you get this in the meantime #apologies #aloy x ikrie

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omoi-no-hoka · 5 years

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Welcome to my second post in the Oku no Hosomichi series, in which I read aloud the work in chronological, brief portions and provide backstory necessary to understand the work.

You can find my brief intro to Basho here.

And the reading of Part 1 here.

Very early on the twenty-seventh morning of the third moon, under a predawn haze, transparent moon barely visible, Mount Fuji just a shadow, I set out under the cherry blossoms of Ueno and Yanaka. When would I see them again? A few old friends had gathered in the night and followed along far enough to see me off from the boat. Getting off at Senju, I felt three thousands miles rushing through my heart, the whole world only a dream. I saw it through farewell tears.

Classical: 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪 Romaji: Yuku haru ya / tori naki uo no / me ha namida English: Spring passes / and the birds cry out -- tears / in the eyes of fishes

With these first words from my brush, I started. Those who remain behind watch the shadow of a traveler’s back disappear.

*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*

The second year of Genroku, I think of the long way leading into the Northern Interior under Go stone skies. My hair may turn white as frost before I return from those fabled places--or maybe I won’t return at all. By nightfall, we come to Soka, bony shoulders sore from heavy pack, grateful for a warm night robe, cotton bathing gown, writing brush, ink stone, necessities. The pack made heavier by farewell gifts from friends. I couldn't leave them behind.

*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*

Continuing on to the shrine at Muro-no-Yashima, my companion Sora said, “This deity, Ko-no-hana Sakuya Hime, is Goddess of Blossoming Trees and also has a shrine at Fuji. She locked herself inside a fire to prove her son’s divinity. Thus her son was called Prince Hohodemi--Born-of-Fire--here in Muro-no-Yashima [Burning Cell]. And that’s why poets here write of smoke, and why the locals despise the splotched konoshiro fish that reeks like burning flesh. Everyone here knows the story.”

Gosh I just love Basho’s writing style so much. It is simple yet captures so much.

Okay, let’s go through things of note, from top to bottom.

1. Tears in the Eyes of Fishes

The haiku that Basho pens at the start of his journey has one of my favorite defunct kanji in it.

Classical: 行春や鳥啼魚の目は泪 Romaji: Yuku haru ya / tori naki uo no / me ha namida English: Spring passes / and the birds cry out -- tears / in the eyes of fishes

The kanji that Basho used for “tears” is no longer used. But I like it better than the current kanji because it is very easy to understand.

Defunct: 泪

The three comma like lines on the left are a radical that represent water. The radical beside it is the kanji for “eye.” so quite literally, it is “the water that comes from eyes.” Very simple and easy to gather meaning.

Current: 涙

Here we have the same water radical on the left, but the right is the kanji 戻, which means “to return.” However, a deeper dive into the kanji 涙 and its etymology reveals that in this particular kanji, the 戻 radical has the meaning of “a never-ending connection or flow.” Add the water radical, and you have “a never-ending stream of water” to represent “tears.” Pretty convoluted. I vote we go back to 泪 haha.

2. Genroku Era（元禄時代）

Japanese Eras are such a pain to remember because there are so many. Whenever an emperor changed, the Era changed as well. The Genroku Era was from the ninth month of 1688 through the third month of 1704. The second year of Genroku was 1689.

The Genroku Era is generally considered to be the Golden Age of the Edo Period. By this point, Japan had been closed off from other countries for nearly a century, there was relative economic stability, and arts and architecture flourished.

3. Go Stone Skies

Go is a board game invented in China more than 2,500 years ago. Played by two people, the object is to surround more territory than your opponent. You play with white and black stones.

So perhaps the clouds were the color of Go stones, or the way the clouds were spread about looked like a board of Go.

4. Muro-no-Yashima, Konoha Sakuya Hime

There’s a lot of backstory to this place.

First off, the shrine that they visit is in current day Tochigi Prefecture, and it still stands to this day.

Ohmiwa Shrine, Sojamachi, Tochiji Prefecture

It is the oldest jinja in Tochigi. Sadly, as we go through this book we will come to find that many of the temples and shrines that Basho visited along the way have been lost to time. So it is really a treat to know that we can visit the same place that he did so many centuries ago.

Jinja each house a god. This one houses Konoha Sakuya Hime, which may sound familiar if you have ever played the PS2 game Okami.

But here is a more traditional depiction of her:

As beautiful as the blossoms she patrons.

Sora, Basho’s travelling companion, kept his own journal and wrote down an additional haiku Basho created upon entering this shrine that was not included in Oku no Hosomichi.

Classical: 糸遊に結つきたる煙哉 Romaji: Itoyuu ni / musubi tsukitaru / keburikana English: Oh, how the smoke interweaves with shimmering steam

(I couldn’t find an English translation so I did my best. Sorry lol.)

In the grounds of this jinja is a pond that emitted steam, which was romanticized as smoke and/or the manifestations of the thoughts of the gods. Many ancient poems had been written about this place before Basho. However, by the late 17th Century, the pond no longer emitted steam. The word 糸遊 (itoyuu, lit. “playing with strings”) is a very old word for the shimmer of a heat mirage. He must have been imagining what it would have been like to see the pond and its steam as the ancients had once seen it.

Muro-no-Yashima when written in kanji is 室の八島, which translates roughly to “low ground of eight islands.” However, the word “yashima” used to refer to kilns or ovens. In fact, many, many centuries ago, it was common practice for people in the region of Yashima to purify their kilns on New Year’s Eve and divine the next year’s fortune based on the ashes within.

At some point, for some unknown reason, the word for kiln/oven became “kamado,” and this region was given the kanji 八島 (Yashima, eight islands) because the kanji matched the pronunciation of the region.

*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*`*

That’s all for now. Hope you enjoyed this installment. I think I’ll try to make this a weekly thing. If you have any advice or suggestions, please let me know! I’m a newbie haha.

#japanese language #japanese culture #japanese history #japanese literature #japanese poetry #haiku #haibun #classical literature #matsuo basho #oku no hosomichi #learn japanese #study japanese #nihongo #classical japanese #omoi no hoka reads oku no hosomichi

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salstray · 4 years

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The Hunt

Only fools looked outside during Hunts.

Children, too young to know better, or the elderly, who’s minds had been lost to time. Or even perhaps the odd person wishing to join in. Whether they would be marked as prey or predator would be put up to the Hunters.

They were dark nights.

The moon hung steady in the sky throughout the day, watching in silent stillness as the sun made its way through the clouds and the stars flickered out, one by one, leaving the world under the cold gaze of the Lady herself.

The forests held shadows deeper than all of humanity’s sins and curtains closed quickly, if they had been opened at all.

Very few went out on those days and it would only ever be in desperation. Perhaps you miscounted your rations, or maybe the nails had gathered rust faster than you’d anticipated. Whatever reason, whatever business you had, you’d get it done well and you’d get it done quick.

Stores didn’t open their doors, but the kind hearted left their wares unguarded for those that had need to step onto the streets on those long, cold days.

The wind blew softly the entire time, whispering and singing to those that would listen. Voices of loved ones long dead or the confessions of hearts long broken. If you listened, you were doomed. Doomed to be plagued by their screams and their laughter all through the Hunt.

And the Hunt is the longest night of the year.

It marks the turning. The next step on the world’s path. It doesn’t come on the same day each time. There are times where it doesn’t come for generations. Times when a number of Hunts happen each year.

Usually, it is something to be feared. The next stone thrown by the gods, careless and cruel as they are, to send ripples and waves through our fragile world. It is a culling. A massacre. Many people’s last night alive.

Though, if you are marked to be Hunted on the night of the Hunt, you were hardly anything close to a person at that point.

There are rare times when we pray for the next Hunt. We beg and we bleed, sending our voices to the gods in hopes that they will send unto us those tamed beasts. The carriers of blades and fire and iron. Those armed with silver bullets and chain whips. The ones that stalk through this world on those long, horrible nights; dressed in the colors of blood and shadow, searching for their marks and fulfilling their dreadful fate.

There are times where we pray for the Hunters.

I remember a time, many decades ago now, where I was young and I was foolish and I dared to brave the sights that fell upon the night of the Hunt.

That age had been long and it had been hard. I had been born into that time of fear and anger and hate. The time of the Bastard King and his four wicked sons. I had known only of the Hunt through fables and history books, but I’d never seen one with my own eyes.

My mother had told me stories. Such terrible hours, those were. Where men became beasts, tearing themselves out of their clothes and flesh, their eyes wild and mad with hunger, lust, or pain. She told me of how my father fell to one of those fates and how she’d had to watch as a Hunter barreled its way into our home, tearing through the iron bands and layered wood like it was not but soft butter on a summer’s eve, working through my father with even greater ease.

The idiotic thing that I was back then, wanted to see one with my own eyes. Mother wouldn’t tell me what the Hunter had looked like; simply that it was like a man, but wrong in every possible way.

And the night of my first Hunt, when the chill came into the air and frost lined the grass on an early fall evening, I watched true fear pass through my dear Mother and I could do nothing but help as she prepared.

We covered windows, boarded up the doors, gathered the simplest of foods into one room and all our clothes, blankets, and things into a pile. She told me I was not to look out the window, as there was only one in the room we had chosen, lest I wish to catch the attention of a Hunter searching for their mark.

And our world fell into darkness.

The Hunt happens over only a single night, but this is a night that lasts for much longer than it should.

The sun faded and the screams came swiftly after. My Mother clung to me, her arms holding me in warmth as I listened in morbid fascination as claws scraped along the cobbled streets and unnatural glows passed by the windows. I listened to the songs that were sung of blood and bone and dead souls that rose from their graves, searching for new bodies. I listened as our neighbors either fell to their own loved ones or as the beasts they became had fallen to a Hunter.

At some point, I fell into a frightened sleep beside my Mother, my head filled with the sounds of our old world that now echoed through our small town.

When I woke, Mother was still asleep, her face twisted into a grimace as she did so, her hands shaking all the while.

I took it as my chance.

I stood, my legs shaking. I slipped over to the window, careful to make not a sound against the wood. And I used a single finger to nudge away the heavy curtains that Mother had insisted we nail around the entire frame.

What I saw still seeps into my dreams, even now, in my twilight years.

It was no monster. No horror of gore and unreasonable hate.

What I saw was a man. But wrong in every possible way.

He was tall, his arms long and legs longer. He was thin, his sleeves and pants gripping against his skin as tight as iron. He wore a long coat and he was facing away from me, the hem of it shifting with the whispering wind.

In one hand, he held a sword, just as long as he was and dripping with a thick, black liquid. In the other, a gun, short, but heavy, with a strip of dirty cloth tying it to his hand.

Upon his narrow head was a hat with a flat brim. Almost like one you’d see on the brow of a fisherman. His hair was cut short and was stark white against his ash grey skin.

And when he turned, as if sensing my eyes upon the back of his neck, his gaze met mine, leaving with me the very image that follows me into my resting nights.

I never saw his entire face. Only the eyes. They were big and round. Not full of anger or rage or whatever emotion I’d expected from a Hunter. They were… tired. I couldn’t tell their color, as the part that would hold color was small, surrounded entirely by bloodshot whites and ringed with dark circles at the lids, if he even had them.

A breath after he met my gaze, I tore myself away, regretting every possible choice I could have made to bring me to this moment in my life.

Mother was still sleeping. And I thank the heavens even now that she slept through the sound of his footsteps, shifting ever closer to the wall of our home. She slept through the sound of a blade on glass, screaming in my ear of my mistakes and regrets.

And longer still, she slept through the silence that followed.

The night rolled on after that. I somehow grew accustomed to the sound of screams and terror and when finally the sun rose again, I stepped out onto the street to find not a drop of mess.

No blood. No gore. Not even an overturned barrel or a broken door.

People had gone missing, of course. People died that night. They were Hunted. But I learned that it was part of our life.

We’d also learned that the King and his sons were all dead. All turned beast and monstrous creatures, left to the mercy of the Hunters, which I now knew did not exist.

After that, life moved on. We adapted to the loss of manpower and we each took up a job that hadn’t existed the day before, learning new trades and preparing still for the next time the age was ready to turn.

#Not any sort of romance thing #but something i was proud of #heavily inspired by Bloodborne if you couldn't tell #My writing #Bloodborne #Not sure what else to tag this as tbh #horror #i guess #writeblr #writing #blah blah blah

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cardest · 4 years

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Austria & Vienna playlist

Hear that accordion high in the mountains? Hear the mountain orcs gathering? That’s the Austria & Wien playlist you are hearing. Mozart is waltzing to this one!

So, come across the streaming tides with might and glory or on a winternacht sit back and play this Austria playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC1-RX_IKMvSqyXYuO8PRMtBL

Have I left a song out? Forgotten some band or singer? Let me know here or on my Youtube channel. Danke!

AUSTRIA & WIEN

001 Falco - Vienna Calling 002 Rammstein - Wiener Blut 003 Pungent Stench - Shrunken And Mummified Bitch 004 Ultravox - Vienna 005 Austrian Death Machine - See You at the Party Richter 006 Trio Alpin - Die Berg haban an Gipfl 007 VANADIUM - Streets Of Danger 008 The Striggles - Die Nation 009 Leonard Cohen - Take this waltz 010 Andreas Aschaber - Tiroler Bergen Mit Andreas Aschaber 011 Ganymed - It Takes Me Higher 012 Die Grubertaler - Hey Reini spiel inz oans 013 Die GeiWaidler - Samma Ehrlich 014 Summoning - Might And Glory 015 Gary Numan - Vienna on the Telekon 016 Schones - Osttirol 017 Lehnen - Immer Fremd 018 Opus - A Night In Vienna 019 Harakiri For The Sky - Calling the rain 020 Dun Field Three - Lion 021 Edenbridge - The die is not cast 022 Mozart - Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Serenade), K. 525; 1st. Movement 023 Billy Joel - Vienna, hey 024 BELPHEGOR - Conjuring The Dead 025 Falco - Expocityvisions 026 Lalo Schifrin - Danube Incident (Mission Impossible TV show OST) 027 Jose Feliciano - The Sound Of Vienna 028 In der Niederschwing - Folk song from Austria 029 Peter Brotzmann & Heather Leigh - Summer Rain 030 Hella Comet - Dice 031 Dornenreich - Zu Träumen wecke sich wer kann 032 Heidis KaBCken - Das kleine KaCken piept 033 Pungent Stench - Viva la muerte 034 Thom Sonny Green - Vienna 035 Abigor - In Sin 036 The Sound of Music Soundtrack - 8 - The Lonely Goatherd 037 Nachtruf - Geistwerdung 038 The Night Flight Orchestra - Domino 039 Der Blutharsch ~ Track XI [In The Hands Of The Master 040 John Cale - Dirty Ass Rock 'N' Roll 041 Tracker - Electrosmog 042 Novaks Kapelle - Not Enough Poison 043 Sex Jam - Junkyard 044 Alexandra - Sehnsucht 045 Speed Limit - 1000 Girls 046 Johann Strauss - The Blue Danube Waltz 047 Svarta -Tagesschleier 048 The Devil and the Universe - Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop Dead 049 L'ACEPHALE - Winternacht 050 Falco - Rock Me Amadeus 051 Hollenthon - To Fabled Lands 052 Mitra Mitra - Telescopes 053 Deathstorm - Await the Edged Blades 054 Melting the Ice in the Hearts of Men - Song of the Lower Classes 055 Asphagor - Aurora Nocturna 056 Kraftwerk - Autobahn (Single version 1974) 057 Garden of Grief - HiberNation 058 Redd Kross - Neurotica 059 Triumphant -Hellknights 060 Alte Sau - Maschinen 061 Rainhard Fendrich - I am from Austria 062 Insanity Alert - All Mosh No Brain 063 Korovakill - Waterhells 064 Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Vienna 065 Summoning - Across The Streaming Tide 066 Ein Tiroler wollte jagen - Austrian folk song 067 Von Thronstahl - Imperium Internum 068 Bulbul - Xx 069 Harakiri for the sky - I, Pallbearer 070 Belphegor - Necrodaemon Terrorsathan 071 Åtem - Perchta 072 Goden - Glowing Red Sun 073 Visions of Atlantis - Where Daylight Fails 074 Rainhard Fendrich - Haben Sie Wien schon bei Nacht gesehn 075 Flowers in Concrete- Sehnsucht 076 Abigor - Unleashed Axe-Age 077 Austrian Dukes of Derangement - Against Humans, Against Animals, Against Everything 078 Sylvain Cambreling · Klangforum Wien · Georg Friedrich Haas - In vain 079 Karg - Irgendjemand wartet immer 080 Velvet Underground - Venus in furs 081 Ewig Frost - High octane energy 082 Deathstorm - Human Individual Metamorphosis 083 Allerseelen - Gläserne Kugel 084 Erebos - Of Dawn and Dusk 085 Anomalie - Vision IV: Illumination 086 Ellende - Augenblick 087 Dornenreich - Eigenwach 088 Pungent Stench - Hypnos 089 Summoning - Kor 090 KONTRUST: - bomba 091 Disharmonic Orchestra - A Mental Sequence 092 Miasma - The Unbearable Resurrection of a Suspicious Character 093 Isiulusions - seas of darkness 094 Plague Mass - Living among maneaters 095 Ash My Love - Fire 096 Pazuzu - Bal of Thieves 097 The Striggles - Cold Song (Album - Version) 098 Die verbannten Kinder Evas - In Darkness Let Me Dwell 099 Nullify - Empty Shrine 100 Ringo Starr - Goodnight Vienna 101 Laibach - So Long Farewell 666 Austrian Death Machine - Ill Be Back Play the songs here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC1-RX_IKMvSqyXYuO8PRMtBL See you at the Austrian playlist party Richter!!

#Austria #Austrian playlist #Summoning #Falco #Vienna playlist #rammstein #abigor #the striggles #pungent stench #bands from Austria #Austria playlist #alpine music #laibach #sound of music #mozart

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spc4eva · 4 years

Text

Morning Wind: Life Debt

Another brief chapter in the continuation of a preface between two bounty hunters. Please enjoy. I had a lot of fun writing out thoughts and imagery. After this chapter, the story will be a bit more linear to the seasons and include more conversation/action. I wanted to make certain there was enough preface between the two bounty hunters before just tossing it all to the main storyline.

Word Count: 2,674

Rating: T

Cross posted on AO3 & Fanfic.net

"Mando. I owe you one."

On the frozen surface of Hoth, he heard words from a stranger he never expected. Bounty hunting was a lucrative business and others rarely played nice. Killing other hunters was frowned upon, but that didn't mean it wasn't a common occurrence, especially for him. Other hunters would get in the way or attempt to swoop in like a ravenous carrion picking a corpse while the predator still gnawed at it. Din Djarin had killed plenty of other hunters that had gotten in his way, but this time is was different.

He had noticed the Ronin a few times before this and partially because Karga seethed about them, comparing Mandalorian to Jakonan. Blood red robes accented by ash and gold, hidden beneath a mask frozen in a snarl. Naturally, as predators did, they steered clear of one another. There was no business to be had with the samurai and he wasn't the type to begin small talk over the fabled Tamahagane sword the Ronin wore, just as the figure respected his own inclinations and the beskar he donned. Still, he duly noted that the Ronin had the highest stakes in the bounty game when compared to him, the only other predator strong enough to take multiple pucks at once and turn them over in the curt deadlines that Karga insisted on dealing.

Despite Din's lack of knowledge of the Ronin, he could respect the hunter's prowess and was gracious that they'd never needed to cross paths until this point.

That was until Karga duped them both, dealing dual pucks for the same elusive bounty.

Hoth was a wasteland decorated in a beautiful sheathe of pristine white, gilding the desert with a blanket of purity, constantly being turned over by the shrieking tundra winds. Wailing like a banshee, footprints quickly eroded on the snow dusted surface of thick ice, rarely having melted more than an inch or two within the last few centuries. Despite the inhospitable hell that Hoth was, creatures still found a way to survive in the glimmering ice encrusted mountains and caverns.

Half the battle of finding a bounty here was the environment, the plummeting temperatures, and fauna in desperate search of its next meal. The other half was following a cold trail before the screeching wind erased it. Tracking fobs only worked within a certain proximity of the bounty, so establishing an area to search within the white fingers tried to pry past his visor, choke underneath his flak suit, and strip at his offensive durasteel like a rabid lover.

Finding the correct cave had been the least of his worries. Aside from the fading mint of large boots, a second set was more innocuously hidden, utilizing the original prints to mask their own. However, he was able to discern the soft bite of a toe, the second individual's foot considerably smaller than the bounty's. His quarry was already being hunted and that hastened his pace, unwilling to part with the high payment, nor the irritation of losing out to another hunter. He was the best at his trade and some upstart hunter wasn't going to circumvent him by being light on their toes and a few paces ahead of him.

Crunching through the permafrost, each step grinding ice into snow, he ducked into the cavern, the wailing wind subsiding within the shelter of the stone walls. Despite the coverage, inside was just as frozen and frigid. Stalactites and stalagmites were encased in cloak of ice, chomping down to create the image of a throat of magnificent diamond teeth of a beast, illuminated only by a fallen torchlight.

A guttural roar echoed deep within, rattling the icicles and setting his teeth on end as his blood began to pulse in his ears. Before him was a detailed story of what had happened, written in the language of footprints in the frost. One had entered, another had followed. Deeper, the story continued until a set, thrice the size of either original paces, joined the ballad. Droplets of crimson blossomed like poppies in the scant grey light of the cavern, brightened by his own light as he frowned deeply, grazing over gouged stone where claws had shorn rock. Another glance at the enormous paw prints reminded him that Hoth possessed rather terrible fauna and he had an idea of what the quarry and hunter before him had encountered.

Drawing his pulse rifle, he glided forward, carefully rolling heel to toe to mask all the noise he made. Stealthily, stealing into the darkening depths of the unknown, he swapped the safety off and kept his finger ready by the trigger. Scarlet flowers of blood lined the path, tiny little buds winking freshly, indicating that they'd only bloomed recently. Movement made him jerk instinctively, leveling the rifle as an ashen cloak fluttered like a raven's wing and a silhouette danced away from a hulking, behemouth shag carpet of ivory. His visor caught the glint of the Tamahagane blade first, striking the light of his torch and throwing crackling stripes of pearl where the steel was lanced with lightning-like folds.

The Ronin.

Fleeing from the Wampa, the samurai treaded lightly, gliding elegantly as the robes beneath the fold of their cloak whipped. Din observed from his perch up toward the incline of the cavern, eyes raking over the yeti and then to the Jakonan. He doubted that such a hunter, rumored to be on equal grounds with himself, required assistance. Eyes narrowing, the Ronin swiped their sword down, air whistling where the blade passed and kept the Wampa at bay from tackling them. Then he saw it, the slick liquid trailing down from the hilt of the blade, over the guard, and dripping against the charcoal steel. Whatever trauma was there, it was hidden beneath the wide brim of the kimono sleeve, whispering only in the form of ruby liquid dripping and staining a wake where it trailed.

The Ronin had been injured, hefting the long curved katana as they back themselves into a corner without realizing. Remembering the story in the dust, Din realized that the Ronin had not anticipated crossing the Wampa and had been ambushed, the wound a telltale sign that the yeti had gotten the better of them if only for the briefest of moments. The fact they were still alive was a testament for their speed and agility, but such luck was running thin and the Ronin seemed aware of this. Drawing a second blade, the Ronin turned it toward themselves, poising it over their heart, more willing to commit suicide than be ripped apart by the monster.

Din raised his pulse rifle and fired.

Crashing and echoing like the mighty smash of cymbals, the shot took the Wampa on the side of the heat, incinerating the skull and causing it to collapse in a white mound just ten feet from the Ronin. The blade clattered from the Ronin's hand, head whipping up to leer at him from behind a snarling countenance, pausing as they shuddered and reached over to grip their wounded arm, an attempt to staunch the flow of blood that had led Din to them like a trail of crumbs.

"Mando," the gravelly, demonically modulated voice had rarely been leveled his way. In fact, this might have been the first time they had officially spoke other than a few muttered words that their vocoders never properly translated.

Shouldering his rifle, his T visor listed down to meet the darkened pits of black sit into the wolf's face. "Ronin." A silent stalemate, leering between two hunters, and the obvious predicament they were both in. Perhaps not so much Din, as he was uninjured and had the comfort of two dozen feet between him and the swordsman. And yet, he drank his fill of the bottomless abyss of the Ronin's mask and wondered what the creature behind it was thinking.

"The bounty is hiding deeper in the caves," Ronin informed him eventually, sheathing their sword and glancing over to their injury still obscured by the copious amount of fabric that they somehow moved as if made of wind when the samurai stirred. "It would seem Karga gave both of us the same puck." No suggestions were made, just a plain statement that this might have been a setup to see which hunter would return victorious and if their counterpart would ever step within the cantina on Nevarro. A petty game on Karga's part.

"It would seem," Din agreed solemnly.

Another terse quiet slipped over the caverns, interrupted only by the heavy mouth breathing of the Ronin who appeared to be more gravely wounded than they were letting on. "Mando. I owe you one," they proclaimed, bending down to pick up the fallen dirk, sliding it into the plethora of multicolored obi sashed wrapped around their waist. "The bounty is yours, but-" Ronin fell to their knees, not out of faintness or blood loss, but in a respectful manner. The rim of the ashen rice hat tilting toward the ground as they pressed their uninjured arm over their heart. "I owe you a blood debt. Had you not shot the beast, I would be dead."

The legacy of Jakonan honor was not a matter to be taken lightly. He knew enough of their culture to be aware that any debts incurred were always paid in full. Saving the Ronin and expecting payment aside from the quarry, had not been his intention. However, in the few moments whilst he stood there regarding the cloaked silhouetted, he realized the debt he'd carved for the samurai.

"The bounty is payment enough," Din shifted uncomfortably, disliking the idea of being owed such a favor. He didn't need help, nor any indentured servitude from the Jakonan. What he had done was purely to create a means for an end. The Wampa needed to die regardless and letting it kill the Ronin did nothing but cost the galaxy the skill of another veteran bounty hunter. While they were not friends, he had passed the Ronin in the cantina for nearly 8 years now and they were the only hunter not to press his patience.

"A debt is owed," the Ronin repeated, the gravel in their voice softening and becoming disconcertingly soft compared to the imposing swordsman Din had warily watched from a distance. "And it may be paid in any manner which you see fit. Now or in the future."

He spared no other words to the Ronin as he stalked by, continuing to eye the figure as he slipped by, wondering if the samurai would ambush him while preoccupied with the bounty. However, upon returning with the wilting quarry in tow, the Ronin had departed, making well on their relinquishment of the bounty and leaving behind a few more droplets of blood. Despite how ominous the Ronin had always seemed, they could bleed.

"Did you offer the Ronin the same quarry?" Din asked tersely, leering down at Karga as he spoke of a Client in need of very particular and talented help. Two years had passed since his encounter with the samurai on Hoth, the snarling wolf's mask tilting toward him questioningly when they did manage to cross paths, a debt not forgotten. He had no intentions of ever making good on what the Jakonan felt they owed him. It had been a job and the Wampa was in his way.

"Ronin isn't interested. Fellow's got a list of jobs he won't take and this one falls under that category. Real shame, would've liked to see you beat him at his own game again," Karga yawned, glancing at his nails in disinterest over the finger details of why his other premier bounty hunter wasn't willing to take the job. This should have been an obnoxious red flag to Din, but instead a pang of relief echoed in his chest, glad that he wouldn't be crossing the swordsman again. Apparently, Ronin had given Karga an earful about passing the same fobs between them and had set boundaries that Din didn't care to discuss.

As far as Karga was concerned, Din had beaten Ronin to the punch with the quarry on Hoth. The disgruntled magistrate was unaware that the Ronin had been paces ahead of him and had their roles been reversed, it might've been Din getting his durasteel crushed in by the Wampa in place of the Jakonan. Most of the other hunters in the Guild were under the assumption that there was a bitter rivalry between the two of them. Ironically, they couldn't have been more incorrect. Both warriors kept their distance and respected each other's abilities. There was an unspoken line neither crossed and until Karga had decided to play his games, no necessary requirement for either to interact.

Despite the masks they both wore, the modulated voices, and the predatory prowess both of them moved in, the Ronin was different. On many afternoons, Din had entered the cantina to find the Ronin sitting at tables playing sabacc and conversing gently to other hunters. Despite the metallic and earthen tone the demonic mempo spoke with, there was something rather quiet and soft spoken about the samurai. He supposed that was why the majority of the hunters in the Guild preferred the Ronin to him. Din did not spend any longer within the grimy cantina than required, ferrying himself out to the next job unlike Ronin who tended to loiter and collect stories.

It had taken Din the better part of three years to glean why Ronin did this.

Despite being quietly charismatic, the Ronin did nothing without a reason. Subjecting themselves to the teasing of other hunters, to having to share a few stories of their own, it was minute payment in exchange for the tales and information other hunters adored vomiting up. Most bounty hunters, while guarded, loved to brag about their endeavors. While Din ignored his competition, the Ronin got to know them when they were least suspecting, over a hand of cards and with a few drinks in their system. Not once had Din ever noticed a drink in front of the samurai.

The Jakonan was playing them like they played sabacc, gleaning the intentions and ambitions of any hunter that stepped foot on Nevarro. Had Din the patience or social skills, he might have entertained the idea of making a futile attempt to commit the copious amount of time and credits that the samurai did. Though his patience had waned long ago and Din did not gamble. Despite this, the Ronin's intellect was not lost on him and he respected his adversary - who, until Hoth, had never failed bringing in a quarry.

Not until the fated day that he had donned a suit of full beskar did Din ever contemplate speaking to the Ronin about the incurred debt. Only when he sat up in his cockpit, staring forlornly through the observation shield with a silver orb rolling in his gloved palm, did he notice the flapping of the crimson kimono as the hunter trotted toward their own small starship to depart on a mission, did he consider it. Aside from his Tribe, he rarely put weight into the words and promises of others. Carrying him as if his legs were wind, he was outside his ship and following in the wake of the sandal imprints the samurai had left in the sand, peppered with ash.

"Ronin!" he called brusquely, the figure freezing, slowly craning to glance at him with the bottomless eyes, tusks peeled back in a menacing snarl. A palm rested calmly on the hilt of their katana, a gesture he'd noticed was natural rather than defensive. "Your debt."

The wind danced across the space-port, kicking up a haze of dust and ozone from the sulfuric lava flats less than a kilometer away. Neither figure felt it, their respective masks filtering the haze. A questionable tilt declined their hat and Din knew what it was they were wondering, without voicing it outwardly.

"I require payment."

#the mandalorian fanfic #the mandalorian fanfiction #din djarin x oc #fennec shand & oc character #slow burn #very slow burn #touch-starved #homage to japanese culture

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leowyattv · 5 years

Photo

Steep Grade Fadeaway

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#poems #poets #poetry #poemsandpaintings #poemsandimages #poeticstories #writerscreed #artontumblr #whateveritis

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miguelmarias · 5 years

Text

World Poll 2019

Great recent movies (made since 2014) seen for the first time in 2019

Mademoiselle de Joncquières (Emmanuel Mouret, 2018)

Dau Huduni Methai (Song of the Horned Owl, Manju Borah, 2015)

El Crack cero (José Luis Garci, 2019)

Jiang hu er nv (Ash is Purest White, Jia Zhang-ke, 2018)

Carré 35 (Plot 35, Éric Caravaca, 2017)

Sic transit Gloria Mundi (Gloria Mundi, Robert Guédiguian, 2019)

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)

Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)

Le Chant du loup (The Wolf’s Call, Antonin Braudy, 2019)

Shooting the Mafia (Kim Longinotto, 2019)

Village Rockstars (Rima Das, 2017)

Tantas Almas (Valley of Souls, Nicolás Rincón Gille, 2019)

Un peuple et son roi (Pierre Schoeller, 2018)

Aamis (Ravening, Bhaskar Hazarika, 2018/9)

Fishbone (Adán Aliaga, 2018)

O que arde (Fire Will Come, Oliver Laxe, 2019)

La Fin de la nuit (Lucas Belvaux, 2015)

Ramen Teh (Ramen Shop, Eric Khoo, 2018)

Light of My Life (Casey Affleck, 2019)

Great movies (made before 2014) seen for the first time in 2019

’49-’17 (Ruth Ann Baldwin, 1917)

Ba shan ye yu (Evening Rain / Night Rain of Mount Ba, Wu Yigong and Wu Yonggang, 1980)

The Spirit of the Flag (Allan Dwan, 1913)

Versailles (Pierre Schoeller, 2008)

Ùn pienghjite mica (Les Anonymes, Pierre Schoeller, 2012/3)

Foxfire (Joseph Pevney, 1954/5)

Johnny Come Lately (William K. Howard, 1943)

I girovaghi (Hugo Fregonese, 1956)

Nunal sa Tubig (Speck in the Water, Ishmael Bernal, 1976)

Ikaw ay Kin (You Are Mine, Ishmael Bernal, 1978)

Pervyí eshielon (The First Convoy, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1955/6)

The Sea Wolf (Alfred Santell, 1930)

Surrender (William K. Howard, 1931)

The Restless Years (Helmut Käutner, 1958)

Darling, How Could You! (Mitchell Leisen, 1951)

Ko:Yad (A Silent Way, Manju Borah, 2012)

The Flame (John H. Auer, 1947)

Ernst Thälmann-Sohn seiner Klasse (Kurt Maetzig, 1954)

Ernst Thälmann-Führer seiner Klasse (Kurt Maetzig, 1955)

Bólshaia Sémia (A Big Family, Iosif Kheífits, 1954)

Circuit Carole (Emmanuelle Cuau, 1995)

Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950)

As It Is in Life (D.W. Griffith, 1910)

Abroad with Two Yanks (Allan Dwan, 1944)

Behind Office Doors (Melville W. Brown, 1931)

Lovin’ The Ladies (Melville W. Brown, 1930)

La Tarea o cómo la pornografía salvó del tedio y mejoró la economía de la familia Partida (Homework, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1990/1)

A Modern Hero (G.W. Pabst, 1934)

Surrender (William K. Howard, 1931)

Jubilee Trail (Joseph Inman Kane, 1954)

Matinée (Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1976/7)

Linda (Mrs. Wallace Reid = Dorothy Davenport, 1928/9)

Die missbrauchten Lebesbriefe (Leopold Lindtberg, 1940)

Very good movies (made since 2014) seen for the first time in 2019

Photograph (Ritesh Batra, 2019)

The Mule (Clint Eastwood, 2018)

The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (Robert D. Krzykowski, 2018)

Frères ennemis (Close Enemies, David Oelhoffen, 2018)

L’Homme fidèle (A Faithful Man, Louis Garrel, 2018)

Pris de court (Not on My Watch, Emmanuelle Cuau, 2016)

Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)

Frost (Šerkšnas, Sharunas Bartas, 2017)

Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019)

Da xiang xi di er zuo (An Elephant Sitting Still, Hu Bo, 2018)

Di qiu zui hou de ye wan (Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Bi Gan, 2018)

La Tenerezza (Tenderness, Gianni Amelio, 2017)

Fourteen (Dan Sallitt, 2019)

Bulbul Can Sing (Rima Das, 2018)

A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen, 2019)

Legado en los huesos (Fernando González Molina, 2019)

Ma vie dans l’Allemagne d’Hitler (My Life in Hitler’s Germany, Jérôme Prieur, 2018)

La Vie balagan de Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Yves Jeuland, 2018)

Gangbyeon Hotel (Hotel by the River, Hong Sang-soo, 2018)

The Wind (Emma Tammi, 2018)

Kothanodi (The River of Fables, Bhaskar Hazarika, 2015)

Dar Jostojoy-e Farideh (Finding Farideh, Azadeh Moussavi & Kourosh Ataee, 2018)

Sir (Rohena Gera, 2018)

El Proyeccionista (The Projectionist, José María Cabral, 2019)

Intemperie (Benito Zambrano, 2019)

Madre (Mother, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 2017, short)

Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle, 2018)

Madre (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 2019)

Very good movies (made before 2014) seen for the first time in 2019

A Life for a Kiss (Allan Dwan, 1912)

Futari de aruita iku haru aki (The Days We Spent Together, Kinoshita Keisukē, 1962)

The Necklace (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (Ship of Lost Men, Maurice Tourneur, 1929)

The Broken Locket (D.W. Griffith, 1909)

Primrose Hill (Mikhaël Hers, 2007)

The Rejected Woman (Albert Parker, 1924)

El último malón (Alcides Greca, 1917)

Bullets for O’Hara (William K. Howard, 1941)

Le Récit de Rebecca (Paul Vecchiali, 1964)

La noche avanza (Night Falls, Roberto Gavaldón, 1952)

Over-Exposed (Lewis B. Seiler, 1956)

I rollerna tre (Christina Olofson, 1996)

Il Viale della Speranza (Dino Risi, 1953)

Because of You (Joseph Pevney, 1952)

1870/…Correva l’anno di grazia 1870 (Alfredo Giannetti, 1972)

Demi-tarif (Isild Le Besco, 2003)

L’Exercice de l’État (The Minister, Pierre Schoeller, 2011)

Cheng nan jiu shi (My Memories of Old Beijing / Old Stories of the Southern Part of the City, Wu Yigong, 1983)

Strangler of the Swamp (Frank Wisbar, 1945/6)

Sword in the Desert (George Sherman, 1949)

There’s Always Tomorrow (Too Late For Love;Edward Sloman, 1934)

East Side, West Side (Allan Dwan, 1927)

Le Départ (Damien de Pierpont, 1998)

Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli, 2009)

The Eagle and the Hawk (Mitchell Leisen, credited to Stuart Walker, 1933)

Whirlpool (Roy William Neill, 1934)

The Animal Kingdom (Edgard H. Griffith; uc. George Cukor, 1932)

Le Passager (The Passenger, Éric Caravaca, 2005)

Razumov (Sous les yeux d’Occident) (Marc Allégret, 1936)

Banjo On My Knee (John Cromwell, 1936)

One Night of Love (Victor Schertzinger, 1934)

Enchantment (Robert G. Vignola, 1921)

Charell (Mikhaël Hers, 2006)

Men With Wings (William A. Wellman, 1938)

Delitto per amore (L’edera) (Augusto Genina, 1950)

Les Amants de Minuit/Les Amours de Minuit (Augusto Genina, 1930/1)

Human Cargo (Allan Dwan, 1936)

Up the Ladder (Edward Sloman, 1925)

Luxury Liner (Richard B. Whorf, 1948)

Surrender! (Edward Sloman, 1927)

The Judge (Elmer Clifton, 1948/9)

Turbión (Antonio Momplet, 1938)

Der Ruf (Josef von Báky, 1949)

Faubourg Montmartre (Raymond Bernard, 1931)

Träumerei (Harald Braun, 1944)

The Red Lantern (Albert Capellani, 1919)

El Paseíllo (Ana Mariscal, 1968)

La quiniela (Ana Mariscal, 1960)

Great movies growing up or just rediscovered in 2019

Letter of Introduction (John M. Stahl, 1938)

Only Yesterday (John M. Stahl, 1933)

Our Wife (John M. Stahl, 1941)

Wohin und zurück (Axel Corti, 1982-6)

Giorno per giorno, disperatamente (Alfredo Gianetti, 1961)

Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna (Hanns Schwarz, 1929)

Alyonka (Boris Barnet, 1961)

Craig’s Wife (Dorothy Arzner, 1936)

Imitation of Life/Fannie Hurst’s “Imitation of Life” (John M. Stahl, 1934)

Captains Courageous (Victor Fleming, 1937)

Test Pilot (Victor Fleming, 1938)

The Eternal Sea (John H. Auer, 1955)

Hello, Sister! (Anonymous: Erich von Stroheim, Alfred L. Werker, Raoul Walsh, Alan Crosland, 1933)

La noche de enfrente (Night Across the Street, Raúl Ruiz, 2012)

Journey into Light (Stuart R. Heisler, 1951)

Feel My Pulse (Gregory LaCava, 1928)

La signora senza camelie (The Lady Without Camelias, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1953)

Nosotros que fuimos tan felices (Antonio Drove, 1976)

Very good movies improved

Liana (Boris Barnet, 1955)

L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

Du haut en bas (High and Low, G.W. Pabst, 1933)

Amok (Antonio Momplet, 1944)

The Man Who Never Was (Ronald Neame, 1956)

Open Range (Kevin Costner, 2003)

Con la vida hicieron fuego (Ana Mariscal, 1959)

Timberjack (Joe Kane, 1954/5)

En la Palma de tu Mano (Roberto Gavaldón, 1951)

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)

Expreso de Andalucía (Francisco Rovira-Beleta, 1956)

El Camino (Ana Mariscal, 1963)

La viuda del capitán Estrada (José Luis Cuerda, 1991)

Vestida de azul (Antonio Giménez-Rico, 1983)

Segundo López aventurero urbano (Ana Mariscal, 1953)

Hell’s Outpost (Joe Kane, 1954)

Fuente: http://sensesofcinema.com/2020/world-poll/world-poll-2019-part-5/#4

#listas #senses of cinema

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back-tothe-story · 5 years

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Back to the Story Recap: Episode 66

Ep 66: Báldorok

Valas-Mohr, White Tomb of Tynirre: 4-7th Feast 3E Y628 (558)

Previously, as the Bronze Scales seek out the prophecies of the Last Son of Vladas, exploring the homeland of Giants, they found themselves at a sacred site, cornered by the Isejotun (frost giants). With Bál holding the fabled hammer, Avalmmer, the Isejotun were able to be convinced, blessing Bál and even sent a scout to lead the Scales to Valas-Mohr, the burning city.

Hiking across the mountainous ridges towards the smoking peak in the distance, Bál was faced with memories of his past, memories of when he was called Báldorok. Once reaching Valas-Mohr, the Scales were guided in to meet their leader, Furvicinderok, who called Bál “son” and explained his origins with the Ochre Witch and the destiny around the Titans and the return of Tyrus.

We come Back to the Story here...Furvcinderok and the other Ildjotun (fire giants) were adamant about Bál, as the Last Son of Vladas, taking Avalmmer to face a Titan Serpent in order to pass the Trials of Ash & Ember and fulfill destiny. You’ve been given food and a place to rest, all piling into one large bedroom. The stone is dark obsidian, but reflects the red light coming from the small magma trails around the perimeter of the room, used as light.

After some deliberation and Vesper speaking to Diether, you all found rest for the night. The heavy iron boots of patrolling giants was intermittent, but in your meditation, Felix, you heard the steps stop right outside your doorway. The glyphed circular stone was rolled away to reveal a 20ft fire giant in heavy iron armor, horns running up from the helm, a black beard of coal falling below, and eyes burning yellow fire. Quickly reading his mind, you caught glimpses of heightened emotions, anger, mine, take, kill, jealousy, as Felix began to call out to the Scales to wake.

#Back to the Story #dnd #DnD podcast #actual play #actual play podcast #ttrpg podcast #ttrpg #recap #Episode 66 #Episode Sixty Six

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suzie-guru · 4 years

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FIRE, FROST & FABLE: Glass, Hearts, & Snow Excerpt

As requested, here’s Meredith’s (and the readers) introduction to Ash!

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The figure studied their handiwork before grabbing a handful of their cloak and swiping it along their blade, though Meredith noted that there were no spatters of blood staining the snowy trail. Yet it was only after a few good strokes that the person sheathed their sword, nodding their hooded head at the metallic hiss it made as it returned to the scabbard.

There was a huff of laughter, and Meredith turned and tensed as Grump came out from the cart he had been guarding and approached the stranger. Amazingly enough, he sported a grin, his eyes crinkling. “Hells bells, Ash, but that’s a welcome only you could give. How long were you following us?”

“Long enough, seems like,” said a smoky voice from beneath the hood. A hand, sporting a fingerless glove and wrapped in leather binding, came out from the cloak to reach up and push back the hood. A swath of pale blonde hair came tumbling down the back of the cloak and the stranger turned to survey the trail with unimpressed glass gray eyes. “But not before those buggers got here. Been too long in the Mines, Grump. I thought you knew how to keep quiet while traveling.”

Meredith gaped, clutching the tree close in her shock. A woman.

A woman had rescued them, had fought so fiercely…?

Grump gave a rueful chuckle, and Meredith saw him cast a look her way, one that held a wry, weary sort reproach, and she realized it must have been her chattering to the donkeys that had caught the attention of the attackers.

She flushed hot with both horror and humiliation and gave him as contrite a look as she could, silently pleading in her mind. Please please please, I know better now, please please please don’t send me away.

Grump merely arched a heavy brow at her before turning to the woman standing before him, her tall, thin form seeming taller still against his own. “Ain’t so long to forget that. We…have a new traveling companion who had yet to learn this.”

He looked back over his shoulder at Meredith and gave her a significant look. “Though I fancy she’s a wiser one now, and will put such knowledge into practice.”

Relief made Meredith weak, and she managed a heartfelt nod of agreement to his words. Just as long as I don’t get thrown out…

Grump gave a half-smile then beckoned a hand at her. Timidly, Meredith rose from the snow and left her tree to step towards him and the woman, who was looking at her with frank bewilderment, her brows knit and her eyes slowly going over Meredith’s tattered dress and shawl, the long crow’s nest of her hair hastily swept back. Meredith bit her lip and dropped her eyes down, sheepishly passing a hand over the rope of her braid and feeling quite foolish indeed.

“Ash, may I introduce Milk, the Seven’s new cook and companion,” Grump announced, and Meredith felt a mild thrum of resentment at his obvious amusement at her discomfort. “Milk, may I introduce Ash, a long-time acquaintance amongst many other things, but first and foremost the one who saved all our sorry asses just now.”

Meredith flushed at the casual cheerfulness of his vulgarity but quickly dropped a curtsy to the woman, inclining her head as Sarada had instructed her so long ago. “A great gratitude to you, m’lady.”

Grump gave a rude snort, and the woman – Ash – gave him a scowl in return before she turned back to Meredith. She hesitatingly rose, timidly chancing a look up at this strange creature, who dressed and fought like a man. Meeting her eyes, Meredith saw that up close the icy gray of them was now a softer slate, the sky overhead casting them blue, and that while her features were rough and still frank with confusion, there was no unkindness to her bewilderment.

The woman inclined her head as well, the movement measured and her eyes never leaving Meredith’s. “No need to call me what I’m not, lass, though a pleasure all the same,” she said, voice low and rough and still strangely smoky. “Didn’t give you too much of a scare with that there show, did I?”

“We’re starting to find that everything gives Milk a scare,” Grump interjected dryly, and Meredith flushed, tucking a loose curl behind her ear and biting her lip anew with an irritation she could not keep back.

“Better afraid and aware then bold and block-headed,” Ash replied evenly.

Grump laughed aloud at that, throwing his head back. “Left myself open for that attack, didn’t I? They’re right about Awful Ash’s tongue being worth ten of her blade, you know. I should rid you of your weapon and cut it out here and now.”

“That’s assuming I’d let the likes you close enough to me in the first place, Grime–Grump.”

Meredith looked between them in confusion as they laughed long and loud, any irritation forgotten as she tried to figure out if she was witnessing a fight or a friendship.

Ash looked at their companion, her laughter fading as confusion came to her face once more. She stepped closer to Grump, who was still chuckling, and angled herself towards his ear, her eyes still on Meredith. “Truly, why did y’bring a whore with you?” she whispered.

Grump stopped laughing as Meredith let out a squawk of shock. “WHAT?!”

#fire frost & fable #fire frost & fable: Meredith #fire frost & fable: Ash #fire frost & fable: Greg #oh my god guys I love Ash so damn much #I love that people are intrigued!#I can't believe I've gotten so many asks about Fire Frost & Fable tonight!

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womenofice · 5 years

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Apparently I have a thing for electricity

Runa isnt the only video game character I have here on tumblr, but I've just realized a trend I have in magic bases gameplay. Almost all of then are shock mages.

Runa, granted, is far more fire based since it lasts longer and she'd prefer her enemies burn as she attacks them. She also uses a ton of healing spells because, well, she's squishy and needs healing, and is apparently the only one that'll heal herself. She still uses plenty of lightning based attacks due to liking how it looks and loving the power surge it gets her. It just doesnt get the job done as well as fire does.

I also have a Surana here from D.A., but shes almost strictly a frost and healing mage. Only a few shock spells are in her arsenal. BUT my inquisitor is a shock mage and will smite any and all down with her Devine lighting. So this was idle for a bit, but came out full force in my Inquisitor Levellan.

My final game based character is Sparrow from Fable 2, and shes all about lightning. Both I and the character kinda like how, if it's a critical hit, the enemy turns into a skeleton or ash.

So, all in all, lightning is a very common theme in my game plays. Whether its delayed like the D.A. games were, or secondary cause it doesnt let me turn ppl into ash. Apparently I must have been a lightning mage in my past life, damn.

#ooc #out of magicka #words of the dovahkiin #due to that heads up on her favorite spells there

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ambroisekane · 3 years

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The Wandering Augur

Under a shabby porch roof twinkled and tinkled a plethora of trinkets and chimes, hanging from every corner of the shack, in the hope of catching dreams and nightmares both, spirits malevolent and kind, wishes and thoughts alike. A rustic cabin for a bucolic life, austere in its way, both rewarding and worthless, like the act of living itself, a goal unknown, but to go through another day, another hour, ‘til dawn, ‘til something, a higher law, decided it to be the last.

To the uncareful eye, the cottage came as a welcome sight, stranded between the interminable trunks of ancient trees stretching their crooked fingers towards unblemished sunlight. Then came the details, the broken bones of tiniest animals captive of strings and twines, the eerie silence filling the air once the peal of minuscule bells stalled, the uncanny lights oozing from blurred windows, and any gratifying feeling of refuge and shelter died down. Whispers and tales evoked a silhouette clothed in nothing but fur, hearsay and lies recalled a disfigured witch with fiery fingers and a twisted back, rumors and stories breathed of a wry soul shunned by the light of sun and sentenced to lurk in the shades of dark arts and darkest solitude. Of all the fables and legends, Isseyane cared for none. Narrow shoulders swaddled in black linen, straight neck wrapped in baubles and beads and stones, glimmering on frosted skin, wide hips bundled in timeworn petticoats and pernickety slacks, feet clamped in antique galoshes laced up lithe calves. Aged writings and ancient words etched on her arms and ribcage conjured an ancient magic, concealed mysteries of an occult soul. Soothsayer, seer, marvel, diviner or trickster, she did not care much for the name, for none of them encompassed or neared the extent of her powers and talent. Apricot locks of hair curled and rebelled around her rounded cheeks, enhancing a faded grey gaze. Freckles sprinkled a mundane nose, soon forgotten once the eye reached plump, fleshy lips, from which sometimes emerged the tip of a strawberry-shaded playful tongue. With her traveled the scent of smoke, of fire and ashes haunting the single room she settled in, moons ago, clinging to her garb, soaking through her hair, imbuing her very skin. She moved and walked and flowed in twitchy, nervous ways, irrascible and jittery, safeguarding her burrow, shielding her den against the rest of the world. And hidden in her lair, she gathered furs and pelts, twines and wool strings, ripped cushions and dated pillows, she assembled them in a corner by the fire, crafting a nest for her biggest secret yet, the smallest of beds, of collected bits and bobs, built with all the love, and fondness, and fervor, and obsession she could muster. For of all the legends they spoke, of all the myths they shared, only that one of loneliness and solitude was true. A seclusion the charmer intended to abolish, soon.

#the beautiful is always bizarre #it is such a mysterious place the land of tears #stories

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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(REVIEW) ‘Germ Songs’ by Will Burns and Jess White

In this review, Maria Sledmere explores the arboreal and rhizomatic understories of Will Burns and Jess White’s new pamphlet, Germ Songs (Rough Trade Books x William Morris Gallery, 2019), asking what lyric poetry can do in a time of dieback, scarcity and precarious land.

> ‘What are we aiming for anyway?’ Will Burns asks in opening poem, ‘Ash’. To aim is to point, direct, focus, train. ‘Anyway’ indicates something will probably happen, in spite of something else. Is a poem a kind of aiming? What about a song? Germ Songs, a pamphlet fresh as its lime-green cover and published by Rough Trade Books, is part of a quartet of slender volumes: The William Morris Gallery Series. With Jess White’s gorgeous, intricate illustrations set alongside Burns’ neat and curious lyrics, Germ Songs embodies William Morris’ association with etching, aesthetics and ornament alongside a Blakean dialectic of print and song. You will be struck by the lively neon cover, a kind of nu-rave ~ ~ nNature~ ~, but find something decorative, arboreal and Romantic in the typeface, the whorls and notches of line and lyric. This is a book that holds between thin pages a rhizomatic undersong of multiple times, while its canopy gleams for a modern reader.

> Although the decorative intensity of Germ Songs would normally invite a more reposed and formal register, there is a conversational lightness to some of the poems. A frank admission of vagueness, a hedging of the representational ‘real’. Trochaic and anapaestic beginnings feel like a shoot and release, seedlings spun from the branches of trees: ‘Somebody, somewhere’, ‘counsels all this’, ‘Delays at all points’, ‘Decay, and worse’. The spondaeic emphasis of ‘all this’ swells with the everything that haunts the book. I have been reading Germ Songs as a lighter companion text to Richard Powers’ arboreal epic The Overstory (2018), a novel of interwoven tales relating to trees: tales of activism, game design, human intimacy, science, rebirth, environmental justice, illness and injury, violence and song. In Powers’ novel, there is this sense of a self-rejuvenating Nature — ‘trees lap at the low, wet sky, the clouds they themselves have helped to seed’ — a kind of agential, four-dimensional thicket of enmeshed relations. Fiction being this ecomimetic device to conjure the high-definition sensory realm of the forest we are losing, the forest-as-such. In Germ Songs, there is a different kind of toggling between stories, scales, maps and voices.

> In these short poems, Burns navigates the thickening histories and frictive material realities of the anthropocene, gesturing towards something like a vernacular of endangered beauty. There are questions around the ethics of making beautiful work about something on the brink of loss. Are we celebrating or pre-emptively elegising the environment that previous generations could enjoy in varying naiveties of plenitude? Or is something else going on, a kind of pressing awareness that blows upon those who move through the forest of language, a stirring breeze, a heat? The book’s blurb reads:

These poems and drawings take their shape from the land, utilising both artists’ interest in the natural world and the questions that close observation ask of us as human beings living through the landscape and flora that surround us.

The blurb also notes the pamphlet’s thematising of questions around ‘access to these spaces, about property, ownership, boundaries and how these ideas have played out through history’. We read William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789) within the context of land enclosures and human construction and domination of green spaces; equally we might read Germ Songs as a lyric conversation with the more-than-human world understood in the context of capital, growth and decay, loss, ‘domestic grief’, fires and the enflamed, complex affects of contemporary politics. Even the titles bear these slippages: ‘Heartwood’ for instance, a quick google reveals, is at once a Stirling-based tree surgeon, a Dulux colour shade, an investment management company and a herbal medicine education service. Such brand appropriations reveal the metaphoric density at work in a word which otherwise refers to the central, dead wood of trees. Also called duramen, heartwood is resistant to decay and ripe with aromatic tannins that darken and flavour its cells. Yet the poem ‘Heartwood’ reveals a complex, fraught resilience; what is starkly presented is ‘The empty, burned-out house / at the bottom of Hale Farm Lane’. An image of stability and pastoral timelessness, the farmhouse, becomes an extinguished symbol of upheaval, transposed into ‘A useless piece of property— / willed against heavy skies’. As though you could hedge a failed infrastructure against the coming storm. As though we could trade our increasing vulnerability for some inheritable protection: a will that somehow defies what is phenomenologically there in the poem, the ‘heavy skies’ that indicate the end, period, a possible violent return. Outbursts of fire and water; skies weighted with smoke or rain.

> There is something crying in the trees: ‘I laid me down upon a bank, Where Love lay sleeping; / I heard among the rushes dank / Weeping, weeping’ (Blake, ‘The Garden of Love’). Are not the trees supposed to sing? These ‘Germ Songs’ are billed as songs, and yet there is often an imagist simplicity to their presented scenes. What if Ezra Pound’s Imagist manifesto was a kind of anthropocene tract of material scarcity: ‘to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word’. Defiantly, Germ Songs nevertheless flirts with the decorative. Whether her illustrated scenes are of rich mycelia, plates of specimen seeds, crying or pensive birds, undergrowth, varieties of mushroom, fronds of lichen and moss, branch and cell, Jess White situates the forest of Germ Songs as quietly teeming. These are the painted yet tangible scenes we must continue to long for, support and sustain. I learn from The Overstory: ‘Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere’. Forests thrive on ‘older, rotting trees’, which feed the beetles, the fungus, the chorus of those species that farm decay to further life. In writing about the thinning of forests under late-capitalism (‘everything just / cheap protein, cheap motive, cheap material’) alongside the ornamental closeups of ecological treasure, you might say Germ Songs enacts the poetry of this transformation. Composting language, lyric and story as necessary to survival, openness, living on as multitudes.

> There is a sense that we are starved by overfeeding, that our calories are abundant but empty. There is a violent history to this, as described in ‘Cheap’:

the frontier itself, built on the violence of sugar and grain-calories, the groundwork of horses, cattle, dogs, that made things cheap as we need them to be—cheap enough to travel.

As Robert Macfarlane and others have asked, does this play out in the increasing austerity of our diet of language? These are poems presented quite plainly, often with a plodding rhythm (though the verse is free), stripped of Latin names or excessive description; I think again of Pound’s insistence on ‘the language of common speech’. It is as though the poem dares you to burrow into that space between ‘the nearly-exact’ imminence of lyric utterance and the maximalist sprawl of illustration — drawings you quite simply want to enter into. That sometimes seem to hold a warmth, a depth; even as their adjoining lines are cooler, clipped and precise. This is not to say the poems are written in the style of timber: stripped, smoothed and felled from a monocrop generality. Rather, the holding back allows Burns to occasionally sweep us into a line of quiet devastation, ‘empty of birds / but for kite calls that grieve the great songs of sparrows’. I think of Robert Frost’s choice of metaphoric paths against the existential and material gravitas of the decisions we make now regarding our traversal and use of the land:

We have miles to cover to get back on the potholed road west. Which is how we will have to leave the town and feel its bearing forever, overgrown into dog days.

(‘Mid-Point’)

There is a twist of New Weird Britain within these lines, an eerie kind of emptiness in plenitude — something not quite placed. I think of the fable-like evocation of ‘The dark village’ which ‘sits on the crooked hill’ in Rachael Allen’s recent collection Kingdomland (Faber and Faber, 2019). Panning out, I think more widely of a generalised ‘west’: a beckoning frontier, a lawless district, a California wildfire raging, a stark apocalypse sunset. There are places we might fall on the road, when we are forced ‘to leave the town’ with the heartwood of that perilous scene inside us. The poem as microcosm for grander dramas. Dog days can mean both the hottest period of the year and one of inactivity or decline. There is a burning pressure of something which blooms too hard and enters stasis; the excess in capital, production, growth becomes something torpid and awful: ‘Though all weather is fell weather / there is only one meaning to heat / that swells so late’ (‘Spruce’), ‘These corrupted seasons—months of rain / then a high summer of fire—’ (‘Ash’). We know this is because of our carbon, our cars and planes, our human decisions. There is bound to be another fall, or perhaps the falling is happening already.

> To name a poem for a tree, after a tree. Does the poem come before or after? ‘Exhausted and exhausting, under the ash / —selfhood as dieback’ (‘Ash’). As in the poems of Emily Dickinson, the em-dash functions as a kind of hinge — or better still, a connecting branch, a stretching stem, a tilting trunk — gesturing towards those interpretations which are not quite fixed in language, semantics or time. As Richard Stacey recently argued in a recent undergraduate lecture at the University of Glasgow, Dickinson’s dash performs an invitation to look inside the occluded openings or splits in a poem, while also providing a cover (we might say canopy) against ‘prurient speculation’. So the poems reveal and conceal, like bristling leaves letting in, shading or blocking the light. The ‘dieback’ of ‘selfhood’ follows, somehow, the push and pull process of the ‘Exhausted and exhausting’, the held noun and flicker between adjective and verb; but it also suggests some hidden space in the poem, the dash itself as dieback, which is itself a progressive dying from the tip backwards. The dashes seduce you deeper into the thicket of lines that are carefully sung or drawn between life and death, presence and absence. They are units of ecology itself as ‘a branch’ of science that deals in the relations of organisms and environments.

> And what is meant by a germ? Germ: ‘An initial stage or state from which something may develop; a source, a beginning. Also: a small constituent or quantity’; ‘To produce new buds or shoots; to germinate’ (OED, 2019). The poems and drawings are germinations, surely, invitations to a budding consciousness about what’s going on in the understory of the land and trees. The fragments of narrative in these poems hold human distance and tensions (‘We were hundreds of miles apart’) alongside the detritus and trace of what we become: ‘The unit of violence in these hills / is no longer the disused MOD site / but the bloody mess of people—’ (‘Bastard Service’). Our plastic litter, our packaging, our ‘stuff’ of capitalism’s fallout. How to move through this. The precision of a sentence held enjambed across lines, every punctuation deliberate, aimed, held. In their short sentences, there’s a sense of every expression bearing a thicker weight, a whole trunk of meaning. Transient shortcuts tracing deeper histories. In the ‘bloody mess’ of what we have already left, what does it mean to write a poem?

> ‘Bastard Service’, the pamphlet’s final poem, ends with ‘the phrase—“leave no trace, leave no trace”’. To say it twice, as if to say, to yoke repetition to ritual, to evoke — and this being the ‘point’ of lyric. ‘What are we aiming for anyway?’: maybe this anyway, its conditions of possibility, its frustrated in spite of, indifferent production, is the actual stuff of Burns’ lyric. For the insistence against traces belies the actual work of lyric in forging musical phrases that beg to be ‘thought over and over’, leaving synaptic traces as much as physical marks on a page. A poem, Buddy Willard derisively claims in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), ‘is a piece of dust’. But what if it were more like a germ? A trace of the living and dying and dead; something to mull over, let dwell inside us; spread to a blurry future as lyric persistence among an ‘air so thick it had killed birdsong’ (‘Wild Service’).

Germ Song is available now, via Rough Trade Books.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 2/2/20

#poetry #poem #review #poetry review #reviews #SPAM #Will Burns #Jess White #Rough Trade #Maria Sledmere #William Morris #ecopoetics #Richard Powers #Rachael Allen

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