#heinz insu fenkl

[caribeandthebooks]

Caribe's Read Around The World TBR - Part 3

Books set in Asian countries <3

[have-you-read-this-short-fiction]

"The Fox Sister" is available to read here

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Skull Water: A Novel

By Heinz Insu Fenkl.

[violetsiren90]

I AM HERE FOR THE ASK GAME! 1 and 14 pleeeeeaaaseeee

HALI 💕

This is going to sound weird, because it's not a song that was released this year, and it's not really a track that was released at all, but I listened to Yoongi and IU's live version of "Eight" that they sang on IU's Pallet almost every day since it aired. Their vocals are so beautiful together (Yoongi's harmony??? 😭) and I just adore that song and them.

14. The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-Jung was definitely the best thing I read this year. It was a beautiful piece of philosophical mythology. I read Heinz Insu Fenkl's translation. 10/10 would recommend to anyone interested in mythological literature!

Thank you for the asks, Hali!! LY 🥰

End Of the Year ask game!

[shellcrush]

tagged by @gajra !! thank u for the tag

last song- wrestling in dirt pits- ethel cain

currently reading- skull water by heinz insu fenkl; border & rule by harsha walia (this one is taking me so long bc i'm not smart enough for it but it's very good so far). also finished the lying life of adults by elena ferrante yesterday and i was so enthralled by it.. need to read the neapolitan novels asap

currently watching- i don't watch tv so idk how to answer this one, but the last movie i watched was I, Tonya and it made me sob

current obsessions. poetry by kim hyesoon; going down the rabbit hole of niche perfumes on fragrantica dot com; sending homemade cards to my friends in other states; posting through the decline of the twitter empire; google sheets; taking 0.5 pics of my dogs; sketching with a paintbrush and fountain pen ink; animal crossing pocket camp

tagging some mutuals @feytouched @sprouttheambassador @tearsofthemagdalene @pictureusinthelight @hakkiest!!! and anyone else who wants to make one of these; it's very fun

[musingsofmonica]

February 2023 Diverse Reads

February 2023 Diverse Reads

•”Black Candle Women” by Diane Marie Brown

•”The House of Eve” by Sadeqa Johnson

•”The Laughter” by Sonora Jha

•”Our Share of Night” by Mariana Enriquez and Pablo Gerardo Camacho

•”Venco” by Cherie Dimaline

•”When Trying to Return Home: Stories” by Jennifer Maritza McCauley

•”This Time It's Real” by Ann Liang

•”A Country You Can Leave” by Asale Angel-Ajani

•”The Daughters of Madurai” by Rajasree Variyar

•”The Porcelain Moon” by Janie Chang

•”She Is a Haunting” by Trang Thanh Tran

•”Stealing” by Margaret Verble

•”Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir” by Lamya H

•”Don't Fear the Reaper” by Stephen Graham Jones

•”My Nemesis” byCharmaine Craig

•”Skull Water” by Heinz Insu Fenkl

•”Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation” by Camonghne Felix

•Victory City” by Salman Rushdie

•”Your Driver Is Waiting” by Priya Guns

•”A Spell of Good Things” by Ayobami Adebayo

[hackoftheyear]

Oh cool he has his own wiki page now

[graysonnightwing]

tag six (6) people you’d like to get to know better! (tagged by @rocketnebulas thanks grace!)

last song: simple times by kacey musgraves bc im back on my bullshit and this song reminds me sooo much of dick grayson when he was batman, thinking about his days in the titans

currently reading: Heinz Insu Fenkl's Skull Water although i’m only one chapter in so i dont really have any thoughts about it yet

currently watching: we have like 1/2 of succession s4 next and then we’re rewatching the wheel of time babeyyy

current obsession: ive been rereading @penny-anna’s the path of a lightning bolt series on ao3 basically over and over since its one of the only good billy batson series. been kinda obsessed with billy/shazam the last few days ngl!

tagging: @gecgecgecs @phantomsolotour @herecomesthefirstday @axelaqua @bisexualdinahlance @stregoniconiconii

[lunastationquarterly]

Fox

A mother fox dug under the old barn now used as a storage shed. Some of us think she has eight kits; one person counted nine. She’s raising her little ones beside a well-used path to the arena where riders on horseback pass several times a day. The boldest of the kits sun themselves as we stare, mystified that their mother isn’t threatened by us or our massive, stomping companions. She quietly…

[whosafraidofvirginiawoolf]

You say the dream and the world are two separate things, and that is because you have yet to awaken from the dream

Kuunmong / The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-Jung, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl

[anartistsometimes]

Still trying to get the hang of this new pen. But I like this piece a lot more than my first attempt.

This piece was loosely based on the Fox Sister fairytale which you can read about here

https://thesupernaturalfoxsisters.com/fairy-tales/the-fox-sister-a-korean-tale/

[alexannedra]

Vulpes vulpes

In the Scandinavian countries, foxes were believed to cause the northern lights.  These aurora were called  "revontulet" in Finland, meaning "fox fires".  Foxes sometimes replaced cats as witch´s familiars in medieval European folklore, and were occasionally persecuted in the resulting hysteria.  The Japanese revered foxes as the divine messengers of Uka no Mitama, the Shinto rice goddess, although tales were also told of evil Japanese foxes that could possess people. Many cultures have stories about shape-shifting "werefoxes".  In China and other Asian countries, werefoxes were demons that prolonged their lives by seducing humans and feeding off their souls.  A variation of this theme is a myth common among the Siberian Koriak people, the Inuit, and various tribes of native North Americans. "The Mysterious House Keeper", tells of a fox that entered a hunter´s house and removed its skin to become a beautiful woman. When the hunter returned, he found that the woman had cleaned his house and he decided to marry her.  The bliss was short lived, however, as the hunter began to complain about his wife´s smell.  Her feelings hurt, she transformed back into a fox and ran away.

Some of the best known classic fox literature was written over 2,500 years ago by Aesop.  His fables told stories about various intelligent animals, and were used to convey a moral point to the reader.  Because of their craftiness, beauty, and solitary nature, foxes figured prominently in these fables whenever deceit, pride, or individuality was necessary to the story.  One such fable is The Fox and the Grapes.  In it, a red fox finds itself in a vineyard and tries to feed on the grapes hanging on the vines.  Despite its best efforts, the fox just can´t reach the fruit and gives up in frustration.  He saves face and consoles himself by saying the grapes were probably sour any ways.  The moral of the story is that people often badmouth things they can´t have.  Like many other of Aesop´s fables, the story gave rise to a popular expression (sour grapes) or proverb.  With the possible exception of the lion, few other animals are mentioned as often by Aesop as the fox is.

Both clever and foolish, creative and destructive, perfectly civilized and utterly wild. Trickster foxes appear in old stories gathered from countries and cultures all over the world -- including Aesop's Fables from ancient Greece, the "Reynard" stories of medieval Europe,  the "Giovannuzza" tales of Italy, the "Brer Fox" lore of the American South, and stories from diverse Native American traditions...

...but at the darker end of the fox-lore spectrum we find creatures of a distinctly more dangerous cast: Reynardine, Mr. Fox, kitsune (the Japanese fox wife), kumiho (the Korean nine-tailed fox), and other treacherous shape-shifters.

Fox women populate many story traditions but they're particularly prevalent across the Far East. Fox wives, writes Korean-American folklorist Heinz Insu Fenkl, are seductive creatures who "entice unwary scholars and travelers with the lure of their sexuality and the illusion of their beauty and riches. They drain the men of their yang -- their masculine force -- and leave them dissipated or dead (much in the same way La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Keats's poem leaves her parade of hapless male victims).

"Korean fox lore, which comes from China (from sources probably originating in India and overlapping with Sumerian lamia lore) is actually quite simple compared to the complex body of fox culture that evolved in Japan. The Japanese fox, or kitsune, probably due to its resonance with the indigenous Shinto religion, is remarkably sophisticated.  Whereas the arcane aspects of fox lore are only known to specialists in other East Asian countries, the Japanese kitsune lore is more commonly accessible. Tabloid media in Tokyo recently identified the negative influence of kitsune possession among members of the Aum Shinregyo (the cult responsible for the sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway). Popular media often report stories of young women possessed by demonic kitsune, and once in a while, in the more rural areas, one will run across positive reports of the kitsune associated with the rice god, Inari."

(To read Heinz's full essay on "Fox Wives & Other Dangerous Women," go here.)

There are tales of fox wives in the West as well, but fewer of them; and they tend, by and large, to be gentler creatures. (To marry them is unlucky nonetheless, for they're skittish, shy, and not easily tamed.) An exception to this general rule can be found in the räven stories of Scandinavia. The fox-women who roam the forests of northern Europe are portrayed as heart-stoppingly beautiful, fiercely independent, and extremely dangerous.

(Fox Woman by Susan Boulet)

(Little Elvie in the Wild Wood by Catherine Hyde)

The "nine-tailed fox" of China and Japan is often (but not always) a demonic spirit, malevolent in intent. It takes possession of human bodies, both male and female, moving for one victim to another over thousands of years, seducing other men and women in order to dine on their hearts and livers. Human organs are also a delicacy for the nine-tailed fox, or kumiho, of Korean lore -- although the earliest texts don't present the kumiho as evil so much as amoral and unpredictable...occasionally even benevolent...much like the faeries of English folklore.

In the West, it's the fox-men we need to beware of -- such as Reynardine in the old folk ballad, a handsome were-fox who lures young maidens to a bloody death.

Mr. Fox, in the English fairy tale of that name, is cousin to the kumiho and Reynardine, with a bit of Bluebeard mixed in for good measure, promising marriage to a gentlewoman while his lair is littered with her predecessors' bones. Neil Gaiman drew inspiration from the tale when he wrote his wry, wicked poem "The White Road":

There was something sly about his smile, his eyes so black and sharp, his rufous hair. Something that sent her early to their trysting place, beneath the oak, beside the thornbush, something that made her climb the tree and wait. Climb a tree, and in her condition. Her love arrived at dusk, skulking by owl-light, carrying a bag, from which he took a mattock, shovel, knife. He worked with a will, beside the thornbush, beneath the oaken tree, he whistled gently, and he sang, as he dug her grave, that old song...

shall I sing it for you, now, good folk?

Jeannine Hall Gailey, by contrast, casts a sympathetic eye on fox shape-shifters, writing plaintively from a kitsune's point of view in "The Fox-Wife's Invitation":

These ears aren't to be trusted. The keening in the night, didn't you hear? Once I believed all the stories didn’t have endings, but I realized the endings were invented, like zero, had yet to be imagined. The months come around again, and we are in the same place; full moons, cherries in bloom, the same deer, the same frogs, the same helpless scratching at the dirt. You leave poems I can’t read behind on the sheets, I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost. you may be imprisoned in an underwater palace; I'll come riding to the rescue in disguise. Leave the magic tricks to me and to the teakettle. I've inhaled the spells of willow trees, spat them out as blankets of white crane feathers. Sleep easy, from behind the closet door I'll invent our fortunes, spin them from my own skin. Although chancy to encounter in myth, and too wild to domesticate easily (in stories and in life), some of us long for foxes nonetheless, for their musky scent, their hot breath, their sharp-toothed magic.  "I needed fox," wrote Adrienne Rich:

Badly I needed a vixen for the long time none had come near me I needed recognition from a triangulated face     burnt-yellow eyes fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail I needed history of fox     briars of legend it was said she had run through I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through I craved to feel on her pelt     if my hands could even slide past or her body slide between them     sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur lacerated skin calling legend to account a vixen's courage in vixen terms

(Full poem here.) Ah, but Fox is right here, right beside us, Jack Roberts answers, a little warily:

Not the five tiny black birds that flew out from behind the mirror over the washstand,

nor the raccoon that crept out of the hamper,

nor even the opossum that hung from the ceiling fan

troubled me half so much as the fox in the bathtub.

There's a wildness in our lives. We need not look for it.

(Full poem here.)

There are a number of good novels that draw upon fox legends -- foremost among them, Kij Johnson's exquisite The Fox Woman, which no fan of mythic fiction should miss. I also recommend Neil Gaiman's The Dream Hunters (with the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano);  Larissa Lai's When Fox Is a Thousand; and Ellen Steiber's gorgeous A Rumor of Gems (as well as her heart-breaking novella "The Fox Wife," published in Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears). Alice Hoffman's disquieting Here on Earth is a contemporary take on the Reynardine/Mr. Fox theme, as is Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, a complex work full of stories within stories within stories. For younger readers, try the "Legend of Little Fur" series by Isobelle Carmody. And for mythic poetry, I especially recommend She Returns to the Floating World by Jeannine Hall Gailey and Sister Fox’s Field Guide to the Writing Life by Jane Yolen. 

[fictionz]

White light was floating everywhere like flour dust, and the beautiful woman climbed up on the bed, on top of me, and, right in front of her servants, she took off her clothes and pushed herself down onto me. I thought my penis would burst, but she was slightly cold, not like a Korean woman.

“Five Arrows” by Heinz Insu Fenkl

[largethingslargerthings]

REVIEW IN 6 WORDS OR LESS: HEINZ INSU FENKL'S MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER

TRAUMA'S HAUNTS WARP MATTER AND SPACE

[quicklit]

Had I not been there, perhaps he would have spoken to himself or sat in some kind of trance, talking with his spirits and his dreams. Had I not been there, he might have sung himself to sleep with the songs from his childhood, the ones his mother and his aunts sang for him on warm summer nights. Had I not been there, he might have wept with sadness or shouted out his anger at the family that had driven him across the river to live like a Taoist hermit, and in the momentary quiet of his cigarette smoking I wished I weren’t there in body but looking down on Big Uncle instead, watching over him from above, the way his tutelary spirit might from the other world.

Heinz Insu Fenkl, “Five Arrows,” 2015

[whosafraidofvirginiawoolf]

Men and ghosts have different paths, but love can bring them together

Kuunmong / The Nine Cloud Dream by Kim Man-Jung, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl