#nancy's austen project

[horsetailcurlers2]

random regina mills headcanons that i believe to be 100% true:

-she secretly LOVES classic rom coms from the 80s/90s/2000s. she has seen every nancy meyers movie.

-in the early days of the curse, she tried to teach herself to knit bc she was so restless and bored. it did not go well at all and if she had her magic back then she probably would have set the yarn on fire.

-she’s bilingual. even though her mother disapproved, her father secretly taught her the language of his kingdom.

-her shoe collection is absolutely bonkers insane. henry teases her for it sometimes but she loves it. she probably has a bit of a shopping problem but she likes being able to treat herself and choose things for herself just because she enjoys them- not because somebody else chose them for her or because she’s trying to project a certain image.

-she is a stress baker

-when the curse first brought them to storybrooke in the 80s, she went through a phase with jane fonda workout tapes- leg warmers and all. this is a secret she will take to her grave.

-she goes ALL OUT for henry’s birthday. like, it’s a lot. she spoils him with gifts, she makes all his favorite foods, and she used to throw big parties for him when he was little. as he gets older, it’s a little embarrassing for him but it seems to make her so happy so he doesn’t complain. (she never really had good birthdays growing up so she is determined to do everything in her power to make sure he never has a bad one)

-her library is very extensive. she had a LOT of time to read during the curse and she explored every last genre of the literature of our world. she has very varied and eclectic taste- she’s very fond of both stephen king and jane austen.

-this one is a little out there but about twice a month or so she likes indulging in pipe tobacco in her study. they didn’t exactly have tobacco in the enchanted forest but they had a similar plant and her father used to smoke it so it reminds her of him.

[cogentranting]

My 2023 Reads

See below for the full list of the books I read and a 1-2 sentence review of each.

Fiction, non-fiction, poetry

Italicized- reread

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Anthony Doerr) - It's like a combination of All the Light We Cannot See, Cloud Atlas and The Book Thief, except not quite as good as any of those. Good, just not as good.

The Stolen Heir (Holly Black) - Highly recommend if YA fantasy romance is your thing

On the Incarnation (Athanasius of Alexander) - one of the foundational works of early Christian theology

Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro) - Beautiful, and lovely, and thoughtful and bittersweet

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Tolkien translation) - technically this is poetry but its also narrative so I grouped it with fiction. Green Knight is very fun. Pearl is quite boring.

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Louise Perry) - I highly recommend this, just be cautious because it has some very frank discussions of some very hard topics so there's a whole bunch of language and trigger warnings attached to this recommendation

Justification Reconsidered: Rethinking a Pauline Theme (Stephen Westerholm) - I'm going to be honest-- I don't remember what I thought of this book. It was for school and I also did a bunch of research on the topic and I don't remember what part of that research this constituted.

A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (J.I. Packer) - I read a few chapters of this for a research project last year and liked it enough to buy myself a copy and read the whole thing for fun

The Warden and the Wolf King (Andrew Peterson) - Book 3 of this series (this is 4) remains my favorite but this one is really good and is a beautiful culmination of the themes

The Elements of Eloquence (Mark Forsyth) - About as good as a book that is just explaining various rhetorical figures can be.

The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Richard Bauckham) -THIS book right here I want to read again. This book made me fall in love with Revelation.

King of Scars (Leigh Bardugo) -It's the reason why I'm very upset over the cancellation of the Shadow and Bone tv series (because I won't get to see more of my boy Nikolai) but it's fine

The Secular Creed: Engaging Five Contemporary Claims (Rebecca McLaughlin) - A very useful book, very accessible

Rule of Wolves (Leigh Bardugo) - But seriously I love Nikolai and I mostly really enjoyed this duology.

The Waste Land and Other Early Poems (T.S. Eliot) - So many words saying so many things and maybe I'll know what they mean if I read this another 30 or 40 times.

Notes From Underground (Fyodor Dostoevsky) - Very different from other Dostoevsky but fascinating in its own way

The Scarlet Pimpernel (Emmuska Orczy) - It's a romp

Calvinism: A Southern Baptist Dialogue - genuinely very very helpful to me and just randomly was emailed to me as a pdf by some site that I ended up on the email list for

The Great Hunt (Robert Jordan) - I do not have faith in this series being good over time but at book 2 they're fun

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) -It really is that good.

Original Sin: A Cultural History (Alan Jacobs) - a really interesting exploration of the idea

Out of the Silent Planet (C.S. Lewis) - The Space Trilogy is great because it just has such a different feel from most of the other sci fi I've read

Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been (Jackie Hill Perry) - Perry has such a lovely poetic way of telling her story

Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (Karen Swallow Prior) - This book is really lovely and peaceful and reflective

A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin) -honestly was not very impressed by this. It was fine.

Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) - If you're really into the Russian classics, I would recommend this, but there's like 6 others I would recommend first.

Firefly: Big Damn Hero (James Lovegrove, Nancy Holder) -If you want the book equivalent of a solid but not stand-out filler episode of Firefly

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Ken Liu) -I ranked all of the short stories in this on my blog if you search for it. Some are great. Some are not.

All the Light We Cannot See (Anthony Doerr) - It's really really good. A book you just want to sit with.

The Chalice of the Gods (Rick Riordan) - Kinda the same vibe as the Firefly one. It's good to see Percy again, it's a fun time, it's not taking any big swings or doing anything particularly new. But I did really enjoy the thematic linking of which gods were chosen to be a part of the story.

Dracula (Bram Stoker) - It's Tumblr, I don't need to review this here.

Biblical Critical Theory: How The Bible's Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (Christopher Watkin) - This book is really big but it has so much good stuff in it. Well worth the read.

An Experiment in Criticism (C.S. Lewis) - There was quite I while through this one where I was not really jiving with it, but then at the end he pulls it together and I really like where he ends up, as evidenced by quoting half of it on posts here.

Poems (C.S. Lewis) - I'm not good enough at reading poetry to review it. There's a few in here that I quite liked though.

For teaching-

1. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)- it's still great. After reading it who knows how many times, it's just so good.

2. The Crucible (Arthur Miller)- The character work in here is fantastic, and I really do like it a lot, but if Miller understood grace a bit better? the ending could be phenomenal.

3. Long Way Gone (Ishmael Beah)- It's not my favorite but it is really powerful and worth reading and the kids were really invested in it

[tim-burton-facts]

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (US 2012)

Director: Timur Bekmambetov.

Screenplay: Seth Grahame-Smith, from the novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Producers: Timur Bekmambetov, Jim Lemley, Tim Burton.

Executive Producers: John J. Kelly, Simon Kinberg, Michelle Wolkoff.

Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel.

Editor: William Hoy.

Original music: Henry Jackman.

Cast: Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln), Dominic Cooper (Henry Sturges_, Anthony Mackie (Will Johnson), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Mary Todd Lincoln), Rufus Sewell (Adam), Marton Csokas (Jack Barts), Jimmi Simpson (Joshua Speed), Joseph Mawle (Thomas Lincoln), Robin McLeavy (Nancy Lincoln), Erin Wasson (Vadoma).

Running time: 105 minutes. Color.

Released through: 20th Century Fox

Movie co-produced by Tim Burton based on the book of the same title written by SETH GRAHAME-SMITH. Grahame-Smith had a hit novel in “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” (2009), so it is little surprise that the producing team of Jim Lemley, Tim Burton, and TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV optioned “Abaraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” (2010) before it was even finished. Both books tap into a pop cultural desire to think of the familiar in different terms. What if honest Abe had also fought against a worldwide vampire conspiracy? What if Jane Austen’s iconic novel was set in a world replete with the living dead? Over the next few years, both Burton and Bekmambetov directed an adaptation of Grahame-Smith’s screenplay (with Burton remaining as producer). According to Gina McIntyre, Burton’s goal as a producer “has largely been to help preserve the project’s unique character to the greatest extent possible.” During the making of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”, Grahame-Smith worked with Burton on the screenplay to “Dark Shadows”. Both were released in summer 2012.

The principle conceit of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”, established early in the film and explored throughout, is that there are vampires throughout the world. These vampires have been responsible for some of the more unsavory practices in history. In the United States, they are the principal benefactors of the slave trade (it is unclear whether the South is totally under their thrall, but a scene between head vampire Adam [Rufus Sewell] and Jefferson David [John Rothman] shows that they are colluding). In this version of the nineteenth century, the causes of the Civil War are not open to debate: this is a war over slavery- and, by extension, vampirism- that is not over until both are removed from the nation. In fact, rather than grow into the role of abolitionist gradually, our Abraham Lincoln is ideologically righteous from the start. He witnesses the assault on his friend Will, a young slave boy. He vows revenge on Jack Barts (Marton Csokas), a man who he comes to learn is a slaver and a vampire. For Lincoln, Barts is doubly guilty. This vampire bites (and possible r***s) Lincoln’s mother while he watches. When he grows up (the adult version of Abe is played by Benjamin Walker), his desire for vengeance leads him to Henry Sturges (Dominic Cooper), an eccentric and seemingly ageless man who advises Lincoln in a long war against the vampires. Lincoln acts as Sturges’ enforcer, attacking vampires as ordered. Only later does he realize that Sturges is himself a vampire, and is carrying on against Adam and his cabal for personal reasons not unlike Lincoln’s own. In this world, vampires cannot harm other vampires. Abaraham Lincoln must act on Sturges’s behalf.

The film roughly splits into three narrative sections: Lincoln’s childhood and initial trauma; his life as a young man in Springfield, Illinois; and his time as president, including his personal stake in the Civil War. The middle section is the best executed, despite playing like an extended rethinking of John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939). Here, Abe meets store owner and later political confidant Joshua Speed (Jimmi Simpson), is reunited with Will, courts Mary Todd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), debates Stephen Douglas (Alan Tudyk), and learns about the vampires’ larger set of plans. The sections of Lincoln’s time in office feel especially condensed, since they cover all of the Civil War. One of the film’s major historical liberties is that it sets up the personal and political climax at the battle of Gettysburg, where Union soldiers are fighting against Confederates and their vampire leaders. Lincoln has it out with Adam on a train carrying a supply of silver that is en route to the fashioned into weaponry that can actually harm these supernatural foes.

Although at times overly generic (its focus on some of the more well-known battles and people of the nineteenth century feels lazy, or like a pat on the back to a basic recognition of American history), “Abaraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” reflects Grahame-Smith’s and Bekmambetov’s personal interests. Grahame-Smith’s vampire mythology takes some well-known ideas (the transfer of blood through a bite, the aristocratic associations of vampires) and adds a few different ones (these vampires are able to function during daylight and are mainly impervious to silver, since Judas’ betrayal of Jesus had to do with thirty pieces of silver). The central thematic leap of the film (that the mast-slave relationship, which is founded in the uneven exploitation of one person by another, is analogous to vampirism) is rather clever, and helps explain how these vampires could find a ready supply of blood. However, this alignment between slavers and vampires does undercut the film’s relation to history. As Kim Newman notes, “Slavery was quite bad enough- indeed, worse than it’s depicted here- when it was an economic rather than supernatural phenomenon, and giving slavers fangs and dark glasses tends to excuse rather than underline a real historical human evil.”

This film has a slightly more subdued visual style than “Wanted” (2008), but still plays with a number of Bekmambetov’s favorite tricks. In particular, Bekmambetov takes advantage of digital cinema’s ability to augment time. During fight sequences, Lincoln’s skill as a warrior is rendered intelligible thanks to selected changes in speed, which variously showcase his precision with the ax and convince us of his superior strength and ability. Bekmambetov’s camera frequently moves and keeps the action coherent- it seems to avoid the kind of action-sequence immediacy suggested by shaky, handheld cameras that populate recent action films by Paul Greengrass (”The Bourne Ultimatum” [2007]) and Christopher Nolan (”The Dark Knight” [2008]).

The film opened in late June 2012 in the United States to roughly $16 million and largely negative reviews. Writing for “Wired” magazine’s “Underwire”, Hugh Hart opined that “the alt-history lessons and neck-chomping money shots deserve points for originality, but Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter could have truly triumphed as grand entertainment if only its anemic human characters had received the transfusion of humor and wit that such an outrageous concept demands.” Peter Travers noted that the film somehow lost the magic of the book, which “was a fun escapist read.” The film’s overblown action-theatrics left him saying that “the movie deserves a stake through the heart.” The film was defended by some critics as an occasionally worthwhile and technically competent action movie. For example, Ken Hanke says that “taken on its own terms as a po-faced presentation of goofy material, it’s rather fun.”- Kevin M. Flanagan

References

Ken Hanke, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Asheville Mountain Express, June 26, 2012, www.mountainx.com/movies/review/abraham_lincoln_vampire_hunter#.Uea0B42siSo; Hugh Hart, “Review: Bloody Serious Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter Isn’t as Fun as It Sounds,” Underwire, June 12, 2012, www.wired.com/underwire/2012/06/review-abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter/; Gina McIntyre, “Seth Grahame-Smith Wants to Resurrect ‘Beetlejuice,’ ‘It’,” LA Times Hero Complex, August 9, 2012, herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/seth-grahame-smith-wants-to-resurrect-beetlejuice-it/#/0; Gina McIntyre, “Tim Burton on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: I Just Wanted To See That Movie”, LA Times Hero Complex, June 10, 2011, herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/tim-burton-abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter/; Kim Newman, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, “ Sight and Sound 22, no. 8 (August 2012): 52; Peter Travers, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Rolling Stone, June 21, 2012, www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/abraham-lincoln-vampire-hunter-20120621. 

Taken from “The Tim Burton Encyclopedia” by Samuel J. Umland.

[books-in-media]

Masterlist of books mentioned & read by Reese Witherspoon

—A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow, Laura Taylor Namey (2020) (X)

—A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905)

—A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle (1962)

—Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps, Kelly Williams Brown (2013)

—All Is Not Forgotten, Wendy Walker (2016)

—American Like Me, America Ferrera (2018)

—Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery (1908)

—Becoming, Cindy Crawford (2015)

—Becoming, Michelle Obama (2018)

—Big Little Lies, Liane Moriarty (2014) (X), (X)

—Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, Brené Brown (2017) (X), (X)

—Conviction, Denise Mina (2019)

—Dad Is Fat, Jim Gaffigan (2013)

—Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid (2019) (X) 

—Decorating Is Fun!: How to Be Your Own Decorator, Dorothy Draper (1939)

—Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, Gail Honeyman (2017) (X) 

—Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, Balli Kaur Jaswal (2017) (X)

—Everything Inside, Edwidge Danticat (2019) (X)

—Fable, Adrienne Young (2020) (X)

—Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (And More Life to Live), Eve Rodsky (2019)

—Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley (2021)

—First Comes Love, Emily Giffin (2016)

—From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home, Tembi Locke (2019)

—Furia, Yamile Saied Méndez (2020) (X)

—Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life, Christie Tate (2020) (X)

—Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After, Heather Harpham (2017) (X) 

—Heart of the Matter, Emily Giffin (2010)

—His Only Wife, Peace Adzo Medie (2020) (X)

—I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown (2018) (X), (X), (X) 

—In a Dark, Dark Wood, Ruth Ware (2015)

—Infinite Country, Patricia Engel (2021)

—Insight Guides New Zealand, Insight Guides (2012)

—It's All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook,   Gwyneth Paltrow, Thea Baumann   (2016)

—Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls, David Sedaris (2013)

—Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng (2017)  (X), (X), (X)

—Little Hoot, Amy Krouse Rosenthal (2007)

—Little Oink, Amy Krouse Rosenthal (2009)

—Little Pea, Amy Krouse Rosenthal (2005)

—Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868)

—Love The One You’re With, Emily Giffin (2008)

—Luckiest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll (2015)

—Me Before You, Jojo Moyes (2012)

—My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem (2015)

—Next Year in Havana, Chanel Cleeton (2018) (X)

—Northern Spy, Flynn Berry (2021)

—Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned", Lena Dunham (2014) (X)

—One Day in December, Josie Silver (2018) (X), (X)

—Outlawed, Anna North (2021)

—Permission to Parent: How to Raise Your Child with Love and Limits, Robin Berman (2014) (X)

—Radical Beauty: How to Transform Yourself from the Inside Out, Deepak Chopra (2016)

—Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811)

—Something Blue, Emily Giffin (2005)

—Something in the Water, Catherine Steadman (2018)  (X), (X)

—Spoon, Amy Krouse Rosenthal (2009)

—Still Lives, Maria Hummel (2018) (X) 

—Stirring Up Fun with Food: Over 100 Amazing and Easy Food Crafting Projects, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Gia Russo (2017)

—Such A Fun Age, Kiley Reid (2019) (X), (X)

—The Alice Network, Kate Quinn (2017)

—The Art Forger, Barbara A. Shapiro (2012)

—The Cactus, Sarah Haywood (2018)

—The Chicken Sisters, K.J. Dell'Antonia (2020) (X)

—The Early Stories of Truman Capote, Truman Capote (2015)

—The Engagements, J. Courtney Sullivan (2013)

—The Giver of Stars, Jojo Moyes (2019) (X) 

—The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

—The Guest List, Lucy Foley (2020) (X), (X)

—The Henna Artist, Alka Joshi (2020) (X), (X), (X)

—The Jetsetters, Amanda Eyre Ward  (2020) (X), (X) 

—The Last Black Unicorn, Tiffany Haddish (2017)

—The Last House Guest, Megan Miranda (2019)

—The Last Mrs. Parrish, Liv Constantine (2017)

—The Last Story of Mina Lee, Nancy Jooyoun Kim (2020) (X) 

—The Library Book, Susan Orlean (2018)  (X)

—The Light in Hidden Places, Sharon Cameron (2020) (X)

—The Light We Lost, Jill Santopolo (2017) (X), (X), (X) 

—The Lying Game, Ruth Ware (2017)

—The Measure of Our Success: Letter to My Children and Yours, Marian Wright Edelman (1992)

—The Night Tiger, Yangsze Choo (2019) 

—The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah (2015)

—The One & Only, Emily Giffin (2014)

—The Other Woman, Sandie Jones (2018) (X)

—The Proposal, Jasmine Guillory (2018) (X)

—The Rules of Magic, Alice Hoffman (2017)

—The Sanatorium, Sarah Pearse (2021)

—The Scent Keeper, Erica Bauermeister (2019) (X), (X), (X) 

—The Secrets We Kept, Lara Prescott (2019) 

—The Sprinkles Baking Book: 100 Secret Recipes from Candace's Kitchen, Candace Nelson (2016)

—The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul Conversations, Oprah Winfrey (2017)

—The Woman I Wanted To Be, Diane Von Furstenberg (2014)

—These Precious Days: Essays, Ann Patchett (2021)

—Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed (2012)

—This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel (2017) (X)  

—This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett (2011) (X)

—Untamed, Glennon Doyle (2020) (X), (X), (X) 

—Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens (2018)  (X), (X), (X)

—Whiskey in a Teacup: What Growing Up in the South Taught Me About Life, Love, and Baking Biscuits, Reese Witherspoon (2018) (X), (X), (X) 

—Wildflower, Drew Barrymore (2015)

—Year of Yes, Shonda Rhimes (2015)

—Yes Please, Amy Poehler (2014)

—You Have A Match, Emma Lord (2021)

—You Should See Me In A Crown, Leah Johnson (2020) (X)

—You Think It, I’ll Say It, Curtis Sittenfeld (2017) (X) 

—You’ll Grow Out Of It, Jessi Klein (2016)

[goddessofdandelions]

Dark Academia Suggestions For Women

Books that are also movies: 

Anne of Green Gables 1-4 by LM Montgomery (BBC’s Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Green Gables: the Sequel)

Orphan Anne Shirley is adopted by bachelor Matthew Cuthbert and his spinster sister Marilla Cuthbert in edwardian Canada and must learn to reconcile her romantic and imaginative nature in this coming of age story

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (1994) or Little Women (2019))

A coming of age story following 4 sisters and their mother while their father is off at war. The main protagonist, Jo, is an especially romantic figure

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic)

Two sister witches must cover up the murder of one of their abusive ex boyfriend while an agent is investigating his disappearance

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Hugo)

Orphan Hugo befriends Isabelle who helps him unravel the mystery of his father’s automaton

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield (Ballet Shoes)

Three orphan girls are taken in by an eccentric explorer and his niece, but once he’s gone they must take up performing arts careers to fend for themselves

Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson (Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day)

Miss Pettigrew, a governess, is accidentally sent to the wrong address by her agency and befriends a night club singer 

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice (2005) or BBC’s Pride and Prejudice Mini Series)

Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters attempt to find love in Regency England, but Elizabeth and her love interest Mr Darcy make things more difficult than they need to be

Emma by Jane Austen (Emma (1995) or Emma (2020))

Emma Woodhouse fancies herself a matchmaker in Regency England, but quickly finds she knows little about love. 

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility (1995)

A coming of age story for the Dashwood sisters, who have lost their home but find love in Regency England 

Other novels by Jane Austen

All of her novels have been adapted to screen. While all of her novels are good, I highlight these three because of their emphasis on female friendship and romanticism

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre has a troubling childhood but grows up to become a governess and fall in love with her benefactor in Regency England

The Help by Kathryn Stockett (The Help)

A white female journalist records the stories of two black women who work in white households during 1960′s America

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (BBC’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell mini series)

A historical fantasy following the last two magicians on earth in Napoleon-era England

Legally Blonde by Amanda Brown (Legally Blonde)

Attempting to impress her ex boyfriend, Elle Woods applies to and gets accepted to Harvard Law School where she tries to prove herself as more than just an airhead blonde. 

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (A Little Princess)

Orphaned Sara finds herself adjusting from a life of wealth to a life of poverty and abuse working at a boarding school and comforts herself by imagining she is a princess. 

Matilda by Roald Dahl (Matilda)

Young Matilda is a prodigy in an abusive household, sent to a school with an abusive headmistress. But when she discovers that she has magical abilities, she uses it to seek justice for herself and her friends. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)

In an indeterminate time period, three orphans get moved from guardian to guardian as they are pursued by the villainous Count Olaf who wants their family fortune. Along the way they find themselves wrapped up in a secret society that has split into factions and gone to war with each other. 

Movies: 

The Mona Lisa Smile

When Katherine Watson takes a job as an art professor in a conservative town in the 1950′s she tries to teach her female students to become more assertive

Whisper of the Heart 

Shizuku is a Japanese student at the end of her summer break who befriends an antique shop owner and his grandson after following a cat through the city. Inspired by the events she attempts to write a novel

Shakespeare in Love 

A fictional account of a noblewoman who poses as a man in order to perform in a Shakespeare play, only to fall in love with the playwright and inspire future plays

Miss Potter 

A hyperbolic account of Beatrix’s Potters life 

Becoming Jane 

A hyperbolic account of Jane Austen’s life

Ever After 

A retelling of Cinderella set in renaissance era France and without magical elements, replacing the fairy godmother with Leonardo Da Vinci instead. 

The Bookshop��

Widowed Florence Green follows her dreams and opens a bookshop in the 1950s but unexpectedly finds herself at odds with the queen bee of the town who wanted the property for her own project. 

Kiki’s Delivery Service

Coming of age story that follows 13 year old Kiki who, according to witch tradition, goes off to live on her own for a year to practice her magic. She sets up a delivery service but learns things will be harder than she anticipated.

Books: 

*Some of which have movies that I either haven’t seen or didn’t personally like

The Girl with the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier 

A fictional account of the servant girl who inspired the real life painting by Vermeer

The Awakening by Kate Chopin 

A truly bleak tale set in New Orleans at the end of the 19th century following Edna as she begins to have an awakening about feminism which affects her daily life. This is regarding as one of the first novels to primarily focus on the concept of feminism. 

Agatha Christie Mysteries 

Agatha Christie was so good at what she did that her books are still used today in toxicology classes and she largely helped define the mystery genre

Nancy Drew Mysteries by Carolyn Keene

Though written for children, the Nancy Drew books follow the amateur detective and her female friends as they solve mysteries in mid-20th-century America and the character has become a cultural icon. 

Gathering Blue and Son from “The Giver Quartet” by Lois Lowry

Books 2 and 4 in the Giver Quartet. While books 1 and 3 are also good, books 2 and 4 are featured here because they have female protagonists. The books are part of a series, but only loosely connected and can be read as standalone books if desired. Gathering Blue follows Kira in a dystopian future as she makes a place for herself in her village through her ability to dye cloth, a skill which helps prevent her from being cast out for being disabled. Son, meanwhile, follows Claire who is looking for her son after he was taken from her. 

The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare

Follows Kit who moves from the Caribbean to Puritan Connecticut where she befriends an elderly spinster woman who is accused of witchcraft 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

A staple of dark academia, it tells the story of Victor Frankenstein who creates artificial life and is immediately horrified by his creation, who swiftly grows angry and vengeful towards his creator. 

The Secret History by Donna Tartt 

Another staple of dark academia, follows six students who study the classics. The narrator is an adult version of one of the students reflecting on the events that led to a murder. 

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquival 

Taking place in Mexico, Tita is being kept from her lover by her traditionalist mother. Tita expresses herself through her cooking which takes on magical properties. 

The Inkheart Series by Cornelia Funke (Inkheart, Inkspell, and Inkdeath)

Follows Maggie and her book-worm father after she discovers her father has the ability to bring to life any book that he reads aloud. They are quickly swept off into the narrative of a fantasy novel. 

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman 

Though part of a trilogy, the first novel is the most appropriate for dark academia, following a female protagonist (Lyra) in a historical fantasy setting as she unravels a mystery. 

Music: 

Florence Welch 

Lana Del Rey

Lorde 

Hozier 

Enya 

Alice Merton 

Regina Spektor 

Lenka 

[nerdyskeleton]

I posted 7,143 times in 2021

196 posts created (3%)

6947 posts reblogged (97%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 35.4 posts.

I added 1,285 tags in 2021

#star trek - 289 posts

#ace attorney - 256 posts

#the locked tomb - 243 posts

#personal - 116 posts

#about me - 95 posts

#david bowie - 65 posts

#blackmadhi - 62 posts

#asks - 56 posts

#nancy drew - 55 posts

#jane austen - 48 posts

Longest Tag: 120 characters

#sometimes i want to do that to others but then i get paranoid i somehow used the wrong name despite it being right there

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

this blackmadhi fake dating au wedding epilogue chapter is udder-ly full of cow puns and if you read it you will find out why maybe reblog this link so others can also find out why

check out my kofi, where there are no cow puns ): 

44 notes • Posted 2021-03-14 22:24:21 GMT

#4

for once, I have written fanfic that people have asked for. please see the soft, fluffy blackmadhi established relationship marriage fic that continues the story of my utterly bananas fake dating au from a few years ago. 

why don’t u reblog my hard work mm perhaps?? or mm perhaps visit my kofi?? i can’t tell you what to do. 

45 notes • Posted 2021-02-21 18:17:55 GMT

#3

I'm putting this out in the universe right now.......please send me good vibes and positivity in advance of 4pm EST on Thursday 4/15

57 notes • Posted 2021-04-12 18:55:43 GMT

#2

KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE 🌸

71 notes • Posted 2021-09-20 19:40:15 GMT

#1

DS9 crew about Jake Sisko:

142 notes • Posted 2021-08-29 18:25:38 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[dwellordream]

“The two examples of projected cousin-marriage in Pride and Prejudice stand in stark contrast to the love match that forms its core narrative. To cement an already existing family alliance, Lady Catherine plans for her nephew and her daughter to “unite the two estates”: by “the wishes of both sisters,” the maternal cousins “are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses.” And she also shapes the other cousin-­marriage subplot by offering the obsequious Mr. Collins some “particular advice and recommendation” concerning matrimony (PP 71).  Aping the marriage strategy of her class, he decides on one of the Bennet sisters—distant cousins on the father’s side, girls that his patroness would consider “not brought up high” (PP 71). In each case, it falls to Elizabeth to articulate and enact the principle of individual choice: she resists coercion by denying both Collins’s appeal to the interests of her family and Lady Catherine’s representation of Darcy’s duty to the interests of his family. 

In both cases, the directive to marry a cousin figures a surpassable constraint. The novel’s characterization of cousin-marriage normalizes what literary critics, loosely following the anthropologists, call exogamy or, more simply for our purposes, marrying outside the family. This consummate form of the heterosexual plot culminates in “the ideal marriage [that] would combine and reconcile” difference as resemblance. Reading her fiction as consistently Burkean, Tony Tanner argues that in Austen “everything tends towards the achieving of satisfactory marriages—which is exactly how such a society secures its own continuity.” To factor gender into the class discourse that Pride and Prejudice and its critics more or less explicitly deploy, we can add, with Clara Tuite, that the heroine is appropriated by the ruling class and married to an exemplar of landed manhood so as to vindicate “the upward social mobility of the lower-gentry or upper middle-class female within the marriage market,” thus making for a modicum of gradual social change.

The genteel but penurious Elizabeth captures the well-to-do but pompous Darcy only at first by her fine eyes; it is more particularly her wit, her intelligence, and even her insults that make him eager to explain himself, after she rejects his verbal proposal, in written language that challenges the interpretations she had previously drawn under the influence of Wickham’s eloquence and self-assured bearing. Material disparities of situation between the protagonists give way to a “deeper” similarity: in its “reliance on the figure of sexual exchange,” Nancy Armstrong has famously argued, “the novel redistributes authority between Darcy and Elizabeth,” transforming “all social differences into gender differences and gender differences into qualities of mind.” The “differences” between two strangers ultimately resolve themselves into an underlying sameness, as two become one even before the wedding night. 

To be sure, the other marriage subplots illuminate the particular virtues of this union: both the prudent marriage, such as Charlotte Lucas’s merger with Mr. Collins, and the status-seeking marriage, which Caroline Bingley hopes to bring about, cast into sharper relief the action involving unrelated strangers who fall in love over time and connect previously unconnected families. But like the projected cousin-marriages, these are made to look insufficient: only the fate of the central couple exemplifies, as Tuite has put it, “the naturalizing function of Austen’s marriage plots and heterosexual romance,” accomplishing the cultural work of presenting a particular form of love that conquers almost all differences as the norm (Romantic Austen 17). Joined by Darcy’s sister Georgiana, the happy foursome produced by the marriages of two sisters to a pair of best friends forms the core of a new second family; by contrast, the “endogamous” plot of cousin-marriage in Pride and Prejudice is especially discredited. The very minimizing of the cousin’s affective appeal works to align marriage within the family with the bad old days of unlimited aristocratic power.

Elsewhere in Austen, intrafamilial union takes on almost sinister overtones, as in the story Colonel Brandon tells in Sense and Sensibility (1811) of his thwarted love for his cousin Eliza. Adhering more closely than even Lady Catherine’s scheme to the aristocratic paradigm, “in which a woman married her father’s brother’s son” so as to keep “her estate in her father’s family,” this subplot typifies the use of cousin-marriage as a means of consolidating the family fortune in men’s hands by constraining a woman’s power to choose. Brandon describes Eliza as “one of my nearest relations, an orphan from her infancy, and under the guardianship of my father”: while it is certainly possible that she is a maternal cousin, it seems more than likely, because of the disposition of the guardianship, that she is actually a rich relation on the father’s side.

Married “against her inclination” to Brandon’s older brother, Eliza’s ruin directly follows, not through incestuous adultery with Brandon— a possibility first raised by the rumor that the second Eliza “is his natural daughter,” then denied by Brandon himself—but via extramarital sex with other (presumably unrelated) men (SS 178, 57). Without the prerogative to choose the cousin we can infer she favors, Eliza exerts her own will only in breaking her marriage vows; deprived of her fortune by her marriage, she lacks even the economic power to support herself and her child. While Brandon’s narrative does not so much indict cousin-marriage per se as marriage to the wrong cousin, its gothic overtones imply that this match perpetrates feminine imprisonment for patriarchal interests, that it is “tainted by social ambition,” as Ruth Perry describes the general run of “paternal first cousin marriages” in Austen’s fiction, “and the venial desire for accumulation of wealth.”

Tellingly, in relating the sequel of the second Eliza’s unhappy fate, it is not only the original injury to his cousin or the cruelty practiced on the child of his “unfortunate sister” but also the damage Willoughby has inflicted on him on which Brandon dwells: Willoughby “had ... done that, which no man who can feel for another, would do” (SS 180, 182, emphasis in original). If “endogamous economics” rather than incestuous erotics dictates the impediment between the first Eliza and Brandon (as is true, from a different angle, for Fanny and Edmund during much of Mansfield Park), then it is still also the case that both mother and daughter figure largely in Brandon’s imagination as men’s property, to be disposed of in marriage, damaged by seduction, or put away by adultery. “Happy had it been,” Brandon sententiously concludes, “if she had not lived to overcome those regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned” (SS 179).

 With its class and status motives laid bare, cousin-marriage—even its mere prospect—is either decidedly unattractive or downright destructive in these two novels, especially but not exclusively for women, because it ostensibly subordinates individual desire to family interest, as if those two principles were inevitably and irrevocably opposed. By contrast, Mansfield Park radically departs from this model. Admitting the idea of making strangers into suitable marriage partners, it gives full play to the charms of Mary and Henry Crawford and, in the end, just as fully discards them. The ultimate turn to marriage within the family “preserves the inviolability of Mansfield and excludes the risks attendant on” intercourse with strangers, in Glenda A. Hudson’s words, by reforming the family from within; the cousin-union of Fanny and Edmund, Tanner further suggests, becomes “essential to the maintaining of the ‘house’ because so many of its actual blood descendants go to the bad.”

Within this framework, Fanny Price achieves “upward social mobility,” as Elizabeth Bennet does, but not exclusively through marriage: it is by leaving her birth family in the first place—by undergoing her own trials of estrangement on the road to familiality—that she gains her opportunity to marry into the Mansfield family of which, not incidentally, she has already become an integral part. Considering cousin-marriage a regressive practice, those who seek to position Austen’s fiction as more radical than conservative, more feminist than patriarchal, look askance at Fanny and Edmund’s union, conferring an ideological slant on both the exclusion of the sexy Crawfords and the incorporation of the modest cousin as daughter and wife. 

As Claudia L. Johnson forcefully argues, “The language of disease permeates Mansfield Park, and the problem is not with perniciously ‘new’ people like the Crawfords...the problem is within the great house itself.” Subsequent commentators identify this metaphorical “disease” with various strands of the novel, especially as figured by the Bertram slave-owning interest in Antigua and by “the infection of acting,” but Johnson herself specifies its nature rather differently. Invoking Burke not to suggest Austen’s allegiance to the fiction of the national family, she argues instead that Austen aims “to turn conservative myth sour” by illustrating how “Burkean models of parental authority go awry in Mansfield Park” ( Jane Austen 97, 99).

The novel levels its charge not so much at metropolitan strangers as at fathers and the disease that breeds and is bred by their exclusion of others: the “paternal affection” of Sir Thomas Bertram and the prurience of Mr. Price are not “exempt from an aura of erotic implication” ( Jane Austen 118, emphasis in original). Most generally, Johnson argues that “the principals in Mansfield Park gather together in a tighter knot of consanguinity because the larger world outside has always proved more than they could manage”: Fanny and Edmund’s marriage thus “savors of incest” ( Jane Austen 119, 116). According to this line of thinking, the problem with Mansfield, especially by contrast with the “successful” cross-class union presented in Pride and Prejudice, lies less in its elimination of strangers than in its overly familial preference for kin. 

Mansfield Park exposes the incestuous insularity of the Bertrams, who cling to resemblance rather than embrace difference. Above all else, Johnson locates incest as the disease of the family at Mansfield, which the novel diagnoses without curing: “Because familial love ...appears to be the only legitimate arena for strong feelings...it is prone to incestuous permutations” ( Jane Austen 117). In making that claim, she extends the critique of cousin-marriage present in other Austen fictions to its logical conclusion. While Tanner and Armstrong view the production of resemblance as the work of the exogamous marriage plot, Johnson sees Austen as critiquing sameness as the basis for marriage and family life.”

- Mary Jean Corbett, ““Cousins in Love, &c.” in Jane Austen.” in Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf

[grandhotelabyss]

Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: “I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.”

Giles Harvey, “Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us”

(A long New York Times profile to crown the publicity campaign for Klara and the Sun, which I will read and review just as soon as it arrives, though I have a foreboding that it won’t add much to Never Let Me Go. 

We here at Grand Hotel Abyss are interested in what we have elsewhere called “esoterica in the literary press”—what in other genres of writing would just be called themes or subtexts but which demand a more menacing appellation in the field of journalism, where writing is supposed to be transparent as glass. The undercurrent in Harvey’s piece is dolce far niente, which you can see if you compare how Harvey characterizes Ishiguro’s writing practice—as inspired laziness—to the way it’s described as an almost spiritualized martial art in the Guardian profile [“a process he compares to a samurai sword fight”]. 

Why this cryptic defense of the indolent? It accompanies an attempt to reinterpret the politics of Ishiguro’s fiction for the present, even though the first novels belong to the early triumphalist neoliberal moment in their skepticism of all organized politics. Never Let Me Go extends this skepticism to the organizations that have taken the place of politics and therefore breaks through into a true critique of neoliberalism. Never Let Me Go speaks to so many on a nearly forbidden channel because it is, more specifically, a critique of the feminine modes of domination that our era brings to the fore [e.g., as I’ve mentioned already, “why won’t men go to therapy?”]. 

We’ve discussed Nancy Armstrong before in these electronic pages; she wrote the book on the realist novel as a feminine mode of domination, and when she turns to Ishiguro’s science fiction—noting, as did the late Swedish Academy secretary Sara Danius, his odd resemblance both to Jane Austen and to Franz Kafka—she seemingly gets the message:

That is to say, as Kathy verbally replenishes her biologically depleted emotional life by describing all the connections she has made by means of this ruthless logic, what can only be called positive affect pulses back through the web of pathways which end in death. As it does so, her story converts the deaths of individual students into the form of life in common shared even by the dead in Walter Benjamin’s poignant lament for the passing of the traditional village storyteller. As it thus converts loss into connection at once banal and unavailable to normal individuals, Kathy’s story, I would argue, proposes a model of community that does not hark back to a bygone pastoral world, as Benjamin’s does, so much as open up the possibility that even individuals who consider themselves irreplaceable can and must acknowledge the continuous biological substratum on which they are already inscribed.

But Armstrong’s dense theoretical disquisition on a new post-novelistic model of community, as much as Harvey’s journalistic portrait of the artist as neo-social-democrat, doesn’t penetrate to the real Ishiguran esoterica. The author presents himself as a genial bumbling Englishman, a very decent liberal, a kindly multi-genre humanist like Gaiman or Mitchell—see his Amanda-Palmer-quoting daughter—who lacks even the grit in the eye you get from Amis or Rushdie. This is the softer book-club version of what Harvey and Armstrong are selling. Harvey writes,   

Ishiguro came of age as a writer in the early 1980s, when market fundamentalism was sweeping Britain and the West, a development that caught him entirely off guard. “I never wanted revolution,” he said of his younger self. “But I did believe we could progress towards a more socialist world, a more generous welfare state. I went a long way into my adult life believing that was the consensus. When I was 24 or 25, I realized that Britain had taken a very different turn with the coming of Margaret Thatcher.” Although his books never explicitly address Thatcher’s neoliberal project, they reflect its dismaying human consequences. For Ishiguro’s characters, not working is not an option, or even a proclivity. 

So much in his work is “not an option.” I think of the doomed clones torturing the fly in Never Let Me Go, the pianist enacting his great performance only when thinks he’s alone in The Unconsoled, the painter becoming a fascist because he sympathizes with the poor and oppressed in An Artist of the Floating World. The temptation is to recuperate this for a progressive politics in some watered-down Adornian reading that would show his works’ negativity to subtract from the world the very shape our hopes ought to take so that they become handbooks for utopia once you reverse the writing [I weakly lapsed into this at the end of my essay on Never Let Me Go]. His post-Nobel insistence on his genial liberalism points this way as much as does Armstrong’s summary of his work’s purpose as “provid[ing] a glimpse of what it might be like to live without the misbegotten notion that being a self-contained subject is the best and only way of being fully human,” or Harvey’s quiet argument for social democracy as a system that will allow us to be productively lazy just like the author. 

The theme, the subtext, the esoterica is something else, though, something less like socialism in cipher and more akin to a philosophy of quiet retreat, inner exile, beneath the posture of conformity, something like Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith or Jünger’s Anarch, though let me finish Eumeswil before you quote me on the latter. 

The 20th century is dying more slowly than Onegin’s uncle, but it’s still clear what the future holds: corporatist biosurveillance city-states, which will come in “woke” Zuck/Bezos forms with democratic-socialist veneers and “based” Thiel/Musk versions that are more frank, but which will be the same in the end. Why else does even the present political left’s theory of “equity,” as encapsulated in this genuinely disgusting meme, imply the coerced correction of inherent biological inequality? This is the point I’ve been making since my essay on Spike Jonez’s Her in 2014: what the woke and the based want is basically the same thing—the juridical and biological extermination of the human being. Some will advertise this state of affairs as the expansion of humanism and the alternative to neoliberalism Ishiguro says he was hoping for. They will buy and sell our information and our atoms and tell us it’s freedom, they will bribe us a pittance to be serfs and call it socialism, and like Kathy and Ryder we will do our best to play our part with pride and decency. It is to this future that Ishiguro’s best novels offer a guide.

Further reading: check the Kazuo Ishiguro tag over at the main site for me on A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and a first response to Ishiguro’s Nobel. Confession: I’ve never read When We Were Orphans; I should have by now, but I know so little about its historical setting and am always intimidated by the word-problem aspect of detective novels, so I’ve put it off.)

[fandomtrumpshate]

Unlisted Fandom Challenge - the Results

Signups are closed, and the FTH mods will spend the next couple weeks organizing the form responses into Dreamwidth posts and getting all the tags done so that browsers can search by fandom, fan creator, fanwork type offered, rating, and more. Browsing week starts 2/17, and when it comes around, bidders will have the opportunity to view all 748 (yes! seven hundred forty eight!) offerings in 298 (!!) fandoms. That’s ... staggering.

Of those 298 fandoms, 182 were ‘Other’ fandoms that were written in on the contributor’s sign up docs. Posted below is the whole list of all 182 fandoms. Topping the list is Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed, with 9 contributors interested in creating fanworks for it. Just below that, with 7 contributors, is Yu Yu Hakusho. Tied for third place, with 6 write-ins each, are Bungou Stray Dogs, Kingdom Hearts, and Shadowhunters.

The rest of the list under the cut.

9 Mo Dao Zu Shi / The Untamed 7 Yu Yu Hakusho 6 Bungou Stray Dogs 6 Kingdom Hearts 6 Shadowhunters 4 Final Fantasy XV 4 Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses 4 Red White and Royal Blue 3 Charmed 3 Gravity Falls 3 Hannibal Extended Universe 3 Lucifer 3 Mindhunter 3 Nirvana in Fire 3 No. 6 - All Media Types 3 Roswell New Mexico 3 Saiyuki (including Gaiden and excluding Ibun) 3 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 The Magicians 3 The Umbrella Academy 3 White Collar 2 9-1-1 2 Avengers Assemble 2 Babylon 5 2 Bandom 2 Castlevania 2 Come From Away 2 Derry Girls 2 Dream Daddy 2 Dreaming of Sunshine by Silver Queen 2 Final Fantasy VII 2 Firefly 2 Game of Thrones 2 How To Train Your Dragon 2 Marilyn Manson (Band) 2 Motionless In White (Band) 2 Newsies 2 One Piece 2 Person of Interest 2 Pet portrait 2 Pokemon 2 Prodigal Son 2 RootBound 2 Sailor Moon 2 Skam 2 Skyjacks 2 Slipknot (Band) 2 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 The Legend of Zelda 2 The Losers 2 The Terror (season 1) 2 The West Wing 2 Tian Guan Ci Fu / Heaven Official's Blessing 2 镇魂 | Guardian (TV) Anne Bishop's The Black Jewels series Assassin's Creed Avengers Academy Back to the Future Battle Creek (TV) Battlestar Galactica (2003) Call My By Your Name RPF Campaign Podcast Captain Harlock: Space Pirate (2013) Carmen Sandiego Compilation of Final Fantasy VII Critical Role - Tal'Dorei Campaign Only Crooked Media RPF CSI: Miami Dangan Ronpa Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (My Chemical Romance) Daria Dark Matter (TV) DCU Diamond no Ace Doom Patrol (TV) Dragon Ball Z Ekaterina (2014 tv series) Euphoria (TV 2019) Fallout Figure Skating Final Fantasy (XV and XIV preferred) Firefly/Serenity French Revolution RPF Greedfall Green Creek Series (Wolfsong etc.) Guardian (Drama or Novel) Hawaii 5-0 Hazbin hotel Hocus Pocus movie & the Sequel Novel It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Jane Austen (completed novels) Jane The Virgin Jupiter Ascending K Project Knytt Stories Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (book and sequels LJ Smith - The Secret Circle books Longmire Loveless Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard Men's Football (Soccer) RPF Mr. Robot Mushishi Musketeers (BBC) MXTX novels My Chemical Romance My Favorite Murder Nancy Drew (PC game adaptation-verse) Narnia New Girl Patricia Briggs' Mercy verse (Mercy Thompson & Alpha and Omega) Peaky Blinders (BBC) Persona 5 Pride & Prejudice Primeval Princeless: Raven: the Pirate Princess Prison Break Promare Psycho Pass Quantum Leap Queen's Thief Queer As Folk Ranger's Apprentice Ready or Not Red Dead Redemption Red vs. Blue Rick & Morty Romeo and Juliet (including any production of RetJ) Rookie Historian: Goo Hae-ryung Rurouni Kenshin Russian Doll Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast) Safehold Series Sanders Sides Sanditon (TV) Seraph of the End SEVENTEEN Sha Po Lang Single feature film of your choice Skins (UK) Skulduggery Pleasant Slayers (anime and light novel series) Smile For Me Smallville Suikoden II Supergirl Supergirl (TV Show) Tales of Series Tamora Pierce Works Tangled the Series Terminator Films (1-2-6 - the Sarah Connor trifecta) Terminator: Dark Fate The A Team The Billabong Series - Mary Grant Bruce The Boys (Amazon tv show) The Breakfast Club The Dark Tower (2017 film) The Disguiser The Dragon Prince The Elder Scrolls The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison The Hardy Boys (books) The Legend of Heroes Trails series The Lost Boys (1987) The Mechanisms The Penumbra Podcast The Queen of Attolia The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System The Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff Vandermeer The World Ends With You Tiger & Bunny Transformers: Prime Twilight Twin Peaks Vorkosigan Saga Welcome to the Night Vale Wellington Paranormal Yona of the Dawn Ys series Yu-Gi-Oh! Zero Escape

[sfaioffical]

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA:

Kota Ezawa: National Anthem, and Mike Henderson’s At the Edge of Paradise Opening Friday, November 8 at Haines Gallery. On view through December 14, 2019.

National Anthem, the artist’s most recent project is a stirring and timely body of work that offers a powerful meditation on protest, patriotism, solidarity, and hope, depicting professional NFL athletes “taking a knee” during the national anthem to protest police brutality and the oppression of people of color.

Mike Henderson: At the Edge of Paradise, Henderson’s thirteenth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery, features a suite of newly created, large-scale abstract paintings whose complex palettes and carefully worked surfaces explore the tension between gestural and geometric abstraction.

The Qualitative Validation Principle - Marc Horowitz (2001) Ever Gold [Projects] presents The Qualitative Validation Principle, Marc Horowitz’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. On view November 9 – December 21, 2019.

BoundarySpan – a group exhibition featuring Michael Arcega (BFA 1999), Jimin Lee (MFA 1997), Paula Levine (MFA 1988), Sherwin Rio (MA 2019), Desiree Rios (MFA 2017) In a time of increasing divisiveness, separation, polarization, and fortified walls, artists can serve critical roles in building indirect associations, nurturing connections, and reminding us of the importance of considering a multitude of perspectives. BoundarySpan is a group exhibition at the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery displaying works by artists Michael Arcega, Jimin Lee, Paula Levine, Sherwin Rio, and Desiree Rios. On view November 12, 2019 - February 21, 2020

Shaw & Co. - Richard Shaw (BFA 1965, Martha Shaw (BFA 1966), Alice Shaw (MFA 1999), Virgil Shaw & Friends Gallery 16’s exhibition “Shaw & Co.” presents a collection of work by members of the Richard and Martha Shaw Family, plus a plethora of SFAI-affiliated artists—faculty and alums—including Richard Shaw, Martha Shaw, Alice Shaw, Rebeca Bollinger, Mike Henderson, Don Ed Hardy, Bob Hudson, Sahar Khoury, Alicia McCarthy, Jim Melchert, Ruby Neri, Cornelia Schulz, Wanxin Zhang, and more!

Völva Saga, Silenced – Monet Clark Join Monet for the opening of Völva Saga, Silenced, a 24 hour projected performance video at AP/SE on November 15. The piece will run 24 hours starting at noon with a request to gather at dusk 4:45, to 6pm

Savor The Moment and Table Testaments - Nancy Willis (MFA 2005) Nancy Willis will feature in two upcoming exhibitions this month. The first is Table Testaments which opens November 16 at Arts Benecia, then Savor The Moment opens November 23 at Chandra Cerrito / Art Advisors in Oakland.

Fresh Focus: Small Works Exhibition of Recent Bay Area MFA Artists - Jordan Taylor Holms (MFA 2019) On December 11, 2019 SFMoMA Artists Gallery opens this exhibition featuring small-size artworks by recent and current MFA artists of the Bay Area, including alumna Jordan Taylor Holms. The show will be on view through February 23, 2020.

NEW YORK

Urbanites and Ur-Beasts – Olive Ayhens (MFA 1969) On view October 30 – December 20, 2019 at Bookstein Projects, Urbanites and Ur-Beasts is Olive Ayhens fourth show with Lori Bookstein and the second at Bookstein Projects.

Umwelt - Christine Davis (BFA 1992), Patricia Olynyk, Meredith Tromble (SFAI faculty) Umwelt exposes the multilayered work of artists who engage with the sciences, while offering visitors a nuanced view of what science both is and can be. Meredith Tromble, Patricia Olynyk, and Christine Davis are artists who approach science as material for art. Through their works in digital media, installation, sculpture, and photography, Tromble, Olynyk, and Davis orient viewers to a playfully provocative and imaginative world of questioning. On view at BioBAT Art Space November 1, 2019 – March 30, 2020

Women in Possession of Good Fortune - Kira Nam Greene (BFA 2002) Women in Possession of Good Fortune, an exhibition by Kira Nam Greene, refers to the opening lines of Jane Austen’s novel, “Pride and Prejudice” and alludes to both the persistence of sexist assumptions and the achievements made by women from different races, ages and sexual orientations. On view at Lyons Wier Gallery November 7th - December 7th, 2019.

Catch and Release - Carolanna Parlato (MFA 1980) Often employing only a few colors and compositional elements, Parlato’s newest paintings are efficient in their drama and demonstrate the sheer power of limits: just this much is just enough. Carolanna Parlata’s solo show, on view at Morgan Lehman November 7 – December 14, 2019.

Liz Atz and Gelah Penn: Splice - Gelah Penn (MFA 1973) Please join us in celebrating alum Gelah Penn during the opening of Splice on November 22 at The Yard: City Hall Park.

Los Angeles, CA

Units by Seth Lower (MFA 2008) On January 9, 2020 Seth Lower will host a book launch and signing for his latest, Units at Book Soup in Los Angeles. “Units contains photographs taken from 1994–2017. The images depict a variety of everyday materials and situations, many seen in sets, parts, or multiples. Within such scenes, Lower seeks out a kind of integrity (or lack thereof): standards of measurement, materiality, vague questions about the boundaries of entities and experience.”

NEW JERSEY AND ONLINE

Show Me Your Neon and Winter Solstice – group exhibitions featuring Holly Wong (MFA 1995) Show Me Your Neon is on view November 18 – December 31, 2019 at Gallery 1202.Holly creates installations, assemblages and works on paper, integrating non-traditional approaches with more traditional sewing techniques associated with the history of women. Her approach is both non-conventional but also deeply rooted in her history and culture. Winter Solstice opens November 16 at MarinMOCA and is on view through December 22, 2019.

Paul Valadez (BFA 1997) Visiones Latinx: Selections from the Permanent Collection and Mucho Caramelo If you are in New Jersey before December 11, 2019 check out Paul Valadez’s group show Visiones Latinx: Selections from the Permanent Collection, and click the link above to view Mucho Caramelo, an online exhibition of Paul’s recent gift to the Latin American Studies program at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

Seattle, WA

Boundaries – Claire Brandt (MFA 2005) Boundaries, opening Nov. 14 and on view through December 9, 2019 at The Factory in Seattle, WA is an exhibition of Claire Brandt’s paintings and a performance of States of Being Traced, her interactive drawing project.

Austin, TX

Allochory – Jamie Spinello (MFA 2007) Jamie Spinello’s 7 foot tall sculpture, "Allochory”, will open on Saturday, November 16 as part of an outdoor sculpture group exhibit, "Convergence". “Convergence” is a collection of public art works that were funded by the City of Austin for 2019 as part of the Art In Public Places, Tempo Program. This is an official registered East Austin Studio Tour Event located at #456 on the tour map.

Top image credit: (left) Jordan Taylor Holms, Holy Grails and Zero Degrees, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches. (right) Jordan Taylor Holms, Look the Part, 2019, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 13 x 11 inches.

[britneyshakespeare]

top 5 sabrina the teenage witch episodes

ooh or top 5 ryan ross-penned songs

ooooh i see. strangle me with my own niche obsessions, will you?

thank you so much nancy.

sabrina eps:

1x11/hilda and zelda: the teenage years honestly my soft spot for season 1 is so real. it’s probably the season i caught the most of on tv as a kid. but hilda and zelda are such good characters and in most cases the more involved they are in the plotline, the better. also the actresses they get to play young hilda and zelda are so seamless for the most part.

1x18/sweet charity THIS episode made me love libby chessler. for some reason i always love mean girl archetype characters that i don’t relate to whatsoever, whether in cheesy 90s sitcoms or jane austen. idk. that’s something i maybe have to talk about with my therapist but when libby steals sabrina’s adopted nana… oh my god sis did that.

2x11/oh what a tangled web she weaves if nothing else but for the fact that hilda admits that the earth used to be flat and it’s only round now because of her own nonsense and that shit’s amazing

4x04/little orphan hilda again more great hilda/zelda backstory but also this episode gets me… weirdly emotional. like holy shit no one expected a campy 90s fantasy sitcom to make me cry but sometimes it do my friends.

5x07/sabrina’s perfect christmas i know a lot of people dislike the later seasons but eh… i just. don’t. well i have some major qualms w season 7 but i think seasons 5 and 6 are pretty good, for what they are. i like a lot of the new characters they introduce, especially morgan cavanaugh, aka the kind of bitch i would love to be if i were born rich and straight. again, another libby-esque mean girl but i think she holds her own, especially in this episode where we actually learn to sympathize with her for her own personality and situation. a poor-little-rich-girl story that lands w me, at least. plus, roxie’s arc in this episode is really good too.

and ryan ross songs……..hooooo  boy.

nearly witches either version of this song really… but i especially love the studio version for its perfect completion of vices & virtues and ryan ross’s contribution to panic. i also love how you can totally tell which lyrics were written by ryan and which were written by brendon, that’s just amazing. they complemented each other quite well though, when they did work together. oh what a time… what a time. whatever. the entire music of this thing is just so magical and haunted and oddly enjoyable.

there’s a reason these tables are numbered WOW is this song just incredible. it all just flows off the tongue, line by line, cruel and sardonic and sassy. and CLEVER. i’m never gonna forget when i was sitting in freshman science watching bill nye when he put together the chemical compound for nitroglycerin and said “and here’s nitroglycerin–the ingredient in dynamite that makes it explosive” and i just kind of sat there in awe thinking about “oh and the smokes in that cigarette box on the table/they just so happen to be laced with nitroglycerin” for the rest of the period.

the piano knows something i don’t know there’s not a song on pretty odd that hasn’t at one point been my favorite song on pretty odd, i’m just gonna get that outta the way, but at least lately this has been the one i come back to more than the others. “if i could build my house/just like the trojan horse/i’d put a statue of myself upon the shelf of course” there’s so much i love about that line. the interior rhyme. the perfect meter. he was so poetic. swan-diving off of the deep-end of my tragic cigarette. she’s steam laughing on the windowpanes. and this one’s also kind of like nearly witches except more… mellow? if that’s the word i wanna use. i don’t know if it is. but it feels similarly enchanted and possessed.

build god, then we’ll talk & mad as rabbits these are tied because i couldn’t not mention both of them. although they are very different emotionally and sonically. but perfect songs nonetheless with wonderful lyrics. the sound of music sample in build god is so sickly inspired and mad as rabbits with its rimbaud references. we stan a weird boy.

heart of mine i wouldn’t consider this the best song from take a vacation by a long shot, actually, but it does feel oddly earnest. like, lyrically, it’s so unimpressive that it’s almost trite, but on this beach rock throwback album (just before throwback pop became the big thing this decade, might i point out) that’s as kitschy as it is sincerely passionate, in almost a dumb way. i just love it so much. and it’s sung so purely you can tell he really poured his heart into this project. it’s such a shame the young veins haven’t done anything since. :\ god i hate that i still love ryan ross. what a sad life.

ask me for top 5s

[annychristine831]

Helstrom: Everything You Need To Know About The Latest Hulu Horror Show

Halloween season is near, and all the streaming platforms are teasing with their incredible spooky content. Recently, Hulu dropped the first trailer of the upcoming supernatural show Helstrom, and you can check the trailer. And the show promises some guaranteed chills and thrills.

Helstrom is an American television show created by Paul Zbyszewski for Hulu. The series is based on Marvel Comics Satana Hellstrom and Satana’s characters, and it tells a story with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Marvel Studios and ABC Signature Studios produce Helstrom. Sydney Lemmon, in the character of Ana Helstrom and Tom Austen, played the role of Daimon. They are the children of a powerful super killer, known for hunting the worst of humanity. Helstrom was announced to release on the Hulu platform in May 2019 and planned as the first series of Adventure into the Fear franchise in Marvel Television.

The shooting of the show started in October 2019 in Vancouver and will end in March 2020. The series moved to Marvel Studios in December 2019. The team of Helstrom planned to release the show with ten episodes on 16 October 2020. So even though fans will miss the Marvel characters like Eternals, Black Widow, The Falcon, and The Winter Soldier this year, now they will get Helstrom.

In the cast of Helstrom, fans can witness the fantastic performance of Tom Austen. He is an English actor named Thomas Michael Carter initially and known for his popular characters like Guy Hopkins on Grantchester and Jasper Frost on The Royals. Austen started his acting career by portraying a rent boy Anto in the episodic series titled, Shameless in 2010. He also played multi-episode characters on Beaver Falls and The Borgias in 2012.

Sydney Lemmon will also be seen playing the role of Ana Helstrom. Lemmon is known for her award-winning performance in the series Succession opposite Jeremy Strong. She was also nominated for the Saturn Award for her role as Isabelle in the fifth season of Fear the Walking Dead.

And in the role of mother, the audience will see Elizabeth Marvel. Marvel is an American actress. She has appeared in many characters, including Nancy Parras on The District, Elizabeth Keane on Homeland, and Heather Dunbar on House of Cards. Marvel had a recurring role in the Netflix miniseries Unbelievable and season 2 of the FX series Fargo.

Actors Robert Wisdom and Ariana Guerra were seen in projects like Raising Dion and Ballers, respectively, as fellow demon hunters. Wisdom is an American actor known for roles as Norman “Lechero” St. John in the show Prison Break and Howard “Bunny” Colvin in The Wire. In the character of the head of the psychiatric hospital, June Carryl is cast. She is known for shows including Mindhunters, Law & Order: LA, Criminal Minds, Parenthood, Without a Trace, and The Bold and the Beautiful. While movies like Back Roads, What Dreams May Come, and Sweet November.

Now the audience might be confused, is it Helstrom or Hellstrom? It is Helstrom. Although the name of the Marvel comics is Hellstrom. The show is based on the Marvel Comics Television show, but you can not tell that from the official synopsis or trailer.

The series’s plot is based on the two siblings, Satana Hellstrom and her brother Daimon Hellstrom. Their names have been changed and shortened by removing the ‘L’ from Hellstrom and ‘Satana’ changed to ‘Ana.’ both Roy Thomas writes the characters along with John Romita co-creating Satana and Gary Friedrich co-creating Daimon. Daimon’s character debuted in Ghost Rider #1 in 1973, and Satana featured a year later in Vampire Tales #2. The Hellstrom is the original “Son of Satan,” had a headline story in Marvel’s Spotlight for a few years. In the 80s, Hellstrom married Hellcat and joined The Defenders. Satana is more or less featured as the antagonist, though her most notable role came as a member of Thunderbolts.

The development of the show started on 1 May 2019. The executive producer of the series, Paul Zbyszewski, said that the show would add “scars” to the Marvel Cinematic formula of “action, humor, and heart.” The show has suffered production delay due to the global pandemic coronavirus in April 2020. The show was no longer titled as Marvel’s Helstrom. Disney has changed the title to Helstrom to distant Marvel from horror-based content.

Marvel and Hulu announced two series in May 2019, one is Helstrom, and another is Ghost Rider. Marvel revealed that the two shows would not crossover with other franchises.

The comic book and the show have some similarities. In both, the content Daimons worked as professors. And his sister Victoria Hellstrom institutionalized after finding her family’s darkest secret. The character of June Carryl, Louise Hastings, was Marvel’s Occult team member the Darkhold Redeemers. Helstrom is planned to release on 16 October 2020 as a part of Hulu’s “Huluween” and consists of 10 episodes.

The above is all about the latest updates about the show Helstrom. To keep updated about more such latest stay tuned.

I’m Anny. I’m a social media manager living in USA. I am a fan of technology, design, and music. I’m also interested in fitness and movies. You can visit our website:

Source: Helstrom: Everything You Need To Know About The Latest Hulu Horror Show

[consideredart]

Quarantine Movie Mixtape Volume 1

Here are 10 movies you can stream right now to make your day a little better. Most of them you’ve probably heard of, a couple you probably haven’t. But they’re all easy to watch, with enough substance to feel like a solid use of a couple hours. Stay inside. Take care of yourself. Enjoy. 

Support The Girls (Hulu)

Regina Hall plays the general manager of a Texas breastaurant in this breezy day-in-the-life comedy. The setting would seem to call for leering raunchy hijinks but instead, we get a grounded and three-dimensional look at female friendship as well as a sharp examination of the modern American wage economy. Feeling a bit like a pilot for a workplace sitcom you’d happily spend 5 seasons with, its laid back pacing and pitch perfect performances make it endlessly re-watchable.

The Straight Story (Disney+) A road trip movie at 5 miles per hour; David Lynch throws a career curve ball with the story of 73-year-old Alvin Straight who hops on a lawnmower and travels from Iowa to Wisconsin to reunite with his estranged ailing brother. Warm and family-friendly, but also deeply melancholic, this true story was shot sequentially along Alvin’s real life route. Filled with the type of oddball characters and complicated Americana one would expect from the creator of Twin Peaks, albeit in a much more narratively traditional package.

Springsteen on Broadway (Netflix) The Boss recounts tales from his life while performing solo in this dazzling mix of memoir and concert film. The stripped down format displays Springsteen’s generation defining storytelling prowess and recontextualizes some of his greatest work. A soothing balm for those of us pining for the return of live music, it’s the kind of film you wanna grab a drink with.  Just make sure to keep some tissues handy.  This one will knock you on your ass more than once.  

Paddington 2 (HBO) Tim King’s exquisite sequel made headlines upon release when it became the highest rated film in Rotten Tomatoes history and it’s a distinction that doesn’t end up feeling hyperbolic. Ben Whishaw turns the title character into one of cinema’s most charming creations and finds a perfect foil in a never-better Hugh Grant. Endlessly inventive, the film effortlessly switches gears between vaudevillian slapstick, Wes Anderson levels of whimsy and dazzling setpieces, and even throwing in a splashy musical number for good measure. It’s “immigrants: we get the job done” message also makes it one of the first great anti-Brexit films. This one’s an absolutely essential viewing, even if you normally bristle at talking animal flicks.

The Love Witch (Amazon) Budding auteur Anna Biler wrote, directed, edited, produced, set decorated, costume designed, and *deep breath* scored this Technicolor mood piece. Gorgeously shot on 35mm film, the dark comedy follows a young witch named Elaine as the love spells she concocts to attract men go awry in increasingly amusing ways. Samantha Robinson gives a wonderful and hyper affected old Hollywood style performance in a story that is packed with thorny intricate themes and feminist imagery.  But after your first viewing, its dazzling production design also makes it a perfect piece of living art to throw on in the background while you work from home.

The Parent Trap (Disney+)

Whatever your memory of this movie is, I assure you it’s better than you remember. The solo directing debut of Nancy Myers, who would go on to be the queen of white wine movies, The Parent Trap displays a level of warmth and craftsmanship that is sorely lacking in future Disney remakes. It’s the rare family film that treats the children and adults with an equal level of respect. It is also highly kinetic, bouncing between summer camp, Napa Valley, and London settings with an infectious energy. The dual starring performances by Lindsay Lohan are truly remarkable, especially when she’s having to play one twin disguised as the other. Be sure to also luxuriate in Myers’ sublime set design.  These are the kinds of interiors that will have your brainstorming your next great redecorating project. 

Happy Death Day (HBO)

Don’t let the title or slasher movie trappings fool you.  This Groundhog Day riff does a better job capturing the vibe of 80′s teen comedies than almost anything else released in the past 10 years. Newcomer Jessica Rothe plays a college student who is murdered on her birthday and must keep reliving the day endlessly until she figures out who’s responsible. It’s all played with laughs with Rothe delivering a manic go-for-broke central performance that’s reminiscent of a young Tom Hanks as she’s put through a series of fantastic sight gags. If this one pleasantly surprises you, be sure you to check out its deeply weird Back to the Future II inspired sequel.

Love & Friendship (Amazon)

Throw any notions you have about stuffy costume dramas out the window for this adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Instead, settle in a smart, stylish, and side-splittingly funny romp with Kate Beckinsale starring as a recent widow turned voracious social climber. Writer-Director Whit Stillman crafts an 18th Century Mean Girls as Beckinsale and co-star Chloe Sevigny wittily and ruthlessly navigate societal norms and clueless men in an effort to stay atop the class heap. A highly quotable future cult classic.

Lady Bird (Amazon)

I won’t even bury the lede here. I think this is the best teen comedy of the 2010’s. Greta Gerwig’s directing debut stars Saorise Ronan as the titular (and self-named) character; a Sacramento high school senior struggling to define herself as she chafes against her lower-middle class upbringing. The attention to detail it pays to the specifics of its 2002 setting is akin to time travel and the intricacies of its central relationship will have you calling your parents, siblings, and high school best friends. But above all else, it’s a comedy for the ages. The razor sharp script unfurls smart honest one-liners at such a rapid clip that you’ll find yourself either immediately re-watching it or frequently pausing to catch up. I recommend both. 

Shirkers (Netflix)

In 1992, 19-year-old Sandi Tan and her friends met a fellow film lover who helped them shoot their own independent film before mysteriously vanishing with all of the footage. When Sandi got a call 20 years later saying that someone was in possession of the film, she decided to make a documentary chronicling the entire ordeal. This is that documentary. It’s also a love letter to cinema and a rousing look at an artist’s quest to reclaim control of her narrative and her work. The documentary as well as the footage shot in 1992 prove that while it took us a while to hear from her, Sandi Tan is a voice that should be with us for a long time to come.

[biggoonie]

Pride & Prejudice #1 by Sonny Liew

PRIDE & PREJUDICE #1 (of 5) Written by NANCY BUTLER Penciled by HUGO PETRUS Cover by SONNY LIEW IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife...

Tailored from the adored Jane Austen classic, Marvel Comics is proud to present PRIDE AND PREJUDICE! Two-time Rita Award-Winner Nancy Butler and fan-favorite Hugo Petras faithfully adapt the whimsical tale of Lizzy Bennet and her loveable-if-eccentric family, as they navigate through tricky British social circles. Will Lizzy's father manage to marry off her five daughters, despite his wife's incessant nagging? And will Lizzy's beautiful sister Jane marry the handsome, wealthy Mr. Bingley, or will his brooding friend Mr. Darcy stand between their happiness? "This project has been like a dream come true for me as a writer and as a former graphic designer-not only am I adapting a book I love, I am doing it in the one forum, comics, where words and pictures carry equal weight." Nancy Butler, two-time RITA winner and multiple RT Reviewer's Choice winner in Regency 32 PGS./Rated T+ ...$3.99

[yegarts]

2019 Travel Grant Recipients (First Round)

Altameda perform at SXSW. During the first round of travel funding in 2019, the Edmonton Arts Council approved support for 45 artists. The recipients sought out unique opportunities, or were invited to showcase their work, around the world. Diverse art projects and training opportunities—in visual arts, dance, music, writing, installation, theatre, poetry, and film—were supported from Tokyo to Kisumu. Get some inspiration for your own projects and opportunities by seeing what our current travel grant recipients are working on—and where they’re going. For more information about EAC’s travel grants, or to apply for funding, click here. Deadlines are February 1, June 1, and October 1 annually.

Erik Grice, Matthew Kraus, Todd Andrews, and Troy Snaterse of the band Altameda travelled to Austen, Texas with manager Jessica Marsh to showcase at SXSW.

Clare Mullen and Ron Pearson are traveling to West Palm Beach in Florida to attend a conference for magicians and entertainers in order to continue to develop their show Minerva-Queen of the Handcuffs.

Alyson Dicey, Caley Suliak, and Ellie Heath of the improv troupe Girl Brain Sketch Comedy travelled to Toronto to perform at TO Sketchfest.

Connor Ellinger, Jesse Northey, and James Cuming of the band Jesse and the Dandelions travelled to Tokyo for a tour of their new album Give Up the Gold.

Harry Gregg, Kyle Mosiuk, and Maddie Storvold travelled to Montreal with manager Daniel Lenz to showcase at Folk Alliance International.

Andrew de Groot, James Murdoch, and Robb Angus of the band The Dungarees travelled to Tamworth, Australia to perform at the Tamworth Country Music Festival.

Fabiola Amorim and Vladimir Machado Rufino of The Vaughan String Quartet travelled to Montreal to be filmed for a project by composer Frank Horvat.

Ava Karvonen and Scot Morison travelled to Ashland, Oregon to present their documentary feature film Finding Bobbi at the Ashland International Film Festival.

Ainsley Hillyard travelled to Winnipeg to perform a solo dance work, Laisse Fair, at Art Holm.

Musician Ann Vriend travelled to Germany to tour and promote her new album.

Textile and fibre artist Brenda Philip travelled to Blonduos, Iceland to attend a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre.

Darrin Hagen travelled to Key West, Florida to see performances of and participate in a talk-back for the American premiere of their play With Bells On.

Beth Dart travelled to San Francisco to attend the Immersive Design Summit to inform the development of a new transdisciplinary, immersive musical.

Erin Yamabe travelled to Prague to assist in the recording of the works of Allan Gilliland with the FILMharmonic Orchestra at Smecky Studios.

Gail Sidonie is traveling to Halifax to host and present at the Writers’ Union of Canada OnWords Conference.

Isabella Pisapia travelled to Germany, Austria, and Hungary to participate in invitational auditions for world-renowned ballet companies.

Janet Selman is traveling to Kisumu, Kenya to direct two plays with Ignite Afrika Trust.

Janine Waddell is traveling to Sydney, Nova Scotia to teach stage combat and intimacy choreography at Broadmore Theatre’s iPlay Festival.

Writer Jason Lee Norman is traveling to Denver, Colorado to attend a flash fiction workshop led by writers Kathy Fish and Nancy Stohlman.

Joanne Madeley travelled to Tokyo to attend an artist residency in Japanese woodblock printmaking (mokuhanga) at the Women’s Studio Workshop.

Musician Joe Nolan travelled to Europe for a four-week tour of his new album Cry Baby.

Johanna Wray travelled to New York City to attend publicity events in recognition of her work being included in Art Tour International magazine.

Textile and fibre artist Kelly Ruth travelled to Blonduos, Iceland to attend a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre.

Visual artist Kyle Beal travelled to Montreal to exhibit artwork at Papier art fair.

Luciana Gomez travelled to Havana to study Afro-Cuban dance at the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional de Cuba.

Maria Palakkamanil travelled to Montreal to study Kathak with Indian Classical dancer Sudeshna Maulik.

Maryam Zarei travelled to Berlin to attend the world premiere of her short film Magralen at Berlinale.

Theatre designer Megan Koshka is traveling to Prague to attend the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

Sharmila Mathur travelled to Jaipur to train in Bansuri (Indian flute) from Kamesh Talwar.

[culturatora]

💐 “A” is for Austen, Assembies and, of course, Arrogance. 💁🏼‍♀️ Goals for 2019: I have lots and lots on my idea list, but I had to narrow it down to a few projects to start. Many of you may know I have been thinking about doing a Pride and Prejudice project for quite a while – and here it is! 🎉 I will be doing each letter in an 18th-century font, adding a watercolor illustration, and lettering associated words. At the end of it all, I’m going to compile them into one big print with a banner heading, The ABCs of Pride and Prejudice”, which I will offer as a poster, print, cards, fabric. I was thankful to get “A” and “B” done, and “C” sketched today in spare minutes at my popup @cottagegrovevintage today. 🖼 Stay tuned! 🖼 🎨 🖋 With kindest regards, Nancy https://www.instagram.com/p/BtXFmYnFJzO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1tjrhwlb189xn