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deoffal-mp-adm7000-n-s1-2022 · 2 years

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Why I read and take fiction seriously as works of philosophy, akin to the works of Eugene Thacker.

Source for this original inspiration of this post: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fiction/

Within the here cited article as published by Stanford University as part of their Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a reliable and often once used source of mine, back before I became an advocate for luddites within academia, this article in particular discusses the origins of fiction as a now mainstream recognised faculty of philosophical discourse, yet it always has been allegorically so by most academics, whether that would be to disavow a work as degenerate and influencing it’s audience to agree with it’s more misanthropic and crude ideas like in the case of the Marquis De Sade and his 120 days of Sodom, to the plays of antiquity and their authors as debated by such greats as Plato and Aristotle. In short, it is natural for us to seek meaning where there isn’t always a clear answer, something philosophy has thrived on since the first philosophers and thinkers at their most metaphysical level of probing the unknown and questionable, so it’s no surprise that someone as influential in my own research (Eugene Thacker) would be promoted this very discourse, after all, it’s an old concept to study creative outcomes as conversations on the less than certain and specific, as if they have a potential to discuss things that words will always struggle to do so on their own, as if they need to promote some kind of visual stimulus or association to engage our visceral imagination and produce succulent imagery from the thought and consideration needed to challenge our own comprehensions beyond a fixed assumption or definition, something creatives have been pushing speculatively since they could action their imagination into a medium or performance etc.

This can be seen in the contemporary contents of Eugene Thacker’s work as he is in no way ashamed of coupling immense orientationally and ontological discussions with horror films, writers and artists, often citing Dante, Lautreamont( Isidore Ducasse) Junji Ito, H.R. Giger, Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, to discuss subjects that no real world example could fit probably. It being the job of those most creative to discuss and imagine the as of yet unimaginable, a close friend of the philosopher being firstly the dreamer and by consequence the artist and speculative writer. Scientists and academics are their offspring yes, as writer like Descartes and all the Sophoclean elites would argue to you, but it’s the creatives who further the discourse beyond the established and convinced, they have to be able to consider what the scientist and standard academic can only dream of due to a lack of creative ability/ potential, and so it is they who feed the philosopher in a mutual binge of the unpredictable and anti-immediate, after all you, it isn’t about answers for philosophers like it is in science and academia, but about the adventure into the as of yet imagined. Try to think of a world that wasn’t first imagined or written by a creative, even religious manuscripts and speculative biology and astrology had to be written by those first concerned by the curiosity that comes from being interested in mythology and questioning the odd and unanswered as evidenced by the thousands of verbal histories and generation fairy tales throughout the world, it takes a nature to stir the pot and every one else to define the flavour and taste of a specific subject, but it’ll always be the oddest of folk who best test the limits of the conventional and odd of itself, that’s what my work intends of doing and so does Thacker's, and you can’t do that without reading and sampling the works of those who dared to reimagine the established and assumed, the previous authors and artists being the best example of this, though horror fiction is still struggling to be taken seriously in this regard. The only reason why I often say that it isn’t take seriously is simply because I know the reaction I get when even discussing my religion with people, let alone my ideas. People are led first by their assumptions, secondly by gossip, thirdly by their background and ethics, and lastly their education. It would be easy for me to act like the original surrealists and indulge in absurdity and give the audience a circus show, but I’m far too educated and well read to see horror treated as a lesser discourse just because it deals in immensely taboo subjects, and often takes the left hand path and post modernist direction, it may be a generational thing where later writers and artists like myself will have the potential to stand out as academic long after we’re dead, after all, Nihilism wasn’t taken seriously in the time of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Zapffe, and yet now it’s all people can talk about, that and social decline, accelerationism and mutual assured destruction and pessimism, the very foundations of Nietzsche’s message to the west back in the late 1800s. I could talk all day about how Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism were not overnight successes and the persecution of each didn’t recede entirely to this day, yet at their beginnings they were all still fighting for the same fancy of wanting to be considered by the greater public as worth listening to, and now they are considered the major world religions, philosophers get assassinated and sell out in every store long after their persecution, it’s not a new fad at all. Those who are misunderstood have no reason to conform to everyone else’s logic, they’re already not included in the conversation so why try to fit into it? This is the logic that my work looks to protest as a living and proactive academic within the contemporary art scene, I’ve had all the assumptions against myself and my work so now I can get on with it and hope to prove people wrong all the more, that’s atleast an ambition of mine as an alternative artist and speak in the contemporary scene.

The examples I can offer on Eugene Thacker basing his work in fiction writer can be found best emblemised by the contents page of his ‘Horror of Philosophy’ Books:

(Examples taken from -Thacker, Eugene (2015) Tentacles Longer Than Night, Horror of Philosophy Vol. 3. UK: Zero Books. Images were edited to up their contrast and to make the letters more visible etc)

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fun-with-colors · 3 years

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Persona 5 Royal and “Poe’s Masquerade”

I recently (read: a few minutes ago) saw a post about how Beneath the Mask is a brilliant and tragic character study of Joker, and I felt compelled to talk about some of the awesome references in Persona 5 Royal (not sure if they’re all in the vanilla game, never played it.)

So, in Beneath the Mask, there’s the line “I’m a shapeshifter, at Poe’s Masquerade,” right? Which is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death. Seems like a pretty cut-and-dry thing, it ties into the theme of there not being anything beneath the mask, as was the case in Poe’s Masque. Well, I am here to tell you that that particular reference is anything but simple. It’s brilliant.

Fair warning: this is gonna be a long post.

First off, some context on The Masque of the Red Death. It’s a short story where, basically, there’s this plague going on. It’s called the Red Death, it makes you sweat blood and die in less than an hour. Terribly contagious, the Red Death. So this rich guy gathers up all of his friends and allies to hole up in his abbey, and locks the gates behind them. A few months in, they decide to throw a rocking masquerade party.

The party is structured as such:

There are 7 rooms in order, each color-coded. Blue, then purple, then green, then orange, and then violet. The last room is black, and lit up by red lights. There’s a big imposing clock in the last room, and whenever it chimes the hour everyone stops partying until the clock is done, and then resumes.

Everything’s going great while people are dying outside until midnight, when this new guy shows up in a gaudy red costume that looks like a corpse killed by the red death. The host chases this guy down with a dagger. They go through all the rooms, and once they reach the last room the host finally looks the mysterious stranger in the face, and instantly dies. The guests panic and remove the mask to see who it was, only to find that there was nothing there. The guests then all also die to the Red Death.

Grim, right? Well, it also has a lot of striking similarities to Shido’s palace.

The basic premise of some rich asshole trying to save only his friends from the plague on the land, only this time the plague is one that he himself has orchestrated: the mental shutdowns. Those on his ship are safe from being permanently cancelled, while those who aren’t (like the Shujin principal) are not.

The letters of introduction parallel the 7 rooms, since all of that preparation is in the eventual goal of unlocking the final room.

The guests on the ship are all wearing masks that look a heck of a lot like masquerade masks.

The intruder, ie: the thieves.

as a last-ditch effort to kill the thieves, Shido takes a pill that will temporarily kill him, mirroring the moment when the host dies in The Masque of the Red Death.

But wait! We’re not done!

That is just the first layer of references

This is why I said that it was gonna get super long. Strap in folks, because those references aren’t even an original choice that the game made. They’re INHERITED references. Also I have a lot to say, and am bad at being succinct. Well, they say that if you can’t be concise, you can at least be interesting, and I hope that I’ve managed that.

Some more context:

Akechi is based off of the famous Japanese detective Akechi Kogoro. The author of the Akechi Kogoro stories is a man by the pen name of Edogawa Ranpo. If that name sounds familiar, it should. It is, as wikipedia puts it, “A rendering of [Edgar Allan] Poe’s name.”

There is one Akechi Kogoro story, called Gold Mask (Or The Gold Mask, or The Golden Mask), that is especially relevant here. In it, Akechi goes up against the mysterious Gold Mask, who turns out to be none other than Arsene Lupin.

It should not be surprising how many similarities there are, but I am somehow surprised nonetheless.

These are some insane connections, y’all. I’m basically just gonna retell the events of the story because it’s mostly relevant anyways. It’s not even all about the red death thing. Also I just really like this section of the story. This is gonna get rambly, but bear with me here.

Ok so first plot twist: this book also references The Masque of the Red Death. Big time. Like, there is a chapter titled “The Masque of the Red Death.”

The setting: a masquerade ball put on by the French Ambassador (The Count de Rouzieres). The ball takes place in seven chambers, in the same color order as in the original story. This time, however, they are set up so that one can only see one room at a time. Do note that the final room is described as making things look as though they are “somehow not of this world.”

The inevitable twist

Guess who shows up unannounced at the moment the clock strikes midnight? Ding ding ding! That’s right, it’s the Gold Mask.

(The next chapter is called “The Gold Death”)

The investigator who had been Akechi’s sidekick (more on that later) chases after the Gold Mask, along with the Count and one other dude.

I’m just gonna quote the book’s description of the third man.

“It was impossible to identify the man on account of his eccentric costume. [...] He wore a form-fitting black shirt and trousers, black shoes, black socks, a black cloth on his head, the ends of which rose sharply into two long horns, and, of course a face mask.”

...Yeah. I was way more surprised to find out that that design is straight out of the source material than to find out who that mysterious third man was. (more on why akechi was disguised in a bit)

The Count is the first into the final room with the Gold Mask. No sooner does he enter than the other two men hear a gunshot. They run in, fearing the worst.

Turns out it’s the Gold Mask who’s been shot by the Count. They pull off the mask and discover... the Count’s interpreter. One of the investigators declares that the interpreter must be the gold mask, and this all can be called off. The guy’s dying, everything’s fine.

Suddenly, the man with the black mask starts laughing. They demand he removes his mask, he does so and reveals himself as Akechi Kogoro. Akechi insists that this man cannot be the Gold Mask, because Arsene Lupin is the gold mask.

Everyone else thinks he’s ridiculous, until he gets the dying interpreter to confess that yes, he was working for Arsene Lupin.

Now. The part that makes this all really funny is that as the interpreter is dying, he points out to Akechi who Arsene Lupin is (since Lupin has so many disguises as to not fundamentally have a true identity). The interpreter points to (dun dun duhDUH) The Count of Rouzieres, the French Ambassador to Japan.

Obviously the police commissioner is finding that hard to believe, but when Akechi produces an envelope that he claims is evidence, he orders that the rest of the investigators and guests leave the room, so that it’s only him, the POV character, Akechi, and the Count.

The letter is apparently from another well-known detective familiar with Arsene Lupin, full of evidence that proves that the Count of Rouzieres is actually Arsene Lupin. Incriminating stuff, blah blah blah.

Arsene admits to being, well, arsene, and then proceeds to have a superficially amicable conversation with Akechi. He then pulls his gun out of nowhere and threatens to shoot akechi. Suddenly, the detective who supplied Akechi with the note (his name is Weber) jumps out of the clock mechanism behind Arsene and confiscates his gun. Arsene Lupin is about to be arrested, with no way out. One of the investigators pulls out his own gun on Arsene, and both Akechi and the police commissioner are very experienced in making arrests. Even beyond that, there’s an entire crowd of investigators waiting outside the only door.

We cut to the aforementioned crowd of investigators, who have just noticed that the voices from inside the room have gotten very quiet. After knocking and hearing only silence, they decide to open the door.

The room is empty.

We cut back to Arsene, who is acting very confident despite his precarious circumstances. He says that he has the power to create such a catastrophe as to make it impossible for them to arrest him, before calmly walking out of the only door in the room.

The detectives call for the police officers outside to arrest Arsene, but... there doesn’t seem to be anyone there to do it. He locks the door to the room from the outside, and flees out of an open glass window and down a fire escape to his waiting allies. (very similar to the way Joker attempts to escape from the Casino, and VERY similar to how he ultimately escapes from the interrogation room.)

It turns out that the “black-velvet room” was actually a cleverly disguised elevator, with the mechanism in the clock. Arsene used the elevator to separate the detectives from the rest of the investigators, and to make his escape for real. It is SHOCKING to me that of all the things in persona 5, the interrogation room escape is ENTIRELY true to the source material. It’s wild.

Anyways, I’ll stop there. I’ll probably make another post with all of the miscellaneous connections between the Gold Mask and Persona 5, since there are a lot. I’ve had this topic sitting in my brain for a while.

Edit: I forgot to get to why Akechi was disguised. Well, it turns out that’s another connection: Akechi had been presumed dead. Everybody thought he had been shot. Turns out it was just a fake version of himself, a trick taken from Sherlock Holmes. (and one that shows up in Persona 5 Royal). He was taking advantage of the fact that everyone thought he was dead to get more info without being suspected.

#persona 5 #persona 5 royal #persona 5 spoilers #persona 5 royal spoilers #original oat #fun with rambles #arsene lupin #akechi kogoro #goro akechi #akechi goro #akira kurusu #ren amamiya

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what-if-i-imagine · 5 years

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Chapter 5

“From the same source I have not taken…”

-Alone, by Edgar Allan Poe

Flash was sandwiched between Betty and I, being cuddled to death on the school lawn after Decath. got out. We had gotten into a pretty deep conversation, and Flash had started talking about the way he felt when it came to the team.

“I used to find it to be a safe place,” he explains. “The team was opening, and kind. Then I started making jokes, and I know my humor doesn't appeal to everyone, but they started to give me weird looks and avoid me. Ever since freshman year, I’ve always been so jealous of Parker because he had everything. I picked on him because he was perfect, and it never phased him. The one time I had the spot light, he pushed me out of it again when he didn't even deserve to have it back. They all love him and hate me, I get that, but if they would just give me five minutes, I would never ask for anything ever again. Five minutes to prove I’m not who they think.”

“Flash, you deserve a lot more than five minutes” I said, hugging his head to my chest as Betty ran a hand through his hair. “If they won’t let you in, then Betty and I will.”

I heard Flash sniffle a bit, but he didn't say anything. Betty kissed his cheek, “They have no clue what they are missing out on. You are smart, and protective, and kind. Harley and I will always be here, we promise.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

A sudden honk startled us all into sitting positions. A sleek silver cat had pulled up on the curb, that I recognized immediately. The window rolled down and we were greeted by Rhodey’s smiling face, “Hey kids. Happy couldn't make it, so I will be your river today.”

“Is that really”

“It is,” Flash grinned, answering Betty. Her mouth hung open, making Rhodey and I burst out in laughter.

“Darlin’, you’re gonna catch flies,” I said, getting up off the grass.

Flash helped out still shocked friend into the car and I climbed into the back with them. After we all buckled up, Rhodey pulled out of the school and made his way through the city.

“So kids, we have an hour before dinner at Stark Tower and I’m not in the mood to go back to the compound,” Rhodey looked at us through the rear view mirror when we were at a red light. “Who wants to go to the Himalayas and meet a real wizard?”

“The Himalayas?” Flash asked. “Sir, er, lieutenant, we can't get to the Himalayas and back to New York in an hour.”

“And I don't have a passport,” Betty added.

I just smirked, sharing a look with Rhodey in the mirror, as he took off to the New York Sanctum.

Rhodey made a parallel park in front of the five story tall building on the corner of Bleecker Street. Getting out of the car, I looked up to the fifth floor where a circular window sat in the center of the wall, overlooking the New York streets. The window was empty.

We lead my friends inside and up the stairs to the fourth floor where three sets of glass double doors displayed the rain forest, the California beach, and a desert. I looked up at Rhodey for permission before running to the middle door, the one displaying the stony beach. I turned the dial until we could see the streets of Kathmandu.

I opened the glass doors holding out my hand to my friends to help them through.

“How does it feel to be wrong?” I asked once we were standing fully in an alleyway, the cold nipping at our skin. My friends both had wide eyes, and were almost frozen from shock.

Rhodey walked up to a green door on the plain wall and knocked a quick code the sorccerrers had taught us. In the blink of an eye, we were inside the open space of Kamar Taj’s entry room.

If my friends said anything, I didn't hear it, because as soon as we walked into the corridor a certain red cloak wrapped around my ankle and hung me upside down from the ceiling. My friends and guardian all burst out into laughter as I struggled with the cloak, yelling for it to put me down while trying to keep my shirt down.

Uncle Stephen wouldn't have noticed the three standing in the corridor had it not been for my yelling for help. He had his nose stuffed in a book, Wong walking beside him and speaking quickly,but when he heard me, he looked up and grinned.

“Is the cloak being mean to you?” he asked, paying no mind to the two laughing teens who were practically rolling on the floor.

“Tell this glorified rug to put me down,” I begged.

“I don't know, what did Rhodey say?” Stephen turned to my guardian.

“I say keep the punk upside down,” Rhodey said, smirking up at me.

“You are the worst uncle and parent ever,” I whined. I tried to pull my leg out of the cloak’s grasp but was unsuccessful. “Betty, Flash, stop laughing and help me!”

“Nope,” Betty finally said through fits of giggles.

“Never,” Flash agreed.

After another minute I gave up and let myself hang there, arms crossed over my chest. Stephen waved his hand and I was gently lowered until Levi could lie down on the floor. I stood, fixing my shirt and hair in a huff. Betty walked over and helped me, poking at my flushed cheeks until I smiled.

“Is this your first time in the Himalayas?” Uncle Stephen asked Betty and Flash as he gave them a tour of Kamar Taj.

“This is my first time outside of the country in general,” Betty said, looking around us in aw.

“Are you really the boss here?” Flash asked.

“Well, I wouldn't call myself the boss,” the doc shrugged. “They call me the Sorcerer Supreme, and in a normal workplace I would be the boss, but this is no normal workplace.”

As we passed a set of pillars looking out into the outdoor courtyard, we all peaked out to the class. They were learning about pushing their astral forms out of their bodies then back in.

“What do you people even do?” Flash asked.

“We protect your reality from outside threats that the Avengers can’t,” Stephen explained,continuing the tour. “We fight beings from other dimensions and universes. The multiverse is a very dangerous place, and the sorcerers are earth’s first line of defense.”

“So you can do real magic?”

“Correct. We call it The Mystic Arts, though. Magic is really just science that humans don't understand. We bend matter, space and time, drawing energy from other dimensions and from our own untapped power.”

Rhodey and I were proudly ginning as my friends asked questions in amazement. We followed a step behind them to give them space, but still close enough to hear everything.

Rhodey nudged me, still looking straight ahead, “I told you this might be good.”

“What can I say, mother is always right,” I teased, making him laugh.

“So I’m mother now?”

“Ya always have been.”

We both started laughing while Stephen was in the middle of explaining the time stone, earning a glare from my uncle..

“Speaking of which,” Rhodey whispered now out of courtesy to the doc. “There is something we need to talk about when your friends go home. Tony, Pep and I had a long conversation after our mission a few days ago, and we feel it’s only right to get your opinion on the matter.”

Rhodey looked down at his watch and cleared his throat, “Well kids, that’s all the time we have for today. Maybe the good doctor will invite you to come back another time.”

“Of course,” Stephen nodded.

Both of my friends made a disappointing sounds, but followed Rhodey and I back to the entrance hall. Stephen offered to portal us right back to the tower, but Rhodey wanted to get his car, so we said our goodbyes and were off through the portal door.

During the drive back to the tower Flash, Betty and I nerded out over Uncle Stephen’s magic. It was fun to hear their personal opinions of the logic of it all, Flash being a firm believer in science, and Betty always open to the idea of real magic.

After seeing Kamar Taj nothing really seems impressive anymore, but they were still amazed by Stark Tower. They seemed especially interested in the renewable energy source that made the tower so different from everywhere else, as well as the elevator that ran on magnetism. The first floor was furnished like a modern home with those weird chairs that have no back, and clean, shiny surfaces. The first ten floors were reserved for tech only, the penthouse was where Tony and Pepper lived, then two floors below them was what we called the family floor, where Rhodey and I lived. The family floor had a bright fire place in a corridor living room that had one door beside the couch that leads to the kitchen, and a half way that lead to the bedrooms and bathrooms.

Below the family floor was the business floor where we had a large dining room with a long table you sit at during board meetings. I never liked the business floor, it was too clean and modern like the first floor of the tower, so we usually just ate on the family floor. Tonight though, when we got to the family floor, there was a note in the kitchen saying we were on the business floor tonight since we cant fit everyone at the five setter table.

Rhodey and I didn't think much of it, we figured that they just didn't want to cram six people around our table. On the way down to the business floor I explained to my friends that my guardians were going to try and test them since they are very protective over me. They both just laughed, probably not understanding how deadly serious I was.

We walked into the dinning room laughing and joking, pushing each other around and making really bad jokes. All of us froze when we realized there were three other people besides Pepper and Tony sitting at the long white table.

I wasn't all that surprised to see Happy, though he rarely ate with us, but it was a little shocking to see his girlfriend sitting by his side. They had been dating for a month or two, but she had never actually come over to the tower. She had long, straight brown hair and circular glasses, and even I couldn't deny the fact that the woman was extremely beautiful. She was really good for Happy, and I loved the days that she hung out with him and I at the compound. It was that a boy was sitting beside her,looking more comfortable in my own home than I felt.

“Harley, you shouldn't be all that shocked, May and I have been talking about her having dinner with us for weeks,” Happy said with a laugh when he saw my expression.

“Yeah, uh, hey May,” I said, unable to remove my eyes from the boy.

“Didn't I tell you that her nephew was Peter?” Happy asked.

Slowly I shook my head.

When I looked at May and Peter Parker sitting next to each other, the dots definitely connected. They boy had those big brown eyes and toned olive skin that reminded me of the locals in Italy that I had met on vacation once. Their voices as well as sense of style were even similar, to the point that I would have been convinced that May was his mom.

From the corner of my eye I saw Flash shrink and Betty instinctively stepped a foot in front of him. I felt hostile towards the boy, and in a hot flash of anger almost turned and left the room. I wished I could tell him off for the way he and the rest of the team made Flash feel, but held myself back due to the fact that his aunt was a pretty awesome person. I shocked myself when I realized later that it wasn't only Flash that made me mad at Peter Parker, I was suddenly understanding what Flash was talking about. I was jealous that he had as amazing on an aunt as May, jealous of how Tony was talking to him before we walked in, as though Peter were his child and not me, jealous of the way all of my family seemed to love him.

“Peter told me he met you on Monday,” May smiled like it was a good first meeting. “He was asking a lot about you that night.”

“Aunt May!” Peter looked at her in embarrassment.

“Harley was asking about Peter too,” Happy said, earning himself a glare from me.

Rhodey must have been the only one who sensed the waves of annoyance I was practically radiating. He guided us to our seats that were on the other end of the table, as far from Peter as he could get us. I could see something in Betty’s expression change when she was seated in front of May. It eerily reminded me of Pepper.

“Hello Ms. Parker, I’m Betty Brant,” she said, holding out her hand with a business like smile. “Midtown High’s news anchor. I believe we met at one of the Decath. matches last year.”

“I believe we did,” May smiled and shook her hand. If she sensed Betty’s tension, she didn't let it show. “It is very nice to meet you again Betty. I didn't realize you were Harley’s friend.”

“We just became friends today actually,” Betty said.

“Tony, Pep, Happy, these are my friends Flash and Betty,” I introduced them, letting myself relax a bit.

“So you’re the one he won't stop talking about,” Pepper said jokingly to Flash.

“I am afraid so Ms. Potts,” Flash laughed a little.

“I like him,” Pepper whispered to me. “Does the girl remind you of anyone?”

I couldn't help my laugh. After that point, everybody melted into easy conversations or ate their food. Betty talked with Peter a little, but he was mostly engaged with Tony. I pushed down my growing dislike for the guy and ignored him until he decided to try to talk to me.

“So how are you liking the school Harley?” he asked.

I froze up. Everyone was suddenly looking at me.

“It’s a good school,” I said. I slapped on that fake smile, causing Happy to cringe in recognition of it and Pepper to raise an eyebrow at it.s use. “The teachers are very helpful so far, and most of the students are nice.

“Did you enjoy your first Decath. Meeting?”

“For the most part. I spent most of it watching how things are done, and talking to these two. Definitely a better way to spend my time instead of wasting away at the compound.” I said.

Tony snorted, looking to Peter, “This boy spends more time at the compound than anyone else, I swear. He hates being alone in the tower, and doesn't like tag along with Stephen all day unless he’s in the library. Pep was the only one who could ever seem to get him out of there by bribing him with talking down a cocky businessman.”

Everyone laughed easily,but I had to force it through slightly gritted teeth. I didn't like this one bit. Tony had always teased, but only with family, it felt different when I barely knew the guy he was telling my stories to. Flash saw the way my smile was trying to slip, and took my hand under the table for comfort. A wave of calmness passed over me, allowing the smile to return to its full strength and for the conversation to move on.

After dinner, my friends and I made our way to the elevator where we loaded in and pressed the button for the family floor. Before the door could close through, Tony stopped it and stepped in with Peter.

Betty, Flash and I started talking about what movies we were up for watching tonight, and what snacks were required for it. Tony and Peter were talking in hushed tones, so quiet I could barely hear them, but a certain hero’s name caught my ear and I started half listening in to what they were saying.

“So you have a new design for Spider-Man’s web shooters-”

“There’s a new security threat somewhere in Brooklyn-”

“How late is May letting you stay out-”

Betty and Flash when quiet when they saw me looking at my guardian and Parker from the corner of my eye.

“So Mr. Stark, what do you have planned for tonight?” Betty asked. I could practically feel her suppressing her interviewer voice she used early that day on a boy on the Decath. Team.

“Peter and I have some work to do in the lab,” he said, giving her a pleasant smile. “You kids are studying for a test this week, right?”

“That was the original plan, but Betty and I have all of the stuff down already, and Harls is a genius,” Flash said, nudging me playfully.

I rolled my eyes, “We decided to have a movie night instead. Maybe a sleepover if you’re cool with it.”

“Har, you know me, of course I’m ‘cool’ with it,” Tony said. Then, he looked at Peter and the light bulb went off in his head. “Maybe Peter should join you.”

“Mr. Stark, I’m busy tonight in the lab with you,” Peter said.

“If they want you to join them, then I’ll let you off the hook for tonight.”

A beat passed and Flash was the first to speak, “That would be cool. I mean, we’re just marathoning Battlestar Galactica and eating junk if that’s what you're into.”

“I’ve never actually seen Battlestar all the way through,” Peter admitted.

“Then join us,” I said, now assured that Flash was okay with this happening.

“Sounds good then,” he smiled.

We stepped out of the elevator at the family floor, leaving Tony alone. Peter said thank you and goodnight before the elevator closed, then shot May a text to let her know where he was. Flash and Betty made class to their respective parents to make sure it was okay that they spent the night while Peter and I went to the kitchen to get popcorn and other snacks ready.

“Can you make the popcorn?” I asked him, walking over to the fridge. “It’s on the third shelf in the pantry with all of the sessioning. You can pick whatever toppings if you want it.”

Parker nodded and started it up, leaning against the counter, “What are you making?”

“Sugar strawberries and peaches n’ cream,” I said, pulling the fruits out of the fridge.

I looked up to see Peter raising an eyebrow at me, so I sighed and explained, “Strawberries covered in sugar, so just what the name sounds. Peaches n’ cream are peaches, or other assorted fruits in heavy whipping cream with sugar and whipped cream on top.”

“You southerners really like your sugar,” Peter commented, pulling the bag of popcorn out of the microwave to put another in.

“Only with our oxygen,” I snarked, popping a blueberry in my mouth after dipping it in sugar. I cut off the tops of the strawberries then rinsed them off and got to work on dipping them in sugar.

Peter snorted, dumping the contents of the popcorn bag into a large bowl.

We worked silently after that until he had made three bowls of popcorn with different seasoning on each. I wasn't quite done yet, so he hopped up on the counter and watched me work.

Carefully I sat the four bowls of peaches and blueberries drown in cream and sugar onto their own plates,leaving plenty of room to decoratively set up the strawberries. In the blank space left on each plate, I carefully placed slices of bananas leaning on each other. When the full arrangement of the plates was done, I topped off the peaches n’ cream with whipped cream,then spraying a dollop on each strawberry and banana. I shook the can at the end, sure that there was only a little left, and squirted it in my mouth.

I saw Peter make a weird face from the corner of my eye and I turned to him.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” he held up his hands. “It’s just… that’s kinda gross.”

“Of course you would think so,” I said, tossing the empty cans in the trash.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothin’ offensive bud, just that you’re a New Yorker, born and breed, so I understand if you have no clue what it means to take that chip off your shoulder and live,” I shrugged. I started putting the remaining fruits away in the fridge, along with the leftover cream.

“Just because I think it’s gross to have whipped cream straight from the can doesn't mean I have a chip on my shoulder,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I asked, pulling another, almost empty can of whipped cream from the back of the fridge. “Have you ever actually tried it?”

“No,” he said,watching me carefully.

I tossed the can at him without warning and leaned against the counter as he caught it. “Try it,” I said, gesturing to the can.

“I’ll pass,” Peter said.

“And there goes that chip on your shoulder, perkin’ right up.”

“I won't be peer pressured into having whipped cream from the can.”

“You sure ‘bout that?”

We had a staring contest, never breaking eye contact. Finally his resolve crumbled and I grinned as he popped the cap off.

“How do you even do this?” he asked.

“Shake the can, of course, then tip it upside down over your mouth with your head tilted back,” I instructed. “Try not to inhale or put the can in your mouth.”

Peter did as I said, swallowing down the whipped cream then making another odd face as he tossed the can back to me.

“You know, that was actually good for some reason,” he said.

“Fresh out of the can, it’s better than when it sits in the air,” I shrugged, putting it away.

‘ I listened for a second for Flash or Betty. It sounded like Betty was putting the disk for the first session, and Flash was still on the phone with his mom or dad.

“So I need to give you a quick shovel talk because I don't have that long before one of them wanders in here,” I said, causing him to gain a confused expression. “Flash messed up in teasing you okay, but he’s trying to fix it. If you even fucking think about ignoring his attempts at a new start or push him out of the light ever again, I will personally make you see stars. I know you guys are seventeen, and I only know of when it happened when you were fifteen, but I’m smart enough to figure out that stuff like that has happened multiple times.”

“I understand,” Peter said, putting his hands up again. “Though, you talk like you aren't our age.”

“I’m fifteen,” I said bluntly. “Was pushed up two year in schooling as a kid back in Tennessee.”

He blinked in shock for a moment, but before he could say anything in response, Flash popped his head in the room.

“Guys, we’re ready if you have everything finished,” he said, looking between us.

“Yeah, I grabbed the four plates waitress style, the way my mom taught me, and walked into the living room. Betty had the main menu pulled up.

“Do you mind putting on subtitles?” Flash asked, taking his plate of sugary fruit as he sat on the couch beside her. Peter sat on Betty’s other side, while I sat on the floor between Flash’s legs.

“Sure,” Betty said through the strawberry in her mouth, starting up the show after everyone was settled in.

We only got through six of the hour long episodes before I could hear Betty’s gentle snores. I glanced up and saw she had her head on Flash’s shoulder, cuddling his arm like a teddy bear. Peter drape a blanket gently around her shoulders, making eye contact with Flash for a moment. I looked back to the screen, only making it a few more minutes before I started to drift off to the sound of Six and Baltar talking about the existence of God.

I was trapped in that state where I awake but asleep, blinking in and out of reality, unsure of what reality even was. At some point a soft blanket was tucked around me, and a pillow was propped between Flash’s knees for me to rest my head on.

The words and sounds coming from the TV blended with what I barely recognized as Peter and my friend’s voices. They Spoke quietly, but in a way that assumed Betty and I were out cold. I only caught a few words here and there between waves of unconsciousness.

“Peter,” I heard Flash say at one point.

Peter stopped him, “I understand, you don't have to explain it if you don't want to.”

“I want to. You deserve and explanation-”

Darkness and quiet.

“Why do you care about him this deeply? You’ve only known him for a week.” Peter’s voice.

“He’s special. There is something very special about him. Betty was caught by it too. I have a feeling you can sense it too.” Flash’s voice.

Darkness and quiet.

“I promised I would be honest with you, so I have to tell you something,” Flash Spoke me into the dim light again. “I know your secret-”

An explosion on screen caught my thin attention span before I could hear what he said.

“How long have you known?” Peter asked.

“Ever since DC.”

“But the way you were acting-”

“The way I treated you was the act.”

Darkness and quiet. This time permanent. It overtook me, leaving me floating in an endless abyss with no beginning or end. I didn't dream often, unless it was a nightmare. Either I would stay like this or a nightmare would break through the peace.

The moment I felt a pressure on my neck in the shape of a hand, I knew this was going to be a long night. At least this night I had my friends to wake up to when the light returned.

#flowers for his heart #harley keener #Flash Thompson #betty brant #james rhodes #tony stark #pepper potts #stephen strange #happy hogan #may parker #peter parker #harley keener x peter parker #parkner #peter x harley #harley x peter #parley

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geek-patient-zero · 5 years

Text

Prologue (Part 1)

Or: My Dinner with Reuben

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Dead Trilogy Volume 1

I always loved the cover art. It was done by an artist called BROM. Here’s his website.

Robert Weinberg dedicates the book to Edgar Allan Poe “for obvious reasons” and Bram Stoker “who started it all”, though Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu might disagree with that. On Poe, peppered throughout the book, between the three parts and on the back cover are short quotes from his works, mostly “The Masque of the Red Death”. Obviously. It’s a little BS though. Any elements inspired by Poe are shallow, at least in this book.

Underneath the dedication is a little disclaimer:

While the locations and history of this trilogy may seem familiar, it is not our reality. The setting of Vampire: The Masquerade of the Red Death is a harsher, crueler version of our world. It is a stark, desolate landscape where nothing is what it seems. It is truly a World of Darkness.

For in the grim dark 1990′s there is only war. And vampires.

Going into the book I thought this disclaimer was a little wanky. I expected that “a harsher, crueler version of our world” would translate to “our world but with more rats, goths, and supernatural creatures.” Similarly, the book’s spine labels the genre as “Dark Fantasy” which in my experience usually translates to “regular fantasy but with more rape.” Turns out the World of Darkness setting is a little more complicated than that, but most of the time Weinberg isn’t too subtle on the whole “darker version of our world” thing.

I just want to let you know, before we get started, that I’m not the biggest expert when it comes to V:TM lore. I’ve never played the tabletops, or read their source books. My knowledge comes from Bloodlines, wiki binges, and lore dumps on Reddit and the Something Awful Bloodlines 2 thread. Please bear with my dumb ass if I get something wrong.

Alright, enough preamble, let’s get to the actual story.

We start in Rome, June 15, 1992, at an outdoor restaurant near the Coliseum. A meeting there was set up the night before through an anonymous phone call to the “heart of the Vatican.” For a suitcase full of money, they’d talk about vampires, or as the book dramatically puts it:

“We will talk,” declared the mysterious voice in somber, cold tones, “of The Kindred.”

The first to arrive is Father Naples, named so because it’s a word you’d find on a map of Italy. He’s a member of the Society of Leopold, who only get one more brief mention after this prologue so all you need to know is that they’re Catholic vampire hunters. He’s a big buff guy, described like a cross between a priest and a high ranking CIA agent. He came unarmed.

His faith served as his shield. Along with the five other agents of the Society of Leopold in the restaurant, including two women disguised as streetwalkers.

The Society of Leopold is the “the devil was behind this” kind of religious, so it’s weird they’d jump straight to hookers when thinking of disguises for their agents, or that said agents would agree to it. But this is the World of Darkness, a harsher, crueler version of our own, and that means there’s hookers everywhere, so put on the hot pants and think of Italy.

So Father Florence here’s got his disguised agents, who “carried enough firepower on them to start a minor war.” He’s also something of a badass.

And, though he had retired years before as a field operative, Father Naples still maintained his training in the martial arts. An expert at both kendo and karate, he could kill an attacker a dozen different ways.

He’s also got some agents in a nearby hotel room with a directional microphone aimed at his table to record the conversation. Soon, the target of all this seeming overkill arrives; a blonde mid-twenties guy in a white suit. His voice was different than the one who made the phone call, implying to Naples, and us, that there’s at least two people involved on the other side of this setup. It’s a neat bit of foreshadowing. After a firm handshake and no-selling Father Naples’s patented death glare, the stranger introduces himself as Reuben, “like the sandwich.” They banter a bit about the biblical Reuben before he decides to troll the Father a bit. First by saying he’s older than he looks, then by passing on the Father’s offer of wine.

“No thank you,” said Reuben. “I do not drink wine.”

He waits a beat for a reaction, then orders a Coke and a menu. I think I like Reuben.

Since vampires can’t eat or drink (unless they have high Humanity and a good dice roll) Father Naples is thus satisfied that the guy is not a vampire trying to trick him, deciding he’s “definitely human. And not very clever.” Reuben had made an obligatory knock at airline food, so now Naples believed the agents recording the conversation could use this clue to track down his real name and where he came from through airline records.

They get to the You Got the Cash/You Got the Stuff part of negotiations, with Reuben showing off the twenty million US dollars in his briefcase (Not euro because we’re the only country whose currency matters fuck you Italy) in exchange for a monologue from Naples about the history of the Kindred, starting from the beginning. Reuben says Father Naples can summarize if need be.

“Summarize?... How does one summarize ten thousand years of absolute evil? An impossible task, but let me try.”

The rest of the prologue until the end is Naples’ exposition on vampires while he drinks a shit ton of vino. Since it’s Vampire: The Masquerade Lore 101, I’ll summarize like our pal Naples.

Vampires secretly control the world. There are thirteen vampire clans descended from Caine, of Cain and Abel fame only spelled with an e for some reason. Ye olde Caine killed his brother, though I once read that in this setting it wasn’t so much just committing the first murder as introducing the very concepts of murder and killing to reality and basically ruining everyone’s lives, including demons. God punished Caine by giving him vampirism, forcing him to kill to survive for inventing killing. The vampirism also gave him superpowers, so he’s like a little bloodsucking demigod. I’ve seen jokes about God punishing Caine by giving him cool superpowers, but according to Father Naples Caine needed them because everyone knew what happened and were pissed at him for inventing murder and eating them. When everyone and everything wants to kill you on sight you need to be OP to survive and then feel sad about it.

(He also didn't learn most of those powers until later, when he met Lilith.)

Caine discovered that he could make more vampires through the classic “drain their blood to the point of near death and then feeding them your own blood” method. He sired three new vampires, who weren’t as powerful as him but still quite capable of ruining your day, a trend that continues through twelve or thirteen vampiric generations, although the latest generations are puny compared to Caine and his kids.

Caine and the Second Generation founded Enoch, the First City, and were worshiped there as gods, I’m guessing because of a mixture of fear and the hope of getting some sweet vampire powers if you suck up to the first murderer. The Second Generation then sired the Third Generation, thirteen vampires that became known as the Antediluvians. They’re the ones the modern thirteen vampire clans descend from.

Then everything goes to shit for Caine. Again. The Antediluvians, ambitious dicks, rose up and killed the Second Generation, destroying Enoch in the process. This could be thought of as Caine’s true curse: being forced to watch his childer, and their childer, and so on plot against and murder each other as he had done to his brother, and generally being a plague on mankind. See, Vampire: The Masquerade can be a bit too try-hard edgy and horny at times, but then you also get neat bits of writing and lore like that. As for Caine, he disappeared after the fall of Enoch. He’s now a cab driver in Los Angeles. Or a hermit in Greece, messing with traveling scholar vampires. Or both. Depends on who you ask. No, really. I’m being serious.

I should mention that, religious guy that he is, Father Naples likes to pepper his monologue with casual mentions of the devil. He says things like...

“It was then, in his darkest despair, that Caine learned from Satan a monsterous secret.”

“Encouraged by Satan, Caine created three such monsters.”

“And, in time, urged by Lucifer, they, too, bestowed the gift of eternal life on a select group of their victims.”

“They knew not the Lord God, but Lucifer, the Dark Angel.”

...and generally blaming the big guy below for getting the vampires to do vampire things. While most of what Father Naples says about the setting’s history is correct, the Satan stuff isn’t. Lucifer is a character in the World of Darkness, specifically Demon: The Fallen, but he has nothing to do with V:TM. This adds a neat bit of characterization and unreliability to Naples’ narrative; something Reuben will point out at the end of the prologue.

The Great Flood happened, but Father Naples doesn’t mention it. He skips to the Antediluvians founding the Second City, which didn’t get a name like Enoch because in its two thousand years of existence apparently no one could think of one. With the support of their childer, the fourth generation, they ruled over the Second City and, according to Naples, enslaved humanity. But eventually humanity rose up against the vampires, killing some of them with sunlight, fire, and beheading. The Second City fell and the surviving vampires fled. The Antediluvians disappeared. Some modern day vampires believe the Antediluvians were all dead, while others (the correct ones, turns out) believe they’re hiding, resting in torpor (a kind of vampire coma) this whole time and one day, they’d wake up and, as Father Naples says, “...the world of the Undead shall tremble.” This is our first mention in this book of Gehenna, the end of the wold according to the Kindred. He also says their return was predicted in Revelations, but I’m no biblical expert so I can’t tell you what bits of Revelations that might be referring too.

Reuben asks what happened to the fourth generation, or the Methuselahs as they’re now known because they’re old as balls but not “lived before the Biblical Flood” old. Father Naples tells him, then goes on to explain the titular Masquerade, vampire factions, and the thirteen clans.

#vampire the masquerade #vtm #vtmb #world of darkness #vampire: the masquerade #blood war

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azfellandco · 5 years

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Hey there, so your reply to my comment on the vampire AU, about Aziraphale and consumption and such, has been rattling around in my head since I read it, and I was hoping, if you have the time/energy/desire of course, to pick your brains about what kinds of meta/headcanons you've got? Because Aziraphale and food and softness and subversion give me LIFE and I have some thoughts of my own but I'd love to hear yours :D

I would love to talk about this some more, hell yeah. Thank you so much. Please do also tell me your headcanons, @dwarven-beard-spores, I definitely want to hear them. Here is the AU in question for anyone else who might be interested.

Anyway I’m going to have to put this under a read-more because this has become like… thesis level long. My apologies to anyone on mobile.

The thing I love about this book in general is that there’s such a rich vein of history of thought to explore baked into the premise. Angels and demons and god and the devil and satanic nuns and witches and the four horsemen and the antichrist and the Book of Revelation’s “capital A for Apocalypse” exist in this universe and because so much of it is played for humorous effect there’s a lot of wiggle room as to how these things actually interact with their real world theological equivalents. Which is all building up to say: I am absolutely fascinated with the dichotomy in popular conception between angels as good/holy and angels as monstrous, and how to a lot of people that really isn’t a dichotomy at all.

Here are some quotes I think about in conjunction with Aziraphale a lot.

“Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?“ –The Prophecy

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchyof angels? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

Every angel is terrifying. What? Whomst? Aziraphale, light of my life, in love with a demon who thinks bullet-hole window transfers and expensive divers’ watches are cool, calls said demon “my dear”, is terrifying? Excuse me?

I am utterly in love with the idea of Aziraphale as this potential force of nature, with the righteous fury and the wings and the sword and wait. What did Aziraphale do with that sword? He gave it away to the humans that got kicked out of paradise, because they looked cold.

The first thing Aziraphale does in the whole book is a renouncement of this particular idea of angels, and we see him sort of… butt up against it later, when he talks to the Metatron. Aziraphale doesn’t want the world to end, of course he doesn’t, but I just have… so many feelings about the way Aziraphale talks about the war versus the way the Metatron talks about the war.

The point is not to avoid the war, it is to win it. –the Metatron, pg. 242

The Metatron is the kind of angel above, blood and fury, and Aziraphale’s voice goes “flat and hopeless” in the face of it, “the bitterness in his voice would have soured milk”. Aziraphale doesn’t want this war to happen, and the way all his thoughts and feelings are tagged versus the sort of netural, descriptionless way the Metatron’s are (pretty much the only characterization the Metatron gets is “a well-educated voice” and “a shade testily”, the latter of which is in response to Aziraphale saying he has to delay returning to Heaven) has always struck me as like… the difference between Aziraphale and other angels is that Aziraphale cares so much. We talk a lot in this fandom about Crowley and “the truth was that Crowley rather liked humans. It was a major failing in a demon” but Aziraphale is the same, he’s just… subtler.

Where the heck was I going with this. I’m so fond.

Ah yes. Aziraphale is different from other angels because he cares, because he wants. I wrote a fic about this, too, actually. So it’s sort of interesting to me that it’s in the things Aziraphale wants that he is most an ”every angel is terrifying” angel, even though in some cases it’s a muted and complex kind of thing, a lot of which has been helped along for my by popular fandom and my love of gothic lit and isn’t necessarily comping from the book anymore, everything from here on out is my headcanons.

The most obvious example of Aziraphale’s desires being the most monstrous thing about him comes from that same conversation with the Metatron. I’m sure everybody here is aware of the good old “Aziraphale was willing to kill a child so he could stay on earth and keep eating sushi” post which, while reductive, is essentially what I’m getting at here. Aziraphale calls the Metatron with the specific intent of the Metatron killing Adam and stopping the ball rolling because he likes the world and he likes living there and I really do think, when it comes down to it, that’s a purely selfish decision on Aziraphale’s part. Crowley knows that the things about the world that will get Aziraphale on his side near the start of the book are all things Aziraphale likes.

“No more compact discs… no salt, no eggs. No gravlax with dill sauce. No more fascinating little restaurants where they know you. No Daily Telegraph crosswords. No small antique shops. No book shops either. No interesting first editions. No–” Crowley scraped the bottom of Aziraphale’s barrel of interests, “regency silver snuffboxes.” –pg. 46

It’s all well and good to like people and want to help them and want to save them, but in the end, for a certain kind of person (the kind of person I see Aziraphale as), you have to make it personal. And people, as I’m sure everyone is aware, will do truly awful things in the name of protecting what is personal to them.

I don’t know where to put this observation so it’s going here. That one line that’s like “Six millennia exposure to humans was having the same effect on Aziraphale as it was on Crowley, only in the opposite direction”? I’ve generally seen this taken to mean “six millennia had made them both more human-like by making Crowley less evil and Aziraphale less good” but personally I’ve always taken it to mean that exposure to humans has made Crowley like humans more and Aziraphale like humans less. My angel is antisocial and likes people in a general sense only, because it’s important to his self-image to love all of God’s creation or whatever.

On that slightly ominous note let’s move on to the point about consumption. There’s a sentiment in some feminist literature about desire, and sexual desire, and hunger, and how they overlap that is relevant here but I cannot find the exact quote I am thinking of so these will have to do.

For a woman who has learned to make herself physically and emotionally small, to live literally and figuratively on scraps, admitting that you have an appetite is a source of cavernous fear. Women are often on a diet of the body, but we are always on a diet of the heart. The low-maintenance woman, the ideal woman, has no appetite. This is not to say that she refuses food, sex, romance, emotional effort; to refuse is petulant, which is ironically more demanding. The woman without appetite politely finishes what’s on her plate, and declines seconds. She is satisfied and satisfiable. –Hunger Makes Me by Jess Zimmerman (if the contents of this meta i’m writing interest you then I suggest you read this article as well)

Please also see this “a softer world” fancomic which is a remix of the poem Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe– “And we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabel Lee.”

To want is to hunger and to hunger is to want and it’s extremely important to me that Aziraphale’s particular temptation, and one Crowley knows full well, is lunch. Wanting as selfishness, as monstrousness, is… how you say… my entire shit. The subgenre of gothic horror that is about women who want and the way this makes them feel, as though they’re destructive and dark and dangerous, is pretty much the reason I am the person I am today. Crimson Peak, Shirley Jackson’s work but especially The Haunting of Hill House (speaking of which i am going to personally eviscerate whoever approved that netflix series, how dare they), to some extent Karen Navidson’s story in House Of Leaves, probably lots of others but those are the main ones that come to mind. They’re all about women who want, and feel they shouldn’t, and how that disconnect makes them othered from themselves and the world around them.

I’ve always seen some overlap between this and the concept of queering the villain, because historically the idea of sexual desire has been made to look monstrous by bigots and assholes and that absolutely has not stopped us from grabbing these characters and archetypes and saying “mine now”. I’m never going to stop loving queer-coded villains as long as I live, because if society wants us to be evil we will damn well show them evil.

But of course, wanting isn’t actually evil. It’s just human. Aziraphale is not especially selfish, for a human, even when that selfishness manifests as disregard for his companion’s feelings or stubbornness about the big picture (”That only works, right, if you start everyone off equal… that’s the good bit. The lower you start the more opportunities you have. Crowley had said, that’s lunatic. No, said Aziraphale, it’s ineffable.”) it’s still just… human. People have a notoriously hard time caring about suffering beyond themselves, it’s why we invented morality. Wanting has no moral value, not really, just as hunger doesn’t.

But I can’t help but think that, if Aziraphale agrees with this assessment, it’s taken him thousands of years and certainly until after the apocalypse to arrive there. Aziraphale wants to be good, and he wants his side to be “the good side”, so much so that he’s deluded himself for ages into thinking he doesn’t care about or consider the validity of the stuff Crowley says and believes. There is no textual evidence to support the statement “Aziraphale feels guilty for wanting things and part of the reason he’s so attached to Crowley is that Crowley makes him feel less guilty”, but there it is.

Aziraphale wants, and other angels don’t, or at least, Aziraphale wants in a very concrete and specific sense that other angels don’t seem to–food, wine, books, snuffboxes, Crowley– in short, to be in the world and experience. Aziraphale wants sensual things, pretty things. Comfortable things. Aziraphale is such a soft and homey character despite all these little apparent sharp points, and I adore that about him.

Let me quote my own fic for a moment, the vampire fic that prompted this ask in the first place.

Everything about Aziraphale said “soft” to Crowley, it was something he’d always rather liked about his friend. Soft curls framing his round face, gentle hands, warm and unfashionable clothes covering his pudgy middle. There was absolutely nothing about Aziraphale that looked even slightly predatory, and Crowley had never been able to determine if this was intentional camouflage or just the way Aziraphale was [footnote: it was both].

Aziraphale is selfish and petty and can be inconsiderate and obtuse, but he gave away the thing that identified him as an angel because some humans were suffering and needed it. He loves wine, and books, and he’s fat goddammit, because of course he is. He’s nonthreatening because he’s chosen to be. He’s human because he’s chosen to be, just as Crowley is. It just took him longer to realize that’s what he’d done. He’s got the potential, by virtue of being an angel, to be this incredibly powerful and dangerous thing, and instead he owns a bookshop and feeds the ducks and goes to lunch with his friend.

I’m sure I’ll think of like ten additional things I want to say about this after I post it lmao prepare yourself for that, I guess.

#meta #aziraphale #dwarven-beard-spores #my writing

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veritys-diary · 2 years

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CONTEXTUAL ENTRY #2: -Yes, but what about the coffins? -What about them?

Hello, there, our beloved readers. We hope you are all well and having a great week. As you may already know, on this blog we enjoy everything related to crime during the eighteenth century, especially when it includes all the gory details that our beloved Verity can provide us. Going through one of Verity’s diaries, we noticed that she was good friends with a man called Jackson, who was a coffin-maker, so we became interested in this topic. The title of this entry is part of an actual conversation that my partner and I had while we were reading some pages of Verity’s diary. “What about them?” was my partner's question and she is right to have asked because not even Verity wrote much about this important object or burials in general. That is, of course, assuming that it was indeed an indispensable object because death rates in Eighteenth-Century England were not exactly low.

The subject of coffins caught my attention, so I decided to investigate further. During my research, I came across an article in Smithsonian Magazine which addresses how commonly people were accidentally buried alive. There is evidence of this dating back to the fourteenth century. People's fear of being buried alive reached such a degree that coffins were equiped with different mechanisms to alert the outside world if the person inside the coffin was still alive, but this product was not patented until the nineteenth century. They were called “safety coffins.”

In his short story The Premature Burial Edgar Allan Poe describes with great accuracy the sensation of being buried alive, but these kinds of stories are not only found in literary texts, it is also possible to find them in medical journals and gazettes of the time because of how common it was. During the eighteenth century, physicians and propagandists set about the task of trying to estimate the number of people who were buried, embalmed, or dismembered while still alive. These numbers fluctuate between 161 and 700 people in a short period of time, not counting those who managed to escape from suffering one of these terrible ends. It is pertinent to consider, though, that many alarmist texts were circulating at the time, so these numbers should be taken with reservations. This does not mean premature burials were not a reality and a great source of fear for the people of the time.

But why were premature burials so common? The field of medicine was not as developed as it is today, so there were no accurate and reliable techniques with which to determine whether a person had died. In addition, health care providers were not always trained to treat patients, let alone determine causes of death. One of the techniques used to determine if a person had died was to put a mirror under the nostrils for a few seconds, if it fogged up it meant that the person was still alive, otherwise the doctors declared him/her dead.

Before the invention of security coffins, in Germany, a new idea arose to avoid premature burials, which consisted of constructions where the bodies of people considered dead were kept for a period of time in order to give them the opportunity to wake up if they were still alive. This technique was highly criticized as it was considered disrespectful to the deceased and their relatives. In 1790, the idea of equipping the coffins with warning mechanisms was born. During the following years several models of coffins were developed, some more elaborate and complex than others, but all motivated by the same fear. n general, the fundamental elements of a good security coffin were a permanent source of air and an alarm. But, despite all the efforts and the different models available, these coffins were not very successful and were quickly discontinued. Bondeson mentions that "The ultimate reason for the failure of the security coffins to go into serial production must be sought in the field of psychology rather than in that of mechanics" (136) mainly because, even if the mechanism of thiese coffins was well thought of, there was still a chance it could fail resulting in the person inside the coffin dying.

As a matter of conclusion, the growing widespread hysteria created by cases of premature burial during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflects the lack of confidence in the medical community that served society. Before people lived in fear of being buried alive, physicians were relatively comfortable with the techniques they used to declare a person deceased, but their confidence in themselves and their techniques reached a low point with the German waiting mortuaries. Bondeson mentions in this regard that not only did the increase in medical knowledge help to decrease the number of premature burial cases, but also society stopped blindly believing in alarmist propaganda.

Anyhow, we would love to read your thoughts on this matter. And, if you are still curious about this topic, I highly recommend you read Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear.

Bibliography

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. W.W. Norton, 2002.

Magazine, Smithsonian. “People Feared Being Buried Alive so Much They Invented These Special Safety Coffins.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/people-feared-being-buried-alive-so-much-they-invented-these-special-safety-coffins-180970627/.

#eighteenth century #nineteenth century #coffin #society

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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 7 years

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How to Hook a Reader: Ten Examples of Great Opening Lines in Literature, and What They Do Right.

1. “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.”

- “Everything I Never Told You,” by Celeste Ng.

Ng’s masterpiece (which you all need to read, like, yesterday by the way) seamlessly pulls the reader under with this captivatingly cryptic opening line.

She poses several questions right off the bat (who is Lydia? Why is she dead? Who killed her?) that keep the reader captivated for the entirety of the novel.

Of course, Ng is aided in keeping the reader hooked with her immaculately crafted, three-dimensional characters, with all of whom the reader can’t help but empathize by the story’s end, but this doesn’t make her opening line any less masterful. She is, in all ways, an amazing writer.

2. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarance Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

- “Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” by C.S. Lewis.

Okay, first of all, I’d like to point out the substantial irony in a person named Clive Staples Lewis critiquing anyone else’s name. But that by no regard diminishes the comedic brilliance of this line.

Even if I hadn’t been such a Narnia fanatic as a child, this line alone would have made me want to become one. Sometimes, all you really need to do is make the audience laugh with a well-crafted joke.

3. “All this happened, more or less.”

- “Slaughterhouse-Five,” Kurt Vonnegut.

Who doesn’t love Vonnegut? Well, I might not be the most impartial person to ask about this. His absurdist sense of humor taps into something visceral in me.

Nevertheless, there’s something about this line that has a near universal appeal: it shows that the author is self aware enough not to take his work too seriously, and also shows that the work should be a lot of fun. There’s also a familial quality about it, like listening to a tall tail from a favorite relative, and creates a sense of personability that remains prevalent throughout the novel.

4. “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world."

- “Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville.

I wanted to skip this one, I really did, if only because it’s so unanimously acknowledged as one of the best opening lines in literature. But it really is amazing.

It creates an immediate sense of conversation between narrator and reader, without being overly personable. Ishmael cuts right to the chase, and plunges us immediately in to the story at hand, like a harpoon into the blubbery flank of a wale.

Also, in context of the dramatic events of the story, I can’t help but find his casual attitude about the ordeal very amusing.

5. “If you’re reading this on a screen, fuck off. I’ll only talk if I’m gripped with both hands.”

- “Book of Numbers,” by Joshua Cohen.

This is a book that knows what it wants and is not afraid to ask for it. Cohen’s book is meta fiction at its finest, and its opening line is unabashedly reflective of its own self-awareness.

Book of Numbers isn’t for everybody, but it’s hard not to love this opening line.

6. "It was a nice day. All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one."

- “Good Omens,” by Neil Gaiman and Terri Pratchett.

I’m not going to lie: Good Omens is one of my all-time favorite books. This opening line is a promise for the themes that are prevalent throughout the book: hidden depth, wit, and existential questions beneath a thick layer of upbeat, cheerful irreverence and satire.

Like the book itself, it asks serious questions without ever taking itself too seriously, and makes for an enormously fun read that will make you laugh and make you think. I highly recommend it.

7. “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”

- “Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison.

This one is both an objectively intriguing opening line, and a potent one, when viewed in the context that Ellison himself was a Black man. Published in 1952, the line resonates with marginalized groups to this very day, and is evocative of a very real struggle -- the “invisibility” -- of Black Americans, then and now.

It is timelessly pertinent and powerful.

8. “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

- “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” by Douglas Adams.

Oh, Douglas Adams. One of my greatest sources of literary inspiration, who taps into my sense of dry, somewhat absurdist humor like no other. I might have to make another post devoted to all of my favorite of his lines, but that’s not the point here.

This line is magnificent, because it immediately sets the tone for the novel and gives the reader a clear image of what to expect (predominantly, razor-sharp wit and satire.) It’s also short and simplistic, and very clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously, just like the novel itself.

9. “Shadow had done three years in prison. He was big enough and looked don't-fuck-with-me enough that his biggest problem was killing time. So he kept himself in shape, and taught himself coin tricks, and thought a lot about how much he loved his wife.”

- “American Gods,” by Neil Gaiman.

This line is, in my opinion, almost perfect. It gives us an immediate image of Shadow, his personality, his values, and the challenges he’s facing, while at the same time jumping right into the action of the story without wasting the readers’ time with needless exhibitionism.

It also creates immediate interest in the story, and asks many questions that can only be answered if by continuing to read it. It’s almost as amazing as the book itself.

10. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

- “Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen.

This is another one that I, for the sheer purpose of originality, wanted to avoid getting around for the purpose of this list, but there’s simply no avoiding it: this line is amazing. It’s a crime of our era that people consider Austen such a “serious” writer, when she was, in fact, possibly the greatest satirist of her time.

This line encapsulates the irreverence of this novel, as well as Austen’s razor-sharp wit and intelligence. Like most of Austen’s works, it remains a classic.

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deutscheshausnyu · 4 years

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Interview with current writer-in-residence, Daniela Emminger

Daniela Emminger was born in 1975 in Upper Austria. She studied journalism & communication science in Vienna, worked as a copywriter in Berlin, and as an editor in Lithuania and Latvia. Since 2008, Daniela Emminger has lived in Vienna and works as a writer and freelance journalist. She received various scholarships and awards and is the author of several books. She was on the longlist of the Austrian Book Prize 2016 with Gemischter Satz and participated at the Festival for Literature in NYC & Washington in 2019 with her most recent novel Kafka mit Flügeln. Last autumn, her first theatre-play Zirkus. Braunau. – a political piece about the latest right-wing-populistic tendencies within Europe – was published, the book-version will follow 2020.

When did you first visit New York and what were your first impressions of this city, especially in comparison with your hometown, Vienna? What characteristics of New York do you find most appealing, especially as a writer?

My first time in New York was in March 2019 when I participated in the Festival Neue Literatur. I spent one week in the city and I really can’t find proper words to describe the atmosphere. I was thrilled. And overwhelmed with emotion. New York is sooooo fascinating from the very first second. There are all these skyscrapers, so you have to look up all the time. There are all these people and everyone is busy and heading towards something. There is this special (heart) beat you can feel in every move, in every place. For me New York is intangible. But I as a writer of course have to make things visible, audible, tangible through words. Also, a foreign place always has a strong influence on a person; the interplay of geography alters the identity of a character. It definitely makes a difference if you live and grow up in Vienna (in Europe) or New York (in the United States). Compared to New York, Vienna is a one-horse town. So I am sure that New York will change me as a person as well as a writer. It will change my way of absorbing and assimilating things, it will change my way of thinking and writing.

Before beginning your career as an author, you studied Advertising Management and Communication & Economics in Vienna – subjects that one might not immediately imagine as the educational background of an author who writes novels, plays, and short stories. How and when did you decide to become a professional author? Do you incorporate any knowledge or skills that you picked up during your studies into your writing?

It’s true that I started my career as a writer quite late in my thirties. But I already knew at the age of 14 that writing is and would be my destiny. I just felt it inside. And I realized soon that in my case the world was defined by words. It was just natural for me to write about my feelings, sorrows, aims and thoughts. Writing helped me to understand the world. I am words. And there are hundreds of untold stories inside me that will come to fruition one day. Though I grew up in a small village and in a family where becoming a writer – as a profession – was not an option. That’s why I studied something ordinary before I finally decided to quit my job in advertising. At that time I had three finished scripts in my pocket and sent them to different publishing houses. There is a point in life – and this might have to do with age and experience – when you have nothing to lose, when you don’t want to waste the rest of your life with half-hearted things.

What authors and/or works of literature have had the most influence on your career, writing, and style?

I love reading. I already devoured books when I was a child. Authors like Mira Lobe, Christine Nöstlinger were the stars of my childhood. Later on I read a lot of Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, also Russian Literature from Dostojewski to Tolstoi. I am a fan of Daniil Charms and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz who are known for their surreal style. I try to read contemporary literature from colleagues like Josef Winkler, Laura Freudenthaler, Teresa Präauer as well. I think at Austrian schools and universities the literary focus lies on European literature, but of course I also read American classics from authors like Paul Auster, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson.

In fact I really read a lot. The only genres I don’t like are detective/mystery stories and science fiction. And during my own writing process I have to stop reading completely, because the thoughts and the style of another author would definitely influence my own writing. At the moment I have Die New York Trilogie (City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room) by Paul Auster on my bedside table.

In the works that you’ve published so far, is there an overarching theme that you want to explore or a particular question you want to answer that ties them all together? What is your creative process like and how do you come up with ideas for each novel, play, story, and essay?

In general I carry the themes that move me inside – sometimes it even takes years until they come to fruition. My work often deals with „the essentials of life“ – such as love, evanescence, transformation, courage, grief or the search for meaning. The main source of my ideas is my own experience, my own emotion and understanding of the world. Also external sources and influences – a poem I read, a conversation I hear, a person I meet – intentionally play a certain role. For example in Kafka With Wings my inspiration was based upon a number of personal losses, but also influenced by a poem called One Art by Elizabeth Bishop that I discovered at that time. I try to find a way to process these kinds of influences in my art.

I am also fond of mixing different genres. In my mind sometimes a fairy tale perfectly matches with facts and figures, with real things going on in the contemporary world. For example Kafka With Wings is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. It is a wild and vivid journey through an invented world of imagination but at the same time it mirrors the real historical and recent situation of the foreign and mostly unknown country of Kyrgyzstan. I am hell-bent on giving birth to a story. I am fearless and uncompromising. For example, I recently finished a theatre play about Braunau, Hitler’s birthplace, and the latest right-wing populistic tendencies within Austria and Europe. It’s a political play and I had to spend several months in Braunau to do research. Now this might sound a little bit weird, but I bought myself a gorilla costume and every time I worked on the play I jumped into it. This had nothing to do with Mardi Gras, I used the costume as uniform, like a doctor his scrubs. It helped me to keep distance from the crazy Nazi stuff. Also there was plenty of space in it to lock up the right-wing populistic thoughts and tendencies. The costume enabled me to reflect on them in a safe and concentrated way. Also, gorillas – like apes in general – are very intelligent animals. I guess that the aura of the gorilla costume helped me to find a humane solution to the present and ever-increasing Nazi problem.

In your opinion and experience, what is the hardest part of the writing process? How do you overcome it?

I think being an author has a lot to do with discipline. The writing process is not a romantic one, you have to stay tuned, keep on thinking and writing day by day. I have fixed working hours, preferably in the morning from 6am to noon. Sometimes I have to throw away every single page but still the process of writing helps me to stay in motion. At some point a story gets stuck or complicated – especially when it is very complex and convoluted. Then you have to step back, do some analytic work regarding the plot, the characters, and the message in between the lines. Also research is hard work. For example it took me three years to write Kafka With Wings. After the second year I didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. I thought I ´d never finish this story. But I did. Step by step and day by day. So maybe the secret is to keep on going.

Your most recent novel, Kafka mit Flügeln (Kafka With Wings), follows an Austrian woman who embarks on a search for her long-lost, half-Kyrgyz friend from her childhood, who disappeared in his own search for his identity and origins. What was the inspiration behind this story? Why did you specifically choose Kyrgyzstan as the cultural background for the missing friend?

The idea of the story came to me some years ago in 2015. I felt I had to write about changes, losing things, loss in general. At that time I also discovered a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, called One Art, which had great influence on me. It’s about losing things, places and names and even bigger and more important things like relationships, countries or the own past, the own identity. It’s not that I hadn’t experienced any loss so far, for example my mother died in 2015, but I was luckily never involved in a war or had to flee from my country. So I was looking for a place in the world, where I – like my characters – felt completely lost: lost in translation, lost in space, even lost in evolution. And Kyrgyzstan was the perfect place.

I really knew nothing about this country, it was just a place on the map, not real for me. I didn’t speak a word of Kyrgyz or Russian. I didn’t know anybody there. It was really a big adventure for me to go there and somehow I was forced to get to know myself in a new way, to discover myself from a new perspective. And all because I wanted to share commonalities with my characters. I think that’s the way I generally work: I always have to be very close to my protagonists. I have to feel what they feel. I have to merge with them.

Also Kyrgyzstan is a very exciting and inspiring plot location. When I arrived there, I was hit by intense culture shock. But then I quickly dove into the Kyrgyz culture and the way of Kyrgyz living. For example I spent several weeks together with nomads high up in the mountains (at 4000 meters above sea level). Or I travelled through all different regions of the country (from West to East and North to South). Also I had to dive into the world of butterfly research for my book and therefore I joined a group of European lepidopterologists who were looking for rare butterfly species throughout the country. I learnt how to catch them, how to kill them technically and humanely, how to preserve them for observation and study. All these peculiarities finally became part of the story. You learn a lot about Soviet history and a foreign culture.

Without going into much detail about the story, can you explain why you chose the title Kafka with Wings?

The central theme of my book Kafka With Wings is metamorphosis. Butterflies play a central role as symbol for transformation and change. The insect goes through different stages of life until it has reached its final stage of existence. Now in my story I use this process of development in a metaphorical way: also people, things and even countries run through different stages of existence during their lifetime. They change, they become something different, and they sometimes are forced by external and internal circumstances to search for a new identity.

Kafka with Wings also references Franz Kafka, the Czech author, in the title. In fact my book is not a book about Kafka himself, he won’t appear in person in the plot, but still he has a certain influence on my writing. He and his thoughts are synonymous with change, transformation and strange things going on. Let’s consider his novel Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis, where his protagonist Gregor Samsa suddenly finds himself transformed into an insect. In German language we even use the word „kafkaesk“ to describe a situation or condition which is really strange and bizarre but also brilliant. So I think this is why I reference Kafka in my title.

If we may ask, what is your current/next project and what do you hope to achieve during your time as the Max Kade writer-in-residence at Deutsches Haus at NYU?

In fact I wanted to start a new project by the beginning of the year. It has to do with “homeland”, with “spiritual home”, with “home away from home”. At first I thought that the story has to take place in Aurach am Hongar, which is my birthplace and a very small village in Upper-Austria. I wanted to reflect on the special structures and relationships within a one-horse town and also write about hidden conflicts, problems and lies within a family. But then I was invited to New York and I am not sure now, if I can start this “homeland”-story here. In a way New York is the very reverse to Aurach am Hongar. But on the other hand: Is there a better place to think about your origin, your country, your identity, than somewhere far away from home? Another idea for my residency is of course to focus on New York, to walk through all the different boroughs of the city, to absorb all kind of people, conversations, impressions like a sponge, to let the city circulate in my veins, my brain, my body. This could end up as a poem, a thriller, a love story – who knows…

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dragonsongs-reprise · 7 years

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The Anxious Yet Determined Author: A BSD Edgar Allan Poe Meta

Edgar Allen Poe, everyone’s favorite raccoon loving, relatable anxiety filled author! Despite being in only a handful of chapters, he still manages to be a popular character with a loving fanbase. But, why is that? Is it because of his wonderfully well done character design? His unique ability? The fact his social anxious self is relatable to many readers? Or is it just his raccoon? That’s what I hope to answer through this analysis of his character so far

(Note that this will only use info up to chapter 53 as chapter 54 hasn’t been translated yet at the time of writing this and the original source material will always win out over the anime in terms of information I use to analyze )

First off, before I start, I would like to state that any manga translations that I use throughout this analysis aren’t mine. All screencaps and translations I use belong to the wonderful and lovely people over at dazaiscans!

So, let’s start this off by talking about the fan favorite trope that people have decided to characterize Poe with within fanfics, rps, and such. The idea that Poe’s anxiety causes him to stutter constantly. No matter how cute this idea is, this doesn’t line up with what we’ve been presented in canon this far. We’ve been shown that Poe certainly has some kind of anxiety and that his speech seems more hushed and submissive in nature when he feels panicked, yet, a stutter has never been present as a part of his panicked speech.

Yet this screencap does tell us something about Poe’s anxiety and how he deals with being surprised/pushed aside. After Ranpo speaks of not caring about Poe’s reasons for setting up the deduction game despite the fact that Ranpo himself was the cause for Poe creating this game in the first place, he turns to Karl.

He tries to convince Ranpo to listen to his backstory with saying “But this match’s outcome involves our fate!”, yet that doesn’t work. So he doesn’t even attempt to speak to Ranpo about how he feels pushed aside before he can recompose himself. He turns over and mutters his feelings to Karl, as if Karl will reassure him. From this and how Poe explains that everyone basically abandoned him after losing to Ranpo in the investigation competition six years ago, we can infer that Karl has become Poe’s support system, someone that won’t leave him for his failures (cause pets can’t talk down to you or leave you in the way that other humans can). So when Poe becomes overwhelmed or even dejected, he turns to Karl as he’s had no people that he could turn to for the last six years. Talking to Karl seems to recompose Poe (he even gave Karl food just for listening to him) and allows him to continue his conversation with Ranpo without trouble.

Let’s move away from the man’s anxiety and towards his ambition along with the way he works towards the goals he has. While the man may have his moments of anxiety and insecurities resulting from said anxiety, he’s also quite the determined individual. Once he lost to Ranpo those six years ago, he wanted to get back at him. He NEEDS to get back at Ranpo and to regain what he lost then, he needs to prove that he can outsmart Ranpo.

To show that he’s better. Yet, the people who left him six years ago probably won’t care about his victory six years after the fact. Yet, Poe needs this. Not to prove himself to everyone else, he needs to prove that he’s capable to himself.

He doesn’t view this as fair, neither does he care about it being fair. Poe wants a victory over Ranpo, and he doesn’t care about the way he goes about getting said victory over the man that he sees as the man who ruined his life. The satisfaction of beating Ranpo in the way of deduction and proving his intellect is enough for him. No matter what shock or even disappointment he showed in Ranpo proclaiming that he didn’t remember him, it’s all in the past now. All that matters now is seeing Ranpo defeated by the novel of Poe’s design. Ranpo’s defeat will be Poe’s revenge against the one who caused his life to crumble away those six years ago.

Yet, as proven later on in both chapter 37 with Poe showing up to the Agency to show Ranpo his manuscript, at Ranpo’s request along with him agree to write the novel that Ranpo later used in chapter 49 to trap both him and Chuuya in, Poe doesn’t hate Ranpo. In fact he respects him

and from this screenshot, he even cares about Ranpo’s safety and even wonders what he’ll do if Ranpo was to die. Ranpo and him have a stable relationship that at least classifies them as good associates. His hatred for Ranpo only extend as far as to hate the man for his abilities and for seemingly forgetting him, not for the person he actually is.

So when Ranpo told him that he remembered his match against Poe and how Poe had actually made Ranpo work towards his victory, Poe softens towards him. Poe wanted revenge towards the man that ruined his life without effort, he who didn’t even care enough to remember who he is. Not revenge towards the man who remembered him and acknowledged Poe’s abilities. Thus, his relationship with Ranpo turned positive. This relationship is what’s truly making Poe stay as a character who’s able to impact the story as without Ranpo and him working out the kinks (not those types of kinks, you nasties) in their relationship, Poe would have no ties to Japan and would have absolutely no reason to stay and not go back to America.

So to anyone who read until the end, thank you so much! I hope that this short meta helped with trying to explain Poe’s character and perhaps the reasons why Poe has such a big fanbase for a character who has appeared very little within the series.

#edgar allan poe #bsd edgar allan poe #ranpo edogawa #bungou stray dogs #bsd #bsd meta talk

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cajunroe · 7 years

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speirton + college professors!au ↳ as a professor at one of the last male-only colleges left in the nation, lip didn’t expect so many applicants for the english program. but for the past two years, the classes have been full. lip had always loved teaching. he loved when he got to witness the moment when everything clicked in his students’ minds and their eyes lit up with understanding and the love for english literature that he had. it made everything he had to put up with, worth it. his main source of frustration and anger was currently the department chair and sole professor of their edgar allan poe course, one necessary for graduation. norman dike was not a terrible man, but as a man who cared more about his title than his students, he wasn’t a good professor and it showed in his students. many of them filled lip’s office during his office hours begging for his help. and he could only do so much, what with his actual students needing his help too. and when he couldn’t help them all, he felt like a failure. like he’d disappointed the young men that had grown to depend on him. when web comes to his office, near tears because dike had messed up his midterm grade in a huge mistake, lip storms into the dick’s office and demands that dike be removed as a professor. one week later, dike gratefully resigned from the course and dick has a replacement coming in the following week. lip took over teaching and he could see the students’ relief and excitement on their faces. and he was happy that he could at least help them get someone new. two weeks later, lip has yet to meet the new professor, but it is a college and the kids are relatively young, so rumors fly about professor speirs. malarkey had told him that he swore he heard speirs threaten to shoot three students if they showed up late again. and skip had told him that he heard speirs kicked out another student for texting during his lecture. and then toye, not one for gossip, says he heard that speirs just got out of prison and someone high up owed him a favor. lips laughs them off when they invade his office, a little frightened. they ask lip to ask speirs to be less intense because it’s hard to focus on the lecture when they’re scared shitless. lip agrees and the next day he seeks out the infamous professor ronald speirs. and what he finds is more than he ever expected.

from the first moment lip saw speirs, he knew he was fucked. ron speirs was pretty much everything lip had ever wanted.

dark, messy hair, dark eyes, defined jaw meeting in the middle to form a set of perfect, slightly pale lips which were wrapped around a coffee mug. his eyes traced along the planes of the man’s body, focusing on broad shoulders, toned arms, and rough hands holding a book of edgar allan poe poetry.

lip was speechless.

“you’ve been staring long enough, i’m inclined to believe you see something you like?”

lip followed the deep voice, that voice, and his heart raced at the smug smile on the man’s face.

lip cleared his throat, twice, and gather his confidence to sit across from the man he’d heard so much about.

he put his hand forward, “professor carwood lipton, everyone calls me lip, i teach romantic english lit.”

ron put his hand forward slowly, and lip didn’t miss the thorough eye’s checking him out, “ron speirs, i’m dike’s replacement.”

lip let out an involuntary sigh of relief, “thank god for that.”

he sat down on the chair across from ron and smiled..

he didn’t receive a smile in return, but ron put his book down so lip assumed it was a sign of interest in conversation.

“i’m under the assumption that he was a shit professor?”

“what makes you say that?” lip frowned, dick would’ve never used those exact words. nix for sure, but dick was a bit more diplomatic.

ron smiled, “every student has told me so.”

lip laughed warmly, “i mean, they’re not wrong. he’s not a bad guy, just a bad leader. and these boys need more than that.”

ron nodded and lip looked at him curiously. when ron met his eyes, lip’s shifted to the ceiling.

“so,” he breathed out, “edgar allan poe? what made you choose him?”

ron was silent for a minute, “he’s underestimated.”

lip balked, “under...underestimated? how so?”

ron smiled like he was remembering a fond memory.

“there’s so much about him that is still a mystery. he was mysterious in life and death and his legacy. and people still believe they know all there is to know. i mean we have him to thank for more than the raven and the tell-tale heart and annabel lee.”

lip leaned forward as he saw the passion rise in ron’s eyes. wanting so deeply to drown in it.

“and that’s another thing. his greatest, which is completely based on each individual’s opinion, works are magnificent and so are his not so popular works. did you know sir arthur conan doyle praised poe for bringing life to the detective story? he’s underestimated because no one knows just how far-reaching his influence is. he’s underestimated because his works, however popular or unpopular, still have a powerful effects on those who read and study them. he’s underestimated because he’s the greatest author and poet in american history and yet people just use him for fucking halloween spirit and when they want to pretend to be fucking deep rather than truly understand what he was trying to convey.”

ron finished with an angered huff and lip was in love. he’d never met another professor as in love and passionate about their subjects. god he want to learn everything going on in ron’s head.

“why are you looking at me like at?”

lip blinked slowly, coming back down from the academic high.

“what way?” he asked and noticed the curious look on ron’s face, eyes narrowed like he was trying to figure something out.

ron smiled, that same smug smile he had before, “like you just found religion.”

lip laughed and bit his lip, “well, i am a romantic at heart.”

ron smiled and lip loved how easily they were able to become comfortable with one another. he’d never felt such a connection so quickly before.

it was as if....no. no way.

“i guess you are,” ron looked to lip’s mouth and bit his own lip, “so why do you teach what you teach? you don’t strike me as someone who could lecture on austen for his entire life.”

lip laughed softly, “are you kidding me? i could talk about jane austen for the rest of my life, teaching or not. to be able to describe love and affection and admiration so eloquently it was what first drew me into english and then teaching. and then in college i read jane eyre for the first time and i was absolutely in love. i knew i couldn’t possibly teach anything else. i’ve heard from a lot of other professors and colleagues that they think austen and brontë and shelley are overrated and outdated, but i don’t give a shit.”

he notice ron gradually lean closer, mirroring what lip did when ron was talking. that same passion in his eyes as when he was talking about poe. lip was transfixed.

he lowered his voice, and watched ron swallow heavily as he continued, “it’s my job as a professor to prove how wonderful and timeless these works are. they convey so much of the human condition and how powerful and devastating love can be. how, through trials and tribulations and heartbreaks and betrayal and lies can be overcome by three simple, but true, words. there are no more powerful words in any language than i love you. and austen and brontë completely capture that in a single novel.”

lip smiles shyly and blushes when ron says, “you’re incredible.”

they stare at one another a moment too long because nix clears his throat and when lip looked over he saw a wide, knowing smile.

“i see you two have finally met.”

lip smiled and looked from nix back to ron who hadn’t stopped staring at lip.

“yeah, we were just talking about why we chose to teach what we teach.” lip laughed and decided to try to get nix out of the longue as fast as possible, “why don’t you tell ron why exactly you got into teaching counterintelligence courses, nix?”

nix eye’s narrowed and he stormed out of the room with a middle finger pointed at lip.

lip just laughed until it died in his throat when he saw ron, still looking at him.

he smiled slyly, “you’ve been staring long enough, i’m inclined to believe you see something you like.”

ron smiled back and lip’s heart started racing again.

ron let out a small breath, “i do.”

lip braced himself, hoping he wasn’t being to forward, “do you want to have dinner sometime?”

ron let of a sigh of relief, “hell yes.”

lip smiled and dick popped his head around the corner, “guys the meeting is is going to start in twenty minutes.”

the both nodding, smiling.

dick moved to leave but then popped back in, “lip whatever you said to nix, please apologize. i can’t handle an entire meeting of his brooding.”

lip nodded, “sure.”

then both got up and started heading towards but lip stopped ron in the doorway.

“i have to admit i didn’t come in here to ask you out.”

ron frowned, but lip noticed the mischief in his eyes, “no? i’m heartbroken.”

lip laughed, “some of my students ask me t-”

ron sighed, “you wanna know if they're true or not, the stories about me?”

lip nodded lightly, “they do. they say it’s hard to concentrate and in a small, elite school like this, rumors fly.”

ron smiled, white teeth flashing against the fluorescent lights in the lounge, “did you ever notice with stories like that, everyone says they heard it from someone who was there. then when you ask that person, they say they heard it from someone who was there.”

ron sighed, like he was used to this question and having to explain himself. lip regretted bringing it up.

ron continued, softly, “it's nothing new, really. i bet if you went back two thousand years, you'd hear a couple centurions standing around yakkin' about how tertius lopped off the heads of some carthaginian prisoners.”

lip smiled and ron smiled back, “well, maybe they kept talking about it because they never heard tertius deny it.”

ron laughed, “maybe that's because tertius knew there was some value to the men thinking he was the meanest, toughest son of a bitch in the whole roman legion.”

lip was once again mesmerized by the man before him.

ron broke their eye contact, a little regretfully, and moved to leave. lip grabbed his arm lightly, needing to let ron know that he was needed and wanted by more than just him.

“ron?”

ron turned to look at first lip’s contact with his arm and then into his eyes.

“these boys aren't really concerned about the stories. they're just glad to have you as their professor. they're happy to have a good leader again.” lip smiled reassuringly.

ron placed his own hand over lip’s, and held tight. he took a deep breath and spoke softly, “well, from what I've heard, they've always had one. i've been told there's always been one man they could count on. led them through their midterms, held them together when they had the shit kicked out of them with term papers. every day, he kept their spirits up, kept the boys focused, gave 'em direction... all the things a good professor and leader does.”

lip looked at ron blankly, not sure where he was going with it or who he was talking about.

ron smiled, “you don't have any idea who i'm talking about, do you?”

lip gently shook his head, completely lost.

ron took a step closer, backing lip against the doorframe.

“hell, it was you, professor lipton. ever since winters made dean, you've been the leader of the boys of the english department. they love you lip. they never stop talking about you.” ron looked down shyly and then looked at lip through his lashes, “and after meeting you. i can absolutely see why.”

lip had no control as his pressed his lips softly against ron’s and fully deepening the kiss when ron gasped.

they heard a light clearing of someone’s throat and pulled apart reluctantly.

lip’s eyes widened when he saw gene roe, blushing furiously and looking nervous.

ron kissed him once more, chaste and simple, like he’d been doing it forever and god, lip never wanted to kiss anyone that wasn’t ron.

then ron headed towards the conference room and lip turned to roe.

“yeah roe, what’s up?”

“i-i uhm, i’m havin’ trouble with my thesis on jane eyre. i wanna write about rochester’s desperation, but i can’t get my thoughts straight.”

lip patted roe on the shoulder, and walked him through the steps of outlining and web thought mapping.

roe sighed in relief when it finally clicked in his head.

“thanks lip, i couldn’t get it all straight in my head.”

lip smiled, “it’s okay, you have to many great ideas roaming around in there, i can understand why.”

roe smiled shyly, “thanks.” roe went to walk away but turned around and leaned into lip and whispered, “by the way, i didn’t see anythin’.”

he winked and walked away. lip smiled and nodded in return.

lip didn’t even have to apologize to nix, ron talked to him before lip even got into the meeting.

nix slapped lip’s arm, “good luck on your date, lip.”

lip smiled and sat next to ron.

their hands were linked the entire meeting.

and for the first time in his life, lip felt like one of the characters in the novels he based his life on.

he felt like he was in love.

two years later

boston in the spring was perhaps lip’s favorite time of year and ron was certain that it was it the perfect time to marry the love of his life.

since the day they met, ron and lip had been inseparable. it didn’t help that they worked together. he’d lost count of how many people had discovered them making out, all hot and bothered, in various parts of the university. it had been a whirlwind of emotions, to say the least, for both of them. but it made it all the more real. they loved it all.

they loved the summer, teaching classes outside. letting the student feel the rhythm of the words on the page, the music of a story unfolding before them. they loved relaxing on the grass, hands entwined, grades papers with the other. it’s on an ordinary day, with lip laughing at luz’s paper on the patriarchy in jane eyre, that ron realizes he’s in love with lip.

they loved fall when they could walk through campus, leaves falling around them and changing colors before their eyes. lip catches a bright red one just as it’s about to fall on ron’s head. lip repeats a line from the masque of the red death, in a raspy voice, fingers creeping along ron’s chest, the trail of halloween sneaking up on them. and it’s on that cold autumn day, lip laughing softly at ron’s wides eyes. it’s on that cold autumn day, when ron first tells lip, he loves him.

they loved the winter, cuddled on the couch during cold, bleak nights when they would recite poetry and monologues to one another. where they could be away from the school for nearly a month and just be with one another on their own. it’s on a snowed in night, a fire blazing softly, whiskey warming them from the inside out, and their feet entangled on the couch, that their lives change. after an emotional rendition of annabel lee, ron crying out lines, voice wrecked, on his knees in front of lip, that ron proposes to lip with tears in his eyes. lip tackles him to the floor with a kiss that’s forever carved onto ron’s lips.

it only makes sense that they get married during spring. the time of year when lip’s favorite flowers were in bloom. where the scent of rain lingered for months. two years, to the day, since they first met. two hours after their favorite classes graduated, most of them sticking around for the graduate programs ron and lip now run entirely by themselves. their was a small gazebo on campus, just outside the lake and lip had chosen it because he and ron had met there the first time they read some of their favorite passages to one another. it was the place that lip realized he was absolutely and irrevocably in love with ron.

all of them are already in suits and luz and toye had ran around campus right after graduation, gather flowers for all of them. it was a small gazebo so the majority of the boys and faculty were around it, instead of in it.

beside lip stood luz and beside ron stood grant, both students who were now their teaching assistants and, if they were forced to tell the truth, their favorite students. not because they were smarter, better, or more likable. but lip and ron saw a kinship within them that reflected their own love and passion for their crafts.

buck was officiating, having gotten his license for dick and nix’s wedding.

the couple have prepared their own vows.

this was it.

ron hoped lip wasn’t mad or felt cheated, but no amount of words could convey everything he felt for lip. their love and his love for lip was more than he could ever sum up in a mere paragraph. if he had his way, he’d talk for years about his love for lip.

he looked deep into lip’s eyes, tears threatening to fall over and he spoke ten simple words that he hoped lip would understand.

he smiled and squeezed lip’s hands, “we loved with a love that was more than love.”

the entire group sighed and lip laughed warmly.

buck laughed, “lip?”

lip smiled, “sorry fellas.”

he pulled ron a little closer to him and entwined their fingers.

“you must allow me to tell you how ardently i admire and love you.”

ron smiled, tears finally mirroring lip’s and falling down his cheeks.

they exchange rings quickly and before he knew it, lip was in ron’s arms being kissed within an inch of his life.

they pulled apart with large cheers and hollers.

“i love you, ron.”

ron laughed against lip’s mouth, “i love you too, mr. darcy.”

lips slapped him and the two accepted a lot of hugs from the men they had the pleasure of calling their family.

and they’d never felt happier or more complete than in each other’s arms as husbands.

anonymous - thank you!!!!!!!!! i love love love this.

send me a pairing and an au and i’ll make an aesthetic post + ficlet

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5hfanfiction · 7 years

Text

Parting Shot: Episode 2 - A Mighty Harmonist

Camila

She was all I had. Every weekend morning without fail, she would wake up long before I did and cast some sort of magic spell that made eggs appear in the kitchen. The house would start to warm up, sun rising and the scent of breakfast crawling along the ceiling before wafting down the hall. Disoriented and still tired, I managed to fumble down the hallway and find her tending to the stove in the attire she slept in every night. Pant-free and in an oversized white tank-top, Lauren never seemed as laid back as she did on weekend mornings.

The scent of fresh coffee hit me, already dappled with the half-and-half that always seemed to be stocked in the fridge and Lauren’s homemade vanilla flavoured sugar. “It’s Saturday.” I managed to whine, leaning on the side of the fridge. “This is one out of the only two days of the week where you can sleep in purposefully rather than because you hate first period. Why do you have to get up so early?”

Without responding, she turned around with a spatula in one hand and the handle of a burning pan in the other. Whatever was inside moved to a plate on the counter, a long string of steam rising with it. “You complain without fail every single weekend.” She held the plate to me in one hand, the other running idly through her deep black hair. Sitting in the middle of the plate were two aesthetically pleasing fried eggs. “Then you turn around and eat like you’ve been starving for days.”  

“You’re the best Lauren Jauregui.” I grinned, taking the plate and stalking past her to the kitchen table. Food had always tasted a million times better when someone else was behind it, and I made the fact known to her with a chorus of approving noises followed by the wolfing down of both eggs in a matter of seconds. She joined me in the seat opposite, not before setting an unpeeled banana and fresh cup of coffee next to my plate.

I knew only what I needed to about Lauren. I knew she had the bravery to pull over to the side of the road on a fatefully dark night and roll her window down to grab my attention. She had the bravery to unlock her passenger seat door, get out herself and haul the two bags I was dragging through the rain into the backseat of her car. Most important to me - she had the bravery to withhold any questions, hold back all judgement and simply drive with a soaking wet, deeply bruised stranger curled in the front seat.

Lauren hadn’t touched her own coffee, seemingly content with sitting at the other side of the table with her chin balanced on her folded arms. There was a small sliding glass window embedded above the kitchen table, and as every morning, when the sun rose it’s light streamed directly through it and pooled around her. Lauren’s eyes had always been brighter during the day, my own darker at night.

“Record time.” She mumbled, nodding at the empty plate with her lips pursed in a knowing smirk. “Can I make some more?”  

“Let me do it.” I stood, setting the empty plate down on the vacant counter-space and fishing through the fridge for the carton of raw eggs. Lauren hadn’t replied, leading me to glance over my shoulder and see she had turned her head to the side and was watching me with amusement flickering in her eyes. “What?” I straightened, the fridge door slowly suctioning closed. “What’s so funny?”

“No nothing, it’s just that I know you’re going to find a way to screw this up.” She laughed, tone light and teasing. “The eggs are on the inside of the fridge door, not on the shelves.“

The carton was unbalanced, six eggs sitting on the far left, and none on the right. After clumsily setting them down, I upturned the lid and carefully cracked two more into the warm pan. "So what’s happening today?” I asked, re-igniting the gas stove and watching as the artificial blue flame folded to life. “Are we doing anything exciting?”

Lauren had her eyes fixated on the pan. In a world of stark abnormalities and constant chaos, she was a wave of relief for me. A breath of fresh air thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface for a creature who just didn’t belong there. I waited for a response, using a plastic spatula to gently nudge the eggs around the heat and watching the clear, colourless centre slowly turn an opaque white.

“I don’t know.” Her reply was monotonous. “Judging by the number of eggs in the carton I’d say we need to take a trip to the grocery store. Then I’ve got a paper to write for third period psychology, so I’m going to have to drop by the library and do some old fashioned book research.”

“Why?” I gave the eggs a moment more before transferring them both to my plate. “Book research was only a thing back when women wore hoop skirts and could’t vote. Society invented the internet for a reason you know.”  

Lauren’s eyes followed the food until it landed in front of her, a fork and napkin at it’s side. “She wants a print based bibliography.“ She clarified, licking her lips eagerly. "No web sources allowed.”

“And does she know that society invented internet for a reason?”

“Apparently not as well as you do.” Lauren had a bad habit of talking and chewing at the same time, which to most would be worthy of scolding. To me it had always come off as charming, her stone cold facade sometimes adapting a childish sparkle that so many else lacked. I sat down on the other side of the table, resting my chin in my palm to watch her eat. “You’ll come with me right?”

“I love going to the library.” I nodded, leaning forward to drag my chair further towards the table. “I wish Cecily would let me go into the back room and poke around the new arrivals, but I guess that’s just me hoping against hope.”

Lauren looked up briefly. “Maybe she’s just frustrated that you’ve exhausted their resources Belle.” She teased, the light in her eyes flickering. “You can’t wholeheartedly believe a woman named Cecily Gunnderman has even a single patient bone in her body when it comes to the yearning members of Gen Y.” I folded my self against the table, looking stoically at her half-empty plate. Lauren had a good point. I had been fostering a reputation of being a particularly pesky member of the technologically heightened generation.

“Maybe if she got herself a Mr. Gunnderman, she can untwist her lace-lined granny panties and cut loose for once.” I stood up, taking Lauren’s plate from her and setting it in the sink. A steady stream of cold water did good to wash the sticky egg yolk off the centre of the plate. “Then maybe I could get back there and soak up all the Ernest Hemmingway and Edgar Allan Poe I can before she turns into a widow again.”

Lauren was on her feet, her hand resting lightly on my hip as she moved to linger just behind me. “You know, sometimes you’re my charming princess who skips through a french village with a book in her hand, and other times you turn into the pure evil concentrate that comes out of those green vents from the Lion King.” She patted me gently, then turned back to the fridge.

I rolled my eyes, keeping my back to her. “I’m just saying Lauren, love does wonders. At least it would for the three quarters of this town who spend their evenings sulking by the Harry Potter themed coffee shop downtown.”

“Hey don’t say that, you love Expresso Patronum. You even bought one of their mugs the last time we went.” She paused. “Besides, how would you know the wonders love does? You’ve never been in it.”

The gentle scrape of my plastic spatula on the used frying pan filled the silence while I put together a reply. Lauren seemed taken aback by my hesitation, and migrated to lean against the counter again. “You’ve never been in it… right Camz?” She asked, looking up with nudge to my side with her elbow. I couldn’t help but curl up, emanating an unintentional giggle from the contact.

“Right.” I nodded, meeting her glance for a moment with a soft smile. It was the truth, plain and without any veils. Lauren seemed satisfied, straightening up and leaving a quick kiss on the side of my head before returning to the bedroom. I abandoned the dishes a few seconds later and opted instead to peel my banana at the kitchen table and take a happy bite. Our relationship was one of platonic intimacy. Most nights, there was nothing I wanted more than to curl up with her, have a deep conversation or simply snuggle in silence.

Polishing off my banana, I left the peel on the table before starting down the hallway. When Lauren and I had met, we were both lying deep against the bottom of the ocean. We were trapped, encircled by the grape-sized amoebas and fragile coral that needed no sustenance. It was the darkness that made our relationship so seamless, the only place on the earth where the sun was unable to nourish and the moon unable to guide. We no longer had either in our lives, and were forced to become them for each other.

“Here.” Lauren was standing in the centre of the room, her arm extended and laptop balanced on her palm. She had changed from her lazy morning attire into a pair of black jeans and grey long sleeve shirt with a low v-neck. The neutral colours looked perfect on her, jet black hair visibly silky and parted elegantly to the side. “You’ll need this so you don’t spend the entire day annoying the hell out of Lauren when she’s trying to read.”

Taking the machine with a nod, I tucked it into my bag and coiled up the white charger at it’s side. I felt a nudge to the small of my back, angling my body to see her blinking at me with the most curious expression on her face. “That’s the first time you haven’t laughed at my joke Camz, no matter how many times I make it.” She reached out, placing a hand on my shoulder to turn me around. “Are you okay?”

“Brain fog from the weed last night.” I shrugged, doing my best to grant her a smile. It wasn’t complete lie. Most of my high-hangovers consisted of heavy fatigue and serious dehydration, neither of which were aided by the early rising to eggs and her delicious coffee. While Lauren sat and watched from the bed, I quickly swapped my pyjamas for a tank top and jean shorts before lifting my laptop bag’s canvas strap over my shoulder. “Okay, I’m ready.”  

“That’s what you’re going to wear?” Lauren sat forward, smiling sweetly. “It’s the middle of the fall Camz, you don’t think you’re going to end up getting cold?”

“I might.” I turned in the mirror to get a proper look at my butt. “But it’s not like we’re going to be outside for very long, right?”

Lauren sighed playfully, hauling herself up and vanishing down the hall. The jingling of keys followed, then the sound of the garbage can’s lid being opened and shut. I smiled in the mirror at the realization that she had found my banana peel.

The town library was a few minutes by bike from our house. It had been a year or two since we’d committed to keeping Lauren’s 2005 Ford Taurus tucked away in our locked garage for as long as we could. Gas wasn’t cheap, and becoming less so by the day, whereas two bikes that I had flirt my way into getting from the local cycle shop did the job with flying colours.

“Keep up!” Lauren called over her shoulder, white earbuds flying in the wind as she flashed a wide grin at me. The roads in the early morning were virtually empty, the residents of a dying town typically tucked away in their beds until mid-morning and then again only hours after an early dinner. I wedged my hand into the pocket of my shorts to crank up the volume on the music in my own ears, letting the underlying beat propel me forward.

The building itself wasn’t particularly special. A stone structure, towering four floors up and beveled with concrete ledges and cutouts to give it a very old-fashioned, high class feel. Foxcastle didn’t pride itself on architecture, the weather often dreary and grey to the point where most standing establishments looked the same. It was because of this that the library was a hot-spot for visiting relatives and curious by-passers, boasting an impressive stash of literary genius. I screeched to a halt by the racks, swiftly hopping off my bike and shooting Lauren an apologetic smile for the tangle of limbs we easily could have become if not for my brakes.

“Ah, hello ladies. I figured I would see you two pass through here this weekend.” Cecily Gunnderman, the town’s resident crazy lady was seated at her post behind the front desk. I couldn’t help the shiver that crawled up the back of my neck when I laid eyes on her, for not only was the woman withered with age, but it was well known that she had outlived a number of husbands. There was even rumour she retained her maiden name from the beginning for anticipation of just that. In front of me, Lauren was unfazed as ever.

“A research paper a day keeps the doctor away, right?” Lauren had the front half of her body leaned across the desk as she plucked a string-attached pen from it’s base and wrote our names down on the wrinkled sheet of chart paper. “How are you this morning Mrs. Gunnderman?”

“Very well dear, thank you.” The woman’s back was pin straight, hair tied back into a tight bun. Her glassy blue eyes shifted to me, and she dipped her chin down politely. “And Camila. I see the two of you are just as attached by the hip as ever.”

“A Cabello a day keeps the doctor away, right?” I rhymed, granting the elderly woman a sweet smile and stepping forward to wrap my arm around Lauren’s waist. “She loves me.”

Cecily lifted a light eyebrow. “I’m sure she does.” The woman nodded to Lauren, who finished marking our names down. “Simply because of how loveable you are, Ms. Cabello.”

I decided to ignore the deep sarcastic undertone to the woman’s voice and lean against my friend’s shoulder with a giant grin. Lauren’s head turned to me, the kind smile on her face suddenly making any kind of criticism okay, even if it came from a cynical old woman. “I’ll make sure she behaves.” The black haired girl then nodded across the desk. “No shelf climbing, no ordering pizza to the front door.” She looked at me once more, dipping her chin down. “And no prank calls to the manager’s office.”

“You’re a good kid Lauren.” Cecily nodded again, withered lips turning up just a hint. I had concluded that Lauren Jauregui was Foxcastle’s only citizen who managed to make the old bat smile. She took me by the hand, and the two of us ventured up to the fourth floor common area.

Like the roads, the populous of the library was loose and sparse at the very best. The two of us found a comfortable space near the corner of the room, blocked in by a series of shelves and sitting beneath a perfectly circular patch of sunlight. While Lauren set her belongings down and dipped off to scan the alphabetical shelves, I pulled out my own silver laptop and powered it up.

Days at the library was admittedly some of my favourite. There didn’t need to be any kind of conversation between us, no sort of words exchanged to pick up on small subtleties and shifts in mood. When Lauren was frustrated, her shoulders would tense up and the muscles in her upper arms would flex inadvertently. When she was bored, her bottom lip would become trapped within her top teeth as a means of remaining awake. My very favourite was when the green eyed goddess would prove satisfied in her progress, and one eyebrow became lifted in a pseudo-sultry gaze that was meant only for the screen before her.

A few minutes later, Lauren had returned with a armful of books. Most were hardcover journals, stuffed full of articles and studies based on psychology in the literature, while one or two were smaller, soft poetry pieces. One in particular landed at my side, the cover featuring a spectrum of pale blue mountains fronted by a white serif font. William Wordsworth The letters read. A Complete Book of Poems: Volume 1.

“What’s this?” I questioned, peeling back the front cover to reveal a long list of contents. The pages were worn, smelling strongly of the antique, dusty aura that most of the library’s old works retained. Lauren moved her chair over to me, the shift in air cloaking us both in the scent of her flowery vanilla perfume.

“Are you going to work on your demon story from last night?” She asked, leaning forward upon the desk to stare down at the table of contents with me. “If you wanted something new, I have an idea.”  

I pondered the question for a few beats. Lauren’s ideas were often gold, whether she was the one creating the realities, or giving the prompts it never seemed to matter. Letting her proceed, I angled myself back to let her find the poem she wanted down the list and flip to the page. Lauren gestured for me to lean forward, and I did so just in time to see the title of the page pop out in stark black lettering. ”On the Power of Sound” I read softly, not wanting to disturb the few people around us. “Lauren, you know I’m no good at analyzing poetry.”

“I’m not asking you to analyze anything.” A playful amusement was evident in her voice. “I’m not an English teacher Camz, not yet at least.”

“Oh— okay.” Looking back at the page, I gave her a shy nod to continue.

“Take one of the stanzas from the poem, any stanza. Write based on one line in that stanza, but don’t go any further than that.” Lauren pressed her weight against my arm. “Take the line and bring it to life independent of the poem’s message.”

“What’s the poem’s message?” I scanned the title a few times. “On the Power of Sound.”

“Just that.” She didn’t need to consider her answer; Lauren’s speed with literature continued to astound me. “Wordsworth was known best during the era of the romantics. He believed that poetry in itself should be simple and sincere, easy to understand like the language that everyday people use. The man was one of the first to insist poetry should be freed from all the “conceits” and “inane phraseology”. The message of the poem is exactly what the title says. And whispers for the heart, their slave; and shrieks, that revel in abuse. Of shivering flesh and warbled air.

I could see the images as she spoke, the round and mature tone to her voice painted an active photo that my own could never manage to. Lauren backed away from me, sliding her chair and herself back to the adjacent side of the table where her laptop was blinking with inactivity.

That Ocean is a mighty harmonist. The line sat on the eleventh line of the twelfth stanza. After reading the six letters over again a few times, I pushed my chair back and ventured into the forest of bookshelves. I didn’t need to turn back to know Lauren’s eyes were on me, and took her curiosity as a compliment. “Wordsworth capitalized a noun.” I murmured to myself, peering up and down the spines until I found what I was looking for. “He wanted to make it seem like the ocean was something worth emphasizing. Something worth saving. A harmonist is one who brings together worlds of nature, science and spirituality… who unites two notes together in song.”

Oceanography. I brought the large, blue-spined encyclopedia back to the table and set it down with a dull thump. Lauren didn’t look up at the sound, but her eyes flitted up mid-type. The book was aged, featuring a orange-white clownfish on the cover slinking through off-white coral. It wasn’t the information I was seeking, but the glossy photographs that dappled nearly every page.

The idea in my head began to take form. Crion 81J, a planet distant from our own is composed of nothing but sparse islands and surrounding water. It’s an ocean planet, the physiology of which forces creatures to adapt, birds learning how to swim for miles and fish developing wings to escape surface predators. I flipped to a photograph of a turtle, taking my pencil and copying an image of it down to the yellow legal pad before me.

In a world where we cannot find a way to unite those who tip the balance, the ocean is the mightiest harmonist. I wrote. The humans who live on this planet do so only on the islands, harmonizing with the finite resources that Crion 81J gives them while needing no more and no less.

There was a story locked away in Wordsworth’s line, it was only a matter of finding the key. The last thing I wanted was for Lauren to turn and uncover it for me, yet she proceeded to anyway.

“I like it.” The girl smiled. “Even on our planet, something as precious as the ocean is worth saving. Maybe the strongest force on the earth has the power to bring humans together, just as it does to connect one nation to another.”

Before I could open my mouth to agree, Lauren arched over my arm and took her black pen to the yellow paper. A story about an environmentalist that takes place on a small island amidst an ocean planet. The future of peacemaking is a major part of the plot, and it ends with a victorious celebration.

I scanned the lines, the last in particular sparking my amusement. “You always like a happy ending, don’t you Lauren?” I whispered, tilting my head against her upper arm. A gentle vibration against my cheek followed as she wrote.

“Always.” Lauren acknowledged, her tone of voice equally as soft as not to disturb those around us. I was left with the fragmented idea once again, and leaned over to fill out the prompt.

Paul Abbey Lowell I wrote, letting the words flow as they did. A drowning incident orphans him at the age of six, and he spends his mid-pubescent years loathing the water. Love flips his views upside-down, turning a young adult Lowell into a socialist, anarchist and atheist who advocates not only for the preservation of the ocean, but all it’s life. When a sea-faring war breaks out among islands, the future of the ocean world is threatened, and Lowell fights to preserve not only his home, but peace for the taker of his parents.

I sat back, looking at the handwritten passage with a small smile. A story was about forgiveness and retribution, and a statement on how important it is to preserve the things that give us life. I slid the legal yellow pad over to Lauren, who had a pen trapped between her teeth and was studying a book that boasted ridiculously small font. “The victorious celebration.” She whispered, sliding it back to me. Brow furrowing, I swiped up my pen again and started to scribble down some more notes.

The relationship Lowell grew over this time alone is put at stake, his love taken away just as his parents were. I scratched down, sitting up straight and rolling my shoulders back. Lauren didn’t seem to take notice of my hesitation, and in one fell swoop and grabbed the pad of paper and started through the library.

Behind the front desk, Cecily Gunnderman hadn’t moved from her post. People were feeding in and out of the building, most of which were parents and young children taking advantage of the day off. Approaching the desk, I planted my paper down before her with a bold smile.

“Can I help you Ms. Cabello?” The woman’s icy blue gaze shifted to me.

“How do you cope with losing people you love?” I asked, sitting down in the stool opposite her and tapping the end of my pen against the paper.

“Excuse me?”  

“You’ve lost multiple men whom you clearly cared about, at least enough to marry.” I continued without hesitation. The woman had two wedding bands on her ring finger, and that didn’t include the ones that likely sat tucked away in a velvet jewelry box. There was quite literally nothing to lose from partaking in the conversation on my end. “How did you cope that with? Did it change who you were?”

Cecily exhaled, her gaze narrowing to slits. “There is one thing that changes us more than losing those we love.” She replied, looking down at my paper and scanning the paragraph I had previously written. “And that’s gaining them.”

I sat up a little straighter.

“Love is the strongest force.” She continued. “Gaining and losing it is only the course of life. Every man who has lived and died in my arms has contributed to the person I shall die as. Have the losses saddened me? Yes. Have they changed me? Yes. But did I have to cope with them? No. The loss of love and loss of life went hand in hand, so only coping with one followed through to coping with the other.”

“So you believe something as powerful as love sits at the centre of everyone?” I watched her elderly features shift as I spoke.

“I believe the centre of everyone depends only on who you are.” Cecily replied, un-moving and seemingly unable to smile. “Not who I am, not who this protagonist of your story is, but who you are Camila Cabello.”

I swallowed, nervously taking the pad of paper back with a soft expression of gratitude. Back at the table, I was able to finish the beginning of Lauren’s prompt with little struggle.

Lowell discovers that the love he gains and loses matters little, the peace he fights for becomes the victory he is able to celebrate.” I continued. “For some, peace and love go hand in hand, for others, the sacrifice of one means the prevalence of the other.”

Lauren had looked up from her work, cloaking me in the realization that I had been openly speaking as I wrote. She inevitably slid herself out of the sunlight patch and over to me again, sidling up to read what I had progressed with.

“What would you call the book?” She asked, the light in her eyes settling a warm comfort over my shoulders.

“A Mighty Harmonist.” I replied, holding my breath and awaiting her approval. She gave it a moment later, signifying her satisfaction with a sweet nod.

Love was an emotion that I thought about often, yet remained just that. An emotion. It wasn’t a yearning, nor a desire to experience something as profound as romantic feelings towards any one person. Looking at Lauren however, that desire found a way to change. I thought often about the person who would end up loving her. I had no idea who they were, yet pondered constantly at what kind of person they would turn out to be, how they were going to slot into our lives, and whether I would end up back where I began. I had no desire to be lost and alone again.

“Camz.” Lauren’s voice startled me.

“Sorry?”

“I said I liked that title.” She repeated, the corner of her mouth turned up in a small smile. “I like that you took the line straight from the poem, most authors would try to beat around the bush and make their readers think.”

I nodded slowly. “You said that Wordsworth was a man who enjoyed writing words for what they were. Breaking the barriers of inane phraseology so men intelligent and unintelligent alike can understand great literature.”

Lauren laughed softly. “Camz, I think any man who took the time to study great literature can be marked as intelligent.”

“Why’s that?”

The yellow pad of paper angled towards her shifted back to me. “Intelligence is a mark of what you aspire to achieve, not your achievements in the past.” She clarified. “This is a wonderful idea, you definitely have potential to master the science fiction genre, genius.”

I dipped my chin down, fighting the blush that would inadvertently rise in my cheeks each time she complimented me. Lauren didn’t seem to acknowledge it, setting the pen back against my page before returning to her own laptop. Taking the prompt from the pad of paper to the screen of my laptop, I spent the rest of the afternoon bringing it to life.

“You’ve been writing about love a lot recently Camz.” Lauren commented as we bid farewell to Cecily at the front desk and returned to our bikes. “Any reason why?”

“Because love gives you answers.” I replied, pulling these strap of my canvas bag up higher on my shoulder. “Love is everything. It consumes us, and consumes literature. It makes money, it stimulates emotion, it makes us laugh and cry—“

“Camz.” Lauren placed her hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” I shrugged back. “Why?”

“Why?” Lauren lifted her eyebrows. “Because after you complete a prompt, you always seem so satisfied. Right now it seems like you’ve lost your life savings over one night in Vegas.”

The ocean in which we hovered had always been dark, and it was that darkness which led me to fear what would end up changing everything. Who would change everything.

“Would love ever change your mind Lauren?” I asked, the words etched onto my legal pad burning a hole through the shoulder-bag. “About me?”

Her green eyes held my gaze for a moment longer, grip on my shoulder tightening.

“About you Camila?” She shook her head, lips turning into a smile that could one day make millions. “Never. I’ve made my choice.”

***

A/N: Hi, so I’m going to put in a little bit of story background here, which I really should have done in the first chapter but better late than never I guess. Typically this is something I would let the readers discover on their own, but I think it would be beneficial for people to be aware of this as they get to know these two very interesting protagonists.

I’m giving Lauren’s character two distinct traits: Mirror-touch synesthesia, which is the ability of an individual to feel the same sensation of touch as someone else. For Lauren, it’s going to be linked heavily with the sensations of trust and empathy. She’s also got a condition called hyperalgesia, which is the higher than normal sensitivity to pain, typically in undamaged tissue.

Camila is going to have Dissociative Identity Disorder, and one confirmed alter who will play a significant role in the future. We don’t know a terribly large amount about the disorder itself, and by no means is her character going to be 100% accurate based on what we do know, but it should be interesting. You see a lot of writing about themes like depression, anxiety, self-harm, drug addictions and eating disorders, and less about the more "B-list” psychological abnormalities.

I’m basically going at this blind. I have no pre-written chapters, no overarching message, no outlines or writing prompts. All I have is two dynamic characters and a gloomy little town that just screams Netflix drama. What I do know for sure is that every chapter is going to feature a made up story idea and a skeleton concept for a book to go with it. The “chapter” titles will double as the title to that theoretical piece of writing.

Thank you for reading. :)

~rory (wattpad/tumblr)

#UPDATE #series #AU #slash #camren #angst drama #submission #Parting Shot

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kraytclaw · 7 years

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The beginning of an aspiration

Description: The beginning will always seem hard no matter in what field you want to succeed. All that matters is for you to believe in yourself and always move forward.

Word count: 1,311 words Warnings: Description of a murdered (? if that is even a warning)

Inspiration & Disclaimer: I was inspired by both Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and A Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (the latter being my main focus)

Notes: This was actually an assignment for school but I thought it to be nice enough to share (: Please don’t hate for any mistakes. English is not my first language. (:

~Claudia

—————————————————————————–

It’s quite easy to think that a successful person got to that stage over night. Many believe that. And even though in some cases it might be true, those cases usually never last more than a few days. To make yourself known and respected takes time and effort.

There is no exception for me either. I didn’t achieve my dream over-night. It took me years full of hard work, of failures and of people laughing in my faces, yet fate didn’t disappoint me and got me where I wanted to be ever since I read my first whole book. I was quite young, no more than ten years old, when I held in my small pale hands a leather bound book that was roughly as big as my head. Up until then, I had only read small paragraphs from famous books and newspapers, and those with the help of my mother. But that book was the first I had read all by myself without help from foreign sources. It is true that I didn’t understand most of the words, but I managed to get a hold of the action and kind of grasp it’s meaning. Why do I tell you all of this, you may ask? Well, that book, ‘The adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was the book that shaped my whole life and inspired me to become what I am today, a consulting detective.

But this is not why you are all here. You all want to know about my first ever case. Though, to learn about ones path you must first learn ones beginning.

It was late autumn to early winter when it all began. I was assigned from Scotland Yard to a police department from a small town near London. Since I was fresh out of school, my only achievement being the neat, three feet pile of reports that I had to check for spelling mistakes, the chief said I should gather some more experience on the field. Therefore, he sent me somewhere I couldn’t cause too much damage. Truth be told, I was quite known for my deduction abilities that I acquired in ten years time, but with all that, may it be jealousy or simply me being the new man, they trusted none of the words coming out of my mouth regarding any case.

So there I was, at three o’clock in the morning trying to keep my eyelids from shutting once and for all, while waiting anxiously for my night-shift to be over. There was not much to do in that town, especially at night, which was why, I guess, they gave me the night-shift in the first place. Yet I was not going to complain. I was determined to make a good impression, to prove everyone that I was professional and trust worthy, which, I now believe it to be a little hard considering that my head was almost lying flat on the desk in front of me. And observe that I said ‘almost’ because the only thing that still held it in the air was my hand.

The next half an hour is awfully blurry in my memory, partially thanks to my sleepy state that my colleagues found me into. All I remember is them telling me that someone reported a shriek a few hours ago and that we were supposed to investigate. The next thing I know, we were in front an old house on a poorly lit street. There is absolutely no point in describing it in to too much detail since you could already tell and old person was living inside just from glancing at its outside.

My colleagues knocked on the door and to my surprise, a fairly young man opened it, quite fast I might add giving the hour. He was tall, but a few inches shorter than myself with dark blond hair, that in the dim light seemed almost dark brown.

He bade us welcome with a big smile on his face, a smile way to big for someone who was woken at four o’clock in the morning with the police at his door. He explained us that the old man living with him was absent from the country and the shriek that was heard by the neighbours was his in a dream. For the untrained eye and ear, that seemed like the perfect lie, but not for me. Something wasn’t right about that man. He granted us permission to search the house, he even told us to ‘Search well.’, and I did exactly that, only not to the meaning of his words. I let the other two officers search the house bit by bit, while I pretended to do as well only to actually observe the man. The way he encouraged us to search his house was almost as if he was proud of himself, as if he wanted to prove to himself he was better than us. His smile never flattered once from his thin pale lips. I tried to find something about him, something that could answer my main question: was he a suspect, or not?

At last, I have found what I was searching for. His eyes. His dark eyes that reflected the dim light in such a way that they seemed to shine on their own. Gleam with and unspoken madness. The way they moved anxiously around the room but always stopping on the same place on the wooden floor was another clue added to my list. On closer and careful look, I noticed the small tremble in his hands. It was too small to be a medical condition yet too harsh to seem normal. Was it excitement or anxiety? I believed it to be both, for the smile on his face was one of accomplishment.

After we finished searching, he brought us some chairs and we all sat in the same room chatting. Half of my mind was concentrating to my colleagues’ conversation while the other half was alert, my eyes peering form time to time at our host, almost as if I was expecting him to make the wrong move. At some point his behavior changed drastically just as I expected (or more like hoping, though I would never admit it out loud). His face became paler and his voice higher and louder, as if he was trying to cover something up. His hands were balled up into fists and full on shaking. He was grinding his yellow teeth with his brows furrowed and his eyes tightly shut that for a second there I could have sworn he was in great pain. There was no doubt. This man was not only guilty of something (possibly even murder) but he was also mad. His eyes screamed madness, while his voice showed the presence of a completely different person.

At last he stood up form the chair in rage, shouting profanities. And only now was his true form showed to the world. A form of true of psychosis and lunacy all combined in one body.

‘Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed!- tear up the planks! Here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!’ he shrieked and curled into a ball on the wooden ground.

What happened to him after, I do not remember. Needless to say no one believed me when I told them how I knew he was not what it seemed from the start. But that didn’t discouraged me to continue on my path. On the contrary! It made me work even harder until, one day, I was able to prove them what I was truly capable of and finally gain their respect.

I still remember this case, as my first ever case when not only have I met death in the face, but when I realized what the word maniac truly meant.

#sherlock #holmes #edgar alan poe #crime #mystery #detective #story #fanfic #it was just homework #sir arthur conan doyle #my writing

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d-and-s-are-bord-blog · 4 years

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NIGHTMARE ALLEY [1947]

WATCH ONLINE >> Nightmare Alley [1947] www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=F9A4C226B31C2373 ****

Nightmare Alley [1947] @ American Film Institute Production Date: 19 May–late Jul 1947; addl scenes early Oct 1947 Premiere Information: New York opening: 9 Oct 1947 >> DETAILED NOTES SECTION >> EXTENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY www.afi.com/members/catalog/DetailView.aspx?s=&Movie=… *************************************************************************************

NIGHTMARE ALLEY By WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM New York: Rinehart, 1946 MOVIE Tie-In Edition: Triangle Books, 1947 N.Y.: Signet Books, 1949 #738 – Cover By James Avati N.Y.R.B.: 2110

*ALL* Editions – Including KINDLE www.amazon.com/Nightmare-Alley-William-Lindsay-Gresham/dp… AND www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Gresham&tn=… AND www.goodreads.com/book/show/548019.Nightmare_Alley *************

MOVIE Tie-In Edition: Triangle Books, 1947 www.amazon.com/Nightmare-alley-William-Lindsay-Gresham/dp… ****

NEW Edition (New York Review Books, 2110): Nightmare Alley By William Lindsay Gresham, introduction by Nick Tosches – *Links* to buy www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/nightmare-alley/ AND www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781590173480 ****

Cult classic ‘Nightmare Alley’ resurfaces more macabre than ever Baltimore-born writer William Lindsay Gresham could be seen as an heir to Edgar Allan Poe By Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun – [email protected] articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-04-16/services/bs-ae-night…

" It’s time for Baltimore to claim William Lindsay Gresham as one of the city’s literary native sons and a proper heir to Edgar Allan Poe — and not just because he was born here in 1909. He fits the funk-art aspect of this town as well as James M. Cain or John Waters…

…"Nightmare Alley" is about a geek — but the word means something vastly different in the carnival of this novel than it does in teen comedies, where it serves as a synonym for "nerd. " For the denizens of Gresham’s not-so-greatest show on earth, the geek is, in Tosches’ words, "a drunkard driven so low that he would bite the heads off chickens and snakes just to get the booze he needed."

Gresham first heard about this kind of geek when he was 29 years old, waiting to return to the U.S. after defending the Republic in the Spanish civil war. The story connected so deeply with Gresham’s internal agony that he said, "to get rid of it, I had to write it out."…

He later described the novel’s gestation as "years of analysis, editorial work, and the strain of children in small rooms." He alleviated anxieties with liquor — and became an alcoholic. In the middle of this chaos, he wrote a fictional chart of the lowest depths of drunkenness that also included, in Tosches’ estimation, "the most viciously evil psychologist in the history of literature." Along the way, Gresham managed to debunk feel-good spiritualism and pseudo-paranormal trickery. But the book isn’t an Upton Sinclair-like expose. It’s a lowdown American tragedy…

Tosches, who has been researching Gresham’s life on and off for ten years, says over the phone from New York that he’s clearer on the novel’s roots than he is on Gresham’s. He hasn’t located a marriage certificate for Gresham’s mother and father, "and the Maryland State Archives has stated categorically there isn’t one for them." He knows Gresham was born on McCulloh Street and that his family moved to Fall River, Mass., when he was 7, and then to New York City. "But even though he left Baltimore at an early age, he claimed that the strongest influence on his life was his mother’s mother, Amanda, whose family, the Lindsays, came from Snow Hill, and who embodied, at least to him, the spirit of the antebellum South," says Tosches. (The Greshams came from the Piney Neck area of Kent County.)..

Everything in the book emerges from observation and authentic obsession. "He had a wonderfully perverse mind," recalls his last agent, the legendary Carl Brandt. "I remember with great fondness and amusement that he took me out to lunch once with the Witch Doctor’s Club, a group of magicians who would meet, as I remember, monthly, in a hardly glamorous restaurant." Brandt’s father had been Gresham’s magazine agent, and Brandt thinks the drying-up of the once-lucrative magazine-fiction market partly contributed to Gresham’s growing despair.

In the end, Gresham shared Stan Carlisle’s nightmare vision of life as a dark alley, "the buildings vacant and menacing on either side," and a light he couldn’t reach at the end of it, with "something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling." Tosches found "a bizarre letter" Gresham wrote a few years before his suicide. "In it he wrote: ‘Stan is the author.’ "… articles.baltimoresun.com/2010-04-16/services/bs-ae-night… ****

REVIEW By Michael Dirda @ washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/…

" While I’ve known for a long time that William Lindsay Gresham’s "Nightmare Alley" (1946) was an established classic of noir fiction, I was utterly unprepared for its raw, Dostoevskian power. Why isn’t this book on reading lists with Nathanael West’s "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Albert Camus’ "The Stranger"? It’s not often that a novel leaves a weathered and jaded reviewer like myself utterly flattened, but this one did…

In the opening pages, set in the dilapidated Ten-in-One "carny," handsome blond Stan Carlisle stares at a geek, a supposed wild man who bites the heads off live chickens and drinks their blood. Stan, we soon learn, has been working as a magician and sleight-of-hand artist, but he’s got dreams about the big time…

Throughout these early pages, the carny atmosphere is redolent of sweat, dust, alcohol and pent-up desire. While sex in "Nightmare Alley" is never graphically described, it is always strikingly perverse or distinctly sadomasochistic…

Like many good artists (and con artists), Gresham isn’t locked into a single style: He can swiftly modulate from the colorfully vulgar conversation of the carnies to their smooth, stage-show patter, from the professional lingo of sheriffs, psychologists and wealthy businessmen to a drunk’s hallucinatory stream of consciousness…

Gresham lived a colorful if troubled life. According to the biographical note to this edition, he "lost himself in a maze of what proved to be dead-ends for him, from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism." All these contribute to the earthy richness of "Nightmare Alley." ..

Certainly, Gresham’s book chronicles a truly horrific descent into the abyss. Yet it’s more than just a steamy noir classic. As a portrait of the human condition, "Nightmare Alley" is a creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece…" www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/…

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The Book You Have to Read: “Nightmare Alley,” by William Lindsay Gresham The Rap Sheet

" If noir is the stuff of nightmares–you know what I mean, the kind in which (according to the popular conference definition of the genre) you’re fucked from page one–then a one-off, nearly forgotten classic called Nightmare Alley is surely the biggest freak show of them all…

…Gresham’s book is sumptuous, rich, redolent, and literary. Fused with a classically tragic structure, the plot and characters roil and roll in your head, guests who will never leave. In some ways, it’s a bitter, cynical take on the Horatio Alger myth, a commentary on the Americans America left behind…

…In 1947, Nightmare Alley was fortunate enough to be made into one of the greatest of all film noirs. Starring a terrific Tyrone Power (if you don’t think he could act, you’re in for a surprise) and a strong supporting cast which included the lovely ingénue Colleen Gray, Joan Blondell, and noir stalwarts Mike Mazurki and Helen Walker, the movie is available on DVD. Rent it soon and often, or better yet buy a copy. With a crackling good script by Jules Furthman (The Shanghai Gesture, The Big Sleep), and atmospherically directed by Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, The Old Maid–we can only wish he’d been given more crime films), Nightmare Alley is a rare example of a movie almost as good as its source material…" therapsheet.blogspot.com/2009/11/book-you-have-to-read-ni… *************************************************

Carnival of lost souls: Nightmare Alley REVIEW By JB @ thephantomcountry

Nightmare Alley covers a lot of territory, both psychologically and geographically, crossing the US by truck, train, car, and on foot until Stan’s world seems not larger but smaller, shrinking to a blackened point. His carnival experience comes full circle, like the embrace of a family whose door always remains forbiddingly open, and some of Gresham’s finest passages evoke for us this family on the move, seductive and grotesque and leaving only cavities in its wake: “It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns—lights and noise and a chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris wheel, to see the wild-man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.” thephantomcountry.blogspot.com/2010_05_01_archive.html

William Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909–September 14, 1962) @ Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lindsay_Gresham AND en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley *******************************

Fox Studio Classics – Film Noir – Nightmare Alley – Point Of View williamlindsaygresham.com/

The film Nightmare Alley laid in copyright limbo for over fifty years, a struggle between the estates of producer George Jessel, author W.L. Gresham and the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation. In that time, its cult status continued to grow. Not just from the rarity of its screenings on television and at film festivals, but from the later suicides of the book’s author and the movie’s director, and its remarkably grim, bold, and disturbing look at hucksterism and its milieu.

It was 1946 and Tyrone Power, Fox’s leading male star, had returned from service in World War II. From an acting family and a stage background, he had grown tired of the empty “pretty boy” image that had made him a matinee idol. He wanted a different role. One that would showcase his range and depth and change the public’s (and industry’s) perception of him from a toothpaste ad to a serious actor. He had leaned toward that end with his first post-war duty role by playing Larry Darrell in Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge.

Power leveraged his past success (and the considerable money he made for the studio) to make Nightmare Alley his prestige project. Studio Head Daryl F. Zanuck was against it from the start but he owed Power gratitude and a bit of artistic license so he green-lighted the film. Ultimately, Zanuck’s instincts would prove correct (as they so often did). The film failed miserably at the box office and Power ended up returning to the adventurous, swashbuckling roles that had made him famous. Interestingly, many of 20th Century Fox’s most unique and enduring pictures were made in this vein, by a proven film artist’s passionate plea and Zanuck’s begrudging nod.

War weary audiences of the late ’40s were not ready for it. Although film noir was seeping into the mainstream, an “A” picture starring the dashing and overwhelmingly handsome Tyrone Power as a greedy, manipulative charlatan was too much for them. Adding to this shock was the story, adapted from a novel immersed in the sleazy world of carny, portraying the darker realities of alcoholism, marital infidelity, religion, spiritualism and ambition by an author who was a known communist, drunkard and wife beater. williamlindsaygresham.com/ ******************************

BOOKS INTO FILM: Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham reviewed by Jim Hitt www.booksintofilms.straitjacketsmagazine.com/support-file…

" In the world of noir novels, Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham stands apart as a totally originally and innovative piece of literature. As in most noir works, the protagonist Stan Carlisle is a flawed individual, and the world in which he lives is a dark world where predator and prey become one. But Gresham’s world is not the world of Cornell Woolrich where the events rush relentlessly toward the climax. On the contrary, the events in Nightmare Alley unfold in at a slower, more deliberate pace, and the construction of the novel is closer to William Faulkner than Cornell Woolrich…

…William Lindsay Gresham wrote only one more novel, the equally bleak Limbo Tower (1949) about Asa Kimball and other men slowly dying of fear, depression, and tuberculosis in hospital. He then fought his own battles against alcohol. His second wife Joy divorced him and taking their two sons, moved to England where she later married C. S. Lewis. Their relationship became the basis for the stage play and film Shadowlands . When in 1962 Gresham discovered he had cancer, he checked into the run-down Dixie Hotel, registering as ‘Asa Kimball,’ and took his own life…

…Just before he died, Gresham, reflecting on his life, told a fellow veteran from Spain, "I sometimes think that if I have any real talent it is not literary but is a sheer talent for survival. I have survived three busted marriages, losing my boys, war, tuberculosis, Marxism, alcoholism, neurosis and years of freelance writing. Just too mean and ornery to kill, I guess."…

…Print quality : An absolutely gorgeous print. I doubt it looked this good in the theaters when it was first released.

Sound : Sharp and clear.

Extras : A theatrical trailer that appears spliced together from various scenes rather than a true trailer. Also a commentary by film historians James Ursini and Alain Silver. The commentary sounds more like a conversation between two knowledgeable experts rather than a straight commentary, and this casual approach works very well. Their comments are insightful if not exactly spirited…

Summary : A terrific film noir, one of the best. Off beat in the sense that it foregoes crimes and violence, which is at the center of most noir films. The characters are full of life and always interesting. Only the part of Molly rings a bit false, especially considering the ill-advised end, which does little to affect the gritty and honest movie. Time has vindicated Tyrone Power’s faith in this material.

Grade: A- www.booksintofilms.straitjacketsmagazine.com/support-file… *********************************************************************

Nightmare Alley: Faustian Carnival Noir: The rise and fall: From Divinity to Geek REVIEW By monstergirl @ The Last Drive In MANY Dozens of Screencaps monstergirl.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/nightmare-alleyfaust… *****************

Nightmare Alley (film and stage musical) Understanding Screenwriting #46 BY TOM STEMPEL @ slantmagazine.com

The best article on Nightmare Alley is by Clive T. Miller and appears in the 1975 book "Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System"… www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/05/understanding-screenw… ************************************************************

Mister, I was made for it A region 2 DVD review of NIGHTMARE ALLEY by Slarek www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/n/nightmare_alley.html

SUMMARY Let’s not sod about, Nightmare Alley is a terrific film noir, a joyously dark story of a destructive and ultimately self-destructive ambition in which just about everyone is attempting to manipulate others for their own ends. It’s cult status was built in part on its long term unavailability, but can now continue on the back of the film’s cinematic strengths, which are considerable.

Eureka’s Masters of Cinema label does the film proud, with a superb transfer and some very worthwhile extras. Noir fans should run to get their hands on it. " www.dvdoutsider.co.uk/dvd/reviews/n/nightmare_alley.html ******************************************************

William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley Tarot: Carnival Trumps Tarot Hermeneutics: Exploring How We Create Meaning with Tarot

William Lindsay Gresham, Joy Davidman Gresham (poetry pseudonym: "Joy Brown"), and C.S. Lewis

***UNUSUAL***, Detailed, Worthwhile tarothermeneutics.com/tarotliterature/nightmarealley.html *****************************************************

LISTEN >> Naxos Audiobooks "Nightmare Alley" Read by : Adam Sims ISBN: 1843794829 ISBN-13: 9781843794820 Format: CD – Search for other formats www.audiobooksdirect.com.au/William-Lindsay-Gresham/Night… ***********************************************

GRAPHIC NOVEL [= Comic Books for Literary types] Nightmare Alley: Spain Hernandez’s graphic adaptation of the William Lindsay Gresham novel *Links* to Buy >> www.indiebound.org/book/9781560975113?aff=sfnybal

"…Spain Hernandez’s graphic adaptation of Nightmare Alley is at least as successful as its predecessor versions. The artwork is black and white; sometimes cartoony, sometimes realistic. Close-up character studies alternate with splash pages and occasional landscape shots so well done that they resemble woodcuts. Hernandez’s story-line follows Gresham’s novel closely; I don’t recall any major scenes or sequences being left out. He does not stint on quoting Gresham’s dialogue; his word balloons are as packed as any I have ever seen. The story of Stan Carlyle’s rise and fall is as compelling in graphic novel form as it was in earlier versions.

Nightmare Alley is an important work of American crime fiction; it is perhaps unique in that memorable versions of the story are now available in three different media." www.crimeculture.com/21stC/fried.html **************************************

Gresham, William Lindsay (1909-1962) | Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections archon.wheaton.edu/index.php?p=creators/creator&id=77

Location: Archon Send Email | Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections archon.wheaton.edu/index.php?p=core/contact&f=email&a… ****************************************************

Posted by mhdantholz on 2011-02-20 12:09:24

Tagged: , NIGHTMARE , ALLEY , [1947]

The post NIGHTMARE ALLEY [1947] appeared first on Good Info.

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emmagreen1220-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on Literary Techniques

New Post has been published on https://literarytechniques.org/foreshadowing-in-literature/

Foreshadowing in Literature

Foreshadowing in literature is used to create suspense or mood, to hint at upcoming events or plot twists, or to reveal important character traits. Foreshadowing can be created by the narrator or the characters themselves, through descriptions and dialogue. Foreshadowing can also be created by shifting the plot structure of a narrative and using flashbacks or flash-forwards to relay important information about past or future events to the audience.

10 Examples of Foreshadowing in Literature

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

“The weather was unusually warm for the last day of October. We didn’t even need jackets. The wind was growing stronger, and Jem said it might be raining before we got home. There was no moon. The street light on the corner cast sharp shadows on the Radley house… We turned off the road and entered the schoolyard. It was pitch black.”

Scout’s description of her and Jem’s journey to the school for the Halloween pageant creates a mood of suspense and fear, foreshadowing the fateful events that will come later. The night is very dark with no moon; the only shadows come from streetlights which cause shadows on Boo Radley’s house, the source of the neighborhood children’s legends and fears. Scout and Jem are having a difficult time walking to the school because it is so dark, and Jem didn’t bring a flashlight because he didn’t realize it would be so dark. When they leave the pageant, they are the last ones out of the school, and the night is even darker. Footsteps follow the children, and eventually they are attacked by Bob Ewell who finally makes good on his threats to get back at Atticus for embarrassing him in court.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

“A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart.”

Pip narrates his tale from the present so most of the novel is told in a flashback format. Here, Pip is relating the turning point of his life, foreshadowing that there are many changes that are upcoming soon, right after he gets through discussing Estella again. The tone which Pip uses here to tell the reader about the upcoming events foreshadows that Pip’s relationship with Estella does not work out, and that the changes he undergoes aren’t necessarily pleasant ones.

The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled–but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.”

This chilling opening by the narrator, Montressor, to the audience reveals a terrifying foreshadowing of vengeance and murder for Fortunato. Montressor reveals that Fortunato has insulted him in a way that can never be forgiven, and he has decided to make sure that Fortunato will never insult him– or anyone else– again. He lays out in cryptic detail that he has managed to keep Fortunato from suspecting his true intentions, but that he has waited for the moment to get his revenge. This scene sets the mood of the story, and foreshadows Fortunato’s unfortunate untimely demise.

The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst

“At that moment the bird began to flutter, but the wings were uncoordinated, and amid much flapping and a spray of flying feathers, it tumbled down, bumping through the limbs of the bleeding tree and landing at our feet with a thud. Its long, graceful neck jerked twice into an S, then straightened out, and the bird was still. A white veil came over the eyes and the long white beak unhinged. Its legs were crossed and its clawlike feet were delicately curved at rest. Even death did not mar its grace, for it lay on the earth like a broken vase of red flowers, and we stood around it, awed by its exotic beauty.”

James Hurst explores the psyche of brothers in this short story, which features the unnamed narrator and his younger, disabled brother named Doodle. Doodle was born with a weak heart, and was predicted to not survive, let alone be able to walk, run, go to school, or do anything else little boys are supposed to be able to do. The narrator makes it his mission to help Doodle overcome these obstacles, partly because of his own shame at having a brother who isn’t “normal.” Throughout the story, the color red is used as a motif to mirror Doodle’s own red appearance as a baby, and whenever he strains with physical exertion. The scarlet ibis itself symbolizes and foreshadows Doodle’s death. It is a bird that has traveled an unlikely journey far from its home in the tropics, much farther than it should have gone, and in death, it is still beautiful and graceful, with a curved neck and bent legs. This death scene of the ibis, coupled with Doodle’s fascination with the bird, foreshadow Doodle’s own death later on.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

“‘Poor Harry Jekyll,’ he thought, ‘my mind misgives me he is in deep waters! He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten and self-loved condoned the fault.'”

In the second chapter of Stevenson’s cryptic novella, Mr. Utterson, Dr. Jekyll’s lawyer, is becoming increasingly worried about his client’s well-being. His friend Richard Enfield had already imparted a story to him about a man named Edward Hyde trampling a young child in the streets and paying £100 to avoid a scandal. The check he provided for the £100 was signed by Dr. Henry Jekyll. In these lines, Utterson is worried that Dr. Jekyll is being blackmailed by Mr. Hyde for some sin he committed many years ago; however, these words also serve as foreshadowing because Dr. Jekyll is in trouble because he has fallen in love with the darker side of himself that he repressed many years ago. This darker side is allowed to come out with a special potion as Mr. Hyde, which is slowly taking over Dr. Jekyll completely.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

“‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are?'”

Simon has an imaginary conversation with a pig’s head, which the other boys have erected on a stick. It is covered with flies, and Simon begins to call the head “The Lord of the Flies.” The head’s conversation with Simon reveals that Simon is starting to understand the truth about what is happening to the young boys stranded on the island: there is no real beast that is chasing them. Instead, they are battling against each other. The true beast is inside them all, and it will destroy them. Simon’s conversation with the head foreshadows his own death, Piggy’s death, and Jack’s savage behavior which turns the rest of the boys against Ralph.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

“Almost every citizen in the community had dark eyes. His parents did, and Lily did, and so did all of his group members and friends. But there were a few exceptions: Jonas himself, and a female Five who he had noticed had the different, lighter eyes. No one mentioned such things; it was not a rule, but was considered rude to call attention to things that were unsettling or different about individuals.”

Jonas and Lily have just met Gabe, the newchild their father has just brought home to take care of until he is able to thrive better. Jonas and his sister Lily both notice Gabe’s eyes, and how rare they are in the community. These eyes foreshadow something very special about Gabe and Jonas. In fact, the Receiver of Memory of the community also has the same pale eyes, and Jonas is later chosen to become the new Receiver of Memory. Their eyes connect the three in a way that is special and different from the community, especially as Jonas discovers that he can give memories to Gabe. This leads Jonas to form a strong connection to Gabe, and to save him from the community before they can “release” him, or send him to Elsewhere.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

“‘I want you to take me to your cinema,’ Mariam said now. ‘I want to see the cartoon. I want to see the puppet boy.’

With this, Mariam sensed a shift in the atmosphere. Her parents stirred in their seats. Mariam could feel them exchanging looks.”

Up to this moment in the novel, Jalil, Mariam’s father, and Nana, Mariam’s mother have been portrayed in black and white, good and evil. Jalil’s visits to Mariam are a saving grace from her mother, who treats Mariam with utter disdain. However, when Mariam finally makes a request from her father– and especially one to be seen in public with him– the atmosphere shifts and foreshadows that something has irrevocably changed in their relationship from this request. The next day, Jalil does not come to get Mariam, and she walks down to Herat. She soon discovers that her father is ashamed of her, and by leaving her mother’s kolba, she sends her into such a depression that Nana hangs herself.

The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs

“‘It had a spell put on it by an old Fakir,’ said the Sergeant Major, ‘ a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow. He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.'”

This section from Jacobs’ short story reveals both foreshadowing and theme for the story. The monkey’s paw is bewitched, and is intended to grant three wishes to three men. While Sergeant Major Morris is obviously perplexed by the paw and tries to warn Mr. White against using it, he also tells the White family that the intentions of the old fakir who put a spell on it was to show that people can’t interfere with fate. Mr. White wishes for £200, and while he receives it, it is because his son Herbert is killed in a machine accident at work. His next wish, to have Herbert back, results in a strange knocking at the door and Mr. White wishing for his son to be dead again. They know that the real Herbert would not have been at the door; they could not change their own fate.

The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton

“The girl was lovely, but she had dared to raise her eyes to the loved one of the princess; and, with all the intensity of the savage blood transmitted to her through long lines of wholly barbaric ancestors, she hated the woman who blushed and trembled behind that silent door.”

In this excerpt from Stockton’s cliffhanger short story, he uses foreshadowing to hint at what the princess’ choice will be. She comes from a line of semi-barbaric people, and her father, the King, is especially barbaric in his tournaments of judgment. The fact that the narrator continues to focus more time on these elements that are mixed in the princess’ bloodline gives a clear indication that she likely chose the door with the tiger and watched her lover being ripped to shreds rather than allow him to be happy with any other woman but herself.

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