PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
i don't do bad sauce passes
JBB: An Artblog!
Claire Keane
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Game of Thrones Daily
styofa doing anything
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$LAYYYTER
★
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
noise dept.
almost home
Three Goblin Art
trying on a metaphor
todays bird
dirt enthusiast
🪼
cherry valley forever
seen from Australia
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seen from Australia
seen from Singapore
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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seen from Oman
seen from Malaysia
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@estherdedlock
“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Oh, I’ve just been looking for the origin of these drawings for ages! They simply ARE the Greek class to me!
It's November 10th! Bacchanal Day!
Do you have your chitons?
Have you been fasting?
And are you ready to let God devour you, unstring your bones, and spit you out, reborn?
This time of year, in this part of the country, all I can think about is a bacchanal.
this is the last thing i ever pinned to my dark academia board and i can't ever add anything else. what else is there to say
"Seinfeld Dark Academia" was not on my 2023 bingo card, but what the hell.
OMG, perfect!
I've got some Twin Peaks showing up in my FYP and it's made me think about Twin Peaks. It aired from 1990-1991, and then the feature film Fire Walk with Me was released in 1992...the same year that our Ms. Tartt published everyone's favorite novel. The following year, 1993, saw the premiere of The X-Files. These were also the peak years of grunge, whose whole aesthetic was basically, It's raining and we're all doomed.
What was it about the early 1990s that gave everyone such an appetite for tales of bad things happening in gloomy northern landscapes?
Do some readers really think that Camilla is a stand-in for Donna Tartt? No...I don't think so. I mean, she may have been some wish-projection on Donna Tartt's part (i.e. Camilla was an integral member of the Classics in-group, whereas Donna was always treated as an interloper). But I think the analogies end there.
Funny thing though, Tartt did write herself into the book, in the sneakiest way possible:
"...a strange girl was talking to me...Very pretty, in a snub-nosed, good-natured way; dark hair, freckles, light blue eyes...she was a small girl, barely five feet..."
Yep, it's Mona Beale, the "good sport" that Richard hooks up with after doing Bunny in. The description is too spot on, it's a mirror image of the author. And I like to think that Tartt very much enjoyed having Judy Poovey later describe her self-insertion as "kind of a slut" especially since the synonymous meanings of "slut" and "tart" would've been too delicious for an admirer of Charles Dickens to resist.
the secret history is my personal roman empire
This is literally me for the last two years.
Ok let's try something.
Reblog with your favorite TSH lines!
Just, a quote, a piece of dialogue, a random specific passage- anything you'd like that you feel stuck with you!
I'll start- I have several, but the first that comes to mind is this one:
I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point.
'Are you happy here?' I said at last.
He considered it for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.'
"...life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together---my future, my past, the whole of my life---and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!"
There have been two or three times in my life when I had this exact feeling myself, which I was never able to put into words. I'd never even seen anyone express this feeling until I read this passage. Of course, just like Richard, I was completely mistaken each time, but at least no one died as a result of my self-delusion. No one that I'm aware of, anyway.
Everyone remembers where they were when reading 'the snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation' for the first time.
...and where they were when they first read, "He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall."
It randomly popped into my head the other day that Camilla is the only one of the five who never loses her shit, post-Bunny. Charles becomes a full-fledged alcoholic, Francis leans hard into his hypochondria, Richard turns into an even bigger pill-popper, and Henry is rhapsodizing about the liberating benefits of murder. Camilla, however, is completely unfazed. The only thing that changes for her is that when she sees her brother falling apart, she removes herself to be with the person who can protect her. She really is such a terrifying character that I almost wish we hadn't gotten that glimpse of her in the epilogue, broke and stranded at her grandmother's house. I like to think she'd have let them all take the fall, then lit up a cigarette and walked away.
Soooo, I recently found myself reading a synopsis of Goethe's 1777 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, only to discover that the novel ends with the ill-fated title character shooting himself in the head...but living for 12 hours before he dies.
I guess we have to add Goethe to the list of influences on The Secret History and I swear to God, no one will never get to the end of all the literary allusions in this bedlam of a book. Donna Tartt was only 18 years old when she started writing it. How in the hell did she have time to read so much...and remember enough of it to sprinkle throughout this novel?
Been thinking that it’s a while since I’ve seen some amazing TSH fanart...and then this pops up. Graphic novel, please?
Thinking about the German guy who chased Henry and Bunny in Rome.
My theory has always been that he was a literary allusion to the character of Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Because Donna Tartt can’t resist a literary allusion and because this book never ends.
It’s been a while since I did a book review, so here goes: Katy Hays’ The Cloisters. This latest entry in would-be successors to The Secret History is a dark academia murder mystery set at The Cloisters, a real museum in New York City dedicated to medieval art.
I can’t separate this book from my feelings about the real Cloisters, which has always been a very special place to me, with great personal and even spiritual meaning. The book reduces this majestic setting to the backdrop of tawdry and highly implausible intrigue that unfolds between Ann Stilwell, (a brilliant grad student from the sticks of Washington state who lands an internship in the research department), and three of her co-workers: Rachel Mondray (gorgeous, rich), Patrick Roland (handsome, rich), and Leo the gardener (bad boy, poor).
There’s a lot going on here: Ann discovers and decodes an ancient deck of tarot cards that backs up some important research of Patrick’s. Rachel conspires with Ann to keep this from Patrick so they can claim the discovery as their own. At the same time, Ann is being lured into the mysticism of tarot and its divination powers -- something Patrick was also obsessed with. She’s also being drawn into Rachel’s luxurious heiress lifestyle. Patrick and Rachel are having sex. Ann and Leo are having sex. Rachel and Leo were having sex. Leo is stealing minor artifacts from the museum and fencing them through a disreputable antiques dealer. Rachel may have murdered her college roommate...and her parents. Patrick is doing ritualistic tarot card readings at the museum at night. Ann has some kind of dark secret in her past, connected to her father’s death. Then they all take some hallucinatory herbs (supplied by Leo from the Cloisters’ garden) and Patrick dies from an apparent overdose. The police immediately and unbelievably label it murder, and then proceed to investigate it as no real cops (I hope) ever would---jumping to conclusions, not following up on glaringly suspicious behavior, etc.
All of this is piled on so fast and furious that there’s no time to develop the kind of haunting atmosphere and tangled relationships that this story cries out for. The book is just too short. Katy Hays had a good idea and some genuinely interesting twists, but it’s all so rushed that you’re left feeling nothing. There’s no sense of mystery, just a lot of foreboding, laid on thick. There’s sex, but no sensuality. The narrator, Ann, is so flat that she wanders through the story with almost no reaction to anything. I think she’s supposed to be a classic unreliable narrator, but she’s our gatekeeper for this story and it’s a problem that she is so closed-off and devoid of emotion.
There’s some gross stuff in here too: Leo’s conduct towards Ann is textbook sexual harassment that gets hand-waved because he’s hot and Ann is attracted to him. He continues to be an awful creep throughout the book. Frankly, no reputable workplace, especially not a world-renowned museum, would tolerate the behavior these characters indulge in on the job. I suffered a lot of second-hand embarrassment for everyone at the real Cloisters for having their workplace and their work parodied by this wildly fictitious potboiler of a story. And it kind of depresses me to think of tourists visiting such a beloved place just because it’s the setting for this goofy book. I wish that Hays had fictionalized The Cloisters the way Donna Tartt fictionalized Bennington into Hampden. I’m just going to have to purge the memory of this novel before I visit the place again, because it’s just too...bleh. No.
It’s a quick read if you want something for the beach or a long flight, but it’s ultimately disappointing and a little bit off-putting.
You know, if the mountain lion theory were true, then it would mean that Donna Tartt has been sitting on this huge secret for more than thirty years. And that just doesn’t sound believable!
I mean, does this look like the face...
Of someone who would keep...
A mind-boggling literary secret all to herself for more than thirty years?
....
....
Yeah, the mountain lion did it.
The Secret History: A Theories Guide
The Mountain Lion: It Isn't A Theory
Why The Books Called ''The Secret History''
Richard Papen: The Master of Illusion
#1 Charles is Innocent: Fucking Damnit!
#2 Okay I Lied, Charles Isn't Innocent
Julian Morrow: ''Honesty Is A Dangerous Virtue''
Henry Winter Wasn't In A Car Accident.
What Led To Henry Winters Death
Bunny Corcoran: Neglect In Plain Sight If you have a theory or take or whatever the fuck—comment down bellow! If it's intriguing enough I will see if I can either 1) Disprove it or 2) Prove your theory without a shadow of a doubt (Obviously the commenter will be credited!) I want to do a post on Francis, but haven't found anything compelling enough about him to spur on an analysis. [ Links will be added as I post ]
MOAR THEORIES!
THIS. BOOK. NEVER. ENDS!!!
