Me at the bookstore.
Me packing for a holiday.

Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
One Nice Bug Per Day
Cosmic Funnies
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
noise dept.
No title available
tumblr dot com

No title available

JBB: An Artblog!

No title available

blake kathryn
No title available
we're not kids anymore.

titsay

⁂
taylor price
dirt enthusiast
i don't do bad sauce passes
AnasAbdin
seen from United States

seen from Switzerland

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Netherlands

seen from Canada

seen from Vietnam
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Oman

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Romania
seen from Türkiye

seen from Canada

seen from South Korea
@igby
Me at the bookstore.
Me packing for a holiday.
Clarice
If you ever feel like you’ve had an unproductive day writing, please know that one time novelist/playwright/essayist Dorothy L Sayers wrote a letter to Bun (her literary agent) that said “herewith the striking results of today’s literary labours” followed by two pages of rabbit sketches.
(via @smokeandsong) #the question is are they out there somewhere and can i get one tattooed
I am fairly certain that this letter was never published (alas!) but if you are ever able to make your way to @thewadecenter in the American Midwest, you can see the originals!
I can’t photograph or scan the pages without getting in trouble with copyright and security and stuff, but herewith my meticulously accurate (if rearranged) sketches (real size to a 9x11 sheet of paper):
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.
General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…
…and like this…
…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…
:-D
I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…
…he was also a foodie.
He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
If you’re interested in learning more about Dumas père, check out The Black Count by Tom Reiss. It’s a thrilling page turner of a biography that also talks about how it’s likely that General Dumas inspired Alexandre for the Count of Monte Cristo.
Hi.
Submitted by worstsimpsonspageever.tumblr.com
I'm an Emily girl myself, but still cool.
Giveaway: 2 paperback copies of Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
Hi, y’all! Remember this great book? Fantasy set in Regency London that reminds me of what if Harry Potter was focused on adults of color? Author Zen Cho was nice enough to provide two paperback copies for me to give away to interested readers. Here are the rules for the giveaway:
-To enter, you must leave a comment on my review of the book (not on this post, NOT ON TUMBLR, this website is wretched for private communications of any kind) with a recommendation for a fantasy book written by an author from a marginalized group. Give us a sentence or so on why I or my readers should check out this other book. My review of Sorcerer to the Crown should help you determine my tastes and pick a book you think I’d like! (If you want to know more about my tastes, feel free to peruse the blog at my other reviews.)
-You must live in North America because I’m paying for shipping myself.
-Winning entries will be picked on August 1. If you haven’t responded by August 8, I will start picking other entries. Winners will be chosen at random using Excel. You can either put your email address in your comment (I’d advise the “dragonfruit at perach dot moo” method in case those bots from my undergrad days are still a thing) or mention your Tumblr name and keep asks open.)
Best of luck, everybody!
**Reblogging this post is appreciated because it’ll help signal boost, but reblogs and likes are not entries.**
Jhumpa Lahiri photographed by Dan Martensen in The Wall Street Journal
What dreadful Hot weather we have!- It keeps one in a continual state of Inelegance.
Jane Austen in a letter to her sister (18th September 1796). (via aisforausten)
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
Guillermo del Toro on how horror is inherently political as a genre, Time Magazine (x)
I wanted to write a book about ghosts, but I was perfectly prepared–I cannot emphasize this too strongly–I was perfectly prepared to keep those ghosts wholly imaginary. I was already doing a lot of splendid research reading all the books about ghosts I could get hold of, and particularly true ghost stories–so much so that it became necessary for me to read a chapter of Little Women every night before I turned out the light–and at the same time I was collecting pictures of houses, particularly odd houses, to see what I could find to make into a suitable haunted house. I read books of architecture and clipped pictures out of magazines and newspapers and learned about cornices and secret stairways and valances and turrets and flying buttresses and gargoyles and all kinds of things that people have done to inoffensive houses, and then I came across a picture in a magazine which really looked right. It was the picture of a house which reminded me vividly of the hideous building in New York; it had the same air of disease and decay, and if ever a house looked like a candidate for a ghost, it was this one. All that I had to identify it was the name of a California town, so I wrote to my mother, who has lived in California all her life, and sent her the picture, asking if she had any idea where I could get information about this ugly house. She wrote back in some surprise. Yes, she knew about the house, although she had not supposed that there were any pictures of it still around. My great-grandfather built it. It had stood empty and deserted for some years before it finally caught fire, and it was generally believed that that was because the people of the town got together one night and burned it down. By then it was abundantly clear to me that I had no choice; the ghosts were after me. In case I had any doubts, however, I came downstairs a few mornings later and found a sheet of copy paper moved to the center of my desk, set neatly away from the general clutter. On the sheet of paper was written DEAD DEAD in my own handwriting. I am accustomed to making notes for books, but not in my sleep; I decided that I had better write the book awake, which I got to work and did.
Shirley Jackson, “Experience and Fiction” (via
shirleymag
)
Having read The Haunting of Hill House fairly recently, I’m even more terrified of it having read this anecdote from its author.
(via robintalley)
i love that charles dickens got paid by the word. like i cant even be mad when he’s boring and long-winded bc i would do xactly the same??? i wouldnt use contractions or colours at all. want to say the word red? too bad. we r now only using “the colour of freshly-spilled blood on snow; the hue of the horizon when the sun sets over the deserts of sub-saharan Africa” BOOM guess who can afford 2 eat now: me and my boi dickens
What I love about Alexandre Dumas, in contrast, is he got paid by the line. So it’s not really wordy, it more like 80% dialogue which makes it sound pretty modern but also ends up like-
“Where are we going now?”
“We are going to the city.”
“Which city?”
“Paris.”
“We are going to Paris?”
“Yes.”
Have you ever wondered where books come from?
Well then, let me show you, because that’s what I do for a living.
Right now, it’s this time of the year, and the little ones have just freshly hatched:
You’ll notice they’re still blind and naked when they hatch. So I make them little coats to keep them warm during their first winter:
See how they happily line up to put them on:
See? Better. Now they’re ready to go and explore the world.
And if they make it through the winter and we take good care of them, they will grow up to be strong and wise like their older fellows:
So, in case you were ever wondering, now you know.
As a Publishing Professional I can say that this is 10000% accurate, and I am a little concerned you’re just giving away all of our industry secrets on Tumblr.
I am a famousy awards-winning author of BOOKS and I endorse this post.
Simone de Beauvoir, Paris, années 1930. Photo: Denise Bellon.
Yesterday I said that bookmobiles are an instant reblog. Today, I learned that rule also applies to book donkeys.
BIBLIOBURRO
more info on bibloburro here
Daphne du Maurier, author of The Birds (which later became a Hitchcock movie)