juvenilia

we are the point | we are the edge | we are the wolves that hecate fed

[hjbender]

The Four Discoursemen

[starlight788]

King

[assassinationtipsforladies]

No one has ever warranted a presidential pardon more

[evandahm]

Hi here’s another list of things I’ve read that are really important to me, on the loose theme of ‘fantasy urbanism.’ I still haven’t read Dhalgren.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. This is the most essential thing to read if you are even tangentially interested in anything about this list i think. Revelatory to me as a pulpy-literalistic fantasist.

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson. Inspired by the Calvino book, an enormous overview of planned or dreamed cities that were never built.

Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer. Some of my favorite secondary-world fiction I have ever read. Short stories from the history of an empire at the ludicrous extreme of size, depth, history. The English edition was translated by Ursula K. Le Guin who is my favorite.

A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar. Beautiful book and deals with an invented setting and urban spaces with a more densely intellectual approach than I have ever seen.

Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas. An architectural history and “retroactive manifesto” for Manhattan, but some of the most interesting bits are about Coney Island in particular. Huge futuristic conflicts underlie every modern city.

The City & the City by China Miéville. This isn’t a lot of people’s favorites of his because its fantastic elements aren’t the loudest, but it’s so smart and bewildering and develops an allegory for emergent social strata in urban spaces that is really compelling.

The Event Factory by Renee Gladman. Just finished this; it feels loose and dreamlike and engages very clearly with real feelings of exploring new spaces, radically repurposing urban environments…

Country of Ghosts by Margaret Killjoy. Not as totally concerned with cities as the rest of the list, but a really exciting and unusual example of worldbuilding from an intentionally political/utopian perspective.

Surregional Explorations by Max Cafard. The first few essays in this book deal with Surrealist and Situationist approaches to urban space and the unconscious of cities; it’s a weird jumbled book but I liked it

[evandahm]

Addenda–

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Definitely the most overtly allegorical and argumentative of hers that I’ve read, but it’s Le Guin so it’s done in an elegant and narratively engaging way. Modern cities are shown through the perspective of a visitor from an isolated left anarchist community, allowing for intense & emotional engagement with the inhumanity and strangeness of the extremities of urbanism and capitalism in major cities. Also deals with the fastidious class-segregation that is a central throughline in every American city I’ve ever been in.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany. Not fiction, but engages with a lot of ideas this list orbits around. Most of the book is a sort of oral history of gay cruising culture in Manhattan in the 70s and 80s– this is developed into a really nuanced theory of urban development and the problems with what I think is called “new urbanism.” Part that sticks with me is the focus on interclass contact in cities and the huge cultural structures constantly being built to discourage it

[catie-does-things]

I’ve yet to see St. Valentine’s skull on tumblr this year so here you go:

happy optional memorial of saint valentine, bishop and martyr

[mysterium-solis]

Illustration by Charles Robertson for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Sensitive Plant (1911 edition)

[die-rosastrasse]

The way this artist paints the sky 🌙✨

Alfred Stevens

Belgian, 1823-1906

[astriloquuus]

arya being a surrogate mother figure to weasel is so important to me. she worries for her, defends her, cares and protects her as best as she can in the position they’re in. like they’re literally living off of bugs and arya is thinking about weasel’s hair.

and it comes so second nature to her - every time she is doing something for weasel, it’s just a sentence thrown in between whatever else is going on at the time. she never consciously thinks about caring for weasel, because she doesn’t have to - she just does.

[the-king-andthe-lionheart]

This shouldn’t stay in the tags because it’s too good of an addition:

[gunvolt]

im going to have a stroke

[prideling]

Instead try… Person A: You know… the thing Person B: The “thing”? Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING ROD

[artykyn]

As someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:

Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.

Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”

Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.

Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.

Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.

Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.

Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”

Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”

[qillermeme]

[little-witchys-garden]

[arya-jon]

needleheart winter → heart and home

far be it from me to separate two hearts that beat as one.

[parkchanwoohoo]

I love Twitter bc everyone is dumb

[perestroika-hilton]

Just pronouns in general

[deadboytryingtosurvive]

Are- are you trying to tell me "no one" is a pronoun? Is that what this is saying??

[parkchanwoohoo]

Yes

[summerstormsandnoodles]

So if I choose to go by nobody/no one are those nemo-pronouns

[parkchanwoohoo]

i see through your tricks, odysseus

[livepoultryfreshkilled]

[bookhousestark]

needleheart winter → songs and stories: the winter rose

“now as it happened the winter roses had only then come into bloom, and no flower is so rare nor precious. so the stark sent to his glass gardens and commanded that the most beautiful o’ the winter roses be plucked for the singer’s payment. and so it was done. but when morning come, the singer had vanished … and so had lord brandon’s maiden daughter. her bed they found empty, but for the pale blue rose that bael had left on the pillow where her head had lain.”

…

you told the world you burned the king-beyond-the-wall. instead you sent him to winterfell to steal my bride from me.

…

“i think we had best change the plan”

[notbecauseofvictories]

stealingmirrors replied to your post “rolling cookie dough I made a few days ago into…”

that pasta you talked about in the tags sounds actually divine??? would that i could be a friend in your kitchen, that all sounds lovely

…it was really, really good, even reheated in the office kitchen or left on the countertop as I bustled about, working from home.

Honestly, I have yet to encounter a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen that isn’t good, easy to understand, and most importantly, flexible—I have Jamaican beef handpies in the freezer, I’ve left pastry proofing for forty-eight plus hours; even in the recipe below I basically kept stirring and adding pasta water until the cream sauce was exactly the consistency I wanted, no measurements required. I love a recipe so durable that you actually can’t fuck it up, unless you have truly no knowledge of cooking at all, in which case: sorry and also, thank you for supporting the takeout economy.

So in celebration of great recipes and the people who hate them, from America’s Test Kitchen Vegetables Illustrated:

[putridcowboy]

Why did we ever stop wearing 18th century clothing

[marzipanandminutiae]

to wear 19th century clothing you Georgian rake

[autisticraptor]

The vampires are fighting

[captmuldoon]

“i wish we could see adaptations where sherlock holmes hates the rich and is allowed to be kind to those around him and uses his abilities to support society’s underdogs” elementary was doing this back in 2012. this was only episode 4.

[fatandbonepress]

I think the Greeks were right that love will eat a path through everything - that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself.

John Darnielle