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Kaledo Art
shark vs the universe
wallacepolsom
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noise dept.
#extradirty
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
trying on a metaphor
AnasAbdin
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One Nice Bug Per Day
titsay
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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Stranger Things
taylor price
Game of Thrones Daily
Three Goblin Art
Claire Keane
seen from United States
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@the-classics-are-lit
The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
— Happy birthday, Oscar Wilde (b. 16 October 1854) 🖋
Everyone gives Sherlock Holmes a hard time about being mean about Watson's writing, but honestly imagine you told your roommate "sure, you can write up an account of my work for the newspaper," thinking it would be like, about the murder, but then he publishes it and it's 90% about you, as a person, and it's a huge hit and now everyone in London knows that you hoard newspapers and do cocoaine when you're depressed. Because I think you'd be little miffed too.
people are so hard on him but the poor man lives with an influencer who shoots two vlogs a day
been reading the three musketeers
it drives me bonkers the way people don't know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said "it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative." and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we've become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it's the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century "uranianism" and misogyny. second of all, i'm sorry that oscar wilde didn't include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess...
I saw a review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that said 'I can't believe people think this was a feminist book'.
Like, do you know how swooningly, outrage-causingly shocking it was that the main character slammed her bedroom door in her abusive husband's face? Do you have any idea how unthinkable it was that she denied him access to her space and her person? She was supposed to submissively look away while he turned their son into an alcoholic for his own amusement and seduced innocent young women! It was revolutionary in 1848; when Bronte (Anne) wrote it, she had to do so under a male psuedonym because publishers wouldn't accept works by women unless they were harmless pap, which was all that was thought suitable for women to read lest their mild and gentle minds be corrupted.
The reason these groundbreaking books of history seem to tame and understated now is because they worked. They raised the bar, pushed the agenda forwards, cleared the path for the next writer. They did exactly what they were supposed to. Time is linear. History moves forward. We make progress.
When you are old, if things happen as they ought, a future generation of teenagers will read The Hate U Give and Simon and the Homo Sapiens' Agenda and Speak and think to themselves 'why did anybody ever think this was contraversial? Why did they ban them? These are just things we talk about, these are things we deal with like normal people. What was the past like, and how do we stop from backsliding into a place where these things are considered shocking again?"
I really hope that's how it goes.
First rule of literary analysis: the analyst cannot judge a past work by modern standards or ethics. Doing so leads to faulty comprehension, straw man fallacies, and lazy logic and analysis. We must always consider the work within the broader frameworks of the history, culture, and events that shaped it.
When I was a very tiny child my mom was in a local production of The Reluctant Resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, a play where Arthur Conan Doyle is hired to investigate a murder at a haunted house with Sherlock Holmes, a figment of Doyle’s imagination that only he can see and hear. Doyle very sincerely believes that the house is haunted, and Holmes thinks that Doyle is a moron
I was too young to appreciate this concept when I was a child, now that I’m older it’s the best concept for a play I’ve ever heard in my life.
holy fuck I need to see that
On Demand Streaming of Free Shakespeare in the Park productions
"This summer, throughout May and June everyone will have free access to stream The Public’s Free Shakespeare in the Park productions of MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (2019), MERRY WIVES (2021), RICHARD III (2022), and the premiere of HAMLET (2023), captured live from The Delacorte Theater in Central Park by THIRTEEN for Great Performances on PBS.
Streaming Schedule:
May 3-June 30: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Click here to learn more!)
May 10-June 30: HAMLET (Click here to learn more!)
May 17-June 30: MERRY WIVES (Click here to learn more!)
May 24-June 30: RICHARD III (Click here to learn more!)"
[ID: 1: Danielle Brooks as Beatrice and Grantham Coleman as Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing.
2: Ato Blankson-Wood as Hamlet.
3: Pascale Armand, Julian Rozzell Jr., David Ryan Smith, Susan Kelechi Watson, and Phillip James Brannon in Merry Wives.
4: Danai Gurira as Richard III. /end ID]
Sherlock Holmes having a universal ace experience -- expressing disinterest and immediately getting called an inhuman robot.
#images#sherlock holmes#sorry i don't turn rabid and marry the prettiest girl in sight at the push of a button my dear watson
Watson is like "of course I proposed marriage to a girl I met two days ago, I'm normal and make rational decisions"
#I read this part just the other day#He literally proposes within two days it’s crazy
Every Sherlock Holmes remake that tries to make Watson the straight man does him a great injustice. Mfer is a total madlad. Everyone's like "oh he's not addicted to hard drugs and doesn't do chemistry experiments in his bedroom for fun" there are subtler ways to be completely unhinged.
The thing is, Watson may or may not instigate the Situations & Shenanigans, but he voluntarily spends most of his Sherlock Holmes, who DOES!
““Normal”“ people do not do that.
Watson will show up at Holmes' place and be like "are you doing any investigations of super weird shit today" and Holmes will be like "yes I am cornering this dangerous mass murderer, you should come and bring your gun in case anyone tries to shoot us" and Watson will do it without question, thinking "I'm so glad he's got something wholesome to distract himself with so he doesn't take more cocaine".
here's the thing about charles dickens. [discussion of his antisemitism, misogyny, and racism ahead.]
his last, unfinished novel, the mystery of edwin drood, features helena and neville landless, heroic and sympathetic south asian (sri lankan, specifically) characters, and the racism they endure in an english town is relevant to the plot to the point where neville ends up falsely accused of murder. in the wake of the indian rebellion of 1857, dickens applauded the english brutality against "that oriental race," and called for genocide.
fagin is called "the jew" 274 times in the first half of oliver twist. an article in the jewish chronicle asked why "jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." at first, dickens dismissed this, and claimed he was just being accurate about london's criminal makeup. but he was moved enough by eliza davis's letters to him on the matter that he halted the printing of the latter half of oliver twist so he could change the text and remove the antisemitic language therein.
dickens was an abolitionist who despised chattel slavery in the united states, and called emancipation a "moral duty." dickens didn't think black americans were intelligent enough to vote, and he wrote an entire character in bleak house who is a joke to be disliked and mocked because she'd rather oversee charity missions to help children in africa than be a proper mother and tend to her own family at home in england.
speaking of one's own family at home in england, dickens smeared his wife, catherine hogarth, publicly so he could justify separating from her and taking up with a younger woman. catherine hogarth was likely mentally ill, likely living with postpartum depression. she was also an author in her own right and loved her family dearly. her reputation never recovered in her lifetime from the claims he made about her. in dickens's novels, time and time again, from nicholas nickleby to david copperfield to our mutual friend to the mystery of edwin drood, men who menace and take advantage of vulnerable women are portrayed as the worst kind of villains, deserving of whatever grisly ends come to them.
charles dickens was both privately and publicly a raging asshole in many ways and the world would be worse off without him, because he wrote for bourgeois, comfortable victorians, the very people who so often failed to "think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys." in the same breath that he calls agnes fleming, who opens oliver twist as an unwed mother dying in a workhouse, "weak and erring," he dares to add that "i do believe that the shade of that poor girl often hovers about that solemn nook-ay, though it is a church." he calculated jo's death to the page in bleak house for maximum effect. but when he wrote of the orphaned crossing-sweeper, "dead, your majesty. dead, my lords and gentlemen. dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. and dying thus around us every day," people listened.
i dedicated years of my life to reading him and studying him and thinking about him and writing about him and his novels. now, i turn to condemn him; now, i turn to justify him. i wish i had a time machine so i could shake his hand. i wish i had a time machine so i could publicly debate him. i wish i had a time machine so i could break his nose.
charles dickens gives me courage and hope. charles dickens makes me want to tear my goddamn hair out. he is everything i despise and everything i love about the victorian age in one; the term "a man of his time" ought to have been invented for him. the leaps and bounds the victorians made for progress in the public good are only matched in greatness by the extremity of their atrocities against their "fellow-passengers" on this earth. the way we think about nearly every modern social ill can be traced back to the 19th century; the way we think about nearly every modern idea of social justice can be traced back to the 19th century. every last one is writ large and small in dickens's novels. he and his age are the greatest contradictions in human history and that's why i can't shut up about them, ever, even when i am exhausted by them, even when i am inspired by them, even when it was two centuries ago and it shouldn't matter anymore, but it does. it always will.
The thing about every modern Sherlock Holmes story is that it doesn’t understand that “disdain for the existing criminal justice system” is not only a fundamental part of the themes of the ACD stories it’s vital to making the whole concept work.
Holmes, when we first meet him, is on the bleeding edge of forensics for the 1880s, and this continues on into the ‘90s (the planted thumbprint in ‘The Norwood Builder’! the Sherlock Holmes test for hemoglobin in A Study in Scarlet! the use of pigs as substitute cadavers in ‘Black Peter’!) and beyond. He’s flippant about and disrespectful toward the police because he knows how criminology is a science and forensics matter and the cold hard facts are significantly more important than intimidating witnesses to extract coerced confessions, or deciding on a theory and bending the facts to make them fit, or relying on racist stereotypes to explain how people act and who’s most guilty (all things that really happen in the canon, btw). He’s smarter than everyone else because he’s doing things no one else understands yet, he’s made a study of crime and he understands how and why policing is a flawed institution.
This is why he’s not a cop, only occasionally allied with cops, and so often complaining or explaining that a moral injustice and a legal one are two different things. There are multiple antagonists (Sir George in ‘The Beryl Coronet’, Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Roylott, the parents in ‘A Case of Identity’) who he can’t catch in the jaws of the law but wishes he could, and at least one criminal he overlooks because he knows prison would only force them deeper into crime.
But. But.
In the 21st century, forensics are not only the backbone of police investigation they’re common knowledge to any average police procedural enjoyer or true crime fan. Holmes’s once-cutting-edge chemistry and geology are passé and ordinary now. If he’s going to be smart, he’s got to be looking ahead.
And what does that look like? It looks like knowing about the flaws in forensic analysis, like knowing about fingerprints maybe not being totally unique, like arguing over DNA evidence being misinterpreted and innocent people being sentenced for crimes they didn’t commit, like calling for the defunding and dissembling of police forces, like siding with the underclasses every. single. time.
Holmes shouldn’t be working with the cops, he should be trying to destroy them, and fighting to prove why they’re obsolete with science and quick thinking and research. Not doing that is spitting in the face of his roots and missing the whole point of what he’s working for.
heyy it's Alexandre Dumas's birthday! happy birthday dude
221 slutty slutty years
This is a compiled list of some of my favorite pieces of short horror fiction, ranging from classics to modern-day horror, and includes links to where the full story can be read for free. Please be aware that any of these stories may contain subject matter you find disturbing, offensive, or otherwise distressing. Exercise caution when reading. Image art is from Scarecrow: Year One.
PSYCHOLOGICAL: tense, dread-inducing horror that preys upon the human psyche and aims to frighten on a mental or emotional level.
“The Frolic” by Thomas Ligotti, 1989
“Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, 1970
“89.1 FM” by Jimmy Juliano, 2015
“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
“Death at 421 Stockholm Street“ by C.K. Walker, 2016
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1973
“An Empty Prison” by Matt Dymerski, 2018
“A Suspicious Gift” by Algernon Blackwood, 1906
CURSED: stories concerning characters afflicted with a curse, either by procuring a plagued object or as punishment for their own nefarious actions.
“How Spoilers Bleed” by Clive Barker, 1991
“A Warning to the Curious” by M.R. James, 1925
“each thing i show you is a piece of my death” by Stephen J. Barringer and Gemma Files, 2010
“The Road Virus Heads North” by Stephen King, 1999
“Ring Once for Death” by Robert Arthur, 1954
“The Mary Hillenbrand Cassette“ by Jimmy Juliano, 2016
“The Monkey’s Paw” by W.W. Jacobs, 1902
MONSTERS: tales of ghouls, creeps, and everything in between.
“The Curse of Yig” by H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, 1929
“The Oddkids” by S.M. Piper, 2015
“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” by Richard Matheson
“The Graveyard Rats” by Henry Kuttner, 1936
“Tall Man” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“The Quest for Blank Claveringi“ by Patricia Highsmith, 1967
“The Showers” by Dylan Sindelar, 2012
CLASSICS: terrifying fiction written by innovators of literary horror.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843
“The Interlopers” by Saki, 1919
“The Statement of Randolph Carter“ by H.P. Lovecraft, 1920
“The Damned Thing” by Ambrose Pierce, 1893
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, 1820
“August Heat” by W.F. Harvey, 1910
“The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1843
SUPERNATURAL: stories varying from spooky to sober, featuring lurking specters, wandering souls, and those haunted by ghosts and grief.
“Nora’s Visitor” by Russell R. James, 2011
“The Pale Man” by Julius Long, 1934
“A Collapse of Horses” by Brian Evenson, 2013
“The Jigsaw Puzzle” by J.B. Stamper, 1977
“The Mayor Will Make A Brief Statement and then Take Questions” by David Nickle, 2013
“The Night Wire” by H.F. Arnold, 1926
“Postcards from Natalie” by Carrie Laben, 2016
UNSETTLING: fiction that explores particularly disturbing topics, such as mutilation, violence, and body horror. Not recommended for readers who may be offended or upset by graphic content.
“Survivor Type” by Stephen King, 1982
“I’m On My Deathbed So I’m Coming Clean…” by M.J. Pack, 2018
“In the Hills, the Cities” by Clive Barker, 1984
“The New Fish” by T.W. Grim, 2013
“The Screwfly Solution” by Racoona Sheldon, 1977
“In the Darkness of the Fields” by Ho_Jun, 2015
“The October Game” by Ray Bradbury, 1948
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison, 1967
HAPPY READING, HORROR FANS!
I’ve been doing some reading and have more stories to add:
PSYCHOLOGICAL:
“Paradise Pine” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“Suffer the Little Children” by Stephen King, 1972
“Rocking Horse Creek” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“The Ledge” by Stephen King, 1978
“Ted the Caver” by Ted, 2001
“The Fly-paper” by Elizabeth Taylor, 1969
CURSED:
“The Reaper’s Image” by Stephen King, 1969
“Correspondence” by Bloodstains, 2011
“Casting the Runes” by M.R. James, 1911
“The Dionaea House” by Eric Heisserer, 2004
“1408″ by Stephen King, 1999
“Stinson Beach” by Walter Smith, 2011
MONSTERS:
“The Crawlers” by Jimmy Juliano, 2014
“Pickman’s Model” by H.P. Lovecraft, 1927
“Dollhouse” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“I Love My Grandparents’ Fireplace” by Rona Vaselaar, 2016
“Click-clack the Rattlebag“ by Neil Gaiman, 2015
CLASSICS:
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” by M.R. James, 1904
“The Voice in the Night” by William Hope Hodgson, 1907
“The Cask of Amontillado“ by Edgar Allan Poe, 1847
“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury, 1952
“Cool Air” by H.P. Lovecraft, 1928
SUPERNATURAL:
“It Was a Different Time” by Cymoril Melnibone, 2018
“The Testament of Magdalen Blair” by Aleister Crowley, 1929
“Instructions for the Babysitter” by CR Jones, 2018
“The Hand” by Guy de Maupassant, 1880
“63 Years Ago” by Jake Healey, 2016
UNSETTLING:
“Window” by Bob Leman, 1980
“No Matter Which Way We Turned” by Brian Evenson, 2016
“The M Show Fan Club” by lenalona, 2013
“The Dune” by Stephen King, 2011
“Jacqueline Ess: Her Will And Testament“ by Clive Barker, 1984
“The Judge” by Rona Vaselaar, 2015
ENJOY!
Here’s some more stories I’ve enjoyed, bringing the list total to 125 scary tales:
PSYCHOLOGICAL:
“Nightcrawlers” by Robert R. Mccammon, 1984
“Burn” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“Examination Day” by Henry Slesar, 1958
“Miriam” by Truman Capote, 1945
“To See the Invisible Man” by Robert Silverberg, 1979
“A Conversation with a Stranger on the Bus” by C.M., 2019
“The Man Who Loved Flowers” by Stephen King, 1977
“Paleontologists Were We” by C.K. Walker, 2016
CURSED:
“The Hourglass Tattoo” by The Dead Canary, 2019
“I Uncovered the Disturbing Truth Behind a Haunted Film…” by Joel Farrelly, 2015
“Moomaw’s Curses” by Pippinacious, 2017
“A Curse is Killing My Friends and I’m Next” by Zamil Akhtar, 2017
“The Cat From Hell” by Stephen King, 1977
“I’ve Been Getting Strange Letters from the St. Louis Prison” by Andrew Harmon, 2015
“The Ash-tree” by M.R. James, 1904
MONSTERS:
“The Midnight Meat Train” by Clive Barker, 1984
“Recluse” by Jimmy Juliano, 2016
“The Raft” by Stephen King, 1982
“Mr. Widemouth” by perfectcircle35, 2010
“The Beast of Averoigne” by Clark Ashton Smith, 1932
“Graveyard Shift” by Stephen King, 1970
“The Puppet in the Tree” by Dopabeane, 2018
“The Autopsy” by Michael Shea, 1980
CLASSICS:
“The Triumph of Night” by Edith Wharton, 1914
“Specialty of the House” by Stanley Ellin, 1956
“The Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842
“The Mezzotint” by M.R. James, 1904
“The Occupant of the Room” by Algernon Blackwood, 1917
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, 1966
“The Waxwork” by A.M. Burrage, 1931
“The Terrible Old Man” by H.P. Lovecraft, 1920
SUPERNATURAL:
“The Stillwood King” by Kris Straub, 2008
“She’s Gotten One Step Closer Every Night…” by Nick Botic, 2018
“Beauty” by Robert R. Mccammon, 1990
“My Girlfriend Talks in Her Sleep…” by Ryan Matthews, 2018
“The Everlasting Club” by Arthur Gray, 1910
“Char” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons, 1981
“Lemon Blossom Girl” by Kris Straub, 2008
“How to Summon the Butter Street Hitchhiker” by Chris Hicks, 2018
UNSETTLING:
“Soft” by F. Paul Wilson, 1984
“The Taxidermied Child” by Tobias Wade, 2019
“It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby, 1953
“Magnum Opus” by C.K. Walker, 2016
“Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon, 1990
“The Stretching Party” by Nick Botic, 2018
“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” by Joe R. Lansdale, 1991
“Other People” by Neil Gaiman, 2001
HAVE FUN!
I’m sure someone has made a joke text post about this, but I legit think ‘count of monte cristo daily’ over the course of 30 years would be a great idea because of how the book is structured and the gravity/narrative importance it places on the passage of time
Also thinking about how I’m one of maybe a dozen people equipped to start up ‘catch-22 daily,’ but to do so would strip the story of all meaning. I picture it like taking apart a clock and ordering the pieces by size; cool to look at and semi-useful specifically to clockmakers, but it’s no longer a clock
I need sci fi fans to please be normal about the Three Laws of Robotics. These are not a serious proposal about AI ethics – they're a narrative logic puzzle created to facilitate writing detective stories about robots. They're the sort of thing you'd invent to annoy Daniel Craig if you made a movie where Benoit Blanc goes to space.
A couple of folks have commented that the Three Laws are like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, but that's not really it.
The problem with Star Trek's Prime Directive is that half the time the shows are genuinely trying to take it seriously and crashing face-first into its moral inadequacy.
The Three Laws of Robotics, conversely, are explicitly designed to fail. Their storytelling function is to create verbal logic puzzles with tangible consequences.
When a robot in an Asimovian detective story manages to twist "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" around into something horrifying by playing semantic games with the definition of the word "human", that's not trying to make a profound statement about the nature of humanity – it's presenting a puzzle-box for the reader to solve, and challenging them to figure out how the robot did it before the detective does.
Reminder that dracula daily starts again next month for those who missed it last year
I personally started but then failed to keep up, so I'm going to try again this year
Link to the Substack to sign up:
Get the classic novel Dracula, emailed to you in real time as it happens. Click to read Dracula Daily, by DraculaDaily, a Substack publicati
It runs 3rd May - 7th November.
If you subscribed last year and haven't unsubscribed you will receive the emails.
And if reading isn't your preferred method of media consumption, why not check out @re-dracula? A Podcast version of the same concept! Bite-sized real time Dracula for your listening pleasure, featuring Karim Kronfli, Ben Galpin, Isabel Adomakoh Young, Beth Eyre, Giancarlo Herrera, David Ault, Jonny Sims, Felix Trench, Alan Burgon, Alasdair Stuart, and Sasha Sienna, as well as many others in ensemble.
Find the feed on Acast here!
Whaaaaa?! Yes!
moleskine = bad
IT’S SO BAD AND I HATE IT
moleskine makes people hate pens and is probably a huge part of why so many people give up on good pens.
to folks who might not know, moleskine is extremely famous AND infamous. they are hardcover notebooks with elastic enclosures. they are expensive, and sold everywhere from pharmacies to bookstores, and does collaborations with a variety of brands including james bond and pokemon. moleskine has tried to establish itself as a luxury notebook, which it technically is.
as long as you do not write in it.
moleskine paper is wholeheartedly shit. it is complete fucking garbage. you might wonder, what makes good paper? well the first thing is how well it can be written on. good paper can handle ink well. good ink handling means clear, solid lines without any feathering (fuzzy spreading), not bleeding through the page, and not ghosting. basically, you want paper that can do crisp lines with a variety of different inks and be used on both sides.
moleskine does not do that. anything more than a ballpoint or pencil will look fuzzy and gross and bleed right through the fucking page. the paper is shit. and that makes people think their pen is shit. and ballpoint pens can be seen on the other side of the page.
common knowledge is that fountain pens, rollerball pens, gel pens, felt pens, and more work better on good paper. good meaning good with ink. but when many people think good paper without knowing any better, they will reach for a moleskine notebook. because moleskine is expensive and advertises itself as good and is widely available. so people try out actually good writing implements on this shit paper, see how bad it works, and then blame the pen.
fountain pens, gel pens, and rollerball require much less pressure than ballpoint pens. they are ergonomic. easier on joints, easier for chronic pain. and moleskine makes people give up on them. nobody wants shitty bleeding feathered lines.
in the united states, our ideas of good paper and good stationery in general are extremely warped. so much of this is because paper here fucking sucks. a lot of paper performs like moleskine. there is shit paper at all price ranges. but you can pick up caliber brand paper (the ones that say made in vietnam) from cvs and have infinitely better performance for pennies. even though it looks low quality, caliber paper (vietnam) can even handle calligraphy ink clearly. bad paper makes people hate good pens and bad pens make people hate writing.
another thing really important to mention, a lot of people think thick paper is always better. this is extremely wrong. in terms of being able to handle a wide variety of inks clearly and cleanly, some of the best paper in the world is tissue thin (tomoe river).
do not buy moleskine. even if the stand is right there. they have some of the worst paper you can get at that price point. expensive paper is not always good paper, good pens need good paper, moleskine paper makes good pens seem awful, and moleskine is something you should only give to someone you loathe.
THIS.
God Moleskine is such a frustrating product, and as an aspiring stationer, I hate that it’s so popular in North America. They’re beautifully constructed, yes, but god the 70gsm paper that they use is SUCH GARBAGE when it comes to inks wetter than a ballpoint pen. They do offer heavier paper - 100-200gsm weight - but only in extremely expensive, large, or difficult to find products.
Leuchtturm 1917 produces great sketching books and, if you get their 120gsm notebooks, they hold up to inks fantastically. Their standard notebooks come in 80gsm paper, and that does hold up to fountain pen ink much better than Moleskine, but while you do get much less feathering and bleeding, there is still some bleedthrough with wetter pens.
Now, if you want the finest fountain pen paper I’ve found in a notebook format, you want Maruman’s Mnemosyne 183. It’s also an 80gsm paper, but it’s treated and laid in such a way that there’s no feathering or bleeding, even with a very wet fountain pen.
That said though, honestly the best notebook I have, in terms of accessibility, expense, and quality of paper, is a Brandz United notebook that I got for my birthday a few years back. It’s not anything special, in terms of paper weight - I can’t find anything concrete, but it feels like 80gsm to me - but it barely feathers and you need to really saturate the page for it to bleed through.
Also, if you’re looking for loose paper, I highly recommend Tomoe River’s paper - so fine and thin you can practically see through it, but it holds ink like a sponge, doesn’t bleed, has no feathering, and is smooth as glass. For correspondence, though, I am a fan of G. Lalo’s Pur Vélin, which is a 125gsm 50% cotton and 50% wood pulp paper. It’s absolutely beautiful and has just enough grain to it that there’s a super pleasant tactile feedback when you’re writing.
And if you want to go a lil’ bit fancy with gorgeous designs (and I mean GORGEOUS designs), look up Castelli.
My current fave. No feathering, no bleeding, works perfect with ballpoint pens and with fountain pens, and the paper is super smooth. I’ve literally written novels in these fuckers. Also: cheaper than moleskine.
@jimtheviking already mentioned Leuchtturm; I’m adding Black n’ Red, Clairefontaine and Rhodia.
All have better paper than Moleskine, which has been milking its early reputation for years while product quality went downhill. Now they’re just another Lifestyle Accessory for people who shop by brand-name.
I know I have a lot of artists who see my stuff
I was about to add Clairefontaine but I’ll add
ClaireFontaine’s paper is great no matter which books you get [or loose] but the age bag and Europa notebooks are my absolute fave, I buy them in batches to handwrite in with a fountain pen, and their sketching books, hardcover 90gsm is AMAZING if you draw with inks, especially crow and spoon pens, no bleeding, feathering and no catching with the sharp points
lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.
what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?
pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then
...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.
Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.
I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.
If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.
HUGE list of free (!!) books by black authors and revolutionaries. includes writings by toni morrison, james baldwin, assata shakur, angela davis, malcolm x, audre lorde and frantz fanon.
