Happy April from The Attic on Eighth!!

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@theatticoneighth
Happy April from The Attic on Eighth!!
Happy Spring from The Attic on Eighth đ¸ . . . #writer #writersofinstagram #writerscommunity #writersdesk #writers #writersofig #post #repost #ootd #ootdfashion #ootdinspiration #ootdstyle #ootdinspo #fashion #fashionstyle #style #styleinspiration #styleoftheday #styleinspo #spring #springvibes #springday #springfeeling #springisintheair #flower #flowers #flowersofinstagram #flowerstagram #solstice #springtimeattheattic (at Washington D.C.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMr9dteLN9f/?igshid=18wtcrg6fgpf0
Breakfast at The Attic đĽ Whatâs your favorite petit dej pastry? đ¸ @thepouf . . . #repost #morning #morningvibes #morningwalk #morningroutine #breakfast #breakfastideas #breakfasttime #mood #moodoftheday #moodboard #moodygrams #croissant https://www.instagram.com/p/CMhPPhgL1uI/?igshid=zf555z6nbvpf
Media Editor @zgburnett reflects upon two documentaries about two women she should have already known about, and you should, too đ #linkinbio . . . #writer #writersofinstagram #writerscommunity #writersdesk #writers #writersofig #review #post #article #franlebowitz #paulinekael #martinscorsese #film #movies #criticism #critic #newyork #newyorkcity #newyorker #female #femalewriters #journalism #journalist #documentary #series #netflix #netflixseries #culture (at New York, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMVY0oOgyPT/?igshid=17ma6wz7vdfus
As the wheel of the year turns, Vesna Curlic ( @vesnacurlic ) reviews Katherine Mayâs âWintering,â in which she describes âthe art of weathering lean times, of turning inward, of reconceptualising and normalising sadness.â âď¸ #linkinbio . . . #writer #writersofinstagram #writerscommunity #writersdesk #writers #writersofig #review #post #article #book #bookstagram #books #winter #wintering #mentalhealth #wellness #quiet #review https://www.instagram.com/p/CMQLdN5gq1T/?igshid=cl6c89mvvsk2
Tired of winter, tired of not going outside, tired of everything? We are, too đđź New Winter Films review by @zgburnett up now #linkinbio . . . #writer #writersofinstagram #writersdesk #writerslife #writers #writerscommunity #writersnetwork #writeaway #writersofig #review #article #post #newpost #medieval #medievalhistory #medievaltimes #literature #umbertoeco #aubreyplaza #alisonbrie #film #films #movie #movies #moviescenes #filmphotography #winter #winterattheattic #list https://www.instagram.com/p/CLrwjfLA6-l/?igshid=19znqkw5b2qm4
In her new review, Culture Editor @elizaamber wanders the âgender wildernessâ with Torrey Petersâs new novel đ #linkinbio . . . #writer #writersofinstagram #writersdesk #writerslife #writers #writerscommunity #writersnetwork #writeaway #writersofig #review #article #post #newpost #trans #transgender #gender #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqđ #lgbtpride #lgbtcommunity #literature #bookstagram #book #booklove #booklover #books #novel #torreypeters https://www.instagram.com/p/CLmgUjEgkzx/?igshid=boaxexv7a629
Weâre back with âWhat Weâre Readingâ this month, and @oliviawillemin @soundaffects @scienceofluck @wanders_in_wonder and @simplyamysue are discussing the books that have been keeping them company so far in 2021. Read more through the link in our bio and let us know your favorite reads of the moment. đâ¨â¨ #theatticreads #winterattheattic #whatwerereading #booksbooksbooks #bibliophile (at Lausanne, Switzerland) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLjQmZVg6if/?igshid=1o6eeivrdm2af
Happy Valentineâs Day from The Attic on Eighth, remember to love yourself today â¤ď¸ đ¨: Donald Hamilton Fraser, 2009 @ccagalleries . . . #valentine #valentines_day #valentinesday #valentinesday2021 #â¤ď¸ #â¤ď¸â¤ď¸â¤ď¸ #donaldhamiltonfraser #art #artwork #artistsoninstagram #artist #artgallery #artoftheday #artofinstagram #artlover #artdaily #winter #wintertime #theatticoneighth #winterattheattic https://www.instagram.com/p/CLR7_kkgUSL/?igshid=1hh1omecr41p5
Bridgerton, Reviewed
You know Bridgerton is going to be a good show when it opens with Julie Andrewsâ golden voice introducing our characters against the backdrop of a macaron-toned London. With all of Jane Austenâs warmth and Gossip Girlâs raunchiness, Netflixâs new show Bridgerton gives us exactly what we all need: a warm, cosy escape after the horrible train wreck that was 2020. Set in Regency era London, albeit a more fantastical version of it, Bridgerton offers a look into society life and the many tribulations that come with it. The show is an aesthetic carnival, brimming with sprawling garden estates, vibrant gowns, and pastel interiors where our characters giggle and flirt, smile demurely and exchange stolen glances.
This eight-episode series follows the Bridgerton siblings, four boys and four girls, as they navigate their romantic lives in high-society London. While this season mainly revolves around Daphne Bidgerton, the breathtakingly elegant eldest sister and the âincomparableâ of the season as declared by Queen Charlotte herself, her siblings indulge in their equally exciting sub-plots. Viscount Bidgerton, the eldest sibling, is wrapped up in a romance with an opera singer born on the wrong side of town. Eloise wants nothing to do with courtship and instead dedicates her efforts towards unmasking the mysterious Lady Whistledown (Ă la Gossip Girl), whose anonymous scandal sheet has the whole town hooked with its juicy reveals and scathing comments.
Daphneâs love interest is the ridiculously attractive Duke of Hastings, played by RenĂŠ-Jean Page. The two are diametrical opposites; Daphne wants to marry for love and the Duke wants nothing to do with marriage, but the tension between the two is enough to slip and cut yourself on. Indeed, while the show was released on Christmas day, donât make the mistake of watching this with your family. The bawdy sex scenes and titillating flirtations are at the forefront throughout. One memorable scene is of the Duke amusingly explaining the concept of âtouching oneselfâ to a clueless Daphne against the backdrop of a serene London park. While I wouldnât go as far as to compare Bridgerton to Fifty Shades of Grey, there are certainly similar elements.
Sexy dukes aside, there is much more that Bridgerton has to offer. The show gives us a glimpse into what it means to be a lady in the Regency era, albeit in a more lighthearted fashion. Anxiety-fueled social seasons, vicious whispered gossips, and a ridiculous lack of any sex education are the norm. And yet, the show feels incredibly modern. Showrunner Chris van Dusenâs Regency era London is far more ethnically diverse than history allows. Violin editions of songs like âBad Guyâ by Billie Eilish and âThank You, Nextâ by Ariana Grande waft through lavish ballrooms as our characters do the foxtrot.Â
Bridgerton is not an accurate or witty period drama, nor does it pretend to be. Many of the plotlines are silly and exaggerated, much like any other teen drama, and nowhere near the cleverness that one might expect from a Regency era story. Yet, what it does deliver rather spectacularly is a lighthearted story one can enjoy on a cold winter evening, perhaps tucked under a warm blanket while sipping a glass of merlot. In terms of warmth and aesthetic appeal, the show comes out triumphant. It is, as Lady Whistledown would write, a âdiamond of the first water.â
Rhea Peters is a Content Manager and blogger based in Mumbai, India. She recently completed a degree in English Literature and enjoys Victorian novels, historical drama soundtracks and coconut lattes. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her blog for pretty pictures and travel recommendations.
Watching The Queenâs Gambit; on the Remarkable Unexceptionality of Beth Harmon
âWith some people, chess is a pastime. With others, it is a compulsion, even an addiction. And every now and then, a person comes along for whom it is a birthright. Now and then, a small boy appears and dazzles us with his precocity, at what may be the worldâs most difficult game. But what if that boy were a girl? A young, unsmiling girl, with brown eyes, red hair, and a dark blue dress? Into the male-dominated world of the nationâs top chess tournaments, strolls a teenage girl with bright, intense eyes, from Fairfield High School in Lexington, Kentucky. She is quiet, well-mannered, and out for blood.â
The preceding epigraph opens a fictional profile of Beth Harmon featured in the third episode of The Queenâs Gambit (2020), and is written and published after the protagonist â a teenage, rookie chess player, no less â beats a series of ranked pros to win her first of many tournaments. In the same deft manner as it depicts the characterâs ascent to her global chess stardom, the piece also sets up the seriesâs narrative: this is evidence of a great talent, it tells us, a grandmaster in the making. As with most other stories about prodigies, this new entry into a timeworn genre is framed unexceptionally by its subjectâs exceptionality.
Yet as far as tales regaled about young chess wunderkinds go, Beth Harmonâs stands out in more ways than one. That she is a girl in a male-dominated world has clearly not gone unremarked by both her diegetic and nondiegetic audiences. That her life has thus far â and despite her circumstances â been relatively uneventful, however, is what makes this show so remarkable. After all, much of our culture has undeniably primed us to expect the consequential from those whom we raise upon the pedestal of genius. As Harmonâs interviewer suggests in her conversation with Harmon for the latterâs profile, âCreativity and psychosis often go hand in hand. Or, for that matter, genius and madness.â So quickly do we attribute extraordinary accomplishments to similarly irregular origins that we presume an inexplicability of our geniuses: their idiosyncrasies are warranted, their bad behaviours are excused, and deep into their biographies we dig to excavate the enigmatic anomalies behind their gifts. Through our myths of exceptionality, we make the slightest aberrations into metonyms for brilliance.
Nonetheless, for all her sullenness, non-conformity, and her plethora of addictions, Beth Harmon seems an uncommonly normal girl. No doubt this may be a contentious view, as evinced perhaps by the chorus of viewers and reviewers alike who have already begun to brand the character a Mary Sue. Writing on the series for the LA Review of Books, for instance, Aaron Bady construes The Queenâs Gambit as âthe tragedy of Bobby Fischer [made] into a feminist fantasy, a superhero story.â In the same vein, Jane Hu also laments in her astute critique of the Cold War-era drama its flagrant and saccharine wish-fulfillment tendencies. âThe show gets to have it both ways,â she observes, âa beautiful heroine who leans into the edge of near self-destruction, but never entirely, because of all the male friends she makes along the way.â Sexual difference is here reconstituted as the unbridgeable chasm that divides the US from the Soviet Union, whereas the mutual friendliness shared between Harmon and her male chess opponents becomes a utopic revision of history. Should one follow Huâs evaluation of the series as a period drama, then the retroactive ascription of a recognisably socialist collaborative ethos to Harmon and her compatriots is a contrived one indeed.Â
Accordingly, both Hu and Bady conclude that the series grants us depthless emotional satisfaction at the costly expense of realism: its all-too-easy resolutions swiftly sidestep any nascent hint of overwhelming tension; its resulting calm betrays our desire for reprieve. Underlying these arguments is the fundamental assumption that the unembellished truth should also be an inconvenient one, but why must we always demand difficulty from those we deem noteworthy? Summing up the showâs conspicuous penchant for conflict-avoidance, Bady writes that:Â
over and over again, the show strongly suggests â through a variety of genre and narrative cues â that something bad is about to happen. And then ⌠it just doesnât. An orphan is sent to a gothic orphanage and the staff ⌠are benign. She meets a creepy, taciturn old man in the basement ⌠and he teaches her chess and loans her money. She is adopted by a dysfunctional family and the mother ⌠takes care of her. She goes to a chess tournament and midway through a crucial game she gets her first period and ⌠another girl helps her, who she rebuffs, and she is fine anyway. She wins games, defeating older male players, and ⌠they respect and welcome her, selflessly helping her. The foster father comes back and âŚshe has the money to buy him off. She gets entangled in cold war politics and ⌠decides not to be.
In short, everything that could go wrong ⌠simply does not go wrong.
Time and again predicaments arise in Harmonâs narrative, but at each point, she is helped fortuitously by the people around her. In turn, the character is allowed to move through the series with the restrained unflappability of a sleepwalker, as if unaffected by the drama of her life. Of course, this is not to say that she fails to encounter any obstacle on her way to celebrity and success â for neither her childhood trauma nor her substance-laden adolescence are exactly rosy portraits of idyll â but only that such challenges seem so easily ironed out by that they hardly register as true adversity. In other words, the show takes us repeatedly to the brink of what could become a life-altering crisis but refuses to indulge our taste for the spectacle that follows. Skipping over the Aristotelian climax, it shields us from the height of suspense, and without much struggle or effort on the viewersâ part, hands us our payoff. Consequently lacking the epochal weight of plot, little feels deserved in Harmonâs story.
In his study of eschatological fictions, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode would associate such a predilection for catastrophes with our abiding fear of disorder. Seeing as time, as he argues, is âpurely successive [and] disorganised,â we can only reach to the fictive concords of plot to make sense of our experiences. Endings in particular serve as the teleological objective towards which humanity projects our existence, so we hold paradigms of apocalypse closely to ourselves to restore significance to our lives. It probably comes as no surprise then that in a year of chaos and relentless disaster â not to mention the present era of extreme precariousness, doomscrolling, and the 24/7 news cycle, all of which have irrevocably attuned us to the dreadful expectation of âthe worst thing to comeâ â we find ourselves eyeing Harmonâs good fortune with such scepticism. Surely, we imagine, something has to have happened to the character for her in order to justify her immense consequence. But just as children are adopted each day into loving families and chess tournaments play out regularly without much strife, so too can Harmon maintain low-grade dysfunctional relationships with her typically flawed family and friends.Â
In any case, although âit seems to be a condition attaching to the exercise of thinking about the future that one should assume one's own time to stand in extraordinary relation to it,â not all orphans have to face Dickensian fates and not all geniuses have to be so tortured (Kermode). The fact remains that the vagaries of our existence are beyond perfect reason, and any attempt at thinking otherwise, while vital, may be naive. Contrary to most criticsâ contentions, it is hence not The Queenâs Gambitâs subversions of form but its continued reach towards the same that holds up for viewers such a comforting promise of coherence. The show comes closest to disappointing us as a result when it eschews melodrama for the straightforward. Surprised by the ease and randomness of Harmonâs life, it is not difficult for one to wonder, four or five episodes into the show, what it is all for; one could even begin to empathise with Huâs description of the series as mere âfodder for beauty.âÂ
Watching over the series now with Badyâs recap of it in mind, however, I am reminded oddly not of the prestige and historical dramas to which the series is frequently compared, but the low-stakes, slice-of-life cartoons that had peppered my childhood. Defined by the prosaicness of its settings, the genre punctuates the lifeâs mundanity with brief moments of marvel to accentuate the curious in the ordinary. In these shows, kindergarteners fix the troubles of adults with their hilarious playground antics, while time-traveling robot cats and toddler scientists alike are confronted with the woes of chores. Likewise, we find in The Queenâs Gambit a comparable glimpse of the quotidian framed by its protagonistâs quirks. Certainly, little about the Netflix seriesâ visual and narrative features would identify it as a slice-of-life serial, but there remains some merit, I believe, in watching it as such. For, if there is anything to be gained from plots wherein nothing is introduced that cannot be resolved in an episode or ten, it is not just what Bady calls the âdrowsy comfortâ of satisfaction â of knowing that things will be alright, or at the very least, that they will not be terrible. Rather, it is the sense that we are not yet so estranged from ourselves, and that both life and familiarity persists even in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
Perhaps some might find such a tendency towards the normal questionable, yet when all the world is on fire and everyone clambers for acclaim, it is ultimately the ongoingness of everyday life for which one yearns. As Harmonâs childhood friend, Jolene, tells her when she is once again about to fall off the wagon, âYouâve been the best at what you do for so long, you donât even know what itâs like for the rest of us.â For so long, and especially over the past year, we have catastrophized the myriad crises in which weâre living that we often overlook the minor details and habits that nonetheless sustain us. To inhabit the congruence of both the remarkable and its opposite in the singular figure of Beth Harmon is therefore to be reminded of the possibility of being outstanding without being exceptional â that is, to not make an exception of oneself despite oneâs situation â and to let oneself be drawn back, however placid or insignificant it may be, into the unassuming hum of dailiness. It is in this way of living that one lives on, minute by minute, day by day, against the looming fear and anxiety that seek to suspend our plodding regular existence. It is also in this way that I will soon be turning the page on the last few months in anticipation of what is to come.Â
Born and raised in the perpetually summery tropics â that is, Singapore â Rachel Tay wishes she could say her life was just like a still from Call Me By Your Name: tanned boys, peaches, and all. Unfortunately, the only resemblance that her life bears to the film comes in the form of books, albeit ones read in the comfort of air-conditioned cafĂŠs, and not the pool, for the heat is sweltering and the humidity unbearable. A fervent turtleneck-wearer and an unrepentant hot coffee-addict, she is thus the ideal self-parodying Literature student, and the complete anti-thesis to tropical life.
Did you know that the Pride flag was changed in 2017 at the Philadelphia Pride celebrations in order to acknowledge and celebrate the contributions of people of color to the community? To help us better get to know the flag, Culture Editor @elizaamber compiled a list of some of the best LGBTQ+ music, film, television, fiction, and non-fiction inspired by the meanings of the 2017 flag. Find them through the link in our bio and Happy Pride! đ¤đ¤đłď¸âđ #pride2020 (at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) https://www.instagram.com/p/CB77AkIA_N7/?igshid=1xn4jr5fgsyjh
Nothing better than coffee, pastries, and books on a Sunday. đ¤ As we wrap up our look back at reading in 2019, @laurenolmeda is sharing her ten favorite books of the year that sheâs bringing with her into this new decade. Find them through the link in bio! đ⨠#theatticreads #winterattheattic #coffeeandbooks #bibliophilelife đ¸ @laurenolmeda (at Two Pups Coffee) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7OvEgAgu3q/?igshid=414ib11cpdz9
âPajamas as eveningwearâ is a resolution we can all get behind. How are you dressing into the new year? ⨠đ¸ @raquelle (at Savannah, Georgia) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7CZokbAo9C/?igshid=6vl8eia71q0c
Our 2019 in Books: Olivia GĂźndĂźz-Willemin
Our 2019 in Books: Olivia GĂźndĂźz-WilleminÂ
âSo, in 2019, I read to soothe, to spark joy, to relish the written word. I read what I wanted to read and slowly, I learned to accept that sometimes, to read better, we need to read less.âÂ
Our 2019 in Books: Olivia GĂźndĂźz-Willemin
âFor years, it felt like the effort to keep going was about equivalent to walking through a wall of fire, shrieking all the way through with a book in hand.â