the bookish dragon

hoarder of words and worlds

[pangur-and-grim]

[bidet-of-evil]

no! explanation of the gaps will kill Reader! she needs narrative lacunae to enjoy the story!

[komihn]

Launching my first art blogs with a small comic based on the amazing words of Ursula K. Le Guin!

[thespoonisvictory]

Ursula K. Le Guin has truly, truly never missed even once

[the-forest-library]

the lord of the rings - j.r.r.tolkien

artwork by barbara remington

[bbcsherlock]

i dont understand people who never reread a book or rewatch a movie or series. the best art will always improve upon being revisited. girl. let it reveal more of itself to you.

[morriganereshkigal]

"Heraclitus said, 'No man ever steps in the same river twice.' The same is true for books. The words on the page have not changed, but the eyes reading them have.

You are not the same person you were when you first read it. To reread is not repetition; it is measuring your own soul's growth against a constant backdrop.

Awaken! Enlighten! Transform!"

[alivehouse]

sparkle on! its the first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls. forget who you are

[mostlyghostie]

All my unread books, looming

Shop

[ripempezardexerox]

You don’t need therapy you just need to dig a hole.

[redrosydiaz]

[melancholyromantic]

📍Voltaire and Rousseau, Glasgow

[largishcat]

circling back around to the issue of writers being expected to do all their own goddamn marketing via social media these days, because it completely nixes the possibility of writers being weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, or misanthropes. 80% of the literary canon was written by weird shut ins, off-putting eccentrics, and misanthropes. if you weed out everyone who’s the wrong kind of insane to maintain a twitter presence, who on earth is left

[charlottemadison42]

i heard a talk about this by a terrific mystery novelist, John Straley, titled “In Defense of Misanthropes in the Arts.”

I’ll never forget him sharing his candid fear that authors like him, authors who did not want to post on Facebook or Twitter, authors who wanted to be curmudgeonly and left alone, were being steadily squeezed out of the writing world as publishers foisted more and more promotional work directly onto authors. Not everyone is cut out for the spotlight. Not everyone wants to be their own hype man. Not everyone presents well in 280 characters, especially in a space they don’t even want to be present. The time suck, the scrutiny, the punishment for making a “mistake” -- all this extracurricular work is so different from actual writing.

Make room for weird reclusive shut-in eccentric misanthropic artists and writers. Don’t forget those voices are worth your attention, too.

[a-ramblinrose]

“It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt.” ― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

[thingsworthsaving]

“As far as words go, ‘crying’ is louder and ‘weeping’ is wetter. When people explain the difference between the two to English-language learners they say that weeping is more formal, can sound archaic in everyday speech. You can hear this in their past tenses—the plainness of ‘cried’, the velvet cloak of ‘wept’. I remember arguing once with a teacher who insisted ‘dreamt’ was incorrect, dreamed the only proper option. She was wrong, of course, in both philological and moral ways, and ever since I’ve felt a peculiar attachment to the t’s of the past: weep, wept, sleep, slept, leave, left. There’s a finality there, a quiet completion, of which ’d’ has never dreamt.”

— Heather Christle, from The Crying Book

[robert-hadley]

Stairs of the Villa Carolina by Tomislav Marcijus

[sawasawako-archived]

“Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

[mostlyghostie]

What books have you done this to?

Instagram / Shop

[mortals0ul]