boy-next-door in the library basement

Bishop V. Navarro they/them. poet, writer, critic.

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inside me there are two wolves [Walter Chaw's and Emily Wilson's reviews of The Odyssey (2026)]

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I so rarely post on here but I feel like I need to go on the record and say I think Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery rekindled my desire to get confirmed Episcopalian and my devotional fandom toward Josh O'Connor is like. appreciative of Jud's example. partly spiritual. I don't feel like feeling silly about this anymore. The Divine will use anything.

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"I'm through with memory."

Li-Young Lee, "The Interrogation," The City in Which I Love You

[kjscottwrites]

If you had to pick, what's the ONE trait in a fictional character that makes you immediately go "oh this one's mine"

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All day, it rains inside us—

Alina Stefanescu, "Poem in the Key of C-Sharp Minor," My Heresies

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I watch you so closely love is my favorite invention. A boat of close attentions lying sideways.

Alina Stefanescu, "Light Does This Exposing," Little Heresies (2025)

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"Celebrity comes into English at the beginning of C15 from Latin celebritās meaning 'fame,' or 'the state of being busy or crowded' (there is also the related French célébrité). Two important early meanings recorded by OED are: 'Observance of ritual or special formality on an important occasion; pomp, ceremony' (C15) and 'An act of celebrating something; a rite, a ceremony; a celebration.' Both are now obsolete, but survived as late as C19. It should be noted that both meanings have strong religious connotations, and it is legitimate to ask whether these meanings contributed to our current usage of celebrity as marking a desperate seeking for the sacred in the profane. While there seem no traces of these archaic meanings in current usage, it might be argued that such connotations prompted the initial choice of this word to mark what is a recognizable feature in contemporary life."

-University of Pittsburgh (n.d.). Keywords: Celebrity. https://keywords.pitt.edu/keywords_defined/celebrity.html

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"[...] I turned my focus to the world of film, the way a plant turns towards the sun."

-Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

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Sentences and their words always lead elsewhere than the place we were expecting them. Neither the reader nor above all the author knows, foresees, commands, calculates, anticipates, prepares for the event of revelation. This incalculable is the text’s promise and taste of triumph.

“Preface: On Stigmatexts,” Stigmata, by Hélène Cixous

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In short, what Bakhtin left to the world, after a lifetime of thinking and writing, was not a shelf full of polished books and essays, but a grab bag of fragments, uncompleted projects, and works that had, in one or another way, been distorted. Scholars, however isolated, eccentric, and unsociable they may be, depend on a public sphere of criticism and argument: the latter tests their ideas, helps them find definitive form, opens them up to wider concerns. Bakhtin had big ideas and no audience: as a result, we have the ruins of a project.

The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, Ken Hirschkop, p. 2

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Jesse Armstrong saying the third-to-last episode of Succession is the most shocking of the final season can only mean one thing:

Tom Wambsgans is being sent to superhell.

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it’s just me and my Sam Winchester brown Carhartt hoodie against the world

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I wrote a poem today which, in this day and age, feels like a miracle.

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giving diary comics an earnest shot

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Supernatural watch-through diary comics, 1.16, “Shadow”

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Supernatural watch-through diary comics, 1x14, "Nightmare”

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Mike Flanagan’s ‘Midnight Mass’ is a Soulful and Extraordinary Portrait of Horror and Humanity

Netflix In recent years, Mike Flanagan has become something of a super-star for fans of gothic tales full of heart. His two anthology limited-series, The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of …

My review of Midnight Mass is up over at Screen Queens!