Some books lose their charm after the first read, but with Donna Tartt, the more you read it, the better it gets.

Yes, this is your sign to reread the secret history and the goldfinch.

She truly puts her whole donnussy (sorry i hate myself too) into those books every 10 years.

I keep daydreaming about dropping out of my MA to make a video game but then I find out shit like the word “nothing” was, in Elizabethan times, slang for “vagina,” which not only reinvigorates my studies but also puts an incredible twist on the title Much Ado About Nothing. Like my man Will really wrote a play called Some Ruckus Regarding Pussy and now we make kids read that in high school. Absolute fuckin legend.

Staring at the ceiling, daydreaming about an unrealistic future where you are incredibly successful, whilst ignoring the syllabus that you have to study to get to that future when your exams are in two days, is exactly why it's unrealistic at the first place.

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

still one of my favorite bits i ever got to commit was pretending not to know who jesus is when a street preacher was evangelizing to me. he was like "do you know who jesus is?" and i had so much time before my next bus and i wanted to know what would happen so i said no. and you know what. he had clearly never been told no to that question before because if i hadn't actually known who jesus was, his baffled and fumbling attempt sure wouldn't have told me. literally reversed the roles. now you get to stand here feeling very uncomfortable and wishing you could be somewhere else because guess what buddy, this is my bus stop, im early (and can catch like five other buses from this exact stop), and im now thoroughly invested in hearing about this mysterious jesus figure. you're locked in here with me. im eating the key as we speak. i will kill us both before i let you out of here.

very highly recommend this bit if you can pull it off and if you have time to kill

If what we are reading on Astarion's grave is correct, and he was only 39 years old when he died, that adds an entire new level of tragedy to his character. Not only was he extremely young and emotionally immature by elven standards, but he had barely even lived before he died. It's no wonder that he doesn't remember anything about his past when we ask him about it — 39 years is a small drop of water in comparison to 200 years of abuse. There is simply nothing to remember.

7.1.24 🌠 google scholar save me...google scholar...save me google scholar

Highly recommend the 1872 novella Carmilla to all the wlw iwtv fans out there, it's about a gothic lesbian vampire-human romance and it lowkey changed my life. Like I cannot explain to you how shockingly gay and poetic this story that came out two decades before Dracula is. I'm a little devastated it took me this long to read it tbh

(And if you're looking for a good retelling that embraces the gay further I recommend Carmilla and Laura by S.D. Simper. It's not as poetic but it focuses on internalized homophobia, religion and has a happier ending)

preparing to serve law and master cunt!

(some of) my literary roman empires

benedick’s “you” —> “thou” switch in 4.1

the extended portrait metaphor in pride and prejudice

may welland

the repression of female emotions in victorian fiction

henry’s “a country dance as an emblem of marriage” speech in northanger abbey + the way that 19th century dance scenes prefigure marriage in general

the moment in jane eyre when mr. rochester asks jane if she finds him handsome and she says “no, sir”

victorian floriography

ophelia’s final scene

ww1 solider poetry (sassoon, owens, rosenberg, brooke etc.)

the ambiguity surrounding bertha mason

juliet’s “O romeo, romeo, wherefore art thou romeo?” breaks from iambic pentameter because the name romeo has too many syllables so the problem is literally his name

éponine thénardier (just everything about her but especially the “i am the devil” scene)

to be honest, if you consider reading books to be 'media consumption' and not an act of actively engaging and interacting with art i don't think we can ever have a productive conversation

Japanese literature comes with levels of comfort that the common man could never comprehend, all held in just a cup of coffee.

And then there's the unending misery japanese authors, and they will be my babygirls forever.

My first semester of grad school is in the books.

Over the last 3.5 months I’ve written 70 pages, read 16 books, not including the hundreds of poems (or personal reading), and countless articles/essays.

This was tough as hell. Probably the hardest thing I’ve done (academically, at least) but just a few months into the program I can already see that I’m a better reader, a better writer, and more insightful critic.

I will absolutely not be taking a full load from here on—it’s all fun and games until you have three 15 pages papers dude within 4 days of each other—but I’m super coming into my own here.

10/10, would grad school again.

:-P

I know the average reading comprehension on this site is zero but I'm different. I'm applying wildly inappropriate analysis lenses to popcorn media. I'm doing a queer theory reading of Horus Heresy novels. Now I'm doing feminist analysis of Warhammer 40k canon. Now I'm applying Marxist analysis to The Outsiders. Time for a historical analysis of The Locked Tomb. A post-colonial reading of the entirety of Doctor Who. A psychological anlaysis of Twilight. On the horseshoe scale of reading comprehension I'm at "so much reading comprehension that it loops back around to not understanding books at all actually". You can't stop me. I'm literary analysis Georg

just a very quick explanation about eastern european melancholy because it seems important to me -- this term as well as the general concept of melancholy can often be found in art and literature analysis and basically describes how the general depiction of eastern europe is... less than favourable. for example, eastern european characters like in bram stoker's dracula are characterised as being distincly different and not as culturally advanced compared to "modern" western cultures, a trend that is sometimes still seen today when looking at cultural stereotypes.

in the context of the movie damon and kris watched as well as historically, this term now more often refers to a general feeling of hopelessness that is caused by unstable political as well as economic conditions due to the situation post wwii and then the dissolution of the soviet union as well as yugoslavia.

the fact that damon and kris both felt that it was important to illustrate this cultural aspect not just through art but by choosing to evoke a female figure, a slavic babushka, means a lot to me, personally. i was joking with @izpira-se-zlato that damon made kris look like my grandma -- but, as with a lot of people here i assume, my grandma was born in post-war eastern europe and was a young girl during the same time period this movie takes place in and was also forced to experience and live through a lot of hardships in early communist poland.

i do believe that kris feels a strong connection to his slavic heritage and culture (he was the one rambling about interslavic, after all) and the fact that damon felt something, too, while watching the movie and that they wanted to express it together is something that feels very, very important to me and i honestly love and appreciate them so much for doing that.