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self-made-cages · 1 year

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Morgan's 2023 Reading List ✨📚

Jan 2: Truly Madly Guilty - Liane Moriarty (1 star)

Jan 4: True Biz - Sara Nović (4.5 stars)

Jan 15: Spare - Prince Harry (4 stars)

Jan 20: Blood of Olympus - Rick Riordan (re-read) (3 stars)

Jan 23: This Time Tomorrow - Emma Straub (3.5 stars)

Jan 25: The Last Thing He Told Me - Laura Dave (3.5 stars)

Feb 2: Beartown - Fredrik Backman (5 stars)

Feb 5: The Hawthorne Legacy - Jennifer Lynn Barnes (4 stars)

Feb 6: The Final Gambit - Jennifer Lynn Barnes (3.5 stars)

Feb 19: Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting - Clare Pooley (4 stars)

Feb 19: The Unsinkable Greta James - Jennifer E. Smith (2.5 stars)

Feb 28: Where’d You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple (5 stars)

Mar 15: A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas (4 stars)

Mar 20: A Court of Mist and Fury - Sarah J. Maas (5 stars)

Mar 23: A Court of Wings and Ruin - Sarah J. Maas (4 stars)

Mar 25: The Quarantine Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot (2.5 stars)

Mar 26: A Court of Frost and Starlight - Sarah J. Maas (4 stars)

Mar 31: The Mutual Friend - Carter Bays (4 stars)

April 5: From Blood and Ash - Jennifer L. Armentrout (3.5 stars)

April 9: A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire - Jennifer L. Armentrout (4.5 stars)

April 15: The Crown of Gilded Bones - Jennifer L. Armentrout (3 stars)

April 19: The War of Two Queens -Jennifer l Armentrout (3 stars)

April 23: The Reading List - Sara Nisha Adams (3 stars)

April 30: Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus (5 stars)

May 6: Happy Place - Emily Henry (4.5 stars)

May 10: Everything Beautiful in Its Time - Jenna Bush Hager (not rating)

May 13: Well Met - Jen DeLuca (3 stars)

May 21: The Last Mrs. Parrish - Liv Constantine (2.5 stars)

May 25: The Displacements - Bruce Holsinger (4 stars)

May 27: Rock the Boat - Beck Dorey-Stein (4.5 stars)

May 31: Damn Few - Rorke Denver (not rating)

June 14: A Court of Silver Flames - Sarah J. Maas (2 stars)

June 25: Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall (not rating)

June 27: A Court of Mist and Fury - Sarah J. Maas (reread)

July 2: Pineapple Street - Jenny Jackson (4 stars)

July 5: Once More With Feeling - Elissa Sussman (2 stars)

July 13: It All Comes Down to This - Therese Anne Fowler (3.5 stars)

July 15: Mad Honey - Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan (4 stars)

July 27: The Secret History - Donna Tart (3 stars)

July 29: The Comeback Summer - Ali Brady (4 stars)

July 30: The It Girl - Ruth Ware (4 stars)

August 5: The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern (4 stars)

August 6: Educated - Tara Westover (not rating)

August 9: The First 90 Days - Michael D. Watkins (not rating)

August 11: This is How it Always Is - Laurie Frankel (5 stars)

August 20: Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver (4.5 stars)

August 27: A Soul of Ash and Blood - Jennifer L. Armentrout (1.5 stars)

August 30: The Alice Network - Kate Quinn (3.5 stars)

September 4: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V.E. Schwab (4.5 stars)

September 15: This Is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (4 stars)

September 17: Hotel Laguna - Nicola Harrison (2 stars)

September 24: We're All Adults Here - Emma Straub (5 stars)

September 26: A Bend in the Road - Nicholas Sparks (1.5 stars)

October 5: The Celebrants - Steven Rowley (2.5 stars)

October 8: Anxious People - Fredrik Backman (3.5 stars)

October 9: Born a Crime - Trevor Noah (not rating)

October 14: The Wishing Game - Meg Shaffer (4 stars)

October 16: Counting the Cost - Jill Duggar (not rating)

October 18: Love and Other Words - Christina Lauren (2.5 stars)

October 22: Rules of Civility - Amor Towles (4 stars)

October 29: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone - Lori Gottlieb (not rating)

October 30: Troublemaker - Leah Remini (not rating)

November 2: Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen (3.5 stars)

November 7: Good Girl Complex - Elle Kennedy (1.5 stars)

November 23: Modern Lovers - Emma Straub (2 stars)

November 25: Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros (3.5 stars)

December 3: Daisy Jones and The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid (2.5 stars)

December 6: Know My Name - Chanel Miller (not rating)

December 10: Girl in the Blue Coat - Monica Hesse (2.5 stars)

December 15: The Circus Train - Anita Parikh (2 stars)

December 20: Catch and Kill - Ronan Farrow (not rating)

December 22: Today Will Be Different - Maria Semple (4 stars)

December 27: Iron Flame - Rebecca Yarros (4.5 stars)

December 29: Vampire Academy - Michelle Mead (1 star)

December 30: Percy Jackson: The Chalice of the Gods - Rick Riordan (5 stars)

#morgan reads

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roxannepolice · 3 months

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Ooh, I've been thinking about Mozart lately! I'd love to hear your thoughts/feelings on him if you have anything you'd like to talk about 💜

I mean, talking about music is supposedly like dancing about architecture, and I'm no Nijinsky... and I should clarify that my thesis was specifically about Milos Forman's biopics, i.e. Amadeus and Goya's ghosts... so I guess the good part is that a "fictionalized" Mozart is arguably more appropriate to blorboify 😅

And the truth is I absolutely love Mozart's music, largely thanks to Forman's film. I think it managed to convey the pure genius spot on, not just in showing baby Wolfgang playing flawlessly with his eyes covered or exclamations of how there are no corrections on his sheets (which... I've been to Mizart museum in Vienna. It's freaking true. That guys really wasjust transcribing what was already in his head), but perhaps most in one of my favourite scenes in cinema history, that is Mozart vamping up Salieri's march:

youtube

Just... the moment a... Decent. Good. Better by a mile than what most people will write in their lifetime! piece of music turns into something so purely brilliant that hits something going beyond conscious mind, or culture or history, and just... touches the moment beauty crosses the line of aesthetic and becomes a value in its own right???? AND ALL THAT FROM LISTENING ONCE TO A VERY POOR PERFORMANCE (honestly, tons of ink were spilled for F. Murray Abraham and Tom Hulce, and justly so, but shoutout to Jeffrey Jones for the performance that in one of my better choices of words I described as "majestically unaware of his own mediocrity")???!!!! This explains what pure genius is in a way that no cognitivistics ever could!

(This was one of my major statements in the thesis, btw. One of the biggest questions regarding biopics if you can bend historical facts for a story. And I get how that's a problem, but can you convey the pure genius basing on something that isn't already genius? Because the two "improvised" pieces in Amadeus are both in fact music already written by Mozart, with the "march" being the aria Non piu andrai and the "Bach-like" melody in the party/fart scene is Vivat Bacchus. If you already have a contrast between, again. Decent. Good. and GENIUS, should you really avoid an analysis of what's the difference? Incidentally, neither Shaffer nor Forman say Salieri did in fact murder Mozart)

I think if anyone's looking for someone who did have a Nijinsky skill in writing about Mozart, I really recommend Norbert Elias's Mozart: sociology of a genius. He formulates a sort of sociological look on how genius comes to be. Not so much in a "oh, it's actually all about habitus and people maintaining concepts of beauty to serve their own purposes" or "how to raise a genius" (incidentally, if you're looking for "how NOT to raise a kid" look no further than Leopold Mozart), but really digging into "not denying some unique gift, what social circumstances allow this gift to bloom?"

I just think Mozart's music is the epitome of joyfulness that's profound. It grasps the essential unseriousness of life while keeping its importance to each individual. Makes the everyday into an ideal, without stripping or objectifying anything. It gives a sense of connection that remains thoroughly introspective. It's mathematically perfect while quintessentially human. It is, indeed, how God hears the world.

#am i making any sense here? hope that's somewhat appropriate as an answer...#that last line is taken from Shaffer's play and it's spot on #wolfgang amadeus mozart #mozart #antonio salieri #milos forman #amadeus

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afieldinengland · 8 months

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can i have your full list of movie recs? i’m sure you’ve posted them before but idk where to find them, also i hope you feel better soon i’m not terribly good with comforting ppl but i’m thinking of you tonight <3

oh, of course, friend– well, i have a list on letterboxd of a few of my favourites, but i can be much more expansive here :) hopefully this is alright, thank you very much for the kind words

the wicker man (1973) - the best film ever made. erotic and pagan and rolling the sun on the hips of a lord in tweed. to date the only film i have shown people that invariably had made them come to me the day after to tell me i have introduced something undeniable and strange into their world. thank you anthony shaffer for everything

equus (1977) - and thank you peter shaffer for everything, too. uniquely distressing and terribly, unutterably sensual. i know not everyone has galloped like alan strang has, but i have. and i know how it feels to have a god take your intestines in his teeth

harold and maude (1971) - when i first started university someone told me that i reminded them of harold chansen, but it wasn't for another few months that i found out why. i don't think i'm being overzealous when i say that this film would probably change anyone's life for the better, really. go and love some more

penda's fen (1974) - a rare thing indeed, which i was made aware of by someone i consequently owe a great deal to. homosexuality, paganism, spiritual becoming, angels and demons and the music of edward elgar bleeding like a long-exposure across the soil of the english countryside. again a film i hardly have words for.... it feels like a rare thing indeed for a boy on a hill in england in the 1970s to declare so vitally and so beautifully that his sex is mixed

if.... (1968) - mick travis and the proto-droog, or the boys' boarding school as petri dish for violence. ever so slightly hallucinatory and alternately deft and brutal and comic in encouraging the growth

a field in england (2013) - you are a coward in a seventeenth century field with a wizard and he won't tell you he's feeding you psilocybin, but he's feeding you psilocybin. every time i got drunk in a field between the ages of sixteen and eighteen i turned into whitehead.... has the world ever recovered from when reece shearsmith emerged from that tent-flap mad and on the end of a rope. a tw for strobe images

in the earth (2021) - as above, a ben wheatley-directed film in which reece shearsmith kind of plays whitehead's descendant. a spectral pandemic looms large at the margins of an unmapped forest, while a standing stone and parnag fegg speak and scream through the mycorrhizal mat inside. a tw for strobe images / flash

the rsc richard ii (2013) - david tennant plays shakespeare's self-dramatising, histrionic king as a posturing androgyne, an inept ruler, a hysterical poet, a madwoman in the attic, a ghost at the feast and a scared little boy all at once. deposition comes to find him crawling and strutting and wailing by turns in a matrix of history and tragedy

caligula (1979) - anyone who tells you that this is one of the 'films considered the worst' is a coward. aspiring headily to cleopatra (1964) but with every possible flavour of bodily fluid and sex act and effete little costume on malcolm mcdowell ending just below his balls represented. helen mirren i hope we live forever. tw for sexual violence

caravaggio (1986) - love and violence and paint and anachronism talk brutally about art and muse in a way that reaches far beyond 1610. death ejaculates blood everywhere, complete with contortionism and engraved knife-blades and kissing blood and coins from another man's mouth to your own

dead ringers (1988) - ellie... ellie... can you ever escape something like a twin? parasitic siblinghood as addiction / withdrawal / overdose, and how the body opens under metal no matter their mutations

ravenous (1999) - this is a love story. comparable to a field in england, in many ways. the devil comes whistling over the sierra nevada in the 1840s in the shape of a man, and in his hands and on his palate he carries the hypnotic taste of longpig and unnerving manifest-destiny ideas about the bloody power of eating who you kill

the cook, the thief, his wife and her lover (1989) - the insides govern everything. eyes caught across a restaurant germinate a love affair, then chaos, and then the brutal and total and pyrrhic main course. the dry outside moves unforgiving towards the slippery inside. tw for sexual violence and domestic abuse

sleuth (1972) - anthony shaffer does it again. homoeroticism and class posturing and wry detective novel cliché, hemmed in by the animatronics and board games and sedately hedged walls of a wiltshire manor. above all else you have to keep your eye on the rules of the game

mumsy, nanny, sonny and girly (1970) - speaking of which, this is one of the films that inspired anthony shaffer to write the wicker man. childhood games and childhood language dance laughing circles hand-in-hand with axe violence and imprisonment and jelly for elevenses. everyone in the 'family' commits to their place in the game in a way that would even make sleuth's andrew wyke safeword out, i think, but certainly not the beetle-trapping children of summerisle

robin redbreast (1970) - another predecessor of the wicker man, this time a bbc play for today that places a pregnant citydweller in a remote and rural cottage. somewhere between sergeant howie and rosemary woodhouse, she is surrounded by a knowing and smiling circle happy to pull her closer and closer to the golden bough

the lion in winter (1968) - you will see the script of this film posted in webweaves alongside hannibal and succession, and with good reason. henry ii, eleanor of aquitaine and their sons are a writhing, humid familial sickness at the heart of their christmas court, too close for comfort– alternately struggling for the crown, tearfully reminiscing and threatening one another with knives. as with all family christmases, of course

straight on till morning (1972) - peter pan and dorian gray as post-psycho proto-slasher. shane briant and rita tushingham are equally astounding as children who never grew up, telling stories to keep themselves from shaking apart against the brutalist backdrop of the 1970s south bank and the winding tower of their own never-neverland. wendy and peter on a nihilistic backdrop of stashed jewellery, dog mutilation and recorded screams

the creeping flesh (1973) - somehow a standout among many other cushing/lee vehicles like it. victorian attitudes to madness, to women and to sexuality corrode around an uncanny supernatural force that brings forward a spectre of unaccountable grief. tw for attempted sexual violence

who's afraid of virginia woolf? (1966) - me and who. again the spectre of grief, but in the form of a glass hitting a wall like a broken-necked bird and the ultimate and consequent bilious overspill of truth. violence!! violence!!

corruption (1968) - in 1968 peter 'lavender and linen' cushing obe played a sex murderer. surely one of the most bizarre grindhouse flicks for the casting alone, he beheads a woman in a train carriage and rubs the blood of another all over her exposed breasts (in the european cut). there's also an incredibly silly chase scene on a beach, a guy in john lennon glasses who crushes an apple in his bare hand and a giant laser. thank you

theatre of blood (1973) - four words for you: vincent price does shakespeare. perhaps the most fun film on this list, and starring pretty much everyone who was working in british film at the time. critics forced to eat their words, sometimes literally, with the meat of the speeches given to price and diana rigg to devour with the scenery. from greasepaint to chef's hat to the mud of the thames, vincent price is clearly having a whale of a time, and it really is fucking great

the bride of frankenstein (1935) - i have no idea if it's blasphemous to say this is far better than frankenstein (1931), but that's what i think– largely due to the presences of delightfully camp mephistopheles aka dr septimus pretorius and the unutterably captivating bride herself. to a new world of gods and monsters

bride of reanimator (1991) - i think this, too, is better than reanimator (1985), but that's a very close-run thing as both films are excellent. shoutout to herbert west for proposing to dan cain with the heart of dan's dead ex-girlfriend and shoutout to dan for accepting it. before the wrath of the lamb there were two men in a basement laboratory killing geckos for gecko juice

dragonwyck (1946) - vincent price brooding tall as byronic villain, replete with a manor suffused with hints of rebecca and jane eyre and wuthering heights. death, remarriage and birth pass in an opiate haze that drive relentlessly towards mandess

rope (1948) - nietzschean philosophy, dinner party etiquette, palmistry, incriminating furniture and household items, and why every sign in this room of wonderfully dressed people says to me that gay people ought to be allowed to kill whoever they want

the lair of the white worm (1988) - do you want to see peter capaldi in a kilt pull the pin out of a grenade with his teeth? do you want to see him have vitally homoerotic moments with hugh grant on the stile of a fence while covered in blood? do you want to see a sexy snake lady lie on a tanning bed and taunt a hypnotised woman with a giant strap-on? of fucking course you do watch this film right now they have pickled worms and a specifically written folk song

flesh for frankenstein (1973) - somehow a uniquely nasty take on the frankenstein narrative. the film's acting is as awful as its approach to flesh, explicit blood relation between victor and his sister, obvious motives behind his quest for the 'perfect nasum', and overabundance of gushing mutilation are interesting

the medusa touch (1978) - an oddly quiet thriller about the power of the mind with a climax filmed in the beautiful environs of bristol cathedral. which isn't the only reason it's on here, but it helps– especially as they adamantly want to make you believe that it's a building in london

horror hospital (1973) - similar to the creeping flesh in that i have seen its ideas done much weaker elsewhere, but also completely unlike that film because it is so totally unserious. any film that opens with one man calling another a 'silly little red faggot swirling around in his own smoke, who does she think she is, greta garbo' and then turns into the world's most bizarre narrative about a health spa with a limo that beheads people is a joy to behold

dracula ad (1972) - johnny alucard we are making you king of all the faggots. he whores and scores his way across the groovy baby shagadelic underbelly of london and takes his little gang of freaks to a desanctified church to drag dracula up from the dead, as if the old sod hasn't suffered enough. and then he has the temerity to moan and kneel and ask a reasonably irate christopher lee to bite him– which he does. if nothing else i hope you will watch for the line 'close the devil's circle, dig the music, kids'

the satanic rites of dracula (1973) - the bitch is back, and you better forget everything you know about dracula movies because this time he has an office building, a motorcycle gang in sheepskin vests and a eye for bioterrorism. shoutout to joanna lumley for playing peter cushing's granddaughter in this who just a year before had a different face and body and hair colour and was a different actress entirely

frankenstein and the monster from hell (1974) - shane briant's simon helder is baron frankenstein's johnny alucard. they do not have crazy gay bitesex in a church, but they do transplant a brain together and in the world of hammer frankenstein that is a fingers in the mouth sort of a deal. astonishingly strange and fantastic swansong to the hexad, with briant, cushing and madeline smith making up the mental asylum's worst family unit

martin (1977) - another vampire story undoubtedly for the modern age. walking firmly ahead of the bela lugosis and christopher lees before it, and playing with the ambiguity between supernatural and homicidal behaviour. all vampires should be ringing in to radio shows

the finishing line (1977) - a 1970s public information film about the dangers of walking on railway tracks, except the way they convey this is a dreamlike vision of a sports day held on said tracks that takes on the air of a calmly administered mass ritual sacrifice. i keep behind the yellow line on the platform, now, though

apaches (1977) - another public information film, this time about the dangers of being an unsupervised child on a farm. except, again, the way they convey this is to make the world seem a callous and terrifying place in general, because it is the 1970s. anything from a slurry pit to pesticide to a tractor can lead to the name above your coat-hook at school being quietly spirited away

the insomniac (1971) - a hallucinatory journey between the fantasy of storytelling and the cement world outside. short and peculiar, but shares similar concerns to parts of penda's fen

stigma (1977) - a family moving to avebury aim to have one of the stones removed from their back garden. only half an hour long but again tempering british mundanity with incarnadine consequence

#answered #film recs #thank you friend!! i think i've included all my main recs... sorry it's a long one. i haven't tagged gore so take it as par for the course

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eldritch-flower · 8 months

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Excerpt from my urban fantasy epic, "Zenith", because I'm writing this one 'reveal' scene and it's so difficult I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON IT FOR A WEEK AND I'M TIRED OF IT. Anyway, Zenith act 2 spoilers below the cut <3

Christ, the world was going insane.

It has always been insane, sir. You just never saw the truth.

Maybe Cuán was the one going insane. Hearing the voice of a dead man in his head, seeing all those- those mirrors that Danny said he wasn’t supposed to.

It was obvious something was going on. Something he didn’t understand, something he wasn’t privy to like the rest of his so-called ‘friends’ were. But he’d been drawn into whatever fantasies they claimed by murdering Jedidiah Shaffer in that casino. Cuán had thrown himself into the shit without a shovel to dig himself back out. And he had to live with that, consequences be damned.

So what? He was surrounded by alleged beings of… inhuman nature, most likely powerful. He didn’t doubt that any of the three in the room with him could kill him if they really wanted. Did they want to? No. They would have done it by now.

None of them were the kind to procrastinate.

“Cuán?” That was Afshani; dear, sweet Sammy. Cuán raised his gaze from the bohemian patterned rug thrown across the floor. “Are you alright?”

“Not really.”

Tommy huffed out a stiff laugh, strong arms folded over his chest. Tommy… should Cuán even still call him that? Or was he supposed to address the God as such?

“You said you’d already had experience with True World folk, Cuán. We didn’t mean to overwhelm you,” Sam said gently. The softness of their voice was like a cleansing lotion to the turmoil in his heart.

Susie frowned, studying Cuán indiscreetly: “You’ve seen others?”

The man nodded, slowly, and her mouth fell open.

“Other than me?”

“He said he’d seen a grindylow,” Sam said quietly, and Tommy raised an eyebrow. “And – Cuán, forgive me if I’m wrong in saying so… but you mentioned a banshee.”

“Aye.”

“You’re kidding,” Susie breathed out, sitting forward on the sofa. Her nails clawed at the plush fabric of the arm like, well… like claws. “Cuán, please tell me you’re joking.”

“Ain’t the type of thing I’d deem funny, Shiori,” he said stiffly.

“You’re done for, Dunleavy,” Tommy supplied unhelpfully. His words were contrite and filled with the same mirth he always spoke with, but the god’s face was a display of uncertainty that Cuán had never seen embedded in the strong lines of his jaw, in the set of his brow. He looked nervous.

“Don’t say that, Vulturnus,” Sam snapped, losing their collective mind for a moment as they examined Cuán with honey-flecked eyes.

“We can figure this out,” Susie said quietly. “People have outrun their fates before.”

“He knows nothing of the true world, Su. And he’s gonna have Reapers after him – “

Shiori bristled, leaping to her feet. “Who said anything about Reapers being involved?”

Tommy sneered: “The hospital think he’s an illegal. He didn’t have a licence.”

“He doesn’t need one! He’s a human!” The woman’s loud voice rang out, and Cuán pressed a hand to his temple as Shaffer sat in the forefront of his mind, content to watch and not say anything. His black amusement crept like a plague into Cuán’s own sensibilities.

“They don’t know that.”

Susie inhaled sharply, her jaw clenching, and she rounded on Cuán with fiery eyes. “You can’t just make anything easy for us, can you?”

“Hey, lady. You tell me first what a ‘reaper’ is and maybe I’ll get to workin’ on my teamwork skills,” Cuán growled back, green eyes narrowed in frustration. “You all sit here, playing human and pretending to care. But you’re so far removed from what it’s like to know nothing. So stop talking like I’m supposed to have a clue what’s goin’ on, and explain.”

Shiori stared at him, her dark eyes heated, knuckles white and clenched at her sides. Sam just watched him with a forlorn expression. Out of all of them, remarkably, it was Brown who looked the least concerned… and that, in and of itself, concerned Cuán.

Do not concern yourself with their fear. You are more than that. You are better.

#I love writing dialogue #specifically between susie and cuán #wip : zenith #urban fantasy #original writing #writeblr #writing community #creative writing #writers of tumblr #wip #excerpt #writing excerpt #writing snippet #dialogue ideas #writing prompt #fantasy #fantasy writing #supernatural horror

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