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inkskinned · 1 year

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you know, the light that fades at the end of Goncharov isn't light.

i am not a very good person to talk to about movies. i haven't seen most of the "official" american canon - jaws, psycho, citizen kane. i have seen sharknado, though. like so much in my childhood, what i knew was a little jar on a long shelf of gallons; my world was a catholic desert in new england weather.

my father had gotten his snout up about something; so we had to watch it. he was mad we hadn't seen it, the way people are going to be mad i haven't seen those three up i named there, as if i me having-not-seen-the-movie was because i was making some kind of political statement or argument. i just haven't seen them yet, i have no opinion about it. i'll eventually get around to it, god be willing.

during that time, i was doing bad in school and worse in taking care of my body. i sat on the floor on this green pillow, one of the ones my dog eventually tears up. my dad typed g-o-n into the DVR with that slow methodical passion, the remote tilted so the "rays" or whatever would somehow find the ever-smaller input.

he was excited. "you need to understand the light." he didn't look at me while he did it, focused.

"are you spelling gonorrhea." my brother, the eldest, was 17 in this memory. he was sitting on the chair in the corner, playing a game i can't remember the name of. (starfleet? star invaders? it was online, i know that. lots of clicking.)

my dad is used to this. we talk over each other all the time. "when they made it, scorsese wanted this specific hue over everything." my father looks over his shoulder at me, but i'm on the floor, stretching. i don't have a smart phone yet. i'm just watching with the anxious-restless feeling we all get when your father is painstakingly typing something into a virtual keyboard at an eighth of the speed you could have managed. "you'd like this, raquel. what color do you think he wanted?"

my mom comes in from the kitchen. "do we want salt or butter on the popcorn?" she has a handful she pops into her mouth. "wait for your sister to come upstairs. she'll be mad if she misses a part."

"salt," i say, while my brother says "butter."

"spruce." my dad is undeterred. he finally clicks the v, and then navigates over the red tiles to enter. "Spruce."

"okay?" i like dark green too. to be honest, i have no idea who Scorsese is or why he is important. (this is, by the way, still true.)

"here's the thing." my father doesn't actually click the "enter." he just looks at me, adjusting his glasses. "it doesn't exist."

okay. he's right. i do like this. i squint up at him, the signal to go on.

"it came to him in a dream. it's not a real color." my brother monotones, flat. he's heard this story before, and he's 17.

"i still say it's green," my mother says. she comes in holding the salt-and-buttered popcorn, fluffy in an orange bowl. "he just never painted a house, is all."

"it's a candle smell," i say.

"a tree." i don't know when my little sister came upstairs. she's braiding her hair, frowning. "i thought we were going to watch psych."

"it's old movie night," my mother answers. there's something there, in the cant of her smile, which i won't understand until i am much older. if you are over 25, you know what i saw. my mother, seeing her family settle like tired birds around a movie screen, for the moment placid, not-fighting. none of the children are happy about the selection - why would we be?

"Scorsese says it's not green." my father finally clicks rent for 2.99. "he was looking for this specific color, the one from his dreams. the color he had been told was called spruce, through someone in the dream." he looks to me again, his poet. "you know how dreams always feel... different. when you look back on them in your memories, they don't color in all the way. and he wanted that dream tinge."

the memories of my dreams are covered in colored static. sometimes i nightmare in black and white. i did not share this information, thinking it was too private. (forgive me. i was 14. everything was too-private for me.)

"a regular hitchcock," my mom mutters. we don't know, yet, not really, about what hitchcock did.

"he revolutionized the lighting industry. raquel, you have to look for the light in this thing. it's only in a few frames per scene. he didn't want it to be overwhelming."

"he fired like 10 people while he was doing it." my brother doesn't look up from his screen, clicking feverishly. "in order to get the color, he had to develop a software to switch lighting past human speed." he sends a glance towards the TV, kind of relenting. "it was cool, actually. he didn't actually light the room with that speed, he used one set of colors on the set and then another set specifically over the film. we're basically seeing two films: one that has the regular lighting, and then just this lighting track playing on top."

"like a sound list - ah, what's that called?" my father's remote hovers over play. i am trying to figure out what color i think spruce is going to be. "soundtrack," he amends. "are we all ready?"

"i still don't think it's real," my mother says. "i think he made it up for PR." my mother is good at colors. my mother would be right about that kind of thing.

"hon, he spent thousands of dollars on this." my father isn't angry, for once, he's smiling. "i'm telling you, it happens."

she shrugs. "i'll believe it when i see it."

we are not ready. we have to each find places to sit. i've been lying about how bad my eyesight is getting, so i keep my seat on the floor, close to the television. my mother, father, and sister take the couch. i make sure i am within reaching distance of the popcorn. my brother even kind-of closes his monstrosity of a laptop. then my mother has to use the bathroom, so we all do, so we won't have to pause later. then my sister remembers her homework, so i get mine too, spreading it uselessly in front of me. i slide open my verizon sidekick keyboard phone to text Dean who the fuck is scorkayze? [sic] and then we are ready.

my mom falls asleep by the end of the first 15 minutes. my father misses most of it, since he's already seen it, going downstairs to play World Civ instead. my sister doesn't get it, so she ends up at the dining room table, doing homework instead. my brother goes back to the video game.

i stare really, really, really hard at the film, trying to figure out where the spruce happens. a few frames per scene.

i don't like the film. like most movies i saw at the time, i found it boring. i had undiagnosed adhd. i spend most of my time stretching and texting and not-doing my homework. again, i'm sorry - i was 14.

when the "gun" finally goes off - if you've seen the movie, you know the scene, and i won't spoil it here for other readers - i looked back over my shoulder towards my family. all of us, quiet in our own little seats. satellites. did i want this memory to be different? that i would turn and see my family, happily crowded chickadees, our wings brushing? or is this just the real-life, the type of love where we are not nesting birds, but foxes. prowling the edges of our comfort with our jaws open. snapping at the shadows, wishing for the closeness we don't allow ourselves to get. tomorrow we will watch psych. this is the last year of my life that all of us will live under the same roof. my brother goes off to college, and my sister and i follow suit. it is the last year my grades don't matter. it is my sister's first year of middle school. it is 2007; and in 2008, in the recession, we will no longer be able to afford to turn on the heat.

behind me, on the television, the light was fading.

sometimes, when i think back to it, shifting through the memory: it appears out of the thin air. a frame of spruce. it's never around the movie. my father's hands on the remote. my brother's low voice. the sound of my sister walking up the stairs. the popcorn smell hanging in the air. for a moment, the sense - everything is easy. and you know? i think i see it, mr. scorsese.

#how far do we go for a meme?#haha :)#what if i just write about the death of childhood by accident #this was supposed to be 3 paragraphs but i just finished disco elysium #so i am too full up on words #ps most of this is true #i still haven't seen those movies lmafo

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ripeteeth · 2 months

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Writing Patterns

Rules: List the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there’s a pattern! Tagged by @perverse-idyll, thanks for tagging me! This is really interesting, especially as I’ve been playing with my writing style and changing it up lately.

1. “A long cloak of night has fallen across the bed.” [Milk Teeth, MDZS, Jiang Yanli/Jiang Cheng. If I’m ENTIRELY honest, this is an inside joke with myself, as an old livejournal friend once described Snape by saying “pick up your long cloak of darkness and get to therapy”, which is a statement I think describes Jiang Cheng quite well.

2. “The trouble with stories is that they don’t always line up quite right.” [Over My Dead Body, MDZS, Wangxian, WIP. I like to bullshit about storytelling and story structure. There’s something fascinating about the interplay of author and reader, and of reminding the reader that they are sitting down to a story. There’s a special charm when the author editorializes and goes off on tangents - such as Victor Hugo in Les Mis - and while I am no Victor Hugo, it IS extremely fun to do.]

3. “‘Please,’ you say, and he likes it when you say it.” [empty, save you and i, Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley. I just love the cadence of this and the way it establishes the close, confessional second person POV.]

4. “Naked, wrapped in silk, and turned away on his side.” [say it like you mean it (with your fists for once), Kinnporsche, Gun/Vegas. Does the lyric “why is the bedroom so cold / you’ve turned away on your side” from Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart haunt you like it does me? I like how this established the feeling of isolation and loneliness.]

5. “This is how it goes.” [Zoetrope, MDZS, songxuexiao. Again with the storytelling.]

6. “The day he meets them is a red-sky day.” [blood, bones, and butter, MDZS, songxuexiao. Red sky at warning, sailors take warning! How else should you introduce my babygirl Xue Yang? I’m realizing a lot of my lines have tucked-in references, allusions, and inside jokes with myself.]

7. “Spring is pale in Revachol.” [Revachol Calling, Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, WIP. Honestly, I don’t like this line and if I ever rewrite it, I hope to have something that fits better. This doesn’t grab in the way a DE fic should grab the reader. God, this WIP haunts me. Someday I WILL finish it, but it’s been three years since I’ve played the game and I absolutely need to play it again to get a feel for the voices.]

8. “The walk home is lonely.” [long slow love song, TGCF, fengqing, WIP. I really like short first sentences, huh? I suppose this is just brief scene-setting. Mu Qing seems like a guy who takes a lot to open up, so a short opening line suits him.]

9. “He wonders how he’ll die.” [impact, Beyond Evil, lee dongsik/han juwon. I’m proud of this one. I feel like this sets the tone and grabs attention. It’s just a short fic inspired by J.G. Ballard’s Crash, so I can’t think of a better way to begin.]

10. “When Kinn had been a boy, he’d had an old tomcat that liked to sleep in his bed.” [shotgunning, Kinnporsche, vegas/kinn/porsche, WIP. Introduces this as a Kinn character piece.]

Bonus from unposted Frankensmut: “One should not travel these woods alone; the Wild Hunt is strong here, and all are prey.” [Introduction to Natural Philosophy, Frankenstein, The Creature/Victor Frankenstein, WIP. An opening line that promises you that the hunter WILL get his prey. I promise you this.]

What I’m really learning here is that 1. I need to work on finishing my goddamn wips, and 2. wow I really rely on passive voice to open. Huh. Are there any other patterns? Maybe some authorial direction to remind the reader of the story structure. I’ve also got a bit of a penchant for short opening sentences followed by paragraphs that either elaborate on it or negate it, usually heavier in length and description as a counterbalance. Like adding acid to balance fat or sugar. Truthfully, I’ve kinda grown bored with my typical writing style, which is partly why I haven’t posted much fic lately. Art is all about pushing yourself and trying new things and innovating. I’m dead sick of writing present-tense third person limited and am vibing with first and second-person POV, which aren’t fan favorites for fic. I’d also LOVE to try something much more zoomed out, like omniscient third-person.

This was fun! Tagging @brawlite-archive, @iodhadh, @jaggededges123, @rcmclachlan, @weatheredlaw, and @darcylindbergh if you’re vibing, and anyone else who’s interested!

#bro i really gotta sit and write #i’m going to a writer’s retreat cabin this weekend so maybe i’ll get y’all a little frankensmut ficlet #or some sexy sexy miserable salieri thirst

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roaringgirl · 3 years

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Books read in January

I am keeping this as a little record for myself, as I already keep a list (my best new year’s resolution - begun Jan 2018) but don’t record my thoughts

General thoughts on this - I read a lot this month but it played into my worst tendencies to read very very fast and not reflect, something I’m particularly prone too with modern fiction. I just, so to speak, swallow it without thinking. First 5 or so entries apart, I did quite well in my usually miserably failed attempt to have my reading be at least half books by women.

1. John le Carré - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974): I liked this a lot! I sort of lost track of the Cold War and shall we say ethics-concerned parts of it and ended up reading a fair bit of it as an English comedy of manners - but I absolutely love all the bizarre rules about what is in bad taste (are these real? Did le Carré make them up?).

2. John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963): I liked this a lot less. It seemed at the same time wilfully opaque and entirely predictable. Have been thinking a lot about genre fiction - I love westerns and noir, so wonder if for me British genre fiction doesn’t quite scratch the same itch.

3. David Lodge - Ginger You’re Barmy (1962): This was fine. I don’t have much to say about it - I was interested in reading about National Service and a bit bogged down in a history of it so read a novel. As with most comic novels, it was perfectly readable but not very funny.

4. Dan Simmons - Song of Kali (1985): His first novel. This is quite enjoyable just for the amount of Grand Guignol gore, and also because I like to imagine it caused the Calcutta tourist board some consternation. Wildly structurally flawed, however. Best/worst quote: ‘Hearing Amrita speak was like being stroked by a firm but well-oiled palm.’ Continues in that vein.

5. Richard Vinen - National Service: A Generation in Uniform (2014): If you are interested in National Service, this is a good overview! If not, not.

6. Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018): I absolutely loved this. About a camping trip trying to recreate Iron Age Britain. Just, very upsetting but so so good - a horror story where the horror is male violence and abuse within the (un)natural family unit.

7. Kate Grenville - A Room Made of Leaves (2020): Excellent idea, but not amazing execution - the style is kind of bland in that ‘ironed out in MFA workshops’ way (I have no idea if she did an MFA but that’s what it felt like). Rewriting the story of early Australian colonisation through the POV of John Macarthur’s wife Elizabeth.

8. Ruth Goodman - How to Be a Victorian (2013): I mostly read this for Terror fic reasons, if I’m honest. I skimmed a lot of it but she has a charming authorial voice and I really like that she covers the beginning of the period, not just post-1870.

9. Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story (2010): I read this on a recommendation from Ms Poose after I asked for good fiction mostly concerned with the internet, and I thought it was excellent - it’s very exaggerated/non-realistic and that heightening of incident and affect works so well.

10. Brenda Wineapple - The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019): What a great book. I had to keep putting it down because reading about Reconstruction always makes me so sad and frustrated with what might have been - the lost dream of a better world.

11. Halle Butler - The New Me (2019): Reading this while single, starting antidepressants and stuck in an office job that bores me to death but is too stable/undemanding to complain about maybe wasn’t a great decision, for me, emotionally.

12. Halle Butler - Jillian (2015): Ditto.

13. Ottessa Moshfegh - Death in Her Hands (2020): Very disappointed by this. I don’t really like meta-fiction unless it’s really something special and this wasn’t. Also, I’m stupid and really bad at reading, like, postmodern allegorical fiction I just never get it.

14. Andrea Lawlor - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017): This was really really hot! I will admit I don’t think the reflections on gender, homophobia, AIDS etc are very deep or as revealing as some reviews made out, but I also don’t think they’re supposed to be? It’s a lot of fun and all of the characters in it are so precisely, fondly but meanly sketched.

15. Catherine Lacey - The Answers (2017): This was fine! Readable, enjoyable, but honestly it has not stuck with me. There are only so many sad girl dystopias you can read and I think I overdid it with them this month.

16. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall (2010, reread): Was supposed to read the first 55 pages of this for my two-person book club, but I completely lack self-restraint so reread the whole thing in four days. Like, I love it I don’t really know what else to say. I was posing for years that ‘Oh, Mantel’s earlier novels are better, they’re such an interesting development of Muriel Spark and the problem of evil and farce’ blah blah blah but nope, this is great.

17. Oisin Fagan - Hostages (2016): Book of short stories that I disliked intensely, which disappointed me because I tore through Nobber in horrified fascination (his novel set in Ireland during the Black Death - which I really cannot recommend enough. It’s so intensely horrible but, like Mantel although in a completely different style/method, he has the trick of not taking the past on modern terms). A lot of this is sci-fi dystopia short stories which just aren’t... very good or well-sustained. BUT I did appreciate it because it is absolutely the opposite of pleasant, competently-written but forgettable MFA fiction.

18. Muriel Spark - Loitering with Intent (1981): Probably my least favourite Spark so far, but still good. I think the Ealing Comedy-esque elements of her style are most evident and most dated here. It just doesn’t have the same sentence-by-sentence sting as most of her work, and again I don’t like meta-fiction.

19. Hilary Mantel - Bring up the Bodies (2012, reread): Having (re)read all of these in about 3 months, I think this is probably my favourite of the three. I just love the way a whole world, whole centuries and centuries of history and society spiral out from every paragraph. And just stylistically, how perfect - every sentence is a cracker. I’m just perpetually in awe of Mantel as a prose stylist (although I dislike that everyone seems to write in the present tense now and blame her for it).

20. Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means (1963, reread): (TW weight talk etc ) As always, Hilary Mantel sets me off on a Muriel Spark spree. I’ve read this too many times to say much about it other than that the denouement always makes me go... my hips definitely wouldn’t fit through that window. Maybe I should lose weight in case I have to crawl out of a bathroom window due to a fire caused by an unexploded bomb from WW2???? Which is a wild throwback to my mentality as a 16 year old.

21. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station (2000, reread): What a lot of fun. I know we don’t do steampunk anymore BUT I do like that he got in the whole economic and justice system of the early British Industrial Revolution and not just like steam engines. God, maybe I should read more sci-fi. Maybe I should reread the rest of this trilogy but that’s like 2000 pages. Maybe I should reread the City and the City because at least that’s short and ties exactly into my Disco Elysium obsession (the mod I downloaded to unlock all dialogue keeps breaking the game though. Is there a script online???)

22. Stephen King - Carrie (1974): I have a confession to make: I was supposed to teach this to one of my tutees and then just never read it, but to be honest we’re still doing basic reading comprehension anyway. That sounds mean but she’s very sweet and I love teaching her because she gets perceptibly less intimidated/critical of herself every lesson. ANYWAY I read half of this in the bath having just finished my period, which I think was perfect. It’s fun! Stephen King is fun! I don’t have anything deeper to say.

23. Hilary Mantel - Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985): You can def tell this is a first novel because it doesn’t quite crackle with the same demonic energy as like, An Experiment in Love or Beyond Black, but all the recurring themes are there. If it were by anyone else I’d be like good novel! But it’s not as good as her other novels.

24. Dominique Fortier - On the Proper Usage of Stars (2010): This was... perfectly competent. Kind of dull? It made me think of what I appreciate about Dan Simmons which is how viscerally unpleasant he makes being in the Navy seem generally, and man-hauling with scurvy specifically. This had the same problem with some other FE fiction which is that they’re mostly not willing to go wild and invent enough so the whole thing is kind of diffuse and under-characterised. Although I hated the invented plucky Victorian orphan who’s great at magnetism and taxonomy and read all ONE THOUSAND BOOKS or whatever on the ships before they got thawed out at Beechey (and then the plotline just went nowhere because they immediately all died???) I had to skim all his bits in irritation. I liked the books more than this makes it sound I was just like Mr Tuesday I hope you fall down a crevasse sooner rather than later.

25. Muriel Spark - The Abbess of Crewe (1974): Transposing Watergate to an English convent is quite funny, although it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that’s what she was doing even though I lit read a book covering Watergate in detail in December. Muriel Spark is just so, so stylish I’m always consumed with envy. I think a lot of her books don’t quite hang together as books but sentence by sentence... they’re exquisite and incomparable.

Overall thoughts: This month was very indulgent since I basically just inhaled a lot of not challenging fiction. I need to enjoy myself less, so next month we’re finishing a biography of Napoleon, reading the Woman in White and finishing the Lesser Bohemians which currently I’m struggling with since it’s like nearly as impenetrable Joyce c. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but, so far... well I hesitate to say bad since I think once I get into I’ll be into it but. Bad.

#book club

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