Spilled Ink

parsnipbug:

apoemaday:

by Brian Patten

What do cats remember of days?
They remember the ways in from the cold,
The warmest spot, the place of food.
They remember the places of pain, their enemies,
the irritation of birds, the warm fumes of the soil,
the usefulness of dust.
They remember the creak of a bed, the sound
of their owner´s footsteps,
the taste of fish, the loveliness of cream.
Cats remember what is essential of days.
Letting all other memories go as of no worth
they sleep sounder than we,
whose hearts break remembering so many
inessential things.

“People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.”

- From Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

happyheidi:

“And so Gollum found them hours later, when he returned, crawling and creeping down the path out of the gloom ahead. Sam sat propped against the stone, his head dropping sideways and his breathing heavy. In his lap lay Frodo’s head, drowned deep in sleep; upon his white forehead lay one of Sam’s brown hands, and the other lay softly upon his master’s breast. Peace was in both their faces.

Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo’s knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.”

- From The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, by JRR Tolkien

thediktatortot:

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

Very much agree. The word “content” is so empty and mealy-mouthed and it has to go. It has nothing to do with art and fic.

teresafrohock:

There have been some beautiful tributes to Patricia A. McKillip since the news of her death in February has reached us this past spring. I wanted to contribute my memories early on but was so busy enjoying the beautiful tributes other authors and fans left on their blogs, I decided to wait.

I’ve spoken before about my father taking us all to the library every Saturday, and it was there that I discovered a novel called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld when I was twelve. McKillip’s prose and story captivated me, and within her words, I fell in love with fantasy.

The one line in that novel that struck me still was simply this: The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.

She used the line, not once, but twice, first spoken by Cyrin the wise boar and used a second time as a warning and reminder. I’ve always interpreted Grof’s story as a cautionary tale that even those who are willfully blind to their faults will one day be faced with the truth, and when that day comes, will they die of what they see?

The story of the giant, Goff, is merely one of the best known lines from Eld. All of McKillip’s books are full of wisdom strewn through the pages, like little seeds with the ability to take root and grow in fertile minds. Another favorite from the same book:

“But you had a right to be angry.”
“Yes. But not to hurt those I love, or myself.”

The idea that I had a right to be angry, but not to take my anger out on others was a known factor. To include myself in that configuration was a new idea to me, one that I wasn’t fully able to grasp until much later in life, but it was McKillip who first introduced me to the concept.

I know so many people talk about the books they would give a young person, and while all are quite magical, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld is the one book I always recommend because there is so much to think about in each and every line. Both timeless and magical, Eld is as much about the pains of emotional growth as someone makes the transition from child to adult as it is about wizards and enchanted animals.

As I grew older, I left fantasy behind for a while to read other genres, but when I returned, McKillip was there for me again. I read several of her releases before I found In the Forests of Serre. Here was a book about grief and love that brought to me the same feelings I’d once had about Eld. The story is about prince whose grief over the death of his wife and child is so deep, he gives a witch his heart, because who needs a heart when all that he loved has been taken from him? Being a prince, he must remarry, but the princess chosen for him refuses to let him live without his heart. She does battle with the witch to rescue the prince’s heart and unlike Eld with its ambiguous ending, Serre gives us a happier conclusion.

The story in Serre was a much more mature story than Eld, or maybe that was simply how I saw it. Either way, In the Forests of Serre is a beautiful expression of finding love again and the lengths we’re willing to go to in order to change our circumstances. I also loved that “Serre” could very well be a play on “sere,” which means withered or dry, an application that played to both the forest in the novel and to the idea of a withered heart.

Which leads me to another reason that I love her work so deeply. McKillip had a command of language and symbolism that I have only rarely seen in other authors since. Combining poetical sentences with fantastical imagery, her works always did and always will excite the imagination. We have truly lost a giant of the genre, one that can never be replaced.

This is a great post. Totally agree that there are layers upon layers in Patricia McKillip’s work. I can read her books several times over and still find something new.

bloedewir:

Dragon Age 4, guyyyys

look at these beautiful views of apocalyptic Thedas

*(I made it a bit slower)

These are stunning.

“Your father also liked to sulk,” said Mrs Silver.

“I am not sulking,” said Silver.

“I cannot think what else to call it,” Mrs Silver said, “when a healthy young person insists on building himself a thorn-girt fortress and sitting in it consuming nothing but sour fruit and small beer for months on end. I blame myself. I should not have permitted you to read so many fairy tales as a boy.”

—from Drowned Country (Greenhollow Duology book 2) by Emily Tesh

apoemaday:

by W.H. Auden

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

ivoryandforest:

Abbaye de Beauport, Paimpol France.