#specifically for french bc yanno

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 1/25/22

BOY you sure do have to read a lot to get to the recipe in this one

listening sheldon allman’s album Folk Songs for the 21st Century is a goddamn delight. one of the tracks, crawl out through the fallout, is on the fallout 4 radio and i don’t think it’s even one of the strongest songs on the album. i am particularly fond of Big Brother bc i am a sucker for cheerily ominous songs.

You'll disappear in a wink Unless you can double think You'll vanish into the blue Big brother is watching you

reading hexed by michael alan nelson. this is a urban magic/horror series about a bitchy twentysomething what steals magical items that i wanted to like very much but didn’t quite hit for me. i think after the second issue when they switched artists and she got WAY hotter i went “oh. one of these”. props to mr nelson for writing an almost entirely female cast that all feels distinct tho! i wanted to like this much more than i actually did! while it did get stronger as it went along, the pacing remains wonky throughout and it kept telling and not showing through the medium of yanno The Comic, so big emotional beats either flopped or hit in a (probably) unintended way.

the mother-daughter stuff in particular didn’t quite hit for me. i feel like there could have been a more interesting emphasis on cycles and blood vs chosen family? this is an admirable attempt by a dude who manages to sidestep a lot of the strong female character pitfalls, but i don’t think i’ll remember this in a month bc i am unable to keep the plot of any comic book in my head for longer than that and it was simply Fine. honestly it takes a lot for me to go WHOA that was a good fuckin comic.

watching neither of my housemates had seen the lost boys (1987, dor. schumacher) so i had to fix that. this is a movie of pure vibes. the plot is whatever. i simply want to watch some EXTREMELY earnest child actors interspersed with a decaying beach town (my housemate said her new gender is “beach menace” and i’m stealing that) and the best worst fashion you’ve ever seen. i want every single shirt and also this jacket in that movie in my closet by five pm.

“tumblr user girlfriendsofthegalaxy tell us about the vampires” okay so vampires are inherently homosexual for [INSERT ANY NUMBER OF ACADEMIC PAPERS HERE] but i think this is a movie where you could really walk away muttering “wow they really all fucked each other huh” and not QUITE a canon on-screen threesome but. damn fuckin close.

unrelated, i like child vampires and wish we got to see them more often but think i personally would go insane if i was trapped in an elementary schooler’s body with my fully grown adult brain

playing vicariously enjoying @dying-suffering-french-stalkers​ (known sixties/seventies and french and sixties/seventies french media enjoyer) journey through the lupin iii franchise from afar. i absolutely do not have time to get into another long-running franchise with a tall sad gunman at this time but i do have time to play a short queer visual novel bc i feel like i know most of the basics and dynamics ty wendy for your excellent reporting

Is Lupin Still Flirting? is an incredibly charming watercolor visual novel on itch.io. i am a little sad about it not being on steam bc it’s so much better quality (little quality of life things, layout/structure, the music and sound effects have the correct timing and are appropriate, lovely art) than most free visual novels on steam but the licensing rights would be a nightmare. i got through two endings in about half an hour, and i imagine you could get through all five in two, two and a half hours?

great day to be a loopzoop or a polygang fan bc lupin has been caught while setting up a date for fujiko, the bonus scene is with zenigata, and there’s a goemon route and a jigen route!

making THE RECIPE

i do not know what this recipe as written is trying to accomplish. i do not know if it is a workaround of an existing home country recipe or this specific grandmother (notorious for using the same tiny jar of pre-ground white pepper for five years) made it up whole cloth and went “i’m polish so these are polish noodles :) “

Polish Holiday Noodle Dish: 1 lb. dry Mueller noodles - (sometimes pkg has been 12 oz.)  Just make as usual. 1 lb.  Farmer's Cheese or Large curd cottage cheese 1 very large Vidalia onion (chopped so it sautees readily) Grated Parmesan cheese 1 stick unsalted butter  (or can start with quarter & add more if needed) Chop onion, Sautee in butter in large pan so they get golden. Put aside. Boil noodles - 1 minute less than package directions.  Drain. Add Noodles  to onion pan & toss together with Farmer's Cheese/Cottage Cheese. Add at least a Half Cup grated Parmesan Cheese, while tossing lightly.  Can cook mixture over medium heat for a few minutes 'til mixed together. Season with some Black pepper if you have a preference. Pour into casserole/foil pan - lightly butter bottom so noodles don't  stick. Sprinkle extra parm on top. Bake in 350° oven - uncovered 30 minutes - check - if melted & bubbly - done.   - if not, give it another 10 minutes.

it doesn’t. actually i don’t know how to describe the taste. it certainly has a taste? it’s oddly sweet? it’s Fine but i would not make it again on purpose? i added salt, pepper, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and diced bacon to this altho it would have been better with kielbasa or bratwurst and fresh chives and WAY more parm. it could definitely use more sauce, my sister added half again the amount off large curd cottage cheese and liked her results much more.

it looks absolutely tragic and i think that’s a feature not a bug

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem #not joking about the recipe btw

[forr-everrmorre]

btw, I got tagged in like a bunch of these, so TIME TO DO THEM ALL NOW.

under cut bc THERES 3 HOLY CRAP

first tagged by @bellestrashprince​

What’s your favourite batb au?

@lumiereswig‘s crossover one with all the other universes the other actors were in. I’d physically die for that au.

Which batb pairing is most underrated?

Garderenza. that’s just a fact.

Do you have an odd pairing you wish you’d seen more of?

remember Hot Farmer Dude and Shippy Villager lady? they deserved more screentime.

Is there a scene or something that you’d like to add to the movie?

THE CUT VERSION OF DAYS IN THE SUN. IT IS CANON AND YOU CAN RIP IT OUT OF MY COLD DEAD HANDS

Superhero au! Who has what powers?

...come back to me on that one

Recasting time! Who’d you pick for what parts and why?

can I just say my genderbent fancast bc I love them all.

What character/s did you want to see more of?

again, hot farmer dude and shippy villager woman.

What’s something you wish they’d kept from the original?

Cogsworth stabbing more people.

What’s something from the live action you wish had been in the animated?

EVERMORE.

What’s your favourite costume from the movie?

Plumette’s transformation dress, I cry every time.

What characters’ wardrobe would you steal?

Garderobe. maybe if I dress like her, I can hit high notes like her.

next tagged by @vlleneuve​

favorite gift you’ve ever received?

my brother got me a vinyl of my favorite album ever for my birthday last year as a surprise. I actually cried.

tell me about the smartest thing a teacher ever told you

my lit teacher this year told us to remember to have fun learning. it’s how I try live by. and also why I currently hate french.

what can’t you leave home without?

my headphones, my phone and my keys

what are you looking forward to?

spring break, more time with my friends, plus my aunt is visiting and we’re hitting up TKTS.

tumblr crush?

I’ve probably said this before, but @lumiereswig

what’s your iconic look?

this one specific flannel, jeans, combat boots, giant glasses, kinda emo hair, and an over the shoulder bag.

favorite song?

ever? Missing You by Set It Off.

favorite fic you’ve ever read?

there’s this one DEH Tree Bros fic I read not too long ago that was an AU where Connor and Evan became friends right after the “threw a printer at Mrs. G” incident and Evan’s dad leaving. almost every chapter made me cry.

tell me about your favorite thing you’ve done within the past week!

singing? I just like singing dude. for anything.

what are your plans for the day?

(I’ll do tomorrow since it’s almost 11:30 at night) school, then choir, then homework + Smash and/or bfu??? currently undecided.

have any pets? tell me all about them!!

nope!

lastly, tagged by my pal @lumiereswig​

favorite staff member (and why)

cogsworth bc he’s sassy and the mom friend, aka me

favorite batb villager (and why)

stanley bc I’m still unashamedly attracted to Alexis Loizon more than I should be

headcanon on what would happen to gaston if he DIDN’T get completely crushed by falling 80 feet

this

TELL ME A GARDERENZA HEADCANON

ok so some famous composers write roles and stuff for their s/o’s, like before he was married, Mozart apparently wrote an opera role for this famous opera singer he was fucking, and ALW wrote the role of Christine mostly with Sarah Brightman in mind (I know these examples are questionable but shhhhhhhhhh). I’d like to imagine that the best opera Cadenza ever wrote was because he wrote the lead role for Garderobe, like he wrote these beautiful soaring arias and recitatives just for Garderobe and they ended up being like the best of his time.

explain to me pere robert’s romantic history

he is a PRIEST who doesn’t SIN smh

if lumiere and plumette weren’t in love (crAzy i know), who would you pair them up with among villagers/staff? 

I refuse to answer this question

shit!!!! if everybody wasn’t in love, who would you pair everybody up with

why would you do this

to right past wrongs ie the last questions, headcanon about cute shippy thing plumiere do  

yanno that hilltop that Belle (Reprise) happens on? they have picnics there in the middle of the night, sometimes when the village has like a festival or something, so they can see the lit village below and also the beautiful stars above.

if you forgot everything about yourself HOW WOULD YOU JOG YOUR MEMORY AGAIN ##amnesiafics

sit in my room for a few hours. literally. like my room is so me that I will immediately remember who I am.

is your instagram lit af

fuCK NO

what’s your favorite fic trope

it’s generic, but slow burn and enemies to friends to lovers. I’m such a sucker for those.

and bc it’s 11:30 and I can’t think rn, I’m not making questions or tagging anyone!!! sorry!!!!

[lit--bitch]

Current-Reads (10/05/2020 - 17/05/2020) 🍎🐔

(Disclosure: Don’t think I know anyone this week (and sadly Édouard Levé is no longer alive) and I don’t know anyone personally working within these publications/presses bc I am a loner, apart from Hobart actually I do know EE from Hobart.) Preface as always: Every Sunday without fail I throw up the freshest literature and photography I’ve read over the week, sometimes it’s a book, or a piece I saw in a magazine or an online zine, maybe it’s something I saw on social media, etc. If I add ‘RECOMMEND’ next to a few of the titles, but that’s not to say I don’t recommend all of them, I just love some pieces more than others. Not everything will be everybody’s cup of tea, yanno, c’est la vie. And any titles that you see in bold are hyperlinked so if you click or tap them they’ll direct you straight to the source… or shopping basket.   I check all the writers and their social media (i.e. I stalk them and their bios) to make sure I absolutely get their pronouns correct, I don’t just blindly assume hes and shes, etc. So in case anyone’s concerned about that, dw I do this shit properly.

This week’s been weird, I’m starting to feel like I’m dissolving a bit. The lockdown feels like culture now. The last time I went to a bar seems like a dream. Some of the work I’ve read over the past few days has compounded this dazed feeling I’ve been having, and I’ve been dipping into a lot of work which was published way before this pandemic hit, like back in September 2019. I’ve been rereading Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait which is one of my favourite books. I’ve been reading a poet I came across in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Carolee Bennett. I discovered a new writer I’ve fallen hard for, his name’s Richie Hofmann and I’m torn between talking about his recent publication in Hobart and the piece he did in The New Yorker a while back (I guess I’m gonna talk about both), his poetry is so delicate and intimate, it’s like it breathes on the back of your neck. I loved Michael Sutton’s poems on 3:AM Magazine’s Poem Brut series and am now anticipating his next collection. Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry was another piece in 3:AM which I kept reading over and over. 

***

Sarah Cavar’s a complete family / hstry, 3:AM Magazine, (RECOMMEND): The discourse around hysterectomy in writing generally tbh, is very small, practically non-existent. The number of people willing to talk about it outside of a medical, clinical sense is rare. Like abortion, it’s something people don’t talk about, they rarely unpack it in essays or poetry or what have you. It would be kind of obvious to say here that Sarah Cavar’s piece on 3:AM is brave (which of course it absolutely is), because how many people do you know are talking about hysterectomies in the context of trans-identity? But it’s the way they write about this experience, with an enviable, vivid gift for description. Sentences I loved: ‘Blood is a lineage. It begins in the toilet, rings of icing suspended in liquor. [...] The following morning I am discharge with my age-restricted scars [...] ‘The stitches were dissolving; they said goodbye in crimson streams. [...] Finally I told her to leave the room, wrangling my vagina, this traitorous beast’. Another line I love, which is just so powerful, ‘There is something poetic in scarring the site of the umbilical cord. I deny the very people whose (re)productive efforts rendered me possible; upended the dynasty whose heterosexual ehiteness brought them from poverty to vermount and priceless menus.’ It’s articulate and personal and deeply self-aware, and it’s that way from the off. Immediately I was drawn in by that play on words in the title, ‘a complete family / hstry’, hstry playing on history and hysterectomy here. There’s parts to this piece, this self-reflective voice which reminds me of Sontag’s diaries, the way Sarah breaks lines (this is particularly strong in the NOTES — ESSAY ENDING section). They also have a flair for dialogue, a way of pulling a reader into their periphery and having these difficult conversations with family members, wrestling with discomforting terms like ‘ramifications’. The violence of the relationship one has with their body, ravaged by identity. Internalising the reaction from parents whose hopes of becoming grandparents is no longer. As essays go, this is one of the most insightful, articulate and self-aware pieces of transgender literature I’ve ever read. It’s something that myself, I’m not at all equipped to understand, because I don’t share Sarah’s experience, I can’t pretend to believe I even get it. But they write with accessibility and profundity, acknowledging their being as the final sentence in their family tree (what a powerful thing to hold). A writer to watch.

Michael Sutton, poem brut #92 — music / lyrics, 3:AM Magazine (RECOMMEND):  The fusion of note as word and as trebel clef, reinvented into fantastical illustrations. The first piece on here has a ‘creature-ness’ to it, I wonder of the animal in the notes pegged as sheets of music. Some of them feel more like graffiti, and I’m perplexed by what these new lyrics intimate, their renewed musicality in being cut up and stuck elsewhere. These are amazing pieces and I’m anticipating this collection’s release from Hesterglock Press in July.  

Carolee Bennett, ‘Prettier When You Smile’ in Glass Poetry (RECOMMEND): I don’t know how I came across this piece, but it was published two years ago. I hungered for the nostalgia of sitting in a bar and eavesdropping on conversations, as Carolee Bennett does in this poem. Her note about this piece is really interesting, and I wouldn’t have guessed it as a partial collection of fragments from conversations, it kind of wrestles with the subjective voice as commentary and the objective role as listener to these ongoing conversations around her. There’s a solitude to the writing, but it’s not ill at ease with it, it’s comfortable solitude on a bar stool. I really loved this line: ‘The ones we love depart. / We squeeze in and out of anguish / like bees, no opening too small. The hive begins / with single cell. Our vocabulary for this kind of busy work is limited: disease, / disease, disease.’ It’s a really beautiful, complicated cocktail straddling thought and response, and reminds me of a time where we could do that, we could sit in a bar and listen to a human’s hum. And the themes of disease, death and intimacy in ‘Prettier When You Smile’ are more evident and conscious in our minds today, in an ongoing pandemic. Bowie says it best: Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do. Richie Hofmann, ‘The Romans’ (Hobart) / ‘French Novel’ (The New Yorker) (RECOMMEND): I read Richie’s first piece in Hobart this week and thought it was so delicate and vivid. Then I stalked him a bit and read more of his work. There’s something pre-Raphaelite about his writing, I don’t know if that sounds shitty and pretentious, but I just see his poems are paintings in my head, or even sculptures, like they seem to embody an architecture to them. It’s just the way he reminisces and articulates his lovers; it’s almost metaphysical. ‘French Novel’ in particular I just found fragrant, it’s like I could smell red wine and bedsheets and humidity and snow slush. I can sense the texture. And then ‘The Romans’ had a movement and a colour to it I could just see and feel. He has a flair for articulating scenery; as a reader, I’m in his eyes and I’m absorbing every detail. I could feel this new lover wafting the Polaroid, the shake. The tangibility of his memories is so potent, you feel as if you’re there, not as a witness but actually within the experience. 

Édouard Levé, Autoportrait (RECOMMEND): I started reading Édouard Levé just over a year ago, and it was in this tumultuous episode of my life where I wasn’t really writing. If I did, I was forcing myself, and living in London was making me feel really depressed, although I now wonder whether that was more because of my MA and not the city. Édourd Levé was the best thing I got out of my course, and he came at a specific juncture when I was trying to understand how I could merge writing into photography, without taking photographs. I was investigating that relationship between the written and the visual. Autoportrait is a photo album in sentences. It’s a portrait of Édouard Levé himself, who committed suicide in 2007. He crafts this text masterfully, each sentence is like the shutter firing inside a camera, capturing an image, a new angle to his personage. For that reason it’s an intensely personal read. He oscillates between memories in time within the act of writing as memory, there’s a kind of meta-ness to it, a cubist quality to the text as a whole. He doesn’t start with his birth to his current present, rather the structure of the work is a series of non-sequiturs, a stream of consciousness stuck between frames. Sentences are mostly short, the longer you read, the more investigative and analytical it feels, into a forensic analysis of what makes Édouard, Édouard. It’s a book I go back to all the time, and the more I replay this series of images, the more unreadable it becomes. It’s also particularly surreal and disconcerting reading it now, as an artefact of Édouard Levé when he was alive. There is a coldness to his voice, a dismissiveness, and from the off it’s clear that his mental disposition, his depression, is a huge force in his life, the central focus to which all his perceptions, his affirmations, his unbothered demeanour seems to emerge from. The acuity of his self-description is pained by disconnection to the world around him, and that’s synonymous with the way he articulates himself in  disconnected fragments. It’s one of those books you can read once and walk away from, but it leaves you altered and dazed, like the way you feel after watching a strange film in a dark cinema, returning to daylight. And since I picked up that text to read in class, Édouard Levé’s always stayed with me. 

***

That is everything from me for this week. I will be taking next week away to read Ariana Reines’s A Sand Book. It’s a big one and it’s gonna take me some time to read and think and write about it. I’ve also figured out that the quality of my reviews will generally be better if I give myself more time to sit down and think, so I’m going to be posting my reviews now every other Friday as opposed to every Friday (or around then, past couple of weeks it’s been on Sats and Suns). My reviews do border on being full blown essays, and they take a lot of time to put together because I prefer to go into detail. Obviously I can’t keep generating these big pieces in a week turnaround at a quality I’m happy with, that was always going to be too ambitious of me. BUT I don’t think Current-Reads will change, because I’m always reading small bits throughout the week anyway, and I’m happy to keep doing that every Sunday still. 

NOTE TO WRITERS I AM REVIEWING: If I’ve said I’ll review your work and given you a date for when that review will be, that will still be the date I’ll review your work for. It won’t change. Scout’s honour. 

#litbitch #review #currentreads #currently reading #sarahcavar #3ammagazine #michaelsutton #poembrut #caroleebennett #glassjournal #richiehofmann #hobart #thenewyorker #edouardleve #autoportrait #writing #reading #minireviews