#rhapsode reviews

[the-bookish-delights]

As I’m getting towards the end of this, I found myself getting a bit sad. I love the development between Callie and Desmond, the slow burn and tension what pretty off the charts! It’s nice to read about a strong heroine but she can still feel human (even though she is a siren). Despite the trauma, she finds comfort in Desmond, who struggles with his own demons.

I’m thinking about starting Fourth Wing as well as Silver Under Nightfall, two books that I’ve really wanted to read. I definitely want to continue with Seven Days in June(Lord help me for) but I’m a sucker for dark romance. Anyone have any favorite genres they like to read?

#bookworm #books and reading #onlinebookstore #used books #book blog #booklover #book review #books #fantasy books #the bargainer rhapsodic #rhapsodic #laura thalassa

[brehaaorgana]

I got home today and had to unwillingly overhear one of my roommates rhapsodize on about how if you don't get T/swift's lyrics or see how clever they are then maybe you're not very smart/are stupid and aren't good at media comprehension or w/e

and also how brilliant the corporate suit lyric is because not LITERAL, it's about the tragedy of artists who only care about making money (....uh...we're talking about the same woman who keeps releasing albums with like one or two different bonus song variants right?), and why do haters talk about it so much why do they give so much energy to something they hate? Just let people have fun!!!

Obviously she did not realize I had come home and they forget all the time sound carries downstairs right into the living room.

But like okay.

1) i literally cannot avoid thinking about this woman because her face is next to the fridge and you keep playing her music all the time and I have always been "keep it to the bops only, skip everything else. I have strong criticisms about the technical depth of her talent and years worth of criticism about her white feminism and the way some of her fans perpetuate that." My sometimes pleasant "oh I like this single" was never love of her, the person. But I stuck to apathy as an adult because people weren't forcing her in my face constantly irl and I had zero reason to think about her.

Now that I CANNOT escape it, I bring back haterade, especially the more someone insists they can ALWAYS turn someone into a s/wiftie or that people who don't agree are dumb or media illiterate. I cannot believe we're adults and I have to be reminded that people actually believe it is media illiteracy to think that sometimes her lyrics are really stupid, and that people who dislike something must only be sad haters and dumb.

I don't have to like the thing, I don't have to worship her lyrics or find them all that clever, and it doesn't make me stupid to not like it!!! I could think about this less if her fandom wasn't full of obnoxious white women evangelizing her singular greatness.

aughhhhhh

Immediately had to pull up reviews and remind myself even critics had problems with this album

I wish. I could. Escape this.

I can't wait to move. I will be ABLE to not think about this ever again.

[why-so-serious-lucifer]

Tell Me What To Do; A Letter To Jonghyun

If you’ve ever stumbled across one of my posts before, you’ll probably know me as a (maybe somewhat harsh) reviewer, who will always take the chance to rhapsodize about harmonizing and complain about Dynamite. But that’s not what this is; I did write a review about JH’s work but this is different; I want to start off not with my “credentials” but with a story. I’ve been a casual k-pop fan since early 2019 through BLACKPINK and a deeper fan since March of the year after, when I discovered Red Velvet.

In late November of 2020, during lockdown, I lost one of the people I loved most in the world. I was still a teenager (barely younger than he was when he debuted in SHINee), and I felt alone and isolated in that grief. Just three weeks later, on December 18th, three years ago now, I was scrolling on social media when I came across posts memorializing Jonghyun. I had heard his name mentioned, through Yeri of Red Velvet, but had never taken the time to really listen, and I finally did.

It gives me no joy to say that I discovered that he had made a plan; his last album, Poet | Artist was released just a month after he chose to leave the world, a final gift to the fans who had watched him grow up for both so long and not nearly long enough. When I looked closer, I saw people mourning, people celebrating, and most of all, people remembering. The k-pop world had just lost two more idols to suicide, Sulli (Choi Jinri, of f(x)), and Hara (Goo Hara, of KARA), and the messages surrounding mental health had never been stronger. It was this that finally got through to me, like a lightbulb going off, and I went, “Shit. I think I have depression.”

Now, I’m not going to credit him with saving my life because I have no idea what would’ve happened, but to this day, it’s Jonghyun’s voice that sings “tell me what to do” on the 6:45 alarm reminding me to take my anti-depressants. To this day, it’s his music that I turn to when I need comfort. In his memory, I try to continue what he did for me. I take December 18th as a day to be just a little bit of a better person—a better sister, a better daughter, and a better friend both to others and to myself—as much as I possibly can.

Jonghyun’s discography is only five albums, less than three hours long. The mere fact of this makes me sad. I wish I could tell a story with a happier ending, one that I finish by saying that he’s still here, still on his 27th collection of wonderful stories, still teasing the hell out of the band members who loved him more than anything, still being a dork who brightens everyone’s day with the same humor that made me laugh for the first time in a month the first time I came across it.

But, no matter how good of a writer I think I am, I can’t do that. All I can do is what all of us can do, which is remember who he was, respect the art he created, and continue the great advocacy he started. In this, I’m trying to do all three.

I can’t really put into words the feelings I have about this. Writing it has reminded me how grateful I am, not only that I found Jonghyun and his story, not only that I became a Shawol, but that I became a k-pop fan in general. After finding SHINee, I became a fan of Gfriend, Girls Generation, Seventeen, (G)I-DLE, Stray Kids, Sunmi, and, of course, Dreamcatcher, whose music is now a part of me too.

I know that I’ve probably made this way more about me than it should’ve been, but I’d like to end by saying this: I know that k-pop (and being a fan of it) are seen as something to mock, something only done by insecure, screeching teenage girls with too much free time on their hands who are obsessed with random men they’ve never met. And maybe that is who I was in 2019.

But to me now, and so many other people I know, it is stories like mine that are the real reason why we choose to dedicate so much of our precious free time to something that so many people deem childish. I’m a linguistics major, and I can tell you firsthand that music is one of very few things that can break a language barrier and reach people across the world. Had Jonghyun’s not reached me, I don’t know where I’d be. But I wouldn’t be here, and I definitely wouldn’t be a linguistics major. As he wrote in his book, “Even though we can’t communicate using the same language, we use music instead.”

Jonghyun broke boundaries in k-pop, with his openness, his self-producing, his prolific writing, his advocacy, and, of course, his incredible kindness. Both our community and the world as a whole were very lucky to have him for as long as we did, which still wasn’t nearly long enough. He changed the lives of so many people—he changed mine, without me even knowing the word “K-pop” at the time he passed away—and overall, he made the world just a little easier for everybody else, no matter how hard it was for himself. Whenever I have my bad days, I listen to his music; I ask him to tell me what to do. And I make myself a promise: that whatever I do, I will never make the decision that he did.

Whether he’s out there and whether he’s listening or not, I’d just like to say thank you, Jonghyun, for changing my life. You did so, so, well, and, in an odd way, I’m incredibly proud of you and all you managed to accomplish despite the kind of pain you went through. I hope that, even though we never got the chance to meet, you would be proud of me too.

And thank you, for taking the time to read this. I hope that whoever you are and whatever Jonghyun means to you, you find a little comfort in the fact that you are not alone in it. However you want to grieve (or not grieve) is valid. If you’ve never heard of our wonderful singer before, take this as a sign to take ten minutes to learn something about a truly beautiful human.

And if you have, take this as a reminder to take your medication, get some sleep, and check in with your friends. Though Jonghyun thought that what he did was the only way out, he was wrong, because I’ve been there. I’m still there, sometimes. But take this as reassurance that it’ll get better. It might not be better tomorrow and it might not be better for a while. But it will get better.

Happy holidays, folks. Take care of yourselves out there. Tschüss and Fröhliche Weihnachten!

#k-pop #shinee #Jonghyun #onew #Minho #key #Taemin #shawol #mental health #letting go #depression #tw: suicide mention

[jessread-s]

✩🦇📿Review:

“Rhapsodic” is the perfect cure for any type of book hangover. Holy cow. I am just obsessed with this paranormal romance! 

“Rhapsodic” tells the story of Callypso (Callie) Lillis, a powerful siren and badass private investigator who once made 322 deals with the Bargainer in her youth. A black bracelet beads up her wrist, serving as a reminder of all that she owes the fae king of the night. For the last seven years, however, he has not come to collect his magical IOUs. Until now. A dark presence looms over the Otherworld. Fae warriors have begun to disappear without a trace and the Bargainer needs Callie’s help to solve the mystery. 

Thalassa’s book is wholly unique and like nothing I have ever read before, which is why its was so easy to fall in love with her characters and the world she created! I especially liked how each chapter begins with a flashback before transporting us to the present. This way, we do not get the whole picture right away and instead have to read the whole book to find out why the Bargainer never sought Callie out for repayment. 

I really enjoyed reading from Callie’s perspective, even though I got teary eyed at times. As a young adult, Callie suffered her father’s physical and verbal abuse after her mother was killed. Though she has been through a lot, she makes it clear that she is no one’s victim.

The Bargainer recognizes this, giving her the space she needs to be independent despite his possessive and protective nature. His determination to rekindle his friendship with Callie after seven years and develop it into something more had me immediately under his spell. 

I must admit that things were slow moving for the first 200 or so pages while Thalassa engaged in world-building surrounding the differences between the Otherworld (home to the fae and separated into the Kingdoms of Night, Day, Flora, Fauna, Death and Deep Earth, and Mar) and Earth (home to sirens, shifters, seers, and humans). However, once I became familiar with the world, I could not get enough of the storyline. 

➤ 4.5 stars

Cross-posted to: Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

@laurathalassa​

#the bargainer series #rhapsodic #desmond flynn #callypso lillis #des and callie #fae king of the night #laura thalassa #friends to lovers #soulmates #paranormal romance #slow burn #morally grey characters #adult fantasy #Spicy Romance #booklr #book blog #book blogger #bookish #Book Lover #bibliophile #book rec #Book Recommendations #bookaholic #book reader #bookworm

[kaasknot]

Please take this as an offense but I am absolutely fascinated by your current obsession with Buster Keaton and went back through your account to figure out what rabbit hole led to this but couldn't figure it out. If you're okay with sharing can you tell me the rabbit hole that led to this?

OFFENS TAKEN no but okay it's really kind of dumb. this past january someone reblogged a buster keaton post, i assume a stunts gifset because those get numbers, and i hit up his tag on a whim to see what was what.

now, at the time i was writing an OC character for star wars. and while i knew just about everything else important about this character, i didn't have a clear idea of what he looked like. but i was scrolling through pics of this old-timey comedian and it slowly dawned on me: my character looks kind of like buster keaton. official facecast made.

and honestly, that's why i came back to the tag a second time. if it hadn't been for that association, i probably would have forgotten about buster and moved on. but, once a month or so i'd jump back in the buster keaton tag, refresh my memory on my OC's face situation, and then jump back out.

till eventually i guess it hit critical mass, and all of a sudden in late may i'm hitting up the buster tag… because i'm thirsty for buster. i pretty clearly remember a series of gifsets around The General that made me go "…damn, son."

gonna wax rhapsodic here for a bit. let's get the most obvious point out of the way: buster keaton is pretty. he's got cheekbones and big eyes and a profile to die for. and he's ripped, because he's a goddamn acrobat. like, his vastus medialis continually makes me go "that can't be real." also, he's a short king. a small little guy. 5'5", and perfectly willing to make jokes about it—and that kind of security is hotter than the surface of the sun.

he's also ridiculously funny. he made his career on that, you'd kind of hope he would be; but specifically it's funny to me. his sense of humor matches mine perfectly: wry, ironic, a touch of the absurd/surrealistic, leaning to black humor, and with minimal use of sticky substances or stupidity. i have so much trouble with modern comedy because 90% of the time it's just so dumb. buster keaton movies are not dumb. his hero is a clever little shithead—if somewhat naive and literal-minded—with abysmal luck, who gets into awkward situations and does his clever best to get himself back out. i vibe with it.

and then obvs his stunts. the more of his movies i watch the more i mutter "how did he not die?" and "is he made of rubber bands and cotton balls??" his physicality is so satisfying to watch, and not just in a prurient way (tho i am definitely also watching in a prurient way). this is a man with supreme control over his body and a thorough understanding of physical comedy. he was pulling out pratfalls well into his 60s, yo.

and the more of his movies i watch (especially in comparison to roscoe arbuckle's movies), the more i appreciate how good of a filmmaker he was. he let the story do the talking, rather than clutter up the screen with intertitles. his precise use of camera angles, the astonishingly good cinematography, the use of the camera itself to sell a gag (i.e. the dream sequence in Sherlock, Jr.). i saw a letterboxd review call The General "mad max fury railroad" and i haven't been able to get that out of my head, because y e a h, his editing was as precise as margaret sixel's. i watched "One Week" after watching all of the arbuckle shorts he was in, and lemme tell you, my third eye was blown wide open. "oh," i said to myself. "i get why people call him a genius."

and from a frothing fangirl perspective, he has built in artificial scarcity. his smile is rare, his voice is rare, shirtless scenes are rare. (in reality, none of these things are particularly hard to find in his films, but like i say to everyone who sits still long enough for me to yammer at them, their perceived scarcity makes them so much more compelling. when you hear him say "pass" in Sunset Boulevard you quiver like you're catching sight of ankles in the 1800s). it encourages thirsting.

the more i learn about him the more obsessed i get.

#askbox #psychicshr00m #buster keaton #thank u for letting me ramble about my blorbo #no i don't know if/when/how i'll ever write my OC again

[warrioreowynofrohan]

I posted 499 times in 2022

That's 128 more posts than 2021!

250 posts created (50%)

249 posts reblogged (50%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@warrioreowynofrohan

@tolkien-feels

@thearrogantemu

@lifeisyetfair

@theoppositeofprofound

I tagged 492 of my posts in 2022

Only 1% of my posts had no tags

#tolkien - 274 posts

#the silmarillion - 235 posts

#the lord of the rings - 74 posts

#fanfic - 51 posts

#dracula daily - 48 posts

#dracula - 45 posts

#a christmas carol - 38 posts

#maglor - 37 posts

#brandon sanderson - 31 posts

#finrod - 29 posts

Longest Tag: 137 characters

#though the section in “a christmas carol” where dickens is rhapsodizing about fruits and vegetables and nuts that we take for granted now

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

I knew blood types weren’t discovered until after Dracula was published, but I didn’t realize until this morning’s posts (thanks, everyone!) that they were discovered around 1901, only a few years after it was published.

And now I’m just imagining Bram Stoker reading about that discovery and going “….. welp…. that ruins my plot,” like if you wrote a futuristic book about the Cold War in 1986.

1,496 notes - Posted September 7, 2022

#4

FYI Dracula Daily readers, we’re about halfway through the timspan of the book but about one-fifth of the way through the content.

Emails will be getting longer.

2,211 notes - Posted August 3, 2022

#3

(Dracula) Daily reminder that the boxes of dirt on the Demeter are nailed shut and remain nailed shut, so the captain has a very good reason not to suspect that there is someone hiding in them and coming out and attacking his crew.

(Dracula) Daily reminder that Dracula can turn into mist.

3,108 notes - Posted July 18, 2022

#2

I can no longer read the quote that Sauron “loved order and coordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction” without thinking that the starting point of his fall to evil - not the later stages, but the very first starting point - can be summed up as “this meeting should have been an email.”

4,555 notes - Posted August 31, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I think it would be fun if, along the lines of Dracula Daily, we had Dickens December, with portions of A Christmas Carol sent out daily from Dec 1 until Christmas. It’s a wonderful book, with narration that is by turns humourous, satirical, evocative, idiosyncratic, moving, and passionate, and the joy of the full text and writing can be missed even in the best adaptations. It would be fun to have it done as a tumblr book club the way Dracula Daily was, and see everyone comment on it a little at a time.

Does anyone know if someone is already doing this? I don’t think I would have time to assemble it in the next ten days, but if it already exists I would love to participate!

7,704 notes - Posted November 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #wow my most popular content this year was nontolkien #and my one top5 tolkien post was about sauron who i don’t even like #:D #dracula daily was so much fun! #dickens december has been delightful!

[mariacallous]

Throughout a life of erudite jousting and patrician bonhomie, William F. Buckley Jr. was known as a conservative, a writer, a publisher, a talk-show host, a novelist and an avid sailor. But friends and family would say this biographical summary is incomplete without three more words: peanut-butter freak.

Buckley didn’t just devour the stuff; he rhapsodized about it, telling readers in a 1981 column in National Review, the magazine he founded, that when he first married, he told his wife that he “expected peanut butter for breakfast every day of my life, including Ash Wednesday.”

This lifelong passion was nurtured during Buckley’s years in an English boarding school, when his father sent twice-a-month care packages that included grapefruits and a large jar of peanut butter. To his astonishment, British pals who shared in his bounty loved the grapefruit and spat out the peanut butter.

“No wonder,” he wrote in that same column, “they needed American help to win the war.”

For years, Buckley’s favorite brand was Red Wing, produced in this upstate village 45 miles southwest of Buffalo. A jar of the peanut butter had been sent to Buckley soon after that 1981 column by the executive who then ran the company, Douglas Manly.

“He wrote something about liking Skippy,” said Manly, now 87 years old and long retired. “And I asked a sales associate to send him a jar with a note that said, ‘We think you’ll like this better.’ ”

Manly was right. Buckley’s son, the novelist Christopher Buckley, said in a phone interview: “My dad’s one true quest in life was for the Platonic ideal of peanut butter. And I remember one day he announced, with a look of utter transfiguration on his face, that he had found paradise on Earth in a jar with a yellow cap. And it was called Red Wing.”

[lpcoolgirl]

[lovefantasynovels]

Book Review - Rhapsodic by Laura Thalassa - 5 stars

Spoiler free book review. Check out my Reading Ranting page for more reviews. First thoughts… Bargains and curses in a Hades and Persephone retelling, yes please. Good thoughts… I first read this 3 years ago when I saw it on Bookstagram. Since all the books were released, I got the omnibus edition. This time, I listened to the audiobook and got a whole new experience. I love how we get…

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[newstodayjournal]

Review: In the ‘Ernest & Celestine’ Sequel, a Prodigal Cub Returns

One of the many enduring pleasures of “Ernest & Celestine,” the 2014 French film about the unlikely bond between a bear and a mouse, is its rhapsodic bridging of music and imagery. The tale (based on books by Gabrielle Vincent) is rendered with gossamer line drawings so wedded to their accompanying score that the images sometimes ripple, swell and curl in tandem with the musical notes. “Ernest &…

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[mywifeleftme]

129: Paul Simon // Graceland

Graceland Paul Simon 1986, Warner Bros.

I found myself tonight outside a rave rhapsodizing to a new Montrealer I’ll never see again about a sandwich whose principal interest is that it has maintained a reasonable price point despite a general economic bubble in the neighbourhood that has put the bar for a replacement-level edible somewhere north of the $8 range. Just going on and on about it. If I were to try to write out the extemporaneous ode I delivered on this humble egg BLT, there’d be a commotion in front of each noun where I’d scribbled over all the adjectives that make it sound like I'm trying to fuck the lettuce. It’d be nice to be the sort of person who can be this jazzed about the sensual world without waking up with a sore jaw in the morning, but my aperture is puckered. Still, sitting at a picnic table on this incredibly violet morning that has literally hung a rainbow over my neck, feeling a genuine wistfulness watching an empty can of mango White Claw roll into a gutter, I can admit I want to fuck the lettuce. I am a lettuce-fucker.

Writing a record review is like giving someone a tour of a sandwich they haven't ordered yet. It has no material impact on me whether you end up ordering the sandwich (listening to the record) or not, but in some sense I want the emcee’s pride in being a link in the chain that’s brought you to pleasure. So, on account of the puckered aperture I mentioned earlier, it takes a good deal of sweat to make my case. I read the label on the lettuce package and rephrase it in a way that suggests I know the grand dramas of its family, and the wars that were fought for the right to primp it just so. I train myself to tell when a tomato will give a visceral gush when bitten into, and when you should gossip vindictively about it in a back channel. I mention hintingly that the bacon has “been around the block a few times,” refer to the “experimental” qualities of the egg, argue that while American cheese is an abomination, its ability to adhere to this specific tabula rasa white toast is as essential as the generous globs of mayo. It takes considerably longer than love as a recommending strategy, but it’s what I have.

Anyway, Paul Simon's Graceland is a real good listen with a real complicated discourse, and I wish you luck with that, but that purple sky is looming in and if I'm not careful I'll be alive soon, and I am not ready for that.

129/365

#paul simon #graceland #lalime #sandwiches #what

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: A Grayscale Martyrdom by Alec Montalvo

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-grayscale-martyrdom-by-alec-montalvo/

Alec Montalvo‘s debut echos between brutalism and the ethereal. A call to magic realism, set in New York City, these poems provide a haven for detached personas. The speakers squeeze themselves through the cracks of realism and emerge transformed as something fantastical. The collection opens with Three of Swords, the remains of an abandoned backyard wedding reduced to rubble, and then revitalized as a mystic ceremony. The title poem captures the experience of being dissociated at a house party and left in the throes of cabalism. A Grayscale Martyrdom is a collection of poems about gritty transformation, the effects of #detachment and #displacement along with the double function to reconstruct what was once internally dead into something holistically living. #poetry #life #NYC

Alec Montalvo is an English teacher and poet. He holds his Bachelors and MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in Poetry. He has been featured in magazines such as Manhattanville’s Inkwell Journal, was a finalist in the Kallisto Gaia Press Contemporary Poetry Chapbook Competition, and holds publications in many small presses. In his spare time, Alec enjoys quality time with his tripod cat, Caulfield and playing tabletop games. Visit Alecintheink.com or @Alecintheink on Instagram.

PRAISE FOR A Grayscale Martyrdom by Alec Montalvo

“I love the nocturnal mind that navigates the spaces of the poem in which dark clouds comb the sky as lost lovers crawl through broken glass. Montalvo’s A Grayscale Martyrdom is a sinister delight, full of moody humor and keen observations, with images so fresh they’ll stop you in your tracks.”

–Cate Marvin

Opening in apocalyptic aftermath, where an unnamed speaker has just “finished the dig / in the yard / on [his] hands and knees,” Alec Montalvo’s a Grayscale Martyrdom is a strenuous personal and psychological excavation, a self-performed post-mortem of a speaker whose identity and relationships seem always on the verge of disintegration. Yet elusive as this speaker may be, Montalvo makes sure to anchor us in the particulars of his urban environment–unafraid to get his hands dirty, he sifts through grime and gray, looking for some scrap of mysticism or the ephemeral connection one might feel seeing “marijuana passed like a laundry line / between the scattered party dwellers.” Putting a gritty twist on the flaneur poet tradition, Montalvo stalks the city looking to project his consciousness onto what surrounds him, screwdriving embankment mirrors “in skull for a new set of eyes” or hijacking the wind’s perspective to see himself “coming down like something heavenly, crashing / through the clouds,….” With a precise diction, rhapsodous lyrical passages, and stanzaic forms that are inventive and deftly honed, this is a book that poetry readers will love as much for its craft as its personal revelations. These poems will help you contend with those “reanimated bones” you thought were long buried, they will present you with novel vantage points for seeing your past, and reveal beauty in a landscape of bodegas and vampirites.

–Anthony Borruso, poetry editor of the Southeast Review

“With these poems, Alec Montalvo braids the lonely echoes of modern life with ethereal beauty and meaning. Precise and elemental, this collection leaps from the page with resonant experiences of dislocation and yearning. ‘The mind is a wreck of a junkyard/ and the static between radio stations.’ A collection you’ll remember long after your first and second readings.”

–Melanie Faith, author of From Promising to Published: A Multi-Genre, Insider’s Guide to the Publication Process, https://www.melaniedfaith.com/

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[jessread-s]

✩🌄🫶Series Review: 

⋆ Paranormal romance ⋆ Friends-to-lovers ⋆ Soulmates ⋆ Morally grey characters

I knew it was risky to purchase a special edition set without having read the books first, but I am so glad that I did because I LOVE this series! 

The premise alone for book one had me hooked. Once I actually started reading, it did not take long for me to become completely immersed in Thalassa’s world, intrigued by the mystery that unfolds, and invested in Callie’s relationship with the Bargainer. Their slow progression from friends to lovers was well-written and Callie’s journey of self-discovery throughout the series was so inspirational!

If you have not yet read any of Thalassa’s works, this is your sign to do so! 

➤ Rhapsodic: 4.5 stars ➤ A Strange Hymn: 4.5 stars ➤ The Emperor of Evening Stars: 4.5 stars ➤ Dark Harmony: 4.5 stars

➤ Overall Series Rating: 4.5 stars

Cross-posted to: Instagram | Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

@laurathalassa​

#the bargainer series #rhapsodic #a strange hymn #the emperor of evening stars #dark harmony #desmond flynn #callypso lillis #des and callie #fae king of the night #laura thalassa #friends to lovers #soulmates #paranormal romance #slow burn #morally grey characters #adult fantasy #Spicy Romance #booklr #book blog #book blogger #Book Lover #bookish #book reader #bookworm

[musiconanironingboard]

13 January 2023: VU, The Velvet Underground. (1985 Verve/Polygram compilation of 1968-1969 recordings)

It wasn’t easy to find Velvet Underground music in the 1980s. A lot of it was out of print. For some reason the posthumous 1974 set 1969: The Velvet Underground Live was about the only thing still in print for a while. I did manage to find a new repress of the band’s fourth album Loaded sometime in the late ’80s, and I was shocked to see it. The only way I heard the band’s 1967 debut The Velvet Underground & Nico was because my mother’s dermatologist’s son taped it for me during a weird sort of arranged-friendship period, engineered by our parents because we were both young and enthusiastic record collectors.

In 1985 a compilation of outtakes surfaced and it was the first bit of new Velvet Underground stuff to materialize in over a decade, and it electrified fans at the time. A second volume, Another View, materialized the following year. It wasn’t unheard of for people to own these compilations yet not have any of the band’s actual albums. A college girlfriend was a perfect example. I remember looking at her copies of VU and Another View and being practically mystified by them. I’d owned Loaded for a few years by that point, as well as that cassette dub of the band’s debut, but I didn’t have the hardcore enthusiasm for The Velvet Underground that she and many others did, so a couple discs of outtakes were sort of non-starters for me, also in part because I didn’t have any context for them. I also got so tired of hearing her rhapsodize about the track “Andy’s Chest” that I got my fill of it without listening to it. I also recall finding “I’m Sticking with You,” sung by drummer Mo Tucker, quite irritating. These albums did not galvanize me as an undergraduate.

Flash forward to 2023 and I’m in the middle of a deep Velvet Underground dive, listening to all of the multi-disc 45th anniversary editions of the band’s first four albums (which I’ve borrowed from my brother). I’ve also gone back and reviewed material from the excellent 1995 VU box Peel Slowly and See, and I have some other things up my sleeve before this kick is over. It was during listening to the multiple mixes of the band’s 1969 self-titled third album that at long last the Velvet Underground lightbulb really went off for me and, so, for the first time I had to have those mid-’80s outtakes comps. I think I own all these tracks on subsequent reissues, but I want to experience the compilations as fans did when they came out of the blue back in 1985 and 1986. They can be tough to find in affordable condition, and so I took a chance on an eBay copy being sold by a thrift store. Discs from such places can be trashed when they arrive, but I got pretty lucky with this one. The case was cracked and I had to clean it up a lot, but the disc is pristine and overall it’s in perfectly acceptable condition. Next I need to find a copy of Another View.

Above are the front and back covers.

Below is the disc itself. Like most CDs from 1985, this is a no-frills package. The back of the booklet that you see in the picture simply has technical information about the compact-disc medium.

[deepartnature]

Diary Days from Christmas Past

“With December 25th fast approaching we have put together a little collection of entries for Christmas Day from an eclectic mix of different diaries spanning five centuries, from 1599 to 1918. Amid famed diarists such as the wife-beating Samuel Pepys, the distinctly non-festive John Adams, and the rhapsodic Thoreau, there are a sprinkling of daily jottings from relative unknowns - many speaking apart from loved ones, at war, sea or in foreign climes. All diaries are housed at the Internet Archive - click the link below each extract to take you to the source. ...”

Public Domain Review

[aboutanancientenquiry]

” Book review: “Herodotus (Historians on Historians)” by John Gould

PATRICK T REARDON

October 12, 2021

For more than 2,400 years, The Histories by Herodotus has been a foundation block of Western civilization, the first work of history in Western literature.

Written in classical Greek and completed around 430 BC, it is an account of the recent Persian-Greek Wars and what led up to them, set within the context of centuries of past events as well as a vast array of peoples, cultures and events.  It has been a key source and, in some cases, the only source of information about this era in Greece and the Middle East, and a vast amount of its information, checked against other researches, has turned out to be reliable.

And The Histories is the reason Herodotus is known as the Father of History.

So, why does John Gould’s 1989 book Herodotus, part of a series from Weidenfeld and Nicholson called Historians on Historians, read so much like a defense attorney’s brief?

It isn’t until his final paragraph that Gould lets himself go to rhapsodize about this major figure in history and historiography:

For the most lasting of all impressions that one takes away from a reading of his narrative is exhilaration.  It comes from the sense one has of Herodotus’ inexhaustible curiosity and vitality.  He responds with ever-present delight and admiration to the “astonishing” variety of human achievement and invention in a world which he acknowledges as tragic; he makes you laugh, not by presenting experience as comic, but by showing it as constantly surprising and stimulating; he makes you glad to have read him by showing men responding to suffering and disaster with energy and ingenuity, resilient and undefeated.

“His process of enquiry”

The “vitality” and “delight” in The Histories that captivates Gould as a reader is the tip-off for his defensive approach to the telling of his story about Herodotus.

The problem goes back to Thucydides.

Herodotus and his Histories (the Greek word historie means “enquiries”) were followed by Thucydides (younger by about a quarter century) and his History of the Peloponnesian War, fought between 431 and 404 BC, another classic, but one written in a much different style.

Herodotus’s approach, Gould writes, was that of a storyteller and one who invites the reader to join him in teasing out the meaning of things:

It is vitally important also to register that Herodotus is at pains, at every point in the presentation of his narrative, to preserve the traces of his process of enquiry; his narrative, that is to say, incorporates indications of its own limitations as “truth-telling.”

Gould cites another expert Carolyn Dewald who argues that Herodotus’s “contract with the reader” includes his efforts to “thwart any tendency we might have had to fall under the spell of his logioi (sources) and treat them as straightforward versions of past events.”

In other words, Herodotus is constantly giving the reader indications of where he obtained his information is and how reliable it might or might not be.  It’s an approach that’s rooted in the oral tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey and of Greek culture to that point.

It’s an approach that is rooted in questions about the sources — many of which can never be completely answered.  The reader is expected to interact with such questions and, like Herodotus himself, come a personal sense of what to believe and what not to.

“Magisterial and definitive”

In sharp contrast to this approach, Thucydides is telling the reader what to believe, period.  As Gould notes:

Thucydides, apart from a methodological paragraph or two early on in his work, systematically covers the traces of his own investigations and presents the reader instead with narrative as a transparent medium for incorporating the events of the past “as they happened.”…

Thucydides the historical investigator presents himself as having conducted his investigations in so rigorous a way as to render his account of them magisterial and definitive: this is the end of investigation….Thucydidean narrative, in the very rhythms and texture of its language, claims and enacts authority.

Thucydides knew better than anyone how different his approach was from that of Herodotus.  And he might have simply left it at that.

Down the centuries, these two methods have been employed by historians to tell what happened in the past: One reflecting the messiness of human existence and letting history be just as messy; the other seeking to get to the bottom of things and present the “truth.”

Father of…

But Thucydides didn’t leave it at that.  Instead, he included in his book a slap at Herodotus who, although not named, was clearly his target:

To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession than to be rehearsed for a prize.

Essentially, Thucydides is calling Herodotus simply an entertainer who wove into his account wild stories of gods and goddesses and omens and oracles and whose book, well, isn’t “profitable” to read.

Indeed, starting from that point, Herodotus wasn’t only known as the Father of History.  He was also called the Father of Lies.

“The art of storytelling”

Gould’s book does a good job of looking at what Herodotus was trying to do and the book that he brought into existence.

Gould is a fan of storytelling, signaling this with an epigraph from Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist:

The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.

Many readers of history today bemoan the tendency of some academics to de-sap history by following strict scholarly formats and eschewing any literary touches.  Indeed, there are accounts of academic presses rejecting manuscripts for having too much personality.

It is, of course, possible to tell a good story and stick closely to the facts.  And this approach is valuable when the sources of those facts are listed in endnotes.

Herodotus didn’t have endnotes.  Instead, he included his sources inside the story he told. And the story he told was far from dry.  In fact, Gould writes:

The distinctive quality of Herodotus’ perception of human experience is the tragic perception that it is always and everywhere vulnerable to time and chance and to the grim inevitabilities of existence.  Of all the qualities that bear out Longinus’ passing description of Herodotus as “the most Homeric” of historians, it is perhaps this quality of sympathetic engagement with human suffering that is the most fundamental.

The “quality of sympathetic engagement” is the heart of a great story, whether it’s The Iliad or Herodotus’s Histories.

Patrick T. Reardon

10.12.21″

Source: https://patricktreardon.com/book-review-herodotus-historians-on-historians-by-john-gould/

Patrick T. Reardon is American essayist and poet.

Very insightful review! Concerning the very important topic of the relationship of Thycydides with Herodotus, I think that there is today a scholarly consensus that, if it is true that Thucydides was antagonistic toward Herodotus (as most ancient Greek intellectuals were toward their predecessors), Herodotus’ influence on him was huge. I remind also that the characterization of Herodotus as “father of lies’ was a much later invention of Plutarch (or pseudo-Plutarch), who resented Herodotus’ description of the collaborationist attiudes of the Boetian oligarchs during Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, but also Herodotus supposed “philobarbarism”.

#herodotus #the histories #ancient greek classics #john gould #patrick t. reardon