#what belongs to you

[bones-ivy-breath]

Never before had I met anyone who combined such transparency (or the semblance of transparency) with such mystery, so that he seemed at once overexposed and hidden behind impervious defenses.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

#what belongs to you #garth greenwell #quote #literature #aesthetic #books #dark academia #light academia #lgbtq #queer literature #queer #on bearing witness #on being seen #perception #lgbtq literature

[batsandemptybatteries]

i have this list of books on goodreads that i resonate with / mean a lot to me and … there’s a theme there (the theme is i’m trans and mentally ill)

#stone butch blues #middlesex #paul takes the form of a mortal girl #what belongs to you #goodreads #she who became the sun #the other books are in my native language so i won’t list them

[whimsywoo]

#what belongs to you

[poetsandwriters]

Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You, in “ Dialects of Desire,” an interview with Amy Gall published in January 2020.

#Garth Greenwell #Cleanness #What Belongs to You #Fiction #Poetry #Inspiration #Quotes #Writer's Life #Writer's Block #Queer

[galechives]

And he didn’t just pull me to him, he rolled back as well; I had kept a space between us but he pressed against me, the whole length of his back against my front. I tightened my arms around him, holding him as he wept, and he reached one of his legs through mine and pulled me tight, so that I felt his body all along my own, his body that had been, in however partial or compromised or intermittent my fashion, beloved to me. As I pressed my face to his neck and breathed him in, his scent sour with sweat and alcohol, it seemed impossible it could dissolve, simply dissolve, this form I had known so intimately with my hands and my mouth, it was unbearable that this body so dear to me should die.

from Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (2016)

#garth greenwell #what belongs to you #love #grief

[books-apples-socks]

people on here really recommend "what belongs to you" as though it doesn't read like colonialist fiction about "the noble bulgarian savages" k

#oh i know garth greenwell lived in sofia #i can tell #the pity he feels towards the balkan savages is heart warming truly #i'm so warm i'm about to pop a blood vessel #what belongs to you

[blackpetrichor]

#attract #law of attraction #plane #night sky #night #fly #dreams #chase #don’t chase #what belongs to you #belongs to you #belong to me #will find you #find you

[man-reading]

‘What Belongs to You,’ by Garth Greenwell

In a controversial 1999 New Yorker review of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel “The Spell,” John Updike summed up a common prejudice about gay stories: namely, that they have nothing to interest straight readers.

Updike, the author of the sex romp “Couples” (among other sexually frank novels), complained that Hollinghurst’s “relentlessly gay” fiction bored him because in gay stories “nothing is at stake but self-gratification.” In contrast, stories with heterosexual characters “involve perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family.”

Essentially, Updike is asking: What’s the big deal? It’s just sex.

Garth Greenwell’s masterly debut ­novel, “What Belongs to You,” provides a ringing answer to Updike’s willfully dense question. The book is set in contemporary Bulgaria, still struggling to move on from its Communist past. Here, gay desire remains a cultural taboo, so that expressing one of the most basic of human emotions is quite a big deal, with plenty at stake ­beyond “self-gratification.”

Because the novel opens with a man cruising for sex in a public bathroom, some readers may initially be tempted to write off “What Belongs to You” as gay fiction. The cruising man in question, Greenwell’s unnamed narrator, resembles the author: a gay American poet teaching abroad at a college in Sofia.

Looking for sex and maybe companionship in a land where gays find one another in the shadows, the narrator encounters a small-time hustler named Mitko. Their relationship begins as sexual, then turns to something more mysterious, fraught and destabilizing to them both.

It’s a compliment to Greenwell’s writing that the vividly written sex scenes are the least compelling aspect of this wonderful book, which is divided into three sections. The first section, “Mitko,” was published as a stand-alone novella in 2011. It follows the two main characters as they go through the initial paces of their unequal relationship, complicated by the relative financial privilege of the narrator and the elusive personality of the charismatic Mitko. A 21st-century answer to Christopher Isherwood’s shabbily charming ­Sally Bowles, Mitko veers between attracting as many male admirers as possible, in person and online, and then plaintively professing a desire to “live a normal life.”

Despite this dynamic character and Greenwell’s dexterous prose, the plot of “Mitko” feels slightly thin. Readers may want to pull an Updike and tell the narrator: Hey, it’s just sex. What’s the big deal?

The resounding answer comes in the next section, “A Grave,” in which Greenwell powerfully expands the book’s scope. Sparked by news of his estranged father’s impending death, the narrator recounts several evocative vignettes of his own youthful attempts to grapple with his sexual identity in red-state Kentucky.

Taken in succession, these two sections expose the process of gay shame: how a traditional upbringing conditions a sweet, innocent kid to link desire with humiliation and hiding, and then how that kid transforms into a man addicted to that connection. Why would any contemporary American gay man in his right mind move to of all places Bulgaria? Perhaps in this case because it reminds the book’s hero of his old Kentucky home.

In the novel’s final section, “Pox,” the narrator has overcome some of his internal hurdles and formed a healthier relationship with a man from Portugal called R. At the same time, he can’t quite let go of Mitko — or is it that Mitko will not let go of him? Greenwell poignantly evokes the narrator’s inability to resist the draw of Mitko’s erratic neediness. Much (but not all) of the sexual charge of their relationship has dissipated for the narrator, yet a mysterious feeling of responsibility for Mitko’s increasingly grim fate remains.

Greenwell is one of several contemporary writers working in an “all over” prose style, similar to that of a Jackson Pollock abstract expressionist painting, in which all compositional details seem to be given equal weight. (Other current all-over practitioners include the literary darlings — and presumed heterosexuals — Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard.) In these works, even the stories themselves seem barely shaped, merely lifted from the authors’ lives and flung directly onto the page like paint on a Pollock canvas.

Though this style has roots in the works of European writers like W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard and (further back) Marcel Proust, its recent resurgence feels born out of a new and different impulse, perhaps an eerie echo of the relentless, formless “I, I, I” of social media.

Yet Greenwell’s writing stands out from that of his “all over” contemporaries, whose language sometimes slides into blandness or cliché. By contrast, Greenwell takes more consistent care with his finely wrought words and sentences. His prose regularly delivers dazzling treasures:

“How helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat.”

“Three long walkways extended from the beach into the sea, branching out at their ends into three separate promenades, like the arms, it seemed to me, of a snowflake as drawn by a child.”

“At the very moment we come into full consciousness of ourselves what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore.”

And he is equally memorable on up-to-the-minute concerns like online communication — on, for instance, the “symbols and abbreviations of Internet chat that make such language seem so much like a process of decay.”

While other writers use the all-over style somewhat indiscriminately, lavishing the same degree of attention on descriptions of morning coffee or a joint as on Big Thoughts about art or mortality, Greenwell has an instinctual feel for sharpening his focus at key moments to create depth of feeling. For instance, in the bravura opening to “A Grave,” the narrator’s reaction to learning that his father is dying becomes an object lesson in suffusing description of setting with a character’s emotions.

Perhaps for readers who share Updike’s point of view on the subject, the fact of Greenwell’s narrator’s gayness makes his story less “universal” — as if the job of fiction were to act as a mirror, rather than a lens that can introduce readers to characters of all stripes. Yet, objectively speaking, the hazards of being gay for Greenwell’s characters make their plot at least as dramatic as (say) that of Knausgaard’s socially awkward teenager trying to sneak alcohol into a party in Book 1 of “My Struggle,” or Lerner’s expatriate poet adrift on a haze of hash in “Leaving the Atocha Station” — or either of these writer-protagonists’ vainglorious preoccupations with their literary reputations. In Greenwell’s book, the stakes are higher.

It’s a shame, then, that “What Belongs to You” is burdened with such a vague and unmemorable title. And the emphasis on Bulgaria’s history and culture could have been stronger, to help solidify its choice as backdrop. Likewise, even if the country’s thematic role is clear, it might have been nice from a straightforward narrative perspective to understand more about how the protagonist ended up there. Of course, an amiable laxness with story structure is a hazard of the all-over style — at first, the pace lags — but in a short book like this, a little slowness is not fatal. None of these quibbles are. “What Belongs to You” is a rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction because of, not despite, its subject: a gay man’s endeavor to fathom his own heart.

WHAT BELONGS TO YOU

By Garth Greenwell

194 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23.

#Garth Greenwell #writer #author #What Belongs to You #books worth reading #gay fiction #contemporary novels

[theoldkyokodied]

The Allegiance of the Ascended Vampire and the New God of Magic

#bloodweave #baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #gale x astarion #astarion x gale #gale dekarios #astarion ancunin #yes this is about astarion helping gale defeat mystra and take her place with the crown in exchange for gale helping him with the ritual #the ‘they can make each other worse’ part of their relationship turned to the max #I enjoy them being reluctantly soft for each other more but from time to time I just think about how powerful they could get together #toxic evil boyfriends. take love and twist it up until it’s unrecognisable #I like to think that astarion approached gale with that offer after realising no one else in camp is gonna help him #and that he can use gales own hunger for power which backfired when astarion actually became emotionally invested in gale #and after gale kept his word despite everyone’s concerns astarion changed his plan from not fullfilling his end of the bargain to actually #helping gale kill mystra (mostly so that gale could belong to him and him alone. and letting him take the place as a god bc having a god #at you beck and call is definitely appealing. especially one as eager to please as gale) #anyway what I want to say with this is please please please let me kill mystra i don’t even care if the weave gets destroyed again

[ruhlare]

#you are what i belong to and long for #between the lines #my writing #my edit #letters

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i think it would be funny if people occasionally arose from the dead. like if that was a real-life one-in-a-million but well-documented Thing That Sometimes Happens, and the entire legal system around death (laws on inheritance & marriage & murder etc) had to include caveats for the unlikely-but-scientifically-possible event that the dead person in question might spontaneously self-resurrect, even years or decades after death. it would raise so many inconvenient and absurd possibilities

#imagine the legal system in that timeline #property laws and inheritance laws and bigamy laws--what happens if your spouse resurrects 10 years after they die? #think how AWKWARD that would be #what happens if you inherit from someone who comes back do you have to give the inheritance back? what if u used it to buy stuff? #does the jetski u bought with the money your grandpa left u 15 years ago in college now belong to grandpa? #or is there a statute of limitations? #if the guy you got convicted of murdering returns from the dead does your conviction get changed from murder to grievous harm? #how is the grievousness of the harm measured? in the number of years the guy spent as a corpse? #what if you spend 20 years in prison and the victim comes back to life and it turns out grievous harm would have landed you only 5ish years #do you get reimbursed for the extra 15 years u spent in prison? #what is the legal process for proving you have come back to life? #what are the minimum legal requirements for establishing a revenant's identity? #does it become regulation to make fingerprint/dental records of every single person who dies just on the off chance one of them comes back? #what happens if it's someone from like 300 years ago? #the world has changed and everyone they know is dead. is there a social services department that can help with that? #there would be a whole branch of counseling services for people who have reanimated or had a loved one reanimate #grief 2.0 counselors

[bones-ivy-breath]

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

#what belongs to you #garth greenwell #quote #literature #aesthetic #books #dark academia #light academia #lgbtq #queer literature #queer #lgbtq literature #desire #dark things #typography

[becca-e-barnes]

all i can think about is bucky literally BEGGING to eat your pussy. just on his knees, calling himself a needy slut, just looking up at you with puppy dog eyes while he just begs for your pussy on his mouth. ugh.

Men who are this into eating pussy have a special place reserved for them in Heaven. Hearing someone beg to go down on you is life changing when they know what they're doing 🙈

But you're so right, Bucky would be so willing to degrade himself like that just to be allowed to go down on you. He'd be on his knees, trying to ignore how full his balls feel, begging for you.

"P-please." His voice is so quiet you almost start to question if he said it intentionally. "I need to taste you. I can't think about anything else."

His cock twitches despite how heavy it looks, flushed and angry against the pale skin of his thighs.

"Really?" You tease, tilting his chin up with two fingers so he's looking at your face, rather than your body. "Tell me exactly what you're thinking. Describe it to me"

He doesn't miss a beat. "I'm thinking about how soft you are, how warm and silky your cunt feels under my tongue. I'm thinking about burying my tongue as deep inside you as I can reach and still wishing I could get deeper. I want to feel how wet you are but more than anything, I want to taste how wet you are. I want to dream about it for the rest of the week. Every time I stroke my cock I want to be able to remember how you taste."

Precum drips from his tip and you're not sure you can deny him much longer. Not when he's making it sound so appealing.

"Do you even hear yourself?" You do your very best to act like you don't love the sound of every word that has just come out of his mouth.

"I do. I sound like a shameless, filthy, desperate slut. The type of slut who wants to kiss and lick and worship your sweet pussy until you're so sensitive you have to force me to stop." His hand wanders between his own legs, tugging his stiff length to the mere thought.

He's not above begging and you know that. He'll draw this out as long as he needs to until he gets his way but there's very little sense in that when you want this just as much as he does.

"Lie on the bed." You give him time to make his way over before following, lining yourself up just above his face.

You take a second to smooth his hair, enjoying the feeling of his freshly shaved face against the sensitive insides of your thighs.

He's looking up at you, your eyes meeting his. "Thank you." The relief in his voice is clear right before he grasps your hips and pulls you down onto his mouth.

Fuck, he's incredible. This is the mouth you dream about when you're alone. His tongue massages your clit, stroking back and forth before dipping into your fluttering entrance. You swear he must feel what he's doing to you. You feel your cunt clenching and rippling, your muscles contracting in response to the pleasure and for a second you wonder if he can tell.

He's hungry for this; he has been for hours. He's moaning and slurping obscenely, his tongue buried in your cunt. You don't even need to look over your shoulder to know that he's alternating between fucking his own fist and gripping the base of his shaft tight enough to stop him from spilling his release all over himself too soon.

It's very hard to tell which of you enjoys this more.

#asks answered <3 #becca writes spice #anon #needy!bucky #bucky barnes x reader smut #sub!bucky #bucky barnes smut #subby!bucky #this should technically belong to the shs series #but it fit this prompt too well so I'm using it here #I make the rules 😇 #but that 'thank you' nearly killed me #I've noticed this week that my beige flag is that I get so frustrated when people make assumptions about my capacity #I hate when people say stuff like 'how's the new job? you must be really stressed' #or worse 'things must be getting on top of you' #like ??? #why would you assume I can't handle what I put on my own plate? #I know people mean well but it really bothers me

[technovillain]

what if they slayed in paris (yeah it was in paris)

#phineas and ferb summer belongs to you 'in the city of love' but its milla vodello what about that #theyre just in my brain latelyy hiiii #sashamilla #sasha nein #milla vodello #psychonauts #kiwiarts

[inkskinned]

you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.

you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.

instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.

you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.

your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.

because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.

so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.

all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.

#spilled ink #woke up at 530 to write this lmafo #me in a cold sweat: #how do i be normal #edit in the tags: #hey so i've seen y'all talk about like ... wondering if ur ''allowed'' to relate #like if this is about X specific diagnosis #and when i first posted it i really almost labelled it ''please don't assume this is about a specific condition'' #because as an artist i am often walking this line of discussing a symptom or discussing my conditions etc #and sometimes yes ! i do want to talk about an experience that is specific to who i am and my condition #but sometimes the effort of the post is about the EXPERIENCE rather than the diagnosis #because yes i am not neurotypical and as a result that influences my work but it is ALSO true that there are many reasons #why someone might experience this particular vague horrible feeling that you are... almost being CHASED by what you ''really'' are. #that you're outrunning your symptoms... that you're not really normal you're just sort of a mockery of a person #.... that's a really isolating and horrible way to feel no matter why you are feeling it. and the nature of this PARTICULAR post is that #it is inherently talking ABOUT that sense of isolation & of feeling not-deserving & of minimizing your own experiences to make urself #palatable for society in a way that others find easy-to-deal-with.... #this post is about a certain experience such that my impression is there's a higher likelihood that those who relate #would have more difficulty thinking they ''deserve'' to relate - that it doesn't REALLY belong to them #bc often we are the kind of people who are SO used to being alienated and set aside and ''different'' that we AUTOMATICALLY assume #that things are not ''for'' us... they never have been why would it start now #we are the kinds of people to be ... ''too normal for X diagnosis but too symptomatic to be normal'' #[or as this post points out... so good at ''coping''/masking/hiding it that we essentially conform to whatever shape we're poured into] #but i have witnessed others already say in the tags ''thought this was about me but it's about X so it can't be'' #and im like ... of course it was about you. #art is not a resource that is diminished by greater appreciation . #you reflect in whatever mirror fits your frame. not just the ones in your bedroom. not just the ones i specifically give you. #there will be - and often are - times that i will talk about my specific conditions... but if you're reading this #regardless of why you're here... we are here together. holding hands through space and time. and i love you for carrying it #and i know you're exhausted. i am too. but i understand. and i see you.

[galechives]

I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn’t exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.

from Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (2016)

#garth greenwell #what belongs to you #poetry