Testaments to the Boom Times to Come

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Anonymous asked:

i just want to tell you how much i love your Hannibal recaps. i'm not so good at seeing the layers and meanings and generally understanding fictional characters and situations beyond face value, if you get what i mean (ask my english teachers), but reading your recaps helps me get stuff and it increases my enjoyment of the show (which is already a whole bunch).

Oh ANON, you dear, I can’t even begin to tell you – no but I will try to tell you.

Here is What I Believe: I am not good at sketching out the deeper layers of fictional characters, the meanings for why they do the fictional things they fictionally do, because…..no one is! I think to be good at something like that would imply that you are somehow more right than others, and what I love so damn much about stories is that the reason why they matter? It’s because they have soooo many different shades of right in them, different rights for every person. Stories don’t exist without you to feel them. They need you to bring yourself to them, your own singular weird self, because only through your heart & mind are they alive.

So I cannot offer you the Truth in a story, and I’m glad about it. What I can offer you though, and what I try to do here, is share my wild emotional INTEREST in a story. I may not think I can be ‘good’ at this, but I sure as hell can care a lot about it. Caring, I think, is the root of the best kinds of analysis. Caring is critical, in every meaning of the word, if you pardon that sweet pun.

And that’s why I’ve enjoyed doing these Hannibal recaps so much, in fact, because Hannibal is this wrought slip-slidey dreamworld show that privileges emotional realism over logical realism, as Bryan Fuller likes to say while gesturing a lot with his beautifully expressive hands. NY Mag critic Matt Zoller Seitz once said something about Hannibal that I think about all the time, which is that exactly like a dream, the emotions in Hannibal are the thing that matters the most. That’s what you take away with you from your dreams – what you felt during them. Ultimately what this means here is that my writing involves a lot of All-Caps, mostly.

But if I can just feel out loud (& at length) about this show, and you find yourself feeling along? Well really, that’s all I could ever hope for in doing this, and god I’m overwhelmed. Which is how I know it matters.

To the Feels *toasts*

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[elfsroot]

Vikings meme // Five quotes

“Just stories. All things begin and end as stories.”

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

So I’ll tell myself a story, I’ll try and tell myself another story, to try and calm myself…

Samuel Beckett (via lipstickmata)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

• sext: talk to me about deconstructing classic archetypes and narratives, how prolific images never die, and storytelling as a means of survival.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or by numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, stories of justification, of accursedness, of luck and star-crossed love, or versions clad in the cynicism that is at times a very elegant garment. Sometimes the story collapses, and it demands that we recognize we’ve been lost, or terrible, or ridiculous, or just stuck; sometimes change arrives like an ambulance or a supply drop. Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

Rebecca Solnit, from “Apricots,” The Faraway Nearby (Penguin Books, 2013)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

Stories are compasses and architecture; we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or to figure out how to tell their story. Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby (via doskapozora)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling … stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods.

A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.*

It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.

Once upon a time…

Terry Pratchett: Witches Abroad. A Discworld Novel. (via you-are-the-lightning)

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[gristol]

quick concepts for some ideas of spirits i had. from left to right:

1. the keeper: guardian of cemeteries - makes sure graves remain clean and never without flowers.
2. crywolf: once thought to be a trickster spirit that led travelers to their doom, this spirit’s actual intent is to help travelers discover unmarked graves of murder victims.
3. the cacophony: will appear to some individuals - serves the same purpose as a banshee.
4. the rat king: a spirit of vengeance, unleashed upon those who hurt others.
5. the lure: an otherworldly being that feeds on lost souls - will lure them close and devour them whole.
6. the guardian: a watchful sloth spirit that comforts the spirit of dead children, allowing them to paint his fur.

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[cancurlsrob]

Real talk: Ballad Genres. 

Thanks, wikipedia

[Testaments to the Boom Times to Come]

[trickstersmakethisworld]

Scandinavian Folklore – Trolls

No creature frequents the stories and beliefs that make up the Scandinavian folklore as often as the trolls. Trolls often lived inside of mountains, and were then called mountain trolls or mountain people. They could also be found in big blocks of stone or simply underground. Few creatures of folklore have been quite as transformed by modern storytellers and toymakers as the trolls. We’re used to seeing them as clumsy and grotesque, furry human-like creatures. And of course they always have a tail. If only it would have been that simple!

But amongst the people of old trolls had a reputation as being very complex and cunning creatures. What they actually looked like is debatable, and often varies from place to place. There are also stories about them being able to change their appearance at will. Sometimes they could look just like humans, but much more beautiful of course!  

Trolls especially liked to take the shape of animals. If you happened upon a strange cat or dog walking about alone you should be extra careful, because those were the trolls favourite animals to transform into.

The trolls home-life was actually quite similar that of people, they lived in large families and kept animals. You could sometimes hear them shouting or smell their cooking deep in the mountains or forest.  And they also liked to make trouble for the humans nearby. They often sneaked into village and farms to attempt to steal food or beer. A clever farmer would protect himself by always carrying steel (like a troll cross).

But trolls stealing food was not the biggest problem. From time to time, a villager might disappear in the forest and then people would suspect them of having been mountain-taken, kidnapped by trolls.