I never saw it stated that way. I wonder why I didn't come across this subgenre in my English studies. Perhaps it's just a pattern people have picked out now based on current thought. A smattering of dark books can be found in any genre, and yet these are the several American writers of chief importance to me. I don't know who Ugo Foscolo is. He looks like someone who would have hung out with the Shelleys though, not the American Romantics.

I'm not so much interested in American gothic work right now, even though I am reading The Blithedale Romance. I am still obsessed with the Shelleys. They have a little world in my mind where I can go sometimes. I've built a crazed fantasy around the early English Romantics. I think intensely on what they did on a daily basis, what they wore and even what they ate. My dream is to map out and tour Italy in the order they did.

I want to see the places in Greece that inspired Mary Shelley's scenes in The Last Man. The place where the last man wanders along the beach, I want to wander there. Where Perdita is buried beside her ill-fated husband a couple hundred years from now... ago.

I want to sit where he sat. I want to walk where she walked. I want to write what she wrote as she wrote it with no clear boundary between Mary Shelley and Amanda Monteleone. I have never said it before, but I have often thought, half-ashamed at my presumption, that the chief goal of my life could not be higher than to serve as an appendage of her literary ideas, hefting them from the past further into the future with the two hundred-odd difference in years. And I have known it since... high school, when I wrote paper after paper on Frankenstein, and twelve years forward in time, I have accomplished my own Frankenstein novel, and am really pleased with it.

What are we as writers if we live by someone else's idea? A puppet on a string? But I see in her ideas so well-formed I will save myself years and decades to study her work rather than tiresomely pursue my own vision, which I see as a crude and unfashioned idea which will be at some point identical to hers.

I like this small-press candle company. My grandma gave me a kit and I was browsing for new fragrances online. I may order Orange Vanilla or Pomegranate, and try their Bee Butter in Mango.

I cranked out another Aunt Martha cross-stich. I'm slowing up, but I'm going to finish the four, stretch them over canvas and hang them in the kitchen. I like the way this one turned out even better than the other two. My last one will be of strawberries.

This journal is so special to me.

Labels: Texas, towns

Labels: Tarquin

The Way I See It #282

"Childhood is a strange country. It's a place you come from or go to-- at least in your mind. For me it has an endless, spellbound something in it that feels remote. It's like a little sealed-vault country of cake breath and grass stains where what you do instead of work is spin until you're dizzy."

Lyall Bush

The second most important topic in my working novel.

If I could clone Jonah or Henry, would I do so? I believe a great portion of their qualities to be due to my influence. My bird will live perhaps till I am forty. My cat, possibly. That considered, I could live through another bird, and two more cats. If I raised another bird or cat, they might or might not be similar, because my raising them is combined, of course, with natural predispositions, but if that animal had the same genome as my previous one, combined with my specific manner of care, I believe it would turn out to be exactly the same.

Therefore, the cloned bird or cat would love me exactly the same. It would be the same animal and same relationship between us, wouldn't it? I would not be preserving the original animal from old age and death, of course, but I would in a sense be preserving a relationship by reanimating it. The question is, would that be wrong?

6
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is
any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may
see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I
receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon
out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

From Leaves of Grass, "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman.

I am reading through quotations on death in Encarta, believing it to be (at the moment) the cornerstone of Cambriel, that is, to reanimate the dead.

It is an interesting thing that in my twenty-seventh year I have truly begun to feel this thing called death, that many writers have described, and it is not only dreadful but intoxicating. Life, like everything, is thrown into focus at the suggestion of its absence. Without its opposite, something cannot be of importance.

I feel it every day when I am alone at home, slinging off my bags. It rushes over me, cutting of my breath. A trembling compulsion to do. And fast. I did not used to feel this way, and I believe it to be an awareness of death.

I must be in love with death. In its suggestions, its manifestations, its rituals, this thing that the human race considers so untouchable, unspeakable, a betrayal of what they are. I consider it a vindication of what they are.

1. there is a victim who is helpless against his torturer;

2. there is also a victimizer who is associated with evil and whose powers are immense or supernatural;

3. the setting of the gothic story is at some point within impenetrable walls (physical or psychological) to heighten the victim's sense of hopeless isolation--the central gothic image is the cathedral or haunted mansion within which the victim is imprisoned;

4. the atmosphere is pervaded by a sense of mystery, darkness, oppressiveness, fear, and doom to recreate the atmosphere of a crypt--a symbol of man's spiritual death and a "vehicle for presenting a picture of man as eternal victim"[1]; and finally,

5. the victim is in some way entranced or fascinated by the inscrutable power of his victimizer [2].

Source