winsomeandwishing

I thought this was a great essay; and it has a hell of of a kicker:

So I saw this cross my dash, and...well, listen, I've never even seen Heated Rivalry, but I do know how to write Elizabethan pastiche, and this is nowhere near satisfactory to me, so:

HOLLANDER: Come thou with me unto my country place. A rustic spot it is, secluded quite From view of any man. Thou'lt spend the summer, And there shall Rumor's thousand tongues* be still'd, And there shall Envy's eye be seeléd up**, That nor the one shall speak of what we do, Nor shall the other stain us with her curse. And yet I know thou think'st on Muscovy, On public sufferance, not on privy joy. I tell thee, sweet, 'twould all be out of view, As secret and as dark as is the bone Muzzled in flesh, if only thou wouldst come.

ROZANOV: Thou know'st I cannot. HOLLANDER: Even for a week, A fortnight, even, hid beside the lake. If thou dost cherish me...

ROZANOV: Perhaps. Perhaps.

“The letter about curses, the letter about the fact that Koral Tachonis was basically saying like, yeah, this scar bypasses all protections, but the Drowned Men get around that by selling their soul to someone else. And we can't grab it because it's not, owing your soul to a fairy is not a protection. On a dirty 20, the Old Path is very old, and it had to survive thousands of years under the oppression of the Shapers. So a lot of it comes down in folk stories and songs and rhymes and superstitions. One of the oldest superstitions is disrespecting a corpse at a funeral causes you to be haunted by the ghost of that you have disrespected.”