mango

I love Doris and she is so cute but also she looks so much like Teddy Roosevelt sometimes that I can't help but laugh

I'm in a little local cafe and the women behind the counter started griping to each other, "Oh Christ, Stephen's back again," "It's him, is it? I thought he'd stopped coming," "It's definitely him, look, it's bloody Stephen on a Thursday morning," "Do you want me to get rid of him or are you going to do it?" and so I was peering outside, trying to spot this nightmare customer, this pestilence of a person, this pox upon the cafe trade, and then one of the women from behind the counter ran outside, clapping two trays together loudly and yelling "GET OUT OF IT, STEPHEN!" and it turns out that Stephen is an absolutely gigantic fuck-off seagull who hangs around outside, menacing people for crumbs

(guy who's not getting anything done voice) I need to learn every skill and all information

I feel like not enough people talk about the white violets in Villette. Lucy first mentions them, pseudo-casually, in Chapter 13 as one of the middle items in a long list of things she keeps in her room: a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it moment. Not until Chapter 31 is it revealed to the reader that it was M. Paul who gave the violets to her -- even before the vaudeville -- before they ever exchanged a single word. And Lucy just dries this bunch of violets and keeps them forever -- "dried and kept for its sweet perfume between the folds of my best dress." Like, at this point, she's never even talked to him before, and she already considers him "best dress" material??? The same Lucy who owns no more than, like, 3 dresses -- the same Lucy who fetishizes any halfway-decent-looking dress and imbues it with enormous amounts of emotional freight and symbolic value? Sex does not happen on page in Villette, but Lucy keeping M. Paul's violets "between the folds of her best dress" comes as close as anything else, IMO. They're lovers-to-friends just as much as they're friends-to-lovers; no wonder M. Paul gets so jealous during that whole period when Lucy and Dr. John are exchanging letters. All the people who like to talk about Taylor Swift's scarf ought to also be talking about this

I know this kind of falls under unreliable narrator but is there a name for the literary device where the narrator suddenly reveals a crucial piece of information to the reader out of nowhere like it's nbd. like in villette when she doesn't tell us who the doctor is or that she recognized him until a hundred pages later. or also in villette when after four hundred pages of paul locking her in attics and yelling at her for looking at paintings she's suddenly like "oh I might not have mentioned that every day he also left little presents in my desk. just books and bonbons and stuff like that, that he thought I might like. I might have forgotten to mention that part. anyway" and just goes on with the story. maybe we should call it the lucy snowe gambit

The time will pass anyway

doing things at the right age is literally a made up concept. you can start/pursue anything at any age. btw.

i like when fiction treats love as a more complicated force and not something that is inherently pure, redemptive, or salvific. portray it as flawed and complex as any other human impulse. give me love as prejudice, love as possessive stasis, love as addiction, love as blindness, etc.

you are NOT immune to cunty little detective. at some point in your life your brain will be taken over by a fictional detective and there’s nothing you can do about it. it WILL happen to you. you might even end up transgender about it