Oh Jesus I feel really weird about starting this askbox post by answering your message because IT SE

Oh Jesus I feel really weird about starting this askbox post by answering your message because IT SEEMS PRETTY SELF-CONGRATULATORY, WHAT I HAVE ENDED UP DOING HERE, but to be fair you sent this message so long ago that I feel even worse about intentionally messing with linear chronology to put it behind a cut, and also isn’t your icon of Seo, IS IT OF SEO, god I love Nozaki-kun, but none of what I have said so far addresses the actual content of your message which is incredibly kind, thank you very much and I hope that I can continue to entertain you somehow! I had forgotten how bad I am at askbox posts because it’s been a while, but wow I am really bad at them! The memories come flooding back! But can I just talk about how intensely I ship all the pairings in Nozaki-kun, also INCREASINGLY THAT LIST INCLUDES MAYU AND MIKORIN ESPECIALLY AFTER #59 BUT I AM SERIOUS I AM REALLY INTO– wait okay this– the post no longer has anything to do with– I should just stop here and……more terrible answers behind the cut. Go right on ahead, of course! I wish I had a better quality image to provide you with or something along those lines, but I resized the original file, I am sorry :( First of all don’t even jokingly beg for things like this, please save the ritual debasing of your pride for more worthwhile causes– also, in the absence of my tablet most of my doodling activities will unfortunately (fortunately?) be on hiatus BUT ALL THAT ASIDE, THANK YOU FOR THIS MENTAL IMAGE kfld;hg a cat trying to make a long jump and accidentally getting stuck between the couch cushions and then going 100% full megane-kun when its owner fishes it out“Tch, how predictable. You’re meddling needlessly” kfl;dlkhlg;lkad;g The way it is with me and Tom Stoppard is the way I suspect it is for a lot of us and Tom Stoppard! We meet him as teenagers and nothing is ever quite the same again. I am of that party; the people who lost sleep over Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, learned the romance of thermodynamics from Arcadia, and are constitutionally incapable of being objective about Shakespeare in Love. Iain Glen is still (and probably forever) my default mental image of Hamlet.Of the Stoppard works I’ve read, The Invention of Love is the one that hurts the most because of how cuttingly personal it is to me. Not necessarily the one that holds the most personal memories – that’s R&G by far – but the one that always seems too close for comfort, that reads like an indictment. This has perhaps less to do with Invention itself and much more to do with me, which I think must be a very uninteresting answer for you, but… it’s one of those texts where my feelings on it have become inseparable from my feelings on what it means to me. I would never be able to write a paper about Invention!All this has to do with the question I’ve been asking myself for pretty much every day of my adult life: if this is the way you feel about creative writing, why are you in a PhD program instead? And there’s no text in the world that makes me feel as inadequate and embarrassed for my answer to that question as Invention does. That in the end, whether it’s the culmination of Housman’s quiet philological diligence or Wilde’s explosive devotion, poetry is the way we wrench our love out of our mouths. I’m at peace with where I am and what I do, until Invention tells me that about poetry all over again. I don’t think the play is a refutation of the kind of academic work that Housman does – and besides, I guess English as a discipline was seldom as concerned with authorial truth as Classics was, even when dealing with manuscript variants and scribal transmission – but Housman’s poetry does something (for Jackson, for himself, for history) that his scholarship never could, and it’s… hard to be reminded of that. To let the poet and the scholar war within yourself is a kind of courage already, I think. I wish I had it. But enough on that note!What I love most about Invention (and about Stoppard in general) is a certain poetics of metonymy that reveals itself to be metaphor. You watch him start with a thing, then bring in something else that only seems tangential to the first thing, and then it turns out that the two things are ACTUALLY GORGEOUS ANALOGIES FOR EACH OTHER. Ugh it’s so great. Like with the boat in Invention! You start out not even thinking about it, well it is Oxford, of course they are rowing, it is a natural setting. But then characters start trying to redeem homosexuality from its Aesthetic associations by tracing it back to Theban manhood and military excellence, and that stubborn movement starts echoing the struggle of rowing upstream, trying to get back to some originary moment when the current wasn’t against you. AND THEN just as you and Housman come to verbalizing that homosexuality never needed to be redeemed at all in the first place, there was no Golden Age and all the vile names love has been given are not because the love was any qualitatively different in antiquity– THAT STARTS TO ECHO THE REPEATED RETURN OF THE BOAT ONSTAGE, because no one was rowing upstream at all! There is no upstream, because THE RIVER IS A CIRCLE. LOVE WAS ALWAYS LOVE. THESEUS AND PIRITHOUS WERE ALWAYS FUCKING! God I know I am making very little sense right now, so I guess I also fail at being in a PhD program, but THIS IS A TUMBLR ASK AND MY ANSWER IS MUCH TOO LONG ANYWAY. I’M SORRY. Stoppard is cool. I like his stuff a lot. -- source link

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