The author’s biography doesn’t always tell you anything terribly significant about a literary work, but when I think about the fact that Sir Thomas Malory, the compiler of the most well known English-language literary interpretation of the Arthurian myth cycle, was a double-dealing knight who fought on both sides of the War of the Roses, was repeatedly charged with horse thievery, escaped from prison or skipped bail at least five times, and evidently made himself so obnoxious to those in power that he was specifically excluded by name from a general pardon of prisoners on two separate occasions – an accomplishment in which he is, to the best of my knowledge, unequalled – well, that tends to suggest a certain interpretive lens, is what I mean to say.
I had to look up lots and lots of things in Moby Dick. I was pretty skeptical of all the “whale facts” in that book after an early chapter where he lists the various types of whales and includes about forty that sound totally made up (“quog whale”, “grampus whale,” “sulphur-bottom whale”, “junk whale”, “thrasher whale”, “pudding-headed whale”, “scragg whale” etc), and also included dolphins.
How-some-ever, everything else I looked up turned out to be totally true, to the point where I decided Melville MUST have gone on a whaling ship as part of his research. So I looked up his biography!
My dude Herman was born in aristocratic wealth until his father blew it all and they became impoverished, and he did indeed go off to sea on a whaling ship. Then he deserted in Polynesia and lived with the natives for a year before signing up on another whaling ship, where he promptly joined the crew in a mutiny and got thrown in jail for it. He escaped and lived as a beachcomber and “island rover” while personally battling God/having an intense spiritual crisis. Then he went home to New England, became a celebrated author and dinner party guest on the strength of thinly fictionalized retellings of his adventures, and fell shatteringly in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
So uh yeah sometimes an author’s biography can really illuminate the work.
What I love most about Sir Malory is that he is so un-chivalric that some interpreters have spent a great deal of time trying to convince the world that this must be the wrong Thomas Malory!*
*See William Matthews The Ill-Framed Knight: A Skeptical Enquiry into the Identity of Sir Thomas Malory or Richard R. Griffith’s essay ‘The Authorship Question Reconsidered: A Case for Sir Thomas Malory of Papworth St Agnes, Cambridgeshire’
I’m not sure what my favourite part of that whole discourse is: the tortured efforts to explain away the Winchester manuscript literally saying “yeah, the author wrote this in prison” as metaphorical or something, or the fact that there’s a reasonable case to be made that the most popular alternative candidate for the Le Morte’s authorship was also into brigandage of some description.
Historically, many American states considered the rights of private property owners to extend “up to Heaven and down to Hell”, a state of affairs which posed a navigational hazard to American vampires. Those who were wont to fly by night in the form of a bat found themselves obliged to weave through a dense thicket of privately owned airspaces, with dire consequences for miscalculation.
With the advent of commercial aviation, however, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was granted control over passage through American airspace which supersedes the properly rights statutes of the individual states. This created a loophole which vampires could exploit, albeit at a peculiar cost: in order to fall under the FAA’s jurisdiction, vampires are obliged to register themselves as ultralight aircraft and submit flight plans for their nightly excursions.
Today, FAA is heavily infiltrated by vampire thralls tasked with ensuring their masters’ registrations and associated flight plans are properly filed and approved without coming to the public’s attention, a position of both considerable influence and considerable risk.
(The plight of Canadian vampires, meanwhile, is more straightforward. Strictly speaking, all Canadian airspace is the private property of the Queen of England, so the freedom to fly by night hinges upon having received the Queen’s personal invitation. The ability to obtain this invitation remains one of the primary drivers of class stratification in Canadian vampire society.)
Internationally, vampire influence is suspected in the Antarctic Treaty’s non-renunciation of territorial rights ; in particular, the stronger claim that space is “for all mankind” in the later Outer Space Treaty is believed to be proof of organized resistance to extraplanetary hematophage presence and the possibility of vampire colonization of permanently shadowed craters/cold traps, which would provide a stranglehold over human ISRU and deep space flight.
Without contemporary data on vampire infiltration of NASA, this latter theory remains untested.
some faepril drawings!!!!!!!!!! these were supposed to be faerie grunge but they came out more flowery haha oh well. the monkshood one is a nod to a project I did in university hehe
Examples of a Brocken Spectre, aphenomenon where a person’s giant shadow appears magnified onto clouds miles away. The shadow from the sun behind the person creates a halo, giving it an angelic appearance. This mostly occurs on any misty mountainsides or cloud banks, and can even be seen from aeroplanes.
It is tiring, to proclaim a powerful belief in anything. It straightens your spine like an iron rod shoved through it, makes you stand up straight, keeps you from bending in the wind; it makes you strong, if brittle. I do not have a powerful belief in anything very much. This is a large flaw of character on my part.
