And Then the Winchesters Shot Them

 In a comment on a Tumblr post, audreyii-fic posits, "This brings back my thesis that every fanfic — every fanfic on every subject in every fandom — can be improved by adding 'And then the Winchesters shot them' to the last line."

The Winchesters being the protagonists of the longstanding show Supernatural. As the title suggests, the two brothers, Sam and Dean, hunt supernatural creatures, asking questions only until they know who to shoot. Or set on fire. Or stab with a customized pointy object. Whatever. Basically, everyone and everything they touch dies. But that's not important. What's important is that audreyii-fic's thesis works just as well on books as it does on fanfiction, though first-person is a little tricky.

Earlier this morning, I spent about ten minutes perusing my bookshelves and giggling to myself as the Winchesters summarily massacred the Potter-Weasley clan, the Gamgees, the Darcy-Gardiner party, and most importantly, Bella Swan. (Or her legs. The grammar is a bit dodgy.)

In the pursuit of forcing others to suffer the same unbecoming snorts of laughter that I have been at the glorious visuals alone, I've compiled a list of improved quotes below. They are relatively spoiler-free, but I've put the book title before the quote so you can skip the ones you haven't read before.

"Not Fourteen": A Random Shakespeare Appreciation Post

Okay. Well. Here's the thing. The more delicate among you may need to avert your eyes for a moment. Are you ready? Here we go: 

I am not really a Shakespeare fan. Cue the hisses of blasphemy. 

Perhaps this is a product of having to read Shakespeare all throughout high school and into college, without much choice in the matter. We were practically given a mallet and told explicitly to beat the plays to death with it – Hamlet, I'm looking at you. Perhaps I just don't really like to read plays. I've been to Ashland. Macbeth was amazing. Have I ever read it? No. Was I supposed to? Probably. Will I ever? We'll see. (Probably not. Ironically, it's difficult to read Shakespeare by yourself instead of with a class, but with a class, it's almost always unbearable. That might be a catch-22, but I didn't finish reading that book, either, so I wouldn't know.)

Even though I don't like Shakespeare all that much, however, I can appreciate him. Some of the things he does are quite clever, especially within the lines themselves. 

This is going to be a lot less effective, because I can't find the original blog post/article/comment/whatever-it-was, which stated things so clearly and wonderfully, but oh well. Basically, I ran across this interpretation of a single phrase in Romeo and Juliet, and it blew my mind. I've posted about it in at least one place before, but no one shared my enthusiasm, which... WHAT? How is this not amazing?

In Act I, Scene III of the play, the Nurse and Lady Capulet are discussing Juliet. 

Nurse: She is not fourteen. How long is it now / To Lammas-tide?

Lady Capulet: A fortnight and odd days.

Nurse: Even or odd, of all days in the year, / Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.

Juliet is "not fourteen." But do you know what is fourteen? Sonnets. Sonnets, Shakespeare's go-to, perfect form, are fourteen lines. Juliet is thirteen, and will die before she can become that perfect sonnet. She will die before she can become fully formed: a woman. 

It's been eight years since I read the play, so this source tells me the play's action takes place over only four days. Juliet can't even reach for the number fourteen by being fourteen days away from that age, because her mother says Juliet is "A fortnight and odd days." A fortnight being, of course, fourteen days (or nights, technically). It's like, by the addition of that "and odd days," Juliet is being explicitly denied her ~sonnet of womanhood yet again. 

To me, this is a bit more textual evidence that my reading of the play isn't completely unfounded. I personally don't believe that Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate love story; I think it's a cautionary tale. I think it's not only a warning to feuding families, but to stupid kids. 

Even if you do think Romeo and Juliet is romantic (which is totally fine, especially since we are basically socialized from birth to think so), you've got to admit, the sonnet connection is pretty neat. Or perhaps I'm just overly excitable.

Cardamom and Moss: A Pilfering

You, my mythological readers, are perhaps wondering where the title of this blog comes from. It does not, alas, come from my brain, because my brain is not nearly so lovely. (It is squishy, and thieving. Or at the very least, squirrel-like.) Rather, it comes from the brain of Ray Bradbury.

To be perfectly honest, I never expected to like Fahrenheit 451. I somehow managed to escape it being force-fed to me in high school, and it never came up in college until I decided it was high time I actually read it. With some prompting from a vlogbrothers video. I mean, I love dystopian sci-fi, but I always expected it was going to be a little too sci-fi, where all the literary merit is in the metaphor of the plot.

What I didn't expect was for the writing to be absolutely beautiful. Lyrical, rich, and beautiful, but in a tasteful, appropriate way for the subject matter. As one of my former Creative Writing professors might say, Ray Bradbury knows how to write a sentence.

 This is the passage my blog title found itself from:

The shape exploded away. The eyes vanished. The leafpiles flew up in a dry shower.

Montag was alone in the wilderness.

A deer. He smelled the heavy musk-like perfume mingled with blood and the gummed exhalation of the animal's breath, all cardamom and moss and ragweed odour in this huge night where the trees ran at him, ran, pulled away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes (137).

To be perfectly honest, I don't remember a lot about what's happening in this scene, since I read the book last year. All I know is that something about those words was so beautiful to me that I haven't been able to delete the book off of my Nook, even though I know I probably won't read it again, or at least for a long while yet. Perhaps it's silly, but something about that trio of words collided with me on a personal level that I don't think I often experience as a reader. Something about the combination of food and nature imagery, I suppose.