/lit/ - Literature

In the winter of 1918-19, the do-gooding societies of the United Kingdom committed themselves to repatriating from France lunatics who were provably British subjects. This was not mere chauvinism, although the notion that Gallic asylums were at once too lenient and too barbaric did pervade, but also — correctly, I would say — founded on the thesis that the idée fixe of most madmen is that they are not being properly understood, and that if only they were understood they would not merely be released, but lauded for their incisiveness. If a madman and his keeper do not even share a language both are liable to great agitation. The second, and more money-spinning reason, was the forlorn hope that some of the names listed missing - death presumed on the rolls of companies, martial and voluntary, had not vanished into the maw of Passchendaele or Ypres but rather the back wards of the Republic’s rambling provincial madhouses then so ill-administered by the worst functionaries of church and state.

By way of this enterprise, I found myself in an attic room of a cheap railway hotel overlooking the Gare du Nord, stripped of all its furnishing save a mattress and a tin jug, and locked from the outside.

My particular ticket had been punched by an act so out of character and so unlikely to be repeated that I will not repeat it here. I had come from a stay of less than an evening in the Pitié-Salpêtrière in a state of deep alarm that had ceased to be attributable to the cause of my episode. It was instead fixed upon the fact that my passport had been taken from me, and would not be returned, but rather forwarded to my parents enclosed in a letter explaining that I had been declared mad in Paris and that they should pay particular attention to a forthcoming cable explaining which train they should meet and when, lest I be placed in a charity hospital convenient to the commissioners. The knowledge that this letter would either kill my father, or cause him to never speak to me again was the greatest agony of my young life.

Coming as it did on the heels of the second-greatest agony of my young life it reduced me to a despondent, circular creature, human in outline but unable to reason. I had been admitted to the little room, hair still wet, at that time in the early morning in which nothing good happens and nobody can be trusted. I sobbed my way up the stairs and through the door, and was bowled into a far corner in the pitch dark by, as best I can recall, a very large Frenchman.

>>23354530
There, I continued to sob until the breaths between them sounded consumptive and I began to believe I would die, there, after all. Before dawn, someone stirred from the mattress, this started me — my only comfort just then had been the thought that I was, at least, alone — but did not check my crying. I watched as a form padded over to the jug, filled a little mug, and offered it to me with a sort of bow.

“Drink this, please, and try to lie back,” she whispered.

I regarded her, but could not speak until, after a great effort, I choked my sobbing enough to ask if I had woken her, gabbling an apology in the same breath.

“You did,” she said, flatly, then added with cheer “Though it’s not as if I have anything to get up for in the morning.”

Sitting the mug before me and dropping to her knees she went on, drearily, “one sleeps largely to pass the time, anymore.” She reached out a hand to dab my cheeks with the tip of her sleeve. This generated a sharp but unanswerable impulse to swat her away. I supposed that at a stroke her ministering hand could fly from my cheek to my neck, and finish the work I had begun that afternoon. I have wondered since if I would have been glad of that. I think not; the murdered receive such cloying pity, while suicides are dealt with in a very businesslike fashion which I still prefer.

In the dark I had only her voice — soft, but with an ever shifting tempo — and dabs of faraway lamplight in her eyes to know her by. They were large eyes, and their whites were visible above and below the irises in that way that can occur naturally by happenstance of heredity or develop in those driven to lunacy or exhaustion (or by exhaustion, lunacy). This condition did not blink away as she drowsily settled onto the floor, regarding me still.

“You’re quite new. You were not here at supper, or when they put out the lights. Have you come far?”

“Only la Salpêtrière,” I intoned, nipping at the mug of water.

“Ah! You had the good sense to go mad in the metropolis! The up trains were quite poor, I shall never again wonder what it is like to be a third-class parcel.”

“Do you often wonder that?”

“No, but I shan’t have to, now. Would that it were pleasant, it would be very economical. Of course economy…” she gestured to the bare room, “…is certainly the watchword. I imagine we shall cross the channel lashed to the mast, or perhaps in circus crates.”

She paused expectantly, this was patter, and meant to be volleyed. Sighing, she went on: “Might you sleep a while now? It’s very cold comfort, but it’s comfort still.”

“I may.”

>>23354537
“Well, I will leave you to Morpheus...” she half whispered. Touching my shoulder, the woman went on, with a nearly gibbering pace, “You may think it would be better to be alone, perhaps twould be on the first night, but company is quite valuable in a place like this, you know, to us both, indeed, because I find one tends to talk, and it’s better to talk to someone, even if they are practically mute, otherwise the warders begin to look askance and you’ll find yourself fitted for irons ere long.”

“Irons?” I sniffled.

“Well I’ve not seen it done, but I’ve heard it threatened,” she elaborated, rising. She returned to the jug, and, for want of the mug, sloshed some water into a cupped hand and tried to drink from it. Largely failing, she patted her face with her damp palm and retired to the mattress. In laying down, she almost vanished. Her shapeless gown was, near as makes no difference, the same color in the dark. Only her forearms, so pale as to be reflective, and, I could now perceive, bandaged, betrayed her existence.

-

I suppose morning came, I dozed through it, insensible. My first clear picture of the next day is of the woman pacing about in a noonday sunbeam. I ached all over, as I ought to have, though it is only from here that I remember any pain. My chest and head felt heavy and my legs and arms featherlight as if in danger of drifting away. So, it was with difficulty that I stretched a little and picked myself up from the cold floor. No wonder she was in the sunbeam, I quickly joined her there. She was murmuring to herself but stopped, covering her mouth sheepishly as if she had just told a bawdy joke that did not land.

“It’s good to see you up and walking,” she redirected. “You were such a wreck, I put the orderlies off when they came to carry you down to breakfast. If you are hungry you’ve me to blame, but being fed is not a pleasant thing beyond babyhood. Say, do you smoke?”

“When I’m in a bad mood, or tired, when I drink sometimes.”

“Right, well I’d venture that you are two-for-three just now,” she chirped and eloped from the sunbeam. The wretched door was never far away, and she rapped on it. It was opened an inch or so at first and she inquired, in French, “Henri, matches?”

>>23354543
The door swung wider, and a boy of 15 or so stepped into the room. He was in a Gendarme’s coat, much too big, with no insignia of rank. Henri fished around in the coat and produced a greasy box of smoker’s matches, which the woman met with a blue packet of cigarettes. Turning to me, she said in English, “You see, Henri is very good, really quite accommodating.” Henri nodded in my direction, blushing.

Henri struck a match and handed it to her with the same care and dread one might accord a stick of nitroglycerin. My inmate put two cigarettes in her mouth, lit them both, and returned the match to Henri. Taking them out, she kissed the boy on the cheek. “You know,” he began, “even without matches those are still contraband.”

“Well, I suppose they will have to be destroyed,” she replied, affecting a pout.

“...In a series of small fires?” Henri quipped, in English.

“Very good!” She beamed, and, giving him another peck, waltzed him to the threshold.

Gliding back into the sunbeam she handed me my cigarette. I had never smoked after someone before, and I turned it around in my hand as if to inspect it.

Spying that, she murmured, “Madness isn’t catching, Eleanor.”

I had not heard my own name in twenty-four hours at least. I regarded my gown, expecting to find it pinned to it, or something like that. “It’s chalked on the door,” she explained, “and since you’ve haven’t an Henri at your disposal, I’ll tell you I’m Florence. Flossie is just fine, say Flo at your peril.”

Somehow, her having a name came as a shock. After an interval, I told her I preferred Nell, and she told me I looked like a Nell, though she “imagined my father and my aunts couldn’t be disabused of Eleanor.” Incidentally, she was just half right, but my father had coined Nell in our house.

Flossie’s age was hard to place. I thought her about twenty - and so my contemporary - in the night. Now though, in the very hard light I could see greater age in the fingers caressing her cigarette and around her big, bleary eyes. Her hair was about walnut color with the faintest strands of silver beginning to show. I felt sorry for her, for the first time.

“You’ve been a great help. Very kind,” I made a point to say.

Flossie cocked her head, “You flatter! I’m a demented old Savoyard, Nellie, and of no good to anyone. Anyhow, kindness doesn’t require effort - you should remember that when it’s denied you.”

“Savoyard? You’re French?”

“Oh no,” she laughed, “on the Strand! My, are you that provincial?”

“No, but half-Quaker. Not to be my own bigot, but we were not particularly theatergoing.”

“Dreary, quel dommage!”

“How did you come to be here?’

>>23354546
“You know, madness writ small, latterly writ large. D’Oyly Carte toured the front in ‘15, ‘16, and ‘17; on the last go-round I stayed behind with la Croix Rouge. You know if I was a proper Christian, like you, it would have been the best thing I’ve ever done. It was the best thing, up to a point, and not so bad at first. I will tell you, if you have never played by lantern light in the esplanade before a big chateau for 10,000 darling Tommies you have not lived! But it all began to turn up wrong. You know in my day, the Army seemed to us a big hunt club. And, heavens, we thought we knew death, were intimate with it, and there were so many funerals but people died better, and one at a time. It was melodrama, and vanity, to think of it now. We flirted with death, read any libretto, even old Gilbert had poor Yum Yum face the prospect of being buried alive. You poor devils though, death had you in a dark alley and then cut your throat, no foreplay.”

She was leaning against the wall, by the window. She ashed on the sill.

“The war then, sent you mad?” I asked, diffidently.

“I wouldn’t say so. I’ve always been mad, it’s only that before last year, I could spend more time dancing with the fairy queen than Charon. Do you know those colliers on the Thames that are so heavy laden it takes only a snowfall to sink them? I suppose that was me, and I was foolish to venture into the snow unbidden. I won’t claim shellshock, I didn’t get blown up, but the boys... the boys apologized to us when they died, they apologized with their innards lying on their bellies: ‘I hate to do this to you, angels! Well done though!’ and we had done nothing save administer morphine and muck the bloody floors.”

“I’m so sorry,” I intoned.

“You’ve nothing to apologize for, you’re perfectly innocent, a girl quaker - I could think of no one less warlike.”

Flossie shifted to the mattress and swanned down onto it. As she lifted her cigarette to her lips her bloody bandages gazed at me.

“You won’t know poor Leonora Braham, but suffice it to say she was the mother of my roles, she created five of Gilbert’s little confections! I met her in ‘01, and at around four o’clock in the morning, drunk, she told me that her first husband blew his brains out in their front garden, in front of her and her little son. She was picking bits of bone out of her hair for a few days after. That was before she joined the company! Can you imagine standing there with the audience beaming back at you from beyond the footlights, with your little fan and kimono and a bow on your backside trying to give them something gay with that image forever in your mind. And it would be in your mind, once you see something like that you cannot cease remembering it, it is a watermark on your eyes, a bright enough light or busy enough scene might obscure it, but never totally, and it is through it that you see everything else.”

>>23354550
“Is she still alive?”

“Oh yes, I rather like to think that the Savoy and, between us, the brandy, were a sort of fairyland for her, or perhaps a purgatory, but not the real world. It gave her refuge, but she knew when to quit it. I fear I hung on too long.”

I sat beside her. Her cigarette had a very long ash again, and was nearly gone. Mine was still fresh, and at risk of perishing from neglect. I offered it to her.

“Why do you think that?”

“I may look like I can manage on my own ⸺ or at least I flatter myself that I do ⸺ but hold my mind up to the light of any real task or adult endeavor and you’ll find that the theater moths have eaten it full of holes! It would be just so to say that I tried to snuff myself out on account of the war, I would write it that way, but the fact is that had I not left the company in ‘17, I would have been asked to leave, I’m spent, and I cannot imagine growing old.”

I was so close now to her bandaged arms, which were in many parts the color of very old blood.

“How long has it been since you hurt yourself?”

“Longer than you imagine, I imagine. They’re rather infected, so they look worse now than they did when they were fresher, and they smart. Given perfect choice, I would have liked to have done it in the spring, but I could not wait, so I sat beneath a leafing tree rather than a budding one, with a scalpel, a little outside of Reims, and I tried for the happy dispatch. It was happy, you know. They say that when a fellow hangs himself or what have you, as he twitches at the end of the noose, he regrets it all and wants nothing more in the world than for the chair to be put back under him. Perhaps it was because I was particularly downcast, but my sole regret, at least then, was that I had not thought to get hold of a pistol. Think of it: a world war just ended at my doorstep, guns in every rathole and dangling from the bocage, and, in my endless vanity, I favored a blade. ‘Twas not a girlish letter opener to the wrist though, I was done for.”

“And yet you are here, alive.”

“The peril of trying to bleed to death in a warzone is that there are many fellows who are very practiced at stopping just that. I rather slipped away before I was found, but I was, to my shame, found. It has been at least four months since then, and I haven't had a single moment of real liberty since.” She sighed and continued, “Do you know the terrible thing? I do not mind as much as I should. There are no decisions to make, nothing to learn, or mend, anticipate, or fear. I sleep well again, the way I used to sleep only on trains. I suppose my sleeping self likes confinement, and I fear my wakeful self is starting to agree.”

>>23354522
To start off, I will be continuing a low effort scifi fetish story I was writing in /wwoym/ until someone pointed out it's not for that. It uses some terms from blade runner but has nothing to do with it otherwise.

Here is the story so far if you want to catch up, there were too many links and some are dead so I sprung for a pastebin but pastebin won't let me post it so hopefully 4chan allows this:
text.is/JMVY

>>23354555
As if to counter her own point, she rose and approached the little window. The sky was graying and the warm puddle of sunlight that had been the only comfort in the room began to die away. She opened the window.

“Don’t!” I exclaimed.

“Don’t what?”

“Jump!”

“They’re cleverer than that, Nellie,” she replied and pushing the window sash sharply, she revealed that it could only open enough to allow a dribble of fresh air. I steadied myself, and approached the window with her. Beyond the housetops, wreathed in smoke, the halls and yard of the Gare du Nord rippled with comings and goings. A hospital train eased backward into a siding, its carriages a motley array of old Wagons-Lits and creaking forty-and-eights.

“It will be a shame to leave Paris like this, I shall never see her again,” Flossie mused.

>>23354557
>>23354429
[continuing on from here]

Striding stiffly back to the common area, she was relieved to find the full crew present and accounted for, if somewhat worse for wear. They sat silent by the light of a single hooded battery torch, in various states of injury or exhaustion.
Nursey was now seated in an easy chair, a vein pulsing visibly on her forehead, her hands cramping shut as if still on the turret controls.
Jane and Anonson were crowded together looking out the starboard portal and murmuring to each other inaudibly.
Griggs, the quartermaster, had recognizably suffered from mild decompression sickness, likely a result of damage to the cargo bay, and was being attended to by the copilot, Wrygraves, who seemed to have some sort of burn on one hand, himself.
The tripodi Fugbenis had come aboard from his attached ship, looking stocky and out of place amid the Earth furnishings.
Yuki sat down by the portal, behind Anonson and Jane.
"They're really trying to break in?"
Jane looked back at her, for the first time without a hint of the usual animosity that persisted between the two. She just looked drained, like the rest of them.
"Sato. Got your sims in for the quarter, huh?"
Yuki chuckled softly. "Next test better be on flying under aux thrust."
"Yeah," Jane continued, pointing back at the portal. "The schizos are trying to board, I guess. Think they're in a holo, I guess. You sure all those ports are welded?"
"Any more weld and they'd be slag. They'd have better luck getting in through this."
Yuki tapped the omniplex portal for effect.
"Yeah, we were thinking that." Anonson's voice was still low and gravelly, but had regained some of its cheerful hints. His eyes never left the portal. "Not sure what's going to happen once they figure that out. We're just keeping an eye on them until then."
Various banging and mechanical screeching sounded down the corridor as the replicants aggressively went to work on an aft hatch.
"Stupid pricks have been doing that since we cooked them." Nursey chimed in, still sounding herself if very tired. "The noise..."
Nursey leaned forward intently.
"Sato, you're bleeding!"
"It's just a little cut, Nursey. Had some turbulence. I'm more worried about you."
"Yeah..." Nursey gestured helplessly. "My damn hands, they kept seizing up on me, and so many C-Beams."
"What do you mean, C-Beams? Did the turret get hit?" Yuki asked confusedly.
"No, that old thing has its own reserve shield and battery, it'd take a nuke to crack it, honestly. Just the...the light when you split them, it's..."
Nursey rubbed her temples and winced. "You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? You can tune those old models to split C-Beams, and a lot of other things. Not really what they're meant for though, so the eye shield isn't quite there. What, you thought they were letting us off easy?"
"I just thought they were saving battery." Yuki blinked. "You've been splitting them all this time?"
Nursey shrugged modestly.

>>23354530
Are you the one that's been pushing this lately? I keep seeing Imgur links for a typeset (supposedly published) version of this, along with a claim that the author killed himself (and that he wrote some smut before). Pic rel from some variation of the Imgur post that I found.

So what's the deal?

>>23354530
>>23354635
(I'm accusing you of being an elaborate shill, is what I'm saying. Two Imgur links, both from seven days ago, the one sans cover accompanied by the suicide shtick, and the one with shilling it as women's lit.)

>>23354635
>>23354651
No I was attempting to cynically claim it as my own. Nice detective work though.

>>23354653
There were other posts recently about a /lit/ browser killing himself with writing from a board magazine on his screen, so I wondered if there was a connection (either the same guy or a way more elaborate/convoluted shill campaign).

>>23354522
The format of the website doesnt lend itself to this type of posting. If enough people start posting their walls of text in the thread it becomes a mess and no one parses through it

>>23354672
Yeah you have to rely on people linking their posts correctly, or they can ue a trip if lazy and you can filter by that.
I don't really think many people will want to read things other anons post unedited anyways, I just didn't find a thread suitable for my purposes so I made one. Even /wg/ seems to have more bickering than posting writing since it's more for finished, polished things that take time.
So /wbp/ it is.
If too many people posted in it, it would mean people were writing, at least. Think of it like a scrapbook but filled collaboratively by autistic retards.

>>23354627
"They're coming!" Jane cut in. "Hand the torch!"
She grasped the torch from Yuki, dialed it to maximum lumens, and attached a blinder head. They waited breathlessly until a replicant showed its face, cutter in hand, whereupon she pointed it in his eyes and flashed it on for a brief moment. The replicant retreated back along the hull.
"We're saving battery." Jane explained. "We just need to blind them temporarily whenever they come over here."
"Trappers should be here any time." Griggs wheezed, then cleared his throat, seemingly feeling somewhat better. "Can't work out what these bastards hoped to accomplish hunting down a security team, but looks like they won't."
"Wish we could shake a few of them off, meantime, let them drift." said Yuki, coldly. "Fucking replicants."
A pair of hands appeared over the portal, holding an aerosol can of something and some sort of hole punch jabbed into the side of it. The punch was removed and a black substance sputtered out onto the portal, though before it could completely cover it, it seemed to sputter and stop. Jane swung the torch around at various angles flicking it on and off, and the replicants seem to retreat once more, but the portal was largely obscured by the substance.
"Spraypaint, or something? Looks like they're having trouble with it freezing up." said Anonson.
"Well, we'd better suit up and get out some las in case they figure that out and start really cutting in before the trappers get here. I'll tell Sarge." Wrygraves grabbed his and Sarge's spacewalk suits, already laid out on a table, and went fore.
Anonson was still in his suit all but the helmet, and took the torch from Jane as they all prepared for the worst. Griggs passed around standard Magellan-issue laspistols, himself setting up opposite the portal with a self-contained mass driver stabilized by a tripod.
Yuki hesitated locking on her helmet.
"Do you think I have time to..."
A thick blob of some sort of tarry substance adhered to the portal, blocking out the light. Immediately a grinding noise commenced, and green sparks flashed against the portal even through the concealing goo.
"I really wouldn't risk it." Nursey said. "Everyone, helmets on."
Sarge appeared, having left the helm to Wrygraves.
"Get back from there, Anonson. Decompression protocols, everyone. On your feet. Pick a spot and plant carabiners. Run helmet diagnostics now, not later. Boots to maglock."
"I can't tell if they're making any progress." said Anonson.

I have a theory of art or story-writing which I'm not sure has been formulated in specific terms before. It's not a hard-and-fast rule for all art, but simply just one ideal that I think is amazing.

Put simply, you create a story that revolves around one or two specific themes. At the beginning of the story these themes are introduced gently and nonchalantly, but as the story progresses it will circle back around to these same themes more and more intensely in a sort of downward spiral or "circling the drain". I say that because all the stories inspiring this post, like Hemingway novels, have very negative themes. The Sun Also Rises is a great example because it has essentially the same themes throughout, but at the beginning of the novel they're basically brushed off/not taken seriously, whereas the events of the novel are so destructive towards the characters' well-being that at the end of the novel they're just sitting around in a daze asking themselves "What the fuck happened?" even though there were hints of disaster from the very beginning. I consider this markedly different from something like Werther, where that novel begins genuinely optimistic and it's only as things go south that Werther's mood goes into a tailspin. Rather, in this style of story, it contains the exact same theme throughout, but it's ambiguous and hovers ominously overhead at the beginning like a storm cloud. As the story progresses, the storm cloud descends, or more accurately you merely uncover that truth which was there all along, which is the theme of the story.