Lara’s
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(group member since Nov 18, 2008)
Lara’s
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from the Q&A with Lara Biyuts group.
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doing some promotion to my eBooks.These ones, you can read for free.
If you like my books, then, please, leave your comment on Amazon or Goodreads.
Shadows Calling https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MF94810
Pride, Prejudice and Undead https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M9IRQJS
Disharmonie harmonieuse https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AS2D9RA
Autumn in Springtime, Springtime in Autumn https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MTPI8HL
The Darling of Fortune https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N4JZJP3
read something of my historical via #KindleVibrancy in Decadence
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Through the Baltic Looking-Glass. Part 1
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Italian Imbroglios
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The Dome http://amzn.com/B00F65AOPK
PDF or Doc files can be emailed to a reviewer as well.
Manson wrote: "Hello , my friends come on and read what this angelic woman is writing , what can we say about this work , sincerely , i can not find the words to describe it , it s fantastic, awesome, i think rea..."My online friend of the name of "Manson" is truly kind to me. Thank you for your nice review, Manson.
Read the new eBook at Lulu.comFin de siècle and Mists of Albion http://www.lulu.com/shop/lara-biyuts/...
The short story “Fin de siècle and Mists of Albion” is initially a part of my novel “La Lune Blanche” (2005) and at the same time a part of writings by the novel’s main character. Male bonding and the Victorian era. The big town and an orphan. Excesses of bachelorhood and a young thing learning the world. The new obsession of a middle-aged gay man and the mystery from the tangled and disturbing past. “Shared, secret, celebrated, exploded, subtle--as an unrequited longing or mellowing through the years--at long distance, across continents or so close, it is never quite close enough--from the inside out and from the outside in, the likely and the unlikely--hot, unfair, jealous, crazy Love is coming. Get ready--now, it comes to You!” (Lara Biyuts)
Read my interview at my online friend's, Toni Grace Sinns the poet: http://lilgracielou.blogspot.com/2012...
On my LinkedIn profile, some new opinions about me as an author and translator can be foundhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/lara-biyu...
Join me on LinkedIn! Let our professional network is growing!
On my Amazon author page, which is under construction, some of my books books can be found, and they will be more, there, in the future:amazon.com/author/larabiyuts
To all Lulu authors and readers. Almost all my self-published works can be found at Lulu.com as ebooks.Vampire Armastus (ID #12969809): http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/va...
A Handful of Blossoms (ID #12969466): http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/a-...
Silver Thread Spinner (ID #12969774): http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/si...
Reviewers, welcome !
Besides, a printed edition of my essay The Dome, dedicated to my pet cat, with lots of photos of the beautiful kitty, is released at Lulu.com
All cat-lovers, welcome !
Thank you. Let our professional network grow !
from Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh:“Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.” (Anthony Blanche)
"Isn't this a delicious concoction? You don't like it? Then I will drink it for you." (Anthony Blanche)
“Of course those that have charm don't really need brains.” (Anthony Blanche)
“Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things.” (Anthony Blanche)
“Oh, la fatigue du Nord!” (Anthony Blanche)
Good wine needs no ivy bush.
Perhaps I could clear up something that looks obscure if anyone asks questions to me. It seems to be established that the writer, who has something to say to the reader, should teach the readers or at least the young readers, for some reason. But any educational mission never was mine. An avid reader myself, reading books written by the “white dead European men” mainly, I may be regarded as a pupil of the writers or perhaps I am indeed, in a way, (some of them, but not Nabokov’s, because I dare not reckon myself as such and because Nabokov is known to have no literary pupils), but I never felt like being taught when I read the books. The writers simply told their story, and the story could be profound and highly informative or merely beautiful, but most of them only entertained their reader being men of fashion and charming narrators rather than teachers or philosophers and it's the reader's choice to take it or to leave it -- which now is a piece of advice to my reader.
the Goncourt brothers on Edgar Alan Poe’s detective stories. From Journal des Goncourt:“After reading Edgar Alan Poe. What the critics have not noticed: a new genre of literature, a portent of the 20th century literature. A sci-fi, fairytale, based upon the principle A+B; a morbid literature, clear up to translucency. No poesy--imagination is verified by analysis: Zadig--a crime investigator, Cyrano de Bergerac--a pupil of Arago. There is a feeling of monomania in this. Objects play more important part than humans; love makes way for deduction and other sources of thoughts, phrases, plots and entertainment; the base of the novel is removed from the heart to the head, passes from feelings to thoughts; drama is replaced with computations.”
Huysmans, Joris-Karl***one more vampire***
In this note, with the aid of some quotes from the book A rebours (Against the Grain or Against Nature, 1884, the book, which Oscar Wilde loved) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), I’ll try to prove that the main character of the novel is a vampire or something of the kind as a person who definitely lives a nocturnal life.
He lives a life of a nocturnal thing, after “a deep silence wrapped the little house that lay asleep in the darkness.” His first meal he has in the evening:
“At five o'clock in winter, after dusk had closed in, he ate an abstemious breakfast of two boiled eggs, toast and tea; then came dinner at eleven; he used to drink coffee, sometimes tea or wine, during the night, and finally played with a bit of supper about five in the morning, before turning in.”
The windows are designed in some odd way in order that the daylight could not penetrate the rooms freely:
“The dining-room in question resembled a ship's cabin with its wooden ceiling of arched beams, its bulkheads and flooring of pitch-pine, its tiny window-opening cut through the woodwork as a porthole is in a vessel's side.
Like those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other, this room was inserted within a larger one,--the real dining-room as designed by the architect.
This latter apartment was provided with two windows; one of these was now invisible, being hidden by the bulkhead or partition wall, which could however be dropped by touching a spring, so that fresh air might be admitted to circulate freely around and within the pitch-pine enclosure; the other was visible, being situated right opposite the porthole contrived in the woodwork, but was masked in a peculiar way, a large aquarium filling in the whole space intervening between the porthole and the real window in the real house-wall. Thus the daylight that penetrated into the cabin had first to pass through the outer window, the panes of which had been replaced by a single sheet of plain mirror glass, then through the water and last of all through the glazing of the porthole, which was permanently fixed in its place.
At the hour when the steaming samovar stood on the table, the moment when in Autumn the sun would be setting in the west, the water in the aquarium, dull and opaque by daylight, would redden and throw out fiery flashes as if from a glowing furnace over the light-coloured walls.”
Even the moonlight cannot penetrate the rooms unless through the bottle-glass:
“Outside the snow was falling. In the lamplight, ice arabesques glittered on the dark windows and the hoar-frost sparkled like crystals of sugar on the bottle-glass panes speckled with gold.”
He hates how nature looks by daylight:
“As he used to say, Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!”
which is absolutely wrong, if you ask me.
Thus, we can see that the hero’s habits, loathings and likings look much like a vampire’s.
If a vampire, then a vampire-aesthete:
“…a single book, bound in sea-green morocco, the "Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym," specially printed for his behoof on pure linen-laid paper, hand picked, bearing a sea-gull for water mark.”
Adding some charm to the Quotes. Victorians’ charm. “Charm is the great English blight,” said Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, “It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.” I permit myself to disagree with him in this. The books, which I used to read, have something more than charm. I read Charles Dickens' all novels, when I was a teenager, and I reread them several years ago. My favourite are Our Mutual Friend and Nicholas Nickleby. George Eliot's Silas Marner charmed me. I love works by the Bronte sisters--Charlotte, Emily, and Anne--Wuthering Heights and Villette in particular. However, the best Victorian novel is The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, in my view.
“It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.” (Royston Lambert, Beloved and God). “One of the strengths of the belief in Antinous was its appeal to the most sensitive and inward of mystical natures as well as to the exuberant, joyous and ecstatic sides of human experience.” (Royston Lambert)
“Clinical historical explanation may remove the stale savour of scandal which the Antinous-Hadrian affair has generated. But, fortunately perhaps, it can never quite dispel the wonder which those events still evoke. And it will never resolve the mystery which Antinous was to his own time, has been since and must be always.” (Royston Lambert, Beloved and God)
Oscar Wilde’s quotes, which I love:“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.” (De Profundis)
“…that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality absolutely none…” (De Profundis)
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” (De Profundis)
“… and the love of children and flowers--for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and willfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.” (De Profundis)
“To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies.”
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”
“Either this paper goes or I do.”
“If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.” (The Soul of Man under Socialism)
“Yes, the objective form is the most subjective in manner. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” (The Critic as Artist)
“…At any rate, wherever he lay---whether in the little vineyard at the gate of the Gothic town, or in some dim London churchyard amidst the roar and bustle of our great city---no gorgeous monument marked his resting-place. His true tomb, as Shakespeare saw, was the poet's verse, his true monument the permanence of the drama. So had it been with others whose beauty had given a new creative impulse to their age. The ivory body of the Bithynian slave rots in the green ooze of the Nile, and on the yellow hills of the Cerameicus is strewn the dust of the young Athenian; but Antinous lives in sculpture, and Charmides in philosophy.” (The Portrait of Mr W. H.)
“…Many curious stories were related about him at this period. It was said that a stout Burgomaster, who had come to deliver a florid oratorical address on behalf of the citizens of the town, had caught sight of him kneeling in real adoration before a great picture that had just been brought from Venice, and that seemed to herald the worship of some new gods. On another occasion he had been missed for several hours, and after a lengthened search had been discovered in a little chamber in one of the northern turrets of the palace gazing, as one in a trance, at a Greek gem carved with the figure of Adonis. He had been seen, so the tale ran, pressing his warm lips to the marble brow of an antique statue that had been discovered in the bed of the river on the occasion of the building of the stone bridge, and was inscribed with the name of the Bithynian slave of Hadrian. He had passed a whole night in noting the effect of the moonlight on a silver image of Endymion.” (The Young King)
“There is no such thing as moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997). Two aphorisms detachable from the novel may suggest something of the complex nature of this freedom and how it may have struck the novel's first readers. One is the much-quoted “Manuscripts don't burn”, which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion. In fact, during a moment of fear early in his work on the novel, Bulgakov did burn what he had written. And yet, as we see, it refused to stay burned. This moment of fear, however, brings us to the second aphorism--“Cowardice is the most terrible of vices”--which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel.http://ohlala007.blog.co.uk/2007/07/1...
