It's Hard Being A Hopeless Romantic, Literature Loving, Tea Addicted, Gay Poet

“Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to Baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by William Morris’s floral patterns? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting may be either serene or restless, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflect our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work ‘beautiful’ when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ‘ugly’ one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.”

— Alain de Botton & John Armstong, Art as Therapy

French Resource List

Hopefully even if you've been learning French for a while one of these resources may be of use to you

General

French dictionary

Best online French-English dictionary (which also has bilingual dictionaries for a number of languages) as it has example sentences in French with translations, forum, verb conjugations, idioms, and more

RFI listening and reading exercises for all levels incorporating the news into your learning

Grammar

Français Lingolia with exercises

Listening

Journal en Français Facile radio/ podcast with transcripts for each episode

News in Slow French podcast

Conversational French Mises à Jour with transcripts

If you live in Australia, SBS has a French news podcast

French dictation exercises write what you hear

Youtube comedy series Bref

Belgian LGBTQ+ Youtube series La théorie du Y

Youtube comedy series Le Département

French comedy series that has whole episodes for free on Youtube Fais pas ci fais pas ça

Skam France is a teen show so you can learn heaps of slang, it also has subtitles for each episode in French and English

Youtube

Home Language - vocab and grammar

Hugo Décrypte - daily news

MisterJDay - comedy

Le Monde - news but many of their videos have subtitles

Reading

Simple articles originally written for children, also has a Youtube playlist (1jour 1actu)

Le Petit Scribe reading comprehension and exercises level B1 but also has the same for all levels

Reading (or listening) comprehension - Le Petit Nicolas

Writing

À vos plumes - writing practice and grammar

Oui c'est ça writing practice

Proofreading checklist

Other

Thoughtco French articles on grammar, vocab, verbs, etc.

French slang dictionary

French vowel pronunciation part 1 and part 2 with audio

More useful French pronunciation tips with audio and IPA

EDIT: just remembered in case you feel like torturing yourself you can do Victorian year 12 level French exams 2001 to 2020 for free on the VCE website with the audio and answers available. It would probably be more helpful to not do it within the time limit and listen to the audio as much as you need to. You might also find the HSC exam papers useful from what I can see there's three different levels of French exams (beginners, continuers, and advanced) just find them in the list of subjects and you'll get to the exams.

comprehensive list of books that will make you think a lot

at the request of @uglydumbbitchdotcom and @dreamingmappist (just to let you know, most of this is european and pre-1930 so if you're looking for literature from other continents this is not the list to go to. i wish i knew more about african, asian, and latin american literature, but alas - i do not.)

a portrait of the artist as a young man and dubliners: short stories of a city by james joyce

anything by fyodor dostoevsky (specifically crime and punishment, demons, notes from underground, but really anything will do and i'm not going to list his complete works on here)

the goldfinch and the secret history by donna tartt

frankenstein by mary shelley

fathers and sons by ivan turgenev

station eleven by emily st. john mandel

the death of ivan ilyich by leo tolstoy

in the first circle by aleksandr solzhenitsyn

paradise lost and paradise regained by john milton

till we have faces and that hideous strength by c.s. lewis

ninety-three and the man who laughs by victor hugo

faust, pt. 1 by goethe

the ulster cycle and an táin bó cúailnge

the a wrinkle in time quartet by madeleine l'engle

grace by paul lynch (this might be sort of an odd addition but he's one of the authors who follows in the joyce tradition and this is a beautiful book with a fascinating plot set during the great hunger so it deserves a place here)

a streetcar named desire by tennessee williams

the plough and the stars by sean o'casey

the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck

common sense by thomas paine

macbeth and henry v by william shakespeare

a room of one's own by virginia woolf

beowulf

say nothing by patrick radden keefe

one hundred years of solitude and the general in his labyrinth by gabriel garcia marquez

the underground railroad by william still

the letters of vincent van gogh

my god, there is a lot of russian literature on there. anyway, here are the books that made me think the most and hardest out of anything i've read

Who pisses off the 16 types ヽ(ಠ_ಠ)ノ

Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and everything else @mbtitime and @typefy

GOTHIC POETRY RECOMMENDATIONS

Edgar Allan Poe : The Complete Collection of Poems

Emily Brontë : The Complete Collection of Poems

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow : “Haunted Houses”

Dana Levin :  “ Styx”

William Blake : “ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”  /  “A Divine Image”

Margaret Atwood :  “Mushrooms” 

Jorge Luis Borges : “Two English Poems”

Frank Bidart :  “The Ghost”

María Negroni :  “Rosamundi“

Anne Carson :  “The Glass Essay”

Emily Dickinson : The Complete Collection of Poems

Jericho Brown :  “Dear Dr. Frankenstein”

Sylvia Plath : “ Lady Lazarus” /  “Ariel” /  “Fever 103°”

Hughes Mearns :  “Antigonish [I met a man who wasn’t there]”

Robert Lowell : “Florence”

Gregory Orr :  “Gathering the Bones Together“

Paisley Rekdal :  “Bats”

Kallikteros, tr. by Willis Barnstone, from Greek Lyric Poetry; “A Way to the Heart,”

“The light of a candle

is transferred to another candle—

spring twilight”

- Yosa Buson

- Yosa Buson

i often feel like one of the many reasons why we are so passionate about the whole dark academia thing is because it gives us the opportunity to live in a fantasy where our passion, whether that’s literature, art, theater, science, feels valid.

we live in a world where we are constantly stimulated, constantly finding new things, constantly pressured into liking more and more stuff because the world keeps going on at such a fast pace and it never stops and it’s so hard to keep up with it and it makes your breath short your mind tired your fears bigger and.

it almost feels like we are trapped because even though we would like to slow down for a bit, we know the world won’t stop with us, for us.

if we turn our phones off it’s unnatural and people start worrying, if we don’t check our social medias during our study breaks we get anxious – no matter how much we want it not to be that way, no matter how badly we would like to dedicate ourselves completely to these passions of ours, we can’t do it entirely, slaves of times so flourishing but so scary. the world has a crushing weight and most of the times we soccombe to it.

therefore, thinking about the dark academia concept is a way of finding comfort not only in our own minds but even on this tiny corner of the internet.

in a certain way the concept softens me, although it can often be extreme.

gathering in the common room at three in the morning, a circle of eager friends with the same thirst for knowledge; the sound of a pen scribbling ideas on a thin sheet of paper; round glasses slipping down the tip of our noses always hidden by the pages of novels and poetry collections; dim lights caressing our backs curved from studying for so many hours those same subjects that make our heart race increase; our stray black cats resting on our bellies as we curl up in bed, notes spread out all around us – on the floor, glued to a wall, in between the pages of big tomes; the rain gently tapping against the window of our dorm rooms as we sit with our backs against the wooden wall, completely lost in between crinkled words with no cellphone, no distraction other than the characters and philosophers speaking to us in ancient languages, voices sweet as honey; our minds getting poisoned as we start to believe in those revolutions so badly we’re willing to lose our sanity after them; having lessons with just a bunch of other people, tea burning our tongues as it runs hot down our throats; and then, when the line between reality and fiction blurs completely, we might lose ourselves – but we wouldn’t feel guilty in the comfort we find when our love for knowledge becomes so warm it eventually starts to burn our skin. God, how sweet it feels to become ashes for these passions of us.

You wouldn’t think that flamingoes are extremophiles just from looking at them. It’s like somebody tried to build the vertebrate equivalent of that fungus that lives inside nuclear reactors, and ended up with a gangly pink dinosaur with a spoon for a face.

living the dark academia life

messy handwriting and even messier notebooks, doodles of skulls with sunflowers dangling from their eyes

burning the corners of pages, an older look given to them, the smell of ancient given to your room

wearing the cheapest, largest brown sweaters and the most comfortable, softest cream skirts

classical music softly bouncing on each one of the walls in your room, a list of your favorite composers pinned to your wall

a black ring on your finger, your hands wrapped around a warm cup of tea

your eyes closing softly from spending too much time reading, a candle to keep you company

the wet tip of your finger, the turning of yet another page

soft brown on your eyelids, gloss on your lips

long studying session in the library, you’re curled up on your chair, seven academic books are sitting next to your side, three articles are waiting to be read

stains around the edges of your nails, your skin painted with ink

a book in your bag, a pen used as a bookmark to annotate everything that makes your hands shake

a leather belt around your waist, your old grandpa’s sweatshirt tucked in has not gone to waste

standing right in the centre of a museum, sketching the outline of a sculture, scribbling down everything there is to know about a painting – in this, your hands are still stained

letting the rain softly caress your hair, carrying an umbrella to match your velvet trousers

a smile on your face when writing an essay, a yawn from your mouth when you finally go to sleep – after your eyelids are closed, psychedelic, dark and soft dreams are reaching your mind