world lit in fire

A while ago someone asked about where my writing is etc. so I figured I’d make a proper pinned post with relevant links and shit. 

AO3 - fanfic, obvs. Generally:

• LOTR (Boromir lives; also Grima is around getting something like a “be marginally better please” arc),
• Discworld (we love one (1) queer Lord Downey and that scag Dog-Botherer),
• Star Wars (Krennic and Tarkin, divorced parents fighting over the custody of their child the Death Star Defense Sphere)
• Some historical fiction (mostly Napoleonic, some crack Napoleon/Wellington nonsense)

Personal Website for Real Writing Things (I’m a poet and short story writer (there’s gotta be a better term for that), and working on a novel or two)

Writing Tag (it’s the wild west in there) 

Want to join my mailing list? Cool. I only send a letter like every 6 months and it has pictures of my cat in it. 

Like the absolute nonsense I am as a person? I’ve got a ko-fi like a cool kid

If I think of anything else to add, I will update accordingly. 

catch y’all on the flip side. 

I messaged this to a friend but I’m too consumed with Ficino thoughts this morning so am putting it on the main-feed for everyone:

Obviously, as the assiduous followers of my Marsilio Blogging know, I recieved two more volumes of his letter collection recently. I had Volume I already and have received III and IV.

(Vol. II was bypassed as it’s not a letter collection but one, long letter that is essentially a monograph and I’m fine with skipping it for now.)

Naturally, I went and skimmed all the ones he wrote Giovanni, first before going back and reading them as they were meant to be read.

It got me thinking about the slight differences between the included letters to Giovanni compared to everyone else.

Namely, the ones to Giovanni are more varied in that Marsilio includes the philosophical and theological letters alongside the far more day-to-day letters which don’t, to my mind, hold much merit for a clearly carefully curated philosophical letter collection.

And Giovanni is the only one he does this with (of course). Not Piero Soderini, Angelo Poliziano, Bernardo Bembo—all close friends. Nor does he really do it with family—and he includes quite a few letters to his cousin Sebastiano Salvini, who Ficino basically raised as a son after he was orphaned at twelve. But none of them, thus far, have had that same day-to-day, familiar intimacy as some of those included to Giovanni.

Because Ficino was meticulous in what he wrote and what he included in his collected works! So it makes sense that he weeds out the letters of “Sebastiano, please remember to tell my brother, your uncle, that he needs to follow up with that one guy about such-and-such business” etc. We have letters from him to his parents about all sorts of regular family business, including one consoling them on the death of his younger brother Anselmo in 1462 (same year, coincidentally, that Sebastiano seems to have been orphaned).

Ficino was a prolific letter writer (up there with Poggio Bracciolini) but many of them, of course, are not fit for a high minded philosophical letter collection.

Except letters to Giovanni. Including such gems as, “my [our] nephew won’t shut up about slings and arrows of fortune etc. Please make sure I didn’t chew him out too much in my response and send it on to him if it looks alright” and “I just got to the countryside and am writing to let you know I arrived safe. Here are some letters for people back in Florence, can you pass them on?” and “I miss you, please write to me more. I love you. Please write to me more. Have you thought about writing to me more?” and “Ok, look, honey, I get that I write you 5 million letters a week, and you can’t reply to them all, and you’re being very nice in telling me that you can’t reply to them all, but I am bored and I miss you” and “if I see Luigi Pulci’s ugly mug one more time I will commit a violent crime and I cannot be held responsible for my actions” and “saw my brother, he says hi” and “this one person is really annoying me, I’ve written many letters about it, please pick the least offensive one I wrote and send it to him,” so on and so forth.

The seemingly more casual/non-philosophic letters to people not Giovanni are included for political or personal-score settling reasons (I’m thinking primarily of the ones to Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici about Luigi Pulci; some to Bernardo Bembo because it was to help demonstrate/symbolize the strong friendship between Florence and Venice, especially during the Pazzi wars when Bembo was in the hot seat back home in Venice for being so pro-Florence) etc.

I’ve got nothing profound or insightful to say in this, just expressing my Marsilio-Loved-Giovanni-So-Much Brain Worms. It’s just very sweet that he included so much of their relationship, and their dynamic, in the collection! That’s all.

I love what a drama queen Ficino is sometimes. His sense of humour is also quite delightful

“shall we say that Saturn tests me, and me alone??”

“Honey. Babe. you’re fine.”

’“sssssh. I’m being ~~~dramatic, Giovanni. No one has suffered how I suffer.”

“Nephew Sebastiano wrote you the same thing last week and you were like: calm down, Sebastiano, have patience. Shall I send the letter you wrote him back to you?”

“First, Giovanni, I came here for a good time and I’m feeling very attacked right now. Second, I did say I wrote that letter as much to myself as it was to him. So. There’s some self awareness happening here, dear heart.”

I feel like Marsilio was someone who you couldn’t tell when he was joking or not and Giovanni was just the grounded rock to Ficino’s flights of madness and they were just the world’s weirdest couple

Lorenzo de’ Medici: was that a joke? was that…was Marsilio in jest?

Poliziano: let me find Cavalcanti, our local Ficino-Interpreter.

Giovanni: It was a joke. I’m 92% sure it was a joke.

Lorenzo: I can NEVER tell. I have NO idea how my grandfather always seemed to know.

Giovanni: to be fair, they were besties and Cosimo’s ghost hangs out in our backyard.

Lorenzo: which is VERY weird. You know that right?

Giovanni: you get used to it after a while. this is, of course, when my Marsilio isn’t summoning daemons to help him heal people like the weirdo he is. I love him.

Lorenzo: adding him to the list of people I’m going to have to tell the Church to back off from and leave alone. Next to Pico Della Mirandola. Poliziano, you’re not allowed to be heretical.

Poliziano: too busy being gay and poetic to commit heresy.

Lorenzo: I know. I have to tell the Church to cool its heels about that too.

Meanwhile, Clarice is like “can my husband Lorenzo not have one (1) friend who isn’t a heretic, sodomite, flakey artist, mad poet, and/or weird freak? Just. One?”

Lorenzo: shan’t.

What is this? you ask.

Could it be? More letters from Marsilio to his most perfect unique friend, Giovanni?

Perhaps. Perhaps it is.

My latest Ficino letter collections arrived today and I am just

feral about this idiot

I am so so so excited to read them