Appendix M
There’s a bit of a bandwagon going on: lists of personal inspiration for elfgaming in the vein of the original Appendix N. It is a bandwagon that appeals to my ego and thus I could hardly refuse the call. I leave intuiting the whole from its parts as an exercise for the reader.
- Lolita, of course
- Verlaine’s “Langueur” is an obvious second
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, despite its flaws, rounds out the trio
You might say this is just a list of three things I like and have nothing to do with elfgaming. It is. The list of things I like continues below.
- À rebours by Huysmans
- Relatedly, Moreau’s Salome Dancing before Herod and frankly any of his paintings
- Matisse’s figure drawings
- Corinne, or Italy, by Germaine de Staël
- Barthes’s Mythologies
- The Green Knight with Dev Patel
- (Line reading: with shame) George’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which I read in its entirety before I ever opened
- The Hobbit, which is (as everyone but me knew it to be) as close to a perfect fantasy book as there is.
- What is close to the opposite of a perfect fantasy book(s) is Brandon’s Stormlight Archive, the first half of which I read in high school and then for some reason felt a deep obligation to complete as they kept coming out. This listing functions the same as a reversed tarot card.
- To make up for the previous entries and as a ring of keys to jingle in front of you to keep your attention, have a single frame from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, which captures the face unlike any movie I’ve ever seen:
- Steven Soderbergh’s cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark in which he “removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect” and “high-contrast lighting style.” I’ve never seen the film normally but I probably should.
- Back to books: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and
- Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism
- Piranesi (2020) and Piranesi both (I prefer his etchings of Rome to the Carceri)
- On the topic of Roman architecture, Piranesi’s inspiration: the work of Nero’s architects, Severus and Celer
- Hollow Knight (and assumedly Silksong, when I get around to it) evokes a similar feeling of wonder and fantasy to Piranesi’s Rome.
- Breath of the Wild is, I think, the best video game encapsulating that feeling that I’ve ever played, which goes perfectly with
- The BBC’s Planet Earth miniseries narrated by David Attenborough (I couldn’t find good frames and if I went to pull frames from the episodes themselves then that’d be the rest of this post)
- Henry Winkler’s fishing trips
- Paris, Texas, one of the most evil and simultaneously the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen
- Ennico Morricone’s scores for Sergio Leone movies, specifically A Fistful of Dollars (Hateful Eight’s got a good one, too)
- Seven Samurai
- “Tangled up in Blue” and Blood on the Tracks more broadly. Perfect album.
- This picture of Jeanne Moreau
- The television gauntlet begins: The Sopranos
- The Wire
- Black Sails
- Succession (+ bonus image of babygirl)
- Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse, which many are calling the only good movie he’s ever made
- Antigone
- Medea (I prefer the Euripides)
- Ovid’s Metamorphoses
- Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (perhaps you can tell my favorite metamorphosis)
- Rodin’s plaster models of damned figures for The Gates of Hell
- The Fromsoft catalogue, but in particular both Bloodborne and Elden Ring. I never much loved Dark Souls.
- Princess Mononoke
- Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
- The Moody Blues’s album On the Threshold of a Dream. DO NOT!!! listen to the bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of the album. They ruin the whole thing.
- Glass Animals’s album ZABA is that album’s fraternal twin
- The big pond near my house in which live ducks and geese and turtles and the occasional seagull vacationing inland
- This photo of a blue heron
