Thaisa Frank

Bleakly Beautiful. This Hit Me Hard

CW: Neurodivergent and Abusive Parents

This is an extremely dense and uncomfortable diamond of a micro story about being a child with an abusive and neurodivergent mother. It's spartan and rich with pain and emotion. As somone with abusive and neglectful parents and complex post traumatic stress disorder this hit different and really resonated with me. I had to listen to it twice back to back.

I've seen reviews talk question why this exists and that it's 'just' suffering and misery. I feel like I can see the experience and intent of the author and it is both the above and more than that. People make all kinds of art for all kinds of reasons, and it's OK for anything to be not for you. I have no intention of reading 'extreme horror' and other specifically upsetting and uncomfortable works, but I understand why they exist (and enjoy watching videos from those who do read them). Why have you done this? Is an interesting question to consider of an artist in relation to a work, but as a dismissive accusatory statement it is genuinely depressing.

Anyways, I really emotionally connected with this and thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it was not a pleasant experience, and will absolutely be checking out more of the author.… (mehr)

An odd imagining. Toward the end of WWII a group of "scribes" is assembled in an underground world. Their charge is to answer letters from the dead or assumed dead, so that the dead can move on. This fantasy is based on some characteristics of the Nazi regime, most importantly its reliance on the occult.

Then came Heidegger and his glasses. Heidegger, a member of the Nazi party, had his glasses made by a Jewish optician. When the optician is taken, the glasses are left behind, and Heidegger writes the regime, asking for them.

I was never clear about why it was so important to deliver the glasses, along with a note from his friend the optician, who may have been dead by that time. I think it had to do with the importance of Heidegger to the regime, and the need not to disappoint him. Elie Schacten, a leader of the scribes, is given the job of delivering the glasses. She is an unusual young woman whose sympathies are not with the Nazis and who must be careful to not reveal the presence of the strange underground bunker where she lives.

There is intrigue, love, suspicion, and always the possibility that the little world will fall apart and its inhabitants be killed. It's an interesting point of view of the Nazi side of WWII, albeit full of imagination more than reality.… (mehr)