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Veronica | Classics PhD & Cinematic Academia

@desperadefool

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Lest we die, unbloomed - Ginsberg
📍Edinburgh | Wandering classicist
Greek, art, books & beautiful obsessions
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I have never really known how to feel something without wanting to give it a form.

A sentence. A photograph. A piece of clothing. A character. A landscape held inside a frame before the light changes.

Perhaps that is why I write, why I model, why I have always been drawn so violently towards art. They are different ways of attempting the same impossible thing: taking something invisible and giving it a body.

For a while, I thought dark academia was a useful name for some of this.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped recognising myself in it. The words feel like an empty label for artificial poetry, manufactured performances. An aesthetic so carefully standardised that it has lost precisely the thing that first drew me towards it: its wilderness.

Because to me loving The Secret History, Kill Your Darlings, the cursed poets and the Greeks was never about performing a role I saw in a book or a movie.

It was being dragged by the storm of inspiration and drowing in the thirst for knowledge. Getting lost because of curiosity, because on an inspiration arriving like weather: inconveniently, violently, without asking whether you were prepared for it.

It was staying awake because an idea would not leave you alone. Crossing a city for a painting. Becoming obsessed with beauty. Walking until the landscape rearranged something inside you. Reading people who had been dead for a century and finding, impossibly, that they understood a part of you the living world had always called too much.

I never wanted to imitate those artists.

I wanted to be changed by them.

I wanted companionship in the dead poets who felt too fiercely, loved too strangely, wanted too much, and were reduced by respectable society to precisely those excesses that made them difficult to contain.

I wanted solace in literature.

In nature.

In the poetry hidden inside ordinary life.

In paintings and clothes and music and ruined things. In knowledge. In the sea when it becomes almost indistinguishable from the storm above it.

I wanted to feel every form of beauty the world was capable of offering me and, whenever I could, give somefragment of that feeling another form.

Continue in comments👇 taken in Edinburgh, United Kingdom by @desperadefool

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5 months ago

Warning: there is a lot to read in this post. But it is a post for readers after all, so here we are.

PS: In the end, I did give it a name, because, as all the writers, the appeal of words will always win over any post-structuralist phylosophical approach: Cinematic Academia. But I tend to learn and think through dialogue, that verbose man called Socrates would have been proud of me, so what the name entails is starting to get defined thanks to the dialogue with some amazing human beings I am meeting thanks to this journey and with which I had the pleasure to connect, in here and in real life. You can find a fragment of a discussion at the end.

Thank you to everyone who listened to my Manifesto in my reel when it was only a bunch of words thrown into social media and so, here you have some more words in written form this time. Please, feel free to take part to the dialogue, I cannot wait to learn and discover through your perspectives.

Ad maiora. Per aspera ad Astra. by @desperadefool

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a month ago

There has always been something slightly unreasonable about the literary relationship with landscape.

Poets crossed countries in search of ruins, storms, mountains and seas. They travelled to educate themselves, to escape themselves, and occasionally to turn themselves into legends. They climbed too far for a view and left their names on the places that had overwhelmed them, as though beauty were not complete until it had acquired a witness.

Byron’s name survives among the marks left by Romantic travellers at Sounion and Chillon. In the Scottish Highlands, a vertiginous pinnacle on An Teallach became Lord Berkeley’s Seat after a writer was said to have sat above the precipice, smoking with his legs suspended over the void.

It is an old impulse: to travel into the wild and then insist that the wild remember you.

I understand part of it. I travel mostly alone because solitude changes the way I see. Without conversation to maintain or another person’s rhythm to follow, the world becomes unusually precise: the colour beneath the clouds, the structure of the rock, a place-name in a language I do not know, the remains of another culture’s relationship with the land.

Nature gives my overwhelmed mind somewhere larger to exist. I can walk until ordinary noise loses its authority and thought becomes almost physical, something carried through wind, rain and the movement of the body.

The travellers of the Grand Tour came to Italy looking for art, antiquity and beauty. I was born within the country they imagined as their destination. Mine therefore has Always taken another direction: an outsider, non-elitist Grand Tour through faraways lands, cultures, museums, mountains and forgotten corners of the wild world.

I do not want to carve my name into the stone.

I want to discover what the landscape writes into me.

Today, It Is a bit of Scotland for you. by @desperadefool

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2 months ago

If I told my 11yo self that one day we would be visiting Malfoy Manor, she would have never believed me.

I have always been a Slytherin—not because life handed me power, but because ambition became a method of survival.

So I learnt to be strategic about hope. I learnt that identity could be built deliberately, that beauty could be pursued, and that the circumstances of one's birth did not have to determine the limits of one's life.

And I really made it. I moved towards the places that had already made me from afar.

Edinburgh was once part of my imagined world. Harry Potter, Gothic streets, old universities and the fantasy of being told that perhaps you belonged somewhere you had never imagined yourself allowed to enter.

I moved to the UK because I wanted to chase the dreams, aesthetics and obsessions that had formed my earliest and most cherished sense of self.

But I did not inherit the world I wanted, so I built my way into it.
I learnt ambition because wanting another life required strategy.
Before we know exactly who we are, sometimes we practise through fiction.
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#malfoymanor #uk #harrypotter #slytherin #harrypotteredit hogwarts fantasy books draco malfoy edinburgh cinematic academia by @desperadefool

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7 days ago

So, just one more episode to go, have I convinced you to watch this movie?
And, if you have any suggestions of topics, books, paintings or cinema that would fit the concept of cinematic academia, please comment below. I am curious of what might come out of a creative circle. If you are curious of what a creative circle is, you will find out in my next video, so stay tuned.

All the best

#CinematicAcademia #movies #killyourdarlings #darkacademia #artisticmovement
Reading writers books movie reviews queer movies literature artistic personalities historical fiction allen ginsberg beat generation cinematic aesthetics by @desperadefool

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Cinematic Academia is earned Academia. by @desperadefool

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6 days ago

I never took writing in a book for granted. Not even owning one.

For a long time, books were rented from libraries, borrowed from other people, or bought second-hand. They were things I could read, but not quite touch.

Borrowed books were the worse. I remember the anxiety of ruining them, of leaving some accidental mark on something that wasn't mine. Sometimes I had to read them incredibly quickly, in a day if I could, because the person who lent them to me was still reading them too.

Textbooks were no different. I couldn't write in them because they had to be sold again afterwards.

And when silver-spooned bullies damaged them thinking they were making an annoying little spite against me, what I saw wasn't just a ruined book. I saw the economic damage to my family. I saw my mum and dad's blood, sweat and tears being spat upon.

Strangely, that filled me with a kind of rage I didn't feel when the bullying became physical.

Because the book had a price. I knew exactly what replacing it meant.

Maybe that is why annotation means something entirely different to me now.

That anxiety has turned into a fierce desire to own books completely. To make them part of me and, in return, force something of myself onto them, so that by the time I have finished reading, there is a part of me all over them too.

Pages folded towards sentences I couldn't bear to lose. Different versions of myself returning years later and answering the person who wrote there before.

There is something almost childish in the pleasure of it:

I bought this. It is mine. I can do whatever I want with it.

I can return to page 143 ten years from now because I suddenly remembered a sentence.

My library is becoming a record of possession: books I possess, and books that at some point possessed me.

And every mark in the margin still carries a tiny awareness of the privilege behind it.

Do you annotate your books, or does writing on a page still feel almost sacrilegious to you? And if you do — what is the oldest annotation you've ever rediscovered from a past version of yourself?

#BookAnnotations #CinematicAcademia #annotating marginalia annotation second-hand books dark academia working-class by @desperadefool

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14 days ago

Just a few concepts & Greek words to soak together into the undefined waters of Cinematic Academia.
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#creativecircle #ancientgreek #academia #writing #CinematicAcademia
Quotes inspiring words writers poetry wandering dark academia books reading poems ancient greek words mythology bookstagram education knowledge classics by @desperadefool

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11 days ago

Alice, you are not in Wonderland.

Dark academia turned intellectual excess into an aesthetic. Kill Your Darlings asks what happens when that excess becomes real: when literature is not décor but appetite, escape, desire, rebellion and self-invention.

For Ginsberg, art first offers a way out. Then it becomes something more dangerous: a way of looking harder at reality. But creative intensity is not the same thing as self-destruction, and suffering does not make anyone a better artist.

This is episode 1 of a new series on the things dark academia prefers not to talk about.

Did any part of this resonate with you? Have you ever felt “too much” — too intense, too curious, too emotional, too obsessed? Tell me in the comments, and follow for the next episode on Lucien Carr and the difference between looking like an artist and actually becoming one.

#KillYourDarlings #DarkAcademia #CinematicAcademia #AllenGinsberg #TheSecretHistory
Kill Your Darlings, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, dark academia critique, cinematic academia, Beat Generation, literature and identity, artistic obsession, creative intensity, art as escape, intellectual rebellion, queer desire, literary cinema, poetry, self invention, artist identity, romanticising suffering, tortured artist myth, dark academia movies, dark academia books, Columbia University, Beat poets, being too much, creative expression, literature lovers, film analysis, literary analysis, artistic rebellion, poetry and cinema, dark academia aesthetic, art and self destruction by @desperadefool

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23 days ago

Just a Manifesto of a working-class writer that Is a bit tired of that mainstream empty Dark Academia and wants to bring the feels and the love for knowledge back into the equation.
Very welcome to let me know what you think and what you would add to a manifesto like this. Recruitment for poets and artists open 🫡
New Vision in the making.
Arthur Rimbaud and Allen Ginsberg would be proud of my Cinematic Academia, I am sure 😂.

Per Aspera ad Astra.
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#manifesto #darkacademia #newvision #writer #beatgeneration cursed poets poetry quotes beautiful words books academia kill your darlings cinematica academia by @desperadefool

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"I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell."

[ The Secret History - Donna Tartt ]

The vibes of this set are basically how I think about Henry Winter and his melancholic search for an uncontaminated place outside the modern world where he could live true to himself.

Ph: @liviotilotta
Styling: @_gynseng_ _____________________________________________________
#darkacademiaaesthetic #darkacademiastyle #darkacademiafashion #darkacademia #thesecrethistory #thesecrethistoryquotes #henrywinter #vintageclothing #vintageaesthetic #vintagephotography #landscapephotography #handsphotography #greeneyedgirl #greeneyes #vintageoutfit #friedareiss #frieda #friedareisscosplay by @desperadefool

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Finally the moment has come to stop jealously keeping these memories to myself and to throw them out there, hoping they will inspire people to go off and discover the world and the shape, the sound and the taste of their own soul.

Least we all die, unbloomed.

#travelling #outdoors #exploring #landscapes #cinematicacademia locations in each caption.
Poetry romantic exploring cursed poets dark academia longing for beauty cinematic emotional

Old man of Storr - Scotland
The country that adopted me.

Boca do inferno - Portugal

My first solo adventure.
The second one was in China.
My first time ever going abroad by myself was when I was 13 and I went to the UK. Entering King's cross I blurted out "I wanna live here".
Now, 29yo, I live where I first landed in seach of adventures and knowledge (stayed in a college in Winchester for an exchange and travelled the south UK).

The Alps, Italy. Passo Stalle.

Mountains from my own country, but not the first mountains I hiked. I am from the center of Italy and my first loves were the Sibillini chain, on the Appennini.
I grew up on those mountains and my most charished memories have those scenaries. Those I will keep for myself just a little longer.

Seven Sister's cliffs - Southern UK.

How do I explain this? This place is pure poetry and the longing it makes you feel is so strong that you feel your soul banging and ringing in your ears, almost tuned to the waves.

Galloway Forest Park - Scotland once again.

Came here to stargaze in the first Dark Sky Reserve of the UK. It gave me blinding colours and endless forests to get lost in. I camped with a view on Loch trool and my marshmellow bag was stolen by an eagle while stargazing, so I only got to eat one. Somehow, best marshmellow ever, and for a second I though a ghost was stealing my opportunity to have one more.

Kyrgyzstan - Köl Suu

This will be the first of many more in this post from Kyrgyzstan. This trip as been the most amazing one ever and with the best mate ever, my brother. He is the only one I would gradly renounce a solo trip for. He is the one I would want by my side in the Apocalypse. And some moments of this trip bordered survival in the most amazing by @desperadefool

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