#Dr Fagan

[quietparanoiac]

Pleased to meet you. Don't listen to whatever Florence has just told you. Do your own thing.

Decline and Fall (2017), 1x01

[anewkindofme]

I don’t usually initiate these things but I’ve gotten a lot of questions about “The Little Monkey” lately, so I just want to give everyone a sneak peek and show the next installment is coming soon! I appreciate all the love for this story.

———

TK is surprised that his dad lets him walk from the car to the door. Then again, the doctor said to not remain totally cooped up. He’s on house arrest, but he doesn’t have to stay glued to the couch or bed the entire time. In fact, that’ll only hurt his recovery. Just no strenuous activity for anywhere from 10 days all the way up to 3 weeks.

Owen hung on the doctor’s every word upon his discharge. He wrote everything down. TK’s pretty sure his dad knows more about his condition than he does.

“Let me get the door,” Owen says, intercepting him. He hoists the bags with not just the stuff Paul brought for them after the shooting but all the gifts and cards people sent. He digs the key out from his pocket.

TK sighs. “I can open a door by myself, Dad,” he says. “I don’t think that’s what Dr. Fagan meant when she said no strenuous activity.”

“I know. I’m not that protective.” TK arches a brow. Owen ignores him as he unlocks the door. “I’m doing this because I have a feeling a 90 pound gargantuan who thinks he’s a lap dog might be ready to pounce.”

———

No pressure tag: @im-overstimulated-and-im-sad, @snowviolettwhite, @kingofdarkness00 & @cianmarstoo

[domhnallgleesonhaven]

Domhnall with Fintan Fagan (CEO, St Francis Hospice), dr Sarah McCloskey, (chairperson, Together for Hospice) and Jason Doyle (managing director, Bewley’s), promoting this year Bewley’s Big Coffee Morning Social for Hospice.

[rightxonxmain-archived]

☕ cozy things tag game

stuff that brings me, the mun, joy

comfort food(s): sesame tofu, seaweed salad, fried rice, chips & salsa, mexican rice

comfort drink(s): dr. pepper, taro boba, red bull classic

comfort movie(s): Finder's Fee, Wonka, The Little Mermaid (1989), To Grandmother's House We Go, Double Double Toil and Trouble, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Re-Animator, Brain Damage, Young Guns, The Lost Boys

comfort show(s): Miami Vice, The Real Ghostbusters, og TMNT, Mr. Nightmare (and a few similar YT channels), Chip 'N' Dale Rescue Rangers, Adventures of the Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Swat Katz, The Young Ones (1982)

comfort clothing: athletic slides/flip-flops, thick cotton tees, Goodfellow & Co lounge pants, my F13 hoodie, certain lounge pants

comfort song(s): pretty much the entire Wonka (2023) soundtrack but especially A Hatful of Dreams, Sweet Tooth, Hoverchocs, and You've Never Had Chocolate Like This. Every single Martin Fry/ABC song but especially Look of Love, How to be a Millionaire, Show Me, By Default by Design, King Money, Love's A Dangerous Language. Karma Chamelon, King of Everything, My God, Time (Clock of the Heart), and I'll Tumblr For Ya by Boy George/Culture Club. Behind the White Door (Windows). Every single Donald Fagan/Steely Dan song but especially Almost Gothic, Glamour Profession, Only A Fool, Gaslighting Abbie, Things I Used to Know, Mary Shut the Garden Door, Haitian Divorce, Hold Onto That Slinky Thing, and Kid Charlemagne. CATS 1998, Starlight Express (original London), Music of the Night c. MIchael Crawford. I have SO MANY MORE comfort songs from the 80s, it's actually a disgusting amount !!

comfort book(s): After Dark My Sweet, Pet Sematary, Haunted Summer, Brain Damage novelisation, The Flesh in the Furnace

comfort game(s): whatever the current main series Pokemon game is at the time (in this case Violet), DOOM/DOOM II/DOOM 64, og FNAF & FNAF: Security Breach, and a handful of some ancient PC games I can't remember the names of atm

tagged by: @exquisitexagony sama <3 <3 <3

tagging: @everyoneismytoy, @smolcuriouskitten + anyone who wants to do eet! :-P

[wildannise]

Ocs: Ursula Fagan (Green shirt, she/her) and her wife Dr. Anne De Graaf (blue shirt, she/her)

Ursula is an animal witch who can transform into various animals, most notably a bear. Formerly she was a witch enforcer but now works to conserve magic animals in a forest Reserve. Her familiar is an ordinary polecat.

Anne De Graaf traveled the world as a school teacher before offering her services to a group of witch rebels, teaching illiterate members of their outcast community how to read and giving them access to many spells only preserved in writing. She has chronic illness which she treats using herblore, uses a staff and wands as mobility aids, and a helpful familiar: a caladrius (magic bird that soothes illnesses) in the form of a willow-ptarmigan. She met Ursula Fagan there and they married after the revolution.

They live in a beautiful and heavily modified cottage within the black forest with an extensive library and stained glass windows. Ursula is a lesbian, Anne is ace

[zaukvideo]

Ay Logo Tum Par Aik Azmat Wala Mahina Saya Fagan Ho Gaya Hai - Dr Israr ...

[kudosmyhero]

Batman (vol. 1) #237: Night of the Reaper!

Read Date: November 10, 2023 Cover Date: December 1971 ● Writer: Dennis O'Neil ◦ Bernie Wrightson ◦ Harlan Ellison ● Penciler: Neal Adams ● Inker: Dick Giordano ● Colorist: {uncredited} ● Letterer: John Costanza ● Editor: Julius Schwartz ●

**HERE BE SPOILERS: Skip ahead to the fan art/podcast to avoid spoilers (👏=didn't like it, 👏👏=it was ok, 👏👏👏=I liked it, 👏👏👏👏=I really liked it!, 👏👏👏👏👏=I loved it!)

Reactions As I Read: ● since I discuss this issue with some podcasting friends, I'll just let the episode speak for itself! give it a listen if you're interested ^_^

● 👏👏👏👏

Synopsis: On Halloween, the annual Rutland, Vermont Halloween parade is taking place and Dick Grayson has decided to attend with some of his college friends. While in the parade, Dick and his friends notice some crooks attacking a man dressed as Robin and they try to help the young man without success. When the crooks have dispersed, Dick decides to follow them as Robin and he follows their trail to a barren space where he finds a the corpse of a man in a Batman costume. At that moment, Robin is attacked by the dark figure of the Reaper and he is forced to flee until he falls down to a nearby river and and is knocked unconscious.

Batman, who has tracked fugitive Nazi war criminal Kurt Schloss to the Rutland Halloween parade, finds Robin and takes him to the house of parade organizer Tom Fagan. In Fagan's place, Robin is checked by Batman's friend, Doctor Benjamin Gruener, a Jewish German survivor of the Nazi holocaust.

Meanwhile, Dick's friends are looking for him when they come across the Reaper again and when Batman learns of this second attack, he starts investigating the case more closely. His clues lead him to find that other ex-Nazis have been searching for Kurt Schloss because he had claimed some hidden Nazi treasure that they believed belonged to all of them. Those Nazis had killed the man in the Batman costume and tried to kill the Robin, thinking they may be the real things. Batman stops them for good, but not before they are able to kill Schloss.

Afterwards, Robin believes that the case is solved, but Batman reminds him that the Reaper is still on the loose and Batman starts looking for the killer by himself. When they finally meet, Batman has deduced the Reaper's identity as Dr. Gruener, who sought revenge on Schloss. Unfortunately, Gruener has lost himself in his Reaper's personality and he attacks Batman before fleeing the scene. The Reaper tries to make his escape through a nearby dam, but he is stopped by the presence of Dick Grayson's friend Alan. When Reaper gets ready to strike and kill the youngster, he sees Alan's Star of David amulet and Gruener becomes horrified with his actions. Unaware that he was walking on the edge of the dam, Gruener stumbles with his robe and falls downwards to his ultimate death and Batman is unable to save the man.

(https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman_Vol_1_237)

Fan Art: The Boy Wonder by Blooming-Pinguicula

Accompanying Podcast: ● Ninjas 'n' Bots - episode

[cmcsmen]

How Can Men Be Better Husbands And Fathers?

In this video, Dr. Pat Fagan sits down with Human Life International to unpack the role of men in family life. In this two-part series, he discusses why sons and daughters need to play with their dad, the current masculinity crisis, and why marriage is fundamental to family life. 

The current masculinity crisis has men estranged from marriage and fatherhood. It is essential that we explore the root causes of this problem in order to restore men and families to their rightful place in society.

What is masculinity, and what does it mean to be a man? It is evident that masculinity is under attack, and it's up to us to defend it. We need to help boys to develop a strong sense of masculinity, and to see themselves as valuable contributors to society. We also need to teach men how to be good husbands and fathers.

There is a huge campaign aimed at divorcing men from marriage and fatherhood. Masculinity is seen as toxic, and this has led to the destruction of society and has undermined the traditional family structure, and this is why fatherhood is so important.

Dads are important not only for their children, but also for their wives. This is why it is important for sons and daughters to play with their dad. Playing together helps to foster a close relationship between father and child. Marriage is the cornerstone of the family, and we need to keep it strong if we want to restore stability to society as a whole.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Phantom Limbs by Deirdre Fagan

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/phantom-limbs-by-deirdre-fagan/

Part celebration, part elegy, Phantom Limbs is about living fully, arms wide open, despite or perhaps even because of repeated loss. Each depiction is grounded in survival and yet there is often unanticipated joy juxtaposed with heartbreak as the collection reveals intimate moments from childhood trauma to marriage, divorce, parenting, terminal illness, disability, caregiving, widowhood, remarriage, mortality itself. These poetic encounters are a reminder that while every literal or metaphorical birth signals an unpredictable and inevitable end, endings themselves often have the greatest capacity to impart beauty and knowledge. Just as each poem in Phantom Limbs closes with hope, the collection itself reverberates with the belief that while #life may sometimes become a jagged quest for #survival, it is also always something to savor and embrace.

Dr. Deirdre Fagan is the award-winning author of the memoir, Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death (2022), a short story collection, The Grief Eater (2020), a chapbook of poetry, Have Love (2019), and a reference book, Critical Companion to Robert Frost (2007). A creative writer and literary scholar whose work has recently been featured on NPR, ABC, and CBS, Fagan’s writing has appeared widely in literary and scholarly journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias, as well as magazines and newspapers. She is a widow, wife, mother of two, and professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Meet her at deirdrefagan.com

PRAISE FOR Phantom Limbs by Deirdre Fagan

In Deirdre Fagan’s stunning new collection, Phantom Limbs, we are drawn into a world inhabited by compassion, lost innocence, grief, and healing. These poems pulse and ache; they leave us with a sense of deep reverence for life and what it means to be truly devoted to a loved one. Throughout this tender collection, Fagan brings us glimmers of hope and resilience, “a new life signaling life, / an urging forward.” What lingers for the reader is heart strength, and how we all have this within our core, human selves.

–Cristina M. R. Norcross, Founding Editor of Blue Heron Review; author of The Sound of a Collective Pulse and other titles

Deirdre Fagan’s Phantom Limbs explores deeply and tenderly what all of us hope will never happen as she chronicles a journey of loss and recovery through short lyrics which read like gems. From despair and a hopefulness about life, Fagan has brought to us both a tearful and joyous new collection of poems that reminds us we have much to learn.

–DeWitt Clinton, author of Hello There winner of the 2022 Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award

In her poem “The trouble with pairs,” Deirdre Fagan begins, “I want to be inside of you / No, not like that / I want to unzip you / And climb inside.” Somehow, this is what Fagan manages to do throughout Phantom Limbs: she magically inhabits her readers—their thoughts, their feelings, their everyday lives. And then she tells us about it all in ways that resonate, stun, soothe. Readers will navigate this collection as people do the dark, “but once you can feel the switches / . . . you are / where you are, whether you want / to be or not.” These poems—and all that Fagan says in them—help unburden us from the often-crushing weight of this world, if only for the time we spend reading them.

–Marissa Glover, Author of Box Office Gospel and Let Go of the Hands You Hold

Please share/please repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry #read #poetrybook #poems #life

[abcnewspr]

HIGHLIGHTS FOR ABC NEWS’ ‘GMA3: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW,’ DEC. 19-23

The following report highlights the programming of ABC’s “GMA3: What You Need to Know” during the week of Dec. 12-16. “GMA3: What You Need to Know” is a one-hour program co-anchored by Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, with Dr. Jennifer Ashton as chief medical correspondent. The news program airs weekdays at 1:00 p.m. EST | 12:00 p.m. CST on ABC, and 4:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. EST on ABC News Live.

Highlights of the week include the following:

Monday, Dec. 19 — ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl on the final U.S. House Jan. 6 Committee hearing; 9-year-old Bobbi Wilson and her mother, Monique Joseph; Podcast of the Month with podcast host Alex Cooper (“Call Her Daddy”); a performance by Shaggy

Tuesday, Dec. 20 — Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX); actor Stephen Lang (“Avatar: The Way of Water”); a performance by Straight No Chaser; author Megan Alexander; (pre-taped) ABC News’ Correspondent on Congress Jay O’Brien on the nationwide police shortage

Wednesday, Dec. 21 — First woman Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan; actor and host James Corden (“Mammals”); chef, restaurateur and author Einat Admony

Thursday, Dec. 22 — Actor Tamara Tunie (“I Wanna Dance with Somebody”); (pre-taped) ABC News Chief Meteorologist Ginger Zee on raising a family through climate change; CEO of Feeding America Claire Babineaux-Fontenot

Friday, Dec. 23 — (pre-taped on Dec. 15) “Broadway Brings the Holidays to ‘GMA3’” with performances by Broadway actor and singer Michael James Scott (“Aladdin the Musical”), actress NaTasha Yvette Williams (“Some Like It hot”), actress and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph (“Sleigh”),actor and Broadway performer Tyler Hardwick (“White Christmas”) and singer Shoshana Bean (“Sing Your Hallelujah”)

-- ABC --

[marymcdivan]

David Suchet as Dr. Fagan, Dacline and Fall, 2017

[catt-nuevenor]

I'm getting that feeling of being slowly pulled into a research rabbit hole again...

How do you separate medieval architecture from Roman and Christian influences? With great difficulty, it turns out.

Basically throw pre-Romanised Celtic architecture, pre-Christianised Germanic architecture, and a smattering of Norse Viking era architecture into a blender, and forget everything you know about church or castle architecture...

So far (and this is simplifying things down to a criminal degree here) I've got roughly that Brittonic, Irish and Scottish Celts ere towards round houses and anti right angle constructions, Anglo Saxon's ere towards more rectangular and square dwellings, but can be partial to a circle or two at times, and the Norse like long things with spiky roofs.

Most of these are non-stone constructions too, so archaeological sources are somewhat sparse... Must Farm being a glorious and local exception, but one cannot build an architectural style from one marshland settlement alone.

Oh well, I do love a challenge.

Pretty Pictures Below:

Newgrange, County Meath, Ireland - 3200 BC (ish)

Photograph from Johnbod Wikimedia Commons

Skara Brae, Bay of Skaill, Orkney - 3180 BC-2500 BC

Photograph from Dr John F. Burka Wikimedia Commons

Reconstructed Longhouse, Viking Museum Borg, Vestvågøy/Lofoten, Norway

Photograph from Jörg Hempel Wikimedia Commons

Reconstruction Bryn Eryr Farmstead, St Fagans National History Museum, South Glamorgan, Wales

Photograph from M J Roscoe Wikimedia Commons

Reconstruction, West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village, Suffolk

Photograph from Midnightblueowl Wikimedia Commons

Now all I've got to do is stick about 800 years of development on what I can scrape out of the blender!

[mediaevalmusereads]

Nobber. By Oisin Fagan. London: JM Originals, 2019.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Genre: literary fiction

Part of a Series? No

Summary:  An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim lands that once belonged to them. As these groups converge upon the town, the habitants, who up until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: blood, gore, violence, body horror, misogyny/sexism, animal abuse and death, bestiality, attempted sexual assault, ableism

Overview: I don’t know how to rate this book. I recognize the artistic value of it, and I think Fagan executes his intentions well. The question just becomes: did I enjoy or find intellectual simulation in the reading process? I think the answer is yes, but I also think the answer is “eh... maybe.” So, I’m confused, and if the author wanted me to be confused, then I guess job well done. Three stars on account of confusion.

Writing: Fagan’s prose is well-crafted and extremely emotionally and viscerally evocative. Sentences and phrases flowed together well, and I liked that despite some confusing things happening on the page, there was no confusing syntax or unclear wording. I also appreciated that Fagan knew just how to elicit disgust (at least from me) with just the right imagery or just the right phrase. He doesn’t revel in lengthy descriptions of nasty things, but makes them seem incidental - and I found that to be somewhat unsettling.

Perhaps Fagan’s biggest strength is the ability to create an overall mood that I can only describe as hallucinatory nihilism. Characters would act in ways that didn’t seem quite logical or believable, but they seemed to have purpose - perhaps that purpose being to illustrate that sometimes, destruction (or suffering?) has no meaning. While I don’t know if I personally enjoy that kind of literary approach, it was at least evident that it was done on purpose, so props to the author.

If I had any criticism, I would say that I got rather tired of women being called “sluts” and “whores” so often. I saw this kind of language come up almost every chapter, and my personal tolerance for it became lower and lower the longer it went on. Some critics may counter with “well, the middle ages were sexist,” and that might be valid, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy myself or that historical accuracy is a valid argument here.

Plot: There’s not really a “plot” to this book, per se. Things happen, but I wouldn’t call them “plot points” that build up a grand narrative. Mostly, this book is about a town (called Nobber) that is besieged by plague, and we follow various characters as they navigate that plague.

I was kind of at a loss as to how to react to this book until the end, when I had the idea that maybe Nobber (and the surrounding area) is this space where all the bad gets condensed - a hub for the grotesque, if you will. Plague besieges the town, and no one can leave because of the curfew, so there’s this definite inside/outside boundary that seems to be important. I had that thought while reading about the crow cross (which makes no sense until you read the book) that marks the boundary of Nobber, and how characters acted once they came in contact with it (or in proximity to it). I don’t know if that’s a valid interpretation of Fagan’s work, but I found the book more easy to digest through this lens.

Characters: What to say about the characters...? They’re odd, but that’s an understatement. I didn’t find any of them likeable, but they weren’t supposed to be. I did find them alluring in a grotesque way - they rarely did anything that made logical sense, and many of them were (physically and morally) gross. But I don’t know... I couldn’t look away.

My favorite character to follow was Raghnailt - a mother who struggles with her feelings towards her adult son. I found her to be fairly complex, deciding to love her son fiercely one moment but being repulsed by him the next. Watching her try to figure out how to feel and how she tried to create a family around her was fairly touching, and I ended up really feeling for her.

TL;DR: Nobber is the kind of book that will probably appeal to fans of Irish modernism/postmodernism, but not to those looking for a historical fiction tale. With its focus on the grotesque and gaggle of unnerving characters, this book will surely appeal to those who enjoy literary explorations of nihilism.

[brian-in-finance]

REVEALED: ALL THE WINNERS AT THE GOSSIES 2022

SOME OF IRELAND’S BIGGEST STARS STEPPED OUT FOR GOSS.IE’S SEVENTH ANNUAL AWARDS SHOW, THE GOSSIES 2022, ON APRIL 8TH.

The glitzy awards bash, which was held at The Convention Centre Dublin, saw major Irish stars from TV, radio, music, and social media grace the red carpet.

Hosted by the fabulous Lucy Kennedy, the ceremony will be broadcast on Goss.ie’s YouTube channel on April 10th – so you can catch the winner’s speeches, see all the glitz and glam from the red carpet, and all the laughs in between.

Lucy Kennedy at The Gossies Awards 2022 at The Convention Centre, Dublin. Picture: Brian McEvoy

Celebrity guests on the night included: Maura Higgins, Love Island’s Faye Winter and Teddy Soares, Dáithí Ó Sé, Claudine Keane, Grainne Seoige, Alan Hughes, Martin King, Clare Dunne, Erica Cody, Holly Carpenter, Rosanna Davison, Erin McGregor, Doireann Garrihy, Stephen Byrne, Thalia Heffernan, Dr. Ciara Kelly, Aoife Walsh, Pamela Uba, and Ellen Keane.

A host of influencers and social media stars also made an appearance, including: James Patrice, Carl Mullan, Tadhg Fleming, Rachel Gorry, Sophie Murray, Kiki Nugent, Keilidh Cashell, Lauren Whelan, Miriam Mullins, Shauna Lindsay, Katja Mia, Enya Martin, Victoria Adeyinka, Bonnie Ryan, Aideen Kate Murphy, and Paddy Smyth.

On the night, 19 awards were presented to the winners of each category. Check out the full list of winners below:

https://goss.ie/featured/revealed-all-the-winners-at-the-gossies-2022-290945

Other well-known guests at The Gossies included: Lea Heart, Soulé, Triona McCarthy, Fiona Fagan, Chloe Markham, Corina Gaffey, Laura Jordan, Grainne Gallanagh, Emily O’Donnell, Lynn Kelly, Rebecca Rose, Fionnghuala O’Reilly, Kerri-Nicole Blanc, Rosalind Lipsett, Kelly Horrigan, Lynsey Bennett, Ceira Lambert, Denise Kenny Byrne, Linda Stinson, Aoife McNamara, Aisling Kavanagh, Sue Brophy, Paula Callan, Jade Mullet, Yvonne Maher, Ciara Ryan, and Gogglebox Ireland’s John and Dave.

Guests were treated to a fabulous three-course meal during the ceremony, and were entertained by The Event Band – who had everyone up on their feet throughout the night.

Before the show, our nominees and celebrity guests were invited to our official Gifting and Pamper Suite.

They were given glam makeovers by our Official Makeup Partner KASH Beauty, and had their hair transformed by our Hair Partner Silke Hair & Beauty.

Ahead of the ceremony, nominees also had their skin prepped by our Official Skincare Partner REFORM Skincare.

On top of that, nominees were treated to gifts from some of our incredible brand partners this year, including treats from: 17 now available at Boots, Aperol Spritz Ireland, humm, NOW, Ór Jewellery, Carry Out, Expert Electrical, and Oakpark Foods.

As always, guests also took home a luxury goodie bag from The Gossies, which included products/vouchers from our brand partners, and more treats from category sponsors SHEIN, Flowers.ie, and O’Donnell’s Crisps.

https://www.odonnellscrisps.com/about#OurStory

Remember… in 2007 Ed O’Donnell, a young seventh generation farmer wanted to diversify as farming was looking bleak at the time. He saw a niche in the market for an Irish hand cooked cooked crisp and decided to make crisps from the potatoes grown on his farm. Ed believed it was important that the product and flavours were Irish and artisan so he sourced local food producers to give the crisps fantastic individual flavours. In June 2010 O’DONNELLS Crisps were born!

[fromkenari]

Now that I’ve finished season 4, I’m working on character teas for The Expanse. So far I have 60 teas lined up. We shall see how many more come with season 5. They’ll be up on Adagio by the end of the month, I think. I’m so ready to get to blending!

Season 1

Joe Miller

James Holden

Naomi Nagata

Amos Burton

Alex Kamal

Chrisjen Avasarala

Julie Mao

Sadavir Errinwright

Fred Johnson

Octavia Muss

Diogo

Jules-Pierre Mao

Anderson Dawes

Antony Dresden

Franklin Degraaf

Admiral Souther

Arjun Avasarala

Shed Garvey

Captain Shaddid

Inspector Sematimba

Dimitri Havelock

Elise Holden

Ade Nygaard

Season 2

Roberta Draper

Camina Drummer

Admiral Nguyen

Cotyar

Dr. Praxidike Meng

Mei Meng

Dr. Strickland

Secretary-General Gillis

Lt. Sutton

Solomon Epstein

Korshunov

Hilly

Corporal Sa'id

Private Travis

Season 3

Anna Volovodov

Klaes Ashford

Clarissa Mao

Riko Oshi

Monica Stuart

Cohen

Tilly Fagan

Katoa

Namono Volovodov

Hector Cortez

Season 4

Adolphus Murtry

Dr. Lucia Mazur

Esai Martin

Coop

Dr. Elvi Okoye

Dr. Fayez Sarkis

Chandra Wei

Nancy Gao

David Draper

Leelee

Marco Inaros

Phillip Inaros

Felcia

[ruminativerabbi]

What I Saw on Mulberry Street

At first, I was slightly amused by the whole brouhaha that followed the announcement last week by the estate of Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, that it would stop republishing and selling six of the famous author’s books, including such classics as And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, and McElligot’s Pool.  I know all these books; they were classics of children’s literature so long ago that I remember reading them when I actually was a child and enjoying them immensely. We all did. Dr. Seuss was part of the children’s canon back then: read by all, touted endlessly by librarians and teachers, and considered controversial—as far as I recall—by none. Just the opposite, actually: if there was one children’s author from back then whose whimsy was deemed charming and fully acceptable, it would certainly have been Dr. Seuss.

But times have changed. And there is no question that illustrations in all the books in question feature caricatures of various minority groups, particularly Asians (depicted with slanty lines for eyes, pigtails, and conical coolie-style hats) and Black people (shown shirtless, shoeless, and wearing grass skirts). On the other hand, Dr. Seuss himself was a powerful enemy of fascism who published more than 400 wartime cartoons savaging Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese leadership. And some of his books were thinly veiled anti-fascist parables: it is widely understood, for example, that Yertle the Turtle (1958) was meant as a direct attack on fascism (apparently dictatorial Yertle originally sported a Hitler-style moustache) and that Horton Hears a Who (1954) was meant as a kind of encouraging parable about the American occupation of Japan. More to the point for Jewish readers is that The Sneetches (1961), a book that the estate will continue to publish, is a focused, double-barreled attack on racism and anti-Semitism and was understood that way from the time it was published. Nor was this imputed meaning—the author himself was widely quoted at the time as saying formally, that The Sneetches “was inspired by my opposition to anti-Semitism.”

So we are left with an interesting dilemma. Geisel, a life-long Lutheran who actually suffered a bit of anti-Semitic discrimination in college when he was mistaken by some bigoted classmates for a Jew, was a proud anti-fascist, a virulent opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, and a true American patriot. And he published some books that featured images which feel—at least by today’s standards—racist or at the very least inappropriate for books pitched at impressionable children. The managers of his estate solved their problem the easy way by deciding simply not to republish six of the man’s books, thus ending the controversy by eliminating the problem. An alternate approach, of course, would have been to re-edit the books, eliminate the offensive imagery, and bring out versions that feature the original text with illustrations tailored more precisely to suit modern sensitivity. And speaking specifically as a Jewish American, the fact that there aren’t any Stürmer-style caricatures of hook-nosed Jews holding huge bags of money in these books shouldn’t be a factor in our evaluation of the evidence: if anything, the thought of Black parents cringing when they come across racist caricatures of Africans should be more than resonant with Jewish parents able to imagine being in exactly the same position and feeling exactly the same level of hurt and outrage. And that brings me to the question that feels to me to be at the heart of the matter: should works deemed utterly non-offensive in their day be altered, either slightly or dramatically, to suit evolving standards with respect to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, etc.? It’s an interesting question, one that goes to the heart of the question of what literature actually is and what role it could or should play in society.

There are, of course, lots of examples of books that have been successfully revised to suit modern tastes. Agatha Christie’s book And Then There Were None was originally published in the U.K. as Ten Little Negroes (and the third word on the cover was specifically not “Negroes”). That was deemed offensive here, so the publisher just made up a different title. (The English publishers eventually did the same and brought the book out under the marginally less offensive title Ten Little Indians.) In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a favorite of my own children years ago, Roald Dahl originally depicted the Oompa-Loompas who worked in the factory as African pygmies and the depiction was basically of them as slaves and certainly not as dignified, salaried employees. A century earlier, Dickens himself was prevailed upon to tone down Fagan’s Jewishness in Oliver Twist, which he did by halfheartedly removing some of the references to Fagan’s ethnicity. Of course, when the author himself makes the revisions we are having an entirely different discussion: surely the actual authors of books should feel free make whatever changes they wish to their own work. The question is whether the world should “fix” published works to make them suit issues that were on no one’s radar, or hardly anyone’s radar, when the book was written and published.

Some readers will recall that one of my pandemic coping exercises last spring was embarking on a re-read of Mark Twain, a favorite author of my younger years. I was surprised how well many of his books stood the test of time, but I found myself most engaged of all by my re-read of Huckleberry Finn. Widely and entirely reasonably acclaimed as an American classic, the book is basically about the relationship of Huck and Jim, who is almost invariably referred to as Negro Jim. (Again, that’s not the word that appears in the book.) Of course, Mark Twain was writing about Missouri life in the 1830s and he himself was from Missouri and a child of that era. So he certainly knew how people spoke and I’m entirely sure that that word was in common use to reference Black people. Today, that word is anathema to all and is considered unusable in normal discourse, written or oral. But what about the book itself? Should it be “fixed” by having the dialogue altered specifically to reflect a dialect of English spoken in those days by no one at all? Or should the book itself be dropped from high school or even college reading lists as something too offensive to allow, let alone to require, young people to read? Huckleberry Finn is an interesting book for many different reasons, not least of all because Jim, a slave, is depicted sympathetically as a man of character, virtue, and strong moral values—a fact made all the more poignant by the fact that he is depicted as almost wholly uneducated. Indeed, Jim is a grown man with a wife and family, while Huck is a boy of thirteen or fourteen and the clear implication is that while the white world has failed utterly to make Huck into a decent adolescent, Black Jim, an uneducated slave, is quite able to bring him to the threshold of decency by showing him how to behave in an upright manner. So the book is hardly anti-Black. Just the opposite is far more true: in many ways, Jim, not Huck, is the hero of the book. And yet the constant use of that word is beyond jarring. Editions have been published for use in school that simply omit the word or change it. Is that a rational compromise? Or does that kind of bowdlerization deprive the book of its essential honesty, of its ability to depict a society as it truly was and not as moderns vaguely wish it had been? It’s not that easy to say.

When I was deeply involved in the research that led me to publish my translation of the Psalms, I became aware—slightly to my naïve amazement—of the existence of Christian editions of the Psalms from which all references to internecine strife, violent clashes between opposing groups in old Jerusalem, the corruption that led at least some poets to condemn the Temple priesthood, and the deep alienation from God with which at least some psalmists struggled—that the psalms depicting all of that challenging stuff had been nicely excised from the book so as to create a book of “nice” poems. (This parallels a Christian edition of the Old Testament I once saw from which the entire book of Leviticus had been omitted, presumably lest readers be offended by the notion that animal sacrifice and the safeguarding of ritual purity were essential elements of the covenant between God and Israel.) Those editions of the Psalms struck me as ridiculous and precisely because the resultant book was specifically nothing like the original work and gave a totally incorrect impression of the original work. But would one of the Dr. Seuss books under discussion really have been substantially altered by some of the drawings of black or Asian people replaced with more respectful images?

My feeling is that the Dr. Seuss affair is indicative of a larger issue in society. Obviously, changing a few drawings in a book is not such a big deal and is something that I’m sure happens without fanfare in the world of publishing all the time. But this specific issue seems to have struck such a chord with so many precisely because Dr. Seuss is deemed, not entirely incorrectly, as representative of a simpler world—by which term people generally mean one in which it wasn’t deemed necessary to care what smaller groups in society felt or thought. We’ve come a long way since then, and rightly so. The Seuss estate could certainly have felt justified in commissioning some new drawing to avoid going against modern feelings about ethnic or racial stereotyping. The books themselves would have been substantially the same. Once that line is crossed, however, and the book no longer is the same as it was—“fixing” the language in Huckleberry Finn, for example, or eliminating Shylock’s Jewishness from the play or Othello’s blackness—that is missing almost entirely the reason literature exists in the first place: to stir up emotion, to challenge readers’ preconceptions, and to educate—in the literal sense of the world: to draw the reader forward to a new level of understanding of the world of the author…and of the reader as well.