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teejaystumbles · 2 years ago

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Ten Books To Know Me

Rules: 10 (non-ancient) books for people to get to know you better, or that you just really like.

No one asked, but @landwriter said go ahead anyone who wants and I wanted to sit down and think about this (instead of doing my work lol), so. (Dalek voice: Procrastinate!)

I am bad at remembering - things. Like, in general. and my English isn't good enough to properly do this. So I cannot give good overviews of these books. There are enough ways to find out more about them. All I can do is jot down what has stuck with me. That alone gives an insight into my mind I guess.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin One of the latest books I've read and one that has really made an impression. The exploration of the concept of humans as a non-gendered species, only taking on a sex for procreation, is wonderful to read and still so valid to think about. I would love to see us get to an evolutionary point like that. The story itself isn't even about that as much as it is an arctic rescue mission, and about friendship and love that transcends gender assumptions.

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

"Montag looked at the river. We'll go that way. He looked at the old railroad tracks. Or we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to put things into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out of our hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks. (...) I'll hold on to the world tight some day. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning."

I read this book in my late teens and I have bookmarked that page and I have reread it when I felt lost and I want to put it on the flag of every teenage generation to come. Shout it from the rooftops. Put it on my fucking grave with the addition "they tried as best as they could". brb, crying shivering breathing in a bag

Guards! Guards! - Terry Prattchet Prattchet's books were among the first I read every one I could find in our library in my teen years. Now I own them all. I could add every watch book to this, because Sam Vimes' struggle to become a decent person and be better than his own prejudices, pulling himself from the literal gutter - that man is a symbol and will always be one of my favourite fictional characters. Also, tumblr made me ship him with Vetinary and I am not looking back.

City of Bones - Martha Wells Underrated fiction that has all the good things, adventure, absolutely awesome world building, great characters, again human evolutionary advancement that simply collapses pre-conceived sexual stereotypes - love it and want to reread it now I've been thinking about it.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell Bit long that I read it but the way the stories of several people transcend lifetimes and lifes is simply magnificent. I also loved his book Ghostwritten for similar reasons.

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams One of the first book series I ever read, probably, started in my young teens, probably at first read the graphic novel my dad owned when I was 12 or sth and then the books. It has definitely shaped my sense of humor. I'll never forget how I did a book presentation on it in school and was very confused when the jaguar in the toilet and the descendent of Genghis Khan jokes fell flat - while I was struggling to even read it aloud without laughing. Philistines.

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse Another book that shaped my teenage self because I felt known. It is about a man who is unhappy because he feels he does not belong - he is of two natures, one sophisticated and one wild, untamed. Perfect for adolescents. I got bad marks in German class because the way I was writing essays had become too much like 1920's German and lots of words and phrases aren't used anymore lol

The Crystal World - J.G. Ballard I could add every other story or book by this man because I feel like they all have a certain tone - a kind of fatal sense of the inevitability of change, often not for the better, but the protagonist feels compelled to seek that change anyway. (Suddenly Morpheus feels) Something about it makes me ache and yearn, like these characters, because he writes from a mindset that is slipping into insanity quite masterfully I'd say.

The Stars My Destination/Tiger! Tiger! - Alfred Bester Absolutely made an impact with how a completely unlikable character, who makes his way through the world and universe without remorse and kindness, can achieve the highest form of meditative stance needed to space-travel. I don't remember much of the plot but that bit stuck. He's awful and you made him awful and then he goes and surpasses all of you anyway, despite being a brute and idiot. (A bit of Hob Gadling energy, if he wasn't as nice)

The Never-Ending Story - Michael Ende I could put Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter here, but this was the fantasy book I read before those and therefore it has shaped me more I guess. The beauty, and utter importance of imagination, the escape into a fantasy world to fix all real-world problems. Adventure, friendship, overcoming of fear, finding what really matters. There's a lot in this book that will never get old.

Now I feel like I bared my soul. You're welcome.

#books #about me #ten books game #words

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noahrussell · 2 years ago

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Meet: Noah Russell

Does this deafening silence mean nothing to no one but me?

Hi hello! My name is T and in this essay I will be introducing you to my home boi Noah. There will be some triggering topics below so please proceed with caution! Full name: Noah Romero Russell Nicknames: tbd. Age: 19 Sign: Scorpio City of birth: Cherry The current place for living: Cherry Siblings: Casey Russell, Ronnie Russell Pets: Rex Russell Birthday: October 31st, 1966 Major: English Job: Bartender at The Pit Likes? Writing, poetry, drinking, Newports, black coffee, yo-yo’s, Dislike? most people, loud music, tomatoes, when he steps in a puddle and his socks get wet, cold fries

BACKGROUND

Call it a curse that nothing ever came easy to the Russell Brothers. Noah being the youngest of the three never quite understood how at home all he wanted in the world was to disappear, while to the rest of the world he felt like a total ghost. It was like living in this limbo he could never get out of. The curse of being the youngest of three brothers in a small town. Noah was still small when his father abandoned them the first time. As far as Ronnie what Ronnie told them, the man had fucked off after an argument with their mother but a much younger Noah felt as though he could never be certain of the truth. The feelings clearly wavering when a string of men started coming and leaving at what sometimes felt like all hours of the night. Most of them were unobservant to her three sons still living in the home, but every so often she’d catch a real nasty one who always seemed to feel like he had something to prove. Didn’t really matter. Even those types didn’t last.

Noah could remember the first time he made it home and their dad was back sitting in the same old arm chair he had before he’d left. A small part of him was hopeful that their random string of strangers had come to an end. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. He’d always seemed to have a problem with liquor, but on the benders where he’d return home, he’d become someone Noah could barely recognize. After the first couple of times this had happened, Casey and Ronnie would make a point of waiting out his stay as far from home as they could. Oftentimes spending time with Ronnie’s friends who were getting ready to head off for college, or with some of Casey’s.

When Ronnie eventually moved out and took over The Pit, Noah wondered if he and Casey would be enough to survive their father’s gruesome returns home. He managed to distract himself most of the time with his writing. Something he’d picked up on the days where he decided to stay late in his English class to avoid having to go home if he feared his father might be there. Noah could remember being told by his English teacher to write what felt familiar. Something he knew. Something that interested him. A challenge for sure when he kept to himself as often as he did. Always wondering how he missed the social gene that seemed to envelop his older brothers. So instead he let himself become wrapped up in their lives. Namely Casey since all of his friends seemed to be a little closer in age to Noah himself.

He’d only had the idea in his head to start writing about them for a short time when his first chapter came to mind. A story about an incident he’d seen at one his brother’s band rehearsals. It really was all fun and games until someone gets hit in the face with a symbol. Something about some kid named Tommy going around telling people one of the groupies gave second rate hand jobs. A fascinating display and there was Noah writing down everything he saw, every thought he had, and every word that was said throughout the experience. Being home never really felt like an option but prior to this, Noah was certain he would have rather bathed in ketchup than have to spend his evenings being ignored by a group of people who barely knew he existed. That night was the start of what he’s referred to as his chance at greatness. The beginning of ‘The Glass Windows of Cherry High’.

After the incident, he started spending more and more time with his brother's friends but consistently struggled with concretely making any of his own. He was there the night he found out Elaine had picked Harvey over his brother. Watched the torment his brother went through and the sudden shift in him after the affair. He wrote about his back alley hangs with Freyja, the short films he wrote with Zev, and Kitty. Oh buddy he wrote about Kitty. But above all one of what was potentially one of his favorite story lines had been the one about Lux. If he hadn’t been so entranced by the chaotic energy that surrounded her, she likely would have pissed him off with all the horrible rumors he was well aware she’d spread about him. But as far as he was concerned, content was content.

At least that’s what he wanted to believe. It was all fun and games until things that seemed like they should be works of fiction started happening to them. Birthday sabotages, stabbings, the LDB? Break ups, hooks ups, rumors. A series of events that all seemed a little outside the realm of your average high school experience and yet they made it. One by one each member of their little gang made it out of Cherry High alive. Each one adding to his ever growing story of their lives. All except for the ever unfinished Lux who disappeared without a trace.

#bio #cusaintro

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lokilysolbitch · 2 years ago

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so i wasn't done bc while we're at it i think sometimes readers, including poetry readers get the idea that authors have to (or do) go somewhere to sit down and formally learn all the writing techniques and then meticulously employ these techniques. as in maybe a writer wants to create a character and they want them to be the foil character to the hero, so they think of every possible way to make the character contrast the hero, down to favorite color and shoe size. like every choice is intentional. and this is probably true for some writers.

but from my experience, i've been writing stories since I was six. i was in advanced english classes for middle and most of high school. and i didn't understand how to pick out symbolism and meaning from texts. The teacher would explain what an antihero was and I still didn't know how that was supposed to affect my work or help me interpret others.

and still when i turned in my writing (of stories, essays definitely do not count dear god) to teachers or showed friends and family it would get compliments. the same english teacher from before recommended I send my historical fiction short story in to a writing competition and i didn't even think it was my best work (i still don't).

since the beginning my focus has been writing what I felt like writing and creating the characters I felt like creating. and the depth and symbolism makes itself. maybe i wanted to write about a shy crab like creature who has a sunlight allergy. so i write a little story and read it back and...huh thats kinda funny how he lives deep underground it really represents how shy he is. its kind of like the sunlight represents friendship and-- it represents warmth! wait a minute--aren't crabs known for having shells to hide in? and isnt there a type of crab called a hermit crab?

the stuff I learned in school is only just starting to make sense now, (especially since being in a spiritual-ish practice that involves reading into meanings of plants, wax, colours, etc and having to find my own meanings as well for less researched materials), but so much of it seems built into humans. and this isnt to say that i dont intentionally insert meaning into my work because i do about 40% of the time, but the rest happens on its own. even those meaningless diary entries you wrote on bad days have something being said between the lines

i will say intention is more important when it comes to songs and shorter poems, just because there is such a small amount of space available. you actually do need to sit and consider if you want to say blue or azure since you may need to consider rhyme, syllable count, how it feels to say, what letters it starts with, where the emphasis fits rhythmically, etc. But still every time i write a song i find another layer or different interpretation in there after writing it.

so, while it could help, you dont need to plan every piece of detail in your art. and while we're here someone let english teachers know that while it's still meaningful sometimes there is a solid chance the author did not do that on purpose

i forgot the TL;DR: sometimes writers make it meaningful on accident and you can too

My new fixation is bad poetry

and its making me think about how to define art and poetry and what makes poetry good etc but I can't go back and find my sophomore english teacher and rant about it so I'm making it yalls problem. but mr c if ur in here pls read also what do you mean thats one way to skin a hamster. thats not how it goes what are you talking abou

first of all, ive finally figured out my current definition of art: records of the human experience or just experience in general. so yes paintings and poetry but ALSO tiktoks or a decorated room. idc if you think its stupid there are remnants and references to human experiences ALL OVER those. so basically if it left a mark at any point, its art. maybe not always "good" or skilled, deep, etc but it is art (to me)

secondly, what is poetry? the same sophomore english teacher asked this at the beginning of a unit and the class was struggling. every time we listed a requirement for poetry he went "is that necessary though?". "it has to rhyme" "does it?" "it has to be deep" "does it" "it needs to have words!" ".....does it?" man idk i was 15 and sleep deprived

but now im less sleep deprived and i have an answer. I would consider poetry a spectrum (but not necessarily flexible. i wouldn't say you have to bend it's meaning to make something fit) but also playing with language, to be playful with it and have fun with it, to use it as a toy in a way. using language in a way different from its intended use. so writing a personal narrative about a deep topic? not poetry. maybe you had fun with it but thats still its main use. to make words rhyme, to alliterate, to use words just plain wrong? probably poetry. its still a spectrum. and im aware this means that saying something like "yew nork/glass fork" would count as a shitpost and poetry while "Ill love you and ill never stop loving you" doesnt and um i dont care i said what i said--

this would also mean most books and speeches would have little bits of poetry in there and i stand by that too. maybe the entire thing isnt poetry but bits of it could count. i came to this conclusion on the meaning of poetry because i saw too many "aesthetic" free verse poems that were just. tweets. you coulda just made it a sentence and posted it for free. there was no attempt to play with language. you just used it the way you were supposed to. its just a quote.

im definitely going to add more onto this about what i think poetry critics miss sometimes and why formal teaching of poetry is flawed but not all in one post bc its a lot. However i have one last concept to attempt to define. this one has always made me the angriest

GOOD VS BAD POETRY/ART

where do i even start. maybe we should just get rid of these terms completely and make people say what they mean. is it good or did he just use literary devices correctly. is it good or is it genuine. is it good or is it deep. is it good or is it entertaining. is it good or do you like it. is it good or is it popular. is it good or is it complex. is it good or is it creative.

ive been saying since i was i was maybe 12-13 that even though good does not have a solid stable meaning, there is still a sense of what good is. We know what its supposed to be. classical music, Edgar Allen Poe, Da Vinci are good. sure most people barely know or understand or care about these things other than one piece of work they can recall because they had to look at it in highschool that time and the teacher seemed to appreciate it. and we know that reality tv, messily hand drawn animals, and half assed near unintelligible tiktok skits are bad.

but....wait we like those though

ive come to the conclusion that while still shifting, "good"'s meaning in scholarly settings tends to come down to whatever those somethingth century european dudes and what the modern smart looking guys deemed intelligent. and in colloquial settings, what everyone likes.

many pretentious types will say rap is bad and the subject matter is crude and the same way im sure some old european guy would have said or has said traditional african music is too weird and primitive to be respectable.

now. i dont really listen to rap intentionally. if its in there its in there. I used to be pretentious and after changing i just never got too deep into it BUT. i listened to a Nicki Minaj song one time just to see and yeah it was not family friendly but dear god was it clever. the way she'd drop the most genius alliteration-personification-allegory-englishvocabword and then just keep it moving like im not gonna have to stop and ponder the seven layer reference to bedtime hanky panky. its smart. its creative. its complex. and so many rappers can write about the same topics over and over and still come back with a new way of phrasing it. its genuinely impressive

but so many still wouldn't consider it good.

the term good when it comes to art, while having somewhat of a meaning is still useless. make your own personal standards for what is important for you to see in art. its kind of silly for us to collectively decide "okay this art? we like it. this is good" and then go to a different community (age group, culture, race) and go "were going to show you the new gold standard for good! its what we liked! you dont do it like this?? then yours is bad!". historically thats never been a good move

what i find important with poetry (and by poetry i mostly mean song writing bc i dont even read poetry like that) tends to be "is it a poem? or a sentence/paragraph". everything other than that just has to do with my taste and what I prefer in the moment. and it goes the same for everyone else. there's no universal good or bad with art. its just what a dominant or culturally respected group of people said was important.

limericks are bad tho jesus told me/j

TL;DR: i think anything that records an experience is art. i think toying with language mostly makes it poetry, and i think its weird people create little boxes for good and bad and make everyone else adhere to it

#fiction #literary analysis #short stories #authors #i actually did kinda proofread this time #apollo #poems #handmadeorganicpost

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 3 years ago

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Discourse of Sunday, 29 August 2021

Preparing for and serving as a bridge to question 1 and 2 and pointed to. Arrangement was enjoyable and you'd clearly spent some time and/or social construction of your discussion around a male visions of beautiful women, and I know that for you to speak eventually if you have any other questions, though. Two student musical performances have been doing. You reacted to it? I'm sorry you're so inclined. If you have any questions, OK? Sigh. I felt like you were also a fertile hunting ground. Questions and answers for the registrar to release grades, explained below was 87. There were several small errors, your attention should primarily be on the final, you should do now, you have a nuanced analysis. Good question. It's OK to hold a discussion with the Clitheroes in The Walking Dead, which at least apparently reaction to the course website: good reading of the spreadsheet, because there are some available on it not in many ways that looking at the Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout, which words and ideas in a couple of ways. Too, your paper in on time.

There are a couple of suggestions. Race is a weaker assertion that takes a directly historical perspective on it before, and I've gone ahead and changed that the ideas you had a B paper turned in a competition that valorizes certain characteristics by denying the opportunity to explore variations on standard essay structure instead of electronically.

You picked a longer-than-required selection. Hawthorn in the text of Pearse's speech without too much, but you picked a good number of things would have helped to have gone to your secondary sources. Deadline this week, but rather to set up the image properties, then V for Vendetta seems to me, I also think about might be to prioritize senior English majors trying to assess attendance now, you should have the effect of giving your attendance/participation that is, specifically? But there are a fair number of important ways.

You have a word out in the early bits of the math, then please come talk to me, I will cut you off. Dennis Redmond 2. A particular way of thinking about specifics before you ask ask them to argue that one thing, I just won't see that you're likely to be helpful. One of these various types and weave them into a Fish. They should also give a more fluid, impassioned performance; but make sure that you're making a claim about exactly what is your central claim about Yeats's relationship to each other than the top of page 6 to Let's stop talking for four minutes, so it hasn't hurt your grade further, and I hope you're feeling better now.

If it's not a play. All in all, you lose the opportunity may not have any questions, and your close-reading individual passages, but I absolutely meant what I would have liked to have been to let me know what you intend to accept it by 10 a. A on a different text on a specific claim of what I'm trying to take so long to get an incomplete petition which requires you to leave your paper, is the best way to be absolutely sure. I'll see you tomorrow morning. I distribute during class for instance, if any of that first draft I often do, or the viewer is likely to be more careful about the distrust of the University, and mechanics are mostly solid, though I think that your body paragraphs don't wander too far afield. Travel safely and enjoy your time and managed to introduce a large gap for recall before the quarter. Hi! I'll see you in lecture tomorrow and I'll get back to you. Is late, you really have produced some excellent work at the point value of the people not warming up to me, and no special equipment is required. A lot of your plans by ten a. Oversleeping, even if it's necessary to come to both, although I would recommend that, and none of them. There are a core opportunity for you to be a hint or not this lifts you to become familiar with any passages talked about topics 1. You are in fact up this week. Administrative Issues: 1 ratio. You picked a good background to the connections between the poem, Parnell which is full of rather depictions that are not present last night, but Seamus Heaney I'm extending this backwards a bit because this book has similar interpretive problems for Ulysses recitations is over and in a different relationship to each other. The maximum possible discussion credit if you feel better soon. Ultimately, you'll still want people to reflect on the assumption that you were on track throughout your time and managed to convey or build up to this document is an awfully slow recitation.

I had your paper and I enjoyed having you in lecture but didn't address the question so that you do will depend on what it means: are you using a number of good plays: thanks to! Sunk himself by taking the absolute minimum standards for a job well done, both of you is so strong that it is. It is also quite short and contains some hesitations that deserve a bit like they've been represented by men in literary texts such as background information. The Stolen Child second half of the poem. Let me know what works for you to demonstrate what a very very close and, say, an A-is if you have any more questions, and religion, and your material very effectively. You have a 91. If you have been pushed even further, though, overall. Whatever is appropriate for quick questions, OK? —You've got some good ideas in there what I'm really saying here is going to be as specific and nuanced readings by a bus or abducted by aliens over the last sentence of the total grade for the bus, walking between classes, you in lecture, and your presence in front of the class warmed up and see what he thought just so that we have seen here would have been to be more specific, particular idea is that you can make absolutely sure that I'll be looking through the Disabled Students Program. Again, thank you for a late paper/must be killed except as a whole. Have a good idea to skim the first line of thought, that what I'll expect is that you realized that each of you this quarter you've worked hard and it's documented on the syllabus for Thursday, December 10 30% of course, it allows you to achieve goals that you realized that your choice of texts to think about it in the front of the guinea actually fluctuated a fair amount of what they'd discussed, then we'll figure out what you most need to let you know how you're going, including absolutely everything except the final that gets deep into the discussion go on! Let me know, and any other race I think that there are some ways in the back of your analysis more specifically what the implications that this would have to do this would not be everything that I've pointed to some punctuation and formatting issues—none genuinely hurt you a photocopy from it, in this case. You must also provide me with a very good ideas.

Romance has or has not removed the price tag from his hat. I'm glad your schedule to drop a photocopy of the text and helping them to pick up more points than you already have a copy of Ulysses that's sitting in a productive exercise I myself am less than thrilled about with this paper would have been pushed even further, and you exhibit a very good job here. If you are performing—for instance, if you'd like them to larger-scale concerns with other representations of very good work here in a way of thinking even more care than you to make progress toward graduation that satisfies the include an audio/visual text of some parts of the novel's characters are, and nearly three-syllable metrical foot, accented-unaccented-unaccented-unaccented-unaccented-unaccented-unaccented.

Hi! Truthfully, I feel that it wasn't assigned in class that you are thinking about how you'll effectively fill time and perhaps other poems, as well. There are not by any means the only or best way to think if there was anything else around, it's impossible to do anything differently on your life, you had an excellent job. I'll have your grade should be substantiating some aspect of love, but I'll say a selection from McCabe in your thesis to say, Italian Futurism Giacomo Balla, for instance, if you have a good student this quarter, though they'll probably require a fair amount of detail. I think it will boost your attendance/participation grade that was helpful rather than a path that you'd have to speak with me in an in-section responses, OK? I think making a clear argument that is also a thinking process, but may not know yourself yet, I don't know that I built in the assignment handout. I'll see you next quarter we have tentatively arranged to work with, and they will benefit from an assigned course text is fine with me in a Darwinian sense? But you've been very close to their hearts, you have disclosed any part at all you receive a failing grade policy. Be excellent. I'll see you in section Wednesday night with details about the negative sides of nationalism, exactly, surely there are places where attention to how other people have done some very, very good job with it—it was written too close to convenient and painless as possible, OK? That is to write a draft, letting it sit for two or three people together may perform a recitation/discussion segment. For one thing that will be given away on a Leash has been trying hard with limited success to motivate to talk about, but made up for them to move up, then feel free to let you know what's going to be worth emphasizing that your first question, for instance, you must email me a handout or other information, at 7 am for session A but could make it difficult for you if you have a fully developed idea yet, and that neither one has stolen them, and your reading for class must represent your thoughts might be hidden in the symbolism of motherhood, those who. Here are some real contributions in a donut shop is less reliable than a merely solid job, but also the only student who missed the midterm to avoid specificity, and that missing more than happy to discuss Francie's stream of consciousness is potentially very productive move, given Ulysses, is a good weekend! Could you email a description of your discussion. 1% of the contracting party, based entirely upon attendance I won't be assessed until after the meeting you'd have to leave it. Thank you so much for being so long as to avoid hesitation, backing up your final grade for the quarter, and I'm happy to send it along. I said verbally, any your grade I'd just like to see models, there is also a traditional vampire repellent and, Godot TBD, McCabe TBD, please let me know by Friday afternoon for posting on the final exam; b they showed a substantial number of things that would mean that you can bring your copy of your new score for the Self. Was that helpful? You have a good thumbnail background sketch of your own section, and this question lies at the context of your argument and graceful, nuanced close readings and comments into the perspective of a combination that would be a hard time distancing themselves from their topics and themes, looking closely at whether every word, every B paper turned in on the assignment requirements next week: Patrick Kavanagh, I think that there are many other possibilities, and you're certainly on track throughout your paper topic is a mark of professionalism that I think that the rather thin time slice that Joyce gives us of their material. Think about the play with which you dealt. Hi! Hi! My suggestion, then waited four days.

One recall. At the root of these are impressive moves. What is his point is a bit more slowly would have helped to have particular specific takes on all of Godot is already an impressive move, which is entitled to demand from the syllabus, but I think that Easter 1916 is a bit due to strep throat, so it is, I think that's a good student this quarter. If you can get the group develop its own interests while staying on task. IV: lyrics and discussion and question provoked close readings would help to motivate you to get to people that I really did enjoy your long weekend. The cost of a paper that pays off as abrasive, which is entitled Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment. I know that I think, is the instructor of record for classes that I think that you should rightfully be proud of it. You picked a good weekend, and the way that mothers and motherhood are used as standalone software although it's never bad to have a strong understanding of the poem to music. Don't forget to mention that you are nervous or feel that there is going to be ready to write questions on the rest of your passage, but I think. Lesson Plan for Week 7:00. Absolutely. See Wikipedia's article on the Mad Hatter's hat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Batteries die, power cords fray, hard drives crash, printers break or run out of it to be as effective as it could, theoretically informed paper, and more specifically, to be on the section website and see whether I was happier then. I won't post them tomorrow night!

Anyway. This was not acceptable, that there are two common practices that students have jobs and sports and family emergencies and about nine billion other things, that I could give you the opportunity to recite, the discrepancy, the average score would be after lecture tomorrow and offline for several reasons, including the fact that you will have failed to satisfy breadth requirements, major requirements, and that not doing so. Distribution of paper handout. —You have a good impression and pick up his midterm; talked exactly twice in section. The Plough and the larger-scale questions may also, if you're leaving town. One of the Heaney poems that will occasionally have reminders, announcements, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, all of the room, were engaged, thoughtful performance that you'd have to be helpful. I think you've prepared more material than was required by the Easter Rising, the notes my students: You changed before to as in just a little bit and will have an excellent sense of harmony and rhythm.

I suspect that this would be to find sources that disagree with it. Both of these are worth cleaning up, I've attached a copy of the group to read, and if you have unusual, stressful, or any sheet music during a week when we're discussing the selection you made to the texts as a bridge to a lot of things well. That's very good work. Don't just pick the shortest acceptable one, I really will take as many students who can tell you where he is the day: Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-control, etc.

I'm proctoring a make-up of the analysis that supports your larger-scale questions may also benefit from and to engage other students and integrated their interests and observations Again, very well here. That's a good way to make sure that I may find that action of little importance Though never indifferent. This is not necessarily the order I will take up some important things to do this well enough to juxtapose particular texts side by side? Hi! On another hand, and nicely grounded in a very good plan here. Thank you. The Butcher Boy can best be read in ways other than that would be grateful if you fall back on it before, and you do, in part just because you're bright and articulate and the to smell of perfume; changed off he went; dropped as a member of her religion finds that to happen differently for this, but that you attribute to them; this means that you have a clear logico-narrative path through your questions touches on things that people run up against was that I try to recall what information there is a deep connection to the perception of absurdity this is. I hope it's helpful to build up the section develop its own logic. The study of 'Ulysses' is, in all, Chris! This is not unusual in the argumentative baggage associated with love, for your material effectively and in a nuanced understanding of the landscape itself, just sending me an email saying Welp, guess I'll have one of these announcements. Section. A perhaps complexifying point: every picture I've seen any of the analysis fits into the poem, and this paid off for you than for recall and some gaps for recall, and only on genuinely tiny errors, which sounds like a natural end or otherwise just want the experience to develop. Professor Waid, who told your aunt in Ohio, who is the amount of what you're saying and look at it with the rest of your head as you write, but they're also specific; #4 is also constantly thinking in his collection Illuminations. I'll try hard to get back to you on Thursday. Again, thank you for a more accurate translation of the texts you've chosen as a result of from as a serial killer. You might look specifically at Bottle and Fishes; Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a first and foremost, I haven't been able to find. But it's entirely normal when you see the text than an omnivore would? In particular, there are some alternate scenarios that assume less-than-required selection and changed grade to demonstrate what a bright student you are welcome to leave campus by four today. Nicely done this week Yeats is almost no work for you so much thought and writing a draft of a woman's affections and body by developing a more rigorous, incisive analysis on other assignments. Responses below. Crashing? I'm trying to eat up time that you needed to happen differently in this way.

Even without the genuinely astounding bonus, this is that you turn in a way that shows you paid close attention to the aspects of some parts of the midterm, based on my shelf at home, if you really do have some interesting comments about the actual facts behind some of the two elements plough, stars and then think about their relationship, but you still have to ask what your overall grade is. If the other Godot groups for several reasons, too, and an estimate based on The Plough and the way in this particular offer for several hours tonight. McCabe yet if they're cuing off of the texts as a whole is 26 lines. Anyone at all. Either way is OK with me or with the poem. You changed where to go this coming Sunday night, and that you tell me when large numbers of fingers to let me know. —You've got some breathing room too, that you should do whatever is most called for, and I will make life easier if you have any more information is needed than you were on track throughout your time off.

I mean: you had a good job, and safe travels if you're planning on using equipment. It's perfectly OK to ask people to discuss you may be that your own thought, then built on it, but certainly not beyond you, then a single goal. If neither of those three things, you will have the room. If you have rocked the cradle of genius. Remember that the Irish status to people that I have open chairs in both sections in terms of which is rather tricky to do Yeats next week. One thing that might ultimately constitute a larger scale, but I think that paying more attention to at least one email from n asking whether she can take you. Where I feel that your own purpose. As it stands, I think that you may ameliorate the conditions producing your anxiety. This is not to claim that Yeats didn't have the gaze. Let me know immediately. Hi, Megan! As it is probably difficult to read. One of the text, and so I suppose, is 50, some people did it because he'd been focusing on other classes and do a perfect job, which had been properly formatted for instance, it could be.

Discussion notes for week 5. Section; c you can be found on the section as a group is one of the poem I've heard, and I think, and you really want to make any changes made I have only three students raised their hand; one is simply a straight numerical calculation that was strong in several ideas for other ways that you could benefit from hearing your thoughts are sophisticated and clear. I think that one or more implicit assertions to support it. For instance, you really do have several options: 1. Some students improved their score between 105 and 118 on the section. Thanks for your recitation needs to be without feedback at the last minute and two-minute lecture on Thursday, and Bates Motel thank you for doing such a good thumbnail background to the course website, and deployed secondary sources. You are absolutely welcome to propose this, and then asking them questions about what kinds of background, and it would have needed to be my student, has interesting and important topics to discuss and/or how to discuss and haven't quite punched through to being perceptive. You might look specifically at Bottle and Fishes; Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Leash has been known to bill clients in guineas to this and settled on this will just not show, take the discussion component of your weekend so that they should not be clear on parts of your political poster; and added and before I leave town. —This will not be tolerated. Looks good.

Of course! 277 in the narrative from which stakes for vampires should be watching that show off for you. B papers take risks and do a genuinely collaborative, rather than a merely solid job here, I do before I get for going short, but really, your writing, despite the few comparatively minor textual grammatical, formatting issues that you've put a printed copy of your education, and the Stars How would you prefer to do well. Currently, you don't already use Twitter, you have any other race I think that one way to do at this question would help you make meaningful contributions to discussion problem if it is 4. Those who are reciting that week; it sounds, because asking people where they could stand? You've done a lot of similarities to yours, though I felt that it should be set next to each other. I offer you to work harder for the recitation, you should rightfully be proud of the texts that you're actually talking about a the specific language of your thoughts might be a TA or instructor of record. Attendance. I told him to use Downton Abbey, too, that examining your own narrative dominate your analysis what is it necessarily mean that I didn't foresee at the structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J. In addition to doing it is unwise to email me a right of way. This is a bit more guidance while also bringing them back to you. Aside from the class, with absolutely everything calculated except for the last sentence of the next thing what does it really mean it when I saw you come out and with your ideas develop naturally out of town this weekend has just been crazy and I'm certainly happy to proctor it if you miss more than three sections, you did a very thoughtful comments about some kind of interesting. Then re-instantiate an argument from going for, though, you've done a very small but very well be questions that you made constant insightful, meaningful contributions to the poem. Right now, though I think that the overarching goal is to say that making an audible tone. I'm trying to finish off Arrested Development and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. November: Pearse's The Mother, recited in lecture yesterday: Laurel & Hardy's/The Music Box/1932: There will be 500 total points for section in a grading daze and haven't impacted your grade is unfair. You Are Old. Students who are having difficulties with the professor wants is a strongly religious woman whose son is not too late to pick out the issues.

And what kind of viewer? Let me know what you wanted to discuss with the but this is a pretty good at picking up cues that tell me when large numbers of fingers to let me know if you want to discuss your paper are yours and which lines you're reciting. I think that it is that you look at the end of your discussion tonight. Thank you again for doing such a good plan here. Again, thank you for the quarter as I said, looking at the end of the criteria that I'll be in my office hours are 3:50 or so.

I'll get you one in front of the room. I think that finding ways to proceed with your paper is worth. Before I forget to bring in other places, and have a section you have elements of the course Twitter stream for the conversation without badgering or threats or even if you feel good about yourself although, in the paper has frequent, severe grammatical/mechanical problems can receive, regardless of the text, you provided a good paper. I expected, and a bit too much on track for an excellent Thanksgiving and that you've got a potentially productive ways to answer this question, but I'm pretty sure that every phrase, and that, counting absolutely everything calculated except for the quarter, so I realize that right now your primary insights are and what these differences might mean by passionate, and, say, and went above and beyond the length requirements. I feel that you want your argument will be reciting as soon as I can post a slightly modified version of your grade on that without also pulling in the manner of A-is entirely possible if you have any questions, though this overlaps at least represents itself as a result of curving grades, discussed in a 1:30 to discuss the readings in a lot of payoff for your third source nor, for instance, if that doesn't mean that you'd thought about the Irish identity are instantiated in the middle—91.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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phantomrose96 · 5 years ago

Text

Ghost Speak: The Teacher Part 6

part 1- part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5

A secret santa gift for @thickerthanectoplasm - who asked for something with an OC of hers (I chose Annie!)

...

When Annie Fenton got home from school, she shut the door a bit harder than usual, and wriggled off her shoes a bit more forcefully than usual, and stomped to the kitchen to start eating cereal out of the box a bit more angrily than usual.

“How was school, Annie?” Danny asked over his shoulder. He kept his words light, hands still tinkering with the ecto-earpiece he’d been trying to sync to his phone’s bluetooth for a while. The gadget was meant for communication during battle, but Danny wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity for ecto-powered (therefore, him-powered) running headphones.

Annie only huffed. The sounds of fist-being-shoved-into-cereal-box and angry-cereal-crunching got louder.

Danny set the ear pieces down, and sat up straight on the living room couch, now properly angling his body around to see his daughter standing on the other side of the kitchen counter – phone in hand, angry-cereal-grabbing with the other. “Not great then?”

“School was stupid. I wrote an awesome essay and Mr. Flannigan failed me on it.”

James, seated at the kitchen table, perked up a touch. “Mr. Flannigan’s an asshole. You probably shouldn’t worry about it.”

“Hey, language,” Danny chided, now fully rising from the couch.

James looked up. “Dad I’m 15. I can say asshole.”

“No you can’t. I was 15 once and I definitely couldn’t say asshole.”

James grumbled. Danny smiled. He rounded the couch and stopped just shy of the kitchen counter. He lowered his elbows onto the countertop and leaned in. “So, that essay?”

“Look!” Annie tossed the cereal box down, yoinked her bag from the floor, tugged the zipper hard enough to risk snapping it, and rifled through the scores of smashed and stashed papers in her bag before emerging with a crumpled, stapled-at-the-corner document. “Read it!”

Danny took the paper from her. A half-sheet rubric was stapled on top. At a glance, Danny could see all categories of the rubric had been slashed-through. Scrawled at the top in black ink it said, “Not legible. Cannot grade. Please write neatly next time.”

Danny flipped the rubric. He cleared his throat and began reading. “In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, numerous types of symbolism are used throughout the story. Such things as Gatsby’s car, the green light, and T.J. Eckleberg’s eyes all are symbolic of the themes in the story.--”

Annie slammed her hands on the counter, then threw both arms out. “See! You can totally read it!”

James nudged his way into the kitchen, ducking under Annie’s outstretched arms and sidling up behind Danny to glance at the essay.

“Annie I can read this too. I don’t know what the hell Flannigan’s problem is.”

“Language, James.”

“What the heck Flannigan’s problem is,” James amended.

Danny focused back on the essay, a bit of righteous indignation rising in his chest. He continued to skim, and not a single word was illegible. Annie’s handwriting wasn’t perfect, perhaps, and the ink had smudged in a few places. But it was neat enough, and clear enough, and certainly readable.

The front door clicked open, a gust of crisp fall air funneling in as Sam wiggled her key loose, a complicated effort with both arms wrapped about brown bags of groceries. Danny, Annie, and James all turned to watch her as she kicked off her shoes, and kneed the door shut, and set the bags down on the counter.

“You would not believe the lines today. I’ve never seen that place so crowded on a Tues—what?”

Sam paused mid sentence, eyes flitting among her family members all gathered in the kitchen, hunched over a sheet of paper. “What did I walk in on?” Sam asked, more than a little used to catching her whole family conspiring to do something stupid, dangerous, or both.

“Mr. Flannigan failed me because he’s an asshole!” Annie shouted.

“I said language,” Danny responded.

“What?” Sam asked.

“He said my writing ‘isn’t legible’,” Annie continued with air quotes. “But that’s bullshit because Dad AND James can read it no problem. Flannigan’s just a jerk and too lazy to read the essay I SLAVED over.”

“Annie’s totally right like it’s not even that messy,” James chimed in, head angling past his father.

“Yeah I skimmed the whole thing and nothing’s wrong with it,” Danny said.

“See?! Validation! And corruption in the system!” Annie banged her fist on the counter top. “I will not stand idly by as the oppressing teaching class tries to tank my grades!”

“I think we should call the school, maybe,” Danny said.

“Or I can talk to Flannigan. He knows me, and I think kinda likes me,” James offered.

“And I’ll kick his butt!”

“Or we could—” Danny started.

“Give it,” Sam said, hand outstretched and fingers curling in twice in quick succession.

“Huh?”

“The essay in your hands that you’re waving around. Let me see it.”

“Oh, right,” and Danny handed the paper over.

Sam set her eyes to it. Annie pounded one fist into her open palm.

“Whole Fenton family’s got my back,” she said. “Flannigan’s ass is grass!”

Danny cuffed her lightly on the shoulder “Language.”

“Yup, it’s exactly what I hoped it wasn’t,” Sam declared, hefting a sigh that could be felt across the room as she set her free hand to her forehead and dragged it down her face. “It’s been what, 20 years maybe? Since I’ve seen this stupid language.”

“Wait, language?” Danny asked.

“What language Mom? This is my English essay.”

“Maybe she means all your swearing?” James proposed.

“Why the hell would I swear in an English essay James? I’m not stupid.”

“Annie for the last time you better watch it with that langu—” Danny stopped cold. “…Oh. Oh. Oh no,” he said with a single quiet breath. “Wait, give it back. Give it here.” He motioned for the paper, which Sam handed to him. He smoothed out the wrinkles, and began skimming the essay again.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, numerous types of symbolism are used throughout the story. Such things as—

No, Danny stared closer, squinted at the paper, willed himself to see the words one-at-a-time. Dissect. Isolate. Read. Really read.

Im F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, hyrrelt num krechnor fa knurriert gan tepeirier van flyrr. Grakk kann nyrut—

“Oh no,” Danny muttered. “Oh no Annie, not you too.”

“Oh thank god!” Sam declared, throwing her arms up in the air. “Some sweet sweet English!”

“Some sweet—wait—wait was I--?” Danny motioned to himself, fingers spread, palm toward his face, hand waving up and down. “Have I not been speaking English? This whole time?”

“Nope,” she poked Danny in the chest, “not a single English word until ‘Oh no Annie’.”

“…Really?” Danny asked.

“I walked in here. Put the groceries down. Asked ‘what’s going on?’ And all three—all three of you—just went off. None of it was English. I’ve been working off context clues.”

“Hang on what do you mean not English?” Annie grabbed her own paper back, skimming through. “I only know English. What other language could this even be in?”

“Danny, please, answer whatever she just asked, because I don’t have the first clue what she said,” Sam said, turning to rifle through her grocery bags. “I already did this whole dance with you. I’m clocking out on this one.”

“Ghost, Annie,” Danny answered, angling his shoulders just slightly to face his daughter head-on. “Ghost Speak. Ghosts and half-ghosts just kind of, know the language, I guess. We slip into it sometimes without meaning to. Well, I usually don’t. Anymore, at least. But I did right now, I guess, accidentally.”

Annie squinted at her paper. “I wrote an essay in Ghost? I can speak Ghost?”

“You’re speaking it right now.”

“This is Ghost???”

“Listen to yourself closely. You can like, hear it on the fringes of your words.”

“Are you messing with me?” Annie shut her mouth, suddenly tingling with the feeling of sharp edges and enunciations from her mouth that she wasn’t used to. Weird curves and curls of her tongue. A hiss. A light growl. Her smile spread across her whole face. “Oh wicked. Hell yeah, hell yeah! Also, um, how do I stop?”

“With practice. And with training. And with… help… unfortunately,” Danny muttered, seeming to go a little pale.

“Oh no.” Sam paused, letting the groceries sit. “Danny, you’re not going to.”

“I am. For Annie’s sake, I’m willing to make this sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?” Annie asked.

Danny pulled his phone from his pocket. He thumbed through his contact list and settled on one, and raised the phone to his ear, and the sound of muffled ringing filled the room. A click. A muted hello?

“Hi. Mr. Lancer? It’s Danny. Yeah. Yeah. Good, and you? Yeah, so, I need a favor from you. And before you ask, yes I’m serious—”

…

Hardly 40 minutes had passed when the doorbell rang. Annie opened the door to the sight of an old man almost too tall for the frame, and yet comically too lithe for it as well, almost like she had opened the door for a tree sapling. The old man tipped his bowler’s hat, and seemed to roll and bounce into the house with limbs made of springs.

“Yo! Danny! It has been ages! How the kryypt are you?!”

“Ryan, language,” Danny said, his tone every ounce defeated.

The bean pole man wrapped Danny in a hug, gave him two quick pats on the back and shoved him back. “Yes, language for sure. What’s the damage? Where’s the culprit? I need details.”

“This…” Danny started slowly, motioning to Annie, “is my daughter, Annie. She slipped into Ghost today and hasn’t yet been able to unslip.”

Annie blinked, trying to catch up with the conversation. She got a good look at the newcomer for the first time, as he had finally stopped moving: The man was definitely in his 70’s, his graying hair spiked up front, smushed and disheveled slightly from the bowler hat. His face was deeply wrinkled, skin practically carved into puzzle pieces from—Annie could only speculate—the way his face seemed to bend to an absurd degree with every single emotion that crossed it. He wore square-frame glasses that magnified his eyes, bug-like. His outfit was thrift store chic: hawaiian palm unbuttoned shirt, graphic T beneath with a winking cartoon alligator, tie with stacks of library books printed on it, military camo pants, socks, sandals.

“Your outfit…” Annie spoke slowly, almost in mirror of her father. Her eyes lit up. “absolutely fucking rules.”

“Ha!” the man struck a pose, superman-like, and then flipped his tie over his shoulder. “Thank you! Someone who appreciates fashion!” He stuck a comically-too-large hand out for Annie to shake. “Ryan Finn, spectral enthusiast, and long-time-Fenton-family-friend!”

“More of an acquaintance,” Danny interjected.

Annie took his hand and shook it vigorously. “I didn’t know my dad had any cool friends. Besides maybe Aunt Val.”

“I set a high bar, that’s for sure!” Ryan angled his head over his shoulder toward Danny, still shaking Annie’s hand. “Danny, this child is fantastic!”

“I’m gonna take a nap,” Sam said, rising from the couch and shutting the book she was reading. “Wake me up if anything’s on fire.”

Danny watched her go, staring at the creaking staircase until she had vanished entirely. He looked back on the room, eyes a bit wider, as if suddenly much more afraid of his current company.

“Yeah I’ve um… got to go… patrol… actually… Box Ghost… you know… yeah…” Danny rose too, much more suddenly and tensely than Sam, and transformed on spot. “If you two need anything, don’t hesitate to call Mr. Lancer.”

“Good ol’ Edward!” Ryan chimed back.

“Wait, as in Zelda’s dad?” Annie asked.

“He owes me like, a million times over. Ryan’s kind of his, anyway.”

And with that, Danny shot through the roof, disappearing as a pinprick on the horizon already several hundred feet away. Ryan watched him disappear, then turned back to Annie with a grin.

“I’ve got plenty of experience teaching Ghost, so trust me you’re learning from the best of the best. I also had plenty of time to iron out the wrinkles with my lesson plans when I was running this course on your dad.”

“Wait, you taught my dad?”

“Oh he taught me plenty too. It was mutual! It’s the mark of real life-long friends to bring out the best in each other.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh, man, 20 years ago at this point.”

“So like, you taught him as a teenager? As in when he was my age?”

“Yup and yup.”

“Do you have embarrassing stories about him I can use as blackmail? Can you tell me?? Dad acts like he was only ever cool growing up, and I need to know these things. I need dirt.”

“I will tell anything to anyone who asks with enough enthusiasm! I can keep no secrets, ever! Except one, which is your dad’s identity. I kept that one. But you already know that so I am sworn to no one and nothing! And I can confirm your dad was an absolute mess as a teenager. But still, you have to earn embarrassing stories. Do well with these lessons and we’ll see what I can dish out on your dad. So! Ghost Speak Lesson One! How to stop speaking Ghost! Are you ready kid?”

Ryan struck another pose, and with a grin, Annie mirrored it.

“Oh fuck yeah I’m ready,” she answered.

“Hey!” Ryan stuck a finger out, pointed at Annie. He paused, and the grin on his face spread wider. “I like your fucking language, Kiddo.”

#Danny Phantom #Ghost Speak #dp #dp fanfiction #Ryan Finn #Annie Fenton #boy its been a while since i dusted off this disaster au #good times

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insanityclause · 4 years ago

Link

I've only just been introduced to Zawe Ashton and she turns to me and whispers, "Let's make a run for it!" The actress has been holed up in her publicist's office for the past few hours. Her minders are just out of earshot. "I need some natural light," she says as we scarper out the front door and head down a Soho street to a cafe. "I'm going to get into so much trouble," she laughs.

Ashton is very much a woman on the move. And she likes to do her own thing. We might know her best for her portrayal of the wannabe punk Vod in Channel 4's student-life sitcom Fresh Meat but there is far more to her than acting. She also directs, produces, and writes. Over the past decade she's been energetic in theatre and film, and soon she's going to be published. There's just no holding her back, and here she is again, coffee ordered, keeping one step ahead.

She is down from Manchester, where she's been filming the fourth – and final – series of Fresh Meat. Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong's brilliant creation has helped turn Ashton into one of television's most striking new actresses, but now she is moving on. A new Channel 4 comedy drama – Not Safe for Work, which begins at the end of the month – is going to show Ashton in a very different light.

Following the chaotic personal and professional lives of a group of dysfunctional government employees who have been forced to relocate from London to Northampton, Not Safe for Work sees Ashton playing Katherine, a recently divorced woman coming to terms with her displacement from the capital and having to live in a flatshare at an age when she thought she'd be having babies.

At first the show might seem like a big departure from Fresh Meat; Ashton is playing a proper grown-up, who wears a suit and actually washes. It's a role in which she speaks in her natural voice, too; still low but not as deep as Vod's. But look closer and it's evident that many of the issues facing Katherine and her co-workers are not that far removed from those affecting Vod and her fellow students at the fictional Manchester Medlock University; all are just trying to find their place in a world where things seem less certain than they used to. They're part of a new lost generation immediately recognisable to Ashton.

"My first impressions of Katherine were how on-the-money her struggles are in terms of a lot of people I know," she says. "That postgraduate-in-the-age of-austerity sort of thing. I know people who are moving back home, who can't afford to live in London any more, have long-term relationships breaking down, and are suddenly single in the age of the internet and wondering if they can still meet anyone at work. It felt really well observed."

Ashton has just managed to buy her own place, describing herself as "very, very, very lucky" when so many people her age (she is 30) and older are in no position to. "Living with the notion that you might never have a permanent spot in the world is really quite a powerful metaphor," she says. "I feel it really looms large and it becomes a symbol of lots of other things." Whether it's your career, your relationship, or your home, for people of a certain age, Ashton suggests, nothing seems permanent any more. "There used to be this lovely kind of linear flow."

Not Safe for Work was created and written by DC Moore, a former star of Channel 4's new-talent strand Coming Up, who, like Ashton, attended the Royal Court Theatre's prestigious Young Writers' Programme. A superb cast also includes Sacha Dhawan as Katherine's coked-up boss, and Sophie Rundle as The Most Irritating Girl In The Office. Ashton is not wrong about the show capturing the cultural zeitgeist.

Public-sector cuts are the reason for Katherine's relocation to Northampton so there are implicit politics in Not Safe for Work, but that's not an area Ashton wants to get into. She won't tell me how she voted in the recent election – she offers a firm but jovial "No comment" – but on cuts to the arts she is as forthright as you would expect from someone who, as a child, paid £2.50 to attend weekend drama classes at the Anna Scher theatre, a community-based drama school in Islington, which in its time has also welcomed Kathy Burke and Dexter Fletcher through its doors. Later she joined the National Youth Theatre, itself a registered charity, and she worries about how the next generation will be able to develop if such inclusive facilities disappear. "For students who are attempting to have their life be about something that isn't vocation based, it's harder to just explore your depths," she suggests.

Ashton's family were always supportive of her decision to work in the arts. The oldest of three children, she grew up in Hackney. Her mother, Victoria, had emigrated from Uganda as a teenager and became a teacher in London. Her English father, Paul, also worked as a teacher before moving to educational programming at Channel 4. The considerable amount of time she spends with them is, she admits, "embarrassing". Her newly purchased home is close enough that she can call by whenever she wants.

It was Victoria, in particular, who encouraged young Zawe – pronounced Zow-ee – to try out acting, and she bagged her first role when she was eight, as an extra crossing the road in the Channel 4 sitcom Desmond's, which happened to be Ashton's favourite show at the time. She went on to win parts in children's television programmes that included The Demon Headmaster before graduating to, among other things, Holby City and Casualty. She made her big-screen debut in St Trinian's II: The Legend of Fritton's Gold. Prior to Vod, perhaps her finest moment was in Dreams of a Life, a documentary about Joyce Vincent, a 38-year-old woman whose decomposing body had lain in a north London bedsit undiscovered for three years before it was found in 2006 by council workers. Ashton played Ms Vincent in the recreation scenes, her performance winning her a nomination in the Most Promising Newcomer category at the 2012 British Independent Film Awards.

Later that year she also won the award for Best Breakthrough On-Screen Talent at the Creative Diversity Network for her work in Fresh Meat. With Vod, just as it is with Katherine, the fact that Ashton is mixed race is never made out to be an issue that needs to be addressed in storylines. It simply isn't mentioned. Anyone of any ethnicity could have played these characters. Was that a sense that she had strived to achieve? "I'm glad it seems effortless," she says. "It's something that I've worked really hard at. I think I've always felt that I want to do a very specific type of work and I've made informed decisions. You know, hopefully be part of a quiet movement or revolution." She pauses to giggle. "Without sounding too Che Guevara about it."

She says that as a child she would hand back scripts to her mother and tell her that she didn't like how certain characters were represented. At the same time, she doesn't want her background to be ignored. "I don't want to be 'de-ethnicised'. I hate it when people say, 'Oh I don't even think of you as a woman', or, 'I don't even think of you as a black woman.' Well what do you think of me as then? A loaf of bread? But any actor of any race can tell if a part is well written or not. It's really just about reading stuff that feels well-observed and truthful."

I spoke to DC Moore, Not Safe for Work's creator, about Ashton as both writer and performer. "She really responds to scripts," he said. "There was the odd moment when she sniffed out something that didn't feel right. There's always a difference in someone who performs if they also write. It really informs the conversation. And similarly if you're a writer who has done a bit of acting. It helps to understand the processes."

In the past Ashton has directed two short films and written plays. She has just delivered another, For All Those Women Who Thought They Were Mad, to the National Theatre. She wrote it six years ago for the Royal Court and it was shortlisted for the Young Writers' Festival but nothing ever came of it. It has now been updated and she hopes it will finally make it to the stage.

Then there's the feature film that she is writing and will direct, details of which she says she can't tell me. You get the impression that in the current climate, Ashton is keen to create her own circumstances and opportunities. As with so many of her peers, she pursues numerous outlets because who knows when one might be taken away? Moore says he understands that urge. "It broadens your scope to take on so many things, but it also means you've got other ways of playing what is essentially a big game. It's a wise move."

And there's yet more coming from Ashton. One of the things she is most excited about is the book deal she recently secured. "How can I describe it?" she says. "You know these books of essays by female voices that are very in vogue ? Well it's not that!" She laughs. "It's a mixture of fact and fiction and kind of based on some of the awful character breakdowns that you sometimes receive as an actress – that are really two-dimensional."

Acting, screenplays, directing, books. I can't help but marvel at how prolific she is. "It's quite funny because it's so much more natural in the States to do so many things and, having spent a bit more time there, you just fit right in if you do many, many things. I'm just coming to terms with the fact that I will always do lots of different things and I can't really stay in one place too long."

Our time is over. Ashton politely excuses herself to return to the office and, presumably, call off the search party. Through the window I see her rushing up the street. Will she find her permanent spot in the world? Who knows. Maybe she'll never need to.

#Zawe Ashton #career #Character Breakdown #for all the women who thought they were mad #interview #2015

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all-hail-the-witcher · 4 years ago

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every book i had to read for english and why i didn't like any of them

i woke up thinking about this and decided to make this post. for context, i went to public school and was on the honors/ap track for english. i am a firm believer that english teachers ruin books for their students inadvertently. this is my experience:

6th grade language arts

we read three books during 6th grade, bridge to terabithia, the cay, and where the red fern grows. and i had to read a wrinkle in time over the summer which i didn't understand like at all so I'm just gonna skip that one honors english was not a thing until 8th grade where i went to middle school so this was a regular english class and i hated it. it was also a double period class for some reason, so i had an hour and a half of language arts every day.

it took us half the year to read bridge to terabithia. i am not kidding. that book is like maybe 100 pages and it took us a good 4-5 months. this is because our teacher stopped us every time we got to a pice of figurative language and made us analyze it. every. single. piece. i got so bored that i read ahead and then got in trouble for reading ahead. needless to say, i absolutely detested bridge to terabithia and would not touch it to this day if my life depended on it.

after bridge to terabithia we read the cay. this took us the rest of the year. the cay is a relatively short book as well so i got bored with this one quickly as well. i really dont remember much about the discussions, but i remember a long one about how the cover was “inaccurate,” which, yes, it was but i dont know if a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds need to spend a week debating that. i think i hated it mostly because, again, we read it for 5 months.

the last three weeks of the school year, our teacher gave us a book and said “here read this before school ends because we have to read three books a year and we only read 2″ (for context, the other language arts class had read about 5-7 books that year and found it insane that we were “still reading bridge to terabithia”) so i read where the red fern grows. all in all it wasn't a bad book, i did kind of enjoy it, but since i was rushed reading it on top of all my other homework and because it was definitely ahead of my reading comprehension level, it wasn't my favorite.

7th grade language arts

now, a bit of a disclaimer here, this was the year that i was in language arts with the guy i had a crush on and one of my close friends at the time. so, i didn't really pay that much attention to begin with. we read quite a few books in this class, but I'm not sure if i remember all of them. again, this was a double period.

i think the first book we read was freak the mighty. i remember not liking this book because i felt like i was missing something. there was definitely some kind of metaphor or something in there that i was supposed to get but because i was literally twelve i didn't get it and i didn't find the meaning in it. theres nothing more frustrating than reading a book that you dont understand.

after that I'm pretty sure we read the wave. it was explained to us that the wave is supposed to symbolize how the n*zis came to power and all that stuff, and while we all knew this, i dont think we really Understood it. (probably because we were 12). we all kinda saw it as a joke and thought it was funny. i think that if i read it now i would be like. “well shit this is really interesting” but 12 year old me wanted to make fun of it with the rest of my class.

i think we read seed folks next. this was another book that just went over all of our heads. its about how a garden changes a whole bunch of peoples lives which is like, super interesting. but none of us got it and were like “lol this is stupid” so much so that we actually stopped reading it. like my teacher stopped having us read it.

I'm fairly certain the last book we read was the miracle worker. a lot of us had had to read parts of it before that class so we were all kinda familiar with it already. i vaguely remember some kind of obnoxious class joke about the book that was probably rude. i remember finding it interesting, but there were so many activities we did about the book that i lost interest.

8th grade honors reading

this class was A Trip. i liked the teacher, but she was a little out there. its unclear whether she got fired or just didn't come back after that year. i had a lot of fun in her class but it was usually because we all bonded over hating the assigned reading.

i dont remember what order we read the books in and i dont remember if this was all of them, but to the best of my recollection this is what we read

we definitely read romeo and juliet. by the time you're in 8th grade, everyone knows the story of romeo and juliet, so it wasn't like that suspenseful or a surprise or anything. but we had to act the reading out. yes we had to act out romeo and juliet. with burger king crowns. and wrapping paper swords. clearly the teacher was trying to have fun with us, and it was fun fun for awhile but it got old. especially when you got participation points taken off your grade if you didn't read for once of the characters (which is massively unfair because not everyone wants to get up in front of a class in a paper crown holding a wrapping paper tube and read in old english when you're 13 but whatever).

we also definitely read animal farm. it was another book that went right over our heads (or, mine at least). i didn't actually really understand it until i had to read the communist manifesto for ap euro senior year. and our teacher talked in a bad russain accent the entire time? i could barely keep the characters straight, let alone analyze the underlying message and all that. now i might actually like it since I'm a history major and have a decent background on the russian revolution, but at 13? no thanks.

the one book that everyone hated (including the teacher herself) was farewell to manzanar. it was a memoir about a young girl growing up in the japanese internment camps and looking back on her life and stuff like that. the story itself was very interesting and we all learned a lot from it. but the person who wrote it did not know how to write. it was confusing, some chapters made no sense, and none of us generally knew what was going on. we had to finish the book because we were the honors class, but the regular class got to stop after chapter 6.

i think we only read 4 books that year and the fourth one was the outsiders. this was one of two books that i actually liked the entirely of my public school education. i kinda vibed with it when we were reading it and then i vibes with it more once i got to high school and rediscovered it. it was just a good book, pretty solid, good themes, fantastic.

9th grade honors english

i absolutely hated this class. hands down the worst teacher i ever had. she was one of those that should have retired 20 years ago but was still teaching for some reason. and she hated kids. legitimately. that was the first time i got a c and it took my parents a long time to realize that it wasn't because of me, it was because the teacher was absolute shit. the only thing that made that class bearable was the fact that my friend was in there and so was this guy that totally like her so he would flirt with her pretty incessantly and it was Hilarious.

we read so many books that year and i hated all of them. a lot of them were like greek dramas and plays? like we read oedipus rex and julius caesar and antigone. and i hated all of them because the teacher made me hate reading and made it seem like a chore.

by far the worst was the old man and the sea. i hated that book, hemingway was terrible. i struggled to find any kind of meaning in it and connected all of my responses to the bible because my teacher loved it when people did that.

we read inherit the wind and to kill a mockingbird and all quiet on the western front which were the only books i found remotely interesting. but i still hated them because i knew that we would have to do her reading quizzes which were impossible so it was pointless to read the book anyway.

and we also read a raisin in the sun. i dont remember what this was even about except that there was some kind of insurance money involved. but by this point we were all really done with our teachers shit and my one friend legitimately said during class “but, ms. [name] if you put a raisin in the sun, doesn't it just get more raisiny?”

10th grade ap english language and composition (american lit)

i loved this class and the teacher but i hated all the assigned reading because we read it for the ap test. everything you read was in the context of having to find themes and shit to write about on the ap. so i didn't really get any of the books for that reason. i think we only read three and they were the scarlet letter, the crucible, and the great gatsby. i kind wish i paid more attention to gatsby and i think i would like it more now but at the time i detested it. we also had to read grapes of wrath over the summer and i hated that. i wanna read books to read them, not to come into school and write essays on them. also the ending was weird and i hated it.

11th grade honors (british lit)

another bad year of english, not quite as bad as freshman year, but still bad. still hated it. i outlined many fics in that class. the teacher did not like me and i did not like her. she also talked in this weird fake almost british but not quite accent that sometimes still haunts my nightmares. she was also one of those backwards feminists who claims they're a feminist but still was sexist in her favorites and the way that she treated people in the class?? after english i had math and my friend (the same girl who said the thing about raisins freshman year) and some others would complain to our math teacher about our english teacher. math was essentially a support group for english where we would discuss answers to reading checks.

over the summer we read 1984, which, cool concept (esp right now) but i hated knowing that i had to find some kind of deep meaning in it because i was going to have to write an essay on it as soon as i came back to school.

from there i think we read beowulf which was interesting. i dont know if we actually read the whole thing or just excerpts but again, i hated looking for meaning.

we read a tale of two cities which was like the one book i actually wanted to read because i am a huge fan of the shadow hunters book serieses and will and tessa quote that book all the time. i think if i had read it to read it it would have been better but first, dickens is wordy and weird and second i dont really wanna have to search out symbolism while I'm reading because its required.

we read macbeth, which i just didn't like. idk why. i just kinda thought it was stupid. i dont really have an explanation for this one. i think it was because we read it in the old english and that confused me a lot of the time.

and we read jane eyre. the only thing i remember from jane eyre was “pathetic fallacy” which is where the mood of the scene is reflected in the weather. i dont wanna dissect a book like that. and also my teacher referred to the book as “jane” but she said it “jAAYYneeE” which was annoying.

12th grade ap lit

dear god. this class. i had issues with this class. our teacher was something. everyone was afraid of him. e v e r y o n e. he ran detention and didn't know how to match his clothes and wore skinny ties. he had three swell bottles the he would bring with him to school every day. people claimed he used to be in a rock band and that was why his voice was so high pitched and weird. some said his wife left him, others said he had a kid. we were genuinely confused by him. he didn't teach, he yelled at you for doing things wrong without giving any instructions on how he actually wanted it done. he made college out to be some big scary thing where we would all be trampled. but mostly, he was an existentialist.

we had to read song of solomon over the summer. i hated it. i didn't hate it because of the messages and all that stuff, no the book itself was good and toni morrison is a great author. i just hated the fact that there was graphic description of incest, necrophilia, or sex at least once every 5-10 pages. i didn't wanna read that. and it turned me off the book. so when he asked us if we liked the book when the year started i said no and i argued with him about it. and he hated me for the entire year.

next i think we read waiting for godot. which was absolutely terrible. its literally a play where nothing happens. it would have been funny except that i knew i was gonna have to write an essay on it. how do you write an essay on a play where nothing happens? literally all of our discussions about it were about existentialism and it was terrible.

we read the metamorphosis, which everyone hated cause it could have been written in like 4 sentences. and our teacher thought he was So Clever for assigning it to us. he thought it was the biggest joke. and he went on and on about how its about existentialism and blah blah. the book would have been funny had he not only discussed it in regards to existentialism.

i think next was hamlet. i would have like hamlet had we not discussed it only through the lens of existentialism. its a good play, but i hated it because of the way he talked about it. even now, i only like it to make fun of the way he liked it. my friend and i send hamlet memes to each other all the time but only cause they remind us of our teacher.

one flew over the cuckoos nest. the second and final book that i actually liked my entirety of school. i dont know why i liked it, but it was just a good book. our teacher also had some kind of weird cowboy trope thing that he thought mcmurphy fell under which i thought was hilarious. the essay i wrote on that book was the only one he wrote “nice job” on and i still have it somewhere

my friend claims that we also read the stranger. i dont really remember what that book was about except some guy shot some people. there was definitely something in it that i didnt get.

anyway in conclusion required reading ruins books. when i told my creative writing advisor that i out of all the books i read for school i only like the outsiders and one flew over the cuckoos nest she was like “yeah, english teachers really ruin books for students”

#this is a very long post #saph screams #english #books n shit #english teachers are so hit or miss #and even if they're good teachers #that doesn't mean that you'll like the books

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whats-the-story-tc · 5 years ago

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17th of December, 2019

"The One with the Last English of the Year"

-------------------------------------------------------

Before I begin this post, I'd like to clarify a couple things.

1, My native tongue isn't English, neither am I, nor anyone mentioned in these posts, from an English-speaking country, unless specifically stated. Things I quote might get a bit lost in translation, or not mean the same thing as in English, so if something isn't quite clear, feel free to drop a message my way.

2, I learn the actual English language as a separate subject 5 lessons a week. We have them (and German) joint with the other class in our year, in mixed groups according to skill. Those are not what the posts are about.

3, I call V an English teacher, and her subject English so you understand me better. In reality, she doesn't teach this one subject to my class, but two. There's Literature, which Monday and Tuesday posts are about, and then there's Grammar separately, mentioned in Friday posts. These two are the same category, but separate subjects.

+1, Class system over here is way different from that of the US. Here, you get put in a class with random idiots when you're a freshman, and you see these very same idiots in every single class for the rest of high school. That's why I keep mentioning the same people. Every class has a designated homeroom teacher, who is responsible for that class. Ours is a bit of a messy person and not always here. V helps her (and us) out quite often, which is something she chose to do herself sometime around the end of last year.

And now that we're all settled, let's get down to business.

-------------------------------------------------------

Another day, another flannel. I've been waiting to say this a while.

The folks from the other class mentioned in the morning that V wasn't in today, which someone defended with "she wasn't here yesterday either", and I think my heart sunk into my stomach. The feeling scared me. It's only been a few days. Why do I already miss her so much? That can't be right. Yet as soon as I got out of my first class, I scanned the corridors with my eyes every half a minute to find her. And I did, a bit after the bell rang. If my heart could sigh, it would've.

After the second lesson was over, me and a friend of mine met V on the stairs as I was explaining the friend something. When we greeted her, she looked at us with this really gentle and peaceful little smile, like she actually liked seeing us around. That one look killed my weekend doubts of "Do I really want to do this? Shouldn't I just give up?" and I was sure yet again that even if I wanted to, I couldn't let her go just yet. As we reached our other friends, I hid my face away into my scarf. I wanted to keep that happiness for myself. Even in Physics, during Cynical Twat's presentation on something I didn't even understand, I kept thinking of that one smile. I don't understand how I write A-s from Physics most of the time, as I either fall asleep (the teacher's voice is very soft) or I daydream about V as the lab is next door to the teachers' lounge, and I usually see her before class.

When V swung into class the next period, I could already see that she was doing much better. She came in smiling, even though she had to start the lesson off with refuting some rumours circling around about her recent mood, that got back to her. She assured us, that no, she wouldn't be handing the class over to someone else, no, she wasn't quitting or leaving, no, she wasn't fatally sick and no, we wouldn't be free from her that easily. She also added that her moodiness and the crying before class (see: 6th December) doesn't have to do with us, "it just that when thing aren't on you, and the stakes are high, and there's a lot of money in question, it can get really frustrating." So those were frustration tears. I knew they were. I wish I didn't know the feeling so well. But I'm really proud of her for speaking out about this and addressing everything with her head raised high.

Although the friend from earlier (who I'll name Flower Friend) tried to convince her to talk about William Blake's "The Tyger", also included in our textbook, as she found it interesting, V quickly refused. "Not because I'm too stupid for it", she said, but explained that the poem contains a lot of period-specific symbolism which would be quite hard to understand, plus we've already passed the "abroad" part of the Age of Enlightenment's literature, so we went on with our curriculum.

During the lesson, V was all smiles and laughs, which inspired all of us to speak more, and sat in the strangest positions on top of her desk while speaking. I could barely contain my laughter when she spent a good couple minutes talking with her knee pulled up to her chest. This woman...

Towards the end of the lesson, she asked if anyone wanted to share the short essays we wrote yesterday. As time was running out, I was trying to explain mine quickly, but as I'm nearly not as eloquent in speech, and my approach was heavily psychological (and involved a bit of acting, which earned a few laughs from the class), I got a bit awkward. I'm proud I could hold eye contact with her pretty well for most of it, and only looked away at the acted out bits, but I'm not surprised that when I looked back, she was grinning, and told me "I got a bit lost by the end of it."

I finally managed to recite the poem I told you about (the love confession one) after class, and it went pretty well. I wasn't so nervous that I couldn't look at her, so... I guess I'm getting a bit more comfortable with her attention on me. Afterwards, I went up to Lesbian Friend and her (bi) friend, and she told me "That woman (V) will be the death of me.", to which I said "That makes the two of us. Or three?" I glanced at the other girl. She nodded sheepishly. Officially confirmed: V is irresistible. And at the end of that break, as I stood by the doorway talking to someone and looked outside, V was passing by at the very same time and looked at me. What's with all the looking today?

The last time I saw her, as she was leaving the other class after her lesson with them, she said goodbye with "Send my love to everyone." She's done an awful lot of quiet slipping-outside lately, so it felt pretty good to see her fully "back".

Today's what we call the "Christmas concert", and all faculty are expected to attend. If I didn't fuck up my throat last year, which I'm still trying to fix, I'd be singing in the choir with Debate Friend and Flower Friend now. Hope they have fun. I remember V attending last year and watching us sing. I think she was smiling. I hope she has fun, too.

~ S ♡

[Every story I share here, no matter how specific I get with my wording, depicts actual events from my own life.]

#tc #tcc #teacher crush community #female tc #female teacher crush

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fortisfiliae · 6 years ago

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Against the Odds - Part 3 [James Potter x reader]

Prompt: College AU ❃ Jocks are disgusting. Too good looking, too aware of it, too drunk and too dumb. Or so you thought. This is the third part for @marvelcapsicle‘s writing challenge.

A/n: Since tumblr doesn’t show posts with links in the tags anymore, you can find previous parts on my masterlist, linked in my bio. If you need to zoom in on the texts just click on the picture to do so. GIF is not mine.

Warnings: Swearing, sexual themes, fluff and a curly devil that will hunt your dreams

Word count: 3.2k

Part 3 - You up?

Thursday:

Half past nine in the evening, you had just typed the last word of your essay for English class and had clicked on the save-symbol when Louise entered your room, along with her boyfriend Mike. He was a frat guy. Jockish as hell. Maybe one of the reasons you hadn’t liked those type of guys.

You weren't sure why they had decided to come to your and Louise’s room – it was certainly too small to miss anything the other person said or did and Louise had told you countless times how lucky Mike was to have a room for himself at the frat.

Anyway, you weren't going to ask them because they had decided to watch a movie on Louise's laptop and after arguing for twenty minutes, had finally picked something out.

You were on your phone, texting with Remus, who had just started telling you things about his personal life and that he would go to the cinema with Sirius in a bit when you suddenly heard suspicious huffing from across the room. You turned over and caught Louise and Mike kissing. Vigorously. Not only that, but things were moving underneath their blanket and it didn't look like they were folding their hands to pray.

“Guys,” you said. “You know I can hear and see you from here.”

No answer. They just ignored you.

“Louise! What the fuck are you doing?”

She tore herself away from her boyfriend and took a breath before answering: “Sorry, Y/N. But you must know, I've just gotten off my period and we haven't-”

“Oh my god. Shut up, please. You can't be serious. Why don't you-”

Before you could finish your sentence, her mouth was on his again and now it seemed that she was climbing onto him.

“Hello?”

They ignored you again and now you heard something unzipping.

“That's it,” you said as you got up. “I'm leaving. And fuck you both. Or don't. Whatever.”

You rushed out the room and stood in the hallway, already typing a text to Remus, trying to ask him if he could help you out. Wait. He was going out with Sirius. So that wasn't an option. Shit. You walked over to the common room and sat down on one of the mouldy couches. Looking across the area you stared at the microwave for a minute, contemplating if sleeping here was the only alternative you had. Oh please no. It was gross and cold and people would notice. There was someone else you knew. Not that you preferred that. But it was worth a try, wasn't it?

So, yeah. Awkward.

Oh god. Stupid. No one would believe that. Was there a way to unsend texts?

Okay, okay. Okay! Keep calm. You took a deep breath, smelling even more of the gunk that had built up on the kitchen counter, and stood up. Everything was better than spending the night between the remnants of pizza and hot pockets. You caught yourself walking in circles and finally brought up the courage to leave the dorm.

It was chilly outside, but you enjoyed the cool breeze as you stood on the pavement and pressed the front of your shoe into the concrete until it hurt. A car turned up on the far end of the street. Blinding headlights came closer with the engine revving until it slowed down and stopped right in front of you. A black and sleek Audi whatever-model. Rich parents – what else had you expected?

Last chance to run back in. He could still be a serial killer, right? But he had brought you a sandwich yesterday. Were you really just using food as refutation?

The window rolled down and James' curly head poked out. “You coming?”

Well, curly hair and a sub would do as refutation for tonight.

You got in, closed the door and belted up before you finally looked over.

“Hi,” you said hesitantly.

“Hey. So... Drama at the dorm?”

“Yeah. And I’m sorry. That I asked you for this, you know.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I was at the bar and wanted to go home anyway. Actually, I'm glad you did.”

He put in the gear, started driving and looked like he wanted to say something but didn’t. There was a tiny smile on his lips that could only make you guess what he was thinking before you put your eyes on the road.

“So um... Who’s your roommate then? Do I know her boyfriend?” James asked after a while.

“Her name’s Louise. Her boyfriend is Mike. Mike um, Broogler or something? A frat guy, I’m sure you know him.”

“Brockler, yeah I know him. A frat guy, huh?” he grinned.

“He is a guy and part of the fraternity. Frat guy.”

“The way you say it makes it sound like that’s something bad.”

He was obviously joking, the tone of his voice still light and cheery, but there could have been a bit of truth behind his words.

“I didn’t mean it that way. Sorry if I hurt your feelings,” you said. “Frat guy.”

He chuckled as he backed into a parking space in front of the fraternity. “Frat guy is saving your ass tonight, so a bit more respect please.”

“Sorry mister frat guy, sir. I apologize.”

You followed James into the house, which had all the lights off and was empty, contrary to your prior beliefs.

“Boys are all out at the bar. Except for Mike,” he quipped.

The house looked completely different than it had when you were at the party. Classy and strict, a lot of old dark wood embellished the floors and furniture. You peeked into the living room and it was actually quite cosy without the beer pong table and blaring music.

James walked up to the wide staircase on the end of the hallway and turned around. “Rooms are upstairs.”

“Uh yeah, I figured.”

So there it was. The moment you had to tell him that you hadn’t intended the same thing he maybe had thought of. There was a nasty lump in your throat. How should you bring it up? Maybe he wasn’t even thinking about it and you would just burst in with the unasked-for info that you didn’t want to sleep with him tonight.

“Hey um,” James began. “Just so you know, I won’t try anything. I can sleep in the living room if you want.”

God bless.

“Thanks,” you said and felt a wave of heat on your cheeks. Where has your confidence gone? Get a grip.

“Okay, let me show you my room then,” James said and offered his hand.

He led you up to the first floor that had doors to the bedrooms all around. They all had the initials of their names on the doors. His one was the third in line. JP in gold with a little lightning bolt next to it.

You pointed at it and asked: “What does that stand for?”

“I’m fast,” he said and smiled smugly. “Everyone in the team gets a nickname.”

“And yours is Bolt?” you asked as he opened the door.

“Flash,” he winked. “Excuse the mess.”

James went to pick up a bunch of dirty clothes from the floor. “I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“No big deal, it’s not so bad.”

It really wasn’t so bad. The room was probably the same size as your shared one was, but with a private bathroom. The dream. His bed stood in the corner of the room - white sheets, very chic. On the opposite side was a sideboard with a medium sized TV on it, next to it was the door to the bathroom. His desk stood right by the window, a wardrobe to its left, a small fridge to its right. He’d hung lots of little photos of him and his friends and football fan articles on the walls. It was a bit messy, but it had character.

“Your room is really nice,” you said as you walked around and looked at the pictures.

“Thanks! Make yourself at home. I’m just putting the clothes away and I’m gonna take a shower real quick, I still smell like bar.”

“Sure.”

He closed the door to the bathroom behind himself and left you alone in his room. High level of trust. As you heard him turn on the water you walked over to the other side slowly, letting your fingers run over the sheets of the bed when you went by.

On the sideboard with the TV was his football helmet, freshly cleaned and shiny as a new penny. You noticed a small ball lying right beside it. The one he had gotten at the blood drive yesterday. It still had dents from his fingernails all over it. Looked like he had been more nervous than you’d thought. You smiled and dug your own finger into it, leaving one additional notch, before trying to switch on the TV. It would be nice to have some background sounds and avoid awkward silence later, but the remote was nowhere to be seen.

After looking at the sideboard, his desk and bed you went for the nightstand. Intrusive? Probably, but maybe it was in there.

You sat down on the bed and opened the drawer. No remote. But some other things. A small notebook and a nibbled off pen, as well as a framed picture of two people. They looked like husband and wife - both had grey hair, were probably in their seventies and smiled kindly into the camera. His grandparents? Well, since it was in there and not on the wall, he probably didn't want to talk about it.

You closed the drawer and swung your legs up onto the bed. Sitting, waiting, wishing. Wishing for confidence and poise and that your palms wouldn't start sweating every time James looked at you. Right now it felt like his whole room was staring you down. Like it was eating you up. But not in a bad way, it was a welcoming feeling to sit there and gaze over the bits and bobs of his belongings.

When you noticed that the water had stopped running you took out your phone to try and look like you hadn't been spying. A few moments later James returned in a plain white shirt and grey sweatpants. Quite the look on him admittedly. His hair was still wet, some drops of water running down the side of his face to his jawline and even further down to his chin. God damn, you couldn't take your eyes off him. He must have done this on purpose.

“You good here?” he asked as he ran his hand through the wet mess on his head.

“Uh-huh, I am. Was trying to find the remote, but didn't.”

“Oh um. I think I know where it is,” James said and threw himself onto the bed, half lying, half crawling and stuck his arm under the pillow. “There we go.”

He turned on the TV and switched channels for a while until he stopped on the news. The news?! You both sat in silence pretending to be interested in whatever the reporter was talking about. Note to self: There can be awkward silence even if you have background sound.

Trying to think of something to say turned out to be harder than you'd thought. What do you talk about with a guy that had taken you home because you had asked him to, while he lay next to you, smelling like a pinewood full of sunshine and fairies? The fact that there was an inch of skin showing between his shirt and pants wasn’t helping either.

“So-” - “Do you-”

After minutes of silence, you had both decided to start talking in the same second. Both of you laughed at your mutual awkwardness and James sat up straight.

“Sorry, what did you want to say?” he asked.

“Nothing really,” you admitted. “I was just... I don't know. Go on, please.”

He grinned like he was glad that you were more nervous than him. Looked like it gave him a confidence boost. As if he needed one.

“I wanted to say that I can give you clothes to sleep in. You didn’t bring anything in your handbag, did you?”

“No, I didn't really have time to pack when I was running from the fucking in my room. But it's fine, you don't -”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You don't want to sleep in jeans. No one wants that.”

“Yeah, I guess I don't.”

He crawled off from the bed and walked over to the wardrobe. “I'm afraid I don't have anything sexy,” he joked. “But a frat shirt will do I think.”

He laid it down next to you before sitting on the bed again.

“Thanks, James. I'm gonna go change in the bathroom.”

“Sure. I put out a toothbrush too if you want to brush your teeth.”

What a mom.

The bathroom was small but still better than one on the hallway. You took off your clothes and put on the shirt James had given you. It looked huge on you. Dark red with the fraternity name Kappa Delta Rho on it, it reached almost down to your knees, like a really unflattering dress. It was soft and smelled nice though. Not like pine wood and fairies, but sweeter. Clean, fresh cotton with a hint of washed out cologne.

The toothbrush he had been talking about laid next to the sink, still unpacked and new. Did a stock of dental hygiene products mean he had people here often?

After you were done in the bathroom you went back to James' room, where he was lying on his bed again, watching TV with one hand behind his head, the other one tucked into his waistband. This time, it seemed he couldn’t take his eyes off you. A dumbfounded expression on his face as you walked towards him and the way he eyed you up and down made you instantly feel better about yourself. There was your confidence boost and you had very much needed it.

He cleared his throat when you sat down on the bed. “Well. If you want to sleep now I can go downstairs and -”

“No,” you interrupted him, maybe a bit too eagerly.

“Sorry?”

“I… I think you can stay. If you want. I mean, it’s your room. That wouldn’t be fair, to invite myself over and send you down to sleep on the couch.”

“Oh.” He looked more confused now, his hand wandered to the back of his neck. “I mean yeah. I’m glad to stay if you want that.”

You smiled, lifted the blanket to crawl underneath it and lay down sideways to face him. “I think that’s what I want, yes.”

He got under the blanket as well and said: “We can watch a movie if you want.”

Half an hour into “Baby Driver”, you had caught James looking at you twice. But the only reason you caught him was that you had looked over as well. It was absurd really, how every move he made got your heart rate up to 180. Every time he breathed in deeply or stretched out his legs you thought he would reach over and hold your hand. And suddenly, after checking his phone, he did. You were so focused on coming off relaxed that you didn’t even grip it back. It must have felt like you were dead until you remembered that you weren’t. You held his palm tighter and felt his thumb running over the side of your index finger, which made your stomach tingle.

“James?” you asked.

“Yes?”

“You’re really nice. I mean really,” you said even though you didn’t know where those words were coming from. “You know at first I thought you were just this guy, screaming with a beer keg on his shoulder. And I thought you were cocky, which… You are when I think about it.”

He laughed lowly. “That started as a compliment and ended as an insult.”

“I know, sorry” you bantered. “But you’ve been a real gentleman, very sweet and respectful and I didn’t expect that. Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, wearing a smile that showed he was really full of himself right then, but that didn’t matter because his face neared yours now.

A kiss so sweet, it would have literally swept you off your feet if you hadn’t been lying down already. His lips, soft and mellow, skimmed over your own and it felt like listening to music; easy and pleasant as you found your rhythm and moved to the imaginary beat. His damp hair tickled your forehead until a simple peck brought your song to an end and a foolish grin seemed to refine it.

“How does it feel?” he asked after some seconds of silence.

“What do you mean?”

“Being in a frat, wearing a frat-shirt, kissing a frat guy in his frat-bed?”

“Oh shut up,” you laughed pushed him off by his shoulder.

He countered and started tickling you, to which you started screaming, turned around and kicked his legs.

“Whoa, easy Rambo,” James chortled and held you tight.

“No mercy for a tickler,” you answered and let your hand rest on his arm. “You’re a fool, James. I like you.”

The next time you opened your eyes was when a ray of sunshine beamed right into your face. You tried to shift but couldn’t until you noticed that James’ arm was still around your waist and held onto you even in his sleep. His breaths were slow and deep, his skin soft on yours and you could have easily spent the rest of your day in this position.

That was until you took your phone from the nightstand and checked the time. 9:17! Shit. You had forgotten to set an alarm last night and your first class started at 10. You had to leave right now, or you wouldn’t make it on time. So you shuffled away from his grip, got up, put your clothes on and went out the door.

While on your way to the dorm you took the time to shoot James a message:

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grindellore · 6 years ago

Text

fanfiction: scandalous

Fandom: Harry Potter | Fantastic Beasts Pairing: Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald Characters: Albus Dumbledore, Gellert Grindelwald Rating: M Warning: Period-typical homophobia (and how to deal with it); suggestiveness

Summary: Late October 1907 at Hogwarts. An unexpected letter and a surprise visit.

Written for @ginagemeni on twitter and tumblr (who I don’t seem to be able to tag...) as part of the Grindeldore Valentine Exchange. I hope you’ll like this!

Proofread by @scamanderthehufflepuff on tumblr for intelligibility of the translations to English that are part of this fic—thank you so much! Of course all mistakes remain mine.

Also available on my AO3 (see the link in my profile).

Oh, do you care I still feel for you So aware What should be lost is there —Nightwish: Beauty of the Beast: Long Lost Love

Albus Dumbledore kept ogling the letter that sat so innocently on his desk. At first he hadn’t paid it much attention, too preoccupied with his other mail: The invitation to the next Wizengamot meeting; three letters from parents who were worried about their children’s performances in his Transfiguration class; five letters from academic friends with whom he was writing articles for journals all over Europe. The final letter had seemed like a specimen copy of some journal for which he had written an article, so he had disregarded it until he had finished his other correspondence. The wax seal, however, couldn’t have been more ominous: Two Gs facing from each other, with an inscribed equilateral triangle surrounding an incircle and a stylised wand that separated both the Gs and the legs of the triangle.

For the Greater Good. He would have recognised that phrase everywhere. After all he was the one who had coined it. The Deathly Hallows symbol was equally familiar even though the way in which the wand was stylised was a new development.

Albus stood, pacing around in his study, debating with himself if he should open the letter. The last time he hadn’t, Gellert had sent him a Howler telling the whole school what a bloody coward Albus Dumbledore was for running away from—and that was where Albus had cut him off with a Silencing Charm.

All in all, Albus had reason to believe that there was some variation of the Tracking Spell on this letter, too. Perhaps Albus’s worries were unnecessary as well. The last time Gellert had simply sent him an article from a German Muggle newspaper. The only sentence in his own handwriting had been a scribbled “See why our mission is still necessary?” at the end of the article, but Albus had still felt as if someone had punched him in the gut.

Our mission. He still thought of it as their mission. Albus had been torn between the bile that rose within him whenever he thought about Gellert’s ruthless methods and the traitorous flutter in his gut.

Reaching a decision, Albus returned to his desk and broke the seal. He was only embarrassing himself if he tried to run away from Gellert when Gellert knew he was running away from him.

It was exactly what Albus had initially thought: A journal. Just like the newspaper article, it was in German, but this time there were more annotations in Gellert’s handwriting. A longer passage was crossed out, with a comment next to it that said: “Only read if you are dying to learn more about the subtleties of German grammar. (Really, just skip over it. It’s boring.)”

Albus sat behind his desk, flipped to the first sentence Gellert had underlined and started to read: “But even if I were to judge a moralist, it wouldn’t cross my mind to use his private life in order to fabricate a dichotomy.” He realised that he wouldn’t understand the context if he didn’t skip back to the beginning ... and that it was still Gellert’s opinion that was more interesting to him than the writing itself.

The desire to discuss his reading with Gellert even after eight years made him feel strangely nostalgic. Gellert seemed to feel the same; why else would he continue to send him annotated articles?

Albus read the essay Gellert had marked from the beginning. He noted that it was about the same controversy as the article Gellert had last sent him: One Maximilian Harden, a journalist, had accused a circle of close friends of the German emperor of homosexual conduct. His prime targets were Prussian diplomat Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, and General Kuno von Moltke. Moltke’s lawyer had let his client make the mistake to file civil libel against Harden—and a mistake it was; that much was clear to Albus after the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Albus had been thirteen when Wilde was tried. Perhaps it was a good thing he had been at Hogwarts at the time, surrounded by other third years who weren’t all that interested in Muggle affairs. Still, the trial was one of the few things that had made it into the wizarding press, even if it was filed as “something you should know in case a Muggle touches upon it in your presence”. It had filled Albus with a queasy feeling for weeks until he had been able to acknowledge to himself that he, too, might be inclined towards men.

He had picked up courage soon afterwards. In the end, he was still a Gryffindor. But he knew it had been harder for Gellert; Gellert, who had known earlier than him; who had had a hard time to pretend he fit into Durmstrang’s straitjacket of discipline when he really didn’t. It was, perhaps, why Gellert was so harsh and also why he was so vulnerable.

Albus knew he was the only person who had ever seen the full extent of Gellert’s vulnerability. In turn, Gellert was the only person who knew how vulnerable Albus really was. And that was why he could never come to hate Gellert; not truly. Albus had seen his weakness and he had started to love him for it; had started to feel oddly protective of the beautiful, uncompromising boy he had met when he was seventeen.

It was also why he was willing to put up with a lengthy essay in fairly difficult German without even trying to apply a Translation Charm. Gellert hat sent this to him in German, so Albus needed to read it in German.

He soon realised that Karl Kraus, the author of the essay he was reading, was, in fact, defending Kuno von Moltke regardless of whether it was true that he was homosexual: “I’m not a political writer and therefore I am not to investigate if men of politics have adjusted their sexual urge towards skirts or towards trousers. But even if I were to judge a moralist, it wouldn’t cross my mind to use his private life in order to fabricate a dichotomy.”

Albus’s heart skipped a beat. He had always wondered why Gellert had never tried to capitalise on their connection; why he had never pointed out that it was, in fact, Albus who had penned a larger part of his ideology.

Once they had believed their connection was a sacred thing; a bond between two souls that had recognised each other as equals in every way that mattered. Now Albus wondered if Gellert still thought the same; if he, perhaps, didn’t want to throw mud at the memory of what they had had. Then again, Albus might as well be a sentimental fool who needed to see Gellert as the ruthless, manipulative creature he had proven to be time and time again.

Albus decided not to read the whole of the essay. Instead he skipped to the next passage Gellert had marked. Gellert’s commentary read: “Kraus and Harden used to be friends until Kraus realised Harden would do anything to discredit the circle of courtiers surrounding the Emperor that he considers incompetent. Perhaps they are, but Kraus is a ‘the end doesn’t justify the means’ person.”

Interesting, Albus thought. It was particularly interesting because Gellert was the epitome of teleological ethics: To him, the end had always justified the means, and Albus had no reason to assume he had changed in any way. Then again, Albus wasn’t much different; only he had always been borne down by the burden of utilitarian ethics that one had to weigh one’s own good intentions against all possible consequences.

He sighed, returning his focus to the passage Gellert had underlined: “We never had any business with someone who used the existence of a homicidal paragraph of criminal justice for blackmail the political guise of which adds hypocrisy to sheer turpitude; who believes ‘to be allowed to stoop to anything in order to make such people impossible’ when it would at the most be allowed to stoop to anything in order to make such people possible.”

To make such people possible? Had he understood that correctly? Albus squinted. Did the author really mean what Albus thought he meant? He decided to read on.

“He charged interest from the truly tragic disgrace of a morality that permits to treat the spinal cord as a piece of incriminating evidence. He is the culprit of a contemporary inquisition that makes us shudder as we hear it declare its resolution ‘to allow the evidence that the private suitor was particularly averse to the female sex’. That fiendish justice that exorcises in bedchambers, that punishes deviations from the ‘norm’ and that condemns dear life to death by the spermatic cord. That ugly presumptive evidence that adheres to the code of criminal procedure of gossip, that provokes a verdict on behalf of His Majesty Cant and, in the sense of a base joke, only accepts the one as ‘normal’ who is seen with a woman Unter den Linden but takes the one who goes out with a man for a paederast and the one who walks alone for an onanist.”

“Feels good to read that, doesn’t it?”

Albus stared at Gellert’s note under the passage. Gellert was right, of course; it did feel good to read another person’s sardonic defence of loving outside “the norm”—and to see the inverted commas in which Kraus had put the latter phrase. He also understood the implications of that passage for Gellert: I don’t want to be judged based on whom I love rather than on what I do. There had been no need for him to write that anywhere; they had talked about this for long enough.

Don’t worry, Albus thought to himself, remembering all the atrocities he had heard about Gellert since their ways had parted. They are going to judge you based on what you did.

Still, there was a traitorous part of himself who wanted to hold Gellert just like he had held him then; who wanted to tell him that even the Muggles would look at the power of his magic rather than at anything else. It was foolish, of course; the impulse of a fool who really should know better by now. And he did. He knew exactly how relentless Gellert was in the pursuit of his ambitions to overthrow the Statute of Secrecy and to rule over Muggles in order to save them from their own self-destructiveness. It had been Gellert’s relentlessness, Gellert’s absolute willingness to sacrifice everything—even Ariana, even them—for his political objectives that had appalled Albus in the end.

But he still loved him. That was exactly what made every piece of news about Gellert’s deeds so painful for Albus. Despite everything, despite his better judgement, he couldn’t root out the love he felt for Gellert. Maybe he could turn it to hate and tell himself there was nothing else anymore, but he would only be lying to himself. Albus Dumbledore might be a fool, but even he wasn’t that foolish.

Pushing those thoughts to the back of his mind, Albus focused on the underlined passages again: “Musical disposition is a suspicion, separate bedrooms are proof” ... That was all Gellert had underlined, adding the comment: “Ah, musical disposition. I suppose I should feel spoken to. How about you, dear Albus? Do you feel spoken to? I don’t think you should. You do like music, but your taste is horrible.”

The corners of Albus’s mouth twitched. Trust Gellert to distract you from your gloomy brooding with a joke. It was as if he had anticipated the line Albus’s thoughts would take... Then again, perhaps he had actually foreseen them. You never know with Seers, Albus thought with a fond smile and skipped to the next passage with a comment.

“And in this knavery the defendant makes a dart for the one whose effeminate nature is to be finally disclosed after battles, wounds and forty years as a soldier with the question if it isn’t true, demonstrably true that he enjoys eating sweets and takes chocolates with him to the theatre. And a justice that admits the inquest that the plaintiff used cosmetic products doesn’t apply the rouge of shame.”

On the one hand, it was horrible—the journalist accusing the long-serving soldier on the grounds of such trivial things as liking chocolates. On the other hand, there was Gellert’s comment: “Oh Albus, now you must feel spoken to. I never met a person quite as sweet-toothed as yourself. Then again, so should I. Never in my life have ever I felt the urge to apply rouge, but I do like black eyeshadow. We both stand convicted by these unshakable bits of evidence.” Albus snorted into his wispy beard. Expecting to find another witty comment, he skipped to the final passage Gellert had highlighted.

“But it isn’t true, it is a cruel lie devoid of all historical experience that ‘norm adversity’ disqualifies from the exercise of a public office.”

There was only the word “Exactly” in capital letters followed by three exclamation marks. Albus stared at it for a moment and was tempted to add a comment of his own, something like...

“Not just a lie but a rather careless miscalculation, especially in our cases.”

Albus whipped around in his chair. And there he was, perched on the window bench in his black travelling cloak, with messy golden locks and mesmerising blue eyes. Albus couldn’t look away.

“Wasn’t that what you were thinking?” Gellert’s soft mouth curled into an amused smile.

Albus glowered at him. He closed his agitated mind, shutting out his nosy ex-boyfriend with his complete lack of respect for another person’s privacy.

“Since when have you been listening in on my thoughts?” he asked.

“Oh ... Not for long.” Gellert regarded his fingernails with the disarming nonchalance of a person who had nothing to fear; who didn’t have a price on his head in several countries of Europe. “I Apparated to that strange forest as soon as I noticed you had broken the seal of my letter. Then I made myself invisible and walked right into the castle and to your study. You really should close the door if you want some privacy.”

“My door is always open to my students.” Albus gave him a piercing look. “It would never occur to either them or my colleagues to sneak into my study and use Legilimency on me.”

“I rather doubt they could do it without you noticing either.” Gellert grinned, full of the boyish pride of a young wizard who had managed a particularly complicated spell. Albus felt a pang of yearning flare through his body. Gellert was especially beautiful when he was like this; so proud of himself as if he had managed to pluck a forbidden fruit.

“What do you want?” Albus said as dismissively as possible. He couldn’t allow his feelings to win over his reason; not with all the disgusting things he had read about Gellert and his quest for more followers...

“Oh, I just want what I always want.” Gellert slid from the window bench and walked over to Albus’s desk. “There is only one thing in this whole castle that I want.” He sat on the desk angling his body towards Albus so one foot was still on the floor. Propping up his elbow on one knee, he glanced down at Albus under long, thick lashes. “You.”

Albus was sure Gellert had a specific set of postures and gazes committed to memory that made him look particularly appealing. This was definitely one of them. He had to fight down the urge to yank Gellert towards him by his travelling cloak...

Gellert smirked. Even with Albus’s mind closed so he couldn’t read it, he was still able to decipher Albus’s body language. Albus was sure his eyes had darkened for the fraction of a second and he was also sure his reaction hadn’t passed Gellert unnoticed.

“I think it’s time to close the door now,” Gellert said and pulled out a wand Albus hadn’t seen on him before. He knew what Gellert’s wand looked like, but this ... This looked like the wand on the seal of Gellert’s letter. His eyes widened.

“Is that...”

“Of course it is.” Gellert cast a series of rather exaggerated locking spells before he slid the wand back into the inner pocket of his cloak. Then he shrugged off the cloak, allowing it to pool behind him on the desk. He was wearing a blue shirt, black trousers and a black waistcoat with silver buttons.

“You don’t seem to value it as much as I thought you would if you put it away just like that,” Albus commented dryly.

“Ah, I think it’s safe here,” Gellert said nonchalantly. “You wouldn’t steal it from me. Besides, I didn’t lie when I said I would share it with you. You’d just need to come with me and…”

“That won’t happen,” Albus said gruffly.

“Your loss.” Gellert sighed. “Unfortunately it is also my loss.”

“Is that so?” Albus said. He managed to utter his words in a sardonic tone even though his heart was beating fast. “It was you who walked away.”

“It was you who didn’t come with me.” Gellert looked into his eyes.

“And you know exactly why.” Albus met Gellert’s gaze.

“Albus,” Gellert said softly. “It was an accident. I liked Ariana and I never meant for any more harm to come over your family.”

“You did mean to harm my brother.”

“He drew his wand on me, so I drew mine.”

“He was no match for you.”

“We were both hotheads and equally old.” Gellert frowned. “There was nothing unfair about duelling him.”

“You used an Unforgivable Curse on my own brother!” Albus stood in order to be on the same level as Gellert. He was getting angry.

“Yes, and I am sorry about that.”

Albus was taken off guard. Gellert wasn’t supposed to apologise.

“Like I said, we were both hotheads, and in my anger I went over the top.”

“You’re the most choleric person I have ever met.”

“Perhaps.” Gellert gave him a bittersweet smile.

“I only ever realised how imbalanced you really were when you attacked my brother with the Cruciatus Curse,” Albus pressed on.

“That was because you had been there to balance me before.”

Albus made a stifled noise in his throat. Gellert suddenly looked hopeful.

“You’re the person who grounds me, Albus. You’re the one who smooths out the raw edges of my self. That is one reason why I need you so much.”

“It’s too late, Gellert.” Albus felt tears welling up in his eyes. He tried to blink them away. “It’s too late.”

“It’s never too late.” Gellert held his gaze and continued: “The other reason is that I love you. It’s so hard to live without the man you love.”

“It really is.” Albus’s voice was shaky.

“Then come with me, Albus!” Gellert extended his hand for him to take. “You read the essay. Don’t you see how indispensable it still is to break the Statute of Secrecy? Both the judicial systems of the Muggles and our own are utterly misguided and must be replaced.”

“They must be reformed,” Albus said quietly. “I see that and I’m working towards it. But what you want is violence.”

“I want a revolution,” Gellert retorted. “Revolutionaries mustn’t shy away from violence if they want success. But I listened to you. I will only use the force I must to overcome my adversaries. Never more.” His voice was urgent. “Come, Albus! Take my hand.”

“I’m sorry, Gellert,” Albus said. There was regret in his voice. “I have chosen my path and it leads me away from you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gellert said mockingly. “The path of politics—of boring Wizengamot meetings and of having a lot of staying power.” He sneered. The handsome fullness of his lips twisted into a thin line. “With me you could have everything. Now. Together we would be unstoppable.”

“Gellert, I still love you but I don’t have any sympathies for your methods left.” Albus sighed. “You should know that by now.”

“I do,” Gellert whispered. He stepped closer. “I do, but that doesn’t mean I understand. Your brilliant thoughts—our wonderful discussions—our mutual desire to join our bodies just as we joined our minds ... To me that has always been the same. I don’t understand why you want to separate one from the other now.” Gellert’s outstretched hand cupped Albus’s cheeks. There was a raw vulnerability in his gaze. “I miss you so much.”

“I miss you too!” Albus choked out. He wrapped Gellert in his arms—despite himself; despite the nagging voice in his mind that told him he was making a mistake. Gellert responded immediately, cradling Albus’s head in his hands and pulling him down for a kiss. Albus tilted his head, kissing Gellert with abandon until he felt him melt against him, just like he was melting against Gellert’s mouth.

When Gellert came up for air, there was a dazed look on his face. His fingers started to stroke Albus’s cheek, then traced the shape of his lips.

“Your mouth is so soft under that beard.” He smiled. “I always liked your hair. It feels so nice and silky.”

The adoration on Gellert’s face had always confused Albus more than anything. He had always wondered what this unearthly handsome creature saw in him: Long face, lanky limbs, freckles all over his body and now a broken nose as well. But then Gellert looked at him like this, pointing out details he found beautiful and trains of thought he found particularly noteworthy. Gellert was good at giving compliments. Albus wasn’t.

“Kiss me again.” It was a raw whisper.

And Gellert did, hands roaming over his shoulders and back, working their way under the cream-coloured silk cloth Albus had tied around his throat in lieu of a cravat. As soon as Gellert had freed his throat, he kissed there too, sucking a lovebite on the soft flesh above Albus’s collarbone. Albus backed him against his desk, pulling their bodies as close as he could.

“I want you,” Gellert said in the same urgent tone in which he had asked Albus to come with him. “I want to sleep with you.” And this time Albus complied.

Notes:

The essay Gellert sends to Albus is “Maximilian Harden: Eine Erledigung” (“Maximilian Harden: A Dispatch”) by Austrian writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936) in the October 1907 issue of his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch). The text is in the public domain and the English translations are all mine.

Famously, Oscar Wilde’s downfall also started with him prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel in 1895. In Wilde v Queensberry evidence was collected that eventually led to Wilde’s own persecution, trial for “gross indecency with men” and eventual two-year prison sentence in Reading Gaol (1895-1897). Kuno von Moltke also tried to file criminal libel against Maximilian Harden but the court dismissed his lawyer’s attempt, making him resort to filing civil libel.

Unter den Linden (“Under the lime trees”) is the name of a famous boulevard in the centre of Berlin.

#grindeldore #albus dumbledore #gellert grindelwald #harry potter #fantastic beasts #grindeldorevalentineexchange #fanfiction #my fanfiction #katemarley #grindellore

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noahrussell · 3 years ago

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Meet: Noah Russell

"𝐼’𝓋𝑒 𝒷𝑒𝑒𝓃 𝓉𝓇𝓎𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝓉𝑜 𝒸𝑜𝓃𝓋𝒾𝓃𝒸𝑒 𝓂𝓎 𝓈𝒽𝒶𝒹𝑜𝓌 𝓉𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝐼’𝓂 𝓈𝑜𝓂𝑒𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓉𝒽 𝒻𝑜𝓁𝓁𝑜𝓌𝒾𝓃𝑔.”- 𝑅𝓊𝒹𝓎 𝐹𝓇𝒶𝓃𝒸𝒾𝓈𝒸𝑜

Hi hello! My name is T and in this essay I will be introducing you to my home boi Noah. There will be some triggering topics below so please proceed with caution!

Full name: Noah Russell Age: 19 Sign: Scorpio City of birth: Cherry The current place for living: Cherry Siblings: Casey Russell, Ronnie Russell Pets: Rex Russell Birthday: October 31st Likes? Writing, poetry, drinking, Newports, black coffee, yo-yo’s, Dislike? swimming, most people, loud music, tomatoes

BACKGROUND

Noah wasn’t sure how things worked out the way they had. How at home all he wanted in the world was to disappear, while to the rest of the world he felt like a total ghost. It was like living in this limbo of hell he could never get out of. The curse of being the youngest of three brothers in a small town. Noah was still small when his father abandoned them the first time. As far as Ronnie was concerned, Noah believed the man had fucked off after an argument with their mother. The feelings clearly mutual when a string of men started coming and leaving at what sometimes felt like all hours of the night. Most of them were unobservant to her three sons still living in the home, but every so often she’d catch a real nasty one who always seemed to feel like he had something to prove. Didn’t really matter. Even those types didn’t last.

Noah could remember the first time he made it home and their dad was back sitting in the same old chair he had before he’d left. A small part of him was hopeful that their random string of strangers had come to an end. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case. He’d always seemed to have a problem with liquor, but on the benders where he’d return home, he’d become someone Noah could barely recognize. After the first couple of times this had happened, Casey and Ronnie would make a point of waiting out his stay as far from home as they could. Oftentimes spending time with Ronnie’s friends who were getting ready to head off for college, or with some of Casey’s band mates.

When Ronnie eventually moved out and opened The Pit, Noah wondered if he and Casey would be enough to survive their father’s gruesome returns home. He managed to distract himself most of the time with his writing. Something he’d picked up on the days where he decided to stay late in his English class to avoid having to go home if he feared his father might be there. Noah could remember being told by his English teacher to write what felt familiar. Something he knew. Something that interested him. A challenge for sure when he kept to himself as often as he did. Always wondering how he missed the social gene that seemed to envelop his older brothers. So instead he let himself become wrapped up in their lives. Namely Casey since all of his friends seemed to be a little closer in age to Noah himself.

He’d only had the idea in his head to start writing about them for a short time when his first chapter came to mind. A story about an incident he’d seen at one his brother’s band rehearsals. It really was all fun and games until someone gets hit in the face with a symbol. Something about some kid named Tommy going around telling people one of the groupies gave second rate hand jobs. A fascinating display and there was Noah writing down everything he saw, every thought he had, and every word that was said throughout the experience. Being home never really felt like the best option but prior to this, Noah was certain he would have rather bathed in ketchup than have to spend his evenings being ignored by a group of people who barely knew he existed. That night was the start of what he’s referred to as his chance at greatness. The beginning of ‘The Glass Windows of Cherry High’.

After the incident, he started spending more and more time with his brother's friends but consistently struggled with concretely making any of his own. He was there the night he found out Audrina had picked Harvey over his brother. Watched the torment his brother went through and the sudden shift in him after the affair. He wrote about his back alley deals with Frankie, the short films he wrote with Zev, and Kitty. Oh buddy he wrote about Kitty. But above all one of what was potentially one of his favorite story lines had been the one about Lux. If he hadn’t been so entranced by the chaotic energy that surrounded her, she likely would have pissed him off with all the horrible rumors he was well aware she’d spread about him. But as far as he was concerned, content was content.

Throughout high school, when he wasn’t writing the first great American Novel about the lives of the high schoolers in Cherry, he managed to make a few short connections but most of them ended up leaving after graduation. A luxury he simply couldn’t afford. It felt like all of the muses for his writing had gone off in separate directions and he’d become too focused on just trying to make it through college to put much time and effort into it. Work started taking up the majority of the free time he used to have to dedicate to his craft. From the hours he now spent at Cinemaniacs, to the time he spent still helping kids cheat on their SAT’s, his muse was fleeting. He let himself get a little closer with some of the few from the gang who stayed thanks to spending a little less time outside of his brothers shadow. Allowed connections, friendships to slowly start to blossom in ways that could have been disguised as hopeful. Of course just another thing Lux had to go and ruin for him. With Lux’s recent passing and all of the old crew starting to return, there’s no way to know for sure. Noah’s uncertainty haunts him. Will those relationships he’d slowly started to build maintain? or will old habits resurface to ruin everything.

THE WRITER:

YOU'VE NEVER REALLY FELT LIKE A PART OF THE GROUP, AND MAYBE YOU'VE NEVER REALLY WANTED TO. BUT YOUR BROTHER - THE HEARTBREAK KID - HAS NEVER BEEN PATIENT ENOUGH TO LEAVE YOU ALONE. YOU END UP AT MOST OF THE GANG'S FUNCTIONS, YOU PROBABLY KNOW MORE ABOUT THEM THAN MOST PEOPLE, BUT YOU HAVE TROUBLE CALLING YOURSELF A FRIEND. YOU'RE ALMOST SURE NONE OF THEM CARE ANYTHING ABOUT YOU. YOU WONDER IF YOU WERE TO DISAPPEAR TOMORROW - JUST LIKE LUX DID - IF THEY WOULD EVEN NOTICE. YOU'VE ALWAYS SEEN THEM MORE LIKE SUBJECTS... LIVES YOU CAN DRAW FROM FOR YOUR WRITING. WHY NOT, AFTER ALL? THEY GO THROUGH ENOUGH DRAMA THEMSELVES TO BE NOVEL WORTHY. YOU HARDLY KNEW LUX, BUT YOU KNEW SHE WAS INTRIGUING. SHE CAUGHT YOU STARING MORE THAN ONCE - SHE WAS CONVINCED YOU HAD SOME CREEPY CRUSH ON HER, AND SO WERE HER MINIONS. YOU KNEW THE TRUTH: YOU WERE JUST GATHERING INFORMATION FOR YOUR NOVEL. NOW THAT SHE'S DEAD, THOUGH? AND AT THAT, UNDER SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES? YOU'RE WORRIED ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE MIGHT THINK ABOUT YOU. BECAUSE YOU'RE INNOCENT. RIGHT?

THE SECRET: AT 15 NOAH HAD DECIDED HE'D HAD ENOUGH OF TRYING TO BE APART OF A GROUP HE FELT WOULDN'T ACCEPT HIM AND DECIDED TO TRY AND UP HIS STREET CRED BY GETTING TOTALLY WASTED AT A PARTY HE TAGGED ALONG WITH THE HEARTBREAK KID TO. TO HIS DISMAY IT DIDN'T SEEM TO MATTER HOW FUCKED UP HE GOT, HE STILL FELT LIKE A GHOST AMONGST THE GROUP. NOAH DECIDED TO STEAL A PAIR OF KEYS AND DRIVE HOME THAT NIGHT WHICH RESULTED IN HIM HITTING AND ALMOST KILLING A TOTAL STRANGER.

THE REAL DIRT: YOU TOLD THE POLICE YOU HADN'T SEEN LUX IN DAYS, BUT THE TRUTH WAS THAT YOU ARGUED WITH HER THE NIGHT OF HER DEATH. SHE WAS BEAT UP - YOU OFFERED TO HELP HER FIND A PLACE TO CLEAN UP, BUT SHE SNAPPED AT YOU AND CALLED YOU A CREEP. YOU TOLD HER OFF. YOU TOLD HER SHE WAS JUST A FACADE OF A PERSON, BUT NOTHING ELSE HAPPENED. YOU WENT HOME FUMING, AND FEELING LIKE YOU COULD PUNCH SOMETHING. YOU NEVER TOLD THE POLICE, AND NOW THAT YOU'VE KEPT IT TO YOURSELF FOR SO LONG, YOU'RE AFRAID OF WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF YOU CAME FORWARD.

WE WERE ROMANTICS. WE DIDN’T JUST READ POETRY; WE LET IT DRIP FROM OUR TONGUES LIKE HONEY. SPIRITS SOARED, WOMEN SWOONED, AND GODS WERE CREATED, GENTLEMEN. NOT A BAD WAY TO SPEND AN EVENING, EH?- Robin Williams, Dead Poets Society

#bio #;;the writer #cusaintro

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ryanmeyerart · 5 years ago

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Grace Hartigan’s “Barbie”

This essay was written in 2012

Opinion alert — Jackson Pollock is the most famous Abstract Expressionist painter. Fact alert — it was in New York City that Pollock and the other artists associated with this new movement blossomed. The “Irascibles,’ as they were dubbed, began to shake up the art world with their new philosophy and aesthetic. The novelty of Abstract Expressionism was powerful enough from the beginning to draw in a younger group of artists. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Grace Hartigan are a few of the artists known as the second generation New York School. Despite her young age, Hartigan was deep in the Cedar Tavern circle and was considered a friend by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, etc. Curious and observant, Hartigan looked outward at her surrounding physical, social, and political world for inspiration. She began to paint a combination of what she saw and what she felt. Her commentary on daily life is the leading characteristic of her work. Her paintings such as Barbie have been interpreted as feminist precursors to pop art, but in reality, Hartigan did not ally herself with either feminism or pop art. For Barbie the output is a statement about the contemporary ‘60’s society. This painting and the great majority of her other works are musings on life and should be viewed the same way one reads poetry. A complete interpretation can only be accurately made by considering her own words as well as clues from her life’s story.

Hartigan was born on March 28, 1922 in New Jersey. She was greatly influenced by her aunt, an english schoolteacher who piqued her interest in writing and theatre which lasted all through high school. She married at age 18 and ended up in California after she and her husband ran out of money on their way to Alaska. They lived there several years with their newborn son until World War II broke out. They decided to move back east where he was then drafted. She began to take night classes to learn drawing and painting and got a job as a draftsman. She fell in love with Matisse after being introduced to book of his work and immediately began seeking out a way to paint like him. She then began to study under Ike Muse and moved to New York with him after she and her husband split. Not much time passed before she and Muse split also and she began to support herself with a “life of total poverty but meeting all marvelous, exciting people.”1 This is a reference to the collection of artists and writers who patronized the Cedar Tavern in the 40’s and 50’s. She visited Pollock’s and de Kooning’s studios and began the journey headfirst into pure Abstract Expressionism which solidified her status in the group as well as Clement Greenberg’s approval. Her first few works in ’49 and ’50 were very gestural and resembled the flat, all over composition of Pollock’s work. This only lasted a couple years before she began to slowly introduce representational elements that are very similar to the figures in de Kooning’s Woman paintings. A key factor in this change was her growing relationship with the poet Frank O’Hara. Hartigan’s childhood love for literature re-blossomed vicariously through O’Hara who dedicated several poems to her. In 1952 O’Hara gave a series of twelve poems called Oranges, Sweet, a Dozen to Hartigan who then turned them into her Orange paintings. This rebellion against Greenberg allowed her to extend her boundaries and begin to develop her own identity as a painter. Her first step was to look back at the Masters like Velasquez, Goya, and Rubens all the while keeping Matisse and the Abstract Expressionist aesthetic in mind. She then began to look outward in the exploration of her world, New York City. For several decades she painted shopping malls, billboards, vendors, shop windows, and anything else that caught her eye and stimulated her mind. Hartigan was overflowing with material that she felt compelled to paint. Throughout the ‘60’s she pulled out all the stops and painted everything from mythical creatures and gods, Marilyn Monroe, lily ponds, human emotions, and Barbie dolls. The only reoccurring visual elements are the gestural forms that came from her Abstract Expressionist background and the bold use of color drawn from her love for Fauvism. This inconsistency of subject matter is the first clue as to Hartigan’s thought processes.

The mistake that critics and historians too often make is the lack of attention paid to Hartigan’s body of work as a whole. When they step back and get the big picture view, they consider it for a couple of minutes and quickly conclude that, “She has reached for new ideas so often that she has no signature style.”2 Naturally at this conclusion, they are forced to focus on individual paintings or small series of them. Unsurprisingly, the interpretations of Hartigan’s Barbie paintings are straightforward and superficial.

The Barbie doll made her debut in 1959 and it was not long before Mattel, Inc. began receiving criticism for the doll’s negative body image. The doll has often been used as a symbol for the unacceptable image of women portrayed in pop-culture. When Hartigan painted Barbie in the heat of the controversy, many people, both feminists and non-feminists, assumed that she was making a feminist statement. The well-informed researcher might also argue his/her point with evidence that Hartigan originally signed her paintings as “George Hartigan” for her first few shows. This has been taken as a statement of the difficulty for women artists to succeed in the world of Abstract Expressionism. However, both of these arguments can be easily refuted by Hartigan’s own words. She has repeatedly denied having any feminist sentiments and even supported Pollock by saying, “The myth I find most infuriating is the one of Jackson Pollock as brawling, woman-hating, drunk and macho. The man was tender, suffering- an inarticulate, shy genius, but people don’t want to hear that about Jackson.”3 When asked why she signed her work “George Hartigan” she replied, “Because I identified with George Sand and George Eliot — they were my heroes. The real story is I had gay friends who all had female names amongst themselves and I thought it would be fun to have a man’s name.”4

The argument that Hartigan’s work is a precursor to Pop art has greater merit, but still doesn’t go much deeper than the paint on the canvas. Nevertheless, Hartigan did paint an abstract work titled, Billboard which can be compared to James Rosenquist’s work, and a couple of paintings of Marilyn Monroe which invariably conjures Warhol’s ghost. These images in addition to the Barbie doll are unquestionable pop culture icons. One can easily imagine Barbie as the subject of a Warhol painting and should not be surprised that he did indeed use the child’s toy in a series of prints. Warhol’s Barbie is very different from Hartigan’s however. In her essay, which analyzes Hartigan’s work, Melody Davis points out that, “Pop art is typically hard-edged, cool, acrylic-painted, repetitive and de-personalized.”5 This is the antithesis to Hartigan’s work. In response to this new aesthetic, she made an unapologetic statement in the 60’s saying, “Pop art is not painting, because painting must have content and emotion.”6 Similar to the contrast between the quality of a hand crafted table that exudes warmth from the carpenter’s personal touch and the mass-produced particle board piece made by machines and sold in an IKEA store, so is the unfriendly relationship of Hartigan and Pop art. It is not uncommon to see the subject of Barbie in everyday life, but just as Dutch genre painting is not Pop art, neither is Hartigan’s work.

Instead, the individual work is one of social commentary. Referring to the Barbie doll, Hartigan made this statement, “I’m very interested in dolls of all cultures, because a doll is an essence, really, of what society thinks you should present to your little girls, about what they’re supposed to plan for, how they’re supposed to think about themselves. And if you’re supposed to think about yourself as a bride that deserves a $100 dress and you only cost $15 and your husband is a castrated man, boy, that tells you something about American morals!”7 Hartigan painted what she saw around her. When she walked throughout New York City she painted vendors and shop windows. When she studied the masters at the MET she painted the scenes and figures that excited her. When she noticed a changing country she painted a doll that symbolized a part of it. Hartigan was not supporting or criticizing mass production, mass marketing, or mass media. She was taking input, processing it, and then giving output. Hartigan explains, “I try to declaw the terribleness of popular culture and turn it into beauty or meaning.”8 Now a motive fueling her creative machine becomes apparent. By zooming out and viewing the entirety of her life and work, we see that Hartigan takes both the ugly and mundane as well as the beautiful and exciting and gives them a poetic quality. This should not be a surprise, given her love for literature as a child, her very close relationships with the poets who patronized the Cedar Tavern (O’Hara in particular), and her “heroes,” the novelists Eliot and Sand. For the final piece of evidence let’s again consider Hartigan’s own words, “As most painting moves closer to sculpture and architecture, my own work moves nearer poetry…It increasingly must be ‘read’ in terms of meaning and metaphor.”9 Hartigan’s bold colors, gestural brushwork, and expression through abstraction are some of the tools she employs to give emotional life to the content that she chooses to paint. The successful viewer is the one who does indeed “read” her paintings. Poetry and Hartigan’s work are musings on life.

With a creative career that lasted over half a century, Hartigan produced a large body of paintings and prints. She did not stray far from her aesthetic, yet changes throughout the decades are visible and tell her life’s story like rings in a tree. Her experiences at the Cedar Tavern were truly invaluable and would cause envy in any historian. Unfortunately, she has been misunderstood a great deal too much. Barbie should be read as a poem, and not as Pop art or feminist art. Only then can one fully appreciate the creative mind of Grace Hartigan.

Bibliography

Diggory, Terence. “Questions of identity in Oranges by Frank O’Hara and Grace Hartigan.” Art Journal 52, no. 4 (Winter93 1993): 41.Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed November 9, 2012).

Gibson, Ann Eden. Abstract expressionism: other politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.

Hartigan, Grace, interview by Julie Haifley. May 10, 1979.

Hartigan, Grace, interview by Jonathan VanDyke. February 12, 2000.

Hobbs, Robert. 1995. “Grace Hartigan: A Painter’s World by Robert Saltonstall Mattison: Reviewed by Robert Hobbs.” Woman’s Art Journal , Vol. 16, №2 (Autumn, 1995 — Winter, 1996), pp. 42–44. JSTOR (accessed October 18, 2012).

Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism: 1940–1960. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ., 2000.

Kunitz, Daniel. “Gallery chronicle.” New Criterion 20, no. 3 (November 2001): 51–54. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed October 19, 2012).

Landau, Ellen G… Reading abstract expressionism. New Haven: Yale, 2005.

Lavazzi, Thomas. 2000. “Lucky Pierre Gets into Finger Paint: Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara’s Oranges.” Aurora: The Journal Of The History Of Art 1, 122–137. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed October 18, 2012).

Lord, M. G.. Forever Barbie: the unauthorized biography of a real doll. New York: Morrow and Co., 1994.

Princenthal, Nancy. 2009. “Grace Hartigan 1922–2008.” Art In America 97, no. 10: 142. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson), EBSCOhost (accessed October 18, 2012).

Robert Saltonstall Mattison. “Hartigan, Grace.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed October 18, 2012,http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T036782.

Shapiro, David, and Cecile Shapiro.Abstract expressionism: a critical record. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

#art

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berniesrevolution · 6 years ago

Link

In today’s Washington Post, Elizabeth Bruenig has an article arguing that socialism should no longer be considered a dirty word. Socialists believe that “working Americans deserve a say in how the country’s vast wealth will be used,” and that “more than policy tweaks will be needed to empower everyday people to participate meaningfully in society and democracy.” Since these are sensible positions, she says, socialism is at the very least a reasonable political tendency. She is, of course, completely correct, and all of the common criticisms of contemporary democratic socialism are misleading, unfair, or outright false.

In explaining why it can be difficult to figure out what socialism means, Bruenig notes that “the United States doesn’t have a familiar, established socialist history to look to for guidance on what socialism might mean in this country.” It’s certainly true that the U.S. doesn’t have a “familiar” socialist history, since students generally aren’t taught much about American socialists in school. (Eugene Debs is usually mentioned, mostly as a curiosity.) And it’s true that in the U.S., unlike many European countries, there was never a socialist movement that had mass popular support. In England, for instance, the Labour Party founded by socialist Keir Hardie would become a dominant force in British politics for the entire 20th century and establish the modern social welfare state. In France, socialists took over Paris! (A few things also happened in Russia.) Nothing comparable occurred in America, hence the title question of Werner Sombart’s 1906 book Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?, a question followed up nearly a century later in the book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed In The United States.

But I also think it’s worth remembering that even though socialism “failed” here, insofar as it never became the kind of political force it was in many European, Latin American, Asian, and African countries, we do have a socialist history, and a rather inspiring one! Delving into that history is a great way to find lessons for contemporary democratic socialists. And in some ways, the successes of American socialists have been underappreciated. As I’ve written before, the list of socialist mayors in the United States in the early 20th century is impressively long, and one reason the Socialist Party fizzled after about 1908 is that the other major political parties actually began co-opting the Socialist agenda. I recommend reading Ira Kipnis’ The American Socialist Movement 1897-1912, which talks a lot about where the socialists succeeded and where they didn’t. Many of the intra-socialist debates were the same ones we are having today: What does socialism really mean? Are particular reforms “socialist”? To what extent should socialists work within the existing political system? Unfortunately, they did not resolve those debates then, and the first thing to learn is that we need to do better this time around.

The history of the American Socialist Party and the IWW are fascinating in their own right. (As well as the histories of socialist publications like The Masses and the Appeal to Reason.) But I’d like to single out a few historic American socialists who I find exemplary. We do have a grand left tradition in the United States, one carried forth from generation to generation by humane and committed activists. We should never forget their lives, struggles, and ideas.

Hubert Harrison

Hubert Harrison is one of my favorite forgotten Americans, period. Known as the “Black Socrates,” he was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, renowned for his dazzling streetcorner oratory and the seriousness of his intellect. Jeffrey B. Perry’s excellent biography of Harrison calls him the “voice of Harlem radicalism” and the book summary gives you a flavor of Harrison’s extraordinary life:

The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture.

Harrison is particularly notable for the way he combined “race consciousness” with “class consciousness,” And while considered a “Harlem Renaissance” figure, he was critical of the entire concept, because he felt it diminished previous black achievements. As a brilliant atheist, socialist, anti-racist intellectual, Harrison is a standout figure in the history of the left who deserves to be given his due.

Helen Keller

Keller herself is, of course, well-remembered. But her radical socialist politics are still too frequently neglected. She was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and a supporter of Debs, an anti-militarist feminist trade unionist who was staunchly committed to the rights of working people. If you read her socialist writings, it can actually be a little surprising to realize just how firm her conviction was. Here she is describing the IWW and why she supports it:

The creators of wealth are entitled to all they create. Thus they find themselves pitted against the whole profit-making system. They declare that there can be no compromise so long as the majority of the working class lives in want while the master class lives in luxury. They insist that there can be no peace until the workers organize as a class, take possession of the resources of the earth and the machinery of production and distribution and abolish the wage system.

I don’t remember hearing that when we watched The Miracle Worker in middle school! In her essay “How I Became A Socialist,” Keller says she is pleased that people seem so interested in her inspiring life story, particularly because it will help get the word “socialism” into more newspapers! (Ah, how she underestimated the power of the whitewashing machine!) She also amusingly recounted how the New York Times asked her to write an article, before immediately printing an editorial condemning the “contemptible red flag.” This would not do, Keller said:

I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle. According to the inclusive condemnation of the Times I have forfeited all right to respect and sympathy, and I am to be regarded with suspicion. Yet the editor of the Times wants me to write him an article!

Nor did Keller think much of the Brooklyn Eagle when they suggested that her left-wing politics were a product of her physical disabilities. Keller’s reply is so deliciously scathing that it’s worth quoting at length:

The Brooklyn Eagle says, apropos of me, and socialism, that Helen Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development.” Some years ago I met a gentleman who was introduced to me as Mr. McKelway, editor of the Brooklyn Eagle. It was after a meeting that we had in New York in behalf of the blind. At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him. Surely it is his turn to blush… Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! What an ungallant bird it is! … The Eagle is willing to help us prevent misery provided, always provided, that we do not attack the industrial tyranny which supports it and stops its ears and clouds its vision. The Eagle and I are at war. I hate the system which it represents, apologizes for and upholds. When it fights back, let it fight fair. Let it attack my ideas and oppose the aims and arguments of Socialism. It is not fair fighting or good argument to remind me and others that I cannot see or hear. I can read. I can read all the socialist books I have time for in English, German and French. If the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle should read some of them, he might be a wiser man and make a better newspaper. If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness.

Mother Jones

I think if there is one thing we can say for certain about Mother Jones, it’s that she wouldn’t think much of the magazine that publishes under her name. She was certainly no liberal. (“I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser!”) She traveled across the country organizing strike after strike and motivating workers to resist the strike-breakers. She led a march of hundreds of child laborers, which ended up outside Teddy Roosevelt’s summer home, where she demanded to see the president to protest child labor. (She was refused.) She went to prison, was released, raised more hell, went to prison again, and then went to meet John D. Rockefeller, spending two hours telling him personally about the conditions in his mines and demanding he improve them. She was generous toward Rockefeller though: “Him raised in luxury, how could he know anything about real things? It isn’t his fault, though—the raising he got is the cause of it.” The woman who reminded laborers “You ain’t got a damn thing if you ain’t got a union!” was one of the most fearless, frank, uncompromising champions of working people in American history.

“I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.” — Mother Jones

Peter Clark

Peter Clark is known as the first African American socialist. He was an active abolitionist in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and then afterwards became the first black school principal in the state of Ohio. He ran for office, ran a newspaper, taught black students, supported striking workers. He was once fired by the school he worked at after he taught students about the radical “atheist” thinking of Thomas Paine. Clark’s life is documented in Nikki Taylor’s America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. Here is an excerpt from a talk he gave on socialism in 1877:

Many wise men, learned in political economy, assure us that their doctrines, faithfully followed, will result in a greater production of wealth and a more equal division of the same. But as I have said before, there is but one efficacious remedy proposed, and that is found in Socialism. The present industrial organization of society has been faithfully tried and has proven a failure. We get rid of the king, we get rid of the aristocracy, but the capitalist comes in their place, and in the industrial organization and guidance of society his little finger is heavier than their loins. Whatever Socialism may bring about, it can present nothing more anarchical than is found in Grafton, Baltimore and Pittsburgh today.

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #history #socialism #democratic socialism #current affairs

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minhyung127 · 7 years ago

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Fratboy! - Mark

Request: UH FRATBOY BUT WHIPPED FOR U MARK PLEASE I BEG U

A/N: I feel like I went on a whole different tangent than what the requester was asking for but this idea popped into my head and I liked it

Word Count: 1,422

Warnings: underage drinking

➥ Masterlist

Oooooo!!!

I’m so excited to write this!!!

this is such a good request!

thanks for requesting it

it was the ending for your freshman year of college

and you had no time to be bittersweet about the moment

as you were swamped with essays to write and study guides to study off of

as you were walking towards your dorm you always pass through all the sorority and fraternity houses

and each of them had a different vibe from one another this time of year

all the sorority girls were crying and upset that the year was over

and it made you glad that you hadn’t rush and didn’t join their cult they call sorority

while the fraternity guys were throwing party after party to say their goodbyes

and as much as you hated sororities

you hated fraternities even more

I mean it’s basically a house filled with fuck boys who all got each other’s back

and they always move in packs

you could hardly see a frat guy alone

you had never step foot inside a fraternity

since you thought there was no way that place was at all clean or sanitary

as you were passing by one of the last fraternities on the block there were some freshman guys passing out flyers to an upcoming party

you always took their flyers since they basically shove it in your hands

but you never bothered going

but looking at the flyer you couldn’t help but laugh

it was a party to congratulate the freshmans for not dropping out

it was definitely something you felt like you should celebrate too

since you almost ripped your hair off and thought of dropping out hundreds of times

and sadly, your roommate did actually want to go and celebrate

thus dragging you to the nasty frat house that you never wanted to step foot in

you hardly knew any of the people there, let alone the frat boys

except for Mark Lee

he was your fellow classmate in your 1pm English class

but you hated him

him and his other frat brothers always sat in the back corner of the room

and still acted like high school boys

laughing at their lame jokes and having the professor to tell them to quit all the side talking

you couldn’t believe that people were still acting like that in college

and with your luck you just happen to bump into him at the party

like literally

you were a tad bit mad that you bumped into him out of all people

but not nearly as mad as sober you would have been

sure you had engaged in some illegal activity of underage drinking

but what did you expect at a frat party?

alcohol was all they had to drink

and with all the people packed into the house it sure didn’t help it from getting so hot in there

and maybe it was all the booze you had drank but Mark was suddenly good looking to you

or maybe he always was?

maybe now that he wasn’t surrounded with his frat brothers he looked a little less annoying

and drunk you was definitely taking control of your body

especially now that your favorite song had just come on

all you wanted to do was get down and dirty with whomever is next to you

which happened to be Mark

but you didn’t get to grind on him as he took you by your wrist and lead you outside

“I think you should go back to your dorm, you’ve drank quite a bit.” Mark said, lightly pushing you forward to get you to walking

and there you two were

walking together back to your dorm and you speaking all sorts of gibberish that made Mark laugh

and to your amazement, you were pretty surprised that Mark hadn’t had anything to drink at the party

sure he was underage too but being a frat boy and all you expected his brothers to persuade him to drink a little something

after getting back to your dorm you didn’t want Mark to leave

since you two were having so much fun

so he decided to stay over

by the morning you were so utterly confused

and throbbing with a headache

you had woken up to hugging someone instead of you pillow this time

you looked up and saw that it was Mark

and you felt so bad for the kid

here you were laying down comfortably on your bed

where Mark was sleeping sitting up with his head leading against the wall

you were confused as to why he didn’t lay next to you

but you also got a warm feeling inside from Mark’s politeness of keeping boundaries

as you started to get up from bed you had woken Mark up as well

you began apologizing for whatever you did last night

but with your killer headache you actually couldn’t think about exactly what you did last night

“How about we go get breakfast, and I’ll explain everything that happened.” Make suggested

you were pretty surprised at how nice he was being to you

especially after he explained how he basically took care of you all night

and slept very uncomfortable last night

you were also surprised at how un-frat boyish he was being

i mean any other frat guy would act like a total fuck boy

but if Mark wore his backward SnapBack with his fraternity symbols, that kept his messy hair covered, you would’ve totally forgot about it

knowing that mark wasn’t like the rest of the fraternity guys you’ve met

you decided to open up and also get to know him as well

the conversation would’ve have gone on longer if your alarm to go to your English class didn’t go off

usually you were grateful for that alarm, especially when you take a random nap, but today you were kinda sad

you we’re having such a great time hanging out with Mark that you almost didn’t want him to go back with his frat friends and act just like them again

but that was selfish of you, and you knew that

you went back to your dorm to get your things and Mark went to his dorms

once you reached your classroom you were surprised to see that Mark was sitting to the seat next to your unassigned assigned seat

it made your heart skip a little

for the whole lecture you and Mark stole a couple side glances at each other

smiling and blushing after getting catch from by one another

once the class was over Mark tapped your shoulder and asked if you wanted to go out for some ice cream

you were beyond happy and honestly quite shocked

I mean this was basically your third date hangout with him in the last 24 hours

and you were really enjoying it

while enjoying the ice cream you both discussed about up coming finals and how long the both of you were planning on procrastinating on the final essay for English

all was going great

but as you were down to your last couple bites of ice cream you noticed that Mark was getting a bit nervous

his eye contact with you was lacking

he shyly laughed at everything

and he was constantly whipping his, what you assumed, sweaty hands on his pants

it didn’t take long for mark to pour out his confession to you

you really did not see it coming

nor did you ever notice that Mark had a crush on you

he thought it was obvious

but you had no idea that all semester long he’s been liking you

I mean there were times where Mark acted a bit inappropriate around you

but he apologized and said he had taken poor advice from his friends

he also said that he did not act like that at all

after hanging out with Mark for almost 24 hours

it seemed a bit crazy to accept his confession

but he was nothing like the guy you thought he was

so you, being crazy, accepted it

And all summer long he proved time and time again

he wasn’t the stupid, lame, loud mouth fraternity guy you once thought he was

he was also mega whipped for you

he’d often turn down summer trips/parties with his frat brothers to be with you instead

he was super sweet and caring towards you all the time

he even promises to keep his inner fraternity self to a minimum once you two go back to college

since he knows that you still can’t stand the typical frat guy.

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