#Written for his spy for the entity verse

[spiesintheshadows]

what else are you hiding from me?

PROMPTS FOR ASSERTIVE ACCUSATIONS [x] *  assorted dialogue, adjust as necessary

He looked over at Steve. Slowly, unbothered. The game was up. He knew when to fold his cards. A wicked smile graced his face as he stood fully up. "Careful, Stevie.. You might not like the answer to that question."

[fincalinde]

💡, and 📒 if you want to lay out a WIP list

💡what inspires your fic ideas?

A strong desire to see Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao tenderly stroking each other's hands while staring into each other's eyes and discussing situational ethics.

More seriously, I tend to look at canon and go 'I like that aspect, I want more of it'. Hence the weakness of falling in love: I wanted to see what might have happened if Xiyao had acted on their romantic tension. Several other fics have come out of discussions with friends, and that kind of input is invaluable. The baby LXC fic (and its as yet unposted counterpart) was discussed in detail with @xiyao-feels, for example. I also like to turn things inside out, such as with we keep running where I thought it would be interesting to explore a way in which LXC might take care of JGY during their time hiding from the Wen.

📒any fics planned?

Ohoho. All right, let's do this. A selection of my current WIPs:

the weakness of falling in love - chapter 8

This has been written since the end of 2020/start of 2021 and the editing has honestly been fairly light but has taken me a long time for unrelated reasons. It will be posted hopefully not too far in the future. done

unnamed gift fic, prompt: xiyao make an unexpected discovery

I'm still settling on what I will do for this one, but it will happen. done

unnamed gift fic, prompt: xiyao on a picnic

I know exactly what I'm doing for this one and I am not telling, but I intend for it to be in the same verse as weakness.

unnamed gift fic, prompt: [redacted]

This will also be in the same verse as weakness, and I'm not telling. done

unnamed gift fic, prompt: domestic fluff

This is a redo as my other attempt was not fluffy enough; I think I have mentioned I struggle with doing pure fluff. It's from the modern AU and this time I'm trying something much earlier in their relationship. done

unnamed gift fic, prompt: xiyao casefic

So the premise of this one is there was [unspecified fix] and JGY and LXC both continued as active clan leaders for many years. A generation or two has passed and they are now living quietly together away from both their clans, but when a mysterious entity begins systematically burning down watchtowers they come out of retirement to put a stop to the attacks. done

gusu baby lxc

I am extremely stupid and this is another multichapter, but it's quite episodic and slice-of-life-ish which is more relaxing for me. Essentially there is an accident at the Cloud Recesses and LXC becomes baby. JGY receives a vague and alarming letter from Er-ge and rushes over there, only to find a fifteen-year-old who was very nervous to meet Lianfang-zun and now has stars in his eyes. It's [not currently decided but probably around a month or two] until the conditions are right for LXC to be unbabied, so JGY decides to stay and look after baby LXC amongst the Lan. This plan is very sensible except baby LXC would like his kisses now please and thank you.

a study of the urban fridge-deer

Modern AU in which baby Meng Yao finds destitute baby LXC at the bus stop and takes him home to his poky attic studio. They make stir fry. They share their tragic backstories. There Is Only One Bed. done

grandmaster jiggy

I have been wanting to do this one for many moons, but it has to wait until after the giftfics are done. WRH discovers that MY is a spy and has his golden core melted and flings him into the Burial Mounds. MY is the one who invents demonic cultivation. Inspired by the fact that JGY absolutely could and would do this because he is staggeringly talented and the rest of the cast are frankly lucky his education was so deficient or he would put them all to shame with his achievements. Yeah I really, really want to finish this one. It will definitely happen but probably long after everyone else has lost interest.

That's it in terms of things I categorically know I will finish and post, I think.

Thank you for the ask!

[thecreaturecodex]

White Zetsu

Screenshot from Naruto. Or Naruto Shippuden. Whatever.

[Commissioned by @coldbloodassassin. I know next to nothing about Naruto, and have no desire to learn. So being commissioned to do two Naruto monsters was somewhat frustrating, especially since they seem to be among the most complicated creatures in the series. The wiki entries for the Zetsus were not terribly helpful as to telling me what they could do, as the wikis are written by fans, for fans, and assume I am already well versed in the Naruto-verse definitions of chakras, jutsus, etc. Even then, I could tell that the Zetsus do possess abilities that do not play nicely with the Pathfinder rules. Cloning themselves and fusing together are both things that this system does poorly if at all, as is exactly duplicating the abilities of creatures you’re disguised as. So I dropped the cloning, gave a shout to the ability mimicry by borrowing a page from Pathfinder’s doppelganger, and would stat the fused Zetsu as a third, separate stat block.]

White Zetsu CR 9 LE Aberration This being appears as a warped human form, with a single eye and single arm, both on his left side. His right side appears as a mass of curving tendrils and root-like growths. His skin is pale, his eye is yellow and his short cropped hair green.

A white zetsu is a supernatural spy and assassin. They are doppelganger-like creatures, but infused with verdant life energy, which gives them the ability to control plant matter and fire deadly blasts of thorns and roots. Their personalities tend towards the playful, and they are given to taunting opponents and playing tricks on those they are sent to spy on. Although a white zetsu can infiltrate the ranks of an enemy directly, they can also plant spores on a creature to turn them into an unwitting source of intelligence. The white zetsu can then manipulate these spores, turning them into a straight-jacket before teleporting to that site to eliminate the spy once their usefulness has ended.

In combat, white zetsus are mobile, preferring to play the part of support than a front-line fighter. The phytokinetic blasts they fire are dangerous, as is the white zetsu’s ability to manipulate the terrain around it with magical plant-life. When in disguise, they often equip themselves with weapons and armor suitable for the creature they’ve replaced, and duplicate their tactics as closely as possible. The distrust and paranoia this sews are as dangerous as any direct damage the white zetsu can inflict. White zetsus rarely fight to the death, preferring to plant their spy spores on a few targets before fleeing to report back to their superiors.

Of note is the relationship between white and black zetsus. The two creatures appear to be halves of a whole entity, and they can fuse into a single creature, called a “perfect zetsu”. This perfect zetsu is far stronger physically than either is individually, and this mode is preferred if the zetsus are expected to engage in direct combat. This fusion is dominated in behavior and personality by the black zetsu, with the white becoming little more than an accessory identity. As such, white zetsus tend to avoid these associations if they are able.

White Zetsu  CR 9 XP 6,400 LE Medium aberration Init +5; Senses darkvision 60 ft., Perception +13, tremorsense 30 ft. Defense AC 23, touch 16, flat-footed 17 (+5 Dex, +1 dodge, +7 natural) hp 104 (11d8+55); regeneration 3 (cold iron or fire) Fort +8, Ref +8, Will +9; +4 vs. mind-influencing effects, paralysis, poison, polymorph, sleep, stun DR 10/cold iron Defensive Qualities vegetal Offense Speed 30 ft., burrow 30 ft. (earth glide) Melee masterwork short sword +14/9 (1d6+1/19-20) Ranged phytokinetic blast +13 (6d6+11 piercing) Special Attacks spy spore Spell-like Abilities CL 11th, concentration +16 (+20 casting defensively) At will—entangle (DC 16), warp wood (DC 17), wood shape 3/day—clairaudience/clairvoyance, command plants (DC 19), tree stride 1/day—greater teleport (self plus 50 lbs. objects only), wall of thorns Statistics Str 13, Dex 21, Con 20, Int 15, Wis 14, Cha 20 Base Atk +8; CMB +9; CMD 25 Feats Combat Casting, Deceitful, Dodge, Mobility, Point-Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Weapon Finesse (B) Skills Acrobatics +16, Bluff +16, Diplomacy +13, Disguise +16, Knowledge (nature) +13, Perception +13, Stealth +16, Survival +13; Racial Modifiers +20 Disguise when using change shape Languages Common, Infernal, Sylvan SQ change shape (humanoid, alter self), mimicry, perfect copy, superior woodland stride Ecology Environment any forests and underground Organization solitary, squad (2-6) or army (7-24) Treasure standard (masterwork short sword, other treasure) Special Abilities Mimicry (Ex) A white zetsu is proficient with all armor, shields and weapons. In addition, it can use any spell trigger or spell completion items as if those spells were on its spell list. Its caster level is equal to its racial Hit Dice. Perfect Copy (Su) A white zetsu can assume the shape of specific individuals when using its change shape ability. Phytokinetic Blast (Su) As a standard action, a white zetsu can unleash a blast of plant matter at a single target within 30 feet as a ranged attack. A creature struck takes 1d6+1 per 2 HD of the white zetsu, plus the creature’s Constitution modifier (6d6+6 plus 5 for the average white zetsu). Spy Spore (Su) As a swift action when it hits a creature with a melee attack, phytokinetic blast or touch attack, a white zetsu may transfer a spy spore onto a target. The creature may resist this with a successful DC 20 Fortitude save. As long as the creature is on the same plane as the white zetsu that bestowed its spore, the white zetsu always knows the location of that creature, as per a discern location spell, and can use that creature as a center for its clairaudience/clairvoyance spell-like ability, regardless of distance. As a standard action, a white zetsu may command its spy spore to expand, acting as the entrap special attack (hardness 5, 10 hp, vulnerable to fire, DC 20), regardless of distance—doing so consumes the spy spore. A white zetsu may have a number of spy spores active equal to 3+ its Charisma modifier (8 for an average individual). The save DC is Charisma based. Superior Woodland Stride (Su) A white zetsu ignores all movement penalties from mundane or magical plant growth. Vegetal (Ex) Due to its plant-like nature, a white zetsu gains a +4 racial bonus on all saves against mind-influencing effects, paralysis, poison, polymorph, sleep and stunning effects.

[thetaboochristian]

Christians And Cannabis... Always At Odds?

I’m a Christian who uses Cannabis, and I’m sure that’s a pretty Taboo statement to make (within the Church community that is), but let me clarify. I’m NOT saying it’s ok to blaze up and get blasted for recreational purposes, and if you are getting super high as a Christian you better have an extreme medical necessity/justification for it. However, for more typical medical uses as well as occasional, responsible recreation, reasonable dosages that DON’T make you a drooling vegetable stuck to the couch or DON’T make you feel like the toaster is an alien spy from outer space plotting to assassinate you, you may be surprised to see what the Bible says that at least implies that it’s ok. Also, I’m talking about using high CBD cannabis with low levels of THC (I believe that is suitable for Christians). I believe that Christians should never use high THC weed or THC extracts unless they have a true medical necessity for it and have a high tolerance and/or have some medical reason why an abundance of CBD will worsen their condition rather than help it.

Yes, there are verses in the Bible that say we should remain sober, and verses that condemn drunkenness, but you really need to look at the specifics, the circumstances and the full meaning in the original Greek and Hebrew in order to fully understand what it really means beyond taking it at face value that “sober means sober, all the time, end of story.”

I will also address the whole issue of pharmakia and “witchcraft” that the Bible mentions, and I’ll explain what that really means as well. Pharmakia being listed as witchcraft doesn’t mean that it’s always witchcraft in God’s eyes when someone takes any drug at any time for any reason, like some Christians try to portray.

The reality is, you need to look at WHY the Bible says what it says and take into account the culture and limited scientific knowledge of the time.

I will address the witchcraft issue first. At the time that the Bible was written, witches used drugs to alter their consciousness in order to connect with the spirit world and perform divination, communing with demons, etc. The most accurate definition for “Pharmakia” is “the use of drugs for magical purposes.” However, some other biblical dictionaries simply say “the use of drugs” or “the use of pharmaceuticals” which is a GROSS and EGREGIOUS error! Using drugs for the purposes of performing witchcraft through the aid of the drug is what is witchcraft, not simply the use of the drug itself.

I will say however that if someone who was not going to be performing any kind of magic/witchcraft took a dosage of any drug that was high enough to connect their consciousness to the spirit world, and if there was no medical necessity for that high of a dosage, then I do believe it would be a sin simply because they’d be exposing themselves to have their minds manipulated by demons and they’d have no medical necessity for it. Any time that someone is in a psychedelic state, they are open to have demons appear to them, talk to them, implant crazy thoughts into their heads, try to deceive them in some way, etc. The demons can appear as they truly look or they can appear masqueraded as some kind, loving, peaceful “entity.” 

There is a difference between what I mentioned above and using a light to medium dose of CBD, THC, alcohol or most other drugs for the purpose of relaxing and de-stressing after a long, hard day or doing it just on occasion for the sheer enjoyment of it, even if you are already having a good day with no real problems. There are a few reasons for this, but the first is that low to medium doses of any kind of drug (besides psychedelics and hard stimulants like meth or bath salts, etc) do not open your mind up to encounter demons or be manipulated by them. If it does occur, it’s barely... it’s just a tiny bit of mental noise coming from the other side that’s easily ignored.

This ties in to the definition of “sober” in the original Greek. There are a few places where the consumption of alcohol itself is forbidden, but that was only to the Nazarites like Samson and John the Baptist. Even Jesus drank wine and was accused of being a drunkard, though He really wasn't. The point is, most of the time in the original Greek and Hebrew, the word “sober” actually means “sober-minded” or “able to think clearly and reasonably.” It is true that when you are drunk or significantly high on something you can’t think or speak properly, though the Bible makes a medical exception for allowing non-sobriety when it’s really necessary for extreme medical conditions. The reason why it is so important to remain “sober-minded” is because the devil will almost always try to mess with people’s minds when they take something psychoactive, including alcohol. What most laypeople who are not educated in pharmacology do not understand however, is that there is a certain dosage range for every drug that will give your body a buzz but NOT intoxicate your mind. It is possible with virtually every drug to have physical effects from it but have a sober mind. It is having a sober mind that is most important here so that you can think and speak normally in any circumstance, and so you can withstand attacks from the devil and his minions.  

Now, I’m NOT telling people to break the law, I’m simply referring to what is legal to do in your area, or what the morals and ethics of it would be if no drug laws existed at all. I believe that it was NO ACCIDENT that God made psychoactive plants and their psychoactive chemical constituents. Even though the Bible rarely mentions the use of psychoactive or medicinal herbs (psychoactive herbs always have some medicinal uses BTW), what the Bible says about alcohol can transfer over easily to any other natural substance. 

While the Bible does condemn the overindulgence of alcohol, it DOES OK larger amounts of alcohol when used to ease suffering in a person who’s on their death bed, in severe pain, or suffering some kind of tragedy. Moderate quantities of alcohol are listed as being ok for “lifting the spirits” of a depressed individual as well as for celebrations like weddings, special occasion feasts, etc. The Bible finally says that light doses of alcohol are acceptable for regular everyday use at meals (at least it was acceptable at that time when wine was usually the only clean thing to drink or clean water was scarce). 

I just honestly, 100% firmly believe that when God created high CBD and high THC varieties of Cannabis, He knew exactly what He was doing and designed them that way intentionally. While God certainly did not intend for them to be smoked, He knew how it would affect people when they did inhale it, and He did know that one day people would smoke or vaporize it for medical and recreational purposes, and God knew how the plant would affect the people who used it that way too, not just from eating it or applying it topically.

I believe that God designed Cannabis to be frightening as the dosage gets higher, because that was God’s way of minimizing abuse of the plant, though many people nowadays have figured out how to ignore that built in warning and keep on pushing to outrageous heights anyway. I do not condone that, I think it’s foolish and I do believe that God is not ok with it. However, I do believe that God is ok with medical use of Cannabis (high THC or high CBD kind, depending on the specific needs and conditions), though I believe that God does not want or like people smoking it (though He understands when and why people do choose that method of consumption). I believe that God is NOT opposed to non-e-liquid vaporization as long as it is done in reasonable frequencies that do not cause major lung issues. I believe that God is only ok with e-liquid vaping for people who are trying to transition off of smoking or need some in a pinch and can't bring a dry herb or resin vape with them wherever they need to go. I say this because e-liquid vaping still has a good bit of carcinogens in it while dry herb/resin vaping that is convection (not conduction which is burning on a hot coil) is virtually free of any carcinogens, toxins or harmful byproducts. I believe that people who need constant medical administration of cannabinoids as medicine should use edibles because even the safe type of vaping will cause lung problems if done more than a few times per day.

What I said about God designing psychoactive plants to intentionally be the way they are and contain built in defense mechanisms (AKA scary or uncomfortable side effects as the dose increases) I believe it applies to ALL plants, not just marijuana or hemp. I believe it applies to magic mushrooms (I prefer to call them Psilocybin Mushrooms because magic is evil), datura (AKA Devil’s Trumpet), belladonna, Opium, Calamus, Frankincense, Myrrh, Peyote Cactus, the list goes on and on. I believe that God intended all of them to feel the way they do when ingested (different effects at different dosage levels) and that each of them has their own pros and cons, each having their own medicinal uses and safe dosage limits.

It is the responsibility of each individual person to research any drug they plan to take, learn how it works inside the body, the pros and cons, the medical benefits and risks, etc. I believe that God will hold each person accountable for how they use each substance they ingest (whether natural or man-made) but I believe that God intended for everyone to have the freedom to choose what they put into their body, NOT to have to have the government decide for them what they are allowed to consume, when, where and why... that should be between each individual and God. An individual may know better than their government and/or their doctor what drug is best suited to their needs and they should not have that freedom taken away from them. If they are irresponsible and get hurt or die because of using a drug inappropriately then they also ought to have the freedom to experience the logical and rightful consequences of their actions. Either way, everyone should be free to decide what they take, how much, when and why... then God will be the judge. End of story!

I hope this has given you a pretty clear picture of what I believe about drugs from a health, spiritual and freedom standpoint. I hope that you will consider the truth of what I’ve presented to you today, no matter how Taboo it may appear.

Until next time,

“Luke Davidson” (Pen Name)

Author of The Taboo Christian

[agentargus]

//Character brainstorming and rambling for me to refer to later:

So I keep thinking over and over about writingwithcolor’s threads about Muslim vampires and wondering if I should make some changes to Silvano’s character. I sent wwc an ask and they haven’t replied yet but I think when they do, I’ll base my decision on that.

Things I need to think about:

1. Given that much of Silvano’s character is rooted in his long life and everything he’s seen and done, I would have to figure out how he might have achieved that if he wasn’t a vampire. He could be an alchemist, but just as drinking blood is considered Haram, magic can be seen as Haram too, depending on how it’s written.

2. The other option is that I could make him not Muslim. I know that not everyone considered an Italian Moor in the 1300s was Muslim, but many were. Some upper-class Italians of North African descent were Christian, Alessandro deMedici, but I worried that making Silvano a Christian could be erasure of Moorish Muslim culture during that time period. Besides, I‘m Jewish and really wish there were more characters in both the fantasy and spy genres who weren’t Christian.

There’s also the possibility of me doing what I’m already doing, which is basing Silvano’s relationship with Islam on my relationship with Judaism—namely, identifying with the cultural heritage aspect over the specific beliefs and organization of the religion. I’ll mix meat and dairy outside of the house. I work on Shabbat. I only really go to Synagogue for special occasions and family functions. I’m agnostic when it comes to the traditional idea of God. I’m Jewish because it’s my cultural heritage identity, not because of my dietary stuff or what holidays I observe. That said, I don’t know if it makes sense to look at a Muslim character through a Jewish lens or if specific cultural aspects of Islam would make similar experiences incomparable.

(I haven’t talked at length about any of this to my Muslim friends, but I do know that their relationships with Islam vary quite a bit. As for what’s considered Haram within a fantasy context, one of my friends literally wrote a web series where he plays a self-insert character who is both a practicing Muslim and a wizard, so there’s that—but again, I don’t know if it’s my place to explore anything similar if I’m not Muslim.)

3. “Why do need/want to write this story/character now?” That’s what wwc asks so I want to explore my answers. I’m not writing a story per se, but maybe I should approach this as though I was. Why a Muslim vampire?

Silvano was Moorish (technically North African-Italian) first. I did more research on the history there first. Many Moorish people, even those who weren’t Muslim, were expelled from Italy during the Crusades. Many of the survivors took refuge in Albania, which is the birthplace of the European vampire legend.

But I’ll go back even further. Given that everyone in Roanoke-affiliated verses has at least some connection to the unknown/paranormal/etc. making characters for that universe will involve thinking of supernatural elements they may have. I was thinking of Repubblica Dei Lupi characters first and foremost. I’m an art history major and I liked the idea of having an immortal character from a time in which some of the paintings I studied took place. Then I saw these photos of Pharrell Williams looking even fancier than usual:

And I was reminded of this painting of Alessandro deMedici

Which prompted me to go back and look further into all this stuff and the rest just kind of happened. The only social implication my white butt considered is that I did not want to make him a servant (or descended from a servant as deMedici was) WWC only fueled that when the admins said they wanted to see more historical black characters who existed outside of the context of servitude to white people.

But I’m getting off topic. Again, writing Silvano as a Muslim reconcilng existing outside of the natural cycle of life and death with his family’s heritage really allows me to process my own complicated feelings about which elements of Judaism I want to keep in my life as I become more of a separate entity from my parents. So that’s why now.

[science-criticaltheory]

John le Carré

David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré (/ləˈkæreɪ/), was a British author, who took Irish citizenship towards the end of his life, best known for his espionage novels. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). His third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works.

Writing

Le Carré's first two novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), are mystery fiction. Each features a retired spy, George Smiley, investigating a death; in the first book, the apparent suicide of a suspected communist, and in the second volume, a murder at a boy's public school. Although Call for the Dead evolves into an espionage story, Smiley's motives are more personal than political. Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works; following its publication, he left MI6 to become a full-time writer. Although le Carré had intended The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as an indictment of espionage as morally compromised, audiences widely viewed its protagonist, Alec Leamas, as a tragic hero. In response, le Carré's next book, The Looking Glass War, was a satire about an increasingly deadly espionage mission which ultimately proves pointless.

Most of le Carré's books are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91) and portray British Intelligence agents as unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work and engaged more in psychological than physical drama. The novels emphasise the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of east–west moral equivalence. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict is internal, rather than external and visible. The recurring character George Smiley, who plays a central role in five novels and appears as a supporting character in four more, was written as an "antidote" to James Bond, a character le Carré called "an international gangster" rather than a spy and who he felt should be excluded from the canon of espionage literature. In contrast, he intended Smiley, who is an overweight, bespectacled bureaucrat who uses cunning and manipulation to achieve his ends, as an accurate depiction of a spy.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People (the Karla trilogy) brought Smiley back as the central figure in a sprawling espionage saga depicting his efforts first to root out a mole in the Circus and then to entrap his Soviet rival and counterpart, code-named Karla. The trilogy was originally meant to be a long-running series that would find Smiley dispatching agents after Karla all around the world. Smiley's People marked the last time Smiley featured as the central character in a le Carré story, although he brought the character back in The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies.

A Perfect Spy (1986), which chronicles the boyhood moral education of Magnus Pym and how it leads to his becoming a spy, is the author's most autobiographical espionage novel, reflecting the boy's very close relationship with his con man father. Biographer LynnDianne Beene describes the novelist's own father, Ronnie Cornwell, as "an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes, but no social values". Le Carré reflected that "writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised". He also wrote a semi-autobiographical work, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), as the story of a man's midlife existential crisis.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's writing shifted to portrayal of the new multilateral world. His first completely post-Cold War novel, The Night Manager (1993), deals with drug and arms smuggling in the murky world of Latin American drug lords, shady Caribbean banking entities, and western officials who look the other way.

As a journalist, le Carré wrote The Unbearable Peace (1991), a nonfiction account of Brigadier Jean-Louis Jeanmaire (1911–1992), the Swiss Army officer who spied for the Soviet Union from 1962 until 1975.

Credited under his pen name, le Carré appears as an extra in the 2011 film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, among the guests at the Christmas party in several flashback scenes. He allegedly coined the espionage terms "mole" and "honey trap" (the latter referring to the use of female agents by both sides to blackmail male civil servants). Le Carre records a number of incidents from his period as a diplomat in his autobiographical work, The Pigeon Tunnel. Stories from My Life (2016), which include escorting six visiting German parliamentarians to a London brothel and translating at a meeting between a senior German politician and Harold Macmillan.

Politics

Le Carré feuded with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, stating that "nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity".

In January 2003, two months prior to the invasion, The Times published le Carré's essay "The United States Has Gone Mad" criticising the buildup to the Iraq War and President George W. Bush's response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, calling it "worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War" and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams". Le Carré participated in the London protests against the Iraq War. He said the war resulted from the "politicisation of intelligence to fit the political intentions" of governments and "How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history".

He was critical of Tony Blair's role in taking Britain into the Iraq War, saying "I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretences has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed".

Le Carré was critical of Western governments' policies towards Iran. He believed Iran's actions are a response to being "encircled by nuclear powers" and by the way in which "we ousted Mosaddeq through the CIA and the Secret Service here across the way and installed the Shah and trained his ghastly secret police force in all the black arts, the SAVAK".

In 2017, le Carré expressed concerns over the future of liberal democracy, saying "I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it's contagious, it's infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There's an encouragement about". He later wrote that the end of the Cold War had left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance – all of that we called anti-communism" prevailing during that time.

Le Carré opposed both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that their desire to seek or maintain their countries' superpower status caused an impulse "for oligarchy, the dismissal of the truth, the contempt, actually, for the electorate and for the democratic system". Le Carré compared Trump's tendency to dismiss the media as "fake news" to the Nazi book burnings, and wrote that the United States is "heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism".

Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and sharply criticised Brexit. Le Carré criticised Conservative politicians such as Boris Johnson (whom he referred to as a "mob orator"), Dominic Cummings, and Nigel Farage in interviews, claiming that their "task is to fire up the people with nostalgia [and] with anger". He further opined in interviews that "What really scares me about nostalgia is that it's become a political weapon. Politicians are creating a nostalgia for an England that never existed, and selling it, really, as something we could return to", noting that with "the demise of the working class we saw also the demise of an established social order, based on the stability of ancient class structures". On the other hand, he said that in the Labour Party "they have this Leninist element and they have this huge appetite to level society."

On Brexit, le Carré did not mince his words, comparing it to the 1956 Suez crisis which confirmed post-imperial Britain's loss of global power. "This is without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez," le Carré said of Brexit. "Nobody is to blame but the Brits themselves - not the Irish, not the Europeans". "The idea, to me, that at the moment we should imagine we can substitute access to the biggest trade union in the world with access to the American market is terrifying," he said.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, he commented "I've always believed, though ironically it's not the way I've voted, that it's compassionate conservatism that in the end could, for example, integrate the private schooling system. If you do it from the left you will seem to be acting out of resentment; do it from the right and it looks like good social organisation." Le Carré also said that "I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years. And it's a kind of liberation, if a sad kind."

In Le Carré's final novel Agent Running in the Field, one of the novel's characters refers to Trump as "Putin's shithouse cleaner" who "does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can't do for himself". The novel's narrator describes Boris Johnson as "a pig-ignorant foreign secretary". He says Russia is moving "backwards into her dark, delusional past", with Britain following a short way behind. Le Carré later said that he believed the novel's plotline, involving the U.S. and British intelligence services colluding to subvert the European Union, to be "horribly possible."

[victoriagloverstuff]

The Sound of Black Voices, The Sound of My Father

I. Who Will Build this Ark of Bones ?

Once upon a time I had a house full of cousins, convivial aunties, resounding uncles with gold belt-buckles and big happy teeth, a black grandmother who washed my hair in the sink and taught my mom how to cook greens so tender and comb through my coils. On Sundays we’d all be at the local Baptist church, the whole choir was blood, I would clap and spin and scoot up to the stage in a rile of girlhood and pride, dad would be leading everybody, being the commanding, larger-than-life, chief-of-a-loving tyrant that he could be, for the good times. Nothing mattered but the tone when he got to singing—no one should question the authority of a voice like that, the fear that it would go silent was enough to convince us to endure every scream.

One by one those bodies visiting our house turned into ghosts, figments of my imagination. Day by day our routine was slipping into disaster’s taunting shadow and it seemed everybody was waiting for dad to fulfill a prophecy and enter the afterlife, sing to us from the other side. When he did, his haunting compliance so well-timed it’s my eternal fable for unconventional acts of deep generosity, my mom and I were out in California having left the paradise of phantoms I called home for a safer environment, a less complicated dream. By the time we got word, our Iowa fairytale had turned into a Reparations graveyard.

Maybe they weren’t legal heirs to the rights to his songs but my grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, deserved something—a gold record, a Stetson or fringed suede and denim jacket, one of his many guns packed in a suitcase like grams—that announced Jimmy was here, was ours. By the time it was my mom’s turn to look through the remaining belongings all that was left was her stuffed childhood monkey, Zip, some pictures and letters he’d written me and her in his broken penmanship, and a shoebox full of tapes he’d been keeping under their circular bed, recordings of his latest music.

Enough for a new beginning.

After all, his voice remained immortal, black with grief and guile, sweet and childlike, chills down the spine, gritty and remote, knowing when it’s time to tremble and when to be still in the low of limbo.

  II. Can’t You Hear It?

Listening, knowing one another by sound and voice, is the first law of black liberation—without this skill there is no self-preservation. From differentiating between urgent aggression and routine to separating moments of life-threatening anguish on a slaveship from the casual agony of another day in the hold, from deciphering the outcome of a session on the auction block through the cadence of those in attendance bidding in, to listening for the music of keys and shoes and rippling bills of sale and commands, all while still in disbelief at having become human contraband.

Next came the soul-threatening business of navigating life and forced labor on plantations, using the well-tuned ear of black survival to decode a symphony of footsteps, whips, Bible verses, moans, hisses, work chants, screams, hooflandings, rainfall, collapse, talking drum rising from the tap-rooted foot to the shamed skull, all of it echoing in the trapped and huddled sound of the English syllabics mangling in the planters’ mouths, acting as one of many indications that violently broken logic was the fulcrum of the West and would be used to keep black bodies in captivity in one form or another, for as long as circumstance or the bodies themselves would abide. And if we listened closely enough to that cacophony, we could detect within it the performance of hatred and domination used to mask the violent, obsessive, almost fanatical love American whites harbor for black bodies, black people, and everything we produce—how they tend to often covet and resent all otherness for the trance of envy or awe it strikes in them. We who hear this grand hypocrisy with our whole bodies are the first fugitives from it, running and not in fear.

“That box of tapes my dad left opened up a life of listening to the recorded voices of black people, developing almost pathological kinship with resonant timbres.”

We had to learn to listen through the wall of their deflected self-loathing on the road to turning their heroes and healers—us—into capital, before we could even hear ourselves think. We had to improvise small acts of subversion and freedom using our sensory attention and then project that provisional understanding of where we had been taken and why onto our own musical and spoken and mimed forms as we invented songs and styles of movement to relay the stories our hushed listening helped us gather and remember and invent. Our music became a form of collective listening and we used it to deliver dire messages as well as just to cope and retreat into beauty in otherwise-wretched places.

Learning to read could get us killed on plantations, but a literacy in rhythm and tone so acute we could communicate several very different intentions in one five-word arpeggiated blues phrase, was lost on those too literal, too evil to hear truths they didn’t comprehend: watchmen and slavers. And anything they could not ruin upfront became our grail, our pastime paradise, salvation. The improvisational musics we invented under those hyper-traumatic circumstances—deep listening projected outward, become mirrors to our jailers, deleting their obscene vanities, exposing them to themselves by inventing pure sonic opposition.

III. Alone Together

My own listening practice began early and as a matter of survival and generational reckoning, because I was born into a household brimming with music and conflict, to parents who were either up all night singing and testing chords on the piano, or up all night fighting, with little in between. Everyone was acting funny, all the adults around me were a little lost and crazy—so not only was I both spy and informant for both sides, I was ruthlessly neutral; no one seemed like a victim and at the same time everyone did, and l listened closely.

Before I was three, I’d learned to listen for quarreling between my parents and decipher its severity. I knew how to listen to figure out if dad was sleeping and if so, with or without the phone off the hook. I could tell by the energy in his voice what kind of mood he was in, manic or brooding, and I could tell if mom was hysterical by the pitch of her moments of catatonia. I had to listen to my own breathing or lack thereof to block them out, the acoustics of survival that traveled in my DNA were needed in my household, where the race and gender problems played themselves out in microcosm and became inverted: the black man was in charge here and also petrified of the creative power that guided his rule; the white woman was his willful slave and not meant to get away. I was the evidence of what they could not otherwise say, that life begets life and it’s okay.

I listened in my sleep, my subconscious a vigilante. I’m not exaggerating. I developed a kind of clairaudience that helped me remain one step ahead of the misguided adults around me, I could feel them unraveling acoustically before they knew a new shambles was closing in on them, and I could dazzle them with my innocence just enough to remind everyone who the child was, who was responsible for whom (though I also learned that it’s a blurry equation, responsibility, everyone is everyone’s burden). I had to be responsible for my own psychic protection and it made me feel close to my ancestors—before I even knew their story, I felt it, was guided by events I had not lived in this lifetime, and the guidance came in the form of sound awareness, a kind of keeness no one taught me, born of necessity. Listening offered the distance and dimension I needed to endure, it’s how I drew a boundary around my body in that chaotic space, how I came to be a form, why I am a destiny.

  IV. The Man’s Gone Now

There’s an undeniable connection between close listening and absence, a sense that something is missing or has been stolen from us and might be tiptoeing toward us in the night from an unnameable erotic distance, pursuing triumphant reunion. This quiet almost anti-social optimism needs a place to play hide and seek with fate and the song and the sound offer an idyllic landscape. For this reason we rarely broadcast (to the limited radio imagination) our deepest acoustic preoccupations, and the diasporic music that collective listening generates is not always guarded by anything besides generational memory.

In the West the only thing more jarring than being free-spirited enough to make something up as you go along and enjoy it, is the confidence to not spy on yourself while doing it, to not maintain a record of exactly what happened, to not write it down or find some other form in which to engrave every nuance of every event into a lifeless monument.

In Black culture the record is the memory and the memory is the body, so the record is the body, and when it changes form, the spirit, the soul, the feeling and stories and teachings are passed down body to body like trusts without much fear that they will be lost. Even now, as we are lost, we’re not always inclined to create static archives that might lead us back someplace that makes sense. Our archives have always been alive, entities, capricious and at risk and traveling with us and guarding our sense of meaning, the sonic territory we can draw from no matter where we happen to find ourselves, this way nothing ever really goes missing, there is no myth that cannot be repopulated and reborn in any moment. Though spiritually this makes us versatile giants, economically in America it means we don’t always possess the mixture of opportunism and self-esteem that inspires us to keep track of our sh*t in a culture that uses formal recordkeeping as another excuse for the distribution of capital and real estate.

“Listening, knowing one another by sound and voice, is the first law of black liberation—without this skill there is no self-preservation.”

At the same time I realized that the distribution of land and resources in the US was often manipulated by large institutions that invest a lot of money into buying archives, creating exclusive portals through which documented history can be accessed and studied and changed, I saw that my family’s ransacked home and all of the missing parts of my father’s legacy revealed more than just circumstance. With all of that information scattered among estranged family members, a man’s story becomes compartmentalized, eventually forgotten, unless someone does the work of telling it, recording it, gathering it all back in one place, as sound, as verbal action, as music’s own memory, as more music, as better listening.

For black people of the diaspora, that place is often on a vinyl record, because the truth for us remains in the sound. That box of tapes my dad left opened up a life of listening to the recorded voices of black people, developing almost pathological kinship with resonant timbres, and a feeling of brotherhood, sisterhood, toward people I had only heard on a record or tape.

Eventually, after years and years of that practice, I started making my own archives, assembling recordings of black voices in ways that defy typical archival logic simply because the data collecting is improvised and at the mercy of in-the-moment human interaction, what I can grab from one basement or closing record depot—our archives, like our listening, will be collectively improvised. When we finally accept the value of keeping autonomous records of our histories, and demand places to keep those records, places we ourselves own and run, when that demand is universal for diasporic artists, it will be collective improvisation, our shared black technology, that stirs it and ensures our success, lets us tonally recover what has been materially erased or made into ruins. We can make music with those ruins, reanimate them, listen and speak them into new forms.

V. A Brief History of My Improvised Listening

Stevie Wonder’s Ribbon in the Sky One of the first songs I remember hearing and listening to for hours on end was Stevie Wonder’s Ribbon in Sky. I was learning a dance to it and I think sometimes I left out a step on purpose so that my instructor would have to rewind the tape, because I loved that song that much. At home with my Walkman™ I would pace my room and mark the dance and trace the imaginary ribbon with my eyes like some kind of cat entranced by her own leash. I was a prisoner of the song’s somber fantasy and I loved waiting for the divots in Stevie’s tone—I loved the pacing, the whole composition. I guess it’s the first time I remember a song soothing a void I had otherwise ignored, filling in a missing space, running toward me in the dark carrying visions of my father and his mother, and that happy broken home in Iowa transported to Hollywood on the edge of Stevie’s we won’t lose, with love on our side.

Jimmy Holiday I’m Gonna Use What I Got, To Get What I Need Dad wasn’t just singing, he was crying and bargaining with eternity. To me, he had always been a king, always been glorious and formidable and in charge of everything, so hearing my dad talk about being born in a shack and struggling, and needing something from the world, was devastating and a relief. I heard this song on one of those tapes we managed to get away with, and I wore it out, studied it. I wanted to protect the boy he had been on that white man’s farm picking cotton, making weight, with no school to attend. I wanted to console him when he hopped a train to Louisiana and started recording and had to find women enamored enough to sit up nights and listen to him sing and write down the songs because he could not write them himself, had not been allowed the time to learn to read or write.

Eleven words that hit me like daggers. Dad had suffered, had been afraid, wounded, neglected, and was afraid to be loved even after all of his success. He remained, psychologically, the young black boy from the country who just wants to sing into the comfort of night and feel free. Listening to my dad describe prevailing over deprivation, I understood the interplay of vulnerability and violence he had used as a survival tactic; I observed men like him at every level of society, male archetypes who had to pretend to be tough and unruly in order to hide their dangerous sincerity. 

Minnie Ripperton’s Loving You I learned this ballad for another ballet solo, this one en pointe. I wore a cherry red unitard and stiff red pointe shoes to match, and was meant to glide across the dance floor like an erotic young nymph, an apparition, someone impossible, at least that’s what I told myself. I decided I was redefining beauty and the weightless bourrees and unwound turnings were my physical manifesto, my way of using my body to tell the world that I loved myself after all, that that love came easy, that I could relax and listen to birds chirping and not worry about some great tragedy lurking behind that mindless bliss.

Loving you, is easy ‘cause you’re beautiful, and everything that I do, is out of loving you. Dedicating this song and solo to myself made it clear to me that I needed my own love and attention, and also made me feel like a desired object of that universal gaze—I felt redeemed and more self-possessed than ever before in all that dance’s bloodred confidence. I didn’t know a black singer could sound so carefree, the way Minnie did, no grinding on her throat, no foreboding blues, just soft almost dainty relishing in common emotion. A new way of being was made available to me with her song, a happy disguise or a part of myself I felt the world unworthy of, my rapacious joy, the part of me I expose when I’m dancing had an analog in Minnie’s soft voicings, of pure unfettered romance.   

Billie Holiday In college, she was all I could hear over the self-important rhetoric of my philosophy seminars. I’d leave some critical theory course where we’d spent three hours discussing Freud’s concept of the Death Drive as it relates to warring nations in the throes of late capitalism, and I’d be nauseated. Did this compulsive violence deserve the dignity of high concepts? Not in my estimation. If we’re gonna talk about self-made martyrs and epic self-destruction fueled by displaced love and tenderness without talking about Billie Holiday we’re gonna be liars forever. Her crackling and medicinal tone was how I made it through that indoctrination in western thinking that we call a college education. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Foucault and Derrida and Joyce and them, but without Billie Holiday I might have told everyone about themselves more often than I already did (that white boyfriend I had to dump because he said, verbatim, “who actually listens to Billie Holiday,” like black culture was some kind of Disneyland and she was a mascot for his idea of it, acted shocked that anyone could be that misguided). I urge everyone to listen to “Strange Fruit” or “I Cover the Waterfront ” while reading Plato’s Apology and not believe in miracles.

Miles Dewey Do what he says Davis His voice is broken, gutted, a grammar of aching gashes, but when Miles Davis says My father’s rich and my mother’s good looking, I have never suffered and I don’t intend to suffer and I can play the blues, I forgive everyone for about five minutes and tell all my friends to get rich and scream this through the open roofs of convertibles and it’s lit.

James Baldwin When YouTube democratized listening and looking beyond the capacity of radio and television, I spent months listening to James Baldwin speak. I had found my other father, another prophetic Jimmy, in the most unlikely corner of the digital omniverse—how had I gone so long without hearing a voice like that? After Baldwin, I found Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Amiri Baraka and Nina Simone and Lorraine Hansberry and Abbey Lincoln, speaking out loud, healing my sense of story and of cadence and oratory as a practice. The meta language that can be heard, the breath or slight cough or rustle of fabric, all of that poetry felt like gold, felt like the first time I heard my dad cry I’m gonna use what I got, to get what I need.

Midnight Girl When I was in grad school and a friend was helping me digitize some of my tapes, I found a recording of my dad singing at home in Iowa. It’s my favorite love song of all time because it feels like it’s for me, for my mother, for my sisters, for all women who feel in some way abandoned by convention. It’s a song about permission to not belong to a man, to recognize when you have more to forge than romance and its specific kind of alienation—in a way it’s him saying goodbye and also saying I’m here always, deliberate, intentional.

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