#also I changed the date of Ian's journal entry

[crossmydna]

I fucking hate history why did I have to start a series that involved constantly looking shit up???

[spottedtoad]

Freud, in the only book of his I’ve read, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that every dream, no matter how unpleasant, represents an unarticulated desire. This has always struck me as more convincing (and useful) as a description of fictions like books and movies than for interpreting my own dreams. Whose unarticulated desire is being represented is a matter for debate of course- the protagonist’s, the author or director or performer’s, the audience’s? Hard to say.  Karl Popper said of Freudianism that it wasn’t science because you couldn’t prove it wrong, but literary criticism isn’t astrophysics and a certain malleability goes a long way.

But accept for the moment that movies represent desires (not always unarticulated: I’ve heard multiple four-year-olds say they want to be Iron Man.) What kind of desire is represented by the new movie Joker, comic book in origins but resolutely art house in style? This question was taken to have some social import even before the film was in wide release. A story in which a man (the appellation “young” often added by critics beforehand, though more about that later) finds actualization through psychopathic violence was warned to be a potential instigation to more real life instances of nihilistic violence, of the mass shooter type we’ve seen with great regularity over the last several years. This fear was not, I thought, entirely groundless: a showing of an earlier Batman-related movie, The Dark Knight Rises,  was the scene of a 2012 mass shooting, and while as it turned out that killer had not intended his dyed hair to mark himself as “the Joker,” the rumor that he had has persisted. The earlier incarnation of this character by Heath Ledger, in the 2010 The Dark Knight, seemed indeed to embody exactly what makes mass shootings a potent source of terror, in spite of their low aggregate frequency and body count relative to other forms of homicide: The Dark Knight‘s Joker was motivated by chaos for its own sake, often contradicting himself in discussing his motivations and “how I got these scars.” Heath Ledger’s death at 28 prior to The Dark Knight‘s release from a cocktail of abused prescription drugs put a seal on an indelible performance, suggesting the darkness of the character (in a movie that, to be honest, I find kind of a slog whenever Ledger’s Joker is not on screen) came at least in part from real life internal torment as well as the actor, director, and screenwriters’ craft.

If this backstory gave some cause for concern, media outlets were eager to magnify it, with dozens of articles warning that the Joker movie could set off copycat (copying off of real or fictional violence unclear) killings, to the point where it became ambiguous whether these articles were intended to forestall violence, use its threat to boost ticket sales, or, for the benefit of an ideological narrative, call it into existence. Fortunately, we have been spared any accompanying violence related to the film; even last night, there were two uniformed local policy prominently standing at the entrance to my local megaplex when my wife and I went to see the 9:45.

The genre which Joker forms a part of is both an unusual one- the art house homage to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy that is also a comic book movie- while it is also immediately adjacent to the preeminent commercial production of our time, the superhero origin story. Almost every superhero franchise and reboot now begins with a portrayal of how the hero gained his or her powers, how he or she became- by magic or mutation or training montage- a god sent to live among men. The origin story is, it would appear, the audience’s entry-point into identification with the superhero; it is not enough that the great ones of the earth have our interest at heart, but that we learn how they were once weak and helpless like us, whether as babies saved from Krypton or as young orphaned billionaire heirs.

More precisely analogous to Joker is 2011’s X-Men: First Class, which sought to portray the origin not of an individual superhero (though it is really antihero Magneto’s film) but of the broader social world of the other X-Men films, of Professor X’s School for mutants as well as Magneto’s competing band of outlaws. What was distinctive about First Class was its temporal setting: casting backwards before the era of the earlier movies of the series, it sets itself in a mythic Kennedy Era of Cold War intrigue (unleashed in the film by mutants rather than ideology) and of mutants’ Civil Rights struggles substituting for black Americans’. While to me one of the most artistically successful of recent superhero movies, First Class is notable in how comfortable its alternative history feels to us; we are used to viewing the era immediately before the 60s counterculture as an ancien regime both glorious and unjust, as Mad Men was fond of showing- we are eager both to revel in the aesthetics and grandiosity of the world of the Baby Boomers’ childhood and deplore its moral failures and unequal civic ethics.

Joker is more unfamiliar and unsettling in its setting. The disintegration of urban America prior to its partial rebirth in the last 30 years is easily remembered, and in the case of New York, where Joker is more-or-less explicitly set, is often if incompletely discussed. But it is an ambiguous and incompletely mythologized portion of our collective narrative. What exactly led to American cities being riddled with garbage, graffiti and crime, near abandoned by middle class families, aesthetically blighted and seemingly spiritually bereft? Why were there over 2,000 murders a year in New York City (when there have been under 300 per year in a larger city in the last few years)? My precinct in my last neighborhood in Brooklyn had 99 rapes in a single year in the early 90s, and only one the year I lived there, 2006. To say that this descent into Tartarus was due to lead poisoning, or white flight, are clearly incomplete; to say this was due to a collapse of civic authority and popular morality begs the question.

Joker is, in its own way, eager to answer this question. The Gotham of Joker is not Tim Burton’s cartoonish 1940s Gothic of his Batman movies, or Christopher Nolan’s Bloombergian circle of shiny glass and steel from the Dark Knight trilogy. It is, instead, an exaggeratedly decayed, almost shattered, version of the 1970s pimps-and-pushers New York of Taxi Driver, with an endless garbage strike reminiscent of several from 1968 to 1977 piling refuse in every exterior shot, over which giant rats crawl, and the filming locations drawn from the sadder and more austere corners of the Outer Boroughs. The movie’s most deliberately iconic image, of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker dancing on the steps leading to his apartment building, is a real staircase in the Bronx several blocks from the school where I taught and which I described in 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip.

In fact, in an ill-fated field trip that didn’t make it into the book, I led my students to and from Crotona Park past those exact stairs to dig up and observe grubs and earthworms. (On the way back, a boy was accused of slapping a girl’s butt, leading to hours of recrimination, between me and the students and between the principal and me). I lived at the time next to a similar, if slightly less filmic set of stairs in Washington Heights, and spent a lot of time in apartment buildings identical in design if slightly less poorly maintained to the one where Joaquin’s character Arthur Fleck, lives. The subway stations and trains are similarly familiar to anyone who has lived in New York, even if the names are changed.

All of which is to say that Joker wants itself to be set in a real-seeming, if mythically nightmarish, New York-turned-Gotham, a 1970s megalopolis collapsing under its own refuse and under the burden of hatred and collective ill will. The first image of the film is a faded, deliberately dated version of the Warner Brothers’ logo, flickering and faltering. The human elements of Gotham are, in general, shown through a similarly harsh lens; while many reviewers describe the Arthur Fleck character as an alienated young man, Joaquin Phoenix is shown as anything but; his face, on screen for practically every shot, is made to seem every minute of his 44 years:

His wasted torso, for which the actor lost over 50 pounds, is similarly contorted, abandoned, presumptively worn down by the character’s nonexistent diet, constant chainsmoking, and cocktail of pharmaceutical meds. There’s something interesting about this visual emphasis on the character and actor’s age. Compare, for example, to Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, a youthful 32 playing 26:

De Niro’s Travis Bickle is, implicitly, the “all American kid from New York City,” explaining other characters’ frequent positive affect towards him, and his own social incapacity and descent into violence is, visually at least, the result of the fallen world impinging upon him rather than his own intrinsic corruption. He amiably convinces Cybil Shephard to go out with him on a date, before his incomprehension of the world leads him to take her to an X-rated film.  Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck on the other hand, is not only visibly aged and incapable of ordinary conversation, passing into peals of barking laughter and incoherence, but evidently has an inner life constructed only of darkness and destructive images, as shown by the ink-scribbled journal and alleged joke diary he writes in, into which pornographic images are taped and from which inopportunely fall out.

What exactly is Arthur Fleck- or Joaquin Phoenix- doing in this 1970s world, we might ask? While X Men: First Class substituted youthful James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender in telling the origin of the characters previously inhabited by Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, Joker is about a middle aged man trapped in perpetual boyhood, searching pathetically for father figures, resentful of his mother’s injuries to him, yearning for women with whom he cannot speak. It seems not coincidental that both Phoenix and director/screenwriter Todd Phillips are of an age to have been born roughly at the time of the film’s setting, and that the film’s central axis finds Fleck trying to understand the mystery of his birth, becoming the Joker only when this question is revealed to be unanswerable. In other words, Joker is a Generation X origin story, an attempt to find, in the inscrutable dirt of urban blight, the origin of an inconvenient and extraneous generation like Fleck’s inconvenient and extraneous man.

If the viewer is cast backwards into the past to find their own origins amid 1970s decay, Fleck is equally out of temporal step with his world. A clown is intrinsically a dated persona, even in a 1970s milieu, and much of the film emphasizes that Arthur’s world is itself locked in an inaccessible and unrealized past. Arthur first appears dancing to a ragtime piece, watches Fred Astaire on TV, and the songs referenced up until his transformation into the Joker are either old (“Slap That Bass,” “That’s Life,” Jimmy Durante’s “Smile” ) or deliberately dated despite their 1970s provenance, like “Send in the Clowns.” When Arthur tails Thomas Wayne to the theatre, it is Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 Modern Times that they- and the rest of the city’s fat cats- are watching and laughing to; just as we as viewers are caught off from the mystery and dishonor of our origins amid 1970s decay, Arthur cannot come to understand his origins in the forgotten and unlearnable disgraces of the 30s.

At the same time, Arthur is, like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, incapable of speech, but expressive in movement.  While Travis Bickle’s social missteps are mitigated by his youth and external amiability and the measured tone of his voiceovers, Arthur Fleck is redeemed only in a few moments of physical performance- in the moments before a gang of kids intercedes to attack him or a gun falls out of his pocket, he is clearly a gifted physical performer when in make-up as a clown. While the film concludes with him becoming the Joker, his acts of violence having merged the darkness of his inner verbal life with the grace and self-possession of his clown performance, self-actualized in psychopathy.  Suddenly, the film’s dissonance between temporal setting and cultural signifiers disappear- the Joker dances to Gary Glitter’s 1973 “Rock and Roll (Part 2)” on the stairs, and as Gotham descends into the fire and chaos that delights the Joker’s heart, that universal cliche of unchained liberation, Cream’s “White Room” plays a few distorted guitar bars of freedom.

A hidden tension in our culture- starting to become less hidden- is that once Baby Boomers took over the culture, historical consciousness became somewhat fixed and recent eras have been mostly exempt from the myth-making and revisionism that dominate our views of the world before Watergate. My guess is that both MeToo and some of the media controversy over Joker are partly driven by this closed book starting to open and people angling to grab control over what can be written in it and what cannot. For now, it seems telling the story of the costs of post-Sixties liberation and urban blight is allowable, as long as these costs are presented as result of empowering the rich, white, male, and straight to indulge temptations, not a broader breakdown of order that encompassed multiple types of culprit and victims. This creation of historical myth is perhaps what distinguishes the prominent generational cohorts from the marginal ones.

The supposed political controversy over Joker is at one level strange; the film takes a basically left-sympathetic view of the horror of Gotham, with canceled social services and rich, sadistic or narcissistic businessmen primarily to blame, and the racial dynamics of Joker are at least at a surface level politically correct. While Arthur is assaulted by a mixed-race group of young hoodlums at the movie’s onset, he explicitly forgives them, in a way he doesn’t the three rich white men who attack him later. The riots by which Gotham is consumed at the film’s end is shown as outsider white men rising up against insider, rich white men. The four main black characters- his social worker, his next door love interest, a clerk at the insane asylum he convinces to share his mother’s file, and a psychiatrist he meets with at the end of the film- are not only sympathetic and kind. They are essentially the only characters, apart from a colleague with dwarfism, to show Arthur attention and concern, and with whom he finds himself eager to express himself in humane terms and show himself to be sane. Not coincidentally, they are filmed in a forgiving and gracious light, at odds with the washed-out and unforgiving appearance of almost all the other (white) characters.

  If there is a racial subtext to Joker– and this is America, how could there not be- it is likely that it is, in fact, the desire to sideline racial conflict from the paroxysms of post-60s urban life, to present black Americans as patient, sane, wisely enduring bystanders to class and civic conflict and crime rather than primary participants and victims.  Arthur’s visible fantasies- or hallucinations- of a love affair with his next door neighbor are exaggeratedly chaste, in spite of the cutout pictures of naked black women in his notebook. While 1970s films themselves often wished to juggle the social role of blacks and whites in collective consciousness (as Rocky did), or to offer white men a role as instruments of reactionary vengeance without explicitly invoking racial revenge (as Taxi Driver  did by making the main target of Travis Bickle’s bloodshed the white pimp played by Harvey Keitel), Joker takes place in a different kind of dream-like world- there is a reason Arthur’s six-shooter revolver shoots nine bullets in his first burst of violence. The dream desire I would guess it seeks is to find an origin story for our own incoherences, inequalities, injustices, that does not make race determinative of whether one is inside or outside the circle of privilege, in the present and in the past. If fictions are defined by pretending to be someone else, perhaps Joker is an attempt by middle aged white guys, to be sure to say that, while they may be- perhaps definitively are- the villain, they can at least choose what kind of villain they wish to be.  This choice amounts, according to many in media, and an increasing segment of our most prominent institutions,  to the Joker dancing on concrete steps following bloody deeds, an ornamentation of psychopathy that does not and cannot change its character, whether we used to think our story a comedy, but now realize it is a tragedy, or the other way around.

The Generation X Origin Story Freud, in the only book of his I've read, The Interpretation of Dreams, argues that every dream, no matter how unpleasant, represents an unarticulated desire.

[blue-opossum]

Exit Point Modulation in Dreams, page 1

Saturday, 14 September 2019

Reading time (optimized): 5 min.

In this dream journal entry, I will explain the nature of exit point modulation in dreams, giving various genuine examples and relevant dynamics responsible for emergence outcome. In these examples, I will mainly be using instances where preconscious simulacra (reticular activating system personifications as well as animal semblances) accompanies the waking transition regardless of dreaming mode.

My use of subliminal, liminal, and supraliminal threads corresponds with the following implications from the perspective of dream space. With subliminal mode, my waking life identity is often not present though I can still control my dreams by way of instinctual dreaming. (That is, my conscious self is instinctually aware I am dreaming, but my dream self is not as it has not coalesced. It is the default mode for all dreaming potential.) In subliminal dreaming, the preconscious may be inactive until the reticular activating system (ascending arousal system) initiates emergence.

With liminal factors, some attributes of genuine waking life identity may emerge. In sustained liminality, there may be ambiguity and autosymbolism related to detectives, spies, jigsaw puzzle pieces, or as in a few childhood dreams, question marks floating in the air. Ambiguous sustained imaginary physicality was a common factor in my childhood dreams. Liminality in coming out of the dream state lasted longer. For example, I would vividly perceive my body as lying in tall grass in a culvert near the side of a road at the same time I also knew I was in bed. Over time, I have used a porch as the principal setting to sustain liminality.

Supraliminal, as used in my journal, means above the level of dream self perception, including co-occurrence with biological dynamics such as the need to use the bathroom, investigate an environmental noise (perceived as a potential threat), a need to change sleeping position, the need to quench thirst, and so on. (In contrast, it refers to something above the threshold of consciousness in waking life). The preconscious becomes more defined and "intrusive" with supraliminal dynamics, mainly because of being much closer to emergence and coalescence with consciousness.

Assuming the casual reader understands all of the above content, I will now explore specific instances in the pages to come. Anyone of reasonable intelligence would easily see the same processes (often in the same order toward waking point modulation) in thousands of my dreams. Please note that the snippets in this series do not include full dream content, only exit point modulation. By habit (both instinctual and lucid), I have typically used a door to exit the dream state, but many other autosymbolic constructs serve the same purpose, for example, a store's checkout or remaining in a car in a parking lot (a waking point modulation factor I developed in childhood by habit). Focusing on text and attempting to read decreases imaginary physicality while increasing cognitive arousal (and in real life works similarly but with opposite effects, for example, resulting in drowsiness).

I will start with vivid instances where exit point modulation utilized personification as a celebrity. (Celebrities are typically the gating factor to avoid associations with waking life, analogically correlating a dream as akin to the end of a movie or television show.)

February 7, 2018. American actor Ian Somerhalder (as himself) sits on the steps near the back door of our present home as I enter our house. Ian says, "Yes, you used just the right amount of physical strength and force" in response to my statement "I did not want to be too violent, I just wanted to get the message across" referring to my confrontation with a dream character that was a reaction to summoned but unrecognized reinduction (as part of a sequence of known processes too complex to include here). In this case, I was distinctly aware I was mentally making him agree with me.

June 26, 2016. American actor David Boreanaz appears in a longer than usual wall mediation process. Zsuzsanna and I walk close to a television broadcasting an old episode of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet." We enter the television studio as a result, and it is filming a new version of the show. David Boreanaz appears from behind a doorway on my right, in shadow and bigger than life. It seems he has taken the role of Rick Nelson in the new copycat version of the series. In the last scene, Zsuzsanna and I enter undefined liminal space with supraliminal pacing. David comes out from a doorway, approaches us, and says, "There are no cell phones here." (Zsuzsanna and I are not carrying cell phones.) Personified exit point modulation does not "like" telephones. I will explain this in other entries, but here I will point out that maintaining the imaginary physicality of the dream state conflicts with emergence. It ultimately stems from the simple fact that dream self instructions to my real physical body are ill-advised. In contrast, there are sleepwalkers, but I am not one.

September 20, 2014. American actor Tom Welling features in a dream in the next-to-last scene after two unknown young women are talking about a tapped telephone in the first scene. Tom Welling is here in his Clark Kent role investigating Batman and his possible identity. Later, Tom is in a Batman prototype outfit, but as he is lying on his back in bed (in an unknown hotel room where Zsuzsanna and I are present), he is disintegrating similarly as the monsters in "Little Monsters" when exposed to light. One of the arms of the jacket is still flopping around, but Tom is gone. This event defines the loss of imaginary dream state physicality as the emergence into consciousness with genuine physicality, and even includes the dream state indicator of someone being in bed.

May 5, 2016. Now that I have established the occasional integration between liminal and supraliminal communication as a telephone, I will look at an example that does not use personification. In a dream of this date, I notice a thin piece of cloth swelling and rising on my desk. I lift it and discover a rotary telephone underneath it, possibly overheating from being covered. (It is confusion with an AC adapter becoming hot when covered). Because I became too warm as I was sleeping, the telephone is validated to represent precursory communication between my emerging consciousness and physical body.

October 1, 2016. In this dream, the vestibular system simulacrum (as an unknown girl) "steals" my cell phone from my computerized suitcase (as I am instinctually attempting to sustain and vivify the dream state while seated on the left side of the jumbo jet, which stems from dreaming directives as I sleep on my left side). I am a spy on an airplane in flight (liminal space). She claims, "I know all about this. Country code fifty-four is America" (which is incorrect as it is Argentina). I am likely beginning to recall my age (which is fifty-five, not fifty-four). The unknown man she is trying to communicate with speaks Argentine Spanish. Once again (as in the second instance in this entry) the personification of exit point modulation does not want my dream self to gain potential control of my physical body.

Some scientists speculate sleepwalking is caused by the brain attempting to transition from slow-wave sleep to wakefulness. There is a factor for sleepwalkers that certainly does not operate in the way my sleep cycle always has. Still, the purpose of this series is not to focus upon the misfortunes of sleepwalkers but to study the nature of exit point modulation.

[maxwellyjordan]

Friday round-up

Yesterday the Supreme Court released four decisions, including one in a high-profile case with significant implications for ecommerce. In South Dakota v. Wayfair, the justices voted 5-4 to overrule two prior cases that prohibited states from requiring out-of-state retailers who don’t have a store or warehouse in the state to collect tax on sales to state residents. Mark Walsh has this blog’s opinion analysis. Subscript has a graphic explainer for the decision. At Good Judgment, Ryan Adler notes that the outcome “was not a win” for forecasters. At NPR, Nina Totenberg reports that the ruling “reversed decades-old decisions that protected out-of-state vendors from sales tax obligations unless the vendor had a physical presence in the state” and that “date back to a time when mail-order sales were relatively small and online sales were all but nonexistent.” Additional coverage comes from Brent Kendall, Jess Bravin and Laura Stevens for The Wall Street Journal, Bill Mears at Fox News, Richard Wolf at USA Today, Robert Barnes for The Washington Post, Adam Liptak for The New York Times, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Pete Williams at NBC News, Lydia Wheeler and Naomi Jagoda at The Hill, Mark Walsh at Education Week’s School Law Blog, Bernie Becker and Josh Gerstein at Politico, Jon Chesto for the Boston Globe, Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle at The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), and David Savage for the Los Angeles Times, who reports that “[t]he decision will inject billions of dollars into state coffers, but also increase prices for many online shoppers.” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]

At Dorf on Law, Michael Dorf maintains that “Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion inadequately responds to the key objection by Chief Justice Roberts” in dissent that a change in states’ ability to tax out-of-state retailers should come from Congress. Additional commentary comes from Lisa Soronen at the National Conference of State Legislatures Blog.

The court also held 7-2 in Lucia v. Securities and Exchange Commission, that SEC administrative law judges are “officers of the United States” within the meaning of the appointments clause, who have to be appointed by the president, a court or a department head. Ronald Mann analyzes the opinion for this blog. Subscript’s graphic explainer is here. For The Washington Post, Robert Barnes reports that “[i]t was not immediately clear how many other SEC rulings will require new hearings or how the decision will affect administrative law judges in other government departments.” Additional coverage comes from Adam Liptak for The New York Times, David Savage for the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Chung at Reuters, and Tony Mauro at The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), who reports that the federal government had “urged the court to consider strengthening presidential power to remove as well as appoint key officers,” but the court “declined that invitation.” At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Jonathan Adler notes the “unusual line-up[s]” in Lucia and Wayfair.

The justices held 8-1 in Pereira v. Sessions that a notice ordering a noncitizen to appear for deportation proceedings without specifying a time or place does not stop the clock on the noncitizen’s accrual of continuous presence in the U.S. [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel on an amicus brief in support of the petitioner in this case.] At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that in a brief concurrence, “Justice Anthony Kennedy sharply criticized the ‘Chevron’ doctrine, raising questions about the future of judicial deference to federal agencies, and adding to the buzz in Washington about whether he will stay or leave the court.” Additional coverage of Kennedy’s concurrence comes from Amanda Reilly at E&E News, who reports that “[t]he remarks by Kennedy, who is seen as the court’s moderate justice, could reinvigorate the debate over the doctrine’s future.” At Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Damon Root remarks that “[i]t’s a big deal when Justice Kennedy … signals his interest in revisiting such a contentious precedent,” and “[i]t might just mean that Chevron‘s days are numbered.” At Take Care, Joshua Matz warns that “[i]f Chevron is overruled, federal agencies will face a far more treacherous terrain when their actions and regulations are challenged in court” and “[c]ourts, in turn, will assume far greater control of the nation’s regulatory agenda.” At Reason’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Jonathan Adler maintains that “[w]ere Chevron overturned, it would not mean open season on agency actions.”

The fourth opinion yesterday was in Wisconsin Central Ltd.v. United States, in which the court ruled 5-4 that stock options are not taxable compensation under the Railroad Retirement Tax Act. Daniel Hemel analyzes the opinion for this blog. Here is a graphic explainer from Subscript. Amy Lee Rosen covers the decision for Law360 (subscription required).Mark Walsh has a “view” from the courtroom of today’s opinion announcements for this blog.

The editorial board of The Washington Post weighs in on this week’s two partisan-gerrymandering cases, Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone, both of which the justices sent back to the lower courts without reaching the merits, warning that “the justices cannot dodge responsibility forever.” Commentary on Whitford comes from Cullen Seltzer at SandsAnderson and Jessica Mason Pieklo at Rewire.News. At the Election Law Blog, Rick Hasen notes that supplemental briefs filed in the wake of Whitford may delay disposition of a cert petition in a North Carolina partisan-gerrymandering case. At The Inquirer, Jonathan Lai and Liz Navratil report that “Pennsylvania’s top two Republican lawmakers filed an appeal Thursday with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging a ruling that the state’s congressional boundaries constituted a partisan gerrymander.”

At Local 10 News, Bob Norman interviews Fane Lozman, whose First Amendment retaliatory-arrest suit the court revived this week in Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach. Scott Cosenza discusses the decision at Liberty Nation. Additional commentary comes from the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times.

At Slate, former State Department consular officer Christopher Richardson casts doubt on the validity of the visa-waiver process the government has relied to defend its position in Trump v. Hawaii, a challenge to the latest version of the Trump administration’s entry ban, calling the process “window dressing to mask the true intent of Trump’s Muslim ban.” At ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser argues that this “is, at its heart, a case about whether America’s borders are a civil rights-free zone.”

Briefly:

The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times urges the justices to review Dassey v. Dittmann, a cert petition filed by one of the subjects of the Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer,” which highlights “the widespread failure by lower courts to take seriously the Supreme Court’s teaching over the years that ‘juveniles and those with intellectual deficits are at particular risk of confessing involuntarily — and often falsely — under the strain of coercive police tactics.’” [Disclosure: Goldstein & Russell, P.C., whose attorneys contribute to this blog in various capacities, is among the counsel to the petitioner in this case.]

At her eponymous blog, Amy Howe looks at who may be writing this term’s 10 remaining opinions.

At The Daily Wire, Jay Hobbs proclaims that “[i]t’s free speech or bust” in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, a First Amendment challenge to a California law that requires crisis-pregnancy centers to disclose information about publicly funded family-planning services, including abortion.

At the Mississippi Business Journal, Ben Williams maintains that “[r]egardless of what Congress and the States do with sports gaming” after the court’s ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, in which the court struck down the federal law that bars states from legalizing sports betting, “the clear winner in this case is the Tenth Amendment.”

The Download highlights Apple v. Pepper, an antitrust suit against Apple brought by IPhone app purchasers that the court will consider next term.

At The George Washington Law Review’s On the Docket blog, Donald Clarke looks at Animal Science Products v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical Co., in which the court held that courts are not bound to defer to a foreign government’s interpretations of its own law, finding the decision “consistent with international practice and very likely the practice of the Chinese government itself.”

We rely on our readers to send us links for our round-up.  If you have or know of a recent (published in the last two or three days) article, post, podcast, or op-ed relating to the Supreme Court that you’d like us to consider for inclusion in the round-up, please send it to roundup [at] scotusblog.com. Thank you!

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[nicolawritesnovels]

Just general notes to myself before I actually go attempt to archive these notebooks, I just want to note what I found for myself. 

So I was looking for a specific binder, which has a poem on the cover that was about the original inspiration for Terry’s character, and kind of ended up causing the inspiration for Alophie’s plotline, and parts of Cippie’s, but it’s an earlier version of Terry’s character, where he was a lot more morally grey, and a lot more vague, before he became someone supportive. That poem was from when the series focused on  Cippie rather than Alex. The binder itself contains a notebook, with the original cover picture for the Ally Series taped onto it. The cover was a photo copy of my Global History textbook from 9th grade (a class which inspired a lot of this), and in big letters written in sharpie, it says Ally. Underneath the name, it says “failure won’t kill you, Ally, just try your best”, which was one of the over all themes for the original story, because the main part of Alcippe Smythe’s character was that she was afraid of failure. Something which has kind of been lost of the years, as I stopped giving a damn about the false concepts of success and failure, but should probably be something I write back into her. 

I think it might also contain my very first original story, written in the form of Alcippe’s diary. Originally starting on November 24, 2008, it was later switched to February. Which is what it continued to remain. I don’t think those dates line up anymore, but that was when the main character was centered as Cippie rather than Alex, which was several versions ago. 

Terry is referred to as Mr. Harrsen, which is interesting because I don’t remember having his name as that ever. He is called that on page 1, entry 1. But by page 2, he is being called Mr. Hassen. I’m not sure when I morphed from Mr. Hassen to Mr. Hassan but I don’t think it was on purpose. 

Characters mentioned include: Jaci, Ian, Cippie, Matt (who is clearly based on a real person named Matt, and was written out later because he wasn’t relevant, but I should put him on my character list anyway), Tristan, Hemming, Birtch

In this version, Jaci is supportive of Cippie’s insane plan. She’s also the genius behind it, which is a job that later ends up moving to Alex. Ian is aware of the thing happening, and Tristan works on the experimental project. For some reason, his name is listed as Tristin or Tristen. Jaci is also the one who somehow gets a hold of Terry’s sperm for their ridiculous scheme and when she eventually tells Cippie, she says that Ian got it. Which is an interesting twist I don’t remember. 

It contains a lot of poetry, because I was into poetry at the time. A lot of which is not relevant, and about death. But usually focused on something that can be related back to the Global class. 

Cippie has been having a lot of dreams about Mr. Hassen. They seem to be relevant to the story because they’re showing up every few pages. They’re mostly about him, but there’s also been several mentions of a dream about an abandoned McDonalds that doesn’t involve him, that seems relevant although I’m not sure why.  I don’t know if the assault happened in this version, or if he was responsible for it. Cippie is also an atheist, and I’m honestly not sure if that changes in later versions. I always have the thought of her being religious but I’m not sure it’s been written down anywhere. 

Cippie is clearly delusional, and there’s mention of the clone named Erica delusion, which actually made it’s way into several of my early stories, although it was never fully explained and I have no idea where I got that from, but it was just like a thing I did. The terrorist rumors also make an appearance, which is interesting because my friend keeps mentioning that I did that in real life, but that’s not how I remember it happening. 

It’s mentioned that Terry is married, and this version is old enough that I think he would be married to Alcyone Raptis, with Aliet as the side chick with the kid she never told him about until Alex finds out. But actually, no, Aliet and Lani wouldn’t appear until the next draft. It would just be him and Alcyone this draft. 

The false pregnancy starts on March 15, 2008 in this version. 

Someone beats Terry up for “getting Cippie pregnant”. 

Cippie is honestly a little bit of a psychopath here, tbh. 

Terry is arrested on May 5, 2008. 

Ah yes, the assault did happen in this one, but it isn’t revealed until near the end, and it wasn’t the one that Cippie told everyone about. It was one that happened years earlier, the same one that I’m reworking to fit in the new version of the story. But in this version, Terry did it. And Cippie doesn’t remember it at all. It was still the day she found out about her dad, but Terry was the social studies sub. 

Also, in the margins, it says: “Do they have strippers in ancient Greece?” and I’m not sure the relevance of that question, but I’m pretty sure the answer was yes. 

Birtch is introduced in this version as the sub that takes over Terry’s class, and he’s not very good at teaching. Cippie doesn’t like him. 

Interestingly, I picked out Ally-Cassie’s name right away as well, before any of the other characters were introduced. She was Ally Cassandra Hassen, although it also lists other potential names. 

It ends on June 17, 2008 with the story unfinished. 

Overall, the draft is 44 hand written pages, entirely in the form of journal entries. It was my very first draft, and while I assume I have it typed up somewhere, I’m not actually 100% sure of that. After I reached page 44, I stopped and decided to to switch around POVs. So I think that those 44 pages constitute draft 1, and the next segments, which seem to be more e-mails between Cippie and Jaci, with a few journal entries as well, would count as draft 2. 

Draft 2 is only about 8 pages. 

In between the two of them, the character list also includes Alyx (which is the original mention of the character who turns into Alex), Bobbi Kirche, Ella and Andi, even though they are not mentioned in any of the journal entries from Draft 1 and I don’t think I’m seeing them in Draft 2 either. 

And then Alex is introduced, so I’m going to pause this post and then make a new one about that, because it ends up being a big game changer.