#but she also taught it from the lens of what literature said about the people of the time

[coffeebanana]

Every time I read classic books I feel this pressure to enjoy them, and I just...never do? I can appreciate why they're important or influential for their time, and I appreciate that they exist, but...I just don't enjoy the style? Like they tend to be very repetitive and they have a lot of scenes that frankly...don't do anything to move the story forwards. The kinds of things that today would get the story tossed aside by publishers. And obviously I'm not saying it is bad writing, because again--different time period. Different style. But I wish I could be completely comfortable saying I just don't enjoy those books. For me personally, reading them is often more effort than what I get out of them. And sometimes I will read them anyways because I want to understand references people make to them in other books or media, but at the end of the day they don't bring me joy like modern books or fanfiction do and I think that's okay.

[council-of-beetroot]

As we see an increase in antisemitism I have reflected on my experiences how many years ago being the token Jew in my eighth grade English class and I have found some aspects about it which lead me to believe are the parts that Holocaust Education in the U.S. goes wrong

Being taught in English Classes

Often such as in my state, the Holocaust is taught as part of English curriculum. English teachers aren't history teachers and they may be lacking in the skills or knowledge required to teach in the necessary depth to discuss the Holocaust.

My mother used to teach English but she had a history degree as well. She would lecture in class about everything leading up to and during WWII. I remember reading handouts she had in her classroom while I was waiting after school about the history of antisemitism. I didn't have any of this in my English class unit, because to put it simply most English teachers aren't my mother who also has the prior knowledge of how to teach history.

Additionally, as it is part of English, there is often more focus on Holocaust literature rather than the topic itself

This is where I think it gets extremely flawed if a person's primary knowledge of a historical period is Anne Frank or the incredibly inaccurate boy in the striped pajamas. A single account or work of complete fiction shouldn't be your main lens to view any topic whether it's the Holocaust, Slavery, Civil Rights movement etc.

You're in short blurring fact and fiction when discussing these things in the context of literature.

Sense of Finality

I feel like in my classes at least there was this idea that was kind of implied that hatred of Jews began and ended with Hitler and the Holocaust. I think this leads to misconceptions about antisemitism.

I feel this is a problem as I remember mistakenly getting that takeaway in school regarding civil rights in America. It was taught that Slavery was a problem, emancipation proclamation, MLK said I have a dream, and the civil rights act was passed and bam no inequality or racism. Later on, I fortunately learned this was flawed for many reasons. But not everyone does.

Not teaching about how the Holocaust happened

If you aren't given the knowledge of how centuries of hatred lead up to the Holocaust, I feel the main takeaway becomes that it was almost a random occurrence.

Many learn the Holocaust is bad without learning the signs of thinking that can lead neighbors to kill neighbors.

So many people don't have the basic facts such as Hitler being elected rather than assuming power.

I think when you learn of an atrocity of such scale without learning the human beliefs that brought about it, you have learned nothing.

I had a girl in my college uni class who was shocked when I said that antisemitism didn't begin and end with Hitler. I can see where she would get this idea if I at ten figured that racism ended with MLK.

Using Simulation

Slavery and the Holocaust should probably not be taught using roleplay. It usually goes poorly and you can find dozens of examples of how this goes wrong.

Sanitizing History

Exactly what it sounds like. But it's a major problem in general with history education in the US. I think we downplay westward expansion, and slavery in the us. When we downplay those it's easy to see how some begin to downplay the Holocaust.

We had a kid faint on the trip to the Holocaust memorial at some of the images. I think it was because they were inadequately prepared to see the horrors in image, my teacher didn't show any pictures in class.

Final notes

I don't blame teachers. Teacher's jobs fucking suck from what I've seen and many don't have the skills or resources or experience. I guess for now I think it's good to recognize those holes in our education and fill them ourselves through self education and life long learning

With the current political atmosphere of education of the unpleasant or difficult to discuss parts of history, i can only see things getting worse if we don't change anything. But like I said in the absence of a solid education which discusses these topics, it's important to educate ourselves and confront our lack of knowledge.

[dragonofyang]

The Heroine with a Thousand Faces

As the youngest member of #TeamPurpleLion, not only have I learned a lot in just the four months we’ve been working together, but I’ve explained a lot of what I’ve learned to others. Sometimes it’s about the history of Defender of the Universe and Beast King GoLion that @crystal-rebellion researched, sometimes it’s referencing @felixazrael‘s musical knowhow or @leakinghate‘s animation knowledge, and most recently, it’s leaning on @voltronisruiningmylife‘s expertise in how to break down and identify writing to provide corrections to those who see something in a show or article not working but can’t tell why. One big thing I learned since starting this crazy ride with my team is a massive hole in my college education on writing, which Felix filled in for me since we hit the ground running. Sure in my fantasy literature class we discussed Aesop and The Hobbit, and what the phrase “The Hero’s Journey” means and why it’s the monomyth, but there was one thing that my dear professor never taught us, although I’m sure she will in the future. Compared to Joseph Campbell’s heroic journey, this other monomyth is much younger.

What is it, you may ask?

Simply put, it’s a heroine’s journey.

[Image description: Princess Allura with her hair up and wearing her flightsuit from season 1 “The Rise of Voltron” backlit by white light.]

Let’s go on an adventure together.

To understand the heroine’s journey, I want to give you all a rundown on what exactly the hero’s journey is first. While it was never neatly labeled as “The Hero’s Journey” until Campbell, studies on common themes and plot points began back in the 1870’s. As time moved forward, Campbell published his 17 steps to the monomyth in 1949 (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and as we move toward the present his monomyth is eventually dubbed as “the hero’s journey”. I won’t overload you with the dates and stuff I needed to study since that’s a) not the point of this piece and b) Campbell’s monomyth is actually secondary to the main one in Voltron: Legendary Defender. That said, it’s the backbone of a lot of literature both old and new, and while not every story follows these 17 steps outlined by Campbell or approaches them in the same order, you’ll find everything from the story of Christ to Lord of the Rings somewhere in these steps. It’s just that a lot of times the steps of the hero’s journey aren’t ever really explained, so you as a reader/viewer/consumer will see them and will have a gut instinct as to what’s supposed to happen, and when it happens you feel great! The story followed a formula that satisfies its audience! But it also makes a story that doesn’t follow a formula feel fundamentally wrong, from just a mild discomfort like putting on a shirt and buttoning it slightly off, all the way to triggering strong emotional responses including panic attacks or tears. Stories are designed to bring forth emotions from their audience, but what good is a tragedy without a lesson to learn? How can we enjoy an empty marriage when the couple has no chemistry?

So with this piece, I hope to illuminate just what the steps of the heroine’s journey are, contrast them against the hero’s journey, where VLD fits into all of this, and through that demonstrate why they are not interchangeable even though they share similar names.

Part I: Of Heroes and Heroines

In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell outlines seventeen steps, which are laid out in this diagram by Reg Harris:

[Image description: diagram of The Hero’s Journey using a circular diagram shape separating out the seventeen steps into eight categories, divided into the Known World and the Unknown World.]

In Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, she writes the heroine’s journey as follows:

[Image description: The Heroine’s Journey depicting a cyclical diagram of the narrative, featuring 10 distinct steps that loop back to the beginning at the top.]

The Heroine’s Journey is fundamentally cyclical in nature, and while the diagram above shows the Hero’s Journey as a circle as well, it ultimately has finite start and end points. One of the key differences between these is that the Hero’s Journey explores internal character in an external adventure and the hero achieves a (theoretically) lasting peace once their journey is finished. Conversely, the heroine must constantly evaluate themselves in the bigoted environment that tries to disenfranchise them.

As a note, while I use gendered terms such as “hero” and “heroine”, I use them as gender-neutral placeholders to label which monomyth I’m speaking about at present. Women can undertake a hero’s journey, and men can undertake a heroine’s journey, particularly when you examine them in an intersectional lens.

A heroine’s journey, at its heart, is an examination and acceptance of the self in an unaccepting environment, and its cyclical nature stems from the fact that whenever a heroine moves into a new environment, they have to make that journey over and over. They can be a queer man of color, a white stay-at-home mom, a disabled nonbinary person, whatever the case, the constant need to re-evaluate their place in the world is what marks the heroine’s journey as separate from the hero’s journey.

But while it’s cyclical in nature, we should start at the beginning nonetheless.

[Image description: Alfor (right) holding Allura (left) in the Castle of Lions. She says, “We can’t give up hope!” and he replies, “I’m sorry, daughter.”]

In The Heroine’s Journey, the story begins when an event causes the heroine to separate from the feminine. A significant event spurs them to reject the prescribed role of the patriarchy, which in the case of a woman could be a mother, a damsel in distress, a wife, etc. The heroine is put into a box and chafes against its edges because it cuts them off from their ability to reach for the masculine, the power and privilege it affords. This marks a stark difference from how our archetypal hero lives and begins their own adventure. The hero lives a fairly mundane life for the brief time we see them before the first element comes into play: the Call to Adventure. This is generally an external force spurring the hero to action, as opposed to the internal force of the heroine.

The hero then will Refuse the Call and will be introduced to the Mentor they will come to rely upon, whereas the heroine typically immediately begins on a journey to become more powerful/masculine, generally through rejecting femininity. Princess Allura does not inherently reject her own femininity. She rejects the helplessness of being forced into cryostasis after her people have been destroyed and embarks on embracing her masculinity by finishing the war her father and Zarkon started 10,000 years ago. The heroine Identifies with the Masculine and Gathers Allies, which we see Allura do in the pilot of season 1 of VLD. She awakens to find a team of five men and her male adviser Coran, her allies in the coming intergalactic war, and she takes up the metaphorical lion herself as the pilot to the Castle of Lions, changing into her armor--pink, to honor the fallen--for the fight against Sendak as he tries to claim the Lions of Voltron for Emperor Zarkon. Her choice of pink, particularly pale pink, is reminiscent of the breast cancer awareness ribbon, baby pink, it is an intrinsically female color that she dons to assume the role of her father, King Alfor. The narrative is reminding the audience that Princess Allura--the first nonwhite Allura, no less--is just as much a princess as her previous white and blonde iterations are warriors.

After choosing their allies and undertaking this quest of gaining power (not to be confused with empowerment, our heroine is still operating within the confines of the patriarchy here), our heroine undergoes trials and faces enemies that try to persuade them back into the box, into what’s known and fundamentally safe and silencing. The words may be kind, be delivered kindly, but ultimately they can be boiled down to a single message: “go back to where you belong.” For the hero this is a point of no return as an external journey. The hero can choose to go home and leave saving the world to someone else, or they can choose to face the trials that bar them from their prize. But the heroine? They can’t. There is nobody who can save the heroine’s world because for them because their world is what they are trying to escape, and often they are the prize for a hero. It’s up to them to save themselves, and at this point in time, adopting the masculine and the power of the father figure is the way to go. And it works. Princess Allura, again while she does not get discouraged by the men around her to remain an idle princess, because this is the 21st goddamn century, her conflict arises from inexperience. King Alfor supports her drive to finish the war and take decisive action, to finish what he started. The Paladins challenge her authority as a sovereign in the beginning because even if she’s a princess by birth, she has no planet and they’re not of her planet or species anyway, and until they themselves undergo trials in the first few episodes do they appreciate that Allura is still critical as a person, despite her lack of sovereign weight.

Together, she and her team move through the obstacles and the war against Zarkon together, while simultaneously trying to build a coalition of allies to aid in the fight. In fact, much of the plot of VLD takes place during this stage of the heroine’s journey, and it’s here where we as the audience follow Allura as she meets her animus in the form of a Shadow figure: the cunning Prince Lotor. He takes on the role of the challenger to force Allura to better herself, and as Allura rises to the occasion each time, he is textually impressed by her battle skill, then by her intellect. The most iconic moment of Lotor as a Shadow (aka: the half of herself that Allura doesn’t want to accept yet), is when he baits Voltron into battle, then pilots his cruiser through the volatile environment of Thayserix. He expresses disappointment at Voltron’s ability in battle, but when Allura in Blue rises to meet the challenge he lays out, he praises her, even if he textually does not realize who is in Blue at the time.

[Image description: Prince Lotor in profile, a pleased expression on his face, and the subtitles read “Someone’s learning.”]

As a brief aside: the animus comes from Jung and is often paired with an anima, or masculine and feminine energies. The key takeaway is that these energies are complementary to each other and exist in a balance. While they typically are portrayed in a more heterosexual context, like everything else in this meta, the terms are used in a gender-neutral context when not applied directly to Allura’s storyline. While Lotor could be likened to either Meeting the Goddess or (Wo)Man as Temptress in the hero’s journey, a key difference between the heroine’s journey animus and either of these feminized roles is that the Goddess and Temptress are two separate figures--generally women to male heroes--and are generally not equal to the hero physically or mentally. The animus, however, is intrinsically the perfect match to the anima of the heroine, being their complement and their intellectual and physical equal. Lotor is not meant to be seen as the woman on Indiana Jones’ arm, he’s meant to be a force in his own right, challenging Allura to better herself and raise the standards for them both. It’s fitting that this occurs in an episode full of fog and a dangerous abyss, because the traditional hero descends into a metaphorical (or literal) one to encounter these flattened versions of feminine energy.

The trials continue for Allura through the seasons, and she makes many allies and continues to face their enemies head-on, and once Prince Lotor, now Emperor, cements his place as one of Allura’s allies he shifts from the Shadow figure challenging her to the animus in full, being encouraging and supportive as they work together as allies to find Oriande, a mythical place that should yield them the secrets of unlimited Quintessence. While Lotor challenges Allura in a traditionally masculine way (physical trials, battle, strategy), he also encourages her in a decidedly feminine way through Altean history and mythology, as Altea is very feminine-coded compared to the Galra Empire, which through Zarkon represents a familiar and violent strain of masculinity that seeks to crush Allura and force the universe to fit his will through abusive language and physical violence and genocide. Allura taking up the battle in Alfor’s place is simply her continuing the cycle and seeing power in masculine terms, rather than breaking the cycle.

Now here is where the diagrams diverge even further. Until this point, the journeys followed fairly similar trajectories. After the trials and battles of the heroine’s journey, they experience the boon of the journey, which the hero does not achieve until they face further trials and temptations. As such, we will continue to follow the heroine’s journey model and I’ll explain the significance of the flip.

Part II: Not the Place to Arrive

One of the significant things about the heroine’s journey is that when a woman undertakes it, it’s empowering and her becoming her most unified self. Campbell once reportedly said to Murdock, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” In the hero’s journey, often a woman’s place is as the prize, rarely is she her own agent. As I stated previously, the hero and heroine journeys do not have to ascribe to gendered protagonists, however the reality is that the hero’s journey is very patriarchal in nature since it was formulated primarily through the study of male heroes and does not take into account the constant reassessment heroines must face. For heroes, they simply must survive going from point A to point B. Heroines are always subjected to reevaluation within their environment and the people around them, so their journey never really ends.

All this is to say that the hero receives their boon at the end of their story and that’s the end of it. They get a happily ever after and can return to normal life and spread their bounty to those in need or dearest to them.

The heroines?

They get their boon at the middle of the story.

And there’s still more to come for our heroine as they build toward the climax (pun intended).

Princess Allura receives the boon of Oriande’s secrets with Lotor by her side, which in pretty much every literature class would become a discussion on the ways this represents sex, or the the ways Allura is interacting with the world in terms of gender, particularly how they discover Oriande after having an emotional reaction in Haggar’s lab and activating the Altean compass stone. In the heroine’s journey, this boon is often of the same significance as the hero’s boon/reward at the end of their journey, but for the heroine it’s false. It’s fleeting. It’s not meant to last. This is the turning point for our heroine because while yes, our heroine achieved the goal of the adventure, they did so by consciously or unconsciously shunning the feminine. In Allura’s case, she’s still taking after her father, trying to follow in his--and to an extent Zarkon’s--footsteps by mastering the unlimited Quintessence.

And true to form, before season 6 is out, our heroine seems to be betrayed by her animus, returning him to the status of Shadow figure as he challenges her to unleash the power within one final time. Princess Allura thinks Lotor lied to her and has been harvesting Alteans for their Quintessence when Keith and his mother Krolia discover a living Altean in the Quantum Abyss, and with the budding on-screen romance between Allura and Lotor, this betrayal cuts our heroine deep. To her, he not only lied about there being no more Alteans left, but he actively continued the genocide his father began 10,000 years ago. That’s not an easy thing to get over. So Lotor assembles Sincline, which bears a visual resemblance to a wingless dragon--the last metaphorical dragon she faces before moving into the next step of the heroine’s journey--and with Allura in Voltron the two battle it out in a tragic action-packed scene that leads to Voltron overloading Lotor with Quintessence and leaving him in the Rift.

With the dragon defeated and the boon lost, the heroine has to sacrifice not only her animus, but the last vestiges of her home to try and undo what following the masculine has done: close not only the original Rift, but all the fractures in reality caused by their battle.

And what does a girl who has already lost her planet, people, and lover have left to lose?

[Image description: The five Lions of Voltron flying away from the massive Rift, the Castle of Lions flying straight toward the center of it.]

The heroine following the footsteps of the masculine always comes at a major cost to them. In Allura’s case, she has to sacrifice her castle in order to make right the harm done to the literal universe. In this case, she mirrors Zarkon in his destruction of the universe, but rather than directly harming billions of lives on uncounted planets, she creates a literal hole in the universe because of her blindness to the consequences of the actions of herself and those around her.

And much like her father sending away the Lions, she must send away her castle in the hopes of saving the universe from greater destruction.

Part III: Transcending the Rift

From the gain and loss of the boon, things look dire for the heroine at this stage in the journey. In Allura’s case, she is without people, without planet, without castle, and as she learns at the beginning of season 8, her found family has families of their own--other than Coran, that is. Our heroine continues to lose pieces of the things and people surrounding her at the beginning of the story: which Murdock refers to as awakening feelings of spiritual aridity or death. She is losing her place in the universe even faster than before, when she stood on the shoulders of her father, and she must move forward. Allura passed the point of no return all the way back in season 1 episode 1. As the heroine, she broke free of the safe mold she knew for the past 10,000 years, and every episode since her awakening she has had to try to forge forward on the path she knew: that of her father. Now, though, her father’s methods have failed her, just as they failed him, leaving her with no option but to keep moving forward and to approach her journey from another angle.

[Image description: from left to right, Veronica, Allura, Romelle, and Pidge (mostly off-screen) in a clothing swap shop as Allura speaks. Caption reads, “I could give you a royal decree of service from the Crown Princess of Alte…”]

Allura not only must deal with the loss of her place in the universe, but she must also deal with the fact that by leaving Lotor in the Rift, she abandons half of herself as well. Physically she is a whole person, but if we look at her role as an anima and what her fears and strengths are, destroying her animus throws her self-knowledge out of alignment. She’s careening away from the safe path of her father, but she must now rediscover the strengths within herself without succumbing to her weaknesses and do so by stepping out of her father’s shadow.

Season 8 is rife with emotional buildup and no payoff. We as the audience don’t know what happened to Lotor for the whole of season 7 and we see Allura struggling to deal with all her losses, we travel to Earth and meet the MFE pilots, a plucky bunch who probably were meant to lay groundwork for a new Vehicle Voltron, and we see that Haggar/Honerva is the final big bad of the whole show, ready to vindicate the son she lost to the Rift, but also 10,000 years ago when he was born and she became the Witch we love to hate. So when we join Allura and the gang on Earth with Luca in the infirmary, and Allura’s final trials begin…

Or they should have.

[Image description: Lance and Allura kissing in rainbow lighting where they are artificially-colored in red, then pink, then blue from top to bottom in front of a fading background of warm yellow at the top to gray at the bottom.]

Instead, we are treated to the final acts of a hero’s journey, but still following our heroine through the steps.

Our heroine wears down to the persistence of Lance, who in a heroic journey would receive a fair princess as his boon, and Allura is trying to find a place to belong. In seasons prior to this, Lance acts like a goofy everyday guy, very much a typical character in many present-day stories that allows the audience to see themselves in him. He fantasizes about wooing the princess, calls himself a ladies’ man, tries to be funny, he’s a pretty typical character that a male audience is more likely to sympathize with, and as such the fantasy is pairing up with the prettiest, smartest, etc. girl in the story. The woman as a boon, the Goddess, and the Temptress are never on equal footing with the male hero, and even in the case of female heroes, the meeting with a god(dess) means that the female hero is worthy of being a consort rather than the equal that a heroine is to the anima/animus. In fact, Campbell reportedly told Murdock, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.” In the hero’s journey, if the hero is male and heterosexual, the women will always be the prize, the virginal ideal, or the sexualized damnation, and in all of them, the woman is meant to be receptive to the man (and doesn’t THAT sound like some familiar rhetoric). Never is the woman an agent in the hero’s journey when it fulfills a male fantasy. And it is this very same box that spurs a heroine to begin their heroine’s journey: this breakdown of people to individual parts as determined by a patriarchal society.

While Lance is a hero in his own right, in Allura’s heroine journey, he acts as an ogre that comes dressed as a male ally all the way back in season 1. He’s a Subverted Nice Guy in that he’s constantly trying to woo Allura, but ultimately he’s still reinforcing the same patriarchy that not only plagues Allura in this iteration, but also in previous iterations of the Voltron franchise. The Nice Guy doesn’t challenge the heroine like the animus, but rather encourages them to stay in place or to fit a predetermined mold once more.

Look familiar?

[Image description: Lance’s fantasy, with him standing triumphant over Zarkon as the team cheers him on, Allura kneeling at his right side and looking up at him, while a flag with his face waves on his left.]

Many of the silly shots in the series have been foreshadowing, whether in the most direct sense or in the promise of subverting what’s portrayed. In the case of this screenshot, by the time Lance gets the girl, Zarkon is killed (by Lotor), Allura has already had an intimate relationship (with Lotor), and the team collectively became heroes and allies of Lotor before the end of season 6 happened. Lance, textually, is not Allura’s equal as an animus, and while he doesn’t quite view her as his equal--especially in earlier seasons--he can only textually become her equal when she is at her lowest point, and he’s still affixed to the idea that she’s a prize, going so far as to say that “winning prizes is my specialty” in “Clear Day”. Really, it’s a messy relationship dynamic that tries to show the audience why, as they stand in the canon material, they don’t work. Not only is Allura still not his equal, but his fantasy comes about at the hands of others, or with the help of others, and he comes second. He plays a role, but he is not the singular hero he once fantasized about being. Textually this subversion is teaching him a lesson about becoming his best self and acknowledging that he doesn’t have to be the hero, the payoff of which should have come in season 8 as Allura completes her heroine’s journey to become her most unified and realized self. It’s meant to be his apotheosis, the new perspective and enlightenment brought to the hero after facing all the trials of the journey as a part of the final reward.

Allura, fighting with this sudden loss of herself, must now also help spearhead the war against Honerva, the archetypal Bad Mother, in an alchemist-versus-alchemist battle for not only Lotor’s physical soul but for Allura’s metaphorical one as well. This is a new fight, the gauntlet thrown by someone other than her animus, and after all his tests, she must still rise to the challenge with the same energy, but she must do so with new knowledge now that she knows she cannot rely solely on her father.

But what’s the next step for a heroine trapped in the arid desert of the unknown self and with the weight of the world pressing onto them?

They must descend to the underworld and begin the transformation from the masculine methods to unleash the femininity that’s been locked away this whole time.

And who do we have to escort Allura to the metaphorical underworld as she falls asleep?

[Image description: A close-up of Lotor’s face in deep shadows as he stares head-on at the “camera”.]

Her Animus, acting as a Shadow once more.

His entrance is littered with sex. Not literally, but metaphorically. He greets Allura while she’s in bed, the camera does a gratuitous slow pan over his body in a way that many cameras exclusively afford to women, the presence of a blooming flower with an erect stamen, the lighting of the preview--altered in the final season itself--is purple even, a romantic and spiritual color. You know the joke in college English classes about how everything is sex except sex? That’s this scene in a nutshell. He’s always been drawn and behaved in a way designed to appeal to the female gaze (an essay in itself), but this scene really takes the cake.

[Image description: Lotor as viewed in profile from a low angle in a Garrison room, looking down at a juniberry flower in a pot.]

And it’s this scene where we see Lotor give Allura the first critical piece of information for how she can stop Honerva/Haggar, but also reminding her that some people do not change. While Allura must change to achieve her realization, he reminds her that Haggar is still the same witch, and that her pain of losing Lotor becoming public does not excuse the fact that she has not expressed remorse or tried to change herself, let alone her hand in not only his downfall but in the brainwashing of the Alteans. She is an antagonist so focused on the wrongs done to her that she justifies the wrongs she does to others with them. Allura, however, expressed remorse and wanted to save Lotor as soon as she realized what was going on, which further cements the ways in which their fates could have been the same or switched had they made slightly different choices. Honerva is 10,000 years too late. Like Lotor mirrors his father and in “Shadows” is shown to be more empathetic, Allura mirrors Honerva and both prove throughout the show to have stronger moral compasses than their predecessors. They are the Emperor and Alchemist, and while fate decrees they must take up the mantle left behind, their free will dictates that they should not blindly follow their footsteps if they truly wish to make a lasting change. Narratively, they must forge a new path if they are to bring the universe to peace again.

[Image description: A close-up shot of the juniberry flower with Allura visible in the background, but blurred. The subtitle reads Lotor’s line, “The witch may change her name, but she will always be a witch.”]

Lotor tempts Allura to take the entity into herself, and when she reaches out to connect with it, she is taken further into the dreamscape and finds herself back on Altea and greeted by her mother. This marks the beginning of the reconnection with the feminine, but while Allura has always so desperately missed her family and Altea, she finds herself in a precarious position. Suddenly, she is in the very same mech suit that Luca was found in, and to save Altea from the Galra fleet overhead, she makes the decision to use the planet’s Quintessence. However, in the process of destroying the Galra fleet, destroys Altea as well. As her world crumbles, her mother congratulates her for a job well done. This presumably mirrors the dropped plot about the Altean Colony and the decisions Lotor would have been faced with, and after “Shadows” would lend both Allura and the audience a greater appreciation for the position he was in before he died.

And when she finally wakes?

[Image description: Allura sitting up in the Garrison bunk, looking at the mice, the juniberry dry and wilted in the foreground, blurry. The subtitle reads, “It was only a dream.”]

Our oh so sexual symbol is wilted, and Allura wakes up alone.

With the visual deflowering and this new revelation about the kinds of decisions those before her have had to make, Allura can begin reconnecting with the feminine in earnest without falling into the old placements she may have been subjected to at the beginning of the story. This would have continued further with Allura reconnecting with her animus in the missing episode @leakinghate titles “The Descent”, especially fitting as she continues her descent to her feminine roots as a heroine and to reconnect with her lost animus. Reconnecting and reconciling with him--and with the side of herself he represents--is critical to her achieving unity within herself and being able to face Honerva head-on.

Once the heroine has descended to the underworld, begun the reconnection to the feminine, and returned with new knowledge on their relationship to their emotional side and the aspects overshadowed by the masculine, they are ready to begin healing the mother/daughter split. This in essence is the heroine returning to the old knowledge she has cast aside when following the path of the masculine/father, but approaching it with a new understanding and perspective. Think of it as understanding why your parents enforced rules like “don’t run into traffic”. As a kid, the danger may not be obvious, but as an adult you’re able to look at the same situation, see over obstacles younger you might not have, and realize “oh shit, that’s a car”. That said, the heroine does not allow themselves to get put back into the same or even a different pre-prescribed role because they now have a greater understanding of the situation at hand.

In Allura’s case, this means revisiting the plan on how to take down Honerva, and realizing that she must pursue the course laid out by her trip to the underworld to not only save the universe, but awaken Lotor from being a robeast. Part of the conflict against this plan comes from the team, who see the entity she took within herself as dangerous. While that’s true, stopping the plan also prevents Allura from growing in strength to be able to fight Honerva. The power flowing within her that Lotor referred to back in season 6 is at her fingertips, and like his visit in “Clear Day” reminded her, she need only take it. During both parts of the “Knights of Light” episodes, Allura is confronted with shades of Honerva’s memories as they dive deeper, and it’s here that we as the audience and the cast are meant to learn what truly became of Lotor after he was imprisoned in the Rift, and it’s meant to be utterly jarring to everyone. Instead, with how the scenes were edited together during the post-production alterations, Hate aptly points out in “Seek Truth in Darkness” that Honerva promising vengeance and seeing Lotor’s corpse has next to no impact. Or rather, it does to the audience--a melted corpse isn’t exactly Y-7 appropriate--but the characters don’t really react to this revelation at all.

That said, it’s more than likely that Allura genuinely believes Lotor to be dead (as opposed to a sleeping prince), which would explain her aggressive reaction to seeing pre-Rift Zarkon, and we don’t see his reaction to learning what he did to his son, either. This would be a prime location for Zarkon to experience and express remorse for what his actions have done to his son, subverting the toxic masculinity narrative his character had been representing prior.

At the end of “Knights of Light Part 2”, Hate mentions that Allura would need to make another trip to the underworld to commune with Lotor and realize that no, he’s not dead, but also that she not only must defeat Honerva, she must do so in order to save Lotor and free everyone of the cycle of violence that began 10,000 years ago. This is the final descent she makes before she can heal the wounded masculine, both in herself, and Lotor directly.

[Image description: Allura in profile inside the cockpit of Blue Lion, unconscious. Her window displays measurement increments and stars in red-tones, while Allura herself is lit in blue tones.]

After the end of this episode, however, Hate mentions that much of what was there is butchered in the post-production editing, so I will be extrapolating based on the content we have in the season as well as utilizing her analysis of the story as it should have been.

When Allura wakes up from falling unconscious, this is when we should see her proposing to save her animus, and it should come with a discussion with Lance about how they don’t click romantically. That said, in the version on Netflix, we see their relationship continue, however much of their shared body language doesn’t necessarily even match up with an awkward couple. Lance seems sullen and possessive, and while he might still be sullen in Allura’s original heroine’s journey, he would have had this moment of growth in which he learns to let go of Allura. She’s his fantasy, and not only is that unfair to Allura, it’s also unfair to him, and he doesn’t need to be the hero or the guy that gets the girl. He can be himself, silly, sharpshooting, video game-playing Lance. A genuinely nice dude, which completes the subversion of the Nice Guy trope his character embodied for so long.

“Uncharted Regions” is a hot mess of an episode in terms of narrative flow and consistency, but this would have marked the beginning of the alchemist vs. alchemist fight for not only Lotor’s soul, but the universe. Honerva uses the Sincline mech and her new mech to start tearing holes through realities, and once Allura jumps into the fray, that moves the audience into the next missing episode proposed by Hate: “Storming the Pyramid”. This would be where Honerva uses Allura to revive Lotor because she did not receive the life-givers’ blessing, and Allura would do it, literally healing the wounded masculine, but also falling right into Honerva’s trap in the process. This would almost certainly be a highly-controversial thing among Allura’s allies, but like Allura remaining on the path she knew, it’s easier to accept Lotor as pure evil who got what he deserved, when at no point is there a definite case against him. In fact, “Shadows” is designed to render him as a sympathetic character, and seeing his melted corpse is even more horrifying after seeing him as a baby and child. But that’s the way it is when a heroine breaks the mold. The heroine defines their own role, and as part of that, it gives them the ability to help others break theirs. The heroine experiences true empowerment by divorcing themselves from the power structures that defined them before, and doing so with the greater knowledge of their internal masculinity and femininity. Allura revisiting the war of her father with the lifegivers’ knowledge to compound her intrinsic alchemical abilities is the moment when she achieves union within herself, and it manifests physically as reviving Lotor, her animus.

It’s after this point that we see the Purple Lion and Purple Paladin manifest, our namesake.

In “Day 47”, Kolivan references the team sizes the Blades of Marmora use. He references four and five as the usual sizes, but six occasionally happening, but what he says next is particularly interesting.

[Image description: Kolivan being filmed for an interview, saying, “Seven seems rare, but… it could happen.”]

The Voltron team had four Paladins briefly after Shiro disappeared and before Allura took up the mantle, but the full team always has five. After Shiro returned for good, their team became six Paladins.

Now, with the healed animus Lotor on their side, they could have the rare seven-person configuration that Hate discusses at length in “Seek Truth in Darkness”.

With the anima and animus aligned together at last with no secrets, they can unify externally the same way Allura unified internally, and battle against Honerva properly. Now, Team V, Lotor, and the entire universe can face Honerva head-on and stand a chance at winning.

We also should get the emotional payoff for Lotor as an abuse victim in his own arc, closing up this nice little loose end that hurts way more than it did before season 8 dropped.

[Image description: An up-close shot of Lotor glaring into the “camera” in green lighting and saying to Haggar, “maybe I will take pity on you when the time comes.”]

And it’s worth mentioning that while the final battle is exciting and action-packed, the final surrender of Honerva comes quietly, in the rift of all realities. The characters of Team V are able to deliver their character-based arc lessons, it’s a somber moment of learning as Allura, using once more the blessing of the lifegivers, enlightens Honerva to her memories and what she’s done, but also restoring her sense of self the way Allura was. This is the final healing of the mother/daughter split, and it’s significant that Honerva’s abuse victim not be her healer. Not only does Lotor (as far as we know) lack the ability, but it’s never the victim’s job to heal their abuser, just as it’s not the obligation of the oppressed to appease their oppressor. Honerva can finally move on and begin atoning for what she did by setting the ghosts of the Paladins of old in her mind free, but that still begs the question of what our heroine and her animus must do to finish the job.

This is where Lotor would get his second chance, in the most literal sense of the term, where he faces a similar trial to the one in Oriande back in season 6 and the burning question for a man so concerned with survival and cunning.

Is there something he would give up the life he has known and fought so hard to keep for?

And this time, the answer is yes.

Allura.

It was always Allura.

While Honerva is able to stop the rift from expanding by, well, not expanding it herself, she lacks the ability to properly close it the way that it was closed the first time. It takes one final adventure, one final unification by the anima and animus, by the heroine and her Shadow, and one final goodbye. Allura and Lotor, born of an age long past, become the lifegivers eternal through staying behind to close the rift.

The lionhearted goddess of life and her stalwart champion of survival.

[Image description: The final scene after the credits, where an Allura-shaped nebula is nestled up against a smudged, darker nebula with a sea of stars among them, and the five Lions of Voltron flying toward the nebulae.]

Sources

Dos Santos, Joaquim and Montgomery, Lauren. Voltron: Legendary Defender. Netflix. 2016-2018.

LeakingHate. “Seek Truth in Darkness”. VLD Visuals Detective and Imperial ApologistTM. 2 Mar. 2019. https://leakinghate.tumblr.com/post/183160042843/seek-truth-in-darkness

“Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey Arc”. The Heroine Journeys Project. https://heroinejourneys.com/heroines-journey/

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine’s Journey. 1990.

University of Kansas. “Science Fiction Writers Workshop: Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey”. KU Guinn Center for the Study of Science Fiction. http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Workshop-stuff/Joseph-Campbell-Hero-Journey.htm

[humansofhds]

Alejandra Oliva, MTS ’19

“Literature offers me joy and the ability to exercise empathy. It’s a lot easier to practice empathy when it’s a character in a book and then when you run into a situation in the real world, it feels almost like you’ve practiced for that encounter.”

Alejandra Oliva studies religion and literature at HDS. Below she reflects on how she got to HDS, her favorite classes, and why she thinks literature is so great.

A Faith That You Live Out Everyday 

I grew up partly in the Boston area and partly in Texas in a very evangelical family, going to Vineyard and other Bible-oriented churches. I moved pretty strongly away from religion in high school and then more so in college, when I was allowed to stop going to church. I was in that space for a long time.

The church I grew up in was really evangelical, charismatic, Pentecostal. People would regularly speak in tongues and be moved by the spirit in various ways. As a child, it was always startling and visceral. When we moved to Texas we started going to a much more traditional, larger church that was a more standard, somewhat politically involved evangelical church. I think the reason that my family as a whole stopped going after a while was because it was so political in ways that felt uncomfortable sometimes.

In my senior year of college, I started working on my thesis in sociology, which was about a group of Catholic women whose church had been closed in 2008 (this was 2014-15). They still met outside of their church every Sunday, and they had their own Bible study and prayer group and were really close as a community. I went and hung out with them every Sunday for a couple of months to see what they were up to and how they had managed to meet every week for so long.

That’s when I started to think, Maybe religion isn’t just this thing that I associate with a lot of restrictions from my childhood … What if it could be more to other people? Through that project, which taught me so much about what it’s like to be in community with other people and to have a faith that you live out every day, especially a faith in community. I started reading more about it and thinking about what a faith that I could have might look like. I ended up coming here to HDS because I had been thinking about religion a lot, and academic spaces have always felt to me like safe spaces for me to do emotional work in sometimes, which is not everyone’s experience at all. But I felt that if I knew how to approach this intellectually, maybe eventually everything else will catch up with it. That’s why I’m here.

A New Lens

Last semester I took a translation class in the Yard. I found translation theory to be a really cool lens to look at everything through. This semester I’ve been putting that lens in front of everything that I read and thinking about translation as a process that is inherently flawed and that leaves gaps. But those gaps can get filled in in really cool and exciting ways. For example, in the “Women and Mysticism” class with Barbara Zimbalist, there are a lot of spaces in the texts that we were reading that feel like people grappling with something and trying to put it into words and maybe not being able to do that so well. But that not doing it so well is really interesting to me. I’m also doing actual translation work in Latin, for better or for worse, which feels a lot less theoretical and is more about figuring out what words mean.

Stephanie Paulsell’s class on Virginia Woolf has been less about translation and more about something like moving through different layers, or approaching ideas of divinity and secularity and individuality and community in ways that are exciting and fresh. I wrote an essay on Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves. The way that the book is structured is that you start out with six school children and each of them just talks. There’s nothing else. No narrator, just six voices ringing out from the dark. All of them sound alike, but every once in a while one of them will circle back to something and you think, Oh, this is that character. They’re all friends, and you can see them watching each other.

I think in that structure Woolf is suggesting that while we are all individual there is also something, like a “thingness,” that makes one human that we all share. I think there are possibilities for that idea and empathy in all these conversations that we’re having on a broader scale, like: What does it mean to be American? and, What happens if we let too many people in from the outside? There are all of these big worries, and looking at them at a very granular and individual scale seems to be an answer of some kind. Which is basically saying: It’s fine. It does not matter that much.

Woolf also outlined her own ideas in an essay where she said something along the lines of: “There is no Beethoven; there is no Shakespeare; there is no God. There is only the thing itself. We are the music; we are the words; we are the thing itself.” When you talk about us, as in humanity, being the “thing itself” instead of God, then that suggests a really humanistic, lovely way of looking at the world. It’s not exactly atheistic, though. I liked what Caroline Emelia Stephens said, something like: “I am an agnostic with a bend towards mystery.” I think Woolf may have described herself in a similar way.

Empathy Training Wheels

Literature offers me joy and the ability to exercise empathy. It’s a lot easier to practice empathy when it’s a character in a book and then when you run into a situation in the real world, it feels almost like you’ve practiced for that encounter. That’s a very silly and simplistic way of looking at it, but it also helps. I think the ways that literature (and I mostly do non-fiction) and religion intersect is that writing about God is not possible in a lot of traditions—you are always going to fall short. With religion and literature, one illuminates the gaps in the other. Like, if you put God up close next to literature, you think, All these people have tried to write about this and some of it is very moving and beautiful. But ultimately, it doesn’t feel like all of it. So I feel like putting religion next to literature shows the project of what it literature could be.

Both religion and literature fall short of their ultimate project, but they fall short in different and interesting ways. Both encourage you to reach outside the bounds of yourself. And I think community is a safe way to reach outside of yourself and to recognize the needs and existence of the other in a way that's both really safe and can be really challenging. Community is sometimes not that easy. All of it is like empathy training wheels, so that when you get to a place where much greater empathy or action is required of you then you are better able to do that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy lately and what it means to be empathetic or to reach outside yourself or to offer help or imagine yourself into another’s situation and in what ways can that be a helpful exercise and in what ways is it like, No, please stop doing that you don’t know what you’re doing. I think it’s an interesting line to negotiate and one that’s been negotiated a lot lately.

Literary Pillars

Anne Carson and Annie Dillard are my two pillars. Anne Carson is a classicist by training, but she writes poetry and essays that are sometimes based around her translations of Greek plays. When you read her you get the sense that there are like 14 different things going on that you don’t totally get but what you do get is really great. She’s incredibly smart and well-read and sharp, but that doesn't cover it all.

Annie Dillard is a naturalist/kind of a theologian. She got famous for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which she wrote when she was in her 20s and that won the Pulitzer Prize. In the book she goes to a cabin in Virginia and writes about what she sees all year. But she also writes about the different ways in which nature and seeing things are at once a reflection of God’s beauty and a reflection of God’s terror. There’s a section on insects and this entire idea that the world is teeming with insects and they are multiplying at ferocious rates and you are unaware of it but it is happening all around you and she’s like: “Creation is horrible.”  There’s a moment where she watches a water bug suck out the insides of a toad and she’s like: “God made that.” She seems to understand the full beauty of the natural world and the full horror of it.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: The Beginning of Wisdom - Chapter 3 (Ao3 link)

Fandom: Flash, Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Leonard Snart (Len) & Leonard Snart (Leo), Len Snart/Mick Rory, Leo Snart/Mick Rory, Len Snart/Mick Rory/Leo Snart, Leo Snart/Ray Terrill, Len Snart/Barry Allen

Summary: In which Leonard Snart is twins.

(the life and times and loves of Len and Leo Snart)

—————————————————————————————————–

Life went on.

Even if Marie was gone, she had left them Lisa, and for Lisa they would give up anything. Any comfort, any safety, anything.

Giving up school was certainly easy enough.

Len proposed that they swap out days of attendance, so that CPS didn't look too closely at them, and Leo agreed. It did not seem like a great sacrifice, especially since it would only be a short while: they could care for Lisa, yes, but only long enough to ensure that she was taken care of elsewhere.

Their father knew very well what drew the attention of the police; he would never let them stay home to guard her.

A friendly neighbor agreed to take her into the little daycare she ran from her home; the Leonards watched her like a hawk for weeks before conceding that the neighbor's friendliness was just that, and concealed no darkness.

(They still came for random inspections at least once a week. The babies and children there all loved them dearly, a reaction neither of them could explain, but which they repaid with kindness and laughter whenever they could.)

Their grades suffered that year, marked down for poor attendance, but their test results easily overcame that deficiency and they advanced to the next grade without any serious difficulty.

As always, they presented the best overall set of grades (Leo's, usually, but only by a little) to their father, and as far as Leo was concerned, that was all.

Len did not think the same.

A thought had come to him, an idea stealing in through the dark one night as he lay awake, comforting himself by watching his brother's chest rise and fall, and he could not rid himself of it.

He could not, because he could not share it with his brother.

"What do you want to do when you're older?" he asked one day after school, as they played with the babies at the daycare.

"Are you asking the babies?" Leo laughed, even as the older children all shouted out their answers, throwing out suggestions like "fireman" or "spaceman" or "dinosaur researcher".

"No," Len said, after they had finished praising each child's choice as excellent and brilliant and innovative and certainly within their capacity to achieve. "I meant you."

Leo blinked. "I hadn't really thought about it."

"Neither have I," Len said, his voice grim as he thought of all the reasons they had not given the future any mind: too tired, too scared, too concerned with surviving today to think about tomorrow. "You should."

Leo hummed noncommittally, but Len persisted.

After months of nagging, and trips to the library to research careers, and visits to career fairs at the high school where Leo complained that they were the only under-ten-years-olds present, Len finally got his answer.

"I don't know, okay?" Leo exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "I might be interested in psychology, or maybe fashion design, but I won't know for sure until I go to college and figure out what I'm good at. Isn't that what everyone else does?"

"Yes," Len said. "That's fine."

"You're being stranger than usual," Leo told him. "Won't you tell me what's on your mind?"

"I had an idea," Len said. "I'll tell you about it, but not now."

It was the first secret he ever kept from Leo.

After that, their divergence began to accelerate. Leo began to focus on his artistic skills, which Len did not care about, and on the higher world of literature, which Len was bored by, and the intricacies of biology, which Len understood but did not love. Len, instead, focused on math and the science of angles, physics, where the answers at the lower levels were simple and the questions at the higher levels were fascinating, but which Leo thought were a gigantic boring waste of time given the presence of calculators.

They both spent hours playing with Lisa, but Leo taught her shapes and the alphabet, while Len taught her sleight of hand and how to measure time.

Leo became more confident in himself.

Len, who had always been confident, became even more protective.

Their father called on them more and more for jobs, but now, instead of splitting them equally, Len took the lion's share.

"Are you sure?" Leo asked, frowning at his brother. He found that he valued his father's esteem less now that he was assured the affection of both his brother and little Lisa, and even a friend or two outside that circle: he was sociable and well-liked but not reliant on others, by his own preference, and having a support team was invaluable to him in staying that way.

"If you don't mind," Len said. He valued his father's praise as much as ever – even more so, now that he had more people to protect, as his father's goodwill was a necessity in protecting them. He did not tell Leo about the extra bruises he obtained when he took responsibility for Lisa's childish mistakes: he had learned by now what it was to be a burden on others, and also that once you keep one secret, it was easier to keep the next. "Your literature essays are a lot more tricky than my math proofs, after all."

"I suppose," Leo said, screwing up his nose. "But are you –"

"I'm sure," Len said firmly.

And so Len went on the jobs, and Leo stayed behind.

Len even liked some parts of the work he did with his father: he was deemed old enough to listen in on the planning, although his suggestions were appropriate only when phrased as innocent questions, and he was extremely proud of his skills, his light fingers and his quick mind, all aspects that helped him be a successful thief.

Those parts, he liked.

Other parts, he hated.

Other parts –

He came home to Leo one day, shaking, for once seeking comfort instead of offering protection.

"What happened?" Leo demanded.

Len shook his head. He had no words: no words that could convey the depth of hurt in his heart, the violation of his soul, that had come when his father had forced him to pull the trigger of a gun when it was pointed at another man – to deliberately end another life before its time.

Another life that lived and breathed and loved; a life that might have had brothers and sisters, too, a Leo and Lisa of their own now left bereft; a human life.

Leo could not understand, and Len never wanted him to.

He had never felt so alone.

Leo got the story out of Len eventually, despite Len's best efforts to repel him. Just as Len had gloomily foreseen, the knowledge caused Leo great pain, for he could do nothing to help assuage the agony in Len's mind. He could do nothing but offer his presence, alive and breathing, Lisa at their side doing the same.

That was still some comfort. Len took that comfort to heart, and it broke through the icy barriers he had erected to hide himself from what he had done.

And so Len wept: an act their father had forbidden as weak.

When their father called for his Leonard, hours later, drunk and laughing and joyous at a job successfully accomplished, Leo went to him in Len's place so that he would not see the tear tracks on Len's face.

And in Len's place, Leo was given a beer and a slap on the back in congratulation for 'becoming a man', which was all the recognition that their father saw fit to bestow upon the incident.

Leo drank the beer, and thought to himself for the first time that perhaps he hated his father.

After that, Leo insisted upon going on the jobs more often again, especially once they became more and more frequent, taking days out of school instead of merely nights and weekends.

Len agreed to relinquish some of the jobs to Leo, secretly relieved to have some time to rest from the thankless never-ending task of pleasing his father, but he insisted that Leo only take the ones where no firearm was involved.

They fought over that, a real fight like they hadn't had in years, but Len held his ground and stood firm. His hands were already bloody; Leo's were not, and he intended for it to stay that way.

Eventually Leo conceded, though he never stopped worrying over it.

Years passed.

Lisa grew up, and grew talented, and there was nothing her brothers would not give her: Leo his presence at her ice skating practices, cheering her on, and Len his growing skills at picking pockets and cracking ATMs in order to pay for the increasingly expensive lessons.

Years passed, and there were more men who needed shooting.

Len's hands stopped shaking after each kill. Instead, they started twitching – not just after a death, but all the time: a nervous tic, a compulsion, a need to move, to act, to steal.

Leo read books from the library about it, books about anxiety and trauma and negative reinforcement and feedback loops, and came up with the word kleptomania, but for all the knowledge he gained on the subject, he could not stop it from being true.

Len was sick, now, in a way Leo wasn't, and that was something they had to deal with.

Leo thought that at least they would deal with it together.

Len did not agree, but it would be some time before Leo found that out, for Len had grown very good at keeping secrets where he thought he needed to.

But all secrets come out in the end.

After one year that had been particularly bad – job after job, night after sleepless night, their father intent on winning a promotion within the foul ranks of the Family to which he had sold himself and using his child (his children) ruthlessly to get there – Leo finally discovered the oldest of Len's secrets.

Of course he did.

It was inevitable: the truth of it was in their final report cards for the year, of which they only ever presented their father with one.

"You're failing out," Leo said numbly, staring at the numbers that marked his brother's test scores.

"My test grades are fine," Len said, not disagreeing. "But not enough to overcome the issues with my attendance."

Leo nodded, unable to tear his eyes away from the rows of zeros and no-shows, looking desperately for some sign of unreachable hope, some signal that this wasn't happening.

He saw one zero that makes his eyes go wide, and he jabbed at one of them with a frown. "That was my day," he said, the slightest shade of triumph in his voice: for if they had made one mistake, then surely they might have made others – perhaps even enough others enough to save Len even from such a miserable performance. "I went on that job that day – remember? I remember, because you had to borrow my textbook."

"Yeah," Len said. "I remember."

"But you're still listed as a no-show that day!"

"Yeah," Len said again. "Because I told them I was you."

Leo stared at his brother.

"Yeah," Len said a third time. "I lied and I said I was Leo on the days I went in and you didn't. I did your tests, I did your homework, I did your class participation –"

"But why?!" Leo demanded. "You – you're Leonard –"

"So are you," Len said firmly, his eyes glinting angrily. "Maybe I got that name first, being the oldest, or maybe I didn't; who even knows at this point? It doesn't matter. It's both our names now. But more than that, you're not just Leonard. You're the Leonard that's going to do good."

"What?"

"You're going to college," Len said, that long-ago decision spilling forth at last. "Just like you said you would: go to college and see what you're good at. You're gonna be good at so many things, and you're gonna pick one, and then you're gonna have a real job. A real life. Dad only wants one of us for his jobs, after all, and that's going to be me."

"But –!"

"I'm the one who's a kleptomaniac," Len said, his voice bitter – not at Leo, who he looked at only with love in his eyes, but at the necessity of this whole pretense. Bitter, not at his father whom he never blamed as much as he ought, but at the life he saw as inescapable. "I'm the one who's a murderer. You're going to make it straight, Leo, with no crime at all. You're going to be good."

"I don't want to make it straight!" Leo cried out. "Not without you!"

"I'll always be there," Len said, "when I can."

"That's not good enough! Why can't I be like you, huh? Why can't I –"

"I don't want you to be like me," Len said. "I want you to be better."

"You haven't given me a good reason to stick to the straight and narrow," Leo said, crossing his arms as he glared.

"You'd be able to adopt Lisa when you turn eighteen," Len said promptly. He'd had longer to prepare for this conversation than Leo. "But only if you have no record."

Leo faltered.

He’d always said and thought that there was nothing they would not do for Lisa.

But –

This?

"You don't have a record either," Leo said, but it's weak and he knew it. "Not yet, anyway."

"The police have always let me go when they catch me because I've been small and had good grades," Len said. "I'm still small, but with my grades like that? They'll ship me off to juvie next time they nab me."

Neither of them pretended that he wouldn't get nabbed. It was practically a feature of some of their father's plans, to leave Leonard behind to take the fall.

It might not happen on the first job Len ran, nor even the tenth, but it would happen eventually. And then Len would be taken away, painted with the brush of the bad kid.

The bad twin.

And once one was marked as good and the other as bad, they would be separated with all the force that society could bring to bear upon them.

"Why didn't you just split the days with me?" Leo whispered.

"Because we were out of school enough days to fail us both," Len told him, his voice gentle but sure and certain. He had not made the decision lightly, but make it he had, and he would defend his decision with all the force of his mind brought to bear upon it. "I did the math."

Math was always Len's talent, but Leo could do it, too. He couldn't dispute Len's conclusion.

"I don't want you to," Leo said.

"I don't want to, either," Len said, and that plaintive plea reached him where nothing else would have: his cold mask of calmness broke into tears that beaded up in his eyes, tears that he would never let anyone but Leo see. "I don't want to be like Dad, Leo. But it seems like one of us has got to be, and I'd rather it be me."

"Not like Dad," Leo, who hated their father now more than ever before, a searing hatred that burned at his heart until it was as cold as stone, said. "A thief, yes. Maybe even a murderer. But you will never be like Dad."

Len pulled Leo into his arms the way he always had, and Leo clung back to him like he always had, and they curled up in their single bed the way they always had.

Neither wanted to think of the day when those easy expressions of affection might not be so easy to come by.

There was no more switching, after that.

Len stayed home, caring for Lisa and catching up on his sleep, brushing up on his skills – his light fingers to take things, his quick eyes to spot traps, his ready mind to plan escapes. He ran small, simple jobs of his own. The jobs were intended to be practice runs, preparation and learning to develop his skills for the real events, but they also usually produced enough money to buy Leo and Lisa some small treats.

He did not get caught on these jobs of his own.

Leo, in turn, threw himself into his studies, forcing himself to become better at math rather than relying exclusively on his brother's talents, pushing himself to excel more and more in what he was already good at, and devoting himself to extracurriculars he had previously ignored: extracurriculars he might need to cite on an application to college. Len had sacrificed so much so that Leo could make it, and, to honor that sacrifice, make it Leo would. And he would make it no matter what obstacles, whether poverty or his birth in the slums, stood in his way.

And though they knew the day would soon come to divide them, they tried their best to stay together.

They were careful, risking more of their father's anger than usual to ensure that his plans worked well, that he would not be caught, that Len would not be caught, but in time the day came that all of their caution was for nothing.

And, as Len had predicted, this time the grim machinery of justice did not have mercy: the child with the good grades and the ex-police father could be pitied and forgiven, but the child who was rapidly growing into a delinquent, whose grades were bad, whose father had been kicked off the force?

He got none of that mercy.

Len was taken, first into police custody where he was too terrified to speak, and then, when they tired of that, before the juvenile court. There, the judge sentenced him to a stint in the local juvenile hall.

Local, here, meant all way over in Keystone, since the actual local one had been shut down as a result of some sort of allegations of misconduct and abuse.

Len thinks that he would have preferred the abuse, if it meant that he could stay closer to home.

After all, he was used to abuse, wasn’t he?

He wasn’t used to distance.

"It's only a few hours away, taking the buses," Leo said that night, watching as Len packed away what little clothing he could spare. His knees were pulled up to his chest and his arms were wrapped around them, and he felt far colder than the room actually was. “We could visit, me and Lisa.”

“If you leave for that long, Dad will notice,” Len said. He’d already done the math, his faithful companion which never lied to him, and had already started to armor his heart against the loss of his other half for months on end.

If Leo wasn’t there to protect his heart, he’d have to do it himself.

He hopes he can.

"Dad won't notice that I'm still there at all," Leo said. He’d done some thinking of his own on the subject. "I'm planning on staying with a friend from school instead. You know how he thinks there’s just one of us, mostly; I'm hoping he thinks you're just gone, and doesn’t call for me."

"Lisa –"

"I'll still take care of her. Not like Dad will bother to, or notice that she’s still getting fed on time. I’ll make it a big secret and tell her she can’t tell Dad I’m around. She’s a good kid; it’ll be fine."

"Okay."

“We’ll call you,” Leo said. “And we could come to visit you – maybe on a long weekend – if Dad’s away –”

“If that happens, then okay,” Len said, and smiled. He did not believe they would be able to come, but he appreciated the promise.

Leo did not smile. He knew how hard it would be for them to make it. "There will be phone calls."

"Every day," Len promised.

“You protect that stupid heart of yours.”

“I will.”

“No new friends.”

“Leo…”

"And you have to promise not to die in there."

"I promise. It's only three months, Leonard."

"A lot can happen in three months, Leonard."

"Take care of Lisa," Len said, because he could not deny that truth. "And yourself."

He left the next day.

Leo stayed at home, curled up with Lisa with him instead of Len so that he could sleep, and wondered how Len would survive.

He wondered, too, if being away so long would teach Len how to live without them.

He wondered what Len would do with that knowledge.

As Leo thought this, Len arrived at juvie.      

[thetldrplace]

White History

So I found out about this woman on twitter. I think twitter is generally dangerous as a platform specifically because it only supports ‘bites’ of the issue by limiting what you can say to a few sentences per tweet. When I say I think it’s dangerous, I should probably qualify that I think it’s dangerous to take what is said on twitter as a fair accounting of anything. Twitter is fine as a launch pad to look deeper into a subject, but if I read someone’s hot take and decide that’s enough information for me to make a sound judgment, I’m fooling myself. So I did what I usually try to do, and looked up the original interview and listened to what she had to say.

Something she said was a catalyst for me to sort through some thoughts on a ‘white-centric’ view of history.

 Dr Khilanani’s Interview The woman in question is Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and she had made some very serious comments in a forum at Yale. There was a lot of blowback on her, and to try to get to the bottom of what she was trying to say, Marc Lamont Hill interviewed her.  

MLH: Are white people psychopathic?

DAK: I think so, yeah. The level of lying that has started since colonialism- we’re just used to it.

MLH: What kind of lies?

DAK: Every time you steal a country, you loot, you say you’ve discovered something; this level of lies is actually a part of history. We don’t say we killed all these people, we got rid of all the Native Americans. We say we discovered America. You don’t talk about the level of death, you don’t talk about the level of what actually occurred. You wipe the slate clean, you sanitize the violence.

This level of ‘discovery’ is everywhere; you’ve discovered vegetarianism, you’ve discovered yoga, yet it’s actually stolen. 

For full context, the entire interview is here, but I don’t believe this snippet misrepresents her at all.

[Note for myself: Psychopathy (says Wikipedia) is a personality disorder characterized by persistent anti-social behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.]

The Whitewashing of History My response would have to be: these facts are neither ‘wiped’ nor ‘sanitized’. They are well-known about our history. We are, in fact, taught about them in school from the time we’re small. Claiming that the “slate has been wiped clean and the violence sanitized” is false. One could of course make the claim that we don’t talk about them enough, but what constitutes “enough” is a subjective claim. Her claim of not talking, at all, about the negative of our history is demonstrably false.

Discovery instead of Robbery Then there is the fact that she ties our use of the word discovery to what she sees as pathological lies we tell ourselves about history.

I’m also mystified at her understanding of the word ‘discovery’. Discovery means to uncover something, whether physically or metaphorically. Saying Columbus discovered America is only saying it was uncovered …. to him, and by extension, to Europeans. People of the west aren’t saying they found an uninhabited land or created it. When they say Columbus discovered America, they are saying that at that point, the new world was uncovered to them.

 But to be fair, I think the main argument is that what Europeans called discovery, was really just robbery. Of course, we did push the tribes that inhabited the land to the side and took it by force. But again, that isn’t being disputed.

When it comes to someone saying they discovered yoga, or vegetarianism, that is only saying that they personally found out about this, not that they invented it. How this is conflated into the previous false statement about whitewashed history is, as I said, mystifying to me. It looks to me like a basic misunderstanding of the word ‘discover’ is at the heart of tying it to the pathological lies of white people.

Stolen Granting the equivocation on the word discovery when robbery was really meant, to say that something like yoga has been ‘stolen’ is nearly incomprehensible. Yoga isn’t a ‘thing’, such that if X has it, Y can’t. White people engaging in yoga makes no difference whatsoever to Indian practitioners.

So are these things “actually stolen”? No, not actually.

While cultural appropriation was not mentioned per se, I would imagine that’s the justification for stating that something like yoga has been stolen. I don’t have much respect for the usual whining about cultural appropriation. On one hand, I grant that it can be a cheapening of culture. But even granting that, it just looks like whiny brats saying ‘That’s mine, and you can’t play with it!’.

I’m of Italian heritage, and I can complain all I want about deep-dish pizza not really being ‘pizza’, but ultimately, no one cares, and you just have to get on with your life. Rather than whining on about how Italian culture is being cheapened by deep-dish pizza, I take my friends to a real Neapolitan pizza place when I can, so they can experience the real thing. But if they prefer deep-dish “pizza”, that’s up to them. I know it’s not really pizza, and it’s not really Italian, but it’s also not really important. Italian culture isn’t harmed because some yahoos in Chicago made something vaguely related to pizza and called it the same thing.

 Euro-centric History The charge of history being ‘euro-centric’ is of course true…. But I grew up in the west. I expect each culture will focus on important elements of their own cultures and histories, just as we learn important elements of ours. It would be strange if we didn’t concentrate on our own history. A Californian who knew nothing about the history of California would be considered an ignoramus. So yes, we here in the west tend to spend most of our time on western history.

Reading Dead White Guys I read a lot of classic literature by, well, I guess…. white guys. I don’t think of what they have to say as being ‘by white guys’, I think of it as wisdom written by men. Undoubtedly this color-blindness would itself be labeled as white-privilege, but I don’t see any wisdom in that label. I read to gain insight and knowledge about the way humanity works in this world.

I expect true wisdom to be applicable to life, regardless of the author’s, or my, race. Perhaps people of color think in terms of what race the author of a work is in order to gauge the fitness or applicability of its wisdom to their life. I can only imagine that must be severely limiting. There may be times when voices of color would be necessary, but in general, I’m not reading anything with a racial lens.

[sciencespies]

New Research Suggests Alexander Hamilton Was a Slave Owner

https://sciencespies.com/history/new-research-suggests-alexander-hamilton-was-a-slave-owner/

New Research Suggests Alexander Hamilton Was a Slave Owner

For Jessie Serfilippi, it was an eye-opening moment. As she worked at her computer, she had to keep checking to make sure what she was seeing was real: irrefutable evidence that Alexander Hamilton—the founding father depicted by many historians and even on Broadway as an abolitionist—enslaved other humans.

“I went over that thing so many times, I just had to be sure,” recalls Serfilippi, adding, “I went in to this with the intention of learning about Hamilton’s connection to slavery. Would I find instances of him enslaving people? I did.”

In a recently published paper, “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” the young researcher details her findings gleaned from primary source materials. One of those documents includes Hamilton’s own cashbook, which is available online at the Library of Congress.

In it, several line items indicate that Hamilton purchased enslaved labor for his own household. While antithetical to the popular image of the founding father, that reference has reinforced the view held by a growing cadre of historians that Hamilton did actively engage in enslaving people.

“I didn’t expect to find what I did at all,” Serfilippi says. “Part of me wondered if I was even wasting my time because I thought other historians would have found this already. Some had said he owned slaves but there was never any real proof.”

One who is not surprised by the revelation is author William Hogeland, who has written about Hamilton and is working on a book about his impact on American capitalism.

“Serfilippi’s research is super exciting,” he says. “Her research confirms what we have suspected, and it takes the whole discussion to a new place. She’s found some actual evidence of enslavement on the part of Hamilton that is just more thoroughgoing and more clearly documented than anything we’ve had before.”

A 1784 entry from Hamilton’s cash books documenting the sale of a woman named Peggy

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Hamilton’s connection to slavery is as complex as his personality. Brilliant but argumentative, he was a member of the New York Manumission Society, which advocated for the emancipation of the enslaved. However, he often acted as legal arbiter for others in the transactions of people in bondage.

Serfilippi points out that by conducting these deals for others, Hamilton was in effect a slave trader—a fact overlooked by some historians.

“We can’t get into his head and know what he was thinking,” she says. “Hamilton may have seen enslavement of others as a step up for a white man. That’s the way many white people saw it in that time period.”

Serfilippi works as an interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New Yori, the home of Hamilton’s father-in-law Philip Schuyler, a Revolutionary War general and U.S. senator. Her paper came about as part of her research on the many African Americans enslaved by Schuyler. According to the mansion, Schuyler enslaved as many as 30 laborers between his two properties in Albany and Saratoga, New York. Sefilippi initially looked at Schuyler’s children, including Eliza, who married Hamilton in 1780, and as she examined the founding father’s cashbook, the evidence jumped out at her in several places.

One line item, dated June 28, 1798, shows that Hamilton received a $100 payment for the “term” of a “negro boy.” He had leased the boy to someone else and accepted cash for his use.

“He sent the child to work for another enslaver and then collected the money that child made,” Serfilippi says. “He could only do that if he enslaved that child.”

The smoking gun was at the end of the cashbook, where an anonymous hand is settling Hamilton’s estate following his death. That person wrote down the value of various items, including servants. It was a confirming moment for Serfilippi.

“You can only ascribe monetary value to a person you are enslaving,” she says. “There were free white servants who he hired but they were not included there.”

She adds, “Once you see it in his own handwriting, to me there’s really no question.”

An 1893 photograph of Hamilton’s estate, the Grange

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

In late-18th century New York, according to historian Leslie Howard, the words “servant” and “slave” were often used interchangeably—especially in New York, where enslaved workers were likely to be members of the household staff. Howard, a professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, points out it is an important distinction in understanding the many guises of slavery in 18th-century America.

“In casual usage, enslavers used the term ‘servant’ to refer to people they enslaved, especially if they were referring to those who worked in the household—the idea of a ‘domestic servant’ could be inclusive of enslaved, indentured or free laborers,” she says. “So in reading documents that refer to people as servants, we have to be careful to find other evidence of their actual legal status.”

Harris is impressed by the research in Serfilippi’s paper and how it is reshaping the way we view the founding father. “It’s clear that Hamilton was deeply embedded in slavery,” she adds. “We have to think more carefully about this [idea of Hamilton as] anti-slavery.”

Hamilton played an important role in the establishment of the American government and creation of many of its economic institutions, including Wall Street and a central bank. The illegitimate son of a Scot, he was born and raised in the Caribbean, attended college in New York and then joined the Continental Army at the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775. He eventually became aide-de-camp to General George Washington and saw action at the Battle of Yorktown.

Largely self-taught and self-made, Hamilton found success as a lawyer and served in Congress. He wrote many of the Federalist Papers that helped shape the Constitution. He served as the first Secretary of the Treasury when Washington became president in 1789 and was famously killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1804.

Despite being on the $10 bill, Hamilton remained generally ignored by the public until the publication of Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton. The bestseller was read by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who turned it into a watershed Broadway hit in 2015, winning 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.

For the most part, Chernow and Miranda hewed to the accepted dogma that Hamilton was an abolitionist and only reluctantly participated in the sale of humans as a legal go-between for relatives and friends. Though Chernow states Hamilton may have owned slaves, the notion that he was ardently against the institution pervades his book—and not without some support. The belief is rooted in a biography written 150 years ago by Hamilton’s son, John Church Hamilton, who stated his father never owned slaves.

That idea was later refuted by Hamilton’s grandson, Allan McLane Hamilton, who said his grandfather did indeed own them and his own papers proved it. “It has been stated that Hamilton never owned a negro slave, but this is untrue,” he wrote. “We find that in his books there are entries showing that he purchased them for himself and for others.” However, that admission was generally ignored by many historians since it didn’t fit the established narrative.

“I think it’s fair to say Hamilton opposed the institution of slavery,” Hogeland says. “But, as with many others who did in his time, that opposition was in conflict with widespread practice on involvement in the institution.”

A portrait of Elizabeth Schuyler, Hamilton’s wife

(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

In an e-mail, Chernow applauds Serfilippi’s “real contribution to the scholarly literature” but expresses dismay over what he sees as her one-sided approach to Hamilton’s biography. “Whether Hamilton’s involvement with slavery was exemplary or atrocious, it was only one aspect of his identity, however important,” he writes. “There is, inevitably, some distortion of vising by viewing Hamilton’s large and varied life through this single lens.”

In her paper, Serfilippi cites the work of other historians who have similarly investigated Hamilton’s past as enslaver, including John C. Miller, Nathan Schachner and Sylvan Joseph Muldoon. Hogeland also cites a 2010 article by Michelle DuRoss, then a postgraduate student at the University at Albany, State University of New York, who claims Hamilton was likely a slave owner.

“Scholars are aware of this paper,” Hogeland says. “It’s gotten around. It predates Serfilippi’s work and doesn’t have the same documentation, but she makes the argument that Hamilton’s abolitionism is a bit of a fantasy.”

Chernow, however, holds steadfast on his reading of Hamilton. “While Hamilton was Treasury Secretary, his anti-slavery activities did lapse, but he resumed them after he returned to New York and went back into private law practice, working again with the New York Manumission Society,” he writes. “Elected one of its four legal advisers, he helped to defend free blacks when slave masters from out of state brandished bills of sale and tried to snatch them off the New York streets. Does this sound like a man invested in the perpetuation of slavery?”

For her part, Serfilippi is taking the attention she is receiving from historians in stride. At 27, she is part of a new breed of researchers who are reviewing now-digitized collections of historical documents to take a fresh look at what happened in the past. She is pleased her discovery is shedding new light on a familiar figure and adding insight into his character.

More importantly, she hopes it will help deepen our understanding of the difficult issue of slavery in the nation’s history and its impact on individuals—the slavers and the enslaved. The driving force for Serfilippi was to get to know and remember the people held in bondage by the founding father. She recounts one correspondence between Philip Schuler and his daughter and the potent impact of learning the name of one of Hamilton’s slaves.

“Schuyler, just in letters to other people, will casually mention enslavement,” she says. “In one letter he writes to Eliza in 1798, ‘the death of one of your servants by yellow fever has deeply affected my feelings.’ He goes on to identify the servant, a boy by the name of Dick.

“That was a shocking moment for me. This is the first and only name of somebody Hamilton enslaved that I’ve come across. It’s something I’ve never stopped thinking about.”

#History

[bloodunderthebridge]

The Magic of Postmodernism in How I Met Your Mother

We all know (and if you don’t, you should know) that How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) is a comical t.v series that went off the air after its ninth and final season in 2014. But, for those of you who have not enjoyed the future storytelling plot that is HIMYM, here is a quick recap of what takes place in the t.v show composed of nine amusing seasons. The first main character is Ted. Ted is the guy who narrates the entire story to his teenage kids of how he met their mother. Ted tells the story of his journey to finding a wife in 2030 and each season takes the audience through another year of Ted trying to find his wife with his best friends/sidekicks adding to the drama prior to 2030. For the second, third, fourth and fifth characters, you’ve got Lily and Marshall who have been together since college, but have their ups and downs that result in marriage and a baby. You have Barney who has a sketchy job that makes an absurd amount of money and spends most of his time dating as many girls as possible while asking them out in extreme, impossible ways and then you have Robin. Robin brings her daddy issues, t.v broadcasting skills and rough Canadian lifestyle to the streets of New York City. Combined, these characters date each other, date an uncountable number of other people, succeed along with tons of failure and in the end, create a t.v show that reaches a large audience with its sarcastic tone and unrealistic, but relatable circumstances.

So now that I’ve throughly discussed the characters and their role in HIMYM (for those of you who have watched HIMYM and for those of you who's my detailed description is good enough), what comes to mind when we think of the show? Perhaps how uneventful and upsetting the end of the series was or how Barney and Robin should have never broken up and like why did Tracy have to die? Whatever the reason, it probably wasn’t the postmodern aspects of the t.v show. In-between Barney’s multiple conquests, Robin’s foreign Canadian phrases, Lily and Marshall’s never ending relationship and Ted’s seemingly forever lasting search for love are techniques typically used in postmodern works of literature and in this case, good t.v. But since there is a handful of ways in which HIMYM can be looked at through a postmodern lens, I’m going to focus on three specific techniques, metafiction, magical realism and intertextuality. Now although metafiction and intertextuality may sound boring in comparison to watching t.v and even though magical realism seems to entail more fun, each technique adds a level of depth to HIMYM.

T.V, I’m pretty sure everyone has watched it at least once, but what happens when we’ve watched all the shows that interest us, do we exit our box and try a new show or do we watch a series over again? I’m voting for the latter. Whenever I watch something for a second or third and sometimes a fourth time, I notice different things about the show or whatever episode I’ve re-watched. “I could have sworn that storm trooper wasn’t there before”, I notice the smaller details when I re-watch shows and that’s why looking at HIMYM while keeping the postmodern techniques in the back of my mind, helps understand the t.v series more accurately. It’s an underlying layer that you don’t notice at first, but contributes to how the show is perceived by the audience. Imagine HIMYM having modern aspects, rather than postmodern, would more or less people watch it? Would the meaning and perception change? My guess is yes, of course it would change because even though it’s only a small number of aspects that I am looking at, those small parts are what make up the whole and changing enough of those small parts will eventually change the whole.

Okay, so now that I’ve convinced you that looking at HIMYM through a postmodern lens is important, what specifically does metafiction, magical realism and intertextuality mean? Meta fiction is the act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the fictional nature of the very fiction they're reading, or in the case of HIMYM, when the characters know they are in a t.v show. This is commonly know as “breaking the fourth wall”. Magical realism is the introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a narrative that is otherwise realistic which is pretty explanatory and an easy definition. And lastly, intertextuality is the acknowledgment of previous literary works within another literary work or when a t.v show references a movie or book or vice versa. Each of these three techniques are actively used in HIMYM and now that you know what they mean, time to dive into a close viewing of HIMYM.

Metafiction, breaking the fourth wall, if you will, is not something I am typically a fan of. I think some shows use it well, like Jane the Virgin, but than shows like House of Cards, I can’t stand, but then again, the majority of people I know like House of Cards, so maybe thats just me. Anyways, Jane the Virgin and House of Cards use metafiction many times throughout each episode, but that’s not the case in HIMYM. There are only a number of instances in the entire series of HIMYM where metafiction is used, it is a technique that is used in addition to many other techniques, but not alone. Okay so to give an example so everyone can see what I'm blabbing on about, I’ve looked at season eight, episode four titled “Who Wants to be a Godparent?”. In this episode, Lily and Marshal, now married and pregnant, are hosting a game-show-like competition between Ted, Barney and Robin to see who should be the Godparent of their first child. Towards the end of the scene, when the game is almost over, Marshall looks directly at the screen and says “we will be right back after a message from our sponsors” (00:11:40 - 00:11:50). This was a clear cut, easy example of meta fiction. Another example just for good measure, but not as obvious as my first example is in season seven, episode six, “Mystery vs. History”. Barney, Ted and Robin are all sitting on the couch in Ted’s apartment and Ted is rambling on about breaking the fourth wall in Annie Hall (this is also intertextuality, but that’s for later) and then, out of nowhere, Robin turns to the camera and says “can you believe this guy?” and motions her thumb in Ted’s direction. Personally, Robin breaking the fourth wall is my favourite out of the two just because it was less expected in that scene than in the other one, you know. Okay well, I think that’s enough about metafiction for now… on to magic……al realism!

When I first heard of magical realism, I thought, yes finally some magic being taught in university. This is not the case, but also it sort of is the case. Let me explain. Magical realism is when events and stuff happening in a t.v show or movie or whatever are unrealistic, but they are shown in a realistic setting, therefore making it somewhat believable to some people (maybe?). Now, magical realism is so important that even Oprah talked about in her book club. On Oprah’s website an article is posted saying “magical realism sets magical events in realistic contexts, thus requiring us to question what is "real," and how we can tell” (Parkinson Zamora), which is my opinion, nicely summarises why magical realism is like magic. So thank you Oprah for also seeing the importance of magical realism and talking about it, but now to bring the magic to life in HIMYM, we need to look at season seven, episode seven titled “Noretta”. I know I’ve already explained a bit about Barney’s role in the t.v show and if you’ve watched HIMYM, you already know for yourself, but Barney is addicted to asking as many women out as possible. Like I’m pretty sure that’s all he does, it is his life mission to sleep with a record number of people. Not the most attractive quality in a person/character, but it does make for good t.v. “Noretta” is a prime example of far Barney will go and magical realism all in one! Background: Barney is on a date with an attractive British women he has been dating. They have not slept together yet, but in episode seven, Barney was determined to change that. While skating, Barney’s date fell down on the ice and completely lost a tooth, but somehow Barney managed to convince his date to not give up on the night. After his date fell, Barney also looked up to the roof (aka the sky, aka God, aka magic) and said “I can turn this around” (00:05:40 - 00:06:11). Magical realism? Yes, an extreme example of it? No, but the saga continues, finally back at Barney’s apartment, they go on the balcony where Barney and his date witness a man jumping from a roof committing suicide. Barney again says, “I can turn this around” and despite his date crying “I want to go home”, he manages to win her over (00:09:30 - 00:10:12). What makes this magical realism, if it isn’t clear enough, is that Barney still managed to sleep with his date despite her losing a tooth (which must have been insanely painful and ugly to look at) and that she witnessed death. Those two things happening don’t really set the mood for most people. That is one example of an episode of HIMYM where there is magical realism, but you could find magical realism in probably more than half of the episodes of HIMYM because the technique is used too often when it comes to Barney’s character.

Now finally, we get to discuss intertextuality, my personal favourite. You may be thinking, why is intertextuality my favourite? Especially compared to a technique that is magic adjacent, but when I understand a reference to another movie or book, I just feel like I know more, you know. The important thing to note about intertextuality though is that “much of the show’s humour relies on the reader’s recognition of common tropes” (Levine 67). This directly relates to HIMYM because if the viewer doesn’t understand the reference, they may also miss the humour which would be unfortunate and HIMYM uses intertextuality as humour more often than not. To illustrate intertextuality in HIMYM, I am going to use Star Wars as an example. Star Wars is my all time favourite movie series and therefore I like to take every opportunity to force my obsession upon everyone else and lucky for me, it seems that the characters of HIMYM love Star Wars the same as me!! So here we go, example number one, season nine, episode seventeen, “Sunrise”, Ted argues with his fiancé about what CP30 is made of and he also mocks her by saying “You know what’s weird? Not seeing Star Wars until you’re thirty” (00:03:15  - 00:03:47). Example number two, season nine, episode fifteen, “Unpause”, Barney gets so drunk the night before his wedding he mimics Jabba the Hutt. Example number three, season nine, episode two, “Coming Back”, Barney speaks like Yoda to Marshall, “there is no try” (00:16:18 - 00:16:26). Example number four, just kidding, I won’t keep going with the Star Wars intertextuality references because if you don’t get the point by now, you probably won’t ever get it. That was rude, if you didn’t get the point though, its that if you don’t understand or know Star Wars, HIMYM won’t make any sense. Just kidding, but it definitely won’t be as funny.

We all know now that How I Met Your Mother is a comical t.v series that went off the air after its ninth season and that the producers of this t.v show employ the use of the postmodern techniques metafiction, magical realism and intertextuality. So if anyone ever asks you for examples of magical realism in HIMYM, hopefully now you will be able to give them at least one answer. But in all seriousness, looking at pop culture or anything with a certain lens in mind (in my case, postmodernism) helps read between the lines of whats going on. I find that closely viewing movies and t.v shows or even literature gives a different perspective and shows the layers that can be hidden and I encourage everyone to stop watching HIMYM for a good laugh, but to really learn from the show.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/entertainment/how-will-satan-adam-play-in-2019/

How Will Satan & Adam Play in 2019?

An interracial blues duo born in 1980s Harlem was a symbol of harmony in a tense time. But times have changed.

May 2, 2019

“I can’t believe how many white people are in Harlem now,” Adam Gussow said. He was strolling around the neighborhood, marveling at how much the place had changed since he was a Columbia University grad-school dropout in the 1980s. “I was the only white guy in Harlem at the time. I just saw a white guy jogging. You never used to see that.”

But he was more than an interloper in Harlem all those years ago. He was the harmonica player in a blues duo called Satan & Adam that started off playing on the sidewalk of 125th Street and then went on to tour the country, make a record that charted, and even appear briefly on a U2 album.

“Back then,” he said, “everyone used to tell me, ‘Don’t go to Harlem.’ I would say, ‘Why not?’”

It was in Harlem that he met Sterling Magee, the guitarist he would play with for the next 12 years. Mr. Gussow was in town for the New York premiere of a documentary about the band. The movie, “Satan & Adam,” opened in theaters last month, and it starts streaming on Netflix early this summer.

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle. I’ve finally woken up, and now everything is different.” He turned reflective: “I wonder if anyone still remembers Sterling.”

Long before Mr. Gussow’s arrival in Harlem, Sterling Magee had been a neighborhood eccentric who called himself “Mr. Satan.” He was the bluesman of 125th Street, wailing on electric guitar, singing soulfully, and stamping out a rhythm with a pair of high-hat cymbals. He had a Moses-like beard, and rumor was he used to play in the bands of Ray Charles and Etta James and had performed with James Brown at the Apollo.

As the story goes, Mr. Gussow was getting over a bad breakup, and he wandered up into Harlem one day and encountered Mr. Magee. Feeling the blues in his bones, Mr. Gussow took out his harmonica and started jamming with him. Passers-by were riveted by the unlikely pair, and Mr. Magee’s tip jar filled up quickly, so he said Mr. Gussow could come back.

Racial tensions in the winter of 1986 were boiling over in New York in the wake of the Howard Beach attacks and the massive protests that followed. The duo’s image of musical harmony was soon picked up by the media, and they became a local news sensation. They played Central Park SummerStage, appeared on U2’s “Rattle and Hum” album, toured with Bo Diddley, and performed at the New Orleans jazz festival.

“They were playing the kind of Chicago blues I don’t think anyone was playing anymore much less in New York,” said David Fricke, a writer for Rolling Stone. “Here was this guy who did his time in the trenches, and this other guy who could play in that school and galvanize him.” He added, “The fact that they united at a time of racial tension is something important that should be paid mind, but if they sucked, no one would have cared.”

Mr. Gussow is now 61 and lives in Oxford, Miss. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton and he teaches English and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi. After his flight into town for the premiere, he was eager to retrace his footsteps in Harlem. Mr. Magee did not make the trip. He is now 82 and lives in a nursing home in Gulfport, Fla. He doesn’t play the guitar much anymore and his thoughts about the documentary were scattered during a phone interview last month.

“I’m still Mr. Satan,” he said. “I’m Mr. Satan all the way. There’s no explanation. I am truly Satan. The message I’m giving is the truth, and the truth shall set me free.”

I asked if he liked the documentary. After some silence, his caretaker spoke.

“We’ve shown it three times here,” he said, addressing Mr. Magee. “Your family saw it at a big showing. Then here at Boca Ciega. Don’t you remember all the fan mail, Sterling?”

I asked about Harlem.

“I miss Harlem,” he said. “My music reflects the energy of Harlem because it is my home and she was pretty. Maybe Harlem has changed but I haven’t.”

The tale of two musicians from different walks of life is the familiar heart of the documentary, but as a roiling national conversation about race is taking place in 2019, it’s hard not to wonder how their story fits into New York today. In the film, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who rose to prominence as the organizer of the Howard Beach protests that winter of 1986, considers as much. “To see two people that came from two diametrically opposite existences in the streets of Harlem,” he said, “even if it violates tribal code, takes a lot of self-confidence, a lot of courage, or a lot of ignorance to the environment that you’re in.”

The documentary focuses heavily on the myth of Sterling Magee. Born in 1936 in Mount Olive, Miss., he grew up attending a Baptist church and worrying his mother when he discovered the blues. He served as a paratrooper in Germany before recording hits for Ray Charles’s Tangerine label in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he radically reinvented himself in Harlem as Mr. Satan. Eventually, Mr. Magee suffers a nervous breakdown and disappears and is later found by the filmmakers living in Florida.

Mr. Gussow’s origins receive less screen time. Born in 1958 and raised in Congers, N.Y., Mr. Gussow’s father, Alan, was a celebrated landscape painter, and his mother, Joan, is an influential nutritionist who The Times once called the “matriarch of the eat-locally-think-globally food movement.” A 2010 article in the Home section of The Times visited his mother’s house overlooking the Hudson River, and his uncle, Mel, was a theater critic for The Times. He discovered the harmonica in his teens and he dropped out of graduate school in his 20s to busk on the streets of Paris.

“It’s funny, I think about my class position now sometimes in regards to all this,” Mr. Gussow said. “My parents had no money. We grew up poor in a big house. My grandfather was Lithuanian and grew up dirt poor.” His grandfather, he said, later founded a successful publishing company that printed trade magazines. “I had rich grandparents. But they never gave us any money. They lived in Sutton Place, but the world of Saks Fifth Avenue was not my world. I grew up raising chickens.

“The first time I ever felt class was at school,” he continued. “All the kids would go on ski vacations, and my parents got me oversize ski shoes. I’m not complaining, but that’s when I got my first real sense of class. I had a real chip on my shoulder after that because I realized there was this whole world of privilege I didn’t know about. I went to Princeton, but I also cleaned bathrooms at Princeton.”

He added: “Sterling was colorblind to me. I needed mentoring, and he provided that.”

In 2019, this kind of racial imbalance is seen in a much less forgiving light. But Mr. Magee said such comparisons fatigued him. “When we get together, I’m Mr. Satan and he’s Mr. Gussow,” he said. “I want to put the message out that Mr. Satan is in love with this person, and that I don’t give a damn about all that stuff.”

Some might say Mr. Gussow has grappled with the blues, its appropriation, and privilege in his work as a scholar. In 1995, he wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine about his experiences with Mr. Magee, and he later published a memoir, “Mister Satan’s Apprentice.” At the University of Mississippi, according to his faculty page, he has taught courses like “The Blues Tradition in American Literature” and “Cotton, Slavery, Travel, and the Blues.”

V. Scott Balcerek, the film’s director, started documenting the duo in the 1990s. “I guess it always occurred to me Adam might be considered problematic even when I first met him, but I knew his heart was in the right place and that’s what mattered,” he said. As the documentary tours the festival circuit, he said, he’s gotten a few critiques of “white lens,” but he added, “It’s honestly only white people who bring it up.”

As the afternoon progressed, Mr. Gussow stopped at a patch of sidewalk on 125th Street. It was his old busking spot with Mr. Magee. But the block was unrecognizable to him, and so he moved along to Mr. Magee’s old apartment building. No one there remembered much. Mr. Magee’s favorite stoop, where he displayed his street art, had become part of a hotel. But at Paris Blues, the dive bar on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Samuel J. Hargress Jr., its owner, remembered the duo and was pleased to see Mr. Gussow. “Yes, I remember a good-looking white boy who played the harp,” he said.

Mr. Hargress, 83, stepped outside in his three-piece suit and pointed to where Mr. Magee used to hang out. He opened the bar in 1969, and he said that Harlem’s gentrification has been good for him. Business is lively and his building’s property value keeps rising.

“I stayed in Harlem because I couldn’t leave,” he said. “I never thought any of this would end up happening.”

“It’s like winning the lottery,” Mr. Gussow said.

Mr. Hargress then gestured proudly to his bar’s live music schedule.

“Got some rich white boys playing here tonight in fact,” he said.

[sfpcschool]

Meet the students of Code Narratives

Today we’re excited to announce the new students for Code Narratives. This session will be taught by Allison Parrish, Ross Goodwin, Hannah Davis, Alexander Provan, and Taeyoon Choi. Todd Anderson will be organizing this session with Melanie Hoff joining as a Teaching Assistant. We’re so happy to welcome these people to our community.

Angeline Meitzler is a coder and artist based in Brooklyn who works with digital media and traditional drawing/painting materials. Her work is often influenced by quantum mechanics and linguistics. She is interested in visual computation and in exploring methods of communication and relationships.

Nabil Hassein is a longtime programmer currently working as a web developer at Khan Academy, with a strong interest in software's personally expressive and socially liberatory potential. He is one of the organizers of !!con and an alum of NYU and the Recurse Center, with past projects including several translators for simple programming languages and an interactive map of NYPD data on criminal court summonses.

Rachel Haberstroh is an artist, writer, and researcher based in NYC. She enjoys playing with light, building games, directing faux exercise videos and developing interdisciplinary anti-oppressive curricula. She is one half of Wavy Dash, a loving administrator to Millennial Focus Group, and an education programmer at Pioneer Works. Recent exhibitions at Flux Factory and the Wassaic Project.

Hannah Celli is a visual artist with a practice that is fueled by collaboration and play. Recently, her work has been influenced by spaces that evoke feelings of meditation and collective consciousness including clubs, temples, bonfires, and certain Korean spas. Hannah’s work uses programming to transform traditional materials like wax and facilitate stimulating social experiences.

Cara Warner:

["Cara is an #adjective# #calling# who #verb# #noun#."] Cara is an urban fantasy engineer who debugs fiction. Cara is an infrastructure author who dreams of deploy scripts.Cara is a red-headed South African Software Engineer and fiction writer interested in narrative structure, the story-writing process, and fiction ‘formulas’. She’s looking forward to being both her selves simultaneously while at SFPC.

Jay Weeks: I studied architectural design as an undergraduate and have been a practicing web programmer for several years. I am interested in pursuing future works that provoke novel experience through interactive media and sculpture, which challenge traditional expectations about space. I feel there is much opportunity to merge computation with physical experience, and hope to realize future work outside the screen.

Chuck Driesler is an architecture student actively working to automate himself out of a future in architecture. His two main goals are to make a moving building and to go to space. One of his favorite professors once said this outlook is "missing the point," and last semester he was asked if he "was even interested in architecture." He believes that no industry is safe from automation, but he also understands that architects don't like to say they aren't important. As a solution, he does what he can to live and work outside of the architecture school bubble often. Cross-pollination is key.

Caroline Hadilaksono: Born in Indonesia, I moved to Los Angeles to live on my own when I was 12. I currently live in New York, but always consider myself a California gal. As a designer & illustrator, I spend my time making pictures, books, and educational science apps. I dream of traveling around the world and to one day live in a tree house.

Mikey Badr is web developer based in Brooklyn, though he had previous lives in education and science. He's interested in the intersection of technology and relationships and using data and code to explore uniquely human experiences. 

Stefan Pelikan is a rising senior at the Pennsylvania State University. His programs of study are Graphic Design, Art History, and German Language. Stefan currently works as an intern for the singularly awesome Kelli Anderson, with whom he spends lots of time cutting paper and discussing the value of clarity and fun in the task of communicating knowledge. After graduation he would like to dive into the choppy-waters of design entrepreneurship, graphic narratives, self publishing, experimental video and the web, art criticism and/or starting a band. His primary interests are reading, coffee, being alone in nature and amusing semiotic play.

John Balestrieri is a software developer with a background in art and design. His Brooklyn-based company, Tinrocket, produces engaging iOS apps based around his computer graphics research. His software includes several popular photo transformation apps where images are "artistically" analyze and then turned into beautiful images: Waterlogue creates watercolor paintings; Percolator creates mosaics using circle packing. Prior to developing apps, John worked as a newsroom developer at the Associated Press, where he created software to visualize large data sets, such as real-time, national poll results for the US Presidential elections. John has also taught undergraduate visual communications at Pratt Institute.

Matt Wysocki is a kid that likes connecting things, ideas, and people. In making connections Matt hopes to help many people and have fun while doing it, solemnly smiling in the face of unbearable suffering while seeking to offer support in whatever way possible, and there is always a way.

Seori Sachs comes from the realm of game audio, inspired by her studies at NYU's Music Technology program. In her spare time, she plays around with creating generative images, plays games, and reads. She always wants to learn something new.

I'm Stephen Thomas, a UX designer based in New York. I've surrounded myself with technology, design, and art since I was a kid (I count video games), and continue to be interested in exploring how the three can intersect with each other to improve peoples' lives at different levels and scales–from personal to shared experiences, on-screen to off, tools to systems.

Sekyeong Kwon (Laura) is a borderless visual communicator born in South Korea, now living in the UK, working over multiple disciplines. She loves to think about how the world could be in the future and her recent practices are driven by questioning ‘What if’. She is interested in finding ways to apply emerging technologies to encourage our humanness, and ultimately to design a better world.  Currently, she is completing her Master’s Degree in Communication Design at Falmouth University focusing on the future of communication through the lens of speculative design.

Ernesto Espinoza (ERES) is a poet and interaction designer looking for innovative ways to write and read poetry. His background is in engineering and literature. His first book was published on 2011. He is interested to turn poems into reading experiences through computers. Ernesto is originally from Puebla, Mexico

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: How to Talk to Each Other When There’s Little Common Ground

During my book tour this summer, I was asked more questions about my life and Native people than I’d ever thought possible. Most were thoughtful, but occasionally I got questions so ignorant, they were offensive. A white woman asked me whether if she thinks she was a Native American in a past life, is it O.K. to practice our ceremonies? I told the woman no, and said Native ceremonies come from Native experience and are there for us to heal, to understand Native experience. I saw her after the reading, and it seemed she wanted to talk, but she didn’t want to talk enough to wait more than five minutes for me to finish my conversation.

Ignorant questions are frustrating to people of color because in movies as well as in literature, the white male is the default representation. This country has been ruled by white men and made to benefit white people above all else since its inception. It is deeply damaging to the psyches of oppressed communities who suffer because of this history to hear lies about what this country means and has meant. It’s not even agreed upon that this country’s origins are steeped in slave labor, genocidal bloodshed and the taking of land from a people, even though these are facts most if not all historians would agree are facts. The onus is always on us, we the oppressed, to challenge a system that wants to conserve its traditions and traditional values. We come to understand that if we want to be included in the American conversation, we have to work twice as hard while being told that we’re lazy, or that the government gives us money, and then told that we’re angry if we bring up the problem of racism in public spaces or when it doesn’t feel like the right time. So we keep putting off these conversations, or we’re having them on the Internet, where it’s too easy to be anonymous and therefore cruel and selfish. It’s like car drivers behaving dangerously on the road, simply because they’re hidden behind metal, glass and distance. In our more personal online spaces we fill our feeds exclusively with people we agree with. If there is conflict below a post or tweet it never feels like a conversation–only like road rage.

Both the writer and the reader bring their experience to the page

  So if we can’t seem to find ways to talk in person, or online, when and where and how do we talk? I think a novel is a kind of conversation. Both the writer and the reader bring their experience to the page. The reader’s experiences and ideas can be reshaped, challenged, changed. I know, I’m a writer, so of course I think the answer is books, but I think reading books is a good place to start thinking about and understanding people’s stories you aren’t familiar with, outside your comfort zone and experience. A novel will ask you to walk in a character’s shoes, and this can build empathy. Without empathy we are lost. I tend to read mostly novels and have come to understand the world better through the lens of novels. When someone else’s world is different from our own, we see how we are the same. We not only become more empathetic to their experience but we see how we are equal. We also see how much upper-middle-class white male writing has been the only thing taught in schools, the only experience for so long–most of the time anyway. I think institutional change can come by teaching women, teaching writers of color. We will all be better for it. I like that novels ask us without seeming to ask us to think about other people, to understand the many-storied landscape of this country we live and die in–with or without truly knowing or understanding them.

By Tommy Orange on October 25, 2018 at 11:41AM

[nofomoartworld]

DIS Magazine: Dining with Reba Maybury

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Dining with Reba Maybury

Deconstructing power through fetish

Will Sheldon

Ada O’Higgins: I heard the person who you were loosely inspired by for Dining with Humpty Dumpty was angry at your depiction of him and was threatening to sue, and sent you a death threat while you were here in NY for your reading at Bridget Donahue.

Reba Maybury: All fiction is usually based on the author’s experience, and every experience is skewed by each person’s lens, so there’s this very fundamental argument of literature and writing which I suppose I’m currently having to deal with. I have fictionalised every discerning element of the various personalities that I’ve based this character on so there isn’t much that they can do.

AO: There’s nothing unethical or wrong about what you did; especially given the nature of your Sub/Dom relationship, you’d think they would have more of a sense of humor about your depiction of them.

RM: Absolutely, and I think one of the reasons I wrote about one of these people in particular is because they actually showed themselves to be a terrible person. The person he first presented himself as ended up being an illusion. He said he was a female supremacist, but it turns out he was more of a men’s rights activist. He’s a character that, for me, exemplifies a lot of stereotypes about white, cis, straight, corporate masculinity. I fictionalized his character and used it to explore issues that I see in our society. The character has a humiliation fetish and what could be more humiliating than having your fetish written about by your domme?

AO: Speaking of the discrepancy between his daily views and his fetish, I was thinking about how common that is: fetishes that go against one’s own views. Like women with a rape fetish, or people who want to be racially abused for their ethnicity, for example.

RM: The most common, extreme desire that I’ve encountered on fetish sites is South-Asian men looking to meet white women who will dominate them. When I talk to them, they want me to be their ‘white supremacist goddess’. When I refuse and tell them my mother’s actually Pakistani, they get completely thrown off and embarrassed, but then weirdly turned on by me being mixed. The world of fetishes is endless… Sex is ultimately the closest we can come to true escapism isn’t it?

AO: Most people can relate to having a fetish or sexual inclination that doesn’t align with their views. Erotica is one of the few places where it’s possible to safely explore otherwise social taboos and consensually perform otherwise unethical or illegal behavior.

RM: That’s where the often very real stereotype of the submissive feminist comes from, some of us are sick of fighting every day for our rights, so in bed we want to let go of control and be dominated. It makes sense. That’s also why a lot of these men want to be submissive, because they’re taught not to be in daily life. But the problem with the character of Humpty is that his fetish is a lifestyle fetish. He wants it to take over his life, he wants it to completely control him. He doesn’t ever want to switch off.

AO: Within the realm of sexuality there is arguably nothing wrong with these fetishes. It’s a way for people to release these feelings. Why is it different with Humpty, what is unacceptable about his lifestyle fetish?

RM: I don’t think his fetish is unacceptable, but more simply that it possesses uncomfortable social juxtapositions. He proved himself to be very judgmental and right wing, but he was trying to metamorphose himself into an obese person, a characteristic that’s unfortunately most often associated with poverty. It’s also entangled with sloth, laziness, and greed. The feeding fetish was complicated because in his case, he needs a woman to do it, he can’t feed himself. So he’s reducing these very visceral stereotypes into a fetish: he’s greedy, he’s lazy, he needs feeding, he wants his stomach stroked–he needs a woman to do that for him. It’s a fetish of absolute pure indulgence that only he can get pleasure out of. And obviously his problem is that he cannot find a woman who he can enjoy this lifestyle with. When we think of the feeding fetish, we think of men feeding women, which in a way is overtly sexist, because it’s about making a woman lose her self-esteem and literally not be able to move, so that she’s completely dependent on a man who controls her. But why would a woman ever want to make a man that fat? That’s why Humpty is so depressed, he really just wants to find a girlfriend who will make him incredibly obese, but that’s not really attractive to women. Healthy people want partners who are independent. There is also the issue over how overweight women and men are treated with intrinsic difference over their physicalities, which is something that doesn’t bother or affect Humpty. Considering that Humpty declares that he is a ‘female supremacist’ against his out and proud political values as a Tory, it would be grotesque for Mistress Rebecca to take him seriously.

AO: There are so many examples of impossible or extremely difficult fetishes to fulfill, like cuckolding. In some cases, could it be that people seek complex scenarios that are difficult to achieve because they like longing for something unattainable? People become obsessed with an unattainable scenario, and, as in your book, you begin to wonder if they really do want it after all. What if they were just using this obsession to fill a void?

…this is a book about power more than men. Trying to understand how we deconstruct power. When I say men I mostly mean men in power.

RM: Obsession cures boredom, and there is a lot to be bored about if you accept our neoliberal reality. I feel like Humpty’s fixation to get fat is just an unconscious rebellion from the utter banality of his faux creative, corporate and ultra comfortable life. Some men feel like they can have whatever they want. They can just pay for it. He thought ‘oh I can pay a dominatrix and get whatever I want’. Whereas how many women have the confidence to fulfill their fetish in this fashion?

AO: And he did get what he wanted, in a way, didn’t he?

RM: Well, he couldn’t put the weight on… [laughs]

AO: That’s so funny. You mentioned that in his fetish scenario the pleasure was all for him, and I was wondering, do you think a dominatrix in a paid Sub/Dom relationship should have pleasure?

RM: Being a domme, or any kind of sexual interaction, is pleasurable when it’s engaging, and you respect each other, and there’s a thirst. And that can occur, intellectually as well as physically, with or without payment. Mistress Rebecca does get pleasure from Humpty, but it’s a purely anthropological one; ultimately she feels like she’s being put on a maternal pedestal, which isn’t sexy.

The likelihood that anyone who is reading this has a male boss, or even if they don’t have a male boss, that their boss’s boss is a man, is very high.

AO: The narrator talks about her disgust and repulsion for Humpty a lot, and it becomes clear that her performance of repugnance to fulfill Humpty’s humiliation fetish coincides with actual real revulsion on the part of Mistress Rebecca. So the role of the submissive can be humiliating not only within the parameters of the performed erotic scene, but outside of it in that the sub’s desires are shameful. But the position of the dom can be equally humiliating: the dom is getting off on performing power over someone else. So both parties are revealing their weaknesses, their insecurities.

RM: The sub has all of the power and that is the conflating irony of the whole scenario.

AO: True! In the book the situation is ambiguous because the narrator describes their power over Humpty, but Humpty is the one paying the narrator, and the story revolves around enacting his particular fetish.

Will Sheldon

RM: What I wanted to get at is that being a dominatrix is performance. This idea of power as a domme is rehearsed, you know what these men want to hear, and when you first meet them you work out how they treat you, what the language is, and you figure out what they are turned on by, and you have some phrases in the back of your head to begin the initial conversations and see what they are into. But ultimately that performance has to end. Often the dominatrix doesn’t talk about their own experience besides being this totem of mystery and steely perfection. You expect a dominatrix to have this inflated ego because she is so adored, but the submissive adores the performance of a woman and not the tangible nuances of her personality. I believe in the absolute honesty of the female experience and that includes the unveiling of the different emotional layers of the sex worker. Stereotypes exist to be destroyed.

AO: I really enjoyed how Mistress Rebecca reveal her own vulnerability and disillusionment with men, separately from her experience with Humpty.

RM: That was really important, to counter the image of the dominatrix as always strong and powerful. Women are always needed to perform different characters. We think of dominatrixes as these flamboyant, empowered women, almost creations of a gay male gaze. The experiences I had while writing this book had me confused about my own romantic experiences and how I felt as a woman who enjoys intimacy with men. And also how men have viewed me, being a dominatrix, lecturer and model. How being a ‘strong, successful woman’ can be isolating, and how as the feminine – you can’t really win. Just because someone is a dominatrix doesn’t mean she doesn’t get heartbroken and humiliated. Being a dominatrix is a performance, but what we have when the performance ends is what truly matters.

AO: How do you navigate your own feminist values and your work as a domme? Do you question whether it can be an entirely feminist act, given that the men in these relationships are the ones with financial power who dictate the parameters of your encounters?

RM: Men have all the money in anything you do. That’s my conclusion. The likelihood that anyone who is reading this has a male boss, or even if they don’t have a male boss, that their boss’s boss is a man, is very high. Money and power is still controlled by men, whether you’re a waitress and a man is not tipping you properly or a professor being patronized by a male student, there are so many examples of the gendered aspect of economics. And it’s all coming from the same thing.

AO: Women’s bodies are constantly dissected and women are ridiculed for their looks, and men aren’t, or it doesn’t matter if they are. Look at any man in power. It gets them more respect to be unattractive, because it puts the focus on their abilities rather than their appearance.

RM: I teach politics in fashion programs at a London University, and I spend a lot of time fixated on the nuances of the dressed body. I’m hyper-aware of how women are constantly being watched and that’s a theme of the book, who’s watching and who’s being seen. While I was writing I would try to internalize how men in public would react to me or my friends, on the tube, in a bar, walking down the street and so on. Interactions that, as women, we often to block out because if we acknowledged every stare we get on a daily basis we would feel crazy. Very Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion. With Humpty I wanted to explain how women feel when they’re being watched. So I did this by describing the mundane nuances of how long his sideburns are, or how thin his lips are or how horrible his leather jacket is. There are parts of the book where I describe him looking at Mistress Rebecca, but the point is to turn the whole thing on it’s head. When women look in their closet and think ‘Oh god I have nothing to wear’, they’re not saying they have nothing to wear, they’re asking themselves ‘what type of woman am I going to be today, what type of woman am I going to be treated as today?’ Men don’t have to worry about that, they can wear the same jeans and shirt every day, but a woman has to ask herself ‘Am I going to look strict, sexy, or girly today?’ and ‘When I go to work today, is this person going to judge me if my skirt is above my knee?’ In the book I want to analyze the intricacies and the aesthetics of how men dress themselves-not all men-I’m talking about this universal man who wears jeans with a fade on the thighs and an ugly leather jacket or blazer. There are so many articles in magazines about what type of eyebrows women should have. But why is no one talking about the length of a man’s sideburns? How often do men think about their sideburns, and how often do women think about their eyebrows? Time is gendered.

AO: I would never judge a woman for having a humiliation fetish, or a gay person who gets off on being treated in a homophobic way. But I do think twice when a man has a fetish that’s misogynistic at its core. How should we navigate this question, is it rig htto have this double standard? Are all fetishes created equally?

RM: All sexuality is acceptable if it’s consensual and respectful, and that’s what it comes down to. The reason Humpty’s fetish is deconstructed is because it’s actually really harmful. It operates under the facade of loving women and wanting to empower them, but actually he reveals that he thinks it’s ‘so difficult to be a white man right now’. And because of that he’s a terrible human being. He initially insulted me, then all people of color and all women with that statement. That leads me to wonder if there’s anything more repugnant than using a political view as a fantasy and not abiding by that view in one’s life. Like you say, we all have mad fantasies. But there’s a need for responsibility and maturity. I feel like I’m at school talking to kids about sex now. [laughs] If sex is ruthlessly selfish like Humpty’s was, then it’s obviously dangerous.

AO: Why so? How would you explain this to Humpty, who seems baffled by the possibility that his fetish is problematic.

Will Sheldon

RM: Of course fetish is private but within the book’s context Humpty’s aim was to be constantly catered by the emotional labour of a woman for his pleasure. It shows a deep lack of respect or care for other people. I based Humpty’s character on this universal male stereotype. I met one of the people who inspired Humpty’s character, in January 2016 (pre-Brexit and pre-Trump) and began writing this shortly afterwards. When Trump won I realized that I had been writing a portrait of the type of man who did actually vote for Trump without realizing it. On the outside he might look a bit liberal, he might wear Converse, he might listen to Radiohead or Talking Heads, but actually he is harboring this deep-seated, silent resentment against women and racial diversity. I was spending time with this man, and writing this book loosely based on his character. It’s about this person who on the outside looks liberal enough, and may behave in modest ways in public. but inside has deeply terrifying views. That’s why we had Brexit and you have Trump. It’s shocking to liberals, but those feelings are shockingly real and exist within the most unchallenged of the Western population. Mundanity is political and Mistress Rebecca is desperate for Humpty to really feel something real.

AO: There’s a frustration in the book about how to face this person who is so different her, in terms of values and thought-processes. It’s courageous, but also idealistic, that she tries to change his views. How do you think people should confront peers or public figures with values based in prejudice and disrespect? It’s quite a sensitive thing to do, that can veer into it’s own form of condescension.

RM: It’s a very difficult thing to do, and I think you have to be as positive as you can, and not jump to conclusions when you meet people. If you go around thinking every white man you meet is going to degrade women, for example, you’re going to have a nervous breakdown. And that’s not even the case, and I’ve tried to convey with the book as well. Mistress Rebecca loves men, but, like everyone she has also had some shit experiences. And the book is about her frustration, feeling isolated by this patriarchal system. She wants to have beautiful experiences with men, but unfortunately she’s not having them. In terms of confronting people, I see my American friends all fighting with one another over the smallest bigoted nuances rather than looking at the bigger picture. I understand how emotional the rise of the contemporary far right is, it’s a time of high stress and we all want someone to blame – but accusing your art school educated friend of minute appropriation isn’t going to alter the minds of fascists into compassion. For me, this is a book about power more than men. Trying to understand how we deconstruct power. When I say men I mostly mean men in power. We have to work out what those are, as well. I don’t want to be judgemental, I want to be open and strike up conversation with people. I think conversation is the most important thing, physical conversation. As the narrator says in the book, the only way you can create a decent political opinion is to talk to as many people as you can, from as many different backgrounds, and then figure out what matters. And that’s why one should try and converse with rich cis white men, not just point fingers at them.

AO: There’s so much liberal hate and anger, especially here in the U.S, towards conervatives who elected President Trump. Anger is an important vehicle for change, but it’s hard to gage how far anger will get you.

RM: With Humpty, you could think ‘Oh God it’s ridiculous he feels victimized for being a white man.’ But obviously he does feel like that. And it’s infuriating, because he’s so blind, but if someone’s been born into never having to really prove themselves, because of their race, the gender they identify with, and their social class, if they start to feel that things are not being given to them as easily, they are going to react. And this is one of the reasons why Trump won and Brexit happened. People thought they had this birthright to privilege and saw it changing and got scared, and it’s happened in this very insidious way. No one knew this was happening because we live in a society where we accept men not expressing themselves and so many men seem so normalized in their identical behaviors and aesthetics, but these feelings of victimization have been bubbling under the surface over the last decade. Anyone can go into the voting booth without actually having to have any discussions about how they were going to vote. The anonymous but ever present white man’s power should never be taken for granted. This is expressed with Humpty: he works in a superficially creative corporate job, he likes Patti Smith and Blondie, but he also secretly thinks Black people are stealing his jobs.

AO: I don’t know if Humpty was very humanized in the book [both laugh] but it was interesting to spend any time with him at all.

RM: Humpty is a caricature, a symbol. In the book, Mistress Rebecca asks why there isn’t a fetish for a kind person who is just themselves. The problem is, when men want to be babied and wear diapers, for example, that’s also a fetish for a woman being put into the stereotype of the mother. So we can either be cold, hard bitches––the strict, disciplinarian mother–– or doting, babying mothers. So we’re rarely just a person.

AO: But men have that as well, sadly, the pressure to be a Dad for example.

RM: Look after the family, pay for dinner – paying for everything! There are terrible complexities for a lot of men, men who don’t want to fit into male stereotypes. There’s a line in the book that says ‘vulnerability is beautiful in it’s ungendered beauty’, and that’s something I really believe in. We should all enjoy being vulnerable, and if men started being more vulnerable we would have many less problems.

AO: As bell hooks discusses in her book on Men and Love, and how men need to be allowed to be more emotional in order to free themselves from the constraints of patriarchy.

RM: It’s absolutely true, and I’ve written about that quite a bit, when I discuss Mistress Rebecca being emotional with men, and being rejected, and how she’s been attracted to these subversive characters and it’s because she’s been sold this idea of the rock star or noise musician who exerts themselves on stage and therefore must be this emotional, tactile and sensitive person with a passion for progression. But actually a lot of these men are not that way, they are actually quite politically stagnant. It’s this false sense of security that one can have when dealing with creative men, where they have this explosion of emotion but the rest of the time are cut off, self interested and cold.

AO: Did you enjoy putting the book together?

RM: I loved it maybe even more so because I never thought I would write a book. It took me about a year, but I felt like now was the right time for it to come out. The book has morphed into this character that is partly to blame for the current political situation we are in. Regardless of the fetish or feminist aspects of the book, I feel that this book has unconsciously explored a person who exemplifies the mess we’re in now.

AO: What do you think the future is for this man, and for these men? What is their place? As a white person I question the place of my voice in cultural discourse. Similarly what is the place for men?

RM: I have this conversation with a lot of Americans. Britain is horrifically colonial in it’s violent history, but everything in America is even more extreme but more open to progressive conversation because it’s apartheid means you don’t have a choice but to talk. I hate the idea, when I speak with my white female friends, that they think they shouldn’t do anything. I think anything that you do is valid, as long as it brings in accepting and compassionate ideas to other people. Your voice is important as long as you think it’s going to empower other people (without patronising them), because there are a lot of people out there who have huge platforms and are only thinking of themselves – more than ever now with social media.

AO: Did you feel like Humpty actually learned something or changed following your exchange? He said he did, but do you think he really did?

RM: No, not at all. I think it made him angry and made him feel like he had the right to be more prone to his views.

Will Sheldon

AO: In the book the narrator wonders why fetishes so often center around abusing people and unequal power dynamics. Since you practice being a dom, why do subs seek someone who is emotionally detached do you think?

RM: People want to be able to project all their shit onto someone else – that is animalistic. Being a sex worker is like being a caregiver. It’s emotional support, like therapy. Some people get a massage, some people want to be cuddled. Some people get tied up and some people want good head.

AO: Did you encounter the fact that people who work with sexuality are less respected than others? Especially women.

RM: People think sex is just pulp fiction, sensational, and that you’re just trying to grab attention and expand your ego and claim that you’re sexy. Whereas for me my interest in sex comes from knowing how deeply rooted it is in gender dynamics. Male sexuality is such a huge drive behind the patriarchy, that if I can explore those issues, maybe we can deconstruct a lot of other things too. I also realized lots of women have terrible sex, and we can only change that when we understand the sexual content men are consuming, how they see women. Sex is a political issue. And I’m not a hippy. I am very British. I don’t believe in star signs. I’m a very sensual person but not spiritual. I’m trying to approach sex from a sociological perspective. It’s bullshit when people don’t take sex seriously. It clearly still comes from this draconian obsession with sex being shameful.Queen Victoria died over a century ago but puritanism is still so embedded into us and we’ve got to learn how to throw it off.

AO: Men, because they have less shame and allowed to explore their sexuality, within the narrow path of patriarchal masculinity that is set out for them, can asses what their desires and fetishes and sexual triggers are, and then they can seek them. But women, not as much.

RM: Womens sex drives are just as high as men’s. We’ve just been repressed into not being able to explore them. We’ve had to suppress our ability to feel sexual pleasure because we associate sex with danger and shame, and seeking sex is dangerous for a woman, where it only is fractionally for a man.

Dining with Humpty Dumpty is available for purchase at Claire de Rouen in Europe and Shoot The Lobster in New York.

from DIS Magazine http://ift.tt/2rlP6uI via IFTTT

[teachanarchy]

Emily E. Smith is a fifth-grade social justice and English language arts teacher at Cunningham Elementary School in Austin, Tex. She was just awarded the 2015 Donald H. Graves Excellence in the Teaching of Writing award given at the National Teachers of English Language Arts Convention in Minneapolis.  Smith created and founded The Hive Society, a classroom that inspires children to creatively explore literature through critical thinking and socially relevant texts.

In her speech accepting the award, Smith talked about a seminal moment in her career when she realized she needed to change her approach to teaching students of color, one of whom told her that she couldn’t understand his problems because she is white. The following is an excerpt of the speech in which she discusses her transformation (and which I am publishing with permission).

    Teacher: My students knew about white privilege before me

Play Video6:02 Texas fifth-grade teacher Emily E. Smith talks about altering her teaching style for students of color as she accepts the 2015 Donald H. Graves Excellence in the Teaching of Writing at the National Teachers of English Language Arts Convention in Minneapolis. (Brian Buster)  

From Smith’s speech:

I’m white. My classroom is not. Sure, it’s been my dream to work at an “urban” school. To work with kids whose challenges I could never even fathom at such a young age. And changing at-risk lives through literature is almost a media cliché by now. These were, however, how I identified myself at the beginning of my teaching career. I was a great teacher. I taught children how to truly write for the first time and share meaningful connections on a cozy carpet. We made podcasts about music lyrics and filled our favorite books so full with annotated sticky notes that they would barely close. We even tiptoed into the alien world of free verse poetry.

But something was missing. If you’ve already forgotten, I’m white. “White” is kind of an uncomfortable word to announce, and right now people may already be unnerved about where this is going. Roughly 80 percent of teachers in the United States today are white. Yet the population of our students is a palette. That means America’s children of color will, for the majority of their school years, not have a teacher who is a reflection of their own image. Most of their school life they will be told what to do and how to do it by someone who is white, and most likely female. Except for a few themed weeks, America’s children of color will read books, watch videos, analyze documents and study historical figures who are also not in their image.

I’ve been guilty of that charge. But things changed for me the day when, during a classroom discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I “couldn’t understand because I was a white lady.” I had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I did. The closest I could ever come was empathy.

My curriculum from then on shifted. We still did all of the wonderful things that I had already implemented in the classroom, except now the literature, the documents, the videos, the discussions, the images embodied the issues that my children wanted to explore. We studied the works of Sandra Cisneros, Pam Munoz Ryan and Gary Soto, with the intertwined Spanish language and Latino culture — so fluent and deep in the memories of my kids that I saw light in their eyes I had never seen before. We analyzed Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again” from the lens of both historical and current events and realized that the United States is still the land that has never been. The land that my kids, after reading an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son that connected so deeply to their personal experiences, decided they still wanted to believe in. The land they decided to still hope for. The land that one of my kids quietly said would be changed by her generation. A generation of empathy.

We read about the Syrian crisis, analyzing photographs of war-torn faces at the border and then wrote poetry of hope, despair and compassion from the perspectives of the migrants. Many of my kids asked to write about their own journeys across the border and their [dreams] for a better future. One child cried and told me he never had a teacher who honored the journey his family took to the United States. He told me he was not ashamed anymore, but instead proud of the sacrifice his parents made for him.

We listened to StoryCorps podcasts by people from different walks of life, and children shared their own stories of losing pets, saying goodbye to a mother or father in jail, the fear of wearing a hoodie while walking to a 7-Eleven, and thriving under the wing of a single parent who works two jobs.

So as I stand here today I can declare that I am no longer a language arts and social studies teacher, but a self-proclaimed teacher of social justice and the art of communication with words.

Looking back, I think that my prior hesitation to talk about race stemmed from a lack of social education in the classroom. A lack of diversity in my own life that is, by no means, the fault of my progressive parents, but rather a broken and still segregated school system. Now that I’m an educator in that system, I’ve decided to stand unflinching when it comes to the real issues facing our children today, I’ve decided to be unafraid to question injustice, unafraid to take risks in the classroom — I am changed. And so has my role as a teacher.

I can’t change the color of my skin or where I come from or what the teacher workforce looks like at this moment, but I can change the way I teach. So I am going to soapbox about something after all. Be the teacher your children of color deserve. In fact, even if you don’t teach children of color, be the teacher America’s children of color deserve, because we, the teachers, are responsible for instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of this country.

So teach the texts that paint all the beautiful faces of our children and tell the stories of struggle and victory our nation has faced. Speak openly and freely about the challenges that are taking place in our country at this very moment. Talk about the racial and class stereotypes plaguing our streets, our states, our society. You may agree that black and brown lives matter, but how often do you explore what matters to those lives in your classroom?

Put aside your anxieties and accept your natural biases. Donald Graves once said, “Children need to hang around a teacher who is asking bigger questions of herself than she is asking of them.” I know I’m going to continue to ask the bigger questions of myself and seek the answers that sometimes feel impossible, because my kids deserve it … you’re welcome to join me. Thank you.

[thinktosee]

Our ideals and our strength to see them through - Part 3 - Pearl Buck

Image courtesy Pearl S. Buck International

“Freedom – it is today more than ever the most precious human possession.”

- Pearl S. Buck, speaking at the Nobel Prize for Literature banquet in 1938. (1)

My introduction to Pearl Buck occurred in a grade 7 Literature class in 1972 and taught by the likable Miss Ang. It was a story by Buck and originally published in 1931. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932 for “The Good Earth”. (2) This grey tale takes the reader through the lens of the Wang Family in rural Anhui, China during the closing years of the Ching Dynasty and the birth of the new republic. Famine, infanticide, opium addiction, foot-binding and betrayal were themes which were arrayed in the story. For me then, not yet 13 years, O-lan was the character whom I admired and empathized most in the story. Her prolonged suffering brought out the silent tears, as it probably did for millions of readers. She typified the woman in feudal and patriarchal China. It could also be argued for India or Africa and even Singapore then. During those long-ago lessons on The Good Earth, I was constantly reminded of the woman I loved most of all and how her life could have been different if there had been deep respect for individual worth in our society. If anything, and like O-lan in Buck’s story, this sensitive woman showed me the power of perseverance. It seems this too was what defined the life of Pearl S. Buck.

Image courtesy Pulitzer novels

Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was born in West Virginia and spent her formative years in China where her parents were missionaries. She married in 1917 to John Lossing Buck, a missionary and economist in China. Buck’s unique experience, growing up in China would lead her to become a foremost activist and author for human rights, especially for women and minority groups within the country of her origin, the United States. She was a prolific writer, with hundreds of books and essays, beginning with her first book in 1930, titled “East Wind : West Wind.” (3) The story centers on the relationship and marriage of a Chinese man and an American woman, which scandalized the tradition-bound groom’s family in China, where the institution of marriage then, was an arranged and local affair.

In 1935, Buck and John Lossing divorced. Not long later she married Richard Walsh, her editor at John Day Publishers. It is said that their professional collaboration gave form and substance to her literary works. (4) Buck would go on to help found the first international inter-racial adoption agency, and orphanages in several countries in the Asia-Pacific.

It would be a gross understatement, especially now to say that Pearl Buck had been an inspiration to me. While researching for this essay, I chanced upon her file in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) FOIA archives, named The Vault. Perusing the documents in the file, it became quite apparent to me that Buck was the real McCoy. She spoke and fought courageously for everything which she believed in. This included standing up for the marginalized peoples of the world : 

“Are we all-out for democracy, for total justice, for total peace based on human equality or are the blessings of democracy to be limited to white people only?.....Our relation to the colored peoples and democracy does not even lie so far off as Africa or India. It is just outside our doors. It is inside our homes. The deepest loyalties today are not national.” (5)

These words, spoken in 1942, resonate through the decades to the present. The social and political issues of the past remain battened under the floorboards of the present. We pretend they do not exist, it seems. These views which she held and promoted were considered radical then and which of course, placed her in an unenviable position and with associated hostility from some established quarters, including the media. She remained undeterred in her lifelong pursuit of justice and equality however. Buck also left us another piece of cautionary advice, and which we should be left under no illusions about her commitment to peace and harmony :“We have now solidly laid the foundations for future wars in Asia. We have laid them in the two most important countries, China and India : but we have not wholly neglected Russia. Should Russia be dissatisfied with us in the future, a thing always possible, she will find two potential allies, numbering between them most of the world’s population. It may be, if industrialization is rapid enough, that Russian leadership will not even be necessary.” (6)

This was written some 70 years ago! 

Pearl Buck’s life was no doubt challenging to say the least. Perhaps she knew that the good earth which our very existence relies on, always leaves a space for each to make our stand. She did, and in her uniquely uncompromising way. 

Sources/references

1. Pearl S. Buck @ Nobelprize.org

Pearl Buck - Banquet speech (nobelprize.org)

2. The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck (John Day) - The Pulitzer Prizes

Re-Reading Pearl Buck's 'The Good Earth' | Asia Society

3. Pearl S. Buck International - Biography

About Our Founder - Pearl S Buck  

4. Brief Biography of Pearl S. Buck | Department of English (upenn.edu)

5. Buck, Pearl S. “Tinder for Tomorrow.” p16-19, The Vault, FBI FOIA Archives “Pearl Buck” Part 1 of 4.

6. Buck, Pearl S. “Our last chance in China.” p45, The Vault, FBI FOIA Archives “Pearl Buck” Part 1 of 4.

[bnrobertson1]

No Hooch, Year Two: On Moby Dick and Meditation

To mark a second year of not drinking, I wanted to do something more substantial than last year’s Se7en-style “celebration” of engorging half a cake, so I decided to read Moby Dick. I’d never read Melville’s meditation on, well, everything*, but a confluence of Wiki-wormholes, a pandemic-limited social calendar, and a lifelong promise to myself to actually, you know, read it (as opposed to referencing it as though I had whilst defogging my monocle) merged at just the right time to propel me through the tome’s intimidating heft.

*It’d be pedantic horseshit to call it my new favorite book, but it’s The Greatest Novel I’ve Ever Read. I recommend it for its existence-sized ambition alone, although if you write things you will feel a little insignificant afterwards.

You know the story: fish eats man’s leg. Man, upset about the whole leg thing, pursues revenge at all costs. Between pages of the most Metal shit* ever put to page (articulated with Shakespearean grandeur, no less) a story of obsession is painted that is as powerful now as it was 170 years ago.

*Metal Gods Mastodon’s album Leviathan is an ode to the book, and does not exaggerate the intensity whatsoever

I’ll can it about Moby Dick- but for the purposes of this, one of the novel’s main themes is a suitable launch pad. Specifically, that of the seductive, destructive power of self-delusion. Drinking, for some- for me- fueled self-delusion like no other. Sure, the self-delusions at first were usually of the more harmless, if not exactly positive, variety- feelings that I was stronger/ more handsome/ more charming/ smarter/ funnier than I might actually be- in other words a confidence boost of debatable need. Alas, as has happened to far better than me, the self-delusions eventually began to take on a more negative tone, and that- eventually- is why I decided to take a break.

But self-delusions don’t just stop when the drinking does. Oh, they fester, alright, and morph into toxic self-trickeries. Delusions that relationships won’t significantly change*. Delusions that the fact you don’t constantly talk won’t come across to some as a sort of new holier-than-thou attitude. Delusions that others care about your own well-being as much as you should. Delusions that warp themselves into useless mental narratives that in retrospect feel more at home in a bad sitcom than real life. They eat at your mind like termites, chewing through ladders of progress like driftwood. 

*As someone who responded to others abstaining from alcohol with cynical, if sarcastic, grumblings along the lines of “I don’t trust people who don’t drink,” I really understand both sides. The funny (and perhaps hypocritical) thing is I still kind of don’t.

I decided to place the blame for all my woes at booze’s tasty, awesome feet, thinking like (sorry, one more MD ref) Ahab that if I slayed my White Whale, all would be solved. I’d convinced myself that the only thing keeping me from bliss was just that one hurdle- perma-happiness merely required snatching the fermented fly from my ointment. I had convinced myself that my many, many flaws would evaporate like the corn squeezins from my skin and other organs and that the world would regain some lost, heavenly harmony once I put the bottle down.

Of course, this turned out to be utterly false. My the relief of my newfound quasi-clarity proved to be almost narcotic in its power, constructing a pride that blinded me to my own complexities. In fact, alcohol had helped me a lot more in life than I wanted to give it credit for- it made my quirks less rigid and my tolerance for pretty much everything far, far higher. To call it a mere “social lubricant” seems to minimize its profound (albeit ranging) effect on my personality. 

Alcohol filled a void in my life that I just assumed would be replaced with light and good tidings once I stopped. And while other substances, concerts, Stereolab vinyl, the first three books of Knausgaard’s My Struggle, and sunrise exercise did do a bang-em-up job filling that emptiness at a slightly-higher-minded level, in truth a lot of the hurt I was trying to avoid by not drinking was more than happy to wait and sharpen its knives while I fooled myself into thinking I’d figured it all out. Anxiety- while not nearly as bad as it was in my hungover/drinking days- would still spread and pop in my veins at the mere scent of confrontation or reckoning, like an oil site aching for a cracked pipe. Even though I was doing good things for my physical and mental health, I wasn’t really grappling with some of the things that drove me to alcohol in the first place. But that’s a topic more appropriately discussed with a certain person I pay a (non-prostitute) hourly rate every other week. 

Hungry for a reprieve from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I found myself doing deep dives into literature and music that would heighten some of my experiences with some of the aforementioned substances. Another self-deception? Sure, but in concert with a slightly clearer head, this one actually produced something positive when it led me to stumble upon Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler’s life-altering Stealing Fire. A book about elevated planes of consciousness, “flow” states, and how they can vastly improve lives, the book- as well as David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish- coincided with an intellectual superior’s suggestion to get me to try- of all things- meditation. 

I freely admit this was not easy for me to do, as I have found “earthy” folk to be some of the most obnoxious on the planet for most of my life. But my desperation for some sort of lasting change led me to get over my stereotypical assumptions about the cliche meditator (and the fear of being associated with their soft-spoken, vowel-loving kind) and give the meditation app Calm a go. I felt results immediately, even in a period where outside forces seemed to be conspiring to obliterate my ego. Long story short*, taking time for mindfulness provided refuge in a real motherfucker of a year, and would eventually lead to a daily Transcendental Meditation practice and a peace of mind I hadn’t ever encountered and for which I will be eternally grateful.

*Yes, this is the abridged version.   

Meditation taught me humility, appreciation, and clarity by slowing down my relentless thoughts- something I once thought an asset- and gave me the new lens of equanimity through which to see the world. The humility* to realize I wasn’t the “most” or ‘best” anything in the world, nor would I ever be, but I wasn’t the “least” or “worst”* either**. I began to appreciate kindness as a form of a most pure, dynamic courage, not the bi-product of some bland weakness. Finally, a heightened concentration gave me the clarity to see a lot of those self-delusions for what they were, well-intentioned self-defense mechanisms that’d gotten warped and lost their way. Being exposed for what they were, they just kind of went away. The culmination of these teachings gave me the foreign feeling that while I still have a lot- like a stupid amount- of work to do, I actually kind of like myself.

*Another excellent teacher of humility has been picking up my mom’s dog’s shit every morning for the last few months. Few things will make you reflect like a dog making direct eye contact with you as she, as my mom puts it, “does her business.”

**Sure, I knew these things at a lip service level but to actually realize them was due to meditation.

But it’s not all good. Some relationships got stronger- others rusted- others crumbled. Some of my flaws that had been dulled by alcohol or good ol’ fashioned neurosis grew pointy again.  All of this probably would have happened had I been drinking, albeit in more dramatic fashions. Life- at times- seemed insistent that I pick up the bottle to smooth some rough patches both personal and universal. 

I didn’t not drink because I was strong, or disciplined. But- for the first time in a long time- the sheer terror of total relapse wasn’t the cause for my not drinking either. I abstain because I’ve got enough shit to sift through and frankly I’ve come to kind of like my edges, plus I find just thinking about being hungover to be exhausting. 

(That said, I promise if I pick up the bottle between now and the next of these over-shares, I will exhaustively report back, much like I think people who post outrageous amounts of wedding photos on social media should be legally obligated to also post subsequent divorce papers.)

I’ve started to see my faults as something to be worked on, not a damnation- or something to be blindly defended, for that matter. Meditation has taught me that change isn’t just possible- it’s constant whether you want it to be or not. I miss a lot of who I was, but I certainly don’t miss the way I felt, and embracing the now only sharpens that appreciation. There has been pain and will be bad days, but the alternative simply doesn’t appeal to me anymore. I don’t laugh as much but I smile a lot more.

I’ll close with what you may have been thinking- why write this? The first reason should be self-evident: to get some hot, hot ass.* But for realsies, I share this because writing helps me give what I referred to last year as “the abyss” some semblance of shape. What was once the void is just now a really big, fucking mountain of labyrinthine design. And while not feeling understood has always been an issue of mine, so I genuinely appreciate it if you made it this far, its really the posting itself that’s the point. Secondly, I find the stigmatization of those with mental health issues, while much improved in recent years, to be one of the biggest plagues on modern society. Although I don’t live anything resembling a sweet life, I feel being brutally honest is at least my way of trying to combat that. Thirdly, I wanted to impress you with the fact I read Herman Melville’s 1851 classic Moby Dick**. Now, if you’ll excuse me the 2/5 of cake I’m staring at isn’t going to eat itself...

*Every blog’s raison d’etre 

** Great book!

[art-of-living-and-philosophies]

Reminder: don’t forget to expect the unexpected.

It is very easy to fall into a pessimistic thinking pattern when it just so happens that one usually faces undesirable outcomes on a daily basis. 

Of course, part of that has to do with reality, but another part of that has to do with ones perception of reality. An undesirable outcome for some may be viewed by others as an unproblematic or even fortunate outcome. But I digress.

The main point of this entry is to remind myself that Life is full of unexpected occurrences.  

I so often and so easily become engrossed in a perception of reality that always assumes the worst in anything. People, places, events... you name it. Most troublesome of all is that I actually come to believe that this perception is incontrovertible. As my therapist often says upon hearing my views on life, if that’s the way you think, it is no wonder why you are always sad and anxious.

It takes an unusual day like today to shake my ‘core beliefs’ on life and crack the lens of pessimism that I use to view the world.

Just two days ago, I was sad as hell, angry, and worried about my student life. Early in the day, I regretfully thought to myself how I wish I had taken courses I enjoyed more this year. It was my last year after all, and I questioned why I had not simply taken courses that could make my everyday life more enjoyable. Why did I choose challenging courses from which I have barely learnt and for which I barely care? 

The answer to that would be that I thought my transcript had to be adorned with “wow” courses with “wow” grades in order to optimize my chances at whatever indiscriminate ‘thing’ it is that I may attempt to do in the future that would require my transcript in a selection process.

Furthermore, I visited the office hours of one professor upon whom I had high hopes of making a good impression and whose course I really wanted to shine in. 

The course is a special Capstone Seminar course offered at the prestigious Victoria University as the University of Toronto, taught by a former Canadian Ambassador. 

He told me that, while my first assignment was one of the cleanest and well-written of the entire class, its content was in numerous ways subpar. It implied that in comparison to my sparkling peers, I was only dim. The grade I received on that assignment made that course become the one with my lowest grade of the entire semester. This course, I thought, would have to be the one I need to put the most time into remedying. I therefore also mentioned to the professor that I was absolutely inundated with assignments and feared that I would not be able to put maximal time and effort into producing quality work. My words did not affect him whatsoever, and he simply said some sentences to the effect of ‘just deal with it.’

So that entire meeting was a punch to the gut. I felt sad leaving his office, but the sadness turned to slight anger when I began to think, in a very competitive manner, about how I would show my professor and peers that I absolutely deserved to be in the class, and that I was on par with the best among them. 

The mixture of sadness and anger then started to involve feelings of angst as I rhetorically questioned how the hell I was going to deal effectively with my numerous impending assignments and exams that were coincidentally all due at once. For the next two days I worked neurotically and non-stop on the two most pressing assignment I had. While not developing the assignments quite to the extent that I would have felt satisfied with, it still felt better to be working than idling.

Then came today. And my emotions have deeply swayed from what they were for the past two days.

Indeed, today was usual in a sense that things have gone swimmingly. In my opinion, things rarely ever do; and if they do, never so many times in a day, which is why I found today worth writing about. Allow me to elaborate: 

My agenda today included - visit History of Hong Kong professor’s office hours - visit Politics of Southeast Asia professor’s office hours - visit New College Student Council

After my lecture on the History of Hong Kong I immediately headed to my professor’s office to discuss the 15-page paper that would be due in two weeks.

I had spent many days brainstorming ideas, but only to meagre avail. Given the amount of work I had ahead of me, I had given myself a deadline of one week in advance in order to have time to devote to my other assignments and exams. The pressure of time was on, and with every moment that went by where I did not get closer to creating a clear outline for my paper, the worst I felt.

I went in telling him, firstly, that I was very worried about not being able to fill 15 pages with the current topics that I had been researching. Through some discussion however, he was able to give me direction and structure for my thesis. He somewhat reassured me that there would be enough scholarly work out there to support my paper, however it would require lots of sifting through the available literature. On the topic of requiring a lot of time for this paper, I then brought up my second concern. I explained to him that i actually care about his course and that I rarely want to go above and beyond with research  for courses as I do with his. Going above and beyond would require time, and I feared I wouldn’t have enough given my current assignment and exam schedule. All of my courses have consecutive due dates for final assignments and exams, leaving me with little time to devote to each. He responded with ‘There’s no problem. When the due date for this paper approaches, if you find that you need more time, send me an email and we can make arrangements.’ 

Alleluja. Not only had he helped me produce a structure of sorts for the paper (the biggest step in the direction of getting it done), but he had also given me the green light for an extension. Sigh of relief as I left his office.

I now had about one hour to kill before visiting my other professor’s office hours. I remembered that I intended on giving New College Student Council a visit. It turned out that their entire office was closed off due to construction, so I went to the New College Office for Student Life in hopes of getting information on how to see someone from student council. By chance, there happened to be one girl sitting at reception who was on the student council. I immediately welcomed the opportunity to talk with her. she heard my concerns out and said she would get in contact with people in order to rectify the situation. As we were in the middle of our conversation, another member of the student council walking into the office. The girl and I then stepped aside with the other council member to discuss the concern further. He mentioned something about there being a lack of graduate representatives, and I mentioned that I was wondering why no grad rep had contacted us about the photos. He then immediately asked me if I would consider taking on the position myself for the coming semester. Wow, did not expect that. I said I wasn't opposed to the idea but that I would have to know more about the responsibilities of the position. Then came in another student council member, the Vice President (also coincidentally someone with whom I had kind interactions earlier in the year), and both student council members I was with told my concerns to him and also said I might be the new Grad Rep. What an odd yet positive string of events, I thought.

Off I went to my other professor’s office hours. As I waited for the professor to arrive to the office, I attempted to prepare my speech which would essentially beg her for an extension on the paper that would be due in three weeks. It was the lowest-stakes assignments among the 4-5 others that I would be having that very week. If I could get that assignment extended merely by a week, I would be relieved of so much pressure it seemed. Finally, the professor arrived and I sat before her. I began with something close to “I am here to talk about the essay, but not about the topic per se, it’s about the timing of the essay.” I then showed her a document on my laptop that I had created for the very purpose of demonstrating to my professors my hectic schedule.

I had also shown this very document to the professor from two days ago, and it had no effect.

i showed it to her saying, ‘this is what I’m dealing with.’ And immediately--and I mean before I could even finish my sentence--she said “I have no problem whatsoever giving an extension on this assignment.” I was shocked at the rapidity and kindness of her response. I told her I felt badly about asking for things of this nature (i.e. extensions), but she was completely in favour of extending the deadline for me. She said that she saw how I performed on my midterm (she gave me a 91 or 92 per cent... ridiculous) and she knows that I am always in class -- all to say that she knows I am not asking for an extension because I am a bad student. I was very touched and relieved to hear her say that. And then she went even further with her kindness and said that I wouldn’t even have to give in the assignment until the beginning of next semester if that suited me best. THAT’S A 4-WEEK EXTENSION. UNHEARD OF. I was simply blindsided by her utterly unsolicited generosity. To close our conversation I repeated several times how thankful I was for her kindness. Unreal, unreal, unreal...

And now here I am writing this passage. What an afternoon it has been! I had felt quite low for weeks, dreading the inferno I believed awaited me in the remainder of this month, and I had felt especially low two days ago after receiving hefty criticism from my one professor. Yet now, the unexpected string of events that occurred today have completely change the way I think and feel about myself and the immediate future. 

Times like these prompt me to reflect on the kind hearts that have touched my life throughout my time at the university. 王老师, Prof. Jurgensen, Mrs. Vandergberg, Miss Amanda Arulanandam, Miss Minh Do, Prof. Lim, Prof. Murali ... They have all acted as sources of light amidst darkness, gasps of air when I felt I was choking, hope when I felt only despair. Without their kind hearts, my university life would certainly have been worse off. I owe so much to those who have helped me along the way. In times like these I have to meditate on my benediction, and change my perspectives on life. The world cannot always be black grey and blue... To view the world this way even though I have seen the love from so many around me is to insult their actions. I must honour their acts of love I have received by both viewing the world with a more optimistic and loving lens and by modelling my actions on theirs.