#but ultimately i decided against being a full-time novelist

[not-poignant]

random genuine question. how do you write a book? I've written multiple fanfics successfully and want to be a full time author nothing too crazy but just enough to make a good living. But I'm finding myself stuck when it comes to executing my original ideas. I plan them out well but when it comes to the acts/chapters and actually writing I can't seem to pull the trigger. I understand it takes time and I may just be overthinking but still I'm worried I won't be able to execute.

Hi anon,

You are probably better off asking someone who writes books for a living, because I definitely don't, and when I did publish two novels, they have never done as well as my serials (and writing a serial is very different - for me at least - to writing a book). Like, they did moderately well, but I consider myself a professional serial writer and not a novelist, and those two things are 100% not the same thing. (Which is also maybe where you're struggling.

Writing fanfics successfully can often have zero bearing on whether you can (or want to) write a novel. Writing one is not writing the other! The processes are totally different, unless you were just writing novels and splitting them up into serial chapters and then, well, you wouldn't be here asking this question sdalkfjad)

There are some great novel-writing books out there, and many can be requested through libraries, and many of their authors have blogs or similar where they teach many of their techniques online. There are so many different ways of structuring a novel (and it can change depending on your genre, and I don't know what your genre is either!) I can't recommend any personally, because I don't read them, because I don't really write novels.

When it comes to actually sitting down and actually writing anything of length though, it's sometimes down to asking yourself a few things:

What feelings are happening in you that hold you back? Are you afraid it won't be good? (In which case there's no way but through, anon, you have to write some bad writing in order to get to the good writing, it's a mandatory part of the practice - a garden needs shit/manure in order to grow, lol).

Are you bored because you planned it all out? (In which case you may need to look into writing novels without plotting them first).

Are you more excited for future chapters instead of present chapters? (Write out of order! And make the present chapters shorter).

Are you more interested in fanfiction's regular feedback from readers? (In which case consider creating a reader group for your original writing, or finding a really good beta who can give you that feedback). (I can't get dopamine from writing novels, so I don't write them, I just find the process boring in a way that's pretty intolerable to me).

Is the novel too huge of a road into meeting your characters and setting/s in prose? (Consider writing small oneshots for your characters and world first. Consider writing side characters in the world in a 2-3k fic. Treat it like responding to a fanfiction challenge. It can often make access to the world a little easier).

Is something about the story actually broken? Do you need to go back to the drawing board re: the strengths of the characters?

Learn how to fall in love with your characters the way you've fallen in love with fanfic characters. If they're not strong enough to earn that 'love'/'obsession' - make them stronger. (Although, frankly, sometimes you can only learn that love by writing them. Think of it this way: When you start writing fanfiction, you've already invested hours of time into learning the characters and their depth. You need to invest at least the same amount into your own characters and their stories before you might stumble across that same love).

Outside of that you can apply any number of techniques to novel writing, but ultimately, a lot of it is sitting down and just writing (sometimes pretty terribly) and learning how to overcome writer's block and understanding why it's happening for you.

For me, I learned that the cons of writing novels just didn't outweigh the pros. The lack of dopamine feedback re: readers doesn't play well with my unmedicated ADHD brain, which means writing to no feedback at all tends to leave me extremely unmotivated. And fitting the novel formula re: story lengths ultimately just didn't work with me either, most of my long stories naturally hit or exceed the 250k mark, which is fine for serials, but not fine for most novels outside of epic fantasy or hard science fiction.

So I would also recommend sitting down and asking yourself what did fanfiction give you that made you able to write it? And what do you need novel writing to give you, to make you able to write it? Likewise, ask yourself - do you want to write original novels? Or original serials? There's a good market for both now, and novels =/= serials. Like, they are naturally written in different ways!

Do you think you would struggle to write an original serial the same way that you're struggling with novels? All of these things are important to ask yourself.

But ultimately, just... I hate to say it, but sometimes you have to force yourself through the struggle, and write stuff while groaning because you know it's bad, to get to the other side. It's like learning any new skill - and fanfiction writing does not naturally lend itself to writing novels with everyone! You are learning a brand new skill!! Just because I know how to draw with pencils doesn't mean I know how to paint with watercolours, and I may be even more intimidated to learn watercolours because I know now how long it took to get the hang of fanfiction. Sometimes you just have to actually sit yourself down and be like 'okay I have to get real good at being real bad at something for a little while, even if I hate it.'

Chances are it won't be as bad as you think anyway, and then even if it is, well that's a normal part of writing a novel. That's why the first draft is the first draft, and not the final product. :)

[justforbooks]

Nausea (French: La Nausée) is a philosophical novel by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, published in 1938. It is Sartre’s first novel and, in his opinion, one of his best works.

The novel takes place in ‘Bouville’ (literally, 'Mud town’) a town similar to Le Havre, and it concerns a dejected historian, who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.

French writer Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, claims that La Nausée grants consciousness a remarkable independence and gives reality the full weight of its sense.

It is one of the canonical works of existentialism. Sartre was awarded, though he ultimately declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. The Nobel Foundation recognized him “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” Sartre was one of the few people to have declined the award, referring to it as merely a function of a bourgeois institution.

The novel has been translated into English at least twice, by Lloyd Alexander as “The Diary of Antoine Roquentin” (John Lehmann, 1949) and by Robert Baldick as “Nausea” (Penguin Books, 1965).

Written in the form of journal entries, it follows 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin who, returned from years of travel, settles in the fictional French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a “sweetish sickness,” as he calls nausea, increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys: his research project, the company of an autodidact who is reading all the books in the local library alphabetically, a physical relationship with a café owner named Françoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved, even his own hands and the beauty of nature.

Over time, his disgust towards existence forces him into self-hatred and near-insanity. He embodies Sartre’s theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point. But finally Antoine comes to a revelation into the nature of his being when he faces the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself.

In his resolution at the end of the book he accepts the indifference of the physical world to man’s aspirations. He is able to see that realization not only as a regret but also as an opportunity. People are free to make their own meaning: a freedom that is also a responsibility, because without that commitment there will be no meaning.

Antoine Roquentin – The protagonist of the novel, Antoine is a former adventurer who has been living in Bouville for three years. Antoine does not keep in touch with family, and has no friends. He is a loner at heart and often likes to listen to other people’s conversations and examine their actions. Even though he at times admits to trying to find some sort of solace in the presence of others, he also exhibits signs of boredom and lack of interest when interacting with people. His relationship with Françoise is mostly hygienic in nature, for the two hardly exchange words and, when invited by the Self-Taught Man to accompany him for lunch, he agrees only to write in his diary later that: “I had as much desire to eat with him as I had to hang myself.” He can afford not to work, but spends a lot of his time writing a book about a French politician of the eighteenth century. Antoine does not think highly of himself: “The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so.” When he starts suffering from the Nausea he feels the need to talk to Anny, but when he finally does, it makes no difference to his condition. He eventually starts to think he does not even exist: “My existence was beginning to cause me some concern. Was I a mere figment of the imagination?”

Anny – Anny is an English woman who was once Antoine’s lover. After meeting with him, Anny makes it clear that she has changed a considerable amount and must go on with her life. Antoine clings to the past, hoping that she may want to redefine their relationship, but he is ultimately rejected by her.

Ogier P., generally referred to as “the self-taught man” or the Autodidact – An acquaintance of Antoine’s, he is a bailiff’s clerk who lives for the pursuit of knowledge and love of humanity. Highly disciplined, he has spent hundreds of hours reading at the local library. He often speaks to Roquentin and confides in him that he is a Socialist.

Like many Modernist novels, La Nausée is a “city-novel,” encapsulating experience within the city. It is widely assumed that “Bouville” in the novel is a fictional portrayal of Le Havre, where Sartre was living and teaching in the 1930s as he wrote it.

The critic William V. Spanos has used Sartre’s novel as an example of “negative capability,” a presentation of the uncertainty and dread of human existence, so strong that the imagination cannot comprehend it.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel places La Nausée in a tradition of French activism: “Following on from Malraux, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus among others were all able to use the writing of novels as a powerful tool of ideological exploration.” Although novelists like Sartre claim to be in rebellion against the 19th Century French novel, “they in fact owe a great deal both to its promotion of the lowly and to its ambiguous or 'poetic’ aspects.”

In his What Is Literature?, Sartre wrote, “On the one hand, the literary object has no substance but the reader’s subjectivity … But, on the other hand, the words are there like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them towards us … Thus, the writer appeals to the reader’s freedom to collaborate in the production of the work.”

The novel is an intricate formal achievement modeled on much 18th-century fiction that was presented as a “diary discovered among the papers of…”

Hayden Carruth wonders if there are not unrecognized layers of irony and humor beneath the seriousness of Nausea: “Sartre, for all his anguished disgust, can play the clown as well, and has done so often enough: a sort of fool at the metaphysical court.”

Like many modernist authors, Sartre, when young, loved popular novels in preference to the classics and claimed in his autobiography that it was from them, rather than from the balanced phrases of Chateaubriand that he had his “first encounters with beauty.”

Sartre described the stream of consciousness technique as one method of moving the novel from the era of Newtonian Physics forward into the era of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He saw this as crucial because he felt that “narrative technique ultimately takes us back to the metaphysics of the novelist.” He wanted his novelistic techniques to be compatible with his theories on the existential freedom of the individual as well as his phenomenological analyses of the unstable, shifting structures of consciousness.

Disdaining 19th-century notions that character development in novels should obey and reveal psychological law, La Nausée treats such notions as bourgeois bad faith, ignoring the contingency and inexplicability of life.

From the psychological point of view Antoine Roquentin could be seen as an individual suffering from depression, and the nausea itself as one of the symptoms of his condition. Unemployed, living in deprived conditions, lacking human contact, being trapped in fantasies about the 18th century secret agent he is writing the book about, shows Sartre’s oeuvre as a follow-up of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in search of the precise description of schizophrenia. Rilke’s character anticipates Sartre’s.

Roquentin’s problem is not simply depression or mental illness, although his experience has pushed him to that point. Sartre presents Roquentin’s difficulties as arising from man’s inherent existential condition. His seemingly special circumstances (returning from travel, reclusiveness), which goes beyond the mere indication of his very real depression, are supposed to induce in him (and in the reader) a state that makes one more receptive to noticing an existential situation that everyone has, but may not be sensitive enough to let become noticeable. Roquentin undergoes a strange metaphysical experience that estranges him from the world. His problems are not merely a result of personal insanity, without larger significance. Rather, like the characters in the Dostoevsky and Rilke novels, they are victims of larger ideological, social, and existential forces that have brought them to the brink of insanity. Sartre’s point in Nausea is to comment on our universal reaction to these common external problems.

Hayden Carruth wrote in 1959 of the way that “Roquentin has become a familiar of our world, one of those men who, like Hamlet or Julien Sorel, live outside the pages of the books in which they assumed their characters… . It is scarcely possible to read seriously in contemporary literature, philosophy, or psychology without encountering references to Roquentin’s confrontation with the chestnut tree, for example, which is one of the sharpest pictures ever drawn of self-doubt and metaphysical anguish.”

Certainly, Nausea gives us a few of the clearest and hence most useful images of man in our time that we possess; and this, as Allen Tate has said, is the supreme function of art.

Criticism of Sartre’s novels frequently centered on the tension between the philosophical and political on one side versus the novelistic and individual on the other.

Ronald Aronson describes the reaction of Albert Camus, still in Algeria and working on his own first novel, L’Étranger. At the time of the novel’s appearance, Camus was a reviewer for an Algiers left-wing daily. Camus told a friend that he “thought a lot about the book” and it was “a very close part of me.” In his review, Camus wrote, “the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered.” Camus felt that each of the book’s chapters, taken by itself, “reaches a kind of perfection in bitterness and truth.” However, he also felt that the descriptive and the philosophical aspects of the novel are not balanced, that they “don’t add up to a work of art: the passage from one to the other is too rapid, too unmotivated, to evoke in the reader the deep conviction that makes the art of the novel.” He likewise felt that Sartre had tipped the balance too far in depicting the repugnant features of mankind “instead of placing the reasons for his despair, at least to a certain degree, if not completely, on the elements of human greatness.” Still, Camus’s largely positive review led to a friendship between the two authors.

G.J. Mattey, a philosopher rather than a novelist like Camus, flatly describes Nausea and others of Sartre’s literary works as “practically philosophical treatises in literary form.”

In distinction both from Camus’s feeling that Nausea is an uneasy marriage of novel and philosophy and also from Mattey’s belief that it is a philosophy text, the philosopher William Barrett, in his book Irrational Man, expresses an opposite judgment. He writes that Nausea “may well be Sartre’s best book for the very reason that in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being conjoined.” Barrett says that, in other literary works and in his literary criticism, Sartre feels the pull of ideas too strongly to respond to poetry, “which is precisely that form of human expression in which the poet—and the reader who would enter the poet’s world—must let Being be, to use Heidegger’s phrase and not attempt to coerce it by the will to action or the will to intellectualization.”

The poet Hayden Carruth agrees with Barrett, whom he quotes, about Nausea. He writes firmly that Sartre, “is not content, like some philosophers, to write fable, allegory, or a philosophical tale in the manner of Candide; he is content only with a proper work of art that is at the same time a synthesis of philosophical specifications.”

Barrett feels that Sartre as a writer is best when “the idea itself is able to generate artistic passion and life.”

Steven Ungar compares Nausea with French novels of different periods, such as Madame de Lafayette La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Honoré de Balzac Le Père Goriot (1835), André Malraux La Condition humaine (1933), and Annie Ernaux Une femme (1988), all of which have scenes with men and women faced with choices and “provide literary expressions to concerns with personal identity that vary over time more in detail than in essence.”

A main theme in La Nausée is that life is meaningless unless a person makes personal commitments that give it meaning. William Barrett emphasizes that the despair and disgust in Nausea contrast with the total despair of Céline (who is quoted on the flyleaf of the French edition) that leads to nothing; rather, they are a necessary personal recognition that eventuate in “a release from disgust into heroism.”

Barrett adds that, “like Adler’s, Sartre’s is fundamentally a masculine psychology; it misunderstands and disparages the psychology of woman. The humanity of man consists in the For-itself, the masculine component by which we choose, make projects, and generally commit ourselves to a life of action. The element of masculine protest, to use Adler’s term, is strong throughout Sartre’s writings … the disgust … of Roquentin, in Nausea, at the bloated roots of the chestnut tree …”

Mattey elaborates further on the positive, redeeming aspect of the seemingly bleak, frustrating themes of existentialism that are so apparent in Nausea: “Sartre considered the subjectivity of the starting-point for what a human is as a key thesis of existentialism. The starting-point is subjective because humans make themselves what they are. Most philosophers consider subjectivity to be a bad thing, particularly when it comes to the motivation for action… . Sartre responds by claiming that subjectivity is a dignity of human being, not something that degrades us.” Therefore, the characteristic anguish and forlornness of existentialism are temporary: only a prerequisite to recognizing individual responsibility and freedom. The basis of ethics is not rule-following. A specific action may be either wrong or right and no specific rule is necessarily valid. What makes the action, either way, ethical is “authenticity,” the willingness of the individual to accept responsibility rather than dependence on rules, and to commit to his action. Despair, the existentialist says, is the product of uncertainty: being oriented exclusively to the outcome of a decision rather than to the process yields uncertainty, as we cannot decide the future, only our action.

In his “Introduction” to the American edition of Nausea, the poet and critic Hayden Carruth feels that, even outside those modern writers who are explicitly philosophers in the existentialist tradition, a similar vein of thought is implicit but prominent in a main line through Franz Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, D. H. Lawrence, André Malraux, and William Faulkner. Carruth says:

'Suffering is the origin of consciousness,’ Dostoevsky wrote. But suffering is everywhere in the presence of thought and sensitivity. Sartre for his part has written, and with equal simplicity: 'Life begins on the other side of despair.’

Sartre has written, “What is meant … by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives of him, is undefinable, it is only because he is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he will have made what he will be.”

If things—and also people—are contingent, if they “just are,” then we are free and we create ourselves solely through our decisions and choices.

David Drake mentions that, in Nausea, Sartre gives several kinds of examples of people whose behavior shows bad faith, who are inauthentic: members of the bourgeoisie who believe their social standing or social skills give them a “right” to exist, or others who embrace the banality of life and attempt to flee from freedom by repeating empty gestures, others who live by perpetuating past versions of themselves as they were or who live for the expectations of others, or those who claim to have found meaning in politics, morality, or ideology.

In simply narrative terms, Roquentin’s nausea arises from his near-complete detachment from other people, his not needing much interaction with them for daily necessities: “the fact of his alienation from others is important; as his own work ceases to entertain and to occupy him, Roquentin has nothing that could distract him from the business of existing in its simplest forms.” As a practical matter, he could solve his problem by getting a job; but, as a device for developing the novel’s theme, his aloneness is a way of making him (and the reader) recognize that there is nothing inherent in the objective nature of the world that would give any necessary meaning to whatever actions he chose, and therefore nothing to restrict his freedom. “[H]is perception of the world around him becomes unstable as objects are disengaged from their usual frames of reference,” and he is forced to recognize that freedom is inescapable and that therefore creating a meaning for his life is his own responsibility. “Nothing makes us act the way we do, except our own personal choice.”

“But,” David Clowney writes, “freedom is frightening, and it is easier to run from it into the safety of roles and realities that are defined by society, or even by your own past. To be free is to be thrown into existence with no "human nature” as an essence to define you, and no definition of the reality into which you are thrown, either. To accept this freedom is to live “authentically”; but most of us run from authenticity. In the most ordinary affairs of daily life, we face the challenge of authentic choice, and the temptation of comfortable inauthenticity. All of Roquentin’s experiences are related to these themes from Sartre’s philosophy.“

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

During the Second World War, the experience of Sartre and others in the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France emphasized political activism as a form of personal commitment. This political dimension was developed in Sartre’s later trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949), which concern a vicious circle of failure on the part of a thinking individual to progress effectively from thought to action. Finally, for Sartre, political commitment became explicitly Marxist.

In 1945, Sartre gave a lecture in New York that was printed in Vogue in July of that year. In it he recast his prewar works, such as Nausea into politically committed works appropriate to the postwar era.

Marxism was not, in any case, always as appreciative of Sartre as he was of it. Mattey describes their objections:

Marxism was a very potent political and philosophical force in France after its liberation from the Nazi occupation. Marxist thinkers tend to be very ideological and to condemn in no uncertain terms what they regard to be rival positions. They found existentialism to run counter to their emphasis on the solidarity of human beings and their theory of material (economic) determinism. The subjectivity that is the starting point of existentialism seemed to the Marxists to be foreign to the objective character of economic conditions and to the goal of uniting the working classes in order to overthrow the bourgeoise capitalists. If one begins with the reality of the "I think,” one loses sight of what really defines the human being (according to the Marxists), which is their place in the economic system. Existentialism’s emphasis on individual choice leads to contemplation, rather than to action. Only the bourgeoise have the luxury to make themselves what they are through their choices, so existentialism is a bourgeoise philosophy.

Sartre was influenced at the time by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and his phenomenological method. He received a stipend from the Institut Français, allowing him to study in Berlin with Husserl and Martin Heidegger in 1932, as he began writing the novel.

Roy Elveton reports:

In January, 1939, one year after the death of Edmund Husserl, Sartre published a short essay entitled 'Husserl’s Central Idea.’ In the space of a few paragraphs, Sartre rejects the epistemology of Descartes and the neo-Kantians and their view of consciousness’s relationship to the world. Consciousness is not related to the world by virtue of a set of mental representations and acts of mental synthesis that combine such representations to provide us with our knowledge of the external world. Husserl’s intentional theory of consciousness provides the only acceptable alternative: 'Consciousness and the world are immediately given together: the world, essentially external to consciousness, is essentially related to it.’ The only appropriate image for intentionality and our knowing relationship to the world is that of an 'explosion’: 'to know is to “explode” toward’ an object in the world, an object 'beyond oneself, over there…towards that which is not oneself…out of oneself.’

Following Husserl, Sartre views absurdity as a quality of all existing objects (and of the material world collectively), independent of any stance humans might take with respect to them. Our consciousness of an object does not inhere in the object itself. Thus in the early portions of the novel, Roquentin, who takes no attitude towards objects and has no stake in them, is totally estranged from the world he experiences. The objects themselves, in their brute existence, have only participation in a meaningless flow of events: they are superfluous. This alienation from objects casts doubt for him, in turn, on his own validity and even his own existence.

Roquentin says of physical objects that, for them, “to exist is simply to be there.” When he has the revelation at the chestnut tree, this “fundamental absurdity” of the world does not go away. What changes then is his attitude. By recognizing that objects won’t supply meaning in themselves, but people must supply it for them – that Roquentin himself must create meaning in his own life – he becomes both responsible and free. The absurdity becomes, for him, “the key to existence.”

Victoria Best writes:

Language proves to be a fragile barrier between Roquentin and the external world, failing to refer to objects and thus place them in a scheme of meaning. Once language collapses it becomes evident that words also give a measure of control and superiority to the speaker by keeping the world at bay; when they fail in this function, Roquentin is instantly vulnerable, unprotected.

Thus, although, in some senses, Sartre’s philosophy in Nausea derives from Husserl and ultimately from René Descartes, the strong role he gives to the contingent randomness of physical objects contrasts with their commitment to the role of necessity. (Elveton mentions that, unknown to Sartre, Husserl himself was developing the same ideas, but in manuscripts that remained unpublished.)

Ethan Kleinberg writes that, more than Husserl, it was Martin Heidegger who appealed to Sartre’s sense of radical individualism. He says, “for Sartre, the question of being was always and only a question of personal being. The dilemma of the individual confronting the overwhelming problem of understanding the relationship of consciousness to things, of being to things, is the central focus” of Nausea. Eventually, “in his reworking of Husserl, Sartre found himself coming back to the themes he had absorbed from Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik?” Nausea was a prelude to Sartre’s sustained attempt to follow Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit by analyzing human experience as various ontological modes, or ways of being in the world.

In 1937, just as Sartre was finishing Nausea and getting it to press, he wrote an essay, The Transcendence of the Ego. He still agreed with Husserl that consciousness is “about” objects or, as they say, it “intends” them – rather than forming within itself a duplicate, an inner representation of an outward object. The material objects of consciousness (or “objects of intention”) exist in their own right, independent and without any residue accumulating in them from our awareness of them. However, the new idea in this essay was that Sartre now differed in also believing that the person’s ego itself is also “in the world,” an object of consciousness to be discovered, rather than the totally known subject of consciousness. In the novel, not only Roquentin’s consciousness but his own body also becomes objectified in his new, alarming perception.

And so Sartre parted company with Husserl over the latter’s belief in a transcendent ego, which Sartre believed instead was neither formally nor materially in consciousness, but outside it: in the world.

This seemingly technical change fit with Sartre’s native predisposition to think of subjectivity as central: a conscious person is always immersed in a world where his or her task is to make himself concrete. A “person” is not an unchanging, central essence, but a fluid construct that continually re-arises as an interaction among a person’s consciousness, his physiology and history, the material world, and other people. This view itself supported Sartre’s vision of people as fundamentally both doomed and free to live lives of commitment and creativity.

As Søren Kierkegaard, the earliest existentialist, wrote: 'I must find a truth that is true for me … the idea for which I can live or die.’

La Nausée allows Sartre to explain his philosophy in simplified terms. Roquentin is the classic existentialist hero whose attempts to pierce the veil of perception lead him to a strange combination of disgust and wonder. For the first part of the novel, Roquentin has flashes of nausea that emanate from mundane objects. These flashes appear seemingly randomly, from staring at a crumpled piece of paper in the gutter to picking up a rock on the beach. The feeling he perceives is pure disgust: a contempt so refined that it almost shatters his mind each time it occurs. As the novel progresses, the nausea appears more and more frequently, though he is still unsure of what it actually signifies. However, at the base of a chestnut tree in a park, he receives a piercingly clear vision of what the nausea actually is. Existence itself, the property of existence to be something rather than nothing was what was slowly driving him mad. He no longer sees objects as having qualities such as color or shape. Instead, all words are separated from the thing itself, and he is confronted with pure being.

Carruth points out that the antipathy of the existentialists to formal ethical rules brought them disapproval from moral philosophers concerned with traditional schemes of value. On the other hand, analytical philosophers and logical positivists were “outraged by Existentialism’s willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on non mental processes of consciousness.”

Additionally, Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism is opposed to a certain kind of rationalistic humanism. Upon the confession of the Self-Taught Man as to being a member of the S.F.I.O., a French Socialist party, Roquentin quickly engages him in a Socratic dialogue to expose his inconsistencies as a humanist. Roquentin first points out how his version of humanism remains unaffiliated to a particular party or group so as to include or value all of mankind. However, he then notes how the humanist nonetheless caters his sympathy with a bias towards the humble portion of mankind. Roquentin continues to point out further discrepancies of how one humanist may favor an audience of laughter while another may enjoy the somber funeral. In dialogue, Roquentin challenges the Self-Taught Man to show a demonstrable love for a particular, tangible person rather than a love for the abstract entity attached to that person (i.e. the idea of Youth in a young man). In short, he concludes that such humanism naively attempts to “melt all human attitudes into one.” More importantly, to disavow humanism does not constitute “anti-humanism”.

The kind of humanism Sartre found unacceptable, according to Mattey, is one that denies the primacy of individual choice… . But there is another conception of humanism implicit in existentialism. This is one that emphasizes the ability of individual human beings to transcend their individual circumstances and act on behalf of all humans. The fact is, Sartre maintains, that the only universe we have is a human universe, and the only laws of this universe are made by humans.“

In his Sartre biography, David Drake writes, Nausea was on the whole well received by the critics and the success of Sartre the novelist served to enhance the reputation he had started to enjoy as a writer of short stories and philosophical texts, mostly on perception.”

Although his earlier essays did not receive much attention, Nausea and the collection of stories The Wall, swiftly brought him recognition.

Carruth writes that, on publication, “it was condemned, predictably, in academic circles, but younger readers welcomed it, and it was far more successful than most first novels.”

Sartre originally titled the novel Melancholia. Simone de Beauvoir referred to it as his “factum on contingency.” He composed it from 1932 to 1936. He had begun it during his military service and continued writing at Le Havre and in Berlin.

Ethan Kleinberg reports:

Sartre went to study in Berlin for the academic year 1933. While in Berlin, Sartre did not take any university courses or work with Husserl or Heidegger. Sartre’s time seems to have been spent reading Husserl and working on the second draft of Nausea.

Drake confirms this account.

The manuscript was subsequently typed. It was at first refused by the Nouvelle Revue Française (N.R.F.), despite a strong recommendation from their reviewer, Jean Paulhan. In 1937, however, the imprint’s publisher, Gaston Gallimard accepted it and suggested the title La Nausée.

Brice Parain, the editor, asked for numerous cuts of material that was either too populist or else too sexual to avoid an action for indecency. Sartre deleted the populist material, which was not natural to him, with few complaints, because he wanted to be published by the prestigious N.R.F., which had a strong, if vague, house style. However, he stood fast on the sexual material which he felt was an artistically necessary hallucinatory ingredient.

Michel Contat has examined the original typescript and feels that, “if ever Melancholia is published as its author had originally intended it, the novel will no doubt emerge as a work which is more composite, more baroque and perhaps more original than the version actually published.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[theonewiththefanfics]

80s Retro (one-shot)

Requested: @rockyroadthepastryarchy  (hope I did the fluff justice, cause I no longer have any clue how to write things apart from angst and smut, apparently :D)

70s Vintage (one-shot)

70s Bling (one-shot)

70s Glam (one-shot)

Synopsys: Roger has been married to the Reader since forever and when ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is finally underway, she can’t help but reminisce of the past.

Pairing: Roger Taylor x f!Reader

Genre: pure fluff

Warnings: swearing, alluding to sexy times and drinking

Word count: 2085

   When they had first met the actress that would play Y/N in the new Queen biopic, the woman was completely star-struck and a blubbering mess. But Roger Taylor, oh he was a different story. His jaw had hung open, for she was a complete carbon copy of the love of his life. His gaze had looked her up and down, completely missing how the real Y/N passed him by, slapping him over the head.    “Keep gawking like that and you’ll be sleeping on the couch,” she said, sauntering away, one of the movies PA’s running after her and showing her to the Live Aid stage.    Roger had to take a few seconds to snap out of the moment, only to see the actress smirk at him. “I’m going to take your reaction as a compliment, mister Taylor, but I do believe you should run after your wife. From what I’ve read she’s quite the woman.”    “That she is.” And with a loud "Wait, honey!" Roger rushed to Y/N’s side.    “ ‘M sorry,” he quickly pecked her lips, beard scratching her chin. “It’s just… for a second it was like I was transported back in time…”    “What? You saying I don’t look as pretty as I used to?” her eyebrow was raised, but there was that devilish glint in her Y/E/C orbs that told him- she was just teasing.    “Actually, the opposite. You look more beautiful with every day that passes.”    Y/N hummed, feeling Roger’s arms weave around her waist, so, she leaned back and rested her head against his shoulders, a finger tracing the line of a tattoo. When he had first brought up the idea of getting a sleeve Y/N was pissed. Not because she didn’t like them, the woman herself had a quill wrapped around her ankle, she was mad because she’d been deprived of that look for more than thirty years of their relationship.

   “How dare you!” Y/N had emphasized each word with a hit of a pillow. “Why couldn’t you do it sooner!” Roger had been laughing throughout the whole thing, a hand sneaking underneath her assault, and grabbing at Y/N’s knee to pull her towards him, and ultimately make her flop down onto the bed. “Do you know, how much sex you’ve missed out on?”    He was hovering above her, a palm pushing a strand of Y/H/C hair away, grey weaving through it. “Then we have to make up for the lost time, don’t we?”    When his voice dropped down to a husk, usually Y/N would melt. But not this time.    “Do it on your own, Rog,” Y/N said and pushed him away, walking to sulk in the guest bedroom. “Thirty-seven fucking years and now he decides to make me lose my mind! I’m not as flexible as I used to be, you wanker!”    Roger had fallen asleep with a wide grin on his face.    “You know, I’m glad they’re recreating Live Aid,” Y/N’s voice brought him back to reality, the grip around her middle tightening. She’d always been a feisty woman, so the fact that he could call her his, and have been able to share his life together since 1979, was astonishing to him.    “Yeah?” Roger pecked her temple as Brian walked up to the two and the BoRhap guys nervously trailed behind him. “And why is that?”    “Cause you got me bloody hammered before the show,” she smiled, embracing Brian and standing next to the man as one by one they introduced themselves to her. Ben, who was playing Roger in the movie, was absolutely shaking from how nervous he was, so Y/N hugged him a bit longer. “You’re gonna be amazing,” she whispered to him. Pulling back, she looked at the four men gathered there. “You’re all gonna be fantastic and if Freddie could be here, I know he’d say the same.”    “Actually,” Brian piped up, a too happy of a look on his face, “he’d be asking why Melinda is here,” he gestured towards the Y/N of Bohemian Rhapsody.    That made the real one choke on her coffee and snort it through her nose. Rami instantly was by her side, offering a tissue as she, Bri and Rog laughed.    “So, the legend is really true- you were drunk while they performed the most iconic concert in history?” Joe asked as a stylist poofed up his wig a bit more.    Y/N smirked and nodded. “Also, Rog shagged my brains out five minutes before they had to go on stage,” she winked at Ben. “Couldn’t feel my legs, nor walk to the car afterwards.”    The guys’ mouths all hung open and they turned redder with each passing second.    “Honestly, Y/N, can’t you keep at least something private?” Roger exasperated, watching Brian as he fixed Gwilym’s wig. When Y/N had first seen the actor in the full get up, her eyes almost had bugged out of her head and the cup of tea, she had been nursing, had shattered on the ground.    “That bad?” Gwil had nervously laughed as Y/N came towards him and poked his cheek.    “Holy shit, it’s real,” she’d whispered, causing Roger to cackle, who had been watching the whole scene unfold. She’d turned to him and in a conspiratory tone stated, “I told you, Rog, cloning exists! Years ago! And now they got your DNA from one of the groupies you once shagged, and the apocalypse is starting now. Holy shit, he’s Brian!”    And that had eased all of the tension there could possibly be, for everyone had the approval of the three most important people.    Throughout the filming, Y/N was on set constantly. Not only had she been close to the band and still was, but she had also been best friends with Freddie.    “Honestly, darling,” he’d said to her years ago as both sat on the steps of the Garden Lodge, Delilah rubbing her head up and down Y/N’s thigh. “If I didn’t have Mary and Delilah here, you’d be the love of my life.”    “Oh, shut it Fred!” she had laughed and placed her head on his shoulder. “We both now, Delilah has you wrapped around all her tiny paws.”    And he’d hummed in agreement, watching the sun rise with his best friend dozing on his shoulder.    She hung out with all of the guys as much as possible, giving a third-party opinion and directions, for how the band used to act, and some little things that each did, either when nervous or when playing their instruments.    At that moment, Y/N was relaxing in one of the seats, after having shooed a fifth PA away by saying, “Love, you brought me a cup ten minutes ago.” The young woman had bashfully smiled at the legendary woman and Y/N had just waved her off, telling, “Go. Relax. I see how all of you run around like chickens without heads. You must be exhausted. And if anyone gives you any shit, you come and talk to me. Immediately.”    The PA gave Y/N a look of pure relief, before peeling away to take a nap in some corner. She smiled, thinking as long as the girl pulled through the hectic life that was being in the entertainment industry, she had a bright future ahead of her.    “They really don’t do you justice in the movie,” Ben’s deep voice came from Y/N’s left and she smiled at the boy. Well, man, but he was the baby of the cast and she just couldn’t stop herself.    “You know, I helped with the script revisions.”    “Then you’re too modest, cause with everything that we’ve read and filmed, it truly doesn’t let your heart shine.”    Y/N threw him a wink. “You already get to make out with young me as young Roger. No need for flirtin’. Besides… this is about Freddie and Queen. I was and still am just lucky to call them a family.”    A fond look came over her face as the memory of their most recent Christmas came to mind. All of them, Deaky and Veronica included, had gone out to a market, intended on buying their grandchildren and each other presents, but a few cups of beer and mulled wine later, they’d ended up stumbling around London and wreaking some havoc. Y/N was surprised nothing was in the press the next day, for it was an adventure worthy of the front page.    “Can I just say, Ben, you’re nothing like Roger, when he was young,” Y/N returned to the present day and sipped on her still warm coffee.    Immediately at the comment, she saw the young man’s face fall.    “Oh, no, honey, I didn’t mean it like that. Trust me, it’s a compliment.”    “What’s a compliment?” Roger’s voice invaded the pair’s conversation, as he plopped down next to his wife, draping an arm around her shoulders.    “I was just saying how different Ben is from you when you were young, and how that is a good thing,” she emphasized the last bit, hoping to ease the young actor’s nerves.    Roger put a hand on his chest in mock hurt. “How is that a good thing?”    “You were a bloody self-centered, egotistical asshole who only cared if he had a hole to put his dick in by the end of the day! And contrary to you, Ben is the sweetest, kindest most humble person I’ve ever met.”    From the corner of her eye, Y/N saw Ben blush at the compliment and she threw him a wink.    “Hey!” Roger tapped Y/N’s shoulder. “No flirting. He could be your grandson.”    “What can I say? He just makes me remember the good old days before you became a shrivelled prune,” the woman said, snuggling closer to Roger’s side who fondly smiled down at her.    “If you don’t mind me asking- how come you two have worked so well over the years?” said Ben with awe in his eyes, as Roger lovingly stared at Y/N who snorted. “You two come from completely different worlds.” And it was true. She was a world-renowned novelist and Rog was a rock-and-roll drummer.    Y/N had actually been the one to achieve fame half a decade before Queen was even on the map, but she never had and still didn’t care about recognition.    “Cause I call him out on his bullshit. And also, we broke up one time, so it wasn’t all roses…” she answered, mischievously looking at her husband.    That took Ben by surprise. “Wait you broke up? How come no one has ever spoken about it?”    “Well, cause it was only two days. And it wasn’t a breakup,” Roger exasperated, rolling his eyes.    “Of course, it was!” Y/N exclaimed, sipping on her coffee.    “You were just being petty,” he pinched her cheek, and she swatted at his hand.    “Petty or not, I threw you out of the house and didn’t speak to you.”    Ben was watching the interaction, heart swelling at how the two acted. “Would you mind, if I ask- what happened?”    And the grin that appeared on Roger’s face was nothing else but shit-eating. “Yes, dear. Why don’t you tell Ben, why you decided to throw a fit and have me stay at Fred’s?”    Y/N shrugged. “He looked hotter as a chick than I did.”    Ben spluttered the tea he was drinking. “Wait, what?”    “When he came up with the idea for ‘I Want To Break Free’ I was all for it, ya know. Supporting my man and such. But when I saw him as Rogerina… wearing my blouse, which by the way was my only good work blouse and you smeared it with red lipstick, I threw a fit. How come, he gets to look like that and I don’t? I simply couldn’t allow it.”    “But-“ Ben couldn’t contain the laughter that bubbled past his lips. “Are you joking?”    Roger shook his head, pecking Y/N’s temple. “Not one bit. Came home that evening to find a bag packed and her sulking on the couch. Said to leave and come back when I figured my shit out and when she was once again my first priority.”    “Ever since that day, he’s forbidden to wear my clothes. Or women clothing in general,” Y/N smiled placing the finished coffee cup on the table.    Ben chuckled hearing that. “Well, I do hope that when we start filming the scene, where I have to be in Roger’s position, you don’t evict him again.”    “Who knows,” Y/N smirked. “It might bring back too many painful memories and he might just have to stay at Bri’s.”

Tags: (crossed out wouldn't take): @lumelgy @palaiasaurus64 @supernaturalbaesduh @breezy1415 @crazy--me @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @sea040561 @staryeyedgirl @deathbyarabbit @s-c-a-r-e-d-po-t-t-e-r @reblogger-not-a-blogger @m-a-t-91 @dalilx @i-need-a-hero-i-need-a-loki @maladaptive-ninja-returns @averyrogers83 @in-the-end-im-still-trash @gallifreyansass @dewy-biitch @avxgers @unlikelygalaxygiver @sweet-ladyy @16wiishes @wanderingsami @desir-ae @thiccio-and-thicciet @roseslovedreams @vesoleil @gloomybisexualemo @kostyaownsmyheart @perriwiinkle

A/N: so, I guess I’m being nice and not breaking y’all hearts for once :D

P.S. what did ya think?

P.S.S. if you wanna be tagged in anything, my tags are always open, so just drop a message :)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT KAY

If you grow to the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something whether Viking raids, or central planning drags their productivity down to the average. That's because, unlike novelists, hackers collaborate on projects. There need to be solved, and d deliver them as informally as possible, e starting with a crude version 1, then f iterating rapidly. This won't be a change, because the rate of technological change seems to be wired into us. Another approach would be to start new silicon valleys. In those fields it can take months to find a new job in a bad economy. History offers some encouragement. It must be terse, simple, and hackable. Prose can be rewritten over and over until you're happy with it. If the best hackers start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. A deals per partner per year.

Many of the interesting applications written in the coming years will be server-based applications also give us the answer to this question. Companies will pay for software, but fortunately we can do that. Investors have poured into this territory from both directions. An unbiased review would go something like this: instead of a fixed round size, startups will do a rolling close, where they take money from investors one at a time. When you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them back. The one example I've found is, embarrassingly enough, Yahoo, which filed a patent suit against a gaming startup called Xfire in 2005. The Louvre might as well flip a coin.

If Microsoft used this approach, their software wouldn't be so full of security holes, because the rate of new companies increases. I don't think that physical books are outmoded yet. Most technologies evolve a good deal of effort into seeming smart. Now people are saying the same things about Arc that they said at first about Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. I think, maybe I should say Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds, or Alan Kay, or someone famous like that. Remember, too, will be custom deals for the forseeable future. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that there can even be such a thing as good taste, but that it's obvious. The smart ones learn who the other smart ones are, and are aghast at the thought you'd be so disloyal as to leave them out of your round. I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid.

There should be online documentation as well. It's harder to escape the influence of your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. There's nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. Programming languages, especially, don't get redesigned enough. Sound is a good cue to problems. But because humans have so much in software is public opinion—or rather, hacker opinion. They didn't mean to make the startups they want more expensive? One thing I can say is that 99. Reddit and think the founders were lucky. You don't have any of that if you and a couple friends decide to create a new web-based application. The idea that you could actually make the finished work from the prototype. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to them only to fill up rounds that are oversubscribed, being last in line means they'll probably miss the hot deals.

The only real role of patents, for most startups, is as an element of the mating dance with acquirers. If a round takes 2 months to close, and once founders realize that, it's going to stop. Hackers like to work for them by establishing a separate R & D department where employees don't have to think more about each startup before investing. It's like trying to convince someone by shouting at them. So the test of a language were how good finished programs look in it. In a traditional series A round, before the VCs invest they make the company set aside a block of stock for future hires—usually between 10 and 30% of the company? You must not use the word algorithm in the title of a book. Much of the stress comes from dealing with investors. I think hackers will use it.

I was a kid, computers were big, expensive machines built one at a time, like the temporary buildings built at so many American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away. Sarbanes-Oxley. Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley, few startups go public now. If good art is thus a property of objects after all. Often, indeed, it is not merely an accident of history that the great paintings of the Renaissance are all full of people. I would not be far from the truth to say that the novel or the chair is designed according to the most advanced acquirers, identifying companies to buy is extremely ad hoc, and completing the acquisition often involves a great deal of unneccessary friction. And yet the Lisps we have today are still pretty much what they had at MIT in the mid-1980s, because that's what a struct is supposed to mean. The higher-level abstractions, which you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a counter-suit.

Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. Startups succeed by creating wealth, not by suing people. With the rise of server-based applications. Was Amazon supposed to say no? So ultimately we're aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions. That sounds hipper than Lisp. Nor am I defending the current patent system. A rounds is that they're more prestigious. When Reddit first launched, it seemed laughable to VCs and e-commerce business was granted a patent on online ordering, or something like that. If you're starting your own company, why do you need a degree?

There are lots of good examples. Indeed, these statistics about Cobol or Java being the most popular language can be misleading. The lower of two levels will either be a language in its own right, and that often means seeing something the big company doesn't want to imagine a world in which high school students think they need to fix it. You're most likely to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. But have they tested that theory? Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular language can be misleading. Before patents, people protected ideas by keeping them secret.

[dillydedalus]

what i read in july

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT aka i’m finally out of the (relative) reading slump for good & my bro james joyce was there

men explain things to me, rebecca solnit the original mansplaining essay is great, and still scarily relevant; the others in this collection (most on feminist issues) are also quite good; some aspects are a bit dated & problematic so be aware of that. 2.5/5

erschlagt die armen!, shumona sinha (tr. from french, not available in english) short but very impactful novella about a young french woman, originally from india, who works as an interpreter in the asylum system and becomes more & more broken by this system of inhumane bureaucracy and suffering, until she snaps and hits a migrant over the head with a wine bottle. full of alienation and misery and beautiful but disturbing language - the title translates to ‘beat the poor to death’ so like. yeah. 3.5/5

fire & blood: a history of the targaryen family I, george r r martin look, it’s a 700-page-long fake history book about a fictional ruling dynasty in a fictional world, and i’m just That Obsessed & Desperate about asoiaf (and i don’t even care about the targs That Much). anyway, now i know more about the targs than any ruling family from, you know, real history, which is like, whatever. this is pretty enjoyable if you are That Obsessed, although i will say that some bits are much better than others (there are some dry dull years even in everyone’s fav overly dramatic dragon-riding incest-loving family) and the misogyny really is. a lot. too much. way too much. BUT i did really like Good Best Queen Alysanne (her husband king joe harris is alright too i guess) and i found my new westerosi otp, cregan stark/aly blackwood, who both have Big Dick Energy off the fucking charts. 3.5/5 (+0.5 points for cregan and aly’s combined BDE)

the old drift, namwali serpell hugely ambitious sprawling postcolonial nation-building novel about zambia, told thru three generations of three families, as well as a chorus of mosquitoes (consistently the best & smartest parts). there is A LOT going on, in terms of characters, of plot points, of references to history (the zambian space programme) and literature (finally my knowledge of heart of darkness paid off) and thematically, and honestly it was a bit too much, a bit too tangled & fragmented & drifty, and in the end i probably admire this book more than i liked it, but serpell’s writing is incredibly smart and funny and full of electrical sparks 3.5/5

a severed head, iris murdoch the original love dodecahedron (not that i counted). iris murdoch is fucking WILD and i love her for it. this is a strange darkly funny little farce about some rich well-educated londoners and their bizarre & rather convoluted love lives. not as grandiosely wild as the sea the sea, but fun nevertheless. 3/5

midnight in chernobyl, adam higginbotham jumping on the hype bandwagon caused by the hbo series (very weird to call the current fascination with chernobyl a hype bandwagon but you know). interesting & well-written & accessible (tho the science is still totally beyond me) & gets you to care about the people involved. lots of human failure, lots of human greatness, set against the background of the almost eldritch threat of radioactivity (look up the elephant foot & see if you don’t get chills), and acute radiation syndrome which is THE MOST TERRIFYING THING ON EARTH . 3.5/5

normal people, sally rooney honestly this is incredibly engrossing & absorbing once you get used to how rooney completely ignores ‘show don’t tell’ (it works!), i pretty much read the whole thing in one slow workday (boss makes a dollar, i make a dime so i read books on my phone on company time, also i genuinely had nothing to do). i also think rooney is really good at precisely capturing the ~millenial experience in a way that feels very true, especially the transition from school to uni. BUT i really disliked the ending, the book never engages with the political themes it introduces (esp. class and gender) as deeply as it could and the bdsm stuff never really gets TIED UP LOL. so overall idk: 3.5/5

störfall: nachrichten eines tages, christa wolf quiet reflective undramatic little book narrated by a woman waiting to hear about the outcome of her brother’s brain surgery on the day of the catastrophe at chernobyl - throughout the day she puts down her thoughts about her brother and the events unfolding at chernobyl, as well as the double uncertainty she is trying to cope with. really interesting to read such an immediate reaction to chernobyl (the book came out less than a year after chernobyl). 2.5/5

the man in the high castle, philip k dick it was fine? quick & entertaining alternative history where the axis powers win the war, some interesting bits of worldbuilding (like the draining of the mediterranean which was apparently a real idea in the early 20th century?) but overall it’s just felt a bit disjointed & unsatisfying to me. 2.5/5

fugitive pieces, anne michaels very poetic & thoughtful novel about the holocaust, grief, remembrance & the difference between history and memory, intergenerational trauma, love, geology and the weather. i’m not sure how much this comes together as a novel, but it is absolutely beautifully written (the author is a poet as well) and very affective. 3.5/5

american innovations, rivka galchen short collection of bizarre & often funny short stories about neurotic women whose furniture flies away, or who grow an extra breast, or who are maybe too occupied with financial details. very vague & very precise at once, which seems to be the thing with these sort of collections. 3/5

fool’s assassin (fitz & the fool #1), robin hobb YAASS i’m back in the realm of the elderlings!!! i thought this was one of the weaker installments in the series - i still enjoyed it a lot, and Feelings were had, but it just doesn’t quite fit together pacing-wise & some of the characterisation struck me as off (can i get some nuance for shun & lant please?) and tbh fitz is at peak Selfcentred Dumbass Levels & it drove me up the fucking wall. molly, nettle & bee deserve better. still, completely HYPE for the rest of the trilogy. 3.5/5

JAMES JOYCE JULY

note: i decided not to read dubliners bc it’s my least fav of joyce’s major works & too bleak & repetitive for my mood right now AND while i planned not to reread finnegans wake bc……. it’s finnegans wake…. i kinda do want to read it now (but i also. really don’t.) so idk yet.

a portrait of the artist as a young man, james joyce y’all. i read this book at least once a year between the ages of 15 and 19, it’s beyond formative, it is burnt into my brain, and reading it now several years later it is still everything, soaring and searing (that searing clarity of truth, thanks burgess) and poetic and dirty, and stephen is baby, and a pretentious self-important little prick and i love him & i am him (or was him as only a pretentious self-important teenage girl reading joyce can be him - because this truly is a book that should be read in your late teens when you feel everything as intensely and world-endingly and severely as my boy stephen does and every new experience feels like the world changing). anyway i love this book & i love stephen dedalus, bird-like, hawk-like, knife-blade, aloof, alienated, severe and stern, a poet-priest-prophet if he could ever get over himself, baby baby baby. 5/5

exiles, james joyce well. there’s a reason joyce is known as a novelist. this is….. a failed experiment, maybe. a fairly boring play about an adulterous love-square and uh… love beyond morality and possession maybe??? about how much it would suck for joyce to return to ireland??? and tbh it’s not terribly interesting. 2/5

travesties, tom stoppard a wild funny irreverent & smart antic comedy inspired by the fact that during ww1, james joyce, lenin, and dadaist tristan tzara were all in neutral zurich, more or less simultaneously; they probably never met, but in this play they do, as dadaist poetry, socialist art critique, and a james joyce high on his own genius & in desperate need of some cash while writing ulysses, AND the importance of being earnest (joyce is putting on a production of it) all collide in the memories of henry carr, who played algernon & later sued joyce over money (tru facts). not my fav stoppard (that’s arcadia) but it’s funny & fizzy & smart & combines many many things that i love. 4/5 

ulysses, james joyce look i’m not really going to tell y’all anything new about ulysses, but it really has everything, it’s warm & human(e) & cerebral & difficult & funny & sad & healing & i always get a lot out of it even tho there’s bits (a lot of them) i’ll never wrap my head around. ultimate affirmation of humanity or whatever. also stephen dedalus is baby. 5/5

dedalus, chris mccabe the fact that this book (sequel to ulysses about what stephen dedalus might have done the next day) exists and was published ON MY BIRTHDAY is proof that the universe loves me. 

anyway this is very very good, very very clever, extremely good at stephen (less good at bloom but his parts are still good), engages w/ ulysses, portrait & hamlet (& others) very cleverly & does some cool meta and experimental shit. y’all it has stephen talking to a contemporary therapist about how he’s stuck in joyce’s text which is all about joyce & very little about whoever stephen is when he’s not joyce’s alter ego/affectionate but slightly amused look at younger self and ithaca is an interview w/ the author about how his relationship to his dad influenced his response to ulysses and I’M INTO IT. the oxen of the sun chapter replaces the whole ‘gestation of english prose’ w/ just slightly rewriting the first pages of about 10 novels published between ulysses and now & it does lolita w/ “bloom, thorn of stephen’s sleep, light in his eyes. his sire, his son’ and i lit. screamed. anyway i don’t want to give this 5 stars (yet) bc i think some of the experimental stuff ended up a bit gimmicky & didn’t add that much to the text but fuck. that’s my boy & i want to reread it right now. 4.5/5 ALSO it’s a crime no literary weirdo woman has written ‘a portrait of the artist’s sister’ about delia ‘dilly’ dedalus, shadow of stephen’s mind, quick far & daring, teaching herself french from a 3rd hand primer while her father drinks the nonexistent family fortune away and her older brother is getting drunk on a beach & starting fights w/ soldiers bc he’s a smartarse

[auctes]

as someone who believes toko best trigger happy havoc character, i HATE IT when people say "syo has no depth!!!" and "toko's an annoying joke!!! wowzurs!!!", AS AN AMAZING FUKAWA/SYO FAN, CAN YOU HELP ME CONSTRUCT COMPELLING ARGUMENTS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF BOTH?

hi ,   anon  !

it  can  be  frustrating  when  people  reduce  our  faves ,   but  the  first  thing  i’d  like  to  say  is  :   they’re  kind  of  right  about  touko  being  a  joke .   touko’s  fragile  mental  health  is  usually  played  for  laughs ,   and  reduced  to  a  punchline .   the  localization  calls  her  a   “  schizo ,  ”   and  her  maladaptive  daydreams  are  framed  as  something  psychotic  rather  than  for  what  they  are  :  a  coping  mechanism  that  her  brain  has  developed  to  help  her  endure  a  high - stress  situation .

i  love  when  people  ask  these  things ,   because  the  more  we  talk  about  that ,   the  more  we  can  start  to  break  down  touko’s  character .

i  would  also  like  to  state  that  this  is  a  dissociative  identity  disorder   [ DID ]   conversation .   i  do  not  have  DID ,   and  i  am  not  a  psychologist .   i  will  answer  this  to  the  best  of  my  ability  based  on  personal  research  and  an ardent  love  for  the  character ,    but  welcome  corrections  if  necessary .

let’s  talk  about  syo .

syo  has  depth .   she  is  an  extension  of  touko ,   who  is ,   herself ,   a  deeply  introspective  person .   while  syo  is  played  for  comic  relief ,   it’s  important  to  understand  where  she  comes  from  :   trauma .   childhood  trauma  that  touko ,   as  a  very  small  child ,   could  not  cope  with .   due  to  the  intense  physical ,   emotional ,    and  psychological  abuse  to  which  she  was  subject ,   touko’s  mind  created  syo ,   who  fronts  during  times  of  duress  and  guards  those  memories  that  touko  cannot  endure ,   as  a  means  of  ensuring  touko’s  survival  and  base  function .   syo  and  touko  do  identify  as  separate  entities ,   with  a  few  key  points  to  consider  :

1 .   DID  alters  can  be  ...   anyone .   anything .   have  their  own  ages ,   genders ,   sexual  identities ,   ethnicity ,   personal  histories ,   and  memories .   syo  identifies  as  the  name  the  media  give  her ,   but  identifies  with  touko’s  body ,   and  accepts  this  as  her  appearance .   a  lot  of  alters  look  physically  different  to  how  the  body  of  the  core  personality  looks .   that’s  always  been  very  interesting  to  me .

2 .   touko  acknowledges  syo  as  part  of  herself .   both  touko  and  syo  bounce  back  and  forth  when  referring  to  themselves  :  between  singular   (  i  )   and  collective   (  we  ) .   syo ,   to  herself ,   looks  like  touko .   she  looks  in  the  mirror  and  goes ,   “ i  look  like  this . ”   touko ,   especially  in  her  later  appearances  throughout  the  series ,   feels  a  sense  of  belonging  to  syo ,   and  acknowledges  that  she  is  a  part  of  touko .  

3 .   they  “  share  emotions , ”   meaning  that  there  is  some  sort  of  co - conscious  link  between  them  that  doesn’t  go  away  completely  during  a  switch .   when  touko  hurts ,   syo  hurts.   when  touko  is  in  love ,   so  is  syo .   while  syo  may  not  be  able  to understand  and  interpret  complex  emotions  to  the  capacity  at  which  touko  does ,   she  absolutely  still  feels  them .   this  is  what  enables  syo  to  act  upon  them  :   as  a  persecution  alter ,   and  later  a  protector  alter ,   syo  knows  when  she  is  fronting  that  touko  is  scared ,   or  stressed ,   or  in  danger .   these  are  the  cues  upon  which  she  justifies  her  murders ,   but  also  those  upon  which  she  is  able  to  fall  in  love  and  build  friendships .

which  leads  me  into  my  next  point  on  syo  :   everything  shed  does  is  with  the  health  and  prosperity  of  touko  in  mind .   DID ,   as  a  trauma - based  disorder ,   is  a  neurological  mechanism  in  place  to  protect  the  integrity  of  the  individual .   alters  fulfill  a  purpose  :   they  perform  roles  that  the  core  personality  physically  cannot .   syo  is  absolutely  no  different .

when  touko  decides  to  actively  end  syo’s  murderous  tendencies ,   syo  complies .   she  knows  that  touko  is  suffering  maltreatment  at  future  foundation  on  the  basis  of  her  being  labeled   “  unstable  and  dangerous ,  ”   and  so ,   syo  abstains  from  killing  so  as  not  to  jeopardize  touko’s  wish  to  eventually  join  the  foundation .   while  she  still  responds  aggressively  to  threats ,   the  only  time  she  seriously  contemplates  killing  is  during  another  episode .

you  can  watch  it  here .

this  scene  is  so  loaded  with  depth .   firstly ,   we  see  a  clear  co - conscious  link  between  syo  and  touko .   syo  volunteers  control  of  the  body  back  to  touko  when  touko  is  ready  :   even  then ,   touko  is  able  to  recall  the  moments  immediately  before  the  switch ,   when  komaru  makes  an  emotional  appeal  to  syo .

here ,   we  also  see  a  reflective ,   emotive  side  of  her .   we  see  her  pause ,   despite  whole - heartedly  believing  that  she  is  going  to  kill  komaeda .   it  is  apparent  to  syo  what  is  important  to  her  :   byakuya ,   and  komaru .   these  things  are  important  to  touko ,   and  therefore ,   important  to  syo .   she  has  never  been  treated  as  normal  :   she  has  never  really  been  considered  by  anyone  to  be  a  part  of  the  system ,   as  opposed  to  a   “  deviant  who  kills  for  pleasure .  ”   and  she  thanks  komaru  for  talking  her  down .   in  saying ,    “ i  betrayed  you ,  ”   syo  is  feeling  remorse .   it’s  touko’s  remorse ,   because  it  was  touko  who  made  the  deal  with  komaeda  to  exchange  komaru  for  byakuya .

but ,   in  the  end ,   it  was  syo  who  threw  the  fight  in  order  to  spare  komaru’s  life ,   because  she  cannot  bring  herself  to  hurt  a  person  for  whom  she  and  touko  feel  so  warmly .

i’d  also  like  to  turn  your  attention  to  danganronpa  3  :   future  arc  episode  six ,   in  which  we  can  further  witness  syo  and  touko’s  co - consciousness ,   and  syo  ultimately  choosing  to  pursue  what  feels  safe  and  warm  and  inviting  rather  than  exacting  vengeance .   komaru  talks  her  out  of  killing  monaka  :   out  of  quite  probably  letting  herself  die  in  the  process .   komaru  knows  instinctively  that  syo  has  emotions  :   love .   protectiveness .   bravery .   syo  loves  byakuya  and  komaru  more ,   and  feels  a  desire  to  protect  them ,   more  than  everyone  assumes  her  to  simply  love  violence  for  violence’s  sake .   if  something  won’t  serve  the  purpose  of  protecting  touko  and  what  is  important  to  her ,   she  isn’t  going  to  do  it .

now ,   let’s  think  about  touko .

my  blog  is  full  of  essays  upon  essays  regarding  touko ,   but  i  believe  she  can  be  best  summarized  by  the  phrase ,   the  heart  wants  what  it  wants .   a  truly  emotional ,   giving ,   and  romantic  woman ,   she  actively  hides  herself  underneath  a  repelling  armor  of  grossly  exacerbated  flaws  in  order  to  protect  her  heart  from  being  harmed .

touko  has  suffered  in  the  past  from  consistent  dehumanization ,   belittlement ,   and  abuse .   her  parents  expressed  that  they  would  have  preferred  her  dead ,   and  so  they  abused  her  at  home .   her  classmates  thought  she  was  weird ,   and  so  they  bullied  her  exorbitantly .   whenever  touko  would  actively  reach  out  to  others  to  pursue  friendships  or  romantic  relationships ,   she  would  be  betrayed  by  others ,   and  made  to  suffer  for  it .

to  help  you  understand  the  breadth  of  the  psychological  impact  that  nearly  two  decades  of  being  treated  as  less  than  human  has  had  on  touko ,   here  is  a  link  to  a  short  thing  i  wrote  on  her  ablutophobia ,   or  fear  of  bathing .   it’s  a  very  quick  overview  of  her  self  image  issues ,   and  self  preservation  tendencies .

next ,   why  don’t  we  consider  how  fully  and  completely  touko  fukawa  loves  ?   as  a  romance  novelist ,   we  expect  her  to  harbor  a  highly  idealized ,   grossly  saturated  perception  of  romantic  love .   instead ,   we  get  a  woman  who  writes  romance  purely  because  she  believes  in  channeling  the ugly  tragedies  of  her  situation  into  something  of  beauty .   here  are  my  style  notes  of  touko  fukawa’s  literary  works ,   but  we  learn  from  her  that  she  :

1 .   prefers  to  write  stories  that  are  grounded  in  reality .

2 .   enjoys  magic  realism ,   aggrandized  settings ,   but  innately  human  characters .

3 .   prefers  romantic  tragedies  to  happy  endings .    (  komaru  remarks  upon  how  sad  so  lingers  was .  )

furthermore ,   touko  states  that  while  the  power  of  delusion  and  its  subsequent  escapism  is  a  powerful  coping  tool ,   she  understands  the  harsh  line  between  fiction  and  reality .   she  understands  that  no  love  story  on  the  page  can  resemble  how  true  love  feels ,   but  her  work  is  so  intricately  entwined  with  emotion  that  she  scaffolds  her  novels  with  universal  emotional  appeal .   fictional  romance ,   then ,   does  not  satisfy  the  resilience  of  her  own  heart .   she  is  as  cynical  as  she  is  whimsical  :   a  true  hopeless  romantic  who  believes  herself  undeserving  of  loving ,   and  being  loved .   she  pours  her  heart  and  soul  onto  a  page ,   so  that  others  may  feel  to  even  a  small  margin  of  the  scope  of  her  feelings .

touko  has  a  very  resilient  heart .   despite  the  horrible  things  that  togami  did  to  her ,   and  the  abysmal  way  that  future  foundation  treated  her ,   touko  is  able  to  protect  the  last  shred  of  love  within  her  being  and  use  it  as  fuel  to  improve  herself  as  a  person .   please  remember  that  all  personal  tragedies  are  learning  experiences  of  touko  :   the  pain  she  felt  as  a  child  became  a  rich  and  lucrative  imagination .   the  trauma  she  undergoes  as  an  adult  is  the  catalyst  to  her  finally  turning  against  her  self  loathing ,   and  building  herself  from  the  ground  up .

what  do  i  mean  by  that  ?   well  ...   touko  fukawa  is  a  badass .   komaru  naegi  remarks  constantly  upon  fukawa’s  strength  ;   that  she  can’t  imagine  a   “  weak  touko .  ”   touko  loathes  herself  ;   her  fears ,   her  weakness .   loathes  that  she  can’t  function  as  a  normal  human  being  who  holds  meaningful  friendships  without  being  suspicious  of  them  ;   loathes  that  she  can’t  look  after  herself ,   exact  self  care ,   without  knocking  back  a  cocktail  of  conglomerate  anxiety .   loathes  that  she  was  weak ,   and  cowardly ,   and  it  almost  got  her  killed  when  she  has  learned  the  value  of  being  alive .

touko  vocally  objects  to  people  walking  all  over  her .   she  wants  to  be  vilified  ;  she  wants  to  be  autonomous ,   and  respected  as  a  woman ,   an  artist ,   and  a  person  within  her  own  right .   touko  exits  her  killing  game ,   and  the  next  time  we  see  her  in  ultra  despair  girls ,   she  is  the  furthest  cry  from  the  woman  we  previously  knew .   why  ?   because  touko  put  her  foot  down ,   and  went ,    “  i  need  to  change .  ”    touko  decides  to  do  away  with  her  cowardice ,   to  fight  for  acknowledgement ,   and  to  reclaim  her  own  life  when  she  has  been  so  deprived  for  so  long  of  basic  human  kindness .

touko  systematically  exposes  herself  to  blood  to  combat  her  hemophobia .   touko  credits  other  people  for  their  strength  and  uses  it  as  inspiration  to  keep  going .   touko  puts  a  stun  gun  to  her  head  and  endures  fucking  electrocution  so  that  she  can  control  her  switches  and  bequeath  her  body  to  syo  when  she  needs  to  physically  protect  other  people .   touko  mother  fucking  fukawa  admits  that  she  is  scared ,   but  picks  her  broken  body  up  of  the  ground  and  stays  standing  so  that  she  can  do  what  is  right .

touko  has  an  incredibly  strong  sense  of  right  and  wrong  that  was  cauterised  by  her  participation  in  the  killing .   in  this  scene ,   we  see  touko  voluntarily  get  the  shit  kicked  out  of  her  so  that  she  may  save  thousands  of  innocent  lives .   she  calls  haiji  towa  a  coward  for  hiding  underground  and  not  fighting  back  against  the  warriors  of  hope  as  they  terrorize  towa  city .   she  does  these  things  simply  because  it  is  the  right  thing  to  do  :   because  if  no  one  is  going  to  stand  up  and  fight  for  the  people  who  cannot  fight  for  themselves ,   then  by  god ,   touko  is  going  to  do  it .

and ,   finally   ...   the  heart  wants  what  it  wants ,   and  touko  wants  to  offer  her  heart  to  others .    “  i’ll  definitely  protect  both   ...   even  if  it  costs  me  my  life  .  ”    actual  quote  out  of  the  mouth  of  touko  fukawa .   touko  loves .   touko’s  heart  leads  her  into  danger  with  the  full  conscience  of  her  inevitable  death ,   but  she  follows  it  to  protect  the  lives  of  those  closest  to  her .   we  see  her ,   over  the  course  of  ultra  despair  girls ,   as  she  gradually  opens  up  to  the  first  person  who  has  ever  called  touko  a  friend  :   to  have  treated  touko  with  an  ounce  of  humanity  and  kindness ,   and  to  have  assured  her  unconditionally  that  touko  was  not  alone .

pain ,   to  touko ,   is  transient .   physical  pain ,   that  is .   she’d  allow  a  person  to  beat  her  to  a  pulp ,   even  kill  her ,   if  it  meant  she  would  saves  the  lives  of  those  who  matter  to  her .   byakuya  and  komaru  make  her  a  stronger  person  :   love  makes  touko  fukawa  strong .   love  makes  her  stand  against  impossible  odds ,   and  tell  those  odds  to  go  fuck  themselves .   touko  listens  to  her  heart  :   to  what  her  emotions  are  telling  her ,   and  for  that ,   her  loyalty  is  stalwart .

i  hope  this  helped  you .   i  hope  you  have  enough  in  your  arsenal  to  speak  up  for  our  girl ,   and  to  remind  everyone  of  the  strong - ass  motherfucking  hero  she  is .   if  you  have  any  further  questions ,   i  am  always  up  for  talking  about  my  daughter ,   and  how  phenomenally  important  she  is  to  me .   i  don’t  think  this  post  really  scratches  the  surface .

in  conclusion ,

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Andrew Offutt, The Broken Sword, Walt Simonson, Siege of Malta, Lovecraft Lunch Bags

Authors (The Silver Key): Andrew J. Offutt was a complex, deeply flawed man. A resident of rural Kentucky, Offutt was a husband and a father who supported his family with a successful insurance business, a job which he did not love and ultimately abandoned to make the bold leap into full-time writing. He was at one time a promising science fiction writer. He also subjected his children to emotional neglect, held baseless grudges against various personages, lacked a full emotional maturity and cohesive personality, and held a life-long obsession with pornography.

New Release (DMR Books): Next week will see the release of the 20th title from DMR Books. After publishing numerous excellent authors past and present, for the first time I’ll get to release a collection of my own writings! Necromancy in Nilztiria contains thirteen stories of adventure and wonder with a touch of gallows humor. A few of the tales have appeared before in other publications, but most will see print here for the first time (including “A Twisted Branch of Yggdrasil,” which was supposed to be included in the ill-fated Flashing Swords #6).

Fiction (Dark Herald): It was written in 1954, you can tell it was written in 1954 because it couldn’t be written today. This is a work of high tragedy that is strongly influenced by the Norse sagas.  If you like Game Thrones but would prefer that it be written by a non-sadist that can actually fit a story that should only take two hundred pages, into two hundred pages.  This is the book for you.

  RPG (Kairos): A speculative element is what sets the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror apart from literary fiction. There’s no element more speculative than magic, and it’s become a common term of art to speak of an SFF universe’s “magic system”. By reader request, here is my philosophy of magic in genre fiction–with advice on how to handle magic in your secondary world.

    Lovecraft (Tentaculii): So, kiddies, it’s back to school on Tuesday 1st September. Here are a few suggestions for last-minute rush-orders for school stuff, to arrive Monday. All available now on eBay… The H.P. Lovecraft shoulder bag for all your stuff, robust in black and blood red…

History (Compagnia san Michele blog): A common misconception is that the siege of Malta of 1565 was a one-on-one battle between an army of Hospitaller Knights against an all-Turkish invasion force. The opposing forces, in reality, were composed of troops hailing from a number of locations. In this write-up we will look at some foreign forces assisting the Order of St John in the defence of Malta. According to contemporary sources such as the diary of Francisco Balbi di Correggio, who served as a harquebusier during the siege, and from later historiography such as the work of Giacomo Bosio, the total defending force comprised of approximately the following:

Art & Philosophy (Chrislans Down): Over at Amatopia, Alexander Hellene discusses nihilism, primarily in art. It’s a good post, worth reading. There’s one segment of it that I want to discuss, though, because I think that it somewhat misses the bigger picture. There are two ways in which this misses the bigger picture.

Fiction (Amatopia): The Fall of Hyperion may as well be titled Hyperion: Part Two, as it picks up right where the first book in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos abruptly ends. Yet The Fall of Hyperion doesn’t merely pick up the story, it runs with it into wild, exciting directions before delivering a deeply satisfying conclusion that actually resolves mysteries while creating a few new ones to propel the narrative into the final two books of the series.

Pulp Science Fiction (Pulp.Net): Ray Cummings (1887-1957) is one of the “founding fathers” of pulp science fiction who unfortunately never got out of the “pulp getto.” During his career he wrote some 750 works, most for the pulps, and mostly science fiction. I was surprised to learn he had written quite a bit outside of sf. His most well-known work is Girl in the Golden Atom. This was his first original professional sale as the short story “Girl in the Golden Atom” in All-Story Weekly in 1919.

Science Fiction (Porpor Books): ‘Cestus Dei’ (283 pp) was published by Tor Books in June 1983. The cover art is by Kevin Eugene Johnson. This novel first was published, in greatly shortened form, as a hardback book titled ‘The Strayed Sheep of Charun’, issued by Doubleday / The Science Fiction Book Club in 1977. ‘Charon’ was John Maddox Roberts’s (b. 1947) first published novel. Roberts went on to be a prolific sci-fi and fantasy author during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, writing novels for the Dragonlance and Conan franchises, as well as for his own ‘SPQR’, ‘Stormlands’, ‘Cingulum’, and ‘Island Worlds’ properties.

History (Western Fictioneers): Happy National Rum Day! This Sunday (August 16) is National Rum Day. I felt inspired to write an article about my personal favorite form of alcohol – along with some other libations your character would have been exposed to in the Old West. The first North American distillery began making rum in present-day Staten Island, New York (or New Amsterdam) in 1664. The earliest spirits distilled in the colonies were rum, gin, and brandies.

Comic Books (Diversions of the Groovy Kind): Walt Simonson’s birthday was this past Wednesday. If you ever wondered how much Ol’ Groove loves the handiwork of Walter Simonson, just check out any of the 66 (this will make 67) posts he’s featured in here on DotGK! There’s a reason the Marvel Bullpen nick-named him “Wondrous”! Here’s a huge pile of spectacular Simonson masterworks for you to ooh and ah over–then go check out all those other posts to give it all some context–and yourself added joy! Happy 74th, Mr. Simonson! Groove City loves you tons!

Edgar Rice Burroughs (DMR Books): The two defining works of ERB’s career, A Princess of Mars (1912) followed shortly after by Tarzan of the Apes, hit the pulp readership of All-Story Magazine like a bombshell. Nobody had ever read anything quite like those novels. Movies and hardcovers soon followed. For the mass market impact, the movies were more important. However, the hardcovers allowed young, aspiring writers who never had a chance to read the original pulp appearances–authors like Robert E. Howard, C.L. Moore and Fritz Leiber–to devour the early Burroughs classics.

  Alt History (According to Quinn): One of the causes for the decline and fall of the (Western) Roman Empire is the revival of the old enemy Persia under the vigorous Sassanid dynasty. This gave Rome a major military threat to the east at the same time the Germanic tribes were growing larger and more organized and the weaknesses of the Roman imperial system (namely how the armies could make emperors in the provinces) were becoming apparent.

Pulp & Comic Books (Mens Pulp Mags): Lately, I’ve been on a Mike Shayne kick. My reading and watching involving that famed Miami-based Private investigator has led to a series of posts on this blog, starting one about the first appearance of a Mike Shayne story in a men’s adventure magazine, “The Naked Frame” in BLUEBOOK, February 1953. I blame my Shayne trip on my new friend Bill “Mad Pulp Bastard” Cunnigham and my old friend, novelist, editor and retromedia maven Paul Bishop.

RPG (Monsters and Manuals): Dickheads bring sexual content into a gaming session. This is one of the fairly large number of things that traditional conservatives and woke types can merrily agree on: don’t bring up the issue of sex unless you are really sure it’s appropriate. And never bring up the issue of rape at all, because: why are you doing that other than to either be deliberately edgy, or be a creep?

Dickheads hog the limelight. If you feel like you are talking too much, you probably are. If you don’t, you still probably are.

Fiction (Chrislans Down): Over on Twitter, Benjamin Kit Sun Cheah wrote a very interesting thread on Wuxia (Chinese heroes) and the meaning of this genre. He kindly gave me permission to quote it in full here since that’s much easier to read than a Twitter thread if you’re not used to Twitter.

Fiction (Paperback Warrior): Using a combination of the names Ian Fleming (James Bond) and Alistair MacLean (Where Eagles Dare), author Marvin Albert (1924-1996) conceived the pseudonym of Ian MacAlister in the early 1970s. The prolific author of crime-fiction, tie-in novels, and westerns authored many books under his own name as well as the names of Al Conroy and Nick Quarry. Conveniently, at the height of the 1970s high-adventure market, Albert used the MacAlister pseudonym to write four genre novels.

Paranormal and Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): Six months ago, before the world fell apart, I wrote about the evolution of the flying saucer from nineteenth-century airship to twentieth-century flying disk. Now I write again. It seems to me that the conceit of the nineteenth century was both progressive and romantic. The conceit was that Science, this new and exciting force, could be and would be used to solve previously intractable human problems. Airships were a symbol of this kind of thinking, the belief being that airships, because of their great power, would render war impossible to wage.

Crime Fiction (Pulp Serenade): I initially reviewed Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg’s By Hook or By Crook, and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year (2010, Tyrus Books) when it was new, and when we could count on new anthologies from its editors every year to highlight a fine array of stories from writers new and old, our favorite writers of today and tomorrow. How I miss those times. Cancer robbed readers of both of them, Greenberg first, in 2011, and Gorman in 2016.

Manga (Karavansara): Hiroaki Samura’s dark fantasy Blade of the Immortal was the last manga that I bought regularly before I decided it was too expensive a hobby, and I did not like the local fandom anyway. The fact that the Italian publisher of the series went belly up halfway through the comic’s run was also part of my decision to let it go, and with it let go of the whole hobby for a decade or two.

RPG (Skulls in the Stars): Operation Seventh Seal (1985), by Evan Robinson. Let’s look at an adventure from another TSR roleplaying game, Top Secret! Top Secret was introduced in 1980 as a contemporary espionage roleplaying game, designed by Merle M. Rasmussen and published by TSR. Looking back on playing Top Secret as a teen, I’m struck at how strange it is: it is effectively “spy D&D,” with a group of 4ish spies accomplishing missions. But can you imagine anything less practical than doing espionage as a *group*?

Sensor Sweep: Andrew Offutt, The Broken Sword, Walt Simonson, Siege of Malta, Lovecraft Lunch Bags published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[insession-io]

In Defense of Antidepressants

The backlash against antidepressants results from a suspicion of medicine, and misunderstands the very nature of depression.

I was first prescribed antidepressants in 2000. Ever since, I have been on and off these drugs, mostly because the idea of taking them made me uncomfortable. It was a mixture of guilt, probably not unlike the guilt some athletes must feel for taking a prohibited doping substance; shame for needing a pill that had such a profound impact on my behaviour; and frustration with the recurrent episodes of depression that would bring me back to the antidepressants I would then quickly abandon.

I broke this cycle when my daughters were born and I realised that it would be irresponsible to stop treatment because being a good father meant having a stable mood. It was a purely pragmatic decision, made without resolving the existential issues that antidepressants had raised for me before. That being the case, I do not write with the fervour of the newly converted, although sometimes I speculate about how much smoother my life would have been had I decided much sooner to stick to the antidepressants.

Depression is widespread. According to the World Health Organization, in 2015 depression affected more than 300 million people, or 5.1 per cent of females and 3.6 per cent of males, worldwide. It was the single largest contributor to global disability, and the major cause of the nearly 800,000 deaths by suicide recorded every year – suicide being the second leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds.

Despite these statistics, depression remains misunderstood by the public at large and is, it seems, best described by those who have lived it. The novelist William Styron wrote in his memoir Darkness Visible (1990) that: ‘For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths.’ Andrew Solomon’s memoir The Noonday Demon (2001) is a useful tome and the book on depression for the public at large. ‘It is the aloneness within us made manifest,’ he writes of the state, ‘and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.’

For those outside the experience, part of the confusion comes from the association of the disease with melancholia and sadness, feelings we all have experienced. Malignant sadness, or depression, is something else entirely, and it takes a leap of faith to accept that too much of something can become something completely other.

Clinical depression manifests in different forms. The two main categories are major depressive disorder (MDD) and dysthymia, which is a milder form of depression. (Episodes of major depression alternating with extreme euphoria characterise bipolar disorder, but this disease is typically treated with mood-stabilising drugs, which are not the focus of this piece.)

Broadly, depression is a chronic, recurring and debilitating disease that turns you into a prostrated citizen, an absent or incompetent employee, a needy friend, a self-absorbed partner, a useless parent. You can’t think clearly, you can’t make decisions, often you can’t get out of bed in the morning and, even if you manage to stand up, you won’t find anything worth engaging with, not even your regular hobbies or your dearest friends and relatives. You also tend to ruminate endlessly, fuelled by feelings of guilt and worthlessness, which sometimes leads to suicide ideation, suicide attempt and death.

Even if the vague links that some people see between depression and creativity are real, by sustaining depression you would still be making a pact with the devil, given the extent of the associated pain. If you have any doubts, read David Foster Wallace’s brutal short story, ‘The Depressed Person’ (1998), in which a young woman is depicted as a self-centred monster who asks: ‘What kind of person could seem to feel nothing – “nothing,” she emphasised – for anyone but herself?’

It is obvious that the discomfort I once felt over taking antidepressants echoed a lingering, deeply ideological societal mistrust. Articles in the consumer press continue to feed that mistrust. The benefit is ‘mostly modest’, a flawed analysis in The New York Times told us in 2018. A widely shared YouTube video asked whether the meds work at all. And even an essay on Aeon this year claims: ‘Depression is a very complex disorder and we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve.’

The message is amplified by an abundance of poor information circulating online about antidepressants in an age of echo chambers and rising irrationality. Although hard to measure, the end result is probably tragic since the ideology against antidepressants keeps those in pain from seeking and sticking to the best available treatment, as once happened to me. Although I am a research scientist, I work on topics unrelated to brain diseases, and my research is not funded by the ‘pharma industry’ – the disclaimer feels silly but, trust me, it is needed. I write here mainly as a citizen interested in this topic. I take for granted that a world without depression would be a better place, and that finding a cure for this disease is a noble pursuit. Without a cure, the best treatment available is better than none at all.

In second-millennium Mesopotamia, depression was treated with a concoction of poppy extract and donkey’s milk, which sounds delicious, but time is too precious to be wasted on anecdotal recipes when the suffering is so great. There is no universal medicine or therapy for depression. Several approaches are possible, frequently chosen on a trial-and-error basis and in a non-exclusive manner, including psychosocial treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy, which are focused on changing cognitive distortions and behaviours, and therapeutic drugs. The psychotherapies have had their critics since the invention of psychoanalysis, but the biggest debate swirls around the use of antidepressants, especially the most popular configuration of these drugs, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

The drugs work directly on the human brain, which is comprised of around 86 billion neurons that communicate with each other through the release of neurotransmitters into a space called the synaptic cleft. These neurotransmitters modulate the electric signals that travel along the neurons and ultimately shape our feelings, thoughts and actions. Serotonin is one such neurotransmitter. SSRIs essentially block the molecular transporters that reuptake serotonin from the synaptic cleft back into the neuron that released it. By inhibiting this transport, the concentration of serotonin in the synaptic cleft is selectively increased while the concentrations of other neurotransmitters are unaffected.

For many like myself, this is enough to help depression lift, yet the critical drumbeat against these drugs goes on. There is strong opposition to antidepressants among a particularly resistant, yet heterogeneous crowd: those who have crystalised a mistrust of the profit-hungry pharma industry (partly justified by many examples of wrongdoing); those with a philosophical or mystical opposition to pills that interfere with the mind, particularly if these medicines are not ‘natural’; and those who make a living by promoting alternative treatments.

Critics ignore the finding that the magnitude of the effect increases with the severity of depression

Even decades after many of these treatments emerged to change the landscape of psychiatry, they are still hotly debated by people ‘full of passionate intensity’, to quote from W B Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1921). The American actor Tom Cruise, boosted by Scientology, and the English writer and critic Will Self, universalising what must have been a terrible personal experience with therapeutic drugs and a psychiatrist, have both pontificated against antidepressants, spreading the typical ideology-driven myths.

Some of those myths, such as the idea that these drugs are addictive ‘happy pills’ that produce the ‘high’ of a recreational drug, are pure lies; anyone who echoes them could be easily exposed as dishonest or ignorant. The most common antidepressants do cause withdrawal symptoms such as nausea, but reports of addiction to antidepressants are rare and tend to occur in patients with a history of drug or alcohol abuse. Unlike recreational drugs that are highly addictive, such as cocaine or heroin, antidepressants do not hijack the reward circuit that is associated with the euphoric rush of another neurotransmitter, dopamine.

The discussion gets more complicated when the scientific evidence for or against the effectiveness of antidepressants is evoked. Such evidence comes mostly from randomised trials in which some patients are assigned to a group that receives an antidepressant, and others to a group that is given a placebo. The conclusions of these studies can be distorted by different sources of error. The most important source of error is publication bias; much of the research is funded by the pharma industry, where there is a tendency to report studies that find positive effects for antidepressants, while studies that find no effect are left in the drawer.

Breaking the blind in clinical trials is another source of error. Here, the individual might correctly guess in which group he or she was included, based on the established side-effects of the drugs, such as dizziness, low sex drive, stomach aches or dry mouth, among others. A third source of error, caused by a skewed measurement scale, is overestimation of the effects.

All these issues are compounded in the popular mind by the tendency to emphasise not individual randomised trials but meta-analyses that combine multiple studies to increase the sample size, iron out discrepancies between different studies, and eventually extract a more valid, that is to say, statistically robust, conclusion. However, the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ dictum of computer science applies perfectly to these exercises. If a relevant proportion of the original studies is fundamentally flawed, the meta-analysis will not fix that problem.

One of the main findings ignored by critics of antidepressants is that the magnitude of the effect compared with the placebo increases with the severity of depression. In the go-to study cited by critics, published in 2008 by Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School and colleagues, this effect is attributed to the decrease in responsiveness to the placebo for the extremely depressed patients. But in a subsequent, technically superior analysis from Jay Fournier and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, the benefit of medications over a placebo is substantial, and not due to differences in response to the placebo. These findings appear unequivocal: while antidepressants could indeed be being prescribed to many people with mild depression who do not need them, they nonetheless work well in many patients with MDD. Overprescription and the usefulness of antidepressants to people with mild depression could be open for debate, as there are conflicting data in the literature, but it has been repeatedly demonstrated that antidepressants work in people with MDD. Why is it so difficult to accept this highly cautious conclusion of the published data?

The message is clear: antidepressants are better than placebo; they do work, although some work better than others.

One reason for the recent surge of skepticism is a gigantic meta-analysis by the psychiatrist Andrea Cipriani at the University of Oxford and colleagues, published in The Lancet in 2018. While the earlier study by Kirsch had included 5,133 participants, Fournier’s had 718, and another study, by Janus Christian Jakobsen in Denmark in 2017, had 27,422, Cipriani and colleagues analysed data from 116,477 people – or 3.5 times more participants than in the three previous studies combined.

The sample size is not sufficient to ensure quality, but the authors were careful to select only double-blind trials and did their best to include unpublished information from drug manufacturers to minimise publication bias. They found no evidence of bias due to funding by the pharma industry, and also included head-to-head comparisons between drugs (which minimised blind-breaking). They concluded that ‘all antidepressants included in the meta-analysis were more efficacious than placebo in adults with MDD, and the summary effect sizes were mostly modest’. The results are summarised by a statistic, the odds ratio (OR) that quantifies the association between health improvement and the action of the antidepressant. If the OR is 1, then antidepressants are irrelevant; for ORs above 1, a positive effect is detected. For 18 of the 21 antidepressants, the ORs they found ranged from 1.51 to 2.13. These results have been widely mischaracterised and described as weak in the press.

It is not intuitive to interpret ORs, but these can be converted to percentages that reflect the chances of experiencing health improvement from the antidepressant, which in this study ranged from 51 per cent to 113 per cent. These percentage increases are relevant, particularly taking into account the incidence of the disease (20 per cent of people are likely to be affected by depression at some stage of their lives).

For comparison, please note the uncontroversial finding that taking aspirin reduces the risk of stroke – its associated OR  is ‘only’ 1.4, but no one describes it as weak or has raised doubts about this intervention. It would be unscientific to describe the work of Cipriani and colleagues as the definitive word on the topic, but it’s the best study we have so far. The message is clear: antidepressants are better than placebo; they do work, although the effects are mostly modest, and some work better than others. This paper was an important confirmation in times of a reproducibility crisis in so many scientific fields. We don’t have to look too far: a major study was published this spring that does not confirm the association of any of the 18 genes that were reanalysed and had been proposed to be associated with MDD.

Now that the scale has dramatically tilted in favour of antidepressants’ efficacy, it is likely that the critics will keep insisting that we remain mostly ignorant about the causes of depression. To deal with this critique, we need to go back a few decades. Chance often plays a role in the discovery of our most famous drugs, as in the case of L-DOPA for Parkinson’s disease and catatonia, Viagra for erectile dysfunction, and antidepressants. Hollywood movies have been made only about the first two – Awakenings (1990) and Love & Other Drugs (2010) – but the discovery of antidepressants is cinematic in its own right.

Prior to the 1950s, depression was treated with sedatives, stimulants such as amphetamines, and electroconvulsive (shock) therapy, without much science backing up these approaches. But new treatments emerged as neuroscience advanced. In the 1950s, three observations led to what is still our current understanding of the action of antidepressants. First, in 1951, doctors from the Sea View Hospital on Staten Island noticed that a drug named iproniazid, used to treat tuberculosis, had a peculiar side-effect on patients, which was described at the time as ‘a sensation approaching euphoric dynamism’, including increased appetite, more energy and resistance to fatigue. This tempted psychiatrists to try iproniazid as a ‘psychic energiser’ in depressed patients, with encouraging results.

Biochemically, iproniazid is an inhibitor of monoamine oxidase (MAO), an enzyme that breaks down biogenic amines, a group of neurotransmitters that includes serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine, among others. When the MAO enzyme is inhibited, these crucial neurotransmitters stay intact and become available for release into the synaptic cleft, influencing connected neurons and ultimately contributing to mood or behaviour. Iproniazid worked but because of its substantial adverse effects, such as liver toxicity, dizziness and drowsiness, it was eventually withdrawn from the market.

Second, around 1957, a drug named imipramine (brand name Tofranil), developed as an antipsychotic, showed little effectiveness on schizophrenics, but had remarkable effects on the depressive symptoms of schizophrenics with depression. In the words of the doctor who first noticed these effects: ‘Patients who had great difficulties in getting up in the morning, get out of bed early with their own initiative, at the same time as other patients. They initiate relationships with other people, start conversations, participate in the daily life of the clinic, write letters, and are again interested in their family matters.’

The ‘monoamine hypothesis’ said depression results from a depletion of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamin.

Imipramine was the first member of a class of drugs named tricyclic antidepressants (TCA) because of the presence of three rings in their molecular structure. TCAs act in several different ways, but their therapeutic effects are thought to result from the inhibition of the reuptake of norepinephrine and serotonin released into the synaptic cleft. The drug has side-effects such as dry mouth, drowsiness, dizziness and urinary retention, among others, and an overdose can be lethal.

The final observation revolved around reserpine, a treatment for hypertension that sometimes caused depression. Reserpine is an alkaloid (a naturally occurring organic compound containing basic nitrogen atoms) from the plant Rauwolfia serpentina. Its negative psychiatric effects were ultimately traced to the inhibition of molecular transporters; with the transporters inhibited, neurons retained neurotransmitters that would otherwise have been released into the synaptic cleft.

Combined, these three observations were the basis for the ‘monoamine hypothesis’ put forward in the 1960s, which proposed that depression results from a depletion of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. Over the four subsequent decades, efforts concentrated on developing safer drugs with fewer side-effects within the frame of the monoamine hypothesis.

In the late 1960s, research began to single out serotonin. Decreased concentrations of this neurotransmitter were found in the corpses of depressive suicides, and binding molecules, called ligands, were developed to inhibit only the reuptake of serotonin. The first of these SSRIs, fluoxetine, was described in 1974. In 1989, it would reach the market under the name you’re probably familiar with: Prozac. In 1993 came venlafaxine (brand name Effexor), a serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI). In 2013, vortioxetine (brand name Brintellix) was approved as a ‘multi-modal’ drug for its ability to target the serotonin transporters but also several serotonin receptors. Over the years, the monoamine hypothesis became, at least for the non-experts, the serotonin hypothesis.

The human body contains at least 12,000 metabolites. On the day of his final exam, a biochemistry major might know a few hundred, but most of us will be able to name only a few dozen, with a clear bias for the metabolites known to influence behaviour. We will immediately associate adrenalin, cortisol, testosterone, oestrogen, oxytocin and dopamine with stereotypical behaviours and personality types, but what about serotonin? The molecule is certainly no obscure metabolite. The French novelist Michel Houellebecq named his latest novel Sérotonine (2019). But would you associate the ‘happy hormone’, as serotonin is often described, with the formation and maintenance of social hierarchies and the impetus to fight observed across the animal kingdom, from lobsters to primates? Indeed, since SSRIs have been found to influence our moral decision making, naming serotonin the ‘happy hormone’ appears to be a mistake. Apart from its role in mood balance, this neurotransmitter is involved in appetite, emotions, sleep-wake cycles, and motor, cognitive and autonomic functions. In fact, most of the body’s serotonin production is not found in the brain, but in the gut.

We simply do not have a consensual overarching explanation for how SSRIs/SNRIs work in depression, and how to link these neurotransmitters to the environmental stressors, genetic factors, and immunologic and endocrine responses proposed to contribute to depression. It is also clear that restoring the chemical balance of monoamines in the brain with a pill, which only takes minutes or hours, is insufficient to immediately produce therapeutic effects, which take several weeks. Indeed, without a complete picture of the mechanism of depression, it is not surprising that the available drug treatments are not fully effective. In a study involving thousands of MDD patients consecutively encouraged to move to a different treatment if they did not achieve remission from the previous treatment, only about 67 per cent of the MDD patients taking antidepressants went into clinical remission, even after four consecutive treatments. Thus, there is a large group of patients who don’t respond to SSRI/SNRIs, which raises doubts about the monoamine hypothesis to explain depression in full.

Other ideas have emerged. One line of thought focuses on the neurotransmitters glutamate (involved in cognition and emotion) and GABA (involved in inhibition), among others. One of the most exciting findings in the field is the clinical efficacy of ketamine, which targets glutamate neurotransmission, producing immediate effects in patients refractory to SSRI/SNRI treatments. Along with the monoamine hypothesis, most of these newer approaches are somehow related to the notion of neuronal plasticity, the ability of the nervous system to change, both functionally and structurally, in response to experience and injury, which can take some time to occur. Thus, it could be that the decreased levels of monoamines are not the real cause of depression, perhaps not even an absolutely necessary condition for depression. The data certainly suggest that there might be better targets to be found, and that the pharmacological approach has to become progressively more tailored.

That said, the temptation to dismiss the monoamine hypothesis to score points against antidepressants shows a lack of understanding of how medicine has worked for most of its history; imperfect but useful therapies have been the rule, even as we refine our understanding of disease.

We have an inbuilt need for self-control, and the idea that a drug fixes our behaviour is not attractive.

The monoamine hypothesis was a remarkable triumph of deductive reasoning, and deserves better from critics who say that depression is so complex it cannot be treated by tweaking neurotransmitter levels. Such a view seems to predate the lessons of chaos theory, which holds that complex systems can be ruled by extremely simple equations, and that small changes can have big consequences. It is also a view not supported by our understanding of biological systems and disease, because we know that a cause as minuscule as a single amino-acid change can make the difference between a healthy life and a living hell.

If you ever tried to convince someone to take antidepressants, maybe you used the argument ‘antidepressants are to depression as insulin is to diabetes’. This recurrent comparison might be useful to diminish the stigma around antidepressants, but for the depressed individual the analogy has two major problems. The first is trivial: he has the option not to take antidepressants, which creates the burden of choice, whereas the diabetic will die without the insulin shots. The second is subtler, but goes to the heart of the issue: a diabetic would be furious if told that he had never needed insulin in the first place, that he had been a victim of a big scam to extort money from him for life. If the same story were told to a lifelong consumer of antidepressants, he might display public indignation as well, but deep inside some pride could emerge from the realisation that, after all, he survived on his own, without any drug. We have an inbuilt need for self-control, and the idea that a drug fixes our behaviour is not attractive. Thus, unconsciously or not, each time someone poses as a contrarian skeptic or whistleblower claiming that antidepressants don’t work, he is essentially a crowd-pleaser.

The key difference between insulin and antidepressants is that the former heals the body, whereas the latter fix the mind, and our sense of self is more strongly attached to the mind than to the body. We do not spend a minute thinking about our pancreas, unless it fails to work. In contrast, our conscience can easily become fixated on a moral dilemma when we take drugs to change the brain. Antidepressants restore the healthy state just like any other medicine, but by tapping into processes so intimately connected to our perception of the self and our moral compass, they raise an existential problem – one that is likely to gain relevance as these drugs become more refined and we leave mental-health restoration for the realm of cognitive enhancement.

The constant trashing of antidepressants has created an absurd situation. These drugs are the most rigorously scrutinised treatments for depression we have to date, yet they keep getting a bad press while ‘holistic’ approaches such as practising sports, yoga or salsa dancing, and consuming St John’s wort, Omega-3 fatty acids, soul food, daylight, Radiohead or J S Bach, perhaps even poppy extract and donkey’s milk, get a pass from everyone. Antidepressants don’t fix the sources of depression that can trigger the disease, they merely fix a biochemistry that makes some of us more vulnerable to stress and life in general. It is a truism that these drugs should be combined with life changes, and that transformative life events remain relevant for depressed individuals taking antidepressants. The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton advised his audience to ‘be not solitary’, and that ‘every man almost hath something or other to employ himself about, some vocation’. This advice is as good as ever. But given the state of the art, the high rate of antidepressant discontinuation, and the tragedy that a depression could trigger, bold statements such as ‘antidepressants don’t work’ are a disservice to the public.

Vasco M Barreto works in molecular immunology at CEDOC (Nova Medical School) in Lisbon, Portugal. He is finishing a book for a lay audience on the social implications of our genetic inheritance.

Kathryn McNeer, LPC specializes in Couples Counseling Dallas with her sound, practical and sincere advice. Kathryn's areas of focus include individual counseling, relationship and couples counseling Dallas. Kathryn has helped countless individuals find their way through life's inevitable transitions; especially that tricky patch of life known as "the mid life crisis." Kathryn's solution-focused, no- nonsense counseling works wonders for men and women in the midst of feeling, "stuck," or "unhappy." Kathryn believes her fresh perspective allows her clients find the better days that are ahead. When working with couples, it is Kathryn's direct yet non-judgmental approach that helps determine which patterns are holding them back and then helps them establish new, more productive patterns. Kathryn draws from Gottman and Cognitive behavioral therapy. When appropriate Kathryn works with couples on trust, intimacy, forgiveness, and communication.

[deniscollins]

How to Disclose a Disability to Your Employer (and Whether You Should)

The Americans with Disabilities Act forbids employers from discriminating against applicants or employees on the basis of disability. But sometimes you are never sure what the real reason is why you get rejected for a job. What would you do if you were applying for a job and had a disability due to severe back pain that required some work accommodation: (1) mention it during the job interview, (2) wait until immediately after obtaining the job and then tell your employer, or (3) wait longer, until after you have proven your value to the company as a hard and talented worker, and then make the accommodation request? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

The invisible nature of my chronic illness protects me from a whole universe of discrimination and microaggressions, but it also insulates me from potential support.

Of course, I acknowledge that my position is a privileged one. Some disabilities announce themselves as soon as a job candidate enters an interview room, along with all of the misconceptions society places on anyone with any degree of difference. I wondered what we’d have to do to help people come out of it empowered and employed.

The issue is as complicated as people are. As with all forms of discrimination, there’s a world between what the law says and how we relate to one another that’s murky and difficult to navigate, even for legal professionals, disability-rights advocates and those long-practiced in explaining themselves to a world not built for them. But there are ways to make it easier, and difficult truths everyone should know.

The cost of staying silent

Perhaps you’ve seen the little self-disclosure boxes on job application forms. Employers are prohibited from directly asking anything about your disability; that puts the onus on the employee or applicant to educate the employer, said Eve Hill, a disability rights attorney. You can request the accommodations you may need and explain how you can best perform the job, but that can be as much a burden as an opportunity, she said.

“In the best outcomes, you become the guide on how to do this well,” Ms. Hill said. “That’s an extra burden that people with disabilities bear.”

Disclosure during the interview process can open up a world of support. Or, worst case, it can reveal an atmosphere in which you wouldn’t feel comfortable working, anyway. And hiding a major part of yourself — assuming you have that ability — takes its own toll.

“Disclosing a disability to an employer enables a person to live one’s life authentically and be able to bring one’s whole self to work,” said Kathy Flaherty, executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project. “Hiding a disability takes emotional energy that could be better spent elsewhere, like doing one’s job.”

That bore out for Katie Rose Guest Pryal, a former academic who said keeping her mental illness a secret from her colleagues meant she could be only about 70 percent herself at work. “Keeping a major aspect of your identity a secret because you fear for the ramifications is not good for you,” she said. “But every time I sat down and weighed the positive and the negative, the negative of sharing outweighed the negative of keeping the secret.”

After seven years, Ms. Guest Pryal left her position as a nontenure-track professor to become a full-time freelance writer and novelist, documenting her decision in a book, “Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education.”

Legal requirements vs. reality

The Americans with Disabilities Act forbids employers from discriminating against applicants or employees on the basis of disability, but the gap between the letter and application of the law can swallow people whole.

Emily Johnson was denied a handicapped parking spot at work because her boss wanted to leave it open for visitors who might need it. Holly Nelson, who has a hearing impairment, was terminated from a new position during her probation period because she didn’t hear a supervisor’s instructions. Jocelyn Mondragon called to reschedule a job interview when her motorized wheelchair broke down. Instead, the hiring manager canceled entirely. Roz Tolliver’s supervisor told her she was “broken” and would never get promoted. Allyson DuPont started her own company after getting fed up with access barriers related to her wheelchair. All of these stories are horrifying. Many are technically illegal. None are particularly unique.

“It’s difficult to disclose at work because most of us know about cases of overt or covert discrimination in employment, whether it’s around disability or age, gender, sexual orientation, race, class or another category,” said Sonya Huber, an associate professor at Fairfield University who has written extensively about living with rheumatoid arthritis. “People are frightened for good reason.”

Caren Goldberg, a human resource management professor and a consultant on discrimination issues, said she often sees people grappling with the decision. “I wish I could say everyone should disclose, but depending on the nature of the organization, reactions can be very subtle,” Dr. Goldberg said. “Often, it’s something that’s not done with nefarious intention.”

Negotiations for accommodations can be arduous, even when they are conducted in good faith. When Charis Hill asked for a yoga ball chair to alleviate pain related to their ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that affects the spine, a simple request stretched into weeks of public self-advocacy. “I felt a little humiliated by the lack of confidentiality when the time came to complete the formal request,” they said. “The experience certainly made me have second thoughts about requesting any other assistance in order to do my job.”

For Jed Findley, who works in education, his reluctance to disclose stemmed from his desire for privacy, as well as fear of losing a position he loved. “I knew they couldn’t fire me, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t discriminate in other ways,” he said. “People’s attitudes could change toward me. Oftentimes an accommodation is viewed as an excuse.”

Eve Hill acknowledged that deciding whether and when to disclose a disability can be challenging. “You don’t want them to be thinking things that aren’t true, especially things that may be worse than the reality,” she said. “When given a choice, you probably want to go with the one that gives you civil rights protections.”

How to have the conversation

Under the A.D.A., companies with more than 15 employees are required to provide reasonable accommodations to people who disclose a disability, which the law defines as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” Those with invisible disabilities may be asked to provide medical documentation to support their need for requested accommodations, and to suggest adaptations that will enable them to perform to their full potential.

“The accommodation changes how you do the work. It doesn’t change whether you do the work,” Ms. Hill said. “You still have to meet the basic productivity requirements, the basic outcomes of the job, just in different ways or in a different location or using different equipment.”

Of course, what’s considered a “reasonable” accommodation can be hard to determine. “The right to a reasonable accommodation doesn’t mean a guarantee of getting the accommodation you want,” Ms. Flaherty said. “The employer is not supposed to just say no; they have to engage in a discussion about the accommodation.”

Ms. Hill and Dr. Goldberg both stressed that communication is key when requesting an accommodation. “The employee can suggest things that might be helpful, when making their case to the employer,” Dr. Goldberg said. “As long as it doesn’t pose undue hardship, there’s really no reason for them not to do it.”

Preparation is also essential. “You ultimately need to be your own advocate,” Mr. Findley said. “Before disclosing your illness or disability in the workplace, come up with a list of answers to questions, and before listing duties you don’t feel comfortable performing, come up with solutions that will allow you to keep doing your job.”

Ms. Flaherty also recommends thinking creatively to come up with solutions that will carry minimal or no cost. The Job Accommodation Network is a helpful resource that your employer can consult for ideas. And as the old saying goes, trust — but verify. “If the employee is feeling in any way concerned that the employer is not responding positively, make sure you’re taking notes and keeping records of those interactions,” Ms. Goldberg said. “If things do unfold and you have to take further action, you’ll have a written record.”

Timing is everything

For people with visible disabilities, it’s not so much a question of whether to reveal, but when. After realizing the only successful job applications she submitted were ones on which she didn’t mention that she used a wheelchair, Ms. Dupont decided to disclose only after getting an in-person interview. “In the face of stigma and misconception, disclosing on my own terms does sometimes give me the opportunity to control the dialogue,” she said. “But I have to be strategic in doing so or the consequences can be disastrous. The balance between discretion and disclosure is treacherous.”

Keah Brown, a writer with visible and invisible disabilities, noted the balance between being upfront with potential employers and risking retribution if they find out later. “Disclosing means to risk not getting the job and then, if you do so afterward, you risk the boss and company’s trust because you waited to say something,” she said.

In light of that possibility, Ms. Tolliver hid her disability until she couldn’t anymore, sometimes performing tasks that aggravated her chronic pain until she’d proven her worth. “I always hid the truth and hoped I’d stay healthy until I’d been at a job for a while,” she said. “I thought that if I made myself valuable to the organization, then management would understand and accept my accommodations and absences.”

The A.D.A. protects people from losing their position because of disability, but it doesn’t prevent microaggressions or water cooler chatter that can turn toxic. “Even though it’s prohibited by law, the law is not a guarantee that discrimination won’t happen,” Ms. Flaherty said. “Unfortunately, bias and misperceptions abound, and employers will sometimes make bad decisions based on that false information. So I totally understand why people don’t disclose and stay in the closet about it.”

If you do decide to seek accommodations, Ms. Hill suggests doing so before disciplinary action takes place, or as close to afterward as possible, so no one ends up in a defensive position. “You want to keep it out of the law as much as you possibly can,” she said. “You want to say, ‘I’m still a great employee. I’m having this barrier to doing just the best work you’re ever going to find. How can we work together to fix this barrier?’”

People who encounter discrimination do have legal recourse. That may include filing a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or a state agency that protects the right to work, or even taking the matter to court. However, there are time limits for reporting most forms of discrimination, as well as a formalized process to follow. The E.E.O.C. recommends contacting your local field office to discuss your best course of action before diving in.

Living in the light

The decision to disclose is as personal as what goes on in your body and mind. It’s often an ongoing process that evolves as we do, and as society hopefully evolves with us.

“People sometimes talk about disclosure like a single event,” Dr. Goldberg said. “But it’s not like a gender reveal party. We don’t always get along similarly with all co-workers and there may be those to whom you never disclose. But if you confided in one person and got a good reaction, maybe over time you might not think twice about telling someone else.”

Ms. Huber discovered a network of empathetic colleagues once she talked to them about her disability. By writing extensively about her life with chronic pain, she gained confidence that supported her work, as well.

“Disabled does not always mean ‘can’t work,’” she said. “I work very differently now, but I also appreciate how much I get done as I have learned to understand what daily schedule and conditions are best for my body.”

[recentanimenews]

Bookshelf Briefs 3/11/19

The Ancient Magus’ Bride, Vol. 10 | By Kore Yamazaki | Seven Seas – Welcome to the first volume of Chise Potter, though hopefully we won’t get a Professor Quirrell. Chise gets settled in at college, choosing a dorm by choosing cats, which in my opinion is how every college should do it. Elias follows along, of course, as a teacher, and there’s a gaggle of new characters, most of whom I didn’t really get much from at all. Chise is, thankfully, much less awkward at being social than she used to be—in fact, it’s her roommate who’s the tough nut to crack. That said, most of this volume was pure setup, and I suspect it will read better after I’ve read the next two. I’m definitely grateful that this series is continuing, though, and it’s worth the eventual reread. – Sean Gaffney

Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection | By Go Nagai | Seven Seas – My first real introduction to Cutie Honey was through Shimpei Itoh’s modern manga adaptation Cutie Honey a Go Go!. It was a fun series, so I was looking forward to delving into Go Nagai’s original manga from 1973. Fortunately, along with an essay by novelist Hirayama Yumeaki and an afterword by Go Nagai, Seven Seas has collected the entirety of Cutie Honey in a single hardcover omnibus. Cutie Honey is an entertaining if somewhat absurd series. Much of the manga’s humor tends towards the lewd and admittedly some of the jokes aren’t as socially acceptable as they may have once been. Between the titular heroine’s transformation scenes and the frequency of characters’ clothing being ripped to shreds, there’s a fair amount of nudity in the action-oriented manga. Since the cast is primarily made up of women, it’s mostly female nudity, but the men aren’t immune from sudden clothing loss either. – Ash Brown

Durarara!! re: Dollars Arc, Vol. 4 | By Ryohgo Narita, Suzuhito Yasuda, and Aogiri | Yen Press – Once again, I’m left feeling that the anime and novels handled this material better—the wait between releases doesn’t help, plus the author’s plotting, which involves everything happening at once, makes the manga more diffuse and confusing than it has any right to be. The best bits probably involved Ruri and Shizuo’s brother, who bond over their difficulty with basic human emotions, like so many other Narita couples. Last time I said Izaya was about to jump start things, but he’s absent from this book, meaning that it meanders a bit too much. It really needs someone making everyone’s lives miserable again. Which I’m sure will happen soon. Maybe. – Sean Gaffney

Everyone’s Getting Married, Vol. 9 | By Izumi Miyazono | Viz Media – The final volume of this series ties up everything that’s been getting in the way of Asuka and Ryu getting married. Ryu decides he does love Asuka and resolves to return and fight to save their relationship. Asuka realizes that she doesn’t have to get married NOW and uses that to spend three years doing so well at her job that she can now take a year off to get married and have a baby and NOT have to worry about being fired for being a married woman. Heck, even Asuka’s friend who was perfectly happy to not get married is getting married. So in the end the title proves to be true, and you’re really happy to see the two of them finally work everything out. A very good josei series, bring on more of them. – Sean Gaffney

Hakumei & Mikochi: Tiny Little Life in the Woods, Vol. 4 | By Takuto Kashiki | Yen Press – I joked on Twitter that after the girls from Girls’ Last Tour died, they were reincarnated as Hakumei and Mikochi, and while Hakumei may be a bit too sensible for that to map exactly, there is very much the sense of exploration across both volumes, even though the two should be more familiar with their setting. We meet Mikochi’s sister in this volume, who is a writer and a tease, not in that order. There’s a festival chapter (sort of), a hot spring chapter (sort of), and a chapter which will make you cry at the death of a coffee grinder. In short, most of why readers read this series is on full display here. I enjoy this more and more with each volume, and always smile as I read. – Sean Gaffney

Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Vol. 7 | By Aka Akasaka | Viz Media – There’s some good comedy here at the head and tail of the book. My favorite chapter was probably the one involving Miyuki, who is no longer sleep-deprived, losing the bags under his eyes—which terrifies everyone and makes Kaguya realize that her love of them may be a fetish. But the bulk of this book is to introduce a new major character, Miko, the girl on the cover who is super earnest and also super awkward. She’s running against Miyuki in the election, and her ideas are great but her stage fright isn’t. Fortunately, Miyuki takes a page from Hachiken’s book and makes himself the bad guy to fix things—fortunately he wins anyway. I want to see how Miko adds to the dynamic. – Sean Gaffney

Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, Vol. 2 | By Waco Ioka and Midori Yuma | Viz Media – I enjoyed this second volume more than the first, not uncommon with Shojo Beat stories. Aoi’s still having trouble getting anyone to give her a job, but after she gives some home-cooked food to a passing drunk who turns out to be really important, she’s making important connections. More to the point, Aoi compares her story explicitly with Beauty and the Beast, and she’s not wrong. There’s also a jealous woman who attempts to sabotage things and is caught and about to be humiliated. That said, that’s the cliffhanger, and I’m fairly certain Aoi’s going to save her with the power of niceness. I am OK with following this yokai series now that Kamisama Kiss has ended. – Sean Gaffney

Maiden Railways | By Asumiko Nakamura | Denpa – Somehow, I’d gotten the impression that this was a girls’ love anthology, but in reality, only one couple depicted herein fits that bill. Instead, we get stories about a pickpocket helping an inattentive husband make up with his wife, a girl who’s moving away seizing the moment to confess to a boy, a ghost with lingering regrets, and a guy whose wife thinks he’s cheating on her because he works late and brings home cake. Trains figure prominently in each story—in a couple we get some detailed timetables as one party tries taking a different train to catch up with someone, but in some stories the action is just rooted around a train station, or perhaps about a beloved late relative’s model train set. They’re all low-key and they’re all enjoyable, even if they ultimately don’t leave a strong impression. I look forward to Doukyuusei by this author, coming soon! – Michelle Smith

Skip Beat!, Vol. 42 | By Yoshiki Nakamura | VIZ Media – Kyoko’s audition for the role of Momiji continues. She’s emerged victorious over the scheming Kimiko in terms of swordfighting, but that alone isn’t enough to convince the director to cast her. Overhearing another actor deduce that Kyoko likes Ren, Kimiko manages to convince Kyoko that Ren is in love with her, with nearly disastrous results. There are some frustrating things in this volume, like Kyoko almost telling Moko about her feelings for Ren but chickening out and her taking in some intel about Kimiko liking some other guy without actually questioning her conclusion that Ren’s secret love is Kimiko. I know, I know. Shoujo gotta shoujo. But I am just so ready for some real movement on this point, as much as I love seeing Kyoko kick ass career-wise. Soon, please? – Michelle Smith

By: Ash Brown

[topmixtrends]

ALISA GANIEVA’S APPEARANCE in the world of Russian literature took everyone by surprise, in the literal sense. A critic by training, she published her first work of fiction, the novella Salam, Dalgat! (Salam tebe, Dalgat!), when she was 25, under a male pseudonym; when the novella received the Debut Prize in 2009, Ganieva outed herself as a woman at the awards ceremony. Two novels written under her own name followed, enjoying similar critical success: The Mountain and the Wall (Prazdnichnaia gora, 2012) was longlisted for Russia’s National Bestseller award, while Bride and Groom (Zhenikh i nevesta, 2015) made the shortlist for the Russian Booker. What sets Ganieva apart from most other contemporary Russian writers has to do with what being a “Russian writer” actually means. Her background is culturally and linguistically hybrid. She was born in Moscow but is ethnically Avar, the Avars being the largest ethnic group in Dagestan, a Muslim-majority republic of the Russian Federation located in the North Caucasus. (It neighbors the more sadly famous Chechnya.) Although Ganieva later returned to Moscow, she grew up in Dagestan. As she explains in an interview, her first language was Avar, but she writes in Russian, with which she also grew up, as it is Dagestan’s lingua franca.

This movement between places, cultures, and languages is characteristic of Bride and Groom. Like her previous works, the novel is set in Dagestan, in the small village where Patya and Marat — the bride and the groom — are from and to which they have come back to visit their families. Marat works as a defense lawyer in Moscow, where Patya has just spent a year working in a courthouse copying documents. They are both intimately familiar with village culture and comfortable with Moscow’s modern ways. Intermingling in the novel also occurs on the linguistic level: while Ganieva writes in standard Russian, she injects many words and expressions from Avar and Arabic, making hers a specifically Dagestani Russian variant. In Ganieva’s original texts, these words and expressions are translated into Russian in footnotes, which presents her English-language translator, Carol Apollonio, with the question of how best to handle them in translation. Apollonio opts for two different approaches: in The Mountain and the Wall, she puts these terms in a glossary at the end, whereas in Bride and Groom, possibly because there are fewer of them, she italicizes them to mark their foreignness but leaves them untranslated, asking readers to rely on context for a general understanding of their meaning.

Literature by Dagestani writers is virtually unknown in the West. The press release by Ganieva’s United States publisher, Deep Vellum, notes that The Mountain and the Wall is the first novel by a Dagestani writer to be translated into English (making Bride and Groom the second). Yet even those living in the Russian Federation are poorly versed in writing from Dagestan, having been raised, as was Ganieva herself, on a Russian literary canon overwhelmingly made up of writers of European descent. The rise of a Dagestani author with Dagestani-themed works challenges this hegemony and alters the way the Caucasus, which occupies a prominent place in Russian writing, has been traditionally represented.

As part of its colonial expansion during the 19th century, the Russian Empire sought to bring the region under its control through a series of military campaigns, a conflict that resumed in the late 20th century, as Russia attempted to suppress separatism in Chechnya. Before he became a pacifist and insufferable moralist, the young profligate Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) went to the Caucasus and joined the army after piling up gambling debts. Several writers were exiled to the remote region for displeasing tsarist authorities — notably Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), who fought in the military there. Indeed, the Caucasus as a literary setting is most often associated with Russian Romanticism and Lermontov, its most famous practitioner. His novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), whose Byronic protagonist finds himself stationed in the Caucasus like his creator, serves as a foundational text of the Russian novelistic tradition. This work highlights the way many European Russian authors exoticized the Caucasus as the polar opposite of European Russia: warm, lush, romantic, and full of adventure, yet also a foreign, non-Christian space of savagery and violence.

If the Caucasus has for the most part been written about from the point of view of Russocentric outsiders, Ganieva represents it as an insider focusing on Dagestani people and events, while sending up Russians who have no cultural understanding of the region. In the novel’s opening chapter — the only one set in Moscow — Patya becomes the object of fascination for a group of Russians when she goes to an acquaintance’s dacha for a party. When one of the guests begins describing his time in the Caucasus while serving in the army, she laughs at him — “You must be mixing up the nineteen-nineties with the nineteenth century” — and subsequently decides that it is easier not to argue when he asks whether she has to undergo a “gynecological exam every month” to ensure that she is still a virgin.

Ganieva’s works show a society that is much more nuanced than these Russian stereotypes suggest. Dagestan is a place where tradition vies with modernization. Those with hardline religious views chat up prospective partners on the internet: for example, Timur, a fundamentalist political youth organizer and denier of evolution, insists that he and Patya are meant to marry because they have been corresponding for several months. Crucially, Ganieva depicts a range of characters’ Islamic practices. Patya and Marat are modern secular Muslims. Patya tells Timur, “I don’t pray. That’s not happening,” while Marat refuses to consider marrying a woman who wears a headscarf and throws a proselytizer out of a cafe in which he and Patya are on a date — itself a modern concept. Marat’s friend, Rusik-the-Nail, eccentric by his society’s standards, walks out into the street with a placard declaring, “I am an agnostic,” for which he unsurprisingly suffers immense consequences. While most of the society is religious, there is a definitive split between families like Patya’s and Marat’s, who practice a conventional form of Islam, and those like Timur and his friends, who represent the Wahhabi fundamentalism encroaching on the region, which many of the other characters find abhorrent. This split is embodied in the two warring mosques in the village: the regular “mosque on the avenue” and the extremist one “across the tracks” that radicalizes its attendees. While fundamentalism is spreading — more women are wearing hijabs and there are violent clashes between the mosques — it has not completely taken hold. Ganieva has stated that she sees the tendency toward hardline practices as a problem in the region, and her works capture Dagestan in a moment of flux, the path it will head down still unfinalized.

Moreover, as a woman writer, Ganieva injects a different gender dynamic into the Caucasus narrative. The Russians who wrote about the region were largely men writing about male protagonists; Ganieva’s own Salam, Dalgat! and The Mountain and the Wall also feature male protagonists, with the latter especially depicting women as secondary characters in largely clichéd terms. But she takes a different approach in Bride and Groom, alternating the chapters between Patya’s and Marat’s points of view. Arguably, Patya’s point of view predominates, at least until the very end, since her chapters are in first person, while Marat’s are in third person. As a character, Patya is independent and headstrong, with ideas that conflict with the traditional mores of her society, which brand women sluts for sleeping with their boyfriends, as happens to her friend, and even prohibit them from wearing pants in public. She questions the narrowly domestic roles women are expected to assume in a society obsessed with marriage; as she wryly observes when she goes into town, “A wedding salon on every block […] Weddings, weddings, weddings. As though there was nothing else to do.”

To be sure, this society insists on marriage for men as well as women. Marat comes home to his village because his parents have rented out the banquet hall for his wedding and a bride must be found in short order. His mother personally escorts him to meet the women on the list she has compiled for this purpose. Yet marriage demands affect women’s lives more. While his parents will lose their deposit on the banquet hall if a wife is not found, Marat can return to his job in Moscow. In contrast, Patya’s mother refuses to let her go back to Moscow, insisting that she must stay in the village and find a husband; at 25, she is reminded at every turn that she is “[a] little long in the tooth for a bride.” While she eventually becomes engaged to Marat, she does so on her own terms. Even though everyone strongly encourages her to marry Timur, she rejects him because he treats her like an object, and although her family ultimately agrees with her choice of groom, it initially goes against their wishes. At the same time, Ganieva does not always depict Patya consistently. In the scene of their declaring their love for each other, which occurs toward the end of the novel, Patya’s responses to Marat — for example, she assures him, “Go ahead and tell me. I will understand,” when she clearly doesn’t — seem as though Ganieva is relying on cultural clichés of how women in love should talk to the men they are in love with. (In Apollonio’s translation the scene reads more neutrally than in Russian.)

Patya and Marat’s courtship unfolds against the social and political tensions around them, which form the backbone of the story and ultimately determine its outcome. The central event occupying everyone as the two arrive in the village is the arrest and imprisonment of Khalilbek, a man whose status in the community is nothing short of mythic:

Khalilbek was omnipotent, omnipresent, and more […] He had a finger in every pie and knew the details of the most minor matters; at the same time, he was behind all major shifts in power, missing persons cases, and fateful decisions.

Because of his epic powers, many believe he is “Khidr, a prophet,” a man of God and divine wisdom. At the same time, he is imprisoned on charges of corruption and murder and is directly responsible for the death of Adik, Marat’s half-brother and his father’s illegitimate son, whom Khalilbek ran over in his car several years previously. Although Khalilbek’s highly ambiguous nature is never fully resolved, the surprising reason behind Adik’s murder and Khalilbek’s role in the closing scene of the novel does suggest a particular reading. It is the confluence of external circumstances — Adik’s past actions, the jealousy of Marat’s ex-lover, the unscrupulousness of the local police in their efforts to root out fundamentalism — that ultimately decides the private fates of Patya and Marat, underscoring individuals’ precarious position in a world largely out of their control.

The novel’s ambiguous ending, while not entirely satisfying, works well enough. What works markedly less well is Ganieva’s decision to include an afterword in the English version, whose aim, as she explains, “is to address a quiet but very important subtext of the novel that has to do with Sufism, an esoteric Muslim teaching.” To be sure, Sufism is not a topic with which most of her English-speaking readership will be familiar, and it is understandable why she feels the need to elaborate (although she seems not to have felt this need with her Russian audience, most of whom would be equally unfamiliar with it). Looking back at the novel with this subtext in mind does change one’s perception, including the interpretation of the ending, which is Ganieva’s goal. However, adding an afterword in which an author instructs her readers how to read her novel is decidedly an overreach. This misstep aside, Bride and Groom is an intelligent and interesting read that brings into focus a little-known part of the world while challenging cultural and literary clichés that have clustered around it. The fact that this corrective is the work of a woman author and a woman translator may be coincidental, but it is hardly surprising.

¤

Yelena Furman teaches Russian language and literature at UCLA. Her research interests include contemporary Russian women’s literature, Russian-American literature, and Anton Chekhov.

The post A Voice from the Caucasus: On Alisa Ganieva’s “Bride and Groom” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2MQKSSt

[theconservativebrief]

Every soccer game is a story that opens up onto an infinite number of other stories. The World Cup is the ultimate concatenation of these stories, the greatest work of literature the sport has to offer. World Cup teams are perhaps the most visible embodiment of nations — collectives whose actions on the pitch can seem, in the moment, to determine the fate of a country. The biographies of particular players intermingle with that of the team, channeling and condensing our most vexed histories, those of nations and their unending quest to define themselves.

Yet while many of us root for a particular nation in the World Cup, our fandom during the tournament is often an expression of a complex web of allegiances. “In both soccer and life,” Kanishk Tharoor recently wrote, “it is perfectly possible to be a proud representative of your nation while being helplessly, incurably global.” While the World Cup is a “place for nations to live out collective dreams and tragedies,” it also turns national identities into “signs of longing for a wider world.”

Like US fans this year, most people across the globe will watch the World Cup without having the option to root for their national team. And while many feel regret and despondence, this represents an opportunity — a kind of freedom to decide what you want soccer to be, and to mean, in the world.

Ask someone who they will be rooting for in the World Cup, and you’ll likely end up hearing a story. It might be a simple one, about where the fan was born or now lives. But often it will open into much more, a recounting of when they saw their team play for the first time, of parents or friends who drew them in, of the emotions they felt when a player scored — or missed — at a crucial moment, of how and where they celebrated a victory or mourned a defeat. And, often enough, your story will intersect with theirs, and you’ll remember the same game, and tell them where you were when you saw it, and what you saw and felt.

Soccer has become a shared, global memory palace, like the imaginary buildings that ancient philosophers and medieval theologians built as a way of remembering arguments and principles. Except that it is a place full of movement, of collective action between players, between crowds and team, the ball always moving back and forth, back and forth.

Our memories are individual, often linked to the powerful emotions sport inspires in us. But it is because they are also shared, connecting us to others in remembrance, they gain power and meaning. What connects all who watch the World Cup, whoever they are rooting for, is that we’re willing to throw ourselves into the big story, to try and make meaning out of 22 players running up and down a pitch for a few weeks every four years.

Why, wonders the Mexican journalist Juan Villoro, has there never been a great soccer novel? Because every soccer game is already a novel: “its own epic, its own tragedy, its own comedy,” all condensed into 90 minutes.

Novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has imagined a work of fiction that would “chart all the incidents, all the moves, all the names” in a game, but also tell “their stories before the game, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, friends, what happened after the game, the following years, the career that finished, life in a satellite town outside some Colombia or Iranian city.”

In a sense, as fans we are always writing and rewriting the story of the games we have seen, the ones we are watching, and the ones we hope someday to see.

Take Mohamed Salah. A year ago, he was a relatively well-known professional soccer player for the Italian team Roma, beloved in his home country Egypt, but by no means a household name. Then he transferred to Liverpool, where over the course of the season he scored 44 goals and became not just beloved by the team’s hard-nosed fans but recognized as a global superstar. He is a devout Muslim who prays before games and after goals; Liverpool supporters wrote a new chant for Salah declaring that they want to be Muslims, and sit in a mosque, just like him.

His style in front of goal is joyous and ever-changing. The season at Liverpool, he has scored almost every kind of goal you can imagine, some from near the edge of the box, others flying through the air and chipping in the ball. What characterizes them all though is a kind of eerie confidence and calm he has in front of the goal. It feels like he’s shifting time around him, Matrix-like, so he can pause to send the perfect strike into the net. But there’s more to his story.

Last October, he sealed his role as a national hero in Egypt when he secured the country a place in the World Cup. Soccer is hugely important in Egypt: the country has won more African Cups than any other on the continent, but they have only made it to the World Cup twice before, the last time in 1990. In the qualifying phase, Salah scored two goals in the decisive game against the Congo, the second of them a penalty during the waning minutes of the game. Egyptian fans in the stadium were in tears, the commentator prayed to — and then praised — god, and the streets of Cairo erupted in celebration.

In Egypt and across the Middle East and beyond, Salah has now become a symbol, his road from a small village to the heights of sporting glory an inspiration, the humble and slightly dazed way in which he has greeted his fame endearing. In the recent presidential election in Egypt, an estimated 1 million voters wrote in his name on the ballot as a way of protesting against the regime.

Egyptian fans will watch their country, and Salah, play with a particular depth of feeling. But the game invites us all, for a time, to be Egyptians — to stand for something ineffable, even utopian.

This is just one of the stories that will unfold during the World Cup. I could tell you about some of the other players — Belgium’s Romelu Lukaku or France’s Paul Pogba — whose stories I have come to learn and adopted as my own. What makes tournament work so powerfully as a global story is its constrained narrative structure, in which an opening profusion of games — for two weeks, usually three a day, sometimes more — will lead the players and teams to an ever-narrowing set of possibilities.

Each team, in fact, plays strikingly few games: the two who make it to the final will play just seven. So there is concentrated meaning of what happens in any given ninety minutes. This amplifies each move, each ball, and it’s potential to change the course of history.

A soccer game is like any other work of art. You can encounter and absorb it without knowing anything beforehand, but it also deepens in meaning once you know what surrounds it and has come before, once you allow others to share with you how they see it. Each team enters a game haunted by the stories of what has come before, of victories or defeats by prior generations, sometimes even the wider political meaning of a given encounter.

To watch a game with others is to hear the stories they see hovering over the pitch. It is to effuse together about a particular move, to shout vociferously at the referee who, once again, has made a terribly unfair call, and of course to jump and scream when a goal is scored.

Those moments are all the more precious because they are fleeting: in the end, with near certainty, your team’s World Cup will end in a loss, perhaps a tragic and wounding one. Going in, we don’t know what will unfold, but we do know that we will emerge with a new trove of stories, and — as with an encounter with other great art — a little bit changed by what we have seen.

In 1990, while the men’s World Cup was being played in Italy, a devastating earthquake struck Iran, leaving 30,000 dead. Director Abbas Kiarostami journeyed into the disaster zone, filming as he searched for the actors that had appeared in his last movie. He comes upon a boy who starts talking about the World Cup — about how Brazil was playing Scotland, and Scotland scored a goal, and only then about how during the game, as they were watching, his house collapsed.

Later in his film, Life and Nothing More, Kiarostami encounters a man who is setting up an antenna above a refugee camp so that the community can watch the game. He asks him whether, in a time of such disaster and mourning, it is appropriate to watch the World Cup. The man explains that he, too, had lost several family members. “But what can you do?” he asks with a smile that is full of sadness, but also harboring the anticipation of the game to come. “The World Cup only comes every four years, and an earthquake every 40. Life goes on.”

We can ask the same question in 2018, with Vladimir Putin using the tournament to his own political ends, with the tournament taking place in Russia only as a result of FIFA’s monumental corruption, and with the world of soccer often reflecting the ugliness that stretches all around us. Yet if people are drawn to the World Cup, again and again, as they have been since the first tournament in 1930, it is precisely because it brings us unexpected stories, and as yet unwritten victories for us to talk about, and dream about together.

Laurent Dubois is the director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University and the author of The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018). He tweets @Soccerpolitics.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Original Source -> How to really watch the World Cup

via The Conservative Brief

[newstfionline]

Hurricane Maria swept away the illusion of Puerto Ricans’ citizenship

By Ed Morales, Washington Post, June 7, 2018

Protesters in San Juan left more than 100 pairs of shoes outside the Capitolio, home to Puerto Rico’s legislature, a silent rebuke to the government, which has been criticized for undercounting the number of residents who died last year from the effects of Hurricane Maria. A Harvard University study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated the death toll was 4,645, rather than the official figure of 64.

At a rally held in New York the same day, speakers captured the disappointment of the crowd. “If it were 5,000 kittens, there would be outrage,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of Uprose, a Brooklyn-based community organization, said. “If it was 5,000 dogs, there would be outrage. If it was 5,000 blond-haired, blue-eyed women, there would be outrage.” Yet as Media Matters noted last week, the mainstream media gave more coverage to the fallout over Roseanne Barr’s exit from network television than the revelations about the undercount of Puerto Rico’s death toll.

In the 1990s, my parents returned to Puerto Rico for retirement, a move that strengthened my ties to island and allowed me to reconnect to its people and culture in a way many of us raised in places like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia find it hard to do. When Hurricane Maria hit, I saw firsthand the trauma islanders felt when their access to electricity, water and gasoline was cut off. Two weeks after the storm, I went with members of my family to retrieve my mother and aunt from their homes and witnessed how friends and neighbors struggled to keep their lives together. I remember the ache and concern of my cousin, who had to move her mother from her home to a hospital as she became increasingly disoriented.

Many on the island had grown skeptical of their relationship with the United States two years ago, when Congress approved the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA, which was intended to help restructure the island’s $72 billion debt. It not only created a Fiscal Oversight and Management Board that would render the island’s government largely powerless but also imposed painful austerity measures.

After Maria, that skepticism morphed into a real feeling of disenfranchisement.

The frustration has been building because damning evidence of the Trump administration’s neglect has stubbornly emerged. In March, Politico reported significant shortfalls in Washington’s commitment to efforts in Puerto Rico, compared with those in Texas and Florida. From the deployment of military helicopters to the funds approved by FEMA for individuals, food and water provided, and the number of military personnel deployed, Puerto Rico was clearly underserved. Frontline reported on how FEMA’s inability to deliver tarps for temporary roofing left many Puerto Ricans unnecessarily exposed to the elements for months.

“Are we receiving equal government resources for aid in crisis? No. For infrastructure repair? No,” said Efraín Molina, a senior computer network engineer at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. “Definitely feels like second-class citizenship to me.” Molina and I became friends as regular attendees at performances of traditional Puerto Rican plena music in New York and on the island.

Like myself, Molina is a “Nuyorican,” a Puerto Rican born and raised in New York, able to take advantage of rights and privileges that those who reside in the 50 states enjoy--voting for president in the general elections, electing representatives who vote in Congress--that unincorporated territories like Puerto Rico do not. In some ways, the full rights that mainland Puerto Ricans had seemed to be symbolically transferred to those on the island, who were free to relocate to the mainland as citizens and not go through the legal process that immigrants do.

But that phrase--unincorporated territory--always carried with it a nagging doubt, a sense of incompleteness when it came to citizenship. As I studied more about what it meant, it became more obvious that it was couched in the language of exclusion, one that could ultimately be employed to justify neglect. In fact, Puerto Rico’s current debt crisis was exacerbated because of its status, since, as an unincorporated territory, it was able to issue bonds with a triple tax exemption, feeding a bond-market speculation frenzy.

The debt crisis, which has become more severe in the wake of Maria, led to Congress’s imposition of the Fiscal Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) that has the power to overrule any decision made by Puerto Rico’s elected government in its efforts to satisfy creditors’ demands for payment. Ronaldo Emmanuelli, one of the lawyers who recently filed suit on the behalf of several unions of Puerto Rico’s State Insurance Fund Corp. against the U.S. government to declare null all the proceedings of the FOMB, thinks Puerto Rico’s plight is rooted in its inferior form of citizenship.

“The second-class nature of our citizenship is clear,” Emmanuelli said a phone interview from San Juan. He feels strongly that the legal basis for PROMESA was provided by the Insular Cases of 1901, which “asserted the racist reasons why Puerto Rico was not sufficiently dignified enough for full citizenship.” One of those cases, Downes v. Bidwell, famously stated that Puerto Rico was an unincorporated territory “belonging to, but not a part of,” the United States. “That case was decided on by some of the same judges who ruled on Plessy v. Ferguson, which said whites and blacks were separate but equal. It’s a legal justification for different treatment,” Emmanuelli asserted. Plessy was overturned in 1954, but unfortunately for Puerto Rico, Downes v. Bidwell has never been overturned.

Emmanuelli hopes the suit against the control board, which is being examined by a federal district court, can be considered by the Supreme Court. The higher visibility could raise more awareness in the United States and be championed by Puerto Ricans living on the mainland.

“Unfortunately, the final decision-making power is held by the U.S., and it has become clear that there is no political will to deal fairly with the case of Puerto Rico,” said Ana Teresa Toro, a Puerto Rican journalist and novelist.

Toro sees the Maria fiasco is “one of the many historical experiences in which Puerto Ricans have experienced direct discrimination because of our political status.” With the island no longer useful as a Cold War rejoinder to the Cuban experiment, she felt Trump’s actions “showed the most inhuman face of the treatment the island has been subjected to since it ceased to be the showcase of the Caribbean.”

With a new hurricane season upon us, and so many struggles still remaining for everyone marginalized by Trump’s America, it’s time for Puerto Ricans, first- or second-class, island or mainland, to build bridges and find a way forward.