#deb whitman

[ewzzy]

If we're going by the "closing the door behind you means sex" standard then by 1981 Pete's been with Mary Jane, Betty Brant, Deb Whitman, and Marcy Kane. Just figured you'd all want to know.

[huntingtonnow]

Juneteenth Celebrations Around Huntington

Juneteenth has blossomed into multiple celebrations this year in Huntington, with music, fashion and poetry among the ways people will mark the end of the American legacy of slavery. Wednesday On Wednesday, the Caribbean American Poetry Association, with Deb Thivierge, Founder and executive director of ELIJA, will host a poetry reading for Juneteenth and Caribbean American Heritage Month. That…

[orangeispice]

guys what if cissy ironwood and deb whitman got married

make peter their best man and all

[marvelousmrm]

Amazing Spider-Man #207 (O’Neil/Mooney, Aug 1980). MJ proves to be a tough act to follow. Pete’s dating Debra Whitman now, secretary for his grad school department. MJ never seemed to care when Pete took off for superheroics — Deb takes it personally every time, assuming she’s unlovable. It’s tough to read!

[whileiamdying]

Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet of Beat Generation, Dies at 70

by Wilborn Hampton April 6, 1997

Mr. Morgan said that Mr. Ginsberg wrote right to the end. ''He's working on a lot of poems, talking to old friends,'' Mr. Morgan said on Friday. ''He's in very good spirits. He wants to write poetry and finish his life's work.''

William S. Burroughs, one of Mr. Ginsberg's lifelong friends and a fellow Beat, said that Mr. Ginsberg's death was ''a great loss to me and to everybody.''

''We were friends for more than 50 years,'' Mr. Burroughs said. ''Allen was a great person with worldwide influence. He was a pioneer of openness and a lifelong model of candor. He stood for freedom of expression and for coming out of all the closets long before others did. He has influence because he said what he believed. I will miss him.''

As much through the strength of his own irrepressible personality as through his poetry, Mr. Ginsberg provided a bridge between the Underground and the Transcendental. He was as comfortable in the ashrams of Indian gurus in the 1960's as he had been in the Beat coffeehouses of the preceding decade.

A ubiquitous presence at the love-ins and be-ins that marked the drug-oriented counterculture of the Flower Children years, Mr. Ginsberg was also in the vanguard of the political protest movements they helped spawn. He marched against the war in Vietnam, the C.I.A. and the Shah of Iran, among other causes.

If his early verse shocked Eisenhower's America with its celebration of homosexuality and drugs, his involvement in protests kept him in the public eye and fed ammunition to his critics. But through it all, Mr. Ginsberg maintained a sort of teddy bear quality that deflected much of the indignation he inspired.

He was known around the world as a master of the outrageous. He read his poetry and played finger cymbals at the Albert Hall in London; he was expelled from Cuba after saying he found Che Guevara ''cute''; he sang duets with Bob Dylan, and he chanted ''Hare Krishna'' on William F. Buckley Jr.'s television program. As the critic John Leonard observed in a 1988 appreciation: ''He is of course a social bandit. But he is a nonviolent social bandit.''

Or as the narrator in Saul Bellow's ''Him With His Foot in His Mouth'' said of Mr. Ginsberg: ''Under all this self-revealing candor is purity of heart. And the only authentic living representative of American Transcendentalism is that fat-breasted, bald, bearded homosexual in smeared goggles, innocent in his uncleanness.''

J. D. McClatchy, a poet and the editor of The Yale Review, said yesterday: ''Ginsberg was the best-known American poet of his generation, as much a social force as a literary phenomenon.

''Like Whitman, he was a bard in the old manner -- outsized, darkly prophetic, part exuberance, part prayer, part rant. His work is finally a history of our era's psyche, with all its contradictory urges.''

Allen Ginsberg was born on June 3, 1926, in Newark and grew up in Paterson, N.J., the second son of Louis Ginsberg, a schoolteacher and sometime poet, and the former Naomi Levy, a Russian emigree and fervent Marxist. His brother, Eugene, named for Eugene V. Debs, also wrote poetry, under the name Eugene Brooks. Eugene, a lawyer, survives.

Recalling his parents in a 1985 interview, Mr. Ginsberg said:

''They were old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers. My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' My mother made up bedtime stories that all went something like: 'The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers and healed them.' I grew suspicious of both sides.''

An Authorization For a Lobotomy

Allen Ginsberg's mother later suffered from paranoia and was in and out of mental hospitals; Mr. Ginsberg signed an authorization for a lobotomy. Two days after she died in 1956 in Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, he received a letter from her that said: ''The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window -- I have the key -- get married Allen don't take drugs. . . . Love, your mother.''

Three years after her death, Mr. Ginsberg wrote ''Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956),'' an elegy that many consider his finest poem.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village,

downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

the rhythm, the rhythm -- and your memory in my head three years after -- . . .

''Kaddish'' burnished a reputation that had been forged with the publication of ''Howl!'' three years earlier. The two works established Mr. Ginsberg as a major voice in what came to be known as the Beat Generation of writers.

Mr. Ginsberg's journey to his place as one of America's most celebrated poets began during his college days. He first attended Montclair State College. But in 1943, he received a small scholarship from the Young Men's Hebrew Association of Paterson and enrolled at Columbia University. He considered becoming a lawyer like his brother, but was soon attracted to the literary courses offered by Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling, and switched his major from pre-law to literature.

At Columbia he fell in with a crowd that included Jack Kerouac, a former student four years his senior, Lucien Carr and William Burroughs, and later, Neal Cassady, a railway worker who had literary aspirations. Together they formed the nucleus of what would become the Beats.

Kerouac and Carr became the poet's mentors, and Kerouac and Cassady became his lovers. It was also at Columbia that Mr. Ginsberg began to experiment with mind-altering drugs like LSD, which would gain widespread use in the decade to follow and which Mr. Ginsberg would celebrate in his verse along with his homosexuality and his immersion in Eastern transcendental religions.

But if the Beats were creating literary history around Columbia and the West End Cafe, there was a dangerous undercurrent to their activities. Mr. Carr spent a brief time in jail for manslaughter, and Mr. Ginsberg, because he had associated with Mr. Carr, was suspended from Columbia for a year.

In 1949, after Mr. Ginsberg had received his bachelor's degree, Herbert Huncke, a writer and hustler, moved into his apartment and stored stolen goods there. Mr. Huncke was eventually jailed, and Mr. Ginsberg, pleading psychological disability, was sent to a psychiatric institution for eight months. At the institution, he met another patient, Carl Solomon, whom Mr. Ginsberg credited with deepening his understanding of poetry and its power as a weapon of political dissent.

Becoming a Protege Of the Poet Williams

Returning home to Paterson, Mr. Ginsberg became a protege of William Carlos Williams, the physician and poet, who lived nearby. Williams's use of colloquial American language in his poetry was a major influence on the young Mr. Ginsberg.

After leaving Columbia, Mr. Ginsberg first went to work for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. After five years, he once recalled, he found himself taking part in a consumer-research project trying to determine whether Americans preferred the word ''sparkling'' or ''glamorous'' to describe ideal teeth. ''We already knew people associate diamonds with 'sparkling' and furs with 'glamorous,' '' he said. ''We spent $150,000 to learn most people didn't want furry teeth.''

The poet said he decided to give up the corporate world ''when my shrink asked me what would make me happy.'' He hung his gray flannel suit in the closet and went to San Francisco with six months of unemployment insurance in his pocket. San Francisco was then the center of considerable literary energy. He took a room around the corner from City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's bookstore and underground publishing house, and began to write.

During this period, Mr. Ginsberg also became part of the San Francisco literary circle that included Kenneth Rexroth -- an author, critic and painter -- Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Robert Duncan and Philip Lamantia. He also met Peter Orlovsky, who would be his companion for the next 30 years.

His first major work from San Francisco was ''Howl!'' The long-running poem expressed the anxieties and ideals of a generation alienated from mainstream society. ''Howl!,'' which was to become Mr. Ginsberg's most famous poem, was dedicated to Solomon, and begins:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .

Mr. Ginsberg read the poem to a gathering arranged by Mr. Rexroth, and those present never forgot the poem, its author or the occasion.

Mr. Rexroth's wife privately distributed a mimeographed 50-copy edition of ''Howl!'' and in 1956, Mr. Ferlinghetti published ''Howl! and Other Poems'' in what he called his ''pocket poets series.''

With its open and often vivid celebration of homosexuality and eroticism, ''Howl!'' was impounded by United States Customs agents and Mr. Ginsberg was tried on obscenity charges.

After a long trial, Judge Clayton Horn ruled that the poem was not without ''redeeming social importance.''

The result was to make ''Howl!'' immensely popular and establish it as a landmark against censorship. The outrage and furor did not stop with the sexual revolution. As late as 1988, the radio station WBAI refused to allow ''Howl!'' to be read on the air during a weeklong series about censorship in America.

There were almost as many definitions of Beatniks and the Beat movement as there were writers who claimed to be part of it. As John Clellan Holmes described it, ''To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality looking up.'' But if the movement grew out of disillusionment, it was disillusionment with a conscience.

Mr. Ginsberg tried to explain the aims of the Beats in a letter to his father in 1957: ''Whitman long ago complained that unless the material power of America were leavened by some kind of spiritual infusion, we would wind up among the 'fabled damned.' We're approaching that state as far as I can see. Only way out is individuals taking responsibility and saying what they actually feel. That's what we as a group have been trying to do.''

On another occasion, he described the literary rules more succinctly: ''You don't have to be right. All you have to do is be candid.'' Mr. Ginsberg was nothing if not candid.

As he wrote in ''America,'' another 1956 poem, which took aim at Eisenhower's post-McCarthy era:

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing

America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956

. . .

America this is quite serious

America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set

America is this correct?

. . .

Mr. Ginsberg said the poets who formed the prime influence on his own work were William Blake, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Williams. He declared he had found a new method of poetry. ''All you have to do,'' he said, ''is think of anything that comes into your head, then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.''

His disdain for poetry's traditional rules only gave ammunition to his critics. James Dickey once complained that the ''problem'' with Allen Ginsberg was that he made it seem as if anybody could write poetry.

Traveling Widely For Two Decades

Mr. Ginsberg used the celebrity he gained with ''Howl!'' to travel widely during the next two decades. He went to China and India to study with gurus and Zen masters and to Venice to see Pound. On his way home, he was crowned King of the May by dissident university students in Prague, only to be expelled by the Communist Government. He read his poetry wherever he was allowed, from concert stages to off-campus coffeehouses.

He was in the forefront of whatever movement was in fashion: the sexual revolution and drug culture of the 1960's, the anti-Vietnam war and anti-C.I.A. demonstrations of the 1970's, the anti-Shah and anti-Reagan protests of the 1980's. In 1967 he was arrested in an antiwar protest in New York City, and he was arrested again, for the same reason, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. He testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.

Through it all, he kept writing. After ''Kaddish'' in 1959, major works included ''TV Baby'' in 1960, ''Wichita Vortex Sutra'' (1966), ''Wales Visitation'' (1967), ''Don't Grow Old'' (1976) and ''White Shroud'' (1983).

In his celebrated career, Mr. Ginsberg received many awards, including the National Book Award (1973), the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement (1986), and an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence (1990).

In 1968, Cassady died of a drug overdose. Kerouac died of alcoholism the next year. By the mid-1970's, Mr. Ginsberg had helped start the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., a Buddhist university where he taught summer courses in poetry and in Buddhist meditation. He also was becoming one of the last living voices of the Beat generation and the keeper of the flame.

In 1985, Harper & Row published Mr. Ginsberg's ''Collected Poems,'' an anthology of his work in one volume that firmly established the poet in the mainstream of American literature. The poet again made tours, showing up on television shows, but this time he was in suit and tie offering a sort of explanation of his work.

''People ask me if I've gone respectable now,'' he said to one interviewer. ''I tell them I've always been respectable.''

During another interview, he confessed: ''My intention was to make a picture of the mind, mistakes and all. Of course I learned I'm an idiot, a complete idiot who wasn't as prophetic as I thought I was. The crazy, angry Philippic sometimes got in the way of clear perception.

''I thought the North Vietnamese would be a lot better than they turned out to be. I shouldn't have been marching against the Shah of Iran because the mullahs have turned out to be a lot worse.''

But despite his suit and tie, the censors continued to look over Mr. Ginsberg's shoulder. During the interviews, David Remnick, then of The Washington Post, accompanied him to CBS's ''Nightwatch.'' A producer, unfamiliar with the poet's work, asked if he would read something on the show.

''How about reading that poem about your mother?'' she suggested.

'' 'Kaddish,' yes. Time magazine calls it my masterpiece,'' Ginsberg replied. ''But I don't know. . . .''

The poet pointed to a word in the poem he doubted would make prime time. As Mr. Remnick reported, the producer's eyes glazed over and there was a long silence.

''Your mother's . . .?'' the producer said in horror.

''Couldn't we just bleep that part out?'' the poet offered, always helpful.

''No,'' the producer said.

''It's O.K.,'' the poet replied. ''I've got other poems.''

Social Conscience Plus Sex and Drugs

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

-- From ''Howl!'' (1955-56)

America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia

I'm addressing you.

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time magazine?

. . .

It occurs to me that I am America

I am talking to myself again.

-- From ''America'' (1956)

And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem, or the Buddhist Book of Answers -- and my own imagination of a withered leaf -- at dawn --

Dreaming back thru life, Your time -- and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment -- the flower burning in the Day -- and what comes after,

looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city

a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed that never existed --

like a poem in the dark --

. . .

O mother

what have I left out

O mother

what have I forgotten

O mother

farewell

-- From ''Kaddish'' (1959-60)

. . . Kansas! Kansas! Shuddering at last!

PERSON appearing in Kansas!

angry telephone calls to the University

Police dumbfounded leaning on

their radiocar hoods

While Poets chant to Allah in the roadhouse Showboat!

Blue-eyed children dance and hold Thy Hand O aged Walt

who came from Lawrence to Topeka to envision

Iron interlaced upon the city plain --

Telegraph wires strung from city to city O Melville!

. . .

Thy sins are forgiven, Wichita!

-- From ''Wichita Vortex Sutra'' (1966)

[oliveroctavius]

I think Deb Whitman and Harry Osborn should be friends

[brawltogethernow]

Professional comic nerd types really wander around writing cringing, apologetic articles with titles like “In Defense of Deb Whitman” that are still vaguely character-bashing like it’s not a top quality premise that the one time Peter Parker dates somebody who isn’t as up to eleven batshit as he normally unthinkingly goes for he accidentally gaslights her into a mental breakdown without changing his behavior, just with his own native shifty obnoxiousness, and later she writes a bestselling book slamming him. Unbeatable. I’m aware that this is one of those posts you scroll past like "Hmm you’re neck deep in a nonsense I didn't know existed until you started talking about it."

[traincat]

Is peter a cheater in relationships?

I wouldn’t say that Peter is a cheater because for me to label a fictional character a cheater there has to be a strong and consistent pattern of infidelity present in their relationships, and that’s not true with Peter. If anything in a serious relationship he’s incredibly loyal -- I think it’s a mistake to view, for instance, the Gwen/Peter/MJ or Betty/Peter/Liz interactions as “traditional” love triangles where one party is torn between two romantic interests because in both in cases despite being pursued Peter displays a clear and consistent preference for the girl he’s with. 

(ASM #96-97) Peter’s reaction to Mary Jane hitting on him, even while Gwen is in England, isn’t interest, but chagrin, which actually from Mary Jane’s perspective is I think a strong part of the reason she does hit on Peter in the issues leading up to Gwen’s death; it’s not to try and break up him and Gwen so much as viewing Peter as someone who is safe to play around with because he’s so loyal to Gwen, or as someone to test to see if he’d break that loyalty, in which case she could write him off as the same as other men.

It’s complicated! I love it! So no, Peter’s not a cheater -- I don’t think we can characterize him as having a pattern of infidelity in his romantic relationships.

This does not, however, mean he’s always behaved great in relationships. Which I think is realistic for a character with a long-running history, but for the sake of the discussion let’s run with it. Before Peter unmasked to Felicia, for instance, there is deception in his romantic relationships. It’s not the deception of infidelity, of sneaking around in a romantic sense, but he is sneaking around -- in his Spider-Man costume to fight crime. This kind of relationship problem isn’t unique to Spider-Man -- “masked hero hides identity from the object of their affection for their safety” is a pretty old tale, but Spider-Man does love to play it up for misunderstandings in relationships. Back when Peter and Betty were together in the Lee/Ditko run Betty often did wonder if Peter was seeing other girls when the reason behind his secretive behavior was Spider-Man. 

(ASM #13)

Which ironically ended up with Betty and Peter embroiled in an extramarital affair -- the marriage was Betty’s to Ned Leeds -- years later, after Mary Jane had turned down Peter’s first proposal of marriage. 

(ASM #189 & #193) So not a cheater -- it’s not his marriage -- but maybe a little bit of a homewrecker, which is very sexy of him actually. Betty deserved to have a wild and sexually satisfying extramarital affair with Peter. (There’s at least one writer -- I think it was Marv Wolfman but don’t quote me on that -- who maintains Betty and Peter didn’t sleep together during this period because Peter would have “never shut up about it” which given how Peter is isn’t an unfair assessment, but my counterargument is that they did because Peter’s canonically great in bed and Betty deserved that dick.)

I think it’s fair to say that towards the tail end of his relationship with Felicia, Peter was having an emotional affair with Mary Jane, who he married shortly after. I don’t think he would have described it as such at the time or realized what he was doing, but I do think that’s pretty clearly what’s on the page. It’s not intentional emotional cheating but it’s hard to say he was 100% emotionally faithful to Felicia, which did cause problems later on down the line when Felicia returned to find him suddenly married to Mary Jane. There was also a brief period where Mary Jane was believed by both the public and eventually Peter to be dead -- she’d actually been kidnapped and her death faked -- where he almost slept with both Felicia and a former college student of his (which is a whole other kettle of bad behavior). But in the end he didn’t go through with either encounter, despite not knowing that Mary Jane was still alive. He did have a long running emotional connection/flirtation during this point with Jill Stacy, Gwen’s cousin and a friend of both is and Mary Jane’s, but I think this attraction towards Jill is actually something he shared with Mary Jane, not something that threatened to separate him from her, as long as I’m spinning out subtext. Jill disappeared from the pages almost immediately as soon as Mary Jane returned, too, even when Peter and Mary Jane really did separate shortly after for reasons entirely unrelated to another woman. 

Rather than a cheater, I think Peter’s just sometimes a little bit of a dog. When he’s dating Deb Whitman in grad school, I do think that in terms of romantic behavior this is when he’s the worst behaved in general -- he’s relatively unattached and directionless and it shows. I wouldn’t say that Peter cheats on Deb, but he yanks her around emotionally and it’s pretty clear that she’s not his first priority and that he’s not particularly interested in her romantically. But he keeps seeing her anyway, which gives her false hope for their relationship considering she really does like him.

(ASM #213) “I have a feeling Debbie’s gotten the wrong idea.” Oh, you THINK? But like, even considering he’s yanking her around emotionally, it’s pretty clear he’s not sleeping with her just because he could and then going around seeing other girls behind her back. I pick on Peter a lot for some of his behavior but I think in the grand scheme of things it’s hard to label much in his romantic affairs as intentionally hurtful on his part, even if he is sometimes careless with other people’s feelings. 

[justdealingwithsomeissues]

I’m honestly getting super tired of the “Peter is dragging Deb along” plot. Deb honey you can do better. 

[oliveroctavius]

#shes like fluttershys fuckin humansona what did she do to deserve any of this shit

Making my way through ssm and if there's one thing I've learned it's that, if there's one character who deserves to beat the shit out of Peter Parker, it's Debra Whitman oh my god, peter please be nice to her I'm losing it

[ewzzy]

OOOH YEAH that's the look of a woman who finally knows why her life is so messed up. My profile series of Debra Whitman ends here. Last time we saw Deb written out of the series with a mental breakdown after discovering Peter Parker was Spider-Man. That was 1983 and now it's 2007 and Spidey's identity is public after the events of Civil War.

So naturally Deb has written a tell-all book. Well it was ghost written anyway. That's made her a target for The Vulture.

It's also made her a target for investigative reporter Betty Brant. Betty's life has also been ruined time and time again by her association with Spider-Man.

OOF that's the least flattering drawing of Betty ever. Anyway her angle is that her life makes more sense now that she knows Pete's secret and she's not scared of Spider-Man anymore because she trusts who's behind the mask.

BRIEF INTERLUDE FOR PETE'S EMBARASSING DISGUISE AND DATED STEPHEN COLBERT CAMEO

So Vulture knocks out Spidey. He's in freefall as he imagines all the *deserved* terrible things Deb has to say to him.

But then at the last second (or last 20 seconds actually) Deb actually shouts out words of support!

"Wake up you idiot!" It's what I've been shouting at Pete this whole profile series!

As a final note, Deb goes to Betty and confesses that she only agreed to the book to get the money for her mom's medical bills. She and Betty conspire to anonymously publish a backtracking of the more salacious details of the book.

It's decades late but it's nice to that Debra got some vindication. Wait this is 2007... that's the same year of One More Day. That means immediately after this everyone's memory of Pete's secret identity and all evidence of it was wiped from the earth. So... all her books were erased and she's back to thinking she's crazy?! Maybe for the best she's never been brought back since.

[splendidnothings]

peter parker like she's a 10 but I will gaslight her until she has a mental breakdown

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

I just rewatched an episode of Spider-Man the Animated Series Season 4 and...holy shit...it was the most soap opera/shipperiffic thing I’ve ever seen in an American cartoon.

Get this...

 So Spider-Man is grieving the loss of his girlfriend Mary Jane (she’s not dead, he just thinks she is) but is also feeling guilty because he’s starting to fall in love with his new crime fighting partner the Black Cat who’s making him feel better.

 She wants t take their relationship to the next step by having them reveal their secret identities to one another but he can’t bring himself to do that because compromising his identity led to the loss of MJ, so he strains their relationship.

 The irony of this is of course that they already know one another in their civilian identities because as Peter Parker and Felicia Hardy they attened Empire State University together.

 Meanwhile another ESU student Deb Whitman is straining her own relationship with Flash Thompson because she is trying to find Michael ‘I got turned into a Vampire in season 2’ Morbius who she was also in love with but was also rejected by because he was dating and in love with Felicia.

 When she finds him though suddenly Black Cat is torn between her old feelings for Morbius and her new ones for Spider-Man and starts being distant with him which gives him mixed signals.

 All of this is made worse because despite being a Vampire Morbius does still love Felicia who also still loves him and does reveal her identity to him unlike with Spider-Man. But now she’s got to decide whether there is any hope for their romance or if it would be better to just kill him and end his suffering...and if it’s the former what does it mean for her romance with Spider-Man?

 Like...Jesus Christ...That’s one big ass love polygon for a children’s cartoon show even by modern standards. I don’t recall anything from even Spec Spidey being that brilliantly complicated.

 This right here is why the 1994 cartoon was awesome. It had character drama that wasn’t played for kids, it had legitimate romantic entanglements that weren’t all that cliché among other shows aimed at the same target demographic and by doing that it also succeeded in replicating the spirit of the original Spider-Man comic books even if the relationships were original to the show.

[gwenjoon]

i only love gwen stacy 

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Backpacker:

President Biden has nominated Chuck Sams, a former administrator of the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation, to be the first official head of the National Park Service since 2017.

Sams, a Navy veteran and former adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Whitman College who has also led several conservation nonprofits, currently serves on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a regional group established to create a master power plan for four northwestern states and balance it with fish and wildlife’s needs. If confirmed, Sams, an enrolled member of the Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes, would be the 19th director of the NPS and the first Native person to fill the role, and would report directly to Deb Haaland, a former New Mexican congressperson and the first Native secretary of the interior.

“The diverse experience that Chuck brings to the National Park Service will be an incredible asset as we work to conserve and protect our national parks to make them more accessible for everyone,” Haaland said in a statement. “I look forward to working with him to welcome Americans from every corner of our country into our national park system.”

The role of director of the National Park Service has technically been vacant since January 3, 2017, when Obama nominee Jonathan Jarvis retired. Rather than nominating a replacement, former President Donald Trump’s Interior Department filled the seat with a rotating cast of acting directors, each of whom served for a matter of months.