#despite my main knowledge of the ocean coming from my limited experience with it. and driving through swampland to get there.

[seagullcharmer]

just realised that my current design for my lorule swamp people is basically just. the people of lurelin.

[cheri-translates]

[CN] Gavin’s Sky Date - Prologue

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a date prologue, 云霄之约, which has not been released in English servers! 🍒

Do note that you have to read this before embarking on the actual date, because it contains background information and sweet domestic bliss you wouldn't want to miss :>

[ This date was released on 14 April 2021 ]

[ Part One: A Dream About to Take Flight ]

MC: Ahhh! My life is up to me. Not. Up. To. Fate!

The small dice in my furled hand is tossed around several times. When I loosen my grip, it rolls quickly on the map -- ‘2′.

Gavin: Hahaha--

Gavin laughs, but hurriedly retracts his smile when he senses my murderous gaze.

Gavin: It’s okay, things will definitely take a favourable turn in the next round.

Sulky, I let out of a huff. I watch as he picks up the dice, casually rolling a '5′. Then, he cheerfully shifts his own plane on the map by six spaces.

[Note] In the game of Aeroplane Chess, your plane can only leave the starting point if you roll a ‘5′ of ‘6′!

MC: ...

It’s a Saturday afternoon. Gavin and I had nothing to do after eating, so we randomly grabbed a set of Aeroplane Chess from the supermarket to play. But I didn’t expect to have such a terrible gaming experience!

Although it’s been the sixth or seventh round, I just can’t the ‘6′ I need to get my plane out of the hangar. On the other hand, Gavin has always been able to get it to take flight smoothly, and very quickly reaches the goal.

MC: Gavin, with your kind of luck, there’s no need to waste it on playing games with me.

After pondering for a long while, I offer him a serious suggestion.

MC: Let’s head out to buy a lottery ticket?

Gavin: Why don’t we play something else? The paper model from last time was only half done. Since we have time today, we could get it done at one go.

At this moment, the phone on the floor beside me rings. Seeing the familiar number, I tap on the hands-free function.

Nurse: Miss MC, the physical report done at our hospital is ready. Please bring your receipt and collect it within fifteen working days.

MC: Mm, got it, thank you.

Gavin is currently storing the Aeroplane Chess pieces into the box. Hearing this conversation, he gives me a puzzled look.

Gavin: Haven’t you already gone for a physical examination this year? Are you feeling unwell?

MC: No, no. I’m using the report for the registration.

I deliberately pretend to be secretive, leaning towards him. Then, I show him the registration form that I had submitted online beforehand.

MC: I’m going to get a Private Pilot License.

-

[ Part Two: First Day of School ]

On the first day of aviation training, I set the alarm to wake me up at 6.30am. Even Gavin is stunned at the level of enthusiasm I have for learning.

Gavin: The courses for the aviation license can get pretty dry. You have to be mentally prepared.

MC: Are you referring to things like meteorology, aircraft structure, air traffic regulations?

Gavin: Mm. Aside from the exams, such knowledge is necessary for aircraft pilots.

While he speaks, he lifts his head to give me a smile.

Gavin: But they definitely won’t stump you.

After packing my things, I grab a random jacket and prepare to leave.

The classes take place in the suburbs, and it takes an hour to get there. Despite waking up early, I’d be late if I don’t hurry up.

But Gavin is clearly not too worried about this matter. He holds a slice of bread in his mouth while looking at his phone.

Gavin: Since I’m sending you there, you won’t be late. Before your first official lesson, I’ll give you a flight class.

I walk over to him, pulling up the zipper of his uniform, and also picking up the motorcycle helmet from the table.

MC: To prevent this from being a mere flash in the pan, I want to leave the joy of flight to the end of the course. But if going by land would make me late...

Gavin rolls the bread into his mouth, taking the helmet from my hand.

Gavin: No matter the route, you won’t be late. Oh yes, what class are you taking today?

-

[ Part Two, Option 1: Principles of Meteorology ]

Instructor: I’ll ask some small questions to test your foundation and see if you take note of knowledge in this area.

He opens the PowerPoint presentation, then uses a laser pointer to point at the image on the first page - it's a cumulus cloud with a flat bottom layer and a high, upward curve at the top.

Instructor: Does anyone know what this cloud is called?

MC: Cumulus congestus cloud.

Instructor: Correct. The next question - when the International Civil Aviation Organisation observes cloud volume, how many segments do they divide the sky into?

MC: It should be eight segments.

I recall that Gavin brought this up before.

Instructor: Not bad, miss. You did preparatory work beforehand, didn’t you?

MC: No no, I have a friend who has a better understanding in this area, so I was just influenced.

After saying this, chuckles drift from the surroundings. The instructor nods in understanding.

Instructor: In that case, you won’t have a problem during the exams.

MC: ...I’ll do my best.

After all, my confidence is limited when it comes to exams.

Just as I’m thinking about this, I receive a notification on my phone. Gavin has sent me an incredibly large document file.

Gavin: I don’t know how to teach, so I compiled some materials you might need for the exam.

I grip my phone, suddenly feeling like the weather is so good that it makes one carefree and relaxed.

It’s just an exam. I’ll definitely be fine.

-

[ Part Two, Option 2: Aviation Regulations Class ]

At 2pm in the afternoon, the sun shines from above. I had a full meal, so fighting against the sleeping bug is a difficult challenge.

Instructor: Before the flight, the captain has to carry out the necessary inspections of the aircraft. Until the inspections are complete, you can’t take off. This regulation is easy to understand. In fact...

When the dullness of the course matches how fine the weather is, the entire classroom gets immersed in a drowsy atmosphere.

I take a few deep breaths and pat my face... but I still feel like sleeping.

Instructor: Okay, we’ll take a 10 minute break. You students look sleepy, so go wash your faces to freshen up.

The moment he finishes speaking, the sound of heads plopping down on the tables can be heard all around.

Just as I prepare to stand up and stretch, my phone suddenly vibrates.

Delivery boy: Hello, I’ve placed your take-out at the main counter.

MC: Take-out?

But I didn’t order take-out...

While I’m puzzled, the young lady from the main counter very politely brings the item to the classroom - it’s a cup of coffee.

There’s only one simple line on the note of the take-out: Persevere for a little longer. Gavin.

I retrieve the coffee from the bag, taking a tiny slip. The instructor walks past, giving me a glance from the side.

Instructor: Are you drinking coffee or milk tea? You’re smiling so happily.

MC: Being able to swim in the ocean of knowledge is always meant to be a happy thing.

The instructor gives me an expression which says, “like I’d actually believe you”.

MC: Instructor, let’s continue with the lesson. I’m not drowsy anymore. Learning for another four hours is no problem at all!

-

[ Part Three: Being Your Co-pilot ]

Gavin: Do you want to head out for a stroll after dinner? It seems to be really cooling outside.

I’m currently taking out plates from the kitchen drawer, subconsciously craning my head to glance outside.

MC: It’s going to rain, isn’t it...

Gavin: Really? I’ll check the weather forecast. Earlier in the afternoon, Eli mentioned taking out some time to wash his car at night. I even thought today would be a good day.

I step into the living room, setting down plates on the dining table. 

MC: There are just some cumulonimbus clouds in the sky. It might not really rain.

Gavin scrolls through the real-time weather, then gives me a smile.

Gavin: It’s really going to rain.

He gets up, opening the rice cooker and scooping a full bowl of rice for me.

Gavin: At first, I even thought you’d find such theoretical knowledge boring. I didn’t think you’d learn them so earnestly. Looks like you really want to get the license.

MC: Of course. I want to be your co-pilot.

Although Gavin hasn’t even scooped rice for himself, he’s already served me a huge pile of vegetables.

Gavin: Sure. I’ll wait for the day you get your license.

Just as I’m about to talk about how assured I am about getting the license, I realise that the plate on my hand is becoming fuller and fuller. 

Before I can even voice my question, Gavin responds.

Gavin: Learning is tough. You need to eat a little more. I also bought you ice-cream. It’s in the second compartment of the freezer. I remember you mentioning that as long as you eat something delicious during difficult times, you can press on easily.

MC: ...hahaha! Mm! After having this meal, I’ll complete all my post-class homework!

-

[ Aviation Terminology Class ]

MC: Calling for the control tower. Number N8596 has arrived, and is requesting for a landing gate.

Gavin (through the phone): Number N8596, you may use aircraft Gate Number One.

Gavin’s light-hearted laughter drifts from the phone.

Gavin: Shouldn’t your class end at 7pm? It’s only 6pm.

MC: The plan was to be dismissed at 7pm, but... for some reason, those in my class were really interested in the Aviation Terminology class, so they did their preparatory work in advance. The three hour class was over in one and a half hours. The instructor said that we already grasped all the key points, so we were dismissed early. What about you? How much longer till you’re off work?

Gavin: For me... less than half an hour. You could think about what to do with this unexpectedly free hour. I remember that there’s a new dessert shop opposite the cinema.

MC: You remembered? I never even told you about it. How could you remember? Officer Gavin, you better tell me the truth. You didn’t remember it - you specially searched it up.

Gavin: Mm, I specially searched it up. I even found that there are claw machines along the shopping street on the ground level of the cinema. 

MC: Looks like what I’m going to do in the next hour has already been scheduled. 

Gavin: Wait for me at the office first. I’ll look for you once I’m done with the work on hand.

-

[ Part Four: Flight Practice ]

Today’s the first flight practice class. The instructor is sitting in the co-pilot seat, watching my every move throughout the entire journey.

I wasn't nervous at first, but each time he glances at me, I involuntary wonder if I’ve done something wrong.

In an instant, I recall the fear of taking the aviation exam...

Until the plane successfully takes flight, I keep feeling as though the thing suspending in the air isn’t the plane, but my heart.

Instructor: It’s rare for you to make a trip up here. What’s there to be nervous about? Come, lift your head and look at the sky.

At this moment, countless gripes flash across my mind: What’s so nice about the sky? I’ve seen all kinds of skies. Right now, all I want is to fly the plane...

But the moment I lift my head, I’m rendered speechless.

Instructor: How is it? The first time I saw it, I was so stunned that I couldn't speak either.

MC: It’s really beautiful.

Sunlight casts a layer of golden hue on the soft and white clouds, blending the colours of gold and crimson.

I’m unable to describe how the scenery before me makes me feel. 

It’s a feeling which... makes one feel that life has meaning.

All of a sudden, another thought surfaces in my mind: I wonder what went through Gavin’s mind when he saw such a sight for the first time.

The instructor sitting next to me glances at me from the side.

Instructor: Thinking about your boyfriend again?

MC: [blushing] ...no!

Instructor: It’s normal. Each time I’m flying, I can’t help but think of my wife. There isn’t a reason to it. It’s just a sudden thought, an involuntary reaction.

The instructor laughs as he gives me advice with a contagious smile.

Instructor: If you’re thinking about him, just do it. It’s fine. It’s a normal thing. When you see certain things, your natural reaction is to think of someone.

MC: ...Instructor, I usually can’t tell, but you’re actually quite philosophical.

I grab the joystick of the plane, watching as countless clouds drift past leisurely.

All I want to do is take a photograph of this moment for Gavin.

Date: here

-

Gavin watching as I drool over the thought of Eli scrubbing his car in the rain while wearing a singlet:

[tawakkull]

Spirituality in islam: Sakr and Sahw (Intoxication and Sobriety)

In the language of Sufism, sakr (intoxication) means that an initiate is enraptured by the rays of the manifestations of God’s “Face.” His/her returning to his/her former, normal state is sahw (sobriety). These two terms are usually used together as sahw u sakr.

There is a relation between intoxication and absence. If the inner world of seekers after the Truth who feel intoxication is not satisfied with the Divine gifts, then they lack something in intoxication, and suffer irregular tides with respect to the state of absence. It is coloring, rather than self-possession, which is witnessed in their actions. For this reason, such seekers should be regarded as those who have perhaps feigned intoxication rather than being actually intoxicated. However, it sometimes occurs that the gifts come in showers and invade the whole being, with the result that then they do become fully intoxicated.

Intoxication sometimes arises from a strong belief, a considerable knowledge of God, and is balanced by fear and awe, making itself felt in a broader sense. As for the degree of intoxication which is felt by those who have advanced further on the way and who have approached nearer to God, whenever such travelers are honored with the light of the manifestation of the “Face” or with the vision of the “Face” beyond all concepts of modality, they immediately become intoxicated. The spirit overflows with zeal and joy and the heart feels excessive excitement.

Sobriety means that the intoxicated ones return to their former, normal state. Like intoxication, sobriety is also an undeniable part of the journeying toward the Almighty. Whenever the Truth invades the very being of the intoxicated lovers of God the Almighty, who spend their lives immersed in spiritual pleasures in the valleys of absence, they feel as if they have immediately fallen into an ocean and have vanished like a drop into the world of feelings, or that they have been burnt away like a dried, flammable object and that their nature has changed. Furthermore, the ways and bridges of sensing are demolished one after another and He alone can be felt everywhere and in everything. There are many who see a relation between such a state and what is meant in the verse (7:143): As soon as his Lord displayed an exclusive manifestation for the mountain, He made it crumble to dust, and Moses fell down in a swoon (as if struck by lightning). Just as Mount Sinai, or a part of it, was rendered dust, despite its immensity, and just as Prophet Moses, upon him be peace, fell down in a swoon as if struck by lightning, despite his being one of the five greatest Messengers of God, people of ecstasy feel as if they have changed their nature, they take up different attitudes, act as if intoxicated and utter words that suggest intoxication:

O cup-bearer, pour wine into the cup, it is time to break the fast;

Restore this ruin; it is time to display the favor we receive. (M. Lutfi)

This day Nasimi displays intoxication with the grace of the cup-bearer;

I have always seen Mustafa in the wine which intoxicates me. (Nasimi)

There are many other words uttered that concern intoxication, but it is beyond the scope of this book to cite them all. Only consider that the famous Hafiz al-Shirazi begins his Diwan with the verse, Beware, O cup-bearer, bring a cup and pass it around!

Intoxication is a state in which one is enraptured with pleasures; of sobriety the main characteristics are knowledge and self-possession. A traveler is in waves of unintended, unpremeditated joy and pleasures in the state of intoxication, while in sobriety, he or she is conscious, self-possessed, and makes deliberate efforts to feel the All-Holy Truth.

Some consider intoxication to be when a heart boils with extraordinary joy and excitement in the moment when the person feels deeply the All-Beloved One. We may interpret this state as the human self being immersed in joy and pleasures in the face of the gifts coming from the Unseen World or when an initiate loses him or herself, being overpowered by love. If the human self gets intoxicated because of immersion in joy and pleasures, this is regarded as a natural state of intoxication which an initiate gets into. If love drives the person into intoxication, this is the state of intoxication into which God Himself draws him or her. However, whatever the reason for intoxication, the traveler to the Truth lives wonder-struck and acts in tides of zeal and joy. As seekers deepen in intoxication, they begin to wander in the valleys of amazement and astonishment. Sometimes their will-power may even break down, with the result that they begin to feel as if they were a shadow of the Light of His Existence. Those who have reached this point are called the “willed ones.” Their finite attributes are replaced by the manifestations of the Attributes of the All-Permanent One, and they become a polished mirror of the fact that he sees by Me.

Indicating this highest point, it is said in Thamarat al-Fuad (“The Fruits of the Heart”):

My voice, which sings like a nightingale, has been made to speak by Him;

My eyes, which see, see by Him, and I have heard speech from Him.

He has favored me with speech, with which He has brought mysteries to light.

By the all-brilliant Light of God, my heart has been made extremely bright,

And by the light of Muhammad, I have become one with a pleasant heart.

Some have disapproved the use of the word intoxication for a spiritual state as it celebrates a concept that is scorned by both reason and the Shari'a. But intoxication, which we can describe as the state of losing oneself due to the depth of love and ecstasy, is a metaphor used to express being exposed to or being favored with the rays or gifts of the Almighty which enrapture. Initiates enraptured by these gifts or rays cannot distinguish anything because of the depth of the waves of joy and pleasure in which they are drowning. In a hadith concerning repentance, God’s Messenger, who is the most advanced in reasoning and sensibility, tells us that a man of the desert expresses the excessive joy he feels with the words coming from his mouth unintentionally: “My God! You are my servant and I am Your Lord." This may be a good example of what may happen within the ecstasies that one experiences due to being favored by the Almighty’s stream of gifts.

There have been numerous people overpowered by this state, who burn with love and yearning. With his words, "O singer, play the instrument, for tonight I am intoxicated!”, Muhammed Lutfi Efendi, taking advantage of the permissibility of metaphors, declares nothing more than the joy and zeal of a lover.

As it has been to date, many travelers to the Truth will from now on murmur the same things each in their own style in the face of the Divine lights, colors and forms that they observe everywhere. In fact, when a heart falls in love with the Eternally Beloved One and is invaded by ecstasies, and in its conscience feels His company, only those who have Prophetic insight and resolution can save themselves from confusion. Other faithful lovers, who dive deep into the cataracts of love (or who flow abundantly like a river swelling with rains,) will sometimes overflow their limits; they will let themselves into the huge waves of love due to the rejoicing originating in feeling in His company, and always live in wonder, uttering “He!”

The feeling of absence that a traveler to the Truth has during intoxication is expressed by “He!” Although some suggest confusion, the following verses are beautiful in expressing this:

The lights of my eyes are He, and the direction for my reason is He;

My tongue always utters He is He, and I sigh and groan with He.

My heart goes on an excursion in He, the love of my soul is He.

Those who are lovers and intoxicated are always with He.

My soul has sacrificed itself in the way of its Beloved,

Its union is with He, its parting is with He;

And the cure for its afflictions is He.

Sobriety is the condition when one favored with knowledge of God comes to after having gone into an absence of feelings and consciousness, or, as with the Prophets, when one spends a lifetime in wakefulness and consciousness. It is the opposite of intoxication. The following couplet of Tokadizade Sekip is worth quoting in this respect:

The people of peace intoxicated with intimacy in Your Presence,

Do not want to exchange their rapture with sobriety.

Intoxication is a state, while sobriety is a station and is more objective, secure, and straightforward when compared to intoxication. While intoxication comes from a subjective consideration of the Truth, sobriety is based on the consideration of the All-Exalted, Majestic Being known by His Names and outlined by His Attributes and Whose Essence cannot be perceived. From another perspective, an initiate is out of his or her senses when in a state of intoxication, but is sensible in sobriety. Intoxication suggests “self-annihilation in God,” but sobriety implies “subsistence with God,” which is subsistence by His Subsistence and is defined as “subsistence with God and being in His company.”

Some prefer intoxication to sobriety, yet this is the view of the intoxicated when overpowered by the state or induced by traveling through the valleys of coloring. There is absence in intoxication and in sobriety there is peace and rest. Sobriety is a few steps higher than intoxication. Intoxication means being overpowered by state; it is accompanied by coloring, and is the way of some saints, while sobriety depends on consciousness, is accompanied by self-possession, and is the way of the Prophets and the purified scholars. The Qur'an declares (15:99): Worship your Lord until certainty, which is bound to come, comes. An approach to this Qur'anic declaration is: “Continue on the way to God until you are fully awakened by death to the truth of the belief’s pillars, for traveling toward the Infinite One is endless.”

In addition, sobriety is closely connected with the consideration of life and requires strong will-power. While in intoxication, the considerations of one’s feeling annihilated in (God’s) Existence and one’s feeling annihilated in the Witnessed or in His manifestations, sometimes keep the will-power under pressure, there is in sobriety special assistance and protection that come from the company of God, such as that which is expressed in: He hears by Me, and sees by Me, and holds by Me, and walks by Me.

Our Lord! Grant us from Your Presence a special mercy and arrange for us in our affairs what is right and for our good!

May Your peace and blessings be upon our master Muhammad and his family for ever.

[mobydickmusical]

Every book chapter a song is named after: Loomings (Ch 1)

Since most of the (most recent) tracklist is named after chapters of the book, I’m going to attempt to work through the whole of the show this way, talking a bit about my thoughts on each chapter’s translation into a song. Based on the tracklist chronology rather than the book chronology. Skipping the songs we’ve already heard, for obvious reasons.

Also fairly obvious, but even though I’m using the chapters to imagine the songs, I naturally can’t be sure how closely they’ll follow the text of that specific chapter (see, The Pacific, which actually follows completely different chapters). 

TW for brief mention of suicidal ideation 

Loomings is very different from Extracts, in that I can pretty easily envision it fitting into a show of Dave’s, and imagine what it might be like as a song.

This chapter is our first direct introduction to what to expect from the body of this book, and it has four-ish main sections: 

1. Ishmael introduces himself as the narrator recounting this story, and explains his general path in it (going to sea because it’s what he does when he’s exceedingly depressed) 

2. He dwells on mankind’s inevitable attraction to water, and that this is due to how it represents the unknowable to us 

3. He details his reasoning for why he always goes to sea as a simple sailor, as opposed to a passenger or a crew member of higher rank

4. He describes his “choice” to go on a whaling voyage in particular as actually designated by fate. He does, however, then explain his personal attraction to going on the voyage, that could make it appear like free will to him. 

So, there is a lot being set up in this chapter. I can very much feel this becoming my main issue to accept (i.e. get my head out of my ass) with reconciling the adaptation with the book overall - there is so Much in Moby Dick and there is only so Much you can fit into a musical. Even a 4+ hour one. But yeah, that’s seen on a smaller scale with Loomings, in how it sets up a lot of background information about Ishmael and how he thinks, as well as starting some thought process about a number of important themes for the book (fate vs free will, capitalist and power dynamics, the limits of mankind’s knowledge… all that important shit). Where the song draws its focus from will just depend on what Dave chooses to emphasise the most. 

I'll go through the chapter, and mention where I connected things to either comments Dave's already made about the musical, or to his writing in general.

Coming into reading Moby Dick because I knew Dave was writing his musical, and reading the opening paragraph of Loomings where Ishmael introduces himself by launching headfirst into the details his depression, I naturally went straight to “so this is an introductory solo for a character played by Dave”. It’s not only something that leapt out at me straight off the bat, but one of the more ludicrously famous sections of Moby Dick, so I have to imagine it’s likely to make an appearance. 

The further thing I wanted to point out while I’m on this section, is that despite how famous this little piece of Moby Dick which clearly describes Ishmael’s depression and suicidal ideation is, the majority of Moby Dick adaptions have little to no other reference to his depression. Or they just have none at all if they’re really eschewing the narration. I’m not saying that it’s a deal-breaker for an adaption or anything of that kind, but mental illness definitely has a presence and impact in Moby Dick (I’ll just, leave it at that for now) that doesn’t especially get a lot of attention. On the other hand, it’s something that I, personally, will notice and think about. Anyone who’s familiar with Dave, however, knows that his shows almost consistently revolve around mentally ill characters (and what’s probably the most famous solo he’s written is about depression/suicidal ideation), and portray them in ways mentally ill fans relate to and appreciate. If an adaptor was to make a specific effort to earnestly portray Ishmael’s depression, and how that relates to his role in this story, it’d be Dave. (I could potentially even argue that The Pacific and Cetology already suggest ways in which he’s doing this but. Mm.)

But, anyway. I said Loomings is a good fit for that song that can be found in almost any Dave Malloy musical, where everything is just starting out, and someone (who is often played by Dave) sits down to pour out all their frantic thoughts and unstable feelings and draw you into their story - so, how I imagine the song is strongly based off the pre-existing examples of that type of song. Namely, I drift to Pierre and The Astronomer. 

Both songs have aspects I like for an imaginary Loomings. They’re both ruminative, emotive introductions to a character and their brain’s inner workings. They’re both at least somewhat depressed and ranty. I like Pierre for its emotional tumult, its inquisitiveness and desire for something more, its explicit descriptions of the effects of his depression on his behaviour, its moment of curiosity about mankind, and its drama. I feel like Pierre barging his way into his introductory solo, the first time we ever hear him sing about himself, with “It’s dawned to me suddenly, and for no obvious reason, that I can’t go on living as I am...” is not worlds away from how Ishmael can come across. I also like how it’s piano-driven (because I unimaginatively imagine Ishmael as a pianist in the show), unlike The Astronomer, but on the other hand, I prefer the less dense instrumentation of The Astronomer (maybe not quite that sparse though. Intermediate). I also like The Astronomer for its slow-paced style ranting, its dreaminess, its dwelling on Big Ideas, and the way it is more an explanation of who this character is through exploring his beliefs. Which is relevant as Loomings goes on. 

Both songs, particularly Pierre, channel more anger and resignation than is really relevant to Loomings, however. A part of this is that they’re both dwelling inside the emotions of an unhappy/unsatisfying present, describing that to us as who they are, now. Ishmael is outside of his present self because he’s a narrator. Throughout Loomings he is... recounting his past, but also describing the future of and influences on his past self, moreso than his past self’s present or who he was at that particular time. And, from that more distant position, opening these influences up to us, and the rest of the world. Uh. How relevant or sensible this is to point out I don’t know, but it seems like a very different emotional experience to convey. 

The second section of Loomings, where Ishmael discusses water, moves the furthest from talking directly about himself and his story, I suppose, but is a big bit of theme/motif/setting foundation, and is also just very beautiful writing. I love it a lot, and I’d love to hear some of it put to music... A few little quotes from it because I like them:

What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.

///

They come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues,—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

///

There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water

///

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

///

But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.

I also like the abundance of rhetorical questions in this section, and how that invites the reader in as if you were in a conversation. Those could fit well into a theatre song, where you have Ishmael sort asking himself, sort of asking the audience (also a bit Pierre, tbh). This, combined with how much switching up of sentence length there is in this section, give it this lovely gentle-paced, meandering, breathing rhythm that makes me think of it being sung. There’s probably a better, more technical way of describing that, but I don’t know that smartness, so essentially - I can almost hear it simply because of the way it’s already written. 

The conclusion of this section is where Ishmael draws together his claim that the reason we all find water so magnetic is because to us it represents the things that’re unfathomable and unreachable in life:

Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

It’d definitely be a way to get us onboard this ship, swept up in this journey, while we’re inside a theatre: “Come along with me, into this huge, intrinsic thing, come, and try to obsessively chase down whatever inscrutable thing is still maddening you in the craziness of the world today!” Mmm. 

A little thing I find interesting, however, is how this little piece, and how it’d be presented in the context of the show, relates to some pre-existing lyrics from Cetology: “And the ocean is too deep for me to fathom/ And life is just to big for me to bear/ But who am I to compare my despair to the shaking of the sea?” These lyrics have no root in the chapter Cetology itself, and I can only assume they’re actually rooted in this section here. The weirdness of that is how Ishmael makes the comparison he lays out in Loomings, but then immediately questions his right to make it. He paints his own personal experiences as insignificant in the scheme of it all, even if he does harbour those feelings about the ocean which are due to feelings about the unknown. Which is intriguing and opens up a lot of shit. There’s a lot going on in Cetology which can explain why he says that in the context of That Song, but it makes me wonder if this claim will appear in Loomings and then reappear later with the catch on the end, or if it’s sole appearance is in Cetology. It shall be seen. And I’ll probably discuss those Cetology lyrics more when I’ve... actually heard Loomings! Or, oh, you know, the full show for legit context. 

The next thing Ishmael does in this chapter is discuss why he makes the choice to go as just a "simple sailor" every time he goes to sea, in doing so telling us a bit more about himself and his opinions. I won’t expand on these hugely, but I do think it’s a fair enough point to say that Ishmael makes statements in this section which could act as starting points for themes that Dave has specified he’s discussing through this show - namely capitalism, democracy and race/systems of power, in this situation. 

One of Ishmael’s reasons is money. He doesn’t have the money to pay to go to sea as a passenger, he needs/wants to be paid for it as a sailor. The actual pay for which, by the way, is really, really not that much considering how dangerous a job he’s signing on for. But we have to survive somehow, we suppose...? And, his opinion on the money-making in general?

The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. 

Another of his reasons is that he prefers not to go to sea in any higher rank because he doesn’t care for the honour attached to these positions, and doesn’t want the level of responsibility involved. He goes on to explain that while it can be unpleasant to be ordered around by one’s superiors, he accepts it, and there’s no sense in striving for superiority when he is in essence no lesser than them, since, he states, everyone is inevitably under the command of someone else. 

With very intentionally provocative wording in the context of a book published in America in 1851.

Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't a slave? Tell me that. 

He finally says that it’s the ordinary sailors rather than their superiors who get the first, freshest breath of that revitalising ocean air. He then leans deeper into the thought: 

He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.

Having laid out his justification for this choice, Ishmael moves onto why a whaling voyage specifically. He essentially accounts it to the mysteries of fate - though his desire to experience new, remote things could trick him into exaggerating the role of his free will. 

There’s a part towards the end of the chapter that I specifically wanted to point out, where Ishmael actually uses a piece of theatre as a metaphor for his voyage. It’s not as famous/iconic as some other parts from this chapter but it’s very entertaining in the context of an actual musical, and I’d love if it were referenced:

“And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States "Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN." Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgement.”

This little piece fits well with the metatheatricality Dave has said he’s interested in exploring in the show. In terms of this concept, he’s mentioned both Ishmael vs Meville antics, but also broadening the idea of character vs writer with the added layer of him as the composer playing Ishmael. This quote specifically refers to theatre, and referencing one’s own role in a performance, which obviously becomes increasingly funny when you’re a narrator in and composer of a musical based on the book. Pondering over your “shabby part”, and why it was given to you, while you’re existing in theatre you composed yourself… strikes me as in line with Dave’s humour. In the song Cetology, Ishmael already actually laments that “this could be an amazing song...”, in doing so pretty heavily suggesting that he’s self-aware of being in a musical he wrote. So I don’t think Dave using this quote for metatheatre’s sake would be that surprising. 

I also like this quote because of the quite bizarre, almost eerie throwaway piece of modern foretelling we’re given in the layout of performances in the “bill”. It’s interesting enough for a modern adaption to point out as it is, but especially since Dave is highlighting connections between the book and modern America, it feels like something he might reference. 

[carousel-under-the-rain]

Memento Vivere: A Wanderer's Perspective

“Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”

─Stephen Covey

Travelling is really one those things that I enjoy the most. Going to different places, meeting new people and discovering their stories are truly fascinating. I’ve always dreamed to set on a journey for the sole purpose of wandering. The idea of learning a place’s cultures, beliefs, language and history gives fuel to my wanderlust. I guess what drives my love for travelling is my thirst and passion for discovery.

The quote above was said by Stephen Covey an American educator and a keynote speaker. I saw a video of his talk about “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in YouTube two years ago, which later on I realized was actually from his own book. Hearing that short line from his talk was captivating because I share the same belief when it comes to my outlook in life. I agree that a person should live his life through a compass that doesn’t only represents going to different directions but also about the memories and the people you would encounter all throughout your personal voyage. Though the clock somehow symbolizes the limited chances we have, it also teaches us to give importance with the things we experience and to live at the moment.

Being given a task in our course Language, Culture and Society that requires embarking on a journey within our local towns made me excited. The fact that I have a soul of a wanderer was an obvious reason why but the assignment of promoting that municipality through our travelogue. The class was divided through our respective places of residence. I was part of the group of people coming from the second district of Leyte (which includes Jaro and Barugo). We were a group consisting of four members where the first two are from Jaro while my other classmate and I are from Barugo. Due to our even number of members we held a discussion about which place should we go and eventually we picked Barugo as our destination. Originally, I’m not really from Barugo but it has been my residence for four years already. The decision of choosing my current residence was great because I am hitting two birds with one stone at the same time, I would have the chance to finally go home and to enjoy our travelogue.

Barugo is a 4th class municipality in the province of Leyte. It might be a humble town but is known for being the home of Sanggutan Festival and one the original makers of tuba or coconut wine earning its nickname “Land of the Coconut Wine”. Despite of living for almost four years in that town, there are a lot things that I still don’t know about the place which is also a challenge for me and to my group mates as well. It was during the holy week when we start working on our task and we agreed to meet up in Robinsons Marasbaras’ Terminal. After an hour and a half travel from Tacloban we arrived at Barugo and went to our house first to plan our itinerary. After planning we first decided to focus and discover things in poblacion (the central of the town). We went to the municipal office and interviewed some people who could help us learn about the background and history of the place. We also took pictures of important details that could be found from the office. The people from the municipal’s office that helped us were one of the main contributors of information for our travelogue making. We also visited the local church that dates way back Spanish colonization and the store run by a women’s association which makes the town’s local delicacies: roscas and torta. Our second day was full of adventures, we went to a few barangays and experienced the wonders of nature through mountain climbing, trekking and swimming.

I could say that we really had fun and accomplished our task within two days. But of course we also faced various obstacles that challenged our journey. First, the lack of means of transportation especially when we are in the far barangays. Second, the dangerous paths we take through walking to reach our respective destinations. Third, unlike other groups we were only a small group. There are times that one member would need to sacrifice so that there’s someone who will shoot the videos and take the photos. Lastly, it was also exhausting at some point but it was all worth it. In spite of these minor challenges we have encountered, our group were able to deal with it through quick response and solutions with the situations. While when it comes to the memorable parts, I would say that my favourite was when we climbed Mt. Sampaw. The trek up there was not easy but the feeling you get when you reached the top is beyond any words. I loved that remarkable breathtaking view which overlooks some coastal barangays of the town, some parts of Carigara and ─the peaceful ocean.

My contribution to the group was being one of the resource person of our travelogue. I used my advantage as a resident of the town to assist my members. I was also an instant tour guide and pseudo-historian during our two day travelogue. Working in a group made the task easier and more enjoyable especially there were only four of us. Through accomplishing this task, I also discovered a lot of things I didn’t know before, finally understood some things I get confused about and some additional knowledge about the town. As a language student, it made me come up with few realizations. We are actually missing out a lot of good things if we won’t pay attention or at least observe. This journey proved that language, culture and society are correlated and inseparable. Furthermore, we need to help our local municipalities to recognize and preserve these rich culture and history. As a professional, in the future I would like to encourage the local government unit to engage on research works and I would still support my previous suggestion of pushing our local officials to contribute something to the society by preserving and promoting these unique features.

The trip was not only something we have done because it was our task in school but also something that we would treasure us a beautiful memory. As for me it is one of my unforgettable experience as a college freshman. It also served as our outlet and stress-reliever from all the hectic class schedules and demanding school deadlines. In conclusion, this activity did not only act as requirement in school but an immersion that taught as few lessons we do not simply learn at school and some discoveries about our locals. When I was younger I’ve always wonder how other countries looked like and wished to travel around the world but this experience made me write another goal in my bucket list. In the future, I would love to travel our local places first and learn new things. I shall live a life of a compass and the clock as my guide. Si gue adelante!

[askmissthunder]

I thought it went great, especially since it was my first time throwing this type of party!

Eli arrived early to give me a hand tidying up, mainly with vacuuming and dusting. It had been a while since I had new guests over and the last thing I wanted them to think was I lived in a pig sty. Cassie would've helped too, but she was busy rounding up the girls since none of them knew where I lived.

Talon arrived early as well in the only way she could: up the fire escape and outside my balcony. Eli and I nearly leaped out of our skins when she knocked on the glass door.

"You know I have a front door, right?", I asked, letting her in.

"Yes but too many people would know I was coming into your building.  They might ask questions."

"Sure, because climbing up the side of the building is so inconspicuous."

I saw that despite Talon's glum attitude, she was already dressed for the occasion, wearing a Slayer T-shirt with torn off sleeves and dark flannel pajama pants.

Seeing her sleeping clothes only reminded me that Cassie's friends would have to be subjected to seeing me in my sleeping clothes.  And by "sleeping clothes", I mean some of my Nan's old Circus Fat Lady costumes and let's just say that Nan wasn't afraid to show off some skin back in the day.

As I finished putting up some snack trays (lots of Halloween sweets and frosted pumpkin biscuits), I heard Eli give a loud sniff.

"What do you smell, luv?", I asked with a smile.

*Sniff!*

"Lots of hair products..."

*Sniff sniff!*

"Nail polish and old socks..."

*SNIFF*

"Mmm! Candy apples! Penny, the girls are here!"

"Yippee.", Talon said monotonously, setting up her sleeping bag on the floor.

Not even a minute later, my flat's intercom buzzed.

I trotted over by the front door to answer, "Hello?"

Cassie's voice crackled through, "Hey, girl! We're all here!"

"Fantastic! Come on up, then!"

I turned towards Eli, "Wow, luv! You smelled them all the way at the bottom floor!"

Eli leaned back against the wall, smiling smugly, "Well, when you got a nose like mine..."

I pinched his cheek playfully as I remembered I had to play the part of huge fat girl with very limited mobility and took my spot on the couch.

It wasn't long before there was a rapping at my chamber door.  Eli, ever the dutiful boyfriend, opened it with a theatrical bow. "Enter! If you dare...", he said in a mock Vincent Price voice.

In the doorway, stood Cassie and the Dance Squad. "HEEEEY!", they all shouted in unison as they marched in, all of them carrying duffel bags, pillows, and blankets.

"Hello, hello, girls!", I greeted, waving excitedly.

"Wow, Penny!", Karen exclaimed, spinning around, "You got such a big place!"

I chuckled, gesturing to my body "Well, it has to accommodate all of this, you know?"

"Ah didn't know what food y'all might have but Ah brought some caramel apples straight from home!", Amanda stated, holding up a tray filled with the scrumptious delights. I looked at Eli who gave me a knowing wink.

"Damn, girl! These are all yours?", Tamika asked, pointing at the boxes and stacks of vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs I had in the corner of my living room next to my stereo. It was hard to miss.

"I told you Penny's a music buff!", Cassie said while dropping her gym bag, claiming the spot. "Go ahead! Ask her anything about music!"

"Okay, what year did....oh, the Thiller album come out?", Stacey questioned.

I grinned, "1982."

"Pssh! I could've told you that!", Lailani stated, "Let me try."

She looked through my vinyl selection and gave a sly smile. "Penny, in the Indigo Girls album, Strange Fire, what is the sixth track?"

"Ah, that's a trick question. In the original Canadian release, it was 'Hey Jesus' but I have the American re-release, so Track 6 is 'Get Together', a cover originally by the Youngbloods."

The girls all "Oooooh"ed at that.

Deb stepped up, "All right, all right, I got one!"

She cleared her throat and sang, "Dah! Dah dah! Dah dah dah dah dah dah! Dah! Dah dah! Dah dah dah dah dah dah dah!"

"Serenade No. 13 in G Major, more commonly known as Eine kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."

Deb threw her arms up, "Damn! And I just watched Amadeus last week! I give, Penny. Cassie wasn't just bullshitting us as usual."

"Oh, hush!", Cassie snapped back, "I would never joke about Penny's music knowledge! And what the hell do you mean 'as usual', Miss 'there are alligators in the sewers' ?!"

"There are alligators! Just not in Ocean City! They only live in New York, you yutz!"

They both stuck their tongues out at each other for a moment before going into a giggle fit.

Stacey rolled her eyes, "Don't mind them. Not a day goes by without Deb antagonizing somebody."

Cassie gathered her composure and clapped her hands authoritatively to the dance squad, "All right, ladies! Pick out a spot! Get comfy while I'll go ahead and get those pizza pies ordered! Four of everything, right?"

"No anchovies!", Amanda spoke up.

"Yes, and for the love of God, no pineapple.", Tamika added.

"Aww!", Karen whined, "I like pineapple. And pickles. And asparagus. And Froot Loops."

"I'll get one pineapple pizza for you, Kare.", Cassie said comfortingly, "But only one."

"Yay!"

If nothing else, the party was a good excuse to get the know Cassie's friends better, especially since we would be waiting a while for our rather large pizza order to arrive. Mainly things like Cassie has been friends with Joanie, Tamika, and Stacey since their primary school days while Amanda, Karen, Deb and Lailani have only joined their circle in college.

Joanie, who you may remember made my Belle costume last year, is a Fashion major, hoping to make it big in the New York fashion scene. If my costume was evidence of her hard work and dedication to the craft, I suspect we might be seeing models sporting her designs in the near future.

Tamika is one of Cassie's oldest friends as both of their Mums were in the same theater company so they practically grew up together. Like Cassie, she's also extremely passionate about dancing. While her main goal is to become the next big Broadway star, she also want to open up her own dance studio.  

Stacey, Cassie claims, is the "Team Mom", always looking out for the others whenever they go out or making goals for them to accomplish with their dancing. It's not that much of a surprise, considering she's a All-A student with a 4.0 GPA who's also part of the debate team and has a job on the side as a babysitter.

Amanda, as her accent might have revealed, is a country girl straight from Kentucky. Her family owns a dairy farm and a small orchard so she's not afraid to get her hands dirty.  She's has that nice southern hospitality but she can get pretty rowdy as well, seeing how she nearly punched one of my bullies, Bianca, after she insulted Tamika. I asked her why she would come all the way to Ocean City for college. She responded, " 'Cause of the ocean, of course! We got lakes and rivers in Kentucky but Ah've never seen the ocean before! Ah figured Ah could use a change of scenery for my schoolin'. "

Deb is a New Yorker, through and through. She's loud, she can be abrasive and she's definitely not afraid to tell it like it is. (Except for volume, not too different from Talon but don't tell her I said that!) While she does have a habit of teasing the other girls for shits and giggles, at the end of the day, she's a loyal friend who's always got your back whether it be help for a complicated dance technique or lending a hand with changing a flat tire.  

Lailani immigrated from the Philippines with her family when she was just a baby. While she's a gifted dancer, having trained in ballet since she was little, I was surprised to learn she's a talented magician as well! Poor Eli, having no experience with slight-of-hand, was beside himself as her card tricks baffled him to no end.  

Karen is...odd, to put it kindly. She seems to space out constantly and blurt out whatever pops in her hear at the moment. "Hey, do you know horned lizards shoot out blood from their eyes as a defense mechanism? That'd be cool to do, just like 'Hey, get away!' and go 'squirt'! Heh heh!"  Deb tells me Karen is like this due to her parents being former hippies and might have conceived her while tripping on acid or so she claims.

Cassie had told the girls that this was my first slumber party so they were all eager to give me the "classic" slumber party experience.  Makeovers, games, talking about boys (or girls), the works.  As I promised, I made sure the girls didn't bother Talon, who only gave a piercing glare at they pulled out their makeup kits.

While the girls partnered up, Eli decided to give Talon some company by playing Street Fighter II on my Genesis.  Cassie browsed through my music library to play some mood music as a flurry of eyeliners, lipsticks and nail polish went wild.

I'm still not used to putting on makeup except for special or formal events, but even then it was my Mum who usually applied it. However, while trying to decide what to put on my face, Stacey only made a puzzled look.

"What's wrong?", I asked nervously, fearful that she would say no amount of makeup in the world would make me look presentable.

"Nothing. It's just...you don't really need that much makeup, Penny. You have very clear skin."

"Heh. A few years ago, my face was pretty damn spotty."

"Really? You don't have any acne scars or anything like that. What'd you do?"

Of course, I couldn't tell her that when I received my powers, it not only made me taller and fatter, it also cleared my skin and fixed my vision.

"Umm...just got committed to washing my face more thoroughly and acne cream, I guess?"

She smiled, "I'll admit I feel a bit jealous. I wish my face and skin were as nice as yours. I sweat even a teensy bit, my face practically explodes with zits."

The idea that somebody was actually envious of me, even if it was just my skin, was an alien concept to me. I gave out a snort, "Give over! I know you're not jealous of all this. What with my chipmunk cheeks and quadruple chins!"

Stacey's brow furrowed a bit, "Hey now. I wouldn't fib to you about that!"

She leaned over her shoulder and yelled to Joanie, who was busy applying facial cream to Amanda. "Joanie! Doesn't Penny have a super pretty face?"

"Oh, yeah, those big green eyes are to die for, Penny! Eli's a lucky guy!"

"Hell yeah, I am!", Eli called out, not taking his eyes off the screen.

"If you say so...", I muttered as Stacey applied very light touches of eyeliner.

It wasn't long before the intercom buzzed.

Cassie let out a loud gasp as she scrambled to her feet, "It's here!"

Pushing the button, she let out a a chipper "Y'ello?"

A man's voice came from the other side, "Yeah, I got an order of four pepperoni, four mushroom, four cheese, four Italian sausage, four Canadian bacon, four supremes, four-"

"Yes, yes! That's us! Come on up!", Cassie interrupted, practically bouncing on her feet as we could all hear her stomach give a tremendous growl.

"Cassie!", Tamika yelped, her eyes wide from surprise, "How are you still hungry?! You literally ate three foot-long hot dogs on the way over here!"

"Yeah, where the hell do you put it all?", Amanda added.

Cassie lifted up her shirt and rubbed her trim belly with the slightest hint of abs showing. "Hee hee! You girls should know by now that I got an appetite! It may be small but there's always room in my tummy!"

Everybody got up to help the poor pizza man out as he had stacks and stacks of pizza boxes to carry in.  I could only imagine what he must've thought seeing a gang of scantily clad college girls in various states of make-up, a handsome shaggy-haired boy, a tall buff girl staring daggers at him ("He might be an assassin."), and a massive blob of a girl stuck on the couch.

Then came two of the more harrowing moments of the party.

First, and as I said before, I decided to put on my "pajamas".  It was a dark blue silk two-piece outfit consisting of a tank top and shorts. I would feel a little more comfortable with it if it did a better job of covering my belly. The sad thing is this is the more conservative piece as the others tend to be more like nighties with short skirts.

With Cassie and Eli "helping" me walk to my room then back into the living room, I was certain the girls would stop and stare at this half-naked super fat girl in their midst. It certainly didn't help my mood by seeing all the girls in their sleeping clothes, mainly tank tops, crop tops and short shorts, showing off their super toned dancer bodies.

If it bothered them, they didn't show it as they happily munched on pizza and only gave friendly smiles as I plopped back down on the couch.  What shocked me most was that Karen actually got up and laid her head against my belly. I couldn't help but give a small yelp at the sensation of somebody other than Eli or Cassie touching my body.

"Ooh! You're really warm, Penny! And soft! Girls, come try this out!", she called out to the others as she nuzzled her head deeper and deeper into my blubber like an overly affectionate cat.  Stacey was about to scold her for her cheekiness but it was too late, the girls were upon me like piranha to a piece of meat.  It was...very surreal, to say the least, mostly because I was certain at least one of them would find me gross. Instead, they softly kneaded my fat, giving "oohs" and "aahs" at the sensation.

I know I probably should've told them to knock it off but as long as they weren't doing it out of malice, what was the harm?

The other harrowing moment was one I was both excited and fearful for: Talon's Halloween Movie Selection. Knowing Talon's tastes, it wasn't going to be a classic Universal Monster movie or a cheesy 50's B-Movie. As the girls' attentions was on me, they failed to notice Talon quietly going through her duffel bag and pull out a hefty stack of rental movies from the video store.

She cleared her throat to get everyone's attention. "Which one do you want to watch first?", she muttered. In her hands, she held An American Werewolf in London, Zombie, Last House on the Left, The Evil Dead, The Beyond, Intruder, The Shining and Suspiria.

I must be like a giant teddy bear to everybody as Eli took his usual spot atop my right hip, his weight sinking into my fat. The girls followed suit, laying their heads against my legs and belly. Only Talon refused to join in with the others, knowing that she doesn't like intimate contact at all.  

While most of the movies were, well, scary and shocking and disgusting and gory, Suspiria was probably the one that got under the girls' skin as it took place in a dance school. A little too close to home, that one.

"Oh God, I'd hate to fall into a pit of razor wire like that!", Lailani gulped, thinking of the grim fate of one victim.

"What if Miss Avery was a witch?!", Amanda squeaked out, thinking of their dance instructor, "Didn't she go to Germany for some convention last year?"

"Fuck me, you're right!" Deb cursed, "Is she part of a coven?!"

Karen giggled, "Maybe if we dress up as witches at practice, she won't try to kill us. She'll think 'I can't kill them! They're my fellow witches!'."

"Oh, you sweet, sweet innocent child.", Joanie said, rubbing Karen's head, "I know it was just a movie but...jeez!"

"Why did that dog attack his owner?", Eli asked sadly, "Is he okay?"

"No! He got his throat ripped out!", Tamika answered, "You don't walk away from that!"

"I was talking about the dog. Did he find a new owner?"

Sensing Eli's distress, I held his hand and gave him a peck on the cheek.   "It's all right, sweetie. I'm sure he's fine, although he may want to lay low for a while."

Looking around me, I could tell that Eli wasn't the only one stressed out. We did just watch several horror movies back to back so all the girls seemed on edge. Except Talon who was trying to fight off a losing battle against sleep, her eyes looking very droopy.

"Do you all want to watch something a little more...cheerier?", I asked, the image of the woman getting her eye stabbed out in Zombie, still fresh in my mind.

Eli, Cassie and the Girls all looked at me and solemnly nodded.

(A half hour later...)

"OH WELLA WELLA WELLA UH

TELL ME MORE, TELL ME MORE

DID YOU GET VERY FAR?

TELL ME MORE, TELL ME MORE

LIKE DOES HE HAVE A CAR?"

We all sang at the top of our lungs as we watched Grease in the wee morning hours while Talon slept on, snuggled up in her sleeping bag and ear plugs firmly in place.

Happy very, very, VERY Belated Halloween, everybody!

[assignmenthelpstudio-blog]

Personal Reflection on Consumer Behavior

Consumer Behavior

Introduction

Through consumer behaviour unit, what is selected as a core subject, I have learned and read some interesting topic and articles which have impacts on my understanding of consumer behaviour. By looking at the first lecture, Dr. Maxwell presented the main keys of consumer behaviour definition and theories, cognitive and behavioural theories. As the first dissection of consumer behaviour definition, it is, in general, consumer purchasing or buying. But, more specifically consumer behaviour is “the study of the processes involved when individuals or groups select, purchase, use or dispose of products, services, ideas or experiences to satisfy needs and desires” (Solomon, Russell-Bennett & Previte 2010). In the beginning, I am very confused about consumer behaviour, and when I think that, yes I get the logical fact, then the other idea and theory is logic and acceptable as well. Therefore, I think, both theories work effective in marketplace, and help marketers to understand consumer behaviour and the reaction of the consumer. Despite there are a lot of arguments and conflicting point of views, those arguments encouraging me to recognize the differences between the theories, cognitive and behavioural theories. I am going to discuss my reflection of consumer behaviour unit during this semester, and how my understanding and knowledge have improved. I am going to cover three main sections, which they have impact my reflection, first; the reflection of the first assignment, and the interesting reading that I have read during the semester, then I conclude the reflective journal with the future implication of consumer behaviour in marketplace and marketing managers.

The first assignment:

By understanding behaviour of consumer, marketers and practitioners in marketing field can reach the consumer with appropriate strategy. However, consumer behaviour is a complex field to understand it because the behaviour has changed overtime and a consumer affects by several factors such as psychological, social and cultural elements. Therefore, understanding the motivation of consumer to buy a product is the main function of marketers to stimulate that motivation or in other words how marketers can affect and change consumer behaviour to buy particular brand or product. This is the question of the first assignment which was difficult for me to answer it and, I think, the answer did not have specific direction and it was a wide answer. I discussed the ability of marketers to effect consumer behaviour in two main points; first the behaviour of consumer is changed by stimulating a consumer to buy a brand and contacting with him/her through sensory system. The examples to explain this point are, first the effecting colour in consumer reaction and their meaning in consumer mind such as green is relaxing”, “environmentally and friendly, red is grape attention and stimulate quick decision making” and yellow can “drive an attention. The other example is the positive relationship between brand image and consumer purchasing (Chen, Chen & Huang 2012). Second is capturing consumer loyalty which was poorly covering in the assignment. But the argument is that marketers face difficulties to reach consumers in global environment because they are affected by cultural element (Mooij 2003). The other challenge is to capture customer loyalty within strong competition and diversity of products and brands and consumer is usually spit loyalty according to Barnard and Ehrenberg (1997). If I will answer this question again, I am going to focus on consumer behaviour theories and how they work to understand how marketers can change consumer behaviour through these theories. Specifically, answering that question in short essay is by explaining both cognitive theory, which is explaining and specifying the “behaviour by internal processing of information or action of mental traits”, and behavioural theory is focusing on behaviour and looking at thought and feeling as effects not causes (Winchester 2012).Then, I will provide some evidences to support one of these theories, to be honest; I usually tend to agree with cognitive theory.

Reading article

There are several reading articles I have read during the semester, and they have made my understanding more clearly. First, I would like to start with the most interesting article which is (Advertising: Strong force or weak force? Two views an ocean apart) for John Philip (1990). My group and I selected this article from WebCT as the main article for our presentation in week 11. I preferred this topic because it is related with our topic in marketing management subject last semester so, I familiar with it or I have enough idea about it, that I though. However, it is very difficult for me to link it with consumer behaviour or how advertising works with and affect consumer. Jones (1990) present very interesting debate between two views what are strong theory and weak theory or US point of view and UK point of view. I thought and believed that advertising strong enough to change behaviour of consumers and persuade them thus I believed that it works thorough strong theory. But, after reading and studying this topic and this article, now, I am tending to and convinced with weak theory. Jones argues strong theory with first point which I like it, which is, the outcome of advertising is less than expectation by comparing with its expenditure for example, in US in 1998, “more than 70 billion was spent on advertising”. In addition, Jones presents the argument of Ehrenberg what is advertising nudges the behaviour of consumer rather than persuades him/her because first, consumer does not care to watch or listen to advertising very much so the information is limited importance. Second, consumer is not persuaded by thirty second and limited words. Furthermore, consumer is learned and affected more by promotion and word of mouth. To explain this argument, I need to know how advertising works through this theory, what was difficult for me to understand in the beginning. But by finding the other interesting and useful article which is (Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity) for Ehrenberg et al (2002), I could clearly understand this argument. According to this article advertising publicise and reinforce a brand to be salience, and salience means “presence and richness of memory traces that result in the brand coming to mind in relevant choice situation”. Therefore, advertising it reminds consumer about advertised brand as a result it works through consumer memory, long term memory. Also, I found that example of Sharp (2010) of Coca Cola very useful to explain the reaction of light and heavy buyers about advertising, which is no reflection and reaction on light buyers because they already buying the brand every day. Heavy buyers are reminded about the brand by refreshing their memory; however, the profit probably will not be increased by this recalling and reminding. Therefore, the main objective of advertising is maintain market share rather than boost and increased profit. In addition, I have read other two interesting reading which were selected from last semester in Marketing Management unit and they help me to understand the topic of advertising. They are (Differentiation or Salience 1997) and (Advertising: Strongly Persuasive or Nudging 1997), they are both associated and confirming with weak theory. Further, both articles belonging to Ehrenberg and Barnard, and Scriven participated with the authors in the first article. In the first article explain that why a brand should be salience. Marketers attempt to keep the brand different from other competitive brands by developing innovative idea. However, competitors have copied that idea and developed their brand in the same way, therefore, a consumer select and purchase a brand what is similar with other brands, because that brand is more salience than other. Moreover, consumer is usually split loyalty more than he or she loyal to one brand. Consequently, according last article, the main functions of advertising are first advertising reinforce your brand’s customers’ existing propensities to buy it as one of several, second it “nudge” them to perhaps buy it somewhat more often, and then get other consumers perhaps to add your brand as an extra or substitute brand to their existing brand repertoire. For me, I think, I am satisfied about this topic because I understand it, and I select more logical argument and opinion.

In addition, the other reading is related with segmentation topic. Despite segmentation is important in marketplace and it instead of using mass communication to reach consumers by grouping them in specific groups have the same characteristic to reduce the cost, and gain high benefits and profits (Kotler, Keller & Burton 2009), it could be charged when marketers apply inappropriate type of segmentation. Don Schultz (2002) suggests that in his article (Behaviour changes: do your segment?) to apply dynamic segmentation which is adjust with change that occur in consumer behaviour. For example, Tesco, which is a supermarket in UK, “reclassify every customer every week” to understand changing behaviour in real time, and this kind of segmentation helps Tesco to be better than other competitors. Therefore, through my reading, I have learned that as marketers have effect consumer behaviour, consumer is also inspiring marketers to modify and improve the strategy to reach consumer in suitable method.

Future implication

By understanding consumer behaviour, marketers have improved their skills to be professional, and built strategy to meet consumer needs and wants. For example, as mentioned above, changing or modifying segmentation strategy to be dynamic segmentation to gain competitive advantage, and benefits. In addition, they can reach their objectives with low cast. To explain this point, by applying weak theory in advertising strategy, marketers will minimize the spending and achieve the objective rather than push high spend in marketplace with low profit or the profit will be less than the expectation. Therefore, marketing managers should be open mind to listen, know, and understand to all different opinion and argument, and then select the appropriate one to be a foundation and bases to their strategy and tactics. As well as marketers should focus on both heavy and light buyers to build a relationship and the best way to communicate with them to keep heavy buyer in the same level of purchasing and convert light buyers to be loyal (Kotler, Keller & Burton 2009). Todays, technology provides a great chance for marketers to improve their strategy. For example, marketers can easily communicate with their consumer via email or though social network to collect the consumer’s information. However, they have to study electronic consumer behaviour, because they have different characteristic from traditional consumer. For instance, through the internet, consumer looks at promotional product with low price, therefore, they are in some cases are loyal price. By studying these difference marketers can develop offline and online strategy. Through these implications, I can say that consumer behaviour is a science in practical method.

Conclusion

Consumer behaviour is very complex unit because it is associated with human though, feeling and behaviour and the several factors effect a consumer such as; social, cultural and psychological. This is a reflective journal of my reflection about consumer behaviour subject which was selected as a core unit. This piece of paper has been divided into three main sections. First my reflection of first assignment and how I answered the question which is “how marketers can change consumer behaviour? My reflection is about developing my understanding and my knowledge of the theories of consumer behaviour, cognitive and behavioural theories and the argument between these theories. Second, it has been discussed the most interesting readings and how influence and change my though about advertising and segmentation topics. I discussed five reading articles; first four are about the argument of advertising between strong and weak theories, and how advertising works within cognitive structure. This topic is very interesting for me. Third section is about the implication of consumer behaviour in the future of marketing, and marketing managers and they should improve their skills and knowledge to understand consumer behaviour and how they affect them in different method. In addition, how marketing should concern traditional and electronic consumer behaviour and the differences between of them. Finally, although consumer behaviour is a very complex subject to understand, it is also very interesting topic.

Originally published at assignmentstudio.net.

[castlehead]

Hartford Pomes: or, “FINDINGS,” circa 2010. (PART ONE: Pomes of Observations upon the String.)

WASSERFALL AND FROSTED GRASS, AND SUN UPON BOTH, BOTH OF THEM, DIMINISHING ONE, FOREVER DIMINISHING ONE.

And suddenly I was seized- -With I know not what but something premature, Premature yet clear: clearness transposed to roughness.

I then elaborated on my findings, As light elaborates in blond-

-Upon the wasserfall: before the fall Of noon into the evening: the Light ebbs on the tumbling Waters, down Into the gorge.

It came upon me slowly, Pictured as like the falls in assiduous motion, Over the course of the night that knew It would be day before I started to describe it, It came upon me slowly. Thru the night it came,

Like frost on grass when I awaken, Like a blondness of the falls somewhat.

. .  .   .    .     .

These images of nature, What marasmus of a sort is this?

. .  .   .    .     .

I awaken, viewing the same- -Inspiration I had had while I had slept, Except: for now, at least: it’s an intimation, diminishing Like frost, dried up by the noonday sun.

I realized just as suddenly its disappearance, as though- -All inspiration were somewhat simultaneous,

In how it arrives, in how it goes away, In how it does these both at once, a friction,

A friction that continues to be friction, A concealing of the spareness of thought-

-Behind the energies of this vocal consciousness, Energies that do not ebb like day.

. .  .   .    .     .

This losing simultaneity, This rapid flickering-out that causes what Returns to so return with energy that flickers out

That flickers out, and dies, Like the hinge of noonday into evening;

Like something private, and alienated The useless falls reflect the sun.

....

CRITICAL ERROR.

(Lazy days, lazy men, Lazy communication throughout, and soon Cornered into an idea- -Seen image, finely done. And lazy automobiles.)

When strong, Unevil days pass,

They are They are likened but somewhat- -Off a faltering, somewhat Off a certainty: both to be bettered,

With time and knowledge. The Figments of anticipation. See:

The fair enuff relation: Callow men: that is, those who- -Do not cross the park at night,

And walk across Traffic, to waiting cabs;

The unplaceable, tho sure symbolism Uttered in passing after lunch; the asthmatic

Puff of loveless, Brittle cars, passing thru clever Causeways. All this brings- -Us back to MARS, one day. One day, The sudden day will suddenly decide to Be every single strong, unevil,

Humane day of many days, that all- -Will forget, of all of them, what regarding What was in them, Was in these queer fealties of nature—

And how she, in her wandering, Sensed places about them.

IDEA: Having no clear speaker. Why do we need a speaker- -At all???????????? Upon Ridding myself of these Constraints, the constraints Of an involved poetic identity, I am able to go more Places with thoughts. And, yet, there is a pattern here,

I am conveying myself, by elaborating on the search. My ambivalence regarding this subject is proof enough.

....

SYNECDOCHE.

So, here I am: I have decided: I am going to teach us myself

With the light on this time around: I no longer- -Have places in the darkness left to nestle this new glowing of light encountered just now, midway up the arc of my personal tempers: this arc: this arc, developing infinitely away from me and into more of an arc than before, trapping me in a void of endless weakening: since it is that such a climax is no such inevitability as I thought but rather a dream to dream up. Yes,

Yes . . . a dream, yes, a dream to dream upwards into a wakening that seems more and more inexplicable, and so then less and less a wakening. I am coming to realize that my standing as a poet, at present,

Occurs more like a posture: rarely footed but rather swaggering from this, to that; moreover, it is conscious of this. This consciousness is the main detraction.

It is also the main strength. My climax will wilt more the more it must go through to be reached.

As my experience as a poet and what I write are bound and the same, this reaching, then, is a reaching that I myself must go through to reach it; 'it' of course being

This funny little climax . . . yes . . . because, you see: I see this whole shebang, this whole ‘reaching’ thing as a thing that is not a zenith, but, rather, a climax,

As though afterwards things might quell down into the denouement. However, I do not know the end of this journey any more than I would know the date of the end of my life.

. .  .   .    .     .

My personality is tempered by my own personal tempers . . . yes. As a writer of emotional emotions I had had once I had once used an oblique darkness as counter-point to the dull-dreaming facility of these my long—dull—uneven scribbles . . .

I saw this as an obstruction, and so then struggled to properly suffocate much of the ambient things—and, much as I could—with obliqueness: ambient things, always new, always the best so far.

These first brightnesses of a mind delayed so long of what it believes, mordantly—these brightnesses, once placed there in the darkness. And, too often, with results not as I supposed would come: that is as

An entrance through that dark. A Lighting-up of it; don't have such places, not anymores I don’t: places,

For example, places on the wall—to hang a picture. I used

Up all of the dark space with that; that is, with a quietly weird complicatedness. I did this before I had the chance to experience more things; before I had the chance to grow, humanly, and so then understand and understand further where, in my sleepy logic—where, besides in bed, could I conduct

My sermons-on-the-bed; where in ghosts could There be an understanding-                         -Of hunger, enough, for them to sustain their ghostly selves And eat this food I offer them . . . ? If I found THAT I would know

My ghastly ghosts. I would know my wishful eidolons to thrive                         Out of their present contagion, nicely squared In the nonetheless corrupted, imperfect niche of my reality-

-And eat the giving of this muse: A sultry Madonna: my sleepy logic woken up to do me out on paper.

. .  .   .    .     .

I led myself always to a greater complication, attempting to trump the machinery of my own brain . . . spare, yes, spare the amount of times these fascinations were resolved, but, only, I felt, if a part of me let the amount be spare . . .

For so long I had been holed up behind the fascinations: wall: wall of the spatial darkness/darknesses, yes. Wall,

Dark wall of a room with no windows and the lights off. A place therefore on which to hang my wishes of the light—like a picture of the sun in a frame. A picture, shining, proudly, against the bleakness, fabricated.

. .  .   .    .     .

Either way most likely you have not yet gone towards my darkness; you will. Preferring light, you have somewhat misunderstood what I say; you won't.

Even though from the beginning, what you searched for was a head filled with improper shadows, explanations known thus improperly as illuminations of a thing in reality wilting into twilight, in reality. Transience. You struggled despite your best efforts to be exposed by me, the person whom you sought—and hated—for what he said the nature of your search amounted to.

. .  .   .    .     .

I am now wary of wanton contradiction. I am in search of an utterance like one that could make light out of light; rather, am in search of a plain rabbit out the hat. A magic realness. Grace, grace, devised at the beginning of my life as a sort of moving-on of frustrations to somewheres away from my considerable head, nonetheless—still—possessed the words, but at times, rather than always; such was the insanity of my ambitions. It was

A seeming infinity of an arc: this evil grace, charting my own limited biography: my finite life: I had to possess it, somehow, so as to not let this grace eke out of me and die, having no way to survive. SOUL.

. .  .   .    .     .

Grace died, still, stillborn, almost, in that it considered its potential to need more making, more building.

It needed more of a constructing of itself, into more than that—to be any good, I thought—and, I failed in this enterprise, poetential being too heavy a boulder for me to lift—at least—without seeming to challenge GOD in the lifting.

I would know myself to lose such a battle; lose, that is, if the the the deity were to take some time just to craft more carefully the mightiest-

-Of its powers, that is, humility. This stillborn thing became stillborn Because of me, you see: because of my need to report to you the reposed, strange darkness like an idle fuck, gracefully, inevitably. The need, moreover, to light myself up all fake on the real wall: but, no:

I wish now instead to vision an imperative as though it were not so much dogma. An imperative, yes—and yet not needed to be repeated as a way to become familiar,

Because at the start it was familiar, unlike prayers, unlike the prayers of humans.

. .  .   .    .     .

I repeat some things because they would be my GOD . . . I know this. I lie about what meaning I give to the tone of the light so as to break from a differenter greater and unseen place the light that comes truthfully, honestly. Break the light. This is how I see it. I once could adduce a point out of this, a reason for doing this—nonetheless—because, I was used to my own abstract devices as a comfort. It

Was graceful and was not plain . . . to begin with . . . it was not a guide for you; was not a simple guide for you, rather: however: know and know well that you-

-Do not yet understand what it is like                                       To hold the key to your own house When you have not for so long. I will tell you nothing about it.

. .  .   .    .     .

In your own way I guess you will amble towards me, towards my processes, my calculations, my diction . . . and I receive you to purge my ramble. I urge you to weave like a river, like the river that is an idea not yet possessed, yet to be possessed—I urge you to clean up my meanings as you would the house. I urge you, reader, to sail, gracefully, up your own meaningful delta, and arrive at an ocean of what I say. The thing is,

          Without you beside me my otherness feasts on me, Eats me alive, feasts. . . so, then: the teaching of whatever                                   It is is what I myself must teach, I must inflict whatever this is upon myself, first, In order to be able to live alone.

Having realized that I have a lot of places to go with that particular sturm-and-drang, this teaching of myself, that is . . . well, in carrying out such an ambition to the end I would find I finally perceive to know others better, better than I know myself; so then it would be a challenge to teach myself things, being that I do not know myself. Myself: talkative, in search of a friend in his opinions . . .

And yet this weave is threadbare methinks, except in the attempt of a sojourn towards that Mecca of understood life. To reach that stone, on which to scribe my influence, permanently.

I explain others to myself and am met with an amalgam: a mixture, delved into solution: a voice speaking to me as though floating on airs of impermanence, fleetingness,

As it is I am viewing the sun from the EARTH, really; saying the experience of what I see, as opposed to fully experiencing that sun and knowing it differenter than what I put forth as a truth, a truth I make seeming due to merely an ambivalence regarding the expression of words . . . not, necessarily, because I know what I communicate to myself as an approximate width of that experience I might have, of walking on the sun.

So, then, all this is just a picture in a frame; the picture is set. I Can only change the shade of the walls from something less a darkness, as a way to beat the air to fly, wingless.

So, then, I am now done with my willingness to make a fickle art out of consciousness by saying there is no science in it, and then putting forth hypotheses that fail, because I did not start the piece out as a precision; merely hearkened that precision as a sort of tone, as a way to figure the words, so as to create an air of truth/deliberateness.

. .  .   .    .     .

I wish to be done with that. I wish for something to pray to. Not myself; something free of myself and his wicked otherness. Perhaps things will become recognizable again. If so, Then, I will see things, others, as I see myself—though they are not me—

. .  .   .    .     .

Though others trouble me with what they wish to pursue and vindicate,                                               What they wish to alleviate and accrue.

And if I may chance to guess: you know enough about me to know yourself as not me, but rather a person whom you may change into—given the time—given

Time and given the teaching of our species to create ourselves.

Ourselves—yes—together, known finally as all that would be in ourselves to create,

Without thinking otherwise. Without loping off, kicking the ground, dejected, yes,

Dejected, by the very vague and discontinuous image that it itself is: used only as a way to perpetuate this frustrated, driven emotion of frustration, Carried, like the same tune . . . oh ah oh ugg loo loo loo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!                                The arbitrariness of the molding of being

Yes, from a vacuous nothing. A rupture, a tangent of the dignity in the self, made exuberant and clumsy in me, suddenly: expressed faultily but going on with the expression: the words are the metaphor in this: the tone changes with my feelings for the tone: this

Expression, previously magnified and argued for and against by the priggish scholars in my head. And yet that is me indeed, indeed me: how hotly they analyze, is me: they weave the truth together, yes,

Rather than letting it be what it is—that is—an obloquy for feeling around for the pursuit of it in the dark; struggling, as I said, for light;

A thing that wants requital, but cannot have it. a calm amongst the chatter, a feeling of the mind that is grandiose and calm. This is

An immaturity, yes . . . a flaw in me, and my processes; we do not know truth nor what the good might be in coming to it.

There's no subject for pomes, no derring-do besides in what we are able to handle. . .

. .  .   .    .     .

And so I teach you myself through myself's digression, depicted in words. Not anyone else, not GOD nor SOUL. In other words, this: my consciously-enacted

Vagueness of the motion of my thoughts and the processes of my thoughts and all that lies between the processes.What is there left to teach? The GOOD GRAY POET, yes. He

He he knows he knows and does not say but in vagueness, In the wholeness of his parts; in the equivocal provocation

Of his whole pome. Teacher, teach.

....

BLESSINGS.

Draft One:

So it is our contentedness withers, Withers and falls off of us—as would

The leaf, as would the leaf of life                      And sensitive pain— Never known. What???????????

What? Shall I benumb myself? All Is now what I strain to feel. The leaf

Is gone. If it was pain, then I should Rather have been sensitive to it, know it,

Yes, and feel content in knowing At least one thing in my inverted

Chest with accuracy, but, nah . . . this is A lopping-off, and I can only sense

The disappearance: it is a disappearance —Of one season into another: a wresting,

Almost, of a single leaf from the tree of myself: One less blessing of pain that though it were pain

Had once sharpened, yes, sharpened out of nothing An intensity and a pathos to describe: now, I can only

Elucidate the void that now is in the place of such Sharpness, without an experience of what was- -Once there: an ode to some lost feeling.

. .  .   .    .     .

Draft Two:

Contentedness withers, falls off

Of me, as would- -The leaf, As would the leaf of life: my life, To be particular: a life made of leaves           That fall, each one a sensitive pain, Forgotten. What?????????????????????????   What? Tell me, shall I benumb myself? All-          -Is what I strain to feel, now: I       Am left, at least, to cherish that                               In its entirety. The leaf Is gone: if it was pain that was here: once- -Here, in that place of my clear thoughts, Then, I should- -Have rather been Sensitive to it, was not; would Rather have known it while it was around,

Would rather have felt content in knowing

At least one thing in my chest With accuracy, at least: but, no: this is A lopping-off . . . yes: I can only sense The disappearance: it is a disappearance —Of one season into another. It is a wresting —Of a single leaf from the tree of myself: it is one Less blessing of pain that though it were pain Had still once sharpened—yes—sharpened out Of nothing- -An intensity and a pathos To describe. At this point, I can only-

-Elucidate that void now in the place of such Sharpness, without an experience of what was Once there. An ode to some lost feeling, here:

(end.)

....

CANCER.

In her mind, she is exquisitely Persuasive. To others, she dialogues the Fantasy of a past lit by the vague light Of happenstance, news for the quarterlies, Furious libel. Fake attention. Lacking proper Placement—in the trackless mode Of life—she plays instead the Part in her own existing.

To herself she is concave: a spinning Head on weak shoulders: a severe flap Of skin over bones, and—perhaps—a heart, Thudding, quietly, to itself: she Will not last long, and the diagnosis Will be grim, and nothing Will get in the way of her simultaneous Fear and accomplishment—one secretive,       And painful—the other outlandish, and  Yet somehow seen a positive result by her:          That is, DEATH, indeed, something That suddenly is, before one had begun To know it as something there: she is Scared, yes—and still—her penchant for Ruining, ruining what is already a ruined, stray Self shines thru, and we are left wondering why.

. .  .   .    .     .

Why?

....

TALKING ABOUT A FLOCK OF BIRDS RESUTSL.

We hear what we hear, Which is everything, And we think of what we think of, Which is everything, And when we hear what we think, That is one encompassing, a kernel of a thought, A kernel out of the bag of uncooked opcornp.

(We, that is, the varieties of me, misspell The WORLD. We spell out things, Things without a name. And The name—like me, Like the varieties of me, the me's unheard, Unheard, because each one is infinite—

That good name: it is infinite, so as to beckon a perimeter, Only beckon. A perimeter that misspells. The name- -I do not give to what I see in the experience, Well, harumph, it spells out, Corretcly. It's the same thing, Rearranged, until new meaning's there, A new meaning for the same old thing.

An old thing beckoning the perimeter, Wishing, yes, to acknowledge both ends Or both beginnings . . . either way, It ends in the middle, so that what

. .  .   .    .     .

So that, what comes out afterwards Is a fizzle: a present- -Uselessness expanding, Until it misspells, and then the meaning's there . . .)

A larger circumference is, and does The same thing, and has a perimeter that is, Because if it is it usually has a perimeter,

And this encompasses the impasse. What we see as a pause, an impasse, Is a plausible end that has not come yet, So, we make up our own ends; we misspell, Yeah. The end that ends up coming will be-

-Something that I, nonetheless, will not know, Nor kowtow to, in not being what I expected,                      But in being better/more useful, rather, More license to expand is given it, it pours out unexpectedly

....

ALCOHOLISM.

Wake up. Drink. Think. Rub yur eyes. Return To sleep, sleep in a chair, Yu slept in a chair, In the kitchen, awkward position, headache- -The next day, stiffness. Wake up, again, on the floor,   Yu and the chair, too. Again, drink, go to work, come-                                 -Home, drink. Think. Feel; Too markedly change things: emotions slur: find yurself- -Hiding, hiding so as to think, in a hole,                          Drink. Drink, again. Lose friends. Become a story. Story of yur life, sob story. Drink. Find yurself saying, "it's that way-           -All the time" but Immediately afterwards do not know what yu refer to. Drink. Press on, with thoughts, towards the first one, Don't find one, don't think, drink, again, as a result, This sucks, think this. Repeat, drink, until it is a warp, a vortex- -That yu are dragged into the middle of and wrung out from, Drink. Think, upon living out the aftermath. Turmoil, The strong feelings, they stimulate yur brain, after drinking drains yu, So that yu can press on and on, and drink. So- -It is, my turmoil is the drug that helps me think,                Because I drink, and live thru personal folly, Which inevitably occurs with abuse, to instigate, to help occur- -A vital flickering in the mouth of the dulling flame, Those very strong, Strange feelings of remorse that help us change.

....

COLLEGE: A SENTENCE.

Cuz it doesnt fit, we fit to it, and end up all the same, processed, organized- -into deferential life,

a consuming listlessness- -for being not how we are, and telling only of ourselves, to speak our being plain- -does nothing

but drive us crazy, utterly,

and then we go to college

and learn about others, others, who made their- -importance apparent, public,

perhaps, in thinking of this public disposition of- -ourselves as beings of no sort of reality, but rather HELL, simply because it is not us, but who we thought we were—disproved, possessed by college—

left us by the hinges, and, then, everything’s an idiotic confusion, a confusion that we make deferential, public, anonymous, we- -go to college to be,

to be anonymous. A sentence; here’s another one. And another one.

....

THE QUIETING DOOR.

The road we follow, What of the road We follow, Mr. Eliot? What Have you else to say????????????????????????? What of the figure beside you, walking beside you; You think him Jesus Christ? Ah, nuts. It’s As much JC as you are TIRESIAS, you Anti-prophet. Crane’s more an oracle Than you, what with- -His vision of NEW YORK as a hell      To be celebrated: shaped into white                     Buildings: curving words into    The curves of his BROOKLYN BRIDGE;      To him, both harp and alter, and a place From which he would have leapt, almost, Had this beautiful oracle, this difficult                       Crane, not leapt Into the sea and drowned, Quite literally, his Fury finally fused; but, It isn’t him either that’s beside you,                             On this road. It’s Whitman, I believe— It is Whitman-GOD: and he holds his own tally, his own Sweetness: lilacs of which you are one, Budding. You budding- -From the dooryard sprang; then, fully grown, Lamented your wife instead of Lincoln.

I’m guessing it was your wife,            Since you locked her Away in a loony- -Bin, and, ironically, had a mental breakdown Afterwards, and from this sprang your haunting- -Poem: that lamentation, for her? I think You saw her pill-popping self as a representation, You made every human thing a representation; Her, yes, placed all fragmented among Your other fragmented Images of people on sleds and slick rats Slinking down aqueducts near the THAMES —And men, looking always at their feet.

This comes together Through the fragmentation As awesomely resonant, a painting of the plague of being On a canvas of nothing: the best result of your writing, Mr. Eliot, and no doubt proof in the pudding of— Your own poetic schedule, your pattern.

This came all this together to depict Yourself and, as well, the ethos of those other Selves who had lost hope; you showed them More hopelessness, and became The hopelessness more to teach what Could happen, if a people wrecked by WAR Were to be consumed by their own pessimism, Uttered at them at night in bed by them.

Fragmented. You drawl beautifully, Mr. Eliot, And your rhyme scheme is simultaneously Humorous and lyrical, Mr. Eliot, purveyor Of human chaos, the very human open ends . . .

So do you end your bleak and formal poem

—With an omen: a triple-prayer of SHANTIH, To communicate, oddly enough, a very Christian regret                          You must have felt, upon Reviewing the spiritual paucity of your age. And so, the words you Chose were dour and unyielding- -As a wasteland, and yet powerfully eloquent. It was probably what the thunder would have said, Except that, thunder as I know it generally is provoked To sound with the passing of a bolt of lightning hitting The ground as a finish, a unity, relinquished, Finally. What might the thunder have said About Whitman, yes??????????????????

Whitman, well, he doesn’t really need these flowers That you offer him, unknowingly, Hyacinth-girl, girl of innocence remembered With ill-ease by you, Mr. Eliot, who see- -Innocence as platitude, yes, but perhaps a key to wisdom . . . if used wisely.                                             No, he just wants them. He allows you to give What he has given you back to him, Because he loves you, Mr. Eliot; As he loves the prostitutes The syphilitics, Hanging in the dooryards

This is somewhat struggling to be a pastiche. Weird.             After reading The Wasteland again I found, suddenly, that I understood, To put it bluntly, barely—as in, To put my thoughts in a bare way For now, until my name is called to- -Be a name, so that I may further towards me that which                      Had so long been distant from my craving, My calling craving. But, so, I understood there to be a want in this, yes,

This craving for want: crabbed and angered, Yes, from a throat of phlegm, passed,                     Calling. It is the want to make it new, New, like a WORLD of things unearthed just now, Previously thought of by everybody As not worth it and impossible to picture, an                      Intellectual dearth, a humming of a disappearance. The disappearance of clouds after a hard rain in NEW HAVEN,

Hard rain, washing away the detritus of dreams of some reality, And then the coming rainbow like a stretching band- -Of colored light, towards oblivion. The thing is,

To whatever name is called, I will respond, Though it may not be mine. It may be that I have no figure beside me, But I do: it sometimes thinks itself not there- -When I think it is, and is when I think it is not, And when we both realize ourselves, we

Celebrate the clarity of seeing the same, frail-seeming self. Whether left in my care/hands or not, it is a clarity, still —That I can rejoice in knowing that I know. So then There is no ambivalence. Put your cards on the table, genie, and see My fortune in your own handfuls of dust. I mix your meanings with the ones of others, Never say whom I am speaking of, or to whom I speak. I take the dust you give me, turn it gold:

His beard is white: this man, this man of gold, who- -Walks beside me without speaking, Speaking the most through the scream of his drear eyes:

Looking out upon a society: a brave wound Bleeding out all of him into him. Terrible vision,  Yes, Walt, and so then did you make Your explanation devoid of tragedy So that you could pursue that that that ‘craving’ so-called

. .. . ....... . . ...        ..... . . . . .. . ... . . . ... ..

‘Craving’: yes: to want to need

What he cannot have, Because Whitman-GOD broke the new wood. We need him

As a reference-point to figure out How our nation's poetry should- -Be dealt with, now and then, anew. We should then Research what it was that this man Needed to escape from; or else, why would he be poet?

He wanted a place without frustrations, I think: Frustrations of the inhumane, observed.                  Tap your drums. Let what I say be true. Unless That is, this fellow, Whitman, poor, poor GOD, was merely Filled with feelings; needed to let his blood. Filled, yes, with a sense of- -Truest, slovenly injustice,,,

This then is why this Whitman-GOD is a celebrant, really, Ultimately: a rouser for the wasted energies of man alive.

...  . .. .  . . ... . . . . . ....... . . . . . . .     .

It is a WORLD he made, really, and for himself:  The open wound of a door, entering into the privacy Of a universe of Walt, and just for you: a man estranged from What he must have felt- -To be his inspiration, his honorific. Gone, or Never there? Upon discovering That the thing he had devoted so much time to believing                  And writing down as a whole, as something Or someone not a whole, it became- -Not as who he was, at all:

... . .. . . . . .. . .       .......   . . ... . . ..  .. .

 Having accepted his role already of the brunt-bearer Of the WORLD's otherworldliness, of our need to escape the WORLD by making it realer, by making it a huge realness,,, He then did not know himself—if he was not his book—                             And unconsciously broke his book: Changing things around, changing punctuation, changing words, And making his old purity into brokenness, a shroud,                   An unnatural shroud that left him on his death-bed With more that he wanted to say, which he could not, the more he said. No poet speaks in poetry the way they speak themselves. Mr. Wallace Stevens, fatly soft, a ten-foot inchling, Breaks purposefully, saying it important. He says That he, this Whitman-GOD, carries A gnarled staff of leaping flame . . . you see, Mr. Stevens, I have questions to ask, one of which Involves yourself: ahem: these metaphysical Abstractions: this glass of water or a jar-               -In Tennessee: are these a proper gradient or Wave on which to catch whatever particles of that feral Attention: that blurry feeling that Your mind explores to points, I suppose: these Catacombs you comb through, unexpectedly . . .             You spent your time on darkness, Mr. Stevens, Observing the Aurora Borealis with disdain, recollecting- -As like a strange old Wordsworth-GOD upon The memory of youth, which itself withers, And proves his slipping mind. Meanwhile,

All the bright things remain too dear to you To be possessed, and then must you so darken- -Through proliferate abstractions, As though to rather be nestled in this mode of carrion

Things; this isolated, bare thing on the side of a house. Your NEW HAVEN is not so much extraordinary As it is a hero without you speaking it as such, And so is not extraordinary. And in this you are flawed, But correct. Correct by being flawed, as though, Like wordy Mr. Ammons, you accomplish rawness;                            Work, yes, to make it that way, as though You would not bother to correct the flaws in your own work:

Nor does it seem you edited the content of What you had expressed, at all: as though

The founded assumptions made, perhaps incorrect, Were—nonetheless—the result of a beautiful consciousness: A consciousness of youth, hurt at what he sees, Enamored with what he sees, gone over the deep end:

A road mechanically riven rather  Than passed through: as though In accordance with something else, some Sort of blooming anxiety to swerve. And this made all of what you both had scribbled,

That is, what you, Mr. Stevens, Mr. Ammons, Had scribbled, seem a paraphrase or- -Rather a denoting of your flaws, so as to Make one who reads you unsure of what they were,,,                  Almost, as a way to make them Not there; if brightly obvious, Such flaws would                             Imply a nakedness of form, and do. Less obvious were the actual shortcomings, as they usually are:

Jumping unawares from the corporeal: Stevens-GOD: your Sense of what is real in vision-sense, envisioned As sense, that is: and this, incorporated Instead into what you stated, while dismissing- -Something more important about that statement,

Not to be returned to. These things were for a time

Relevant, at least, before you- -Moved on from them: Jumping then into obfuscations, Those unsaid things became a dynamic,                                      Concentrated prayer, a lamentation, an elegy In speechless-making dithyrambs, for what was not there: as opposed To the innocence of what that poet, Whitman, private, really, Consistently alluded to, and struggled to include,                             And did not. Them being his own crises, they Were not the crises of the U.S., simply put. Usurper: DAN. This Whitman-GOD was kind of Elitist, led on by a fiction that was, after all, a love —Of himself that he was able to neutralize,                       Because the love of himself was terrifying; he Needed to make other people feel it for him as well because He felt this terror in all people, much as in him, And so then attempted to pander To the egotism at the heart of each individual, At the heart of greed, a giant commerce of the U.S.,

And so then he could simulate a feeling of universality Through implying all, as objectively as possible.                        And yet his subjectivity is a high art Because it is highly attached to people, not him. So, He contradicts himself, let him do so, He contains multitudes, I guess. The problem With Whitman-GOD is that one cannot include nothing            Or the idea of it, at least, when using his device,

Because, one does this mechanically, already, by default, In needing to adhere to everything and so then contradict.

On the other hand, to me, Contradictions are the basis of that nothing. Rather than- -Through implication this is done. Again, problematic: To imply nothing

Would be a stronger statement than to work it to the bone, Make it happen—in other words—swallow it up

Into an ineradicable inclusion: to prove diversity in things, A blazon of the nation. This Whitman-GOD, I will concede Implies a great deal in those lines, those facts, relayed And conversing, jabbering like a room of old fathers With each other, a melting pot of subjects, an—

Excited pump of monosyllabic words after one another. However . . . yeah, he does not imply nothing                   But rather speaks it plain, as an attempt To analyze it, which seems rash, to me . . . but, yeah, Since, well, the meaning for monosyllabic- -Words is usually recognized immediately, the reader Obtains information at a quicker pace, so that The power comes faster, quicker, depending on the Sentence at hand. Such is his quick power: idiomatic, A uniform hieroglyphic, markings somewheres- -In the corners of grass, so that we may remark And say: whose?

. . ... . . .....   .. . .. . . .. . . . . . . ...  .....

And strange language, at times, at times brute reality Are both juxtaposed, at times:

Just as the fellow-GODs Wordsworth and Coleridge juxtaposed                      Fantastic and the human, real things. Since then, in The twentieth century, poets like Ammons, to bring It back—poets like Stevens—utilize the strangeness most, Out of all things,

And though it is the best it is the worst strategy, Because it makes one wrapped up in the strangeness And this can be ruinous. There are, yes, the obvious

Openings you open without doors. Stevens-GOD, Why do you open them, these doo,rs if the only purpose For such a quest would be to quiet them, afterwards? You both—unlike Mr. Eliot, a miserable miser, hating misers—          Possess more functioning ideas, and a greater Comprehension of the shooting of abstractions Towards a virility of phrase, a— More functioning ambivalence, indeed. Yet This man, this Mr. Eliot possesses, at the least, A clear hold on his daemon: a clear reconcilement Between the sphinx, being sexual desire, cloude,d

And the everlovering cherub, being Creative desire, of course!, and harder to pursue. He had his objectives down to a science, This Eliot fellow, see, and this gave the man confidence- -In what he was trying to express, that is, The absurdity of that crisis altogether. If bad things were to happen, as they did to him, They would not unhappen if he were to write a poem, Which made the man listless: he broke down, spoke of ideas                                as puppets, terror as a puppet-thing, Because he could not bring abstractions together to imply! He solidified, too exactly himself, and started forth- -With his his his ‘new criticism’ and ‘objective correlative’; being Romantic, rejected Romanticism.

And yet you both: you Ammons, you spangled Stevens, You fictive men that eat ugliness like pineapples, And, view a harder travel of the road—through

This hardness do your struggles inflict upon The reader a handsomer pathos of acceptance,

An acceptance of the poem you are writing

Beyond the highest Pavement of Eliot and his reductive stairs.

. .. . . . …..   ..   … .  .     …    ... . .. .. . . .

For example, where Down the road will I find that house, wherefrom I have strayed, Have strayed for so long? I reveal myself- -In a revelry of nonsense, at times, so time To change that before it leads, surreptitiously

              To ruin, without climax. Endless Responses to the agon. I must find a ghost to fight, Buried in the hole. In the way it fights—this                       Unified melody, heard out to you from across A generic distance—this shouted, loud descant is such a hole,

A pothole in the road. As feeble as lost metaphor. I must find where I have lost it, this metaphor. No longer should I find another road

That speaks to others. Others have their prudent- -Paths. Others’ will will will their own vices to be used

As a form of seductive narrative. Eroticism Can be made plain however, and, yet, The road, what path? Is it a road of paths? Is it a location of empathy in me??????????? Is this tendency, yes, to find myself in fighting- -Merely fighting with myself, without finding? Yes, For, very much beyond- -How far you’re feet are willing to take you Is a place, a house of the will,

A tapping of a preconcert, an Indifferent nerve, a type

                Of verve, as like a Shelleyan summoning. I Haven’t gotten there yet: haven't gotten, yes, to a lofty

Telling of how things are, without- -A need for astringent things, eroticism, Dirtiness, degradation, even of style. Rilke handled erotic longing better, anyway. Rimbaud handled dirtiness as if it was his dirty life.

… . . .. . … ..   . . . . .     . .. . .     .... . . . .

Is this a plan of GOD, or for GOD; Or, perhaps of me myself, the Whitman-GOD, Reworked by me, for the sake of summoning A new GOD out of Whitman, rather than- -Harping laden terms: Greek mythology,

Ovid, Homer, whatever—things I would not assume To know enough about to make my metaphor, yeah, Whatever. This

Whitman-GOD, delved in his own solution- -Of innocence and excited, good gray surprise, Who is he? Know that he is summoned. Will I have the will to transcend my will, though, And not utterly castrate my poor book??????????????? Bullshit. Whitman-GOD has his place; they all have their- -Ordained path, or road or whatever. Wordsworth ends, And Pound begins, but wrongly, in that, Yes, indeed, we should echo our lineage, yes, And we should make the old ways abstract, yes, And yet we should then need to pray the maker of this fusion Does not consult another tarot-lady before meeting us, Meeting us, with what it knows will happen in mind. What you carry on your back, I am forbidden to see.                         So then should the expression be forbidden To be made aware of what is wrong with it, and yet, and yet, This, and all the that in this is all, Very much, of what I do.

.. .  .. .     ..  . .  ……   . ….  .  . .. . ....

Awareness could amble down this road And calm the abstract, maintain the dark passage-                         -Into the aether, yes, and yet, Light up. It should light up like some new Renaissance, And then the farther I get on on this road, this pathless- -Road; the farther, the longer I go, the more I will be illumined in the words, I will define the WORLD. I will define the Me Myself, yes, The WORLD of Whitman-GODs and Stevens-GODs, who will Be infinitely greater, yes, by the good work of greater flaws that We may find in newer tendencies, newer foils of the silly old Palaver, yet to- -Be recognized, until they are and soiled. Perhaps,                   This strutting corpse slips because     The tarot card says he should, that is, I should. Though,                  It would not be my job to feel, through inference,                 Had not all these feelings had by me been inferred,                  Already, as though I were observing the clue of it-                           -That I, myself, told myself as keepsake.                Merely, I feel through feeling, wish to, yes,            I wish to find the end of this dark road,                  This large dark road ahead, Red with human clay, not dead.

....

MOUTH, MUTTERING.

. . . The welter wakens wanting Without wings. The wanting is

A need to have, slowly displaced To stillness—after a sound. And,

There is no Need for wings. It is something Upended, waiting to crash;

Rather than an animal thrusting Itself from the ground. It is the

Scream of the night that Lives on in the welter, And, two things, two— Forms exist, by this: the Scream, and the welter Of the scream, into the night:

In careless suspension, the Tossing of the scream, into The bare night air, is a-           -Volley of strings, shed From where the source divined A grace, enough, to cut into the silence

Everywhere: light of the aural stain Everywhere: in a golden spooling of Directions go each ringlet, collected Into the same surge: passed, like a— Whip against bare skin, made to bleed Out something that is heard in the— Night, as something seen: energies

Working to make it all shine out A motion, and, a cradle for— That motion. Yes, that, yes,

That is it: that is what I mean . . . What I meant to say, or, rather, Write down, just for you, Indeed, however, this particular sort of motion-                              -Is bad, because of how it Is done: whereby the scream Is an opponent gearing back And-hellishly-towards the maker

Of its exile, while What would suffice           To continue manifesting As that original motion forth, is- -Already broken, by The time you have Mended your wounds- -From the whip of a Sound-the whip

Of sounds, together In a single sound, A freshness, of- -Articulation, yes, and

A speaking in- -The night, of motion, Motion: a welter happily Thru thrifty silence followed By a stillness more profound By association: juxtaposition: Fantasy. The sides of the divine.

....

MASOCHISM.

Briefly: the words feel it so I don’t have to . . . which is why I’m ok. I’m just thinking about the next piece at this point in time. I’m literally building me . . . I don’t really care about me, to be honest; this isn’t sad because, number one, I’m not sad about it, he’s barely even there to begin with, anyways, I wouldn’t notice if he left . . . so why should I care about what I build from this projection? Ironically, it’s this very lack of a true sense of selfrespect that will end up being an important tool. It has taken years for me to turn this skewed perception of myself into something that can actually assist me, but I think I’m getting it. I couldn’t change it, so I worked around it. Adaptation, yo. This seemingly destructive aspect of myself, u c, is what gives me a sense of otherness, and thru the lens of this otherness I observe my own emotions, objectively. I feel something strong when I write it down; not sure what. Afterwards, if I want to feel a certain emotion I’ll read the piece and feel it. Eventually, I hope every emotion I have is manifested, satisfactorily, in words. Cuz then, I won’t need to feel anything; it’s already being felt somewhere in English. Myself is my science project, basically, and I’m going to the fucking core . . . even if it costs me what little equilibrium I have left. In other words, the writer of these things, whoever it is, is a chameleon of the psyche: he can conjure any shade of feeling at any time, because he has no ego whatsoever and so then can see the legitimacy in any concept or passion, because he has no self to reinforce with beliefs. This is the closest I can get to the achievement of a positive life: endless circumnavigation, which is why a lot of my pomes are an endless loop of evasions.

I share my writing the same way a person might share the events of the day: these words possess the same level of importance to me. How I visualized and felt them as I wrote them—is a different story—and, discovering what this feeling is, or was, or will be, is the next step in my therapy . . . and, well, believe me, there are many, many feelings I have yet to shed from my shitty consciousness . . . the only reason I can write about this with honesty is that so much time has passed that living has become less painful enuff to write about, as it is. There’s no need to convince myself that I’m writing about something else, anymores; denial is unnecessary in my work because there is a clear distance, now, between how I felt then—which I had previously denied, and now accept and face—and, how I feel now, which I am denying at present, as tho by rote. These two things, when in the process of writing, mesh together in a highly complex fiction: in that, though I would like to think that I am, in writing, expressing my present emotional reality, most likely, I am explaining a previous one. All that changes without my control is the style in which I say things. The pains in the past that came after I came to terms with a past before are more intense, and so then I cannot bear them for long enuff to directly address. Beyond that? I know what is beyond that: it is anguish never to see the light of day, because, simply put, I’m not a good enuff writer; moreover, I am obliged to carry this anguish within me till the end of time, as it just might be the instigator of this denial I must feel, unnecessarily, regarding my present reality—so that I may possess the reality of a previous one—and so then live eternally in the past, in order to continue on with my craft. Masochism . . .

....

DELIVERANCE.

I am surrounded by truths- -As a man surrounded

By books he does not read. I carry the weight of the way ahead. I speak unknowingly, forgetting Things, often and oftener;

Letting things disintegrate. However, There are places that remain truths,

Even if yu forget the place. There Is much in the dearth that is not dearth;

Merely, perceivably, it is an end. It is- -Fractional, the way knowledge

Comes to be known is a way- -Of fractions, commensurately

Striving towards a truth too late, yes, Yes, a truth by now not truth for how-

-It is come upon, Not, as people think, for what it is.

What it is is what we are able- -To glean from what it is,

And harbor as a grotesque.

A retained delirium- -Seen as truth,

Because it is perpetually existing. So, then, perpetuity perpetuates

Truth. So, then, proof- -Is lauded:

When, that is, there is a substantial-              -Amount of it, an amount

To be hoarded, harbored like A depthy malice, recorded-

-And left there in that      One place. A place to stay, Lifted by a prayer, a perpetual

Prayer that we make, for the sake

Of knowing this the right way . . . A way, a path, without continuance,

Hoping thru this hope To find deliverance to see, To know it there, To know it there unmoving.

....

IN WHAT I COULDN’T SAY.

what speaker shunned as now from my lost brain has depth to prove my sanity as yet legitimate as

what forest of an otherness to see? what rarity of less surprise is

spoken after written words construe, And then is factual, after

the experience? these whispers,

what are these?

where, exactly, could my ideas turn; where far aways from here could they take form?

could i sum up what i say? could i be less formal and more vocal

could i retain? could i memorize- -volumes, and follow thru

with knowing more; and, if- -thru all of this i have not come

to a conclusion, think again? think more fully, rather,

and resonance improves.

improves, thru proving significance- -in what resonated afterwards:

negatives and confusion- -follow, just were:

a knave: a trunk of things a knave has: like knives: like a nonsense of knives,

speak, now, of the knives

of the knaves,

speak like nonsense inspired and rolling-

-like hate, like aspiring love too far. and, like he says to u, u say

too much . . . he says u care, absolutely, without conditions

without true positions, opinions.

feeding this core of indifference, u defend, u post up ur men-

-around it. it is a fort of spite, rather than the periphery

of an orbital, orbiting things, orbiting around indifference,

focusing on that to quell it, while not touching it,

instead of touching it- -and leaving circumference

to the dogs. feeling the spite- -cuz indifference doesn't go down,

the indifference of it to be known afterwards

within some frigid callus of my heart, consider this space this destined faculty, this lost brain, flexing out in neutral tones.

this flexing faculty to be- -of rocky perceptions, differing perceptions,

i am trying not to go in circles. i have emotion within the focus-

-that smashed the core the core apart when stated

....

ONE SAID MORE.

Note to self: sprig of lilac, blooming perennial: I am entombed                Within the center of the lilac: I crouch there Forever, waiting, in my natural solitude: I— Wait until the petals fall off of ludicrous eternity, and, the Next stage of oblivion stops to push forward, finally, I find myself Without all pretenses I had cared for, very much, and I'm very Much like a brainless, obscure attachment: something that Needs to be extricated from something else, as—                     Would corn from the husk. This analogy is lacking because It accomplishes no task, but, instead, by the stoking of my own muttering Fire, endlessly furtive in the living room hearth, unused till now, spills —Crude insatiability from out my stomach, and I am left   Crudely satiated, and, I am, thru sublimation, made Into a person who merely sums himself up into a irremediable Hungering for corn; and, when I think about the— Analogy, I get hungry, and, yet, scared to be filled Up. I know, I know, horribly, that I will be spared, whether —I like it or not, until, suddenly, I find myself full to the proverbial                         Brim, as like an hourglass filled to the top With sand would defeat its purpose, this Fullness is timeless, in such a way. This

                  Makes me scared. Also, I cannot Explain, definitively, if at all, all the ways that are in the The the feeling of the lilac, the youth blooming perennial,           A depressing corn husk. Come here, said the—    Delicate bird: first, tho, yu must vouchsafe yur own      Fertility, and apprehend every guise that I might Shake into expression, as tho to be off with them, each One of them, tho, It seems, I convey the feeling, after gestures and Intonations quell sincerity; and, the feeling, it leaves my face, leaving              Me with a blank, black stare that nonetheless feels Contrived to me because I figure that other people Look at me, and see a— Person who is uneasy about his own goddamned facial expressions . . . This gives to the idea of a deep dishonesty in me of course that blows           Up, when realized for what it is, by whatever creature That happens to be the victim of this joke that my mind plays On itself, at one time or another. This corroborates in an opposite      Fashion to how the other perceives what the creature Had communicated, that is, in this case, what I had           Communicated, and, yet, I do it just to put my own Spin on each being inside of each contention that my being Births: but, look: the lilacs, a— Smattering of them around the purple oak tree: they Are located in the purple fields, and, the fields are turning          Vermilion. Away, quick bird, quick bird of my old Subsequent design, manifested after I came                         Up with something Better before. Hi! Undisguised, the sun is there—like a spook,          Up high in the blue fields of the air, and you are Farther off, and, I search for the center of yurself, And fail, and know yu as a pattern that fluctuates Based on failures: I cannot find yu one place, and so Then uncover yur psyche for my own devices, which I later learn were yurs anyway. I look for you in your Eyes. I give up one place to search for another, Only to find that you had been there, at the place I—           Had just given up searching, and, by the time I get There you have gone off somewhere under my boot soles.

You say:

“Fail to find me at first keep encouraged: if —I am in one place, you’ll search another. You will stop somewhere waiting for me. And, I will go out searching for you, And we never will find each other But only understand fully The opposite of who the other is And so then know the other as ourselves, And so then find one another perfectly, and in vain.”

....

SALVAGES FROM THE APOCALYPSE II.  

Consider the idea of layers- -Of the same thing, leading Up to something different.

Consider How many times this must occur, Throughout our lives of points!!!

Points reached, points to be —Reached and points to be,                    Points yet to be, yet to be Dismissed, and offered up to the occult.

Consider, lastly, how Such an embellishment could Lead up to a chance, more refined- -And yet an extra piece is there, is there.

....

GOIN FER A WALK.

“You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands...”

-TS ELIOT

Or would such understanding catch the grace of this old wind, One last time swinging in and out the fields of NEW YORK, Catching the breath of SATAN, in the Cold calm of a saturated 1: 00 A.M. bite of a trail, This street that seemed to mutter down the street— Apportioned gusting, making vision white?

. .  .   .    .     .

Though my vision, white enuff already, was- -White enuff already, Afterwards, as I had blown down, as I had Nothing better to do, at the time; moreover, As the wind blew down, as well, upon my Face, the shock of the pressure of that wind Had blinded me to whiteness: a zephyr, wreaked- -By crisp SATAN, solitary, fallowing his words In condensing, properly, into the retreated, Quieting tongue of a street, going out of vision

. .  .   .    .     .  

Space, brick-by-brick removed to legions —Of squared rectangles upwards, Making up a conurbation of channels of streets, And sidewalks where the people walk and plan Based on possibilities given to them by the rectangles,

By rectangles that rise to their dimensions-                                       -In the same way that that DONALD TRUMP fellow gets short and fires, real-estate values based on Architectural impressiveness, also whether- -Someone had died in the house all night, once, Or if it has cockroaches, or risk of fires, ruddy corpse,           Possible infestation, ruddy entablatures, The medieval downtown frieze, sitting gargoyles, Open windows, without blinds, sometimes,

You can see a beautiful nakedness In the gargoyles behind their windows without blinds.

Cheap churches with neon signs, waking up To telemarketers, foreign, flickering strangers with scarves,                     Trying not to look at you. Shift in tone, Ominous reluctance/fragmentariness. Rectangles rise up, yes,

Into muddy CITIES: Rat cages: piled high: some with spiffy-looking interiors, Where people purchase and desire and beget- -Incompetent children who purchase And desire more; go to mediocre,         But very expensive schools, and flunk out Because of their COCAINE addiction or whatever it is;

Some with not-so-spiffy interiors, Places where people have to use the INTERNET Because they can’t afford CINEMAX;

Some, actual rat cages, where the rent goes up, Constantly, because it isn’t paid at all, yur dealing with Subhuman crackheads, after all, “Because you can??? What an asshole, you cocksucking motherfucker, Get the fuck over here . . . !” fights the guy, bashes- -His brains in over cash, goes to some BAR, Somewhere down MALCOLM X, remembers Himself as he is walking there, he told him That he’d get it, pleading for respect, right after shooting dope- -Between cracked, whitish toes, the dude just came in,

I obviously forgot to lock the door, what if- -My motherfuckin PAROLE OFFICER Had decided to swing by????????? Shit,

Took him by surprise, he was nervous enuff already, Having used up the last of the eighties, and this was his Last bag of heroin, too, damn, had knocked over a- -Lamp, the landlord lies there, bleeding; Goes outside for a smoke after the drink, gets mugged,,,

And people get murdered and raped in the playground And people sell drugs in the playground Some fucking playground!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

. .  .   .    .     .

There must be a degree to which We could consider more tuneful pleasures, More inner pleasures of the body and the mind, A peace of mind that does not need- -To trip out, while straggling down the street. Straggling thoughts . . .

Straggling, like myself, down the windy street . . . Now, what value, what degree should we Attach to this, In relation to the young kid's purloins From the bodega? Dashed off, after an expletive Shouted by the PAKISTANI, or something, it Loaded out, then squandered Down the dark street, the shout,

Ubiquitous, And yet sharp, despite the large blur- -Of the presence of it, down the dingy street. This                               Degree to which we hold up ourselves                 In the sinking light of a streetlamp, waiting for the BUS,                                                Hold up ourselves and steal ourselves,                      Is similar in kind to the young kid who steals down like a-                                         -Ghost, along the windy, SATANIC street,              Alone, with a forty of OE in his hands, hoping to get drunk; Breathless, from running too far, slows down, and starts to walk.

....

HAHA, WAIT!!! WAS WHAT SHE SAID.

The natural flow of poetry, I believe, Is constructed upon simultaneous periods that change Simultaneously. What happens merely- -Comes after what happens, Without an interlude. Because nothing is easily identifiable, Abrupt changes in the pome appear- -Seamless, the figure in the pome can see a paper boat float by, And find, they now ride across the waves of an ocean, The ocean and its broad continuum,

Dipping upwards places, dipping down, green, mainly, An amalgamation of reflections, An etch that bobs. We are a scribbling, moving, Moving down across the waves of the EARTH.

....

FOLLY.

What we first think of as- -trivial might well become more difficult to consider as trivial,

With time, with time and less important occurrences

That prove things can be weaker, weaker than before.

....

[myicelandblog-blog]

Pre-expectations vs Reality

In this section, you can first read about my expectations from Iceland before travelling there followed by the comparison I made after visiting the country.

PRE-EXPECTATIONS

Iceland is a country in the north side of Atlantic Ocean and it is located almost 1000kms away from the west of Norway and visiting this country has always been on my bucket list since I was a little child. The wild and beautiful nature of Iceland has always attracted me even though I am not really a cold weather person. (Maybe it’s because I am from a very warm country, I don’t really know) 

Everyone I know who had visited Iceland before seemed like they really enjoyed the country which always encouraged me to arrange a trip. The official language is Icelandic in the country and it is one of the oldest languages in the world which is still in use. Most of the locals can speak English fluently which is an opportunity for us.

Also, I have always been a big fan of Björk who is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, actress, record producer, and DJ. She released an album called “Homogenic” which was regarded as one of her most experimental albums and with the beats she used on this album, she tried to reflect the landscape of Iceland.

(You can listen to one of the popular songs from this incredible album below)

I have also been following an Instagram account devoted to sharing pictures from Iceland by the successful photographer Gunnar Freyr. The pictures he uploaded have always amazed me so far and helped me generate an idea about the life in Iceland in every month of the year. (You can find his account on www.instagram.com/icelandic_explorer/)

I believe that Iceland is a country where I should leave all of my prejudices before travelling and let myself enjoy whatever I come across during the trip. If we are not lucky enough to experience the northern lights, I will try and not let this make me upset and ruin the whole trip for me. I will try to see it as an opportunity to make a visit to Iceland again in the future. Also my past travel adventures have taught me that that I should not expect to be on time with the schedule all the time during the trip. Even though it is not an ideal situation, as a big group of people travelling around, it is so easy to fall behind the schedule and we should be ready to experience such things in advance.  

WEATHER

As we are planning to arrive in Reykjavík on the 6th of March one of the most important things I should take into consideration is the weather. Iceland is not a warm country at any time of the year, but the temperature is likely to be reasonable throughout the year as the Gulf Stream affects the weather in the region.

From October to April, it is known as the low season where there are less visitors compared to the other months of the year.  During the low season, there is only few hours of daylight and this situation increases the chance of catching and experiencing the famous Northern lights for the visitors.

When I think about Iceland, the first things that come to my mind are the freezing weather and the constant snow! However, according to some online resources, it does not really snow that much in the country, especially in Reykjavik. I find this fact kind of hard to believe. I think it will be freezing! When I have a look at the itinerary of the trip, I feel like I should try and find the warmest clothes and the most comfortable shoes before we go there.

ACCOMMODATION

During our trip, we are going to stay at Brimhótel which is a budget accommodation in Reykjavík. It seems very close to the famous Hallgrímskirkja Church and just a short walk from the main shopping area in the city. According to what I have found online about this accommodation, I should not have high expectations as there are both good and bad reviews from previous visitors. However, I have stayed at budget accommodations before and I believe that as long as I do not expect much from the facility and as long as they provide amenities to meet our basic needs, I will leave Iceland feeling quite content with the accommodation chosen.

PRICES

In Iceland, the money currency is “krona” (ISK) and the visitors can exchange their money at currency exchange offices. Also, ATMs can be found quite easily in the country as most of the locals prefer using credit or debit cards instead of carrying cash. Apart from the natural beauties the country has to offer for visitors, it also has a reputation for being incredibly expensive and this is a big concern for me. According to Guide to Iceland (2017), compared to the other Nordic capitals, hotel prices in Reykjavík is higher up to %32 percent compared to the other Nordic capitals; accommodation and restaurants are more expensive than the average in EU by 44%; and more interestingly, the prices of alcoholic drinks are higher up to 123%. As I am an exchange student from Turkey, even the prices in the UK are always so high for me. I can’t stop asking myself if I will be able to survive spending 4 days in Iceland without having to spend all the money that I have for my whole year in the UK.

REALITY

According to Arcodia & Dickson (2013), the field trips improve what is being taught in classrooms by providing real time experiences that are either different from or support the theoretical background. During the trip, we were able to observe Iceland as a country and analyse and compare our knowledge of the tourism industry in the area as a group of Tourism, Event and Hospitality students.  

Now that we came back to the UK from the dreamy country of Iceland, I am going to compare my expectations before going there with the reality I have faced with.

WEATHER: Before going to Iceland, I was expecting constant snow especially outside Reykjavik. The weather was freezing every single day we were there but not as much as I expected it to be. I was wearing many different layers and carrying hand warmers with me wherever we went to. However, I did not really use them because I did not need to. When we arrived in Reykjavik, it seemed like the weather had settled down and was only really cold but there was no snow. Also, I was quite surprised by the length of the daylight we had which was roughly 11 hours despite of the many sources I read stating there would only be 4-5 hours a day.

In addition, I was quite disappointed when we experienced the Northern Lights. This was because of the fact that my perceptions were shaped by the pictures shared on social media by the people and organisations in Iceland to promote tourism. Marketers use destination image to position destinations regarding competing ones and to differentiate them in the minds of travellers. Destination image is thus used as a promotional tool to gain a competitive advantage over other destinations. (Hosany, Ekinci and Uysal 2006; Morgan, Pritchard and Piggott 2002; cited by Michaelidou et al. 2013) The pictures used on the media were obviously augmented on different photography applications and what we saw in the sky was quite different from the images I saw of the Northern Lights before. In the pictures, the colours looked vibrant in a crazy way. I could see the green colour when I checked my camera’s gallery however my eyes only witnessed a grey curtain waving slowly in the sky.

ACCOMODATION: I really liked the Brim Hotel, our accommodation, where I had to share a room with 3 other people. I was quite nervous before the trip as I have never shared a room with other people before but the room was quite comfortable and my roommates were really friendly towards me. We had a bathroom in our room but also a communal WC and a bathroom outside our room on the same floor. We didn’t have to wait for each other as we could use them, too. There was a kitchen with everything we would have needed such as a microwave, oven, lots of plates, glasses and cutlery. They even provided some dry food for everyone in one of the cupboards. People who stayed at the same hotel seemed like students coming from other countries to explore Iceland as we were. I saw many people in the communal area working on maps, trying to plan their next day in Iceland to make the best of their trip. They were talking to the hotel staff to get advice on what to do and the staff seemed very helpful at all times. I may consider staying at the Brim Hotel again if I ever visit Reykjavik again.

CULTURE/LOCALS: Local people of Reykjavik seemed to have the cool and recognisable Nordic attitude similar to people coming from Sweden and Norway. Everyone I talked to could speak English rather fluently which was a great advantage for me even though the official language of the country is Icelandic. People I encountered seemed quite friendly, some tried to make small conversations asking where I am from, how long I was going to stay in Iceland, what my plans were, etc. when I was buying stuff from the souvenir shops in the city centre. Some even suggested galleries that I could visit.

According to the World Economic Forum (2018), Iceland, even though is an island, is not isolated from progress towards gender equality and has been the top country in gender equality index for the past 9 years. I am originally from Turkey and we are still fighting for women’s rights in so many occasions. When I saw women in every part of life in Iceland, I felt quite happy and wished the same for all the countries in the world.

FOOD: As I knew that Iceland is a very expensive country, I bought lots of dry food before flying there such as noodles, biscuits etc. I had a limited amount of money in my bank account and I decided to spend it on different things such as souvenirs other than food. However, I checked the menus at every single café and restaurant we have visited and I couldn’t stop myself but compared the prices with the UK and Turkey every single time. Fish seemed to be the most popular food in the island and lots of different kinds of fish could be found easily in cafes and restaurants if you have enough funds to afford it. If we look at this situation from a different perspective, people from less developed countries are less likely to visit Iceland due to high prices which may reduce the impacts of over-crowding in the long term.

NATURE/ATTRACTIONS: I was blown away by the natural beauties when I first visited Norway, basically I couldn’t believe my eyes and Iceland reminded me of Norway in so many ways. After visiting a couple of different waterfalls, I found myself saying “Oh, another waterfall? They all look the same to be honest” in a jesting way but in fact I was amazed by all of them. I had the chance to take amazing pictures and this made me very happy as I am interested in photography as an amateur.

REFERENCES:

Arcodia, C., & Dickson, C. (2013). Tourism field studies: Experiencing the carnival of Venice. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Education, 25(3). 

Hosany, Sameer, Yuksel Ekinci and Muzaffer Uysal (2006). “Destination Image and Destination Personality: An Application of Branding Theories to Tourism Places.” Journal of Business Research, 59: 638-642

Michaelidou, N. , Siamagka, N-T. , Moraes, C. and Micevski, M. (2013) Do marketers use visual representations of destinations that tourists value? Comparing visitors' image of a destination with marketer-controlled images online. Journal of Travel Research, volume 52 (6): 789-804. DOI: 10.1177/0047287513481272

Morgan, Nigel, Annette Pritchard and Rachel Piggott (2002). “New Zealand, 100% Pure-The Creation of a Powerful Niche Destination Brand.” The Journal of Brand Management, 9: 335-354.

World Economic Forum. (2018). This is why Iceland ranks first for gender equality. [online] Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/why-iceland-ranks-first-gender-equality/ [Accessed 13 Mar. 2018].

[politicsprose]

2017 Holiday Newsletter

Welcome to the 2017 Politics and Prose Holiday Newsletter. As always, we’re proud to present a selection of some of the year’s most impressive books. Happy holidays to all!

American Fiction

Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (@scribnerbooks) captures a time and place on the verge of momentous change. Set in Brooklyn in the 1940s, the novel tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who has dropped out of Brooklyn College to contribute what she can to the American war effort. Unsatisfied with her job of inspecting and measuring machine parts, she attempts to enter the male-only world of deep-sea diving. Manhattan Beach is rich and atmospheric, highlighting a period when gangs controlled the waterfront, jazz streamed from the doors of nightclubs, and the future for everyone was far from certain. - Mark L.

Shaker Heights is a perfectly planned town full of people with seemingly perfectly planned lives, but when Mia and her daughter Pearl move in they start a series of little fires, small rebellions, that shake the community to its core. Celeste Ng brilliantly explores the nature of art, family, and identity in her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere (@thepenguinpress). The writing is beautifully elegant and layered, and you’ll find yourself immediately swept up in the lives of the characters. At the heart of the story are four mothers: one whose carefully planned family was nearly derailed by a high-risk pregnancy and who watches her youngest daughter so carefully that she forgets to show her love; one who leaves her child at a firehouse to save her life in a hopeless moment; one who longs for a child and fears her chance will be snatched away before she can experience the wonder of motherhood; and one who made a dangerous choice to raise her child on her terms. Whether you are a mother or a child, the story of these women and their families will stay with you long after you turn the last page. - Tori O.

Larry McMurtry has always been ambivalent about the success of the fiction in which he portrays the cowboy myth and the rugged Texas machismo that comes with it, but as you read the three novels collected in Thalia: A Texas Trilogy  (Liveright) you won’t be of two minds. Actually, upon learning that McMurtry wrote all these books in his twenties and that they were the very first three he wrote, you’ll be burning with envy. In Horseman, Pass By, McMurtry sets Lonnie Bannon with his love of his Granddad’s ranch and way of life against Hud, his step-brother, who is endlessly crude and cruel. At the center of Leaving Cheyenne are Gid, Johnny, and Molly, a rancher, his cowboy hand, and the woman they both love. They each take a turn telling the story of their unconventional lives in small-town Texas. Finally, there’s The Last Picture Show, in which we see Thalia as a dead-end place. Of the three, this is perhaps the most darkly comic, as nearly every character engages in self-deception in order to eke out an existence in a town where every day is the same. Amid the fantastic and perhaps unbelievably melodramatic events, McMurtry finds a bottomless well of compassion for his characters. This is one time capsule was worth re-opening. - Sharat B.

Described as an “illustrated novella,” and looking like a quirky coffee table book, A Field Guide to the North American Family (Knopf), by Garth Risk Hallberg, is neither. This work, which Hallberg wrote before his 2015 New York epic, City on Fire, is an ingenious maze of a narrative based on the concept of the North American Family. Reminiscent of Lydia Davis’ seemingly quotidian pieces of pointed brilliance, Hallberg’s work is multi-layered, surprising, and deft. At one level the book uses a series of flash-fictions to recount the story of two families. At another, it’s an index of terms that readers can reference while reading the main plot—or savor for the wisdom they offer on their own. Then there are the photos. Each episode comes not only with its keywords but with a visual image. These are sometimes directly related to the text, like conventional illustrations, but often their relationship to the narrative is more elusive. Some pages look as if they’ve been torn from one scrapbook and pasted into this one, others look fresh and new. Grab this emotional map of North American family life and get ready to wander – it’s sure to be a warm, nostalgic trip. - Justin S.

In Paul La Farge’s The Night Ocean (@penguinrandomhouse), Marina Willett’s husband, a famous-turned-infamous literary historian, has disappeared, seemingly a suicide case but maybe that’s just what he wants people to think. From this hook, the book’s tentacles spread into a kaleidoscopic series of investigations, as Marina double-checks her spouse’s leads to get to the bottom of a mysterious bit of H. P. Lovecraft apocrypha called “The Erotonomicon.” Cameos extend from Lovecraft to William Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, and more, becoming something like “The Savage Detectives of American weird fiction.” To follow this book’s incredible story, you don’t need to like, or even know, these figures, which are all fictionalized creations anyway, despite the author’s deep knowledge of their histories. La Farge critiques and parodies but does not romanticize these writers. He’s deeply attuned to how our human sympathies toward icons we learn about from afar can morph into blind obsession despite our best intentions. His narrative is a seamless combination of trickster humor and utter heartbreak, plumbing the depths to which people will go to forgive, embody, and take revenge upon their former idols, all while preserving their own reputation. The best writing lives inside you —even possesses you. The Night Ocean does just that. - Jonathan W.

Lily Tuck, whose novel The News from Paraguay won the National Book Award in 2004, is one of our finest writers of novels-in-vignettes, and her latest, Sisters (@theatlantic), takes compression to extremes. Its “chapters” are often over in a page, a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, but they’re such vivid shards that you feel like you’re catching all the other pieces in a mosaic without having to see them spelled out. This is the story of a woman reflecting on her shaky marriage, whose trappings—her husband’s children, passions, and memories—all come courtesy of a prior spouse. Tuck centers on her narrator’s relationship with this other woman, who, though living across town, always seems to be in the air. What could turn spiteful in another writer’s hands comes off as gentle and empathetic in Tuck’s, as her lead character seizes on snatches of imagery (“a messy ponytail,” “did not wear rings”), to think through what her ostensible rival’s life must be like. Is it the narrator and not the man who links the two of them who truly understands this woman, she who sees that the bouillabaisse dinner he fondly remembers from France might have made her pregnant body sick? For such a short novel, Sisters is full of these kinds of insights, simply but inimitably framed. - Jonathan W.

One of the most talked about books this autumn, and my favorite, was My Absolute Darling (@riverheadbooks), by Gabriel Tallent. Shocking and unsettling, at times difficult to read, the novel follows fourteen-year-old Turtle Alveston, who feels more at home in nature than she does with her survivalist and damaged father, as she searches for freedom and fights for her soul. Roaming the woods one night, wondering if her father would be able to find her, she meets two lost teenage boys and guides them safely out. And that is the moment she starts questioning her home life. The way Tallent brings you steadily into Turtle’s mind makes you almost feel her pain. He manages to capture her deepest thoughts, her internal struggle, her will to survive. Obviously suffering from Stockholm syndrome, she debates with herself over whether to stay or leave, doubting her worth every step of the way. But she fights and she survives. She is the kind of girl, brave and determined, with whom readers are almost duty-bound to fall in love. Tallent grew up in Mendocino and spent a lot of time outside. His love for the region is evident in Turtle’s view of the place and Mendocino itself is a strong character in the book. This is Tallent’s debut novel. And what a remarkable debut it is! - Marija D.

Friendships seldom get the sustained literary treatment that romances do, but Claire Messud’s insightful novel The Burning Girl (@wwnorton) shows that these relationships strike as deep, stir as many emotions, and do as much to shape a person, for better or worse. They can have special force when formed early in life, and Messud’s protagonists, Julia and Cassie, are best friends from nursery school to roughly seventh grade. Narrating the friendship and its aftermath, Julia, the one who takes paths already there rather than striking out into untrodden territory—the one who sets limits—insists that she and Cassie are as close as sisters. Their two families never mesh, however, and Julia comes to realize that her notion of “home” is not Cassie’s. Much of Cassie’s home life is guesswork, and while Julia does that work, her version of Cassie is partly made up; at times Cassie seems like one of the characters Julia, an aspiring actress, inhabits on stage. Messud uses the inherently self-dramatizing period of adolescence as a lens to view more difficult questions of how well any two people can know each other, and she brilliantly demonstrates how the typical rites of passage—fantasizing about an alternative family, surviving junior high cliques—can suddenly yield “one of those events that that was little and big at the same time,” bringing about the kind of understanding that a person never forgets. - Laurie G.

[nosuchthingasthewritetime-blog]

Armageddon is a Man-Made Disaster

Armageddon does not come with the ringing of bells and trumpets of angels, but instead with the promise of ever-growing progress. I recently read an article called All the News is Bad that summarizes how we have orchestrated the end of the world through our own actions that have hit fast forward on climate change. As a review of The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells, this article brings the most important parts regarding our imminent demise to attention. 

Global warming— characterized by rapid climate change— is the main point of much of the article and book and is described as the reason for previous extinctions. Human beings are producing greenhouse gasses at an alarming rate, around 10 times faster than the period that triggered the last greenhouse gas-related extinction. These gasses are causing global increases in temperature and it is estimated that by 2100 that the increase will be about 4.5° C. This increase in temperature is not only causing ice melting but also triggering the release of poisonous gasses from within ice caps and causing dead zones without oxygen or life in the oceans due to sulfur-producing bacteria.

These dead zones aren’t only caused by sulfur-producing bacteria, however. With over 400 such dead zones all over the ocean, you can find many clustered around cities where pollution, sewage, and fertilizer runoff create perfect habitats for algae colonies. These colonies then leach all of the oxygen from the water when they begin to decay. Although a serious problem, dead zones are actually just a fraction of the nightmare currently affecting our oceans and Gooding goes on to describe other topics the book covers such as coral bleaching and ocean acidification.

Terrifying right? Gooding seems to agree but brings up that this book is ultimately unhelpful despite it being about a very real and terrifying thing. Why? Because it is an attempt to prepare you for events that have already happened and it is an overwhelming dump of data and information. Wallace-Wells places focus on events that have already happened or that are currently happening such as the wildfires currently raging in California. By focusing on old news it is difficult to look for solutions that may come in the future. We focus on what’s going on now as a side effect of the shock of climate change. Far off dates such as 2100 are out of focus to an adult living now as they will be largely unaffected (or so they think) by the changes to come. 

How can we fix this disconnect and how do we make climate change less of a data dump of fear? Well, technical writing and its focus on the reader and using plain language may be a great first start in creating a more manageable and relatable experience. Technical writers are often the liaison between experts and the average person, which means they have to understand and meet both the needs of the expert as well as the end reader without losing the core concept of the message. When translating this information from one form to another, it is important not to lose any of the content just transform it.

Many pieces of media regarding climate change, particularly those that are written, tend to be scientific and seemingly overcomplicated in nature and aren’t accessible to the average person. This is extremely unfortunate because while scientists may be able to come up with new ideas regarding climate change and global warming, the average person is going to be the one implementing them. If a person cannot read and understand the importance of a new process or change to their current lifestyle, they are unlikely to adopt these things despite the value attached. The language needs to be written in a way they can understand rather than what seems to be a contest between authors of who can sound the most intelligent and impressive. As writers, we need to place a limit on jargon and fear-inducing buzzwords that make our writing unapproachable. Articles or “instructions” to reduce the effects of climate change need to be written with the average person in mind rather than a scientist who has pre-existing knowledge to supplement their understanding. By immediately trying to data dump with statistics and figures you alienate the reader by overwhelming them with too much information. The same is true for buzzwords crafted to shock, although the concern is the desired effect. 

As for the disconnect about the demise of our planet happening within our lifetime or outside of it, the focus should perhaps be on the younger generations that are now reaching adulthood or who are currently in “early” adulthood (aka the “Millenial” and “Zoomer” generations). For older generations it is hard to get around the disconnect of “well it’s not happening in my life so why should I care” and it’s also difficult to promote the feeling of empathy with the new generations (their children and grandchildren) who will be the ones experiencing these things during their lifetimes. However, Millennials and Zoomers have shown great concern with the environment. Even internet memes are focused on environmental concerns. “Save the turtles” began as a concern for the environment in regards to plastic straws entering the ecosystem, progressed into an internet meme which increased exposure to the problem and has actually prompted people to choose more sustainable options such as paper, silicone, and metal straws. The ease of sharing posts and articles has exposed predatory hunting practices of celebrities and other individuals of means that devastate natural ecosystems. The ability of young generations to turn serious topics into relatable memes or succinct posts that can be shared en masse to promote social or environmental change is an incredible talent, and something to aspire to. 

Young adults, teens, and children are the hope for the future when it comes to climate change and other serious problems facing the world today. They should be our priority when we communicate about such serious topics, so we should target our communications to them. We need to evaluate what appeals to this particular reader/viewer group and discuss its obvious success rather than mock it. Buzzfeed articles, Twitter threads, TikTok clips, these are the communication methods and media that are currently popular but these platforms come in and out of style frequently so it is important to stay up to date with them. Despite trends, many of these platforms follow the same format as previous sites so the formulas can be replicated and their success studied. On these platforms messages with weight and importance such as climate change, genocide, etc. are brought to the attention to millions in a way that is accessible to people who can and will eventually work to solve these issues. While older generations seem to find trendy social media ridiculous and a waste of time it is the clear and obvious way to communicate with young people today.The industry needs to catch up to the times and use what works to our advantage in order to promote change.

[sage-nebula]

If you could rewrite Pokemon Sun/Moon with things like better character development and more depth to the Aether Foundation, how would you do it? :D

I mean, these games were such a ridiculous disappointment (especially with regards to the Aether Foundation) that we could be here all day, but …

Let’s get started.

General:

Let the Island Challenge actually be a fucking challenge. I love the concept behind it, and how similar it sounded to the Orange Islands in the anime, and I love the idea of having that instead of the standard Gym challenge, particularly since it allowed Alola to be run under a religious oligarchy rather than the typical League system (even if Kukui staged a political revolution, but more on that in a second). However, the actual Island Challenge itself was pathetic. There was hardly any exploration, the challenges themselves were like teeny-tiny minigames … and considering how interesting or challenging they could have been, it made the entire thing feel boring, particularly since the “totem battle” at the end is basically just a Gym Leader battle, albeit against “wild” pokémon. It’s a cool concept that Game Freak didn’t bother to flesh out at all.So instead, I’d want the Island Challenges to actually be detailed and fleshed out. Give us temples or caves to fully explore. Give us actually challenging puzzles to complete. Make it a blend between Pokémon and The Legend of Zelda. And don’t just have us do a totem battle for every single one, or at least—perhaps there’s a way to pacify the totem pokémon without battling. Maybe you can battle, but you can also find alternative solutions with your team, thereby strengthening the message of unity between person and pokémon and also giving players various different ways to complete their Island Challenge—a way to make it unique to each person. At the very least, don’t just have us go through pretty much empty locations (like Kiawe’s mountain—there was practically nothing there, just a boring hike to the top and then a ridiculously easy “game” before the totem battle) until we hit the end goal. Give us more lore, exploration, and challenge instead of wasting a perfectly good concept.

GIVE. US. BACK. THE. BIKE. Or at the very least do away with the fugly outfit and godawful Ride music. And for that matter, let us use our own pokémon for the Ride feature. I should not have to call upon a charizard when I have a charizard in my party. That’s asinine. 

Similarly, MAKE ALOLA BIGGER, and make it so that we can surf between the islands. Alola feels tiny. Having a tiny region isn’t necessarily new—some of the other regions aren’t that big, tbh—but it feels very compact because you just insta-travel between the islands, rather than being able to surf the distance as you could in, say, Hoenn. Additionally, some of the islands are mini, sometimes only having one city or town. I get that Alola is based on the State of Hawaii, but there were certain design choices that limited exploration that make it seem infinitely smaller, which is a disappointment. Make Alola bigger, or at the very least let it breathe.

Stop having everyone fawn over and worship the player character. It felt so unnatural and got to the point where I wanted to punt all of the other characters into the ocean. The player character—or player, I guess—does not need to be worshiped and have their shoes licked for being “OMGOSH SO AMAZING BEST TRAINER EVAR!!1!!!1!!” by the other characters. I hate that. Let the other characters be incredible, too. Let them recognize their own strengths and talents. Shine some light on them, rather than on this rando child who spontaneously moved to this region and yet is somehow the savior they were all waiting for. I just … hated that, so much. It felt like even more fawning and salivating over how awesome the player is than usual, and it really rubbed me the wrong way.

Put so much more focus on Kukui’s honest-to-Arceus political revolution. Kukui overturned the religious oligarchy that had governed Alola for ages and turned it into a League system because … well, because he felt like it, I guess, and yet this not only goes smoothly, but basically no attention is called for it whatsoever. Now, I know that Nintendo did this because they still wanted to give the player a chance to be the Champion and have an actual throne to sit on while the rest of the characters at the game salivate at their feet (sigh), but that doesn’t change the fact that this should have been met with a lot of resistance and upheaval and should have been a very solid B Plot (if they weren’t going to make it the actual plot), particularly since the end result was an eleven-year-old child who had just moved there and knew nothing of the history or populace suddenly being placed in charge. Like, you would think Hala would take serious issue with Kukui being an upstart and calling for a revolution, but no, he was fine with it because … just because. We don’t know, because Hala didn’t get to actually do much in the main story despite being hyped up as an important character. But as far as we know, everyone was perfectly fine with Kukui’s massive political revolution, and the ramifications this would have on Alola (both domestically and internationally in fields like general politics, finance, et cetera) were completely ignored.So let’s explore that at least a bit. Even if Kukui is still ultimately successful, perhaps show him meeting resistance from people like Hala, and gaining support from people like Nanu (since Nanu doesn’t want to be a Kahuna anymore lol), and people like Olivia being torn. Show the effect this has on the kids, where perhaps Hau ends up coming into conflict with Hala because Hala is against Kukui’s revolution, while Hau thinks it could be interesting and fun, and so they encounter some family strife there as Hau tries to find his own way in contrast to what his grandfather wants for him. Show this coming up again and again, and explore Kukui’s motivations for it more deeply. Why does he want a revolution so bad? Is it really that he wants Alola to have a stronger presence internationally? Does he have personal stakes in that? Will Alola have a stronger presence internationally if they switch to a League system? And so on and so forth. And since he’s the one leading the revolution, make him the Champion, versus the eleven-year-old who literally just moved here and knows fuck all about Alola. Honestly, please give Kukui some semblance of intelligence and let his revolution actually be treated with some degree of gravitas, as it should be. (Alternatively, if Game Freak is incapable of doing this, remove this subplot and let Alolan government stand. We don’t need to be the Champion. It’s not that big of a deal after six bloody generations of letting us do just that.)

On that note, Professor Burnet needs to play a bigger role in the Aether plot. While Kukui is spearheading his revolution, Burnet is studying wormholes and Ultra Space and, as such, should have played a bigger role in the main plot, going up against Lusamine (or at least assisting the kids in doing so) in the process. That she was all but ignored in favor of Kukui, whose research and ultimate goals had absolutely nothing to do with the Aether Foundation, was a huge mistake and (imo) just one of the MANY ways in which Gen VII treated its female characters horribly.So let her be more involved. Actually show her relationship with Lillie, rather than just telling us about it in a couple lines of dialogue. Let her continuously run experiments on the wormholes and dig deeper into what the Aether Foundation is doing. Show her her science contrasts with that of Lusamine’s, in addition to how her parenting contrasts with that of Lusamine’s. Let her show up at various times throughout the plot, including when Aether Paradise is stormed, because this is her field of expertise and, as such, she is damn knowledgeable about it. Let Burnet be the one to point Lillie and the others to the pedestals where they can get the flutes, and let her be the one to direct them when it comes time to play. Basically, actually utilize this wonderful character that was created, instead of ignoring her because she’s not the “main professor” (or more accurately, because she’s female, because apparently this series can’t give us a female professor without upstaging her with either her father (Cedric Juniper) or her husband (Kukui), regardless of how little sense that upstaging makes).

Make the RotomDex optional. This speaks for itself. The RotomDex was obnoxious, and is quite possibly one of the worst companion characters I’ve ever seen in a video game (far worse than Navi, for instance). I hate it. 

Don’t make Team Skull bad guys at all. The idea of having them appear to be criminals (or at the worst being punks) but actually having some heroic moments near the end was one that was kicked around a lot, and was also one that was shamefully wasted by making them cardboard caricatures of villains instead. Instead, it’d be much better if they were instead representative of the terrible CPS system / justice system in Alola (at one point a cop NPC mentions there being no crime despite crime being everywhere, showing how useless the police in Alola are), which could potentially be fuel for why people like Kukui and Nanu want a revolution, thus tying into that B Plot. It would also drive home a message about appearances being deceiving to have Team Skull actually be decent people despite being forced to sometimes steal food because they have none, whereas the Aether Foundation looks pristine but clearly isn’t. It’d certainly be more meaningful than the “they’re comic relief but also still Bad Guys™” message we were given instead.On that note, LET PLUMERIA PLAY AN ACTUAL ROLE, GOD DAMN IT, particularly with regards to Guzma teaming up with Lusamine (if he still acts as her grunt), and Plumeria being the one to confront him over it. If Plumeria is the aneki of Team Skull, let her act like it, and let us see her acting like it. I would have her stepping up and taking charge, the one truly in charge of Team Skull (and even Guzma tbh) because she has her shit together. I would also expand and build upon her relationship with Gladion, with whom she actually does have a good relationship with, so that he, too, had some support outside of Null / Silvally. But more on that in a second.

Give Hau actual depth. The most we get out of him is that he has an inferiority complex, is a bit of a stepford smiler, and dislikes how much of a bully Gladion is to him (and thus dislikes Gladion—and yes, he did dislike him, complete with an D8 reaction whenever Gladion showed up, and their “reconciliation” was rushed af, so I don’t count it).  That’s not really enough, and Hau deserved better. If Kukui’s revolution B Plot was given more focus, inserting that conflict between Hala and Hau mentioned before could spur Hau to really find himself and his own motivations other than what was expected of him + his “having fun” excuse. He could also have his relationship with Lillie explored more, particularly since they were friends before the player character showed up and stole everything, meaning that he should have been more prominent as a support figure for her rather than being shoved to the side so that the player could do it instead (again, rather inexplicably). And as a final idea, perhaps he could be manipulated by Lusamine (whom he seemed to like in the games) into working for her, possibly even for Lillie’s sake (potentially) because he wants to help Lillie reconcile with her mother, + believes Lusamine is doing the right thing, + is potentially even trying to escape the brewing conflict between Kukui and Hala and figures that since the Aether Foundation is removed from it, joining up with them is a safe way to go. He doesn’t know that Lusamine is evil af, of course, and so he (rather like Alan in the anime) is completely manipulated into thinking he’s doing good—but that could spur his development along even more and make him a much more prominent and important character, which would be awesome considering the fact that he was another under-utilized character who, again, deserved better. There’s no reason why he can’t be involved in the plot from multiple angles so that he can exist as more than a simple rival, and I think that would be a good way do it.

Aether Foundation + Aether Twins:

LET. THE AETHER. FOUNDATION. BE. SCIENTIFIC. And I don’t mean general zoological science, but I mean, very specifically, that I want them to be drenched in alchemy and science of that nature. It doesn’t have to be historical, realistic alchemy; in fact, making it strictly realistic would be boring, which is the reason why stories such as Fullmetal Alchemist go the “magical alchemy” route. Nonetheless, I want that. I want the basis of the Aether Foundation to be scientific and alchemical. I want the reason for their existence to be based in the alchemy plot that makes up the A Plot, because these games have been heading toward alchemy for several generations now and it would have made so much sense to have that payoff be here. I want to see experiments, I want to see talk of theories and hypotheses, I want tests, I want—I want the Aether Foundation to resemble Aperture Science Laboratories in a lot of ways, basically.

On that note, the “conservation” needs to be a farce. None of this “well, most of them were good, but it’s just the neurotoxins that made them bad!” bullshit. The conservation needs to be nothing more than a facade in order to gain them funding from the government + good press. Additionally, the pokémon that they “save” could be used in experiments (such as the chimera creation experiments that created the likes of Type: Null) behind the scenes. Essentially, just as Team Skull should have been good with bad publicity, the Aether Foundation needs to be bad with good publicity. LET THEM BE EVIL, particularly since I love the visual contrast between how pure and clean they look, but how corrupt and vile they are beneath the surface. Love that so much.And note, too, that it isn’t necessarily that every single grunt knows the full scope of Lusamine’s plans and is on board with them. Perhaps some of them are in it for personal gain, perhaps some of them are in it because they’re interested in studying science, perhaps they put up with parts that creep them out because they feel the benefits outweigh the cons, et cetera. Not every unnamed Aether employee needs to be evil, they can all have their own motivations for going along with the plan + might only know bits and pieces, but by and large the Aether Foundation should have been our large villainous organization for this game, rather than the half-assed nonsense we were given. And on top of being villainous and corrupt, they should have also been massively scientific, in terms of actually carrying out experiments that we see and using conservation as an excuse / way to get test subjects. Don’t make them charitable; make them corrupt. Go big or go home.

LET WICKE ALSO BE EVIL. My god, Wicke had all the personality of a wet piece of cardboard, and it’s bullshit that she was relegated to just being a motherly piece of cardboard while Faba actually got to be the villain he always wanted to be. Wicke, as I characterize her, would know pretty much everything of what Lusamine is up to, and would be in support of it both because it aligns with her personal beliefs and because she loves and is deeply devoted to Lusamine (what type of love that is would be up for interpretation by the player, but in any case, Lusamine doesn’t return it, she just takes advantage). Wicke wouldn’t truly care for the twins, but would instead be the type to guilt trip them for not also being loyal to Lusamine + hurting Wicke in the process by running away and whatnot. She has that simpering, faux honey approach, similar to Umbridge. She’s allowed to be competent, strong, and every bit a member of the villain triad as Faba and Lusamine.

On that note, let Faba be more of an actual scientist. Let’s see what contributions he has made to the Aether Foundation other than his ego. Maybe he was the one who made the chimeras. If so, great! Let’s see that. Let’s see why Lusamine bothers to keep him around. Let’s see more of a conflict between him and Wicke that isn’t so much that he puts her down and she cowers, but more that she looks down on the fact that he’s here mostly for his own self-interest (+ interest in science + Lusamine lets him do what he wants) and less because of loyalty to Lusamine, whereas he thinks that her loyalty to Lusamine (/ her reasons for that loyalty) are pathetic and that the only thing that matters is, well, science. Like, he’s loyal to Lusamine, but he’s loyal because she’s giving him the opportunity to do / get what he wants, rather than because of personal feelings for her. He thinks he’s using Lusamine. He’s not aware that the situation is actually the other way around. Let’s see that, let’s explore it, and let’s explore how his hubris is in direct contradiction to the principles behind the Philosopher’s Stone and, more importantly, the lion that devours the sun, according to alchemical writings from our own world, long in the past.

LET THE TWINS HAVE AN ACTUAL RELATIONSHIP. My god, one of the things that bothered me the most was the fact that Lillie and Gladion barely interacted, on top of how under-utilized Gladion was and how Lillie seemed, in so many places, to exist only as a way to further boost up the player and make them feel special rather than getting to explore her story for her own sake. (Right down to giving Nebby to the player, ugh.) To begin with, I want to know more about their past at Aether Paradise. What happened the night Gladion left? Why did he leave without Lillie? I’d like to think there was a fight or disagreement there—that Lillie wanted to stay because she was insistent that perhaps they could change Lusamine’s mind, or that combating her plan would be easier from Aether Paradise, or (far more likely) that it was their duty to stay, that they were family and thus it was wrong to leave. Gladion disagreed, and so he left, leaving Lillie behind when she refused to come with him. This creates tension between them in the main plot, because Gladion resents Lillie for seemingly choosing their mother over him, whereas Lillie resents Gladion for leaving as he did, even though she herself leaves later in order to save Nebby.But over the course of the game, they encounter each other again and again, and slowly their relationship mends. Gladion appreciates that Lillie is now willing to rebel against their mother, while Lillie learns to admit that her brother had good reasons when he left two years prior (even if his method of leaving still chafes with her), and she respects how he has managed to survive on his own (well, with Null). They meet again and again, come to understandings, and ultimately reform the bond of best friendship they had prior to Gladion’s departure in order to stand against their mother TOGETHER in the climax. (So if there are two flutes to be played, the player is standing off to the side watching while the twins play the flutes in restored harmony.) On top of all of this, I would want to modify Lillie’s personality so that she’s more than just the demure, shy, moe girl who worships the player. Gladion shows the C-PTSD he has from years of child abuse by being harsh, closed-off, and cold. While Lillie doesn’t have to be exactly like him and while everyone is different, I feel that Lillie just being ~omg shy~ as a result of her abuse is not only playing into the Good Victim / Bad Victim dichotomy (with Gladion being the Bad Victim), but was also done just to make her someone the player would want to protect at the expense of making her a well-rounded character with a believable personality. So I would want to modify Lillie so that she’s also stand-offish and cold in various ways; where she, like Gladion, feels that she has a unique view of the situation because of her background, where she’s incredibly studious and smart even if she doesn’t battle, where she’s unwilling to open up to others without the others putting in serious effort (such as Hau potentially, pre-game), where she “defrosts” just as much as Gladion does, because girls can be cold and hard as well and she should be no exception, regardless of how feminine she is. Lastly, both of the kids should have been adopted by Kukui and Burnet at the end of the game. I won’t budge on this.

LET LUSAMINE BE THE VILLAINOUS SCIENTIST QUEEN SHE WAS ALWAYS MEANT TO BE. Lusamine’s canonical role / personality is perhaps one of the biggest letdowns the Pokémon franchise has ever bestowed upon me and I’m never going to be over it. Whether she’s actually an Ultra Beast herself or not (and I’m still disappointed that the Ultra Beasts didn’t get to be shapeshifters), she still should have been the mastermind behind everything, the one in control, and the one perfectly aware of everything she was doing, as well as the one wanting to do it because of her own grand plans, rather than just being ~*~manipulated by neurotoxins~*~ and ~*~in need of redemption~*~. So to that end?Lusamine is the actual founder of the Aether Foundation, versus it being founded by her father or grandfather or whatever that NPC said, because I’m sick of this series having women simply inherit positions from male relatives or else be overshadowed by them. Lusamine founded the Aether Foundation as a scientific organization to promote her own ambitions and goals while using pokémon conservation as a convenient cover (as well as a means to get government funding if need-be). She’s the president and founder both, and everyone respects her for it.To that end, Lusamine is blindingly intelligent. Not only does she have a wealth of scientific knowledge across various fields (alchemy is obviously her forte, but she’s also incredibly knowledgeable about chemistry, physics / astrophysics, and various other fields), but she’s also quite knowledgeable in terms of history, various fields of mathematics, and other areas of study. She is very much a Ravenclaw in that she loves learning and studying, but also views the universe in terms of the ultimate question True or Not. She is very interested in the (or at least a, but in her mind she is always right, so the) universal Truth, and seeks to not only claim knowledge of the Truth for herself, but also to grasp it in her hand show the rest of the world / universe that she has it. Right or Wrong doesn’t matter to Lusamine, because both of those things are subjective. True or Not is what matters, more than anything else. She is very, very Ravenclaw. So Lusamine is the Big Bad. I have actual motivations and goals for her in my AU fic, To Devour the Sun, and I won’t get into those here—but if Game Freak didn’t want to make her actually an Ultra Beast, they would change anyway. Instead, we could say that perhaps Lusamine was furthering her alchemical ventures in an effort to grasp the Universal Truth™, much as alchemists of the past were always searching for that very same thing (in a fashion), usually by means of the Philosopher’s Stone. In the context of Pokémon, Lusamine could not only be searching to harness the power of Solgaleo (or Lunala ig, but Solgaleo makes far more sense) for this endeavor, but could also be trying to rip open the Gates between Worlds in order to obtain the Truth (much like Father in FMA:B!). This could potentially put the entire world at risk, particularly since Lusamine wouldn’t exactly care who or what needs to be sacrificed in order to make her dreams reality. To that end, no, she doesn’t care about her children; in her mind, they would be additional pawns that could be used in order to accomplish her goals, and if they disobey then they are cruelly punished—but otherwise, she doesn’t (and has never) care(d) about being a family with them. Mohn isn’t really important, either; he has no bearings on Lusamine’s motivations or desires. If anything, he doesn’t even need to be in the game, at least not as the twins’ father. It’s not like he adds to the plot, and it wouldn’t be the first time kids didn’t have present fathers in this series. (Additionally, if the Johto Rival’s mother is never identified, I don’t see why the twins’ father needs to be.)So yes, Lusamine is frighteningly intelligent, calculating, savvy (she doesn’t take gambles or risks if they can be avoided, generally—once she has everything in place, she won’t risk it for a lesser payoff than she’s planning for), extremely manipulative, and ruthless … with a spiteful or sadistic sense of humor at times (in terms of causing emotional pain, rather like GLaDOS). She uses whatever and whoever she needs to in order to achieve her ends, and while I’m aware that sounds Slytherin, remember, Lusamine does not have precious / important people, does not care about those close to her, and is concerned with the question of True or Not, which is all very not Slytherin and also very Ravenclaw. (And yes, while her actual goals are different in To Devour the Sun, this is the characterization I’m using there, too. She, like Sycamore, is a Ravenclaw. She just also happens to be a very terrible person on top of it. She foils him, in other words, in a variety of ways, on top of having some surface resemblance to Lysandre.)Let her be the true, unapologetic villain she deserved to be. Let her be in command the way she was supposed to be. Lusamine was done a massive injustice in canon and I’ll never be over it. (Oh, and as a final note? She either dies or goes to prison in the end. No exceptions.)

Of course, I’d still love it if the Aether fam were Ultra Beasts as well (and that Ultra Beasts could have human forms), but if Game Freak didn’t want to go that route in canon, then the above is fine as well.

This is all I’ve got for right now. Completely rewriting the plot would take more time (and would likely largely ignore the player, but tbh that’s probably for the best, because the fact that Lillie’s most important was relationship was with the player instead of her brother will never cease to make me salty af), but these are the base ideas I have that would have made me more happy than the disappointing, flat mess we were given. Here’s hoping USUM can improve things, but unless the plot is radically changed, I highly doubt it will.

[cw-guzman]

Light the Lamp and Get Started

There’s a knock at the door. Through it you hear the rustling of papers, spilling of liquid, and something heavy hit the floor inside. ”Hello!?” a voice shouts back at you nervously before getting quieter, “Wasn’t expecting any company so soon.” You hear footsteps haphazardly approaching the door and instinctively retreat a step backward. A few heavy locks finally come undone as the door swings inward revealing a man in a white t-shirt, thick grey pajama shorts, and black socks inside comfy slippers. The stranger eyes you warily, glances around outside, and then back at you before seemingly remembering something with a gasp. “Oh! Are you here about the blog!?” a maybe-too-crazed smile lingers as they await your reply, but carry on without really waiting for it. ”Well you must be, nobody else knows about me ‘round here. Come in, come in! Please feel free to take a look around the place, it’s not exactly new, just new to this particular place and time.” The stranger ushers you in gently and, as you peek back over your shoulder, you catch them peering into the darkness outside before nodding with a harumph and pulling the door closed. You don’t hear any locks clicking this time and begin to look around the dimly lit area. Everything is covered in paper, and whatever isn’t covered in paper is home to a candle, oil lamp, or torch lending an incredibly warm orange glow to the entire place. And it’s huge. You can see stacks of paper, books, and bookshelves stretching in all directions from this initial entryway, not only on this first floor but the endless floors above and below. It’s like standing inside of a tower with the capacity to go on and on forever. The various staircases going upward were made of wood, while those going deep below were worn-smooth stone steps. As your attention returns from the incredible display back toward the immediate area, the stranger quietly steps out in front of you some distance and splays their arms, gesturing vaguely like a game show host about to give you a brand new car. ”Ehhh? Whaddya think!?” their proud, toothy grin was liable to crack their cheeks. Your brows raise in astonishment as you slowly give a distracted nod and your gaze continues to wander over everything. It was simply far too much to take in. ”I hope you like it. I do anyways,” they shrugged, “I know it’s not as nice or elegant as what others have built but it’s been my life’s work—so far. Well,” they recalled, “whatever I could manage to put together outside of work, on nights and weekends; and train rides, plane rides, car rides…any downtime, really.” They keep glancing around the room and back at you, seeming anxious but proud at what they’d accomplished so far. It certainly was a mess—a master architect and designer they most certainly were not. Though you can see what they’re going for and understand the general idea, it’s as if you were standing inside the head of an inventor or philosopher, nearly stepping on all of the ideas, plans, and goals they’d come up with over a lifetime. Before you can concentrate on the underlying themes and thought-processes that may have gone into what you can see from here, the stranger notices your curiosity and walks up to you with an outstretched hand. ”My name’s Christopher, by the way, you can call me Chris,” he finished with a nod, and upon shaking your hand with a gentle yet firm grip, continued on, “This is my place: a room of my own, home away from home, and a quiet space to dream and create.” Walking away from you, toward the center of this first area with arms wide, “What you’re seeing is every thought I’ve thunk, rumination I’ve reasoned, and dream I’ve dreamt up. Or at least the ones I was able to remember or jot down at the time.” An excited look came over their eyes as they whispered to you from almost too far away, “Let me give you a tour!” Chris brought you around the ancient main floor where the strongest, most fundamental thoughts and ideas were archived and seldom moved. They weren’t dusty or dilapidated, but it was as if they’d acquired density over all that time and you could almost feel how weighty they were now. Though, despite how solid each bookcase, volume, or stack was you couldn’t help but worry that it could all vanish in one fell-swoop if anything were to go catastrophically wrong. Everything was being saved so precariously, relying on things working out just-so and leaving little room for error. Chris was passionately carrying on in the background with the tour. ”For example, this area here houses my general thoughts on the human condition. Down that way is scientific knowledge and personal philosophy—constantly under renovation—and these few stacks encompass my religious background, or lack thereof,” he leaned close and whispered to you without checking to see if you were even listening, “They concluded a long time ago,” and moved on. Not wanting to get lost in the seemingly endless rows and halls of the main floor, the two of you returned to the entrance and descended the long stone steps down below. ”Watch your head and your step! it gets a bit darker down here,” he paused as an aside, “pun fully-intended!” then giggled to himself. As you descended, the orange light of the main floor above gave way to an almost eerie, green hue. Upon exiting at one of any number of floors down, the two of you enter through a wrought iron gate bathed in green light, sending light rays through the intricate designs. ”This is my laboratory,” Chris began, “Down here I experiment with concepts and test new ideas. I have full creative control down here and can conjure up anything I can imagine!” You notice the green glow is emitting from various jars, beakers, and vials lining the shelves and walls of the rooms, while additional green goo flowed along the edges of the hallways and rooms like aqueducts or moats, lighting the otherwise dark catacombs. There were several other blues, purples, and oranges mixed in amongst them but the vast majority were bright green. As you peer into a cauldron of swirling colors, looking to you like a fluorescent galaxy floating in space, Chris calls out to you from the other side of the room, ”Feel free to mix and match whatever you’d like down here. There are no wrong answers or bad ideas, only new and undiscovered ones. Let the creativity flow!” The two vials he was mixing promptly overflowed and ran down his arms. Eventually, the two of you continue up, and up, and up to the farthest reaches of the tower, passing by and through the warm orange glow of the main floor again and into a brighter, full-color paradise. The dazzle of it shocked your eyes to the point that you had to squint to wait for them to properly adjust. It was like standing in the clouds, and floating in the ocean, all at the same time. Everything was weightless, formless, and ever-changing up here. Just when you thought you had focused on something long enough to figure it out it seemingly vanished from existence without registering in your mind what it ever was. Chris floated over to you as if wading through a pool. ”Up here, I can do anything.” He continued to float around you in a lazy circle. “I can make plans and break plans, set goals or change them, all while moving within the vast limits of life and time.” You didn’t really get what he meant, yet you kind of understood it all. He continued after a while, “I can set my sights on anything, just as quickly as I can change my mind completely. Nothing is permanent up here and everything is up to me.” He slowly pointed in a direction you weren’t sure was left, at something you didn’t understand the shape of, “Some of these things have been around for nearly as long as I have which, to me, is as long as is physically possible. Forever, yet really just a blink.” The two of you roamed for what felt like a lifelong moment before finding yourselves trudging back down the stairs to that same-old orange glow. Breathing slowly, and moving slower, your eyes slowly adjusted to the darker conditions and harder reality. ”While there may be many like it, this one is mine, and for the first time (in this timeline, anyway) I’m opening it up for you to enjoy.” The look in his eyes was hopeful, if not slightly worried. ”So, please, make yourself at home. Food and drinks are over there,” he pointed back by the door, “pick up a candle or lamp, and read whatever you’d like. I’ll be around if you need anything or have any comments, questions, or concerns.” Chris paused a moment and then remembered one more thing, “Oh, and of course, you can leave whenever you’d like. I’m certainly not abducting you here. Come and go as you please, just make sure to share what you learn with others, or even bring them with you next time if they’d be interested. That way this big old place can live on even after I’m gone,” he stopped, “Hopefully just to another timeline!” And with that, he dove back into his work. The rest is up to you. The knowledge, creativity, and experiences here were now a part of you as much as they were a part of this place, and you know you could now take them with you wherever you went. Always returning for more.

[junker-town]

Why have Americans traveled so well for the Women’s World Cup?

Despite language barriers and ticketing issues, Americans are loving France — likely because their passion for soccer has created a sense of instant camaraderie.

They���re easy to pick out, on United States game days: swarms of Americans, hauling their rolling suitcases and camping backpacks, staring up at departure boards and comparing tickets. Dotted throughout, familiar jerseys in red, white, and blue, some with three stars, some with two. They’re on their way to Reims, to Le Havre, to Paris. They’re waving the stars and stripes from the stands, temporarily turning the stadium into home turf. In a sense, the United States women’s national team hasn’t played a single away game since they began their 2019 World Cup campaign.

American fans tend to travel well for the national teams, and France has been no exception. Every train from Paris out to the cities the United States has played in has been so packed with Americans that you might be forgiven for thinking you’re back in the States, but for the speed and efficiency of the train. They’ve come from all over, alone or with friends or with family, flying in from California to Tennessee, from Texas to Michigan. Some are world travelers. Others have never been to Europe before. But when the World Cup was awarded to France, they all knew they had to go.

But why? Of course, France is a lovely destination lure, and plenty of fans said they deliberately rolled the World Cup into a summer vacation package as well. But they weren’t planning European vacations until the World Cup came along. The chance to be part of the capital-T Tournament was the trigger instigating a wave of ticket purchases, flight schedules, and hotel bookings.

Why are human brains wired to seek out emotional highs and lows, to crave excitement and fellowship? Why do fans huddle together in the stands in abominable weather for the love of something that has no regard for their feelings, that sometimes seems as susceptible to the whims of an uncaring universe as our own random lives? The Americans I spoke to were almost uniformly cheerful about flinging themselves into a country where they don’t speak the language and don’t know the systems — like my own travel group, who got stuck on the turnstiles exiting the Metro the first time because we didn’t realize our tickets wouldn’t let us exit in that zone. But most US supporters haven’t found it a problem at all.

Katherine Bickford, a strength training coach who traveled from Oakland, says an earnest attempt at a few French phrases enables her to find a Parisian happy to help. Karimah Browne, a teacher from Houston, says she underestimated how difficult it would be to get around without French, but that even while staying in a part of Paris with fewer tourists and therefore fewer English speakers, she found the people kind and helpful. The American fans uniformly seem in high spirits as they Google translate their way through the country. Perhaps it’s easy to stay chipper when your team is racking up record numbers of goals through the group stage, but you get the sense that even in the event of a loss, there would be that air of bonhomie that comes from being in this thing together.

Some of these fans have been watching the USWNT for a few years, others their whole lives. But the intensity of the devotion is the same, uniting them all here in France, an ocean away from home. Many fans I spoke to described an instant attachment to the USWNT, a sharp realization of compatibility that served as a point of no return. Elise Stawarz, a digital marketer who traveled from Nashville, went to a USWNT game in 2016 at the invitation of friends. At the time it seemed like good value for money at $20 a ticket, and as Stawarz puts it, “a good excuse to day drink.” She was hooked after 90 minutes and has been a fan ever since.

What is it about sports — about anything — that can create such an instant moment of sympatico? Maybe it says as much about the person as it does about the sport. For some fans, it’s a bolt out of the blue. For others, it’s a slow and steady affection over time, turning to love somewhere along the way.

Bickford says she was excited for the 99ers, stayed an intermittent fan for the next couple of World Cups and Olympics, then finally took the plunge about three years ago. Her wife suggested going to France for a couple of weeks and they’ve been hopping around the country, watching not just the USWNT, but other international players they came to know and like from NWSL.

Browne started following the USWNT during the 2011 World Cup and she “ended up becoming obsessed with all things women’s soccer.” She wanted to go to Canada in 2015, but as a fresh college graduate, it wasn’t feasible at the time. She resolved she would go in 2019 and spent a week in France during the group stage.

Jenna Choquette, an engineer who traveled from Ventura, California, attended a group game during the 1999 World Cup when she was around 11 and hasn’t stopped watching since.

There is a sense of sharing among all these fans, not just of a common experience, but of a pooled experiential history. Maybe you weren’t at the same game, but you remember that play, that miss, that goal. Or you weren’t a fan yet, but someone at a nearby table was there, and is only too happy to pass down their knowledge. It’s almost a kind of informal oral tradition, passing around stories until there’s a collective consciousness around them, and around the team.

As for the tournament itself, there have been logistical ups and downs. Stawarz hasn’t been able to buy merchandise at stadiums without considerable effort, waiting in line for 40 minutes just to buy a shirt. Choquette was trapped in a couple of bottlenecks at stadiums due to insufficient female security guards available for pat-downs, and also encountered extremely long lines for merchandise. Steph Bauchet, a student from Houghton, Michigan, says security in Nice was disorganized and created long wait times to enter the stadium, and that merchandise options were both disappointingly limited and in scarce supply, with some shirt sizes nearly sold out just 30 minutes after the gates opened. And Bill Nottingham, who traveled with his wife and two daughters from Chapel Hill, was one of the unlucky fans who got caught up in the ticketing mess. His family’s tickets for USA vs. Chile were scattered across several rows and they were left to sort things out themselves by going to the box office on game day.

But every American I asked about their experiences in France came down on the side of positivity. Long lines, paltry fan souvenirs on offer, tickets gone wrong — as long as they actually got to see games, none of them seemed to mind the surrounding noise.

“The community’s just so great,” says Hallie Craddock, who traveled from New Jersey for the first week of the tournament. She was there to watch as many teams as possible in the short time she was in France. Some of the teams she liked because they had internationals in NWSL, some just because it’s easier now to follow teams outside of the US. When asked if she could sum up the main thing she wanted to get out of this tournament, she said, “Connect with more women’s soccer fans from different parts of the world and get to see some really awesome football.”

[tawakkull]

SUFISM 101 -Sakr and Sahw (Intoxication and Sobriety)

Sakr and Sahw (Intoxication and Sobriety) In the language of Sufism, sakr (intoxication) means that an initiate is enraptured by the rays of the manifestations of God’s “Face.” His/her returning to his/her former, normal state is sahw (sobriety). These two terms are usually used together as sahw u sakr. There is a relation between intoxication and absence. If the inner world of seekers after the Truth who feel intoxication is not satisfied with the Divine gifts, then they lack something in intoxication, and suffer irregular tides with respect to the state of absence. It is coloring, rather than self-possession, which is witnessed in their actions. For this reason, such seekers should be regarded as those who have perhaps feigned intoxication rather than being actually intoxicated. However, it sometimes occurs that the gifts come in showers and invade the whole being, with the result that then they do become fully intoxicated. Intoxication sometimes arises from a strong belief, a considerable knowledge of God, and is balanced by fear and awe, making itself felt in a broader sense. As for the degree of intoxication which is felt by those who have advanced further on the way and who have approached nearer to God, whenever such travelers are honored with the light of the manifestation of the “Face” or with the vision of the “Face” beyond all concepts of modality, they immediately become intoxicated. The spirit overflows with zeal and joy and the heart feels excessive excitement. Sobriety means that the intoxicated ones return to their former, normal state. Like intoxication, sobriety is also an undeniable part of the journeying toward the Almighty. Whenever the Truth invades the very being of the intoxicated lovers of God the Almighty, who spend their lives immersed in spiritual pleasures in the valleys of absence, they feel as if they have immediately fallen into an ocean and have vanished like a drop into the world of feelings, or that they have been burnt away like a dried, flammable object and that their nature has changed. Furthermore, the ways and bridges of sensing are demolished one after another and He alone can be felt everywhere and in everything. There are many who see a relation between such a state and what is meant in the verse (7:143): As soon as his Lord displayed an exclusive manifestation for the mountain, He made it crumble to dust, and Moses fell down in a swoon (as if struck by lightning). Just as Mount Sinai, or a part of it, was rendered dust, despite its immensity, and just as Prophet Moses, upon him be peace, fell down in a swoon as if struck by lightning, despite his being one of the five greatest Messengers of God, people of ecstasy feel as if they have changed their nature, they take up different attitudes, act as if intoxicated and utter words that suggest intoxication: O cup-bearer, pour wine into the cup, it is time to break the fast; Restore this ruin; it is time to display the favor we receive. (M. Lutfi) This day Nasimi displays intoxication with the grace of the cup-bearer; I have always seen Mustafa in the wine which intoxicates me. (Nasimi[1]) There are many other words uttered that concern intoxication, but it is beyond the scope of this book to cite them all. Only consider that the famous Hafiz al-Shirazi begins his Diwan with the verse, Beware, O cup-bearer, bring a cup and pass it around! Intoxication is a state in which one is enraptured with pleasures; of sobriety the main characteristics are knowledge and self-possession. A traveler is in waves of unintended, unpremeditated joy and pleasures in the state of intoxication, while in sobriety, he or she is conscious, self-possessed, and makes deliberate efforts to feel the All-Holy Truth. Some consider intoxication to be when a heart boils with extraordinary joy and excitement in the moment when the person feels deeply the All-Beloved One. We may interpret this state as the human self being immersed in joy and pleasures in the face of the gifts coming from the Unseen World or when an initiate loses him or herself, being overpowered by love. If the human self gets intoxicated because of immersion in joy and pleasures, this is regarded as a natural state of intoxication which an initiate gets into. If love drives the person into intoxication, this is the state of intoxication into which God Himself draws him or her. However, whatever the reason for intoxication, the traveler to the Truth lives wonder-struck and acts in tides of zeal and joy. As seekers deepen in intoxication, they begin to wander in the valleys of amazement and astonishment. Sometimes their will-power may even break down, with the result that they begin to feel as if they were a shadow of the Light of His Existence. Those who have reached this point are called the “willed ones.” Their finite attributes are replaced by the manifestations of the Attributes of the All-Permanent One, and they become a polished mirror of the fact that he sees by Me. Indicating this highest point, it is said in Thamarat al-Fuad (“The Fruits of the Heart”): My voice, which sings like a nightingale, has been made to speak by Him; My eyes, which see, see by Him, and I have heard speech from Him. He has favored me with speech, with which He has brought mysteries to light. By the all-brilliant Light of God, my heart has been made extremely bright, And by the light of Muhammad, I have become one with a pleasant heart. Some have disapproved the use of the word intoxication for a spiritual state as it celebrates a concept that is scorned by both reason and the Shari’a. But intoxication, which we can describe as the state of losing oneself due to the depth of love and ecstasy, is a metaphor used to express being exposed to or being favored with the rays or gifts of the Almighty which enrapture. Initiates enraptured by these gifts or rays cannot distinguish anything because of the depth of the waves of joy and pleasure in which they are drowning. In a hadith concerning repentance, God’s Messenger, who is the most advanced in reasoning and sensibility, tells us that a man of the desert expresses the excessive joy he feels with the words coming from his mouth unintentionally: “My God! You are my servant and I am Your Lord.”[2] This may be a good example of what may happen within the ecstasies that one experiences due to being favored by the Almighty’s stream of gifts. There have been numerous people overpowered by this state, who burn with love and yearning. With his words, “O singer, play the instrument, for tonight I am intoxicated!”, Muhammed Lutfi Efendi, taking advantage of the permissibility of metaphors, declares nothing more than the joy and zeal of a lover. As it has been to date, many travelers to the Truth will from now on murmur the same things each in their own style in the face of the Divine lights, colors and forms that they observe everywhere. In fact, when a heart falls in love with the Eternally Beloved One and is invaded by ecstasies, and in its conscience feels His company, only those who have Prophetic insight and resolution can save themselves from confusion. Other faithful lovers, who dive deep into the cataracts of love (or who flow abundantly like a river swelling with rains,) will sometimes overflow their limits; they will let themselves into the huge waves of love due to the rejoicing originating in feeling in His company, and always live in wonder, uttering “He!” The feeling of absence that a traveler to the Truth has during intoxication is expressed by “He!” Although some suggest confusion, the following verses are beautiful in expressing this: The lights of my eyes are He, and the direction for my reason is He; My tongue always utters He is He, and I sigh and groan with He. My heart goes on an excursion in He, the love of my soul is He. Those who are lovers and intoxicated are always with He. My soul has sacrificed itself in the way of its Beloved, Its union is with He, its parting is with He; And the cure for its afflictions is He. Sobriety is the condition when one favored with knowledge of God comes to after having gone into an absence of feelings and consciousness, or, as with the Prophets, when one spends a lifetime in wakefulness and consciousness. It is the opposite of intoxication. The following couplet of Tokadizade Sekip is worth quoting in this respect: The people of peace intoxicated with intimacy in Your Presence, Do not want to exchange their rapture with sobriety. Intoxication is a state, while sobriety is a station and is more objective, secure, and straightforward when compared to intoxication. While intoxication comes from a subjective consideration of the Truth, sobriety is based on the consideration of the All-Exalted, Majestic Being known by His Names and outlined by His Attributes and Whose Essence cannot be perceived. From another perspective, an initiate is out of his or her senses when in a state of intoxication, but is sensible in sobriety. Intoxication suggests “self-annihilation in God,” but sobriety implies “subsistence with God,” which is subsistence by His Subsistence and is defined as “subsistence with God and being in His company.” Some prefer intoxication to sobriety, yet this is the view of the intoxicated when overpowered by the state or induced by traveling through the valleys of coloring. There is absence in intoxication and in sobriety there is peace and rest. Sobriety is a few steps higher than intoxication. Intoxication means being overpowered by state; it is accompanied by coloring, and is the way of some saints, while sobriety depends on consciousness, is accompanied by self-possession, and is the way of the Prophets and the purified scholars. The Qur’an declares (15:99): Worship your Lord until certainty, which is bound to come, comes. An approach to this Qur’anic declaration is: “Continue on the way to God until you are fully awakened by death to the truth of the belief’s pillars, for traveling toward the Infinite One is endless.” In addition, sobriety is closely connected with the consideration of life and requires strong will-power. While in intoxication, the considerations of one’s feeling annihilated in (God’s) Existence and one’s feeling annihilated in the Witnessed or in His manifestations, sometimes keep the will-power under pressure, there is in sobriety special assistance and protection that come from the company of God, such as that which is expressed in: He hears by Me, and sees by Me, and holds by Me, and walks by Me. Our Lord! Grant us from Your Presence a special mercy and arrange for us in our affairs what is right and for our good! May Your peace and blessings be upon our master Muhammad and his family for ever. [1] Imadeddin Nasimi (1369-1417), Azerbaijan’s outstanding poet of the 15th century, wrote in Azerbaijan along with Arabic and Persian. He was very successful in lyric poems. (Trans.) [2] Al-Muslim, “Tawba,” 7. www.reverthelp.com

[sprob002-blog]

A Little About New Zealand

Like many other people, what intentionally made me interested in traveling to New Zealand was the breathtaking scenery and to visit the set of the Lord of the Rings. Just one minute into this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo4ueevKfdE), and I am ready to pack my bags and book the next flight. This beautiful country is split into the North Island and South Island, and its remoteness from the rest of the world has allowed the creation of some beautiful animals. I study marine biology, so it would be really amazing to experience evolution’s works and see things that you can not see anywhere else in the world. New Zealand is home to some unique creatures, like the kiwi, which has become the unofficial symbol for the country as well as a nickname for the native people. Another native species is the yellow-eyed penguin, which is one of the six types of penguins found around the country. 

My knowledge of New Zealand is quite limited, but I was aware that it once was under British rule until they gained independence in 1947. Even though they are now a sovereign nation, the countries flag still represents a time they were under the crown. The interactions with Great Britain and the native Maori people of New Zealand have shaped the culture of the society. An important day in history that is celebrated annually is when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed on February 6, 1880. The treaty was designed to determine who had authority over the land, but the natives and English had disagreements which subsequently led to The New Zealand Wars just five years later. One interesting fact is that New Zealand was the first self-governing nation to give women the right to vote in 1893. 

 English is the common language, but many natives can speak Maori which is the second popular language in the country. The English language in New Zealand is similar to that of Australian English in the way its pronounced, but there are some differences. They say you can tell an Australian accent from a New Zealand accent by the way they pronounce vows and by the slang that is used. Australians tend to draw out their vows more, and have their own unique slang for things such as sandals that they call thongs. Even if you have an ear for accents, I’m sure it would take a couple time visiting to truly be able to tell the difference between the two. 

Prior to searching and collecting images, I was not informed of the rich history that New Zealand has. Its culture is influence mainly by western culture, the isolation of the islands, and the indigenous Maori people. In present day, the majority of inhabitants are of European decent and the Maori have become a minority, but their influence is still strong. A big component of New Zealand culture is Kapa haka, which is the term for Maori performing arts, and is a cultural dance to express heritage through song. It has even been performed before sporting events by their national rugby team, the All Blacks. When traveling to any foreign country, it is a good idea to become familiar with traditions and cultures. This short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB3m5Nc1BzM) was a good start for me when brushing up on New Zealand traditions. 

The Maori have a traditional way of cooking that involves digging a deep hole in the ground and using hot stones to cook meat and vegetables that are wrapped in leaves. This method is called hangi, and lets you embrace the authentic experience of New Zealand cooking. I found it interesting that schools will have a hangi because this differs greatly from the food that is known to be served in US lunchrooms. 

Another popular dish is whitebait fritter, which is juvenile fish cooked in egg whites to create an omelet. This is considered a delicacy and alternative to fish and chips, and it is a must try when I visit. It’s no surprise that seafood is a big part of New Zealand diet consider the country is an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 

Food gatherings are a popular and common social event in New Zealand. If a native says they are “shouting” it means that they are providing the meal at their cost. If you are invited over for dinner, the same social manners follow as in the US. It is proper to offer to bring a dish or something to drink, and to be sure if you can bring an additional guest. Also, the drinking age in NZ is 18! Some people follow Maori customs within the home by not having shoes on, not sitting on tables or pillows, and saying a karakia to bless the food before the meal. Do not be alarmed if someone greets you with a kiss on the cheek, as it is a friendly and common thing to do. After dinner a favorite New Zealand dessert is hokey pokey ice cream, vanilla ice cream with clumps of honeycomb toffee, and they apparently eat 23 liters per capita a year alone! New Zealanders also like their lolly, which is slang for candy. 

Despite having deep cultural roots, New Zealand is not immune to acts of racism. Unfortunately, they have been at the forefront of world news recently because of the terror attacked at various mosques that left over 50 dead and many others injured. (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/03/14/witness-many-dead-in-new-zealand-mosque-shooting)

It is incredibly sad that we must fear for our lives when we walk outside, but it is especially heinous to prey on innocent people at a place of worship. This incident is the worst attack in New Zealand history, and in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sOKzcd0Uxg) the Prime Minister explains that she dose not plan to do nothing about it. She vows that the gun laws will change to prevent further incidents like this one. However, it is uplifting to see an article in the NZ Herald that schools in the country are stepping up and trying to help students with their mental health (https://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=12212778). Many schools, like ones in the US, believe teachers should not intervene in a student’s life, but perhaps if we took a more proactive action to help mental illnesses then maybe terrible acts like this recent one will no longer occur. 

New Zealand has been a constitutional monarchy since 1952, and this basically means that Queen Elizabeth II reigns, but it is the government and people who do the ruling. They do not have a formal constitution, but rather a collection of documents, such as the Treaty of Waitangi, that help lay the framework for their government. The country has their own form of currency, and one New Zealand dollar equals $0.66 US dollars. Their government functions in the same way as the United States by having three separate branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. However, unlike the US their legislature branch is only made out of the House of Representatives. Another notable difference in their government is that they are a unitary state and not a federation. Their central government limits the authority of the regions and even is in charge of police and education. I am not sure if I would like the idea of a more powerful central government, but it does seem that the country would be more uniform in their actions.  

There are many aspects about New Zealand life that remind me of the United States. For starters, the gender roles are about the same in each country. Men are supposed to be the breadwinners while women stay at home with the children. For New Zealand, this role began because back in 1840 the majority of Europeans were men that came for work, and the women slowly started to move to the islands to create permanent homes. These roles were fairly common and constant and woman did not really start joining the workforce until the late 1900′s. In today’s world, women in both United States and in New Zealand are working to break that stereotype and are taking on more unconventional roles. Another similarity between the two countries is that Christianity is the main religion, and in New Zealand almost 50% of people claim to be Christians. Even though Anglicanism is the religion of the monarch of New Zealand, the country does not have an established church. The country has had the basic right of freedom of religion since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Also, the mainstream music in New Zealand is not much different from music I hear in America. I looked up their top 100 popular songs, and I was not familiar with #1 which was a song called “Days Go By” by a welsh band called High Contrast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9pUR1QV3yQ). However, I was familiar with many of the other songs I saw on the list. Before researching popular artist, I had no knowledge that Lorde, who is played on many radio stations in the US, is from New Zealand. One of her most popular songs, “Royals” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlcIKh6sBtc), has an astonishing 757 million views on Youtube. I enjoyed many of the artist that I came across, like Marlon Williams. The first video of him that I saw was on NPR Music’s channel, and I was familiar with the segment they do called Tiny Desk Concert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab8YnmHB6tE). I found it very interesting to learn that many of the artist I have come across I’ve had no idea they were from places such as New Zealand. 

Besides Lord of the Rings I did not know of any movies made in New Zealand or by a NZ company. The film industry is definitely smaller than in the US, and many of their films do not receive international credit. The highest grossing film in their country is called Hunt for the Wilderpeople and made almost 10 billion dollars in 2016. The movie is a comedy/drama about a boy and his foster father running through the NZ wilderness because there is a manhunt after them. I came across the site “NZ On Screen” (https://www.nzonscreen.com/explore) that broadcast all different types of TV shows, movies, music videos, and even cultural art performances that have been made in New Zealand. I found this site really useful in trying to explore popular media as well as a way to learn more about their society. 

Before traveling to New Zealand, I believe it is a good idea to look up some travel blogs to get an idea of what it might feel like to be a tourist in a foreign land. One I found very useful was “The Do’s and Dont’s of a New Zealand Road Trip” (https://youngadventuress.com/2014/08/new-zealand-road-trip.html). It covers everything from the perfect campervan to rent, a review of popular tourist sites, and even to driving in New Zealand because lets be honest driving in a foreign country can be a little scary. However, the most informative blog I came across was “How to Plan Your Ideal New Zealand Trip” (https://misstourist.com/how-to-plan-your-ideal-trip-to-new-zealand/). This blog has all the information you need in terms of the best time to visit, how much you can expect to spend, and even some tips on how to score the best deals because it can become rather expensive. 

After researching and collecting images about New Zealand, I have a better understanding of their cultural roots and some of the traditions that are popular. I plan to expand my knowledge by keeping up with current news and exploring more of their popular movies and music. The collection I have so far will help me be more respectful when I travel to New Zealand, and it has made me more comfortable when I travel abroad.