#i am returning to the 2000s era of don't like don't read

[silverwhittlingknife]

hi Silver! o/ because that fanart made me wonder - would you happen to know when/where Dick's stuffed elephant plush Zitka turns up in the comics?

GREETINGS CAM <3333 THAT ART WAS SO CUTE

Yeah, I think your instincts are right - it's a truly adorable bit of transformative fandom, but I'm 95% percent sure it's not comics canon. Barbara has canon plushies, but I don't think anyone else does.

I got kinda invested in the investigation (it's hard to prove a negative!) and I ended up typing out an entire History of Elinore/Zitka, so, uh, if you're curious, meet me below the cut for:

Where does Elinore / Zitka - the animal - appear in comics?

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

Where does Elinore / Zitka appear in comics?

We're gonna go in chronological order!

Dick's circus elephant friend was first created for practical reasons: in Batman 436, Marv Wolfman does a big expanded flashback to Dick's circus backstory as a way to subtly show us Tim before officially introducing him (so that we can have a technically-solvable mystery-of-Tim's-identity in LPoD). In this comic, there's an elephant named Elinore who loves Dick:

Aww. Such a cute elephant!

Batman 436 comes out in August 1989. New Titans 60 comes out a few months later, in November, and guess what? When Dick visits the circus, he is suddenly surprised by an unexpected blast from the past! It turns out that even though it's been years, Elinore still remembers him!

Here's the part where Elinore remembers Dick:

SUCH a cute elephant. I love her.

(Guess who else still remembers Dick even though it was so long ago. Guess which other character is about to be an unexpected blast from the past. Guess which character Elinore is directly paralleling guess guess guess sorry everything is about Dick and Tim in my mind but I can focus I swear)

Four years later, in 1993, Batman: The Animated Series retells Dick's origin story. They like and keep Wolfman's elephant, but they change her name to Zitka:

Wolfman doesn't return to the elephant beyond those two appearances, and a few years down the line, New Titans gets cancelled and Wolfman's not writing Dick anymore anyway. So the animal gets abandoned for a while, until Devin Grayson, a fan of both Wolfman and B:tAS, revives the Wolfman-era Titans team in JLA/Titans and then the ongoing series Titans 1999.

Grayson then brings back the elephant in a flashback to Dick's past in Titans 16 (Jun 2000), where she imports the B:tAS name. Sometimes I'm skeptical of TV-to-comics imports, but honestly, I endorse this one. You lose the alliteration, which is a shame, but IMO Zitka is a better elephant name than Elinore.

Here's Dick with the newly-christened Zitka in Titans 16:

Grayson also briefly references the elephant in Gotham Knights 20 and - in a final angsty callback - in Nightwing 88 (Feb 2004), where Zitka tries futilely to comfort Dick in the midst of his trauma conga line:

... And... honestly, I think that's it for comic appearances? The two Wolfman comics plus the three Grayson comics.

Both Wolfman and Grayson are writing multiple titles - Batman, New Titans, Titans, Gotham Knights, and Nightwing between the two of them, spanning a big chunk of Dick's post-Crisis canon - and both writers use the elephant for heartwarming moments of nostalgia, which means if you're doing a post-Crisis readthrough for Dick, Elinore/Zitka feels memorable. But I don't think she actually shows up that much.

For post-2011, I am not as well-informed - throwing this out to the dash? anyone know? - but I feel like Zitka the heartwarming symbol of Dick's heartwarming circus past is, uh, thematically very at odds with the Court of Owls evil!circus vibes, so my instinct is that this story element was almost certainly dropped in the reboot.

Did Dick ever have a stuffed elephant toy in comics?

In WFA, yes; in main comics continuity, no. Technically, I have not read every comic ever published, so I could be wrong!! But I don't think so.

Below, find my rambling reasoning on the tonal vibes of pre-Crisis, post-Crisis, and post-2011, and why this particular story element doesn't seem right to me for the first two.

Pre-Crisis (...okay, mostly the Silver Age): stuffed animal, yes or no?

tl;dr no, requires too much background knowledge on the part of the reader, plus the elephant wasn't a thing until later

Elinore doesn't get created until post-Crisis, but also just generally, pre-Crisis callbacks are more along the lines of this reference in Batman 129 (published in 1960), where, wow, Batman and Robin are hunting jewel thieves - and it turns out Robin recognized this strongman! BUT HOW?!

The comic goes on to recap Dick's entire origin story in flashback, on the assumption that you may not know it.

(BTW, if you'd like to know more about Haly's Circus throughout the years, nightwingology has a great post here summarizing a lot of fun plotlines and characters!)

Basically: Silver Age comics are very self-consciously episodic and kid-friendly; they're not generally gonna do overly-elaborate callbacks because they don't know what comics their kid readers may have randomly picked up or remember.

By the time of post-Crisis, comic books were being written for an adult audience buying from the direct market, i.e. readers who are collecting whole runs & don't need or want Dick's origin story to be recapped to us in full every time it's referenced. That's why in post-Crisis, we get stuff like "hey, neat, this particular soda brand is getting mentioned in several different books!!" or "in order to understand this story arc, buy SIXTEEN DIFFERENT COMICS in FIVE DIFFERENT RUNS and read them ALL ACCORDING TO A NUMBERED ORDER and also you better be following the individual plotlines and recognize these five minor characters who we don't bother to introduce!! Good luck!!" But the elaborate post-Crisis plotlines - and subtler worldbuilding like a stuffed animal callback to Dick's backstory - don't make a lot of story sense UNLESS you're imagining your readers as completionist adult fans.

So IMO a stuffed animal wouldn't be a pre-Crisis thing unless it was The Episodic Story Of the Week, and I don't think a stuffed animal is action-adventure-y enough for the fast-paced storytelling of the Silver Age. (Unless it, like, came to life and tried to eat you or something.)

Post-Crisis: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr: no, Dick's a manly tough guy, he's not gonna have a stuffed animal, that'd be lame, like something Tim might do

Part of the edgy grimdark adult vibes in 80s/90s comics is that some characters who used to be kinda silly & goofy & lighthearted - like Batman and Robin - get reimagined as Serious and Angsty and Edgy in a Tough Cool Manly Brooding Way. This massively affects characterization for Bruce, Dick, and Bruce and Dick's relationship.

(I obviously love this change & love the tense Bruce-and-Dick interactions, but plenty of fans of the earlier fluffy comics really disliked the edgy retcons of Miller / Wolfman / Starlin / et al.)

The upshot is that post-Crisis is a period when you could have a recurring reference like a stuffed elephant, but you wouldn't have a stuffed elephant, not for Dick. I think a toy like that would be too cutesy / childish / effeminate to give a male character in post-Crisis, unless you were poking fun at him.

Now, you could probably let Tim have a stuffed animal, because Tim is sometimes cool but also sometimes a tryhard loser who is faking being cool and not entirely pulling it off (see e.g. the Robin comic where he practices tough-guy faces in the mirror, or the Teen Titans comic where Conner discovers his cringy Enya CD, or when he's fanboying over Connor and it's awkward, etc etc.). A stuffed animal would be deeply embarrassing, and you'd have to be careful to compensate by having Tim do something cool afterward - but Tim's character concept allows for "he's kind of a loser sometimes."

But Dick isn't!! In post-Crisis, Dick's a tough / impressive / "cool guy" character, the kind of guy anyone would want to be, even in the flashbacks where he's Robin, and even in the stories where he's more lighthearted than angsty. It'd be kinda lame for Dick to have a stuffed elephant, so he wouldn't. I feel like Dick would be more likely to poke fun at it if someone had one, like when he's making fun of Wally for liking the Hardy Boys. Dick could have a Batman action figure, at most, and if he had one he would have it ironically.

Basically: in post-Crisis, a male character hugging a stuffed elephant feels more likely to be a punchline to me, not something poignant. (Even with Tim, Tim could have an embarrassing stuffed animal, but he couldn't hug it when sad - that's too far. Maybe Booster Gold might do this. Probably he wouldn't, but spiritually, he would. Sorry Booster ilu! <3)

Instead, Dick instinctively deals with his inner turmoil like the TORTURED ACTION HERO he is: by punching things and brooding and yelling and joining the mob and sleeping on rooftops and going on obsessive secret missions and acquiring Angsty Stubble!! Just like Batman!

(Technically I don't know if Bruce ever joined the mob but you know he would.)

Anyway as you know this is my favorite continuity and I am poking fun affectionately, but uh, yeah sdfsfdsfs. No stuffed animals.

Post-2011 / Infinite Frontier / Wayne Family Adventures: stuffed animals, yes or no?

tl;dr it's in WFA! Probably not anywhere else, but it could be.

Post-2011 stuff tends to be cutesier overall, most of all in the current Infinite Frontier era. So I don't feel like this would be tonally out-of-line with IF comics. Taylor tends to go for more meme-y references rather than fanfic references, though.

So the obvious best fit is WFA, which is aiming for a rough approximation of Silver Age family-friendly vibes - wholesome, episodic plots, Teaching Good Moral Lessons For The Youth, etc. - plus lots of Easter eggs for fanfic readers and some comic references.

And look, here we are:

Aww.

Whew - that's everything I could find!

Anyway as you can probably tell, I LOVE the elephant, so this was a very entertaining rabbit hole to go down, thank you <3

[mindshelter]

HI doing my kyle readthrough (up to oyl) rn and i must know what are some of your fav issues/arcs 🙏 and if there's anything u think i should just skip. if ur feeling hateful enough

HI i appreciate this ask a lot i don't know if i count as any paragon of kyle expertise but... well. that's never stopped me.

if you're up to oyl you're pretty far along, and i assume you'd seen a handful of reading guides that nudge you towards all of gl (1990) #48-181 and its surrounding crossovers, including zero hour (1994) and final night/parallax: emerald night (1996). i derive most of my takes on his character from this era.

green lantern rebirth and gl publications thereon are often (in)famously authored by mr. geoff johns, so i cannot in good conscience integrate most of that body of work into my belief system. that being said! it does include the buildup to ion (2006) #1-12, which, while not perfect, has phenomenal art and is also pretty key to kyle's whole ethos. the buildup to ion is the following:

green lantern: rebirth (2004)

green lantern corps: recharge (2005)

rann/thanagar war: infinite crisis special (2006)

ion (2006)

if you're not allergic to ensemble comics, he is also a frequent cast member in jla (1997) for the first 70 or so issues; it's a good place to look to see him foster relationships with other members of the dc universe (like wally, whose friendship with kyle is basically nonexistent nowadays but i have not forgotten) and gradually gain confidence as gl. some highlights include:

jla (1997) #1-7 — he's such a rookie here. he's clearly very new to the game and nervous about it, so it's a good look into how he started off and what he grew from.

jla/titans (1998) #1-3

jla (1997) #16-17

jla (1997) #32-46 — tie-ins to no-man's land, hal's return as the spectre in #35, and the world war iii/tower of babel storylines.

green lantern: circle of fire (2000) — starts about here, in terms of publication timeline, but portrays a version of kyle that is still relatively new to the jla. the kylealex worms are here.

jla (1997) 47-68, #70, #72-75

jla (1997) #76 — kyle's final issue in the JLA's main rotation, as a tie-in for the later events in gl (1990). john steps in for him.

as for standalones, personal recommendations, or just random appearances i happen to remember:

green lantern/flash: faster friends (1996) #1-2 — (to an empty auditorium) WALLY AND KYLE WOO! WOO!

total justice (1996) #1-3 — more budding hero kyle. wally is a hater. tim is also there.

dc universe holiday bash (1996) #1 — kyle goes to synagogue and beats white supremacists :)

dc universe holiday bash I (1997) #1 — connor and kyle go holiday shopping. very cute also.

adventures in the dc universe (1997) #11 — kyle and wonder woman hang out! he also gets bullied by children and falls into a sewer.

superman (1986) #159, #165, #170

batman chronicles (1995) #15 — be fucking nice bruce

green lantern 3D (1998) — standalone. jen and kyle being cute.

green lantern secret files and origins (1998) #1-3

green lantern 80-page giant (1998)

flash 80-page giant (1998) — kyle appears for two pages but it's of wally asking him about alex because he's worried about his own relationship. kyle gets very sad and visibly withdrawn to the point that wally apologizes. VERY FUNNY.

(final note: THANKS! i am so flattered. was it because of the kyle slayner shooba wooba cherry pie brownie cake post. i rambled on for way longer than i thought i would. i hope this is helpful, and happy reading!)

[thegoldenhoof]

Exploring Death of the Mentor trope in Izzy's death scene

Izzy's death has been described as the death of a mentor by Jenkins and whether Izzy and Ed ever had a mentor mentee relationship aside, I wanted to explore the death of the mentor trope a bit and how it applies here.

(Heads up this is close to 2000 words)

(If someone knowledgeable at media studies help me out here. Actual references/essays for me to read would be great. For now I am hoping my google fu is enough.)

Where is the death of a mentor trope used?

In trying to understand how the death of a mentor works in OFMD the first obstacle I ran into was the fact that the mentor archetype and the death of the mentor as a trope belongs to what has been called the hero's journey and do not directly translate to romances, much less romantic comedies.

Mentor adjacent roles in romantic comedies are not strictly mentors in the traditional sense but avulcular characters, the older neighbour/friend who drop by to share their wisdom to to nudge our protagonists onto the right path of love. If this is the role Jenkins envisioned for Izzy in Episode 7 I must say it makes Izzy rather a failure at this mentorship gig.

2. What are the functions of the death of a mentor trope?

Off the top of my head, the ones I can think of are

Character growth from student to hero. 

2. Motivation of hero - Specifically when the hero is facing a dilemma regarding their actions, the death motivates them to make a decision.

3. Revaluation of the hero's ideals - The opposite of the above is of course that the death may itself push the protagonist to reconsider and debate his decisions/ideals taking him in a new direction.

4. Reconciliation- The hero (maybe hotheaded) has a fall out with the mentor over a difference of ideology or something returns to the fold and tries to live according to the mentor's ideals

5. Inheritance of responsibilities/knowledge/wisdom - Where the influence of the mentor extends beyond just the protagonist and his death passes on the burden of his responsibilities/knowledge forcing the hero to grow up.

6. Sacrifice to save the hero as a fulfilment of his role ensuring the hero lives to fight another day

7. The evil Mentor - The Mentor is responsible for actions for which no redemption is possible so his death is the only thing that can serve. This usually has the protagonist unambiguously morally superior and standing in ideological opposition to the hero. The mentor is either killed by the hero or has a last-minute change of heart and dies protecting the hero.

8. End of an era / Passing of the old guard- The protagonist heralds the coming generation whose ideals stand in opposition to the mentor. Unlike the evil mentor, their ideological opposition does not place them on opposite moral sides but still creates enough conflict that they are unable to see them as coexisting with each other, and the death of the mentor's ideals is framed as progress. As stated for this universalization of this interpersonal difference in ideology both the mentor and protagonist have the power to influence the larger social structure of their community.

In applying these roles to Izzy and Ed, I think 1,3,4,5,6 can be thrown out of consideration automatically. Ed and Izzy don't fit into any of these tropes.

2. Motivation of a hero in dilemma - I would have liked this actually. If Izzy's death had in any way influenced or finalized Ed and Stede's retirement plans, put them on the same page, and consolidated Ed's wavering character development I would have considered the plot well served by Izzy's death. It also has the advantage that this is the form of the trope that is best adapted to a romantic comedy where the mentor’s death makes the protagonist to understand the value of life and the regret of lost chances and pushes the protagonist to pursue their love. 

  As it stands however we have no indication that this is in any way true in the show. And sadly so because I feel it would have worked so much better with Izzy’s role as Stede’s mentor. 

6. Villain Mentor- As much as I thing this would be rather loved among some fans, this stands in opposition to the entire arc of the season. But more than that, death of the evil mentor works for me only when the harm caused by the mentor is 1) to a society at large and 2) of a greater magnitude than the protagonist. Ed does not stand as a moral better than Izzy. If anything they are emotionally contradictory and not ideologically. Even then, perhaps this trope maybe could have been stretched to apply in Episode 1 but not anytime later. But honorary mention for that.

7. End of an era/Passing of the old guard- 

As I understand this to be the most commonly accepted trope in play in OMFD, supported by Jenkin’s comments, I wanted to break down the application and expectations from this trope.

The episode attempts to elevate Izzy to this symbolic role by having Ricky describe Izzy as the “Brains behind Blackbeard,” a notion utterly laughable for anyone who remembers season 1. The fact that Izzy does not in fact laugh Ricky out of the room is the first point of dissonance in the episode. The second reinforcement of this elevation is by placing Izzy as the half of Blackbeard that is still active as opposed to Ed’s half of dormant Blackbeard. 

In this trope, the mentor’s death can be either a catalyst or a signifier of a larger social change. In OMFD this larger change, we are told is meant to be the passing of the old age of piracy- the culture of abuse. But it is also the passing of the golden age of piracy and the looming threat of the empire. For Izzy’s death to be a signifier of this, Izzy needs to be more than Firstmate Hand and become the the symbolic representative of piracy of both the culture of abuse and this glorified golden age. and already the cracks are showing.

There is a major problem with the use of this. Jenkins mentions death of the mentor at the end of th second act as the trope he was mimicking. But this version of the trope is better applied in the third act, often after the resolution of the crisis for emotional closure and a short hand for the future fate of the characters. That is the only place it can exist.

To exists at the end of the Second Act, the death of the mentor has to impact the character and thus the direction of the story in a significant way and a romanticized farewell to a passing age does not do that.

HOW DOES THE TROPE FIT IZZY?

I am stepping away from the larger role of Izzy as the representative of the old guard (in both its roles) as a part of Blackbeard to explore the implications of Izzy being part of Blackbeard, 

Izzy as half of Blackbeard always made sense for me in that I saw Izzy as the brute execution of Blackbeard’s plans. However, by canonizing this relationship, the narrative runs into the problem that it casts Izzy’s actions in season 1 in a much more sympathetic light. He is suddenly not the angry jealous second in command trying to separate the lovebirds but a man desperately trying to hold on to his life’s work because that is all he has. The narrative then tries to counter this by *telling* us that Izzy regrets “feeding Blackbeard’s darkness for years even after he knew Ed outgrew it.” At this point, not jumping to either extreme (of Izzy love and hate)  we can draw couple of conclusions. 

The darkness was not something Izzy introduced to Ed. 

Izzy fed the darkness and encouraged it because that was the only way he could have something that was them.  “Blackbeard was us”. Even in this apology, there is something heartbreakingly lonely about this confession. (Con O’Neill is magic and deserves all the awards on the planet). 

He regrets it now.  

We leave the scene with Izzy permitting Ed to be “Just Ed.” 

Here Izzy’s role as the supposed mentor reaches its conclusion, resolving the ideological  (or emotional in this case ) conflict with the protagonist by surrendering to his better ways. Except when we pull back to look at the entire season we realize that this ideological conflict is a few episodes out of date. We know that by Episode 7 they have reached a resolution if not catharsis and as many others have pointed out, they had reached a place where that catharsis was possible without the dramatic catalyst of death. Again, death as the only place this conversation could happen would have worked for E3 Izzy at best but not any time after. One death and rebirth each later they are not the same people anymore.

Secondly, this dramatic catharsis has no impact on our protagonist Ed. As I mentioned before this is not the trope of the mentor’s death pushing the protagonist to pursue his love. He is already on route to getting the love and life that he wants and Izzy’s death, his “permission” even the supposed catharsis has no discernable impact on it. (If there is any, we are yet to see the signs of it.) 

On the other hand, here Izzy, in his other role as the old guard has passed, allowing for the emergency of the new age of piracy. Except, stepping back again, to the larger reality, we know that it is not true. There is no new age of piracy to herald. There is no better pirate society emerging yet. Izzy’s Ideal of Piracy, which he so passionately advocated for, which was the beginning of elevating his character simply does not exist beyond the Revenge. For the simple reason that if it already did, there would be no reason for a new type of piracy in the first place.

We are again running into the old problem that Izzy is playing two roles, contradicting each other in two different scenes where one scene is meant to add to the allegorical understanding of the other. Is he the passionate defender of the new piracy or the stubborn remnant of the old? In trying to give Izzy both the glorifying speech of the martyr and make him the representative of the toxic old guard, in attempting to elevate him from an individual to a figurehead, Izzy’s role becomes too large to be contained by one character and starts to crumble.

On a larger scale I idea of an old piracy vs a new piracy simply doesn't work because the Revenge is just one ship. In spite of Stede’s newfound fame, he does not hold the kind of influence to change the shape of piracy, and Blackbeard, according to the story is dead and simply unable to effect any change. Without taking up the mantle of Blackbeard Ed has even lesser influence than Stede. Stede’s brand of softer piracy is uniquely ill-suited to survive the ruthlessness of the Empire looming large on the horizon. One can hope that these are issues that will be addressed in the third season if we ever have one. But at this point the allegory is incomplete and the catharsis we are meant to feel is dependent on a future we may never see. 

 And once consider the whole season, Izzy as the representation of Blackbeard itself starts to loose strength. Everything Izzy has grown to become, all the ways he has been embraced by and has embraced the ethos of the show and the spirit of the Revenge, simply outweighs his half of Blackbeard in the past. To refuse to acknowledge this change is to say that he never had a hope of being a better person because no matter who he became, the weight of who he was will always tilt the balance against him. The grace extended to Ed by Stede’s love, to discover who he could be, is denied to Izzy in the last moments. Ed can shed Blackbeard with Izzy's blessings but no one lets Izzy do the same.

OFMD’s strength has always been its personal narratives, of growth, of healing, of kindness. In trying to expand the scale of the show in the last episode of the season it has chosen to sacrifice one of the most dramatic triumphs of its ethos to ask us to slide back to view Izzy only by his past in order to turn him into the allegorical stand in- a strawman of a the toxic culture he had left far behind by this point. 

[ikemenomegas]

Hey!! (animeomegas here <3) I don't know anything about jjk, but I love actor AUs and I was wondering if you have any fun ideas for Naruto, the arcana or Mystic messenger? For some reason I've been imagining how a Mystic Messenger TV show would work and sketching out poster ideas for it 😫 This isn't really intended as a request, I just want to hear your stream of thought haha. Hope you've been having a wonderful day! <33

Hi @animeomegas I actually had a really long day but it was nice! I got a lot of things done. I hope you also had a good day ^^. So, okay okay okay you know I love casual stream of thought... and talking ahaha, and I also love behind the camera drama (I am also avoiding any wip work because 9+ hours at work fried the thesaurus bit of my brain)

Naruto

Naruto is such a specifically anime show. The budget for a complete 1:1 live action remake would probably make people so mad, there would have to be so much CGI for the final battle.

I feel like it could work for actors au as either:

1. Make Naruto a movie series. It's probably got a cult following like Star Wars and started off as some kind of original idea in the 70s and then got acquisitioned by a huge conglomerate in the 90s-2000s era, and had enough films (like the fast and furious franchises XD, so... eight at least) that it was able to cover all the material up until our time lol.

I actually went and reviewed the arcs because I love procrastination through research oop, but if you cut out/combine the filler arcs/turn them into serialized shows for streaming, you're left with enough material for about 3 movies from genin-days (when the actors Sasuke, Naruto, and Sakura age from 11-14) and 5 movies from the shippuden era (there the main trio actors age from 16-24)

Playing off that nostalgia factor, Jiraiya's actor either played Minato or Naruto in the 70s film. He's since become a very famous actor/producer/director. Kakashi's father also played Kakashi's character in the original 70s film, so having him return as Sakumo for the Pein arc was a little Easter egg. There's a couple of instances of this throughout the series. For example, Madara is actually played by the same actor who played Sasuke in the og series, and the makeup used to age him in the flashback arcs gets high praise. Hashirama is played by the same kid who played Rock Lee in the first films too. Tsunade was played by the same girl who was either Ino in the original, etc.

Kind of like marvel, there's a ton of actors who are only sort of or not very famous when the films start, and the kids are certainly no-name actors (kind of [Sakura reads to me like a former disney-channel kid lol]), and then as the films get wildly popular, the franchise gains the Midas touch and even all of the recurrent minor characters get arcs/spinoffs/or see further success in their careers.

And as with marvel, it truly becomes like... everyone famous in a certain generation was in the Naruto franchise.

Sasuke had some actual industry connections prior to casting, but that was only because his brother was a young up-and-coming model. They sort of spring-boarded one anothers' careers. Playing the franchise characters traumatized them oop, and irl they're very close. There's a noticeable uptick in viewership for compilation videos of the Uchiha brothers being best siblings after about movie 6 when Sasuke finally kills Itachi and movie 7's fight with Kabuto is one of the most watched clips ever.

Also marvel-esque, I think people have mixed opinions about the ending lol (just like they do the anime) because on one hand, explosions! amazing visual effects! the whole ensemble ready to assemble! stacked nostalgia value! answers to some of the most asked fandom questions! amazing physical feats (Naruto and by extension Sasuke mostly insist on doing their own stunts)! and on the other... you have some of the thousand story threads being lost in the sauce, lackluster characterization for a some of the ladies, leaning perhaps too much on nostalgia value, complete obliteration of power scaling, suddenly there's almost too much content, and you have to have watched all three spinoff series to understand some of the in-world references, also fighting between the original concept creator and head writer and the production teams :p (yes this is Io being too literal haha)

2nd option: The Naruto characters all belong to the same representative entertainment company (think SM or YG /pulls face because cabal culture disturbs me/). I think this is more like an idols AU, and the relationships are significantly more catty and have more drama, but they're all actors/other entertainment related career lol so it's also kind of actors au?

The company probably tried for a ninjas/powers theme during recruitment and promotion so that's where you get Kakashi associated with dogs and lightning, Sasuke associated with snakes and later hawks and fire, Naruto associated with frogs and wind, Sakura associated with slugs and healing, Itachi associated with crows and dreams, Haku associated with ice and mirrors, Sai associated with tigers and ink, Tenzo/Yamato associated with trees, Gaara associated with tanuki and sand etc.

Itachi and Sasuke have an infamous rivalry that never really "resolves" so much as disappears because Itachi retires for a few years to deal with physical and mental health issues. It would be during this time he goes public with a relationship and he gets married before making a comeback. Even after the brothers reconcile and do projects together, people still bring up their Fighting Era and it pisses Sasuke off because the public doesn't really know what happened and he hates the speculation. Part of the controversy is that Sasuke left the company only a few years after signing on, joined a small rival company that was later embroiled in scandal, and then returned to the same company as his brother right around the time Itachi took a break.

Kakashi is the oldest of the "new generation" that's promoted during that time, but he's a very successful child actor turned model and adult actor. He did a bunch of shows that have great repeat value though so he basically lives off residuals and picks his projects and is very obvious but rather quiet about the ways he critiques the current entertainment industry. He's very good friends with Tenzo, stagename Yamato

Haku is a musician first and an actor second. He made his debut as part of a short lived idol group before going solo and starting musical stages. He's an up and coming favorite for historical dramas.

Gaara and Naruto are child actors who have been best friends for ages and help one another work through the inevitable industry challenges. They separately become really popular role models for kids from their hometowns. Kankuro is Gaara's personal rock in the working world, even though Kankuro's bad-boy image and slightly freaky aesthetic don't surface level seem to match with Gaara's more reserved and authentic method of dealing with the constant press.

Shikamaru and Nagato both separately give me musician/model vibes, but in different genres. Shikamaru quits the music thing very quickly to become a producer lol because more math and less fighting with fickle public opinion.

Mystic Messenger

If you sketch the the poster idea you haaaave to post it, please pretty please Amy?? Because you're so right, the whole plot is absolutely like a thriller/romcom kdrama. (Because the characters are well fleshed out it could also work with preserving the character backstories but have them all have entered acting later on.)

I looked up some Kdrama posters and the one where the leads for "because this is my first life" are standing in a stylized apartment balcony reminded me somewhat of thee game, mostly because the MC is stuck in the apartment for a good portion of the seven days lol.

If the whole Mystic Messenger plot were a drama...

MC is probably a rookie actor with one or two well done but not widely distributed productions under their belt.

Yoosung was maybe a child-actor which makes the whole ingenue thing kind of funny for his fans. Like yes, this is his first "adult role" (his baby face means he otherwise plays a lot of high schoolers) but it's this odd mixture of experience meaning he plays the role perfectly, but lack of experience with normal people resulting in a lot of blushing and stammering and totally tunnel vision flirting during the press tour haha.

I'd love for Jumin to come from a similar but less severe situation as game-Jumin. Like maybe his father has remarried a bunch of times, but he actually gets along with the stepmother who's been his mother for most of his life and he takes her to premiers with him. He grew up poor so he finds playing a lot of wealthy heirs type characters because of his looks to be a very strange turn of events, but he overall doesn't talk about his past much in public.

Hmmm, Jaehee seems the type to play a lot of severe characters in her usual roles because of her appearance, but like game-Jaehee she's got a very cute and adorable side that's coupled with a very genuine personalty. The interviewers probably make her do a lot of aegyo T.T poor Jaehee. She probably also worked her way through a prestigious drama school, either in-country or abroad, so she loves to read.

Zen always offers to do the aegyo with Jaehee so she doesn't have to suffer alone haha. He on the other hand never went to drama school, he's been acting since he was about 17 so all his training was in-company, although his company helped to put him through college where he did an advertising and media degree. He didn't have the exposure Jaehee did to classical media and arts, so they are irl very good friends who bond over their interest in business and Zen's interest in gaining a deeper understanding of acting and theater.

I see 707 as the person who was probably an idol musician before he started acting and mostly left group music behind. I've never played his route through, but he seems like the kind of person who is sometimes frustratingly talented lol. He is a natural at almost everything he tries which sometimes stresses him out because he wonders if there's something else he should be doing besides acting.

V seems like the kind of person however who was maybe a model first, and then turned to acting? I hate to say this, but it's the kind of situation where his incredible looks and sweet irl personality have garnered him a very devoted following but his parts in dramas tend to be second-string or somewhat minor or... kind of weird lol, and when he is the lead the show is usually only "okay" because the writing will be strange 😅 which is technically not his fault, but to be honest most of his income comes from promotional deals.

You like Saeran, right? so I won't leave him out! He's got this doe-eyed look that makes me think of a new debut actor! This is also one of his first major roles so he and MC lean on each other a lot and have to work hard to make sure their relationship off-screen is comfortable because they have so many scary intense scenes later on. He and 707 are either irl siblings, or just because so close during filming that they're truly like brothers now and 707 is always seen supporting Saeran, especially when Saeran decides to venture into the music scene and his vocal style and color means he explodes into popularity almost right away.

The Arcana

Somehow I can see this becoming an HBO drama? or maybe an Akuzon special because it's very good about placing lgbtq themes in-world (which was sort of groundbreaking when the game debuted). This one is so hard because each route gradually ended up diverging so much and in such different ways and expanding on the world in such a rewarding diversity of directions that you could truly have a beautiful, successful show no matter what route was filmed.

You could potentially have a Witcher-type situation where you really do have multiple routes and timeline splitting. If someone who's got a really good editing team working with a really tight writing team I think they could do it.

But otherwise, this is another situation where the main cast has had friend configurations for a While and doing this project brought them all closer together!

Ilya and Asra have known one another probably the longest industry-wise. They did a smaller well received indie film once about five years before Arcana with the vaguest of nods to brokeback mountain (I've never seen it, sorry) but a much happier road trip lovers plot, so having to play disillusioned, one-sided pining ex-lovers who had a very toxic last year to their relationship is... something XD.

Asra and Muriel have been personal friends since their days as students - they went to the same camps and programs to study acting and in their interviews, they have a fun time talking about some personal anecdotes (like the fact they did indeed frequently camp at a lakeside together as children) which made it into their own characters' backstories.

Nadia and Lucio are very Nikolaj/Gwendoline during their press and off-screen interactions. They find their characters' personas to be sort of hilariously poorly matched.

Portia is a famously hard working actress who clawed her way through the world of cinema and still managed to stay a decent, well grounded person. She's not actually related to Ilya irl but they got along really well from the beginning so there's lots of videos of them acting like siblings off screen.

Because the on-site shoots for Arcana required so much travel, the cast got to spend a lot of bonding time together, and saw a ton of unique places. The cast always has stories of swimming and hiking or trying new food or pictures of each other at famous sites during their days off. Muriel is actually the one who plans the outdoor adventures the best, he was an athlete and had military training before becoming an actor and he loves being outside so he'll lead these kinds of outings. People adore his social media because he's got that outdoors guy vibe but he's very sweet and he smiles a lot more irl than his roles usually do.

Portia and Julian are the most likely to get lost in any place, but they're also super fun to travel with because they always find interesting people and places that are off the beaten path.

Nadia and Asra have the most normal but also most aesthetic social media feeds. They always seem able to catch the golden hour light somehow...

After Arcana, they each often end up cast in or around the same movies/franchises/series as well, because they do work very well together. The show also helped them break out of some type casting, to their delight.

Lucio trends towards action and romcom films, he does often get typecast as some kind of villain, but his redemption arc in Arcana actually helped him break into more of the antihero type roles. He can be adorably goofy at times.

Nadia used to play the femme fatale quite frequently but since Arcana she's been able to take on softer roles, still often playing a woman in power, but she's been able to mix and cross genres. She also has been working on a screenplay and wants to try directing.

Portia was famous before Arcana but the show helped enter her into some of the more mainstream conversation and she has her first action-type role soon after Arcana ends.

Asra has a delicate physique and had some trouble in the past with being passed over roles that required more "force of presence" in the past. However, since showing his side as the secretive, enigmatic, manipulative magician, he's been able to try on the hats of villains, return to some roles on the true stage (his first love), and play the lead in a more serious political thriller.

Muriel had the opposite problem with his large build often precluding him from anything but action films. Since Arcana he's been able to try a few romantic lead parts, and has embraced his popularity by searching out meaningful mid-budget films where he can broaden his talents.

Julian is very tall, so he used to play quite a few more domineering, dastardly types in the films he did before Arcana. The show also brought him into the spotlight. He still does well as the sneering, dangerous, tall and dark type, but he's found that he can and is willing to push for playing something softer, someone who follows instead of leads in the on-screen dynamics. You and Ilya end up in a bodyguard type of drama at some point where he spends a lot of time on his knees swearing his devotion and playing a lot of subtext lol.

MC in this seems like they would have been a more experienced actor before taking on the linchpin role for Arcana, but the show granted you the experience to step into other roles both in front of and behind the camera and we'll probably see an MC directed and produced short film or indie film within the next few years!

[gigabyte1027]

Bring back 2012 UI design

Or just the mentality in general.

Everything that I remember, and my recent archive surfs has lead me to believe, that the late 2000's to early 2010's had more soul.

Most of the "Make the web old again" sites are wanting the 90's to return in some way, be it personal websites, or just the way things looked.

I 100% agree with that idea, it makes the web more personal and gives people a reason to surf again

I want the web design of old to come back for a few reasons. Mainly for the UI design since I'm an absolute nut for skeuomorphism or early flat design.

But there were other factors too. For example: How small businesses were run back then.

My second hand experience was watching my mom run her t-shirt website from around 2009 to 2013. She had read up on a bunch of ways to run a successful business from home, and one of the key factors was blogging.

So she had made a Twitter, Pintrest, Facebook, and even Tumblr page to help spread the word of sarcastic shirts.

There's also just the feel of that era of UX design.

Effort was put in across the board. Now that's not to say effort wasn't put in on some of the more advanced sites and software today.

What I am saying is there was a certain craft to them. Each site felt like a place you could visit, with the ribbons, and pseudo coffee shop aesthetic that people went for.

It felt like a second home if that makes sense. And that's something we've truly lost. I personally haven't found a website that felt like someone's passion project in a long while. I could be blind to it, but i do encourage you to go on archive and browse around your favorite websites between the years 2006-2014 and you may or may not notice a certain era where everything feels like a second home of sorts

And finally: Depth.

Everything is flat nowadays, and for the most part its gotten very boring. I've seen plenty of sites that really pull off the flat look, don't get me wrong. But then there's sites that look like one solid color and needs *something*. I'm looking at you, Discord.

If you go to my Tumblr page or my website: You'll notice everything feels 3D.

And old, but I'm ok with that.

Also: for my blog: I managed to find a Tumblr theme from 2012 that still works, I'm absolutely delighted to use it

What's the takeaway from this? I'm sad, nostalgic, and want I more dopamine hits to help calm my ADHD brain hopefully.

I miss 2009-2012 web design in particular because everything had character, and no two sites looked entirely the same.

Unless they used wordpress, every wordpress site was the same.

Thanks for reading! -Gigabyte

[grandhotelabyss]

I noticed you restructured the American syllabus for the IC, and after groaning at the extra cash I would have to lay down to buy the readings (and at there being only one week of Dickinson*), I rejoiced that I would finally get introduced to American modernism. Along those lines —

Would you consider postwar literature (through to the millenium) for a future IC? If not (or even if so!) I would love to hear how you’d structure this era/a syllabus on it, which you’ve talked about in glowing terms before. But I’m too young to have picked it up as it happened, and it’s too young to have been really canonised yet (or at least, the culture wars have stopped it from being canonised on its own terms rather than primarily political ones). Or maybe it has been but I don’t know where to look, although you said recently that criticism for that era hasn’t yet lived up to the books themselves.

But like, Morrison and DeLilo and Ellison and Bellow and Roth and Baldwin and Pynchon and McCarthy and Nabokov (kinda) and Wallace (apparently) and who else am I missing, and a handful of romancers like Dick and Le Guin — not to mention poets, playwrights, essayists, or Brits! And I don’t know how it all fits together, since we’ve (as Bloom predicted!) handed over the keys to the cultural narrative to the ‘cultural studies’ people who know only how to read films and magazines, and even then just barely.

*Also, do you think you might be able to include at the end of the syllabus a note on the works you’ve swapped out? The expanded guide would be useful, even though (indeed because!) it includes some of the more obvious picks, which I can return to later.

Thanks! I did address some of your questions about how exactly I changed the syllabus in my most recent Substack. I mainly just deleted a few Emerson essays (Nature, "The Divinity School Address," "Circles," "Experience"), Thoreau's Walden (in favor of two shorter pieces by him), and a handful of Whitman's Civil War poems.

I have the lectures for a course I taught on American Lit from 1945 to the present on YouTube here. I wouldn't do anything differently when it comes to poetry and drama than I did there. With fiction, I focused on the short story because it was an intro-level class; for that reason I omitted some writers mainly known for novels (Ellison, Bellow, McCarthy) but I didn't avoid anyone on strictly political grounds (Roth and Wallace are included, for instance, despite the controversy about them). I don't really think of Nabokov as an American writer! For the criticism of the era, big names include Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, and then it becomes more strictly academic...I'm not sure I'd ever teach a course on that per se.

I would consider and have considered an IC course focused on the postwar American novel, though I'd probably cut it off at 2000. (As Roger Shattuck once said quixotically of the Visible College, "Students can read living authors on their own time." The few living authors below are over 80 and effectively beyond criticism.) The reading list would probably look like this:

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

Saul Bellow, Herzog

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey [*]

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Toni Morrison, Paradise

With the postwar British novel, I don't have a list at my fingertips and would have to think about it—and probably read more widely myself. Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, J. G. Ballard, A. S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, David Mitchell...who else? I'm probably missing obvious people! (I've never read Penelope Fitzgerald, for example. I want to read The Blue Flower but have to read that Novalis thing first and then it never happens, etc. Never read Kingsley Amis, don't care for Martin Amis...)

___________________________

[*] This one would be aspirational. It's long and ambitious, and I read and was fascinated by some of it while researching for the "U.S. Multicultural Literatures" class I used to teach. I never finished it, though, and keep meaning to get back to it.

[godbirdart]

can confirm twitter is basically pre-2018 tumblr hell right now and it’s why i’ve been heavily leaning away from it as of recent

this is based on my personal corner, but over the years it’s gone from a [remotely] humble platform filled with aspiring artists just trying to vibe, to a cluttered hellscape of callout posts, drama, with a light sprinkling of unrelated perfectly fine fandom art. it feels like i see at least one callout near-daily for things ranging from petty art theft to actual accounts of abuse and you’re almost Expected to react to it no matter if it merits the reaction or not

people i’ve followed for years who used to just vibe and post cute art or photos are now ALWAYS involved in the comments section of something that had nothing to do with them to begin with, as if they have to prove “hey look how nonproblematic i am!” and it’s... really uncomfortable to see. i’ve watched people tear creators with huge followings apart over very literal baseless callouts then smugly gossip about them all over my timeline, as if they were WAITING for the person to slip up. shit’s fucked.

twitter has reached a point where if you follow a person who got called out, and you weren’t there for the great unfolding of events to get the memo, YOU YOURSELF may now be considered a shitty person simply by following them still. twitter shows you if people you follow follow a person on the person’s profile, and if you haven’t checked your twitter app in a hot minute, it’s possible you’re going to get a passive aggressive “uhhh hey you’re still following them :/” ping, as if other people have any kind of say as to who you follow to begin with

in a strange way you almost feel obligated to post a “hey i don’t agree with [xyz content]” in your bio or pinned tweet or whatever, and not solely just because you’re against those things but because if you DON’T post that, people may assume otherwise about you if you just so happen to interact with the wrong person. i know this isn’t exclusively a twitter thing, but it feels Especially bad on twitter

i’ve had people forward me callout posts, and while i’ll still read them [because yeah some posts can be merited], i always ask the person who sent it: what’d they do? is it recent? are they harming people? are they trying to be better? and i’ve been met with “oh i didn’t read it” or “how can you defend them?!?” or “oh so you think [xyz thing] is okay??” and i just

i fucking Just

maybe i’m just old now but after years of having drama after drama hitting my timeline, being expected to react to every little thing with the same level of outrage, i’m so tired. twitter has numbed me to a point where i say: if it’s not recent or related to present behavior + actions, not someone i know personally, not harming irl people or animals, and the person in question has either long since stopped doing the thing or is actively trying to be better, i do not fucking care. do not send me that shit. go away, go outside maybe

[sword-of-summer]

okay so i did a breakdown and prediction for WandaVision before the show started and It's Turning Out To Be True, Guys, so I'm posting it below and just tell me if it's okayish or not-

Now, WandaVision marks the beginning of Phase 4 of the MCU, and it is in itself a pathmaking event because it shows normal life without the original Avengers. Now, the show explores Wanda's mental state after Vision's death in Infinity War, and how she uses her Chaos magic to create a 'pocket reality' where things are just what she wants them to be.

The entire series is set over 6 decades, and has a running theme of couples living in sit-coms throughout the years, the late 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and present. Now, my theory is that WandaVision is the beginning of a Multiverse Act that continues in Spiderman - 3 and culminates in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness.

Now, as for the shots within the trailer, it seems that Wanda and Vision are changing their localities as time passes, and that is through the decades I mentioned above. Now, all the posters have this unique red-blue television static rip in the upper left corner, which is also the transition effect used by the editors whenever Wanda warps reality and tries to adapt to the passing, and this actually represents Wanda's warped reality fading away and opening up a multiverse. In the late 50s poster, there isn't much that suggests anything, just we know that this involves the b/w part of the show where Wanda and Vision are a newly married couple and Vision as a human, which is strange, because in all trailers/posters after that time, Vision is shown as the Android he is, from the 60s black and white where Wanda acts as Vision's assistant in the magic show, and now, the next transition is the most interesting for me because they shift into the era of coloured television and during this warp, Wanda becomes pregnant and slips into the stripes of the 70s - another fact is that the upper left rip is not normal, not it is a wood panel torn apart, like by a demon, which leads me to the obvious villainous entity for the show, Mephisto.

This marks Wanda's descent into confusion as to who is in control of this warped reality, because it may not be Wanda, it may be some evil entity who is using Wanda to get into MCU's Earth-199999 and is proved later when Jimmy Woo's voice is heard out of the radio saying "who is doing this to you?". Now, the 80s poster has a ton of references in the 2 paintings it has, one being a hybrid phoenix chicken, aka representing Vision, who here is both a hybrid between human and metal, and like a Phoenix brought to life by Wanda's magic from the ash he was left in by Thanos, and the second bird is a wren from Australia with varying plumage which is like Wanda, because her magic clashes with life in the same way. The next 90s poster is the most indicative too as this is the time where they have the twins, Wiccan and Speed, but interestingly, there's a picture on their wall with three, yes, three not two eggs, which is another reference to the fact that snarky Mephisto has snuck up into this reality using Wanda's magic, also the TV still here is of them in their original Avengers' goofy hallowe'en costumes, and the last shot is a trailer and poster mix where Wanda races out into their frontyard but there are 2 small bikes parked, meaning that is the 2000s where they live as a family of four, but what Wanda doesn't realise that Mephisto's using this fake family to claw his way into this reality and wreak havoc.

Some other shots that stood out to me were of Monica Rambeau constantly transitioning from friendly neighbour to outright "I don't know who (I am)", then the character of Agnes who I suspect is none other than Agatha Harkness from the West Coast Avengers comics where Mephisto, yet again, played with Wanda's chaotic magic and in a way it also merges with the House of X comic series where Wanda yet again creates a pocket reality (I mean, what is up with all the reality stuff) - another interesting thing is the beekeeper seen in the second trailer, which I propose is a reference to the way in which we make honey commercially, wherein the queen bee is kept incharge of a beehive with her subordinates, and she thinks that she is in charge, but the actual person benefiting from this is the beekeeper looking from above the hive, collecting the honey, just like it is here where Wanda thinks she is the queen but in reality it is Mephisto the Beekeeper looking from above the pocket reality using Wanda's brand of Chaos magic to enter into this reality.Â

I believe that the base of this entire series by which it will continue into the wider MCUÂ is The Mind Stone, because it was The Stone that gave Wanda her powers and also to the two men she loved the most - Vision and her brother Pietro. Now, there is an amazing amount of screen time given to shots of the Mind Stone in the trailer, the most intriguing of which is a tired Wanda with greyish hair looking up at the Stone with slivers of blue around it - this is the incident where Wanda received her Enhanced powers from Stucker is Sokovia and this indicates that there will be some flashbacks to earlier memories which may involve Quicksilver returning. Now, the Mind Stone is the smart one, so it has a certain intelligence which it imparts to those affected by it, as is evident in Wanda's Chaos magic and tele-abilities, Tony Stark's vision of the Earth ravaged and the Avengers dead, and maybe even Thanos's curse of Titan's fate. Now, for sure, the mind stone has been destroyed but this does not mean it hasn't already affected given the Universe changes.

Now, back in 2015, Marvel wasn't allowed to use the term "mutants" but now with the Disney-Fox merger, yes they can introduce the idea of mutants with Wanda and Quicksilver as the first in Sokovia, and then Wanda's Chaos-Mephisto born mutant kids Wiccan and Speed which of course may tie to the New Mutants storyline. Also, my theory is that mutants are made by a combination of both their mutant gene and exposure to cosmic radiation, just like Wanda was exposed to the Mind Stone. Also, the mutant gene may exist in specific closeted spaces of the earth like Sokovia, or just for the sake of an example, in Chernobyl cause well the incident. Now these mutant genes become activated on exposure to radiation, and well we have had Four Omega Level Cosmic Infinity Snaps by Thanos, Thanos, Hulk and IronMan, and there is plenty of reason to suggest that this may have triggered the mutant abilities. That is my first theory.

The second one involves Wanda unleashing her chaos magic in an exponential wave at the end just like she did in Age Of Ultron, maybe because she realises that in reality, Vision is dead and manipulation won't help, and in grief she lets out her power that rips upon the Marvel Earth 199999 to the Multiverse which will continue later for Doctor Strange and SpiderMan to put back to normal. This mega event was teased in the trailers where the S.W.O.R.D. helicopter escapes from a wall of red television like static energy, and yes, I expect S.W.O.R.D. to be fully involved in the last part of the show headed by Jimmy Woo and Darcy cause Darcy has had encounters with otherworldly beings and thus may be consulted here. The last act will culminate in Wanda and Vision rising back up to their original title of the Avengers and fighting Mephisto to stop him, but something turns and thus Wanda/Mephisto releases that wall of Magic to wreak havoc.

Also a side note - Vision will also play the act of a realist in the show where he makes Wanda realise that this is not the real earth and he realises that the Eastside/Westside area they live in as well as the people there are unusual, not real, but at the end comes to his usual humane proposition that they save them and the reality from the demon trying to wreak havoc.

TL;DR Wanda creates a pocket reality where she lives with Vision, maybe reincarnating him using her brand of magic in the grey android left after Infinity War, and as the decades pass by, their reality deteriorates due to the Satanic entity that is Mephisto, making his curses seem like blessings, but at the end Wanda and Vision try and stop this reality shredding with S.W.O.R.D and that leaves us with an indecisive future of the mutants, Vision's reincarnation(like said by Banner in Infinity War)/Vision's death and the coming of the Multiverse into focus.

That's it, I guess.

Sorry a bit long ik but i do this.

Enjoy?

Thanks for reading...

tagging @aredhel-of-gondolin cause it was in that chat i realized i have a blog ugggh why am i so stupid

[citylightsbooks]

The Motor of the Essay: Rachel Kushner in Conversation

This is an excerpt of a free event we held in conjunction with Litquake for our virtual events series, City Lights LIVE. This event features Rachel Kushner in conversation with Dana Spiotta celebrating the launch of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, published by Scribner. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by our events coordinator Peter Maravelis. You can listen to the entire event on our podcast. You can watch it in full as well on our Youtube channel.

*****

Dana Spiotta: I know that everyone's going to ask you these questions about writing fiction versus nonfiction. And I read somewhere that you said, with your novels, you begin with imagery more than an idea or a character. With the nonfiction, there is a range of pieces about writers and specific books to journalism--like the prison story and Palestine--and then there’s the ones that are personal essays, right, like the girl in a motorcycle. So I guess they might all have different origins. But where do you begin with that? And how is that different as a process from what you write in fiction?

Rachel Kushner: Yeah, so it is kind of a different process for me, although I sometimes feel guilty to try to make declarations about which is harder, or how one does one thing, because you know, for some people, the essay is what literature is.

For me, fiction is more difficult. And so in a certain way it's what I've signed on to do with my life, because the process can be so mysterious and fickle and unreliable. And I'm waiting to catch a wave, or get the drift and then try to figure out how to sustain it, and then how to change it in order to sustain it. Managing so many different things at once is a very curious hermeneutic, because you need to know where you're going.

But then you also need to let happenstance inform you. I think some of the ways that we are challenged, and how we learn in our lives and also as writers, are by having encounters that we did not anticipate or predict, and that happens in fiction. And then you're kind of in a "taking mode" and you know exactly what's for you and you go with it and you run.

Essays are a little different for me. I mean, obviously. Time is shorter. But usually the motor of the essay is a sprung sentence. I come up with one sentence that is doing something in the syntax and it's making something sort of declarative. And it's kind of a gambit. And it needs to be followed by another. And sometimes I'll have a whole paragraph like that. And those paragraphs will just be floating in the void of the potentiality of the essay that I haven't written yet. And I don't sweat, like, "How am I going to link this to that?" yet. Because I just know by instinct that they're both going in. And if I put them in the essay, then they are interrelated by virtue merely of their proximity to each other. Then I start to build links.

Some journalism is a very different process. Like you mentioned, for the piece that I wrote, originally for the New York Times Magazine, about prison abolition and the carceral geographer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, they said it can be any length and made it long. So you know, it was like 20,000 words. And it was my version of that essay, and it probably was a pretty good essay. But I think the weakness in it was that I was not speaking to their audience. And they really--you have written for the New York Times Magazine--they want to be able to countenance everything you say, sentence by sentence. It's not like writing an op-ed, where you just say your thing and then people can fight it out in the comments. They want to be fully on board. And I wouldn't want to have to do that all the time.

It's extremely difficult, because you have to keep remembering how to bring in somebody who may have wildly different ideas about how society should be organized, and not seem polemical, not seem pushy. It's a kind of seduction I think that really benefits from collaboration with an editor. It's arduous, it takes time. That essay took two years to write, but because the subject matter was important to me, ultimately, I decided it was worth it.

Dana Spiotta: Yeah, it's such a great essay. And I learned so much from it.

Peter Maravelis: When you're writing about events and feelings from decades ago, how do you return to the experience? What takes you back?

Rachel Kushner: That's a really great question. So, you know, with some of these essays, like the first essay in the book called “Girl on a Motorcycle,” which is about the Cabo 1000--a no longer existent, illegal motorcycle road race where you span the Baja in the course of a day--was the first thing that I ever published and I wrote it 20 years ago. And after looking back over it, in order to put it in this book and to improve upon it, I opened it up; I wrote a new beginning and a new ending. There are so many details and scenes in that essay that I never, ever would have remembered had I not written them down when I was much closer to the meat of that experience.

But there are other essays like the title essay which I just wrote quite recently. I'd put the book together, and I knew it was going to be called “The Hard Crowd.” And then I just basically sat down and wrote this essay. And I think, you know, as maybe you're telling a story, or going through your life, sometimes things really do sort of trigger the release of a memory. And Proust has this conception of two different kinds of memory that he calls voluntary memory and involuntary memory. And voluntary memory is the kind of fixed story that you tell, you know, "Oh, he's telling that story again," meaning it's a kind of sclerotic, hardened account that, for Proust, doesn't really have any real artistic or intrinsic wealth to it. Whereas involuntary memory is maybe when you would smell a perfume that you haven't smelled in 30 years and it reminds you of this or that. And I think that writing itself can activate involuntary memory, because you start to see into spaces you haven't seen in a really long time.

Like when I was writing this essay, I somehow ended up talking about Terence McKenna, and remembered that I'd seen Terence McKenna give this lecture at the Palace of Fine Arts. And then I saw the Palace of Fine Arts and him on the stage and where I was sitting, and who was in the audience. And so then I mentioned in the essay that this noise musician who I don't know, but I knew who he was, was sitting right in front of me. And that was a funny thing because the New Yorker called him and asked, "Were you at a Terence McKenna lecture in 1991." “Yeah, I was.” I mean he probably thought like the FBI is after him or something. I can start to see things and details in pretty haunting detail, particularity once I'm starting to build the framework that will allow those kind of involuntary memories to come up to present themselves.

Peter Maravelis: Do you feel that maybe kids who grew up in a certain era share communal memories, like growing up in San Francisco in the 70s is full of shared moments and scenes?

Rachel Kushner: Yes, I do feel that, but I would maybe even particularize it to not just an era, but to kids who grew up in a certain world within San Francisco. And I'm going to just be blunt: it's the kids who went to public school in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s. We all traversed a world together, and the particularity of that world. I'm not saying that it's special or different. Everybody has a world that they traversed, and that stays inside of them as memory. And ours is ours. And those who experienced it do feel bonded, I think, for life, in a way. And it's something I've thought about a lot since that essay was published in the New Yorker because of the number of people who reached out to me and wanted to talk about their own memories of this same world that we shared.

Peter Maravelis: In the New York Times review, Dwight Garner mentioned the phrase: “At the party, she was kindness in the hard crowd," from the Cream song "White Room." Is that in fact where your title came from?

Rachel Kushner: It is. I mentioned that in the title essay, it all becomes clear, or at least somewhat clear where I heard that song, and why I made it the title of this book. It's a good line.

To see upcoming events at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, check out our complete calendar.

[jezabelpoiesis]

Poiesis.8k.com my 1995 website

https://web.archive.org/web/20071102052753/http://www.poiesis.8k.com:80/ ----- How To Be Good| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12Or        bad or strong Or WEAK............To Be Among The Trees.... ---- en silencio, la grandeza del ser se embellece y apasiona por lo que en vano al alma no enamora. 1.1.07            ¿Qué llevo y qué te dejo? ¿Qué doy y cómo soy y qué me quedo? si nadie ya responde es quizás por el seco ruido del monte y la ciudad que se deja invadir de gente que no ama, que pasea y luego por la noche se esconde. 02.06.02                                                                                                                                                          Poiesis| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13|                                  @2000-2007                                                                                                                                                                   ----- Hola| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13| Fotos | Cry the tears and the tears of the others but full of pain will your eyes be, cry until you smile again cause it can happend that one day love your hands will hold again. -------- | Domenicas del Campo | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12| 13   TOMO LO SERENO, LO REFRESCO.    TOMO LO SIMPLE, LO CONCENTRO.  TOMO LO CERCANO, SE ALEJA.       TOMO LO CIERTO Y LO SIN CAUSA.      TOMO LA SOMBRA QUE ME SALVA. TOMO SIN VER  LO DE SU ALMA.             TOMO LO MISMO,  TOMO LO DEMAS Y LO DE MENOS. TOMO LOS SORBOS  MUY DEPRISA. DEJARME IR COMO    UNA HIERBA QUE CRECE VERDE Y FUERTE POR TODO  EL CAMPO. ASI SERIA MUCHAS, TODAS JUNTAS. DE MI TODAS SERIAN LA QUE VOS ELIJAS TE MIRO FIJAMENTE  COMO TAMBIEN DE VOS ME ALEJOME QUEDO FIJA   EN COSAS COMO ESAS.      j.c.       beljeza@hotmail.com   ---- 1    | 2 |    Afuera de la Noche | 4 | 5    | 6 | 7    | 8 | 9 | 10    | 11 | 12 | 13  DESDE  EL  SILLON CON   LA  CASA   MEDIA   DORMIDA                                                                  A LUZ SEMI APAGADA Y SEMINOCHE    TODAS  LAS HORAS QUE LLEVO  DESPIERTA  SE ENCUENTRAN  EN MIS OJOS   EN COMO LOS DEJE  QUIETOS O LOS MUEVA   ---- there will be other places       where I will place the magic the good things I can give. the lights are getting close to us, to our road, so get closer to me   on my way back to the sky.use the rain to wash my soul, and forget   the vicious world, but please remember me. More than this I may not tell, I've been in all those places but found no relief My world of hours is running to the depths and therefore I'm learning how to breath....    email:beljeza@hotmail.comJezabel Cohen   ---- Poiesis II   Ha de ser hoy mi muerte y sin llegar a atajarla ha de venir sola la guerra; El silencio ya es costumbre de las suertes. Han de ser hoy las heridas veloces,   hay una mano abierta entre tantas, ha de tener una flor verde, hay detenidas cientos de alas. Ha de acabarse hoy el dia y ha de sangrar el muerto en su siesta.  ---- 6 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Random Dreams | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12| 13 Un sueño, que se    salva de serloOtro más que queda    intacto; puro. Nadie te sueña Sueño que quedás    en el encierro  O asomando en las horas    de la tarde Quisiera adivinarte solamente    Para no tener que tocar     Tu seno de sueño Así tal vez a nadie le toques Y seas algo eterno . Comprendiendo que el navegar tuyo va por  ríos y el aguardar mío va por mares y por lluvias, atraso mi regresoComo cuando el viento permanecía agitado, como cuando estrellarse era fatal y delicado, como cuando sumergirse en un preciso  caminar se transformaba en un permanente caudal de sensación.Así, como cuando la noche se olvidó de vos, como cuando los hombres recordaron lo tentador del universo.       Como cuando el disfraz embellecía al cuerpo, como cuando la tormenta era oculta y era tuya. Como cuando conservar los sueños era como regresar.           Seamos          más soñadores con quienes están cerca; y con los          que no están seamos sus sueños    understanding that your sailing goes by rivers and mine by seas and rains, my return, I delay. Like when the wind remained anxious, like when crashing   was fatal and delicate, like when to submerge in a precise walk was transformed into a permanent volume of sensation.   Thus, like when the night forgot you, like when men remembered the tempters of the universe. Like when the disguise embellished the body, like when the storm was hidden and was yours. Like when to conserve the dreams was like returning. Let's be more dreamers  with those who are close;   and with those who are not let's be their dreams. j.c beljeza@hotmail.com 2001 --- 7 callar    es como ocultarse o defenderse    de tanta inmensidad vacía cuando    vivimos llenando nuestros ojos    de ella1|    2 | 3    | 4 | 5 | 6    | 7 | 8 | 9    | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13   to be silent is like hiding or defending ourselves from the empty inmensity that sorround us while we live filling our eyes with it.          beljeza@hotmail.com.28-09-1997.    j.c.  ---- en la luna 1|    2 | 3    | 4 | 5 | 6    | 7 | en la luna | 9 | 10    | 11 | 12 | 13 Una lágrima cae de tu ojo Y las salpicas. Tratando de hablar en el llanto (nadie te comprende) y mojas su cuerpo que es tan sensible a cada movimiento y ruido que tu haces Como un paisaje cambia, pero no por el pasar del día o de la noche; su singular señal esta abierta entre el cielo, el árbol, la piedra, la hoja, y el trago de agua que te moja. Y no alivia ningun beso lo duro de tu mirada. Quisiera a tí también adivinar, para no tocar el seno de aquello que te despierta y distrae de tu dormir tranquilo. Tal vez acerque así mi corazón y aleje aquello que me lleva. 11-4-03 No quieres escuchar Se te acabaron las horas No tienes más tiempo Estas muerto. No tienes más cambios Ya nada te sorprende No lloras No ríes No sueñas Entonces no piensas. Te han tirado flores Por encima Como a una muerte. Cuando el sol Sale te duermes Y mueres de nuevo. Esa es tu vida Y no te culpes. Desnudo sos igual A otros hombres, Que solos No son nada Y todos juntos Están solos. 05-01-03 Ahora heroicamente los hombres Se reparten campos Ahora un solo grito No se oye El rezo de servir. Que solos se lamentan los que piden Ahora ya los campos no son fértiles No puedo detener ya nada. 3-4-03   Se algo ya que nada no podrás elegir ; se quien quieras algo alegre, verde o gris. Al pie del manzano todos descansamos, Pero solo uno, despierta. Tal vez aquel que viaja sin un sueño O el que ya sin sueños decide no vivir O no morir. Ver el mar entonces, nos entrena para estrellarnos en las noches Con la inmensidad del universo Y sus tres lunas, o las que sean. Deja que sea una luz La que te lleve o te devuelva. 23-05-00 Se va alineando el principio Si puedes mirarme en los ojos Eso ya es un comienzo Puedes verlo dentro de mí Considerando que es lo que menos seguro tengo, a parte de los celos de una noche, reconozco lo convencida que soy con mí contorno no te acuso sino me conoces en mis sueños, aprendí a soportarme mis sonidos, lo unico que quería era dormir sin ruidos y cuando me levante estaba todo en llamas, todo, solamente corrí hasta llegar a desaparecer del unico sueño profundo que tenía, pero todos ya se habían ido; En cambio intente quedarme a regresar los momentos pero tambíen, habían desvanecido con ustedes. Me sente a esperarlos y nunca mas volví cuando ví que era el final. 95 ----- si en lo que queda de la luz, se fuera mi tristeza y se apagara para siempre en un silencio oscuro, las lágrimas se endurecerían en el tiempo y el tiempo seguiría recto su camino, dejando rastros y sombras de mi alma apenas perceptibles en las horas que amenacen a mi pena llorar sola y no conmigo 1.9-05-1994/ 05:25 am . ----- en el aire el oler las flores me ha despertado en suenos,   el cruzar ciudades me ha hecho mas bella,  el amar me da pureza,   pero heme aqui, en soledad y trizteza hasta volverme blanca, tan blanca. ---- en el suelo EN  EL SUELO CAES DURANTE EL DÍAEstoy  por entender todo lo que me falta y en eso vas también vos.Hoy  ya sé como serán los días que vendránparte  lo haremos separados, parte juntosjuntos  - separadamente ---- en el agua                                                                                 el miedo que me das arrastra penas,     arrastra lento un viento helado.     me hundo en la tierra y en el agua floto.                 y ries de dia, y de noche caes,     no sabes lo que quieres y lo quieres ahora, y lo destruyes, y no lo retienes, lo quiebras, no lo pruebas tampoco lo presientes, y no lo serenas, lo secas y rompes, lo deshaces, y no lo intuyes y no lo sigues, lo vigilas, y lo contagias y quemas, y lo abrazas y no lo sanas y lo soplas, lo agitas y sofocas, y alejas, y desconoces, y no cuidas, y lo celas, y no piensas, y no sos simple y no sos libre, te reprimes, te humillas, te despiertas hundida en una pena, te hundes en un llanto, te haces los ojos tristes, te haces la vida menos llena.beljeza@hotmail.com,jezabel-    17-05-2004 --- parada like the body of my soul, go on straight and read your mourn -------> take a break take your head ----> ----> rest ----> go right but not to left but not depth not too blind not to sell -----> not to leave not to kill -----> not too fake go left but not to say that if I left was only for the best. 3.3.2008 <---S.O.S.--->

The station closed and people are dying like birds in the air sad and no hunger. No shadows, no rails, no trains that arrive or departure. The faces of my soul belongs to a red blood color that smells like a trap and like anger to be part of. The dogs don't walk and no one runs the park 1.3.2008 La estaci�n cerr� y hay gente que  muere como aves por el aire, tristes, sin hambre. No hay sombras, no hay rieles, ni trenes que arrivan o parten. Las caras de mi alma pertenecen al color rojo sangre que huele a trampa y a bronca de ser parte. No salen ni los perros y nadie corre por el parque. 1.3.08 Se algo ya que nada no podrás elegir ; se quien quieras algo alegre, verde o gris. Al pie del manzano todos descansamos, Pero solo uno, despierta. Tal vez aquel que viaja sin un sueño O el que ya sin sueños decide no vivir O no morir. Ver el mar entonces, nos entrena para estrellarnos en las noches con la inmensidad del universo Y sus tres lunas, o las que sean. Deja que sea una luz La que te lleve o te devuelva. 23-05-00 Mis horas igual al coraz�n que llevo. Estando enamorada creo en �rboles que est�n llenos de ramas, porque cantan. Igual con las olas y con la noche del mar. Si el coraz�n separa al viento de la mar, un  �ngel vuela y me toma de la mano, Si el coraz�n se para en una noche donde el brillo nada leve sobre el mar, todo lo que fuimos flotar� siempre en el agua. 26.2.2008 Adentro sepan que mi fortuna no se encuentra Adentro sueltan cardos las selvas de mi sangre. As� como no nos vemos, tampoco nos sentimos. D�jame abrazar tu vientre y cubrir de calor mis manos d�jalas que cuando hablan van a abrazar el alma tuya. 9.2.08/ 16.2.95 ha bajado toda la noche por la misma escalera ha dormido en ella he so�ado una vez con ella y no logro recordarla suelen regresar algunas veces, sus mejores gestos pero no como ahora. Ella duerme y conserva una piel serena ha bajado, toda la escalera y por la misma descansa. sospecho que aunque esten quietas sus piernas soportan largos senderos. ella duerme en formas imprecisas. Ha querido conjugar en su cuerpo cientos de verdades y crearlas yo no digo en vano que una noche a solas conviene dormirla o atravesarla con dignidad. he despertado sin restos de olvido y estoy dejando que la ma�ana tome vertiginosa su ascenso. 1.6.1995 after you cry a little,  you laugh so silent and that is so good. the words as us, have the spirits of the ghosts, are light, when far and close, and in the air, they are whispers to the ears, after love, please love. if you want to clean your soul, here I'll keep it away from careless love, but after love. 06.1.08   Is almost dark now, when hours fall I try to play with time, one cannot wait so long to see the light,for it's the day that makes it all so bright.But darkness holds a strange shine,that even if I thought I want it bright,  light comes from below and it goes down,is almost dark down here. 25.1.08    

                                        @2000-2008                                                                                                                                                        

             https://web.archive.org/web/20050210095006/http://poiesis.8k.com:80/fotos.htm

         beljeza@hotmail.com

cien        cantos pueden separarnos

pero        no más que lo que hemos estado;

cien        selvas caminamos

y        sin embargo seguimos siendo lo que eramos

Corramos        fuerte, saquemos lo que queda.

Tanto        será el esfuerzo que durará

Toda        la vida.

Tanta        será la vida

que        tomaré hasta un poco prestada.