#i might write something longer/more cogent about this at some point

[veliseraptor]

out with redemption arcs, in with rehabilitation arcs

[elsiebrayisgay]

For the ask game: 3, 16 and 17 😊

um yeah! 3. Describe the creative process of writing a chapter/fic so this has changed a lot since i started writing prose, tbh, but there are some hallmarks of my process that have stayed the same. the absolute first thing that has always remained true whether it's been more academic, poetry (which is what i did for my degree,) TTRPG stuff, or now prose fanfic, is that no matter what no matter where no matter when if i have an idea i do my best to write it down. i have lost too many good ideas to not being sure what i had thought up and being certain i'd remember it. so often when i am laying in bed drifting off to sleep and thinking about my work, i will grumble and sit up and unlock my laptop to type out some notes.

another thing that was true for a while and still holds up somewhat today (with caveats) is that when i get inspired by something, i *write*. the first chapter of sourceless bruises was written in one evening after i got home from being out at dinner. i'd had vague concepts and ideas floating around for months before then but when it finally hit me i just sat down and wrote. this doesn't really happen as much anymore because even though i have the inspiration and the hyperfixation, i just don't have the energy to be up and in such high gear for so long, so i need to break it up more. this was true of my poetry and essays for school as well, though; i would just sit down start turning work out when i wanted or needed to.

16. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Share one of them?

alright so i've been kind of trying to figure out what i want to write after sourceless bruises. i took kind of a long break between my first fic and my second fic (more of these queer feelings... it's probably nothing on ao3) because i was just sort of waiting to have an idea i felt really solid about working on and that's how long it took. partially because sourceless bruises is a bigger project and is taking longer, these days i have a lot more ideas for what to work on next kicking around. none of them are really formed into anything super cogent, because i pretty strictly keep myself to one involved/long-term creative project at a time. however, things i have been interested in developing once i have wrapped up sourceless bruises in no particular order:

i have a draft started for a sequel to more of these queer feelings. it's mostly outlined, but i hadn't really gotten far into the drafting process.

korrasami modern au. this kind of setting adaptation is my bread and butter, if you couldn't tell. i posted a joke about this sort of idea on tumblr a while back but it actually got a lot more traction than i was expecting and so honestly i'm thinking about putting some more work in on it.

cait/vi (vilyn?) has been really interesting to me recently. i dunno, something about those girls. so i've been thinking about early stages of what i might want to do with them, whether to give them my normal au treatment or try something else.

i have also been working a bit on a premise for some original fiction. i will only say at this point that it will be horror/mystery and probably be a fair bit bleaker than what i tend to write for ao3 (though honestly i have no idea how i would go about publishing original fiction.)

17. What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)

okay so at this point it's time to circle back to the first answer in this post because honestly the truth of how i go about writing chapters these days falls a lot more under this question than that more general one. the first thing i'm going to say is that in my opinion, writing is labor. there's an old interview with john darnielle and john k. samson (among others) where JD talks about how there's no such thing as convenience store clerk block, or coal miner's block, so writers shouldn't get blocked—they should just keep sitting down to write, and to some extent i believe in that idea, but i want to add nuance. i think there probably is such a thing as convenience store clerk block, and coal miner's block, it's just that society doesn't allow or expect them to take breaks, or go on sabbatical or whatever. so they end up working through, and maybe burning out. i think that labor is something that any person, in any field, needs to take at their own personal sustainable pace. it's really easy, as a writer, to compare yourself to others. word counts on ao3, stories published, etc. but i think it's very important to listen to your mind and body about what you need as a creative person and also just as a person. if you've got nothing right now, i think it is important to try allowing your mind to simply lie fallow. there's that post about mental crop rotation, and about letting your mind have time where it isn't expected to turn out anything that needs to get put on a page. i think respecting that need is pretty important. this philosophy is how i've been going about writing since i got out of school.

this ties into the actual difficulty i've mostly been having with sourceless bruises. around late 2022/early 2023 i had some life circumstances cause my chronic illness to get a lot more severe, from which i have never fully recovered. this has meant that my pain is a lot worse, and my energy levels are a lot lower. what i used to be able to do with turning out thousands of words a day when i was really inspired happens only very rarely now, when those moments line up with my good days. there's another post on here (somewhere in my reblogs) talking about what to do as a fic writer when your capabilities change, and a lot of the advice on that post has stuck with me. accepting my limits and working within them has definitely meant that my process is a lot slower, especially during flares (and once the weather warms up in the spring i am mostly stuck in one big flare until fall) but it also means that i get to maintain the quality of what i produce and my own quality of life. in these periods, i mostly just try to carve out a bit of time every day when i am able to sit up, usually only fifteen or twenty minutes or so, to peck away at my draft. i sit down, get a paragraph or two dealt with, maybe look at a bit of research, maybe not, and at the end of it i have maybe two hundred more words than i did before. some days, i don't even feel up to this. sometimes i go a week without doing it. but i try to just carve out some time when i can to peck away and eventually i end up with a finished chapter. that's really what my creative process looks like these days.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

I never said that voting is the only way to impact politics, I said the exact opposite. The individual act of submitting a ballot is the least impactful way to create political change because the ballot limits your voice to a handful of pre-defined choices. Sure, you have a slot to write in a candidate if you like, but nobody will see what you wrote besides some ballot counter who will just tally it and move on.

Biden and the Dems aren't going to care about whether or not their voters actually like them and want to see them succeed so long as they vote for them, and the same goes for Trump and the Republicans. Strategic voting keeps the other guy out of office, but you still have to contend with the fact that the guy you voted for is going to do things you don't like.

The preferable option is to get people and measures you actually do support on the ballot and to convince other people to vote for them. The preferable option is to make sure that no matter who wins, they will not be enabled in their efforts to do things you don't like. But these are hard to do, and they involve actually going out in public and making cogent arguments in favor of your preferred policies and candidates and working over and over to fight for these things.

It's a lot easier to take the side of a rich and powerful lesser evil and to coast off of their political momentum than it is to fight for something genuinely good that doesn't have the same support. But lesser evils are still evils, and Biden is still a conservative. If we can't get people on board to fight against his bad policies and decisions, how are we going to fare if Trump wins?

Trump did not win the popular vote in 2016. Hillary got a couple million more votes than Trump did. Biden could win more than 70% of the popular vote and still lose the electoral college. That's not going to happen unless we get some wild state flips, but it goes to show that voting isn't everything.

We need to be prepared no matter who wins to take control of our own destinies instead of acting like we're helpless to do anything other than reacting to politics. Trump might win despite the best efforts of his opponents. Biden might win and still go on to do more shitty things. Instead of waiting another four years and hoping that in 2028 the two big parties give us better candidates to choose from, we should work to organize ourselves, build a real working class party and movement that can challenge the status quo as well as support vulnerable people in material ways. We need to control the narrative and put them on the defense, make them react to us for a change. Otherwise we're doomed no matter which candidate wins.

I believe we can do it and that's the kind of thing I'm fighting for every day, but I also think that the momentum for this kind of change isn't going to start in first world developed countries, it's going to start in the developing world as more and more workers fight for and win their rights. That's going to put economic pressure on the first world which has relied on exploiting developing countries for far too long. Once the capitalists realize they won't be able to do that any longer, once all the cheap goods that flow into the global north start to dry up, that in my view is when the turning point will happen, and I think it's going to happen sooner rather than later.

The types of reactionaries and fascists that will burst into the mainstream when that happens are going to make Trump look like a centrist. That's not me being pessimistic, that's just what happens in times of severe economic distress, and I do believe we can stop them, but it will be a lot easier to do that if we get organized ahead of time. The labor movements of the global south are already gaining momentum. Climate change is having its own effects and putting its thumb on the scale. The clock's ticking, and we can't afford to let ourselves be caught off guard when the next big political economic shift happens.

Only one-third of U.S. adults say they approve of President Biden’s job performance — a record low for his presidency and for any president in the last 15 years.

In an ABC News/Ipsos poll, conducted Jan. 4-8, only 33 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Biden, a drop from the previous poll in September 2023, when 37 percent approved of his performance. Biden’s disapproval rating is 58 percent, up from 56 percent in September.

ABC News said it’s the lowest approval rating since former President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2008.

Biden, who is running for reelection, has a lower approval rating than former President Trump, who is the leading GOP nominee for president.

14 Jan 24

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Sleep Tight For Me...I’m Gone

Lately I’ve been writing these Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️ posts in Microsoft Word, selecting all and changing the font to Garamond, which is so readable and beautiful, and posting the Word docs, paragraphs by paragraph, inside these Tumblr drafts. It makes things look nice, to my old fashioned sensibilities, but fixing errors is a time-consuming and needlessly convoluted four-step process.

First, I have to copy, then delete the paragraph containing the error. Then I open the doc. and paste the error-ridden paragraph back into Word. After I find and fix the error, I need to save it and copy and paste it back into the post. It's time-consuming because I’m not just copying a paragraph. As you can see from more recent post, what I copied looked more like a photograph of the paragraph, not the words themselves written in Tumblr’s default font Arial. For an example of this, see below. I like the way it looks like old newspaper clippings. I posted an article about how my fent dealer John Smith kept getting robbed, and had resorted to putting a machete in front of his front door as a way of preventing this, a lever of sorts, which is plainly visible in the video I posted,

So today I’ve given up on trying to make my posts look like books or zines, and have given into the Tumblr font, which is about as pretty as a horse with his snout shot off.

There are two much longer posts I’m working on right now, one about Nirvana and one about Soundgarden, respectively, and how both bands were very unlike their public perception, but those posts are taking a lot of work so I’m putting them on the backburner because today is some dumbass corporation’s day where it tries to synthesize mental health and profit and the end result is as baldly capitalist and clumsy as you would expect. 

I’m not gonna name the company, or repeat their stupid fucking slogan. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far), talking about my trauma has never made me feel better. And in fact it has sometimes made me feel worse, because in telling you what hurts and scares me, I’ve given a part of myself away that I can’t get back. When you’re like me, and you’ve lost everything multiple times, sometimes the only form of power you have is how you choose, or do not choose, to tell your story. And in a world where everybody wants to tell “their truth,” silence is power. 

You don’t get to know me, sorry. I’m not gonna hand you my life, both my bad and good experiences, and conclude: “Welp, that’s why I’m so fucked up. Case closed.” 

Honestly, I used to be a little confused, or miffed that my former partner (who is an amazing person btw, in every respect) almost never spoke about some of the traumatic things she’d experienced in her past. I took it as a sign that she either didn’t trust me, or she didn’t think I would be a sympathetic listener, or the mere fact of my gender precluded her from sharing because I couldn’t truly understand what it was she had gone through. It’s not like I ever asked her to talk about it, but I did say, once or twice, “hey if you ever wanna talk about that stuff, I’m around.” She never took me up on it, and I let it go. 

But as I watched her, and saw her life unfold, over the years we spent together, I began to realize I wasn’t exactly in any position to be telling her how to live her life or how to be mentally healthy. After all, she has found success in a number of avenues, both creative and occupational, and I’ve found neither. I'm not saying the fact that she didn't talk much about her trauma is the reason for her success. I'm saying that she's forged a better path through life than I have, and maybe I should take a cue from that.

She never told me what to do, per se. It was more like living by example. But because I’m pretty dense, and a severe addict, our time together actually sorta reminds me now of that Cornell lyric from his first record: She’s going to change the world. But she can’t change me.

I have certainly found that talking about how shitty my life is only makes me feel more shitty, not free, or unburdened, or better. If you wanna talk about your problems, and you find it helpful, more power to you. Just don’t wait for a corporation to tell you it’s okay to not be okay. 

When Chris Cornell died I was so shocked. Of all the grunge icons he seemed the most stable, and he'd survived the rise and fall of two major label rock bands. If anyone had survived the media machine that chewed up and spat out Staley, Cobain, and to a lesser extent Andrew Wood and Shannon Hoon, it was Cornell. He would be the last guy to support hashtag activism like #StarbucksMyLifeSucks. Chris Cornell actually loved to fuck with the best laid plans of corporate rats. Molson once had a few promotional concerts in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, called Molson Canadian Rocks Arctic, with both Hole and Soundgarden playing to a crowd of flown-in grunge fans and bemused locals. But the whole anti-corporate thing grunge was known for actually came through when Courtney Love told the crowd she “use[d] Molson Canadian to douche.” Lol. Here’s a photo of Love arriving in Tuktoyatuk.

Cornell told the same people “so we’re here because of some beer company? Labatt’s?” Both artists’ jabs are funny. Cornell’s was a bit more subtle, but that’s what Cornell was like. 

So today’s post is about Chris Cornell’s suicide, more specifically the media’s reaction to it. For whatever reason, when Cornell died, every single news outlet, from CNN to Fox to CBC, posted “Black Hole Sun,” as if it’s the only song he ever fucking wrote, or – and this is far worse – the only song he wrote that’s worth hearing. The problem with this is more than twofold or threefold. It's fucking hydraheaded. 

Not only is “Black Hole Sun” a mediocre piece of music, it’s a complete misrepresentation of Soundgarden’s sound. 

Now, I’m a huge fan of the A.V. Club series HateSong, in which public figures gleefully talk shit about the one song they hate more than any other song in the world. The Max Bemis (Say Anything) one where he talks about Nirvana’s “Rape Me” as a terrible rewrite of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is terrific, but comedian Anthony Jeselnik’s HateSong takes “Black Hole Sun” apart, and I love it. I think the best line is: I think the more I hear it, the worse it gets. AVC: After the song became a huge hit, Chris Cornell said that he’d written it in about 15 minutes. AJ: I totally believe that. I don’t believe that Soundgarden likes that song. Like, I remember Eminem once said that he knew his song “My Name Is” was going to be a huge hit because the first time he heard it he was annoyed. It’s something about an annoying song that just grabs onto people. But I don’t think that anyone likes “Black Hole Sun.” I’ve never heard of anyone who likes it. I don’t understand why it gets played so much. It’s become a summer jam, and it’s not a summer song at all. Jeselnik is right that Soundgarden didn’t think much of the song. Guitarist Kim Thayil wasn’t kidding when he disparagingly called it the “Dream On” of their live show. And Cornell himself, known for a meticulous approach to his songwriting, had admitted that with “Black Hole Sun”was “probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written. I guess it worked for a lot of people who heard it, but I have no idea how you'd begin to take that one literally.” I mean it’s obvious from the opening lines that Cornell is just playing with words and how they sound: in my eyes/indisposed/in disguises no one knows What songs would have been more appropriate for Cornell’s untimely death? Glad you asked! Cuz there’s like…fucking at least ten that would have been better. I’m not tryna be one of those “the deep album cuts are better maaaaaan,” but with Soundgarden, it happens to be true. With some bands, the single are their best work. With other bands, the singles are the hors d’oeuvres for the entrees. So what deep cuts would have celebrated Cornell’s death a bit better? Well, to begin with, Superunknown’s strange and stately closer “Like Suicide” would have worked, for obvious reasons.

“Tighter and Tighter,” a song that is actually about the moment of death and what it might feel like, is one of my all-time fav Soundgarden songs. Not only is it a creepy and prescient prediction of what Cornell’s death by hanging himself may have felt like, it’s opening line is a good description of the personification of death: Shadow face/Blowing smoke and talking wind

Another sample lyric: “A sucking holy wind will take me from this bed tonight/and bloody wits another hits me and I have to say goodbye/sleep tight for me, I’m gone/and I hope it’s  a sweet ride/here for me tonight/cuz I’m feel I’m going/feel I’m slowing down.” 

The morning after Cornell’s death hit the news my buddy and bandmate James told me that en route to work his phone, which was playing music randomly through his car speakers, landed on “Tighter and Tighter” and he had to pull over because he was tearing up. 

“Fell On Black Days” is another song about depression and mortality. Cornell had the following to say about the song: “Fell on Black Days” was like this ongoing fear I’ve had for years ... It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything’s going well, things are exciting—when all of a sudden you realize you’re unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked! 

Now, if that’s not a cogent and even-tempered explanation of suicidal thoughts, what is? Why else would Cornell have admitted to being “really really scared” by his depression unless he knew what that depression could ultimately leasd to? Here’s some lyrics to “Fell on Black Days.” Dig the high literary use of “whomsoever” and “whatsoever.” Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life Whatsoever I fought off became my life Just when every day seemed to greet me with a smile sunspots have faded and now I’m doing time cuz I fell on black days

Whomsoever I’ve cured I’ve sickened now Whomsoever I’ve cradled...I put you down I’m a searchlight soul they say but I can’t see it in the night I’m only faking when I get it right I sure don’t mind a change but I fell on black days how would I know that this could be my fate?

Eagle-eared listeners might think this version different from the album version. They are right. The rendition in the video was recorded live off the floor @ Bad Animals, the Seattle studio owned by Heart, where Soundgarden would record Down on the Upside. 

“Boot Camp” is a scary meditation about loss of agency that for years was tied with Zeppelin’s “I'm Gonna Crawl” for Creepiest Song to Cap a Discography, until Soundgarden reunited and released King Animal.

“Taree” is about ghost light, influencing events after dying and features Cornell’s most exhausted, convincing “yeah” @ 2:57.

“Applebite” is a Matt Cameron-penned ponderous clunker about Adam’s original expulsion from Eden. Doomy and death-laden.

“Let Me Drown” is a song about letting someone die.

“The Day I Tried To Live” is frequently cited as Soundgarden’s finest achievement, its odd time signature somehow sounds straight, thanks to Matt Cameron’s brilliant time keeping.

“4th of July” is a song about a post apocalyptic urban landscape, where the speaker isn’t sure whether he is seeing fireworks or bombs. 

“Limo Wreck” is a cool death song and has an eerie 9-11 prediction. “Building the towers belongs to the sky/when the whole thing comes crashing down don’t ask me why.” 

ANY of the above songs would have been better than that fucking asinine dirge-like major key fuckaround that has somehow not just become Soundgarden's signature song...but their ONLY song. 

Does nobody remember Johnny Cash covering “Rusty Cage?” 

“Outshined?”

“Burden In My Hand?”

“Blow Up The Outside World?”

Did none of these other songs get stuck in the electric head? (The electric head is Rob Zombie’s term for the technologically advanced culture we have found ourselves enmeshed in, or imprisoned by. It was the subtitle for White Zombie’s 1995 hit album Astro-Creep 2000: Songs of Love, Destruction, and other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head.)

For my money (which ain’t much honey), the song that best fits both Cornell’s artistic integrity and the sad circumstances of his suicide is “Tighter and Tighter.” I once wrote a whole article on the way artists use “yeah” as a placeholder or as a way to convey emotion when words themselves aren’t adequate. Dig that tired, world-weary exhausted “yeah” at 5:35 of “Tighter & Tighter.”

Or the creepy line going into the first chorus: remember this...remember everything’s just black or burning sun. Not that I agree with such a bleak worldview. It’s a writer’s line. And Randy Bachman has said, “when you’re a writer, you’d step over your own mother.” That’s the Cornell I want to remember. Not that he would step over his own mother. By all accounts he was a committed family man. I mean, I want to remember the Cornell who created strange atmospheric sonic worlds, who explored the dark side that sadly, eventually won out. His otherworldly beautiful music is what I choose to remember about Chris Cornell, not his estate tastelessly exploiting “Black Hole Sun” by using a line from the song to title a posthumous Cornell album of covers No One Sings Like You Anymore. Sigh.

First Cornell’s widow said this was “Chris’s last album.” Okay. What about the Soundgarden songs he recorded vocals for before he died? Kim Thayil was pretty diplomatic about it when asked recently. Cornell did record vocal tracks for the follow up to King Animal.

Kim Thayil: “Given our love for Chris, I do not see us reconfiguring without him.”

But he makes it clear in this interview that Cornell’s widow Vicky has those tracks and won’t release them to the band. Maybe because she blames the band for Chris dying that night? She’s not wrong to believe that they would have known, and seen, what kind of shape Cornell was in, at least at the venue, maybe not later at the hotel.

Kim Thayil: “It’s entirely possible that a new Soundgarden album will be released. Certainly. All it would need is to take the audio files that are available. I tighten up the guitars. Ben does the bass. We get the producers we want to make it sound like a Soundgarden record.”

Interviewer: “Is there an obstacle stopping that?”

Kim Thayil: “There shouldn’t be. There really isn’t. Other than the fact that we don’t have those files.”

Interviewer: “They’re not under your auspices?”

Kim Thayil: “Right. It would be ridiculous if [the record wasn’t made]. But these are difficult things. Partnerships and...property.”

You’re just gonna keep those wav files? And why title his covers album Volume 1 if it’s his “last album?”

Oh right. $$$

No one does sing like Cornell, but is “Black Hole Sun” really the best thing he ever did? The best song he ever sang? Should an album of covers be the last thing he gives to the world?

The only honest answer is no.

Sleep tight Chris. You’re gone.

[letteredlettered]

What's your opinion on James Potter and Snape(not as a ship, just the characters) it seems like these two are the ones people fight over the most

Wow so I have also been thinking about this ask all week, because I could talk about this for ten years.

Snape is my favorite character. He’s the reason I kept reading the Harry Potter books.

I haven’t really read much of the fighting about him, but from what I gather, there are people who think he is a a) good person because he realized the error of his ways and fought on the good side, b)  bad person because he was verbally abusive toward children and only did what he did because of a girl?, c) character in a book who has both flaws and virtues.

My guess is the first point of contention in probably his childhood. Some probably say he is a blameless victim who was bullied and some probably say he was an asshole who never tried to be nice to anybody. He is both; he is a person who was not very nice and didn’t try hard to make friends, except for Lily, and he was also bullied and traumatized, and no doubt that bullying shaped him. It doesn’t justify joining a bigoted hate group that went around killing people, and that fact that Snape did that doesn’t change the fact that he was hurt, lonely, and damaged.

My guess is the second point of contention is Lily? I suppose some people thought Snape had a bit of a “nice guy” thing going on where he felt he deserved Lily and was pissed that she chose James? Yep, I’ll bet Snape did. It doesn’t make him evil. Being part of a bigoted hate group that went around murdering people made him evil. Lots of people have feelings of jealousy and that they “deserve” someone. Those feelings aren’t justified, and yet it is not bad to have those feelings. It’s bad to act on them, and if the reason Snape became a Death Eater was because Lily didn’t choose him, surely that is a bad action.

Another point of contention would mean his treatment of children—in particular that he is abusive to Hermione and Harry. Yep. There’s no getting around that. Is he as bad as some abusive parents or teachers? Nope. Does that make it okay? Nope. Does it cancel out good things he does? Nope. Do the good things he does cancel out the cruelty and abuse? Nope. Does it mean he’s not a good person? Yep. He’s seriously fucked up, and his treatment of children is wrong. I don’t see why that can’t be true for me to still love him as a character.

Lastly, there’s the issue of his redemption, such as it is. One argument I have seen--perhaps I noticed it because I care about it the most--is that Snape only stopped being a Death Eater because of Lily. He would have been fine killing other people’s children, but not Lily’s. This means he didn’t realize the error of his ways or attain virtue or become a good person; he just did it because he’s a creepy obsessed stalkerish dude who has placed one woman at the center of his moral existence.

I care about this point for two reasons: the first is that I have thought way too much about intentionality, and whether intentions matter. Does it matter if Snape does what he does for a girl, if what he is doing is the right thing? I think that it does matter, because while only our actions affect others, not our intentions, action cannot be isolated. The actions we take have consequences that ripple on forever, such that the slightest variation in the way you do something can have vastly different outcomes even if the initial action looks no different. And intention can cause that slight variation without the variation even being visible at first.

But the other conclusion I’ve come to about intentionality is that these systems are so vast and complex that intention not only influences action but action can influence intention. You start out doing something for one reason but keep doing it because It’s The Right Thing To Do.

Which brings me to the second reason I care about the argument that Snape stopped being a Death Eater because of Lily. I think what I love the most about Snape is that he did change his mind because of Lily, but it became about something more. He strongly implies to Harry that the reason he did all of it was for her, but I think that for Snape, Lily isn’t a real person any more. She’s a symbol of kindness, compassion, bravery, and goodness; she is his moral compass that allows him to make correct decisions (again, bearing in mind that plenty of Snape’s decisions are not only incorrect but cruel and mentally abusive).

Some would characterize this hero worship—putting Lily on a pedestal—as also wrong, and to some extent, I agree. People are human, not moral beacons, and they should be treated as humans, not worshipped. But how you view someone in your mind is different than how you treat them, and Lily is dead, so the fact that she is no longer a real person for Snape doesn’t matter, as far as I can tell. She is a symbol that helps him make his decisions and comforts him when he feels lonely in those choices.

God is that symbol for some. Simple moral rectitude and a feeling of satisfaction of having done the right thing is that symbol for some others. A dog is that symbol for still others. We all have things that guide us; I do not think our moral centers matter as much as our moral peripheries, because those are the parts that touch others.

But for me, perhaps the most telling thing about Snape is that he uses this Lily backstory and his love for her as a way to . . . convince Lily’s only child to go sacrifice himself. You can argue that Lily might also have sacrificed her only child to save the world, but her dying act was to sacrifice herself to save Harry’s life. Snape’s dying act is condemnation of Harry to death. In the end, it can be strongly argued that Snape was no longer guided by Lily at all, that he had moved past doing it for her. If he had been doing it for her, perhaps his dying act would be to help Harry find a way to escape and get as far away as possible. Instead, Snape thought that stopping Voldemort was more important, and since Snape knew that only Harry could do it, he did exactly the opposite of what Lily would have wanted, and sent Harry to his death.

I will say that I was disappointed in Snape overall, because the setup for finding out he had been working with Dumbledore was so good. I would have liked to see more of a Zuko-style last leg of his story, where at the very beginning of Deathly Hallows we find out Snape is on the Order’s side. Harry & Co. struggle to trust him because he is still the asshole who abused them, and Snape begins to realize other errors he has made—not just having become a Death Eater at 17—but the way he has treated people since then, the way he has treated Harry and Hermione.

Instead he died, which is a vastly over-simplified way of making him look (sort of) good without addressing the actual problems of his actions. His death means he doesn’t have to keep living with what he did, and the people left behind feel as though they have to forgive him because he’s dead. It reads like a heroic sacrifice, but it does not fix any of the wrong things that he did, and I would have liked to see him and everyone else struggle with who he was.

So ultimately, I think that the writing and the shape of the stories did not deal with a lot of the problems that Snape presents in a very cogent way, but I love the character for the moral quandaries he presents. That’s how I feel about Snape.

I feel exactly the same about James. We get less of him, so it’s harder to see why he is the way he is. He and Lily had to have joined the Aurors straight out of school. Presumably it’s because they read the writing on the wall and thought they could help protect Muggles and Muggleborns etc, and this was a worthy cause. You could posit he became a cop because he’d like to have power and beat people up, but I feel like that’s a bad faith reading. A good faith reading would be that James cared about different types of people, wanted to help, and was trying to do the right thing.

That doesn’t change the fact that he was a bully in school. Fighting the good fight doesn’t automatically make you a good person. Nothing can ever excuse how James treated Snape, but James as a person could change. People can always change, and it’s that much more likely that change can and did happen because James was young when he was being abusive towards Snape. Youth doesn’t excuse his actions either! But cognitive development does mean you are not the same person at 21 as you were when you were 15, and you don’t have to forgive someone for what they did to you when you were younger, but you do have to accept the fact that they can change. So is James excused? No. Does he still have his virtues? On a good faith reading, yes.

Does it matter whether he’s a good or bad person? Not really. I can enjoy thinking about him regardless of his moral value as a human being because he’s not a human being. He’s a character in a book.

[csolarstormhealthjournal]

I have come to the conclusion that my depression has worsened significantly, and I’m conflicted about whether the Effexor has backfired and I need to stop it, or whether I need more.  Or whether I just need someone to talk to.  It’s true I’m going through something.  I’m preoccupied with figuring out whether I can get the job that was the entire reason I started graduate school - the best case scenario is that I completely reform the way my household works, gambling my health insurance, my mother’s health, our income, oh god.  Wow.  WHEN I PUT IT THAT WAY.  The worse case scenario is that I get halfway through that and fail.  And the middle is I just don’t do what I wanted to do. 

And I’m doing this while being the President of my club, because it’s where I ended up since I was doing well.  I’m standing on a foundation of two-plus years of straight A’s, two conferences, lots of practicum points, lots of club participation.  I’ve done great.  So what is it that’s doing this - is it just the job thing?

It could just be the job thing.  That’s enough to turn someone gaunt.

So I’m writing at 4:00 in the morning.  For the last few weeks I’ve had awful insomnia that will keep me up until 5:00/6:00, and the insomnia hurts me afterward.  I end up hungrier, more sore and arthritic, less cogent, all sorts of stuff.  I’m realizing now that while it’s believable that I might not want to play as many games, I’ve actually changed the way I feel about a lot of things recently, enough to note that I think I know what “not finding pleasure in activities that you used to like” means.  At first I thought I was in a transitional phase and I’m just changing what I like to do, but instead of just not doing things I like to do, I realize I’m consciously deciding I don’t find things fun and then not replacing them with anything.  

Every once and a while I get this flash of excitement about doing something I like to do, but it immediately goes away, like a thought accidentally scurried across a neuron and set it off briefly.  It’s the weirdest happy memories and inspirations from my life that just pop in and out.  But then I get in my room and there is no excitement.  Which makes it hard to prepare for things that are outside my room, but how can I?  It’s like I become a different person when I come home, someone who doesn’t want to do anything.  Not even go to bed.  Getting up in the morning takes energy.  I’ll stop in the kitchen in the morning and stare into space. 

I wonder if having this success and having this job in front of me, not just the prospective job but the job of researching its do-ability - is triggering a specific anxiety over having a lot to lose.  I see the specific flaws in getting a job now.  I see the problems with being in class AT ALL.  The bowel obstruction/kidney stone surgery showed me the mortality of my place in the grad program.  Now I’m looking for all the reasons I can’t do the grad program because in my mind, it’s an inevitability that I will be brought down.  That’s what PTSD is.  The predator will catch up.  And not in the form of some routine medical problem that you can take vacation days for.  It’s in the form of a crash.  Something terrible.  And in my mind, the fact that all these problems are little and difficult to define, difficult to explain to people, frustrates me to no end, because I know that the threat is real.  I “know” that I’m having problems digesting.  I “know” that if I don’t have an infection right now, I will.  And I’m scared that the longer I wait to do something about it the more I’m going to be in a place of success and happiness when it happens.

I need to change something.  I cannot continue shouldering this.  I have a psychologist, but...I’m not seeing her fast enough.  And when I see her, it can’t be about OCD now.  This is for once more important.

[rhetoricandlogic]

JOINT REVIEW: THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND IN A SHIP OF HER OWN MAKING BY CATHERYNNE M VALENTE

Twelve-year-old September lives in Omaha, and used to have an ordinary life, until her father went to war and her mother went to work. One day, September is met at her kitchen window by a Green Wind (taking the form of a gentleman in a green jacket), who invites her on an adventure, implying that her help is needed in Fairyland. The new Marquess is unpredictable and fickle, and also not much older than September. Only September can retrieve a talisman the Marquess wants from the enchanted woods, and if she doesn’t . . . then the Marquess will make life impossible for the inhabitants of Fairyland. September is already making new friends, including a book-loving Wyvern and a mysterious boy named Saturday. With exquisite illustrations by acclaimed artist Ana Juan, Fairyland lives up to the sensation it created when the author first posted it online. For readers of all ages who love the charm of Alice in Wonderland and the soul of The Golden Compass, here is a reading experience unto itself: unforgettable, and so very beautiful.

Stand alone or series: It can be read as standalone but hopefully it will be a series? Pleaaaaase Ms Valente?

How did we get this book: The author made the book available online free of charge, a couple of weeks ago and we rushed to download it. But we will get final copies soon.

Why did we read this book: Because it looked and it sounded great. And it won an Andre Norton Award. Not to mention that it is a Catherynne Valente book.

Review:

First Impressions:

Ana: I will try my best to be coherent about this book and not to break out the caps lock too much but it will be hard because OH MY GOD. This is the book that rescued me from a horrible reading slump; it is the book that made me realise that Cat Valente is an AWESOME writer (which I already suspected but this settled the matter); it is a book that is so beautifully written and full of incredible imaginative twists and ideas that I constantly had a sense of wonderment reading it; but above all, this is a book I will treasure forever and keep close and go back to, many times in the future. I just know it.

Thea: I have been an unabashed Cat Valente fan ever since I picked up The Orphan’s Tales (thanks to the glowing reviews from trusted bloggers), and I have seriously loved her adult fiction. When Ana sent me an excitable email (replete with many exclamation points and capslocking) that The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland was available for free download, I joined in the jubilation and immediately scurried my way to Ms. Valente’s website. And then I read the book, and then I fell in love. This is the first book from Ms. Valente that I’ve read that doesn’t employ the nested story-within-a-story, alternating chapters, narrators, and storylines – and even without that particular flavor, Ms. Valente’s writing shines. I, like Ana, loved this book, and I, like Ana, plan on rereading and treasuring this gem of a novel countless times over.

On the Plot:

Ana: It opens one fine day, with (The Somewhat Heartless) Twelve-year-old September being invited to visit Fairyland by the Green Wind. She says yes (and how could she not, being a fierce and adventurous girl?) and travels forthwith by means of Leopard (which is obviously, the best way to travel, if you ask me). In Fairyland, she will have many adventures and meet new friends including a half-library Wyvern (who most certainly is NOT a dragon) and a blue boy named Saturday. But also: this is where she might lose many things (including her shadow) and meet the all-powerful Marquess who sends her on a quest to retrieve a mysterious casket and what lies inside may well change Fairyland forever.

I am in AWE, folks, in AWE at Cat Valente’s creativity. This book is so full of wonderfulness that it is difficult to know where to start. Perhaps with the narrative itself, with an omnipotent narrator who sometimes interrupts the story to speak directly to the reader. It is so easy to get this wrong, to have these interruptions jarring and disrupting the narrative but not here: here it works well, and it adds to the story rather than disturbing it.

Then there is the creativity, the imagination: like for example, a creature that believes himself to be the son of a library and another one that is a soap golem; there is a herd of wild bicycles as well as flying leopards.

But this is only SURFACE, because underneath each creature has an underlying idea or concept or issue that is addressed with subtly and beauty: from a search for self-identity (if Wyvern is not the son of a library, then who is he?) to the horrible truths of slavery; from selfless devotion to political unrest. This is a book that celebrates fairytales without ever being derivative and never forgetting that they can be dark and gruesome. It sort of reminds me of Peter Pan and Neverland and how every child wants to visit Neverland and its wonders but let’s not forget: it is indeed a dangerous place inhabited by bloodthirsty people including young boys who are there because their mothers and nannies lost them.

Because in the end, I think that the most important thing to say about The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is: you cannot have adventures without grief. And there is no shying away from it. But despite the grief and darker undertones, there is a lot of love and friendship here enough to – I can’t resist any longer, allow me to break out the caps lock- FILL MY HEART WITH JOY.

And then, to make things even BETTER, this book has the most amazing illustrations!

(link)

I mean, seriously. How can anyone resist?

Thea: Yes, yes, yes. What Ana said. The Girl (I am truncating this title because it is cumbersome to type, and much like September, who loves “A through L” as her friend Wyvern’s name, it is far too many syllables) is a gorgeous, imaginative novel that celebrates the daring-do of youth, the magic of the unknown, and the pitfalls and horrors of power. Also, this is decidedly unlike any other novels I’ve read by Ms. Valente, not only because the narrative style is more traditional, but also because the prose is ever-so-slightly screwball (I mean that in the best way). I completely agree with Ana that the omniscient narrator is a fantastic touch and sets the overall tone for the novel – doing the whimsical, breaking-the-fourth-wall type of narration can easily go sowrong – providing levity and whimsy, but tempered with actual thematic depth (the aforementioned examinations of slavery, of polity, and so on and so forth). This is a tall order, and to accomplish all of that in a children’s book, without ever becoming preachy or ham-handed, or completely frivolous is flabbergasting. I am honestly in awe of how Ms. Valente managed to weave together some of the most absurd story elements (migrating bicycles, hello!) into a cogent, poignant story.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is an amalgam of some of my most treasured stories, conjuring comparisons to The Neverending Story, Peter Pan, but most of all, it feels to me like a modern, more-fun version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – and if anyone is worthy to earn comparison to these classic works of children’s fantasy literature (even surpassing them), it is Catherynne Valente.

On the Characters:

Ana: There is a whole plethora of wonderful characters in The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland and I fell in love with every single one of them. I felt so bad for the lonely Soap Golem who was still waiting for the return of her Queen; I felt tremendously sorry for Saturday and how terrible it was that his entire life was about granting wishes and the horrendous way he was made to grant those wishes. Hey, I even sympathise with the villain, the Marquess, once her full story is disclosed – scrap that: I completely related to the Marquess and her motivations and maybe even rooted a little for her. But just a little.

Then of course, there is September, our main character, who is so fierce and a bit heartless that she leaves her house and her family behind without even thinking twice – but that decision is brought back and thought about throughout the entire book. She is dedicated, extremely loyal, compassionate, creative and just such a cool young heroine.

Thea: Yep, this is another one of those reviews where I am sitting in the back nodding my head emphatically, playing hype-man to Ana’s lead. What she said. I loved the lovely Soap Golem, and I loved SATURDAY, and I loved the Marquess (because, having been something of a heartless child myself, I have a soft spot for characters like this), and I loved A-through-L (or “Ell”) and the Green Wind and the leopard, and of course, more than anything, I loved September. September is not particularly pretty or smart or brilliant, but she is September – a normal, if slightly heartless, little girl from the decidedly unromantic land of Omaha, who is swept up by the Green Wind and embarks on an Adventure (with a capital “A”).

What is not to love about this book, I ask you? Nothing. It is perfect.

Final Thoughts, Observations & Rating:

Ana: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland is a small beautifully packaged bundle of perfect JOY. It is as awesome as a quest-coming of age story can be and I highly recommend it to everybody who loves fairytales, awesome heroines and beautiful writing. This goes straight into my top 10 of 2011.

Thea: I completely and wholeheartedly agree with Ana. It is a fantastical sort of bildungsroman (I have always wanted to use that word and something about Catherynne Valente encourages one to stretch and use vocabulary outside of one’s daily vernacular), a descriptive fairytale, and an imaginative feast of the bizarre and wonderful. I adored this book, and it too has a locked position as one of my top 10 books of 2011 (even if that is technically cheating since it was published prior to this year).

Notable Quotes/ Parts:

When they are in a great hurry, little girls rarely look behind them. Especially those who are even a little Heartless, though we may be quite certain by now that September’s Heart had grown heavier than she expected when she climbed out of her window that long ago morning. Because she did not look behind, September did not see the smoky-glass casket close itself primly up again. She did not see it bend in half until it cracked, and Death hop up again, quite well, quite awake, and quite small once more. She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest, but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.

Additional Thoughts: The author has a website for the book where you can read HOW the book came about and why plus, read the first 8 chapters online, free.

And check out the lovely trailer:

[tonidorsay]

So let’s start with the basics:

Ground Rules

Fairly Simple and straightforward. Ok, so we now have some strong guidelines here on how to do so. You cannot have a discussion from the get go if you cannot agree to abide by basic principles of reasonable discussion. Which are, now, laid out fairly well above.

Good Faith

You need to have Good Faith – the first three sections in the first graphic up above are, essentially, the keys to good faith, provided you are honest.  The moment you are dishonest, you no longer are acting in good faith. It also does not matter to me if you do not realize you are being dishonest as a result of repeating something someone told you. In the image above, the yellow/orange bar at the front is what you can use to determine, in part, if you are going into the conversation with good faith.

Active Listening

You have to actively listen to what the other person is saying. Part of the reason my “attacks” on other people are so effective is that I engage, each and every time, in active listening. Which I combine with my own skills from my work. Makes for a deadly combination that means I can see shit they don’t even know they are saying. Because I am listening to them and giving what they are saying not only my full attention, but my good faith.

Good Arguments

  The third graphic shows a sort of pyramid of ways to argue, with the most preferred at the very top, and then descending in order of value. The top 3 are the ones you want to use. In an actual conversation, I generally stick to them with occasional use of the time honored tradition of good insulting jabs at my opponent(s). Bluntly, since I very rarely have actual conversations with haters since they seem to always come from a position of bad faith and dishonesty (which means, well, they aren’t interested in a conversation, an so I won’t have one), I generally degrade into the bottom four. Because why put more energy into something beyond laughing at it for the absurdity it is?

On “Proving Your Point”

People often argue that it is the job of a person making an argument to prove the point, and to do so they will demand links and citations.  This is actually succumbing to a logical fallacy of appeal to Authority, and relies on the ad hominem attack of the subject not knowing what they are talking about without them proving that about themselves first. So the demanding of links or other “proof” is, while popular, a failure of critical thinking. In order to establish that you know the topic you are speaking to, you should be able to answer some various questions about it through the use of critical thinking and various scientific critical analysis. Here is one tool to help with that:

This does not mean that evidence doesn’t need to be provided, or that someone cannot turn to an expert authority in reference, but that one cannot demand it of them, and still be operating in good faith. It also does not mean that a link or citation somehow excuses the person using them from making a cogent argument of their own, that the link is merely a supporting reference for. This last bit is very, very important – if your entire argument is being made for you by someone else (a link to someone else’s work), you are not doing the job yourself, and, therefore, you are not arguing in good faith. A further note about links and citations – and this is a big one. IF someone says “According to X book”, they are making a citation. They do not need to provide a link or an explicit, outlined style form of citation, unless they are writing for some professional purpose – essentially, unless the form of discourse explicitly calls for a bibliography in the rules of the format (and most internet discourse does not) then there is no need to do so. So, for example, if I say “the world health organization”, I have cited a source that someone can use – and I need not go further than that – it is still their job to verify the information and examine it, and there is no requirement that the work of doing so be done for them.

Forms of Violence

Avoid Violence Since a great deal of my work centers around oppression, human rights, shame, ostracism, and social violence, and therefore my conversations are in that arena as well, it becomes critical that as part of that act of good faith, that the people involved avoid being violent. Violence immediately destroys any sort of good faith one might otherwise have. You cannot be nicely violent. For example, the moment you call a trans woman a man, or male, you are being violent, and, because of that – no matter how strongly you believe otherwise or whatever – you can no longer have good faith, and the conversation ceases. Now, I realize that a lot of people do not believe this to be the case. I don’t care. It is a fact that doing so is exactly that, and it is a fact that every major organization in the world dealing with human rights recognizes. Specifically, in the chart, you can see that community part, and the stranger and acquaintance side of things. Then you will note that there is psychological, and then deprivation & Neglect involved. That is the specific form of violence being referenced. So, to have a discussion in good faith, first you have to secure permission from a trans person if you want to be violent towards them.  Or – better choice – just not be violent. It isn’t that hard.

Logical Fallacies

One more thing to keep in mind that is also a large image: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/pdf/FallaciesPoster24x36.pdf the website that comes from is very handy.

About my mocking folks who are not arguing in good faith:

I am very tough on this.  I am quite happy to “play around” and not have a discussion when these rules are broken – these are called exchanges, and are often very unpleasant. They are not debates – a debate is a kind of discussion, but not a conversation. These are not lectures. These are me teasing the hell out of someone who wants me to allow them to be a fuckwit. I don’t do that well. And that is how you have a conversation.

[coldtomyflash]

So I was hoping you could do a speech analysis of Lisa Snart despite her unfortunately very few appearances (I hope the #BringbackLisaSnart will bring some acknowledgement from the writers. Thanks!

I think I got the older of these two asks over a month ago, so I’m sorry for the delay. Speech analyses take special effort, especially for a character with very few lines (and few gifs in the system so I have to make more of my own), so I let it sink to the bottom of my pile while I was working on writing and other stuff.

Annnd it got quite long so I’ll save everyone’s dash the trouble and put it under a cut.

But okay, on to Lisa!

It’s interesting to analyze her because, given how few lines she has, fic writers have a lot of license for how they want to characterize her speech patterns across different settings and moods. She also doesn’t have too many things that jump out as making her linguistic patterns unique, because so much of it is in tone of voice for her, and facial expression. So I’ll talk about what we can glean from canon, but I’ll also discuss how I’ve extrapolated from there for my particular Lisa “voice” when I write.

One of the very first things that jumped out about Lisa’s voice to me was her use of the diminutive suffix for people’s names. Huh? I mean the “y” she adds on. She does it for Len, calling him “Lenny”, but she also does it for Mick, showing it’s not just a thing between her and her brother.

Lisa calls men she knows by a ‘cuter’ or softer version of their name (and these are some hardened men). Also note the use of “darling”: she’s comfortable referring to people by petnames, particularly if she wants something from them. When I write, I make sure to pepper those in (classic ones like ‘darling’ and ‘dear’), but only when she feels confident or in control, mind you. When she’s aiming at something, placating or amused. Not when she’s feeling too worried or strained.

And this is all part of her ‘charm’, the way she puts on a cute, simpering voice designed to control and manipulate. To make herself nonthreatening, because damn can she be threatening. She makes people (men, romantic paramours or otherwise) do what she wants by playing up her femininity, either in a cute manner or a weaponized one. 

Look at that pout, directed at her brother. And note the direct reference to her femininity. We see that earlier in the same episode when she’s trying to manipulate Cisco.

References to her femininity are common in Lisa’s speech in both direct and indirect ways. It’s a super fascinating counterpoint to how she dresses like she’s ready to start busting heads. 

Personality stuff aside for a sec, note the use of sentence starters: “well” “besides”. Lisa continues ideas when she starts a new sentences. Unlike her brother who tends to start a sentence cold (and even drop subjects at times, he’s so weird), Lisa’s speech patterns imply that she’s replying to someone, bringing them in to her speech. She softens her speech in this way too. 

[She doesn’t let the boys get away with excluding her and I love it].

Also! 

Never ignore that Lisa loves a bit of chaos. She is every bit as hard or harder than Len. To be honest, I think of her as someone with his patient and eye for detail, and Mick’s thrill and impulsivity. Lisa is a storm. And when she’s in business (head-busting) mode, she shows it in her speech. Her sentences become colder commands, and her speech becomes a lot more clipped. 

Even in a fight, she’s exclaiming in a short way.

(Which, note that Len’s reply to her after this is a lot longer of a sentence).

But all of that is when Lisa is in charge, after a sense. Feeling in control and safe, or manipulating people. Her speech patterns when she’s worried about Len take on a different tone.

Watch how she goes from simpering/manipulative to about 1000% more genuine when she’s worried about her brother.

When she thinks Cisco might say no, realizes that her ‘cute’ act isn’t going to have any more sway with him (thanks to what happened at Ferris Air), she drops it entirely and goes for broke. So it is an act, and be cogent of that if/when you writ her. She likely enjoys being cute and coy, but it’s also a defense mechanism.

Like that? That’s a defense. Keeping people away, calling herself bad/toxic/etc before anyone else can call her those things, so that she doesn’t give them the power to hurt her when they do. And she bats her eyelashes and tries to be cute while she does it (or else cold, like above when she calls herself toxic, which felt much harder).

It’s also notably an act because she drops it when she’s monologuing / in business mode, when she’s focused.

Note the details in her speech. Where they were, what they were doing. Lisa likes a clear picture of things. Nothing jumps out in terms of word choice, but she speaks in positives a lot. You might remember I talked about how Wally makes his speech a little more flowery with some clever double-negatives? Yeah she doesn’t do that.

For all her charms, Lisa is more direct almost always, regardless of whether it’s short sentences or long ones. She cuts to the point. More evidence? There’s also not much metaphor in her speech (another example? Her talking about putting plastic down when she’s worried her head will explode is probably the closest we’ve seen to being roundabout about something, and that was literally her death).

So she’s very plain spoken, if you look at how she says things.

Like that isn’t flowery, it’s very much to the point. Len called their father a ‘sterling role model’, his own roundabout and ironic way of saying the man was a menace, and he talks about Lewis having broken his sister’s heart. Lisa just goes straight to “he’s a bad guy”. She doesn’t speak with irony or sarcasm pretty much ever.

So in that regard, keep her speech simple. She conveys her ideas straightforward and honestly except when she has a reason not to. You can see it in all the gifs I’ve posted her, but also when she’s happier and more open, she’s still straightforward and linguistically uncomplicated in what she conveys.

Some final ‘parts of speech’ type notes.

She uses adverbs in all her speech. Beyond just opening sentences, she uses them as (*gasp*) proper qualifiers. So excited to see a character use a range of qualifiers on verbs. Some examples are “Actually” (like above) and “really” (”I really did enjoy kissing you, know you”) and “Lenny practically raised me”.

With the adverbs and the sentence openers, her normal speech is direct, but it’s not clipped or short in the way that say, Mick (another straightforward character) ends up sounding at times. She’s also less absolute in her speech than Mick though, “you might actually be” instead of a more absolute “you are”. So she doesn’t hedge a lot, but it comes up.

And hmm... don’t fear contractions. “Wha’d’you say?” “gotta” but not “woulda” (she says would’ve or even “would have” sometimes). 

And it’s okay to drop the occasional article (”a” and “the”), particularly when they’re implied sentence openers. This comes out when she’s being coy, like “[A] girl’s gotta defend herself” (1x16) and “[The] least you could do” (1x22) -- both lines from when she’s got her perfect pout and/or smirk in place and is needling someone (Len or Cisco) for something. But that’s not inherently the case either, because we see it come out when she’s being very serious too:

(She drops “the” here, and it even seems like she drops “he” at one point in this speech as a sentence opener). Her speech doesn’t have a ton of articles in general, nothing making it longer than it needs to be or rambling.

Final notes? Tone of voice is huge for her, beyond the specific words. It ranges from simpering to cold and hard to vulnerable and open. She laughs at herself in a soft, pained sort of way she’s in private with Cisco, but laughs loud and excited on a job. She scrunches her face (it’s adorable) and is generally very visually expressive, even more so when she drops her acts, I find.

And that… is what I’ve got for you on Lisa. This is long but hopefully fruitful.

[dalelans]

Town Hall 1.1 - EJP

In observation of the soul-splitting political reality that we now inhabit, I would like to hold a Town Hall meeting in the Dale on the role of art in political life. The first order of business is to get you, reader and potential participant, familiar with some of the ideas I’ve been considering. To this end, I will first define the phrases “role of art” and “political life” in incredibly narrow terms that should clear the subjective-conceptual smoke that might choke an otherwise cogent discourse. Later, we can imagine together new forms of poetic activism that will hopefully empower us and put our sad feels to positive use!

Role of art

A postulate is a statement that I expect you will agree with because it feels true. To describe what I think the role of art is, I would like to invoke two postulates:

(1) Art is commentary on life. By commentary, I mean an intentional statement. By life, I mean the phenomena of direct personal experience. Music is always at least a commentary on hearing. Dance is always at least a commentary on being instantiated in a body subject to mechanical laws. Poetry is always at least a commentary on using language. You get it. An important part of this postulate is that art can comment on multiple things at the same time, especially to connect them. For example, a slow ballad in D-minor about your shit ex-boyfriend comments both on the somber funereal sound of hearing a ballad in D-minor and the related somber funereal feeling of having a shit ex-boyfriend.

(2) There’s a continuum of phenomena that runs from the primitive (sexual satisfaction, a panic attack, a psychedelic drug trip) to the cerebral (ethical reasoning, scientific understanding, self identification). The primitive is much more captivating than the cerebral but harder to call attention to or evoke. For example, if you had a schizophrenic vision that the world was run by goat-demons, your decade of training as a behavioral economist would not convince you otherwise. You’d probably not be able to convince anyone else of the goat-demons, but you still might be able to teach a behavioral economics course. Primitive, powerful experiences are hard to faithfully replicate in oneself or others while cerebral experiences are easy to replicate in others if they’re properly conditioned. Primitive phenomena are fleeting and personal, while cerebral phenomena are memorable and communicable.

With these postulates, I propose that the role of art is to evoke primitive phenomena by way of cerebral comment. For example, if I say ‘really big depression’ I can’t evoke that experience in your mind (or even mine). Instead, if I write an imagistic poem like: ‘a street person with filthy, sun-damaged skin howling and weeping and punching nothing in the rain’ then I probably succeeded in actually making you experience something in your head and that probably even spidered out with details I didn’t provide to you, like ‘he’s got squinty eyes and a red scraggly beard’ or even ‘he hasn’t seen his mother in quite a while.’ I also probably evoked something deeper and harder to describe about desperation, loneliness, and (hopefully) compassion. If I play a complicated improvisational solo on the distorted electric guitar, I may be able to actually evoke something as ineffable as empowered freedom or the feeling of being unmoored from the ground. The whole argument can be made quotable: the role of art is rub your face in the mystery.

Maybe I came across too brutal or romantic in that last bit, like there is something caustically healing or enlightening about getting the mystery rubbed in your face. Maybe that is true, but I argue that healing or enlightenment are not the major reasons people make or consume art today. The major reason is that it’s fun. The next reason is that it is sometimes socially advantageous to evoke the ineffable. Is the intense music accompanying a car commercial art? Maybe technically, but certainly not in a way with much grandeur. This is a critical point. In practice, art is fun and useful more often than it is transcendent. Even more often, in our society of complete media inundation, it is a distracting coloring to a life that would otherwise be unpalatable: ‘buy these shoes’, ‘worship this god’, ‘sit quietly in this living room.’

An important conclusion of this line of thinking (and the blessing that blossomed so much of the excellent poetry and music to come from the Dale) is that art is absolutely not the prerogative of societally-designated artists. Most people don’t feel like they could be real artists because of a misapplication of a societal preference for hyperspecialization. The repulsion of poor white non-rural America towards the elite stems in part from a very legitimate recognition of the wrongness of this societal preference. The academic choice to study a form of art or the economic choice to make a living selling one’s art certainly can yield more effective artists, but art is a natural form of human communication much older than specialization cultures. Art is simply a stylish way of recalling important things. The final conclusion is that folk art is real art, and whatever art is good for in life, it’s as good for you as it is for Ai Weiwei or Rene Redzepi.

Political Life and art

Political life is about how we live among other people. I would like to call attention to the distinction between the political life of the hungry and the political life of the ideological. The hungry have real or imagined needs that are unmet by the other people (particularly those specially tasked with coordinating the behaviors of other people, the government). Hungry political life is generally practical civic engagement including voting and protesting and petitioning. In our society it is often quite local. Wanting food or health care when you can’t afford it is hunger, as is wanting a dependable job that sustains your expected quality of life or wanting to feel safe from foreign or domestic enemies. The first point I’d like to make is that the major priority of any sane, compassionate government should be to satisfy the hungry. For instance, practically no one today believes that a police officer should not protect someone who owes back taxes. Even if they disagree on the effort that governments ought to spend in these matters, most people believe there is value in making the water safe, the air clean, the able-bodied employed, the disabled provided for, the homeless sheltered, the sick healed, the jails empty, the minorities treated equitably, the powerful good and the evil few.

Ideological political life instead answers the question ‘How should society be?’ I don’t believe our current political situation precipitated due to real hunger, but rather an ideological dissatisfaction of large parts of America with the future proposed by the establishment. They didn’t like the looks of the society they were offered, and who can blame them? This prescient analysis from Richard Rorty in the 1990s:

“Members of labor unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desperately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots...

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.” -Richard Rorty

Nonetheless, Trumpism is a repulsive, cognitively-dissonant ideology that most Americans would almost certainly shuck off if they were offered something better. The real political challenge for the left is to discover an American ideology around which we can unify with our brothers and sisters in non-urban America. There are many possibilities, of course. My personal favorite is that after the hungry are fed, healed, and provided with acceptable work, the goal of the society should be to generate the most diverse and successful individuals possible (this is also an echo of Rorty). I do not mean explicitly forcing everyone to accept and celebrate the self-identifications of others, nor do I think parentally-transmitted cultures have intrinsic value that warrants preservation (as Terence McKenna said: “Culture is not your friend”). Rather, I think that every person should be given the tools and encouragement she needs to explore the rainforest of human activities and pursue her own wild ambitions until she becomes the heroine of her own self conception. It’s the ‘You can grow up to be whatever you want to be’ philosophy writ as large as Teddy Roosevelt. Practically, it would involve massive investments in education, infrastructure, technology, and the arts. The left would offer an inclusive and productive nationalism. The president would be Walt Whitman and every person you met could be some self-made American god. I think you could convince people to live in that world.

Suppose this is my political aspiration, to move the society I live in towards one in which every person has their (1) hungers satisfied and (2) their ambitions kindled and stoked. Does anything I hypothesized about art naturally suggest ways in which a which a new political ideology could be explored, developed, and communicated? What sort of art comments on political life anyway? Where in history has art shaped ideology and from whence these strengths? How does the current culture and landscape of media consumption improve or reduce the reception of politically-motivated art? These are the questions I’d like other interested people to help answer.  

I hope that was interesting and not too sermonizing! I look forward to responses.

Love, Eugene

Post-scripts: I don’t think I’ve made an airtight argument at all, so let me call some of it into question (if not completely invalidate it). First, some primitive experiences, like hearing a catchy tune or seeing practically anything, are both communicable and memorable while some cerebral phenomena (like differentiable geometry or patent law) are hard to call to mind even for the properly conditioned. ‘Rubbing your face in the mystery’ is ostensibly the function of most spiritual traditions, some sciences, and all psychedelic drugs. Calling those things art does not feel right, but maybe they are distant neurological cousins. Finally, there is the looming, unaddressed question of aesthetics, which is: ‘Why do I associate this art with this ineffable feeling while you do not? What in me makes this association and how was it established?’ No clue bro, no clue.

For the political section, the whole thing is written from an un-apologetically progressive and almost futurist perspective. The clunkiest correction I could make would be to change every ‘is’ to ‘seems to me might be.’ (Culture seems to me might not be your friend). I also think my claim about ‘not real hunger, ideological hunger’ is barely or not true. Judged by the meth-towns in the belly of our mother-state, Pennsylvania, things have gotten objectively worse for non-urban America since the middle of the 20th century. Even if you completely reject the sexism, racism, rudeness, war-mongering, and ideological carelessness that is Trumpism, taking a positions against global trade and the ‘smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors’ is not completely irrational.

[jeki2011-blog]

The Power of Short Writing Assignments

Benjamin Barbour

A panicked student confronts a blank laptop screen late at night. A frazzled teacher sits in front of a pile of yet-to-be-graded essays the following evening. Long writing assignments can cause fear and anxiety for students and teachers.

Some educators avoid assigning writing, believing that they don’t have the time to either incorporate such a project or grade it. Thankfully, writing assignments need not be long in order to be effective. If you don’t wish to assign a potentially time-consuming project, try these short assignments to help students become better writers and thinkers.

SUMMARIZING FOR COMPREHENSION



Summaries are an easy way to incorporate writing into any subject. They are a valuable way to challenge students to concisely identify the main details, themes, or arguments in a piece of writing. The longer the reading assignment, the more demanding the process of writing a cogent summary.

Teach students how to engage the text in a conscientious manner, reading the material while noting its most important elements. I periodically ask my students to write a 50-word summary on a textbook chapter, an exercise that many of them find exceedingly difficult at first. Gradually they become more confident in distilling an author’s main points.

Share the best work with the class, underscoring the components of particularly effective summaries. When students hear the summaries of others, they develop a greater understanding of how to construct their own.

PROMPT WITH QUESTIONS

Part of our jobs as teachers involves giving students the tools to continue learning new information on their own, as well as equipping them with the desire and skills to challenge their own biases. All of this involves teaching young people how to craft incisive questions.

Review with students the importance of questioning, and introduce to them different question-writing techniques, pausing before calling on a particular student to encourage every student to think about the answer.

Have students write a single-sentence question in response to a piece of nonfiction or fiction writing. Then, assign students to answer each other’s questions with another carefully constructed sentence. Each student should have a piece of writing—a question and an answer—that is roughly two sentences in length for teachers to review.

Consider employing question prompts such as Bloom’s question starters. Teachers can tailor the complexity and specificity of these prompts to the needs of the student.

ENCOURAGE CREATIVE RESPONSES

Short writing assignments can also be more imaginative assignments. Consider, for instance, asking students adopt the voice of a historical figure:

Thomas Jefferson composing a three-sentence response to Hamilton’s banking plan.

Theodore Roosevelt tweeting his opinions on modern antitrust investigations of Google, Facebook, and Apple.


A series of text messages between George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt about whether the Lend-Lease Program is a harmful “entangling alliance.”


English teachers, for example, may want to incorporate fictional characters into their creative-response assignments to require students to practice inferring a character’s thoughts. English teachers can use these creative responses as brief, but powerful, assessment tools for reading comprehension.

KEEP IT SHORT

A student is never too old to revisit the basics of writing, and educators should not underestimate the importance of teaching students how to construct compelling and grammatical sentences.

Any short writing assignment can be reduced to a single sentence. Some options include the following:

Write a sentence-long summary of an article or book.


Describe the main idea of the piece in one sentence.


Complete a one-sentence story or memoir. 


One-sentence assignments push students to meticulously choose the right words and structure to convey their points.  

A CHANCE FOR COLLABORATION

Short writing assignments offer many opportunities for collaboration between disciplines.

Try incorporating vocabulary words or techniques that students are learning in other classes into a short writing assignment. A history teacher might ask students to write a summary of a reading using vocabulary from their English class. A history teacher could also integrate a book or short story from an English class. These techniques need not be limited to the humanities and social sciences. STEM instructors could assess informative or explanatory writing skills by asking students to compose a list of sentences outlining the steps they took to solve a problem or create something.

MECHANICS MATTER



Good writing on any subject demands proficiency in content and form. Short writing assignments allow busy teachers to pay attention to grammar and punctuation.

When assigning a short writing project, a teacher may wish to require some structural element (“incorporate a quote” or “use at least two compound sentences in your response”). Whatever the case, educators should stress the importance of grammar, punctuation, style, and syntax.

Mark Twain famously wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Trying to get a point across in a few words or sentences is often more challenging than going on for many pages. Short assignments also require students to self-edit—a skill that is valuable throughout school and in their working life.

Short writing assignments allow for fun, quick, and stimulating ways of teaching valuable writing skills.

https://www.edutopia.org/article/power-short-writing-assignments

[how2to18]

UNLESS YOU ARE reading this in North Korea, or perhaps Cuba, capitalism is your problem. Your suffering today — right now, this minute — almost certainly has something to do with the market allocation of goods and the selling of your labor power. (This is true even if your suffering is of the unavoidable human variety that can be at most eased by a superior system of economic distribution: the difficulties that come from the hard work of being young, being old, or being middle-aged.) The profit motive as an organizing principle for human societies has not disappeared, though in some places it has been tempered. The basic promise of liberal democracy — that it should be possible, through collective action, for people to exert control over their own lives — strains against the power of money and markets to influence political outcomes. It’s 2017, and capitalism is still your problem. And if by some miracle it isn’t your problem, then congratulations: you’ve managed to offload your problems onto some poor souls located somewhere else in the system.

A hundred years ago, if you were in just the right place and were just the right person, you might have been able to imagine that it would be otherwise. The Winter Palace had fallen. Vladimir Lenin and a cadre of fellow revolutionaries had taken responsibility for shepherding in a new order. Capitalism had, at last, a true world-historical rival; its internal contradictions were leading inevitably to socialism. Its days were numbered.

We know, or think we know, where all this — the idea the world once called communism — leads. It leads to famines, to work camps, to cults of personality, to drab public art, to crumbling apartment blocks, to the loss of political rights, to forced confessions, and to shooting a few million of your closest comrades in the back of the neck in the pursuit of a just cause. The reason that capitalism is your problem today is that communism failed, catastrophically, to provide a better alternative. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it seemed to leave liberal capitalist democracy as the only viable system remaining, This is what Francis Fukuyama meant when he declared, with apologies to Hegel, that the global spread of liberal democracy represented “the end of history.”

Yet that argument now seems as unfortunate and dated a product of the 1990s as Stone Temple Pilots and Jar Jar Binks. Certainly its optimism no longer seems warranted, after the scandalous global response to the financial crisis that began in 2007 has led, in the United States and elsewhere, to the rise of an unholy union of xenophobic and plutocratic politics. In the wake of these developments, even Fukuyama has admitted that he can now more clearly see how liberal democracy can fail. But where does that leave us, 100 years after the October Revolution? If capitalism and democracy are not going to save us, can there be anything from the legacy of communism that is worth salvaging?

¤

The ambitious goal of A. James McAdams’s Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party is to tell the world history of the communism, from the time of Marx to the present day. The communist idea, McAdams reminds the reader, was an extraordinarily influential one. In 1985, he points out, 24 of the world’s 162 countries (representing 38 percent of the world’s population) were ruled by communist parties. Liberal democracy, communism’s ideological rival, was the system of government in 35 countries at that time.

McAdams knows that his readers will probably have a particular idea of the Communist Party in mind. The Party as an institution, we think, was hierarchical, hidebound, rigid, corrupt, and slavishly subservient to Moscow. McAdams’s purpose is not to entirely demolish this received idea — any examination of the history of the Communist Party would have to acknowledge such tendencies — but rather to emphasize that what made the Communist Party model so successful was its flexibility. Far from being uniform, the forms communism took actually varied from place to place, as its leaders adapted to local and national circumstances. There was a “family resemblance” between communist parties, McAdams argues, rather than a bunch of Soviet clones.

Put aside what we all know is coming and there is no denying the extraordinary appeal of the basic concept of communism. The idea of the proletariat’s inevitable victory over the forces responsible for its immiseration resonated in many places, offering a panacea for many ills. Add to that the sense of community and solidarity of those who participated, and the pride of working for something greater than oneself, greater even than one’s nation. “My own fate was of no account compared to the struggle being waged,” the Yugoslavian communist Milovan Djilas wrote in 1961, “and our disagreements were of no importance beside the obvious inevitability of the realization of our idea.” The selfless actions of many communists testify to the power of that emotion.

The most thrilling parts of McAdams’s book, and where it hews closest to the history of an “idea,” are in the construction of the basic communist party model. The story begins in the mid-19th century, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were just two revolutionaries forming a diagnosis of the social problems that surrounded them. The particular vantage of their London exile connected them to the most advanced industrial proletariat in the world, contributing to their confidence in its historic role. Before they were codified into dogmas followed by bureaucrats, their ideas were formulated in specific debates with other socialist intellectuals: one of the few times Marx mentions the “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” for example, is in a marginal note responding to a program of action influenced by the moderate socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, later published by Engels as the “Critique of the Gotha Program.”

The basic dispute about revolutionary practice, still unresolved on the left, had to do with what sort of party structure could support the social transformation that everyone believed was coming. Some believed in building a mass party by winning gradual concessions over time. The idea of the elite, disciplined vanguard of professional revolutionaries was solidified with Lenin who, like Marx, was not writing blueprints but forcefully engaging in the political debates of his time and place. In Russia, where industrial workers were perhaps two million out of 128, a mass party of the proletariat was not an option. He thus formulated plans to match the situation: plans involving the careful work of dedicated organizers to mobilize workers. It was not that Lenin abandoned belief in the power of the working class, as some have argued. But he was committed to smashing forms of bourgeois power, including representative democracy. Because Lenin and his cadre emerged victorious from the Bolshevik Revolution — even though much of that had to do with the collapse of the old Tsarist order, rather than their actions — their approach came to be taken as a prescriptive model rather than a strategic intervention at a particular moment.

Even with a revolutionary vanguard in charge, there are still organizational issues that remain unsettled. Was the form of rule a party dictatorship or a personal one? How much should people in the party be allowed to openly debate policy? How much violence should be deployed against the remnants of the old order, and how can you rely on it during transitional phases? How much can you attribute discontent with your policies to surviving remnants of that old order, when things get difficult?

As McAdams progresses through learned discussions of the Soviet Union, Chinese communism from Mao and beyond, and Cuba, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and other communist states, it is clear that there was no single answer to any of these questions. Each country solved (or failed to solve) these problems in their own way, and even in Russia and China there was oscillation over the long term between the personal dictatorships of Stalin and Mao and the party dictatorships that held sway under other periods of Soviet and Chinese communist rule. And it was under the personal dictatorships that communism’s worst offenses — the famines and the mass purges of the Great Terror under Stalin; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution under Mao — took place.

Through it all, the idea of the Party retained much of its inspirational power. As the Polish journalist Julia Minc put it in 1980: “If you have to choose between the party and an individual, you choose the party, because the party has a general aim, the good of many people, but one person is just one person.” Nikolai Bukharin, one of the old Bolsheviks who was a victim of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1938, tried to keep faith even as he was put on trial under false pretenses. “I know all too well,” he wrote, “that great plans, great ideas, and great interests take precedence over everything.” He was, of course, put to death.

Such abuses are not, as is sometimes asserted, the inevitable result of the communist model. Had Bukharin won the contest for leadership instead of Stalin, he likely would have been more flexible and less ruthless. But, as McAdams cogently argues, “[T]he odds were stacked heavily against Stalin’s opponents by a political system that provided no means for constraining a man who had willfully abandoned all scruples.” It was a problem that would recur in other settings. The combined notions of a vanguard party, a personal dictatorship, and ever-shifting class enemies on all sides set the stage for crime after crime: much evil could be done in the name of the people, and of History.

McAdams is a political scientist by training, and although the subtitle of his book is “The Global Idea of the Communist Party,” it would be better described as a study of communist leadership. Especially once Stalin arrives on the scene, the approach is not really that of intellectual history. Nor is it a social history of communism, describing the transformation of lives of ordinary people. It is a broad, comparative history of communist parties in power, one which required a tremendous amount of knowledge to write, and subtly but successfully undermines the easy equation of communism with totalitarianism that has been a liberal talking point for far too long. There were too many different expressions of the Party, McAdams makes clear, to leave it at that.

Unfortunately, McAdams’s focus on leadership leaves him very little room to examine the minority communist parties that operated around the world without coming close to exercising power. There is some discussion of postwar France and Italy, where communist parties commanded considerable working-class support. France’s party was more closely aligned to Moscow; Italy’s party was more independent and creative, eventually leading the way to the “Eurocommunism” that blended into the democratic system, giving up elements of the vanguard model. The Communist Party of the United States also gets a bit of attention, mostly in the context of the factional disputes of the 1930s. But otherwise, the parties that stayed on the margins are absent from the book. What interests McAdams is the exercise of political authority. This means that he cannot have much to say, for example, about the relationship of communist movements to decolonization or civil or indigenous rights. There is no room for someone like Nelson Mandela, who was confirmed after his death to have belonged to the South African Communist Party in the 1950s. Mandela, of course, never governed as a communist, but surely his and related stories are an important part of the history of the communist idea.

Consideration of minority communist parties might also have shifted the larger analysis in interesting ways. There are no easy generalizations here: as with the terroristic Shining Path in Peru (also absent from the book), lack of power was no obstacle to the generation of brutality or a cult of personality. Dependence on Moscow was certainly an issue for many of the world’s small communist parties, usually to their detriment. And perhaps it is the case that other small communist parties, given the chance to rule, would have done so with the same righteous rectitude that marked their more successful cousins. Yet communist parties in Cuba (before Castro) and in the state of Kerala in India expanded welfare state provisions and social rights. In general, it seems fair to note that communist parties that remained in minority roles were far more the subject of repression than its agents, while the opposite is generally true for those that reached power.

Perhaps a truly global history of the communist idea would be beyond the ability of any single scholar, and Vanguard of the Revolution is already a long, broad, and deeply researched book. But an even more complex history might have emerged from taking into account the contributions that minority communist parties, in spite of their delusions about Stalin and Mao, have made to the 20th-century left. It might have done so in ways that are worth considering in the 21st century, where, outside of China, it seems likely that communist groups are more likely to be influential in intellectual circles than they will be successful in gaining political power.

¤

McAdams’s book ends in the early 1990s, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and, thus, the Communist Party as a world-historical political force. (There is a short coda on North Korea and Cuba.) But of course the history of communism also includes its aftermath: what has become of the countries the Party once controlled in its absence. This is the theme of Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism: a banquet of a book, full of unexpected dishes. It consists of 14 chapters: four of them fiction, most of them essays. They are often personal, and there is no sustained argument per se. In the wrong hands, this could have been a disaster. But Ghodsee writes with moral seriousness and exceptional force, and Red Hangover is the rare academic book that is compulsively readable and thoroughly compelling. “According to scientists,” the first sentence reads, “the human body, provided sufficient fuel or kindling to ignite it, can burn for seven hours.” Thus begins a discussion of a wave of self-immolations in Bulgaria in 2013, during a period of serious material deprivation throughout the country. One 52-year-old man, an unemployed blacksmith, said he had hoped his death would draw attention to the conditions of ordinary Bulgarians. “Under communism, we had money, but there was nothing to buy,” he said to the press. “Now, there is everything to buy but no money.”

Ghodsee is an ethnographer of Bulgaria by training, but she ranges across Eastern and Central European post-communist states in Red Hangover, trying to take stock of the area’s difficult transition to “democracy.” By most measures, this has been an enormous disappointment. The economist Branko Milanovic has estimated that only one in 10 citizens living in post-communist countries has made a successful “transition” toward the prosperity associated with the West. Sixty percent are seeing growth so slow that they are falling behind or treading water, and fully 20 percent are facing a multi-decade climb just to get back to the income levels they had at the end of communism. Only a few countries have consolidated democratic politics. In all of the “successful” countries, economic inequality had increased markedly.

At one point, Ghodsee recalls a conversation with a Bulgarian friend who worked assiduously to root out communist influences, and who was much-loved by Western promoters of democracy. Ghodsee observes to her friend that nothing was done in Bulgaria to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “That’s because there’s nothing to celebrate,” her friend replies:

I thought we were fighting for freedom, for democracy, for principles that I believed in. But it was all a lie. What we have now is worse than what we had before. I used to think that maybe we did something wrong, but now I realize that the whole thing was rotten from the start; 1989 was not about bringing liberty to the people of Eastern Europe; it was about expanding markets for Western companies. They used the language of freedom of democracy, but it was all about money.

Compare this to the passion, however misguided, that people felt for the communist idea for much of the last century.

Ghodsee’s general argument is not really that things were better before the fall of communism. She acknowledges Stalin’s monstrosity. She acknowledges the labor camps and rule by secret police. But there were also years of “ordinary” communism that, whatever their frustrations and injustices, were not Stalinism. She also thinks that images of the Soviet state at its totalitarian worst have been allowed, in the West, to overtake a more complex understanding of what everyday life was like under communism. It was a system quite capable of evil, but daily life for ordinary people was not always one of unrelenting misery.

Throughout Red Hangover, Ghodsee picks up some of the common arguments against communism and throws them back at the reader with a bit of unexpected topspin. She knows she’ll horrify bien-pensant Western aesthetes by confessing her appreciation for socialist realist art. She builds a story around an impressive public clock to ask: What is so wrong about depicting the social contribution of workers in art? Socialist realism could be kitschy and propagandistic, but it wasn’t always. Yes, the state controlled artistic production, and yet, she writes, “I have spoken with artists, filmmakers, journalists, and writers across the former communist countries. They complain bitterly that their creativity is more constrained today by free markets than it ever was under the socialist state.” For all their repressions of subject matter and style, communism at least supported the arts at a local level; today, many of Bulgaria’s young artists have abandoned the country.

Another essay mentions a comparative study of East and West German women right after the Wall fell, which showed that it was the East Germans who reported greater sexual satisfaction, a finding that Ghodsee attributes to the economic system. Jobs guarantees may have introduced inefficiencies and reduced productivity, but there were ways that they could also make life seem less busy. Weekends and holidays could actually feel like time off. Child care was free for all. The state made at least a formal commitment to gender equality, however incomplete in practice. Perhaps it made a real difference in the bedroom.

Ghodsee’s aim is not a defense of communism so much as an attack on the way that it has been misremembered in the West, and the pernicious consequences of the Cold War–inflected equation of capitalism and freedom. What did the citizens of the former communist countries want, and expect, after the Wall and the Soviet Union fell? Democracy, yes, and an end to dictatorship. Greater prosperity? Certainly. But free market capitalism? Not necessarily. There were many things about socialist economies, Ghodsee insists, that people valued that were dismantled along with the political system that had lost its legitimacy. People didn’t want to give up every aspect of socialism, but they didn’t have a choice. While most citizens in communist states were eager to be democratic subjects after years of party dictatorship, they were not necessarily eager to become capitalist subjects. But those are the transformations that the system has required, with attendant increases in anxiety and insecurity, and loss of equality and solidarity.

“Twentieth-century communism failed,” Ghodsee writes,

because the ideals of communism had been betrayed by the leaders who ruled in its name. When the reform efforts came, they came too late: ordinary people had already given up on the system. Today, democratically elected leaders too often betray the ideals of democracy and those who are calling for reform may also be too late.

Communist states told themselves myths about their nature: all societies do. But when the gap between myth and reality grows too large, the system loses legitimacy. We may be reaching a point, sooner than we think, when the gap between “democracy” and “freedom” and lived reality gets too big. When it does, what will emerge to take democratic capitalism’s place?

¤

“For too long,” Ghodsee warns, “the horrors of communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe have legitimated the horrors of democro-capitalism.” She’s right, of course, but somehow it doesn’t seem adequate to point out that both communism and liberal democracy can be horrible. As we see from McAdams, there are some structural features of its political model that make communism more likely to produce humanitarian disasters. The famines of Stalin and Mao, which destroyed millions of lives and reduced people to cannibalism, could probably never occur in a democratic system — though they have occurred under empires run by democratic states, like the British in India.

The path forward is not an easy one. The creative work of imagining the way to a different future needs to be undertaken again, with a full acknowledgment of what went wrong the first time. The experiences of the 20th century should teach the political left of the importance of remaining humble and responsive to democratic signals. It has to be willing to lose, and not see itself as the only possible source of justice, in order to maintain a commitment to doing good in the world.

But it also has to be willing to act when it does win. One key idea Ghodsee emphasizes is decommodification. Markets can efficiently allocate consumer goods, but humans also derive value from collective goods and pursuits. Certain forms of essential care are so fundamental to life that denying them to anyone, especially in the context of general plenty, is to make a political choice in favor of cruelty. A jobs guarantee and a minimum basic income would so fundamentally change labor markets that they are sure to be fiercely resisted, but if achieved they would transform our lives and our politics forever. There will be relief for most people in stepping away from the pressures of capitalism, with the attendant commodification of time and life. In the 20th century, the choice (though it was not one that most people could exercise) was between being a democratic subject and a socialist one. The challenge of the 21st century is to achieve both at the same time. It is not clear that it can be done, and if it does it will not happen at all once. But if it can be done, it will be revolutionary.

¤

Patrick Iber is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cold War in Latin America.

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Between Worlds

Between Worlds ~ Persephone to Caela I want to write her story, but it isn't ready to write. I imagine it as a painting, swirling colors and intricate spectral figures, everything moving at once, a kaleidoscopic panorama. When I was a kid, I used to wish on the Moon, the big Full Moon. It was so much grander than any sparkling star. I would twirl around and around on the dewy summer grass, electrified by blinking fireflies. Then, I would flop down to watch the sky swirl like a Van Gogh Starry Night. What kind of Solstice celebration would she have? Would they have comparable seasons? They would have to have a whole new system of astrology, if anyone bothered with that Earth-based lore. They would have ceremonies, celebrations, dancing and romancing and offerings of special performances to keep in touch with the mysterious. They would be a spiritually aware people, happy in the shared wealth of their culture. They would know to honor, value, celebrate the individual as the ultimate resource of the common wealth. Empaths have no ambition based on suspicion, no need for hierarchical arrangements to be secure in one's place. The year, or whatever passed for one, would no doubt fall out differently than our years. What constellations might appear? How many moons? Does it matter? Important occasions are marked, harvests and births, rewards for hard labor, sacredly meaningful losses that we move beyond through honoring sacrifice. What else must be honored, must be held holy? There would be celebration for the occasion of the moment when the spirit is strong within the tribe, when there is need for release, tears and laughter, impassioned artistic rendering, raucous song, frenzied dance, the strong scent of blazing emotions gone wild in the loving safety of tribal union. ************** She found the children, understandably frightened but so far unharmed. The telepathic ability which had condemned their parents had helped to save them. She knew this to be a time of crisis, a crossroad, which must open an opportunity to end this unnecessary enmity, these unnecessary tragedies. Caela was called. She chose to answer. She was uprooted as a child, but within the caring arms of community. Within that communal embrace, she was able to learn her power, use it for the communal good. She enjoyed a happy, balanced life with family, friends, fulfilling work, peaceful spirituality, the grace of natural beauty. At the point when her life as it had been had taken her as far as it could, she was called to a sacred journey, a mission for her own continued growth of soul, and for the transformation of a world long divided, a healing of the wound dividing the people of her world. It all came as a natural progression. She was always given all she needed to be able to give what was needed by those she served. Gentle eyes, but much more, eyes anyone could stand before with no shame. Self-evidently these eyes were ready to accept and respect what they saw. She speaks to me sometimes. No, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. She speaks to me in my own voice, though, perhaps, in a different register. She comes to me in a dream, a recurring dream. It was so clear and powerful. She is beautiful, full of life, full of magical power. I feel safe with her. Perhaps she is some kind of totem, spirit guide. Perhaps she is someone I could become, in the fullness of time, as some kind of metaphoric singularity, familiarity, familiar inner voice who has always guided me. I feel a special affinity to cats. They are so completely themselves. I love the strong sensual flowering scents of Spring. Yet, I am a creature of the Winter of low lights, of shadow and multiple realities. I call her Caela. She makes me happy in a special, secret way. I have a sparkling, shining secret. No, it's not schizophrenia. In a way, it is sanity. She helps me to understand who I am, who I could become, free and self-empowered. She is like a fantasy mother who is giving me everything I need to face my fortune. She is a gift from me to me. Moon in Virgo, maybe? I’m losing track. It’s all one long wintry night. None of that life so mine so few months ago seems real to me now. I am not that person who lived there. Can't go back; don't have a clue how to go forward. Celia's still taking care of me -- I have no financial woes. I can stay here for probably longer than I would ever need to, meeting all my 21st century needs, even indulgences, without having to concern myself with paychecks. One less thing. Pandora cuddles up to me, lets me blubber and cry all over her. She doesn't make the demands of human friends for coherency, consideration, a semblance of self-control. Yeah, I miss me, miss them, miss us. It's like I'm being told, simply, in strict terms, that here and now I am not that girl, that womanchild. I am not clear on who this metamorphosed me is becoming. A great, golden cockroach comes to mind. But I am not ashamed. I have no family to fail, no social position to lose. I am not a golden butterfly, simple grace flying from flower to flower. Often I feel like a wraith, between worlds -- not of one or the other. Am I my namesake? But in what realm am I Queen? No, I am not taking over your place, sweet Pandora, so solidly Queen of the household. There is solace in the awareness of another life, a natural way of being. I am Persephone in her mother's home. It is Demeter who has been taken by the minions of death, her body barely holding on to life's sweet definition. Strangers minister narcotics to soften the veil, blur the journey. That is where the dream comes from. The potent journey; the aging mother, crone, no longer a complete integral of her tribe, no longer anchored to her long-time position in life. Is she called to a sacred mission? Is she a possible guide to my own salvation? What do I need to be saved from? The endless days that make no sense, unanchored, dependent on inspiration? It is getting dangerously close to dawn on this not long enough winter night. I can't bear to see the light as if ordinary routine of weekday activity could be my expected, accepted norm. I feel so much more naturally alive in Caela's world, as I diligently figure it out in a faithful inner theatre of cinematic splendor. This has got to be a good thing, this insistently reveling imagination that hugs me with warmth and ecstatic emotion. So much more than a distraction or psychotic state, I believe it is meant to heal and elevate. But what do I know, pretending to be somewhere other than this sad little apartment in this sad little neighborhood, someone more grand than sad little me. This lassitude is not like me, or not like the me I like to be. I do remember other times when life was too much with me and restlessness without activity overtook me. I need a visionquest. I can attain that even from this restraining lassitude by projecting my mind onto another, more vital, life. I can follow that path of no resistance, encounter demons and deities, solve the puzzle, claim the prize, reemerge, shimmy down the beanstalk refreshed and reinvented. Perhaps I must. It's hard to know, living on all these levels, in all these layered dimensions of cosmic meaning to random happenstance, how to go about continuing. It's not the drugs -- anyway, they are only mild antidepressants along with that old central nervous system shut-down stand-by measured in proofs below 30. I'm a self-medicator from way back; but I have considerably grown up and cut way down. I refuse to touch Celia's pain medication, even though she left quite a nice stash behind when they evacuated her. Or, what is the word? They removed her from her former life to watch her die. I should evacuate myself, get back to where I once belonged. I should get over this private pity party and find my way to be useful and productive in the world. I am drawn into this fantasy universe as if it were the one that was real. I imagine channeling is like this. So now I am the gypsy witch of fairytales casting my scrying eye into other worlds. Anything's better than being nothing, no one, lost, drifting, alone. Yeah, melodramatic and untrue. I have wonderful friends who I just can't seem to reach out to. But, you know, I know, I'm used to being alone. It's restful, familiar, delightfully irresponsible, just me. Yet I'm never alone with my insistent imagination ever entertaining me with charming characters playing out stories. I will self-indulge for awhile, take advantage of this luxurious lapse into insanity to see where it lands me. I can't think of any reason not to that makes any sense to me. I'm sure if I get too loud the neighbors will complain. Just a ditsy witch with her cat and inner crucible, listening to jazz, smoking herbs, drinking wine, writing fantastic journeys. If Celia wanted more from me, it's too late for her admonishments now. Danny wanted nothing from me. Maybe some absolution, but I'm not in that business. What do I want from me? That's the question worth pondering. Maybe Caela will tell me as I follow her visionquest through the brave forest, discovering who we are, what we can do, where we belong. Hours melt into hours, navigators' objects move across the sky outside this progressively filthier window. I feel the luxury of my hand losing itself in soft fur as Pandora purrs beside me on Celia's couch. From time to time as it occurs to me, I pretend to write cogently, for something to pretend to do. Yes, I know there are vast ventures of exciting adventuring, or even simple chores I could engage in, if I could engage. Gulping down wine when the feelings get too close to the surface probably is not helping my thinking to find coherence. The radio music gives me an illusion of being somewhere, some connection to a greater world out on the airwaves. I can ride those airwaves like a magic carpet to imaginary places, people to whom no responsibility can be owed or expected. I somehow hypnotically manage to do the few daily chores necessary to maintain me, cat, plants, to keep real squalor at bay. Going through those motions with minimal consciousness is not responsibility. I don't have to answer for or explain myself, keep up a conversation or show appropriate emotional responses. How did such simple everyday bits of business become so exhausting to even contemplate? It's not just that I'm not the person others expect of me. I am no one at all. There is no cohesive sense of me to explain or hold together an acceptable identity. My memories don't feel of me but like some old tv drama series of connected stories. Do you remember that episode when Persephone and Tom made love on the beach at dawn, hidden in the water though there was no one else around to see? Or that one in the earlier seasons when Danny explained to little Persephone why he wouldn't be living with her and her mom anymore? Seasons and seasons of this long-running soap opera in which nothing is ever resolved; no strong central character emerges complete with her happy well-rounded life, a joy to her friends, a boon to her neighbors. Or is that Caela, the refugee? Not that I think I can find myself in her; lose myself in her is more where I'm aiming. But maybe, Goddess willing, I can lose myself in her, live out her story in my inner movie, to find myself later, after the show, curled up in the shelter of some hidden woodland tree, a sprouting seed learning how to be this new creature as I become. Or maybe I'll just get lost in my own insanity, no good to anyone. Happy pitty party to me, lazy and selfish and brazenly morose. Who do I think I am? Secretly: Once upon a time a princess grew into a queen, and then into a crone, and then into a legend that never dies. When all she wanted was a world that made sense in which she could feel free to be alive. But that makes no sense. That's not me. Must be the alcohol talking -- in vino a lot of nonsense, hyperbole, and sloppy thinking. Caela wouldn't need wine. But they would probably have come up with a process for making fermented fruit juice, along with everything else they would need to come up with as a community creating their own existence outside civilization as they had known it. So much to consider in creating a new world. I suppose this one happened bit by bit and all at once like most endeavors over time. Is that how it happens? Threads and consequences moving together imperceptibly until there you are, hemmed in by rules and customs and history? If we travelled back along every thread to the less than conscious decisions creating consequences along the way, we would probably find much better ways of making it all work out. But I'm not that conscious or conscientious; nor are most people getting by or getting behind in our narrow little worlds. Those with real vision come off just sounding crazy. Caela's people, despite their unique situation, would most likely fall into their own level of complacency over time. Goddess, what would you have me do? I feel there is some purpose of yours in all of this, not just my little personal devolvement into insanity. Of course that feeling of destiny could easily be a symptom of insanity. No doctors! No prodding or psychotic drugs or setting myself up for nasty incarceration or reindoctrination to normalcy -- whatever that is. I will follow my own damned path, wherever. So, Goddess, I guess we are in this together until you abandon me too. Those dreams of sinking into mushy ice on blue frozen tundras, there is a way through, beyond -- or am I frozen in stasis, merely waiting for the frostbite to reach vital organs? It all remains to be seen. Walking unsteadily between the worlds, I could fall forever I suppose. But wouldn't that become its own level of complacency, falling without thought, receding into a normative back-drop for lazy, selfish, morose self-entertainment? Let's pretend there is a future-place where all the threads come together in colorful, festive array that make perfect sense on reflection. It's just a matter of making it from here to there. So, dear imaginary Caela, what can you tell me? I feel a kinship to Caela. It's not just because she is a creature of my mind, woven from bright bits of thought, feelings, fantasy. It's like she can see inside me and understand as I look into her, learn her. She does not look like me. I envision her as slightly tall, strong frame, dark hair and eyes, swarthy skin, quiet, pensive, yet with a strong sense of somewhat ironic humor, a merry open laugh, sweet loving smile, mischievous grin, dancing countenance. She is intelligent, not erudite. She is compassionate, loving, kind with that strong solid kindness that tolerates fools with enduring good humor, never maudlin, never haughty, but never obeisant or credulous. She stands tall, moves gracefully, takes in each scene, each lesson, each conversation or reflection deeply, holistically, completely. She is intimately connected to her people and place, yet always able to stand apart and accept her own vision. She is quite imperfectly human, and very comfortable with exactly who she is. She loves and lives without reservation, yet with deep, complex reflection and an eternal sense of wonder. She is not representative of her people nor her time, yet she is completely enmeshed with them. I feel comfortable with her. Her presence in my mind calms and inspires me. She is an amazing friend and confidante. I feel compelled to tell her story though it is nothing like mine. Probably there are metaphoric parallels that I, my deeper self, knows I can learn from, can delve into to discover my own intimate secrets, to grow and heal. If I fall into this other world of my own creation and never return to conventional reality, it will harm none and expand my horizons. But that is getting way too ahead of where I am now. Most likely I will go through this little experiment in traversing into a different realm, find myself on the other side an experienced dimension-shifter, cosmic traveler, no more lost to insanity than most who dare to follow the art star to personal freedom and multiple awareness. Okay, Caela, tell me a story. Tell me stories for a thousand nights in whatever time zone we can agree on. My mother told me stories all my life. She was very certain of the line between fiction and fact; but she was also aware of the kind of truths that can best be understood through myth, fairy tales, poetry. Celia, in your death bed, do you see and understand your morphine dreams? Are you just fading away, or are you finding answers to your lifelong mysteries? I know you no longer need or want to talk to me, to share with anyone your last ecstatic visions or drooling pain. Will I feel that why too at my end? Right now I only want to live in my spinning fantasy with Caela on her world where it is all quite wonderful and far away from here. It's not that I get to control this world of my creation while the real world is too far out of control for me to come to terms with. It's that I get to make wonderful discoveries, to leave the routinely painful neighborhood of planet Earth and think big thoughts, experience my wild and crazily manifesting dreams. Pandora wants to cuddle, presses her purring body against me. Another magical companion on my road to Goddess knows where. Tom has left several concerned messages: why don't I respond? Isn't he my magical companion? My wine glass needs refilling. The curtains are drawn against impending dawn. I thought of calling Danny, but there's too much to say. I'm not ready to say any of it. Thank Goddess I have this time, this place, to dissolve and, hopefully, resurrect. What do people do when their reality fragments and they have no realistic choice but to keep moving forward, doing the day job, paying the bills, supporting the family, acting responsibly? Guess that's why pharmaceutical companies make the big bucks on anti-depressants. Then there are those who crack and become homicidal suicides. It's always the quiet ones, so they say. I can understand that. When I was more actively alive, I was so much noisier. Not that I'm about to be outwardly dangerous, or actually suicidal. I'm just going on a little sabbatical within a dreamscape. I can see her now in her teen years. She is full of passion and purpose. She is in love with the lover of her life, waiting for him to pursue her. She is happy and reasonable and ready to take on the world with no idea what awaits her. Transitional times. Caela wouldn't have the astrology as we Earthlings developed it, being under different skies. Still, I see her as a Scorpio. She is a healer by going within and sharing deep content. She has power of her own, independent yet entwined in her relationships, deeply intuitive, a person of total integrity. Talk to me, Caela the naturally wise, of the integration of my soul. I feel split into ethereal bubbles wafting into unknown space. I will concentrate, become as one with my imagined healer. I know you will carry me through into my best destiny. I will learn and emulate you, my very personal hero. We will become a legend in my mind to carry me forward. I am moving forward, though not at pace with the outside world. I am on my own time and space with my own reasons. I am on my educational sabbatical, exploring an other world, other ways of being human, to discover who I am, separate from everything I've known. I get to overdramatize in my own private theater. And I harm none, I get to do what I will, imagine what I will, will what I imagine to hold me with divine mothering arms, rock me with lullabies and fairytales. Twilight's future is the heroine's journey. I understand, compassionately, that too much choice is overwhelming to an individual trying to navigate a reasonably safe, reassuringly livable, life. That should not excuse or glorify obstruction against less usual ways, more ambitious or far-seeing strategies. Caela does not feel the pain or outrage of the outcast. She is happily enmeshed in her community, comfortably acknowledged. The solitude and self-directing she has carved out to accommodate her gifts, honed into skill for her best contribution, are well respected. If she wants to leave the group to follow her own dreams and visions, that is her choice and right. The newer generations of her people no longer keep an outcast identity. They are woven into, continuing with their own threads, the rich fabric of a community that creates their experiences and goals. Her daughter, as an integral member of this younger, self-integrating generation, lives in a large home of like-minded self-identified professionals and their children, sharing familial chores, responsibilities, celebration, physical and emotional care. Caela is happy on the outskirts of the community in her small, cozy cabin. She visits and enjoys visitors, but spends much of her time on her own. I am learning who these people are, slowly gaining their acquaintance. They are more real, immediate, than the world outside my self-absorption has become for me. I ask questions about how they live, what their world gives them. My grateful mind forms moving pictures, so beautiful, engaging. The scenes, the backgrounds, change to meet my changing expectations. It doesn't matter if I ultimately put it all together in cogent words. It is the world I need now to be formulating, a soothing, enlightening meditation. I keep getting caught up in the details. Lovely, soothing details, like doing sums in grade school. Weather. What would the differences in planetary physics do? And even if I am no scientist, how have they developed economic and cultural norms? How have the planet's -- let's call it Eden -- natural lifeforms (because if it is capable of sustaining life it probably already does) dealt with the invasion of life from Earth? I surmise they would have brought embryonic and seed life on the spaceship to continue farming once land was reached. Would there have been combinations, mutations, some species devouring others to become dominant in that ecological niche? I recall attempting some preliminary research about space colonizing, some proto-musings about this race of genetically engineered empaths that seems to have morphed in my subconscious into Caela’s witchfolk. At that time I got too caught up in immediate living, abandoning forays into an imagined far future. If I get too caught up in these endless details I could ensnare myself and be unable to continue. I can let them percolate, let the questions come to a head and seep through my imagination. Looking deeply into my metaphoric crystal, I can watch these people, see their details play out, feel out what feels right for these far off colonists and their descendants. In the mysteries of time and space and fantasy, I can watch these people I command into existence assemble into their customary daily lives for my inspection. See the scenes. Note the salient points. Feel the poignant stories. Those devilish details don't daunt me. They will fill out as they will, as I will, once the grounds percolate and become more clarified, more real than reel (omg, what mixing of metaphors, what a mish-mash of maudlin strings). Willingly giving myself over to this fantasy, somehow this is who I am, at least for now. It feels right and safe. It's like I want to be scared, but can't feel it. But what is there to be scared of? I am protected by the great power of prepaid bills and social anonymity, the strongly purring cat beside me, the blessings of alcoholic bliss, and a total lack of real world responsibilities. Whoever the Hell I am, must be some mumbo-jumbo mystical power there. Caela would know about that kind of power. I see the beginning of a beautiful friendship, despite the boundary difficulties between worlds. As long as I've only myself to answer to, reality can be whatever I agree to. Young Caela was able to adjust and thrive because she was tuned in to herself, to her own perceptions and power. Her parents, Lev and Letta, they exist within her, but so does all that psychic energy moving through her. To make use and sense of that, she needs integrate experiential impressions, integrating a trusted sense of self. How moderate can temperatures be? Do we have the ranges we do have because of some specificity of size or shape or orbit and distance form our Sun? I'm not picturing Winter on Eden, despite its frigid everpresent reality for me here and now on Earth. Fall I can see, the harvest season. But why not several harvests like in the sunny warm states? Out in the farm areas beyond the city's structures, they have greenhouses, even hydroponic technologies from the ship. Even if the planet has a variety of climate zones, they may have settled in an area less likely to freeze. Would it be sweltering in the Summer in the city? They would know how to build for minimizing that, design to encourage cooling winds, maybe have air conditioning. They would plant trees according to ecologically thought out plans for shade and water retention and air cleaning. The cultural norms would include a slowness of outdoor perambulations, light-weaved clothing. I see bright colors, even in the enclosed atmosphere of the built-up city. There is an appreciation for art, culture, color, design. It's not that they don't enjoy diversity. They are worried, frightened, that they will be left behind, out-classed, unable to successfully excel in competition for what they think to be scarce resources, even such nonmaterial resources as public appreciation and prestige, as well as whatever passes for wealth in their culture. They have closed themselves in to this city. Those of true valor and adventure have gone off exploring. Those who can't abide fences and rules have been sent to the outer reaches to work out their destinies as farm labor or defense trainees or bucolic eccentrics. People jammed together with their secret inadequacies and fears can build up a psychological squalor. People who present as clean, upright, hard-working citizens can be harboring petty and grand mal demons who rule over their potential better natures and insist on penance without respite, respect or concern. The empaths are not immune from demons, though are to some extent insulated from personal devolution by their mutuality of feelings, the ability to if they so choose never be alone. They will be able to take advantage of distance from the closed in city to develop a culture of their own design. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The dialectic of socially evolving mankind prevails. This is not a story about man against nature or man as part of nature, but about human nature; but we are not alone in the Universe. There is no clear division of background and foreground. The picture includes waves and landscape and sky and all the rest, as far, as near, as detailed, as the artist bothers to render; as the eye bothers to see. All I can do is look deeply into the crystalline vision, and respect, describe, reflect my impressions, my perceptions, my emotions and their creations. Jase was Singer's father, not Aron. She had heard Maris talking with her father, Lev. Aron was Maris's husband, father of her three daughters, though apparently not of her youngest, her son, Singer. When the troubles started getting serious back in the city, Aron had not felt his wife and children worth the sacrifices of standing by them. He was not an empath, had only married one. He had become resentful over the course of that marriage, feeling that Maris was better than he was in every way that counted. She was, but not because of some special talent. She was naturally practical and loving. He was naturally neither. He had been young and charming, confidentally ambitious but privately shy. Over time he had become uncomfortably aware that this wonderful prize of a wife he had won neither made him a better man nor failed to see his flaws. Be careful what you wish for. Keep your eye on all the clauses and subparagraphs. Relationships won't heal us, only give us comfort and anchoring when we do the work to heal ourselves. If Jase were Singer's dad, not Aron, Singer was full empath, unlike his sisters. Jase was a sweet, good-humored drifter of a guy, strong and smart, always ready to help out, but mostly a loner. He and Maris had been close friends since childhood, back in the city. Neither were the kind to deny their feelings, or broadcast them. Maris and Lev had become good friends since the relocation. She was at the moment ranting a bit, reminiscing a bit, in the company of a friend she found easy to talk with. He was happy to listen. He certainly had his share of venting, ranting, sharing memories secondhand. His wife, Letta, Caela's mom, had become unreachably ill, unable to participate in conversation, to show evidence of reciprocating his love which he now sometimes felt bordered on tragic. Like children everywhere, Caela picked up bits and pieces of gossip and common knowledge listening to adult conversation as it drifted through her day. She had never met Aron, but did feel the distinct negative tinge given to memories of him by those who had known him. Everyone loved Jase. She supposed Singer had gotten the better of the bargain without consciously thinking about the matter at all. She loved Singer and Maris, similarly though differently from the way she loved Lev and Letta. They were all family, intertwined lives. Though she was a few years older than Singer, they were left to play together while the grown-ups worked, often looked after by one or more of Singer's sisters. There weren't a lot of children in this new community. Everyone did what they could to make sure all were cared for, all the necessary work got done and done well. Everyone taught what they knew, shared tools and techniques, learned what they needed to. Separately and together they figured out how to make a life that worked. Singer and Caela took on what chores they could as time went on. Still, there was plenty of time for playing, just being, figuring out who you are and how that's done. Friends are good mirrors, sounding boards, brain-storming aids, quiet companions. True to Maris's intuitive naming, Singer loved to sing and was incredibly talented at contriving a wide range of soundings from his voice and various musical instruments he was finding ways to fashion from what came to hand. He could keep those around him singing and dancing as well, lightening chores, enlivening leisure. Certainly he was quite a popular figure, central to celebrations. He took this popularity in his gently smiling way, always generous, always bubbling with fun. Music is magic. It excites, inspires, and heals. Caela found she could heal in another way. She knew without thought that she had profound feelings of empathy, profound insights, much more than was ordinary for the extraordinary people of whom she had been born and nurtured. She had from earliest times learned without knowing she was learning to encapsulate the feelings driving into her from all around that she might work through and understand them without being overwhelmed. It had always been like a special extra mother within her teaching and protecting, perhaps an extra gift from Letta who had not been able to learn such necessary protection well enough for herself. Though little girl Caela had tried and tried to use this gift of separating, working through feelings to move in with care and incisive healing, to help her beloved mother, Letta, cope with the demons that crippled her mind, she had not the power to effect that cure. Letta had not learned to protect herself. She had not felt the need in her protected environment where her naturally strong healing abilities had given her a fine, well-respected career. She had never expected a need to prepare for her denouncement or the escalating troubled times eventuating in exile from the life she depended upon for emotional anchor. Though Caela's efforts to heal that breach continued to be heartbreakingly unsuccessful, the failure did not deter nor break her. It was like layers of strength being built by practice and reflection. She found, bit by bit, that she could look into the core of dis-ease and injury to encourage and accelerate natural healing processes of those who suffered. She was also drawn to learn about healing plants, meditative practices, techniques of touch and movement. Not all callings are so strong. Perhaps she had been learning from Letta, even from the womb, to take this offered gift farther, to develop the instinct for self-preservation needed to make it a blessing rather than a curse, even should her world fall apart. Lev had been a writer in the city, a journalist of wry social and political commentary published regularly in the most popular news magazine. In this new life, he was finding artistic and physical outlet in learning carpentry -- a craft he had never been exposed to in his former life. It amused and amazed him how much he enjoyed working with his hands to miraculously create a useful product. He had been quite appreciative of Maris's skill in weaving beautiful fabric of the fur and plant fibers of their now farming community. He continued to appreciate her creative skill, even more so, as he learned his own craft. Former city business types were having to relearn how to be alive, become people they had never known they were, processing radical change, a broken linear norm revealing to them that it was only a convenient fantasy. For Caela it was all perfectly natural, the colorful adventure of life. Nothing is promised. A great deal is possible. Singer's sisters, Mirra, Cali and Arla, were cheerful, responsible, warm and witty like their mom. Even in appearance they resembled her and each other, though they had not yet achieved her manner of calm wisdom. Though they might appear less vivid younger copies of Maris, each had her own distinct flair and essence. They were all wizards of cloth, weaving, sewing, designing clothing and other useful textile wares. They had their own cottage industry, producing for their own use and trade as well as teaching others who wanted to create their own clothing and furnishings. Though no one had thought the need to come up with "money," there was plenty of rudimentary trade. For big projects, work and outcome were shared. It was expected that everyone help out as needed. Beyond that, individual enterprise took over. Tools were shared on rough timetables open to disruption by urgencies. Adaptations often had to be invented suitable to available resources, repurposing, devising tools and processes as necessary. Of course there were angers, resentments, frustrations, but this is where the skills of empaths excel. There are those naturally soothing presences who help to keep good feelings flowing. There is not the kind of awkward or tragic miscommunications to slow useful negotiation. It helps that there's plenty of cohesive goodwill, shared sorrows and celebrations, respect grown from working together, playing together, sharing humor, philosophy, and everyday concerns. Recipients of an interconnected web are intimately in tune to enlightened self-interest, true vested interest in success for all.