#i think the historian in me needs to come up with archival material

[mearchy]

❌ Work on my OSHA certifications

❌ Work on my WIPs

✅ Review all the Legends material and study a bunch of honor codes and warrior society lawbooks to come up with a proposal for what the Supercommando Codex might have looked like from beginning to end

[matau-the-228th]

Rahaga Nokama of Ga-Wahi.

Outside of protecting the Matoran under her care from aquatic Rahi, her primary duty is the recovery and translation of records from the sunken Water Sector Universities.

She is often seen in the waters beside the walkways of Ga-Koro with a small entourage of assorted Matoran doing their best to both take notes on her lectures and begin restoration of the materials she brings to the surface. She has invited me to participate a few times, but as Historian, I think I'm better suited to simply write about what records have been found.

It is a very rare sight to see her on land when she is not attending a meeting with the other Rahaga, as her legs degraded into fins after giving up her Toa Energy. But she can be incredibly stubborn about it, once having walked unassisted into Onu-koro to ensure the safe delivery of a relic to the restoration Archives.

One of Rahaga Onewa's projects is attempting to restore and expand the surviving Metru-era aqueducts to key points in the other Wahi to allow Nokama to travel more easily. (Though he keeps claiming that the other Wahi just need multiple supply lines as part of the reconstruction efforts)

She hypothesizes that the primary Rahi attributes that the Hordika Venom has infused her with come from Dermis Turtles and Proto Drakes

Songs: Perchance to Dream (Halo:CE OST), Floating Huts (MNOG), Achenar's Theme- Channelwood Age (Myst OST), Orinoco Flow (Enya)

[transmutationisms]

How do you find the time to read all your book recs?? Also would you mind talking about your process for researching specific topics :)

i generally only make rec lists for things i have enough familiarity with to navigate the literature so, you have to keep in mind those lists are sometimes literally a decade+ of cumulative reading on my end. i do also sometimes include texts i haven't read in their entirety, or occasionally even ones i've only come across in footnotes but still think are foundational or relevant enough to warrant a rec.

as to my research process: there's no single answer here because the sort of research i do will depend on what questions i'm trying to answer. usually if i'm starting to look at a topic completely from scratch, i'll ask someone who publishes in that area what the major recent works are, then scan a few of them. i might 'snowball' those texts (read the works they cite in their footnotes) but, that strategy has limited utility because it only goes backward in time and sometimes a recent or uncited text can be incredibly valuable. so there's a fair amount of bumbling around in the secondary literature at this point. some academic journals maintain bibliographies for their subfields, which are not comprehensive but can be useful; i usually also do a certain amount of keyword fuckery in my library's database. sometimes i waste a lot of time at this point chasing leads that turn out to be irrelevant, or i discover that a question i was chasing is really better tackled from an entirely different direction. shit happens.

at some point i usually reach a stage where i need to look at some primary sources, because i'm oriented enough in the major issues to identify spots where previous researchers haven't made full use of historical records, or may be interpreting them in a way i disagree with. so, what exactly i'm looking for now really varies. sometimes i just want to read the primary texts that another historian is commenting on: for example, the last few months i was trawling through the french national library's archives to see what people were saying in print about a specific historical figure between about 1778 and 1862. other times i might want population data or land records: births, deaths, cholera infections, records of church property sales, &c. depending on, again, what sorts of questions you're asking, anything might have useful information to you: postmortem personal auction catalogues have given me some mileage, along with wills and personal correspondance. i have a committee member who collects and analyses postcards often being sold for pennies at flea markets out of people's grandparents' attics, and another who has an ongoing project looking at a zillion editions of a specific children's book printed in the late 19th century. along the way, as i look at primary sources, i will typically go back and forth to more secondary literature, as i find new topics that might be relevant or help me contextualise what i'm looking at. i can't ever really plan these things out systematically; i just follow what looks promising and interesting and see where it leads me.

another thing to consider is that the primary sources sometimes tell me useful information directly in their capacity as material objects. what type of paper is used, what personal or library stamps appear on the cover, who's the publisher, how many editions did it go through, are the print and typeset jobs sloppy, where was this copy found or preserved? these sorts of details tell me about how people reacted to the text, its author, and the ideas within, which can be a valuable part of whatever investigation i'm trying to conduct. sometimes i end up chasing down information on a publisher or the owner whose personal library a book or piece of ephemera came out of; there are people who research processes of preservation, printing, &c in themselves, which has yielded some fascinating studies in recent decades.

at some point, if it's a research project i'm trying to communicate to other people, i will switch to writing mode, where i try to organise ^^ all of that in my head, and form a coherent narrative or argument that i think is worth making. this might be revisionist in nature ('people have argued before that such and such was x way or historical actors thought about it like y, but what i have here indicates we should actually understand it in the context of z') or it might be more like, "hey, i found this thing i don't think anyone knows about!" or anything else. again, the way you put together a research project will vary so widely depending on what you're researching, and why, and why you think it matters and to whom.

also, i should emphasise that what i've written here isn't necessarily something that happens on a strict or compressed timeline. i'm working on a dissertation, so for that topic, i do have reasons i want to complete parts at certain times, unfortunately. but i also have research projects that i just chip away at for fun, that i've had on various backburners for literally years, that i might sometimes write about (eg, on here) without necessarily ever planning to subject them to the hegemon of academic publishing. i think knowledge dissemination is great and to that end i love to talk to people about what i'm researching and hear about their stuff as well. but, i also think research projects can be fun / rewarding / &c when they're completely for your own purposes, untimed, unpublished, &c &c. i guess i'm just saying, publishing and research conventions and rules sometimes have purposes (like "make it possible to publish this as a book in the next 5 years") but don't get so hung up on those rules that they prevent you from just researching something for any number of other reasons. there are so many ways to skin a cat 📝

[jilisilver]

Oblivion the hit list

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Oblivion the hit list archive#

Oblivion the hit list full#

Thankfully, Mark had a habit of hanging on to anything that he thought might be important later. But when the era of the arcade ended, the city’s bigger game-makers began to go extinct, and they left reams and reams of material behind. The city was the birthplace of such familiar arcade games as Rampage, Mortal Kombat, and NBA Jam. He worked for numerous game-makers-Mindscape, Acclaim Entertainment, Konami, Midway Games, Atari, and NuFX, which became EA Chicago-at a time when Chicago was a video-game capital of the world. Mark amassed his collection during two decades in the video-game industry, first as a quality-assurance tester and later as a producer. Listening to them, I felt like a kid on an unchaperoned field trip. “This is the longest-running and most-subscribed-to video-game magazine in the U.S.,” Lewin observed. Cifaldi summarized it for me: “Here’s some stuff coming out about dinosaurs. The article about dinosaurs was buried in the back of the magazine, and it wasn’t even really about video games. “The early days of Game Informer were very out of touch,” Cifaldi, who is tall, with an air of intense concentration equal to Lewin’s, told me. Lewin, who is compact and laser focussed, suddenly pulled a magazine from a pile and exclaimed, “Year of the dinosaur!” She had discovered her favorite-ever issue of Game Informer, from the nineties.

Oblivion the hit list full#

The house, I noticed, was full of cat-themed décor. By the time I finally found the place, Cifaldi and Lewin were already hard at work in the living room, hunched over piles of old documents. The Flitmans live just down the street from a suburban high school, and their two-story brick house is so nondescript that I initially drove right past it. I tagged along to witness the work of the Video Game History Foundation. In June, Cifaldi and Lewin traveled to Chicago to visit another game designer’s trove, and they took the opportunity to revisit Mark’s stuff. senator’s list of wasteful projects.) The challenge isn’t just technical: it’s also about convincing the public that game history is history, and that it’s well worth saving. (One museum curator even told me that a federal grant for his game-preservation work ended up on a U.S. But games aren’t always treated as a serious part of the culture, and historians and archivists are only starting to preserve them. Generations of kids grew up playing these video games and helped to jump-start the digital revolution.

Oblivion the hit list archive#

They have been working to archive his collection ever since. Cifaldi and Lewin agreed to fly out to Chicago to sift through Mark’s hundreds of games and dozens of dusty boxes. He directs it alongside Kelsey Lewin, the co-owner of Pink Gorilla Games, a retailer that sells retro video games in Seattle. Two days later, she was on a Zoom call with Frank Cifaldi, a Bay Area preservationist who incorporated the foundation in 2016 and opened it to the public in 2017. It was downvoted enough times that it appeared at the very bottom of the thread, but Michelle decided to send the foundation an e-mail. One of these comments referenced an organization called the Video Game History Foundation. Out of a hundred and forty-nine comments, one or two urged Michelle not to sell the games and to preserve them for posterity instead. I’ll give you all of the money for it.” The most popular comment joked, “Do you need kidneys? I’ve got kidneys.” Another said, “I think I have some unwanted family members lying around here somewhere.” Someone else said, “I want that boxed copy of castlevania 4. “You can make a living out of these games,” one person told her. The thread quickly filled up with commenters who clearly saw the value of Mark’s stuff. “We plan on selling most of his collection. “​​My dad was a video game producer for multiple companies in the 90’s/2000’s,” she typed. When we spoke recently, she recalled a realization that she had: “Historians care about this stuff.” She decided to post photos of her dad’s collection-shelves of games in black-and-red boxes, some of them still in their original shrink-wrap-on a subreddit devoted to game collecting. Then, in college, she took a course on video-game history, and her professor nudged her to write a research paper. Michelle tried to interest YouTube hosts and Web-site owners in the relics she grew up with, but nothing came of those efforts. But to Michelle, they were part of the fabric of childhood, and she thought her father deserved some recognition. To her dad, Mark, they were the odds and ends of corporate life: he was a game producer and designer who worked on NFL Blitz 2003, Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, and WWF Raw. Michelle Flitman, a recent art-school graduate who lives in a suburb of Chicago, grew up in a home full of video games.

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[tackyink]

The only reason I've decided to post this is that I think unless I do I won't stop anxiety-editing it and I'd like to move on to something more interesting. And maybe pick up Veleta again, because I had written more than what I posted here and I want to keep working on her.

I can only offer for context that I hail from real life Dressrosa and one day someone asked me what, as a historian, I would do if I ever came across a Poneglyph in the OP world.

— — — — — — — —

Chapter 1

In a remote corner of Paradise, outside of the main travel routes, there was an autumn island called Harlun, and on its shores there was a place called Duster Town, remarkable if only for the fact that every day was exactly the same and nothing of interest ever happened.

Duster Town was acceptably hot in summer, relatively cold in winter, and unavoidably wet and muddy the rest of the year. This had been a big reason for Alex’s stay to last as long as it had: five years and counting. She was fond of the weather because that was what living in summer islands for nearly twenty-two years did to a person.

She had been working in Duster Town’s old, old library since she had arrived there, having secured the job through contacts she had made while studying. Alex was a historian, and there weren’t a lot of secure jobs for people in her field unless one wanted to work under close supervision of government officers. She had never liked research that much, anyway – or rather, she had liked sticking her nose in archives for the sake of it, but the actual process of searching for documents, putting the pieces together and then writing papers sucked. Learning to satisfy her own curiosity was fun, being forced to share that knowledge was not. Besides, if there was an area of research that grabbed her attention more than anything else, it was that conspicuous century-wide blank in human history, and everybody in her profession knew what happened when someone tried to look too closely into that. Ohara was the biggest ‘accident’ that came to mind, but it wasn’t the only one. Things happened to people who knew too much. Everybody was aware of it, but complicit silence was a healthy tactic that her sensible colleagues employed.

Alex had opinions on that, as, admittedly, did most historians she had met, and since opinions were like assholes, she wasn’t going to be the gross weirdo showing hers to other people. Figuratively speaking or not, it was liable to get her in trouble with the law, and that was the last thing Alex wanted.

She liked her library, and even though she was incredibly disappointed that she’d never be able to set foot inside the Tree of Knowledge due to the unfortunate circumstance of having been born too late. Her job was quiet; since she wasn’t a librarian proper, they had put her at the entrance desk to check out and retrieve books, and she handled the petitions for documents researchers sent to the library. The building in which she worked dated back to several centuries, and the foundation upon which it was built, and which housed the local archive, suggested an even earlier date. It contained one of the biggest and best preserved documentary collections in that half of Paradise, so she spent a lot of time digging inside the archive to fulfill the researcher’s requests.

All in all, she thought she had had an amazing run so far, lending books, persecuting tardy neighbors to retrieve them, memorizing catalogs from too much use, and sending informative material to researchers who were actually doing important things with their lives, unlike herself. Her coworkers were few and not very nosy, which she appreciated, because she loved her time alone and wasn’t too fond of talking about the past.

She could see herself growing old in there and getting cobwebs, if sudden changes in the town hall didn’t run her out of the island, and the way things worked in moderately small towns like that, where everybody knew everybody and keeping a job was more a matter of knowing the right people and having been there for a while than being actually competent at it, meant that her position was likely secured in the long run. That said, the local mushrooms by themselves would have tempted her to stay, even without the rest of advantages. Not many of those in her hometown or Sabaody. Lots of heat and not nearly enough rain.

The sun wasn’t yet up when she woke up with an itchy nose in the small apartment she lived in, and a flurry of sneezes alerted her that she should have taken her allergy meds the night before. Navigating the place with closed eyes, she threw on the same skinny jeans and oversized sweater that she had left on a chair two days ago for yet another day at work. It took more effort than someone who had slept so many hours at her age had a right to. Like nearly every morning, really.

The last remaining days of winter had brought the cold in full force, at least for her summer island sensibilities, and after having a steaming cup of red tea that fogged up her glasses, she bundled inside her black coat and red scarf, put on a pair of burgundy gloves, and headed for the library with a thermos full of more tea, making the usual stop at the nearest bakery to buy a croissant. Her hands ached with the chilly breeze.

(She kept a kettle in the library, but there was never too much tea, in her humble opinion, and the thermos kept her freezing hands warm on the way.)

The sun had barely risen when she arrived at the building, an old stone structure that casted its shadow over a private square, though the tall iron fence was open at all times so the people of the town could use the benches and the fancy stone fountain in the middle of it. According to the records Alex had read, the whole area was built four hundred years back or so as the private residence of some rich family that eventually lost its fortune. The basement that doubled as the archive, though, was considerably older, but records stopped around 700 years back, like everywhere else, and so she couldn’t tell how old the foundations were, or what sort of building used to be there in the past without digging a trial trench in the square, something the town hall had been vehemently against when she suggested it. The refusal only made her want to do it more.

She crossed the fence and was halfway through the square when she saw someone in front of the library’s massive oak doors. That was so unusual it made her stop in her tracks. She wasn’t ready to interact with human beings this early in the morning. In fact, the baker was so used to her being absent at that time of the day that the only things she needed to say when she picked up her breakfast were ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you.’

She repositioned her glasses to peek above them and tried to focus her teary eyes on the figure before approaching it. It belonged to a man, obnoxiously tall as many in these seas had a tendency to, who wore a long black coat with a yellow pattern around the hem and a fluffy spotted hat that looked quite ridiculous but also warm, so she wasn’t going to judge in a morning like that. Since he seemed to be looking for something and having no luck, she did what she was paid for, though she was still off the clock, and approached him.

“Hello,” she said to catch his attention. Her voice came out raspy because this was only the fourth word she had uttered since waking up, so she immediately wanted to jump in one of the flowerbeds and melt into the muddy soil. She cleared her throat softly. “Is there anything you need?”

He turned around to look at Alex. He was in his twenties, and his face was kind of familiar. His earrings caught her attention, but then again, she had a bad tendency to not pay much attention to people’s faces and fixate on irrelevant details. This individual’s entire ensemble and circumstances, though, made him difficult to forget overall.

“Do you work here?” He asked.

She barely registered the question, because it was about then that she noticed the smiley yellow faces on his coat and the long-ass sword he held against his shoulder. She hadn’t been able to see them from behind, and if she had, she sure as hell would have kept her distance until he left.

That… had the potential to be really bad.

“Yes,” she said, thinking she should have not, but it was stupid to deny it when there was nowhere else to go in the plaza, she had offered to help, and the only place she could hide in was inside.

After she unlocked the building.

With the keys she was carrying in her hand.

Yeah, honesty had been the right move.

“What are the opening hours?”

That was also unexpected. “Nine AM to eight PM. It’s on the plaque—” She pointed to the side of the door, and she saw someone had vandalized it with rude graffiti. “Not again,” she sighed to herself, and then back to him, “Nine to eight.”

There were still thirty minutes to go, and she hoped to god that he didn’t plan on sticking around until it was time to open.

“I see,” he said, looking pensively at the door. “I’ll be back later, then.”

“Of course,” she replied, smiling, relieved, and then panicking inside because there was a pirate planning on coming to her workplace that morning and this was an anxiety factor she hadn’t asked to be burdened with. He had to be dangerous. People who weren’t dangerous didn’t carry swords around. Not that people who were dangerous sometimes didn’t carry weapons, but at least those had the grace of not putting every stranger around them on edge. And wait a minute, were those tattoos on his fingers? She couldn’t see all the letters, but she could guess, and after she did, she wished she hadn’t.

When she thought he was already done and about to go, she made her even more nervous by saying, “Just to make sure, I heard you have a sizeable medicine collection.”

Ah, so he was looking for something specific. It made more sense than him simply waltzing in for some light reading, she supposed. “You heard right. It’s not updated often, but it was until ten years ago or so.” Then they ran out of funding. “If you’re looking for recent studies, you may not be in luck.”

Medicine. Why medicine? This man was a pirate. Was he a doctor in his ship? She regretted more than ever having such a bad memory for names and faces. She should take a look at the newspaper archive when she went in, just in case.

“Lucky me, then. What I’m looking for is older than that.”

She noticed a bit of a northern accent. He sounded… not quite polite, but not aggressive, either. Clinical. At the same time, it made the innocent statement sound vaguely threatening. She was curious now about what he wanted to read. What if he was one of those weird pirates? There was a chance, she supposed. Like winning the lottery twice, which she didn’t count on.

“That’s good,” she replied awkwardly, and then added in a valiant effort to be left alone, “There’s a café around the corner that’s already open, if you need to kill some time.”

He looked slightly surprised at the courtesy, and nodded before going off.

And when he was far enough to be a very stupid but not totally unsafe to say, she spoke a little louder to tell him, “Excuse me! Weapons aren’t allowed inside the library!”

The dude seemed amused when he looked over his shoulder to look at her, and he didn’t say anything as he walked off.

Nobody could say she hadn’t tried.

❦

Unbearably jittery after the encounter, Alex went on to switch on the lights of the entire building, put the last few books she hadn’t returned to the shelves the day before in their place, and picked up the day’s newspaper to sit down at the front desk to scarf down the croissant and hopefully wash down all that nervous energy with a cup of tea.

If her first encounter in the morning was a sign of what was to come, she could tell her day was going to be shit. She should have known when her own sneezing woke her up.

Alex wasn’t sure when or how her anxiety had started. It just had, a few years prior, seemingly unprompted, and though it wasn’t severe, thankfully, it had a tendency to assault her when she least expected it. Like a pirate. Pirates did that, right? Not all of them, but according to her limited experience there was a fifty-fifty chance that he would, at the very least, turn out to be a pain in the ass.

Still, without any additional intel, she couldn’t think of any ulterior motives for the guy to come to the library. Since she couldn’t do anything to stop him, for her peace of mind, she decided to be willfully optimistic and believe.

Or at least she could try. She had never been too good at this denial thing.

A several bites into her pastry and a few pages into the newspaper, she came across an article about a sunken Marine warship by a pirate submarine, and she choked on her tea when she saw the same smiley face on the picture that accompanied the article. On said submarine. Accompanied by the word “DEATH.” Good on her for guessing what was on his fingers. At the same time, a coworker arrived, and blanching, she said good morning, got up from her seat and made a run for the newspaper archive, where they also kept in storage a copy of every bounty the Marines distributed with the World Economic Journal.

She didn’t have to look too far to see that yes, the face was familiar because it was supposed to be. She had classified it a few times in the last months – every time the guy got a bounty raise.

Surgeon of Death. Heart Pirates. Captain of one of the several rookie crews that were stirring up trouble that year. Those were the worst, they thought they were at the top of the world just because they had made it into the Grand Line. She could deal with older pirates, but she had yet to come across a newbie that wasn’t an unrestrained asshole.

She thought she saw something about dismemberments in the poster, did a double-take because she had surely read wrong, and by the time she was done with all the crimes attributed to the guy she just put the bounty back in place, went to the front desk once again, and told her concerned coworker, “A famous pirate will probably show up today. Don’t mind him. Let’s hope he just wants to read.”

She looked a little frightened. “Should I call the Marines?”

“If worst comes to worst. Let’s try not get involved if we can. He didn’t seem aggressive.”

“Okay,” she replied, sounding relieved. “Good luck out here, I’ll be in the back tagging the new arrivals.”

“Some people are lucky.”

She sighed and turned the page. Sipped on her tea. It was getting cold. Sipped on it again. She just had to play it cool. She was a professional. The guy had been okay to her.

She just hoped he would come soon, because she wasn’t so sure she could drown her nerves in tea anymore.

It was okay.

Everything was surprisingly okay.

The pirate, the day, the lunch she had at the café around the corner – waitress said the guy even tipped – but yes, everything had gone fine.

Alex didn’t move a lot from the lower floor because she often had to come and go from the front desk to the archive, but she made escapades upstairs to make sure everything was still standing.

She had seen the pirate sitting next to a window in the medicine section reading one of those thick tomes that looked very interesting but made her dizzy because she suffered from having a very graphic imagination.

Her coworkers, who roamed up there more often than her, gave her periodic reports, and one of them remarked that he was kind of hot, didn’t she agree?

No, she did not. The radiator was hot. The kettle was hot. The adjective could hardly be applied to a man unless he was on fire.

Though perhaps he was not a human man, because he had spent all day long sitting in the same position, staring at that book. She had to admire that attention span, if nothing else. She was pretty short on that, lately.

And so, having avoided any type of incident during a day in which she was very tense for no reason after all, it came time to close shop.

The pirate was still there.

Her coworkers were, very conveniently, not. She was sure it had nothing to do with the fact that someone had to remind the wanted man that it was late and he had to go.

As much as she wanted to go home and have dinner, the temptation to stay in her post so she didn’t have to interact with a criminal that hacked his victims to pieces was strong, and no one could blame her for it.

But then he appeared.

The massive door in front of her began to open, and Alex thought it was one of her treacherous coworkers returning to pick up something until a head peeked inside the hall.

“Hi?” The newcomer said shyly.

Alex wasn’t sure if the gross amounts of tea she drank every day had finally caught up to her and were making her hallucinate, because she was seeing a polar bear’s face.

“Hi?” She replied, to busy processing what was in front of her to come up with words of her own.

It seemed that that was enough for the bear, because it – no, not it, he? She? How deep was a female bear’s voice anyway? – pushed the door open some more, becoming more visible. A bright orange jumpsuit was not what she was expecting, but the smiley face on its chest and the sight of the sword the pirate had been carrying that morning didn’t leave a lot of room for imagination.

The creature in front of her eyes was a bear walking on two legs. A pirate polar bear. Probably a boy, with that size. Was he a mink? She had never seen one so up close.

“I’m looking for my captain,” he said, clutching the sword against his body. “Is he around?”

Words decided to come back to her, although in a rather clumsy manner. “Oh. Yes. Yes, I think so. He should be upstairs, reading.”

The bear smiled and she melted at the sight. “Can you… tell him to come?”

“Sure,” she said, sealing her fate. She had to face it sooner than later, she thought as she rose from her seat. The bear was still half-hidden by the door, his boots barely touching the tiles of the library. Curious. Was he that shy? “Why don’t you step inside?”

“I thought you can’t enter the library with weapons.”

His reasoning hit her in the solar plexus with the force of a herd of rainbow ponies. “Right,” she breathed out, wondering how something in the planet had managed to be so big and cute at once. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll go get your captain.”

“Thank you!”

Alex walked as fast as she could towards the stairs until she was out of sight and covered her face to keep her reaction under control. So. Goddamn. Cute. Was that how those pirates lived? Trying not to squeal whenever the resident polar bear was being sweet?

Steeling herself, she walked up the remaining steps, hoping the captain had somehow vanished while she wasn’t looking.

No such luck.

She stepped a little more forcefully than necessary as she approached him from behind a shelf, always staying at a safe distance, to try to catch his attention, but he didn’t move.

(The annoying voice in her head told her that the only safe distance from that man was a sea away.)

Could he have been asleep? That would have explained things. What was his name again?

“Mr. Trafalgar?” She tried. She wasn’t sure if she should have made known that she knew who he was, but the deed was done. He looked up. “It’s about time to close and… there’s a polar bear looking for you in the reception hall.”

“Bepo’s here?” He looked in confusion at her, and then at the window. It was dark outside. “I hadn’t noticed it had gotten so late. Eight, right?”

He stretched in the chair. Between the movement and the spotted hat and jeans, he reminded her of an overgrown leopard.

“Almost,” she offered.

He glanced at the book, frowning. Granted, his face seemed to be stuck in a perpetual frown and he didn’t sound angry. “Do you have the same hours tomorrow?”

“Oh, no, we don’t open on Sundays,” she replied, wondering if this was the exact point where the conversation would go downhill. She attempted to make it better. “But you can come on Monday if you want to keep reading.”

He grimaced, this time for real. “Can’t do. We leave on Monday morning.”

“Oh.” A quick stop, then. It was a thing that happened often. The recording time for the Log Pose was less than a day in Harlun. “Well, we could make some photocopies, but…” The book was way too long for that, and he seemed to be about halfway through.

“Can I take it out tonight and give it back to you sometime tomorrow?”

She appreciated wholeheartedly that he wasn’t getting mad at her, but the thought of the book going out of the library like that made all her alarms go off. “Not without a library card.” Which was only for residents, obviously.

She braced for retaliation, but it never came.

The pirate looked kind of conflicted. She didn’t know what was so interesting about the book that he couldn’t find it in another island, and she didn’t need to know the options that were crossing his mind to realize that she probably wouldn’t like them.

Since idiots had to find ways to console themselves, she would tell herself during the following hours that the only reason she made a tremendously stupid offer was to avoid the much worse alternatives.

“I’ll actually be working here tomorrow. The library is closed, but if you’re really that interested, I can let you in.”

Or maybe she was a fucking bleeding heart who couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make someone’s day better for free. But ironically, at what price.

She recognized the emotions on his face. First surprise, then suspicion. “Why would you?”

Because she really was that stupid, she wanted to say. “You’re a doctor, right? I don’t want a dead patient on my conscience because you couldn’t finish a book you needed. Anyway… you’re free to come tomorrow.”

And she left him there, quickly making her way down to retrieve her stuff. The bear had come inside, at last, and he looked up from the documents on Alex’s desk. She would have been surprised if he could read that handwriting.

“He’s coming,” she said with a small smile, but she didn’t know if it showed. She had, on occasion, been asked why she was angry when she tried to smile. “I’m going to pick up my things inside.”

He looked pleased, though. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She went into the back room, taking extra long on purpose until she heard movement outside and the sound of the door closing. By the time she found the courage to crawl out of her hole, the pirates were nowhere to be seen.

She left a note in her desk’s drawer, just in case, saying that if she disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Trafalgar Law was to blame. She had thought about phoning a coworker to alert her, but she wasn’t supposed to let anybody in on Sundays, much less a wanted man, and she didn’t want to risk this incident reaching the ears of the mayor.

For the first time in years, her stomach couldn’t handle the tea and she had to throw most of her cup down the drain. Damn nerves. Her hands were acting up more than usual, to the point where the warmth of the thermos wasn’t doing a lot to soothe the pain. She would have worried about that if it weren’t because of more pressing matters.

❦

Even earlier than the day before, he was already waiting for her at the door when she arrived.

Alex would admit without missing a beat that she had been an idiot for offering – never mind the very real possibility that the guy could have broken in to retrieve the book and left damages the library couldn’t afford to repair – but he was either equally dumb or exceedingly confident for having shown up. Alone. Alex could have called the Marines, for all he knew.

She didn’t miss the sword he was carrying, this time around.

She put two and two together then. Of course. He had appeared before the hour to check that the surroundings were safe.

“I didn’t expect you to actually show up,” he said as a greeting, and she reached for the key in her pocket. His tone was impressed with a good dash of mockery. “Do you know who I am?”

He already knew the answer, since she had called him by name the day before. With only two sentences, he demolished most of the halfway positive impression he had made the day before, and Alex, already predisposed to think he was a dick, decided he was exactly that.

She was tired and anxious, so she couldn’t muster up any facial expression as she said, “Should I care?” Upon noticing that had sounded even worse than she meant to, she added in a hurry, “I mean, what’s the point of asking that? Do you want me to turn around and leave the door locked?”

He didn’t seem to take it badly, thank the heavens. He looked a bit amused, in fact. “I don’t need you to unlock a door.”

“I’m well aware,” she replied in a monotone. “I appreciate you had the courtesy of waiting.” The budget was tight and changing the lock would have been a royal waste of money.

She opened the door and went in first to turn on the lights. He closed the door after going in, and she would have usually locked it again, but she really did not want to be stuck alone inside of a building with a stranger, even if the state of the lock wouldn’t make much of a difference.

“I’ll be working downstairs.” She pointed to an old, reinforced door on the wall behind the front desk. “Give me a heads up when you’re done.”

That sword was making her unnecessarily jumpy. He didn’t need to have it with him.

“Alright,” he said, glancing at the staircase to the second floor, and then he must have noticed that she was giving the sword the stink eye, because he tapped it against his shoulder and smirked. “Got a problem?”

Yeah, one about two meters tall. “None as long as you don’t use it.”

“As long as you don’t give me a reason to.”

She wanted to say a lot of things. That they were alone, that he was kind of a dick, that yes, she was as dumb as he was thinking, and to please leave her alone until he was done and only then appear to say goodbye and thank you.

Instead, she picked up a folder from her desk drawer and a lantern from the wall and left it at, “Enjoy your reading.”

He took the hint and left, and so did she.

The door to the archive closed behind her with a heavy thud, and she lit the lantern.

It was a fire hazard in a library, but it was inevitable, because the basement didn’t have electricity. After many years of pressuring the city hall for a budget increase, the council had seen fit to make renovations and extend the electrical installation to the basement. She just had to keep herself from setting the archive on fire for a couple months and the risk would be no more.

She went to the farthest area from the entrance and set the lantern on an ancient wood table. The basement was pure grey stone from floor to ceiling, making it permanently cold. She hadn’t bothered to take off her coat and scarf, but the gloves had had to go and she wasn’t happy about it. She had icicles for hands as every winter, and this year they had begun to hurt earlier than usual.

Alex had decided to put in some overtime that week because she was researching a family tree that a cousin of the mayor, a pretentious git that paid very well, had commissioned. Something about proving a blood relation to a noble family from a nearby island to have a claim to somebody else’s lands. Alex didn’t care. She had been trained for this thing, a job was a job, and she was going to do it to the best of her ability. Even if she had absolutely loathed genealogy back when she was still a student.

She didn’t think her employer would be too happy with her findings, though, because so far she’d only found a mess of marriages that didn’t bring her any closer to the neighboring island. She even found some records of a family branch that had one of those pesky Ds in the name and then disappeared from record. She supposed they just left the kingdom. She had noticed that every D. that rose to prominence was an outright weirdo, and she wasn’t sure if it was just confirmation bias because boring people didn’t make the news, but damn it they didn’t seem to crop up in the most outlandish incidents. There was the infamous Monkey D. Dragon, his father Garp, who she had seen a couple of times in person and seemed frankly overbearing, the guys in Whitebeard’s crew… And the biggest weirdo of all, of course: the King of Pirates. She’d heard from an acquaintance funny stories of him to last her a lifetime. A lot of the mystique around his figure was lost, but that was one of the things that made history interesting, in her opinion.

Sitting down on the floor to open the cabinet on the lower part of a bookcase, she took a look at the bundles of papers there. It was a seriously old part of the archive, housing documents from six hundred years back, but thanks to the cold and darkness, they had stood fairly well against the tide of time.

She reached inside and pulled out the dozen of tomes at the forefront to make sure noting was trapped behind. That part of the archive had been catalogued way before Alex’s time, after all, and not every archivist had been as careful as they should have. She had learned that the hard way, finding folders that didn’t match the catalog and misplaced pages centuries into the future. Whenever that happened, she passed the mess to her coworkers, the actual archivists, who had a tendency to curse her incessantly until they fixed the issue, but it was all in good humor.

Very carefully, she took the lantern and approached it to the cabinet. She looked inside and stared at the darkness. In fact, she had to stare for a very long while before realizing that she wasn’t looking at the back of the cabinet or even the wall.

There was an empty space there.

A secret compartment?

Work forgotten, she had a good minute of doubt, sitting on the floor. She was severely allergic to dust mites and exploring further was a health hazard. There could be spiders or rats or fungi or lethal mold. She could wait until the next day and ask a coworker to check it out in her stead.

But the temptation. There was only so much willpower she could exert in less than twenty-four hours until she ran out.

Please let it not be rats or fungi, she thought as she peeled off her coat and scarf to avoid getting them dusty, and dived in.

❦

It had been eleven years since he had any anything to remember his parents by other than the bitter memories of how Flevance had gone up in flames.

If someone accused Law of dwelling too much in the past, he would have denied it with full knowledge that he was a liar. But there was a hint of truth in that, and that was that he didn’t think of his dead family often. It was another particular piece of past that haunted him.

There was nothing left of Flevance but ashes and ruin. He knew it well, and that was why he avoided revisiting those times.

And yet.

He closed the book he had just finished, running a finger over the cover. He remembered the nights his parents spent locked in their study, writing the results of their investigations in order to share their knowledge, hoping that a cure could be found in time.

He had spent the last two days reading every word in their voices, surprising himself when he could still recognize in the wording which parts had written who.

He’d been thinking from the moment he’d found the book, the first time in over a decade he had found a copy of it anywhere, that he’d have to let it go, but he wasn’t willing to. He had considered offering to buy it from the librarian, but given she hadn’t even let him take it out the day before, he had a feeling that she would refuse. She was understandably wary of him.

Well, he was already going to hell, so proving her suspicions right wouldn’t make a difference.

He slipped the book inside his coat and went downstairs to find her. He’d at least say thank you before she could find out what he had done. He was mildly curious about her reaction, but he’d make sure to miss that.

He opened the door to the place where she’d said she’d be to be greeted by darkness and a faint light, and he immediately tumbled down half a set of stairs when he set a foot down and only found air.

Cursing under his breath, he fought against the urge to leave unannounced and, going against popular advice, he followed the light at the end of the tunnel. It got increasingly brighter the more he advanced, passing bookcase after bookcase. The way they were set made the basement somewhat labyrinthine, and he was unsure he’d be able to find his way upstairs again if he had to follow the same path he was taking.

And right as he reached the source of light… it disappeared. Briefly. As did half of the librarian’s body inside of a low cabinet in which there was no human way an adult’s torso could fit.

How interesting.

He cleared his throat, and she visibly jumped, hitting her head with a resounding plunk and an ow. She pulled out of the cabinet, looking pretty embarrassed when she faced him.

“Um, oh—Are you heading out?”

“That was the plan.”

“Okay, then,” she said like nothing had happened. Her hair, brown and chin-length, was covered in dust bunnies, as was her sweater. She took off her glasses to clean them with her clothes, revealing a set of dark circles under her eyes that could rival his. When she noticed she couldn’t wipe anything with what she had available, she discarded the glasses on top of a nearby table. “The door’s open, so—”

“What’s in there?” He asked.

“Oh, nothing important,” she said calmly, and rubbed her nose with the back of a hand. “Just old registries.”

She watched her watch him. She wasn’t budging under his stare, but Law could detect lies from miles away. Also dust allergies. He hoped she was getting medicated for those, because this town was supposed to be a quick, relaxing stop, and he wasn’t in the mood to get the corpse of a librarian added to his list of crimes. “Inside the wall?”

“I guess someone saw fit to build a compartment in the cabinet?”

“A compartment where an adult and a lamp can disappear into?”

She spread her arms, as if to make a point. “I’m fairly small.”

“Don’t you say.”

Her expression went from neutral to mildly annoyed as she dropped her arms and the pretense altogether. “You really don’t have anything better to do in town?”

The question would have been fair had there been anything out there other than mud and the tavern his men had occupied since the day they arrived. “Any suggestions?”

She conceded the point. “No, not really.” With a sigh, she nudged her head towards the cabinet. “There’s no wall. I think there’s a hidden room in there. Too wide for a passage.”

“Is this something common in libraries?”

“No, but it is with old buildings, to an extent. And these shelves may be old, but they sure as hell aren’t as ancient as the basement.” She knocked on the wood. “Someone hid that room when this basement was repurposed as an archive.”

Consider his curiosity officially piqued. “Any idea of what’s inside?”

“I was about to find out.”

“So?”

“You want to check it out?” She sounded confused and like she didn’t want to hear the answer to that question.

Too bad he wasn’t feeling charitable. “Sure. You never know where a treasure may be hiding.”

If she had been tense until then, at that moment she looked ready to shove him out with her own hands. “Any objects that may be in there could be historical artifacts and need to be treated as such.”

“And are you going to stop me if I decide to take something?”

Her frown deepened, but there was little else she could do. She had to know that, even if he left just so they wouldn’t have to put up with each other any longer, he could come back any time he wanted, key or not.

There wasn’t as much bite in her voice when she relented. “Be my guest,” she said, offering him the lamp and gesturing towards the cabinet.

“Ladies first,” he replied, which didn’t win him any points, going by her huff, but she didn’t waste more time arguing and headed inside.

And then he was left without any light on his side.

“Well?” She asked, sounding a bit nervous.

“Are you in a hurry?” He said, feeling his way down the cabinet until he found the opening. There. He saw a faint light on the other side.

“Do you enjoy making people uncomfortable?”

“It’s a job perk, so might as—” Thud. His hat fell off his head and rolled to the other side. “—well.”

“…Did you hit your head?”

“No,” he lied, crawling out of the cabinet and picking up his hat.

“That’s why I tried to give you the lamp,” she said with obvious satisfaction, ignoring his reply, and holding the lamp higher to cover as much terrain as possible with the light. “The floor and walls look the same as outside. This is an extension of the basement, built at the same time as the rest of it, by the looks of it.”

“Why do you think someone would block the entrance?”

“To hide something or someone, so there’s a good chance there’s going to be a corpse instead of treasure. In fact, I hope it’s a corpse,” she sentenced.

“You have strange hobbies.”

“You wouldn’t try to steal a corpse. At least I’d avoid a pointless argument.”

Well, that depended on its state. He was bored, and it couldn’t hurt to take a body part back for closer inspection.

“…You wouldn’t, right?”

“Technically, it wouldn't be anyone's property.”

“Just saying, you have no right to judge anybody else’s hobbies. Hm?” She walked forward a few steps, and the light revealed something square standing in the middle of the room.

“Doesn’t look like your corpse,” he said.

“Doesn’t look like your treasure, either,” she replied, but she seemed to tune him out as she approached the object, and by the time she was standing in front of it, her eyes were wide open and her mouth fell a little bit.

Law waited for her to say something, but she was too caught up inspecting the thing. He took a few steps forwards and saw a perfect stone cube with etched inscriptions that covered one of its sides completely, and whatever it was, the librarian must found it fascinating. She was running her free hand over the symbols, leaving trails in the dust, and looking at them so up close that she may as well have been head-butting the stone. He was fairly sure that he had forgotten he was there. And that had to mean something, since she had made clear that she didn’t want him there.

“What is it?” He asked. There wasn’t anything interesting to him about that stone, and the fact that she had the lamp he had refused to take just to be a smartass meant that he couldn’t inspect the rest of the room while she did her thing.

She wasn’t brought out of her reverie right away. When she finally spoke, she took a couple of steps back to look at the entirety of the cube. “It’s a Poneglyph. It makes no sense, but it has to be.”

That didn’t answer anything. “And what’s that supposed to be?”

“A Poneglyph’s a… a record of sorts. There’s an indeterminate number scattered across the world, and they contain… well. Historical records.”

“So something that makes sense to have it in an archive.”

“Well, yes, but no. Poneglyphs contain forbidden knowledge.” Her stare could bore a hole in the stone if she kept it up. “You know the Void Century? Have you heard about the tragedy of Ohara?”

“On passing.” He recalled the news about the Tree of Knowledge burning and the scientists being declared enemies of the World Government. “One of the people involved has joined a pirate crew recently, hasn’t she? Devil Child, they call her.”

“Do they?” It seemed to come as entirely new information for her, and that made her look at him, at last. Without the glasses and under the light of the lamp’s flame, her eyes looked yellow. “I don’t pay that much attention to pirate news. No one ever comes here.” The question of why was he there was left unspoken, and thus unanswered. “Anyway. They are the only remaining records of the Void Century, and its study is prohibited by the World Government. Rumor goes that Ohara’s experts were working on them.”

“World Government covering up stuff then. Nothing new.”

“Indeed.” She switched the lamp to her other hand and glanced back at the Poneglyph. “I wonder why there’s one here. They are supposed to be extremely hard to find.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know. Nobody can read them. Maybe the people of Ohara could have, but…” She shrugged. “We’re twenty years late.”

She stared pensively at the Poneglyph, the lines of frustration etched on her face showing more emotion than anything he’d seen so far from her. Then, unexpectedly, she offered the lamp to him. “You want to take a look around, right?”

Their hands brushed for a moment when he took it by the handle, and she turned again towards the stone and crossed her arms.

He was still curious.

“What are you going to do?” He asked.

“Hm? About what?”

“What do you think?”

“The Poneglyph? Did you not hear what I said? Its study is prohibited.” He tone became despondent. “And… the city hall is going to know it’s here in a few months.”

“Why?”

“Renovations. We’re supposed to get electricity in the basement. Lamps are a fire hazard.”

“So it’s your only chance. Could you decipher it?”

“With years of work and research, maybe. But that’s—nah, no way, they reduced an island to bits because of this. It’s not worth the risk. I couldn’t do it anyway.”

“Sounds to me like you’re just making excuses, but what do I know? I’m just a pirate.”

And he started walking around the perimeter of the chamber, in hopes of finding something. After a few minutes of continuous disappointment, the librarian spoke up, and she sounded oddly polite.

“Could you wait here a moment? I want to pick up some material from outside.”

It was his turn to be suspicious. “Won’t you need the light?”

“No, I can navigate this place in the dark. I’ll be right back.”

He supposed that this was too convoluted to be a trap, but he felt kind of naked having left Kikoku in the archive. He didn’t feel uncomfortable for long, though, because true to word, about a minute later and after bonking her head on the way back in, she reappeared in the room with large sheets of paper and several other packs that she stacked up in front of the stone.

“Is that carbon paper?” He asked as he approached her. He hadn’t found anything else in the room, but damn if the library’s resident gremlin wasn’t a welcome entertainment.

“That’s right.” And she climbed on top of the unstable pile of papers and started to smooth the carbon paper over the stone. “I’ll transcribe it back home.”

This was a turn of events he hadn’t seen coming. “What happened to ‘it’s forbidden?’”

“All the good things in life are unhealthy for you.” With one hand, she pulled out a roll of adhesive tape and cut a few pieces with her teeth to stick the carbon paper to the Poneglyph. “Besides, fuck the government.”

Law couldn’t help but smirk at that. “A commendable sentiment.”

“Why, thank you!” She beamed at him, whether sarcastically or not, it was hard to tell. With considerable effort, she kept sticking pieces of carbon paper to the surface. He guessed the plan was to cover it entirely.

“Do you need help?”

“Are you offering?”

For someone who had been so wary of him a few hours earlier, she was a bit of a smartass, herself.

“Good question.”

He thought he heard her snort, but he couldn’t tell if it was because she was annoyed or amused. Probably the former.

“That stack of papers looks very unstable,” he commented.

“Yes, thanks for mentioning it.”

“You aren’t tall enough to reach the corner of the Poneglyph.”

Silence, resignation, and the telltale look of someone who was looking at an infestation beyond the capabilities of pest control. “I don’t suppose you would help me?”

“If you asked nicely.”

She looked at him with a strange face, one that indicated many thoughts and the inability to pick a single one and answer accordingly.

“No?” He tried.

Her eyes narrowed as she motioned to one of the papers. “Can you hold this up for me, please?”

His reply, however, was immediate. “I’ll think about it.”

She sighed, determined to ignore him, and returned to her work like she hadn’t expected anything from him at all, which he thought was a great attitude to have. But again, because he didn’t particularly care to see her slip and crack her head against the stone tiles, he did the tremendous effort of lifting up an arm to hold the paper in place.

She paused to look at him. Stone-faced as she was, it was hard to tell if there was any surprise in there or just mere curiosity, but she smiled a little when she said, “Look at you. Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.”

He let go of the paper, but since she didn’t stop chuckling to herself, he nudged the stack under her feet to remind her who was in control here.

❦

Alex said goodbye to the pirate that had managed to surpass her admittedly low expectations, but not before filing him under the pain in the ass category. Her classification system stood the test of reality so far.

Relieved at being alone again, she locked the door, did a few stretches, and decided that she’d had a lot of emotions that day and deserved another cup of tea.

One hurdle overcome. The pirate had seemed a way bigger problem before she’d found a fucking Poneglyph in the basement. Now she had no clue what to do with the new one.

It didn’t take her long to realize that she was fucked, no matter how she looked at it.

She felt oddly calm about it at that moment. She supposed it had something to do with the shock of the discovery and that the danger was still nebulous, if certain.

She sipped on her tea.

She was the only person that ventured regularly into that art of the archive, but alerting about the discovery herself was out of the question. If they knew she knew, they’d probably make her not know anything anymore.

The problem was that the construction workers would surely find the door, and now that she and Trafalgar had been walking around the room, there was obvious tampering. Cleaning the dust would get rid of the footprints and marks on the Poneglyph, but the lack of dust would be as suspicious as the sets of footprints.

The next gulp of tea scorched her throat.

So, only two options remained: stay, wait patiently and leave up to chance whether an accident happened to her, and probably the whole library with its workers, or quit her job, take a boat somewhere else and drop off the radar. The first one wasn’t worth the risk.

Two things to take into account with the remaining option: anybody with half a brain could suspect that her sudden departure had something to do with the Poneglyph, and in that case, all suspicions would fall on her. The plus side was that her coworkers would probably be spared.

What to do? It was a long way to her hometown. She could settle back there if she was spared from the government’s suspicions. If not…

Well. There was Sabaody.

Which was stupid for several reasons, the main one being that it was on Marineford’s and Mary Geoise’s doorsteps.

The ache in her hands felt especially acute, even through the heat radiating from the cup.

It would come down to luck, no matter what she did. Maybe she was overthinking the situation and nothing would happen. Workers would move the Poneglyph in the middle of the night, or seal it away while no one was looking, and that would be the end of it.

But assuming a best case scenario would most likely spell death in this situation, and she’d like to avoid that. She may not have had a super interesting life, but she was quite fond of having it.

Reality started to sink in then. Oh, god. She had to make a run for it, didn’t she?

She left the cup aside on her desk and started pacing around and up the stairs to burn energy. She could tell the city hall that a family member was ill and she needed to go back home. That would be sensible, but all the paperwork and finding a replacement for her would take weeks. At least one month would go by before she could leave the island without raising suspicions. Being able to cross the Red Line depended entirely on travel time and the wait for permissions to traverse the Holy Land, both of which would take money she didn’t have. She could probably cover the expenses to get to the Red Line, but not the rest of the way.

She’d need to pick up a quick job in between to replenish her wallet, then.

Why couldn’t she go work to a normal library? Why had this happened to her?

She hurried towards the medical section to put the book back in its place, and when she didn’t find it in the cart, she went to check the desks. All empty. Maybe he had put it back in place?

But all there was where the book should have been was an empty space, and a nervous heat started to rise to Alex’s cheeks as she realized that she had been duped and the son of a bitch had stolen her book after she’d had the generosity to open the door for him on a Sunday so he didn’t have to break and enter.

She was too full of anxious energy, with all that had happened, to sit still and fume silently. She’d never been prone to resignation where there were still options left to try, and if what her near future held for her was a one way trip to Impel Down, getting murdered by a pirate wasn’t the worst that could happen.

Harlun wasn’t big, and it was muddy outside. Very much so. Enough that Alex picked up her belongings, went outside, and, for once, was grateful that the roads were made of dirt and not pavement.

She hurried through the private plaza, carrying her bag on her shoulder, boots stomping on the cobblestones until she reached the road and saw a recent pair of shoe imprints that headed down the street.

With her black coat open and billowing in the wind, she went on Trafalgar Law’s pursue and, to her relief, his trail didn’t lead to the port, but rather to the tavern where every single sailor that stopped in Harlun seemed to spend their days in. Not like they had much of a choice.

A friendly face saluted her from behind the counter as she crossed the door. “Long time no see, A—”

“HiAl,” she said to the bartender so fast that she wasn’t sure if the words came out properly, but she didn’t care, because the bastard she was looking for was sitting on a barstool right in front of her. She couldn’t interpret the look on his face, but what she could tell for sure was that she wanted to deck him in it. “You,” she said, accusatory.

He smirked, and her irritation only grew. “What a coincidence. Here for a drink?”

She inhaled deeply, angrily, walked up to him and dropped her bag on the nearest barstool. Damn, he was tall, and so was his seat. Even sitting down, he towered above her. Not that it mattered, because most people tended to be taller than Alex, so this didn’t register as an intimidating factor. “You know what I’m here for.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You stole my book.”

“Your book?”

She had come here to embarrass herself, hadn’t she? Too late to turn back now. “The library’s book.”

“What makes you think I did?”

Oh, he was insufferable.

“Do you take me for an idiot?” She retorted. “You’re the only person who could have taken it.”

“How so? The library’s closed today.”

Alex’s mouth fell a little bit open at Law’s flippant answer under the curious gaze of Al. “Really?” She said, unimpressed. “I can’t make you return it even if I try, and that’s how you’re going to play it?”

He wore a self-satisfied smile, and he wasn’t even looking at her. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She considered what to say for a few seconds. “Okay,” was the best she could do. She didn’t know why she felt so disappointed. It wasn’t like she had expected anything good from him, from the start. He was right if he thought she was an idiot. “Serves me right for trying to help,” she said, yanking on her bag to retrieve it and turning around without facing him. “Bye, Al.”

Being taken advantage of was the worst feeling.

She hadn’t taken a second step away from him when a hand grabbed her by her left arm and pulled her back.

“Wait,” she heard Trafalgar say. When she turned around, he wasn’t smirking anymore. “What’s the name of the book?”

“You know the name,” she said irritated, confused, and offended that he was invading her personal bubble.

“Do you?”

“Effects of heavy metal poisoning on the cardiovascular system, I think?” She said, punctuating the sentence with a tired sigh. “Do you need the reference too?”

“No. The authors.”

“Are you getting at something or are you just laughing at me?”

He let go of her to search for something in the coat he had discarded on the barstool to his other side. The book she was looking for. He held it up for her, but didn’t offer it, and Alex didn’t try to take it by surprise because there’s no point in stealing when you can’t make a swift escape with the loot.

She looked at the names written below the title. “Doctor…” She muttered, and then she read the surname, and the surname below it, and she blinked a couple of times before redirecting her attention to Law. “You aren’t old enough to have written this book.”

It said Trafalgar. Twice. Family? Was this a con? Did he come from a line of doctors?

“Obviously.”

“A parent?” No, there were two. “Parents?”

“Bingo.”

Alex’s indignation and disappointment fizzled against her will. He was a thief, he’d taken advantage of her good will and was waving the prize in front of her face, she should’ve been furious!

And yet, she had to be a bleeding heart again. “And I don’t suppose you can ask them or the printing press for another copy?”

His response wasn’t immediate, but when he gave one, it was silent. He opened the book from the back, and showed her the words printed behind the back cover:

Printed in Flevance.

That was a resounding no if there ever was one. But did that also mean…? No, he couldn’t have anything to do with that incident, there wasn’t anybody left from Flevance. Perhaps his parents had been working there when war broke out. It was safe to assume that the son of two doctors wouldn’t become a famous pirate if he still had a family to fall back onto. This was a huge can of worms that she had no intentions of opening, though.

“If you’re a liar, you’re a very convincing one,” she admitted. She couldn’t even get rightfully enraged without the universe throwing her a curveball, huh? “All right, keep it. Not that you need my permission.”

With a satisfied smile, he put away the book. “Will you get in trouble?”

“Why do you—” She cut herself short. Not worth asking. “No, I’ll blame you if anybody notices,” she replied. “Al—”

“Not a word.”

“Thank you.” She nodded, and then looked at the pirate once again. “Well, Mr. Trafalgar, it’s been…” Not exactly a pleasure. “Interesting.”

A short laugh escaped him. She had to wonder if it was the alcohol what had him in such high spirits. “Leaving so soon?”

“What, you steal from my workplace and want me to stay for the party?” She asked with incredulity.

“Is it theft if you’re allowing it, though?”

The gall of this dude. “No, thank—”

Suddenly, a red haired man wearing sunglasses indoors and a white jumpsuit entered the scene, putting an arm around Law’s shoulders. “Hey, Captain! Who’s the girl?”

“She’s…”

“A librarian,” she offered. “Just a librarian.”

“Oooh, the librarian!”

“…What—”

“Penguin, come here! It’s the librarian!”

His friend, who wore a cap with the word ‘penguin’ on it that concealed his eyes, but otherwise was dressed exactly like him, walked up to them, “Nice to meet ya!” He wave at her. “You’ve got guts!”

She sensed her chance to make a swift exit was gone. “I think I’m a little lost.”

“Captain said you opened the library just for him.”

“Oh. That.” She was still regretting that. She should have never woken up. Sundays were meant for sleeping. “That’s not guts, it’s being a dumbass.”

The two men laughed, and the first said, “Aren’t they the same?”

She tilted her head, conceding the point. The tilt of their voices was similar to the captain’s, she noticed. Northerners, too. She felt small thinking that they had travelled from practically the opposite side of the world until she remembered she had done the same. The difference was that she had managed to make it boring.

“So what brings you here?” Penguin asked. “Come for a drink after work?”

“No, not really, I was just about to—”

“Come on, have a drink with us!”

“Um, I should really—”

“You live here for long?” The redhead intervened. “I wanna hear about this town. Is it as boring as it looks? Because we’ve been trying to find something to do since we got here.”

“There has to be something.”

Alex smiled a little despite herself, feeling their plight until she remembered the Poneglyph in the archive. “There’s nothing at all.” She turned her head to look at the tables for a moment, hopefully find an excuse to escape. As expected, she saw about a dozen people dressed in the same kind of uniform as those two, but she did a double take when she saw someone clad in orange.

There was the polar bear again, toasting with his friends.

“Is he a mink?��� He asked the guys, who grinned at her. She saw Law hide a smile behind his glass before returning his attention to the bear.

He was laughing as he lifted a companion from a chair one handed. Everyone looked so… happy.

“Woah!” Penguin exclaimed. “Second person—”

“Third.”

“Right, third – third person who’s realized what he is since coming to the Grand Line!”

Not surprising. She had never seen any so far from the Red Line. “Is he part of your crew?”

“Yeah, Bepo’s our friend.”

“And our navigator,” Law added.

Aw. Oh, she was getting soft with age.

“Wait here,” said the redhead, “we’ll introduce you!”

“Oh, no need, we already—”

But the two were gone before she could finish her excuse and leave. She supposed there wasn’t any harm in staying a while. She had already demolished her life in a matter of hours, and she didn’t see how this could make it worse. They seemed friendly people, even if their captain was kind of an ass.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” she said quietly, more to herself than anybody else.

Law replied, though. “There aren’t many of them around.”

“No, I’ve seen minks before. I meant a free one.”

Law regarded her with a brand interest that she hadn’t received from him yet. “Are you talking about slaves?”

“You’re headed to the Sabaody Archipelago, right?”

“Eventually.”

“Be careful. Minks aren’t safe there.”

He snorted. “I assure you Bepo can take care of himself.”

Raising her eyebrows at her dismissal, “Don’t underestimate what those people are willing to do to get their hands on a novelty slave.”

“How do you know? Have you been there?”

For longer than she had ever expected to. “Some time ago,” she replied noncommittally. “And it’s dangerous enough for boring people with the kidnapping crews, the human auction, the Celestial Dragons and the Marines so close. You already stand out, but your friend? Keep an eye on him.”

He sounded disgruntled when he said, “You don’t need to tell me,” but it sounded as close to a concession as she thought she was going to get from him.

“Coffee?” Al interrupted to offer one to her. He already had a press in hand.

“Sure,” she said, giving in. She wasn’t going anywhere soon, it seemed, so she climbed on a barstool. “How did you even meet him?” She asked Law, who seemed amused by her interest in his friend. “Don’t they live in the New World?”

“North Blue. We met eleven years ago.”

That was about the last answer she expected. “He’s been with you all along? Wow.”

She felt kind of jealous. She didn’t have any friends from when she was a child. She knew people, sure. A lot of people. Some she liked, many she’d rather not have met at all. A couple of true friends here and there, but no one close by. As much as she enjoyed being alone, and she couldn’t recall a moment in her life she’d felt lonely, she had to wonder how it was like to have such good friends around all the time. It sounded exhausting and fun.

“Yeah,” he agreed, though she hadn’t expected him to, and the admission made her smile a little. “My thoughts exactly.”

[rileyjakusik]

Creative Problem Solving Interviews

Name: Schmid Etienne

Profession: Entrepreneur

1. How do you generate ideas? (How, when, and where are you inspired? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles?)

I normally generate ideas or the most inspired in the morning after my meditation or quiet time. It normally happens from connecting the dots between my experience, and information received from books, research papers, or articles. The majority of the obstacles come from breaking down the many phases of the idea and/or properly explaining the idea to others.

2. What process(es) do you use to solve problems? (Describe the steps of your problem-solving process. Explain your journey from inspiration to implementation.)

I use a process that I created when working with individuals called RODAR loop Readiness, Observe, Decision, Action loop (http://www.se2studios.com/readiness). I would normally get a download about an idea or concept. I would write it down multiple times, I would try to connect as many dots with it as possible (research, article, theories, how does it solve the problem, how would it make people feel and how it would add value to the lives of others). Next, I will start to talk to certain people about it just to get others opinions or views. I will use the information gathered, my knowledge, and research to make an educated decision, then I will act on that decision and leave room to improve and implement whatever is needed to get the desired outcome.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Name: Stacy Strong

Profession: Elementary Math Instructional Coach

1. How do you generate ideas? (How, when, and where are you inspired? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles?)

I usually come up with ideas while working with students. Part of my job is creating/finding/refining interventions for students who have trouble in math. When I am working one on one with a student I can get a feel for where they get stuck and what type of tools or challenges or questions can help them make connections. I also develop a lot of ideas while I am driving and thinking. Obstacles: Biggest obstacle is self-doubt. I may have a good idea but feel afraid to share it with veteran elementary teachers because I am afraid that they will scoff at it.

2. What process(es) do you use to solve problems? (Describe the steps of your problem-solving process. Explain your journey from inspiration to implementation.)

I try to write down a list of issues I can identify, and figure out ways to tackle the issues. Lists are my go to. Also, brain maps. One more thing— part of problem solving is identifying problems, keeping those problems on the back burner, and then keeping an eye for solutions I see or hear about for that problem. Many times I don’t come up with a solution— I just connect a solution to a problem.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Name: Tim Bradish

Profession: Historian

1. How do you generate ideas? (How, when, and where are you inspired? What inspires you? What obstacles do you face in coming up with a new idea and how do you overcome those obstacles?)

Inspiration strikes me in a number of places. In terms of research topics, I prefer to let my natural interests pull me into topics that have been less thoroughly researched. The best example that comes to mind is my work studying the social impact of coffee consumption in the American colonies. Once I have a topic and an abundance of material, the gym and sauna tend to be places where my mind slows down and makes connections.

2. What process(es) do you use to solve problems? (Describe the steps of your problem-solving process. Explain your journey from inspiration to implementation.)

Historical dead ends can be maddening. Typically, if I need to find more information about something, I’ll broaden my search topics and begin to look for related items. I develop a web of related topics or people and begin to dig up anything on those topics in the hopes of coming across some new source material. Or, if possible. Try to get to a local museum or archive to pull up more source material.

[montagnarde1793]

Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 3)

Parts 1, 2, 4 and 5.

Style Issues

 Stylistically, there’s a great deal of “tell don’t show” in this book, especially as regards the actual politics. The only things that are really concrete are the characters’ romantic entanglements and scenes of violence. This is a flaw that runs so deep that correcting it would mean writing a completely different book.

 One thing that they could have done that would have made it somewhat more bearable, however, regards the use of language. In a book written in English but that takes place in France and where all the characters are French, please, I’m begging you, do not randomly (and often ungrammatically) insert whichever French words and phrases you half-remember from high school French class into descriptions and dialogue. It doesn’t give the characters a flavor of being French, it gives you a flavor of ignorance.

The key word here is “randomly”: note that I’m not talking about things like terms of address, exclamations, etc., for which there is an established convention, or terms for which there might not be an exact equivalent in English. No, I’m talking about this kind of thing: “[…] running a hand through his short-cropped noir hair” (p. 352). Please, resist the urge!

 Also, this isn’t strictly a style issue, as the grammar is the least of the problems with it, but I don’t really know where else to put it... Each of the six parts opens with an epigraph. Here’s the one for Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe’s (p. 437) :

 “It was a sensual delight for l’homme rouge to see fall in the basket these charming heads and their ruby blood streaming under the hideous cleaver.”

—Archives Nationale [sic]

 I can’t believe I have to say this to a fellow historian, but just saying a quote is from the archives is bizarrely and baffling amateurish. It’s like saying a quote is from the library, or from a book or from the internet. Without further information, it’s about as useful a citation as saying it came to you in a dream. Why? Because it tells us nothing about the author or the date or any kind of context and therefore gives us no real way of evaluating it — though the lurid, sensationalist language doesn’t inspire confidence. Since the author of this section more than any other seems to take as a principle of novel-writing that whatever is the most over-the-top makes for the best fiction, I would say sure, why not, but as the authors also apparently want their depiction of “history” to be taken seriously… I mean, what is there to even say?

  Writing What You Want to Know

 There’s a problem throughout this book with characters talking about 18th France like it’s a place they’ve only read about in books rather than the only place they’ve ever lived and therefore the only reality *they* know firsthand. Now, obviously, the authors, like the rest of us, *have* only read about a 200+ year-old setting in books (or come to know it through various types of primary sources), but good historical fiction should be able to make you forget that, or at least come close.

I can’t entirely decide whether we’re looking at a failure of research here or of imagination — or just clumsy handling of exposition. I suspect it’s some mixture of all three.

 Allow me to explain. The clumsy exposition is a result of the aforementioned lack of trust in the reader as well, I suspect, of the few pages allotted to each author, which don’t allow for a more natural immersion of the reader into a world that is entirely alien to them but is made up of both new and familiar elements to the characters.

 The research vs imagination issue is more complex. I’m a firm believer in the updated adage “write what you want to know,” but if you’re going to do that, the intermediate step between wanting and writing is inevitably research. And well, there’s research and there’s research. For a novel especially, you don’t just want to be researching what happened, the concrete material facts such as who was present for what event or what a given figure’s relationship was to the people around them, but also people’s mentalities/sensibilities. To plausibly write from their point of view, you also have to investigate the reasons they might have believed what they believed and to take that investigation seriously, whether or not you agree.

 This was achieved better with some characters than others and again, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s for lack of research or lack of ability to empathize with certain points of view. Ironically, the chapter on Mme Élisabeth is probably the best handled. The author of that section says she wanted to be “fair” (back matter, p. 12) to her subject and I think she succeeds better than her co-authors, while showing that Mme Élisabeth, convinced of the absolute validity of the divine right of her brother, advocates at every turn for violently repressing the Revolution. She’s allowed to articulate her (frankly pretty abhorrent) beliefs in a plausible manner.

 Perhaps the author of this section is just a better writer than her co-authors, but I think there’s more to it than that. I obviously can’t read minds, but from the text of the novel itself as well as from the authors’ notes, I get the impression that we’re dealing with a dual problem of epistemology (i.e. how do you know what you know?) and politics. In either case, it’s not a coincidence if Mme Élisabeth is the best drawn character… and Reine Audu and Pauline Léon are the worst.

 First, on the epistemology side: whether consciously or not, it seems to me as if the authors largely started out with the assumption that they already basically understood their protagonists. Sophie de Grouchy is so ahead of her time she might as well be a modern woman, got it, no problem… Reine Audu is an avatar of the “mob,” (the author of her section’s words, not mine, back matter, p. 8), pitiable because of her poverty but with no real politics beyond that of hunger and resentment… Pauline Léon is a “well-intentioned extremist” to use TV Tropes parlance — you would think that label would apply better to Charlotte Corday, but the latter ends up being so saintly she basically converts Pauline Léon (in what is quite possibly the most maddening moment in the whole damn book)… and so on. If I’m right, the authors’ assumptions about these archetypes made them not really feel the need to dig too deeply into the question of what made these women tick, either through research or empathy.

 We don’t know much about Reine Audu or Pauline Léon, but there has been a fair amount of research into the beliefs of the popular movement and revolutionary crowds from Georges Lefebvre onward (most of it tending to dispel the lazy stereotypes on display here). The authors either didn’t bother with it or made poor use of it (as is evidently the case with poor Dominique Godineau, who does figure in the bibliography).

 The book does Pauline Léon a disservice on both sides, mischaracterizing her beliefs for good and for ill. They make feminism as a contemporary audience would understand it her primary cause and her support for the rest of the popular movement’s program (in which we learn that women and people of color are to be included, but not actually what it consists of...) accessory and easily disposable so Charlotte Corday can be proved right and “radical” men can prove to be the real enemy.

 (Which… I could roll with it if the idea was just that men of all political flavors can be misogynists, but as usual, the message is all men are potential rapists (except Condorcet, Buzot, La Fayette and Louis XVI, of course) but the further left they are the rape-ier they get. That’s not how that works.)

 Anyway, the point is, these are characters the authors seem to have gone in assuming they understood, either because they found them relatable or because they thought they knew what archetype they corresponded to. The author of the section on Mme Élisabeth, on the other hand, writes that this was a character that it took some effort to understand because the character’s worldview was so different from the author’s and that of her presumed readers. This was also the case to some degree with the author of Manon Roland’s section, who writes about having to grapple with her protagonist’s not being a feminist (a position that this author bizarrely seems to think was rare at the time). Regardless, in both cases, the effort to understand, along with the existence of more sources produced by the character they were attempting to inhabit, produced better results.

 But again, I think there’s also a political element. Remember how I mentioned that this book’s main flaw is its feeling of artificiality? (I mean, to the point that the rest of this critique is really just about understanding why it feels so artificial.) One of the moments that felt the most authentic to me was Mme Élisabeth’s extravagant shoe-buying habit, her feeling bad about it and her confessor reassuring her that it’s fine because she hasn’t taken a vow of poverty, after all. And I don’t mean ‘authentic’ necessarily in the sense of ‘historically accurate’ — I don’t know enough about Mme Élisabeth off the top of my head to comment on her shoe collection. But I did think: there, consumerism and guilt about consumerism are in fact much more relatable to the middle class authors and their presumed middle class audience than hunger and privation — or activism relating to socio-economic issues, for that matter. Which is how we end up, here as in a lot of other media, with a relatable royal and revolutionary caricatures.

 This is also a good demonstration of how research and imagination or empathy play off each other. Marge Piercy didn’t have more information about Pauline Léon than the authors of this book. In fact, she had less: she writes in the preface of her book that she learned that Léon’s mother was in fact still alive at the time of the Revolution when it was too late to change what she had written. Credit where credit is due, once again, this new book corrects that error.

But in every other respect, Piercy’s version is far superior, because Pauline Léon’s views as well as her experience are taken seriously. This is no doubt due in large part because Piercy herself has been an activist for various left-wing causes. Her activism surely allowed her to relate to her characters, but far from writing a simple projection from her own experience, it allowed her, just as importantly, to entertain the notion that there was something there to be taken seriously. And therefore, that it was worth researching what precisely these figures were fighting for and not simply the question of why people get caught up in “extremism.” That’s why Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe’s chapters are the best in City of Darkness, City of Light, while Pauline Léon and Reine Audu’s are the worst in this book.

Next time: inaccuracies big and small!

[tcm]

An Interview with Daniel Raim, director of IMAGE MAKERS by Raquel Stecher

IMAGE MAKERS: THE ADVENTURES OF AMERICA’S PIONEER CINEMATOGRAPHERS (2019) is a new original TCM documentary that celebrates the early visionaries who shaped and molded an art form into what it is today. The film focuses on seven early cinematographers who developed their craft through invention, practice and collaboration. These include Billy Bitzer (Intolerance [1916’], Way Down East [1920]), Charles Rosher (Sunrise [1927], The Yearling [1946]), Rollie Totheroh (City Lights [1931], The Gold Rush [1925]), William H. Daniels (Flesh and the Devil [1926], Anna Christie [1930]), Karl Struss (Sunrise [1927], Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [31]), Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane [41], The Grapes of Wrath [40]) and James Wong Howe (The Thin Man [34], Hud [1963]). I had the pleasure of chatting with director Daniel Raim, who has directed the critically acclaimed Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story (2015) and Something’s Gonna Live (2010), about his new documentary.

Raquel Stecher: Congratulations on IMAGE MAKERS. Can you tell me a little bit about how this project started?

Daniel Raim: I had met up with James Harmon Brown, who's the grandson of Harry Stradling, Sr., ASC (Pygmalion [1938], My Fair Lady [1964]) and James Harmon Brown's close friend Curtis Clark, ASC. They had explained to me that 2019 will be the 100th anniversary of the ASC (The American Society of Cinematographers), and they'd love to produce a documentary honoring the generation of cinematographers, the early cinematographers like Jim's grandfather. I was immediately engaged by this subject matter and knowing that there was a documentary made in '92 called Visions of Light, I wanted to do something very different from that and start from the very beginning and kind of make a documentary that, like most of my other films, sort of puts the audience in the shoes of these pioneer master craftsmen and craftswomen.

I said, "Let's find out what archival materials we have access to." Because I want to bring them to life in their own words. That's the most important thing for me.

It was a process of discovery, but the criteria was it's vital that we have access to their own words.

Stecher: How did you select the seven cinematographers to be profiled in the movie?

Raim: Out of the seven that we picked, we had access to archival materials. Billy Bitzer wrote an autobiography. Gregg Toland was never interviewed on tape because he died at the age of 44—he was quite young—from heart disease, but he left behind a substantial amount of archival print interviews. In the early stages, I learned that his daughter, Lothian Toland, is still alive and well. And I said, "Lothian, I'd love to interview you about your dad… we'll come out to Palm Springs and interview you." She said, "No, no. I'll drive out to the ASC clubhouse because I want to be next to my dad's camera.” … I really want the audience to feel Gregg Toland through the presence of his camera sitting next to his daughter.

David Totheroh, the grandson of Rollie Totheroh, also came to the ASC clubhouse. This was in the very beginning of the documentary making. I had no idea that this guy's a walking encyclopedia of his grandfather… Rollie Totheroh was one of those fascinating stories about a third baseman baseball player, who out of nowhere is thrust into the middle of some of the most important moments in cinema history… and would become Charlie Chaplin's closest collaborator.

The ASC had this incredible archive of audio recordings done by Kemp Niver, ASC. Dating back to the '70s. Our archival producer, Martha Winterhalter, was the publisher of American Cinematographer magazine for 30 years. During that time, she had digitized these recordings.

Stecher: What do you think are some misconceptions about the cinematographer's contribution to the filmmaking process and the director's contribution?

Raim: To a large degree, there's very little study on the contribution of the early pioneer cinematographers until recently. We need to understand the directors and who they are, the artistic vision of the director. What we learn in IMAGE MAKERS is the pioneering cinematographers invented the language that became film grammar. That was an essential question I had when I first started working on this, where does the grammar of cinema come from? I certainly agree that a general audience is aware there's a continuity. IMAGE MAKERS offers sort of a look at the puzzle…

You learn that Billy Bitzer taught D.W. Griffith about the components of storytelling. There's action and comedy, and here are the genres. Here's how we show it visually. Bitzer kind of invented the medium with Griffith. We don't know anything about Bitzer or what he did. Then Griffith came into his own and was clearly a master visual artist in his own right.

Charles Rosher, who [was] Mary Pickford's cameraman, is invited to UFA to show how he lights Pickford. Two years later, he comes back to Hollywood with Murnau and they do Sunrise (1927) together. Sunrise is one of those films I saw at film school that just blew my mind.

Then [there’s] James Wong Howe… a Chinese-American cameraman. Now suddenly you realize that this guy has an amazing sense of humor and artistry and an enormous respect from directors like Martin Ritt and impacts the ending of what John Bailey in our film calls the most important climax to any film… Hud (1963).

Stecher: IMAGE MAKERS includes illustrations by Patrick Mate, which help visualize some of the behind-the-scenes actions. Can you tell me about how you worked with Mate and why it was important to incorporate these illustrations in your film?

Raim: I'm having lunch with Patrick Mate and [writer] Michael Sragow. Mike tells us the story of Karl Brown remembering Fireworks Wilson... he was the head of pyrotechnics on Intolerance (1916). He had a stump for an arm and helped Billy Bitzer light the gigantic Babylon set with magnesium flare torches. There [are] no photographs of Fireworks Wilson. I thought there's nobody better on planet Earth to draw and depict Fireworks Wilson than Patrick Mate, to bring to life this kind of extraordinary character who basically helped Billy Bitzer light the Intolerance night scene with those magnesium flare torches.

Patrick has this uncanny ability to inject drama and humor and personality into a historical depiction of an event and bring it to life on multiple levels. And certainly, that began in our collaboration with Harold and Lillian. In this case, we decided to go for a period look that is born out of the cartoon magazine illustrations of the time and looking at the cartoon of the Pathe Brothers from 1910... I thought it was important to use art. The criteria is I would only use an original artwork by Patrick if there were no historical photographs.

Stecher: Can you tell me about working with Kevin Brownlow and Leonard Maltin, two celebrated film historians featured in the documentary, as well as actor Michael McKean who narrated?

Raim: Working with Michael McKean with the narration [was] really great... first of all he's a TCM fan... He is one of the great American actors who brought into his narration knowledge and love of film history. He's so dynamic at drama and comedy. And he did all the voices as well as the narration of the different interviews. He did the voice of Billy Bitzer and William Daniels. And then there's Kevin Brownlow... [with] his wealth of knowledge about silent film. I didn't want to interview Kevin Brownlow just as a talking head. 

I wanted to interview Kevin Brownlow as someone who can share with us their passion and their insight. I'm interested in Kevin Brownlow as a character, not as an interview subject. I hope the film gives Kevin Brownlow the breathing space to really... connect with him as a character, and so I really try to make him comfortable to really be who he is and not edit around him but let him breathe, let the film really see him and spend time with him and not make it into sound bites. But, boy, can he talk about William Daniels.

Then of course, Leonard Maltin's interesting because when he was 24 he came out to Hollywood for the first time to write a book that was published called The Art of the Cinematographer. I loved how just eloquent Leonard was bringing to life the contributions of Billy Bitzer, specifically, and Charles Rosher and spoke eloquently to the transition from silent to sound. He brought his own personality into it. I love the moment where he says, "And then comes sound, and all of that beauty and all of the luster of those late silent films vanishes as if a meat cleaver has been whacked down mercilessly on an art form." For me, that's just so much the essence of what I also want to communicate in IMAGE MAKERS: the passion that people like Kevin Brownlow and Leonard Maltin have for silent filmmaking.

Stecher: What do you hope viewers take away from Image Makers?

Raim: I hope is that when audiences continue to watch classic Hollywood movies on TCM, in this case, that they'll be looking at the scenes with new eyes and going, "who is the cinematographer and what is the continuity of style? And how did he light this scene?" Then getting a sense of the kind of incredible contribution of the motion picture cinematographer, as well as sort of an appreciation of the art and the technology that enabled them to do what they did.

[olderthannetfic]

You’ve probably heard of that film version of The Magnificent Seven from a couple of years ago. Maybe you know it’s based on a film from 1960, which is itself a remake of Seven Samurai.

But if you’re like 99% of fandom or even that guy I know who worked on the 2016 version, you probably don’t know that there was also a TV series starring, among other people, Ron Perlman.

(This came up because said dude and I were working on another Western starring Ron Perlman. A sucky one though. Alas, I cannot pimp it.)

Mag7, as it is usually called in fandom, was quite the little slash fandom in its day, yet it is nearly forgotten by newer fans. The show aired for two seasons from 1998-2000.

It’s one of those shows I bought, sight unseen, so I could catch up on older fandoms. I ended up liking it more or less, but I don’t think canon has aged well. It’s too bloodless for the era it came out in while making a pretense at covering serious, dark shit. It has neither the standing sets of old Western TV nor the big budgets of the 2010s Western revival. It’s too white. The one black lead gets relegated to token status along with all Native characters. The treatment of women is laughable, from the Happy Hooker stuff (gah!) to the time they try to teach the tomboy to be more girly so she can get the young dude in the cast (ragescream!). It feels more in line with what I’d expect a Western to look like in 1988 than 1998, especially on the heels of the far more inventive The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. in 1993.

Fanlore says that Mag7 suffers because current fandom is not into Westerns, but my problem is that I am far too into Westerns, and this show is not a good one.

OTOH, there is a lot of material here to work with, and work with it fans did!

It’s a super interesting fandom for a fandom historian because of how intensely AU-infested it is. Maybe you’ve heard something about “ATF-verse”? That’s a Mag7 thing. It’s not just regular AUs: The fandom is full of these shared universes with established rules for writers who want to play in them.

The “Seven” are:

Chris Larabee: The black-clad, taciturn loner with... wait for it... a dead wife and child.

Vin Tanner: The soft-spoken woobie, sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, who has spent time amongst the Indian tribes. (It is every bit as cringey as you think.) Fandom’s #1 fave, natch.

J.D. Dunne: Horrid little twerp with a terrible hat. I wanted to stab him every time he was on screen. x100 whenever he was interacting with a woman.

Buck Wilmington: Played by Dale Midkiff of Time Trax fame! (What? Everyone important, by which I mean me, loved Time Trax!) He is Chris’s old friend and polar opposite, a jolly, good-humored man raised by a prostitute mother. Ladies, including the working girls, love him. Also he gets fake dead more than once, so he’s clearly the BEST character, and fandom ought to have loved him the best too! >:( 

Josiah Sanchez: Ron Perlman plays a wacky preacher and ex-gunfighter. Is he haunted by his past? Does he make woo-woo philosophical proclamations about this? Does this show love its ubiquitous Western cliches? (Don’t answer that.)

Ezra Standish: If Vin is the quiet, soft-spoken woobie, Ezra is the woobie who hides his Tragic Pain under a mask of charm and cheer. He’s the one with the rapidfire con artist patter, the fancy suits, and the Southern accent. He has a complicated relationship with his con artist mother. His wardrobe is a thousand times prettier than anyone else’s, and he crossdresses at some point. Naturally, he is fandom’s other darling after Vin. Possibly the #1 darling in ATF-verse.

Nathan Jackson: Nathan is a former slave and a doctor. He has a girlfriend in the local Seminole village and not enough to do on the show.

Other characters include a sad widow for Chris to have sad dead partner angst at, the judge who sends them on missions, and, in the pilot, that guy who played Harper in Sharpe. The judge is played by Robert Vaughn, which I 100% did not realize until I was looking at wikipedia just now!

Anyway, standard Western hijinks happen. The mystery of Chris’s wife’s death is eventually solved as angstily as possible. Chris pretends to kill Buck as part of a ruse at one point, making them my ship of choice. (What?) J.D. and the local tomboy get set up by all the other characters, causing me to want to stab not only them but also myself in the eye.

COME AT ME BRO!

Oops. I’m supposed to be promoting Escapade, not starting fights about old tv shows. Anyway, I think the canon has some issues, but the fic... let me tell you, there are no words more likely to attract me to a fandom than “presumed dead”, and Mag7 fandom delivered, not only in the slash but in the gen. I have no idea, years later, where to find any of those fics or even which ones I read, but I remember there was self-indulgent melodrama and it was GREAT.

Sweet, sweet idfic, come to Mama!

I would link you to a vid, but as Fanlore hilariously confirms for me, there are like no good vids in this fandom. They did eventually release it on DVD, but the image quality is... uh... not great. Oh, wait, I did love this lulzy het vid about ladies being thirsty for Buck.

Actually, that’s a total lie. I have gone looking for Mag7 vids repeatedly for the Escapade dance party. Excavating my old spreadsheets, I see a bunch of interesting ones, like this slash vid of Nathan/Ezra. The Southern gentleman and the black guy are an obvious cliche teamup for Westerns, but the fandom rarely went there. This vid is great though! The only reason I’ve never played it is that no one at the con ships this.

Past Escapade panels include:

2001 - True pairings and permutations (Who are the "right" couples, and what other combinations are remotely possible? Video excerpts for newcomers.)

2003 - AUs! Crutch or creative lifeblood? (Are ATF stories a creative extension of the universe or a cop-out by folks too lazy to do their historical research?)

2004 - The Multiverse (Where canon is a formulaic retread of a remake of a classic, the critical mass of fan creativity has exploded in fascinating and bizarre ways. Often, richly textured parallel universes seem more attractive than stories based on the original source material. From conflict over "closed" AUs to creative in-breeding, what's really going on in the Mag 7 multiverse?) [HAH, EVEN YOU GUYS AGREE WITH ME.]

2005 - Where has the Old West gone? (Magnificent Seven has it all! Seven sexy men, horses, the old west, guns, adventure, right and wrong, you name it! So why isn't there more Old West fic? Why all the modem and future AUs? Where do we go from here?)

2006 - Cowboys- Real Life v. Fantasy (From Magnificent Seven to Brokeback Mountain, from John Wayne toughness to curtain fic. What's reel? What's fun? And how much reality do we want in our fun?)

2007 - Chris Larabee: Tragic Hero or Pig-Headed Bastard? (How worthy is Chris to lead the Seven? Does he lead them because he believes in protecting the weak an innocent, or because it strokes his ego? Does he truly value Buck's friendship and support? Vin's? Anyone's?)

2008 - M7: Need Topic! by Megan Kent [LOL]

2011 - Mag 7: Deader Than a Beaver Hat (They're gorgeous. They're archetypes. Lots of other fandoms have less to work with. So, what the hell?)

2012 - My Paring is OK. Your Pairing Sucks! (In a fandom famous for pairing wars, let's get it all out in the open and put it to bed. Come and defend your pairing of choice, and enjoy others doing the same. Inflatable lightsabers, laughter, and the ability not to take yourself seriously. All welcome.)

2013 - What holds the gang together? (The deal was simple: a dollar a day, plus room and board, for a month. And now they've been together *how* long? What holds these seven loners together over the long haul? All pairings, all points of view. Bring story recs to share.) [Duct tape. The answer is always duct tape.]

Mag7 on Fanlore (including links to many smaller archives)

Mag7 on AO3

Mag7 on FFN

[thelastspeecher]

I couldn’t come up with a good title for this quickly and I wanna post it now, so have a title-less ficlet.  What is it?  Why, it’s the scene in my King Stansort AU (where Ford finds out his estranged twin married a European queen) where Ford finally makes Stan upset enough that Stan kicks him out.

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              “What the hell were you doing?” Stan demanded.  Ford held up his hands placatingly.

              “Calm down, Stanley, I was just examining the Royal Archives.”  After Stan and the royal family were summoned for an emergency meeting of some sort, Ford had been told to do what he wanted until the meeting was over.  And what Ford wanted to do was look through the immense archives.  During the tour of the castle, Fiddleford had mentioned them offhand, explaining that they held the entire country’s history, stretching back to when society was first established in Lirone by immigrants from elsewhere in Europe.

              So, Ford had found his way back to the archives, read the instructions on how to handle the delicate material, and dug in.  But after only half an hour, Stan had burst through the doors and demanded Ford leave immediately.  Now Ford stood in a secluded hallway, getting scolded by Stan.  Stan’s guards, who escorted him everywhere, glanced at each other uncomfortably.

              “You didn’t get permission to do that!” Stan said firmly.

              “I wasn’t aware I needed permission.”

              “You weren’t- sweet Moses, Ford, are you pretending, or you really that fucking stupid?” Stan asked.  Ford bristled.

              “I was told I had free rein-”

              “Yeah, to do the other things you’ve done while you were here!  Obviously, you’d like to go to the archives.  I know that and so does Fidds.  Don’t you think that if you were allowed, you woulda been there already?”

              “I followed the instructions on handling the books,” Ford said.  “To the best of my abilities, that is.  There was additional instruction written in what I assume is Lironian.”  Stan’s face paled.  “Trust me, nothing will come of this.”

              “You better be right about that.”  Stan ran a hand through his hair.  “Only the royal family can read what’s in the archives, Ford.”

              “Not even historians are allowed to read the annals?” Ford asked.  Stan grimaced.

              “It depends.”

              “It depends?  Stan, people shouldn’t be kept in the dark about their country’s history.  If they don’t know what’s happened in the past, how can they prevent themselves from repeating it?”

              “It’s- everyone can learn about Lirone’s history,” Stan stammered.  “Just not from the archives.  They’re- they’re fragile.”

              “Then why is the royal family allowed to read them, but not those trained in how to handle delicate documents?”

              “I-”  Stan looked away.  “…It’s complicated, okay?  Just let it go.  We’ll go do something else, like go to the garden again.  Danny and Daisy want you to tell them the English names for the plants there.”

              “Let it go?  No!” Ford’s outburst startled even him. Stan looked back at Ford, his expression guarded.  “Why is everything so damn secretive, Stanley?  Every other question I ask, I get told I’m not allowed to have the answer.”

              “It’s above your pay grade.”

              “Why?” Ford demanded.  “Why?”

              “It just is.”

              “You’re my brother!  And Fiddleford is my research partner.  Whether the royal family likes it or not, I have the right to be involved.  I have the right to at least know why there are so many secrets, even if you won’t tell me what those secrets are.”  Stan merely stared silently at Ford.  “Say something, dammit!” Ford shouted.  One of Stan’s guards took a step closer to Ford.

              “Fine!” Stan snapped.  “You wanna know why we won’t tell you any of the secrets?  It’s not just ‘cause they’re so high level that no one outside the castle knows them.  It’s also ‘cause you can’t be trusted, Stanford!”  Ford’s jaw dropped.  “Fidds told me about your research.  You’ve been obsessed with uncovering all this wild shit in Oregon.”

              “You- you know about-”

              “Yeah.”  Stan scowled. “I also know that almost every single ‘anomaly’ you ‘discover’ doesn’t get a say in whether they’re part of your research or not.  Maybe the unicorns or gnomes or whatever the fuck you study doesn’t want everyone to know about it.  But you don’t give a shit.  You’re still gonna publish it.”  Stan met Ford’s eyes.  “You can’t keep a secret.”

              “That’s different!  It’s for my research!  If I don’t publish my findings-” Ford started.  Stan turned away.  Ford’s fury boiled over into rage.  He grabbed Stan’s shoulder.  “Look at me when I’m talking to-”  The guard that had inched closer earlier promptly grabbed Ford and shoved him onto the floor, pinning his arms behind his back.

              “Do not touch the king consort,” the guard said in thickly accented English.  Ford tried to move his head to see Stan, but couldn’t.  The guard had him in too tight of a hold.

              “Marley, let him go, he wasn’t trying to attack me, he’s just pissed,” Stan said in a tired voice.  The guard released Ford slowly.  Ford got to his feet.  He glared at Stan.

              “I take it Lirone is now going to go to war with the United States?” he spat. “Given what I’ve been told about minding my manners and kowtowing to everyone here, that’s the only logical conclusion.”  Stan rubbed his face.

              “Look.  I get you’re pissed.  But-”

              “All I wanted to do was comfort you in your hour of need.  Offer reassurance when your wife was in danger,” Ford continued.  Stan’s weariness morphed into anger.  He grabbed Ford’s shirt and pulled him close.

              “I didn’t ask you to do that,” Stan snarled.  “I didn’t ask you to show up and turn my life upside down during the worst thing that’s happened to me since you watched Pops kick me out and didn’t do shit about it.  Are we piling the manners on a bit thick?  Yeah.  But things aren’t exactly fine and dandy right now, in case you haven’t noticed. The queen, my wife, was almost assassinated.  You’re good at pissing people off even when they’re not on edge.  Hell, you upset Lute, the prince who cares least about being polite, within a minute of meeting him!”

              “I didn’t realize-”

              “No, you didn’t.  Because you don’t realize anything.  You don’t realize that the person who tried to kill my wife is still on the loose. You don’t realize that I have a million things to do and keeping my brother happy isn’t on the list.  You don’t realize that you’re not allowed in certain rooms of a goddamn castle you’re a guest in.”  Stan let go of Ford’s shirt.  Ford stumbled back.  “And when you find out that last one, you throw a fucking tantrum.  Like one of my three-year-old daughters when we don’t let her stay up until midnight.”  Stan looked at the guards.  “Escort my brother off the premises.”  The guard that had pinned Ford earlier immediately grabbed his arm.

              “Stan-” Ford protested.

              “I don’t have the time or energy to fuss over you,” Stan said, his face twisted in frustration and fury.  “I have a meeting to get back to.  A meeting on my wife’s assassination attempt.”  He turned around.  “I’ll tell Fidds to get your things and arrange for a plane back to the States. Where you won’t be yelling at me while I’m trying to keep my daughters from getting shot, too.”  Stan stormed off.  Once the echoes of heavy footsteps had faded, Ford looked at the guard holding him.

              “You don’t need to have such a tight grip,” he said.  The guard’s hold tightened further.  Ford winced.  “…I’ll stop talking.”  The other guard rolled his eyes.

              “That’s probably the smartest thing you’ve said since you’ve got here, Dr. Pines.  Come on. The sooner we get you out of here, the sooner we get back to our job and the sooner you get back to yours.”  After spending two weeks immersed in the drama of Stan’s new life, Ford’s research almost felt like it took place in a different lifetime.  Ford let the guards lead him down the hall.  The anger that had flared up during his argument with Stan was swiftly fading, being replaced by a hollow guilt.

              “Right,” Ford said quietly.  “My job.”

[shirlleycoyle]

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex

“It’s quite possible someone’s having sex with me right now and I don’t even know it,” adult performer and director Stoya told me.

Her vulva is for sale on the internet and in stores. Or rather, a rubbery, lifelike mold of her vulva is, in the form of a Fleshlight. The outside of it looks almost exactly like her actual body. The inside is a labyrinth of corkscrew shapes, nodules, and ridges. It’s dubbed “The Destroya,” a name that, nine years after the product launched, still makes her laugh.

Fleshlight manufacturer Interactive Lifeforms LLC has sold more than 75,000 Destroyas and more than 15 million Fleshlights total since the company started 20 years ago. It averages around 20,000 retail orders every month, according to a spokesperson for the company.

At around 1.63 pounds each, that’s nearly 24.5 million pounds of fucktoy floating around, taking up space in closets, nightstands, and under beds around the world.

The Fleshlight is an artifact of the sexually adventurous, technologically innovative 90s, but it’s become the face—and lips, and anus, and lips—of the male sex toy industry. The fact that a disembodied vulva and vaginal canal to jerk off into exists in 2019, the era of #MeToo and grabbed pussies and tabloid uproar over sex robots, shows the often contradictory intersection of sex and technology.

On one hand, the Fleshlight is a portal to new forms of sexual openness, allowing people, even those who think of themselves as heterosexual men, to engage in sex that moves away from old notions of gender and the biological body in general. On the other, the Fleshlight is also the reduction of a person to a replica of their reproductive organs. But 21 years since its inception, Fleshlight, the people who use them, and sex toy experts are realizing that maybe people don’t need an exact replica of a vulva or anus to get off. Sex toys are increasingly taking on more abstract, functional forms, and the future of the Fleshlight and toys like it may rely less on using replicas of disembodied genitals.

Today, the Fleshlight is polarizing even for the people who use it. No matter your opinion of the ubiquitous brand, it’s made an undeniable mark on human sexuality and the world.

Hundreds of years from now, if sentient life still exists on Earth, when archeologists dig up the still-intact bits and pieces of plastic casings containing rubberized genitalia, what will they think of the Fleshlight? Will it be considered an antiquated representation of how society literally objectified and commodifed sexual pleasure, or a turning point in the normalization of sex toys for all people, and our first step into a world where technology is an inseparable part of sex?

The answer, according to people who make them, use them, and are them, is both.

WHAT MAKES A FLESHLIGHT

The original Fleshlight model consists of a 10-inch plastic tube casing with a soft sleeve inside. You stick an erect dick (plus some water-based lube) into one end, grip ridges on the outside of the casing, and stroke the penis inside of the sleeve. You fuck the tube, come in the tube, then (ideally promptly) unscrew the whole apparatus and rinse it out with water (soap could degrade the material) and dry it.

Earliest archived version of Fleshlight.com, captured May 1998

Why the Fleshlight exists is a complicated story that’s become seminal sex toy lore. If the many interviews given by the company’s founder Steve Shubin are to be believed, the Fleshlight was born from his desire to get off while his spouse was pregnant.

In the late 90s Shubin, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team, and his wife Kathy were expecting twins. Both in their 40s, the couple was advised by doctors that because of their age and the fact Kathy was having two babies, the pregnancy was high-risk. He claims they were told not to have sex again until after the baby was born.

“I asked my wife ‘would you think I was a pervert if I told you there was something that I could use, sexually?'” Shubin told Wired in 2008. “But the adult store had only junk. Just crap. I thought, I can make something better, and took $50,000 of our savings to start working on it.”

Image from the 1997 patent filing for a “discrete sperm collection” device.

Shubin’s first patent filing, in 1995, was for a “female functional mannequin,” a hard sex doll torso. He called his next invention, which boiled the whole doll down to just the genitals, a “device for discreet sperm collection.” The proto-Fleshlight.

This version of the Fleshlight was pretty similar to what we see on the market today. But the description Shubin laid out in the 1997 patent filing was much more clinical. The product was framed as useful for sperm banks or doctors’ offices.

It also predicted some of the embarrassment many men feel from tucking a sex toy away in their own homes:

While my [sex doll] patent succeeds admirably in fulfilling the objects of that invention, it has several characteristics that prevent it from universal acceptance. When the torso mannequin is used in sperm banks, doctor’s offices, and other public facilities, it is sometimes intimidating to the patient being treated or may have an adverse effect upon the patient’s sexual desire and ability to deposit sperm. […] When the device of my patent is used in the home, or by those who find such a mannequin to be positive in nature, there is the concern that others will still find the object during a casual visit to the home.

The earliest version of Fleshlight.com that’s archived online, captured in 1998, shows a company attempting to carve a path as the first widely-accepted male sex toy by characterizing it as a requirement of virility, manliness, and insatiable sex drive. From an archive of Fleshlight’s “Our Philosophy” page circa May 1998:

The need for sexual gratification is as present and as powerful in a man as it is in the stallion. But where the stallion has no ability to wait, relentlessly pursuing his desire until he is satisfied or restrained, man has the ability to control his desires through fantasy… That release has to be done in a responsible way or we risk our relationships, expose ourselves to disease, take a chance with unwanted pregnancy, or even, in extreme cases, break the law.

The market, and we as a species, were primed for this thing to succeed. Hallie Lieberman, sex historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, told me that artificial vaginas and sleeves date as far back as the 1600s—the first being Japanese masturbators made from tortoiseshell and velvet, she said. Artificial vaginas were sold in the U.S. as early as the late 1800s, she said, and Doc Johnson debuted the “pocket pal” in the late 1970s. Pocket pals look a lot like Fleshlights without the hard case around them (therefore, like long fleshy sandworms), and the labias themselves are a lot more realistic-looking compared to Fleshlights’ more smooth, almost cartoonish aesthetic.

Doc Johnson’s “Pocket Pal,” as seen for sale on Amazon.

When Fleshlight hit the market in the late 1990s, sex toys marketed to male customers still mostly consisted of “pocket pussies,” “those disembodied, often clunky looking artificial vaginas—sometimes with fake pubic hair,” Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation, told me. “They were really kind of gross looking and for years, many women-friendly retailers, such as Good Vibrations, refused to carry them because they felt that displaying disembodied female body parts didn’t fit with their women-friendly vibe.” (San Francisco-based Good Vibrations became the first sex-positive, women-friendly sex shop in the U.S. in 1997.)

“Some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

Since time immemorial, men have been fucking whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be rubber gloves, toiler paper rolls, couch cushions, fruit, teddy bears, etc. A story about a Redditor who jerked off into a coconut, then later had his penis covered by maggots (he did it multiple times with the same coconut), has become treasured Reddit lore. There are also communities committed to exploring upscale DIY masturbators by refashioning Pringles cans, sponges, and building a better Fleshlight.

The Fleshlight arrived in a perfect pro-masturbation societal storm, Lieberman said: On the heels of the safe sex messaging of the 1980s AIDS crisis, in the midst of cultural landmarks like Seinfeld’s 1992 episode “The Contest” which grappled with masturbation both male and female, and as the White House forced Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 for suggesting masturbation should be taught in school. In the 90s, masturbation, for better or worse, was discussed more openly than ever.

Shubin couldn’t have happened into a better time to unveil a tasteful sex toy for penis-having people. But the Fleshlight founder’s reputation is controversial: he’s waxed nostalgic in interviews about his time as an aggressive LAPD cop, and the company’s Glassdoor reviews are generally abysmal.

In 2010, Stoya stopped by the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin, Texas before her mold was made, and described Shubin as a “mountain of a man” who normalized the absurdity that surrounded him.

“He was like, ‘We’re having a meetin’ about selling your vulva, in a can, in a box,'” she said. “It suddenly seems so reasonable and everyday when you’re talking, but you get back to regular life and it’s like, Ha, there are like 100,000 replicas of my pussy floating around.”

USER EXPERIENCES

When I went looking for Fleshlight users, nearly 200 people messaged me to voluntarily talk about their Fleshlight experiences.

“It felt a lot better than I thought it would, which kind of depressed me tbh,” one Fleshlight user told me. “Made me miss actual physical intimacy. Hence why I only used it like 5 times.”

I offered all of them anonymity in order to speak freely about their private, sexual experiences, and asked the ones who requested anonymity to explain why they didn’t want to be named. Almost all of them cited some element of social stigma or shame.

The overwhelming majority of these people were male-identifying. Many said they were lapsed Fleshlight or non-Fleshlight pocket pussy enthusiasts—guys who told me they’d been gifted a masturbation sleeve of some kind, years ago, or bought one on a whim, and used it once or twice before casting it aside again. Several cited the difficulty of cleaning the Fleshlight for why they don’t use it more.

At least three cited some hazing ritual in college, or sharing one pocket pussy with an entire group of male friends.

Several described feeling a sense of disgust with themselves after using it.

“Used it like 4 times, post nut clarity hit extra hard, & now it’s somewhere in my closet soaked in semen & dust,” said one person.

Almost everyone who spoke to me said the feeling of masturbating into a fake vagina is nothing like the real thing.

“They’re billed as lifelike, and they simply are not,” one said. “Of course! It’s a chunk of rubber at the end of the day. It’s not a bad thing, they feel good.”

A few men told me that they use Fleshlights due to physical disability, to increase stamina, or conditions that make it difficult for them to have sex otherwise. One said he bought his online when he was 22. Because he has cerebral palsy, finding sexual partners is difficult. A Fleshlight, he thought, would make imagining the experience more vivid.

“It was what I expected, but it was also more difficult to enjoy for me as my hand would cramp from using the plastic container thing it came with for extra suction,” he said. “As a disabled user, it allowed me the freedom and knowledge that sex toys were definitely for me! It helped me deal with some of the loneliness that I was experiencing.”

I also spoke with Dan Cooper, senior editor at Engadget, about his experience reviewing a Fleshlight Launch—the company’s digital product made with teledildonics company Kiiroo, that moves up and down on its own, in tandem with porn scenes. Cooper’s childhood phimosis (a condition that causes over-tightening of the foreskin) led to him needing a medical circumcision, which he said gave him limited sensitivity during sex or masturbation.

“Even as someone who thinks of themselves as sex-positive, I’ve always held the view that Fleshlights were a bit sad,” Cooper told me. “I’d assumed that they wouldn’t have worked with my broken genitals, but it was revelatory how effective (and fun) they are to use.”

A few wives and girlfriends told me why they bought their male partners Fleshlights as gifts. Their stories usually involved buying masturbators as a couple, to use while traveling or in long-distance relationships. Some said they were gifts to use during military deployments.

Karabella, a trans woman and porn performer, told me that she first encountered a Fleshlight in 2012, on her first big production shoot. “I’d never even heard of a ‘pocket pussy’ before, but [the director] pulled out a brand new one and handed it to me,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly inviting when I first slid into the butthole-shaped slit of cold silicone, so I initially started to lose my erection. However, as it began to warm up around me it was increasingly difficult to differentiate between it and real flesh.” Seven years later, using a Fleshlight has become a staple of her cam shows and performances.

HOW IT’S MADE

Beyond what’s publicly available on the Fleshlight website, specific details about the production of Fleshlights are a closely-guarded company secret. No one outside the company seems to know what the soft, skin-like material—trademarked as “Real Feel SuperSkin”—is made out of.

Kristen Kaye, Fleshlight’s Head of Business Development until late last month when she left the company, said that the material “is indeed proprietary.” She told me she believes it is biodegradable, and “made of natural materials, mostly.”

The closest I came to finding the secret recipe for SuperSkin was through the founder of FleshAssist.com, a website devoted to all things Fleshlight and masturbators. A 24-year old web developer who goes by the pseudonym John started FleshAssist in 2014 after years spent frequenting Fleshlight forums. He told me in an email that ever since buying his first name-brand Fleshlight at 20 years old, he was “hooked.”

John told me that SuperSkin, as far as he’s aware, is made from “amorphous polymers,” a mixture of PVC and silicone. It’s similar to CyberSkin, another type of thermoplastic faux-skin material used in lots of non-Fleshlight brand sex toys and dolls (but not patented, like SuperSkin).

“The trick with softer materials is that they will inevitably not feel as velvety or suede-y as harder silicone,” Emily Sauer, founder of sex wearable company Ohnut, told me. “So there is in the development of the product, there is a constant battle between, you know, does it feel too sticky? Does it feel gross in any way? There’s a very fine line.”

“The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

Micropores in the Fleshlight’s PVC make their “skin” more realistic to the touch, but also can never be fully, truly sterilized once it’s used. The top complaint I heard from all of the Fleshlight users I spoke to was that it’s too hard to clean to use regularly.

“That’s really gross to me that guys don’t even rinse them out right after, now I’m thinking about it,” Kaye said. “How hard it would be to clean…. If you were to let things dry in there, how disgusting that would be?”

After our call, I borrowed a friend’s (unused) Fleshlight to find out for myself. It’s relatively easy to unscrew the pieces and take apart, and there’s a hole in both ends of the removable soft sleeve to run water through it. As In Bed Magazine’s YouTube review notes, the most inconvenient part of cleaning is leaving it out to dry in the open long enough that you can safely store it without worrying about mold growing in a wet, airtight can—but not so long that your roommates or family stumble across a silicone worm with a vulva on the end of it.

“I think it just comes down to laziness, to be honest,” Kaye said about why people don’t regularly clean their Fleshlights.

According to my very informal online polling, she’s right.

“The biggest annoyance for me was the clean up,” Twitter user and self-proclaimed “vaginal aficionado” @BurlClooney said. Burl first heard about Fleshlight on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had a partnership with the company from 2010 to around 2012, according to Rogan’s tweets at the time.

“Your semen goes down into a base at the bottom and you should really clean that shit immediately,” he said. “But, I usually just wanted to sleep right away and would leave it until the next day or I would forget until I next used it. It was absolutely fucking disgusting. The cum would turn a weird color and it was so gross to clean out then. However, I mainly stopped due to all the prep work. The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

BECOMING A ‘FLESHLIGHT GIRL’

Stoya told me she once fucked a man with a mold of her own silicone vagina.

“It was so like, bizarrely narcissistic, but kind of beautiful,” she said.

She’s featured in one of Fleshlight’s most popular product lines, the Fleshlight Girls. There are also Fleshlight Boys (anal molds), and Guys (dildos), all modeled after real porn performers’ anatomy. Fleshlight currently offers around 45 models of Fleshlight Girls, including Stoya, Riley Reid, Jessica Drake, and Kissa Sins.

“I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Becoming a Fleshlight Girl is a career goal for many in the industry. Kaye, who led the selection of Fleshlight models, told me that three or four years ago the performer’s popularity rank on Pornhub, for example, would have been a deciding factor. Now, she looks at a variety of metrics—social media following, engagement online, how entrepreneurial and invested they are in their own success.

As secretive as the SuperSkin material recipe is, the process of molding a real vulva into SuperSkin is kept even more tight-lipped.

Fleshlight Girl Elsa Jean told me that the process of getting her custom mold done involved going to the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin and having someone cast a mold of her vulva and anus. Fleshlight models’ genitalia are also photographed using a 3D camera, and the final mold is hand-sculpted by a professional artist to get the details as accurate as possible.

“For my butthole, I had to go into a doggy[-style position],” Jean said. “I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Once they’re finished making the silicone mold, the models are given the product to check out. When Stoya saw a Fleshlight modeled after her own anatomy for the first time, the first thing she did was text a handful of her former lovers a photo of the silicone vulva. They’d know, she reasoned, if it was realistically accurate. (They said it was.)

“It was a very like, holy shit moment,” Stoya said. “You feel a bit like an action figure.”

Models are paid in royalties instead of a flat fee. The more that sell, the more money they personally make. For Stoya, being recruited for a Fleshlight of her own was a springboard into independence in the adult industry. “It’s what’s enabled me to start independent porn companies like Zero Spaces,” she said. “It’s sold well enough that it gives me the extra resources to do creative things.”

“Having my vagina and butthole on sale for people is actually pretty amazing,” Jean said. “Believe it or not, it was one of my goals when I first started in the industry. It’s as close as they can get to having the real thing.”

The actual objectification—turning a woman’s body into an object—involved in making a custom Fleshlight has brought the company, and anatomically-correct masturbation sleeves generally, some criticism.

“I don’t think it’s objectifying,” Lieberman said. “In fact, I’d even say that some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

I asked Stoya how she feels about the objectification criticism, as someone who’s worked in the adult industry as an actor, director, writer and business owner. Is the idea that hundreds of men could be fucking “her” right now weird at all?

After all, hundreds of people could be jerking off to her porn right now, too—and isn’t that kind of the same? Not at all, she said.

“People like don’t give a fuck largely about who’s doing the fucking [in mainstream porn], who’s coming up with the fucking, but with a Fleshlight—someone has looked [for me],” she said. “And even if they don’t know who I am, or my work, or care who I am as a person? They’ve still chosen my vulva. And that’s qualitatively different.”

People choose the Stoya Fleshlight because they’ve seen her work, or read something she’s written, or even just read the description on the product page of her persona, she said—and liked what they saw enough to pay $79.95 to fantasize about fucking her.

“That feels really humanizing,” Stoya said. “Whereas seeing one of my videos pirated on Pornhub with a sentence in the description that says, ‘Don’t mention the performers name so she can’t find this and get this removed’? That’s really dehumanizing, and really separates you from your work. With the Fleshlight, it’s the opposite.”

THE STIGMA

As the woman charged with marketing a plastic pussy to the masses, Kaye had a big job. And a huge part of that job, she told me, is overcoming the stigma attached to masturbation sleeves, and the men who buy them. Kaye’s worked in the adult industry—in advertising, consulting, and marketing—for 13 years, but for the last three with Fleshlight, she’s made it her mission to drag that shame out from under men’s beds and bring masturbation tools into the light.

“Unfortunately, for men, there are stigmas attached to using a masturbation device… because for whatever reason, if a guy’s masturbating or talks about masturbating, it’s like they’re not getting laid,” she said.

“For cis-gendered males, revealing you have a fleshlight gives implications that you can’t ‘get a girl’ on your own, which inhibits the positive ramifications of using sex toys,” one anonymous user told me. “In reality, they can help people explore what satisfies them, and healthily masturbating can relieve stress or just clear one’s mind, at least in my experience.”

“I feel like a lot of men feel ashamed or embarrassed for using one, but when you’re having a dry spell or not getting laid often, it’s very beneficial,” Twitter user @g0dsparadise said. “I have given Fleshlights as gifts in the past, I have told my closest friends about it, and I am hoping that one day it becomes very common to own one just because this whole stigma is ridiculous to me.”

Some pointed out a percieved double standard between male and female-gendered sex toys. “There’s an interesting dichotomy,” Cooper said. He attributed it to women’s sex toys being seen as “luxurious” and respected, while men’s typically aren’t. “But it all drills back to the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of sex.”

FleshAssist founder John told me that while the stigma itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, it still exists.

“I saw a comment before that said something along the lines of ‘a dildo looks potent, it shows that a woman doesn’t need a man,’ making it a symbol of female independence and empowerment,” John said. “I think if we flip that around, and say ‘a man with a masturbator shows that he doesn’t need a woman’ it doesn’t have the same resonance at all.”

Liberman said that she has noticed this stigma, too—and that despite toys like Fleshlight in the mainstream, it hasn’t changed much. “I think that’s because men are supposed to be self-sufficient and not need additional tools to get off,” she said. “Their hands are supposed to be all they need.”

THE FUTURE OF FUCKTOYS

It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.

If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.

Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.

Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.

Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.

“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”

She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.

As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.

Sauer points to Tenga, a Japanese company that’s been making disposable soft strokers and sleeves since 2005, as an example of where the industry could continue heading: Toward a less gendered, more pleasure-centered future of sex. One of their products, the Tenga Egg, is a handheld stroker shaped like a gummy, hollow egg, and they’re sold inside Easter egg-hunt-shaped packaging.

“They’re de-misogynizing the male masturbator,” Sauer said. “[Tenga products] are so delightful, but they’re just as dirty. They’re meant to be thrown away, but they come in really fun patterns. And what’s less masculine than a white egg?”

“I think that sex toys now are moving away from realism: the idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away,” Lieberman said. “People are more focused on both the utility of a device (does it give me an orgasm) and the design: they want something that looks beautiful.” She noted that the Eva II vibrator by Dame, and Unbound’s Bean and Squish are geometric—not dick or vulva-shaped.

Fleshlight is no exception to this trend. According to Kaye, the Fleshlight Turbo, a newer, non-anatomical sleeve, is creeping up in reviews. It looks nothing like human anatomy. It doesn’t even come in “skin” colors—only “Blue Ice” and “Copper.” (However, a helpful cross-section of the Turbo labels where you’re meant to imagine the lips, throat and tongue would be.)

Screenshot via Fleshlight.com

“I think marketing the other stuff—the stuff that’s not like, pardon my French, fucking a rubber pussy—that’s how we’ve transitioned our marketing approach,” Kaye said. “The exact replica of the genitalia? I think that’s kind of getting tired. I see that the younger people are more inclined to get the stuff that’s non-anatomical, that’s a little more discreet.”

“The idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away.”

“There’s more of an acknowledgement that many people don’t fit into the gender binary and our toys should reflect that,” Lieberman said. “I think that gender neutral sex toys are popular now because sex toys always reflect the culture of the time they’re created in; they reflect the current gender norms…. I think this shift in sex toy design to gender neutral reflects both a profit motive and a desire for inclusivity.”

For some companies, this might be an inclusivity effort, but for others, “it’s a response to the fact that inclusivity can be profitable,” Comella said. “A business that de-genders vibrators or ‘queers’ sex toys also expands its potential market reach by eliminating labels that don’t have to be there in the first place.”

But for those who still want the visual illusion of another person, Fleshlight isn’t going anywhere.

“That’s the thing to always keep in mind with the adult industry: It’s the business of fantasy,” Stoya said. “It’s like magic or professional wrestling. The audience who enjoys it comes in, ready to suspend their disbelief.”

Lieberman believes that lifelike sex toys impact our sexuality mostly for the good. If you want the feeling of fucking a penis or vagina or butthole without another person attached to it, that option is available to us, here in the future.

“I’m not sure that our society is that much different for having the Fleshlight in the world,” Lieberman said. “But our society is better when more people are having orgasms, and since Fleshlights provide orgasms, then our society is a bit happier thanks to the device.”

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[uwmadarchives]

Black Student Strike Teaching Kit: Memory for Justice

by Student Historian in Residence Rena Yehuda Newman (They/them)

For the past three months, I’ve been working collaboratively with the UW Archives Staff to put together a Teaching Kit about the Black Student Strike of February 1969, in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Strike, coming up in February 2019. As of the end of December, the first draft of the kit has been finished and sent out to community members for review. By the end of January, I’ll have a link up here for anyone to view the kit publicly.

I drafted the following post before winter break, and though it’s a bit late in its posting, I figure that as I enter the revision stage of the kit (having received tons of helpful, wonderful feedback from community collaborators), I want to post this bit of personal reflection.

______________________________________________________________

Mid December, 2018

I’m heading home for winter break this Sunday. But before I sign off for the break, I wanted to take a second to reflect on the experience of putting together this kit, especially as a white historian working on a public project to document black activism.

After Cat, Troy, Katie, and I had our first meeting to talk about compiling a teaching kit for the strike, I was enthusiastic about the project. These days, I think reparations through education can be an effective tool for restorative justice, revitalizing memories of upstanding community members fighting injustice. The staff was kind with entrusting me with a lot of say in the process, more or less putting me in charge of curating the primary source documents that the kit would feature.

Holding this responsibility means being transparent about my own limits: as a white student, there are limitations to my work on this project. The meanings and choices I make regarding the materials and curation of this kit will be influenced by my own identities and experiences. Whiteness impacts those choices. While it is necessary that white people also engage in anti-racist action in all spheres, at all times during this project I have wondered deeply about my ability to do justice for a project like documenting the Black Student Strike of 1969 for Students in 2018-2019.

Many of my weekly meetings with Cat Phan, my supervisor, were spent discussing this question of curation, bias, and identity. By nature, this collection will be limited (we tried to keep it to ~10 documents for accessibility’s sake). I’ve included an extra document, a placeholder entitled “Absent Materials”, highlighting omissions in curation and encouraging students to question inclusions and exclusions in the collection. We also included a set of “Modern Materials” regarding a set of demands by black students for 2016, also calling for anti-racist action on campus.

We wanted the kit to include a wide swath of voices, especially student voices. We wanted the kit to uphold the story of the black student organizers, despite the fact that our UW archival collections have enormous gaps with regards to firsthand student activist accounts. I wanted the kit to make clear the history of state violence that the UW enacted on its own students by calling in the National Guard. I wanted the kit to reaffirm the ongoing relevance of the Black People’s Alliance’s “13 Demands”, salient today. I wanted this kit to bear witness and I wanted this kit to help my peers bear witness.

But as a public, community project, the UW archives staff cannot be the only voices in constructing the kit. While my usual instinct is to bring in more student voice, especially connecting with my black peers about this project, Cat suggested that we send it out wider, including scholars from the Black Studies Department, Black Student Center, and Multicultural Student Center. Now that the first draft is done, we’re in process of sending it out to these community partners for critique. I want to be accountable for mistakes I’ve made in this process, transparent about my thinking. I want to be accountable for the work that’s being done/needs to be done. I want to document that process of accountability so that students doing similar projects in the future can learn from my mistakes and reflections.

I hope that this kit, after feedback, collaboration, and revision, can be a jumping-off point for restorative education. A small teaching kit cannot claim to tell the whole story of an event like the Black Student Strike, but it can provide an opportunity to glean old-new meanings, to give students and educators alike the chance to explore a less-commemorated event that bears enormous significance for the UW community. The process as well as the product brings lessons to questions of what it means to be a part of this strange American project, locally and nationally.

The Black Student Strike contains lessons for me as a young, white student seeking to work for justice on campus and in the world. I hope that the questions contained in this teaching kit can act restorative, opening up conversations about the Strike itself and what it means to inherit its memory.

[didanawisgi]

For Heller, thank the scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm

Arlington, Va.– In the hours after February’s school massacre in Parkland, Fla., Joyce Lee Malcolm watched the response with growing annoyance:

“Everybody seemed to leap upon it, looking for a political benefit, rather than allowing for a cooling-off period.” As a historian, Malcolm prefers to take the long view. As a leading scholar of the Second Amendment, however, she is also expected to have snap opinions on gun rights, and in fact she often has engaged in the news-driven debates about violence and firearms. “Something deep inside of me says that people never should be victims,” she says. “And they never should be put in the position of being disarmed by their government.”

Malcolm looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences. Her favorite topic is 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-American history, from the causes of the English Civil War to the meaning of the American Revolution. Her latest book, due in May, is The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold, a biography of the infamous general. She doesn’t belong to the National Rifle Association, nor does she hunt. She admits to owning an old shotgun, but she’s unsure about the make or model. “I’ve taken it out a couple of times, but the clay targets fall safely to earth,” she says in an interview at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, where she’s a professor who teaches courses on constitutional history as well as on war and law.

She is also the lady who saved the Second Amendment — a scholar whose work helped make possible the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision, which in 2008 recognized an individual right to possess a firearm. “People used to ask, ‘How did a nice girl like you get into a subject like this?’” she says. “I’m not asked that anymore.” She smiles, a little mischievously. “Maybe they don’t think I’m a nice girl anymore.”

Back when Malcolm was a girl, she lived in Utica, N.Y. A state scholarship sent her to Barnard, the women’s college tied to Columbia University, where she majored in history. “It was a process of elimination,” she says. “I took calculus and chemistry, but history seemed the least narrow. You could study the history of math or the history of science. It had the widest scope.” She got married as an undergraduate — “people did that in those days” — and by the time she was 23, she was both a college graduate and a mom.

Malcolm wanted to continue her education. Living outside Boston, she applied to graduate school at Brandeis University, thinking that she might attend part-time. Administrators, however, talked her into the normal, full-time option. So she launched into a Ph.D. program, focusing on England in the early modern era. “I really liked the period,” she says. “It was wonderfully complex, with divisions between the rights of the state and the rights of individuals.” For her dissertation, she moved to Oxford and Cambridge, with children in tow. Now separated from her husband, she was a single mother. “It took some balancing. I’m not sure I was the best parent I could have been, but my kids grew up seeing what you can do when you put your mind to working.” (One of them is Mark Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize–winning health and science journalist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.) In Britain, she met a Scotsman who became her second husband. She brought him back to the United States and took his surname.

Malcolm’s doctoral dissertation focused on King Charles I and the problem of loyalty in the 1640s, and much of her scholarship has flowed from this initial work. The Royal Historical Society published her first book, and she edited a pair of volumes for the Liberty Fund, totaling more than 1,000 pages, on political tracts in 17th-century England. As she researched and wrote on the period, she noticed something peculiar. “During the English Civil War, the king would summon the local militia to turn out with their best weapons,” she says. “Then he would relieve them of their best weapons. He confiscated them. Obviously, he didn’t trust his subjects.”

At a time when armies were marching around England, ordinary people became anxious about surrendering guns. Then, in 1689, the English Bill of Rights responded by granting Protestants the right to “have Arms for their Defence.” Malcolm wasn’t the first person to notice this, of course, but as an American who had studied political loyalty in England, she approached the topic from a fresh angle. “The English felt a need to put this in writing because the king had been disarming his political opponents,” she says. “This is the origin of our Second Amendment. It’s an individual right.”

As she researched, Malcolm taught at several schools and worked for the National Park Service. In 1988, she took a post near Boston, at Bentley College, a school best known for business education (and now called Bentley University). Fellowships allowed her to pursue her interest in how the right to bear arms migrated across the ocean and took root in colonial America. “The subject hadn’t been done from the English side because it’s an American question, and American constitutional scholars didn’t know the English material very well,” she says. Some Americans even resisted looking to English sources because they wanted to stress their country’s uniqueness. Moreover, law-school textbooks and courses skimmed over the Second Amendment. “The subject was poorly covered.”

Her research led to a groundbreaking book on the history of gun rights, To Keep and Bear Arms. Before it went to print, however, she faced something she had not expected: political resistance. “I had a hard time finding a publisher,” she says. After several years in limbo, To Keep and Bear Armscame out in 1994, from Harvard University Press — an excellent result for any scholar in the peer-reviewed world of publish-or-perish professionalism. “The problem was that I had come up with an answer that a lot of people didn’t like.”

The Second Amendment, she insisted, recognizes an individual right to gun ownership as an essential feature of limited government. In her book’s preface, she called this the “least understood of those liberties secured by Englishmen and bequeathed to their American colonists.” Confusion reigned: “The language of the Second Amendment, considered perfectly clear by the framers and their contemporaries, is no longer clear.” The right to keep and bear arms, Malcolm warned, “is a right in decline.”

She aimed to revive it at a time when governments at all levels imposed more restrictions on gun ownership than they do today. Many legal scholars claimed that the Second Amendment granted a collective right for states to have militias but not the individual right of citizens to own firearms. With To Keep and Bear Arms, which received favorable reviews and went through several printings, Malcolm joined a small but increasingly influential group of academics with different ideas. Her allies included Robert J. Cottrol, of George Washington University, and Glenn Reynolds, of the University of Tennessee (and best known for his Instapundit website). “I was so naïve,” she says. “I thought the idea of research was that you find information and people say, ‘Good! Now we know the answer!’”

She learned the truth in 1995, when House Republicans invited her to testify before a subcommittee on crime. The subcommittee’s ranking member was Representative Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York (and today’s Senate minority leader). In his opening remarks, Schumer scoffed at Malcolm and other witnesses. “The intellectual content of this hearing is so far off the edge that we ought to declare this an official meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” he said. “Because the pro-gun arguments we will hear today are as flaky as the arguments of the tiny few who still insist that the Earth is flat.”

Malcolm still bristles at those words. “I was a Democrat at the time,” she says. “I was raised a Democrat. I was just there to tell them what I had found out. It wasn’t a political issue for me. But the Democrats were nasty. Schumer was nasty.” After the hearing, Malcolm came to a realization: “For some people, opposition to individual gun rights is an article of faith, and they don’t care about the historical evidence.” Ever since, she has received regular reminders of this fact. In 1997, for example, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia praised Malcolm’s “excellent study” but also erroneously called her “an Englishwoman.”

The unfortunately named legal scholar Carl T. Bogus jumped at the blunder: “Malcolm’s name may sound British, and Bentley College, where Malcolm teaches history, may sound like a college at Oxford, but in fact Malcolm was born and raised in Utica, New York, and Bentley is a business college in Massachusetts.” This irritates Malcolm. “They’re always trying to write me off because of Bentley, this ‘business college,’” she says. “It reminds me of the saying that if you don’t have the law, argue the facts; if you don’t have the facts, argue the law; and if you don’t have either, attack your opponent. The attacks have helped me grow a really thick skin.”

Along the way, the popular historian Stephen Ambrose provided Malcolm with inspiration. “He spent most of his career at the University of New Orleans,” she says, noting that it’s not considered a top-flight school. “He said he wanted to write himself to the top of his profession. It doesn’t matter where you teach. So I tried to write and write and write. You can lift yourself.”

Even so, some people continue trying to keep Malcolm down. The latest slight occurred at a symposium sponsored by the Campbell University School of Law in February, when the legal scholar Paul Finkelman equated the Supreme Court’s Heller decision with its notorious 1857 ruling in Dred Scott, which denied citizenship to blacks. Right after this provocative claim, Finkelman raised the old canard about Bentley in a bid to damage Malcolm’s credibility moments before she addressed their audience.

It didn’t matter to Finkelman that Malcolm had written her way up in the academic world’s pecking order: In 2006, she left Bentley and became a professor at George Mason’s law school, now named for Scalia. By this time, not only had Scalia praised her work, but so had other judges, including Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who cited To Keep and Bear Arms in an opinion.

Then, in 2008, came Heller, arguably the most important gun-rights case in U.S. history. A 5–4 decision written by Scalia and citing Malcolm three times, it swept away the claims of gun-control theorists and declared that Americans enjoy an individual right to gun ownership. “If we had lost Heller, it would have been a big blow,” says Malcolm. “Instead, it gave us this substantial right.” She remembers a thought from the day the Court ruled: “If I have done nothing else my whole life, I have accomplished something important.”

A simple idea has motivated her work: “For me, trust in the common man is such a basic principle. Few governments actually allow it. They want to keep their people vulnerable and disarmed. I find it awful that people wouldn’t be allowed to protect themselves.” She also calls attention to a cultural aspect: “City people who grew up without guns think it’s just a bunch of rednecks.” She recalls an incident at Bentley, years before Heller: “I was in my office one day and a groundskeeper came up. ‘I just want to shake your hand and thank you,’ he said. What else could I have been writing about that anyone would want to thank me for?” She pauses. “There’s just so much vilification of the people who want to ‘cling’ to their guns,” she says, echoing the words of Barack Obama, who as a presidential candidate in 2008 said of rural and working-class whites — future Trump Republicans — that “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

Malcolm is now a Republican herself. When she hears gun-control advocates say they don’t want to ban all guns — “just the ones that look scary,” as she puts it, with a tone of contempt — her thoughts turn back to Britain. In 2002, she published Guns and Violence: The English Experience. It showed, among other things, that crime rates were low in the 19th century, a period with few gun restrictions. Things are different today: Crime has worsened in the United Kingdom, while gun ownership is rare. “Britain has gone down the road of taking away guns,” she says. “And look where it got them.”

She points to a website of the U.K.’s Police National Legal Database, which includes an online forum called “Ask the Police.” One question inquires about self-defense products. Are any legal? The answer: Only one, a “rape alarm” that looks like a car remote. Its panic button emits a screeching sound. The website also warns against using nontoxic sprays against assailants. If “sprayed in someone’s eyes,” such a chemical “would become an offensive weapon.” In other words, potential rape victims can push panic buttons but must not dare to injure attackers — not with sprays, let alone knives or guns. “Can you believe it?” asks Malcolm. “They don’t let people protect themselves.”

Americans probably won’t face such a predicament, even in the aftermath of the Parkland killings and whatever reforms are enacted as a result. State legislatures have taken strong steps over the last generation to protect gun rights, and the Supreme Court has clarified the language of the Second Amendment. Even so, Malcolm is worried. “Some judges are ignoring Heller, and unless the Supreme Court agrees to hear these cases and overturn them, we’ll see an erosion,” she says. Liberals in the media and at law schools cheer on the renegades. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has called for the overturning of Heller itself, and if a single seat now held by a conservative were to flip to a liberal, she could get her way.

In the meantime, however, the right to bear arms will not be infringed — thanks in part to the pioneering scholarship of Joyce Lee Malcolm.

[tingthings]

The Kiap’s Wife

Jan Sinclair tells the story of her husband, the late Dr. James Sinclair.

‘A lot of people know about Jim’s work but they don’t know a lot about him’ she said, as she stood proudly with a smile radiantly beaming across the many faces eager to hear the story of her late husband during the launch of his last book DIWAI, The history of The Divine Word University.

Jan Sinclair was the wife of a man renowned for his exploratory patrols into a remote and untamed Papua New Guinea. His 41 books and hundreds of photographs are a rare and accurate source of PNG’s colorful colonial past.

James Sinclair or ‘Jim’ as people called him, was fascinated by the early history of New Guinea. As a student at Sydney Grammar School he read every book he could about that country.

‘He was a non-conformist, even after school’ she said with laughter under her breath. His mother said one son Max was to be a doctor and Jim a lawyer. Jim did not want to go to University and the young, rebellious and adventurous James applied to become a kiap. He was too young and worked at menial jobs until he was old enough to apply to go to New Guinea.

In 1947 after a five-and-a-half-month course at the Australian School of Administration in Sydney the 20-year-old James began his first posting to New Guinea as a Cadet Patrol officer. He went to Wau then Ioma then back to Lae and other posts. He eventually went to the Southern Highlands. There Jan had been posted to open a Primary A school at Mendi. The trouble was there was no school just the Mendi Valley Club.  She was the first single female officer to be sent there. ‘In our group there were 10 women – 8 were sent to Moresby. One to Daru and me to Mendi. I asked the Director why I had been sent to such a remote place and he replied ’Because we thought you would fit in better’.

The Methodist Mission was her temporary home. From there it was a fair trip across a suspension bridge then on the back of a motor bike to her school. The school always had the smell of stale cigarettes and beer.

Jan rebelled and asked to live on the station. Materials were scrounged and Jan’s house was built. The only paint available was bright pink so the house became known as the pink House on the Hill.

A loud ‘Whoop whoop’ from the hills was heard one day and the children knew a big patrol was coming in. I had forbidden them to go out to see it but they went anyway with a throng of people watching the patrol come in.

Jan looked outside the classroom and saw a man, skinny as a whip stick with a bright red beard, holes in his shirt and very grubby. Teachers did not regard kiaps highly and thought them bigheads.

‘When you go to Mendi look for my friend Jan and send her my regards’ asked a friend from Wapenamunda and the message had to be delivered by the red bearded kiap. ‘My boss introduced me to Jim (James Sinclair). All I could see was a scruffy, skinny and untidy man. I did not think much of him.’

Easter was always fun as most of the kiaps were given a break at Headquarters. The Mendi Valley Club was the venue for the Easter Party. ’I loved big skirts, winkle pickers and Rock and Roll as did others. After a dance I looked for somewhere to sit and there were no chairs so Jim offered me his knee. I sat on his knee to be told ‘You are a fast-little bit”. I left straight away.’

Next morning, I heard a knock at my door. On opening it I saw a clean shaven.  smiling face and a well-presented young man. ‘Don’t you remember me’ he said to which I replied that I had never seen him before.

Later on the District Commissioner wanted an exhibit to be presented at the Goroka Show. Jim being a good photographer myself and others went to Goroka.

A while later we decided to get married. Jim went back to Koroba and we conducted a courtship by ‘Sched’ a daily radio linkup with outstations. Everyone spoke – admin people, missionaries, visitors from all over and much advice was given to us. It provided entertainment.

Preparing for our marriage we decided to choose what we would need from both our houses so I visited Koroba on a wet cold day. As wood in the fireplace burned down it was found other wood was too wet so Jim threw a large bundle of papers (screwed together neatly) into the fire. I asked him what it was and he replied that it was a book he had written. I asked why he would burn it and he replied that everyone who came to New Guinea wrote a book and he was no different.

After our marriage we were posted to Wau. In 1962 the Foot Royal Commission announced that Australia had to hurry up its attempts to have Self Government so six local persons were to be Advisory Members to the Legislative Assembly. Many people thought their jobs were in jeopardy, so they left and others took up study. So, with two young children and me not working I told Jim he had better finish his law degree. Sometime later he came home and said I am not going to do any study but I will write that book again. That was the one he burnt at Koroba. I did not think he could remember it but he started next day in February and wrote the book which was published by Melbourne University Press in December. It has become a very valuable book on early exploration in that era.

We were posted to Lae, Finschhafen and then Wau and twice more to Lae. During this time, I started teaching again. Jim was transferred to Goroka as Deputy District Commissioner in 1968.

He always loved the Highlands and he was thrilled.

He was appointed District Commissioner in 1969 because it was petitioned by the local leaders.

The Goroka Shows were the most colourful shows in New Guinea at that time and Jim took up his photography with great delight. Taking his photography talents to a new level, Jim captured the colours and the vibrant cultures of PNG. ‘One of his photos showed a yellow and red initiation mask from the Duna. He did not know hat this would become a national symbol.

Jim was a good communicator. One episode is worth telling. At a big gathering in front of some Royal visitors it was the interpreter’s turn to translate the speech. A rumble went through the crowd and fists were shaken; mutterings began. I felt it was a tense situation. The upshot was that the people wanted Jim to tanim tok (translate), not the interpreter. His Pidgin was superb.

A visitor to our house was David Attenborough (now famous naturalist) who was at that time a BBC journalist. Jim was interviewed for the famous British Current Affairs program ’24 Hours’. He and Jim were of the same age and had much in common.

After Jim wrote ‘Behind the Ranges’ I said to him I hoped he had got writing out of his system. He said the book he had always wanted to write was one on Jack Hides – The famous ‘Outside Man’ He did that and later Bobby Gibbes pressured him to write his biography. In spite of work pressure and protests he relented.

He was appointed District Commissioner in 1969 because it was petitioned by the local leaders.

Many books on Aviation followed.  Jim loved doing these as he was always a frustrated pilot.

Many famous figures crossed our path and stayed in our house. In 1972 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh came.

Jan recalls seeing the Queen in earnest conversation with Jim talking about using reflectors for taking good portraits. She was just a wonderful lady.

One local leader Soso Sube, was very disappointed because the Queen did not wear her Crown and let Missis Kwin know this. She placated him by saying she had to wear a hat because the sun was too hot and the Crown too heavy.

Localisation had come and Jim was posted to Port Moresby in 1972. Relics of the past era of colonialization were unpopular – that is records of Government. They were to be destroyed. Politicians just did not understand their value. Jim was encouraged to get as much as he could copied to save. These became a fundamental section now in the Archives – a rich area for researchers.

1975 came sadly for Jim as we left PNG.

He was never going to settle in Australia and hated his job at Melbourne University Press.

He won a couple of Commonwealth Literacy Fellowships and we settled on the Sunshine Coast.

His writing became hard work but he just loved getting back to New Guinea.

In his last years he wrote about his years in New Guinea:

“I think that most men who have patrolled in the uncontrolled areas will agree that the years so spent are in many ways the finest and most rewarding of the patrol officer’s life, filled with the satisfaction of country covered, new people seen and new mountains climbed.”

Jan has given all of the past historical documents collected by her husband to the Canberra Archives – his being the biggest collection on the South Pacific. It is waiting for national scholars to record their own history, which was Jim’s great wish.

Smiling as she was applauded, ‘Thank you for listening to an old lady who has talked too much’ said Jan Sinclair, the wife of an historian, photographer, explorer, friend, husband and father.

Read the story here: https://tinyurl.com/kunyja5r

[greenpapayaartprojects]

MATERIALISM IS A EUPHEMISM: Excerpts from the first Kalampag Tracking Agency screening, UPFI Videotheque, 2014

The Kalampag Tracking Agency was initially started as “a screening program in the form of an initiative.” An organizational collaboration between Shireen Seno of Los Otros and Merv Espina of Green Papaya under its Generation Loss (GEN_LOSS) program, Kalampag sought to present some of the most singular, fragile, and striking moving image works by Filipinos over the past 30 years. The initiative was launched by two screenings and discussions, the first of which took place on 20 August 2014 at the University of the Philippines Film Institute (UPFI) Videotheque.

The impulse of Kalampag led to ongoing research and archiving of Philippine artists' moving image that branched off into other projects, such as the ongoing Light Leaks series currently hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD).

Advancements and ongoing experimentation with digital technologies and artists’ moving image creation and distribution are ever accelerating at breakneck speeds, perhaps even more so now because of the conditions set about by the pandemic. Who could have imagined that in less than a decade since the first Kalampag screening that watching videos from our smartphones would become normal behaviour? Most of the artists, collaborators, and curators had no smartphones during the preparation work for the Kalampag in 2014.

Below is an excerpt from a lengthy post-screening discussion between Alice Sarmiento, Raya Martin, John Torres, Nick Deocampo, and Merv Espina. Shireen Seno, Kidlat Tahimik, Kidlat de Guia, Teddy Co, Jon Lazam, Martha Atienza, Malay Javier, and many others were in attendance and actively contributed to the discussion. What follows is an example of the performative and participatory nature of the screening program and the post-screening discussion that further enriches the materials and informs ongoing research.

*****

Alice Sarmiento (AS): To append to what Nick [Deocampo] and Raya [Martin] were talking about earlier, I think one of the interesting things I noticed from the second half was this element of decay that was present in almost all the films. I know it has to do with bad prints or whatever, but the fact that it’s present in these films from the past, if you look at the current visual vocabulary especially with something like Instagram, you’ll notice that decay is something we simulate now using technology.

The thing with technology now is that we’re coming from a place of abundance where it’s super easy to flatten everything, but everything is also infinitely reproducible so we’re talking of a very different garbage pit altogether. We’re not talking about the dumpster behind LVN Pictures or Mowelfund, we’re talking about how to work and sift through a different pile of garbage. We now have concepts like infinite reproducibility, flattening, and simulating decay and the fact that there is no limit to what you can upload to YouTube. These really change the potential for what film is going to be in the future or what we’re experimenting with.

I have a really horrible example right now. I saw the trailer for Sex Tape (2014) earlier, starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz. One of the things there is that they have an iPad and they filmed themselves having sex for three hours which accidentally got uploaded to the cloud. So, we’re talking about a generation that’s born into this concept of the cloud.

To add to what Teddy Co was saying about communities earlier, we’re not even talking about forming communities. We’re talking about a population that’s literally native to this idea of filming themselves and publicizing everything they do. I think those are the things that are completely beyond our grasp right now. The fact that the common, the public sphere, and the act of disseminating something have all changed.

Of course, you have technology as the culprit for all of that but I think that, rather than feel nostalgic or like you’re being displaced, just understand that technology never really displaced or displaces us, but more like it adds to what is present. Thank you, Raya, for laughing.

Raya Martin (RM): No, I think I kind of understand it…

Merv Espina (ME): Well, I agree.

RM: Sorry, just a footnote, but what you said about that certain aesthetic of bringing together the older and newer works, of course we still don’t see it yet, but what if this sort of cinema from the ‘70s is now in this one big app or  website?

AS: Well, yeah. Because if we think about it, the people who are using Instagram now are the people who have access to smartphones. Who are these people who have access to smartphones? It’s people who were born in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So, there will still be that hampering that, “When I was a kid, it was like this.” We’re still the generation that can recognize that kind of frame. I’m sure that if I show it to my nieces, they’re not gonna have any idea what celluloid and those frames are. They’re gonna think, “Oh, that’s the thing they have on Instagram right?” It has now become a filter. It’s another way of co-opting that language from the past, but that is something that came up. It’s something that they’re going to translate in their own hands.

RM: In the same way, I’d like to say that experimental cinema turned into a music video aesthetic.

AS: Yeah, that’s what I recognized also. I’m sure that Nick sees something else when he sees the videos of Roxlee, but I was like, “It’s like that Peter Gabriel video.”

Nick Deocampo (ND): This is the reason why I’m more of a historian than a filmmaker right now because the fear that I have in what we’re discussing is that you tend to efface the historical markings that are necessary to inform us of the state of technology, politics, economics, society, our mental well-being.

I’m sorry if I or some of us here may sound nostalgic because, in the end, I think it’s a kind of temporal framing. That’s also our legacy. One thing you may understand is that materialism is a euphemism of Marxism. You belong to that generation where the material reality, all of these were part of the process that we were in. That’s what I’m trying to caution ourselves; that unless you see that, it’s just a style that belongs to a certain temporal continuum, which technology enriches and adds up.

We still need to demarcate exactly that this technology in the ‘70s is different from the ‘80s. I’m sorry to be so chronological about it. Of course that kind of historical periodization can be put into a question or argument, but I feel that there’s still room for a historical nuancing for us to know what is still useful. Again, being informed is all I’m asking for and that’s why, as I’ve said, I engage in history because this country, our people primarily, tend to forget so easily.

AS: I think the fact that it’s becoming added to the argument is a result of a very interesting point that we started to realize what technology has to do with the formation of communities and how it influences aesthetic because you’re working from a place with limitations.

ME: There are still a lot of limitations with digital, so much.

ND: Codec issues.

AS: Yes, there is! I only mean to bring up how that is going to be augmented in the future especially now that you see 15-year-old filmmakers and 8-year-old app developers. I mean, those are very interesting developers right now. One of the things that concerns me at least, is how optimized it’s becoming with how people develop things. It’s becoming more convenient and more possible to just confine yourself to your room and do your own thing there without having to relate to people in this space because dissemination and screening mean something else now.

ME: We’ve all been very nostalgic about form, material, and how your works from the ‘70s and ‘80s were disseminated. Now that you’re focusing on the digital, no one has questioned or brought to attention the politics and possibilities of distribution when it comes to digital forms. There are so many ways to distribute. Cross-referencing with what you were saying about community, of course communities are developed from screenings and workshops because you literally had to be physically present in the workshops and the screenings.

ND: Now it’s all virtual.

ME: Yeah, and now, for example, some of the Marcos-era films can actually be seen online. Jon, what works do you have online? [Hindi sa Atin ang] Buwan (The Moon is Not Ours) (2011)?

Jon Lazam (JL): Yes, Buwan.

ME: You can see some of Raya’s works if you download.

RM: But I’m more old school, you have to pay for it.

John Torres (JT): I like watching in a big dark room with the others. Some people prefer to download and watch in solitude at home. Inside the cinema, I don’t have the remote so I power through a contract of continuous playback. If it were just me and the remote, I could take my sweet time and take breaks or naps. Or I could just decide not to watch altogether. I like both.

Teddy Co (TC): It’s also a discipline not to answer any phone calls!

ND: As a challenge to the curators here: why don’t you try to program something digitally? Because this actually questions the very practice of why you have to have a physical screening like this and bringing us together. Of course, we are rushing here because this is a sacred ritual as far as we’re concerned. Now, here’s the challenge: we won’t see each other. Let’s see what results you’re gonna have and inform us, maybe we’ll see each other. Again, it’s not a question of comparison of which one is better. We want to see exactly how we can move on from this old ritual of getting together, talking to each other, and trying to exchange or share some ideas. I know that on the internet, we somehow can, we can comment immediately. So, let’s move on to that.

If I sound so nostalgic, then I just want to correct one thing. It’s just an impression that maybe we sound nostalgic but personally, I’d like to say that we’re not. In fact we do recognize the materiality of video technology and that cinema has moved on. As I said before, my works right now involve digital technology and my documentaries have CGI. I’ve reconciled myself with the technology. It’s just that once again, we’re burdened by history. And don’t worry, 20 years from now, Raya, all of you will be speaking the same language when we are in the age of holograms. You know, I’m sure digital media will be over! Holograms will be here and that’s where the new masterpieces will be. We don’t even have to see each other, we’ll just be projected there.

***** #ThrowbackThursday #greenpapayaarchives #KalampagTrackingAgency #experimentalfilm #videoart #artistsmovingimage #losotros #losotrosfilms #lightleaks

This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Some parts were translated from FIlipino.

***** Images by Neo Maestro.

If you can: https://greenpapaya.art/donation

[mappingmeaning1]

Hidden Worlds (and how to find them)

by Alison Safford

Seeing Hidden Worlds

I spoke with Joanna van der Zanden last summer. She is a Dutch curator, writer, educator, as well as one of the originators of the Repair Manifesto and repair cafes, which have spread worldwide. I asked her what skills she thought were valuable for today’s students to have. She thought for a moment, and said they should be able “to see hidden worlds”. She mentioned the importance of noticing connections, relooking at the familiar, seeing potentials, and using a new eye all as ways of noticing invisible worlds and ultimately forging new connections.

The following online project is one that reverberates with maps’ potential to help us see the hidden.

Canon Zeedijk: Walking an Amsterdam Street Throughout the Centuries

Meeting Dio

I met Dutch historian Dionys de Hoog (also known as Dio), a friend of a friend, this past summer in Amsterdam. He was working on an online map of Amsterdam, combining a few of my favorite things: Amsterdam, maps, and hidden histories. 

He showed me some of the basics of the website on a friend's iPhone. It was very much a manifestation of things we love to look at in Mapping Meaning.

 His project, Canon of Zeedijk (link below), maps the architectural structures of Zeedijk, a busy street in the center of Amsterdam. Zeedijk is a busy street combining tourism, escapees from the Red Light District, a quick path from Central Station to Nieuwmarkt Square, or a good place to find amazing Chinese food at Nam Kee. The project shows incremental changes on the street since the 1500s, during various eras. These changes point to social and historical events, and the various powers that led to different uses of the plot that now holds a Buddhist temple. The maps show how the changes to a physical space, to brick and mortar, can reveal events, morals, and powers. 

Dio is working with 3D digital artist Daan Claessen, and several Amsterdam educational and city organizations to create this interactive historical map.

Mission Statement from the website:

With this project we hope to make the residents and entrepreneurs of the Zeedijk even more proud of their street. If that succeeds ... then we also manage to make them deal better with the street and with each other.*

The maps represent both the physicality of Zeedijk, and uncovers the stories behind the physical. Connections are established across time, to the present: from Catholic monastery in the 1500s before the Protestant Reformation, to Jewish quarter before WW2, and after the war robbed Zeedijk of it's inhabitants, the area declined. During the post-war era the city tore down the buildings now in disrepair to build a playground. Once the playground was overrun by drugs coming in from the neighboring Red Light District, the present day Chinese temple was built as an anchor for the street's current community with it's own interesting story, like most things Dutch, related to the VOC and trade of the Netherlands (link below). As inhabitants changed, changes were made to the structures to repurpose and at times "fix" problems, such as the drug problem in the 1970s playground. 

One of the most exciting aspects of it is a call for the public to contribute stories, old photos, and documents. Documents in archives tell stories, but this is a living, breathing neighborhood that demands current updating. Including the citizens to contribute to the history and experiences of Zeedijk, highlights a democratic and social aspect, and encourages a public connection to the project. The virtual provides an anchor for the physical community. 

Community is a focal point.

The Workings of the Site

To experience it best, go to the website (link below), take a short tour (available in English as well), and explore. Each “?” link takes you to source material about the buildings at various points in time. This includes specific historic imagery, and their archival provenance. As you navigate the site, you can change views, and years. 

Questions come up, about the history of the street, the town, and the country, and the people who lived there, and live there now:

Why was the convent abandoned?

Why did the buildings in a Jewish neighborhood fall into disrepair?

Why was there a need for playgrounds in Amsterdam post WW2?

Why was the playground plagued with heroin-users?

Who decided what progress was?

“Inquisitiveness and sensitivity are always important for me. I always ask myself why something is the way it is. A new world opened up when I began to study architecture. I became aware of what it means to design and build in a complex social environment, to intervene and change it.”

-Malkit Shoshan, architect, Harvard Grad School of DesignChange Makers, R. Jongewaard & A. Van Kesteren, 2017, Boijmans Museum

*The blog uses Dutch language (of course), which I ran through Google translate. Hence, it may read awkwardly.

Classroom Concepts to Explore 

Some ideas this project stimulates for teaching and beyond:

First hand sources: How connecting parts of a story can form a greater whole?

Interactive navigation: The viewer becomes the author or detective in this search. You can research your own questions, and investigate various angles.

How to represent time: To think not just about the movement through a space physically, but through time; what was there before you? How did you come to this space? What allowed for it? (We have projects about representing how one moves through space in time, I would love to consider moving through time while in one locus).

Making a community more curious about their neighborhood: How does a community become more curious? More informed? Knowledge is powerful way to create community.

Learning to read a space: When you walk down a street everyday, what do you notice? Do different façade treatments mean the Jewish grocery store was once part of a Catholic convent? Can you imagine that what is now a Buddhist temple, was previously a open public space?

The importance of primary sources: How do you tell myth or assumption from accurate narratives? And while two sources can both provide information, how do we read the spaces in between to gain a fuller insight? To flesh out the story? A student's or citizen's ability to piece together information creates a greater narrative, and both social and civic involvement.

Relevant Links  

Canon of Zeedijk

Project Page for Canon of Zeedijk (in Dutch)

Blog of Canon of Zeedijk (in Dutch)

History of the Chinese in Amsterdam

Repair Manifesto