#if curious the class is like. stories about the American west

[gothic-chicanery]

I just realized if I want to write about Oppenheimer for my final paper for my west class I probably have to rewatch it and it is So Damn Long. I’m also writing about it in comparison to a production I saw of Doctor atomic (the Oppenheimer opera (yes there’s an Oppenheimer opera)) but that will be a little bit easier bc I’m pretty sure no footage exists of that production so like at least I don’t have to rewatch that

[rubykgrant]

I made some adjustments to the colors/added a few more details, so here they are again! My Super Hero kids, that I first came up with a LONG time ago with my best friend, way back in middle school. I started with 5 characters... which turned into 7, and because I kept on going, that turned into two teams of 7 characters! A lot has changed over the years, but the "core" concept of the characters was always there. The things I've updated genuinely feel RIGHT, like this is who the characters were always supposed to be. (I also added descriptions to the images)

From left to right-

Casual; Lisa West, Bobby Gold, Ella Noble, Deke Garden, Rodney Bright, Cloe Chance, Min Shirabe

Heroes; SuperNova, Sunburst, Ferris, Rosewood, Vivid, Spellbound, Lyric

The basic plot of their story is two groups of kids begin developing super powers, and naturally want to start being heroes and villains about it (though, the "villain" kids aren't "evil", just little jerks/brats/punks who have some angst to work through). In the larger scheme of things, there is a lot of insidious background problems the kids slowly become aware of, and they all start working together to deal with it (a slow realization that the world they live in, while seemingly "normal", is actually recovered from some kind of post-apocalyptic event, and the concept that "heroes" have been used as tools or weapons in the past becomes clear. it is an unfair responsibility, but the kids are determined to change the system that the adults around them use to destroy each other... also, they have plenty of fun shenanigans, too. these are kids with super powers after all~)

Lisa/SuperNova's powers are enhanced strength/durability, flight, and the ability to control/conjure flames (she can also concentrate fire into intense heat-blasts). Personality traits; compassionate and courageous, sarcastic sense of humor, casually rebellious attitude. She is 16 (sophomore, held-back 1 year in 6th grade), her best subjects are history and art (crafting/woodwork), but she struggles in math. Lisa plays on her school's soccer team, and has taken several martial arts classes. She also enjoys cooking/baking, and horror movies. Lisa is autistic. Background; Native American Hopi/Norwegian/Columbian (dad's side), Inuk and Irish (mom's side). Gender/sexuality; nonbinary (she/her), bisexual, demisexual

Bobby/Sunburst initially thinks he only has powers after stopping an experiment that was trying to recreate what SuperNova can do, thus giving him similar abilities (his REAL power is being able to absorb energy, and that lets him copy/combine/enhance other powers), less of a strength-boost, but he can also conjure/create fire, and is eventually able to fly. Personality traits; conscientious and ambitious, modest, eager to help, curious. He is 12, a child prodigy (placed in 7th grade, but takes a few advanced classes) who excels at science/chemistry/physics. He's also just a kid who enjoys playing video games/tabletop RPGs, skateboarding, and collecting comics. Bobby is autistic. Background; he is Black, Kenyan and Greek (mom's side), Dominican and German (dad's side). Gender/sexuality; cis (he/him), heterosexual

Ella/Ferris can control metal, moving it, liquefying and reshaping it, and manipulating magnetic fields. Personality traits; talkative, insightful, calm and clever, witty and off-beat humor. Ella is 14 (skipped ahead to be a sophomore), a genius with electronics/machines (likes to collect vintage/out-dated devices and up-grade them), doesn't seem like she takes things seriously but is totally reliable, and is a big fan of sci-fi literature. She is always good for a philosophical conversation. While she isn't interested in being the center of attention, she isn't shy either. Ella is autistic. Background; she is Black, South African/Italian (dad's side), Ethiopian/Spanish/French (mom's side). Gender/exuality; transgender girl (she/her), heterosexual

Deke/Rosewood has nature powers, connected to plants and flowers (making them move or rapidly grow to great sizes), also able to decay/regenerate plant life. Personality traits; likes to make people laugh, mellow and easy-going, quietly sensitive. Deke is 15, a sophomore in school. Deke's interests are earth sciences, including botany and ecology, and cares a lot about the environment (they're family has a small farm and ranch). Sometimes seems like a daydreamer in class, but is actually very smart. Deke also likes to collect different scented candles/incense, and keeps a first-aid kit handy for emergencies. Deke was injured as a child, resulting in an amputation below the left knee (has a prosthetic leg, and also uses other mobility aids when needed). Deke is dyslexic. Background; Irish (dad's side), Jewish Ashkenazi/Romani (mom's side). Gender/sexuality; nonbinary (he/they), bisexual

Rodney/Vivid creates solid forms of colorful glowing light, using it as shields for defense, or an energy blast as an attack (he can also turn himself/other people/objects invisible by reflecting light, but have to stay still), and as solid surfaces for movement. Personality traits; soft-spoken, kind and clever, a little socially awkward. Rodney is 14, and a sophomore in school (previously went to a private school that was too competitive and harsh). Rodney is good in most academic subjects, and also a very creative person, with an interest in surreal/abstract art (both whimsical and horror), working with different mediums (painting/sculpture). He's somebody who likes to have lots of little snacks (and is happy to share). Rodney has anxiety. Background; Rodney is Native American Lakota, Ogala (mom's side), Sicangu (dad's side). Gender/sexuality; cis (he/him), gay

Cloe/Spellbound is a witch with magical powers (associated with darkness/night and the moon), but she is also capable of telepathy/telekinesis. Personality traits; withdrawn and cynical, determined, thoughtful. Cloe is 15, a sophomore (previously doing independent study after leaving a school where she was bullied). Cloe has spent a lot of time alone, and struggles to be comfortable around others, but slowly opens up (despite being argumentative, she's also very sympathetic toward other people). She likes fantasy/sci-fi/horror books, and enjoys reading about the history of folklore/mythology. Cloe is a little afraid of deep water (generally doesn't like to swim without something to float with), and isn't comfortable with touching/contact with anybody outside of her family/friend group. Craves extra sour candy. Cloe is autistic. Background; Cloe is adopted, raised in London. Both her adoptive and biological family are English, Scottish/Welsh (biological dad's side), Romanian/Polish (biological mom's side). Gender/sexuality; cis (she/her), asexual

Min/Lyric has music/sound themed abilities, she can let out a scream so loud it creates a sonic-boom, identify/mimic any sound or voice, and uses "magical musical energy" to make solid objects (usually in the form of musical instruments, for emphasis). Personality traits; self-assured, welcoming and friendly, loyal, optimistic and energetic. Min is 14, a freshman at school. Her talents are music and fashion, but she also takes gymnastics and ballet. She has studied classical music (with a broad interest in different genres, and contemporary music), and participates in a lot of talent shows/chorus groups/plays. Min is outwardly a social-butterfly, but isn't worried about fickle/fleeting popularity. Min is plural (DID), and has synesthesia. Background; Min's family is Asian American, Japanese (dad's side), Chinese (mom's side). Gender/Sexuality; cis (she/her), pansexual, asexual, polyamorous

[burberrycanary]

For the fic commentary game...I want to ask about so many lines, but ok. I've narrowed it down to three from Lost Vocabularies..., so you can pick—I'd be so interested to get your author's commentary on any (or all) of them! 💛

He will never forget nine months of stock prices from 1950.

(this is the one I'm probably least likely to get an answer to, which is fine, but I'm so very curious about what Steve did during those months in the past, and a girl's gotta try! 😜)

2. But he sure as hell doesn’t want them back, not so long as Bucky is willing to carry them, whatever they mean to him now—though Steve doesn’t like to think how Bucky must have found them and when.

(Basically, I just like to make myself sad about Bucky Barnes, so hey: talk to me about the dog tags!)

3.

“Why were you always signed up for something? You already took more vocational classes than about anybody.”

[…]

“Trying to impress my dad,” Bucky admits on a slow breath out. “But not in the way he wanted. ‘One of the laborin’ Barnes with a proper education,’ he liked to say. ‘Bastards won’t know what hit ‘em.’ He wanted me to live out that better American life he was chasing. Be respectable.” Bucky gives a faint dry laugh. “Sorry Pops.”

(I know this is more than one sentence...but I'm just endlessly fascinated by Bucky's (and Steve's) pre-war life and especially Bucky's relationship with his parents and how he feels about them now, after everything. So, if you'd be willing to elaborate on that snippet up there (I'm particularly intrigued by But not in the way he wanted), I'd be ecstatic!

(📦&🧼&◼&⬜-🔪)

2. But he sure as hell doesn’t want them back, not so long as Bucky is willing to carry them, whatever they mean to him now—though Steve doesn’t like to think how Bucky must have found them and when.

Crying into our beers over Bucky Barnes should be the name of our band. 😭🍻😭

The dog tags were such a distinctive element in TFATWS that I knew I wanted to use them in this post-Endgame fix-it series that ended up sprawling out to a bigger scope than I originally intended. But the first question from canon to consider is: whose dog tags are they, anyway?

In the surgery flashback from CATWS, we see that Bucky is no longer wearing his dog tags, which means they were taken away by Hydra. And this makes sense since Hydra was starting the process of completely stripping away Bucky’s identity. What Hydra does with Bucky’s dog tags depends on what kind of organization Hydra is, culturally and administratively. While you could write any number of stories here, especially since Bucky, as a specific known recovered asset, isn’t what the Japanese scientists in Unit 731 called “maruta” (“wooden logs”) or what the CIA-run black sites in West Germany under Project Bluebird called “expendables,” you could argue that Zola might keep Bucky’s dog tags for any number of reasons: spite, gloating, pride, or a perverse attachment to his greatest success. But the most rational course of action would be to destroy anything that could identify Bucky as a well-known American soldier—because this era of American history shows you could get away with not just murder but crimes against humanity as long as you played by certain bureaucratic rules. And this is the organization that Peggy Carter built, canonically, and the era that Steve returns to in Endgame—"the dark and bloody heart of the twentieth century [that] beat and maimed all the unsteadiness out of Bucky’s hands long ago." 

I’d argue these aren’t the dog tags that we see Steve wearing when he wakes up in the fake recovery room, which would have been replaced as part of the attempted deception, but instead the ones that he was wearing when he went into the ice, which would’ve been returned once the jig was up: 

Hanging around Bucky’s neck on a bright beaded chain are tarnished dog tags with the raised text turned, here and there, the pale green of copper eaten away by time.

I’ll admit I did look up the composition of WWII dog tags and scanned through some research papers on the corrosion levels in metal equipment used in the Arctic before deciding that I could just take a little literary license here and have Steve’s old dog tags be thematically “tarnished,” which in the text is explicitly tied to the theme of things being transformed over time, but the word also carries the connotation of something that’s sullied. For the dog tags, both meanings hold. 

My backstory headcanon is that Sam, who was the executor of Steve’s will and his chosen next of kin, invited Bucky to go through Steve’s surprisingly few personal effects for anything he wanted to keep before Sam donated the rest to museums. All Bucky took was the last, unfinished, mostly empty, little notebook and Steve’s old dog tags, which he restrung on a new chain. That’s it. That’s what Bucky is left with as a stranger in this strange land of the present. 

In the first glimpse Steve gets near the end of Still Left with the River, he interprets Bucky wearing his old dog tags as indicating that Bucky never stopped caring about him, which is true—Bucky kept on caring a whole hell of a lot. This is Steve’s “it taught me to hope” moment in the text that helps push him toward being honest with Bucky about how he feels after several decades of alternating between pining and grieving, pining and grieving. How many times has the worst already happened between them?

There is always an end to the line where the same big black pit is waiting. And eventually Bucky won’t crawl back out.

But the dog tags are deliberately ambiguous as a symbol, since they equally represent the grief that we see Bucky struggle with in TFATWS. They are Bucky’s chosen gesture of mourning when Steve buries himself in the past. It’s telling that even after Steve returns, Bucky doesn’t take the dog tags off or offer to give them back to Steve again. Whatever they mean, they’re Bucky’s now. And Bucky on some level continues to mourn a faith between them—ineffable and up to that point mutually committed to despite the worst the world could do—that Steve broke when he decided to go back to the past and which returning doesn’t unbreak. Because that’s the problem: “Time only moves in one direction.”

(“There’s a creepy stone somewhere that says otherwise.”

“Exactly.”)

Significantly, over and over, these fraught identification tags are described as occupying the space between Steve and Bucky:

Tipping Steve’s chin up with his thumb, Bucky kisses the blazes out of him while the old dog tags swing a little on their glinting new chain in the space between them.

How Steve left is still very much between them throughout this whole series. 

The scene where the dog tags are revealed as Steve’s is significant:

...Steve’s old dog tags swinging in the space between their bodies; then the warm tender weight of Bucky’s forehead, pressed just off-center against his chest, overlapping with the light touch of metal and the pooling chain; [...] Bucky pressed close, and his face hidden.

The contrary actions of Bucky pressing close but still hiding is how Bucky has chosen to deal with the complicated emotional situation Steve has put him in—the combination of intimacy and distance that shades through most of this series. Bucky is trying to both protect himself and give Steve a good-faith chance to do better. Bucky’s strength and generosity win out in the end, because that’s who Bucky is at heart: the bigger person in a way that has nothing to do with being tall or strong or healthy. But part of the problem of any post-Endgame fix-it is that no one fight or confession or “being shoved in a closet together” shortcut could solve these emotional sticking points. 

Steve really did that. Whatever his reasons or motivations, which this series digs into a lot in the subtext, in the moment Steve meant it. And there’s no way to undo the choices that have been made, not without recourse to an ethically flawed concept that’s the opposite of living: because trying to undo past losses is exactly what Endgame gets wrong by attempting.

Fuck Endgame: the only way out is through. And by “through” I don’t mean Steve passively playing white-picket-fence house with Peggy through the ugly back half of the 20th century and then getting some sort of science-fiction second chance for a life with Bucky, once all that’s over. That’s doubling down on the flawed ethics of Endgame.

Life is a process of making choices, over and over. And living with the consequences. How you live with them is another ethical choice you get to make, over and over. That’s the constant and inescapable ethical action inherent in being alive.

This series is deliberately full of minor characters with losses just as profound as Steve’s: loved ones gone, former ways of life lost, all the small gathered-together pieces that we each painstakingly build into a life vanishing, whether bit by bit or calamitously all at once:

Her face lights up. “Thanks, I make them myself. I’m thinking of going to fashion school, maybe. Textile design. I’ve already died—fuck being scared, right?”

Between war, the Blip and the Return, she has lost every member of what was once a huge family. And life just keeps going on.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Fuck being scared.”

Or:

“Been walking since Greenwood Cemetery. I can’t get to where any of my people are buried so you know what I’ve decided?”

Steve gives a hum, meaning what’s that?  

“I’ve decided to collectivize. Every grave on earth with the first name George is my boy’s. I’ve claimed every Elizabeth—in all forms—and Rachael, Robert and Joseph. Never cared for my husband’s people so I don’t bother with them. But I’ve got some favorites down in Greenwood picked out for my boy. ”

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Steve says, quiet, and thinking briefly of his own most recent dead. He doesn’t add, I know what it’s like to let grief triumph over reality. “So you visit.”

“Every day that I can. Lots of graveyards in this city. But Greenwood is nice. All the flowers and so forth.”

This is a story about grief.

Steve is trusted with great power to help set right wrongs the Avengers did during Endgame, setting all these other timelines on roads to destruction to save their own. And in the face of the temptation of that great fantastical power: the possibility of easy facile answers to unsolvably hard problems about change and loss so many people equally have to confront and hurt over and struggle with—all the time, right now, forever, constantly—Steve Rogers falters:

Preemptive—that idea is never going to seem right to him. But isn’t that what he’d tried to do when he’d stayed in the past? Get the preemptive good life by side-stepping the possibility of more loss? Because, for him at least, one way or another everything that mattered would have already happened.

And still the same old story at the bottom of whatever idealized notions got papered over top: trading other people’s lives for your own security.

He’ll never know whether, if his plan had worked, he would have stayed in the past for good.

And now he’s got to live with that.

If the dog tags in this story stand for anything, it’s living with the consequences.

You can make mistakes. We all do, individually and collectively. But there’s no undoing the past—not even in the MCU’s confused theory of the multiverse. All you can try is to do better: to make right what’s been put wrong as much as you can; or find things that are good and help them be better for more people.

There are deliberately four apologies offered in Lost Vocabularies: two from Bucky and two from Steve. But this is the climactic and closing apology that echoes the same language used to introduce the dog tags into the narrative: 

Pushing Bucky back, he touches the tarnished dog tags where the raised text has turned, here and there, the pale green of copper eaten away by time.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, meaning a whole lot.

Bucky’s response, “We got here,” deliberately sidesteps the question of forgiveness and is designed to be read in two ways. The first reading challenges the relative significance of the past—we reached here however that happened—while the second rejects the past more completely: all we actually ever have is right now.

The thing is, Steve has been angry his whole life and he’s trying so hard to be a little more grateful for a change. 

He’s been doing better and he’ll keep on trying.

But there’s still just so much to be angry about everywhere he looks, from the past all the way through to this moment, burning up in front of him right now: this crawling-forward world that should be better, and isn’t, and won’t be unless people step forward to shoulder the hard slow work with no one to punch and no climactic battle you win or you lose.

This sort of work requires the splendid terrible patience of the tide eating away at a face of rock: mighty and irresistible, but wearisomely slow.

You gotta do the work. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

A Man Takes His Sadness Down to the River (The Consolation of Philosophy)

[joecial-distancing]

2024 Mediatimes

Absolutely disgusted to be drafting a post on here again. RIP Cohost.

Didn't do, like, a ton of highbrow media engagement, but did manage to get caught up with a handful of classics. Also makes it easier to come up with some resolutions & plans of action for them, so hey it's not all bad.

Literature!

This year stunk for reading! Maybe the biggest shortcoming of any of these categories--I started hot and then ran completely out of steam way too early. I've felt like a dumber and more boring person, and it's been a struggle to get momentum back up.

Some of this feeling might be coming from a place of not counting comics and genre work as "real literature," but the point is I used to have more variety!

anyway!

Iliad:

Picked up the Emily Wilson translation, since I liked her take on The Odyssey a lot. I was really into this one at the beginning. I’ve only ever read the Achilles going super saiyan parts for a class before, so it was my first crack at the bulk of the text. I really liked the way that the mass death was approached; even as rando soldiers are being slaughtered, most of them get named, often with some lines about their families at home, and a lot of them even get some words about who they were and the life they’d lived. But then that ended up being almost all that was going on in the thing. Like in between the school class excerpts (things like the night raid, diomedes fightin' gods, achilles going apeshit, etc), the text really is mostly a big slog of duels that all run together after so many of them, and I had a tough time reaching the finish line.

Tehanu:

I'd read & enjoyed the previous three Earthsea books pretty recently, so I didn't revisit those when the Shelved by Genre crew covered them, but I hadn't made it to this one before. I was going back and forth with my opinion on it, but I think they kind of nailed it to the wall on the podcast by referring to it as a "custody thriller." It's a book that's Up To Something, but the Something is claustrophobic in a less artful way than Tombs of Atuan was, and then the return of dragons and destiny stuff at the very end was really strange and undermining. Ended up putting me off of trying to read the short stories.

Manga Digression--Junji Ito:

A Read-Along experience for Shelved by Genre, and a good reference point to have checked off. Uzumaki's easily tops on that list, and I think I didn't care for Gyo much by the end of it.

Manga Digression--Dragon Ball->Dragon Ball Super:

Figured I was already on the manga reading apps, might as well tackle another Big One, especially since Toriyama dying this year had a way bigger impact on me than I would've expected. I was never a Dragon Ball kid growing up, but I'd managed to osmose a lot from the surrounding pop culture.

Turned out I pretty much had the gist of Z-era from memes and having watched some DBZ Abridged back in college, but the early comics were interesting for better & worse. That first arc basically had exactly one joke to hammer on over and over, which ended up just being Sexual Harassment. Might've come across funnier if I were more familiar with the Journey to the West stuff that's having that kind of thing inserted into it. I'm also curious how much of all that made it past the censors for the american localization of the anime. The rest of it all the way through Z was basically the Shonen Bible, which was cool to see how much groundwork centered around this one property. Turns out the secret sauce was "make it less hetero."

My last post on Cohost was about reading through the Super stuff, which I can just repeat here--it's fun enough, but the ballooning scale of the arcs' threats being treated with identical severity each time ended up making me sad in the same way as researching satellites in a civ game.

The Stones Are Hatching:

Very much a coming of age story for kids, but steeped in fucked up terrifying English monsters and folklore. This had been a book I'd grabbed off the library shelf as a kid, and it left a huge impact on me. Was inspired to track it down again after honeymooning in Scotland, and it didn't disappoint on reread. Whole subthemes around WW1 that had gone over my head as a child.

Piranesi

Good recommendation, Jordan! Susanna Clarke at 2/2. I dunno why labyrinths make for such a good thematic space, but I love 'em. Very fun to have made it to this during a year that I'd played Void Stranger.

Speaking of, I saw somewhere that that one stop-motion studio had acquired rights to do an adaptation of this, which sounds interesting, but also the way more natural medium to adapt this kind of story to is 100% video games, and I think that's the first time I've thought that in my life.

A City On Mars

I feel like Zach Weinersmith's become one of the more interesting people to have emerged from that era of webcomic-making, in no small part due to his commitment to doing a lot of reading and research to back himself up, and I'm enjoying this arc of his & Kelly's growing profile as pop science figures. The book's solid, too. Pretty light reading overall, but it seems to be taking off at exactly the right time to throw some much-needed cold water on some of the more annoying public figures out there. It's asking good questions.

Movies!

Didn't keep up very well with (good) new releases, but I did do some catching up on a lot of 90s stuff I hadn't seen when I was younger

Bring It On:

Technically watched this one last year, but forgot to add it to the EOTY post. Really, really surprising movie. It started with a bunch of the usual components that show up in teen movies, and then swerved extremely hard into directions I absolutely was not expecting.

Legally Blonde:

Absolute classic of moviemaking & characterization, I'm extremely happy to have finally watched the thing.

Jumanji Remake:

"Watchable," given low expectations. Less interesting and less funny than the Robin Williams one

Pitch Perfect:

lol they ripped so much off of Bring It On and then made a dumber and more boring movie out of it. Jacob Wysocki from Dropout shows up briefly, which was fun to recognize him.

The Menu:

This was a fun time! Was worried we were going to be in for a cheap "eat the rich, audience claps" kinda thing, but then it kind of just turned into a movie about Ralph Fiennes chewing the scenery, which has never been a bad time. Nicholas Hoult was actually extremely good casting too, which isn't something I always think about him.

D&D Movie:

Most of any buzz I'd heard about this one was along the lines of "better than it had any right to be," which ended up being technically true, but also turned out to indeed be damning it with faint praise. Fundamental problem at the end of the day is Chris Pine's playing the main character, and he's exclusively there to Whedonvoice the entire time.

Stoned Watching:

Shelby and I got a tradition of every six weeks or so taking an edible and watching franchise movies that one or both of us hasn't seen before. The tradition started with the Twilight series, which were extremely fun to do that with, and we've been failing to hit the highs (heh) of those ever since.

Fast & Furious--FFX and Hobbes & Shaw: Had a few of these to get over the finish line from last year. These two in particular were weird ones to catch up on, because for me they really call in to question what the fuck people are talking about with their opinions on certain action stars. Why was everyone spending the last decade going bananas over The Rock? why do people talk about Jason Momoa like he's some kind of underappreciated star in the making? I understand these movies to be part of the basis of all that, and both of those guys are so goddamn annoying in these! What are you people talking about.

Die Hards--123, Live Free, A Good Day: Whole series checked off, each of them in order was worse than the last. First one's obviously a classic--I feel like people don't quite talk enough about how evil and insane McClane is in this, that santa hat dead body thing was a real sicko move. 2 and 3 are perfectly fine '90s action sequels, and then the last two are some of the most nauseating boomer dad pandering I have ever seen in my life.

Speed and Speed 2: Speed 2 is entertainingly terrible, in large part because they couldn't get Keanu Reeves back and instead cast a plank of wood as a new stand-in character. Dafoe scenery chewing always appreciated. Speed 1 though is an incredible idea for a movie, and extremely well executed

Twisters:

Mission accomplished: this was an extremely dumb movie that was very fun to go watch in the theater with friends.

Pride & Prejudice(s):

Shelby was telling me about how people have big disagreements on the 90s miniseries vs the '05 movie, and I was like "oh the only thing I know about either is that a guy from Succession's in the movie version and Succession watchers think that's extremely funny" which led to us watching both of these during Christmas time.

I think I mostly liked the miniseries more, but I did prefer MacFayden's take on the character. Some of that's down to directing, though, because they gave movie Darcy more stuff to do when he's in a scene but not talking yet. Like it makes sense for him to be curt with people when they're interrupting him writing a letter etc, whereas Firth's only ever staring out windows or into fireplaces--not exactly preoccupied with anything important. I dunno if I'm likely to read the book at any point, but I'm definitely on board with P&P being a story well worth checking out if you want to see a foundational work for so much romcom and sitcom writing.

Little Women:

Similar background--I knew people had OPINIONS on the Greta Gerwig version, but never read it and never watched an adaptation and we're officially on a period piece kick now. Only got through the 90s version before the year closed out. It's fun companion to P&P, like here's 50 years into the future, in America, in an Actual lower-class family, now let's compare & contrast & ignore some age differences.

Podcasts!

Mad Men Project

It's nice to have the picnic boys releasing stuff again! They've done media lightning round & one-off type stuff before that I've mostly been lukewarm on, but a several-episode deep dive is very solid ground for them. Super excited for future seasons.

Shelved by Genre

I'm a fan of the hosts, and it's made for a really good reading list. Fell off a bit after the Junji Ito unit, will have to check in on what they have coming up next.

FatT: Palisade

They finished the season on a real hot streak and I'm excited for them to start releasing stuff again next year

Games!

Void Stranger (mop-up)

The previous thing I'd gotten stalled on turned out to have a really easy solution, so I managed to work my way through some other secrets and unlocks. Reached a point though where it unlocks a mode that's a completely different video game, at which point I looked up youtube gameplay and decided "ohhhh no, I will not be running this many bullet hell drills to get the hang of this." Extremely good game! Labyrinths are a solid theme to build a game around.

KOTOR II Content Restored

Got a bee in my bonnet after playing BG3, and figured it'd be a good time to check out how the Content Restored mod played. Ultimately, the mod was mediocre; it fleshed out some cutscenes pretty well, but there still wasn't enough to make the final section Work, and the whole droid factory was a complete dud. I was vindicated on how inexcusably terrible BG3's party & inventory management systems are, though! Shit was basically a solved problem 20 years ago, it's like Larian decided to make things bad on purpose.

The other really interesting thing to fall out of the revisit was rereading all the Kreia stuff, armed with some inside baseball context about the game's writing. The guy who wrote Kreia also wrote Durance from Pillars of Eternity, and Durance's whole deal in hindsight is so clearly Chris Avelone taking a second crack at situating Kreia Ideology in a game world, but stated more plainly. The problem of course being that this ideology basically boils down to "Struggle is virtuous; generosity is handouts and therefore bad." Code the character spouting that as grey smoke instead of red, though, and people will read some serious depth into that starwars character!

Octopath Traveler II

I was in the mood for a jrpg, but ended up not being a big fan of this one. The tone of the thing was all over the place; it's written at a very juvenile level, but then one of the main storylines is about stuff like child brainwashing and human trafficking incestuous bloodline-purity sex murder cults

Balatro

I think I got past the addiction faster than a lot of people, but definitely put in my share of time on it. I might need to dip my head back in there now that there's been a couple gameplay patches.

Hades II Early Access

I'm enjoying myself with it so far. Compared to the first one, the game's rhythm is less twitchy reflex, and more zoning and positioning, which I'm into.

Caves of Qud

I'm having fun, but I might not have the exact right kind of personality to have this one dominate my life in the way that it apparently does for some people.

Magic: The Gathering

This one's been the real all-star this year. Some friends got me a commander precon for my birthday & set up a game night that week, and I've been fully In It the whole year. In addition to being a good attention outlet for staying off of social media feeds, it's just been good socially! Has me out of the house seeing friends more often than I've been able to do since COVID first hit.

Been exclusively playing commander, but maybe one day will branch out into draft or something

Music!

Cleared 1,024 on the 1,001 album generator (which has a total length of 1,089 because it includes entries from every published edition of the book). It's been educational! It's maybe not been worth the time investment, but my opinions on its pitfalls are way better informed now than they would have been 3 years ago before I started the project.

Next year I'll have a couple new music tasks once this wraps up. First, I need to start actually listening to and engaging more with the amount of stuff that gets posted on the Picnic Discord music channel. But then Second is that the generator has NG+ where people who have completed the 1,089 can submit an album, and then have a daily album generated from the user-submitted list. In other words, it'll be a fun look at the kind of stuff that's foundational or interesting to the kind of person that would commit to this thing for 3 years. I dunno if admin keeps a full available list anywhere, but I know there's some Big touchpoints I haven't listened to on there, like Weezer or Sophie.

Highlights:

Run-D.M.C. Raising Hell:

Hard to not be charmed by this era.

Pink Floyd The Wall and Wish You Were Here:

Growing up, my parents for some reason had a lot of albums from The Alan Parsons Project hanging around, Alan Parsons maybe being a recognizable name as the guy who did the audio production on some big deal albums, like Abbey Road and Dark Side Of The Moon. His music project is a weird blend of cool audio layering playground, art rock, and some of the most exhausting 80s soft pop you've heard in your life.

This year was the year I learned that Pink Floyd is absolutely the outlet for getting more of the parts of APP that I liked. Tremendous band.

David Bowie Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust:

Absolutely buckwild that the first Bowie album I got from this project was Low, with Ziggy Stardust being the last. That is like exactly the opposite order that someone trying to learn about Bowie should do it. There's a handful of artists on the list that have way too many albums included; Bowie's one of the few that actually kind of needs most of them on there.

Fela Kuti Zombie and Femi Kuti Femi Kuti:

Kuti Family undefeated. Afrobeat really does it for me, and Fela in particular was hugely influential on the parts of new wave that I like a lot.

Frank Zappa Hot Rats:

Hell yeah Zappa

Portishead Third:

More abrasive than Dummy, but makes for a really fun midway point between trip hop and something along the lines of HEALTH

Curtis Mayfield Superfly:

Underrated stand battle. Definitely one of those albums where you listen to it, you get familiar with it, then you start hearing everywhere how much people sampled it later on.

Pixies Surfer Rosa:

I owe Doolittle a relisten, since it was the literal first album that the project served me, but for now I actually think I prefer Surfer Rosa. Like one of them is the Pixies doing Pixies stuff, and the other is the literal soil for what would turn into the next 20 years or so of Good rock projects

The Mars Volta Deloused in the Comatorium:

Tremendous work, holding down the prog rock fort during a trying era.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz!:

Man these guys are like the ideal example of a 4.5/5 on the thing's ratings. Had a lot of fun with the album and I absolutely love when they come up on the highlights playlist, but they're just missing a little bit of juice that I can't quite ID.

U2 War:

I knew I wasn't just imagining that they had a genuinely great album in their discography.

Adele 21:

"Rolling in the Deep" is well worth cost of admission, but the rest of the thing really really held up for me.

Neu! NEU! 75:

It's the shame of british music critics that this genre's only really known in the anglosphere as krautrock, but goddamn it I really like krautrock.

Funkadelic Maggot Brain:

Opening track's an all-timer. I felt like it was kind of losing me in the middle, but then "Wars Of Armageddon" brought me back with the synthesizer fart noises. Long Live George Clinton.

Onto next year!

[nkjemisin]

ooh i saw your tags on a post about horizon forbidden west! do you mind me asking, what didn’t you like about the game? was it some of the writing or characters? my guess would be the Ancestors and/or Sylvens….. but i admit, the plot was secondary for me because I was having so much fun running around as Aloy: riding sunwings and exploring subterranean Las Vegas and swimming in the San Francisco Bay. and like you said, it’s SO visually beautifully, so i have on rose-colored lenses when it comes to both games. but i’m always interested in what other folks think about them because no game is perfect. anyway thanks! :D

Well, I tried to explain this once before and Tumblr ate it; let's see if I can do it this time.

My biggest issue with the game was that it had worldbuilding fails in specific areas -- namely wherever the devs were reluctant to let go of their own culture. It's a common flaw in worldbuilding that I talk about all the time; I did a Masterclass that addressed it in greater depth, but since I can't share that, here's a presentation I did a few years ago. (Note that the slides are meant to be accompanied by my verbal explanations and examples, so if something's not clear, that's probably why.) Anyway, in that presentation, I don't really have a name for this "fear of straying from the familiar," but I note that it's everywhere in SFF, and it's one of the reasons that so many "original" fictional cultures end up feeling like "us all over again, but they wear funny clothes." Usually those "us again" cultures feel a lot like medieval Europe, specifically, for reasons of historical racism and Eurocentrism -- and in the game, that's the Quen, Oseram, and Carta. Like, clothes aside, Avad was more Louis the XIV (also called the Sun King) than Rameses II or Moctezuma -- and there was no real reason for the Carta to feel familiar at all. And I'm pretty sure this is also why the few societies which structurally resembled any Indigenous American cultures (Tenakth, Nora, Banuk) were framed as innately tech-backwards and dangerously superstitious -- because that's how white supremacy and scientific racism have taught us to think about them, even though many Indigenous societies had tech advancements colonial Europe hadn't mastered (offhand: public health and sanitation, agricultural techniques, land management techniques that are damn near terraforming, much more). But it fit the pattern: all the places where the worldbuilding fell flat were where the creators could not for whatever reason give up the things they found familiar and comforting about our current world, whether they made sense for the future or not. I also think this is why the story in the second game landed squarely on racial and gender/sexual tropes that most writers know better than to deploy unironically these days, like The Black Guy Dies First and Depraved Homosexuals, and more. And I think this is the source of the game's cringier moments, like the weird nostalgic paeans to Vegas and the US military.

Then there's the game's United Colors of Benetton-style handling of race -- lots of superficial diversity, but a curious aversion to exploring its implications in any meaningful way. There was none of this aversion when it came to exploring disability, class, or sexuality. And meanwhile they can animate every strand of Aloy's flowing locks, but only one character gets kinky hair? (Why would anybody remark on Aloy's hair color when Varl is the real hair-unicorn in this game?) That made it obvious that the problem was unease with the whole concept of race on the part of the decision-makers, in-game and IRL.

So tl,dr; the devs couldn't or wouldn't decenter themselves, and so sacrificed story quality and plausibility in order to maintain completely unnecessary Americentrism, jingoism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.

Now, I want to emphasize: I also play the shit out of this game, and will buy the third game whenever it happens. It is genuinely beautiful and mostly does a good job of creating a world that feels plausible and lived in. It comes so close, in fact, that I suspect editorial interference; that is, I suspect some of the flaws I see were inserted by non-writers at the company, because they're too glaring for writers of any skill -- the skill necessary to make everything else we see in the game -- to have missed. Maybe I'm letting the writers off too easy, but I always try to remember that writing within a corporate environment for a multimillion dollar investment, with decision-makers whose egos must be appeased, is a whole other ballgame from writing for yourself. But it's frustrating to see good writing, and see so obviously that it could've been great writing.

Well, maybe in the third game.

ETA: Minor edits for clarity, because that’s how I roll.

[antoine-roquentin]

obliquely, this is in reference to how formerly working class bastions in the midwest that used to elect socialists now elect republicans. if we all gave up the theory that LGBT people are normal, we might once again go back to the days where we elected socialists across the country. thomas frank, what’s the matter with kansas:

But its periodic bouts of leftism were what really branded Kansas with the mark of the freak. Every part of the country in the nineteenth century had labor upheavals and protosocialist reform movements, of course. In Kansas, though, the radicals kept coming out on top. It was as though the blank landscape prompted dreams of a blank-slate society, a place where institutions might be remade as the human mind saw fit. Maps of the state from the 1880s show a hamlet (since vanished) called Radical City; in nearby Crawford County the town of Girard was home to the Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper whose circulation was in the hundreds of thousands. In that same town, in 1908, Eugene Debs gave a fiery speech accepting the Socialist Party’s nomination for president; in 1912 Debs actually carried Crawford County, one of four he won nationwide. (All were in the Midwest.) In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt signaled his own lurch to the left by traveling to Kansas and giving an inflammatory address in Osawatomie, the onetime home of John Brown.

The most famous freak-out of them all was Populism, the first of the great American leftist movements.* Populism tore through other states as well—wailing all across Texas, the South, and the West in the 1890s—but Kansas was the place that really distinguished itself by its enthusiasm. Driven to the brink of ruin by years of bad prices, debt, and deflation, the state’s farmers came together in huge meetings where homegrown troublemakers like Mary Elizabeth Lease exhorted them to “raise less corn and more hell.” The radicalized farmers marched through the small towns in day-long parades, raging against what they called the “money power.” And despite all the clamor, they still managed to take the state’s traditional Republican masters utterly by surprise in 1890, sweeping the small-town slickers out of office and ending the careers of many a career politician. In the decade that followed they elected Populist governors, Populist senators, Populist congressmen, Populist supreme court justices, Populistcity councils, and probably Populist dogcatchers, too; men of strong ideas, curious nicknames, and a colorful patois....

For a generation, Kansas has been the testing-ground for every experiment in morals, politics, and social life. Doubt of all existing institutions has been respectable. Nothing has been venerable or revered merely because it exists or has endured. Prohibition, female suffrage, fiat money, free silver, every incoherent and fantastic dream of social improvement and reform, every economic delusion that has bewildered the foggy brains of fanatics, every political fallacy nurtured by misfortune, poverty and failure, rejected elsewhere, has here found tolerance and advocacy.

Today the two myths are one. Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness. Kansas today is a burned-over district of conservatism where the backlash propaganda has woven itself into the fabric of everyday life. People in suburban Kansas City vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of New York and Washington, D.C.; people in rural Kansas vituperate against the sinful cosmopolitan elite of Topeka and suburban Kansas City. Survivalist supply shops sprout in neighborhood strip-malls. People send Christmas cards urging their friends to look on the bright side of Islamic terrorism, since the Rapture is now clearly at hand.

Under the state’s simple blue flag are gathered today some of the most flamboyant cranks, conspiracists, and calamity howlers the Republic has ever seen. The Kansas school board draws the guffaws of the world for purging state science standards of references to evolution. Cities large and small across the state still hold out against water fluoridation, while one tiny hamlet takes the additional step of requiring firearms in every home. A prominent female politician expresses public doubts about the wisdom of women’s suffrage, while another pol proposes that the state sell off the Kansas Turnpike in order to solve its budget crisis. Impoverished inhabitants of the state’s most scenic area fight with fanatical determination to prevent a national park from opening up in their neighborhood, while the rails-to-trails program, regarded everywhere else in the union as a harmless scheme for family fun, is reviled in Kansas as an infernal design on the rights of property owners. Operation Rescue selects Wichita as the stage for its great offensive against abortion, calling down thirty thousand testifying fundamentalists on the city, witnessing and blocking traffic and chaining themselves to fences. A preacher from Topeka travels the nation advising Americans to love God’s holy hate, showing up wherever a gay person has been in the news to announce that “God Hates Fags.” Survivalists and secessionists dream of backyard confederacies out on the lone prairie; schismatic Catholics declare the pope himself to be insufficiently Catholic; Posses Comitatus hold imaginary legal proceedings, sternly prosecuting state officials for participating in actual legal proceedings; and homegrown terrorists swap conspiracy theories at a house in Dickinson County before screaming off to strike a blow against big government in Oklahoma City.

the problem with this simple story is that social liberalism actually grew in lockstep with an economic policy tailored to the poor. in the 70s, the most common place to get gender reassignment surgery was at a catholic hospital in small town colorado. in 2010, in response to deep opposition in the town, the practice was forced to move to california. the second most common place was at a baptist hospital in oklahoma city, where such surgery was viewed as routine until a number of religious leaders decided to oppose it in the 70s. at the same time, many other religious leaders spoke out in favour of the surgery, saying that it comported well with religious tenets.

likewise, colorado legalized abortion in 1967, as did states like kansas, missouri, georgia, and north and south carolina prior to roe v wade. today, these states are considered anti-abortion and anti-lgbt hotspots, yet prior to the late 70s, compassion for such people was viewed as paramount in the life of america’s christians. so what happened? it clearly wasn’t an emphasis on the social aspects of poor american lives that shifted the political arena in favour of religious conservatism. rather, as thomas frank points out in the same book:

Nobody mows their own lawn in Mission Hills anymore, and only a foot soldier in its armies of gardeners would park a Pontiac there. The doctors who lived near us in the seventies have pretty much been gentrified out, their places taken by the bankers and brokers and CEOs who have lapped them repeatedly on the racetrack of status and income. Every time I paid Mission Hills a visit during the nineties, it seemed another of the more modest houses in our neighborhood had been torn down and replaced by a much larger edifice, a three-story stone chateau, say, bristling with turrets and porches and dormers and gazebos and a three-car garage. The dark old palaces from the twenties sprouted spiffy new slate roofs, immaculately tailored gardens, remote-controlled driveway gates, and sometimes entire new wings. One grand old pile down the street from us was fitted with shiny new gutters made entirely of copper. A new house a few doors down from Esrey’s spread is so large it has two multicar garages, one at either end.

These changes are of course not unique to Mission Hills. What has gone on there is normal in its freakishness. You can observe the same changes in Shaker Heights or La Jolla or Winnetka or Ann Coulter’s hometown of New Canaan, Connecticut. They reflect the simplest and hardest of economic realities: The fortunes of Mission Hills rise and fall in inverse relation to the fortunes of ordinary working people. When workers are powerful, taxes are high, and labor is expensive (as was the case from World War II until the late seventies), the houses built here are smaller, the cars domestic, the servants rare, and the overgrown look fashionable in gardening circles. People read novels about eccentric English aristocrats trapped in a democratic age, sighing sadly for their lost world.

When workers are weak, taxes are down, and labor is cheap (as in the twenties and again today), Mission Hills coats itself in shimmering raiments of gold and green. Now the stock returns are plush, the bonus packages fat, the servants affordable, and the suburb finds that the princely life isn’t dead after all. It builds new additions and new fountains and new Italianate porches overlooking Olympic-sized flower gardens maintained by shifts of laborers. People read books about the glory of empire. The kids get Porsches or SUVs when they turn sixteen; the houses with asphalt roofs discreetly disappear; the wings that were closed off are triumphantly reopened, and all is restored to its former grandeur. Times may be hard where you live, but here events have yielded a heaven on earth, a pleasure colony out of the paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

america's workers and small farmers were saved by the reforms of the 1930s, as frank explains, then crushed as the wealthy found out how to squirrel away their taxes (in part thanks to the collapse of the british empire), accumulate wealth away from prying eyes, lobby the government for preferential treatment, and between 1976 and 2000, triumph completely in the political domain. mission hill donates more money to politicians than the rest of kansas combined. unions are swamped in state politics, and see declining fortunes. as a result, neoliberal social atomization takes effect, which sees even workers demanding beggar-thy-neighbour policies. and when thy neighbour is socially distinct from you, it becomes easier to justify voting for such politics based on a survival instinct. the majority of the working class tuned out and do not vote any more. among the rest, low skilled working class jobs in highly stratified and inequitable cities vote democrat, hoping for some patronage from the white collar creative class voters they serve, while blue collar skilled workers tend to vote republican, devoid of any examples of class politics in their lives with the death of unions and hoping to keep their share of wages against their only opposition, the tax man.

ultimately, any socially liberal politics sustained by donations from rich big city donors is unsustainable. on the other hand, the notion that “woke” politics is holding back leftism is, save for a few clearly absurd situations (robin diangelo, for instance) also wrong. economic leftism leads to social leftism, because respect to the working class leads to respect for its identities. neoliberal atomization is a much deeper force than can be surmounted at the ballot box, even in a primary, but it is always an economic force first and foremost.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Have you read Anne Applebaum’s new book The Twilight of Democracy? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts as a Brit living and working in Europe about how she writes about the schism in conservatism around democracy in the post 1989 era.

I must thank you for dropping this question because I would not have got around to finishing this book if I hadn’t been prompted by your question. I was sent The Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends some time ago by a good friend of mine who works as a newspaper foreign correspondent and knows Anne Applebaum well. I don’t know her but I have read a few of her journalistic pieces over the years when she was with the Economist and the Spectator.

I also read her harrowing book The Gulag: A history (2003). Applebaum's account of the Gulag was majestic and full of pathos. Almost 40 years after Robert Conquest's classic, The Great Terror (1968), she brought the terrible history of the Soviet camps to life again. She made brilliant use of Gulag and secret police archives to write a compelling history of how cruel and evil the Soviet system really was. Her book is one of the most vivid histories we have of a system - "the meat grinder", Russians called it - that marked or destroyed the lives of millions.

So it was with trepidation I approached this latest book because it’s dealing with weighty stuff. It’s partly a brilliant political reportage, partly a Central European-style psychodrama, partly a political analysis, and partly a personal diary. It is also a postscript to a distinct epoch when the Berlin Wall comes down and we enter the post-Cold War. The story Applebaum tells is that of the death of anti-communism as the public philosophy of the West. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union wasn’t only America’s principal military adversary but also its ideological and moral “other.” Both left and right in America and Western Europe defended their competing visions of a liberal society in reaction to the Stalinist nightmare. But in the absence of the Red Menace both the left and the right turned on liberalism and that continues today with Trump in America, Brexit and the EU, and Victor Orban in Hungary.

I cowardly put it near the back of my reading queue because I already reading more than a few weighty tomes (mostly history and literature books) and I didn’t want my senses to be overloaded. I typically have fifteen books on the go and I travel with four whenever I’m stuck in a business class lounge or in a hotel room and so I can switch according to my mood. With Applebaum’s book I also wanted to take notes and so I took my time with it. I’ve finished it but I’m still processing my thoughts on it. I hope to write up a book review as part of my on going Treat Your S(h)elf post in my blog. So don’t hold your breath.

I’m glad that I’ve read it, but it’s a haunting book, that’s for sure. It’s a potent, and somewhat apocalyptic, reminder that democracies are only as strong as the people who live in them, that there is nothing about them that is ontologically strong and secure. In order to continue to function as they should, they require buy-in and maintenance and support and, above all, faith. Without those things they are subject to corrosion and destruction from within.

I love how she mixes the personal with the political because Applebaum as a Yale and Oxford educated historian and journalist, and as someone who is married to then Polish deputy foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, was as connected as anyone in the 1990s and 2000s to both liberal and conservative wings in Western democracies.

It’s a great opening to start at a soirée of the great and the good to see the dramatic scene.

On New Year’s Eve in 1999, Applebaum and her husband Radek Sikorski, who was then Poland’s deputy foreign minister, hosted what sounded like a really great party. Their home was filled with American and British journalists, Polish dignitaries, and some of their neighbours. Applebaum characterises them as representatives of “the right,” which at the time meant something vastly different from what it means today. They were staunch anti-communists in the Thatcherite tradition, who were optimistic about Poland’s embrace of democracy and free markets. The gathering was held at an old manor house that had been abandoned in 1945 by its previous owners, who had fled from the advancing Red Army. It turns out Sikorski’s family had purchased and renovated the dilapidated house, making it the perfect metaphor for a nation rising from decades of oppression at the hands of the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, the friendships and the optimism that animated that celebration have largely evaporated in the past 20 years or so. According to Applebaum, “Nearly two decades later, I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party. They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there.”  

Many of her Polish friends, colleagues, and acquaintances have abandoned their belief in classical liberalism and embraced an illiberal right-wing authoritarianism that sees democracy as flawed and free markets as rigged by elites. She maintains that the bitter political divisions that developed among those who attended this party in Poland are similar to those now found in many countries today, including Hungary, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and the United States.

“Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians?” Applebaum wonders. “Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades?” The book is an admirable quest for answers and goes a long way toward providing them. 

Applebaum identifies several factors that have contributed to the rise of twenty-first-century illiberal movements, often using personal anecdotes to illustrate her points. She is not then particularly concerned with theories, nor is she attempting to offer a grand thesis about the phenomenon. She makes a few passing references to the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno among others, and relies on the work of a behavioural economist, Karen Stenner, to point out that about a third of the world’s population simply has an authoritarian disposition that makes them deeply suspicious of views different from their own.

Indeed throughout the book, Applebaum is as concerned with people as she is with processes, in that she often focuses on the individuals whose choices and political actions have led to the current state of affairs. There’s a potent truth here, for it’s a fact that no authoritarian is able to rise to power without having the support of at least some of those in positions of cultural authority to buy in, what Applebaum, following in the footsteps of Julien Benda’s classic 1927 book, The Treason of the Intellectuals, refers to these sycophants as clercs. These are the people who make authoritarianism palatable to the masses, whether through their positions in powerful media or by distorting museum exhibits to support a dominant agenda (which has happened in Hungary).

Applebaum helps us better understand the disturbing increase in division, the roiling anger, the willingness to discard democracy by not just the elites but also the masses and especially the populists. It used to be we understood revolution by charting the inequality and desperate poverty that led to them, but in Hungary, Poland, Spain, the UK, and in the United States, while many may be hungry few are starving. And those in the streets of London and Washington are hardly destitute.

Applebaum writes, “They have food and shelter. They are literate. If we describe them as ‘poor’ or ‘deprived,’ it is sometimes because they lack things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi. In this new world, it may be that big, ideological changes are not caused by bread shortages but by new kinds of disruptions. These new revolutions may not even look like the old revolutions at all. In a world where most political debate takes place online or on television, you don’t need to go out on the street and wave a banner to assert your allegiance. In order to manifest a sharp change in political affiliation, all you have to do is switch channels, turn to a different website every morning, or start following a different group of people on social media.”

Applebaum is a very good writer; her style is lucid, and her arguments are bracing. This has made her one of the most powerful voices of the anti-populist resistance. But the strength of her new book is not so much in exposing the authoritarian nature of populists in power but in revealing the intellectual hollowness of the anti-communist consensus. I didn’t find myself agreeing to everything in the book because it’s not always easy to compare apples to oranges when one looks at the USA, Britain, Europe, and Eastern Europe. Culture and history gets in the way of easy generalisations.

Overall, this book is, at least my first impressions, something of an intellectual call to arms. It reaches out to each of us, asking us to do our part to ensure that democracy doesn’t go the way of so many other failed political systems. As she reminds us near the end of the book: “no political victory is ever permanent, no definition of ‘the nation’ is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind […] rules forever.” There’s something more than a little terrifying about the idea that history is one long cycle, that every political victory must be re-fought again and again and again. But such, alas, is the nature of modernity.

Thanks for your question.

[yukinojou]

I already squeed quite a bit on Twitter, but turns out my Shadow and Bone thoughts demand longform. So that was a 40+ tweet thread or using my Tumblr for an original post for once.

I was wary about the Shadow and Bone adaptation the way I'm usually wary about good books being adapted onscreen. It was amplified because my actual favourites are the Six of Crows books, and because the American-based movie complex has a bad track record of doing anything based on Eastern Europe. 8 episodes in 3 days should tell you how much I loved it - the moment I finished, I wanted more.

First, the technical praise:

Damn but the plotting is tight. It took me a while to realised it's based on heist movie bones, where every little thing (The Freaking Bullet!) is important. The story fulfills its promises and manages not to bore at the same time - it delights by the way they're fulfilled. I called out a few plot developments moments before they happened, and I was happy about it. Such a joy after so many series where "not doing what viewers expect" led to plot holes and lack of sense. It might be an upside to the streaming model after all.

From a dramatic point of view I can tell all the reasons for all the changes, especially providing additional outsider points of view on Ravka (Crows) and letting viewers see Mal for themselves the way he only comes across in later books.

Speaking of which, this is a masterclass in rewriting a story draft. SaB was Bardugo's first, and having read later books you can really see where she didn't quite dare to break the YA rules yet, especially Single POV that necessitated a tight focus on Alina's often negative feelings rather than the big picture and a triangle that felt a bit forced. The world in the series is so much bigger, the way Bardugo could finally paint it when SaB success gave her more creative freedom, and some structural choices feel familiar too. It's a combination of various choices by crew and cast, but the end result meshes together so tightly and naturally.

Visuals! Especially the war parts because Every Soviet Movie Ever, but also the clothes (I would kill for Nina's blouse in the bar), the jewelry, the interiors. The stag was so very beautiful. And a deep commitment to a coherent aesthetic for each character and setting.

Look, you can do a serious fantasy series with colours! Both skin colours and bright sets and clothing! And all scenes were well lit enough to know what's going on, even in the Fold!

Representation (aka I Am Emotion)

To start with: I was born behind the Iron Curtain, in the last years of the Cold War. The Curtain was always permeable to some extent, and we have always been aware that while we have talented artists of our own, we never had the budgets and polish of the Anglosphere Entertainment Machine. So we watched a hell of a lot of American visual storytelling especially because yeah, you can tell we don't have the budgets. 90s and 2000s especially, it's getting better now.

In American stories, the BEST case scenario for Eastern European representation is the Big Dumb Pole, the ethnic stereotype Americans don't even notice they use, where the punchline is that his English is bad or that he grew up outside Anglo culture. Other than that, it's criminals, beggars, sex trafficking victims, refugees. Sure, we may look similar (except we really really don't, not if you're raised here and see the distinct lack of all those long-jawed Anglo faces), but we are not and have never been the West, never mind America. It's probably better for younger people now, but I was raised under rationing and passport bans. Star Trek and Beverly Hills 90210 were exactly as foreign to me.

The first ever character I really identified with was Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5 (written by J. Michael Straczynski, yay behind-camera representation). This was a Russian Jewish woman very much in charge, in the way of strong women I know so well, not taking any bullshit, not repressing her feminity. I recognised her bones, she could be my cousin. The sheer relief of it. There have been few such occasions since.

The reason I picked up Shadow and Bone in the first place was recommendations from other Polish people. I've had no problems finding representation in Eastern European books because wow our scene is strong in SFF especially, but it's always a treat to find a book in English that gets it. And Leigh gets it, the bones of our culture, and I could even look past the grammar issue (dear gods and Americans, Starkova for a woman, Morozov for a guy) that really irked me because of the love for the setting and the characters, the weaving in of religion/mysticism (we never laicisized the same way as the West, natch), the understanding of how deep are the scars left in a nation at war for centuries. The books are precious to me, they and Arden's Winternight and Novik's Spinning Silver.

To sum up: Shadow and Bone the Netflix series gets it. You can tell just how much they've immersed themselves in Eastern European culture and media, it comes across so well in visuals and writing and characters. Not just the obvious bits (though the WWII propaganda posters gave me a giggle), but the palaces, the additional plotlines and characters, the costumes, the attitudes. About the only thing missing in the soldier scenes was someone singing and/or quoting poetry.

I will blame the Apparat's lack of beard on filming in a non-Orthodox country. Poland's Catholic too, but I very much imagined him as an Orthodox patriarch, possibly because I read the books shortly after a visit to Pecherska Lavra in Kiev and the labyrinthine holy catacombs there. Small quibble, not my religion, not my place to speak.

(I've seen discussion on the issues with biracial representation in the show, which is visceral and apparently based on bad experiences of one of the show writers in a way that's caused pain to other Asian and biracial people. I'm not qualified to speak on those parts, other that Eastern Europe is... yeah. Racist in subtly different ways. If anything, the treatment of the Suli as explained in Six of Crows always read so very true of the way Roma are treated, and even sanitised.)

And now for the spoiler-filled bits:

Kaz and Inej. I mean... just THEM. So many props to the actors, the writers, the bloody goat.

I adore the fact the only people who get to have sex in the show are Jesper and a very lucky stablehand.

Ben Barnes needs either an award or a kick. The man's acting choices and puppy eyes are as epic as his hair.

So Much Love for Alina initiating the kiss. Her book characterisation makes sense, she's so trapped in her own head because she has no time to process everything that's happening, but grabbing life by the lapels is a much more active choice. Still not making the relationship equal, but closer to it.

Speaking of, Kaz's constant awareness of how unequal his relationship with Inej is, and attempts to give her agency. I'm really curious how his touch issues come across to someone who doesn't know the backstory there.

Feodor and his actor. He looks exactly like the pre-war heartthrob Adolf Dymsza, a specific upper-class Polish ethnic type that's much rarer now that, well, Nazis killed millions of Polish intellectuals in their attempt to reduce us to unskilled labour only. The faces he makes are the Best.

Nina!! Nina is perfect, those cheekbones, that cheek, I was giggling myself silly half the time. I cannot wait to see Danielle Galligan take on the challenge of Nina's plotline in Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, she'll kill us dead.

I already mentioned that the writers fixed Mal's absence from the first book, but Mal in general! The haircut gives him a kind of rugby charm, and Archie Renaux is outstanding at emoting without talking. Honestly, all the casting in this series is inspired, but him in particular.

Extra bonus: Howard Charles and Luke Pasqualino playing so very much against the type of the swaggering Musketeers I saw them play last. Arken dropping the mask at the end... Howard Charles is love.

I can't believe not only was Milo's bullet a plot point, but the fact Alina was wearing a particularly sparkly hair ornament in a long series of beautiful hair ornaments was a plot point.

In conclusion: so much love, and next three season NOW please. Okay, give me a week to reread the books, and an extra day because new Murderbot drops tomorrow...

[katehuntington]

Title: In Bad Waters - part five Word count: ±4250 words Episode summary: Still in possession of the Winchesters’ belongings, Zoë meets up with the hunters on her next case. When it turns out to be a little more complicated than anticipated, she accepts their help in order to make an important deadline. Part five summary: Sam tries to find out more about Zoë’s past, but when he meets up with his brother again, he never thought he would have to reveal his own. Episode warnings: Dark! NSFW, 18+ only! Descriptions of domestic violence/child abuse. Drug use/addiction. Angst, gore, violence, character death. Description of blood, injury and medical procedures/resuscitation. Swearing, alcoholism. Supernatural creatures/entities, mentions of demon possession. Descriptions of torture and murder, drowning. Illegal/criminal practices. Mentions of nightmares and flashbacks. Author’s note: Beta’d by @winchest09​​ and @deanwanddamons​​. Thanks, girls!

Supernatural: The Sullivan Series Masterlist

S1E02 “In Bad Waters” Masterlist

     Paragould, Arkansas      June 16th, 2005 - Five months ago

     A shrill whistle reverberates over the training fields. Children stop in their tracks and run back to the teacher, bursting with energy.      “Alright! Good job, everyone! Red team wins!”            A woman, probably around her thirties, smiles as she is surrounded by her class. Like they always do after practice, they sit down on the grass in a circle, looking up at their teacher, waiting for her to give the cue to head off to the dressing rooms. The sun shines brightly and stands high in the blue sky, shining down on them. Birds chirp, hopping from branch to branch in the trees surrounding the fields, while the American flag flutters from the frontage of a school building.

     “Looking forward to summer break?” the teacher asks, laughing when her question is answered with loud enthusiastic cheer.      “Aren’t you even going to miss me?” she pouts.      “We’ll miss you, Mrs. Dawlson,” one of the little boys speaks up.      More kids agree with him, causing their supervisor to smile, humbled.      “I’m sure you will do fine at Oak Grove, Roy. You’re all going to middle school! Fifth graders already, my boys and girls are all grown up.” She observes her class, pride in her kind eyes. “I tell you what. Next Friday we are going to play lots of fun games, alright?”      The faces of the children light up and they happily beam at each other, already excited for next practice.      Their teacher lets them off the hook. “Be safe, off you go!”

     All get up and bolt for the dressing rooms, challenging each other to get there first. Some squeal and laugh as they play tag along the way. All but one. The joy disappears from Mrs. Dawlson’s face as she watches one of the girls, who slowly strolls back to school. Despite the warm weather, she’s wearing a long sleeved shirt and blue sweatpants.      Mrs. Dawlson sighs, clearly caring too much about her children to let this slip. “Laura?”      The little girl looks over her shoulder, her expression blank. She carries her long, chestnut hair in two braids, her bangs cover her eyes.      “Could you come here for a second?” Mrs. Dawlson asks, gently.

      Laura drags her feet with her head hanging down, like a dog who has done something wrong and is now called back to get punished. The teacher sits down on her heels to level with the little girl, making sure not to talk down to her. But Laura doesn’t look her in the eye and keeps staring at her feet.      “How are you doing, Laura?” she wonders, her voice friendly and calm.      “I’m fine, Mrs. Dawlson,” she replies, politely.      The coach hesitates for a moment, figuring out the best way to approach her pupil.      “Well, alright. But if there is anything you want to talk about, let me know, okay?”

      The young girl looks up and Mrs. Dawlson startles at what she sees. She can detect a dark bruise through her bangs, right above her left eyebrow. With her fingers, she carefully sweeps away Laura’s hair and reveals the injury underneath. Scared, the student backs out and turns her head away. Quickly, but without hurting her, Mrs. Dawlson grabs Laura’s wrist and pulls up her sleeve. What she sees then, would make everyone’s stomach turn; her entire arm is bruised.          “How did you get these?” Laura’s teacher questions, a bit firmer than before.      “I fell,” she lies.      “Tell the truth, Laura. Who did this to you? It’s alright,” Mrs. Dawlson tries to convince her.      “No one! Please don’t tell anyone!” The little ten year old begs as she pulls herself loose.      “It’s safe with me. I promise,” her teacher assures.      “No, I - I can’t,” Laura stammers.

     By now she’s crying. Big tears stream down her porcelain cheeks. It seems like she is going to cave in, but suddenly she turns around and makes a run for it. Mrs. Dawlson lets her go and straightens her back. With a sigh, the teacher places her hands on her waist and watches the girl leave the field.      Disapproving, she shakes her head and closes her eyes, swallowing thickly. “Poor girl…” she whispers to herself.

     Paragould, Arkansas      November 26th, 2005 - Present day

     It’s still early morning when Sam pulls over at 2310 West Kings highway and enters the parking lot of the Ramada Inn. He left Zoë still asleep; apparently she really needed her rest. Last night, he wondered what was going on in her head and what she’s been through, as he went over the database she developed during her years of hunting. He could tell from the file properties that she didn’t just accidentally stumble on a ghost and got curious. He doesn't know the entire story behind her possession, but something happened. Something bad.

     The first file was added over four years ago, containing information on a Diligo Vesco. ‘Diligo’ can be translated to ‘love’ in Latin, ‘Vesco’ meaning ‘eater’ in that same ancient language. A demon who served directly under the devil himself in the early years, one of Lucifer’s creations, if you believe the lore. Not your ‘casual’ black eyed rat from hell, like the ones Dad dealt with every so often. No, this one was much worse.

     The name fits, because that’s exactly what it does; it literally feeds on love, by possessing someone and slaughtering the host’s loved ones. The demon doesn’t just kill them, though. A Diligo Vesco is one of the most vicious and sadistic of its kind. It’s been reported to take its sweet time torturing the victims, before actually killing them. Sam found case reports in Zoë’s database that described the gory details. Limbs severed, organs ripped from bodies, missing parts of the brain. Arson, waterboarding, skinning, mutilation. Ways of torture he had never seen before. One of them was called Blood Eagle, where the demon would cut open its victim’s back, break all the ribs and twist them upwards, giving the poor soul ‘wings’.

     Since the beginning of time, these creatures are responsible for unexplainable and brutal murders within families and close circles. The Ade family murders in 1874, where the children were cut up and set on fire. The Green Family massacre in 1994, in which the mother of three slaughtered her children with an axe. These smart monsters play the game well, framing the vessel for the blood that the demon sheds.

     The Diligo Vesco is only able to show its true face when the host is physically close to someone he or she loves. Until that time it holds on like a leech. An exorcism would be the only way to spare the life of the possessed, but this is where it gets tricky; the demon can only be exorcised when it manifests. By the time a hunter picks up its scent, it is usually too late. Most of the time the damage is done and the thing is long gone. When it does come to driving out the demon, the host nor the exorcist rarely survive. Killing these demons is close to impossible without harming the person it's controlling. Yet this is what his father and Dean must have accomplished, since Zoë is still walking amongst them.

     Curiously, Sam had compared Zoë’s online database with his father’s journal, but the case happened to take place in a period of time from which a couple of pages of the book are missing. Zoë does not elaborate on the details of her own case either, but whatever happened, it triggered her to become one of the best hunters in the country. The list of creatures that she slayed after her possession is impressive. Zoë ended more supernatural spawn from Hell in the past four years than some hunters manage to kill in a lifetime.

     Still pondering over this newfound information, Sam gets out of his brother’s car. On his way over to Paragould, he and Dean talked about this new Sullivan girl. The youngest Winchester couldn't help but to be curious about her motives, her past. Dean doesn’t get why Sam even gives a damn. He said it’s none of their business and if Zoë doesn’t wanna share, why dig further and risk getting your eyes scratched out?

     While rummaging in his pocket, he enters the motel lobby and makes a left turn to the main corridor. The red carpet underneath his feet is stained and the wallpaper has come off at the corners, a sheer contrast to the Hampton Inn, where Zoë is staying. Here, the coffee machine in the hall spits out the most horrendous brew, they need a flashlight in the bathroom because the light is broken and the air conditioning sounds like a generator, but doesn’t actually do jack shit. But then again, he has a feeling that not even a freezer could have cooled down the rabbits inside of room 106.

     Just as he takes out his room key, he sees that he won’t need them; Dean is already at the door with the blonde he picked up the night before.

     “Call me,” she tells him, as she saves her number in his phone.      “I sure will,” Dean smirks.      They kiss once more. Both can barely keep their eyes off each other as the young lady parades away in last night’s clothes with a flustered grin on her face. 

     Sam passes her in the hallway and looks over his shoulder. He can see where Dean’s coming from; she’s beautiful. Dean has spotted the look upon his brother’s face, though.      “Forget it, tiger. She’s mine.”      “Had a good night?” Sam chuckles, hoping he will skip the details.      Dean yawns and saunters back into the room. “Did I have a good night? I barely got a chance to sleep.”      “Okay, already more than I wanted to know,” Sam cuts off, before Dean spills the goods.

     He follows his older sibling into the room, finding one bed untouched and the other a complete mess. An empty bottle of Sauvignon lays on the ground, while a dirty glass still stands on the cabinet next to a half a bottle of Jack Daniels. The window is wide open, the heavy curtains wave in the wind slightly, but despite the fresh air, the room still smells like sex. Seems like they had one hell of a party.

     “Let’s get going,” Sam announces.      Dean looks aside at his little brother, frowning. Since when is Sam the one who gives the orders?      “Already?” he replies, bummed, clearly hoping for a rendezvous.      “Yeah, I found our stuff,” Sam informs.      “Ah, so you found Sullivan,” Dean chuckless, raising his eyebrows.

     Sam huffs and rolls his eyes, but his older brother doesn’t pay attention to it, tipping over an empty bag which once contained potato crisps. Apparently he’s hungry.      “Yeah. It didn’t take me long to find her. Her bike was parked outside a hotel. She’s working a case,” Sam explains, acting casual, but Dean can’t help himself.      “If it didn’t take you long to find our shit, then where were you all night?”      Reluctantly, Sam sighs before he answers. No way in hell his brother is going to respond maturely to what he is about to say.  “I spent the night at her place.”      Dean laughs out loud, throwing his head back. “I knew it! You cheeky bastard!”      “Nothing happened, Dean,” Sam states with a tone.      “Oh, come on. Not even a little smooch?” he teases, but Sam denies.      “A look then? You know, one of those cheesy Notebook moments.”      But again, Dean’s brother shakes his head, although he can’t resist to comment on that. “You saw The Notebook?”      “Well... no. So I’ve heard,” the oldest corrects uncomfortably, quick to turn the conversation back around. “But let me get this straight; absolutely nothing happened?”      “That’s what I said,” Sam confirms.

     After opening a pizza box that - to Dean’s disappointment - is empty, he stops searching for food. Then he turns to Sam, who is clearly annoyed with the interrogation.      “Are your eyes fucked up?” Dean wonders in disbelief. “Honestly, I'm a little disappointed. I thought I taught you better than that. How can you spend the night with a woman like that without making a move?”      “That’s it. I’ve had it.”      Sam squares his shoulders and stares at Dean, furiously. His brother pissed him off, but Dean can hide his victorious grin. For weeks he has tried to push Sam over the edge, to trigger him to let it out. To yell, cry, take a swing at him if that was what his little brother needed to do to feel better. Anything to get him out of the dark hole in which he’s currently hiding up.

     “Did it ever occur to you that I might feel terribly guilty if I would just head off with some girl for a one night stand like you always do?!” the youngest of the siblings exclaims.      “I have no idea, Sam. You never talk to me about it, so how the fuck am I supposed to know how you feel?” Dean bounces back.

     “And you think it’s strange that I don't talk about what happened?! My girlfriend was murdered, Dean! I was going to ask her to marry me, for fuck’s sake!” He pauses, growing even more furious. “I had everything planned out! Law school, Jess, everything!”      By now Sam paces from one side of the room to the other, restless and upset.

     “You were gonna marry her, really? Sam, with your background the chances of the American dream coming true was close to zero. You should’ve known that,” his brother reminds him.      “I was just trying to move on, I was trying to be happy! And you know what? I actually was!” Sam halts in front of Dean and raises his voice even more. “I loved her, Dean! I still do and I can’t get her out of my fucking mind! She died because of me!”      Dean looks at his younger sibling, sympathetically. “Don’t do that to yourself, man. It’s not your fault she’s dead.”      “It is. I didn’t warn her about the danger out there!I lied to her--”

      Sam intends to ramble on, but Dean intervenes.      “- What makes you think that telling her the truth would have made a difference? Whatever killed Jessica, wasn’t just some ghost, Sam. Hey, listen to me.” The older brother grabs Sam’s shoulder and forces him to look down into his eyes. “That same thing killed Mom, and probably a whole bunch of other people. It’s powerful, and if Dad has trouble stopping it, no offence, but you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

     “I’m not talking about stopping him at that moment, Dean!” Sam pulls himself loose and turns away.      An unpleasant silence fills the room as Dean waits for a follow up, but his brother doesn’t continue.      “What then, Sam? Talk to me,” he pleads.

     Again that silence. The younger Winchester doesn’t move and stares at the wall with his hands placed on his waist. He swallows apprehensively, his jaw tensed. Then Sam sighs and turns around for Dean to see his eyes glister.      “I could have prevented it,” Sam claims, his voice soft and broken now.      Dean observes him, thinking through his next question first before he shoots. He has a feeling there’s more to this than just guilt.      “How?”      Sam bites his lip and averts his gaze. Then, after a month of silence, Sam finally opens up to his brother.      “I dreamed of Jessica’s death, days before it happened.”

     Complete silence. While the air grows even thicker with tension, Dean stares at his brother, his eyes confused and stunned. Taken aback, he opens his mouth in order to respond, but can’t find the words he’s looking for.      “Y-you mean, as in… a vision or something?” he returns disbelieving, chuckling nervously.      Sam scoffs as he moves away, ready to leave this conversation already; he knew Dean would respond like this. “Never mind.”      But Dean doesn’t let it go. “You’re telling me that you actually saw Jess die, like she did, in a dream?”      His younger brother halts, turns back slightly and eventually nods his head. “I didn't think anything of it at first. I figured it was just a bad dream. Until…”

     He doesn't need to finish his sentence. Dean says nothing, instead he just stares at Sam. Several thoughts rage through his head. What the hell is going on with him? What the hell could this mean? Why the fuck didn’t he tell me this before? The sheer thought that something might be terribly wrong with his little brother, has his stomach in knots. This isn’t ordinary. In fact, this is as far from ordinary as a human can get. He is stunned and overwhelmed by the idea, but his own brother might actually be something a hunter would keep a close eye on.

     Sam swallows thickly, feeling exposed and embarrassed. “You’re looking at me as if you’re about to empty a bottle of holy water over my head.”      For a moment Dean glares at the flask on the table.      “Dude, you’re seriously considering?!” Sam shouts, frustrated.      “You wanna tell me that this is normal, Sam?!” Dean counters, raising his voice.      Sam shakes his head and turns around, already regretting that he brought it up.      “Why didn’t you tell me before?” the older brother questions.      “I don’t know,” Sam mutters, staring at the ground.      “You don’t know? You’re psychic, right?” Dean scoffs.

     The youngest of the Winchester boys grinds his teeth, but doesn’t say a word. The tension between the two of them is heavy and familiar; it feels the same as when they had the argument before Sam took off for college.

      “Anything else I should know, Sam?” Dean pressures, clearly worked up over this. “I don’t know, maybe you can stop bullets or run super fast.”      Dean steps to the other side of the room with his arms folded in front of his chest, making fun of the situation because he has no idea how else to deal with it.      Sam eyes him, following his movements. “Funny,” he snaps. “Mature, too.”      “It would explain a lot of things. The ‘S’ stands for ‘Sam’ and there’s your love for tights,” Dean provokes.      “Stop it,” Sam hisses, but Dean isn’t done.      “Can you fly? ‘Cause that would be fucking awesome.”      “Dean!” Sam warns mad.      “What?! Either I joke about it or I lose my fucking cool! Take your pick,” Dean returns.      “One way or the other, it doesn’t help!” the youngest exclaims. “You see? This is exactly why I didn’t tell you, Dean! I knew you would give me this kind of shit!”      “What did you expect? You kept this from me for over a month!” Dean brings to mind, hurt seeping past the words.      “I don’t have to tell you everything I go through. I don’t owe you that,” Sam makes clear, venom in his tone.      “And that’s where you’re wrong,” Dean turns to him, pointing his finger as he approaches his brother. “I am your fucking brother, Sam! So yes, you do owe me that!”

     Dean stares straight into Sam’s eyes, his head tilted slightly backwards to look at his younger yet taller brother. Sam can see his words struck a nerve.      “We used to tell each other everything. What happened to that?” Dean wonders.      “It left, along with me.”

     Sam breaks eye contact and walks past him. As Sam bumps his shoulder against his, Dean shuts his eyes and clenches his jaw.      “I know you’re pretty damn good at it, but don’t you walk away from me,” he threatens, not brave enough to turn around to watch Sam leave.      “Why wouldn’t I?” Sam tests, not impressed by Dean’s stern words.      “Because this is not something you can walk away from! When will that finally come to you? When you’re in, you’re in. There’s no way back when you know about the things in the shadows, especially not when you have fucking visions about it!”       Now Dean does turn to face Sam, who scoffs at the message. “So what then, huh?! You’re planning to hunt until you’re in a wheelchair?”       “No, I’m planning to hunt until I finish the job Dad left for us to do and along the way, I will kill as many sons of bitches as I possibly can. Saving people, hunting things, the family business.” He pauses, staring at his brother with fiery eyes. “I intend to prevent people from going through the same shit we’ve had to endure, and if I don’t succeed, I’ll die trying.”

     This time, Sam doesn’t have a counter ready. No stubborn remark, no smart answer, just silence. He’s not sure what to say to that. He has to admit, he respects Dean for his morals, his honor. It gets him thinking, too. About his own future, his own life. Because deep down he knows Dean is right. He can run from the supernatural all he wants, but it will continue to follow him, always and everywhere.

     “Why should we be the one to sacrifice everything?” Sam questions, less hostile than before.      “I don’t know,” Dean sighs. “It’s just the way it is. So we either feel sorry for ourselves, or we suck it up.”

     Sam nods, admitting, but not at all okay with the inevitable. He can never have the life he wishes for. There will always be more to hunt, more to kill; this is a never ending story. And even if he does turn his back on the business for good, will he be able to forget about Jessica’s death? Can he move on without scanning every street, expecting something out of the ordinary around every corner? Right now, actually getting his law degree seems impossible, but then again, maybe he was being naïve when he went to Stanford in the first place.

     “Shall we go?” Sam suggests.      Dean looks up at the defeated man. The peace has returned, but brought a sense of devastation along as well. Accepting his fate is hard on Sam, he understands that. So Dean decides they had enough arguments for one morning and lets it go. He got Sam to talk to him; one step at a time.      “Can’t we stay one more night?” Dean tries, carefully.      Sam frowns, but then understands his reason for hesitation.      “Denise”, he chuckles. “Or Demi? I’m not sure. Her name started with a ‘D’.”      Dean’s typical grin appears on his face again, his eyes still soft, though.

     “Listen, man. I’m not pushing you to hook up with some chick just to mess you up, okay? At some point it’s gonna be time to move on, and I just figured a girl might help with that,” Dean lets him know, somewhat apologetic.      Sam eyes at his brother for a little while with an expression saying something in the line of ‘yeah right’. After a moment of who-gives-up-glaring-first, Dean caves.      “Alright, I wanted to piss you off so that you would get it out of your system,” he admits.

     The corner of Sam’s mouth twitches upward; he knew it. He’s not mad at Dean for playing that card, though. His older brother means well and he actually feels a little better now that he told him what is going on.      “Seriously, man. Talk to me when something’s up,” Dean underlines.      Sam responds with a nod of the head, then he gathers his stuff, apparently intending to leave.      “Ah, come on. One night,” Dean begs.      “There’s something ripping out hearts down in Texas, described by locals as ‘possibly coyotes’,” Sam offers.      Dean rubs his unshaven chin and thinks it over.      “Awesome werewolf hunt or awesome sex? Tough one,” he ponders.      Sam can’t help but smile and waits for the final call.      “Alright, let’s hunt some wolf,” Dean gives in. “Do you need to change in a phone booth before we go?”      Sam gives him a death-stare once again, but his brother keeps a straight face.      “No?” he checks, teasing.

     Dean can’t wipe the comical smirk off his face and so Sam shoves his brother towards the door, triggering him to let out a laugh. Before he follows, the younger Winchester feels his pockets for his phone and freezes. Unpleasantly surprised he looks around.      “Lost something?” Dean wonders.      “I think I left my Blackberry at Zo’s,” Sam realizes.      “Naturally,” Dean chuckles, failing to believe he didn’t leave it there on purpose.      “Would you quit it already?!” Sam returns, feisty.      “Okay, I’ll stop,” Dean promises. “We need to score some food anyway, I’m hungry.”      “There’s a In-N-Out a block from Zoë’s hotel,” Sam mentions.      Dean’s eyes light up, imagining the food in front of him already. “A Double-Double it is.”

     Sam grins as Dean picks up a small duffel containing only the few things they carry around at the moment. He follows Sam outside, who locks the door behind them. A quick bite before they leave another town and move on to the next. They never stay long, but the last two stops have been extremely short. Dean likes Denise, or whatever her name is, yet he has never been the guy who sticks around long enough to get serious with a girl. To be honest, a wolf hunt already sounds more fun than doing the girl he already did last night. After that shapeshifter drama, and now this newfound information about Sammy, he’s up for something equally exciting and distracting. Dean is sure of it; Texas, here they come.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate every single one of you, but if you do want to give me some extra love, you are free to like or reblog my work, shoot me a message or buy me coffee (Link to Kofi in bio at the top of the page).

Read chapter six here

[astrophysicist-guitar-god]

I was curious if Jimi Hendrix had ever played in Columbus, and it turns out that he did, one show in March 1968. 

I found two stories about it, one in the Columbus Dispatch marking the 50th anniversary of the show, and this one, about Hendrix hanging out with one of  the local support bands afterwards, and partying very wholesomely. 

I. Love. This.

The night Jimi Hendrix partied with the Dantes in Linden

By Eric Lyttle, Editor, Columbus Monthly

Posted Mar 3, 2018 at 1:45 PM

Fifty years ago tonight, Jimi Hendrix was sitting on the floor inside a small, nearly empty house in Linden enjoying a post-concert glass of red wine. No, not London. Linden. As in the working class neighborhood of northeast Columbus.

Lynn Wehr doesn’t remember much about the show itself. Neither does Barry Hayden. The two were members of the Dantes, arguably the most popular local band in Columbus at the time. The Dantes served as the warmup act for Hendrix that night, March 3, 1968, at Vets Memorial Auditorium on West Broad Street, just across the Scioto River from City Hall.

Wehr, now 71 and living in Delaware County as a retired T. Marzetti Co. executive, thinks he watched the flamboyant rock guitarist from the side of the stage. “I don’t even remember what he played,” says Wehr. “I remember there was a cover or two. I believe he did ‘Hang On Sloopy.’ ”

Hayden says he couldn’t even see Hendrix. “I was stage left, between the second or third curtain,” says Hayden, now 70 and retired in Powell after arranging guided tours of the Ohio Statehouse for nearly 20 years. “I had a straight-on shot of Mitch Mitchell’s kick-drum foot. It was the fastest kick-drum foot I’d ever seen,” Hayden says of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s drummer. “I watched that all night and couldn’t believe how he did it.”

But before the show and after—that they both remember.

Before the show, all the bands on the bill—including Soft Machine, progenitors of England’s prog-rock scene, and Four O’Clock Balloon, another local Columbus favorite—shared the same dressing room. Hayden, the Dantes’ boyish, blond heartthrob of a lead singer, remembers that he wore a silk scarf around his neck that night. When Hendrix entered the dressing room, he, too, was wearing a scarf. “But it was tied differently,” Hayden says. “I kept looking at it, trying to figure it out. I finally went over to him and asked him about it. He says, ‘You’re tying it like an American ties it.’ I did the crossover thing, like a necktie. He says, ‘Let me show you how the British tie it.’ And he showed me. And I tied it like Jimi forever after that. What the hell? If Jimi Hendrix says this is the way you’re supposed to do it, that’s the way you do it. It’s not open debate.”

After the scarf-tying lesson, Wehr, the Dantes’ rhythm guitarist, remembers, “Barry said, ‘Hey, we’re having a party afterward. Would you guys like to come?’ Mitch Mitchell and [Hendrix bass player] Noel Redding immediately said, ‘No.’ But Hendrix said, ‘Yes.’ We were like, ‘Wow. OK.’ ”

After the show, Wehr arranged to pick up Hendrix at the Christopher Inn, the city’s iconic cylindrical hotel on Broad Street, where the Experience was staying, and take him back to the house on Howey Road, a couple of blocks south of Hudson Street, that the Dantes used as a party house and rehearsal space.

“We get to the Christopher Inn—I think Jack White, the drummer for Four O’Clock Balloon was with me—and it’s late, probably after midnight, and there’s one guy at the desk,” Wehr says. “We told him we were there to pick up Jimi Hendrix. Here we were, a couple of guys in polka-dot pants and long hair. I’m sure we looked like groupies. And the guy at the desk says, ‘He’s not staying here.’ But we were like, ‘Look, we just were on the show with him at Vets, we told him we’d pick him up.’ We must have been convincing enough, because the guy picks up the phone and makes a call. Then he turns around, kind of sheepish like, and tells us, ‘He’ll be right down.’ ”

“Not five minutes later, the elevator doors open and out steps Hendrix, colorful, flowing clothes, a big hat with a big feather in it, completely dressed the part,” says Wehr.

Hendrix climbed in the passenger seat of the Dantemobile, a blue Chevy Caprice station wagon with “Dantes” in letters down the side. “We started down High Street, and when we got to campus, students were still out doing their thing,” says Wehr. “Every time we’d stop at a stop light, they’d see the Dantes car, turn and look and see Hendrix sitting in the passenger seat, and start running. The light would change and I’d speed away before they could catch us, until the next light, and the same thing would happen. We were like the Pied Piper, with kids running after us down High Street.”

The Dantes’ Howey Street house wasn’t much—nothing but a few mattresses thrown on the floor, egg cartons stapled to the walls of the basement to help muffle the sound during rehearsals. “We basically had nothing to offer him,” says Wehr. “We asked what he’d like, and he said he’d enjoy a glass of red wine. We all kind of looked at each other and thought, ‘What do we do now?’ Fortunately, one of the girls there said she lived close and could get a bottle. In short order, she came back with a bottle that she probably took from her parents. We sat around on the floor and talked and drank the bottle.”

“There were no drugs of any kind, nothing crazy,” Wehr says. “He was really soft-spoken, nice, mild-mannered—nothing like the guitar-burning wild man you’d see on stage. I think we just talked about music. He wasn’t put out. I think he genuinely wanted to be there. It was a scene.”

“After about an hour or so, he says, ‘Hey, I’ve really enjoyed being with you guys but have to get up early,’ ” Wehr says. “I think he had a gig in New York the next day. So we got in the car and I drove him back to the Christopher Inn.”

Both Wehr and Hayden say there was no idol worship—no photos, no autographs. They weren’t starry-eyed teens. They were in their early 20s, only a couple of years younger than Hendrix. They’d opened for other big names, had toured the country and had enjoyed their share of success. Their first single, “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” had cracked the Billboard Top 40 nationally and had become the No. 1 song in the Columbus market in 1966, pushing ”(You’re My) Soul and Inspiration” by the Righteous Brothers off the mark.

“I looked at it like we were all peers,” says Hayden. “It was another gig. We were happy about it for sure, because we liked him. But we basically had the same clothes, the same gear.”

They thought it would last forever. It didn’t. Within two years, Hendrix was dead of an overdose, and the Dantes were done. “I realize now, in later years, it was a big deal. It’s cool. I’m glad I get to talk about it now,” says Hayden. “But I miss it. It’s not the same now as it was. I liked it better then. I feel bad for anybody who didn’t grow up when we did. Being a teenager was just about the best thing you could be. We ruled. To be truthful, if you brought a time machine to my house, I’d set it for 1964 and leave right now.”

I wanted to include a link to the venue, but the old Vet’s Memorial has since been demolished to make way for a brand new national Vet’s museum on the same spot, and that’s mostly what I’m finding. But! Here’s an interesting article (with a picture) about the politics behind tearing down what was a pretty major landmark in Columbus to make way for the new building.

And! To make a long post longer, the shows before and after Columbus on that tour; from setlist.fm:

March 2, 1968: Hunter College Assembly Hall, New York, NY (two shows)

March 3, 1968: Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Columbus, OH

March 4, 1968:  Paul's The Scene, New York, NY

March 5, 1968:  Paul's The Scene, New York, NY

Looking over his entire concert schedule, he must have been exhausted. I hope he enjoyed hanging out with a local band for a little while, just drinking a little wine and talking. He probably needed it. :-(

[sciencespies]

Meet the Western Soil Scientists Using Dirt to Make Stunning Paints

https://sciencespies.com/nature/meet-the-western-soil-scientists-using-dirt-to-make-stunning-paints/

Meet the Western Soil Scientists Using Dirt to Make Stunning Paints

SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Jan. 26, 2021, 8 a.m.

In September, as wildfire raged in Medicine Bow National Forest, Karen Vaughn watched smoke billow in a choked-off Wyoming sky. The sun was reduced to a matte neon-pink disc behind the haze, and Vaughn worried about her research site in the burning mountains. One of her graduate students still had one more day of fieldwork to complete, and the roads would soon be closed, if they weren’t already. Vaughn’s family—her husband and two kids—were outside too, watching as a light gray layer of wind-blown ash settled onto the landscape. The ash and vivid colors sparked something in Vaughn, who continually sought new inspiration for the paint she makes. She began dashing around, scraping the sediment from every flat surface and encouraging her kids to help collect the fine powder. She decided to incorporate that ash into watercolor pigments with hues reflecting the fire, indelibly preserving the moment. The small batch of paints, distributed to friends and local artists, would be used to create depictions of the destructive forces that allowed their creation in the first place. “You’re breathing that air, even in your house, and you look outside and see that weird orange glow,” says Vaughn. “You couldn’t help but be a part of that.”

A soil scientist and a professor at the University of Wyoming, Vaughn sees a lot more soils than the average person, and certainly knows them more intimately. Over many years spent examining them, she has come to appreciate their natural beauty and immense variability. Two years ago, she began channeling that appreciation into a product she could share with the world, turning the soils she loved into watercolor pigments. Now, she and her collaborator, Yamina Pressler, a soil scientist at California Polytechnic University, use soils to make pigments and paintings, bridging the gap between science and art. By sharing both their creative processes and scientific knowledge on social media and connecting with artists, scientists and the public, they aim to make soil education entertaining.

Vaughn’s research is in pedology, which means she studies minute, subtle changes within a soil. Does the size of the grains change? Do the colors fade into each other or get cut off abruptly? What microorganisms are present at different levels in the soil? The very nature of her field, she says, is subjective. “It is an art form,” she says. “It takes a nuanced eye to really be able to see the changes within a soil.”

Her job requires her to hop in a deep hole, map out tiny changes few people notice and interpret the soil’s history. Her specialty is studying water in soils: How much is there? When is it present? How does it change the soil’s chemistry? What features does it leave behind? Her work helps us understand how soils form in unique environments, like wetlands in the otherwise arid Wyoming mountains, and how fragile soils like permafrost might respond to climate change.

To the uninitiated, the landscape of Wyoming might seem like a monotonous stretch of tan dirt. But that idea is exactly what Vauhgn is trying to change through her art. By explaining to artists and curious laypeople how the myriad hues in soils come to be and sharing them visually through both her own creative works and those by other artists, she hopes to give people the ability to see soil as more than “just dirt.”

Soils, paints and swatches from samples collected throughout Wyoming and Utah allow a glimpse at the belowground natural beauty of the western United States.

(Karen Vaughn)

“Sometimes art opens the door to people wanting to learn about science,” says Laura Guertin, a geology professor at Pennsylvania State—Brandywine. Guertin too has brought art into science, both for her classrooms and her communities, by crocheting temperature records and quilting climate change stories. “Using different perspectives to introduce a topic, like soil, can help people understand and connect with it a little more.”

Soil is often overlooked in basic geology classes, says Guertin, and understanding how it works and where it comes from is important. “Without soil, you don’t have the rest of Earth’s systems,” she says. “It’s such a fundamental material, it’s the basis of our food systems.” And society’s indifference to soil led to the Dust Bowl, one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of the United States. “With my students, I talk about the Dust Bowl and how it was a loss of soil that triggered a chain reaction, impacting a broad cross-section of society,” says Guertin.

Vaughn began making pigments as a fun way to engage with her kids, now ages 7 and 9, and keep them away from screens. They come soil collecting with her, and occasionally help mix the pigments and paint. But the main reason she makes pigments now is to share her perspective on soils’ inherent beauty with the public. “I found all these amazing soil colors,” Vaughn says, “and I wanted to do something more with them. I wanted them to persist longer.”

She recognized that by making paints she could share science with people who lack her expert training. “Spending all that time as a pedologist looking at soil formation and thinking about how much the colors of the soil can tell us about the natural history of that area, I wanted to let people in, open their eyes a little bit,” she says.

Vaughn collects soils for pigments almost everywhere she goes, from dirt collected in a wetland study site high in the mountains to coal unearthed in her backyard. On a family road trip to Florida in a campervan, for instance, she grabbed a small bag of soil from every stop, with the intent of creating a palette that reflects that memory. One dull pandemic day, she and her kids took to their bikes on a scavenger hunt near her home for as many colors of the rainbow that they could find. It was a change of pace for Vaughn, who is normally more opportunistic than intentional in her soil collecting. She made a palette of red, brown, orange, white, yellow and purple to represent that effort. And, of course, she has the three-hue palette from the September wildfire, corners of which were still smoldering away when we spoke in November.

Because it was just a small batch, Vaughn distributed the ash-infused pigments to local artists and a few select clients to create works reflecting the wildfires. California artist Tina Pressler, Yamina’s mother, painted a patchwork American bison, the West’s once-ubiquitous megafauna, and Bethann Merkle, a Wyoming artist and science communicator, created a series of three abstract paintings of fire-wrought forest textures. The ash-infused pigments felt fluid and heavy, says Tina. “The addition of ash made it seem really tactile, in a way, and I loved it.”

Artist Tina Pressler used pigments made of ancient Wyoming soils and recent ash to paint this bison, which she says “represents a visual amalgamation of flora and fauna over time.”

(Tina Pressler)

“I’ve long had a fondness for rocks—my windowsills are piled up with them at home and at work—but [Vaughn’s] work and pigments have helped me expand that curiosity and appreciation to the soil,” says Merkle.

Before Vaughn began sharing her pigments with artists, she had to spend some time getting the day-long pigment-making process down. It took her a few tries: “My first pigments,” she says with a laugh, “were chunky and terrible. But I gave them away with a disclaimer.”

In the first step of her process, Vaughn removes the sandy portions of the soil, leaving only fine silts and clays mixed in water, which she then pours into a cookie sheet and bakes in the oven for a few hours. After all the water has evaporated, the soil appears cracked and desiccated, like a mudflat after a long summer drought. “Look, mom, it’s all wrinkly like you,” her daughter once helpfully said. Vaughn grinds the baked silt into a fine, homogenous powder. Then comes Vaughn’s most meditative step: mulling, or combining the soil with the watercolor medium— a mixture of water, gum arabic, honey and vegetable glycerin. Only then does she get a sense for what the final hue will be. “You might start with an amazing green soil that, all of a sudden, becomes this dull, greenish white. And that’s okay,” Vaughn says. “It’s always a color I’ve never made before, so I’m thrilled.”

After Vaughn bakes the pigment, cracks appear that reflect patterns seen throughout nature—such as in this ancient orange soil pigment collected in the Red Desert of Wyoming.

(Karen Vaughn)

The colors of the paint come straight from the soil’s geologic past: Bright reds and oranges mean the soils were exposed to the oxidizing effects of intense climates, long stretches of time or both. Dark browns and blacks represent rich organic matter, reflecting the cycle of life and death at the Earth’s surface. Brighter hues result from minerals with specific elements; the presence of copper lends minerals blue-green colors, sulfur creates vibrant yellows and manganese presents as faded purple. Stark whites could mean acid once trickled down through the soil from a pine copse, or that ash once settled over the landscape, like that which Vaughn collected in September.

“Everything has a story,” Guertin says. “What’s been here in the past? Where do these colors come from? Where do these materials come from that give us these colors? I love that [Vaughn is] taking the soil science and showing how you can break it down to materials, to these pigments that have cultural meaning and to painting, which people already have a familiarity with.”

Vaughn describes her soil collecting, her artistic process and the science of each soil on Instagram, where she answers questions about chemistry, location and geology. Sometimes artists send in questions about the science of pigment-making itself, but many are just interested in learning more about the natural world. Depending on how much detail people want, she’ll even send along some scientific papers in a private message. Because so many of her clients are interested in learning about the soils, Vaughn is planning to start including a “soil story” with each palette shipped out.

Vaughn’s connections with artists sometimes grow from the virtual world to working together in person. Diana Baumbach, a Wyoming artist who Vaughn collaborated with a few years ago, loved going into the field with the scientist to forage for natural materials, including soil. “I really hadn’t thought about soil or considered it as a material before,” Baumbach said. “Looking at soil profiles with [Vaughn] was totally new for me. We both pulled each other into our worlds, which I thought were quite different. In the end, it was surprising how many intersections there actually were between my work and her work.”

While Vaughn does paint with her pigments, she doesn’t typically share her work; she leaves that to the younger Pressler, for whom painting has become a public affair. Growing up with an artist mother, Pressler says, meant that art was always in the background. “But it wasn’t until I started painting soils that I began to embody being an artist as part of my identity.”

Created during a soil art live stream on Instagram, this piece by Yamina Pressler is painted on post-card paper as a reminder that the beauty of soils is meant to be shared far and wide.

(Yamina Pressler)

Pressler also connects with an interested audience through social media. She hosts live paint-along sessions in her ‘virtual soil art studio’ on Instagram, inviting participants of all backgrounds to create soil-focused art inspired by where they live. These two-hour public sessions are open to children and adults, scientists and laypeople.

Tatiana Prestininzi, who has a bachelor’s in agricultural science but never cared much for soil science, now brings her young niece and nephew to Pressler’s paint-along sessions. “It’s not only from the artistic side, but we’re also getting the educational side of things,” she says. “It’s not just the 15-to-30-somethings on Instagram, she’s got 7 and 5-year-olds learning about soil profiles… so now I can go hike around San Diego with my eight-year-old niece and have a conversation about the soils she sees. She’ll ask to paint it and send it to the ‘soil doctor.’”

Through Vaughn’s art outreach and Pressler’s educational outreach, the scientists aim to inspire in the public the feelings children have while digging in the dirt and wondering at the world around them. Vaughn’s process of finding soils for pigments has a sense of play that is really infectious, says Baumbach. And while Pressler does draw soils realistically, she’s more drawn to whimsical doodles that reflect her feelings towards soil, which she shares on her Instagram sessions, along with the science stories behind them.

Yamina Pressler’s painting “Mojave Dreaming 28” was inspired by the unexpected winter tones of the Mojave desert.

(Yamina Pressler)

Tapping into her artistic side has helped Vaughn re-imagine what college soil science classes can be. She has her students sketch frequently, and she occasionally has them paint with soils. Her collaboration with Baumbach led the pair to cross-pollinate art and science further, with Baumbach bringing her art students to Vaughn’s science labs to talk about color and Vaughn giving guest lectures in Baumbach’s art materials courses. “Really, basic things like observation and analysis are at the core of what we both do, and we’re communicating through materials and visual forms,” Baumbach says. “The students are just starting to think broadly about materials, so hearing Karen talk about soils as a raw material is really interesting for them.”

In addition to giving talks about soil science and life as a researcher at K-12 schools and museums, Pressler works directly with teachers, taking them into the field and lab so they can get firsthand experience with soils. “They can then go back to their students and talk about soils and ecology, and the process of science, from their perspective,” says Pressler. “It’s more meaningful to the students that way.”

Michelle Bartholomew, a middle- and high-school science teacher, jumped at the chance to head into the field with Pressler in Colorado and Alaska. They developed soil science classes together, did some drawing and studied soils. “That was the highlight of my time with her, working on those tundra soils,” Bartholomew says. “It’s doing science, you know? Even though we’re science teachers, we don’t get to do that. It rejuvenated me… and gave me new ways of teaching old concepts.”

Artist Bethann Merkle, who has worked with scientist Karen Vaughn for two years, used soil pigments created from a burned area to paint scenes of the charred landscape.

(Bethann Merkle)

Pressler and Vaughn also believe in the importance of being role models who break out of the compartmentalization so common in science today. “It’s about showing young people that there are lots of different ways to be a scientist,” Pressler says, “that you can be colorful and explore different parts of your curiosity and still be a scientist.”

“We used to be Renaissance people,” Vaughn says. “Now it’s, ‘You need to stay in your box so you can do well at that.’ I feel like we’ve almost made it okay to be artistic while also being a scientist.”

#Nature

[thecoleopterawithana]

The next night Elliot [Mintz] took us out with a friend of his, Sal Mineo, and we all went to a gay cabaret/discotheque. John was oblivious to the gay ambience. He was curious about everyone's sexuality and liked to gossip about who was sleeping with whom, whether they were gay or straight. John made no judgements about homosexuality but was really curious about who was and who wasn't gay.   He knew that his appearance at a gay club might start rumors about his own sexuality, and it made him laugh. He told me that there had been rumors about him and his first manager, Brian Epstein, and that he usually didn't deny them. He liked the fact that people could be titillated by having suspicions about his masculinity. Then I was the one who was laughing. "How could anyone believe a man who likes women as much as you do is gay?" I told him.   After the show we went back to Mineo's apartment. I was thirsty, and Mineo told me to look in the refrigerator. There was nothing in it but one big bottle of amyl nitrite.   Mineo told John that he knew Ava Gardner. "I'm a real fan of hers. I love Ava," John replied excitedly.   Mineo went to the phone, called London, woke Gardner up, and told her that John wanted to speak to her. John took the phone. "Ava, is that you? Ava, I think you're beautiful. I've seen all your movies. Christ, is it really you?" They spoke for five minutes, then a thrilled John handed the phone back to Mineo.

In May Pang’s Loving John (1983).

-

[Once again, a million thanks to @eppysboys for sending over passages of interest.]

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Elliot Mintz (born February 16, 1945) is an American consultant. In the 1960s and early 1970s Mintz was an underground radio DJ and host. In the 1970s he became a spokesperson for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and took on other musicians and actors as clients as a publicist, including Bob Dylan. [...] 

Though not in a professional capacity, since the death of Lennon, Mintz has acted as a spokesperson for the Lennon estate. In addition, while sifting through Lennon's belongings, he discovered hundreds of unreleased tape recordings including half-finished new songs, early versions of famous hits, and idle thoughts. Beginning in 1988, he hosted a weekly syndicated radio series based upon these recordings called The Lost Lennon Tapes, which was broadcast for about four years. After the show came to an end, Mintz began hosting the spinoff radio program The Beatle Years. Mintz has appeared in feature documentaries about Lennon and Yoko Ono, including The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Imagine: John Lennon and The Real Yoko Ono. In 1985 he was a technical advisor on the television film John and Yoko: A Love Story. He also authored an essay about his relationship with them published in 2005 in a book entitled Memories of John Lennon. [Source]

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Salvatore Mineo Jr. (January 10, 1939 – February 12, 1976) was an American actor, singer and director. Mineo is best known for his Academy Award-nominated performance as John "Plato" Crawford opposite James Dean in the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Mineo also received a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Exodus (1960). A 1950s teen idol, Mineo's acting career declined in his adult years. He was murdered in 1976. [...]

By the early 1960s, Mineo was becoming too old to play the type of role that had made him famous, and his rumoured homosexuality led to his being considered inappropriate for leading roles. [...] In 1969, Mineo returned to the stage to direct a Los Angeles production of the LGBT-themed play Fortune and Men's Eyes (1967), featuring then-unknown Don Johnson as Smitty and himself as Rocky. The production received positive reviews, although its expanded prison rape scene was criticized as excessive and gratuitous. [...] By 1976, Mineo's career had begun to turn around. While playing the role of a bisexual burglar in a series of stage performances of the comedy P.S. Your Cat Is Dead in San Francisco, Mineo received substantial publicity from many positive reviews; he moved to Los Angeles along with the play.

Mineo met English-born actress Jill Haworth on the set of the film Exodus in 1960, in which they portrayed young lovers. Mineo and Haworth were together on-and-off for many years. They were engaged to be married at one point. According to Mineo biographer Michael Gregg Michaud, Haworth cancelled the engagement after she caught Mineo engaging in sexual relations with another man. The two did remain very close friends until Mineo's death. [...] While some have described Haworth as being nothing but a close friend and a "beard" to Mineo to conceal his same-sex partners, Michaud casts doubt upon this claim; he asserts that Mineo and Haworth's relationship was genuine, that Mineo fell in love with Haworth, and that Mineo regarded her as one of the important people in his life. [Source]

“Portrait of a Marriage really disturbed [John]. The book was an account of the fifty-year marriage of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, both of whom were bisexual and continually unfaithful to each other, yet were able to evolve a relationship of great depth and longevity despite the incompleteness of their marriage. John was very distressed by the theme of sexual incompatibility in the midst of great emotional attraction and the fact that no matter how hard one tries, a marriage may always remain incomplete.”

In a 1972 interview with Boze Hadleigh, Mineo discussed his bisexuality. At the time of his death, he was in a six-year relationship with male actor Courtney Burr III. [Source]

BH: Who are those two girls you mentioned, for a double date?

SM: (Laughs.) Are you kidding? I got a girl in every port- and a couple of guys in every port, too.

BH: Do you think rumors about being bi have hurt you in your career?

SM: Maybe. . . Nah, I doubt it. Everyone's got those rumors following him around, whether it's true or not. Everyone's supposed to be bi, starting way back with Gary Cooper and on through Brando and Clift and Dean and Newman and . . . you want me to stop?

BH: Did you resent the rumors?

SM: Well, no. Because what's wrong with being bi? Maybe most people are, deep down.

BH: Shirley MacLaine has publicly said that.

SM: I think she's right- got a good noodle, Shirl does. But anyhow, the rumor about me, from what I hear, was usually that I'm gay. Where, like, with Monty Clift or Brando, the rumor was that they're bi. [Brando later publicly admitted to bisexuality.]

— Boze Hadleigh’s interview with Sal Mineo (1972).

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“John and I had a big talk about it, saying, basically, all of us must be bisexual. And we were sort of in a situation of thinking that we’re not [bisexual] because of society. So we are hiding the other side of ourselves, which is less acceptable. But I don’t have a strong sexual desire towards another woman.”

Have you ever? “Not really, not sexually.”

One online satire imagined an affair between Ono and Hillary Clinton.

“It’s great,” Ono laughs. “I mean, both John and I thought it was good that people think we were bisexual, or homosexual.” She laughs again.

What about that old rumor that Lennon had sex with Beatles manager Brian Epstein (which was also the subject of the 1991 film, The Hours and The Times)?

Lennon himself said: “Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship.” Later, Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton said Lennon had told him that he had allowed Epstein to “toss [wank] him off.”

“Uh, well, the story I was told was a very explicit story, and from that I think they didn’t have it [sex],” Ono tells me. 

— in Yoko Ono: I Still Fear John’s Killer by Tim Teeman for the Daily Beast (13 October 2015).

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Q. Have you ever fucked a guy?

A. Not yet, I thought I’d save it til I was 40, life begins at 40 you know, tho I never noticed it.

Q. It is trendy to be bisexual and you’re usually ‘keeping up with the Jones’, haven’t you ever… there was talk about you and PAUL…

A. Oh, I thought it was about me and Brian Epstein… anyway, I’m saving all the juice for my own version of THE REAL FAB FOUR BEATLES STORY etc.. etc..

Q. It seems like you’re saving quite a lot for when you’re 40…

A. Yes, there might be nothing better to do, tho I don’t believe it.

— John Lennon, interview conducted by/on John Lennon, and/or Dr Winston O’boogie, for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine (November 1974).

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John: [...] I was trying to put it 'round that I was gay, you know– I thought that would throw them off… dancing at all the gay clubs in Los Angeles, flirting with the boys… but it never got off the ground.

Q: I think I’ve only heard that lately about Paul.

John: Oh, I’ve had him, he’s no good. [Laughter]

— John Lennon, interviewed by Lisa Robinson for Hit Parader: A conversation with John Lennon (December 1975).

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Like other alkyl nitrites, amyl nitrite is bioactive in mammals, being a vasodilator, which is the basis of its use as a prescription medicine. As an inhalant, it also has a psychoactive effect, which has led to its recreational use with its smell being described as that of old socks or dirty feet. It is also referred to as banapple gas. [Source]

Popper is a slang term given broadly to drugs of the chemical class called alkyl nitrites that are inhaled. [...] Popper use has a relaxation effect on involuntary smooth muscles, such as those in the throat and anus. It is used for practical purposes to facilitate anal sex by increasing blood flow and relaxing sphincter muscles, initially within the gay community.

"If you trace the bottle of amyl (a type of alkyl nitrite) through late 20th century history, you trace the legacies of gay culture on popular culture in the 20th century”

The drug is also used or for recreational drug purposes, typically for the "high" or "rush" that the drug can create.

Poppers were part of club culture from the mid-1970s disco scene and returned to popularity in the 1980s and 1990s rave scene. [Source]

“A cable had arrived for him that very morning stating the obvious: ‘Come too quickly. Stop. Try again. Stop. Am waiting in Paris. Stop me if you’ve heard it. Stop. Stuff yourself with artichokes and live. Stop. Don’t stop. Stop.’ He knew it was from Amie L'Nitrate.”

— in John Lennon’s unfinished story about a sudden rendezvous in Paris. Published in “Skywriting By Word Of Mouth”.

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Ava Lavinia Gardner (December 24, 1922 – January 25, 1990) was an American actress and singer. [...] Gardner appeared in several high-profile films from the 1940s to 1970s [...] She is listed 25th among the American Film Institute's 25 Greatest Female Stars of Classic Hollywood Cinema.

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Answered asks about:

John’s sexuality

Yoko and his sister Julia’s public statements about John’s sexuality

John "trying to put it ‘round that” he was gay

The Bob Wooler Episode

The Tony Manero Story

[Disclaimer: The answer to these asks represent my personal opinion at the time, which is liable to have evolved since then.]

[thesunnyshow]

Name: Kim Age: 26 (27 in September) Writing Blog URL(s): @jinterlude​   

Nationality: Filipino-American Languages: English  Star Sign: Virgo MBTI: ISFJ-T Favorite color: Any shade of blue  Favorite food: Ah, I have so many, but I really do love ramen & this Filipino noodle dish my grandma makes. Favorite movie: West Side Story. A close second is Pride & Prejudice (2005) Favorite ice cream flavor: Rocky Road  Favorite animal: Pandas Go-to karaoke song: Upside Down by A*Teens (I think I just dated myself) 

What fandom(s) do you write for? Mainly BTS, but I have written for SVT, EXO, GOT7, Monsta X, B.A.P, & NCT

When did you post your first piece? Oh dang, when? Hmm… I want to say Oct. 2016 (?) on my first blog (I had deleted and came back to Tumblr).

Do you write fluff/angst/crack/general/smut, combo, etc? Why? I mostly write a combo because it just happens that way! My main genres are: fluff, romance, & humor/crack. 

Do you write OCs, X Readers, Ships...etc? I mainly write OCs stories because that’s what makes me the happiest when it comes to writing, but I still write x reader fics for drabbles and oneshots. 

Why did you decide to write for Tumblr? Funny story. The reason why I started writing for Tumblr is because an old group of friends said that I should write a funny story based on a college class of mine, so I did and here we are. 

What inspires you to write? Usually, it’s my imagination, but other times it’s either the song I’m listening to or even the show I’m currently watching. Right now, my inspiration draws from anime. 

What genres/AUs do you enjoy writing the most? Genre wise, I love writing fluff & romance. AUs wise, I’m a sucker for Royal/Royalty. Mafia/Gang & Soulmate AUs would be a close second. 

What do you hope your readers take away from your work? Oh, wow. I honestly never thought about that before. I think for me, the one thing I hope my readers get from my stories is at the end of the day, please do something that will make you happy. Your own happiness should always be a top priority for you. 

What do you do when you hit a rough spot creatively? I take a break! Instead of forcing myself out of the creativity slump, I just take a break and let my mind recharge. Then, I go back to my outline and look over while listening to music that I know will spark some creativity juices. 

What is your favorite work and why? Your most successful? My favorite works (yes, I couldn’t pick just one) are my Royal!AU Seokjin series (Fight for Me & Our Second Chance). I love the amount of time and effort I put into those two stories, and I’m simply in awe at the world and characters I created. My second favorite is my latest Seokjin oneshot, Protecting Each Other. It’s my first story that exceeded 10,000 words, and I’m just proud of how that turned out. Successful wise, I would say it’s, This Little String. It’s a Soulmate!Taehyung oneshot based around the red-string of fate, and every other month, I see someone like and/or reblog it, so I say that’s pretty successful!

Who is your favorite person to write about? Seokjin hands down. I mean, not only is he one of my ultimate biases, but for some reason my creative banks dishes out ideas and inspiration for him like it’s nothing. 

Do you think there’s a difference between writing fanfiction vs. completely original prose? I personally don’t think so. You are still writing original content that derails from the source material (or adds to it), all you have to do is just replace your idols’ name with an original character name, and there you go. What do you think makes a good story? For me, I’d say that if you’re honestly proud of the end product, then that story is good, and your readers will see that. What is your writing process like? First I get an idea, or I like to call it, “it appeared to me in a vision,” then I outline it (if the idea lingers in my brain), and then I start writing and editing. Sometimes I’d sprint with my fellow writers on a server I’m in, and other times, I’d put on music and just let my brain go wild. Most of the time, I’m sprinting with friends. 

Would you ever repurpose a fic into a completely original story? If I had the time, probably. I can see my Royal!AU series becoming an original story with different characters and an expanded plotline. What tropes do you love, and what tropes can’t you stand? I am a sucker for F2L I (friends to lovers)! I just love the idea of dating someone who’s your best friend, so why not date your best friend, if the feelings are mutual of course! As for tropes, I dislike, I can’t say that I have any. I think it’s because (and I feel so bad for this), I don’t really read much stories other than what my mutual friends have written. 

How much would you say audience feedback/engagement means to you? It means the world to me because I do like knowing if I’m doing something right or if I need to go back and edit something for clarity. Mainly, I get likes and reblogs (with no feedback), and while it’s still nice of someone for taking the time to like and reblog something, I would like some feedback, please. I’m still grateful no matter what, though!

What has been one of the biggest factors of your success (of any size)? I think it’s the support of my amazing group of friends/mutuals! It’s thanks to their support that my work is reaching a wider audience, and it just means the world to me that they read my blood, sweat, and tears. I love them so much, especially my close friend, Jey (softjeon on Tumblr)!

Coffee or tea? What are you ordering? For coffee, my go-to is a Caramel Macchiato with Soy Milk (from Starbucks), but lately I’ve been using my Keurig, so I just Peppermint Mocha and 3 tsps of Sugar (I can’t stand bitter coffee lol). For tea, I really like Mango green tea from Gongcha (another boba place chain). 

Dream job (whether you have a job or not)? My dream job is to be an elementary school teacher, however, I am currently working on becoming a social worker where my population will still focus on children/students. So, it’s a good compromise!

If you could have one superpower, what would you choose?  If I could have one superpower, it would be cryokinesis aka ice manipulation!  

If you could visit a historical era, which would you choose? Oh, that’s a tough one, but if I had to choose one, I would go for the 1960s so I can see the Beatles live!

If you could restart your life, knowing what you do now, would you? No, because it’s thanks to those life lessons that I grow up to be who I currently am. Sometimes you have to go through those harsh experiences to be a better version of yourself!

Would you rather fight 100 chicken-sized horses or one horse-sized chicken? One horse-sized chicken, then I can feed my family for months. 

If you were a trope in a teen high school movie, what would you have been? Oh, hands down, I would be the stereotypical geek/nerd. Though, I was called a “preppy” in 9th grade, so that was a first. 

Do you believe in aliens/supernatural creatures? Yup, especially ghosts! 

Fun fact about yourself that not everyone would know? I can say the alphabet backwards! 

Do you think fanfic writers get unfairly judged? Oh, hands down, especially when it comes to writing smut. I’ve seen other blogs condemn writers who write smut about real people, but my thing is that these idols are merely face claims for a character that the author is writing about. 

Do you think art can be a medium for change? I think so! Every artist has a voice, especially with what’s going on recently, we need to be able to use our voices to spread light on certain issues. 

Do you ever feel there are times when you’re writing for others, rather than yourself? I used to think that way, especially when it came to writing x reader inserts since I know that’s what “sells” to the Tumblr audience. Now, I’m perfectly happy with writing x OC stories, and I’m content with my stories getting at least 5 notes. If it breaks 10 notes, then that’s a success!

Do you ever feel like people have misunderstood you or your writing at times? If they did, then I wouldn’t know. Most of the time, I think my writing is okay with people. 

Do your offline friends/loved ones know you write for Tumblr? Yes, my soul friend managed my old blog once upon a time and actually read one of my smuts. I was so embarrassed! But at least he said it was tastefully written, so that’s a bonus? 

What is one thing you wish you could tell your followers? Always remember that it is okay to take breaks/go on hiatus! 

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who might be too scared to put themselves out there? My advice to those who want to start writing but are too afraid put themselves out there is to simply go for it. I was that person who was afraid to put their writing out there for the world to see, especially with some already established BTS writers on Tumblr, but I went for it. At first, it might be discouraging but know that your mutuals/friends will always be your number one supporter! Use their support as a motivator to keep writing and finding your groove! Then, eventually, all of your readers will start trickling in and showering you with the love and support you deserve!

Are there any times when you regret joining Tumblr? I wouldn’t say regret joining but more like allowing my life to be revolved around it. At one point in my life, it felt like a second job/chore for me, and Tumblr should never be that type of site! 

Do you have any mutuals who have been particularly formative/supportive in your Tumblr journey? Oh, I have so many! The ones that come to mind are definitely Jey (softjeon), Beanie (jinned), Nina (j-sope), Kenz (parksfilter), Renae (mygsii), Atlas (astraljoon), & Niah (randomkoalablog) to name a few! I love these amazing people so much and cherish their friendship to the moon and back!

Pick a quote to end your interview with: "Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious … and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney

[uschangelings]

Did you know that Agatha Christie wrote sci-fi??

“The Hound of Death” by Agatha Christie (short story)

I.

It was from William P. Ryan, American newspaper correspondent, that I first heard of the affair. I was dining with him in London on the eve of his return to New York and happened to mention that on the morrow I was going down to Folbridge. He looked up and said sharply: ‘Folbridge, Cornwall?’ Now only about one person in a thousand knows that there is a Folbridge in Cornwall. They always take it for granted that the Folbridge, Hampshire, is meant. So Ryan’s knowledge aroused my curiosity. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you know it?’ He merely replied that he was darned. He then asked if I happened to know a house called Trearne down there. My interest increased. ‘Very well indeed. In fact, it’s to Trearne I’m going. It’s my sister’s house.’ ‘Well,’ said William P. Ryan. ‘If that doesn’t beat the band!’ I suggested that he should cease making cryptic remarks and explain himself.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘To do that I shall have to go back to an experience of mine at the beginning of the war.’ I sighed. The events which I am relating to took place in 1921. To be reminded of the war was the last thing any man wanted. We were, thank God, beginning to forget … Besides, William P. Ryan on his war experiences was apt, as I knew, to be unbelievably long-winded. But there was no stopping him now. ‘At the start of the war, as I dare say you know, I was in Belgium for my paper – moving about some. Well, there’s a little village – I’ll call it X. A one horse place if there ever was one, but there’s quite a big convent there. Nuns in white what do you call ’em – I don’t know the name of the order. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Well, this little burgh was right in the way of the German advance. The Uhlans arrived –’ I shifted uneasily. William P. Ryan lifted a hand reassuringly. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a German atrocity story. It might have been, perhaps, but it isn’t. As a matter of fact, the boot’s on the other leg. The Huns made for that convent – they got there and the whole thing blew up.’ ‘Oh!’ I said, rather startled. ‘Odd business, wasn’t it? Of course, off hand, I should say the Huns had been celebrating and had monkeyed round with their own explosives. But is seems they hadn’t anything of that kind with them. They weren’t the high explosive johnnies. Well, then, I ask you, what should a pack of nuns know about high explosive? Some nuns, I should say!’ ‘It is odd,’ I agreed. ‘I was interested in hearing the peasants’ account of the matter. They’d got it all cut and dried. According to them it was a slap-up one hundred per cent efficient first-class modern miracle. It seems one of the nuns had got something of a reputation – a budding saint – went into trances and saw visions. And according to them she worked the stunt. She called down the lightning to blast the impious Hun – and it blasted him all right – and everything else within range. A pretty efficient miracle, that! ‘I never really got at the truth of the matter – hadn’t time. But miracles were all the rage just then – angels at Mons and all that. I wrote up the thing, put in a bit of sob stuff, and pulled the religious stop out well, and sent it to my paper. It went down very well in the States. They were liking that kind of thing just then. ‘But (I don’t know if you’ll understand this) in writing, I got kinder interested. I felt I’d like to know what really had happened. There was nothing to see at the spot itself. Two walls still left standing, and on one of them was a black powder mark that was the exact shape of a great hound. ‘The peasants round about were scared to death of that mark. They called it the Hound of Death and they wouldn’t pass that way after dark. ‘Superstition’s always interesting. I felt I’d like to see the lady who worked the stunt. She hadn’t perished, it seemed. She’d gone to England with a batch of other refugees. I took the trouble to trace her. I found she’d been sent to Trearne, Folbridge, Cornwall.’ I nodded. ‘My sister took in a lot of Belgian refugees the beginning of the war. About twenty.’ ‘Well, I always meant, if I had time, to look up the lady. I wanted to hear her own account of the disaster. Then, what with being busy and one thing and another, it slipped my memory. Cornwall’s a bit out of the way anyhow. In fact, I’d forgotten the whole thing till your mentioning Folbridge just now brought it back.’ ‘I must ask my sister,’ I said. ‘She may have heard something about it. Of course, the Belgians have all been repatriated long ago.’

‘Naturally. All the same, in case your sister does know anything I’ll be glad if you pass it on to me.’ ‘Of course I will,’ I said heartily. And that was that.

II. It was the second day after my arrival at Trearne that the story recurred to me. My sister and I were having tea on the terrace. ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘didn’t you have a nun among your Belgians?’ ‘You don’t mean Sister Marie Angelique, do you?’ ‘Possibly I do,’ I said cautiously. ‘Tell me about her.’ ‘Oh! my dear, she was the most uncanny creature. She’s still here, you know.’ ‘What? In the house?’ ‘No, no, in the village. Dr Rose – you remember Dr Rose?’ I shook my head. ‘I remember an old man of about eighty-three.’ ‘Dr Laird. Oh! he died. Dr Rose has only been here a few years. He’s quite young and very keen on new ideas. He took the most enormous interest in Sister Marie Angelique. She has hallucinations and things, you know, and apparently is most frightfully interesting from a medical point of view. Poor thing, she’d nowhere to go – and really was in my opinion quite potty – only impressive, if you know what I mean – well, as I say, she’d nowhere to go, and Dr Rose very kindly fixed her up in the village. I believe he’s writing a monograph or whatever it is that doctors write, about her.’ She paused and then said: ‘But what do you know about her?’ ‘I heard a rather curious story.’ I passed on the story as I had received it from Ryan. Kitty was very much interested. ‘She looks the sort of person who could blast you – if you know what I mean,’ she said. ‘I really think,’ I said, my curiosity heightened, ‘that I must see this young woman.’ ‘Do. I’d like to know what you think of her. Go and see Dr Rose first. Why not walk down to the village after tea?’

I accepted the suggestion.  I found Dr Rose at home and introduced myself. He seemed a pleasant young man, yet there was something about his personality that rather repelled me. It was too forceful to be altogether agreeable.  The moment I mentioned Sister Marie Angelique he stiffened to attention. He was evidently keenly interested. I gave him Ryan’s account of the matter.  ‘Ah!’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That explains a great deal.’  He looked up quickly at me and went on. ‘The case is really an extraordinarily interesting one. The woman arrived here having evidently suffered some severe mental shock. She was in a state of great mental excitement also. She was given to hallucinations of a most startling character. Her personality is most unusual. Perhaps you would like to come with me and call upon her. She is really well worth seeing.’  I agreed readily.  We set out together. Our objective was a small cottage on the outskirts of the village. Folbridge is a most picturesque place. It lies at the mouth of the river Fol mostly on the east bank, the west bank is too precipitous for building, though a few cottages do cling to the cliffside there. The doctor’s own cottage was perched on the extreme edge of the cliff on the west side. From it you looked down on the big waves lashing against the black rocks.  The little cottage to which we were now proceeding lay inland out of the sight of the sea.  ‘The district nurse lives here,’ explained Dr Rose. ‘I have arranged for Sister Marie Angelique to board with her. It is just as well that she should be under skilled supervision.’  ‘Is she quite normal in her manner?’ I asked curiously. ‘You can judge for yourself in a minute,’ he replied, smiling.  The district nurse, a dumpy pleasant little body, was just setting out on her bicycle when we arrived.  ‘Good evening, nurse, how’s your patient?’ called out the doctor. ‘She’s much as usual, doctor. Just sitting there with her hands folded and her mind far away. Often enough she’ll not answer when I speak to her, though for the matter of that it’s little enough English she understands even now.’  Rose nodded, and as the nurse bicycled away, he went up to the cottage door, rapped sharply and entered.  Sister Marie Angelique was lying in a long chair near the window. She turned her head as we entered.  It was a strange face – pale, transparent looking, with enormous eyes. There seemed to be an infinitude of tragedy in those eyes.  ‘Good evening, my sister,’ said the doctor in French. ‘Good evening, M. le docteur.’  ‘Permit me to introduce a friend, Mr Anstruther.’  I bowed and she inclined her head with a faint smile. ‘And how are you today?’ inquired the doctor, sitting down beside her.  ‘I am much the same as usual.’ She paused and then went on. ‘Nothing seems real to me. Are they days that pass – or months – or years? I hardly know. Only my dreams seem real to me.’  ‘You still dream a lot, then?’  ‘Always – always – and, you understand? – the dreams seem more real than life.’  ‘You dream of your own country – of Belgium?’  She shook her head. ‘No. I dream of a country that never existed – never. But you know this, M. le docteur. I have told you many times.’ She stopped and then said abruptly: ‘But perhaps this gentleman is also a doctor – a doctor perhaps for the diseases of the brain?’  ‘No, no.’ Rose said reassuring, but as he smiled I noticed how extraordinarily pointed his canine teeth were, and it occurred to me that there was something wolf-like about the man. He went on:  ‘I thought you might be interested to meet Mr Anstruther. He knows something of Belgium. He has lately been hearing news of your convent.’  Her eyes turned to me. A faint flush crept into her cheeks. ‘It’s nothing, really,’ I hastened to explain. ‘But I was dining the other evening with a friend who was describing the ruined walls of the convent to me.’  ‘So it is ruined!’  It was a soft exclamation, uttered more to herself than to us. Then looking at me once more she asked hesitatingly: ‘Tell me, Monsieur, did your friend say how – in what way – it was ruined?’  ‘It was blown up,’ I said, and added: ‘The peasants are afraid to pass that way at night.’  ‘Why are they afraid?’  ‘Because of a black mark on a ruined wall. They have a superstitious fear of it.’  She leaned forward.  ‘Tell me, Monsieur – quick – quick – tell me! What is that mark like?’  ‘It has the shape of a huge hound,’ I answered. ‘The peasants call it the Hound of Death.’  ‘Ah!’  A shrill cry burst from her lips.  ‘It is true then – it is true. All that I remember is true. It is not some black nightmare. It happened! It happened!’  ‘What happened, my sister?’ asked the doctor in a low voice.  She turned to him eagerly. ‘I remembered. There on the steps, I remembered. I remembered the way of it. I used the power as we used to use it. I stood on the altar steps and I bade them to come no farther. I told them to depart in peace. They would not listen, they came on although I warned them. And so –’ She leaned forward and made a curious gesture. ‘And so I loosed the Hound of Death on them . . .’  She lay back on her chair shivering all over, her eyes closed.  The doctor rose, fetched a glass from a cupboard, half-filled it with water, added a drop or two from a little bottle which he produced from his pocket, then took the glass to her.  ‘Drink this,’ he said authoritatively.  She obeyed – mechanically as it seemed. Her eyes looked far away as though they contemplated some inner vision of her own.  ‘But then it is all true,’ she said. ‘Everything. The City of the Circles, the People of the Crystal – everything. It is all true.’  ‘It would seem so,’ said Rose.  His voice was low and soothing, clearly designed to encourage and not to disturb her train of thought.  ‘Tell me about the City,’ he said. ‘The City of Circles, I think you said?’  She answered absently and mechanically. ‘Yes – there were three circles. The first circle for the chosen, the second for the priestesses and the outer circle for the priests.’  ‘And in the centre?’  She drew her breath sharply and her voice sank to a tone of indescribable awe.  ‘The House of the Crystal . . .’  As she breathed the words, her right hand went to her forehead and her finger traced some figure there.  Her figure seemed to grow more rigid, her eyes closed, she swayed a little – then suddenly she sat upright with a jerk, as though she had suddenly awakened.  ‘What is it?’ she said confusedly. ‘What have I been saying?’  ‘It is nothing,’ said Rose. ‘You are tired. You want to rest. We will leave you.’  She seemed a little dazed as we took our departure. ‘Well,’ said Rose when we were outside. ‘What do you think of it?’ He shot a sharp glance sideways at me.  ‘I suppose her mind must be totally unhinged,’ I said slowly. ‘It struck you like that?’  ‘No – as a matter of fact, she was – well, curiously convincing. When listening to her I had the impression that she actually had done what she claimed to do – worked a kind of gigantic miracle. Her belief that she did so seems genuine enough. That is why –’  ‘That is why you say her mind must be unhinged. Quite so. But now approach the matter from another angle. Supposing that she did actually work that miracle – supposing that she did, personally, destroy a building and several hundred human beings.’  ‘By the mere exercise of will?’ I said with a smile. ‘I should not put it quite like that. You will agree that one person could destroy a multitude by touching a switch which controlled a system of mines.’  ‘Yes, but that is mechanical.’  ‘True, that is mechanical, but it is, in essence, the harnessing and controlling of natural forces. The thunder-storm and the power house are, fundamentally, the same thing.’  ‘Yes, but to control the thunderstorm we have to use mechanical means.’ Rose smiled. ‘I am going off at a tangent now. There is a substance called winter-green. It occurs in nature in vegetable form. It can also be built up by man synthetically and chemically in the laboratory.’  ‘Well?’  ‘My point is that there are often two ways of arriving at the same result. Ours is, admittedly, the synthetic way. There might be another. The extraordinary results arrived at by Indian fakirs for instance, cannot be explained away in any easy fashion. The things we call supernatural is only the natural of which the laws are not yet understood.’  ‘You mean?’ I asked, fascinated. ‘That I cannot entirely dismiss the possibility that a human being might be able to tap some vast destructive force and use it to further his or her ends. The means by which this was accomplished might seem to us supernatural – but would not be so in reality.’  I stared at him.  He laughed. ‘It’s a speculation, that’s all,’ he said lightly. ‘Tell me, did you notice a gesture she made when she mentioned the House of the Crystal?’  ‘She put her hand to her forehead.’  ‘Exactly. And traced a circle there. Very much as a Catholic makes the sign of the cross. Now, I will tell you something rather interesting, Mr Anstruther. The word crystal having occurred so often in my patient’s rambling, I tried an experiment. I borrowed a crystal from someone and produced it unexpectedly one day to test my patient’s reaction to it.’  ‘Well?’  ‘Well, the result was very curious and suggestive. Her whole body stiffened. She stared at it as though unable to believe her eyes. Then she slid to her knees in front of it, murmured a few words – and fainted.’  ‘What were the few words?’  ‘Very curious ones. She said: “The Crystal! Then the Faith still lives!”’  ‘Extraordinary!’  ‘Suggestive, is it not? Now the next curious thing. When she came round from her faint she had forgotten the whole thing. I showed her the crystal and asked her if she knew what it was. She replied that she supposed it was a crystal such as fortune tellers used. I asked her if she had ever seen one before? She replied: “Never, M. le docteur.” But I saw a puzzled look in her eyes. “What troubles you, my sister?” I asked. She replied: “Because it is so strange. I have never seen a crystal before and yet – it seems to me that I know it well. There is something – if only I could remember . . .” The effort at memory was obviously so distressing to her that I forbade her to think any more. That was two weeks ago. I have purposely been biding my time. Tomorrow, I shall proceed to a further experiment.’  ‘With the crystal?’  ‘With the crystal. I shall get her to gaze into it. I think the result ought to be interesting.’  ‘What do you expect to get hold of?’ I asked curiously.  The words were idle ones but they had an unlooked-for result. Rose stiffened, flushed, and his manner when he spoke changed insensibly. It was more formal, more professional.  ‘Light on certain mental disorders imperfectly understood. Sister Marie Angelique is a most interesting study.’  So Rose’s interest was purely professional? I wondered. ‘Do you mind if I come along too?’ I asked.  It may have been my fancy, but I thought he hesitated before he replied. I had a sudden intuition that he did not want me.  ‘Certainly. I can see no ob jection.’  He added: ‘I suppose you’re not going to be down here very long?’  ‘Only till the day after tomorrow.’  I fancied that the answer pleased him. His brow cleared and he began talking of some recent experiments carried out on guinea pigs.

III.  I met the doctor by appointment the following afternoon, and we went together to Sister Marie Angelique. Today, the doctor was all geniality.  He was anxious, I thought, to efface the impression he had made the day before.  ‘You must not take what I said too seriously,’ he observed, laughing. ‘I shouldn’t like you to believe me a dabbler in occult sciences. The worst of me is I have an infernal weakness for making out a case.’  ‘Really?’  ‘Yes, and the more fantastic it is, the better I like it.’  He laughed as a man laughs at an amusing weakness.  When we arrived at the cottage, the district nurse had something she wanted to consult Rose about, so I was left with Sister Marie Angelique.  I saw her scrutinizing me closely. Presently she spoke. ‘The good nurse here, she tells me that you are the brother of the kind lady at the big house where I was brought when I came from Belgium?’  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She was very kind to me. She is good.’  She was silent, as though following out some train of thought. Then she said:  ‘M. le docteur, he too is a good man?’  I was a little embarrassed. ‘Why, yes. I mean – I think so.’  ‘Ah!’ She paused and then said: ��Certainly he has been very kind to me.’  ‘I’m sure he has.’  She looked up at me sharply. ‘Monsieur – you – you who speak to me now – do you believe that I am mad?’  ‘Why, my sister, such an idea never –’  She shook her head slowly – interrupting my protest. ‘Am I mad? I do not know – the things I remember – the things I forget . . .’  She sighed, and at that moment Rose entered the room.  He greeted her cheerily and explained what he wanted her to do. ‘Certain people, you see, have a gift for seeing things in a crystal. I fancy you might have such a gift, my sister.’  She looked distressed.  ‘No, no, I cannot do that. To try to read the future – that is sinful.’ Rose was taken aback. It was the nun’s point of view for which he had not allowed. He changed his ground cleverly.

‘One should not look into the future. You are quite right. But to look into the past – that is different.’  ‘The past?’  ‘Yes – there are many strange things in the past. Flashes come back to one – they are seen for a moment – then gone again. Do not seek to see anything in the crystal since that is not allowed you. Just take it in your hands – so. Look into it – look deep. Yes – deeper – deeper still. You remember, do you not? You remember. You hear me speaking to you. You can answer my questions. Can you not hear me?’  Sister Marie Angelique had taken the crystal as bidden, handling it with a curious reverence. Then, as she gazed into it, her eyes became blank and unseeing, her head drooped. She seemed to sleep.  Gently the doctor took the crystal from her and put it on the table. He raised the corner of her eyelid. Then he came and sat by me.  ‘We must wait till she wakes. It won’t be long, I fancy.’  He was right. At the end of five minutes, Sister Marie Angelique stirred. Her eyes opened dreamily.  ‘Where am I?’  ‘You are here – at home. You have had a little sleep. You have dreamt, have you not?’  She nodded. ‘Yes, I have dreamt.’  ‘You have dreamt of the Crystal?’  ‘Yes.’  ‘Tell us about it.’  ‘You will think me mad, M. le docteur. For see you, in my dream, the Crystal was a holy emblem. I even figured to myself a second Christ, a Teacher of the Crystal who died for his faith, his followers hunted down – persecuted . . . But the faith endured.  ‘Yes – for fifteen thousand full moons – I mean, for fifteen thousand years.’  ‘How long was a full moon?’  ‘Thirteen ordinary moons. Yes, it was in the fifteen thousandth full moon – of course, I was a Priestess of the Fifth Sign in the House of the Crystal. It was in the first days of the coming of the Sixth Sign . . .’  Her brows drew together, a look of fear passed over her face. ‘Too soon,’ she murmured. ‘Too soon. A mistake . . . Ah! yes, I remember! The Sixth Sign . . .’  She half sprang to her feet, then dropped back, passing her hand over her face and murmuring:  ‘But what am I saying? I am raving. These things never happened.’  ‘Now don’t distress yourself.’  But she was looking at him in anguished perplexity. ‘M. le docteur, I do not understand. Why should I have these dreams – these fancies? I was only sixteen when I entered the religious life. I have never travelled. Yet I dream of cities, of strange people, of strange customs. Why?’ She pressed both hands to her head.  ‘Have you ever been hypnotized, my sister? Or been in a state of trance?’  ‘I have never been hypnotized, M. le docteur. For the other, when at prayer in the chapel, my spirit has often been caught up from my body, and I have been as one dead for many hours. It was undoubtedly a blessed state, the Reverend Mother said – a state of grace. Ah! yes,’ she caught her breath. ‘I remember; we, too, called it a state of grace.’  ‘I would like to try an experiment, my sister.’ Rose spoke in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘It may dispel those painful half-recollections. I will ask you to gaze once more in the crystal. I will then say a certain word to you. You will answer another. We will continue in this way until you become tired. Concentrate your thoughts on the crystal, not upon the words.’  As I once more unwrapped the crystal and gave it into Sister Marie Angelique’s hands, I noticed the reverent way her hands touched it. Reposing on the black velvet, it lay between her slim palms. Her wonderful deep eyes gazed into it. There was a short silence, and then the doctor said:  ‘Hound.’  Immediately Sister Marie Angelique answered ‘Death.’

IV.  I do not propose to give a full account of the experiment. Many unimportant and meaningless words were purposely introduced by the doctor. Other words he repeated several times, sometimes getting the same answer to them, sometimes a different one.  That evening in the doctor’s little cottage on the cliffs we discussed the result of the experiment.  He cleared his throat, and drew his note-book closer to him. ‘These results are very interesting – very curious. In answer to the words “Sixth Sign,” we get variously Destruction, Purple, Hound, Power, then again Destruction, and finally Power. Later, as you may have noticed, I reversed the method, with the following results. In answer to Destruction, I get Hound; to Purple, Power; to Hound, Death, again, and to Power, Hound. That all holds together, but on a second repetition of Destruction, I get Sea, which appears utterly irrelevant. To the words “Fifth Sign,” I get Blue, Thoughts, Bird, Blue again, and finally the rather suggestive phrase Opening of mind to mind. From the fact that “Fourth Sign” elicits the word Yellow, and later Light, and that “First Sign” is answered by Blood, I deduce that each Sign had a particular colour, and possibly a particular symbol, that of the Fifth Sign being a bird, and that of the Sixth a hound. However, I surmise that the Fifth Sign represented what is familiarly known as telepathy – the opening of mind to mind. The Sixth Sign undoubtedly stands for the Power of Destruction.’  ‘What is the meaning of Sea?’  ‘That I confess I cannot explain. I introduced the word later and got the ordinary answer of Boat. To “Seventh Sign” I got first Life, the second time Love. To “Eighth Sign,” I got the answer None. I take it therefore that Seven was the sum and number of the signs.’  ‘But the Seventh was not achieved,’ I said on a sudden inspiration. ‘Since through the Sixth came Destruction!’  ‘Ah! You think so? But we are taking these – mad ramblings very seriously. They are really only interesting from a medical point of view.’  ‘Surely they will attract the attention of psychic investigators.’  The doctor’s eyes narrowed. ‘My dear sir, I have no intention of making them public.’  ‘Then your interest?’  ‘Is purely personal. I shall make notes on the case, of course.’  ‘I see.’ But for the first time I felt, like the blind man, that I didn’t see at all. I rose to my feet.  ‘Well, I’ll wish you good night, doctor. I’m off to town again tomorrow.’  ‘Ah!’ I fancied there was satisfaction, relief perhaps, behind the exclamation.  ‘I wish you good luck with your investigations,’ I continued lightly. ‘Don’t loose the Hound of Death on me next time we meet!’  His hand was in mine as I spoke, and I felt the start it gave. He recovered himself quickly. His lips drew back from his long pointed teeth in a smile.  ‘For a man who loved power, what a power that would be!’ he said. ‘To hold every human being’s life in the hollow of your hand!’  And his smile broadened.

V.  That was the end of my direct connection with the affair.  Later, the doctor’s note-book and diary came into my hands. I will reproduce the few scant entries in it here, though you will understand that it did not really come into my possession until some time afterwards.  Aug. 5th. Have discovered that by ‘the Chosen,’ Sister M.A. means those who reproduced the race. Apparently they were held in the highest honour, and exalted above the Priesthood. Contrast this with early Christians.  Aug. 7th. Persuaded Sister M.A. to let me hypnotize her. Succeeded in inducing hypnoptic sleep and trance, but no rapport established.  Aug. 9th. Have there been civilizations in the past to which ours is as nothing? Strange if it should be so, and I the only man with the clue to it . . .  Aug. 12th. Sister M.A. not at all amenable to suggestion when hypnotized. Yet state of trance easily induced. Cannot understand it.  Aug. 13th. Sister M.A. mentioned today that in ‘state of grace’ the ‘gate must be closed, lest another should command the body’. Interesting – but baffling.  Aug. 18th. So the First Sign is none other than . . . (words erased here) . . . then how many centuries will it take to reach the Sixth? But if there should be a short-cut to Power . . .  Aug. 20th. Have arranged for M.A. to come here with Nurse. Have told her it is necessary to keep patient under morphia. Am I mad? Or shall I be the Superman, with the Power of Death in my hands?  (Here the entries cease) VI.

 It was, I think, on August 29th that I received the letter. It was directed to me, care of my sister-in-law, in a sloping foreign handwriting. I opened it with some curiosity. It ran as follows:  Cher Monsieur,  I have seen you but twice, but I have felt I could trust you. Whether my dreams are real or not, they have grown clearer of late . . . And, Monsieur, one thing at all events, the Hound of Death is no dream . . . In the days I told you of (Whether they are real or not, I do not know) He who was Guardian of the Crystal revealed the Sixth Sign to the people too soon . . . Evil entered into their hearts. They had the power to slay at will – and they slew without justice – in anger. They were drunk with the lust of Power. When we saw this, We who were yet pure, we knew that once again we should not complete the Circle and come to the Sign of Everlasting Life. He who would have been the next Guardian of the Crystal was bidden to act. That the old might die, and the new, after endless ages, might come again, he loosed the Hound of Death upon the sea (being careful not to close the circle), and the sea rose up in the shape of a Hound and swallowed the land utterly . . .  Once before I remembered this – on the altar steps in Belgium . . . The Dr Rose, he is of the Brotherhood. He knows the First Sign, and the form of the Second, though its meaning is hidden to all save a chosen few. He would learn of me the Sixth. I have withstood him so far –  but I grow weak, Monsieur, it is not well that a man should come to power before his time. Many centuries must go by ere the world is ready to have the power of death delivered into its hand . . . I beseech you, Monsieur, you who love goodness and truth, to help me . . . before it is too late.  Your sister in Christ,  Marie Angelique  I let the paper fall. The solid earth beneath me seemed a little less solid than usual. Then I began to rally. The poor woman’s belief, genuine enough, had almost affected me! One thing was clear. Dr Rose, in his zeal for a case, was grossly abusing his professional standing. I would run down and –  Suddenly I noticed a letter from Kitty amongst my other correspondence. I tore it open.  ‘Such an awful thing has happened,’ I read. ‘You remember Dr Rose’s little cottage on the cliff? It was swept away by a landslide last night, the doctor and that poor nun, Sister Marie Angelique, were killed. The debris on the beach is too awful – all piled up in a fantastic mass – from a distance it looks like a great hound . . .’  The letter dropped from my hand.  The other facts may be coincidence. A Mr Rose, whom I discovered to be a wealthy relative of the doctor’s, died suddenly that same night – it was said struck by lightning. As far as was known no thunderstorm had occurred in the neighbourhood, but one or two people declared they had heard one peal of thunder. He had an electric burn on him ‘of a curious shape.’ His will left everything to his nephew, Dr Rose.  Now, supposing that Dr Rose succeeded in obtaining the secret of the sixth Sign from Sister Marie Angelique. I had always felt him to be an unscrupulous man – he would not shrink at taking his uncle’s life if he were sure it could not be brought home to him. But one sentence of Sister Marie Angelique’s letter rings in my brain . . . ‘being careful not to close the Circle . . .’ Dr Rose did not exercise that care – was perhaps unaware of the steps to take, or even of the need for them. So the Force he employed returned, completing its circuit . . .  But of course it is all nonsense! Everything can be accounted for quite naturally. That the doctor believed in Sister Marie Angelique’s hallucinations merely proves that his mind, too, was slightly unbalanced.  Yet sometimes I dream of a continent under the seas where men once lived and attained to a degree of civilization far ahead of ours . . .  Or did Sister Marie Angelique remember backwards – as some say is possible – and is this City of the Circles in the future and not in the past?  Nonsense – of course the whole thing was merely hallucination!

[iandeleonwrites]

Ian’s Case: A Personal Statement for Grad School Admission

Personal Statement, Ian Deleón

“He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed.”

It was more than a decade ago when I first read those words. Written by the American author Willa Cather, Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament has always felt to me like an intimate account of my own life penned by a woman one hundred years in the past. 

That is a feeling which makes me proud; that my personal whims, fears, and desires, could find their echo long ago in a story about a young man and his pursuit of a meaningful life. Because of it, I felt a pleasing sense of historicity at a time when I was struggling so much with my own. 

I grew up in Miami Beach. Literally not more than a block away from water for most of my life. My father had emigrated from Cuba with his family in 1980. My mother had come on a work visa from Brazil a few years later. They met on the beach, had an affair, and I came into the world in May of 1987. 

My life was marked with in betweenness from the very beginning. My parents’ relationship did not last long, so I grew up traveling between houses. I had two families. I was American, but I was also Cuban and Brazilian. I even have a Brazilian passport. I spoke three languages fluently, but I couldn’t dance salsa or samba. I felt at home with the working class immigrants and people of color in my neighborhoods, but I often had to work hard to prove I wasn’t just some gringo with a knack for foreign tongues.  

[A quick note on Paul’s Case––If it happens that the reader is not familiar with the short story, let me briefly summarize it here:  A disenchanted youth in turn of the century Pittsburgh feels increasingly alienated from his schoolmates, his teachers and his family. His only comfort is his position as an usher at Carnegie Hall, where he loses himself in the glamour of the art life. Having no drive or desire to become an artist, however, the dandy Paul makes a spur of the moment criminal decision and elopes to New York City. There, he is able to live out his fantasies in a financial masquerade for about a week’s time, until the authorities back home finger him for monetary theft. Learning that his father is en route to the city to collect him, Paul travels to the countryside and flings himself in front of a speeding train, musing about the elegant brevity of winter flowers.]

When I first encountered Cather’s short story I was blown away by the parallels I saw between my own life and Paul’s. In 2005, fresh out of high school, I was living mostly with my father as my mother had relocated to faraway West Palm Beach. I was an usher at the local concert hall, a job I cherished enough to volunteer my time for free. I became entranced by the world of classical music, opera, theater, and spectacle––often showing up for work early and roaming the performance spaces, probing high and low like some kind of millenial phantom. 

In school, however, I had no direction, no plan. I had good enough grades, but no real motivation, and worst of all, I thought, no discernible talent. I probably resented my father for not being cultured enough to teach me about music, theater, and the arts. No one in my family had ever even been to a museum, or sat before a chamber orchestra. And it didn’t seem to matter to them either, they could somehow live blissfully without it. 

Well I couldn’t. I began to mimic the fervor with which Paul immersed himself in that world, while also exhibiting the same panic at the thought of not being able to sustain my treasured experiences without a marketable contribution to them. But here is where Paul and I take divergent paths. 

I was attending the Miami Dade Honors College, breezing my way towards an associate’s degree. I took classes in Oceanography, Sociology, Creative Writing, Acting and African Drumming. I was experimenting and falling in love with everything. 

But it was my Creative Writing professor, Michael Hettich, who really encouraged the development of my nascent writing talent. Up until that point my ideas only found their expression through class assignments, particularly book reports and essays on historical events. My sister had always felt I had a way with words, but I just attributed this to growing up in a multicultural environment amongst a diversity of native languages.  

As a result of that encouragement I began to write poetry, little songs and treatments for film ideas based on the short stories we were talking about in class. Somehow, thanks to those lines of poetry and a few amateur photographic self portraits, I was admitted to the Massachusetts College of Art & Design for my BFA program. 

There, I attended classes in Printmaking, Paper Making, Performance Art, Video Editing, and Glass Blowing. I was immersed in culture, attending lectures and workshops, adding new words to my vocabulary: “New Media” and “gestalt”. I saw my first snowfall. I had the dubious honor of appearing at once not Hispanic and yet different enough. I was overwhelmed. I felt increasingly disenchanted and out of place in New England, yet my work flourished and grew stronger. 

It was during this time that I developed a passion for live performance and engagement with an audience. I also worked with multi-channel video and sculptural installations. Always, I commented on my family history, grappling with it, the emigrations and immigrations. I even returned to those early short stories from Miami Dade, one time doing an interpretive movement piece based on The Yellow Wallpaper. Most often I talked about my father. He was even in a few of my projects. He was a good sport, though we still had the occasional heated political disagreement. We never held any grudges, and made up again rather quickly. It would always be that way, intense periods of warming and cooling. A tropical temperament, I suppose. 

I continued to take film-related classes in Boston, but my interests gradually became highly abstracted, subtle, and decidedly avant-garde. I had no desire to work in a coherently narrative medium. This would eventually change, but for now, I let my ambitions and aspirations take me where they would. 

I returned home to Miami for a spell after graduation. I traveled the world for five months after that. I moved back to Boston for another couple of years, because it was comfortable I suppose, though I was fed up with the weather. 

Finally, I wound up in NYC. Classic story: I followed a charming young woman, another performance artist as luck would have it, a writer too, and a bit of an outsider. We were quickly engaged and on the first anniversary of our meet cute we were married on a gorgeous piece of land in upstate new york, owned by an older performance-loving couple from the city. Piece of land doesn’t quite do it justice, we’re talking massive tracts, hidden acres of forest, sudden lakes, fertile fields, and precocious wildlife. As they say in the movies, it really is all about location, location, location. 

Nearly all of our significant personal and professional achievements in the subsequent years have centered around this bucolic homestead. After meeting, courting, researching and eventually getting married there, we soon decided we would stage our most ambitious project to date in this magical space––we would shoot...a movie.

We hit upon the curious story of an eighteenth century woman in England called Mary Toft. Dear Mary became famous for a months-long ruse that involved her supposed birthing of rabbits, and sometimes cats. The small town hoax ballooned into a national controversy when it was eventually exposed by some of the king’s physicians. My wife and I were completely enthralled by this story and its contemporary implications. Was Mary wholly complicit in the mischievous acts, or was she herself a sort of duped victim...of systematic abuse at the hands of her family, her husband, her country? 

We soon found a way to adapt and give this tale a modern twist that recast Mary as a woman of color alone in the woods navigating a host of creepy men, a miscarriage, and a supernatural rabbit. 

Over the course of nine months, our idea gestated and began taking the form of a short film screenplay. This was something neither of us had done or been adequately trained to do before. But we knew we wanted it to be special, it was our passion project. We knew we didn’t want it to look amateurish––we were too old for that. So we took out a loan, hired an amazing camera crew, and in three consecutive days in the summer of 2017 we filmed our story, Velvet Cry. It was the most difficult thing either of us had undertaken...including planning our nuptial ceremony around our difficult families. 

It was an incredible experience––intoxicating––also quite maddening and stressful. But it was all worth it. Because of our work schedules, it took us another year to finish post production on the film, but throughout that process, I knew I had found my calling. I would be a writer, and I would be a Director. 

Perhaps I had been too afraid to dream the big dream before. Perhaps I had lacked the confidence, or simply, the life experience to tackle the complexity of human emotions, narratives, and interactions––but no longer. This is what I wanted to do and I had to find a way to get better at doing it. 

In the intervening months, I have set myself on a course to develop my writing abilities as quickly as I could in anticipation of this application process. I know I have some latent talent, but it has been a long time since I’ve been in an academic setting, and in any case, I have never really attempted to craft drama on this scale before. 

I’ve read many books, listened to countless interviews, attended online classes, and most importantly, written my heart out since relocating down the coast to the small college town of Gainesville in Central Florida with my wife in June of 2018. It was through a trip to her alma mater of Hollins University that we learned about the co-ed graduate program in screenwriting a few months ago. After all the debt I accrued in New England, I didn’t think I would ever go back to college, though I greatly enjoyed the experience. But what we learned about the program filled me with confidence and a desire to share in the wonderful legacy of this school that my wife is always gushing about. 

Our Skype conversation with Tim Albaugh proved to be the deciding factor. I knew instantly that I wanted to be a part of anything that he was involved with, and I had the feeling that my ideas would truly be nurtured and harnessed into a craft––something tangible I could be proud of and use to propel my career. 

I continue to mine my childhood and adolescence in Miami for critical stories and characters, situations that shed light on my own personal experience of life. I’ve found myself coming back to Paul’s Case. No longer caught up in the character’s stagnant, brooding longings for a grander life, I’m now able to revisit the story, appreciating the young man’s anxieties while evaluating how it all went so fatally wrong for Paul. There was no reason to despair, no cause for lost hope. I would take the necessary steps to become the artist I already know myself to be. The screenplay I am submitting as my writing sample is a new adaptation of this story, making Paul my own, and giving him a little bit of that South Florida flavor. 

I will close by reiterating how I have visited Hollins, and heard many a positive review from the powerful women I know who have attended college there. As a graduate student, I know Hollins can help me to become a screenwriter, to become a filmmaker. This is the only graduate program to which I am applying––I have a very good feeling about all this.

I want to be a Hollins girl.