#julia child captured the winter soldier

[buckets-and-trees]

Bucky and the Shelves

Characters/Pairings: eventual Bucky Barnes x female!Reader Word Count: 1436 Summary: Bucky discloses a new interest to you, but he also doesn’t know if he can forgive you for introducing him to that damn kids book series.  

Warnings: Slow burn

Additional Notes: At 1.4k, this is a drabble that got a little lengthy for the series, too... Follow up to Bucky and the Brief Brush; part of The Brooklyn Boys drabble series.

As you’d started to get used to him coming to the bookstore every Monday, it had brightened the beginning of your weeks, but not today. Today you were nothing but anxious, stomach swirling and whole body tight with nerves.

When Bucky shows up only a few minutes after opening, you’re not sure if you are relieved or not that he’s in this early, but you take a deep breath and steel yourself.

His eyes scan the shop, and he smiles when he sees your face but he’s shaking his head.

You can’t help but laugh; you’ve seen that look before on many faces – it’s the look of a reader who needs to debrief a particularly gripping narrative journey they’ve just had – and almost immediately most of your tension melts away from your mind.

“Good morning, Bucky Barnes.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Good morning? I think not.”

“You finished Half-Blood Prince?”

A solemn nod. “And the only thing that got me through was Julia. I’m only here for two books today, but first we talk. Dumbledore, Snape, horcruxes, the cave, Ginny, Draco, R.A.B. – I’ve got a list.”

He makes a beeline to the café side of the shop, and you hurry to follow, a grin growing on your face. The break between the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books is one of your favorite points in the series.

“Tell me more!”

He turns and you have to stop abruptly.

“Coffee first, and then, believe me, I will tell you everything.”

He orders his usual coffee, but adds a croissant to his order, which is new.

“Dare I say that’s very French of you?” you ask.

He shakes his head and laughs. “Maybe. Now order up so we can get to this.”

You order tea and a muffin for yourself and then you two sit at a table near the window. You rest both forearms on the table, learning eagerly towards him.

“I want to hear everything.”

“Thursday I read All the Pretty Horses and usually I read both of my picks before I read any of your picks, but I was too curious about Julia’s Cats, so I read that next.”

“And?”

“McCarthy’s writing was better than the plot for me, and it was a fine read, but I don’t think I’ll be reading the books that come after in the series. Julia’s Cats was simple but charming, I’ve got my cat, but I, too, now want to move to France, and of course I had to look up some of her old shows online.”

“What did you think?”

“She is a true singularity. I watched her on and off for hours.”

“Welcome to food tv, and she was the pioneer.”

One of the new kids working the café soon brings your order over to the table as Bucky goes on. He explains that he read Atonement next, which he was conflicted over, but then he dove into the sixth Harry Potter on Saturday, couldn’t put it down, and then couldn’t stop thinking about it, but had no one to talk to. He tried to start one of his other books, but couldn’t put the Half-Blood Prince out of his mind. “So, I read it again.”

You laugh outright, and he glares.

“No, I’m sorry, I’m honestly just delighted. The sixth book is one of my favorites of the series, so I’m loving this.”

“Which is your favorite?”

“No, not telling my ranking until you finish. But I want to know now, Sirius or Dumbledore? Which death was worse for you?”

“See, I can’t do another weekend like this, I’ve got to be able to text you for analysis in real time. I need your number.”

You pull a pen from the pocket of your smock apron, and scribble down your number as you press him again for his opinion, “But you didn’t answer my question.”

“They’re both terrible! But now who’s going to explain everything to me and Harry at the end of each schoolyear and book?”

“That’s what I wondered when I first read it! The thing is you’ve only waited, what, a day? A day and a half? I had to wait two whole years to find out what happened. It was as sweet as it was torturous though – all the anticipation and all the theories going through the fandom… it was one of the high points growing up.”

He’s fairly sure he knows who R.A.B. is, which doesn’t totally surprise you – it was another of instance of seemingly unimportant details that were mentioned earlier but easily forgotten, and you had only had your hunch so quickly because you were obsessed with the Black Family. He’s correct with his guess, but you don’t give anything away.

For nearly an hour it’s only Potter talk, and you vigilantly avoid any spoilers, though you coax his speculations out thoroughly. He only gets to stop at this precipice once, and the next time you see him, he’ll be done and know everything.

He explains that Julia saved him on Sunday – he fully immersed himself, starting at the beginning with The French Chef.

He said when he came in, he was only getting two books today.

They are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and you had a copy of the former waiting at the front desk for him, but the latter you hadn’t predicted or thought of, but you’re thoroughly delighted with this revelation, and you lead the way over to the bookshop side of the store and make your way to the cookbook section.

You find Julia’s two-volume set of recipes that started it all and hand it to Bucky. “Maybe I will put together a Julia collection for one of our late summer features with her books and the books that have been written about her,” you muse.

“I know she’s sucked me in,” Bucky says with a smirk. “But, um,” he pauses and unnecessarily adjusts a book on the shelf at his shoulder that doesn’t really need adjusting, “how was your weekend?”

“Oh,” your heart stutters and your stomach drops. “It was fine. Good.”

You turn and start to make your way to the front.

He says your name, and you stop.

You turn back to look at him.

“Are you okay? Did something happen?”

“No, I’m okay it’s just...” You shrug and then cross your arms and lean up against the bookshelf. Your eyes drop to the books he has tucked under his left arm to avoid his face for a moment while you try and think of what to say.

“Sorry if you didn’t want to talk about it, but I’d been thinking I never ask you about anything other than books.”

If you don’t do this right, everything could implode.

“Now your heart is racing.”

You give half a laugh. “Super soldier hearing is so unfair.”

But it’s broken just a touch of the tension, enough that you can take a deep breath and force yourself to look into his face again.

His expression is open but earnest. Your heart skips a beat, but you simply let the words tumble out of your mouth, “Is this more than books?”

You can’t manage to say more than that.

But you don’t have to.

“God, I hope so,” he says.

The next second, Bucky has closed the distance between you, and his right hand is warm against your skin, cupping your cheek and angling your face up to capture your lips in a kiss.

Everything in that moment except his lips are forgotten. The kiss is somehow tentative but earnest – as earnest as he was looking at you the moment before, as earnestly as he always looks at you. His lips are firm and warm. You bring your left hand up to hold gently onto his wrist, not wanting him to let go of you.

Finally, he breaks off the kiss, and you are a little breathless. He only pulls his head back slightly, just enough to take in the expression on your face. He’s reading you, and you can see the question lingering in his eyes. His hesitancy melts your heart, and you can’t help but smile. He matches it, and then leans his forehead against yours. Both of you close your eyes, and for a moment you just breathe him in. He brushes his thumb softly over your cheek, and although you want to stop and hold onto this moment for days, there are more moments you’re yearning to experience with him now, too, so you tilt your head up and kiss him again.

NEXT: read Steve and the Blindside because Bucky makes a significant appearance for the overall narrative of the series - DO NOT SKIP

(their stories have been much more intentionally connected ever since the Interlude, so if you have not already read Steve's half up to this point, you may want to so you have the full context for everything that will go down in the next part - The Brooklyn Boys series list)

↠ Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

I do not do tag lists, but FOLLOW @buckets-and-stories and TURN ON NOTIFICATIONS to be updated any time I publish a new work!

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: American Artists’ Fraught Responses to the First World War

Installation view of World War I and American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (photo courtesy the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

PHILADELPHIA — When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the United States declared neutrality. President Woodrow Wilson feared that entering the conflict would cause civil unrest at home as many United States citizens had come from the nations that were now at war. In the end, the US was only officially active in World War I for 18 months, from April 1917 to November 1918, but as the exhibition World War I and American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts argues, the Great War had a deep and complicated impact on American artists both before and after the country entered the conflict, pushing them to change their visual language as they debated, promoted, and processed the historical events.

Marsden Hartley, “Portrait” (ca 1914–15), oil on canvas, 32 1/4 × 21 1/2 in, the Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, bequest of Hudson D. Walker from the Ione and Hudson D. Walker Collection

The exhibition begins in 1914, when much of the country was apprehensive about participating in the conflict, even though the US’s economic bias leaned heavily toward the Allies. Such split allegiances are explored through the pairing of Childe Hassam and Marsden Hartley. Painting in New York, Hassam depicted patriotic, impressionist cityscapes filled with American and Allied flags; while living in Berlin, Hartley created a series of elegiac images in memory of his lover Karl von Freyburg, a German military officer. Though Hartley claimed his work was neither pro-German, nor political, his moving images capture the conflicted emotions of one mourning the loss of a forbidden love.

Childe Hassam, “Flags on 57th Street, Winter 1918 (1918), oil on canvas, 35 3/4 × 23 3/4 in, the New-York Historical Society, bequest of Julia B. Engel (photo © the New-York Historical Society)

American neutrality was tested as early as 1915, when German U-boats attacked the British passenger ship the Lusitania, killing nearly 1,200 people on board, including 128 US citizens. The attack outraged the American public and became a popular subject for artists, like Winsor McCay, who attempted to record the event based on first-hand accounts in his short animated film “The Sinking of Lusitania” (1918), which depicts the shocking speed with which the ship sank, as bodies fall over the sides in an unending cascade. For interest groups attempting to gather US support for the Allies, the incident became a rallying cry, as is evident in Fred Spear’s poster “Enlist” (1915). Commissioned and printed by the Boston Committee for Public Safety, the poster tapped into the belief that the incident had been an attack on innocent lives, showing a mother and child caught in a tender embrace as they drown in the cold ocean.

Henry Glintenkamp, “Physically Fit” (1917), published in The Masses, October 1917, crayon and India ink on board, 20 7/8 × 16 1/2 in, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division

After the United States entered the war in 1917, the government used art to establish a powerful media environment saturated with seductive, sentimental, and nationalist propaganda. In much of the imagery, the Axis enemies are barbaric apes and murderous fiends, while US soldiers are strong, sexy, and clean, adored by their loving wives and children who stay at home and buy war bonds. Yet participation in World War I was deeply unpopular among US citizens, and political cartoons published in The Masses, such as Henry Glintenkamp’s “Physically Fit” (1917), liken the draft to a death sentence, as a skeleton measures a fit young man for a coffin. These critical opinions, however, were quickly silenced through official censorship efforts, which criminalized anti-war speech and encouraged people to spy on their neighbors. These laws prompted citizens to focus on the enemy “within,” partially in an attempt to convince the American public that the war was not just, as the famous song says, “over there.”

Charles Burchfield, “The East Wind” (1918), watercolor on paper, 18 x 22 1/2 in, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, bequest of A. Conger Goodyear, 1966 (photo courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY)

Georgia O’Keeffe, “The Flag” (1918), watercolor on paper, 11 15/16 × 8 3/16 in, Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of Mrs. Harry Lynde Bradley (© 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society, ARS, New York; photo by Larry Sanders)

Despite strict censorship, apprehension about the war is still evident in the contemporaneous canvases of many American artists. The young Charles Burchfield recorded his growing fear of having to fight in his diaries as he waited for his draft number to be called. Although he later denied that the war had affected his imagery, it is impossible not to see his mounting anxiety in “The East Wind” (1918), in which a large, skull-like form threatens to envelop a vulnerable house. The war found its way into the work of Georgia O’Keeffe in a more mournful and conflicted manner. Her younger brother Alexis enlisted almost immediately after the US joined the conflict, and she found herself both confused by and in awe of his devout patriotism. Executed in 1918, O’Keeffe’s “The Flag” shows a red flag against a deep blue sky, which seems to seep into and overcome it. Throughout the war, red flags were commonly raised at socialist and anarchist meetings, where pacifism and obstructing the draft were often discussed, and with this in mind, the work seems to evoke the battle between O’Keeffe’s red apprehension and her brother’s true blue allegiance.

Installation view of World War I and American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts featuring “Gassed” (1919) by John SInger Sargent (photo courtesy the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

The unique skills of artists were also put to work as part of the official war effort. Edward Steichen, for example, was made chief of the photographic section of the American Expeditionary Forces, while Burchfield designed camouflage, and others made medical drawings and drew maps. In 1918, the British government commissioned John Singer Sargent to make a picture that captured Anglo-American cooperation on the front. After spending three-months in France, the artist decided to portray a harrowing sight — a line of gassed and blindfolded men. Despite the tragedy of its subject matter, Sargent’s “Gassed” (1919) holds fast to the Edwardian idea that war is noble. Though wounded, the soldiers still grasp their rifles; though blind, they walk in ordered formation. In marked contrast, George Bellows showed the war to be marred by dishonor. Unable to fight because of his age, Bellows never saw the conflict in Europe and, ironically, the former champion of visual journalism based his depictions solely on articles and published reports. In a series of lithographs inspired by the Bryce Report, Bellows portrays in lurid detail the war crimes committed by the German army as they marched through neutral Belgium in 1914: woman are raped, families are murdered, and babies are skewered on bayonets.

The question of what it means to be a witness and to depict the experience of war is woven through the exhibition. Artists like Claggett Wilson and Horace Pippin went to France not to draw but to fight and both only depicted the conflict after they had been wounded, relying on memories that haunted them. The realism in Wilson’s watercolors encompasses more than mere description, mining the psychological dimensions of the conflict: soldiers march across fields of grass that have turned yellow under the mustard gas and a line of ghostly enemy soldiers wearing gas masks appears in the purple mist beyond an expanse of twisted barbed wire. Wilson also paired each image with a description of the memory he depicted, for, as one captions says, he was trying to capture “not how it looks but how it feels and sounds and smells.”

Claggett Wilson, “Dance of Death” (ca 1919), watercolor and pencil on paperboard, 16 3/4 × 22 1/2 in, Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Alice H. Rossin (photo clourtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY)

Horace Pippin, “The End of the War: Starting Home” (1930–33), oil on canvas, 26 × 30 1/16 in, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Robert Carlen, 1941

Pippin completed “The End of the War: Starting Home” (1930–33) more than a decade after returning to the United States from the battlefields in France, and the painting condenses the traumatic wartime experiences documented in his journals into a single chaotic composition. At center, amid the melee, a white German solider, raising his arms in surrender, is confronted by a black American solider wielding a bayonet. Though Pippin captures the triumph of the African American soldiers, in their dark uniforms, they almost seem to blend in with the blackened background, reminding the viewer that despite the initial flurry of homecoming glory that met the black soldiers who gallantly served their country, they were quickly made invisible by racial segregation at home.

Violet Oakley, “Henry Howard Houston Woodward” (1921), oil on canvas, 53 × 35 in, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, gift of Dr. and Mrs. George Woodward

The exhibition ends with works created after the war that memorialize those who died — as seen in Violet Oakley’s portrait of the lost solider Henry Howard Houston Woodward — or question the effects of the conflict, as seen in Carl Hoeckner’s “The Homecoming of 1918” (1919), which depicts an infinite mass of emaciated and traumatized war victims. Such images clearly illustrate the fact that by the 1930s many Americans saw the United States’ participation in the conflict to be controversial and deeply flawed, leading us to question how we remember a period that cannot be reduced to a simple fight between good and evil. Many later historical accounts have recast World War I and the unstable peace that followed as merely a prelude to World War II. The exhibition at PAFA serves as a corrective of sorts to the historical accounts that downplay the complexity and importance of World War I for American artists, providing a more unsettling and honest picture of a nation’s reaction to it. Concluding with poignant images of reflection, the exhibition upends previous declarations that the Great War was ever the “Forgotten War.”

Carl Hoeckner, “The Homecoming of 1918” (1919), oil on panel, 57 × 83 3/4 in (courtesy the John & Susan Horseman Collection of American Art)

Installation view of World War I and American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (photo courtesy the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia)

Laura Brey, “Enlist — On Which Side of the Window Are YOU?” (1917), poster, 39 × 26 in, courtesy of the New-York Historical Society (photo © the New-York Historical Society)

Harry Ryle Hopps, “Destroy This Mad Brute — Enlist” (1917), poster, 41 15/16 × 27 7/8 in (courtesy the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)

E. G. Renesch, publisher “True Blue” (1919), poster, 20 1/2 x 16 1/8 in, the Wolfsonian — Florida International University, Miami Beach, The Mitchell Wolfson Jr. Collection

World War I and American Art continues at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (118-128 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) through April 9,

The post American Artists’ Fraught Responses to the First World War appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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