#professor!jack morrison

[teamfireforce]

"Mrss. Ember andTear. You will come to my office after class." That was the first thing Mr Morrison told the two girls as they entered his classroom. And immediately whsipers flew around the class wondering what the two girls could have done to deseeve this.

“Yes professor Morrison.” Both girls nodded and after class they followed Jack to his office

[loveenchantinggentlemencollector]

@comfortfoodcontent and @kylereadscomics did this first, so I thought it would be fun to think about what some of my favorite comics are. Here are some of my favorite single issues, stories, and runs:

Avengers by Kurt Busiek and George Perez - This was my first Avengers run, loved the characters and George Perez's amazing art, plus my favorite Ultron story, Ultron Unlimited.

DC vs. Marvel - I love crossovers like this, and as a kid, because my favorite character is the Flash, I was Team DC. The other fights were fun as well.

Detective Comics #627 - A reprint of Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics #27, plus updates of the story by different creative teams, including Marv Wolfman and Jim Aparo, and Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, showing how Batman has evolved over the years.

Superman for All Seasons - Possibly my favorite Superman story, showing Clark's early days and my favorite version of Superman, the guy with incredible power who just wants to help.

Green Lantern: Rebirth - The story that made me a Green Lantern fan, loved the big space opera action, the different ways the lanterns use their rings, and made Sinestro my favorite Green Lantern villain.

Incredible Hulk #377 - The first Hulk comic I read as a kid, loved the Peter David run, his examinations of Bruce Banner's character, and Professor Hulk was my favorite version of the Hulk.

Kingdom Come - One of my favorite DC stories, loved the commentary of traditional super heroics versus the grim and gritty 90s, and how those ideologies clash. Plus, Kingdom Come Superman's outfit is still epic.

Flash: The Return of Barry Allen - My favorite Flash story, loved seeing Wally West step out of Barry Allen's shadow, the start of the Flash Family, also solidified Eobard Thawne as my favorite Flash villain.

Starman by James Robinson, Tony Harris, Peter Snejbjerg, and others - A more recent addition for me, as I was always a JSA fan, but never read all of this run until recently. Loved the characters, especially Jack Knight and the Shade, the Golden Age history, the themes of legacy, the villains, and how the story reaches a satisfying conclusion.

Wolverine and the X-Men by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Nick Bradshaw, and others - I'm probably going to get some heat for this pick, but this was the book that got me back into X-Men post Morrison and Whedon. I read every issue as it came out, and it was so much fun, I liked the characters, the action, the villains, and Genesis is one of my favorite characters (love the idea of "what if Apocalypse, but Superman"). Plus, it has Wolverine and Storm as a couple, my OTP.

[beardedmrbean]

Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, headed by critical race theory activist Ibram X. Kendi, revealed last week that it was laying off about 40% of its staff as part of organization restructuring. About 15 to 20 of its approximately 45 employees were let go. Testimonies from former employees have exposed alleged mismanagement of Kendi’s center, which in turn has exposed the fraudulence and fragility of the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex.

Disgruntled former employees have accused Kendi of mishandling grant funding, failing to complete major projects, and fostering an exploitative company culture in which he ruled with an iron fist yet was routinely missing in action. The center has raked in $43 million since its inception, according to 2021 budget records obtained by the Daily Free Press. It received corporate support from Peloton, Deloitte, Stop & Shop, TJX Companies, and Deckers Outdoor Corporation, according to a 2020–2021 donor report. Only six weeks after its launch, then-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey gifted $10 million without conditions.

“Your $10M donation, with no strings attached, gives us the resources and flexibility to greatly expand our antiracist work,” Kendi posted at the time. “The endowment is vital, as we build our new Center.”

Despite the investments, the center did not deliver on some key priorities, such as the much-hyped Racial Data Tracker that would document racial inequities in all sectors of society to finally root out racism.

“I don’t know where the money is,” Saida Grundy, a BU professor who worked at the center from fall 2020 to spring 2021, told the Boston Globe after the staff cuts.

Multiple other BU professors served as faculty leads on various projects at the center. Professor Sanaz Mobasseri of BU’s business school led the Antiracist Tech Initiative, professor Kaylene Stevens of BU’s education school led the “Designing Antiracist Curricula” team, and political science professor Spencer Piston led the Policy Office, for example.

In December 2021, Grundy emailed BU provost Jean Morrison that the organization had been showing a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated” by them.

Like its umbrella idea DEI, “antiracism” actually translates to, well, nothing of note. Serial academics such as Kendi have built careers around racial fearmongering, even inventing new disciplines to study racism and its early-stage minutiae “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.” Rather than confront actual crimes of racism, these courses seek to aggressively manufacture racist intent.

Despite all this bureaucracy, academic DEI projects have unclear aims and products. Kendi’s center published just two research papers since its founding, the Washington Free Beacon reported. A January paper, "Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Build Environment Indicators Derived From Street View Images,” found that predominantly black neighborhoods had more dilapidated buildings than white neighborhoods. The center released a report from its "Antibigotry Convening” from fall 2021 and winter 2022 that included many intersectionality themes such as “Ageism,” "Anti-fat Bigotry,” and “Transphobia,” further confusing its purpose.

Rachel Lapal Cavallario, spokeswoman for Kendi’s center, told the Boston Globe Wednesday that BU had “received some complaints from individuals questioning whether the center was following its funding guidelines. We are currently looking into those complaints.”

However, the center rejects the “characterization of it not having produced important work insofar as antiracism is concerned,” she said.

To raise Grundy’s question again, where did the money go? Echoing that sentiment, BU has launched an “inquiry” into the center amid the scandal, the Daily Free Press said.

The situation is reminiscent of the lawsuits against Black Lives Matter, another embattled racial justice organization. In 2023, Black Lives Matter reported a $9 million deficit for 2022 after raising $90 million in 2020. Only 33% of that massive sum went to charitable activism, federal filings showed, as a significant chunk was squandered on the leaders’ mansions, personal expenses, and favors for friends. Both Kendi’s center and BLM followed a similar model: drum up rumors of racism, prescribe DEI, create an apparatus, lure in donors, get paid.

The racial grievance business welcomes little accountability — or accounting, for that matter — which explains why it’s found a home in academia. Many colleges, such as Boston University, or my alma mater Boston College down the road, charge their students exorbitant tuition for useless degrees and boatloads of debt. Tenured professors collect big paychecks while hawking critical race theory, turning students into activists instead of real scholars.

Despite its self-destructive tendencies, the DEI racket continues to spread throughout academia. Some colleges are trying to meet demand for so-called DEI experts by creating a corresponding major, USA Today claimed. At least six colleges across the country offer DEI degree programs or will in the future, according to the publication’s analysis. Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania even have DEI graduate programs.

Some universities have also woven DEI into their academic missions. Duke University in 2020 launched a Racial Equity Advisory Council, composed of four subcommittees including faculty members and students, which will propose “measures to assess and foster racial equity” to the university’s leadership. Every year since fall 2020, the Duke Endowment has sponsored professors with seed grants to pursue research proposals related to race as part of the school’s anti-racism mission. That’s more money down the drain.

DEI in America’s prestigious colleges contributes nothing, wastes money, and fuels a bubble of empty courses, professions, and promises. But if the shakeout at Kendi’s BU center is any clue, it might be starting to pop.

[blubushie]

Is there a particular way Aussie nicknames for someone work? Are they only for certain names? (John to Johnno, Michael to Mick, ect)

They usually consist of altering the name with an "-o" or "-za."

In the "-o" category we have these. This ending is more common with male names.

Brandon → Branno

John/John → Jonno/Johnno (OR Jack → Jacko)

Steve → Stevo

Daniel → Dan → Danno

Richard → Rick → Ricko/Rico

Nicholas → Nick → Nicko/Nico

In the "-za" category we have these. This ending is more common with female names.

Jeremy → Jez/Jezza

Sharon → Shazza

Lawrence/Laurence → Lozza

Teresa → Tezza

Harry → Hazza

Daryl/Darren → Daz → Dazza

Cheryl → Chezza

And for some unspecified alterations:

Anything that starts with "Mc" → Macca (for examples, if you were to go to McDonald's, in Australia you'd say you're heading to Macca's)

Eric → Ecka/Ekka

Evan → Evs

Jacqueline → Jacks

Julia/Julian → Jules

Michael → Mickey → Mick

Generally Australia hates the concept of long "titles." Anything beyond a polite "sir" or "ma'am" means you're being relegated to a nickname, especially if you're a person of authority because Aussies hate authority (to be expected from the descendants of convicts, ay?) Anything from professors to pollies use their first names, or hypocoristic nicknames. For example, our former PM Scott Morrison was called Scomo both by the people, in person, and even in the press. The higher your authority, the more likely we are to knock you down a peg to be closer to the Common People by giving you a nickname.

Sometimes however nicknames are hard to do. My birth name wasn't that impressive as Joe, so growing up I was called Joey. As I got older Joey stopped being used as it was too infantilising for me, so people defaulted on the nickname I'd had growing up: Blue, which is an Australian slang term for a redhead. I was a strawberry blonde for most of my life up until around puberty, so I was deemed Blue growing up until we realised I'm not actually a ginger and just a really bright reddish blonde. It's darkened to a dirty blonde but the nickname stuck, and now it's my actual name after the whole dehydration incident.

[nerds-yearbook]

The X-Babies (Sugah, Wolvie, Lil Dazzler, Lil Havok, Shower, Lil Longshot, Colossusus, and Psychilde) invaded Earth 616 in the one shot Excalibur Mojo Mayhem (cover date December, 1989) where they encountered Kitty Pryde and eventually the rest of Excalibur (Captain Britain, Nightcrawler, Rachel Summers Phoenix, and Meggan) WHO (lead by Professor Alistaire Stuart and Brigadier Alysande Stuart) and the comic book creaters Chris Claremont, Grant Morrison, and John Bolton. They escaped Mojo World and the Trademark Police through The House of Ideas (Marvel) in the place in there called The House of Jack (Kirby) and Stan (Lee). They were being chased by the Agent who could steal their abilities if they signed a contract. ("Mojo Mayhem" Excalibur, Marvel Comic Event)

[guess-that-ship]

is there any list of the ships with their fake names of the first time around put together? looking at the tag gets confusing real fast lmao (sorry if this has been asked before)

Sleepy in bed hope this isn't too late.

Character Names

Chuuya Nakahara

Victor Frankenstein and his Creature

Lord Boxman and Professor Venomous

Wesley Wyndam-Pryce and Illyria

terezi pyrope and vriska serket

Kaito Kuroba & Shinichi Kudo

Joker and Goro Akechi

Ellen and Nanase

Reaper/Gabriel Reyes & Soldier: 76/Jack Morrison

andrei bolkonsky, natasha rostova, pierre bezukhov

Corvus and Serena

Pastel Meringue Cookie and Black Currant Cookie

Dean Winchester&Castiel

galehaut and lancelot

Unohana Retsu/Kenpachi Zaraki

IV/Thomas Arclight is A and Shark/Kamishirou Ryouga/Nasch is B

ai, yusaku fujiki

Heathcliff

charles xavier & erik magnus lensherr

Izumi Sena is A, Tsukinaga Leo is B

Franziska Von Karma/Maya Fey

Grelle Sutcliff + Madam Red/Angelinda Dalles

Shylock Bennett and Murr Hart

(Captain) Agustin / Admiral Kennedy

c!Badboyhalo is guy A, c!Skeppy is guy B

Zolf Smith and Oscar Wilde (fictional version)

lestat de lioncourt, louis de pointe du lac, claudia

Polarbear (Iceberg) x Slate (Titanic)

L Lawliet and Light Yagami

Jean Valjean and Javert

Whizzer and Marvin

yusei fudo, kyosuke kiryu

Yugi Amane and Minamoto Kou

[poetlcs]

classic lit is the only genre of book I buy every time because I just like to annotate and keep note thus I decided to make a read vs to be read of my classics as right now I do have a lot piled up I've been meaning to get to ALSO! I just like talking about classic lit

so please let me know which I should prioritise

physical tbr classics

zami: a new spelling of my name by audre lorde

a room with a view by em forster

the professor by charlotte bronte

a passage to india by em forster

mrs dalloway by virginia woolf

the last tycoon by f.scott fitzgerald

jamaica inn by daphne du maurier

if beale street could talk by james baldwin

howards end by em forster

dr jekyll and mr hyde by robert louis stevenson

antony and cleopatra by william shakespheare

a clockwork orange by anthony burgess

read classics below cut for my tracking

pre 1500s:

the iliad by homer

oedipus the king

1500-1800

the merchant of venice, hamlet, much ado about nothing, king lear pericles, the tempest, othello, measure for measure by william shakespheare

1800-1900

a tale of two cities, hard times, great expectations by charles dickens

heart of darkness by joseph conrad

jane eyre by charlotte bronte

wuthering heights by emily bronte

the tenant of wildfell hall by anne bronte

sherlock holmes by arthur conan doyle

the mill on the floss by george eliot

cousin phyllis by elizabeth gaskell

the moonstone by wilkie collins

little women by louisa may alcott

dracula by bram stoker

maurice, where angels fear to tread by em forster

sense and sensibility, persuasion, emma, pride and prejudice, northanger abbey by jane austen

the turn of the screw by henry james

frankenstein by mary shelley

treasure island by robert louis stevenson

the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde

black beauty by anna sewell

peter pan by jm barrie

1900-1970

on the road by jack kerouac

dubliners, ulysses by james joyce

the great gatsby, tender is the night by f. scott fitzgerald

rebecca, the house on the strand by daphne du maurier

notes of a native son, giovanni's room by james baldwin

childhood by tove ditlevson

letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke

voss by patrick white

my brilliant career by miles franklin

nightwood by djuna barnes

brideshead revisted by evelyn waugh

their eyes were watching god by zora neale hurston

one hundred years of solitide by gabriel garcia maquez

wide sargasso sea, good morning midnight by jean rhys

passing by nella larson

the waste land, the lovesong of j.alred prufrock by t.s eliot

to the lighthouse, a room of ones own by virginina woolf

to kill a mockingbird by harper lee

sula by toni morrison

endgame by samuel beckett

things fall apart by chinua achebe

lord of the flies by willian golding

death of a salesman by arthur miller

a streetcar named desire by tenneesee williams

animal farm by george orwell

[uneasylisteningradio]

The Kids Just Don’t Understand: Bubblegum Apocalypse March 18, 2023

This show finally lives up to its name! Another Saturday sub!

stream on Mixcloud

The Oranges - Saturday Night

Kasenetz-Katz-Super-Circus - Let Me Introduce You (To the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestral Circus)

DJ speaks over Mr. Bloe - Groovin' with Mr. Bloe

Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army - Captain Groovy and His Bubblegum Army Tommy James & The Shondells - Mirage Steel Wool - No Sugar Tonight Chee Chee and Peppy - I Know I'm in Love Wadsworth Mansion - Sweet Mary Detroit Road Runners - Whole Lotta Lovin' Tommy Roe - Jack and Jill The Banana Splits - Wait Til Tomorrow Honeybus - Girl of Independent Means

DJ speaks over Up 'n Adam - Rainmaker

Kasenetz-Katz-Super-Circus - I Got It Bad For You UK Jones - And the Rains Came Down Roberto Jordán - Como Te Quiero (Birds of a Feather) Tricycle - Simon Says

GG Allin - Up Against the Wall Tru Fax and the Insaniacs - Up in the Air The Dogs (with Les Calamites) - Down at Lulu's Prince - Crimson and Clover Pickettywitch - Waldo P. Emerson Jones Lush - Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep Librarians with Hickeys - I Enjoy Being a Boy (In Love With You)

The Wombles - Remember You're A Womble Mike Chapman - Santa Monica Sunshine (demo) Sweet - Funny Funny The Equals - Green Light ? and the Mysterians - Do Something To Me The Teri Nelson Group - Sweet Talkin' Willie

Bo Gentry & Ritchie Cordell - Stone Go-Getter Thee Prophets - Magic Island Professor Morrison's Lollipop - Oo-Poo-Pah Susie Le Cirque - Land of Oz

The Fevers - Ohio Express

[whileiamdying]

Toni Morrison and the Ghosts in the House

“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place to write from,” Morrison says. “It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it.”Photograph by Richard Avedon for The New Yorker / © The Richard Avedon Foundation

From 2003: As an editor, author, and professor, Morrison has fostered a generation of black writers.

By Hilton Als October 19, 2003

No. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lorain, Ohio, is a two-story frame house surrounded by look-alikes. Its small front porch is littered with the discards of former tenants: a banged-up bicycle wheel, a plastic patio chair, a garden hose. Most of its windows are boarded up. Behind the house, which is painted lettuce green, there’s a patch of weedy earth and a heap of rusting car parts. Seventy-two years ago, the novelist Toni Morrison was born here, in this small industrial town twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, which most citydwellers would consider “out there.” The air is redolent of nearby Lake Erie and new-mown grass.

From Morrison’s birthplace it’s a couple of miles to Broadway, where there’s a pizzeria, a bar with sagging seats, and a brown building that sells dingy and dilapidated secondhand furniture. This is the building Morrison imagined when she described the house of the doomed Breedlove family in her first novel, “The Bluest Eye”: “There is an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio,” she wrote. “It does not recede into its background of leaden sky, nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone poles around it. Rather, it foists itself on the eye of the passerby in a manner that is both irritating and melancholy. Visitors who drive to this tiny town wonder why it has not been torn down, while pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it.”

Love and disaster and all the other forms of human incident accumulate in Morrison’s fictional houses. In the boarding house where the heroine of Morrison’s second novel, “Sula,” lives, “there were rooms that had three doors, others that opened on the porch only and were inaccessible from any other part of the house; others that you could get to only by going through somebody’s bedroom.” This is the gothic, dreamlike structure in whose front yard Sula’s mother burns to death, “gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box,” while Sula stands by watching, “not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested.”

Morrison’s houses don’t just shelter human dramas; they have dramas of their own. “124 was spiteful,” she writes in the opening lines of “Beloved” (1987). “Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way.” Living and dead ghosts ramble through No. 124, chained to a history that claims its inhabitants. At the center of Morrison’s new novel, “Love,” is a deserted seaside hotel—a resort where, in happier times, blacks danced and socialized and swam without any white people complaining that they would contaminate the water—built by Bill Cosey, a legendary black entrepreneur, and haunted by his memory.

Morrison spends about half her time in a converted boathouse that overlooks the Hudson in Rockland County. The boathouse is a long, narrow, blue structure with white trim and large windows. A decade ago, when Morrison was in Princeton, where she teaches, it burned to the ground. Because it was a very cold winter, the water the firefighters used froze several important artifacts, including Morrison’s manuscripts. “But what they can’t save are little things that mean a lot, like your children’s report cards,” she told me, her eyes filling with tears. She shook her head and said, “Let’s not go there.”

We were in the third-floor parlor, furnished with overstuffed chairs covered in crisp gray linen, where we talked over the course of two days last summer. Sun streamed through the windows and a beautiful blue-toned abstract painting by the younger of her two sons, Slade, hung on the wall. As we chatted, Morrison wasn’t in the least distracted by the telephone ringing or the activities of her housekeeper or her secretary. She is known for her powers of concentration. When she is not writing or teaching, she likes to watch “Law & Order” and “Waking the Dead”—crime shows that offer what she described as “mild engagement with a satisfying structure of redemption.” She reads and rereads novels by Ruth Rendell and Martha Grimes.

Morrison had on a white shirt over a black leotard, black trousers, and a pair of high-heeled alligator sandals. Her long silver dreadlocks cascaded down her back and were gathered at the end by a silver clip. When she was mock-amazed by an insight, she flushed. Her light-brown eyes, with their perpetually listening or amused expression, are the eyes of a watcher—and of someone who is used to being watched. But if she is asked a question she doesn’t appreciate, a veil descends over her eyes, discontinuing the conversation. (When I tried to elicit her opinion about the novels of one of her contemporaries, she said, “I hear the movie is fab,” and turned away.) Morrison’s conversation, like her fiction, is conducted in high style. She underlines important points by making showy arabesques with her fingers in the air, and when she is amused she lets out a cry that’s followed by a fusillade of laughter.

“You know, my sister Lois was just here taking care of me,” she said. “I had a cataract removed in one eye. Suddenly, the world was so bright. And I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered, Who is that woman? When did she get to be that age? My doctor said, ‘You have been looking at yourself through the lens that they shoot Elizabeth Taylor through.’ I couldn’t stop wondering how I got to be this age.”

When “The Bluest Eye” was published, in 1970, Morrison was unknown and thirty-nine years old. The initial print run was modest: two thousand copies in hardcover. Now a first edition can fetch upward of six thousand dollars. In 2000, when “The Bluest Eye” became a selection for Oprah’s Book Club, Plume sold more than eight hundred thousand paperback copies. By then, Toni Morrison had become Toni Morrison—the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993. Following “The Bluest Eye,” Morrison published seven more novels: “Sula” (1973), “Song of Solomon” (1977), “Tar Baby” (1981), “Beloved” (1987), “Jazz” (1992), “Paradise” (1998), and now “Love.” Morrison also wrote a critical study, “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992), which, like all her novels since “Song of Solomon,” became a best-seller. She has edited several anthologies—about O.J., about the Clarence Thomas hearings—as well as collections of the writings of Huey P. Newton and James Baldwin. With her son Slade, she has co-authored a number of books for children. She wrote the book for a musical, “New Orleans” (1983); a play, “Dreaming Emmett” (1986), which reimagined the life and death of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955; a song cycle with the composer André Previn; and, most recently, an opera based on the life of Margaret Garner, the slave whose story inspired “Beloved.” She was an editor at Random House for nineteen years—she still reads the Times with pencil in hand, copy-editing as she goes—and has been the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton since 1989.

“I know it seems like a lot,” Morrison said. “But I really only do one thing. I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.” What Morrison has managed to do with that job—and the criticism, pro and con, she has received for doing it—has made her one of the most widely written-about American authors of the past fifty years. (The latest study of her work, she told me, is a comparison of the vernacular in her novels and William Faulkner’s. “I don’t believe it,” I said. “Believe it,” she said, emphatically.) Morrison—required reading in high schools across the country—is almost always treated as a spokeswoman for her gender and her race. In a review of “Paradise,” Patricia Storace wrote, “Toni Morrison is relighting the angles from which we view American history, changing the very color of its shadows, showing whites what they look like in black mirrors. To read her work is to witness something unprecedented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.” It’s a claim that her detractors would also make, to opposite effect.

“I’m already discredited, I’m already politicized, before I get out of the gate,” Morrison said. “I can accept the labels”—the adjectives like “black” and “female” that are often attached to her work—“because being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”

Morrison also owns a home in Princeton, where nine years ago she founded the Princeton Atelier, a program that invites writers and performing artists to workshop student plays, stories, and music. (Last year, she brought in the poet Paul Muldoon as a co-director.) “I don’t write when I’m teaching,” she said. “Teaching is about taking things apart; writing is about putting things together.” She and her sons own an apartment building farther up the Hudson, which houses artists, and another building across the street from it, which her elder son Ford, an architect, is helping her remodel into a study and performance center. “My sister Lois said that the reason I buy all these houses is because we had to move so often as children,” Morrison said, laughing.

Morrison’s family—the Woffords—lived in at least six different apartments over the course of her childhood. One of them was set on fire by the landlord when the Woffords couldn’t pay the rent—four dollars a month. In those days, Toni, the second of four children (she had two brothers, now dead), was called Chloe Ardelia. Her parents, George and Ramah, like the Breedloves, were originally from the South (Ramah was born in Greenville, Alabama; George in Cartersville, Georgia). Like many transplanted Southerners, George worked at U.S. Steel, which was particularly active during the Second World War and attracted not only American blacks but also displaced Europeans: Poles, Greeks, and Italians.

Morrison describes her father as a perfectionist, someone who was proud of his work. “I remember my daddy taking me aside—this was when he worked as a welder—and telling me that he welded a perfect seam that day, and that after welding the perfect seam he put his initials on it,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Daddy, no one will ever see that.’ Sheets and sheets of siding would go over that, you know? And he said, ‘Yes, but I’ll know it’s there.’ ” George also worked odd jobs, washing cars and the like, after hours at U.S. Steel. Morrison remembers that he always had at least two other jobs.

Ramah, a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a homemaker. From the first, it was clear that Morrison was not made to follow in her footsteps. “I remember going outside to hang some clothes on the line,” she said. “And I held the pants up, I hooked them by the inside pockets. And whatever else I was doing, it was completely wrong. Then my mother or my grandmother came out and they just started to laugh, because I didn’t know how to hang up clothes.” Her parents seemed to have different expectations for her, anyway. “I developed a kind of individualism—apart from the family—that was very much involved in my own daydreaming, my own creativity, and my own reading. But primarily—and this has been true all my life—not really minding what other people said, just not minding.”

The Woffords told their children stories and sang songs. After dinner, their grandfather would sometimes take out his violin and everyone would dance. And no matter how many times Ramah told the ghost stories she had learned from her mother and her Auntie Bell in Alabama, Chloe always wanted to hear more. She used to say, “Mama, please tell the story about this or that,” her mother recalled in a 1982 interview with the Lorain Journal. “Finally I’d get tired of telling the stories over and over again. So I made up a new story.” Ramah’s stories sparked Morrison’s imagination. She fell in love with spoken language.

Morrison always lived, she said, “below or next to white people,” and the schools were integrated—stratification in Lorain was more economic than racial—but in the Wofford house there was an intense suspicion of white people. In a 1976 essay, Morrison recalled watching her father attack a white man he’d discovered lurking in their apartment building. “My father, distrusting every word and every gesture of every white man on earth, assumed that the white man who crept up the stairs one afternoon had come to molest his daughters and threw him down the stairs and then our tricycle after him. (I think my father was wrong, but considering what I have seen since, it may have been very healthy for me to have witnessed that as my first black-white encounter.)” I asked her about the story. “The man was a threat to us, we thought,” Morrison replied. “He scared us. I’m sure that man was drunk, you know, but the important thing was the notion that my father was a protector, and particularly against the white man. Seeing that physical confrontation with a white man and knowing that my father could win thrilled, excited, and pleased me. It made me know that it was possible to win.”

Morrison’s family was spread along a color spectrum. “My great-grandmother was very black, and because we were light-skinned blacks, she thought that we had been ‘tampered with,’ ” she said. “She found lighter-skinned blacks to be impure—which was the opposite of what the world was saying about skin color and the hierarchy of skin color. My father, who was light-skinned, also preferred darker-skinned blacks.” Morrison, who didn’t absorb her father’s racism, continues to grapple with these ideas and argue against their implications. In a television interview some years ago, she said that in art “there should be everything from Hasidic Jews to Walter Lippmann. Or, as I was telling a friend, there should be everything from reggae hair to Ralph Bunche. There should be an effort to strengthen the differences and keep them, so long as no one is punished for them.” Morrison addressed her great-grandmother’s notion of racial purity in “Paradise,” where it is the oppressive basis for a Utopian community formed by a group of dark blacks from the South.

As a child, Morrison read virtually everything, from drawing-room comedies to Theodore Dreiser, from Jane Austen to Richard Wright. She was compiling, in her head, a reading list to mine for inspiration. At Hawthorne Junior High School, she read “Huckleberry Finn” for the second time. “Fear and alarm are what I remember most about my first encounter” with it, she wrote several years ago. “My second reading of it, under the supervision of an English teacher in junior high school, was no less uncomfortable—rather more. It provoked a feeling I can only describe now as muffled rage, as though appreciation of the work required my complicity in and sanction of something shaming. Yet the satisfactions were great: riveting episodes of flight, of cunning; the convincing commentary on adult behavior, watchful and insouciant; the authority of a child’s voice in language cut for its renegade tongue and sharp intelligence. Nevertheless, for the second time, curling through the pleasure, clouding the narrative reward, was my original alarm, coupled now with a profoundly distasteful complicity.”

When she was twelve years old, Morrison converted to Catholicism, taking Anthony as her baptismal name, after St. Anthony. Her friends shortened it to Toni. In junior high, one of her teachers sent a note home to her mother: “You and your husband would be remiss in your duties if you do not see to it that this child goes to college.” Shortly before graduating from Lorain High School—where she was on the debating team, on the yearbook staff, and in the drama club (“I wanted to be a dancer, like Maria Tallchief”)—Morrison told her parents that she’d like to go to college. “I want to be surrounded by black intellectuals,” she said, and chose Howard University, in Washington, D.C. In support of her decision, George Wofford took a second union job, which was against the rules of U.S. Steel. In the Lorain Journal article, Ramah Wofford remembered that his supervisors found out and called him on it. “ ‘Well, you folks got me,’ ” Ramah recalled George’s telling them. “ ‘I am doing another job, but I’m doing it to send my daughter to college. I’m determined to send her and if I lose my job here, I’ll get another job and do the same.’ It was so quiet after George was done talking, you could have heard a pin drop. . . . And they let him stay and let him do both jobs.” To give her daughter pocket money, Ramah Wofford worked in the rest room of an amusement park, handing out towels. She sent the tips to her daughter with care packages of canned tuna, crackers, and sardines.

Morrison loved her classes at Howard, but she found the social climate stifling. In Washington in the late forties, the buses were still segregated and the black high schools were divided by skin tone, as in the Deep South. The system was replicated at Howard. “On campus itself, the students were very much involved in that ranking, and your skin gave you access to certain things,” Morrison said. “There was something called ‘the paper-bag test’—darker than the paper bag put you in one category, similar to the bag put you in another, and lighter was yet another and the most privileged category. I thought them to be idiotic preferences.” She was drawn to the drama department, which she felt was more interested in talent than in skin color, and toured the South with the Howard University Players. The itineraries were planned very carefully, but once in a while, because of inclement weather or a flat tire, the troupe would arrive in a town too late to check in to the “colored” motel. Then one of the professors would open the Yellow Pages and call the minister of the local Zion or Baptist church, and the players would be put up by members of the congregation. “There was something not just endearing but welcoming and restorative in the lives of those people,” she said. “I think the exchange between Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison is along those lines: Ralph Ellison said something nice about living in the South, and Irving Howe said, ‘Why would you want to live in such an evil place?’ Because all he was thinking about was rednecks. And Ralph Ellison said, ‘Black people live there.’ ”

After graduating from Howard, in 1953, she went on to Cornell, where she earned a master’s degree in American literature, writing a thesis titled ��Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s Treatment of the Alienated.” What she saw in their work—“an effort to discover what pattern of existence is most conducive to honesty and self-knowledge, the prime requisites for living a significant life”—she emulated in her own life. She went back to Howard to teach, and Stokely Carmichael was one of her students. Around this time, she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican-born architect. She joined a writing group, where the one rule was that you had to bring something to read every week. Among the writers in that group were the playwright and director Owen Dodson and his companion the painter Charles Sebree. At first, Morrison said, she brought in “all that old junk from high school.” Then she began writing a story about a little black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wanted blue eyes.

“I wanted to take the name of Peola”—the “tragic mulatto” character from the 1934 movie “Imitation of Life”—“and play with it, turn it around,” Morrison said. When she was young, she said, “another little black girl and I were discussing whether there was a real God or not. I said there was, and she said there wasn’t and she had proof: she had prayed for, and not been given, blue eyes. I just remember listening to her and imagining her with blue eyes, and it was a grotesque thing. She had these high cheekbones and these great big slanted dark eyes, and all I remember thinking was that if she had blue eyes she would be horrible.”

When Morrison read the story to the writing group, Sebree turned to her and said, “You are a writer.”

In 1964, Morrison returned to Lorain. Her marriage had fallen apart and she had to determine how she was going to take care of her family—her son Ford was three years old and Slade was on the way. An ad in The New York Review of Books listed a position with L. W. Singer, a textbook division of Random House that was based in Syracuse. Morrison applied for and got the job. She took her babies (Slade was born in 1965) and moved East. She was thirty-four years old. In Syracuse, she didn’t care to socialize; instead, she returned to the story about the girl who wanted blue eyes and began to expand it. She wrote when she could—usually after the children went to sleep. And since she was the sole support for her children, she couldn’t sacrifice the real world for her art. “I stole time to write,” she said. “Writing was my other job—I always kept it over there, away from my ‘real’ work as an editor or teacher.” It took her five years to complete the book, because she enjoyed the process so much.

Holt, Rinehart & Winston published “The Bluest Eye” in 1970, with a picture of Morrison lying on her side against a white backdrop, her hair cut in an Afro. Taken at the moment when fashion met the counterculture—when Black was coöpted as Beautiful and soul-food recipes ran in fashion magazines next to images of Black Panther wives tying their heads up in bright fabric—the picture was the visual equivalent of the book: black, female, individualistic.

Set in Lorain at the end of the Depression, “The Bluest Eye” remains the most autobiographical of Morrison’s novels. In it, she focusses on the lives of little black girls—perhaps the least likely, least commercially viable story one could tell at the time. Morrison positioned the white world at the periphery; black life was at the center, and black females were at the center of that. Morrison wasn’t sentimental about the black community. Cholly Breedlove rapes his daughter Pecola because it is one of the few forms of power he has (“How dare she love him?” he thinks. “Hadn’t she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? What could his calloused hands produce to make her smile?”); a group of children scapegoat her as her misfortune worsens (“All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness”); and three whores are her only source of tenderness (“Pecola loved them, visited them, and ran their errands. They, in turn, did not despise her”).

The writing, on the other hand, was lush, sensible-minded, and often hilarious. If Morrison had a distinctive style, it was in her rhythms: the leisurely pace of her storytelling. Clearly her writing had grown out of an oral tradition. Rather than confirm the reader’s sense of alienation by employing distancing techniques, Morrison coaxed the reader into believing the tale. She rooted her characters’ lives in something real—certainly in the minds of black readers.

This came at a time when the prevailing sensibility in most American novels was urban and male, an outgrowth of the political and personal concerns that Ellison and Bellow, Baldwin and Roth had developed living in predominantly black or Jewish neighborhoods. Morrison was different. She grew up in an integrated town in the heart of America. “The point was to really open a book that’s about black people, or by a black person, me or anybody,” she said. “In the sixties, most of the literature was understood by the critics as something sociological, a kind of revelation of the lives of these people. So there was a little apprehension, you know—Is it going to make me feel bad, is it going to make me feel good? I said, I’m going to make it as readable as I can, but I’m not going to pull any punches. I don’t have an agenda here.”

One of the few critics to embrace Morrison’s work was John Leonard, who wrote in the Times, “Miss Morrison exposes the negative of the Dick-and-Jane-and-Mother-and-Father-and-Dog-and-Cat photograph that appears in our reading primers and she does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry. . . . ‘The Bluest Eye’ is also history, sociology, folklore, nightmare and music.”

The poet Sonia Sanchez, who taught “The Bluest Eye” in her classroom at Temple University, saw the book as an indictment of American culture. For Pecola, the descendant of slaves, to want the master’s blue eyes represents the “second generation of damage in America,” Sanchez told me. “For this woman, Toni Morrison, to write this, to show this to us—it was the possible death of a people right there, the death of a younger generation that had been so abused that there was really no hope. What Toni has done with her literature is that she has made us look up and see ourselves. She has authenticated us, and she has also said to America, in a sense, ‘Do you know what you did? But, in spite of what you did, here we is. We exist. Look at us.’ ”

“What was driving me to write was the silence—so many stories untold and unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature,” Morrison said. “I was inspired by the silence and absences in the literature.” The story she told was a distinctly American one: complicated, crowded, eventful, told from the perspective of innocents. “I think of the voice of the novel as a kind of Greek chorus, one that comments on the action,” she once said. She was a social realist, like Dreiser, with the lyricism and storytelling genius of someone like Isak Dinesen.

In 1968, Morrison was transferred to New York to work in Random House’s scholastic division. She moved to Queens. (“I never lived in Manhattan,” she said. “I always wanted a garden.”) A couple of years later, Robert Bernstein, who was then the president of Random House, came across “The Bluest Eye” in a bookstore. “Is this the same woman who works in the scholastic division?” he asked Jason Epstein, then the editorial director of Random House. Morrison had been wanting to move into trade publishing, and went to see Robert Gottlieb, the editor-in-chief of Knopf, an imprint of Random House. Gottlieb recalled the interview: “I said, ‘I like you too much to hire you, because in order to hire you I have to feel free to fire you. But I’d love to publish your books.’ ” He became her editor, and Morrison got a job under Epstein as a trade editor at Random House.

At Random House, Morrison published Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, and Angela Davis, among others. She was responsible for “The Myth of Lesbianism,” one of the first studies of the subject from a major publisher, and “Giant Talk,” Quincy Troupe and Rainer Schulte’s anthology of Third World writing. Morrison gave me a copy of one of the first books she worked on, “Contemporary African Literature,” published in 1972, a groundbreaking collection that included work by Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Léopold-Sédar Senghor, and Athol Fugard. (For some of them, it was their first publication in America.) The book is lavishly illustrated, with many color photographs of African tribesmen and African landscapes. Showing me the table of contents, Morrison said, “What was I thinking? I thought if it was beautiful, people would buy it.” (Not many did.)

The women she worked with, in particular, became some of her closest friends. “Single women with children,” she said, when I asked her about that era. “If you had to finish writing something, they’d take your kids, or you’d sit with theirs. This was a network of women. They lived in Queens, in Harlem and Brooklyn, and you could rely on one another. If I made a little extra money on something—writing freelance—I’d send a check to Toni Cade with a note that said, ‘You have won the so-and-so grant,’ and so on. I remember Toni Cade coming to my house with groceries and cooking dinner. I hadn’t asked her.” The support was intellectual as well as practical. Sonia Sanchez told me, “I think we all looked up and saw that we were writing in different genres, but we were experiencing the same kinds of things, and saying similar kinds of things.” Their books formed a critical core that people began to see as the rebirth of black women’s fiction.

Before the late sixties, there was no real Black Studies curriculum in the academy—let alone a post-colonial-studies program or a feminist one. As an editor and author, Morrison, backed by the institutional power of Random House, provided the material for those discussions to begin. The advent of Black Studies undoubtedly helped Morrison, too: “It was the academic community that gave ‘The Bluest Eye’ its life,” she said. “People assigned it in class. Students bought the paperback.”

In order to get attention for her authors—publishers still thought that the ideal book buyer was a thirty-year-old Long Island woman, and reviewers would lump together books by Ishmael Reed and Angela Davis, along with children’s books, in a single article—Morrison decided to concentrate on one African-American text each season. She worked diligently. “I wanted to give back something,” she said. “I wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line. And I didn’t want to fail my grandmother. I didn’t want to hear her say, ‘You went to college and this is all you thought up?’ ” She laughed. “Compared to what my family had gone through and what I felt was my responsibility, the corporation’s interest was way down on the list. I was not going to do anything that I thought was nutty or disrupt anything. I thought it was beneficial generally, just like I thought that the books were going to make them a lot of money!”

Morrison’s view of contemporary black literature transcended the limitations of the “down with honky” school of black nationalism popularized by writers like Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. She preferred to publish writers who had something to say about black American life that reflected its rich experience. In 1974, she put together “The Black Book,” a compendium of photographs, drawings, songs, letters, and other documents that charts black American history from slavery through Reconstruction to modern times. The book exercised a great influence over the way black anthropology was viewed.

At first, Random House resisted the idea of “The Black Book.” “It just looked to them like a disaster,” Morrison said. “Not so much in the way it was being put together, but because they didn’t know how to sell it. ‘Who is going to buy something called “The Black Book”?’ I had my mother on the cover—what were they talking about?” She wrote about the project in the February 2, 1974, issue of Black World: “So what was Black life like before it went on TV? . . . I spent the last 18 months trying to do a book that would show some of that. A genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived. It has no ‘order,’ no chapters, no major themes. But it does have coherence and sinew. . . . I don’t know if it’s beautiful or not (it is elegant, however), but it is intelligent, it is profound, it is alive, it is visual, it is creative, it is complex, and it is ours.”

Despite all misgivings, the book garnered extraordinary reviews. Writing in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Alvin Beam said, “Editors, like novelists, have brain children—books they think up and bring to life without putting their own names on the title page. Mrs. Morrison has one of these in the stores now, and magazines and newsletters in the publishing trade are ecstatic, saying it will go like hotcakes.”

Morrison got a letter from a man in prison who had read the book. “Somebody had given him a copy, and he wrote to say thank you,” Morrison told me. “And then he said, ‘I need two more copies, because I need one to pass out to other people, and I need another one to throw up against the wall. And I need the one I have to hold close.’ So there were readers on, quote, ‘both sides of the street,’ which is the way they put it.” I recall buying “The Black Book” as a teen-ager and feeling as if I had been given a road map of the Brooklyn community where I lived at the time.

“Toni became not a black editor but the black editor,” a friend of hers told me. In 1975, D. Keith Mano, the “Book Watch” columnist for Esquire, devoted an entire article to Gayl Jones and her new book, “Corregidora,” but the piece was as much about Morrison as about Jones. “Toni Morrison is Gayl’s Svengali editor at Random House,” Mano wrote. “Toni is dynamic, witty, even boisterous in a good-humored way. And sharp. Very sharp. She often uses the pronoun I. She’ll say, ‘I published “Corregidora.” ’ . . . I suspect the title page of ‘Corregidora’ should read, ‘by Gayl Jones, as told to Toni Morrison.’ ” If Morrison had been a man or white, it seems unlikely that Mano would have noticed her championing of an author. Jones was uncommunicative and Morrison had books to sell. If a writer needed fussing, she fussed, and if not, not.

Morrison was a canny and tireless editor. “You can’t be a slouch in Toni’s presence,” the scholar Eugene Redmond told me. “Her favorite word is ‘wakeful.’ ” (She still gets up at 4 a.m. to work.) When she published the books of Henry Dumas—a little-known novelist and poet whose work was left fragmentary when he was murdered by a transit officer in the New York City subway in 1968, in a case of mistaken identity—she sent copies to Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and all the major movie executives and television hosts. In a letter inviting people to read at a tribute to Dumas, she wrote, “He was brilliant. He was magnetic and he was an incredible artist. . . . We are determined to bring to the large community of Black artists and Black people in general this man’s work.”

The racial climate in the mid-seventies made it especially hard for Morrison to promote certain books—books that might be taken as too radical. Morrison remembered that the marketing department balked when she wanted to have a publication party in a club on 125th Street. No one from Random House came—it was rumored that someone in management had cautioned the staff about the danger—except the publicist and her assistant, who said it was the best party they’d ever been to. A couple of news crews showed up, however, and the party was on the evening news, giving the book hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of free publicity, by Morrison’s reckoning. Similarly, Morrison said, when she brought out Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, “The Greatest,” in 1976, all the department stores that were approached about hosting the book signing backed out, fearing riots and looting. When E. J. Korvette’s, the now defunct department store, agreed to host the signing, Morrison brought in members of the Nation of Islam, who came with their families, as peacekeepers. She also installed a white friend, a woman who worked in the sales department, to guard Ali. “You stand right next to Ali,” she said. “And when people come up and punch him—‘Hey, Champ!’—you stop them. Because he’s not going to say it ever, that it hurts when you get a thousand little taps. And when you think Ali is tired give him a baby to play with. He likes babies.” Two thousand people came to E. J. Korvette’s, on a rainy night, and, with the Brothers of the Nation of Islam milling around in the crowd, everything was serene and orderly.

Throughout the seventies, Morrison worked as a teacher at Yale, sunyPurchase, Bard, Rutgers, and suny Albany. “Random paid about ten cents, so Toni took on teaching jobs,” Jason Epstein recalled. In a 1998 interview, she said, “When I wanted a raise, in my employment world, they would give me a little woman’s raise and I would say, ‘No. This is really low.’ And they would say, ‘But,’ and I would say, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re the head of the household. You know what you want. That’s what I want. I want that. I am on serious business now. This is not girl playing. This is not wife playing. This is serious business. I am the head of a household, and I must work to pay for my children.’ ”

“The Bluest Eye” had made the literary establishment take notice. In “Sula,” which was published three years later, Morrison’s little colored girls grew up and occupied a more completely rendered world. “The Bluest Eye” was divided by seasons; “Sula” was divided into years, stretching from 1919 to 1965. Again, the story is set in a small Ohio town, in a neighborhood called the Bottom. (“A joke. A nigger joke. That’s the way it got started.”) Sula Mae Peace, Morrison’s heroine, is the progeny of an eccentric household run by formidable women. She leaves the Bottom in order to reinvent herself. Morrison does not relay what Sula does when she ventures into the world, but her return is catastrophic. (The first sign of impending disaster is a plague of robins.) Her return also brings about a confrontation with her grandmother Eva—a parable of the New Negro Woman confronting the Old World.

At Eva’s house there were four dead robins on the walk. Sula stopped and with her toe pushed them into the bordering grass. . . . When Sula opened the door [Eva] raised her eyes and said, “I might have knowed them birds meant something. Where’s your coat?”  Sula threw herself on Eva’s bed. “The rest of my stuff will be on later.”  “I should hope so. Them little old furry tails ain’t going to do you no more good than they did the fox that was wearing them.”  “Don’t you say hello to nobody when you ain’t seen them for ten years?”  “If folks let somebody know where they is and when they coming, then other folks can get ready for them. If they don’t—if they just pop in all sudden like—then they got to take whatever mood they find.”  “How you been doing, Big Mamma?”  “Gettin’ by. Sweet of you to ask. You was quick enough when you wanted something. When you needed a little change or . . .”  “Don’t talk to me about how much you gave me, Big Mamma, and how much I owe you or none of that.”  “Oh? I ain’t supposed to mention it?”  “OK. Mention it.” Sula shrugged and turned over on her stomach, her buttocks toward Eva.  “You ain’t been in this house ten seconds and already you starting something.”  “Takes two, Big Mamma.”  “Well, don’t let your mouth start nothing that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.”  “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” . . .  “Pus mouth! God’s going to strike you!”  “Which God? The one watched you burn Plum [Eva’s son]?”  “Don’t talk to me about no burning. You watched your own mamma. You crazy roach! You the one should have been burnt!”  “But I ain’t. Got that? I ain’t. Any more fires in this house, I’m lighting them!”

Where I come from, this dialogue doesn’t sound so much fictional as documentary; it could be about the women—sisters and cousins—who passed Morrison’s books on to me when I was growing up, women who didn’t know they were “marginal.”

Morrison’s interest was in spoken language, heightened and dramatized. (Bob Gottlieb told me that he was always inserting commas into Morrison’s sentences and she was always taking them out.) In describing her style, Morrison said, “I thought, Well, I’m going to drop ‘g’s where the black people dropped ‘g’s, and the white people on the same street in the same part of the state don’t. But there was a distinction in the language and it wasn’t in the spelling. It was someplace else.” Morrison went on, “Maybe it’s because African languages are so tonal, so that with the little shifts in pronunciation, the little shifts in placement, something else happens.

“I was just determined to take the language that for me was so powerfully metaphoric, economical, lunatic, and intelligent at the same time—just these short sentences or these developments of ideas that was the language of my family and neighbors and so on—and not make it exotic or comic or slumming.” Zora Neale Hurston, the nineteen-thirties novelist and folklorist, was an example, Morrison said, of a black writer who treated dialogue as a transcript to show white people how it really was in the Florida swamps. Morrison’s aim was different. “Street language is lyrical, plus it has this blend of the standard English and the sermonic, as well as the colloquial, you know—that is what I wanted to polish and show, and make it a literary vehicle,” Morrison said. (She has succeeded in this to the point of irritating some readers. James Wood, in a review of “Paradise” titled “The Color Purple,” wrote, “Morrison is so besotted with making poetry, with the lyrical dyeing of every moment, that she cannot grant characters their own words. . . . She seems to view her people as mere spokes of style, who exist to keep her lyricism in motion.”)

Situating herself inside the black world, Morrison undermined the myth of black cohesiveness. With whiteness offstage, or certainly right of center, she showed black people fighting with each other—murdering, raping, breaking up marriages, burning down houses. She also showed nurturing fathers who abide and the matriarchs who love them. Morrison revelled in the complications. “I didn’t want it to be a teaching tool for white people. I wanted it to be true—not from outside the culture, as a writer looking back at it,” she said. “I wanted it to come from inside the culture, and speak to people inside the culture. It was about a refusal to pander or distort or gain political points. I wanted to reveal and raise questions.” She is still raising questions: Bill Cosey, the deceased patriarch in “Love,” is both beneficent and evil, a guardian and a predator.

Doing so, Morrison broke ranks—particularly with black male writers such as Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka, who were taking an increasingly militant stance against racism. Their attitude descended from the realistic portraits of black resistance in the novels of Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison—who, Morrison believed, were writing for a white audience. “The title of Ralph Ellison’s book was ‘Invisible Man,’ ” Morrison said. “And the question for me was ‘Invisible to whom?’ Not to me.” Morrison refused to present an ideal or speak in unison, even if it meant she was perceived as a traitor. “There is that sense of firm loyalty for black people,” she said. “The question is always, Is this going to be useful for the race?”

“I really liked that book,” one black woman told Morrison after reading “The Bluest Eye.” “But I was frustrated and angry, because I didn’t want you to expose us in our lives.” Morrison replied, “Well, how can I reach you if I don’t expose it to the world?” Others, myself included, accused her of perpetuating rather than dismantling the myth of the indomitable black woman, long-suffering and oversexed. In a book about real and fictional black women, I wrote that the obsessive “man love” of Hannah, Sula’s mother, was a stereotype. (At the time, I didn’t see that Morrison’s decision to burn her to death was a moral condemnation, not a melodrama.) Morrison is used to being challenged and isn’t afraid to confront her critics. “I didn’t like what you wrote,” she said to me a few years ago. I was caught off guard, but she steered the conversation to another topic.

The reviews of “Sula”—like those of “The Bluest Eye”—were mixed. Writing in The Nation, the critic Jerry H. Bryant came closest to identifying the confusion: “Most of us have been conditioned to expect something else in black characters, especially black female characters—guiltless victims of brutal white men, yearning for a respectable life of middle-class security; whores driven to their profession by impossible conditions; housekeepers exhausted by their work for lazy white women. We do not expect to see a fierceness bordering on the demonic.”

After “Sula,” Bob Gottlieb advised Morrison to move on. “ ‘O.K.,’ I told her, ‘that’s perfect. As perfect as a sonnet,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’ve done that, you don’t have to do it again. Now you’re free to open up more.’ ” She followed his advice with “Song of Solomon,” a sprawling epic about a prosperous but tortured black family that drew comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” As she turned her attention to history—taking on, in years to come, slavery, Reconstruction, the great migration, the Harlem Renaissance—writing began to occupy more of her time. “I went to Bob Bernstein twice,” she told me. “Once, when I saw a house I wanted to buy. I didn’t want to go through the whole black-woman thing—no man, no credit—and so I asked the company to get the mortgage for me. The second time was after ‘Tar Baby’ was published. I knew it was unorthodox, but I wanted to come into the office less. I was doing what the editors did—line editing—at home. It was such a waste of time to come in and drink coffee and gossip. So I started working one day a week. I’d get eighty letters done, stay until eight o’clock, but get my work done.”

Eventually, she resigned. “The job at Random House was a life raft for her,” Gottlieb recalled. “She had two sons and she was worried about losing that life preserver. After she published ‘Tar Baby,’ I said, ‘Toni, you can depend on your writing to support you.’ ”

Morrison remembered Gottlieb’s telling her, “O.K. You can write ‘writer’ on your tax returns.”

Morrison provokes complicated responses from her literary progeny. She is routinely placed on a pedestal and just as frequently knocked off it. Black writers alternately praise her and castigate her for not being everything at once. With the deaths of Wright and Baldwin, Morrison became both mother and father to black writers of my generation—a delicate situation. (It’s similar to the phenomenon James Baldwin noted in his essay on Richard Wright: “His work was an immense liberation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and alas! my father.”) She spoke through her characters when we wanted her to speak to us. With every book, she loomed larger, and gave us more opportunities to define ourselves against her. In 1978, “Song of Solomon” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, beating out Joan Didion’s “A Book of Common Prayer” and John Cheever’s “Falconer.” It was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club—the first by a black since Wright’s “Native Son.” When “Tar Baby” came out, three years later, Morrison was on the cover of Newsweek, one of the first black women to appear on the cover of a national magazine since Zora Neale Hurston in 1943.

“Beloved,” too, was an instant sensation in 1987. It told the story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who murders her child rather than allow it to be captured. When “Beloved” failed to be nominated for a National Book Award (Pete Dexter’s “Paris Trout” won that year), forty-eight prominent black intellectuals and writers, including Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, and Quincy Troupe, protested “against such oversight and harmful whimsy” in a statement that was printed in the Times Book Review. “Alive, we write this testament of thanks to you, dear Toni: alive, beloved and persevering, magical. . . . For all America, for all of American letters, you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people.” They contested the fact that Morrison had yet to be considered for a Pulitzer Prize. Later that year, “Beloved” did win a Pulitzer. Ralph Ellison, for one, disapproved of the special pleading. “Toni doesn’t need that kind of support, even though it was well intentioned,” he said.

“Beloved” ’s profile only got higher as time went by. The contrarian critic Stanley Crouch called it “protest pulp fiction” and complained that it idealized black behavior “to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn’t weaken.” He objected to its commerciality. “Were ‘Beloved’ adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison’s literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this: ‘Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.’ ” (As it happened, it was adapted for film, with Oprah in the role of Sethe.)

Best-selling books, film adaptations, television talk-show appearances all increased Morrison’s celebrity and drew other famous people into her life. The actor Marlon Brando would phone to read her passages from her novels that he found particularly humorous. Oprah had her to dinner—on TV. By the time the film of “Beloved” was released, Morrison’s fame was inescapable. I recall walking along the West Side piers in Manhattan and hearing a Puerto Rican queen, defending one of her “children,” say to an opponent, “You want me to go ‘Beloved’ on your ass?”

Morrison’s critics reached their loudest pitch when she was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1993, a year that Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates had been favored to win. “I hope this prize inspires her to write better books,” Crouch said. Charles Johnson, a black novelist, called her writing “often offensive, harsh. Whites are portrayed badly. Men are. Black men are.” He said that she had been “the beneficiary of good will” and that her award was “a triumph of political correctness.” A piece in the Washington Post asked well-known American writers whom they would like to see receive the award. Erica Jong (whose choice, Doris Lessing, Jong described as “the wrong kind of African: white”) wrote, “I wish that Toni Morrison, a bedazzling writer and a great human being, had won her prize only for her excellence at stringing words together. But I am nevertheless delighted at her choice. . . . I suspect, however, that her prize was not motivated solely by artistic considerations. Why can’t art in itself be enough? Must we also use the artist as a token of progressivism?” The Nobel Committee said that Morrison “delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race.” To this, one critic retorted that she has “erected an insistent awareness of race (and gender and whatever else may be the ‘identity’-defining trait du jour) as the defining feature of the self.”

“I have never competed with other people,” Morrison told me. “It just never occurred to me. I have to sort of work it up to understand what people are talking about when they complain about what this person did or that person shouldn’t do. There were several contenders from the U.S. that year, and my wish was that they would’ve all gotten it, so that I could be left alone. I only compete with myself, with my standards. How to do better the next time, how to work well.”

Near the end of one of our interviews last summer, Morrison took me on a tour of the house. Descending the staircase off the sitting room, we had a look at her office, with its two big desks stacked with paper and correspondence. Behind one desk was her assistant, John Hoppenthaler, a poet. Windows surrounded the room. “I don’t really write that much in here,” Morrison said. “Don’t look at it—it’s a mess.” She decided that she would pick some tomatoes for lunch. She is what she calls a “pot” gardener—she enjoys gardening on a small scale. The room below the office is where Morrison does her writing. It has a slate floor, a big wooden table—“It’s from Norway, not that I got it in Norway, and I’m sure the man who imported it overcharged for it, but I love all the grooves and cracks in it”—and a fully equipped kitchen. Sometimes she cooks Thanksgiving dinner for her family there (both sons are married, with children), but it’s a room meant for work. French doors lead out to a stretch of grass and the river beyond. Morrison got to work picking tomatoes off a small vine trained against a stone wall. Two tomatoes that did not meet her standards she chucked into the river. Then she led me inside to get back to work.

A previous version of this article misstated the length of time between Morrison winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and the publication of “Tar Baby,” and misstated the number of black women who appeared on the covers of national magazines between 1943 and 1981.

Published in the print edition of the October 27, 2003, issue, with the headline “Ghosts in the House.”

[hmgn3]

23-January 散財記録

03(tue) ・Matthias Lindermayr / Sequence (2022, used LP) ・Peter Zummo / Dress Code (Don't Look at My Car) (2016, used LP) ・High Places / Original Colors (2011, used LP) ・The Notwist / Pick Up the Phone (2002, used 12inch) ・Indian Ocean / School Bell/Treehouse (1986, used 12inch) ・Serge Gainsbourg / Aux Armes Et Cætera (1979, used LP) ・Tony Snell / Medieval & Latter Day Lays (1973, used LP) ・Isaac Hayes / Theme From the Men/Type Thang (1972, used 7inch) ・Van Morrison / Blue Money/Sweet Thing (1971, used 7inch) 06(fri) ・AmmonContact / New Birth (2005, 2x12inch) ・The Ramsey Lewis Trio / Upendo Ni Pamoja (1972, used LP) ・Jerome Richardson / Going to the Movies (1962, used LP) 07(sat) ・Eri Nagami / どちらかというとそう思う (2022, cassette) ・ザ・なつやすみバンド / 風の谷のナウシカ (2022, used 7inch) ・TWIG EP for Hiraparr Wilson (2021, used 10inch) ・んミィ & ゆめであいましょう / ひかりのうた & おだやかにひそやかに (2019, 7inch) ・Jack Wilson / Spare Key (2013, used LP) ・João Bosco / Galos De Briga (1976, used LP) 09(mon) ・odd eyes / A love supreme for our brilliant town (2015, used 7inch+CD) ・Óbó / Innhverfi (2014, used LP) ・Loren Connors / Airs (1999, used LP) ・Solid Eye / It's a Salon (1996, used 7inch) ・Love of Life Orchestra / Geneva (1980, used LP) ・Maurice Jarre / Die Blechtrommel (1979, used LP) 12(fri) ・中村祐子 / 私��連れていって (2020, used CD) ・蓮沼執太 / CC OO (2012, used 4CD) 13(fri) ・Brian Chase / Drums & Drones II (2018, used LP) ・DATE OF BIRTH / AROUND+AROUND (1985, used 10inch) ・Bossa Combo / Ambiance D'Ete (1981, used LP) 14(sat) ・Stargaze / Deerhoof Chamber Variations (2015, used 12inch) ・Julian Lynch / Terra (2011, used LP) ・John Hughes / Scarlet Diva - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (2000, used LP) ・The Silver Apples / Fractal Flow/Lovefingers (1996, used 7inch) ・Harvie Swartz / Underneath It All (1982, used LP) 15(sun) ・中尾勘二 / Record of Recording 1967-1978 (2022, CD-R) ・中尾勘二 / My Orver Dubbing Life 2019-2022 (2022, CD-R) 20(fri) ・David Byrne / Music For The Knee Plays (1985, used LP) ・Blood, Sweat & Tears / Lisa, Listen to Me (1971, used 7inch) ・The Firehouse 5 Plus 2 / The Firehouse Five Story, Vol. 1 (1955, used 4x7inch) 21(sat) ・Esperanza de OTO 音のエスペランサ (2013, used LP) ・The King Of Luxembourg / "Sir" (1988, used LP) ・Mama Cass / Mama's Big Ones: Her Greatest Hits (1970, used LP) 23(mon) ・Vicktor Taiwò / Joy Comes in Spirit (2018, used 2LP) ・Chick Corea, Miroslav Vitous, Roy Haynes / Trio Music (1982, used 2LP) ・Carmine Appice / Carmine Appice (1981, used LP) ・Nat Adderley / You, Baby (1968, used LP) ・The Monkees / Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. (1967, used LP) 24(tue) ・Justin Wright / A Really Good Spot (2022, used LP) 28(sat) ・Professor Brian Oblivion / The Dark Realities of the Moment (2011, used LP) ・Beneath Fire & Smoke / The Iceberg Waltz (2007, used 10inch) ・Sukpatch / Honky-Tonk Operation E.P. (1998, used 12inch) 29(sun) ・Errol's Compilation (2002, used 2x10inch) ・Chari Chari / Keep on Flowin' EP (1998, used 12inch) ・(Garden Of Delights Presents...) Seek Refuge... (From Your Intolerable Situation) (1995, used LP) ・The Helicopters / The Helicopters (1984, used LP) ・Manos Hadjidakis / Never On Sunday (Original Sound Track Music) (1960, used LP)

[strikecommanding]

I don't mind to be rude and I'm sorry if it comes that way so feel free to ignore this question, but what kind of ending you had in mind for the professor!76 series? I absolutely love it and I'm curious what you originally planned for Reader and Prof!

you’re not being rude at all! honestly i thought it would be a nice parting gift from me to everyone here if i could have finished that series up by the time i actually graduate but i just. don’t see that happening lol

basically the whole “plot twist” i had in mind for the end was that hana was in on it with jack and was even more yandere for reader than he was. there was going to be a prequel-esque chapter from hana’s perspective where she’s a lot less stable and glittering than the reader believes, jack laments how unhappy she is and she tells him the only thing that would make her happy was if their family was complete, and then the moment they both set eyes on reader and come to the same conclusion that she would be the perfect addition to the family

[yandere-genji]

The Masterlist

REQUESTS OPEN

yandere quote prompt list

rules/info

Overwatch Boys

Reaper/Gabriel Reyes:

Professor!Reyes

College Bully!Reyes pt1 pt2 pt3

Commander Reyes fluffy smut with captive s/o

Commander Reyes with easily startled s/o

Reaper with a degradation kink

Quote prompt: “God, you have no idea how amazing you are, do you?”

Yandere Commander Reyes Headcanons

Yandere Reaper Headcanons

Commander Reyes quote prompt: “You think I’m jealous? Trust me, buttercup, you haven’t even seen jealousy.”

Commander Reyes quote prompt: “This world doesn’t deserve an angel like you.”

Soldier: 76/Jack Morrison:

• Yandere Soldier Headcanons • Texts from Soldier

• Shy darling with a stutter pt1 pt2 • Breaking in a housewife darling

• Quote prompt: “Cry for me, baby.”

• “So…do you want your underwear back?”

• “I know it hurts, honey, but that’s what happens when you don’t do what I say.”

• “If you don’t kiss me, I’ll slit your fucking throat.” • “I know when someone’s in my room, my things are missing.”

Cole Cassidy:

• Yandere Cassidy Headcanons • Texts from Cassidy • Love letter from Cassidy • Lifeguard!Cassidy Headcanons • Darling seeking attention from Cassidy • Incubus!Cassidy • Bully Blackwatch!Cassidy • Sugar Daddy!Cassidy • Protective Cassidy with short bf

• Cassidy’s darling confesses to him • Quote prompt: “So…do you want your underwear back?”

• “If you don’t take your clothes off, I’ll take them off for you.” • “If you just do what you’re fucking told then we wouldn’t have a problem, would we?” (fem!reader)

• “You’ve been so good lately, my pet. Don’t make me have to punish you…” pt1 pt2 • “You’re such a pretty little thing tied up like that, baby.”

• “God, you have no idea how amazing you are, do you?” • “I’ll carve my name into your back if that’s what I have to do to let you know you’re mine.” Deadlock!Cassidy with male!reader • “I know when someone’s in my room, my things are missing.”

• Cassidy and Ashe with the same darling

• Yandere Deadlock Cassidy Headcanons

Genji Shimada:

• Yandere Genji Headcanons • Texts from Genji • Love letter • Some more headcanons • Genji and Hanzo competing for their darling • Genji simping for ace!reader • Genji’s darling doesn’t like to snuggle • Bathing darling with a shoulder injury • Quote prompt: “You’re so cute when you’re struggling.” • “You will do what I ask.” • “I saw you last night…you looked beautiful.” • “I can’t help it, i just want to see you, talk to you, always.” + “Instead of following me around, trying to be sneaky, why not just come talk to me?” fem!reader

Hanzo Shimada:

• Yandere Hanzo Headcanons • NSFW Headcanons • Texts from Hanzo • Warrior!Hanzo • Hanzo competing with Genji for his darling • Angst Hanzo • Bathing darling with shoulder injury • Some fluff • Clumsy/forgetful darling • Quote prompt: “It’s okay to love me. Please love me.” • “I want to tell you I love you until my throat bleeds.”

• Yandere Yakuza Hanzo Headcanons

Doomfist:

• Quote prompt: “You’ve been so good lately, my pet. Don’t make me have to punish you.”

Lucio:

• Yandere Lucio Headcanons • More headcanons • Quote prompt: “If you leave me, I’ll die!”

Ramattra:

• Yandere Ramattra Headcanons

Maximilien:

• Yandere Maximilien Headcanons • Quote prompt: “You don’t even know how lucky you are. I protect you and provide for you. Don’t act so ungrateful.” • “If you don’t take your clothes off, I’ll take them off for you.”

Overwatch Gals

Sombra:

• Quote prompt: “It’s kind of not normal to keep getting repeated texts and calls from strangers.”

D.Va/Hana Song:

• Yandere D.Va Headcanons

Kiriko:

• Yandere Kiriko Headcanons • Jealousy Headcanons

Moira:

• Yandere Moira Headcanons • Headcanons with fem!reader

Tracer:

• Quote prompt: “I just want to show you how much I love you…”

Ashe:

• Fluffy Ashe Headcanons

• Ashe and Cassidy with the same darling

Junkerqueen:

• Yandere Junkerqueen Headcanons

Poly/Multi-character

• OW Yanderes with darling who hates affection • OW Yanderes with a darling that has been broken too far • Zarya, Ana, and Genji with reckless darling • Soldier, Reaper, Genji, and Cassidy with an inexperienced darling • Cassidy, Reinhardt, and Junkrat with an introverted darling • Cassidy, Reinhardt, and Soldier finding their male!darling smoking pot • Reaper76, Cassidy/Hanzo, and Hanzo with a bored captive darling • Hanzo/Cassidy quote prompt: “I’ll do whatever it takes if it means we’ll be together forever, my sweet.” and “You will do what I ask.”

[chiefbasementcreator]

Characters I'll play (if a charcter/series you like isn't on the list, send a PM, I may have heard of them) :

Overwatch: Every female characters, genderbent male characters as well as Jack Morrison/Soldier: 76 (either young or old) Comes with teacher AU and Vampire AU

Dragon Age Origins/Awakening/2: Every chaarcter

World of Warcraft/Heroes of the Storm: every character

Pokemon: Cynthia, May, Dawn, Hilda, Lusamine, Lillie, any Female Trainer, Jesse, Sonia, Professor Sada, any female Professor/assisstant

One Piece: Every female character, Monkey D. Luffy, Roronoa Zoro, Vinsmoke Sanji

Naruto/Boruto: Naruto/Naruko (genderbent Naruto), Sasuke/Sasuki, Sakura, Ino, Hinata, Hanabi, Temari, Mei Terumi, Tsunade... Any character I know/remember

Taimanin Asagi: Every character

Miraculous Ladybug: Entire cast.

RWBY: Ruby rose, Blake Belladona, Glynda Goodwitch, Weiss Schnee, Yang Xiao Long

Star Wars: Bastila Shan, Revan (male and female), Carth, Mission vao, Padme, Leia, Ashoka, Rey, Aton, The Exile, Visas Marr, Atris, the Handmaide/Brianna, twi'lek

The Witcher: Geralt, Ciri, Triss, Yennefer, Shani, the Sorceresses

Warhammer Fantasy: Everyone

Dishonored: Corvo, Emily, Jessamine

Mass Effect: Everyone

Fallout 3/New Vegas: Anyone i remember

Evenicle: Every character

Final Fantasy Series: Tifa Lockhart, Aeris Gainsborough, yuffie, Jessie, Scarlet (FF7), Lightning (FFXIII)

Metal Gear Rising: Revegeance: Mistral, Raiden, Jetsream Sam

Nekopara: Every catgirl

Life is strange: Chloe Price, Warren Graham, Victoria Chase, David Madsen, Maxine Caulfield , Kate Marsh

valkyria Chronicles 1: every character

Banner of the Maid: Every character

Half-Life/Portal: Chell, Gordon freeman, Alyx vance, Adrian Shepard

Miscancellous: Elsa (Frozen), Anna (Frozen), Samus Aran (Metroid), Gwen stacy/spider-girl (Spider-man), 2B, AS (Nier Atomata), Wii-fit trainer (Nintendo), Peach/Rosalina/Daisy/Bowsette (Mario), Wonder Woman/Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn/Super-girl/Power Girl(DC), Lara Croft (Tomb Raider), Albedo (Overlord anime), Olga Discordia (Kuroinou)

Rules:

My main kink is hyper, i never do m/m, not a huge fan fo futa but that can be negociated, ask me in DM for specific kinks/rp situations

I dont ask perfect writing (i myself make frequent mispells), but at least write complete sentences.

[non-bionical-mecha-dude]

FANDOMS, CHARACTERS, HEADCANNONS, ONE SHOT, FANFICS, RULES & STUFF

Hello! Sorry if this is messy, I just wanted to lay down some ground rules! If you have any questions or asks, then feel free to let me know!

ALSO, KEEP IN MIND, I HAVE ADHD, AND I OFTEN FORGET SOCIAL MEDIA EXISTS, AND MAY DISAPPEAR RANDOMLY. IF YOU DECIDE TO REQUEST SOMETHING, PLEASE UNDERSTAND, IT MAY TAKE ME A LONG WHILE, I APOLOGIZE IN ADVANCE AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE!!

Undertale/Deltarune

Sans

Papyrus

Alphys

Undyne

Temmie (PLATONIC ONLY)

Muffet

Toriel (PLATONIC ONLY)

Asgore (PLATONIC ONLY)

Mettaton

Napstablook (PLATONIC ONLY)

Flowey (PLATONIC ONLY)

Frisk and Chara (PLATONIC ONLY)

Annoying dog/toby (PLATONIC ONLY)

Kris

Susie

Ralsei

Lancer (PLATONIC ONLY)

Noelle

Birdly

Roulx Kard

Seam

Jevil

Queen

Swatch

Spamton

Tasque Manager

The Addisions

Dream Daddy

Robert

Damien

Craig

Hugo

Mat

Amanda (PLATONIC ONLY)

Detroit become human

Ralph

Connor

RK900

Markus

Gavin

North

Stardew Valley

Literally all of the bachelors

Penny

Abigail

Resident Evil Village

Alcina Demitrescu

Karl Heisenberg

Donna Beneviento

Overwatch

Hanzo Shimada

Genji Shimada

Cole Cassidy (Mcree)

Gabriel Reyes (Reaper)

Lucio Correia Dos Santos

Mei

Hana Song (D.Va)

Ashe

Lena Oxtan (Tracer)

Bastion (ONLY PLATONIC)

Jack Morrison (Soldier 76)

My Hero Academia

Katsuki Bakugou

Shoto Todoroki

Izuku Midoriya

Tenya Iida

Denki Kaminari

Ejirou Kirishima

Ochako Uraraka

Tamaki Amajiki

Togata Mirio

Toga Himiko

Mina Ashido

Shota Aizawa

Eri (PLATONIC ONLY)

Ouran Highschool Host Club

Tamaki

Kyoya

Hikarou

Haruhi

Kaoru

Mori

Honey (PLATONIC ONLY)

Seven deadly sins

Ban

King

Gowther

Diane

Gilthunder

Meliodis

Merlin

Dereri

Escannor

Toilet Bound Hanako-Kun

Hanako-Kun

Yashiro

Mistuba

Kou

Tsukagimori

Tsukasa

Aoi Akane (the time keeper)

DeathNote

Mello

L

Light

Misa

Mitsuba

Near (PLATONIC ONLY)

Seduce me the Otome

James

Erik

Sam

Matthew

Damien

Malik

Diana

Harry Potter

Harry Potter

Ronald Weasley

Hermione Granger

Draco Malfoy

Professor Snape

Tom Riddle

FNAF Security Breach (ALL PLATONIC ONLY)

Sunrise/Moondrop

Glamrock Freddy

Montgomery Gator

Glamrock Chica

Roxanne Wolf

DJ Music Man/tiny music man

Wet floor sign bots

Map bot

LotR/Hobbit

Bilbo

Thorin

Tauriel

Thranduil

Legolas

Sam-Wise

Mary

Pip

Aragorn

Gimli

Fili

Kili

Bard

Gladriel

Arwen

TMNT 2012

Donatello

Raphael

Leonardo

Mikey

Splinter (PLATONIC ONLY)

ROTTMNT

Donatello

Raphael

Leonardo

Mikey

April O'Neil

Big Mama

TMNT Bayverse

Leo

Raph

Donnie

Mikey

April

Vern

Mr. Sacks

Casey Jones

Hellboy (2004-2008)

Hellboy

Abe Sapien

John Myers

Johann Krauss

Liz Sherman

Prince Nadja

Princess Nuala

✨Lego Monkie Kid✨

MK

Mei

Red Son

Tang

Sun Wukong

Macaque

Ao Lie

Azure Lion

Spider Queen

✨Sparkles✨ mean I'm currently hyperfixating on this topic at the moment and will have a higher chance of writing for this/these one('s)

While these are not all the fandoms I'm in, these are the ones I'm most comfortable with writing about

Some rules:

I may or may not write smut? I'm not sure since I haven't really done it, but I will NOT write smut for characters under the age of 21

I won't write anything that has to do with the reader being super OP or being half of like, literally everything

When it comes to Y/N being an anthropomorphic animal/human or half of that, if stuff like that is canon in the fandom, then I'll write it (like a half human half monster for Undertale, or a Cat person for TMNT) but if stuff like that just doesn't exist in that world, then I most likely won't write it

I won't write a character being a racist, rapist, homophobic, transphobic or anything like that, those things are fucked up and aren't ok and that character I may write, might be someone else's comfort character and I don't want to ruin a character for someone

I won't write a character as being an abuser, sure, I could say they where abused some way in the past if it is relevant to the fic, but I will not write a character being an abuser themselves, that's just not right

I won't write yandere characters, it just feels to toxic to me to have someone be THAT possessive of someone

If a character is canonically underage, I will not age them up, if a reader or character is being romantically shipped with the underage character, the reader/character must and will be underage as well

(Keep in mind I might add rules or change certain rules)

I can do:

LGBTQ+(THIS ABSOLUTELY INCLUDES ASEXUAL AND AROMANTIC)

Any gender for reader, if not specified, I shall do gender neutral

I will write angst and mental health related topics of asked

I will absolutely 100% write a character or reader with ADHD and other neurodiversities

I can do shipping fanfics! Although, it depends on the characters, but I may be able to write it, even if I don't entirely agree with the ship! AS LONG as it is not anything like AbuserXvictim or MinorXadult or anything like that.

As a writer, I hope that I may advance in my writing skills, as well as have fun with what I write, so, I ask as many requests as your heart's desire!

Remember, I have every right as a writer to deny a request if I'm not comfortable with writing it.

HAVE A GREAT DAY YOU BEAUTIFUL/HANDSOME BITCHES, BROS AND BO BURNHAM HOES! (See what I did there?)

[whetstonefires]

Do you have any thoughts about Eath 3 Professor Pig? I just had the idea today and was trying to find content about him. He would totally offer gender affirming surgery for free, though. Because he enjoys doing surgey.

I was not really plugged in when Pyg debuted, and Morrison's whole aesthetic/narrative sensibility with that generation of New Rogue didn't really speak to me (I could have dug Nobody if developed slower, and some of Flamingo's max camp was fun, but the writing lacked commitment, best I can say) so I haven't had many thoughts about him.

He had an impact on Jason's brief-lived sidekick, Sasha, converted her dad and fucked up her face; that's the most interesting contribution he's made to the DCU for all of me. (Bring back Scarlet and Abuse. And Onyx while we're at it, though she faded out without help from a full reset.)

But the illegal free clinic does need doctors and I observe from his wiki page that the Nu52 gave him a backstory as an actual qualified surgeon (as opposed to his original vibe as a deranged butcher) associated with Spyral and Leviathan, so yeah, I guess he can come. Hit the Gotham pro lunatic circuit late in the game, develop professional ties with the Circus.

I don't think they'll really become friends, because let's be serious is Pyg ever going to reasonably integrate into the Rogues gallery even in canon? Unlikely. Zsasz never has even after getting nerfed, and despite Morrison's bragging about the originality of the premise Pyg is basically Zsasz with the initial braininess and dark-mirror-to-Batman business dialed way down and the gross dialed all the way up.

Plus minions a la Hatter but so much worse.

Previously the only surgeon our guys had access to was Mockingbird (Thomas Elliot) and he was working very hard to keep his secret identity, so there was only so much volunteer surgery he could work into his schedule.

So now the patients willing to go to a trained but not licensed lunatic using stolen equipment for their surgery on account of Free just have to deal with the fact that the person doing it enjoys the process way too much. 😆🔪💉🧵

I'm assuming better ethics means a better sense of hygiene although I'm sure he's a tremendous slob in his personal life regardless.

It's funny though, Tommy Elliot for story reasons (in canon to justify the Face Thing and in my mirrorverse because angst and control issues) spent several years working exclusively in plastic surgery while Pyg's sketch backstory seems to suggest a more practical focus, so it's funny to think that when they both go Black Jack, Tommy's preference is Lifesaving Medical Care while Pyg gets really into Elective Surgeries For Improved Quality Of Life.

Like, I can see it. There's something there about how rebellion is always deeply contextual and defined by what you're reacting against.

If you wanted more general thoughts I apologize, I can only do My Hyperspecific Universe That I Haven't Updated Since Before The Pandemic Yikes.

[racefortheironthrone]

What do you think of Xavier?

Thanks to my experience writing the People’s History of the Marvel Universe series, I have a lot of thoughts about Charles Xavier.

I’m going to put them below the cut, because this is getting a bit long:

Why is Professor X So Difficult?

He’s a really tricky character to get right: one of the reasons why Silver Age Xavier keeps getting killed off and then brought back (often retconning this as him faking his death for some weird conspiratorial reason, which has helped to influence this idea of him being a bad, manipulative father figure) was that I think Stan and Jack had a legitimately hard time balancing the need for Xavier to play the Wise Mentor figure versus him being this overpowered and overly-tempting Deus Ex Machina that could solve every crisis and thus obviate the need for this team of teen superheroes.

Added to that is the difficulty of Xavier being a symbolically-loaded figure, whose ideology (referred to as “the dream” or “Xavier’s dream” in a way that Claremont meant to be a direct reference to what was actually not supposed to be the central metaphor of Dr. King’s speech) plays a major role in the mutant metaphor. Now, the analogy between King and Xavier has always been a flawed one for many reasons, but it can’t be disputed that there was something of a tendency to portray Xavier as a benevolent, saintly figure - hence why Claremont ultimately wanted to get rid of him in favor of Magneto as the Headmaster of the Xavier School, because he thought Magneto’s struggle to do good despite his background was more interesting than Xavier’s “uncomplicated” good nature.  

In recent decades (certainly since Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis, although I would argue you see signs of it in Morrison’s New X-Men), there’s been a tendency to deal with this issue by giving Xavier such increasingly large feet of clay that it’s become an active hindrance to how the character is supposed to function within the story and vis-a-vis the audience. I would argue this created a great deal of unnecessary tension in the fandom come HOXPOX, where a significant part of the fandom was convinced that Xavier was mind-controlling characters who were supposed to have had a sincere change of mind, because if Xavier was involved, whatever he was involved with had to be bad or dangerous. 

Who Is Charles Xavier?

I would argue it’s not necessary to villainize Xavier in order to have him be a complicated, well-rounded character, because if you strip him down to the essentials laid down by Jack, Stan, and Chris, he is a complicated, fascinating, sometimes infuriating individual. 

Let’s start with the fact that he’s a very unusual figure to be the inspirational figure, let alone leader, of a social movement, because almost everything in his life screams privilege. Whereas the archetypal Silver Age Marvel character is a working class New Yorker, Xavier is old money (like Bruce Wayne, he has a manor that’s named after his family, and the manor has been in his family for ten generations) suburban Westchester. Given this heritage, his parents’ history as scientists working on the Manhattan project, and his own Korean War service, I’m almost certain that Silver Age Charles Xavier was a Rockefeller Republican in 1962 who turned around and voted for LBJ in 1964 because he considered Goldwater an unacceptable extremist but then turned around and voted for Richard Nixon in 1968. 

There are only two things in Charles’ life that have ever marked him out as anything else than privileged. The first is that he’s a mutant - but the only way that this marked him out when his mutant powers activated in his adolescence is that this academic and athletic (more on that in a bit) prodigy lost his hair when he was in high school. The fact that he was able to hide his mutation is something that’s common to a lot of mutants with psychic powers - fellow telepaths like Jean, Emma, and Betsy all are able to pass in human society with ease - compared to physical ones, and as a result Xavier has always been very good at staying closeted as a mutant. 

This has led to this paradoxical position, where Charles’ activism, his insistence that mutancy is a good thing that ought to be tolerated, welcomed, and developed like any other aptitude, is motivated by his experience of mutancy as an unalloyed good. At the same time,he has this firm belief that pro-mutant politics can coincide with remaining closeted as a mutant. Not only does Charles himself pose as a human ally for most of his political career - most notably in his debates with Bolivar Trask and William Stryker - and only comes out of the closet when possessed by his evil anima Cassandra Nova, but he also provides image transducers to members of the All-New X-Men to help them stay closeted as well.

The second is that he’s disabled. More specifically, Xavier is an adult paraplegic. Now, a lot of great work has been done applying the lessons of disability activism and disability theory to the X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor, but what I haven’t seen as much is an exploration of how Xavier’s particular history with his disability shapes his thinking about himself and mutancy. 

Not all people with disabilities think about or experience disability in the same way, and one common dividing line is between people who developed their disability at birth or in early childhood versus those who develop their disabilities late in life. This is something that I’ve experienced personally as an adult amputee - my experience of my amputation, my prothesis, etc. is profoundly shaped by the fact that I have a lifetime’s experience of what it was like before my injury.  

Prior to his injury, Charles led an extremely active life - he was a high school sports star, a world traveller (albeit in a rather Indiana Jones-style orientalist fashion), a decorated war veteran - and so he has a very different relationship to his body than someone like Whiz Kid, who despite being in a very similar situation physically has preferred to use his mutant gift to enhance his adaptive technology rather than try to get back to “normal.” Thus, it’s been a running theme of Xavier’s stories over the last forty years that he’s always trying to escape the chair - only to be returned to it by editorial mandate - and why it makes total sense that Xavier chose to be resurrected without his disability. 

Why Is He So Bad at Politics?

As I’ve written about before, Xavier is notably bad at politics for someone who is, at base, a very political character. Notably, we mostly see Xavier engaging in politics through televised debates and other elite fora - this is something that started in the Silver Age with his debate with Bolivar Trask, it carried through to the Kelly hearings over the Mutant Registration Act where Xavier appeared as an accredited expert in genetics, and it carried through to his debate with the Reverend Stryer in “God Loves, Man Kills.”

However, at no point does it appear that Xavier is particularly winning any of these debates. Usually the audience responds to him as an eggheaded liberal academic, making high-minded calls for tolerance and calm that fail to engage people emotionally. (It doesn’t help that he’s pretending to be a human ally when both his interlocutors know or suspect that he’s secretly a mutant, allowing them to put him on the defensive.)

And this speaks to Charles’ background: Charles is an academic prodigy who came up through the world of elite higher education. He graduated high school early, and was attending Bard College in his early teens before transferring to Harvard, where he graduated with honors at only 16. He then went to Oxford University (where he met Moira) to do a dual PhD in Genetics and Biophysics, and then went on to Columbia University where he did another joint PhD in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Anthropology.

This is educationally superfluous in the extreme, and it speaks to a certain kind of thinking that can pop up in people who were academic prodigies or went through gifted and talented programs - Charles has difficulty with social interactions, because he didn’t have much in common with his chronological peer group and spent a lot of his life in a bubble of other academics. Notably, Moira described him as “arrogant” and having a “god complex,” which wouldn’t come off well in political situations where emotional communication is crucial.

And I think this academic arrogance helps to explain why Xavier decided to operationalize his dream through an elite private school with himself as headmaster, rather than pursuing the more politically-sensible path of (in the context of the 1960s and 1970s) starting up campus-based social movement organizations meant to mobilize mutants and human sympathizers and building connection between his mutant rights movement and the broader “movement of movements” that had emerged by the 1970s.