#third essay I’ve had published!!

[pemberlaey]

if anybody cares my essay on may welland / the systemic infantilization of young women in old new york high society was finally published <3

[k4vehrtz]

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE YOUNG, YOUNG LOVERS? dom ! nanami kento / sub ! m. reader

content warnings. nsfw content / hybrid au ergo predator - prey dynamic where applicable / bunny hybrid ! nanami & reader / explicit mentions of and allusions to social anxiety / age gap (reader is 25 + nanami is 45) / satosugu cameo / self - degradation (brief, nanami) + mild degradation (r receiving) / fingering (r receiving) / spontaneous sex / ‘bunny’ & ‘little rabbit’ used as a pet name / doggystyle / ass‐to–mouth / overstimulation / heat cycles / nipple play / explicit consent / reader is shorter than nanami but there is no explicit description of a body type / virgin nanami ergo loss of virginity

word count. 3K

notes. i’ve had this bunny ! reader req in my inbox for a while and it has been on my mind so i decided to explore a couple ideas :) i’m dyslexic so any errors just give the fic personality

nanami had, over the course of his life, nurtured a particular distaste for other human beings.

he’d grown up in a city — one that never slept; a city that hummed to the tune of debauchery. busy days pre–empted busier nights. and he’d always remember two things: one, that the winters were cold, but the people there were always colder and two, he’d stuck out in a crowd.

hence, at the age of forty–five, he’d decided to leave.

“… so let me get this straight,” satoru, who’d made it his mission to mimic a koala, says as he untangles himself from suguru after having concluded that this was, in fact, a serious conversation. “you’re moving to a small town to avoid human interaction more efficiently instead of addressing your underlying social anxiety?”

satoru naturally spoke faster than the average individual, but his pace increased near the end of his sentence. nanami pretended not to notice (something he’d become exceptionally good at).

“real subtle, smart ass,” suguru hadn’t though, narrowing his eyes at his partner before turning his attention back to nanami, “i think it’s a good idea, better environment to write and all.”

writing, yes. he’d gotten in the habit during high school. it was nothing more than a hobby — something to pass the time between classes. being a loner by choice (as he’d liked to call it), he’d had a lot of time to get lost between the lines of an empty notebook. and being a creature of habit (in the self–proclaimed ‘right’ opinion of the startlingly blue–eyed man sitting across from him), he’d made a career out of it.

“i…suppose,” he responds almost nonchalantly, lacking the energy that his two closest friends possessed.

he hasn’t written since his last work — a collection of essays on how one’s perception of their surroundings is impacted by one’s perception of oneself — was published two, almost three years ago.

he’s embarrassed, a sensation that sticks to his skin uncomfortably and the silence that falls between them only exacerbates his discomfort.

“i’ll see you two, then,” he speaks up after the silence proves to be too much for him, standing to his full height in a bashful sort of way that can only be described as endearing — typical for rabbit hybrids.

the two fox hybrids, long since accustomed to the abrupt end of get–togethers, exchange their goodbyes as they stare at his retreating form with sympathetic eyes.

and nanami, instinctively observant of his surroundings to a fault, doesn’t have to turn around to know the expressions that colour their complexions. he can feel it — the eyes of predators following his every move.

he exhales slowly through his nose: once, twice, and then a third time before the intensity of his heartbeat subsides. they’re his friends, not a threat.

his stride resumes, albeit awkwardly, with full awareness of the fact that he has a problem. he’s had a problem for a long time. but running comes naturally to prey animals.

designated ‘safe spaces’ for prey animals had become the norm in recent years following a series of unfortunate events. the café you worked at was one such establishment.

“…i’m so sorry for the delay, my co–worker called in sick so i’ve been on my own and today is a lot busier than—”

nanami clears his throat, his intention crystal clear, and your ramble comes to an abrupt end.

warmth gathers beneath the surface of your cheeks as you raise your gaze to his, though he swiftly looks away, “what can i get you?”

without looking at the menu, he responds, “a croissant,” and you interject, “so you’re the croissant guy!”

he stares at you for a moment before slowly repeating after you, “the…croissant guy?” and when you smile at him, he can’t help but think that he’d need sunglasses if you were to do that again.

you apologize for the second time before continuing, “you should know by now that there aren’t that many people that live here and, between you and me, even fewer people that buy our croissants,” a distinct warmness to your tone.

nanami nods thoughtfully, responding curtly with an indifferent, “i see,” as he pays for the pastry before finding himself someplace to sit with his laptop.

it’s been a week since he’d first arrived and he considers himself familiar enough with his new surroundings. all that was left to do was to write but, as it turns out, a change of scenery only goes so far.

as he stares at the empty document on his screen, his thoughts wander back to a few minutes ago. you’re a new face — he presumes the co–worker you’d mentioned was the barista he’d met before.

but his thoughts wander so far before you appear at his side, croissant in hand, “i heard you were an author, that’s pretty cool,” and your seemingly perpetual smile curling your lips.

you mean no harm; it’s merely an attempt to be polite, making small talk is perfectly normal. but nanami isn’t normal, he feels strange, a surge of anxiety materializing seemingly from thin air.

“you heard?” he repeats after you, stumbling over his words, and he feels stupid and embarrassed.

you tilt your head to the side, your overly large ears flopping as you do so, before taking it upon yourself to sit across from him.

“isn’t it great to have places like these to ourselves?”

he raises a brow at the sudden change of topic but you continue nevertheless, “i think it’s great, ‘cause you get to meet people who understand you. there’s a book club at the library down the street this saturday, i think you should stop by if you have the time to spare,” before excusing yourself, leaving as fast as you came.

nanami lowers his eyes to the croissant, not entirely sure of what had just happened. while you stare at him from behind the counter, a complex mixture of emotions colouring your expression.

“i think you should go; it won’t hurt to get out of the house.”

satoru’s voice echoes through his laptop’s speaker and nanami falls into contemplative silence.

“besides —” suguru interjects, “you’ve been seeing that therapist, right? i bet she’d agree that this is a step in the right direction,” moving into the camera’s frame as he settles down on satoru’s lap.

they’re not wrong; he, deep down, knows that they’re not wrong, but he hesitates all the same.

“i don’t know,” he breathes out after a moment of silence, pushing the pickled vegetables around his plate with his reusable chopsticks absentmindedly.

the line of communication falls silent once more and then suguru responds, “whatever you decide to do, we support you,” before ending the call.

and nanami exhales slowly, staring at his reflection on his laptop’s screen. he’s aged (of course he has), baby fat no longer rounds his cheeks, and crow’s feet round the corners of his eyes.

but, even now, he stands out — and nanami hates standing out.

he’d stood out among his peers; other prey animals were shorter, always shorter. there was always ‘too much’ of nanami — it made him easier to spot and made his movements awkward. he never fully knew what to do with himself.

rabbit hybrids were meant to be small and cute, two things nanami wasn’t.

you, on the other hand, were the epitome of society’s expectations; smaller and sociable. at least, that’s what he’d observed over the past four days. and he doesn’t hate you for it — ‘hate’ is too strong of a word to describe how he felt.

‘envy’, however, leaves a bad taste in his mouth, it ruins his already depleted appetite, and he pushes the ceramic plate of pickled vegetables away from him when the thought crosses his labyrinthine mind.

he doesn’t envy you; that would be absurd. but, isn’t that what this world is, absurd?

‘it is’, he decides as he changes into more suitable clothing for leaving the house — abandoning his pyjamas for a white shirt tucked into the waistband of black slacks. it was plain, nanami liked plain; he liked uniformity.

but you, you again, you were anything but plain.

as he rounded the corner of the library after receiving directions from the librarian, a sweet elderly woman, your brightly coloured sweater caught his eyes first. it stood out amidst the piles of books of all different shapes, sizes, and colours that surrounded you.

his gaze flickers to the watch around his wrist, an all too familiar sensation creeping up on him. he’d come too late. but the sound of your voice drags him out of his thoughts before he can spiral any further. hell, he hadn’t even noticed when you approached him.

“you should get out of your head sometime.”

he narrows his eyes at you, not entirely because of what you’d said (though it played a role) but because of how you said it. now that you were in such proximity to one another, he can’t help but acknowledge that you look terrible.

you sound as though you’d just run a marathon, your chest rising and falling in quick succession. without thinking he presses the back of his palm against your forehead, beads of sweat dampening his skin but he doesn’t mind. you’re burning up.

“christ,” he grimaces as he gives you a once–over, adrenaline coursing through his veins as his own body begins to heat up in a similar manner.

so, this is not a regular fever, duly noted.

“i don’t consider myself a believer but each to their own,” you grin, a lopsided type that nanami swore could give him cavities. but now is not the time for that.

he clears his throat, making the conscious decision to ignore the growing strain of his cock against the fabric of his slacks, and asks carefully, “do you need a ride home?”

nanami’s studio was a blank canvas; untouched white walls, and brand–new furniture (some still encased in its plastic wrapping) in different shades of grey. even in your heat–induced haze, you could tell that this was a ‘house’, not a ‘home’.

he doesn’t comment on it though, so you keep your thoughts to yourself as he gently guides you to his designated bedroom.

the mattress sinks under the combined weight of the two of you. your chests rising and falling in sync as you stare into each other’s eyes, your oversized ears touching in a way neither of you knew could be so pleasurable until now.

“i look old enough to be your father,” he murmurs, his voice breathier the longer his body hovers over yours. and your response comes between laboured gasps, “i’m—oh shit, you’re big—twenty-five, don’t worry, i’m a big boy.”

you can feel his growing erection through the fabric of his slacks against your own. and the air between the two of you feels charged, igniting as he lowers his lips to your throat, his warm breath feeling like miniature needles against your sensitive skin, “do you or do you not want this?”

it’s the question of the hour and you nod eagerly but he pauses, holding your chin between the soft pads of his thumb and index finger as he tilts your head upwards, “i need words, bunny, think you can use your words f’me, bunny?”

your lips part, a low, open–mouthed moan cascading down your tongue before you manage to form a coherent response, “i want ‘you’, not ‘this’.”

and your choice of wording is not lost on him, he hears you loud and clear.

“i’ve never done ‘this’ before,” he blurts out, embarrassed by his lack of cleverness when compared to your confession only moments prior.

it is the truth though; something he prides himself on being to others — truthful. although it’s up for debate how forthcoming he is with himself.

he had, however, every intention of taking you back to your place wherever that may be. but as the distinct floral scent indicating the arrival of your heat enveloped the confines of his car, he had to make a decision that was for the best of both of you. driving while approaching his heat was no better than driving while intoxicated; thus, the choice was clear.

“i can teach you,” comes your response, sounding as though it took a great deal of effort to say whilst pushing yourself up into a seated position, unintentionally bumping your forehead against his in the process.

“it’s so warm,” you both groan in unison as you pull away from each other, removing all articles of clothing deemed ‘unnecessary’ which truthfully rendered you both nude.

your state of undress mattered not, though, as nanami promptly leaned to the side, rummaging in the upper drawer of his nightstand for a moment before retrieving a lubricant specifically designed for rabbit hybrids (a gift he’d received from the ocean–eyed freak) and handing it over to you.

which you happily accept, coating both your own and his fingers in a considerable amount of lubricant before leaning against the headboard and spreading your legs.

you carefully guide his palm between your legs, gently nudging the tight ring of muscle with one of his fingers.

“i haven’t done this in a — fuck fuck fuck, your fingers are thick,” you hiccup, your breath catching in your throat as you rapidly descend into a string of curses as his finger breaches your entrance. the sudden intrusion hurts, but in the midst of your heat, it’s enough to send you over the edge, your toes curling as ropes of cum erupt from the head of your cock.

and there’s that bad taste in nanami’s mouth again, clinging to his bones and invading his muddled thoughts: ‘you just have to be perfect, don’t you?’ but with it comes the realization that he’s the reason why you’re like this and it fills him with an odd sense of satisfaction.

determination renewed, and perhaps in tandem with his desire to experience such relief, he cautiously adds another thick finger whilst you come down from your high.

“is penetration all it takes to send you over the edge, little rabbit?” he questions, curling his fingers towards what he presumes is your prostate, and you can’t help but whimper.

it’s strangely degrading when you think about it; nanami, a rabbit, a prey animal like yourself taking on a dominant role. a role that isn’t in his nature thus his tone remains mild–mannered whilst his words and actions, while cautious, are the exact opposite. 

 another finger is added — the total amounting to three now. you’re stretched around three of his thick fingers as he memorizes the layout of your insides, curling his fingers in such a way that he grazes your prostate with precision.

instead of teaching him, you’re rendered speechless as he maintains a steady pace with his fingers. the sound of your gasps, moans, and whimpers creating a symphony in the otherwise silent studio.

by the time he retracts his fingers for the final time, you’ve already climaxed two more times, your cum splattered across your bare abdomen.

“you’re so easy, little rabbit,” he whispers as his lips ghost yours before fully enveloping them in a heated exchange of saliva. there’s no real heat behind his words but you shudder nevertheless.

when nanami pulls away from your lips, it’s solely because you both need air. a string of saliva, however, remains connected to both of your lips, a testament to the heated kiss.

as you both catch your breath, you take it upon yourself to reposition yourself so that you’re on all fours, gleefully presenting yourself to nanami who obliges you.

your thighs tremble in silent anticipation of what’s to come, your loosened ring of muscle winking invitingly. but it’s not his cock — no, when the wet muscle breaches your entrance you squeal, almost losing your balance had nanami’s hands not been on your hips.

it’s a strange sensation — his tongue in your ass, his warm breath wafting across your most sensitive region. but you slowly adjust as he ravages you, lapping at your puckered entrance as you subconsciously clench and unclench.

and in a matter of minutes, you’re climaxing once more, the muscles in your pelvis twitching convulsively as your erect cock spurts ropes of cum onto the sheet beneath you. 

nanami pulls away from your ass with a ‘pop’, aligning himself with your entrance before easing into you and savouring every spasm of your gummy walls. he doesn’t move until he’s buried to the hilt, angling his hips as he thrusts into you with a steady pace, his balls colliding with your sensitive skin.

you’re overwhelmed by a sense of euphoria, having experienced multiple orgasms. so much so that salty tears roll down your cheeks as you feel nanami throb inside of you, the angry tip of his cock bullying your prostate relentlessly.

he truly is brutal, desperately chasing his high as one of his hands wanders up to your chest, taking your nipple between his thumb and index finger and teasing it.

nanami’s thoroughly bullying you but you can’t even protest, ‘uh–uh–uhs’ tumble past your lips in rapid succession along with the overwhelming urge to please him rearing its head.

thus, you endure his assault on your body until you fall limp on his mattress in a puddle of your cum as his leaks out of your entrance, some cascading down your inner thighs.

you’re still asleep when nanami wakes up the next morning, golden rays filtering into his apartment through the blinds. and he takes it upon himself to wipe your unconscious body with a damp towel from head to toe before taking a shower and heading into the kitchen.

a sense of dread settles in the pit of his stomach as he ponders the various directions the conversation the two of you are bound to have may go. but with it comes a new perspective.

[geonij31]

Hey Newsies Fandom, LETS TALK LODGING HOUSES (by someone who wrote a 13 page essay on them for a university class)

I’ve recently delved into the world of Newsies Fanfiction and I’ve been going a little crazy over some of the representation of the Lodging House so I thought I’d offer up some FACTS regarding some things I’ve seen. For this I’m going to focus on the N°9 Duane Street Lodging-House.

(If you want a basic idea without doing too much research or reading this post, just go watch the 1992 Newsies, it’s not perfectly accurate but it’s close enough.)

THE LAYOUT: the lodging house itself was 6-7 floors. The first floor was rented out to shops like some apartment buildings.

Floor 2: The second floor consisted of a large dining-room “where nearly two hundred boys can sit down at table” (Campbell et al, 1897, 122), as well as a kitchen, laundry room, store-room, servant’s room and living quarters for the lodging’s superintendent and their family.

Floor 3: The third floor contained the school-room as well as washrooms, leaving the two top floors for the dormitories.

Floor 4-5: Each dormitory was “furnished with from fifty to one hundred beds” (Campbell et al, 1897) with spring mattresses and plenty of comforters. There were also “private rooms” which were squared spaces quartered off by curtains for privacy. These beds, though more expensive, were almost ALWAYS filled.

A couple different sources mention the lodging house having a gymnasium (with a trapeze) but they can’t seem to agree exactly where the gymnasium was. My guess is it was on the 6th floor as mentioned in an article by The Journal. The attic was used as extra space for the winters when the dormitories were full.

COSTS: lodging was 6 CENTS (or 10 for a “private room”) and meals (breakfast and dinner) were the same price. Boys could have as many helpings of a mean as they wanted! Without paying extra! From what I could tell they didn’t serve lunch because the afternoon paper came out around noon and most boys just picked up something while they were out so they wouldn’t miss a prime selling time.

(Don’t forget that most papers cost 1¢ for customers so a newsie would only have to sell 6 papers to stay the night or get a meal)

AMENITIES: THEY. HAD. SHOWERS. They had access to both hot and cold water and free towels. Boys were expected to wash up after entering the lodging house. Also, as mentioned, there was a laundry room. From my understanding it was most often used to clean the sheets of the beds which were used every day, but there were also boys said to be around helping with chores, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were also able to wash their clothes there when they wanted.

There was also a free clothes ‘closet’ with donated clothing for boys to access. It seemed most boys chose not to make use of it out of pride, but it didn’t go UNUSED. When a kid really needed stuff they would give it to them.

SCHOOLING: boys staying at the lodging house who did not receive a pass to stay out late were expected to attend the night school held there from 7:30-9. During the day the lodging house also held trades classes and other such courses for those who couldn’t attend a full day of school for whatever reason.

There’s so much more but that’s the basics of it and some of the stuff I’ve seen people get wrong (both in fanfics AND here on Tumblr) I’ve added photos from the Lodging house as well as some links of interest for those who want to go do their own research.

Campbell, H., Knox, T. W., & Byrnes, T. (1897). NEW YORK NEWSBOYS-- WHO THEY ARE, WHERE THEY COME FROM, AND HOW THEY LIVE-- THE WAIFS AND STRAYS OF A GREAT CITY. In Darkness and Daylight; or Lights and Shadows of New York Life; A Pictoral Record of Personal Experiences by Day and Night in the Great Metropolis (pp. 111–138). essay, Hartford, Conn. The Hartford Publishing Company. Retrieved November 23, 2024, from https://archive.org/details/darknessdaylight00campuoft/page/137/mode/1up.

^ Chapter IV: NEW YORK NEWSBOYS— WHO THEY ARE, WHERE THEY COME FROM, AND HOW THEY LIVE— THEY WAIFS AND STRAYS OF A GREAT CITY.

Riis, J. A. (1890). How The Other Half Lives. Charles Scribner’s Sons. November 23, 2024, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45502/45502-h/45502-h.htm#Page_82

^Chapter XVII: The Street Arab

Riis, J. A. (1908). The Children of the Poor. Charles Scribner’s Sons. November 23, 2024, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32609/32609-h/32609-h.htm#Page_122

^Chapter XIV: The Outcast and the Homeless

Smallest saving bank in the world. (1896, February 16). The Journal, pp. 19–19. Retrieved November 23, 2024, from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84031792/1896-02-16/ed-1/?q=Great+Depression&sp=19&st=image&r=-0.421,0.085,1.842,1.398,0.

[acasualcrossfade]

Balcony Kisses

Written for @steddielovemonth Day 26

Rating: T | Cw: mention of underage drug use | Words: 1240

Tags: established relationship, established Steddie, Steddie dads, making out

Prompt: Love is a fire that never goes out. @sidekick-hero

Steve and Eddie share a moment during their daughter’s graduation party.

--

Steve leaned against the railing of the master bedroom balcony, letting out a slow exhale. The balcony rails were wrapped in lights, still up from when Eddie decorated for Christmas, but their glow added a nice touch for their daughter’s graduation party. 

The party still continued in the backyard below and Steve could still hear the sizzling sounds of Hopper’s famous burgers on the grill, the faraway laughter of teenage kids and their friends, and the pulsing beat of some party music Dustin had chosen. 

The balcony was quieter than the party itself, and from here, Steve could hear the droning buzz of cicadas as he took in the blue-purple color of the summer evening sky. 

In the glow of the fairy lights that hung across the backyard, Steve spied their daughter, Sienna, at a table with her friends. Sienna turned her wrist every now and then, showing off her charm bracelet, sure to point out her newest charm, a gift from both him and Eddie. It was tradition to give her a new charm for each milestone: graduating middle school, first theater performance, first band performance, and most recently, her first published work. Her piece on the importance of music as a way to capture time and memories won the state essay contest earlier that year, and it was hard to imagine that she would be off to the University of Chicago next week. She’d been invited to their summer writing program before the semester started. 

It was exciting, but it meant Sienna left in a week instead of in a few months. Anxiety hummed between Steve’s ribs at the thought of Sienna on her own. The air was thick with the bittersweet taste that came with moving on.

Summer was just beginning, and yet, everything was ending.

“Thought I’d find you up here.”

Steve turned at the sound of Eddie’s voice as the man stepped out onto the balcony. Eddie looked as good as always, even with his long hair that he’d fussed over that morning now thrown in a messy bun, and his suit jacket abandoned hours ago for a UChicago sweatshirt. Steve spotted the tell-tale taquito grease stain on his sleeve.

“Thought you said you’d leave the taquitos for the guests,” Steve chuckled, loving the way Eddie’s arms laced to embrace him from behind.  

“Couldn’t resist,” Eddie murmured, kissing Steve’s neck softly. “They’re almost as delicious as you are.”

“And here’s when I’d say something about your cholesterol and–”

Eddie gave him a playful squeeze, cutting Steve’s sentence off with a surprised gasp. 

“I’ve been in the mood to indulge tonight. Guilty as charged. But I did take my medicine this morning,” he assured.

“Guess I’ll let you off with a warning,” Steve replied. He turned to face Eddie, leaning against his husband’s chest as Eddie’s arms wrapped around him. Steve couldn’t help but snuggle in closer.

“So, is the party better from up here?”

Eddie’s voice came at Steve’s ear, as Eddie’s hands rubbed the back of Steve’s neck. Instantly, Steve’s shoulders dropped, and Steve hummed in relief.

“Just needed some air.”

“Mm, and what else, sunshine?”

Steve almost hated the way Eddie could read him like a book. Still, the words stuck in his throat as he spoke. “Sienna. She’s leaving us, Eds. We get her for another week, but then…she’s gone.”

Eddie stroked Steve’s cheek, nodding along. “I know. I can’t believe it, either. Feels like yesterday when she was nervous for her first day of school.”

Steve hugged Eddie close as he continued to watch the party downstairs. His eyes drifted across the yard to Max and Nancy chatting excitedly to Erica, no doubt about their publishing company, who’s third office would open in Brooklyn next week. They already had locations in Chicago and Seattle, and Brooklyn was their biggest move yet.

“Everyone’s moving on. What are we even going to do with her out of the house?”

Eddie nibbled Steve’s ear in reply, earning another hum from Steve. “I can think of a few things, starting with you bent over this—”

It was Steve’s turn to surprise Eddie with a playful squeeze. Eddie’s sentence dissolved into laughter as leaned in and connected their lips, taking Steve in slowly with intention.

Steve’s mind went hazy. Eddie tasted like burgers and beer, and everything home and Steve responded by pulling Eddie’s hips impossibly closer, closing every centimeter of space between them. He felt a smile tug at his lips as Eddie’s hand moved down his neck and back to curl around the curve of his ass to give it a squeeze.

Steve let out a breathy moan; even after twenty-five years together, that move still made Steve’s entire body tingle.

“Of course they’ll be plenty of that,” Steve whispered against Eddie’s lips. “Might have to get a head start tonight. Clearly, we’ve got a lot to cover.” 

Steve moved his hand from Eddie’s hip to Eddie’s ass, glad when Eddie’s moan heated his lips. 

Steve had many plans for what he wanted next, starting with pushing Eddie back into their bedroom, but the moment was cut short with a Hey! shouted from the backyard.

“We can still see you up there, lovebirds,” Robin crowed from the backyard in her best sing-song voice. 

Steve broke apart instantly as he felt his ears heat, but Eddie, as always, took it in stride and flipped her the bird as he laughed and pulled Steve in for another deep kiss.

Eddie’s lips made him dizzy and this time was no different. The world went fuzzy in the best way, and Steve threw his arms around Eddie’s neck to tangle in his hair.

Ripples of chuckles, whoops, and whistles came from the backyard, and when they broke apart again, Steve caught Sienna laughing as she playfully gave them both a thumbs down.

“I think we’re embarrassing our daughter,” Steve chuckled. 

“Well that just means we’re good dads,” Eddie winked. 

The party picked back up as attention shifted back to food and socializing. Steve leaned against the railing, glad to get more time with Eddie.

“You think….we did okay?” Steve asked, turning to glance again at Sienna. She’d moved across the yard to join Nancy, Max, and Robin. “She’ll be okay, right?”

Eddie’s arms wrapped around him again, carrying the same safety and love as always. “She’ll be okay,” Eddie assured, pecking a kiss on Steve’s cheek. “Besides, she’s been doing her own laundry for years, so at least we’ll know she’ll be in clean clothes.”

“I guess that’s a relief.” 

“And she knows to call us about anything, too. And she has,” Eddie reminded. “Remember when she was at that awful 70s party and everyone was trying weed?”

“Oh god, yes.”

Their daughter hadn’t partook, but called them instead to have them pick her up because everyone was freaking out and acting weird. 

Eddie was right; Sienna knew to call them for anything. 

Steve leaned into the familiar love and safety of Eddie’s arms. “I’m gunna miss her so much.” 

“We both are,” Eddie hummed. “But we still have a week. We’ll make the most of it.”

Steve nodded in agreement, melting into Eddie’s touch as the man pressed gentle kisses into his neck. 

Although the taste of everything ending was still tangible in the summer air, Steve felt the beginning curl of desire in his abdomen as Eddie kissed him, knowing that some things never changed. 

[superlinguo]

Research Data Management. Or, How I made multiple backups and still almost lost my honours thesis.

This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I haven't had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you could, and often would, run out of online email storage space. Content note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it's stressful for most of the story, I want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management. In Australia, 'honours' is an optional fourth year for a three year degree. It's a chance to do some more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a small thesis project. Of course, it doesn't feel small when it's the first time you've done a project that takes a whole year and is five times bigger than anything you’ve ever written. I've written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project, it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but I wasn't sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better. During that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out with the laptop I'd used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files, transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I had uploaded to the University's online portal. Uploading was optional at the time, if I didn't do that I probably would have just been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro). Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment. That Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn't replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it. Thankfully, I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I'd tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted floppy disk). When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.

Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house. It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies. When Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.

I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jackie Hajdenberg

An authors’ panel at an Albany book festival Saturday has been canceled after organizers said two panelists refused to share a stage with the “Zionist” moderator.

Elisa Albert, who is Jewish, was set to moderate a panel at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday called “Girls, Coming of Age.” But on Thursday, she received an email from a festival organizer informing her that the event had been canceled: Two of the three panelists — authors Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad — objected to sitting on the panel with Albert because they did not want to appear with a “Zionist.” The third panelist was to be Emily Layden.

Albert said the cancellation is of a piece with her experiences since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised,” Albert told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday. “I’ve been really vocal from the get-go, and I’ve lost many friends. I’ve seen my whole professional life wildly altered. I’m not surprised at all. I’ve seen all kinds of people behaving in all kinds of ways that are on the spectrum of this exact same kind of bigotry, complicity, fear — all of it.”

Albert, who lives in Albany, first learned about the panelists’ objections on Thursday afternoon, when she got an email from Mark Koplik, the assistant director of the New York State Writers Institute, which is organizing the festival.

“We have a crazy situation developing and we’d love to talk on the phone,” Koplik wrote in a message that JTA obtained.

“Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’” he added. “We’re taken by surprise, and somewhat nonplussed, and want to talk this out.”

By Thursday evening, Albert had been notified by Paul Grondahl, director of the Writers Institute, that the event had been canceled.

“We regret this situation, which was out of our control,” Grondahl wrote in an email obtained by JTA. “It is unfortunate for everyone involved.”

Grondahl added, “I wish this were otherwise. We will find a way to air these issues we have discussed in a deeper, more considered, more carefully planned event with intentionality and context.”

The cancellation of the panel is the latest in a long series of literary events to be upended or nixed because of disputes over the Israel-Hamas war and Zionism. Activists have sought to hinder the careers of authors they deem “Zionist,” many of whom have Jewish heritage.

In one notable recent instance, a launch event for Jewish journalist Joshua Leifer’s new book, “Tablets Shattered,” at a Brooklyn bookstore in August was canceled because one of its employees objected to the event’s “Zionist” rabbi moderator.

Some of those facing the criticism have not expressed public support for Israel. Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote the bestseller “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,” for example, has faced calls for cancellation despite saying nothing publicly about Israel or the war.

Albert, on the other hand, has been an outspoken advocate for Israel since the outbreak of the war nearly a year ago. On Instagram, she has posted aggressively and frequently in support of Israel and against Hamas and those she perceives as supporting it, including pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States, whom she has called “terror apologists.”

On Friday afternoon, following the cancelation, she appeared to embrace the cancellation, posting an image of her latest book — “The Snarling Girl,” a collection of personal essays published last month — with the text, “Now’s as good a time as ever to promote Zio lit!” She later added a selfie with the text “Friendly local Zio bitch” over it.

[tamamatango]

My Project Revealed: The Fabled Fanfiction Come to Fruition

Crossing an item off the bucket list before the dopamine gods give out on me. (Yes that’s the story link in case you want to just go there and skip the whole me not shutting up part)

Back in my most active period in the Keroro fandom, I tried and failed multiple times to write a fanfic; might’ve even talked about it here at some point. But for one reason or another, it just never panned out, and I ultimately fell out of it for a few years before I managed to publish anything. However, I got back into the practice with my next hyperfixation, so now that I’ve returned to frog hell again, I knew I had to do what teenage me could not.

I can’t say this is “the fanfic I always wanted to write,” because I ended up scrapping whatever I had started all those years ago. When this started to come together in my head, it initially seemed way too ambitious given the limited time I have and where my strengths and weaknesses lie as a writer…but I got possessed by the artsy demon or something and started to write it anyway. Whoops.

To Chase a Butterfly asks one simple question: What if Kururu actually failed to save Saburo at the end of episode 229? Okay that’s not really a simple question, considering it leads to a whole emotional and physical journey about grief and companionship and space-timey shenanigans. But basically, Kururu goes “bet” and attempts to bring him back to life. Naturally, the deuteragonist of such a story is…Dororo? Yes, at the central conflict of the story is Kururu’s friendship with Saburo, but it’s Dororo who serves as his confidant/partner in crime over the course of the story, and so I consider this to double as a KuruDoro fic as well—though I will make it clear now that it’s not conclusively romantic, so you can decide if that’s the direction they go in or if it stays platonic, and it works either way.

As of the latest update from. Uh. 15 minutes ago at the time of writing, the fic currently sits at about 60-65% completion and is divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–6) is the angst/drama-heavy half, which I uploaded in full as a batch drop. Part 2 (7+) is more action/adventure, sort of in the vein of what you’d expect from one of the Keroro movies, and I am updating it chapter-by-chapter, since it was getting too unsustainable to try to dump it all at once. AO3 has the most robust features, so that’s where it’s hosted for now, but I know people have very understandable problems with that site, so I’ll consider porting it elsewhere if that’s something anyone is interested in.

Well, that’s enough yammering from me. If you like the idea, please do check it out. Things are starting to heat up as the climax approaches, especially with the introduction of a surprise third major character who very longtime Kirb fans miiiight faintly recall. And if you’re already following it—it’s been up for a while now, just waited to discuss it here to temporarily save myself from potential embarrassment—thanks for your support, and I hope you look forward to the rest! Part 2 is very research/planning heavy and has been pretty challenging to write so far, but I intend to see this all the way through damn it. And yeah, this is what’s been pulling my focus away from the blog, but there will still be posts here whenever I feel like putting energy into an essay and/or next real info drop about the new anime (BNP gimme something soon please I’m parched).

[calaisreno]

Point of View in Fiction: Some Observations

I did a poll on point of view in fanfiction a while ago. The results didn't surprise me; I knew that some people just don't read 1st person stories, and most people don’t care about POV. I was more interested in the reasons people gave for their preference.

It's a personal thing, how someone tells you a story, and if you don't like the narrative voice, you will associate it with other things. Readers don’t often think about voice, but it is one of the most important ways a story draws you in, or sends you to the back button. I suspect it's narrative voice that is affecting some readers more than POV.

I’ve never hit the back button on any fic because of the POV. I have hit that button because of format, paragraphing, and a few other issues. I’m an English teacher who taught creative writing for many of those years. Now I don’t read things that feel like student writing-- simply because I can’t enjoy reading something if it feels like I should be grading it. If there are spelling errors or common grammar mistakes that I see over and over in student work, I don’t read it. It might be a good story, but I can't put myself in the right headspace to appreciate it because it feels like work.

Judging from the replies to the poll, some people associate first person POV with bad writing, but there are many other things that flag a story as badly written. And a badly written story isn’t necessarily a bad story. (Barbara Woodhouse assured us that there are no bad dogs; this may be true for stories as well, but choice is an individual matter. There are some breeds I would not choose as a companion.)

I was given the task of teaching creative writing because the admin in charge of the schedule at my school needed another English elective and I had a hole in my schedule. I was an avid reader and had written a lot of original fiction at that point, and thought having students write poems and stories might be a nice change from essays and book reports. My feelings about it were not relevant. Nobody cared whether I was qualified; it was either Creative Writing or Study Hall (i.e. Purgatory) for me. I did not hesitate.

The reality: I loved it and hated it.

Many of my young writers were reluctant, having been placed in my class to fill a hole in their schedules; they did not enjoy writing in the least. A hundred words was an accomplishment for some of them; if they could break this barrier, they got smiley faces and exclamation points. Others were wildly enthusiastic, producing pages of badly spelled and punctuated narrative, a chaotic jumble of scene and dialogue with random flashes of brilliance.

Grading a story is not like grading an essay. The fledgling writers who are serious need to know that spelling, punctuation, and grammar matter: it’s the suit you put on for the interview so you get the job. The ones who dislike writing need encouragement to see that it doesn't have to be punishment. It can be play.

A few observations from my years working with student writers:

Inexperienced fiction writers tend to use POV 1st person more often. Most of these writers are also enthusiastic readers. First person POV helps them find the camera eye focus they realize fiction needs. However fantastic, the story they write is their story, intimate and personal, and 1st person feels most comfortable to them. They need encouragement and a few friendly suggestions, not a paper bloodied by my red pen. In writing process, first drafts are allowed to be horrible.

The non-readers in my class were the most reluctant writers; they often failed to understand POV and wrote from an outsider third-person POV which ended up being more of a summary than a story. My job was to show them how to pull scenes out of the summary. People talking, doing things.

We all start somewhere.

Publishers note that first submissions are often written in first person. It is not that they reject these stories because of that; the stories have other amateur flaws and the POV is just a flag for other issues. First person is not bad, it’s just harder for new writers to pull off well.

Several novels I’ve recently read use first person narrator to good effect: Piranesi comes to mind, The Rule of Four, and Moriarty. The Left Hand of Darkness is a story I can’t even imagine in third person-- and it has two narrators! The original Sherlock Holmes stories (all but a couple) are written in first person, with Doctor Watson narrating.

There are choices even within a first person narrative. The main character doesn’t have to narrate. Watson isn’t the main character in ACD’s stories, Holmes is. Watson is an involved/interested observer (a common use of first person); he stands in for the reader, seeing the mystery unfold, not understanding what all the clues mean until— surprise!— Holmes reveals the solution. I have read mysteries where the first person narrator turns out to be the murderer; the shock value of this fades if you use it every time, but it’s effective on some stories. First person is not bad, if chosen for a good reason.

And third person has its own set of problems. The multiple “he” and “his” that need clarification. The accidental wandering out of limited point of view into semi-omniscience. Even a close, third-person limited narrative provides some distance from the viewpoint character.

Second person is rare and considered gimmicky. I wrote a story in second POV once; the only comment from my most admiring reader: NO. Just, NO. Since that horror, I’ve used first person with second person address in a couple stories (Blessings and The Story of Us, if you’re curious). It’s not a choice I’d often make, but sometimes it’s the right one.

Several of my favourite fanfics use the first person brilliantly. (Pointing to ivyblossom’s The Progress of Sherlock Holmes and The Quiet Man.) When reading, I generally don’t notice point of view unless I think about it; if the narrative flows, the choice obviously works. I don't read much in other fandoms, but think that the Sherlock fandom has a lot of really talented and experienced writers, better than many published stories I’ve read.

I use first person in some of my stories, usually because I’ve found a narrative voice I like. I’ve also rewritten stories after the first draft, changing POV (first to third, or third to first) because I thought it would work better. My feeling is that neither is better in general; in a specific story it should be a deliberate choice, not an accidental one. It’s one of many things to think about when writing a narrative. Voice is one of the most important.

My conclusions:

Reading for pleasure means that the best story is the one you love. It’s a personal choice, not a debate.

Writing well develops over time, as a product of many things. If you’re writing for pleasure, not pay, you should write what you love. Do not change your story because of what a poll says.

If you’re unsure or unhappy about what you’ve written, find a beta reader. Ask them questions. Pay them in adoration. Return the favour; it’s a great way to learn.

Polls are useful only for provoking thought. My thanks to all who participated!

[hahahahawk]

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was Tangerine by Edward Bloor. It was modern. It was surreal. It was gripping.

(The other novels of his i read at the time didn’t hit me as hard as Tangerine)

—- Fast forward 20+ years. —-

I don’t read like I did as a kid. I read genre fiction, I read romance, I lean on audiobooks a lot.

Specifically, I’ve been leaning on A Taste of Gold and Iron for the past few months. I’ve listened to it 4 times now? It’s my go to bedtime story. Every time I finish the book, I flirt with new/different books, but inevitably return to Casey Jones’ performance of the love story between Kadou and Evamer.

Kadou is third in line to the throne and Evamer is his guard/servant/companion—a position known as a kahya. The kayahlar (plural) are highly trained royal “guards” with an education pipeline that raises kids from as young as 10. Cadets graduate to be in the fringe guard, then can be promoted to the Core Guard which are all the attendants to the royal family. The power and loyalty dynamics between a prince and his servant were a big topic in the book.

—-

A couple weeks back I was thinking about books that has a big impact on my childhood, so Tangerine came to mind. Now that im older and know more about the publishing industry, I wondered about Bloor’s career and what he’s been up to since then—if anything at all!

Found a couple titles from the library, downloaded London Calling and Taken.

—

Tonight I got in bed early so rooted around on my phone for something to read, found the Bloor titles and opened up Taken because it has chess imagery on the cover.

It’s set in America in 2035, in a wealthy gated city in Florida. The main character is a young teen girl who lives there. She tells us via reading her own school essays that “domestic servant” is now one of the top 2 jobs in the county.

The top tier of servant comes from an agency called “Royal Domestic Servants” that provides butlers, maids, cooks, nannies. These elite servants to the wealthy are meant to organize menial labor (cleaning, grounds keeping) rather than do it. And they’re trained to protect their employers. An “unspoken rule” is that these “royal” servants are expected to take bullets for the family they serve.

—-

But I don’t think any of the rich snooty Florida folks are going to deliver passionate monologs about the duty of care they owe to their servants.

ATOGAI is really good, even though my first time through I had to do the first 3 chapters two or three times to have a grounded understanding of the story.

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part One

This is going to be a long series of posts in which I interpret Carl Jung's Red Book! Jung has been a cornerstone of my mystical practice for basically as long as I've been practicing, and a major inspiration for my creative work, so imagine my surprise when I learned that Jung had his own grimoire of mystical experiences! This is maybe the most important book I've ever read.

Introduction

I owe a lot to Carl Jung. I read one page about him in a book about symbols that I received when I was about twelve, and something just clicked. In particular, the idea of the Shadow Complex really stuck with me, and has absolutely defined the last decade of my life in terms of my personal spirituality, my approach to interpreting media, and my creative writing. It’s kind of hard to overstate the impact that Jung has had on me, but despite that, I haven’t actually read that much Jung. You all know how much I care about primary sources, so I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was using Jung’s ideas as the basis of my own work without being intimately familiar with his.

I’ve made some missteps. I originally really loved the idea of interpreting gods as archetypes, and claiming that all of humanity worshipped the same gods under different names. I saw that as a beautiful uniting feature of humankind. But the concept did not hold up under scrutiny, for a long list of reasons; the short version is that I was ignoring nuances that distinguished gods from each other, dismissing some of their defining qualities as cultural quirks, as if entire human cultures were “hats” that gods put on and not the thing that makes them what they are. I didn’t start having real relationships with gods until after I started viewing them as individuals, rather than archetypes. And then there’s Joseph Campbell, and his whole “Hero’s Journey” idea, which seemed extremely profound until I actually read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and realized how flawed the Hero’s Journey framework really is. (Spencer McDaniel has a great article about that over on her site, so I recommend you check that out.) So, that was all another strike against Jungian ideas. The third strike is that people like Jordan Peterson use his ideas a lot. That in particular has made me afraid that I’ve been misinterpreting Jung this whole time.

There’s also the fact that Jung’s ideas are difficult to understand and apply, and frequently misunderstood. Clinical psychology has mostly disregarded Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes as more mystical than empirical, despite Jung’s efforts to prove his ideas empirically. Fans of Jung will sometimes downplay his mystical leanings to try to lend more scientific credibility to his ideas. But to me, Jung’s mysticism is a feature, not a bug. Turns out, Jung was a mystic. Jung had mystical visions and prophetic dreams since he was a young child, and his entire brand of psychoanalysis was developed specifically to explain said mystical experiences (which honestly explains a lot). Not only was Jung a mystic, he was basically the William Blake of his day! He chronicled his mystical experiences in what is basically a personal grimoire, written in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript, with stunning illustrations.

It’s called The Red Book, or Liber Novus, and it was published in 2009 (translated by Sonu Shamdasani). I got the really expensive version that’s about two feet tall and contains a facsimile of the actual illuminated manuscript. To call it an eye-opener would be an understatement. Reading it is infinitely more valuable to my spirituality and my writing than reading any of Jung’s psychological essays. The Red Book is the real source of most of Jung’s ideas and theories, and the purely mystical nature of them explains why the concepts themselves resonate much more for me than the psychoanalytic application of them does. Reading it is immensely validating, because it proves that I was right all along! Not only were my interpretations of Jung’s ideas spot-on, but my UPG aligns with his — though some of that alignment is undoubtedly a result of his influence on me, I’ve also come to many of the same conclusions entirely on my own.

I hope that the field of modern psychology will eventually do mysticism its due diligence using modern methodology, but until then, Jung’s attempt to ground all of this weirdness in psychology is the best we’ve got. I’m no psychoanalyst, so I’ll interpret Jung as a fellow mystic, because that is what I am most familiar with. I can compare his own experiences against my own, and hopefully get something valuable from my interpretation of them.

Disclaimer: These are mostly my notes and impressions; I’m not responding line-by-line (because that would take forever), I’m responding to what stood out to me. This is my interpretation of The Red Book based on my own mystical experiences and mystical knowledge, not based on Jung’s other writings. I’m using Jung’s name as shorthand for “the person writing this” or “the dreamer” — I don’t mean to suggest that what Jung expresses here is indicative of his personal spiritual beliefs. I know he had a complicated relationship with mysticism, science, and religion, so I won’t even touch that here. I’m going to be looking at this from a strictly mystical angle, and everything that follows is subjective.

The Way of What Is to Come

Jung began by introducing two spirits. One is “the spirit of this time,” a literal translation of zeitgeist (Jung’s manuscript is in German), which represents the conscious mind and conventional thought. It’s a reference to Goethe’s Faust: “What you the Spirit of the Ages call / Is nothing but the spirit of you all, / Wherein the Ages are reflected.” It’s called “the spirit of this time” because the times that we live in influence what and how we think, and form the foundation of our conscious faculties. I might define the Zeitgeist as the set of assumptions we make that defines our base-level interpretation of the world around us. So, when I complain about “latent Christianity,” I’m calling attention to the Zeitgeist. To put it in my own mystical terms, the Zeitgeist is the part of you that thinks like a human, instead of thinking like a god.

The opposite of the Zeitgeist is what Jung calls “the spirit of the depths,” which represents the unconscious mind. The Spirit of the Depths is both a personification of and Jung’s guide to the unconscious. It is something like a collective Shadow combined with a chthonic god, that encompasses all of the hidden and buried parts of humanity (or at least of Jung) that can be accessed through dreams and mystical visions. It operates independently from the Zeitgeist, and therefore can introduce Jung to secret information and concepts that fall outside of the Zeitgeist’s purview. A lot of what it tells Jung is harsh, but he understands that it’s necessary to listen to the Spirit of the Depths and internalize what it tells him.

Only a page in, and we’ve already got a mention of the Shadow concept. Since everything has a Shadow, God also has a Shadow. Jung defines God as “supreme meaning,” so God’s Shadow is lack of meaning — nonsense, void. The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung to notice the small things in life, which is pretty banal spiritual wisdom for most of us nowadays, but it’s very hard for Jung to accept. He writes, “It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting.” Everything has their own thing that they’re working through — I have to work through issues related to power and sexuality, and what Jung has to work through is issues relating to meaning vs. meaninglessness, greatness vs. mediocrity, sensibility/respectability vs. foolishness. The Zeitgeist of early-twentieth-century Germany insists that only great deeds, great men, and great ideas are the ones that matter. Jung was taught to think that things must be “glorious” and “heroic,” larger than life, for them to matter. The Zeitgeist encourages Jung to dismiss the little things as part of God’s shadow. The Spirit of the Depths informs him that the small things are still part of God and not God’s Shadow because they are not nonsense. The mundane is still divine, because it is not nonsense.

The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung, “all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away lie in you.” It’s a big deal to be one of the people of this time who can experience the Mystery the way the ancients did, or near enough. Actually, wait — Jung isn’t quite a person of this time. There’s a solid century between Jung and me, which is enough time for the Zeitgeist to have changed considerably, but not that much time. He’s essentially my immediate ancestor, the most recent entry in my mystical tradition. It is absolutely wild to be reading the Mystery filtered through a specific, named person who lived only a century ago, as opposed to ancient mystics of Antiquity who didn’t write everything down so I have to blindly guess at what they might have experienced or how they might have interpreted it. But there’s enough time in there that I keep wondering, am I in the time that is to come? Is Jung receiving this information so that I can be primed to receive it?

Jung says, “It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.” Yeeeeah! We’ll get back to divine madness, but I love that it’s being brought up this early. However, it’s a lot harder for Jung than it is for me to admit that these words or visions might come from a place of madness, because Jung is a person who really likes for things to make sense. On that note:

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning [God] by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

Hmm, this doesn’t sound like any god I know at all… I love that phrase “a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.” That’s Dionysian worship in a nutshell, right there.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

That checks. Mystical experiences often come as floods of insights and images, but few words, I think because words are literally processed differently by the brain (don’t quote me on that). Putting it into words literally requires a translation, and it can be very difficult to find the right words to do it justice or record every aspect of it. I’m also reading an English translation of Jung’s German, so that’s another degree of separation, but two degrees of separation is relatively little.

Jung has a vision of a sea of blood blanketing Europe, which is obviously a premonition of WWI. He also dreams that he returns to his homeland (Switzerland) from a “remote English land,” to find it covered in frost in summer; he makes wine from iced grapes, which he shares. The first part of this is a premonition — he was in Scotland when WWI broke out, and hurried home. As for the second part, “…I found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.” Not sure exactly how to interpret this, but it’s a striking image, especially to a Dionysian like me.

Reassuringly, Jung insists that he is relaying his own experiences, not mine or anyone else’s:

It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws, Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.

Thank the gods for this! It’s too common for mystics to assume that their own personal revelations apply to everyone else, because mystical experiences really do make you feel like you have all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Hearing straight from Jung himself that he is only speaking for himself, and that what he says here need not apply to me or anyone else, ironically makes his words more validating. Also, my biggest criticism of Jungian psychoanalysis is that it seems to apply the same symbols universally (the gender essentialism in the anima/animus concept comes to mind), so I assumed that Jung was extrapolating from his own mystical experiences. It seems as though he actually had the wisdom to admit that these symbols apply only to himself.

Refinding the Soul

Jung feels distanced from his soul, because surprise surprise, 20th century patriarchy is spiritually bankrupt. At the time he had the bloody-flood vision, Jung was forty years old and had accomplished everything that patriarchy says you should want in life — he had honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and happiness. He succeeded. He won the game of life. All he was left with was abject horror and the question of what to do with himself, a midlife crisis. (From a quotation in the footnotes, Jung defines the midlife crisis at the moment at which the Shadow first asserts itself: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of going down to death.” Buddy, I’ve gotten way past that and I’m not even twenty-five!)

Jung thus came to the realization that he had dedicated his life to the wrong things:

I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off, and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.

“A dead system” is a great way of putting it. It reminds me of the Fight-Club-esque dissatisfaction of having ticked all the boxes within the system and done everything you’re supposed to, and receiving absolutely no real fulfillment from it. (I bet Fight Club also owes a lot to this.) It also reminds me of my new favorite Terry Pratchett quote, from Small Gods, “People start off believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.” A structure by itself is completely hollow — what’s scaffolding for if it doesn’t support anything? I also like that second line. You exist through your soul, by means of your soul, and not the other way around… That suggests that it’s more real than you are.

Jung explains to the reader that if you seek external things – money, success, validation from other people — then you will not find your soul, and will enter midlife crisis. The soul is only found internally. So go inward, and do the work. Pretty self-explanatory at this point, but must have been earth-shattering back then because he spends a lot of time justifying it. It’s the Spirit of the Depths who tells Jung to look internally and reconnect with his soul:

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

I think it’s interesting that Jung uses feminine pronouns for his soul. That makes sense, since I use masculine pronouns for mine. I’m not sure how this relates to the anima/animus concept, whether it’s the same thing or a slightly different thing. It’s probably the same idea, because “anima” is the Latin word for “soul.” I checked, and Jung uses “seele” and not “anima,” possibly because he hadn’t developed the concept yet.

I interpret Astor as my Shadow and associate him with my repressed personality traits, but Jung would say that he was my animus, because I’m a woman and Astor is the man that exists in my mind. Jung conceived of the Shadow and anima/animus as separate figures — the repressed aspects of the personality and repressed femininity/masculinity, respectively — that need to be integrated separately. For me, they’re the same figure. The anima/animus is one of the concepts that I think hasn’t aged well, not because the concept is inherently bad (internal repressed qualities that one associates with the opposite sex) but because the way it’s presented and describes falls along strictly gender-essentialist lines. This is especially because the anima/animus is less personal and less “universal” than the Shadow, which inevitably means projecting Western gender norms (such as “women are more emotional and men are more logical,” which Jung expressed as Eros and Logos) onto everyone in the world and calling it an inherent psychological feature of humankind.

I think it’s is one of those concepts that was progressive for its time but regressive now with our more nuanced interpretation of gender. For example, the anima appears in men’s minds as a sex symbol, but the animus apparently does not appear as a similar sex symbol in women’s minds: In Man and His Symbols, Marie Louise von Franz says “…the animus does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood [as the anima does for men]; it is more apt to take the form of a hidden “sacred” conviction.” Yeah, that’s bullshit. I’m willing to bet anything that this interpretation is the result of women being sexual objects from men’s perspectives (as the “anima”) but denied any access to or expression of sexuality within their own minds. Women aren’t culturally allowed to desire men, so the animus is the unsexed voice of her father giving her very judgemental advice and rigid solutions, instead of a seductive incubus. That doesn’t check. Astor is basically a sexual fantasy with a mind of his own, and if Lestat, Rhysand, Edward Cullen, and Azhrarn exist, I’m clearly not the only woman who has a relationship with this specific archetypal lover.

Actually, I also have the “nightmare woman,” a separate entity from Astor that is a textbook example of what Jung would call a “negative anima”… if I were a man. Maybe having an opposite-sex Shadow and same-sex anima/animus is another sign of my gender identity being a bit screwy. Or maybe the reason why Jung’s soul is female is because his gender identity isn’t that straightforward, either. Either way, I think the anima/animus concept needs to be redefined to make it less cishet. It’s not universally applicable to say that your Shadow must be the same sex as you or that you have repressed femininity/masculinity. That was probably true back in the early twentieth century when anyone would repress any inclination towards cross-gender expression for fear of social disembowelment, but now? “Hey, turns out men/women have feminine/masculine traits, too” is not an archetype.

I digress. Back to The Red Book.

I came upon an interesting revelation while reading this section — if Jung’s soul is feminine and he has to “refind” her, then that’s why the hero of every fairy tale gets his princess at the end of the story. The princess is his soul, which he is given a right to by having completed the self-actualization process through the events of the story. The “half a kingdom” part of the Standard Hero Reward could represent control over part of the unconscious mind. I got a prince and half a kingdom from this process (maybe it’ll be a whole kingdom if I ever finish a version of the map that I’m happy with). It’ll quickly become apparent that this whole book chronicles Jung’s own Hero’s Journey. That means… in a manner of speaking… the the Hero’s Journey isn’t based on Jung’s ideas – Jung’s ideas are based on the Hero’s Journey. Because the Hero’s Journey is the ancient mystical process of self-actualization.

[Edit: I was getting ahead of myself here. Pretty much all of this will be addressed later when we get to Liber Secundus.

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul his poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. […] My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

I interpret this as meaning that in order to “possess” the world in full, to have our princess and half-a-kingdom, you have to have both the internal and external aspects of it. To put it in alchemical terms, unite the fixed and volatile. (Unification of opposites is going to be a big theme throughout this book.) If you don’t “nourish the soul,” then it festers like a wound and you start projecting unaddressed Shadow aspects on the external world. (We’ll get back to that, too.) Without your Shadow or your unconscious mind, you’re half gone.

[contemplativereading]

Introducing The Prophet

Dear Friend, We close out our third season of The Contemplative Reading Project, and this year’s spring reads, with a book I’ve had on my “to be read” pile for so many years:The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I’ve selected the 2015 Vintage Books Edition, with the author’s original illustrations. Publisher’s description: The Prophet is a collection of twenty-eight poetic essays that contain powerful…

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: July 2023

Summertime! Full of good vibes and a bunch of good movies I’ve yet to see. Here’s how I spent the month of July.

……….FILM……….

Barbie (2023) Just incredible. As an artist who works with existing properties overseen by a lot of people, I was amazed at just how deep, critical, and weird this movie was able to get. I truly had no idea where it was going. Funnier and sillier than I expected but am so thrilled that this wasn’t a generic cash-in.

Lupin the Third: The Mystery of Mamo (1978) Years ago I saw a poster by Sam Bosma and that was both my first introduction to Lupin and the reason I wanted to check him out as a character. Going in mostly blind (aside from knowing the main character is a master thief), this movie was weirder, hornier, and way more avant garde than I was expecting! Some really cool animation on display and while the pacing is up and down, I can’t recommend it enough. The main villain reminded me of a mix between Akira’s espers and Paul Williams and turns out Swan from Phantom of the Paradise was an inspiration! So wild.

……….TELEVISION……….

Jury Duty (Episode 1.01 to 1.04) The premise is fun and just when I thought it was starting to dip it turns out the fictional case is compelling too so I’m BACK! Very keen to see how the season ends and what Ronald makes of this in the end.

Mashle (Episode 1.01 to 1.12) This series seems to answer the question: what if Harry Potter was a meathead with no magic? It didn’t really hooked me and the characters are kinda thin but it has moments of wonderful goofiness that I’m glad I finished out the season.

The Bear (Episode 1.04 to 1.08) Just when I thought the show was getting less stressful, the characters pointed out that fact! Then the following episodes ramped up the stress again. But it never feels contrived or unnatural. Everything, from the humor to the stakes to the character interactions, feels wholly organic. Like we’re watching real people live out real lives. I dunno I guess what I’m saying is it’s really good.

……….YOUTUBE……….

Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [ST03] by Not Just Bikes VIDEO (Title if needed) I’ve been watching a lot of videos about transit lately (like this series by Vox) but the above video is probably the most important one you can watch. His entire Strong Towns series is great and succinctly explains why north american cities suck and keep getting worse. Vote for elected officials that push for density.

What if We Had a GREAT X-Men Game? by The Cosmonaut Variety Hour VIDEO Real shift from bikes and cities but I keep thinking about this video. Speculative stuff rarely hits for me but this is really great and hits all the right notes for the series. Really wish this sorta stuff could get made.

……….READING……….

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (Complete) I think it was a mistake to keep the original article/essay that inspired this book at the beginning. I found the points made were clearer and more succinct in the condensed version and the book’s tone seems to waffle. There are some good ideas in here but I think it needed more time in the oven. If anything, read the article and the last chapter and I think you’d be good.

……….AUDIO……….

Lofi Covers of Popular Songs (Playlist) I’ve been writing a lot lately so I haven’t been engaging with a lot of music. HOWEVER this playlist on spotify has been on in the background and offers the perfect balance for me: not distracting but engaging if I focus on it.

……….GAMING……….

Oz: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) The Mof1 Crew is currently on the run after the retiring couple they kidnapped escaped but I’m sure everything will work out just fine.

Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) The group is still navigating a group of elves on the island and seeing what happens now that they’ve let their star-collecting duties slip. Big trouble. You can read about it here.

And that’s it. See you in August!

[richincolor]

[Image is of the two book covers. The Cartographers features a young woman sitting on an escalator facing the reader. For Reggie and Delilah’s Year of Falling, the two main characters are sitting on the ground and leaning into each other. Her head is on his shoulder.]

Shining a Light on Some Early 2023 Books

Out of solidarity with HarperCollins workers, we held off on promoting or reviewing books during the strike, but we want to re-visit those titles now. Two of the books that were published in January caught my eyes and they are worthy of a first, second, and even third glance.

The Cartographers by Amy Zhang also @Theamyzhang on Tiktok

Struggling to balance the expectations of her immigrant mother with her deep ambivalence about her own place in the world, seventeen-year-old Ocean Wu takes her savings and goes off the grid. A haunting and romantic novel about family, friendship, philosophy, and love.

Ocean Wu has always felt enormous pressure to succeed. After struggling with depression during her senior year in high school, Ocean moves to New York City, where she has been accepted at a prestigious university. But Ocean feels so emotionally raw and unmoored (and uncertain about what is real and what is not), that she decides to defer and live off her savings until she can get herself together. She also decides not to tell her mother (whom she loves very much but doesn’t want to disappoint) that she is deferring—at least until she absolutely must.

In New York, Ocean moves into an apartment with Georgie and Tashya, two strangers who soon become friends, and gets a job tutoring. She also meets a boy—Constantine Brave (a name that makes her laugh)—late one night on the subway. Constant is a fellow student and a graffiti artist, and Constant and Ocean soon start corresponding via Google Docs—they discuss physics, philosophy, art, literature, and love. But everything falls apart when Ocean goes home for Thanksgiving, Constant reveals his true character, Georgie and Tashya break up, and the police get involved.

Ocean, Constant, Georgie, and Tashya are all cartographers—mapping out their futures, their dreams, and their paths toward adulthood in this stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding the strength to control your own destiny. [Read a Sample Here]

My Thoughts: I've always loved maps and the idea of exploring the world so the title already had me from the start. Zhang delivers on the exploration, but while they do journey around the city, more of the journey is within. Ocean is trying to figure out a path for herself and is stumbling about a bit inside and out. She's having growing pains and trying to find her footing, but loses her way more than once. The story is so full of emotions and wonderings that a reader almost has to start wondering things too. There are many struggles and tears to be found on the pages, but there is a little hope too.

Reggie and Delilah's Year of Falling by Elise Bryant

Delilah always keeps her messy, gooey insides hidden behind a wall of shrugs and yeah, whatevers. She goes with the flow—which is how she ends up singing in her friends’ punk band as a favor, even though she’d prefer to hide at the merch table.

Reggie is a D&D Dungeon Master and self-declared Blerd. He spends his free time leading quests and writing essays critiquing the game under a pseudonym, keeping it all under wraps from his disapproving family.

These two, who have practically nothing in common, meet for the first time on New Year’s Eve. And then again on Valentine’s Day. And then again on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s almost like the universe is pushing them together for a reason.

Delilah wishes she were more like Reggie—open about what she likes and who she is, even if it’s not cool. Except . . . it’s all a front. Reggie is just role-playing someone confident. The kind of guy who could be with a girl like Delilah.

As their holiday meetings continue, the two begin to fall for each other. But what happens once they realize they’ve each fallen for a version of the other that doesn’t really exist? [Read a Sample Here]

My Thoughts: This book had me smiling so many times. There are cute interactions all over the place and it was just what I needed to cheer me up. Reggie and Delilah are both trying to impress each other and avoid being truly vulnerable so of course there are issues, but nothing life or death level. They ultimately bring out the best in each other. This one made my heart happy and I'd hand it to anyone looking for a sweet read.

[wander-wren]

THE POINT ABOUT SHIVER BEING A CASHGRAB THAT GOT DERAILED

i’m actually semi-qualified this time! i’ve done a lot of research into publishing, bc i want to Get Published, and i happen to have recently written a small essay on maggie stiefvater so i have info about how shiver came to be.

i also have a lot of anger. i will try to contain it. ahem. also i apologize to the person/people who made the cashgrab allegations originally, i am not mad at you so much as at the general world/attitude. patpat. we’re all good buddy

basically, i don’t think shiver was a cashgrab. i try not to have parasocial relationships with authors, but i do think maggie stiefvater is dedicated enough to authenticity to not, like, do that. specifically i remember reading this blog post about author-reader and reader-author responsibility.

everything i’m about to say, unless stated otherwise, comes from maggie’s interview on the First Draft podcast. i’m too lazy to track down links, but i’ll try to at least say where i got things from.

so, shiver is maggie’s third book. the first, she sold to a small publishing house for an advance that was around $2000 that’s small as fuck. the average advance is $25,000, the median is $50,000, and those numbers if memory serves come from a 2021 survey of debut authors.

(average and median, for people who are curious, are so far apart because most advances are on the smaller side, but big six and seven figure outliers affect the median. i think. i gave a speech on this but that was six months ago. i may be getting them backwards, the principle stands.)

so anyway, maggie sells her first book, ballad, buys a mattress, and keeps writing. she sells its sequel, lament, and also happens to have shiver ready at the same time. the house also wants shiver, so the two go together. ballad and lament both come out very quietly. shiver comes out about a year and a half later (i don’t know why, publishing is fickle), and immediately lands on the nyt bestseller list. this was august 2009. mstief couldve very well written it bc of the twilight paranormal romance boom, was probably writing it around 2005, 2006. lament was published january 2008, meaning both books had probably been bought in 2006 or 2007. but we don’t know what her thinking was.

small house, quiet releases, and none of the Peak twilight tropes. somehow i don’t think maggie was aiming for, or expecting, a cash grab.

and i hate this! i hate this assumption. not bc i think a very famous very successful author needs to be defended on tumblr, but because it’s such a common assumption that authors (especially ya, especially fantasy romance) are just out for money. it sucks.

first of all, publishing is almost impossible to make a living in. see those advances up there? they’re split into chunks. right now, usually quarters, each to be paid on a specific milestone of the publishing process. often, when the book comes out an author has not received all or even most of their advance payments. yes, that is stupid. we hate it too. and you can’t receive royalties until after the advance is paid, so that 25k or 50k or what-have-you may take two or three years to get to you. and then there’s taxes and a 15% cut for your agent. @xiranjayzhao (ohgod i’m so scared to tag you if you see this hii) has spoken before about how they could not live off the money from iron widow, despite it being a huge bestseller.

it’s very difficult to make a living off of books. it’s even more difficult to make a living off of books while being honest. people with ghostwriters or ai help or just a lot of determination can churn out dozens of crap romance novels and perhaps make that work. and that’s valid. yknow, i respect the hustle.

but quality and authenticity take time and this industry moves SO goddamn slow that even if you can write a sellable book in a month it’ll be two years before it comes out so what’s the point in writing to the current market?

i don’t care what you think privately about maggie stiefvater or shiver but i DO care that there’s this strange culture that if something is a little bit tropey or a little too much like something popular it has to be a cash grab. that authors are doing this for the money. some are. most aren’t.

maybe i’m just a bit sensitive bc i’m working towards hopefully the final round of edits on a book heavily inspired by six of crows and i agree wholeheartedly with the blog post i linked above. i’ve ranted before about how important authenticity in writing is to me and how much i hate the implication that i value quantity over quality or whatever the fuck.

so here’s a post that is probably too long with a whole lot of numbers to tell you that sometimes people are actually honest. and sometimes people do care about art for art’s sake. and if you don’t like a book, that’s okay, but at least dislike it for accurate reasons, thank you

[ayearwithoutwater]

Four.

A decade ago, I began collecting Hello Mr., the self-proclaimed magazine “about men who date men.” I discovered one of their earliest issues as a coffee table book in someone’s apartment (memory fails me, but I’ve narrowed it down to having been either a friend of a friend’s or a hookup’s) during my third year of college, and I became quite taken with the magazine because it represented unspoken possibilities that I’d not yet found realized both in the wider world and within my own life.

I thought Hello Mr. was beautifully curated. Its images were simple yet evocative, and its essays gave me a glimpse into the headspaces of other LGBTQ+ men. (Although I have no qualms about referring to myself as a gay or queer man, I hesitate to apply such labels liberally to others given each individual’s personal relationship to the terms.) I was a baby gay who didn’t yet know how to behave, and I was very much in the early stages of constituting my sense of self. I didn’t know who or how I wanted to be, but the voices within Hello Mr. gave me examples of who or how I could be—and affirmed that the me I already was was not so alien after all.

Although it ran for only ten issues, Hello Mr. published and interviewed the likes of Alexander Chee and 黃家奇 (partner of the late 任航). Because the magazine had only just launched in 2012, mere months before I chanced upon it, I felt poised to begin amassing my own collection of something original, something important and artistic and beautiful, that I could use to decorate my space, to give visitors hints about my inner world, and to demonstrate that I was learned yet interesting yet stylish. I purchased the issues already extant and read voraciously. I read and reread again. I had only just experienced my first romantic relationship, and I subconsciously came to rely on Hello Mr. (and HBO’s seminal television show, Looking) to give me some sense of validation that what I was doing was right and natural.

But, the beginnings of my self-discovery weren’t limited to curating my media consumption. I took advantage of the flexible control I exercised over my college curriculum to study scientific racism, ethnomusicology, neocolonialism, and the like, and I grew increasingly disillusioned with mainstream LGBTQ+ media as I read more and more and more. The works that I so idolized suddenly rang hollow, because, frankly speaking, the lives and experiences depicted within were so far removed from my own. Despite our shared commonality as a minority group, despite the fact that certain works here or there did at least somewhat resonate with me, there was almost nothing that spoke to me in totality as a gay Asian American man. I wanted something that conversed with my soul, and, within Hello Mr., I only ever found fragments of such conversations.

One such fragment was an essay, published within one of the magazine’s first four issues, on what remains after a breakup: items left behind by ex-boyfriends, memories made physical of what once was. As I processed my breakup with Henry, that was the one essay that kept returning to me. Written with this theme, the piece included testimonials from random men about the belongings that they kept as well as their symbolism. So, in the wake of my own, in the aftermath of the ending to the one relationship I wanted so badly to go on forever, I took stock. I reached out to all the men who’d ever dated (and still maintained an open connection with) me to talk. And, then, as I excavated my belongings, so too did I excavate myself.

In chronological order, from my ex-boyfriends, this is what I(‘ve) kept.

From Alberto: The first and only love letters anyone’s ever written me, a pair of pants (later returned), and photo strips

From Wayne: Sketches and notes, a personally-designed cap, a bespoke etched wood lamp, a cardboard cutout of Mariah Carey, a pair of flip-flops (later broken and trashed), and photo strips

From Jun: A custom handmade Surskit plush doll, his old set of Cardcaptor Sakura cards, assorted kitchenware (disproportionately spoons, to my continuing chagrin), one or two errant pieces of underwear, and photo strips

From Henry: Skincare products, a Uniqlo shirt, an AirPods case in the shape of a Digimon Digivice, bathmats (later disposed), a cover sheet for my foldable couch, winter outerwear, and photo strips, so many photo strips

As I sorted through, I was an emotional mess. Some items only made me smile, resurfacing fond memories; others only upset me to no end, and I made plans to rid myself of those offending items forever. Unsurprisingly, it’s the photos that gave me the most pause. I’m sentimental to a fault, so I’ve never tossed or destroyed any of the photos I’ve ever taken with any of these men, reasoning that they still remain worthy tokens memorializing the time and love spent and developed together; throwing them away would feel too much like casting aside those past iterations of my self.

There were so many photos of us. I looked at each, refreshing my memory of every moment captured within those images by reading the captions I’d written on the back. It’s long been a practice of mine to provide handwritten context (date, location, and a rough sketch of that day’s events) on the flip side of each for posterity, and doing so has never not come in handy whenever I decide to look back through time. I obsessed over the pictures of me with Henry, including extra copies of the ones I had printed and laminated at a FedEx shop around the corner from my FiDi apartment, where I’d explained to an employee that I was going through a rough patch with him and that he needed to be reminded that he loved me. (Sympathetic, she had nodded and agreed because, as she said, so too did her boyfriend.) I’d mailed the originals to him with a handwritten letter in which I accepted blame for every fight we’d ever had, because I no longer had my pride, because it was worth it to debase myself if it meant that he would come back, that he wouldn’t give up on us as I had begged him to do, because I loved him. I fucking loved him and I wanted the world for us, and I would have done anything—even hiring or somehow engaging his favorite Indonesian pop star—if it meant that I could save us, because he was the one that I wanted more than I’d ever wanted anyone in my whole life. He was the one that was supposed to last forever.

Although I’d earlier returned most of his possessions to him, at which point we’d had conversations that I originally thought were fruitful, I confess that I didn’t return his winterwear on purpose—mostly because they were too heavy to carry on either of the two trips I made to his apartment during the aftermath, but also because I had still harbored hope that he would one day come to his senses. As my year without water went on, that hope crumbled away, only to be replaced by bitter acceptance.

The guys in Hello Mr. discussed preserving these physical remnants of their past relationships as a meaningful exercise; to them, it was better to have loved then lost than to have never loved at all. Ardently, vehemently, obstinately, I disagree.

I don’t discount how lucky I’ve been to have experienced the loves that I’ve had. I don’t regret some of them, and even then I regret only one of them to the point that I would so stubbornly object to that adage.

I regret Henry.

I was not—am not—better off to have loved him, to have been loved by him, and then to have lost him, than I would have been had I never loved him at all.

My friends would say that my life now is eons improved from the life I had before I met him. I counter that that improvement was made not due to him, but despite him: I had no choice but to survive, but to press onward. I was so lost without him and, without exaggeration, I almost died. I withered away; my friends nourished me back to life.

I remember, week after week, apologizing to my therapist. Objectively, my life did get better: I landed a fantastic new job, I moved into the apartment of my dreams, I took myself on vacations around the world, I was making new friends and I was letting myself partake in every activity I’d wanted to but never let myself do. Yet still I apologized to my therapist because still I yearned, still I wished that things would work out, still I couldn’t quash in entirety the hope that he would return. Still I talked about him. I felt like a broken record, I’d say over video conference, laughing, but this was the one subject that bothered me to no end, to which I kept subjecting my poor therapist, because there truly was nothing else in my life that felt worth our weekly sessions. I talked about my childhood, I talked about the people I’ve lost, but it invariably always came back to him: my grief was additive. I apologized for boring my therapist; this was the one wound that wouldn’t heal.

To this day, I’m still divesting myself of his belongings. As I do that, I also shed the mental baggage whose dead weight I’ve been carrying. Although I didn’t, won’t, dispose of all that remains, every tangible reminder of the life we once shared, I’m allowing myself to leave some things behind. I’ve made my peace with letting go of them so that the worst memories can begin to fade. Slowly, inexorably, I’m moving on.

I never purchased another copy of Hello Mr. Upon vacating my apartment on Tompkins Square Park, all those years ago, I left my four issues in the building lobby. I wondered whether someone else would chance upon them.

[monriatitans]

The Neverending Reading List: Book LIV

"They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing" by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein

[Part of the] PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

WE CONTINUE TO BE THRILLED BY THE RECEPTION OF OUR BOOK, which has now sold over a million copies and is assigned in more than 1,500 (over half) the colleges and universities in the United States. We are also delighted that while the audience for our book in composition courses continues to grow, the book is increasingly being adopted in disciplines across the curriculum, confirming our view that the moves taught in the book are central to every academic discipline. At the same time, we continue to adapt our approach to the specific ways the “they say / I say” moves are deployed in different disciplines. To that end, this edition adds a new chapter on writing about literature to the chapters already in the Second Edition on writing in the sciences and social sciences. In this new chapter, “Entering Conversations about Literature,” we suggest ways in which students and teachers can move beyond the type of essay that analyzes literary works in isolation from the conversations and debates about those works. One of our premises here is that writing about literature, as about any subject, gains in urgency, motivation, and engagement when the writer responds to the work not in a vacuum, but in conversation with other readers and critics. … Even as we revised and added to “They Say/I Say,” our basic goal remains unchanged: to demystify academic writing and reading by identifying the key moves of persuasive argument and representing those moves in forms that students can put into practice. We hope this Third Edition will get us even closer to these goals, equipping students with the writing skills they need to enter the academic world and beyond.

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GERALD GRAFF, a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the 2008 President of the Modern Language Association of America, has had a major impact on teachers through such books as Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education, and, most recently, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. The new Common Core State Standards for K-12 cite his work on the importance of argument literacy for college and career readiness. CATHY BIRKENSTEIN, a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has published essays on writing, most recently in College English, and, with Gerald, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Academe, and College Composition and Communication. She and Gerald have given over a hundred lectures and workshops at colleges, conferences, and high schools—and are at present working on a book contending that our currently confusing school and college curriculum needs to be clarified by making the practice of argument the common thread across all disciplines.

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