#two novels of the american revolution

[aronarchy]

A copy of the first reading list, if you dislike clicking on Google docs links:

The liberal news media is working overtime to silence Palestinian voices. As we sit thousands of miles away, witnessing the massacre through social media, the least we can do is educate ourselves and work to educate others. Apartheid threatens all of us, and just to reiterate, anti-Zionism ≠ antisemitism.

Academic Works, Poetry and Memoirs

The Revolution of 1936-1939 in Palestine: Background, Details, and Analysis, Ghassan Kanafani (1972)

Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Rosemary Sayegh (1979)

Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, Mazin Qumsiyeh (2011)

My Life in the PLO: The Inside Story of the Palestinian Struggle, Shafiq al-Hout and Jean Said Makdisi (2019)

My People Shall Live, Leila Khaled (1971)

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi (Baghdad, Ministry of Culture and Guidance, 1968)

On Palestine by Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky (2015)

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the US-Israeli War Against the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé (2013)

The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination, 1969-1994, Edward W. Said (2012)

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa’ed Atshan (2020)

Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel, Andrew Ross (2019)

Ten Myths About Israel, Ilan Pappé (2017)

Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, Christopher Eric Hitchens and Edward W. Said (2001)

Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh (2010)

The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, David Hirst (1977)

Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, Norman Finkelstein (2018)

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky (1983)

Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations, Avi Shlaim (2010)

Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, Baruch Kimmerling (2006)

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Norman G. Finkelstein (2015)

Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Jehad Abusalim (2022)

Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod (2007)

Peace and its discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East peace process, Edward W. Said (2012)

Three Poems by Yahya Hassan

Articles, Papers & Essays

“Palestinian history doesn’t start with the Nakba” by PYM (May, 2023) 

“What the Uprising Means,” Salim Tamari (1988)

“The Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist,” Louis Allday (2021)

“Liberating a Palestinian Novel from Israeli Prison,” Danya Al-Saleh and Samar Al-Saleh (2023) 

Women, War, and Peace: Reflections from the Intifada, Nahla Abdo (2002)

“A Place Without a Door” and “Uncle Give me a Cigarette”—Two Essays by Palestinian Political Prisoner, Walid Daqqah (2023)

“Live Like a Porcupine, Fight Like a Flea,” A Translation of an Article by Basel Al-Araj

Films & Video Essays

Fedayin: Georges Abdallah’s Fight (2021)

Naila and the Uprising (2017)

Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2015)

Tell Your Tale Little Bird (1993)

The Time That Remains (2009)

“The Present” (short film) (2020)

“How Palestinians were expelled from their homes”

Louis Theroux: The Ultra Zionists (2011)

Born in Gaza (2014)

5 Broken Cameras (2011)

Little Palestine: Diary of a Siege (2021)

Al-Nakba: The Palestinian catastrophe - Episode 1 | Featured Documentary

Organisations to donate to

Palestine Red Crescent Society - https://www.palestinercs.org/en

Anera - https://support.anera.org/a/palestine-emergency

Palestinian American Medical Association - https://palestinian-ama.networkforgood.com/projects/206145-gaza-medical-supplies-oct-2023

You First Gaza - https://donate.gazayoufirst.org/

MAP - Medical Aid for Palestinians - https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate

United Nations Relief and Works Agency - https://donate.unrwa.org/-landing-page/en_EN

Palestine Children’s Relief Fund - https://www.pcrf.net/   

Doctors Without Borders - https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/palestine

AP Fact Check

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-misinformation-fact-check-e58f9ab8696309305c3ea2bfb269258e

This list is not exhaustive in any way, and is a summary of various sources on the Internet. Please engage with more ethical, unbiased sources, including Decolonize Palestine and this list compiled by the Palestinian Youth Movement.

[mask131]

So you want to know about Oz! (1)

Then congratulations! Welcome to this quick crash course to know everything about the world of Oz! The movies, the adaptations, the musicals, the books! Yes, books, with an S, because "The Wizard of Oz" everybody knows and love was just the first book of an entire BOOK SERIES that became the enormous franchise we know today! You thought there was just ONE Wizard of Oz movie? Think again! You thought "Wicked" was the only work that gave a backstory to the Witches? Get ready for some discoveries!

And so we begin our journey to the wonderful land of Oz...

The story of Oz begins with one novel. No, not one movie - but the novel that caused the movie... L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz"

Published in 1900, this children novel is still to this day one of the most famous works of American youth literature, as well as the master-piece of Baum, THE book everybody knows he wrote. Baum intended, with this book, to create a purely American fairy tale: he wanted to rival the European tales of Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen - and he succeeded! The novel was a best-seller as soon as it was released, and is still considered as "America's greatest fairy-tale".

Most people know of "The Wizard of Oz" through its famous adaptation, the 1939 musical movie. While these two works do share a same set of main characters and a similar plot, the novel contains many, many details that were not adapted into the movie ; and, in return, the movie brought a lot of elements that were absent from the novel. Both, however, are still the story of a little girl by the name of Dorothy (she wasn't yet named "Gale") and her dog Toto, who are swept up into a tornado and taken to the magical Land of Oz. There she meets three comical companions (the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion), and together they go seek the Wizard of Oz in hope he can grant their wishes, only to have to escape from the clutches of the Wicked Witch of the West...

If you want to read the original novel, it will be very easy! Not only is it still regularly printed today, with various anniversary editions ; but it is in public domain since the 1950s! So you can go read it for free right now, without any problems!

Most people tend to stop at just this book... Not wondering if there was any sequel, treating it as if this was just a one-shot. Except, we told you, this book was a best-seller! An ENORMOUS success! Never before had a children's book brought so much money in the United-States! As such, Baum was not going to just stop there...

While he did intent "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" to be a self-contained novel existing as its own thing, in 1904 he published a sequel "The Marvelous Land of Oz":

This novel does not follow Dorothy however, but rather a very different character... A little boy who lives in the Land of Oz post-Dorothy: Tip (short for Tippetarius), an orphan boy who escapes the clutches of his wicked witch of a caretaker alongside a pumpkin-headed scarecrow he just brought to life. And the two undergo a journey to the Emerald City ruled by the Scarecrow-king, only to get swept into a revolution...

This novel was conceived in a similar way to the first one, as a "self-contained" story. While it does take place after the events of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", reuses several of the same characters (The Scarecrow and the Tin Man are part of the main party, Glinda plays a key part in the final act) and briefly recaps the events of the first novel, it can still be read on its own. This novel especially get a lot of attention today (after decades and decades of falling into pur oblivion) due to its fantasy-dissection of the topics of genders - differences between men and women, boys and girls, unfairness and injustice among sexes (the revolution in question is a "girl revolution" seeking to destroy what is perceived as a misogynistic patriarchy)... All culminating with what is still to this day one of the most famous accidental depictions of a trans character in fantasy!

But I'll return to this all in a later post, possibly...

This novel was ALSO a best-seller and a huge success. And as such... you know what that means. Yes, Baum wrote a THIRD book taking place in Oz! Well, almost... The novel actually mostly takes place in lands neighbors to those of Oz, the land of Ev and the realm of the Nome King... But all the Oz characters return - including Dorothy, who is again swept away into fairy-lands, this time not with her dog Toto, but with a pet chicken Billina.

This story is the novel "Ozma of Oz", published in 1907:

And with these three books, you have the original Oz trilogy!

"But wait, there were other Oz books, weren't there?" you ask. Oh yes, there were more books, indeed! However, I want to stop at this point because these three books do form a specific trilogy for various reasons. The trilogy of the "good" Oz books before everything went... let's say downhill (but more about that next post). But more importantly, the trilogy of Oz books most people know about!

Indeed, even if you have never read "The Marvelous Land of Oz" or "Ozma of Oz", you probably came across various elements of these books, that are regularly scattered throughout Oz adaptations and novels. For example the famous Disney movie "Return to Oz" is mostly an adaptation of "Ozma of Oz", but with numerous elements of "The Marvelous Land of Oz" added to the plot

More recently, the trilogy also formed the basis of the new plot offered by the short-lived TV series "Emerald City"!

Langwidere the princess with a hundred heads, Mombi the witch, Ozma the princess of Oz, the Nome king, Tik-Tok the automaton, Jack Pumpkinhead, general Jinjur, the land of Ev, the Powder of Life and many other names and concepts you might be familiar with come from these two direct sequels to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Sequels which unfortunately never knew the lasting popularity of their predecessor, despite being just as famous, if not more, in their time...

Next post: Baum's downfall...

[double--hh]

Henry, reluctantly exploring the Astral Circle Appartment Complex, "I swear, I hear a little girl around here, sound like shes nine or something... where's her parents?!"

Quachil, manifesting itself through a wall, "Mmm, I'm 15, so shut the fuck up."

___

*~imagine phones exist in the 50s~*

Ciprianni- can you shrow the hole vid

Steven- *show *whole

Ciprianni- I'm from Italy!!!!!!!!!!

Steven- I pound dudes!!!!!

___

Teutates, writing a very strongly worded letter to Abducius, "Yo, bro, what should I start this off with?"

Ah Puch, "...to whom it may aggravate?"

Teutates, "...Shit, no, that's now the title of a song, think of something else."

___

Anastacha, walking with her friends, "If you remove all veins, arteries, and capillaries from your body and lay them end to end, you will die...or whatever."

One of her friends, "...I'm starting to see why your dad left."

___

Robertsky, walking outside in a torrential thunderstorm, "I got a pocket full of sunshine... why'd you make me ginger?!"

Insert Robertsky getting struck by lightening.

___

Nacha, sitting in Mia & W's apartment with Mia, holding some failed essays from Anastacha...

Mia, "Nacha, I'm getting pretty worried about Anastacha, like, look at what she wrote for one of her essay openers, 'Buckle your seatbelts boys and girls, Teacher or whoever is reading this at this spectacular time in your life.. da-da-da... so sit down and shut up and listen to my 3-AM-Monster-Energy-ADHD-Medicine-Induced-Self-Hatred-Fulled-Extravaganza about the Industral Revolution... or whatever.'"

Nacha, sighing and pinching her eyebrows, "Why am I not surprised... That's the last time I'm letting Francis help her with school work."

___

Mia, two seconds away from a mental break down, knocking on the Rudboys' door.

Steven answers, "Oh! Mia! What's up?"

Mia, eye twitching, "Steven, take me to the range before I pull my hair out."

Steven, nodding, "Lemme grab Ciprianni, meet me downstairs."

~20 minuets later~

Mia, unloading a full magazine at moving targets, hitting all of them.

Ciprianni, mildly concerned, "How... the hell is she doing that?!"

Steven, watching her, "Man, she was a WAC, armorer type. Kinda in her blood."

Ciprianni, shaking his head, loading his pistol, "You Americans concern me."

___

Izaack, writting frivolously in his notebook, "Mn-hm, and anything else you'd like to add?"

Mia, chuckling, "Ah, yes, list the source as... 1984 by Gorge Orwell."

Izaack, stopping mid sentence and slowly glares at Mia, frowing, "...You did not just quote another book and passed it off as facts about the Trojan Horse Project again... did you?"

Mia, taking a sip of her coffee, "What? So I'm the bad guy for reccomenting you more books to read after your 'minute and minute' fiasco earlier today, Gauss?"

Izaack, scribbling out everything except for the book title, flipping it shut, "I'll have you know, Ms. Stone, I read every damn day and our teleprompter is new!"

Mia, smiling, "Oh you're such a phony, Izaack, it's amusing."

Izaack, snapping a finger at her, "Ah! Catcher in the Rye! J.D. Salinger!"

Mia, nodding, "So you do take my recommendations!"

___

The Schmicht's, moving into the Apartment, "Oh, Gloria, I think we did just right chosing this place!"

Gloria, smiling, "Yeah, yeah, watch there be some sort of fanclub for your novels!"

Anold, placing a box down, "Heh, I doubt it! I'm still trying to find a time and place for a meet and greet!"

The Sverchzt's, Lois, Margrette, and Rafttellyn, looking up from the stair case,

"Oh my god, is that the Arnold Schmicht?!"

"You think he can give up an early copy of Ceasefire of Hostility?!"

"I have GOT to get his signature!"

"Do you think we can invite the both of them to tomorrow's meeting?! He said his wife is his muse from the last interview!"

Gloria looks out the door and watches the group of book nerds scramble down the stairs, whispering to eachother.

"Bubbles, because you live on the same floor, you better share the spoilers!"

"Oh hush I will!"

Arnold, "Who was that, sweetie?"

Gloria, "Your fanclub."

[livelaughlovelams]

No BC I'm actually so sick and tired of the Von Steuben hate. His portrayal in fanfiction is just atrocious. First of all he deserves so much love and attention oml, second, what made you think he's a monochromatic dirty old man who cares about nothing but sex? What evidence do we even have that he was at all like that!? Have you read his letters, have you read memoirs, have you read accounts of, idk, HIS FRIENDS!? People who actually met him!? Because he does not seem like that at all and the way we portray him is not only stereotypical but extremely disrespectful. Have you ever read a single sentence about him mistreating or over-sexualising his aides? NO!? Yes, he was probably dating a good amount of them. Yes, he was MUCH older than most, but he was a human. He was a human being, not just some throwaway gay general who we get to absolutely exploit in fanfiction, and if you can't take the time, to see that, you shouldn't even write about him. I'll also add that he wasn't some random German who came to America to wave his flag or promote homosexuality or whatever, not only was he VERY crucial in our independence but he had actual trauma, yk? He was DEFINITELY mentally struggling, I'll tell you that, I'd say (almost) as bad as Laurens, even. And I also think some of you guys are forgetting that homosexuality was completely illegal almost everywhere in the 18th century. Neither George Washington nor Ben Franklin cared what this guy and his lovers did behind closed doors, BUT GOOD GOD NO ONE WANTS TO SEE THAT IN THE MIDDLE OF A MEETING, EVEN FOR TODAY'S STANDARDS!? For the love of God, you can keep covering Du Ponceau in hickeys, I guess??? BUT WHY DOES IT HAVE TO HAPPEN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, DAMMIT!?

I think part of this comes from the rumor that he was "openly" gay, because no... That's... Not how that works. The only people I'd really say are OPENLY gay in the 1700s are MAYBE Frederick the Great and Henry III of Prussia but that's because they literally rule their country and can do whatever they want. Von Steuben wasn't even OPENLY gay in Europe, he was just a queer man who kinda got called out and OUTED, BTW, and fled to America because nowhere else wanted him.

Have any of y'all read the novel "Forge"? It's a sequel to the novel "Chains", and it's GREAT. It's a 4-7th grade novel about two enslaved (teenagers?) in the American Revolution, and it was so good oml. I read it in 5th grade. One thing I noticed is they portrayed Von Steuben GREATLY.

They portrayed him as a kind, good drillmaster WITHOUT mentioning his homosexuality.

The two Von Steuben personalities I see in the media are a hypersexual man whore who wants everyone to know his sexuality, or a monochromatic angry, sad old man who hates everyone

Is this really how America wants to remember their first drillmaster?

:(

[theculturedmarxist]

War Games

You need to be ready because war between the United States and China is inevitable.

I hate to use the word "inevitable" because it implies that it is preordained, a foregone conclusion irrespective of circumstance or volition. In this instance it is apt because the US has crafted the circumstances and shaped itself internally and externally so that it has no other choice but to engage in conflict.

To fully explain why this is would require a substantially longer post, several posts in fact, at the very least. In summary though, the welfare state created by the New Deal and the activist sentiment cultivated by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement spurred a reaction by the bourgeoisie, which resulted in the "Reagan Revolution." Proletarian empowerment was to be checked and dismantled at every opportunity and any impediment to corporate power was to be removed. Unions were dismantled. Public Education was attacked. Trusts were to be facilitated in the name of "efficiency."

Over the course of forty years, the players of the US political and economic system have taken steps favorable to themselves which have made reform impossible. Aberration from the desires of the ruling class is treated with extreme intolerance and the heterodox are expelled from "polite society." Alternative conceptions to the current state of things are portrayed as quixotic at best and foreign or evil at worst.

The result is such that any attempt to reform or ameliorate the social, economic, or political status quo of the United States is virtually impossible.

The US's foreign policy goals since the fall of the Soviet Union has been the dissolution of the Russian Federation and the subjugation of the People's Republic of China, as set out in the policy document "Project for a New American Century." 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, occupation of Syria, etc, etc, have all been stepping stones on the war towards those ultimate goals. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have all facilitated those goals.

The problem is that the "United States," by which I mean the bourgeoisie which represent its interested parties, its political facilitators, and its petite-bourgeois factions which occupy its implementation mechanisms, have crafted the internal and external national circumstances so that novel responses to emerging circumstances are impossible.

To give an example, the war in Ukraine proves that its patently impossible for the US to wage war directly against Russia. In terms of production capacity, the United States simply cannot compete. Case in point, the Russian Federation is producing 4.5 million artillery shells per year. The US meanwhile is producing somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000. The reason this is is because monopolies have hollowed out the US's production capacity. Increasing production would mean decreasing profit, and that would mean bankruptcy, and then no production. So the US government has to guarantee profit in order to guarantee production. Russia and China don't have this defect currently. Part of the reason Russia has been able to out-produce the US is that its production companies and facilities are state owned. The Russian government says "jump" and their MIC says "how high?" Profit isn't the goal, but rather production.

These circumstances aren't entirely alien to the US. During World War 2, the US government intervened heavily in its domestic economy, dictating wages and benefits, ordering production in support of its war effort. Now though the tail is wagging the dog. In the name of the "economy," monopolies dictate economic and state policy. We saw this recently when the CEO of Delta airlines got the isolation period for covid cut from two weeks to five days.

So we have is a situation where the US can't achieve its goals because of its own inadequacies. If the US wanted to achieve parity with its rivals, it would have to at the very least assume the sort of state-directed production that its rivals have. However, currently that isn't possible because the monopolies which control economic production enjoy control over the state which is ostensibly supposed to regulate it. Put another way, in Russia and China, the state dictates economic activity. In the US, the economy dictates political activity. To use an American saying, "the inmates are running the asylum."

These circumstances cannot be reformed as they currently are. We saw in 2016 that attempts to do so were legally thwarted. If the political system cannot be restructured so that the people's will is preeminent before the will of the bourgeoisie, then the will of the bourgeoisie will dominate. That means that economic monopolies will continue their stranglehold over policy, and profit will retain preeminence before any other consideration, including militaristic victory.

The significance of Taiwan currently is that it accounts for at least half of the planet's semiconductor microchip production. This produces a dilemma for the United States. This essential resource is at least de jure in the hands of an ideological enemy and a presumed economic subordinate. Furthermore, it has no way of ameliorating this state of affairs without military intervention. To the first part, this state of affairs would give China de facto control over US economic policy, both foreign and domestic, as it would give Beijing control over how many microprocessors the US has access to to put into its various domestic products as well as the military hardware it requires to enforce its domestic policy. To the second part, in its efforts to crush the working class all those skilled trades necessary to facilitate its own domestic production, along with the educational institutions necessary to impart the knowledge and expertise for their creation, have been systematically gutted by the bourgeoisie.

In short, if the United States started today to try and achieve the productive capacities currently existing in China and Russia, it would be at least ten years before it could accomplish what either of its adversaries are currently capable of. It lacks the skilled personnel. It lacks the machinery necessary. Its institutions lack the candidates or the program to train its citizens at scale. It very simply lacks the capability to produce more than its limited quantities of boutique weaponry, which means it cannot possibly compete with its chosen adversaries.

The rational response to these facts would be to adjust its course in relation to the existing circumstances. The period of American hegemony outlined in the PFANAC is as unrealistic as traveling to the moon on a hot air balloon, so rational course of action would be to adjust policies and expectations accordingly. Unfortunately, these adjustments cannot be made. They would require upsetting the dominance of the monopolies over the American political and economic status quo, and the monopolies are unwilling to let that happen and the US government is incapable of making that happen. For the American economy to continue, the monopolies must continue to exist as monopolies, and also for American politics to continue. It is a reciprocal relationship, where reformers that endanger corporate profits like Sanders are kept out of positions of power, so that those in power can continue to guarantee corporate profits. One hand washes the other, and nothing is allowed to fundamentally change.

The problem, as any Marxist could tell you, is that change is the fundamental state of things. In spite of the war and sanctions, Russia's economy is strengthening while Europe's is weakening. China alone has more than twice the consumers as all of NAFTA combined. The bottom line is that the United States simply cannot compete, and what's more is that it has fashioned itself into such a state so that it can never, ever do so, because the necessary changes are simply impossible to achieve and implement while also keep profits up and proles down. To keep things as they are, change is utterly impermissible, in spite of how devastatingly necessary it might be.

Yet regardless, the status quo is not only viewed by the bourgeoisie as the natural state of things, but totally essential. Unable to escape their own ideology, they are restricted by its prescriptions. The United States must, must, dominate not only Russia, and China, but the entire world. It cannot do so economically, and yet it cannot alter itself so that it may do so. In terms of production the US can never, ever surpass China in its current state, but at the same time it cannot realistically alter itself to do so. The American bourgeoisie has achieved victory over the American working class, but in so doing it has forfeited the struggle to dominate internationally. It has very little to offer in terms of real goods. Its only useful product is its currency and the ascendance of BRICS severely limits that's lifetime. Since 2001 the US has let its diplomatic strength atrophy, and in its hubris reality has increasingly passed it by.

If it has no real goods to offer, no useful currency, and no means of persuasion, then the only thing left that the US has to ensure its necessary, is essential dominance is its military weaponry. While much of it is dated and inherited from the First Cold War, it still has the capacity to wreak fearful destruction, especially its nuclear arsenal.

We see the evidence of this fact even now. The US's puppet Ukraine cannot possibly win against Russia. This was a fact even before the start of the most recent phase of this conflict in 2022. Yet in spite of the unrelenting slaughter of the Ukrainian people the conflict continues because the US as instigator of this war has no other alternative. It cannot allow peace to break out. It cannot pursue an alternative to war. It cannot even fathom a world where it doesn't dictate the state of affairs. So in spite of bleeding itself dry trying to wear down an enemy that surpasses it in virtually every capacity, it insists on continuing, because the alternative cannot possibly be countenanced.

Russia, in spite of its growing strength, is nowhere near the level that China currently enjoys. If the United States cannot even defeat Russia, it would be absurd to court conflict with China, especially considering how much the US relies on Chinese goods for, well, practically everything. The pandemic "shutdown" saw the US practically on the verge of collapse and panic as essential goods grew scarce. Still, the US continues to ratchet up tensions with China, provoking it, while preparing itself for war insofar as its capable. For the United States and its controlling monopolies, there is no other choice. Profit must be assured, which can only come at the expense of its imperial subjects, and without any other alternative those subjects must be maintained at the barrel of a gun—or the tip of a nuclear weapon.

[kemetic-dreams]

"The original "Uncle Tom",

Rev. Josiah Henson and wife; Dresden ,Canada (c1907)

Josiah Henson (June 15, 1789 – May 5, 1883) was an author, abolitionist, and minister. Born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland, he escaped to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1830, and founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, near Dresden in Kent County. Henson's autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself (1849), is widely believed to have inspired the character of the fugitive slave, George Harris, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), who returned to Kentucky for his wife and escaped across the Ohio River, eventually to Canada. Following the success of Stowe's novel, Henson issued an expanded version of his memoir in 1858, Truth Stranger Than Fiction. Father Henson's Story of His Own Life (published Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1858). Interest in his life continued, and nearly two decades later, his life story was updated and published as Uncle Tom's Story of His Life: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (1876).

Josiah Henson was born on a farm near Port Tobacco in Charles County, Maryland. When he was a boy, his father was punished for standing up to a slave owner, receiving one hundred lashes and having his right ear nailed to the whipping-post, and then cut off. His father was later sold to someone in Alabama. Following his family's master's death, young Josiah was separated from his mother, brothers, and sisters.His mother pleaded with her new owner Isaac Riley, Riley agreed to buy back Henson so she could at least have her youngest child with her; on condition he would work in the fields. Riley would not regret his decision, for Henson rose in his owners' esteem, and was eventually entrusted as the supervisor of his master's farm, located in Montgomery County, Maryland (in what is now North Bethesda). In 1825, Mr. Riley fell onto economic hardship and was sued by a brother in law. Desperate, he begged Henson (with tears in his eyes) to promise to help him. Duty bound, Henson agreed. Mr. R then told him that he needed to take his 18 slaves to his brother in Kentucky by foot. They arrived in Daviess County Kentucky in the middle of April 1825 at the plantation of Mr. Amos Riley. In September 1828 Henson returned to Maryland in an attempt to buy his freedom from Issac Riley.

He tried to buy his freedom by giving his master $350 which he had saved up, and a note promising a further $100. Originally Henson only needed to pay the extra $100 by note, Mr. Riley however, added an extra zero to the paper and changed the fee to $1000. Cheated of his money, Henson returned to Kentucky and then escaped to Kent County, U.C., in 1830, after learning he might be sold again. There he founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, Upper Canada. Henson crossed into Upper Canada via the Niagara River, with his wife Nancy and their four children. Upper Canada had become a refuge for slaves from the United States after 1793, when Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe passed "An Act to prevent further introduction of Slaves, and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province". The legislation did not immediately end slavery in the colony, but it did prevent the importation of slaves, meaning that any U.S. slave who set foot in what would eventually become Ontario, was free. By the time Henson arrived, others had already made Upper Canada home, including African Loyalists from the American Revolution, and refugees from the War of 1812.

Henson first worked farms near Fort Erie, then Waterloo, moving with friends to Colchester by 1834 to set up a African settlement on rented land. Through contacts and financial assistance there, he was able to purchase 200 acres (0.81 km2) in Dawn Township, in next-door Kent County, to realize his vision of a self-sufficient community. The Dawn Settlement eventually prospered, reaching a population of 500 at its height, and exporting black walnut lumber to the United States and Britain. Henson purchased an additional 200 acres (0.81 km2) next to the Settlement, where his family lived. Henson also became an active Methodist preacher, and spoke as an abolitionist on routes between Tennessee and Ontario. He also served in the Canadian army as a military officer, having led a African militia unit in the Rebellion of 1837. Though many residents of the Dawn Settlement returned to the United States after slavery was abolished there, Henson and his wife continued to live in Dawn for the rest of their lives. Henson died at the age of 93 in Dresden, on May 5, 1883.

[queering-ecology]

Chapter 11. ‘fucking close to water’: queering the production of the nation by Bruce Erickson (part 2, final)

Land

First ‘canoe’ that European colonists saw were likely Mi’kmaq gwitnn, birchbark boats designed for both ocean and river travel (318)

The colonist’s name is mentioned but the natives in these stories don’t ever get their names so…the colonist realized that to go further inland he would need the gwitn,  he needed “the boat derived of the landscape realities of the new world” (Raffan 1999a, 24) (318)

the ‘canoe’ as a symbol unique to Canada (Jennings 1991, 1) (319), reworks essentialized aspects of indigenous cultures into a symbol of national health and success” (319) and as a “gift” from natives to settlers. The canoe as unique entity, because of the exploration done by canoe, the canoe is the guard that maintains the boundary of Canadian identity.

A vague connection could be made to the American symbol of the cowboy to the American west except the canoe is more ‘natural’ for being of the land and from the native people and further substantiated in its uniqueness by its use in colonialism.

Canada as a nation has ‘perfected’ the canoe; the only way the canoe can be made perfect is through its ability to be incorporated into European expansion (320) the connection of the land to the canoe as a discourse of inevitability illustrates the privileging of the European subject as the natural inheritors (indeed, the rightful inheritor) of First Nations land…and implicitly heterosexual and patriarchal subject (320-321)

Possibility

“We cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, if we were really to consider the ten million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean "(Shannon Winnubst, 190) (324)

“Rethinking nature that is not bent toward the utility of power” (324) Opening ourselves to the possibilities of history means addressing the ways in which the ideologies and concrete practices that have formed our current understanding of nature represent more about the desired human outcome than they do about anything nonhuman (324)

Similar to really considering 10 million dead bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, this would mean really considering (as a broad list) the malicious wars over land and fur, the forced conversions, the repeated exposure to flu epidemics, the establishment of reservations and classification of First Nations as wards of the state, and the widespread physical and sexual abuse in residential schools designed to assimilate and civilize a supposed “savage” population” (324).

The Kiss of the Fur Queen is a novel by Tomson Highway, Cree playwright and novelist. Two Cree brothers are taken from their parents to a residential school several hundred miles away at the age of six, baptized into the Catholic church and have their names changed, they forbidden to speak their language and are abused by the priests of the school. They are alienated from their parents by the education and sexual predation of the school priests, but also are disconnected from the land, language and culture of their people…(the canoe plays a central role in the story, where difficult conversations about their alienation take place). As they grow up one of the brothers finds “continual inspiration” from the traditional Cree culture and discovered a “need to know the cultures that were suppressed by the residential school”. “As the crowd dances to the migisoo, the eagle, Gabriel realizes its power: ‘Gabriel saw people talking to the sky, the sky replying.” (Highway 1998) (324-326) (this is a poor summary, i apologize.)

“The movement between tradition and innovation is always fluid and uncharted” (327)

“Thus, while as a quirky national joke, the idea of making love in a canoe surely belongs to the post-sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, we need to remember that as a national symbol, the connection it strives to make between the canoe, nature,  and nation signals a sexual politic that was born of the age of imperialism. “

“As Foucault reminds us, the legacy of the Victorian repression of sexuality is held within the resistance of the sexual revolution that fails to move outside the biopower networks of modern sexuality.” (327)

[purplesigebert]

Thanks for tagging me @forasecondtherewedwon 💜!

rules: list 5 of your favourite books on a poll, so your followers can vote which book they think captures your vibe the best

Tagging: @the-road-betwixt, @austennerdita2533, @galvanizedfriend, @orlissa, and @cbk1000.

Book summaries from Goodreads below the cut:

A Murder for Her Majesty by Beth Hilgartner

Horrified at having witnessed her father's murder and fearing that the killers are agents of Queen Elizabeth I, eleven-year-old Alice Tuckfield hides in the Yorkshire cathedral by disguising herself as one of the choirboys.

The Way Lies North by Jean Rae Baxter

This young adult historical novel focuses on Charlotte and her family, Loyalists who are forced to flee their home in the Mohawk Valley as a result of the violence of the 'Sons of Liberty' during the American Revolution. At the beginning, fifteen-year-old Charlotte Hooper and her parents begin the long trek north to the safety of Fort Haldimand (near present-day Kingston).

The novel portrays Charlotte's struggle on the difficult journey north, and the even more difficult task of making a new home in British Canada. In the flight north, the Mohawk nation plays an important role, and Charlotte learns much about their customs and way of life, to the point where she is renamed 'Woman of Two Worlds.' Later in the novel she is able to repay her aboriginal friends when she plays an important part in helping the Oneidas to become once again members of the Iroquois confederacy under British protection.

Strong and capable, Charlotte breaks the stereotype of the eighteenth-century woman, while revealing a positive relationship between the Loyalists and aboriginal peoples.

The Romanov Prophecy by Steve Berry

Ekaterinburg, Russia: July 16, 1918. Ten months have passed since Nicholas II’s reign was cut short by revolutionaries. Tonight, the White Army advances on the town where the Tsar and his family are being held captive by the Bolsheviks. Nicholas dares to hope for salvation. Instead, the Romanovs are coldly and methodically executed. Moscow: Present Day. Atlanta lawyer Miles Lord, fluent in Russian and well versed in the country’s history, is thrilled to be in Moscow on the eve of such a momentous event. After the fall of Communism and a succession of weak governments, the Russian people have voted to bring back the monarchy. The new tsar will be chosen from the distant relatives of Nicholas II by a specially appointed commission, and Miles’ job is to perform a background check on the Tsarist candidate favored by a powerful group of Western businessmen. But research quickly becomes the least of Miles’ concerns when he is nearly killed by gunmen on a city plaza. Suddenly Miles is racing across continents, shadowed by nefarious henchmen. At first, his only question is why people are pursuing him. But after a strange conversation with a mysterious Russian, who steers Miles toward the writings of Rasputin, he becomes desperate to know more–most important, what really happened to the family of Russia’s last tsar? His only companion is Akilina Petrov, a Russian circus performer sympathetic to his struggle, and his only guide is a cryptic message from Rasputin that implies that the bloody night of so long ago is not the last chapter in the Romanovs’ story . . . and that someone might even have survived the massacre. The prophecy’s implications are earth-shattering–not only for the future of the tsar and mother Russia, but also for Miles himself.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed writing, technology, government, and organized religion—as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war—and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by JK Rowling

Harry Potter, along with his best friends, Ron and Hermione, is about to start his third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry can't wait to get back to school after the summer holidays. (Who wouldn't if they lived with the horrible Dursleys?) But when Harry gets to Hogwarts, the atmosphere is tense. There's an escaped mass murderer on the loose, and the sinister prison guards of Azkaban have been called in to guard the school...

[alexa-santi-author]

@mermaidsirennikita's posts earlier about outdated (and often offensive) themes and plot points in romance novels that sometimes require cultural context to really understand made me think of the book that was my ur-book, the one that really kicked off my love of historical romance. Almost no one has heard of it, because the author has wisely allowed it to go out of print. I'm going to share what it is, what the context is that it was written in, and why it was best to let it go out of print.

The book is Bitterleaf, and it was published under the name of Lisa Gregory in 1983. Lisa Gregory was the original pseudonym of a historical romance author still popular and publishing today: Candace Camp.

I'm going to be up front with everyone and put the rest of this essay under the fold so you can stop reading if you want: this book takes place on a South Carolina plantation before the American Revolution, and the storyline involves slavery. The heroine owns slaves.

If you want to nope out now, please feel free. I'm going to go into some of the cultural context about why this book was written with this plot in 1983, but you don't have to keep reading.

One thing to understand about the early 1980s is that Gone With The Wind -- both the book and the movie -- was still hugely influential in terms of historical romance. Many, many historical romances were written about antebellum plantations in the American South, and pretty much all of them hand-waved slavery away.

Except for Bitterleaf.

What's pretty wild for a historical romance novel published in 1983 is that slavery is central to the storyline of this book, and the hero, Jeremy Devlin, is the one who mostly carries that storyline. The reason it takes place prior to the American Revolution is that Jeremy arrives in South Carolina as an indentured servant. He has been kidnapped from his homeland, thrown onto a ship, and dragged in front of a crowd to be sold at auction. The "meet cute" is when the heroine Meredith's stepfather buys Jeremy, along with several Black captives.

Much of the plot seems to be modeled on the movie The Long, Hot Summer. You have the father figure who decides his daughter needs a Real Man to marry her instead of the milquetoast who refuses to propose and the irresponsible rake who decides to take the old man up on his bargain but ends up falling in love.

But slavery and discussions of slavery continue to play a huge role in the story. Jeremy is freed once he marries Meredith, but after his own experiences, he's uncomfortable owning other people. We're also introduced to the story's B or secondary couple, who are Meredith's lady's maid Betsy and a recently enslaved man, Neb. To have two enslaved people as the secondary couple of a mainstream romance written by a white author is pretty ballsy in itself for 1983, but add in Jeremy's decision to free everyone on the plantation (which requires Meredith to spend days writing up manumission papers for them) and you have a book that, however clumsily, actually does attempt to grapple with American slavery and give us lead characters who don't just go along with what most books normalized at the time.

Is is perfect, especially by modern standards? Hell, no. It's pretty cringey, and that's even before you get to the forced kisses and other standard historical romance tropes of the time. Camp's writing is much better now than it was 40 years ago.

But I have never run across another historical romance published in that time period of the early 1980s that took place in the American South before 1865 and even attempted to deal with the moral implications of the lead characters literally owning other human beings.

The book is very much a product of its time, in that it's making an implicit argument against other books on the market with a similar setting, but if you read it as a standalone today without any cultural or historical context, it's just a weird book that has slave owners as the central romantic couple for no apparent reason and what the hell did I just read?

As I said, the book was republished at least once under Candace Camp's name (I have copies of both the original and the reissue on my keeper shelf), but she seems to have let it fall back out of print. She has released two of her other Lisa Gregory books as ebooks (one of which has a free Black couple as the secondary romance), but not Bitterleaf.

And that's probably a wise decision. As we get further away from the cultural context in which she published it, the book becomes more and more offensive instead of being seen as the corrective it was written to be.

Why do I love this book? Because it's one of the first books I read that helped me understand you don't have to knuckle under to what's most popular in the genre. You don't have to accept that the model for your subgenre (in this case, Gone With The Wind) is above critique and you can only imitate it without questioning it.

It's also a harbinger of why American historical romance had a huge dip in the 1990s -- white authors and publishers realized they would need to grapple with slavery and the effects of it on our society as a whole, and they didn't want to do that. After that, we pretty much only got Western historical romances until Gilded Age romance that took place safely after the Civil War finally came along.

So there it is. The book that changed my life and made me a historical romance fan for life is one that most people have never heard of and likely will never read because of the culturally offensive content. For me, it will always hold a place in my heart for what it tried to do even if, with the passage of time, what it tried to do is no longer enough.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

THIS WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

#20yrsago Stephen King finishes the Gunslinger books https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/20/stephen-king-finishes-the-gunslinger-books/

#20yrsago Neal Stephenson’s Slashdot interview https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-responds-with-wit-and-humor

#15yrsago Yahoo hires lap-dancers to entertain at its open, inclusive Hack Day event https://simonwillison.net/2009/Oct/19/hackday/

#15yrsago 86-year-old WWII vet on gay marriage: “What do you think I fought for in Omaha Beach?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrEbJBFWIPk

#10yrsago American cities, ranked by conservatism https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/88528

#10yrsago LISTEN: Run DMC meets Danny Elfman (spooky!) https://soundcloud.com/dj_bc/the-king-of-halloween-run-dmc

#5yrsago Why we should ban facial recognition technology everywhere https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opinion/facial-recognition-ban.html

#5yrsago The Catalan independence movement is being coordinated by an app designed for revolutions https://www.wired.com/story/barcelonia-riots-catalonia-protests-news

#5yrsago Yahoo Groups archivists despair as Verizon blocks their preservation efforts ahead of shutdown https://web.archive.org/web/20141018140923/https://modsandmembersblog.wordpress.com/for-the-press-2/

#1yrago Amazon's bestselling "bitter lemon" energy drink was bottled delivery driver piss https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

[panorama2024aaaa]

"هذا يُحزنني : الحياة مختلفة جداً عن الكتب ، ليتها كانت مثلها ، واضحة ، منطقية ، منظمة ، إلّا أنها ليست كذلك".

‏Pierrot le Fou 1965

‏" بيارو المجنون " للمخرج الفرنسي جان لوك غودار أحد أبرز مخرجي الموجة الجديدة في السينما الفرنسية , ومن بطولة عملاق السينما الفرنسية النجم "جان بول بيلموندو " والنجمة الرائعة "آنا كارينا " .

‏هذا العمل مقتبس عن رواية ( الهوس , او الاستحواذ ) للكاتب الامريكي ليونيل وايت ,و هو العمل الاول لغودار في سينما الالوان حيث ان جميع الاعمال التي سبقته كانت بالابيض والاسود .

‏تدور احداث هذا العمل حول حياة " فردينان/جان بلموندو " وهو رجل يعمل بوظيفة مرموقة في التلفزيون و متزوج من امراة غنية تنتمي للطبقة المخملية ولديه اطفال وبحكم ذلك الزواج فانه يعيش كفرد من افراد تلك الطبقة ويبدو انه لا يحب حياة تلك الطبقة و يرفض طريقة عيشها , يفقد فردينان وظيفته بالتلفزيون , يلتقي فردينان بالصدفة مع صديقته القديمة (ماريان/آنا كارينا) التي تعمل جليسة اطفال مما يجعله يجد الفرصة المناسبة لهجر حياته والخروج من البوتقة التي يعيشها والذهاب للعيش مع ماريان في جنوب فرنسا على البحر المتوسط ولكن ضمن رحلة مليئة بالحب والجريمة والمغامرة وتدمير الذات .

‏هذا العمل ليس معقدا ولكن صعوبته تكمن في انه يريد الحديث عن كل شيء , ابتداءا من المجتمع البرجوازي والحياة الاستهلاكية والذات الناقدة و الساخطة على ما يحيط بها من ظواهر اجتماعية ومفاهيم و مرورا بالسياسية حيث يتطرق العمل لحرب امريكا في فيتنام والثورة الجزائرية والتلميح الى فرنسا الاستعمارية , كما يغوص الفيلم بالتحليل النفسي وذلك من خلال علاقة الحب بين فردينان واريان حيث يبرز لنا الاختلافات الجوهرية بين الشخصيتين في نظرتهما الى ذاتهما والى العالم والى السعادة وذلك على الرغم من قوة علاقة الحب بينهما , كما يتميز هذا العمل بأنه مليء بالاقتباسات الادبية واللوحات الفنية التي تم توظيفها بكل ذكاء في السرد الدرامي

"This saddens me: life is very different from books. I wish it were like them, clear, logical, organized, but it's not."

Pierrot le Fou 1965

"Pierrot the Madman" by French director Jean-Luc Godard, one of the prominent directors of the French New Wave cinema, starring the French cinema giant Jean-Paul Belmondo and the fantastic actress Anna Karina.

This work is based on the novel "Obsession, or Possession" by American writer Lionel White, and it is Godard's first color film, as all his previous works were in black and white.

The story revolves around the life of Ferdinand/Jean Belmondo, a man who holds a prestigious job in television and is married to a wealthy woman from the upper class. He has children, and as a result of this marriage, he lives as a member of that class. It seems that he does not love the life of that class and rejects its way of life. Ferdinand loses his job in television and coincidentally meets his old friend Marian/Anna Karina, who works as a nanny, which gives him the opportunity to leave his life and go live with Marian in the south of France on the Mediterranean Sea. However, this journey is filled with love, crime, adventure, and self-destruction.

This work is not complicated, but its difficulty lies in its desire to talk about everything, starting from bourgeois society, consumerist life, the critical and resentful self, and the social phenomena and concepts surrounding it, and passing through politics, as the film touches on the Vietnam War, the Algerian Revolution, and hints at colonial France. The film also delves into psychoanalysis through the love relationship between Ferdinand and Ariane, highlighting the fundamental differences between the two characters in their perception of themselves, the world, and happiness, despite the strong bond of love between them. This work is also characterized by its abundant literary quotations and artistic paintings, which are cleverly employed in the dramatic narrative.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Kevin Ray

Published: Jan 23, 2024

Prologue: Navigating Cultural Revolution

I’m days away from starting rehearsals for my third literary adaptation as a theater director; my heart is pounding with excitement and fear. There’s nothing more thrilling than the electricity of a vibrant rehearsal room full of talented, generous, creative actors and designers, collaborating with me to adapt literature into a play, but it’s also anxiety-producing because there are a million creative decisions to make. Nonetheless, the theater is booked and the curtain will rise in October 2024; the only thing to do is persist in the pursuit of making great theater.

The inspiration for this production—an adaptation of a 1924 dystopian novel by Russian heretic Yevgeny Zamyatin—arose from my experience, not in creative persistence, but persisting in the face of an ideology that endeavors to bar heretics like me from the arts.

A culture of the arts without heretics isn’t a healthy culture—it's a boring culture. Regrettably, a small but very loud group of activists in the theater have sidelined heretics by demanding artists conform to an identity-grievance fueled monoculture.

Fortunately, I found a way to make theater. I feared I’d be forced out of the field altogether. I lost work for refusing to promote concepts such as “White Supremacy Culture” and “Decolonization,” I infuriated some by refusing to adopt “gender-neutral pronouns,” and I faced disdain for being white, male, and even for identifying as gay and not “queer.”

Unfortunately, I was prepared to deal with identity-based discrimination—I’ve faced prejudice since the beginning of my career. 

Act I: The Wrath of Westboro

I was drawn to theater from a young age, partly because theater groups were welcoming to oddballs, weirdos and outcasts who didn’t fit in elsewhere. Even before it was clear to me, my classmates knew I was gay, and I silently endured daily bullying. Theater was an oasis where I could get away from demeaning comments and fit in with other kids. I relished using my imagination to stand in the shoes of a character who was not me; facing obstacles in a different time and place.

By the late 1990’s I was acting, singing and dancing in a professional production of a musical that toured small and mid-sized cities across the United States. Getting paid to tour in that musical was the epitome of a “dream come true.” 

I was lucky to be in that show for various reasons. First, the production held auditions in New York, a city overflowing with talented performers. Being cast in that show was, as they say, “a lucky break.” But this was not the first break I had had in my life. 

When I was eight years old, I had a break of a different kind: I broke my neck. The two vertebrae just below my skull were fractured. A neurosurgeon told my mother and me it was rare to see someone with this injury still alive, most people died instantly; the few who lived were permanently paralyzed. After the neurosurgeon explained the procedure he would perform, he looked directly into my eyes and said, “If there is anything you want to do in your life, you should do it before this surgery.” I said I wanted to have another birthday. 

I survived; and at twenty-six, I was dancing across stages around the country. More than lucky, that was miraculous. 

The last bit of luck I had was the date of my birth. If I had been born a few years earlier, I may not have lived to see my twenty-sixth year. The generation of gay men who came just before me were ravaged by HIV/AIDS. As reported, “by 1995 one American gay man in nine was diagnosed with AIDS.” The epidemic also spawned an anti-gay activist movement. 

Enter stage left: the Westboro Baptist Church. Founded by Fred Phelps in 1955, the church gained notoriety in the early 90’s for picketing a park frequented by gay men. As reported, they also “picketed at American soldiers’ funerals, thanking God for killing those who’d fought for a country that ‘institutionalized sin.’ They prayed God would kill Westboro’s enemies.” The musical I was in prominently featured gay male characters, making it a prime target for Westboro’s bigoted activism.

As our tour bus pulled into the parking lot of a Kansas theater, church members stood outside holding signs that read “God Hates Fags” and “Two Gay Rights: AIDS and Hell.” Many in the cast were gay, but to the Westboro protestors we were not three-dimensional human beings with the capacity to love, dream and hate, just like them. They didn’t care about the commitment we had to our craft, the challenges everyone overcame to be cast in the show, and that, at the end of the day, we were all performing in the musical because of our love for theater. The point of identity-grievance activism is to ignore our common humanity and weaponize identity.

The protesters were within their legal right to peacefully hold signs with heinous language. Considering the musical highlighted how difficult the lives of gay men can be because of the discrimination they face, I wonder if Westboro’s activism only deepened the meaning of our show: as they walked past the signs, that audience experienced, first-hand, the ignorant vitriol many gay men encounter.

I was afraid that night, but I did what I had to do: I went on with the show; Westboro didn’t stop me from living my dream.

Despite fringe groups like Westboro, the late 1990’s was a time of great advances for gay men. As the country headed toward a new century, society was becoming more welcoming to a wide variety of minority populations. How could any of us have predicted the identity-grievance nightmare that was to come, and the impact it would have on the theater?

Act II: A New Dream

When actors aren’t working in a show, they survive by holding down a “day job.” Around 2002, I stumbled into a day job as a Teaching Artist. Teaching Artists visit schools on behalf of cultural institutions (theaters, dance companies, orchestras etc.) delivering arts programming, often in under-funded districts that don’t have budgets to hire full-time arts teachers.

I didn’t think I would like teaching, but within a few months I was hooked. The students loved the opportunity to get out of their seats and participate in theater activities, and I was fascinated by the challenge of writing a lesson plan; it was like a magical chemistry experiment: two parts explaining directions, twenty parts playing games, one part classroom management. And it was a kind of performing, the curtain went up every time I entered a classroom. 

I remember the exact moment I decided to stop pursuing acting. When I arrived at an elementary school in Far Rockaway, Queens for my third or fourth visit, I opened the door to the classroom, and the students exclaimed, “HE’S HERE!” At that moment I thought, “Nobody is excited when you walk into an audition room, but these kids, their teacher, and you are excited to be together in this classroom – go where it’s warm.”

I worked hard to improve my skills. I read books about teaching, went to conferences, and studied pedagogical theories. But the best way to learn how to teach, is to teach. So I took as many jobs as I could get, working with every age group from pre-K to high school, with students diagnosed with “special needs”, students who predominantly spoke Spanish and Polish, jobs in low-income neighborhoods and jobs at high-profile theaters offering programming for youth from wealthy families. I worked in schools, summer camps, and church basements. I loved theater, and I now loved teaching, which led me to a new dream: to become a theater professor.

In 2008, I enrolled in a graduate program without understanding all master’s degrees are not considered “terminal.” When I completed the program, I was devastated to discover my degree had no value in the academic job market. I sank into a deep clinical depression and spent the next year and a half digging myself out with the help of a skilled therapist. But in 2016, I had another lucky break: I was chosen for a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Theater Directing. I earned my “terminal degree” in 2018. I was on my way to a successful career in academia, but a new kind of activism attempted to kill that dream.

Act III: Something Wicked This Way Comes

In the summer of 2018, I attended a national conference for theater professionals in higher education. A panelist with experience on hiring committees explained, “To teach theater and direct productions at a college or university, you have to have an MFA and you have to show the  committee you can get yourself directing work at regional theaters.”

I left the panel deflated. During my final stretch of graduate school, we practiced “elevator pitches” for potential interviews with artistic directors. Although the professor said my pitch was excellent, I wondered, “Who would I pitch to? My chances of meeting with an artistic director are less than my chances of a sit down with the Pope!” 

I knew this because an activist movement sometimes referred to as Critical Social Justice (CSJ) was deeply entrenched in the theater industry. In the same way Westboro Baptist Church demonized me based on an identity trait I could not change, CSJ activists in the theater were deciding who was a so-called “oppressor” based on identity. I was nearly everything they deemed “oppressive”: white, male, middle-aged and, probably worst of all, I identified as gay, not queer. For readers unfamiliar with the distinction, gay simply connotes same-sex sexual orientation while queer conjoins sexual orientation with a laundry list of radical leftist politics. Although many claim the word queer is “inclusive” of the variety of identities encapsulated in the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ acronym, as Andrew Sullivan explains, “queer” is “designed to trigger gay men, especially gay men who aren’t politically of the far left … to make us feel we aren’t part of the world or of the community.” Rather than function as a term of inclusivity, “queer” has been weaponized to identify and exclude traitors.

When I asked an aspiring playwright what she thought my chances were, she said white men had been directors “for so long” and it was time that they step aside. I didn’t think a person’s race or sex determined whether or not that person had the skills, talent or commitment to be a theater director.

Theater artists were the last people I suspected would attempt to bar anyone from participating in the arts based on identity. We were the oddballs, outcasts, and weirdos who accepted each other because our differences excluded us from mainstream culture. Now, my colleagues in the theater no longer saw me as a three-dimensional person with thoughts, feelings, and dreams untethered to my identity. Instead, I was nothing but an embodiment of identity characteristics they wanted to amputate.

I ran into a professor from my first stint in graduate school at a reception for theater directors in higher ed. Mid-conversation he said, “Look around this room! I’m the only person of color in here. I’m not feeling supported! Come with me.” Without telling me his intentions, he led me over to the event’s planner and told her the organization needed to do a better job getting “directors of color” into the room. I stood frozen, a dumbstruck pawn furthering someone else’s activist agenda.

I was used as a pawn again when I attended the second night of a festival of theater directors’ projects in development. The first two works came and went from the stage, but the third piece started on an odd note. A bald, middle-aged man stood center stage and a young female director sat far away from him on the stage’s edge. At first, I thought this was a curious experiment in hyper-realism, but I soon realized it was not a performance. The director apologized to the audience for the work presented the night before because, she said, she’d received several emails saying the piece “offended” and “harmed” some audience members. The man center stage chimed in, but was quickly cut off by the director who asserted, “I’m speaking now.” It was revealed the man was a former NYPD officer who asked the director to help adapt his experiences on the police force into a play. Suddenly, audience members who had been at the previous evening’s performance were standing and shouting at the retired officer. Each time he tried to defend himself, the director cut him off saying it was not his “time to speak.” The man’s wife stood up and pleaded, “My husband is a good man! He protected this city on 9/11!” But the ravenous audience continued to shred the retiree over the “offensive” and “harmful" words presented the night before, words we were now not allowed to hear. I never learned what the police officer said that caused this reaction. But from the way he was treated, it seemed his mere existence as a police officer was contrived as somehow “harmful" to these people—who wouldn’t even let him talk. After the “show” I approached the theater’s artistic director and said, “I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.” She said, “There were some things he needed to hear.” 

On a cold January weekend in 2019, I was alone in my Brooklyn apartment desperately trying to hatch a plan to change my prospects in an ecosystem increasingly intolerant of people and views that did not conform to CSJ. To get a college teaching job, I needed to direct something. I decided I could either whine and cry that the activists were preventing me from realizing my dream, or I could create my own opportunity. If I couldn't direct a play at an established non-profit theater, maybe I could independently direct and produce it myself.

ACT IV: Burning Down the House

As part of my Teaching Artist work, I had experience “devising” original plays with youth. Devising is a theater-making technique that means collaboratively creating a play originating from an idea rather than a playwright’s pen. “Devisors” start with source material such as newspaper articles, transcripts of court documents, old photographs, paintings, stories, anything that stimulates ideas a devising ensemble can transform into a play. On that frigid weekend in 2019, I decided to devise a play from ghost stories by Edith Wharton. Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton skillfully used fiction to criticize rigid social structures and her lesser-known ghost stories overflow with rich social commentary and wry humor. I pitched the project to some colleagues from my MFA program. Excited both by the stories and my collaborative approach, they all said, “Yes!” They didn't see my identity as a liability, but my employers did.

In the fall of 2019, at an annual “back to school” workshop, I was, for the first time, segregated into what’s called a “racial affinity group.” When asked why we were breaking into groups by race, our supervisor said, “Because we live in a systemically racist country.” I was asked prior to the meeting via a Google survey if I was willing to participate in racially segregated groups, and I responded, “No.” After I was put in the “white affinity group,” I asked the facilitator why I had been segregated at work against my will. She told me she would get back to me. She never did. 

At another arts organization, my supervisor called me into a private meeting to reprimand me for refusing to let my co-workers address me with “they/them” pronouns in emails. She said everyone was using “gender-neutral pronouns” in an organization-wide campaign to “dismantle patriarchal systems of oppression.” I let her know that I was a gay man, proud to be one, was not willing to let anyone else decide what my pronouns should be, and that applying pronouns to a person who doesn’t want them is the definition of “mis-gendering.” My supervisor bristled. I said, “Well then, we will have to agree to disagree.” In response, she slammed her hand on her desk, jumped out of her seat exclaiming, “NO!” and left the room. I wasn’t hired back.

I was also pressured to incorporate concepts from CSJ into my teaching. The idea was to “embed” theories such as Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” Ibram X. Kendi’s “Anti-Racism,” Judith Butler’s “Queer Theory,” Frantz Fanon’s “Decolonization,” Kimberly Crenshaw’s “Intersectionality,” Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” and Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture” into pre-K to 12 arts-instruction.

Instead of spreading the joy and excitement of theater, I was to use theater instruction as cover for indoctrinating children into a worldview that taught them to see themselves as victims or “oppressors” based on their race and sex. When I voiced concerns, I wasn’t offered further work.

Determined to “dismantle” so-called “harmful white-centered” practices in the theater, activists were inadvertently destroying collaboration. The most important ingredient in collaboration is trust. Trust enables collaborators to bravely take artistic risks as an ensemble. But the activists were sowing distrust by reducing everyone to identities “oppressing” each other; re-casting benign interactions as overt acts of prejudice or covert insults like “white women’s tears” and “microaggressions”—the latter is a doctrine that turns everyday interactions, like asking where someone is from, into a grave racial insult if a listener decides their subjective feelings are hurt. Where there are no real insults or real acts of aggression, “microaggressions” can be manufactured out of thin air. Rehearsal rooms became ticking time bombs where activist artists could hurl overblown accusations of supposed psychic harm at any moment.

Not satisfied with obliterating collaboration, the activists jettisoned their audience. As reported in Washingtonian, when a theater endeavored to revamp its programming to create “the most woke theater in Washington,” the journalist wondered, “Can they do this without alienating a crowd who, liberal as they may be, might also be slower to get with the times?” To which an executive board member replied, “It’s entirely likely that as we continue the work we’re doing, we’re going to lose more people, and I think we’re all okay with that.”

I attended one show that ended by pressuring “the folks who call themselves white” to leave their seats and stand on stage to understand that they don’t “own” their seats. At another show, “non-Black audience members were invited to leave” before the end because the play was “not for or about” them. Some productions held segregated “black out” performances. How do you reach hearts and minds when you’re kicking hearts and minds out of the space?

When the pandemic hit, and all our work meetings took place on Zoom, I repeatedly heard the phrase “burn it all down” from my Millennial and Gen Z colleagues. Their perspective seemed to be the theater that existed before the lockdown was a racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, capitalist (fill in whatever “-ists” and “-phobics” you could think of) oppressive system of “predominately white institutions” traumatizing artists through a “nonprofit industrial complex” (an oxymoron in any case) that needed to be vaporized. As reported in The Intercept, Millennial and Gen Z employees across the nonprofit sector were, in the words of one anonymous senior leader, “not doing well” and creating a “toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it - callout culture, cancel culture whatever - [that’s] creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one's able to talk about it, no one's able to say how bad it is.” It should have come as a surprise to no one that, during 2020’s summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests, the atmosphere imploded.

First came the "Not Speaking Out” list, a Google spreadsheet listing the names of not-for-profit theaters that did not make a “sufficient” statement on social media about “systemic racism.” Then came “We See You White American Theater,” a twenty-nine page list of demands for reform that included race-based hiring quotas, ceasing “all contractual security agreements with police departments,” and requiring “creative teams to undergo Anti-Racism Workshops at the beginning of each rehearsal or tech process and ensure accountability with signed statements.” Finally came the targeted attacks on non-compliant individuals. One of the most heartbreaking incidents was the pressure campaign that preceded an executive director’s resignation. Her own staff circulated an online petition to the entire membership stating: 

We are here to tell you that, underneath your dress of respectability politics, your slip is showing… it looks like your predatory tokenism of BIPOC staff members, your opportunistic fundraising, and your calculated obstruction of anti-racist programming.

This executive director played a major role in sustaining not-for-profit theater in New York City through the aftermath of 9/11 and "The Great Recession” of 2007-08 and was an ardent advocate for promoting women as leaders in the field. But the petition painted her as a notorious racist who needed to be excommunicated. I was horrified to see the document populated with the names of people I’d known for years. I declined to sign. No one publicly came to this woman's defense because the activists’ tactic was clear: do what we say, or we will cull you from the field too.

Overt discrimination permeated every meeting I attended that summer. At an organization established to support theater directors, one member asked the group’s president, “Can we have a conversation at some point about the ethics of white directors?” When asked for clarification, the member said, “This is about the ethical responsibilities of white… members as we work to transform the American theater… and whether white directors should be directing.” The president responded, “We’ve already begun to put a task force together… to help particularly our white members work through setting up rehearsal halls and production processes that are anti-racist.” It was odd that only white directors were singled out as needing support understanding what is or isn't “anti-racist” because, from what I saw, there was a lot of racial discrimination aimed at white people. 

A prime example was American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter Keith Wann, who lost work solely based on his skin color. As New York Post reported, the director of ASL for Broadway’s The Lion King stated, “Keith Wann, though an amazing ASL performer, is not a black person and therefore should not be representing Lion King.” To be clear, and typical of the convoluted logic of this movement, the director was advancing the proposition that only black ASL performers should play the animal characters in The Lion King. Since when was it “anti-racist” to insist that only black people were uniquely fit to play animals? Citing race-based employment discrimination, Wann sued. According to court documents, the case settled in Wann’s favor with lightning speed. Perhaps this employer should have provided staff with “anti-racist” training that included Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John G. Roberts and his plurality opinion in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, which states, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” 

Activists pressured artists to create theater aligned with their beliefs. As reported in The New York Times, the artistic director of a festival that once prided itself on being “uncensored” canceled a show because the playwright and performer dared to assert, “There are two sexes, male and female.” The artistic director explained, “I support free speech, I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.” Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, explains the motivation behind this type of behavior in his book Kindly Inquisitors, “In an orthodox community, the threat of social disintegration is never further away than the first dissenter. So the community joins together to stigmatize dissent.” Stigmatizing unorthodox views by canceling shows that express them is censorship, and theater artists used to know better: In 1992, Stephen Sondheim refused the National Medal of Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), stating it would “be an act of the utmost hypocrisy” to accept the award because the NEA had become “a conduit and a symbol of censorship and repression rather than encouragement and support.”

Unlike film, television and recorded music, live theater has no rating system; it should not look for ways to self-censor. Not only should theater reject self-censorship, it should overflow with a wide variety of plays that explore uncharted, daring and dangerous topics. Why not unleash diverse perspectives on various stages and let audiences decide what they think? Instead, activists insist the theater should be comprised of people who, however much they all may look different superficially, must all share the same beliefs. That’s not diversity, it’s monoculture.

If some artists want to create shows that extol CSJ, they have every right to pursue their projects. However, they have no right to bar other artists from daring to critique CSJ’s inconsistencies and intolerance.

Westboro knew they could hold slanderous signs, but they understood attempting to stop the show was beyond their purview–it’s time CSJ activists in the arts learned that lesson.

A few voices of dissent have begun to document the devastation caused by this activism as Clayton Fox does in his essay “The Toxic Gentleness of the American Theater”, but a New York Times article titled “A Crisis in America’s Theaters Leaves Prestigious Stages Dark” hints insiders know some of this “crisis” was self-inflicted. As an executive director admits, “Some theaters have forgotten what audiences want — they want to laugh and to be joyful and to cry, but sometimes we push them too far.”

ACT V: Building New Institutions

At the risk of being the skunk at the garden party, I don't believe logic and reason can be used to persuade theater leaders to take an off-ramp from their misguided allegiance to CSJ. Their devotion is fundamentalist in nature, and that is nearly impossible to pierce by persuasion, even if someone could get them to listen in good faith.  

Look at the example of former Westboro member Megan Phelps-Roper: it took thirteen years of engaging with opposing views before she left the church. At fifty-one, I can’t wait for people to change their minds before I make art. The way to make art now is to build new institutions that state from inception a commitment to freedom of artistic expression, a recognition that ideological conformity is not a prerequisite for participation in the arts, and a pledge to refrain from making statements on social media about current events. If theaters want to tackle current events, do it on the stage.

Despite the storm around me, I pursued my ghost story project. I needed funding, so I looked for grant opportunities. One application asked, “Why this project, why now?” I wrote that a project based on ghost stories was relevant to the moment because they are about our relationship to transgressions in the past. Every ghost story features the living encountering an apparition who returns either to make the protagonist aware of a past injustice, or to punish the protagonist in the present. Considering Ibram X. Kendi declared in How to Be an Anti-Racist, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” I thought it would be meaningful for audiences to experience what happens when people are punished for things in the past, whether they had anything to do with the earlier transgression or not.

It worked! In 2021 I received two small grants to produce and direct Unearthly Visitants. The project went so well that my collaborators and I decided to mount a second show, an adaptation of E.M. Forster's 1909 science fiction story "The Machine Stops." In a review, a critic wrote the play was "a Space Mountain roller coaster ride, an intellectual white water rafting expedition, a production that will have you talking about it for hours and days to come.”

Every moment putting those shows together was pure joy and fulfillment. I didn’t “embed” CSJ into the rehearsal room or the plays. I didn’t force the ensemble to declare preferred gender pronouns, no one was accused of “microaggressions,” and I didn’t impose my socio-political beliefs onto anyone else. The rehearsals were about the bliss of creating the best productions we could devise.

Identity is important. I don't deny that. My identity surely informs my views, but it is not the totality of who I am. Reducing everyone to the same person based on identities serves activists’ causes, but we are simply not all the same. 

Artists have choices: they can use identity to blame, shame and divide, or they can use identity to bring people together, helping us see what we have in common, despite our differences. Most new theater I've seen that wades into identity expresses a contradiction that linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter identifies in Woke Racism: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people,” while simultaneously insisting, “You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.” McWhorter discusses only race, but the contradiction he pinpoints has been applied to various “oppressed” identities in several plays. This fashion is wearing itself out, but I fear it will leave behind a long-lasting stain of resentment, assuming an audience remains in its aftermath. 

One of the four Wharton ghost stories I chose to include in Unearthly Visitants, “The Eyes,” featured a main character Wharton strongly suggests is homosexual. The story shows the cost he pays for not accepting himself. Anyone can identify with struggling for self-acceptance. Wharton didn’t wield homosexuality as a weapon to berate and alienate, she used it as a window to let readers experience the price paid for refusing to accept oneself. Theater should offer audiences more windows, and fewer mirrors merely reflecting back every audience member's identity.

Being an independent producer and director is hard, but rewarding. I choose who I work with, what we work on, and how we collaborate. It’s a lot of responsibility, but when things go right it feels great. It’s not what I imagined I’d be doing in my fifties, yet here I am, putting together my third production: an adaptation of Russian dissident Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1924 dystopian novel We. Zamyatin is a true hero: a Bolshevik who left the party when it declared “all art must be useful to the movement,” he spoke out against party orthodoxy when doing so had mortal consequences. In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin wrote,

“True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.” The same could be said of “true theater.”

I owe both the Westboro Baptist Church and Critical Social Justice activists heartfelt gratitude because their efforts backfired: instead of culling a gay, white, middle-aged artist from the field, they created a resourceful, resilient and persistent artist, committed to freedom of expression, fairness, a belief in common humanity, and hellbent on finding joy and fulfillment as a theater director – isn’t that a great thing.

And I haven’t given up my dream of getting a college or university teaching job. As the saying goes, “Don’t quit before the miracle.”

Epilogue: Calls to Action

Essays like this can make readers feel overwhelmed because things aren’t changing fast enough. Fear not–there are things you can do to help:

Like and follow artists whose work you support on social media;

Subscribe to Substacks and alternative publishing outlets like this one;

Write a letter to your local theater. If you see a show you liked, let them know. If they put on lousy shows, write a letter telling them you didn’t like what you saw and why;

Don’t give money to theatrical institutions putting on shallow morality plays. Instead, give money to organizations you like. Send a letter explaining why you didn’t contribute to the former’s annual fundraiser and why you did to the latter;

Keep in mind the saying, “Politics is downstream of culture.” If you care about the future of our country, get involved in the arts.

==

“I didn't know I was going to be a participant in a public shaming before I bought a ticket to this event.”

This is literally what they did in China. It's called a struggle session.

[toaarcan]

It's election year in both the US and the UK, and that means I am once again banging two saucepans together and yelling at people to vote.

(This is mainly going out to the Americans. The ol' voter suppression tactic isn't working so hot over here when we're on our fourth unelected Tory on the trot, they're all utterly awful, and the opportunity to choose our PM is quite novel)

The heroic socialist revolution that burns down the government and establishes the Glorious Left-Wing Utopia isn't coming. It doesn't exist. I'm sorry, I know it sucks that we have to participate in democracy and capitalism and all those other imperfect systems but the alternative isn't ever going to happen. It's not real.

The perfect candidate isn't ever going to show up, and if they did, they wouldn't win a primary. But you don't get to sell everyone else out just because you didn't like the choices on offer. The last guy has already made things so much worse because you people didn't fucking listen when you were told that the Supreme Court was on the line in 2016. And now look at where you are.

And I know Gaza is the hot-button issue for some of you right now, and do you honestly think letting the Republicans take over again is actually going to improve the situation? The people who would look at the amount of dead kids and call them rookie numbers? The people who rabidly support the Israeli government because they think doing so will get them the rapture they crave? The people who increased the amount of drone strikes in the Middle East when they were in charge, started dropping massive ordnance bombs on people, those guys?

They will make it worse. They already want to make it worse. Will you feel good about sticking it to 'Genocide Joe' when Donald accelerates things, because he fucking will.

Politics is like a tug of war, except it's been going on since before you were born and it'll keep going after you're dead. Once you're old enough to be considered politically responsible, you're involved whether you like it or not, and you've got to constantly drag that rope toward your side for the rest of your life. The other side are going to keep pulling like their lives depend on it, because the right-wing media has told them that their lives do depend on it. And you might be privileged enough to take your hands off the rope and stop pulling for a bit, but if you do, the people who don't have that privilege are going to get dragged into the mud.

There's not going to be a revolution. The guys on the other side tried doing an insurrection already and it didn't work, and they're the crazy assholes with the guns.

[pleas3pretendimnothere]

My mystery pain improved somewhat this month, so I was able to read four books! I'm still behind my 1-book-a-week goal, but whatever! I care more about my body feeling better. And it's too bad none of these books really stood out this month!

The Door In the Moon

By Catherine Fisher - This is the third book in Fisher's Obsidian Mirror series. The previous two books I enjoyed for their fast pacing and colorful characters. I did recommend adventure-enthusiasts read them! However, this third book may have changed my opinion somewhat...

This book feels like filler. By the end, I was asking, "Was an adventure in mid-revolution Paris really necessary?" It all felt a bit like pandering to the dramatic allure of this historical time period. The reader realizes the setting and thinks, "Uh-oh! How will our heroes get out of this one!" At least, I suppose that's what was the intended effect... It didn't pay off for me. Instead, the book shuffles things around in a way that should feel refreshing, but instead disappoints. Side characters whom I care very little for are reintroduced and made pivotal to the plot. Meanwhile, the series' most likeable characters are pushed into the background. This mix-up destroyed Fisher's usual intense pacing! And the big ending...well, it could have easily been the ending to the previous book. Why, why, why? What happened here!?

It's tough to be three books into a series and realize you've just read a worse book. You ask, "Do I still care?" And I think I do. The previous books were strong enough, so I will be finishing the series. I'll give my final verdict then!

Life After Life

By Kate Atkinson - A book opens with a woman assassinating Hitler. You, having freshly opened the scene in your mind, must decide: heroic, or campy? That question haunted my entire read.

The majority of Life is fantastic. Our protagonist Ursula Todd is reliving her own life over and over again. Each time she dies, she relives her life with new instincts, her own intuition linking her to the mistakes of her past failed lives. We as the readers see Ursula make mistakes, and then improve upon them in the next life. We see her at her lowest, and then at her highest. She makes decisions that have positive effects in some ways, and negative effects in others. Consequences riddle each small decision. Atkinson's ability to jump between lives, sometimes in ways that can be quite confusing to the reader, brings a huge amount of fun to this read. The reader constantly asks, "What will she do different? Will her life be better or worse? Do any of her decisions actually matter at all?"

And then you remember she is somehow going to kill Hitler. Huh???

Ultimately, Atkinson made it make sense. I too would kill Hitler if I realized he was the source of all despair in all my multitude of lives! Most importantly, this is emotional, thought-provoking literature. I often found myself reflecting on my own life and the decisions I make every day, how the smallest things might affect me years down the line. And then, I wonder if any of it really matters, or if it will all just end up undone.

I really enjoyed this read, but it is quite long, and the Hitler stuff comes off as quite distracting in this year of 2024. Still, I'd highly recommend you RENT IT!

Akata Witch

By Nnedi Okorafor - A thirteen-year-old American, albino girl of Nigerian parents returns to Nigeria, where she discovers she is part of a secret society of magic-users that spans the globe. It's giving Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, folks. It's a lot of fun.

Okorafor has written a children's novel that brings the readers into the world of African magic. It's tantalizing, it's magical, it's whimsical, and, in a wonderful Riordan-esque way, still quite serious! There are stakes and risk, and our adorable cast of characters must navigate huge responsibilities suddenly placed on their shoulders. And the story, the world, always, always, it's strange, and it's fun! I had a blast reading this.

Not a lot to say about Witch, but it's a delightful, quick and easy read. If you're looking for something light and refreshing like Rick Riordan, definitely RENT IT!

God Emperor of Dune

By Frank Herbert - And now for something completely different. The brilliant new Dune film inspired my return to the books, all of which I'd gobbled up. Dune was incredibly detailed and wise. Dune Messiah was a reflective finale to its predecessor. Children of Dune brought us back into the weird intrigue and horror of Arrakis. And God Emperor...um. Don't read this book....

Wow. This book was bad. I didn't think it possible, but hoo boy! The people weren't kidding when they said "Just read the first three!" This book is a miserable, patronizing slog.

There is virtually no plot. The God Emperor Leto II spends 80% of the book taking guests into his chamber and philosophizing at them. Herbert's writing is astonishingly nuanced and intelligent--to a fault. There's so much nonsense wordplay, that at some point, you just stop trying to understand any of it. You lose interest. You ask, 300 pages in, "Wait, what the hell happened to Siona???" Then, when Duncan cries out in fear of two girls kissing, you ask, "Is Dune bad??"

And the philosophy! Good god, it's dated. Hope you enjoy sexism and homophobia in your worldly discussions! Just know I spent a lot of time laughing. (That's right! Male armies always tend towards homosexuality, which always leads to self-destruction! I so agree, Frank!!)

If you loved Dune like I did, you will not love this book. If you MUST read it, I'd advise a tailored reading experience, where all the pointless nonsense is skipped. That would be a good 70%. Otherwise, SKIP IT!

[hpowellsmith]

Books of 2023

I was pleased to read lots of books this year! I greatly enjoyed the majority of these - the only one I wouldn't really recommend was Rated M for Mature - and the favourites are bolded. There were quite a lot of others that I didn't end up finishing, which were mostly memoirs of people who I felt interested in but didn't find their writing very compelling, and some second-world fantasy novels that didn't grab me. Most of this year's reading was historical, contemporary, memoirs, or horror: it was only towards the end of the year that I got some fantasy in there, which is funny as I've always thought of myself as a big fantasy fan - if anyone has any queer non-YA fantasy recommendations, I'd love to have them. The most recent new-to-me fantasy I loved was The Sacred Dark series by May Peterson, if that helps!

I was really happy to read Alison Rumfitt, Torrey Peters, Maya Deane, Lee Mandelo, EE Ottoman, and Brandon Taylor for the first time in particular, and look forward to reading more of them in the future; Ducks by Kate Beaton hit hard and stuck with me; Passion and Play is a massively illuminating read for anyone interested in writing intimate scenes in games and made me feel a ton more confident and intentional in doing so; I loved returning to and crying over old favourites Elizabeth Wein and Terry Pratchett after a very long time.

Detransition, Baby - Torrey Peters

A Perfect Spy - John le Carre

Felix Ever After - Kacen Callender

Lark and Kasim Start a Revolution - Kacen Callender

Youngman - Lou Sullivan

The Ministry of Unladylike Activity - Robin Stevens

Winterkeep - Kristin Cashore

Rated M for Mature: Sex and Sexuality in Video Games - Matthew Wysocki (ed.), Evan W. Lauteria (ed.)

Passion and Play: A Guide to Designing Sexual Content in Games - Michelle Clough

How Games Move Us: Emotions by Design - Katherine Isbister

Tell Me I'm Worthless - Alison Rumfitt

The Companion - EE Ottoman

The Pearl Thief - Elizabeth Wein

Real Life - Brandon Taylor

The Autistic Trans Guide to Life - Yenn Purkis, Wenn Lawson

The Enigma Game - Elizabeth Wein

Filthy Animals - Brandon Taylor

Gender Queer - Maia Kobabe

Ten Steps to Nanette - Hannah Gadsby

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes - Rob Wilkins

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands - Kate Beaton

The Late Americans - Brandon Taylor

Wrath Goddess Sing - Maya Deane

Vivi Conway and the Sword of Legend - Lizzie Huxley-Jones

Summer Sons - Lee Mandelo

Slow River - Nicola Griffith (reread)

The Others of Edenwell - Verity Hollowell

Pageboy - Elliot Page

Brainwyrms - Alison Rumfitt

Uncomfortable Labels - Laura Kate Dale

The Easternmost House - Juliet Blaxland

The Two Doctors Górski - Isaac Fellman

Dark Matter: A Ghost Story - Michelle Paver

Charmed Life - Diana Wynne Jones (reread)

A Trans Man Walks Into A Gay Bar - Harry Nicholas

Going Postal - Terry Pratchett

Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett (reread)

In Strictest Confidence - Craig Revel Horwood

[nexusofdomains]

My Writeblr Introduction

Greetings, folks. You may call me Lucian. I am an autistic adult. I write in English, but I am learning German, so I will eventually write in German as well as in English. My writing journey began on August 5th, 2020, when I began drafting "Jaggedshadow's Vengeance", which was titled "A Raven Calls, Wind Answers" at the time (more on that later). I write fantasy, sci-fi, adventure, fanfic, flash fiction, and other genres. I plan to get into writing hurt/comfort, realistic fiction, and suspense. I may try to write romance, horror, and historical fiction.

My interests, especially when it comes to writing, lie in government, magic and magic systems; weaponry, the fae, folklore, anthropomorphic animals, fantastical materials, birds in general but corvids in particular, armor, werefolk, and many other topics.

I'm developing fantastical worlds three: Kello, Ouroboros, and Nexus. Kello, as its name suggests (kello is Finnish for clock or time), is a disk-shaped world ringed by two wall-like mountain ranges. It has magitech and a myriad of different fantastical creatures inhabit it. Ouroboros is an earth-sized torus world. Anthropomorphic black-footed cats, humans, and a myriad of creatures from European and North American mythologies inhabit it. It is high fantasy. Nexus is a planet, slightly larger than earth, with planetary rings orbiting its equator. Magitech is becoming prevalent, and much of Nexus is undergoing an industrial revolution due to the discovery of a name-pending magical synthetic crystalline material that can power machinery. Humans, anthropomorphic animals, and mythological creatures (some of which I'm putting my own spin on) inhabit Nexus.

I am working on various WiPs in various states:

WiP 004 “Storm of Light” 

CWiP 006 “Setting Sun” 

CWiP 008 “A Story to tell” 

WiP 009 “Phoenix Ritual” 

WiP 019 “[Sentinel]” 

“Storm of Light” is a major rewrite of “A Storm of Light”, a short story I set in Nexus. “A Storm of Light”, is based on a personal narrative essay I wrote for my composition class last year. It is pending writing. “Setting Sun” is a Star Wars fanfic set in the Old Republic era. It is pending a considerable rewrite. It follows a shistavanen named Ilta, as she runs afoul of a pirate crew. “A Story to Tell” is currently a flash fiction story about a dragon defending his territory. I will rewrite it into a short story to expand upon its themes and increase the tension. Set in Nexus, “Phoenix Ritual” is a short story about a group of friends seeking immortality. “Sentinel” is a novel I'm developing. It is about a group of werewolves in Ouroboros, who are escaping religious extremist knights.