#young connecticut yankee

[fuckyeaharthuriana]

I bought a copy of A Young Connecticut Yankee so I could have a good quality video of handsome Galahad

[queer-ragnelle]

Trying to find A Young Connecticut Yankee (1995) either a download link or a DVD I can buy to rip. Ideally not stupid expensive. Any leads welcome!

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

Hey so like many of you, I saw that article about how people are going into college having read no classic books. And believe it or not, I've been pissed about this for years. Like the article revealed, a good chunk of American Schools don't require students to actually read books, rather they just give them an excerpt and tell them how to feel about it. Which is bullshit.

So like. As a positivity post, let's use this time to recommend actually good classic books that you've actually enjoyed reading! I know that Dracula Daily and Epic the Musical have wonderfully tricked y'all into reading Dracula and The Odyssey, and I've seen a resurgence of Picture of Dorian Gray readership out of spite for N-tflix, so let's keep the ball rolling!

My absolute favorite books of all time are The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Classic psychological horror books about unhinged women.

I adore The Bad Seed by William March. It's widely considered to be the first "creepy child" book in American literature, so reading it now you're like "wow that's kinda cliche- oh my god this is what started it. This was ground zero."

I remember the feelings of validation I got when people realized Dracula wasn't actually a love story. For further feelings of validation, please read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. There's a lot the more popular adaptations missed out on.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is an absolute gem of a book. It's a slow-build psychological study so it may not be for everyone, but damn do the plot twists hit. It's a really good book to go into blind, but I will say that its handling of abuse victims is actually insanely good for the time period it was written in.

Moving on from horror, you know people who say "I loved this book so much I couldn't put it down"? That was me as a kid reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Picked it up while bored at the library and was glued to it until I finished it.

Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barrie was also a childhood favorite of mine. Next time someone bitches about Woke Casting, tell them that the original 1911 Peter Pan novel had canon nonbinary fairies.

Watership Down by Richard Adams is my sister Cori's favorite book period. If you were a Warrior Cats, Guardians of Ga'Hoole or Wings of Fire kid, you owe a metric fuckton to Watership Down and its "little animals on a big adventure" setup.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry was a play and not a book first, but damn if it isn't a good fucking read. It was also named after a Langston Hughes poem, who's also an absolutely incredible author.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is a book I absolutely adore and will defend until the day I die. It's so friggin good, y'all, I love it more than anything. You like people breaking out of fascist brainwashing? You like reading and value knowledge? You wanna see a guy basically predict the future of television back in 1953? Read Fahrenheit.

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee are considered required reading for a reason: they're both really good books about young white children unlearning the racial biases of their time. Huck Finn specifically has the main character being told that he will go to hell if he frees a slave, and deciding eternal damnation would be worth it.

As a sidenote, another Mark Twain book I was obsessed with as a kid was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Exactly what it says on the tin, incredibly insane read.

If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin is a heartbreaking but powerful book and a look at the racism of the time while still centering the love the two black protagonists feel for each other. Giovanni's Room by the same author is one that focuses on a MLM man struggling with his sexuality, and it's really important to see from the perspective of a queer man living in the 50s– as well as Baldwin's autobiographical novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain.

Agatha Christie mysteries are all still absolutely iconic, but Murder on the Orient Express is such a good read whether or not you know the end twist.

Maybe-controversial-maybe-not take: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is a good book if you have reading comprehension. No, you're not supposed to like the main character. He pretty much spells that out for you at the end ffs.

Animal Farm by George Orwell was another favorite of mine; it was written as an obvious metaphor for the rise of fascism in Russia at the time and boy does it hit even now.

And finally, please read Shakespeare plays. As soon as you get used to their way of talking, they're not as hard to understand as people will lead you to believe. My absolute favorite is Twelfth Night- crossdressing, bisexual love triangles, yellow stockings... it's all a joy.

and those are just the ones i thought of off the top of my head! What're your guys' favorite classic books? Let's make everyone a reading list!

[teafourbirds]

Please take a moment to admire Tiny Baby Roy Harper who is Trying So Hard to organize his notes and finish his book report while Ollie cheerfully smokes a pipe and distracts him with random facts.

It is my firm headcanon that Ollie goes on to derail the writing of the book report by reading Connecticut Yankee out loud, substituting himself and Roy for Hank Morgan, and that the whole of the following comic (later described as "maybe a dream????") is actually his retelling (Chitty-chitty Bang Bang-esque, for anyone old enough to have grown up on that movie). Because really, what else is Ollie's dream (especially this clean-shaven young Ollie) but to be an old-fashioned hero saving villagers from wild boars and emptying slaves from the dungeons of evil queens?

Adventure Comics #268

There will just never be enough early Ollie-tiny Roy content on this earth to suit me, and one of my favorite games to play is building out their golden/silver age stuff in my head to fit with the later comics. I still haven't read very much past the early 2000s (and almost nothing post-Flashpoint) but one of the major exceptions is the 2022 "Earn It Back" story, which is the loveliest Roy-Ollie relationship, where Ollie is Trying So Hard to be a good parent for Roy but also is clearly uncertain about what a good parent looks like, vacillating between being overly permissive and overly strict.

(Ollie's lack of parental figures growing up is another of those astonishingly under-explored stories, IMO. The few interactions we see involve him begging to be allowed to travel with his parents, and his father telling him to "toughen up" when he doesn't want to go hunting. This followed almost immediately by his parents getting mauled by lions in front of him, and then getting shipped off to boarding school by an unnamed uncle. Of course Ollie doesn't know what he's doing. Bruce, the famous orphan, had Alfred from the beginning - who did Ollie have? What does he know about being a parent? I think he goes in with a lot of love and no game plan, except maybe for his firm conviction that Roy is strong and capable and resilient. That he'll be okay no matter what Ollie does. That he probably doesn't really need Ollie at all except as a partner in crime.)

So I'm eternally fascinated by going through the old World's Finest/Adventure Comics (which is nearly all we have of young Roy-Ollie) and imagining how those dynamics fit together. Little Roy, who collects stamps and stands up to bullies and is the secretary of the school's Green Arrow Fan Club (lmao) and is saving up to buy a sailboat and tries SO HARD to prove himself. Ollie, who trusts Roy to pull himself up but still follows him to make sure he's safe when he’s been gone to long, who whisks Roy away from school and homework to save the world, who doesn't realize the extent of his influence over Roy, who trusts that Roy has everything under control because of course he does, because Roy is just that great.

Adventure Comics 262 // Green Lantern (1960) #85

Anyway, all that is to say, enjoy a bit of Ollie trying to be helpful by distracting Roy from his homework with stories of heroism and bravery. They are everything to me.

Adventure Comics 264

[merlincersei]

Merlin BBC UK TV Show - Opinion Piece Part 7 - How The 2008 Series Reinterprets and Subverts Arthurian Legends

I was talking to a mutual friend about movies and TV shows in the fantasy genre and this friend bought up the fact how Arthurian legends have influenced most of them.

As that conversation progressed, we both agreed that the best adaptation of Arthurian legend was John Boorman’s 1981 classic "Excalibur".

However he seemed very amused when I told him that I was a huge fan of the 2008 BBC TV series Merlin. His opinion was that the TV series was "so childish, historically inaccurate and farcical" when he watched it.

I disagreed with him profusely and decided to make this post to outline my love of the TV series. I will share this post with this person so we can have further discussions on this topic. So here it goes:

Creators wanted to reinterpret Arthurian legend.

PROOF:

Julian Murphy, co-creator and executive producer: It all began in a restaurant on Kensington Church street, where I had lunch with the writer Jake Michie. And the pitch I gave him was very simple - It was 'I'd like to do the Arthurian story, but as an origin story in the same way that the Superman story had been done in [US TV series] Smallville.' And I think from there, it evolved.

But the decision that I think was at the heart of it, which was to make Arthur and Merlin contemporaries, rather than make Merlin the old man looking after the young Arthur, was there from the very beginning.

Source : https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/merlin-at-10-the-cast-and-creatives-on-how-they-made-the-bbcs-boy-wizard-drama/

If you are a fan of the series i would recommend to read the article above for more information and details about the TV Show.

______________________________________________________________

There has never been a concise Arthurian story. The legends are an amalgam of numerous versions, the most popular of them being as follows:

 History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth

Geoffrey’s account of the legendary king contains the first appearance of many of the iconic features of the Arthurian legend, including the wizard Merlin.

Lancelot by Chrétien de Troyes

Geoffrey of Monmouth never mentions Arthur’s most famous knight, and it wasn’t until Chrétien de Troyes wrote Lancelot and introduced the idea of an affair between Guinevere and Arthur’s most noble knight that Arthurian legend really got the ‘romantic’ treatment

The Mabinogion by Anonymous

The Arthur we glimpse in the Mabinogion is usually a marginal figure so it’s worth reading if you’re a fan of early legends containing King Arthur.

Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

This is a vast prose retelling of the story of King Arthur and the Round Table.

Idylls of the King by Lord Tennyson

Here we find the stories of Lancelot and Elaine, Geraint and Enid, Merlin and Vivien

______________________________________________________________

So for the 2008 series to collect Arthurian stories from various sources and try to repackage it to a modern audience is nothing new as the trend has already been established through works of T. H. White in The Once and Future King, Mary Stewart in The Crystal Cave, Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court etc...

But it is through reinterpreting Merlin & Guinevere's storylines and using Magic as a motif that we get a brand new Arthurian story.

Guinevere

The name Guinevere means The Fair One in old Welsh.

To cast Angel Coulby, a woman of color as one of the most famous white woman in history was a revolutionary act by 2008 British TV standards.

In the legends, Guinevere is of royal blood. Gwen in the TV series is a servant of common birth who ascends to become a queen.

Here the audience come to see Gwen as the fair one based on the strength of her character and not the color of her skin.

In the TV show Arthur forgives Gwen's infidelity with Lancelot rather than having her sent to a nunnery or worse having her die. The old male authors were okay with Arthur bedding several women but expectation of chasteness placed on Guinevere always contained an undercurrent of misogyny.

In the TV Show, Gwen leads Camelot into the golden age, instead of being blamed for the downfall of Camelot due to her affair with Lancelot

PROOF : Excerpt From Hyable Article:

Meanwhile of course, Guinevere was left to lead Camelot into the golden age. “We’ve had that in our minds for about three series,” Julian Murphy says. “We felt that to take Gwen from a servant girl to a powerful and strong queen, a person who can bind the kingdom together, was the journey we wanted to do, and I think Angel [Coulby] delivered that brilliantly.”

Merlin

By having Merlin be of a contemporary age to Arthur they effectively changed Merlin from being a father figure to being a companion of Arthur.

The close bond that Merlin shares with Arthur in the TV Show effectively replicates Lancelot's close bond with Arthur in the historical legends.

Bradley James here confirms how in some legends Lancelot was in love with Arthur.

The gay subtext that was prevalent between Lancelot and Arthur in the historical legends is played out in all its glory between Merlin and Arthur .

Motiff of Magic

Throughout the history of Abrahamic religions, there has been a connection between magic and (deviant) sexual practices. From the osculum inafme (kissing of donkey’s anuses and kissing the Devil’s anus) to witches who were supposedly inserting hallucinogenous mushrooms into their vaginas. The series association between magic and non heteronormative people becomes pronounced as series progresses.

And therein lies the appeal of the 2008 Merlin TV Series. With this modern retelling it succeeds in addressing certain historical wrongs, make it more representational, address issues and highlight subtext that have been historically ignored in popular media for the time frame it aired.

Arthurian legends no longer becomes the domain of a patriarchal Judeo Abrahamic narrative about a return to the good old days but of class mobility, race, feminism, queer acceptance and the belief of a better world to come in context of the TV Show.

[thatscarletflycatcher]

"He told the truth, mainly": what Paul Moses knew about Huckleberry Finn.

(Abridged from Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction)

Mark Twain had himself done a lot of ethical criticism long before he published his famous warning against morality hunters at the head of Huckleberry Finn ([1884] 1982). I am thinking not mainly of essays like the devastating “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” but rather of the criticism implicit in his fictions… In short, Mark Twain knew well enough what it means to “find a moral” in a tale, and he knew that every tale is loaded with “morals,” even if it avoids explicit moralizing.

What he was right to fear is the destruction that can result for any story, and particularly for any comic story, when a reader busily extracts moralities rather than enjoying the tale… When he mocked courtly romances in A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and adventure tales in Tom Sawyer and parts of Huckleberry Finn, he must have known that his perceptive readers would never again enjoy those originals quite so much. And as the kind of moralist who increasingly was to lay about him with a heavy cudgel, with fewer and fewer freely comic effects, he had good reason to know that people who put their attention on finding the moral in any human story risk destroying the fun of it. Critics like me who do find a moral are going to be distracted from the sheer joy of dwelling for many hours in the mind and heart of a great natural comic poet, that “bad boy,” Huckleberry Finn.

Even so, I suspect that Twain would have been surprised, and no doubt dismayed, at the floods of moral criticism evoked by the tale. Initially the moralists’ attention seems to have been entirely on the dangers to young people of encountering the aggressive “immorality” of Huck himself—his smoking, his lying, his stealing, not to mention his irreverent “attitude.”... Twain could easily have predicted— and no doubt savored the prediction—that the portrait of an appealing youngster openly repudiating most “sivilized” norms would upset good people…

The uselessness of “conscience” is dramatized with example after example of how Huck’s conscience, actually the destructive morality implanted by a slave society, combats his native impulse to do what he really ought to do—what Twain called his “good heart.” The most famous attack on the norms dictated by obedience to public morality—and especially by official Christianity '’—comes when Huck realizes that he is committing a terrible sin in helping Jim escape slavery. Almost two-thirds of the way through the novel, long after Huck has discovered his love for Jim and has been willing to “humble myself to a nigger” and apologize for a cruel trick (709; ch. 15), Huck sits down to think by himself, after hearing some adults talking about how easy it is to pick up reward money for turning in a runaway slave. Though the pages that follow are probably more widely known than any other passage in American literature, I must trace them in some detail, because they have always provided the evidence used by us liberals in opposing Paul Moses’s kind of indictment.

[I omit that part of the discussion, as it is widely known in how the text is taught in schools]

The Indictment

If Twain could have predicted such conventional distress, he could not have predicted Paul Moses’s response, the response, as we might say, of “good old Jim’s” great-great-grandchildren reading the novel from a new perspective—not Jim’s, not Huck’s, not the white liberals’ of the 1880s or 1980s, but theirs: the perspective of a black reader in our time thinking about what that powerful novel has for a hundred years been teaching Americans about race and slavery. It would surely have shocked Twain to find that some modern black Americans see the book as reactionary in its treatment of racial questions:

For black people and for those sympathetic to their long struggle for fair treatment in North America, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn spirals down to a dispiriting and racist close. The high adventures of the middle chapters, Huck’s admiration of Jim, Jim’s own strong selfconfidence, and the slave’s willingness to protect and guide Huck are all rendered meaningless by the closing chapters in which Twain turns Jim over to two white boys out on a lark. (Jones 1984, 34)

As a black parent... I sympathize with those who want the book banned, or at least removed from required reading lists in schools. While I am opposed to book banning, I know that my children’s education will be enhanced by not reading Huckleberry Finn. (Lester 1984, 43)

Such objections might well have seemed to Twain much more perverse than the cries of alarm from the pious. After all, the book does in fact attack the pious; they were in a sense reading it as it asked to be read—as an attack on them. But when black readers object to it, and even attempt to censor it from public schools (Hentoff 1982), are they not simply failing to see the thrust of scenes like the one I have quoted? How can they deny that Jim is “the moral center” of the work, that Twain has struck a great blow against racism and for racial equality, and that the book when read properly could never harm either blacks or whites?

So I might have argued with Paul Moses. So most white liberals today still argue when blacks attack the book. So even some black readers defend the book today. Many critics have objected, true enough, to the concluding romp that Tom Sawyer organizes in a mock attempt to free the already freed Jim. But most of the objections have been about a failure of form: Twain made an artistic mistake, after writing such a marvelous book up to that point, by falling back into the tone of Tom Sawyer. Not realizing the greatness of what he had done in the scenes on the river, he simply let the novel “spiral down,” or back, into the kind of comic stereotypes of the first few chapters. Though put as a formal objection to incoherence, this objection could be described as ethical, in the broadest sense: the implied standard is that great novels probe moral profundities; because the ending of Huck Finn is morally shallow, the book as a whole ought not be accepted as great.

Seldom is the case made that the ending is not just shallow but morally and politically offensive. Most critics have talked as if it would be absurd to raise questions about the racial values of a book in which the very moral center is a noble black man so magnanimous that he gives himself back into slavery in order to help a doctor save a white boy’s life. Why should this book, so clearly anti-racist, be subjected to the obviously partisan criticism of those who do not even take the trouble to understand what a great blow the book strikes for black liberation? Critics, black and white, are inclined to talk like this: [E]xcept for Melville’s work, Huckleberry Finn is without peers among major Euro-American novels for its explicitly anti-racist stance. Those who brand the book ‘racist’ generally do so without having considered the specific form of racial discourse to which the novel responds. (Smith 1984, 4)

In this view, all the seemingly objectionable elements, such as the use of the word “nigger,” are signs, when read properly, of Twain’s enlightened rebellion against racist language and expectations. The defense is well summarized by one black critic who seems enthusiastic about the book, Charles H. Nichols. Huck Finn, he says, is an indispensable part of the education of both black and white youth. It is indispensable because (1) it unmasks the violence, hypocrisy and pretense of nineteenth-century America; (2) it re-affirms the values of our democratic faith, our celebration of the worthiness of the individual, however poor, ignorant or despised; (3) it gives us a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society; (4) it dramatizes the truth that justice and freedom are always in jeopardy. (Nichols 1984, 14)

Accepting the first two and the last of these, with minor qualifications, must we not question the third? Can we really accept this novel as a vision of the possibility of love and harmony in our multi-ethnic society?

It was in an effort to answer that question that I recently read the great novel again, asking what its full range of fixed norms appears to be, a century after its composition, and thus what its influence on American racial thinking is likely to be. While I found again the marvelously warm and funny novel I had always loved, I found another one alongside it, as it were. That novel looks rather different. Here is how a fully “suspicious” interpreter might view it:

“This is the story of how a pre-adolescent white boy, Huck, reared in the worst possible conditions no mother and a drunken, bigoted, cruel, and impoverished father—discovers in his own good heart and flatly against every norm of his society that he can love an older black slave, Jim—love him so strongly that he violates his own upbringing and tries to help Jim escape from slavery. Huck fails in his sporadic attempt to free Jim, but Jim is (entirely fortuitously) freed by a stroke of conscience (the same ‘good heart’?) in his owner just before she dies. (There is some problem of credibility here, since she presumably has good reason to believe, along with others in her town, that Jim earlier killed Huck Finn; but let that pass.)

“At the beginning and again at the end of the novel, Jim is portrayed as an ignorant, superstitious, boastful, kind but gullible comic ‘nigger,’ more grown child than adult. Naturally affectionate toward and uncritical of his white masters, he is almost pathetically grateful for any expression of sympathy or aid. During the central part of the novel he is turned into something of a father figure for Huck; we see him as a loving father of his own children (full of remorse about having beaten a child who turns out to be deaf); and as a deeply loyal friend (once he has found that his ‘only friend’ is the almost equally ignorant but less gullible white boy). He becomes, for large stretches, an ideally generous, spiritually sound, wonderfully undemanding surrogate parent. The implication is clear: wipe slavery away and you will find beneath its yoke a race of natural Christians: unscarred, loving, infinitely grateful people who will cooperate lovingly with their former masters (with the good ones, anyway) in trying to combat the wicked white folks, of which the world seems to be full. (There are no other black characters—just the one ‘good nigger.’) Only occasionally through these middle chapters does the author reduce Jim again to the role of stage prop. Whenever he gets in the way of the author’s plan to satirize the mores of small town and rural American society, he is simply dropped out of sight— and out of Huck’s mind: an expendable property, to be treated benevolently as part of the implied author’s claim to belong to the tiny saving remnant of human beings who escape his indictment of a vicious mankind.

“All the more curious then that we find, especially in a couple of chapters at the beginning and in a prolonged section at the end—al- most a third of the whole book—that Jim is portrayed as simply a comic butt, suitable for exploitation by cute little white boys of good heart who have been led into concocting a misguided adventure by reading silly books. There are moments in the novel when we expect that Huck Finn will discover behind the stereotype of the ‘good nigger- mistreated’ a real human being, someone whose feelings and condition matter as much as those of whites and who at the same time is not, under the skin, merely a collection of Sunday school virtues; a white prince in disguise (‘I thought he had a good heart in him and was a good man, the first time I see him. Then they all agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some notice took of it” [905; ch. 42]). But we lose this hope early, and we are not really surprised, only disgusted, when Huck forgets all that he might have learned and allows himself to take part in Tom’s scheme to free the already freed Jim. Huck is in one sense invulnerable to our criticism here, because he thinks that he is still ‘wickedly’ freeing a slave, his friend. But the novel, like the mischievous Tom Sawyer, simply treats Jim and his feelings here as expendable, as sub-human—a slave to the plot, as it were. We readers are expected to laugh as Tom and Huck develop baroque maneuvers that all the while keep Jim in involuntary imprisonment. Twain, the great liberator, keeps Jim enslaved as long as possible, one might say, milking every possible laugh out of a situation which now seems less frequently and less wholeheartedly funny than it once did.”

”Twain’s full indifference to what all this means to Jim, and his seeming indifference to the full meaning of slavery and emancipation, is shown in the way he exonerates Tom for his prank and compensates Jim for his prolonged suffering. I italicize (superseding Twain’s italics in this passage) the moments that now give me some trouble as I think about what the liberal Twain is up to:

We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom, they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him up to the sick-room; and had a high talk; and Tom give Jim forty dollars for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says:

“Dah, now, Huck, what I tell you?—what I tell you up dah on Jackson islan’? I tole you I got a hairy breas’, en what’s de sign un it; en I tole you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich agin; en it’s come true; en heah she is! Dah, now! doan talk to me—-signs is signs, mine I tell you; en I knowed jis’ ’s well ’at I ’uz gwineter be rich agin as I’s a stannin’ heah dis minute!” (911; “Chapter the Last’’)

All nice and clear now? The happy-go-lucky ex-slave, superstitious, absurdly confused about the value of money (he happily clutches at the gift of forty dollars while Huck, by the final turn on the next page, gets six thousand), reveals himself as overjoyed with his fate, and all is well. But just what is the “vision of love and harmony” that this novel “educates” us to accept? We find in it the following fixed norms:

1. Black people, slaves and ex-slaves, are a special kind of good people—so naturally good, in their innocent simplicity, that the effects on them of slavery will not be discernible once slavery is removed. Some few whites are like that, too—the Huck Finns of the world who miraculously escape corruption by virtue of sheer natural goodness.

2. Black people are hungry for love (essentially friendless, unless whites befriend them) and they will be (should be) obsequiously grateful for whatever small favors whites grant them, in their benignity.

3. White people are of three kinds: the wicked and foolish, a majority; the foolish good— essentially generous people like the Widow Watson who are made foolish by obedience to social norms; and naturally good people, like Huck, whose only weapons against the wicked are a simulated passivity and obedience covering an occasionally successful trickery. We may find also an occasional representative of a fourth kind, the essentially decent but thoughtless trickster, the creator of stories, like Tom— and Mark Twain. They will entertain the world regardless of consequences.

4. The consequences of emancipation will be as good as they can be, in this wicked world, so long as you (the white liberal reader) have your heart in the right place—as you clearly do because you have palpitated properly to Huck’s discovery of a full sense of brotherhood with Jim. You needn’t worry about his losing that sense almost before he finds it; after all, Huck, our hero, is not responsible for anything that society might have done or might yet do about the aftermath of slavery.

5. All institutional arrangements, all government, all “‘sivilization,” all laws, are absurd—and absurdly irrelevant to what is, after all, the supreme value in life: feeling “comfortable,” as Huck so often expresses his deepest value, comfortable with “oneself,” that ultimate source of intuition which, if one is among the lucky folk, will be a sure guide.”'

6. The highest form of human comfort is found when two innocent males can shuck off all civilized restraints and responsibilities, as represented by silly women, and simply float lazily through a scene of natural beauty, catching their fish and smoking their pipes. As Arnold Rampersad says, “Much adventuring is [like this novel] written by men for the little boys supposedly resident in grown men, and to cater to their chauvinism” (1984, 49). The ideal of freedom, for both blacks and whites, is a freedom from restraint, not a freedom to exercise virtues and responsibilities— which is to say, in the words of another black critic, Julius Lester, “a mockery of freedom, a void” (1984, 46). The final addition to that blissful freedom-in-a-void is to be (or to identify with) a rebellious white child cared for and loved by the very one who might otherwise be feared, since he might be expected to act hatefully once free: the slave, toward whom the reader feels guilt. If we will just let nature take its course, those we have en- slaved will rise from their slavery to love us and carry us to the promised land.

After Such Sins, What Forgiveness?

What can we reply to such a picture? Not, I think, that it is irrelevant to our view of the book. Not that such a suspicious reader “does not know how to read genuine literature, which is not concerned with teaching lessons.” And not, surely, that the fixed norms central to the power of this book are all to the good. The events of the past hundred years have taught us—since apparently we needed the teaching—that America after Emancipation and the aborted Reconstruction just did not work that way, though white northern liberals until this last quarter of a century tended to act as if it did, or should. Nor can we take what is perhaps the most frequent tack in defending Twain: “He rose to a great moral height in the middle of the book, then simply got tired, or lost touch with his Muse, and fell back into the Tom Sawyer gambit.” That line will not work because the problems we have discovered are not confined to the gratuitous cruelty and condescension of the final “evasion.” Though they are most clearly dramatized there, they run beneath the surface of the whole book --even those wonderful moments that I have quoted of Huck’s moral battles with himself.

In the critical literature about Huck Finn, | find three main lines of defense of the book as an American classic.” In all of them, the novel is treated as a coherent fiction, not as a work that simply collapsed toward the end.

The first is the simplest: the attribution to Huck, not to Mark Twain, of all the ethical deficiencies. Since Twain is obviously a master ironist, and since we see hundreds of moments in the book when he and the reader stand back and watch Huck make mistakes, why cannot we assume that any flaw of perception or behavior we discern is part of Twain’s portrait of a “character whose moral vision, though profound, is seriously and consistently flawed” (Gabler-Hover 1987, 69)? In this view, the problems we have raised result strictly from Twain’s use of Huck’s blindnesses as “an added indictment against the society of which he [Huck] is a victim” (74; see also Smith 1984, 6, IO).

Clearly this defense will work perfectly, if we embrace it in advance of our actual experience line- by-line: dealing with any first-person narrative, we can explain away any fault, no matter how horrendous, if we assume in advance an author of unlimited wisdom, tact, and artistic skill. But such an assumption, by explaining everything, takes care of none of our more complex problems. If we do not pre-judge the case, the appeal to irony excuses only those faults that the book invites us to see through, thus joining the author in his ironic transformations. Our main problems, not just with the ending but with the most deeply embedded fixed norms of the book as a whole, remain unsolved.

George C. Carrington similarly defends the ending as of a piece with the rest of the novel, and in doing so he also defends the novel as the work of a great moral teacher who “knew what he was doing.” But he discerns not so much a great conscious ironist as an author exhibiting great intuitive wisdom, a kind of sage. The questionable norms are indeed to be found in the work, but they are fundamentally criticized by it: the views and effects I have challenged are themselves challenged by the great art of Twain, an art that in a sense goes beyond his conscious intentions. The work’s moral duplicity in fact is a brilliant portrayal of the national dilemma following the collapse of Reconstruction. Twain “could not help paralleling the national drama-sequence,” Carrington says; the story of Huck is “rather like” the story of the northern middle class, many of them former Radical Republicans who had fought to free the slaves, [who had become] irritated by the long bother of Reconstruction, became tired of southern hostility, and were easily seduced by strong-willed politicians and businessmen into abandoning the freedmen for new excitements like railroad building. . . . The spirit that led the country to accept the Compromise [of 1877, that abandoned the goals of Reconstruction] might ironically be called ‘the spirit of 77.’ Absorbed in his work and his new life in Hartford, Twain shared that spirit. He thought the Compromise a very good thing indeed... . Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is thus not only a great but a sadly typical American drama of race: not a stark tragedy of black suffering, but a complex tragicomedy of white weakness and indifference. It is one of those modern books that, as Lionel Trilling says, ‘read us,’ tell ‘us’… about ourselves. . . . The meanness of Huckleberry Finn is not that man is evil but that he is weak and doomed to remain weak. . . . Twain did not shirk the presentation, but managed to avert his gaze from the subject’s Medusa horrors by looking at it through his uncomprehending narrator. .. . By experiencing and accepting the ending we can perhaps take a step toward a similar level of self-awareness. A novel that can help its readers do that is indeed a masterwork and deserves its very high place. (1976, 190-92)

While it seems remotely possible that an author with a mind as ironically devious as Twain’s could have worked, consciously or unconsciously, to ensure that some few readers over the centuries would read the work in this special way, obviously most readers have not done so—no doubt because the book itself offers no surface clues to support such a reading. Indeed, both of these defenses spring more from the critics’ ethical programs and ingenuity than from anything that the novel proposes for itself. On the contrary, a vast majority of the artistic strokes, especially during the “evasion,” seem explicitly de- signed to heighten our comic delight in a way that would make these interpretations implausible. They both depend on the wisdom and insight of a reader who has learned to see through the “surface” of the book and recognize that it in fact mocks naive readers who laugh wholeheartedly at Tom’s pranks. They thus leave us with the question, What then happens to the great unwashed, for whom so much of the book has proved totally deceptive? Well, they are going to identify mistakenly with a deceptive implied author who has in some sense worked to take them in. Meanwhile, the real author is above all this,

creating a work that a few discerning readers can make out, after weeks, perhaps years, of careful study. In short, the defense may work well if what we are thinking of is maximum fairness to Twain, but it doesn’t work at all for the critic who cares about what a book does to or for the majority of its readers, sophisticated or unsophisticated. A third influential defense, considerably more complex, has the virtue of leaving the reader able to laugh at the troublesome ending, though embarrassed by the laughter. James Cox argues that Twain set out, through the attacks on Huck’s conscience that lead to his great moment of decision to go to hell, to enact a conversion of morality into pleasure (1966, 171-76). The form implicit in such an ethic demanded an ending that celebrates pleasure and makes everyone “comfortable,” including of course Huck and Jim. But at the moment of choice, that same form requires not the election of pleasure but of another “conscience,” the northern conscience that combats the southern conscience of Huck’s upbringing: “In the very act of choosing to go to hell he has surrendered to the notion of a principle of right and wrong. He has forsaken the world of pleasure [his own eternal salvation] to make a moral choice” (180). It is that conscience which validates, in Huck’s eyes, his going along with Tom, even though he thinks until the end that Tom, who was brought up right, is unbelievably wicked in working to free Jim.

The result is that when we exercise a “northern conscience” that confirms Huck’s choice and find ourselves laughing at the burlesque, “we are the ones who become uncomfortable. The entire burlesque ending is a revenge upon the moral sentiment which, though it shielded the humor, ultimately threatened Huck’s identity [as a natural hedonist]” (181).

If the reader sees in Tom’s performance a rather shabby and safe bit of play, he is seeing no more than the exposure of the approval with which he watched Huck operate. For if Tom is rather contemptibly setting a free slave free, what after all is the reader doing, who begins the book after the fact of the Civil War? This is the “joke” of the book—the moment when, in outrageous burlesque, it attacks the sentiment which its style has at once evoked and exploited. . . . This is the larger reality of the ending—what we may call the necessity of the form. That it was a cost which the form exacted no one would deny. But to call it a failure, a piece of moral cowardice, is to miss the true rebellion of the book, for the disturbance of the ending is nothing less than our and Mark Twain’s recognition of the full meaning of Huckleberry Finn. (175, 181)

Again we see here a critic who saves the novel by rejecting the reading that almost every white reader until recently must have given it. Each reading considers “the reader” —the “we” of these passages—to be plainly and simply the white reader, and neither one considers closely the effects on the white reader who does not feel uncomfortable with the ending. But surely the most common reading of this book, by non-professional whites, has always been the kind of enraptured, thoroughly comfortable reading that I gave it when young, the kind that sees the final episodes as a climax of good clean fun, the kind in fact that Brander Matthews gave it on first publication:

The romantic side of Tom Sawyer is shown in most delightfully humorous fashion in the account of his difficult devices to aid in the easy escape of Jim, a runaway negro. Jim is an admirably drawn character. There have been not a few fine and firm portraits of negroes in recent American fiction, of which Mr. Cable’s Bras-Coupé in the Grandissimes is perhaps the most vigorous, and Mr. Harris’s Mingo and Uncle Remus and Blue Dave are the most gentle. Jim is worthy to rank with these; and the essential simplicity and kindliness and generosity of the Southern negro have never been better shown than here by Mark Twain. . . . Of the more broadly humorous passages—and they abound— ... they are to the full as funny as in any of Mark Twain’s other books; and perhaps in no other book has the humorist shown so much artistic restraint, for there is in Huckleberry Finn no mere “comic copy,’ no straining after effect. (Matthews 1885, 154; qtd. in Blair and Hill 1962, 499-500)

If that is in fact what most white “liberals” have made of the book until recently, it dramatizes the inadequacy of the defenses we have so far considered. A book that thus feeds the stereotypes of the Brander Matthews kind of reader insults all black readers, and it redeems itself only by inciting some few sophisticated critics, many decades later, to think hard about how the story implicates white readers in unpleasant truths. That is surely not what we ordinarily mean when we call a book a classic. Even if we find a reading that at some deep level vindicates Twain for writing better than he knew, our ethical concerns remain unanswered.

Still hoping that I might someday see more merit in these defenses by others, I turn to my own efforts and find, to my considerable distress, that each of them seems almost as weak as those I have rejected. We might first use the “conversational” defense that worked for Lawrence: though Twain’s racial liberalism was inevitably limited, though he failed to imagine the “good Negro” with anything like the power of his portraits of good and bad whites, though in effect he simply wipes Jim out as a character in the final pages, he has still, by his honest effort to create the first full literary friendship between a white character and a slave, permanently opened up this very conversation we are engaged in. We would not be talking about what it might mean to cope adequately with the heritage of slavery, in literary form, had he not intervened in our conversation. There is surely something to this point, but unfortunately the argument fits Twain less well than Lawrence. Twain is not a great conversationalist, not at all “polyphonic”; rather, he is a great monologuist. We have seen here that he is not particularly good at responding to our questions: the critics I have quoted have had to do too much of the work. A great producer of confident opinions—many of them by the time he wrote already thoroughly established (for example, slavery is bad)—he never probes very deep. His positions on issues have not stimulated the kind of public debates that continue about Lawrence’s views. Instead we find collections of colorful expressions, like Your Personal Mark Twain: In Which the Great American Ventures an Opinion on Ladies, Language, Liberty, Literature, Liquor, Love, and Other Controversial Subjects (Twain 1969). Twain has opinions about many matters, but their intellectual content or moral depth would not give many TV shows serious competition. His mind takes me into no new conceptual depths; he is conventionally unconventional, so easily seduced by half-baked ideas that one would be embarrassed to offer him as a representative American intellectual.

Might I “save” him, then—or rather myself, because he is after all quite secure on his pedestal—by talking of the healing, critical power of laughter, the sheer value of comedy? Here is what I might say: “Let us celebrate Mark Twain’s preeminent comic genius, his gifted imaginings of beloved but ludicrous characters in a (quite ‘unreal,’ quite “unconvincing’) world of their own, a world in which I love to spend my days and hours and from which I emerge delighted that my world has included that kind of sheer delight. Samuel Johnson says somewhere that the sheer gift of innocent pleasure is not to be scoffed at, in a world where most pleasures are not innocent. Twain redeems my time by providing me a different ‘time’ during which my life feels quite glorious.

“It is true that in that world, in that time, there are dangerous simplifications and moments of embarrassment: it is a world inhabited only by good guys and bad guys, clever ones and stupid ones, and Twain tries to lead me too easily to think that I—one of the good and clever ones—can tell which are which. There are marvelously absurd clowns and villains, and I don’t have to reproach myself (as I do in life) for finding them clownish and villainous. I relish here good, honest, wholesome, intense sentiment; I relish an absolute sureness that everything will turn out all right and a freedom from the ‘uncomfortable’ burdens of conscience. Just think of that achievement. Twain has portrayed a world of cruelty and misery, a world of national shame, a world in which good people will in fact always be bested by the bad, and he makes us believe that everything must turn out all right! How many other novels can I think of that I can re-read again and again, teach to students and teach again, decade after decade, and still wish, after each re-reading, that they would go on longer? Huck Finn thus provides me with a kind of moral holiday even while stimulating my thought about moral issues. What a gift this is, this terribly misguided, potentially harmful work! If you try to take it away from me (you censors, black or white) I will fight you tooth and nail.

“How, then, you ask, does Huckleberry Finn differ from simple escape literature of the kind that we enjoy for an hour and then dismiss without a second thought? It does so in two ways, both of which we have hinted at already. The first is the quality of the escape: line by line, Twain simply rewards my returns with exquisite pleasures that are not so much ‘escape’ from life as the kind of thing life ought to be for. The second is a somewhat different form of our ‘conversational’ defense of Lawrence. Though Twain’s fantasy of the innocent boy discovering within his natural self the resources for overcoming society’s miseducation about ‘difference’ threatens us with the kinds of dangers I have described, it also moves us with a mythic experience that can lead to endless but fruitful inquiry into what kind of creatures we are. It is no accident that it is Huck Finn of all Twain’s works that stimulates controversy about the ethical quality of its ending and about its central situation. Somehow the fantasy/myth touches us at our most sensitive points.

In brief, long before Paul Moses and Charles Long had ever led me to think ethically about the book, it had already done its true work in this respect. The vivid images of that great-hearted black man crouched patiently in that shed, waiting while the unconsciously cruel Huck and the consciously, irresponsibly cruel adventurer Tom planned an escape that almost destroys them all— hose images haunted me even as I laughed, and they haunt me still.

“I can never know, of course, just how much miseducation the novel has provided while haunting me in this way. Who am I to say that simply thinking about the book can have removed the kinds of distortion that my black friends have pointed out. But I do believe that the mythic force of that book will be a permanent possession, a permanent gift, long after we repair black/white relations as we find them in the twentieth century. Just as Homer’s epics can now no longer harm our children in the specific way that worried Plato—shaking their confidence in the rationality and decency of the Greek gods—I suspect that Huck Finn will survive the longed-for time when racial conflict is no longer a political and moral issue in our lives.”

I seem to have grown warmer in this defense than in any of the others. But always at my back I hear the voices of those readers—including myself now—who see that the infatuation is not after all innocent. They remind me that the hours I spend in that world are after all fantasy hours; whether or not I see them as that, they have the power to deflect my imagination in dangerous ways. Jim is the “Negro” we whites might in weaker moments have hoped would emerge from slavery: docile, grateful for our gift of a freedom that nobody should ever have had the right to withhold, satisfied with a full stomach and a bit more cash than he’d had before. The picture of pre—Civil War America is a fantasy picture, in which all of the really bad occurrences are caused by caricatures of folly and evil, none of them by people who look and talk like people of our kind.” The battle in the novel for freedom from oppressive Christianity is a superficial battle, at best, and the encounter with the realities of slavery is even more superficial. The story thus offers us every invitation to miseducate ourselves, and therein lies the task of ethical criticism: to help us avoid that miseducation. The trick is always to find ways of doing that without tearing the butterfly apart in our hands.

It should be obvious that I am by no means “comfortable” (to use Huck’s word) about the incompatibilities that my project has led me to here. Having made my case against the book as honestly as possible, I now find a distressing disparity between the force of my objections (along with the relative weaknesses in the various defenses), and the strength of my continuing love for the book. My ethical criticism has disturbed a surface that once was serene. But instead of making the work and its creator look at least as great as before (Austen), or renovating a wrongly denigrated author (Lawrence), I have somewhat tarnished my hero, and since I cannot wipe from my mind the readings that black critics have imposed, I cannot, by a sheer act of will, restore Twain’s former glow. Still, though much of Huck Finn amuses me somewhat less when I read it now than it did in times irrecoverable (the recent reading was, like Cox’s, considerably more solemn than the one Twain himself obviously hoped for), the achievement still seems to me quite miraculous. On the other hand… Such a non-conclusion is disturbing to the part of me that used to seek unities and harmonies that others have overlooked, the part that once spent two years attempting to discern the form of Tristram Shandy, the part that still delights in having once “demonstrated” that Sterne actually brought that “unfinished” work to a close (1951), the part that has often earned its keep by teaching students how to see unities where others have seen only chaos. But should we not expect to discover irreducible conflicts of this kind, if each of our imaginative worlds must finally be constituted of manifold values that can never be fully realized in any one work or any one critic’s endeavor?

What is not in question is that the ethical conversation begun by Paul Moses has done its work: it has produced what I can only call a kind of conversion (both words come from the Latin convertere, “to turn or turn around”). Led by him to join in a conversation with other ethical critics, my coduction of Huckleberry Finn has been turned, once and for all, and for good or ill, from untroubled admiration to restless questioning. And it is a kind of questioning that Twain and I alone together could never have managed for ourselves.

[haljathefangirlcat]

Now that you mention it, the Volsung-Nibelung-Dietrich cycle would make a good sitcom if you just focused on the zanier parts. The Nibelung siblings Gullrond, Gunther, Gernot, Giselher, Kriemhild, and (maybe) Hagen, with all their pals. Nephews Dankwart and Patavrid; Gunther's incredibly athletic girlfriend Brynhild and her dog and horse; the Nibelungs' best pal and Brynhild's ex Sigurd, who would be the man you wished your man could be if not his moments of random philosophizing or idiotic life decisions despite knowing what was going to happen; Hagen's best pals, Volker the musician and Walther the nerd; local businessman Rudiger and his sweet, cutesy young daughter; socially maladjusted Dietrich and his gang of pals, who always pop up during hangouts despite nobody inviting them... With less murder and more mayhem, it sure would make a good show!

You know, one thing I will always be irrationally sad about when it comes to the Sigurd/Siegfried cycle and related legends is that... it just never gets any of the wacky, zany, "how tf did you even come up that" adaptations and reimaginings Arthuriana keeps getting.

I mean, sure, you do have adaptations with some humor in it, and different ways to mesh Norse and Continental and even Wagnerian elements, and very different perspectives on the same characters. But Arthuriana really has anything and everything from Disney movies to anime and manga to Monty Python movies and musicals to kids' cartoons to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and all its parodies to Young!Arthur/Young!Merlin Slashy Bromance shows to irriverent French sitcoms to loosely-inspired queer YA romance novels to a few recurring and even main characters in "all stories are true" fantasy series like Once Upon a Time or The Librarians. There's even those collector's edition Merlin & Morgana Barbies that were making the rounds on here a while ago!

Meanwhile, the wackiest, less "serious" stuff our Nibelungs get are:

The brief Siegfried & Fafnir cameo in the Mara and the Firebringer movie, where the main mythological figures are actually Loki and Sigyn (can't really say anything about the books, as I haven't read them)

A weird Hungarian (?? iirc??) comedy movie where Siegfried has a talking piglet as his animal companion for some reason and Kriemhild really doesn't like him but she apparently can't just tell him to get lost and stop courting her so she orders Hagen to drive him away from Worms and kill him, which I've only ever managed to "watch" in bits and pieces

The comedic operetta Die lustigen Nibelungen, which I've never managed to find anything about that wasn't in German, so I'm not even really sure what it's actually about

The 70s porn movie The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried, which... tbh, I'd rather stick to fanworks on the nsfw side of things, if the alternative is Siegfried with a pornstache

A Modern/High School AU fantasy romance self-pub I once found where, from what I remember of the summary and excerpt I read, Brunhild is a Mean Girl/Queen Bee who tries to steal Siegfried away from Kriemhild and Hagen is Kriemhild's shitty jealous ex-boyfriend (nothing against High School AUs, or romance novels, or alternative takes on the Kriemhild/Siegfried/Brunhild love triangle, or Hagen/Kriemhild as a ship... but tbh, I'd rather see all those elements handled in vastly different ways XDD)

A couple of old Italian Disney comicbook parodies featuring Donald Duck and his family (but those were mostly Wagner-based, iirc, and then again, an amazing thing about Italian Disney comics is that they will parody literally everything under the sun from the Divine Comedy to Twilight)

... Siegfried (or Sigurd?) showing up in one of the Fate anime series? Or novels? Or games? Not sure. I've only ever watched like two episodes of the Fate/Stay Night anime and then dropped it because I didn't like the normal guy protagonist always rushing to protect his (secretly Fem!King Arthur) supernatural sworn knight just because she was a girl

And... that's it, I think.

And on the one hand, I get it. With Arthuriana, you have adventurous romances and ridiculous (affectionate) quests and so many different bizarre canons and twists on them that even that cartoon where Morgan Le Fay sends an American football team back in time to Camelot (I think that was the plot, at least????) is just another "you know, this might as well happen" situation. I suppose that, at least by comparison, the Nibelungensage & All Adjacent Stuff may appear more grounded and less easy to play with and bring in whatever strange, unlikely new direction you want. Plus, tragic events like Sigurd/Siegfried's death, Brynhild/Brunhild being tricked into marrying a man she doesn't want, and Gudrun/Kriemhild's revenge, or even Dietrich's exile, are just central to it, so that's kind of a downer already, I guess.

... on the other hand, King Arthur's tale literally ends with him and his son killing each other at the end of a bloody civil war. And it's not like anyone's ever had any problem merrily ignoring THAT part to, idk, have everyone in the story be cats.

All this to say, I'd watch the hell out of a Modern AU Nibelung sitcom. Or even just a Nibelung sitcom set in the Middle Ages, or Late Antiquity, or a vague mishmash of the two. The dream for that would be a Galavant-style show with musical numbers and a lot of scenes poking fun at epic and heroic tropes, ngl.

Actually, let's be real: I wouldn't just watch it, I'd probably write fic and make gifs and fanvids for it!

[elitheaceofalltrades]

2024 Reading Goals

Hello hello! Happy New Year to all!

Fun fact, by posting this at 11:00am GMT, 2023 has officially ended in all inhabited countries as UTC -11 is the last inhabited timezone.

I haven't been a resolutions person for a couple of years now but I admit I do love a challenge and goal setting. I also love reading. I'm sure you don't need the title to tell you where this is going. I've had goodreads since Sept, 2016 and have been taking part in their reading challenge since 2020. I've met my goal evey year except 2021 and I hope to make three years in a row this year!

2023's goal was an ambitious 48 books and I somehow managed to read 48 (I attribute a good 1/3 to getting a library card and access to libby). 18 of those books were comics/manga though and while I do believe anything with a ISBN counts, I'd like for comics & manga to only be about 25% of my books instead of the current 38%. I feel like I might be setting myself up a bit but I'm not going to be too upset if at the end of the year, I don't lower the percentage. This is just a bit of fun.

Anyways in no particular order, here's a tentative list of the 48 books I plan to read in 2024. This is subject to change due to availability, gifts, recommendations and new releases.

~Eli

Ace of All Trades, Pro at None😆

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

The Lost Adventures and Team Avatar Tales by Gene Luen Yang & Faith Erin Hicks

Girls and Autism by Barry Cerpenter, Francesca Happé & Jo Egerton

Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

ATLA: The Promise by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko

Windrush by Mike Phillips & Trevor Phillips

In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan

The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan

The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan

The House of Hades by Rick Riordan

The Blood of Olympus by Rick Riordan

ATLA: The Search Omnibus by Gene Luen Yang

Queer by Frank Wynne

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

ATLA: The Rift Omnibus by Gene Luen Yang

This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

ATLA: Smoke & Shadow Omnibus by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko

The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

ATLA: North & South Omnibus by Gene Luen Yang, Michael Dante DiMartino & Bryan Konietzko

I Will Not Be Erased by Gal-dem

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Katara & The Pirate's Silver by Faith Erin Hicks

They/Them/Their by Eris Young

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Suki, Alone by Faith Erin Hicks

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

The Turn of the Shrew by Henry James

Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Abertalli

Toph Beifong's Metalbending Academy by Faith Erin Hicks

How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Middlemarch by George Elliot

This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron

The Movement Vol. 1: Class Warfare by Gail Simone

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Hold Tight, Don't Let Go by Laura Rose Wagner

Saga Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughn

[kenyatta]

Gun policies, I argue, are downstream from culture, so it’s not surprising that the regions with the worst gun problems are the least supportive of restricting access to firearms. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of 61 to 36, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region — the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky — supported gun rights by exactly the same margin. Far Western states backed gun rights by a proportion of 59 to 38. After the Newtown school shooting in 2012, not only Connecticut but also neighboring New York and nearby New Jersey tightened gun laws. By contrast, after the recent shooting at a Nashville Christian school, Tennessee lawmakers ejected two of their (young black, male Democratic) colleagues for protesting for tighter gun controls on the chamber floor. Then the state senate passed a bill to shield gun dealers and manufacturers from lawsuits. When I turned to New York-area criminologists and gun violence experts, I expected to be told the more restrictive gun policies in New York City and in New York and New Jersey largely explained why New Netherland is so remarkably safe compared to other U.S. regions, including Yankeedom and the Midlands. Instead, they pointed to regional culture. “New York City is a very diverse place. We see people from different cultural and religious traditions every moment and we just know one another, so it’s harder for people to foment inter-group hatreds,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “Policy has something to do with it, but policy mainly controls the ease to which people can get access to weapons. But after that you have culture, economics, demographics and everything else that influences what they do with those weapons.”

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. - POLITICO

[girddlepatchilles]

So I’m responding to this post, but I’m not reblogging because I’m really not interested in Lily coming after me, but I just wanted to gush for a moment.

So, to the point: isekai/portal fantasy/whatever you want to call it, have been around for years and the fact that the genre shows up in many different places is just so damn cool! The theme of a “normal” person going through a portal/doorway/whatever to go into another world shows up in plenty of myths and legends. Many stories about the fair folk talk about mortals being taken away to the fairy realm through portals and the like. In Japan, the story of Urashima Taro involves a young fisherman travelling to the Dragon Palace and staying there for what he perceives as three days before returning to his village. Upon his return he finds out it has been three hundred years! Again, this is a theme that also shows up in stories regarding the fair folk in parts of the UK and Europe, this shit is universal.

The Urashima Taro story is believed to be the forbear of the modern Isekai genre in Japan. Interestingly enough, an animated adaption of the story made in 1918 was one of the earliest anime created. What I also find quite interesting is many modern Isekai don’t seem to include the “when I return so much time has passed” aspect of the original folklore. In fact, it’s fairly common for the protagonist to just remain in the fantasy world and just not leave. Part of this is due to how the protagonist got there (here’s looking at you truck-kun), but from what I have seen, there aren’t that many Isekai where the protagonist goes home in the end.

This, of course, is very different to many of the portal fantasies in English language literature. The first instance of what would become portal fantasy comes to us from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland written in 1865. In it, the titular Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole and into Wonderland, where she experiences a strange world quite unlike our own. Unlike some of the more well known portal fantasy books, Alice’s adventures end when she wakes from a dream. The sequel Through the Looking Glass continues to explore the theme of dreams. Jules Verne would later produce Off on a Comet (Hector Servadac) in 1877, while Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court would come out in 1889. A Connecticut Yankee is also an early example of time travelling appearing in speculative fiction (H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine would come out in 1895). One of the most well known portal fantasies is of course C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia which saw the plucky protagonists being transported to Narnia through wardrobe, painting and various other means. Ironically enough, the final novel in the series The Last Battle involves several of the previous characters being allowed to remain in Narnia because they had died in a train accident on earth (an early example of truck-kun?).

Portal Fantasy and Isekai are both great forms of escapism, especially if it’s the kind of story where the protagonist ends up in a fictional setting they had previously read. I was a big fan of the Narnia books as a kid and another of my favourite books was a series where a group of Aussie kids ended up in Arthurian myth and tried to change how things turned out. I’m pretty sure I got rid of those books at some point, otherwise I’d be tempted to re-read them to see if they hold up. I’m not much into Portal Fantasy or Isekai these days (I read more fluffy romance, domestic fluff, speculative fiction, queer romance and fiction, fantasy, sci fi and gay cooking manga), but I can still see the appeal to a lot of people. I get a little side-eye-y when I see characters use their modern knowledge to “improve the lives” of the people in the fictional world they inhabit, but some authors and show runners have managed to do so in a way that doesn’t seem too bad. If I had to pick an Isekai I’ve seen that I loved, it would probably be The Devil is a Part-Timer! which is an example of a reverse Isekai. (It’s really great, go watch it!)

So... yeah. Just a little gushing from me.

[flashseo]

Exploring the Unique Charm of the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, NJ, and CT

The New York City metropolitan area is more than just skyscrapers and fast-paced life; it’s a blend of boroughs and neighboring regions, each with its own unique character and appeal. The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, New Jersey (NJ), and Connecticut (CT) all contribute to the area’s incredible diversity, culture, and lifestyle options. Whether you’re looking to explore history, try international cuisines, enjoy scenic views, or experience urban and suburban life, each of these areas has something unique to offer. Here’s a deep dive into what makes each of these regions a fascinating part of the Greater New York area.

The Bronx

A Snapshot of the Bronx’s History and Culture

The Bronx, one of NYC’s five boroughs, is known for its rich cultural history, including the birthplace of hip-hop. From art museums to cultural centers, the Bronx celebrates a vibrant mix of traditions and influences that have shaped its identity over the decades.

Unique Attractions in the Bronx

The Bronx Zoo, one of the world’s largest urban zoos, is a must-visit for families and animal lovers. Another gem is the New York Botanical Garden, which spans 250 acres of beautifully curated gardens. The Yankee Stadium, home of the New York Yankees, brings sports fans from across the country. For those interested in arts, the Bronx Museum of the Arts offers contemporary exhibitions celebrating diverse artists.

Neighborhoods in the Bronx

Popular neighborhoods include Riverdale, known for its quiet, tree-lined streets and affluent vibe, and Fordham, with its historic architecture and energetic college-town feel. South Bronx is seeing a resurgence in popularity due to its artistic scene and thriving community.

Queens

Queens as a Melting Pot of Cultures

Queens is the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world. Here, you can find neighborhoods dedicated to various cultures, making it a food paradise for those interested in authentic international cuisines. From Indian to Greek to Chinese, Queens represents the world within a borough.

Popular Sites and Activities in Queens

Astoria Park, with its stunning views of Manhattan, is a favorite among locals and visitors alike. The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria celebrates the history and evolution of film and media, while Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is a sprawling space that includes the iconic Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair. Citi Field, home to the New York Mets, is another popular attraction.

Neighborhoods in Queens

Jackson Heights, known for its rich blend of South Asian, Latino, and other communities, is a must-visit for food lovers. Forest Hills offers a more suburban feel with easy access to green spaces and shopping, while Astoria has become a hip and bustling area attracting young professionals and artists.

Brooklyn

Brooklyn’s Rise in Popularity

Brooklyn has become synonymous with trendy neighborhoods, artisanal markets, and cultural hotspots. Once considered NYC’s quieter sibling, Brooklyn has risen to fame with neighborhoods that boast unique lifestyles, art, and music scenes.

Iconic Landmarks and Activities in Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Bridge, offering stunning views of Manhattan’s skyline, is an architectural marvel and a favorite for walkers and photographers. Prospect Park is a local favorite for picnics, sports, and outdoor concerts. DUMBO, known for its cobblestone streets and art galleries, has become one of Brooklyn’s top destinations. Other must-sees include Coney Island’s historic amusement park and the Brooklyn Museum.

Neighborhood Highlights

Williamsburg is famous for its hip cafes, street art, and music venues. Park Slope is a family-friendly neighborhood with a mix of historic brownstones and modern amenities. Brooklyn Heights offers classic charm with its picturesque waterfront and tree-lined streets, attracting both locals and tourists.

New Jersey (NJ)

New Jersey’s Connection to NYC

Just across the Hudson River, New Jersey provides an alternative for those who want proximity to NYC with more living space and suburban comforts. NJ’s closeness to New York makes it a convenient location for commuters, with easy access to both urban life and scenic landscapes.

Attractions in Northern New Jersey

Liberty State Park offers breathtaking views of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. The Meadowlands Sports Complex is a top destination for sports enthusiasts, hosting events for both the New York Giants and New York Jets. For family outings, the Adventure Aquarium in Camden and the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City are popular attractions.

Neighborhoods and Cities in NJ

Hoboken, with its lively nightlife and beautiful waterfront, has a vibrant community feel. Jersey City has seen a boom in development and offers a wide range of cultural and dining experiences. Montclair, known for its tree-lined streets and historic homes, is a favorite for families seeking a suburban feel with a city vibe.

Connecticut (CT)

The Appeal of Connecticut’s Proximity to NYC

Connecticut’s close proximity to NYC makes it an ideal location for those who want the balance of suburban life with city access. With charming towns, natural beauty, and historic sites, CT offers a relaxed lifestyle with an upscale feel.

Scenic Destinations in CT

Connecticut’s coastal towns like Mystic and New Haven provide picturesque waterfront views and a peaceful atmosphere. Mystic Seaport Museum is a popular destination, offering a glimpse into maritime history. Yale University in New Haven, one of the Ivy League’s historic institutions, is also worth a visit for its beautiful architecture and cultural significance.

Notable Neighborhoods and Cities in CT

Greenwich, known for its upscale homes and shopping districts, is one of the most affluent areas in the state. Stamford is a bustling city with corporate offices, parks, and a lively downtown area. Westport offers scenic beauty along the coastline and is famous for its arts community and theater scene.

Conclusion

Each of these regions—the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, NJ, and CT—adds its unique flair to the Greater New York City area. From the urban pulse of the Bronx and Brooklyn to the cultural richness of Queens, and from the scenic charm of New Jersey and Connecticut to their suburban comforts, these areas cater to various lifestyles and interests. Whether you’re visiting or considering a move, exploring these areas offers a glimpse into the diverse character and vibrant life that define this incredible part of the country.

[fuckyeaharthuriana]

My favorite arthurian movies (part 2/3)

More details (and youtube links for the less known movies) under cut. Some of these I love, some are so bad so good, some are beautifully epic, some are just funny.

New Adventures of a Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1988) (youtube part 1) (youtube part 2): No idea what the characters are saying as this is in Russian, but the visual of this movie is gorgeous and so is Mordred.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1989) (youtube): Lovely Connecticut Yankee movie with a girl as a protagonist. It adds some new scenes, very heart warming and cute and has a scene of Guinevere dancing.

Guinevere (1994): Loose adaptation of Persia Wolley's Guinevere books. A bit boring, but this is the first time we see Guinevere as protagonist. Focusing on her marriage with Arthur, inhereting her father's kingdom and her love for Lancelot.

A Young Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1995) (youtube) : Another Connecticut Yankee movie, the quality is not as good as others but it has an interesting Galahad (who often is not in movie) and an amazing Morgana.

First Knight (1995): Romance movie between Lancelot and Guinevere.

A Knight in Camelot (1998): The last Connecticut Yankee movies, one of the funniest ones too, with Whoopi Goldberg as the protagonist.

Quest for Camelot (1998): Only slightly arthurian, as the focus is on two new characters (one is called Gareth but has nothing to do with Sir Gareth). Set during Arthur's kingdom. Animated movie about the daughter of Lionel returning Excalibur to King Arthur.

The Excalibur Kid (1999) (youtube): One of my favorite movies and one of the only movies where Morgause is present. Focusing on a kid ending up in King Arthur's times as future king of Camelot because Morgause feels he is easier to manipulate than Arthur, the real king. I shipped him and Arthur.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2002) (youtube): Animated short movie on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, visually beautiful, following the story very loyally.

[queer-ragnelle]

I found a DVD in German. It has an English track too. Here's the eBay link -> https://www. ebay. com/itm/333278475140

Oof $13.39 shipping is a bit much but thank you I’ll keep an eye on this!

[littlewalken]

sep 28

Well, I was feeling a bit sort of what will I occupy my brain with today when I looked at the blog of someone who reposted one of my Trek things and now I have to go cast the DS9 version of Clue.

(and by now Dr Bashir would be one nickel short of tree fiddy)

First off you kids on my DS9 lawn need to know that Rene has a comedic history behind him. There's Benson of course but really it's in Police Academy 5 where you know he knows this is a bad movie and he's just going to devour the scenery. And he was an adorable Merlin https://archive.org/details/connecticutyankeek0nn9ol0u9vhs/1.+A+Connecticut+Yankee+in+King+Arthur's+Court.mp4

On a side note Keisha Knight Pulliam in ACYIKAC shows how you can adapt what was originally a story starring a white man in to one starring a little black girl and making it child friendly without fucking it up. She was also in an adaptation of Pollyanna that did the original story justice while making it more meaningful to the target audience.

Point being Rene, even as Odo, would have gone to town as Wadsworth in Clue and y'all have to remember when he left the Broadway production of Big River there was only one other chaos being that could be brought in to replace him-

Yup, it was Brent Spiner.

And while I said Andy's energy is a better fit for Mr Green I'm going to keep him on the short list for Mr(s) Peacock because like with Pepe the King Prawn I'd want to hear him do the scream.

As for other things I'm still writing odds and ends, mostly Smallville right now and I might be able to piece something together, middle of the night thoughts went to different takes on the asylum arc from the middle of season 3. Might take a Smallville break and tidy up my Grease 2 notes.

If I feel the need to do some serious work I not only don't know what all digital books I have it also looks like some of the snaps are on the blurry side and I need to decide if I can live with that or I'll need to redo them.

Still looking for TUA s4 so I can compare its level of dumpster fire to that of Young Blades.

[writerchickmarie]

John Lloyd Young - Broadway Magic By The Bay

Just when I thought that there was no way John Lloyd Young could improve upon the perfection of his Broadway set - he did just that. And Northern Michigan will never be the same.

From the opening notes of "So You Wanted To Meet The Wizard" from The Wiz, JLY produced his own special magic and captivated a diverse audience at Great Lakes Center For The Arts, along the bay in Petoskey, Michigan. By the second song, "I Have Dreamed" from The King And I, he held everyone in the palm of his hand.

He was backed this evening by a powerful trio as well. On piano, and serving as musical director, was Andrew Hertz, joined by stellar local musicians Will Harris on drums and Jack Dryden on electric bass. I had seen Andrew accompany JLY at View Arts Center in Old Forge a few weeks ago, which was phenomenal. On this night with the band, it was even better. Watching him lead the other musicians on stage was a joy, and it was so seamless that you would have thought that all four of the men on stage had been working together forever. Hopefully there will be many more collaborations together in the future.

JLY assured everyone that there would be plenty of Jersey Boys material in this set, in addition to many Broadway classics that shaped his life and inspired him to reach for his own Broadway dreams. He then moved right into "Oh What A Night" as an appetizer for the JB fans, complete with audience participation.

One of the things I love about his Broadway set is how he shares backstories and information about all of the songs he has chosen, and he is well-versed in Broadway history. Sometimes there are also personal anecdotes, as was the case with "Till There Was You". JLY grew up watching The Music Man with his grandmother, and it sparked some dreams that wound up coming true for him. Just like Robert Preston, JLY originated a role on Broadway, won the Tony Award, and starred in the movie version for Warner Brothers. Always pay attention to your dreams - they lead the way! The Beatles arrangement of this song was the perfect choice for JLY voice.

His deep, rich version of "My Heart Stood Still" (from A Connecticut Yankee) was accompanied by stories of how Lorenz Hart came up with the idea for the song, along with song ideas in general. And then he told the story of being an usher for 42nd Street and hearing this next song every night, and the serendipity of having this song arranged for him a year later by Ron Melrose for Jersey Boys. "I Only Have Eyes For You" was truly breathtaking, and I hope we continue to hear it often.

The next song was an absolute showstopper. JLY listened to cast recordings as he was growing up, and he dreamed of getting to play Marius in Les Miserables one day. That day came after Jersey Boys, when he was asked to portray Marius at the Hollywood Bowl. It is always special to hear him sing the haunting "Empty Chairs At Empty Tables", and it moves me to tears every single time.

The next section of the show was dedicated to Jersey Boys, complete with stories of working with Clint Eastwood on set making the movie. So many cool insights, and humorous moments - sometimes all wrapped up into one. It will never get old hearing JLY sing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", and it is always a special moment. We also were treated to "Walk Like A Man" (where we got to sing along), "My Eyes Adored You", and "Moody's Mood For Love". JLY shared a story about the latter, which was another serendipitous moment for him where he realized he was going to get the part on Broadway. (It's a sign!) When he performs it during his shows, you are transported right back to the movie scene, and totally understand why Bob Gaudio says that he needs to write for that voice.

I am so glad that this next song is now in JLY's Broadway set. He has performed it in other sets before, but it is the ideal song to honor the inspiration he got from Nell Carter during his childhood. His full vocal range is showcased on "Mean To Me" from Ain't Misbehavin', and is so stunning that it completely blew everyone away. I hope he records this one at some point, because it's something you definitely want to hear over and over again.

It's always fun when JLY comes out into the audience, especially for "One Last Kiss" (from Bye Bye Birdie). Of course we all enjoy participating in this one as well! It takes a lot of stamina to work your way around a room of this size, especially while while singing. He always makes it look effortless as he enjoys every moment along with us.

Another song that I am glad to see back in this set is "The Impossible Dream" from Man Of La Mancha. JLY's arrangement and performance of this song is just the inspiration we all need in times like these, and I know I can personally relate to it as well. The emotion, combined with his powerful voice, will get you every time.

We finished the evening on our feet for "Sherry", and JLY had fun with all of us on this as well. This multi-faceted set is truly stunning, thrilling not only those of us who regularly attend shows, but also all of the new people who got to experience one of his performances for the first time, and couldn't say enough wonderful things about him. Here's to more performances here in the future - and to many more across the country and around the world, in both familiar and new venues. The world is gonna hear that voice...and I'm so happy that we are all a part of this journey!

[tahelms85]

Stole this from someone else on a tag.

A book recommended by a librarian Saint X by Alexis Schiatkin

A book that’s been on your TBR list for way too long Wicked by Gregory Maguire

A book of letters Mr. Men series by Roger Hargreaves

An audiobook The Otto Digmore Difference by Brent Hartinger

A book by a person of color Their Eyes Were Watching God by Toni Morrison

A book with one of the four seasons in the title Suddenly Last Summer and Other Plays by Tennessee Williams

A book that is a story within a story Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen

A book with multiple authors The Heist by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

An espionage thriller The Davinci Code by Dan Brown

A book with a cat on the cover Pet Sematary by Stephen King

A book by an author who uses a pseudonym The Regulators by Richard Bachman

A bestseller from a genre you don’t normally read Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shatterly

A book by or about a person who has a disability Deaf Utopia by Nyle DiMarco and Robert Siebert

A book involving travel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

A book with a subtitle Monster: The True Story of the Jeffrey Dahmer Murders by Anne E Schwartz

A book that’s published in 2017 Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

A book involving a mythical creature It by Stephen King

A book you’ve read before that never fails to make you smile Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

A book about food The Hundred Foot Journey by Richard C Morais

A book with career advice One For the Money by Janet Evanovich

A book from a nonhuman perspective The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

A steampunk novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

A book with a red spine Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by Harry Potter

A book set in the wilderness Call of the Wild by Jack London

A book you loved as a child The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone

A book by an author from a country you’ve never visited Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

A book with a title that’s a character’s name Coraline by Neil Gaiman

A novel set during wartime The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

A book with an unreliable narrator How's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones

A book with pictures Amelia Bedelia Means Business by Herman Parish

A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

A book about an interesting woman The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

A book set in two different time periods A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

A book with a month or day of the week in the title Mad Hatters and March Hares by Ellen Datlow

A book set in a hotel The Shining by Stephen King

A book written by someone you admire This Time Together by Carol Burnett

A book that’s becoming a movie in 2017 Berlin Syndrome by Melanie Joosten

A book set around a holiday other than Christmas Cupid Strikes…Three Times by Ajme Williams

The first book in a series you haven’t read before A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sara J Maas

A book you bought on a trip The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

ADVANCED: A book recommended by an author you love One For the Money by Janet Evanovich

A bestseller from 2016 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by JK Rowling, John Tiffany, and Jack Thorne

A book with a family-member term in the title A Child Called It by Dave Pelzer

A book that takes place over a character’s life span A Prayer For Owen Meaney by John Irving

A book about an immigrant or refugee We Were Dreamers by Simu Liu

A book from a genre/subgenre that you’ve never heard of Dungeons & Drag Queens by Emma Alice Johnson (bizarro fiction)

A book with an eccentric character A Series of Unfortunate Events by Daniel Handler

A book that’s more than 800 pages The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

A book you got from a used book sale Wicked by Gregory Maguire

A book that’s been mentioned in another book The Outsiders by SE Hinton

A book about a difficult topic Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (OCD)

A book based on mythology The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller