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Catharine MacKinnon speaks on the work of Andrea Dworkin

This speech was given by Catharine A. MacKinnon at the Andrea Dworkin Commemorative Conference, April 7, 2006. This original transcript was prepared by secondwaver (blog now defunct).

Andrea should have been here for this. She would have liked it, or most of it. [laughter in audience]

There’s something awful, in both senses, that is, terrible and awe-inspiring, both, about Andrea’s work having to be my topic, instead of my tool, speaking her words not only to further our work together as they were and we did, for over thirty years, but to speak about it, and about her, as a subject, and in the past tense.

Yet even at the same time, her clarity and her passion and her inspiration to all of us to go further, go deeper, flows through her words.

Her whole theory is amazingly present in each phrase that she used. As Blake saw a whole world in a grain of sand, in each of Andrea’s sentences you can see the whole world the way she saw it.

Andrea Dworkin was a theorist and a writer of genius, an unparalleled speaker and activist, a public intellectual of exceptional breadth and productivity. Her work embraced the last quarter of the twentieth century and spanned fiction, critical works of literature, political analysis in essays and speeches and books, and journalism. Her legacy includes a vivid example of the simultaneity of thinking and activism, and of art and politics. Formally, she was an Enlightenment philosopher, in that she believed in and used reason. She was interested in diginity and equality and morality, and, especially, in freedom. Her contribution as a complex humanist was to apply all of this to women, and that changed everything.

An original thinker and literary artist, Andrea saw society ordered by power and the status excrescences of its variations animated by the sexual. She pioneered understanding the social construction of sexuality, and the sexual construction of the social, long before academics dared touch this third rail of social life.

In talking about The Story of O, a book of S/M pornography, in her book, Woman Hating, she says, “The Story of O claims to define epistomologically what a woman is.” She saw O as “a book of astounding political significance.”

Largely overlooked as an intellectual in her own time, she mapped social life before the postmodernists did, finding fairy tales and pornography to be maps for women’s oppression. She wrote about humiliation and fear before study of the emotions was a big academic trend. She analyzed social meaning before hermeneutics really caught on in the scholarly world, asking what pornography means, as for example, in the preface to Pornography, “this is not a book about what should or should not be shown. It is a book about the meaning of what is being shown,” what intercourse means, to men and women, most of all, what freedom for women means.

Her first book, Woman Hating, she “wrote to find out why I am not free, and what I can do to become free.” In her later work, this emphasis on freedom was synthesized with a re-made equality, consistent with and necessary for that freedom.

Her cadences were rhythmic, her use of repetition gaining inevitability and momentum, her suddenly-shifting convergences and metaphors were telling, and often surprising, lyric and antic, fluid and explosive by turns.

Such was her skill as a writer that she gave us almost the experience of pornography without her writing–being–pornography. She could even make intercourse funny, writing of Norman O. Brown speaking of entering women “as if we were lobbies and elevators.” [laughter in audience]

And for undertaking a synchronic reading of her work as a whole and selecting some over-arching themes, I want to reflect for just a minute on what it means that we are here doing this.

The relation between the work and the life is not a new question. But the relation between who Andrea Dworkin was and how her work was socially received is. And it has, as some of us have noticed, shifted noticeably, even dramatically, since the death of her body.

Three months after she died, so unexpectedly, a prominent French political theorist in a Ph.D. exam that I was in, in Paris, referred to her, excoriating the poor student, for eliminating various notables from the bibliography, referred to her as “l’incomparable Andrea Dworkin”–this, in a country that has long refused even to translate her work!

How has the world related Andrea Dworkin’s body to her body of work? Why was it necessary to destroy her credibility and bury her work alive, only now to be resurrected, disinterred, as it were? Why can now she be taken seriously, respected, even read, now that her body is no longer here? Why this is the first conference ever to be held on her work is one side of the coin of the question of why there never was one when she was alive. Her work is as alive now as it ever was, as challenging, threatening, illuminating, inspiring. Maybe it is that she can no longer tell us that we’re wrong, but don’t bet on it. Or maybe if you engage her work while she’s alive you further her mission, and we can’t have that, now, can we?

But why was respecting her and taking her work seriously such a risk? Why were the people who did it considered brave? As the quintessential scholar of the hell of women’s embodiment in social space, Andrea’s relation to her work is posed by, as well as in, this conference. Her work guides us to pursue this question, I think, as one of stigma. Stigma is what has kept people from reading Andrea Dworkin’s work, especially in the academy, where, I must note, people are not noted for their courage. That stigma has been sexual, due to her public identification as a woman with women, including lesbian women, especially as a sexually abused woman publicly identified with sexually violated women–in particular, the raped and the prostituted among us.

Being marked by sexuality, is, in her analysis, the stigma of being female, analyzed by Andrea in greatest depth in Intercourse, a work of literary and political criticism, a work of how men imagine and construct sexual intercourse when they can have it any way they want it, as they can, in fiction. It is a work of criticism of literature, that is at the same time a trenchant and visionary work of social criticism, her most distorted, I would say, a signal honor in a crowded field, published in 1987, at, as John and I were saying, the height of her powers. Of Elma, in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke, she wrote: “This being marked by sexuality requires a cold capacity to use, and a pitiful vulnerability that comes from having been used, or a pitiful vulnerability that comes from something lost or unattainable, love, or innocence, or hope, or possibility. Being stigmatized by sex,” she wrote, “is being marked by its meaning, in a human life of loneliness and imperfection where some pain is indelible.”

If the stigma of being a woman is the stigma of the body sexually violated, it lessens some when you die. That, girls, is the good news! [laughter in audience] Before now, we have had to be kept from reading Andrea Dworkin’s work, and were, by the living, breathing existence of her sexualized body attached to it, thereby, that work was sexualized. We had to be kept from holding a violated woman’s body in our hands and having her speak to us what she knows. Especially, we had to be kept from knowing in-depth, up close, and personal, that for women, having a body means having a sexuality attributed to you, the sexuality, specifically, of being a sexual thing for use, and from knowing that the need to be fucked in order to see and value ourselves as female means living within a political system that is pervasive, cultural, organized, institutionalized, unnatural, and unnecessary. Cutting to the quick of all of this, with her customary conciseness, Andrea always said she would be rich and famous when she was dead.

Now, Andrea’s great subject is the status and treatment of women, as has been said, focusing on violence against women, as central to depriving women of freedom.

Andrea’s method was predicated on the lived, visceral body experience that women have of our social status. She mined her life, particularly, in her work, knowing what she wrote from experience. Her driving force was rage and outrage, unapologetic critique, unbridled, passionate, truth-telling. Her sensibility was tenderness, kindness, and love. Her aesthetic is political–political in method, that is, you know it’s true because it happened to you, political in voice–clear, direct, no writing for passive readers, as John noted, and no talking down to anyone.

In the rhythms you can feel her breathing. Here is a woman talking to a publisher who is trying to get her to have sex with him. Essentially, this is a woman being sexually harassed. It is from Ice and Fire.

“I want, I say, to be treated a certain way, I say, I want, I say, to be treated like a human being, I say, and he, weeping, calls my name and says, please, begging me in the silence, not to say another word, because his heart is tearing open, please, he says, calling my name. I want, I say, to be treated, I say, I want, I say, to be treated with respect, I say, as if, I say, I have, I say, a right, I say, to do what I want to do, I say, because, I say, I am smart, and I have written, and I am good, and I do good work, and I am a good writer, and I have published. And I want, I say, to be treated, I say, like someone, I say, like a human being, I say, who has done something. I say, like that, I say, not like a whore. Not like a whore, I say, not any more. And I say to him, seriously, some day I will die from this, just from this, just from being treated like a whore, nothing else. I will die from it and he says, dryly, with a certain self-evident truth on his side, you will probably die from pneumonia, actually.”

Her writing is new; this is a new voice in literature. It has new forms; it’s full of new ideas, in part because the reality she wrote, like her, was submerged and ignored. But she was interested in all the classical questions of western philosophy–method, reality, consciousness, meaning, freedom, equality, especially the relation of thought to world, and the connections between social order and human action.

She created new concepts: moral intelligence, scapegoat, woman hating, not quite the same as misogyny, gynocide, gave new meaning to the term possession. She was a profound moral philosopher, and she gave new juice to old concepts like dignity, honor, and cruelty.

But I’m going to do a reading now, today, of her as a political philosopher, a specifically intellectual reading of her work in terms of these questions. Which is not how she wrote it to be read, actually. But she certainly knew what she was doing in these terms. She did not use the word method, but she had one, and she knew it. She observed in her book Pornography: “Women have been taught, that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out, nevertheless, and so far, we have not fallen off.”

In the afterward of Woman Hating, she said this: “One can be excited about ideas, without changing at all. One can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without changing at all. People are willing to think about many things. What people refuse to do, or are not permitted to do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.” She knew thinking had a way, and that she had a way of thinking, and she wrote to change the way people thought.

Central to all her work was a metaphysical distinction between what she once termed truth and reality. While the system of gender polarity is real, it is not true.” The polarity of the sexes is a reality because reality is social. Equality of the sexes is true, but social reality is not based on it, but instead on a model that is not true, that is, that the sexes are bipolar, discrete, and opposite–some of us with little, tiny feet. For example, “we are living imprisoned inside a pernicious delusion, a delusion on which all reality, as we know it, is predicated.”

And, then, similarly, on the relation actually between sex and gender–not called that–but check it out: “Foot binding did not emphasize the differences between men and women, it created them, and they were then perpetuated in the name of morality.”

She also said we “need to destroy the phallic identity in men, and masochistic non-identity in women.” Now, it is not that she thought all reality was only an idea, as in classical idealism or only a psychology or an identity in the internal sense. She analyzed material reality and ideas as equally, and reciprocally, even circularly determinative. Of reality, she wrote this: “Men have asked over the centuries a question, that, in their hands, ironically, becomes abstract: ‘What is reality?’ They have written complicated volumes on this question. The woman who was a battered wife and has escaped knows the answer.” Philosophers, take note (is my note here): “Reality is when something is happening to you, and you know it, and can say it, and when you say it, other people understand what you mean and believe you. That is reality, and the battered wife, imprisoned alone in a nightmare that is happening to her has lost it, and can not find it anywhere. A fist in your face is not just the idea of a fist in your face. Reality is relational, and that relation is unequal and social.”

She also wrote explicitly of the relation between the ideational and the material in women’s status, without using specifically those words. That is, both have to be there, and both are there. In Right Wing Women, her 1978 book, the most extended analysis of women’s status and of feminism together, the elements and preconditions of both, she said this: “It does not matter whether prostitution is perceived as the surface condition, with pornography hidden in the deepest recesses of the psyche, or whether pornography is perceived as the surface condition, with prostitution being its wider, more important, hidden base, the largely unacknowledged sexual economic necessity of women. Each has to be understood as intrinsically part of the condition of women, pornography being what women are, prostitution being what women do, and the circle of crimes–these are the crimes against women, rape, battering, incest, and so on, that she discussed–being what women are for.”

The resulting “female metaphysics” under male dominance means that rape, battery, economic and reproductive exploitation “define the condition of women correctly, in accordance with what women are, and what women do,” correctly meaning consistently and accurately, within the existing system. She also said you can’t be a feminist and support any element of this model, including “so-called feminists who indulge in using the label but evading the substance.”

Her identification with women made her especially brilliant at seeing how women’s views are reflected in their material circumstances, hence, were rational, in that sense, including in her devastating portrayal of the academic, not-Andrea, so-called feminist woman who begins and ends Mercy, one of her novels, having been sexually abused, actually, this not-Andrea woman with the arch voice, siding with abstraction, with power, and with distance.

Right wing women, she shows in her book of the same name, also side with male power, because it is powerful, and reject feminism because women are powerless, in the hope, and on the bet, that male protection is a better deal than feminists’ resistance and struggle for change. It is, in that sense, a rational choice, meaning a direct reflection of their circumstances, which isn’t to say that it’s in their long-term interest.

She saw, always, how what women think and do makes sense in light of the realities of male power. As she put about right wing women, “the tragedy is that women so committed to survival can not recognize that they are committing suicide.”

The right–this is part of her deep analysis of religious fundamentalism–gives women form, shelter, safety, rules, and love. This complex and respecting analysis completely outdistances any analysis of false consciousness.

Similarly, in Intercourse, which I am going to have to discuss, this part, she wrote complexly of what it meant that Joan of Arc was a virgin. Probably not literally, she said, but because she carried herself with the dignity of the nonpenetrated, i.e. as a man, and her dressing as a man meant noncompliance with her inferior/female status, for which the Inquisition killed her. Joan wore men’s clothes, not to flout convention, or to make a statement about women’s status, or to portray dignity (performists take note), but because she’d been raped in prison. All she had to do was say–this is Joan–that she would not wear men’s clothes, and they would let her go free. Andrea says, “she was a woman who was raped and beaten and did not care if she died. That indifference is a consequence of rape, not transvestism.”

A new concept of ideology as sexual was proposed by Andrea in the book, Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Pornography is analyzed as male ideology, for its meaning and its dynamics. The concrete harms of pornography weren’t, then, its central topic. All the evidence of that was to come. But Andrea notes that “with the technologically advanced methods of graphic depiction, real women are required for the depiction, as such, to exist.”

In asking what it means, she said this: “the fact that pornography is widely believed to be sexual representations or depictions of sex emphasizes only that the valuation of women as low whores is widespread, and that the sexuality of women is perceived as low and whorish in itself. She says, “The fact that pornography is widely believed to be depictions of the erotic means only that the debasing of women is held to be the real pleasure of sex, and it also embodies and exploits, sells and promotes the idea that ‘female sexuality is dirty.’

So how do you go from seeing to being pornography, from buying a woman in pornography to owning her, from owning pictures of her to owning her, you might be wondering. She says this: “Male sexual domination is a material system with an ideology and a metaphysics. The metaphysics of male sexual domination is that women are whores. The sexual colonization of women’s bodies is a material reality.” This ideology is effectuated sexually, a level of belief and experience never before analyzed as political and gendered in the way she did.

Now on the subject of freedom, her core concern. She notes in her piece, “Violence against Women: It Breaks the Heart, Also the Bones,” “Our abuse has become a standard of freedom, the meaning of freedom, the requisite for freedom throughout much of the western world.” She goes on to say, “as to pornography, the uses of women in pornography are considered liberating.”

The subject of Intercourse, specifically, is what freedom means for women, precisely, how it is denied by the inferiority imposed and the occupation effected thereby, “destroying in women the will to political freedom, destroying the love of freedom itself,” when it takes place under conditions of force, fear, and inequality.

She says, ” to want freedom is to want not only what men have but also what men are. This is male identification as militance, not feminine submission. It is deviant, complex.” This becomes something she terms “the new virginity,” or what might be called the new freedom. “Believing that sex is freedom,” she says, intercourse needs blood, “to count as a sex act in a world excited by sadomasochism, bored by the dull thud-thud of the literal fuck. Blood-letting of sex, a so-called freedom, exercised in alienation, cruelty and despair, trivial and decadent, proud, foolish, liars, we are free.”

This analysis converged her thinking on equality, which underwent a progression over her life. In Our Blood, the piece renouncing sexual equality, she rejected equality, which she understood there as “exchanging the male role for the female role.” There was no freedom or justice in it, an accurate understanding of the mainstream view of equality. Over time, she reclaimed and redefined equality. In “Against the Male Flood” she said, “equality is a practice; it is an action; it is a way of life. Equality is what we want, and we are going to get it.”

To clarify the relation between her freedom and the equality that she redefined, she said this (this is again in her piece for the Irish women, “Violence Against Women: It Breaks the Heart, Also the Bones”)–check this out–: “What we want to win is called freedom or justice when those being systematically hurt are not women. We call it equality because our enemies are family.”

Even with family, Andrea took no prisoners, a paradoxical result of her passionate humanism. She says this in “I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” a talk to five hundred men in 1983: “Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It’s because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.”

Now, her legacy leaves us a lot to do. We can learn from the richness of her thirteen volumes, we can read her work closely, figure out how her writing was so singularly effective, and we can effectuate it. We can respond to the challenges of her questions, and be changed by her interventions and fearless probing of the structures and forces and people that rule our lives, denied by most people, a denial she also analyzed.

But in the academy, you know, whole theses could be written exploring sentences chosen virtually at random, that are ripe with possibilities, such as this: “any violation of a woman’s body can become sex for men. This is the essential truth of pornography.”

Or this: “in pornography, everything means something,” overwhelmingly ignored by massive departments of Media Studies and Communications, except for a tiny branch of largely social psychologists. Or this one, an analysis of social life in gendered terms: “Money is one instrument of male force. Poverty is humiliating, and, therefore, a feminizing experience.” Now, envision an economics where the laws of motion of sexuality socially are as well understood as the laws of motion of money are understood today, and the relation between the two of them.

Or this. Racism has always been central to her analysis, as it was in Pornography: “the sexualization of race within a racist system is a prime purpose and consequence of pornography.” And she talked about depicting women by sexualizing their skin, thus sexualizing the abuse, sexually devaluing black skin in racist America by perceiving it as a sex organ.

In Scapegoat she took this entire analysis to a whole deeper and higher level simultaneously showing what a gendered analysis of racism would look like in application. Try this: “While Nazism was a male event, Auschwitz might be called a female event, built on a primal antagonism to the bodies of women, an antagonism that included sadistic medical experiments.” In Scapegoat she also said this: “Hitler tried to make Jews as foul and expendible as prostitutes already were, as inhuman as prostitutes were already taken to be.” All of this can be taken up, unpacked, deeply considered, extended, gone further with.

Andrea wanted a day without rape. She said, “I want to experience just one day of real freedom before I die.” And that was the day without rape. She didn’t get it. She told the story of her own life in many ways in her work, over and over again. In one meditation, in Ice and Fire, turning over and over Kafka’s referring to coitis as “punishment for the happiness of being together,”–that’s a quote from him–Andrea writes this: “Coitis is punishment. I write down everything I know, over some years. I publish. I have become a feminist, not the fun kind. Coitis is punishment, I say. It is hard to publish. I am a feminist, not the fun kind. Life gets hard. Coitis is not the only punishment. I write. I love solitude. Or, slowly, I would die. I do not die.”

She wrote in Intercourse of her vision of all of our sexual lives, never, as always, excluding herself. In writing of the sex reformer Ellen Key’s consistent vision of sexuality for women, in the words of Ellen Key: “based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible,” one not based, in Andrea’s words, “on fear of force and the reality of inequality as now.” “A stream, herself,” Andrea wrote, “she would move over the earth, sensual and equal; especially, she will go her own way.”

“A stream herself.” Well, maybe a raging river at flood tide, perhaps, Andrea went her own way. She even wrote what might be her own epitaph: “I am whole, and I am flames. I burn. I die. From this light, later you will see. Mama, I made some light.”

Living without Andrea is living without this special light, the one she burned her life to make. Her incandescent mind never to illuminate another dark chasm or hard alley or guard tower of male supremacy. We are going to need a lot of what she wrote about, so long ago, at the end of Lesbian Pride, in Our Blood, seeing us walking into a terrible dark storm in which she said, “Those who are raped will see the darkness as they look up into the face of the rapist” in hunger and despair.

Love for women was what we need to remember, she said, that light within us that shines, that burns, no matter the darkness without which there is no tomorrow and was no yesterday. Quoting her now, she said, “That light is within us–constant, warm and healing. Remember it, sisters, in the dark times to come.”

Question and Answer Session with Catharine MacKinnon

Clare Chambers: Thank you very much for a wonderful, wonderful address. Does anyone have any questions or comments they would like to make?

Male voice #1: You touched on, I think, race in her work, which is rarely commented on. Do you understand the, I mean, there’s an invisibilization around a lot that she did, but I’ve often wondered why that, in particular, kind of dropped off the radar screen, in people’s reading of her. Don’t you understand it?

Catharine MacKinnon: Well, a lot of women of color know it’s there, and haven’t missed it, at all. I think it’s because it would give her credibility, that pigeon-holing her as just the woman who talks about women, as if racism isn’t about women, that that pigeon-holing, you know, confines her. You know, people think that things about women are “that’s just that stuff about women. Now let’s talk about freedom, or equality, or dignity, but this about women’s just that stuff.” And it would break down that isolation to recognize the central place that it always had in her work and the indivisibility of the analysis of male dominance and white supremacy in her work.

Female voice #1: You know that there’s all kinds of lies out there about how feminists never considered issues of race, and the women’s movement was a white women’s movement, and so on,

Catharine MacKinnon: As if all these women of color weren’t there making the women’s movement before Day One!

Female voice #1: Absolutely! Absolutely! It’s the most common attack on feminism, really, and then you go back, and look at Woman Hating, which is from 1974, there’s a huge section in there on race, and how feminism came from the struggles against racism in the US. It’s an enormously powerful section, the book was 1974! So it was written in the two years previous to that, so it gives the complete lie to these very serious and ridiculous accusations against feminism, so I ..

Catharine MacKinnon: But also, also, those accusations, which, you know, in part, are valid, for pointing out that an analysis of racism in the women’s movement in general, needs to be better, needs to go further, and so on. It also makes invisible all the women of color who are the backbone of that movement. In other words, it has this double way of being racist in itself. It’s like they weren’t even there! Like they aren’t even there.

Female voice #2: One of the things you made in your talk, let me speak to something that, I’ve been thinking about how to … (untelligible) … pull up, that you said that many of her individual sentences could be Ph.D. theses in themselves…

Catharine MacKinnon: Right.

Female voice #2: … that you could take the sentences and unpack them and go… I’ve often felt that, you know, Andrea Dworkin’s work is complex, it’s very detailed, it’s very nuanced, it’s very kind of packed with meaning, and I think one of the reasons, perhaps, why her work has often been misrepresented is that people haven’t been willing to read it with that kind of complexity, haven’t been willing to read it with that kind of seriousness that often people are willing to read the work of, you know, “great male theorists,” and that they have kind of been willing to just read it of very quickly and to see sentences which are hard to understand in a nuanced way–would you share that idea?

Catharine MacKinnon: I do! You know, people were told how to read Andrea Dworkin’s work, and have remarkably, on the whole, it strikes me, accepted that. They were told, you know, simplistic lies, about what it’s about, and including what our work together was about, and so that’s then what they see, people who should know better. And especially people who make their living by reading and writing about what they read, really should read what they write about.

Female voice #3: I wondered if you could say anything helpful about the way forward … look at the situation through Andrea Dworkin’s vision of it … you’re living it, we’re all living it, in different ways … You’re an academic, you work in the law, I’m an academic, I work in … we’re all in these different situations where … we’re put in these situtations where we have to compromise, … I don’t know … we don’t have to compromise … people like Andrea …

Catharine MacKinnon: Do you have tenure?

Female voice #3: Yes, I do.

Catharine MacKinnon: Ok, well …

Female voice #3: But I’m under a gagging order by my university …

Catharine MacKinnon: Pardon me?

Female voice #4:

I’m under a gagging order by my university … I may not say why … I’m in a kind of complicated position … but, you know, I’m constantly interacting with people who make my blood boil, and I’m sure there’s lots of people here who are as well, … I don’t know … or else you don’t say anything and it makes you crazier …

Catharine MacKinnon:

Well, you know, this may sound odd, but I don’t identify as an academic. I do work in the world, which includes, when I can financially afford to do it, thinking and writing, which I, myself, I did for twelve years with no job at all, I mean no real job, just one hitch to another, to another, kind of thing. You know it’s called unemployment, in the academic world and you know if the academic world finds value in it, looking on, while I’m addressing the world as a whole, that’s up to them. So that’s what I have to say about that. I think, too, that the way academia works is that younger people think that they will sell out now just a little bit in order to get tenure so that then can say something, which is why they wanted to be in academia in the first place and what happens is, that process destroys in you the very possibility of becoming the person who will have anything to say by the time that time comes.

Female voice #4:

I didn’t mean academia is in any way special, I don’t think it is, I just think it’s one way …

Catharine MacKinnon:

Indeed.

Female voice #4:

I take your point … compromise … the very thing you’re compromising to attain … I just wondered what the hell you do … that vision of the world is so dark … atrocity … and the experience of it … is there some some maneuver that we can make that doesn’t include having to do battle with men …

Catharine MacKinnon:

Well, I actually think it’s kind of important to, and indeed to, how to say it, I think one gets a lot of self-respect out of having integrity and that that gives you a kind of energy, it isn’t called doing battle with people around you all the time, it’s called not letting every atrocity just go by you. I think a tremendous amount of women’s energy in particular goes into denying atrocities to women, and I deal with them very directly, absolutely all the time, and you know people are always asking me, you know, how can you, like, do this, and I’m like, how can you, like, not? And I don’t mean that as a moral stand, I mean that as a stand of how much of your energy is going into denying what’s going on around you, how much of it is going into holding down, holding in, shutting up, squishing, compressing, flattening yourself inside yourself? You know, you get a tremendous amount of energy out of actually letting it in and flowing back with it, letting it go through you, and feeling what it really feels like, and being changed by it, and knowing what you know and saying it and finding ways to say it and push back against it and work around it and you get a tremendous amount of energy from actually — you know, Andrea once said to me, and it like shocked me totally, to death, I think she published it, that she, how’d she say, that she had recently come to think, it’s something she learned largely from me, she said, that women have a right to be effective. Now, I had never thought of it that way, you know, but I think that we do. Like, we live here, too. And that understanding that we have a right to occupy space and, you know, to speak out and to say what we see, and that that isn’t the same thing as doing battle all the time as if you’re just, you know, smashing your head against a brick wall. It’s actually engaging with the life of your own time, as opposed to acting like you weren’t even there. [applause]

Male voice #2:

I learned one thing from Andrea, that I attribute to Andrea, and I probably mangled it a little bit, and it’s not repeated, and I wouldn’t even be able know where to find it, maybe you could help me with this, that she said that biological superiority is the world’s most dangerous idea

Catharine MacKinnon, in unison: is the world’s most dangerous idea

Male voice #2:

Where is it?

Catharine MacKinnon:

It’s in Our Blood somewhere, it’s somewhere in Our Blood, I’m certain it is.

Male voice #2:

Yeah.

Catharine MacKinnon:

John, do you know where it is?

John Stoltenberg:

I think it might be on line, actually, it might be on line.

Catharine MacKinnon:

Yeah, look in Nikki’s website. You know Nikki’s website?

Other voices in the room:

Nikki Craft’s website. The website is on the postcard. … ironically, … I was the one, we were asked, I think, for favorite quotes, and that was one that I …

Catharine MacKinnon:

About the delusion of sexual polarity and …oh, no right … about biological determinism being the world’s most dangerous idea, yeah, see now, sociobiologists …

John Stoltenberg:

I don’t want to put you on the spot, and this might be a topic for a conversation, rather than a Q & A session, but since there are a lot of teachers, or people who teach here, and the one time Andrea taught was at the University of Minnesota, she co-taught with you, and I don’t know a lot about that time, because she was in Minneapolis and I was in New York…

Catharine MacKinnon:

And she missed you very much.

John Stoltenberg:

Ah. [pause] The question was,

Catharine MacKinnon:

I remember that.

John Stoltenberg:

what you learned while teaching together, about teaching. [pause]

I think that’s my question. I think I just want to know what it was.

Catharine MacKinnon:

Yeah. Well, one really major thing we learned was that we thought that we could teach a course on pornography, and, of course, you can’t teach on a subject that isn’t there, you know. I mean, in other words, it would be like teaching about a novel and not reading the novelist. So, and, indeed, sometimes, … one’s novels … but in any case, the way we organized it was: if I’m the court, here’s the pornography, and here’s the law on this pornography, which is usually just so way wacked out, beside the point–the second, of the first, you know, it’s highly instructive, so here’s the pornography, here’s the law on the pornography, here’s the pornography, here’s the law on the pornography, and we went all the way through, Playboy to Snuff, you know, and everything in between. And what we learned is that to say pornography violates women was not excessive, and it was not a metaphor. That, what was happening was that our students were in traumatic stress, on week-by-week basis, and, indeed, a couple of them had psychotic breaks, one when she … we actually had child pornography, and that was assigned, as well, and she, just in the way one of the children in the child pornography looked, or turned, or something, suddenly, she remembered having been sexually abused on a stage when she was a child, not too long before, and pornography had been made of her. Anyway, that was her … there were five or six people who had extremely serious psychological consequences from this, and the whole class was this cumulation of traumatic stress over the term and so we learned that we can’t, you can’t do what we thought you could do and we learned how much … that’s what we learned about teaching, was that you can’t do this, you know, unless you want to violate your students, and pornography violating women was not hyperbole. And it was not an approximation. And this was before there had been any real studies on the effects on women of consuming pornography, but the men were as messed up and harmed by it as the women. There were lots of men in that class, and that’s one thing we learned–that you can’t ever assume that you control the context more than the pornography does. That the pornography is its own context. That’s what we learned. You’re surrounded by critique! You’re surrounded by law! You’re surrounded by whatever, you know, but it is still going to do what it does. And it did it. We learned that. We also learned from the people who snuck in, who weren’t at the university, and just came in and sat in the back, and the people who were, that … first of all, that some of them, in particular, the .. I mean, Andrea had always known this, but we both learned it all over again, in a whole other way, that when people … first of all, that prostituted women know everything, and that if and when their visions can be brought out, and applied that whatever it is you need to know is something that they already know. And there were numbers of them, and that there’s something about the organizing potential of the issue of pornography in relation to prostitution that broke open in that class, and has gone forward, ever since. Now we learned that about teaching, as well, both in the university, and in a university within a city. And it also turned out, then, eventually to be a lot of the people who were our students who became the organizers for the ordinance that she and I ended up writing, out of the process of our teaching together. Just a couple things that occur to me.

Female voice #5:

… I’m a radical feminist .. (unintelligible). it is dark times, difficult times .. now … don’t by any means have the answer . (unintelligible) .. to go out to just talk to people we encounter . (unintelligible).. thank you so much …

Catharine MacKinnon:

Thank you. Andrea wanted respect for her work. And this conference has that. So thank you.

Clare Chambers:

If there aren’t any more questions at this point in the presentation, on which to end. We do have a drinks reception in the common room, to which you are all very, very welcome, and I hope you will. And let us end by thanking you all for coming, and thank you again, Catharine MacKinnon.

[applause]

#Resistance Strategy and Struggle #radical feminism

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robertreich · 2 years

Text

How to Get Teenagers to Read Important Books? Ban Them.

When I was a young teenager near the middle of the last century, I asked the high school librarian if I could borrow J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Why did I want to read it? she asked. I lied and told her my parents told me it was excellent literature.

The real reason I wanted to read The Catcher in the Rye was it had been banned from the library. I knew the librarian kept one copy behind her desk, and I was determined to get it. She reluctantly handed it to me. I read it voraciously.

There’s no better way to get a teenager to read a book than to ban it.

Which is why it was so clever of the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board to vote to remove Maus from its eighth grade curriculum. Maus is a Pulitzer-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that conveys the horrors of the Holocaust in cartoon form. The board cited “objectionable language” and nudity.

Before the board made its decision, teenagers in McMinn County probably weren’t particularly eager to read about the Holocaust, even in the form of a graphic novel. But now that Maus has been banned for objectionable language and nudity, I bet they’re wildly trading whatever threadbare copies they can get their hands on.

Since it was banned, half the teenagers in America seem to have bought Maus (or insisted their parents do). Two weeks ago, the book wasn’t even in the top 1,000 of Amazon’s bestseller list. Now it’s hovering around number 1.

Way to go, McMinn County school board! Get teenagers all over America excited to read about the Holocaust!

******

Btw, if you’d like my daily analyses, commentary, and drawings, please subscribe to my free newsletter: robertreich.substack.com

******

Even the McMinn County school board has been outdone by the Matanuska-Susitna school board in Palmer, Alaska, which presumably had a more serious problem on its hands than getting teenagers excited to read about the Holocaust. It couldn’t even get them to read the great novels of American literature.

So the Matanuska-Susitna school board voted 5 to 2 to ban Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Brilliant! I bet nearly every teenager in Palmer, Alaska is now deep into these books. They’re probably having intense discussions about them online late at night, away from their parents and other snooping adults. “Why do you think Ellison called himself ‘invisible?’” “How did Angelou come up with those amazing metaphors?” “Why did Daisy Buchanan reject Jay Gatsby?” “Wait! Gotta go! My parents are right outside my room! Call back in 20 minutes!”

The Great Gatsby was required reading when I went to high school. I admit I never read it. Had it been banned, I probably would have devoured it.

Beginning last fall, at least 16 school districts in a half-dozen states have demanded school libraries ban Out of Darkness. It’s a young adult novel about a love affair between two teenagers, a Mexican American girl and Black boy, set against the backdrop of the 1937 natural gas explosion at a New London, Texas plant that claimed nearly 300 lives. The book received lots of favorable reviews and literary rewards, but only a handful of teenagers read before it was banned. Now, it’s hot.

It’s the cleverest marketing strategy I’ve ever seen. Publishers must be clamoring to have school districts ban their books. (Why haven’t my books been banned, dammit?)

An influential group called “No Left Turn” is partly responsible. Just take a look at their website of books “used to spread radical and racist ideologies to students.” (Here's the link: https://www.noleftturn.us/exposing-books/) You can bet teenagers across America are now lining up to read them.

#book ban #book banning

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dwellordream · 3 years

Text

“...The letters, biographies, memoirs, and diaries that recorded Victorian women’s lives are essential sources for differentiating friendship, erotic obsession, and sexual partnership between women. The distinctions are subtle, for Victorians routinely used startlingly romantic language to describe how women felt about female friends and acquaintances. In her youth, Anne Thackeray (later Ritchie) recorded in an 1854 journal entry how she “fell in love with Miss Geraldine Mildmay” at one party and Lady Georgina Fullerton “won [her] heart” at another. In reminiscences written for her daughter in 1881, Augusta Becher (1830–1888) recalled a deep childhood love for a cousin a few years older than she was: “From my earliest recollections I adored her, following her and content to sit at her feet like a dog.”

At the other extreme of the life cycle, the seventy one-year-old Ann Gilbert (1782–1866), who cowrote the poem now known as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” appreciatively described “the latter years of . . . friendship” with her friend Mrs. Mackintosh as “the gathering of the last ripe figs, here and there, one on the topmost bough!” Gilbert used similar imagery in an 1861 poem she sent to another woman celebrating the endurance of a friendship begun in childhood: “As rose leaves in a china Jar / Breathe still of blooming seasons past, / E’en so, old women as they are / Still doth the young affection last.” Gilbert’s metaphors, drawn from the language of flowers and the repertoire of romantic poetry, asserted that friendship between women was as vital and fertile as the biological reproduction and female sexuality to which figures of fruitfulness commonly alluded.

Friendship was so pervasive in Victorian women’s life writing because middle-class Victorians treated friendship and family life as complementary. Close relationships between women that began when both were single often survived marriage and maternity. In the Memoir of Mary Lundie Duncan (1842) that Duncan’s mother wrote two years after her daughter’s early death at age twenty-five, the maternal biographer included many letters Duncan (1814–1840) wrote to friends, including one penned six weeks after the birth of her first child: “My beloved friend, do not think that I have been so long silent because all my love is centered in my new and most interesting charge. It is not so. My heart turns to you as it was ever wont to do, with deep and fond affection, and my love for my sweet babe makes me feel even more the value of your friendship.”

Men respected women’s friendships as a component of family life for wives and mothers. Charlotte Hanbury’s 1905 Life of her missionary sister Caroline Head included a letter that the Reverend Charles Fox wrote to Head in 1877, soon after the birth of her first child: “I want desperately to see you and that prodigy of a boy, and that perfection of a husband, and that well-tried and well-beloved sister-friend of yours, Emma Waithman.” Although Head and Waithman never combined households, their regular correspondence, extended visits, and frequent travels were sufficient for Fox to assign Waithman a socially legible status as an informal family member, a “sister-friend” listed immediately after Head’s son and husband.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf lamented that a woman born in the 1840s would not be able to report what she was “doing on the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875,” for “[n]othing remains of it all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about it.” Yet as an avid reader of Victorian life writing, Woolf had every reason to be aware that in the very British Library where her speaker researches her lecture, hundreds of autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and letters provided exhaustive records of what women did on almost every day of the nineteenth century.

One cannot fault Woolf excessively for having discounted Victorian women’s life writing, for even today few consult this corpus and no scholar of Victorian England has used it to explore the history of female friendship. Scholars of autobiography concentrate on a handful of works by exceptional women, and historians of gender and sexuality have drawn primarily on fiction, parliamentary reports, journalism, legal cases, and medical and scientific discourse, which emphasize disruption, disorder, scandal, infractions, and pathology. Life writing, by contrast, emphasized ordinariness and typicality, which is precisely what makes it a unique source for scholarship.

The term “life writing” refers to the heterogeneous array of published, privately printed, and unpublished diaries, correspondence, biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, reminiscences, and recollections that Victorians and their descendants had a prodigious appetite for reading and writing. Literary critics have noted the relative paucity of autobiographies by women that fulfill the aesthetic criteria of a coherent, self-conscious narrative focused on a strictly demarcated individual self. Women’s own words about their lives, however, are abundantly represented in the more capacious genre of life writing, defined as any text that narrates or documents a subject’s life.

The autobiographical requirement of a unified individual life story was irrelevant for Victorian life writing, a hybrid genre that freely combined multiple narrators and sources, and incorporated long extracts from a subject’s diaries, correspondence, and private papers alongside testimonials from friends and family members. A single text might blend the journal’s dailiness and immediacy and a letter’s short term retrospect with the long view of elderly writers reflecting on their lives, or the backward and forward glances of family members who had survived their subjects.

For example, Christabel Coleridge was the nominal author of Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (1903), but the text begins by reproducing an unpublished autobiographical essay Yonge wrote in 1877, intercalated with remarks by Coleridge. The sections of the Life written by Coleridge, conversely, consist of long extracts from Yonge’s letters that take up almost as much space as Coleridge’s own words. Coleridge undertook the biography out of personal friendship for Yonge, and its dialogic form mimics the structure of a social relationship conducted through conversation and correspondence.

The biographer was less an author than an editor who gathered and commented on a subject’s writings without generating an autonomous narrative of her life. Reticence was paradoxically characteristic of Victorian life writing, which was as defined by the drive to conceal life stories as it was indicative of a compulsion to transmit them. This was true of life writing by and about men as well as by and about women. The authors of biographies often did not name themselves directly. Instead they subsumed their identities into those of their subjects. Authors who knew their subjects intimately as children, spouses, or parents usually adopted a deliberately impersonal tone, avoiding the first person whenever possible.

In her anonymous biography of her daughter Mary Duncan, for example, Mary Lundie completely avoided writing in the first person and was sparing even with third-person references to herself as Duncan’s “surviving parent” or “her mother” (243, 297). The materials used in biographies and autobiographies were similarly discreet, and the diaries that formed the basis of much life writing revealed little about their authors’ lives. Victorian life writers who published diary excerpts valued them for their very failure to unveil mysteries, often praising the diarist’s “reserve” and hastening to explain that the diaries cited did “not pretend to reveal personal secrets.”

Although we now expect diaries to be private outpourings of a self confronting forbidden desires and confiding scandalous secrets, only a handful of authenticated Victorian diaries recorded sexual lives in any detail, and none can be called typical. Unrevealing diaries, on the other hand, were plentiful in an era when keeping a journal was common enough for printers to sell preprinted and preformatted diaries and locked diaries were unusual. Preformatted diaries adopted features of almanacs and account books, and journals synchronized personal life with the external rhythms of the clock, the calendar, and the household, not the unpredictable pulses of the heart.

Diaries were rarely meant for the diarist’s eyes alone, which explains why biographers had no compunction about publishing large portions of their subjects’ journals with no prefatory justifications. Girls and women read their diaries aloud to sisters or friends, and locked diaries were so uncommon that Ethel Smyth, born in 1858, still remembered sixty years later how her elders had disapproved when she started keeping a secret diary as a child. Some diarists even explicitly wrote for others, sharing their journals with readers in the present and addressing them to private and public audiences in the future. By the 1840s, published diaries had created a popular consciousness, and self-consciousness, about the diary form.

In 1856, at age fourteen, Louisa Knightley (1842–1913), later a conservative feminist philanthropist, began to keep journals “written with a view to publication” and modeled on works such as Fanny Burney’s diaries, published in 1842. When the working-class Edwin Waugh began to keep a diary in 1847, his first step was to paste into it newspaper clippings about how to keep a journal. One young girl included diary extracts in letters to her cousin in the 1840s. Princess Victoria was instructed in how to keep a daily journal by her beloved governess, Lehzen, and until Victoria became Queen, her mother inspected her diaries daily.

Diarists often wrote for prospective readers and selves, addressing journal entries to their children, writing annual summaries that assessed the previous year’s entries, or rereading and annotating a life’s worth of diaries in old age. Journals were a tool for monitoring spiritual progress on a daily basis and over the course of a lifetime. Diarists periodically reread their journals so that by comparing past acts with present outcomes they could improve themselves in the future. A Beloved Mother: Life of Hannah S. Allen. By Her Daughter (1884) excerpted a journal Allen (1813–1880) started in 1836 and then reread in 1876, when she dedicated it to her daughters: “To my dear girls, that they may see the way in which the Lord has led me.”

Far from being a repository of the most secret self, the diary was seen as a didactic legacy, one of the links in a family history’s chain. Victorian women’s diaries combined impersonality with lack of incident. Although Marian Bradley (1831–1910) wrote, “My diary is entirely a record of my inner life—the outer life is not varied. Quiet and pleasant but nothing worth recording occurs,” she in fact devoted hundreds of pages to recording an outer life that she accurately characterized as regular and predictable. Indeed, the stability and relentless routine that diaries labored to convey goes far to explain why Victorians were so eager to read the poetry that lyrically expressed spontaneous emotion and the novels that injected eventfulness and suspense into everyday life.

Diaries and novels had common origins in spiritual autobiography, and diaries played a dramatic role in Victorian fiction, but although diaries shared quotidian subjects and diurnal rhythms with novels, they were rarely novelistic. Most diarists produced chronicles that testified to a woman’s success in developing the discipline necessary to ensure that each day was much like the rest, and even travel diaries were filled not with impressions but descriptions similar to those found in guidebooks. When something unusually tumultuous took place, it often interrupted a woman’s daily writing and went unrecorded.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Friendship and the Play of the System.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

#victorian #history #sexuality #sharon marcus #between women

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hankwritten · 3 years

Text

The Weight of Other People’s Thoughts

Demoman/Soldier, 2k

Request for @lilythedragon05, Scotland

It was a bad idea to follow that tugging cord at the center of his being, the one that called him to Ullapool, and he never would have dared to entertain it if he knew it would have brought him here.

Jane sat by the ocean, stone’s throw from the town, but his distasteful frown kept his eyes locked firmly ahead instead of gazing dubiously at it. What had he been thinking? Coming to Ullapool had only make him feel worse, not better, a smirch against Tavish’s memory if there ever was one. Rubbing in Tavish’s face that he’d never go home again—and here Jane was, free to frolic across the whole damn planet, even if it took him to stupid countries ending in ‘land’.

He leaned further over his knees, barely feeling the sea breeze as he thought about his dead friend.

His murdered friend, he reminded himself. Murdered by someone who he thought he could trust, who now had to carry that guilt with him for the rest of his life.

Everywhere Jane looked it reminded him of Tavish. Maybe that’s why he’d come: self-flagellation. Appropriate punishment. Or maybe he was so desperate not to forget, he’d take the pain that came with remembering. Torturing himself truly, since he could look on the hills and surrounding coast that he had once only known through enthusiastic descriptions, see for himself the places where a young Tavish had played with dummy-grenades. He could imagine him talking to the local shopkeeps. He could practically see him walking up this very path, groceries in one hand, a newspaper filled with fried fish in the other as he took a large bite out of it-

Wait.

Tavish stopped dead, his face enveloped in utter shock. Still mid-chew, he said, “Jdra-ne?”

Jane leapt to his feet. “Apparition!” He pointed an accusing finger at the offending spirit. “Do not think for a second I will be cowed into repentance by the spectral manifestation of my guilt!”

Tavish nearly choked as he tried to swallow his bite of fish. “I…what?”

“Ghosts serve no purpose on my journey to recovery,” Jane continued. “Not even ones that look like my dead friend! Be gone creature of the other world!”

“What I- I’m not bloody dead.”

Jane squinted at him. He definitely didn’t look dead, totally opaque, no fettered chains representing his sins in life and his guilt over failing to help his fellow Man.

“…Are you sure?” Jane pressed.

“You’d think someone would know if they were dead,” Tavish grumbled poignantly, now glaring at Jane for some reason.

“I killed you though. It was-” -pickaxe right through the sternum, crushing, all the red bits coming out when they should have been in- “That was definitely fatal.”

“Aye, was, but I managed to limp my was back into Respawn range. Took a better part of an hour, but I made it.”

There was something odd to Tavish’s voice, something he wasn’t saying, but the realization that he might actually-seriously-really be alive was starting to set in and Jane was too afraid to believe it.

He took a step closer, past the bench he’d been enjoying his solitude at and completing a full circle around the Demoman. Tavish’s head followed him all the while, up until Jane came to a stop in front of him. “…Promise you are not a ghost?”

“I’m not a ghost,” Tavish said, as convincingly honest as he’d always been. Not that his acting skills hadn’t covered for his mendacity before-

-no, no that was a trick, it all turned out to be a lie a damn lie-

“Fine then. You’re not.” Though Jane would keep his eyes peeled for phantasmal anyway. “What the hell are you doing here then?”

“I live here,” Tavish huffed. “Gravel Wars are over, wasn’t going to spend the rest of my years in some blighted desert. Better question is what are you doing here, yank?”

Crap. Well, maybe a half-truth would suffice. “You always talked so much about Scotland I thought…” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.”

Tavish stood there, one hand still clasped around his groceries. The moment dragged on, vast seas of unsaid things between them, of regrets still festering, to which he ended with, “would you like me to show you around?”

Jane looked down, trying not to stare at his shoes but instead at the foreign soil around them. “…Sure. Why not.”

“Everything is incredibly vertical,” Jane complained as they climbed up yet another hill Tavish insisted was part of the journey.

“Aye, that’s why they call it the Highlands, BLU.”

Jane hated how fucking smug he sounded. Hated, and missed it all the same, missed how this bastard could set a fire in his gut just with one of his damn smiles.

“And there she is,” the Demoman said proudly as the crested the final ridge.

“Damn. Really went to crap in the last couple centuries.”

“Oi, don’t point fingers at me! I’ve only been around for forty of those.”

DeGroot Keep was shriveled and hunchbacked since Jane had last seen it, folding under its own legacy as ages had eaten the tallest spires first and chewed its way down to the cob. Still, he could just make out the choke points, the parapets, the places he used to go charging into with his mêlée weapon held high—all sanded down by the years, the vaguest memories of control points where a portal in time had briefly allowed Jane to witness their existence.

“So what,” he asked, following Tavish into the slight dip in the Highlands where the Keep nestled, “you live in here like some sort of anti-Italian?”

“An anti- what now?”

“Anti-Italians! Despises sun, allergic to garlic, doesn’t show up in mirrors, no sex life. Basic literary reference, RED.”

Tavish rolled his eye. “No, I’m not squatting in the dilapidated castle. Got a perfectly nice home down in the village, I just happen to have inherited this along with…all the other crap.” He waved his hand. “I’ve considered shelling out to having it restored but…dunno. Seeing it go from its heyday to this makes me think that in another couple hundred years it’ll just fall apart again.”

He sat on a piece of tumbled rock, one that used to hang over the Keep’s gate, a bright and shining keystone now used as a stool. Jane joined him.

“Don’t get much of this at home, do you? Old crap. Yer country’s still a wee babe you know, nothing’s even falling apart yet.”

“Incorrect!” Jane amended. “There are plenty of old things in America!”

“For last time lad, Thomas Edison wasn’t immortal, and he didn’t be build a second Shangri-La under Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Your statements reveal both your ignorance and your compunction, but I was actually talking about mounds.”

“Mounds,” Tavish repeated dubiously.

“Yes! Mounds! Fourteen hundred years ago Americans were building ceremonial mounds in order to track celestial events! They look like animals from the top, lynx, bears, fish, all that crap. I used to walk next to this bird one every day on the way to school.”

Tavish blinked at him, tilting his head. “No offense Jane, but including Native people usually isn’t in your worldview. Where’d you even learn all ‘o that?”

“My mother taught me, so think insinuating more cyclops—lest you show disrespect against her memory and I am forced to take out your other socket!”

Tavish raised his hands defensively, but there was a smile creeping at the corner. “Alright, alright, I get ye. A Mum’s honor is a serious thing.”

“Hm. Good.” Jane glanced ahead, suddenly afraid of lapsing back into silence, as though Tavish would start to slip away from him if they did. “How is your mother?”

“Ah…she passed some years back.”

“…I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s alright.” Tavish paused. “I still see her sometimes.”

“Metaphorically or…?”

Tavish glanced at him, but then away just a quickly, as though frightened of what he might see. “I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s alright with you.” Instead, he stared ahead, the sun setting between its cradle within the mountains. “Heh. At least there’s something that’s the same no matter where you go. Always a sunset.”

“Guess so.”

Still, Jane found he liked this one better than the ones back home. At least, better than all the ones he’d seen before he’d met Tavish.

The next day was spent in the village, and Jane couldn’t help but yearn for more of Tavish’s time, more of his attention. His friend. His friend who was still alive. Tavish had a kind word for every person they passed, all of whom didn’t seem to notice Jane at all, simply starting up a conversation with their fellow local and submitting to the rhythm of the morning. Breakfast was some sort of potato scone, but Jane wasn’t hungry, so he just walked beside Tavish as the other man ate. They found themselves at the same bench where they’d first run into each other.

“So,” Tavish asked. “Ullapool everything you thought it would be?”

“Hm. It’s…nice. It is obviously not perfect for geographical reasons entirely outside of its control, but. I understand how it made you the man you are.”

“Me? Nah.” Tavish wiped off his mouth with his sleeve. “I made myself like this.”

Again, he wouldn’t look at Jane, wouldn’t say what they were both thinking. That things had gone wrong, that they had both fucked up. One of them more than the other, but Jane had found him again, and maybe they could still figure something out, still have time to unearth all that they had deemed too dangerous and buried in the sand.

Jane reached forward, and put his hand over where Tavish’s was resting on the bench.

And watched it pass straight through.

Jane sprang away. “I knew it! I knew you were a ghost!”

Likewise, Tavish stood up sharply. “I am not. I bloody told you I was’t.”

“Liar! I will not be swayed by any more perjury from your ethereal mouth!”

“I’m not lying!” Tavish snarled at him, his eye dark and narrowed, burning hotter than the words would imply. “I never lied. I never wanted any of-”

“Blasphemy!”

“Would you just listen for-!”

“You cannot guilt me apparition! For I know that-”

“Shut up! Just fucking shut up!” Tavish’s fist closed around the neck of his scrumpy bottle, half drained before noon, and threw it full force at Jane’s head.

Jane raised an arm to block the incoming blow, but the impact never arrived. A second ticked by, then two, then three, and slowly he lowered his forearm to reveal the panting Demoman behind it, shoulders heaving and an inscrutable expression tearing across his features.

“How’s that for the truth you bleeding idiot,” he said.

Jane looked to Tavish, then rotated his neck slowly, staring at the bottle that had landed in the grass behind him. He blinked, willing what he was looking at to make sense, to suddenly disappear and go back to where things were a second ago. To believe he hadn’t seen that bottle connected with his own nose.

There was something he didn’t want to do, but he did it anyway, turning his gaze forward inch by agonizing inch, staring down at his own hands. Fully taking how translucent they were.

The moment shattered, Tavish tore his eye away. “Fuck. Fuck I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve…”

Jane was still looking at his hands. There was panic, deep and overwhelming rising within him, but there was no raised pulse to accompany it, no sweat on the back of his neck.

He lifted his chin to Tavish. “What? I don’t…”

“I didn’t die,” Tavish said thickly. “You did. I killed you and I walked off and you just bled out for who knows how long and-”

-the pickaxe but also a sword, just as deadly buried two feet into his chest and the man above him trying to shove it in a few extra inches, strangled screaming as it pushed deeper-

Jane hadn’t been paying attention to the last half of Tavish’s muttered confession. The Demoman was crying now, pawing furiously at his one lone eye as stared out valley below them, looking anywhere but at Jane as his sclera turned red.

“I’m sorry,” he sputtered. “Christ Jane I’m so fucking sorry. If you came to haunt me or whatever I just- I just want you to know that you can’t hate me more than I hate myself. That it’s been killing me every day since.”

He collapsed on the bench, curling away from Jane as he buried his face in his hands.

It could have been some sort of trick. A ghost bottle or…no Jane wouldn’t even try. He attempted to remember what flight he had come in on but couldn’t. He grasped for how many years since the Gravel Wars had ended, and couldn’t find the answer.

Jane was a ghost, yet everything still hurt as much as it had when he had lived. Immaterial, and he still so badly wanted to touch Tavish’s hand.

He sat on the bench next to him. “I didn’t come to make you feel bad, Tavish.”

“Then why did you come?” It sounded like it was meant to be venomous, but instead it only sounded empty—empty and wet with tears, like a plastic bag trampled into a puddle.

Jane looked down at his hands. His useless, ghost hands that he could still knit together. “I…I wanted to see you,” he said truthfully. “I missed you.”

Tavish looked at him, bleary-eyed. He whispered, “I missed you too. So damn much.”

“Whatever I was doing before, I missed you enough to come here. To someplace I thought you would be.”

A panicked jolt crossed Tavish’s face. “You’re not leaving, are you?” The same man who a moment ago thought Jane had come to smother him with guilt was despondent at the idea that Jane might go after all, that he wouldn’t get a chance to hurt himself with his own regret anymore.

“No, no not yet,” Jane said. He tried his best to wrap and arm around Tavish’s shoulder. The mortal shivered where their skin met.

“Okay,” Tavish said quietly. “Okay. Good. Thank you. I don’t think I can…When I saw you sitting up here I couldn’t believe it could be fore something good. That the only reason you’d want to haunt me would be because you hated me.”

“I don’t hate you.”

It was true. Even though he remembered now, remember lying there, thinking how they’d killed each other, Jane had only ever hated the man who’d believed the TV’s lies.

“I really did come because I was thinking of you. Missing you.” Jane paused. “Today was fun. I’m sure you have a lot of other places to show me, right private?”

“…Sure. Sure whatever you want.” Tavish wiped at his nose. “I’m sorry Jane.”

“It’s alright Tavish.” He held his head in the crook of Tavish’s neck. “I’m sorry too.”

#demosolly #boots n bombs #tf2 fanfiction

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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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I want to hear about gay knights. Please.

Ahaha. So this is me finally getting, post-holiday, to the subject that was immediately clamoured for, when I volunteered to discuss the historical accuracy of gay knights if someone requested it. It reminds me somewhat of when my venerable colleague @oldshrewsburyian volunteered to discuss lesbian nuns, and was immediately deluged by requests to do just that. In my opinion, gay knights and lesbian nuns are the mlm/wlw solidarity of the Middle Ages, even if the tedious constructionists would like to remind us that we can’t exactly use those terms for them. It also forces us to consider the construction of modern heterosexuality, our erroneous notions of it as hegemonically transhistorical, and the fact that behaviour we would consider “queer” (and therefore implicitly outside mainstream society) was not just mainstream, but central, valorized, and crucial to constructions of medieval manhood, if not without existential anxieties of its own. Because medieval societies were often organized around the chivalric class, i.e. the king and his knights, his ability to make war, and the cultural prestige and homosocial bonds of his retinue, if you were a knight, you were (increasingly as the medieval era went on) probably a person of some status. You had a consequential role to play in this world, and your identity was the subject of legal, literary, cultural, social, religious, and other influences. And a lot of that was also, let’s face it, what the 21st century would consider Kinda Gay.

The central bond in society, the glue that made it work, was the relationships between soldiers, battlefield brotherhoods, and the intense, self-sacrifical love for the other that is familiar to anyone who has ever watched a war movie, and dates back (in explicitly gay form, at least) to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Medieval society had a careful and contested interaction with this ideal and this kind of relationship between men. Because they needed it for the successful prosecution of military ventures, they held it up as the best kind of love, to which the love of a woman could never entirely aspire, but that also ran the risk of the possibility of it turning (homo)sexual. Same-sex sexual activity was well-known in the Middle Ages, the end, full stop. The use of penitentials, or confessors’ handbooks, as sources for views or practices of queer sexual behaviour has been criticised (you will swiftly find that almost EVERYTHING used as a source for queer history is criticised, shockingly), but there remains the fact that Burchard of Worms’ 11th-century Decretum, a vast compilation of canon law, mentions same-sex behaviour among its list of sins, but assigns it a comparatively light penance. (I don’t have the actual passage handy, but it’s a certain amount of days of fasting on bread and water.) It assigns much heavier penalties for Burchard’s main concern, which was sorcery and the practice of un-Christian beliefs, rituals, or other persistent holdovers from paganism. This is not to say that homosexuality was accepted, per se, but it was known about, it must have happened enough for priests to list in their handbooks of sins, and it wasn’t The End of The World. Frankly, I am tired of having to argue that queer people existed and engaged in queer activity in the Middle Ages (not directed at you, but in general). Of course they did. Obviously they did. Moving on!

Anyway. Returning to gay knights specifically, the fact remained that if you encouraged two dudes to love each other beyond all other bonds, they might, you know, actually bang. This was worrisome, especially in the twelfth century, as explored by Matthew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’ and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179-214 and 273-86. I have written a couple papers (in the ever-tedious process of one day being turned into journal articles) on the subject of the Extremely Queer Richard the Lionheart, some material of which can be found in my tag for him. Richard’s queerness has been argued over for a long time, we all throw rotten banana peels at John Gillingham who took it upon himself to deny, ignore, or minimize all the evidence, but anyway. Richard was a very masculine and powerful man and formidably talented soldier who could not be reduced to the stereotype of the effeminate, weak, or impotent sodomite, and the fact that he was a prince, a duke, and a king was probably why he was repeatedly able to get away with it. But he wasn’t alone, and he wasn’t the only one. He was very much part of his culture and time, even if he kept running into ecclesiastical reprisals for it. It happened. If you want a published discussion that covers some of my points (though not all of them), there is William E. Burgwinkle, ‘The Curious Case of Richard the Lionheart’, in Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050-1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 73–85. Also on the overall topic, Robert Mills, Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Peter the Chanter, a Parisian cleric, also wrote De vitio sodomitico, a chapter of his Verbum abbreviatum, fulminating against “men with men, women with women [masculi cum masculis […] mulieres cum mulieribus]” which apparently happened far too often for his liking in twelfth-century Paris (along with cross-dressing and other genderqueer behaviour; the Latin version of this can be found in ‘Verbum Abbreviatum: De vitio sodomitico’ in Patrologia Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: 1855), vol. 205, pp. 333–35). Moving into the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries, this bond only grew in importance, and involved a new kind of anxiety. Richard Zeikowitz’s book, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), explores this discourse in detail, and points out that the intensely homoerotic element of chivalry was deeply embedded in medieval culture – and that this was something that was not queer, i.e. unusual, to them. It is modern audiences who see this behaviour as somehow contravening our expected stereotypes of medieval knights as Ultra Manly No Homo Men. When we label this “medieval queerness,” we are also making a judgment about our own expectations, and the way in which we ourselves have normalized one narrow and rigid view of masculinity.

England then had two queer kings in the 14th century, Edward II and Richard II, both of whom ended up deposed. These were for other political reasons, but their queerness was not irrelevant to assessments of their character and the reactions of their contemporaries. Sylvia Federico (‘Queer Times: Richard II in the Poems and Chronicles of Late Fourteenth-Century England’, Medium Aevum 79 (2010), 25–46) has studied the corpus of queer-coded historical writing around Richard, and noted that while the Lancastrian propaganda postdating the usurpation of Henry IV in 1399 obviously had an intent to cast his predecessor in as unfit a light as possible, the accusations of queerness started during Richard’s reign, “well before any real practical design on the throne […] and well before the famous lapse into tyranny that characterized the reign’s last few years. In poems and chronicles produced from the mid-1380s to the early 1390s, and in language that is highly charged with homophobic references, Richard II is marked as unfit to rule”. E. Amanda McVitty (‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77) examined how the treason trials of high-status individuals centred on a symbolic deconstruction of his chivalric manhood, demoting and exiling him from the intricate homosocial networks that governed the creation and performance of medieval masculinity.

This appears to have been a fairly extensive phenomenon, and one not confined to the geopolitical space of England. Henric Bagerius and Christine Ekholst (‘Kings and Favourites: Politics and Sexuality in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of Medieval History 43 (2017), 298–319) traced the use of ‘discursive sodomy’ as a rhetorical tool employed against five late medieval monarchs, including Richard II and his great-grandfather Edward II, John II and Henry IV of Castile, and Magnus Eriksson of Sweden. In all cases, the ruler in question was viewed as emotionally and possibly sexually dependent on another man, subject to his evil counsels and treacherous wiles, and this reflected a communal anxiety that the body of the king himself – and thus the body politic – had been unacceptably queered. Nonetheless, as a divinely anointed figure and the head of state, the accusations of gender displacement or suspected sodomy could not be placed directly on the king, and were instead deflected onto the favourites themselves, generally characterised as greedy, grasping men of ignoble birth, who subverted both social and sexual order by their domination of the supposedly passive king.

None of this polemic produced by hostile sources can be read as direct confirmation of the private and physical actions of the kings behind closed doors, but in a sense, this is immaterial. The intimate lives of presumably heterosexual individuals are constructed on the same standards of evidence and to much greater certainty. In other words, queerness and queer/gay favourites could not have functioned as a textual metaphor or charged accusation if there was not some understanding of it as a lived behaviour. After all, if the practice did not physically exist or was not considered as a potential reality, there could have been no anxieties around the possibility of its improper prosecution.

This leads us nicely into the deeply vexed question of adelphopoiesis, or the “brother-making” ceremony argued by some, including John Boswell, as a medieval form of gay marriage. (Boswell, who died of AIDS in 1994, published the landmark Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980, and among other things, controversially argued that the medieval Catholic church was a vehicle for social acceptance of gay people.) Boswell’s critics have fiercely attacked this stance, claiming that the ceremony was only intended to join two men together in a celibate sibling-like relationship. A Straight Historian who participated in a modern version of the ceremony in 1985 actually argued that since she had no sexual inclinations or motives in taking part, clearly it was never used for that purpose by medieval men either. (Pause for sighing.)

The problem is: we can’t argue intentions or private actions either way. We can understand what the idealized and legal designation for the ceremony was intended to be, but we cannot then outrageously claim that every historical individual who took part in it did so for the party line reason. Maybe medieval men who joined together in brother-making ceremonies did live a celibate and saintly life (this would not be surprising). It seems ludicrous to argue, however, that none of them were romantically in love with each other, or that they never ever ever had sex, because surprise, formulaic documents and institutional guidelines cannot tell us anything about the actions of real individuals making complex choices. Even if this was not always a homosexual institution (and once again with the dangerous practice of equivocating queerness with explicitly practiced and “provable” sexual behaviour), it was beyond all reasonable doubt a homoromantic one, and one sanctioned and organised according to well-known medieval conventions, desires (for two men to live together and love each other above all) and anxieties (that they might then have sex).

The medieval men who took a ‘brother’ would probably not have seen it as a marriage, or as the kind of household formation or social contract implied in a heterosexual union, but as we have also discussed, the definition of marriage in the Middle Ages was under constant contestation anyway. The church was constantly anxious about knights: their violence, their (oftentimes) lack of religiosity, their proclivity for tournaments, swearing, drinking, and other immoral behaviour, the possibility of them having sexual affairs with each other and/or with women (though Andreas Capellanus, in De amore, wrote an entire spectacularly misogynistic handbook about how to have the right kind of love affair with a woman and dismissed same-sex relationships in one sentence as gross and unworthy, so he was clearly the No Homo Bro Knight of his day). So, as this has gotten long: gay knights were basically one of the central social, religious, and cultural concerns of the entire Middle Ages, due to their position in society, their necessity in a warlike culture, the social influence of chivalry and their tendency to bad behaviour, their perceived influence over the king (who they may also have given their Gay Cooties), their disregard of the church’s teachings, and the ever-present possibility that their love wasn’t celibate. So yes. Gay knights: Hella Historically Accurate.

The end.

#history #medieval history #queer history #gay knights #long post #i have a lot more to say but yes #the old guard meta #for reference #though this post was originally written in december 2019 #anonymous #ask

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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Doubting the Story of Exodus

By Teresa Watanabe Los Angeles Times religion writer April 13, 2001

It’s one of the greatest stories ever told: A baby is found in a basket adrift in the Egyptian Nile and is adopted into the pharaoh’s household. He grows up as Moses, rediscovers his roots and leads his enslaved Israelite brethren to freedom after God sends down 10 plagues against Egypt and parts the Red Sea to allow them to escape. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and, under the leadership of Joshua, conquer the land of Canaan to enter their promised land. For centuries, the biblical account of the Exodus has been revered as the founding story of the Jewish people, sacred scripture for three world religions and a universal symbol of freedom that has inspired liberation movements around the globe. But did the Exodus ever actually occur? On Passover last Sunday, Rabbi David Wolpe raised that provocative question before 2,200 faithful at Sinai Temple in Westwood. He minced no words. “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all,” Wolpe told his congregants. Wolpe’s startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua’s fabled military campaigns never occurred—archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible. Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan—modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel—whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites who took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt—explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges. “Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we’ve broken the news very gently,” said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America’s preeminent archeologists.

Dever’s view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but “no one would do that today,” he says. The old emphasis on trying to prove the Bible—often in excavations by amateur archeologists funded by religious groups—has given way to more objective professionals aiming to piece together the reality of ancient lifestyles. But the modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua’s conquests ever occurred. In the hottest controversy today, Herzog also argued that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described as grand and glorious in the Bible, was at best a small tribal kingdom. In a new book this year, “The Bible Unearthed,” Israeli archeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University and archeological journalist Neil Asher Silberman raised similar doubts and offered a new theory about the roots of the Exodus story. The authors argue that the story was written during the time of King Josia of Judah in the 7th century BC—600 years after the Exodus supposedly occurred in 1250 BC—as a political manifesto to unite Israelites against the rival Egyptian empire as both states sought to expand their territory. Dever argued that the Exodus story was produced for theological reasons: to give an origin and history to a people and distinguish them from others by claiming a divine destiny. Some scholars, of course, still maintain that the Exodus story is basically factual. Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research in Maryland, argued that the evidence falls into place if the story is dated back to 1450 BC. He said that indications of destruction around that time at Hazor, Jericho and a site he is excavating that he believes is the biblical city of Ai support accounts of Joshua’s conquests. He also cited the documented presence of “Asiatic” slaves in Egypt who could have been Israelites, and said they would not have left evidence of their wanderings because they were nomads with no material culture. But Wood said he can’t get his research published in serious archeological journals. “There’s a definite anti-Bible bias,” Wood said. The revisionist view, however, is not necessarily publicly popular. Herzog, Finklestein and others have been attacked for everything from faulty logic to pro-Palestinian political agendas that undermine Israel’s land claims. Dever, a former Protestant minister who converted to Judaism 12 years ago, says he gets “hissed and booed” when he speaks about the lack of evidence for the Exodus, and regularly receives letters and calls offering prayers or telling him he’s headed for hell.

At Sinai Temple, Sunday’s sermon—and a follow-up discussion at Monday’s service—provoked tremendous, and varied, response. Many praised Wolpe for his courage and vision. “It was the best sermon possible, because it is preparing the young generation to understand all the truth about religion,” said Eddia Mirharooni, a Beverly Hills fashion designer. A few said they were hurt—"I didn’t want to hear this,” one woman said—or even a bit angry. Others said the sermon did nothing to shake their faith that the Exodus story is true. “Science can always be proven wrong,” said Kalanit Benji, a UCLA undergraduate in psychobiology. Added Aman Massi, a 60-year-old Los Angeles businessman: “For sure it was true, 100%. If it were not true, how could we follow it for 3,300 years?” But most congregants, along with secular Jews and several rabbis interviewed, said that whether the Exodus is historically true or not is almost beside the point. The power of the sweeping epic lies in its profound and timeless message about freedom, they say. The story of liberation from bondage into a promised land has inspired the haunting spirituals of African American slaves, the emancipation and civil rights movements, Latin America’s liberation theology, peasant revolts in Germany, nationalist struggles in South Africa, the American Revolution, even Leninist politics, according to Michael Walzer in the book “Exodus and Revolution.” Many of Wolpe’s congregants said the story of the Exodus has been personally true for them even if the details are not factual: when they fled the Nazis during World War II, for instance, or, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Daniel Navid Rastein, an Encino medical professional, said he has always regarded the story as a metaphor for a greater truth: “We all have our own Egypts—we are prisoners of something, either alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, overeating. We have to use [the story] as a way to free ourselves from difficulty and make ourselves a better person.” Wolpe, Sinai Temple’s senior rabbi, said he decided to deliver the sermon to lead his congregation into a deeper understanding of their faith. On Sunday, he told his flock that questioning the Jewish people’s founding story could be justified for one reason alone: to honor the ancient rabbinical declaration that “You do not serve God if you do not seek truth.” “I think faith ought not rest on splitting seas,” Wolpe said in an interview. “For a Jew, it should rest on the wonder of God’s world, the marvel of the human soul and the miracle of this small people’s survival through the millennia.” Next year, the rabbi plans to teach a course on the Bible that he says will “pull no punches” in presenting the latest scholarship questioning the text’s historical basis. But he and others say that Judaism has also traditionally been more open to nonliteral interpretations of the text than, say, some conservative Christian traditions. “Among Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, there is a much greater willingness to see the Torah as an extended metaphor in which truth comes through story and law,” said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That’s when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University’s archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank. The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua’s conquests in the 13th century BC and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers. If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys’ final results were published three years ago. The settlement research marked the turning point in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed that Egypt’s voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 BC inscription did mention them in Canaan. Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries BC. Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of the pharaoh’s charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea. And some of the story’s features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at UC Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a “formulaic genre of catastrophe” found in other Near Eastern texts. Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. “People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections,” she said. “That wasn’t considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across.” Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would have meant there were a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, guarded by fortresses along the way. Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said “you’d have to be a bit crazy” to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a swift military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan. But Schiffman, chairman of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, still maintains that a significant number of Israelite slaves fled Egypt for Canaan. “I’m not arguing that archeology proves the Exodus,” he said. “I’m arguing that archeology allows you, in ambiguity, to reach whatever conclusion you want to.” Wood argued that the 600,000 figure was mistranslated and the real number amounted to a more plausible 20,000. He also said the early Israelite settlements and their similarity to Canaanite culture could be explained as the result of pastoralists with no material culture moving into a settled farming life and absorbing their neighbors’ pottery styles and other cultural forms. The scholarly consensus seems to be that the story is a brilliant mix of myth, cultural memories and kernels of historical truth. Perhaps, muses Hendel, a small group of Semites who escaped from Egypt became the “intellectual vanguard of a new nation that called itself Israel,” stressing social justice and freedom. Whatever the facts of the story, those core values have endured and inspired the world for more than three millenniums—and that, many say, is the point. “What are the Egypts I need to free myself from? How does the story inspire me in some way to work for the freedom of all?” asked Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades. “These are the things that matter—not whether we built the pyramids.”

Teresa Watanabe Teresa Watanabe covers education for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the Times in 1989, she has covered immigration, ethnic communities, religion, Pacific Rim business and served as Tokyo correspondent and bureau chief. She also covered Asia, national affairs and state government for the San Jose Mercury News and wrote editorials for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. A Seattle native, she graduated from USC in journalism and in East Asian languages and culture.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html

_____________________________

Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua – there is no evidence any of them ever lived

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

Unearthing the True Origins of the Bible   – interview with Dr. Andrew Henry

#Exodus #Moses

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gravitascivics · 3 years

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CARLYLE AND COLERIDGE

In the attempt to describe how Romanticism affected American political views in the early to mid-eighteen hundreds, this blog next looks at two British writers who had significant influence on those Americans. They were Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first is primarily remembered as an influential historian and essayist and the second as a poet.

Carlyle’s writing has been judged as reflecting a recurring balance between the Romantic thrust for both emotions, such as a love for freedom, and what was known to be historical and political fact. But within that general aim, he was drawn to the heroic struggle. This admiration for struggle, per se, seemed to take priority over any of the issues that such struggles represented.

In that, the “great man” seemed to be his main topic for analysis. One of his most famous pieces betrays this emphasis, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. That was a book that shared a series of lectures about how important heroic leadership was to history.[1] One can sense in Carlyle an anti-democratic bent and that his ideas – not necessarily his writings – lent to the march toward dictatorial leadership in the twentieth century.

Along with this level of hero-worshipping, he also promoted a nationalism. He is thought of as a strong protagonist of Anglo-Saxonism – Carlyle saw the Anglo-Saxon “race” as being superior to all others. “Thomas Carlyle was perhaps the first notable Englishman to enunciate a belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, and, as he told [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, among the members of this select race he counted the Americans.”[2]

Apparently, this sense of kinship, albeit reserved (Americans were seen as formless in their Saxon character), served to solidify whatever affinity he and Emerson shared. Carlyle’s nationalism had some complexity in that it ascribed a role to the Norman invaders of the eleventh century. The Normans added order to the English national structure in Carlyle’s thesis.

Added to his unfortunate – in that they were anti-democratic – views was his antisemitism. He refused to support the extension of the franchise to Jews in 1848. He argued that Jews were two-faced in seeking the vote when their true homeland was Palestine where they should go. Of course, he also expressed common stereotypical attributes to Jews, such as being excessively materialistic and using their wealth to lead to corrupt practices. To varying degrees, his thoughts and biases had their effects on those Americans who extended him credulity.

As for Coleridge, he is most known for his literary masterpieces. The titles, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are well entrenched in the British literary canon. He left readers a timeless instruction that when they are reading literature, to engage in a “suspension of disbelief.” Considered by current biographers as a bipolar person, he suffered from recurring physical challenges which originated with a serious case of rheumatic fever and other diseases as a child.

Unfortunately, during his time he was treated with laudanum which led to a lifelong addiction to opium. All of this, it is believed, set the stage for his constant suffering from anxiety and depression. This fits convincingly with his best-known metaphor, the albatross around the neck featured in the The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

He also knew and had an effect on Emerson, the American essayist. Along with many early supporters of the French Revolution who would eventually become a critic of that disruption. Eventually, he became politically a conservative more in the line of thoughts expressed by Edmund Burke. Today, he is credited with influencing John Stuart Mill. His political thinking centered on three themes. They are:

1. “The idea” or function of institutions as opposed to shortcomings being central to how institutions should be judged.[3]

2. Social stability or “Permanence” as Coleridge stated this concern in that what he emphasized was community and national education.[4]

3. British history depicted as organic, natural growth with an emphasis on common law as exemplifying this growth.[5]

In these studies, Coleridge took on an internal – inside the social matrix – vantage point instead of an external, unfamiliar, objective view.[6]

As one can see with these two British writers, Emerson, in America, takes on a central role in the popularization of Romantic sentiments. As in Europe, it was a many-sided belief system and highly individualistic although through various angles. Also mimicking the Romantics from across the ocean, Americans had intense levels of moral excitement, support for individualism, and the promotion for the importance of intuitive thinking or perception. They also adopted that Romantic attraction to nature as a source of goodness while seeing society as the source of corruption.

Within these broader themes, American Romantics sought a bit of freedom from strict religious dogma and practices as it reinvigorated their rebellious spirit from the previous generation. They tended to reject Calvinistic beliefs in predestination and a more liberalized view of what humans’ relationship to God should be.

For example, people could and should have less restrictive religious sanctions put on them. All of this was philosophically in tune with the transcendentalism the last posting reviewed. In that, reason is at least diminished, and intuitiveness enhanced. Also, customs and traditions came under scrutiny as their value was questioned relative to the more modern conditions of those days.

Generally, on the political front, Romanticism encouraged Americans to spur a level of concern for the poor and those considered oppressed. This was further emphasized by expounding ideals supporting freedom – extending to the relief of exploited people – and the promotion of social progress along equalitarian grounds. And here one finds its most pro-federation message. That is, it prized the federalist sense of civic responsibility for fellow-citizens and that was even extended, among many transcendentalists, to the slave population.

Now, this story is ready to focus on Emerson, the topic of the next posting. He was not the ideal Romantic, but he employed many of their assumptions. If he accomplished anything along Romantic lines, he gave definitional substance to individual integrity, a central concern of federation theory.

[1] Eric Bentley, The Cult of the Superman: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche, with Notes on Other Hero-Worshippers of Modern Times (London, UK: Robert Hale, 1969).

[2] Robert Frankel, Observing America: The Commentary of British Visitors to the United States, 1890-1950 (Studies in American Thought and Culture) (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 54.

[3] Andy Hamilton, “Coleridge, Mill, and Conservatism: Contemplation of an Idea,” in Coleridge and Contemplation, ed. by Peter Cheyne (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 143 (source did not have total pages).

[4] Alan Ryan, J S Mill (London, UK: Routledge, 1974).

[5] Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004).

[6] John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today (London, UK: Routledge, 2006).

#Thomas Carlyle #Samuel Taylor Coleridge #Transcendentalism #Romanticism #civics education #American history #social studies #federation theory

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fyeahhozier · 5 years

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The Irishman is deeper and darker than he's maybe been given credit for... but the geniality and swoon factor remain high.

Variety: Hozier Proves He’s a Career Artist in Gratifying Greek Show

At Hozier’s sold-out show at L.A.’s Greek Friday night, one of the first things you couldn’t help noticing on stage —because it’s still an anomaly — was that his eight-piece lineup was half-male, half-female. Knowing his penchant for socially conscious songs, his decrial of “the anthems of rape culture” in his lyrics, and a general female-friendliness to his appeal, it’s easy to figure this gender parity is a conscious one and think: That is soooo Hozier. Which it is … and so effective, too, like just about every choice he’s made so far in his short, charmed career. On the most practical level, if you can bring in that much female harmony while also getting ace players in the bargain, why wouldn’t you? But it also makes for a good visual emblem of some of the other dual energies Hozier is playing with in his music: darkness and enlightenment; romantic hero and cad; raw blues dude and slick pop hero. He’s got a lot more going on than just being an earnest do-gooder. (Although he does do good, earnestly.)

During Friday’s hour-and-three-quarters set, Hozier focused largely on material from this year’s sophomore album, “Wasteland, Baby!,” which sounded good enough on record but almost uniformly improved in the live experience. Sometimes the upgrade came from making full use of the multi-instrumentalists on hand. The first album’s “Angel of Small Death and the Codeine Scene” now had Hozier on guitar facing off against violinist Emily Kohavi, trading solos — and if it’s hard to hear an electric guitar/fiddle duel without automatically thinking “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” it was one of many welcome moments making use of the MVP skills of Kohavi, the newest addition to the band. Other times, the improvements on the album versions just had to do with Hozier allowing himself louder and gutsier guitar tones. He’s a bit like Prince, in that way — someone you’d happily listen to playing a very nasty-sounding six-string all night, although he has so many other stylistic fish to fry, which in this case means a still slightly greater emphasis on acoustic finger-picking.

For somebody who made his name on as forlorn but powerful an anthem as his 2014 breakout smash “Take Me to Church,” and who can milk that melodrama for all it’s worth, Hozier has a lot of other modes he can default to. He treads very lightly into the area of soul with songs like “Almost (Sweet Music),” the lyrics of which consist of either name-checking or alluding to some of the great jazz vocal classics of the 20th century, in an idiom that’s not so much jazzy itself as folk-R&B. You could almost cite it as the subtle kind of Memphis-swing thing Justin Timberlake should aspire to, if the tricky polyrhythm and oddly chopped up meters Hozier adds as wrinkles weren’t so un-replicable. Bringing up Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” as the night’s sole cover also established that early ‘70s era and sound as an influences he’d like to make perfectly clear. At the other extreme, this son of a blues musician can hard back to those roots so well, in noisy numbers like “Moment’s Silence (Common Tongue)” and the brand new “Jack Boot Jump,” that he could give the Black Keys a run for their money.

“Jack Boot Jump,” which is scheduled to go on an EP of completely fresh material that Hozier said he plans to put out before Christmas, was possibly the highlight of the night, even though — or because — it stripped his excellent band down to just him and longtime drummer Rory Doyle. Having earlier played the current album’s “Nina Cried Power,” which is maybe more of a tribute to other historic protest songs than one of its own, Hozier gave a lengthy introduction to “Jack Boot” indicating that he’s aware of the traps that come with the territory. “I do have some reservations about the words ‘protest song’ and ‘protest music,’” he admitted. “But if you’re familiar with an artist called Woody Guthrie, he wrote the evergreen anthem ‘Tear the Fascists’ down. I was kind of looking into songs in that sort of tradition, that singing out, and I was worried that this is 2019; it’s a very unsubtle way to approach songwriting.” But, he added, “it was a funny few weeks, with 70 people shot in Hong Kong and arrests obviously in Moscow; Chile now at the moment also. And I was thinking, forget about subtle art — what is not subtle is this murder of protesters, and what is not subtle is the jack boot coming down in Orwell’s picture of the future: ‘If you want to imagine the future, imagine a jack boot stomping on a human face forever,’ that chilling quote from ‘1984.’ Anyway, I was just thinking, yeah, f— it, it’s not subtle, but let’s do it.” His electric guitar proceeded to be a machine that kills fascists, and also just slayed as maybe the most rock ‘n’ roll thing he’s written. (Evidence of the new song on the web is scant, or should be, anyway, since he begged the audience “in good faith” not to film it.)

If there’s a knock people have on Hozier, it tends to be the sincerity thing. He’s a nice guy who’s finishing first, which doesn’t necessarily help him become an indie-rock darling or Pitchfork favorite. (Predictably, “Wasteland, Baby!” got a 4.8 rating there — that’s out of 10, not 5.) At the Greek, there was an almost wholesome feeling that would’ve been an immediate turnoff to anyone who insists on having their rock rough, starting with his graciousness in repeatedly naming the band members and repeatedly thanking his opening act (Madison Ryann Ward, a fetchingly husky-voiced Oklahoman filling in on this part of the tour for a laryngitis-stricken Freya Ridings). That extended to a sense of uplift in many of the songs that doesn’t always match the themes of the material. But then, there was the impossible good cheer and attractiveness of the young players, to match Hozier’s own; this is a group where everyone looks as if they could be in Taylor Swift’s band or actually looks like Taylor Swift. The swoon factor in Hozier’s appeal is undeniably high, and it’s safe to say no one left Griffith Park less smitten.

But ladies (and gentlemen), do be aware that Hozier has some dark-side moments that can almost make Leonard Cohen look like Stephen Bishop. The only time he really overtly accentuated that in concert was in introducing and playing the new album’s “No Plan,” a love song that is also an amiable statement of atheism in which Hozier reminds his beloved that the universe is going to collapse upon itself someday. This may be rather like the gambit in which the ‘50s boy gets the girl to make out with him in a fallout shelter, but in any case, Hozier didn’t stint on the end-of-all-things aspect of it, even putting up on screen behind the band a statement from astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack pointing out humankind’s and the galaxy’s ultimate fate. (“Honestly I never really imagined I’d end up being name-checked in a song for talking about how the universe is eventually going to fade out and die so this is all very exciting for me,” Mack tweeted in replay earlier in the year.) Suffice it to say that with that soulful a vintage ‘70s groove and that fuzz-tastic a guitar line, many babies will be conceived to the tune of “No Plan,” whether it foresees generational lines ending in a godless black hole or not.

Other Hozier songs reveal darker gets more estimable the more you dig into it. With its bird talk, “Shrike” sounds sweet enough, till you realize that a shrike is a kind of bird that impales its prey on thorns, which does add a rather bloody metaphoric undertone to what sounds like a reasonably pacifist breakup song. “Dinner & Diatribes,” meanwhile, is just deeply horny, not thorny. The most brooding song of the set, “Talk,” has verses where Hozier sings in lofty, literary terms about the romantic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, only to reveal in the chorus that he’s talking to this woman in such high-minded terms because he just wants to charm her into the sack. As a piece of writing, it’s hilarious, establishing a devilish side of Hozier it’s good to hear. As a piece of performance, it’s just sexy.

But as enriching as it is to realize Hozier has a healthy sense of humor in his writing, bad-boy wit is never going to be what you’re going to come away from a Hozier album or show with. The main part of Friday’s concert ended, as expected, with “Take Me to Church,” his outraged take on abuse and homophobia in the scandalized Catholic church — which just happens to be easily taken as a lusty hymn to sexuality. Following that, the large band returned to a stage that had now been decked out in some kind of ivy, as Hozier talked about his love for the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney (whose last words he has tattooed on his arm) and, “since I’ve come this far,” went ahead and recited his poem “Mint,” sharing his hero’s affection for the plant and its “tenacity for life.”

Tenacity is likely to be a buzzword, too, for Hozier, given his leaps and gains as a writer-performer and seeming level head atop his tree-top shoulders. Taller still of voice, musical dexterity and good will — and still just 29 — he’s somebody the swooners and even some cynics should feel good about settling in with for a very long Irish ride.

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ayearinfaith · 4 years

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𝗔 𝗬𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗵, 𝗗𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟮: 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻

Norse religion, also known as Norse mythology, Norse paganism, Heathenry, and other names, is the collection of mystic traditions, folklore, and other such cultural aspects of pre-Christian North Germanic people, the ancestral peoples of modern day Denmark (Faroe Islands included), Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.

𝗧𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗸𝘀, 𝗦𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶 𝗦𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗹𝘂𝘀𝗼𝗻

Though Scandinavia was among the last parts of Europe to be Christianized, becoming fully Christian around the 12th Century CE, we have precious little direct evidence of the native traditions. The Old Norse people did have written language, the runic Futhark, but lacked the robust literary tradition of the Greeks and Romans, instead preserving their traditions primarily orally. The very earliest attestation of Germanic religion comes from the Roman historian Tacitus in his 1st century CE book, the 𝘎𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘢. This book was likely compiled based on secondhand information about West Germanic peoples, and as such is not a great source for true Norse religion (or even that of the West Germans). It does give us the Roman interpretations of the Germanic gods, the same interpretation upon which the days are named in all Germanic languages, and as such we do know that by this time Germanic people were already worshiping a distinct pantheon from their sun-worshipping Indo-European ancestors (the Romans, by contrast, still worshiped the sky god Jupiter). Between then and the 13th century the record is sparse, the occasional runic inscription or placename, and a few off topic mentions in 11th century history books. The majority of what we now know as Norse mythology come from two sources, both from 13th century Iceland: the Eddas. The “Poetic” Edda is a collection of poetry compiled from several sources, primarily the 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘹 𝘙𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘶𝘴. Neither the Codex nor the additional poetry has a known author, though it is believed to be more or less authentic transcriptions of oral Icelandic folk (i.e. non-Christian) traditions. The “Prose” Edda is a composition by Snorri Sturluson, a prominent Icelandic lawspeaker, historian, poet, and very much a Christian. Snorri purpose in writing the 𝘌𝘥𝘥𝘢 was not to preserve Norse faith but to preserve Icelandic poetic traditions. Snorri believed that without the record of these old fables that the poetic kennings, metaphors, and common sayings would become incomprehensible to future generations. It is Snorri’s Eddic version of Norse mythology that most of us in the modern world have grown up knowing, Snorri’s Thor and Loki that became re-imagined as comic book icons. We do not know how much of his work was authentic, Christianized, or simply made up to fit his fancy, but there is reason to believe a mix of all three. Both Edda’s, and in fact most of the sources listed here, would remain largely unknown and some almost lost until the era or European Romanticism and the “Viking Revival” in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was the culmination of several factors: advances in printing press technology made the spread of books much wider than in prior centuries, the translation of the Eddas into Latin (at the time still the most widespread language of literature in Europe), and a sudden surge of interest in pre-Christian Europe. While this enabled Norse myths to become the pop-culture fixture it is, it also means most “common knowledge” on the subject comes through the lens of enthusiastic but often inaccurate imaginings of what Norse religion was like.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗡𝗼𝗿𝘀𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲

Distinctive Germanic faith, at least the version we are familiar with today, probably emerged in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE. We know from linguistic evidence that the familiar figures of Odin, Thor, and others were prominent before the splintering of the Common Germanic language into Western, Northern, and Eastern varieties between the 1st and 3rd century CE. Norse people probably did not think of themselves as having a religion in the Western sense. Instead, they would have viewed their faith in a way quite similar to how many modern Japanese people do with Shinto: their rituals and tales weren’t so much a faith as simply a culture, a definitive feature of Norse-ness and not necessarily incompatible with or exclusionary to other beliefs. This is part of why we have little record; with no centralized houses of worship or canonic texts there was little pressing need for much else than the bardic oral tradition. We do know that Thor has always been popular, from Denmark to Iceland, as his name is a common element in places and personal names and the symbol of his hammer, Mjolnir, is common. Sacrifice was definitely practiced, both of animals and humans. Most attestations we have of ritual human sacrifice come from Christian origins with a clear political agenda, so the specifics can only be guessed at, but archaeological and linguistic evidence definitely supports that it happened. We know that goddesses and other female spirits were important in both North and Western Germanic faith, but the male written histories and male written 𝘌𝘥𝘥𝘢 have largely doomed them to obscurity. The number 3, and by extension 9 (3 squared), were auspicious and came up often, for example gods are often depicted in 3’s and the cosmos was divided into 9 realms. A unique feature of the Norse tradition is the separation of the gods into two rival and eventually allied clans; the Æsir and Vanir. Some historians have theorized that this developed from an ancient memory of migration and conflict, a position that feeds into linguistic theories that Germanic languages were effected by a now extinct non-Indo-European language. The word “Æsir” has been shown to be related to the Hindi word “Asura”, an antagonistic class of gods often equated with Greek Titans. Another peculiarity of Norse religion is the position of Thor in the divine hierarchy. Thor has brothers across the Indo-European spectrum: the Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Slavic Perun, and Hindu Indra. All these gods wield lightning and storms, are very popular in their traditional homelands, and fight with serpents or dragons. All of them, except Thor, are also kings among their kind. The Norse uniquely have demoted their storm god below a “new” king, the enigmatic Odin. Norse rituals typically were outdoor affairs and associated with certain features of the landscape. This may be the origin of the term “heathen” which is itself derived from “heath” meaning an open patch of land, though it may also have been coined to parallel the Latin derived “pagan”, which originally simply meant “rural”.

𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻

Starting with the aforementioned Romantic “Viking Revival” new traditions of faith in the gods of the Old Norse have risen and fallen. Many of these early movements did not start in Scandinavia but nearby Germany and England, where they were often hand in hand with unfortunate conceptions of Germanic racial supremacy. The Nazi’s, though very much Christian, were keen to adopt many Norse symbols that had been popularized by these movements, most of which collapsed with the Nazi regime. To this day the community of “Germanic Neopagans” are deeply divided on the issue of racism. The term “Heathenry” is more commonly used by non-racist organizations, as it contains no explicit relation to German-ness. Racist organizations are more likely to use such explicit language, and especially enjoy use of the word “folk” (either in English or another Germanic language) and terms similar to “Odinism”. The movements also often struggle with sexism and homophobia, an unfortunate side-effect of the perceive hypermasculinity that is more a result of male romantic idealism than actual Norse culture. One of the larger, less problematic, and more well-known organizations is the Ásatrú, originating in Iceland. The name is literally “Æsir-true”, in the sense of loyalty or allegiance to the Æsir, though the practitioners do venerate spirits and divinities outside of the Æsir as well. Few practitioners, even more organized ones like Ásatrú, have an established dogma or set of canon practices. Similar to the ancestors they emulate, they generally believe that learning, telling, and thinking about legends and taking part in rituals are sufficient guidelines for the practitioner to find their own spiritual and ethical path.

Image Credit: Viking Age (8th-11th century) Runestone G 181 from Gotland, Sweden

#A Year in Faith #Norse Religion #Norse Mythology #Religion #Mythology #day 22

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chiseler · 4 years

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The Crowd Doesn’t Just Roar, It Thinks: Warner Bros.’ All-Talking Revolution

“Iconic” is a gassy word for a masterwork of unquestioned approval. But it also describes compositions that actually resemble icons in their form and function, “stiff” by inviolate standards embodied in, say, Howard Hawks characters moving fluidly in and out of the frame. Whenever I watch William A. Wellman’s 1933 talkie Wild Boys of the Road, these standards—themselves rigid and unhelpful to understanding—fall away. An entire canonical order based on naturalism withers.

To summon reality vivid enough for the 1930s—during which 250,000 minors left home in hopeless pursuit of the job that wasn’t—Wellman inserts whispering quietude between explosions, cesuras that seem to last aeons. The film’s gestating silences dominate the rather intrusive New Deal evangelism imposed by executive order from the studio. Amid Warner Bros.’ ballyhooing of a freshly-minted American president, they were unconsciously embracing the wrecking-ball approach to a failed capitalist system. That is, when talkies dream, FDR don’t rate. However, Marxist revolution finds its American icon in Wild Boys’ sixteen-year-old actor Frankie Darro, whose cap becomes a rude little halo, a diminutive lad goaded into class war by a chance encounter with a homeless man.

“You got an army, ain’t ya?” In the split second before Darro’s “Tommy” realizes the import of these words, the Great Depression flashes before his eyes, and ours. No conspicuous montage—just a fixed image of pain. Until suddenly a collective lurch transmutes job-seeking kids into a polity that knows the enemy’s various guises: railroad detectives, police, galled citizens nosing out scapegoats. Wellman’s crowd scenes are, in effect, tableaux congealing into lucent versions of the real thing. The miracle he performs is a painterly one: he abstracts and pares down in order to create realism.

Wellman has a way of organizing people into palpable units, expressing one big emotional truth, then detonating all that potential energy. In his assured directorial hands, Wild Boys of the Road sustains powerful rhythmic flux. And yet, other abstractions, the kind life throws at us willy-nilly, only make sense if we trust our instinctive hunches (David Lynch says typically brilliant, and typically cryptic, things on this subject).

I’m thinking of iconography that invites associations beyond familiar theories, which, in one way or another, try to give movies syntax and rely too heavily on literary ideas like “authorship.” Nobody can corner the market on semantic icons and run up the price. My favorite hot second in Wild Boys of the Road is when young Sidney Miller spits “Chazzer!” (“Pig!”) at a cop. Even the industrial majesty of Warner Bros. will never monopolize chutzpah. The studio does, however, vaunt its own version of socialism, whether consciously or not, in concrete cinematic terms: here, the crowd becomes dramaturgy, a conscious and ethical mass pushing itself into the foreground of working-class poetics. The crowd doesn’t just roar, it thinks. Miller’s volcanic cri de coeur erupts from the collective understanding that capitalism’s gendarmes are out to get us.

Wellman’s Heroes for Sale, hitting screens the same year as Wild Boys, 1933, further advances an endless catalogue of meaning for which no words yet exist. We’re left (fumblingly and woefully after the fact) to describe a rupture. Has the studio system gone stark raving bananas?! Once again, the film’s ostensible agenda is to promote Roosevelt’s economic plan; and, once again, a radical alternative rears its head.

Wellman’s aesthetic constitutes a Dramaturgy of the Crowd. His compositions couldn’t be simpler. I’m reminded of the “grape cluster” method used by anonymous Medieval artists, in which the heads of individual figures seem to emerge from a single shared body, a highly simplified and spiritual mode of constructing space that Arnold Hauser attributes to less bourgeoise societies.

If the mythos of FDR, the man who transformed capitalism, is just that, a story we Americans tell ourselves, then Heroes for Sale represents another kind of storytelling: one firmly rooted to the soiled experience of the period. Amid portrayals of a nation on the skids—thuggish cops, corrupt bankers, and bone-weary war vets (slogging through more rain and mud than they’d ever encountered on the battlefield)—one rather pointed reference to America’s New Deal drags itself from out of the grime. “It’s just common horse sense,” claims a small voice. Will national leadership ever find another spokesman as convincing as the great Richard Barthelmess, that half-whispered deadpan amplified by a fledgling technology, the Vitaphone? After enduring shrapnel to the spine, dependency on morphine, plus a prison stretch, his character Tom Holmes channels the country’s pain; and his catalog of personal miseries—including the sudden death of his young wife—qualifies him as the voice of wisdom when he explains, “It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick 120 million people.” How did Barthelmess—owner of the flattest murmur in Talking Pictures, a far distance from the gilded oratory of Franklin Roosevelt, manage to sell this shiny chunk of New Deal propaganda?

How did he take the film’s almost-crass reduction of America’s economic cataclysm, that metaphorical sock on the jaw, and make it sound reasonable? Barthelmess was 37 when he made Heroes for Sale; an aging juvenile who less than a decade earlier had been one of Hollywood’s biggest box-office titans. But no matter how smoothly he seemed to have survived the transition, his would always be a screen presence more redolent of the just-passed Silent-era than the strange new world of synchronized sound. And yet, through a delivery rich with nuance for generous listeners and a glum piquancy for everyone else, deeply informed by an awareness of his own fading stardom, his slightly unsettling air of a man jousting with ghosts lends tremendous force to the New Deal line. It echoes and resolves itself in the viewer’s consciousness precisely because it is so eerily plainspoken, as if by some half-grinning somnambulist ordering a ham on rye. Through it we are in the presence of a living compound myth, a crisp monotone that brims with vacillating waves of hope and despair.

Tom is “The Dirty Thirties.” A symbolic figure looming bigger than government promises, towering over Capitalism itself, he’s reduced to just another soldier-cum-hobo by the film’s final reel, having relinquished a small fortune to feed thousands before inevitably going “on the bum.” If he emits wretchedness and self-abnegation, it’s because Tom was originally intended to be an overt stand-in for Jesus Christ—a not-so-gentle savior who attends I.W.W. meetings and participates in the Bonus March, even hurling a riotous brick at the police. These strident scenes, along with “heretical” references to the Nazarene, were ultimately dropped; and yet the explosive political messages remain.

More than anything, these key works in the filmography of William A. Wellman present their viewers with competing visions of freedom; a choice, if you will. One can best be described as a fanciful, yet highly addictive dream of personal comfort — the American Century's corrupted fantasy of escape from toil, tranquility, and a material luxury handed down from the then-dying principalities of Western Europe — on gaudy, if still wondrous, display within the vast corpus of Hollywood's Great Depression wish-list movies. The other is rarely acknowledged, let alone essayed, in American Cinema. There are, as always, reasons for this. It is elusive and ever-inspiring; too primal to be called revolutionary. It is a vision of existential freedom made flesh; being unmoored without being alienated; the idea of personal liberation, not as license to indulge, but as a passport to enter the unending, collective struggle to remake human society into a society fit for human beings.

In one of the boldest examples of this period in American film, the latter vision would manifest itself as a morality play populated by kings and queens of the Commonweal— a creature of the Tammany wilderness, an anarchist nurse, and a gaggle of feral street punks (Dead End Kids before there was a 'Dead End'). Released on June 24, 1933, Archie L. Mayo's The Mayor of Hell stood, not as a standard entry in Warner Bros.’ Social Consciousness ledger, but as an untamed rejoinder to cratering national grief.

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to R.J. Lambert

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tolstoys-nemesis · 5 years

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Funsize list of literary classics :)

Hey so this is just going to be a very brief list of classics I've read and really enjoyed. Please do bear in mind that I've only read a handful of all the books out there so don't get upset if you don't find your favourite classic or whatever, this is intended to be a very short rec list for people who don't really like classics/want to get into classic literature but don't know where to start. This is probably going to be very basic, but uh, sue me!

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen Premise: The novel follows Elizabeth Bennet, a young woman, second-born of a family of five daughters. Her older sister, Jane, meets a man named Mr Bingley and the two of them fall in love. Bingley has a friend, Mr Darcy, who is remarkably haughty and inconsiderate. One day Bingley leaves town for no apparent reason. Cool stuff: Austen is peak feminist literature. Lots of female characters, amazing friendships, huge diversity in their personalities. Very nice and cosy, the book does have a plot and some conflict, but the stakes are quite low which allows for a peaceful read. Not-so-cool stuff: Ok so this might just be me, but I read the book and listened to the audiobook at the same time, and I found that a lot of the spelling was archaic, causing me to be quite reliant on the audio to fully grasp what was being said. But don't get me wrong, P&P is easier to understand than #3 on the list.

2. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens Premise: We meet the main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, on Christmas Eve. He's a greedy man who thinks socialism is a plague and is generally terrible. Later that evening, the ghost of his long-dead business partner comes to him and tells him that he must get his act together, lest he should be condemned to eternal damnation. That night, he is visited by three spirits, the first one takes him back to his youth, the second one shows him the horrors that he is passively contributing to, and the third one shows him what will become of him if he doesn't change his ways. Cool stuff: A Christmas Carol is essentially baby Dickens. The tone is ludicrously light for Dickens, and the book is very short (my copy is like 130 pages), so you can absolutely sit down one afternoon in December and read it in one sitting!!). The story is super famous so you already know what you're getting into, so the prose won't get in the way of your understanding of the text. Speaking of which. . . Not-so-cool stuff: ACC may be Dickens' most accessible book, but the style is still very, well, Dickens.

3. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens Premise: Oliver Twist is an orphan brought up in a workhouse in the first half of the 19th century (read, under inhumane conditions). One day, he is drafted by his friends to ask the quartermaster for more food. This goes over quite poorly indeed and Oliver is sent away to learn a trade away from the workhouse. Things go from bad to worse, and we follow Oliver on his journey from the English countryside to the slums of London to his long-lost family. Cool stuff: While Oliver Twist is a famous story, a lot of people don't know the specifics of the plot, and trust me, they're iconic. You catch feelings (both good and bad) for the characters, and honestly it's just so aesthetic I'm- Not-so-cool stuff: Right so there's the obvious factor of Dickens' notoriously pompous prose, but that's still very superficial. On a more serious note, anti-semitism. It's there. Dickens toned it down himself after it was pointed out to him, but it's still uncomfortable. There's also a lot of abuse, both physical and emotional, and uh,,, femicide happens, so if those are things which are sensitive issues for you, you might want to skip on that one? idk, I'm not the boss of you.

4. The World's Wife, Carol Ann Duffy Premise: Is it too early to regard Duffy as a Classic author? What's that I can't hear you over the sound of my love for her! Right so uh this is a collection of poems published in 1999, which focuses on the women behind great men (kinda? that's the most general summary I can give of it?) or bends great men's gender and gives their point of view on the events their Great Man are famous for. Cool stuff: Women loving woman writes about women. It's amazing. Not-so-cool stuff: it's very sexually explicit? yeah that's it.

5. The Last Day of a Condemned Man (Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné), Victor Hugo Premise: Ok so most of the book is actually in the preface, an essay attacking the death penalty. (there's also a play in there for some reason?? I don't think all editions have the play but mine did and it was very confusing? I think the play is a satire of the society Hugo lived in, but yeah, quite odd). The actual narrative is more of an emotional complement to the very rational preface than anything and omg it's brilliant. Anyhow, the story follows an unnamed man, sentenced to death for an unknown crime (note: this is a far more solid way to advocate against the death penalty than your average "sOmEtiMeS iNnOcEnT pEoPLe aRe WrOnGLy aCcUsEd aNd eXeCuTeD", because that doesn't actually address what's really wrong about the death penalty) from about 6 weeks before his set execution date to moments before he meets the guillotine. Cool stuff: ok so if you're into activism, this is really an amazing book. It's short, can easily be read in one afternoon. Not-so-cool stuff: it's a bummer. You don't want to read that if you're going through some shit, you will make your existential crisis worse.

6. Animal Farm, George Orwell Premise: Do you know about communism and the USSR? Congratulations, you know about Animal Farm! Soviet leaders are pigs, soldiers are dogs, all the other animals are regular citizens. Men are aristocrats. If you like thinly veiled metaphors for autocratic regimes, but 1984 was too icky for you, this is the one! Cool stuff: Short and sweet, can be read in one afternoon. Gets you thinking but doesn't entirely rob you of your will to live. Not-so-cool stuff: Allegories can get very annoying in very little time.

7. Froth on the Daydream/Mood Indigo (L'Ecume des Jours), Boris Vian Premise: It's surrealism time sillies! Right so the main character's name is Colin, he's wealthy, he has a poorer best friend, and he wants a girlfriend. He meets this girl, Chloe, they fall in love they get married and everything is great for about 47 seconds! During their honeymoon, Chloe falls ill, and she is eventually diagnosed with *checks notes* a water lily in the lung! Everything goes to shits in record time! Cool stuff: It's very aesthetically pleasing. There have been a bunch of film adaptations and I don't want to watch any of them because I don't want images that are any different from those I pictured while reading the book. Best enjoyed with some ominous music playing in the background. Quite short, can be read in one afternoon but not necessarily advised. Can absolutely be read over one week-end though! Not-so-cool stuff: Remember what I said about the aesthetic? A lot of people I know read the book and disliked it because of the aesthetic. You just have to figure out whether that's your jam or not. Oh And, I've never been high, but finishing this book made me feel things that I'd never experienced before, and idk whether that's a good or a bad thing.

#classic lit #classic literature #classic lit memes #jane austen #pride and prejudice #charles dickens #a christmas carol #oliver twist #victor hugo #the last day of a condemned man #carol ann duffy #the world's wife #george orwell #animal farm #boris vian #froth on the daydream #mood indigo #book recommendations

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travllingbunny · 5 years

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The 100 6x05 The Gospel of Josephine

While we’re still on the hiatus, waiting two weeks for the next episode, at least I have more time to finally put my thoughts on episode 6x05 in one place and post the belated review.

I appreciated this episode better on my second watch, because, the first time, I found it a bit hard to believe that no one besides Bellamy was suspicious of „Clarke“’s new, decidedly non-Clarke-like behavior, even though they all noticed at least some of it, and that they didn’t put two and two together after they had already found out about bodysnatching. However, putting it into perspective, it all happened over a very short period of time – and besides, it is such a huge thing to accept. Most people wouldn’t even want to believe it.

Still, while everyone seems to have caught the small blunders, like calling Murphy „John“, I do wonder if anyone except Bellamy was alerted by the fact that „Clarke“ was OK with bodysnatching and arguing that it’s OK because it doesn’t affect them. Could it be that their idea of her is a bit skewed? The funny thing is how much others (well, mostly Raven and Murphy) were bashing Clarke this season as the Worst Person Ever, and now her body is possessed by an actual villain, who is the polar opposite of Clarke: selfish, egotistical, immoral, arrogant, devoid of compassion and caring, allergic to children, and convinced that she is better than everyone and that she can just walk over the lesser, disposable people. There are even some people in the fandom who somehow imagine Clarke to be the Bad Guy, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, which is a really incredible misunderstanding of the story and characters. Well, if people wanted to see a real villain in Clarke’s body? They got her now.

I expected the reveal about Clarke not being dead (surprise, surprise) but dormant, to happen at the end of this episode. It turns out it will probably happen in the next one.. Even though I can’t wait to see real Clarke again, watching JosephineClarke (JC) try and fail to pretend to be her was a lot of fun. To be fair, JC knows very little about Clarke, so of course she wouldn’t be able to guess how she’s supposed to act, but her hubris also got in the way. Thinking that, just because she was once in a famous play, she would be able to pretend to be a person she’s never met, is perfectly in character for JC, with her dismissive attitude towards „disposable“ people, which made her blunders so much more enjoyable to watch. Eliza Taylor did a great job giving JC completely different voice inflections and mannerisms from Clarke, at times just as playful and carefree as Sara Thompson’s original Josephine we saw in 6x02, but also more evil and scheming. Her „Clarke“ act went from basically just being JC herself in new situations, to doing something of a caricature of Clarke, in her „These people are happy, their world works“ speech in her final scene with Bellamy. But, she’s certainly smart, so she ended up deciding there’s no point of pretending with some people, namely Bellamy, and that she needs a better ’coach“ to teach her how to play Clarke and manipulate the one person who, as it turns out, matters to the Primes’ plan, Abby, so it will be interesting to see her doing her best after getting some pointers on how Clarke would act.

We also learned about something called Offering Grove – apparently, the Sanctum community doesn’t just sacrifice people to their ’gods“, the Primes, so they could live forever – they also do the classic human sacrifice, in this case – to the meat-eating trees. Lovely. And we see another weird thing specific to this planet – the strange green storm that seems to destroy or age or suck the life out of living beings. I’m hoping for more info on that in the following episodes.

One of the great things about this season is the amazing cinematography. Metaphorically, season 6 has been dark AF, but, fortunately, it’s not literally dark, as so many shows are these days when they try to be „dark and gritty“, so everyone wears black and grey and you can’t see a damn thing on screen due to poor lighting. No – The 100 season 6 has incredibly bright colors, with a planet that looks beautiful, with Sanctum looking like Renaissance Fair and with people in all sorts of rich, colorful clothes – and it’s all incredibly weird and disturbing.

Josephine’s first actions after waking up in a new body? Kill her „best friend“ Kaylee, after calling her out on the fact that Kaylee killed her in her previous body; paint a portrait of herself, while dancing and singing along to „Alors on dance“; take a shower and change clothes.

So, Josephine thinks that Kaylee and her family were running away because they were scared Russell would find out that Kaylee killed Josephine VII. But how were they supposed to find out? The only new ’naming’ was Priya. The next one was to be in 14 years, when Rose turns 21, and that was supposed to be Jasmine (someone Miranda loved, but we don’t get info what she was to her). There wouldn’t be a new Josephine for a long time. This doesn’t really make sense, unless there was another reason why they were eager to get away from Sanctum.

It’s been fun piecing the info about the identities and relationships of the Primes. So far, we know for sure that there were 13 people in the Eligius 3 mission = four families, plus Dr Gabriel Santiago, the geneticist. Those were:

Russell, Simone and Josephine Lightbourne;

Priya Desai and her teenage son Ryker (we learn her last name from her plaque in this episode)

Kaylee („Leelee“ as Josephine calls her), her mother (Faye), father and brother (I currently think the father was called Victor and the brother Daniel).

Miranda and her family, which consisted of Jasmine and a man we saw on the portraits of the Primes on the walls of Sanctum in 6x02 (some say that his name on the plaque in high resolution reads as Caleb Mason). We still don’t know for sure what the relations within that family are. I initially assumed Jasmine was her daughter, but from the way the portraits were lined up (parents above, kids below – and only Caleb was above, with two portraits below), it seems more likely they were sisters. (Or, who knows,, maybe one is his daughter and another is her wife.)

Although Josephine and Kaylee were apparently ’best friends“ (weird friendship, that one), that relationship had to develop that way only after their first lifetime, because the age difference between them seemed to be at least 10 years. Josie doesn’t seem to have much use for children, and Kaylee and her brother were pre-adolescent children during the original mission – the same ones that Josie used to test the unknown plants that, for all she knew, could have killed them. „I didn’t try it. I gave it to the kids. Leelee loved it. If it was poisonous, they’d be dead by now!“

The backstory is that Kaylee killed Josie, after Josie killed someone called Isaac, and non-Prime that Kaylee loved, possibly a boyfriend, though Josie claimed he volunteered to be sacrificed in the Offering Grove. I guess murder is a bit less seriously taken if it just means you get to wait for a few decades to be put in another body. So, basically, Josie decommissioned Kaylee, so, right now, there are just 6 active Primes: Russell, Simone, Miranda, Priya, Ryker, and Josie, but the other Primes don’t know about her yet. They wouldn’t be happy to know Russell and Simone skipped the line for their daughter – Miranda, in particular, would be pissed. They also don’t want the others to know about the whole killing thing, which is why all the sneaking had to happen. The Primes need the Earth people because they hope several of them are Nightbloods. It’s a reasonable assumption, but an incorrect one – but that’s not going to be important after what JC learns later about Abby’s ability to make Nightblood in the lab.

JC and Russell are kind of like Cage and Dante: Russell really likes to think of himself as a moral, noble guy, in spite of the horrible things he’s been doing for 236 years, so he has moral boundaries, such as, no bodyshatching without the hosts’ consent (it’s OK if you first brainwash people into worshipping you so that they will willingly sacrifice themselves and believe they’re becoming „one“ with the deity and that it’s a great honor), though he broke that rule for Josie; and no eugenics, which Josephine has been arguing for, even to the point that she wrote a book about it. From the immoral sociopathic POV, selective breeding really is the best and most obvious way to ensure the birth of new Nightbloods, but Russell insists he won’t treat human beings as cattle. (Even though he already does in many other ways?) As in season 2, you find yourself wondering: should I be more on the side of the immoral sociopath, or the huge hypocrite? Answer: f*ck both of them.

I really hope Josephine’s science books contain the driest, most straightforward prose possible, because, while she’s brilliant in many ways, literary talent is certainly not one of her strength. „This Ferrari I’m wearing“? Fun line, but what a mixed metaphor.

So, yeah, as we all know Josephine finds Murphy cute rather than Bellamy, which was obviously thrown there to subvert viewer expectations, and stress once more how completely different she is from Clarke etc.… but „he’s cute“?! She’s 200 years old and she talks like a pre-teen? There’s been some discussion over whether the Primes ever really emotionally mature over their many lifetimes. Josephine doesn’t sound any more mature than she was in the flashback in 6x02, and come to think of it, Ryker kind of has an attitude that could fit a teenager. But I don’t think it has anything to do with brain maturity, they are in adult brains, and they certainly have experiences of multiple lifetimes and centuries. I think it’s a consequence of they way of life (similar to how people who, due to circumstances, still live with their parents and are supported by them way into adulthood tend to act younger than people who have adult responsibilities early in life): all the Primes are locked into the past (even with the way JC can’t stop using 21st century slang and references), and even new relationships they develop cannot last beyond one lifetime, while their relationships with each other can go on indefinitely. Kaylee acts like an adult, not a little girl, but her primary relationships are always going to be with her parents and brother, and, as we saw in 6x02, those familial relationships didn’t change at all: during the hijacking, the dad („younger man“) seemed to be telling the son/brother („handsome older gentleman“) what to do, and Momma Faye (the „younger woman“) was definitely in charge and ordering Kaylee around („Just push the damn buttons, Kaylee!“) and telling her with her dying breath that she has to save the heads, though Kaylee already knew that.

Speaking of all the time in the world that the Primes have had – couldn’t Russell and Simone have made an effort to learn Mandarin in all that time? You live so long and you never care to learn new skills and expand knowledge? What do they even do with their time? At least Josephine has been writing books.

I wonder when Gabriel decided to leave and became the enemy of the Primes. He must have had an attack of conscience, after having done such awful things. Of course, people who were developed by Gabriel from embryos they brought from Earth were the ones used as hosts for the Primes, and are also obviously where the entire human population of Sanctum came from. We also learned that 45 or 46 of little embryo girls (I don’t remember the exact number) died in his experiments before he managed to successfully implant Josephine’s mind into one of them, after realizing that the host has to have a fully developed, adult brain. (Was this also the case with the minds of Prime children – if Kaylee, her brother and Ryker were also killed during Russell’s killing spree?) And „consent is key“ wasn’t something Russell cared at the time, since he had no problem with Josie’s mind being implanted in the body of the obviously unwilling and horrified Brooke, who was fighting and screaming until Gabriel injected her with the paralyzing serum (now we know why it was initially developed). Apart from the effect of loneliness and isolation after so many (all?) of the other people in the mission were killed, Russell’s guilt over it, Gabriel’s obsession with Josephine, finding out at some point that Earth was no more (7 years after they came to the planet), another factor could have been that they had the same attitude towards clones as many people seem to have in real life – that they are somehow not „real people“ because they didn’t get conceived and born the regular way (what’s with all the talk of cloning as a way to harvest organs?!).

How did the Primes choose Jade to be the bodyguard of the hosts (and now JC, who doesn’t seem to need someone to protect her anyway)? Did they go „Let’s find the smallest person in this compound!“ But I have a feeling that „bodyguard“ is not exactly the best description of Jade’s job. It’s just what Diyoza called her, and it seemed like the closest term.

In spite of all the new info about the Primes, this was an episode with strong character moments for Murphy, Abby (with important character revelations about both, about things that make them potentially most vulnerable to Josie’s manipulation), Octavia, Diyoza, Gaia, even some for Jackson, certainly for Jordan (it’s his best episode so far), and Bellamy had some good scenes, but in his case, this episode was a calm before the storm, leading up to the moment when realizes the horrible truth about JC.

Bellamy also deserves points for making plans to explore the planet (and pointing out how weird it is that the Sanctum people haven’t explored much of the planet for 236 years… really, what have they been doing? They’re content to stay locked in their small, narrow space and old habits), and go and found their own community somewhere, away from Sanctum, after learning the important things from them. Someone had to finally mention all these things, and those 400 people still on the ship. To be fair, they’ve only been in Sanctum for a few days and were mostly distracted by other things, including trying to get Sanctum people to accept them and teach them to survive.

Jordan has been fleshed out a lot in the last couple of episodes. We knew him as a sweet, optimistic manboy, and we learned of his brilliant scientific knowledge in the premiere, and sure, he could be naive and trusting, but in 6x04, we saw his sadness and feelings of guilt as he talked about his upbringing and his parents, and now we’ve seen him make the right conclusions and be the first person to pay attention to the suspicious things in Sanctum (which, I think, the others would have also noticed earlier if they hadn’t been so eager to see the Sanctum people as good and to find peace), and determined to investigate what’s going on, after realizing that his girlfriend really isn’t the same person anymore, literally. He had to face obstacles such as, others not taking him seriously (and dismissing him as just a naive guy who’s dealing with being dumped) and the extremely brainwashed Sanctum citizens, including even Delilah’s mother. Priya VII even tried to pacify him by claiming Delilah was happy, which sounds like BS, since we know that the Primes believe that the hosts are ’dead’, which means they have no clue what, if anything, the host is feeling.

However, I didn’t like Jordan’s line about „Heart Bellamy“ – that was too much like breaking the fourth wall, like Jordan was the stand-in for the fandom and the things they say about Bellamy pre- and post-Praimfaya (which I’ve been pretty fed up with, to the point I’m almost starting to hate all the „Head“ and „Heart“ mentions, since they’re used to ridiculously oversimplify the characters of both Bellamy and Clarke). I guess I can imagine Monty and Harper telling them that Bellamy told them on the ring he had to use his head more, to honor Clarke’s memory, because she told him to do that – but it’s still jarring.

When Jordan, Gaia, Bellamy and Murphy broke into the lab and found the videos, it may seem like it was way too easy and that all the info was just lying there waiting, but the fact that the Primes didn’t think they needed anyone to guard it shows how complacent they are, how much they’re used to everyone in Sanctum supporting them, except for a rare Child of Gabriel – and everyone including CoG knows what and who they are, so there’s no reason to guard the information, only to guard the Nightbloods/future hosts.

It was satisfying to see Gaia go from her attitude that every religion should be respected (which is, on one hand, nice in general in terms of tolerance, but also absurd if taken too far, like including cults, created by people who made themselves gods so they can oppress others), to being horrified by bodysnatching and the way the Primes have brainwashed an entire community to worship them and sacrifice people to them. She made the same points about the difference between the Flame and the mind drives that I talked about in my review of 6x04, including the fact that the former was created to help future generations with accumulated knowledge and advice (as it does not take over the host, who is still in control of their body), rather than to let people live forever. (Which was presumably Becca’s intention and the initial purpose for the mind drives, too – before Gabriel modified them so they could store the entire consciousness of a Prime, allowing them to live as the same person in a new body.)

But I also enjoyed Murphy’s snarky but truthful comments about the Grounder religion – the fact that they made children fight to the death for the right to become Commanders is incredibly messed up, too. And Becca was also not a god but a scientist who made herself Nightblood in the lab – although that would have been more relevant to the plot of 4x09 (where the Grounders were shocked by the „blasphemy“ of Clarke trying to pass her scientifically created Nightblood as the same thing as the Nightblood of the Commanders… which also came from a lab).

The reactions were interesting - Jordan was the voice of morality and humanity, but I think almost everyone agreed with him, except for Murphy. He was the only one – other than Josephine – to defend the Primes and their way of life – and it kind of feels realistic that at least someone would be tempted by immortality as an option. It makes sense it’s Murphy, especially after his recent brush with death that made him think he saw what hell was like, and it also makes sense he would say that openly.

While Bellamy didn’t speak much during those scenes where the group was discussing their shocking discovery, he was, of course, agreeing with Jordan (as confirmed with his later comments to „Clarke“) – but he was, instead, focused on watching „Clarke’s“ surprising reactions. I think he was getting more and more suspicious of her throughout the episode, and since finding out about bodysnatching, he was starting to realize the horrible truth.

Let’s see how many times JC screwed up while playing Clarke:

She was uncomfortable when hugged by Madi, and then told her she can go to school, contrary to what Clarke told Madi in the previous episode. But Madi was just being a child and was happy to get what she wanted.

JC also, naturally, didn’t understand a word of what Gaia said in Trig (to make it impossible for Jade to understand what she was saying), but she covered it reasonably well.

Saying „Chill out“ (21st century slang is not something people from the Ark are familiar with) was what caught Bellamy’s attention.

Then he asked her about her happy demeanour and the „fun“ she had with the doctor, referring to seeing her dance with Cillian at the club. Bellamy asking about these things isn’t exactly typical of him, either, but it’s interesting. He may not have even been fully aware where it came from, but to me, it sounded like he needed to know more: „So, uh, I’m glad you look happy, but is it because of the doc? Are you really into him? It’s not serious, is it? Please tell me it’s not? I’m just curious for… reasons“. But JC immediately assumed it was about sex, confirmed Clarke had sex with Cillian and was basically like „I banged him and I’m an animal in bed“. Which was one of the most non-Clarke things imaginable: talking openly about her sex life, and bragging about it, and to Bellamy of all people (the two of them have always avoided any talk about each other’s love life or sex life or each other’s love interests). But JC walked out thinking „Nailed it“!“ Bellamy seemed too busy being surprised, confused and dealing with all sorts of feelings and images in his head caused by her comment, so he probably didn’t suspect anything at this point.

JC made more blunders with Abby – including writing with her right hand, which Abby noticed; making a comment that Josephine was a „visionary“ when Abby calls her a monster, and having new knowledge that Clarke didn’t have. A lot of people are harsh on Abby because she didn’t figure it out. However, I think that’s unfair – she didn’t know about the bodysnatching, so she couldn’t put two and two together. The human mind tends to rationalize things it can’t make sense of. She was also very tired, after not having gotten any sleep (reading books from the library instead), and distracted.

Bellamy was getting suspicious when „Clarke“ argued that bodysnatching is „not murder if they go willingly“ and that the Sanctum people are not a danger to them (in spite of herself and Madi being Nightbloods). JC was at that point worried about being found out, so she made sure to take a vial of the paralyzing serum if she is found out. After she left, everyone focused on stopping Jordan from making trouble publicly, as he went to openly confront Priya.

The group talk in the bar was when I think Bellamy definitely had clear suspicions about „Clarke“. First she called Murphy „John“, which weirded out everyone, including Murphy and Jordan. But I think it was her arguments that they should just be OK with what the Primes were doing, and look away – that from „I want to save everyone“ Clarke – that sealed the deal. That and the „Eureka“ look on her face when she heard about Abby being able to make Nightbloods in the lab.

It would have been safer if Bellamy hadn’t confronted „Clarke“ on his own, but I think he desparately wanted his suspicion to not be true. He tested her with Trig – which is a good test, as it’s the one language no Sanctum person could know – and she guessed some of the meaning from the context the first time, but the second time, it was too specific even for her to figure it out (no matter how good with picking up languages she is). So JC was like, my cover is blown, why even pretend anymore, and started taunting him instead. Bellamy’s reaction, the shock and horror on his face, especially as JC confirmed her identity after paralyzing him, was heartbreaking, and made this the best scene in the episode. I cannot even imagine what reactions we’ll see from him in the following episodes. He already went through losing Clarke and believing her dead once before – but that was her heroic sacrifice. This was awful and done against her will. He is going to raise hell, and do everything to fight the Primes and get Clarke back – once he realizes that she is not completely gone.

Murphy naturally had to go along with Josephine for the time being, but is he really going to be on Josie’s side, or play a double agent and help his friends? I believe he will do the latter – he does care about Clarke, and the group, he wants to be a part of the family, and we’ve seen how much he’s changed and that he was willing to die and let the others save themselves in the season 5 finale. I think that he will be tempted for a while to accept the offer, because of his fear of death and hell, but will eventually choose his friends over immortality.

Another character who may be tempted in the next episode is Abby – as JC, pretending to be Clarke, will no doubt play on her desire to save Kane. However, that won’t work when Abby realizes that JC took Clarke’s body – and I doubt JC can keep up the ruse too long.

Many fans tend to talk about and judge Abby only in terms of her role as Clarke’s mother, but she is a character by herself, with her own trauma and issues that are not about being a mom. For the last two seasons, she has been struggling with the trauma and guilt from the Dark Year and her role in Blodreina’s rule. Her comment to Jackson, where she compared both him and herself to war criminals, made a good point: „I was just doing my job“/“I was just listening to orders“ is a poor excuse when you participate in crimes. And her desire to save Kane isn’t just because of romantic love, but also a reaction to that guilt, and on top of that, the guilt of failing Kane multiple times due to her addiction, and indirectly causing his injuries by indulging Vinson (a symbolic embodiment of her addiction and guilt over cannibalism). Kane and Abby have switched roles since season 1, and he has become her moral center. It’s because Kane’s response to feeling guilty was a healthy one: he decided to change his worldview completely and to start doing better. He tried to redeem himself through sacrifice in season 1, but he was never suicidal for the sake of it. But Abby doesn’t know how to deal with guilt, and gets crushed by it. When she feels she’s failed her own moral standards, she starts hating herself. Her death wish at the time of Praimfaya was a result of guilt over the things she did trying to find a solution to save everyone, and her addiction in season 5 was also response to guilt. Now she’s come to the point where she thinks that she doesn’t deserve to survive, but Kane does. She’s made him a symbol of all that’s good in the world.

I’m really enjoying the scenes with Diyoza and Octavia. The two main enemies/villain leaders of season 5 are now on a rogue buddy trip. Diyoza has been amazing this season, but now I’m starting to be afraid she’s doing to die, after we get her backstory and she gives birth. And we really need to get her full backstory. She’s almost playing a mentor to Octavia now, because she had gone through similar things and understands where Octavia’s behavior comes from, maybe better than anyone else, but she’s rational and pragmatic where Octavia is impulsive and self-destructive. The different ways Diyoza and Octavia dealt with the live sand is the best example of the contrast between them. It was funny when Octavia said „At least I’m trying“ – she really didn’t get how the whole ’The harder you fight, the faster you die“ thing works! But Octavia has shown some of her old humanity, again – this time, by telling Diyoza to save herself and her baby – and, for the first time in a while, a desire to live, since she saved herself from the wave. Nothing like the danger of death to make you realize you don’t really want to die.

Interesting: the Children of Gabriel calling that live sand thing „The Crucible“ – another reference to Miller’s play (Gabriel’s favorite play! Banned by the Primes!). Do CoG identify with the unfairly accused people from that play?

Xavier’s motivations are becoming clearer – he is a rational, no-nonsense guy, just like Diyoza, and wants to get info from them rather than kill them.

I don’t know what the weird green wave is. A lot of people seem to think it has something to do with the Anomaly, but it could just be another phenomenon. I couldn’t even make out what exactly messed up thing it did to Octavia’s hand – did it age it up, suck out some of its life, or what.

Raven, Emori, Echo and Miller were MIA this episode since they were away – Ryker is showing Raven how to build a radiation shield, and the others are protecting them. Next episode, I hope to see more Emori (and Memori interaction). We know from the promo there will be Echo and Jade interaction (they could bond and compare notes on being the follower/servant who follows orders and doesn’t question them) there will also probably be more Raven and Ryker interaction; JC will try to manipulate Abby with Murphy’s help, but I doubt she’ll be able to fool her for a long time, and everyone should find out that she is not Clarke. And I’m sure we’ll learn that Clarke’s mind is really dormant rather than destroyed, and it will be interesting to see how she fights back inside her own mind and her friends and family try to save her, and hopefully kick JC’s and the Primes’ asses.

Rating: 8.5/10

#the 100 #the 100 6x05 #the gospel of josephine #the 100 season 6 #clarke griffin #josephine lightbourne #bellamy blake #john murphy #abby griffin #gaia kom trikru #russell lightbourne #octavia blake #charmaine diyoza #xavier #marcus kane #jordan green #gabriel santiago #the children of gabriel #the primes

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years

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Book Review

The Bourbon Thief by Tiffany Reisz. MIRA Books. 2016.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Genre: historical romance? historical fiction? who’s to say

Part of a Series? No.

Summary: When Cooper McQueen wakes up from a night with a beautiful stranger, it's to discover he's been robbed. The only item stolen—a million-dollar bottle of bourbon. The thief, a mysterious woman named Paris, claims the bottle is rightfully hers. After all, the label itself says it's property of the Maddox family who owned and operated Red Thread Bourbon distillery since the last days of the Civil War until the company went out of business for reasons no one knows… No one except Paris. In the small hours of a Louisville morning, Paris unspools the lurid tale of Tamara Maddox, heiress to the distillery that became an empire. But the family tree is rooted in tainted soil and has borne rotten fruit. Theirs is a legacy of wealth and power, but also of lies, secrets and sins of omission. The Maddoxes have bourbon in their blood—and blood in their bourbon. Why Paris wants the bottle of Red Thread remains a secret until the truth of her identity is at last revealed, and the century-old vengeance Tamara vowed against her family can finally be completed.

***Full review under the cut.***

Trigger Warnings: sexual content, rape (including statutory rape), incest, suicide of a gay character, racism

Overview: This book will definitely not be for everyone. It’s a huge pile of problematic for those looking for an escape-read, but there’s also something compelling about it for those who are game for a modern-day Greek tragedy. While this book is frequently classified as dark historical romance, I think it would have done much better as literary fiction if it had leaned into the elements that reminded me of a Greek revenge plot. As it stands, it only gets 3 stars from me - I think there was much more that could have been developed had the author focused less on the relationship between the two main characters and more on the history that drove the whole narrative.

Writing: Reisz’s writing isn’t very complex. There’s a nice image here and there, sometimes a lovely metaphor, but overall, it’s pretty straight-forward and skimable. Much of the book is dialogue; there are very long stretches of conversation between the two main characters, which was great for getting a sense of their personalities, but not very good for creating mood or atmosphere. When the dialogue did break up, I had a lovely reading experience - I liked the way Reisz communicated Tamara’s mental state by having her seemingly jump backwards in time, for example, and some of the descriptions of the distillery at the end of the book were quite evocative. I also think Reisz had a good sense for pace. While there were some moments that felt somewhat rushed, overall, I was satisfied with the speed at which the narrative unfolded.

I do wish, however, that Reisz had toned down how horny this book is. Characters think about sex a lot, and have sex a lot, and while that’s fine if that’s what you’re going for (in a romance novel, for example), it did annoy me because there was so much else that was included and could have been more fully explored. I’ll detail more about what I wanted to see expanded below, but for this portion of the review, it’s enough to say that the constant horniness frequently reminded me of male literary fiction.

Plot: To me, this book felt as if it were trying to be two stories at once - on the one hand, there was a vengeance plot. Reading the book as participating in the same tradition as, say, Oedipus or Tis Pity She’s a Whore actually made it more enjoyable for me, since there was a whole lot of problematic sexual content involving incest and rape. Had more work been done to make it mimic the arc that Greek tragedies or revenge narratives have, it would have been a fine work of literary fiction, especially since the book is about a bourbon empire (something about the setting/premise really lends itself to the idea of a Greek tragedy for me, perhaps because it would allow the author to take advantage of a story about power and pair it with the horrifying history of white people's role in building that power via slavery). On the other hand, the book also seemed like it was trying to be a work about black vengeance. There was a lot of talk about race and what role it played in the mystery, since the whole foundation of the distillery is rooted in the exploitation of black slaves. However, race didn’t get enough attention to make it a fulfilling story about black vengeance - Tamara’s desire for vengeance was centered, but black characters mainly existed on the fringes of the narrative as supporting characters (with the exception of Levi, Tamara’s love interest, who is half-black and passes as white). With Levi, this book tried to bring up a lot of issues about race, but as if the author wanted to show she was aware of these issues without writing a full story about them. As a result, some of this book read to me like a story about white guilt or black curses without much focus on black experience. If the author truly didn’t want to write about race, I think she could have more fully embraced the Greek tragedy route, but given Paris’ ending, a black vengeance tale could have been benefited from centering more black characters. I’m not sure if I’m right about this, however, so I’ll defer to black and mixed-race readers and their thoughts.

Technically, however, this book is classified as a historical romance, which makes me uncomfortable since the main couple is a 16-17 year old girl and a man who is about 30. Regardless of the laws of the region or the time period (which isn’t that long ago - 1980), the relationship didn’t sit right with me as a modern reader. I couldn’t root for the protagonists to succeed as a couple, which is why I found it more satisfying to read it not as a romance.

Characters: The story is told using a frame narrative, with Paris relating the mystery of a 1980s bourbon distillery fire to Cooper McQueen in the modern day. I liked Paris’ cunning and general unimpressed air around Cooper, who was generally uninteresting as a rich white dude who like bourbon and sex. Seeing her confidently undercut him was a real joy to read, especially since Paris is a rich black woman in her mid-thirties.

Tamara was an interesting character in that she grew from a spoiled rich white girl to a kind of avenging female fury. While I didn’t like her constant horniness, I did like that she was assertive and somewhat fanciful. I wish the author was more consistent in how she wrote Tamara’s spirituality, however - at one point in the book, Tamara has turned to God to help her cope with her trauma, but that seems to be forgotten once she starts putting her plans into motion.

Levi, Tamara’s love interest, was hard to like. While I initially had some sympathy for him as a white-passing black man, and I did like his sharp tongue, he would constantly flip back and forth between seeing Tamara as a child and wanting to take her to pound town. The constant reminders that Tamara was underage and Levi’s fleeting moments of morality (that he shouldn’t be sleeping with her) made me hate him rather than see him as an interesting love interest.

Supporting characters were generally fine. They all seemed to be entirely likeable or incredibly evil, and mainly appeared to help move along the plot. I can’t say they were entirely useless, since they were involved enough to keep things moving in a meaningful way.

Recommendations: I would recommend this book if you’re interested in historical fiction, southern fiction, Greek tragedy, revenge plots, dark or problematic romance, and questions of inheritance.

#book reviews

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lyricpoets · 4 years

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Single and Loving It? Wallada bt. al-Mustakfi, Lizzo, and the Breakup Blast

The first line of Lizzo’s chart-topping ode to making better choices, “Truth Hurts,” can be taken a few ways. “Why men great ‘til they gotta be great?” could relate to having the boldness to, as a subsequent line suggests, tell women the truth about their feelings in relationships rather than cowering behind text messages and vagaries. It could also mean that men are great until they get ideas of grandeur in their heads, and want to find grass they perceive to be greener. In either case, with this one line Lizzo puts all would-be lovers on blast for their fickle natures. By contrast, the artist presents herself as an assertive, emotionally in-touch, and self-assured catch, after all, as she says, “you coulda had a bad bitch.” In framing her iconic breakup song in this way, Lizzo follows a trend of styling a song about lost love as one of found singleness, which brings a woman freedom and confidence, rather than the wallowing and whiny, self-blaming breakup ballads of crooners past and present—think Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable” vs. Beyoncé’s “Love Drought.” Instead of a breakup ballad, I prefer to call pieces like Lizzo’s a breakup blast—one last callout to call attention to the fine, fine woman that some idiot has given up. It’s an exuberant “fuck you” along the lines of elaborate job resignations or, if you’re a boring academic type who gets thrills from strongly worded letters, “quitlit.” And, as it turns out, this trend has a long history.

I’ve discussed women’s poetry in Classical Arabic on this blog before, and in particular, the fact that women in the pre- and early Islamic periods were often expected to compose only within certain, highly ritualized genres such as the rithā’, or mourning verse. Such poems have been looked at by scholars as instigating male action: women would mourn the fallen and call for vengeance against their killers, which men would then go exact. Even works not on this pattern, such as women’s war poetry, at times fall into this trope of the feminine voice as a catalyst for male movement, as with Hind bt. ‘Utbah’s famed poem about the women of the Ṭāriq tribe refusing their lovers’ embraces unless they succeed in battle—a sort of reverse-Lysistrata. Love poetry composed by women, meanwhile, is relatively sparse in the early Islamic period except in the most rarefied halls of high society, with courtesans composing amorous poems for their patrons that, once again, would have instigated male ardor and—ideally—lavish generosity. The call-and-response dynamic of women’s verse tailored to evoke men’s reactions is not merely an invention modern Orientalist or misogynist interpretations that want to view Arabic-speaking women of the past as submissive or impotent (though it surely has been abused to reach such conclusions). Rather, they are products of social hierarchies and modes of female exchange that flourished in order to navigate the power structures innate to their realities. Ritual mourning, pre-battle poetry exchanges, and mixed-gender courtly salons were all commonplace institutions with well-known rules, and as such they provided occasions for the relatively public communication of carefully constructed messages between differently gendered subjects.

A particularly exceptional figure to arise was Wallāda bt. al-Mustakfī, a Spanish Umayyad royal born at the end of the 10th/beginning of the 11th century. Not only did Wallāda compose poems about her lovers—and in particular her on-and-off-again flame, the famed poet Ibn Zaydūn—but she also often wrote not with the aim of impelling a male response but of preventing one. That’s right, Wallāda was a master of breakup verse, or, more appropriately, the breakup blast. Some of her most sparkling verses are, in effect, cease and desist orders issued to Ibn Zaydūn because he has slighted her in some way, or simply because she’s bored with him. It seems only fitting to pair Wallāda with Lizzo, not least because of the ongoing success both have enjoyed. In fact, much of what is commonly known about Wallāda is blown up to larger-than-life proportions—she has become a feminist figure of some renown, known as an irreverent Muslim Spanish princess who, according to some accounts, would walk around scantily clad before all the courtiers on a lark. However, it is essential to keep in mind that most of these impressions are derived from either her own poems or Ibn Zaydūn’s verses about her, which are often filtered through an amorous and emboldened male lens which may feature no small fraction of exaggerated boast or bathos, as when he exclaims “If my night grows long without you, how I’ll complain over having cut short a night with you!” Muslim biographers offer some facts about Wallāda in accounts of her life, but their reports are at times stitched together with connective tissue used to make her poetry fit a continuous narrative of her relationship with Ibn Zaydūn. In other words, there is a lot of room for imaginary thinking even in the medieval sources, to say nothing of modern feminist readings. So, to give Wallāda her proper due, let’s start with what we can know about her and her context before diving in to her works.

Wallāda bt. al-Mustakfī

^N.B. this is an Orientalist-as-shit painting by Frank Bernard Dicksee and we. have. no. clue. if our girl looked like this. But good Lord, those textiles! That freaking leopard skin in the background!

Before we proceed, it’s worth noting that one of the reasons that the annals of history have preserved so much of Wallāda was the remarkable fact of her elite social station: as a woman of noble birth, her words were inevitably valued as more precious, as well as refined and shaped by the education to which she had access. Often, collections of woman poets from the medieval period are peopled with a figure analogous to Wallāda in access to court culture, but far removed from her in degree of freedom, namely, the slave concubines of the upper-crust. These “singing slave girls,” or qiyān, occasionally attained great heights of renown for their witty repartee and their amorous effects on the people who owned them. Long before these women became courtesans, they were given training in arts and language. Kristina Richardson notes that qiyān were “typically purchased as children,” and the surest way to secure their position in the court was not through their literary practice, but rather through bearing children to their owners—their issue was born free, ensured that their mother would not be sold into another family, and guaranteed her eventual manumission once her owner expired. In his recent book, Slavery & Islam, Jonathan Brown uses the case of the caliphal consort ‘Arīb—poet, musician, and much lauded romantic interest of a variety of ‘Abbasid potentates—to illustrate that there were scenarios of elite slavery in the Islamic world that afforded one great visibility and admiration. Though Brown acknowledges that these women led “challenging lives,” he adds that the most successful among them were “protagonists in the epics spun around them,” and earned commemoration in the works of other elite, free male litterateurs.

All of this is argued by way of perturbing what Brown imagines his readers think of when they think of “slavery”—an unfree and permanent social underclass without freedom of movement or the forms of social and material access that these courtesans seem to have had in abundance—but it is worth noting that elite slave-concubinage is hardly an institution unique to Islamic societies. Moreover, it was hardly an enviable position in comparison to that of Wallāda, who was simultaneously plugged into courtly life and insulated from some of its most dangerous intrigues by dint of her position as a daughter of the caliph Muḥammad III. In other words, Wallāda was sitting pretty by comparison. Where court concubines were subordinated to both caliphs and their brides, Wallāda could enjoy the eventual prospect of wedding someone of her station, not being groomed as a proprietary mark of her lover’s prestige. Though marriage was often articulated as ownership in Islamic law (with a wife, like a slave, being milk al-yamīn), Wallāda’s poetry, in which she repeatedly brags of her free choice of suitor, shows that this dynamic was not absolute. In her writings on trysts with Ibn Zaydūn, it’s clear she does not feel she owes him anything--sex, children, emotional consistency...

Most importantly, Wallāda’s poetic utterances are enshrined not because she rose through the ranks and plotted carefully to bend the ears of those around her, but because she was already even from birth a prominent enough figure that her silver tongue was well-placed to be exercised and noticed. Unlike with ‘Arīb—who once fled an owner that she could not tolerate and, when about to be beaten for doing so, supposedly screamed “I am ‘Arib, and if I am owned, then he must sell me. If I am free, he shall have no way with me.”—when Wallāda laments that love is her enslaver, saying, “the nights march on without me seeing separation’s end/nor any emancipator from desire’s bondage,” she is speaking purely from metaphor. Moreover, when she rages against Ibn Zaydūn for havinga fling with one of Wallāda’s own maids—herself a slave woman ensconced in an elite household—she could still vaunt her class over her competitor by referring to the woman as her property (jāriyatī, “my servant”) and saying “You’ve left a fruiting branch in all its beauty/And inclined toward a barren branch,” with fruitfulness suggesting Wallāda’s wealth and breeding.

^For more on ‘Arīb, and for sheer delight, READ THIS. DO IT.

Even by the standards of her time, both literary and socio-cultural, Wallāda seems to have taken more liberties in her relationship with Ibn Zaydūn than was conventional: she names him openly in her poems, mocks his body, and airs his sexual proclivities. Wallāda was to be one of the last of her line to enjoy quite this degree of leniency and luxury, as the caliphate of the Spanish Umayyads was to end during her lifetime—when Wallāda was nearly 30 years old, civil war fractured al-Andalus into a series of ta’ifa states run by local nobilities, and Umayyad sovereignty came to an end.

^Umayyad sovereignty be like...

Wallāda’s poetic works, while ostensibly controversial, are represented in the biography of her found in al-Suyūṭī’s work Nuzhat al-Julasā’ fī Ash’ār al-Nisā’ simply as striking; she is said to be, “unique to her age, known in her era, an embellishment to assemblies and a grace to conversations.” Despite her supposed love of risqué outfits, including one garment with which the text opens—a tunic embroidered with her lines (with some translator liberty), “I am well-suited to finer things, and as I walk I sway/ I offer my cheek to a lover, and kiss their cravings away!” –al-Suyūṭī is sure to quickly follow by telling us of her “solicitousness and integrity.” With this in mind, here are some of Wallāda’s choicer lines in which she’s breaking it off in her tempestuous fashion with Ibn Zaydūn:

Ibn Zaydūn has an anus that loves trouser staffs, Were it to spy a penis in a palm tree, It would become a bird [ṭayr abābīl] and flock to it!

And:

O, is there any way forward for us after this parting?

Lovers all around have long bewailed their fates.

Even in our winter visits, I remained inflamed, standing over passion’s embers. How, though I seemed to linger this way a while, Did the moment I feared so quickly come to pass? The nights march on without me seeing separation’s end, Nor any emancipator from desire’s bondage. God pours forth on the land you have departed Endless torrents of rain, rushing and flowing.

And, on the pain of loving him:

Wait until the shadows conceal our visit, For surely the night is good for secret trysts From you, I’ve experienced [such torment], If the sun felt this way, It would not shine The moon would not rise, And the stars would not traverse the skies.

And just for fun, on a dude named al-Asbaḥī who she clearly didn’t like much:

O Asbaḥī, rejoice, for how many a luxury has God, enthroned, bestowed you? From your own son’s asshole you’ve gotten that which Cannot be acquired from the pussy of Būrān, al-Ḥasan’s daughter!

Between the first and second of these two short poems, we essentially see the two different sides of the breakup song dichotomy. In the second poem, we get the weepy (or, per Wallāda, torrential) emotional vulnerability of a woman writing her way through a breakup with a ballad—a studied melodrama featuring all the staples (“how did this happen?” “I kept loving you though you’d grown cold,” and “I still love you, ouch, it hurts”). In the first poem, we get a breakup blast—a heavy dose of mockery, a callout by name, and a heaping side-dish of “you’re not my type anyway,” colored deeply by the taboo of male bottoming. And, even when she’s in her more emotionally volatile state, Wallāda still plays the role of exhibitionist, repackaging what she herself acknowledges as the well-trod terrain of lovers’ complaints (fa-yashkū kull ṣabb bi-mā laqī), but imbuing it with her own style. In her poem about the pain of actually *being* in love, she stages her feelings on a cosmic plane.This poem was supposedly written, according to her biography, after she had been long rejecting Ibn Zaydūn’s visits and had decided to let him back into her bed. Even when Wallāda is in a relationship, it’s her emotions alone that reach beyond the stratosphere. If there’s way in which Wallāda and Lizzo are especially kindred, it’s this interest in the reversal and the subversion that can take a love song or a breakup ballad and place the woman at the center in intriguing ways, rather than focusing on her beloved.

Lizzo

Watch the video first, folks.

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Before she got nominated for, like, 1 billion Grammys, Lizzo was Melissa Viviane Jefferson. Born in Detroit, MI, Lizzo grew up across a few different cities in the U.S. (Detroit, Huston, Minneapolis, and most recently, L.A.), and long knew she wanted a career in music. In college, she studied classical flute, and she often finds ways to incorporate that into her songs, live performances, and even into an iconic scene set in the backstage area of a strip club in the film “Hustlers.” Unlike Wallāda, who is an elite insider par excellence, Lizzo comes to the world of mainstream hip-hop from the outside: she’s not from money, she’s not from the industry, and her hobbies haven’t exactly been conventionally chic and on-trend, from her long commitment to marching band flute, anime, and writing fantasy stories, to her admission in her soulful EP track, “Coconut Oil,” “I remember back, back in school when I wasn’t cool/shit I still ain’t cool, but you better make some room for me.” Perhaps most prominently, she’s a plus-sized woman who loves to sing upbeat "bops” about loving yourself as you are. Lizzo has said before in interviews that she learned to love herself and her size a while back and that it wasn’t until body positivity went mainstream and the discourse caught up to her that her music really took off and started resonating with people. One New York Times article characterizes her music as “pure gospel,” and it does often feel like Lizzo is part preacher. She closed out her Tiny Desk Concert on NPR by saying, “I just want everyone to remember, if you can love me you can love yourself […] if you can love my big black ass at this tiny, tiny desk, you can love yourself. Can I get one more hallelujah?!” But where gospel tends to be characterized by reveling in certainty—in salvation, in God, in truth—there are many moments in her breakup songs where Lizzo revels in ambivalence and reversal. Take her hit “Jerome,” which made waves with her performance at the AMA’s, the song is structured as a crooning ballad, the sort of melancholy, juicy sound you might associate with Whitney Houson’s “I Will Always Love You,” or, more recently, Adele’s “Someone Like You,” yet the refrain goes “Jerome, take your ass home/ and come back when you’re grown.” Despite appearances, it’s not a meandering ode to lost or unrequited love so much as a wakeup call about a man who isn’t complicated or emotionally torn or broken, just disappointing. Another brilliant reversal comes in the music video for her most famous breakup blast, the chart-topping “Truth Hurts,” the first line of which (“I just took a DNA test, turns out, I’m 100% that bitch”) has resulted in some controversy over possible plagiarism, as well as an endless stream of cringe-worthy riffs, including Pete Buttigieg’s (please-clap-style) attempt at relatability here:

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In the video (didn’t watch it yet? scroll up, come on now), Lizzo appears bedecked in a frilly wedding dress and flanked by bridesmaids clad in robin’s egg blue, a shirtless officiant in a bedazzled hat, a groom’s party, and—conspicuously—no groom. At the line “You tried to break my heart, well that breaks my heart, that you thought you ever had him but you ain’t from the start,” another woman in the assembled crowd stands up and begins voicing the words herself, as the verse’s tension builds (“hey I’m glad you’re back with your bitch, I mean who would wanna hide this…”) the camera moves between the two women—Lizzo and the guest—culminating with them both wagging their fingers at each other and saying the line “I will never ever ever ever ever be your side chick!” Where the term “side chick” seems to unambiguously label who is at the margins of a relationship, this clever camerawork shows that when two women are both being played in a relationship, each thinks of the other as the expendable, extraneous mistress.

This critique of the “side chick” concept and the intra-female competition it signifies it something Lizzo actively contests throughout the song by emphasizing bonds of female friendship instead; in the aftermath of her breakup, her friend takes her to the salon to wash the relationship away. After all, competition over a less-than-worthy guy not only draws fire away from failings of the man (who breaks up via text in the song for crying out loud!), but also, to quote Emily Gordon, often is simply a way for women to contend with the idea of their own selfhood by pitting ourselves against a “fun-house mirror that reflects an inaccurate version of who we are.” Wallāda is perhaps finding one such fun-house mirror in her servant with whom Ibn Zaydūn has a dalliance, as mentioned above. The full poem compares Wallāda as the brilliant, close-by full moon with the servant as remote, dim Jupiter even as it acknowledges the woman’s enchanting effect on her lover:

If you only shared the passion between us,

You wouldn’t have been charmed by my handmaid

You’ve left a fruiting branch in all its beauty

And inclined toward a barren branch

Surely you’ve come to know that I am the

Full-moon of the sky, but with Jupiter,

You’ve sparked distress in me.

Meanwhile, Lizzo shows that she already has enough self-assurance and awareness to realize that she’s “100% that bitch,” even when she’s “crying crazy” in a spell of heartache, and moreover that she would rather be the player than be played. References to other prospects are strewn throughout the song, from “something more exciting,” to a “new man on the Minnesota Vikings,” to other guys “in my DMs.” Lizzo indicates that these relationships are transient, though, with the line “I put the sing in single, ain’t worried ‘bout a ring on my finger,” showing us that the most important thing after a breakup is not learning how to forgive, to support other women and recognize their pain, or even to love again in the conventional, coupled-off sense. Rather, the greatest achievement is to learn how to love and have a sustaining relationship with yourself.

With Wallāda, self-love trickles in here and there throughout her oeuvre, but it is often articulated as a function of her status (she is high-born, beautiful, etc.) and the power and allure this enables her to exert over men. Though the breakup blast may traverse times and regions, its open celebration of single womanhood—and especially single womanhood that isn’t depicted as something fleeting, an in-betweenness rather than an identity—is far less universal and historically commonplace. Indeed, it’s still something many are uncomfortable with today, though we may be on the precipice of a change in the United States. As Rebecca Traister writes in her book All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, “Many women, unmarried into their thirties, living in geographic, religious, and socio-economic corners of the country where early marriage remains a norm, as well as many women who remain single less by choice than by circumstance, into their forties, fifties, and sixties, do not feel as though they are living in a new, singles-dominated world. They feel ostracized, pressured: they are challenged by family and peers. However, statistically, across the country, these women are not alone. Their numbers are growing by the year.” Lizzo, at 31, continues to live her self-loving, single truth (and has explained that she doesn’t seek relationships out of need, but rather out of want, because she’s still at base a “single-minded” individual)—a truth that is increasingly applicable for many of her listeners. Wallāda, who never wed, would perhaps find this a welcome shift.

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