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everythingsinred · 1 year

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Let's Talk About NatsuMikan: Mikan (pt. 7)

It's been a while, I know. I was just sooooo lazy. I was writing this essay, but posting seemed like so much work so I procrastinated. Oh well, I'm posting now and that's all that matters. In a year, when someone reads this, they won't be aware of the posting gap at all! Let's forgive Anya for this little mistake.

AnYWAY, the culture fest has finally arrived at Alice Academy and Mikan is looking forward to having fun with friends. Unfortunately, she's already run into trouble since Natsume got her genie lamp and now she has to fulfill three of his wishes, which are sure to be sadistic and terrible in nature.

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Chapter Twenty

And of course he starts the tormenting right away, deciding to have her follow him around the festival so she can carry his stuff. Because of Ruka’s kindness, Natsume was convinced to give her the afternoon off to spend with her besties Hotaru and Yuu, but for now, she is his gopher.

I love these little panels because they're easily overlooked but do a great job of revealing the characters' basic personalities.

The technical area is amazing, and Mikan is quickly taken with it, oohing and ahhing over everything she sees. Mikan is still an alice newb, new to an exciting world that is pretty normal to the rest of them. Dancing vegetables and singing flowers are a nice touch to any Alice, but to Mikan they’re all magic. Part of what makes Mikan so entrancing is not just her cheerfulness, but the fact that she is Alice in Wonderland (I’ll eventually get tired of saying this, but for now it’s just delightful to me). She is naturally childish, on account of being a child, but she’s also seeing most of these things for the first time, and so everything is sparkly and new. Such excitement can easily be contagious.

But to some people it’s just irritating.

Natsume the impatient jerk flings some biscuit in her mouth that makes her bawk like a chicken whenever she speaks. So Mikan is quiet for a while, dreading the biscuit. That is until she sees Hotaru’s attraction, a special all about her and her amazing robots. Mikan tries to rush to her but is just beaten down. The presentation commences and ends and Hotaru emerges from her creation, instantly surrounded by fans and sponsors.

Mikan is struck with Hotaru’s dazzling future. The technical class is composed of artistic and creative types, people who clearly know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. They all have plans and goals and passions, and Mikan admires that. She assures herself that she too has goals for the future, but her goals are limited to better training her alice and seeing Jii-chan again, so she doesn’t feel that much better. She has no idea what she’d wanna do after graduating.

Whenever Mikan is different from others, she gets self-conscious, no matter what it is she's "lacking."

So she turns to her companions, just to check if maybe she isn’t alone. Sumire quickly responds that she’d want to use her alice for criminal investigations or government work (narc). Ruka has a dream, but he’s uninterested in sharing. But the point is that he has a dream, and that’s more than Mikan can say.

Natsume is her last hope, but he’s not even paying attention!

I love to imagine Natsume and Mikan actually chatting in their teens, two losers who have no plans for what they're gonna do after graduating. And because she's not alone, it won't feel so scary not to know.

Okay, but honestly, I’m gonna derail here because although Mikan certainly isn’t thinking this, I am. Mikan and Natsume may be opposites in many ways, but they have more similarities than differences. All of the people around them have potential and clear futures, but they’re the two kids left in the lurch, though for different reasons. Natsume can’t imagine his future because he’s sure he doesn’t have much time left; Mikan can’t imagine her future because it’s a daunting prospect. But they’re both in the same boat of having nothing but blank pages ahead. I don’t only ship NatsuMikan because they’re marked by the academy and are partners, or because of the “fated pair” thing. It’s not all about Natsume’s ceaseless devotion. They have much in common, and that will end up being a driving force for Mikan’s journey falling in love with him. No, they don’t have a heart-to-heart here where they bond over being lost and future-less losers. But they still are, together and alike in this way. God, I love them.

Anyway, Mikan feels hopeless. They’re just kids but Alices are mature. They know everything about life, it seems, their futures paved out for them already. And Sumire points out that Ruka is a triple star too, just like Hotaru and Yuu, and Mikan is impressed once again. The people around her are so amazing, with so many talents and abilities, and apparently Ruka is too, just like her besties. (She is, in comparison, useless and unimpressive.)

But Ruka dismisses the accomplishment, saying that it had nothing to do with his actual ability, like it was for the other triples in their class. But before Ruka can say more, Natsume shows up again, interrupting rudely to complain about being hungry.

This panel does a great job of establishing that Mikan is actually the weird one for finding this pie entrancing. Not only Natsume and Ruka but the student in the corner are very put off by Anna's bizarre creations. No, it doesn't look edible.

So they move on to the cafe where Anna is working with her senpai Miruku. Anna’s alice is not simply that she can cook or bake, but that whatever she cooks or bakes ends up being a little weird. Mikan, an excitable girl, loves that she’s about to eat something crazy, but the boys are less enthused. Anna brings over a delicious-looking pie unlike anything Mikan has ever seen and she gushes over the colors and textures. Mikan is ready to dig in, until Natsume dumps the pot of tea over the whole table.

Natsume is an insufferable menace. All he ever does is ruin things, wherever he goes.

Mikan is on her feet, already scolding him. When he bluntly states that the pie was terrible, he seems uninterested in the fact that he says it in front of Anna. Mikan demands he apologize to Anna, but he just walks away. Mikan watches him leave as she trembles with rage. This is a whole new low for him. He’s not just a jerk; he’s sadistic, somehow finding pleasure in hurting other people for no reason at all. Good for Anna that Miruku shows up to comfort her. Except that Miruku notices that the flour must have expired because there’s a rotten scoundrel in the filling.

Miruku suggests that Natsume dumped the tea over the pie for this very reason, to keep them from eating the pie themselves.

Mikan and Ruka leave but Mikan is unsatisfied by that explanation. There must have been some other, normal way to keep them from eating the pie. But Ruka--the irritating Natsume apologist--pipes up that Natsume did that so they wouldn’t eat the pie. If Natsume had said something around all those customers, it would have reflected poorly on Anna and she could’ve ended up in trouble. Natsume did what he could to avoid that outcome.

You can't cancel Natsume without cancelling Ruka too. When are Natsume haters going to finally understand that Ruka is his bigGEST defender?

But that sounds like blatant apologism, so Mikan is skeptical, wondering if Natsume would really think that much about other people. After all, what Mikan knows about Natsume is that he may have a sad life, but he’s still a jerk in almost every way. He’s given her very few reasons to believe that other people’s feelings are something he ever considers, let alone prioritizes in such a selfless way. We might know from his POV that even his instances of cruelty are often inspired by selflessness, but from Mikan’s eyes, nothing about his actions suggests a martyr complex or a compassionate person.

But Ruka insists that she’s wrong, that Natsume is actually kind. He’s mysterious, and has done many morally dubious things, but at the end of the day, he would do anything for his friends, and will always quietly help somebody, even if it means he gets hurt.

Natsume is a mystery. He is a confusing mess, a puzzle with a million pieces and half of them are hidden. Nobody seems to be able to shed some insight into what makes him tick. But there is one person who knows him better than anybody: Ruka. And Ruka is telling her now that there’s more to Natsume than what she’s seen so far.

And when she thinks back on what happened with Reo, she understands where he’s coming from too. Natsume was willing to take on Reo’s attention in order to distract him from singling out Mikan or Sumire. He was a hair’s breadth away from blowing himself up to help them get away. So she is starting to see what Ruka is talking about. This conversation is important, not just because it helps us as readers understand Natsume better, but because it helps Mikan get him better. Because of this chat, she will keep Ruka’s words in mind when she evaluates Natsume’s behavior in the future, looking deeper at his actions instead of just assuming the worst, which is what he wants.

The parallels exist but don't fall for the easy propaganda that Mikan and Ruka or Natsume and Hotaru are the same. It makes life (and relationships) super boring.

Mikan still calls Ruka out for his apologist behavior, for defending Natsume so desperately, which means he must love him a lot. Mikan connects Natsume with Hotaru, deducing that they have a lot in common. Hotaru is also cold on the surface, but kind when it matters. Especially after the events of the first chapter, Mikan has appreciated the more subtle parts of Hotaru’s personality. And she shows that off now, smiling and boasting her love. In that way, she and Ruka are similar too, being so devoted to their best friends.

Ruka seems touched, so he finally opens up about what she had asked before, about his dream, which is to be a vet and live with Natsume, somewhere surrounded by animals but not by people, where they can live in peace unbothered. A misanthropic paradise.

Mikan beams. She’s still not happy about her lack of goals, but she can’t be dismayed by his dream because she can see it took him courage to open up about it. So she doesn’t make it about herself. Instead, she smiles and promises him that his dream will come true. Now that she’s calmed down and is in better spirits, and understands her class nemesis a little better, she’s ready to go find Natsume.

I don't like the whole "Mikan has a favorite person" nonsense because real people are capable are loving a lot of people. I don't ship Mikan and Ruka romantically but I will fight you to the death over the fact that she loves him so much, platonically.

Her friendship with Ruka is deeply important on several counts. On a NatsuMikan level, Ruka is the only person who is able to divulge information about Natsume, since the boy himself isn’t about to open up any time soon. Ruka is desperate to defend and protect Natsume, even just in regards to his reputation. More often than not, the important details that Mikan learns about Natsume she learns through Ruka making the choice to share them with her.

But their relationship is deeper than that too. They’re united through their devotion to their friends and through their ability to see deeper into people’s personalities, able to analyze how their loved ones behave to see their motives and intentions, even if they try to hide them. Mikan and Ruka understand each other in a lot of key ways, and this is just the start of a friendship where they will help each other be stronger.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mikan realizes that she hasn’t visited Yuu yet! She manipulates Ruka into letting Natsume take them to the latent area. Again, she gets worked up about the amazing things surrounding her, and again is intimidated into silence by Natsume the jerk before she can run off to random attractions. So they head straight for the haunted mansion.

Reread GA and pay excruciating attention to small things because this is one of my favorite two panels in the whole arc. NatsuMikan are so similar! They get distracted by the same nonsense and have the same reaction! Cute Ruka is focused on his little map, but Natsume and Mikan's attention is easily diverted by Koko's attraction. It's the little things, you know?

Yuu lets them in ahead of the line. Mikan has a complicated relationship with ghosts, so she puts on airs--as she is prone to do--that she is totally fine. She instantly drops those airs when the doors slam. Suddenly it’s all too scary and the boys are leaving her behind, which is unacceptable. She latches onto Ruka--the nicer of the two. After all, Natsume is being very mean about her fear. He for sure wouldn’t let her cling to him. And she’s just had a nice, heartfelt chat with Ruka. He feels safer.

They’re finally chased by a crawling hag and all three of them book it through the maze, and cruel fate sees to it that Yuu passes out and breaks the electricity, leaving Natsume and Mikan stuck in a room, with Ruka chasing after his rabbit.

Mikan is calling for help, but Natsume tells her it’s no use. So they should climb the wall next! But his ankle is twisted. Dang. Well, he could at least make a fire so it’s not so dark--but of course he sets an evil, scary fire. There really is no winning with this guy.

Though Mikan feels guilty because she’s the reason his ankle is twisted, she still gets annoyed when he suggests breaking down the wall in order to escape. That’s also unacceptable, because the latent students worked hard on their attraction and it would be cruel to break it. Natsume’s not really coming off as nice right now, even though Ruka insisted he was capable of it.

But he gives in. Which means they have to sit there. In the dark. Trapped alone. With the ghosts.

Natsume "hugged" Mikan at the SA event. Mikan "hugs" Natsume at the haunted house. It's the little things. uwu

Mikan is very scared of every noise, so she clings to Natsume, the only person around to cling to. And that’s unfortunate because he is using her fear for his own entertainment. He refuses to hold her hand or comfort her and instead lies about seeing the faces on the wall move. She scolds him for being a jerk, which reminds her that he’s always a jerk, except that Ruka told her he’s not always a jerk.

So Mikan apologizes to him about Anna, because she had misunderstood his intentions. But Natsume doesn’t care and doesn’t even seem to know what she’s talking about, which hints that maybe Ruka is insane for being friends with this person.

The text circled says, "Completely forgot about being scared." This chapter introduces two aspects of Mikan's feelings about Natsume: he makes her self-conscious, but he also helps her completely forget about her problems. This is consistent.

Mikan muses on her current unpleasant situation. Natsume is difficult to deal with and to talk to. He isn’t chatty. He isn’t nice. He ignores her most of the time and when he’s not ignoring her, he’s making fun of her. This is the first time she’s alone with him that isn’t a life-or-death situation, and it’s weird. She states clearly--in her mind--that she doesn’t hate Natsume anymore, but that she still doesn’t know how to talk to him, and that she feels self-conscious around him.

Natsume is in fact one of the few people who makes Mikan feel self-conscious. She’s usually confident and bold, but with him, she gets insecure. I’ll talk more about this insecurity and expand on it later on, but it’s not a typical experience for her (with other people, that is), which is why it stands out. He’s different from other people. She’s stuck between wanting to be friends with him and understanding what Ruka sees in him and the facts that he’s clearly presenting her with. She doesn’t know what to think or how to act around him, so it makes her nervous. For now, it’s certainly his fault. Though she has tough skin and fights back just as hard whenever he insults her, there’s also the question of small talk. How is she supposed to talk if he just shoots down every conversation?

Does Natsume even know how to have fun? Because, now that she thinks of it, Natsume doesn’t ever look like he’s having fun. He never laughs or even smiles. She realizes she’d never actually asked him about those rumors she’d heard. People are always talking about him, but she’s never heard anything directly from the horse’s mouth.

While Mikan is sitting here, quietly, she’s figuring things out about him for herself and by herself. He’s not sharing anything. But she’s intuitive and emotionally intelligent enough to come to conclusions on her own. She figures that he’s probably not having fun because his mind is in a different place than the rest of them.

AND OH MY GOD GUYS DYGFHDSFGDHSF

Like I beat to death in my other essay, Natsume is a mystery to most people. He’s not close to people, but he’s surrounded by admirers and fans. Besides Ruka, nobody seems to get that Natsume’s demeanor is a mask. He’s not snarky and cold because he wants to be. And Mikan can see that. She’s been able to see it since the culture fest was first announced, that he’s lying when he says the festival is lame and pathetic. The festival is awesome, actually, and Natsume must agree, because who wouldn’t? But Natsume can’t participate the way the others can. And despite all the fun and excitement of the festival, he’s still not smiling. There must be something else going on, something getting in the way. She figures it out--that he’s lonely and miserable, trapped in turmoil. And she wants to help him, to make him happy for once. If his life is difficult, then he needs something to make him smile.

How else does one combat this sort of problem than with jokes?

Mikan wants to mold her relationship with Natsume into something she's more comfortable with, but eventually the nature of their relationship will develop into something that she gets comfortable with and that will even bring her comfort.

But he doesn’t laugh. Figures that the one second Mikan actually talks to him, he ruins things again. Now he’s a jerk again and they bicker until he kicks up her skirt.

By the time they’re finally rescued, Mikan is attacking Natsume to punish him for what he did to her. The people who have found them are all shocked at what they see, but it takes Mikan a moment to register what exactly they think they saw. She quickly denies that they were doing anything other than fighting, but then stupid Natsume has to open his mouth again, accusing her of jumping him.

Natsume smiles a little, amused by their bickering, but Mikan is no longer interested in making him laugh.

This chapter is huge for Mikan’s musings on Natsume’s character. In the anime, Natsume demonstrates some of the selfless behavior Ruka told her about earlier. She has evidence now and can see that Ruka was right. However, in the manga, Natsume did not shield her with his body. He did not hide his twisted ankle. No, he was open about his injury and did nothing noble. He was just stuck there with her. Mikan doesn’t end the chapter having figured anything out for sure about Natsume. The thing is: Natsume is an enigma to her. He is simply incomprehensible and nothing he does ever makes any sense.

The anime had less time to work out the characters and relationships. Natsume had to be established as selfless and kind both to the audience and to Mikan in a timely manner, which is why he's such a hero in this episode. But here, in the manga, Mikan looks really hard at his behavior because she wants to see what Ruka keeps assuring her is there. But there really isn't any outstanding evidence because Natsume doesn't want her to see it. If there was some beautiful, noble action here, then Mikan would be justified in pursuing this friendship and in getting to know him better. He'd be giving her a reason to like him. Manga!Natsume does not do this. Like I said in the first part of this Mikan essay, she falls in love with him against his will and despite his every flaw. Natsume was, for the most part, insufferable today. She will continue hanging out with him because she has to, because she can't help but feel like he's hiding something.

I just think they're neat.

But she wants to figure him out. And she’s working very hard at it, which is admirable, because he hasn’t really given her a reason to. Ruka told her that there’s kindness there, hidden under a veneer of cruelty. She is sure now that if she looks closer, eventually she will see it too. NatsuMikan wouldn’t work if she wasn’t willing to try, because he has already given up on his end.

And one more thing, we see a glimpse of one of my favorite aspects of NatsuMikan, and that’s Natsume’s tendency to distract Mikan from her problems. To be fair, he’s not really doing that here on purpose. But Mikan is so preoccupied with thinking about Natsume that she forgot entirely about being scared. By the time she’s finally rescued, she hasn’t been scared for a while. I’ll discuss this in more depth later, but for now I’ll reiterate that Natsume and Mikan have way more similarities than differences.

Chapter Twenty-Two

This chapter isn’t really about Mikan at all. I’ll discuss what I can, but it will be pretty limited. Y’all might know that I’m a big fan of Hotaru and Subaru’s sibling bond, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the manga. But this is a Mikan essay, specifically regarding NatsuMikan. I’ll analyze the parts that are about Mikan, but I’ll be brief. Know that this is killing me.

Mikan has her afternoon off and is excited to spend it with her besties and away from Natsume (on Mikan’s end, we haven’t fully vacated the enemies stage of enemies to lovers). But Hotaru is strangely distant for most of their time together. Mikan takes it personally. She’s been looking forward to this part of her day, so how come Hotaru isn’t having as much fun as she is? But Hotaru is distracted by something else.

The scans situation here is tragic. What matters is that Mikan starts the chapter by making Hotaru's distraction about her.

Their little outing is interrupted by an accident at an attraction. They watch the chaos as one of the Principal students--Subaru--arrives to use his healing and pain alices. Mikan is, as always, impressed by this mysterious person, but not nearly as much as Hotaru, who walks right up to him. She is not intimidated. She does not back down when his assistant tells her to. She just stares at him and he stares back.

And Mikan realizes that Hotaru has been keeping a secret from her: Subaru is her older brother. And she never thought to mention it? Mikan is supposed to be Hotaru’s best friend, but there’s parts of her that remain a stubborn mystery. To make matters worse, the Imai siblings don’t even act like siblings. They are cold and detached. They talk more like they’re at a business meeting than that they’re meeting their family member for the first time.

Mikan continues to make Hotaru's issue about her. And I continue to cry about the scans.

When the encounter ends, Mikan doesn’t complain about Hotaru not telling her. So far, she's been very betrayed that Hotaru would, first, be distracted for the short time they actually spend together during the festival, and second, that she would keep such a huge secret from her. She could very easily start complaining and whining. But that’s not important, because Hotaru is clearly upset. She is saddened by the fate of her brother, who has spent so much of his life in this institution that he’s forgotten his humanity. She wonders if she will become like that and Mikan quickly denies it. Hotaru is different! Just like Ruka is desperate to defend Natsume against anybody who says a bad word against him, Mikan will defend Hotaru, especially when the person underestimating her is Hotaru herself. How could Mikan continue to make this about herself when someone is going through something so hard?

The chapter ends happily, with Hotaru realizing she can’t lose her humanity when she has Yuu and especially Mikan by her side.

Mikan wants to comfort Hotaru. She rarely sees Hotaru upset or unhappy. She can figure out for herself that Hotaru didn’t tell her about her brother because of those insecurities she was keeping to herself. She knows that what Hotaru needs now is comfort and she’s willing to give it. Even though she’d initially been hurt that Hotaru would hide something from her, she’s able not just to set the matter aside for later, but to completely dismiss it. She understands, so it doesn’t hurt anymore. What hurts now is that Hotaru is hurt. She’s emotionally intelligent enough to know that this moment isn’t about her, and she shouldn’t try to make it about her. It’s about Hotaru.

Maybe the reason why Mikan and Hotaru feels a little lackluster to me is because people never mention Yuu with them. I LOVE this trio to death but they get so little love as a group! But they all love each other... that keeps me going.

Mikan is such a sweet friend. I love her.

Conclusion

I'd add one more chapter but the next two chapters are a unit so... I'll just have to save that for tomorrow.

"Tomorrow?" you may ask. "But, Anya, you've been so flakkyyy." Yes, I have been. And that's because Mikan's essays are annoying to format. There's no (realistic) limit to how many images I can include in any post anymore which means that I'm including way more. They take me much longer than Natsume's did. And so I decided to change my posting schedule! I need to have a schedule because if I don't, I'll simply never post and that would be terrible. So instead of posting on weekdays, I'll post on the three day weekend, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. That way I have more time to write Mikan's essays (which are harder than Natsume's) as well as more time to format the longer posts.

Also it'll give you guys more time to read these monstrosities. I know they're long and tedious. I'm sorry.

Anyway, today we discussed the second part of the tri-part culture fest. There's one more left, which I will post tomorrow. We can look forward to a shocking development in Mikan's feelings in the next and final part of the culture fest. Very exciting! So stay tuned!

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livingmybestfictionallife · 4 years

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What If?

Request from @chanandlersstuff: Hii, it's me, again. I want to request another Mgk imagine. Something like he goes to a new bar in the city and discovers that the owner is his childhood sweetheart or his first crush, the reader, and they can kiss or something like that. I love how you write and that's why I will ask you for a lots of requests

A/N: Thank you so much for your support! :) I hope you enjoy this one! Also, idk where Cassie and her mother reside. I assume it’s Cleveland, so that’s what it’s going to be in this story. ALSO, a bit of Pantera/Damageplan trivia is included as part of the plot of the story simply because I was listening to it and realized this takes place in Ohio--you’ll see why it’s important if you don’t already know. Hope you enjoy!

A/N part 2: If you ever want to be tagged in something, send me an ask or a message! :)

December 8th, 2004 was always a day that stood out to Colson, simply because it was the biggest ‘What if?’ in his life. He’d experienced too much heartache in his youth and would continue to face pain and anguish throughout his adolescence and early adulthood, and he had so many things that he would reflect back on and wonder what could have happened to make things go differently? What could he have done better? What kind of divine intervention would have been needed? What if he’d just gone home? What if he decided to hang out with someone else?

It seemed that as he reached thirty, he became more enamored with laying these what if questions to rest. He could spend the rest of his life wondering about what would happen had he not fucked something up or had something just gone a different direction, or he could accept that each of those mishaps had led him to the man he was today. He was happy with his life, and for the first time in a long time, he could admit that he was truly happy; he had a beautiful, happy, and healthy daughter that was the light of his world, a successful fifth studio album that blew away the punk and rock charts, and he was in what had to be the healthiest relationship in his life with a gorgeous woman that he loved. Yet still, there was one what if that refused to escape his mind: what if December 8th, 2004 went differently?

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Cassie had told her father over a thanksgiving dinner in Los Angeles about her school’s Winter Talent Show, and that she would be performing a song off her father’s album as a tribute to her late grandfather. Colson couldn’t refrain from tearing up as his daughter told him this and promised he wouldn’t miss it for the world.

He’d shown up to Cassie’s talent show with a bouquet of flowers and a couple of friends he bothered to still talk to after all these years. His eyes glistened with proud, sorrow-ridden tears as he listened to the angel he had for a child sing his lyrics--with school appropriate revisions made--about the struggles he faced with his father since he was about her age. Of all the what ifs that passed through his mind, a lot had to do with his ability to be a good father for Cassie, and every second he spends with her reminds him that she is so much better of a person than he ever was at her age, and it was in that pride that he allowed a solitary tear to fall. He knew his father was proud of Cassie as well as she sang Lonely for her school, and when the show was over, he wrapped his daughter in the tightest hug he could, terrified of the fact that someday, he wouldn’t be around to hold her anymore.

It seemed death was always prevalent in his life; after all it was a death that caused the biggest what if in his mind to continue to pester him.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

(Y/N) paced around the densely populated room and watched not only the patrons, but the employees as well. She’d never even thought of opening a bar, in fact, she never considered being an entrepreneur of any sort, but when the opportunity came, she realized she’d have to be a fool to turn it down. Music had always been a passion of hers; she’d performed in small garage bands with friends, played local shows throughout high school and college, and she even got a degree in music production in hopes of working with a recording studio or record label. (Y/N) had followed this dream and worked at a Bad Racket Recording Studio since 2012, about three years after the studio opened.

It wasn’t until about a year ago that a friend got her in contact with someone who was looking to co-own a bar and turn it into a music venue for local bands. She loved the idea of promoting local bands and musicians, especially since she’d spent the past seven years watching people bring their dreams to life through recording. Maybe it was time to help them realize another dream, the dream of performance.

The reverberations of heavy guitar and drums pulsed through her heart and bones as the performing artist tonight began a cover of Damageplan’s ‘Breathing New Life’. Her heart skipped a beat inadvertently as her mind became lost in the music that electrified the air around her. As an early teen, she’d found solace in music of all genres, but her favorite had been the rock/grunge/metal scene. Pantera had been one of her father’s favorite bands, and so she grew up with a fondness of the musical stylings of the two Abbott brothers from Texas. A lot of kids her age couldn’t understand what was so appealing about Pantera to her--they assumed that just because her parents listened to it she was forced to as well and therefore didn’t know what good music was--but there was always one kid who understood.

One blonde boy would always make sure to ask (y/n) what new music she’d found, if she’d heard of the drama that was going down between bands, and if she’d wanted to listen to CDs together after school. She always responded with a smile before any words left her mouth to continue the conversation, and over the course of middle school, that blonde kid, who she’d known only in passing before, became her closest friend.

As (y/n)’s eyes continued to drift over the crowd, images of her childhood friend’s face flashed through her mind as her gaze came to rest on a tall man dressed in all black, with unruly blonde hair. Had he not been wearing his jacket around his waist and a short sleeved shirt that revealed his tattoos, (y/n) would have glossed over the man’s presence without a second look, but the I-71 North tattoo that was half-visible beneath the rolled up sleeve had given away the man’s identity. With a smile on her face and confidence in her stride, (y/n) approached the bar.

Colson had been in town for a few nights before he’d had enough of his old buddies bugging him about trying out a new bar called Panther’s Den. They continued to swear up and down about it having a nineties feel, and how maybe he should see about setting up a small performance for old-time sakes there. After about three days of this continuing pestering, he gave in and agreed to go to the bar. Together, the small group sat huddled together as they waited to order drinks when a woman approached them with an unforgettable smile pulled across her face.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” she called out over the band as she shifted her weight from one foot to another and waited for the man to bring his eyes to hers. She half expected to see the bloodshot, sleep-deprived, almost hallowed out expression he had worn from time to time in his youth, but when those bright blue eyes turned to face her, (y/n)’s smile grew as she looked into the healthy face of her long time friend.

“(Y/N),” Colson was quick to exclaim as he stretched out his arms and pulled the woman into his chest. “What are you doing here?”

“Just running my business.”

“You manage this place?” Colson asked as he looked down into the woman’s eyes. She’d always been mesmerizing to him, although he could never put his finger on it. Maybe it had been how little she cared about what other people thought about her in school, or how badass her taste in music was to him. Maybe it was how supportive she was in him when he said he wanted to rap, or the way her eyes seemed to light up whenever a good riff stood out to her. Maybe it was the way she couldn’t help but nod her head to the beat of every song, the way she bit her lip when she was concentrating on a specific lyric, or the fact that she was his earliest supporter. Whatever it was that captivated him at thirteen was doing the same thing to him at thirty.

“I own it; well, co-own, technically, but I picked the name.” With a smirk, (y/n) lowered herself into the barstool beside Colson and watched as the posse that had surrounded him began to disappear.

“I definitely see the connection now,” he laughed as his eyes traced over the woman’s features. There was a lot that was different--she had less of a baby face that she had in school, seemed a bit more kind and lighthearted than when she was so doom and gloom back in the day, and wore a smile that used to take him what felt like hours of coercing to bring to her face. “How have you been?” Colson hated the question. Often he thought people would think he asked it just to compare his success to their current phase in life, but with (y/n) it came with a different kind of awkwardness that he would have to face.

“I’ve been doing well. My business partner and I got this place up and running last year and it’s been going pretty smoothly,” she admitted. “I was working with a recording studio for a long time before this, but nothing too exciting.” (Y/N) loved what she did and often didn’t have much to talk about with other people besides her work. Her personal life consisted of watched re-runs of TV shows that haven’t been on the air in years, entertaining herself and her pets at home, and not really making an attempt of finding new relationships--friendly or romantic.

“No guy in your life?” Colson found himself asking with an insecurity swelling in his chest that didn’t die down until she shook her head and dismissed whatever fears he didn’t realize he had.

“What about you? Dating Megan Fox must being something,” (y/n) said as she nudged Colson’s ribs with her elbow.

“Yeah,” Colson muttered as he tried to hide his face from (y/n) as he spoke. “She’s great, and I’m really happy.” His words were truthful in every sense of the matter, but that what if still tugged at his heart.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

At twelve and thirteen-years-old, there’s no way to know what love feels like, so Colson tried to ignore the knots that came into his stomach or the words that got caught in his throat whenever he would hang out with (y/n). He ignored the burning in his chest whenever their faces touched while sharing the cheap headphones they used to listen to (y/n)’s CD player with, and buried the jittery feeling he had whenever he knew he had plans with (y/n) and was counting down the hours until seeing her. The only thing that forced him to come to terms with how he felt towards (y/n) was another boy in her class that offered his headphones over to her one day before school to listen to the newly released, Volume 2 box set from Motley Crue, which had just announced they were reuniting.

His blood boiled as he saw her hand brush against the other boy’s as she accepted the headphones and bobbed her head to the beat of whatever song was flooding her ears. It took Colson all of the courage his young self could muster to ask (y/n) to go on a date with him, and all of the money he had earned through small, odd-jobs to pay for the perfect date for this perfect girl.

He’d tried to ask two of his older friends who could drive to take him and (y/n) to Columbus, but wasn’t able to bribe them with enough money for them to agree. Eventually, he had to ask (y/n)’s father for help. His own dad was too busy working to be bothered with a middle school date, so he hoped the man who gave his daughter her love of music would be understanding. (Y/N)’s father found the young man’s idea heartwarming and fun, and agreed to take the pair to Columbus under the stipulation that he stayed to keep an eye on them. At that point, Colson was so relieved the date was panning out, that he didn’t care if her dad came along.

Excitement had overwhelmed both (y/n) and Colson as they embarked on the two hour drive from Cleveland to Columbus, but the time passed quickly through their loud singing, enthusiastic conversation, and (y/n)’s wild anticipation as Colson revealed to her that they were going to Columbus to see Damageplan perform live. He remembered an early conversation he’d had with (y/n) about how she’d love to see Pantera live, as well as the disappointment she had a year ago when the band broke up. Although it wasn’t the exact same as seeing her all-time favorite band, he’d hoped Damageplan, which the founders of Pantera formed after their breakup, would be a close second.

Had they not been caught in traffic, they would have gotten to the show on time. To this day, Colson and (y/n) were both sure the traffic had been a blessing in disguise. They wanted to be front and center for the first song, but that came with the possibility of losing their lives.

They pulled up to the venue about fifteen minutes late. “The show is hours long! We won’t miss much in fifteen minutes,” (y/n)’s father had continued to reassure the teenagers that sat together in the back seat of his car throughout the drive. However, as they pulled up to see ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars flooding the scene, he realized that they may have missed everything. After her father got out and talked to a few people who had remained at the venue--either to give statements to officers or simply because they were in too much shock to drive--he returned to the car where Colson and (y/n) waited, put the vehicle into drive, and pulled away from the scene. It was about twenty long, agonizing minutes of silence before he pulled over through a fast food drive through to order the teens food. With his voice low as they waited for burgers and French fries, he delivered the news to the pair sitting in his backseat. Dimebag Darrell was dead, and their lives had been spared by some traffic on I-71.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

“Do you ever wonder what would have happened with us if we actually made it to the concert?” Colson found himself asking (y/n) as his fingertips picked at the label on his beer bottle.

“The possibility of getting shot crosses my mind,” (y/n) responded dryly as she leaned against the bar on her elbow.

“I mean, what if we made it to the venue and that guy didn’t show up--he never got on stage and killed all those people. What would have happened--with us?” Colson’s eyes never left (y/n). The question had plagued him since that night, followed by a million subsequent questions, such as, Why did I never ask her out again? Why did I see that as missing my shot?

“Well,” (y/n) began with a smile playing on her lips. “That would have been the best date of my entire life. Hands down, nothing could have ever topped it,” she said as her genuine smile curled even higher into a beaming grin that made Colson weak. “I would have probably found a way to give you a kiss whenever my dad wasn’t looking, just to show you how much I appreciated not only your plan for the date, but also you as a person, my best friend, and my biggest crush back then.”

“If I would have asked you out again would you have said ‘yes,’ even after what actually happened?” He was hesitant to receive her answer; he didn’t want to know he had wasted so much time wondering if he missed out on the relationship he was meant to be in by being too cowardly to ask. As his eyes met the soft smile of the woman that stood beside him, his heart sank into his stomach and his stomach turned to lead.

“Yeah, I would have,” she admitted. “You were always there for me, Colson, and I kind of anticipated you asking me out again. You were my favorite person to be around, and I’m so proud of you for chasing your dreams.”

“But how much different would my life be if you were beside me the whole time?” He seemed defiant in his question, as if his tone could change the past and alter the present so he could see the difference in his life like comparing two ‘find-the-difference’ pages from a Highlight’s book.

“You wouldn’t have Cassie,” (y/n) stated with a matter-of-fact tone, “and I know how much you love that child.” Colson smiled at the mention of his daughter, and knew her statement to be true. If (y/n) was around, he would have never met Emma and Cassie would have never been born. “You would have still gone off on your own and done what you wanted to. Having me as your girlfriend wouldn’t have changed you wanting to be with models, I couldn’t ever keep you from something you set your mind to, so the drugs would have pulled us apart. In your own opinion, would I still be your friend if I saw everything you’ve done?” With a smirk and a chuckle, Colson reached out for (y/n)’s arm and gentled rested his hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t know if I would still be my friend. But I’m turning around from a lot of the stupid shit I used to do. You know, mellowing out with age,” he laughed and earned a small smirk from the girl that got away. “What about who I am now? How do you feel about him?”

The words came from his mouth with a solemn look on his face as he scanned the woman’s appearance. He still loved her, and a big part of him knew he would never stop loving her. After all, how could he? He never got the opportunity to see where he and (y/n) would have gone. Would they have a child of their own? Would he have listened to her if she pestered him or threatened to leave when it came to the drugs? Would he have even felt he needed them? All they could do was speculate, and speculation wasn’t enough for him. He wanted an ending on their relationship, one way or another, he needed to know. This open-ended bullshit was eating at him every waking second of his life since December 8th, 2004, and he needed to have her tell him it would have never worked, then he could move on.

“You’ve always been incredible to me,” (y/n)’s softened voice admitted as she gazed up at the man she’d loved since her youth. “And you always will be, but you have Megan, and I know you--you’re happy. Don’t ruin what is a great thing over something that could have been, regardless of how either of us feel.” (Y/N) could feel her heart sinking and her eyes ache as they threatened to fill with tears.

All she’d ever wanted was for him to walk in here, admit his feelings for her, and live some fan-fiction reality of a happily ever after, but the real world was much more cruel. People move on, and even if they don’t fully move on emotionally, they don’t sit around waiting forever. Colson hadn’t remained single in the sixteen years between their first almost date, and she never expected him to. The least she could do was wish happiness onto him and be happy for him when he found it. “I think you may have had a bit too much to drink, Col,” she sighed as she pushed the glass of liquor that sat in front of him aside. Throughout their reminiscing and conversation, he continued to order drink after drink to drown the anxiety of seeing her, and (y/n) could tell it was getting to his head. “You don’t want to do something you’ll regret when you sober up.”

“I need to know, (y/n),” he stated in a firm and exasperated gasp as they pair disappeared into her office so that he could sober up while she collected his friends to take him back to wherever he was staying.

“Colson--”

“Please,” his gentle blue eyes were staring down intently at (y/n)’s soul, a soul filled with hope and warmth clouded with traumas of her own, a soul that always felt tethered to his. With a deep breath and gentle sigh, she pulled herself onto her toes, gently rested her hands against his chest and shoulder, and closed her eyes as her lips found his.

Their kiss was simple, something a pair of middle school kids would have become so giddy over having done, but as adults, it was damn near impossible to ignore her heart jumping into her throat, the way his hands felt on her hips, how soft her lips were against his, how desperate he was to deepen the kiss, to sweep his tongue across her lips and lean her against a wall to feel her pressed against him. (Y/N) had pulled away from Colson before he could find the courage to do what he’d always wanted, and the pair stood toe to toe with electricity buzzing in their heads as they continued to reflect back on the past few seconds. Neither had felt that way with another person before, and neither were certain they would ever feel that way again, because Colson was happy, and Megan didn’t deserve to be thrown aside over the possibility of all the what ifs he had in regards to (y/n).

She gently bit down on her lip and stared at the floor in a desperate attempt to avoid looking Colson in the eyes, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to contain herself if he decided he wanted more. Thankfully, he took the hint and pulled (y/n) into a gentle hug before he turned rather clumsily on his heel to catch up with his friends.

“You’re always welcome here, Colson,” (y/n) called out before he left her sight, hoping he would understand her on the deeper level they always were able to converse with one another on.

“Thanks, (y/n),” he said in return as he held the door to her office gently in his hands. “I’ll try to come back again when I’m not so busy.” A coy smile played on both of their faces once the door was placed between them, and hope continued to spring from both of their chests.

Colson left the Panther’s Den feeling even more confused by the what ifs than he had initially been, and the sensation of the kiss had left him feeling even more light-headed and puzzled than any alcohol or overthinking could cause. In their silences and stolen glances, in the touch of their lips and how each other felt beneath the other’s hands, Colson knew whatever electricity between them, whatever spiritual connection, or tethering of souls would never go away. It was a matter of timing for the pair, thirteen wasn’t the right time for them to get together and it was deflected in a gruesome way, but whatever the temptress of time was planning for Colson and (y/n), he knew he was ready to fall, so he placed their fate in the hands of life, and continued down the street with the gentle graze of her lips pressing like a phantom against his own.

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thechicchicsagency · 4 years

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Can Anna Wintour Survive the Social Justice Movement? A reckoning has come to Bon Appétit and the other magazines of Condé Nast. Can a culture built on elitism and exclusion possibly change?On Monday, as swiftly as a 9-iron taken to a tee at Augusta, Adam Rapoport resigned as the editor in chief of Bon Appétit magazine after a damning Halloween photo circulated on social media that morning. Drawn from the vast insensitivity archives to which so many influential people have made inadvertent submissions, the picture, from 2004, shows him costumed in a tank top and thick chain necklace as his wife’s “papi,’’ the term she attached to it in an Instagram post several years later.As it happened, Mr. Rapoport had been facing mounting grievance from his staff about the magazine’s demeaning treatment of employees and freelancers of color and the dubious ways in which its popular video division presented culturally appropriated cooking. But these apparently were insufficient grounds for forcing him out.Over and over, power structures seem to require that accusations of racial bias are documented by photographic evidence — proof to override a reflexive or simply inconvenient skepticism. Police officers abused their authority for decades without consequence. It was not until a growing body of video footage revealed all the brutality, and the systemic prejudice at the heart of it, that the world began to express the outrage there to be mined all along — justice by iPhone.In that sense, Mr. Rapoport’s ouster at the hands of a camera was entirely fitting. Bon Appétit belongs to Condé Nast, a media empire perhaps unrivaled by any institution on earth in its supplication to image. For decades, both at the level of corporate culture and branded worldview, the company’s lifestyle magazines have held to the notion that there are “right’’ people and wrong people, a determination made by birthright.

There are the rich, and there are the dismissible; the great looking, and the condemned — a paradigm that has now become dangerously untenable, and one the company has been striving to change.Within the Condé Nast framework, autocratic bosses were left to do whatever they pleased — subjugating underlings to hazing rituals with no seeming end point. So much was excusable in the name of beauty and profit. “Difficulty,” Kim France, a former editor in chief of Lucky magazine, told me, “was regarded as brilliance.

”No one at Condé Nast has had more of an outsize reputation for imperiousness wed to native talent than Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, the artistic director of the company and more recently its “global content adviser’’ as well. Mr. Rapoport, who spent 20 years at the company and turned around an ailing product in Bon Appétit, reported to her.What sort of management cues were to be taken? Famous for a self-regarding style — she might demand that subordinates arrive 30 minutes early for certain meetings she attended — Ms. Wintour was obviously not in the best position to try to convince him, for instance, that he should not ask his assistant (black and Stanford-educated) to clean his golf clubs. (That was one of the many revealing details in a Business Insider exposé of the food magazine that arrived this week.)Race is a fraught subject at Condé Nast. Several employees of color I spoke with, all of them laid off over the past few years, talked about the challenges they faced. They struggled to be heard or get the resources they needed to do their jobs at the highest levels; they faced ignorance and lazy stereotyping from white bosses when the subject of covering black culture came up; they all said they were exhausted by always having to explain it all.

Even though they were no longer at Condé Nast, not one of them felt free to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation from the company or the concern that they would be looked at as complainers, making it much harder to find work.Editors’ PicksHotels Transformed New York’s Social Life. Now What?Solving the Mystery of What Became of J.F.K.’s Other Patrol BoatOne former staff member who is black could not fail to see the irony in being made to go to unconscious bias training — which became mandatory at the company early last year — only then to lose a big chunk of his portfolio shortly thereafter. “I felt so devalued,’’ he said, “after working so hard.’’Unconscious bias training is supposed to alert you to your blind spots in your perception of people and ideas. But at the level of corporate and creative governance, the programming at Condé Nast has not been seamlessly woven into the company’s broader philosophy. Last month, during a round of layoffs, in which 100 people were let go amid the economic calamities of Covid-19, the company dismissed three Asian-American editors, all of whom covered culture at different publications.Among the top 10 editorial leaders listed on Vogue’s masthead, all are white. According to a spokesman for Condé Nast, across divisions on Vogue’s editorial side, people of color make up 14 percent of senior managers. On June 5, amid global protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, Ms. Wintour sent a note to her staff, acknowledging that “it can’t be easy to be a Black employee at Vogue,’’ and that the magazine had “not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.”Although Vogue has made a greater effort to feature black women on its covers in recent years — Rihanna, Serena Williams, Lupita Nyong’o — the gate swings open far more easily for those who are not. And in this particular area, too, legacy weighs heavily. When LeBron James made history as the first black man to grace the cover in 2008, he shared the space with a white supermodel, Gisele Bündchen, who appeared as a damsel in his clutches, an unmistakable reference to King Kong.

A spokesman at Condé Nast admitted that much progress needs to be made in regard to diversity at the company, but he defended Ms. Wintour’s record, pointing out that she has passionately supported various designers of color throughout her career, helping to raise money for them through her work with the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She also installed two black editors to lead Teen Vogue, genuinely radical in its content, one following the other (Elaine Welteroth and then Lindsay Peoples Wagner).At the same time, Ms. Wintour has presided over Vogue for 32 years, and during that period she has done more to enshrine the values of bloodline, pedigree and privilege than anyone in American media. A brief and very inconclusive list of Ms. Wintour’s assistants in the 21st century includes the Yale-educated daughter of a prominent Miami dance director, the Dartmouth-educated descendant of a major bank president, the Princeton-educated daughter of an Oscar-winning screenwriter and so on. For so long it was central to the Condé Nast ethos that you had to be thin, gorgeous and impeccably credentialed to retrieve someone else’s espresso macchiato.

Even now, as the publishing industry continues to implode and wonderful writers who could really use the work (or at least the prestigious affiliation) abound, Vogue continues to list among its contributing editors people like the German heiress Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis and many others among the well born. Five years ago, Ms. Thurn und Taxis posted a picture on Instagram of a homeless woman reading Vogue, seated on the sidewalk, with the words, “Paris is full of surprises.” Vogue quickly issued a statement, calling the gesture distasteful, and then proceeded to run her byline on its website at least 10 more timesLast year, Grace Coddington, another contributor, who had held enormous influence over what was shot for Vogue and how, in her many years as the magazine’s creative director, was photographed with her collection of “mammy’’ jars, racist ceramics depicting African-American women as servile maids.

Ms. Wintour clearly believes that she can break from the past and kill off any vestiges of a system steeped in the benighted values for which she has become the corporate avatar. The public apology from Bon Appétit was quite startling in its admission of failure, particularly its concession that the magazine “continued to tokenize” the people of color that it did hire.As part of her contribution to this new wave of progressivism, Ms. Wintour wrote a piece for Vogue.com a week after the death of George Floyd, aligning herself with Black Lives Matter and calling on Joe Biden to select a woman of color as his running mate.For someone who had seemed so averse to activism as the world has roiled from inequality for years, it felt like a desperate grasp for relevance. A spokesman for the company bristled at the suggestion, arguing that it is Condé Nast’s job “to cover what’s going on in the culture in the moment.”As it happens, André Leon Talley, who recently wrote a memoir about his complicated relationship with Ms. Wintour, as a black man and longtime former editor at Vogue, also has a lot to say about the current moment. This week in a radio interview with Sandra Bernhard, he offered his opinion about his ex-boss’s professed transformation.“I wanna say one thing, Dame Anna Wintour is a colonial broad; she’s a colonial dame,” he told Ms. Bernhard. “I do not think she will ever let anything get in the way of her white privilege.”

#Vogue #racism #anna wintour #2020 #blm

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totallyrhettro · 7 years

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Adrift, chapter 3

Word Count: 2004 Rating: This chapter: PG; overall story: explicit Warnings: None Summary: After almost drowning in the Cape Fear River as a young man, Rhett can’t seem to get over his fear of swimming. Link is a swim instructor who offers to help. Notes: AU. Rhett and Link have never met and are in their late 20s. Based on the events described in GMCL 24, but Rhett was there alone.

Chapter 1 Previous Chapter

Rhett opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was blue and for the briefest of moments he thought he really was underwater. Blinking his vision cleared and more of the world began to focus. Bluer than the sky on a clear, summer’s day, gentle and intense, the blue was a pair of eyes that were looking down at him with curiosity and concern. Blinking again a face came into view. Link’s face. A kind, beautiful face filled with worry, and once again Rhett’s breath was caught in his throat.

“He’s coming to,” Link was saying. There must have been others around, equally confused worried, but Rhett saw none of them. “Rhett? Can you hear me?”

“Link?” he choked out. Swallowing the large lump in his throat, Rhett tried again. “What happened?”

“You pass out, my friend.” A smile crossed Link’s face, happy to see his new friend was responding. “Think you can sit up for me?” Groaning Rhett raised himself up from the cold floor, rubbing the back of his head. There was a small bump there, but not too bad. He must not have been too far off the ground when he fainted. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess.” Rhett rubbed his head. From his newly seated position he could see the small crowd that had gathered around him and he felt shame quickly creeping in. “I’m fine,” he asserted. “Just fine.” There was a glint in Link’s eyes, but he nodded all the same.

“You heard the man,” he announced, standing up. “Shows over, everyone.” Waving his arms about, Link shooed away the audience. “Go on, give him some space, okay?” Rather reluctantly the other swimmers began to slowly disperse and eventually Rhett was alone with the man and his lovely blue eyes.

“Thanks,” he sheepishly muttered as Link helped him to his feet. He wasn’t sure how to recover from such a public humiliation. He very much wanted to leave this gym and never come back. Still, looking down at the man before him, he wasn’t sure he could do that.

“No problem,” Link said with a smile. “You sure you’re okay? You didn’t just faint out of nowhere.”

“You s-saw that?” Great. Not only did a bunch of people see him pass out they probably all saw him floundering about beforehand.

“It’s okay, I don’t think everyone did,” Link assured him. “Just the fainting part.” Chuckling he offered the most charming grin, Rhett couldn’t help but laugh along with him. His face felt a bit hot.

“I think I’m gonna hit the showers.” Images of the man before him using the gym showers filled Rhett’s head and he blushed even more.

“You want me to hold your hand in case you fall again?” It was meant as a joke, and Rhett laughed along with him, but inside he was shaking. His mind was conjuring thoughts that were definitely not appropriate for casual conversation.

‘God, yes, hold my hand,’ his brain was shouting. ‘Take my hand and pull me into the showers. Throw me against the wall and-’

“I think I can manage,” he chuckled. Excusing himself as politely as possible, Rhett rushed off to the lockers, He couldn’t have been gone from his situation fast enough. He didn’t even want to waste time pretending to wash off the chlorine from the pool. Going straight to his locker he hurried to change back into his street clothes so he could leave right away. As soon as he was dressed he hastily made for the front exit of the gym.

Once outside Rhett headed for the parking lot still trying to figure out if he wanted to come back to this gym ever again. He did already pay for three months, after all. Walking to his car he wasn’t really paying attention and nearly jumped out of his shoes when someone called his name. It was Link. He was wearing glasses now, jeans and a shirt with the words ‘star wars’ printed in pink letters on the chest, but it was definitely Link.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” Such a charming, crooked grin.

“Come to make sure I didn’t faint on the way to my car?” Rhett joked, rather humorlessly, as Link walked over.

“I wanted to talk about what happened, if that’s alright.” Biting his lip, Rhett hesitated. Any more time spent with this gorgeous man was a god-send, but he was still very embarrassed by his fainting spell back there.

“I just got a little light-headed,” he lied, trying to play it off.

“You were at the gym yesterday, weren’t you?” Link asked, clearing knowing the answer was yes. “You didn’t get wet then, either.” So he had noticed Rhett. Hopefully he hadn’t noticed Rhett when they were in the locker room showers. “Just curious what kind of man goes to a gym pool, wearing swim trunks and all, and doesn’t get in the pool?”

“It was my brother’s idea,” Rhett blurted. “He suggested I take swimming lessons.”

“Your brother wants you to learn how to swim?”

“I know how to swim.” There was a bit of frustration in his voice, but it was mostly aimed at himself. He felt silly being an adult man who was afraid of a swim.

“Maybe he wants you to get over your fear.” Rhett’s jaw fell open in surprise.

“What?”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Link explained. “I had a student a few years back who had the same problem. I know a panic attack when I see one.”

“I had…?” Rhett had never experienced a panic attack before, but looking back there was little else it could have been. Maybe he was worse off than he had assumed.

“I don’t think my usual class is for you,” Link continued. “But, if you want, I think I can help you.”

“I checked online. There isn’t a Link listed as teaching a swimming class.” It was a slight accusation, but Rhett wanted to make sure his new acquaintance wasn’t just a crazy man at the gym.

“Oh, that’s because my official name is Charles. Link is my nick name.”

“What’s it short for?”

“My middle name is Lincoln. Businesses don’t really take me seriously if I introduce myself as ‘Link’.”

“I like ‘Link’,” Rhett admitted. Link smiled at that.

“‘Rhett’’s not bad either,” he said with a grin. A second passed, then another as the two men regarded each other in an awkward but wonderful silence. Finally Rhett cleared his throat.

“You think you can help me?” he asked, bringing the conversation back around. Link adjusted his glasses as he nodded.

“I’m no therapist,” he began. “But I think I can. If you don’t like the gym scene I have pool at my place. Bit more private. What d’you think?” An invitation to this handsome man’s home? It was too good to be anything innocent, but Rhett didn’t care. Looking at that gentle baby-faced man, Rhett wanted to follow him anywhere.

“I already paid for three months,” he remembered. Link laughed out loud.

“There’s always the Pilates classes.” Rhett laughed along with him, but inside he thought that maybe having a gym membership could come in handy. He had a bit of stomach flab he wouldn’t mind being rid of. “Besides, I don’t charge for my services. I teach at the gym as a volunteer gig.”

“What do you do as a job, then?”

“I’m an engineering consultant. I work for BW, in Los Angeles. People hire me to make sure their facilities are running safe and efficient.”

“I’m an engineer, too! Graduated from NC State. Worked at Black and Veatch for awhile before I moved out here.”

“Raleigh? You’re from Raleigh?”

“Grew up in Buies Creek, actually, but yeah.”

“I’m from Boone Trail!”

“That’s amazing!” Rhett gave a short laugh. “Can’t believe our paths never crossed. When did you move out here?”

“Right after college.” He gestured towards the cars, silently offering to walk Rhett to his car. “Where are you workin’ now?”

“Uh, between jobs. Sort of.” For some reason he didn’t think ‘unemployed’ was going to sound very impressive. “I make do,” he quick amended. “I play the guitar at cafe’s and bars. It’s decent money.” His voice faltered slightly, at the lie. Sneaking a peek at Link he expected to see pity, or sympathy. Instead Link looked rather impressed.

“That’s cool, man. I can’t barely play the trumpet.”

‘I bet you have a very talented mouth.’ The thought popped into Rhett’s head before he could stop it and he chuckled to hide his dirty thoughts.

“Is this you?” The question shook Rhett back to reality. Without thinking he had stopped walking beside his black scion. It wasn’t his favorite design for a car, but it had plenty of legroom.

“Uh, yeah. Y-yes.” He patted the hood. “This is me.” Link pulled out his wallet and found his business card.

“My cell number’s on there,” he explained, handing it to Rhett. “Let me know what you decide about those private lessons.” Rhett took the card and nodded.

“I will,” he assured him. ‘Does this count as getting a guy’s number?’

“I’m free on Thursdays.”

‘Was that a wink? That was definitely a wink.’ As Link headed off to find his own car Rhett cheerfully got into his. He couldn’t get the smile off of his face. He didn’t want to. Even though he knew full well there was a chance this new friend was out of his league, or seeing someone, or not even attracted to guys, Rhett didn’t care. On a little card, written in elegant letters, was an invitation to get private swimming lessons from an incredibly hot guy. A hot guy who wore speedos. Things were definitely looking up.

That evening it was Cole’s turn to call. It had to be way past his kid’s bedtime, but Rhett figured that was on purpose. He settled down on the couch, getting comfy before picking up the phone.

“Hey, bro,” he began, sounding more than a tiny bit cheerful.

“You’re in a good mood,” Cole noted. “You get a new job?”

“No. Thanks.” His voice dripped with sarcasm but his brother just chuckled in response.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “I’m just hopeful. You wanna tell me why you are so happy?”

‘I met a guy. A hot guy. I got a date. A date with a hot guy. Well, not technically a date but we’re going to be alone at his house, in just our bathing suits. Alone. At his house. In bathing suits. Me. And a hot guy.’ Rhett thoughts raced faster than his heart when he had been in the locker room showers. He was far too excited for this conversation right now. In fact, he was far too excited for this upcoming Thursday in general. Getting his hopes up wasn’t going to be good for anyone. He cleared his throat before he actually spoke.

“I… I took your advice,” he finally said. “I got a gym membership and signed up for swim classes.”

“That’s great, Rhett!” Cole exclaimed, so proud of his little brother. “You get in the water yet?”

“No. My first class isn’t ‘til Thursday, but I’m looking forward to it.” That was an understatement. Despite his better judgement, his hopes were sky high. At the very least he knew he was going to get to look at Link in his speedos for a prolonged period of time. That alone was going to be worth the potential fear and embarrassment. It had been far too long since Rhett had anything like a date and this one-on-one time with Link was close enough.

“I’m proud of you, man,” his brother continued. “I’m sure you’re going to do great.” Suddenly he laughed out loud. “You gonna wear speedos or what?” he joked. Rhett laughed with him but inside he got an idea. He certainly wanted to get Link’s attention without saying anything stupid. Maybe a new bathing suit would do just the trick.

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Khaldoun Samman, Go West Young Turk: Personal Encounters with Kemalism, 3 Hum Architecture 183 (2004)

My research can be described as a comparative-historical analysis of what I deﬁne as three modes of identities found in the Middle East: Occidentalizing, Modernizing, and Orientalizing nationalist identities. My main concern is this overlapping question: How did Palestinians and Arabs come to be seen as distinct from the Jews, Greeks, and Turks of this once symbiotic civilization, all presumed to be in need of separate national “homes” (i.e., the containers called nation-states)? Here I focus on the impacts that modernity has had on the identities of this world and myself.

“My patient is suffering from an inferiority complex. His psychic structure is in danger of disintegration. What has to be done is to save him from this and, little by little, to rid him of this unconscious desire.” —Frantz Fanon

“We shall adopt hats along with all other works of Western civilization.” — Kemal Ataturk

“He always has his eyes on Europe, and always dreams of escaping there ... We are like strangers to ourselves.” — Ale Ahmad

I. Personal Encounters

As I write these words upon my return from a visit to Istanbul, I remember so clearly, at the age of seven, my father in- forming my family and me of the news that we would be leaving Jordan to live in the United States. Immediately I started to en- vision my future life. I imagined myself dressed in white sneakers and white socks, white shorts, and a white shirt. I imagined a sparkling new bicycle, and my family and I living in a big house with a green yard and lots of trees. I remind you that I was seven years old, but I understood, although unaware of the origins of this dream, that I was about to be transformed—color, accent, and all—into the image that I had just begun to see on my next-door neighbor’s television set. Excited by the news, all I knew was that I, along with my family, was moving West.

Indeed, I had already begun practicing my new self before I even landed in New Jersey, frantically trying to learn my first English words and putting on clothes that I believed would best fit my new-found identity. Dressed in this new clothing, and with the few English words I had learned, I looked into a mirror and tried to act “like an American.” In New Jersey I continued down this path in full force, trying to remove my “Arabness” in every conceivable way, even at the expense of keeping my family distant from my friends. When the phone rang when I was suspecting a call, for instance, I would run in a frantic effort to get to the phone before my father or mother, because I feared that they would pick it up first and, with their “thick Arab accents,” demonstrate to my friends and others how Arab we really were. I would plead with each of my parents to speak more like an “American.”

Even my school lunch bag was a point of contention between my mother and me, because I would request that she leave out any food looking Middle Eastern. I found creative ways to make myself feel and look white-American, especially through music and partying. Loading my car with the best hi-fi stereo equipment available, courtesy of Samman’s Electronics, I would pack my car with friends and jam down the streets of Jersey to the powerful rhythms of great rock and roll bands like Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Pink Floyd. The mu- sic I heard in my home, like Umm Kulthum and Farid al-Atrash, never made it into my car. Of that I made sure.

It was not until I entered college that I began rethinking this warped “assimilation” route, my research becoming the vehicle through which I would make sense of it all. At first my search was unsystematic and confusing. I did not yet have the right questions or tools to penetrate this unconscious desire to repress my Arabness. At times, I turned to a crude form of multicultural identity politics. But that felt awkward and unreal, like a museum representation of natives dressed in colorful clothing chanting to tunes that seemed distant and unreal to my life—in many ways replicating the Orientalist representations that made me want to shed my “Arabness” in the first place.

Thankfully that project quickly faded away, and in its place I began pursuing more serious intellectual pursuits. I began reading people like Immanuel Wallerstein and Edward Said, who were arguing that the world is in fact politically, economically, and culturally stratified, with race constituting the very epicenter of the stratification. Racism and underdevelopment, Orientalism and its residual “Other,” the “West” and the “rest,” the rise of Europe and the decline of southern civilizations were, I was beginning to learn, all a product of modernity, of a “specific manifestation of a basic process by which our historical system has been organized: a process of keeping people out while keeping people in” (Wallerstein, 1991: 83). According to Said, this is a system held together by power. The lens through which we have access to it is racially tainted, leading to an interpretation of a world where the “West” possesses some unique trait that legitimates its rise above the “rest,” rendering the Arab, the Turk, and the Muslim racially or culturally inferior, unable to match those refined qualities that are believed to be the sole patrimony of the West.

Through these penetrating analyses, I began to link my desire to assimilate into America along with the highly stratified global system that it constructs, in which some sectors of the world population are seen as superior while others are deemed inferior, with the whole organized around an axial division of labor that inserts people into a complex set of unequal relations. This construct forms the foundation, I believe, of a world-system that shapes, forms, and destroys our very identities. It unfortunately has dire psychological consequences for a majority of this world’s population, engendering in many of them an inferiority complex similar to the one I experienced as a young child.

Now, at the age of forty, standing in Istanbul, it seemed that the dreams of my early years were returning in full force, a déjà vu of a sort, but this time it was not me at the center of this dream moving West but a nation and its elites, symbolized by Kemal Ataturk in his tuxedo, gazing out over Istanbul and pounding his nationalist message into the minds of the populace and announcing to the Turks: you must transform yourself into the image of the West, for it is a fact that “uncivilized people are doomed to be trodden under the feet of civilized people” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 2002: 438). In the same way that I quickly appropriated a strategy of removing my imagined Arabness in order to travel West, we now see Turkish elites, including many of Turkey’s brightest intellectuals, struggling with all their might to pull on the rope that hangs between an imagined East and West, using every muscle and bone in their bodies to pull in the “Occident”—with the belief that by doing so they can finally “develop,” modernize Turkey, and join the “civilized” West.

The déjà vu that I experienced on this trip was deep, and the parallels between my own biography and the psyche of the Turkish nation were stunning. As was the case with me, “what the people wore, how they lived, what kind of music they listened to, and even what they ate” (Kasaba, 1997: 25) sounded like pages taken straight from my own diary, all in the effort to transform the “Oriental” self into a modern, civilized, and “Occidentalized” self. For these Kemalist leaders, “formal elements of change, such as the outward appearance of people, the cleanliness of the streets ... became synonymous with modernization and consumed an inordinate amount of their time and energy” (Kasaba, 1997: 25). As Bryan Turner also observed, “The mimetic quality of Turkish secularization had to be carried out in detail at the personal level, in terms of dress, writing and habit” (Bryan Turner cited in Sayyid, 1997: 68). Kemalists even made a “fuss about introducing ballroom dancing, replacing traditional Turkish music with opera, and so on” (Sayyid, 1997: 68).

Modernizing the nation’s cuisine, moreover, fit into this schema as well. In the same way that I was determined to rid my lunch bag of all its Middle Eastern contents, one of Turkey’s earliest cookbooks, from the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, declared that “because of the changes in lifestyles, the old dishes were no longer satisfactory, and that the ‘[Turks] need to adopt a new cuisine from the West that goes better with our new conditions’” (cited in Kasaba, 1997: 25). Even the music, similar to my purging Arabic tunes from my hi-tech car audio in favor of Western sounds, had to be “updated,” as this remark by Meral Ozbek makes clear:

Any Turkish music that did not fit into the officially sanctioned categories of Turkish art music, Turkish folk music, Turkish light (pop) music, or polyphonic (Western) music was assumed to be Arabesk music and therefore subject to censorship ... Turkish classical and folk musicians condemned Arabesk for pol- luting the ‘pure’ traditions with Arab influences. (Ozbeck, 1997: 225)

The identity crisis of this nation was a personal reminder for me of the devastating effects this racialized discourse inflicts on individual minds. Experiencing it firsthand in Turkey reminded me of my own family photo album, with the eyes of siblings besieged by an inferiority complex so deep that you can see it, if you look carefully enough, in their faces. It is a destructive discourse that compelled my beloved family, and Kemalists alike, “to assert their Western identity by denying and repressing the oriental within themselves” (Sayy- id, 1997: 68).

But fortunately with the maturing of the nation (as with my own realization upon entering college), these representations have never gone completely uncontested. State-driven modernization has proved to be an ambiguous enterprise against which popular protests are continually emerging. So we should be cautious to also see how Kemalist discourses are ambiguously digested by the larger forces of society, in the marketplace, mosques, universities, villages, the streets, and on the body.1 This is another face of modernity: that even in a world where “all that is solid melts into air,” modernity is never a uniform, singular experience (Bozdogan et al., 1997). Rather, it is always in a moment of crisis and contradiction, offering spaces of resistance and harnessing the creative impulses of a population under great stress. In other words, while it may have worked for an elite sector of Turkish society, the Kemalist project has otherwise been unsuccessful. As I walked the streets of Istanbul, it was apparent to me that the “Middle East” is alive and well†there in the bazaars, in the restaurants, in people’s homes, in the musical sounds, in the architecture ... despite all efforts to erase it.

Since I am most concerned with the nationalist elites, however, my analysis will be focused largely on the destructive side of modernity, where all that is solid does in fact melt into air, leaving people, as described beautifully by Ale Ahmad, in a state of Westoxification:

I speak of “Occidentosis” [Gharbzadegi] as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it. (Ale Ahmad quoted in Ali Mirsepassi, 2000: 105)

Admittedly this is not the first time I have seen or experienced a nation constantly constructing itself in the image of the West. The few times that I’ve visited Israel have shown to me, all too clearly, a people murderously imagining themselves as European, part of Western civilization, and on the move to remove all that is eastern, Oriental, Arab, Palestinian, and Sephardic from the state of the “new Jew”—and, as in the Turkish case, always at the expense of the “Other.”1 I have even seen this in my “home” country of Jordan, where King Hussein continually commissioned architects and urban planners to produce an Amman that looks and feels like Washing- ton, D.C. But unlike the Turkish and Israeli cases, Jordanian nationalists have a more schizophrenic personality, sometimes placing the king on a camel and dressing him in “traditional” Bedouin clothing—at times he is eating a “traditional Jordanian meal” (mansef) with his hands while simultaneously undermining and destroying Bedouin communities!2 All this, I have to add, even as the Jordanian elites are dressing themselves “up” to look more European than James Bond. Representations of a major political figure participating in “old world” traditions would be, to say the least, hard to find in Turkey, with the possible exception of a few marginal images that the new government has been permitting in the past few years. Here, as in the Israeli case, anything that is suggestive of the Orient is something to be removed—skin, bones, and all—unless, of course, it advances the tourist industry in which the “primitive” Arab is given a license to entertain “modern” Turks and Western guests for a night of tea and belly dancing, with a camel at times included in the package.

My research can be described as a comparative-historical analysis of what I define as three modes of identities found in the Middle East: Occidentalizing, Modernizing, and Orientalizing nationalist identities. My main concern is this overlapping question: How did Palestinians and Arabs come to be seen as distinct from the Jews, Greeks, and Turks of this once symbiotic civilization, all presumed to be in need of separate national “homes” (i.e., the containers called nation-states)? Here I focus on the impacts that modernity has had on the identities of this world. For in the process of becoming separate peoples, Arabs, Jews, Turks, and Greeks are being pulled and tugged away from one another by powerful cultural and political forces in Europe and elsewhere (Keyder 1987; Fatma Gocek 2002).

The case of Palestine/Israel today is an area that I have been extensively researching. My visit to Istanbul in the summer of 2004 provided me with the means to extend this research with a comparative analysis of Turkish nationalism. Turkish nationalists used strategies similar to those of their Zionist counterparts by also choosing the path of pulling away from the “Orient” in their effort to join “Western civilization.” Such a trip also allowed me to meditate a little about my life as an Arab-American, linking my own biography with that of Kemal Ataturk, in the effort to explore a process that I call Occidentalizing identities.

II. Turkey’s Radical Makeover: Modernization Discourse and the Racialization of the Self

“The civilized world is far ahead of us. We have no choice but to catch up ... It is futile to resist the thunderous advance of civilization, for it has no pity on those who are ignorant or rebellious ... Our thinking and mentality will have to become civilized. And we will be proud of this civilization. Take a look at the entire Turkish and Islamic world ... we have to move forward.” —Ataturk

“The national bourgeoisie ... has totally assimilated colonialist thought in its most corrupt form [and] takes over from the Europeans and establishes in the continent a racial philosophy which is extremely harmful ... By its laziness and will to imitation, it promotes the ingrafting and stiffening of racism which was characteristic of the colonial era.”—Fanon

As a child, I remember a teacher of mine informing me quite candidly that “we here in America bathe every day.” Rather than being insulted by such a remark, I took it as sincere advice that I needed to wash myself everyday and be “clean” like my American classmates. Likewise Kemal Ataturk, upon hearing Europeans ridicule Turkey as a backward “Oriental despotic regime,” went on a shopping spree and bought himself a completely new wardrobe.1 In this section, I would like to provide an analysis of how such an inferiority complex consolidated itself in the mind of Kemal Ataturk, a leading figure in Turkish nationalism.

The most ironic legacy for many liberation movements of the twentieth century was that the colonized, although by no means all of them, accepted the colonizer’s discourse of European supremacy by identifying modern Western society as the perfect model of progress, and by counterposing themselves, the “other,” as primitive, traditional, underdeveloped, non-European, non-modern, and as there- fore in need of a modernizing state led by an elite cadre of men. This has been, indeed, a fundamental element of what would become known as the modernization project.

In the process of constructing the self as “other,” many of us who were infected by this inferiority complex created for ourselves the task of remaking ourselves in the image of those more powerful. We sketched a detailed account of what we imagined to be “the West” and adopted it as our own “culture.” In the same way as I collected an array of habits that I believed represented America through clothing and cuisine, Ataturk, through the ideology of modernization, instituted national changes with the intention of producing the new Turkish and Occidentalized self. What is interesting is that the discourse Ataturk used and adopted as his own was in fact first invented by the colonizer. The colonizer indeed invented the discourse of modernization as a way of asserting his own identity and forging a vision of history that placed Europe at the center of the world. This colonialist discourse made it possible to explain the superior position of the Occident as compared to the remaining mass of humanity, all in the name of rationalizing the rise of the West (Blaut, 1993). Many nationalist/ anti-colonialist movements would take this same discourse and use it against their own people (Fanon, 1968: 148-205).

But there is one outstanding difference between the colonized and the colonizer: In the decolonizing world, the post-colonized pursued the colonizer’s Orientalist and racist discourse, reinventing his ideology in innovative and destructive ways. It was as if the nationalist saw eye to eye with the colonizer and then some. The colonized felt outsmarted and defeated by the victors of the modern world, and believed that his own nation was primitive, backward, and underdeveloped. He continued using the same binary dichotomies of “developed” and “underdeveloped,” “modern” and “primitive.” But what the colonized did was to take the colonizer’s discourse one step further. He exaggerated the colonizer’s version of reality by including an addition- al step in the modern/non-modern dichotomy: The “Other,” the self was not inherently born to remain underdeveloped or primitive. Rather, with a little help from the new vanguardist state, the primitive, backward self could aspire to become modern by follow- ing the criteria established by the West. Success could be his if he followed a step-by-step guide to modernity. Thus what essentially changed hands from the colonizer to the colonized was that the latter believed he could rule and administer “his own people” more efficiently, and could provide a more disciplined regime of governance with the capacity to produce a more productive and civilized nation than what the colonizer had previously offered.

In the same way, I attempted to trade in my Arabness for what I was made to believe was a superior being, the Westerner. Writ large, the nationalist elites demanded a change in the character of the nation so that it could be recreated to fit the paradigmatic figure of the modern, superior West. By carefully overhauling the nation’s history, tradition, and culture, and by making the nation less “primitive” and more “modern” (Said, 1978), these nationalist elites believed they were en route to creating their own modern civilization in the image of the West. It was an idea that promised to make “underdeveloped, primitive, and traditional” societies into ones which resembled the “progressive” civilization of the West.

Thus a new, nationalist project emerged in the twentieth century. It no longer required either differentiating the modern from the non-modern only, or simply establishing and celebrating the uniqueness of the Occident. Rather, the nationalist had to do something very different. He had to become an activist, one who attempted to make the non-modern perform to the capacity achieved by his Western counterpart. He had to become Khaldoun the child, looking into the mirror and transforming himself into a new self, undressing the inferior other self and replacing it with something that felt more white and Western/ American. What the nation needed to demonstrate to the European world was that it, too, could be like the West: dynamic, productive, secular, civilized, and rational. This was indeed perceived to be a new era in the life of the nation, an era in which “static” and “unchanging” traditions would finally come to an end. For the colonized, such a project would have seemed ludicrous before the twentieth-century, when the question of remaking “ourselves” in “their” image was subdued by the reality of direct colonialism. The spreading of liberal ideals to include non-Western peoples could only have become a reality with the success of national liberation movements in taking state power.

The role of the developmental state was thus seen as an instrument of change that had the capacity to turn the new nations from passive to active agents of modernity. It was at this time, after World War II, that articles and books with titles like “The Modernization of Man,” “The Im- pulse to Modernization,” “The Modernization of Religious Beliefs,” Modernization of the Arab World, Modernizing the Middle East, and Becoming More Civilized began pouring out.1

Ataturk was already there years before any of these books hit the bookstores, announcing in a speech in 1925 that what “the country needs was to train waiters to provide table service in a manner suited to civilized people” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 479). To get to that highest stage of modernity, Ataturk spoke out strongly against what he believed to be Islam’s sanction against certain forms of artistic and scientific expression that he viewed as essential to his modernization project: “A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 371). Decades before Daniel Lerner published The Passing of Traditional Society (1958), Ataturk preached what would eventually become dogma: To develop and modernize, reforming the state and economy, was not enough; the nation must also transform its interior self by creating new cultural practices that were up to par with the West. His insistence on such cultural reforms was loud and clear: “We will become civilized ... We will march forward.” At times he even used metaphors that sounded as if they were pulled, ironically, straight from Quranic texts: “Civilization is a fearful fire which consumes those who ignore it” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 2002: 434).

It was to this discourse that Kemal Ataturk responded favorably. By claiming the “modern” as his own preferred subject matter, Ataturk sought to remove from the nation’s body all those behaviors, cultural traits, and systems of thought that he perceived as forming the stumbling block to producing a new Turkey. Just as I felt that I had to remove from my lunch bag anything that looked Middle Eastern, Ataturk focused his mind on eradicating Islamic and Middle Eastern elements from the Turkish nation, as the following remark makes clear:

In the face of knowledge, science, and of the whole extent of radiant civilization, I cannot accept the presence in Turkey’s civilized community of people primitive enough to seek material and spiritual bene- fits in the guidance of sheikhs. The Turkish republic cannot be a country of sheikhs, dervishes and disciples. The best, the truest order is the order of civilization.” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 435)

Ataturk envisioned himself removing those elements that he perceived to be dangerous to the production of a healthy “modern” and “civilized” Turkish nation. In this way, Kemal Ataturk and other Turkish nationalists attempted radically to transform the Turk by contrasting the future modern nation of Turkey with that of the past Turkish-Muslim self. As time went by and this construct started to produce a Turkey that envisioned itself as a transformed being, some Turks would counterpoise themselves to the Arabs, Iranians, and so on, a theme that I heard over and over again during my visit to Istanbul. This self-transformation, therefore, helped to define for generations what the “new Turk” was made of, everything that “they” were not:

Alas, the Western lands have become the daysprings of knowledge. Nothing remains of the fame of Rum and Arab, of Egypt. The time is the time of progress, the world is a world of science. Is the survival of societies compatible with ignorance? (Ataturk cited in Kasaba, 26)

Like his colonialist predecessors, Ataturk shared the idea that people of the non- Western world were of a different cultural type than that of the West. But Ataturk passionately believed that these differences could be overcome, that the Turkish nation, with the proper mindset of visionary modernizers, could transcend its present condition and be remade in the image of the West. To that end, he would search for those characteristics that are peculiar to modern Western societies and transplant them into Turkey, just as a gardener would select his favorite plants from a neighboring garden and replant them in his own backyard. Only through this radical makeover would Turkey overcome its archaic predicament. Ataturk believed that he could literally pluck those irritating Islamic roots out of the soil of Turkey just as a landscaper plucks weeds out of a well-manicured lawn. “The fez sat on the heads of our nation,” he complained, “as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, and fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization” (Ataturk cited in Kasaba, 25). It too, along with many other Islamic and Oriental characteristics, must be removed from the new Turkey forever, for it is only by this route that

“our thinking and our mentality will ... become civilized” (cited in Kasaba, 27). How often I tried to do the same, to remove everything from my body that looked, smelled, or sounded like “home.” Indeed, one of the few times I actually allowed myself to “dress up” as an Arab was during Halloween.

Notice the central role that modernization discourse plays here. Associated with the concentration on cultural factors is a tendency to treat so-called problems of development as primarily the result of cultural and social elements that act as barriers to modernization, characteristics that could nonetheless be changed in a short period of time. Modernization theory assumes that a society’s capacity for development is retarded by certain archaic features of a cultural system that induces individuals to act in a traditionalist manner. These types of traditional, irrational characteristics must be eradicated. For Kemal Ataturk, they were a form of social disease that incapacitated Turkey, negating any possibility of progress and development. Along with other Turkish nationalists, he reinvented, and in many ways exaggerated the racist constructs of the colonizer. It was a crude— yes even racist—discourse that he engaged in.

With all that said, it is important to remind the reader that not everyone respond- ed in the same way as Ataturk and I did, and that many, just as I eventually did, awoke from this colonialist nightmare. Kemalism was only one form of response to the challenge of the West. While Kemal Ataturk and other Turkish nationalists were busy Occidentalizing the self, remaking the public sphere (the state, science, and commerce), and purging the inner sphere (family, gender, dress, culinary practices, etc.), other nationalists in the region opted for different approaches. As I mentioned earlier, even as Turkish officials were actively transforming the “inner life” of the nation, choosing to shed any “Muslim” traditions, other nationalist elites, like the Hashemites, could not decide which direction to take. These Jordanian nationalists moved “West” one moment and “East” the next, sometimes putting on traditional Bedouin clothing and participating in traditional ceremonies, at other times acting like Kemalists.

But today throughout the Middle East, as in many other locations in the world, you can also find another emerging trend. Many have opted completely out of any Kemalist project, preferring to take what I call the Orientalization route in order to Islamize the self from head to toe. Here both the private and the public spheres are completely collapsed and are “cleansed” of any Western contamination. Thus no distinction between private and public is needed, for Islam is a total unity of life, so they say. Everything, from governance and science to the minutest everyday practices of childrearing and the body, needs to be Islamized.

All of these projects in the end require a disciplinary and repressive apparatus, which only the modern world can manufacture. Neither the Ottomans nor the Mamlukes had a political or ideological apparatus strong enough to nationalize the “minds” of the populace. Their tributary systems simply did not have the capacity to penetrate the living rooms, the bedrooms, and the kitchens of their subjects. That form of “discursive power” would have to wait until the flowering of modernity, with its tentacles (print media, television, corporate advertising) reaching every nook and cranny of society.

Few theorists of nationalism and national identity have compared these forms of response to Western hegemony. Indeed, my long-term research objective will be to compare Israel, Turkey, and Greece (examples of “Occidentalizing” nationalisms) with Jordan and Syria (examples of “modernizing” nationalisms), and both of those in turn with post-revolutionary Iranian and Islamist trajectories (examples of “Orientalizing” movements). Such comparisons will help us to distinguish between different kinds of nationalism and other social movements, some traveling West, “others” traveling East, and others still vacillating.

Footnotes

On Islam and popular culture in Turkey, see the fine selection of essays in Kandiyoti and Saktanber (2002).

On Zionism’s effort to purify the “new Jew” from any “Oriental” affiliations, see Segev (1998: 155-194), Shohat (1988), and Said (1992).

For a similar analysis of Jordanian nationalism, see the excellent book of Joseph Massad (2001).

This is intended as a metaphor and not a statement of an actual occurrence. The thought came to me when I was reading about an incident that had occurred while Ataturk was delivering a speech. He stopped abruptly in the middle of his talk, pointed at a man in the crowd, and denounced him in front of all for the type of dress he was wearing: “He has a fez on his head, and a green turban round the fez, a traditional waistcoat on his back, and on top of it a jacket like mine. I can’t see what’s below. Now I ask you, would a civilized man wear such peculiar clothes and invite people’s laughter?” (Ataturk cited in Mango, 435)

For an example of this trend in thinking, see Leonard W. Doob (1960), Becoming More Civilized: A Psychological Exploration, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Bibliography

Blaut, J.M. (1993), The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Publications.

Doob, Leonard W. (1960), Becoming More Civilized: A Psychological Exploration, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Fanon, Frantz (1968), The Wretched of the Earth, New York: Grove Press.

Gocek, Fatma (2002), Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Kasaba, Resat (1997), “Kemalist Certainties and Modern Ambiguities,” in Sibel Bozdogan et al., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, pg. 15- 36.

Kandiyoti, Deniz, and Ayse Saktanber (2002),

Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Keyder, Caglar (1987), State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, London and New York: Verso Press.

Lerner, Daniel (1958), The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Mango, Andrew (2002), Ataturk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press.

Massad, Joseph (2001), Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, New York: Columbia University Press.

Mirsepassi, Ali (2000), Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, University of Cambridge Press: Cambridge.

Ozbek, Meral (1997), “Arabesk Culture: A Case of Modernization and Popular Identity,” in Sibel Bozdogan et al., Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press, pg. 211-32.

Said, Edward (1978), Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books.

Said, Edward (1992), “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” in his The Question of Palestine, New York: Vintage Books, pg. 56-114.

Sayyid, Bobby (1997), A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism, London and New York: Zed Press.

Segev, Tom (1998), 1949: The First Israelis, New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Shohat, Ella (1988), “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Point of View of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 7: 1-36.

Turner, Bryan S. (1974), Weber and Islam, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991), “The Myrdal Legacy: Racism and Underdevelopment as Dilemmas,” in his Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms, Cambridge: Polity Press, pg. 80-92.

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mikemortgage · 6 years

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Banks must get ‘express consent’ from customers for services under new consumer protection proposals

The federal government unloaded an 850-page piece of proposed legislation on Monday that is chock-full of measures bound to grab the attention of both consumer-protection advocates and the residents of Bay Street.

That’s because Bill C-86, the latest budget implementation bill tabled by Finance Minister Bill Morneau, would pile new consumer-friendly burdens on Canada’s banks, but also remove some red tape for lenders as well.

According to the Liberals, the legislation “advances the rights and interests of consumers when dealing with their banks.” If it passes, the effects will be felt all the way from the neighbourhood branch to the C-suite.

Liberals propose tougher consumer protection rules for banks

How Canada’s banking protections stifle innovation at home, but give Big Six free rein to expand abroad

Ottawa may be eyeing new rules to protect bank, telecom consumers

The Post has sifted through the so-called Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 2, and picked out some of the choice cuts.

Naming and shaming

The chief watchdog for banking customers, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, has issued 131 decisions, according to its website. For instance, the latest ruling from the FCAC was on a bank that “failed to provide accurate mortgage payment frequency information in a clear, simple and not misleading manner to its customers as required by the Cost of Borrowing Regulations.”

That bank’s name was not given. And the name of an offending bank hasn’t been published by the FCAC since 2004, allowing for lenders to remain anonymous when they are taken to task for flouting consumer-protection rules.

But one passage in the new budget-implementation legislation amends the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada Act so it would state that, “subject to any regulations, the Commissioner shall make public the nature of a violation, the name of the person who committed it and the amount of the penalty imposed.”

Currently, that section states the commissioner “may make public” the same information.

In other words, if the present iteration of Bill C-86 passes, naming-and-shaming banks who break consumer-protection rules could become the norm, not the exception.

“In making public the nature of a violation,” the bill adds, “the Commissioner may include the reasons for his or her decision, including the relevant facts, analysis and considerations that formed part of the decision.”

At the same time, the budget implementation bill is proposing to seriously crank up the level of fines the FCAC can impose, increasing it to a maximum of $10 million for a single violation from the current limit of $500,000.

Closing time

Closing bank branches could become a more arduous — and at times more political — experience for lenders under Bill C-86.

According to the text of the bill, a bank trying to close a retail deposit-taking branch in a “rural area” where no other branch is within 10 kilometres has to give written notice at least six months in advance to all of that branch’s customers, to the public in general, “and to the chairperson, mayor, warden, reeve or other similar chief officer of the municipal or local government body or authority for the area in which the branch is located.”

A TD Bank branch in Vancouver.

The bank must also publish a notice about the closure in the local newspaper.

What’s more, once that notice is given, but before the branch closes, the head of the FCAC could force the bank to hold a meeting with its own representatives, officials from the FCAC “and interested persons in the area affected by the closure of the branch or the cessation of the activity.”

The purpose of that meeting would be “to exchange views about the closure of the branch or the cessation of the activity, including alternate service delivery by the bank and measures to help the branch’s customers adjust to the closure or the cessation of the activity.”

Whistleblower protections

Bill C-86 could hand regulators and government another tool in uncovering misconduct, as it sets out protections for bankers thinking about turning whistleblower.

According to the legislation, any bank employee, “who has reasonable grounds to believe that the bank, authorized foreign bank or any person has committed or intends to commit a wrongdoing,” could report this to the proper authorities, which would be required to keep the employee’s identity confidential.

In addition, the legislation also proposes that a bank would not be allowed to fire any employee that has blown the whistle.

Sales tactics

Arguably, the Liberal government was nudged towards introducing new consumer-protection measures for banking customers after the FCAC released a long-awaited report earlier this year that detailed a sales-focused culture at the Big Six banks.

While the FCAC said it found no “widespread mis-selling” at the banks, it did find some unflattering details, and expressed concern that a sales-heavy environment could increase the possibility of selling products or services to a customer that may be incompatible with their needs.

Bill C-86, however, explicitly states that a bank “shall establish and implement policies and procedures to ensure that the products or services in Canada that it offers or sells to a natural person other than for business purposes are appropriate for the person having regard to their circumstances, including their financial needs.”

It also states that, subject to any regulations, a bank would not be able to provide a person with a financial product or service without first obtaining their “express consent,” which must be asked for “in a manner, and using language, that is clear, simple and not misleading.”

Regulatory relief

While Bill C-86 may place a greater regulatory burden on the retail side of the banking business, it removes some burdens on the industry as well.

For example, the proposed legislation sets out that banking customers can now give their consent “electronically” to receive electronic documents.

Another section of the bill would make it easier for banks to make smaller acquisitions or increase its investments in some businesses by allowing transactions below a certain threshold to proceed without requiring the approval of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions.

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: GeoffZochodne

from Financial Post https://ift.tt/2qiPuHN via IFTTT Blogger Mortgage Tumblr Mortgage Evernote Mortgage Wordpress Mortgage href="https://www.diigo.com/user/gelsi11">Diigo Mortgage

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janeaddamspeace · 6 years

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In Washington DC: disrupting the notion of what public education and what black boys can do and be #JACBA Newsletter 2Feb2018

These kids started a book club for minority boys. It's the most popular club in school.

The club dates back to December, when a fifth-grader complained one morning that his lackluster results on a citywide English exam didn't reflect his true reading abilities.

The principal, Mary Ann Stinson, placed a book she had lying around - "Bad Boy: A Memoir," by Walter Dean Myers - in his hands and told him to start reading.

The boys quickly became engrossed in the 2001 book about Myers's childhood in New York's Harlem.

The club's sponsor and the boys meet once or twice a week at 8:15 a.m. - a half-hour before the first bell rings - and use the book to launch into conversations about their own experiences with race, identity and adolescence.

"It's a blessing to be in this predicament, to have kids who are becoming ravenous readers," Redmond said. "We're disrupting the notion of what public education can be and what little black boys can do and be."

Now Is Your Time! The African-American Struggle for Freedom by Walter Dean Myers 1992 Awardee

Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam by Walter Dean Myers 2003 Awardee

'Monster' Review: Powerful Crime Drama Finds the Intersection of Race, Justice, and Storytelling [Sundance]

Ever since its publication in 1999, author Walter Dean Myers' award-winning novel Monster has be a favorite among young adults, providing them a glimpse into the world of Steve Harmon, a black teenager whose life is thrown into chaos when he is arrested and put on trial for taking part in a robbery gone wrong, resulting in the death of a Harlem bodega owner. The film adaptation from music video veteran and first-time filmmaker Anthony Madler is an ambitious, complex, and layered look at how the court system in America is virtually designed to keep defendants like Steve from every getting a chance at actual justice.

'Monster' Director Seeks To Explore The Larger Question Of How One Moment Can Define Your Life - Sundance Studio

"To crystalize the lens and look at mass incarceration and criminal justice and the ways our laws were written, as well as this incredible journey of a young artist," said Mandler on his decision to take on the project. "Watching this kid from a great family goes to a great school seek out his take on the world and how that curiosity leads him to a place where he now has to defend his life against what happened, I was attracted to it on all those different levels."

New Kids' and YA Books: Week of January 29, 2018

The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis. Scholastic Press, $16.99; ISBN 978-0-545-15666-0. Echoing themes found in Curtis's Newbery Honor-winning Elijah of Buxton, this tense novel set in 1858 provides a very different perspective on the business of catching runaway slaves. The book earned a starred review from PW.

No Truth Without Ruth: The Life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Kathleen Krull, illus. by Nancy Zhang. Harper, $17.99; ISBN 978-0-06-256011-7. In this addition to the growing body of Ruth Bader Ginsburg literature for children, Krull offers a detailed account of the Supreme Court justice's intellectual and professional development.

Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis 2008 Awardee

The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis 1996 Awardee

Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, written by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Yuyi Morales 2004 Awardee

Wilma Unlimited, written by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by David Diaz 1997 Awardee

Native American storytellers to perform at Morris

Morris Central School will present a "family-friendly" presentation by Native American author, musician, and storyteller Joseph Bruchac and his son, Jesse Bruchac, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 15 in the school auditorium.

The Heart of a Chief by Joseph Bruchac 1999 Awardee

Bonnier Publishing USA's Five Pillars of Positive Children's Books

Bonnier Publishing USA has developed five pillars to guide its children's imprints in publishing books that have a positive impact on kids and teens

During an all-hands planning meeting this past fall, the children's team at Bonnier Publishing USA realized they'd hit a critical point. Their titles were coalescing around five themes, which they dubbed their "five pillars": acceptance, anti-bullying, awareness, diversity, and empowerment. According to Sonali Fry, publisher of the children's book group, "while we had already been publishing books connected to some of these themes," such as Freedom in Congo Square by Carole Boston Weatherford and R. Gregory Christie, which received a 2017 Caldecott Medal and a Coretta Scott King Honor, "we wanted to refocus our lists so that we hit every one of them."

"We feel that now, more than ever, it's important to give kids stories that reflect the world they live in and encourage them to imagine how they could make it better," says Fry. While, she says, the kids' team doesn't limit its acquisitions to books focused on one of the pillars, "there's often a natural connection to at least one. These themes unite the types of books we're passionate about, which helps shape our lists and, in turn, define who we are as a publisher," she says.

The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth & Harlem's Greatest Bookstore by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie 2016 Awardee

Birmingham, 1963 by Carole Boston Weatherford 2008 Awardee

Greenwich Academy quilts its commitment to MLK's message

The colorful quilt squares are inked with words like unity, resilience, trust, hope and harmony. Crafted by the Greenwich Academy student body and staff, they are a patchwork representation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s message of equality and inclusion.

"In order to memorialize the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, each advisory was asked to create a square for the quilt," said senior Elisha Osemobor. "This quilt represents our dedication as a school to follow the principles and behaviors of the beloved community in our everyday lives."

Greenwich Academy's quilt was inspired by the work of African-American artist Faith Ringgold who combined images and text in "story quilts," among other projects. An outspoken civil rights supporter, she demonstrated against the exclusion of black and female artists by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art from 1968 to 1970. Her work was later shown at the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Aunt Harriet's Underground Railroad in the Sky by Faith Ringgold 1993 Awardee

Children, Culture, Community: Muskegon Museum of Art celebrates diversity with a variety of events this winter

This year, the museum's annual children's book illustrator exhibition highlights a Hispanic artist and Native American author. Thunder Boy, Jr.: Illustrations by Yuyi Morales runs through May 20 and includes illustrations and sketches by Yuyi Morales for Sherman Alexie's children's book.

Morales herself has an inspiring story. Although she loved drawing as a child, she wasn't a trained artist and studied physical education in Mexico, later working as a swim coach. She moved to America in 1994 with her husband and young son and felt isolated and alone without a job or friend, barely knowing English.

That all changed when she discovered children's picture books in a San Francisco area public library, learning English by also reading the books to her son. Inspired by the vivid colors and visual stories, Morales took up painting and enrolled in a class on writing for children.

Morales since has written several original stories, including Viva Frida, which received the 2015 Pura Belpre Medal for illustration, as well as the 2015 Caldecott Award Honor.

Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez, written by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Yuyi Morales 2004 Awardee

This Is Just To Say: Naomi Shibab Nye

In this edition of This Is Just To Say, poet and novelist Carrie Fountain talks with Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Nye reads her poem "Burning the Old Year," and they continue to explore the idea of what we take with us and what we leave behind as we enter 2018 through W.S. Merwin's To the Mistakes.

Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye 1998 Awardee

Sitti's Secrets by Naomi Shihab Nye, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter 1995 Awardee

Governor's reply to student's letter is lost opportunity

Hope Osgood, a 16-year-old High School student, wrote to Maine Gov. Paul LePage to express her concern about the negative impact the pending repeal of internet "net neutrality" rules could have on her schoolwork. His response: "Hope. Pick up a book and read!"

The episode calls to mind a famous letter exchange between the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and a Maine school child, Samantha Smith. Andropov, who became General Secretary of the Communist Party (in effect, leader of the Soviet Union) on Nov. 10, 1982, was hardly a gentle or sentimental man.

In November 1982, Samantha, then a 10-year-old elementary school student living in Manchester, Maine, wrote a famous letter to Andropov in which she expressed, with child-like sincerity and naiveté, her concern about the risk of nuclear war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Reagan era.

Samantha's visit inspired other exchanges of child goodwill ambassadors and may even have signaled the start of a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations.

It is ironic that the remarkable achievements of Samantha's short life were inspired by the words of a political leader who had neither experience in nor sympathy for democracy. If Andropov could react appropriately to Samantha Smith, why couldn't a democratically elected governor do at least as well with Hope Osgood?

Journey to the Soviet Union by Samantha Smith 1986 Awardee

Pam Muñoz Ryan To Receive The 2018 Anne V. Zarrow Award For Young Readers' Literature

New York Times best-selling author Pam Muñoz Ryan is the winner of the Tulsa Library Trust's 2018 Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature.

Ryan is being recognized for writing more than 40 books to inspire imaginations, dreams and pride in all ages. From picture books, early readers and young adult novels, her writing encourages cultural awareness and the importance of believing in yourself.

Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan 2001 Awardee

Orion Children's to publish Ghost Boys

American author Jewell Parker Rhodes has signed her first UK publishing deal with Orion Children's Books, part of the Hachette Children's Group (HCG).

Ghost Boys is about a black boy who is killed by a white police officer. After his death, Jerome comes back to his neighbourhood as a ghost, where he starts to notice all the other ghost boys.

Sugar by Jewell Parker Rhodes 2014 Awardee

The Ninth Ward by Jewell Parker Rhodes 2011 Awardee

Metro Theater Company And Jazz St. Louis present BUD NOT BUDDY

Based on the Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award winning book by Christopher Paul Curtis

Written by award-winning playwright Kirsten Greenidge and based on the Newbery Medal and Coretta Scott King Award winning book by Christopher Paul Curtis, with a exhilarating score by five-time Grammy-winning jazz legend Terence Blanchard, "Bud, Not Buddy" follows 10-year-old Bud as he sets off on a journey to find his father who he believes is leading a traveling jazz band.

More Than Movies: Blues and books featured at the Dietrich Theater

This year we are thrilled that acclaimed children's author Susan Campbell Bartoletti, who wrote "The Boy Who Dared," made time in her busy schedule to speak to students at our middle school in two assemblies. She also met with a group of interested student writers for two writing workshops. Any adult would have benefited from her two-hour workshops, which she made so engaging for students that the time sped by.

How fortunate we are that Susan Campbell, publisher of 20 books for children, Newbery Honor Book author, shared her stories and writing secrets with 300 Tunkhannock middle school students. Thank you Rotary Club of Tunkhannock, Walmart, and Claverack for making this extraordinary experience possible.

Writer inspires students in craft

Susan Campbell Bartoletti offers one important piece of advice to those interested in writing.

Read.

"Only a reader can become a writer," Bartoletti explained to 30 sixth and eighth grade students at Tunkhannock Area Middle School on Thursday.

Bartoletti is the featured writer this year at the 'Reader Meets Writer' program, a joint effort between the school district and the Dietrich Theater.

Kids on Strike! by Susan Campbell Bartoletti 2000 Awardee

Growing Up In Coal County by Susan Campbell Bartoletti 1997 Awardee

Film based on Simcoe author's book gets Oscar nod

The Breadwinner, an animated movie based on the book by Simcoe author Deborah Ellis, has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Nominations for the 90th annual Oscars were announced Tuesday morning, with The Breadwinner getting the nod in the animated feature category.

"You always hope for the good things and today it happened," Ellis said in a phone interview.

Ellis, who was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2016, won't travel to Los Angeles for the March 4 event. In February of last year, Ellis announced publicly she would not travel south of the 49th after the U.S. government attempted to implement sanctions to restrict immigrants from predominantly Muslim nations.

Oscar-nominated film 'The Breadwinner' depicts daily danger in Afghanistan

It's a delicate balancing act, bringing something like Canadian author Deborah Ellis's novel - published in 2000 - to the big screen.

While aimed at children, the story directly confronts the misogyny and chauvinism of contemporary Afghanistan.

It may sound a little much for a children's story but then perhaps that's underestimating the book's youthful audience. Saara Chaudry, the 13 year-old Canadian actress who voices Parvana, says it was "shocking" when she first read Ellis's book and its two follow-ups. "I was ignorant," she says. "Living in a First World country, I didn't know. Having read the books and seen these different stories, it opened my eyes to a whole new world that I never really knew."

Impressively, the team behind the film produced an online study guide, at www.thebreadwinner.com to complement the film. "If young people watch a film like The Breadwinner, they can start to explore answers," says Twomey. "For me, the whole thing is about education. It's not about easy answers ... anything we can do to have young adults ask questions and understand the complexity of places like Afghanistan [is a good thing]."

Oscars 2018: Nearly every animated feature nominee spotlights women. Finally.

IN THE entire first decade of the Oscars' animated feature category, which launched in 2001, only one woman - "Persepolis" creator Marjane Satrapi - received a nomination.

It's a measure of just how much has changed that on Tuesday, women received nods for four of the five animated feature nominees.

"We're delighted that Nora is in the limelight this year, of course," "Breadwinner" producer Tomm Moore, a two-time Oscars nominee, tells The Washington Post's Comic Riffs on Tuesday morning, "as well as her talented screenwriter Anita Doron and indeed, the book's author, Deborah Ellis, and our executive producer Angelina Jolie.

The Heaven Shop by Deborah Ellis 2005 Awardee

The Breadwinner Trilogy, three books by Deborah Ellis 2004 Awardee

Parvana's Journey by Deborah Ellis 2003 Awardee

LitWorld And Scholastic Announce World Read Aloud Day 2018 And A Special Collaboration With Harry Potter Book Night

On February 1, children, families, and educators around the globe will celebrate World Read Aloud Day with classroom and community events, an author video series, a U.S. educator sweepstakes, and a Facebook Live

In an ongoing effort to encourage reading aloud to kids of all ages, the global literacy non-profit LitWorld and title sponsor Scholastic, the global children's publishing, education, and media company, today announced February 1, 2018 as this year's World Read Aloud Day, an advocacy day that calls attention to the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories.

Scholastic has created a video series harnessing LitWorld's 7 Strengths, as featured in Pam Allyn and Ernest Morrell's professional book Every Child a Super Reader. Each week leading up to World Read Aloud Day, we will share one video featuring a Scholastic author and/or literacy expert who will share their favorite read aloud book that highlights one of the 7 Strengths-Belonging, Kindness, Curiosity, Friendship, Confidence, Courage, and Hope.

Authors and literacy experts include: Andrea Davis Pinkney (author and Coretta Scott King Award-winner), Pam Muñoz Ryan (author and Newbery Honor-winner), and more!

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney 2011 Awardee

Sojourner Truth's Step-Stomp Stride, by Andrea Davis Pinkney & Brian Pinkney 2010 Awardee

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The Jane Addams Children's Book Award annually recognizes children's books of literary and aesthetic excellence that effectively engage children in thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equity for all people.