#the displaced protagonist h | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

tossawary · 3 years

Text

2,500 words of the Moshang Forced Marriage AU, in which the PIDW plot is turned off and Tianlang-Jun doesn’t fall, but this only causes even more problems for Mobei-Jun and Shang Qinghua. Written on my phone.

Shang Qinghua stumbled back into his leisure house with a jar of Zui Xian Peak’s best light wine in one hand and a sack of Qian Cao Peak’s tastiest specialty melon seeds in the other. He kicked the door closed, kicked off his shoes, and then kicked back for some quality lounging.

“Ahhh, now this is more like it!” he declared, wiggling into the cushions worthy of a head disciple’s house. “It’s all shoving off my chores onto other people from here on out! Having flatcakes on order with a snap of my fingers! Making some other poor bastard deal with Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge - at each other’s throats even at Yue-Shixiong’s nice dinner to celebrate our future ascension, eugh. I’ve really earned this! I’ve suffered enough!”

He dropped the sack of seeds onto the side table and fiddled with the wine, embarrassingly clumsy despite the fact that he was sober. As always, he’d been much too chicken-shit to really indulge around other people. He needed his fast reflexes for ducking and running away when he was out and about! Plus, people would freak the fuck out if a transmigrator started running his mouth, giving everyone existential issues and shit, so him waiting until he was alone to drink was really more of a societal service here than sad.

The Transmigration System had also been a concern before, but not anymore!

Shang Qinghua raised his jar and laughingly declared, “The plot is dead! Long live the free author! Ah, this toast is a little late, but better late than never, huh?”

At long last, this transmigrator had managed to get into the Transmigration System’s settings and turn off the plot! It had honestly been a little infuriating just how easy it had been, once he’d hit on the right combination of things to open the right settings menu. There may or may not have been a lot of outraged shrieking and frustrated crying, after all the sweat, blood, and tears he’d shed to become the head disciple of An Ding Peak. All Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky had needed to do, in the end, was flick a few buttons from “on” to “off”. Outrageous.

“No more missions! No more restrictions! And no more bad endings for anyone! Ah, at least for everyone besides Huan Hua Palace Sect’s old master, that is… but, heh heh, I really think that I and the new Empress Su Xiyan can live with that,” Shang Qinghua muttered, then took a drink, wiggling deeper into his lounging and feeling very good about himself.

He felt as free as a bird! As free as the wind! Why shouldn't he celebrate his newfound freedom and future as a Cang Qiong Peak Lord by doing a little bit of nothing at all?

Shang Qinghua shamelessly did his best to become a lump. As he toasted to the distant happy couple and the bouncy baby protagonist on his way, with wine and melon seeds both, he removed all but one layer of clothing, tossed his belt and his jewelry on top of the pile, and yanked everything out of his hair. He slid from a sitting position to a totally horizontal one without realizing how it had happened, then he let heavy eyes fall closed with the knowledge that everything was going to be so much better now.

A person knew things were good when they could fall asleep just like this.

Then a burst of cold air startled him into looking up at a shadowy figure stepping out of nowhere above him. Shang Qinghua shrieked with terror.

"SHUT UP!” the shadow snarled. “Get up!”

“What- my king?!”

Mobei-Jun didn’t wait and grabbed Shang Qinghua by the front of his robes, hauling him to his feet. The wine sloshed against the floor and the melon seeds scattered around them. Shang Qinghua yelped, choked, and then wheezed and flailed, and then yelped again as his loose robes got a little looser with the rough handling and he slipped in Mobei-Jun's grip.

"What- get dressed!" Mobei-Jun snapped, and then dragged him into the bedroom right away.

"The sight of my naked chest offends you this much, bro?!" Shang Qinghua thought, stumbling along. "There's not enough room in this house for two tits-out outfits?! What the fuck is going on?!"

Mobei-Jun threw Shang Qinghua towards the dresser. He just barely managed to catch himself, taking a hard wooden edge to the gut and stubbing his toe on its base, instead of falling and concussing himself at least. Shit! It still hurt, though!

"Get dressed!" Mobei-Jun snapped again, pointing at the dresser for emphasis. "Now!"

"Right away! Right away, my king!" With shaking hands, his heart thundering in his ears, Shang Qinghua pulled out the first set of robes his fingers touched.

"Not those!"

"Aah!"

Shang Qinghua dropped the robes onto the floor. They were the regular everyday robes of an An Ding Peak disciple, plain and sturdy, something that the demon had seen him in many times before.

"Wh- what's wrong with th-these?"

"Too plain!" Mobei-Jun barked, and stalked forward to shove Shang Qinghua aside and go through the dresser himself.

Shang Qinghua stumbled away and took shelter near his bed, quickly retying his current robes to prevent another fucking nip-slip or worse. He watched with wide eyes as Mobei-Jun threw his clothing to the floor as not good enough. The next drawer was yanked open with so much strength that it splintered and tilted crookedly to one side.

"My king, why-?! What's happening?! Are- are we going somewhere?! Who does this servant have to impress?!"

Mobei-Jun finished throwing aside everything in this drawer and tried to shove it back in, but it was too broken to be moved. The demon snarled, yanked the entire drawer from the dresser with another terrible splintering sound, and threw the drawer out of his way. It hit Shang Qinghua in the chest and sent him sprawling back onto his bed.

He lay there and wheezed without shoving it away, just feeling the impact rattle through his ribs. He heard another drawer splinter.

"Ah, so this is how I die?" he thought. "Just as expected: with a bang AND a whimper."

He pushed the drawer to one side and sat up, only to be smacked in the face with the robes thrown at him. They were the nicest robes he owned. The An Ding Peak Lord had ordered them for him for the coming ascension of a new generation of Peak Lords, so they had all sorts of fancy embroidery and several heavy layers, which meant Shang Qinghua fell back against the bed again under their weight when they hit his head. He sat up again and then gawked at these robes he had never worn and wasn't supposed to wear yet-

"Tianlang-Jun."

"Aha, what?" Shang Qinghua looked at the demon lord scowling at him. "My king…? What about Tianlang-Jun…? This- no. What?! My king, you can't mean to take this servant before the Demon Emperor, that would be ridic-"

"Get dressed," Mobei-Jun snapped.

"It's not Tianlang-Jun, right? Why-?! What's really going on here? Are we going somewhere? Are we meeting someone?"

Shang Qinghua got to his feet, but he didn't dare put the fancy robes on, like being nearly naked would save him from being dragged off anywhere else. No amount of nice clothing would ever make the likes of this displaced author impressive to the likes of the OP Demon Emperor, finally sitting on his late sister's throne.

"This servant can't serve his king to the best of his abilities unless he knows what the-"

"My father is dead!"

“...Wh… what?”

Mobei-Jun’s expression was like a thunderstorm. Shadows curled around his clenched fists, as light and heat fled this room that was suddenly even smaller than Shang Qinghua remembered it being.

"My father…" Mobei-Jun repeated, slowly, daring Shang Qinghua not to understand a second time. "...is dead."

Shang Qinghua stared in horror, the robes slipping out of his hands, which itched to count all the years that had just been skipped even though he knew he didn't have enough fingers. Thirty years or so? Definitely more than twenty. His breath came out in a trembling fog as he demanded:

"H-how?!"

"Tianlang-Jun," Mobei-Jun said again, through gritted teeth.

Good point! Good point! Who the fuck else could it be? The real question was why the fuck?! And also what the fuck was Shang Qinghua of all people supposed to do about clashes between OP demon lords?!

Mobei-Jun advances on Shang Qinghua, the shadows in his fists writhing like he's strangling them. "Tianlang-Jun took offense to some of my clan's foolish disrespect towards his human Empress and he made an example of my father. He has threatened to destroy the body unless a suitable gesture is made."

"But… the power of your ancestors…"

Mobei-Jun, looming over him, shoved him down to his knees to pick up the robes he had dropped, and snarled: "Get dressed."

Shang Qinghua snatched up the robes and skittered away to dress himself up for the slaughter. His heart was racing fast, but his mind seemed to be going even faster, almost too fast to actually think and also do things like make sure clothes weren't inside-out as he put them on.

The power of the Mobei clan rested in the ascension ritual in which the new king "consumed" the body of the old king. Spiritually and… er… possibly also physically? Shang Qinghua had no idea if the System had picked up on those implications or not. Anyway, if Mobei-Jun's father's body was destroyed, then he wouldn't receive that power-up necessary to enforce his rule, which would make him the target of every ambitious cousin and every greedy neighbor. The Mobei clan would probably fall into civil war and the rest of the northern kingdoms would follow them into bloody battle.

Shang Qinghua's favorite character, currently glaring at him for the fancy clothes probably making him look even less fancy by comparison, was sure to die. Mobei-Jun's shitty uncle had probably already picked the poisoned knife with which to stab him in the back.

"My king… what… what gesture is being made here…? This servant… this servant really needs to know how he's supposed to be of service…"

Shang Qinghua also needed to know whether or not he needed to take the first available window to run away. He definitely wasn't above leaping out of literal windows. If Mobei-Jun intended on hanging him over to Tianlang-Jun as a human sacrifice or some shit, then promises of loyalty might expire a lot sooner than originally planned!

At the question, Mobei-Jun's expression only darkened and the room darkened again with it. The cold seemed to spread from Shang Qinghua's skin deep into his twisting chest.

"Marriage," Mobei-Jun said, again through gritted teeth. "Tianlang-Jun has suggested marriage to a human as a worthy gesture."

"M-marriage?"

Mobei-Jun looked so fucking murderous that Shang Qinghua knew he hadn't misheard. He had to have misheard, though, because this was absurd.

"Marriage betw-between me and- and…?"

"Yes."

"And… you?"

"Yes."

Shang Qinghua should have been given an award for not fainting dead away. The System should have given him a million points for every second he managed to stay conscious, except… the System had essentially been turned off. No more points. No more plot.

No more Proud Immortal Demon Way plot, at least.

Ah, was this some kind of warped vacuum effect? A new plot come to take its place?

"There will be great riches."

Shang Qinghua refocused on the demon glaring at him. Riches?! What the fuck did riches have to do with anything right now?!

"Mobei Clan is the second strongest in the Demon Realm," Mobei-Jun informed him, but the demon was kind of scowling like he resented this now, instead of bragging. "You would not have to work again."

It was a really fucking weird day when being told that his Dream Guy wanted him and that he'd never had to work again was somehow bad news. It almost sounded like Mobei-Jun was… was… trying to persuade Shang Qinghua to marry him by offering wealth, power, and a life of indolence. All things that would tempt most people! Especially blindly greedy, thigh-hugging sect traitors like his character!

"Did… did Tianlang-Jun tell you… to just pick any human?" Shang Qinghua asked faintly. "There weren't… there weren't any requirements…?"

Clearly Mobei-Jun didn't want to be tied to Shang Qinghua of all humans!

"He asked - laughingly - if none of us knew any humans. I said that I did."

Okay, Shang Qinghua fully believed that Mobei-Jun didn't know any other humans. Mobei-Jun was on a deadline and didn't have time to go find the most acclaimed matchmaker or anything. By default, Shang Qinghua was the best, most handsome, most skillful, most wellborn, most desirable, and altogether most marriageable human Mobei-Jun knew - and he was not feeling super fucking thrilled by this victory.

"What… what did my king say about me..? What is the Demon Emperor expecting?" Shang Qinghua could only hope expectations had been set on the floor, preferably into the floor or maybe even underground.

"A disciple of Cang Qiong in my service."

"Oh…"

"Fix your robes."

"What? Oh, shit. Right away!"

Shang Qinghua didn't have a lot of experience wearing robes this nice and Mobei-Jun barking at him to look less like shit wasn't helping. The fact that he was sweating from nerves and his fingers were still shaking a little also wasn't helping. He skittered around to add tasteful ornaments and jewelry, some of which got violently rejected by Mobei-Jun as too ugly to show anyone, but looking down at himself, he mostly just felt like he was throwing shiny gold onto a pile of crap. How could this really fool anyone?

"My king, what… what am I supposed to say to the Demon Emperor? Do you want me to lie? To the Demon Emperor?!"

"Do not speak unless spoken to."

Sure, Shang Qinghua could do that, but was he really supposed to leave the talking to Mobei-Jun?! To Mobei-Jun?! The protagonist's right-hand man had not been known for his silver tongue! Did he think people weren't going to have questions? Like, "How the fuck do you know some random human?" Or, "Holy shit, you're really going to marry THAT one?"

"Isn't… my king, isn't Tianlang-Jun well known for his interest in humans and human stories… though...?"

Love stories! Shang Qinghua was pretty sure that the man loved a good love story! How the fuck were he and Mobei-Jun supposed to pull off a love story? And make it a love story compelling enough to convince a pissed-off Tianlang-Jun to grant the Mobei Clan mercy? Shang Qinghua wasn’t totally sure he was going to be able to do anything besides break down sobbing and curl up into a pathetic ball on the floor.

Mobei-Jun's face twisted slightly, in the way of an angry demon who didn't want to admit that his lowly human servant actually had a super great point. Tianlang-Jun had already proven himself a man who liked to play with his food a little.

"Do not tell some story," Mobei-Jun snarled finally. "Do not speak unless spoken to. Do not lie."

"Of course! Of course! Very wise not to lie to him!” Shang Qinghua told himself to focus on the logistics here; he was the logistics man; it was what he did. If he just kept focusing on the details, he didn’t have to think about the bigger picture. “This servant will remain silent until called upon, which… when… my king, when will that be? Tomorrow morning? I have to tell-"

"Now."

"-my martial sib- what?!"

"Now," Mobei-Jun repeated. "He is waiting."

#moshang forced marriage au #tossawary updates #tossawary svsss #moshang #mobei jun #shang qinghua #svsss

405 notes · View notes

honorarycassowary · 3 years

Text

I really hope Higuruma ultimately decides to help the main cast. He’s framed in such a sympathetic way during this chapter - a significant contrast to Kashimo Hajime, who is introduced casually examining a corpse they just blew apart, and Takaba Fumihiko, who seems more pathetic than anything. Instead, we’re introduced to Higuruma as a man who will relentlessly fight for justice even when the system is skewed against his clients.

People pushing back against corrupt systems is a repeated theme in JJK, going all the way back to Chapter 11, when Gojo states his goal is to “reset this crappy jujutsu world!” More recently, we’ve seen:

Yuuta lying to the higher-ups and faking Itadori’s execution because he disagreed with their goals

Maki obliterating the Zenin clan and its conservative, misogynistic, abusive politics because of the abuse they wrought on her and Mai

Kusakabe defying the higher-ups to free Panda

Yaga hiding the truth of sapient cursed corpses from the higher-ups so they can’t use them

Hakari flat-out saying he wants to rewrite the rules of the jujutsu world

Higuruma is the first time we’ve seen someone push back against a real-world corrupt system, and it’s fascinating. There’s been plenty of talking in the recent Recruiting Hakari chapters about how Shibuya has totally shaken up the jujutsu world, but the regular world is equally shaken - in the immediate aftermath, nobody knew if the prime minister and cabinet were safe, the yen was plummeting, and there were million of displaced residents. If this is our protagonist’s chance to reform jujutsu society, it’s also someone’s chance to reform the society of regular Japan.

However, thinking of regular Japan and the jujutsu world as two separate entities is becoming more and more difficult. Kenjaku’s Culling Game affects the whole country; Shibuya has made concealing the existence of cursed spirits (and therefore maintaining the jujutsu world’s isolation) a practical impossibility; and Hakari actively wants the secrecy clause of the jujutsu code abolished. Why do I bring this up?

Well, Higuruma wants to dismantle the biased justice system that hands out convictions 99% of the time, even to defendants who have CCTV proof that they were elsewhere at the time of the crime ... but the jujutsu criminal system is even worse. The literal premise of the series is that the jujutsu higher-ups sentenced Itadori to death without trial and were only held back by Gojo’s interference. (Which, like, I’m glad Gojo did that, but no functioning justice system would give someone that kind of power!) Shibuya has made the corruption in the jujutsu justice system even more clear, with three sentences without trial handed down and two absolutely without cause (I actually think they have grounds to argue for Itadori’s execution on the grounds of him being too dangerous even though he’s not truly morally responsible for any of the Shibuya deaths, but Yaga and Gojo’s sentences are clearly just scapegoating.)

Not to mention that on the non-jujutsu side of things, public knowledge of curses and cursed techniques will surely cause more problems in the judicial system as they try to create procedures for evidence that doesn’t show up on cameras and is invisible to 99% of the population. It makes convicting people on limited evidence a lot easier, for one! Sure, the accused has an aiibi, but can we know they didn’t use a shikigami to kill the victim? (I kind of doubt that the higher-ups would be particularly keen to send out sorcerers as expert witnesses.)

I’d really like to see the protagonists and Higuruma discuss the parallels between their shitty systems and join forces to make something better. I have full faith in Itadori & co.’s fighting skills, but very little in their knowledge of how to improve the justice system. It would be great for them to have an adult on their side who can see to the practical side of things that requires experience that they just don’t have. (This goes back to Higuruma’s similarities to prototype!Nanami, who would have a curse user who killed off everyone from his crooked company and eventually becomes an ally.)

Sure, Higuruma’s killed between 22-102 people, but I don’t think the protagonists necessarily have a leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing that. We already know Itadori feels culpable for the people Sukuna killed in Shibuya; he readily accepted Choso as a companion; and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to turn on Maki when she comes back. Moreover, Higuruma’s desire to make everything right and his willingness to kill those who directly impede that would be fascinating to compare/contrast to both Itadori and Fushiguro’s moral codes.

To be clear, I think Higuruma will need to stop killing people, because that’s not a sustainable justice system either. But I think that the protagonists recognizing his legitimate grievances with the system and understanding how they can work with him to create a better system for both sorcerers and civilians would be much more interesting than anything where he’s an arc villain who gets killed off.

#jjk #jjk spoilers #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen spoilers #higuruma hiromi #jjk meta

83 notes · View notes

fiadhaisteach · 2 years

Text

'Tis Impressed Reader Touting Works - 2022.01.08

Legacy of Protection series & Virtually Faded Universe series by AntlersandFangs (@thededfa) & Celtic_Lass (@thecelticlass) - MGiT(h) & MBiT(v) siblings (pairings listed in each story) - 857,686 words (combined) - all complete

🔸 I almost don't know where to start with this one. Epic & self-indulgent, all at the same time, these stories are some I come back to again and again and again 🤩. I can't tell you how many times I've reread these as I sometimes read just my favorite parts... and usually end up reading until the end again, because the authors drag me in every time, but do sometimes (rarely) manage to just read a few bits.

🔹 Another protagonist named Emma, though this time she's a Modern Character and was displaced with the 2nd protagonist, Damon, her best friend/brother/blood sister.

The rest of this post has spoilers that may change your initial read through of the stories. If that's not your cuppa, click directly to the main Virtually Faded Universe series and read them in order. You won't regret it. Otherwise... let's continue on.

(mostly) Stand Alone Prequels

⚜️Protection - Glorfindel/OFC(h) - 53,993 words - complete

Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Additional Tags: Kidnapping, Cultural Differences, Misunderstandings, Language Barrier, bitter sweet, there be smut, we make no apologies, Extremely and Unapologetically Self-Indulgent, reverse, Middle earth Character in semi-modern earth... sorta, AU territory, Family Fluff, Glorfindel has a family! Summary: Everyone assumes that Glorfindel went to Mando's Halls when he fell defeating the Balrog. Assumptions are rarely correct. Do not expect any historical, canonical, cultural, lingual, or any other kind of accuracy. :)

⚜️The Black Devil - OMC(h-e)/OFC(h), Glorfindel/OFC(h) - 41,530 words - complete

Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Glorfindel (Tolkien), Glorfindel's Wife, multiple OCs Additional Tags: language barriers, Cultural Differences, middle earth character in earth, there be smut, Slow Burn, Arranged Marriage sort of, domestic abuse, but not from the pairings, Extremely and Unapologeticly Self-Indulgent, We started this and now we can’t stop, AU territory, Happy Ending, Family Fluff, Light dom/sub undertones Summary: The misadventures of Glorfindel's son

otherwise known as: Mom, don't be angry, but I sort of bought a wife and she's terrified of me

⚜️Virtual Friends - OFC(h) & OFC(h) - 2,080 words - complete

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: original child characters, Main Story characters' moms Additional Tags: uhhh, this will only make sense if you read Virtually Faded, It's just some useful background info for later in Virtually Torn Summary: A pair of distant, really, really distant cousins meet at a family reunion, and find something special

Main Story

⚜️Virtually Faded - Solas/MGiT(h), Cassandra/MBiT(v) - 519,973 words - complete, but you do NOT want to stop here

Chapters: 101/101 Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Characters: self insert ocs - Character, original male qunari character, Original Female Character, All the Companions, multiple original characters Additional Tags: extremely and unapologetically self indulgent, Modern Girl in Thedas, Modern Characters in Thedas, Humorous, you're going off script a bit hun, misunderstandings are hilarious, Solas Being Solas, Snowball Fights, Cameos, sorta Slow Burn, Dragon hunting, in universe racism, worst world state, like worse than possible in the games, solas finds out, Minor Character Death, drug mention, Self Harm, Feels, You've been warned, Angst, It just keeps happening, Elvhen rituals, NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS, just keep that in mind, Unreliable Narrator, Babies!, fluff soooo much fluff, Back to plot, Damnit Emma, gets a little dark, Sorry Not Sorry, Cousland’s a psychopath, Hey y’all Surana’s here too!, Knives are romantic... well here they’re romantic, Everything’s connected, AU territory Summary: Game night gone horribly wrong! Two friends find themselves in a game, one has the mark the other is along for the ride. Follow Damon and Emma as they dive into the world of dragon age. Emma loves dragon age and it's characters but being pulled physically into Inquisition with the worst worldstate imaginable? Plus getting the anchor? Thankfully her longest and best friend is right beside her... only thing... He's now a Qunari and hasn't played the games yet.

[You Need These] Sequels

⚜️Virtually Torn - Thranduil/MGiME(h) - 68,977 words - complete

Chapters: 25/25 Fandom: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, Dragon Age - All Media Types Rating: Mature Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Characters: Thranduil (Tolkien), Original Female Character(s), Oropher (Tolkien), Gil’galad (Tolkien), Glorfindel (Tolkien), OC’s, Elrond Peredhel Additional Tags: Modern Girl in Middle Earth, Care, Friendship, Emma is broken, Healing, Panic Attacks, Emotional Instability, Last Alliance of Elves and Men, Protective Thranduil, It will get better... eventually., Quadruple G, Galadriel is... annoyed?, Emma can block her, Scars are important, Young Legolas, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con Summary: Emma saved the world from being torn apart... but in doing so she is torn from her family and became a shell of her former self.... But fate is not done with her yet.

Once again she falls from the sky....

Continuation of Virtually Faded

⚜️Virtually Separated - Solas/MGiT(h), Cassandra/MBiT(v), background Dorian/Iron Bull, background Alistair/Josephine - 54,231 words - complete

Chapters: 23/23 Fandom: Dragon Age - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Characters: Fen'Harel | Solas, Original Male Character(s), All Companions, multiple OCs, Cassandra Pentaghast, Original Female Character(s), Glorfindel, Legolas, Gimli, Beth!!! Additional Tags: broken bonds, This will hurt, Modern Character in Thedas, MGiT, in universe racism, Gets a little gray, Kidnap- uh... fostering., we are aware Emma took the brains with her somehow, The kids are amazing!, Family reunion!!, now all we need is a few hobbits and we have a fellowship :D Summary: She's gone. She's gone, and there is nothing he can do besides care for their children and try to keep Solas alive till she makes it back.

because he believes she'll come back

She has to

Continuation of Virtually Faded

⚜️Virtually After - Thranduil|Solas/MGiT(h), Cassandra/MBiT(v), background Glorfindel/OFC(h), background Dorian/Iron Bull, background Gimli/Legolas - 70,892 words - complete

Chapters: 23/23 Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition, TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Cassandra Pentaghast, Fen'Harel | Solas, The Iron Bull (Dragon Age), Thranduil (Tolkien), Glorfindel (Tolkien), Glorfindel's Wife, Legolas Greenleaf, Gimli (Son of Glóin), Original Characters, Elrond Peredhel, Felassan (Dragon Age) Additional Tags: Canon Divergence, Modern Girl in Thedas, Modern Character in Thedas, Healing, cuddle piles, Reunions, Kids, shape shifting, Valor revealed, Felassan revealed, Emma has been collecting LOTR elves..., major character deaths, happy ending! Summary: After they were torn and separated, they have finally found their ways back to each other.

continuation of the Virtually Faded universe, highly recommend you read Virtually Faded, Virtually Torn, and Virtually Separated first.

Companion Stories

⚜️A Faded Companion - 31,537 words - complete - side stories, alt PoVs, & art

Chapters: 7/7 Fandom: Dragon Age (Video Games) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s), Loghain Mac Tir Additional Tags: POV Minor Character, Modern Girl in Thedas, in game racism, Outsiders POV, Thedas elves, Companion POV, ART!!! Summary: a collection of companion pieces to Virtually Faded, all from different points of view or happenings that didn't make it into the main story

Companion to Virtually Faded (main story)

⚜️Virtually Unspoken - 14,473 words - Solas/MGiT(h), Cassandra/MBiT(v), Thranduil/MGiME(h) - complete - extended scenes for us smut lovers

Chapters: 6/6 Fandom: Dragon Age: Inquisition Rating: Explicit Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Cassandra Pentaghast, Original Male Character(s), Fen'Harel | Solas, Original Female Character(s) Additional Tags: Shameless Smut, Safewords, sub/dom, First Time, Biting, Possessive Solas, Jealous Solas, Inexperienced Thranduil... but he catches on ;), Bondage, Anal Sex, Everything is consensual Summary: The smutty side of the Virtually Faded Universe, some of those yummy scenes we didn't keep in the main fic :D (also an apology for the angst... )

🔸 If you read through the individual story tags, you may have noticed that these are Dragon Age x Tolkien fusion, though it's not obvious for most of the main story. Imagine that Arda is pre-Elvhen Thedas, or DA Thedas is like the sixth age (or maybe seventh) of Arda & the continent of Thedas is Aman/Valinor (Middle-Earth is across the sea); and the Evanuris were (mostly) 1st Age elves who renamed themselves 🥸 🤯... and prophecies will be fulfilled.

🔹 I'll never be able to watch the Hobbit quite the same again. Stupid Silly, foolish, feels 😭. 💖💖💖

(previous TIRTWs & TIRTW Key/Legend)

#spotlight Saturday #fic recommendations #writer recommendations #tirtw #'tis impressed reader touting works #aisteach reads #aisteach recommends #solas/mgit #solas x mgit #cassandra/mbit #cassandra x mbit #MECoE #glorfindel x oc #oc x oc #thranduil x mgime #dragon age x tolkien #thededfa #thecelticlass #long post

21 notes · View notes

thefinishedarticle · 3 years

Text

Depth

In Jules Verne’s novel of the same name, the protagonists journeyed Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The title is popularly thought to refer to the ocean’s depth, but actually refers to distance travelled: the greatest depth actually reached is four leagues.

In my analysis of the depth of European national teams, I’ve gone one further: I’ve looked at Europe’s top five leagues, home to the fifteen top-ranked teams under UEFA’s club coefficients. They’re all familiar names. The top tier is Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, and Man City. The next rung is made up of Atlético Madrid, PSG, Manchester United, and Liverpool, Sevilla, followed by Arsenal, Chelsea, Borussia Dortmund, Spurs, and Roma.

I have looked only at regular players. This means at least 25 appearances so far in the 2020/21 season, including all competitions and sub appearances - these teams have all played over 40 games, so this allows a fair discount for rotation.

Only three national teams can make up a 23-man squad from these teams.

This will come as a surprise to many. In the build up to Euro 2020, there has been plenty of discussion about the teams to watch. One of the first names on anybody’s list is Belgium, who are seen to have some of the best depth of any squad. They don’t even come close to making the cut. They only have five regular players in the top 15.

This is not the last decade, when every Premier League club seemed to have a Belgian star. Courtois and Mignolet kept goal for Chelsea and Liverpool respectively. Kompany and Vermaelan were the rocks at the heart of City and Arsenal’s back lines, and Alderweireld joined Vertonghen at Spurs. Hazard, de Bruyne and Lukaku were the centre of Chelsea, City and United’s attacks. The same clubs picked up Boyata, Fellaini, Januzaj, Chadli, Benteke, Origi and Bashuayi as part of the world’s new footballing superpower.

Courtois now plays for Real Madrid, and Alderweireld and de Bruyne are still in place, but other than Origi’s spot on Liverpool’s bench the rest have fallen out of the spotlight. Eden Hazard has struggled with injuries since his own move to Madrid, but most have simply passed their prime, or failed to realise their potential.

Leicester City are leading a second wave with Tielemans, Praet and Castagne. Mertens is 33 and still a regular at Napoli. Lukaku deserves recognition at Inter Milan, whose coefficient should be higher. Hazard’s brother Thorgan has 19 appearances for Dortmund. But by the terms of this search, only his teammate Meunier and Atleti’s Carrasco join Courtois, de Bruyne and Alderweireld in making the list. They still have some big hitters, but the wave of talent has passed.

Portugal are another team considered amongst the favourites. They have Man City trio Cancelo, Dias and Bernardo Silva, Liverpool’s Jota and United’ Fernandes, some of the best players in the league this year, together with the likes of Atlético’s Felix and Juventus’s Ronaldo. But again, they are nowhere close to having a whole squad of top level players. Only 9 make the list. As with Belgium, they make up the rest of their squad from their own domestic league, and players from second-string teams (including what seems like half of the Wolves squad).

You could argue that it’s more important to have five world-class players than 50 decent ones, and that’s a fair point, but it’s not what I’m looking at here. I’m talking about squad depth, and Portugal simply don’t have it. Neither do Belgium, despite what many of us suspect, given our recent memory of their players’ dominance.

There are two other sides of a similar class. Wales, Scotland, Croatia and Denmark have three players on the list, which is an interesting comparison to Belgium’s five (although, as noted above, a dominant midfield was enough for Croatia’s first team to go far in the 2018 World Cup). Portugal, on nine, are sandwiched between two other big footballing nations: the Netherlands (7) and Italy (11).

The former aren’t exactly a shock, given that they met Portugal in the 2019 Nations League final. But after the break-up of the Ajax side that starred in that year’s Champions League, they look a little less secure. They should really have another player on the list in the form of de Vrij, with Inter Milan harshly marked down, like we saw with Belgium and Lukaku. But the injury to van Dijk is a massive blow, like Hazard is to Belgium, and they are otherwise fielding a lot of squad players: Bergwijn, van de Beek, Wijnaldum and Ake all technically play for the Premier League’s biggest teams, but they aren’t exactly their star players. They have de Jong at Barca and de Ligt at Juve, but not a great deal more.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the top five teams represent the top five leagues. You could say it’s inevitable, that even the biggest teams will have a preference for domestic players and so these nations will have players at those teams. You could argue that Portugal and the Netherlands might be better represented if only Porto or Ajax had made the cut.

Indeed, 7 of Italy’s 11 come from Juve and Roma, with PSG contributing Kean, Verratti and Florenzi and Chelsea’s Jorginho making up the set. Not that half the Juve team is something to be lightly dismissed, and if anything there can be an advantage to having a squad used to playing together. But Juve aren’t quite what they were, and that famous Italian rear-guard are well past their prime, with Barzagli retired, Chiellini and Buffon warming the bench and Bonucci now 33.

Italy also have the benefit of players at other domestic clubs, like the two Milan teams who are at least the equal of a Porto or an Ajax, and others like Lazio’s Immobile. They’re short on star-power, but they have an actual world class manager in Roberto Mancini, and their recent results have been consistently impressive. They are one of four teams with a chance of winning the 2021 Nations League after the Euros are done, but everybody seems to write them off because they lack Portugal’s big names.

Germany have a similar story. Their list is much larger, jumping from 11 to 21 players, but again there is a domestic advantage: nine of those players come from Bayern, and a further four from Dortmund. But as Bayern may be the best team in the world, having nine of their regulars less a caveat and more of a boast, with that same advantage of having existing relationships and fluency. Adding the likes of Toni Kroos, Ilkay Gundogan and Julian Draxler to Bayern’s midfield, and Germany are as impressive as any team in the world.

But again, they aren’t really rated as one of the sides to watch in the tournament. This might be because of how the numbers are distributed: having 21 players at top sides is impressive, but they can only play three or four midfielders at a time, so having nine or so of the best midfielders in Europe doesn’t really help them more than Portugal having a few of them. They also have three of the best goalkeepers, but look a little bare in defence and up-front, not helped by the decision to exile Boateng, Hummels and Muller since 2018 (a self-inflicted punishment no other nation has to face).

France are the first team to clear the hurdle of 23 players for a squad, with one to spare. They are also the first to have those players spread relatively evenly over all of the required positions. In fact, their squad depth is deeply impressive. Using only Premier League players, they could select a fairly decent group: Lloris, Areola, Fofana, Zouma, Digne, Laporte, Mendy, Saliba, Doucouré, Mendy, Guendouzi, Kante, Pogba, Ndombele, Sissoko, Martial, Lacazette, Giroud. Not all world-class footballers, but that would still be one of the top handful of sides in the Euros.

But then they have players across the rest of Europe. As well as two Man City defenders, they have two defenders at most of Europe’s biggest clubs. PSG just beat Bayern Munich with Kimpembe and Dagba in their backline, and played Kurzawa against Barcelona in the previous round. Bayern have Hernández and Pavard, who won the 2018 World Cup final on either side of Barcelona’s Umtiti, since displaced by Lenglet, and Real Madrid’s Varane, who shares his club with Ferland Mendy.

Further forward, those four teams provide the firepower of Mbappe, Toilsso and Coman, Dembele and Griezmann, and the exiled Karim Benzema (as with Germany, a self-inflicted punishment, although in this case it doesn’t seem to hold them back). A.C. Milan, currently top of the Italian league, have another two defenders in Hernandez and Kalulu. Atlético Madrid have Lemar and Moussa Dembele. Juventus have Rabiot.

Then there are highly rated players like Upamecano, Aouar, Fekir and Ben Yedder at other sides across the German, French and Spanish leagues. I went with regulars from the top 15 clubs as a rough metric for the best 159 European players, on the basis that football is a meritocracy and the best players tend to either increase the standing of their club or move to a bigger one, but obviously there are big fish in small ponds as well - the exceptions to the rule, and much harder to quantify.

France could probably field two or three squads and they would all make it out of the group stage. Before Belgium and Portugal, they are the first team which get mentioned in terms of Euro 2020 squads, and in their case the hype is fully vindicated. But, strangely enough, they are only third in terms of this list. England pip them by just one player, although that’s two if you subtract Benzema.

Weirdly, England are ahead of them. Again, this is thanks to having a lot of domestic teams in the selection, and indeed almost none of the English players are abroad: Tripper at Atléti and Sancho and Bellingham at Dortmund are the only three of the twenty-five, and they might not even make the squad. That’s less than any of the other comparable nations.

But the Premier League contingent are also spread out between the teams, so there is no teamwork advantage like Germany have with Bayern. Instead, there is the potential disadvantage that England’s team is made of club-level rivals. As with Germany, the distribution of the players is a problem. It is no good having 50 players on the list if they are all strikers, and England’s list of 25 has five right-backs and no goalkeepers (the opposite of Germany).

The English list is forward-heavy, and most of them won’t make the squad. Kane, Rashford, Sterling, Sancho, Foden, Saka, Nketiah, Hudson-Odoi and Abraham appear for the top clubs in the same positions, and face competition from the likes of Grealish and Calvert-Lewin from elsewhere in the league. In the absence of the injured Joe Gomez, England really only have two top centre-backs, with Curtis Jones and Rob Holding unlikely to even appear as subs.

The base number is therefore not as impressive as it seems, and about eleven of these players aren’t in Gareth Southgate’s plans. But perhaps that is testament to the depth at other club sides, with players like Rice, Phillips and Lingard appearing in midfield as well as those up front. It’s also true that England only have four players in the top 5 clubs, compared to five for Portugal, ten for France and Spain, and twelve for Germany. They may have more decent players, but fewer superstars.

That’s right: Spain are top. They have a massive 29 players on the list, and only 14 of those are at Real, Barca, Atléti and Sevilla. Every team on the list has a player with the exception of Liverpool and Dortmund, and even they have Thiago and Morey just a few appearances short. That shows the depth they have even beyond this list. Chelsea’s Kepa and Alonso, City’s Garcia, Arsenal’s Mari, United’s Mata also don’t make the cut, and neither do 17 players who have appeared for Barcelona or Real Madrid this season.

They could make a back line of Gerard Piqué, Sergio Ramos, Nacho, Dani Carvajal and Sergi Roberto, with the likes of Isco and Ansu Fati ahead of them, and that’s on top of the 29 players who appeared enough to make the list. Atlético have even more, and most sides in La Liga are predominantly Spanish, with the likes of Iago Aspas and Gerard Moreno (one of the most in form strikers in Europe) further down the table. Spain aren’t mentioned in the same breath as the likes of France, Portugal and Belgium when discussing favourites for the tournament, but I think a lot of people are sleeping on the sheer depth they have available.

They won the 2020 Nations League group they shared with Germany, beating them 6-0 in November, and underperformed in the 2018 World Cup having sacked their manager on the eve of the tournament. They also won all of the games they played at home, and will be playing most of their Euro 2020 games in Bilbao. The host advantage is often a huge factor for international tournaments, and this time around Italy, the Netherlands, England, Spain and Germany will have an edge. In the group of death between Germany, France and Portugal, could playing in Munich make the difference for the Bayern contingent?

#football #Spain #France #England #Germany

1 note · View note

scifigeneration · 4 years

Text

Guide to the classics: The War of the Worlds

by Robert Hassan

BBC/IMDB

Spoiler alert: this story details how The War of the Worlds ends.

The latest screen adaption of H. G. Wells’ 1898 modern masterwork The War of the Worlds will hit our screens this week. Continuously in print since its first publication, the book is a literary gift that keeps on giving for producers and screenwriters. They recognise the story’s unerring capacity to find its mark with each generation.

Wells – who also wrote The Time Machine (1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) – helped pioneer the science fiction genre when he conceived this astonishing book. With an eyewitness narration that reads grippingly still, it tells of a Martian invasion of Earth.

youtube

The new War of the Worlds stars Gabriel Byrne (ZeroZeroZero), Elizabeth McGovern (Downton Abbey) and Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People).

Shock and awe

Set in London, Wells depicts a complacent world; of men “serene in their assurance” of their dominion over the planet. But humans get the shock of another reality when suddenly visited upon by blood-feeding and squid-like creatures possessed of “intellects vast and cool” that are “unsympathetic” to Earthlings whose planet they had long “regarded with envious eyes”.

Penguin

An advance party arrives inside metal cylinders shot from giant cannons stationed on Mars. From the cylinders come dozens of Martians, each operating a three-legged metal “fighting-machine” that attacks London’s helpless population by means of a “heat ray”. From these “whatever is combustible flashes into flame”, metal liquifies, glass melts and water “explodes into steam”.

Fleeing like rats from a burning ship, panic spreads like a contagion. The narrator describes a breakdown of law and order, and undergoes something of a breakdown himself.

Upper-class women arm themselves as they cross the country, because traditional deference has gone up in smoke. The “social body” of organisation – police, army, government – suffers “swift liquefaction”.

The Martians, however, had become too intelligent for their own good. They had made the Red Planet disease-free but forgotten about germ theory. And so while laying waste to London, they inhale a bug; a simple bacteria “against which their systems were unprepared” and so suffered a “death that must have seemed to them as incomprehensible as any death could be”.

London will rise again. The world has been spared. Humanity gets lucky — this time.

A wider war

In the new Anglo-French television series, La Guerre Des Mondes, the action takes place in both London and France. Martian devastation is given wider latitude.

Why does this now-familiar story have such a hold on successive generations? Iterations include the Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of “fake news” bulletins about Martian invasion, to the 1978 contemporary music version with Richard Burton narration, to Steven Spielberg’s film blockbuster starring Tom Cruise. Last year also saw a BBC production set in Edwardian London.

Tom Cruise and the red weed in the 2005 film. IMDB

One response is to consider our attraction to sci-fi. It sees the laws of science upended. Technology seems to make anything possible and to minds already accustomed to real technological transformation, sci-fi literature brings the now-thinkable future into the present.

But there’re less obvious elements to think about: themes that were important in 1898 and resonate still.

Invasion and imperialism

Wells’ book touched something existentially British during their Pax Britannica period of relative peace. Across the Channel, Europe seethed with diplomatic intrigue and tensions culminating in the first world war.

The new sci-fi genre connected to an older “invasion literature” genre; a long-standing British apprehension of the Continent, especially its renascent German threat. Wells hints at this when he writes that the arrival of the cylinders (before the Martians emerged from them) “did not [initially] make the sensation that an ultimatum to Germany would have done”.

Then there’s the imperialism angle. Was Wells tapping a source of late-Victorian shame at the true source of British wealth and power? Then, a quarter of the world map was coloured British Empire pink. London was the epicentre of modern imperialism — the coordination point for the suffering of millions and the plunder of their lands.

Moreover, Belgium, Germany, France, and also the USA, were engaged in the “scramble for colonies” in Africa and Asia. Under the veneer of sci-fi, Wells describes what it’s like to be a people facing a powerful invader.

youtube

A BBC version was set in Edwardian times.

Fear is the contagion

A very different perspective says something about our species and our idealised self-conception. In 1908 the Russian novelist and revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov, drew on WOTW for inspiration. In his novel Red Star protagonist Leonid travels to Mars to learn about communism from Martians who had made their own revolution and now lived in peace. Leonid despairs of the congenitally “unstable and fragile” nature of human relationships and looks to another planet for guidance.

The Earth-bound communist project of the 20th century ended badly, to say the least. But our human vulnerability to invasion, to tyranny, to economic catastrophe, and even to the bacteriological danger from microbes resistant to antibiotics, continues to haunt us.

The latest adaptation is set in our time with smartphones and the internet. Here again our 21st-century complacency is shattered, and our vulnerability laid bare.

Fear is a contagion in WOTW, and its Londoners show little heroism in the face of an alien invader.

A new battle

Bacteria did in Wells’ Martians and might do for us too – unless drugs to overcome resistance are developed. Through sci-fi, we can explore our fear of the invisible foe.

Global warming might be our other enemy – the red skies of Australia’s last bushfire season fresh in our memory and reminiscent of Well’s novel.

youtube

Jeff Wayne created the progressive musical version of The War of the Worlds, featuring Justin Hayward (The Moody Blues), Chris Thompson (Manfred Mann’s Earth Band), Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), Julie Covington and David Essex.

The narrative provides a hugely enjoyable fantasy. But we need to think about what science fiction might be doing to our relationship with science fact, especially if we consume it as a tranquilliser to displace and sublimate our fears of invisible threats.

If we do, then the incomprehensibility felt by Wells’ Martians may add that little bit more to our discord regarding the sources and solutions to global warming. Humans got lucky in The War of the Worlds. They didn’t need to do anything to survive. We can’t count on luck to save us or our planet.

About The Author:

Robert Hassan is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

#science fiction #television #TV adaptation #H. G. Wells #scifi TV #featured

15 notes · View notes

douglashonorscollege · 3 years

Text

Uncivilized and Colonized: Analyzing Caliban’s Character in The Tempest

essay by Anthony Krueger ⌂

Throughout the duration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest characters move through a single setting, a mysterious island populated with mystical creatures: witches, spirits, and magical beings to name a few. Yet perhaps the most difficult to understand character is not these mythical beings but the proclaimed half-man, half-monster Caliban.In The Tempest, readers witness consistently cruel actions inflicted upon Caliban by all those around him, yet the reading experience does very little to provoke any sense of empathy for his character and his hardships. Through a careful examination of Caliban’s character journey in The Tempest, this essay will propose the idea that although Caliban is a troubled and impulsive man, he is no monster; rather, he is an innocent and misunderstood character with poor ill luck that follows him through the play. His character is symbolic of the truest of misfortunes that can befall a man or woman: the imprisonment of colonialism. With an analysis of Caliban’s journey throughout the play, perhaps a greater understanding of his character’s true nature can arise, thus establishing an increased understanding of colonized people in the real world and their continued struggles.

Before delving into the colonized nature of Caliban’s character, one must first understand the Manifest-Destiny mindset of the colonizer; in The Tempest, the colonizer is none other than the protagonist, the man the audience follows throughout the play: Prospero. For context, Prospero held a high position of authority in his homeland, as he was the Duke of Milan; yet, upon a rebellion executed by his brother Antonio, Prospero found himself banished from his homeland and forced onto a long voyage. In his travels, Prospero ends up stuck on an island inhabited by Caliban and once inhabited by his magically gifted mother, Sycorax. Coming from a position of power, Prospero immediately takes control over the island, quickly ridding the land of any reminder of Sycorax’s rule. Caliban despises Prospero for taking power over the island; in fact, the readers’ introduction to his character begins with Caliban’s opening lines:

All the charms Of Sycorax—toads, beetles, bats—light on you, For I am all the subjects that you have, Which was first mine own king. And here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ the island. (Act 1 Scene 2)

Prospero’s taking of the island without regard to its inhabitants closely resembles the philosophy of Manifest Destiny. According to ushistory.org, “At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior.” The belief of superiority, a characteristic that Prospero undoubtedly demonstrates, enables colonizers to take control over lands without any sense of guilt for they view it as their right. Prospero, as said colonizer, embodies the philosophical assumptions of Manifest Destiny when he takes over the island, dehumanizing and enslaving Caliban, whom he views as inferior.

Being stripped of power on his own island is just the beginning of Caliban’s ill-fated storyline. Caliban’s is belittled to the point of being consider a literal monster by those around him, which further highlights the dehumanizing nature of the colonizer-colonized relationship. When Trinculo the jester first encounters Caliban, he declares the following infamous description of Caliban: “A fish, he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-john. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver.” (Act 2 Scene 2). Trinculo’s characterization of Caliban is just one of many cruel comments spit at Caliban throughout the play. These belittling comments are more than just spiteful as they work to dehumanize Caliban’s character, further drawing on the symbolic nature of Caliban as a colonized person. In the essay “White Americans’ Dehumanization Toward American Indians in John Steinbeck’s The Pearl,'' author Hening Wulandari Kadarsih defines dehumanization as “the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. This can lead to increased violence, human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide” (Kadarsih). As Kadarsih’s definition explains, dehumanizing a human being or group of people allows those that see themselves as superior to act maliciously against said person or group. As Caliban is minimized to a monster by those around him, their callous treatment of him begins to feel justified in their eyes. The effect of Caliban’s dehumanization suggests that he is less than human, which further implies that he is in need of being civilized.

Deprecated to the extent of being characterized as an animal, it is suggested that Caliban’s character needs some form of saving in order to reach a civilized status. Initially, the task of ‘civilizing’ Caliban was taken on by Prospero and Miranda. In order to begin the process of civilizing Caliban, the father and daughter duo began with teaching Caliban their language. In response, Caliban declares: “You taught me language; and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. the red plague rid you for learning me your language” (Act 1 Scene 2). Miranda had implied that as a ‘savage’ Caliban should have held a sense of indebtment towards her; however, Caliban’s angered response highlights that the only thing of value he obtained from the foreigner’s language is the ability to curse his captors—the ability to exactly express how much he despises them in a means they understand. Language is a powerful tool and serves as a means of authority in the novel. The power of language is represented through Prospero’s books. In order to bring Prospero down, Caliban tells Stephano, “Remember first to possess his books...for without them he’s but a sot” (Act 3 Scene 2). Prospero’s immense power and persuasion comes from his books, with books being an important symbol of words, and words being the prime component of language. Caliban’s poor language abilities contrasted against Prospero’s boundless knowledge of the language suggests that Caliban is of minimal importance in the novel’s social hierarchy. Losing his language as language is a means of power highlights the acts of assimilation forced onto Caliban. Caliban’s forced assimilation mirrors that of indigenous people who were made to adapt to Western culture upon the invasion of westerners. For instance, in 1879, Richard H. Pratt created the model Indian school which promoted the philosophy “kill the man, save the indian.” According to digitalhistory.edu, the goal of the boarding school was “ to use education to uplift and assimilate into the mainstream of American culture,” as “Pratt trimmed their hair, required them to speak English, and prohibited any displays of tribal traditions.” The traditions of native peoples, including their language, was viewed as uncivilized compared to the traditions and language of white people. The effects of such assimilation was a loss of culture and loss of oneself. As with many indigenous people, Caliban was stripped of his accustomed way of life, viewed as too savage by Western measures, thus further justifying his anger towards his captors.

Caliban, as a symbol of the colonized person, not only lost his home, but also faced the emotional dilemmas that come with such displacement. Upon being condemned to a cave, Caliban in fact was also forced into slavery. As Prospero states, “We'll visit Caliban, my slave - he does make our fire, fetch in our wood and services in offices that profit us” (Act 1 Scene 2). Prospero’s suggested ownership of Caliban further strengthens the colonizer-colonized relationship between the two as Prospero is that of a slave-owner with Caliban being that of a slave. Caliban’s exploitation is no stranger to indigenous people as many were forced into slavery as well. Upon displacement, many natives found themselves forced into involuntary labor by their colonizers. The effects of such displacement and slavery was detrimental to the natives and these effects can be seen through Caliban’s anger, sadness, and impulsivity in the play, with all those emotions proven to be more and more validated as the play progresses.

By the end of the play, Caliban has been dehumanized, assimilated, displaced, and forced into slavery. In fact, by the second act, Caliban’s spirit has been broken and this is represented through his perceived need for a ruler. As the act begins, Stephano and Trinculo, two drunken jesters, wash upon shore with the preconceived notion that they are the sole survivors from the shipwreck. Upon discovering Caliban, the drunken duo degraded his appearance, which further weakens Caliban’s already poor stability; yet, Caliban views the two men as saviors. He vows to follow them, worship them, and tend to their needs:

I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow; And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts; Show thee a jay's nest and instruct thee how To snare the nimble marmoset; I'll bring thee To clustering filberts and sometimes I'll get thee Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me? (Act 2 Scene 2)

Stephano and Trinculo are two unsympathetic, callous, and power-hungry characters that quickly discredit any humanity in Caliban; however, Caliban still views the two as God-like entities that he may follow to safety. In this quote, Caliban is vowing to tend to every one of the duo’s needs in a slave-like fashion. Caliban’s quickly made decision to offer himself to the duo highlights his broken spirit, for he believes at this point he needs a ruler. This showcases his tragic trajectory as a character: Caliban began as a free person ruling his own island, yet he now finds himself seeking some sort of authority figure even if that figure degrades him as a person. Caliban’s perceived self worth is now less than nothing; a disheartening character journey as a man who once held the strength to verbally fight back against his captors now has little strength left to give, thus leading to his worshipping of false deities as a way of obtaining false security and comfort, security and comfort he once found within himself on his island. Caliban’s tragic character journey highlights the real-world issues that colonized people face: a loss of autonomy comes with bewilderment in regards to what to do next.

Throughout Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Caliban’s character journey is representative of a colonized person who is stripped of all sense of self through his forced learning of a foreigner's language, his exile, his loss of autonomy, and overall dehumanization. The play does little to promote any sense of empathy for Caliban; rather, he is a character that the readers are supposed to look down upon. The play emphasizes his attempted rape of Miranda multiple times, his innocence is twisted into stupidity when he follows Trinculo and Stephano as leaders, and lastly his appearance is heavily dramatized to further the idea of Caliban being a monster. The Tempest silences Caliban’s voice as a colonized person through showcasing his wrong doings as opposed to highlighting his struggles. Caliban’s voice being silenced mirrors one of the most common struggles that indigenous people face: their voices aren’t heard when it comes to retelling history. In the essay “Historical Silences and the Enduring Power of Counter Storytelling,” author James Miles describes the issue of historical silencing: “unequal power structures work to create and reinforce historical narratives that contain ‘bundles of silences.’ He contends that these silences are found not just in academic histories, but in sources, archives, and more broadly in how societies remember the past.” Essentially, Miles is conveying the idea that history favors the voice of the victors, which leaves the once-perceived inferiors trailing behind as a side story. Caliban, considering his established symbolic nature of a colonized person, loses the power to tell his story through The Tempest, which greatly affects how he is perceived. In order to not only understand Caliban but indigenous and colonized people in general, one must hear their stories, empathize with their struggles, and allow their once-silenced voices to be heard. Through the process of listening and understanding the ones that history and stories have pushed to the margins, a bridge between those in power and those injured by that power begins to form, thus bringing people together in a way that matters. Throughout the duration of Shakespeare’s The Tempest characters move through a single setting, a mysterious island populated with mystical creatures: witches, spirits, and magical beings to name a few. Yet perhaps the most difficult to understand character is not these mythical beings but the proclaimed half-man, half-monster Caliban. In The Tempest, readers witness consistently cruel actions inflicted upon Caliban by all those around him, yet the reading experience does very little to provoke any sense of empathy for his character and his hardships. Through a careful examination of Caliban’s character journey in The Tempest, this essay will propose the idea that although Caliban is a troubled and impulsive man, he is no monster; rather, he is an innocent and misunderstood character with poor ill luck that follows him through the play. His character is symbolic of the truest of misfortunes that can befall a man or woman: the imprisonment of colonialism. With an analysis of Caliban’s journey throughout the play, perhaps a greater understanding of his character’s true nature can arise, thus establishing an increased understanding of colonized people in the real world and their continued struggles.

Cursing Prospero for taking control over the land that was his birthright, Caliban’s hatred for Prospero’s rule is showcased in full effect. Caliban rightly states how he was the king of his own island, but in true colonial fashion, Prospero tore this autonomy from Caliban with little regard, thus establishing a tense colonizer-colonized relationship that provides a source of conflict throughout the play. Prospero’s taking of the island without regard to its inhabitants closely resembles the philosophy of Manifest Destiny. According to ushistory.org, “At the heart of manifest destiny was the pervasive belief in American cultural and racial superiority. Native Americans had long been perceived as inferior.” The belief of superiority, a characteristic that Prospero undoubtedly demonstrates, enables colonizers to take control over lands without any sense of guilt for they view it as their right. Prospero, as said colonizer, embodies the philosophical assumptions of Manifest Destiny when he takes over the island, dehumanizing and enslaving Caliban, whom he views as inferior.

Forced to assimilate, Caliban loses his sense of self; however, breaking his spirits was just the beginning of the colonization process. Once free to roam his own island as he pleased, the arrival of Prospero resulted in Caliban’s exile, as he was condemned to live alone in a cave. Caliban’s forced exile closely resembles the exile that indigenous people found themselves in as well. According to history.com, reservations held the goal of trapping natives under government control, seeking to “minimize conflict between Indians and settlers and encourage Native Americans to take on the ways of the white man. But many Native Americans were forced onto reservations with catastrophic results and devastating, long-lasting effects.” The effects of such exile expand far beyond displacement, including immense stress and depression that falls onto the displaced. Caliban, as a symbol of the colonized person, not only lost his home, but also faced the emotional dilemmas that come with such displacement. Upon being condemned to a cave, Caliban in fact was also forced into slavery. As Prospero states, “We'll visit Caliban, my slave - he does make our fire, fetch in our wood and services in offices that profit us” (Act 1 Scene 2). Prospero’s suggested ownership of Caliban further strengthens the colonizer-colonized relationship between the two as Prospero is that of a slave-owner with Caliban being that of a slave. Caliban’s exploitation is no stranger to indigenous people as many were forced into slavery as well. Upon displacement, many natives found themselves forced into involuntary labor by their colonizers. The effects of such displacement and slavery was detrimental to the natives and these effects can be seen through Caliban’s anger, sadness, and impulsivity in the play, with all those emotions proven to be more and more validated as the play progresses.

Works Cited Digital History, www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3505#:~:text=In%201879%2C%20an%20army%20officer,the%20mainstream%20of%20American%20culture.&text=Pratt's%20motto%20was%20%22kill%20the%20Indian%20and%20save%20the%20man.%22. History.com Editors. “Indian Reservations.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 8 Dec. 2017, www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/indian-reservations#:~:text=In%201851%2C%20Congress%20passed%20the,leave%20the%20reservations%20without%20permission. “Manifest Destiny.” Ushistory.org, Independence Hall Association, www.ushistory.org/us/29.asp. Miles, James. “Historical Silences and the Enduring Power of Counter Storytelling.” Taylor & Francis, 17 July 2019, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2019.1633735. Shakespeare, William, and Frank Kermode. The Tempest. T. Nelson & Sons, 1998. ∎

More on Anthony ~ Minerva’s Owl Homepage

#journal #journal2021 #2021

1 note · View note

rosebloodcat · 6 years

Text

Arrival

AN: I'm an HP nerd and BatIM is steadily joining it. Here's a new AU that I'm gonna be playing with. Wish me luck, I guess.

Harry fidgeted in his seat. He’d given up on a quick way home, but was still nervous about getting a job. All it had taken was one mis-cast spell in the Time Room of the Department of Mysteries and suddenly he’d been stranded in the 40’s in America, of all countries.

The MASUCA Auror’s had picked him up under an alert from their Unspeakables, interrogated him on how he got there, then took pity on his situation and helped him get settled in the current time.

He’d spent ages with the American DoM trying to figure out how to get him home, but there had been nothing they could do. The only thing he’d really learned was that Time Magic was one of the most complex, confusing, and least understood branches of Magic out there. The only thing he could really do was sit back and wait for them to do their own searching or for time to pass on its own.

Which led to his current situation.

Due to him technically not existing yet, he couldn’t use his real name or accounts or else his presence would interfere with the inheritance magics that would take place before his actual birth. Which meant he had to live under a different name, and not in the magical world. In other words, he would have to etch out a living in the Muggle world until he finally got home. And while that didn’t sound so bad, he was also stuck in an entirely different era and country than he was used to.

He was staying in a magical apartment with a woman who actually worked in the DoM, to give them all easy access to each other and to keep an eye on him (this was different from the order, at least the people from MACUSA told him that they were watching him).

But he needed a way to pay rent (he refused to leech off of someone else’s kindness, even if it was work related), so he had gotten the okay to go into the Muggle world to find a Job. It had involved a lot more paperwork than he’d expected, but he dreaded the idea of just sitting around and doing nothing.

He’d found himself surprisingly enthralled by the American cartooning industry, when he’d taken the time to immerse himself in the pop culture of the Era. It had landed him on the doorstep of an animation studio that was finally branching into voice cartoons. Previously the studio had stuck firm to the use of music and sound effects for their cartoon, but now they wanted to give their character’s voices.

He’d seen a few episodes of their top cartoon, “Bendy the Dancing Demon” (it had caught his eye thanks to the unusual protagonist), and Harry had decided to try his luck and apply for a job.

He’d spent days practicing the audition lines, struggling to make his accent less noticeable as he read them out loud, and now he was sitting in the waiting room of the music department with the other hopefuls looking for work in the studio. He sighed to himself, leaning back in his chair and rereading the script once more.

“Harrison Evans?” green eyes shot up fro his papers to the brown haired man peering in through the door.

“H-here!” He stumble to his feet, hurrying over. The man smiled at him and chuckled.

“No need to be so nervous. I’m sure you’ll do fine.” He led Harry down the halls to the recording booth. Harry had a feeling he was only saying that because of Harry being younger than all the other applicants, but didn’t comment on it. “I’m Henry, one of the animators.”

Harry gave him a nervous smile.

“Nice to meet you, mate.” The man blinked in surprise.

“Where are you from kid? I’m not familiar with your accent.” Harry tucked a chunk of hair behind his ear, suddenly feeling self conscious.

“B-Britain. I’m from Britain.” Henry gave him a sympathetic smile.

“Ah, so you’re new to the country then?” Harry nodded. “Must be hard being so far from home.”

Harry shrugged. Yes, there were things he missed about home, but he was more worried about what had (would?) happened after he’d ended up there. (Were the others okay? Would they be okay? Would he ever see them all again?)

“I’m… Alright, I guess. Just- Trying to focus on the now at the moment. Finding a job and all that.” Henry nodded at that. The older man clapped his shoulder.

“Don’t worry about how you’ll do in the interview. Joey’s a good guy, just give it your best shot and you’ll be fine.” Harry gave a shaky smile.

“Thanks mate. I’ll try.”

A few days later, Harry collapsed into the bed in his apartment. He couldn’t believe it. Not only had he gotten a job as a voice actor, he wasn’t voice background or bit characters.

Even with his slight accent, Mr. Drew had liked how he did enough that he wanted him to voice their star. He was Bendy, the main character! He was going to voice Bendy!

He was still displaced in time, but things were finally starting to look up for him.

#Harry Potter #Harry Potter crossover #hp #hp crossover #Bendy and the Ink Machine #Bendy and the Ink Machine crossover #batim #batim crossover #voice actor Harry #bendy Harry #time travel

4 notes · View notes

ivyprism · 9 months

Text

A Soul Sona and the Original Villainess OC (Info Dump)

Warnings: Mentions car accident, faking till she makes it, etc.

Celadine - The Displaced Protagonist: H

Personality: She is a very quiet and reserved person. Despite this, she is an accomplished actress who understands how to play a role, but she does not want to be here. She likes a lot of things that the villain whose part she adopted doesn't. She strives to accomplish these things whenever she can. She is compassionate and gentle. She adores children and enjoys assisting them whenever possible. She mostly functions as a healer, taking advantage of the villainess's abilities. She gives it her all and does her best. She has a slight fear of transportation since she was in a car accident when she died.

Appearance: She is a human woman with long wavy brown hair. She has green eyes and she wears glasses. She is about 5'1". She has a small scar on the edge of her eye. She has a chubby physique.

Clemensia - The Villainess

Personality: Clemensia was a nasty and aggressive individual who softened when Celadine entered her life. She assists when she can and does her best. She is concerned about Celadine and talks with her through dreams and memories. She has a tough and sarcastic personality and doesn't take crap. She attempts to bolster Celadine's confidence through visions and is an excellent friend. She dislikes how people treat Celadine and attempts to persuade her to protect herself. Celadine is very important to her.

Appearance: She is a human woman with bright purple eyes and long straight white hair. She is about 5'3". She has a petite figure and has a somewhat curvy body.

-------

@didderd @hearty-dose-of-ranch @monomori3 @caycanteven @rainbowut @underfell-crystal

#the displaced protagonist h #the villainess oc #info dump #info #sdiohgiog #so much info #siodhgoigihgx #.hdgio #reincarnation?#soul taking over?#feeling out of place

6 notes · View notes

georgiecarrfilmreview · 5 years

Text

Fate and the State: Sophie Deraspe’s ‘Antigone’

Sophie Deraspe’s film adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone updates the central themes of the original – family, exile, state power and sacrifice – to reflect the struggles of a family of first generation Algerian immigrants in Montreal as they negotiate the many violences of police racism, the criminal justice system and gang culture. In the fifth-century play, Antigone disobeys her uncle’s decree that her brother be left unburied and is sentenced to death as punishment; in Deraspe’s Antigone, Antigone Hipponome (Nahéma Ricci) is desperate to save her brother Polyneices (Rawad El-Zein) from deportation. When she breaks the law to do so she is arrested and her divided loyalty to brother and state are tested in a highly publicised trial. “Don’t tempt fate,” urges Antigone’s grandmother, Ménécée, a warning which contains within it the contradictory forces of agency and predestination. In the tradition of Greek tragedy a great man or woman is brought to ruin by their hamartia, or fatal flaw, but also by fate, a paradoxical downfall that is both self-determined and pre-ordained. For Sophocles, Antigone is the “unlucky daughter / Of an unlucky father”, doomed by heredity, but also by her choice to act as she does: “mad and so defiant”.1 Deraspe’s Antigone explores this tragic double bind while working to maintain its own identity under the weight of the original.

Antigone’s Montreal is a city of distinct zones, either homely or hostile. Public spaces are green and sunny, the Hipponome family flat is inviting, but most of Antigone’s story takes place in the strip-lit, claustrophobic environment of the police cell. This harsh aesthetic is continued in the spaces of the courtroom, morgue, immigration detention centre and airport, and visually connects the different aspects of state bureaucracy to depict the system as a totality. Deraspe gives us a material representation of what is ultimately a material process: the monitoring, arrest and deportation of immigrants. This is important. In ‘Dead Zones of the Imagination’, David Graeber argues that structural violence depends on a “tendency toward abstraction that makes it possible for everyone involved to imagine that the violence upholding the system is somehow not responsible for its violent effects”.2 Here what is usually abstract is made concrete – the violence of the system and its effects are put front and centre. While Sophocles’ Antigone is doomed by fate, Deraspe’s is condemned by the system. Antigone frames its protagonist in tight close-up and short focus. From the first shot of her, wide-eyed in the white glare of the police processing station, the film renders her as symbolic of a wider struggle. This is also explored more obviously in scenes that show her (re)construction by the media as a public figure. A rapid montage of images demonstrate how her police mug shot is edited for different purposes. In one rendering she is reframed with gang symbology, captioned as a “habibi sister” or “radical bitch”; in another scene the outline of her short hair and wide eyes are printed as a stencil, Che Guevara-style. She is repurposed as Algerian, Canadian, guilty, or innocent, depending on the particular slant. Her lack of control over her own destiny is exemplified in the manipulation of her image.

Is Antigone doomed by the state, then, and not herself? Does she have any moral agency? In Sophocles’ Antigone the protagonist places the “unwritten and unchanging” laws of the gods above the transient justice of state law, and buries her brother. Creon’s punishment of Polyneices goes beyond the norm. It is furthermore an assertion of the rule of power rather than the rule of law, motivated by personal revenge. By extension, Deraspe’s Antigone suggests a comparison between Creon’s arbitrary ruling and a modern criminal code in which Algerian immigrants can be punished in more extreme ways than their Canadian counterparts. Antigone’s brothers have committed crimes but they have been singled out for excessive punishment on the basis of their identity. For Antigone, “It is not their crimes I defend. I defend my family”. Only through a focus on an unwritten moral code, rather than a system of laws which are blind or compromised, can this injustice be made clear. The tension between agency and predestination in Deraspe’s Antigone is constructed through the relation of the state to the immigrant, rather than that of the divine to the heroic individual. Alfred R. Ferguson argues that in Sophoclean tragedy “the worst fate was not death … but to be ‘stateless’”.3 Deraspe’s Antigone follows Queens of Syria (2014), a documentary which explored the parallels Syrian refugees drew between their own experiences and those of the characters in Euripedes’ Trojan Women, mourning the homes and family they lost through displacement. Sophocles’ Antigone is similarly preoccupied by this need to belong: for “when [man] honors the laws of the land and the god’s sworn right high indeed is his city; but stateless the man who dares to dwell with dishonor”.4 For those seeking citizenship today the fates of displacement and death cannot be divided so clearly – the probability of the latter is increased by the former. Antigone’s actions to save her brother endanger her own quest for Canadian citizenship. She might ‘tempt fate’, in the words of her grandmother, not just through her own agency but due to her lack of it, her destiny and that of her family circumscribed by their immigrant status. In Sophocles’ play the gods are invisible and can’t be held accountable, forces of fate that in Deraspe’s Antigone are made concrete and literal in the form of the state. But the state isn’t fate, and can be altered and transformed. It is our duty, Deraspe suggests, to push against it.

This review was first published on Another Gaze Feminist Film Journal.

1 Sophocles, Antigone. Translated by H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford University Press: 1962) p.31 2 D. Graeber, Dead zones of the imagination On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2006) pg. 114 3 Ferguson, Alfred R. “Politics and Man’s Fate in Sophocles’ “Antigone”.” The Classical Journal 70, no. 2 (1974) pg. 43 4 Sophocles, Antigone, tr. E. Wyckoff, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. D. Grene and R. Lattimore (Chicago 1959) pg. 354

#tiff19 #tiff #antigone #deraspe

1 note · View note

lucky-fallen-angel · 7 years

Text

“Wonder Woman” Review

Non-Spoiler Review: WATCH IT! Go see it. Enjoy it and love it and know that our Princess has saved us from bad DCEU movies.

And now for my one spoiler-y-ish gripe...with lots of notes because I have a degree in this, I’m gonna use it to analyze something, ok? Ok:

Ares =/= Lucifer, no matter how much you want him to be.

Ares and Lucifer rule over a ton of different aspects and as much as you think they are similar, they aren’t. While we are here: Ares = War in Battle, as in the horrors of War and the bloodlust, murder, etc that comes with it. It’s why Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Panic) follow him around. Athena = War in Thought, as in the planning and execution, the generals deciding on how thing should go and then how to fix it when sh*t hits the fan.

Anyway, main point is that Ares and Lucifer are NOT THE SAME THING.

AT ALL.

EVER.

They both want different things that are expressed in different ways, which is why learning about Ares in the same way Diana did results in General Ludendorff (who was a real person and apparently liked the Sherman idea of TOTAL WAR, so...ok) being the Obvious Baddie is Obvious. When the truth is revealed to Diana and the audience, it raises the tension and shows off a great deal about both Ares and how he’s grown with Humanity and their ability to make War, as well as the turning point Diana must take.

Historically, WWI is the result of a lot of blocks that the Imperial powers built up at their height (right around the American and French Revolutions, as well as the end of the Napoleonic Wars) crashing down so hard that everyone is kinda surprised a small incident in the Sudan didn’t actually start it and not idiot nationalists in Sarajevo. (Seriously, look at this, it was pure dumb luck!) There is a reason that before WWI, it was considered the War to End All Wars. It was messy, horrible, bloody, and overall resulted in the deaths and displacements of so many people it’s SCARY.

When we meet Remus Lucifer Ares, he’s advocating Armistice, meaning this is around 1918, when all the powers are having their collective “well, this isn’t gonna work” moments. The Triple Entente had lost Russia to that whole Communist uprising (Russia also learned that having TWO UPRISINGS during a war does not count as ‘we give up’ when Germany is working on actually cutting through the Eastern Front). The newly-formed Allies (also including Japan and Italy in this war) were starting to get help, in the form of more bodies to throw at gunfire, from the VERY isolationist Americans and the ideological Woodrow Wilson, who thought we should have a League of Nations to not have such things happen again by having other nations tell the rest, politely, to stopit.

Oh, and to screw with the fallen Ottoman Empire and the allied Arabs that had helped with said fall, there was Sykes-Picot.

Basically the Armistice was good for the reason Diana said - it would result in the stop of the war that had been going on for four years, and that everyone involved thought would only last a few weeks (which I think also turned off the Americans, ‘cause we had a war like that and it ended up with similar f*ck ups). However, long-term, this was a TERRIBLE treaty because France and England basically bullied everyone into the treaties, didn’t listen to anyone, and set up for everything to come. I’m not saying they had that insight - the people at the table were the same ones who started the war - but that they had their ‘beliefs’ and the prevailing one for those two were to keep their Empires and even up the ante because this Imperialism thing would Totally Work, Lookit How Well It Works. So do Secret Deals.

So how does this make Ares into Lucifer? We have a) a fallen heavenly/powerful/godlike being who b) went against the will of their father and c) is upset with the last creation (Mankind) and d) believes they’re all bad, meaning they wish to e) destroy them because they’re destroying their father’s creation/nature/the way things were/something here to double for a reason their manpain equates to the last creation, and it f) doesn’t matter how good one or multiple ones are, all are obvious evil just g) look at this underling/person I was manipulating while they did their job and/or thing they loved that happened to hurt people/very evil human being with no redeemable value and h) join me and together we can rule the world/change things/kill them all/rule over them because i) we’re family/I’m your father/rule as father and son or something and also j) search your feelings, you know this is true, which is why I will k)kill your lover/friend/both in front of you and/or invalidate their heroic and noble sacrifice, that always works and will in no way backfire on me.

11 Easy steps, and all of them were handled at varying degrees of bad/ok to result in a ‘meh’ thing for Ares. Or I’m spoiled by the DCAU (Animated Universe) and John Rhys-Davis as Hades and whoever-else it was as their Ares.

Probably that.

The cherry on top of this 11-step mess was that Diana and he have a)the same father and b) she is the only one who can defeat him. Because of course, you can’t have a Lucifer stand-in without having a Jesus Metaphor or some sort of Savior/Messiah figure. Even if it leads to a pretty badass fight in which the rest of our protagonists look at, say ‘Our lane is over there, with the big death-plane of Obvious Love-Interest Martyrdom’ and kept themselves there and didn’t try to take a shot at Ares once, allowing Diana all the chance to take him down herself and prove herself as Badass Awesomeness of Awesome.

She also had her whole Savior of Mankind thing, but she does it in the same vein as Jesus chasing out the moneylenders at the Temple.

That’s how you do your Obvious Jesus Metaphor, Superman. Take note.

If this had been with any other actor (up to when he powered up, sorry Remus) or any other war, there would have possibly been some groaning and overuse of the Lucifer stuff, and while I do groan and it brought me out of Ares’ whole attempt to try to be ‘poor me’ with Diana, I think her actions afterwards, as well as his actions before and what I know of the history of that time, as well as what happens afterwards, makes it a bit more of a little gripe over the glaring trope. I mean, it was tropey and could have easily failed, but for me, even with it, the fake-out, as well as Diana’s realization during that whole battle, was worth it.

#wonder woman #spoilers #wonder woman spoilers #long post under read more #a random history lesson for you!

1 note · View note

mastcomm · 4 years

Text

Things to Do in N.Y.C. This February

Looking for even more reasons to get out of the house? Visit our Arts & Entertainment Guide at nytimes.com/spotlight/arts-listings.

Feb. 1

‘Lunar New Year Festival: Year of the Rat’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This daylong celebration includes a parade, performances and family-friendly art activities. (While in the area, head to Rumsey Playfield in Central Park for the free winter sports festival Winter Jam, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; metmuseum.org.

Feb. 2

BAMkids Film Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A range of international works, from live-action features to animated shorts, should appeal to children of all ages. A carnival rounds out the weekend-long festivities. Feb. 1-2; bam.org.

Feb. 3

‘Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection’ at the Grolier Club. With more than 200 items, the Grolier Club’s latest exhibition documents the history of women making an independent living. Among the works are one of the first books printed by women, a 1478 history of Rome’s emperors and popes, and a copy of Mary Seacole’s 1857 autobiography, the first by a black woman in Britain. Through Feb. 8; grolierclub.org.

Feb. 4

The Moth StorySLAM at Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The writer Dame Wilburn will host this iteration of StorySLAM in which 10 Harlemites will be selected to share their stories on the evening’s theme: “Only in Harlem.” Doors open at 7 p.m.; eventbrite.com.

Feb. 5

Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ at Le Poisson Rouge. The Brooklyn ensemble Darmstadt performs its interpretation of this 1964 landmark composition ahead of the musician and composer’s 85th birthday this summer. At 8 p.m.; lpr.com.

Feb. 6

Art in Dumbo’s First Thursday Gallery Walk in Brooklyn. Galleries will stay open late so visitors can browse the Triangle Arts Winter Open Studios and other galleries on their own, or join an Insider’s Tour, a free guided tour of exhibitions on view at Janet Borden and A.I.R. Gallery. (Then stroll along the East River to take in Antony Gormley’s “New York Clearing,” a monumental public work piece called “drawing in space,” at Pier 3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.) From 6-8 p.m.; artinDUMBO.com.

Feb. 7

‘Cane River’ at BAM Rose Cinemas. Horace Jenkins died shortly after finishing this 1982 romantic melodrama tackling issues of colorism, the legacy of slavery and deceitful practices against African-American landowners. After a negative was found and painstakingly restored, the film is now getting its theatrical release. Feb. 7-20; bam.org.

Feb. 8

Animation First Festival at the French Institute Alliance Française. Award-winning features, immersive exhibits, video game demonstrations and more are the heart of this festival. For those Academy Award-minded fans of animation, the Oscar-nominated feature “I Lost My Body” will be shown on Feb. 8 at 11 a.m., followed by a behind-the-scenes panel discussion with the film’s editor, Benjamin Massoubre. Feb. 7-10; fiaf.org.

Feb. 9

‘Visions of Resistance: Recent Films by Brazilian Women Directors’ at the Museum of the Moving Image. Stories of resilience and uprising are the focus of this series, which pays particular attention to the lives of black Brazilians. Feb. 8 and 9; movingimage.us.

Feb. 10

‘Hamlet’ opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Ruth Negga received rave reviews for her portrayal of Hamlet in Dublin. Now she will reprise the role that she says “cracks you open,” for New York audiences — and it’s a very tough ticket. Feb. 1-March 8; stannswarehouse.org.

Feb. 11

‘The Mother of Us All’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Virgil Thomson’s opera, with a libretto by Gertrude Stein, is rarely performed. All the more reason to see one of the performances of this work this month. Feb. 8, 11, 12 and 14; nyphil.org.

Feb. 12

‘Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures’ opens at the Museum of Modern Art. After its inaugural exhibitions, the newly renovated museum begins its rollout of new shows. Among the first up is Lange’s photographs, which sharply reflect the human condition. It’s the first major MoMA exhibition of Lange’s career in 50 years. Feb. 9-May 9; moma.org.

Feb. 13

Artist Talk and Book Signing: Rachel Feinstein at the Jewish Museum. In her first museum retrospective, the artist and fashion muse Rachel Feinstein presents fanciful works with a core of steel — a balance of the whimsical and the grotesque. On this night she’ll speak about her exhibition, “Maiden, Mother, Crone,” and the inspirations for her art, which underscore that there is no reality without fantasy. From 6:30-8 p.m.; thejewishmuseum.org.

Feb. 14

‘High Fidelity’ premieres on Hulu. The latest adaptation of Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel, Mike Hale wrote, “gender-switches the record-store-owning, Top-5-list-making protagonist, who’s now played by Zoë Kravitz.” She plays a record store owner in the gentrifying Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. hulu.com.

Feb. 15

20th anniversary screening of ‘Love & Basketball’ at BAM Rose Cinemas. Sanaa Lathan, Omar Epps, and teenage hoop dreams: See Gina Prince-Bythewood’s 2000 classic on the big screen as part of the “Long Weekend of Love” series. Make it a Valentine’s double-feature: “The Photograph,” a new Issa Rae-Lakeith Stanfield vehicle reminiscent of 1990s black love stories, arrives in theaters Feb. 14. bam.org.

Feb. 16

Irina Kolesnikova in ‘Swan Lake’ at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Russian prima ballerina and the St. Petersburg Ballet Theater make their United States debut in Tchaikovsky’s beloved classic. Feb. 15 and 16; bam.org.

Feb. 17

‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein’ open at Classic Stage Company. Kate Hamill reimagines Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and Tristan Bernays adapts Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” for this repertory cycle of two Gothic tales. In repertory through March 8; classicstage.org.

Feb. 18

Toni Morrison’s ‘The Source of Self-Regard’ at 92nd Street Y. André Holland and Phylicia Rashad perform a dramatic reading of the writer’s 2019 nonfiction collection, consisting of works written over four decades that still resonate socially and politically. Morrison would have turned 89 on Feb. 18. At 8 p.m.; 92y.org/event/toni-morrison.

Feb. 19

‘Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks’ at the Brooklyn Museum. For this exhibition, the artist, who is of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, has selected items from the museum’s collection to be presented alongside his recent work. The result: a rethinking of institutional categorizations and representations of Indigenous peoples and Native American art. (Also on view: “Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas,” an exploration of the effects of climate change on Indigenous communities. It includes more than 60 works spanning 2,800 years and cultures across North, Central, and South America.) Both shows opens Feb. 14; brooklynmuseum.org.

Feb. 20

‘West Side Story’ opens on Broadway. New moves and plenty of tattoos: Ivo van Hove’s approach to this beloved musical is finally here. Jerome Robbins’s choreography has been replaced by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s; “I Feel Pretty” is gone; and this production has an intermission-free running time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. Open run; westsidestorybway.com.

Feb. 21

‘It’s All in Me: Black Heroines’ at the Museum of Modern Art. On the heels of Film Forum’s four-week “Black Women” festival, MoMA presents this intriguing series with works both familiar and obscure, including “The Watermelon Woman,” “Support the Girls,” “Sambizanga” and “Lime Kiln Club Field Day.” Feb. 20-March 5; moma.org.

Feb. 22

‘Platform 2020: Utterances From the Chorus’ at Danspace Project. “If contemporary dance holds a certain allure yet still seems intimidating,” Gia Kourlas wrote recently, this series “is a way in.” Ideas about performance and protest will be explored by its organizers, Okwui Okpokwasili, a MacArthur recipient, and Judy Hussie-Taylor, Danspace’s executive director and chief curator. Feb. 22-March 21; danspaceproject.org.

Feb. 23

‘Countryside, The Future’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The museum turns over its rotunda to Rem Koolhaas’s long-awaited exhibition. In addressing environmental, political and socioeconomic issues, it will examine changes to what Koolhaas calls the “countryside” — that is, rural areas not occupied by cities. Feb. 20-Aug. 14; guggenheim.org.

Feb. 24

‘Cambodian Rock Band’ opens at Signature Theater. Lauren Yee’s music-infused work, featuring songs by Dengue Fever, follows a Cambodian-American woman trying to prosecute a Khmer Rouge prison warden. Previews begin Feb. 4; signaturetheatre.org.

Feb. 25

‘Dana H.’ opens at the Vineyard Theater. Lucas Hnath’s latest is personal: It’s the story of how his mother came to be held captive by an ex-convict who kept her trapped in a series of Florida motels, disoriented and terrified — for five months. Previews start Feb. 11; vineyardtheatre.org.

Feb. 26

‘José Parlá: It’s Yours’ at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. For his first solo museum exhibition in New York City, Parlá presents new paintings that explore his connection to the Bronx. Expect works that “address the suffering caused by redlining policies, the waves of displacement imposed by gentrification, and structural racism,” according to the exhibition news release. Feb. 26-Aug. 16; bronxmuseum.org.

Feb. 27

‘Pioneering African-American Ballerinas’ at the Museum at FIT. This event focuses on some of the ballerinas who paved the way for Misty Copeland, who, in 2015, became the first African-American woman to be named a principal at American Ballet Theater. The panelists include Virginia Johnson, now the director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem; Lydia Abarca, first prima ballerina of the Dance Theater of Harlem; Debra Austin, the first African-American female dancer at New York City Ballet; and Aesha Ash, former ballerina with City Ballet. At 7 p.m.; fitnyc.edu/museum.

Feb. 28

‘Intimate Apparel’ previews begin at Lincoln Center Theater. Lynn Nottage’s 2003 play has been adapted into a chamber opera, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon. Nottage wrote the libretto and Bartlett Sher is directing. Set in 1905 New York, the story follows an African-American seamstress who through letter writing courts a laborer working on the Panama Canal. Previews begin Feb. 27; opening night is set for March 23; lct.org.

Feb. 29

‘Brendan Fernandes: Contract and Release’ at the Noguchi Museum. A collaboration with the dance and visual artist Brendan Fernandes is the focus of Saturday programming at the museum this month. Dancers engage with Isamu Noguchi’s works as well as with Fernandes’s “training devices.” Saturdays through February; noguchi.org.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/entertainment/things-to-do-in-n-y-c-this-february-2/

#Entertainment

0 notes

thesnhuup · 4 years

Text

Pop Picks – February 3, 2020

What I’m listening to:

Spending 21 hours on airplanes (Singapore to Tokyo to Boston) provides lots of time for listening and in an airport shop I picked up a Rolling Stones magazine that listed the top ten albums of the last ten years. I’ve been systematically working through them, starting with Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I just don’t know enough about hip hop and rap to offer any intelligent analysis of the music, and I have always thought of Kanye as kind of crazy (that may still be true), but the music is layered and extravagant and genre-bending. The lyrics seem fascinating and self-reflective, especially around fame and excess and Kanye’s specialty, self-promoting aggrandizement. Too many people I know remain stuck in the music of their youth and while I love those songs too, it feels important to listen to today’s music and what it has to tell us about life and lives far different than our own. And in a case like Twisted Fantasy, it’s just great music and that’s its own justification.

What I’m reading:

I went back to an old favorite, Richard Russo’s Straight Man. If you work in academia, this is a must-read and while written 22 years ago, it still rings true and current. The “hero” of the novel is William Henry Devereaux Jr., the chair of the English Department in a second-tier public university in small-town Pennsylvania. The book is laugh aloud funny (the opening chapter and story about old Red puts me in hysterics every time I read it) and like the best comedy, it taps into the complexity and pains of life in very substantial ways. Devereaux is insufferable in most ways and yet we root for him, mostly because A) he is so damn funny and B) is self-deprecating. But there is also a big heartedness in Russo’s writing and a recognition that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, and life’s essential dramas play out fully in the most modest of places and for the most ordinary of people.

What I’m watching:

I can’t pretend to have an abiding interest in cheerleading, but I devoured the six-episode Netflix series Cheer, about the cheerleading squad at Navarro College, a small two-year college in rural Texas that is a cheerleading powerhouse, winning the National Championship 14 times under the direction of Coach Monica Aldama, the Bill Belichick of cheering. I have a new respect and admiration for the athleticism and demands of cheering (and wonder about the cavalier handling of injuries), but the series is about so much more. It’s about team, about love, about grit and perseverance, bravery, trust, about kids and growing up and loss, and…well, it’s about almost everything and it will make you laugh and cry and exult. It is just terrific.

Archive

January 2, 2020

What I’m listening to:

I was never really an Amy Winehouse fan and I don’t listen to much jazz or blue-eyed soul. Recently, eight years after she died at only 27, I heard her single Tears Dry On Their Own and I was hooked (the song was on someone’s “ten things I’d want on a deserted island” list). Since then, I’ve been playing her almost every day. I started the documentary about her, Amy, and stopped. I didn’t much like her. Or, more accurately, I didn’t much like the signals of her own eventual destruction that were evident early on. I think it was D. H. Lawrence that once said “Trust the art, not the artist.” Sometimes it is better not to know too much and just relish the sheer artistry of the work. Winehouse’s Back to Black, which was named one of the best albums of 2007, is as fresh and painful and amazing 13 years later.

What I’m reading:

Alan Bennett’s lovely novella An Uncommon Reader is a what-if tale, wondering what it would mean if Queen Elizabeth II suddenly became a reader. Because of a lucked upon book mobile on palace grounds, she becomes just that, much to the consternation of her staff and with all kinds of delicious consequences, including curiosity, imagination, self-awareness, and growing disregard for pomp. With an ill-framed suggestion, reading becomes writing and provides a surprise ending. For all of us who love books, this is a finely wrought and delightful love poem to the power of books for readers and writers alike. Imagine if all our leaders were readers (sigh).

What I’m watching:

I’m a huge fan of many things – The National, Boston sports teams, BMW motorcycles, Pho – but there is a stage of life, typically adolescence, when fandom changes the universe, provides a lens to finally understand the world and, more importantly, yourself, in profound ways. My wife Pat would say Joni Mitchell did that for her. Gurinder Chadha’s wonderful film Blinded By The Light captures the power of discovery when Javed, the son of struggling Pakistani immigrants in a dead end place during a dead end time (the Thatcher period, from which Britain has never recovered: see Brexit), hears Springsteen and is forever changed. The movie, sometimes musical, sometimes comedy, and often bubbling with energy, has more heft than it might seem at first. There is pain in a father struggling to retain his dignity while he fails to provide, the father and son tension in so many immigrant families (I lived some of that), and what it means to be an outsider in the only culture you actually have ever known.

November 25, 2019

My pop picks are usually a combination of three things: what I am listening to, reading, and watching. But last week I happily combined all three. That is, I went to NYC last week and saw two shows. The first was Cyrano, starring Game of Thrones superstar Peter Dinklage in the title role, with Jasmine Cephas Jones as Roxanne. She was Peggy in the original Hamilton cast and has an amazing voice. The music was written by Aaron and Bryce Dessner, two members of my favorite band, The National, with lyrics by lead singer Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s wife, directs. Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play is light, dated, and melodramatic, but this production was delightful. Dinklage owns the stage, a master, and his deep bass voice, not all that great for singing, but commanding in the delivery of every line, was somehow a plaintive and resonant counterpoint to Cephas Jones’ soaring voice. In the original Cyrano, the title character’s large nose marks him as outsider and ”other,” but Dinklage was born with achondroplasia, the cause of his dwarfism, and there is a kind of resonance in his performance that feels like pain not acted, but known. Deeply. It takes this rather lightweight play and gives it depth. Even if it didn’t, not everything has to be deep and profound – there is joy in seeing something executed so darn well. Cyrano was delightfully satisfying.

The other show was the much lauded Aaron Sorkin rendition of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring another actor at the very top of his game, Ed Harris. This is a Mockingbird for our times, one in which iconic Atticus Finch’s idealistic “you have to live in someone else’s skin” feels naive in the face of hateful racism and anti-Semitism. The Black characters in the play get more voice, if not agency, in the stage play than they do in the book, especially housekeeper Calpurnia, who voices incredulity at Finch’s faith in his neighbors and reminds us that he does not pay the price of his patience. She does. And Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape – “convicted at the moment he was accused,” Whatever West Wing was for Sorkin – and I dearly loved that show – this is a play for a broken United States, where racism abounds and does so with sanction by those in power. As our daughter said, “I think Trump broke Aaron Sorkin.” It was as powerful a thing I’ve seen on stage in years.

With both plays, I was reminded of the magic that is live theater.

October 31, 2019

What I’m listening to:

It drove his critics crazy that Obama was the coolest president we ever had and his summer 2019 playlist on Spotify simply confirms that reality. It has been on repeat for me. From Drake to Lizzo (God I love her) to Steely Dan to Raphael Saadiq to Sinatra (who I skip every time – I’m not buying the nostalgia), his carefully curated list reflects not only his infinite coolness, but the breadth of his interests and generosity of taste. I love the music, but I love even more the image of Michelle and him rocking out somewhere far from Washington’s madness, as much as I miss them both.

What I’m reading:

I struggled with Christy Lefteri’s The Beekeeper of Aleppo for the first 50 pages, worried that she’d drag out every tired trope of Mid-Eastern society, but I fell for her main characters and their journey as refugees from Syria to England. Parts of this book were hard to read and very dark, because that is the plight of so many refugees and she doesn’t shy away from those realities and the enormous toll they take on displaced people. It’s a hard read, but there is light too – in resilience, in love, in friendships, the small tender gestures of people tossed together in a heartless world. Lefteri volunteered in Greek refugee programs, spent a lot of interviewing people, and the book feels true, and importantly, heartfelt.

What I’m watching:

Soap opera meets Shakespeare, deliciously malevolent and operatic, Succession has been our favorite series this season. Loosely based on the Murdochs and their media empire (don’t believe the denials), this was our must watch television on Sunday nights, filling the void left by Game of Thrones. The acting is over-the-top good, the frequent comedy dark, the writing brilliant, and the music superb. We found ourselves quoting lines after every episode. Like the hilarious; “You don’t hear much about syphilis these days. Very much the Myspace of STDs.” Watch it so we can talk about that season 2 finale.

August 30, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but the New York Times new 1619 podcast is just terrific, as is the whole project, which observes the sale of the first enslaved human beings on our shores 400 years ago. The first episode, “The Fight for a True Democracy” is a remarkable overview (in a mere 44 minutes) of the centrality of racism and slavery in the American story over those 400 years. It should be mandatory listening in every high school in the country. I’m eager for the next episodes. Side note: I am addicted to The Daily podcast, which gives more color and detail to the NY Times stories I read in print (yes, print), and reminds me of how smart and thoughtful are those journalists who give us real news. We need them now more than ever.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead has done it again. The Nickel Boys, his new novel, is a worthy successor to his masterpiece The Underground Railroad, and because it is closer to our time, based on the real-life horrors of a Florida reform school, and written a time of resurgent White Supremacy, it hits even harder and with more urgency than its predecessor. Maybe because we can read Underground Railroad with a sense of “that was history,” but one can’t read Nickel Boys without the lurking feeling that such horrors persist today and the monsters that perpetrate such horrors walk among us. They often hold press conferences.

What I’m watching:

Queer Eye, the Netflix remake of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy some ten years later, is wondrously entertaining, but it also feels adroitly aligned with our dysfunctional times. Episode three has a conversation with Karamo Brown, one of the fab five, and a Georgia small town cop (and Trump supporter) that feels unscripted and unexpected and reminds us of how little actual conversation seems to be taking place in our divided country. Oh, for more car rides such as the one they take in that moment, when a chasm is bridged, if only for a few minutes. Set in the South, it is often a refreshing and affirming response to what it means to be male at a time of toxic masculinity and the overdue catharsis and pain of the #MeToo movement. Did I mention? It’s really fun.

July 1, 2019

What I’m listening to:

The National remains my favorite band and probably 50% of my listening time is a National album or playlist. Their new album I Am Easy To Find feels like a turning point record for the band, going from the moody, outsider introspection and doubt of lead singer Matt Berninger to something that feels more adult, sophisticated, and wiser. I might have titled it Women Help The Band Grow Up. Matt is no longer the center of The National’s universe and he frequently cedes the mic to the many women who accompany and often lead on the long, their longest, album. They include Gail Ann Dorsey (who sang with Bowie for a long time), who is amazing, and a number of the songs were written by Carin Besser, Berninger’s wife. I especially love the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the arrangements, and the sheer complexity and coherence of the work. It still amazes me when I meet someone who does not know The National. My heart breaks for them just a little.

What I’m reading:

Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of Homer’s Iliad through the lens of a captive Trojan queen, Briseis. As a reviewer in The Atlantic writes, it answers the question “What does war mean to women?” We know the answer and it has always been true, whether it is the casual and assumed rape of captive women in this ancient war story or the use of rape in modern day Congo, Syria, or any other conflict zone. Yet literature almost never gives voice to the women – almost always minor characters at best — and their unspeakable suffering. Barker does it here for Briseis, for Hector’s wife Andromache, and for the other women who understand that the death of their men is tragedy, but what they then endure is worse. Think of it ancient literature having its own #MeToo moment. The NY Times’ Geraldine Brooks did not much like the novel. I did. Very much.

What I’m watching:

The BBC-HBO limited series Years and Years is breathtaking, scary, and absolutely familiar. It’s as if Black Mirrorand Children of Men had a baby and it precisely captures the zeitgeist, the current sense that the world is spinning out of control and things are coming at us too fast. It is a near future (Trump has been re-elected and Brexit has occurred finally)…not dystopia exactly, but damn close. The closing scene of last week’s first episode (there are 6 episodes and it’s on every Monday) shows nuclear war breaking out between China and the U.S. Yikes! The scope of this show is wide and there is a big, baggy feel to it – but I love the ambition even if I’m not looking forward to the nightmares.

May 19, 2019

What I’m listening to:

I usually go to music here, but I was really moved by this podcast of a Davis Brooks talk at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/david-brooks-quest-moral-life. While I have long found myself distant from his political stance, he has come through a dark night of the soul and emerged with a wonderful clarity about calling, community, and not happiness (that most superficial of goals), but fulfillment and meaning, found in community and human kinship of many kinds. I immediately sent it to my kids.

What I’m reading:

Susan Orlean’s wonderful The Library Book, a love song to libraries told through the story of the LA Central Library. It brought back cherished memories of my many hours in beloved libraries — as a kid in the Waltham Public Library, a high schooler in the Farber Library at Brandeis (Lil Farber years later became a mentor of mine), and the cathedral-like Bapst Library at BC when I was a graduate student. Yes, I was a nerd. This is a love song to books certainly, but a reminder that libraries are so, so much more. It is a reminder that libraries are less about a place or being a repository of information and, like America at its best, an idea and ideal. By the way, oh to write like her.

What I’m watching:

What else? Game of Thrones, like any sensible human being. This last season is disappointing in many ways and the drop off in the writing post George R.R. Martin is as clear as was the drop off in the post-Sorkin West Wing. I would be willing to bet that if Martin has been writing the last season, Sansa and Tyrion would have committed suicide in the crypt. That said, we fans are deeply invested and even the flaws are giving us so much to discuss and debate. In that sense, the real gift of this last season is the enjoyment between episodes, like the old pre-streaming days when we all arrived at work after the latest episode of the Sopranos to discuss what we had all seen the night before. I will say this, the last two episodes — full of battle and gore – have been visually stunning. Whether the torches of the Dothraki being extinguished in the distance or Arya riding through rubble and flame on a white horse, rarely has the series ascended to such visual grandeur.

March 28, 2019

What I’m listening to:

There is a lovely piece played in a scene from A Place Called Home that I tracked down. It’s Erik Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies: Gymnopédie No. 1, played by the wonderful pianist Klára Körmendi. Satie composed this piece in 1888 and it was considered avant-garde and anti-Romantic. It’s minimalism and bit of dissonance sound fresh and contemporary to my ears and while not a huge Classical music fan, I’ve fallen in love with the Körmendi playlist on Spotify. When you need an alternative to hours of Cardi B.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Esi Edugyan’s 2018 novel Washington Black. Starting on a slave plantation in Barbados, it is a picaresque novel that has elements of Jules Verne, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad. Yes, it strains credulity and there are moments of “huh?”, but I loved it (disclosure: I was in the minority among my fellow book club members) and the first third is a searing depiction of slavery. It’s audacious, sprawling (from Barbados to the Arctic to London to Africa), and the writing, especially about nature, luminous.

What I’m watching:

A soap opera. Yes, I’d like to pretend it’s something else, but we are 31 episodes into the Australian drama A Place Called Home and we are so, so addicted. Like “It’s AM, but can’t we watch just one more episode?” addicted. Despite all the secrets, cliff hangers, intrigue, and “did that just happen?” moments, the core ingredients of any good soap opera, APCH has superb acting, real heft in terms of subject matter (including homophobia, anti-Semitism, sexual assault, and class), touches of our beloved Downton Abbey, and great cars. Beware. If you start, you won’t stop.

February 11, 2019

What I’m listening to:

Raphael Saadiq has been around for quite a while, as a musician, writer, and producer. He’s new to me and I love his old school R&B sound. Like Leon Bridges, he brings a contemporary freshness to the genre, sounding like a young Stevie Wonder (listen to “You’re The One That I Like”). Rock and Roll may be largely dead, but R&B persists – maybe because the former was derivative of the latter and never as good (and I say that as a Rock and Roll fan). I’m embarrassed to only have discovered Saadiq so late in his career, but it’s a delight to have done so.

What I’m reading:

Just finished Marilynne Robinson’s Home, part of her trilogy that includes the Pulitzer Prize winning first novel, Gilead, and the book after Home, Lila. Robinson is often described as a Christian writer, but not in a conventional sense. In this case, she gives us a modern version of the prodigal son and tells the story of what comes after he is welcomed back home. It’s not pretty. Robinson is a self-described Calvinist, thus character begets fate in Robinson’s world view and redemption is at best a question. There is something of Faulkner in her work (I am much taken with his famous “The past is never past” quote after a week in the deep South), her style is masterful, and like Faulkner, she builds with these three novels a whole universe in the small town of Gilead. Start with Gilead to better enjoy Home.

What I’m watching:

Sex Education was the most fun series we’ve seen in ages and we binged watched it on Netflix. A British homage to John Hughes films like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink, it feels like a mash up of American and British high schools. Focusing on the relationship of Maeve, the smart bad girl, and Otis, the virginal and awkward son of a sex therapist (played with brilliance by Gillian Anderson), it is laugh aloud funny and also evolves into more substance and depth (the abortion episode is genius). The sex scenes are somehow raunchy and charming and inoffensive at the same time and while ostensibly about teenagers (it feels like it is explaining contemporary teens to adults in many ways), the adults are compelling in their good and bad ways. It has been renewed for a second season, which is a gift.

January 3, 2019

What I’m listening to:

My listening choices usually refer to music, but this time I’m going with Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast on genius and the song Hallelujah. It tells the story of Leonard Cohen’s much-covered song Hallelujah and uses it as a lens on kinds of genius and creativity. Along the way, he brings in Picasso and Cézanne, Elvis Costello, and more. Gladwell is a good storyteller and if you love pop music, as I do, and Hallelujah, as I do (and you should), you’ll enjoy this podcast. We tend to celebrate the genius who seems inspired in the moment, creating new work like lightning strikes, but this podcast has me appreciating incremental creativity in a new way. It’s compelling and fun at the same time.

What I’m reading:

Just read Clay Christensen’s new book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty. This was an advance copy, so soon available. Clay is an old friend and a huge influence on how we have grown SNHU and our approach to innovation. This book is so compelling, because we know attempts at development have so often been a failure and it is often puzzling to understand why some countries with desperate poverty and huge challenges somehow come to thrive (think S. Korea, Singapore, 19th C. America), while others languish. Clay offers a fresh way of thinking about development through the lens of his research on innovation and it is compelling. I bet this book gets a lot of attention, as most of his work does. I also suspect that many in the development community will hate it, as it calls into question the approach and enormous investments we have made in an attempt to lift countries out of poverty. A provocative read and, as always, Clay is a good storyteller.

What I’m watching:

Just watched Leave No Trace and should have guessed that it was directed by Debra Granik. She did Winter’s Bone, the extraordinary movie that launched Jennifer Lawrence’s career. Similarly, this movie features an amazing young actor, Thomasin McKenzie, and visits lives lived on the margins. In this case, a veteran suffering PTSD, and his 13-year-old daughter. The movie is patient, is visually lush, and justly earned 100% on Rotten Tomatoes (I have a rule to never watch anything under 82%). Everything in this film is under control and beautifully understated (aside from the visuals) – confident acting, confident directing, and so humane. I love the lack of flashbacks, the lack of sensationalism – the movie trusts the viewer, rare in this age of bombast. A lovely film.

December 4, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spending a week in New Zealand, we had endless laughs listening to the Kiwi band, Flight of the Conchords. Lots of comedic bands are funny, but the music is only okay or worse. These guys are funny – hysterical really – and the music is great. They have an uncanny ability to parody almost any style. In both New Zealand and Australia, we found a wry sense of humor that was just delightful and no better captured than with this duo. You don’t have to be in New Zealand to enjoy them.

What I’m reading:

I don’t often reread. For two reasons: A) I have so many books on my “still to be read” pile that it seems daunting to also rereadbooks I loved before, and B) it’s because I loved them once that I’m a little afraid to read them again. That said, I was recently asked to list my favorite book of all time and I answered Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. But I don’t really know if that’s still true (and it’s an impossible question anyway – favorite book? On what day? In what mood?), so I’m rereading it and it feels like being with an old friend. It has one of my very favorite scenes ever: the card game between Levin and Kitty that leads to the proposal and his joyous walking the streets all night.

What I’m watching:

Blindspotting is billed as a buddy-comedy. Wow does that undersell it and the drama is often gripping. I loved Daveed Diggs in Hamilton, didn’t like his character in Black-ish, and think he is transcendent in this film he co-wrote with Rafael Casal, his co-star. The film is a love song to Oakland in many ways, but also a gut-wrenching indictment of police brutality, systemic racism and bias, and gentrification. The film has the freshness and raw visceral impact of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. A great soundtrack, genre mixing, and energy make it one of my favorite movies of 2018.

October 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We had the opportunity to see our favorite band, The National, live in Dallas two weeks ago. Just after watching Mistaken for Strangers, the documentary sort of about the band. So we’ve spent a lot of time going back into their earlier work, listening to songs we don’t know well, and reaffirming that their musicality, smarts, and sound are both original and astoundingly good. They did not disappoint in concert and it is a good thing their tour ended, as we might just spend all of our time and money following them around. Matt Berninger is a genius and his lead vocals kill me (and because they are in my range, I can actually sing along!). Their arrangements are profoundly good and go right to whatever brain/heart wiring that pulls one in and doesn’t let them go.

What I’m reading:

Who is Richard Powers and why have I only discovered him now, with his 12th book? Overstory is profoundly good, a book that is essential and powerful and makes me look at my everyday world in new ways. In short, a dizzying example of how powerful can be narrative in the hands of a master storyteller. I hesitate to say it’s the best environmental novel I’ve ever read (it is), because that would put this book in a category. It is surely about the natural world, but it is as much about we humans. It’s monumental and elegiac and wondrous at all once. Cancel your day’s schedule and read it now. Then plant a tree. A lot of them.

What I’m watching:

Bo Burnham wrote and directed Eighth Grade and Elsie Fisher is nothing less than amazing as its star (what’s with these new child actors; see Florida Project). It’s funny and painful and touching. It’s also the single best film treatment that I have seen of what it means to grow up in a social media shaped world. It’s a reminder that growing up is hard. Maybe harder now in a world of relentless, layered digital pressure to curate perfect lives that are far removed from the natural messy worlds and selves we actually inhabit. It’s a well-deserved 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and I wonder who dinged it for the missing 2%.

September 7, 2018

What I’m listening to:

With a cover pointing back to the Beastie Boys’ 1986 Licensed to Ill, Eminem’s quietly released Kamikaze is not my usual taste, but I’ve always admired him for his “all out there” willingness to be personal, to call people out, and his sheer genius with language. I thought Daveed Diggs could rap fast, but Eminem is supersonic at moments, and still finds room for melody. Love that he includes Joyner Lucas, whose “I’m Not Racist” gets added to the growing list of simply amazing music videos commenting on race in America. There are endless reasons why I am the least likely Eminem fan, but when no one is around to make fun of me, I’ll put it on again.

What I’m reading:

Lesley Blume’s Everyone Behaves Badly, which is the story behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and his time in 1920s Paris (oh, what a time – see Midnight in Paris if you haven’t already). Of course, Blume disabuses my romantic ideas of that time and place and everyone is sort of (or profoundly so) a jerk, especially…no spoiler here…Hemingway. That said, it is a compelling read and coming off the Henry James inspired prose of Mrs. Osmond, it made me appreciate more how groundbreaking was Hemingway’s modern prose style. Like his contemporary Picasso, he reinvented the art and it can be easy to forget, these decades later, how profound was the change and its impact. And it has bullfights.

What I’m watching:

Chloé Zhao’s The Rider is just exceptional. It’s filmed on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which provides a stunning landscape, and it feels like a classic western reinvented for our times. The main characters are played by the real-life people who inspired this narrative (but feels like a documentary) film. Brady Jandreau, playing himself really, owns the screen. It’s about manhood, honor codes, loss, and resilience – rendered in sensitive, nuanced, and heartfelt ways. It feels like it could be about large swaths of America today. Really powerful.

August 16, 2018

What I’m listening to:

In my Spotify Daily Mix was Percy Sledge’s When A Man Loves A Woman, one of the world’s greatest love songs. Go online and read the story of how the song was discovered and recorded. There are competing accounts, but Sledge said he improvised it after a bad breakup. It has that kind of aching spontaneity. It is another hit from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, one of the GREAT music hotbeds, along with Detroit, Nashville, and Memphis. Our February Board meeting is in Alabama and I may finally have to do the pilgrimage road trip to Muscle Shoals and then Memphis, dropping in for Sunday services at the church where Rev. Al Green still preaches and sings. If the music is all like this, I will be saved.

What I’m reading:

John Banville’s Mrs. Osmond, his homage to literary idol Henry James and an imagined sequel to James’ 1881 masterpiece Portrait of a Lady. Go online and read the first paragraph of Chapter 25. He is…profoundly good. Makes me want to never write again, since anything I attempt will feel like some other, lowly activity in comparison to his mastery of language, image, syntax. This is slow reading, every sentence to be savored.

What I’m watching:

I’ve always respected Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but we just watched the documentary RGB. It is over-the-top great and she is now one of my heroes. A superwoman in many ways and the documentary is really well done. There are lots of scenes of her speaking to crowds and the way young women, especially law students, look at her is touching. And you can’t help but fall in love with her now late husband Marty. See this movie and be reminded of how important is the Law.

July 23, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Spotify’s Summer Acoustic playlist has been on repeat quite a lot. What a fun way to listen to artists new to me, including The Paper Kites, Hollow Coves, and Fleet Foxes, as well as old favorites like Leon Bridges and Jose Gonzalez. Pretty chill when dialing back to a summer pace, dining on the screen porch or reading a book.

What I’m reading:

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson tells of the racial injustice (and the war on the poor our judicial system perpetuates as well) that he discovered as a young graduate from Harvard Law School and his fight to address it. It is in turn heartbreaking, enraging, and inspiring. It is also about mercy and empathy and justice that reads like a novel. Brilliant.

What I’m watching:

Fauda. We watched season one of this Israeli thriller. It was much discussed in Israel because while it focuses on an ex-special agent who comes out of retirement to track down a Palestinian terrorist, it was willing to reveal the complexity, richness, and emotions of Palestinian lives. And the occasional brutality of the Israelis. Pretty controversial stuff in Israel. Lior Raz plays Doron, the main character, and is compelling and tough and often hard to like. He’s a mess. As is the world in which he has to operate. We really liked it, and also felt guilty because while it may have been brave in its treatment of Palestinians within the Israeli context, it falls back into some tired tropes and ultimately falls short on this front.

June 11, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Like everyone else, I’m listening to Pusha T drop the mic on Drake. Okay, not really, but do I get some points for even knowing that? We all walk around with songs that immediately bring us back to a time or a place. Songs are time machines. We are coming up on Father’s Day. My own dad passed away on Father’s Day back in 1994 and I remembering dutifully getting through the wake and funeral and being strong throughout. Then, sitting alone in our kitchen, Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence came on and I lost it. When you lose a parent for the first time (most of us have two after all) we lose our innocence and in that passage, we suddenly feel adult in a new way (no matter how old we are), a longing for our own childhood, and a need to forgive and be forgiven. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll understand. As Wordsworth reminds us in In Memoriam, there are seasons to our grief and, all these years later, this song no longer hits me in the gut, but does transport me back with loving memories of my father. I’ll play it Father’s Day.

What I’m reading:

The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin. I am not a reader of fantasy or sci-fi, though I understand they can be powerful vehicles for addressing the very real challenges of the world in which we actually live. I’m not sure I know of a more vivid and gripping illustration of that fact than N. K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award winning novel The Fifth Season, first in her Broken Earth trilogy. It is astounding. It is the fantasy parallel to The Underground Railroad, my favorite recent read, a depiction of subjugation, power, casual violence, and a broken world in which our hero(s) struggle, suffer mightily, and still, somehow, give us hope. It is a tour de force book. How can someone be this good a writer? The first 30 pages pained me (always with this genre, one must learn a new, constructed world, and all of its operating physics and systems of order), and then I could not put it down. I panicked as I neared the end, not wanting to finish the book, and quickly ordered the Obelisk Gate, the second novel in the trilogy, and I can tell you now that I’ll be spending some goodly portion of my weekend in Jemisin’s other world.

What I’m watching:

The NBA Finals and perhaps the best basketball player of this generation. I’ve come to deeply respect LeBron James as a person, a force for social good, and now as an extraordinary player at the peak of his powers. His superhuman play during the NBA playoffs now ranks with the all-time greats, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, MJ, Kobe, and the demi-god that was Bill Russell. That his Cavs lost in a 4-game sweep is no surprise. It was a mediocre team being carried on the wide shoulders of James (and matched against one of the greatest teams ever, the Warriors, and the Harry Potter of basketball, Steph Curry) and, in some strange way, his greatness is amplified by the contrast with the rest of his team. It was a great run.

May 24, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I’ve always liked Alicia Keys and admired her social activism, but I am hooked on her last album Here. This feels like an album finally commensurate with her anger, activism, hope, and grit. More R&B and Hip Hop than is typical for her, I think this album moves into an echelon inhabited by a Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or Beyonce’s Formation. Social activism and outrage rarely make great novels, but they often fuel great popular music. Here is a terrific example.

What I’m reading:

Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad may be close to a flawless novel. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer, it chronicles the lives of two runaway slaves, Cora and Caeser, as they try to escape the hell of plantation life in Georgia. It is an often searing novel and Cora is one of the great heroes of American literature. I would make this mandatory reading in every high school in America, especially in light of the absurd revisionist narratives of “happy and well cared for” slaves. This is a genuinely great novel, one of the best I’ve read, the magical realism and conflating of time periods lifts it to another realm of social commentary, relevance, and a blazing indictment of America’s Original Sin, for which we remain unabsolved.

What I’m watching:

I thought I knew about The Pentagon Papers, but The Post, a real-life political thriller from Steven Spielberg taught me a lot, features some of our greatest actors, and is so timely given the assault on our democratic institutions and with a presidency out of control. It is a reminder that a free and fearless press is a powerful part of our democracy, always among the first targets of despots everywhere. The story revolves around the legendary Post owner and D.C. doyenne, Katharine Graham. I had the opportunity to see her son, Don Graham, right after he saw the film, and he raved about Meryl Streep’s portrayal of his mother. Liked it a lot more than I expected.

April 27, 2018

What I’m listening to:

I mentioned John Prine in a recent post and then on the heels of that mention, he has released a new album, The Tree of Forgiveness, his first new album in ten years. Prine is beloved by other singer songwriters and often praised by the inscrutable God that is Bob Dylan. Indeed, Prine was frequently said to be the “next Bob Dylan” in the early part of his career, though he instead carved out his own respectable career and voice, if never with the dizzying success of Dylan. The new album reflects a man in his 70s, a cancer survivor, who reflects on life and its end, but with the good humor and empathy that are hallmarks of Prine’s music. “When I Get To Heaven” is a rollicking, fun vision of what comes next and a pure delight. A charming, warm, and often terrific album.

What I’m reading:

I recently read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, on many people’s Top Ten lists for last year and for good reason. It is sprawling, multi-generational, and based in the world of Japanese occupied Korea and then in the Korean immigrant’s world of Oaska, so our key characters become “tweeners,” accepted in neither world. It’s often unspeakably sad, and yet there is resiliency and love. There is also intimacy, despite the time and geographic span of the novel. It’s breathtakingly good and like all good novels, transporting.

What I’m watching:

I adore Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, Pan’s Labyrinth, and while I’m not sure his Shape of Water is better, it is a worthy follow up to the earlier masterpiece (and more of a commercial success). Lots of critics dislike the film, but I’m okay with a simple retelling of a Beauty and the Beast love story, as predictable as it might be. The acting is terrific, it is visually stunning, and there are layers of pain as well as social and political commentary (the setting is the US during the Cold War) and, no real spoiler here, the real monsters are humans, the military officer who sees over the captured aquatic creature. It is hauntingly beautiful and its depiction of hatred to those who are different or “other” is painfully resonant with the time in which we live. Put this on your “must see” list.

March 18, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Sitting on a plane for hours (and many more to go; geez, Australia is far away) is a great opportunity to listen to new music and to revisit old favorites. This time, it is Lucy Dacus and her album Historians, the new sophomore release from a 22-year old indie artist that writes with relatable, real-life lyrics. Just on a second listen and while she insists this isn’t a break up record (as we know, 50% of all great songs are break up songs), it is full of loss and pain. Worth the listen so far. For the way back machine, it’s John Prine and In Spite of Ourselves (that title track is one of the great love songs of all time), a collection of duets with some of his “favorite girl singers” as he once described them. I have a crush on Iris Dement (for a really righteously angry song try her Wasteland of the Free), but there is also EmmyLou Harris, the incomparable Dolores Keane, and Lucinda Williams. Very different albums, both wonderful.

What I’m reading:

Jane Mayer’s New Yorker piece on Christopher Steele presents little that is new, but she pulls it together in a terrific and coherent whole that is illuminating and troubling at the same time. Not only for what is happening, but for the complicity of the far right in trying to discredit that which should be setting off alarm bells everywhere. Bob Mueller may be the most important defender of the democracy at this time. A must read.

What I’m watching:

Homeland is killing it this season and is prescient, hauntingly so. Russian election interference, a Bannon-style hate radio demagogue, alienated and gun toting militia types, and a president out of control. It’s fabulous, even if it feels awfully close to the evening news.

March 8, 2018

What I’m listening to:

We have a family challenge to compile our Top 100 songs. It is painful. Only 100? No more than three songs by one artist? Wait, why is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on my list? Should it just be The Clash from whom she samples? Can I admit to guilty pleasure songs? Hey, it’s my list and I can put anything I want on it. So I’m listening to the list while I work and the song playing right now is Tom Petty’s “The Wild One, Forever,” a B-side single that was never a hit and that remains my favorite Petty song. Also, “Evangeline” by Los Lobos. It evokes a night many years ago, with friends at Pearl Street in Northampton, MA, when everyone danced well past 1AM in a hot, sweaty, packed club and the band was a revelation. Maybe the best music night of our lives and a reminder that one’s 100 Favorite Songs list is as much about what you were doing and where you were in your life when those songs were playing as it is about the music. It’s not a list. It’s a soundtrack for this journey.

What I’m reading:

Patricia Lockwood’s Priestdaddy was in the NY Times top ten books of 2017 list and it is easy to see why. Lockwood brings remarkable and often surprising imagery, metaphor, and language to her prose memoir and it actually threw me off at first. It then all became clear when someone told me she is a poet. The book is laugh aloud funny, which masks (or makes safer anyway) some pretty dark territory. Anyone who grew up Catholic, whether lapsed or not, will resonate with her story. She can’t resist a bawdy anecdote and her family provides some of the most memorable characters possible, especially her father, her sister, and her mother, who I came to adore. Best thing I’ve read in ages.

What I’m watching:

The Florida Project, a profoundly good movie on so many levels. Start with the central character, six-year old (at the time of the filming) Brooklynn Prince, who owns – I mean really owns – the screen. This is pure acting genius and at that age? Astounding. Almost as astounding is Bria Vinaite, who plays her mother. She was discovered on Instagram and had never acted before this role, which she did with just three weeks of acting lessons. She is utterly convincing and the tension between the child’s absolute wonder and joy in the world with her mother’s struggle to provide, to be a mother, is heartwarming and heartbreaking all at once. Willem Dafoe rightly received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role. This is a terrific movie.

February 12, 2018

What I’m listening to:

So, I have a lot of friends of age (I know you’re thinking 40s, but I just turned 60) who are frozen in whatever era of music they enjoyed in college or maybe even in their thirties. There are lots of times when I reach back into the catalog, since music is one of those really powerful and transporting senses that can take you through time (smell is the other one, though often underappreciated for that power). Hell, I just bought a turntable and now spending time in vintage vinyl shops. But I’m trying to take a lesson from Pat, who revels in new music and can as easily talk about North African rap music and the latest National album as Meet the Beatles, her first ever album. So, I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy winning Damn. While it may not be the first thing I’ll reach for on a winter night in Maine, by the fire, I was taken with it. It’s layered, political, and weirdly sensitive and misogynist at the same time, and it feels fresh and authentic and smart at the same time, with music that often pulled me from what I was doing. In short, everything music should do. I’m not a bit cooler for listening to Damn, but when I followed it with Steely Dan, I felt like I was listening to Lawrence Welk. A good sign, I think.

What I’m reading:

I am reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I’m not usually a reader of biographies, but I’ve always been taken with Leonardo. Isaacson does not disappoint (does he ever?), and his subject is at once more human and accessible and more awe-inspiring in Isaacson’s capable hands. Gay, left-handed, vegetarian, incapable of finishing things, a wonderful conversationalist, kind, and perhaps the most relentlessly curious human being who has ever lived. Like his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, Isaacson’s project here is to show that genius lives at the intersection of science and art, of rationality and creativity. Highly recommend it.

What I’m watching:

We watched the This Is Us post-Super Bowl episode, the one where Jack finally buys the farm. I really want to hate this show. It is melodramatic and manipulative, with characters that mostly never change or grow, and it hooks me every damn time we watch it. The episode last Sunday was a tear jerker, a double whammy intended to render into a blubbering, tissue-crumbling pathetic mess anyone who has lost a parent or who is a parent. Sterling K. Brown, Ron Cephas Jones, the surprising Mandy Moore, and Milo Ventimiglia are hard not to love and last season’s episode that had only Brown and Cephas going to Memphis was the show at its best (they are by far the two best actors). Last week was the show at its best worst. In other words, I want to hate it, but I love it. If you haven’t seen it, don’t binge watch it. You’ll need therapy and insulin.

January 15, 2018

What I’m listening to:

Drive-By Truckers. Chris Stapleton has me on an unusual (for me) country theme and I discovered these guys to my great delight. They’ve been around, with some 11 albums, but the newest one is fascinating. It’s a deep dive into Southern alienation and the white working-class world often associated with our current president. I admire the willingness to lay bare, in kick ass rock songs, the complexities and pain at work among people we too quickly place into overly simple categories. These guys are brave, bold, and thoughtful as hell, while producing songs I didn’t expect to like, but that I keep playing. And they are coming to NH.

What I’m reading:

A textual analog to Drive-By Truckers by Chris Stapleton in many ways is Tony Horowitz’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize winning Confederates in the Attic. Ostensibly about the Civil War and the South’s ongoing attachment to it, it is prescient and speaks eloquently to the times in which we live (where every southern state but Virginia voted for President Trump). Often hilarious, it too surfaces complexities and nuance that escape a more recent, and widely acclaimed, book like Hillbilly Elegy. As a Civil War fan, it was also astonishing in many instances, especially when it blows apart long-held “truths” about the war, such as the degree to which Sherman burned down the south (he did not). Like D-B Truckers, Horowitz loves the South and the people he encounters, even as he grapples with its myths of victimhood and exceptionalism (and racism, which may be no more than the racism in the north, but of a different kind). Everyone should read this book and I’m embarrassed I’m so late to it.

What I’m watching:

David Letterman has a new Netflix show called “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” and we watched the first episode, in which Letterman interviewed Barack Obama. It was extraordinary (if you don’t have Netflix, get it just to watch this show); not only because we were reminded of Obama’s smarts, grace, and humanity (and humor), but because we saw a side of Letterman we didn’t know existed. His personal reflections on Selma were raw and powerful, almost painful. He will do five more episodes with “extraordinary individuals” and if they are anything like the first, this might be the very best work of his career and one of the best things on television.

December 22, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished Sunjeev Sahota’s Year of the Runaways, a painful inside look at the plight of illegal Indian immigrant workers in Britain. It was shortlisted for 2015 Man Booker Prize and its transporting, often to a dark and painful universe, and it is impossible not to think about the American version of this story and the terrible way we treat the undocumented in our own country, especially now.

What I’m watching:

Season II of The Crown is even better than Season I. Elizabeth’s character is becoming more three-dimensional, the modern world is catching up with tradition-bound Britain, and Cold War politics offer more context and tension than we saw in Season I. Claire Foy, in her last season, is just terrific – one arched eye brow can send a message.

What I’m listening to:

A lot of Christmas music, but needing a break from the schmaltz, I’ve discovered Over the Rhine and their Christmas album, Snow Angels. God, these guys are good.

November 14, 2017

What I’m watching:

Guiltily, I watch the Patriots play every weekend, often building my schedule and plans around seeing the game. Why the guilt? I don’t know how morally defensible is football anymore, as we now know the severe damage it does to the players. We can’t pretend it’s all okay anymore. Is this our version of late decadent Rome, watching mostly young Black men take a terrible toll on each other for our mere entertainment?

What I’m reading:

Recently finished J.G. Ballard’s 2000 novel Super-Cannes, a powerful depiction of a corporate-tech ex-pat community taken over by a kind of psychopathology, in which all social norms and responsibilities are surrendered to residents of the new world community. Kept thinking about Silicon Valley when reading it. Pretty dark, dystopian view of the modern world and centered around a mass killing, troublingly prescient.

What I’m listening to:

Was never really a Lorde fan, only knowing her catchy (and smarter than you might first guess) pop hit “Royals” from her debut album. But her new album, Melodrama, is terrific and it doesn’t feel quite right to call this “pop.” There is something way more substantial going on with Lorde and I can see why many critics put this album at the top of their Best in 2017 list. Count me in as a huge fan.

November 3, 2017

What I’m reading: Just finished Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, her breathtakingly good second novel. How is someone so young so wise? Her writing is near perfection and I read the book in two days, setting my alarm for 4:30AM so I could finish it before work.

What I’m watching: We just binge watched season two of Stranger Things and it was worth it just to watch Millie Bobbie Brown, the transcendent young actor who plays Eleven. The series is a delightful mash up of every great eighties horror genre you can imagine and while pretty dark, an absolute joy to watch.

What I’m listening to: I’m not a lover of country music (to say the least), but I love Chris Stapleton. His “The Last Thing I Needed, First Thing This Morning” is heartbreakingly good and reminds me of the old school country that played in my house as a kid. He has a new album and I can’t wait, but his From A Room: Volume 1 is on repeat for now.

September 26, 2017

What I’m reading:

Just finished George Saunder’s Lincoln in the Bardo. It took me a while to accept its cadence and sheer weirdness, but loved it in the end. A painful meditation on loss and grief, and a genuinely beautiful exploration of the intersection of life and death, the difficulty of letting go of what was, good and bad, and what never came to be.

What I’m watching:

HBO’s The Deuce. Times Square and the beginning of the porn industry in the 1970s, the setting made me wonder if this was really something I’d want to see. But David Simon is the writer and I’d read a menu if he wrote it. It does not disappoint so far and there is nothing prurient about it.

What I’m listening to:

The National’s new album Sleep Well Beast. I love this band. The opening piano notes of the first song, “Nobody Else Will Be There,” seize me & I’m reminded that no one else in music today matches their arrangement & musicianship. I’m adding “Born to Beg,” “Slow Show,” “I Need My Girl,” and “Runaway” to my list of favorite love songs.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J from President's Corner https://ift.tt/2UlsRCQ via IFTTT

#President's Corner #SNHUblogs

0 notes

topmixtrends · 6 years

Link

“OÙ SONT les neiges d’antan?” Throughout my childhood, at odd moments, I heard my stepfather Vasily Yanovsky — a noted Russian émigré author who provides one of the bookends to this brilliant, poignant anthology — burst out with that melancholic line from François Villon. Even as a child, I could hear its wounded beauty. Now, as an ageing translator from the Portuguese, I can see it as a manifestation of saudades, the famously untranslatable Portuguese term best glossed as a yearning, a longing, both for what is now in the past and for what perhaps never existed. One might speculate that saudades and les neiges d’antan represent a universal response to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We are all exiles from a vague paradise that, by its nature, is forever blocked to us, creatures fallen from grace. Bryan Karetnyk, the expert editor of Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky, suggests this poignant connection to the expulsion of our mythic ancestors with the epigraph to his introduction, taken from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest.”

Strange as it may seem, though born in New York and speaking at best an embarrassingly rudimentary Russian, I found myself quite at home in this anthology — at home in a world where loss was the starting point, death the never-forgotten conclusion, and love a desperately desired antidote or anodyne. Again I remember the expulsion, the rude thrusting of man and woman into a world of suffering and death, but also with the possibility of salvation: “They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way.”

Memory

Along with their clear, familiar tones of joy and despair, these tales also include minor details that remind me of my Russian-American childhood in New York in the 1940s. For example, Georgy Ivanov, in his tale “Giselle,” describes a billiard player’s apartment back in St. Petersburg, where the “windows […] had not yet been sealed with extra putty against the coming cold.” And suddenly I remember, for the first time in almost 70 years, my fascination with the gray strips of putty that my grandfather, a survivor of Siberian prisons, always clean-shaven and redolent of Eau de Cologne 4711, meticulously pressed into the gaps between window and windowsill in our ordinary apartment in ordinary Rego Park, Queens, allowing me the pleasure of pushing my fingers against the softly receptive substance. This unprofessional aside leads me back to the collection, and the title of a lengthy Parisian tale by Yury Felsen, “The Recurrence of Things Past,” with its obvious Proustian echo. Like Proust’s masterpiece, this anthology is, in fact, a book of memory. And suddenly I remember that Yanovsky’s last published book was Elysian Fields: A Book of Memory (1983, translated by my mother, Isabella Levitin Yanovsky, in 1987), in which he recounts the Russian émigré experience in Paris between the wars, with firsthand sketches of many of the writers included in the present anthology. And then I notice that Bryan Karetnyk initiates this very anthology with a salient quote from Vladimir Nabokov, in response to the question: “What is your most memorable dream?” His answer is: “Russia.”

As I step back for a wider view, I see a kind of double nexus permeating this collection of stories, a nexus of the remembered, seemingly distant past in Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sebastopol) — a kind of ghost that cannot be escaped — jostling against the more recent past of eternal displacement in Berlin, Paris, Nice, or Montpellier. And this doubleness, I now realize, explains why Yanovsky gave the fictional protagonist of his best-known novel No Man’s Time (1967, translated by my mother and Roger Nyle Parris, and introduced by W. H. Auden) two names: Cornelius Yamb and Conrad Jamb. As the protagonist says of himself: “It is not at all clear who I really am. For instance, one person will say: I, and the other also says: I … Do these two feel something different or is it exactly the same?” A dilemma indeed — the dilemma of the exile.

It’s appropriate, then, to begin my survey of the themes and symbols that recur throughout this collection by looking at memory’s dream, incarnated as les neiges d’antan.

Snow

Ivan Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days” is a lengthy, disjunctive nightmare of the past. But in the chaos of the narrator’s dreaming, religion and nature provide some solace: “I recall the lovely icons, my icons. They exist only in one’s childhood.” And then he encounters snow:

The night street shows blue. The snowdrifts are swept in mounds — you could drown in them. It has been snowing heavily all day. Great bales in snow-capped rows. It’s so quiet on our little street […] Atop the posts, atop the fences — little mounds of snow. Soft, powdery. Lanterns covered in snow shine drowsily; dogs dig up the snow with their snouts. Beyond the fence, among the birches, a crow croaks hoarsely, foretelling more snow.

For the American reader, this gentle, endless snow reminds us of Robert Frost’s ambiguous vision of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, where “the only other sound’s the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake” and where seduction is not easy to resist, for “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” In any case, as the dream flickers on, Shmelyov’s narrator is left with “joy, loss — all in a flash.” And when he awakes, it is in alien Paris, to the calls of a rag-and-bone man passing in the street.

In another nightmare vision, Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum,” the narrator leaves the titular building and finds himself, unexpectedly, in a snowy landscape:

The stone beneath my feet was real sidewalk, powdered with wonderfully fragrant, newly fallen snow, in which the infrequent pedestrians had already left fresh black tracks. At first the quiet and the snowy coolness of the night, somehow strikingly familiar, gave me a pleasant feeling after my feverish wanderings. Trustfully, I started to conjecture just where I had come out, and why the snow, and what were those lights exaggeratedly but indistinctly beaming here and there in the brown darkness.

Soon he realizes that the “strikingly familiar” snow-covered streets are those of Russia, which is now in Soviet hands. The story ends: “But enough. I shall not recount how I was arrested, nor tell of my subsequent ordeals. Suffice it to say that it cost me incredible patience and effort to get back abroad.”

Love

A possible salvation from the long shadow of displacement is love. For example, in Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin’s “In Paris,” the narrator finds love in a Russian restaurant in the guise of Olga Alexandrovna, a waitress. We assume that solace has come to the uprooted protagonists in the form of a convenient alliance, and only at the end do we understand that the younger waitress had not only found support and comfort in the well-to-do older Russian gentleman, but had actually fallen in love with him. By that point the elderly gentleman is dead and the former waitress, turned rich by his death, is “convulsed by sobs, crying out, pleading with someone for mercy.” What touched me in this tale was the understated and simple drift from a casual pickup to a true love between two Russians, making their lonely way in the alien West.

Another story that turns with an unexpected rush toward love is Irina Odoevtseva’s “The Life of Madame Duclos,” in which, after a lifetime of compromises, the Russian protagonist, having bought comfort and success by marriage to an elderly Parisian, suddenly senses salvation in the offing with a younger Russian. This time, however, the heroine can only declare herself to her mirror:

“Hello,” she will say, in Russian. She can see her lips moving in the mirror, struggling to remember the long-forgotten Russian word.

“Hello.”

She leans closer to the mirror.

“Kolya …”

And, so close now that she’s touching the cool glass, she whispers:

“I love you. I love you!”

Alas, the yearned-for lover, unaware of her feelings, has slipped aboard a ship returning him to Russia: “And then there is nothing. No ship, no happiness, no life.”

Finally, Irina Guadanini’s “The Tunnel” is a sad retelling of the author’s doomed love for Vladimir Nabokov, who was then already married to Véra. The intensity of her love is sustained through the 13 sections of the tale, but in the end the unfortunate woman, grown frantic, falls from her perch high above the Italian coast — where she was seeking distance and perspective, while also trying to spy on her lover — and tumbles downhill to the railroad tracks. There she lies, perhaps dead, perhaps only dying, but clearly reminiscent of Anna Karenina, her literary progenitor. The glory and obsession of love give way to despair. The exile does not find salvation.

Gambling

Though gambling is a universal human pursuit, Russian literature has given it a particular focus. In his notes, Karetnyk traces the literary portrayal of this obsession to Alexander Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1834) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Gambler (1867), which was based on the author’s own experience with the deadly fascination of roulette. In fact, Dostoyevsky used proceeds from the novel to pay off large debts he had accumulated in the casino. In this collection, we encounter, in Georgy Adamovich’s “Ramón Ortiz,” an Argentine version of Dostoyevsky’s obsessed youth. With no restraint, no realistic self-appraisal, the young man, fond of being considered a baron, gambles his way from early success to utter destitution and resolves his situation by committing suicide. The narrator approves of this final act, seeing it as a proper response to the universe’s indifference toward the individual’s sufferings. Adamovich himself was the chief arbiter of the Paris Note, a Russian-Parisian literary movement that sought, in Karetnyk’s words, “to combine the despair of exile with the modern age of anxiety.” Certainly Ortiz’s suicide can be seen as indicative of both the despair of exile and the age of anxiety pressing on these displaced people. And I recall that shortly before Adamovich died, Yanovsky invited him to his home in New York to meet W. H. Auden, the man who coined the very phrase “Age of Anxiety.” It was a great satisfaction to Yanovsky to bring together the two intellectuals he admired most, one from his youthful years of exile in Paris, the other from his mature exile in the United States. Within one year of that meeting, both Adamovich and Auden were dead.

One of those who gambled over the bridge table with Yanovsky and Adamovich in Paris was Vladislav Khodasevich, whose story “Atlantis” depicts a circle of obsessed Russians immersed in games of bridge in a basement below the cafe Murat. (Interestingly, the lost land of Atlantis is also the setting for Yanovsky’s unpublished short story “The Adventures of Oscar Quinn.”) And in Dovid Knut’s “The Lady from Monte Carlo,” we again encounter an obsessed gambler, who can see the truth in others, if not himself: “these indifferent people [are] eternally — tragically — lost and disassociated from one another.” He is tempted by an older woman with a secret for winning (borrowed from Pushkin’s tale a century earlier), but in this version we have a seemingly happy ending: the ancient temptress resists her own urge to pass along her secret and insists that he leave her. Still, indifference reigns: “She kissed my forehead. The evening was cold, majestic, and indifferent.”

Chaos

Entropy is, of course, our common foe — the one to whom, in the end, we must succumb. But for the exile, the onslaught of chaos can come early and in a heightened, phantasmagoric form. Here are snippets of chaos from Shmelyov’s “Shadows of Days”:

Night. Snow. I’m in the alleyways. […] Dead houses, closed gates. I’m lost, I don’t know where mine is. […] Dark, blind buildings. They’ve all gone. Now there’s just one road — […] I run in trepidation. The Champs-Élysées, my final road. […] The Elysian Fields! […] The end!

And “It’s them, they’ve come for me … I know it. […] The trees and the wind are whispering. Footsteps below the windows. I listen — a scratching at the window sill, they’re climbing up. […] I scream, I scream.”

In the anthology’s final text, Yanovsky’s “They Called Her Russia,” we encounter a vortex of entropy in a circular vision of hell: a trainful of soldiers going round and round through jumbled fields, never engaging “the enemy,” slowly spiraling through the repetitive brutality and madness of the Russian Civil War toward utter dissolution. In fact, it is never clear who the enemy is. Their own “engine-driver offered to find a way through to the Reds; the stoker tried to persuade them to join the partisans.” Eventually, “[t]hey decide to break through up ahead: if not Whites, then Reds — whomever they meet.” In this nightmare — where the commandant’s refrain is “Dream or real?” — the enemy they engage is themselves.

Two Horses

It seems appropriate to conclude with the most painful, touching image I found in this anthology, an image that occurred twice: a horse without a rider, striking out into the sea — one in Gallipoli, the other in the Crimea. Both horses are valiant, yet have nowhere to go, no function to fulfill; nothing awaits them but death in an alien sea. They are abandoned by history. The narrator of Ivan Lukash’s “A Scattering of Stars,” a poetic evocation of the retreat to Gallipoli, tells of his beloved horse and its shameful end:

I spot my Leda […] craning her neck towards the water, whinnying, nostrils flaring. […] I see her suddenly, with all four legs, leap into the water. She couldn’t bear the thirst. She went crashing down, placed her lips to the sea salt and began jerking her head about. She jerked her head, Leda did, but she was soon swept away by the current.

And in Galina Kuznetsova’s “Kunak,” the denouement is even more poignant: “Above the grey misty water, a horse’s head could be seen craning. It was swimming apparently without knowing where it was going, borne by the current out towards the middle of the bay.” A rowboat comes to the rescue, but in fact only offers the hopeful horse three sudden bullets in the head, and then “the current was freely, and with terrible speed, bearing it away. It disappeared again, then reappeared … until finally it vanished for ever in the quick-flowing water.” The onlookers “all gasped in horror and compassion.”

And there we stand, observers of an entire culture carried out to sea, but with nowhere to go. There is much grimness, much pain, much despair in this collection, but it is also struck through with deep emotion and a pulsing sense of life. We contemplate the struggle of the exiles with horror and compassion, for we know that, at some level, we all share their plight.

Alexis Levitin, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, translates works from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador. His 40 books of translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugénio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions Publishing.

The post “Où sont les neiges d’antan?”: On “Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2C2EoLW

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

0 notes