#i think if valence knew what she was. they would have been so different. but also maybe exactly the same. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gretavanfleetposts · 1 year

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Valence: Epilogue

Author's Note: I just wanted to say, thank you all for going on this journey with me! Thank you for all of the love and support you've shown me and this fic. It means so much and I'm so happy so many of you enjoyed it! Summary: The daughter of a drug lord, you're ready to take over the family business. Your father's only stipulation? You must marry the man he has picked out for you instead of the man you love in order to claim your kingdom.

TW: slight sexual content (18+ minors do not interact), talk of drugs

Word Count: 2k

Chapter Ten Masterlist

It was Danny that stood before you in your office in the Kiszka’s home, the fireplace raging at your back as summer had turned to fall and fall had turned to winter.

Josh was taking a much-needed break from the business and was letting you handle things for the time-being, even though you planned to run it alongside one another when he was ready to return, you as the head, him as your right-hand man. But for now, the desk that sat across from yours sat empty, waiting for Josh to fill it.

It gave you a better view of the snow falling though, unobstructed by the mess of curls piled atop his head.

It was a different mess of curls that stood in front of you now though, looking much less bubbly than the Kiszka boy in comparison. You hadn't seen him in months and his presence there was certainly unexpected, though you didn't find yourself upset over the opportunity to speak with him. He had been on your mind as of late.

He had entered silently but purposefully and you knew you only had one chance to say to him what you'd been thinking lately, what had been haunting you ever since the day of your father's funeral that felt much more distant after Jake's rescue not long after. But still, you remembered clearly the way Danny's arms had wrapped around Lily to hold her up in her grief, a kindness he had not afforded to you when you needed it most. When you might have needed him most. And as you looked at him, watched him stand there before you on the other side of the desk, you hardly even recognized him.

Maybe he hardly recognized you too.

“I could have needed you, you know," you started before he had a chance to break the silence himself.

You breathed a light sound into the quiet, not moving to meet him but choosing to sit there in your rightful place as he faced you. "I could have needed the friend I once had.”

He didn't look far hurt enough by it. Actually, he looked certain. He looked certain that that wasn't what he had wanted.

“I don’t want to be your friend. It’s not enough. Not after what we had.”

You watched as he shook his head, fiddling with his hands nervously at the admission. He wasn't ashamed of it, no. Just afraid to tell you, knowing it would hurt you.

You knew he meant it. And you understood then why you had never been right for one another. But even still, reminiscence hurt, and you would mourn for the friend you had lost, there practically since birth to guide you through life.

“It was enough for you once,” you whispered as the memories of him as a small boy flooded your mind, memories of him with his then-frizzy curls wandering the gardens with you, playing and laughing, reading books under the covers in the sheath of night.

"We lose things so we can gain things," your mother had said. But she hadn't said we couldn't miss the things we had lost.

He was silent under your stoicism, saying nothing for a long moment before he finally changed the subject.

"We're leaving, Lily and I. If you'll allow it."

He met your eyes with thinly veiled emotion, trying to hide the pain he felt as he said it, even despite the fact that you could tell it was what he wanted.

But still, it would be dangerous for them to leave. You knew now that there were Antony's still out there, a single remaining son who had been visiting a smaller family in the countryside, preparing to buy out their product. You expected him to make a peace deal with you but there was no guarantee he wasn't plotting his revenge as you and Danny spoke. And you'd prepared for it many months ago, sure. But it was a risk nonetheless.

With them gone, you couldn't keep him safe, couldn't keep your sister safe. And you hated the idea that your decision would bring their swift end. Not that you had regretted that decision. But still, it was a consequence nonetheless.

"You should know that if you choose to leave, I cannot protect you. There are people out there who may come for you because of what I started. I will not be there to save you."

He only clenched and unclenched his teeth with a singular nod.

"I understand."

It would hurt you to see him leave. But maybe it was for the best. At least he could protect Lily. At least neither of them would be alone. At least he would no longer look at you with the sad wet dog look he had, looking small under your eyes knowing he didn't want to be around you any longer.

Maybe it would bring him peace.

"Then I will allow it."

He nodded as if to thank you and finally, his eyes turned upward and he looked a little less forlorn, standing there with almost a smile on his lips. Not quite, but almost.

"You'll be good here. I see it now. Your father would be proud. Your mother would be proud."

You didn't know if he was right. You weren't really convinced you'd done what your father would have done, after all. But you weren't your father. You no longer wanted to be your father. You weren't your mother either. You were a product of them, sure, but you weren't them. You made your own decisions, made your own mistakes, loved in a way that was entirely you, lost in a similar way, and at the end of it all, you were proud of yourself for doing what needed to be done.

"Are you happy?" he spoke again over the silence as you lost yourself in thought.

And with his question, you met his eyes again with certainty.

"Yes. I'm happy."

You were, immeasurably so. Even without the business, without the kingdom at your fingertips, you were the happiest you had ever been. You had your Jake, back there was nothing to be unhappy about.

There was nothing left to dwell on.

But Danny only nodded.

"Are you?" you asked back.

He was silent for a long moment, perhaps debating his answer. It seemed like a no if it wasn't an immediate yes. But you only watched a moment longer before a light smile finally found his lips.

"I'll find it."

It might have broken your heart.

"I'll find it."

As he turned to leave, you knew it was the last time you'd see him. And you hoped that he would find it, the happiness he deserved.

—

Jake had grown stronger with each passing day. The nightmares had almost stopped entirely, the bruises had faded, stitches had come out and his fingers had healed, allowing him to play guitar once more.

He was himself again, your Jake, seemingly more now than he ever had been, like a second chance at life had made him a little less serious and a little more handsy, unable and unwilling to deny himself any of the pleasures of life. Really, it warmed your soul to see him that way. The sight alone had pieced you back together.

"There you are," he chirped as you met him in your now shared bedroom, moving to ready yourself for a meeting with a much smaller family that wanted to sell out their farms.

"Sorry, I got…held up," you murmured, letting him catch you for a quick kiss as you headed to your vanity in search of particular diamond earrings that always made you feel powerful. Not that you didn't feel powerful now without them because you certainly did.

"Anything I need to know about?" he asked as he watched you flit about the room in search for them, smiling as he produced them easily having known where they were and handing them to you with an outstretched palm.

"Nothing important," you assured him as you took the jewelry from his hand absentmindedly, still thinking about the friend you had once had.

Danny had found his path forward. And as much as it had hurt you to see him go, it brought you peace thinking about him moving on, thinking about him being okay. Suddenly you weren't angry, you didn't feel guilty. You knew then that you couldn't have ever given him what he really wanted. You were never meant to be with him and though it hurt to lose him, it had brought you to Jake.

And Jake was where you really belonged.

Jake's smile widened, his eyes sparkling with that knowing that he always had, always seeing you a little deeper than you showed yourself. But he let the 'nothing' slide.

“I'm choosing to believe that," he smiled easily. "Now, can we talk about this security detail? Is that really necessary?”

You'd increased Jake's security detail, quite a bit at that, just until you felt certain there was no one after him. He hardly went a moment without security in the room with him, just as they were now, lining the walls like statues adorning the home. They were there from the moment he woke until the moment his head hit the pillow for a good night's rest. It was the only comfort you could find in the silence of enemy movements. Or lack thereof.

“Yes, it is," you answered with a sigh, finally letting yourself turn to him as the earrings found their place in your ears. "And if you argue with me about it, I'll increase it even more.”

You gave him a quick peck on the cheek as he answered you with a smirk and a, "Yes, ma'am," catching you by the wrist before you had a chance to step too far away from him and pulling you into an immediately heated kiss.

"Guess I'll just have to get creative," he mumbled against your lips as he reached both hands up into your hair to tilt your head back and slide his tongue into your mouth, which you accepted with a hum before you remembered your surroundings.

“Jake, we have company,” you huffed in a near breathless voice as you pulled back, eyes already hooded with lust for the man you happily called your husband.

“Dismiss them if they don’t want to watch, then. It'll be hard to look away from though," he smiled, utterly pleased with himself, as he usually was.

He was just as irresistible now as he was when you had met him, the tension never thinning, so much so that the housekeepers maintaining the home had taken to wearing earplugs. And Josh and Sam just suffered, apparently.

You dismissed the relieved guards with a flick of your wrist as Jake's lips dropped down to your neck, knowing you wouldn't put up a fight for long.

“J-Jake, are you forgetting we have somewhere to be?” you breathed as his hands busied themselves smoothing up your thighs under your dress and hooking into your panties to pull them down, all as his body backed yours up to your vanity where your hips met the wood with a thud.

“You can’t be late to your own meeting? he asked, his lips still working against the crook of your neck to elicit those sounds he loved so much, the ones you were desperately trying to stifle as you thought about how late you already were, how much later you were going to be. "What kind of job is this?”

“I have to set an example,” you answered breathlessly as he continued his attack.

And even though your words challenged him, your body didn't. Your body pressed into him with need, without shame. He was the man you wanted day and night. You couldn't be kept from him. You never could be.

You let him lift you onto the vanity, knowing he'd swiftly replace whatever objects were falling and breaking against the hard wood beneath you as he did so.

“I’m just a faithful subject trying to show you my devotion since I missed your swearing in,” he gave you another sweet smile as he halted his attack on your skin to look up at you as he sank down onto his knees.

"There was no sw-swearing in," you whispered with a gulp as you watched his sweet look turn mischievous.

"All the more reason then," he grinned before turning his lips to the inside of your knee, his hands holding the fronts of your ankles as he kissed along the skin of your leg.

“Mmm is that so?” you asked, letting your head fall back against the mirror and your eyes flutter closed as he kissed up and up and up the inside of your leg.

He only hummed against your skin as his lips worked their way up the inside of your thigh, just before he pulled back one last time.

“Now spread your legs for me, Mrs. Kiszka, so I can show you just how loyal I am to you.”

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addictedtostorytelling · 2 years

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Hi again! Very short, specific and kinda stupid question, but I was just rewatching 11.09 'wild life' and there's an exchange between Greg and Sara at the victims' apartment that stood out to me. Noting that the couple's parrot's still there, Greg asks why it isn't talking, and Sara says that he might be traumatized cause he 'lived in an abusive household and witnessed dad kill mom'... And I'm like hello? Sara says it so casually, with Greg standing right beside her. I don't think he knew about her childhood in that moment, and I'm not sure if that confuses me more or less. Anyways, it's a very short, hardly trascendental exchange, but I thought it was very strange.

Thanks in advance!

hi, @its-a-geeks-world!

greg almost certainly doesn't know about sara's family history at that point, as he and the rest of the team aside from grissom seemingly only learn (vague) details about sara's childhood during the events of episode 13x15 "forget me not."

as for why sara can remain so calm and seemingly unaffected when talking about case details that closely mirror her own trauma, outside of the universe of the show, i blame the lazy writing of the later seasons: the writers didn't recognize what the implications were in putting those particular words into sara's mouth, and while jorja might've known as an actress what the valence was (given how in tune she is with her character), since the scene itself and the direction she was given likely didn't call for any kind of personal reaction on sara's part, she didn't insert one. it was meant to be just a quick exposition line, so that's what it was played as.

it's just part and parcel of the later seasons of the show basically forgetting all of sara's previous character history except for in one or two very special episodes™—same as why she doesn't have a particularly notable reaction to the horrific ipv aspects of the case in episode 14x12 “keep calm & carry on,” even though by all accounts she probably should.

the later seasons writers just in most cases eschewed making reference to any deep history with their characters.

they wrote "for the episode," not for the arc.

that's why the characterization of s10-s15 typically feels so shallow.

of course, if you're interested in an in-universe explanation for her weird level of blasé about the whole thing, you could maybe

a) attribute it to the fact that perhaps she feels comfortable "going there" because ultimately they're talking about a bird and not a kid (so she doesn’t feel as much personal connection as she might if there were an actual human being involved in the situation for her to empathize with),

b) assume that at this point in her life, when she's otherwise happy and stable and has a confidante/emotional support system in grissom, she just isn't as easily triggered as she would have been back of the day, so simply mentioning a case that resembles her father's murder isn't enough to set her off*,

c) suppose that her cool is just a product of her having now had six years of practice in talking to grissom about her trauma, reasoning that now that she’s been able to apply language to the fact of it with someone she feels comfortable with, she has an easier time referring to it across the board,

d) infer that perhaps she feels at liberty to parse the situation in the way that she does for greg because she has a feeling he won't draw connections between her and a parrot, no matter how insightful she is about the bird's trauma.

* that’s a strange thing about triggers: sometimes events/encounters that by all accounts should probably set someone off don’t, whereas events/encounters that shouldn’t occasionally do. the traumatized brain is idiosyncratic.

i mean, honestly, we could probably rationalize her behavior here in a dozen different ways, but i guess the bottom line is that, for whatever reason, she does seem to feel safe to make the comments that she does in this particular situation.

one way or another, she’s not worried about being “found out” or having an emotional reaction that might clue greg in that what she was talking about was personal to her.

somehow, she’s able to discuss (in a generic way) the condition of being traumatized from watching one parent murder another without being set off about it herself.

and since the episode itself doesn’t offer any insight into the issue, really, it’s dealer’s choice on this one, in terms of what in-universe explanation one latches onto.

sorry i can’t be more definitive!

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

#answered #its a geeks world #asks: csi #**#my meta #speculation csi #11x09 #later seasons #let's talk shop #csiverse

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dadbodosamu · 3 years

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chemistry

Miya Osamu x Cis!Fem Reader x Miya Atsumu

WARNINGS: mutual masturbation, degradation, bullying, college au, they go to princeton but that’s not important, manhandling, Osamu has a jacob’s ladder bc i couldn’t resist, one (1) instance of daddy, squirting

3.3k words

You nearly groaned out loud as you saw Osamu and Atsumu making their way towards you. Could you not have one day without them making your life a living hell? You went to turn around, maybe to run, but a long, strong arm slung across your shoulders.

“Ah, ah, ah, where do ya think yer goin’, princess?” Atsumu asked.

“Yeah, don’t ya wanna see yer only friends?” Osamu asked, pinching your cheek a little too hard to be considered friendly.

“We’re not friends,” you mumbled, hugging your laptop to your chest. “Please leave me alone, I just want to study.”

“Study?” Atsumu asked. He laughed.

“We all know yer too dumb to pass anyway,” Osamu said.

“Why study if yer gonna fail anyway?” Atsumu asked.

Your face burned from embarrassment. You were currently failing one class, and no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get the hang of it. It sucked when your bullies were right.

“Maybe we should cut her some slack, Tsumu,” Osamu said. “If she fails, she’ll lose her scholarship and then who would we taunt?”

“Yer right, Samu,” Atsumu said. He turned you around back towards the library, your original destination. “Don’t worry, princess, Samu ‘nd I’ll help ya.”

“It’ll be hard gettin’ the information through yer thick head,” Osamu said, knocking his knuckle against your head painfully. “But we’ll do it.”

“Yer failin’ chemistry, right?” Atsumu asked. He opened the door to a private study room and shoved you in. You stumbled, catching yourself on the table and nearly dropping your laptop.

“Please, just leave me alone,” you said, standing up. “I can study by myself.”

“Aw, where’s the fun in that, sweetheart?” Osamu asked, pulling out a chair. He pushed you down into it and sat next to you.

“Don’t worry, we’ll set up a rewards system,” Atsumu said, sliding into the chair on your other side.

“For every question ya get right, Tsumu and I’ll take somethin’ off,” Osamu said.

“What? Why would I want that?” You asked, scoffing.

“Because, if ya get us naked,” Atsumu said. He looked at Osamu with a smirk. “We’ll let ya watch us get off.”

“Again, why would I want that?” You asked. Your stomach tightened at the thought of watching the twins jerk themselves off. The sounds they’d make. You bit your lip.

“Of course, there’s gotta be somethin’ in it for us,” Osamu said.

“Every question ya get wrong, ya gotta strip,” Atsumu said. He tugged at your jacket. “Hope ya got a lot of layers on.”

“No, no way,” you said.

“It’s cute ya think ya have a choice,” Osamu said. “Get yer work out.”

You opened your laptop, pulling up your chemistry homework.

“Question one,” Atsumu said. “What group of elements are all diatomic?”

You reached down to grab your textbook, only to have Osamu snatch it out of your hands.

“Ah, no cheating, sweetheart,” he said, smirking at you. “Answer the question.”

“Um, group eighteen, noble gases,” you guessed. Osamu tutted and pulled your jacket off your shoulders.

“Such a dumbass,” Atsumu said, leaning back and crossing his arms. “That’s high school chemistry.”

“Try again,” Osamu said, tossing your jacket across the table.

“Come on, ya should know this one,” Osamu said. So far, you’d lost your jacket, both of your shoes, and your shirt. The twins had lost their shoes and Osamu had lost his sweater while Atsumu was currently shirtless.

“Um, bromine has seven valence electrons,” you said.

Osamu grinned and pulled his t-shirt off as Atsumu unzipped his pants.

“Good girl,” Atsumu said, pushing his jeans down. You pointedly ignored the way his cock strained against his briefs, instead reading the next question.

“What is the oxidation state of chlorine, barium, potassium, and phosphorus?” Osamu asked.

“Uh, chlorine is negative one, barium is positive two, potassium is positive one, and phosphorus is… positive three?” You said.

Atsumu hissed. “So close, princess.”

“Phosphorus is negative three,” Osamu said. Atsumu reached behind you and smoothly undid your bra.

You instinctively crossed your arms as he pulled your bra off.

“Uh-uh,” Osamu said, tugging your arms away from your chest. Your breasts bounced heavily as the twins eyed you.

“Cute,” Atsumu said, pinching your nipple. You bit your lip to keep from moaning as Osamu groped your other breast.

“These tits almost make ya worth somethin’,” Osamu said.

“Maybe we should let her fail,” Atsumu said, rolling your nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “We can just keep her around for her tits.”

Osamu leaned down and sucked your nipple into his mouth. You couldn’t stop the moan that left your mouth.

“O-Osamu,” you moaned, tangling your fingers in his hair and pulling him closer.

“Next question,” Atsumu said, still squeezing your breast. “What group of elements is almost completely nonreactive?”

You struggled to think as Osamu’s tongue flicked against your nipple.

“No- fuck, Osamu- Noble gases,” you moaned. “Group eighteen.”

Osamu pulled back with a pop.

“Maybe yer not as dumb as we thought,” he said. He unzipped his jeans, momentarily pausing to palm his cock.

“I dunno, Samu,” Atsumu said, running his fingers under the elastic of his briefs. “Still think this head is empty.”

Atsumu pushed his briefs down. You swallowed thickly as his cock sprung out, bobbing heavily before resting against his toned stomach. His cock was longer than any you’d seen in person and thick enough that you knew just from looking at it that your fingers wouldn’t meet if you wrapped your hand around it. Your mouth watered as he wrapped his hand around the thick shaft and gave it a slow stroke. He moaned breathlessly.

“Next question,” Osamu asked. You tore your eyes away from Atsumu, licking your lips as Osamu asked the next question.

“Um, helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon,” you said, glancing back at Atsumu. He was still slowly stroking his cock, head thrown back and the smallest moans leaving his lips.

Osamu snapped and raised an eyebrow. “That all?”

“Damn it, uh, fluorine?” You guessed.

“Lose the skirt,” Osamu said. You hesitantly stood up. You bit your lip as you ran your thumb along the hem of your skirt. You almost regretted wearing your lacy panties, but that had been the only clean pair of underwear you had. Anyway, at least you hadn’t worn your period panties. The last thing you needed was Osamu and Atsumu seeing you in your blood stained granny panties.

Atsumu let out a low whistle as your skirt fell around your ankles, revealing the white lace thong you were wearing.

“Were ya expectin’ to be a slut today?” Atsumu asked.

“Who would want to see ya in those, anyway?” Osamu asked, eyeing you as you sat back down.

You almost responded that they obviously wanted to see you in them, but you bit your tongue.

“What’s the next question?” You asked.

“What groups make up the periodic table?” Atsumu asked.

You opened your mouth to answer when Osamu’s hand landed on your bare thigh.

“The alkali metals,” you started. Osamu’s large hand moved, and his fingers fiddled with the hem of your panties. “Alkaline earth metals, transition metals are groups three through twelve, triels…”

Osamu’s hand slid under your panties.

“She’s soaked, Tsumu,” Osamu said, spreading your folds with his fingers.

“Shut up ‘nd let her answer the damn question,” Atsumu said. He pumped his cock, still at the same slow pace he had before.

“Tetrels,” you said. You shivered as Osamu pressed two fingers against your clit. “The pnictogens, chalcogens…” Osamu’s fingers moved slowly around over your clit, following the same pace as Atsumu. You moaned and spread your legs wider.

“Look at her, spreadin’ her legs like a slut,” Osamu said.

“Keep goin’,” Atsumu said. You didn’t know who he was talking to, but you continued.

“Halogens and noble gases,” you finished. You nearly whined as Osamu pulled his hand away.

“Good girl,” he said, pushing his boxers down. You greedily eyed him as he released his cock. Just as long as Atsumu’s and visibly thicker with a slight curve to the left and five piercings running along the underside. You licked your lips as he wrapped his hand around it, thumbing the slit.

“What are the families of the periodic table?” Osamu read. He moaned as he gently squeezed his cock, a bead of precum forming at the tip. You swallowed. “Want a taste, sweetheart?”

You couldn’t stop yourself from nodding. Osamu scooped the precum up with his thumb and pushed it between your lips. You reached up to grab his wrist as you licked the bitter liquid away. You moaned as he shoved his thumb deeper in your mouth.

“Answer the question,” Atsumu said. “Come on, it’s the last one, princess.”

You went to pull away from Osamu, but he grabbed the back of your neck and jerked you back, gagging you on his thumb.

“I didn’t say stop,” Osamu said. “Now, answer the question.”

Your voice was muffled by Osamu’s thumb.

“What was that? I can’t understand ya,” Atsumu said. “Speak clearly.”

You whined around Osamu’s thumb.

“Don’t know the answer?” Osamu asked, thrusting his thumb in your mouth. He smirked as you gagged again.

“Guess ya lose yer underwear,” Atsumu said. Osamu pulled his hand away from your mouth.

“I know the answer!” You cried.

“G’head, sweetheart,” Osamu said. He gently rolled his balls in his hand.

“The lithium family, beryllium family, the transition metals don’t have a family name, boron family, carbon family, nitrogen family, oxygen family, fluorine family, and helium/neon family,” you said. You smiled as the twins both leaned back, pumping their cocks at different paces. Atsumu was still stroking himself slowly while Osamu pumped himself off faster.

“Still think ya should lose yer panties,” Osamu said. He slowed down, squeezing his cock as precum leaked from the tip. “I wanna see that cute, lil cunt o’ yers.”

“I got the question right,” you said. You watched as he reached over to you, popping the elastic of your panties against your skin.

“Come on, let us see that needy pussy,” Atsumu said. “Yer already makin’ a mess of ‘em anyway.”

You bit your lip as you pushed your hips up, wrapping your thumbs around the sides of your panties and pulling them down. Osamu snatched them from you.

“Now, get up on the table and spread yer legs,” Osamu said. “Wanna see how ya touch yerself.”

You pushed your laptop out over the way, hopping up on the table and bracing your feet on a knee from each twin.

“Didn’t even argue,” Atsumu said. “Maybe she’s startin’ to get it.”

You ignored him as you reached down, rubbing a circle over your clit. You let out a soft moan.

“Fuck, she’s already leakin’ all over the table,” Osamu said. His hand moved faster. “Finger yerself fer us.”

“Fuck,” you hissed as you slipped two fingers in your tight hole. Atsumu threw his head back before lazily looking back at you.

“Feel good?” Atsumu asked. You nodded and moaned desperately.

“Imagine how much better it’d feel if it were my fingers in ya,” Osamu said. He squeezed around the base of his cock and groaned. You thrusted your fingers deeper as he fisted his cock.

“Please,” you whimpered. “Want you to touch me.”

“Hear that, Tsumu?” Osamu asked. “Lil slut wants me t’ touch her cunt.”

“Fuck you,” Atsumu growled. “I’d get her off faster and better than ya any day o’ the week.”

“Oh, yeah?” Osamu asked. “I’d have her cummin’ on my cock ‘fore I could even bottom out.”

“Fuck off,” Atsumu said, moaning as his cock twitched.

“Gonna cum already?” Osamu asked. “Like ya’d even last long enough t’ fuck her.”

You moaned loudly as your fingers scissored your walls open. Both twins snapped to face you as you threw your head back.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Osamu cooed. Your walls clenched around your fingers. “Gonna cum fer us?”

“Mm-hmm,” you hummed as your free hand squeezed your breast. You rolled your nipple between your thumb and forefinger.

“Rub yer clit,” Atsumu said. You pulled your fingers out of your cunt and rubbed them over your clit furiously.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” you cried. Your toes curled and the knot in your stomach tightened. Osamu groaned, pumping his cock at the same pace as your fingers.

“Wanna see ya cum,” Osamu said. “Cum fer me.”

You cried out as your vision went spotty and your eyes rolled back into your head. Your walls clenched around nothing as your juices gushed out, running down your skin into a puddle on the table.

“Fuck, come ‘ere,” Atsumu said. You stood up from the table, legs wobbling beneath you. “On yer knees.”

Atsumu stood up as you sank to your knees in front of him.

“Gonna cum all over that face o’ yers,” Atsumu grunted, jerking his cock quickly. You opened your mouth and let your tongue hang out, waiting patiently for him to cum. “That’s a good girl.”

Atsumu moaned as the first spurt of cum hit your tongue. He slowly pumped his cock as he covered your face with his cum. He breathed heavily as the last spurt of cum landed on your cheek.

You swallowed the cum on your tongue, licking your lips as Atsumu pulled his phone out.

“Hang yer tongue out again,” he ordered, pointing his phone’s camera towards you. “Now, that’s a sight. That’s lock screen material.”

You stuck your tongue out, looking up at Atsumu. He grabbed your tongue, pulling it out further. He let go, shoving three, long fingers down your throat. You gagged, grabbing his wrist.

“Next time, I’ll gag ya on my cock,” he said. “Wouldn’t ya like that, princess?”

You nodded as your eyes watered. He pulled his fingers out and lightly slapped your face twice.

“That’s my cockwhore,” he said, endearingly.

“My turn,” Osamu said. He grabbed your arm and yanked you towards him. You yelped as your knees slid painfully over the rough carpet.

Osamu was still seated, stroking his thick cock with your underwear around his hand.

“Come ‘ere,” Osamu said, pulling you up. He pulled you into his lap. He spread your legs over his and grabbed your hips as his cock slotted between you folds. You moaned as the tip of his cock hit your clit with every thrust he made.

“Fuck me,” you moaned, grabbing onto his forearms.

“Ya want my cock?” He asked, slowly grinding it against your wet folds. You nodded. “Just the tip.”

Osamu reached down and lined his cock up with your entrance. The fat, mushroomed head popped past the tight ring of muscles, resting just inside your walls. You moaned and ground against him, wanting him deeper.

“Ah, ah, I said just the tip,” Osamu said. He squeezed your hips painfully as he guided you along the tip of his cock. You whined as the tip went in and out of you.

“More, more,” you begged. Osamu shook his head and reached around you, rubbing your clit.

“‘M gonna make ya cum on my cock, okay, sweetheart?” Osamu asked. You nodded desperately.

Atsumu snapped another picture of your fucked out face as you leaned your head back on Osamu’s shoulder.

“Get a picture of her cunt,” Osamu said. Atsumu held the camera down in front of your cunt, snapping pictures as the head of Osamu’s cock teased you. Atsumu flashed the pictures to you and Osamu.

“Now that’s lock screen worthy,” Osamu said. “Send that to me.”

The picture was lewd. Osamu’s fingers spreading you out, revealing your swollen clit and the head of his cock halfway in you. You moaned.

“Gonna cum?” Osamu asked. You nodded, digging your nails into his forearms. Your legs shook as Atsumu pushed them further apart.

You cried out as Osamu slapped his cock against your clit. He shoved the head back in your walls before they clamped down on him. You came hard, juices squirting out of you, making a mess on Osamu’s thighs. He groaned as your cum leaked down his cock, covering his balls.

He ground against you as cum shot out of his cock, part of it filling you up before he pulled out, letting the rest of it land on your used pussy.

“That’s a picture worth taking,” Atsumu said, snapping a photo of your cum covered cunt as your chest heaved.

Osamu moved your legs together, reaching down and tugging your panties up. He stood you up on wobbly legs and pulled your panties into place over your cunt.

“I wanna see my cum still on ya later when ya touch yerself,” Osamu said. You nodded. “Now, what do ya say since we so graciously helped ya with yer chemistry? And we even rewarded ya so nicely.”

“Thank you,” you said, looking down at your feet.

“Thank you, what?” Atsumu asked. You looked up at him.

“Thank you, sir,” you mumbled. Atsumu smiled.

“What about Samu?” He asked.

“Thank you…” You paused and your face heated up at your thought. You’d almost called him daddy. He’d never let you live it down if you did.

“G’head, sweetheart, say it,” Osamu said, smirking.

“Thank you, daddy,” you said, quietly.

“Good girl,” he said, patting your head like a dog. “Now get dressed, I don’t wanna see yer slutty body anymore.”

Osamu pushed you down to your knees before turning away from you and dressing himself. You glared at him as you stood back up, pulling on your skirt. You wiped your face clean on your jacket after putting on your bra and shirt, and shoved it in your bag.

Osamu shoved his sweater into your arms.

“I don’t want our cumdump catching a cold,” he said. “Who else is gonna take our loads like a good girl?”

Any girl on the campus given half the chance, you thought. You stayed silent as you tugged the oversized sweater over your head. You slung your bag over your shoulder, grabbing your laptop and textbook.

Atsumu opened the door, pushing you out of it before the twins followed you out of the library.

“Yer knees are bleedin’,” Atsumu sneered as you stepped out of the library. You glanced down. Your knees were red from scraping against the carpet and they were indeed bleeding a little bit.

“Everyone’s gonna know ya were on yer knees for us,” Osamu said. He and Atsumu laughed as you dug in your bag for something to wipe the blood away with. Atsumu pushed you onto a bench before kneeling down in front of you, holding a napkin and a bottle of water in his hands. You didn’t say anything as he cleaned your knees off. You just stared at the wind ruffling his blond hair. Osamu silently handed him two bandages. Atsumu carefully placed the bandages on your knees before Osamu grabbed your hand and jerked you up. You stumbled into him. He pushed you away, never dropping your hand.

“Come on, let’s get ya to yer dorm before ya hurt somethin’ else,” Osamu said, glaring down at you. He held your hand tighter as you tried to pull it away.

“I don’t need you to walk me to my dorm,” you said, glaring at them as Osamu pulled you along.

“Stop fuckin’ yappin’,” Atsumu said. You flipped him off.

“Fuck you,” you snapped. He flipped your skirt up, flashing the people behind you your bare ass. “Atsumu!”

“What a slut, wearin’ those panties with such a short skirt,” Osamu said. He looked back, glaring at the guy behind you. “Bet ya like havin’ guys look at ya.”

“Let me go!” You exclaimed, pulling your hand away from him. “Fuck you!”

You hugged your laptop and textbook to your chest as you stormed away from the twins.

“Hey, if ya pass yer chemistry quiz, we’ll fuck ya next time!” Osamu called, smirking.

You flipped them off before running towards your dorm.

#samu thoughts #tsumu thoughts #miya thoughts #miya osamu x reader x miya atsumu #atsumu miya smut #atsumu miya x reader #miya osamu imagines #miya osamu x reader #miya osamu smut #osamu miya x reader #osamu miya smut #miya atsumu smut #miya atsumu x reader #miya atsumu #miya osamu #haikyuu smut #tw:bullying #tw:degradation

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woman-loving · 3 years

Text

Lesbian Unintelligibility in Pre-1989 Poland

Selection from ""No one talked about it": The Paradoxes of Lesbian Identity in pre-1989 Poland, by Magdalena Staroszczyk, in Queers in State Socialism: Cruising 1970s Poland, eds. Tomasz Basiuk and Jędrzej Burszta, 2021

The question of lesbian visibility is pertinent today because of the limited number of lesbian-oriented activist events and cultural representations. But it presents a major methodological problem when looking at the past. That problem lies in an almost complete lack of historical sources, something partly mended with oral history interviews, but also in an epistemological dilemma. How can we talk about lesbians when they did not exist as a recognizable category? What did their (supposed) non-existence mean? And should we even call those who (supposedly) did not exist “lesbians”?

To illustrate this problem, let me begin with excerpts from an interview I conducted for the CRUSEV project [a study of queer cultures in the 1970s]. My interlocutor is a lesbian woman born in the 1950s, who lived in Cracow most of her life:

“To this very day I have a problem with my brothers, as I cannot talk to them about this. They just won’t do it, I would like to talk, but. . . . They have this problem, they lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic, because they were raised in that reality [when] no one talked about it. It was a taboo. It still is. ... I was so weak, unable to take initiative, lacking a concept of my own life—all this testifies to the oppression of homosexual persons, who do not know how to live, have no support from [others], no information or knowledge learned at school, or from a psychologist. What did I do? I searched in encyclopaedias for the single entry, “homosexuality.” What did I learn? That I was a pervert. What did it do to me? It only hurt me, no? Q: Was the word lesbian in use? Only as a slur. Even my mother used it as an offensive word. When she finally figured out my orientation, she said the word a few times. With hatred. Hissing the word at me.”

The woman offers shocking testimony of intense and persistent hostility towards a family member—sister, daughter—who happens to be a lesbian. The brothers and the mother are so profoundly unable to accept her sexuality that they cannot speak about it at all, least of all rationally. The taboo has remained firmly in place for decades. How was it maintained? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we access the emotional reality that it caused? The quotes all highlight the theme of language, silence, and something unspeakable. Tabooization implies a gap in representation, and the appropriate word cannot be spoken but merely hissed out with hatred.

Popular discourse and academic literature alike address this problem under the rubric of “lesbian invisibility” (Mizielińska 2001). I put forward a different conceptual frame, proposing to address the question of lesbian identity in pre-1989 Poland not in terms of visibility versus invisibility, but instead in terms of cultural intelligibility versus unintelligibility. The former concepts, which have a rich history in discussions of pre-emancipatory lesbian experience, presume an already existing identity that is self-evident to the person in question. They assume the existence of a person who thinks of herself as a lesbian. One then proceeds to ask whether or not this lesbian was visible as such to others, that is, whether others viewed her as the lesbian she knew she was. Another assumption behind this framing is that the woman in question wished to be visible although this desired visibility had been denied her. These are some of the essentializing assumptions inscribed in the concept of (in)visibility. Their limitation is that they only allow us to ask whether or not the lesbian is seen for who she feels she is and wishes to be seen by others.

By contrast, (un)intelligibility looks first to the social construction of identity, especially to the constitutive role of language. To think in those terms is to ask under what conditions same-sex desire between women is culturally legible as constitutive of an identity. So, instead of asking if people saw lesbians for who they really were, we will try to understand the specific epistemic conditions which made some women socially recognizable to others, and also to themselves, as “lesbians.” This use of the concept “intelligibility” is analogous to its use by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, as she explains why gender conformity is key to successful personhood[...].

For Butler, cultural intelligibility is thus an aspect of the social norm, as it corresponds to “a normative ideal.” It is one of the conditions of coherence and continuity requisite for successful personhood. In a similar vein, to say that lesbians in the People’s Republic of Poland were not culturally intelligible is of course not to claim that there were no women engaged in same-sex romantic and erotic relationships—such a conclusion would be absurd, as well as untrue. It is, rather, to suggest that “lesbian” was not a category of personhood available or, for that matter, desirable to many nonheteronormative women. The word was not in common use and it did not signify to them the sort of person they felt they were. Nor was another word readily available, as interlocutors’ frequent periphrases strongly suggest, for example, “I cannot talk to them about this. ... They ... lace up their mouths when any reference is made to this topic” (my emphases).

Interviews conducted with women for the CRUSEV project are filled with pain due to rejection. So are the interviews conducted by Anna Laszuk, whose Dziewczyny, wyjdźcie z szafy (Come Out of the Closet, Girls! 2006 ) was a pioneering collection of herstories which gave voice to non-heteronormative Polish women of different ages, including those who remember the pre-1989 era. Lesbian unintelligibility is arguably a major theme in the collection. The pain caused by the sense of not belonging expressed by many illustrates that being unintelligible can be harmful. At the same time, unintelligibility had some practical advantages. The main among them was relative safety in a profoundly heteronormative society. As long as things went unnamed, a women-loving woman was not in danger of stigmatization or social ostracism.

Basia, born in 1939 and thus the oldest among Laszuk’s interviewees, offers a reassuring narrative in which unintelligibility has a positive valence:

“I cannot say a bad word about my parents. They knew but they did not comment. . . . My parents never asked me personal questions, never exerted any kind of pressure on me to get married. They were people of great culture, very understanding, and they quite simply loved me. They would meet my various girlfriends, but these were never referred to as anything but “friends” (przyjaciółki). Girls had it much easier than boys because intimacy between girls was generally accepted. Nobody was surprised that I showed up with a woman, invited her home, held her hand, or that we went on trips together.” (Laszuk 2006, 27)

The gap between visceral knowing and the impossibility of naming is especially striking in this passage. The parents “knew” and Basia knew that they knew, but they did not comment, ask questions, or make demands, and Basia clearly appreciates their silence as a favour. To her, it was a form of politeness, discreetness, perhaps even protectiveness. The silence was, in fact, a form of affectionate communication: “they quite simply loved me.”

Another of Laszuk’s interviewees is Nina, born around 1945 and 60 years old at the time of the interview. With a certain nostalgia, Nina recalls the days when certain things were left unnamed, suggesting that there is erotic potential in the unintelligibility of women’s desire. Laszuk summarizes her views:

“Nina claims that those times certainly carried a certain charm: erotic relationships between women, veiled with understatement and secrecy, had a lot of beauty to them. Clandestine looks were exchanged above the heads of people who remained unaware of their meaning, as women understood each other with half a gesture, between words. Nowadays, everything has a name, everything is direct.” (Laszuk 2006, 33)

A similar equation between secrecy and eroticism is drawn by the much younger Izabela Filipiak, trailblazing author of Polish feminist fiction in the 1990s and the very first woman in Poland to publicly come out as lesbian, in an interview for the Polish edition of Cosmopolitan in 1998. Six years later, Filipiak suggested a link between things remaining unnamed and erotic pleasure, and admitted to a certain nostalgia for this pre-emancipatory formula of lesbian (non)identity. Her avowed motivation was not the fear of stigmatization but a desire for erotic intensity:

“When love becomes passion in which I lose myself, I stop calculating, stop comparing, no longer anchor it in social relations, or some norm. I simply immerse myself in passion. My feelings condition and justify everything that happens from that point on. I do not reflect upon myself nor dwell on stigma because my feeling is so pure that it burns through and clears away everything that might attach to me as a woman who loves women.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Filipiak acknowledges the contemporary, “postmodern” (her word) lesbian identity which requires activism and entails enumerating various kinds of discrimination. But paradoxically—considering that she is the first public lesbian in Poland—she speaks with much more enthusiasm about the “modernist lesbians” described by Baudelaire:

“They chose the path of passion. Secrecy and passion. Of course, their passion becomes a form of consent to remain secret, to stay invisible to others, but this is not unambivalent. I once talked to such an “oldtimer” who lived her entire life in just that way and she protested very strongly when I made a remark about hiding. Because, she says, she did not hide anything, she drove all around the city with her beloved and, of course, everyone knew. Yes, everyone knew, but nobody remembers it now, there is no trace of all that.” (Kulpa and Warkocki 2004)

Cultural unintelligibility causes the gap between “everyone knew” and “nobody remembers” but it is also the source of excitement and pleasure. For Filipiak’s “old-timer” and her predecessors, Baudelaire’s modernist lesbians, the evasion, or rejection, of identity and the maintaining of secrecy is the path of passion. Crucially, these disavowals of identity mobilize a discourse of freedom rather than hiding, entrapment, or staying in the closet. The lack of a name is interpreted as an unmooring from language and a liberation from its norms.

Needless to say, cultural unintelligibility may also lead to profound torment and self-hatred. In the concept of nationhood generated by nationalists and by the Catholic Church in Poland, lesbians (seen stereotypically) are double outsiders whose exclusion from language is vital.[1] A repentant homosexual woman named Katarzyna offers her testimony in a Catholic self-help manual addressing those who wish to be cured of homosexuality. (It is irrelevant for my purpose whether the testimony is authentic; my interest is in the discursive construction of lesbian identity as literally impossible and nonexistent.) Katarzyna speaks about her search for love, her profound sense of guilt and her disgust with herself. The word “lesbian” is never used; her homosexuality is framed as confusion and as straying from her true desire for God. The origin of the pain is the woman’s unintelligibility to herself:

“Only I knew how much despair there was in my life on account of being different. First, there was the sense of being torn apart when I realized how different my desires were from the appearance of my body. Despite the storm of homosexual desire, I was still a woman. Then, the question: What to do with myself? How to live?” (Huk 1996, 121)

A woman cannot love other women—the subject knows this. We can speculate that her knowledge is due to her Catholic upbringing; she has internalized the teaching that homosexuality is a sin, and thus untrue and not real. The logic of the confession is overdetermined: the only way for her to become intelligible to herself is to abandon same-sex desire and turn to God, and through him to men. Church language thus frames homosexuality as chaos: it is a disordered space where no appropriate language can obtain. Within this frame, unintelligibility is anything but erotic. It is rather an instrument of shaming and, once internalized, a symptom of shame.

For many, the experience of unintelligibility is moored in intense heteronormativity, without regard to Church teachings or the language of national belonging. Struggling with the choice between social intelligibility available to straights and leading an authentic life outside the realm of intelligibility, one CRUSEV interlocutor, aged 67, describes her youth in 1960s and 1970s:

“I always knew I was a lesbian ... and if I am one, then I will be one. Yes, in that sense. And not to live the life of a married woman, mother and so on. This life wasn’t my life at all. However, as I said, it was fine in an external sense. So calm and well-ordered: a husband, nice children, everything, everything. But it was external, and my life was not my life at all, it wasn’t me.”

She thus underscores her internal sense of dissonance, a felt incompatibility with the social role she was playing. The role model of a wife and mother was available to her, but a lesbian role model was not.

The discomfort felt at the unavailability of a role model may have had different consequences. Another CRUSEV interviewee, aged 62, describes her impulse to change her life so as to authentically experience her feelings for another woman, in contrast to that woman’s ex:

“She visited me a few times, and it was enough that I wrote something, anything ... [and] she would get on the train and travel across the country. There were no telephones then, during martial law. Regardless of anything, she would be there. And at one point I realized that I ... damn, I loved her. ... She broke up with her previous girlfriend very violently—this may interest you—because it turned out that the girl was so terribly afraid of being exposed and of some unimaginable consequences that she simply ran away.”

The fear of exposure, critically addressed by the interlocutor, was nonetheless something she, too, experienced. She goes on to speak of “hiding a secret” and “stifling” her emotions.

A concern with leading an inauthentic life resurfaces in the account of the afore-quoted woman, aged 67:

“I couldn’t reveal my secret to anyone. The only person who knew was my friend in Cracow. I led such a double life, I mean. ... It is difficult to say if this was a life, because it was as if I had my inner spirituality and my inner world, entirely secret, but outside I behaved like all the other girls, so I went out with some boys. ... It was always deeply suppressed by me and I was always fighting with myself. I mean, I fell in love [with women] and did everything to fall out of love [laughter]. On and on again.”

Her anxiety translates into self-pathologizing behaviour:

“In 1971 I received my high school diploma and I was already . . . in a relationship of some years with my high school girlfriend. . . . But because we both thought we were abnormal, perverted or something, somehow we wanted to be cured, and so she was going to college to Cracow, and I to Poznań. We engaged in geographic therapy, so to speak.”

The desire to “be cured” from homosexuality recurs in a number of interviews. Sometimes it has a factual dimension, as interlocutors describe having undergone psychotherapy and even reparative therapy—of course, to no avail.

Others decide to have a relationship with a woman after years spent in relationships with men. Referring to her female partner of 25 years, who had previously been married to a man, one of my interlocutors suggests that her partner had been disavowing her homosexual desires for many years before the two women’s relationship began: “the truth is that H. had struggled with it for more than 20 years and she was probably not sure what was going on.” Despite this presumed initial confusion, the women’s relationship had already lasted for more than 25 years at the time I conducted the interview.

Recognizing one’s homosexual desires did not necessarily have to be difficult or shocking. It was not for this woman, aged 66 at the time of the interview:

“It was obvious to me. I didn’t, no, no, I didn’t suppress it, I knew that [I was going], “Oh, such a nice girl, I like this one, with this one I want to be close, with that one I want to talk longer, with that one I want to spend time, with that one I want, for example, to embrace her neck or grab her hand”.”

Rather, what came as a shock was the unavailability of any social role or language corresponding to this felt desire that came as a shock. The woman continues:

“It turned out that I couldn’t talk to anyone about it, that I couldn’t tell anyone. I realized this when I grew up and watched my surroundings, family, friends, society. I saw that this topic was not there! If it’s not there, how can I get it out of myself? I wasn’t so brave.”

The tabooization of homosexuality—its unintelligibility—is a recurring thread in these accounts; what varies is the extent to which it marred the subjects’ self-perception.

#lgbtq history #poland #lesbian history #unintelligibility #lesbian unintelligibility #this might be deleted in the future so read it while you can

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miswaken · 3 years

Text

excerpts from House of Leaves that I just think are neat + inform my portrayal of Alice

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

Of course, [Will] Navidson’s pastoral take on his family’s move hardly reflects the far more complicated and significant impetus behind the project -- namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion Karen Green. While both have been perfectly content not to marry, Navidson’s constant assignments abroad have lead to increased alienation and untold personal difficulties. After nearly eleven years of constant departures and brief returns, Karen has made it clear that Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his family. Ultimately unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into a subject for documentation.

None of this, however, is immediately apparent. In fact it requires some willful amnesia of the more compelling sequences ahead, if we are to detect the subtle valences operating between Will and Karen; or as Donna York phrased it, “the way they talk to each other, they way they look after each other, and of course the way they don’t.”

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

In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway whish has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall. Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness towards the faint flicker of light within...

This is the first sign of Karen’s chronic disability. Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat.

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

Navidson was no longer around, except of course Karen still saw him every day and in a way she had never seen him before -- not as a projection of her own insecurities and demons but just as Will Navidson, in flickering light, flung up by a 16mm projector on a paint-white wall.

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

Leslie Stern, M.D.: More importantly Karen, what does it mean to you?

Funny how out of this impressive array of modern day theorists, scientists, writers, and others, it is Karen’s therapist who asks, or rather forces, the most significant question. Thanks to her, Karen goes on to fashion another short piece in which she, surprisingly enough, never mentions the house, let alone any of the comments made by the glitterati.

It is an extraordinary twist. Not once are those multiplying hallways ever addressed. Not once does Karen dwell on their darkness and cold. She produces six minutes of film that has absolutely nothing to do with that place. Instead her eye (and her heart) turn to what matters most to her about Ash Tree Lane; what in her own words... “that wicked place stole from me.”

...Karen gives her piece the somewhat faltering title A Brief History Of Who I Love...

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

There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as a perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs. The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love, and colour.

By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place was not. She also discovered what she needed more than anything else. She stopped seeing Fowler, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, selling the house, and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliations.

Of course she had no idea what that would entail.

Or how far she would have to go.

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

“He’s still alive,” she tells Reston over the phone. “I heard him last night. I couldn’t understand what he said. But I know I heard his voice.”

Reston arrives the next day and stays until midnight, never hearing a thing. He seems more than a little concerned about Karen’s mental health.

“If he is still in there Karen,” Reston says quietly. “He’s been there for over a month. I can’t see how there’s any way he could survive.”

But a few hours after Reston leaves, Karen smiles again, apparently catching somewhere inside her the faint voice of Navidson. This happens over and over again, whether late at night or in the middle of the day. Sometimes Karen calls out to him, sometimes she just wanders from room to room, pushing her ear against walls or floors. Then on the afternoon of May 10th, she finds in the children’s bedroom, born out of nowhere, Navidson’s clothes, remnants of his pack and sleeping bag, and scattered across the floor, from corner to corner, cartridges of film, boxes of 16mm, and easily a dozen video tapes.

She immediately calls Reston and tells him what has happened, asking him to drive over as soon as he can. Then she locates an AC adapter, plugs in a Hi 8 and begins rewinding one of the newly discovered tapes.

The angle from the room mounted camcorder does not provide a view of her Hi 8 screen. Only Karen’s face is visible. Unfortunately, for some reason, she is also slightly out of focus. In fact the only thing in focus is the wall behind her where some of Daisy and Chad’s drawings still hang. The shot lasts an uncomfortable fifteen seconds, until abruptly that immutable surface disappears. In less than a blink, the white wall along with the drawings secured with yellowing scotch tape vanishes into an inky black.

Since Karen faces the opposite direction, she fails to notice the change. Instead her attention remains fixed on the Hi 8 which has just finished rewinding the tape. But even as she pushes play, the yawn of dark does not waver. In fact it almost seems to be waiting for her, for the moment when she will finally divert her attention from the tiny screen and catch sight of the horror looming up behind her, which is of course exactly what she does when she finds out that the video tape shows...

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

nothing more now than the mere dark. The tape is blank.

Finally when Karen does turn around to discover the real emptiness waiting behind her, she does not scream. Instead her chest heaves, powerless for a moment to take anything in or expel anything out. Oddly enough as she starts to retreat from the children’s bedroom, it almost looks as if something catchers her attention. A few minutes later, she returns with a halogen flashlight and steps towards the edge.

Hanan Jabara suggests Karen heard something, though there is nothing even remotely like a sound on the Hi 8. Carlos Ellsberg agrees with Jabara: “Karen stops because of something she hears.” Only he qualifies this statement by adding, “the sound is obviously imagined. Another example of how the mind, any mind, consistently seeks to impose itself upon the abyss.”

As everyone knows, Karen stands there on the brink for several minutes, pointing her flashlight into the darkness and calling out for Navidson. When she finally does step inside, she takes no deep breath and makes no announcement. She just steps forward and disappears behind the black curtain. A second later that cold hollow disappears too, replaced by the wall, exactly as it was before, except for one thing: all the children’s drawings are gone.

Karen’s action inspired Paul Auster to conjure up a short internal monologue tracing the directions of her thoughts. Donna Tartt also wrote an inventive portrayal of Karen’s dilemma. Except in Tartt’s version, instead of stepping into darkness, Karen returns to New York and marries a wealthy magazine publisher. Purportedly there even exists an opera based on The Navidson Record, written from Karen’s perspective, with this last step into the void serving as the subject for the final aria.

Whatever ultimately allows Karen to overcome her fears, there is little doubt her love for Navidson is the primary catalyst. Her desire to embrace him as she has never done before defeats the memories of that dark well... In this moment, she displays the restorative power of what Erich Fromm terms the development of “symbiotic relationships” through personal courage.

Critic Guyon Keller argues that the role of vision is integral to Karen’s success:

I believe Karen could never have crossed that line had she not first made those two remarkable cinematic moment: What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love. By relearning to see Navidson, she saw what he wasn’t and consequently began to see herself much more clearly.

Esteemed Italian translator Sophia Blynn takes Keller’s comments a little further:

The most important light Karen carried into that place was the memory of Navidson. And Navidson was no different. Though it’s commonly assumed his last [recorded] word was “care” or the start of “careful,” I would argue differently. I believe this utterance is really just the first syllable of the very name on which his mind and his heart had finally come to rest. His only hope, his only meaning: “Karen.”

Regardless of what finally enabled her to walk across that threshold, forty-nine minutes later a neighbor saw Karen crying on the front lawn, a pink ribbon in her hair, Navidson cradled in her lap.

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

As to what happened after Karen disappeared from view, the only existing account comes from a short interview conducted by a college journalist from William & Mary:

Karen: As soon as I walked in there, I started shivering. It was so cold and dark. I turned around to see where I was but where I’d come from was gone. I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to die. But somehow I managed to keep moving. I kept putting one foot in front of the other until I found him.

Q: You knew he was there?

Karen: No, but that’s what I was thinking. And then he was there, right at my feet, no clothes on and all curled up. His hand was white as ice. [She holds back the tears.] When I saw him like that it didn’t matter anymore where I was. I’d never felt that, well, free before.

[Long pause]

Q: What happened then?

Karen: I held him. He was alive. He made a sound when I cradled his head in my arms. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first but then I realized the flashlight was hurting his eyes. So I turned it off and held him in the darkness.

[Another long pause]

Q: How did you get him out of the house?

Karen: It just dissolved.

Q: Dissolved? What do you mean?

Karen: Like a ad dream. We were in pitch blackness and then I saw, no... actually my eyes were closed. I felt this warm, sweet air on my face, and then I opened my eyes and I could see trees and grass. I thought to myself, “We’ve died. We’ve died and this is where you go after you die.” But it turned out to be just our front yard.

Q: You’re saying the house dissolved?

Karen: [No response]

Q: How’s that possible? It’s still there, isn’t it?

END OF INTERVIEW

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

In Passion for Pity and Other Recipes For Disaster (London: Greenhill Books, 1996) Helmut Muir cried: “They both live. They even get married. It’s a happy ending.”

Which is true. Both Karen and Will Navidson survive their ordeal and they do exchange conjugal vows in Vermont. Of course, is it really possible to look at Navidson’s ravaged face, the patch covering his left eye, the absence of a hand, the crutch wedged under his armpit, and call it a “happy” ending? Even putting aside the physical cost, what about the unseen emotional trauma which Muir so casually dismisses?

The Navidsons may have left the house, they may have even left Virginia, but they will never be able to leave the memory of that place.

#ʀᴇғᴇʀᴇɴᴄᴇ #house of leaves at least partially inspired the game #there's even a neat little promotional arg with a v similar name!#'this house of dreams'#basic summary of one layer of the story: couple with a rocky relationship buy a house and endless dark rooms and hallways start appearing #karen is claustrophobic and hates it -- navidson goes exploring and gets other people involved #he gets obsessed w the house and eventually goes into one of the rooms and doesn't come out #karen goes back to nyc with the kids kinda hating his guts #eventually makes a movie of clips of navidson's film about his life from childhood through their relationship #(v similar to alice's movie from american nightmare!!!)#realize she does actually love this idiot and goes back to the house and faces her fears to get him out :)#give me alice facing her fears :) to get alan back somehow :))) that is all i want #and that is why i want to take inspo from the book lol #anyway this is mostly for my own reference everyone else just look away

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the-outsiders-blogg · 4 years

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Can you write an imagine where Dally is flirting/ teasing Cherry Valence and gets a bit get touchy/ tries to make her laugh since she puts on a tough face around him? Thanks 😊 (love your imagines btw!)

Sure bby and I’m so glad you like my writing! Thank you for reading :)

Crossing paths (cherry x dally)

Dallas tries win over Cherry Valence.

Cherry Valence always put on a tough face around Dallas Winston. After all, Dallas was different than the guys she was used to. He was rough, harsh, and not afraid of the law. But, she couldn’t deny that Dallas had a certain charm that soc guys just didn’t have. She knew deep down that she could fall for him.

Dallas was from the wrong side of town. He ran off middle schoolers and shoplifted for fun. He never really thought he’d end up with a girl like Cherry; he just messed around with them for fun. However, Cherry Valence seemed to be different. She didn’t look down on greasers like other soc girls. She helped them when they needed it. She treated them like human beings. And he didn’t run her off after giving her a hard time once or twice.

Cherry Valence was walking home alone; she had ditched her ride again. Dallas was walking in the opposite direction as her, and their paths were just about to cross.

Dally grinned ear to ear when he saw Cherry. He gave a low whistle and turned to walk in the same direction as her. “Where you headed, sweetheart?”

“None of your business, hood,” she said in a tough voice.

“Ah, lighten up,” said Dallas, pulling at a strand of Cherry’s hair. “I always liked redheads.”

“Get your hands off of me!” said Cherry quickly, batting away Dally’s hand.

“Oh c’mon, Cherry. You help out my friends and you act as this little spy, I mean you’d think we’d be friends,” said Dallas.

Cherry didn’t respond. She didn’t want to talk to Dallas because she knew she could fall in love with him. And she knew Dallas wasn’t the type of guy you want to fall in love with.

“What, you into Soda or something?” asked Dallas.

“No!” said Cherry. “No, not Soda.”

“What, he’s not your type? How bout Darry?”

“Darry’s a great guy,” said Cherry softly. “But I’m not into him.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty uptight,” said Dallas. “Where are we going, anyhow?”

“I am going to my friends house,” said Cherry. “I don’t know where you are going.”

“Oh, are we going to Marcia’s house? I love Marcia! She’s the one who uh-“

Cherry stopped herself from laughing. “You’ve never been to school, how would you know how Marcia?”

“I’ve seen her around, she owns a corvette, doesn’t she?” said Dallas.

Cherry laughed. “No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t even have a car. And we’re not going to Marcia’s.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Dallas with a grin. Cherry had said we. “So, where are we going?”

Cherry stopped and turned to face Dallas. “Dallas, I don’t know if we’re good for each other. I mean, I’m a soc, you’re a greaser, I mean-“

“Slow down there, Cherry Cola, I was just asking where we’re going,” said Dallas with a grin.

Cherry paused, and looked at her shoes to prevent Dallas from seeing her face turning red. “We’re going to the Curtis house,” she said turning back around.

“Alright then. The Curtis house.”

🥺🥺🥺omg thank you @ anon for requesting this and thank you at everyone who’s readingg

#the outsiders #the outsiders imagine #the outsiders fanfiction #the outsiders fanfic #sodapop curtis #dallas winston #dallas winston imagine #dally #dally winston #darry curtis #cherry valence #cherry valence x dallas winston #dallas winston x cherry valence #cherry valance imagine #cherry valance #dallas winston x cherry valance

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vorcotec · 4 years

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aidestown brainstorming:

like i said in the initial ramble it’s not that i think aides is incapable of wrongdoing, just that her perspective is going to be different, and how she justifies wrongdoing will be different.

her issue is not about buying, as such, persephone or eurydice and wanting them or any other woman to feel obligated and grateful to her; and, again, she doesn’t have the patriarch’s desire to amass material things as a replacement for an ability to create. money is essentially meaningless to her, always has been.

her issue is about protection and control, specifically. i’ve spoken in the past about how aides, as a character, is much more defined by trauma than any other version of jane, and how obsessive she is about controlling herself and her environment because of the initial shock and devastation of regurgitation and her early, repeated, deeply harmful exposure to stimulation she couldn’t endure. that’s why Classic Aides is covered from head to foot in a Noise Cancelling Weighted Sensory Blanket Cloak that keeps everything and everyone OUT and away from herself at all times.

this isn’t to imply that she doesn’t need her accommodations in that respect, that her sensory experiences aren’t real, but that she compensates for them the way she does because of how much it hurt, because no one protected her or knew she needed protection at first. so she had to do it herself and do it Muchly.

this is also why aides doesn’t have casual sex btw 😂 and why she couldn’t have that “casting couch”/affair subtext with eurydice even if she tried. she can’t let people close because she typically assumes she can’t trust them to touch her or even be touched by her.

off the top of my head, here are some things that have different valences, meanings, weights, etc. given the differences between aides and hades:

the paternalistic dimensions of the role vanish, given that aides is a woman and would be a mother to “my children, my children,” not a father. this isn’t to say that she isn’t controlling and harmful to them, but that, again, it’s a different motivation and justification for that control.

also, yes, she is masculine in appearance, but i’ve spoken before about why i don’t see jane as a character as “masc” or “butch” or even really “futch” and how i am very leery about playing into ideas of autism as “extreme male brain” by essentially denying jane her gender/maternity on the basis of her not liking makeup. so yes, she is a mother, not a father to “her children.”

more emphasis on the wall that surrounds aidestown, its protection and shield, and how no one gets in or out; less emphasis on the “golden scale” and the “chromium throne.“ more emphasis on owning people and less on owning things, and how when you’re in the house of aides, under her wing, you will never leave again.

“hey little songbird” loses its, uh, old man in a strip club looking for his next sugar baby vibe

she does NOT have the following lines in chant II: Take it from a man no longer young If you want to hold a woman, son Hang a chain around her throat Made of many carat gold Shackle her from wrist to wrist With sterling silver bracelets Fill her pockets full of stones Precious ones, diamonds, Bind her with a golden band Take it from an old man like... not to belabor the point but this is one of the show’s nods at gender relations and misogyny and it’s just not aides.

also, this is maybe more of a personal interpretation/aside, but given the STRONG subtext (at the very least, in r/eeve c/arney’s performance) that orpheus is autistic, he and aides are even stronger parallels than the ones already in the show between him and hades.

some other little things that are just nitpicky bits that come to me when i think about aidestown:

hades makes his first intra-narrative appearance in sunglasses. aides’ sunglasses are these weird steampunky doodads, because i reject hades’ wannabe-leatherdaddy vibes.

obviously this is not something that could be reflected on a stage, but aides never walks into or out of a room(/on or off the stage). she just disappears and reappears.

hades wears silver snakeskin sleeve garters. aides’ are gold. where he has a silver shirt and silver pinstripes on his suit, hers are white. he wears a vest with a red back, but hers has a purple back.

she wears a spider brooch on the lapel of her suit jacket.

hades has a brick wall tattoo sleeve on his left forearm. aides has a floral vine tattoo sleeve instead.

what’s disturbing about aidestown is that it’s silent and you can’t hear any of the activity or people if you’re not immediately in the middle of it. it’s not just like... depressing, gloomy, and exploited; it’s a very creepy place to be.

#long post /#∴ headcanon tag.#∴ show them the crack and they'll tear down the wall ( aidestown verse. )#there's a tag now for people to blacklist fhdgmgh

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daggerzine · 6 years

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Awaking Up Together- Ben Crum discusses the different lives of Great Lakes.

It was the S/T debut in 2000 that was released on Kindercore that initially got me interested. I loved most everything on that label so when a cd by a band called Great Lakes popped into my po box I was excited to check it out. Like a few of the others under the Elephant 6 moniker, (Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, etc.) it exuded a sort-of grandiose 60’s pop charm with bits of psychedelia and some beautiful noise ala Pavement, too. Other records followed (including the brand spankin’ new, and very good, Dreaming Too Close to the Edge) and along the way Crum lended his skills to bands such as Ladybug Transistor and the Essex Green. The more recent Great Lakes records have been a bit darker, more guitar heavy (less sunshine pop) than previous records but still with excellent songwriting and an overflow of hooks. I wanted to know a bit about Crum and what made him tick and when I shot some questions his way he was more than happy to expound and expand on his life from the early days until present day. If you’ve never heard the music of Great Lakes then by all means check out one of their many releases, each one with its own distinct personality. Read on dear fans….

L-R- Kevin Shea, Suzanne Nienaber, Kenny Wachtel, Chris Talsness and Ben Crum

Where did you grow up?

Mt. Airy, Maryland, though I finished high school in suburban Atlanta.

What was the first band that made you take notice?

The Descendents was really the first band that I was in to. I mean, I was discovering classic rock at the same time, but that 80s punk stuff was big for me. I came to them through skateboarding videos. They’re still one of my favorite bands, though I confess I haven’t kept up with their latest music. Fugazi was also an early big one for me. That first EP especially. I also loved, and still love, The Misfits.

When did you first pick up an instrument? Was it a guitar?

I was required by my mother, who played piano, to take piano lessons. She made me practice right after school. While sitting at the piano practicing my scales I could hear the other neighborhood kids playing and having fun. I found it miserable at the time. But my piano teacher let me come early to the lessons. She had a giant leather recliner and a nice stereo system with headphones. She’d let me play whatever records I wanted to listen to. That was my introduction to CCR. The main lick from “Down On the Corner” really grabbed me as a kid. That and the lead guitar part from “Up Around the Bend” had really caught my attention.

By middle school I chose to be in the school band. That lasted about one year. I think I mainly did it because I didn’t like the other options. I “played” saxophone. When I was about 14 I was watching Maryland public TV and I saw the One Night With You movie with Elvis. It’s taken from the 68 Comeback Special. I still love that stuff. I got out my mom’s old nylon string guitar and started teaching myself to play. I begged my parents to let me trade my sax for a steel string Guild acoustic. I took a few lessons, but those didn’t really take. I learned to play “Dust In the Wind” though.

What was your introduction to independent music? Was it hardcore? New wave? Something else?

I used to have a skateboard ramp in my backyard. All kinds of people would hear about it and come to my house to skate. There was an older dude who had a hardcore band and he gave me his 7 inch when I was about 15. That must’ve planted the seed in my mind that independently putting music out was something I could do. Before then, I don’t think it had occurred to me.

What was your first band? And how/when did Great Lakes come about? That was in Athens, GA, right?

It’s all kinda related, to me. The way I got started in doing music was that during breaks from college, around 92-93, I started getting together with high school friend, Dan Donahue, when we were both visiting our parents in Atlanta. We would write songs and record them on 4 track. We liked Galaxie 500/early Luna, The Flaming Lips, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr. And I remember he liked The Chickasaw Mudpuppies a lot and got me in to that stuff. He didn’t really play an instrument, though in the early days neither did I, really, so we both played whatever we could. He liked writing lyrics, though. That was his main thing. It always felt like a chore to me, and I was happy to have him be the lyricist. We called ourselves The Patty Melts. We had a song called “I’m Alive” that was kind of a fictional blues about how bad life was for the narrator, but the idea was that at least he was alive. A choice nugget of the lyrics, referring the guy’s wife, went: “ she’s a briarpatch with an eyepatch”, and later the narrator says: “…gettin’ my ass up is a damn chore.” We made a pretty cool 4 track recording of that song. I had this homemade 4 string fretless instrument that my dad and brother had built. I’ve still got it. It was made out of paneling for the body and a piece of molding for the neck. The tuners were eye screws, screwed right into the wood. I tuned it to an open chord and played slide on it with a screwdriver as the slide. So we made this Chickasaw Mudpuppies-inspired song with that. By about 94 I started visiting Dan in Athens, where he was in college, and we would write songs and try to record them. Jamey Huggins, who was then in high school but came to Athens a lot on breaks and weekends, joined us on drums. We were all really into Teenage Fanclub by that time, and one night we stayed up all night and wrote a song that we thought was so good that we had to start a band one day. Even then, I was focused on the recording. Unless we had a cool recording of a song, it was as if it almost didn’t really exist. I think we all felt that way. I still do.

Meanwhile, I was in a band in college in Birmingham, Alabama with some friends. We were first called a few different names that I’ve forgotten, but when we started playing shows we were calling ourselves Wonderock, like a superhero or something. We had a couple good songs, actually. I remember getting some encouragement from the sound guy when we played our first show at The Nick. He was a pretty grizzled old guy, Johnny Mack, and he came up to us after our set and said begrudgingly, “Well, my toe was tapping and my toe don’t lie to me…” One of the members of that band, Craig Ceravolo, moved to Athens with me in 96 and went on to play in the earliest version of Great Lakes. Another member of that band formed a band called Three Finger Cowboy. They were on Amy Ray’s label and, I think, did a tour or two opening for The Indigo Girls. After that band I had a short-lived band with Craig, Jason Hamric, and Jamey, called Alaska. Craig, Jason, and I all lived together in Southside, and Jamey had come to Birmingham to stay with us for the summer. I think we chose the name because of that line in “Stephanie Says:, “It’s such an icy feeling / It’s so cold in Alaska”. We also called ourselves Cherry Valence for a bit (this was back before there was a band called The Cherry Valence). Anyway, that band had 3 members of what would become Great Lakes in it. I tried to convince Jason Hamric to leave Birmingham and move to Athens with us, but he wasn’t into that idea. He definitely would have been in Great Lakes, though, if he had moved with us. Great player, and great guy. So, anyway, in Athens, Dan joined us as a lyricist, and we merged Alaska/Cherry Valence and Wheelie Ride and The Patty Melts and became Great Lakes. And then Great Lakes evolved over time. But it wasn’t until 2009 or so that the current iteration, the longest running consistent lineup the band has ever had, came together. But Great Lakes is really more than a band to me. It’s what I consider my life’s work as an artist.

Tell me about your tenure in both the Ladybug Transistor and the Essex Green.

Well, when I got to Athens I arrived right as the Elephant 6 thing was coalescing. The first Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control records had just come out and they blew me away. Elf Power, too. All those guys were into 4 track recording, like us, but, of course, they were way more advanced. We became friends with that whole group of people. And then, after years of recording (including really learning how to record), the first Great Lakes album came out on Kindercore/E6. Ladybug Transistor had a connection to E6. Their album The Albemarle Sound had certainly caught nearly everyone’s attention that year. I mean, if you liked Love and The Beach Boys and Van Dyke Parks’ Song Cycle and stuff like that, then that record was pretty much made for you. We loved it. That and that Lilys record that sounded like The Kinks (Better Can’t Make Your Life Better). Through E6 connections some of the people in Ladybug asked the Kindercore guys to release the first record by their other band, Essex Green. Kindercore happily did. We played a show or two together with Essex Green and Ladybug in Athens, which was fun. We hung out and kinda bonded over shared musical tastes, they way you can only really do when you’re in your 20s, it seems like. A few years later when I moved to Brooklyn they were some of the only people I knew. Jeff Baron, of both bands, immediately asked me to get together with him and Mike Barrett and play some music. We quickly realized that not only did we all love 60s psych and pop, but we also really loved old country music and the whole Flying Burrito Brothers style of country rock. Because we each knew so many country songs, and because we just loved to play, we would get together and play a lot. Mike and Jeff lived together, and had a cool little low volume set up in their apartment, and we’d hand out and play for hours, swapping instruments and trading off singing lead on all kinds of stuff. Eventually we started doing some of Mike’s originals, and Jeff and I would do some tunes. We talked about making a record, possibly of Mike’s original songs, and probably should have. But for some reason we ended up not doing that. But, like I said, we had a bunch of fun. It was also like some kind of music school for me, in a way. Jeff and Mike helped me train my ear to hear the changes, and to improvise. Previously, a live show for me had been about basically just executing what I’d written beforehand; but I came to see music differently through that experience of playing with those guys. I mean, with them, nothing ever sounded the same way twice, and I learned to love that. Then, soon after, Essex Green didn’t have a bass player for a tour they had booked, so they invited me to play. Tim Barnes (Silver Jews, Royal Trux) was on drums for the first tour or two that I did with them, and between Jeff’s great guitar playing and Tim’s incredible drumming and way of listening and responding, it was a great experience. That lineup of that band was definitely one of the best bands I ever played in. We did a tour or two with other drummers, and despite the fact that the Essex Green songs are great and I love playing with them, there came a point when I decided to bow out and focus on a new Great Lakes record, which became Diamond Times. But after that album came out Gary of Ladybug found himself without a guitarist. I guess Jeff didn’t want to do it at that point, so I started playing guitar with him. We did several tours, sometimes with Ladybug Transistor and Great Lakes on the same bill, and then we made what I call the Buckingham Kicks album together (officially titled Can’t Wait Another Day). I wanted to change the band name to Buckingham Kicks and release a self-titled debut, because the album we did was so different from previous LT albums, but Gary decided against that. The great thing about joining Ladybug Transistor, apart from playing with Gary, who is one of the better singers around, was that I got to play with longtime Ladybug drummer San Fadyl. He was another fantastic drummer, and he taught me tons as a musician. After he died tragically, my days in that band were numbered. But Gary soldiered on and made another record, and he’s still doing stuff now. I think he’ll keep making great records for a long time. I’d like to think that I’ll do more stuff together with the Essex Green/Ladybug Transistor folks. We’ve talked about wanting to do something, but logistically it’s a little tough. Maybe one day, though. There’s a new Essex Green coming out soon, though. I’ve been listening to it and it’s great.

When did you move to Brooklyn? What prompted the move?

I moved in 2002. I think I stayed in Athens a little too long for me. I’m not saying people shouldn’t stay in Athens. It’s a great place and I love it. But I was there 6 years, and it’s a small southern town, you know? That has its up and downsides. I think I should have left a little before then, but I didn’t for some reason. The way I actually ended up moving is that my girlfriend at the time was moving and I came along. We promptly broke up, but I stayed in New York because I liked it. Though New York is expensive, it’s a fun place to raise a family. We got to the Catskills, we have a great beach nearby, and we live in a community that is progressive politically. That goes a long way.

Tell us about the new Great Lakes record, Dreaming Too Close to the Edge. Where was it recorded? Who played on it?

Dreaming Too Close to the Edge, the 6th Great Lakes record, ended up being the third in a series of three records that sort of share a lyrical theme. The previous two, Ways of Escape and Wild Vision, are much more country-inflected, however. I think those two are good records, but they’re kinda heavy in terms of the moods and subject matter. This new one feels more fun to me. The subject matter is still pretty heavy, but the songs are back in major keys again. I think it’s a really strong batch of songs. I’m proud of it. I think with Ways of Escape I finally really found myself as a songwriter. I think the stuff I’ve done since that record has been my best work, and this new one feels very strong to me.

The lineup is pretty much the same as played on the previous two records. The drummer is Kevin Shea. He’s been with me for over 10 years now. Suzanne Nienaber sings with me again. Kenny Wachtel plays some guitar. Joe McGinty is back on keys, and Dave Gould on bass. There are a couple other people who played on a song here and there, Luis Leal played mellotron on a aong, and Andrew Rieger did a guest vocal on one song. They’re great musicians, all of them. And just nice, easy-going people. I have no intention to shake up that lineup. As long as those lovely people want to play with me, they’ve got the gig. Of course, it’s different when you’re in your late 30s and early 40s. We’re not trying to tour the world, and I really don’t have ambitions beyond making what I think are good records, and maybe playing the occasional show.

As for the recording of Dreaming, the drums were recorded at Brian Eno’s old space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. I think Martin Bisi has been there for 30 years or more. There’s a documentary film about the place. It’s now called Seizure’s Palace (when Jason LaFarge is behind the desk). It’s a huge room, but Jason’s got a great handle on getting good drum sounds in that space. A Boredoms record or two were done there, as well as several Swans records. It’s a great and really weird space. The keyboards were tracked at Joe McGinty’s vintage keys studio, Carousel, in Greenpoint. I played with him and got to know him through Ladybug Transistor (especially when we were rehearsing with Kevin Ayers, but he was also a good friend of San’s, too). Nearly everything else was done in my home studio. And I went to Don Piper’s Brooklyn studio to track vocals. He’s got a Neve desk there, and gets nice sounds. The record was mixed by Steve Silverstein, who mixed each of the last three records. Steve and I have a long relationship of working together, and he’s great.

Is Loose Trucks your own label? Do you release other music other than your own on it?

Yes. My old friends Andrew and Laura of Elf Power run Orange Twin Records in Athens. They put out a couple Great Lakes records, but for Wild Vision, the 5th record, Andrew suggested to me that there was really no reason anymore to give them a cut of the money. He just hooked me up with their distributor and I started my own label. So far, so good. But I teamed up with Mike Turner (of HHBTM Records, and the guy who released the first ever Great Lakes 7”) to help me with distribution this time. I think that’ll be a positive thing. The truth is, I’d never want to start a label, necessarily, but it just made sense for me to do it.

I haven’t released anything else on the label except the last two Great Lakes records, and I really don’t have any desire to do so.

Who are some of your favorite current bands or musicians?

Steve Gunn. I especially love Way Out Weather. That’s the modern record that I’ve listened to the most in recent years. I love the Fahey meets drone-y raga thing; but it’s the strength of the compositions and the melodies that I find elevates it above other records in that style. I also think David-Ivar from the band Herman Dune is one of the most criminally underrated songwriters around these days. And Bill Callahan has long been a favorite of mine. I think he’s peerless.

What is one musician you’d say who’s had the biggest impact on your music?

My biggest influence as a guitar player is/was Dean Wareham. First, I always thought his sound was really cool. And his solos and lead playing, from Galaxie 500 on, has all been consistently great. I mean, as a beginning guitar player I’d sing along with the guitar solos. It doesn’t happen that often, when the long guitar solo or outro is the highlight of a song, or just as good as the singing part. Wareham was kind of my guitar teacher in a sense, because the way he plays, it’s not super fast. It’s about the melodies and the feeling and the mood. Because his stuff wasn’t very technical, I was able to play along with his solos and lead parts pretty easily and figure out what he does and how he does it. Every now and again I still kind of think to myself, “What would Dean Wareham do on this song?” if I’m stuck trying to figure out a guitar part for a song.

Tell us about your day job as a teacher. How does it fit into your lifestyle? Any of the other teachers know that you’re a musician?

Well, I don’t have a very wild lifestyle, I can tell you that. I’ve got a 7 year old son and a 1 year old daughter. With a full-time job as a third grade teacher, I’ve got my hands full. Lots of responsibility. But I still find the time to play a handful of shows each year, and to release records regularly. I’ve kind of gotten into a pattern of working, that works for me. During the school year I write songs when inspiration hits. But then I have the summers off. That’s when I have more time to work on music. If I can get all the songs for a new record written, revised and ready to record by August, I can track drums for an album. And then the cycle of overdubbing on the recordings, while also writing new songs, can begin again. That’s really my pattern.

People I work with know I write and play music, and put out records. Sometimes they’ll come to the shows. Some of my student’s parent’s have actualy looked me up and bought my records. I leave a guitar in my class and we sing all the time. The parents know me as this gentle teacher who sings Paul Simon and Cat Stevens songs with their kids, but I could tell by the way they some of them talked to me about my music that they were a bit surprised, after hearing my music, at how thematically dark some of my stuff is. It’s not children’s music that I’m making, you know? If they’d asked me I’d have warned them.

As a teacher, I think about Robert Pollard a lot. He’s not only one of my favorite songwriters, but he made a bunch of his best records while he was working full-time as a 3rd grade teacher. It’s really not hard to balance teaching and music. The hours can be tough, though. I have to be on point at 8am when I have to face a class of 8 year olds. One of my regular working times is between 4am and 6am. It’s been less this way since we had our second kid, because I’m really tired from having a baby, a 7 year old, and a demanding job. But I made most of the previous two records, and a lot of Dreaming, between the hours of 4am and 6am. That’s when my brain works best, anyway, I don’t even set an alarm. I just wake up naturally when I’m feeling inspired to work. It’s nice. The house is quiet, and I’ve got a tried-and-true system for recording electric guitars, bass, and keyboards silently. My wife is also very supportive, and often graciously allows me weekend mornings off of childcare duty so I can get some recording work done. I’m one of those people that if I’m not recording and getting work done, I’m kind of irritable and feel unsettled. So it’s probably in her best interest to do that… (haha)

You’re the only remaining original member of the band., then? What’s that like?

Yeah. I've been the only original member of the band for over 10 years now. But it was really only for the first 2 records that the original members were a big part of the band, anyway, to be honest. And even then it was really just the first one that was the product of genuine collaboration. Back then it was me and Dan writing songs together, but by the time the first record came out we'd put together a big band that also featured Kevin Barnes from Of Montreal, Scott Spillane from Neutral Milk Hotel/Olivia Tremor Control, Bryan Poole from Elf Power, and Derek Almstead, Dottie Alexander, Heather McIntosh, and Jamey Huggins as a multi-instrumentalist and our main drummer. Jamey and I really collaborated very closely on the first record, in terms of working out the instrumentation on the songs. That was a really good, positive collaboration. And, truthfully, it hurt me when he chose to pretty much leave the band and focus on Of Montreal. But I understood his decision. They were getting really popular, and I couldn't blame him. Then, in 2002, I moved to Brooklyn and Dan followed not long after, and once we'd both left Athens that was basically the end of the original lineup. Dan and I kept writing songs together, though, with him writing the lyrics and me writing the music. We went back to Athens to record Diamond Times, and a bunch of the old crew pitched in and played on the record, but by that point I'd formed a pretty strong connection with Jeff Baron of Essex Green and Ladybug Transistor, and had convinced him to come down from Brooklyn to Athens with me for the recording sessions. He ended up playing a big role in terms of making that album what it became.

The last released songs that Dan and I co-wrote, apart from one that made it onto Ways of Escape, came out on Diamond Times in 2006. After that album came out, I put together a 3-piece lineup of the band in New York, to tour behind that album. We did a long tour of the US, opening for The Clientele. It was Kevin Shea on drums, and Kyle Forester, who I also roped into The Ladybug Transistor as a keyboardist, on bass. We did a few tours of Europe with that lineup, too. What's strange is that, though it's not the original lineup, we played more shows together as a 3-piece than any previous or later Great Lakes lineup ever played, yet the three of us never made a record. Kyle left right before we began recording the 4th record, Ways of Escape. Around then Dan and I had a disagreement over the musical direction of the band and he abruptly moved back to Athens. Him leaving really turned out to be a great thing for me. Kevin Shea was happy to keep playing drums with me, and I wrangled a bunch of great NYC-based players to help me make that record. Towards the end of that process, Suzanne Nienaber started singing with me. As soon as we started doing stuff together I thought it sounded great. That lineup ended up being the players I've continued to work with for a decade and counting. We made Wild Vision together, which, to me, really felt like a highlight in the band's discography, and then we made the new record, Dreaming Too Close to the Edge, together, too.

Looking back, I think I went out on my own at just the right time. I was feeling weird about singing somebody else's words. And it felt so much better to sing my own. Dan also just wanted more say over the music than I was willing to give him. I think a lot of artists reach a point where they get fed up with making art by committee. At a certain point, you need control to really realize your vision. I've done 6 Great Lakes records now, with the most recent 3 being made without any other original band members. And it's the 3 I've done on my own that I feel most proud of, to be honest. I'll never disavow the early stuff, and if you're a fan of unabashed 60s psych-pop then that's the Great Lakes stuff for you.

The thing about bands continuing on without original members is tricky. A lot of times those bands aren't very good without the original lineup. But I always think about The Byrds when this subject comes up. My favorite Byrds records are the ones Roger McGuinn made without Gene Clark and David Crosby. I mean, I love the Gene Clark solo stuff, and that first David Crosby solo record, too. And of course the early Byrds stuff is great. But those late Byrds records are the ones I like the most. I like to think of Great Lakes like that. Maybe some people prefer the early stuff, and that's fine. But I'm just going to keep on doing my own thing, regardless of what anybody else thinks.

Any closing comment? Final thoughts? Anything you wanted to mention that I didn’t ask?

I’m always focused on what I’m doing next. I’m working on the 7th Great Lakes record now. More and more, I find myself drawing on more of my influences from the time when I was starting to play music, lthe stuff I was into in my early 20s. Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, Sebadoh, Luna/Galaxie 500, Teenage Fanclub, Guided By Voices, Built to Spill. Not that there’s a cohesive sound there, but that combination of sounds is really where my heart is lately. I’m working on the next record now and I can feel it going in that direction. It’s not at all thematically connected to the other records. I feel like it’s going to be good.

Thanks for your interest in my music, Tim. I appreciate it.

All photos by Jami Craig except the 3rd pic from the top (the outdoor shot with the Puerto Rican flag) which is by Diego Britt.

www.greatlakesbencrum.bandcamp.com

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a-philosophy-notebook · 4 years

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The Culture of Democracy, The Old Liberal and The Frankfurt School

What follows is a slightly cleaned up version of a talk I gave in response to John Skorupksi’s remarks on The Culture of Democracy at the YTL Forum, 27th Feb 2020.

The central theme of Skorupski’s talk is the submerged but vital antagonism between the ideals of what Skorupski calls `old liberalism’, and those of democracy. The tensions emerge in three different domains: first, that of normative ethics, second, that of meta-normative theory, and third, in the domain of culture. In normative ethics, the dispute is: are all basic rights and duties rights and dutiess of or to individuals? Yes, says Skorupski’s old liberal; no says the democrat. For the democrat, there are some basic rights and duties — like the duty one might have to one’s country — that are the rights of or duties to collectives: they are rights and duties of belonging.

What about when it comes to meta-normative theory? The old liberal thinks ethics is prior to politics. The most basic question is: what is it for an individual to flourish? Politics is just the application of our favourite answer to the problems of communal life. For the democrat, by contrast, politics is prior to ethics: the virtues are just those traits that fit one to flourish as a member of a democratic community.

Finally, the dispute may be read as over the role and value of culture. That the dispute should have such a valence is not surprising: culture is what mediates between individual ethical life — the primary focus of the old liberal — and the collective life of the community — the primary focus of the democrat.

For an old liberal, the role of culture is to foster, and to be a vehicle for individual flourishing. Given a sufficiently rich account of eudaimonia — one on which the achievement of aesthetic excellence is a distinctive mode of human flourishing — the old liberal can say perfectly sensible things — the things that anyone with a real taste for beauty would want to say — about which forms of culture should be celebrated, and which disavowed.

Things looks different, Skorupski thinks, from the perspective of the democrat. For the democrat, culture is not, primarily, a vehicle for individual flourishing but a technology of belonging: the role of culture is to bind us into a shared whole. This, he says, lies at the core of what classical liberals feared in popular democracy: popular despotism and mediocre conformism. The worry is that:

‘The democratic demand for mutual recognition is maximal...there is no aspect of my values and tastes which you can reject without desrespecting me...Mutual recognition takes over the whole order of value. Exclusion and hierarchy become the worst sins and the content of culture must be adjusted to avoid them.’

On Skorupski’s view, the road from democracy to mediocre populism runs via the ideal of mutual recognition. I’m suspicious. I suspect that the cultural ideal of mutual recognition has its roots not in Skorupki’s democratic tradition, but in a third vision of politics: the egalitarian. This matters: egalitarians disagree with both the old liberal and with the democrat. Instead, of two competing political constellations: the liberal and the democrat, we end up with three: the liberal, the democrat, and the egalitarian. But once we reconceive the demand for mutual recognition as an egalitarian, rather than as a democratic ideal, it becomes implausible that recognition is the engine of populist mediocrity. That’s the first thing I’m going to say.

The second thing I’m going to do is draw out some striking and instructive similarities between Skorupski’s old liberal, and the cultural anxieties characteristic of the Frankfurt School in general, and Herbert Marcuse in particular. Lastly, I’ll suggest that these similarities suggest a re-reading of liberal cultural anxiety; a re-reading on which the true target of liberal anxiety is not politics, but political economy.

Egalitarians agree with democrats that not all norms bottom out in the rights and duties of individuals. But they disagree with the democrat that belonging is what generates these other norms. The egalitarian holds that there are basic norms which govern the character of I-thou relations. In particular, they hold that I-thou relations should be relations that manifest and express equality. This requirement is basic because it does not reduce to a right possessed by or a duty to individuals: the value of equality-expressing I-thou relations is more than a matter of those relations being good for the agents they embed. But nor is it a requirement generated by belonging: not every dyadic relation makes for a group; I do not belong to some special two-membered club with every human to whom I stand in an I-thou relation.

Democratic norms, in some form, plausibly flow from their egalitarian counterparts: if you and I are both members of some group, my having a say in its rules and and your not may well impede our capacity to meet on equal terms. But the converse is not true: equal belonging is not relational equality. We equally belong to some collective if we stand in the same relation to that collective. But that you and I stand in the same relation to a group does not tell us anything about how you and I must relate to each other. Think of a family: the parents and the children belong equally to the family, but they are not equals. In a democratic polity, to be sure, equal belonging has some thinly egalitarian consequences — we equally belong only if we both have the vote — but our I-thou relations need not exemplify any particular spirit for this to be so. At most, I may be required to recognise that you belong just as I do. But it is hard to see how my recognition of your belonging requires uncritical acceptance of your tastes and values: parents may recognise their children as full members of the family whilst deploring their taste in music. (Just ask my Dad!) If mutual recognition is to be an ideal with bite, then, it had better be read as an egalitarian ideal, rather than a democratic one.

But once we situate mutual recognition as an egalitarian ideal, its role as an engine of conformist mediocrity becomes implausible. If your tastes in art, or music or books is different from mine and I really regard you as my equal, the right response is playful disagreement: I will try to persuade you of your folly (Beyoncé is great!) and allow you in turn to persuade me of mine (No she is not!). To capitulate without argument to another’s taste is the height of condescension; the very opposite of relational equality. When read as an egalitarian ideal, then, it mandates the very opposite of uncritical endorsement. We are left, then, with a puzzle: when the old liberal recoils from mediocre populism, they are not recoiling from the ideals of either democracy or egalitarianism. So: from what do they recoil?

We can solve the puzzle by noting the startling similarities between Skorupski’s old liberal and Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse has a critical-theoretic conception of culture: the role of culture, and of art in particular, is to disclose, as Nancy Fraser puts it, `tensions and possibilities which are in some sense immanent to the conception at hand’. Nancy Fraser argues that critical theory attempts to accommodate the demands of immanence and transcendence simultaneously: norms, for the critical theorist, are not accessed by assuming a God’s eye view (transcendence) but nor are we totally bound by a given, culturally sedimented tradition (immanence). Rather, certain fragments of our inner worlds, or our folk politics, mediate between immanence and transcendence. For Marcuse, art, historically, has acted as just such a via media: it has a foothold in the very social reality it points beyond.

Marcuse argues that art is no longer capable of playing this role because the necessary antagonism between art and social reality has been obliterated. Art was able to play an oppositional, alienating role because it stood apart from — remote from — everyday life; now, art-artefacts have become mechanically reproduced consumer products. They circulate like any other humdrum commodity. Rather than pointing beyond the social reality, art is fully subsumed by it; instead of Nietzche’s pathos of distance, we get a bathos of the proximal. Not only is art no longer capable of acting as a via media; it is robbed of its genuinely aesthetic character. Art is vulgarised not because its content undergoes a transfiguration but because the social relations in which this content is embedded undercut its aesthetic character. There is a more general process of which the degradation of the aesthetic is a a part: the dissipation of all cultural activity into the sphere of production and consumption. Marcuse’s worry is not that that what sells ‘takes over the whole sphere of value’, leaving us with no way to distinguish between what is popular and what is good. His concern is more subtle. The worry is that modelling aesthetic appreciation on commodity exchange erases the essentially public character of aesthetic appreciation. As Kant knew, when I regard something as beautiful, I am compelled to “make my pleasure public”: it is partly constitutive of the judgement that I want to announce it to you, and find that you announce the same to me.This public character is part of what distinguishes aesthetic judgement proper from mere preferences (for example, my preference for milky coffee over black has no public character). This degeneration of aesthetic judgement into mere preference generates what Marcuse calls `repressive tolerance’: a situation in which contradictory viewpoints exist harmoniously side-by-side because everyone is free to ignore those he dislikes. Skorupski has a similar anxiety: he worries that the right to free speech is now understood not as conduit for genuine debate (a public good `like clean air’) but as a matter of self-expression. We allow others to speak in the same way that we allow them to sing in the shower: in both cases, the right is granted only because no one else will be forced to listen. For both Marcuse and Skorpuski, what are properly understood as public, dialogical activities are reconfigured as matters of simple, private preference; as such, they acquire the protections that our privately indulged preferences rightly receive, but they lose their value.

What to make of this surprising convergence? For Marcuse, the patterns of production and consumption characteristic of late industrial capitalism destroy the possibility of either a genuinely critical culture, genuine aesthetic experience, and a robust public sphere. All three require spaces which are not subsumed by social reality, but the tendency of a social reality structured by a consumer economy is to eat into and subsume just such spaces. Thus, when the liberal recoils from the hollowing out of public speech and the vulgarisation of cultural esteem, it’s just possible that what they really fear is not their frenemy: the egalitarian democrat, but their oldest ally: capitalism.

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byshwetaupadhyay · 6 years

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BEYOND LYRIC SHAME: BEN LERNER ON CLAUDIA RANKINE AND MAGGIE NELSON TWO FRESH INVESTIGATIONS OF THE PROSE POEM

Language poetry—and to my mind the best Language poetry was written in prose—was a machine that ran on difficulty. Reading a prose poem deploying what Ron Silliman called “the new sentence” was intended to be an exercise in frustration: the reader attempts to combine the sentences—which are grammatical—into meaningful paragraphs. The sentences are vague enough (“Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity”) that a logical relation between sentences will always almost seem possible. But the reader discovers as she goes that many successive sentences cannot be assimilated to a coherent paragraph, that paragraphs are organized arbitrarily (“quantitatively,” as opposed to around an idea), that no stable voice unifies the text, that her “will to integration”—her desire to produce higher orders of meaning that lead away from the words on the page into the realm of the signified (“a dematerializing motion”)—is repeatedly defeated.

The solicitation and then tactical frustration of the reader’s will to linguistic integration had an explicitly political object: it was advanced as a kind of deprogramming of bourgeois readerly assumptions. Such difficult prose would teach us that meaning is actively produced, never naturally given; that language is manipulable material, not a transparent window onto reality; that the “speaker” is a unifying fiction more than a stable subject; and so on. These deconstructive strategies were conceived not only as a critique of other writers—for example, lyric, “confessional” poets with their privileging of subjective experience and inwardness; mainstream novelists with their “optical realism”—but as an attack on existing social and political orders that depended upon the smooth functioning of dominant linguistic conventions.

Many of us learned something from the Language poets’ taking up of a constructivist vision of the self and its literature: their insistence on language as material, their combination of Russian formalism and various strains of French theory into a compelling reading of experimental modernism. (And many of us learned to appreciate certain texts associated with Language poetry in terms other than and often opposed to those provided by essays like Silliman’s “The New Sentence,” with its anti-expressive and anti-aesthetic bent). But who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?

Indeed, for many ambitious contemporary writers, disjunction has lost any obvious left political valence. Does the language of advertising and politicians, for instance, really depend on seamless integration? Transcripts of speeches by Bush or Palin or Trump would have been at home in In the American Tree. When aggressive ungrammaticality and non sequitur are fundamental to mainstream capitalist media (and to the rhetoric of an ascendant radical right), the new sentence appears more mimetic than defamiliarizing. In this context, “difficulty” as a valorized attribute of a textual strategy gives way to the difficulty of recovering the capacity for some mode of communication, of intersubjectivity, in light of the insistence of Language poets (and others) on the social constructedness of self and the irreducible conventional representation.

Language poetry’s notion of textual difficulty as a weapon in class warfare hasn’t aged well, but the force of its critique of what is typically referred to as “the lyric I” has endured in what Gillian White has recently called a diffuse and lingering “lyric shame”—a sense, now often uncritically assumed, that modes of writing and reading identified as lyric are embarrassingly egotistical and politically backward. White’s work seeks, among other things, to explore how “the ‘lyric’ tradition against which an avant-garde anti-lyricism has posited itself . . . never existed in the first place” and to reevaluate poems and poets often dismissed cursorily as instances of a bad lyric expressivity. She also seeks to refocus our attention on lyric as a reading practice, as a way of “projecting subjectivity onto poems,” emphasizing how debates about the status of lyric poetry are in fact organized around a “missing lyric object”: an ideal—that is, unreal—poem posited by the readerly assumptions of both defenders and detractors of lyric confessionalism.

“Who among us still believes, if any of us ever really did, that writing disjunctive prose poems counts as a legitimately subversive political practice?”

It’s against the backdrop that I’m describing that I read important early 21st-century works by poets such as Juliana Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs), Claudia Rankine (Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and, very recently, Citizen: An American Lyric), and Maggie Nelson (Bluets). I mean that these very different writers have difficulty with the kind of difficulty celebrated by Language poets in particular and the historical avant-garde in general. Their books are purposefully accessible works that nevertheless seek to acknowledge the status of language as medium and the self as socially enmeshed. I read Rankine and Nelson’s works of prose poetry in particular as occupying the space where the no-longer-new sentence was; they are instances of a consciously post-avant-garde writing that refuses—without in any sense being simple—to advance formal difficulty as a mode of resistance, revolution, or pedagogy. I will also try to suggest how they operate knowingly within—but without succumbing to—a post–Language poetry environment of lyric shame or at the very least suspicion.

I call Rankine and Nelson’s books works of “prose poetry,” and they are certainly often taken up as such, but their generic status is by no means settled. Both writers—as with many Language poets—invite us to read prose as a form of poetry even as they trouble such distinctions. Rankine’s books are indexed as “Essay/Poetry” and Bluets is indexed as “Essay/Literature.” Bluets is published, however, by Wave Books, a publisher devoted entirely to poetry. Rankine’s two recent books are both subtitled “An American Lyric,” begging the question of how a generic marker traditionally understood as denoting short, musical, and expressive verse can be transposed into long, often tonally flat books written largely in prose. On an obvious but important level, I think the deployment of the sentence and paragraph under the sign of poetry, the book-length nature of the works in question, and the acknowledgment of the lyric as a problem (and central problematic) help situate these works in relation to the new sentence, even if that’s by no means the only way to read them.

Both Bluets and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely open with a mixture of detachment and emotional intensity that simultaneously evokes and complicates the status of the “lyric I.” In the first numbered paragraph of Bluets, quoted above, a language of impersonal philosophical skepticism—the “suppose,” the Tractatus-like numbering, the subjunctive—interacts with an emotional vocabulary and experiential detail. The italics also introduce the possibility of multiple voices, or at least two distinct temporalities of writing, undermining the assumption of univocality and spokenness conventionally associated with the lyric. “As though it were a confession”; “it became somehow personal”: two terms associated with lyric and its shame are both “spoken” and qualified at the outset of the book—a book that will go on to be powerfully confessional and personal indeed. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely opens with a related if distinct method of lyric evocation and complication, flatly describing what we might call the missing object of elegy:

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? We asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Throughout Don’t Let Me Lonely the traditional lyric attributes of emotional immediacy and intensity are replaced with the problem of a kind of contemporary anesthesia—the repression of the reality of death, the leveling of tragedy into another kind of infotainment in a culture of spectacle, the mediation of experience by technologies ranging from television to pharmaceuticals. The problem of the deadening of feeling—the negative image of traditional lyric content—finds its formal correlative in a flat prose in which verse can appear only in citation or paratext, for example, quotations from Celan embedded in the prose, a Dickinson poem reproduced in the notes. Instead of imagining difficult prose as a technology for deconstructing the self, a highly linear and plainspoken account of the problem of the “I” is offered as Rankine attempts to work her way out of social despair: “If I am present in a subject position what responsibility do I have to the content, to the truth value, of the words themselves? Is ‘I’ even me or am ‘I’ a gear-shift to get from one sentence to the next? Should I say we? Is the voice not various if I take responsibility for it? What does my subject mean to me?”

Rankine forgoes difficulty as a strategy for disrupting subjectivity in order to acknowledge the difficulty of calibrating a responsible self socially. We could say that the anti-lyricism of Language poetry is gestured toward in the banishment of the traditional trappings of the lyric—verse itself, musicality, intense personal expression (what Rankine often confesses is a sense of inward emptiness)—but here these lyric strategies are less willfully rejected than made to feel unavailable. And the felt unavailability of the lyric is a result of Rankine’s explicit invitation to read her markedly nonlyric materials (essayistic and often flat prose) as lyric—to invite us to think of lyric as a reading practice as much as a writing practice in which the ostensibly “shameful” attributes of the mode (e.g., an egotistical, asocial inwardness) are replaced by a collaborative effort on the part of reader and writer to overcome “loneliness.”

Bluets explores many of these concerns with related if ultimately distinct means:

70. Am I trying, with these “propositions,” to build some kind of bower?—But surely this would be a mistake. For starters, words do not look like the things they designate (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

71. I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this hard to do.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?—No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink—Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Nelson’s “blue bower” evokes not only the actual bird, renowned for how the males construct and decorate “bowers” to attract mates, but also the traditional association of lyric with a metaphorics of birds and birdsong. It further evokes the Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a shamelessly lyric poet if there ever was one) painting of that name, as well as his poem with the received title “The Song of the Bower.” To build a “blue bower” out of “propositions” is to cross a lyric and anti-lyric project in the space of prose, implicating and complicating both. It is hard to find dignity in the privacy of the aestheticized bower—indeed, one might be ashamed of such inwardness—and one of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.

The color blue functions as the organizing metaphor for both the possibility of intersubjectivity (“15. I think of these people as my blue correspondents, whose job it is to send me blue reports from the field.”) and its limits (“105. There are no instruments for measuring color; there are no ‘color thermometers.’ How could there be, as ‘color knowledge’ always remains contingent upon an individual perceiver.”). Nelson’s accumulating “propositions” do not integrate into a “bower,” but the relation between sentences and sections has little in common with new-sentence disjunction. As in Rankine’s prose poetry, difficulty here is not deployed as a political/poetical tactic irrupting within the norms of prose; instead, the difficulty of finding a defensible, dignified ground for intersubjectivity is narrated explicitly.

“One of the goals of Bluets will be to test what part of experience is sharable as a way out of isolation and despair.”

The shift from the tactical deconstruction of ostensibly natural narrative or lyric unities to the effort to reconstruct them with a difference is legible in part because Bluets foregrounds its relation to avant-garde prose poetry. Nelson’s use of Wittgenstein as muse and model, for instance, invites us to position her work relative to new sentence experiments. Silliman not only cited the Philosophical Investigations in “The New Sentence” as an important precedent, but Silliman’s own The Chinese Notebook models the tone and structure of Wittgenstein’s philosophical writing. More generally, the work of Marjorie Perloff (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) and others has made clear how the philosopher’s inquiries into language as a form of social practice—and his own peculiar linguistic operations—have been central to scores of experimental (“difficult”) writers. If Nelson weren’t also the author of volumes of verse, and if Wave weren’t the publisher of Bluets, my experience of context and thus text would be different: those facts function as a quieter version of Rankine’s subtitle, inviting—or at the very least enabling—us to think of poetry as a reading practice as much as a writing practice, and to experience verse techniques as withheld or unavailable in Bluets instead of as merely forgone or forsworn.

As in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, in Bluets, actual verse is exiled to the space of citation: William Carlos Williams, Lorine Neideker, and Lord Byron, among many others, are quoted; line breaks are replaced with slashes. Indeed, Nelson doesn’t have much faith in the effects of actual poems: “12. And please don’t talk to me about ‘things as they are’ being changed upon any ‘blue guitar.’ What can be changed upon a blue guitar is not of interest here.” Or: “For better or worse, I do not think that writing changes things very much, if at all” (proposition 183). And yet, the relegation of verse to the virtual space of citation lends it a certain power, displaying it while also insisting that it’s nearly out of reach. This allows Nelson’s prose to be haunted by the abstract possibility of a poetry it can’t actualize, somewhat like the Mallarméan fantasy she at one point describes: “For Mallarmé, the perfect book was one whose pages have never been cut, their mystery forever preserved, like a bird’s folded wing, or a fan never opened.” Moreover, Bluets—taking its cue (and lifting many of its locutions) from Wittgenstein’s attacks on Goethe’s Theory of Colors—often refers to outmoded regimes of knowledge or technologies (e.g., the 18th-century “cyanometer,” which sought to measure the blue of the sky). One begins to wonder if verse—lyric poetry in particular—is another set of defunct measures, outmoded conventions for communicating experience.

Perhaps there is a sense for Nelson (and Rankine) in which poetry isn’t difficult—it’s impossible. There is faith neither in poetry’s power of imaginative redescription (the blue guitar) nor in its practical effects as a technology of intervening in history (“I do not think that writing changes very much”). The subject isn’t a dominant bourgeois fiction of inwardness and univocality in need of deconstruction via new sentence difficulty but an avowedly social and linguistic entity deployed over time in the space of writing; expression itself must be constructed, and that process is narrated clearly in a prose that, when read as poetry, makes actual verse present as a loss. Although I believe these authors use the prose poem and the felt absence of verse in fresh and specific ways, I am not suggesting that the logic I’m describing is exactly new. Stephen Fredman and others have suggested that the prose poem arises as a form during periods in which there is a crisis of confidence in verse strategies, and the notion of the lyric being felt as a loss as it becomes prose is at least as old as Walter Benjamin. Here my limited goal is to indicate a few specific ways the new sentence valorization of difficulty can become a frame for a specific kind of accessibility for two important contemporary poets who write primarily in prose.

One can’t pretend to contextualize these books without stating explicitly that part of the contemporary dissatisfaction with attacks on narrative and voice as political strategies is that they can serve to mask what is essentially a white male universalism. The rejection of linguistic integration and anti-expressionist attacks on the lyric subject have recently been described by Cathy Park Hong as a symptom of the avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness,”

its specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde’s “delusion of whiteness” is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be “post-identity” and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.

In a related vein, Nelson’s own work as a critic has been attuned to how “the male Language writers’ occasionally monomaniacal focus on warring economic systems” was both challenged and expanded by women writers inside and outside of the Language movement itself. In ways I haven’t had the space to explore here, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Bluets are engaged with demonstrating how the uncritical acceptance of voice and narrative conventions as well as their “wholesale” disavowal by certain avant-garde writers can preserve racist and sexist ideologies. This is by now an old difficulty, echoing the even older modernism/realism debate—how the emancipatory potential of poststructuralist strategies quickly cools into a conservatism (or worse) like the one Cathy Park Hong describes. Out of this abiding difficulty more complex, accessible prose poetry is likely to arise. How might verse return? And when and why?

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addictedtostorytelling · 2 years

Note

Thanks for your response to my question about the difference between Sara and Grissom's reaction to the lost ring. My other question is, as a call back to some of the earlier seasons, the cocoon storyline seemed to have not been fully explored. Do you think that was a metaphor for their relationship overall, and especially now during the reboot?

hi, anon!

to me, the cocoon only really works as a metaphor for their relationship within the very specific context of what was going on between them in s7 (and during grissom's sabbatical, even more in particular) and doesn't really carry over to have valence for what they are now.

back then, sara was struggling a lot to know what grissom's intentions with her were and whether or not he was as in love with her as she was with him, given that he tends not to express his feelings with words.

meanwhile, grissom remained largely oblivious to her uncertainty, assuming that she knew how he felt because his actions communicated his feelings for her.

this whole fraught situation was then compounded by the fact that their relationship had to remain a secret at work, so they couldn't be open about their feelings with each other there, lest they let on to their coworkers that they were together, even as their desire to "come out" so that they could take their relationship to the next level was steadily increasing.

in my view, this situation is analogous to the cocoon on several levels:

one similarity is that when sara first receives the cocoon in the mail (sans any kind of explanation from grissom), she's not exactly sure how to regard it.

she knows generally that it's a token of his affection, but the exact meaning eludes her. just like she doesn't know how much or what to read into her and grissom's relationship and his behavior toward her, she also doesn't know how much or what to read into the cocoon.

in both cases, she lacks clear verbal/written communication from him that would help her to divine understanding.

another similarity is that just like grissom believes that his feelings for sara must be obvious to her even in the absence of words—he wouldn't be sleeping with her or in a relationship with her or living with her if he didn't love her—he also believes that the meaning of the cocoon is self-evident; that she'll receive it in the mail and know exactly what it signifies*, just by the gesture alone, even in the absence of any kind of direct message from him.

* which, for the record, is that while he's away he's constantly thinking of her and missing her and that every beautiful, wonderful thing he encounters reminds him of her because he loves her so much.

it also carries ties to grissom's growing desire to share "the beautiful life" with sara—to openly give her all of the things that they both want; to let their relationship metamorphose into a more fully-realized form.

"butterflies" have, of course, been a gsr metaphor since episode 04x12 "butterflied."

the final connection i see between the cocoon and grissom and sara's s7 relationship is that both things are these kinds of semi-open secrets waiting to be discovered around the lab.

sara hides the cocoon in grissom's office but does so largely in plain sight. throughout his sabbatical, she routinely visits and checks up on it, becoming somewhat preoccupied with its development.

in many ways, this arrangement is like how her and grissom's relationship manifests in the workplace; how it's both hidden and not, nestled right there in the heart of everything, with people and cases swirling around it, oblivious, not because it's completely invisible but because they don't know what they're looking for. just like team graveyard has no conscious awareness that the cocoon is there (or at least not this particular curio in grissom’s collection is special) and doesn't seem to pay much mind to how sara keeps visiting it, they've also got no idea that she and grissom are in love with each other and that sara is really hung up on what's going on in her and grissom’s relationship the whole time he's in massachusetts.

there's very much this living, growing thing right in front of them that they don't see because they don't even know it's there, much less what it means, you know?

to me, the place in s7 where this metaphor for cocoon-as-relationship becomes most obvious is in episode 07x13 "redrum," where not only does sara encounter keppler while she's in grissom's office looking at the cocoon, but her intimate knowledge of what's in grissom's office (which she has because she's his girlfriend and she knows his secrets) becomes a central plot point.

so.

all of the above said, to me, the cocoon is thematically tied to the s7 gsr storyline—to sara's uncertainty as to where she and grissom stand, to grissom's desire to take his and sara's relationship to the next level, to the fact that what they are is secret, that they're on the verge of growing into something new, etc.

while it's possible to have different interpretations of the metaphor than i do and to maybe even apply the metaphor beyond s7, all the way up to the reboot, i personally don't really see any clear extension of the metaphor beyond s7 myself. to me, it was very much relevant to that particular era of grissom and sara's relationship and wasn't really designed to evolve with them beyond that point.

but that's just my take, and ymmv.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.

#answered #anon #asks: csi #**#my meta #meta: csi #meta: gsr #season seven #csi #gsr #let's talk shop #csiverse

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yoon-kooks · 7 years

Text

Lie- Part 8

Pairing: Jimin x Reader

Genre: Angst / Fluff

Summary: There was a time when you loved him and he hated you. Now you hate him, but does he love you?

Parts: 0 // 1 // 2 // 3 // 4 // 5 // 6 // 7 // 8 // 9 // 10 // 11 // 12 // 13 // 14 // 15 // 16 // 17 // FINAL

“I’ll only show you this one time…” Jimin mumbled. “And only if you promise not to tell anyone else that I dance.” You were shocked. Were you really the only one who knew he was a dancer?

“I promise, Jimin.” You honestly had no intentions of telling anyone anyway. It would be a secret kept between you and him.

You sat quietly on his bed and waited for him to show you his dance, not knowing what to expect. The boy just stood there for a moment and scrolled through his phone. He took his time “searching for the right music”, although you noticed some reluctance in the way he bit his lip. The longer he took, the more you could tell he was nervous. And it didn’t make sense. At school, he was always so confidence and outgoing around others, so why was this any different?

After finally settling on a song, he danced without saying a word. He didn’t have a whole lot of space to move around in his cluttered room, but you were so taken by the way his body flowed. Everything was so precise and graceful. The way he extended his arms, his delicate sways to the music. You knew nothing about dance technique, but to you, he was flawless.

When he came to a stop, his eyes fell on you, as if to make sure you were still there. You looked back with heart eyes, unable to express your amazement in words. His quickly turned his head the other way, but not before you caught a glimpse of his rosy cheeks.

“What’d you think…?” Jimin’s voice was almost inaudible.

“I liked it,” you blushed. “I think you’re really amazing, Jimin.”

“I’m not really…”

“Have you ever thought about becoming an idol?” You imagined him performing in front of thousands of people. “I really think you could do it.”

“Huh? No way.” He shook his head. “Can we just work on the project now?”

You stared blankly at the textbook in front of you. Chemistry was already boring enough, but you really couldn’t focus at all because he had been on your mind ever since you left his dorm. After Jimin said he’d relay your number to Jungkook, the rest of your time in his room was painfully silent. He had asked you about college and how you were liking Seoul, but all you gave him one word responses and nothing beyond that. The only thing that saved you was when the other members came back to the dorm, giving you the perfect excuse to go home. You had to admit, you wished things would’ve turned out better that day.

“Um, Y/N? You okay?” Yoora waved her hand in front of your face to pull you out of your daze.

“What? Yeah, of course,” you lied. “I just don’t get this chemical bonding shit? Like, what even is a valence electron?? Why do atoms attract and repel just like people do?? How can a bond just fucking break like that?? Can I drop out of this class??”

“The professor literally just went over that stuff in class today…” She raised a brow at you. “Are you sure you’re okay? You’ve been a little off since the fansign.”

You thought you had concealed your Jimin problems pretty well, but your friend knew you better than that. And you felt bad that you were lying to her. But at the same time, you had to. “Well…”

“OMG. You fell for one of them, didn’t you??” A huge grin formed on Yoora’s face. “All it takes is one look, I swear. That’s how I sold my soul to Park Jimin.”

You made a face. Not only because she was wrong, but also because you wanted Jimin out of your head, and Yoora really wasn’t helping your cause.

Buzz! Both you and Yoora jumped at the sound of your phone. You didn’t want to open the text right in front of your friend, just in case it was from the love of her life. But it buzzed again, and the more you ignored your phone, the more suspicious you seemed.

You waited for until Yoora was distracted by something on her own phone—probably a Twitter update from Bangtan—and quickly checked your message.

3:04PM Unknown “hey! guess who jimin gave your number to #nochu” You had no idea what the fuck a nochu was, but you found the message extremely adorable. You had an urge to be playful, even if it was only through text.

3:05PM Y/N “yoongi?”

3:06PM Unknown “wrong!”

3:06PM Y/N “sugar?”

3:07PM Unknown “wHO THE HECK IS SUGAR??”

3:08PM Unknown “suga and yoongi are the same guy by the way”

3:10PM Y/N “hey im trying my best to learn all your names okay??”

3:11PM Unknown “but you know my name right?”

3:13PM Y/N “sure i do”

3:14PM Y/N “youre namjin”

3:17PM Unknown “OMFG byeeeeee”

3:18PM Y/N “jungkook wAIT”

3:18PM Jungkook “so you DO know my name ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)”

3:19PM Jungkook “i feel so special 🙈”

3:20PM Y/N “same tbh”

3:26PM Jungkook “soooo”

3:27PM Jungkook “are you free on saturday?” You stared at your phone, thumbs frozen in place. Was he actually asking you out on a date?

3:31PM Y/N “yea, why?”

3:32PM Jungkook “do you like bowling? all my hyungs hate it bc theyre scared of me lol”

3:33PM Y/N “ive never bowled before o.o”

3:34PM Jungkook “good. ill teach you on saturday then ok?” You giggled. He was quite a cute kid, and maybe he’d help keep Jimin off your mind.

3:34PM Y/N “okay!”

“What’s with that creepy grin on your face, Y/N?” Yoora snickered. “Did you get a boyfriend without telling me? Is that why you’ve been acting strange?”

“Haha very funny.” You debated on what to tell your friend. Maybe it would be okay to tell her some things, and leave out other details. Because you certainly weren’t going to tell her that you had once fallen for the same boy she now loved and adored. But maybe it’d be fine to say you’ve been messaging Jimin and Jungkook a little since the fansign. After all, Jimin did mention you could bring Yoora to meet them next time. “He’s not my boyfriend. But I did meet someone.”

“Whaaat?? Tell me!! Spill!”

“It’s a secret for now,” you said, “but I’ll tell you more about it if things go well!” The least you could do was be semi-honest with your one best friend, and you just hoped it all wouldn’t end up hurting her later.

A/N: I took high school chem once in my life and I honestly don’t remember wtf a valence electron is but I know it’s important so lmaoooo

#bts scenarios #bts imagines #bts fanfic #bts angst #bts fluff #jimin #bts #jimin x reader #jimin fanfic #lie

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yyb-school · 7 years

Text

.:If YYB was an OTOME GAME:.

A/N: Here’s Miyu again losing her time with stupid thingies but hey, if we did make an otome game with this entire plot damn- I would def pay money for a game like that istg.

Also, this is a long ass post so gonna put a ‘read more’ thingie and yeah. Enjoy.

Genre: Mystery, Romance & Fantasy.

Routes: 20 routes (11 boys, 9 girls) [11 normal routes, 8 deep routes, 1 secret route] (3 ends per character)

Trailer song:

youtube

Opening:

youtube

Common route [General description]:

You’re a high-school student of the YYB High school; your grades are regular and you live every day of your life normally as you can. However, there’s something always off in your mind, as if you’ve forgotten something each year you’ve been there. Like usual, a new year started for you as this was your senior year but you noticed something different which you used to ignore all this time: The dream club.

Normal Routes

Girls:

[Aaricia Stoffels]

A second-year girl, who’s pretty mature for her age. However, she hides inside herself a joyful girl who can be as childish as she wants; she likes to discover new things and is ready to give a smile to anyone as well as is ready to hit anyone who wants to mess with her or her friends. In her necklace, there’s a big secret of her past and the reason as to why she’s still kind of reserved.

[Jennifer Hollows]

A kind of reserved second-year girl, her shyness is just too much and that’s why she tends to stay out of big groups and just watch over them in the distance. Despite all of this, her mind is quite strong and she’s not scared of anything, she has always a calming yet dangerous aura surrounding her.

[Elize Faith]

A first-year girl, she’s always kind and giving to the others. Showing a smile to strangers isn’t a problem for her and she lives every day of her life fully with high-spirits. What everyone doesn’t know is that she’s the step-daughter of the Faith family, a powerful lineage of rich people who want to gain more with their new heiress.

[Gene Park]

A second-year girl, she’s well known around the school, not because of her good grades but because she’s always messing around and making the principal go crazy. Her temperament isn’t easy to control, as she needs someone to help her stay calm, her family is the boss of the Faith Family and they’re in a pretty relationship. The question Gene always asked herself was... Who’s her real mom?

[Kiwi Kat]

Always full of energy and happiness, this second-year girl is a transfer student in YYB. Always having fun with her new friends, she never misses out anything fun and is ready to give memes to everyone. She’s said to have a long-distance relationship that still makes her kind of sensible. There are some rumors that said they saw her changing of form but everyone thinks that’s a lie.

Boys:

[Kim Taehyung]

He’s well-known for that boxy smile he always gives to everyone. He’s the guy with a deep ass voice and the soul of a child, innocence is his second name. He’s a second-year guy who worked hard to be where he is but he still regrets things that happened in the past.

[Jeon Jungkook]

He wrote “Meme” in his graduation report. He’s a first-year boy who tries to act cocky but it’s actually super scared of girls. He becomes a flustered mess and tends to act super shy, people say he’s a god when it comes to singing. Every time someone asks him about his past schools he just ditches the topic and changes to another one and no one knows what’s the reason behind that.

[Park Jimin]

People say there’s no one that can imitate his graceful moves. He’s a second-year guy who’s always following birdies and because of his kindness, they’re always following him as well. Inside though, he hides a weak guy who suffers from anxiety and is every day scared of breaking down.

[Jung Hoseok]

Known as “J-Hope” because he told everyone to call him like that, he’s a transfer student in his second year. The reason behind his beautiful smile that could literally kill the light of the sun is still a mystery for a long of people, he’s always happy and doesn’t show weakness. The main reason as to why he moved, however, is a mystery even for himself.

[Jung Tye]

This quiet and tsundere transfer student is always locking forward to ending school and just stay in his bed until the next day and repeat the cycle. Behind his mean words and sharp glares though, lies a soft guy who just sometimes doesn’t notice how scary words can sound on him. What’s the reason for him being this way?

[Kwon Valence]

This third-year transfer student shows all the qualifications to be considered the next genius of the world. His grades show he’s really intelligent, although it makes people around him confuse his real self. He’s just a normal guy like others with a high IQ that loves art, has his room in a mess and just tries his best every day. Students say he was blessed by God as he’s as lucky as his grades, but what they don’t know is what that lucky brings with it...

Deep Routes

Girls:

[Yoon Isa]

This girl who often shows an introvert side of her at first is actually a lovely girl with good sense of humor. Her friends love her and she has already made many even in her first year of being in YYB. She possesses a big strength inside of her body, enough to make her break a house in two just with a single punch and bring down big trees with a few kicks. Still, even with all that strength her heart is weak and suffers from a very difficult illness not even doctors could control. She still asks herself every day, what’s the real cause of her inhuman strength?

[Kim Aryaa]

Lifeless, almost like a puppet. Aryaa is on her second year in YYB, she never shows any interest in the world and often tends to stay out of big groups. She felts betrayed as if there’s something that’s missing on her and she still doesn’t know what is it. She started having strange dreams where she could see the past, the present and somehow the future; however, there’s always a missing part of her puzzle that she cannot really find out about: What are her true origins?

[EILEEN]

Darkness, an empty world without a single soul to help. She’s a third-year girl that actually no one knows, always hiding behind the doors of a certain club. She suffers from several headaches that could probably kill a normal human being but she’s used to having these even since she was a child. She has a harsh way of acting and reacting, always with a smirk on her face but never really showing any kind feelings in her eyes. Deep down, she wants to free her friend from all the chains that attach her to that school.

[MIYU]

There’s a girl that’s always helping everyone, that is always watching you without you noticing. Miyu is a third-year girl who seems to always be busy, always in her world and usually always there to prevent anything bad to happen. No one knows which one is her classroom as everyone sees her move around but never getting into any classrooms. For her, wishes are a must and she must fulfill everyone’s happiness so they could make true their wishes. She’s always there, for everyone, when there’s no one for her.

Boys:

[Kim Namjoon]

A smart guy in his second year, he was used to living his life just like any other student and was used to being called the “God of destruction” because of his silly movements. Namjoon has this strange mark around his body that he knows must mean something, but what can that mean? Even if he searches in his memories he cannot find the reason behind that mark, because it’s a story deeper than his own life.

[Kim Seokjin]

Everyone knew him well, he was the third-year student who was caring just like a mom and always wanted to look out for everyone. That changed somehow at the start of his senior year, the smiles he gave everyone weren’t the same they used to be and even if he acted all cheerfully there was a new aura surrounding him that screamed darkness and danger. He's getting lost and slowly losing himself.

[JAY]

This guy is a mystery, he didn’t introduce himself neither did the teachers. He just... Appeared, and the way he stares at you makes you notice he’s not thinking anything good. His words are cold, calculative and he has a dark objective as to why he’s in that school... And for that, he must break down everything.

[Min Yoongi]

A third-year student, he’s always laying around and just going at his own pace through life. Behind that guy who loves to be alone, lies a soft and gentle person who knows when he should talk and act and is actually extremely accurate in all the decisions he takes. There’s always a strong aura around him, like if he’s powerful enough to protect anyone.

SECRET ROUTE

“Somewhere in this world... In this universe or maybe another galaxy, we’ll meet again... And for that, I must finish my work. So we can meet again so we can be born again... So I can finally fulfill my promise.”

Common route ending:

youtube

Deep route ending:

youtube

Secret route ending:

youtube

#BTS as #OC as #If #OC #BTS #BTS rp #Ref

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mathematicianadda · 4 years

Text

Moonlighting https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

In the last week of August, I attended for the first time a virtual conference. This was the 2020 Ural Workshop on Group Theory and Combinatorics, organised by Natalia Maslova at the Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg and her colleagues. The conference was held as a Zoom meeting, and ran with only one hitch. As fate would have it, it was Natalia’s talk that was disrupted by a technological failure, so she started ten minutes late and had to talk fast. My co-author and St Andrews student Liam Stott was talking in the other parallel session immediately afterwards, so I switched as quickly as I could, only to find that the chair of that session had started him early (I assume the previous speaker hadn’t shown up), and he was three-quarters of the way through his talk already. Fortunately I knew what he was talking about!

Yekaterinburg is four hours ahead of St Andrews, so we had a week of very early rising; we had lunch at 10am, and were finished for the day (in both senses) by 2pm most days.

There were some very enjoyable talks, and as usual I can only mention a few. Cheryl Praeger talked about totally 2-closed finite groups. A permutation group G is 2-closed if every permutation preserving all the G-orbits on ordered pairs belongs to G. Cheryl and her colleagues call an abstract group 2-closed if every faithful transitive permutation representation of it is 2-closed. These groups were first studied by Abdollahi and Arezoomand, who found all nilpotent examples; with Tracey they subsequently found all soluble examples. Now this team augmented by Cheryl has considered insoluble groups. At first they found none, but they found that in fact six of the 26 sporadic simple groups (the first, third and fourth Janko groups, Lyons group, Thompson group, and Monster) are totally 2-closed. Work continues.

We had a couple of plenary talks about axial algebras; Sergey Shpectorov and Alexey Staroletov explained what these things (generalised from the Griess algebra for the Monster) are, and what the current status of their study is.

Greenberg’s Theorem states that any finite or countable group can be realised as the automorphism group of a Riemann surface, compact if and only if the group is finite. Gareth Jones talked about this. The proof, he says, is very complicated. He gave a new and much simpler proof; it did less than Greenberg’s Theorem in that it only works for finitely generated groups, but more in that the Riemann surface constructed is a complex algebraic curve over an algebraic number field.

Misha Volkov gave a beautiful talk about synchronizing automata. He began with the basic stuff around the Černý conjecture, which I have discussed before, but added a couple of things which were new to me: a YouTube video of a finite automaton taking randomly oriented plastic bottles on a conveyor belt in a factory and turning them upright; and the historical fact that the polynomial-time algorithm for testing synchronization was in the PhD thesis of Chinese mathematician Chung Laung Liu (also transliterated as Jiong Lang Liu), two years before the Černý conjecture was announced. Then he turned to new results, and showed that, with only tiny changes (allowing the automaton to have no transition for some state-symbol pair, or restricting the inputs from arbitrary words to words in a regular language) the synchronization problem can jump up from polynomial to PSPACE-complete!

Alexander Perepechko gave a remarkable talk, connecting the Thompson group T, the Farey series, automorphism groups of some affine algebraic surfaces, and Markov triples, solutions in natural numbers to the Diophantine equation x2+y2+z2 = 3xyz. (There is a long-standing conjecture that a natural number occurs at most once as the greatest element in some such triple. The sequence of such numbers begins 1, 2, 5, 13, 29, 34, 89, …. I will not attempt to explain further.)

Rosemary became the fourth author of the “diagonal structures” quartet to talk about that work, which I discussed here. She concentrated on the heart of the proof, the first place in the work where the remarkable appearance of algebraic structure (a group) from combinatorial (a Latin cube with a mild extra hypothesis) appears. Without actually describing how the hard proof goes, she explained the context and ideas clearly. I think this ranks among my best work; and all I did, apart from the induction proof of which Latin cubes form the base, was to insist to my co-authors that a result like this might just be possible, and we should go after it.

One of my early heroes in group theory was Helmut Wielandt; his book on permutation groups was my first reading as a graduate student. Danila Revin gave us a Wielandt-inspired talk. Wielandt had asked, in Tübingen lectures in the winter of 1963-4, about maximal X-subgroups of a group G, where X is a complete class of finite groups (closed under subgroups, quotients and extensions). Let kX(G) be the number of conjugacy classes of maximal X-subgroups of G, Wielandt said that the reduction X-theorem holds for the pair (G,N) if kX(G/N) = kX(G), and holds for a group A if it holds for (G,N) whenever G/N is isomorphic to A. Wielandt asked for all A, and then all pairs (G,N), for which this is true; this is the problem which Danila and his co-authors have now solved.

(I hope Danila will forgive me an anecdote here. At an Oberwolfach meeting in the 1970s, one of the speakers told us a theorem which took more than a page to state. Wielandt remarked that you shouldn’t prove theorems that take more than a page to state. Yet the solution to his own problem took nearly ten pages to state. I think this is inevitable, and simply teaches us that finite group theory is more complicated than we might have expected, and certainly more complicated than Michael Atiyah expected. Indeed, in the very next talk, Chris Parker told us about work he and his colleagues have done on subgroups analogous to minimal parabolic subgroups in arbitrary groups. This is intended as a contribution to revising the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, and they hoped to show that with an appropriate list of properties only minimal parabolics in groups of Lie type and a few other configurations could arise; they obtained the full list and were rather dismayed by its length, which would make the applications they had in mind very difficult.)

Among other fun facts, I learned that the graph consisting of a triangle with a pendant vertex is called the paw in Yekaterinburg, but is the balalaika in Novosibirsk.

On the last day of the seven-day meeting, we had two talks on dual Seidel switching, by Vladislav Kabanov and Elena Konstantinova, who were using it and a more general operation to construct new Deza graphs and integral graphs.

After a problem session, the conference ended by a virtual tour of Yekaterinburg (or Sverdlovsk, as it was in Soviet times), covering the history, architecture and economics, and illustrated by photographs and historical documents; the tour guide was Vladislav’s daughter.

Life was made more difficult and stressful for me because I was doing something which would have been completely impossible in pre-COVID times: I spent some time moonlighting from the Urals conference to attend ALGOS (ALgebras, Graphs and Ordered Sets) in Nancy, France, a meeting to celebrate the 75th birthday of Maurice Pouzet, which I didn’t want to miss. Many friends from a different side of my mathematical interests were there; as well as Maurice himself, Stéphan Thomassé, Nicolas Thiéry, Robert Woodrow, Norbert Sauer, and many others.

The three hours’ time difference between Yekaterinburg and Nancy meant that there was not too much overlap between the two meetings, so although I missed most of the contributed talks in Nancy, I heard most of the plenaries.

Stéphan Thomassé talked about twin-width, a new graph parameter with very nice properties. Given a graph, you can identify vertices which are twins (same neighbours) or nearly twins; in the latter case, there are bad edges joined to only one of the two vertices; the twin-width is the maximum valency of the graph of bad edges. Bounded twin-width implies bounded treewidth (for example) but not conversely; a grid has twin-width 4. Graphs with bounded twin-width form a small class (at most exponentially many of them), and, remarkably, it is conjectured that a converse also holds.

Jarik Nešetřil and Honza Hubička talked about EPPA and big Ramsey degrees respectively; I had heard these nice talks in Prague at the MCW, but it was very nice to hear them again.

Norbert Sauer talked about indivisibility properties for permutation groups of countable degree. I might say something about this later if I can get my head around it, but this may take some time. In particular, Norbert attributed a lemma and an example to me, in such a way that I was not entirely sure what it was that I was supposed to have proved! (My fault, not his – it was the end of a long day!)

Nicolas Thiéry gave a very nice talk on the profile of a countable relational structure (the function counting isomorphism types of n-element induced substructures), something to which Maurice Pouzet (and I) have given much attention, and on which there has recently been a lot of progress. (I discussed some of this progress here, but there has been more progress since.) In particular, structures whose growth is polynomially bounded are now understood, due to Justine Falque’s work, and for primitive permutation groups there is a gap from the all-1 sequence up to growth 2n/p(n), where p is a polynomial, thanks to Pierre Simon and Sam Braunfeld.

Unfortunately the conference was running on BigBlueButton, some conference-enabling software which I had not encountered before but which is apparently popular in France. I am afraid that it was simply not up to the job. The second day of the conference saw some talks and sessions abandoned, because speakers could not connect; I could sometimes not see the slides at all, and the sound quality was terrible. I discovered that one is recommended to use Chrome rather than Firefox, and indeed it did work a little better for me, but not free of problems. On this showing I would not recommend this system to anyone.

In particular, a beautiful talk by Joris van der Hoeven was mostly lost for me. I couldn’t see the slides. Joris’ explanations were perfectly clear, even without the visuals, but sometimes I lost his voice as well. The talk was about the connections between different infinite systems: ordinals, Hardy fields, and surreal numbers. In better circumstances I would have really enjoyed the talk.

I hasten to add that the problems were completely ouside the control of Miguel Couceiro, the organiser, and marred what would have been a beautiful meeting.

from Peter Cameron's Blog https://ift.tt/3hCsyw9 Peter Cameron from Blogger https://ift.tt/34KTo1B

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amanda--stevenson · 5 years

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The Communication Theories Seen in Glee

The Expectancy Violation Theory and Face Negotiation Theory

In the dismal town of Lima, Ohio, McKinley High School Spanish teacher Will Shuester dreams of reliving his teenage years of his success in show-choir when he was a student. With minimal support of the school staff and his wife, Will holds auditions to start a Glee club and receives a mix of misfit outcasts who are looking for an escape for the song in their heart. As the club gains success drawing in the students who feel misunderstood, romances stir and friendships and rivalries form. The Glee club is not exactly the coolest group of kids at the school and they are well aware of the negative image put upon the club by other students.

The head of Glee club is the Broadway-wanna-be Rachel Berry, a petite Jewish girl with two gay parents. She is infatuated with the quarterback of the football team, Finn Hudson. The two quickly become the Glee club’s power couple through their romance and help guide the team to Regional and National competitions. Other members of the Glee club range from the handicap-able Artie to the flamboyant Kurt to the closeted lesbian-cheerleader Santana. All of the characters have a certain quality about them that is tested in Glee. The show, made by Ryan Murphy, pushed the boundaries of any other show on television by focusing on the issues most shows avoid, like teenage sexuality, bullying/harassment and teen pregnancy, to name a few. In an attempt to water down these topics in a “family-friendly” way, they usually sang and dance their way through the hard times and expected to feel better about it on the other side. This show gained popularity from its accurate portrayal of pretty much every type of kid in high school. It also shined a light on the sensitive topics teens deal with today and various coping mechanisms, should they be afraid to be forward about these issues with people in their lives.

Two very prominent elements of Glee are unexpected reactions to situations between members of the glee club and how culture helps define conflict and preserving your own self-image and the image of others. I will analyze the communication behaviors in Glee through the Expectancy Violations Theory and Face Negotiation Theory. Both of these theories deal with the way people interact with one another and reactions to things that people do. Expectation Violations Theory is a part of the interpersonal lens and was created by Judee Burgoon. Face Negotiations Theory is a part of the intercultural communications lens and was created by Stella Ting-Toomey. Both theories are seen in many different characters and moments of Glee.

Expectancy Violations Theory was created as an attempt to explain the reactions of other people’s unexpected behaviors. When it began, its main focus was proxemics and personal space violations and how people were to react if someone invaded their personal space. However, this theory has been expanded to provide more categories of personal space, such has eye contact, body lean, and facial expression resulting in even more specific violations. We all possess a threat threshold that can determine the limits of what behavior we will perceive as acceptable until we feel violated. The end result of the action is a violation valence, a positive or negative feeling towards the action that was done.

While much of Glee is a happy song and dance, it does get serious at times. In its third season, the television show became a musical-comedy-drama as it touched on issues that aren’t usually seen in primetime TV. Glee wanted to push all the boundaries. The “emotional, flamboyant gay teen,”(Meyer, 2013) Kurt, had become comfortable in his own skin after expressing his feelings through song the previous year. Approaching the new school year in confidence, he boasted more pride in his appearance and dressed how he wanted to. Unfortunately, this did not please everyone. Soon, a tall, stocky football player, David Karofsky, approached Kurt and told him he highly disapproved of his sexual orientation, calling him derogatory names and physically slamming him into lockers. Kurt developed a negative valence towards David and as he continued to go to school each day, he felt unsafe. Kurt would flinch every time the football team walked by him and was told by David that he “would kill” him. Kurt develops a fallen, scared expression each time David comes towards him and is literally speechless in fear whenever David tries to talk to him. When Kurt meets with the principal, he expresses how he “can’t concentrate” and doesn’t “feel like he is part of the school at all,” instead saying how he feels like he is in a horror movie where the creature follows him around and he can’t escape. David had violated Kurt’s “threat threshold” (Griffin, 2012) by approaching him in “intimate distance” (Griffin, 2012) and physically assaulting him.

Santana Lopez was a feisty Latina who was afraid to come forward about her sexuality. She was in love with her best friend, Brittany, but was afraid of what the world would think of her. One afternoon after verbally harassing another student in front of Finn, Santana is outed by Finn who loudly states in front of many students in the hallway, “Why don’t you just come out of the closet already?”Santana was always one to be violent towards other students until this moment, when she received an unexpected reaction from Finn. Having previously been fairly good acquaintances, Santana never would have expected a friend to violate her like that. Santana and Finn even had a very short romantic relationship and while it passed quickly, they were on relatively good terms despite Santana’s harsh words towards just about everyone at the school. She was mean but she was never legitimately terrible or out to get anyone; she just liked to feel like she ruled the school. She usually was on top of the social hierarchy because she was feisty and on top of the cheerleading pyramid but now a level of her insecurity had been exposed: a level that most students didn’t think existed. Santana had to reevaluate her relationship with Finn because she was now in a heightened state of arousal as she believed the entire school knew her deepest secret. She also developed a negative valence towards him and called him names in the hallway and gave him evil looks in the choir room.

After both Santana and Kurt have been violated, they both experience the internal battle of entering the “fight or flight” mode. Before this outing, Santana was always one to fight. However, feeling that she was now weak and unaccepted by those around her, she fled from school to hide. Kurt also flew and ended up transferring schools because his negative valence

Glee provides a “structural discussion” of high school and how it “creates an environment that perpetuates hierarchical categorization of teens and social discrimination of those at the bottom of the social order.” (Dhaenes, 2012) Because Kurt and Santana were deemed to be unacceptable members of society by some of their peers, they were harassed. The social hierarchy is virtually unavoidable in a high school setting and for some students at McKinley, being gay is a reason to discriminate. Now, Kurt and Santana are both going to expect a negative response from everyone they encounter because of the violations brought upon them by David and Finn, respectively. Santana and Kurt also experience the “emotional victim effect,” (Lens, 2013) and thought they there were worse off going forward in life because the people that wronged them had high social status as popular football jocks. The emotional victim effect also had on the Glee club, as they expected the reactions from both Kurt and Santana to be very emotionally-heavy (which they were) and felt that they had to tip-toe around them. The Glee club offers to protect Kurt after he tells them he will be transferring schools but it is too late. Similarly, the Glee club provides a week of songs promoting and empowering women after Finn mistakingly outs her in the hallway. Finn tells Santana that he “wants to protect her” and will do whatever he can to take back what he has said. Both Kurt and Santana dismiss the support they are getting as the damage as already been done and they are receiving the support from their peers after the fact.

Besides having a negative valence towards people and their unexpected reactions, there are also moments on Glee that show a positive valence towards expectancy violations. When the group breaks into pairs for a singing competition, an uneven number of students in the Glee club leaves Rachel without a singing partner. Mr. Shuester decides to partner up with her and they sing “Endless Love” to show the class an example of a ballad, the assignment for the week. Rachel feels that Mr. Shuester is flirting with her and she believes she has a very positive valence because of his eye-contact and she is then aroused. As they continue to sing, Rachel sees the attraction growing stronger in his eyes (or so she thinks) when in reality he is realizing that something strange is going on with her. While the valence can be positive and negative, the “arousal can be either positive or negative”(Johnson, 2012) as well. Believing that she and her teacher had a very positive relationship, Rachel did not really think of the boundaries that she was crossing and went from residing in a “social distance” to a “personal distance” when she went over to his house and cooked dinner with his wife. Mr. Shuester responded to her violation by telling her to leave his house and sit in the back seat of the car as he drove her home. He felt that he had been aroused in a negative way.

In addition to communicating with one another verbally, the Glee club has a lot of trouble up-holding their social status. In a school that is dominated by social hierarchy, the jocks and cheerleaders rule the school. Everyone else is tossed into dumpsters or gets a slushy tossed in their face. However, for most of these kids that don’t wear a Cheerios uniform or a Letterman jacket, Glee club is where they are truly able to find themselves and feel a sense of belonging and acceptance.

Similarly, the Face Negotiation Theory attempts to explain cultural differences in response to conflict. A large part of this theory has to do with “negotiating face.” (Griffin, 2013) Face is defined as the projected self-image in a given situation; also referring to how we want others to see and treat us. With face comes face work, the verbal and non-verbal messages given that help maintain and restore face loss and work to get face gain. Stella Ting-Toomey, the creator of this theory, named two distinct cultures, the collectivistic culture and the individualistic culture. In a collectivistic culture, people rely on the group. This culture is very much focused on the “we.” In an individualistic culture, the emphasis is on the “I” and people focus on themselves and their immediate families and what is better for them. When conflict arises, “face-negotiation theory…is an explanatory mechanism for culture's influence on conflict behavior.” (Oeltz, 2003) And once conflict has begun, there are various coping mechanisms for dealing with the content.

The glee club is full of a culturally diverse group of high schoolers and while they come together as one group to create music, they are all individuals from different backgrounds before they come together. Most, if not all, bring those individual lifestyles up front. In one group of twenty-or so students there are two African Americans, two Asians, two Jewish students, and four gay students. Each student has their own lifestyle and cultural norms. For example, Santana is from a part of Lima entitled “Lima Heights Adjacent.” This part of town is prone to more violence than others and Santana uses her culture as a reason for her to lash out violently towards people. It also is how she saves her face.

Quinn Fabray, a beautiful, blonde, head-cheerleader, becomes pregnant her sophomore year of high school. After being kicked off of the cheer squad, a collectivistic culture she once sought to be apart of, she became determined to get back into that culture. She tried to integrate herself back onto the squad by going to practices even though she was not a member. After being rejected once again by the Cheerios, she became an individualistic culture. Quinn was only concerned about her own image and did her best to try and please everyone around her. She tried to win the heart of another football player, Sam Evans by convincing him that since all of the other girls he was interested in were taken and that she now is “super-model thin because [her] thyroid is under control,” they should be in a relationship. Quinn was performing face-restoration and trying to bring her image back up. Quinn was only conned for her “own image,” (Oeztel, 2003) otherwise know as self-face.

Finn Hudson, star football player and head quarterback is caught in the locker room shower one day singing his heart out into his shampoo bottle. When Mr. Shuester hears him, he approaches him and asks him if he is interested in joining Glee club. Finn initially declines because he is not apart of that culture. He is apart of the football culture and rules the school and feels that he won’t be socially accepted if he joins the Glee club. After a sneaky blackmailing attempt with some medical marijuana, Mr. Shuester convinces Finn to join Glee club to unleash his talents. After Finn has been in Glee club for a few months, he finds his old culture, the football team, in conflict with a member of his new culture, the Glee club. The football players were pushing the wheel-chair bound Artie into a port-o-potty and wanted to flip it on its side so he would be stuck. However, Finn uses face-giving to take care of Artie knows that he is included in Finn’s new culture of the Glee club. Finn also defends Artie in front of the football players by saying he is proud to be a member of the Glee club now and would never be proud to be a part of a group that uses “aggression” (Griffin, 2013) as a response to conflict management. Finn was concerned about other-face, the concern for another’s image by wanting to protect Artie over himself.

The power couple of Finn and Rachel had ups and downs most high school relationships experience like jealousy, acting clingy, and issues communicating. However, while Finn and Rachel came from very different parts of the social ladder; Finn being a star football player and Rachel being a lonely outcast with big aspirations, they put their differences aside and found they were perfect for each other. Their second year in the Glee club, the group makes it to Nationals and collectively as a culture go back and forth between who should sing the solo and duet at Nationals. It is finally decided that Finn and Rachel will sing the duet because if they just do their job, they will have an excellent shot at winning. Because Finn and Rachel’s relationship is so intense, they became an individualistic culture outside of their collectivistic culture of their Glee club. They go on a date the night before Nationals and rekindle the love that had slightly diminished when they were apart. They are now members of an individualistic cultures. Individualistic cultures “have a greater concern for self-face and lesser concern for other-face than members of collectivistic cultures,” and in turn, at the end of their duet at Nationals, they shared a passionate kiss, abruptly stopping the performance and ultimately losing their shot at even placing in the top 5. Their emotions continued to grow and they needed to “manage effectively and respond appropriately to them.” (Yurtsever, 2013) Finn and Rachel were too caught up in their own individualistic culture to make a name for themselves that they would sacrifice everything that the collectivistic culture has worked for.

The ups and downs of Glee provide for a very good understanding and analysis of Expectancy Violations Theory and Face Negotiation Theory. Both theories provide for a different level of understanding ranging from the ways students communicate with one another to the way various student cultures try to keep their image. While McKinley High is definitely a very over exaggerated representation of the high school where students sing and dance their problems away, the forms of communication in which the students use still holds true to any high school today. People can do very unexpected things to us, both in communication and in conflict. How we react to them can vary on our surroundings, previous expectations and knowledge of the person, and our culture. With all the problems faced in high school, communication is absolutely key to survival and these students are able to put their own spin on it and apply it to their own culture.

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