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a-pirate-my-hearties · 4 years

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The Invitation (chapter 1 of my Captain Hook x adult!Wendy fanfiction)

So the lovely @wisp-of-a-spook and I were talking the other day about writing a fic about a masquerade ball with the said pairing. I actually proposed her she could write it but said I will also write my own, so here is the first part! And let’s hope my writer’s block is gone forever! :D But you have to forgive me, since I’m not a Native English speaker and I’m rusty as hell, since I haven’t written any fic in AGES. So bear with me.

@wisp-of-a-spook, so here it is! <3 I hope I will get to the next part soon :)

I just find the Captain Hook tag very lacking in the fanfiction department. ;)

DISCLAIMER: I don’t own any of the characters, these are barely my interpretations of them.

FACECLAIMS: Captain Hook looks like the irreplaceable Jason Isaacs in “Peter Pan” 2003 film.

Wendy Darling more less as an adult Rachel Hurd-Wood. Examples: her roles as Sybil Vane in “Dorian Gray” or anything other where she’s adult anyway.

~~~~~~~~

Wendy Darling was quite content with her life. She was top of the class at the university, close to graduating with a master’s degree. It was to nobody’s surprise that she chose to study literature. Wendy was, after all, a storyteller, and a masterful one at that. It seemed but the right choice to study the stories that had entranced her from her very childhood.

Once a week, every Friday, her close friends would meet her at Mrs. And Mr. Darling’s house, gathering around the fireplace, faces filled with amazement and awe, to listen to the wonderful stories Wendy has been so passionately and carefully crafting and then telling.

Fire would lit in her jade green eyes when she spoke, a mischievous smile playing on her still yet girlish lips, golden brown locks thrown away in disarray when she gesticulated.

But Wendy Darling was very much a woman now. She grew up and it wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened, she thought.

Yet despite the obvious success in her field, despite the friends and loving family, Wendy’s life lacked something. It lacked something deep and profound and enticing, the feeling that would make her blood stir in excitement, make the life worthwhile – companionship and adventure.

And it’s been like that since she left Neverland.

Neverland was a place full of wondrous but treacherous magic that Wendy and her brothers used to frequently visit as children – in their dreams, at first. But soon the veil between dreams and reality became so thin it could rip at any moment – and so it did. Wendy, John and Michael soon met Peter Pan, who tought them to fly and it was him who took them to Neverland – this time for real.

Peter was her first love. She gave him her hidden kiss – oh, to be so vulnerable again –

They lived through all kinds of adventures, met the lost boys and sirens and Indians and pirates and –

Him.

For the past few nights Wendy has been having the same dream on repeat. Surely she must have been missing Neverland. But it was not Peter hauting her dreams. Those weren’t his boyish green eyes and his ‘cockadoodledoo!’ she could hear. Her feelings for him were gone, she was not a girl anymore –

Wendy was dreaming of eyes so blue, those unmistakable eyes, blue as forget-me-nots, of profound melancholy1, and all around her, as if an echo in a well, she could hear his voice:

‘Wendy… Darling...’

Wendy woke up with a loud gasp, eyes shooting wide open. She fell asleep on her desk again, face against the hardcover of her textbook. Grimacing and rubbing her face, she got up and stretched her neck. She put on her favourite lavender robe and went down the stairs to the kitchen to make herself some tea.

The clock in the living room struck midnight and then stopped ticking.2 At first Wendy didn’t notice, busy making her tea, but then it caught her attention.

‘How odd...’

She went to the living room and frowned at the clock in puzzlement, but then heard a firm knock on the door.

It was very weird for anyone to come at this time , Wendy certainly wasn’t expecting anyone and she was home alone. But Wendy Moira Angela Darling wasn’t raised a coward.

She went to the door and hesitated a bit before opening it. There was nobody and nothing outside.

‘Hello?’

She looked around, irked. Probably some prankster was thinking himself funny with these type of jokes.

But to her surpise there actually was something. A thin, rectangular object, slowly falling down in a feather-like manner and finally landing on her doormat in front of her.

Wendy stared at the object, confused, then picked it up.

It was an envelope, of dark crimson colour, sealed with golden wax. Adressed to ‘Miss Wendy Darling’. And glistening with… was this possible? Was that fairy dust?..

Wendy’s gasp was barely audible when she was staring at the envelope with wonder, but then the chill October air reminded her she wasn’t suitably dressed, so she went back inside.

Still bewildered, she sat at the kitchen table and took a deep breath before cracking the wax open with slightly shaking hands.

Inside there was an invitation card, written in beautiful cursive:

Samhain Masquerade Ball

You are cordially invited to the great Samhain Masquerade Ball, hosted by the ever so generous Captain James Hook. Second star to the right and straight on till morning. We will be honoured by your presence. Wear your best.

Apart from the invitation card there was also a folded piece of parchment. Wendy took it out of the envelope and smelled tobacco, vanilla and spices. It wasn’t a strong smell, it slightly lingered on the parchment, barely a memory of a much stronger essence, but it was enough to make her head spin. Wendy already knew who this was from.

She unfolded the parchment.

‘There’s still a room for a storyteller.’

Even his handwriting felt familiar. And she knew she will accept the invitation.

Wendy felt something light drop onto the floor. She bent down to check what it was. When she got up, her mouth was curling up slightly, eyes filled with nostalgia and pressed forget-me-nots in her hand.

1Just as J.M. Barrie described Captain Hook’s eyes.

2Midnight is the hour of ghosts. In the Gothic fiction it’s the hour where peculiar and fantastical things are more likely to happen. :)

#DarlingHook #captain james hook #wendy x hook #adult wendy x hook #captain hook x wendy #jason isaacs #rachel hurd-wood #neverland #peter pan fanfiction #jas. hook #james hook #darlinghook fanfic #ficlet #the invitation #peter pan 2003 #captain hook x adult!wendy fanfiction #peter pan #peter pan and wendy #my writing

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markwatkinsconsumerguide · 3 years

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Consumer Guide / No.111 / American musician, Barbara Markay, with Mark Watkins.

MW : Why decide (initially) to switch from making classical music to pop?

BM : It happened during my first year at Juilliard College toward the end of the school year. It was in their new building at Lincoln Center, and I was practicing the piano in one of their practice rooms on the 5th floor, which had windows and a beautiful view of the streets below and the whole Lincoln Center area. I was taking a little break, and was looking out the window and thought to myself that I should be down there experiencing life and meeting interesting people, instead of practicing piano all day long! I had gotten into the Juilliard prep department / pre-college division when I was 10 years old, and had been a classical pianist for a long time. Maybe it was time for a change!

After that day in the practice room, I started to think about this more and more, especially every time I got a practice room with a “window on the world” so to speak. I started to think about all those people walking around on the streets, and who among them was actually going to be interested in listening to classical music. I thought that I might be wasting my musical talent on my present studies as a pianist and composer, and that I was much more interested in talking to people and finding out what they were thinking and why they said and did the things they did.

I became more and more interested in writing lyrics, which turned into my first pop songs. I realized that I could communicate the music I had inside me via pop music better than just performing classical music, because I could write about the whole new exciting culture of the times with no narrow, preordained musical style restrictions, or older musical rules. I could write and say whatever I wanted to! It was a brand new world for me! And so much fun! I still appreciated and loved classical music, and graduated from Juilliard college at the end of the four years, but I was now writing these funny, risqué, pop songs, just piano and voice, and everyone I played them for loved it!

We had academic studies as well as music classes as part of our program, and one of these classes was English literature, which I suddenly was great at. I don’t know where this understanding of human beings came from, or my love for reading English literature, but one day my English teacher, Beatrice Taub (who also taught at Columbia University), asked me after class if I really really was sure, that being a classical pianist and composer was really what I wanted to do with my life, because I was exceptionally good at literature. She suggested that I might take some extension classes at Columbia University to explore it further, maybe transferring to Columbia eventually.

It was then that I realized that these songs I was writing were going to be a better career path for me because they involved both writing and music, and I got that encouragement to continue with pop music. There was also another class I took that the music students would take together with the actors, that also was encouraging me to continue to write pop music.

Some of the people in my class were destined to be really famous actors, and one of them was Robin Williams. I felt more at ease in this class because they were mostly all actors, and had broader interests than the music students, I felt. Robin asked me one day to play some more of my songs for him, because he wanted to do a show out of them. He said he just loved the humor and the music I had put to the songs. He said he wanted to do some kind of a musical review with it. He was very funny even then. Just a natural comic, but also a great actor. Nothing came of it at that time, but my songs were eventually made into many musical reviews years later.

That was the beginning of my pop musical career.

Christopher Reeve, Kevin Spacey, Christine Baranski (1974), Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Kline, Patty LuPone, William Hurt, and more, were all actors who were part of the new acting department at the new Juilliard building at Lincoln Center. Eventually, years later, they would put in a classical guitar department, and a jazz department, which would have been unheard of before the new building came into being. Before these new times, Juilliard considered classical guitar to be “folk” music, and jazz wasn’t even on their radar. I guess someone was thinking like me, and these other forms of music needed to be heard and expressed as well as traditional classical music. So I think it was in the 1980s they got Sharon Isbin (fabulous classical guitarist) to head up the new guitar department, and Wynton Marsalis to head up the new jazz department to get these new genres started at the new Juilliard.

So much for my very formative Juilliard years!

These early songs were part of my piano & voice comedy act that was very popular at the time. A lot of people compared me to being a musical Joan Rivers. ‘It’s All Rite’ was part of this set of songs. I went to the UK on vacation soon after graduating college, and met Lee Allen, a music promoter with Carousel Artists (I think that was the name of his company) who booked me on a college tour of England and Ireland. Eventually, I put a small group together and performed everywhere. I played at the New University of Ulster, Belfast, and I opened for 10CC at, I believe, Kings College in London, and played many other colleges as well. What a great time I had, and everyone really liked the songs, including the risqué ones! And I just loved England! But then it became time to return to the states.

MW : Where does your music fit in terms of categorisation / the music scene?

BM : It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that I started writing more serious pop songs, not the early comedy stuff anymore. That was just after I had put out ‘It's All Rite’, the 12” dance, salsa single version of the song, and it was such a huge international hit. After that, I got interested in metaphysics - the invisible world so to speak - and more philosophical and spiritual matters. I found my first and very great meditation teacher, Anne Elizabeth Cooper, in New York City, and studied metaphysics with her for two years. It absolutely changed my life! I developed a totally different point of view of everything! I started writing songs more along these lines, and also songs about how people relate to each other on deeper levels. I needed to grow as a writer and artist, so this new path I took expanded my views of life and consciousness level.

Some of my early pop albums like Change To Come and Heart Like A Song contain some of my favorite and most prized songs, like ‘Still Need You’, ‘Change To Come’, ‘I Am The River’ and ‘Fallen Angel’ from the Change To Come album. And from the Heart Like A Song album, my favorites are, ‘In The Silence’, ‘You Are What You Believe’, ‘Hands Of The Artist’ and ‘All That I Am’. You can tell by just the titles how I had shifted focus and had finally grounded myself in more meaningful songs that brought in a brand new audience.

After those two albums. I continued expanding to world beat grooves with the Shambhala Dance album, which won best dance/dub/club album of the year (New Age Reporter finalist 2005 Lifestyle music award!). ‘Atlantis’, the first cut on the album, got great reviews and lots of airplay, even today it’s still being played. It’s been called “a meditation through movement”, and, “an exotic voyage of mysterious flamenco, Asian and middle eastern melodies, full of powerful world beat grooves beautifully blended together to create an atmosphere of intense, vital emotions both sensual and meditative at the same time” (Wind and Wire magazine, April 2005, Bill Binkelman).

I continued exploring different styles with a meditation album, Heaven And Earth, which is a continuous 50 minute meditation. I got and still get a lot of plays in the yoga studios and meditation classes with this one and the Shambhala Dance album. But you can see how my shift to more metaphysical and spiritual music has carried me into these different, but related styles. I even composed a musical rendition of the ancient, venerated prayer, ‘The Great Invocation’, given to humanity by ascended Tibetan master Djwhal Khul. I have shifted styles as I matured and explored a more expanded and deeper understanding of what I wanted to express musically.

MW : How are you using social media to stream / promote your music on platforms such as Spotify, iTunes etc?.

BM : It’s great! You can see all of the albums and singles I’ve done on Spotify, iTunes, and the other streaming services right away. So can all the other artists who put content out there. Everyone had to switch to streaming for the great international exposure. There’s nothing like it!

MW : Two of your early records were banned. Did you set out to challenge the mainstream with titles ‘It’s All Rite To F*ck All Nite…’ and ‘Give Your Dick To Me’?

BM : I was never really “banned”. What happened is that I produced the first 12” dance single version of ‘It’s All Rite’, and took it to all the record labels, which were mostly all in New York at the time. Everyone absolutely loved the record! Everyone absolutely wanted a few copies for themselves and their friends. But nobody had the balls to put it out into the market!!!! They were all afraid of repercussions, censorship, and their reputations! So I decided that I would put it out myself, something nobody had done at the time! I thought the record needed to be heard. I found a pressing plant in New Jersey, who were fine with pressing it up, then I went to an art store and got some “press type” and designed my own album cover. I got a friend of mine to take a picture of me, and voila! I had an album ready to go. I had no monies to promote the record, only just enough to record it and press it up. I figured that if I could get it heard by some people, maybe I could get some interest in it and maybe sell a few copies.

At that time, in New York and across the whole country, there were record pools, which were organizations of DJ’s who played the music in the dance clubs. I sent a 12” record (CD’s hadn’t been invented yet) to a list of record pools around the country, and to my surprise, I got a great response. Everyone wanted a copy to play. It was a salsa dance groove, something kinda new for mainstream clubs at the time, but the song was funny and danceable so everyone liked it and wanted to hear it. This was a time when you couldn’t get any airplay without a record label behind you. It was payola all the way. But what I could get was club play, and these DJ’s kept asking me for more and more records. And now people were asking the DJ’s where they could buy the record. So I had to get a distributor to put the records into record stores.

By this time, the record was being played in most all the clubs in the United States, but with no place to buy it. My first thought was to go to Sam Goody, one of the biggest record stores in New York at the time, and see if they would sell the record. They said yes, showing me a copy of some dance/club charts they had in the store that said that the record was #1 on the charts!!!!! I had no idea about these separate dance/club listings and was really excited that it was already charting. But there were about five dance charts around at this time, and ‘It’s All Rite’ was #1 on all of them! It stayed #1 for about five or six months in a row! It was a sensation! This started in about May of 1978, or 1979, I think, and ran thru September. Sam Goody gave me the very hard to get whole window display of my record, so did Colony records, another big record store in New York City at the time, and the rest is history! Other record stores followed.

Soon I realized that I needed a bigger distributor, so I contacted several in all the sections of the US, like the South, the Midwest, North Central, East Coast, West Coast, etc. They kept asking me for more and more records. I couldn’t figure out where the records were going. So one day I called my local one stop guy in Long Island City, and he said they were all going overseas. I asked where overseas, and he said, “Everywhere! Especially Holland.” Apparently, 12 miles off the coast of Holland was a ship that had a radio station broadcasting from it, and they could play anything that they wanted. My record was the number one request! Nobody could do anything about it to stop them, because they were in international waters. 12 miles out!!!

Since this was my first big hit, I was inexperienced as to what I needed to do next. It wasn’t too much later, about December of that year, I got a call from WEA International in Holland (Warner Brothers, Electra & Atlantic records all together) who said they wanted to license my record. It sounded great to me, so I took the deal. They published it in Europe, South America, England, Japan, Asia, etc. and promoted it in all the clubs. And I finally got legitimate airplay on it, because on the “B” side I had recorded the “clean” version, called ‘It’s All Rite To Truck All Nite’. Lots and lots of airplay everywhere! Finally!

It became #16 on the Billboard pop charts in the Benelux countries, and #2 on the charts in Paris, Michael Jackson being #1 at the time. WEA asked me for another single to put out, and I gave them, ‘Give Your Dick To Me’, and that was also very successful. I did the same thing with the “clean” “B” side, ‘Give Your Flesh To Me’.

So the bottom line is that if you have a record that everyone wants to hear, nothing will stop it from being heard. The people decided they wanted to hear ‘It’s All Rite’, and it squeezed itself through the cracks to be a big hit. Also, it started a new trend in music of what could be heard and played. Several DJ’s told me that I had really done something BIG with that song. They said it changed the music business forever! It opened the door for new things to come into the market, and then the people could judge for themselves whether they liked it.

Now getting back to your original question about being censored/banned, I really didn’t have any criticism for doing the record. People just wanted to get a copy of it and enjoy it. And I didn’t set out to “challenge” the system. I was simply expressing my views on what people were really thinking, and I did it via a danceable, funny, comedy record. I was just having fun!

Now, a lot of people took it seriously, literally, and that’s ok. Everyone has their own interpretation of things. That is what Art is for. To make people think. And that is what, ‘It’s All Rite’, did. It made people think, laugh, dance, party, and feel good! Remember, this was a time when Lenny Bruce had set a new standard, Joan Rivers was on the scene, along with Richard Pryor, George Carlin, etc. By the time I came along I took it all for granted that I would be able to put this record out. I wrote it when I was 19 years old and still in college, so that’s what you write when you’re that age. I didn’t care at all what people would think about me or this song!

Nobody I was aware of wrote anything negative about this “outrageous” song. One of the many reviews I got for my act (when I was performing all my funny songs with piano & voice around town in the late 1970s) was from Michael’s Thing, an LGBT magazine, New York City’s #1 weekly entertainment magazine and “going out guide” with reviews, comics, of all the performances, Art in the city, new and noteworthy etc. which said about my act, “…...she (Barbara) makes you laugh while she stabs you in the back!” I got nothing but praise for putting this song out! The LGBT community loved what I had done and fully supported me, along with great reviews from the Village Voice, and a nice write up from Billboard magazine by Roman Kozak. I also played at Huey’s Bar, a gay men’s bar, on Hudson street (west side of New York city near the Hudson river) for several months, through that whole summer, just piano and voice. It was a big hit!

MW : Tell me about your involvement with Carly Simon’s Coming Around Again album?

BM : I was doing synthesizer programming for a few of the songs on the album. The arranger I was working with was doing some arrangements for her new album, and I got to do some of the synth programming. It was lots of fun to be involved and to go to the recording sessions.

MW : …and the Michael Jackson (BAD) video…. also include any thoughts on Jackson’s charisma, ability (song & dance)….

BM : I never got to meet Michael Jackson, but I did get to meet Martin Scorsese who was really really interesting! He was asked to produce the video for the song. He came up to the office one day to discuss what kind of extra scored music was needed for the BAD video, music before the song started, and after the song was through. He was very intense, a real thinking kind of guy, and someone who knew what he wanted. He also has a great sense of humor! He impressed me as someone who really knows people. Meeting Scorcese was actually more exciting for me than meeting Jackson as he’s a real character!!! A mature adult!

MW : You’ve worked with Bruce Willis as a backing singer. Tell me about those times … also include your views on his abilities as an actor turned singer…

BM : Bruce Willis is a really great actor, and can play almost any part. That includes as a blues singer. The show we did was as his backup singers (along with two friends of mine) for the opening of the new Hard Rock Café in Austin, Texas. It was a very long day, full of rehearsals on stage with the band, and waiting for Bruce to arrive. As we tested mikes and stage positions, we could see a huge crowd starting to form in order to get a good view of the coming show. The press was there, and reported close to 100,000 people waiting to see this opening.

Bruce eventually got there, extremely exhausted. By the time the show started it was dark out, and everyone was excited. Then came the big moment when Bruce Willis came on stage, and everyone went wild! The band started to play and he started to sing. I was shocked by how well he could sing, and put over a song. It was a real “performance”.

He may not have all the technique of a “professional” singer, but what he has is better. He can make you get into the song, feel the song, …it’s not really the voice but the performance that’s spectacular. So close up to me. I could really see why he’s considered one of the great actors of our time. Acting, singing and performing are all connected. And he puts it all together beautifully.

MW : Describe a typical weekend….before lockdown and during…

BM : Well, I used to love to go to the ocean and watch the sunset a lot, then meet my friends for dinner in one of the great restaurants by the beach or in town. Before lockdown there were great movies to see, not just at home (these days) but at the real movie houses. Plenty of them around in the “old” days. During lockdown everyone has to stream movies at home. At least streaming is safe!

I also used to like to work out at the gym, but you can’t do that yet, so I’m hoping that sometime in the near future that will become viable again. Sometimes it’s fun just to take a ride up pacific coast highway and breathe in the sea air and see the beautiful scenery. You can still always do that.

There are lots of farmers markets around town, so I always go on the weekends to shop for fresh, whole, organic fruits and veggies! That’s always fun, and sometimes I go with my friends too.

Eating good, fresh, organic foods is my entire “Health Plan”! You are what you eat! So far, so good! And I can do this all year long. And during this lockdown, we just all wear masks. It’s fun being at the farmers markets and seeing all the chefs from all the great restaurants in town shopping for their weekly recipes with those big shopping carts they push thru the market. They buy whole boxes of produce and everything else sold there.

MW : What is your favourite…Carly Simon single?

BM : I think that would be ‘Mockingbird’, especially the 2015 remaster. James Taylor sounds great on this, and the two of them together just fit together perfectly. This remaster is from Songs From The Trees (a musical memoir collection). I’m glad they did this, because this is a classic! You can hear all the instruments clearly, the voices are very present, and the whole thing is a pleasure to listen to. Musical tastes change, but the classics will remain with us from “gentler” times.

MW : AND your favourite… Bruce Willis film?

BM : (I can’t choose just one!)

The Whole Nine Yards : hysterically funny!!! I laugh every time. The Fifth Element is a real classic! I see it again every time it’s on TV. Bruce Willis is fantastic in that “deadpan” character he plays. And the score by French composer Eric Serra is superb. Hip, powerful, rhythmic, smooth, jagged, everything needed to match the screen scene.

But the music stands alone if you just listen to the score by itself without the movie. I think they sold a lot of the music score. The Sixth Sense - so powerful, and metaphysical! It’s right up my alley! And Bruce Willis has a knack for finding well written screenplays! That’s a big key to the success of the movies he’s in.

And since they’re so well written, he has an opportunity to really show off his talent and get into those great parts.

MW : AND your favourite… Michael Jackson album?

BM : I think I like the Thriller album the best. I love the songs, especially, ‘Beat It’, ‘Thriller’, and ‘Human Nature’. And it was so well produced by Quincy Jones, with pounding gritty grooves, and great songs.

MW : List, in order of preference, your Top 10 singles & albums of all-time…

BM : (I have the original CD’s of this music, and still call them CD’s, but I’m sure this music is all streaming/downloads by now!)

1. Famous Blue Raincoat: songs by Leonard Cohen, studio album by singer Jennifer Warnes: exquisite, perfect singing of songs with her crystal clear voice! What a superb collaboration this was! I wish they had made more albums together like this one! A true classic! When I first heard it I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! Songs so well written, songs with a real message, and so well sung and produced.

2. I also love Leonard Cohen’s, ‘Hallelujah’, sung by anyone! It gives me chills every time! Powerful and hauntingly beautiful! The best cover of it that I love is K.D. Lang’s version. (I think it was on her album, Hymns Of The 49th Parallel, 2004).

3. Bach: Sonatas & Partitas: violinist: Itzhak Perlman: The sub-title of this 2 CD set put out by EMI classics says it all: “Great Recordings of the Century”, which is aptly titled!!! I can listen to this album at any time, and it will put me into a deep trance. I can’t stop listening.

Itzhak Perlman is an absolute master of the violin, and these solo compositions are not only some of Bach’s finest works, but Perlman’s rendition of them is flawless. He understands what the composer was trying to accomplish, and every time I listen to this it feels like he is showing us the true soul of humanity! The longing, the passion, the “reaching to the Light”! The thing about this kind of classical music is its very high vibration! I think it does make you smarter!

4. Then we have Jorge Aragao and his live album entitled Ao Vivo (which means “live”). Another album I have listened to for years. He’s a Brazilian singer/songwriter, and the songs are all sung in Brazilian Portuguese. But don’t let that stop you from listening. It’s exciting, passionate and very well recorded. It has the whole flavor of Brazil in it! Recorded in 1999.

The last song is a great rendition of ‘Ave Maria’. A true classic! (I took a great vacation to Brazil for a month once in the mid-2000s and this album is the real deal! The Brazilians absolutely Love him!)

5. Edith Piaf: 30e Anniversaire 2 cd set (probably on all the streaming services by now). All the songs are beautifully recorded, written, produced and her voice is extraordinary and present. It gives you the whole culture and passion of the French. It always puts me at a French café with friends and great great food! If you’ve never heard Edith Piaf, it’s well worth a listen.

There was a wonderful movie on her life called La Vie en Rose which I also recommend to get the whole feeling of this music. And I listen to this music often, especially when I’m feeling like there’s no culture west of New York City! She saves the day every time!

6. John Lennon: Imagine: I think everyone knows this is a classic! It’s a positive message!

7. The Eagles: Hotel California the whole album, but especially the title song, ‘Hotel California’: It never gets old!

8. Bach: English Suites performed by pianist Andras Schiff: he’s a Bach specialist, and has a great insight into what Bach intended with this great recording: Part of my regular listening.

9. Buena Vista Social Club: it really gives you the heart and soul of Cuba. I think the reason this album was such a hit when it was first put out is the huge amount of heart, passion, and honesty it evokes. You can feel it’s the real deal. Nothing fake here!

10. And last but not least, two albums that were put out by Putumayo a while back, called Brasileiro and Samba Bossa Nova. They are compilations of several Brazilian artists and styles, including bossa nova, folk, light samba, and I think some other styles too, beautifully put together. They are calming, gentle, rhythmic and haunting, and a great way to wake up in the morning. So many positive vibes! So musical and unpretentious!

MW : Where / what was the best meal you’ve ever enjoyed and what was the company like?

BM : Well, all I can remember is that it was in a Paris restaurant, and I was taken there by a record company executive to discuss publishing my music through a Paris company. I remember she told me that the closer you get to Paris from anywhere in the world, the better the food gets!!!

And I wasn’t disappointed!

The meal was some kind of spectacular steak, mousse au chocolate for desert, and fine red wine throughout the meal. Cheeses for dessert! (that was more dessert after the dessert!) And it was the atmosphere and vibe, not just of the restaurant, but of Paris, and the French people and their culture that I found so fabulous! I love the French and they loved me back!!!!

MW : What can we anticipate coming from you later on in 2021?

BM : I’m currently thinking about something along the lines of my previous Shambhala Dance and Heaven And Earth albums. Worldbeat and with a sleek groove.

It takes time to compose something like that.

It will be announced on my website when it’s done. www.barbaramarkay.com and I will put it out on the streaming services / downloads as usual.

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thisblogisalsoboundforglory · 3 years

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WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY

Kage Baker’s Company Series

In the Garden of Iden

Sky Coyote

Mendoza in Hollywood

The Graveyard Game

The Life of the World to Come

The Children of the Company

The Machine's Child

The Sons of Heaven

The Empress of Mars

Not Less than Gods

Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea

Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

Gods and Pawns

In the Company of Thieves

Ø Science Fiction written by a woman with Asperger’s. Wildly uneven. Main protagonist is female, but there are lots of POV characters, male and female.

Ø Big ideas.

Ø Lots of adventure, some action.

Ø Small doses of humor.

Neil Gaiman

Good Omens (with Sir Terry Pratchett)

Neverwhere

Stardust

American Gods

Anansi Boys

The Graveyard Book

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Ø Neil’s books are a road trip with Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and a baggie full of sativa.

Ø Ideas are incidental. The Milieu’s in charge.

Ø Adventure happens whether you like it or not.

Ø Cosmic humor. The joke’s on us.

Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel Series

Firewatch

Doomsday Book

To Say Nothing of the Dog (and the novel that inspired it – Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat)

Blackout/All Clear

Assorted:

The Last of the Winnebagos

Ø Connie loves her historical research. Blackout/All Clear actually lasts as long as the Blitz, but anything in the Oxford Time Travel series is worth reading. Doomsday Book reads like prophecy in retrospect.

Ø One idea: Hi! This is the human condition! How fucking amazing is that?!?

Ø Gut-punch adventure with extra consequences. Background action.

Ø I’d have to say that Doomsday Book is the funniest book about the black death I’ve ever read, which isn’t saying much. To Say Nothing of the Dog is classic farce, though. Girl’s got range.

Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash (After the apocalypse, the world will be ruled by Home-Owners Associations. Be afraid.)

Cryptonomicon

Anathem

Seveneves

Ø Neal writes big, undisciplined, unfocused books that keep unfolding in your mind for months after you’ve read them. He’s a very guy-type writer, in spite of a female protagonist or two. Seveneves, be warned, starts out brilliant and devolves into extreme meh.

Ø Big. Fucking. Ideas.

Ø Battles, crashes, fistfights, parachute jumps, nuclear powered motorcycles and extreme gardening action. Is there an MPAA acronym for that?

Ø Humor dry enough to be garnished with two green olives on a stick.

Christopher Moore

Pine Cove Series:

Practical Demonkeeping

The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove

The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Okay, yeah, Christmas. But Christmas with zombies, so that’s all right.)

Fluke (Not strictly Pine Cove, but in the same universe. Ever wonder why whales sing? They’re ordering Pastrami sandwiches. I’m not kidding.)

Death Merchant Chronicles:

A Dirty Job

Secondhand Souls (Best literary dogs this side of Jack London)

Coyote Blue (Kind of an outlier. Overlapping characters)

Shakespeare Series:

Fool

The Serpent of Venice

Shakespeare for Squirrels

Assorted:

Island of the Sequined Love Nun (Cargo cults with Pine Cove crossovers. I have a theory that the characters in this book are direct descendants of certain characters in Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon.)

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (So I have a favorite first-century wonder rabbi. Who doesn’t?)

Sacre Bleu

Noir

Ø Not for the squeamish, the easily offended, or those who can’t lovingly embrace the fact that the human species is pretty much a bunch of idiots snatching at moments of grace.

Ø No big ideas whatever. Barely any half-baked notions.

Ø Enthusiastic geek adventure. Action as a last resort.

Ø Nonstop funny from beginning to end.

Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London Series

Rivers of London

Moon Over Soho

Whispers Under Ground

Broken Homes

Foxglove Summer

The Hanging Tree

The Furthest Station

Lies Sleeping

The October Man

False Value

Tales From the Folly

Ø Lean, self-deprecating police procedurals disguised as fantasy novels. Excellent writing.

Ø These will not expand your mind. They might expand your Latin vocabulary.

Ø Crisply described action, judiciously used. Whodunnit adventure. It’s all about good storytelling.

Ø Generous servings of sly humor. Aaronovitch is a geek culture blueblood who drops so many inside jokes, there are websites devoted to indexing them.

John Scalzi

Old Man’s War Series:

Old Man’s War

Questions for a Soldier

The Ghost Brigades

The Sagan Diary

The Last Colony

Zoe’s Tale

After the Coup

The Human Division

The End of All Things

Ø Star Trek with realpolitik instead of optimism.

Ø The Big Idea is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Nor over it.

Ø Action-adventure final frontier saga with high stakes.

Ø It’s funny when the characters are being funny, and precisely to the same degree that the character is funny.

Assorted:

The Dispatcher

Murder by Other Means

Redshirts (Star Trek, sideways, with occasional optimism)

Ø Scalzi abandons (or skewers) his space-opera tendencies with these three little gems of speculative fiction. Scalzi’s gift is patience. He lets the scenario unfold like a striptease.

Ø What-if thought experiments that jolt the brain like espresso shots.

Ø Action/misadventure as necessary to accomplish the psychological special effects.

Ø Redshirts is satire, so the humor is built-in, but it’s buried in the mix.

David Wong/Jason Pargin

John Dies at the End

This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It

What the Hell Did I Just Read?

Ø Pargin clearly starts his novels with a handful of arresting scenes and images, then looses the characters on an unsuspecting world to wander wither they will.

Ø Ideas aren’t as big or obvious as Heinlein, but they are there to challenge all your assumptions in the same way that Heinlein’s were.

Ø Classic action/adventure for anyone raised on Scooby-Doo.

Ø Occasional gusts of humor in a climate that’s predominantly tongue-in-cheek.

Jodi Taylor’s Chronicles of St. Mary’s Series

Just One Damned Thing After Another

The Very First Damned Thing

A Symphony of Echoes

When a Child is Born*

A Second Chance

Roman Holiday*

A Trail Through Time

Christmas Present*

No Time Like the Past

What Could Possible Go Wrong?

Ships and Stings and Wedding Rings*

Lies, Damned Lies and History

The Great St Mary’s Day Out*

My Name is Markham*

And the Rest is History

A Perfect Storm*

Christmas Past*

An Argumentation of Historians

The Battersea Barricades*

The Steam Pump Jump*

And Now for Something Completely Different*

Hope for the Best

When Did You Last See Your Father?*

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple*

Plan For The Worst

The Ordeal of the Haunted Room

Ø The * denotes a short story or novella. Okay, try to imagine Indiana Jones as a smartassed redheaded woman with a time machine and a merry band of full contact historians. I love history, and I especially love history narrated by a woman who can kick T. Rex ass.

Ø The ideas are toys, not themes. Soapy in spots.

Ø Action! Adventure! More action! More adventure! Tea break. Action again!

Ø Big, squishy dollops of snort-worthy stuff.

Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell Series

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

A Letter of Mary

The Moor

Jerusalem

Justice Hall

The Game

Locked Rooms

The Language of Bees

The God of the Hive

Beekeeping for Beginners

Pirate King

Garment of Shadows

Dreaming Spies

The Marriage of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell

Mary Russell's War And Other Stories of Suspense

Island of the Mad

Riviera Gold

The Art of Detection (Strictly speaking, this is in the action!lesbian Detective Kate Martinelli series, but it crosses over to the Sherlock Holmes genre. If you’ve ever wondered how Holmes would deal with the transgendered, this is the book.)

Ø Sherlock Holmes retires to Sussex, keeps bees, marries a nice Jewish girl who is smarter than he is and less than half his age and he’s mentored since she was fifteen in an extremely problematic power dynamic relationship that should repulse me but doesn’t, somehow, because this is the best Sherlock Holmes pastiche out there. Mary should have been a rabbi, but it is 1920, so she learns martial arts and becomes an international detective instead. Guest appearances by Conan Doyle, Kimball O’Hara, T.E. Lawrence, Cole Porter, and the Oxford Comma.

Ø Nothing mind-expanding here, unless the levels of meta present in a fictional world that is about how the fictional world might not be as fictional as you thought come as a surprise to anyone in the era of tie-in books, films, tv, interactive social media and RPGs.

Ø If these two geniuses can’t catch the bad guys with their dazzling brilliance, they will happily kick some ass. Adventure takes center stage and the action sequences are especially creative.

Ø Amusement is afoot.

Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series

The Eyre Affair

Lost in a Good Book

The Well of Lost Plots

Something Rotten

First Among Sequels

One of Our Thursdays is Missing

The Woman Who Died a Lot

Ø In a world where Librarians are revered and Shakespeare is more popular than the Beatles, someone has to facilitate the weekly anger-management sessions for the characters of Wuthering Heights, if only to keep them from killing each other before the novel actually ends. That someone is Thursday Next – Literature Cop.

Ø Mind-bending enough to give Noam Chomsky material for another hundred years.

Ø Adventure aplenty. Action? Even the punctuation will try to kill you.

Ø This is a frolicsome look at humorous situations filled with funny people. Pretty much a full house in the laugh department.

Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series/City Watch Arc

Guards! Guards!

Men at Arms

Feet of Clay

Jingo

The Fifth Elephant

Night Watch

Thud!

Snuff

Raising Steam

Ø If this were a game of CLUE, the answer would be Niccolo Machiavelli in Narnia with a Monty Python. Everything you think you know about books with dragons and trolls and dwarves and wizards is expertly ripped to shreds and reassembled as social satire that can save your soul, even if it turns out you don’t really have one. Do not be fooled by the Tolkien chassis – there’s a Vonnegut-class engine at work.

Ø Caution: Ideas in the Mirror Universe May be Larger Than They Appear

Ø The City Watch arc has plenty of thrilling action sequences. Some other of the fifty-million Discworld novels have less. Every one of them is nonstop adventure. Most of the adventure, however, takes the form of characters desperately trying to avoid thrilling action sequences.

Ø Funny? Even though I’ve read every book in the series at least ten times, I still have to make sure I have cold packs on hand in case I laugh so hard I rupture something.

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gracesloveletters · 4 years

Text

with love. profiles

masterlist

profiles:

💌 y/n 💌 : Your passion for art, history, and literature has led you to the extremes of being the top of your history class, and being stuck in the library surrounded by textbooks during every spare moment (willingly). You’re very involved in high school life as a Student Council member, Student Mentor, and a writer for a column in the school paper. Despite your academic reputation, however, your hopeless romantic antics threaten to ruin your final year of of high school. Honestly, you’re just trying your best.

contact: 😪 how are we even bffs? 💖

mingyu: Somehow the universe had destined for you and Mingyu to become best friends, and that is what the two of you have been since childhood. As polar opposites, Mingyu had always encouraged you to go on adventures, meet new people, live a little. In return you would encourage him to stop failing classes and spend more time in the library with you rather than on the running track. You trust each other completely, so why is it that lately you’ve both been hiding something from the other?

groupchat: ✨ golden boys ✨️

Seungcheol: The school’s #1 golden boy. He has a few important titles under his belt; Captain of the Track and Field Team, member of the Student Council, Student Mentor, top of all of his classes (except for history because of a certain someone), so it only makes sense that he’s in the running for valedictorian. The boy exudes kindness, confidence and honesty, but there’s one skeleton he’s been desperately trying to hide in the closet. Just like you, he’s only trying his best.

Jeonghan: With ethereal beauty and an angelic voice on his side, Yoon Jeonghan is the school’s second official golden boy. As a member of the Student Council and the choir throughout his entire high school life, he’s developed many connections. Although this golden boy has a golden voice, don’t put it past him to cause a little mayhem every now and then. However, becoming the emergency-voted Student Council Vice President halfway through the year was certainly not part of the plan.

joshua: Joshua Hong completes the trio as the final golden boy; possibly everyone’s favourite if they absolutely had to choose. A member of the Student Council, a Student Mentor, in the choir, and known to volunteer outside of school on the weekends, how could anyone not think highly of him? He’s considered the most quiet and reserved of the golden trio, but everyone knows Jeonghan couldn’t possibly get up to all that mischief on his own.

groupchat: 🎶🎨 creative leaders 📚🌟

jun: Jun didn’t really know what he was expecting when he moved high schools a few years ago, but becoming the exchange-student-turned-International-Leader was definitely not it. Anyone from the outside looking in would say he’s perfect for the role; he’s obviously from another country, he’s smart, polite, well-spoken, not to mention he’s been doing a great job with International Leader “affairs” and “responsibilities”. But if you asked him about his role in the school, he would politely excuse himself from the conversation. Not because he doesn’t like the attention, but rather he kind of has no idea what he’s doing... fake it ‘til you make it, right?

soonyoung: The amount of times you have witnessed this boy challenge unsuspecting new students to dance battles in the hallway is quite ridiculous, but unsurprising. Soonyoung, who would prefer it if you called him “Hoshi”, wears the title of Dance Captain like a badge of honour; his apparent life mission being to recruit the school’s most talented and promising dancers into the Dance Team. Everyone in the school could vouch that Soonyoung was the most passionate dancer on the team, whether they were a friend of his or not. The newest recruit has especially impressed him, but there’s someone else entirely that’s caught his eye.

wonwoo: Outside of attending classes, there are two things you could safely bet on that Jeon Wonwoo would be doing; manning the desk in the library, or busily editing the school paper, so bumping into each other is more likely than not for the two of you. School life, and life in general, is quiet for Wonwoo, and he prefers it that way. However, a mysterious letter changes everything, and suddenly Wonwoo finds himself receiving a lot of unwanted attention.

jihoon: Band Captain, Student Council Vice President, and first-chair clarinet were the titles Lee Jihoon unexpectedly dropped halfway though the year, sparking the school’s latest rumour mill. He had caught everyone by surprise with his sudden resignation from those previous responsibilities. Even the teachers knew that no one could ever fill those now-empty shoes. You of all people would know, because you were the first friend he ever made in high school.

seokmin: If Dance Captain Soonyoung had any competition in the passion department, it would come from none other than Choir Captain Seokmin. When he’s not in the choir practice room, you can easily locate him by following the sound of intense vocal warm-ups. Seokmin’s popular in school for being an all-round entertainer and having a smile that could help stop wars. So why did finding a peculiar letter in his locker one day turn that signature smile into a frown.

minghao: Although he’s been attending high school just as long as you have, Minghao continues to remain a mystery to most. One thing that’s for certain about the boy is that you can always find him with a camera in hand; dedicated to his job as the photographer for the school paper, and posting artistic shots on his Instagram. Soonyoung has been begging him to join the dance club nearly everyday for a year after Jun let it slip that Minghao used to b-boy under the alias The8, who seems to be the only one who knows anything about the photographer.

groupchat: y/n + the three musketeers 💯

Seungkwan: When the Student Mentor program was first introduced, you were assigned two new students, Seungkwan being one of them. He and Vernon started the Outside-In podcast during their first year of high school and have gained a significant following ever since. Having made an impression on the boys whilst mentoring them, Seungkwan has dedicated himself to being your loyal supporter and friend, threatening that anyone would “catch these hands” if they dared to even look at you funny. If he’s not hanging out with Vernon, you will most likely find him in the choir practice room.

Vernon: The second student you were assigned with when the Student Mentor program was first introduced. As the other half of the Outside-In podcast, a member of the basketball team, an employee at the convenience store near the school, and a regular at the skate bowl, everyone and their dog knows who Vernon is. He and Seungkwan have attracted the attention of many both in and outside of high school with their (unscientific) advice, coverage of school “news”, and stories of their hectic adventures. So with word coming in about some seniors receiving mysterious love letters in school, what do the duo have to say?

Chan: The latest student to be assigned to you under the Student Mentor program, and you’ve taken him under your wing ever since. Resultantly, so have Seungkwan and Vernon. Although he’s no longer a newbie at school, Chan always comes to you with whatever problems he has (homework-related or not). You spend many after school sessions tutoring him in the library. Chan has also made a great first impression on those in the arts department as the newest and youngest member to be recruited into the Dance Team.

---

really long a/n: hi! this came way later than I wanted it to, sorry if you were semi-anticipating it. i wanted to make some cute profiles for everyone (which took way too long lmao) and give y’all some insight on how they’re going to be in this au. also it’s important to mention that i wrote everyone except seungkwan, vernon and chan as being the same age (seniors), i know that’s super unrealistic and hectic but it’s an au just roll with it. oh also i’m kind of mashing up every single high school trope in history the rules don’t apply here i’m sorry. i’m having second thoughts about going ahead with this fic because uni’s just started for the year and i’m going to get real busy real quick hahaha... but hopefully i’ll be able to update whenever i can. in saying that i’m planning on having pretty big updates/chapters because i have a full on storyline planned out in my head which means a lot of time will be spent on drafting rather than posting, but i’ll try to post filler/smaller updates to compensate. this is probably overly ambitious because i’m the most unmotivated person ever, but i hope to just really enjoy writing this. please be patient with me and i hope you all enjoy reading along xx

#seventeen au #seventeen scenarios #seventeen imagines #seventeen social media au #seventeen sm au #seventeen #fic: with love

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mikauzoran · 4 years

Text

Lukadrien: Nachtmusik Chapter Twenty-Six

A Little Night Music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) Chapter Twenty-Six: Synchronicity

It was the middle of June, and the weather was perfect. All Adrien wanted to do was lie out on the deck of the Liberty, basking in the luxurious warmth of the sun and the soft strumming of Luka’s guitar.

Luka was more than happy to have him. After all, Adrien was good company: quiet in a companionable way when words weren’t needed but always ready with some witty retort or astute piece of insight whenever Luka did feel like talking.

Their musical collaborations were fulfilling in a way Luka had never experienced with another musician. It was as if Adrien instinctively knew where Luka was going with a piece, and whenever Luka got stuck, Adrien always had the perfect suggestion to get him out of his creative slump. Adrien was a well of inspiration, a genuine muse.

After two and a half months of friendship, Luka found that he’d quickly moved from an affectionate crush on Adrien to deep devotion and adoration.

Adrien was fast becoming a staple in all aspects of Luka’s life from family dinners to evenings spent cuddling and watching movies to jam sessions and lying about the houseboat to one-on-one basketball and teaching Adrien to do chores. Adrien was filling up the nooks and crannies of Luka’s life.

Even when they weren’t together, Adrien was always on Luka’s mind. Luka would be out and about and see something in a shop window that made him think of the other teen. Someone would say something funny, and Luka would later text it to Adrien so that they could share the joke.

Adrien stayed in close contact too. Luka periodically got texts throughout the day, even if Adrien was busy, letting Luka know that he wasn’t ever far from Adrien’s thoughts either.

It felt so good to be that in sync with someone, so on the same wavelength.

Nothing had become official yet, and Luka wasn’t one hundred percent sure that Adrien viewed things between them in a romantic light…but the relationship was going well, so Luka decided to take the next step. He invited Adrien to meet and hang out with his friends.

Luka started with a small group from the music program at his university and then introduced Adrien to some of his classmates from the Literature Department. Luka took Adrien to a few of his concerts and let him mingle with his bandmates.

Adrien was a little shy at first with new people but still very friendly. Once a conversation started to flow, though, Adrien held his own well, often talking more than Luka himself.

It was reassuring to see his prospective partner getting along with the other people in Luka’s world. It made him wonder if soulmates really did exist because Adrien just…fit. In less than three months, Adrien had slipped into the grooves of Luka’s life to the point where Luka couldn’t remember how things had been before Adrien and couldn’t imagine things without him.

One Saturday at the end of the school year, a group from the Literature Department was congregating on the Liberty to review course material for the exam. It was during a time when Adrien was typically over, so Luka told him that he was free to join them but needn’t feel obligated, as the class content might be a little boring for someone not studying Literature.

Adrien surprised Luka by showing up anyway.

Luka’s classmates took turns teaching Adrien about different aspects of the pieces, authors, and literary movements that they had studied, and Adrien eagerly asked questions, giving the students a very thorough review that turned out to be objectively better and subjectively more fun than simply reviewing notes and passages from their texts like they had initially planned.

“You’re really interested in this, aren’t you?” Eugénie chuckled, giving Adrien a fond nudge. “Are you thinking about going into Literature in uni?”

Adrien blushed sheepishly, shaking his head. “No, not really. I mean, I love reading, but I wouldn’t want to formally study it.”

“Well, you fooled us,” Gérard laughed. “You seem like you’re soaking this up like a sponge. What’s up with all of the probing questions, then? You just helping us study?”

Adrien’s cheeks darkened further.

He shrugged, hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck as he smiled. “Well, it is interesting…on top of being a good way to learn more about what Luka’s studying. I want to understand so that he can talk about this stuff with me without having to dumb it down.”

“Aww,” Hélène cooed. “Luka, your boyfriend is so sweet! Thierry never takes an interest in the things I care about. You’re so lucky,” she half-pouted.

Luka’s cheeks burst into flame like embers finding dry brush. “Well,” he hedged, “he is sweet, and I am lucky, but…we’re not dating.”

“Wait. Seriously?” Eugénie raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why not?”

Luka’s blush deepened as he averted his eyes, glancing longingly at the guitar propped against the wall by the drum set. His fingers twitched in agitation as dozens of possible answers to that question swirled around his head: because Adrien isn’t interested in guys, because what could Adrien Agreste possibly see in me, because he’s out of my league, because I don’t want to make things awkward and ruin our dynamic by asking him, because I don’t think he’s ready, because I’m afraid of messing it up and losing his friendship, because he’s still in love with someone else…

Adrien instantly picked up on how uncomfortable Luka was with the topic and rushed to take some of the pressure and attention off of his friend. “Does anyone want more of the chocolate lava cake?”

Gérard took mercy on Luka and helpfully raised his hand. “I could definitely go for seconds.”

Adrien scooped up Gérard’s plate and smiled sweetly at the girls. “How about drinks? Can I get anyone a refill?”

“Uh…I’ll just take water, please,” Hélène awkwardly replied.

“Me too, please,” Eugénie added uncertainly.

“Me three!” Gérard jumped in, even though his soda was still half full.

“Luka, could you please give me a hand?” Adrien requested with a practiced smile.

Luka readily acquiesced, following Adrien across the room to the kitchen.

Adrien set about cutting Gérard another slice of lava cake while Luka got out the bottle of Evian from the fridge and poured three glasses.

“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” Luka whispered so quietly that his lips barely moved. He trusted that Adrien’s sharpened hearing would pick up the words.

Adrien turned to rest a hand on Luka’s arm, giving it a bolstering squeeze. “Honestly, it doesn’t bother me,” Adrien assured, voice hushed but strong. “I mean, I do kind of act like your boyfriend, so it’s not like it’s a far-out conclusion to come to. I’m sorry, Luka.”

Adrien’s eyebrows curved in remorse and guilt, taking Luka completely by surprise.

“P5, what do you have to be sorry for?” he wondered, feeling like the ship beneath his feet had suddenly stopped rocking, leaving him off balance.

“Always hanging on you and teasing and flirting,” Adrien whispered back, brow furrowed, bottom lip jutting out slightly. “I didn’t think about how it might give other people the wrong idea. I promise I’ll tone it down when we’re in public going forward.”

If Luka were being totally honest, he would have to admit that Adrien’s affections were a guilty pleasure he savored. Other people seeing non-platonic motives in Adrien’s behaviour put Luka over the moon because that meant that he wasn’t just hallucinating or reading too much into things. It meant that maybe he had a chance. He was loath to lose a single touch, a single flirty line, a single puckish grin.

“You don’t have to do that,” Luka hastily countered, voice a little loud and high in pitch.

Adrien’s guilty expression turned into a puzzled one. “Are you sure? Luka, I saw how uncomfortable you were.”

“I was uncomfortable because I thought the topic made you uncomfortable,” Luka fibbed. “I’m used to straight people assuming that just because I’m bi, I’m automatically interested in every other guy in my age range. Besides…” Luka looked back down at the water glasses. “…it’s really flattering that someone would think you’d date me, so…” Luka cleared his throat. “…so, you don’t have to change anything. You’re perfect the way you are.”

“Thanks,” Adrien replied, but he was still frowning. “I’ll be touched about that in a moment, but, first…why did you say you’d be flattered if someone thought I’d date you as if I wouldn’t date you? Why wouldn’t I date you?”

Luka’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

Meanwhile, Eugénie, Hélène, and Gérard were straining their ears to hear while, at the same time, trying very hard to look like they were studying their notes intently.

“Luka, you’re wonderful,” Adrien supplied when he saw that his friend was at a loss for words. “Anyone would be thrilled to date you.”

Luka wanted to say, “even you?”, but he was afraid of the answer. Part of him thought this sounded like confirmation that he should make his romantic interest known. Another part suspected a trap, like Luka would confess, but then Adrien would say something like, “oh. No. Sorry. When I said, ‘anyone would be thrilled to date you’, I didn’t mean me”.

“You’re the most perfect guy I’ve ever met,” Adrien continued, trying to build up Luka’s self-esteem.

“I’m not perfect,” was the first thing that Luka could get his wits together enough to say.

Adrien rolled his eyes. “I didn’t say you were perfect. I said you were the ‘most perfect’, as in ‘most close to perfect’, so don’t talk down about yourself, okay? You’re always telling me that, so practice what you preach, okay?”

Luka nodded, a fond smile slowly blooming on his lips. “Thanks.”

Adrien winked, grabbing one of the water glasses as well as Gérard’s plate. “We good?”

Luka’s grin widened as he picked up the remaining two glasses and followed Adrien back over to the others. “Yeah. We’re good, Angel.”

“Okay!” Adrien called cheerfully as he set the plate and glass down in front of Gérard. “Someone explain Magic Realism to me. I don’t get it.”

The group reluctantly let go of the relationship drama and got back to work.

Eugénie, Hélène, and Gérard left a little over an hour later, brains successfully picked clean by Adrien.

Luka began collecting the dirty dishes, but Adrien shooed him away, insisting. “I’ll clean up. You go get your guitar and decompress.”

Luka blinked at Adrien. “Decompress?”

“Mmhm,” Adrien confirmed, gathering the forks before stacking the plates they’d eaten cake off of. “That thing you do after you’ve been around other people for too long.”

Adrien looked up and into Luka’s aquatic eyes. “Because being around other people for too long stresses you out, doesn’t it? So get your guitar and decompress. Either sit in here or leave your door open so I can listen to you play while I tidy up, okay?”

So stunned was Luka by the fact that Adrien had been paying close enough attention to identify one of Luka’s stressors and corresponding coping mechanism, that he actually went and got his guitar, sat on the wrap-around couch, and began to play instead of arguing and insisting on helping Adrien clean.

It was ten minutes and one clean plate later that Adrien spoke up.

“I’m around an awful lot, aren’t I?”

“Mmhm,” Luka agreed, eyes closed, still wrapped up in the song taking form at his fingertips.

“…Do you get stressed out when you’re around me too long?” Adrien wondered tentatively, half-afraid of the answer.

“You don’t count as another person,” Luka replied automatically, the filter between his brain and his mouth down for maintenance.

Adrien’s eyebrows danced in confusion for a second before Luka added, “You’re an extension of me.”

Adrien hummed softly, pleased with the response.

Luka opened his eyes and blinked, what he had said finally catching up. “Uh…I mean…”

“It’s okay,” Adrien assured, rinsing the second plate and then reaching for the towel to dry it. “I know what you mean.”

Luka continued to stare. “You…do?”

Adrien nodded. “That’s how I feel when I’m fighting beside Ladybug.”

Luka’s heart sank, his fingers landing a little too high on the strings and creating a dissonant chord.

Ladybug. Of course.

In his disappointment, Luka almost missed the way Adrien’s cheeks began to color.

Adrien paused, gripping the plate in his hands as he looked down with an embarrassed smile, continuing, “…and…”

Luka looked back up, breath catching.

“…how I feel when we’re making music together or lying up on the deck at night talking…or even when we’re just sitting in silence. It feels like you’re an extension of me too.” Adrien set the plate aside and grabbed another as he laughed softly. “It’s actually a relief to hear you say you feel the same way.”

“Yeah,” Luka whispered, in a bit of a daze. “Yeah. I thought it was just me.”

Adrien shrugged. “Nope. Looks like we’re in this together.”

Luka hummed happily, going back to the song he’d been playing and transitioning into G major. “Glad to know.”

The conversation slipped into a comfortable lull, filled by Luka’s music, the clink of dishes, and the swoosh of soapy water.

It didn’t take long for Adrien to get the negligible number of plates and cups clean, dry, and put away, and then he joined Luka back on the couch, closing his eyes and sinking into the notes.

The song eventually found its natural conclusion, and Adrien applauded.

“You need to adapt that one for one of your bands,” he encouraged. “There were some real gems to be polished in there.”

“Yeah?” Luka chuckled, opening his eyes to study Adrien’s earnest expression.

Adrien nodded enthusiastically before hooking one arm over the back of the couch and leaning in to rest his chin on top. “Definitely.”

“All right. I’ll pick it apart and put it back together again later and see what happens.” With a pleased grin, Luka turned back to his guitar, starting with a new melody.

He fiddled around and worked on developing the idea for a few minutes before picking up on a subtle shift in Adrien: the purse of his lips, the slight crease of his brow, the set of his jaw, the cloudy look in his eyes, the slightly heavier feeling to his presence.

Luka tipped his head to the side, focusing his attention away from the guitar. “Something on your mind, P5? You look like you’re puzzling through something.”

Adrien smiled sheepishly, straightening up on the couch with a shrug of nonchalance. “Just…you.”

“Me?” Luka echoed.

Adrien nodded. “Lately, as you’ve been inviting me to hang out with your other friends, I’ve kind of noticed something.”

Luka’s eyebrow cocked slightly.

“You act differently around them,” Adrien answered reluctantly.

The bottom dropped out of Luka’s stomach like an elevator car with its cables cut. “Different…in a bad way?”

Adrien hurriedly shook his head. “No, no. Just…different. I mean, I like you better when you’re just with me, but…it’s not a negative difference. You’re just…a lot quieter around other people. You don’t talk much, you look uncomfortable more often…I mean, sometimes you joke around with other people, but…it’s not like when it’s just the two of us or when we’re with your family. I was just wondering why the difference.”

Luka gave a little chuckle and looked back at his guitar. “Ah. You’ve discovered my secret. I’m socially awkward and fairly introverted.”

“No, you’re not,” Adrien laughed, completely incredulous.

Luka shrugged. “I am one hundred percent serious.”

“You? Socially awkward?” Adrien scoffed lightly. “Luka, you say the suavest things. You’re always teasing and joking and making me laugh. You’re funny and kind and emotionally sensitive. You always know what to say. How am I supposed to believe that you of all people are social awkward?”

Luka smiled sheepishly and shrugged again. “Well, I’m glad you think so, but…look at the evidence. You’re the one who said I’m different around other people. Different how so?”

Adrien frowned, considering before he responded, “…Quiet. Withdrawn…maybe a little shy. Not at ease. It’s not a constant thing. I mean, sometimes you’re totally fine, but…other times…” Adrien’s eyebrows pinched together. “…I guess you are kind of awkward in big groups.”

Luka nodded. “Acting ‘normal’ and determining what’s socially acceptable around a bunch of people for an extended amount of time is really draining. It doesn’t come naturally to me.”

“But…” Adrien pursed his lips. “…you’re not like that with me.”

“No,” Luka confirmed with a warm smile. “I feel at ease with you. I rarely have to think about what I’m going to say—what I’m supposed to say. You’re one of the few people I can just be me around. With you, things just fit.”

“Oh,” Adrien breathed, scooting in closer.

He could feel his cheeks burning with pleasure.

“I feel the same way about you,” he whispered, carefully slotting himself in at Luka’s side so that he wouldn’t get in the way of the guitar. He rested his head on Luka’s shoulder and closed his eyes.

Luka let his head tip so that it rested against Adrien’s, Adrien’s hair soft against Luka’s cheek.

“Thanks, Perfect Fifth,” he whispered.

Luka couldn’t be sure that Adrien meant it in a romantic way, but at least Luka knew for sure that they were on the same wavelength. Adrien was still hung up on Ladybug, but, maybe, in another month or two…

Luka should tell him. At the end of the summer, before school started up again, Luka would reevaluate the situation. At the very least, he could make Adrien aware of his feelings, put the ball in Adrien’s court. If Adrien just wanted friendship, fine, but if there was a part of Adrien that did think of Luka in a romantic light…

At the end of the summer, they would see.

#Lukadrien #Miraculous Ladybug #Miraculous Ladybug Fanfiction #Adrien Agreste/Luka Couffaine #Adrien Agreste #Luka Couffaine #Mikau's Writings #A Little Night Music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik)

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Paul Elie, How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?, New Yorker (June 15, 2020)

She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy.

A habit of bigotry, most apparent in her juvenilia, persisted throughout her life.

In 1943, eighteen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor went north on a summer trip. Growing up in Georgia—she spent her childhood in Savannah, and went to high school in Milledgeville—she saw herself as a writer and artist in the making. She created illustrated books “too old for children and too young for grown-ups” and dryly titled an assemblage of her poems “The Priceless Works of M. F. O’Connor”; she drew cartoons and submitted them to magazines, noting that her hobby was “collecting rejection slips.”

On her travels, she and two cousins visited Manhattan: Chinatown, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Columbia University. Then they went to Massachusetts, and visited Radcliffe, where one cousin was a student. O’Connor disliked both schools, and said so in letters and postcards to her mother. (Her father had died two years earlier.) Back in Milledgeville, O’Connor studied at the state women’s college (“the institution of higher larning across the road”). In 1945, she made her next trip north, enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she dropped the Mary (it put her in mind of “an Irish washwoman”) and became Flannery O’Connor.

Less than two decades later, she died, in Milledgeville, of lupus. She was thirty-nine, the author of two novels and a book of stories. A brief obituary in the Times called her “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” Some of her readers dismissed her as a “regional writer”; many didn’t know she was a woman.

We are still learning who Flannery O’Connor was. The materials of her life story have surfaced gradually: essays in 1969, letters in 1979, an annotated Library of America volume in 1988, and a cache of personal items deposited at Emory University in 2012, which yielded the “Prayer Journal,” jottings on faith and fiction from her time at Iowa. Each phase has deepened the portrait of the artist and furthered her reputation. Southerners, women, Catholics, and M.F.A.-program instructors now approach her with devotion. We call her Flannery; we see her as a wise elder, a literary saint, poised for revelation at a typewriter set up on the ground floor of a farmhouse near Milledgeville because treatments for lupus left her unable to climb stairs.

O’Connor is now as canonical as Faulkner and Welty. More than a great writer, she’s a cultural figure: a funny lady in a straw hat, puttering among peacocks, on crutches she likened to “flying buttresses.” The farmhouse is open for tours; her visage is on a stamp. A recent book of previously unpublished correspondence, “Good Things Out of Nazareth” (Convergent), and a documentary, “Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia,” suggest a completed arc, situating her at the literary center where she might have been all along.

The arc is not complete, however. Those letters and postcards she sent home from the North in 1943 were made available to scholars only in 2014, and they show O’Connor as a bigoted young woman. In Massachusetts, she was disturbed by the presence of an African-American student in her cousin’s class; in Manhattan, she sat between her two cousins on the subway lest she have to sit next to people of color. The sight of white students and black students at Columbia sitting side by side and using the same rest rooms repulsed her.

It’s not fair to judge a writer by her juvenilia. But, as she developed into a keenly self-aware writer, the habit of bigotry persisted in her letters—in jokes, asides, and a steady use of the word “nigger.” For half a century, the particulars have been held close by executors, smoothed over by editors, and justified by exegetes, as if to save O’Connor from herself. Unlike, say, the struggle over Philip Larkin, whose coarse, chauvinistic letters are at odds with his lapidary poetry, it’s not about protecting the work from the author; it’s about protecting an author who is now as beloved as her stories.

The work largely deserves the love it gets. O’Connor’s fiction is full of scenarios that now have the feel of mid-century myths: an evangelist preaching the gospel of a Church Without Christ outside a movie house; a grandmother shot by an escaped convict at the roadside; a Bible salesman seducing a female “interleckshul” in a hayloft and taking her wooden leg. The late story “Parker’s Back,” from 1964, in which a tattooed ex-sailor tries to appease his puritanical wife by getting a life-size face of Christ inked onto his back, is a summa of O’Connor’s effects. There’s outlandish naming (Obadiah Elihue Parker), blunt characterization (“The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two icepicks”), and pungent speech (“Mr. Parker . . . You’re a walking panner-rammer!”). There’s the way the action hurtles to an end both comic and profound, and the sense, as she put it in an essay, “that something is going on here that counts.” There’s the attractive-repulsive force of religion, as Parker submits to the tattooer’s needle in the hope of making himself a holy image of Christ. And there’s a preoccupation with human skin, and skin coloring, as a locus of conflict.

O’Connor defined herself as a novelist, but many readers now come to her through her essays and letters, and the core truth to emerge from the expansion of her body of work is that the nonfiction is as strong and strange as the fiction. The 1969 book of essays, “Mystery and Manners,” is both an astute manual on the craft of writing and a statement of precepts for the religious artist; the 1979 book of letters, “The Habit of Being,” is bedside reading as wisdom literature, at once companionable and full of barbed, contrarian insights. That they are books was part of O’Connor’s design. She made carbon copies of her letters with publication in mind: fearing that lupus would cut her life short, as it had her father’s, she used the letters and essays to shape the posthumous interpretation of her fiction.

Even much of the material left out of those books is tart and epigrammatic. Here is O’Connor, fresh from Iowa, on what a writing program can do for a writer:

It can put him in the way of experienced writers and literary critics, people who are usually able to tell him after not too long a time whether he should go on writing or enroll immediately in the School of Dentistry.

Here she is on life in Milledgeville, from a 1948 letter to the director of Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York:

Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. . . . The Grand Dragon and the Grand Cyclops were down from Atlanta and both made big speeches on the Court House square while hundreds of men stamped and hollered inside sheets. It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with electric light bulbs.

On her first encounter, in 1956, with the scholar William Sessions:

He arrived promptly at 3:30, talking, talked his way across the grass and up the steps and into a chair and continued talking from that position without pause, break, breath, or gulp until 4:50. At 4:50 he departed to go to Mass (Ascension Thursday) but declared he would like to return after it so I thereupon invited him to supper with us. 5:50 brings him back, still talking, and bearing a sack of ice cream and cake to the meal. He then talked until supper but at that point he met a little head wind in the form of my mother, who is also a talker. Her stories have a non-stop quality, but every now and then she does have to refuel and every time she came down, he went up.

Reviewers of O’Connor’s fiction were vexed by her characters’ lack of interiority. Admirers of the nonfiction have reversed the charge, taking up the idea that the most vivid character in her work is Flannery O’Connor. The new film adroitly introduces the author-as-character. The directors—Mark Bosco, a Jesuit priest who teaches a course on O’Connor at Georgetown, and Elizabeth Coffman, who teaches film at Loyola University Chicago—draw on a full spread of archival material and documentary effects. The actress Mary Steenburgen reads passages from the letters; several stories are animated, with an eye to O’Connor’s adage that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” There’s a clip from John Huston’s 1979 film of her singular first novel, “Wise Blood,” which she wrote at Yaddo and in Connecticut before the onset of lupus forced her to return home. Erik Langkjaer, a publishing sales rep O’Connor fell in love with, describes their drives in the country. Alice Walker tells of living “across the way” from the farmhouse during her teens, not knowing that a writer lived there: “It was one of my brothers who took milk from her place to the creamery in town. When we drove into Milledgeville, the cows that we saw on the hillside going into town would have been the cows of the O’Connors.”

In May, 1955, O’Connor went to New York to promote her story collection, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” on TV. The rare footage of O’Connor lights up the documentary. She sits, very still, in a velvet-trimmed black dress; her accent is strong, her demeanor assured. “I understand you are living on a farm,” the host prompts. “Yes,” she says. “I only live on one, though. I don’t see much of it. I’m a writer, and I farm from the rocking chair.” He asks her if she is a regional writer, and she replies:

I think that to overcome regionalism, you must have a great deal of self-knowledge. I think that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a sense, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you have a great deal of detachment.

That is a profound and stringent definition of the writer’s calling. It locates the writer’s art in the refinement of her character: the struggle to overcome an outlook that is an obstacle to a greater good, the letting go of the comforts of home. And it recognizes that detachment can leave the writer alone and apart.

At Iowa and in Connecticut, O’Connor had begun to read European fiction and philosophy, and her work, old-time in its particulars, is shot through with contemporary thought: Gabriel Marcel’s Christian existentialism, Martin Buber’s sense of “the eclipse of God.” She saw herself as “a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness” and saw the South as “Christ-haunted.”

All this can suggest points of similarity with Martin Luther King, Jr., another Georgian who was infused with Continental ideas up north and then returned south to take up a brief, urgent calling. Born four years apart, they grasped the Bible’s pertinence to current events, and saw religion as the tie that bound blacks and whites—as in her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” from 1960, which opens with a black farmer giving a white preacher a Christian burial. O’Connor and King shared a gift for the convention-upending gesture, as in her story “The Enduring Chill,” in which a white man tries to affirm equality with the black workers on his mother’s farm by smoking cigarettes with them in the barn.

O’Connor lectured in a dozen states and often went to Atlanta to visit her doctors; she saw plenty of the changing South. That’s clear from her 1961 story “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” (The title alludes to a thesis advanced by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw the world as gradually “divinized” by human activity in a kind of upward spiral.) A white man, living at home after college, takes his mother to “reducing class” on a newly integrated city bus. The sight of an African-American woman wearing the same style of hat that his mother is wearing stirs him to reflect on all that joins them. The sight of a black boy in the woman’s company prompts his mother to give the boy a gift: a penny with Lincoln’s profile on it. Things get grim after that.

The story was published in “Best American Short Stories” and won an O. Henry Prize in 1963. O’Connor declared that it was all she had to say on “That Issue.” It wasn’t. In May, 1964, she wrote to her friend Maryat Lee, a playwright who was born in Tennessee, lived in New York, and was ardent for civil rights:

About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.

That passage, published in “The Habit of Being,” echoed a remark in a 1959 letter, also to Maryat Lee, who had suggested that Baldwin—his “Letter from the South” had just run in Partisan Review—could pay O’Connor a visit while on a subsequent reporting trip. O’Connor demurred:

No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.

O’Connor-lovers have been downplaying those remarks ever since. But they are not hot-mike moments or loose talk. They were written at the same desk where O’Connor wrote her fiction and are found in the same lode of correspondence that has brought about the rise in her stature. This has put her champions in a bind—upholding her letters as eloquently expressive of her character, but carving out exceptions for the nasty parts.

Last year, Fordham University hosted a symposium on O’Connor and race, supported with a grant from the author’s estate. The organizer, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, edits a series of books on Catholic writers funded by the estate, has compiled a book of devotions drawn from O’Connor’s work, and has written a book of poems that “channel the voice” of the author. In a new volume in the series, “Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor” (Fordham), she takes up Flannery and That Issue. Proposing that O’Connor’s work is “race-haunted,” she applies techniques from whiteness studies and critical race theory, as well as Toni Morrison’s idea of “Africanist ‘othering.’ ” O’Donnell presents a previously unpublished passage on race and engages with scholars who have offered context for the racist remarks. Although she is palpably anguished about O’Connor’s race problem, she winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot, treating O’Connor as “transgressive in her writing about race” but prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control.

The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to a “Southern code of manners” that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks, but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial epithets carelessly in her correspondence, she dealt with race courageously in the fiction, depicting white characters pitilessly and creating upstanding black characters who “retain an inviolable privacy.” And she was admirably leery of cultural appropriation. “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in a 1975 essay.

All the contextualizing produces a seesaw effect, as it variously cordons off the author from history, deems her a product of racist history, and proposes that she was as oppressed by that history as anybody else was. It backdates O’Connor as a writer of her time when she was a near-contemporary of writers typically seen as writers of our time: Gabriel García Márquez (born 1927), Maya Angelou (1928), Ursula K. Le Guin (1929), Tom Wolfe (1930), and Derek Walcott (1930), among others. It suggests that white racism in Georgia was all-encompassing and brooked no dissent, even though (as O’Donnell points out) Georgia was then changing more dramatically than at any point before or since. Patronizingly, it proposes that O’Connor, a genius who prized detachment, lacked the free will to think for herself.

Another writer of that cohort is Toni Morrison, who was born in Ohio in 1931 and became a Catholic at the age of twelve. Morrison published “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” in 1992. “The fabrication of an Africanist persona” by a white writer, she proposed, “is reflexive: an extraordinary meditation on the self; a powerful exploration of the fears and desires that reside in the writerly consciousness.” Invoking Morrison, O’Donnell argues that O’Connor’s fiction is fundamentally a working-through of her own racism, and that the offending remarks in the letters “tell us . . . that O’Connor understood evil in the form of racism from the inside, as one who has practiced it.”

The clinching evidence is “Revelation,” drafted in late 1963. This extraordinary story involves Ruby Turpin—a white Southerner in middle age, the owner of a dairy farm—and her encounter in a doctor’s waiting room with a Wellesley-educated young woman, also white, who is so repulsed by Turpin’s condescension toward people there that she cries out, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” This arouses Turpin to quarrel with God as she surveys a hog pen on her property, and calls forth a magnificent final image of the hereafter in Turpin’s eyes—the people of the rural South heading heavenward. Some say this “vision” redeems the author on That Issue. Brad Gooch, in a 2009 biography, likened it to the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, drawing on a remark in the letters, depicts it as a “vision O’Connor has been wresting from God every day for much of her life.” Seeing it that way is a stretch. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned blacks and whites holding hands at the end of time; Turpin’s vision, by contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and class, equal but separate, white landowners such as Turpin preceded (the last shall be first) by “bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”

After revising “Revelation” in early 1964, O’Connor wrote several letters to Maryat Lee. Many scholars maintain that their letters (often signed with nicknames) are a comic performance, with Lee playing the over-the-top liberal and O’Connor the dug-in gradualist, but O’Connor’s most significant remarks on race in her letters to Lee are plainly sincere. On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.” Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.” Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.” She died at home ten weeks later.

Those remarks show a view clearly maintained and growing more intense as time went on. They were objectionable when O’Connor made them. And yet—the argument goes—they’re just remarks, made in chatty letters by an author in extremis. They’re expressive but not representative. Her “public work” (as the scholar Ralph C. Wood calls it) is more complex, and its significance for us lies in its artfully mixed messages, for on race none of us is without sin and in a position to cast a stone.

That argument, however, runs counter to history and to O’Connor’s place in it. It sets up a false equivalence between the “segregationist by taste” and those brutally oppressed by segregation. And it draws a neat line between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race is involved, even though the long effort to move her from the margins to the center has proceeded as if that line weren’t there. Those remarks don’t belong to the past, or to the South, or to literary ephemera. They belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.

Posterity, in literature, is a strange god—consecrating Dickinson and Melville as American divines, repositioning T. S. Eliot as a man on the run from a Missouri boyhood and a bad marriage. Posterity has favored Flannery O’Connor: the readers of her work today far outnumber those in her lifetime. After her death, the racist passages were stumbling blocks to the next generation’s encounter with her, and it made a kind of sense to sidestep them. Now the reluctance to face them squarely is itself a stumbling block, one that keeps us from approaching her with the seriousness that a great writer deserves.

There’s a way forward, rooted in the work. For twenty years, the director Karin Coonrod has staged dramatic adaptations of O’Connor’s stories. Following a stipulation of the author’s estate, she uses every word: narration, description, dialogue, imagery, and racial epithets. Members of the multiracial cast circulate the full text fluidly from actor to actor, character to character, so that the author’s words, all of them, ring out in her own voice and in other voices, too. ♦

#literature #flannery o'connor #legacies #racism #bigotry #reconciliation #greats #civil rights movement

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Thread: I was sent this and felt the need to thread it here on Twitter. It will be long. It is purported to be an anonymous, open letter from a professor at UK Berkeley in the History Department. The only comment I will make is to say it is worth every moment of the read.

C Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy

Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or 'Uncle Toms'. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders.

Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

…

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email.

Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates' undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries. And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department's apparent desire to shoulder the 'white man's burden' and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it's fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. "Those are racist dogwhistles". "The model minority myth is white supremacist". "Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime", ad nauseam. These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM's problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

…

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution.

Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders.

Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald's and Wal-Mart.

For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

…

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the 'systemic racism' there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

…

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach.

He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species. I'm ashamed of my department. I would say that I'm ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It's hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn't affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating.

No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

#twitter thread #threadreader #anonymous letter #berkeley #read the whole thing

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dreamgloe · 5 years

Note

vanilla, letters & melt

prompt: vanilla, letters & melt (this prompt list here)

words: 4.56k

warnings: fluff, slightest bit of angst

notes: so this is really late but….better late than never, right? I’ll just keep it in the valentine’s day theme. ;) despite how long this took, i’m so happy to be writing some cute namjoon while writing some angsty namjoon (his chapter in ‘half of my heart’ has put me T H R O U G H I T)

tags: @joonieblossoms

mini playlist: fools by troye sivan | call your girlfriend (robyn cover) by clara mae | sponge by clay best friend by ikon

-x-

There were only two sounds in your apartment. One was the loud crashing noises of the Netflix romcom you’d decided to play with a hard press of your forefinger. Afterwards, you tossed the remote to the floor, not caring where it landed. The second was the scraping of your spoon against the paper carton of Tahitian Vanilla ice cream from your favorite neighborhood spot.

You told yourself that you hated this holiday, that it was a consumerist weapon holding people hostage in the name of love. If anyone asked you, you were boycotting and Galentine’s Day was the only holiday worth celebrating. Celebrating womanhood with your girl friends with copious amounts of sparkling rosé was the only draw to this time of the year.

However, that was a damn lie.

Not only were most of your friends in relationships, you actually loved Valentine’s Day. Well, you did. You loved the idea when you were in a relationship, which you had been in until about a month ago. It wasn’t as if you were certain that Choi Sungwoo was the one for you but you did spent the better part of eight months committed to him, his work functions–which you hated–and to trying your best to not demolish his ass in Overwatch every time you played with him. He was funny when he wasn’t trying to be and he was never ashamed to hold your hand in public. The sex was great, you knew there were no complaints in that department.

But…obviously something wasn’t working for him when he told you that it was over. He admitted that there was someone else. He said that he had feelings for someone at his work and he didn’t want to continue to lead you on if he was interested in someone else. He also said he wanted a chance with this person. He didn’t want any “what ifs.”. You couldn’t hate him for being honest but you hated him on principle anyway.

He wasn’t even a coward, you thought to yourself, stabbing your spoon back into the ice cream. You paused, looking into the carton. It was missing something, and with that thought you walked to grab the chocolate syrup out of the fridge, the kind that hardened on top of ice cream. Flipping the cap and squeezing it all over the ice cream, you only stopped when the top was almost completely covered. Flipping the cap back into place, you didn’t even bother to put it back in the fridge.

You just didn’t care.

It was at that moment that you were glad your roommate, Namjoon, wasn’t back. To be honest, you weren’t even sure what he was doing. You were just happy that he wasn’t home to watch the sad scene of a gross ice cream concoction and some pretty abhorrent Netflix romantic comedies.

He’d also broken up with his girlfriend around five months ago but he’d been dating his girlfriend as long as you’d known him which was a little over two years. If it was a competition, you knew he’d won hands down. You liked her too and were sad for him when she dumped him.

And that was pretty big of you, too, because when you first met Namjoon, you might have had a teensy crush on him. Teensy being an understatement. Who wouldn’t? He was smart, kind, tall, and had one of the best smiles you’d ever seen in your life. But the two of you quickly fell into a friendship, one that you’d rather die than ever mess up.

Knowing he was sad, you did everything you could to cheer him up. Museum dates, pounds and pounds of barbeque. You even went with him to see all those foreign films he liked even though you hated them. You should have better taste, having studied French Literature. You met Namjoon in a Modern French Philosophy class for crying out loud! However, you’d always been a sucker for girl gang movies and romantic comedies. But…you couldn’t bear the crestfallen looks across your roommate’s face so you did your best to cheer him up even if it meant sitting through a handful of painful German films.

At the time, you couldn’t bring yourself to pry into why she broke up with him. He’d tell you if he wanted to. That’s what you told yourself. Namjoon had been busy the last month but he tried desperately to be there for you as well. He watched a handful of dramas and even the latest season of Alexa & Katie with you on Netflix. Two things he hated and he did them for you. For that, you were grateful but it didn’t stop you from shovelling your way through the pint of ice cream in front of you, knowing full well you had two more in the freezer.

Obviously, you couldn’t help but soften at the thought of Namjoon holding your hand and giving you tissues as you cried your eyes out watching fucking Alexa & Katie, a show aimed at middle school girls. He wasn’t the best roommate in the world but he was definitely one of the best friends you have ever been lucky enough to have.

Why did your bout of loneliness have to bubble up on a day that was both the epitome and antithesis of loneliness, though? Couldn’t the universe give you a fucking break? You were still holding the carton of ice cream in your condensation covered hands, spoon in mouth, feet up on the coffee table when Namjoon walked in. You’d been so absorbed in your ice cream that your surprise caused the metal spoon to clack against your teeth harshly, causing you to spasm. “Ow,” you said, more to yourself, “Goddamnit!”

“Oh…hey Y/N,” he said, lugging his messenger bag off his shoulder and then onto the ground as he approached the edge of the couch. You sighed loudly, putting the spoon into the carton and placing the whole thing on the table. “Namjoon….” you said, a hint of whine, “don’t just…er….enter the apartment like that. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“So sorry, Y/N. Next time I won’t exist in my own apartment,” he said sarcastically, crossing his arms while looking at you, not being able to help the small smile that spread across his face.

“Thank you,” you say, “I’d appreciate it.” You said it seriously but you couldn’t help the smile that eventually followed too. You played with the blanket it across your lap, smoothing it out. You didn’t expect him to be home. But honestly, where would he be? Both of you were single on Valentine’s Day. You should have thought of that. It had been months since either of you had been relationships, where would you both be going?

There was a moment before you spoke. “Care to join me?” you said, motioning to the nest of blankets, dvds, snacks, and strangely, more than one Apple TV remote. He heaved a heavy sigh before he kicked his shoes off and said, “If we’re doing this, I’m getting the wine.” After grabbing a bottle of red and two glasses, he finally sat down on the couch with a big plop, getting under the blanket with you. He poured you a glass, handing it to you now that you no longer were holding the tub of ice cream. The two of you did a cheers and he leaned back into the couch, hi shoulder touching yours.

He let you finish off the romcom you were watching before the two of your poured over old DVD’s. He’d convinced you to settle on Notting Hill, claiming it was one of the best romantic comedies of all time. You argued and said it was borderline boring, to which Namjoon just scoffed. However, you did your best to conceal the tears you were crying towards the end. Namjoon decided not to rub it in your face because you looked so sad. Soon enough, you found your hand in his. His was warm and it only made you cry more. “Hey…” he said softly, pulling some tissues from his pocket.

You were crying and it wasn’t just the movie. You were sad and lonely as hard as that was to admit to yourself. You missed sharing something with someone, you missed holding hands like Namjoon was currently holding your’s, you even missed playing damn Overwatch. You thought yourself a very independent person and you hated yourself for crying because you were alone on Valentine’s Day. The thought itself drew a choked sob out of you and with your free hand, you furiously wiped at your face.

Taking the tissues, you sloppily dabbed at your face, warm with tears and more than two glasses of red wine. “I’m literally the most pathetic person on planet Earth right now,” you said between sobs, “You don’t have to hold my hand, Namjoon. Thank you, but you don’t have to.” You waited for him to drop it but he only interlaces his fingers into yours more tightly. You looked up at him as he started to speak again. “I want to, Y/N,” he said, taking a deep breath, “What’s this about? What’s going on?” You couldn’t even be annoyed with him because he looked so concerned.

You gave yourself a few moments to breathe before you answer him. “It’s just….I don’t know if I miss Sungwoo or…” you said, trailing off.

“Or what….?” Namjoon asked in a concerned voice.

“Or if I’m just hopeless, awkward, and desperate for love!!!” you exclaimed dramatically. It only took Namjoon a second to get the FRIENDS reference. He laughed, intertwining his fingers with yours. The two of you still couldn’t get enough of syndicated FRIENDS reruns on basic cable.

He leaned his shoulder into yours as you took a deep breath. “But in all seriousness,” you continued, “I know it sounds dumb…but…it’s so nice to be liked, to be wanted or needed or whatever…” You looked down at your lap, blinking your eyes a few times.

“I get that,” he said softly, lukewarm fingers now starting to just slightly condensate in your grasp. Namjoon was rarely this affectionate towards anyone. However, in the last month, the two of you had spent a plethora of your time that you were not working on your dissertations, with each other. At your behest, a lot of it in front of the television with junk food, which contrasted to the time after his breakup. But you two had different tastes.

You liked sitting shoulder to shoulder with Namjoon on the couch, crying your eyes out to preteen multicam comedies on Netflix. But you weren’t sure why he’d put up with you. You just came to assume it was because he was concerned after your break up with Sungwoo.

“Ugh, sorry,” you say, shaking your head, trying to shake out of it, “Do you want to pick the next movie? I’ll even watch that Hebrew movie you were talking about? Fill the Void?” You paused for a second before continuing, “That’s the one about arranged marriage right?”

“The young woman married her sister’s widower,” he said, correcting you. You nodded and the two of you settled into the couch to finish the shitty romantic comedy you were watching. When you finished, the two of you had polished off the vanilla ice cream. You took the empty carton, grabbing your second tub and bringing it as Namjoon was loading up the foreign film. Taking another deep breath, you sat down next to him.

The film was slow but stunning and you couldn’t help but getting wrapped up into it along Namjoon. Shoulders still pressed together, you felt your eyes well up unblinkingly at the emotional scenes laying before you. In a lull, you couldn’t help but speak. “Maybe I should just have my family match me up like Shira,” you said, “Easy, relatively painless, percentage chance of heartbreak significantly lowered right?”

You were just bullshitting at this point, working your way through your second glass of wine, using the last tissue from Namjoon’s pocket to dab at some of the drink dripping from your chin. You were reaching the climax in your rant when Namjoon interrupted you. “Just stop, Y/N, okay?” he said, grabbing your shoulders, only shaking you slightly, “One day, a guy is going to be so lucky that you’ve let him be part of your life. Stop beating yourself up about it. It’s a dumb holiday. You are so very much worthy of love. Trust me, I know. So shut up and let’s finish the damn movie.”

He turns away from you and back to the tv, but you can’t help but stare at his profile. Serious and hellbent on concentrating on the subtitled movie. You eyed him suspiciously. “What do you mean ‘I know?”

He let out a large breath through his nose. “Fine,” he said, getting up, “I guess I’m doing this.” You watched him as got up, leaving you alone on the coach, and made his way down the hall in the direction of his bedroom. Less than a minute later, he came back with a stack of letters rubber banded together. “Happy Valentine’s Day, Y/N,” he said, as if he was annoyed.

As you started to ask, he pushed them into your hands. “Just read, don’t talk, okay?” he said, more forceful than you’d really ever seen him before. This time, however, he sat on one of the bar stools a handful of feet away as you slowly undid the two skinny rubber bands.

“Okay,” you said resolutely, as you carefully pried open the first envelope. It had been dated around five or so months ago, in Namjoon’s skinny, clear handwriting. You started reading, feeling your face crease.

Y/N, I took some time before writing this because that’s what you do when someone who has been a fixture in your life, no longer is. By the time I started this, I told you that Chaeha and I broke up. Chaeha told me that she knew my heart wasn’t with her anymore. What’s worse is that she wasn’t even mad. I denied it to her, told her that I only loved her, but she knew better. I don’t know when it all started but…I’m pretty sure you’ve always been more than a friend to me. Two weeks to come to terms with the fact that she was right.

That was only the first letter. There were definitely more than ten letters in the pile and one by one, you opened them. He had written to you once a week since his breakup with Chaeha. A few of the letters were just Namjoon talking about his day, a short trip he took with his parents, the weekend getaway you took with your mutual friends. However, they all revolved around thoughts of you, even if you weren’t present at the time.

You could feel your eyes and face soften. On one hand, it was all too much and the other, not nearly enough. As you picked up the latest one, dated two days ago, you couldn’t help but look over at Namjoon sitting on the stool by the counter. He looked at you as if to encourage you to keep reading but there was something in his eyes that didn’t want yours to leave either. Always an eloquent speaker, his letters spoke volumes beyond what he could physically say.

February 12th, 2019, February 12th, 2019. Two days ago.

I’m sure if you ever read these, Y/N, you’ll have figured it out quickly by this one. You’re so smart and that’s probably one of reasons we get along so well, why that Modern French Philosophy class was the best class I’ve ever taken at this place. Probably one of the reasons why Chaeha and I ended, even. The day I wrote about in the first letter, Chaeha told me it was you. I didn’t completely admit to myself but I’ve had five months to think about us and I can now confirm. I can confirm my feelings. I still am not sure when it all happened but it did. I fell in love with you along the way of our friendship.

Your eyes scanned the rest of the letter, trying to absorb all the information thoroughly but as quickly as possible. You finished, and turned to look at Namjoon over the couch. Your eyes growing softer, wider, and a bit wetter.

Knowing what was going on but not really knowing how to comprehend, your words faltered in your mouth. “What is–? Why–? Really–?” you said, only being able to form a few short, questioning words. You were emotional and a little buzzed already and now ….you were pretty sure your best friend was telling you that he broke up with his girlfriend five months ago because he was in love with you.

Snapping your head towards the kitchen to look at him, you were sure that you probably looked pretty lost. The expression on his face was serious but not hard, his chin between his forefinger and thumb. You wanted to move, to be able to look him closely in the eyes as if that act could provide you with answers. To be honest, you were overwhelmed and for a moment you thought you might just burst into tears. Where was all of this coming from?

The only thing you could do was hold up the stack of haphazardly opened letters. Not as in “I want to give these back” kind of way but in a way that says “I want to talk about these but my mouth and brain aren’t making the connection with one another.” He sloughs out of his chair and rejoins you back on the couch. You turn to him sideways, one knee up on the couch. You jester to him with the envelopes on your hands but a tight grip on them. A grip that might imply you don’t want to let them go, that if you do…what you just read will disappear.

“I know,” he says, “I know…it’s a lot, but it’s not–” He looks into your watery eyes and you can just tell he wants to stay more, that he probably has this eloquent speech or explanation planned out. He always knows what to say to you, what to say to other people. Where you were often speechless and stuck in your own head, he had a way with words that rivaled many heads of state.

You sighed and swallowed. “Tell me, then,” you manage to say, not quite knowing what is possessing you, “tell me what these letters haven’t.” Your knee brushed Namjoon’s thigh when you readjusted yourself next to him, placing the stack of letters on top of where your leg brushed his. You tried to remain as calm as possible for him, so that you could listen to him, but you were shaking. You couldn’t help it and you did your best to conceal that fact, by holding your arms to yourself, even though you didn’t want to look as if you were closed off from the conversation.

Once he started, you could only listen. The way he put into words possibly years of feelings…your heart was fit to burst. He’d been your friend for so long and you had built a relationship on being friends and roommates that you were more than satisfied with. Well, at least…that’s what you thought until the one person it also included flipped your world upside down with his confession.

“…You know I loved Chaeha. I was with her for half a decade,” he said, almost as if he was pleading. You nodded because it was true. He loved Chaeha. You loved her too…obviously not in that way but you’d grown close to her in the past two plus years of being Namjoon’s friend. She’d never…she’d never even given off any vibes that she didn’t like you, that she didn’t trust you, or that her boyfriend of five years might possibly be in love with another woman aka you. That thought hurt you too.

“I know, Namjoon,” you said, “I know you loved her so much. But why? When? How? I–I’m sorry. I’m not the articulate one in this friendship.” You held onto your own fingers so tightly, you knew there might be the possibility that they might bruise.

“I don’t know when it happened but here I am, fucking hopeless and in love with my best friend. Those five months taught me that Chaeha was right and that…she was right to dump me. I couldn’t continue to be in a relationship with her–even if I really cared about her because at the back of my mind, I was always thinking about you.” he said, finally shifting to face you, taking your shaking hands in each of his.

Never thought you’d see your best friend’s gaze falter, never thought he’d ever be at a loss. His hands were as warm as they were before but they felt different. This is what you were afraid of. Things changing between you. That’s why….whatever “little” crush you had on him when you first met, you pushed it aside. There was never going to be a way that you’d let Kim Namjoon slip away from your life. You had always recognized that you found him attractive but he was Namjoon, the PhD candidate with cartoon character pyjama pants and the guy who you’d let in the bathroom while you were in the shower so he could pee.

He still liked you after that and it confused you even more. “Not to sound like a broken record, but why me? What is it about me?” you asked. You were genuinely curious and confused. You weren’t a mess, per say, but you and Namjoon shared every streaming service and refused to purchase cable tv because you were on a budget. Chaeha had been beautiful, smart, and a fantastic career and life going for her. Why was your roommate looking at you like you held the fucking universe? Why was he taking a step closer to you right now? Why were his eyes bigger and glassier than you’d ever seen them before?

Why was it that when he squeezed your hands in his and he finally looked at you in the eyes, you could feel all the confusing puzzle pieces finally fall into place? Could he see the light bulb go off in your brain?

“What isn’t it about you?” he said, suddenly smiling more brightly than he had since he walked through the door, “One, you’re my best friend. Two, without you I would starve. Three, I realized you have always made my heart do this.” He took one of the hands he was holding and put it on his heart. It was beating rather fast. You could feel your fingers press into the shirt covering his chest, looking for some kind of anchor to keep you on this earth. Now that the two of you were closer, you could feel the light breeze of his wine breath on your face.

Of your own accord, you moved the hand on his chest to the juncture of his neck and shoulder in attempt to not pull him to you but still bring him closer. The only sound you could hear was the foreign film in the background and the sound of your own ragged breath. “What are you thinking?” he asks so quietly, that if it wasn’t silent, you wouldn’t have been able to catch it.

“It’s just that…the feelings I have…I have…I have pressed them so far down because of how much our friendship means to me, how much you mean to me…that I’m just trying to wrap my head around this,” you rambled. Your thumb rubbed at his jaw, reveling in the warmth and softness of his skin there. “Did you know…that I had a crush on you when we first became friends?” you said, not being able to help but chuckle at yourself a little.

“No,” he said, looking down at you.

“But you were with Chaeha and you two were really cute and I wanted to be your friend so bad that I–” you said but in a fast moment, were cut off by Namjoon’s lips against yours. You wanted to cry because you’d thought about it more than you wanted to admit. Repressing your crush on Namjoon was now going to take its toll in the form of big soppy tears that were pooling in your tear ducts.

Pressing your finger into his jaw, you used your hand to bring him closer, a sob stuck in your throat. You used a little more momentum than you had thought to and Namjoon ended up half on top of you as you fell back into the large, squishy couch cushion. His hands were soon around your waist and your arms slipped around his shoulders.

After coming up for air, you managed to get out “Sorry, I’m all emotional. This is all so good but a little much. I just…you overwhelm me…in a good way.” You tacked that bit on at the end because it was true. The very thought and feel of him right now consumed you.

“Please don’t feel pressured to say or do anything you don’t want to,” he said earnestly, “That’s the last thing I want to happen. Your friendship, regardless of this, means everything to me.” You smile, bringing his lips back to you. When you pressed him even closer to you, Namjoon eagerly maneuvered so that you were underneath him on the couch. His fingers brushed your bare sides while yours dipped under the collar of his t-shirt.

He melded to you like you had been there all along.

“I said it earlier but…Happy Valentine’s Day, Y/N,” he said, that big, happy doofy smile blooming across his face.

“You too, Joon,” you said, biting your bottom lip before pulling him in closer. The two of you remained tangled up together for several more minutes until eventually, you ended up on top of Namjoon. When you finally separated, the movie was over and you decided to clear up all your mess on the coffee table except for the wine.

As you reached for the tub of ice cream in order to take it to kitchen, you peered inside only to be disappointed. “Goddamnit, the ice cream melted!” you said annoyedly. But before you could walk to throw it in the trash can, a pair of arms looped around your middle as a chin pressed into your shoulder.

“So did I,” Namjoon said into your ear. You couldn’t help but chortle at the cheesy line. As cheesy as it was, it was still lovely. You wrapped your arms around his and leaned back into him as you help the condensation covered melted tub of ice cream. When his lips reached behind your ear, you leaned forward to place the tub on a surface, not wanting it all over the carpet.

Smiling at that moment, you promised yourself to never call Valentine’s Day a consumerist holiday ever again.

#hyunglinenetwork #btswritingcafe #namjoon x reader #bts fluff #bts angst #bts scenarios #bts fanfiction #namjoon fanfic #bts fanfic #kim namjoon #namjoon #namjoon fluff #namjoon angst #bts #bangtan #joonieblossoms #palepinksuga: writings #writings #fic: drabble

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jenosweave · 5 years

Text

college!kun

FINALLY A KUN REQUEST!! this is one of my favorites please enjoy and don’t let me flop!!

let’s start w the basics…

major: linguistics

minor: comparative literature

extracurriculars: book club

other: literally writing his own novel??

school life

kun is such a good student

he always does his work on time and tries to get ahead when he can

he’s a plug too

he'll even do his friends’ readings and summarize it for them if they have a particularly busy week

he doesn’t allow himself to be used though

he just loves and appreciates his friends so much and wants to help them be successful when there are things they cant control that can get in the way of that

kun really enjoys his studies

his required courses are really stimulating and keep him on his toes

he loves leaving class every day feeling like he’s one step closer to understanding where language comes from and why we communicate the way we do

kun’s passion for linguistics sprouted from his adoration of reading

he’s a member of every book he could find on campus

he firmly believes the more you read, the more perspectives you’re able to see, which in turn, makes you a generally more enlightened and compassionate person

kun loves reading and language so much that he decided to just write his own book over the summer for fun

he sent a “very rough draft” to a local publisher

just for experience

and to get him used to rejection in case he ever wants to seriously pursue a career in writing someday

but now he’s fucked because

they actually liked it??? so he kind of has a book deal now??

which he was not expecting at all

there were a lot of comments for him to address as he expected

and the first one he decided to deal with was the lack of a love interest for his protagonist

except there’s only one problem with that

he has no idea how to successfully write for a love interest

so he does what any normal young writer would do to get inspiration

and goes to the university’s monthly speed dating event in the quad

early stages

you had been “too single for too long,” according to your best friend

and the only way you could get them to shut up about it was if you attended one of the school’s speed dating nights

and you decided it was worth the trouble, and made your way to the quad to get this over with

you had exactly two and a half minutes with every person you’d “date”

and for the most part, those two and a half minutes couldn’t go by fast enough

after talking to other students who only cared about football, trucks, and battlestar galactica, you were about ready to up and go

but your second to last “date” changed your mind

his name was kun

“alright this is gonna go by quick, so i’m gonna take the reigns if you don’t mind,” he spoke

he was oddly productive

you nodded

“great!’ he smiled. “any hobbies?”

“well, i love to read an-”

“reading? me too! what genres are you into?”

a wide smile stretched across his smooth face and his pupils dilated noticeably UGH CUTIE

“i mean, i like fantasy, historical fiction, biographies, science fi-”

“no way! me too!” he interrupts. “i just like all books so much!! i’m writing my own actually!”

you thought that was mighty impressive and asked him what his book is about

and he told you he can’t disclose that information because of his publishing deal

and youre like,,,, wA i T.. PUBLISHER?? THAT’S SO COOL!!

and he goes, “thank you! maybe you’d like to come and read it sometime when it’s finished.”

you couldn’t help but blush and turn your head away

and that’s when you noticed you only had ten seconds left on the stopwatch

you hurriedly seized the pen the event organizers had left on the desk and grabbed kun by the wrist, taking him by surprise and causing a slight gasp to escape his lips

you messily scribbled your number onto his forearm

and as soon as you had finished writing your digits, the timer rang

as you both departed from the table, kun shouted at you from a distance “how am i supposed to read this chicken scratch?!”

you shot him a smile playfully and shouted back

“text me!”

you didn’t receive a text that night

or the night after

but the night after that, your phone dinged as soon as you hopped out of the shower

“hey! this is kun from the speed dating thing. i hope this is the right number. i’ve already texted three wrong people and have had to explain myself to each of them. it’s really embarrassing. please confirm if this is you!”

you sent him a simple “:)” in response

“so does that mean you’re down to get a coffee with me tomorrow?”

“:)”

the next morning, you had the first of many, many morning coffee breaks outside the school library

these quick little meetups usually concluded with a quick sift through the library, where you’d each recommend each other your favorite books and read the prologues to each other over a hot cup of coffee

at first, the librarians used to kick you out for having drinks inside, but now youre clever and just hide your cups under your jackets

this became a weekly occurrence

and then it started happening twice a week

and now you basically see kun every other day

he even managed to get you to join the biographical book club with him, something you’d be way too nervous to do before meeting him

kun was such a good guy

you knew he was smart and funny and you knew he was caring and fun to be around

but what you didn’t know is that he had been smitten with you from the second you scribbled your number onto his arm

one day, as you were studying for your last final of the semester, you got a call from kun

you sent him the automated response, “sorry, i cant talk right now”

but he called right back anyway

“what is it?” you answered

“i’m sorry if you’re studying but this is super important and im so excited and i just have to tell someone!”

“what’s up kun?”

“my book! it’s finished! and i finally added in the love interest like the publishers asked!”

“I’M SO PROUD OF YOU BITCH

“finish studying! then we can facetime and i can read you a chapter!”

and so for the next thirty nights (even over your winter break), you and kun would facetime so he could read you a chapter until the book was finished

and you’d give him pointers at the end of each one so he could go back and revise once you had gone to sleep

the plot was incredible, honestly

the protagonist was a divorced middle-aged man whose wife left him for being too aggressive and absent-minded all the time

in the divorce, the wife got full custody of their teenage son

but when she goes on a business trip, the protagonist gets to watch the son

however, when he goes to pick the son up to take him to his house, hes nowhere to be found

so the novel follows this poor guy trying to find his missing son

but no one seems to be listening to him, so hes losing his mind

he’s working alongside the police and falls for the dci leading the investigation

and basically in the end it turns out he’s schizophrenic and his wife and son never existed at all

all of this was in his imagination

and he had just been showing up to the police station every day like a crazy person

kun did so much research for that

he even got the accuracy of his portrayal of a schizophrenic checked by his pal psych major!jungwoo

on the night kun finally finished reading to you

you were sh0000000000000k like what the fuck all that trouble for it all to be fake?? genius kun!!

so he asked for your feedback on the development and personalities of all his characters

you complimented him on how well he portrayed the dci

they weren’t your typical love interest

they were headstrong and witty and educated

and they were determined to help the protagonist find his son when no one else was listening to him

“you like them?” he asked you

“yes! they were so different than i had expe-”

“i was hoping you’d like them. i was inspired by you.”

your heart BURST!!!

“KUN THAT’S SO SWEET!”

and that’s when he explained to you why he went to speed dating to begin with, and told you he was so glad to have met you

because you were the “perfect muse”

and then he asked if you’d like to be his s/o

and of course

you said yes bc duh?? he’s kun??

relationship

kun is the cutest bf ever!!!

nothing has really changed between you two

you still have library and car dates

but now you hold hands sometimes

and when kun is feeling extra bold, he gives you a peck on the cheek

you guys have such a cute and innocent relationship

you can often be seen together on the campus quad where you met for the first time, you in kuns arms, him tickling your stomach to make you giggle

he’s so sweet and is so considerate of your needs

out of all the boys, he’s hands down the one most likely to change for you if you guys hit a rough patch

he always pays for food

which kind of ticks you off because what if one day he goes broke

but all he really cares about is your happiness and satisfaction

and he really just wants you to know that no one loves you quite like he does

and he tells you every day how grateful he is to have you in his life

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romancenerd · 5 years

Text

Kisses Not Intened

*Dont know what to use for a gif so blank for now*

A/N - *I wanted to make at least one more fanfic before the year was over. Very very very extremely long time ago I was asked to write this when i posted a prompt list 9 decades ago and I’ve been lacking in the fanfic department. This was supposed to be a Christmas present but consider this a new year present. So this fanfic is for @nitia95 thank you so much for requesting this i serioisuly enjoyed writing this the fluff and just everything. Like i love Azusa so very much when i got stuck i didn’t want to force it out of me so this is all for you girl happy new year and thank you for being an amazing tumblr friend and big supporter of my blog!*

Also I don’t feel like proof reading or editing in the moment so please ignore grammar and punctuation until i fix it tomorrow also I’m going to change the title I just don’t know what to call it comment below some good titles please and thank you. So I’m going to shut up and let you all read now.

Liz was rapidly running through the streets of new york. Pausing to catch her breath at a crosswalk she checked her watch to see she only had 5 minutes to get to school before she was marked tardy.

She mentally cursed. The power in her building had went off last night and thank God she woke up when she did or she would have missed first period.

Even if it did only leave her 25 minutes to brush her teeth, hair, get dressed, and shove a granola bar and apple in her bag.

She continued running and glanced down to check her watch and collided head on something.

“Why don’t you watch where you're going.” A deep voice called to her.

She shook her head and glanced up at the dark haired stranger meeting his piercing sapphire gaze.

Rolling her eyes she pursed her lips and try to keep her anger in check, and sarcastically replied.

“Oh I'm so sorry! I'll try to watch where I'm going!” Using air quotes. She began to walk away. And at the same time they both made quite comments which they thought would fall upon deaf ears but would not be the case.

“Morron.”

“Asshole.”

Both of them faced each other with nasty looks.

“Do you have a problem with me or something?�� Liz said

“No but I'm not the one crashing into people am I?”

“Yeah let's keep acting like it was my fault, I'm not the one walking in the middle of the street with my face glued to a map, so who wasn't really paying attention here.”

“ Well your -.”

“Listen I don't have time to argue with you, some of us have places to be.” Liz interrupted

And with that last statement Liz stormed off in the opposite direction slinging her bag over her shoulder with the stranger staring at the back of her head.

•••••••••••

Liz let out a long sign all while rubbing her eyes. She pushed the hair out of her face and grabbed the stack of textbooks near her and proceeded to her next class.

Professor Goldstein had given her extra work due to her tardiness to class this morning.

It was all that jerks fault this morning. What's his problem, she thought. I mean he was really cute but still he didn’t need to be a jerk about it.

As she walked through the halls of the university she was greeted with smiles and friendly waves. Second period was always her favorite class. Zoology. She loved animals more than anything.

That's why she decided to go to college and pursue a career in veterinary medicine. To help care and heal animals.

•••••••••••

Finally third period had arrived and she made her way to her usual spot in the classroom and waited for class to start she was a little earlier than usual than normal and people had yet to arrive.

Once the class started filling up and the bell rang, Professor Schular made an announcement. Not paying any mind, Liz leaned down and began collection and pulling her books out of her bag. When she popped back up she couldn't believe what her eyes were seeing.

“We have a new transfer student joining us today, I would all like you to welcome Azusa Kuze.” Proffesor Schuler spoke

Whispers and gasps suddenly filled the classroom.

“He’s so hot!”

“I think I'm going faint.”

“That jawline!”

Liz however was stunned and went his gaze meet hers her heart skipped a beat.

“Now.” The professor spoke. “ Where to put you ….”

Please not by me please not by me. Liz spoke over and over again in here head.

“ You can have a seat next to Ms. Hart .”

Liz felt her eyes go wide and her blood boil. She clenched her fist under the desk so hard she was positive they were turning white.

How ever he walked all the way to her table in the back of the room with a smile on his face and sat down.

“Well, well, well we meet again.

There staring at her with a sarcastic smile was none other than the blockhead she ran into earlier.

“It would appear so.” Liz said unamused.

She faced forward and began taking notes trying to completely forgetting his existence.

••••••••••••

Once class was over she got up and immediately collected her belongings.

“Hold on a minute.”

“What?”

“I was wondering if you knew where room B213 would be.”

Liz paused momentarily and swallowed the lump in her throat to speak. He handed her the paper and she saw that she had ever single class with him but her first 2.

Great. She thought

“Well according to this schedule apparently starting now we have every single class together.”

Liz tried as hard as she could to keep from sounding irritated.

He smiled sarcastically. She knew that he was getting a kick out of this.

“So I could just follow you for the day correct?”

She stared at him for the longest time and finally spoke.

“Fine, lets go before were late.”

••••••••••••

Today was a day off from school. Liz found herself in cute and cozy coffee shop 2 blocks from her apartment.

She sat with her legs crossed on a bean bag re-reading her favorite novel for the hundredth time.

Yesterday had been Friday and showing that jerk around while he smirked and teased her at every little thing she did.

She was glad it was the weekend now. Setting her book down and taking a quick sip of tea. She slowly inhaled in and out to calm her nerves.

Getting comfortable again, she grabbed her book and picked up where she left off.

The door to the coffee shop opened letting the crisp slightly chilly air into the room. Trying to ignore any and all distractions as best as she could until.

“Loving you was breathing but that breath disappearing before it filled my lungs.”

Liz suddenly looked up to find Azusa towering above her with a calm expression on his face.

“You know the sun and her flowers.”

Azusa suddenly smirked down at her.

“If were being honest here its it's a favorite of mine.” Azusa said chucking.

“Mine too.”

“Really?”

“Really really.” Liz smiled slightly than smirked.

“So even jerks have good literature taste.”

“Life is full of surprises.” Azusa said sitting down in the bean bag next to her putting his arms behind his head

“Tell me about it.” Liz said with her lips pursed. “So do you have anything better to do than stalk me all day and night.”

“You honestly think I give a damn about what your doing every single moment.”

“Clearly you seem to.” Azusa rolled his eyes at her comment and chuckled.

“Maybe I don't maybe I do, who's to say.” He teased

“You are a serious pain in my ass I swear.” Liz then stood up slamming her book shut and grabbed her coffee and purse.

“Where are you going.”

“To enjoy the rest of my day in peace thank you.”

Liz then left the shop leaving Azusa by himself. He simply stared at the door she walked out of with mixed thoughts. He let out a soft sigh and feel back into the bean bag wondering what in the world he was going to do.

“No no no.” Liz rested her head on the steering wheel as the engine started smoking. She was on her way home from the coffee shop when her car starting acting up and died on her.

Getting out and popping the hood she began to cough from all the smoke.

“This is just perfect what else can go wrong?! “ She screamed when the sky rumbled and a heavy downpour was upon her.

“Great what luck. Closing the hood she sat down and brought he knees to her chest. She was still a good 40 minutes away from home.

After several moments the rain upon her finally stopped even though the sound could still be heard. Lifting her head she was met by black jean’s and a white t shirt. Furthering her gaze upwards she was met with sapphire eyes.

“Get in my car and I'll drive you home.”

“You don -”

“Shut up get in the car and don't argue with me.” Azusa sternly said.

Liz knew he was trying to be nice. Maybe trying to make up for being such an asshole these past couple of weeks. Sliding off the hood she stood underneath the umbrella with him. He pulled her close wrapping his arm around her shoulder and guided her to the passenger side.

She never really looked at him before but up close she could see what the other girls were talking about. Liz wasn't going to like he was handsome. Like some guy from a fairytale or a dream.

After Azusa helped her into the passenger side and closed the door all Liz could think was if this was a fairytale. Azusa coming to her aid like a knight in shining armor. Or perhaps she was at home in bed sleeping through the rain. This is probably a dream she reassured herself.

But if it was then why was Azusa in it? She thought to herself as Azusa got in and began to drive.

“Where do you live?”

“In the Reitz apartments.”

“Really?” He laughed

“Yeah what's so funny.”

“I live 2 buildings over.”

“Seriously?” She grumbled

“Seriously, it's a small world you and I live in.”

“A little too small if you ask me.” Suddenly Azusa bursted into laughter. The way he smiled made her heart flutter.

What's the matter with me she thought. Liz sat in silence for the rest of the ride trying to figure out the strange dream out.

Liz wondered how far her dream would go. How long it would last.

“Were here.”He suddenly announced pulling her out of her thoughts.

“Oh.” She said a little disappointed. “Well thank you for the ride I'll be sure to give you money for gas next time I run into you. It's a small world so you shouldn't have to wait long.”

Azusa snorted and suddenly locked the doors when Liz tried to get out. She curiously looked at him, he dream kept getting stranger by the second.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure I guess.” Liz said settling back into her seat.

They sat in silence for a moment before Azusa blurted out. “Do you hate me?”

Taken by surprise Liz looked up at him to find him staring out the window. It took her a moment to answer but when she did.

“No I don't hate you.” Azusa suddenly turned his head towards hers.

“You don't.”

“No not at all. I think your a sarcastic asshole but who isn’t.” She said smiling.

Liz wondered why her subconscious would create such a dream unless. . .

Liz was pulled out her thoughts when Azusa's face got closer to hers. She suddenly forgot how to think. His face got closer until she could feel his breath on her lips.

Azusa then leaned forward a little as their lips brushed together in a soft and delicate kiss. Her heart seizes up and fluttered from the contact. He slightly pulled away and whispered.

“I'm sorry I didn't intend on kissing you.”

She slowly looked up into his eyes. Realizing this was reality. This was the real Azusa in front of her and that was a real, and that what her heart was telling her was real too.

Looking down and gently brushing her fingers across his cheek and returning to his gaze she whispered.

“I’m sorry I didn't intend on falling in love with you.”

Azusa suddenly smiled. “ Well I did intend on falling in love with you.”

Liz smiled back at him and he leaned forward and kissed her again. Its was slightly more passionate than the first.

The only sounds that could be heard were the drops of rain against the car and the sound of their lips meeting in heated breathless kisses.

#shall we date wizardess heart #wizardess heart fanfiction #wizardess heart #swd #wh #swd wh #shall we date #shall we date: wizardess heart #Azusa Kuze #wizardess heart azusa #fanfiction #otome game #ntt solmare #ntt solomare corp

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neighbours-kid · 5 years

Text

Twelve's March

March was….a chaotic cluster-fuck of something that felt like two weeks tops. March went by fast. And also—wasn’t it just the beginning of the year? Wasn’t it just Christmas? Where’s all this time going?

Anyway, March was really weird. Full month of university, relatively full weekends I think, it just all felt weird and fast and I don’t even know what exactly I did all month. Well, except watch TV shows. Well, I say TV shows…I mean Doctor Who. And with that, I mean Matt’s arc with Clara, and all of Peter’s arc. Which you already know because I wrote a massive blog post about it, yelling incoherently about all sorts of things and not remotely making sense, I feel.

March was definitely a month defined by Doctor Who and specifically Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, who I have come to love so much, I still don’t know how to wrap my head around it. I think I’m just gonna have to buy all the DVDs finally and just—watch it again. Because I have emotions and thoughts and ideas and these little bits of je ne sais quoi about so many things in relation to Peter’s wonderful wonderful performance. But I don’t want to spend too much time rambling on about him (again) and waste your time with that.

As I said, March was a full month of university. And honestly, it has sort of started to overwhelm me right now. With me being me and having extended one paper deadline to the end of February, and also fucking up one exam of the last term and having to retake that, I completely fell behind on all my actual work that I had to do for this term. There’s one class that I can’t attend but have to take, so I’m working through a book by myself, there’s another book for another course that I ordered way too late, and there’s so much reading that I should be doing and am not actually doing. So I’m totally behind on all things and I often find myself with books open and texts on my kitchen table, throwing highlighters around and post-it’s, trying to get it together, and just ultimately making more of a mess.

I am very glad Easter holidays are coming up soon so I have time to catch up with that (of course only if I don’t have to work during that week, which somehow might actually happen).

I also started a new minor this term—theology—(and finally finished art history—never have to do art history ever again!!!!), so that is also a bit of a challenge, though I do feel a lot better about it than I did about art history. It’s really interesting and I’m learning a lot of cool stuff, and I’m actually pretty good at being present in class and taking notes, so at least there’s that. Funny thing is: my theology courses are incredibly affirming of my gender identity and my plans for the future, and a lot of the things I learn support my own views, which is really great.

Another thing that’s really cool this term, is that I’m trying to hang out in our English department’s tea corner more often, eating lunch there (now that I actually have time to eat lunch on some days), and just trying to socialise more with people. And it’s great! I’m having a lot of lovely conversations with a lot of lovely people, and I think it’s really good for me to do that and just to try and be more open.

And honestly, I really like being at university currently? I have a cool group of friends, I’m having a really great time and learning a lot of cool and interesting things (mostly. There’s some rubbish introduction courses that I have to take now). But my problem is, that as soon as I sit in my tram home, as soon as I enter my apartment, I am just flat out exhausted. I am so done. Which is also why I rarely actually get any work done at home currently, because all I really do is maybe eat something small and then fall into bed to maybe watch an episode or two of something and then go to sleep.

On that note: Daylight savings time was just last weekend here, and it completely fucked over my internal clock. Like, the day before that, I went to bed at like 1.30AM because I was reading fanfiction (later more on that), and got up very easily the next day even before 10AM. Daylight savings? I went to bed, I think, only a bit after 11PM and had to get up at 7.30AM, and I was absolutely knackered. I immediately dozed off again as soon as I turned off the alarm and it nearly cost me my entire day because I had to catch a train. And it’s still not back to normal, I still have issues every morning getting up. I hope it gets better soon, once I have a day to just sleep in without an alarm and get up whenever I actually wake up. I have hope that this is gonna work.

But now: fanfiction! I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this on here before, but I was big on fanfiction a few years back, mostly in my BBC Sherlock time. And before that too, I think, way back when I first started really getting into Naruto in a more intellectual way than just watching it on TV. But that was when I was like….in sixth grade, or something like that. But I was huge on fanfiction for a long time, and I think together with falling off of the Sherlock train after that last season, I also stopped really engaging with that part of fandom. But now, thanks to my binging of Doctor Who I have absolutely fallen down that rabbit hole again. It’s just such a great thing, isn’t it? People creating massive, massive amounts of, essentially free work. Just to express this joy and this love for a thing and to share it with others. It’s amazing.

(Short side-note here: Did you know, Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest fanfiction sites, was nominated for a fucking Hugo Award? In its entirety? Making, effectively, over 4.5 MILLION pieces of fanfiction Hugo Award-nominated literature, and, with over 1.8 MILLION users, making many of those Hugo Award-nominated authors? It’s fucking brilliant. What a time to be alive!)

What else did I do in March? I’m sort of blanking, because this month went by so fast. Lemme think….

I went to see Captain Marvel opening night (which was, officially, Men’s Night, which we crashed, because we wouldn’t usually support such sexist events, but it was Captain Marvel), and then again a bit later one more time, and it was great, just really fantastic. Carol is right up there as one of faves now. Also, Jude Law was hot.

On that film note, I obviously watched some stuff this month again and tried to make notes of it. Six movies (well five, but one twice), 64 episodes of TV (50 of which being Doctor Who), and a bunch of shorts starring David Tennant. Aside from Captain Marvel I think the movies I liked best this month were Bad Samaritan (2018) and Fright Night (2011), both also starring David Tennant, which is why I watched them. Fright Night was great fun, Colin Farrell was a fantastic, sexy vampire, and David’s vampire hunter/Las Vegas magician act was just hilarious. I love how much of a coward he was, ultimately. What a fantastic vampire movie, really funny. Also, Anton Yelchin was in it, and I just realised how much I miss him and what a shame it is that he died so young. He was a great kid and a fantastic actor.

Bad Samaritan was also really cool. I had wanted to watch it for a while, since it came out actually, because David was in it, and because Dean Devlin directed and produced it, and I really adore his work (Leverage and The Librarians, anyone?) I was always a bit hesitant though, because I’m not very big on films that are too horror-y and gory, so I always pushed it off. But I’m very glad I finally saw it, because it was truly more of a thriller and not a horror movie. Fantastic story, the acting was brilliant (DT as a villain? Come on! So good.), the tension and suspense was absolutely incredible. Really a great movie, you should all watch it.

I’m sure there’s other things that I did in March that would be worthwhile to mention (was at my dad’s, visited my mom, went shopping with a friend), but I’m really sort of hazy about all the details and I honestly can’t be bothered to write more right now.

Anyway, I’m having a bit of a break soon—going to Lugano for four days with a friend—so I can hopefully relax a little and recharge my batteries for April.

Talk to you guys soon! Bye.

#march #captain marvel #david tennant #fright night #bad samaritan #doctor who #peter capaldi #matt smith #12th doctor #university #blog post #text post #monthly blog #update #long post

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nyfacurrent · 5 years

Text

Conversations | Luiza Teixeira-Vesey, Designer & Marketing Associate at NYFA

“Being an immigrant makes you see things from a different perspective, and that’s something employers, jurors in open calls, or gallerists may value.”

Luiza Teixeira-Vesey was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is a Designer and Marketing Associate at The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and works directly on the design of the Immigrant Artist Program Newsletter. Teixeira-Vesey is also an Art Historian focused on the influence of Afro-Brazilian religions in feminism, art, and popular culture in Brazil. Read on to learn more about her role in IAP and her experiences as an immigrant arts professional in New York.

NYFA: Can you tell us a little bit about your projects as a designer/illustrator? Are you currently working on any projects?

Luiza Teixeira-Vesey: My life in design is a product of my passion for books. My first full-time job was as an art director for a small publishing house in Rio. It’s a funny story because I didn’t apply to be a designer; I was actually trying to be an illustrator for children’s books! Later I’d illustrate two published books for kids, but I consider myself very lucky that Laura van Boekel, the editor in chief, invited me to be a designer instead. That job was the foundation of my career; I learned so much, not only about book design but literature, writing, work ethic… Laura was a wonderful mentor!

I rarely work with printed publications nowadays and my career as an illustrator has been on pause for a few years. I like digital a lot but seeing my work on paper gives me an extra joy. I was beside myself when the art catalog NYFA made for Artists as Innovators exhibition came back from the printers.

NYFA: Can you tell us about your work at NYFA? What is your role regarding the IAP Newsletter?

LTV: As you know, NYFA is a small organization with people that are very driven and passionate about what they do, so we all end up wearing lots of hats. I do most of the design work for NYFA, and also assist with the monitoring of Classifieds and their design services for advertisers, along with other marketing efforts for all of our programs. This is where the IAP Newsletter comes in. My job is to help the Learning team make the newsletter as reader-friendly and relevant as possible, using email marketing data and statistics to make informed decisions. Some of this data analysis led to its redesign last year.

NYFA: What was your first impression when you first came to New York?

LTV: I remember thinking there were way too many people everywhere and that was very disorienting. I come from Rio de Janeiro, I’m used to big cities, but nothing can prepare you for the speed at which things happen in New York. I was also amazed that suddenly I had live access to all these works of art that I had only previously seen in books. I’ll never forget the first time I entered a public library: I couldn’t believe Americans had access to so much culture for free!

NYFA: Did you face any challenges when first arriving in the city? How did you overcome them?

LTV: Plenty! But I am very fortunate because I didn’t come here alone. My husband is from New York and his family took me in as one of their own. That helped a lot while I was adapting to a whole new life. Professionally, though, I had to figure things out myself. When you move to a new country, your whole previous professional life almost vanishes, so I basically had to start from zero. It was very difficult and it takes a huge emotional toll on you.

Going back to school, for an M.A., helped me regain a sense of belonging. Finding activities related to Brazil and the Portuguese language was also very helpful. I became a volunteer at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and that opened several doors for me in the art world. I was in the visitor services department and my job was to provide information about The Met (and, a lot of times, other museums as well) to Portuguese-speaking patrons. So it was basically 3 hours a week that I had dedicated to talking about art and meeting wonderful people in one of my favorite places in New York! Plus, it was one of my fellow volunteers that told me about an opening at The Morgan Library–my first art-related job in the US.

NYFA: Any advice for emerging immigrant artists?

LTV: Don’t try to tackle this city by yourself. Find your peers. And by peers, I don’t mean people that come from the same place as you (though that also helps), but people that have the same drive as you. Also, be proud of your roots. Being an immigrant makes you see things from a different perspective, and that’s something employers, jurors in open calls, or gallerists may value. Last but not least: apply for the Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program!

NYFA: As a Brazilian arts professional, what do you think about Brazilian art (art made in Brazil as well as art made by Brazilian artists) in particular, and Latinx art in general, in New York?

LTV: When it comes to major retrospectives, I cannot complain at all. Since I’ve moved here, we had Lygia Clark and Tarsila do Amaral at The MoMA, Helio Oiticica at The Whitney, and Lygia Pape at The Met Breuer. There’s also plenty going on in terms of music. Brasil Summerfest brings in wonderful musicians every year, for example. The same goes for Latinx art in general. New York even has a whole museum dedicated to it, El Museo del Barrio! It’s great to see that the diaspora is looking after their own in the art world.

NYFA: Are there any challenges particular to Brazilian/Latinx artists in New York?

LTV: There are challenges that artists from all peripheric countries deal with when approaching the mainstream art world: how do you break through the stereotype? There’s this sense that we must always be addressing the struggles of our home country or the struggles of ourselves as immigrants. But maybe we want to make abstract art or experimental theater or classical music, and when that happens, there’s always someone to say you’re not being Latinx enough. But we’re slowly making progress and showing that Latinx art can be any kind of art.

- Interview Conducted by Alicia Ehni, Program Officer at NYFA Learning

About Luiza Teixeira-Vesey Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Luiza Teixeira-Vesey (née Luiza Costa Teixeira) is a Designer and Marketing Associate at The New York Foundation for the Arts and an Art Historian focused on the influence of Afro-Brazilian religions in feminism, art, and popular culture in Brazil. She holds a master’s degree in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University; a B.A. in Advertising from Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; a specialization in Art and Culture from Universidade Cândido Mendes, also in Rio de Janeiro; and communication design training from the Fine Arts School of the University of Lisbon, in Lisbon, Portugal. Luiza has published two children’s books as an illustrator, A escola que eu quero pra mim (Ao Livro Técnico, 2011) and Amor de Mãe d’Água (Escrita Fina Edições, 2011).

This interview is part of the ConEdison Immigrant Artist Program Newsletter #111. Subscribe to this free monthly e-mail for artist’s features, opportunities, and events.

Image: Photo by Doris Tamai

#iap newsletter #iap interview #conversations #immigrant artist program #immigrant artist mentoring program #alicia ehni #luiza vesey #design

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superlinguo · 6 years

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Linguistics jobs - Interview with a Communications Consultant

It’s the final linguistics job interview for the year! And we’re finishing on a high note, with Sabine Harnau. Sabine set up From Scratch, a communications consulting firm grounded in linguistic research. Being the boss of your own organisation has its perks, not least of all what Sabine puts on her business cards. You can follow From Scratch on twitter (@scratch_posts) or check out the website (from-scratch.net) for more examples of Sabine’s work.

What did you study at university?

I studied in Germany, where higher education is (mostly) free. This was when Germany still had its own degree structure — before the introduction of the Bachelor/Master system. So I always struggle to translate my “state exam” degree. When you compare the required credits, exams and thesis papers, it's equivalent to an M.A. — perhaps with a bit more breadth rather than depth. At the time, I was planning to teach English and German at grammar school level, so my degree covered anglophone and German-speaking literatures, cultural studies and linguistics from the pre-medieval times to the present day. In tune with the German school curriculum, I focused my linguistics courses on syntax, orthography, translation, sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. And, of course, educational studies to help me share that knowledge with young people aged 10–19. That's a lot of ground to cover, and so I spent 7 years at university and another 2 at teachers' college, using all my available free time to teach at school. Luckily, a state programme allowed me to take on long-term substitute teaching roles with full responsibility and pay (pro-rata), so I was able to gain loads of teaching experience before I had even left university.

What I loved most about my degree was applying the linguistic angle to literary criticism. For example, I really enjoyed tracking the effects of heroin on Renton's way of speaking in Trainspotting. And my thesis paper about poetry competitions combined literature and linguistics, too. That kind of perspective is still present in my current work — it's so much fun!

What is your job?

I run a communications consultancy called From Scratch. As the founder, I got to choose my own job title, and I got to indulge my love of puns! So according to my business card, I'm a Head Scratcher. Which is true — and leads to much more interesting conversations than "managing director".Day-to-day, I work with companies that want to improve the way they speak and write to their customers. A lot of this work involves multilingual copywriting, training teams and consulting on communications strategy. For example, a company might want to improve customer satisfaction with the way their contact centre handles complaints, and I'll teach tailored training workshops that will help them write better.Or there might be a mis-match between a company's website copy and the way people decide whether they want to buy that product at all. So I use UX ways of working to develop a messaging strategy and create new copy.

We work mainly with companies that stand for strong ethical values, and our clients are often creative businesses — transforming their industry or enabling customers to make things ‘from scratch’. This means their customers are likely to have special support requirements: some might question the ethics of a business decision, others may be stuck on a craft project. There’s more at stake in those conversations than in your typical account management or shipping query, so one focus of our work is building trust and conveying warmth and competence via the right language.

From Scratch also brings together a network of foreign-language writers, coaches and other experts so we can support companies as they grow and expand into new markets.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Saying this will make me feel like a rapper dissing her peers, but: having worked in customer communications for years, I've seen a lot of unfounded platitudes being passed off as great revelations. I just don't think that anyone's business will really take off because they hear that “customer service is an attitude, not a department”. On the other hand, there's loads of linguistic research that isn't easily available to businesses. When I started From Scratch, I did so with the aim of connecting linguistics, educational theory and business. My degree helps me make research findings accessible to non-linguists. For example, interactional sociolinguistics can teach us a lot about why certain customer service phone calls don't go well. And I'm able to do a lot of proofreading with confidence because I studied orthography and punctuation in a way that a non-linguist probably hasn't. But it's also a matter of trust: I speak English with a slight German accent, so my degree reassures clients that I know my onions before they've even put me to the test!

Do you gave any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Don't study any topic just because you think it might come in handy in your future job. That future job may not even exist yet — and you'll probably change your mind about it a couple of times anyway! Study what interests you. Career profiles are more flexible than we expect, and your enthusiasm will make you successful.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Two things come to mind:

1) I wish computers had been more interesting when I started university. Had I started a few years later, I would probably have focused much more on linguistics and tech.

2) Copywriting is a funny business: there's so much emphasis on creativity and so little on linguistics. As writers, we all want to make words work harder. Why don't we talk more about how exactly to achieve that, and why?

Previously:

Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for more interviews

#language #linguistics #linguist jobs #linguists jobs #linguist job #linguistics job #linguistics jobs #writing #copywriting #copywriter #linguist #lingblr

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