#Neglected Justice. {Andres.}

[princess-of-the-corner]

Audrey+Andre's crimes in your AUs:

So in all of your AUs where Audrey and Andre get arrested they probably get hit with a bunch of bribes, blackmail, child abuse, and child neglect charges; They might also get hit by insider trading, tax fraud, and any illegal practices that their businesses are doing, although I'm less confident that they are doing those 3 then with the first 4.

Andre gets hit harder then with Audrey, as a politician would have more opportunities to commit those crimes then the head of a fashion magazine.

Audrey can also use the fact that she works overseas to avoid most of the child abuse and neglect charges.

As for the individual AUs;

Public Divorce:

Most of what they're doing is only immoral and unethical, not illegal. It's really only their final stunt that would add any crimes to their list.

Miraculous Justice:

This is set in the future, so more time to commit crimes, but also some of the crimes are past their statute of limitations.

Andre murders his second wife and tries to frame someone else for it, which is going to add a lot of time to his sentence.

As for Audrey, she escaped any legal punishment using this one weird trick that lawyers hate! (Dying)

Beewinx:

Andre commits human trafficking with Zoe.

Audrey commits human trafficking with Chloe, and also might get hit with Zoe's human trafficking as well; She was the one who brought Zoe to Paris after all.

So many crimes, so little time!

[pinkarsonist0]

I found these three storyboards with Stella in them and now it has me thinking.

Was there someone behind the scenes who wanted to do Stella justice by giving her an actual character, making her a truly threatening villain and give her an actual relationship with her daughter, but Viv was like "*Le gasp* Women aren't allowed to be interesting, only keychains to male characters. Also, we need to make Stolas look good, so no good mom Stella!"

This is just speculation from me and I need to know whether or not I'm insane.

FUCK YOU MEAN STELLA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE AT COURT TOO, DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW INTERESTING THAT WOULD BE. But no...Andre has a to take over bc his sister is too stupid...

I feel like Stella was doomed from the start don't get me wrong, but I think there was SOMEONE who had pretty good ideas for Stella as a character and villain but weren't able too in favor of Stolas.

You could argue that Loo Loo Land storyboard of Stella hugging a crying Octavia could show that Stella pretended to be a good mom in public but neglected Via at home, but still, I feel like they should've established that sooner (Loo Loo Land could have been a good chance.)

I know Stella will get a backstory in Season 3, but don't you think that's a little, y'know, late? Like SUPER late.

If we really wanna do Stella justice, then we should've established her character, I don't know...WAY sooner? Late Season 1 or early Season 2 would have been good I don't think waiting 3 whole seasons was a good choice. Not to mention they threw away her character by making her dumb just to excuse Andre budding in. (Why do you exist THIS GUY STINKS)

[beardedmrbean]

Tavares police on Friday announced additional charges for the parents accused of torturing their child before dropping the 10-year-old off at the hospital where he is still fighting for his life.

Police also said a second child was abused by the couple, but did not clarify the relationship to that child.

Sign up for our Newsletters

"These charges mean that both Kimberley Mills and Andre Walker participated in torturing and abusing these two children. We are working closely with the State Attorney's Office to ensure that these two boys get the justice that they deserve," a release from the Tavares Police Department says.

Mills and Walker were confirmed to be in a relationship. Mills is the boy's mother, according to police.

Mills is now facing two counts of aggravated child abuse, two counts of child neglect, one count of tampering with evidence, and two counts of accessory to aggravated child abuse.

Walker is now facing two counts of aggravated child abuse, two counts of accessory to aggravated child abuse and one count of tampering with evidence.

"We are hoping that the boy that is hospitalized pulls through, however, in the event he does not make it, we are prepared to add enhanced charges," police said.

Staff members at the hospital told officers the child was covered in bruises in "various stages of healing."

They also reported burn marks and other types of injuries, according to police.

Hospital staff members conducted life-saving measures on the juvenile before he was life-flighted to Arnold Palmer Children's Hospital.

He was dropped off in the hospital by his mother and Walker.

Kimberley Mills, the mom, was performing CPR on the boy, with hospital staff taking over when they arrived.

However, both Mills and Walker left shortly after learning that the police were coming.

Eventually, Mills returned to the hospital accompanied by her other son. But police said Walker did not return.

Mills holds a license as a registered nurse in Florida.

[enbysiriusblack]

quotes about socrates & alcibiades that remind me of prongstail:

Peter about James: If I allowed myself to listen to him I couldn't resist. He makes me admit that, in spite of my great defects, I neglect myself and instead get involved in politics. So I force myself to block my ears and go away, like someone escaping from the Sirens, to prevent myself sitting there beside him till I grow old. -Plato, The Symposium

Peter about James: A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as James, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but James is there to prove me wrong. -Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

About Peter (because you don't understand what a fucking evil mastermind Peter is): Whereas, there was one Peter in his own day, there were now hundreds of the like: self-serving, cunning and profane; only they did not possess the skills, or the mental acuity. Instead of being exiled, they pushed men of good sense from the center of affairs. Instead of being right about strategy and tactics, they were always wrong. -J.R. Nyquist

James and Peter talking:

James: ignorance of certain things is for certain persons in certain states a good, not an evil, as you supposed just now. Peter: It seems to be. James: Then if you care to consider the sequel of this, I daresay it will surprise you. Peter: What may that be, James? James: Consider it this way: must it not be the case, in your opinion, that when we are about to do or say anything, we first suppose that we know, or do really know, the thing we so confidently intend to say or do? - Plato, Alcibiades

James to Peter:

James: I must speak, then. Now although it is difficult for a lover to approach a man who does not give way to lovers, I must nevertheless dare to speak my mind. For I believe that if some god were to say “Peter, would you prefer to live on, possessing what you now possess, or die on the spot if you were going to be unable to acquire more?” I think you would choose to die... So do I hope to exercise great power over you, by proving that I am more valuable to you than anyone, and that neither guardian, nor kinsman, nor anyone else is up to the task of granting you the power you desire except me. -Plato, Alcibiades

James and Peter talking:

Peter: What should we do now? James: We should neither give up nor prove cowards, my friend. Peter: No, that would not be appropriate, Prongs. James: No indeed, instead we should consider this together. So tell me, we say that we wish to become as excellent as possible, do we not? Peter: Yes. James: What is that excellence? Peter: The very excellence by which men are good men, of course. James: Men who are good in what? Peter: Obviously in performing actions. James: What sort of actions? Those related to horses? Peter: Of course not. James: In that case we would be compared with horse trainers. Peter: Yes. James: Then are you referring to nautical affairs? Peter: No. James: In that case we would be compared with seamen. -Plato, Alcibiades

Also this quote about what they dedicate themselves to:

"James in his commitment to justice and Peter in his commitment to himself." -Andre Archie, Politics in Socrates' Alcibiades

[dailyanarchistposts]

Preface

Does degrowth have any relevance to anarchism? Taking an academic and popular public stance against capitalist growth or, more accurately, the degrowing total material and energy throughput of techno-capitalism is extremely relevant to anarchism, green or otherwise. Degrowth, in theory, is a natural companion of anarchism and other anti-capitalist autonomist tendencies, with direct linkages through authors such as Ivan Illich and Jacques Ellul. Yet where is degrowth in practice? Do degrowthers join the riots against police repression or, more relevant and discussed below, the combative ecological struggles to stop capitalist growth? If they stand by watching, is it with condemnation, support or a righteous criticism that the rioters should be making community gardens? These dispositions matter and some positions are easier to take than others.

A phenomenon with a long intellectual history (e.g. Andre Gorz; Cornelius Castoriadis; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen; Sergio Latouche) that arose from the anti-globalization movement, it has actually remained rather marginal or inconsequential in struggles to defend habitats and maintain autonomous spaces. Meanwhile, degrowth has become a booming academic topic, slowly taking over the halls of universities with an enormous amount of academic articles, books and special issues. In fact, degrowth has now created an important space within universities, yet what is the quality of this space and how is this space experienced by so-called “militants”?

While degrowth intellectuals have made great efforts to connect degrowth with environmental justice movements (Akbulut et al., 2019) and direct action (Treu et al., 2020), ambiguity reigns regarding politics and qualities of direct action. This coincides with an implicit academic conflation of environmental justice with all land and territorial struggles logged into the Environmental Justice Atlas (https://ejatlas.org/), which lumps in armed action with vandalism and arson. The interface of direct action and academic labelling is murky, and maybe rightfully so, yet how does environmental justice speak with or—more concerning—for to all the indigenous, autonomist and anarchist tendencies at war with techno-capitalist progress? Does this labeling preform some type of academic recuperation of political struggle, if so what are the consequences? Does environmental justice and degrowth support and/or profit from environmental conflicts where Indigenous, anarchists and autonomist tendencies are a driving force? These questions deserve further consideration and development within and outside the academy.

The article below attempts to begin this conversation, offering feedback for the degrowth movement to support combative struggles with the space they have created. This short article offers feedback from over a decade of personal experience, but also more immediate observation by working with land defenders in France and Iberia fighting energy infrastructure and wind energy power plants. There is a strong affinity that exists between degrowth and land defenders, yet the academy has a way of excluding disruptive anarchistic and autonomist elements by employing self-referential theory from the narrow lens of the academy, mainstream (or popular) movements and nonprofits. It is my hope the degrowth intellectual and organizers will affirm and work to create greater affinity with anarchist and autonomist land defenders, which—to be clear—some are already doing. Yet the article below identifies some easy ways to further bridge this gap.

References

Akbulut B, Demaria F, Gerber J-F, et al. (2019) Who promotes sustainability? Five theses on the relationships between the degrowth and the environmental justice movements. Ecological Economics 165(106418.

Treu N, Schmelzer M and Burkhart C. (2020) Degrowth in movement (s): Exploring pathways for transformation: John Hunt Publishing.

***

Why do degrowth intellectuals publicly neglect combative self-defense against “growth” projects? The connection between degrowth and anti-capitalist, autonomist and (ecological) anarchist movements exists, and it can be strengthened by acknowledging the legitimacy of a diversity of tactics as necessary pathways towards degrowing the techno-capitalist system and protecting habitats form infrastructural invasion.

Degrowth is about reducing total material and energy throughput, which entails rejecting elite accumulation and the ideology of capitalism itself. For some—those acquiescing or clinging to the growth euphemism—degrowth is a provocative term. “Trying to avoid provocation, or trying to be agnostic about growth,” explains Jason Hickel referring to degrowth, “creates a milieu where problematic assumptions remain unidentified and unexamined in favour of polite conversation and agreement.” However, in matters of political struggle, it seems that the same applies to degrowth.

Currently, influential degrowth approaches veer towards polite political conversation, mainstream movement politics and largely ignore the combative struggles putting degrowth into practice closest to home. While ambiguity can create space, we ought to acknowledge—and support to various degrees—the full range of degrowth action. Specifically, the land defenders fighting economic growth and its interconnected infrastructural schemes.

This issue gained increasing relevance for me after designing a course on degrowth and following three months of connecting with people fighting energy infrastructure projects in France, Catalonia and Spain. Combative ecological struggles are important, yet the degrowth community tends towards ignoring or selectively mentioning antagonistic struggles enacting lived practices of degrowth. Struggles embodying “monkey wrenching,” “diversity of tactics” and articulating a “brisantic politics” are quite literally stopping—or attempting to stop—the expansion and/or growth of capitalist infrastructure into forests and ecosystems. Why do degrowth intellectuals publicly neglect these struggles?

The connection between degrowth and anti-capitalist, autonomist and (ecological) anarchist movements, as they converge to defend habitats, can be strengthened. The connection exists, yet remains vague in the popular degrowth literature. Inversely, when asked about “degrowth” in ecological struggles in France, Catalonia and Spain, land defenders see little relevance, associating degrowth with NGO politics, university culture and middle-class environmentalism.

One visible obstruction to this connection is degrowth’s ambiguity regarding “diversity of tactics” and combative direct action. In response, degrowth should embrace the “de” in “degrowth:” Recognizing the legitimacy in destruction or, more accurately, combative self-defense in struggles against “growth” projects and all that entails. This translates into degrowth intellectuals, teachers and organizers acknowledging these struggles vocally—including them into the degrowth lexicon—by recognizing their contributions to combating (capitalist) growth projects and defending habitats.

This short essay, in addition to highlighting this issue, further draws a link with degrowth and four socio-ecological struggles in Europe. Degrowth is vitally important, yet—following Hickel’s approach—the time has come for degrowth to become less polite and unambiguous about the importance of combative socio-ecological movements.

Recycling has many forms: A Hambach Forest barricade, 2015. Source: Wikicommons

[sweagen]

ARTS IN SOCIETY

The Lost World of Richard Yates

Why a great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print.

Stewart O’Nan

Books & Ideas, Fiction, History

October 1, 1999

Since his death in 1992, all nine of Richard Yates’s titles have quietly dropped off the shelves. Once the most vaunted of authors–praised by Styron and Vonnegut and Robert Stone as the voice of a generation–he seems now to belong to that august yet sad category, the writer’s writer. Andre Dubus, who was his student at Iowa, revered him, as does Tobias Wolff, and the jackets of Yates’s books are adorned with quotes by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Gina Berriault. When authors talk his name pops up as the American writer we wish more people would read, just as Cormac McCarthy’s used to. In the acknowledgments section of his novellas, Women With Men, Richard Ford makes it plain: “I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little appreciated.”.

And yet, Yates doesn’t fit the mold of a writer’s writer. He’s not a linguistic acrobat like Nabokov or a highflying fabulist like Steven Millhauser, not a uniquely intellectual or obsessive writer the way we think of William Gaddis or Harold Brodkey. In the era that saw Pynchon, DeLillo and Rushdie make their names (before storming the bestseller lists), he wrote about the mundane sadness of domestic life in language that rarely if ever draws attention to itself. There’s nothing fussy or pretentious about his style. If anything, his work could be called simple or traditional, conventional, free of the metafictionalists’ or even the modernists’ tricks. The only writer’s writer he might be compared to would be Chekhov, or perhaps Fitzgerald, though without Fitzgerald’s poetic flair.

The surface of his prose is so clear, in fact, and the people and events he writes about so average and identifiable, so much like the world we know, that it seems his books would merit a larger general audience than those of his more difficult literary peers. But that has not been the case.

It may be that writers prize Yates because readers haven’t. In a business that often champions shoddy and false work over true and beautiful accomplishments, his fate confirms our worst fears and prods us to demand justice. He’s the most readable and accessible of literary writers, a master of pacing, moving time effortlessly, and as a serious author he seemed to command respect from the very beginning. His first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was an instant success, a finalist for the National Book Award alongside Catch-22 and The Moviegoer, and equally deserving. As a chronicler of mainstream American life from the 1930s to the late ’60s, he’s matched only by John Cheever. Across his career he was consistently well- reviewed in all the major places, and four of his novels were selections of the Book-of-the-Month club, yet he never sold more than 12,000 copies of any one book in hardback.

If his work was neglected during his lifetime, after his death it has practically disappeared. Of the tens of thousands of titles crammed into the superstores, not one is his. Occasionally you’ll find trade paperbacks from the ’80s Delta or Vintage Contemporary reprints in used stores, maybe a Book Club copy of The Easter Parade or a ragged first of A Good School, but it’s rare to come across his middle books, A Special Providence or Disturbing the Peace.

To write so well and then to be forgotten is a terrifying legacy. I always think that if I write well enough, the people in my books–the world of those books–will somehow survive. In time the shoddy and trendy work will fall away and the good books will rise to the top. It’s not reputation that matters, since reputations are regularly pumped up by self-serving agents and publicists and booksellers, by the star machinery of Random House and the New Yorker; what matters is what the author has achieved in the work, on the page. Once it’s between covers, they can’t take it away from you; they have to acknowledge its worth. As a writer, I have to believe that.

This is the mystery of Richard Yates: how did a writer so well-respected–even loved–by his peers, a writer capable of moving his readers so deeply, fall for all intents out of print, and so quickly? How is it possible that an author whose work defined the lostness of the Age of Anxiety as deftly as Fitzgerald’s did that of the Jazz Age, an author who influenced American literary icons like Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus, among others, an author so forthright and plainspoken in his prose and choice of characters, can now be found only by special order or in the dusty, floor-level end of the fiction section in secondhand stores? And how come no one knows this? How come no one does anything about it?

Eventually the books will make it back in print, just as Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s did, and Yates will take his place in the American canon. How this will come about it’s impossible to say. Writers and editors are keenly aware of his situation, so perhaps his Malcolm Cowley is just moving up through the ranks at Norton or Doubleday. Or maybe, like Charles Bukowski bringing his favorite John Fante back onto the shelves, some major writer will convince his editor to revive Yates. Regardless, the work is there, waiting for its readers. And not only the work, but the life of the author, a vital selling point for American literary lions.

Born in Yonkers in 1926, Yates came from an unstable family. His parents divorced when he was three, and during the Depression he and his mother and sister bounced around the metro area from apartment to apartment. After graduating from The Avon School in 1944, he joined the Army, shipped off to France and, like so many of the young American writers of the ’50s, saw combat. He also contracted TB and recovered after a brief convalescence. After serving in the occupation of Germany, he returned to New York where he married. In 1951, using a disability pension the Army had given him for his TB, he moved to Europe for several years where he wrote stories. When he came back he took on writing jobs for The United Press and Remington Rand, then used ghostwriting and teaching at The New School to pay the bills while his stories were slowly being published. In 1959 he and his wife divorced, his wife winning custody of their two daughters.

In 1961 Seymour Lawrence at Atlantic—Little, Brown published Yates’s first novel, Revolutionary Road. The book details the slow erosion of the marriage and the dreams of Frank and April Wheeler, a suburban couple who believe themselves to be better than their banal surroundings. Frank is working at a dull office job in the city but hopes to go to Europe and become–possibly–a writer. Frank’s great ambition is to be “first-rate,” and he continually reminds himself that April is “a first-rate girl” to bolster his self-confidence. Yates says of Frank that “he hardly ever entertained a doubt of his own exceptional merit,” and while he hadn’t actually accomplished anything, that “in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations.”

Frank has that very American belief in the possible and in his own untapped potential, and April is all too aware of his pretensions. She tries to go along with him in seeing themselves as somehow special or better than their neighbors the Campbells, but it’s difficult for her. She knows him too well.

The novel’s opening scenes show April starring in a local production of “The Petrified Forest.” She plays Gabrielle (Bette Davis in the film version), a waitress at a cafe in the middle of the desert, an amateur artist who moons over Villon and daydreams of going to Paris. Gabrielle is both a romantic and a sentimental fool, and her falling for the big talk of Leslie Howard’s sham romantic puts him in the position of taking a bullet from Bogie’s real villain, Duke Mantee.

The suburban production is a train wreck, and the hopes of the audience–Frank among them–are dashed and ground into powder. Yates renders these scenes moment by moment, catching every slip-up, every missed cue and botched line of dialogue. April, whose beauty and poise we hope will be the show’s saving grace, soon falls apart on stage; the sequence is excruciating in its humiliation. Yates crushes not only Frank’s and April’s hopes, but the reader’s, making us suffer along with his characters:

She was working alone, and visibly weakening with every line. Before the end of the first act the audience could tell as well as the Players that she’d lost her grip, and soon they were all embarrassed for her. She had begun to alternate between false theatrical gestures and a white-knuckled immobility; she was carrying her shoulders high and square, and despite her heavy make-up you could see the warmth of humiliation rising in her face and neck.

And this is only the first act. Another author might cut away, but Yates keeps us there–stuck like Frank–watching as April and the cast soldier through the rest of the play. Yates makes the reader squirm with embarrassment for his characters. Hope has been replaced by acid reality, and there’s more of it to come; it can’t be stopped, we’ll simply have to endure it. Because we’ve all been in these situations, we know the only thing April wants is for it to end. Yet–like shame, like life–it refuses to.

The play serves as a metaphor for the Wheelers’ marriage as well. On his way to the dressing room, Frank reflects on his own high hopes:

… he had drawn strength from a mental projection of scenes to unfold tonight: himself rushing home to swing his children laughing in the air, to gulp a cocktail and chatter through an early dinner with his wife; himself driving her to the high school, with her thigh tense and warm under his reassuring hand (“If only I weren’t so nervous, Frank!”); himself sitting spellbound in pride and then rising to join a thunderous ovation as the curtain fell; himself glowing and disheveled, pushing his way through jubilant backstage crowds to claim her first tearful kiss (“Was it really good, darling? Was it really good?”); and then the two of them, stopping for a drink in the admiring company of Shep and Milly Campbell, holding hands under the table while they talked it all out. Nowhere in these plans had he foreseen the weight and shock of reality; nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn’t seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing (“Wouldn’t you like to be loved by me?”), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell.

Their meeting in the dressing room is awkward and prolonged. Afterward, driving home, Frank tries to tell her it doesn’t matter by ridiculing the other members of the cast, the audience, the entire suburban society of America, but April doesn’t want to hear it. They fight and end up screaming at each other by the dark roadside, the lights of their neighbors’ cars strobing over them. As in Fitzgerald, the dream has soured, given way to disappointment.

Throughout Revolutionary Road, Frank and April are constantly watching themselves, gauging their lives against ideals from the movies or the newspapers. And how do other people see them? Are they beautiful and handsome enough? Do they have the right friends? There’s a self-consciousness, an anxiety of not being quite right or knowing precisely how to behave that undermines all their scoffing at conformity. It’s as if they’re playing at their roles of man and woman, husband and wife, mother and father, terrified they’ll blow their lines. They work around the house and tend to their children, seething with dissatisfaction yet hopeful that “The gathering disorder of their lives might still be sorted out and made to fit these rooms.” Their realization, as the months pass, of the widening gap between their idea of themselves as special people and the reality of being like everyone else makes them take drastic steps, with tragic results.

Revolutionary Road has little good to say about American institutions, a common enough sentiment for the time. More interesting are its two heroes. In the beginning Frank and April Wheeler gain our sympathy, since we all know how stultifyingly dull the suburbs are, how false and vapid the consumer culture, how grindingly dumb the office jobs. And we can all identify with the terrors of self-consciousness and the sorrow of things going wrong for the ones we love, the frustrations of money and the realization that we’re nowhere close to living our ideal lives. We all consider ourselves special, and we all hit desperate patches where we have to compromise or downgrade our larger hopes, give up our bravest expectations. That’s life. But much of what goes bad in the Wheelers’ lives is their own doing, a result of their selfishness, their weakness and their inability to admit the truth. If not passive characters, they’re certainly not strong ones, neither heroes nor anti-heroes. In a sense, they’re unremarkable, except that Yates has made us understand their desires (which we share to some extent) and what forces inside and outside of them have prevented them from fulfilling these dreams. While Frank and April show great disdain for the venal ideals of the culture, at heart they aspire to the same bland successes. Their failure is their own fault, Yates seems to say–as if blaming them for a spiritual lack of imagination or absence of self-worth–yet he has chosen them to write about and asks us to seriously contemplate their inner lives, which we do.

The question of what the reader is supposed to do with his or her sympathy and empathy is complex in Revolutionary Road, and also in the later work. As Greek tragedy turns around its characters’ fatal flaws, so does Yates’s fiction. The depth and breadth of characterization is much fuller, of course, but the end result is the same: the characters earn their downfall, seem fated to it. It’s this merciless limning of his people that makes Yates unique and the process of reading his work so affecting (some would say terrifying). We recognize the disappointments and miscalculations his characters suffer from our own less-than-heroic lives. And Yates refuses to spoon-feed us the usual redeeming, life-affirming plot twist that makes everything better. No comedy dilutes the humiliation. When it’s time to face the worst, there’s no evasion whatsoever, no softening of the blows.

The reader recoils even before these scenes begin, like horror movie viewers realizing the victim is going to open the wrong door. In fact, part of the drama–as in Dostoevsky–is anticipating just how terrible the humiliation will be, and how (or if) the characters will survive it.

Not that Yates or his people are ever hopeless. No, unfortunately the opposite is true. Throughout Revolutionary Road, his yearning for a better life is so strong that Frank Wheeler regularly deludes himself into believing that someday, through some unforeseen mechanism, he might really achieve his dreams and become this other, more accomplished person. He has such stock in this fantasy of himself (and the world) that nothing short of April’s death will rid him of his illusions.

The book is painful and sad, and in the end the reader is left with nothing of comfort. The final scene, in which a husband turns off his hearing aid so he won’t have to listen to his wife prattling on about how she knew the Wheelers were bad from the very beginning, highlights the lack of communication (let alone communion) between people and how isolated we are from each other. It’s a perfect and powerful ending, one echoed, in gesture at least, by both John Gardner in his first novel The Resurrection and Tobias Wolff in the title story of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs. Yates himself said in a later interview: “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”

What is distinctive about Yates in Revolutionary Road–and throughout his work–is not merely the bleakness of his vision, but how that vision adheres not to war or some other horror but to the aspirations of everyday Americans. We share the dreams and fears of his people–love and success balanced by loneliness and failure–and more often than not, life, as defined by the shining paradigms of advertising and popular song, is less than kind to us. Yates proves this with absolutely plausible drama, then demands that his characters–and we, as readers, perhaps the country as a whole–admit the simple, painful truth.

It’s his insistence on the blunt reality of failure that drew me to Yates. In my world at the time (and even now), failure was much more common than success, endurance the best that could be hoped for. Family and love were hard and often impossible. In the world I knew, no one was saved by luck or bailed out by coincidence; no understanding lovers or friends or parents or children made the unbearable suddenly pleasant. Fortunes didn’t change, they just followed a track into a dead end and left you there. To find a writer who understood that and didn’t gussy it up with tough-guy irony or drown it in sentimental tears was a revelation. Yates–even in the mid-’80s, when I first read Revolutionary Road–seemed to me a refreshing change from the false, cloying fiction that passed for realism. He still does.

Contemporary reaction to Revolutionary Road was overwhelmingly positive–raves for Yates’s eye and ear. The few qualms reviewers had reveal more about the uniqueness of Yates’s work than the praise. Some wondered how an author could seem to be sympathetic to his characters at first and then sentence them to such torments, and whether this wasn’t unintentional or unfair, some sort of artistic flaw. Others questioned his use of weak characters to test larger philosophical and social issues, implying that the book’s criticism of the culture was dependent on how heroic Frank and April are (conveniently ignoring the fact that most Americans–and decidedly most of the book’s readers–are probably closer to Frank and April than to any typical fictional hero). But overall the reception was gushy. America had a new major writer.

Atlantic—Little, Brown capitalized on the critical success of Revolutionary Road by collecting Yates’s stories a year later. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness shows a range of characters and settings far beyond Frank and April Wheeler and Revolutionary Road, though, like them, most of his people here are young and insecure and coming to grips with their less-than-ideal lives. The worn-down characters, plain dialogue, and flattened narration in “The Best of Everything” could be from a Raymond Carver story, as could the two couples driving out to the Army TB ward on Long Island in “No Pain Whatsoever.” This is the hard-luck world of Carver, but without his goofy grim humor or his later hope, and sans the stylization of his skeletal, early, Gordon Lish-edited voice. It’s a world purposefully not quirky or picturesque, just plain and sad and inescapable.

If middle class life seemed empty in Revolutionary Road, here it’s both spiritually vacant and economically precarious. The characters in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness are young men looking back at their lives from a discouraging present. The promises America has made them are hollow, the salvation of love and family, faith and community, somehow out of reach, not a possibility. They hate their work, they drink too much, and they can recall a time–maybe just one time, like “The B.A.R. Man”–when they nearly lived up to their ideals, if only for a moment.

In the last and newest story in the collection, “Builders” (1961), Yates uncharacteristically narrates through a first person who could be seen as his alter-ego, a fledgling writer named Robert Prentice who takes on a ghostwriting job for a New York cabbie. Prentice casts himself as Hemingway (and later Fitzgerald), but is struggling to make ends meet. The cabbie, Bernie, contracts him to write true heartwarming stories from life. Prentice tries to do this but feels he is being false to his own view of life by manipulating pat happy endings. Talking about the process of writing, the two resort to a metaphor; they speak of how composing stories is like building houses, how it has to be done with care and precision. In response to one story he feels is too harsh, Bernie says Prentice forgot to put in windows so the light could shine through.

Their paths diverge, but Prentice remembers Bernie and his metaphor. In the end, Prentice has tried to write his great tragic novel and failed. His marriage has foundered as well. The close of the story is introspective–a true rarity for a Yates character, and maybe the effect of using the first person.

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Palpable throughout the collection, here Yates’s pity for his characters, like Bob Prentice’s, is explicit. While the stories are tough, they’re not absolutely merciless, and the relationships between the author and his characters, the characters and the reader, and the reader and the author are agreeable, not at all strained. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness could even be called a gentle book, for all its disappointments.

Again, the reviews were uniformly excellent. Critics puzzled by the Wheelers’ knotty personalities knew where to stand, and technically–line by line–Yates was faultless. The collection solidified his reputation and made readers eager to see what he would do next.

Yates and Sam Lawrence didn’t hurry another book into print. Buoyed by his new celebrity, and drinking now that he was alone, he accepted John Frankenheimer’s offer to write a screenplay of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness and moved to Hollywood, following unwisely in the footsteps of his idol Fitzgerald. After completing the script (it was never shot), in 1963 he made an even stranger leap, signing on with the Kennedy administration to write speeches for then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After JFK’s assassination, Yates took a teaching job at the University of Iowa, finding time to co-author the script of the World War II movie The Bridge at Remagen, released in 1969.

Throughout the decade, his health wasn’t good. He was gaunt, and because of the bout with TB he had difficulty breathing. He also smoked like a stove, drank hard and steadily, and frequently didn’t eat. Apparently he was hospitalized during this period for a nervous breakdown–perhaps several times, according to a comment made in a later interview: “I’ve been in and out of bughouses, yes.”

The visibility of Revolutionary Road and Yates’s subsequent silence naturally had people wondering if he was a one-hit wonder, if he’d let his success intimidate him. “I don’t know what happened,” he said in a 1992 interview with Scott Bradfield. “It was the second novel thing, I guess. That book took seven years, and it had to be torn out of me.”

Knopf finally published A Special Providence in October 1969. The book’s epigraph comes from Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand,” and prepares us for another pair of Yates’s clueless, deluded heroes–Robert Prentice, the narrator of “Builders,” and his sculptress mother, Alice. While Revolutionary Road was set in the near-past of 1955, A Special Providence takes place in 1944, giving it initially, at least, the nostalgic feel of a period piece. But at heart Yates is the least nostalgic of writers, and the relationship between Robert Prentice and his mother is as full of bitterness and misgiving as that of Frank and April Wheeler. The intimate first person of “Builders” is gone, replaced by a distant third person.

The Prentices are a blueprint for the families in Yates’s later work, and one which could be construed as autobiographical: a flighty, divorced mother with artistic leanings, no common sense, and a drinking problem, and an insecure boy who can see through her pretensions but is powerless to change the situation. Here Robert Prentice has escaped to the Army and to Europe where he can make a fresh start and put his inept stabs at normality behind him. In short, he hopes to become a man, if not a hero.

The title of the novel is ironic. Like the Wheelers, both Robert Prentice and his mother consider themselves special. Alice is always talking about how her work will suddenly be recognized and they’ll want for nothing. Bob “saw himself as the hero of some inspiring movie…. The trouble was that his mother refused to play her role.” He’s so sick of her drinking and her fecklessness that he would deny her her dreams. He imagines a conversation in which he straightens her out once and for all. When his mother cries, “Why can’t I have my illusions?,” Bob says, “Because they’re lies.” And yet throughout his tour of duty, Bob imagines himself in a war movie. He’s just as starry-eyed as she is.

As in much of Yates’s writing, the split between expectations and reality fuels the drama of A Special Providence. The Army provides a stage for Bob Prentice to try to live up to his own heroic view of himself. Again and again he fails–at friendship, in combat, at sex. He fails even at knowing when to quit.

The writing in A Special Providence is of a piece with the narration in Revolutionary Road. Yates uses plain language and follows a conventional chronological scheme. The prose is clear–much of the war writing flinty and reminiscent of Hemingway’s best work in A Farewell to Arms–and the scene-setting is swift, with brief bursts of summary narration moving the reader along. Both Bob and Alice Prentice are deep and credible characters, despite their weaknesses. All in all, a success, except that in the past few years American writing, like the rest of the culture, had changed drastically. The metafictionalists were in, as were fantasy and sci-fi, and mad satire. Donald Barthelme’s surrealistic fictions ran nearly monthly in the New Yorker. Compared to the experimentalists, Yates’s traditional approach seemed a throwback, easily ignored.

Yates made no apologies for sticking by his guns:

I’ve tried and tried but I can’t stomach most of what’s being called ‘The Post-Realistic Fiction’ . . . I know it’s all very fashionable stuff and I know it provides an endless supply of witty little intellectual puzzles and puns and fun and games for graduate students to play with, but it’s emotionally empty. It isn’t felt.

Predictably, the critics were not as kind to A Special Providence as they had been to the earlier books, and it hardly sold at all, partly, perhaps, because in the political climate of 1969 readers didn’t know what to make of Bob Prentice, whose values as a young soldier seemed old-fashioned, completely out of step with the times. The setting of World War II itself was not a problem, but unlike Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Heller’s Catch-22 (then enjoying a resurgence), A Special Providence didn’t speak to current issues. Joyce Carol Oates in the Nation praised the book–and all of Yates’s work–calling his characters “invisible people, not quite there, unable to assert themselves or to guide their own destinies”:

One feels that his people never have a chance: odd things may happen to them, but they are never odd enough, never tragic and awful enough, to lead to a change of vision. . . . A sad, gray, deathly world–dreams without substance–aging without maturity: this is Yates’s world, and it is a disturbing one.

But while A Special Providence extended and deepened Yates’s world, it wasn’t a literary sensation. It won no prizes, and commercially it was an utter failure. In the turbulence of 1969 it made no waves. It could not justifiably be called unsparing or searing or prophetic, as Revolutionary Road had been. It spoke for no generation–or perhaps for one that had long since been eclipsed. After waiting eight years for a second novel, critics were disappointed.

Yates himself must have been discouraged with the book’s reception. Unable to support himself by his books, he continued to teach and write through the early ’70s, still plagued by drinking and depression. He had remarried in 1968, and in 1974 he divorced again, his second wife retaining custody of their daughter.

In 1975, six years after A Special Providence, Sam Lawrence, now with his own imprint at Delacorte, published Yates’s third novel, Disturbing the Peace. The wait, though shorter this time, was distinctly not worth it. John Wilder, the hero of the novel, suffers from some unspecified mental illness as well as from alcoholism and a needy, raging ego. The storyline is skimpy, as are the emotions inspired in the reader, probably because Yates focuses not on a close relationship between people trapped and dependent on one another, but on a man wholly alone, willfully beyond the bonds of love and family.

A victim of his illness, Wilder is hopelessly lost and temperamentally incapable of doing anything to save himself, though he knows better. As Gene Lyons said in his New York Times review: “The author himself need not believe that his characters can alter their fate, but it helps if they do.”

The difficulty of where the author’s and reader’s sympathy and empathy lies never comes into play here. Whether Yates has affection or scorn for Wilder is moot because from the beginning the reader sees his desires not as personal and common (as with Frank Wheeler and Bob and Alice Prentice) but as animal and overbearing. His self-pity and self-regard are monstrous, his judgment unsound.

One section, however, sheds some light on Yates’s propensity for the tragic. Wilder, hearing of JFK’s death, reacts strangely:

He felt sympathy for the assassin and he felt he understood the motives. Kennedy had been too rich, too young, too handsome and too lucky; he had embodied elegance and wit and finesse. His murderer had spoken for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance, and John Wilder knew those forces all too well. He almost felt he’d pulled the trigger himself, and he was grateful to be here, trembling and safe in his own kitchen, two thousand miles away.

Yates’s people all wish to possess the Hollywood qualities Wilder attributes to Kennedy, while Oswald, being acquainted with the reality of despair, denies America that false possibility, like Bob Prentice wanting to sweep away his mother’s illusions, or Yates dashing his own characters’ hopes. This paradox of wanting to be on the inside, to be someone special, and then railing against the lucky ones who are chosen applies to nearly all of his main characters. Ultimately they vent their bitterness, and cruelly, on the closest target, often someone who is still hopeful (if deluded). It’s as if it’s the duty of those who know the pain of failure, of being unloved– almost as a protest–to initiate those who haven’t discovered it yet, or to remind those who have but choose to ignore it, like Alice Prentice.

Disturbing the Peace is Richard Yates’s only bad book, but it came at a time when critics were looking for a comeback. A Special Providence, while well-done, had been anachronistic. It had been fourteen years since Revolutionary Road, and the author had shown no further signs of greatness. As slowly as he composed, it might be five or ten years before another Yates novel–if, indeed, there was one left in him. Disturbing the Peace confirmed for some that Yates was finished, that, like Fitzgerald and so many others, he’d squandered his talent, drank it away.

The following September, Sam Lawrence and Yates stunned everyone by bringing out The Easter Parade. The novel opens with the simplicity of a folktale: “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” In his lucid, measured prose Yates’s patient third person narrator follows Emily Grimes from 1930 up to the mid-’70s as she and her sister Sarah and their mother Pookie try to find love and to bear each other.

Pookie is similar to Alice Prentice, moving easily from pleasant self-delusion to screechy denial, and Emily, like Bob Prentice, comes to dread and despise every word that comes from her mouth. Like Bob and Mr. Givings, who turns his hearing aid off at the end of Revolutionary Road, she just wishes her mother would shut up. Pookie drinks and rarely works, so the family is short of money; still she believes they’re special, and that her two girls will turn out to be something.

They don’t. As the opening line promises, their lives are unhappy, their promise chronically unfulfilled. Love turns out to be harder than it is in the movies. Emily, who has romantic dreams and matching anxieties, gives her virginity to a soldier in a squalid, anonymous coupling in Central Park. Sarah, the prettier of the two, marries, but her husband beats her. Emily loves a series of weak men who treat her poorly and winds up alone and bitter, a drinker like her mother.

Near the end of the book, dressing for Sarah’s funeral, Emily remembers her sister playing with dolls and singing “Welcome, Sweet Springtime” and “Look for the Silver Lining.” In Yates’s hands, the distance between these sentimental songs and the reality of Sarah’s life becomes more than just easy or laughable irony but unutterably sad–as is much of the book. His flat, understated style gives the passage of the Grimes sisters’ lives a poignance even as, scene by scene, it strips the bewildered Emily of her dreams. The effect is at once cruel and sweet, heartbreaking and brutal.

For a relatively short novel (229 pages), The Easter Parade has an astonishing sweep and weight, the product of another Yates strength, his mastery of summary narration. Technically the book is probably his sharpest, but its power comes from Yates’s choice of Emily Grimes as its central consciousness. Like Frank and April Wheeler and Bob Prentice (and unlike John Wilder), Emily is profoundly insecure and profoundly hopeful. She’s an innocent, a weakling, trusting the world to treat her gently. It does not, and with each humiliation we feel more for her. Like those earlier characters, and unlike the reader, she can’t see the pattern of her mistakes and ends up making them over and over again, never coming closer to happiness but never truly giving up on the possibility. Ultimately her fate is one we all fear: “There were worse things in the world than being alone. She told herself that every day.” And still she has “a sense of herself as someone important, someone to be reckoned with, someone to love,” even if that belief wavers and occasionally disappears. She does not endure, and she certainly does not prevail, but in her defeat she too is human–too human, really–and deserving of our empathy. In the words of John Gardner, as a character she’s “worthy of and capable of love,” though never really given the chance to prove it. That’s why we follow her and care for her.

The Easter Parade signaled the resurgence of Richard Yates. A year after the career-ending Disturbing the Peace, critics hailed him as an American master. They spoke now of his body of work and raved over the effortless elegance of his prose and the depth of his tragic vision.

Two years later, in 1978, Yates surprised the literary world again when Delacorte published A Good School, his third novel in four years. Suddenly he’d become not only exacting but prolific. His life had become regimented. He’d moved to an apartment in Boston and quit drinking the hard stuff. Sam Lawrence had persuaded Delacorte to pay Yates in advance for his books and then had put him on what amounted to a monthly salary. If he was going to run short of money, he could pick up part-time teaching gigs to fill the gaps. Under these new living conditions, Yates thrived.

A Good School is a short ensemble novel, charting the last days of a second-rate boarding school, Dorset Academy, and set during the same year as Yates’s own graduation from the Avon School, 1944. The epigraph is from the author’s favorite writer, Fitzgerald, his famous “Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.” The narration opens with a foreword in the first person as an unnamed man casts back to that time and tells us about his difficult love for his family. Like Yates’s parents, the narrator’s are divorced, the father a salesman for GE’s Mazda Lamp division, the mother a frustrated sculptress. The father even shares Yates’s father’s first name, Vincent.

The opening has the relaxed and intimate feel of a memoir, and it debuted that June as “an autobiographical foreword” in the New York Times Book Review. The sentiments are warmer than we’re familiar with in Yates–possibly due to the natural openness of the first person, and also the effect of looking back:

They had been divorced almost as long as I could remember. He greatly loved my sister–I think that must have been the main reason for his generosity to us–but he and I, after I was eleven or so, seemed always bewildered by each other. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement between us that, in the dividing process of the divorce, I had been given over to my mother. There was pain in that assumption–for both of us, I would guess, though I can’t speak for him–yet there was an uneasy justice in it too. Much as I might wish it otherwise, I did prefer my mother. I knew she was foolish and irresponsible, that she talked too much, that she made crazy emotional scenes over nothing and could be counted on to collapse in a crisis, but I had come to suspect, dismally, that my own personality might be built along much the same lines. In ways that were neither profitable nor especially pleasant, she and I were a comfort to one another.

This complex, generous voice is only the second first person Richard Yates used in his fiction, the first being the voice of his alter-ego Robert Prentice in “Builders.” Here again, Yates gives us a writer looking back wistfully at his own life. His voice here is so inviting in his patience and forthrightness, his willingness to both expose his deepest pain and forgive everyone (even himself) for their shortcomings in love, that naturally other writers have tried to emulate it–Richard Ford most notably in his story “Communist” and myself in my first novel Snow Angels.

The voice only appears momentarily. When Yates drops back into his usual detached third person for Chapter One of A Good School, the shift is bracing and strange. Only late in the novel do we suspect, correctly, that the narrator of the foreword is the hapless William Grove, in the beginning a victim of the worst schoolboy humiliations, and painfully self-conscious, but gradually across the novel learning to respect his own abilities.

Dorset Academy is second-rate and in the red, and all its quaint Cotswold architecture can’t disguise that fact from the boys. Their anglophile education is just a thin veneer over a savage pecking order based on money, looks, and athletic skill. The shining ideals trumpeted in their brochure are a joke. Tawdry secrets abound, like the wife of a disabled teacher sleeping with the French instructor, and looming behind everything is the war, hungry for more boys.

Despite this, in A Good School the residents of Dorset Academy, like William Grove, find a way to learn their lessons on their own, and to rely on themselves. By the close of the novel–the matching half of the present day first person frame–the characters actually have matured. But all of that, William Grove reminds us, is in the past, and all gone, as is his chance to thank his father and seek his love.

Bittersweet, elegiac, A Good School is Richard Yates’s gentlest book, the one in which he shows the most overt love and pity for his people. The loneliness and yearning of Yates’s adolescents and even his few adults comes through beautifully, and there’s that same sense of innocence tested, that same compassion that kept The Easter Parade from turning savage.

By now the critics had to take Yates seriously, and following The Easter Parade, A Good School seemed slight to them, simplistic and sentimental, especially for him. They praised the first person frame but hammered his choice of material and lack of deep characterization. Not a major work, the consensus ruled. Worse, it didn’t sell, relegating Yates–permanently, it seemed–to the limbo of the mid-list author, well-regarded but hardly read.

In October 1981, twenty years after Revolutionary Road, Delacorte brought out Yates’s second collection of stories, Liars in Love. While the work was recent–some appearing in The Atlantic and Ploughshares–all but one story is set in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s, and all of it can be read through the author’s life.

The opening story, “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired,” is the gem of the collection, but the others are strong as well, and deal with typical Yates characters and situations. The title story features colloquial dialogue and deadpan stage direction that could easily be mistaken for Carver’s, but is of a piece with what Yates was writing in the early ’50s.

By now, the tide of American writing had turned, and the plain style and concern for unheroic characters Yates had remained true to was coming into vogue. Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love had just come out in April, welcomed by a rave on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and both the slick and the literary magazines were filled with stories of average, downtrodden Americans. Critics who knew Yates’s earlier books understood that, like his student Andre Dubus’s stories of the 1970s, his was seminal work. After being called old-fashioned much of his career, Yates–in retrospect–was now hailed as having been ahead of the curve.

But the new fiction only superficially resembled his. It had a thinness of characterization, leaving the story’s true movement to the surface of the prose and often what remained unstated beneath it. And the new authors rarely moved time or favored omniscient narration the way Yates did. In its stylization and severity the new fiction simplified the positions of author and character, choosing as a default mode a neutral, unjudgmental stance and asking the reader to abide by the same rules; and the characters often seemed so flat and cryptic, emblematic, without desire or fear, that this tack seemed appropriate. They were rootless, aimless and clueless, either innocent or desolate and sometimes a numb combination of the two, adrift in a senseless commercial world. The reader waited to see what they would do, never being able to predict their responses, often because the characters themselves didn’t know–a freedom Yates’s people, so determined by their history, never have. Yates’s characters move from innocence to disillusion; in the new fiction, the characters were already there, and paralyzed, unable or unwilling to move on. Part of this was generational. By the early ’80s, after Vietnam and Watergate, the hope so present in Yates’s young Americans was long gone, a vestige of another era.

The critical reaction to Liars in Love split between those who saw the stories as belonging to the new fiction (and dismissed them as therefore typical and unexceptional) and those who felt the depth of his characterization set them apart from and above the trend. But even these critics had to contend with exactly where Yates positioned himself with regard to his characters and how that affected the reader’s response. James Atlas in The Atlantic called Yates “the bleakest writer I know,” adding:

… Yates gives such savage portraits of his characters’ inadequacies that one no longer cares about them; having nervous breakdowns, sopping up gin, they seem beyond salvaging. The novelist, like the tyrant, has complete authority over his subjects, and must rule with at least occasional benevolence or risk revolt. It isn’t enough to claim accuracy, to reproduce an alcoholic’s haggard speech or a failed artist’s delusions of fame; there must be some tempering sense of grace or pity.

But then Atlas himself tempered this:

Toward his more limited, ignorant characters Yates can be pitiless, even vindictive; but toward those who make an effort, however primitive, to retain their dignity–an English prostitute, a secretary who aspires to write radio plays–he is generous. They’re not to blame, he implies; life in general is a shabby affair.

Robert Wilson in the Washington Post weighed in, saying:

Yates does not go wrong when his nostalgia flirts with sentimentality … problems arise when he moves too far in the other direction, distancing himself from his stories by showing too little sympathy for the characters.

This is a problem that recurs both in these stories … and elsewhere in Yates’s work. When the suburban housewife of Revolutionary Road kills herself while trying to abort a child, it is shocking and sad, but without the emotional impact it would have had if she were a character about whom we felt more strongly. Yates looks darkly at human nature; one of his strengths is that he doesn’t flinch. But the very best writers can show us our silliness and vanity, or worse, in characters whom we cannot dismiss so easily.

Atlas, trying to be kind, misses Yates’s gist entirely. Yates does not play favorites; the world, according to his vision, grinds all his characters down alike, and–as in Kafka–the more they struggle, the more painfully they fail. The worst that can be said of Yates’s people is that they don’t know when to give up and instead continue to humiliate themselves even as we, the reader, want them to stop. That’s what makes them so exasperating.

Wilson, on the other hand, projects his own lack of sympathy onto Yates, blaming the author because he (Wilson) is able to dismiss the death of a character who doesn’t strike him as likable. His claim that the reader doesn’t feel strongly about April is spurious; there’s no doubt that we agonize and empathize with her. The strength of Yates is that he brings us close to her in all her hopeless hope: what Wilson really means here is that he’s held back a final measure of emotion for her because with all her flaws she doesn’t fit his idealized view of a saintly, more deserving heroine.

What Wilson doesn’t understand is that the reason it is impossible to dismiss Yates’s characters–the reason they bother and touch us so much–is his refusal to present them as typically sympathetic and strong. Like us, they’re unheroic, rightfully ashamed of their worst selves and hoping to do better. Their failures are tragic because they’re not unexpected. Like Chekhov, Yates has even more affection for his characters because of their faults, and like Chekhov, he’s willing to admit that life rarely works out the way we planned.

With the boom in the American short story, Liars in Love did well enough, and in 1983, on the strength of Yates’s now solid literary reputation, Delta, Delacorte’s trade paperback arm, brought out a reprint of Revolutionary Road. Yates’s health was failing, but he continued to work and teach, and in 1984 published his fifth title in ten years, Young Hearts Crying.

The novel tells the story of Michael and Lucy Davenport from their courtship and marriage in the ’50s through their divorce and their separate lives in the ’70s. Along the way, Yates revisits familiar territory: Michael, who fought in World War II, is an aspiring poet who hates his corporate day job, and eventually the couple leaves the Village (where their dearest wish is to have artistic and interesting friends) and lands in dull suburbia, where the pressures of their unrealized ambitions and romantic yearnings drive them apart.

Like all of Yates’s young people, Michael and Lucy are full of longing yet passive, almost paralyzed by their tentativeness; they don’t know how to live adult lives and can only imitate the models around them. The country cottage they end up living in looks “like something drawn by a child with an uncertain sense of the way a house ought to be,” and when, still doubtful, they tell the realtor they think they’d like to buy it, she says, “I love to see people who know themselves well enough to make up their minds.” To the Davenports, everyone else seems so sure, so competent and accomplished, that it intimidates them. Both Michael and Lucy are plagued by a crippling self-consciousness and lack of confidence. They’re timid and easily hurt, and when their dreams sour they leave each other and wander off in search of something else to fill this new emptiness.

As the years pass and we watch Lucy go through a number of selfish lovers and Michael repeatedly trying to bolster his self-esteem by sleeping with younger and younger women, the Davenports become pathetic and bitter, searching but never finding even a temporary peace. “Fuck art,” Lucy tells Michael at the end, because it hasn’t helped her transcend anything. Michael, who’s been in and out of institutions and has only his poetry to hang onto, grudgingly concedes her point, adding, “Fuck psychiatry.” The final words are in Michael’s point of view; he’s thinking of Sarah, the young woman who may or may not return to him:

‘ … Everybody’s essentially alone,’ she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.

The meaning here is ambiguous: it may be that Michael has reached some maturity, finally come to terms with the disappointments of life, or it may be that he has resigned himself to that aloneness. Regardless, the tone of the last sentence is restful and signals to the reader that for now at least Michael has given up the struggle. For Yates, that’s a happy ending.

While some critics praised Young Hearts Crying for its art, others found Michael not merely childish and vulnerable, like so many of Yates’s men, but infuriatingly weak and self-pitying. His continual pursuit of women grows stale dramatically, and Yates would have done better to pare down or even summarize a few of the later scenes. The elegance and economy that distinguish his finest work are missing here.

Still, critics elsewhere conceded that as a novelist, technically Yates had few peers and continued to be true to his own particular vision. But, as with his other books, Young Hearts Crying didn’t sell, despite being a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection. Though he’d published eight challenging and original books to considerable praise, Esquire was right when it said, “Richard Yates is one of America’s least famous great writers.”

1986’s Cold Spring Harbor didn’t change that. Concise, plain-spoken, and sad, it fits neatly into Yates’s oeuvre. The novel shares its time frame, its characters and its method with his other work, and on the whole succeeds in delivering the world of these people. Yates avoids the repetition of Young Hearts Crying, partly by sharing the narration around; the young husband Evan Shepard, whose aimless frustration and lust is equal to Michael Davenport’s or John Wilder’s, doesn’t have the time or space to become insufferable. The book is also small, running 182 pages, four more than A Good School and half the size of Young Hearts Crying.

The two New York Times reviews of Cold Spring Harbor were polar opposites and illuminate the tricky heart of Yates’s fiction. Lowry Pei in the daily edition found it “difficult if not impossible to feel sympathy with the characters’ dreams”:

… though the narrator at times strains to differentiate himself from the characters by condescending to them, at other times he seems to share their sensibilities so completely there is no perspective on them. This uneasy combination of acceptance and revulsion leaves the reader no distinct place to stand in the attempt to re-create the world Mr. Yates wishes to evoke.

In the Sunday Book Review, though, Michiko Kakutani explained the same effect a different way:

… Mr. Yates writes of these characters with sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth, and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure.

Both reviewers treat Yates’s generosity and harshness as separate powers, called upon at different times, as if, like Zeus, his mood changes as the novel goes on. The converse is actually true; in tone and execution Yates is the calmest of novelists, the surface hardly marred by his intrusion. The characters’ hearts and desires are never explicitly judged–they simply are. Yates, like Joyce’s ideal godlike yet objective narrator, sits in the clouds, paring his nails. He leaves the reader to judge. If, like Lowry Pei, the reader lacks empathy for his characters, is that the author’s fault?

The danger Yates courts is combining the conflicted character with the average or unexceptional person–with a talent I can only aspire to. A sympathetic, exceptional character will always earn our interest as readers (Stephen Daedalus), as will, to a lesser extent or for a shorter time, a sympathetic but average character (say, Lily Briscoe), and even an unsympathetic character can command our attention if they’re exceptional (Richard III, Hannibal Lecter), but it’s rare if not unheard of to find a reader following an unsympathetic, unexceptional person. We only follow Jason Compson because of his connection to the rest of the family. With the exception of the madman John Wilder, Yates’s narrating characters are never fully unsympathetic, though some of his supporting characters are. Rather than cruel, more often they’re frail. At their worst, his people are a mirror of our weaknesses: passive, uncertain, self-pitying, and foolish. To show us his vision of the world–populated as it is by mostly unexceptional, imperfect people–Yates takes us as close to the line as we can go (and, Lowry Pei would say, over it).

Cold Spring Harbor was received as most of Richard Yates’s later books were. It earned respectful if not spectacular reviews, sold poorly, came out in trade paperback the next year and was promptly forgotten. By now, all of his titles had been reissued in Delta trade editions. They floundered on the shelves for a few years, then went out of print.

In 1989, the Vintage Contemporary series begun by Gary Fisketjon picked up Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade. Yates was teaching at USC now, suffering from emphysema and living in an apartment with rented furniture, one wall adorned with portraits of his three daughters. He was still smoking, and still writing, working on a novel drawn from his experiences as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy, titled Uncertain Times, of which Esquire had supposedly bought two chapters. He was almost halfway through the book in 1989, and just finishing it when he died of complications following minor surgery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the fall of 1992.

Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut organized a memorial service in New York, Andre Dubus one in Cambridge, and Yates’s friends and admirers gathered to remember him. Lawrence collected their tributes in a limited edition, Frank Conroy’s and Jayne Anne Phillips’s among them. In the New York Times obituary, he said he was unsure if the manuscript of Uncertain Times would be published.

It wasn’t. Several years later, Lawrence died, leaving Richard Yates’s work without its greatest champion. Since then all of his fiction has gone out of print. Fellow writers claim this is due to the unsparing and truthful picture he painted of ordinary American life, that editors know they can’t sell such a bleak and unredeemed vision in the feel-good Spielberg world of commercial publishing. That could be true, especially now, in the era of Oprah’s Book Club, when sickeningly cute rules the mainstream and pointlessly clever the avant-garde; the author with serious intent and lucid execution is a rarity. But the reality is probably simpler, and sadder: Richard Yates’s books did not make much money when he was alive and a familiar name to at least the literary reader, and today’s editors, on the lookout for the next big thing, assume it’s unlikely they’ll make any more money now.

Not to worry. The same could have been said of Fitzgerald before his resurrection or Faulkner when his greatest work was out of print. Like them, Yates is not only a fine writer, but his fiction represents an important aspect of the American experience: the confusion of the post-war boom. No one portrays the Age of Anxiety as well or as deeply as Yates, or the logical fallout of American individualism, the impossibly high hopes of the ’40s and ’50s curdling, turning bitter. And like his idols Hemingway and Fitzgerald–especially Fitzgerald–Yates lived a life that provides a mirror for the work, an easy handle for a public that likes personalities more than books.

A good biography could spark a re-evaluation of his achievement, though at present there doesn’t appear to be one on the horizon. Likewise, the movie possibilities are nil. In an age when the publication of bad drafts of Ellison and Hemingway are literary occasions, the posthumous debut of Uncertain Times (or just the two chapters in Esquire) might stir things up, but, publicly, there’s no evidence it still exists.

For now, writers will have to keep the novels and stories of Richard Yates alive, rescuing copies from used book stores and passing them along to students and fellow writers just as they’ve passed along James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and William Maxwell’s Time Will Darken It for years. We shouldn’t have to do it, but we will, gladly. Perhaps in the future, if we’re lucky, someone will do it for us. source: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/stewart-onan-the-lost-world-of-richard-yates/

[unproduciblesmackdown]

more deconstruction of "normal" as an obfuscating curtain around supremacy & its concomitant oppression more more!! (an interview by george yancy with subini annamma abt DisCrit, the intersection of disability studies & critical race theory)

some excerpts:

"These scholars were naming the ways ableism animated who we center as the “normal,” and how we draw boundaries around that conception of normal, and punish those outside those walls. In schools, we seek out youth we position as “abnormal” and try to cure, segregate or funnel them out of public spaces."

"Those intellectual ancestors, both those who have passed on and those still with us, created a space for DisCrit to recognize that racism and ableism are interdependent, that they depend on and inform each other. That is, if racism is the ideology for situating specific people in subordinated locations, then ableism is how that goal is achieved — by situating the learning, thinking, and behaviors of Black and Brown people as “less than” and “inferior.” Racism and ableism are mutually constitutive because they need each other to survive; whiteness needed to “other” Black and Brown people, and did so through ableism. Both CRT and DS scholars and public intellectuals left space for us to do this work; to seriously consider how racism and ableism inform one another and are normalized, not aberrant in society. DisCrit uses specific tenets to build on this conceptual foundation to name how, in a system of white supremacy, anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, whiteness defines the normal and desired individual; and positions all Black and Brown folks as abnormal."

"I know you’ve engaged in a discussion with the brilliant T.L. Lewis, and they have described how mass incarceration is a disability justice issue. So I’ll focus on how mass incarceration is a racial and disability justice issue because it targets disabled Black and Brown youth specifically. In other words, age does not protect disabled Black and Brown children because they are not imagined as innocent (what Black women and other women of color scholars, such as Jamilia Blake and Thalia González, have named as adultification) and they are also imagined as hyper-strong and aggressive. Instead, disabled Black and Brown kids are targeted and punished because of their disabilities. Moreover, Black and Brown youth are disabled by prison conditions, which cause trauma. Family separation through incarceration — whether in the name of rehabilitation, child welfare or mental health care — are all forms of punishment for perceived deviance. The abuse and neglect in these systems is well documented. We lock up what we are afraid of — if justice is what love looks like in public, then mass incarceration is hate institutionalized. And in the worst cases, our babies die in these hate-filled cages, babies like Cedric “C.J.” Lofton, Loyce Tucker, Cornelius Frederick, Gynnya McMillen, Elord Revolte, Andre Sheffield, Robert Wright, and more unnamed babies. Or they die while being rounded up to be put in these cages like Ma’Khia Bryant, Tamir Rice, Iremamber Skyap, Adam Toledo, and [others]. Mass incarceration is a racial and disability justice issue for Black and Brown disabled youth because it targets and creates disability, all while trying to eradicate their power and resistance."

"Moreover, disabled Black and Brown girls are experiencing higher rates of these negative outcomes than their nondisabled peers. When these disabled Black and Brown girls are abused by the system and their stories become public, their disabilities are often erased. We imagine them as what scholar Michele Goodwin discusses as “too intersectional,” when their disability or queerness is viewed as something to disassociate them from, trying to cleave their identities into something closer to the norm. Yet, this misses the fact that these Black and Brown girls are being punished because of their disabilities, and that disability labels and laws are not protecting them. We must recognize that Black and Brown disabled girls are not broken, our systems are broken. Carceral geographies threaten Black and Brown disabled girls. We must respond by loving Black and Brown girls in their full humanity."

I want to end with what you envision as hope. Like W.E.B. Du Bois, I am not hopeless, but I am unhopeful regarding the racist attitudes, racist practices, racist habits, racist ideologies and racist structures within the U.S. This includes how racism toxically lives intramurally or extramurally, and this includes how racism functions through ableism — or conversely, how ableism functions through racism. This is another way of saying that racism exists within every nook and cranny of U.S. society. I can’t begin to express how angry I feel as I write about racism and other forms of injustice. This anger is not misplaced, and it has its place. You’ve worked as an educator in both youth prisons and public schools. You’ve been able to observe directly how forms of discipline negatively impact girls of color, how they suffer under panoptic surveillance and pathologizing discourses. I can only imagine that they have internalized such racist and pathologizing forms of captivity. How do you find hope in what you do without being seduced by a neoliberal sense of hope that fails or refuses to think critically about systems of racism and pathology? Does anger help?

"For Black and Brown people, our anger is the antithesis of white supremacy and ableism that centralizes docility and compliance masquerading as kindness and civility. I draw from Audre Lorde who wrote about the uses of anger and Brittney Cooper who writes about eloquent rage. Lorde describes the power of our anger when it is focused with precision on the systems that harm us. So, I try to focus my anger on dismantling those systems, like the abolition of youth prisons, and all prisons. I draw from Mariame Kaba who reminds us to practice hope regularly; I practice hope by being in relationship with disabled Black and Brown youth, many of whom are being pushed out of public schools, and/or are currently or formerly incarcerated. I work to support our community as we labor in violent systems. We can create a world that is less violent, more humane, and even joyful. I believe in abolition, so my anger and hope are rooted in the ways I show up, I experiment and fail, and keep showing up to be in community with Black and Brown disabled youth. And those Black and Brown disabled youth are constantly pushing me to be more radical, to develop a clearer abolitionist imaginary. That is hope.

Hope is recognizing how our fights are all connected and cultivating solidarity. The attacks on trans that are so prevalent right now are built on ableism, misogynoir and white supremacy. Therefore, we must be in solidarity with our queer and trans siblings. One study found that 20 percent of youth in detention centers identified as queer and trans: 13 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls. Eighty-five percent of these incarcerated queer and trans girls are girls of color. Trans and queer youth of color often stay longer in family policing systems (known as child welfare) and juvenile incarceration systems, increasing the likelihood of negative impacts of both systems. Queer and trans Black and Brown youth deserve our solidarity and our protection. These same systems are harming Black and Brown disabled kids; our struggles are connected, and liberation means fighting together. Solidarity, the kind where we recognize our common fights and allow our differences in oppressions and experiences to inform our resistance, is what gives me hope.

Also exciting is the work of my contemporary colleagues and earlier career scholars, public intellectuals and activists who are also thinking critically about race and disability while not stopping there, like Jamelia Morgan, Mildred Boveda, Hailey Love, Maggie Beneke, Jenn Phuong, Tami Handy, Adai Teferra, Ericka Weathers, Sami Schalk, Jina B. Kim, Therí Pickens, Liat Ben-Moshe, Kay Ulanday Barrett, Keah Brown, Akiea Gross, D’Arcee Charington Neal, plus a whole host of students who are doing it better than us. They are thinking with less binaries and more interconnected systems. They are more radical and hopeful. And those of us who are developing a sharper analysis because we are listening to them, filling in gaps of our work we missed the first time around. I wanted a theory that centralized the lives of Black and Brown disabled youth, and DisCrit is what grew. DisCrit isn’t the best theory, it’s the one we created when we needed something better. We have always said we want to see it expanded and pushed until its borders break open and something better is born. That’s the beautiful thing about theory, it must continually evolve. As long as we are listening to Audre Lorde and focusing our rage with precision, our theory will evolve to meet us in the moment."

[eightcurioussouls]

CHAPTER 11: SNOWY TERRAIN.

(( small warning- one of these kids will die, frisk will reload tho, dw ))

    The next area didn't seem so bad- a haphazardly-made sentry station was the only thing that rests within it, Olivia had quickly hopped over to inspect it, and burst into laughter, causing Victor to wander over and look at it himself, and he sighed, shaking his head, “Papyrus left a note.” Was all he said, taking Oli’s hand and carrying on, the others following.

    The next area held a much better looking sentry station, and Olivia broke away from Victor to head closer, almost jumping away at the monster that pops up.

    “Did something move?”

    Olivia almost gasps.

    “Was it my imagination?”

    No, it couldn’t be, could it?

    “I can only see moving things. If something WAS moving, for example, a human…”

    The girl stood in place, staring dumbfounded at the dog monster. Dog. Puppy. Pet puppy?

    “I’ll make sure it NEVER moves again!”

    Olivia was pulled into battle, a grin on her face as she watched the monster move.

    ⚫ Doggo blocks the way!

    She goes to pet, looking curious.

    ⚫ Doggo is too suspicious of your movements.

    “Don’t move an inch!” He barks, and he sends out an attack- a knife, as blue as her SOUL- it collides with it, but no damage is taken.

    Oli did look a little surprised at that.

    ⚫ Doggo can’t seem to find anything.

    Oli’s fingers twitch as she dives for the pet option, small hands beginning to pet the dog monster, he suddenly seemed oddly surprised, beginning to shout “PET?” as well as a few other words.

    Another attack happens, Oli doesn’t move for it.

    ⚫ Doggo has been pet.

    She notices the name in yellow- being quick to spare the dog from her merciless ticklefingers.

     Once out of battle, the dog seemed, as Victor would say, shooketh, “S-s-s-something pet me… something isn’t m-m-moving… I’m gonna need some dog treats for this!!!” He ducks into his station, and Oli looked at the others, grinning.

    After that debacle (and Victor asking, ‘do dogs think of treats as weed?’), they head onwards.

    The next area greeted them with Sans! Victor dies a little on the inside. “hey,” he calls out to them, “here’s something important to remember.” Diction raises an eyebrow curiously at that, “Oh?” “my brother has a very special attack.” He started, “if you see a blue attack, don’t move and it won’t hurt you.” “Fuckin’ gathered that.” Victor grumbled.

    “here’s an easy way to keep it in mind, imagine a stop sign. when you see a sign, you stop, right? stop signs are red. so imagine a blue stop sign instead. simple, right? when fighting, think about blue stop signs.” He stated, Gracie gave a nod, “Right, thank you.” She murmured. During all of this, Frisk had headed upwards, coming back with a small fistful of snow, they gave the others a nod, and they carry on.

    They come across a flat piece of land- and the two skeletons- Victor narrowed his eyes, “Wasn’t he just- what the fuck??” He muttered, Diction sighed, “Let’s not question it.” He replied.

     “YOU’RE SO LAZY!!! YOU WERE NAPPING ALL NIGHT!!” Papyrus boomed, earning a grin from Andres- loud noises, his favourite. Sans shrugged at him, smiling as usual, “i think that’s called… sleeping.” He responded, “EXCUSES, EXCUSES!” The taller skeleton stated, and finally took notice of the group, “OH-HO! THE HUMANS ARRIVE!” He exclaimed, Andres giggled softly.

    “IN ORDER TO STOP YOU… MY BROTHER AND I CREATED SOME PUZZLES!” He stated, “I THINK YOU WILL FIND THIS ONE… QUITE SHOCKING!!” The kids all look at each other, oh no.

    “FOR YOU SEE, THIS IS THE INVISIBLE… ELECTRICITY MAZE!! WHEN YOU TOUCH THE WALLS OF THIS MAZE, THIS ORB WILL ADMINISTER A HEARTY ZAP!” He holds out a blue sphere, “SOUND LIKE FUN?? BECAUSE! THE AMOUNT OF FUN YOU WILL PROBABLY HAVE, IS ACTUALLY RATHER SMALL I THINK.” He rubs his jaw with a gloved hand, Andres already looked really excited! He doesn’t know why, but that sounded great. “OK, YOU CAN GO AHEAD NOW.”

    The kids look between each other again, not noticing how Andres stepped into the maze, only realising too late-

    ZAP.

    Andres covered his mouth, stumbling back as Papyrus got shocked. The skeleton stood for a few seconds, before-

    “SANS! WHAT DID YOU DO?!” “i think one’a the humans have to hold the orb.” “OH, OKAY.” The kids watch as the tall skeleton shuffles through the maze, noticing the tracks he left behind before he carefully places the orb on the ridge of Andres’ cowboy hat, “HOLD THIS PLEASE.” He chirped, and headed back.

   “OKAY, TRY NOW!” He called, and Andres looked at the floor, retracing his steps carefully, the others begin to follow suit, like a conga line, again.

    Once out of there, Papyrus gapes, “INCREDIBLE!! YOU SLIPPERY SNAILS!” Andres giggled at that, “YOU SOLVED IT SO EASILY… TOO EASILY!” Victor goes to open his mouth to tell him about the footprints, but Gracie’s stare causes him to cease, “HOWEVER!” Papyrus continues, “THE NEXT PUZZLE WILL NOT BE SO EASY!! IT IS DESIGNED BY MY BROTHER, SANS!” He gestures to the other skeleton, “YOU WILL SURELY BE CONFOUNDED! I KNOW I AM! NYEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!” He then proceeds to moonwalk away, Victor just, stared, “He better teach me how to do that.” This entire time, Frisk had been chatting to Sans, too, they seemed to be talking about a costume, once they were done, the children carried onwards.

    Cason had rushed off to the nearby vendor within the area, almost excited, he bought four items from them before coming back to the others and passing them out, “We can share them- there’s two of them on each treat.” He exclaimed, showing the Bisicle to the group. Frisk gave a soundless chuckle, and the group spent a few minutes figuring out the nearby Ball Game, too, especially since Frisk had nabbed the red flag for the game- they took note of their virtues, the traits that define them- and Diction glanced to Frisk, “Y’know… they don’t really have a name for your SOUL.” He stated softly, curious, Frisk shrugged, and signed to him, ‘Most people call it Determination. It’s not the real name, but it’s something we generally accept.’ Diction nods to that. And they head on again.

    “HUMANS!!!” Papyrus yells as they walk up, “I HOPE YOU’RE READY FOR…” He stares at the ‘puzzle’, a sheet of paper on the floor, and looked to his brother, “SANS!! WHERE’S THE PUZZLE!!” “it’s right there. on the ground.” Diction had walked over to it, picking it up, “trust me. there’s no way they can get past this one.”

    “Of course we wouldn’t.” Diction replied, “You deliberately changed one of the words in the puzzle, we wouldn’t be able to finish it.”

    “OR WE COULD-” Victor started, irritated, he walked past Diction, and stood next to Papyrus, “-DO THAT, YOU FUCKING RASPBERRY CROISSANT.”

    Now Papyrus looked a bit annoyed, “SANS!! THAT DIDN’T DO ANYTHING!!” He yelled, “whoops. i knew i should’ve used today’s crossword.” Sans chortled, “WHAT?! CROSSWORD?! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU SAID THAT! IN MY OPINION… JUNIOR JUMBLE IS EASILY THE HARDEST.” “what? really, dude? that easy peasy word scramble?” Sans raises a figurative eyebrow, “that’s for baby bones.” “UN. BELIEVABLE.” He turns to the group, “HUMANS! SOLVE THIS DISPUTE.” He exclaimed.

    Without even missing a beat, Oli yelled, “JUNIOR JUMBLE!” Victor gave her a questioning look, Papyrus, however, cheers, “HA! HA! YES! HUMANS MUST BE VERY INTELLIGENT...” In the midst, Oli leans to Victor, “It’s hard because I can barely read English.” She mumbled sheepishly, Papyrus continues, “IF THEY ALSO FIND JUNIOR JUMBLE SO DIFFICULT! NYEH! HEH! HEH HEH!” He runs off, Victor huffs, folding his arms, “thanks for saying junior jumble just to appease my bro.” Sans piped up, “yesterday he got stuck trying to ‘solve’ the horoscope.” He added, the kids gave a collective sigh, and carry on.

    They come across spaghetti in the next area, and Olivia gasps, heading over to it, it was so cold, it was stuck to the table.

    But does that stop Olivia? Apparently, it doesn’t, she grabs the nearby fork, stabs it into the frozen spaghetti, yanks out a piece- Victor distantly goes, “Olivia Jamee Bianchi, what the fuck? How did you do that, that was stuck to the table, what-��- and bites down on it, she stands there, chewing for a few seconds before looking at the others and grinning, “It’s good!” She exclaimed.

    The others stare at her, dumbfounded, and Cason had to rip her away before she went back for more. Frisk had saved meanwhile, and Diction inspected the area- and the note left nearby from Papyrus- before heading onwards.

    The sign by them in the next piece of the forest held a sign, only warning them of ‘dog marriage’, for some reason, it gave Gracie of all people chills. The kids took a few steps forward, and-

    ⚫ Lesser Dog appears.

    Andres was pulled into battle. The boy checked his options, blinking, and went for one of the pet options.

    His eyes widen as Lesser Dog’s neck expands.

    He then proceeds to take the next five minutes of petting and dodging attacks, which just makes the dog’s neck grow and grow.

    “Andres.” Victor called out. No response, “Andres.” Nothing.

    “ANDRES ABEL DIAZ SO HELP ME GOD IF YOU DON’T SPARE THE DOG NOW I WILL COME OVER THERE-”

    Andres turns to stare at him, pouting, before begrudgingly sparing the dog, “Thank fuck.” Victor muttered, the boy waddled over, now looking like a sad puppy.

    Once looking around the area, the children realise that they need to pull a switch to proceed, it took them a solid three minutes to find it, Frisk had taken a moment to head back to save, and they carry onwards.

    They all halt when they see a pair of dogs with axes come forward, Gracie pushes the children back, concerned, “What’s that smell?” One asks, “(Where’s that smell?)” The other asks, “If you’re a smell…” “(Identify yoursmellf!)” They proceed to walk around the area, before stopping by Gracie.

    “Hm… here’s that weird smell.” The first stated, “It makes me want to eliminate.” Gracie’s breath catches in her throat, “(...Eliminate YOU!)”

    They lunge for her, dragging her into a battle.

    ⚫ Dogi assault you!

    Gracie wheezes, looking around- before looking at her options, she chooses to check Dogamy.

    ⚫ DOGAMY - 6 ATK 4 DEF.

    ⚫ Husband of Dogaressa.

    ⚫ Knows only what he smells.

    She frowns at that, vaguely hearing a “Don’t touch my hotdog!” And a “(He means me.)” Before getting smacked with a pair of axes.

    They whittle down 8 HP from her.

    INTEGRITY: 12/20 HP.

    She wheezes, fumbling blindly due to shock, she accidentally checks Dogamy again- getting the same result- she vaguely hears the others yell, they were panicking.

    She gets attacked by dogs throwing hearts this time- she just barely avoids one hit, but another heart hits her.

    INTEGRITY: 8/20 HP.

    Was she… going to die? No- not now, she may have no items but she can’t give up.

    ⚫ The dogs keep shifting their axes to protect each other.

    Gracie bit her lip, and decided to check Dogaressa this time.

    ⚫ DOGARESSA - 6 ATK 4 DEF

    ⚫ This puppy finds her hubby lovely.

    ⚫ SMELLS ONLY?

     Another ring of hearts is thrown at her- she takes a hit from one, and then the other ring hits her full force.

     INTEGRITY: 0/20 HP.

    She screams.

     Victor lets out a devastating “NO!” When Gracie’s body hits the floor, a SOUL of deep blue rising up only to be encased in a small container, Diction placed a hand on Frisk’s shoulder, eyes wide, “Load, Frisk, load!” He exclaimed, Cason was trying to quell the sobs of the youngest two, Oli cries for ‘mama', and Andres was throwing a tearful fit.

    Frisk shakily nods, fumbling through the menu quickly as the dogs re-sniff for their next victim.

    Finditfinditfindut- THERE. They slam their hand on the LOAD button, mumbling inaudibly.

    ‘Mom, come back- please come back. I don't want to lose anyone else!’

    [LOAD.]

(( aaa, gosh i'm so sorry this took so long! I ended up powering through this at like... 12:30 am this morning and it took two hours to type up six pages on my phone buT ANYWays me? murdering the mom friend? yes i may also make a new fic for side stories, that delve deeper into the kids' backstories and what happens during timeskips, too! anyways, i'd appreciate any constructive criticism and i'd love to hear your thoughts on this so far <3!! ))

[iammissfortune]

Chloe End Season 5

First off and pardon thou french

THE FUCK!

How dare they!

Marinette you did nothing to help Chloe. You told her to bond with her Emotionally abusive mother because she was no different. That was the one time you should have butted out.

You and your friends make rude and snide comments whenever Chloe used her Father power to get what she wanted (but no problem doing yourself as ladybug)

You were the Class Rep it was your job to look out for all your classmates to just the ones you like. The fact that you knew what Chloe was doing shows how irresponsible and favoritism you are.

Ms. Bustier you did nothing but expect the her classmates to teach her better. It's not her classmates job to.

And finally Andre Bourgeois

You neglectful ass. You are her father, her guide to becoming a good person. You knew what kind of person Audrey is and let Chloe emulate that toxic behavior. You taught Chloe her behavior she is this way because you never enforced any type of guidance or structure. You never told her no.

But now that you have your perfectly sweet vanilla daughter Zoe you can rid yourself of the one you and your monster of a wife screwed up!

All of you did nothing but contribute to Chloe downfall. Is Chloe a bully. Yes. But to call that justice is just cruel and hateful.

She needs counseling, therapy, meds. The last thing she needs is to be left alone with her Abusive mother.

[sturchling]

Hi. I have a request for you. This is an Adrien story where Adrien's father scheduled multiple photoshoots in a row that go on for a long time, leaving Adrien no time to sleep since he also has homework and Cat Noir duties. He is so tired, he lets loose in class when Lila tries to lie about them dating. After school, his father tries to force Adrien to take back what he said and date Lila. Adrien's boyfriend, Conner Kent (Superboy from Young Justice), brings in his family lawyer to help him.

Adrien was exhausted. His father was really pushing it this time. Mr. Agreste had scheduled back to back photoshoots for different fashion collections for the last several days. For a normal kid, it may have worked out a bit better. But with his homework and his Chat Noir duties on top of everything else, Adrien was at his wits end. He hadn’t been able to sleep in days. He was feeling very irritable when he arrived at school that day, but he thought he would be able to hold it together until the end of the day. But Lila ruined that plan.

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

Lila thought this was a full proof plan. She would walk up to Adrien when he got to class and ask him when they were going on their date. She was sure that Adrien would go along with her lie in front of the class, so Lila wouldn’t be ‘hurt’. Then the class would believe that Adrien was her boyfriend and she would be even more popular. And she knew that would upset Marinette as well, which was a bonus. So, just as she planed, when Adrien walked into the classroom, Lila walked towards him and set her plan in motion.

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

As soon as Adrien walked into the room, he felt someone latch onto him like a leach. He wasn’t surprised when he turned and saw Lila standing there. Lila’s voice seemed even more grating than usual as she tried to sound flirty. “So when are we going on our date Adrien? You asked me out last week, but we still haven’t made a plan.” The class collectively gasps, hearing the news. They all start chattering excitedly with Lila, asking all these questions, as Adrien felt his anger rising. “Yes, he asked me out in front of Andre’s ice cream cart after our latest shoot. It was so romantic-”. That was all it took for Adrien to lose his temper. 

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

“LILA WOULD YOU JUST SHUT UP AND STOP LYING TO THEM?!” The class was startled to hear Adrien raise his voice, and even more startled by what he said. Lila was shocked too. She never thought he would react this way. She tried to play it off, but it was obvious that she was flustered. “What do you mean Adrien? I’m not lying.” The class is even more shocked as Adrien rolls his eyes before glaring at the Italian girl coldly. “Oh please, you lie with each breath. I don’t think I have ever heard you say a single true thing. But you will not lie yourself into a relationship with me.” The class tries to defend their friend, and find out why Adrien is so angry. But Adrien stops them and proceeds to reveal every single lie she ever told, and Lila is so shocked she doesn’t even try to defend herself. She just races from the room, upset at what had happened. But she would make Adrien regret what he did.

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

Lila rushed to the Agreste mansion and asked to speak with Mr. Agreste. She was shown into the study and she told him what Adrien had done. How he had called her a liar and embarrassed her in front of the whole class. She tried to tell him how it wasn’t true and that she wasn’t a liar, but Mr. Agreste already knew the girl was a liar. But he was troubled by this. It would be bad for the brand if his two top models were fighting, and even worse if one was revealed as an attention seeking liar. Mr. Agreste knew he needed to speak with Adrien and resolve the issue before it began. 

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

After school that day, Adrien was called into the study by his father. Mr. Agreste proceeded to tell him that he would be expected to apologize to Lila in front of the class tomorrow. “You will also tell the class that you were wrong, that she isn’t a liar, and that Lila and you are truly dating. If your little outburst from today gets out, it could damage the brand and that can not happen this close to the launch of a new collection. You will do as you are told, or I will pull you out of that school and you will not see your friends again. Am I understood?” Adrien just turned and left the room, feeling himself becoming irritable again. 

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

He went to his room and immediately got on a FaceTime call with his boyfriend, Conner Kent. He vented to him everything that had happened recently. The back to back shoots, what happened with Lila, and what his father had just told him. To say Conner was mad for his boyfriend would be an understatement. And Adrien was just angry enough to agree to his suggestion. Conner had been telling Adrien to take legal action against his father for a long time. The amount of child labor laws alone that Gabriel had broken were staggering. Normally, Adrien just brushed off this suggestion and moved on. This time though, he was just angry enough to agree. He and Conner spent the rest of the night and early into the morning, strategizing and gathering evidence for the storm that was coming.

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

The next day, Conner’s family lawyer was at the Agreste mansion and demanding a meeting between his client and Mr. Agreste. Mr. Agreste was stunned that Adrien had retained an attorney. And even more stunned at the mountain of accusations the lawyer had thrown at him. Child labor law violations, truancy issues with Gabriel constantly pulling Adrien out of school for shoots, and even potential child neglect charges. Gabriel’s hands were tied. He knew that if he tried to force Adrien to do something now, he would be in a lot of trouble. So, he backed off. He agreed to no longer threaten Adrien with pulling him from school, and to also cut back on the photoshoots he scheduled for Adrien, meaning Adrien could have more time with his friends. This also meant that Adrien never took back what he said about Lila and the whole class now knew that she was nothing but a liar. With the battle won, and his father and Lila defeated, Adrien went back upstairs and took a well deserved nap.

[snailg0th]

here’s my giant leftist to-read list for the next few years!!!

if a little (done!) it written next to the book, it means i’ve finished it! i’m gonna try to update this as i read but no promises on remembering haha

Economics/Politics

Property by Karl Marx

Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx (done!)

Wages, Price, and Profit by Karl Marx (done!)

Wage-Labor and Capital by Karl Marx (done!)

Capital Volume I by Karl Marx

The 1844 Manuscripts by Karl Marx

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Fredrich Engles

Synopsis of Capital by Fredrich Engels

The Principles of Communism by Fredrich Engles

Imperialism, The Highest Stage Of Capitalism by Vladmir Lenin

The State And Revolution by Vladmir Lenin

The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky

Fascism: What is it and How to Fight it by Leon Trotsky

In Defense Of Marxism by Leon Trotsky

The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemborg

Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg

Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault

The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin

On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky

Profit over People by Noam Chomsky

An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory by Ernest Mandel

The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith

The Postmodern Condition by Jean François Lyotard

Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher

The Socialist Reconstruction of Society by Daniel De Leon

Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman

Socialism Made Easy by James Connolly

Race

Biased: Uncover in the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Blindspot by Mahzarin R. Banaji

Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism And The Persistence Of Racial Inequality In America by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy And The Racial Divide by Crystal M. Flemming

This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How To Wake Up, Take Action, And Do The Work by Tiffany Jewell & Aurelia Durand

The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism For The Twenty-First Century by Grace Lee Boggs

Tell Me Who You Are by Winona Guo & Priya Vulchi

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race by Jesymn Ward

Class, Race, and Marxism by David R. Roediger

America for Americans: A History Of Xenophobia In The United States by Erica Lee

The Politics Of The Veil by Joan Wallach Scott

A Different Mirror A History Of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki

A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn

Black Theory

The Wretched Of The World by Frantz Fanon

Black Marxism by Cedric J Robinson

Malcolm X Speaks by Malcolm X

Women, Culture, and Politics by Angela Davis

Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis (done!)

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (done!)

The Meaning of Freedom by Angela Davis

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Ain’t I A Woman? by Bell Hooks

Yearning by Bell Hooks

Dora Santana’s Works

An End To The Neglect Of The Problems Of The Negro Women by Claudia Jones

I Am Your Sister by Audre Lorde

Women’s Liberation And The African Freedom Struggle by Thomas Sankara

W.E.B. DuBois Essay Collection

Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois

Lynch Law by Ida B. Wells

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Sula by Toni Morrison

Song Of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Paradise by Toni Morrison

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Dr. Brittney Cooper

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Black Skins, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Killing of the Black Body

Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P Newton

Settlers; The myth of the White Proletariat

Fearing The Black Body; The Racial Origins of Fatphobia

Freedom Dreams; The Black Radical Imagination

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

An Argument For Black Women’s Liberation As a Revolutionary Force by Mary Anne Weathers

Voices of Feminism Oral History Project by Frances Beal

Ghosts In The Schoolyard: Racism And School Closings On Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon To White America by Michael Eric Dyson

Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, Big Business, Re-create Race In The 21st Century by Dorothy Roberts

We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race & Resegregation by Jeff Chang

They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era In America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery

The Common Wind by Julius S. Scott

Black Is The Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, And Mine by Emily Bernard

We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

American Lynching by Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Raising Our Hands by Jenna Arnold

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America by Ira Katznelson

Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affects Us and What We Can Do

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life Of Black Communist Claudia Jones by Carole Boyce Davies

Black Studies Manifesto by Darlene Clark

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Souls Of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

Darkwater by W.E.B. Du Bois

The Education Of Blacks In The South, 1860-1935 by James D. Anderson

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery And The Making Of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

The Color Of Money: Black Banks And The Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran

A Black Women’s History Of The United States by Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross

The Price For Their Pound Of Flesh: The Value Of The Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, In The Building Of A Nation by Daina Ramey Berry

North Of Slavery: The Negro In The Free States, 1780-1869 by Leon F. Litwack

Black Stats: African Americans By The Numbers In The Twenty-First Century by Monique M. Morris

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique M. Morris

40 Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, And Redemption of The Black Athlete by William C. Rhoden

From #BlackLivesMatter To Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

A More Beautiful And Terrible History: The Uses And Misuses Of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History Of Medical Experimentation On Black Americans From Colonial Times To The Present by Harriet A. Washington

Working At The Intersections: A Black Feminist Disability Framework” by Moya Bailey

Theory by Dionne Brand

Black Women, Writing, And Identity by Carole Boyce Davies

Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement Of Black Americans From The Civil War To World War II by Douglass A. Blackmon

Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Some Of Us Are Very Hungry Now by Andre Perry

The Origins Of The Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality In Postwar Detroit by Thomas Surgue

They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays and Poems by Claudia Jones

The Black Woman: An Anthology by Toni McCade

Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female by Frances Beal

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Indigenous Theory

Colonize This! by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman

As We Have Always Done

Braiding Sweetgrass

Spaces Between Us

The Sacred Hoop by Paula Gunn Allen

Native: Identity, Belonging, And Rediscovering God by Kaitlin Curtice

An Indigenous People’s History Of The United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter by Daniel Heath Justice

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, And The Pursuit Of Justice For Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid

The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez

Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga

All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma In The Shadow Of Colonialism by Tanya Talaga

All Our Relations: Finding The Path Forward by Tanya Talaga

Everything You Wanted To Know About Indians But Were Afraid To Ask by Anton Treuer

Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life by David Treuer

Latine Theory

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa

Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of A Continent by Eduardo Galeano

Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism by Laura E. Gomez

De Colores Means All Of Us by Elizabeth Martinez

Middle Eastern And Muslim Theory

How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young And Arab In America by Moustafa Bayoumi

We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future by Deepa Iyer

Alligator and Other Stories by Dima Alzayat

API Theory

Orientalism by Edward Said

The Making Of Asian America by Erika Lee

On Gold Mountain by Lisa See

Strangers From A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans by Ronald Takaki

They Called Us Enemy (Graphic Novel) by George Takei

Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear by Edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats

Yellow: Race In America Beyond Black And White by Frank H. Wu

Alien Nation: Chinese Migration In The Americas From The Coolie Era Through World War II by Elliott Young

The Good Immigrants: How The Yellow Peril Became The Model Minorities by Madeline H. Ysu

Asian American Dreams: The Emergence Of An American People by Helen Zia

The Myth Of The Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind S. Chou & Joe R. Feagin

Two Faces Of Exclusion: The Untold Story Of Anti-Asian Racism In The United States by Lon Kurashige

Whiteness

White Fragility by Robin Di Angelo (done!)

White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege In A Racially Divided America by Margaret A. Hagerman

Waking Up White by Deby Irving

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

White Like Me: Reflections On Race From A Privileged Son by Tim Wise

White Rage by Carol Anderson

What Does It Mean To Be White: Developing White Racial Literacy by Robin DiAngelo

The Invention of The White Race: Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control by Theodore W. Allen

The Invention of The White Race: Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America by Theodore W. Allen

Immigration

Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftir

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist At Work by Edwidge Danticat

My Family Divided by Diane Guerrero

The Devil’s Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli

Voter Suppression

One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy by Carol Anderson

Give Us The Vote: The Modern Struggle For Voting Rights In America by Ari Berman

Prison Abolition And Police Violence

Abolition Democracy by Angela Davis

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis

The Prison Industrial Complex by Angela Davis

Political Prisoners, Prisons, And Black Liberation by Angela Davis

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (done!)

The End Of Policing by Alex S Vitale

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie

Choke Hold: Policing Black Men by Paul Butler

From The War On Poverty To The War On Crime: The Making Of Mass Incarceration In America by Elizabeth Hinton

Feminist Theory

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay

7 Feminist And Gender Theories

Race, Gender, And Class by Margaret L. Anderson

African Gender Studies by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

The Invention Of Women by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

What Gender Is Motherhood? by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

I Am Malala by Malala Youssef

LGBT Theory

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution by Judith Butler

Imitation and Gender Insubordination by Judith Butler

Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler

Excitable Speech by Judith Butler

Undoing Gender by Judith Butler

The Roots Of Lesbian And Gay Opression: A Marxist View by Bob McCubbin

Compulsory Heterosexuality And Lesbian Existence by Adrienne Rich

Decolonizing Trans/Gender 101 by B. Binohan

Gay.Inc: The Nonprofitization of Queer Politics by Merl Beam

Pronouns Good or Bad: Attitudes and Relationships with Gendered Pronouns

Transgender Warriors

Whipping Girl; A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

Stone Butch Blues by Lesie Feinberg (done!)

The Stonewall Reader by Edmund White

Sissy by Jacob Tobia

Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein

Butch Queens Up In Pumps by Marlon M. Bailey

Black On Both Sides: A Racial History Of Trans Identities by C Riley Snorton

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Lavender and Red by Emily K. Hobson

[blacksunscorpio]

Astro Musings No.1

Jupiter, as well as your Moon in your Natal chart, can show your addictions just as much as Neptune can. Jupiter is about excess and your Moon is your emotional state. Where one feels comfort or how they process these things/emotions.  Mercury placements or Mercury Dominant often make people great lyricists and communicators. Many famous rappers are actually Gemini’s (Notorious B.I.G, 2 Pac, Kanye, Kendrick, Andre 3000, etc). That's because Gemini is ruled by Mercury/the god of communication. He also rules the lungs. People with this dominance are very good with wordplay and are blessed with the gift of gab. 

Your Sun is still important

...despite modern astrologers attempting to throw it away. Your sun is your core. Your ego. Your basic identity. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand more-- we are heliocentric as a galaxy. This means all our planets orbit around the Sun. The same goes for your natal chart. Say you have a Gemini Sun and Capricorn moon but seem to identify more with Capricorn-- Your moon is your emotional habits-- and you know what they say about habits: they’re hard to break. This simply means you will always be a Gemini at your core even if you have the emotional tendencies and habits of a Capricorn. The same goes for those who say Lunar Scorpios are more ‘Plutonic’ than Solar Scorpios Now, it may seem that way, but this myth is only prevalent because emotions are extremely primal and powerful things. When they rear their head in a Plutonic way, people mistake the intensity for dominant power when in reality more drama does not equate more scorpionic influence. In fact, Scorpio’s are rarely the types to put on a show. They leave that for their Cousins-- The Cancers, The Arians [also ruled by Mars] & the Pisceans. True Scorpios prefer to be the tacticians. The ones who quietly observe their surroundings and flex when it comes to spatial awareness. They will rarely draw unnecessary attention to themselves and emotional scenes will often be kept under lock and key/private.

Speaking of Scorpio’s cousins, believe it or not, Aries, Sag’s and Cancers are the true divas of the zodiac, not Leos. That’s because Leo’s are upfront about what they want and will not surprise you with their scenes.

You know what’s coming/always knew it was there.  As for the aforementioned three, these triplets demand attention and praise or notice from others. Aries demand to be noticed for their prowess and skills, Sag’s can be excessive and demanding-- they want what they want and they want it NOW. No questions asked. Fueled by fire and Jupiter’s penchant for drama--you will never forget it if you don’t cough up what they demand. I.E. Nicki Minaj and her Grammy stunt[s]. Cancers give ultimatums to expedite the process of getting what they want. They are hard-pressed to demonstrate patience for people or to wait for situations to play out. They are never about the long game. They can be very coercive and forceful. At their worst, they can even be bullies. Of course, this is not the rule, I often find that December Sag’s, are more intense than November Sag’s. April Arians are less high strung than March Arians and July Cancers tend to act out more of the ‘diva qualities’ mentioned above than June Cancers.

Pluto is your friend.

Yes, the shadow is your friend. Pluto often gets a bad rap for being this torturous unknown force that comes to destroy/transform but that is not the case. Pluto is all about transformations, yes but transformations for the better. He is the garbage man. He gets rid of the trash. Toxic relationship? Ok! Pluto will rip it from you. It will hurt. You will cry. But after you’ve used up all the kleenex, you will have spidey senses. You will see those red flags before they and their cheap cologne darken your doorstep. You will level up. And while you’re doing that, Pluto will let you watch as he terrorizes your abuser. Pluto is justice. Not like Libra where all is fair and balanced by the scales. Pluto is Karma. Karmic Justice at that. The equalizer. He will show you the ugly of all those who wore the mask of ‘friend’. See, Pluto gets nasty rep because he forces you to see what you’d love to ignore. He makes you feel what society tells you to be numb to. Euphoria, Obsession, jealousy, bliss, even paranoia. Pluto is the depths. You need to feel. Jealousy is not an ugly emotion, ENVY is. They are not synonymous but people use them interchangeably. Pluto can be jealous, but jealousy is simply the sensation that something important might be taken from you. Envy is seeing someone have something, and hating them for it/not wanting them to have it. Pluto is not envious. He rules the underworld and in his realm live all of Earth’s riches. Gems, diamonds, gold, jewels. He is the wealthiest-- what could he possibly be envious of? Paranoia is equated to him too, but this is simply an exacerbation of his skill at being prepared. Pluto is a GENERAL. He wants you to have a PLAN. And when you don’t he forces you to get one, whether you’re prepared or not. Pluto is Chess, not Checkers. Pluto is the bandaid ripper. Pluto's love is cold and hard but empowering. He exposes. Shows the ugly. Friend’s you weren’t sure were enemies? Pluto rips their masks off so you have no choice but to see their ugliness. You will be disenchanted. Maybe even heartbroken. But a moment of grief for a lifetime of healthy happiness is Pluto’s payoff. Pluto also represents in the chart the area where we can most empower ourselves and elevate our lives and our dignity. Pluto will disempower your just to elevate you and make your story of failure a story of victory. He’s the ULTIMATE glow up King. Pluto shows us where we can triumph if we find a way to revolutionize or otherwise radically transform/change ourselves internally, despite our external challenges. Plutonic cleansings are like working out or giving birth. Excruciatingly painful to the point where you feel like you want to die but the result is a whole new body/person you’re absolutely in love with. He is purging.  Again, Pluto is about evolution. He does not and will not allow you to stay stagnant/in one stage of your life. He forces you to grow and if you won’t he has no qualms with making you. Pluto is not soft. 

Speaking of which. This includes his influence in the bedroom. Often people will talk about plutonic influence in a dark way. As if his influence sexually is something dark/forbidden or something to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary. Pluto rules sex. Literally. It was his domain before it was anyone else's’. Therefore, everything about sex is simply an offshoot of his influence. The rougher, primal, knee-shaking, back-scratching, neck biting, squirting/screaming orgasm, ball-gag wearing stuff? Completely ‘OK’ in his book. He wants you to experience that. The reasoning is that Pluto loves to explore and honor edgier sentiments within. Pluto urges us all to normalize fetishes and fully embrace this side of ourselves. Why? Because Pluto wants us all to live our truth, not hide. Can’t say the same for his brother Neptune though.

See, Neptune is who you should be worried about.

Neptune is the ruler of what is hidden. The realm of the unknown. All that is fantastic, the stuff of fantasy, illusions, dreams, day-dreams, etc. He puts a veil on things. Adds confusion to the mix. makes things hard to see. While Pluto strips away the hidden, Neptune happily puts on the blindfold. Not only does he hand you the rose-colored-glasses, he hands you a ruffied pint to go with it. The essence of this planet is ILLUSION.  With Neptune, it can be difficult to ascertain where and how things are working against you, or you have a hard time figuring out who or what it is. Neptune is about confusion. Neptune clouds your judgment, so you're especially vulnerable to deception and trickery. [Those with hard Neptune aspects can testify] Enemies can be especially difficult to make out/avoid when he’s involved and bad judgment all around can be a theme when he rears his foggy head.  What also makes him so dangerous is because he walks around looking like everything you want. The dream of dreams, if-you-will. As a result, he makes you receptive to mind-altered states. Can even make one prone to hallucinations, the use of poisons such as drugs and alcohol. Even spending copious amounts fo time building castles-in-the-air and neglecting reality. You become addicted to whatever he lays in front of you. The fantasy is more alluring than reality. With Neptune adversely aspected or too many hard aspects to inner planets, this can cause chaos that can negatively impact a native or those closest to them. Neptune on Mercury can be particularly dangerous if ill-aspected because it can cause dishonesty to a pathological degree or simply mental instability. Think Joe Goldberg from ‘You’. 100% crazy 200% delusional. This guy definitely has a shot a gallon of Neptune in his natal cocktail. Manufacturing scenarios that aren’t really occurring. Obsessively daydreaming and idealizing strangers. Successfully conning others into thinking he’s a normal and stable guy when he’s anything but. His judgment is clouded as is the judgment of the poor souls who encounter him, while you, as a viewer, watch in horror. That’s what Neptune does. You won’t see reality until it’s wayyyy too late [RIP Beck].  Neptune rules over all chaotic feelings, and can easily un-focus the lens, making us inclined to obsess over impossible dreams and yearn for far-out things. OMG Neptune is all about yearning. Yearning for the unattainable. But as Dumbledore said: 

“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”

But that’s what Neptune will make you do. Forget to live. Dwell on the impossible. Make you prone to hypnotic mindstates that steal moments of your life away. Sex with Neptune can be almost spiritual but it can cause one to get addicted to the rush, and with Neptune clouding judgment, one can perhaps become addicted to sex or even participate in risky sexual behavior. Neptune at its worst also influences death by mysterious means, suicides, death by drowning, disappearance, or even poisoning if found in the eighth house or connected to it.

Neptune is a beautiful planet. Methane causes it to have that brilliant blue hue. It rains diamonds. But again, there but the aura/odor around it is methane. In layman’s terms? The planet literally smells like shit. This classic example of not all that glitters is gold. Tread very carefully when Neptune is around and keep your eyes peeled. Something or someone may not really be what it/they seem. Astro Musings No. 2  Astro Musings No. 3 Astro Musings No. 4  Astro Musings No. 5 Astro Musings No. 6 Astro Musings No. 7 Astro Musings No. 8  Astro Musings No. 9  Astro Musings No. 10

[rwbybutincorrect]

So... why do you hate Victorious so much?

BECAUSE I STILL WATCH IT???????? the show sucks so much, tori is a horrible protagonist who is a terrible person and does not learn or grow or really deserve anything she gets. she doesn’t even know half the BASIC THINGS upon coming to the school for performing arts idont remember what it was called. 

she is a HORRIBLE SISTER who treats trina so mean and like I GET BEING MEAN TO YOUR SIBLINGS BUT AT THE SAME TIME THERES LIKE NO REDEMPTION ON HER HALF LIKE AT LEAST TRINA HAS HER MOMENTS WHERE SHE SHOWS SHE CARES ABOUT TORI AND ACTS LIKE SHE CARES ABOUT HER BUT TORIS JUST LIKE “damn right” i hate them

and then dont even get me started on that stupid ass nerd boy who uses a puppet to be misogynistic and harrass women!! “rex why would you say that” SHUT UP NERDB OY YOU SAID IT YOURE A VANTRILIQUIEST STUPID IDIOT MAN BOY IDIOT ugh

anyway theres also that canadian boy who had no character besides being hot and rebellious that guy was an idiot (no offence canadians) hes just so useless as a character because all he does is just have girlfriend and be useless (but knows how to drive) idiot oh my god idiot god i hate him

andre and jade were kind of good i like those two 

(EDITING NOTE ACTUALLY WASNT ANDRE LIKE WEIRDLY LIKE LIKE ALSO LOWKEY MYSOGYNISTIC LIKE AT ONE POINT TORI WAS LIKE “pretend im jade :3″ and he was like “oh my gohg. i going to kiss you without your consent” AND SHE WAS LIKE “AAAH” AND HE WAS LIKE “AHH I DONT KNOW WHAT CAME OVER ME” damn even the good ones have their L’s theres no redeemable people here)

BUT I AM CONSTANTLY ANNOYED WITH HOW THEY TREAT CAT. CAT IS TREATED SO BADLY THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SHOW andh er obviously abusive situation at home is played off like jokes and its like “UMM??? ARE WE GOING TO ADDRESS THIS??? ARE WE GOING TO IGNORE HER OBVIOUS CRIES FOR HELP” SHE CONSTANTLY TALKS ABOUT HOW HER BROTHER SCARES HER AND SHE HIDES “TO SURVIVE” AND BECAUSE SHE HAS THAT SWEET HIGH PITCHED VOICE SHES SO INNOCENT AND STUPID AND WE HATE HER UGAHPEHRAPHRWPRHHG cat is so charming and shes treated so badly with whatever she has going on i m so mad im so upset with how they treat her 

AND DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED WITH TORI AND TRINAS PARENTS OH MY GOD THE MOST NEGLECTFUL PARENTS OF THE YEAR AWARD they are NEVER there despite the fact that their kids are CONSTANTLY going off on probably dangerous situations APPARENTLY ACCORDING TO MY BROTHER ALL OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS WENT TO JAIL???? AND WHERE WERE THEIR PARENTS?? THEY HAVE NO PARENTS Im so mad im so angry their parents are so neglectful like when trina had her wisdon teeth removed they said “okay we goin to hAWWIII” SHUT UP YOU DITIO PARENTS YOURE SO CRUEL I THATE YOU 

remember that time a teacher held a sleep over with his students and if they broke acting character THEY FAILED THE ASSIGNMENT DAWG A CHILD GOT BURNED ON YOUR SUPERVISION AND YOU SAID “IF YA BREAK CHARACTER YOU LOOSE THE ASSISGNMENT” SFHSFHAHFF I HAFSKHFF SHE AHFHFBAHFFF i need a minute im getting adrenaline from my rage  hold on i need to eat my cookies

[eats cookies]

WHY WERE THEIR PHONES SHAPED LIKE PEARS there was also this once scene where cat made brownies and they were OBVIOUSLY LITTLE DEBBYS COSMIC BROWNIES yet tori was like “you never eat my brownies :(” to her exboyfriend now dating cat and hes like “hbrrbrhuububububu” and its like THSOE ARENT BROWNIES THOSE ARE ARTIFICIAL AS HELL THATS A COSMIC BROWNIE i feel violent 

the episode where they crossed over with icarly was pretty good ig because sam and cat wasn’t bad as long as cat was appreciated because sam and cat both come from terrible households and now they’re dating ig guess??? goo dfro them :3

jade is done so dirty shes seen as selfish for being ambitious and wanting to succeed and have people be proud of HER ACCOMPLISHMENTS??? wasn’t there that one point where jade was performing her dark play that was entirely written by herself and performed by herself and none of her friends wanted to support her despite the fact that MORE OR LESS SHE IS ALMOST ALWAYS AROUND EVEN IF SHE DOESNT WANT TO BE LIKE SOMETIMES SHE OPTS OUT BUT LIKE SHES PRESENT??? BUT OYU GUYS CANT JUST KEEP DISREGARDING HER AND NOT LETTING HER SUCCEED JUST BECAUSE SHES A LIIIITOL PETTY all you bitches are petty be a little police to this GAY PERSON jesus christmas okay 

anyway dont take this too seriously, i legitimately dont care, to only reason i say “i hate victorious” so much is because its annoying how much nostalgia and sentimental attachment i have to it despite it being a show made by a terrible person and and a show that is just generally like. dumb. i think. i dont think its going to win any awards but whatever. it was a huge ploy to get victoria justice’s but mostly ariana grande’s singing careers off the ground i just think about this show with red anger glasses i dont mean to like. insult anyone or be mean to people who genuinely do care about this show because honestly i dont. i honestly could care less. i am just saying words because words are coming out of my brain and i need to say them or i will explode but this time i get to say them in front of a thousand + people so read this thank you

OH BUT STAN THIS SCENE 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5sGxCpf7ns

[barb-aricyawp]

8 people I’d like to know better

I was tagged by @igothroughphasesalot

ONE / name / alias. Barb

TWO / birthday. Jul 9

THREE / zodiac sign. Cancer

FOUR / height. 5′9″ - I know, I know

FIVE / hobbies. hiking, writing, eating

SIX / favourite colors. green

SEVEN / favourite books. 1. IT by stephen king, 2. paradise lost by john milton, 3. fun home by alison bechdel, 4. the book thief by marcus zusak,  5. everything i never told you by celeste ng, 6. the red dragon by thomas harris, 7. call me by your name by andre aciman, 8. i’ll be gone in the dark by michelle mcnamara, 9. the center cannot hold by dr. elyn r. saks, and 10. crush by richard siken

EIGHT / last song listened to. savior by st. vincent

NINE / last film watched. mysterious skins dir. gregg araki

TEN / inspiration for muse. I don’t sleep well, and most nights I lie awake trying to tell myself a story that helps me fall asleep. sometimes that’s sweeping romances. recently, it’s been horrific torture. 

ELEVEN / dream job. trophy wife for my fabulously rich spouse, who adores me and spoils me with their wealth, but has recently been more distant. they have become obsessed with justice and martial arts. sometimes they come home with injuries that they can’t explain. unrelated, a masked vigilante has been protecting our crime ridden city. due to my spouse’s neglect, I develop an interest in investigative journalism that leads me to follow this elusive crusader. we have witty banter and they frequently save me from harm, but I’m devoted to my journalism.

TWELVE / meaning behind your url. I go hard for Walt Whitman

@glitter-cake20, @omgbubblesomg, @i-blame-my-love-of-whump-on-ryan, @glittercrow, @subverbaldreams, @magicaltyphoonlady, @pythagoreanwhump, and @straight-to-the-pain if y’all have time.