#after being made to read one of his essays from the 60s as a requirement in philippine literature class

[maganne-studies]

"My father said it looked very sad: a stairway in a field of ruin, going up to nowhere."

- The Woman Who Had Two Navels by NIck Joaquin

[j-pankratz]

The Slumber that Creeps to Me

Geraskefer. 7208 Words. Rated T.  Jaskier pulls an extreme all-nighter (read: 60+ hours) to finish a paper he procrastinated on, and finds at the end of it that sleep does not come as easily as he’d hoped. Tags for: Sleep Deprivation, Self Destruction/Lack of Self Care, Hallucinations, Nightmares, Overstimulation, Hurt/Comfort, Whumping the Bard, very loving partners, and a happy ending. <3 AO3 link in the reblog!

As with most disasters spurned by his own cockiness, Jaskier felt as thought that all in all, the situation could have been worse.

The idea to have Geralt and Yennefer spend the spring holiday break at Oxenfurt was, in his defense, ingenious. His students weren’t around, the weather was gorgeous, they all had varying degrees of business in the city, and they could fuck each other senseless at any hour of the day. In a bed. A nice one, provided he was a legitimate professor, now. Well, visiting. Well, it was complicated. But they were his rooms, and that’s what mattered.

When Jaskier gotten the prestigious offer to write the season’s main article for the Continent’s most respected Bardic Journal, he’d just sort of figured he’d… fit it in, somewhere. He had seventeen months, which was plenty enough for him. Then he’d just work with the editors, and have a centerfold piece. It was an honor. He was excited about it! He’d meant to get to it sooner, but decided the summer before that he’d devote the winter to it. But… he’d… he’d been distracted. It wasn’t often the entire family gathered at Kaer Morhen. So, he thought, he’d do it later.

But the first few weeks after winter were, of course, spent with Geralt. And the week after that, a trip to the coast, where he’d played a festival and met up with Ciri, who was becoming an amateur critic herself. And then by pure, absolute happenstance, after 3 more weeks of travel he happened to end up at an inn that he definitely hadn’t heard Yennefer was staying at. So that more time gone. And then he’d arrived in Oxenfurt, and he’d really meant to get to work on it, but there was so much to prepare for! He wanted things to be right for them.

And then Yennefer and Geralt had actually arrived, and the idea of anything possibly being more important than their presence flew his mind.

And now, here he was. If he wanted to get it in on time (unfortunately, that wasn’t a suggestion in this case, more of an actual, terrifying requirement,) he’d need to submit it in… gods above, less than three days. 60 hours, if he was doing the math.

There was no word limit, nor a minimum. But, ever the maximalist, he knew it was going to be… long, if he was going to do it right. They’d edit it down, but it was the focal point of the journal, they’d been leading up to it for ages now. Ahh. Well. There was only one thing for it, he supposed.

“I’m working through the night on my paper!” He’d announced that morning, sitting straight up in bed, jostling his sleepy lovers. “No one bother me! I will be at the dining table until further notice!” He swung himself out of bed and made for the door.

“Pants,” his lovers chorused together.

“Right!” he'd said, and marched back into the room.

He’d pulled all-nighters in his youth. In fact, he couldn’t count the times he’d worked through the night, deposited a composition or essay on his professor’s desk with some polite conversation and maybe a wink, and then promptly fallen asleep during the lecture itself. Just a 15-minute power nap, really! Then he’d be back up and at it again, working through another night just to sleep through the weekend. He’d done it before, he could do it again.

Well, it’d been 25 years ago, but that didn’t change much, did it? He still felt spry, agile, hearty— hell, he’d spent the better part of the last twenty odd years chasing after a Witcher, and later an additional princess and mage— surely he should be in better health now!

This was completely accomplishable. Admittedly, he could have written this sooner… but he hadn’t, and here he was.

Geralt and Yennefer both set out early on different errands, leaving the bard to some peace and quiet. Relatively.

He spread his work and references out before him. 7 books, 4 pamphlets, his favorite quills, a hundred fresh pieces of parchments, his lute at his knee. “Alright,” he said aloud to his empty Oxenfurt apartment, “Just sit down and write the damn thing. Sitting part, definitely done. Writing next. Just… write.”

He stared at the page.

“No! No, no, do not be impossible about this. Just start the thing.”

The page stared back.

“Ah, blast,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. This was fine. Just… do the awful, disgusting part of beginning, and then he’d be off. The sooner he started, the sooner he’d finish, after all! He took a breath, and put his pen to paper.

xx

Yennefer returned a few hours later, a book and small parcel in hand. Jaskier looked up to see her sweep through the room, a commanding presence, though she didn’t acknowledge him yet. A few waves of her hands and a pot of tea was put on to boil, her hair was put in a bun, and three mugs were floating down from a shelf.

“Lovely to see you too,” he smiled as Yennefer poked through the tea collection. He could practically hear her fond eye roll. She neatly plucked two from one box and looked back at him in question. “Ah… peppermint, if we’ve got it?” and she turned back to the cupboard grab it.

“Any progress?” She finally asked.

“A bit, actually!” Jaskier said cheerfully. It didn’t look like much, but he’d done half a page with almost no errors, and he’d made plenty of notes in the margins of the books he’d need later. It was better than he’d hoped it’d be going by this point, at least. He was kicking academia’s ass. Or, he would be.

The kettle whistled and Yennefer poured the tea, bobbing all three of the tea bags up and down as they steeped. He watched her lean against the counter, casual, relaxed, gorgeous, before realizing she was staring back at him. “Um! Yes, no, definitely good. Got a lot of… those words, you know, they are definitely here. Looking very sexy. The words! The writing is looking… very sexy, very curvy… letters. Sensuous words, you know.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Sensuous words.”

“Yeah, yes. Like… contemporaneous… and… iguana.”

“Iguana.” She let out a little huff of a laugh and something in Jaskier’s chest tightened and loosened in quick succession. And in a moment she was there, sliding him a large mug with the carving of a rather playful looking bear on one side, batting at a butterfly.

“Oh! My favorite. Thank you, thank you.”

“Mmm,” she said before waving a hand to cool down their tea a bit. She took a seat opposite him, scanning an eye over the table. “Think you’ll be done by tonight?”

Jaskier laughed. “Darling, I’ll be lucky to be done by tomorrow morning.”

“You’re planning to stay up all night, bard?”

“Unfortunately.” He took a sip. “Should be done by tomorrow afternoon, if I keep steady at it.”

“After tea, of course.”

“Of course.”

Yennefer stretched out a bit, kicking her feet onto Jaskier’s lap and rolling her neck. They sat there a moment, sipping, pausing, drinking in each other. There was something nice about taking a moment of stillness with someone just as frenetic as he was, someone who was usually just as itching for something to do, even if she went about it differently. The grace of choosing stillness, he thought, was not something to ignore.

Yennefer reached the end of her mug and tapped its ceramic walls lightly.

“What’s next for you?”

“I have to refresh my potion stock, so I’ll be at the market for supplies. You sure you don’t want to take a break and join?”

Rat’s ass. He fucking loved the Oxenfurt markets. “I’m afraid I can’t. Academia calls.”

“Who does it call for, exactly? What’s that I hear…” She cocked her head and listened intently. “Who is it calling for… is that… V… Val… Valdo?” Jaskier hefted her feet off of his lap in protest, and she laughed. He plucked his quill from its stopper, and went back to hovering over his paper. Introduction mostly accomplished, now he had to really lead in to his point, give some proper context. He flipped through a book beside him.

Yennefer rose smoothly from the table and went to move her mug to the sink. “When Geralt gets in, tell him I need toadflax and bluebells from him? Might as well put him to use.”

Jaskier flipped through the pages, thumbing through for a note he’d sworn he’d made ages ago, when he belatedly tried to register his mage’s words. He could have his fun, too.

“Blue…Yennefer, you want me to tell Geralt that you need blue balls from him?”

“Bells! Bells, you absolute child!” she said. “Honestly. Blue balls? Really, Jaskier?” He was giggling. “I don’t need to ask to give either of you blue balls.”

“Exactly, Yennefer, you provide that service for us anyway, free of charge!” A balled-up napkin hit him in the head and he laughed joyfully.

“I can’t stand you. I’m leaving, you’ll never see me again.”

Jaskier looked up through his grin and met her twinkling, happy eyes. “Tonight then?”

“Tonight,” she agreed, and left with a quick ruffle of his hair.

xx

“Still working?” Geralt said as greeting later in the afternoon. The desk was neater than Jaskier expected it to be this far in, only a few books open, dog eared and marked in colored ink. He’d written a page and a half since Yennefer left, and it was good, it was, but he’d need to go back and make edits later. His long empty mug of tea sat far across him.

“Mm,” he agreed, continuing to write. “Ah, Yennefer came through earlier,” giving a gesture to the waiting mug of tea on the counter. Geralt made his way over to the mug, and gave it a small igni to warm it. He smiled fondly down at the drink—what a terribly lovely sight he was. Warm here, and safe. Couldn’t it be like this always? The three of them here, comfortable and happy? No, he supposed, but gods how he wanted it.

“She’s at the market now,” Jaskier continued, “wanted me to ask you about...” He lifted his pen and squinted. “Ah, toadflax and bluebells.” He looked up at Geralt, smiling. “Blue balls,” they said together, sporting matching shit-eating grins, Geralt’s albeit much smaller. “I made the same joke myself,” Jaskier added.

Geralt snorted. “How’d she take that?”

“Oh, as well as you’d hope. We’ll never see her again, of course.” He turned back to his work, reading over the last paragraph. He could feel Geralt approach to stand behind him, and while he’d normally shoo his witcher off, he was too deep in concentration to bother.

How long was too long to linger on the progression of oral storytelling to bardship? It’s not like he could ignore it, (Geralt’s hand came to grip his shoulder, a thumb rubbing against it tenderly) as it was a crucial tenant of the argument— but there was plenty to be said for assuming the literacy and foreknowledge of the reader. (He leaned in to get a closer look at Jaskier’s page, the soft warmth of the tea in his other hand bouncing off his chest) But this was to be in a journal often referenced by first years, and he knew how much he would have loved a paper that had everything all in one—

“How’s it going?” Geralt asked softly in his ear.

Jaskier waved a hand over the mess before him. “You know. It’s fine, I’m just not sure at what point I’m lingering on points to excess.”

“Mm,” Geralt hummed understandingly. “Tell the story. Trust your gut.” He gave Jaskier a nuzzle and light kiss against his cheek before taking up the empty mug off the table and walking off further into the apartment.

“I always do!” Jaskier called back. Mm, if only this were as simple as telling a story. Well…Oh—if he spent this paragraph referencing the progression it would end up taking up more room, be a run of the mill lead-in, but if he wrote the actual history as a short story itself, now there was an idea, he could make his point and give the context. Oh, fuck, brilliant—

“Back soon,” Geralt was saying as the front door slipped shut, but the bard was too lost in his work to do more than give a small nod of his head.

The sun was falling, making a graceful bow into the horizon. Warm light spread out over the streets of Oxenfurt like the last pushes of tide, ebbing, and flowing, and sinking back into night.

“Ah, fuck,” Jaskier muttered, crossing out a spelling error with a snarl.

His shoulders ached, and his lower back was going to be the death of him. He was on page 7. All he could see was the work ahead of him, winding off ad infinitum. If he didn’t pick up the pace, he might have to go 60 hours straight—he shivered. Not ideal. He took a breath, stood up and stretched a bit, his muscles groaning in thanks. A quick bathroom break later and he was sliding back into his chair, still warm, his papers grinning up at him, sardonic.

He’d take a meal break at 10 pages, he told himself.

He stood to stretch and his head swam. Well. Plenty of reason to stay seated, he supposed.

Geralt and Yennefer returned at 12 and a half pages. He turned his head in greeting, and when he looked back he got the first real look at the table in hours—it was a disaster, crumbled pieces of parchment, empty quills, and little notes strewn everywhere. Some books propped open, the pile of parchment looking more like a mountain slope, an empty glass from when he’d chugged water hours ago.

His loves were clearly a few drinks deep as they came through the door, and completely unmarred by the woes of academia. Bastards, honestly.

“Hi, hello, hope you had a good evening, I—”

“Come to bed,” Yennefer said, suddenly right behind him. Two small but firm hands came to his shoulders, rubbing deeply.

“Ah! Oh, fuck—oh, yes, darling, right there—”

Geralt came to his other side, tipping his head up for a kiss, which he moaned into. His witcher’s tongue was soft, pleading, tempting him—his mage’s hands pushing almost painfully against his aching muscles. He wanted to cry, it was so good. It was so different than the last… however many hours it had been that he had been sitting here. Geralt pulled away, and Yennefer’s hands came to rest as well.

“So?” Geralt asked, his voice deep and velvety. “Bed?”

“I…” gods, who had he become? “I can’t. I want to, I just—”

Yennefer placed a kiss to the top of his head. “It’s fine,” she said, and he knew it was, but he hated denying them something they all wanted. “Have you eaten?”

Jaskier frowned. “Fuck. Not really.”

Geralt sighed and went to the pantry. “You’re getting a sandwich,” he grumbled.

“Ooo, Geralt, dear heart, would you heat it up? Use some of your,” he wiggled his fingers “your witchery magic?”

Geralt turned and glared. “You’re getting a sandwich.”

“He’s so mean to me,” Jaskier muttered to Yennefer, “I can’t believe he’s so mean to me.”

His mage snorted a laugh into his hair. “You’re really staying up all night, then?” She waved a hand and the curtains around the room swept shut, and his lantern began to burn steadily.

“Looks like it,” he sighed. Geralt retuned a moment later, plated warm sandwich and glass of water in hand.

“Fuck. Thank you.” He took it and took a bite, suddenly ravenous. He looked up at both of them, staring down in fond amusement. “Fank—” he swallowed his mouthful of sandwich. “Thank you both, truly. I’ll be up a bit. If you need something, call, yes?”

They rolled their eyes. “He tells us to call if we need anything,” Yennefer muttered. “Don’t get into any trouble,” she said, and with a peck on the cheek from both of them, they disappeared into the bedroom.

He looked back at his work.

Okay. 12 ½ pages in. He could do this.

x

At 15 pages, he felt ravenous again, and made a second sandwich. Not as good as Geralt’s. Geralt’s sandwiches weren’t even that good, but they were made by Geralt, which added a certain kick, a novelty he adored.

He drank another glass of water and shook his head. Back to work.

At 17 pages, sometimes the world swam before him. He gripped the edge of the table. Fuck.

He was so tired. 23 pages. He kept writing.

It was terrible. The whole paper was a mess. Nothing made sense and people were going to laugh at him. 25 pages.

He heard a sound. Was that Geralt rising for the bathroom? Was it an intruder? Light crept in through the window. 27 pages.

There was a ringing in his ear. His writing was getting increasingly larger. 27 ½ pages.

Geralt gave him a soft nuzzle to the top of his head before padding through to the kitchen. Jaskier’s heart ached. His bones ached. Writing was hard but right then it felt impossible. 27 ¾ pages.

Geralt lingered, and Jaskier felt his nose twitch. He tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for him to leave. He couldn’t have any distractions right now. He shut his eyes tight until he heard the bedroom door close once more.

Yennefer entered hours later, sweeping the curtains over with a flick of her hand. Bright light flooded the room, painting the desk in all its full, disgustingly messy glory. “Well—”

“Could you ask next time?!” Jaskier snapped. “Some of us need consistency to concentrate!”

Yennefer raised an eyebrow, and they stared at each other. Some part of him wanted to slap himself but the rest was just so irritated. Who’d she think she was, anyway?

After a moment, the mage turned and left with a flick of her hand to sweep the curtains shut again.

“Headed out,” Geralt said at 30 pages. “Contract.”

“Good,” Jaskier muttered. “I mean. Good that you’re—fuck. Whatever.”

Geralt stared. “You need rest. It’s been more than 24 hours.”

“I need to fucking finish.”

“Yen said—”

“I’m sure she did,” Jaskier muttered, driving his heels into his eyes. Gods, his eyes burned. Silence hung.

“She portaled out this morning.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes. “Great. Love that. I’m a fucking disaster, thank you for the reminder, Geralt.” He waved toward the door. “Don’t you have a contract?”

He turned back to his papers, shifting around to look for page 11, and didn’t think about how long it took before Geralt left the apartment.

His hand was shaking but he was at 34 pages. He still had so much to say. Fuck. But he was in it now.

He scarfed down some soup that was mostly broth at some point, and he’d under-salted it, but it was something. His eyes kept going blurry; traitorous things.

The bear on his mug was plotting his downfall.

38 pages and Jaskier felt like the gods themselves had gifted him with the knowledge he now bestowed onto meager commoners. He was a genius.

At 43 pages, he had stopped to lay out the entire essay on the ground, so he could see it all. The words sometimes swam before him, and he had trouble remembering what he was meant to say next. Once, he looked up, confused as to where he was. And then, at 44 pages, the guilt of snapping at his dearest loves, the weight of this behemoth paper he wasn’t even sure he could finish, and his own self-doubt crept in and seized him up, leaving him breathless and in tears for… awhile. Everything hurt. He had to keep going.

At 48 pages, he saw a griffon fly through his window, and he named it Kalvin. He turned whatever color Jaskier wanted him to turn, which was very considerate of him. Kalvin was his only friend now, and with a little convincing, might become his editor, too.

At 55 pages his chest seized, and it was hard to breathe for a moment. He closed his eyes but—no, no, couldn’t do that. If he fell asleep now, he’d never finish in time. He tried to relax, got some water, leaned against the counter. Everything was a mess.

He sat back on the floor, his work around him. Keep going.

“I don’t think there’s anything about anything that I have to be doing right now. Kalvin, you’ve… you’ve got to understand, this could be my finest work! It’s good. It’s pretty good here in… in this part, here. In that other part it’s just okay, but that’s why you come in with your big claws and you’re gonna. Rip up the bad parts. Don’t rip up the good parts. Right? Yeah. Do you think they’ve forgotten about me by now?”

He looked down. 57 pages. Took a long blink.

“Yeah,” he said softly, “That’s fair.

He had to write two extra pages so that he could skirt around referencing Valdo Marx’s work as anything other than a contradictory point. Maybe it would have been fun to use his own writing against him but he didn’t want to give the satisfaction of being referenced positively in a centerfold piece.

He lost the essay.

“Fuck—oh, gods, where did—”

He turned around, looked down. Oh, there it was.

“Thank fuck.”

The curtains were still closed and the charmed lantern was still burning, but Jaskier knew it was night by the time he reached 63 pages and Geralt came in.

Jaskier looked up from his spot kneeling on the floor. Geralt looked fine. He was a little dirty. There were some gushy bits. Probably blood. He was tired. Or just mad. Maybe he hated Jaskier.

“You’re still—?!” Geralt asked, looking at Jaskier like he’d just said a griffon named Kalvin had flown in the window earlier and now they were friends.

“I met a griffon,” Jaskier heard himself say. Geralt stared. “We’re friends now.”

“…You need to fucking sleep.”

“No.” Jaskier went back to the margin he’d devoted to drawing circles in. “Sorry ‘bout earlier.”

Geralt sighed. He might have talked but Jaskier didn’t hear, just kept writing.

“How often has that been happening?” he heard Geralt ask.

“What happening?”

“Where you fall asleep for a moment.”

“I haven’t! Fallen asleep.”

“Fuck,” Geralt said. He looked very nice, except for the goop all over him. Well. Even that wasn’t so bad, when the underneath bits were Geralt. His Geralt. Looked so warm, so strong, so able to carry him.

“Later,” Jaskier replied, and went back to his words. The familiar pop of a portal sounded in the bedroom. Their eyes lingered on the direction it came from, but Yennefer didn’t open the door. They looked at each other, and then back at the door which remained very much shut. “She’s mad.”

“Yep.”

“At me.”

“Yep.”

There was a pause. “Are you covered in blood?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Oh.”

“Not mine.”

“That,” he said pointing to the Witcher, “is good.”

“Mmm.”

“Sticky though.”

“Definitely sticky.”

Yennefer came out of the doorway, and Jaskier blinked. When he opened his eyes again she was much closer than she’d been and was in the middle of talking. Magic, he assumed.

“—yourself very lucky, bard.”

“Yeahh,” he said. “Sorry. ‘Bout… Sorry.”

She huffed and crossed her arms. There was a look in her face. Eyes? And her mouth. It was hard to name. Words were hard, when they weren’t the words he desperately needed to write.

“—for a while,” Geralt was saying. “Jaskier. How close are you to finishing.”

“Soon!” Jaskier said. “Soon! Soon. Due… 1pm tomorrow. What time is it?”

“10pm.”

“Fuck. Psshhh. I can… I can do it.” He looked up at Yennefer. “Sorry. Really. I… I’m just tired,” he admitted. “Shouldn’t have snapped. Not fair to you.”

Yennefer stood there, arms folded, emanating some emotion Jaskier had lost the concept of around page 41. Geralt walked further into the apartment, into the bedroom. Oh right. Blood armor. Ick.

He went back to writing and tried to ignore the desire to cry again, and then suddenly Yennefer’s shoes were in his line of vision.

“Let me read it,” she said.

“Oh.”

They stared at one another. She had such a pretty face. He might have been smiling. She rolled her eyes and then came to sit next to him. She quickly found the first page and began.

Halfway through it, he spilled ink on the bottom half of page 64, and wept. Yennefer gave him an attempt at a comforting pat on the back.

Yennefer had read the pages and risen; “It’s good. You need edits, but it’s somehow decent. Good. Whatever. A little… loose, toward the end, though,” made herself a cup of tea, and entered the bedroom.

Either a few moments, or 20 minutes later, Geralt emerged.

“What are you at now?”

“69 pages.”

“Nice,” Geralt said.

“Ha. Yeahhh,” Jaskier agreed.

“That’s not what I—” Geralt sighed the sigh that meant his face was going all pinch-y. “Close to the end?”

“Mmm. What is the end, really?” Geralt made a different pinch-y face. “Soon.”

“Come to bed tonight, Jaskier.”

“I’ll try,” he said. He blinked, and Geralt was gone.

There are a lot of words in an essay that are very hard to spell.

Jaskier ate the rest of a loaf of bread.

For a while, he swore he walked the streets of Oxenfurt while still warm in his professorial housing.

Kalvin’s accent changed three times and at one point he was on fire.

85 pages.

Geralt woke first, as always; There he was! That was his love. So much of his heart.

With shaking hands, Jaskier had brought himself up to sit in his chair, and sat staring down at his work. He looked up at Geralt with a lopsided grin. “I did it,” he said weakly.

“Need help putting it together?”

The tears fell so quickly he didn’t realize it was happening. “Really?”

Geralt sighed softly and knelt down, organizing the papers.

Yennefer emerged a bit later—There she was! His love, a chunk of him was hers entirely. He smiled. “Look!”

“Mmm. And now you can sleep.”

“NO!” Jaskier cried and leapt to his feet, “No, no, now… now is presenting time. To… the editors. Not Kalvin. But I turn it in… and then sleep,”

He had a sudden burst of energy, and tried to step over Geralt and the papers, but fell into the table instead, before the Witcher steadied him from below.

“Ohhhh, thank you dear. It’s time for… presentation! Mm.” He leaned into Yennefer’s warmth at his side, though she did not wrap her arms around him as he’d hoped. “Help me pick out an outfit.”

He blinked. Yennefer was in front of him now, looking at him with a frown, her hands around his waist. Geralt’s hand was against his forehead. “No! Stop that! I’m fine. I’m fine! See me! Fine. It’s action time. Let’s go!” and he marched off to the bedroom.

The floor was suddenly very close to his face.

“Did I—”

“You fell on your face.”

“Have I—”

“You’ve asked three times now, yes.”

There should have been fanfare when he turned it in, but there was only the grateful smile of Edmond, the young new assistant, a firm handshake, and a promise he’d hear back from them very soon, for a quick summarization of their initial thoughts. Or, he’d used all those words, Jaskier forgot which order they’d come in.

The three returned to the apartment, and everything happened very slowly and so quickly he found it hard to keep track. There was definitely a bath drawn for him—gods, it had been days, hadn’t it— oh, fuck, he was gross, wasn’t he—a full meal, and a celebratory drink. He’d made a few good jokes, and all he could see were Geralt and Yennefer, smiling at him. An empty glass. A bar of soap. A long quill. A messy table. A pile of books and an empty mug. They deposited him on the bed for sleep, and left together.

Jaskier lay there, waiting for sleep to take him.

It did not.

He was so tired he could cry. He did, a few times. He couldn’t think straight. All of it, everything, hurt. His body ached. He tried to soothe himself down alone, rocking himself in the hopes it would work. But nothing.

What if he could never sleep again? What if he would always be awake, forever? What if this was how he died?! Oh gods, he didn’t want to die! He still had edits to approve!

Eventually, he could feel himself getting closer. He adjusted himself, lay on his back and took deep, measured breaths, kept his eyes closed but relaxed. Okay. Okay. Sleep.

He was falling, so violently and so fast that when he jolted awake, he forgot he’d been lying on a bed in the first place.

Fuck.

He tried again. It happened sometimes, it was fine. He’d be fine.

He tried breathing deeply once more, trying to let the distant scents of Yennefer and Geralt now embedded in his pillows overtake him.

A fear so powerful it gripped his heart and twisted, whispered to him, ‘this is what dying is, you’re going to die’ and he once again jolted awake. He threw his head back against the pillow and winced; even that hurt.

Fuck. Fuck.

He kept trying. Over, and over, he’d get so close to sleep and then right at the precipice, something would yank him out of it.

Once, he saw Yennefer falling off a cliff. Another time, he saw Geralt stabbed through the chest. At some point, he saw Ciri screaming, and his hands flew out to pull her close, only to find nothing there. Sometimes it was himself falling, and sometimes it was the world below him falling instead.

He’d really done it this time. Stayed awake so long, sleep had abandoned him entirely.

It felt like twelve years before Yennefer and Geralt returned, slipping into the room quietly. He sat up in bed, startling them both.

“Please,” he said quietly, “I can’t. I don’t know why I can’t I just—I can’t. My body won’t let me, I want to but I can’t—”

“How the hell—” Yennefer started, walking over to him with a palm out to check for a curse, maybe? It didn’t matter. He wrapped her hand in his and clutched it to himself, desperate for her. She was so warm. So alive.

“Fuck,” Geralt sighed, “It’s been nearly 70 hours already, Jaskier.”

“Let me just put him down with magic,” Yennefer started, but Geralt put a hand up.

“We can’t. It’s a temporary fix. if he can’t fall asleep on his own without magic, it’ll get harder and harder for him. We need to get him to fall asleep without it.” They looked down at him. What a disgrace he must look like, how pathetic he was. He turned his face away in abject shame. He couldn’t even fall asleep right.

While he looked away, Yennefer tore her hand from his as she and Geralt discarded their clothes into heaps beside the bed, crawled beneath the covers on either side of Jaskier. They hated him. They must. How could they not?

“It’s fine, you don’t—fuck, sorry—”

Geralt shrugged. “Don’t be. I know how bad it gets. It’s different for a Witcher, but no sleep is the whole reason we met Yennefer.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jaskier said softly.

“As I recall, the solution then was to have vigorous sex on the floor.” Yennefer ran a finger along Jaskier’s chest. “Sound appealing?”

“I—yes, Yennefer, it sounds appealing.” He fidgeted, tried to focus on the feeling of Yennefer’s delicate touch. He was oversensitive enough that it felt like fire, but nothing… stirred, and each word he spoke felt like he was pulling honey from his tongue. “I don’t… much as I’d like, I’m not sure I’d be... up for it right now.” Yennefer’s head fell against the pillow and she flattened her hand, ran the palm up his chest to rest above his heart. Pressed a kiss there.

He closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply, but they were looking at him, he could feel every inch of their gazes and it was all too much. He whined in agony. “I can’t do this. Fuck. I can’t, just put me out. We try it again tomorrow, I—”

“Jaskier. You can. Tell us what you need and we can help you,” Yennefer said, sweet but firm. And that was her, wasn’t it?

He couldn’t think. Wanted to. Wanted so much. Wanted to be asleep.

Jaskier curled up on his side, exhausted of being exhausted, when he felt Geralt slide up closer behind him. “Can I hold you?” he murmured into the bard’s shoulder. Jaskier nodded, and felt Geralt’s arm come around him and under his own arm, felt it slide up his chest and cross it protectively.

“Feel good?” Jaskier nodded, and then cracked his eyes open, met Yennefer’s, concern palpable.

He lifted one arm just slightly. “C’mere?” And she did, curled into his arms and around him, tucked her head under his, kissed the top of Geralt’s fingers. He held her close, and was held by the two in turn. Breathing, somehow, felt easier between them.

“Breathe, bard,” Yennefer urged him softly. Geralt buried his nose in Jaskier’s hair, took in a deep breath, and Jaskier tried to follow.

They breathed softly, all together, slow and safe. Soon, he was drifting into sweet oblivion.

‘You,’ Fear said, wrapped around his sternum, ‘will crumble, the moment you let go of wakefulness.’ It gripped him, and tugged him back to reality.

He jolted again. “Fuck, dammit, cock wringing—”

Yennefer pulled back to look at him worriedly. “Is that what’s been keeping you up?” she asked.

“It’s, I don’t know, something just pulls me back, I try to fight it but…”

“Mmm,” Geralt agreed. “Sleep starts. Happens sometimes.”

“The hell are sleep starts?”

“They’re… when you’re too on edge to sleep, or just haven’t in too long, brains… fizzle. Keep you awake. It’s a survival instinct—it makes you think you’ve got to stay awake to stay alive. Feels like falling? Or… a shock. Sometimes other things. Hallucinations.” Geralt pressed a kiss to the back of his head. “It’s scary. It’s meant to be. Your body thinks it’s fighting for its life.”

“I am never letting you doom yourself like this ever again,” Yennefer said, and while it was probably meant to come out angry, she just sounded worried.

Geralt hummed and agreement. “Try again, we’ve got you. We’re not letting go.” Jaskier took a breath. They had him. They had him.

Yennefer lifted a hand to Jaskier’s temple. “May I?” And he let her in, easier than breathing. She gave him Ciri laughing, wind chimes on the breeze, the soft roar of the coast. Geralt hugged him tight, ran his other hand through Jaskier’s hair, tried to keep the bard’s breathing aligned. Now, what had he ever done to earn these two?

Soon, sleep came to him again, and he could feel Yennefer ready to soothe anything that came for him in his mind, Geralt ready to defend against anything that dared hurt his resting body. The darkness crept in, and he felt peace.

Geralt was reaching for him, falling, bleeding, screaming.

“FUCK!”

“Shh,” the real Geralt hushed him. “We’ve got you.”

“Fuck, there’s got to be something else,” Yennefer groaned. “What’ve you tried so far?”

“I have tried… to fall asleep.”

Yennefer and Geralt both huffed small laughs. “No. Positions—”

“Only the good ones.”

“Meditating?” Geralt asked.

“Darling, I haven’t had a thought in my head in hours. This is meditation.”

“Drugs?” Yennefer asked.

“I will try the drugs!” Jaskier said with a drowsy cheerfulness, as Geralt replied “No drugs. No.”

“Ugh,” Jaskier groaned, and shifted to lie on his stomach. Oh. This was… better. He nestled into the pillows, and a soft contented sigh drifted from him.

“That feel better?” Geralt asked as he ran a hand up and down Jaskier’s back. “Mmm,” Jaskier replied. Yennefer’s hand joined Geralt over his chest. Oh, they were going to make him cry.

And then it was too much, too much feeling, like his brain couldn’t handle all the sensation, and he felt Yennefer come to pause, and a moment later, Geralt’s hand as well. ‘That better?’ Yennefer asked in his mind. Jaskier gave her the memory of his favorite hug with her, warm and happy as her legs wrapped around his waist, and his favorite with Geralt, crushing and firm and full of too many emotions to speak aloud.

“Could…” he said softly, “Just. Talk? Not to me. Just… to each other. Just wanna hear you.” He could almost hear their smiles, and felt as they settled in on the pillows beside him, arms and hands intertwining on his back. Yennefer’s head on his shoulder, the gentle planes of Geralt’s chest on his other side. “If you need us, Yennefer and I are here. We’ve got you. You’re safe.”

He nodded into the mattress, cool and soft below him.

“Goodnight, Jaskier.”

“G’night Yennefer.”

“Goodnight, Jaskier.”

"G’night, Geralt.”

He started to fade into oblivion, but stopped himself before he got too far. Not fear, not anxiety, a conscious stopping. Somewhere above him, Geralt was telling Yennefer about the contract from… sometime in the past few days, and Yennefer was telling her own story about some town gossip with a woman and her hens, which, it might have been a metaphor, but he’d basically forgotten what those were by now. He breathed deeply, felt their words flow through him, and when he felt brave enough, he let go, trusting they would catch him.

He could have sworn he heard wind chimes, somewhere.

x

The small amount of light filtering in through the curtains was golden when he awoke. His head both ached and felt light as a feather, his muscles screamed and cried but half of it was in relief. He gave a small stretch and yawned. “G’morning,” an amused Geralt said to him, lounging in a chair he’d brought beside the bed, reading a book. His legs were propped up on the bed beside the bard’s and Jaskier stretched to bump their toes together.

“What time…?”

“You slept 13 hours.”

“Fuck.”

“You probably need more.”

“Yeahhhh.”

“Feel alright?”

“Like a real human being,” he said. “Hungry, though.”

“Mmm.”

Yennefer slipped in the door, but, noticing Jaskier was awake, rose a hand. “May I?” she asked, voice dripping in sarcasm, gesturing to the curtains.

“You may,” Jaskier offered, covering his face with his hands. “Ohhhh, gods, how bad was I?”

“Genuinely awful,” Yennefer said, as Geralt was saying, “There’s been worse.”

“Normally I’d withhold this,” the mage said, withdrawing a small envelope from her pocket. “But, under the circumstances…” she cleared her throat.

“To one Julian Alfred Pankratz. We were extremely pleased to receive your manuscript yesterday afternoon. Our editors are will have their notes to you by the weekend, but we wanted to reach out and extend our most sincere compliments on your work. It is—oh, a flood of adjectives, I’m skipping these. Etcetera, etcetera, sucking your dick, etcetera alright, here—and meticulous in construction. We can tell,” Yennefer said, dragging out the final sentence, “you made good use of your year of writing time to complete the work.” Jaskier and Geralt by this point were holding back true howls of laughter.

“And won’t you believe it, there’s more. Ahem; we have a number of suggestions and questions already, but encourage you to get your well-deserved rest as we prepare our feedback. We are grateful to work with you, and thank you again for your stunning entry. There’s a postscript,” Yennefer added. “As a quick and personal note, we cannot have helped but notice the nature of your penmanship; we mean no offence, but would encourage you to see a doctor of the eye to fit you with some spectacles.”

“My—my penman…? What’d—” and Yennefer, who had clearly been waiting for this moment, brought out a rather crumpled piece of parchment with an ink stain at the bottom—ah, yes, the original page 64— and showed it to him. His eyes were… gods, they were aching, but he was clear minded enough now to see that each line had become at least twice it’s normal size. The lines were far from straight, dipping and bending toward the edge of the paper, the letters changed directions at random points, and a fair amount of the words were smudged so completely they were hard to make out.”

Jaskier stared in horror.

“They. Is that. Is that what it looked like? Really?”

“It’s worse than most of the ones that made it in,” Geralt said, carefully.

“Most?!”

“You drew pictures on one of them,” Yennefer said.

“Oh my god. They…they must…”

“Adore it, clearly,” Yennefer said, setting aside the paper. “It wasn’t worth the strain, and you’ve definitely firmly embarrassed yourself, but they’re either embarrassing themselves by fawning praise on you,” she said, sliding onto the bed, “Or you’re actually just… very knowledgeable and talented, even when addled by sleep deprivation.”

There was a pause, Jaskier soaking this in; it hadn’t been worth it, exactly, but it wasn’t all bad. In fact, it was quite good, and Yennefer was complimenting him outright, so, very good.

“Or both,” Geralt added.

“Definitely both,” Yennefer agreed.

Jaskier groaned. “You can’t be mean to me. You’re in my house and I am extremely tired, which means that you, by law, must kiss me and tell me nice things about myself.”

Geralt laughed, light and free, and Yennefer slunk slower down into the bed. “You get no kisses,” she said, “You get sleep and rest.” She grabbed a pillow from under her head and plopped it delicately onto Jaskier’s face.

“Boo,” Jaskier said, muffled beneath the thing. He closed his eyes. Geralt muttered something, and Yennefer gave a snort of laughter, and then there was silence.

“Are you two kissing up there?!”

More silence.

“UGH,” he groaned, and sunk into his soft, sweet mattress. Oh, beautiful mattress. How he adored it, how he adored his two loves on top of it. He listened to their kissing, soft, and sweet, and knew he’d join them soon. But it was so warm down here. Even as one of them removed the pillow, he could only bring himself to open his eyes for a moment, to see them both leaning to kiss his face gently, before returning to each other. He took a long, deep breath, and listened to them swirl around him, until all he could feel was their love and the sweet caress of his pillow.

[skgway]

1823 Aug., Fri. 15

6

11 55/60

1/4 hour in the stable and about – Reading some detached pieces in “a help to elocution” a 12mo [duodecimo] volume of mine that was my first aunt Lister’s vide page 306 et sequentes very good “on convenversation” –

From 8 1/4 to 9 1/2, just looking at Samouelle page 44 the seven Linnæn orders and examining their etymologies in my Greek lexicon, and then turned to my little “Dictionary of natural history” 18mo [octodecimo] London 1815 and reading over the 28 pages (introductory) of Definitions – vide page 12 the 7 Linnæan orders of insects –

Wrote the above of this morning and went down to breakfast at 9 40/60 – At 10 1/2 drove my aunt to Northgate where we staid some time (a while strap was mending at Furnishs’s) called at Whitley’s, then left my aunt, and called at the Saltmarshes – Mrs. R– [Rawson] of Stony Royde came in for a few minutes – and Mr. C[hristopher] Saltmarshe –

Sat altogether 35 minutes with E[mma] S[altmarshe] – (from 11 25/60 to 12) – My aunt then stopt called for me (did not get out) in the gig, I drove her to King X [cross], then turned down by Saville hill, and Shay, and drove along the skircoat green road on to and round the moor, returned by Saville hill and North parade and got home at 1 1/2 –

Having met Mr. W[illiam] Priestley’s servant, desired him to tell his mistress I would drink tea with her this afternoon – In the stable from 1 1/2 to 2 3/4, and then came upstairs – Wrote the last 5 lines – Looking into my “dictionary of natural history” – vide page 18 definitions “Female” . . . . . “a being generating within itself, receiving its name from thence in contradiction from the male, who engenders in another” –

Sent George this morning with my card to Miss Pickford having written on it, that I was going to drink tea at Lightcliffe this evening, and not to run any risk of not being at home a 2nd evening when she came and begged she we might see her tomorrow or Sunday or Monday –

The S– [Saltmarshe]s shewed me a large (15 guinea size) excellent, and most pleasing likeness of their mother Mrs. Saltmarshe, done by Freeman, an American artist, from New York also a most striking (tho’ not quite so pleasing because too entirely a front view of the face) likeness of Mrs. Rawson of Stony Royde, the same size as the other – I wish M– [Mariana] could sit to this artist – He is still in H–x [Halifax], but going to Manchester, thence to London –

From 4 1/4 to 4 3/4 just skimmed over from page 74 to 117 Samouelle’s Entomology – Dined at 5 – At 6 25/60 put Percy in the gig, and drove to Lightcliffe – Mr. W[illiam] P– [Priestley] not at home – Spent a pleasant evening – Got there at 7, came away at 9 39/60 and got home at 10 5/60 – Very confidential sort of conversation. 

Speaking of my father, said I had never taken a meal at Northgate since he lived there. That he spoke very provincially and my manner shewed that I thought him vulger. Speaking of our using a metal teapot. She said ours was the last house where she would have expected this sort of thing. She always fancied we had everything quite proper. I said my au[n]t would keep a house of mine very differently from one of my uncle’s. He was very amiable, but sometimes a little nattering and required some management. ‘Ah,’ said she. ‘How little one knows people.’ 

She told me of a speech I had made to her some years ago, namely that she was unsuited to the society here from alffa to omega, which she had then taken to mean that I wondered at her marrying Mr. Priestley. I explained this away but said honestly I was surprised at her marrying anyone so soon after her attachment to her cousin at Leeds etc. The world said she had jilted him etc. etc. She explained it had cost her a great deal, perhaps all her present ill health, but they understood one another. 

If he could have gone to India she would have been there now. Mr. Priestley knew all this. Her brother had told she refused him two or three times but he persevered. Her friends, her father wished her to marry him. At first she did not feel towards him as she ought, but she did. Now she was quite happy and persisted in insinuating that she now felt the same sort of feeling towards him, the same strength of regard she felt towards her first love. 

I said it was s[u]rely impossible, but she would have it so, and I said ‘well, if I must believe it I never was more astonished in my life.’ Knew the sort of disposition that would entirely suit her. It was not quite Mr. P[riestley]’s. She was capable off a greater degree of happiness.  No, she thought not –

Rain from about 11 1/2 to 2 1/2 afterwards fine afternoon and evening – E [three dots, treating venereal complaint] O [one dot, signifying little discharge] used only cold water – Came upstairs at 11

A Help to Elocution: Containing Three Essays ... : to which is Added a Very Large Collection of Examples, in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Best Authors, for the Exercise of the Scholar in Reading and Declaiming ... [x]

[rmichaelwahlquist]

Juilliard is the tip of the iceberg. If Juilliard grads are struggling to find work – coming from one of the the most prestigious and well funded programs in the country, with some of the most high profile instructors – imagine the job prospects of all the state school grads. It's hard to imagine any scenarios where potential employers are going to take a ***** State University candidate over someone from Juilliard.

What follows may be my longest tumblr essay ever, buckle up for a ride through the perils of music education and a few ideas and solutions along the way!

And yet music programs around the country continue to expand the number of students in their programs – more students is after all in best interest of the institution (more students=more funding) – somehow without much regard to the hard numbers of how well these graduates will do in their careers.

Now, I work in music education and I readily acknowledge that changing this system is like changing the course of a glacier. For over two hundred years the higher education system in music has focused on a relatively narrow range of topics and techniques to train musicians. Berlioz's irreverent send-up of scholastic fugues during the finale of his 1830 Symphonie Fantastique is just one early example of students rankling at the limits of what was taught in school.

And for the first hundred or so years of the conservatory system (the 1800s), especially when it came to orchestral musicians, the product generally matched the demand - well trained musicians to play the music of the times.

On the other hand, I defend the traditional idea that not everything about a music education in a university has to be about job preparedness. For example, whether or not a musician teaches music history or theory for their career, I believe they should be well rounded and have a knowledge of those things. I tell my students: you want to be the whole package. And no matter what innovations come in music education, it would seem unquestionable that certainly the program should train musicians in excellent technique and performance.

I don't have the answers. I wish I did. I wish every person who wants to make music for a living could go to college and leave prepared to have an enjoyable, reliably profitable career in making the music that makes them happy. But right off the bat if you want to make pop (or any popular genre of) music or video game music or movie music – most university programs can hardly begin to help you with that. While some few specialized programs exist, you've really got to be the cream of the crop in the first place to even get your foot in those doors.

But where are the musicians making the money today? What skills do they have that enable them to make this living? And why does a music education have so little to do with either of those answers?

Many first year music students are surprised and disappointed to find that unless they want to be a band conductor, an orchestra musician, or a private instructor, being a music major may not be for them. And indeed it may not be! Many of the 20th century's and now 21st century's most wealthy and successful musicians became so without a formal music education behind them. Same for many of the ones who, while not wealthy, are working in studios and in live gigs with a steady income. Talent, work and creativity have always mattered a lot more in music than a piece of paper from an institution.

I have been wondering lately whether all of this really boils down to the fallout from the invention of recording technology over a century ago. Prior to the age of recordings, western musical notation had had a thousand years to develop and influence the way music was made, performed, and disseminated. Simply put, if you wanted to write, share, or perform music widely, then written music notation was pretty much the only way to do so. The accumulation of this tradition lead to the heights of late 19th century romanticism and the dawn of musical modernism. It's a staggering artistic achievement for humanity, no doubt about it, and it was all made possible because each generation could build on the written tradition of the previous one.

However, the advent of audio recordings abruptly interrupted (and/or accelerated) this progression/fragmentation. The need for creating and reading sheet music has gone from being universal to being niche - as long as the song can be performed, it can be recorded. The middle-man of notation no longer has a monopoly. This has led to the rise of new genres and commercial aspects of music that have fluctuated with the changing times and technology.

Jazz is an interesting case – an entirely new musical genre whose rise I would credit to recording and broadcast technology. Suddenly you didn't have to have tickets to an exclusive venue, training at a fancy school, or even the sheet music. You copied and learned from what you heard on the radio or recordings. You learned right from the best, right in the comfort of your home. You got playing experience doing live gigs. The genre evolved rapidly from Jelly Roll Morton to Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington to Charlie Parker to Miles Davis to John Coltrane in just a few decades, becoming a well established and vibrant musical language – so well established that it can now retroactively enter higher music education. Those early jazzers would be quite amused, I think, that you can now (as I once did) get a degree in jazz.

Unfortunately, the same effect may be happening to Jazz education as happened to classical music education – the education becomes more about preserving the past than about keeping the music itself alive. (Have you heard some of the things the best jazz musicians are doing today? It is as far from even the wild jazz of the 60s as the earth is to the moon. Still recognizably jazz but not anything you'll learn in school!) Perhaps by its nature, a music education is only capable of teaching about the past. But I think that's an assumption worth challenging.

We may expect a trained jazz musician to be able to play big band styles and bebop with equal fluency, much the same way a violinist may be expected to play Bach and Brahms and Boulez. But is there a point at which a music education becomes too fixated on the past without adequately preparing for the right now, let alone the future, of life as a musician?

In fact, every non-notated music tradition is at risk of the same effect due to recordings. Say you recorded a native music maker from an endangered tradition in the early or mid 1900s. Now for all time, to make music in that tradition there is this temptation to calcification - hardening the whole style around a few interpretations just because they happen to be the earliest of which we have record. The reality is that no musical style ever stays the same forever. Those recorded in the 1900s were not even doing the music in the exact same as their parents, let alone 50 or a 100 years prior. The times changed, the people changed, the music changed.

It will always be that way. Music education may be a glacier set on its course but the flow of music increasingly is finding its way around and beyond it in terms of the art, the artists, the culture, and the money. Now, the times still change, the people still change, the music still changes, while the cultural and practical relevance of a formal music education wanes and wanes.

Man, I hate being so negative about this, but to fix things you have to first diagnose the problem. So let me propose a few solutions or at least work-arounds, especially for music majors.

- don't go into a music degree expecting it to do everything for you. Understand what it is and what it isn't. It will help you be a good musician. It may not prepare you for many other aspects of the career. You can do everything right in a music degree, pass with 'top marks', and still not be ready to go to work in your field.

- do look for opportunities to perform and make music outside the university. How do you expect to suddenly have music making be a money-making enterprise if you haven't already been practicing that? Why wait until you are a 'pro' to start a youtube channel, self release recordings on bandcamp or soundcloud, to self publish sheet music on sheetmusicplus.com? It takes time to build up a following and a reputation and it doesn't come automatically just when you get a diploma.

- do everything you can to learn about music business, copyright, contracts, recording, sound engineering, advertising, etc. whether or not it is required for a class. Learn what you need to know, not just the minimum for the grade or degree.

- be disciplined with your time. Give due diligence to your classes and practice but don't let those things take over the rest of your time. Balance your life and your art. If you don't learn to do that in school you'll have to learn it while trying to start your career...and why wait until that crucial period?

- you've got to be quite committed to make a music career work. It may involve participation in a combination of money-making streams - academia, private lessons, performances, recording, etc. You may even have to balance music making with other non-music income (I know of a successful composer who loves her second career as a yoga instructor). Carefully consider if all this is for you. You can have a lifelong, satisfying and fulfilling engagement with music making without ever making it the sole focus of your study or employment. There is no shame in seeking stability in a career, which music just can't promise.

- don't dismiss the value of the things in your college education that may not be "directly" relevant to the functioning of your music career. Modern college education has a foundation in the ideal that each person should have a well rounded grasp of some of the basics of the world. There's a reason all college grads are required to take classes like math or sociology or science. Practice finding that reason with each class and you'll have a happier time getting through those hoops. There can be relevance in pretty much any topic but don't expect college to spoon-feed you the application of that knowledge.

- Same goes for music topics that seem irrelevant. Just because the class is talking about music history, theory or repertoire that seems useless to you, it doesn't mean that you don't want to know those things as a musician. As I wrote above, you want to be the whole package: a well rounded musician who understands a thing or two about many aspects of life, the world, and music culture specifically.

- do take advantage of every resource that is available for your success. This may not be only within the university system. Look everywhere for mentors, professional contacts, grants, support, performance opportunities, learning opportunities and creative outlets. If you meet somebody who is making it work, pick their brain, ask for their help! If you aren't a voracious type of learner inside and outside of school, being a music major is going to be a tough road. Why suffer through four plus years just to eke out the degree that may not even lead you to a job?

- make the music of TODAY, of RIGHT NOW. Make music that matters to you and to your peers. Make music that is relevant and current and is more than a living museum. Don't be afraid of new music, be afraid of a world without new music!

- keep up with changes in the industry, especially paying attention to where the money is coming from and going. A music career doesn't have to be all about money but, you know, making a living matters unless you are 'of independent means'. Could be NFTs, could be grants, could be (as in the article above) playing your instrument with unusual ensembles. Be as creative with your income pursuits as you are in your art and I bet you can find a happy balance between making the music you like and making money in the process.

- don't give up hope that all the brokenness I mention above can be fixed. Total cultural change is possible and perhaps inevitable within a generation. Balance learning from the past with a push to make a difference in the directions you want to see.

I'll see you in a more vibrant and sonically rich world!

R. Michael Wahlquist | March 2021 | Rexburg, Idaho

[esoanem]

I.

“Let me tell you a story, about a Spaniard named Vasquez...”

Following this fantastic video essay by Rowan Ellis (contains spoilers for the entire show), I am currently rewatching Black Sails. The first season has a slightly different tone from the rest of the show and, in particular, has a major sexual assault storyline. I know several people who have been put off from watching the show as a result

So, with that in mind, I’m gonna give summaries and content notes for the episodes of the first season as well as timestamps of any scenes with particular content people may want to avoid. Hopefully this information can allow people to either skip those scenes or, read the summaries of these episodes and skip them entirely

Anyway, this post is about the very first episode

Major Content Notes:

Violence: some bloody violence, shot fairly brutally

Wikipedia Synopsis:

John Silver joins Captain Flint's crew as his ship's new cook whilst secretly holding a highly valuable page of the Captain's Log, which he takes from the first cook, who had stolen it from the captain himself. Meanwhile, Captain Flint faces a potential mutiny from his crew and must work to secure their support. The Captain recruits his first mate Billy Bones' help to overthrow the mutineer's leader, Singleton. Meanwhile, Eleanor Guthrie tries to keep order on the lawless island of New Providence conducting her father's business, as the Royal Navy's suspicions of the pirates grow stronger.

There’s quite a lot going on in this episode, with several speeches establishing important themes, because it has to establish all the major players, and most of their relationships, so the summary is actually quite a long (albeit quite condensed from my 8 pages of notes). Below the cut are the timestamps of any scenes requiring any of the major content notes, and then the summary (which includes all the events of the episode)

Timestamps:

All timestamps are from the “Complete Collection” DVDs which includes a Starz logo at the start. Depending on your source, timestamps may vary a little, which is why I’ve included the timestamp for the opening titles. Timestamps are only given for the start and end of scenes featuring any particularly warning-worthy content

06:30: opening titles

56:23-60:30: Flint & Singleton’s fight. The violence here is pretty brutal & bloody, moreso than most of the rest of the series

Summary:

1715 West Indies

The Pirates of New Providence Island threaten maritime trade in the region

The laws of every civilized nation declare them hostis humani generis. Enemies of all mankind

In response, the pirates adhere to a doctrine of their own… war against the world

A merchant ship is attacked by Captain James Flint’s pirates on the Walrus. During the attack, the cook steals a page from a logbook, and ends up barricaded in a compartment with the coward John Silver (below). The cook plans to joint the pirates after the fight, saying a good cook is always in demand. Silver spots the pouch the page is hidden in, causing the cook to draw his sword

The rest of the crew barricade in a separate room, but eventually the pirates break in, defeat them and the pirate captain, Flint (below), gets the merchant Captain to surrender

The quartermaster Hal Gates (below) walks through the merchant ship assessing the prize as the crew breaks down the door to Silver’s compartment, in which he finds the cook dead, stabbed in the back, Silver claims to be a very good cook and asks to join

On the deck, Singleton (below, and also pictured in the background of Flint’s picture) is giving a speech to the captured merchant sailors, appealing to their sense of class consciousness

"Now that the fight is over, you have nothing more to fear from us today. Because we know this fight was not of your making, it was the choice of our true enemy, your true enemy, the tyrant captain. Many of us once sailed on ships like this one, we know what it is to be slaves to his whims, his violence, his shit wages! His insufferable stupidity! So we’ve made for ourselves a different life, where we don’t rely on wages”

The accountant Dufresne (below, note that he is played by a different actor as his original actor sadly died after the filming of the first season) assesses the prize as barely covering their costs and, after four prizes in a row with little profit, Gates is concerned about dissent in the crew, and that Singleton is angling for the captaincy

Flint and Gates appear conspiratorial over the logbook, saying it proves that this is the ship, but Gates quickly spots the missing page, the schedule, without which the logbook isn’t very useful in leading them to the greater prize

“let me see if I have this right. This is the fourth prize in a row from which the profits will barely exceed the expenses it took to win it, Singleton’s out there trying to convince your crew to torture that poor bastard of a captain simply because he hasn’t worked out how to get them to do it to you, but all’s well, because you’ve discovered, that the information we can’t tell anyone we’re looking for, exists on a page, that we don’t have“

A Royal Navy Man-o-War, the Scarborough is spotted (unusual seeing as she’s based in Boston), and the Walrus leaves behind the merchant ship so it can get away

Belowdecks, the Bosun, Billy Bones (above) introduces Silver to Randall (below), who used to be the Bosun before him, before he was beaten to within an inch of his life and “lost his wits, but not their loyalty”. Randall is mistrustful of Silver, apparently because he feels like Silver is replacing him. Billy emphasises the equality of the pirate ship, that everyone should get the same food, including the captain & quartermaster

Gates tells Flint that Singleton plans to replace him, and now has the votes to do so. Flint tries to manipulate Gates into blaming himself, even though the crew’s poor morale is due to Flint’s seemingly poor choice of prizes to chases. Flint says that with a few more days, the schedule could be reconstructed from the logbook, but he’ll need a favour from Richard Guthrie who is responsible for selling all the goods the pirates steal. When Gates is skeptical that Guthrie will help them, Flint says they’ll just go back to normal and pretend none of this ever happened & Gates calls him out for lying

The Walrus arrives in Nassau, and the crew go ashore (below). One of the pirates tells Silver that it used to be English, now it isn’t, and that now it’s “ours”. Gates tells Billy that Flint is going to ask Guthrie for a favour and is likely to react badly when he refuses, and tells Billy to go with him and, when the time comes, restrain him, so they don’t lose Guthrie’s business. As Silver is unloading the cargo, he notices one of the logbooks is not among them and deduces the page must be from the missing volume and is in Flint’s quarters

Silver then gets hazed. He is accosted and told he needs to see Blackbeard, who “meets the new ones, no exceptions”. When thrust into a smoky room he’s told contains Blackbeard, he realises that the person in the throne is not, in fact, the pirate Edward Teach, but rather a prostitute. When he questions this, she opens her coat, revealing a large black bush. The pirates laugh, tell him to yell if he gets lost in there, and close the doors. As Silver is stripped, and has sex with the five prostitutes, he keeps glancing for the page that has fallen out of his clothes

Gates goes to speak to Eleanor Guthrie (below, left), in her tavern. She is introduced berating a captain for being scared of the mere whiff of the Navy rather than going for profit, and clapping back at a drunk pirate telling her to fuck herself. Gates warns Eleanor & her right-hand man, the former slave, Mr Scott (below, right) about Singleton’s plan to take over, and asks for a loan to buy the crew’s loyalty. Eleanor eventually agrees, but Mr Scott chides her, saying that he doesn’t think her father would approve

Max (below), one of the prostitutes from Silver’s hazing pours some tea as he scrambles for the page, which she already found, having noticed that despite having “a whore for every finger on your hand, but your eyes kept drifting to this”. Realising it’s valuable, but that Silver doesn’t know anyone to sell it to, she offers to act as a middle-man, in exchange for half

Gates enters a tent with several of the black pirates and negotiates with the eldest of them, who he knows the rest will follow, to buy their votes. Despite having spent the entirety of Eleanor’s loan on other sections of the crew, he persuades them to side with him in exchange for payment taken out of the next prize. Unfortunately for him, Jack Rackham (below) spots him and tells Singleton that Gates has been buying votes

Silver sneaks into Flint’s cabin aboard the ship with Max waiting in a rowing boat, where he finds the logbook and matches the page to it, but disturbs a feather Flint had left

Meanwhile, Flint has his meeting with Richard Guthrie (below), explaining his plan, how he heard of it, how the logbook confirms his lead, and that he needs Guthrie’s contacts to reconstruct the schedule

“Let me tell you a story, about a Spaniard named Vasquez. A few weeks ago, he staggers into a tavern in port royal, takes a seat next to an English merchant captain. Vasquez, it turns out, is dying, bleeding to death from a knife wound to the belly. The knife wound was courtesy of his former employer la Casa de Contratacion in Seville”

“Colonial Intelligence?”

“Navy, more specifically. One of the top agents in the Americas, responsible for the security of one particular ship, a ship with a cargo so rich, the king of Spain is very anxious to see it launched. Vasquez warned that it was too late, storm season was upon them and no escort could be mustered to guard her, but his superiors demanded that he sign off. They advised him that if he couldn’t arrange for an escort, he should plot a course unknown to anyone but our captain, and consider that route to be a state secret of the highest order. When Vasquez refused and threatened to report his concerns to the court things got ugly. The ship in question? Urca de Lima. The largest Spanish treasure galleon in the Americas. According to Vasquez, total cargo in excess of 5 million dollars”

Guthrie refuses to help, saying that the ship is heavily armed even without an escort, and that even making enquiries would jeopardise his standing with the Spanish. Flint twists his arm and goes to break his fingers, asking Billy to threaten Guthrie with his pistol, but Billy instead aims it at Flint

They hear a commotion outside, it’s the British! Captain Hume of the Scarborough to be precise. Billy, Flint, & Guthrie have all returned to their positions to maintain the pretence of respectability, but Hume isn’t buying it treating us to his pontifications on the relationship between gossip and civilisation, and attempts to take them all into custody. Flint & Billy resist, defeating the Navy men, but Guthrie is shot in the shoulder

“Tell me something, Mr Guthrie. Do you have gossip here?

“Gossip?”

“I’ve often wondered if it can survive in so remote a location. You see gossip is what holds civilisation together. It reinforces shame, and without shame, well, the world is a very dangerous place”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand”

“Do you know what the gossip is in London about you? The gossip is that you make your profits selling ill-gotten cargo, stolen by the pirates of Providence Island”

Singleton confronts the leader of the black pirates about his change of heart. When they refuse to change back to his side, Anne Bonny (below right) appears together with Jack Rackham and she kills them

Before the leader is killed, Captain Charles Vane (below) comes out of the shadows too

Gates tells Mr Scott & Eleanor that he’s secured the votes, only to be told by one of the remaining black pirates that their leader was killed, and his last words were “Vane”. Eleanor decides to do something about Vane

Jack, Anne, & Vane are drinking in a brothel, and discuss their plan. Singleton will become captain, fail at it, and the skilled hands will then defect to their crew. We also find out that Jack & Anne are fucking. At this point, Eleanor storms in, and punches Vane. He punches her back and then offers her a hand to help her get back up. He follows her as she goes to clean up. She explains that he’s fucked her over, and we find out he used to love her and, despite grabbing her face, he still tucks her hair behind her ears suggesting conflicted feelings about that. She threatens to cut him off from selling goods, but vane points out that her father is the one who buys the goods, and he’ll always choose profits over daughters

Max sees that Eleanor has been hit, and leads Eleanor to her bedroom, hand-in-hand. She correctly guesses that Vane is the one who hit her and, when Eleanor blames herself she scoffs at it. She nurses Eleanor, they kiss, and then have sex

Flint & Billy sail away from Mr Guthrie’s mansion, with his pale, unconscious body. Flint strips Guthrie’s rings & wig, and explains that he plans to hide Mr Guthrie, so as to avoid panicking the crew when they find out their fence is burnt

Billy calls out Flint’s constant lying, and wonders if maybe Singleton is right, and they do need a change. This causes Flint to move aggressively towards Billy, but he puts his sword between them forcing Flint to keep his distance. 

“War is coming, one ship is not the war. When a king brands us pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries, he doesn’t mean to make us criminals, he means to make us monsters, for that’s the only way his god-fearing taxpaying subjects can make sense of men who keep what is theirs and fear no-one. When I say there’s a war coming, I don’t mean with the Scarborough, I don’t mean with King George, or England. Civilisation is coming, and it means to exterminate us. If we are to survive, we must unite behind our own king”

“We have no kings here”

“I am your king”

Flint tells Gates about Guthrie, and finds out that whilst they were gone, Singleton has called a council to vote on him taking the captaincy. Flint takes a moment in his cabin and, whilst flinging some furniture, notices the feather Silver had disturbed

Taking the logbook to the council, Flint tells them of his plan, and accuses Singleton of having stolen the schedule from the logbook

"I’m sorry. For the short hauls. For the trouble I’ve caused. But most importantly, for the disregard it seems I’ve shown you

“The most important element of a healthy ship is trust. Trust between men. Trust between captain and crew. Without it, a ship is doomed

“For the past few months, you and I have been on the trail of a prize so rich, it could upset the very nature of our world. And for that reason, I felt it necessary to keep it secret

“I didn’t trust you. And that was my mistake. Right now I would like to tell you that prize is within our grasp and we are close, so close. But it would appear that my concerns about secrecy had merit

“Someone on this crew discovered my plans. And tore from this log the very page necessary to discover that prize. Stole it for their own gain. Stole it from us. And then, stoked your resentment to cover his crime, and make himself your captain”

Obviously, Singleton is confused, and protests that he doesn’t know anything about this. Gates points out that this is a serious accusation, thievery being punishable by death, and a false accusation likewise. Per the articles of the ship, Singleton must either submit to a trial (with Gates as judge, who Singleton does not consider would be impartial), or they can settle it by sword

This fight is analysed in a lot of detail by Matt Easton (a historical fencing instructor, well versed in military sabre of the late 19th and late 18th centuries, so only shortly after the period of the show) here (may contain spoilers for later in the show, I don’t remember). Flint has good form, and is clearly well-trained, but Singleton is stronger, tougher, and more ferocious, easily gaining the upper hand

There is some back and forth, with Flint temporarily gaining the advantage, before losing it again, ending up injured and covered in blood. He is finally able to grab a cannonball and smash Singleton on the head, before crawling over him and beating him to death in front of a shocked crew

Flint produces a piece of paper, seemingly from Singleton’s bloody corpse, and offers it to Billy (seeing this page, Silver confirms that he does in fact still have the real page). Billy opens it, sees that it’s a completely blank page, but as Flint coolly holds his gaze tells the crew that it is in fact the stolen schedule

“Friends, brothers, the prize that you and I have been pursuing, is l’Urca de Lima, the hulk, a prize of almost unimaginable value, now with this page securely in our possession, we can begin our hunt, and we will succeed, no matter the cost, no matter the struggle, I will see that prize is yours, I’m not just going to make you rich, I’m not just going to make you strong, I’m going to make you the princes of the new world!”

The crew all cheer whilst Billy, Gates, and Silver, who all know that this page is not real look on in disbelief

Max is called from her room, where we see Eleanor sleeping naked on the bed by Idelle, one of the other prostitutes. She goes down to meet Jack & Anne and, sitting on his lap (which Anne does not like), tells them she has something she thinks they may want to buy

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 273

A DEAD END FOR SCIENCE OR A CALL TO THE CREATOR

The scientists of the world have been engaged in solving the problem of deciphering the so-called human genome during the last few decades. At the turn of the millennium the genetic map had finally been deciphered in general. Nevertheless, classic genetics and all of the more recent research efforts in biology, biochemistry, physiology and some inter-disciplinary methodologies have found themselves, it could be said, at a dead end. But this is only a dead end if we fail to recognize that we are all governed by a single supreme intellect, by the Divine Providence, Who voices His Will by means of the Words.

The name of God is different in different languages of the world and in the minds of those who accept the Creator as the only God; the Christians, Muslims, Jews and other believers, around 60-70% of the global population. Yet this name corresponds for them with the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. In all these instances, there is a Holy Word, in one form or another. The task of every believer is to recognize the very form that the Creator uses to call His Creation. This is a personal issue that originates from the religion that one worships.

So, what is the problem that faces genetics at the beginning of the 3rd millennium and how does it correspond with the Creator’s expressed will and His call to us?

It is here where there is a prospect for a remarkable breakthrough in knowledge, if only… This “if only�� can be connected to academic achievements and issues.

In fact, over the last three or four years scientists have discovered by very sophisticated means and through careful research that the genetic code that governs the human body-and, in a broader sense, everything that is alive in Nature-accounts for no more than 1% of the DNA molecular length of the structure that determines the development of all living species. This discovery was as shocking for scientists as the deciphering of the genetic code had been. They concluded that the genetic programming occurred in the DNA molecular “free zone.” Here, scientists-among them the Russian naturalists A.G. Gurevitch and V.I. Vernadskiy, who some 50-70 years ago claimed that a purely materialistic understanding of the gene was the limit to which non-believing science could go-were proven to be right.

The new discoveries are most certainly related to the emergence of such sophisticated physical instruments as the laser, holography, sol tonics and even powerful computers. Modern technology has proved, without a doubt that the program in space and time for the creation of the human organism is not based on random accident, but rather is predetermined from “above.” The protein molecules and the amino acids that comprise the gene (to date, more than twenty different types of amino acids have been discovered) are placed in a particular order. A single fitting lock-and-key relation exists in the composition of the genetic code components. In addition, it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the genetic code of species that live on the Earth has not changed in three billion years, i.e., there is no room to talk about evolution, the principal postulate of materialists. Then, who or what has created the origin for everything that exists today on our planet several billion years after the creation of the Earth?

Then there is another puzzle: Why does the genetic code have such a small place, only taking up 1% of the DNA?

Scientists in Russia have learned that 99% of DNA-which was previously considered to be useless-hides within itself the so-called “genetic computer” that comprises the programs needed to make living organisms into a variety of species and these mask the genetic features that are unique to a particular species. It is not completely clear how the mechanism of this so-called genetic computer works, but it does work. The concept of a holographic mechanism for the storage, transference, and recovery of information was developed as the result of an experiment.

Scientists took a freshly cut leaf, chopped off part of it, and put this between two slides and two photo plates. As the picture developed, it became clear that the leaf was depicted whole. In short, an idea or a phantom had been photographed. These first experiments were conducted in Russia in the 1960s.

Russian, American, and British genetic scientists continuously repeated the experiment, taking phantom photographs of different objects, and came to the conclusion that science was dealing with a multidimensional picture of the leaf, or its hologram.

Based on this, some other puzzles were solved. The “genetic computer” manages the development of holograms by means of special static waves, called sol tones (the name sol tonics, a special scientific branch, is derived from this term) that function in the DNA embryo cells.

Scientists have long since established that out of one single fertilized ovule other ovules start to instantly develop, as if on command; these are responsible, for instance, for making bone, muscle, nerve and other systems within the human body. And over this totally material process there floats a totally immaterial phantom that dictates and shows the embryo the way to develop.

In other words, there is a certain image according to which development proceeds. The DNA is the text that controls this creation, with its inherent rules of composition; it is possible to perceive the DNA as being made up of letters, i.e. a word. At first there was the Word! This is a quote from the Bible. In Islam, Almighty Allah gave the Word by means of the Qur’an (reading) to Muhammad. A phrase from the Qur’an describes the above process in an amazingly simple and pertinent way:

It is He Who fashions you in the wombs as He will. There is no deity but He, the All-Glorious (with irresistible might), the All-Wise. (Al Imran, 3:6)

The Word of the Creator, according to which the genome “works,” is registered with greater security in the bio-system apparatus. It will only disappear in conjunction with the last of the human beings. This may be the very idea behind what is called the Day of Judgment, or Doomsday in Islam and other religions.

In the context of Einstein’s principles of a single field theory, as well as in Shipov’s physical vacuum theory, it may be possible to find clarification of the phenomenon, when in one case a wave matrix (copy) remains “clean,” but distorted in another.

It is worth discussing here those things that have already been proven. The programs written in the DNA cannot have emerged as a result of simple evolution, in the very least as, due to the huge volume of information contained here, the time required would have exceeded the time that the Universe has existed, that is around 15 billion years. We have established an approximate time that would be required for the genetic transformations that determine the essence of human beings to occur. It is substantially less…

Another study has been carried out that does not fit into the traditional materialistic frames. It seems that the internal structural information of DNA alone is not enough to develop an accurate replica of the image organism from the composition of the protein elements. Numerous experiments carried out by Russian scientists (in particular, from the Moscow Scientific and Cardiology Center) have proved that a frog embryo that has been purposefully protected to a great degree from external influences, distorts, suffering from malformation and finally dying. This means that a DNA has to be connected-maybe by means of sol tones waves or other contacts still unknown to us-with an “external source” that guides the genome-bio-computer work from somewhere in Space. One cannot but recall Muhammad here, the last of the Greatest Prophets, who categorically rejected the possibility of not only seeing, but even imagining the Almighty.

There are few people who still argue about the existence of the soul. The time when the soul departs from the body has been well-documented by scientists, doctors, and naturalists. As a matter of fact, the soul emerges when the heart cells die, that is, when the organism as a whole dies. It is at this time that a certain phantom of the genetic apparatus is formed, similar to the one described above in the phenomenon of the phantom leaf. It is interesting to contemplate the idea that the phantom of a human genetic apparatus that has lost their life by force would possess a high biological reaction and would therefore be in a position to distort and destroy any healthy molecules that may be close by. One cannot but recall the imperative ban on killing the innocent that is contained both in the Old Testament and the Qur’an, a call to leave retaliation to Him and to Him only.

In conclusion to my brief essay on the necessity of belief in today’s science, the common scientific way tries to explain “how,” but it fails to answer the question of “why” that lies behind the mystery of existence. Any scientific approach rejecting faith is doomed to fail; for faith is an inherent need for us. The belief in Him, the Single and Almighty, is genetically programmed. In a hadith reported in Sahih al-Bukhari, God’s Messenger states that every person is born in the primordial nature (fitra) of Islam.

Here, at the beginning of the 3rd millennium, at the height of our scientific achievements, we have come to understand God as a natural phenomenon. We must follow His guidance and not distort the Word or the Image of love that has been implanted by the Creator in our genetic code with mindless acts and evil speeches.

[docfuture]

Princess, part 12

       [This story is a prequel, set in an alternate 2012, several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16.  Links to some of my other work are here.  Updates are theoretically biweekly. Next chapter is partly done so I’m going to try to get it out early in September.]

Previous: Part 11

      Recovery--and a start at change and learning.       Flicker thought about the wrap up of her first session, and Stella's comments on paying a bit more attention to the ways other people were already helping.       "... and I just suppressed thinking about it at all because the frustration got real bad when I didn't," Flicker had said.       "Understandable," said Stella.  "Did you consider talking to Armadillo?"       "I talked to her about some general stuff, but she's... old."       Stella nodded slowly.  "I can see how the Database might have given you the impression that sex was invented sometime in the 60s.  And Armadillo was already middle-aged by then."       "That's not fair.  It just that the primary sources were so indirect and coded about it.  And left so much out.  The Database doesn't..."  Flicker frowned, then sped up to check a few things.  After a while she slowed back down.       "Well, crap," she said.  "I learned most of my 20th century history when I was randomly bouncing around the Database reading whatever caught my interest when I was 11 or 12.  So I missed stuff.  And I didn't go back, and made some implicit assumptions."       "You might find a discussion with Armadillo illuminating," said Stella.  "Have you considered that Doc might not be the person contributing the most to the collective judgement of your social maturity level that the Database uses to set your default access levels?  He seems willing to delegate to people he trusts, and of those, Armadillo clearly has had experience with children."       "Oof.  No, I hadn't thought of that."  Flicker sighed.  "Sometimes I wonder about the amount of time I spend mentally running circles around things without looking at what's at the center."       "Don't be too harsh on yourself.  You blame most of your social difficulties on mental differences, poor references, and lack of practice.  But the form of your education mattered, too.  You never went to school before your graduate work, and you did most of that remotely.  You learned from Doc, the Database, and direct observation--primarily of static scenes because of your speed.  And the bulk of educational material in the Database was written by and for typical humans, with all the embedded assumptions that entails."       "I really like the Database.  And the summaries help."       Stella shook her head.  "Not always.  Not if you don't know what's missing.  The Database AI made judgements when you were younger about what was appropriate at the time.  This shaped your knowledge map, which was already going to be very different from most humans.  So do your Database access restrictions.  Information revealed selectively or out of order can harm.  And if the Database can't reveal A to you--for, say, privacy reasons--and revealing B without A would cause harm, it will restrict B as well.  I'm sure Doc must have warned you about that."       "Yeah, but a lot of his restrictions seem arbitrary."       "Many will, if done right.  Database restrictions can and do cause bias problems, but overriding them is inherently risky.  The Database AI has to balance that, and there are no optimal choices, because the whole idea of the Database as an 'objective' knowledge map is a illusion.  The Database is biased by what gets recorded.  Your access to it is further biased, and what you actually do access is even more biased.  But the idea that you are necessarily getting closer to impartial truth when you override a warning is dangerous."       "So I can mess myself up with overrides."       "You already have.  Repeatedly.  Information shaping is one of my more powerful tools.  Cruder forms of it are in widespread use and getting more effective every day.  But perceptions come pre-shaped."  Stella had sipped from her cup of coffee before continuing.  "For example, you are highly proficient in many math-heavy technical subjects not usually mastered until graduate school, and awkward in areas typically covered by early childhood education or peer group socialization.  So when you made your implicit assumptions?  Of course you missed things.  However."       Stella was good at an 'I have a secret to share--eventually' style of speaking that was both mildly annoying and very effective at focusing attention.       "Yes?" said Flicker.       "Anyone would.  You just missed different things.  Others might have helped with some of them.  But no one could predict them all.  Not Doc, not the Database, not me.  So do what you can, but don't be too hard on yourself when mistakes happen."       "Ah.  I'll try to remember that."       *****       Flicker tried to follow Stella's initial guidelines, which focused on short term recovery, stabilization, and 'stop making this worse'.  Avoiding patrols was the most important and hardest to follow advice.  Physical therapy and exercise were tedious, but not difficult.  The dietary changes... were trickier.  Flicker had lost weight from the accident and the isotope exchanger sessions which she really couldn't afford.  And her kind of pseudo-shapeshifter healing depended on adequate body mass.  Stella forwarded some funny essays on cuisine and recovery for shapeshifters supposedly written by a French werewolf, and had the Database reset her food and drink related warnings, with an eye to both mental and physical health.       She'd also pointed out to Flicker that it only took a few early incidents of plasma in the GI tract while pushing the limits of her entropy dumping to cause lasting aversion to eating much while on call.  So when she later started to feel like she was on duty almost all the time, she stopped eating proper meals except with friends.  Staying off patrol for now made it possible to change that, but not easy.  Theoretically, she could eat like an Olympic athlete in training while exercising appropriately, and recover quite quickly, but that wasn't realistic.  She was stubborn, but so were her habits.       She couldn't patrol, but she could keep busy by surveying--updating Database geographical and obstacle data--and doing interior construction and finishing work on her house.  Back-ordered materials had piled up.  Flicker used power tools mainly for precision and delicacy; she had custom hand tools for speed and power, and boxes of regular hammers and screwdrivers to replace the ones she wore out or broke.  Superspeed and robotic help let her make rapid progress in the half days she was putting in to it.  Common areas and guest rooms were finished, and recreation areas, a wider variety of workshops, and Database node expansion rooms were all taking shape.       Making time to talk and eat with friends wasn't sophisticated advice, but it was obviously helpful.  She'd had dinner with Jetgirl and her husband yesterday.  Good food, carefully non-specific sympathy, then after dinner, 'girl talk' with Jetgirl.  Which meant tech geekery--they spent a few hours discussing the instrumentation and results from Speedtest, and Jetgirl's suggestions for some issues Flicker had encountered expanding her robotics workshop.  Reliable comfort.       The aftereffects from the cybernetic interface withdrawal were finally mostly gone, and Flicker's metabolism and appetite seemed to be responding to her exercises.  She was definitely putting on muscle faster than a human could.  And she'd mentioned her problem to Stavros, the owner of her favorite Greek restaurant, he'd gotten a look on his face like he'd been personally called upon to save the world, and now she had enough takeout in her fridge to feed a starving pseudo-mythological extradimensional being for a week.       Today, a visit with Armadillo.  She had promised something interesting.       Flicker had once asked Armadillo why she hadn't picked the name Glyptodon instead, because that seemed closer in size and fearsomeness to her appearance.  Armadillo had laughed and said she'd never heard of them at the time--the late 40s.  The two of them were at Armadillo's house, sitting at a table with an impressive feast.  It was not unusual for Armadillo; with super strength, near invulnerability, and half a ton of mass, she ate a lot, and saw no reason not to enjoy it.  Armadillo was cheerful and a good friend, as well as effectively family.  And at an age of 98, she knew a lot of history, especially the kinds that didn't usually get recorded very well.       The main reason Flicker didn't visit more often was an embarrassing one: When she'd been younger she'd had episodes of severe insomnia.  But Armadilo knew how to spin a story to help.  So when the biological part of Flicker's brain was working, it associated Armadillo's stories strongly with drowsiness.       Which didn't mean they were boring.       Armadillo was sharing some anecdotes from the late Pre-Net era--the 50s through the 70s--when Luce Cannon, Belle Tinker, and One-eyed Jack had been prominent superheroes.  They had set precedents that ended up shaping the way the Database had been assembled.  The norms Luce had established as a practical way of preserving relationship privacy and security without centralized infrastructure required narrative indirection and implication in order to discuss certain subjects at all.  Armadillo was very good at the style needed.  Unfortunately, that and the lack of unrestricted Database references hindered the usual ways Flicker updated her memories, so she was having trouble with details.  But there were definitely differences from the way she'd thought about the origins of the Database.       "Huh," she said.  "I always assumed that Doc decided everything important when he first built the Database, and the rest was just legacy format and historical records."       "Not entirely," said Armadillo.  "Luce knew all about records and careful access--she built her own intelligence operation, after all--and Belle was already starting to convert some of them to electronic form and building early bots in the fifties.  But reliability for anyone but Belle was always a problem, and she didn't have the level of conscientiousness about documentation that Doc did."       "Um.  Doc isn't always that great about documentation.  He gets--"       "The Database AI or someone else to do a lot of it.  I know.  But someone does.  Heck, I've done my share.  Belle was way ahead of her time, but we never found anything but cryptic notebook scribbles for some of her weirder stuff.  Left a bit of a mess after she was gone.  Doc brought in organization, documentation, robustness, and speed, and then extended it to everything.  But the first Database grew out of what he built for Luce not long before she died.  And Luce set some access conditions, which Doc won't change without a good reason.  So don't blame Doc for all of them."       "So the age restrictions are from Luce?"       "Some of them, yeah--but they aren't hardcoded, they're more flexible; we knew they'd have to accommodate aliens and extradimensional beings and whatnot.  It's really a maturity threshold."  Armadillo smiled.  "But I have a treat for you."       "Oh?"       "There are a few things I have personal discretion about.  And you've hit a block involving one of them twice now.  It's a good example of how we handled a few things back in the day, and might help you understand some of the ambiguity.  I can show it to you, but you'll have to put your visor on locked standby or take it off--no unrestricted electronic images of this are allowed."       Flicker frowned, but arranged a protocol with the Database and pulled back her hood.  Armadillo pushed back a plate, picked up a small case, opened it, and pulled out a large photographic print.       "This is a copy of the last known good photograph of Belle Tinker.  The original is in my family photo album in one of Doc's vaults."       Flicker moved her chair closer to get a better look.  It was a group photo, centered on a younger Armadillo.  "What's that blacked out area?"       "Non-superheroes with living relatives.  The photo is from my 60th birthday party in 1974."       Given the date, Flicker wasn't surprised that Armadillo was a bit narrower--she'd still been slowly adding mass.  But...  "Head spikes?"       Armadillo laughed.  "Yeah, that was my last try at regrowing them.  I'd been on a trip to Tokyo the previous year, and there was a translator around during a Kaiju attack.  I ended up stopping it by talking to the big fellow about the relative effectiveness of head spikes for challenge bellowing.  We had a nice talk, and everyone went home happy.  No property damage, even.  So I decided to give them another try.  But mine were only a little stronger than steel, so they kept breaking off--same kind of problem you have with your hair.  I finally gave up in 75?  Or maybe 76?  But really, I'm the least interesting person in that photo.  I'm curious what you think about the others."       "Okay," said Flicker.  "But that goblet you're drinking out of...  Is that a demon skull?"       "Yep.  The goblet was a birthday present.  It would have been rude not to try it out."  Armadillo nodded towards a nearby cabinet.  "I still have it, but I hardly ever use it anymore.  Little call for it, and it's tricky to clean."       "Um, okay."  Flicker studied the image of the woman with red hair, a lab coat, safety glasses, and an expression of indulgent patience.  "Belle has the same kind of 'I could be in my lab working on something cool' face I've seen Doc make.  Most of the contemporary sources I found in the Database were really bad at describing her.  She'd have been, what, in her late forties?  She looks younger than that, fit, and tough, I don't understand what was going on."       Armadillo smiled.  "There were a few that treated her reasonably--but they tended not to emphasize appearance.  Belle did not fit any 'feminine' stereotype back then, there were a number of media bigwigs who really didn't like her, and she didn't humor patronizing reporters.  So it was common for them to distort or belittle her intelligence and accomplishments, insult her appearance, attack her character, or just use bad pictures.  If they had to write about her at all.  That's one reason why the quality of much of what you found about her is poor."       Another woman with short dark hair was leaning against the table with a relaxed smile, but a very clear presence.       "Did Luce Cannon always look like she was in charge?" asked Flicker.  "I mean, it was your party, but..."       "She could hide it, but she was keeping an eye on someone who could get overenthusiastic."       A girl wearing a black outfit was smiling intently at the camera with a predatory look.  She appeared to be around eleven; it was hard for Flicker to judge ages.       "Is that a toy sword?" asked Flicker.  "It looks awfully realistic."       "Nope.  That was Katya's first magic sword.  She outgrew it; it's in the vaults now."       "Magic sword?  Wait... Katya?  That's Jumping Spider?"       "Oh, goodness no; she wouldn't use that name for years.  That's Katya the... Hunter, I think?  She switched from the Devastator sometime around then.  This was only a year after Luce started teaching her."       "Did... What... Why is she waving a sword around at your birthday party?"       "It was a compromise; she wanted to make a little pyramid out of the other skulls for the picture, but Luce vetoed that as unsanitary.  Just as well; Belle said they smelled pretty manky."       "Other skulls?"  Every time Flicker got a question answered, she immediately had several more--and she couldn't speed up and check the Database because her visor was off.       "Besides the one Jack and Belle turned into the goblet for my birthday present.  It was Katya's idea, so she got to hunt the demons, and she went a little overboard getting spare skulls.  Jack took her to the dimension where they lived--nasty place, but they were immune to poison, which was handy."       "...it's a magic goblet."       "Oh, yeah, it detoxifies anything in it," said Armadillo.  "If I ever want to be absolutely sure I can't be poisoned or I'm worried about contamination, I use it.  But it's usually overkill, it makes most non-alcoholic beverages taste kind of funny, and properly cleaning the precipitate chamber is a pain."       "Doc never let me hunt demons when I was ten," muttered Flicker as she studied the figure standing next to Belle in the photo.       "Mores change, and your adoption process wasn't complete yet.  It would have been awkward to explain."       "Did One-eyed Jack ever show any sign of aging?  It doesn't look like his appearance changed at all in pictures."       "Nope," said Armadillo.  "At least not from when I first met him in '50 or so until he disappeared in the nineties.  White hair, neatly trimmed beard, and the eyepatch.  He almost always wore that hooded robe and carried that staff with the magical doodad on the end.  Occasionally he'd switch to a really old style suit and a dress cane--he could do an impressive Offended Aristocrat act.  But his apparent age never changed.  I suspect he was some kind of shapeshifter, and I know he could create illusions, though, so I'm not sure anyone really knows for sure."       "Wait.  Disappeared?  The Database lists him as 'presumed dead' with supporting evidence; someone found his eyepatch and a scrap of robe near a small crater in the Topaz Realm and Doc verified they were genuine."       "Yep.  Doesn't mean he died.  He might have just decided it was time to stop being Jack.  Hard to believe someone as careful as him would botch a portal like that, and it seemed awfully pat that it happened somewhere with enough ravenous scavengers to ensure the lack of remains wasn't suspicious.  If he was a shapeshifter, there could be someone with his memories who looks quite different running around somewhere.  And he had a saying: 'Sometimes you see something coming and all you can do is get out of the way.'  I think that's what he did."  Armadillo grinned.  "But then, I've been accused of being sentimental from time to time."       "Okay," said Flicker.  "If you're suspicious about Jack, what about Belle?  She was declared dead, but all the Database says is that something catastrophic happened to her portal generator late at night and she was gone afterwards.  Jack is recorded as testifying that as far as he could tell, she hadn't been murdered or kidnapped, definitely wasn't alive on Earth, and he wasn't able to tell quite what happened with the portal.  But Doc said that if she really wanted to burn her bridges, she could have set the portal generator to self destruct, then gone through to somewhere before it blew.  He still has the remains of it in the vaults."       Armadillo looked out the window.  "All true.  She seemed kind of withdrawn for a while before that.  Well, withdrawn for her--she was always full of more ideas than she had time to try.  She'd had a disagreement with Luce and the Volunteer for a couple of years over... I guess you could call it public policy.  She made some predictions that turned out to be pretty accurate, and the first part of one of them had just happened--that was '80.  It's conceivable she might have just been tired of Earth.  But then she was kind of close to Jack, and he was pretty down afterwards--and if she went somewhere else, I don't know why he wouldn't be able to visit.  I tried talking to him about it once, and he just shook his head.  So I really can't say."       "Were they a couple?" asked Flicker.  "Database is ambiguous--they at least pretended a few times, but it wasn't clear what was going on.  I assume it's okay to ask about that now that they're both gone?"       "Heh.  It's not forbidden to ask, and they worked well together in the lab when Belle wasn't out causing trouble with Luce.  I'll say this; Belle never showed interest in most men--she'd roll her eyes at most of my jokes--and Jack never showed any interest in anyone but Belle.  But it could just have been cover; a convenience for both of them."       "Oh."       Flicker frowned at the last figure--a middle-aged man in nondescript clothing, leaning back in the chair beside Armadillo.  His glasses were perched precariously on the end of his nose, his fingers were laced over his chest, and his eyes were closed.       "Who is the guy beside you, and why is he asleep?"       Armadillo smiled.  "Oh, he'd had a long day, then a nice meal, so he just was catching a little nap.  He sometimes answered to the name of Chandler Devon."       Okay, now I know I'm being tested.  Flicker sped up.  The name was vaguely familiar--why?  She glanced at Luce again, then remembered.  Chandler Devon was connected to Luce Cannon in some way, perhaps one of her agents, or possibly romantically linked--but that had been a shaky source.  Documentation about him had been really spotty, with large gaps.  He'd been a skilled enough amateur geologist to get a few articles published, later in life.  But his fondness for volcanoes had apparently done him in--he'd disappeared during the Mount Pinatubo eruption a few years after Luce's death.       That made the third nominally dead person in the picture with a missing body.  The only person who was definitely dead and buried was Luce--she'd died of cancer in the late 80s.       There were several odd things that required explanation about 'Chandler Devon'.  Why was he even at Armadillo's party?  Had Luce brought him?       Why hadn't anyone woken him up for the picture?  It was a memorable occasion.  Was it a prank?       Wait.  Armadillo had said she was the least interesting person in the photo.  What could possible make him more interesting than her?  If he--       Oh.       So that's what he looks like when he's asleep.  But how did he manage...  Luce.  Of course.  She was the original super spy.  Jumping Spider's teacher.  If anyone could cover everything he'd need, it would have been her.  That explained so much.  He'd gone more than fifty years without anyone--       Idiot.  Everyone in that picture probably knew.  He'd always had a family.  A family of choice.  They just never, ever gave it away.  Even when they disagreed with each other.       But still, a few years after Luce died, he decided it was time to stop being Chandler Devon.  Could he still maintain cover?  Probably; Jumping Spider was 27 by then, and Doc was 17, with the Database up and running.  But the Lost Years were about to start, and Doc had seen that coming.  No longer worth the trouble, maybe?  How much had Luce meant to Chandler Devon?       A lot to think about, most of it not even about Belle.  But there was etiquette to be observed.  And as far as Flicker could tell, it was to indicate obliquely that she'd guessed, but not say anything unambiguous.  She could come up with something.       She slowed back down--and found herself blinking back tears.       "He looks like...  someone who works very hard," she managed.  "And doesn't get a chance to relax very often.  I'm glad no one woke him up."       Armadillo nodded slowly.  "So was I."  She started to put the picture back in the box.       "Wait," said Flicker.  "Who took the picture?  I thought I knew, but now I think I was wrong."       Armadillo paused.  "Another time, maybe.  You probably have enough to cogitate about today already."       "Yeah.  Yeah, I do."

Next:  Part 13

[zampanobra]

An Elegy For Cyberpunk

The genre isn't gone, but the silver lining sure is.

William Gibson's Neuromancer is one of those books that I can't remember ever not having read. But I do remember that it wasn't long after I read it that I was introduced to Shadowrun, which quickly supplanted D&D as my go-to RPG. I'm not sure how well I understood what was going on in the plot, and was probably too young to understand a lot of what was going on. (Later on, when I started to understand self-loathing, it made a lot more sense.)

Even then, I loved the world, the technology, and the aesthetic. Gibson is fantastic at showing an entire scene through a couple of hints. He doesn't lean into a lot of what we've come to think of as "cyberpunk" aesthetic, and I prefer his much more understated settings more than a lot of his more over-the-top progeny.

Aside from how it looks, though, a common trope is its focus on people on the fringes of society--the "low life" going along with the "high tech." It's not always criminals, although these lines get a tad blurry due to the increasing corporate dominance that is another common trope of the setting. This is even more the case in the Shadowrun RPG, where your characters ("runners") are mercenaries for hire by all the corporations vying for an edge, where law enforcement has itself been privatized, and where governments' roles in their citizens' daily lives are steadily eroding. (Although a dragon is elected president of one of the major North American countries, so there is that.)

Those familiar with this setting and the tropes associated with it may have raised an eyebrow when I said that there was a silver lining associated with cyberpunk. I'd even venture to say there's an actual optimism in many of these stories.

The Cyber Trickles Downhill

There's a public intellectual of sorts named Eliezer Yudkowsky who started a ~~cult~~ website called LessWrong, and who talks a lot about technology, science, and what-not. He has various "laws" attributed to him, one of which is that "Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point." The idea is that, over time, increasingly powerful technology will be in the hands of everyday people. It's kind of like the cliché about how we all walk around with smartphones that are orders of magnitude more powerful and capable than the computers used to send people to the Moon.

Unfortunately, this is not how it generally works out. When better computers and connectivity end up in people's hands, so does a great deal of capture: DRM, surveillance (both corporate and governmental), monopolization, and more recently the move to software-as-a-service (where you have to pay a subscription to keep using something on your personal devices). You can get around much of these, but only but devoting significant time and effort to doing so, and you may often have to do without some aspects of those services. It's rarely going to be as convenient as the more intrusive version, and in some cases you may be outright prevented from communicating with people without using it. And this is without getting into situations where your information is turned over to third parties without your even having an option. In my own life, two of our doctors' offices use third-party portals that include some aspect of record keeping, schools and daycare facilities use them, and I'm of course subject to any of the national things like credit reporting agencies.

Meanwhile, things like artificial limbs and the like have generally made their greatest advances in times of war. Prosthetics in at least some form go back to Ancient Egypt, but a formal industry focused on their production would not come into being until far later. In the United States, it was the Civil War that would drastically increase demand, with thousands of amputees surviving the war and seeking prosthetic limbs: one study estimated that 70,000 men lost limbs during the war. Part of this was the development of the Minié ball, a more modern bullet that caused more irregular wounds to flesh and was heavy enough to shatter bone. Medical science being what it was, doctors generally decided that amputation was a better approach than trying to piece the patient's body back together. After the war, the federal government created the means for the prosthetic boom by agreeing to provide prosthetics for any veteran who needed them.

One veteran, James Hanger (who had himself lost most of a leg) was dissatisfied with the available options, and so developed an artificial leg that hinged and was shaped more like a human leg. He went on to establish the American Artificial Limb Company after the war (which still exists as Hanger, Inc.). Mass production of artificial limbs wouldn't come about for another 60 years or so. Nonetheless, this next development was again spawned by the same combination of factors: a massive conflict leaving thousands upon thousands of amputees (World War I in this case) combined with the federal government providing the money. (War is, indeed, a racket.)

Little seems to have changed into the present, when it's now the perpetual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with military-oriented welfare programs being the only ones not under constant attack by austerity.

So it is that cyberpunk's dream of widespread limb replacements seems unlikely without coming on the heels of years of additional thousands of traumatic amputees and billions of dollars in subsidies. Under our current system, after all, there is no incentive to continue improvements to artificial limbs without government footing the bill, and the government in turn seems largely unwilling to pay attention to the needs of its citizens that don't have any connection to the military.

The other technologies that epitomize the cyberpunk genre are equally captured. All the improvements to computer technology in the world don't help without the infrastructure to connect them to each other, and service providers have made sure that they can maintain their monopolies (the lucky few have two options). So it is that we get things like data caps, which Comcast introduced for its customers just a few days ago as of this writing, during a time of pandemic when more and more people are reliant on broadband internet access to work and go to school.

In a similar vein, computer and communications technology has become only selectively easier to use. The basics are much simpler, to be sure, but the kinds of things depicted in cyberpunk--hacking and maintaining some semblance of privacy to name two prime examples--are harder and harder. Privacy in particular requires a near constant battle against the hydra of corporate interests that are constantly trying to chip away at it. And not just in terms of taking data itself, but even the expectation of privacy.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube--they're all predicated on making us share. And of course we do exactly that. Why wouldn't we? We have an innate need for community and connection. But just as advertisers long ago figured out that they could turn our own wiring against us, so-called social networks (anti-social networks?) took our desire for connecting with other people and purified it until it became a freebase. It's difficult to avoid and even harder to quit.

It takes money, knowledge, and work to even slightly escape, and even then it's not really possible unless you happen to only interact with similar privacy-minded folk or cut yourself off from society entirely. It takes almost nothing to be entirely mapped.

Meanwhile, the task is made that much harder by the fact that it's not entirely clear why our data is worth anything. The conventional wisdom is that it's for targeted advertising, but I have to wonder if that's actually worth anything anymore. Then again, it could be completely ineffective but still something companies want to do, since marketing believes that someone has to see a product multiple times before they'll actually seek it out. Plus, there's always the possibility of Facebook et al. cooking the books, as they did in the case of view counts on videos some years back.

Regardless, this lack of knowledge makes it harder for us, because we can't target our defenses. We don't have a clear idea of what's valuable and what isn't, what data is already out there and what data is still being sought. We can't, for example, make digital chaff to flood the collectors with junk.

Chains of Chrome

I'm told that essays should have some part of the author in them, and I can't help but notice that this approach--intertwining personal anecdote with the overall point--is used all over the world. Maybe it's a matter of not getting outside my own writing, but it seems to me that simply what I'm writing and how says more about me than talking about the smells in the bookstore where I bought my first copy of Neuromancer, or some story about my relationship with the friend who introduced me to Blade Runner. I personally have more faith in readers than that.

Having written what I have already, is it really surprising to know that what draws me to the genre more than anything is freedom? It may seem strange to associate freedom with the extremely powerful corporate entities and material conditions of most cyberpunk. But notice, these stories don't focus on the corporate bureaucrat trapped in a structure they'll never escape. Instead, it's the technologically-enhanced ronin, whether their particular weapons are blades or computer viruses. They ultimately answer to no one but themselves, and can generally find a way to live their own lives within the cracks in the business edifice. Sure, drama demands that this not always be true in some way, even if it's as simple as the criminal's reputation.

It's not difficult, then, to see the appeal. I have no skills to sell even if there were still a market for such things (instead of credentials). Mercenaries are rightly outcast, since chances are they'll be put to worse use than even a state-sponsored military. There's a reason that Blackwater has had to change its name two or three times by now.

Cyberpunk allows us all of the freedom of a new frontier by finding that frontier within an existing structure. Its characters aren't constrained the way we are in our daily lives, and can overcome both human nature and human society through the technology available to them. What is now considered experimental or only the purview of DARPA is to them a child's toy, with far better ready for purchase on the streetcorner.

In many ways, cyberpunk is a product of its time, when technology seemed to offer at least as much possibility as threat. Now, we don't really trust technology to be enough. We see the slow-motion apocalypse of climate change and don't believe that we can invent our way out of it; recognizing that even if the device existed, someone would figure out how to capture its benefits. I'm not sure it'll be anything so stark as having clean cities and then a burned wasteland surrounding them, but we'll only be saved to the extent that we're useful.

Cyberpunk showed us an increasing commodification of our lives, but even those imaginations couldn't foresee the degree to which this would be true, while they simultaneously underestimated its subtlety. The trackers on every website that form pieces of the economic puzzle that is ourselves feel too small to fight, and so we sell ourselves in a thousand pieces. Even being a corporate spy in a future dystopia is more honest.

[chrisbbaegopayo]

Hold Your Breath (Stray Kids: Stalker AU) ➻ Chapter 3 (part 1)

....

Genre: Thriller, Angst, Gore, Mystery, Suspense Characters: All of Stray Kids, reader, OCs. Word Count: 1.2k Warning: This story will contain elements of gore, on- and off-screen abuse, torture, mental illness, and stalking. It will feature themes that are not suitable for all ages, readers discretion is advised. Each chapter will have its own specific warning.

Sorry for the short post. I’ve managed to hit a very bad case of writer’s block, as well as other things, more on that below. (updates will now be once every two weeks)

Chapters: Premise | 01 Prologue | 02 Chapter one | 03 Chapter two | Chapter three (part 1) | Chapter three (part 2)

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She and Hyunjin ended up getting along really well in class, as they introduced themselves in the timeframe that the professor had given them. She learned that he had been here to earn himself a bachelor’s degree in literature, much like his parents wanted. He had been a pretty hardworking student and liked to participate in extra-curricular activities, although he didn’t really elaborate on which clubs he had joined since attending the university.

It had come to a surprise, then, that he knew who she was. It was kind of strange for her to introduce herself to someone who had already know of her—he did say that he knew of her and knew who she was, but never made an attempt to say anything to her, which, to her, was understandable. University could be somewhat of an intimidating place. And Hyunjin, who kept to himself during classes unless he was asked to participate in group work or class discussions, was naturally relatively inside his head. 

He had a small circle of friends, she learned, of which he had dropped after coming to this university. He told her that he stayed in touch with most of them through social media and that he had missed them. 

They didn’t manage to get too deep into their conversation, although he did tell her that he was in a few of her classes back in first and second year, and much of the reason of keeping to himself most of the time didn’t say anything to her, as they were practically strangers.

Professor Lee stopped the discussion then and then began his first lecture. Much of it had to do with what goals to set at the beginning of the semester, what they would be covering throughout the semester, as well as the many assignments they were expected to do and their due dates that accompanied these assignments. Much to her displeasure, every week, there would be a test that summarized the terms they learned the week before, just to keep them on their toes, apparently. This was probably the most for her, as her memorization skills weren’t the best…

…this would also mean that she would have to do a lot of reading. And note-taking. As much as she enjoyed reading, the mind-numbing technical terms might just defeat her.

However, the silver lining was that there would be some hands-on case studies and there might be field trips planned in the course, although the professor did not specifically say if they were definitely included. As for these field trips, they were still in the process of negotiating some plan, of which professor Lee did not specify.

They also had to write two essays throughout the semester. Great.

As the professor started lecturing, he covered what the meaning of crime was, what each term meant, and how it integrated into society on a very base level. As for the rest of the two-hour lecture, Professor Lee merely just taught through most of the time with interesting examples and various experiences that he had encountered. He made things interesting, and the majority of the class was completely engrossed. The mid-lecture break had gone by and soon, had buzzed by without much of a fuss. 

“All right, remember, class, make sure to read up on chapter 2, pages 60 through to 90! You will be expected to go through it with your teaching assistant in your tutorial later,” Professor Lee said. “Feel free to visit during my office hours should you have any questions or problems regarding class! See you next week!”

She placed her notebook in her bag and looked over at Hyunjin, who looked rather pleased with the class. “Tutorial, huh?”

He nodded and leaned back against his chair. “Yeah, it should be exciting. At least the professor was interesting, hopefully, the teacher assistant will be just as interesting. When do you have yours?”

She pulled up her schedule, and scanned it, trying to figure out which day she had her tutorial. Turned out that she had her tutorial at 11:30 a.m. in two days with a person named F. Lee. And upon showing it to Hyunjin, she was surprised to learn that he also shared the same tutorial. It seemed like a pretty pleasant surprise, she thought. To be in the same class and tutorial—it was as though something was being conveyed to her through this strange arrangement. Or not. It just seemed like a pretty interesting coincidence. 

But life didn’t have coincidences, did they? 

Regardless, the two left the lecture room and went their separate ways after swapping numbers. 

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She had never been so glad to be home. After that stalker fiasco earlier on in the day, she was ready to retire to bed. However, she cracked open the textbook she was required to read for the class and sat at her desk, trying to make some from sense from the lectures. She got a few paragraphs into the reading when her phone buzzed with a text message.

>> Hey I’ve got food Open up OMG bless thank you <<

Jisung seemed to know exactly when was hungry because her stomach grumbled a bit. She went downstairs, and as soon as she got to the door, the doorbell rang, and she opened the door, letting her best friend in.

“You always come at the best time, ever,” she said, ushering him into the house. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. Seriously.”

He laughed. “That’s why I’m your best friend, right?”

The two of them ate and chatted about their day and by the time they finished their food, Jisung had gotten up to toss the containers into the recycling bin. 

She stared at her phone for the time being and sighed. She should go back to reading, but she really didn’t want to do any reading that night. It seemed like a great time to just lay back and chill for a little longer until it was time for her to go to bed.

It was still relatively early in the evening—or late afternoon, and perhaps she could just put her feet up and catch up later on.

But then her mind wandered off to the letter she got—it was unsettling.

“Jisung?” 

He made a noise of acknowledgment, while still staring at his phone. 

“I got another letter.”

His fingers that were once tapping away, seemingly mid-text stopped. He placed his phone down and faced her. “What did it say?”

“It was...something like ‘a new semester will start new things’ or something...and then something about more gifts to come,” she recalled.

Something about Jisung’s expression worried her. 

“Did you file the complaint to the school like I said?” He asked.

She shook her head, but then upon seeing his concerned expression deepen, she held up her hands and reassured him that she was going to file it in the upcoming days.

“I haven’t exactly had time, you know, I promise I will—I’ll even let you know! I promise!” 

He sighed, and with a heavy tone, he said, “fine, as long as you know.”

She was about to say something when he leaned over and put his hand atop her head, almost in a maternal gesture.

“I’m just really worried about you, you know? These are just some precautions that you have to take, okay?” 

She nodded. “Yeah, thank you, Jisung, you’re always looking out for me...”

He chuckled, “that’s what I’m here for, remember?”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I’ve managed to land myself in a really deep ditch called writer’s block, and it’s honestly really draining to write when my motivation is zero most of the time. Sorry, it’s been pretty hard most of the time, especially balancing both work and creative writing at the same time. I do writing for my day job too, and every day I’ve pretty much felt like I’ve exhausted most of my writing into work, and the creative juices are NOT flowing into what should belong to creative writing. Hashtag excuses lol.

However, I did find a good way to keep my motivation up—the story is planned out, I know what’s going to happen in the bigger picture, but the details aren’t exactly set. Sometimes if I see an opportunity to implement new ideas, I will, such as relationships between certain characters and their history and such. I do have several pages of notes of the character’s relationships and backstories.

I will be publishing their backstories starting with Hyunjin, and I think it will make for interesting future plot segments. 

As well, I will be changing the updates to every two weeks until I can get out of this really bad writer’s block. 

Whether or not people like to read it or not, I’ll just keep on writing anyway because I genuinely do love creative writing. As well, I have been planning this story for wayyyy too long and even though my execution of the story might be slow and not what my mind wants me to write, I think I want to continue regardless. I’m just really grateful for the readers that I do have, and appreciate the time you invest in my story. Please feel free to poke me/talk to me about the story and let me know what you think of it. I know I haven’t advanced enough into the story for people have a true understanding or grasp of it, but I will be publishing the character’s relationships with each other and how they’re all connected. Because they are.

If I have any jumping tense problem—I’m sorry, I do try my best to catch them while writing, and I will improve and do my best not to disappoint too much.

Thank you! c:

[narkinafive]

essay update~!

inching ever closer to the right word and page count!! mobile users, i apologize if the read more function doesn’t work bc this one is a doozy

as always, PLEASE don’t hesitate to read and critique, bc i need that sweet sweet criticism babey

Few franchises can match the breadth of Star Wars, and fewer still can claim to be as iconic. Not only have the characters, dialogues, settings, and aesthetics been directly referenced and lovingly parodied across all genres, so too has John Williams’ music. Yet Williams’ music is perhaps most referenced, riffed on, and remixed within the franchise itself; it is difficult to find a piece of Star Wars media which does not contain any number of Williams’ leitmotifs, such as the bombastic “Main Title” fanfare, the sweeping majesty of the Force theme, or the foreboding, villainous “Imperial March.” Within the many, many Star Wars related properties that require the use of music, composers for the franchise’s “lower tier” [properties], i.e. any property outside of the nine-film “Skywalker Saga,” are presented with a difficult challenge: how does one emulate and reference Williams’ original, titanic score, keeping a coherent sonic aesthetic, without copying him directly, and allowing space for the composer’s own musical language? 

By the 1950s and 60s, the practice of using Romantic music to accompany films was dying out; music by composers such as Max Steiner, Erich Korngold, or Leonard Bernstein was slowly being replaced by popular music of the era, or, as was the case with many science fiction films, electro-acoustic music. For example, Bernard Hermann in The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise, 1951) used electronic instruments for the bulk of his orchestra, along with innovative techniques in overdubbing and tape-reversal. Five years later, Bebe Barron, alongside husband Louis Barron, would write one of the first entirely electronic scores for Forbidden Planet (dir. Fred Wilcox, 1956). Outside the realm of science fiction, films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) or The Graduate (dir. Mike Nichols, 1967) used popular music partly for aesthetic purposes, and partly to exploit the songs’ commercial success outside of the films. Lucas himself elected for the use of a completely pop soundtrack for his film American Graffiti (dir. Lucas, 1973). Stanley Kubrick’s decision to use classical music for 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Kubrick, 1960) was unique in film at the time; his use of 19th and 20th century music even more so. 

“Traditionally, music for the sci-fi genre would use a language inspired by twentieth-century musical modernism-atonalism, twelve-tone technique, aleatoric music, and so forth-or would use electronic instruments, timbres, or even musique concrete to provide the musical equivalent of futuristic or hyper technological worlds… Stanley Kubrick in [2001: A Space Odyssey] chose to combine images of deep space and unseen worlds with a compilation of repertoire orchestral pieces--after having rudely rejected Alex North’s original score [commissioned specifically for the film]. The selection spanned from classic pieces like Richard Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, op. 30, 1896) and Johann Strauss Jr.’s The Blue Danube (An der schonen blauen Donau, op. 314, 1866) to contemporary art music like Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna (1966), Atmospheres (1961), Requiem (1963-65), and Adventures (1962)... Yet Kubrick’s choice was also the consequence of a lack of trust in film composers. ‘However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brhams. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music from the past and from our own time?’ Lucas rejected the modernist and electronic options and chose Kubrick’s approach. He wrote the script while listening to the late romantic symphony repertoire…”

Jonathan Rinzler recalls Lucas’ choice of a more traditional, Romantic sonic language as being entirely deliberate, in order to help ease the audience into the extremely unfamiliar fictional world with the use of familiar music. “[Lucas] didn’t want, for example, electronic music, he didn’t want futuristic cliché, outer space noises. He felt that since the picture was so highly different in all of its physical orientations – with the different creatures, places unseen, sights unseen, and noises unheard – that the music should be on fairly familiar emotional ground.” 

The larger Star Wars chronology can be broken into three general eras: the Original Trilogy era (OT), which focuses on the time represented by the films A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and Rogue One, the Sequel Trilogy era (ST), which is comprised of the films The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, as well as the TV series Star Wars: Resistance, and the Prequel Trilogy era (PT), as represented by the films The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and Solo, as well as the TV series The Clone Wars. Of these properties, Williams has obviously scored the lion’s share of the films; Rogue One’s soundtrack was composed by Michael Giacchino, Resistance by Michael Tavera, Solo by John Powell, and The Clone Wars by Kevin Kiner. Kiner’s other work for Star Wars was the score of another TV series, Star Wars Rebels. Rebels occupies an interesting place within the greater Star Wars chronology, qualifying as a prequel due to taking place before the events of A New Hope, yet both aesthetically and narratively more aligned with the OT, rather than the PT. Though Rebels is nominally a prequel, Kiner’s musical language sets it firmly within the OT era, with frequent sonic callbacks to Williams’ score, with each aesthetic connection serving not only to link the viewer to the OT era, but also, through its absences and deviations, highlight the narrative differences between Rebels and the original films. This is particularly exemplified in the parallels and contrasts between the heroes of Rebels and the OT, Ezra Bridger, and Luke Skywalker.

From the outset, several contrasts and parallels can be drawn between Ezra Bridger and Luke Skywalker: both are orphans from provincial areas of the galaxy, both are accidentally caught up in insurrectionist rebel activity against the Empire, and both discover that they can wield the powers of the Force. They are even roughly the same age, born within days of each other. Contrasts do abound, however. Ezra receives several years of Jedi training from a former Jedi, while Luke receives very little; Ezra is actively involved with the Rebellion from the beginning, while Luke steps in at the last second to secure one of the Alliance’s largest victories; Ezra’s primary motif is connected to the twin moons of his home planet of Lothal - this, in contrast to the famous scene of Luke Skywalker gazing into the twin sunset of his planet of Tatooine; and so on. Even their character designs are oppositional; Luke is quite white, blond-haired and blue-eyed, a country farmer from a family of farmers, kind but naive, whereas Ezra is coded as Jewish or Middle Eastern (his parents’ names are Ephraim and Mira, a name likely derived from Myra, Miriam, or Maryam--this, coupled with his physical features, points to a certain ethnic origin. Mira, in flashbacks, even wears a headscarf, and is one of the few human women in the larger Star Wars universe to do so), with dark hair and darker skin, a homeless city orphan who is more than well-acquainted with the Empire’s atrocities. When it comes to their roles in the Rebellion, though, both Luke and Ezra initially start their adventures with the promise of Jedi training, and find themselves drawn in to the major political and martial action of the Galactic Civil War. 

Set five years before the events of A New Hope, the backdrop of Rebels depicts the formal declaration of the Galactic Alliance, the establishment of the famous rebel base on the planet of Yavin IV, and numerous references to the secret construction of the Death Star, alongside several integral character cameos, including Lando Calrissian, Princess Leia, and Obi-wan Kenobi, while the main thrust of the story centers on the crew of the Ghost, an early rebel cell, and the journey of its newest crew member, Ezra Bridger. Described by Dave Filoni, Executive Producer and creator of Rebels, as a con artist, and Taylor Gray, the character’s actor, as “very street smart, he’s a pickpocket, he’s a little thief,” Ezra happens upon the crew of the Ghost as they commit a minor act of terrorism against the Galactic Empire, stealing several crates of supplies. Rather than pick a side in the conflict, Ezra elects to steal a crate of the same supplies for himself, outrunning the comedically incompetent Imperial police force, and dodging the members of the Ghost crew as they try to get the supplies back, until Ezra is forced to seek refuge on the Ghost to escape the marginally more competent TIE figher pilots. After helping the crew in distributing the supplies - namely, food - to a nearby refugee camp, Ezra is convinced by the Ghost’s pilot and leader, Hera Syndulla, to assist in a rescue mission. Despite his initial capture and subsequent escape from Imperial custody, Ezra chooses to see the rescue mission through to the end, and witnesses the Ghost’s second-in-command, Kanan Jarrus, wield a lightsaber, revealing himself as a survivor of the presumed-extinct and quasi-legendary Jedi Order. Recognizing that Ezra has the same gift as him, Kanan offers to train him to wield the Force in order to continue fighting against the Empire, dispelling any notion that the Jedi are gone with a triumphant declaration, “Not all of us.” Ezra agrees, and thus begins their partnership which will last for the next four years, as Kanan, who never technically made it past the rank of apprentice, passes on his fragmented training, and they both become more and more deeply entwined with the Rebellion. 

Luke’s introduction to the Rebel Alliance appears to be as coincidental as the above, though one can argue that it was ordained by the Force, or some kind of similar higher power. When his uncle and adoptive father Owen purchases a pair of droids for the farm, Luke discovers a secret message hidden within one of them: Princess Leia’s plea to a mysterious Obi-wan Kenobi for aid. Luke’s first instinct is to help her, seeking out the reclusive loner Ben Kenobi for more information--with the added gratification of disobeying his uncle, who is currently keeping him tied to the family farm, and will not let him leave the planet. When the Empire, inevitably, comes looking for its stolen property--stolen Imperial secrets hidden within one of the droids--Luke is too late to warn his aunt and uncle, and finds his homestead burned to the ground. Grief stricken and alone, Luke begs Obi-wan to take him with him to Alderaan, in order to learn how to be a Jedi like his mysterious father. After hiring smuggler Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, they instead find the Death Star, and Luke convinces Han to mount a daring, ill-planned rescue of the Princess. While they do rescue Leia, they lose Obi-wan as he stalls the Imperials, buying them time to escape. Thoughts of becoming a Jedi are pushed to the background as Luke volunteers to be a part of the attack on the Death Star, despite Han’s insistence that he should take his cut of their reward money and run. Up against an implausible and unbelievable behemoth of a killing machine, a massive weapon capable of genocide on an unimaginable scale, it is Luke and his superhuman abilities which allow him to fire the shot which destroys the Death Star and everybody on it, immediately cementing him as not only a hero, but the hero, from both a Doylist and a Watsonian perspective. 

These parallels are further underscored by their respective musical motifs. Consider Luke’s theme, the “Main Title” fanfare. In the words of Williams himself, from the liner notes of the original 1977 LP release: 

When I thought of a theme for Luke and his adventures, I composed a melody that reflected the brassy, bold, masculine, and noble qualities I saw in the character. When the theme is played softly, I tended towards a softer brass sound. But I used fanfarish horns for the more heraldic passages. This theme, in particular, brings out the full glow of the glorious brass section of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Comprised primarily of perfect intervals, the theme begins with an ascending fifth, an opening salvo so famous that music students everywhere, yours truly included, use it to identify perfect fifths in other contexts. As Lucas notes, the principal instrumentation is in the brass section, immediately conferring an old-world heroic air to Luke. “[The Main Title theme] conveys the heroism at the heart of the saga with the economy of its opening fifth (reaching upward), descending triplet (gathering strength for another try), and triumphant lift to an octave above the opening note (attainment of the goal).” Peter Nickalls compares this to the “perfect rising fifth” of “Siegfried’s Horn Call” from Wagner’s Ring Cycle as emblematic of many heroic melodies.

[insert sheet music here, recap] 

As a theme, it is punchy, energetic, intrinsically tied up in the “Rebel Fanfare,” and generally underscores moments of onscreen heroism and stylistically valiant acts. 

By contrast, while Ezra’s theme is also played by the horns, they are muted, thinner, ringing out more softly over shimmering, sustained strings. [insert sheet music here, recap] Ezra’s theme mostly serves to underscore the character’s moments of emotional reflection, rather than his superhuman action, which is usually accompanied by the “Force” theme, the “Rebel Fanfare,” or the Ghost’s musical motif. 

Luke’s theme in its first non-diegetic appearance, that is, its first appearance outside of the main titles, is a little different than one would expect; the melody is still a solo, but played in the horns, implicitly sonically identifying Luke as the protagonist, according to Nickalls, and with a much tamer underlying harmonization. Instead of an alternating pattern of quarter notes and triplets, underscoring the martial aspect of the narrative to come, the “Wars” part of the saga, the harmonic rhythm here is much simpler, with gentle, almost sweet chord bursts on the second and fourth beats. Steven Galipeau, in his analysis of Luke Skywalker as a modern myth, writes of this narrative moment, “We meet [Luke] as a discouraged, frustrated young man stuck on his uncle’s farm, dreaming of going to the galaxy space academy with many of his friends. As he goes with his uncle to meet the Jawa sand trawler and the droids they bring, his aunt calls out his name: ‘Luke! Luke!’ The music and sequence immediately set him apart.” Simple, full of youthful energy, this moment is an aural demonstration of Luke at the beginning of his journey. He is not yet the hero of the Rebellion, nor the famed last of the Jedi; he is simply Luke, whose primary goal at this moment in the narrative is to leave his little hometown, by any means possible. Furthermore, beyond being the first narrative iteration of the title fanfare, it is the first recognizable melody in quite some time. While the audience is treated to several recognizable motifs in the opening sequence, such as Princess Leia’s theme, the Rebel Fanfare, and the original theme for Darth Vader and the Empire (the Imperial March would not be introduced until the next film in the sequence, Empire Strikes Back), the music of the sequence of the droids wandering across the desert is highly reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; Lucas even used Stravinsky as a temporary score during the editing process. Famous for inciting a riot in the streets of Paris at its premiere, the Rite of Spring, and by extension, Williams’ scoring of this scene, is strange and almost frightening, meandering and unmoored--perfect for representing the precarious journey of the droids, but difficult to recognize as a melody in the traditional sense. The return to standard melodic form also functions as an auditory notice, as it were, to the audience, politely calling attention to the arrival of the protagonist. 

The first iteration of Ezra’s theme plays as he assists the crew of the Ghost handing out food supplies to a group of poverty-stricken refugees who live in a small cluster of ramshackle tents, named “Tarkintown” in universe, a clear reference to the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. One refugee thanks Ezra directly for his efforts, putting a hand on his shoulder, but walks off before Ezra can weakly admit that he actually had no part in this, apart from physically walking the crate from the ship to the town. Deeply affected by this refugee’s actions, he retreats out of the village, and watches the Ghost crew and the villagers from afar. The day’s events have overturned his entire world view, and he is taking time to process them all; rather than abscond with the supplies stolen from Imperials, the crew of the Ghost chooses to give most of them away, an action which is clearly baffling to him (though, as the audience sees, a crate of weapons will be sold by the crew to a shady businessman for income), particularly as Ezra’s first instinct had been to sell them himself, to any number of the black market dealers with which he has become familiar growing up. At this moment, Ezra is struggling with a great many mysteries, chiefly the question of why the crew had even offered him refuge on their ship. Surely, if they were like any other thief or smuggler, they would have left him behind to be killed by the TIE Fighter pilot, either as a punishment for stealing the crates in the first place, or simply to get him out of the way. (Later, he will be even more shocked that they turn around to rescue him from an Imperial Star Destroyer, one of the Empire’s largest and most heavily guarded space vessels, despite having accidentally left him behind earlier in their haste to escape.) “Who are you people?” he will ask later, befuddled by their seemingly conflicting acts as they alternately help and, to his mind, hinder him. “I mean, you’re not thieves, exactly.” Now, however, this emotional confusion, coupled with a handy tug from the Force, compels him to sneak aboard the Ghost and snoop, where he stumbles on Kanan’s lightsaber and holocron, a treasure trove of Jedi information that only Jedi can open, which he promptly steals. 

Similarly to the film example above, this moment cements Ezra’s place as the protagonist of the series. It arrives more than fifteen minutes into the episode, the bulk of which had been taken up by reworkings of Williams’ motifs; the Imperial March, the TIE Fighter theme, and the Rebel Fanfare are quite prominent, while Kiner’s most incorporated theme is his theme for the Ghost crew, which chiefly plays as its old members size up its eventual new one. Nestled in a flurry of exciting musical moments that recall the thrilling spaceflight chases of the OT, the slowness and pensiveness of Ezra’s theme, in contrast to the previous fifteen minutes of music, also brings the audience’s attention to the forefront. The musical change signals a similar change in mood, content, and focus, from heroic action to emotional reflection. Indeed, this is the first truly character driven moment of the series, and the first moment of an onscreen character struggle, as Ezra tries to reconcile the altruism he has just seen with the cynicism he has known for his entire life. 

[better setup] During their grand escape from the Death Star, Luke and Leia, separated from Han and Obi-wan and on the run from a pack of Stormtroopers, nearly run off the edge of a platform into a bottomless pit. With a sequence lifted right from the screen of a mid-century swashbuckling pirate film, Luke throws a rope across and swings him and Leia to the safety of the other ledge of the hallway, before proceeding with the rest of their escape. The accompanying motif is appropriately heroic, 

Ezra was born on “Empire Day,” the day that the Clone Wars were ended and the Galactic Empire was declared by Palpatine, formerly Senator, then Chancellor, and now Emperor. (It was that same day that the Emperor launched his assault on the Jedi Order, wiping nearly all of them out in one overwhelming blow. Incidentally, Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa were born two days later.) For Ezra, Empire Day comes with its own baggage--this day is also the anniversary of his parents’ arrest for treason, which left him homeless and alone. This Empire Day, however, Ezra is not alone, but instead has joined up with a rebel cell determined to cause some mayhem and headaches for the Imperial occupiers. With Imperials distracted by preparations for a local parade, and their search for a particular Imperial data-worker named Tseebo, Ezra and the rebels happily ruin the parade, and, while hiding in the abandoned apartment which used to be Ezra’s childhood home, discover Tseebo already there. Tseebo was, by Ezra’s admission, a friend of his parents, though Ezra himself wants nothing to do with Tseebo now, who “went to work for the Empire, after they took my parents away.” In the years since, Tseebo has allowed himself to be implanted with cybernetic enhancements by the Empire in order to increase his productivity, before downloading several caches of Imperial secrets, and attempting to flee. With all of the information in his head, Tseebo is little more than catatonic, able to walk and spout random information, but not truly understanding what is going on around him--until some turbulence aboard the Ghost appears to knock him back into consciousness. Seeing and recognizing Ezra, and perhaps knowing that he has a limited amount of time, Tseebo frantically tries to tell Ezra that he knows what happened to his parents, who he had presumed to be dead all this time. Sadly, Tseebo cannot remain lucid for very long, and Ezra must go and help draw the pursuing Imperials off of their tail, in order to get Tseebo to Hera’s rebel operative, the mysterious Fulcrum. Ezra will not discover the true fate of his parents for some time; at this point, however, he claims it is merely a moot point, telling crewmate Sabine, “I've been on my own since I was seven, okay? If I'd let myself believe my folks were alive, if I let myself believe they'd come back and save me, I'd never have learned how to survive.” 

The arrest of his parents was clearly a traumatic event for Ezra, one he, truthfully, hasn’t processed until the events of this episode. Part of a Jedi’s training is learning to deal with one’s emotions in a healthy manner; Ezra, who refused to believe the possibility that his parents were alive, finds himself blocked, unable to tap into or use the Force beyond small bursts of instinctual panic, until he tearfully admits his fear that they may still be out there, and have been for all these years, to Kanan. Open to the Force, in battle with the Imperials, Ezra demonstrates the beginnings of his remarkable skill in connection, particularly with animals and other creatures, until, backed into a corner, he uses the Dark Side in order to summon a monster. With the Imperials beaten back, and Tseebo safely in the hands of the rebels, Sabine finds Ezra ruminating over the days’ events in one of the ship’s turrets, events which have shifted the galaxy on its axis, upping the stakes and changing the characters’ views of each other permanently. Sabine, who had previously treated Ezra as something of an irritating stranger with a misplaced crush, finds a kindred spirit in him as someone who has had their family torn apart by the Empire. For his belated birthday present, she gives him a data-disc which she had picked up while hiding in his childhood home; on it, amidst all the other corrupted data, is an old family photo of his. Too grateful for words, Ezra barely even notices her leave, his attention fixed on the image, as the camera exits the ship, zooming away as the Ghost heads off towards parts unknown, and his musical motif resounding in a full, stately, horn chorus. [insert sheet music]

In a pair of episodes chock full of this motif, [insert count here], this iteration in particular stands out from the rest. Firstly, it is clear that this final iteration is meant to be louder than the others, at least a mezzo-forte rather than a mezzo-piano; secondly, all the voices are working together in a moment of greater homophony, instead of a single voice over an aesthetic accompaniment; and thirdly, the top, melodic line arcs upwards, rather than downwards. These changes, in part, reflect Ezra’s newfound awareness of his own feelings regarding the disappearance of his parents. Rather than shame, which causes him to hide and suppress his emotions as he has done his entire life, he admits his fear and overcomes it, and he lets his joy and happiness at seeing the photo come out fully, rather than trying to save face in front of his peers and continue to keep playing the part of carefree, scrappy, ne’er-do-weller. It is a turning point in several ways, both narratively and musically; from this moment on, Ezra will begin making leaps and bounds in his Jedi education, going on to construct his own lightsaber in the next episode, a ritual which, in universe, historically marks the transition to a proper apprenticeship. Concurrently, instances of Ezra’s theme decrease dramatically. 

[Luke example - death star run?]

[fix this part lmao] Sadly, Ezra’s quest to find his parents ends in tragedy. When a Force-inspired dream pushes him [find his parents again?], Kanan and Hera reveal that they have been trying to do the same for months. Ezra’s parents, according to Tseebo, were arrested and taken to an Imperial prison--one of thousands--somewhere in the galaxy, though soon after, news comes from the Rebel leadership of a prison break; guided by the Force, Ezra is certain that the prison break was orchestrated by his parents. Brimming with excitement and pursuing this new lead with a mildly alarming doggedness, Ezra returns to Lothal to find Ryder Azadi, the former governor of the planet, and friend of his parents. Azadi, a Rebel sympathizer, allowed the Bridgers to make their anti-Imperial broadcasts, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned with them. Ezra, again, perhaps guided by the Force, seems to know what has happened before it is even said; though Mira and Ephraim did orchestrate the prison break, they perished in the attempt. His mourning spills into the next episode, where he and Kanan have to devise a way to get new supplies to the Rebellion without alerting the Empire to their covert benefactor’s identity--who is none other than Leia Organa, in a cameo appearance. Leia finds Ezra quietly crying over the photo of his parents that Sabine had saved for him. His musical motif this time is in the strings, not the horns, and loops repeatedly. 

[Ezra’s journey from start to finish recap] Initially, Ezra joins the Rebellion not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is convenient to him at the time; the Ghost functions as a roof over his head, its crew members as a new set of parents and siblings, and its missions as a source of food and income, along with the added bonus of learning how to use an incredibly powerful, specialized weapon, despite the target it paints on his back. Filoni himself states [need src] that Ezra decides to join the Ghost not only to learn how to use a lightsaber, but because he is in need of a family, having lost his own parents at the age of seven, when they were arrested for their underground, anti-establishment radio broadcasts. Ezra’s larger journey over the course of Rebels is re-learning how to think beyond himself, regaining his trust and faith in others after having it completely shattered at a very young age, and following through with what he needs to do for the greater good of this fight against tyranny to which he has dedicated himself, not just the good of his family and friends--but, as one would expect, at the very beginning of his story, he is far more selfish than selfless. It is more than halfway into the first season before Ezra begins to truly understand and act on the Jedi lessons Kanan has attempted to teach him, beyond lifting rocks with his mind, as he finally admits and begins to face his fears while in the middle of a vision quest (presided over by the disembodied voice of Master Yoda). Over the course of the series, Ezra has frequent, deep brushes with the “Dark Side” of the Force, becoming more and more inclined to fight, hurt, or even kill in the name of pragmatism, earning victories for the Rebel Alliance through dubious and increasingly terroristic means, before the desolation of his homeworld and the loss of his mentor wrench him firmly back on the heroic path. 

This is not to say that Kiner never chooses to use Ezra’s theme in a heroic context. Most notably, in the series finale, his theme plays triumphantly over his great sacrifice, as Ezra summons enormous, semi-legendary whale creatures called the Purrgil, to destroy the Imperial blockade over Lothal, and spirit away the remaining ships beyond the edge of the known galaxy, with both Thrawn, the series’ chief antagonist, and Ezra still on board. From an in-universe, narrative perspective, Ezra, of course, would have to sacrifice himself in some manner in order to explain his absence in the events of the original trilogy; Yoda on his deathbed tells Luke, “When gone am I, the last of the Jedi you will be,” leaving, unfortunately, no room for any other Jedi left in the galaxy, lest the entire narrative of the OT fall apart. It was inevitable that both Kanan and Ezra would have to vanish, though while Kanan died, Ezra merely disappeared, with Filoni confirming that both he and Thrawn are alive, somewhere off the edge of the map. It’s a fitting moment, then, for his theme to return in full force here; a far cry from his introduction as a scrappy street rat, Ezra has fully come into his own as a Jedi in his own right, and understands the role that he plays, both in-universe as it pertains to the fate of the Rebel Alliance, and in a meta-sense, as both precursor and herald to Luke Skywalker. Happily and willingly, he chooses to sacrifice himself in order to save his planet, and the hundreds of civilians who live on it, and the victorious music confirms this. Four years earlier, he stubbornly declared that he would never risk his life in this manner for people he didn’t know: “You know, this whole [rescue] mission thing is nuts. I'm not against sticking it to the Empire, but there's no way I'd stick my neck out this far. Who does that?” Hera, in reply, simply declares, “We do.” His journey with the crew of the Ghost, his apprenticeship with Kanan, and his role in the Rebel Alliance has transformed him, and his music, from shy, unsure, and sorrowful to confident, powerful, and determined, though the core of his music, and by extension, his character, remains the same; this heroism was within him all along. 

In the latter half of 2019, several new Star Wars properties are set to launch, including the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, the seventh season of the revived Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated show, and, of course, the ninth and final film in the so-called “Skywalker Saga,” Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Each of the listed properties’ accompanying trailers, with music scored by Gordy Haab, Stephen Barton, and BLAKUS, composers for the video game Star Wars: Battlefront II, Kiner, and Williams, respectively, have one unexpected thing in common: the “Main Fanfare” theme is nowhere to be found. In the trailer for Jedi: Fallen Order, Haab’s score is much more reminiscent of Alan Silvestri’s Marvel’s Avengers in its melody and harmony than anything else. Though there are two instances of Williams’ themes in the trailer score, they are both short and incomplete; we hear a somber and foreboding four notes of “The Imperial March” as the protagonist gazes anxiously at his broken weapon, and we hear just the beginnings of the Force theme as the title of the game is revealed, though the theme is reharmonized in order to blend with what will doubtless become the protagonist’s own leitmotif. Similarly, in the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, Williams chooses to only incorporate one of his themes, “Princess Leia’s Theme,” with splendid, yearning sixth intervals over long, drawn out horn and percussion crashes, partially as an homage to the late Carrie Fisher, and partially due to Leia Organa’s rumored key role in the film itself. For The Clone Wars season seven trailer, Kiner does not use any of Williams’ original score; instead, the trailer begins with the theme he created for the breakout character of the show, Ahsoka Tano, before moving into entirely his own new material. 

Though the so-called “Skywalker Saga” is ending, Disney has planned nearly another decade’s worth of Star Wars content in the form of spin-off titles, television series, games, books, comics - any and every medium imaginable, and there are currently no signs that production is slowing down. Perhaps it is inevitable, then, that all traces of Luke Skywalker, visual, narrative, and musical, are disappearing from the greater Star Wars landscape as the universe continues to expand and include new protagonists and stories. Die-hard fans will of course decry this as an attack on a precious childhood memory, as they do for any piece of Star Wars media released after 1998. [Kiner demonstrates it’s possible to have the best of both worlds] 

[didanawisgi]

In defense of the natural evolution of Liberty: An essay (in progress)

I made a small update on this essay I am working on, I figured I would put it on my blog. Check back occasionally, as I continue to update and flesh out my thoughts on this topic.  Feel free to leave comments, like/dislike, tell me where I’m wrong and right etc. I would like to hear from you. - 1/4/2019 

As a student of history and human nature, I know many fear what they do not understand. I am also keenly aware of the possibilities, that may repeat themselves, should a Citizenry whose degree of liberty and freedoms, never before seen in known human history, ever forfeit their ability to defend, by force if ever necessary, those same freedoms and liberties that allow them life, liberty, and to pursue those joyous experiences that represent peak experiences of the human condition. 

History teaches us that people who wield power must be tempered. Plato’s idea of the Philosopher King was such that a King whom, essentially, learning of the several liberal arts and sciences, and becoming closer to God and Nature, and understanding Natural Law, would be embodied with compassion and wisdom and other qualities quintessential for successful and benevolent rulership. But as the currents of time flow in one direction, so too does the truth. As it turns out, this is not enough. Francis Bacon’s ‘New Atlantis’ was a place influenced by an academy known as the House of Solomon, a mythical place where humankind will meet its greatest potential. This place is America; the Novus ordo seclorum (New order of the ages). This order, a Republic founded in the principles of the Constitution, is a system devised to benefit all within its borders; a permanent ‘Philosopher King’ found only in a text that allows America (possibly named after the Merica, the Mandaean Star of Venus, and consort to the King/Pharaoh) to not suffer as our ancestors have, and has allowed each successive generation incrementally more freedom, more well-being, and more opportunity, should we take it. This is not to say we don’t have our modern day challenges. But it is the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, not granted by Government, but by God (the philosophical Natural Law), the intrinsic cosmic consciousness and Architect of the Universe, that ensures us at least the opportunity to defend the natural evolution of Liberty and Freedom, and to stop those who would seek to destroy it or take it away from us; for tyranny historically springs forth from the well intended initially. This is perhaps why, in terms of importance, it is the second, after the Amendment which protects our freedom of thought and the ability to communicate those thoughts; the ability to stand up and act, by force if necessary, against forms of Tyranny which throughout the course of Human history has unfortunately, enjoyed many appearances.

Nowhere on Earth is there a ‘Bill of Rights’ so comprehensive with a philosophy founded in Natural Law. This ethos or emergent ethic has its origins in the Judeo-Christian traditions (which can be traced all the way back to Sumeria). This emergent ethic is centered around the individual, which is the most appropriate and logical way to approximate fairness and true freedom in such a large scale as a Nation. The Ethos of America, the cultural identity and source of our greatness, stems from these concepts. This uniqueness in American history does influence us today, particularly those who believe the Second Amendment exists to limit the power of the Federal Government (as the rest of the Amendments do) and to protect our Liberty and personal Freedom henceforth and for posterity; for in a crisis, many times you may be the only one to rely on. It is a matter of individual responsibility. The individual consciousness as the Logos, which carries with it the power to manifest good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death. We require the freedom to think, as is our God given Right, (and therefore Speech, because the thought comes first) in order to manifest our own destiny (I call it the Right to Logos), to develop this inner voice. From our fruits shall ye know us.  In order to maintain this Right to Logos, the American ethic of individualism, (which is an ‘emergent ethic’ in its highest form), necessitates you take responsibility for all aspects of your life. Respecting the Individual is of paramount importance in this ethic, which the Bill of Rights attempts to enshrine in the Constitution, in the sense that it is the only proper level for analysis and prescription, of laws, philosophy and political affect. Herein lies my first issue with things like gun control, censorship, prohibition laws in general, and other laws and ideas that seek to control the evolution of the individual.   

Another problem I have with gun control in particular, is that it is deeply rooted in racism, if you examine history keenly.  Huey P Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party in the 60′s once said, “The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.” It is true that, if you study history, you will find that gun control is rooted in racism and government sanctioned murder. You don’t even have to leave America to see this. Think of what instigated the events at Wounded Knee, which was a failed and illegal attempt of government to secure/confiscate the rifles of natives. Hundreds were murdered...  

Attorney Ralph Sherman has, what I think, is a good synopsis of this argument. This was written in 1999:

Legal Opinion by  Atty. Ralph D. Sherman April 1999 Blacks and the right to bear arms It’s time to resume my discussion of the history and meaning of the Second Amendment (as requested by several readers). One of the myths that you hear from the gun-ban crowd is that the U.S. Supreme Court has “never” said the Second Amendment guarantees every individual the right to keep and bear arms. Our deceitful President would like you to believe that your right to firearms has something to do with duck hunting. There are several reasons that Handgun Control and company don’t want you to know the truth. One reason is that when you research what the Supreme Court has actually said, you quickly find that “gun control” laws are rooted in racism. Wait. I haven’t turned into some kind of conspiracy nut. If somebody had told me 15 years ago that “gun control” and racial discrimination are inseparably linked in the history of the United States, I would have been skeptical, too. After I started to read some of the old cases and statutes, however, I saw that it is impossible to reach any other conclusion. (In fact I recently gave a talk at UConn on the connections between “gun control” and racial, economic, and sexual discrimination.) Anyone who studies the history of the United States in the 19th Century comes across the Supreme Court case known as the Dred Scott decision. The correct title of the case is Scott v. Sandford (1856), and you can find it in any law library. Usually the case is studied because of its bearing on the status of blacks. Today the Dred Scott case is infamous, a good example of how the Supreme Court can be dead wrong. Dred Scott himself was a free black. The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a free black was a citizen, entitled to the full protection of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other laws of the United States. The court held that blacks were not citizens, because the founding fathers didn’t have blacks in mind when the Constitution was written. This is no longer the law of our country, thank goodness, because even the Supreme Court corrects its errors, if given enough time. But the Dred Scott case is still important because it is one of the first cases in which the Supreme Court gave its view of the Second Amendment. In this column I don’t have space to discuss most of the decision. But here’s the critical section. The court found it unthinkable that blacks could be considered citizens, because: “[If black people were] entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which [Southern states] considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give the persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union…the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.” The “special laws” mentioned by the court are the Black Codes, drafted to keep blacks down even if they became free. Essential to the Black Code of every Southern state was a law prohibiting blacks from owning firearms - a total gun ban for blacks only. The “full liberty of speech” is the court’s reference to the right of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment. The freedom “to hold public meetings upon political affairs” likewise refers to the First Amendment. And the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went” - I don’t have to tell you where the Supreme Court found that one. But you can see the meaning as plain as day, in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court. Because of dissatisfaction with the court’s ruling that blacks weren’t citizens, Congress eventually passed the 14th Amendment. This also is quite relevant to the right to keep and bear arms, and anyone who reads this column needs to know why. I’ll explain in a future column. (Source: ralphdsherman.com)

Much of the “black codes” apropos possession of guns, are rehashed in contemporary fashion; except now, the codes are tailored for everyone, not just black people.  If my point has not been made well enough, I shall tell you a story of the only Coup D’Etat in U.S. History:  “A mob of white supremacists armed with rifles and pistols marched on City Hall in Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 10 and overthrew the elected local government, forcing both black and white officials to resign and running many out of town. The coup was the culmination of a race riot in which whites torched the offices of a black newspaper and killed a number of black residents. No one is sure how many African-Americans died that day, but some estimates say as many as 90 were killed.” -https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93615391

What they neglect to mention is that the “black codes” had disarmed the populace, and they were ill-prepared for the slaughter.

Again, racial tensions are not as high today, and this occurred in the not-so-recent past, however the ugly memes of tribalism, which globally and historically have resulted in Warfare, discrimination, violence, racism, religious killings, terrorism etc. are thriving in some parts of the world, and because history, no matter how small the chance, potentially could repeat itself. To quote Fallout: “War, war never changes”.

“The world is not entirely governed by logic. Life itself involves some kind of violence and we have to choose the path of least violence.” -

The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi.

If you have ever been a victim of any crime, or hate crime, you know that it is a terrible ordeal, and that your peace of mind is disrupted.  I have before had to face threats, for instance, racists smashing my mailbox and racial slurs; my grandmother, who lived alone, had her house broken into and virtually everything she ever owned stolen when she returned by cowardly thugs. These things can affect how you perceive the world. I find that many armchair philosophers often come from a highly privileged state of mind, a state that is developed overtime from a perch of relative safety; an Ivory Tower. They underestimate the rate of defensive uses of weapons and overestimate the rate of illegal, criminal acts with firearms, when in fact, according to the CDC, the rate is about equal, or even more defensive uses therefore counter-intuitively avoiding violence.

Defensive Use of Guns

“Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010)…

A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck, 1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck, 2004). - CDC,  Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence (2013)  https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15

There is something to be said for the art of complete nonviolence, however this must be cultivated over time. Only two people I know of have mastered it; MLK and Gandhi. I do not doubt other examples can be found, however, it is extremely rare.

Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence. Violence does not mean emancipation from fear, but discovering the means of combating the cause of fear. Nonviolence, on the other hand, has no cause for fear. The votary of nonviolence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice of the highest type in order to be free from fear. He recks not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life. -

The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi

I want both the Hindus and Mussalmans to cultivate the cool courage to die without killing. But if one has not that courage, I want him to cultivate the art of killing and being killed rather than, in a cowardly manner, flee from danger. For the latter, in spite of his flight, does commit mental himsa. He flees because he has not the courage to be killed in the act of killing.

The Mind of Mahatma Gandhi

I suggest reading Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape. He also has a piece called The Riddle of the Gun, which in my opinion is a good philosophical treatise on the issues surrounding guns, both morally and in terms of rational philosophy. Excerpt:

“Most of my friends do not own guns and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put themselves and their families in danger. Can’t a gun go off by accident? Wouldn’t it be more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs.But, unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time-consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It is true that my work as a writer has added to my security concerns somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I have always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I have never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I have expressed my views on self-defenseelsewhere. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not the fault of the police—it is a problem of physics.Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards (who generally do not carry guns) helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense—and “diffusion of responsibility” has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one’s training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world?” - https://samharris.org/the-riddle-of-the-gun/ & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0DYpaLgWIo

We can try to “cultivate the cool courage to die without killing.”  But if you are not on that level, maintain your weapon, practice, and assert your Second Amendment Right, based in Natural Law, for the defense of yourself, family, community, and Liberty.  

-REGIII32  ‘The Modern Alchemist’

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[artmutt]

10 Steps to Non-Recovery, or, How to Keep Making Art After Art School

(altered cigarette package by Matt Bodett)

The statistics bear it out.  Despite the high number of people who graduate from art schools or university art programs, the majority do not go on to have active careers as artists.  In part, this is the result of the fact that most art schools do very little to prepare students for the realities of a volatile art market and what students will need to know to survive in it.  (Most dental schools, for example, require students to learn basic accounting, so they’ll be able to manage an office one day.)

Yet beyond the realm of the bottom line, beyond the business and marketing and interpersonal skills that facilitate working as an artist, there is the larger question of how one can simply continue to produce work.  It is precisely in this area that most artists fall by the wayside.  One tells oneself that the office job is just a temporary solution, a way of facilitating one’s painting career, and the next thing you know, you’ve accepted a position as regional manager and haven’t set foot in your painting studio in ten years. The real trick, it seems, is less where your money is coming from and more about staying engaged with making art.

Several artists I know talk about their artmaking as their “art habit” or their “art addiction,” and with that image in mind, I wish to offer some thoughts about how one can avoid recovery from this particular addiction.  Since there are numerous twelve-step programs out there to help people recover from bad habits, I wish to offer some steps to help artists resist recovery, and help you maintain your addiction to making art. Whether or not you pay your rent by selling your paintings or by selling real estate, the real issue here is continuing to make “the work,” and how one does that.

 Step 1.  Obsess, Obsess, Obsess

 I’ve frequently encountered artists who say that they require a “deadline” or an assignment in order to make art.  My response is that they’re never going to be able to sustain a life-long career, because the world is not going to give them homework.  Typically, the people who continue to make art after school are the same people who made art before school.  These are the folks who develop a stomachache if they don’t spend time in their studio on a regular basis.  Indeed, if you aren’t really obsessed with making work, if art isn’t your passion as well as your career, chances are you won’t stay an artist. This has nothing to do with talent. There are lots of talented people who end up as real estate agents.  It’s really more a matter of the incredible number of discouraging factors that are out there, as well as the practical interferences of having to pay rent, raise children, etc.  As a result, if you aren’t obsessively driven to create work, you won’t stay an artist.

As a teacher, I often found instances of students with a lot of talent, who seemed to be able to toss off fairly brilliant stuff without much effort. On the other hand, I’d encounter students whose work wasn’t easily brilliant, but who really dug in and worked and struggled with an assignment.  I’m inclined to believe that the latter stand a better chance of lasting the long hall than the former.  “Talented” students, once removed from the strokes of the academy, easily fall by the wayside.  It’s the person for whom art is a compulsion who are most likely to stay in it for the long haul.

 Step 2:  Hang Out with Friends

 First off, ditch the drugged-out, drunken whiners that you used to hang around with, and focus your attention on the people whose own work and ideas and companionship inspire you.  These are the folks you want to hang out with.  People talk about “knowing somebody” or “being in the right place at the right time.”  Many of the major turning points and connections in my career came about just by getting together with friends.

 As an example: when I was in grad school, there was a woman in my Duchamp seminar class who seemed interesting and smart.  One day, after I’d moved to Chicago, I was attending some art openings with friends, and we ran into her.  Only now she was editor of the New Art Examiner, and she mentioned she was looking for writers.  A month later, I had my first review published in the Examiner; a year later, I was the Time Arts Editor. If I hadn’t been hanging out with friends, it wouldn’t have happened.

Another grad school friend used to run a gallery at SUNY Potsdam, and had me to come out as a guest artist.  You’ll eventually find more and more gigs fall in your lap because of the people you just hang out with.  On a cautionary level, if all your art buddies do is sit around and whine because no one is interested in their giant installation made out of cotton candy, maybe you should start thinking about moving in a different circle.  The wrong friends will discourage you from making art, the right friends will enable it.

 Step 3:  Keep Up

While you need to spend time in your studio, it’s also important to stay engaged with what’s going on in the art community.  If you aren’t out and about, attending exhibitions or openings, seeing people and talking to friends about your work, it’s easy for the rest of the world to forget about you.  You’ll find your artistic batteries get charged if you stay in touch with what’s happening in town.  The periodic trip to other art capitals (like New York or Los Angeles or Santa Fe) can also be inspiring.

 I’ve also found that going out and seeing what’s being shown can provide a kind of challenge.  Seeing an exhibit or performance that seems to be less “inspired” than the work you are doing can provide a kick-in-the-pants to get your own work out of the studio and into the world.  Don’t go home and mutter about the “crap” being exhibited: get your slides and resume together, and send it to a gallery, and prove how much better your stuff is!

 Step 4:  Read

 In addition to keeping up with what’s being shown in town, it’s also good to read about the current artworld on a regular basis.  Visit the local library or bookstore, and cruise the art section periodically. Yeah, sure, you look at things online, but it’s better to pick up a book now and then. You should also subscribe to the national art rags and do more than look at the pictures.

Just as when you go out to the galleries, even if you don’t like the art being talked about in Artforum, you need to know what’s new and what’s being said about it, so as to articulate where you stand relative to the current trends.  If your press packet can quote recent critical essays to either back up or provide counterpoint to your ideas, you’ll come across as savvy and engaged.

Step 5:  Document Constantly

 Real artists are constantly documenting their work.  This means documenting work as soon as it’s finished, and sometimes even while it’s in progress.  (You might create a great lecture about your artistic process if you can show a piece as it develops.  And those photos will come in handy when Abrams publishes your catalogue raisonné.)

There are lots of simple steps to follow to take your own slides and photos of your work, but if you don’t feel at home with a camera, then hire someone who does.  This might be an art buddy (who’s willing to work for dinner and a couple of beers) or you may need to spend real money on a real photographer.  Considering that most gallery exhibits and grant applications will be assessing your work entirely on the basis of documentation, it’s the best investment an artist can make in his or her work.  Moreover, sitting down and looking at a bunch of slides of your work can give you a sense of order and direction that you might not have sitting in your studio with the actual stuff.

 I also encourage artists to write about their work on a regular basis. Some folks are naturally inclined to keep journals and sketchbooks, where they reflect on their ideas and processes.  Just as it’s important to document the actual work (and its process) in photos, it’s valuable to keep notes on your ideas and concerns while working.  Besides, getting yourself in the habit of writing about your work on a regular basis can be immensely helpful when you are asked to provide an “artist statement” for a grant application or exhibition.  You might be surprised by how effective this can be. For example, even if you simply made notes every day about things you were seeing and interested in (say, the birds outside your window), after six months you might review those notes and write, “While working on my most recent paintings, I found myself fascinated by birds: their energy, their shapes, their coloration.”  Like other aspects of being an artist, this process works best when its something you do automatically.

Step 6: Do New Things

The great danger of being a professional artist is that you develop a “style” or subject matter interest while in graduate school, and spend the next 60 years doing that same thing over and over and over again. (Especially if you are successful early in your career, it’s a temptation.)  Unfortunately, if you just keep doing the same thing, you never grow as an artist, nor as a human being.  (A recent study showed that the people who lived longest had at least 4 different careers in their lives: what kept them young was constantly having to face new challenges.)

We all know examples of artists who get stuck in a groove.  (Just go out and buy the latest Philip Glass CD: you’ll find it virtually indistinguishable from the last 6.)  But the most interesting artists try new things: new techniques, new styles, new processes.  (For example, Steve Reich’s recent music is considerably different from his work of 15 years ago: compare “Drumming” from the early ‘70s with “City Life,” from 1997.) If you’ve been painting for 10 years, you might find a pottery or sculpture class will send you in a whole new direction.  You might want to do some creative writing or play some music to expand your range of ideas. (The students I teach in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College are often people who correctly sense there are ideas in other disciplines that will enhance their primary discipline.)

You can expand this beyond art as well.  Try traveling.  Take a class in philosophy or ancient history.  Put in a garden in your backyard.  You may find that this new activity will enrich and inspire your artmaking and lengthen your life.

Step 7:  Live in the Real World

There was an Adam Green cartoon a few years back in the New Art Examiner, where an artist was arguing about whether his work was becoming too hermetic and inaccessible.  The joke was, he was having this argument with a sock puppet on his own hand.  It’s funny because it’s painfully true: while you need to obsessively work in your studio, you also need to have frequent reality checks that keep you and your artwork turned outward to the world at large.

Too many artists become self-absorbed in their studio, to the point where they are boring themselves, much less the art-loving public.  I’ve also found that artists who are married to someone who is not an artist often seem to be better at keeping their work outward oriented, in part because they’re engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a non-artist about what they’re doing and why.  A job in the real world, far from being a distraction to an art career, can sometimes keep it on track.

Having friends who are non-artists is also helpful, especially if you don’t “closet” your artistic self.  Invite your co-workers from the bank to stop by your studio.  They’ll find it fun to journey beyond the confines of the office, and non-artists often see things in your work that no artist will see.  You won’t get a professional critique from a real estate agent, but they may tell you things no curator would about how comprehensible your work is to someone outside the profession.  And that can be incredibly valuable.

Artists should also live in the world of their own community.  Get to know your neighbors.  Offer to help the neighborhood kids create an art project for your block.  Vote in the city election, and get to know your local alderman.  Read more than the art section of the daily newspaper. You’ll find that if your heart and mind are engaged with other people and real world issues, it’s difficult to make art that isn’t also engaged with those things.  Which is just as it should be.

 Step 8:  Volunteer

Closely related to Step 7, many artists find themselves re-invigorated by volunteering time to their local non-profit arts organization.  Sharing your expertise with other artists by being part of a board or committee project can introduce you to new people, stimulate your thinking, as well as involving you in the art community.  And frankly, there are lots of other worthy causes that make use of volunteers, such as AIDS service organizations, who are always looking for help.  The few hours a week you might be stealing from your studio time can often be repaid by the emotional and spiritual benefits, and you can also make the world a better place.

Step 9:  Teach a Class

Many artists teach as a way of making a living, and many then find it a struggle to make time for their own art.  (The adage probably should be “Those who teach don’t have time to do.”) However, for artists who do not make teaching their primary career, occasionally teaching a class can be both clarifying and enlightening.  Not only is it valuable to talk to others about techniques that you might take for granted, but often students will take an assignment in such totally unexpected directions that you stand back and go, “Wow!  How did you get that from what I told you?”  It can be very inspiring to see how your ideas are played out by others. I have often found student work so unexpected and surprising that it has challenged me to go back to my studio and make my own work in new ways.

 Step 10:  Know When to Take a Break

 All lives require balance.  Just as Step 1 encouraged you to stay focused on your work, it’s also possible to get stuck in a rut sometimes because you’re spending too much time obsessing over your art. Vacations from your work can often be invigorating opportunities to think and reflect without the pressure of immediately producing something.  In the late 1980s, I took a year-long sabbatical from making new work.  I felt I had reached closure on a particular body of work, and needed to re-think my goals and techniques as an artist.  I still put older work out into the world, but that year of reflection eventually provided a springboard into a large body of new work, which pushed in new and unanticipated directions.

In a letter he wrote in 1904, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that our periods of greatest creativity are the final resonance from our moments of doing nothing.  Brian Eno put together a set of Oblique Strategies for artists to use when they’re stuck about how to move forward. My favorite is: “Go outside. Close the door.”

This was originally written 20 years ago, when I was the editor of Chicago Artists’ News. For “slides,” now read “digital images.” I cleaned up a few other anachronisms before this posting. If I remember correctly, I wrote this for the News because an article I was expecting to run didn’t come in, and I had to sit down a couple of hours before deadline and fill a page with something.

[essayv11]

Differences between Essay and Thesis Writing

You are already in college ready to make it on your course. During your studies, you encounter various assignments. Essay writing is among the most common papers you will handle. On the other hand, there is a thesis, but what’s the difference between the two? Continue reading to find out.

Many reasons abound as to why you will not write many theses for one class as opposed to essays. The latter is more common than the former. A thesis is too much work and requires more time, and it requires you to become an expert on your topic.

Exploring the major differences between the two

By now you are wondering about an essay writing apart from a thesis. As a student, you will come across many essays and theses depending on the field of your specialization. With essays you can write them based on any topic and without much worry about citations and references.

Let's put both scenarios into perspective.

Essay writing is a requirement for a course while a thesis is a degree prerequisite

This is arguably the major difference you need to know if you intend to write the thesis. If you are pursuing a bachelor's, honors, master's, or doctoral degree when you will have o write a thesis. With a thesis, here is more structure as opposed to an essay.

Conversely, essay writing is usually done and submitted as a class assignment. It is not a large project and can be done within the shores time possible.

Essays are shorter in length and less complex

The amount of preparation you put in for an essay is less compared to when you want to write a thesis. You can combine many essays to prepare for a thesis, and you achieve this by combining different topics that highlight your research question. A thesis is longer than an essay because it goes deeper.

On the other hand, an average essay may range from 4 to 6 pages. This includes the introduction, the body, the conclusion, and the essay statement. However, some essays may be slightly longer than his. The length of a thesis may range from 40 to 60 pages and a doctoral one ranges from 60 to 100 pages.

The length varies based on the complexity of the two papers. Essay writing in most cases handles less complex topics. A thesis will dig deeper into an issue and even make recommendations for further study on the topic.

An essay teaches a student ho o write a thesis statement

Essay writing can be viewed as a springboard to catapult a student in writing better thesis statements and eventually, an excellent thesis in the future. It can also be viewed as a chance for the student to learn research techniques necessary in thesis-writing.

However, you cannot use a thesis to learn how to write essays. To write a thesis, you need to have all the information right because you are an expert on the topic you are handling. As such, essays are a must learn before you can reach the level of writing a thesis.

The similarities between a thesis and an essay

Even though are stark differences between essay and thesis-writing, here are some common elements. This is not to mean that these papers are one and the same, but it is good to know what brings them together. These similarities include the following:

Both papers make multiple and directed points

Essays and theses are mean to drive a point home. There is a chance that essays can be similar in some parts to a thesis. For instance, the argument being made, and the evidence therein to support it is one similar area. Just like an essay, a thesis will have the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. However, these aspects are larger in a thesis.

Should you need help with write a thesis, you can always count on Essaymin writers to handle it for you. Les move on to the next similarity.

Essay and thesis writing are requirements for courses and degrees respectively

Consider these two as an academic rite of passage for a course or a degree. If you are writing these papers, you are being prepared to be a future scholar that is if that is what you want. Writing, in general, is no easy, but you must face these two assignments towards the end of your studies.

The steps involved in these two papers build on top of the other. Both the essay and thesis are the foundation for your research paper. Both can be used as a component in the research paper but is better to use a thesis as the groundwork for a research paper. This is because more ground is covered by a thesis as opposed to an essay.

Both papers ought to demonstrate the level of your skills

Essay writing and theses are mean to showcase your writing skills.

To write a thesis or an essay, you need to have written various essays on different topics during your academic life. This is necessary for ensuring ha you can develop a larger argument.

They both follow the same art of writing. You must sit down, think hard, research, and write. Without these aspects, even the easiest essay will give you hard time writing.

Essays and theses ought not to be feared

The two assignments ought not to be feared. Instead, you ought to embrace them. It follows that once you have our main idea, either for the essay or a thesis, you can proceed with the research and later, an outline. They both follow a gradual process, even though it may not be linear, especially in essay writing.

Writing perfect essay

Even as we look at the similarities and differences between essay and thesis-writing, these pointers are necessary for writing a perfect essay. They include:

Reading and understanding the prompt

You must know the requirements of the prompt. You can dissect it into parts

Formulae a plan

You cannot start writing anyhow. You need a plan which starts with brainstorming and organizing your ideas and points systematically. This makes the process of essay writing easier especially if you have supporting evidence.

Cite your sources

If you have borrowed information from other sources, ensure you cite them. He shows you have done your background work. Paraphrase the sources because has makes your work more credible.

Draft your essay

The first thing after completing your preparation is to write a draft. This gives you a chance to write all the crappy ideas you may have and revisit the draft later. You can refine your arguments once you are done with the draft.

Make sure you respond to the prompts

After you are done with your draft, you can write the final copy of your essay dealing with various issues herein.

Proofread

The last thing you do is proofread your work to ensure there are no mistakes. It also helps to ascertain that you did not omit anything or add unnecessary information.

Writing a thesis

Write thesis using these steps

analyze your primary sources

formulae your working thesis and write it down

make your thesis prominent in the introduction

be ready for counterarguments

Should you face difficulties in writing any of the two, Essaymin has expert writers to handle such assignments for you.

[edwad]

If you had to choose 10 marxian econ books for someone who has only read marx, what would you recommend

by “marx” i have to assume you mean capital because that really is the root of “marxian econ”. it won’t suffice to just have read the manifesto or something like that and i don’t want to recommend books that will be saying things that you’re totally unfamiliar with because you’re skipping straight into the secondary literature which already largely assumes a reader which is familiar with capital. anyway, heres a list, which isnt in any particular order and which includes a few things that i’m still working through for myself:

1. essays on marxs theory of value - isaak rubin 

hugely important book which essentially all value-form theory derives from. written by an extremely knowledgeable marx scholar who had a much better idea of what marx was doing in capital than most marxists today. last month brill published a book called “responses to marxs capital” which includes some of rubin’s other writings, most of them being published in english for the first time. hes a huge figure in the literature and definitely worth looking in to. 

2. marx, capital, and the madness of economic reason - david harvey

i was obviously going to put something of harvey’s in here and i think his last book is a fairly good summary of the best of what hes done up to this point with some welcome additions (the visualization of capital, the stuff on anti-value, etc). not perfect but he definitely provides a good framework for how to understand the geography of capital which doesnt require necessarily agreeing with him on everything. honestly, if you keep up with harvey at all you’ll be able to tell that its mostly just typical harveyisms with the inclusion of some stuff from his recent talks (which have all been almost exactly the same). 

3. in the long run we are all dead - geoff mann

maybe this looks more like a book on keynesian rather than marxian econ, but its real argument is that keynesianism as a long historical project (meaning long before and after keynes himself) has been an immanent critique of liberalism and revolution and that keynes is to us what hegel was to marx. a really great book that covers a lot of ground which isnt always explicitly economic, but definitely worth the read if you have the patience. if you want a longer review, i left a pretty lengthy one on amazon a few months ago where you can get a better idea of what i got from this book, what its limitations are, and why i think its so important. 

4. monopoly capital - paul baran & paul sweezy 

an older book which hasnt exactly aged well, but its thesis has become extremely popular again since the crisis. written by baran and sweezy, the fathers of “the monthly review school” of economics, its played a huge role in the direction of marxian debates from the 1960s up until today. the authors were both tending in the same intellectual direction in their earlier works (sweezy’s theory of capitalist development and baran’s political economy of growth, the former still being considered one of the best introductions to marxs work and its relevance to the 20th century, with much controversy of course) and this was the result of them coming together to talk about what they saw as a monopoly capitalism which was fairly different in character than the “competitive capitalism” of marx’s day and therefore had to be dealt with differently. 

5. capitalism - anwar shaikh

probably the most ambitious work the left has seen in a long time which tries to thoroughly critique neoclassical theory and develop an alternative economics which is rooted in what shaikh calls the “classical” school (”classical-marxian” would probably be more appropriate but i think hes trying to downplay his reliance on marx). in it, shaikh takes a good look at many of the competing schools of thought (neoclassical, post-keynesian, sraffian/neo-ricardian, etc) and sees how they stand up analytically and empirically, taking issue with their underlying assumptions and the inevitable problems which arise from building a theory on false foundations. 

one of his bigger points is that the neoclassical theory of “perfect competition” is nonsensical but wasnt thoroughly combatted by heterodox economists, who only made it so far as asserting the “imperfect” nature of competition, which, in shaikh’s eyes, is to simply add imperfections after the fact into the theory which necessarily begins with the absurd assumption of perfection. the book’s argument is that the theorists of “imperfect competition” still rely on the theory of “perfect competition” as their starting point and never really manage to escape the latter because they havent actually created an alternative way of thinking about competition, they’ve just inserted a complication into a theory which was a completely unrealistic assumption to begin with. much of his attack is directed at the monthly review school and the idea of a “monopoly capitalism” which is supposedly different in form than the allegedly “perfect competition” of capitalism during marxs life. in this sense, this book serves as a counterbalance to the MR approach and is also probably the most successful attempt at situating marxs TRPF within an empirical study of kondratiev waves. 

hes also got a website with a bunch of resources and a lecture series from a course he did on the material in the book which is pretty interesting, but it assumes a good deal of familiarity with economics. 

6. a history of marxian economics - michael howard & john king (2 volumes)

this is a pretty thorough history of the internal debates among marxian economists ever since the death of marx all the way up to 1990. it covers a lot of ground and doesnt shy away from controversies where marx didnt come out on top. of course, a good amount of this is subject to the interpretation of the authors and they definitely have a great deal of input, but its a very impressive work which i frequently use as a marxian encyclopedia of sorts. 

7. the making of marx’s capital - roman rosdolsky

despite some problems, rosdolsky’s classic book on the development of marx’s critique of political economy is easily one of the most important marxological works ever written and it still holds a lot of sway. taking the grundrisse as its starting point, the author unpacks marx’s project and constantly asserts marx’s method and in particular his explicit reliance on hegel’s logic, pitting marx (as he was in his drafts) against the then contemporary thinkers and critics which were prone to misusing or misunderstanding the arguments in capital. as a disclaimer and partial criticism of rosdolsky’s portrait of marx, i dont believe that we can simply say that marx in the late 50s was identical to the marx of the 60s and 70s that wrote and published capital, but i also dont think that means we necessarily have to discount the grundrisse (or theories of surplus value, etc) simply because they werent written at precisely the right time for marxs thinking. 

i only just got my own copy a couple of weeks ago so i cant say too much more but i have skimmed through chunks of the pdf and its totally unavoidable in the secondary literature so im not totally unfamiliar. its one i plan on tackling in full very soon.

8. moneybags must be so lucky - robert paul wolff

another marxological one, this tiny book is a literary analysis of capital and in particular the first part of volume 1. wolff does a great job of deconstructing the arguments in chapter 1 to try and clarify what marx is doing and why with a lot of humor and philosophical tangents. one of his biggest points is that marxs heavy reliance on irony was the only adequate way of capturing the contradictory nature of capitalism and is therefore part of the theory itself, rather than simply being a way to dress up the theory and make it more palatable to readers. i approached this book after id already “read marx” too, but it was extremely useful because it wasnt until i read it that i finally started to actually understand marx. for that reason, i dont feel particularly bad about recommending it to anyone thats already familiar with capital because it does a great job of making the most difficult part of volume 1 infinitely more exciting and comprehensible – especially since its never enough to just read capital once. 

9. the production of commodities by means of commodities - piero sraffa

against my better judgement, i’m putting this on the list knowing full-well that i’m going to be harassed by an anon which has been on my ass for about a year now ever since i first recommended sraffa’s book in a reading list despite the fact that ive never finished it (barely even read it to be more precise). i do, however, know that its had a huge influence on the trajectory of marxian thought since 1960 and that many of the thinkers are still trying to recover from the theoretical displacement implicit in sraffa’s thesis. 

its a math-heavy book (which is why i havent been able to wade through it) and its status as a work coming from the “marxian” approach is hotly contested, but its certainly had its way with the marxian school (not to mention the neoclassical school, which has an easier time simply ignoring sraffa entirely), generating countless debates among scholars, many of whom simply wish that this book had never been written. for a short summary of the debate and whats apparently at stake, ive got an old post where i worked out some of the initial responses to sraffa and how this has snowballed into the controversy that it is today. ive got it on this list because of how unavoidable it is. you cant go into the secondary literature at anything resembling an intermediate level without knowing sraffa’s name and why everyone feels so strongly about him.

10. an introduction to the three volumes of karl marxs capital - michael heinrich

i dont quite like that im ending this list with a book that presents itself as an “introduction” when we’ve already established that this is a bunch of recommendations for someone thats already acquainted with capital, but sadly this is the only full-length book that heinrich has in the english language and its reading of capital is so unorthodox that it feels totally alien against all the traditional interpretations of marx. honestly, it doesnt feel like an introduction in the first place, reading more like a challenge and an intervention into the secondary debates about what marx is saying in capital which derives from the german debates which constitute the parameters for the “neue marx-lekture”, or “the new reading of marx”, which sits uncomfortably among the more typical marxisms that surround it on all sides, especially among non-german theorists/readers. 

as far as the dominant reading of marx goes, nearly everything this book says betrays marx’s project, but heinrich knows marx very well, better than most of us (as even his biggest critics readily admit). this may be considered reflective of a “new reading”, but that doesnt mean the old ones are any better or that this one is necessarily a “revisionist” project as many claim (or at least, i wouldnt consider it to be revising marx even if its guilty of revising “marxism”, which is by no means necessarily a bad thing). on the contrary, i think heinrich has the best understanding of marx out of pretty much everyone else right now and thats why i wanted to end with this one. yes, you should read all of the others, especially since you cant understand the way we read and think about marx without coming across the work of people like sraffa and sweezy, but that doesnt really change the fact that heinrich points to a big problem with the way we read and think about marx, that the debates have been getting it wrong all along and largely misunderstanding marxs actual project, miscontextualizing it and falling into dogmatism for various political or academic reasons. 

what heinrich does is to show how the way marx is read and interpreted often misses or downplays the most crucial elements of what marx is actually trying to get across. marxs critique of political economy simply gets converted into a newer, more correct political economy which simply builds on the classical school (shaikh), or it suffers in the hands of those that believe its foundations need to be updated as if it isnt all that relevant anymore (sweezy and baran), or that many of its categories are lacking utility and can simply be done away with (sraffa). rubin’s work plays a big part in establishing the NML reading and harvey draws on heinrich’s scholarship a lot, but nobody really does it as well as heinrich himself and i genuinely think hes lightyears ahead of everyone else. a lot of people are starting to agree and i was one of the most recent converts on the heinrich hype train which has been growing for the last couple of years. 

any day now, we should be getting one of his older books, the science of value, in english and i plan on devouring it as fast as i can, but sadly its been in limbo for several years, with its initial release scheduled for 2014 (if i remember correctly). in the mean time though, we’ve only got his introduction to capital and a bunch of shorter pieces/videos.  

so i guess thats my list of 10 things to read after marx with some explanations on why i think theyre important, culminating in ideologically correct heinrich-worship. this was sorta fun and if you have any other questions feel free to ask. 

[carryforthtradition]

Wrestles with Books by Masha Savitz

Excerpt from magical realism memoir, Fish Eyes For Pearls 

I am born into the tribe of Israelites, the Children of Israel, people of the book. 
Israel, Yisrael means ‘wrestles with God.’

What does it mean to be dyslexic as one from the people of the book?

I’m one who wrestles with books.

I’m a stranger in a foreign land and although I seem to speak the same language, I don’t understand.

This foreign place is school.

I am a character in my own imagined sequel to Camus’ book that I am assigned to read in high school, but never do.

Why would someone who claims to be an existentialist bother writing a book in the first place?

School is the first box.

People banter around the phrase, ‘Think outside the box.’ I didn’t know there was a box. I don’t know of this common system.

Some of us are born in the box, some are herded in soon after, while others need maps and instruction for finding it and operating within its proximity.

Some of us need this instruction drawn in colourful pictures depicting icons and landmarks associated with related emotional resonance. Some need mathematical equations, precise data with circumference for com- fort. Some prefer nautical, elemental references, including the movement of stars, time of year for bird migration and weather patterns.

Still others need it sung in a lullaby.

How does one enter The Box, and what might the consequences or rewards be for doing so? Can you get back out once you get in, are there emergency exits, public transportation, equal access for all?

Kindergarten is lovely, but all becomes alien thereafter.

I’m not indifferent, just different.

In third grade, I wonder how everyone else knows what to do, when I am so lost. We build a huge Noah’s ark. I make the lions. This, I get.

My father asks about my homework assignments. I don’t know. Why don’t I know there are homework assignments? He is frustrated, loses his temper with me. I feel bad that my smart papa has a dud for a daughter. I burrow deep into myself.

In high school, I sit down to study for a final exam, pulling out the year’s notes, all utterly incomprehensible gibberish, turns me cold and sick inside.

Like the moment we find out that Jack Nicholson, in The Shining, has spent all his time writing a book comprised of just one sentence, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’, repeated a bazillion times.

That sick feeling.

Frightening- because this looks like the writing of a mad person. I burrow deeper. Never tell anyone.

But as an art major, I get into university. My personal essay and portfolio are strong. In painting class, I come to sense my intelligence.

I feel like NASA, discovering intelligent life, my own.

It has its own way of organizing, perceiving, analysing, it doesn’t live in my mind, no, somewhere deeper.

I will cherish and slowly learn to trust it, defend it, cultivate it, as it cultivates me- moving from the non- verbal languages to the written, expanding into my mind and heart, eyes and hands and into empty space.

At eight years old, I am fascinated with the back cover of a children’s scrapbook that my grandparents buy me. It is decorated with astrological symbols and signs. The written word, now, begins to interest me.

I read my first books in my twenties.

Astrology books allow me to match my own perceptions and knowing with the written words before me, creating a symbiotic relationship between my thoughts and words in reverse, a process which will eventually begin at the written word and lead to comprehension.

For the first time, the written word, this collection of letters and symbols, has a relationship with something I know. A pathway is forged in my mind for associating words with cognitive ideas and thoughts. Though decoding is still arduous, with effort I crack the codes.

My mind doesn’t build files. So, like a computer, if there is no file or system to save it to, bye-bye.

I don’t make this connection until after an entire summer of trying to organize my apartment, I find at the end it is no more organized than the day I started.

I walk around with a photo album or box of chargers and extension cords, trying to figure out where it goes, can’t decide, and pick up another object. Weeks of this make Jack a dull boy.

To support myself through college I get a job teaching at a religious after-school program at a synagogue outside of Boston. But I am ambivalent about being a teacher, since I had loathed school. I feel like a traitor.

There are children and there are grownups. Us and them.

I cannot conceive how it can be that grownups don’t remember how it was to be a child. Do they really forget? How does this happen?

When I am still a child, I wish as hard as I can to imprint this on my soul and mind, instructing my future self never to forget being a child.

This may be in part the reason it is easy for me to connect with children.

I never forgot. And I don’t forget. And some things about teaching become evident:

1. I have the opportunity to make school for others what it never was for me.

2. Whatever I hope to achieve as an artist happens more readily, efficaciously in a classroom.

I can create a small community of joy and expansion, honouring the individual, while working and sharing together as a collective.

I spot all the kids who are drifting away. I see their manoeuvres to keep me off their trail, so that I won’t suspect they do not understand the lesson.

I know where they are, I know how they feel. I know how to bring them back.
We expect children to meet us where we are. That is impossible.

Like someone adrift on a raft in the ocean, it’s a search and rescue mission.

We must get into the cold water with a life jacket in hand, because they are scared. They would rather fail from not trying, than fail after trying, because that is too humiliating. They will do what they can to avoid any more bruising. Protecting their fragile ego.

Because I am them, I know how to find them and get them safely back to shore. I won’t let you drown I try to say to them in the silent language of my gaze. Ich und Du, I and thou.

In this space created between us, the atoms that will form pathways, bridges, avenues trails and rails. Seeds yielding life.

While working with children I will often sense the profound field that is created, and the words I and Thou, coined by Vienna born philosopher, Martin Buber.

My first awareness of Buber is in a Jewish Encyclopaedia, where in volume ‘B’, there is in an old photo of Buber from the early 60s. My young father’s face beams out from among all the parade celebrants at the side of the eighty-year-old philosopher!

Without having read his work, I sense that this is in part Buber’s thesis, his foundation. Success lies in the space between. The mutuality. Where, sharing that same space, rapport is experienced. Then, can come communication, where all is possible, a third entity of commonality. The new colour made between two primary colours. The fertile green ground of potentiality created between yellow and blue.

The students, like works of art, require similar skills from me. It will be a dance between my will and their potential- a process of discovery.

 My cousin, a child psychologist, connects me with a job to shadow an eight-year-old boy in a private Cambridge elementary school.

W has moved out. This gig should be lucrative and maybe rewarding. I meet Jared, the boy, and his mother for a preliminary interview over coffee.

He is quite a frail little thing, sleepy heavy lids, freckled chipmunk cheeks. He smiles politely, wiggling in his chair with feet dangling a foot from the floor.

I am now part of the second-grade class. The children pet my burgundy velvet full bodysuit. Jared throws blocks across the class at some other children and then runs out of the building. The teacher wants Jared out altogether. His meagre demeanour becomes meaner and meaner as he morphs into a petite terror.

I am given my own little office in hopes that I will occupy him for the school day and keep everyone safe.

Initially, I am told that Jared gets frustrated because he has learning challenges. Squatting on the floor of my office, he sharpens a pencil, and with great fervour, stabs my booted foot repeatedly, a maniacal grin across his face.

‘How is Jared doing? Is he learning his math?’ Asks his quaffed and tailored mother, sitting in my office a few days later in all shades taupe. ‘Well, when we can get past his anger.’ I answer.

‘He’s not angry,’ she replies, placing her hands in her lap.

‘Actually,’ I respond, ‘he is REALLY angry. ‘She smiles and clearing her throat explains, ‘Oh no, he’s just acting angry.’

Jared, though abusive, seems to need me. I’m the only one he has here, the only one who acknowledges that he is angry. But after years of a marriage with anger hurled in my direction at light speed, on the subway platform fresh from work, I hold back tears.

I sceptically purchase a book on energy healing from a local bookstore.

I sit at my kitchen table and read. This all makes perfect sense to me. Traditional therapy only builds a road between the emotional to that of the mental. To contextualize feelings, very important, a start, but ultimately limited. I learn that there are aspects of the self that the self cannot access. This speaks to my floundering stuck state. It seems I should consult someone that has studied with the author. I successfully track down someone in the Boston area.

After reading the book I make an appointment with Perry, an energy healer, I explain my situation...Jared is so angry and W was so angry...and I can’t take anymore anger. They need me, but abuse the one closest.

‘That’s because you are angry.’ Perry explains. ‘I’m not angry.’ I shuffle uneasy in an easy chair. He smiles, ‘No, you’re angry.’

 ‘Jared is not separate from you,’ he explains, ‘but rather an extension of you, and you need to see him as such, and only then, will you both heal this.’

The next morning, I take Perry’s advice. Jared and I go to the gym, and at the count of three, I instruct, we will hurl ourselves into the mats that are hanging on the wall.

‘One two three.’ We leap into the thick foam rubber blue plastic. SMASH. A shock as our bodies hit the mats.

Release. Laughter. And again.

Jared’s moods improve, as do mine. As he lightens, his academics, handwriting, and focus improve along with a joy of learning. They have diagnosed him all wrong. It’s not his school performance that makes him upset, but rather his upset that makes it impossible for him to concentrate on school work.

We write, do math, and research his favourite subject - dogs. We read about Max, a beat poet puppy and Jared writes poetry. But his parents become very concerned the day he punches a pillow.

I had brought in a pillow for him to punch as a way to express and expel the excessive, unmet anger. And, because I am now no longer threatened by anger myself, there is no invisible cap or limit to what I can handle. He is free to fully rage, and I am comfortable letting him go as far as he needs.

His slight boy frame collapses to the ground in exhaustion. Then he crawls back up and swipes some more. And when he is done, he is done. It is done. There is peace.

The next morning, we compose a poem together about the pillow, which he has beaten and thrashed the day before.

The Nothing Pillow, by Jared N.

My pillow is the colour of a sunset, it is soft as cloud, sits nice and warm like sitting by a warm fire in the winter, I want to lay on my pillow, to look at it, and make sure its ok. I call it the nothing pillow because it doesn’t do anything, and when I lie on it, I think of nothing. The stuffing is like cotton candy, I want to eat it. When I hold my pillow,

I feel happy as can be, I feel happy like a warm bed. Good night.

His parents accuse me of riling him up.

By the end of a winter that had left Cambridge squinty bright when the sun reflected off the miles of chalky white snow, that fell that year, Jared has a new school.

A few weeks later Jared’s prominent lawyer father calls to apologize for accusations and to thank me for ‘keeping it together’ when everyone else was ‘going under.’ Jared’s Head of Child Psychology therapist lauds me for seeing what even he missed. He writes me a letter of recommendation for a Master’s in social work at an East Coast school, but West cost is beckoning.

At my new job, I am asked to tutor Eric, athletic, magnetic smile and sweet nature.

He slips through years of Hebrew classes without learning how to read. Now, I am hired to catch him up, prepare him to come in front of the community for his Bar Mitzvah, leading and chanting prayers and scripture in Hebrew.

I work with Eric and he makes great strides. When I move to LA, another teacher takes over for me. She calls me and wants to know the secret of my success.

‘How did you do it Masha? Did you find out his diagnosis?’

‘No,’ I explain, I have a distrust and disinterest in diagnoses. They are too often wrong.

‘Then how? You did really well with him. What did you do?’

‘I played football with him,’ I answer.

‘What? Football? What are you talking about?’ He is athletic, and I show up on the football field, looking inept where he is a star. I’m on his turf, willing to be incompetent, willing to look foolish. So, he is prepared to take a risk with me, in my classroom.

We are equals, willing to go beyond protected boundaries, defended borders, trusting that the other will gently guide us towards success with encouragement and aplomb.

I hadn’t really had a plan, just instincts. I hadn’t been trained, I was unorthodox, just showing up empty and trying to intuit with the children, something no one had done for me. My dyslexia creates empathy and understanding, but I have no direct or received method for guiding them through.

With Rabbinical aspirations and schooling, I sometimes tutor and officiate the Jewish coming of age ceremony for those thirteen years of age, a Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

Many of the tweens I work with are outside of the synagogue school system for one reason or another - a parent not Jewish, kids with learning issues, or the child that surprises parents by wanting the ceremony when the family is not particularly religious.

Because many of the students have no Jewish background, my lessons encompass everything from reading and writing Hebrew, learning about holidays, customs and liturgy, while preparing for the ceremony that they will lead in English and Hebrew.

We often meet at coffee shops accompanied with warm sweet drinks and pastries.

Each child is a riddle with a pad lock keeping them from full success. I unscramble codes and unlock each child, one conversation, lesson, or exchange, at a time.

Ich und Du

Mitch and Devon are twin brothers. One is very sensitive, polite, deeply moral. The other is sweet natured and only interested in baseball. Neither one wants to be studying for a Bar Mitzvah. Both are only doing it for their parents.

Mitch is certain this is not for him, but reconciled. He finds religion superfluous since all humans, in his estimation, know innately how to behave and do the right thing.

Dyslexia teaches me that, because I don’t have answers like a glossary of terms I can retrieve on demand, I am empty, open with receptors up. I understand I need to approach each child on his and her own terms, comfortable with not knowing. And, through listening, with the desire and faith to prevail, there is only the Ich und Du. There, I will find the answers, in the space between us. All is revealed.

Writing the Bar Mitzvah speech offers great opportunity to crystalize and articulate beliefs and ideas. It is a way to forge the nascent adult identity, affirming the individual within the context of family and community.

The individual within society, a balance we have not been able to quite achieve. A society which prizes the self at the expense of the greater collective breeds sickness, but also, failing to value the individual weakens the strength of the collective. Middle path says Buddhism, middle path.

Mitch expands on the idea of empathy ‘You know the feelings of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’

Devon recites, ‘I discovered that Judaism and baseball are similar in many ways. Baseball and Judaism both have rules which allow everyone to play together, a way to measure yourself, and a standard to strive for. Both try to push you to be your best, the rabbi is like a coach, they can guide you, try to help you improve, but it is really up to you.’

After the service, I overhear Mitch say to his younger cousin, ‘Are you going to have a Bat Mitzvah? You should, it’s a lot of work but it’s so worth it.’ He sees that I overhear him. I lower my eyes, smiling in my heart.

Everyone has given up on Alex having a Bar Mitzvah. He is now fourteen.

I am told his ‘condition’ prior to our first lesson. He is diagnosed with mild Asperger’s. He needs structure, I am instructed. Well, if that’s what he needs, that’s what we will do. So, although I am more fluid in my approach, I will adapt to him, I will meet him.

But, structure is not what he needs. During my introduction, I outline in detail a very regimented schedule, and at the end remark, ‘But, I like to be open to inspiration.’

He smiles saying, ‘Yeah, that works for me.’

I ask him to repeat this, making sure he heard and understood.

We never have a rigid schedule from that day onward. He thrives. What I learn about him is the opposite of what the specialists advise. His emotions are very strong, if not addressed at the onset he is moody and unfocused. He must identify his feelings, needs, options, solutions, choices. We have incredible success, and fun. He is philosophical, creative, sensitive and sincere. He craves to express himself, to be heard. As do we all.

Maddie is bright and sassy. Her father is a professor of neurology and she, with the mind of a scientist and the attitude of a Westside girl, thinks that God and Hebrew school is a waste of her time. For weeks I try to find a way to reach her, bring her into the conversation. I explain that her agnostic voice is relevant and welcome in our class, that she too is an equally valuable part of the class. This doesn’t seem to mean anything.

I am losing her. It is like struggling with a painting. I will not give up.

We are making a short film based on a line from Deuteronomy, ‘Love God with all your heart, all of your soul, all of your everything.’ I open a conversation with her saying, ‘This project might be challenging for you to work on since you don’t believe in God.’

‘Yup.’ Only half snarky.

‘Let’s see if we can figure this out, a way for this to work for you.’

We discuss theology, science, creation, belief. She is unsure. ‘So, it’s a mystery to you?’ I reframe. ‘Yeah.’

‘What if we replace the word God for ‘Mystery’, I suggest. Instead we will say, ‘I love The Mystery with all my heart all my soul and all my everything. Would that feel right for you? Would that work?’

Bingo! Game changer! Maddie, is able to find integrity and meaning in her studies from this point forward.

The Bat Mitzvah makes sense as she can place herself comfortably in the tradition. When it comes time for her Bat Mitzvah, she uses the term, ‘The Mystery’ in her speech to the community, she learns her material quickly and easily.

Establishing trust is paramount.

Carl Jung believes and trusts implicitly that his patients must and will arrive at the right decisions on their own.

Since this marks one’s journey towards adulthood, I point out that this is a good example of exercising adult wisdom.

There is a time I had abandoned Ich und Du, and the consequences are not good. When I seek advice from ‘the experts’, my life lessons overwhelmingly expose their deficits, imploring me to trust my own wisdom.

A teenage boy directs a comment to me during class, ‘I thought of you the other day- in my bed.’

I consult the school therapist. ‘You need to talk to him, tell him this makes you uncomfortable.’ She insists.

I ask to speak to him after class and it’s awkward. I’m uncomfortable. These are not my words, my real sentiments. He looks shamed, mortified. He thought he was being cute.

My discussion with him hadn’t come from an authentic place in me, or acknowledged our genuine connection.

Sometimes, I handle sexual inappropriateness with a bit more levity and mastery. Two boys in the back of the seventh-grade class attempt to shock me.

‘Masha, is penis a bad word?’

‘No, penis is my favourite word,’ I respond. Screams from the back row. They babble and yell, arms flailing in adolescent gainliness.

‘Are you serious? ‘No sillies, let’s get on with work.’

I never have a behaviour problem again with this class. Putty.

And then there are the teachers that are pivotal in my life.

Geraldine Jackson, five feet of feisty, with pixy short hair and reading glasses that slide down a slightly pug nose. Lean and sparky. Often scary. She is the math teacher. I am a computative disaster. She puts me in the lower group and ignores me. The next year, she teaches English.

There is no awareness of different learning styles at this time. I assume stupidity is the culprit. ‘She’s sweet, creative.’ Is the best a teacher can say of me.

I am even a creative speller!

Every week Mrs. Jackson gives us a creative writing assignment. One week, though mine is short, my story on re-gifting makes her laugh. She reads it to the class. I am now on her radar.

From this point forward, I rise and rise to the bar set before me, becoming one of the two highest graded students in the class for creative composition. Myself and my friend, Missy.

I am not much for competition, more the Aphrodite than the Athena or Artemis. I am thrilled for us both. She is driven, petit though complains she is fat, frets about failing tests when she will score a ninety-eight.

Chances are I will score a thirty out of a hundred and I am woefully chubby. Eleven years of age.

The thesaurus is now my trusty companion, my favourite game - the wonderment of words! I seek them out, hunting words like a scavenger, a canine on the trail, a pirate for loot ‘n booty. Then, savouring the delight of the hunt, I tack them to sentences like animal heads to plaque and wall.

My treasury of gemmed jewels to which I will devote myself first comes in the form of the sixth grade Friday creative compositions where, I pull all-nighters, writing and rewriting.

Here, it starts. Deep into the hushed amorphous night, I am most awake, discovering shapes in the shapeless, word-less, time space, planting and harvesting in the rich fertile darkness. I am free.

Construction of the bridge begins.

I am born into the tribe of Israelites, the Children of

Israel, people of the book. Israel, Yisrael means ‘wrestles with God.’

What does it mean to be dyslexic as one from the people of the book?

I’m one who wrestles with books.  

[hannahelizabeth30]

Deafening Silence: Discussing the Lack of LGBTQ+ Representation in the Church & “Preacher’s Kid” by Semler

On February 5, 2021, Grace Semler Baldridge (artist name “Semler”) released the EP “Preacher’s Kid”. What many may not know is that Semler is an affirming, Christ-following artist who is married to her wife, Elizabeth. 

Semler is the first openly queer Christian artist to chart on iTunes. 

I have my own history with the church, and I often call myself jaded as a result of it. I was always wanting to create art that expressed a more inclusive place in the church, how I feel that the American conservative narrative of Christianity is wrong. 

When I sat and listened to Semler’s EP for the first time, I could not help but breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, someone else who knew the truth! Someone who thought like me! I have spent so much time feeling so lonesome in my thoughts and in my heart, knowing that many people are steered away from the Church because of the lack of diversity within it.

I have personally struggled with my sexuality, as I feel that everyone has. Whether it be they struggle through their gender identity, sexual preference, or how they feel about themselves and their own personal relationship with sex, it is important and it is okay to acknowledge these feelings. 

I truly believe that God is not going to damn someone to hell for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or not identifying within the “gender norm” (ex: transgender, non-binary, etc.) Gender is a spectrum. The only thing about gender that is truly set in stone is the sex you were born (either with “male” or “female” sexual organs, or intersex ((part of the “+” of the LGBTQ+)) when someone is born with  ambiguous genitalia, making them neither male nor female). 

Semler and her music have gotten a lot of attention, both good and bad. It has started conversations that have needed to happen a long time ago. Being able to listen to some of these conversations have been rather insightful.

Last night, I finished listening to Semler speak with Matt from the site called “Memes for Jesus”. One of the main talking points was the fact that non-affirming (believers who do not support LGBTQ+ community) Christians often refuse to acknowledge that affirming (Christians who do support LGBTQ+ community) Christians exist as well as the fact that there are LGBTQ+ believers. 

(Listen here:  https://player.fm/series/memes-for-jesus-podcast/ep37-grace-baldridge-gracebaldridge)

The concept that struck me the most is that many non-affirming believers feel that it is there duty to condemn people who are members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as affirming believers. 

This is one of the many reasons why I did not feel welcome coming back into The Church because I realized that I am an affirming Christ-follower. I was non-affirming for quite a long time and even got in trouble for it, which I am glad that I did. It made me spend a lot of time learning about the LGBTQ+ community, watching documentaries, becoming more knowledgeable, but the thing that has helped me the most is taking Social Inequalities this semester at The University of Akron. This class has opened my eyes as a questioning, white cisgender woman of the privileges' I have been “given” as a result of my race and sexual identity. The icing on the cake was “Preacher’s Kid”. 

If you are in school or out of school, I highly recommend reading the book: Race, Class, Gender: Intersections and Inequalities by Margaret L. Anderson and Patricia Hill Collins (10th Edition). This is the book that was required for my Social Inequalities class and it is filled with essays regarding race, gender, poverty, misogyny, sexuality, and more. It is a long read, but each chapter is an essay, and I highly encourage you to sit and really think about each essay and how you can grow from reading it. 

Buy here: https://booksrun.com/textbooks/9781337685054-race-class-and-gender-an-anthology-10th-edition?afk=5226) (It is a textbook, technically, so it is pretty impossible to find to purchase below the $50-60 range, but if you can rent it or find it from the library, I really highly recommend reading this book).

At the end of the day, it is our job as people of earth (and Heaven) to be challenged and to learn more about people and their struggles.

The ultimate goal is pointing people to Jesus. And we won’t do that by condemning them. 

Now, here are some amazing lyrics from the songs off of “Preacher’s Kid” that have spoken to me and that I hope will encourage you to listen to Semler’s EP.

“Bethlehem” 

“My dad's never cursed in his life I asked if he smoked, he said 'twice' Well, by that standard i'm a goddamn failure I passed blunts the day i married my wife

But i'm a child of god, just in case you forgot And you cast me out every single chance that you got And that's your loss, not mine I'll be better than fine You just missed your shot to meet the unholy divine...”

“You know the mission trips are scams They do more harm than good We got fame hungry pastors Making bank in hollywood”

“Youth Group”

“Youth group lock-ins are really strange concepts That youth group leaders seem to really like It's like 'Let's take some repressed hormonal teenagers And put em' in a church and hope they find Jesus overnight' Like Jesus is a ghost hidin' in the church And if you just stay long enough you'll find him But in my experience, the only thing you find Is your sexuality, this one's for the kids Who have their sexual awakening At the youth group lock-in, it must have been confusing And I hope you're doing well”

“Jesus from Texas”

“And these days I bеlieve in Bigfoot more than God Causе who’s he hurting? I grew up a preacher’s kid cleaning up after communion So I know that a church is not a way to live It’s a weekly reunion My best friend found God, so we lost touch I guess a Savior beats a friend who thinks you’re good enough I hope she finds love and peace And if her kid comes out, I hope that she calls me”

“Oh what a terrible honor it’s been To learn that my blessings are things you called sins I’ll spend the rest of my life tearing down The Jesus from Texas you put in a crown But I won't give up on you”

If you are interested in listening to more of what Grace (Semler) Baldridge has to say, I highly recommend listening to her talk to former Hawk Nelson front man Jon Steingard on his podcast “The Wonder and Mystery of Being” here:  https://thewonderandthemysteryofbeing.buzzsprout.com/1549963/7679044-queer-christian-music-w-grace-baldridge