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blackbat05 · 3 years

Text

Day by Day

Shangqi x Reader

A/N: My love for this man has hit an all time high so let me capitalize on it while I still can! If you read everything, I sincerely thank you for doing so!!! And holy cow 2 fics in 2 days have I gone back into my prime days?

Genre: PG-13

Notes: As the title mentioned, I’ll probably set it some time after endgame. You could see it as a prequel to my first post! Reader is a social worker and she’s just dealing with all the mess that the snap bought back. The reader’s name as Jen Lee. I also apologize in advance for the potentially long fic.

***

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for my child? Her name’s Wang Yiman and she’s seven.’ Another frazzled-looking parent fought her way to the front of the receptionist, approaching the helpless intern who looked like she was going to be on the verge of tears if another request came in.

‘I got this,’ a hand calmly reassured the young intern as she beckoned the relief parent. ‘Mrs Wang? My name is Jen Lee and I’m the social worker here.’ I offered my hand for the anxious mother. ‘Oh thank god! Is Yiman ok? She must have been so scared!’ I slowed to a stop outside the room at the end of the corridor, gently sitting her down.

‘Yiman has been a very brave girl Mrs Wang, but I will not lie to you. The sudden disappearance of their parents has traumatized a lot of kids. We’ve managed to explain to them what was going on but they will need a lot of support.’ I gave a glance over Mrs Wang’s shoulder, nodding to my colleague, Tammy who was holding the hand of a little girl in pigtails and a floral dress.

妈妈! mā ma (mommy!)

The young girl ran into her mother’s open arms, allowing the floodgates to open from both ends. I turn to Tammy as we shared a silent agreement to leave the area. ‘That’s the last one for the day,’ Tammy unceremoniously plops herself onto the chair, letting out a groan. ‘Thanks for your hard work Jen.’

‘Right back at you.’ I entered the last bit of paperwork before uploading Yiman’s case file onto the portal. Yiman’s reunion with her parents meant the Children and Youth Centre were halfway in getting every displaced child back to their parents. Looking at the dingy television that was hung on the walls at the waiting room, despite not being able to hear anything, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. S.W.O.R.D was apparently in a stand-off against Wanda Maximoff? Reported rumors that Sam Wilson didn’t want anything to do with the shield? It’s been a crazy few weeks but that was utter-

‘Bullshit! If anything it’s the government. They must have psyched him into giving up the shield.’ My chair swiveled to face Tammy who returned a nonchalant shrug. ‘What? You know I’m right. Doesn’t matter if half the world’s gone or our universe gets split into two - they’re the true evil here. I’m still struggling to find a place after I found a couple making out in my apartment! And you know what the global repatriation council told me? We’re only dealing with urgent cases right now. Well I say f-’

The incessant ringing of the bell interrupted our conversation, replacing Tammy’s tirade into a cheeky grin. ‘Look who’s here!’

Shangqi stands behind the counter, dressed in his usual red varsity jacket and jeans, holding bags of what I could only make out as takeout from the Chinese restaurant that was run by a friendly Singaporean couple. ‘Did I interrupt something?’ He scratches his head nervously. ‘Nope, in fact you just saved me from Tammy’s monologue, any further and she’ll explicitly tell me what she saw in her apartment when she got dusted back that day,’ I shivered in mock fear. ‘Still haunts me up till today.’ Tammy meets us by the door, bag in her hand.

‘I thought you were staying? We got fried dumplings and 泡饭 pào fàn (poached rice).’

‘Last minute duty - A parent called, gotta run! Enjoy your dinner date.’ She waggles her eyebrows suggestively, much to our embarrassment. ‘What? It’s not...’ Shangqi stutters, trying to form intelligible sentences. ‘Get out before I throw a fried dumpling at your face Tammy!’ She winks at me, before darting out of the door. Once my nosy colleague was out, I turn towards a red-faced Shangqi. ‘I’m so sorry... just don’t mind her.’

‘Huh?’ The man was knocked out of his stupor. ‘Oh yeah... sure,’ in an attempt to forget everything that had just happened, he opened the packets of fried dumplings. ‘Ready for war?’

‘I was born ready.’

Thirty-five minutes later, all that was left were the remnants of fried dumplings and three empty containers.

‘This should be illegal,’ I patted my stomach in satisfaction to his amusement. ‘Laugh at yourself! You lost track of how many dumplings you had and ended up taking my share!’

Raising his hands in defeat, Shangqi starts to clear the table up. ‘So how’s the center? Everything alright?’ I nodded numbly.

The past five years had been a blur. Hazy, even. All I remembered was a kid running into the office telling me that half of the staff disappeared during a school holiday program that we were running with a dozen other kids. Parents who survived the snap rushed to our center, demanding to see their children. We couldn’t give them any answer as we too, were equally perplexed. Maybe the only thing that made sense was Shangqi and Katy bursting into the center to help us with the chaos.

Coming back from what could be the 1000th phone call, I got a glimpse in the children’s playroom where the five years old kids were at, treating myself to an amusing sight. They all had red cloths draped around their neck, each holding a stick that was from the abandoned prop box. Katy wasn’t spared to as she was wearing her own red cloth that seemed a few sizes to small for her. Not that she didn’t seem to mind.

‘Alright my warriors! Chargeeeeee!!!!!!’

In unison, little pairs of feet pattered across the room towards their ‘enemy’, a cardboard cutout of a monstrous creature who was really just Shangqi in disguise.

‘RAWR! I’ll eat anyone who stands in my way!’ He stands up, mimicking a dinosaur that was about to trample an entire city. I decided that the paperwork could wait, standing near the door to watch an Oscar-worthy performance. With great effort and bravery from the kids, they finally managed to take down 5 foot 10 worth of muscle.

‘Again! Again!’

I chuckled upon seeing Shangqi on the floor, about to drift off into wonderland. It was time for me to step in. ‘Alright kids that’s enough for today! Dinner’s here.’ As the kids dispersed with the help of Katy, it was just the two of us left to clear up the mess. ‘Thank you so much, both of you. I honestly can’t think of what would happen if you guys didn’t come to help.’

Perhaps my body language was screaming ‘I’m dead tired, please just knock me out’ as Shangqi takes a cloth from me, folding it back into the box. ‘It’s what we would have done, this place, it means a lot to us - to me.’

A small knock on the door diverts our attention away from the trash. Little Yiman stands at the door, as she stares at the both of us with big round eyes.

‘Yiman, it’s late, what are you doing here?’ I squat down to her eye level. The little girl beams, ‘ 妈妈 said that I could give this to you!’ She passes me a juice box together with a handmade card with colorful scribbles. Maybe I was carrying too much on my shoulders, as I suddenly felt a boulder lifted off me. ‘Thank you,’ I smile at her sweetly, ‘I love apple juice.’ Happy with the response, she runs to Shangqi. ‘Shangqi 哥哥 gē ge (brother)!’

He breaks out into a smile, opening his arms wide. Yiman nuzzles her head into his shoulder before breaking out into uncontrollable giggles from his sudden attack of tickles. ‘Are you hear to help Miss Jen?’ I took the trash from his hands, giving him some time with the girl.

‘Yes I am. Miss Jen needs some help so I’m here today!’

‘Are you her boyfriend?’

Shangqi freezes on the spot. He had undergone what could be the toughest training by his father, fought the greatest assassins in the world and here he was - stumped by a question from a seven year old. ‘Well... I’m her close friend since when we were very young,’ Yiman looks at him expectantly. ‘She helped me when I was in trouble so I had to be a good friend when she was in trouble too.’

‘Like how Ningning helped me when I injured my knee?’

‘Yeah... something like that.’ He breathes a sigh of relief, thankful to escape his first crisis. Honestly, he wasn’t even sure if he was telling himself the truth.

‘Yiman! Your mother’s here!’ The little girl gives him one last hug before running to the waiting room. Shangqi takes a moment to recollect himself. ‘Here I am thinking that you finally managed to have some stamina while interacting with young children, maybe I was wrong.’ I teased as I sat beside him.

‘Har har, hilarious.’ He tosses me a straw for our peach teas, as we were greeted by the amazing night view of San Francisco. ‘Enough about me, you good though?’ Looks like he didn’t forget the conversation that was cut off earlier. My mind goes back to a few minutes earlier, eavesdropping on the conversation.

‘I had to be a good friend when she was in trouble too.’

Life has been so unpredictable, I don’t even want to think too far into the future. With appearances from more superpowered beings, I don’t know what’s real anymore.

‘Yeah. To be honest, it’s been so crazy and overwhelming but I’ll get through it. I have you don’t I?’ Giving him a wink, I slowly sipped on the sweetness of the tea, savoring the pearls. He pauses for a moment, nodding thoughtfully.

Life isn’t the same as it was before. But maybe, just maybe... if I had Shangqi, I’ll take each day on one at a time. Day by day.

[END]

A/N: Hoho! I literally spent the whole afternoon writing because I just had to get this idea out and also because work was pretty slow today. I have no idea what is up with my first two fics hinting at unrequited love? I guess I got inspired by Shangqi’s and Katy’s platonic relationship because I thought it was so well written but I also love Shangqi so I guess is a compromise kinda thing. Again, do like and comment if you wish! Really thankful that y’all have been so kind to me so far!

Perhaps I’ll try my hand at shorter ones like headcannons before this girl exhausts herself out and I don’t want to do that because I believe I have more to show!

#xu shangqi #shangqi imagine #shangqi x reader #katy shang chi #shang chi #shang chi x reader

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innuendostudios · 5 years

Video

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A short video about story structure, capitalism, and Blade Runner 2049.

Support this work by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Can I ask you something tricky?

In this scene… does consent exist?

Here we have Joi, a holographic girlfriend, programmed to love you but who cannot touch you, and Mariette, a replicant sex worker, programmed to fuck you but who has no strong feelings about it. Put them together and you have almost an entire lover.

Now, I imagine the value of a replicant sex worker is the same as with any automation: a mechanized warehouse never takes a bathroom break, a self-driving rideshare won’t refuse you service for acting inappropriately, and an automated sex worker never turns down a john. Or maybe she can; it’s unclear. Part fo the premise of Blade Runner 2049 is that modern replicants don’t break the rules. [“My kind don’t run.”] Yet the movie is full of replicants breaking the rules. They have some latitude. But the whole reason synthetic laborers exist is because, though the rules may be bent or broken, they constrain replicants in ways they do not constrain humans.

Mariette is told by her madame to go home with Joe and plant a tracker on him that will become important later in the movie. So maybe she can say no to Joe. But can she say no to madame? Both are open questions.

And then there’s Joi. Joi loves her man with all her heart, because that’s what she’s built to do. She is an operating system whose primary function is to love the user. She has no choice in the matter. But, then: who does? None of us decide whom we fall in love with. That is something everyone who’s ever lived has shared with Joi. The difference between us and her is, in Joi’s case, someone else decided for her.

So I ask again: can either of these women consent? Or was consent granted on their behalf the moment they came into existence?

Now, say Mariette can’t say no; how different is she, really, from a human sex worker who goes home with a john she’d rather turn down, or, for that matter, an office worker who goes to work when she should take a sick day, because it’s a lean month and she needs the money? That ain’t trafficking, it’s just capitalism. The Amazon worker who pees in a bottle, the Lyft driver who doesn’t kick you out for being a creep, they live by the same law: give your employers as good as an automaton would or maybe don’t get paid.

And “do what we say or don’t eat” is, technically, a choice, but I wouldn’t call it agency. And did any of us consent to this system? Or was consent granted on our behalf when we were born into it?

I think about agency a lot at the movies, because all the screenwriting and story structure books stressed that agency is the line that divides subject from object.

There are a few ways a story communicates who the point-of-view characters are. Whose eyes does the camera most often see through? Whose perspective are the flashbacks from? A big one is: who has plot agency?

A plot is a sequence of events, where Event 1 causes Event 2 causes Event 3, a chain from beginning to end connected by therefore and but. Searching for the missing child of a replicant woman, Joe finds a date carved on the tree where she was buried after dying in childbirth. THEREFORE he searches the birth records for that date and finds anomalous entries. THEREFORE he goes to the orphanage where the anomalous child was sent. BUT the orphanage’s data for that year is missing. THEREFORE he investigates the premises and finds a hidden toy with the date carved on it, which he has a memory of having hidden himself. BUT replicant memories are usually artificial, so it might be an implant. THEREFORE he meets with the woman who designs artificial memories. BUT she says the memory is real. THEREFORE he concludes he is the missing child. And so on.

The things Joe does in one event are causal to the events that follow; had he done something different, the story would’ve gone someplace else. The plot bends around the actions he takes, which means this is, in part, his story. That makes him a subject.

Joi has her own sequence of events that has to do with her arc as a character, but, by and large, they do not affect the overall plot. She is there as a barometer of Joe’s feelings, and to say out loud what he is thinking. The one pairing of therefore and but she can lay claim to is, she invites Mariette into the apartment. THEREFORE Mariette plants the tracker on Joe. Later, Joe is left to die in Las Vegas, BUT the replicant freedom force saves him by following the signal. It is the only time where, had Joi done something different, it would change the shape of the narrative, and it’s an accident; she dies not knowing she’s done it. The plot acts on her without her acting on it. She is part of the story, but it belongs to someone else. That makes her an object.

All stories have - and need - subjects and objects. But the tendency for subjects to be men, with women serving in largely reactive or thematic roles, is a thing to be questioned. And the tendency for these women to be young, sexy, and sometimes naked often bridges the gap from object to objectified. In truth, of all the central characters, you could most easily write Joi out of the script without seriously changing the story.

But that would be a far inferior movie, because Blade Runner 2049 is less plot-driven than driven by ideas, and Joi is everything the film is about.

Beyond being a narrative or sexual object, Joi is a literal object. The biggest decision she makes is to accompany Joe on his journey, staying by her man’s side and keeping him safe despite the risk because she loves him. And, yes, her love exists solely because it makes a few dollars for someone neither will ever meet, and they both know this, but that makes it no less real. She dies for that love, stamped out in an act of petty cruelty, and, in dying, encapsulates the replicant uprising’s philosophy before it’s even uttered: “Dying for the right cause. It’s the most human thing we can do.”

This is everything the film has to say about living in a world that gives you few options. The only real agency she ever had is when and how she would die, and on whose terms.

That may seem like a lot of symbolic heft to put on a character who is, no matter how to slice it, yet another powerless woman whose tragic death makes a man’s story more interesting. And I’m with you in that. Given the preponderance of women in this movie with nothing to do except die dramatically to underline a sentence, and the Blade Runner franchise’s already dubious notions of consent and female agency, I can’t argue that Joi is a brilliant subversion who escapes the baggage of her tropes.

But I still feel this… ambivalence. Conventional wisdom is that objects can be likable, admirable, but not relatable. They are viewed from without. Real empathy is reserved for characters with agency. And, since agency has, historically, been so unevenly distributed between genders, there is this reflex to treat it as an absolute good, to see a female character who lacks agency as prima facie bad writing.

But… as an elder millennial with no money in a broken democracy with a pitiless economy on a dying rock in space, I feel agency is in short supply. And I know there are lots of people in this world with far less than I have, and I hate to think that makes us all unfit to be protagonists. I am so rarely the thing that acts rather than the thing that is acted on. Joi speaks to me more than anyone else in the movie.

Characters who direct the stories of their lives make for great wish fulfillment, but sometimes I think it makes them less relatable.

I don’t know if that makes the screenwriters’ treatment of Joi defensible. But it is, perhaps, revealing? Maybe it’s worth questioning why agency should be the gold standard for relatability. Because, if we can’t relate to characters with little control over their lives, how could we ever tell stories about capitalism?

#video essay #blade runner 2049 #capitalism

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heechulhamster · 5 years

Text

Magnum Opus - Baekhyun

BYUN BAEKYUN x Reader

Artist!AU, Angst, Fluff, Smut.

You were only in search for the man that would inspire you for your 10th painting, but he already found the subject of his masterpiece.

I know I said that I’d post this next week, but I just couldn’t stop myself from writing. My heart swells from the support and love that you give me, guys. Thank you so much!

5304 words.

____

It spoke of a silhouette of a man looking outside the window towards an episode of storm and undeniable gloom. He’s holding a flute of champagne like the classy man he poses to be. Yet like the scenery he ponders on, he’s nothing but a sad noise of isolation and and abandonment. JJY 11418, one of the paintings in your current exhibit. There were 8 others displayed on the finite space of the art gallery you’ve occupied for the past week. Nine was a small number for a collection of works to conduct an exhibition for, but nine is a huge number for the total of relationships..

JJY, or Jang Jaehyun was one of the nine men you’ve dated the past years - a part of your past, a random person in your wide array of memories, and now painting number nine. His was an image of aloofness and poignancy, exactly how he entered your life. Jaehyun was a broken boy in all aspects. A personification of the bad boy stereotype in the movies, bent, scarred, and emotionally distant. The relationship was mainly physical at first, until he opened up and relied on you. But at this point in your life, you weren’t up for the task to be a bearer of someone’s emotional dependency. It was only a matter of time for him to break you like how much of a ruin he is, so you had to sever all ties with him.

Your eyes wandered further to the other paintings subtly titled with other initials. How you immortalized someone you ought to forget and bury in the past by art. Or rather capitalize on old, toxic relationships. You got hurt, so it was right and just you could use those experiences, their stories, for a living, right?

“Who’s JJY?” You’re brought back to Earth by a random interruption behind you. Abruptly turning to see who it is, you see a man not much taller than you with his face void of harsh features.

“Hmmm… someone.” You answered thriftily.

“I conclude that JJY is an ex.” He said with a short laugh and his eyes disappeared when he smiled. Cute, you thought.

“I believe that the exhibit has been closed for..” You look at your watch. “15 minutes now, I’m just preparing to close.”

“I just finished closing mine, that’s why I dropped by. Been wanting to enter this exhibit for a while now.” He used his thumb to point on the exhibit adjacent to yours.

“Oh you’re the photographer?” You asked to which he nodded to. “Nice to finally meet you. I loved your portraits, your boyfriend?”

“No, I don’t exactly sway that way.” You chuckled a little on his words. “Kai is a friend, been interested to photograph dancers while they dance. You know, motion translates good on photos.”

“Tell Kai that he really looks good while dancing.”

“Sorry honey, my friend is taken.” Laughing at your implication. He reached out his hand in front of you, “Baekyun.” You took his hand and also introduced yourself.

“So, all of them are exes?” Baekhyun slowly took his steps as his head looked around the room. His olive green blazer and faded jeans with his copper toned hair contrasting greatly against the white room.

“Not exactly, one over there was an ex fuck buddy. But got enough story to paint.” You pointed towards a warm colored painting on the other side of the room, LDH.

“Wow, you’ve been around.” He laughed as he adjusted his round glasses and took another step towards another painting.

“Well, I can say I’m just in demand.” You joked.

“This one’s sad, this is literally just a guy on a desk and everything’s black and white. What was he like?” Baekhyun closely examined the piece KJS.

“Man, was he as boring as that painting. In all aspects! Conversation wise, he was of no depth. He was a business man, you know how plain and bland they are.” You explained.

“Even in bed?” Baekhyun looked back at you.

“More over in bed.”

“This KJS guy is really a waste of canvas.” He laughed a little and continued walking around with both his hands on his pockets. You have to admit, Baekhyun didn’t look a lot like your ideal type, tall and tan with masculine features. He is more of a flower boy appearance, like someone you’d meet on a sunny Sunday walk around the neighborhood and greet. Yet his aura exuded something more cunning and it got you curious. He really carried himself well.

“Do you accept commissions?” Baekhyun asked.

“Do you mean do I accept new relationships?” You jokingly answered before you looked back at him with his suggestive look. He earned a scoff from you, “Are you serious?”

“I find you interesting, and cute.” Baekhyun wiggled his eyebrows at you. You did a quick scan of your current appearance, you’re wearing a maxi skirt with an ethnic print and a black lace bralette. Your fashion sense sure was in luck today.

“Cute, what a word. Last time I’ve been called that was probably in high school.” You laughed.

“Okay, I think you’re hot. Besides, I would like to make a deal.” Baekhyun fully turned his body from facing the painting to yours and put his hands in his pockets.

“I just knew there’s gonna be a catch. What’s it?” You crossed your hands over your chest to feign intimidation.

“I might have seen the subject of my next series in you.” He reached out a hand and tucked a loose strand of your hair behind your ear, a gesture that made you blush like a teenager. “And who knows, maybe I could be painting number ten?”

With Baekhyun’s smirk, you just knew that it was too good of an offer to refrain to.

Baekhyun was an interesting person, to say the absolute least. He was colorful beyond being an artist, an extreme delight to talk to. All it took for you was two dates with him to be madly infatuated with him, and what he could be. How he spoke of everything with passion and with a pledge of enthusiastic fervor.

You vividly remember the first date, a textbook definition of a date in a cafe. It was an interesting place just near the art galleries. A space filled with vintage memorabilia and there was an actual vintage car inside. Baekhyun took the opportunity with you and his camera, presenting you photos of sides of yourself that you’ve never seen before. A new smile that suited your face so well, and you just know what made the difference. The cafe was interesting in itself yet with his ecstatic musings and stories of childhood, it made the place look gloomy and he was the sole light in the universe.

“What did you see in me?” You suddenly asked as you stirred your frappe and while he changed batteries of his camera.

“Uhm, beauty?” He playfully answered with the smile that made him look like a dachshund, a cute one that is.

“Shut the fuck up, Baek. Seriously. You told me you saw your next series or whatsoever in me. I need to know why.”

Baekhyun shifted in his seat and put down his Leica. “I’ve always wanted to feature artists in my work. You know, people tend to disregard the artistic process. The time it took and the emotions a person shed just to come up with the art that they’re so willing to buy and consume. I want the world to see that, the story behind. The art in the making of art.” You almost thought that he’s being to serious in his speech until he winked right after the last sentence.

“And you’re hot. You’re art yourself.” You just chuckled at his playfulness. Because honestly, even if you tried to reply, you’d only speak utter gibberish due to the blush that flooded your cheeks.

Baekhyun made you experience teenage love in the age of twenty six.

It wasn’t like your previous relationships the past few years where you just stuck together for companionship, or sex. It wasn’t a matter of just fulfilling the physical and emotional gaps you have in your life. Baekhyun wasn’t just a cork you try to mask your insecurities and loneliness with. He was someone who made you feel as if you really wanted to be there. You didn’t show up on dates just for the sake of courtesy - you were excited for it. You remember how with the past others you’ve dated, you just come as whoever you are. How you put close to no effort in dressing up, because they weren’t someone you need to impress. They asked you out in the first place. But with Baekhyun, you spend two hours in front of the mirror trying to pick a dress that would accentuate all your assets. It wasn’t because you need to impress him, it’s just because you want to look your best.

The second date, you both tried to go out your comfort zone and rented a karaoke booth. He told you that performance wasn’t his thing but he actually had good singing skills. So when he passed you the mic, you amply declined in embarrassment. Yet that boy really had good convincing, or annoying skills that he was able to coax the shame out of you and got you to sing Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and The Waves. A few drinks and songs later, both of you sang a duet and danced to Abba.

It was at that moment where you started to look at his eyes a bit differently. How his eyes were too warm for your liking, how it carried more messages than you could comprehend. You grew aware of how his thumb lightly played with your shoulder as his hand rested on it. Your bare thigh due to the shorts your wearing was attentive of how it connected with Baekhyun’s denim pants. It was as if your senses were at overdrive, and all it could take in was Baekhyun.

“You’re not hot.” You suddenly blurted out.

“Uhm, ouch. But thank you?” He put his hand over his chest to act as if he’s hurt.

“No, I mean. You’re not buff, not muscular. But there’s just something about you I find sexy. And I don’t know what it is.” You shook your head much to your chagrin.

“That’s better.” He quickly answered. You shot him a confused face while your elbow rested on the couch and your hand supported your face. Baekhyun straightened his seat in front of you. “If you’re just attracted to how I look, you could leave me if I gain weight. If you don’t know what you’re here for, you’re just going to keep on wanting to know. You’re stuck with me, missy.”

“I need to know, Byun. How am I going to paint my 10th if you’re going to keep me in a daze?” You pouted.

“Artist’s call.” That was all he answered before he chugged down another bottle of beer.

Baekhyun showed up in your exhibit late at night after his day job. He worked as a photojournalist for the local paper aside from his artistic ventures as a photographer. Keeps the stability of the dinner table, he says. To which you understand fully, a painting can earn you a couple of hundred dollars. A commissioned painting can cost to up a thousand, but how common of an occurrence was that? You yourself experienced needing to work a few temp jobs just to make ends meet.

“Can I ask you something?” Baekhyun whispered behind you, to which you responded a simple hum.

“Which hurt the hardest?” You looked back at him and saw nothing but mere curiosity in his face.

“Hmmm…” You started crossing the finite space of your exhibit, halting in front of a piece that was a burst of reds and oranges, a symphony of warm tones. It featured a two people hugging each other, but one had his back from the other as it seemed that his own figure melted. You sighed, the very first piece that you made in this collection - JTY.

“It really looks painful.” You felt a pair of arms wrap around you and you were enveloped in Baekhyun’s embrace and his scent. “Who is it?”

“My second boyfriend, just right before I graduated from High School. We lasted a while. Close to 2 years , I think. He wanted me to go to the same University as him, take a much more practical course. But I don’t want that. I can’t be just another lawyer like him, I can’t deal with the definitivity of it. How constricted their career is with their laws and everything. He broke up with me and told me I was being dumb. That being an artist would only lead to struggling. And he couldn’t stay with someone so irrational. He didn’t just break my heart, he made me doubt my dreams. Made me doubt if I could actually make it. But hey, here I am, right?” You chuckled a little after you ended your story.

All you felt was his breath fanning on your neck. The story didn’t even make you sad anymore, it was just a part of your past. And you’ve already proven your ex wrong. And you’re with someone way better.

“You’re here, and I trust that..” Baekhyun whispered and planted a chaste kiss on your neck. “To further places you’ll go.”

You turned your face to him, his arms on your waist hugged tighter as you closed the distance between your lips. Gently placing a kiss on his lips as if expressing how thankful you were that he was by your side.

Later that night, both of you ended at your apartment. Out of no reason, he reminded you that he was to commission a painting from you. Baekhyun brought his old film camera and a polaroid, and you remembered that he wanted to capture you as you work.

“What would you like me to paint?” You asked as you sat in front of your easel, paint and brushes already prepared on the side.

“What do you want to paint? Whatever.” He said as he prepared his film camera and set up a blinding set of lights.

“I thought this was commission? You need to give me ideas, sir.” You chuckled a little.

“Me.” He answered as he sat on the chair that was in reverse, then placing his elbows on the backrest. “But how you see me.”

“Shall I paint a puppy, then?” You joked, to which Baekhyun scoffed at.

“Nevermind. Just do a self portrait.” He decided, and you looked at him annoyingly. “I told you-”

“You told me that you don’t do self portraits because you don’t like how you see yourself. But I do like you. And I’d like a beautiful painting so just paint you. It’s a commission, no buts - okay?” He retaliated, and at this point you had no choice.

So you just put your hair up in a bun and started painting. You put one of your legs up on the chair, the way it helps you focus. You tried to not be distracted by the few clicks of camera that you hear, and not be conscious of how you’d look on the photos. But that wasn’t was distracting you all along. Baekhyun already removed the coat that he wore over his black button down shirt, which already had its first three buttons undone. And with the way he focused on his craft, he glistened hotter than the surface of the sun.

You tried your best to just proceed on your work. Choosing to portray yourself naked, only covered by a thin cloth, as a sign of freedom. The way you’re used to. As an expression of your despise for being bound and being told what to do. The way your ex told you what you should do, the way your parents asked you to take another course. The nakedness you showed was a sign of breaking free from all that held you back to who you wanted to be.

“You really want me to hang that on my living room?” Baekhyun suddenly asks behind you.

“You hang it where you want to hang, but I’ll paint what I feel to paint.” You answered without even looking at him as you refrained to be distracted.

“Do you even know that you bite your lips too hard when you focus?”

“I’m not aware of how I look like when I paint, Baek. That’s why I need to see how I look on those photos.”

He walked over in front of you and holds your hand, almost commanding you to stop your activity. “You could continue that some other time. For now, I have another thing in mind.” He said as he put down the canvass you’ve been working on from your easel.

He walked over to the stock of other canvass boards lying in your living room and unpacked one, eventually placing it on the easel.

“I’m to commission another, an abstract.” He said.

“I’m not a fan of abstract, Baek.”

“But that’s what I want. I’ll help you.” He proclaimed and you scrunched up your face in confusion. “Abstract paintings are more than a mess, you see. It portrays what the artist feels as of the moment. An emotion locked in time by a painting. I’ll help you by giving you something to feel.”

You almost choked in shock and confusion when he knelt in front of you. Hands slowly carressing your thighs down to the hem of the skirt you wore. Baekhyun looked at you as if asking for permission, to which you just nodded to. He lifted the hem of your skirt to reveal your legs, and eventually your underwear.

“Baekhyun, what?” You asked almost with just your breath.

“Just paint what you feel, darling. And I’ll make you feel good.” Baekhyun responded just right before he planted kisses on your inner thigh. Your hands quivered at the sensation he was bringing you. You felt his hands palming your heat, a part of you he’s already familiarized himself with the past month you’ve been dating.

Baekhyun continued planting wet kisses on your thighs until his hands started tugging on your underwear. You lifted from your chair a little bit to let him fully pull it down. For him to remove the barrier that’s been separating the two of you. It was when you felt his breath in the middle of your thighs that your mind blanked out.

“You better start painting, baby. I’m planning to take a while here.” Baekhyun declared then suddenly diving his face into your folds. The way his tongue flattened on your heat sent your mind to space. With his tongue’s movements and his arms wrapped around your thighs, constricting you to move, you just blanked out. You closed your eyes and threw your head back as you let him work his wonder into your body.

“The painting, baby. I’m gonna need you to tell me how you feel by that.” Baekhyun parted his lips from yours so you picked up the first shade of paint that came in contact with your hands, violet. He returned his lips on your folds, and eventually sucked on your clit. You were unable to function normally, and the canvass was just a mess of random smears of violet and blue.

He then started using his hands when you picked up another color. You were nearing your bliss when Baekhyun worked faster. Your hands on the canvass almost mimicked his movements, producing jagged zigzag lines of white over the cold colors. A few moments later and you felt your lower stomach contract. Your left hand putting down the paint and finding his hair, bunching it to make him feel how close you were. It didn’t even take another minute for you to reach your release.

Baekhyun distanced himself from you, looking at you with evidences of his actions and your pleasure still smeared on his face. He looked at the painting, “It’s beautiful, and it's mine.”

You laughed at the double meaning of his words. “It’s free, as a payment for your hard work.”

It was another day where you woke up in a place that’s not yours. Enveloped with an arms that held you as if he’d stop breathing if he lets go. Baekhyun sensed that you’re already awake and planted a kiss on the side of your face.

“Good morning, beautiful.” You just threw him a side eye on his cheesy words.

You just lied on his bed when he stood up, you didn’t want to move due to the way your body felt. Sore, tired, and stretched out, but wonderful and pleasured. You closed your eyes again as you felt the blankets peeled away from your body. You almost pulled it back in response but you’re shocked when you opened your eyes and saw a polaroid camera focused at you.

You didn’t know how to react. Because one, you’re naked as hell. And second, Baekhyun was generous enough to shower you with marks and bites last night.

“What the fuck Baek?” You threw a pillow at him. “That’s not going in your collection.”

He laughed at you as he fanned the photo that came out of the polaroid. “No worries, for a very special personal collection. Only my eyes can see.”

You both just cuddled afterwards, immersing yourself in the pleasure of silence and just holding each other close. You turned to him, admiring his youthful features.

“How did you get into photography?” You suddenly asked.

“It was my first love, actually.” You nodded in silence. “She was the first one to make me hold a camera. I fell in love with it, and she’s always been my subject. But I eventually fell in love with the art more than her. She felt it, and grew tired of being with me. She told me to find a new subject, one that’s better suited for me. One that I can produce my magnum opus with. One that feels perfect.” He stared at you as he spoke.

“One that can stick with me and my art forever.” Baekhyun grabbed your hand and planted a kiss on it.

Your breath hitched, on the mention of the word. Forever.

Were you willing to stick forever?

Or Baekhyun was just something that excited you now? And like all other men, would be boring to you afterwards. You always found yourself growing tired of a routine, and the same applied to people. When time comes that you’ve known them too well, when there’s no thrill anymore, you tend to slip away. You tend to lose interest.

Would it be different for Baekhyun? Will he keep you interested long enough for you to commit?

Another thing, commitment. One you’re scared of and one you suck at. Commitments were never your thing. That’s why you never indulged yourself on the steady pay of a day job. Routines sicked the hell out of you. You couldn’t bare to live a life so repeated and cyclical. You’re afraid to be tied down, bound, and be stopped from growing. You don’t want to be stuck in a same place, you loved adventure so much and you seeked it. Whether that new encounters involved new places or new people, as long as you’ll gain another story to tell that you’d then translate onto a canvas. Immortalizing a story into a piece of art that no one can change.

Are you willing to give up that freedom in an exchange of a stability with Baekhyun?

Later that night, you found yourself once again in front of your easel. WIth your feet up and your hair tied in a tight, messy bun. All too fixated on the story that flowed out from your mind, to your hands, and eventually on the painting that you worked on.

Your tenth painting.

It wasn’t too cinematic nor too definitive. It’s just a man with an army green coat, holding a camera that covers his face. His other hand held another that extends to the front of the painting, a hand that was supposed to be yours. The background almost looked like a galaxy, a symphony of blue and violet - a splitting image of the abstract painting that already lived in his bedroom.

It’s a summary of how you saw Baekhyun, how you felt with him, and how much you’re happy and hurt.

Hurt because you just can’t find the will to stay.

You’re a coward that’s afraid of imperfection. He wants someone who could stick forever. His perfect muse of his art. The subject of his masterpiece, the lady of his colorful life. But you can’t find the perfect girl in you, you don’t know if you could fulfill all his expectations. If you were enough to be the perfect girl. Your mouth filled with bitterness on the notion of the word perfect, a word so superficial and so abstract. Because who can even be ever perfect? Is there even a set standard on what perfect is?

But you just knew to yourself that you’re not that.

You couldn’t be perfect.

And you couldn’t be his.

You lifted your brush, and there it was. The painting that will never speak enough on how much you felt, how much you loved, and how much it hurt - BBH.

You stopped dropping by his exhibit even if it’s only opposite yours. You started ditching his calls, not wanting to be the one to break the thing between you two. Because you can’t break his heart and doing so would break yours. Maybe if you just put the two of you in the cold, he would eventually slip away too, that maybe Baekhyun would also just let it slide and let go.

But too much for a wishful thinking.

Baekhyun showed up on the last day of your exhibit, you were currently boxing all the unbought paintings and wrapping up those who found a home. He showed up with his dark jeans and black shirt. His hair ruffled but every strand still in perfect place. You knew with the look on his face that’s he’s here to clear things up.

“What’s wrong, (Y/N)?” He sat in front of you as you neatly taped a painting in its box.

“Nothing? It’s the last day of my exhibit. I just need to clear things up a bit.” You didn’t even look in his eyes, afraid that when you do so - you’ll only give in.

“I’m not talking about the damn exhibit, I’m talking about us.” His voice grew louder, tenser. You could already imagine how veins would show on his forehead and the tendons on his neck would grow tense.

“Us? What’s with us, Baek?” You tried to answer innocently.

“Exactly. What’s with us?” He reached out to your hand. Tugging it a bit harshly to get you to look at him. “You just fucking dropped me off, I don’t even remember doing anything wrong. So tell me what happened. Because obviously, the ball is in your court.”

You sighed, there was just no getting out of this. You stood up and placed the boxed painting among the others that was ready for pickup.

“I finished my tenth painting, and you finished your new series. So…” You tried to flash a smile.

“Yes, it’s done. So?” Baekhyun’s forehead creased in confusion.

“So our deal is done. Remember? You asked for a deal. And it’s done.” You had to turn your back away from him.

“What? So that’s all this was to you?” He grabbed your arm to make you turn around back to him. And when you met his eyes that spoke of agitation and various sentiments, you can’t help your eyes from welling up. You wanted to break down, regret the way you’ve acted the past weeks and just hug him.

“That’s all I am to you? Just another painting to hang on some rich guy’s wall? Another canvass you’d brand with my initials? So fuck, I’m just BBH, painting number ten to you?” He laughed in sarcasm.

“No, Baek. It’s just…” Your words got caught up in your throat. A little bit of too much and too little thoughts flooded your mind. You wanted to say a lot of things, how much he made you feel, how happy you were with him, and everything.

“What? Because, I love you. I fucking love you so much, (Y/N) You’re not just going to be another photo project I’m working on, because you live here.” Baekhyun’s index finger pointed on his chest, where his heart is, where he told you you lived in.

“I can’t be your perfect girl, Baekhyun! I’m not perfect. I don’t know if I’m enough to fill all your expectations. All that you want, because I’m just me, Baek. A girl that paints her exes into canvases to make ends meet. One who dated ten guys to get stories to paint, who’s been around just for the sake of the art I make.” You explained.

“I got addicted into the idea of dating people because it gives me inspiration and stories to paint. And with you, you just didn’t make me want to paint a single work. You’re the one I can’t explain in just one frame. I don’t think a thousand would be enough, too. I’m scared. I’m scared because this shit is new to me. I came to this agreement expecting to gain something and go to the next one but no, I craved something more. I craved to stay. And I don’t know how to deal with it. Because commitments is something I suck at, Baek.”

Baekhyun took two steps and closed the distance between you two. Both of his hands found the sides of your face, cupping it closer to him.

“I don’t need someone’s who’s perfect. I just need someone who stays.” He planted a chaste kiss on your lips. “Just stay, please.”

You just stared at him, you wanted to stay. You wanted to go and find out how it feels to be kept and stay at one place. The pleasure and comfort of finding a home in somebody’s arms. But could you?

“Please, stay.” Baekhun asked once more because he kissed you passionately in the middle of the room. The exact same room where he first approached you. The room that contained all the frames that told stories of each and every heartbreak, every part of your past. And now it contained the man who held your future, and he was holding you.

Baekhyun kept hold of his part of the gallery. Eventually filling it with a new series of photos, one that featured you. There you saw how you bit your lip as you focused on a painting. Each strand of your hair that went haywire from the messy bun on the top of your head. How you sat so unfeminine with your feet up on the chair. It was just so raw, and so you.

“I told you, it looks good.” He said as he planted a kiss on your shoulder. He let you be the first one to see the photos as he freshly hung it in the gallery.

“It only looks good because you’re a great photographer. You know my angles.” You said with a smile.

“No, it doesn’t just look good. It’s perfect. To me, you’re perfect.” His arms embraced around you again. “And this love I share with you is my masterpiece. An art that I’d continue working on.” And Baekhyun planted a kiss on your lips.

And it’s true, because the love you had for each other in your veins will be forever immortalized in the art that you bleed. An emotion captured in time, a moment that’s frozen, and a love that will never fade.

#exo imagine #exo fanfic #exo angst #exo fanfiction #baekhyun #byun baekhyun #BBH #baekhyun imagine #exo smut #baekhyun fanfic #baekhyun angst #exo fluff #baekhyun au #artist au #exo scenario #exo fanfictions

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michams · 5 years

Text

VIXX “Scentist” analysis based on “Perfume”, by P. Suskind PART I - The MV (2/2)

“Scentist” is definitely one of my favorite songs/ music videos/ concepts in kpop so last year, when I got to know it was based on a book, I went after and read it. Since then I’ve been wanting to share an analysis focused on more direct references to Suskind’s story.

* This is the continuation of a two part analysis of Vixx’s “Scentist” MV; you can find the first part here. *

THIRD PART The third part is about the period Grenouille spends in Grasse – pretty much a capital of the aroma’s industry. Going over to the residential area, his attention was for some reason caught by one of the houses. He realizes it was a scent extremely similar to the one he smelled that night in Paris, but not the same. It was even better this time. The girl was a child and he knew that in 2 years she would have completely matured. This time he wished to properly extract and take this scent for himself. He had to expand his knowledge and technique, as he waited for the blossoming.

[Image 26 - 1:37 min] I think by now we can work with the concept of Grenouille’s more sophisticated way of dealing with smell and creating fragrances inside himself. The way I see it, here we can divide the scene in some parts: first, on the right, Hongbin and Hyuk would be in charge of the experimenting; at the center, where N, Ravi and Ken stand, would be the storage for the smells (also previously described as a “beverage cellar”) and on the left side, Leo would be responsible for the “special” creations (the harmonization).

Grenouille is hired at an atelier. He is taught a very efficient process of extraction. He gained more and more experience, and stayed all day long in the laboratory making experiments. He creates more “humane perfumes” for different occasions. Once again, he tries capturing the objects aromas (rock, metal, glass, wood…) and soon begins experimenting with living beings.

[Image 27 - 0:57 sec] [Image 28 - 1:52 min] [Image 29 - 0:54 sec] [Image 30 - 1:56] Grenouille catches some animals to test if he can extract their odors. Here N and Hongbin illustrate those experiments – the book doesn’t specify any lizard or snake, though.

After a year had passed, one night he is taken by the fear of losing the scent; despite some hesitation, he plans to make a base of other aromas to help in conserving hers. This is when the murders start taking place. Every week the citizens would find a girl; all of them followed a similar pattern. Even when taking measures he couldn’t be stopped.

Laure Richis was the girl whose scent Grenouille wants. Even after her father’s attempt of taking her away secretly, he follows their trace. He manages to get inside her room, to kill her and extract the scent.

“He didn’t even once look at the girl’s face; her material existence wasn’t important to him, it was only the Laure in form of scent that existed, as a perfect smell.”

[Image 31 - 0:35 sec] [Image 32 - 2:09 min] The bags containing roses actually represent each one of the girls Grenouille kills when he is in Grasse. Red roses are associated to beauty and perfection and, most popularly, to profound love. In the book, he specifically says he wants to capture the special fragrances from people, those that inspired love.

[Image 33 - 2:49 min] [Image 34 - 3:03 min] In total, he makes 25 victims, considering the last one, Laure, the special scent he had as a goal. As I pointed out in yellow, there are around 20 bags hanging in the MV.

After some investigation the police gets to Grenouille. He is arrested and sentenced to death. He arrived in the police carriage at the square; it was the first time someone to be executed came in such class. He was finely dressed and looked like a free man. By this moment he had already applied the perfume. Suddenly, all those people believed he wasn’t guilty and loved him. They all fell on their knees. An utter state of hysteria took place; everywhere the citizens where filled with admiration and intense desire.

[Image 35 - 2:38 min] [Image 36 - 2:42 min] I associate this other scene involving a car with Grenouille arrival to the execution venue. Grenouille uses of the effect of the perfume to get taken there by carriage. Hongbin's angle to the camera in the first scene also conveys the idea of power over the viewer. In the book he stands by the door for several minutes and also wears a long blue coat.

[Image 37 - 2:11 min] [Image 38 - 2:13 min] This could be a representation of the perfume taking over the crowd like a gas bomb in the same scenario. However Grenouille is immune to it, as Ravi shows by wearing the protection mask.

At first, he thought he had achieved his goal, but he couldn’t feel any joy from that. Again he was disgusted by those people. He understood that love wouldn’t make him blissful. However, the more he hated them, the more they loved him, as they saw him through his divine aromatic mask. Again the mist filled him, like his dream in the cave; but this time the real world was the dream, and there was no place where to escape.

[Image 39 - 1:17 min] I believe this represents the boy’s realization at the square. Now the mist originates from the car that, according to the previous association, is connected to the place where Greouille feels suffocated by it for the second time.

After passing out and being aided by the girl’s father himself, he goes away.

* * * FOURTH PART Grenouille walked at night again. Feeling the bottle in his pocket, he reflects on how he had power enough to dominate the world if he wanted. But he didn’t know who he was if he couldn’t smell himself; everything else was insignificant. In the end, he was the only one able to be fascinated and not controlled by the perfume. He gets to Paris in a day as hot as the day of his birth. At night, near by a fire where some people gathered, he sprays all of his body with the rest of the liquid.

* * * Other commentaries: The MV was a really interesting interpretation of the story. Definitively, it fit Vixx’s dark concepts perfectly, which I’m not sure if it’s that clear by watching it out of context.

I like how throughout the video they work with blue and red, which mixed result in purple – the color Grenouille’s castle is described as. I also thought it was interesting how they introduced music to the story (mainly related to those scenes of Leo by the piano); I feel like the book doesn’t do any kind of comparision to other senses, specially because the important point is exactly the main character’s special way of interacting with the world.

There were also some things that made me confused and I decided to keep them out of the list, such as:

[Image 40 - 0:39 sec] - That tool the boys look through. Although I used a similar scene before, I was really curious to know the real meaning of this.

[Image 41 - 2:02 min]- The boy feeling divided (?). I considered this would be associated to Grenouille’s feelings – hate and the wish to be loved at the same time.

[Image 42 and 43 - 2:55 min] - The gun. I thought that was a representation of the character’s indifference to the fact that he had to kill his victims; the book literally says that didn’t matter to him. The first one would be the younger Grenouille experiencing that for the first time as a way of getting to the scent, and then the older version of himself actively killing the girls to make the perfume.

Concluding… Again, this is a great concept and a great book. Make sure to support Vixx and the author’s work the way you can.

I plan on continuing with this and analyze the other promotions related to “EAU de VIXX”, so please wait for it!

Thank you for reading this!

References used: - Book: Perfume, the story of a murderer; by P. Suskind (2007 ed., Editora Record). - 빅스(VIXX) - '향 (Scentist)' Official M/V (YouTube). - Film: Perfume, the story of a murderer (2006).

#빅스 #vixx #scentist #eaudevixx #kpop #analysis

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katecarteir · 6 years

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my heart beats out of time.

Pairing: Richie Tozier/Ben Hanscom

Part Two of the Bed Posts story line | Explicit |

“No….” Stan whined, flopping backwards so that he rested almost entirely in against Eddie’s torso. Eddie let out an evil little laugh and wrapped his arms around Stan. “Bev… Tell me it’s not true.”

“I can’t do that,” Bev said with a sigh. “And I don’t really want to. It’s actually pretty great.”

Beverly slide off of Richie and moved to grab one of his band T-shirts off the floor. She pulled it up over herself, jumping into her jeans as Richie watched her. His arms were propped up behind his head cockily and he was grinning at her. This was a thing they did now, Bev supposed. It had been two weeks since Richie had more than surprised her with his ability to actually bring her to orgasm. She was a little loath to admit it, but they’d been hooking up regularly since. She didn’t think she’d gone more than two days without some part of Richie inside her since.

It didn’t mean much, Bev knew. She knew Richie knew it, too. He was still Richie Tozier, her stupid, clumsy, best friend. He just happened to be remarkably good at getting her off, and like hell she wasn’t going to capitalize on that shit. Especially not when Richie was so willingly to play along.

“You coming?” Beverly asked, turning around and avoiding looking at Richie’s still-hard cock. “We’re supposed to meet the others at Bill’s to do that big Business project.”

Richie raised his brow. “Did you forget that I’m not part of that? Because I didn’t take a Business class, unlike you fucking nerds. I’m meeting Ben and Stanley later to help them with their Calc midterm.”

Beverly rolled her eyes, tossing an extra pair of sweats at Richie’s bare torso. “And you’re calling us nerds, you fucking math genius. Cover yourself up, nobody wants to see your naked ass.”

Richie cackled. “That’s not what you saying literally an hour ago. Try for some consistency in your life, Marshmallow.”

Beverly rolled her eyes, trying to pretend that the nickname didn’t make her heart jump a little bit, and left without saying anything else while Richie laughed behind her.

xxx

Thanks to Richie, Beverly was the last person to show up to Bill’s, meaning every eye turned to look at her when she entered the room. She knew her face was likely in a matching tone with the hair on her head as she pushed her way in and dropped quickly down beside Bill. “Sorry I’m late,” she said in a rush, rubbing her cheek mindlessly. “Did you decide anything without me?”

“Is that Richie’s shirt?” Eddie asked, smirking at her. Because yeah… of fucking course Eddie Kaspbrak would recognize Richie Tozier’s wardrobe. They’d only lived together for the entire semester, adding onto the whole inseparable best friends for some unexplainable reasons of the last fifteen years. Truthfully, Eddie probably knew all too much about what was going on between Richie and Bev lately, and thrived on chaos too much to just confront her about it.

“Yeah, I…” Beverly cleared her throat, already glaring at Eddie. “I spent the night at his place last night. Didn’t have a clean shirt to change into.”

Eddie let out a disbelieving scoff. “If you say so, Bev.”

Suddenly somebody was poking at her neck, Beverly jerking away quickly with a squawk. “Did you having no cluh-clean shirts have something to do with tha-th-at?” Bill stuttered through his sentence but his grin didn’t dim. Beverly scowled and slapped a hand over the mark that she hadn’t had the chance to see, but knew exactly where it must be starting to bruise. “Luh-looks pretty frush-fresh there, Bev.”

Beverly exhaled hard, and found Eddie’s eyes again. Eddie raised his eyebrows, eyes widening slightly. Challenging her. The little fucking gremlin. “Yeah. It is.” She said this shortly, with finality that only made Eddie grin at her harder.

“How fresh is it, Bev?” Eddie said, leaning forward on the ground to rest his chin in his hands. And yeah, Beverly was going to kill him. Kill him fucking dead. He grinned back at her as though he knew it, and was choosing to enjoy his final moments on this Earth.

Stan suddenly let out a horrified squeak, looking at Beverly with what could only be described as utter betrayal. “No…”

“I’m sorry.” Beverly said quickly.

“I can’t do that,” Bev said with a sigh. “And I don’t really want to. It’s actually pretty great.”

“I bet,” Eddie said with whistle. “I’ve seen Richie’s dick enough times, and if he’s anything in real like the way he is my dreams, then I can see why you haven’t gotten off him in two weeks.”

Stan let out a rather loud scream, rolling away from Eddie with his hands over his ears. Eddie and Bev both found themselves laughing, although Beverly was more than a little embarrassed, as they watched Stan loose every inch of his composure.

Mike had already gone back to scrolling through his phone, while Ben and Bill were much more interested in the growing bruises on Bev’s neck and collar bone than they were Stan’s apparently mental snap. “You know…” Beverly said, allowing herself to poked and prodded at. “If you just asked Richie to fuck you, he probably would. I just said that nobody I’d ever slept with had given me a orgasm before he just offered himself up.”

“What?” Bill asked, leaning away from Bev and giving her a distressed look. “What do you mean nobody you’ve slept with has ever given you an orgasm?”

Beverly sucked her bottom lip into her mouth, and glanced side ways at an Eddie Kaspbrak would looked like his birthday had come early. Stan had leaned up onto his elbows, never one to miss out on making fun of Bill, and even Mike had looked up from his phone and pressed a hand over his mouth.

“Never mind that,” Beverly said, waving Bill off while he slumped onto the bed with a deep pout. “I’m just saying that Richie would be down to fuck if you asked.”

“That is where you and I differ, Bev.” Eddie replied, gesturing at her with a frown. “You might be willing to risk your friendship with Richie for some thoughtful dick, but I’m not.”

Beverly frowned back at him, but only found herself stumbling for a response. Stan cleared his throat and rolled his eyes. “Why did you guys have to tell me this shit right before I have to go listen to Richie explain math to me?”

Ben groaned and closed his eyes.

xxx

Ben was staring at him.

Not in any I’m listening to you explain math way… not even in a you have something on your face and i’m trying to decide if I should tell you way, either. No, no, Ben- Ben Hanscom- was staring at him like drunk girls sometimes stared at him at parties. And it was fucking weird.

“WHAT!” Richie finally hissed, dropping the highlighter and glaring at Ben. “Why are you staring at me?”

Ben’s face turned bright red but Stan let out a scoff. “He’s weirded out because we all just found out that you’ve been hooking up with Bev and didn’t tell anybody.”

“I told Eddie,” Richie shot back on a reflex before it all seemed to sink in. Ben was staring at him like a drunk girl at a party. He grinned and leaned forward on his elbow, resting his chin in his hands. “Benny… Benny boy… What are you staring at?”

Ben’s face burned a deeper red and Richie waggling his eyebrows. “Bev and I don’t have anything exclusive, you know? We’re just playing around. Anybody can take a spin, with either of us, if we wanted them to. They just gotta ask.”

Stan let out a loud, disgusted noise while Richie and Ben didn’t break eye contact. “This is not helping me pass this math class. Thanks for nothing, assholes.” Stan gathered up all his belongings, stomping out of the room while Richie and Ben continued their unwavering eye contact.

Richie scooted closer with his chair, not breaking eye contact, and Ben swayed forward as though being pulled by some invisible string that was attached to Richie’s mouth. “Come on, Ben,” Richie said, dropping his voice in the way that always worked for him. The way he did when he wanted Beverly to agree with him, or wanted to see Eddie blush all the way up to the roots of his hair. Richie Tozier knew that most things about him weren’t sexy in the slightest, but he’d certainly learned to use what he did have.

If the audible way Ben swallowed just then meant anything, it worked. “I….” Ben said slowly, his eyes now stuck on Richie’s lips. “I’m not, I don’t….”

“Is this about your reputation as a romantic who would never do it if he wasn’t in love?” Richie chuckled. “Because you might have the others fooled, but I know about Betty in high school… and Cassie during Frosh week… and Matt at the Hallowe’en party… and Jess at the…”

Ben clapped his hand over Richie’s mouth, eyes flaring. The sound of the slap rumbled through the empty library around them, and Richie’s pupils immediately blew out. Ben clenched his jaw and inhaled deeply through his nose. “You’re going at talking, Rich. I’ve known that forever.” Richie waggled his eyebrows and Ben felt Richie’s tongue run along the hand that was covering his mouth. Ben exhaled hard and yanked Richie to his feet.

Since high school, Ben had shot up a good amount. He was taller than Richie now, though Richie had lost his status of tallest losers long ago, and he had more defined muscles than Richie remembered. He stumbled back, looking at Ben with blown-out eyes and found himself being the one swallowing hard.

Ben took steps towards him, backing him up against the library shelves. “Yeah, real good at talking,” Ben said, voice lower than Richie could ever try to force his own to sound. “But can you do anything else?”

Richie donned his persona and smirked. “Only if you’re real fucking good at keeping quiet.”

Richie dropped to his knees so fast that Ben’s head spun out and had to reached out to grab at the bookshelf in front of him to keep from passing out from the sheer surprise alone. Richie was taking his belt apart like a pro, pulling the zipper down and slowly and yeah- Ben was already half hard in his pants.

“Shit…” Richie let out a soft whine as he wrapped his hand around the outline of Ben’s cock in boxers. “You know I’m not much of a size guy, but fuck… does Eddie know about this?”

“Shut up,” Ben said almost harshly, pushing his free hand into Richie’s curls and tugging. Richie let out a soft oh before he was pulling Ben’s cock free. When he pressed the kiss to the head, Ben had to choose between covering his mouth, holding Richie’s hair and gripping the bookshelf like a life line.

If somebody had told him this morning that he’d been standing in the fucking library with Richie Tozier on his knees in front him, Ben Hanscom would have laughed you right off campus. But when Richie takes nearly the whole of his length into his mouth in one go, Ben couldn’t bring himself to regret a single decision he’d made that day.

Ben pressed his knuckles against his mouth as Richie began bobbing along his length enthusiastically, tangling his fingers tighter into Richie’s curls and near-on yanking on them. It brought out a rough moan from the back of Richie’s throat, and Richie choked down to take Ben’s cock all the way down.

An groan bubbled up from deep Ben’s gut as Richie reached up and palmed lightly at his balls. He glanced down at Richie; a mess of black curls, lips bright red and swollen, spit trailing down Ben’s cock whenever Richie pulled his mouth up.

Ben’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he founded himself thrusting forward into Richie’s mouth almost without noticing. It prompted another muffled moan from the man in front of him, a trembling come up to squeeze at Ben’s thigh.

“Fuck…” Ben hissed out, lowering the fist from his mouth for just a moment. Thrusting a little faster into Richie’s mouth, he released his death grip on Richie’s curls and instead gently pushed Richie’s sweaty fringe. Richie pressed a gentle kiss to the side of Ben’s cock in response.

“I’m close,” Ben told Richie softly, reaching down to where he could feel his cock pressing against Richie’s cheek inside his mouth. Richie looked up at Ben through his lashes, and swirled his tongue along Ben’s length.

Ben gasped, slapping his hand back over his mouth to muffle the moans he couldn’t stop from coming free. Richie’s nails dug into Ben’s thighs as Ben came in his mouth.

Then Richie’s mouth was gone as quickly as it had started. Ben swayed forward in surprise as Richie stood up. Richie caught him and chuckled, tucking Ben back inside and zipping him up. He grinned cheekily, giving Ben a little mock-salute.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Benny boy.”

Then he was walking away.

#trashstack #trashstack fic #ben hanscom #richie tozier #my writing #bed posts verse #this likely will not show up in the tag bc of the links #but .#whatever #i expect this whole verse to flop anyway #ot7: the turtle couldn't save us

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fae-fucker · 7 years

Text

Zenith: Chapter 11-12

Aka the last of the preview bits!

After this post, we’re in completely new territory.

Are you excited? I’m excited.

Chapter 11

We’re introduced to a woman named Nor Solis, who is the queen of Xen Ptera, the planet that’s, like, super shitty.

It used to be a beautiful “kingdom” (well, it’s a planet, but go on), but now it’s all gone to shit because their varillium mines ran out of juice. We’re talking constant earthquakes and acid rain and all that jazz, which makes me wonder how the population survives and why they don’t just move somewhere else, but I guess we’ll find out.

Actually, with the new addition to the ahem ... “lore,” and I use that term loosely, we find out that once their varillium ran out, Nor’s father had turned to the other systems for help, and they all refused to “offer enough,” which then lead to a war that was so hardcore that it’s now called the “Cataclysm” and which apparently fucked up the ecosystem and atmosphere of the entire planet.

The wording also implies that once they were out of varillium, the people literally started starving and disease started spreading easier. Did ... did they eat the varillium? How the fuck did they survive before the discovery of varillium? I can see their trade and status in the galaxy suffering massively, but why did their people start dying?

Literally all of this sounds like complete and utter nonsense.

Flowers ceased to bloom, and real water was now a dream as artificial water tablets took its place.

Artificial ... water ...... tablets ....

I don’t .... I don’t think that’s how that works .......

As Nor is angsting about how terrible things are, some cyborg girl comes in to disturb her.

A girl in the doorway was half Xen Pterran, with smooth, tanned skin, and half metal parts, a whirring gear where her heart should be. A wonderful find, the girl, plucked from the streets of a collapsing sector of this damned city.

A cyborg girl stood in the doorway, patches of metal spiraling across her burned skin, a whirring gear where her heart should be. She was one of the few who had been saved from radiation exposure even after it had done its damage.

Why is their race of people named after their planet like it’s a country?

I mean ... I guess you could call a human an earthling but not without looking like an actual alien.

Update: As you can see, this has been edited, along with the color of her skin. Also I don’t think you can be saved from radiation exposure if your entire planet is radioactive, especially not after it’s done its damage, because once that’s happened, everything is radioactive. Which, on top of the radioactive soil ... They’re all like, double radioactive at this point. I don’t even know what the word means I’ve used it so much.

Nor flips her shit that this servant did what servants are supposed to do and entered her quarters.

Nor had always loved the sound of her own voice -- powerful, yet pure all at once. A voice that brought even the strongest, bravest men to their knees. A voice that could make heads roll, should anyone speak a word against her.

More SJM influences, I see. Is this our BIG BAD BITCH?

Watch as Andi and Nor are described exactly the same way but Andi is arbitrarily better because Shinsay says so.

Seriously, switch out “Nor” for “Andi” and that sentence could’ve been more wank about how great and badass Andi is.

Nor cast a glance backwards. The sharp, spiked collar of her midnight gown stabbed at her throat, but she relished the pain.

It reminded her of the pain she would soon inflict.

What?

She’s wearing a collar? Is this supposed to show how weird and kinky and evil she is? I don’t mind that, kinky people are literally the fucking devil, but it’s still pretty weird.

Update: This has been removed and I am deeply disappointed.

But it’s okay, Shinsay. You may have removed my favorite bits now, but I have another 80+ chapters to comb through, and this time, you can’t edit shit.

Whatever. Nor goes to the person who called for her.

“You think so highly of yourself, Darai, that you summon me to your quarters?” Nor hissed.

Why’d you come then, you fucking idiot?

1) Darai is implied to be below her in rank (he’s her advisor), so the fact that he even did this in the first place makes no sense.

2) If you think you’re superior to him, and you are, why the fuck did you come when he summoned you?

3) Why couldn’t he just like ... send her a message? This is the future, yes? Why didn’t he just do the hologram thing like they do in the Avengers? It turns out that he doesn’t even have to show her anything, just tell her something, so this makes no fucking sense.

4) It also turns out that he’s delivering some pretty important info, which makes me wonder why the person didn’t just notify Nor directly instead of going through her advisor.

5) Couldn’t the servant girl deliver this message, if they’re so technologically impaired?

Does Shinsay not know of any other ways to show how eeeeevil Nor is?

We find out that something that Nor’s been waiting for for months now is in its final stages of development.

Superweapon? Superweapon.

Update: It’s now outright stated to be a weapon.

[...] “Then we should prepare ourselves at once.”

Darai stood from his desk, his long robes sweeping behind him like a curtain. “Highness Nor, if I may suggest…”

“Speak now, Darai Uncle, before I grow tired of you.”

If you want him to speak, why’d you fucking interrupt him you dumbass?

I dunno why they made Darai her uncle (though they’re not related by blood), since it didn’t change their interaction at all, but ok.

Darai tells her that timing is important and that they must wait until all pieces fall into place before making their move. Very ominous.

Nor out-edges him, though.

“The final piece is already in place,” Nor said, with a wave of her metal gold prosthetic hand.

Seeing it only reminded her of the past. The explosions. The loss. The need for revenge that empowered her.

The past was what fueled her present.

[...]

“When we bring the galaxy to its knees,” Nor said, a smile slowly appearing onto her rouged lips, “I’d like to repaint this room. Perhaps, With the blood of every man, woman, and child who has ever lifted a finger against my planet.”

[...]

“Majesty. My dear” His voice was slippery, as if drenched in oil. “When we bring the galaxy to its knees, you can paint the entire palace in blood, if you wish it.”

Nor closed her eyes, and smiled.

She could see it, taste it.

And it pleased her.

Christ.

“The past was what fueled her present” is actually a pretty decent line, though I would suggest changing “was what” to “that” to make it smoother and fit with the line before it.

I know Nor is supposed to be super evil and all that, but does she genuinely think that children have personally done something to hurt her planet? The war was fifteen years ago. Depending on how we define “children,” most were probably born after it already ended.

Chapter 12

Andi is sulking around while the Marauder is being prepared for their mission.

Breck asks how Andi knows the general won’t betray them once they’ve delivered Valen, and Andi says that he made the Arcardian Vow, which is significant because:

The Arcardian Vow was as binding as two souls becoming one.

What does that ... mean?

No? All right. Who cares, I guess.

Andi angsts some more about how even if she wanted to return to Arcardius, it would never be the same and bla bla bla.

Traveling to Olen had become a fool’s journey ever since The Cataclysm ended. There was still the peace treaty in place, preventing the massive Olen System, with its capital planet of Xen Ptera, from attacking the other Unified Systems of Mirabel. But those living in the Olen System weren’t exactly friendly with the Unified Systems.

You’re telling me ... that this system, whose capital planet is dead and whose people are starving and radioactive, is an active threat?

I would’ve understood it if they had superweapons they could threaten people with and it was a North Korea type situation, but they’ve been specified to have nothing, and even if they do have secret weapons, the other systems aren’t aware of them, so logically, they should’ve just forgotten about them all and left them to rot.

Also, who cares if they’re not friendly with the Unified Systems? You’re pirates, specifically chosen because you’re not associated with the Unified Systems. On top of that, presumably you’ll be trying to sneak in anyway, so what’s the fucking dealio?

Gilly expresses skepticism about their odds and Andi’s response is:

“We can’t think of it like that. If we do, we’ll end up overthinking every move we make. It’s just another job. A grab and go.”

Yes, Andi. Overthinking. That’s definitely y’all’s biggest problem right now.

Gilly and Breck fuck off to check the new weapons.

Lira stayed remained behind, watching Andi with those all-seeing Adhiran eyes. They’d been together the longest, shared countless stories over bottles of Cosmic Cram until their eyes became as glassy as the stars.

What does that even mean?

And can we stop reminding the audience of how DIFFERENT and ALIEN Lira is?

She’s Adhiran. We got it the first time you mentioned it. Trust me.

Lira says that she can tell Andi isn’t feeling great, and it’s “clear as varillium.”

I get it, Shinsay. You invented some indestructible glass for your cool space book. Can you stop mentioning it every five fucking seconds now?

“I’m just in shock. Seeing Dex again after I thought he was gone for good...I stuck a knife through him, Lira. And now he’s come back to haunt me.”

If you stuck a knife through him, it kind of implies you were 100% done with the guy. You know, considering you tried to KILL HIM. I get being surprised that he survived (except I don’t, you didn’t even stay to make sure he was dead so of course there was a chance he’d survive you absolute moron), but this comes off as Andi not being over her ex, which is exactly what it is and it makes no goddamn sense.

Look at this ruthless murderer losing her cool because her cute ex-boyfriend is back and she still has fee-fees for him even though he’s a bad, bad boy!

Update: This has been changed to Andi just telling Lira that she needs time alone.

For once, she wasn’t positive what the next step would be, besides rescuing the general’s son. Beyond that was an expanse of complete uncertainty.

A death sentence pardoned. An entire planet waiting for her . But after all that had transpired and with the wounds she still held inside...could she ever really return?

So Andi doesn’t know what the next step would be, but is already planning her return to Arcardius? I don’t think rescuing the general’s son will be as easy as you make it sound, pumpkin.

I love how it says “for once,” as if Andi usually knows what to do at all times, right after we watched them do nothing but get defeated and captured for the first ten chapters.

Andi angsts and has some more flashbacks to when she was younger and wishes she’d just become a soldier like her father instead of a fancy Spectre:

Her earliest memories of their time together were of training days, bruised fists and bloodied knuckles.

I feel like bruised firsts and bloodied knuckles are essentially the same thing, but alright.

We find out that Andi had a TEMPER in school, because what’s a badass female character without anger issues (because emotions are the only acceptable motivations for a female character’s violence, you see), and that her parents put her in dance classes as a way to combat that (wut), and that’s how she met and befriended Kalee, and also why she was chosen to be her Spectre.

Alfie approaches Andi for no reason.

The android AI’s body was see-through, like the Marauder’s walls, and Andi could see all the gears and wires inside its body from head to toe, clicking and whirring silently, like an old-era clock.

1) How can it click silently? A click is a specific type of sound. Who edited this?

2) “Old-era?” That’s awfully specific. Too much worldbuilding! Tone it down!

3) What’s the point of making an android that doesn’t look human?

Ah, so now they’ve removed the android thing, and it’s just an “AI” this time.

Anyway, apparently AIs were briefly banned because that’s what Xen Pterra used in their army, but now they’re back. Woo!

“Oh, I see you’ve met Alfie,” [Dex] said, looking between the two of them.

“Alfie?” Andi asked, confused by the name.

“It stands for Artificial Lifeform and I added the “ie” to make it less boring.”

“It stands for Artificial Lifeform Intelligence Emissary ,” the AI said, staring at Andi with those strange eyes. “But you may call me Alfie.”

And more stupid? They fixed it.

And thanks for clarifying she was confused by the name, the context clues were just too subtle to pick up on!

[...] [Andi] turned around and sat back into her chair.

Dex crouched down next to her, lips level with her ear. “You know, you were a lot more fun three years ago.”

Is her chair embedded in the floor if he has to crouch to get their heads at the same level? Great visual.

Update, I can’t find the chair bit, but Andi is still sitting down and Dex is still crouching, so uh. Ya didn’t fix this one, Shinsay.

Andi gets all flustered when Dex is near her, and remembers the scar she gave him when she stole his ship.

Tenebran Guardians were known for taking pride in their battle marks, but the scar she gave him—whether it still existed or not—was not one he should be proud of.

“Whether it still existed or not?” Meaning you people do have technology that repairs skin?

WHY IS ANDI STILL WEARING HER STUPID CUFFS THEN?!

What she also noticed was how her heart no longer fluttered like it used to when he looked at her. Her heart, the traitorous thing, fluttered for a moment like it used to when he looked at her. She used to love his eyes, their unspoken words. The feel of his skin against hers during their passionate nights,. but

Now those thoughts made her cringe.

Oh sure. Of course. That’s why you think about how handsome he is and about all those passionate nights you had before. And why you’re worried that he’s back. Because you’re toooooohhhtahhhllly over him!! Makes sense.

You’re fooling nobody, Shinsay.

Update: Well, at least they’re a bit more honest this time.

Dex says how it’s good to be back on his ship, to which Alfie responds that his records say that the ship belongs to Androma.

Which ... makes no sense. Alfie is the general’s assistant, meaning his records are most likely official documents. Andi stole the ship. Dex never transferred ownership of the Marauder to her. It should still belong to him.

Anyway, this doesn’t matter because it’s only there so Andi can have the last laugh, to which Dex doesn’t even react, so I don’t even know why this was changed.

Dex.

Even his name was poison in her mind.

Don’t you mean a blade of poison in her heart?

In a different time At another time in her life, Andi would’ve felt guilty for her coldness toward him. But that time was long gone.

“Felt guilty?!?!?!?” YOU TRIED TO KILL HIM!!!

ONCE YOU REACH THAT POINT, YOU’RE KINDA PAST GUILT AND REGRET, NO?!

Remember, she’s supposed to be hating him now, so the fact that she’s even considering guilt make no goddamn sense. She didn’t feel bad about killing him, she’s feeling bad that he’s back and she still wants to ride that space dick.

Or is she?

GOD I CAN’T EVEN TELL WHAT THE CHARACTERS ARE FEELING OR WHY.

Now she was made of ice, too afraid full of anger to get close to him again, for fear that he’d melt her all over again from the inside out.

SEE?!

I FUCKING TOLD YOU SHE’S STILL NOT OVER HIM!!

Update: They fixed this too. Why didn’t you hire me as your editor if you’re gonna use my comments to make your book better, Shinsay?

He’d betrayed her, and so she’d betrayed him.

One shredded heart for another.

1) Edgy.

2) Can you ... just ... pick one. Do you hate him and feel no guilt or are you feeling sad and still want him?

And I know what you’ll say: “Oh but Eff, she could be feeling confused and conflicted!”

THIS ISN’T CONFUSED AND CONFLICTED. SHE COULD BE FEELING CONFUSED AND CONFLICTED AND I WOULD’VE THOUGHT IT MADE SENSE BECAUSE IT WOULD MAKE SENSE. RIGHT NOW, SHE’S HAMMERING ON ABOUT HOW OVER HIM SHE IS AND HOW SHE FEELS NO GUILT IN ONE SENTENCE, AND IN THE NEXT, SHE’S LUSTING OVER HIM AND TELLING US HOW SHE’S AFRAID TO FALL IN LOVE WITH HIM AGAIN.

AND WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT BOTH OF THESE FEELINGS ARE ONE AND THE SAME AND SOMEHOW MAKE SENSE TOGETHER.

I’m ... I’m tired.

Hearts were pathetic things, too easily broken. The Bloody Baroness couldn’t afford such a weakness. Especially not now that Dex was back at her side.

Edgy.

She’s still afraid she’ll fall in love again.

There would be another tally added soon, accompanying the others on her blades.

It had Dex’s name written all over it.

And now she wants to kill him again.

#eff reads: zenith #book rants

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benzinaocenere · 8 years

Quote

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?" If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ... A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home - you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job - and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register. Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people. Or if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20 stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ... If I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is actually I who am in his way. Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line - maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible - it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship. Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing. I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

David Foster Wallace to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio

#david faster wallace #speech

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placetobenation · 6 years

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As many of you are aware, WWE Network is pretty packed with all sorts of content. And as you may also know, we here at Place to Be Nation love long term, in depth projects. So, as part of this initiative, members of the PTBN Staff are choosing programs at random and after watching each program, they will share their thoughts, notes and recommendations with our readers. So, settle in and enjoy this epic ride through wrestling history!

The British Bulldogs – Coliseum Home Video 1986

Run Time: 87 Minutes

Why Calum Why???: Given that the ballots for GWWE Tag Team are now open, and NXT UK has now hit the WWE Network, I thought it would be fitting to go back and look back at two of the pioneers of both offerings.

Best Segment

You want me to do what?

Aaron George: Mean Gene Okerlund and his stubby fingers introducing this shit show. He excites us by declaring this is the first Coliseum Home Video to profile a tag team before promising us SINGLES matches featuring top opponents like JIM THE ANVIL NEIDHART! He then teases us with the climax of the Bulldogs winning the tag titles. It feels like it’s going to be an “awesome” tape, and this bald fuck does an adequate job hyping it up.

Brian Bayless: Seeing the Bulldogs win the titles at WrestleMania was the best moment in a category without too many candidates.

Jacob Williams: There weren’t really many non-match segments on this tape. I’ll say the classic post-match celebration when the Dogs win the titles. That’s the Bulldogs, not the Moondogs.

Calum McDougall: Eh… it has to be the workout segment by default. Out of all of the segments on this tape, this one was definitely the best.

Dave Hall: The Bulldogs’ workout. This was the only segment on the program. It was interesting to hear a little about how the workout helped each man develop their body, and how it benefited them in the ring, Sadly, it was also a little plodding.

Best Match

MASHUP!

Aaron George: I guess the six man tag. I mean I never thought I’d vote for a match featuring Lou Albano AND Luscious Johnny V, but here we are. It’s about 85 percent stomping, but it’s at least not Anvil and Davey Irish whipping each other for ten minutes. It’s the only match that wasn’t clipped to pieces and the crowd was hot. It wasn’t good.

Brian Bayless: Bret Hart vs. Dynamite Kid was the best match on this tape. It took place at the Capital Centre on Landover, MD on 9/14/85 and was shown on the 10/8/85 edition of Prime Time Wrestling if you care to seek it out elsewhere. Dynamite’s snap suplex was like no other and he always had strong chemistry with Bret in the ring. I also thought the match against Big John Studd & King Kong Bundy was fun for a TV match.

Jacob Williams: Ironically, the best match on a tape centered on an amazing tag team was a singles match between Bret Hart and Dynamite Kid. There was a crispness to the moves and selling that you don’t always see in mid 80s WWF. I liked how Dynamite used Bret’s offense against him, and at one point hits Bret with a brutal knee drop to the face. It wasn’t an all timer, but a fine match, especially given the context.

Calum McDougall: By far the best match is Dynamite Kid vs Bret Hart. I thought that this was fantastic, it was incredibly smooth apart from one or two missteps, including a really bad looking one where Kid tripped over Bret and took at dive into the ropes head first! Those aside, you could see these two had clashed a ton before, and they certainly delivered here.

Dave Hall: Dynamite Kid vs Bret Hart. These two got to bring a little of their Stampede history to the WWF. The early stages had some good counter wrestling from both men, and the finishing sequence was quite good, leading to a roll up from Dynamite for the win. This match demonstrated why they were the better technicians on their teams, and in the company, but sadly they were not given the time to make it a classic. The post-match beatdown by Bret was good as well.

Most Cringeworthy Moment

Gene, you are NOT the father.

Aaron George: Gene Okerlund ogling the hipless gym rat. I don’t know what it was; the clothes, the spandex, the 80s hair? Perhaps the formless body as she pushed her way through an interview to pick up a dumbbell? Who knows, but Gene was on her like a drunken Bruce Hart on a discarded Bret Hart singlet.

Brian Bayless: Gene Okerlund tried but the segment at the gym almost put me to sleep. The Bulldogs were definitely a team that got over in the ring rather than on the microphone. Dynamite speaking was never a good thing.

Jacob Williams: The proprietor of the gym was so robotic and unnatural in her interview with Gene. She would just randomly change her tone from word to word and pause in strange places. For any Simpsons fans, it was very reminiscent of Smithers’s turning on his computer.

Calum McDougall: I don’t know if this technically counts as cringeworthy however the steady decline in announcing made me wince. You start out the cream of the crop with Jesse and Gorilla, then move on to Gorilla and Lord Alfred Hayes who were inoffensive. But it falls off a cliff to the point where you’re left with Vince McMahon, Ernie Ladd and Bruno Sammartino and I was ready to watch it on mute. The only word to describe this is urgh!

Dave Hall: The workout segment ends with Mean Gene “lusting” over a woman in the gym and walking off. It made him look like a dirty old man, and leaves Davey Boy with the microphone in hand to end the segment. It looked out of place, and totally scripted, and really felt like it was designed to give Vince McMahon a laugh more than the viewer at home watching.

Funniest Line/Moment

CONCENTRATE!!!

Aaron George: I’m still laughing at Al Wilson dressed as a greaser.

Brian Bayless: I guess by default it was Okerlund trying to hit on a woman at the gym then getting yelled at by Davey for not concentrating.

Jacob Williams: Gene completely drops his interview to perv out on a random woman at the gym, only for Davey to chastise him. “YOU SEE GENE! YOU CAN’T LOSE CONCENTRATION!” I think Gene has other priorities, Davey.

Calum McDougall: My favorite moment is Davey Boy explaining the Bulldogs training regime without uttering the word “steroid” once! What a consummate professional that man is!

Dave Hall: With the program basically devoted to in-ring action and no interviews, the funniest line has to lie in the hands of the commentators, but most of the commentary was focused on the action. Two lines in commentary stood out enough to make me chuckle. In the Dynamite Kid vs. Bret Hart match, Gorilla said (and Lord Al repeated) “…Blowing it all to pieces by the Dynamite Kid”. Then in the six-man tag match, Jesse hit a pearl of a line when he said “A lot of guts from Albano… literally.”

Highlights

What On Earth Is This???

Aaron George: Jesse and Gorilla arguing about the tenor of Nikolai Volkoff’s voice. And Minute 87, when I could finally shut this off and get back to my life.

Brian Bayless: The chemistry the Bulldogs had in the ring made them a great team and we saw their combination of speed, strength, and technical ability. Plus, matches involving Bret Hart and Greg Valentine were entertaining.

Jacob Williams:This might sound shocking, but the Bulldogs really carried this. It was fun to watch both Davey and Dynamite match after match and see how they really brought a unique style to the WWF. The six-man tag, including the manager shenanigans, was fun. Bret and Dynamite bringing the Stampede show to WWF was cool to see, and you could see a glimpse of what singles heel Bret could be. Valentine’s multiple appearances were welcome, as he gelled well with the Bulldogs.

Calum McDougall: The Hart Foundation series of matches were great, then it falls off a bigger cliff than the announcing did! This is the only thing I can think of that I liked on this tape.

Dave Hall: A lot of solid in-ring action throughout the program. Seeing the Bulldogs wrestling Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart in singles actions that early in their careers was really good. The Davey Boy Smith vs. Greg Valentine was solid and well-worked. The match against Studd and Bundy was short, but also highlighted that the Bulldogs were thinkers who could adapt in the ring. I also liked that just about every match had a different finish, showing that the Bulldogs can pull wins out of anywhere. The finish to the Moondogs match was especially spectacular.

Lowlights

MASHUP!

Aaron George: Where to begin… not one match held my attention. Not one. They all bored me to tears, including the Bret Hart/Dynamite Kid encounter that should have been great. Everything else was either a dreary mess or clipped to shit. It’s ALL matches. They told us at the start that we’d see the Bulldogs reach the mountaintop at WrestleMania II, and we did see it, two minutes of it. It’s legit a decent match, it would have been the ONLY decent match on the whole tape. WHY ARE THERE SO MANY SINGLES MATCHES ON THE TAPE DEDICATED TO A TAG TEAM??? Why does Davey Boy Smith invent the sharpshooter in a match with Greg Valentine? I thought Bret said Conan the Barbarian taught him that??? Is it possible that Bret is a fucking liar? Why does Dynamite win all the singles matches and Davey always loses? Dynamite fixes his tights after every single in-ring movement. Is that why Davey fixed his jeans every five seconds during his spectacular 1999 run? Also the Kid starts every fucking sentence with “I’ll tell you something Mean Gene,” before speaking till he ran out of air. Moondog Spot’s selling can only be described as preposterous. Jesse upsets me by outright lying that he’s never seen anyone get out of the camel clutch. IT’S IN THE DAMN INTRO MIXED IN WITH THE OUTLANDISH CLAIM THAT COLISEUM HOME VIDEO TRACES IT’S LINEAGE BACK 5,000 FUCKING YEARS. I’ll say one thing: they have a lot of balls comparing themselves to Roman gladiators while Chief Jay Strongbow is dancing around the screen. This whole thing was awful. Thanks Calum!

Brian Bayless: The Bulldogs vs. Dream Team Tag Title match from WrestleMania 2 was clipped to show only a few minutes of the match, which is lame because it would have been the best match on the tape. The gym segment lasted longer and that was a bore. The Davey vs. Anvil and the match against the Moondogs were not particularly exciting. Plus, why feature a match where Davey loses clean like he did against Greg Valentine?

Jacob Williams: Sheik and Volkoff controlling most of their match wasn’t particularly engaging. The camera missing the finish of Bret/Dynamite was unfortunate. Neidhart in singles competition can almost automatically be stamped in as a lowlight. The Bulldogs having to make the Moondogs look threatening was weird.

Calum McDougall: Right, here we go!! Why do you have Mean Gene open the video but then let Gorilla and Johnny Valiant do the hosting of the tape?! What is the point of putting out a best of tape and have two of the matches ends in loss for the guys you’re highlighting?!?! And the clipping of some of the matches was baffling. I get that you want to sell the Mania 2 tape and the Bulldogs/Dream Team match was the best match on that show, but either put the full match in, or nothing at all!

Dave Hall: Very few. Sadly the first match between the Bulldogs and Shiek/Volkoff was a little clunky, and there were multiple clear missed spots by both Shiek and Volkoff. Then the “title defense” against the Moondogs was slow and drawn out. The Bulldogs should have been made to look more dominant against a team that was essentially now a preliminary team. I also found it annoying that the one match that had the potential to be the best of the program, the title win at WrestleMania 2 against the Dream Team, was cropped to the last two minutes.

Wild Card BABY!!!

Wrestling!

2018 Bigot Award For Misgendering: Lord Alfred calling Dynamite the “Dynamite MAN.” Bigot. – AG

Best Tidbit: The Dynamite Kid refused to drop the Tag Team Titles to Iron Sheik & Nikolai Volkoff and would only do so for the Hart Foundation.

Best Heat: I’d never seen trash thrown into the ring BEFORE a match even starts! Nikolai Volkoff was a heat magnet with the Soviet national anthem in this one – there was so much garbage in the ring that they didn’t even bother to clear it, they just wrestled in among it. – CM

We’re Not On Steroids … Seriously: During the workout, Davey Boy mentioned on 3-4 separate occasions how they train two hours a day, seven days a week. It really felt like they were trying to justify their growing physiques and counter any claims that they may be using synthetic substances to assist their muscle growth. Davey Boy got noticeably bigger during the matches from the start of the program to the end. But this would be understandable if they “Train two hours per day, seven days a week”. – DH

Donald Trump Memorial Hair Award: The ref in the Bret/Dynamite match. Same fucking hair. – AG

Random Fact I Learned: Apparently, Clint Eastwood was mayor of a California town. – JW

Whats The Point?: Captain Lou Albano! I know that the Bulldogs weren’t amazing on the stick but why anyone thought the Captain Lou would be a good fit is beyond me! Why would anyone want Albano to be their manager at this time unless they needed rubber bands at short notice? – CM

How To Win Wrestling Matches: “We will work out and act like men.” – Dynamite Kid sometime in 1986. – AG

Final Thoughts

Why tarnish my good name?

Aaron George: This tape made me like the British Bulldogs less. I’d rather watch outright garbage than this boring mess. RATING: 0/10

Brian Bayless: I was let down by the tape but when it was released there was not that many great opponents for the Bulldogs as the tag team division was not at its strongest. If it was released a year later there would have been more options against better teams. I thought it sucked that their match at WrestleMania 2 was reduced to clip form but for the time it did showcase the Bulldogs uniqueness as a tag team. However, this does not hold up well today. RATING: 4.5/10

Jacob Williams: This tape was a bit of a disappointment, through no fault of the featured team. It was more average than horrible, but I had really high expectations because the Bulldogs are such a great team. Unfortunately, they were dragged down by some of their competition in this collection. It was a little weird having all the best matches be something other than straight tag matches. I can’t help but think they must have had a few better tag matches taped that could have made this a classic. RATING: 6/10

Calum McDougall: I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to the guys for putting them through this. I did not like this. I thought this was going to be a great compliment to the GWWE Tag Team project and NXT UK as I’d said, and it was looking promising, but went downhill really quickly. There was a genuinely great match in Kid vs. Bret, but then it seemed like the promising matches were cut to shreds in the editing and the bad matches were there in all their glory. Again, who puts two losses on a best of tape?! RATING: 3/10

Dave Hall: This program felt right down the middle. Nothing really stood out as great, and nothing stood out as really bad. Everything really felt like it was just middle of the road. It was good that the Bulldogs were showcased against multiple opponents, and had a series of different finishes, but no one match really reached any heights. RATING: 5/10

And we are out! Where will the Network Adventure travel to? Which Coliseum will be conquered next? Which of these assholes will quit the project in an indignant rage??? Find out in TWO WEEKS!

#IFTTT #Place to Be Nation

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7r0773r · 6 years

Text

Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man by Jean Améry, translated by Adrian Nathan West

. . . I did what had to be done, and there was much that had to be done. Had the law allowed it, had the people deemed it proper, I would have rounded up patients in front of the church and the mairie, yelling like a toothbreaker at the market in the old days. It didn’t occur, the bourgeois is a man of moderation. (p. 43)

***

That the country doctor failed to notice his wife’s first playful flirtations with Léon, that he eagerly advised her to go out riding with the notorious ladykiller Rodolphe Boulanger, that he, a bourgeois, didn’t worry more over the bills piling up, that nothing awakened suspicion in his heart—the reader can hardly accept all that. The masterpiece conceals from us what was real and determinate in the imagined life of poor Charles Bovary. How, then, shall we find some trace of what is hidden? (p. 54)

***

When we observe him, this burdened, difficult man, suffering from himself and the world, working away at his Bovary, which will come to be seen as the insuperable summit of his poetic journey, a plain expression comes unexpectedly to our lips: he “drafts it one page at a time.” But this leads us astray, and must be corrected forthwith. This man is a consummate writer, in line with that dictum of Thomas Mann’s: one for whom writing is especially hard. Each sentence is sounded out for its melody, read histrionically aloud in a voice that booms by fits and turns; Flaubert remains the actor he had been as a boy in the billiards room. Does the cadence rise and fall as it should? One must rehearse it, over and over. Do the adjectives fit? There is always only one, he says; only one that works, and it must be found, and a whole night can pass over a single page, corrected to the point of illegibility. Are the metaphors, in their surrealistic singularity of a kind none has written after him, each and every one right and, once again, irreplaceable? One speaks of “inspiration.” But there is nothing here that in-spires—instead, the search takes place under enormous exertion.—And yet it is afflatus, a breathing-into, to take the word literally, for the most assiduous research is useless where there is not a hard-to-define something guiding it along. And so the work proceeds, slowly. Almost five years for some 350 pages. Balzac would have dispatched a comparable labor in a matter of months. (p. 59)

***

This is plain to see, and has long been proverbial: he detests the bourgeoisie in all its varieties, haute, petty, pettiest. The things the bourgeois prattles on about are platitudes—of Charles Bovary, it is expressly stated that his conversation is flat as a paving stone—what he lives through is incurably banal, even when it is tragic. His thoughts are clichés of language, only good enough for assembling in that glossary of commonplaces, the Dictionnaire des idées reçues, which Flaubert composes to scoff at his own class’s stupidity. (p. 60)

***

Flaubert’s irony is hard, maybe even wicked, in any case profoundly unfair. Let us take a look at one of the most important figures from Madame Bovary, the apothecary Homais, and then proceed from his example. In him, bourgeois enlightenment, the heritage of our civilization, the indispensable fundament of every socialist utopia, finds itself cast into monstrous ridicule. Homais is, if we take up his discourses and analyze them word for word, a clever man, who truly does tower intellectually over his fellow citizens in Yonville-l’Abbaye. All that he says has rhyme and reason. There is no doubt he is the man of progress in his village, and that he strides before us as a vain bounder and fawner is, fundamentally, beside the point. In his artist’s arrogance, his estrangement from reality, Gustave Flaubert has not seen, has not wanted to see, that Homaises of all sort were the bearers of bourgeois progress, the forerunners of those who sided with the Radical Party during the Third Republic, the historical progenitors of those who rightly stood with Zola and Clemenceau on the side of Captain Dreyfus. The unrestrained wickedness of Flaubert’s irony becomes clear to us in that diabolic way he has of making the apothecary utter illuminating and irrefutable truths so that in them, through them, the entirety of the bourgeois enlightenment, including the ethics it represents and the scientific view of the world, are reduced to grotesque prattle. What is happening here? Undoubtedly this: the reality of Gustave Flaubert, of this specific I, this “bundle of perceptions,” stands opposed to historical reality. The man marked by destiny is settling accounts: with himself, for he was an atheist like Homais; with his father, a freethinker so notorious that, during the Restoration under Charles X, the secret police maintained a dossier on him; with friends who, as children of their time, were Voltaireans of some sort, one and all. (pp. 62-63)

***

Shut off from the world, irascible and filled with hatred (the probably consequence of a miserable state of self-hatred), Flaubert, the bourgeois, has little access to the authentic bourgeois subject, who stands before him in the image of poor Charles, the dutiful citizen and simple doctor—not a man of renown like Flaubert père, but a helper and a good Samaritan all the same, a caring family father, a man who pays his debts down to the last sou. In essence, he awaits nothing more than that the author do him justice, after all the injustice that has befallen him. Charles, too, is a bearer of values, bourgeois and social ones, no less deserving of mention than the proletarian and communal values of the old maid, which flicker tenderly as the stage lights fall on them in passing. But no, there is nothing! Charles Bovary, country doctor, is the uncouth weakling his wife takes him for; and the morsel of compassion the author patronizingly offers him now and then is a pittance. (p. 66)

***

Mais oui, Madame Bovary, c’est bien lui, Gustave Flaubert. Her excesses are his, her passionate mysticism an analogue to his mystical subservience to the author’s craft. Her pathos, which the author’s irony barely alludes to, is the pathetic irreality of the visionary from the hermitage in Croisset. He said as much, moreover, if not with direct reference to his own self, which he never wished to turn out into the world. In a letter to Louise Colet, he states he is in the midst of composing something no one has yet ventured: he will mock the palaver of the two central lovers, Emma and her second suitor Léon. But just afterward, illuminating both the conception of the work as a whole and his own emotional constitution, which is nothing less than ironic in regards to Emma: “Irony takes nothing away from pathos; to the contrary, it augments it!” (pp. 67-68)

***

Despite the excessive, even overbearing insistence of decades of Bovary scholarship, from which it takes great effort to break free, Emma is not the victim of her bad-to-mediocre readings, or the occasionally slightly better ones (Walter Scott, for example). The destiny she carries out is one that her beautiful body, burning with sensuality, prescribed for her. Why not come out and say it: She chooses the destiny her love and her beauty demand? The “other” that confronts her is money, or if I may, the law of capitalism, exemplified, like a dreadful statue, in the figure of Lheureux. But this law, no less real than the law of her flesh, is one she does not choose, but simply suffers under, like her creator Flaubert.

His whole life long, Flaubert never had to worry over money, it was simply there, by his father’s grace, according to the conditions of his will. In the same way, Emma needn’t pay attention to grubby trifles, Charles will bring home ducats for her to transform into things to serve her beauty and her carnal pleasures. Luxe et luxure, silk, lace, bijoux, cushions. Or, in the author’s life: voracity and bibulousness, suits of the finest fabric, cut by the best tailors; space, freedom of movement, and calm, which too must be paid for with the good money earned by bourgeois sweat. For Emma Bovary, everything ends in repossession and bourgeois ignominy; for poverty is disgrace, and only because it is so does an uplifting proverb exist to affirm the contrary. Emma dies of shame prepared for her by the law as embodied in the brute, Lheureux. After his own unfaithful beloved, Mme. Commanville, his sister’s child, has brought him to ruin, Gustave Flaubert will weather the economic storm, but with shame and carping, a “ruined man” who needed only to lose his estate in order to become an utter and complete failure, such as he had taken himself to be from the first. Not a “family idiot.” Something worse. The poor offspring of a well-to-do and thus highly regarded house. One reduced to writing petitions so the bankruptcy of his shifty nephew-by-marriage will not make life impossible for him. (pp. 71-72)

***

So Gustave Flaubert was playing as he composed Madame Bovary, groaning under the crushing weight of words; and the game plays out further in these pages, albeit according to a different set of rules. Charles Bovary, the poor man from whom everything was stripped away, love, his beloved, his possessions, and even his memory—for, as he is forced to realize, he has lived in error—was treated by Gustave Flaubert as a quantité négligeable. He comes to see himself as victim and bearer of fatalité, as a man of the abyss. This is reality as a game, its imaginary precepts (though sadly, not the weight of its words) as valid as any other. No moderation, no criteria of truth, no palpable notion of reality is close at hand. Just a postulate: The wife of a country doctor gets caught up in two love affairs, brings her husband to ruin, kills herself. That is all. (p. 101)

***

Why did Charles Bovary not follow the trajectory his era laid before him? Why did he take that dubious leap over the line of demarcation, choosing for his wife Emma Rouault, who was marked for destiny by her beauty? For his creator, it was a foregone conclusion. Charles Bovary remains the person presented to us on the novel’s very first page: a tubby mediocrity. That he was moreover risible—ridiculus erat!—was an additional bit of malice from that incorrigible aesthete, who claimed only to find escape from himself in raging verbal debauchery, and in whose bulging eyes the world of the bourgeoisie—from which, in reality, he never broke free—was a flat caricature; thus the petits bourgeois laugh at themselves when they make their vapid jokes about cuckolds in the Café du Commerce. They do not like themselves because they do not wish to be themselves—and then they look away when the simple hearts turn out not to be so simple, and long in turn after a few crumbs from the bourgeoisie’s wealth! Charles, as his creator makes clear, was not a bad country doctor, only a mediocre one. The kind that might have met with great success, for example, by performing a bold operation on a clubfoot. But it was not to be, the omnipotent master willed it otherwise. (pp. 103-04)

***

The poor devil, who even on the first day of school made the sons of the better families erupt in laughter because, stricken with fear and embarrassment, he pronounced his name Charbovaricharbovaricharbovari, was not allowed to thrive. Because that is the way the story was conceived? Naturally. And yet the fact that it was conceived in this way is unnatural to the highest degree. The unsavory pleasure taken by the author in this bourgeois tragedy from an era in which, indeed, the bourgeoisie scarcely produced any comedies, devoting themselves rather to the codification in history of their constant upward ascension, reflects Flaubert’s profound and sinister predilection for misfortune, which was appealing—so long as he didn’t fall victim to it. (p. 105)

***

No fool is only a fool, petrified as such and beyond redemption in his foolishness. Even supposing that Charles Bovary were shackled to his benevolent stupidity, failing to search for the way out that was due to him by his rights as a citizen, still, the duty he carried out every day by the sweat of his brow should have, ought to have, brought him greater respect. The wealth and merit of the bourgeoisie did not represent an irresolvable contradiction, and the latter was not always simply a veneer to cover up the absence of the former. Not to recognize the universality of the values of the bourgeois form of life, even where the particular interests of the bourgeoisie seem to exceed themselves, is an error that may be overlooked in the case of Marxist-dialectical speculations, which in the Hegelian triads of their hurried steps toward the vanishing point of complete human freedom are bound to skip awkwardly over much that lies in their way, but not for the son of a bourgeois who rigs his exquisite game from a position of wealth and favor. Such labors of reverie are only truly good and beautiful when their reality is not merely lexical, but also societal and moral; an acknowledgement of essences and their overarching reality. (pp. 107-08)

***

Charles Bovary inhabited a world. But what he apprehended of it was an insubstantial excerpt. He lived a life. But this life was concealed from him; adages, stamped-out forms of being, pre-predetermined modalities of feeling, reifications of all sorts barred Gustave Flaubert’s country doctor from achieving self-discovery, and not even the omniscient narrator permits us some insight into the conditions of that system of social coordinates under which a bourgeois living under his bourgeois king may become knowable.

. . . . Flaubert’s Charles Bovary was a dimwit; such a person doesn’t reason, he takes things as they come, chimneys and change and corruption, same as wind and bad weather and the irritable impatience of his bride, when she said over and over amid his awkward approaches at tenderness and his prattling: Laisse-moi! But a realist storyteller would have had to fill in the empty gaps. He would have been obliged to speak himself where his creation’s words failed him. (pp. 114-15)

***

When Emma was struck with meningitis—her broken heart after her betrayal by Rodolphe, with whom she wanted to run away, could lead, according to prevailing notions of the time, to brain fever—Charles was at her sickbed, as doctor and companion, and when his barber-surgeon’s knowledge was not enough, he called for Doctors Canivet and Larivière. It surely would have hit him, after the fact, that it was precisely at that point in time when Rodolphe left Yonville and set off on his worldly travels that Emma’s heart and brain forsook their legitimate functions. But no, nothing. He acquiesced to fatalité: his inventor did not accord him the human right of thought, not even when such a thing, transmitted through the medium of feeling, must be conceded to the poorest sap. (p. 121)

***

Je vous accuse, Monsieur Flaubert!

I accuse you, because you made me into an idiot, incapable of uniting passion et vertu, passion and virtue.

I accuse you, because you described my stupidity, or what you considered to be such, as a kind of guilt, no better than that of Lheureux, the usurer.

I accuse you because you refused me my rights as a man and citizen and made me into a spineless slave, as though we still lived in the benighted days when master was master and the serf a serf, and the latter never dared to raise his hand against the former.

I accuse you of violating the pact you sealed with reality, before you set out to write my story: for I was more than I was, like everyone who exists, who daily and hourly transcends himself, in resistance to others and the world, to negate what he has been and become what he will be.

I lodge my accusation because you, in your stupid hermitage, served only your words and their euphony, and would not look at me with the eyes of a compassionate person. (pp. 140-41)

***

In your auctorial omniscience, you did not want to give me my due; the power, established by nature, inscribed in natural law, which elevates the lessons learned from the pathos of carnal passion higher and higher into the immeasurable beyond, out into the space where a new measure is established, even for the bourgeois. The truth is, you knew nothing about me at the beginning, and nothing when you brought me to an end. With the consummate pitilessness of your haut bourgeois compeers, you burned the brand of stupidity into me even back in school; as if, being lowly, one must also be dumb and blind. (pp. 141-42)

#jean améry #book quotes

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