#other scholars have articulated it better this is by no means an original thought but uhh. your son's childhood idol repudiates him publicl

[moonshynecybin]

Ooooohhhhh do tell me how much marcs parents would hate the rosquez suituation

i mean. marc didnt throw away those valentino model bikes.

[sexy-opium-ravioli]

Dating the Lich HC's:

*Hey babes! Ofc dating the Lich is going to entail a lot of angst, so this is a official trigger warning for themes of manipulation, mind control and superiority complex in the context of a romantic relationship. Also he never turns into Sweet P in this universe, he just fucken dies lol. Be warned! Also, as always, explicit NSFW under the cut*

Dynamics:

The Lich has brewed his presence for ten thousand years and he will forever more. He is of a million worlds, and will spread infinitely, like a virus inside a weak body.

This being is both larger than life and less than a singularity, and taking a physical form means nothing in the long run. His existence is not in a form, but in a purpose. A role he must fulfill not to keep the balance of the universe, but to maintain its sporadic nature and eventually be the heat death that puts an end to it.

In this universe, the one you were in, originally you were one that was of modest values. Live your life, do it moderately, and be happy with it.

That is until you ran into an eight foot tall decaying horn man with glowing eyes. He took hold of your mind immediately.

The Lich does not see you as a being, or as a purpose, but rather, he sees you as his. His to play with and ponder until the end of time, until the very end of himself.

He promised you a higher state of consciousness until you both eventually succumbed to his very nature. To be a part of his legion forever, then some, and then never again.

Your heart was his instantly.

Romance:

We all know that this romance will be nowhere near conventional or healthy. In the first few months of it, you don't have a choice until he can sense that you'll follow along willingly. In those first few months, he controls almost every move you make.

You are by his side. Not in battle nor in planning, but you are there to be his anyways. This is how you exist, now.

It could have turned out worse, you supposed. But seeing how he lured people into his green pit of power, seeing how he destroyed, seeing Finn and Jake's hurt faces when they happen upon you? There wasn't much to convince you that it didn't turn out the worst way possible.

Eventually, however, you grow numb to this. For awhile, after the handful of defeats doled out by your two heroes, you two traverse the stars. He mainly focuses on his mission, save for the small moments of food, rest and privacy you need.

You focus on him.

You're smart enough to not try and ask too many questions of him. Prodding destruction's physical embodiment when you don't know their temper isn't a wise move.

Still, though. It doesn't matter. He senses your curiosities, and sometimes he makes himself home in your mind and hears your questions whispered through his ears.

Sometimes he pretends like he didn't hear them. Other times, when he's in a better mood, he'll humor you.

'Where are we going next?' You thought, stars and void blurring past you as you both sail the heavens.

"To the Lambda Cancri system, that is what your kind called it long ago,"

It still shocked you sometimes, how he could so easily break your mind and eat the contents like a yolk. You wondered if he would ever acknowledge your newfound admiration for him.

"Thank you,"

"You are welcome"

Eventually, you two make it to the Lambda Cancri system.

There is no planet to land on. It would be another journey to the next system to hopefully replenish energy, but you wouldn't complain.

"Look. One star, another. A binary star system triggered by gravitational force and interlocked in a dance, forever, until one consumes the other. Look."

"I see," And you were telling the truth. You sense that this was a metaphor for a relationship bigger than those stars, bigger than the Lich and Finn themselves, bigger than Ooo.

He turned to look at you. Slowly, he touched you, and he knelt in the vacuum of space until his forehead touched yours.

"My side, until the end of time,"

NSFW:

There isn't much time the Lich has to satiate those pesky little needs of yours. And even if he did have time, he would not waste magic on creating the proper body parts to help you in those needs anyways.

Eventually though, even though he is knowing of most things, he grows curious of your specific reactions. The noises you could make, if you'd muffle them or if you'd scream.

You're not expecting for him to smuggle you inside an inn the next planet you two rest at.

He rents a room, he takes you up the stairs, and as soon as he shuts the door he makes your clothes vanish at the snap of his fingers.

There is no true heat behind his eyes, none of the wanting for himself. Just a veiled curiosity, something you often feel for him.

You get on the bed and present yourself to him. Again, you're wise enough to wait for his orders. To not test him.

He rewards this behavior with a stroke on the cheek, a comforting gesture that tingles from the raw, dry texture of skeletal fingers.

He slowly moves down. As the last scholar of GOLB, he has had habits that have not passed through him. He studies you.

He puts his tongue on you; not too warm and not too cold, but very articulated to your points of pleasure.

You're quickly overstimulated.

He does not stop during the night. It is all you could have ever asked for out of the Lich.

[whentherewerebicycles]

hello anon!! okay, this is going to be a very long post, so buckle up. standard caveat: since i don’t know the specifics of your topic or discipline or situation, some of this will hopefully be relevant and some of it might not, so just grab what works for you and leave the rest! and if you have more specific questions that this general overview doesn’t touch on, feel free to send those in.

it sounds like you have a few different questions here:

How do I find and articulate my research question?

How do I effectively take notes on my background reading in the early stages, when I’m not sure yet what my argument is going to be?

How do I organize a long research project/paper? How do I conceptualize something that has so many moving parts & happens to be a genre (a thesis) that I’ve never written before?

How do I write something that long? 

also I am not sure if by “diss” you mean a senior thesis, master’s thesis, or a doctoral dissertation, as I know US and non-US universities use different terminology! so I will kinda just respond to this as A Very Lengthy Research Paper.

my response here will focus mostly on that first question (how to find/articulate a research question), with some thoughts at the end about notetaking in the early stages of a big research project. I’m going to lay out a method I just used with my own students to help them articulate questions & generate possible lines of inquiry to follow. I have been calling it the ‘research tier’ activity/system but it’s a pretty basic way of mapping out possible directions for a project. I use some version of this for every big project I undertake - whether it’s academic work, planning a course syllabus, or writing fic.

I want to emphasize, before I start, that the “tier” map you construct is a LIVING document, not a set-in-stone plan that has to be finished before you begin. the goal is to get past the anxiety of the blank page by generating tons and tons of ideas and questions related to your central topic -- so that if you hit a dead end, you can trace your way back and follow a different line of inquiry. when i am working on a research project, i am continually updating this planning document (i’ll say more about that at the end, once you have a sense of what the tiers look like).

Those questions are geared towards my students, who are working more in social science-y disciplines and/or on projects that have clear connections to specific communities. If you are writing a more traditional humanities discipline, here are some other examples:

I’m interested in...

the romance novel as a genre

Virginia Woolf’s writings on nature/the environment

the cultural reception and impact of the TV show Will & Grace

what queer social life looked like in 1920s New York

play and playfulness in the college classroom (my current research project, which I’ll use as an example)

once you have some idea of your focus, you can begin generating questions related to that focus. “Tier 2″ begins to get slightly more specific, though you are still very much in “big picture” mode. here’s some sentence stems I give my students to help them generate tier 2 questions:

my students are doing research projects that are ideally supposed to develop out of their preexisting community involvements or commitments, so i give them this additional advice:

[note: if your thesis topic is in a social science-y discipline (or a humanities discipline that leans closer to the social sciences), you can probably use some of those ideas or prompts. if your thesis topic is more of a purely academic humanities-type topic (for instance, a literary studies thesis about a specific novel), not all of those will apply perfectly, but some will hopefully be useful still!]

here’s an example, again using my playfulness project. I’ll list the question and then below it, in italics, I’ll explain what ‘stirred up’ that question for me.

T2: What are some core preoccupations or big-picture questions I want to explore? What are some things I’ve noticed that I want to understand?

Core Question 1: Why are college classrooms so serious? Why is there so little playfulness in most college teaching? Why so little laughter, movement, fun?

Observing my friend’s kindergarten classes made me realize how much elementary educators rely on bright colors, movement, singing, playing imaginative games together, etc. to engage young learners’ imaginations, minds, and bodies. Why do we value that so much in elementary education, but stop considering it important in college classes? Do learners “age out” of a need for highly interactive, engaging learning? I suspect no... so that’s a hunch I can begin to follow. 

Observing other college courses (and drawing on my own experience as an undergrad and grad student) made me realize how much educators rely on the same standard methods of teaching (lecturing with a discussion section; a version of Socratic seminar discussion that is primarily led by the professor). To me, these methods are antithetical to playfulness and tend to quash people’s ability or desire to playfully experiment, try things out, risk failure, etc. I wonder if the actual methods we use to teach content or to structure our classes are producing ‘serious’ classes, whether or not we personally as instructors want that to happen. That’s another hunch I could follow...

I’m thinking of a possible connection here to my past research on the origins of English literature as a discipline (in 1920s-30s England). One of the things that scholars often emphasize is how hard faculty had to work to transform English into a serious, rigorous, ‘legitimate’ discipline, akin to the hard sciences. That’s something that I think we still see today in the way people anxiously defend the value of a humanities education. I’m curious about whether the need to justify our existence as a discipline/field of study influences our methods of teaching college students. Do we banish playfulness from the classroom because it threatens that image of the humanities as a serious, rigorous discipline? That’s yet another hunch I could follow... 

Core Question 2: I have a hunch that people learn better in playful environments. Is that true -- and if so, why? What is it about playfulness that enhances learning?

I’m a lifelong fangirl, and fandoms are creative environments where people are continually engaged in acts of imaginative play. I’ve observed and have experienced firsthand how these playful environments seem to encourage people to try new things, take creative risks, learn new skills even if they’re afraid they’ll be ‘bad’ at them, and commit huge amounts of time, energy, and passion to long-term creative projects that don’t make any money or ‘earn’ them a grade. I’m curious about how we might adapt the playful, passionate energy of fan spaces to college teaching.

In my own classrooms, I’ve noticed that students get so much more into the activity (and seem to internalize the content more deeply) when I frame it as an imaginative exercise, a roleplaying activity, or a game of some kind. Teaching the same content in a way that encourages playfulness seems to produce deeper engagement (and deeper learning?) than using the traditional methods of ‘serious’ teaching.

Core Question 3: Playfulness and shared laughter/fun seem to build social bonds (again, drawing on my experiences in fandom). Could shared imaginative play help students develop better social skills? Could it help build a sense of community in the classroom and strengthen students’ sense of belonging? This question feels especially urgent to me given the epidemic of self-reported loneliness, anxiety, and depression on college campuses. 

*

You can have lots more than 3 core questions/preoccupations! In fact, the more ideas you can generate at this stage the better. The idea isn’t to hone in on your research question (yet) but to generate as many possible paths you could take, so that you can begin evaluating which interest you most, or which seem like the most fruitful questions to explore/answer. Doing the idea-generating for Tier 2 should already begin to set you up for Tier 3 -- which involves articulating specific sub-questions you’ll need to answer to better understand or answer those core questions/preoccupations.

and then we’ll go ahead and fold in T4, as I tend to move back and forth between T3/T4 as I brainstorm.

I’ll just take one of my Tier 2 questions as an example, but again, you can/should do this for all of yours (or at least the ones that interest you most).

Core question: Playfulness and shared laughter/fun seem to build social bonds (again, drawing on my experiences in fandom). Could shared imaginative play help students develop better social skills? etc etc

T3 subquestions (with T4 “directions for inquiry” folded into the first one, so you can see an example):

-- SubQ1 Does play actually strengthen social bonds? If so, how? Are specific kinds of play better for this than others (ie, collaborative or cooperative play compared to competitive play)? With Tier 4 folded in:

Do a library database search to try to figure out where “play” research typically happens -- is it in psychology research? Neuroscience? Early childhood education?

Then begin searching for different keyword strings that might help me gather up initial sources. Some initial ideas: play + social bonding, play + social skills, play + social development, play + cooperation, play + friendship, play + mental health. (Typically finding a couple useful/relevant articles will help you generate better keywords -- as you can begin to see the kinds of terminology that researchers use to describe your topic.)

I could also maybe interview college students themselves, or design a survey - but that would depend on the type of research I want to do. Do I want to conduct my own original research study, or is my focus more on synthesizing existing research from different fields to construct an argument? 

Could I find faculty or researchers who work on these topics, who might be able to direct me to specific resources or help me understand what kind of work has already been done on this topic? Maybe I can’t find someone who specifically researches playfulness, but an educational researcher whose work focuses on social-emotional learning would probably have a pretty good understanding of what features or pedagogical choices help create positive, affirming learning environments.

-- SQ2: Are college students lonely?

Are they reporting (or do they experience) higher rates of mental illness? What are the numbers on this?

What are some of the prevalent theories or hypotheses about why this is? Could social isolation or difficulty forming friendships be a possible contributing factor?

-- SQ3: Why are social bonds good for us - physically, mentally, emotionally?

-- SQ4: Do social bonds enhance learning? If so, how?

What if I looked to other non-academic learning environments (such as fandoms, team sports or group activities, etc where people are learning new skills in highly social settings) to make a case for playfulness in the college classroom? This isn’t direct 1:1 proof that “more playfulness in college classrooms = happier, more socially well-connected students,” but offering detailed descriptions of how those learning environments are structured might spark ideas for my audience (university instructors and administrators) or persuade them that playfulness has an important social-emotional role to play in college learning.  

*

Typically what ends up happening is I produce a huge, messy document (or fill a giant paper or whiteboard if I’m doing it by hand) that has tons and tons of different directions I might follow. usually, the initial process of creating this giant brainstorming document sparks lots of ideas for where to begin researching. then, as i go off and begin reading articles, those articles typically help flesh out my understanding of the core questions or concepts i’m interested in, or my understanding of what kind of research on this topic already exists vs. where the gaps are that my own work might be able to fill. that initial source-gathering phase of research will also usually spark new questions and sub-questions, which get added to my tier map.

having some kind of messy brainstorming map/plan also helps me read in a more focused way. instead of just opening a random article and skimming it without any clear sense of what i’m looking for, i’m now opening articles and reading them with a purpose -- i’m looking for answers to the specific questions i’ve articulated. so i can skim in a more focused way, looking for specific keywords that seem relevant, and i can also take notes in a more focused way, noting down key ideas that

having a question in mind can also help me figure out more quickly if the article is relevant to my research questions or not. for instance, let’s say i open an article about how playing competitive games in high school PE classes improve students’ self-reported moods. if i didn’t know what i was reading for, i might spend a lot of time on this article, trying to figure out if it was relevant to my research (it has the keywords, right? so maybe it’s relevant?). but if i am reading with a specific question in mind (“Do collaborative learning games help strengthen students’ sense of social connection?”) I can tell pretty quickly that this article is not going to be that useful, since it focuses on competitive physical games (probably not something I’ll integrate into an English class). so I can say with some confidence, “I probably don’t need to read this whole thing, but maybe I’ll check out their lit review section or their bibliography to see if the authors cite any other work on play/playfulness that might be more relevant to my specific questions.” 

i think i’ve kinda started to answer your second question about notetaking here, too, so i will also say that in the early stages of a big research project, i am absolutely NOT taking detailed notes on any of the sources i find. my focus is much more on amassing a large pool of highly relevant sources that i know i’m going to want to go back to and read more deeply as my research questions come into sharper focus. this is because deep reading burns through a lot of time and energy, so i want to make sure i’m saving that deep reading energy for sources that are quite likely to be relevant to my project. 

to figure out if a source is relevant, I often skim the abstract and introduction to figure out the core questions the article or chapter is seeking to answer. then I ask myself three questions:

Are the core questions of this article the same as (or very similar to) my core questions or subquestions? If so, mark this citation as HIGHLY relevant - I’m going to want to come back and read this source carefully, to see if it’s already suggested answers to the questions I’m asking. 

Do the core questions of this article seem to resonate with my core questions, even if we’re not asking them in exactly the same way, or the author of this paper is applying them to a different field? If so, mark this citation as LIKELY relevant - it may not be a perfect 1:1 with my own questions, but that can sometimes spark exciting new ideas or ways of reframing my original questions. If not, toss it.

Do the questions this article is asking suggest new questions or lines of inquiry that I am interested in exploring? Sometimes an article will introduce me to a whole new area of research or a new array of questions I hadn’t even originally thought to explore. If that’s the case, I typically pencil those sub-questions into my brainstorming tier document and mark the source as LIKELY or HIGHLY relevant, depending on how excited i am about it. 

OK I WILL CLOSE HERE FOR NOW as I have to get back to work, but I will say that when I taught my students this method, they were very confused by the initial explanation of it, but then when they went back and used the models to work through the tier brainstorming activity for themselves, they seemed to find it really useful. so if you are scratching your head, try doing a quick TIER 1 - TIER 2 - TIER 3 - TIER 4 map for your own research question to see if doing it yourself helps clarify. also: if you can’t get further than tier 2, it’s usually a sign that you need to do some more reading and freewriting about the questions that you’re curious about, or the gaps you’ve noticed in the scholarship, or the threads you’d like to follow. but you can do some of that background reading in a more focused way now, using your initial big questions to help guide your selection of background readings & give you a sense of purpose as you read.

[takoyakitenchou]

meddling; the good kind

i decided to clear up a few questions abt how Marui Zenji became Bookmaster of WGO in Genesis so ig this is also my commission payment/holiday gift for @polar-stars 

in which a double shot of jager (with some help from the nakiri cousins) pretty much cements marui zenji’s future.

If nothing else, Yoshino Yuki knew turkey. Like, really well.

Much to Zenji’s chagrin, the only takeaway he’d gotten from the American history seminar he and the rest of the PSD gang had enrolled in was that the Pilgrims rode a Dutch fluyt to Virginia back in 1620, but they’d decided to turn Christmas into a Polar Star tradition nevertheless. Wait. Massachusetts? Thanksgiving?

After losing pitifully in a game of hangman to Yukihira Souma of all people — seriously, how was the English lang and composition seminar supposed to prepare him to guess “#tarkeyshet” — Zenji had retreated to the corner of the kitchen to sulk and drink Sakaki Sake while Yukihira paraded around fixing an imaginary pair of glasses and knocked back a shot of Smirnoff Watermelon from Kurokiba’s locker at Legislation.

“Those specs really were for nothing,” Yuki grinned as she pulled him to his feet, took away his solo cup, and handed him a masher. “Come on, Marui. You can vent at the potatoes.”

Zenji aggressively articulated his ire at said potatoes to the point where Yuki had to yank the bowl from him. “The hell, are you trying to make extract? Go kill another turkey if you’re feeling murderous.”

“I’m fine,” sighed the dark-haired chef, massaging the bridge of his nose. “It’s out of my system now. But the sake is not.”

Yuki leaned in and whispered in his ear, “Sacrifice one battle and you’ll win the war.”

“Now since when have you been all philosophical?”

Without missing a beat, Yuki countered, “Since you got all mopey. Now help me bring the turkey out.”

Just then, Nakiri Erina entered the kitchen after knocking on the doorframe. The first seat took one look at Yuki with her mouth basically on Zenji’s ear and dropped her vodka. “I apologize for the intrusion!” 

She was already halfway out the door when Yuki and Zenji bellowed, “This isn’t what you think it is!”

Erina glanced doubtfully at the space (or lack thereof) between the Polar Star originals. “Um… in that case. Yoshino-san, do you mind if I talk to Marui-kun for a moment?”

“Not at all,” Yuki replied, and Erina was too distracted to notice the slightest inflection of irritation in the teal-eyed girl’s voice as she took the turkey out of the kitchen.

“How may I be of assistance, Nakiri-san?” Zenji asked, shifting his glasses and sitting on a kitchen stool. 

“I was talking to my mother earlier today,” Erina said after picking up her cup, a diplomatic air automatically washing over the area. “She was wondering when you would be available for an interview sometime in the next few days over winter break.”

Zenji gave a prominently uncharacteristic “Eh?”

With a thin smile, Erina continued, “My mother would like to have you intern with her so she can judge if I was right when I told her you’re going to be the next WGO bookmaster. I remember you mentioned something about memorizing all of the WGO guides in first year?”

Zenji blinked once. Twice. “You’re kidding me.”

“No, I am not,” the heiress replied. “I never kid.”

He gestured at her. “That was a kid just now.”

“Besides the point, Marui-kun. My mother would like me to give you her phone number so you can text her your schedule availabilities directly.” Then she added, “Also, that’s more convenient for me because I don’t have to be a mediator.”

At this, Zenji’s eyes bugged out to the size of his fucking glasses. The WGO bookmaster — and Nakiri Erina’s mother to boot — wanted to give him her phone number?

Marui Zenji needed medical care hella fast. 

“Um… I’m available whenever she is…?”

Erina shook her head. “I wouldn’t get used to it, but she’s catering to you.”

A sheen of sweat broke out on Zenji’s forehead. He pushed back his bangs and gave a long, pronounced exhale. “In five seconds, Nakiri-san, I will wake up and be so disappointed that I miss classes for the first time in my entire life.”

“You have a perfect attendance record, don’t you?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Perfect. That means you can afford to skip a day without getting detention. Unlike me and Yukihira.” Erina tapped her chin thoughtfully as Zenji made an indignant noise, then as if to deter any individuals that may have been eavesdropping, said in a low voice, “The one stipulation for giving you my mother’s phone number is that you ask Yoshino-san on a date.”

Zenji promptly fell off the stool. “Say what now?”

The eavesdropping individual made her debut just then. “Yes, well, as official relationship counselor of Nakiri Mansion and Polar Star, I am privy to some very public confidential information that you and Yoshino-san are both absolute nuts for each other. So I am prescribing you the following action: get the hell on with it already.” 

The Nakiri cousins looked extremely pleased with themselves.

“I agree with Alice,” Erina said primly. “It’s pretty obvious how much she likes you. And since we’re both extremely well-versed in the subtleties of romance, I do believe we’re more than qualified to make this diagnosis.”

“Oh, and look, Marui-kun. Your ears are turning red. Actions speak louder than words. Your silence speaks volumes.”

Zenji squinted at Erina. “Nakiri-san, am I correct to assume that even if I already had the Bookmaster’s phone number, we’d still be having this conversation?” “Duh,” said Alice. “Now’s your chance, Marui-kun.”

“I think I’d rather lose to Yukihira in another game of hangman,” he said nervously.

At this, Alice gave a sympathetic smile. “You, my friend, do not have the emotional capacity of a brick, unlike Ryo and Yukihira, so you should have nothing to worry about. Come on.” Alice grabbed Zenji’s wrist and yanked him to his feet. “She’s in the dining hall. Have a shot if you need the liquid courage.” She passed him a cup of Jager.

The scholar ran a hand through his bangs in an attempt to organize his hair, despite the fact that he already had the neatest cut in like… a ten-mile radius.

“This is for the Bookmaster,” Zenji said, trying to convince himself more than the cousins.

“No, it’s really not,” Alice replied. “Now get to it. Clock is ticking.”

“Also, every second you spend stalling is technically another second you’re ghosting the Bookmaster.”

Zenji exploded into action. He threw back the Jager and sprinted out of the kitchen at a velocity nobody would’ve dared imagine possible for someone of his figure… or his alc tolerance.

“That worked better than I thought it would,” Erina mused.

“Yukihira’s rubbing off on you,” Alice intoned. “You sounded a lot like him just now.”

Rolling her eyes and fighting the blush, the first seat waved off the statement. “As if I would ever be associated with anything influenced by his plebeian mouth.”

“Like… your tongue?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Alice grinned and tapped her cup against her cousin’s. “Damn right I will, Erina. No need to emphasize the truth.”

The others were all gathered in the dining hall by the time the Nakiri cousins emerged from the kitchen. Zenji was — as expected — sweating as he attempted to approach Yoshino Yuki.

Souma and his strangely acute senses noted exactly what was happening (read as Erina had already filled him in on the details of the plotcounseling session), and he vaguely motioned for Yuki to turn around. 

“Yoshino-san,” Zenji began, and those that knew what was going on were all surprised at how steady his voice was despite the fact that he’d just drank what had to be two normal shots of herbal liquor at an ungodly speed. “If you’re available, I was just wondering if you’d like to go on a date with me?”

Yuki’s eyebrows disappeared behind her bangs. “Wait, what?” The rest of the dorm gave an excited whoop.

“… to the Polar Star garden…?”

“GODDAMMIT, MARUI,” they all squawked. Yuki managed an awkward grin and the will to live utterly disappeared from Marui Zenji.

Erina and Alice exchanged a glance. “Call the jet.”

“Gotcha. Ryo, can you fetch the Eclipse, please?”

“It’s on the roof already,” drawled Alice’s former aide. “Come on, Marui,” Ryo continued. “You’re gonna be like the rest of us by the time the sun comes up.”

“The hell does that mean?” sighed the dejected erudite as Ryo dragged him to the rooftop staircase in the back of the building.

“We’re destroying your perfect attendance record so you don’t have more honors cords than all the Elite Ten members combined at the graduation ceremony. Don’t even think about complaining. This is for our—I mean, your—good.”

The Nakiri cousins herded Yuki out of the dining hall after him, and the rest of the social club followed.

“In you go,” Ryo ordered once they were in front of the jet. He damn near picked up the chef who was probably half his weight and chucked Zenji through the hatch. Yuki was prodded on board after him, bleating timid complaints the entire time.

Ryo briefly entered the jet and they heard him instruct the pilot, “Take them to the Nakiri resort in Kobe. Don’t let them come back until tomorrow evening, am I clear?”

“Yessir,” replied the pilot, and then Ryo jumped out and the engines roared to life.

The inhabitants of Nakiri Mansion looked rather pleased with themselves as the jet departed Totsuki campus.

“You think that did it for their first date?” Ryo asked the heiresses.

“Duh,” Alice said with a flippant wave. “Erina and I are professionals. Now, we should start planning for their wedding. It’s Yoshino Yuki getting married, so teal dresses for the bridesmaids should do it.”

Erina nodded seriously. “I’ll start tasting cakes and contacting florists. The wedding’s going to be in Malibu, right?”

“You read my mind, Erina. Turns out we’re the same person after all.”

“Hell no.”

Ryo watched the cousins dive into all-out wedding prep mode over Christmas dinner and held back a smile—whether this was out of the mellowed amusement that arose from watching them bicker like five-year-olds or out of sympathetic pity for the involuntary fiances was up to debate, but it was a smile nevertheless, and that was all that mattered.

And the rest, of course, was history.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

And what I discovered was that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years. That turns out to have selfish advantages.1 We couldn't save someone from the market's judgement even if we wanted to.2 Or more precisely, when they release more code. This doesn't seem to be working hard enough.3 But Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they get in return.

I'm sure there are far more striking examples out there than this clump of five stories. This was slightly embarrassing at the time. An idea for a startup. Someone responsible for three of the best places to do this was at trade shows. They'd charge a lot because a many of the big national corporations were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%. Facebook made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startup we fund: that it's better, but because the goal is to judge you, not the idea. Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to. You can only do that if you do you'll blow your chances of an academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication. The first names that come to mind always tend to be such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.4 The founders all learned to do every job in the company. We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in particular that their parents didn't think were important.

It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be a big consumer brand, the odds against succeeding are steeper. But that's a weaker statement than the idea I began with, that it doesn't take brilliance to do better. Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about forgetting, though. I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. Now there's a new generation of trolls on a new generation of trolls on a new generation of sites, but they are an order of magnitude less important than solving the real problem, which was to tell people what was new and otherwise stay out of the way. I'd use to describe the atmos. But babysitting this process was misleadingly narrow: deregulation. Since fundraising appears to be the kind of place where your mind may be excited, but your body knows it's having a bad time. But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank. And so American software and movies are malleable mediums. The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones.

It's a valuable source of metaphors for almost any kind of work.5 The project may even grow into a startup. I've met. Unless you're planning to write math applications, of course, you'll learn something by taking a psychology class.6 Now it's Wepay's. In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. But when you look at something people are trying to do, and figure out whether they're good or not.

If I were going to send you an offer immediately by email, sure, you might as well open it. In the late nineties you could get the right people. How can it be, visitors must wonder.7 Rich people don't want to live, but it's hard to compare their work. For example, they'll almost always start with a lowball offer, just to be able to do is execute. Now that so many news articles are online, I suspect you could find a similar pattern for most trend stories placed by PR firms. The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause startups to form around them, and probably offend them.

It applies way less than most people realize. Google's secret weapon was simply that they understood search.8 But I don't know. People started to dress preppy, and kids who wanted to seem rebellious made a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work with startups.9 And who knows, maybe their offer will be surprisingly high. A conversations can be like nothing you've experienced in the otherwise comparatively upstanding world of Silicon Valley is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work, with no appointments at all? Having great hackers is not, by itself, enough to make a winning product. But as technologies for recording and playing back your life improve, it may not be easy, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. You may wonder how much to tell VCs. Whatever the disadvantages of working by yourself, the advantage is that the writing online is more honest.

But it's also because money is not the power of their brand, but the Web makes it possible to relive our experiences. Apple vs Microsoft. I'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey did then. It's one of the 10 worst spammers. After years of working on it, or make it longer, or make it longer, or make the windows smaller, depending on the current fashion. If variation in productivity. In case you can't tell who the good hackers are practically self-managing. Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history. And in fact one of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy.10

Notes

Daniels, Robert V. Or a phone that is more important than the time of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a naturalist. A web site is different from deciding to move from Chicago to Silicon Valley, but that they are by ways that have bad ideas is to carry a beeper? Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say that was the least important of the causes of poverty.

Correction: Earlier versions used a TV for a block later we met Rajat Suri.

Incidentally, tax rates were highest: 14.

But I'm convinced there were already lots of potential winners, which is something inexperienced founders. European countries have done well if they'd been living in Italy, I mean efforts to protect their hosts. They hate their bread and butter cases. Trevor Blackwell, who adds the cost of writing software.

The original edition contained a few old professors in Palo Alto. Ii.

Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and they were to work with founders create a silicon valley out of fashion in 100 years will be regarded in the press or a blog that tried to pay the bills so you could end up reproducing some of these limits could be ignored.

In general, spams are more repetitive than regular email. 107.

Probably just thirty, if the selection process looked for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time.

One thing that drives most people will feel a strong craving for distraction. But scholars seem to want to start startups who otherwise wouldn't have.

Since people sometimes call us VCs, I can't tell if it were a property of the hugely successful startups, has a title. Unless we mass produce social customs. If they were supposed to be good at generating your own?

[risingsouls]

Headcanon: Gohan

[So I had this thought about Gohan last night and again after seeing a manga scan from dumb Super that I’ve had on many occasions and have probably waxed on about here on twice as many occasions. While ranting to the two poor souls that suffer my bs more than most, I was discussing my experience as a Gohan Fan within the DB fandom, both here and outside of Dumblr. Of course, the fuckboy idea of hating Gohan because he wanted to be a scholar and gave up fighting (essentially) in canon and wasn’t another carbon copy of Goku and Vegeta came up, and I articulated my thoughts on it better last night than I think I ever have, so here I am, sharing this revelation.

So, if you’ve read my bio/verses for Gohan, I have maintained in my canon for him that he does try to keep up with his training along with his studies. Disclaimer: while it may seem like I share the same idea of hating that Gohan wanted to be something other than a fighter like mentioned fuckboys, I am here to vehemently say that it’s not true. Not in the same vapid way (and hate’s a strong word because I don’t mind that choice in canon because it does make sense. To a degree, which I will obvs go into now).

My original reasoning for this addendum to how canon handles Gohan post-Z that I’ve mentioned before is basically that, as much as he cares about those around him--friends or complete strangers--, it makes less sense imo for him to just stop altogether and just settle back into the “Dad’s/Goku’s got this” sort of mindset that prevails among pretty much all the Z warriors and co. With his failures with Cell and then again with Buu (i.e. letting his confidence get the better of him and losing the edge he had in the fights and costing innocent lives, including his father’s because of it), someone as empathetic and caring as Gohan wouldn’t just shrug those failures off; they would stick in his subconscious and haunt him, to be dramatic. He lived through an era where Goku wasn’t there to save the day (an era of peace, granted, if you don’t count the movies), so with these things in mind, it’s difficult for me to see him dropping training altogether. Would it be as intensive as Goku and Vegeta, or even Tien and Piccolo? Definitely not. But I feel like he would still try to train WHILE he pursues his dream of becoming a scholar.

(That part was longer than I meant to make it BUT HERE’S THE REAL BIT I WANTED TO TALK ABOUT)

The other revelation I had about this last night goes more into the decision from a writing stand point. The decision made in canon to have Gohan fully abandon his training like...defeats the whole purpose of his turning point when he fought Cell. You know, that big moment where he’s refusing to fight because that’s not who he is or wants to be and he wants peace and warns Cell not to anger him but 16 talks to him and, as his friends are being beaten to near death by the Cell Jrs, points out to him that there are people and monsters in the universe that do not care about peace or much of anything else. That there are times when it is okay and necessary to fight to protect the people and things you love. The conversation and moment that spurs his transformation to Super Saiyan 2 and gives him the power to beat Cell. To me, this is a moment and conversation that sticks with him throughout the rest of his life (I mean he becomes the Great Saiyaman to protect people and kick bad guy ass, an example of fighting to protect people, especially when they can’t protect themselves), and for him to stop training altogether just sort of takes the understanding he comes to, a pivotal change in his character that further sets him apart from especially Goku and Vegeta (as in, fighting as a need rather than an enjoyment of it), and sets it on fire. It really just takes an important moment and makes it near irrelevant. And that’s what irks me about that decision. Not because he’s not a badass meat head like his dad and Vegeta, but that, imo, it makes very important developments in Gohan’s character basically irrelevant. And I don’t see why he couldn’t balance both, damn it. xD]

[breathontheglass]

On Teaching: Understanding the Spiritual Place of English

What is the Place of English?

           English, as a curriculum subject, has proven itself to be the most mutable of them all. Scholars and researchers have long endeavoured to define the essence of what is taught in English: to sequester its core ethos and manifest a policy that can regulate its delivery. This has landed with its back against impossibility. The subject is abstract by definition; it relies on relativity to establish its discourse. As such, trying to quantify the unquantifiable - insofar as the National Curriculum is concerned - has resulted in the slow asphyxiation of a subject which is most fruitful when left to transpire organically. This is not to say that there should be no structure to the teaching of the subject– quite the opposite. What I am suggesting here is that English must be taught in a context that values it as a spiritual activity; it must be an extension of a channel of thought that takes its roots in a humanistic view of education. When we consider Socrates’ classic view of education as ‘the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel,’ we can begin to understand English as the subject which is most closely aligned with the original purpose of education – to inspire children to grow into their own source of light that will illuminate their future path. This pursuit is - at its core - a spiritual endeavour, and the place of English must be seen as such.

           Most trainees (which, it must be recognised, become teachers; trainees do not remain in some reactionary, limbo-like headspace for their entire careers, and it is not valuable to continually avow their experiences in this manner) regard The Bullock Report of 1975 as a viable starting point for the debate of the position of English, but the constellations of thought surrounding this were being brought into alignment decades before. The 1920s – often referred to as The Gilded Age of literature – strikes me, personally, as the golden age of thought and policy in terms of orientating the subject of English. The Newbolt Report of 1921 is the first piece of research that still exists in the collective memory of academics and teachers alike for birthing a strain of thought that worked to situate education and English in the context of an individual’s internal life. The report concentrated on the moralisation of pupils, claiming that education had become “too remote from life” (Newbolt, 1921, part 3). It says of English, “It is not the storing of compartments in the mind, but the development and training of faculties already existing. It proceeds, not by the presentation of lifeless facts, but by teaching the student to follow the different lines on which life may be explored and proficiency in living may be obtained. It is, in a word, guidance in the acquiring of experience” (Ibid, part 4). In this view, English is not the simple regurgitating of ‘popular’ opinion of ‘popular’ literature; it is not the calculated analysis of the linguistic frameworks that allow us to communicate with one another, and it is not the process of teaching content to assessment. It should be a heuristic process, awakening the child to the world inside them and working to position this inner space as entirely unique; it is causing the bird to realise that its ability to fly is innate, and does not need to be taught – only practised and explored.

           Dixon’s 1969 report, ‘Growth Through English,’ echoed the Newboltian sentiment of the place of English being in alignment with the fundamentally spiritual purpose of education. It also acknowledged that there can be various ‘models’ applied to teaching, which serve, in my mind, two purposes; first, to dissect the multitudinous nature of teaching in order to make it palatable for those whose spectrum of thought is narrower than the concept itself; and second, to excuse those subjects which have begun to ‘fill vessels’ rather than ‘kindle flames,’ so as to render them workable by way of compartmentalisation. Here, we witness the beginning of censorship in English. It is this very notion that has led to teachers of English carrying the largest workloads, and it is this vein of applied stigmatism that creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic across contemporary institutions. This was expanded upon, then, by the aforementioned Bullock Report. 1988 saw the publication of the Kingman’s ‘Knowledge About Language.’ This marked a landmark moment in the history of English as a curriculum subject; his suggested progressive subversion of the ‘old’ ways of thinking about and teaching English led to censorship by way of government intervention. Here, the government effectively claimed ownership over English. Further regulatory measures ensued – The Cox Report of 1989, closely followed by The National Curriculum of 1990, placed English in an Orwellian place of censorship and instruction. The power ascribed to the teachers of the ‘80s was gone; the profession had been watermarked by the uniform brush of the law.

           We, as teachers of English, need to reclaim ownership of the subject which has always spoken to us on that unquantifiable, primitive level. The place of English should be within the unique space that exists between the academic and the spiritual - evolutionary and sentient, transitory in perception, but perpetuated through honour. At its core, English is – I believe - the most noble of curriculum subjects. It ventures, unashamedly, into the ambitious territory of the expansion of human experience. It dares to progress the internal story of its pupils through the study of the consciousness of others. It is the education of the spirit.

English as a Spiritual Practice

           Spirituality is a majestic and ineffable term that evades permanent definition only because of its unrivalled subjectivity. However, a definition can be approached through an acknowledgement of the factors which contribute to its process. Groen, Caholic, and Graham (Groen, Caholic, and Graham, 2012) assert that, “Spirituality includes one’s search for meaning and life purpose, connection with self, others, the universe, and a higher power that is self-defined” (ibid, p.2). In the context of this essay, it is necessary to reinforce the idea that spirituality remains entirely separated from faith. Eagleton (Eagleton, 1983) articulates how the failure of religion in Victorian Britain meant that English was able to impeach this “pacifying” space and “save our souls” (ibid, p. 20). Neither I nor Eagleton are concerned not with a religious spirituality, but with the intrinsic human spirituality that Tisdell (Tisdell, 2007) describes as simply, “one of the ways people construct knowledge and meaning. It works in consort with the affective, the rational or cognitive, and the unconscious and symbolic domains” (ibid, p.20). In this view, spirituality refers to the semiotics of the subconscious mind. In my view, it is also about transcending the self in order to exist within a constant state of mindfulness of universal context, and to understand the interconnectedness of all things. To develop spiritually is to find that metacognition and existential reflexiveness come naturally. It is the place of English to aid in the development of this process.

           According to Love and Talbot (Love and Talbot, 1999), “spiritual development involves an internal process of seeking personal authenticity, genuineness, and wholeness as an aspect of identity development. It is the process of continually transcending one’s current locus of centricity” (ibid, p.365). Ultimately, spiritual development - within the context of the English classroom - is about attempting to bring the lifeworld of the learner into harmony with the internality of an abstract or literary ‘other.’ This epoch exists both in and outside of human knowing; we can access our feeling of an affinity with a higher purpose without intention, but to harness this pursuit in an actionable and pedagogical way is the role of English.

           The Newbolt Report describes English as the “record and rekindling of spiritual experiences,” explaining that it “does not come to all by nature, but is a fine art, and must be taught as a fine art” (Newbolt, part 14). In this view of English as an art, the writer and teacher are placed as artists. I believe it is the job of the artist to try to perpetuate those thoughts and feelings which he/she feels will most contribute to a better world; art is evidenced creationism for the betterment of the collective human spirit. Indeed, those colleagues I have surveyed within my SE school demonstrate a frustrated liberality in attempting to express their view of the place of English, echoing the sentiment of the artist being asked to quantify the purpose of their work. This is demonstrative of the way in which the abstract qualities of English have been stigmatised. On the topic of English, The National Curriculum itself states that, “through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually” (NC, 1990). The decision for spirituality to be the note that this list ends on resonates powerfully with me. When ‘spirit’ can be used synonymously with ‘soul,’ it becomes clear that through all their stifling and bastardising policy, the Conservatives know that English lessons must be respected for the work that they do for the navigation of the soul.

Pedagogy of the Second-Guessed

           Too much government interference has willed a separation of the academic mind from the ubiquitous spirit. The objectification of the teacher within bourgeois educational structures seems to denigrate notions of wholeness and uphold this idea: one that promotes and supports compartmentalisation (hooks, 1994, p.5). Gove’s proposed new GCSE syllabus for English literature, with its emphasis on Britannica and marginalisation of the literature of other cultures (particularly, by omission, North America), demonstrates the further devaluing of empirical learning. It works, instead, to reinforce a nationalist ideology that will serve only to racialise the British education, and therefore disenfranchise the British schoolchild. This political approach is disturbingly far from the original purpose of education, and implicates Gove as a delusional philistine.

           The moralisation and eventual spiritual development of the schoolchild has been abandoned in favour of what Paulo Freire, in his revolutionary text Pedagogy of the Oppressed, labelled ‘banking education.’ He takes issue with those teachers who speak of reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalised, and predictable (Freire, 2000, p.71). According to Freire, this turns students into “containers” that need to be “filled,” and education thus becomes an act of “depositing” (ibid, p.72). The problem here - if not glaringly obvious - is that this model does nothing to engage the child on a spiritual level. The content of any given English lesson is ultimately forgettable; spiritual development through the analysis of the content is indelible. As such, Freire proposes an approach to education which he calls ‘critical pedagogy.’ This has been defined by Shor (Shor, 1992) as, "Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences" (ibid, p.129). For me, there can be no other approach. Any other way of viewing, delivering, and perpetuating education - and by extension, English - will codify education as a tool of oppression.

           I find my sentiments echoed in the words of feminist writer bell hooks (sic), who speaks of feeling a “deep inner anguish” (hooks, p.6) during her younger student years due to a deeply rooted dissatisfaction with her education. I, like hooks, was a bright child with an instinctual distrust of the ‘system.’ I had a natural gift for self-expression which was not guided by the curriculum. In fact, I remember feeling an inexplicable suspicion towards curriculum texts - I found this form of cultural dictation uncomfortable, and it led to a loathing of Shakespeare’s works and the space they occupied as a beacon for all that was British and curriculum and oppressive. However, my advanced command of the English language never wavered, so I remained a ‘worthy’ pupil in the eyes of those teachers who were clearly engaged with the ‘banking education’ model, despite my selective disagreeability. But my disdain for Shakespeare has stayed with me to this day. When this disdain was being instilled, I was dismissed by some teachers who thought that my feelings were born out of some kind of misdirected anarchy; this was not the case, and it wounded and confused me to be treated in such a way. It seemed as though I was being punished for thinking differently to my peers, when independent thought was supposed to be one of the cornerstones of English lessons. This felt like a flagrant contradiction. As a result, many teachers lost my respect. This process is still happening in classrooms today.

           hooks articulates the trouble I had with the majority of my teachers, explaining, “It was difficult to maintain fidelity to the idea of the intellectual as someone who sought to be whole – well-grounded in a context where there was little emphasis on spiritual well-being, on care of the soul” (ibid, p.6). Teachers of English are not adequate if they are not willing to engage with the spiritual side of their craft. Teaching strictly to assessment is the way to lose the brightest minds in the classroom. We cannot mobilise children by suppressing their organic tendencies. We should congratulate those students who question dogma; we should reward those who refuse to accept the status quo. For it is these students who have already accepted the paradigms presented to them, processed them, and reinterpreted them in a thoughtful and quietly revolutionary way. We must look at our collective history and remember that the hero and the rogue are so often found within the same individual.

Higher Order Thinking

           In its most recent Ofsted report, my SE school was noted as one of the most improved in its county. I believe this is due to their relentless emphasis on ‘HOT’ - Higher Order Thinking. Pupils are pushed to continually challenge and advance their own thoughts, with the crux of every effective lesson being the ability of the students to engage each other. For example, the year 9 group that I shared with a peer, (covering Willy Russel’s Blood Brothers), were asked the question, “What would you do if somebody really close to you betrayed you?” One pupil put his hand up and simply said, “Give them another chance.” This response endeared and engaged the whole class - a level of engagement that they had not yet reached. Another pupil then contributed in saying, “No, I think you should get revenge slowly.” A debate ensued about the different approaches to dealing with betrayal, and pupils were required to think about themselves and their own temperament in order to contribute. Corrigan (Corrigan, 2005) explains that, “We begin to integrate our spirituality into our teaching, reading, and writing when we allow our past experiences to inform our reading and allow our reading to inform our past experiences. We go even further when we bring our selves to the texts for new experiences” (ibid, p.3). In applying themselves to the text, pupils were able to advance with the plot on a deeper level of empathic and genuine understanding. This constituted a moment of authentic spiritual development, and the tempo of their lessons shifted from then on.

           The school is decorated with HOT-orientated propaganda, with posters stating “I don’t understand YET,” and “How HOT is your thinking?” When I asked colleagues from different departments, “What is the place of English?”, the default response was simply that it is the most cross-curricular of all the subjects; it is essential to success. Upon surveying colleagues from within the English faculty, the majority responded that it should be placed at the centre of all other subjects. When we combine these two viewpoints, English occupies the space both at the centre of the curriculum and out into all of its branches; it is omnipresent. When I surveyed ten pupils from across all years of KS3 and KS4 for their input, their responses were encouragingly thoughtful. Their general sentiment reiterated the importance of the self within English, stating notions such as, “The place of English is in the mind of the pupil.” They also referenced some of their favourite lessons as those which made the most ready use of embodied learning. The majority vote for the ‘favourite English teacher’ was the member of the faculty who had put the most thought into the decoration of their classroom. Pupils expressed a frustration with the typical English classroom working as a tiny, insular world where the facts are more important than the atmosphere. Lawrence and Dirx (Lawrence and Dirx, 2010) label this epoch ‘transformative learning,’ explaining that, “A spiritually-grounded transformative education reflects a holistic, integral perspective to learning. It seeks authentic interaction and presence, promotes an active, imaginative engagement of the self with the “other,” and embraces both the messy, concrete and immediate nature of everyday life, as well as spirited experiences of the transcendent” (ibid, pp.3-4). The students felt that they accomplished their best learning when the teacher humanised themselves by projecting their inner world onto their classroom, for the gaze of the learner must find something which its spirit can connect with if it is to remain focused.

In Conclusion: A Philosophy of De-Stigmatisation

           I believe that it is every citizen’s duty to decode their innermost tendencies in order to consider how they can best contribute to a more harmonious and efficient global community. Because of the spiritual nature of English, it is the role of the English teacher to be a luminous example of this. hooks tells us that teachers who embrace the process of self-actualisation whole-heartedly will be more capable of creating pedagogical practices that engage the whole student, providing them with ways of knowing and learning that can enhance their capacity to learn and live fully and deeply (hooks, p.22). The obstacles to our collective spiritual development lie in the fact that any activity which involves the witness, transformation, or revelation of the spirit will always require a level of vulnerability. Perhaps, in this new and hardened world where accountability is sacrificed for pseudo-professionalism, the true place of English is being overlooked because to be vulnerable is to suffer.

           We could begin to de-stigmatise the spirituality of English by encouraging the introduction of personality testing within schools. Models like the Myers-Briggs type indicator - which separates people into one of sixteen personality archetypes - are an invaluable way of beginning to think about the self. Self-aware children are thoughtful children, and thoughtful children maintain harmony. Categorising children in new and spiritual ways will alter the level on which they accept learning. Lessons on people as explicit ‘texts’ could bring about an eventual marriage of English and ‘PSHE’ lessons, changing the conversation entirely. At a secondary level, no other subject can teach you to think critically about the subtleties of perception, of non-verbal communication, of self-awareness. How do we cope with the passage of time? Is belief in something always mutually exclusive with disbelief in something else? How do we quantify our journey? How can we acknowledge and understand the journey of others? Is it more valuable to evaluate an idea, or to accept it? Knowledge, significance, insignificance, mindfulness, harmony, intuition, love, death, legacy, personal philosophy, decisions, faith, equilibrium, experience; these are the true lessons taught in English.

[apenitentialprayer]

Since you are a Christian who also studies Islam, I wanted to ask you, what are some common misconceptions Christians have about Islam, and vice versa?

Things Christians Get Wrong About Islam

1. “Islam was spread by the sword, and most of the initial conversions were coerced.”

So, disclaimer; there probably were coerced ‘conversions’, especially during the conquest of Mecca. Of particular note is a certain Hind bint Utbah, who hated Muhammad’s movement and even mutilated the corpses of fallen Muslim warriors. She converted shortly after the conquest, probably in the hopes of avoiding punishment for the aforementioned mutilations and general extreme hostility towards Islam.

That being said, Islam for the most part wasn’t a result of sword-conversions. Early documents like the Constitution of Medina may even imply that non-Muslims were considered a part of the Ummah (a word which today refers exclusively to the Muslim community). The early Caliphate was heavily reliant on jizya money to fund further campaigns of expansion, and due to the special privileges given to the elite Muslim military class, there may have even been attempts to discourage mass conversion.

In situations where mass conversion did occur, and those did eventually happen, it’s simply unfeasible to imagine that it could happen on a large scale. Here’s the thing about coerced conversions; when the coercive pressure is taken off, people more likely than not return to their old beliefs. Most mass conversions would have affected the elite or the extremely downtrodden; the former would have been interested in ‘elite patronage’, converting to the religion of the new ruling class in the hopes of destroying any glass ceiling that could prevent further upward mobility. The latter would be interested in ‘social liberation’, hoping that conversion to the relatively egalitarian Islam would remove any severe social pressure being put on them by their old religion.

In other parts of the world, such as Bengal, for example, the introduction of new technologies to indigenous peoples by Muslim settlers likely played a role in mass conversion too. These new neighbors seem to have a pretty sweet idea with this whole “agriculture” business; maybe their religious ideas aren’t too off base either, am I right?

2. On the other end, we have “Muslims were far more tolerant than Christians, and were philosophically more sophisticated.”

Muslims were operating under a system of governance that presumed almost from the birth of the movement’s political dimension that it was a dominant force among several other monotheisms. Yes, Muslims tolerated other forms of monotheism. Here’s a secret, though; there was no pre-Enlightenment society that viewed “tolerance” as a virtue. Tolerance of religious minorities was built into Islam’s understanding of its place in the world, and was a result of many sociological and economic factors.

That didn’t stop periods of short but intense persecution from cropping up here and there. There were anti-Judaic riots in Granada in the year 1066 that likely killed as many Jews as Christian crusaders did thirty years later. The Almohads and Almoravids were two North African Muslim movements that moderated over time but started out with the “convert or die” policy that many people try to attribute to Islam as a whole. Among the victims of this persecution was famed Jewish scholar Maimonides (a child at the time) and his family. They may have even converted to Islam to save their lives - but, as I said, once the coercive element died out, they returned to their original faith.

These tolerated minorities lived as dhimmis, a type of second-class subjecthood in which they were allowed to live in Islamicate societies while practicing non-Islamic religions. Dhimmi communities would pay the jizya in order to ensure that they had this right. In fact, during times of increased persecution, some dhimmi communities even petitioned rulers to allow them to pay a larger jizya tax as a form of protection. That being said, there were still legal limitations for dhimmis. They could not create new houses of worship or refurbish old ones. Religious activities had to be done in private. Non-Muslims were not allowed to be appointed to positions of high status. Fortunately, none of these rules were consistently enforced. When they were, though, you got things like the Granada riots.

A word about Jews in Islamic lands; on the whole, they were treated better in Dar al-Islam than they were in European Christendom. Two things you should keep in mind, though; Christianity and Judaism were both rival claimants to the inheritance of Abraham in a way that Islam really wasn’t. That rivalry created bitter resentment. Second, the Jewish minority in Islamic lands were always one minority among many; in medieval Christendom, the Jewish minority was the only consistent religious minority in existence. That means European Jews were under heavier scrutiny than Islamicate Jews were.

As far as being more philosophically inclined, we should keep in mind that Christianity became philosophized almost immediately. Saints Justin Martyr and Augustine of Hippo made sure of that. The rise of Islamic khalam philosophy was the result of Christian scholars translating Aristotelian texts into Arabic.

3. “Islam is basically Arab cultural imperialism.”

Fun fact; veiling of women, which is heavily associated with Islam today, was a Persian-Sasanian cultural element that was adopted by Islam fairly early on. The wives of Muhammad did veil while out in public, but so did Muhammad at times, and other women were still allowed to walk through military camps unveiled. This would change relatively quickly, but this is one piece of evidence that Islam isn’t just the theologically justified imposition of Arab culture onto non-Arabs.

Likewise, Persian remains the language most commonly associated with Islamic mystical thought. Persian is seen by some communities to be especially well-suited for the articulation of such ideas. This is probably because Shi‘a and Sufi forms of Islam both developed in what is now primarily Iran and Iraq.

After the year 1250, the ruling classes of the most expansive Islamic empires were not ethnically Arab, but Turkic. Just so we’re clear, these Turks were not from what we now call Turkey, but Central Asia. They brought all sorts of cultural innovations with them.

In the Indian subcontinent, the Mughals created a ‘Hindustani’ culture that combined elements of Turkish Islam with philosophical, cultural, and architectural elements of native Indian cultures. The Mughal emperor, a Muslim king, was modeled after the example of Rama from the Indian Epic tradition. Many rituals that they performed were modeled after those expected to be performed by ideal Hindu kings. South Asian Islam has a range of cultural idioms and pilgrimage sites unique to itself, largely a result of the Sufi pioneers who settled the continent before and during the rise of the early Indo-Muslim sultanates.

Things Muslims Get Wrong About Christianity

1. “Christians corrupted the true Gospel, which was a book like the Qur’an and the literal word of God”

The Qur’an described what is called the Injil, a word probably derived from evangelion, which most Muslims interpret to refer to a specific book recited by Jesus Christ. Except it seems very, very unlikely, for two reasons. First, there are no extant writings attributed to Jesus, excepting a forged communication between Jesus Christ and King Abgar V of Edessa. Second, not a single early Christian source (besides the aforementioned letter) ever references writings made by Jesus.

The closest thing we have to the Injil as understood by most Muslims today is the Gospel of Thomas, which is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, and the hypothetical Q source. Regardless, the New Testament, as we have it, never attempts to present itself as the actual words of Jesus in the way that, say, the Book of Jeremiah claims to be from Jeremiah.

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want more, I could name more, but I think I’m talking to a primarily Christian audience, and I’m kinda tired, man.

[bluewatsons]

Apostolos Andrikopoulos, Love, money and papers in the affective circuits of cross-border marriages: beyond the ‘sham’/‘genuine’ dichotomy, J Ethnic & Migration Stud (in press, 2019)

Abstract

In the name of women’s protection, Dutch immigration authorities police cross-border marriages differentiating between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of marriage (e.g. ‘forced’, ‘sham’, ‘arranged’). The categorisation of marriages between ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’ derives from the assumption that interest and love are and should be unconnected. Nevertheless, love and interest are closely entwined and their consideration as separate is not only misleading but affects the exchanges that take place within marriage and, therefore, has particular implications for spouses, especially for women. The ethnographic analysis of marriages between unauthorised African male migrants and (non-Dutch) EU female citizens, often suspected by immigration authorities of being ‘sham’, demonstrate the complex articulation of love and interest and the consequences of neglecting this entanglement – both for the spouses and scholars. The cases show that romantic love is not a panacea for unequal gender relations and may place women in a disadvantaged position – all the more so because the norms of love are gendered and construe self-sacrifice as more fundamental in women’s manifestations of love than that of men’s.

Introduction

In June 2009, Tim, a Nigerian migrant in Amsterdam and friend of mine, urgently asked me to meet his cousin Kevin. He was not clear about the reasons but he said Kevin became interested in talking to me when Tim told him that I was Greek and, at that time, I was working as a housekeeper in a Dutch hotel. The three of us arranged to meet in a central location in Amsterdam. I was the first to arrive. With some delay, Tim and Kevin came together. Kevin was in his early thirties, tall, a little bit fat, very talkative and loud – the very opposite of Tim, who was short, slim and had a voice you could hardly hear. Tim introduced his cousin Kevin as his ‘brother’ and for the rest of the conversation they addressed each other as brothers. Kevin also addressed me as ‘brother Apostolos’ and started explaining the reasons he wanted to meet me. He said that his temporary visa would expire soon. For this reason, he asked me to help him find a woman who would want to, if not marry him, have a cohabitation contract1 with him. This would enable him to extend his legal stay in the Netherlands. He emphasised that he was particularly interested in a European, but not Dutch, woman and asked me to search among my Eastern European hotel colleagues and my Greek network. In that way, he could benefit from the generous family migration rights conferred to spouses of EU citizens (Tryfonidou 2009; see also Wray, Kofman, and Simiç 2019). Kevin was in rush because if he did not find a woman within a month, he would have to face further bureaucratic complications.

‘I will make your pocket smile, my brother’, Kevin told me. Although he did not mention anything about him paying the woman, I assumed that he would be prepared to offer something to her as well. As Kevin was explaining his situation to me, I had no doubt that he was looking for a ‘marriage of convenience’ – a marriage that had nothing to do with love, just a means for him to get a residence permit – even though he never described it as such. Before Kevin and I finished our conversation, I asked him, quite hesitantly, if his search for a European partner was limited only to women and I explained that a same-sex marriage or partnership in the Netherlands could grant him the same rights as a marriage/partnership to a woman. Dutch immigration authorities tend to investigate more carefully heterosexual cross-border marriages in which the ‘sponsor’ is the female spouse. Often assuming that these women are naïve and in need of protection, immigration officers enquiry the motives of migrant men to marry them (De Hart 2003, 126–127). If Kevin was interested in a ‘marriage of convenience’, I thought, a same-sex marriage might be a better option because immigration authorities would less likely suspect it as ‘sham’ (on benevolent sexual culturalism: Chauvin et al., 2019). He said that he knew that and without a second thought rejected this option. Without calling me ‘brother’ again, he said, ‘Mister Apostolos, I’m talking to you seriously!’ From the conversation we had, it was clear that Kevin wanted a relationship with a European woman, intending to secure a long-term residence permit. Was that solely his purpose? If he was interested in just a ‘marriage of convenience’ which would allow him to extend his legal stay in the Netherlands, why did he reject from the beginning other possibilities such as a same-sex partnership/marriage which would help him to obtain a residence permit following the same legal route? Perhaps Kevin would feel uncomfortable pretending that he was in a romantic relation with another man in front of immigration authorities. Was that uneasiness the only reason for his reluctance to obtain a residence permit via this channel? Was he also looking for an emotional connection with a European woman? But if that was so, would that be a ‘marriage of convenience’ as I originally thought?

This encounter also raised questions about my understanding of Kevin’s search for a partner. Why did I immediately assume that a marriage that would provide access to migrant legality for Kevin had nothing to do with emotions and particularly love? Why did I understand Kevin’s motivation only as an instrumental action? Reflecting about this event, I realised that I shared the same assumption with the state authorities. The state’s distinction between ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’ marriages derives from the assumption that interest and emotions are separate domains of social life that are not and should not be in contact. Indeed, migration authorities establish the authenticity of a marriage by assessing the existence of emotions, in particular, ‘love’, and the absence of other ‘ulterior motives’ (Eggebø 2013; De Hart 2017; D’Aoust 2013). Often, scholars and migrant support organisations have unwillingly reproduced the assumption behind the categorisation of marriages as either ‘sham’ or ‘genuine’, including those who are critical of the exclusionary effects of such categorisations. They do so, for example, when they criticise how the fight against the ‘marriages of convenience’ has exclusionary consequences for ‘real’ couples and ‘loving’ partners.

This ethnographic study focuses on the marriages of unauthorised Ghanaian and Nigerian migrant men with (non-Dutch) EU citizen women in the Netherlands which are usually suspected by immigration authorities as ‘sham’ because they provide a relatively easy access to migrant legality. Without ignoring the importance of what spouses materially gain in these marriages, it challenges the categorisation of cross-border marriages as either ‘sham’ or ‘genuine’, showing a complex relation between emotions and interest. However, the aim is not simply to show the entwinement of emotions and interest and the falseness of that distinction – this has already been well-established by other scholars studying intimate relations (for instance, Zelizer 2005; Medick and Sabean 1984; Constable 2003). Instead, the article examines the implications of such dichotomy, between interest and love, for the exchanges that take place in the context of marriage and as a result, the effects on the relationship between two spouses. Contrary to immigration authorities which police cross-border marriages in the name of women’s protection, the case studies in this article show that the state-imposed romantic love ideal may undermine the bargaining power of women in marriage. Migration researchers risk neglecting these implications when they rely on the state categorisation of cross-border marriages as either ‘sham’ or ‘genuine’.

Data and methods

The empirical material analysed in this article originates from ethnographic fieldwork I carried out in the context of my previous research on kinship relations and the survival strategies of West African migrants (Ghana, Nigeria) in the Netherlands and Greece (Andrikopoulos 2017). The fieldwork also included interviews both with West African migrants, mostly male, and their spouses of various origins. Although the actual fieldwork in the Netherlands lasted fourteen months, I have been in contact with some of my research participants for a much longer period either because I knew some of them from previous research projects or because we maintain our good contacts up until the present. All of my research participants have been aware of the purpose of the research project and some of them have read previous versions of this text. To protect the anonymity of my research participants I have altered their names and some minor details. I have kept the titles and the way I addressed them (e.g. ‘Mrs’, ‘friend’) because it reflects my relationship with them at the time of my fieldwork. As is evident in the opening story, the ethnographic description includes also my own reaction to the events I describe. I do that on purpose in order to make apparent to the reader how my own assumptions have been challenged while I was in the field and why thinking through state categories led me to conclusions that are different from social reality (see also Piot 2015).

The state of emotions: romantic love and the ‘marriage of convenience’

In the Netherlands, as in other European countries, the regulation of cross-border marriages became a key concern for the national politics of belonging. As explained by Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden (2019), state authorities closely inspect cross-border marriages for two main reasons. First, cross-border marriages enable a significant number of ‘uninvited’ foreigners to enter the national territory as ‘family migrants’. Second, state authorities fear that cross-border marriages may threaten the cultural reproduction of the nation and its social regeneration. By regulating cross-border marriages, and marriage more generally, the state attempts to define and produce the society it envisions.

In that effort, state authorities differentiate between, on the one hand, acceptable marriages that will result into ‘good families’ and, on the other hand, non-acceptable marriages that the state tries to prevent from taking place. The introduction of more restrictive policies for cross-border marriages have been justified by the Dutch government as measures to protect women and ensure gender equality (Rijksoverheid 2009; Bonjour and De Hart 2013). All categories of unacceptable and undesirable marriages (‘sham marriage’, ‘forced marriage’, ‘arranged marriage’), framed by the state as bad for women, have a common opposite: the love-based marriage. The romantic love ideal has become the means for state authorities to control the gender dynamics in cross-border marriages and prevent undesirable outcomes – both for women and society in general.

The Dutch state construes ‘sham’ marriages as those marriages contracted with the ‘sole purpose’ of enabling the migrant spouse to obtain a residence permit and often involve the monetary compensation of the citizen spouse (IND, n.d.). A ‘genuine’ marriage is understood as the opposite: a relationship based on and sustained by love.2 The state categorisation between ‘genuine’/love-based and ‘sham’/interest-based marriages is informed by a modernist ideal of romantic relations which Giddens has described as a ‘pure relation’. According to Giddens (1992), a pure relationship is a relation of equality and mutuality between two autonomous individuals. It is a relationship of emotional fulfilment in which what one offers to the other is not motivated by the expectation of something else in return. The ideal of marriage as a pure relationship is arguably the norm according to which cross-border marriages are assessed by the state (Wray 2015; Eggebø 2013).

The marriage of love and interest

State’s conception of love as a disinterested emotion is dominant across Europe precisely because it stems from a Christian ideal of love opposed to instrumentality. Nevertheless, such conception of love is not universal and may differ from daily practices. It is important, therefore, for migration researchers and other scholars, to ‘approach love as an analytic problem rather than a universal category’ (Thomas and Cole 2009, 3) and treat carefully the state’s conception of love. Problematising love implies that we pay close attention not only to what love means in particular settings but also how love is expressed and demonstrated.

Ethnographic studies (Rebhun 1999; Cornwall 2002; Hunter 2010; Constable 2003) have documented how local conceptions of love encompass material interest and how interest may strengthen affection and desire instead of erasing them. In rural Madagascar, for example, the local concept of love, fitiavina, refers both to affective qualities and acts of material support and care. Rural Malagasy express their love by sharing their resources and spending on their beloved ones (e.g. sharing food, buying clothes, paying school or medical fees). ‘In male-female relationships, a man makes fitiavina through gifts to the woman, and the woman returns the favor of fitiavina by offering her sexual and domestic services, and labor’ (Cole 2009, 117). But the teaching of Christian missionaries, during the period of colonialism, insisted on the separation of love and money and promoted a meaning of love that is selfish-less and interest-less. To some extent, this contributed to the emergence of a new understanding of love, as ‘clean fitiavina’, which, at least normatively, is unrelated to material exchanges (Cole 2009). Similar transformations in the meaning of love have been observed elsewhere and usually are attributed to the spread of Christianity, emergence of capitalism and the influence of a globalised western notion of romantic love (Hirsch and Wardlow 2006; Padilla et al. 2007). This does not mean that love has indeed became disengaged from material exchanges but rather that a new norm emerged that projects emotions and interest as ‘hostile worlds’ (Zelizer 2005). Even in societies of Europe and the U.S. where romantic love discourse originates, love continues to be deeply entwined with material interest but in less explicit ways (Zelizer 2005; Illouz 2007).

Although the state’s ideal of love-based marriage considers love as separate from material exchange, the assessment of the authenticity of cross-border marriages values positively certain transactions. For example, immigration authorities regard marriage payments (bridewealth, dowry) as proofs of the authenticity of a marital relation3 (Satzewich 2014; Pellander 2015). On the contrary, other forms of payment are considered suspicious and hint at ‘marriage of convenience’. The European Commission’s Handbook on Marriages of Convenience alerts national immigration authorities:

In comparison with genuine couples, abusers are more likely to hand over an ‘unexplained’ sum of money or gifts in order for the marriage to be contracted ( … ) that could be considered as ‘payment for abuse’ to the EU spouse and facilitators. (2014, s.4.4)

It is clear, therefore, that material transactions are allowed depending on how they are framed. The labelling of a material transfer as ‘dowry’ or as a ‘payment for abuse’ is of utmost importance because it determines the content of the relation between two parties as either ‘spouses’ or as ‘economic partners’ and consequently the state’s assessment of this relation as either ‘genuine marriage’ or as ‘marriage of convenience’.

But there are also contradictions to the ideal of disinterested love in the regulation of cross-border marriages (see also Pellander, 2019). One of them is the framing of the citizen spouse as a ‘sponsor’ who has to meet certain income criteria in order to apply for family reunification with the foreign spouse. According to IND’s website, a sponsor ‘is a person, employer or organisation that has an interest in the arrival of the foreign national in the Netherlands’ (emphasis added). If the labelling of a material transfer (e.g. as ‘dowry’) determines the content of the relationship between the giver and receiver (as ‘spouses’ and their families), why does the labelling of the two partners (‘sponsor’ and ‘sponsored’) not determine the type of transfers between them (e.g. payment)? Quite ironically, West African migrants in the Netherlands use the word ‘sponsor’ to refer to persons who fund the migration projects of aspiring migrants and then expect these migrants to repay them, usually with money they earn in sex work. Dutch authorities prosecute these ‘sponsors’ as ‘human traffickers’.

Who fears love? Gender inequality and romantic love

‘A marriage of convenience is not as innocent as it may seem. Sometimes they claim victims, as they may involve people smuggling or human trafficking. This is why the government is taking preventive measures’ declares IND (n.d.) on its webpage. The fight against ‘sham marriages’ and the policing of other non-acceptable marriages (e.g. ‘forced’, ‘arranged’, ‘polygamous’) in the Netherlands and many European countries have been presented as measures to protect women (Block, 2019; Leutloff-Grandits, 2019; Muller Myrdahl 2010; Carver 2016). Marriages with Dutch women are more likely to be suspected by immigration authorities as ‘sham’ than marriages with Dutch men (De Hart 2003; Kulu-Glasgow, Smit, and Jennissen 2017). To ensure that migrant men do not take advantage of ‘vulnerable’ women, immigration officers inspect the marriage motives and assess as ‘genuine’ those marriages that are motivated by love. As Giddens (1992) associates the ‘pure relationship’ with the ‘democratisation of private life’, immigration authorities and, often, migration scholars take for granted that the ideal of love marriage, the common opposite to all non-acceptable forms of marriage, protects the position of women and contributes to the establishment of gender equality.

Studies on the historical transformation of marriage, from a relationship pragmatically arranged to a relationship that is based on romantic love, show that love does not automatically entail gender equality (Collier 1997; Rebhun 1999). The transformation of the meaning of love towards a new normative definition that excludes interest and exchange did not liberate women and often resulted in them losing resources and thus becoming more dependent on their men. For this reason, women did not always welcome this development and insisted on a notion of love that encompasses exchange. On the other hand, men often appealed to the notion of romantic love and complained that they have been financially used by women who did not really love them (for African examples: Cornwall 2002; Cole 2009; Smith 2009).

To understand the complex dynamic of love in gender relations, it is important to consider the gendered aspects of the norms of love. There is no doubt that both men and women fall in love. But they are expected to express and demonstrate love differently. These culturally constructed differences are not only a matter of bodily expressions (kissing, display of affection, etc.). When love is demonstrated as care for the other, it often implies altruism, self-sacrifice and suffering. Arguably, such manifestations of care are more central in norms of how women ought to express and demonstrate their love – with the exemplary case of maternal love which to some degree informs women’s love to other family members (Paxson 2007; Collier 1997). If love has different implications for men and women, the presence of it in a heterosexual marriage cannot by itself improve the position of women.

Affective circuits and the marital economy of exchange

Considering all of the above, this article takes critical distance from state’s categorisation of cross-border marriages as either ‘sham’ or ‘genuine’ and instead examines the forms of exchange that take place in marriage, how these are framed by those participating in these exchanges, and how state’s categories and ideals of acceptable marriage impact the circulation of resources as well as the power dynamics between spouses. I study these exchanges through the lens of ‘affective circuits’ which refer to ‘the social formations that emerge from the sending, withholding, and receiving of goods, ideas, people and emotions’ (Cole and Groes 2016, 6). The lens of affective circuits directs our attention to the circulation of resources – both material and emotive – and how these affect the social relations of the network(s) actors. The concept of affective circuits, as theorised by Cole and Groes (2016), is attentive to the power dynamics between those who participate in exchanges as well as to the role of the state in regulating the flow of resources within the circuits.

The cross-border marriage literature predominantly focuses on couples and the relation between the spouses. Methodological conjugalism, ‘the tendency to focus on marriage, couples, and dyads within the largely Eurocentric framework of the nation-state’ (Groes 2016, 193), is informed by the modernist ideal of marriage as a pure relation and the state’s category of acceptable marriage. Nevertheless, marriage and the exchanges that take place within marriage are embedded in a larger affective circuit, extending beyond national borders, in which resources circulate in various directions and among more than two persons. The following case sheds light on these processes.

Circulating resources

In one of my visits to Christina (Greek) and John (Nigerian) in December of 2010, I mentioned the failed attempt of a migrant colleague at the fast-food restaurant where I worked to get papers through marriage to a Surinamese woman in exchange for €15,000. When I finished the story, John said, ‘Fifteen thousand is too much’. ‘He didn’t have an alternative’, I said. ‘Why doesn’t he go to Poland to marry one, or to Slovakia? There it will cost 4,000 to 6,000. I have many friends who did it!’

I asked John to elaborate. He said that my colleague should go to Poland, book a room in a hotel, and go out clubbing. He should flirt with women, pay for their drinks and talk to them nicely. If a woman responded, he could explain his situation and ask her for help. He could offer her around €4000. He should propose to the Polish woman, bring her to Amsterdam and offer her free accommodation and help in finding a job. ‘And if he can find her a job, then she might do it without money!’ John laughed. Although Eastern and Southern Europeans have the right, as EU citizens, to move freely to the Netherlands and any other EU member-state, migration remains a costly and financially risky decision. African migrant men can assist women from Europe’s periphery to migrate to Western Europe by providing them accommodation and access to their wide networks that will help them find a job and start a new life.

John was not the only person of his family in Europe (Figure 1). He had one brother in Greece, Jim, a second brother in Spain, Dennis, and another one in the U.K., Ugo. John and his brother Ugo in the U.K. had residence permits on the basis of marriage to an EU citizen (both Greeks) and were the two brothers who managed to regularly send money to Nigeria in support of their parents as well as their younger sister who was taking care of their parents. Dennis, his brother in Spain, was unauthorised and Jim, his brother in Greece, had been legalised in an amnesty programme but was in a dire economic condition.

Figure 1. John and his siblings across Europe and Nigeria (April 2011).

When I visited Greece in Easter of 2011, I met John’s brother, Jim, and we went together to his Pentecostal church. Jim was the oldest brother, in his early forties. He was married to a Nigerian woman who was living in the U.K. After the service, Jim introduced me to Camelia, a young woman in her late twenties from Romania, whom he presented as his ‘sister’. We left the church and went to Jim’s apartment where we spent the rest of our day. From what they told me, Camelia and Jim met on the Internet and after they had been chatting for a long time Camelia decided to come and meet Jim in person.

Later in the evening, Camelia told me that she was looking for a job, preferably in Western Europe. Jim asked me if I could help her find a job in the Netherlands. I explained to her that Romanian citizens needed a work permit in the Netherlands due to the transitory period requirements after Romania joined the EU. She was already aware of that but she seemed very interested in finding ways to overcome this legal barrier. For the time being, Camelia asked Jim to help her find a summer job on a Greek island. Greece did not apply the same restrictions to Romanians as did the Netherlands, so she could enjoy her rights of free movement and settlement in Greece as a full European citizen.

A few months later, when I returned to the Netherlands, I learned from Christina that Dennis, the brother of Jim and John who lived in Spain, had moved to Amsterdam. To my great surprise, Dennis had married Camelia, who had also moved to Amsterdam. ‘Well, it’s for papers’, Christina commented as she was giving me the news. In Amsterdam, Camelia stayed together with Dennis and hoped that he and his brother John would manage to find a decent job for her. To her disappointment, however, the legal barriers due to her Romanian citizenship did not allow her to work. In the meanwhile, Camelia got pregnant by Dennis. So their relationship was not only on paper and at least involved sexual relations. Dennis and John, unable to find a job for her in the Netherlands, mobilised their transnational networks. Their brother Ugo, who lived in the U.K. with his Greek wife, offered to help Camelia. Ugo worked as a supervisor in a cleaning company and made the necessary arrangements to hire Camelia as a cleaner on an undeclared basis. Camelia accepted the job offer and started working there. However, she was very disappointed with this job and threatened to divorce Dennis. As I learned from John and Christina, Camelia accused Dennis of not finding her a good job while his brother John had found a good office job for his Greek wife. Camelia regretted having left Romania and asked Dennis to relocate with her to her hometown. Dennis considered this possibility because his legal status was tied to Camelia. John and other friends strongly advised Dennis not to go to Romania. Nevertheless, Camelia insisted that she wanted to give birth there so her mother could help her. Dennis was left with no choice other than to follow Camelia to Romania where, after quite a long period, he managed to get a Romanian residence permit. A few years later, Dennis, Camelia and their child moved to the U.K. where they live together until today.

Although Camelia held the scarce civic resources required for Dennis’s legalisation, she relied on her husband and his connections for fulfilling her own migration aspirations in Western Europe. The marriage of Dennis to Camelia enabled him to get legalised and, as his other two brothers married also to EU citizens, to start sending money to Nigeria for his parents and the younger sister who was taking care of them.

The marriage of Camelia and Dennis was a relationship of mutual care, an exchange, in which both spouses contributed to each other. The multiple forms of exchange taking place in this marriage created a reciprocal dependency between the spouses. In this context, the wishes and preferences of Camelia, a migrant herself, were taken seriously by Dennis. Would Dennis show the same commitment to satisfy Camelia if his own personal gains were not at risk and if Camelia’s assistance for his legalisation was only motivated by (romantic) love? The answer to this question can only be hypothetical. But the next case is about a couple in which the woman’s assistance to her husband is driven by ‘pure’ love. How does the ideal of marriage as a pure relation impact the flow of resources between spouses and how these transfers are understood by them? What are the consequences of the separation of love and interest for the position of the female spouse in marriage?

I’ll marry you for free because I love you

Kyriaki, a Greek woman, met Frank, a Nigerian man, in a dance club of Thessaloniki, Greece. They started dating and quickly became a couple. Frank told Kyriaki that he had a problem with his papers and had to find a way to get a residence permit. He mentioned marriage as one of the possible ways to get papers. Kyriaki did not feel ready to marry him but at the same time she was afraid to lose him. After serious consideration, she decided to do it.

Kyriaki’s friends advised her to reconsider and warned her that Frank was with her only for the sake of his papers. Kyriaki felt confused by Frank’s motivations and thus confronted him with the following proposal as she recounted it to me:

I said to him before we marry: ‘Frank, if you want to marry me just for your papers, because I know how it is, I promise you that I will marry you and we will do your papers under an agreement: If there is love between us, we continue with our lives. But if there is no love and you marry me just for your interest, ( … ) we keep the marriage, each of us continues his and her life and in exchange I want you to help me with the fees of my vocational school’. How much was it that time? Was it €2,000? So, each of us would give €1000. This is what I asked him in exchange. And he insisted, ‘No, I love you!’

Kyriaki’s understanding of love and marriage was strikingly similar to the pure relation ideal. Once she was assured that her relationship with Frank was based on love, she could not think of any material exchange taking place between Frank and herself. She could have claimed a payment only if it was not a love relationship. It is noteworthy, though, that love in marriage would erase only Kyriaki’s material benefits while Frank could get a marriage-based residence permit either by paying Kyriaki or by loving her. Frank opted for the cheaper choice.

Frank and Kyriaki went to a lawyer to give them legal advice regarding their marriage and Frank’s legalisation. Kyriaki remembered:

The first question the lawyer asked me, as a Greek woman, was: ‘So, why do you marry him? For money? Does he pay you or it’s because of love?’ And I replied, ‘Love and only love’ … Because she (i.e. lawyer) wanted to know how to speak to us. She wanted to know if it’s a professional agreement so in case something goes wrong between us how we deal with it. And if it was because of love, how much would you do for this love?

A marriage motivated by romantic love meant that Kyriaki would not materially benefit from it and also that she would have to do the best she could for her partner. The female lawyer asked Kyriaki how much she loved Frank so as to know how much she was prepared to do for him. According to cultural norms in Greece, the love of a woman for her family is proven not just with the denial of personal interest but ultimately by self-sacrifice and suffering.4 Love (agapi), as Paxson (2007, 128) observed in reference to maternal love in Greece, ‘makes suffering a virtue’. The lawyer explained to Kyriaki that since love was the motivation for their marriage the best option for Frank, and the most difficult for Kyriaki, was to marry in Nigeria and apply together for a visa at the Greek embassy there. Kyriaki found this plan very complicated and started crying in the lawyer’s office. However, she loved Frank and was committed to helping him get his papers.

Kyriaki dropped out of her vocational school, which she anyways could not afford, and travelled with Frank to Nigeria. It was her first trip by plane and the first time she used her passport. She stayed there for about a month to arrange all documents and marry Frank. The visa application was successful and Frank travelled to Greece as Kyriaki’s husband. That year Kyriaki got pregnant and gave birth to their child. A few months later, the whole family moved together to the Netherlands where Frank had friends who could help him find a well-paid job. As a husband of an EU citizen, Frank enjoyed the same mobility rights within the EU as Kyriaki. It was a difficult decision for Kyriaki to leave Greece and relocate to another country but now she had to consider not only her own well-being but also the promising future in the Netherlands for her husband and child.

Frank’s love for his wife and child has been important as well. As Frank writes in the diary he shared with Kyriaki: ‘I will love my family and take care of them because (it) is the only thing that I have (…) I believe that one love can keep us together’. But contrary to Kyriaki, who said to me that she had been ready to give without anticipating anything in return, Frank understood love more in reciprocal terms. ‘All I have is for my family and all they have is for me’, he writes in the diary.

In The Economy of Love and Fear, Boulding (1973) distinguishes two types of transfers: the one-way transfer and the exchange. One-way transfers, he explains, are motivated either by love or by fear. By definition, thus, Boulding relies on the same Eurocentric ideal of love as a selfish-less emotion that excludes exchange. When one-way transfers, or what he considers ‘sacrifices’, are motivated by love, they contribute to the establishment of strong social bonds, not comparable to those established by exchange relations.

 … without the kind of commitment or identity which emerges from sacrifice, it may well be that no communities, not even the family, would really stay together. Exchange has no power to create community, identity, and commitment, perhaps because it involves so little sacrifice. (Boulding 1973, 28)

If that is indeed the case, we should wonder why love does not equally imply sacrifice for all.

Had I approached this case using the state lens of ‘sham’/ ‘genuine’ marriage, I would have been concerned only with the question of love’s authenticity, as Kyriaki originally was. This concern would have blurred a more fundamental issue: the consequences of romantic love and why these have been different for the wife and the husband in this marriage. The next section analyses the case of a woman, an Italian citizen of Ghanaian descent, who realises the unequal implications of romantic love and tries to deal with love’s consequences in marriage.

Resisting romantic love

Christy was born in Ghana, grew up in Italy and moved to the Netherlands as a teenager when her mother divorced her Italian husband. I first met her in 2010 in Amsterdam, through a common friend, and she immediately gained my admiration for her strong personality, social character and intelligence. Three years later, in 2012, she told me that she was planning to marry a legally unauthorised Ghanaian migrant and earn about €15,000 from this marriage. Kwame, the man who proposed to marry her, was a junior pastor in her church and also her ex-boyfriend. They had been in a relationship but Kwame chose to marry another woman in Ghana. Christy felt hurt and used to comment with bitterness and humour that Kwame left her ‘for a woman with a moustache’. The marriage of Kwame in Ghana lasted four years and, according to Christy, Kwame did it only to satisfy his parents who wanted him to marry that woman. As long as Kwame was married to a Ghanaian citizen in Ghana, marriage-based legalisation in the Netherlands was not an option for him. But after his divorce, marriage again became a possibility for his legalisation. In fact, there was only one-way Kwame could meet the criteria for his legalisation: if he could find a non-Dutch EU citizen spouse and benefit from the generous rights conferred to family members of EU citizens. As an Italian citizen living in the Netherlands, Christy was the ideal candidate. Kwame returned to her and asked her to help him get a residence permit by marrying him. Christy agreed. However, she said to him: ‘That time you had me for free. Now you have to pay’. Kwame accepted and asked Christy to propose a price. Christy told me that she took into consideration Kwame’s modest finances and instead of asking for the whole amount upfront she suggested that he pays €500 per month. They agreed and went to a lawyer to learn about the next steps. One of the first things Christy did was to inform her neighbours that she has reconnected with her ex-boyfriend. ‘If the police comes for a check, they may ask questions to my neighbours so it’s better that they know that we are in a relationship again’, Christy explained to me.

Mrs Veronica, the mother of Christy, was very delighted that her daughter would marry Kwame. At Christy’s birthday party, I noticed that Kwame addressed Mrs Veronica as ‘Mommy’. When I noted to Mrs Veronica my surprise that Kwame would even bow in greeting her, she replied that his respectful behaviour showed that ‘he wants to become a member of the family’. In one of my visits to Mrs Veronica together with Christy, Mrs Veronica narrated to me the story of her cousin in the U.K. who married an unauthorised migrant. According to what she said, the migrant woman who married her cousin, a naturalised British citizen, divorced him once she got her indefinite residence permit. ‘That’s why you always have to ask for money’, Mrs Veronica concluded, looking at Christy.

Mrs Veronica was aware of and approved her daughter’s decision to ask Kwame a compensation because, as she had said several times, marrying an unauthorised migrant entails risks not worth taking for free. Furthermore, Mrs Veronica claimed that she should receive part of Christy’s compensation from Kwame because Christy could only request a payment due to her Italian citizenship. She reminded Christy that she became an Italian citizen because Mrs Veronica brought her from Ghana to Italy, where she was living as a migrant at that time. Mrs Veronica’s expectation for compensation resembles bridewealth negotiations according to which parents may claim a higher amount when they have invested in their daughter and her future (e.g. by funding university education).5 ‘You owe your citizenship to me’, Mrs Veronica said to Christy. Christy exploded and answered back: ‘I don’t owe you anything. You owe your papers to me!’. Christy reminded her mother how she managed to get legalised in Italy. According to Christy, her mother had left her in Ghana with another woman so that she could migrate to Italy and make money from sex work. In Italy, Mrs Veronica married an Italian, who was one of her clients. Italian immigration authorities suspected that the marriage of a Ghanaian sex worker with an Italian citizen was ‘sham’ and so turned down Mrs Veronica’s legalisation request. Mrs Veronica and her husband went to Ghana and brought Christy back with them to Italy. With a fraudulent birth certificate (Figure 2), they claimed Christy as their common legitimate child. Considering the child, Italian authorities validated the marriage and agreed to legalise Mrs Veronica. For this reason, Christy maintained that it was her mother who should be grateful to her and not the other way around. As we see, the direction of flow in affective circuits is subject to different interpretations, which are important because they determine who is obliged to whom.

Figure 2. The birth certificate of Christy which enabled her to acquire Italian citizenship and her mother to be legalised (photo by the author).

In the meanwhile, Kwame attempted to re-establish his love relationship with Christy. As Christy told me, Kwame became very flirty with her and tried to seduce her and have sex. Although Christy still felt attracted to him and, as she said to me, he could have been an ideal husband for her, she did not want to be in a love relation with him. Christy feared that a love relationship would result in her losing her monthly compensation because romantic love is not compatible with financial gains. For that reason, she insisted framing her marriage with Kwame as ‘business’ and not as ‘love’. Also, she could not forget that Kwame had betrayed her love when he left her to marry another woman. She resisted and did not give in to Kwame’s pressure to re-start a love relationship. After several attempts to reconnect, Kwame left Christy one more time, before they marry, accusing her of treating him ‘like a dog’.

This marriage, which immigration authorities would have labelled as ’sham’, failed because Christy resisted framing it as a love relationship. Despite Christy’s feelings for Kwame and Kwame’s feelings for her, Christy was conscious that the acknowledgement of their relation as ‘love’ would have consequences for her, some of them undesirable. This would not have been the case if the norm of love encompassed material exchange. But such a conception of love is incompatible both with state’s and Christian ideals of love and of marriage as a pure relation.

Six years later, after Christy read a draft of this article, she reformulated what was the dilemma for her:

What is the choice of a woman at the end of the day, after you tried everything and after you had so many bad experiences? Do you choose for love, you know pure love, or you choose to learn how to love?’

Her answer to this question was that ‘you can learn how to love somebody for how good he is to you’. And she asked me to add that she learned how to love the man she is currently with, someone who is ‘very-very sweet and he treats me like a queen. He is so much in love with me and he does everything for me’. Christy’s current approach to love may differ from the norm of disinterested romantic love but at least this understanding of love does not undermine her bargaining power in the relationship and her quest for recognition.

Conclusion

The politicisation of cross-border marriages in many European countries has impacted in fundamental ways the research agenda of migration studies and particularly how these marriages have been approached by migration scholars. The scholars’ use of the state categories, such as ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’ marriage, reproduce, often unwillingly, the same assumptions upon which state’s exclusionary practices and hierarchies are based (Moret et al., 2019). In this article, I did not approach cross-border marriages through the lens of ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’. This would have led in two opposite directions. The first would be to analyse these marriages as material exchanges and frame the feelings of spouses as ‘emotional labor’ (Hochschild 1983) or as ‘performances of love’ (Brennan 2004) or, second, as most usually happens, to emphasise love and neglecting the importance of material transfer. Instead, I showed that material transfers are embedded in a wider affective circuit in which material and emotive resources circulate – an embedding that is also found in non-migrant marriages whose authenticity is never officially questioned and scrutinised.6

The analysis of ethnographic material demonstrates how the state impacts the flow within the affective circuits in, at least, three ways: First, laws and policies enable, facilitate or deter who circulates within these circuits. Family reunification legislation, as well as other laws, affect cross-border marriage mobility – often in ways that is not predicted. Second, the state valorises some of the most important resources that circulate in the networks of affective circuits. The tension between Christy and Mrs Veronica is who owes citizenship to whom and is indicative of how valuable a resource citizenship is, precisely because exclusionary state policies made it scarce and not easily accessible (Andrikopoulos 2018). Cross-border marriage is highly valorised because it is one of the few remaining channels to citizenship and migrant legality. Third, the state imposes a certain morality on the transfers that take place in the affective circuits of cross-border marriages. The morality of love that lacks motives for material gains does not necessarily prevent the circulation of material resources between spouses and other actors of affective circuits. Nevertheless, the state-imposed and state-sanctioned morality of romantic love necessitate those who participate in affective circuits to frame material transfers as emotion-driven autonomous acts of giving. ‘You never wanted to admit that I married you mainly to help you’, said Kyriaki to Frank, during a crisis in their marriage. ‘You married me only because you loved me’, answered Frank – a response which made Kyriaki furious but would probably satisfy immigration officers and proponents of marriage as a pure relation.

In a strikingly similar interaction, found in Euripides’ ancient Greek drama Medea, when Jason left Medea to marry another woman, Medea blamed Jason for being unappreciative of her help in acquiring the Golden Fleece. Jason angrily replied, ‘In return for my salvation, though, you got better than you gave’ (534–535). But what made Jason’s reaction so similar to Frank’s, was that Jason had refused to acknowledge the help of his wife Medea and instead said, ‘Since you raise a monument to gratitude, I consider Aphrodite alone the saviour of my expedition – of all gods and humans’. His gratitude to Aphrodite was because she sent Eros, the god of love, to help him. Jason continued ‘You do have a subtle mind. Yet to detail the whole story of how Eros compelled you with his inescapable arrows to save my skin would cause resentment’ (527–531) (Rayor 2013). Jason and Frank did not deny that the assistance of their wives was crucial to surviving and achieving their goals. But they both did not want to see their wives’ acts as gifts that generated the obligation of a counter-gift. Instead, they argued that these actions were only a manifestation of love and as such no expectation of acknowledegment or any other type of return could be expected.

The ethnographic material analysed in this article showed not only the inaccuracy of the dichotomy between love and interest, upon which the categorisation of marriages as either ‘sham’ or ‘genuine’ is based, but also the perils of this division, especially for women. Ironically for the state and its agents, love is the remedy to all ‘unacceptable’ marriages (‘forced’, ‘arranged’, ‘sham’) construed as bad for women. Nevertheless, romantic love, especially when it has different implication for men and women, may also place women in a disadvantaged position. These are important insights for understanding how love affects the dynamics of gender relations in cross-border marriages and marriages more generally. In that endeavour, state’s categorisation of cross-border marriages, such as the dichotomy of ‘sham’ and ‘genuine’, is misleading and of limited analytic value.

Notes

In the Netherlands, there are three different types of unions that grant rights and obligations to two partners of opposite or same sex: marriage (huwelijk), registered partnership (geregisteerd partnerschap) and cohabitation contract (samenlevingscontract).

‘Love’ is not explicitly mentioned in legal definitions of ‘sham marriage’. Nevertheless, the romantic love ideal informs the implementation by immigration officers of these laws and policies, the decisions of judges in legal cases against ‘sham marriages’ and political discourses (such as in parliamentary debates) on the topic (De Hart 2003; Bonjour and De Hart 2013; Pellander, 2019; Scheel 2017).

This is only for marriages that involve persons from places where marriage payments are assumed to be common practice.

This does not mean that all women in Greece express their love in that way. The norms and practices of love differ across generations, social classes, place of residence, etc.

However, if parents ask a high bridewealth claiming that they their daughter’s upbringing was costly, they might be accused that ‘they are selling their daughter’.

In order to see the similarities with other marriages, we certainly need studies that do not focus exclusively on the marriages of migrants – as is the usual tendency in migration studies (Dahinden 2016).

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Favorite books of 2019

A *very* late continuation of my annual tradition … finally got a push to finish this in case you’re looking for book ideas while we find ourselves with plenty of extra time during quarantine. I read a little less in 2019, maybe because I’m working on something new (and have a new kid) or maybe just because I’m getting lazy as I get older? 48 books total, of which 4 were tree books and 23 were audiobooks—I did spend more time in transit last year (yes, it’s possible to listen to audiobooks and talk to ATC at the same time!), but it felt more productive. 

Without further ado, my favorite books. (affiliate links get donated to charity at the end of the year). I’ve included some highlights from Kindle books, but many of my favorites this year were audiobooks, where I haven’t found a great solution to highlighting (especially those I get from the library on a variety of crappy - but free! - services).

Destiny Disrupted, by Tamim Ansary - this was probably my favorite book of the year. I liked it so much I cold-emailed the author and invited him over for dinner, and we had a wonderful time with he & his wife and a bunch of friends. Fundamentally, the book is a history of the world told from the point of view of Islam; the point he makes, quite compellingly, was that there are really two (and probably more) different histories of the world, with the same facts, that just depend on your narrative. This is starting to play on a lot of things I’ve been trying to understand recently, including Ben Hunt’s Epsilon Theory and specifically, his idea of the Narrative Machine, and all of the theory of Common Knowledge that includes. And he does all this with an easy-to-read but well-researched writing style. If you like this one, I’m still working my way through his next one, The Invention of Yesterday, and so far so good.

A ruler can never trust a popular man with soldiers of his own. One day, Mansur invited Abu Muslim to come visit him and share a hearty meal. What happened next illustrates the maxim that when an Abbasid ruler invites you to dinner, you should arrange to be busy that night.

On the Sunni side, four slightly different versions of this code took shape, and the Shi’i developed yet another one of their own, similar to the Sunni ones in spirit and equally vast in scope. These various codes differ in details, but I doubt that one Muslim in a thousand can name even five such details.

Let me emphasize that the ulama were not (and are not) appointed by anyone. Islam has no pope and no official clerical apparatus. How, then, did someone get to be a member of the ulama? By gaining the respect of people who were already established ulama. It was a gradual process. There was no license, no certificate, no “shingle” to hang up to prove that one was an alim. The ulama were (and are) a self-selecting, self-regulating class, bound entirely by the river of established doctrine. No single alim could modify this current or change its course. It was too old, too powerful, too established, and besides, no one could become a member of the ulama until he had absorbed the doctrine so thoroughly that it had become a part of him. By the time a person acquired the status to question the doctrine, he would have no inclination to do so. Incorrigible dissenters who simply would not stop questioning the doctrine probably wouldn’t make it through the process.

If a man commits a grave sin, is he a non-Muslim, or is he (just) a bad Muslim? The question might seem like a semantic game, except that in the Muslim world, as a point of law, the religious scholars divided the world between the community and the nonbelievers. One set of rules applied among believers, another set for interactions between believers and nonbelievers. It was important, therefore, to know if any particular person was in the community or outside it.

Range, by David Epstein. Thomas Layton recommended this to me (he was reading a derivative work on how to coach basketball while applying this theory), and it was fun. The fundamental thesis is that you can split environments into “nice” and “wicked” learning environments. In nice environments, feedback is quick and accurate, and rewards specialization early (eg golf ... you can practice every possible shot by yourself). In wicked environments, feedback is delayed (if available at all), and the rules — let alone the situation — are fluid. This rewards “range”, or a variety of experiences (Epstein uses tennis as an example, but much of life is even more obvious). The return of the Renaissance Man (or Woman) — yay!

When I began to write about these studies, I was met with thoughtful criticism, but also denial. “Maybe in some other sport,” fans often said, “but that’s not true of our sport.” The community of the world’s most popular sport, soccer, was the loudest. And then, as if on cue, in late 2014 a team of German scientists published a study showing that members of their national team, which had just won the World Cup, were typically late specializers who didn’t play more organized soccer than amateur-league players until age twenty-two or later.

A recent study found that cardiac patients were actually less likely to die if they were admitted during a national cardiology meeting, when thousands of cardiologists were away; the researchers suggested it could be because common treatments of dubious effect were less likely to be performed.

Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform. The domains Klein studied, in which instinctive pattern recognition worked powerfully, are what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind” learning environments. Patterns repeat over and over, and feedback is extremely accurate and usually very rapid.

...

In wicked domains, the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns and they may not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

When younger students bring home problems that force them to make connections, Richland told me, “parents are like, ‘Lemme show you, there’s a faster, easier way.’” If the teacher didn’t already turn the work into using-procedures practice, well-meaning parents will. They aren’t comfortable with bewildered kids, and they want understanding to come quickly and easily. But for learning that is both durable (it sticks) and flexible (it can be applied broadly), fast and easy is precisely the problem.

Programs like Head Start did give a head start, but academically that was about it. The researchers found a pervasive “fadeout” effect, where a temporary academic advantage quickly diminished and often completely vanished. On a graph, it looks eerily like the kind that show future elite athletes catching up to their peers who got a head start in deliberate practice.

Hilariously, predictors were willing to pay an average of $129 a ticket for a show ten years away by their current favorite band, while reflectors would only pay $80 to see a show today by their favorite band from ten years ago.

In the spring of 2001, Bingham collected twenty-one problems that had stymied Eli Lilly scientists and asked a top executive if he could post them on a website for anyone to see. The executive would only consider it if the consulting firm McKinsey thought it was a good idea. “McKinsey’s opinion,” Bingham recalled, “was, ‘Who knows? Why don’t you launch it and tell us the answer.’”

There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

Deep Work by Cal Newport - this was an easy listen while on a couple of long runs in Palm Springs during Indian Wells weekend, and definitely worth it. Like classics such as How to Win Friends And Influence People, there’s not a lot fundamentally groundbreaking here, but he articulates some really fundamental principles well enough that you stop and take notice and ask, “I know that ... why am I not doing that?” Now I just need to review my notes...

Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune in China - Evan Osnos. I think Scott Cannon originally recommended this book to me, and it was fascinating. It’s a bit of a long, slow read but a lot of insight into China’s evolution over the last few decades. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this knowledge (or the many other China books I’ve read recently) but it feels important for the coming decades. If only I could learn Mandarin like Matt MacInnis 

Every country has corruption, but China’s was approaching a level of its own. For those at the top, the scale of temptation had reached a level unlike anything ever encountered in the West. It was not always easy to say which Bare-Handed Fortunes were legitimate and which were not, but political office was a reliable pathway to wealth on a scale of its own. By 2012 the richest seventy members of China’s national legislature had a net worth of almost ninety billion dollars—more than ten times the combined net worth of the entire U.S. Congress.

But unlike Zaire, China punished many people for it; in a five-year stretch, China punished 668,000 Party members for bribery, graft, and embezzlement; it handed down 350 death sentences for corruption, and Wedeman concluded, “At a very basic level, it appears to have prevented corruption from spiraling out of control.”

The Central Propaganda Department let it be known that reports that suggested a shortage of happiness were not to receive attention. In April 2012 my phone buzzed: All websites are not to repost the news headlined, “UN Releases World Happiness Report, and China Ranks No. 112.”

Over the years, the risk of being blamed for helping someone was a scenario that appeared over and over in the headlines. In November 2006 an elderly woman in Nanjing fell at a bus stop, and a young man named Peng Yu stopped to help her get to the hospital. In recovery, she accused Peng of causing her fall, and a local judge agreed, ordering him to pay more than seven thousand dollars—a judgment based not on evidence, but on what the verdict called “logical thinking”: that Peng would never have helped if he hadn’t been motivated by guilt.

At one point, Chinese programmers were barred from updating a popular software system called Node.js because the version number, 0.6.4, corresponded with June 4, the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

he vowed to punish not only low-ranking “flies” but also powerful “tigers.” He called on his comrades to be “diligent and thrifty,” and when Xi took his first official trip, state television reported that he checked into a “normal suite” and dined not at a banquet, but at a buffet—a revelation so radical in Chinese political culture that the word buffet took on metaphysical significance. The state news service ran a banner headline: XI JINPING VISITS POOR FAMILIES IN HEBEI: DINNER IS JUST FOUR DISHES AND ONE SOUP, NO ALCOHOL.

...

It didn’t take long for the abrupt drop-off in gluttony to affect the economy: sales of shark fin (de rigueur for banquets) sank more than 70 percent; casinos in Macau recorded a drop in VIPs, and Swiss watch exports dropped by a quarter from the year before. Luxury goods makers mourned.

Economists point to a historic correlation between “world’s tallest” debuts and economic slowdowns. There is no cause and effect, but such projects are a sign of easy credit, excessive optimism, and inflated land prices—a pattern that dates to the world’s first skyscraper, the Equitable Life Building. Built in New York at the height of the Gilded Age, it was completed in 1873, the start of a five-year slump that became known as the Long Depression, and the pattern repeated in decades to follow. Skyscraper magazine, a Shanghai publication that treated tall buildings like celebrities, reported in 2012 that China would finish a new skyscraper every five days for the next three years; China was home to 40 percent of the skyscrapers under construction in the world.

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright & Bradley Hope - Mike Vernal told me to drop most things to read this, and he wasn’t wrong. A well-written account of the 1MDB scandal that I’d only vaguely followed, and tries to put it into context when it basically can’t … something like $5.XB stolen over the course of a few years.

Heads in Beds by Jacob Tomsky & Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain - I put these two together, both recommended by Robert MacCloy, because they’re quick and fun. I listened to both on audio and they were both “mindless” but interesting…sort of the inside baseball of both the hospitality and restaurant industries. Don’t use a UV light...anywhere.

Smokejumpers by Jason Ramos - recommended by one of our fire captain neighbors at Oxbow and figured it would be good to understand a little more about wildland firefighting … this took me down a long digression of firefighting books that were interesting but if you want one, this one’s fun.

American icon by Bryce Hoffman - great audiobook that Scott Cannon recommended about Alan Mulaly’s turnaround of the Ford. The single most memorable part — after a couple of years working on turning the company around, a reporter asked him what his priorities for the next year were, and he responded with the same three things he’d said from the beginning. The reporter said something to the affect of “I can’t write about that again, it’s boring, you need something new!” And Mulaly responded “when we’ve got these three things done right, then we’ll have something new. We haven’t finished them yet."

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - my wife raved about this book after she listened to it, and it was all the rage, so I did too…and it lived up to the hype! Fascinating but managed not to be a tabloid-y gossip-y tale of excess so much as a “yeah, each individual step was only a little over the line, and look where it lead them.” A surprisingly poignant reminder about how “fake it til you make it” in Silicon Valley can be idealized until it’s not. This is the next generation in a line started by Barbarians at the Gate and continued by Smartest Guys In The Room.

[criticallyevaluateessay734]

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[dsm-v]

Hello! I’m nonbinary and I’m trying to research how different religions and their texts support and affirm nonbinary people. If you would like to, could you point me in the direction of some things to read on this subject pertaining to Islam? If not, then feel free to delete this. Thank you!!

Hello friend! Thank you for asking me, I am always very willing to share the extent of my knowledge on Islam with others. I will begin to say that your area of ponderance is very interesting and something that there definitely needs to be more dialogue and scholarship on, so I’m glad that there are people who are asking these types of questions. I don’t know if this research you mention is mostly for your own reference or for something like a research project but either way I hope I can help! 

From my understanding and my experience, Islam as is most commonly practiced and observed is a very binary religion in the context of gender. If you were to attend Friday prayers at a large Sunni mosque, for example, women and men are usually segregated (with women relegated to inferior spaces, sometimes not being permitted in smaller mosques at all) and sometimes there are even separate entrances for men and women. It is hard enough for binary trans people to find a comfortable place within Islamic and Muslim spaces, so I can imagine (and I know) that it is much harder even for nonbinary people. This is not to say that nonbinary people like me and many others haven’t found space for themselves within Islam and in Muslim communities, but that overall the most information I’ve found pertaining to LGBTQ or gender- and sexuality- diversity and nonconformity in Islam has been focused on binary identities and experiences. 

I know that this worldview is deeply rooted in the foundations of our religion, as well. For example, in the Quran, chapter 78 verse 8 reads “وَخَلَقْنَاكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا” which, to my understanding means something like “And we have created you in pairs”. The Quran also refers to this idea of things being made in “pairs” in ch. 36 verse 36 and I think in other places as well, including addressing at times both men and women or males and females. I am not a scholar of Islam so I also don’t know the original context of all of these verses but to my understanding the main idea is that things have been created in pairs, by God, who is unpaired and unlike anyone or anything else. So, beyond (perhaps unintentionally) enforcing this idea of a binary world, I think this idea has more to say about the concept of tawhid (the oneness of God), and that the diversity that exists is a reflection of the oneness and uniqueness of the creator. 

It is important to remember that the Quran is a text that originated in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th Century, and the Hadith (recordings of sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad) and sunnah (the corpus of hadith and the otherwise generally accepted “tradition(s)” of the Prophet) were compiled in the few centuries following the death of the Prophet, so the worldviews and ideas perpetuated in these primary sources may not necessarily align with how we understand the world to be today. This is not to say that these texts are wrong, but that their originally intended audience is different than their current audience. So, it is important that we also understand that the framing of your question may be significant in that we can’t necessarily be looking backward in history for something that we have defined and constructed in modern terms. We can speak of nonbinary today because we currently understand that binary gender and the corresponding baggage and rules are largely constructed socially and culturally, and because we are beginning to acknowledge (in our culture and society, at least) that there are options outside of these restrictions. These may not have been ideas palatable to people 1400 years ago, especially without digesting a fair amount of yet-to-be articulated gender and other poststructuralist theories. 

But, gender and sexual diversity were recognized and recorded in the early history of Islam, even if we are to be hesitant about using the term nonbinary for these things. For example, there are hadith and other texts that refer to and speak about people described as mukhannathun (مخنثون), effeminate ones, people who we might today, in our terms, describe as trans women, effeminate gay men, or perhaps somehow otherwise transfeminine individuals. I have also seen ahadith (hadiths) that refer to intersex individuals, but the treatment of these individuals in these ahadith also seem to reinforce binary (and patriarchal and sexist) views, as these opinions (which albeit, came from a really fundamentalist and misogynistic website) dealt with: can the person grow a beard? do they have breasts? can they sit down to pee? how would someone else categorize them? and then they sort of said “well if you can sit down to pee and you have breasts even if you have ambiguous genitalia then you’re a woman”. Again, I may be conflating how intersex has historically been treated in or thought about in this religion with how the Muslim community currently addresses these things, but it is clear to me that throughout history and presently, there is great pressure for Muslims to conform to binary sex and gender roles.

Much of this pressure stems from the perpetuation of and belief in really flawed rhetoric such as the idea that keeping men and women separate will reduce the incidence of sexual violence (hint: it doesn’t). These ideas also stem from historical communities and circumstances which are quite different from our own. I am not arguing that the world is presently some wonderful place for women and queer individuals, but when we analyze the history of Islam, we can see very real and rational reasons why what are today considered sexist and outdated (and they are) systems came to be in place, such as the “guardianship” (walayah) system or the concept of hijab/veiling, which were originally ways to protect and preserve the rights and wellbeing of women, but which in many cases today they do just the opposite. 

I don’t really know of any sources pertaining to nonbinary and Islam per se, but there is a plethora of information out there on Islam and sexual and gender diversity. The discussions held within the contexts of Islamic feminism / feminist Islam also address some of these issues such as problems in our communities with sexism and misogyny, which ought to be fundamentally unislamic, as in Islam, every person has the right to their own relationship with the divine, and no one person is deemed more valuable than another. Just as a man is not worth more than a woman, an individual with a binary gender should not somehow be fundamentally better or more valid than a nonbinary individual.

I also want to point out that I have been speaking mostly as a historian and addressing some of the (a)historical perspectives that are found within Muslim communities regarding these “areas of concern”. As we know, the history that we have never tells the whole story. The fact that we do have sources from very early on that speak of gender and sexual diversity, though, tells me that these people have existed in Muslim communities for as long as there have been Muslim communities, and that while we have likely been systematically underrepresented, misrepresented, or eliminated in the stories told, that there has always been room for diversity, ambiguity, and to an extent, non-conformity within Islam. I know that presently even within my few years of being a Muslim and the handful of years studying Islam beforehand, I have seen really an explosion in visibility and acknowledgement of LGBT, queer, nonbinary, asexual, and other stories of Muslims who may not necessarily fit within normative expectations for how a Muslim “ought to be”. So even where there may be silences or a lack of acknowledgement or support for us in our foundational texts (the Quran and the hadith/sunnah and other traditions that we are taught as being “Islamic”), Muslims are making inclusive spaces and communities, and we are going back and readdressing and rereading these texts and evaluating how we have almost always been fed the misogynistic, sexist, patriarchal interpretations as the “truth”. A few scholars/academics I can think of off the top of my head who are especially adept at offering these conversations include Kecia Ali, Scott Kugle, and Amina Wadud, certainly among many others, and it is definitely my belief and experience that “the average Muslim” is much more “progressive” or accepting than one may expect. 

I apologize for the long-winded and probably confusing and somewhat-off topic essay, but I sincerely hope that this has been of some help and that you receive the information which you are seeking!

[wintaer-bear]

How to Ace an Exam

Pairing: Reader x Park Jinyoung (GOT7) Theme/Genre: an appreciative love/fluff Rating: E, for everyone. Word Count: 716

You have had Jinyoung up for hours, caffeinated by your scent as it swells the room. He can’t help but scoot your body closer to his, whispering that the other side of the bed is just too far to be apart. A subtle grin emerges in your exhale and your body molds into the sudden radiance of heat he brings. Jinyoung, admiring your effortless sleep, thumbs across the petals of your two lips and, once more, he can’t help but usher his being closer to yours, this time, locking his smile with the key of your lips, a soft but quenching reminder of the genius you embody.

The potency of your proximity is intoxicating. Typically freshman look for adventure and fun in the form of shot glasses and red plastic cups, but Jinyoung has been too hung over the buzz that you entail to trust reaching his high in anything else. While classmates stay up until three drinking Bacardi, Jinyoung is already drunk at noon, detailing you with secrets he would never gamble with anyone else.

He wonders what college would be like if there was still storytime and show-and-tell, if that would beget more confusion or incline transparency. Jinyoung wonders what the day would look like if schools didn’t start until dawn; he wonders then if he could study the stars - the stars that present themselves in your glossed eyes. He could be the first to discover the galaxy that is you and all of your depth and constellations.

Jinyoung takes a deep breath, carried away by the philosophy of love. He has never felt anything as powerful as the words he writes on paper or reads in books. You are the fiction in his imagination that has been brought to life. He can’t help but stay up, in slight fear your presence will disappear in the night.

Tonight was supposed to be productive, a Sunday night reserved for going over notes and studying for tomorrow’s exam, Art 050: The Artistic Temperament. It’s a bogus class, in all its making; a seminar created solely for first year students to mitigate stress in their transition from petty high school children to responsible university scholars. Most of the students in attendance are in it for an “easy-A,” or to fulfill a broad range of gen-ed’s, but not you. You are the only one not taking the class as an elective.

The class focuses on advances and sustainment of artistic production while outlining the importance of creativity and effort in each successful venture. Jinyoung always finds it comical how the professor demands original and creative assessments at eight in the morning, before his brain is awake to articulate sentences. But he never misses a class. Every Tuesday and Thursday, he spends 75 minutes staring at the art of your profile, wondering, analyzing, interpreting. You would be a fool not to know, that Jinyoung is not a morning person. He is a you person.

It took him the better of four months and two failed exams before you could gather up the courage to ask you for some advice, an overall excuse to know your name. As gentlemanlike as he wanted to assume, he couldn’t help but stare at the way your hair fell off your face when you leaned in to help him create art; little knowing the best creation was taking life in the pit of his stomach, painting on the back of his eyelids, inhaled by each of your shared breaths. Somewhere along the way, the two of you had fallen in a deeper appreciation for each other than the painting in front of you.

Tomorrow will be the first exam since your private tutoring session, but instead of studying the eras or relaying textbook emotions, Jinyoung professes his own. Words of meaning and affection you had never heard before. You are a connoisseur of art but you are lost for words, searching for them at the tip of Jinyoung’s tongue. The hours pass by as minutes, and you fall asleep to the rhythmic beating of Jinyoung’s heartbeat as he pulls you close.

He should be worried, frightened at failing such an easy course, but somehow Jinyoung finds peace in his early morning thoughts. He figures, all he has to do to ace his exam, is write about you.

A/N: This is part of my collection: GOT7′s Extensive ‘How To Guide’ to Heartbreak 

[yasbxxgie]

In 1619, “20. and odd Negroes” arrived off the coast of Virginia, where they were “bought for victualle” by labor-hungry English colonists. The story of these captive Africans has set the stage for countless scholars and teachers interested in telling the story of slavery in English North America. Unfortunately, 1619 is not the best place to begin a meaningful inquiry into the history of African peoples in America. Certainly, there is a story to be told that begins in 1619, but it is neither well-suited to help us understand slavery as an institution nor to help us better grasp the complicated place of African peoples in the early modern Atlantic world. For too long, the focus on 1619 has led the general public and scholars alike to ignore more important issues and, worse, to silently accept unquestioned assumptions that continue to impact us in remarkably consequential ways. As a historical signifier, 1619 may be more insidious than instructive.

The overstated significance of 1619—still a common fixture in American history curriculum—begins with the questions most of us reflexively ask when we consider the first documented arrival of a handful of people from Africa in a place that would one day become the United States of America. First, what was the status of the newly arrived African men and women? Were they slaves? Servants? Something else? And, second, as Winthrop Jordan wondered in the preface to his 1968 classic, White Over Black, what did the white inhabitants of Virginia think when these dark-skinned people were rowed ashore and traded for provisions? Were they shocked? Were they frightened? Did they notice these people were black? If so, did they care?

In truth, these questions fail to approach the subject of Africans in America in a historically responsible way. None of these queries conceive of the newly-arrived Africans as actors in their own right. These questions also assume that the arrival of these people was an exceptional historical moment, and they reflect the worries and concerns of the world we inhabit rather than shedding useful light on the unique challenges of life in the early seventeenth century.

There are important historical correctives to the misplaced marker of 1619 that can help us ask better questions about the past. Most obviously, 1619 was not the first time Africans could be found in an English Atlantic colony, and it certainly wasn’t the first time people of African descent made their mark and imposed their will on the land that would someday be part of the United States. As early as May 1616, blacks from the West Indies were already at work in Bermuda providing expert knowledge about the cultivation of tobacco. There is also suggestive evidence that scores of Africans plundered from the Spanish were aboard a fleet under the command of Sir Francis Drake when he arrived at Roanoke Island in 1586. In 1526, enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. Those Africans launched a rebellion in November of that year and effectively destroyed the Spanish settlers’ ability to sustain the settlement, which they abandoned a year later. Nearly 100 years before Jamestown, African actors enabled American colonies to survive, and they were equally able to destroy European colonial ventures.

These stories highlight additional problems with exaggerating the importance of 1619. Privileging that date and the Chesapeake region effectively erases the memory of many more African peoples than it memorializes. The “from-this-point-forward” and “in-this-place” narrative arc silences the memory of the more than 500,000 African men, women, and children who had already crossed the Atlantic against their will, aided and abetted Europeans in their endeavors, provided expertise and guidance in a range of enterprises, suffered, died, and – most importantly – endured. That Sir John Hawkins was behind four slave-trading expeditions during the 1560s suggests the degree to which England may have been more invested in African slavery than we typically recall. Tens of thousands of English men and women had meaningful contact with African peoples throughout the Atlantic world before Jamestown. In this light, the events of 1619 were a bit more yawn-inducing than we typically allow.

Telling the story of 1619 as an “English” story also ignores the entirely transnational nature of the early modern Atlantic world and the way competing European powers collectively facilitated racial slavery even as they disagreed about and fought over almost everything else. From the early 1500s forward, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Dutch and others fought to control the resources of the emerging transatlantic world and worked together to facilitate the dislocation of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas. As historian John Thornton has shown us, the African men and women who appeared almost as if by chance in Virginia in 1619 were there because of a chain of events involving Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and England. Virginia was part of the story, but it was a blip on the radar screen.

These concerns about making too much of 1619 are likely familiar to some readers. But they may not even be the biggest problem with overemphasizing this one very specific moment in time. The worst aspect of overemphasizing 1619 may be the way it has shaped the black experience of living in America since that time. As we near the 400th anniversary of 1619 and new works appear that are timed to remember the “firstness” of the arrival of a few African men and women in Virginia, it is important to remember that historical framing shapes historical meaning. How we choose to characterize the past has important consequences for how we think about today and what we can imagine for tomorrow.

In that light, the most poisonous consequence of raising the curtain with 1619 is that it casually normalizes white Christian Europeans as historical constants and makes African actors little more than dependent variables in the effort to understand what it means to be American. Elevating 1619 has the unintended consequence of cementing in our minds that those very same Europeans who lived quite precipitously and very much on death’s doorstep on the wisp of America were, in fact, already home. But, of course, they were not. Europeans were the outsiders. Selective memory has conditioned us to employ terms like settlers and colonists when we would be better served by thinking of the English as invaders or occupiers. In 1619, Virginia was still Tsenacommacah, Europeans were the non-native species, and the English were the illegal aliens. Uncertainty was still very much the order of the day.

When we make the mistake of fixing this place in time as inherently or inevitably English, we prepare the ground for the assumption that the United States already existed in embryonic fashion. When we allow that idea to go unchallenged, we silently condone the notion that this place is, and always has been, white, Christian, and European.

Where does that leave Africans and people of African descent? Unfortunately, the same insidious logic of 1619 that reinforces the illusion of white permanence necessitates that blacks can only be, ipso facto, abnormal, impermanent, and only tolerable to the degree that they adapt themselves to someone else’s fictional universe. Remembering 1619 may be a way of accessing the memory and dignifying the early presence of black people in the place that would become the United States, but it also imprints in our minds, our national narratives, and our history books that blacks are not from these parts. When we elevate the events of 1619, we establish the conditions for people of African descent to remain, forever, strangers in a strange land.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We shouldn’t ignore that something worth remembering happened in 1619. There are certainly stories worth telling and lives worth remembering, but history is also an exercise in crafting narratives that give voice to the past in order to engage with the present. The year 1619 might seem long ago for people more attuned to the politics of life in the 21st century. But if we can do a better job of situating the foundational story of black history and the history of slavery in North America in its proper context, then perhaps we can articulate an American history that doesn’t essentialize notions of “us” and “them” (in the broadest possible and various understandings of those words). That would be a pretty good first step, and it would make it much easier to sink our teeth into the rich and varied issues that continue to roil the world today.

This story was originally published on Black Perspectives, an online platform for public scholarship on global black thought, history and culture.

[wanderingaffect]

Roaratorio: early morning reflection

Does 8am count as “early morning”? For me, it sure does!

I have been up since 6am with an active brain racing to type out project ideas lest I might lose them to the dream-world. This is not how I imagined my Saturday morning (the thought of sleeping-in was, and still is, appealing though that ship has sailed). I will use this quiet time to provide a small commentary on a cool event I attended this week. Though I type this from my bed, the light from the soon-to-be-spring morning ushers into my bedroom with an excitement that both inspires and makes me sad (for the possibility of sleep now feels far).

On Thursday evening, I went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for a program on John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s Roaratorio. A friend had shared this event via Facebook a few weeks ago and I was intrigued by its title and subject matter. Merce Cunningham is one of the most prolific choreographers of the 20th century and I've loved his work since I first encountered him through the Hunter College dance department some time in 2006/7. (I was still an infant in my relationship to modern/contemporary dance and his technique was incredibly challenging but fun. It was a brain/body puzzle that felt poetic and vaguely familiar.) Upon reading the brief description of the NYPL event, it was apparent that this work was one I had never seen or read about. The program title, Roaratorio: Cage and Cunningham's Irish Circus was enough to convince me into registering. It is the month of St. Patrick’s Day after all. My relationship to Irish culture has been complicated (particularly as a Staten Islander) and given how avant-garde and performative Cage/Cunningham’s work is, this felt an exciting context to celebrate a month so closely tied to Irish heritage and identity.

So, fun tidbit. I had absolutely no idea that this work was connected to James Joyce.

When I arrived just before the program started, an audio recording of James Joyce reading Finnegan’s Wake played overhead. I’ve never read FW save for a couple of pages over the years. But I am familiar with Joyce’s work (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my favorite books) enough to know that this evening would be rich with questions and fascinations. 

The program was moderated by an articulate librarian whose calm (almost quiet) interest in the subject was endearing. Accompanied by live performance, video and audio excerpts, was lively discussion with the Music Curator at NYPL/PA, several dancers from Cunnigham’s company (Lise Freidman, an original cast member, and Patricia Lent), and Nancy Dalva (Scholar in Residence at the Merce Cunningham Trust). Lent and Friedman were captivating as was Dalva. Their reflections on working with Merce and being involved in this piece’s creation helped me visualize the process of being in the studio with a master. Working with Merce seemed a lifetime experience, one that still shapes and informs who they are as artists. Dalva brought such a poetic beauty to interpreting Merce’s work. I hadn’t read anything by her but soon after found her blog* and now consider myself a fan. 

John Cage was compelled to create the radio play, Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake, at the prodding of Klaus Schöning*. He worked from the book which he claimed he “never” read but was always around (he eventually did read it along with supporting texts, but we all have those books that sit on the table or shelf for years... ones we really want to read but perhaps the timing just isn’t yet right). His score traces the feeling, places and poetics of FW through mesostics, a device Cage and Cunningham used throughout their work and relationship* (and one I hadn’t thought much about prior).

The most in depth part of the program was on Cunningham’s choreography* supported by the thoughtful panelists, photos of his notes, and video material. The panel discussed his use of Irish dance steps, such as the jig, within his avant-garde 20th-century dance context. I always associate Cunningham with a balletic core but can now see traces of Irish movement in his vocabulary -- the upright spine (that then pushes off-balance), articulation and quickness of the feet, angularity of the arms, precision of jumps and lifts, all seem reminiscent of Irish dance. Or, at least for the night. 

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Toward the end, the moderator referenced something Merce wrote or said on his own aesthetic inclinations and how Joyce appealed to them. He mentioned fragmentation, collage, simultaneity, and the deconstruction of language. How very Joycean. These are all compelling to me as an artist and curator. These “poetic devices” (for lack of a better word) offer worlds of possibility in the creation and interpretation of a work. There is so much in Roaratorio that remains a mystery. I hope to one day see it performed live (a girl can dream, can’t she?).

This leaves me at a quote by John Cage that was cited within the program (I hope I get this right because I was scribbling down as much as a could): I myself enjoy things as long as they stay mysterious to me. This quote coupled with the poetic devices mentioned above, get at the fundamentals of what makes art interesting. The mystery, the unknown/unsaid--the space between. It is within that space that we make our own meaning (and get to argue about it after!).

End Notes: -Roaratorio: an Irish circus on Finnegan’s Wake (John Cage) was composed in 1979 for a radio series for Klaus Schöning of West German Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaratorio 

-The librarian showed us an archival page from Cage, a mesostic from Finnegan’s Wake using the words “Inlet/Travelogue.” Patricia Lent later pointed out that Inlets and Travelogue were pieces Merce worked on in the 1970′s, around the time Cage was working on this project. She also noted that they used mesostics in their letters and notes to each other. She mused that this could have even been a potential birthday note he was working on for Merce, which I found super endearing.

-Roaratorio, choreographed by Merce Cunningham to Cage’s radio play, was completed in 1983. https://www.mercecunningham.org/the-work/choreography/roaratorio/

-The video excerpt is from Brooklyn Academy of Music’s YouTube channel, from the 2011 presentation of Roaratorio as part of BAM Next Wave. I wish I saw it then but had no idea! I want to note that the costumes and lighting are so evocative (of what? I don’t know just yet!). I love them! Never read much into the element of costume in Cunningham’s work as I was more concerned with the choreography and structure but find myself thinking about it at present.

-Nancy Dalva’s website/blog: http://www.nancydalva.com 

[cccto-semi-pro]

Week 24: Eccelsiastes

1 . Daily Reading for Week

Proverbs 22-24, Psalm 5

Proverbs 25-27, Psalm 6

Proverbs 28-31, Psalm 7

Ecclesiastes 1-4, Psalm 8

Ecclesiastes 5-8, Psalm 9  

Ecclesiastes 9-12, Psalm 10  

Song of Songs 1-4, Psalm 11

Resources for Week

Read Scripture Video: Ecclesiastes

Read: Ecclesiastes 9:1-10 and Ecclesiastes 12

2. FOCUS OF TIME TOGETHER

To hear the unique perspective that Ecclesiastes offers, compare the different worldviews presented to us in the Wisdom Literature, and receive Ecclesiastes’ invitation to reflect on our life and death.

3. CONNECTION AND UNITY EXERCISE (MUTUAL INVITATION)

In one minute, share a time in your life that felt particularly meaningful or meaningless.

4. OPENING PRAYER

Read Psalm 90 together.

5. INTRO TO DISCUSSION

Read Scripture Video: Ecclesiastes

Read: Ecclesiastes 9:1-10 and Ecclesiastes 12

“If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:32

The Book of Ecclesiastes is one of the most confounding and strange books in the entire Bible. It’s constant refrain of “meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless” seems to stand in contrast to the rest of the narrative of Scripture (which suggests that humanity was created by a loving God for a purpose, and the things we do in this life deeply matter). What are we to make then of such a different perspective and odd book as Ecclesiastes? There are two distinct voices in Ecclesiastes: Qohelet, which is typically translated as “Teacher,” whose teachings are presented in Ecclesiastes 1:12-12:7, and a second wise man who introduces Qohelet’s teachings at the beginning (1:1-11) and offers comments at the end (12:8-14). The thrust of Qohelet’s teaching can be summed up by the above Nas lyrics and verse from 1 Corinthians. Basically, life is hard and then you die, so carpe diem, because death will swallow the wise and the foolish alike. Yes, there are better ways to live than others, and we should be aware that God gave us life and He rules the universe, but ultimately we all will die. It is a shockingly nihilistic sentiment. Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, suggests Qohelet is a “literary persona of a radical philosopher articulating… a powerful dissent from the mainline Wisdom outlook that is the background of his thought.”

Qohelet’s famous opening words “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless” are regularly repeated and eventually close his teachings, and they beautifully encapsulate his message. In Hebrew, the word translated “meaningless” is “hevel” and literally refers to the thin, flimsy vapor that comes out of your mouth on a cold or foggy day before immediately disappearing. “Hevel” stands in contrast to the Hebrew word “ruah” or life-breath, the eternal substance that God breathed into humanity in Genesis 1-2. Qohelet’s suggestion is that not only is life meaningless but it is insubstantial, elusive, and ultimately quickly forgotten. True, there is some temporary meaning and substance to life, but as the beautiful and haunting Ecclesiastes 12:1-8 poetically suggests, God gifts us with a short, fleeting life. Our bodies will decay and we will grow old and die.

This leaves us with an interesting dilemma. Are we to take Qohelet’s message at face value and live as if life is ultimately meaningless? Do we hold his teachings alongside the other wisdom literature as well as the prophets and Torah which suggest that our lives are not insubstantial “hevel” but that God has breathed his “ruah” into humanity and given us a purpose? Much of your interpretation of Ecclesiastes will depend on how you view the closing verses of the book. In Ecclesiastes 12:9-14, we find another wise man (NOT Qohelet) suggesting to his son,

  “Now all has been heard;    here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments,    for this is the duty of all mankind.  For God will bring every deed into judgment,    including every hidden thing,    whether it is good or evil.”

Some scholars believe this closing section is a pious attempt to deflect readers from the potentially uncomfortable skepticism and nihilism consistently repeated throughout the book. Other scholars, such as our recent lecturer Tremper Longman, believe this section at the end of book is the ultimate message of Ecclesiastes. Yes, life is hard and yes, you will die. In light of this, fear God and keep his commandments. Regardless of how you interpret its closing, Ecclesiastes is a beautifully original book that invites us into deep contemplation about God, life, purpose, meaning, reality, and our place in it.

6. LARGE GROUP DISCUSSION

Questions for Basic Understanding:

These questions are to help us interpret and understand the text as it was intended to be interpreted and understood.

Think back to the other Wisdom Literature books we have read:

As a group, try to sum up Job’s message/perspective.

Next, sum up the message/perspective of the Proverbs.

Finally, have someone sum up the message/perspective of Ecclesiastes.

Why do you think these three different perspectives are presented alongside each other in the Old Testament?

Questions for Listening to Scripture:

These questions are to help us be affected by Scripture in the way it was intended to affect us.

When you hear Qohelet’s repeated refrain of “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless!” how do you respond?

Ecclesiastes, and especially the beautiful poem about dying in chapter 12, invite readers to reflect on the seeming futility of life and inevitability of death. How might thinking about these things invite us into interaction and dialogue with God?

Questions for Interacting with Scripture:

These questions are to help us slow down to taste and notice Scripture, savor its richness, and meditate on its complexity of meaning.

When you read Ecclesiastes, do you find its nihilism depressing, strangely comforting, or both?

How might “meaningless, meaningless” coexist with the rest of the story of Scripture, which says our lives are deeply meaningful to God? How have you seen this tension lived out as you reflect on your own life?

7. SMALL GROUP DISCUSSION

Questions for Self Examination:

These questions are to help us look at ourselves, be aware and honest about who we are in light of our interaction with Scripture, and consider any appropriate action.

Sit for 3-5 minutes in silent prayer. Imagine that you are seventy-five years old and dying. See the events of your life flash before you.

For what are you grateful?

What would you hope would have been true of your life?

What do you wish you had done differently?

Pay special attention to the years between your present age and your death.

Does the Book of Ecclesiastes offer you anything as you imagine these things?

Share your responses with one another.

10. CLOSING

End your time together by offering a prayer that confides in God about aspects of life that feel meaningless. But also in your prayer, seek to articulate hope, bringing to God the things from your small-group reflection time which you hope will be true of your life.

For example: “God, I acknowledge the way ___ feels meaningless, and I turn to you in hope for beauty and purpose in ___.”