#when he absorbs a soul it basically 'revitalizes' him

[startistdoodles]

I've a question about how Morpho Knight works. Does he accumulate power and abilities with each soul he absorbs, growing ever stronger, or is his power level dictated by what he uses to take form?

I don't think he necessarily gets stronger with every soul since he is already super powerful as is, but he can gain new abilities based on the soul he absorbs.

[lenbryant]

Dance fans. Another biography to add to our reading queue: "Mr. B." A life of George Balanchine.

A New Biography of George Balanchine, Ballet’s Colossus“Mr. B,” by Jennifer Homans, explores the life of the Russian-born choreographer, as well as the beauty and pains of his art.

Published Oct. 31, 2022, Updated Nov. 14, 2022MR. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, by Jennifer Homans Opera is all about saying goodbye, Virgil Thomson is reputed to have said, and ballet is all about saying hello.In “Mr. B,” a sensitive, stately and often thrilling new biography of the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, Jennifer Homans finds a bittersweet tone to capture Balanchine’s many leave-takings — the way he was chased, as if he were Chaplin’s Tramp, across the first half of the 20th century.When World War I arrived, Balanchine was a young dance student in czarist Russia. Three years later, at 13, he was forced to scavenge for food when the revolution disrupted his life. He spent the interwar years shuffling between Weimar Berlin, before Hitler put an end to that decadent and creative intellectual milieu, and Paris, Monte Carlo and London.He fled for America before World War II. 

He taught ballet and choreographed for Broadway and Hollywood before, alongside the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, he founded what would become in 1948 the New York City Ballet, America’s de facto national ballet company. There he almost single-handedly revitalized the language of an increasingly brittle and conservative art form.Homans’s book, as these details suggest, plays out in widescreen — as if it’s being projected, “Doctor Zhivago”-style, in 35-millimeter in one of those now-extinct, airplane hangar-size theaters in Midtown. 

There are two intermissions, in the form of generous photo inserts.For all its somber goodbyes, “Mr. B” (as his dancers called him) is light on its toes. It keeps finding fresh ways to say hello. For a big book, nearly 800 pages, it’s notably tactile. 

Homans is the dance critic of The New Yorker and the author of “Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet” (2010). She’s also a former professional dancer, trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet.Her dance background matters. “Mr. B” has a scuffed and well-rosined sense of dance at floor level: the discipline, pain, injuries and exhaustion, the aching tendons and joints and ligaments, that lurk beneath an art form that seeks to transcend all traces of that agony.Homans pauses, regularly, to deposit us directly into a classroom or onto a stage. We’re right beside Balanchine, for example, when he starts class at his first ballet school, absorbing the oldest lessons.

First position, heels together, toes open, hand on the barre to steady the unbalanced body, arms down, back straight up through the spine, shoulders relaxed and wide, belly button pulled to the vertebrae, bones aligned. Release the excess, muscles wrapped around flesh, simplify, simplify, simplify. It is basic: Find the axis. Drop a plumb line from the top of the head down through the spine into the heels in first position, divide the body down this center, right from left. Turn out the legs, turn out the feet, turn out the hips, turn out the spine.Physical details drift unfussily toward the metaphysical. About dancing under Balanchine’s tutelage, Homans writes:Dancing pared the body, honed the musculature, subtly shifted bones. 

Training was transformation, and working with Balanchine involved a kind of metamorphosis entangled with pain, self-destruction and shame, but also with desire and joy. External form could even harmonize a fractured inner life, at least in the moment of dancing. It didn’t erase a person’s faults or dull her anxieties, but it did hold out the promise of a more ordered soul. At peak the dancer felt fluid and strong, integrated, coordinated, and above all clarified. Less mass and less food clogging the system (more blood to muscles) added to the feeling of the body as “true light” and a well-lubricated machine. 

Even the salty sweat purged through the ritual exercise of daily class felt like an unburdening, a purification that set a dancer apart from her unholy and civilian self. She was a different creature, part of a tribe, a chosen member of art.This isn’t the first life of Balanchine. Robert Gottlieb published a short, avuncular one in 2004; Terry Teachout published a short, less avuncular one that same year. There’s Bernard Taper’s intimate 1963 biography, based on many interviews with Balanchine. But, 10 years in the making, Homan’s book feels like the first full-dress life.It’s based on a battery of interviews, including nearly 200 alone with Balanchine’s former dancers, whom as a group Homans refers to as “unusually eccentric and fascinating” and “forbiddingly tight-knit.” Many have written memoirs of their own (Suzanne Farrell, Bettijane Sills, Merrill Ashley and Toni Bentley, among them), most of which are largely fond.

Sam Falk/The New York TimesBalanchine (1904-83) was born in St. Petersburg to unwed parents. His father, the Georgian opera singer and composer Meliton Balanchivadze, seems to have come more fully into the family’s life after young George’s mother, Maria, won the state lottery. George’s older sister, Tamara, was supposed to be the dancer. But when she was taken to audition for the venerable Imperial Theater School, George was chosen instead. The family dumped him there, as if at a forbidding prep school.

Balanchine is an unusual subject for what critics like to call, and I’ll go there, a magisterial biography. He was a shy, somewhat receding figure. He had a facial tic, a nervous fluttering under one eye, that got him called “the rat” as a child. He was of average size, though he had strong hands from the piano and his fondness for gardening and other outdoor work.He had tuberculosis as a young man and could seem frail. He was a bit of a loner. Homans refers to his “inverse charisma, a quiet inner certainty.” He had the detachment, she writes, of a survivor. He seemed to live primarily though his dancers. He had fine, dark, melancholy features that made him irresistible to women.In her novel “A Feather on the Breath of God” (1995), which contains some of the most intuitive writing I’m aware of about ballet, Sigrid Nunez says that there are times when it seems to her that “ballet was about nothing but sex.” Nunez compares toe shoes to erections; a dancer’s tutu is “a frilly target board with her crotch for bull’s-eye.”Homans spends a lot of time on, circling and circling again, Balanchine and women and sex and power. 

He married four times, always to dancers, and lived with a fifth in a common-law marriage. It’s well known that he had affairs with many of his principal dancers — nearly all of them swan-necked, long-waisted, with improbable wingspans — and he played favorites. His stormy relationship with Farrell is among this book’s most gripping set pieces. As he grew older, the age gaps widened.Was he a monster? Homans lays out the facts like a prosecutor — there were abortions — but hesitates to break him on a wheel. Balanchine was more interested in teaching his dancers how to live, she suggests, than in sleeping with them, and they responded to him. She writes that he was vastly more loved than feared.

They did not complain, not then, not later. They weren’t looking for consistency or high moral character. They didn’t expect the man to live up to his art; and they didn’t ask him to be as beautiful, sad, joyous, erotic or strange as his dances; didn’t assume that because he dealt with matters of the soul, his own soul would be clear or settled. The question didn’t arise in part because they — at least the ones who lasted — were ruthless too. Had to be. At some level, they accepted it all, which is perhaps why even those who were most hurt overwhelmingly defend him. Working with him and dancing his ballets was quite simply the most powerful experience of their lives.Homans rejects the notion that the New York City Ballet was a cult, but it was certainly cultlike. 

He shopped for his favorite dancers, dressed them, bought them signature perfumes, got them photographed by Vogue, showed them the world. They felt, Homans implies, he’d handed them tickets to the rest of their lives.

The author immerses herself in other difficult subjects, notably the painful thinness that Balanchine required of his dancers (he posted a handwritten sign that read: “BEFORE YOU GET YOUR PAY — YOU MUST WEIGH!), and the company’s paucity of Black female dancers. Balanchine revered Black dance and borrowed from it. He was a pioneer in terms of staging interracial duets. But he did not push hard enough, and the company, all these decades later, remains painfully monochromatic.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who did not speak English well, learned he could get through an evening in America by alternating two phrases: “Scotch and soda” and “Why not?” When Balanchine arrived in America in 1933, he knew three phrases: “OK kid,” “scram” and “one swell guy.”He had a liberal mind but, given his experience with communism, a conservative gut. 

He learned to love good food and nice hotels, but otherwise he did not keep track of, or care about, money. He disliked wealthy people and had few material possessions. He didn’t write things down. Many of his dances are lost to time. He did little planning for New York City Ballet’s future.

“Mr. B” is a serious act of cultural retrieval, by a writer who knows when to expand and when to collapse, who makes unexpected connections, and who knows when her subject pinches, borrows or steals. The critic, historian and dancer in Homans are nearly always in sync.

There are long sections, more interesting than they might be, on the making of his best ballets, and his worst. I doubt I’m alone in thinking that if I have to sit through “Stars and Stripes” again, I’ll leap from the fourth ring.

In 1971 his ballet “PAMTGG,” based on the advertising jingle “Pan Am Makes the Going Great,” premiered in Manhattan. Homans calls it “maybe the worst ballet he ever made.” The N.Y.C.B. should consider restaging it; it might become a perennial cult hit, a “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” and demonstrate that the company has a sense of humor.

His best ballets were and are, Homans writes, “fantastic entertainments that lifted audiences into the great good humor of being alive.” They’re still saying hello.

MR. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century∫ | By Jennifer Homans | Illustrated | 769 pp. | Random House | $40

[lambourngb]

Get me out of here - places to go when canon is complicated

It’s Day 3, time to celebrate those stories that I turn to when I can’t deal with canon, or when I don’t have the emotional energy to untangle all the emotions I have for what’s going on in canon. Alternative universes, the safe harbor for us. Below are a mix of rewrites of canon, remixes of canon, or out right not even set in Roswell- to fill every type distance you want from canon- from near to far.

The first story I’m reccing is a long one,- so pardon the very long review below.

my love is a life taker by @jocarthage (267,600) So one day, Jessi popped into discord to share a dream she had about timetravel and being able to save yourself in the past basically, particularly Alex getting to give his baby-self a hug, and we all went, “holy shit that’s a cool fic idea please write it!” and really reality sucks right now with quarantine and whatnot, so what better thing to do than follow a WIP? I can’t tell you how badly I needed to something to look forward to as I was staring down a milestone birthday with all my plans in tatters, and this story filled the void.

Okay- now about the actual story itself, the world building about time travel in this is incredible but easy to absorb. Jessi dumps you straight into the action in chapter 1 with Alex, at 28, assassinating an Iraqi intelligence agent in 2009 that averts a bomb that was planned on US forces. You learn so much about both the story-universe and Alex here- one, that even dressed in mask and killing someone, Alex is kind and uses morphine as an overdose and has arranged for his victim’s family to be compensated, you learn that time agents can only visit places they themselves have visited during that time, and Jesse Manes had dragged his son, who was ‘time aware’ to every place of war and ruin on the planet before he was 18 and that, Alex’s victim, even as he’s dying, recognizes what a shit childhood Alex had but that Alex doesn’t.

The next part is where Alex’s time crystal malfunctions, instead of returning him to 2018, it takes him to 1998 where an 8 year old Michael is getting beaten by his foster dad and Alex, out of his time line mysteriously, visible to only Michael, saves him, but only temporarily. We all know with abusers, until you’re out of the house, it’s just a matter of time before the next beating. However, with one act, Alex at 28 starts putting into action (even though he doesn’t recognize it at the time) the steps to save his own life as he works to save Michael from his childhood. Each mission, each jump through time, Alex meets Michael, always a year apart and only for 1000 seconds, or almost 17 minutes. Jessi takes you through some of the darkest points of US foreign policy, only as Alex takes control of his life, he also starts to change the missions, and change the world. The details of places, people, food, etc are authentic from the author’s experience, if you don’t click on the links at the end of the chapters and disappear down google-rabbit holes about the events in history, well- you’re made of stronger stuff than I am.  There are lots of heavy subjects discussed, but there’s always care and honesty behind the intent. The way Michael grows, the way Alex grows, and of course the journey to the present time when they could be together? It’s like pining on steroids but it’s so wonderful. I wish I could pull out one thing that I loved in particular in this story- but it’s impossible, only to say that I love that I could disappear completely within the confines of ‘my love is a life taker’ knowing that I would be kept safe by the author, that goodness prevails.


when I’m oceans away by @neapeaikea (28,000) this is a post-2008 shed canon-divergent AU where Alex Manes, after the best/worst night of his life bolts from Roswell and leaves Michael behind. 10 years later, on the hunt for a child conceived at Caulfield, Michael walks into a youth home in California and finds Alex. A few things, I love that this author writes an Alex who didn’t join the Air Force but still lost a leg, I don’t really enjoy disability erasure in modern AUs (I’m better at looking past that in historical or sci fi aus) . It’s pretty clear after five minutes that the connection between the two men is still there and strong despite anger, secrets and guilt. The teasing and flirting between them is great but so is the acceptance of baring their vulnerabilities. I loved the care they take with each other, and the tie in to an alien child is just so perfect.

Crucibles (series) @ninswhimsy (9,000)- I’m cheating and naming both here, but obviously nin had her finger on the pulse of fandom, by writing crusade-set queer stories before The Old Guard ever boomed into a fandom from the movie. I was lucky enough to trade DMs over the ideas of holiness and the body, and how Alex would have treated himself, certain of his doomed soul, and how Michael would have responded in turn. It’s no secret I love everything Nin writes, but this series stuck in my mind. I will be drifting off to sleep, and think about Alex walking through the ancient city of Aleppo, ready to be done with his burden and Michael there with soft palms and scented oil, and boom! I reach for my kindle to re-read it.

no regrets if we walk this new road by @andrea-lyn (97,000) This author has written so many amazing AUs, some quite far away from canon events like her Mummy AU or her Avengers AU, but I have to say, I have a very soft-spot for this rewrite of season 1 for a lot of reasons. I mean, it’s 2020, so my appetite for Cop!Max is definitely at an all-time low, so the idea of exchanging his job with Kyle’s was extremely appealing. At least Kyle is a POC holding the badge, not a white man like our canon. Anyway, politics aside, this story is special to me for the scorching good Isobel/Kyle relationship that develops, the way Isobel sharpens herself into a lawyer (not an event planner) and how Michael rounds his own edges off in turn by becoming a teacher (and being secretly married).  Each deviation from canon made complete sense once you alter the way Rosa’s death affects the pod squad, and how they covered it up ripples out toward Liz, Kyle, etc. 


Layer on layer, down on down by @dotsayers (9,440) I love sci-fi tropes, especially time-loops, but they are incredibly hard to write (I know, I abandoned mine a while ago) so this story stands out because of just how well done the execution is and also the angst. Michael in a time loop about Caulfield, like how great/agonizing is that? The plot is so good, how it ties into Caulfield and why it happens in the first place, like wow.  The care, and the hurt, and the fatigue that Michael has in this story, oh you just want to wrap him in a blanket. There’s a tiny throwaway line about how one of the first things Michael learned to do in foster care was to make himself heavy and unmovable- and you instantly picture kid!Michael not wanting to be removed from a house - like my heart broke! The structure of the story, with the background of his just how much he loves Alex but how badly it hurts to see him die, really makes this study of 1x12 special. Along with all the angst, there’s tiny gallows humor lines, so am I weird, that I laughed through a couple of these scenes even as Michael kept dying?

Petty pace by @aewriting (11,600) Aewriting has a couple of stellar AUs, so trying to pick just one was difficult, but I rather feel this story is sadly underappreciated it (mind the tags). It was a remix of @iwontbeyourmedicine ‘s fantastic ‘Freaky Friday’, where the humans and aliens swap roles. Alex in the role of Michael basically was something I had never pictured until Ly wrote that story, and now feel utterly changed by it, especially with this backstory- the idea of Jesse Manes bringing a foster child home? Incredibly well done because there’s an off the charts level of menace in this story. The way Jesse watches Alex, who at first mistakes it for how a pedophile might size up a victim, but then catches on quickly that it’s so much worse in a lot of ways. And Alex is such a loner in the beginning, even as he reconnects with his pod siblings Liz and Maria, he’s still planning on keeping his head down and leaving Roswell far behind. Like freedom is literally the only thing he can conceive of for himself, no real dreams outside of that until Michael slips under his defenses. I probably could have saved this story for angst day- because the second half of the story, if you don’t sob while you read it, then I dunno. It’s helpful to read Ly’s story right afterward as a reminder that things do get better for Alex ten years later. In a lot of ways this story is sadder than canon (though there’s no murder of Rosa/4th alien), I’m comforted that at least Alex has Liz in the aftermath, alike in heartache in a way that Michael didn’t have because of the pact he and Max made about Isobel in canon.

Unexpected tidings by @bestillmyslashyheart (24,800) Another rewrite of canon, that explores a couple of very interesting questions, like what would it look like if Michael never made it back to Roswell as a kid but met Alex by chance in 2008? Imagine the cornerstone of the Lost Decade love affair revolving around the mundane questions of a long distance relationship that wasn’t built on the pain of the shed or Rosa’s death? Marlo writes an amazing take on this, that is both real and deep with the normal couple problems, before introducing that spanner in the works of oh yeah, aliens are real. With Michael on the east coast, and Alex finishing off his service in Roswell, Project Shepherd still entangles Alex with Liz bringing him in on the secret in hopes that with his hacker skills he can track down the third alien child that Max and Iz remember so they can warn him. As interesting as the current plot was, I found myself absolutely revitted the slow piecemeal reveals that Marlo doled out about Alex and Michael’s relationship over time. (I also while rereading this recently got very nostaglic for season 1 Alex who didn’t trust Jesse as far as he could toss him.) 

Don’t Punish Me For What I Feel by @winged-fool (3,600) Tarsus IV AU - another wonderful author with a catalog of great AUs, both sci-fi and dark, and honestly it was difficult to narrow it down to one. This story, well in 2009 I was a hard core Trek movie fan, so when I saw a trek-fusion story appear, I knew I would love it just on that basis. The thing is, this gave me Michael as the Captain, a surprisingly rare role for these space fusions, even though genius level repeat offender Jim Kirk and genius level repeat offender Michael Guerin seems pretty married in my mind as a connection. As a Tarsus-like story, all the tags are well earned by the story that Alex finally shares with Michael. It hit on so many levels, the hurt/comfort level for sure, but also to have a story where Michael is this stalwart protector of Alex was really nice to find. 

this isn’t the ‘holiday best friends championship’ by @usbournejez (6,090) alright to leave this on a lighter note, my final AU rec is this masterpiece by Kieran that was part of Malex Secret Santa gift fics- and what a gift it was to all of us! The way she writes established Malex is first-rate, because she always includes their canon-levels of snark/sharpness but it’s never directed at each other and that’s something I love. Here we have Alex, where we learn in just a few short lines, is a huge control freak but has the extremely big emotional handicap, and that’s his love/fondness/deserve to caretake Michael. Emotional cactus Alex who is soft for Michael? Love it. There are small drops of angsty backstory peppered in this, but really that just fuels just how sweet and wonderful the main theme of the story- which is Alex might hate the whole world at large, he loves, protects and worships Michael (and vice versa). As someone who can bake cookies, but that’s about it, I was still enthralled with the baking details and this story has never failed to encourage me to eat dessert before dinner basically. 

[risalei-nur]

TAFSIR: Risale-i Nur: The Words Collection:The Twenty Seventh Word.Part 1

Ijtihad in Islamic jurisprudence 

The Prophet’s Companions 

NOTE: To put in their place those who overstep the limits in this matter, the following treatise on ijtihad is included here at the request of two of my brothers. 

In the Name of God, the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate. 

If they would but refer it to the Messenger and those with authority among them, certainly those who are capable of deductions among them would know it and bring it to light. (4:83) 

The door to ijtihad is open, but six obstacles block the way to it.

Six obstacles 

FIRST OBSTACLE:DURING A WINTER STORM OR A FLOOD, WHEN EVEN smaller holes are closed, to open new and larger ones is unreasonable. Likewise, under the onslaught of a mighty flood, making openings in a wall to repair it leads to being drowned. So, at this time of the un-Islamic and even anti-Islamic practices, the onslaught of customs from Europe, the legion of religious innovations and the destruction of misguidance, to open new holes and invasion routes in the citadel of Islam in the name of ijtihad is a crime against Islam.

SECOND OBSTACLE: The essentials of Islam are not subject to ijtihad. They are specified and definite, and are like basic food and sustenance without which life is impossible. At present, they are abandoned and neglected. We must strive to restore and revitalize them with all our strength. The principles which early generations of Islam established for deduction of new rules from the main legal sources and the rules they deduced with perfect authority and pure intention are adequate for almost all times and places. Therefore, abandoning them and seeking new ones in an indulgent and fanciful fashion is a harmful innovation and a betrayal of Islam. 

THIRD OBSTACLE: Various products are sought in the marketplace according to season and demand. This is also true of humanity’s social life and civilization as well. For example, in our age people seek to secure their worldly life and pursue philosophy and politics, and so the demand for those “products” increases. Attention is given to them and minds are preoccupied with them. However, during the early generations of Islam, the most sought-after “product” was learning from the Word of the Creator of the heavens and the earth what He approves of and wants from us, and how to obtain eternal happiness in the world of the Hereafter, the doors of which had been opened so widely by the light of Prophethood and the Qur’an that they could not be closed.

At that time, all minds, hearts, and souls were focused on understanding the things approved of by the Lord of the heavens and the earth. All conversations, discussions, correspondences, and events were devoted to that point. Therefore, whoever had the capacity was naturally and automatically taught by the ethos of the time. It was as if everything were a teacher that prepared one’s mind and soul, and developed one’s capacity for ijtihad. Such a natural and automatic kind of teaching was so enlightening that one could engage in ijtihad almost without requiring the necessary formal education. With a match-like capacity ready to ignite, such a person displayed the meaning of “light upon light” and quickly became a mujtahid (a practitioner of ijtihad).

But now European civilization is dominant. We face naturalistic philosophy’s heavy pressure, and the conditions of modern life scatter our minds and hearts and divide our efforts and cares. Our minds are estranged from spiritual issues. Thus even if one was as intelligent as Sufyan ibn Uyayna, a great mujtahidwho memorized the Qur’an at the age of 4 and later held discussions with scholars, in contrast with the time of Sufyan, one would now need ten times longer to become a mujtahid. If Sufyan became qualified to perform ijtihad in ten years, we would need a hundred years. This is because Sufyan’s natural study began at the age of reason. His capacity developed gradually, was sharpened, and reached the degree where he could learn from everything. In the end, he became like a match (ready to ignite and give light).

As for his counterparts in our own time, our capacity has grown too dull to qualify for being a mujtahid. Our thoughts are absorbed in philosophy, our minds preoccupied with politics, and our hearts giddy with worldly life. We have removed our faculties from ijtihad to the degree of our preoccupation with modern sciences, and have remained backward in regard to it to the extent that we have concentrated on physical and worldly matters. Therefore we cannot say: “I am as intelligent as him. Why can’t I be on a level with him?” We have no right to say this, and we cannot be on the same level as Sufyan.

FOURTH OBSTACLE: A living body has an inherent tendency to expand and grow. Since this tendency is inherent in or comes from within the body, it serves for the body’s development and perfection. If this tendency is an external intervention, it will tear up the body’s skin and destroy it; it is not a growth and development. Similarly, if, like the pious, righteous early generations, those who have entered the sphere of Islam through the door of perfect piety, righteousness and God’s consciousness, and conform to Islam’s essentials strictly have the inclination to expand and the desire to engage in ijtihad, it is a virtue and serves for perfection. But this inclination and desire in those who neglect Islam’s essentials, prefer the world over the afterlife, and occupy themselves with materialistic philosophy destroys Islam’s body and leads to breaking away from the Shari‘a.