#you could have reflected if the protagonist actually HAD any class consciousness or if she didn't mind as long as SHE wasn't porr

[zevranunderstander]

A thing ive been thinking about for years and years and years is. The Selection (you know those really mid hunger games ripoff books that everyone keeps joking about) has a core premise that is actually quite different and unique from hunger games and you could have gone off the hinges with this if you weren't an absolute centrist coward, with milquetoast, unreflected politics. but now I can't write this book that I am seeing in this story because I can't just rip off the premise of the book, you know??

[the-black-birb]

Love in Time Analysis

I wrote this instead of writing an English essay. Enjoy!

Tsukishima and the Reader Character are Foils for One Another – and how that affects their love life

In writing, a foil refers to when one-character shows contrasting qualities of another in order to highlight said qualities. Most often this is between a major and minor character or a protagonist and antagonist, but in this case, we see it between the two major characters.

Love in Time revolves around the contrast between Tsukishima and the Reader’s character traits. In the beginning it is fairly straightforward: the Reader stands up for their friends while Tsukishima constantly puts them down. This is further exemplified in their first meeting: the Reader is helping out Yachi because she is Kenma’s friend and Tsukishima dreads even being with her. This begins the first conflict between the Reader and Tsukishima, in which their differences clash with one another. However, it also highlights a surprising similarity. Both of them appear unafraid of confrontation. This is seen repetitively with Tsukishima’s character: he makes snide remarks on his friend’s posts and is not afraid to tell them what he thinks. But the first time we see this with the Reader is when they first meet Tsukishima in person at their apartment and she calls him out for being generally rude to her friends. In this way, both Tsukishima and the Reader are different from their friends. While they’ve created a whole chat dedicated to keeping an eye on Tsukishima, none of his friends have approached him about his destructive behavior. Similarly, Kenma and Kuroo despite knowing there are problems with Y/N’s situation, never ask them about it. In this, we see Tsukishima and the Reader are set apart from the people around them.

The ‘meet cute’ with the Reader and Tsukishima at his apartment is what truly sets the story in motion. One could argue ‘wasn’t it the first meeting in the art class?’ because that’s when their interactions first began. However, it’s the Reader’s actions at this point that cause Tsukishima to change. Before that, their interactions were coincidences of little consequence, but it is this moment that Tsukishima finally gets his head out of his ass. But why is that?

It’s later established that Tsukishima struggles deeply with insecurities about his college major and path in life, and because of that he shut his friends out. But this wasn’t a decision he made consciously. As he was eaten up by insecurities, he thought that surely everyone around him must be happier than him and chose to put them down. His issues don’t excuse his actions, and the Reader is the one who makes him aware of this in pointing it out to him. The Reader was simply the first person who had the guts to say something to him about it, because all of his friends before that were too consumed with worry that mentioning it might set him off. Because the Reader had only known him since he’d started college, they were able to see him from a broader perspective. And from that perspective, he was a dick.

This obviously causes a greater conflict and disparity between Tsukishima and the Reader with no end in sight and that is where the Ginger incident solves things. In a moment of vulnerability, the Reader relies on Tsukishima for reasons out of their control. Although neither of them wanted to be with each other, they were forced to nonetheless. By being with one another in this moment of vulnerability, it is once again a catalyst for change. Unlike beforehand, where the Reader’s comments caused Tsukki to reflect on his own actions different, now they view each other in a different light. It doesn’t excuse their earlier conflicts, as we see they still don’t get along with each other entirely, but it is a pathway for greater change. That is why when Tsukishima tries to ‘apologize’ for his first comments to the Reader, the Reader believes his apology is sincere even if he doesn’t really say “sorry.”

From here on out, the initial conflict between Tsukishima and the Reader is solved. They don’t really have issues with one another, but they’re still unfamiliar and that makes them awkward. They gain a semblance of friendship; Tsukishima goes with the other guys to visit the Reader while they’re in the art studio and it’s hinted that they have other conversations we aren’t privy to. However, it’s at this point that Tsukishima’s inner conflict with himself comes to light and the use of these two characters, the Reader and Tsukishima, as a foil for one another really begins to make sense.

At the root of Tsukishima’s problems is his fear of having a career that makes him miserable. To Tsukishima, this means he wants to play it safe and take a job where he knows he will make money. He’s always been condescending and of high intellect so he expects it of himself to be better than those around him. However, when he hit college that was proven wrong. Many of his friends are more successful than him, not only in terms of their career but in other ambitions as well. Tadashi and Yachi live together, and no one has any doubt that they will get married. His best friend has managed to find a partner for life and it’s mentioned that he also has a new job. Akaashi is incredibly successful as a writer and his articles are shown to go viral. Finally, Hinata (who Tsukishima always made fun of and looked down on for his ambitions) is living his dream as a professional volleyball player. Compared to them, Tsukishima feels that he has accounted to nothing. Even if he may have a high-paying job in the future, none of that amounts to success.

Enter the Reader. Aside from the conflict with Tsukishima, the Reader hasn’t been shown to have too many personal problems. They go to college and live with friends and generally have a happy-go-lucky attitude. However, the same night that Tsukishima leaves in a fit of anger, it’s revealed that the Reader has been lying about their situation. In truth, they do not have a place to stay or the same success that their friends have been granted. Many of the Reader’s quirks, taking on weird jobs like nude modeling and being overly happy for free food, are explained in a different light.

The Reader’s conflict is different from Tsukishima’s. Almost the exactly opposite, actually, and that is what makes them a successful foil. It’s addressed that the Reader has a fear similar to Tsukishima’s; they don’t want to take on a career that makes them miserable either. However, the way they handle this fear characterizes them much differently from Tsukishima.

The Reader, despite their mother’s wishes, chooses a career path that has very little money to its name. They take a risk, knowing they may become a starving artist, because to them success does not mean the career that is the most stable, but rather the career that makes you happiest. Tsukishima and the Reader’s conflicts are similar because they are both struggling to stay afloat while the people around them are comfortable. This makes it difficult for them to confide in their friends about their issues, and instead they find comfort in one another. This foundation of trust based in mutual struggle is also what makes their relationship successful. Although they are different, they trust one another to understand what they are going through.

Through their differences, the two of them inspire one another to change for the better. When the Reader sees Tsukishima, who has been mothered by his friends since he entered college, they learn to ask others for help willingly. This allows them to go to their mother and speak truthfully so they can achieve a mutual understanding and their mother can help support them. In Tsukishima’s case, seeing the Reader take on a major that doesn’t guarantee a stable income encourages him to pursue a career in something he enjoys, even if he won’t get the big bucks a lawyer does. Their differences inspire change in one another.

While the two work to improve their lives and be honest with themselves and their friends about their conflicts, they stay at one another’s side. Tsukishima is the Reader’s column; he is where they go for stability. Similarly, the Reader is the first person Tsukishima trusts himself to confide in. This allows their romance to be successful because they trust one another. However, this could bring up issues of dependence on one another. That is why the Reader’s apprenticeship is so incredibly important to the story.

The time that the Reader and Tsukishima spend away from each other is after they have worked through numerous conflicts together. This time apart proves that they are independent people who can be successful in their own right without someone constantly at their side. When the Reader left, neither of them were fully ready to be in a relationship because they were still trying to work on themselves. They weren’t ready yet to be fully in love and still trust themselves enough to allow a relationship to foster healthily. But when the Reader returns, the two of them have fought through conflicts both together and alone and are finally ready to be in one another’s company. They don’t need each other, because they are fully realized characters and people in their own right. But they are ready to want each other and be together. That is why it is only at the very end of the story, when they have learned from one another and gotten to a point where they are happy with their own selves, that they are finally ready to be in love.

[kythen]

Haikyuu!! - Bad/Bed Hair Day

Pairing: Kurodai

Summary: After Kuroo moves into Daichi's dorm room, Kuroo's hair undergoes a transformation. Cue an identity crisis and Kuroo and Daichi's many attempts to make things right again.

My piece for the Domestic Kurodai Zine: Midnight to Morning Coffee!

Also found here on AO3.

Word count: 2,671

"Kuroo Tetsurou?"

"Here." Kuroo raises his hand and yawns, slumping down in his seat. It is 8 in the morning, way too early for class, and Kuroo daydreams longingly of slipping back into bed with Daichi.

Instead of marking him off as present immediately like she always does, the TA looks confused, looking between Kuroo and the namelist, and Kuroo sits up, equally confused.

"Is something wrong?" he asks and the rest of his bleary classmates perk up in interest.

She frowns, looking at him disapprovingly. "It's against the school regulations to stand in for another student in class."

Kuroo straightens up, wondering if this is some weird dream he is in. "What are you talking about? I'm Kuroo Tetsurou. You know me. I just talked to you about our current assignment last week."

The TA looks wary as she looks him up and down. His classmates turn their attention on him and it is as if they are seeing him for the first time. Kuroo looks around desperately for a reflective surface. This feels like a nightmare and Kuroo hopes that whatever he sees reflected back at him will shock him into waking up. Maybe he is still in bed and getting cuddled by his boyfriend. Kuroo has only recently started sleeping over in Daichi’s dorm room and Daichi has started to warm up to having Kuroo in the same space as him in his sleep.

But when he checks his reflection in his phone, he is all there, Kuroo Tetsurou, hoodie thrown over his pyjamas and hair flattened down into something that isn't his bedhead. He tugs at the limp strands. He hadn't noticed that his hairstyle had changed. Maybe it was because his sleeping position had changed to accommodate one clingy boyfriend.

Kuroo looks up and sees the rest of the class staring. Acting on a hunch, he sweeps his hair up with his hands and holds it up in an approximation of his usual bedhead.

The TA blinks and checks him off the list. "Oh."

---

Daichi laughs, his head thrown back and his feet kicking the sheets on the bed, his grin as wide as the sky. It is the cutest thing that Kuroo has ever seen.

"Don't laugh," Kuroo whines, tottering over to Daichi on defeated feet and dropping onto the bed with him.

"I can't believe no one recognised you." Daichi reaches for Kuroo as Kuroo crawls over to him and drops into his lap, pillowing his cheek on Daichi's thigh. Daichi cards his hands through Kuroo's hair, the motion gentle and soothing, and Kuroo closes his eyes blissfully. If he were a cat, he would be purring now.

"I can't believe it either. I even had to show a professor my student ID," Kuroo complains. "Do I look that unrecognisable with my hair down? Is Kuroo Tetsurou all in the hair?  Who am I without the bedhead? Daichi, I'm having a major existential crisis right now."

Daichi sweeps Kuroo's hair back from his forehead, leaning down to press a kiss to his exposed forehead. "You're still my boyfriend."

Kuroo smiles dazedly at him, blindsided by the affectionate gesture, before his smile morphs into a scowl. "You didn't recognise me either when I came in. Nice try, mister."

Daichi pats Kuroo's hair back into place as he admits, "You do look different with your hair down."

Kuroo looks accusingly at him. "You do know that this is probably your fault, right? For being so cuddly and warm and nice to snuggle that I can't style my hair while I sleep."

"Is that what you call it?" Daichi raises an eyebrow. "I thought it was just bedhead, not some time-efficient strategy for hairstyling. Anyway, if it is my fault, you could always return to sleeping in your room."

"And miss out on the chance to spend more time with you? No way." Kuroo frowns. "There has got to be a way to get my hair back to its usual handsome style."

"I think you're pretty handsome with your hair down," Daichi tugs at the loose strands of Kuroo's hair, "but if it bothers you that much, why don't you try styling your hair in the morning?"

---

Solution 1: Hair gel

Kuroo slides into the seat Yaku had saved for him at the cafeteria and all conversations at the table immediately end. A shit-eating grin spreads across Yaku's face and Daishou looks like Christmas had come early for him. Kuroo immediately, and not for the first time, regrets that Yaku and Daishou had put aside their enmity in university to form a friendship built on roasting Kuroo.

"Hey, I didn't know that Yu-Gi-Oh got a new protagonist," Yaku says loudly, his eyes fixed on Kuroo's head. Or approximately five centimetres above Kuroo's head.

The both of them burst into laughter.

"Ha ha, guys," Kuroo deadpans, stabbing at his lunch with his chopsticks.

He doesn't think he looks that bad. Daichi and him had tried their best with the hair gel but neither of them had any previous experience with hairstyling considering that all Kuroo had ever used were two pillows to get his hair into shape and Daichi had never bothered learning to style his hair. Okay, maybe Daichi had gotten too enthusiastic with the gel to get Kuroo's spikes to stand up and Kuroo had been too much of a useless, smitten boyfriend to tell Daichi his spikes didn't stand that tall. They were soft spikes, nice to touch and friendly to stroke. Not spikes of doom that could take someone's eye out if he wasn't careful.

"Seriously, what happened to your hair?" Yaku wheezes, once he finally gets a hold of himself.

"My hair hasn't been right lately so we tried styling it a bit," Kuroo says, self-consciously prodding the stiff spikes on the top of his head.

"Honestly, I think I preferred it when I couldn't tell who you were with your hair down," Yaku tells him, still grinning.

"Daichi-kun isn't very good at hairstyling, is he?" Daishou remarks with a sly smile.

"Daichi has other strengths." Kuroo glowers at him, defending his boyfriend loyally. "Just not... hairstyling."

"I'd say he has a talent for it, considering that he's the one who finally defeated your bedhead," Yaku comments. "Weren't you trying to get rid of it?"

"I was, until I found out that my personal identity was inextricably linked to how my hair looked." Kuroo slumps down in his seat mournfully.

Yaku pats him on the shoulder sympathetically. "Well, you better find out how to get it back because your friendships are also inextricably linked to how your hair looks. I'll tolerate it this one time, but I'm not gonna be seen in public with you if you keep this up."

---

Solution 2: Don't cuddle Daichi

"That's harder than you think it is." Kuroo looks pleadingly at Daichi. "Don't cuddle you? That's like asking me not to breathe."

"Considering how you normally sleep, I thought you'd be an expert at not breathing," Daichi retorts. "I'm technically saving your life by sleeping with you."

"Yes, you are," Kuroo says reverently. Ever since he started sleeping with Daichi in the same bed, he swears he feels more rejuvenated in the morning.

"Look," Daichi props his hands on his hips as he looks down at Kuroo in his bed, all tucked in and waiting for Daichi to join him, "I don't like being apart from you either but if you want to get your bedhead back you should go back to sleeping in your room."

Kuroo props himself up on an elbow and peels back a corner of the blanket, patting the Daichi-shaped empty space next to him. "I'll keep my hands to myself this time." When Daichi doesn't budge, Kuroo gives him his best puppy-eyed look. "I mean, who's going to rescue me if I stop breathing in the middle of the night? I can't sleep peacefully without you, Daichi."

"You managed just fine without me for eighteen years," Daichi grumbles but he gets into bed with Kuroo, shoving at Kuroo's lanky body until there is a clear space between them. It isn't much of a gap, seeing that they are two broad guys on a dorm-sized mattress, but Kuroo appreciates the thought and he leans over to give Daichi a peck on the cheek before he turns off the beside lamp.

"Goodnight, Daichi."

Lips brush against Kuroo's in the dark before Daichi returns to his side of the bed. "Goodnight, Kuroo."

---

When Kuroo's first alarm goes off in the morning, he comes into consciousness warm and comfortable, his body moulded perfectly against Daichi. Kuroo blinks dazedly and reaches over Daichi to turn his alarm off before burying his nose back into Daichi's hair and shutting his eyes until his second alarm goes off.

---

Solution 3: Drastic measures

"I have no choice, Daichi. I have to do this," Kuroo says grimly.

"Just go back to your room, Kuroo," Daichi sighs. "I know I joked about you not breathing in your sleep but this might actually stop you from breathing entirely. Forever."

"It won't hurt me," Kuroo says confidently. "I've been doing this since I was a kid."

He holds out his two pillows. If he can't stop himself from snuggling up to Daichi in the middle of the night, then he wouldn't stop it. He didn't need his hands for this anyway, all he needed were for the pillows to be on either side of his head for the entire night.

Kuroo lies facedown on Daichi's bed and pulls his pillows into the optimal sleeping position before getting to work fixing them on either side of his head. It takes two elastic bands to secure the pillows to Kuroo's head and he turns his head from side to side and takes an experimental breath. It feels like his usual sleeping position and he reaches out blindly beside him, groping the sheets as he searches for Daichi.

"Kuroo, this doesn't look safe at all," Daichi says as Kuroo snakes a hand around his waist and tries to tug him down next to him. "I'm serious. You might actually suffocate in the middle of the night."

"'M fine," Kuroo mumbles out, his voice muffled by the two pillows secured to his head. He turns to the side so he can see out of the gap between them and he sees Daichi's worried face peering down at him. It takes a few more coaxing tugs before he can get Daichi to lie down beside him and he wraps his arms snugly around Daichi's waist, beaming at him. "See? Hands-free."

Daichi looks unimpressed as he mutters, "I don't know what this says about me that I'm dating someone like you."

"Hrm?" Kuroo asks, the pillows having muffled most of Daichi's voice.

"Nothing," Daichi sighs. "Just keep breathing until the morning please, Kuroo. I don't want to have to find a new boyfriend."

Kuroo tangles his legs with Daichi's, a wave of affection surging in him at how concerned Daichi is for him. "You won't have to. You're stuck with me, darling."

---

He can't breathe.

Kuroo opens his eyes but it doesn't make any difference when all that fills his vision is darkness and an oppressive force covers his nose and mouth. Panicked and still half-asleep, Kuroo reaches up and his hand meets something soft over his face. With a burst of desperate strength, he rips it off his face and gasps, gulping down quick breaths of air.

His clothes are sweat-soaked and his hair one matted mess as he shoves off the rest of the suffocating tangle surrounding his head and clutches Daichi close, seeking out the protective warmth of his boyfriend in the aftermath of his near-death experience.

"That was so scary. Daichi, I nearly suffocated," Kuroo whimpers, pushing his face into Daichi's soft hair and breathing in his comforting scent.

Daichi stirs, sighing against Kuroo's neck as he mumbles drowsily, "I told you so."

Daichi's hands stroke up and down the length of Kuroo's back absently, soothingly, and Kuroo lets their steady rhythm lull him back into sleep.

---

Conclusion: Failed

"I'm not letting you try out anything new after your previous attempt with the pillows," Daichi declares, folding his arms across his chest. He is planted solidly at the edge of his bed as Kuroo paces the room before him, thinking up some other way to get back his bedhead without having to give up on sleeping with Daichi. "You almost hurt yourself, Kuroo."

"But, Daichi," Kuroo says, aghast. "Nobody knows who I am without my trademark bedhead. I can already feel my identity slipping away from me, one limp strand at a time."

"You'll just have to live out your new life as not-Kuroo then," Daichi says firmly. He reaches up, beckoning, and Kuroo leans down to meet him, letting Daichi card his fingers through the loose strands of his hair. "Besides, it's not like I'm dating you because of your hair or anything."

"I distinctly remember you insulting my hair a couple of times before we started dating. And even after we started dating," Kuroo points out, moving closer and closer to Daichi until he gets Daichi flat on his back on the bed. Kuroo climbs onto the bed, bracing himself over Daichi and boxing him in with his arms as he looks him in the eye suspiciously. "Maybe this was your dastardly plan to get rid of my bedhead all along."

"Maybe it is, maybe it isn't," Daichi says lightly with a teasing gleam in his eye as he tucks Kuroo's hair behind his ear, letting his fingers brush against the shell of Kuroo's ear lingeringly. "So? What are you going to do about it?"

Kuroo can't let Daichi get away with this so he leans in to show him.

---

At the cafeteria, Yaku waves him over to their table and Kuroo slides into his seat, blissfully dazed and drifting on cloud nine after a good night. Yaku looks him up and down and Daishou takes one look at Kuroo before he goes back to texting on his phone.

"Hey, you managed to get your hair back to normal," Yaku says approvingly. "Congrats—if that was what you were going for."

"Normal?" Kuroo blinks and reaches up to touch his hair. He hadn't looked in a mirror before leaving this morning, his eyes glued shut by the early hour as he rolled out of bed, put on his clothes, and shuffled right out of the room.

Daishou turns his phone towards Kuroo and Kuroo finds himself looking at himself in the front-facing camera. His hair is back up in its natural, messy spikes, just as they had been before he moved into Daichi's room, and when he flattens them with a hand, they just spring back up into shape, untameable as always.

"Hair gel?" Yaku asks.

"Or did you finally move out of Daichi-kun's room?" Daishou suggests.

"Neither." Kuroo prods his hair in confusion, trying to figure out the logic behind his bedhead. "I just went to sleep as usual..."

He had fallen asleep and woken up in Daichi's arms, without bothering to think of a solution to tackle his hair. It had been late and the both of them had been exhausted after—

Ah.

"Ah," Kuroo blurts out loud, realising what exactly had shaped his hair last night.

Yaku and Daishou look curiously at him and Kuroo snaps his teeth shut, trying to will down the sudden burst of heat in his face. As much as he considers them his friends, he doesn't think he wants to reveal to them everything that happens between Daichi and him.

"I must be having a good hair day," Kuroo says as nonchalantly as possible, suppressing a shiver as he thinks about the grasping hands that had tugged at his hair last night. But he can't hold back a smirk as he thinks about what this says about Daichi's hairstyling skills. Maybe they weren't so bad after all.

[angeltriestoblog]

The One With All The Books: My favorites + tips on how to get out of your reading slump!

Ever since I was a kid, I've been obsessed with books: while most children I knew then were preoccupied with Barbie dolls and battleships, I immersed myself in fictional worlds and found trusty companions in protagonists who embarked on adventures that transcended the limits of the physical universe. Back then, I would sleep with them under my pillow, read them in the backseat of our family car even on rather turbulent road trips, and turn to them during boring class discussions.

Over time, they ended up shaping my opinions and world views, fueling my hunger for knowledge, and inspiring me to put my own thoughts down on paper. It's safe to say I wouldn't be the person I am now, had it not been for my love for the written word. Which is why I find it odd that I haven't made any of the standard recommendation posts that would normally be found on the personal blog of someone like me. In an attempt to fix that, I'm sharing with you my eight favorites of all time, not only to give them a fitting tribute (that will still not be able to do their profound impact any justice), but also encourage you to pick up a good read! Who knows, maybe it'll change your life as much as it did to mine!

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

As a kid, I loved both science and fiction, but always saw them as two concepts completely opposite from each other. When I found out that they could marry and live in perfect harmony in a genre of their own, I was over the moon. It was exciting enough, getting to teleport across universes by folding the fabric of space and time, encounter terrifying creatures who somehow parallel actual people on Earth, and learn about obscure scientific concepts. But, the fact that it manages to tie in the triumph of good over evil, and the power of familial love was just the cherry on top for me. I brought this with me everywhere I went for a solid two months, obviously with good reason.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

My mom had recommended this to me in high school, and I put off buying it for so long because I originally thought I was "too old to be reading stuff like that". Much to my surprise, what was practically disguised as a children's book, with its simple prose and watercolor illustrations, served as both as a moral allegory and criticism of the way adults operate in today's world. Though its length can trick you into thinking it's a fast read, most passages demand to be looked at a second time, reflected on, and shared to the nearest person—if you're the type to protest against annotating, you might have to rethink your stance.

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

When I was in grade school, my parents had this rule where I was only allowed to buy a new book during special occasions, to control the growing number we had piling up in our house. I remember seeing this in the NBS branch in Glorietta, and having to wait until the end of the quarter to ask my parents to get it for me. Oh, well: as the cheesy saying goes, "True love waits." Although if there is anyone who loves books more than I do, it's Meggie Folchart, as she has inherited her father's gift of bringing fictional characters to life. But, when disaster strikes, as it always does, she must learn how to harness this special power and save her family. The world-building and imagery is unbelievably rich, Funke doesn't just paint a picture in your head: she creates a whole ass movie. No wonder eight year-old me put her up on a pedestal.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (the entire series, but maybe the third was my favorite) (ok it was, don't tell the two others) by Jenny Han

The blurb at the back of the book certainly doesn't do it justice: I remember finding this at a nearby Fully Booked and putting it down instantly, dismissing it as another cliche YA novel. Sure, Lara Jean Covey has to deal with all five of her unsent love letters to her crushes being mysteriously sent out, but she also grapples with important issues such as identity, family, and—in the third book—the future. I read Always and Forever, Lara Jean during the summer before I entered university, and every single line resonated with me so much I paused at the end of every chapter to take a crying selfie. Plus, Peter Kavinsky is my literary dream boy: if I ever expect my future significant other to take me on a cross-country road trip to go antique shopping, they'll only have him to blame.

Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler

We're taught that we shouldn't judge books by their covers, but I'm glad my twelve year old self decided to brush that aside when she bought this. Although I didn't end up reading it until five years after, I devoured the thick hardbound in a day and a half, and was reduced to a ball on my couch shortly afterwards. I know the book has the most self-explanatory title, but it's just that it takes on the universal experience of first love and heartbreak so authentically. The stream of consciousness writing style and slow pacing may be an issue for some, but I reckon it adds to its charm, as it allows Min to take readers through all the motions of a relationship in a way so relatable, entering her headspace feels like slipping into a second skin.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey

A friend of mine in high school had complained to me that her mother had made this required reading for her, and I suggested I'd take it off her hands for a bit. I ended up going through her copy thrice in a month. (Ah, what I would give to go back to the days when I could still afford to read on school days.) An issue a lot of books that claim to "change your life" have is that they elaborate on these supposedly groundbreaking ideas, yet fail to break them down into doable action steps. Fortunately, Covey shares his practical advice in a structured manner, complete with examples, illustrations, and the occasional dad joke, freeing it from any preachy or condescending undertones. I don't know how to say that this is the only self-help book you'll ever need without sounding like someone from the Home Shopping Network.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

This paperback intimidated me from the moment I first saw it on a shelf, because of the metaphorical title and steep price. But, good thing I got around to buying it eventually: this harrowing story is told by a promising doctor with his whole life ahead of him, who turns into a patient as soon as he is diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. Reading this was difficult, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried to dissect and reflect on the questions of life and death being posed by the author, I could never come close to understanding how he felt. But, that didn't make the experience any less necessary.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Creativity is a rather difficult concept to talk about in depth, because it seems so abstract. This is why the author advises readers to treat it as a living entity: one that bestows the best of ideas to those who nurture it, complements the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, and demands our full participation despite the looming presence of fear. I finished this on a school bus ride home from school, and the minute I got home, I marathoned Gilbert's TED talks and keynote speeches on YouTube: there is a distinctly tender, somewhat spiritual quality in the way she speaks about her craft, that easily makes you hang on to and follow every word she says.

Now I know books aren't everyone's go-to when looking for a way to pass the time: I've heard people say that they can't find time for it, that there's nothing out there that piques their interest, or they simply don't have the patience, given that social media posts and Netflix shows practically hold our attention spans captive in this day and age. While all are valid points, they can clearly be worked around! I was in a funk during the start of my Christmas break, because I hadn't touched a non-academic book since the new school year had started. But, I managed to finish four in the span of a month, and am currently on my fifth, as of this writing. Here are some tips I have, just in case you want to kick your reading slump in the ass as well.

Start small. Like with any habit you want to build, introduce the behavior in small increments: five push-ups, five minutes of meditation, fifty pages of a novella. Then, once you're starting to get the hang of it again and you don't feel your two brain cells shrieking for help because they can't figure out if "lived" is an actual word in the English language, you can increase it depending on your progress. This happened to me when, thanks to a notably bad case of tsundoku, I had amassed 14 (!!!) unread books in a year. I decided to tackle as soon as my vacation started, so I kicked it off with a rather easy read: Matilda by Roald Dahl, 232 pages thin, with numerous drawings.

Read something you'd actually enjoy! It's gonna be hard to stay engaged in something that doesn't excite or entice you: reading is supposed to be a hobby, not a household chore. Find something written on an interest of yours, a field of study that you've always been curious about, a person that you've looked up to for forever: I truly believe that there is no topic that hasn't been written about at this point in time.

On a somewhat related note, don't be afraid to DNF books that don't satisfy you. A lot of us pick books up because everyone else loves it, and are afraid to put it down for the fear of being othered. But, if we've all come to believe that we should sever ties with people who no longer serve us, what makes it any different for books that just don't touch our lives? I remember reading The Bell Jar when I was 13 because it came highly recommended by someone on Instagram who I found really cool. It was far too heavy for me, but I couldn't find the heart to shelf it especially after how much it cost me.

Remember that physical copies are not the only way to go. Thanks to the presence of audio and e-books, one can now enjoy stories anywhere and any time, without the daunting feel of several pages, or the burden of lugging around heavy hardbounds. (Although you are missing out on one of the best parts of reading: new book smell. Your loss.) One might find it easier to process the information this way, or even appreciate whatever the author has to say.

Talk about it with a friend! They could help keep you accountable in following through your reading goals, give you solid (and sometimes even personalized) recommendations, or accompany you in mourning over the death of a major character. It's always been a dream of mine to start or join a book club for these exact reasons, but I'm afraid this post is possibly the closest I could get to that right now. Nevertheless, I'd love to hear your suggestions and give you more of my own! Drop me a message here (or here, here, and here!) if ever you're interested.

Love and light,

Angel

[aion-rsa]

How The Living Dead Completes Romero’s Zombie Legacy

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George A. Romero figuratively wrote the book on zombies with his low-budget, independent 1968 horror film epoch Night of the Living Dead. World War Z, 28 Days Later, Zombieland and even The Walking Dead trudged that territory but didn’t map much new terrain. Romero’s final novel, The Living Dead, completed by author Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water novelization), doesn’t expand on the basics of the zombie apocalypse. It doesn’t challenge the zombie trope Romero filled out with his subsequent works on animated corpses, when The Living Dead had their Day, Dawn, Land, Diary and Survival. But, with it, Romero and Kraus do peer deeper into the mirror to find a bitter reflection of the horrors Romero brings out in The Living.

The Living Dead is character-driven in ways the feature films could never be. In Night of the Living Dead, the audience didn’t know, nor would they have cared, whether Helen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman) put on weight after marrying Harry (Karl Hardman). But we know this about Rosa, the wife of novel protagonist Luis Accocola, the Assistant Medical Examiner who logs the first case of reanimation in The Living Dead. We also know Luis paid for Rosa’s education and had to wait to marry her because she was so much younger than him. We know Rosa suffered a miscarriage long before the recently deceased became the ambulatory diseased.

We’ll never know if “They’re Coming to Get You” Barbra (Judith O’Dea) ever dreamed of dancing with Fred Astaire at night. But we know Luis’s assistant Charlene Rutkowski recoils from the very sight of Astaire when her mother Mae tunes in to the classic movie channel because the top hatted, tuxedo-sporting tap dancer tries to lead in her nightmares. Even before John Doe becomes the archive in the novel’s version of Patient Zero, Luis wants to know more about his history, whether he mattered. Why the homeless man is dressed so fine, and why he doesn’t have the curved spine of the long-term vagrant. In this respect, he is Romero. The unimportant details may not solve zombification, but it holds clues to the fading humanity.

The Living Dead is a fitting end to Romero’s zombie chronicles. The novel form allows him to bring more of himself into the pages, each of the characters filled out with flavors Romero himself test-tasted. There is also a bittersweet meta irony to the fact that the horror genius died before finishing the work and it was reanimated by Kraus, an unabashed fan and likely successor to the “Father of the Modern Zombie Film.” He hides Romero “Easter eggs” throughout the book, while also bringing in references to the pandemic apocalypse novel The Stand. Romero worked frequently with Stephen King, adapting his writer’s nightmare The Dark Half, having a barrel of fun with Monkey Shines, and indulging their shared love of EC Comics with Creepshow. The feature film adaptation was even shot in the four color scheme which defined the magazine. They further explored the horrors of publishing with Bruiser. The city of Bangor, Maine, which is King’s home turf, is referenced within the first few pages. He and Romero are wonderfully horrific friends.

The Living Dead is divided into three acts. Act One tells the story through the introduction of disconnected characters. It unfolds like an archive from the future written from multiple points of view. The history is being put together by a team in Washington, led by the researcher Etta Hoffmann. She is autistic and unflappably records survivors’ stories. Goaded on by an internet troll named Chucksux69, News anchor Chuck Corso at the cable station WNN broadcasts the events as they come in, even though he has no idea if anyone can see him. He does this while his co-workers try to eat him. Similar things happen at sea, where the US Navy aircraft carrier Olympia becomes a floating arena where dead sailors face off against the living crew. The gospel of the dead is spread zealously by a preacher in the book.

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth,” Romero warned in Dawn of the Dead. The characters in The Living Dead have to learn this for themselves. The only problem with living in a world written by George A. Romero is that the inhabitants didn’t grow up in a world with Romero in it. They don’t know what to do when the dead won’t stay dead. One of the most consistent things about zombies, whether they’re found in the Living Dead universe or one of the many other genre works, is you kill them by shooting them in the head. It doesn’t have to be a gunshot; Daryl on The Walking Dead does the deed with a bow and some arrows (though that series has gone on for a full decade without ever using the word zombie). From the very first ambulatory corpse, played by Bill Hinzman in Night of the Living Dead, to the present, a fractured skull is the only way to stop chomping teeth. Try telling that to the people in the book.

Why do zombies keep on biting? Day of the Dead posited the corpses reanimate because of primitive impulses in the spinal column. We, the audience, know from that movie onward it was because of special effects wizard Tom Savini. It would be nice to think of his hand on the elderly zombie in the novel who tries to gum someone to death. In The Living Dead, we learn zombies just wake up hungry. “This hunger is different from any you knew before,” a chapter opens. “This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones. Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain.” Zombies aren’t evil, they are animalistic. Humans, on the other hand, are free to act horribly. If this particular horror niche is dead it can be reanimated here with this book. Night of the Living Dead brought the genre to life. The Living Dead gives Zombies souls. 

When Romero and some friends shot the indie film for just over $100,000 that would become The Night of the Living Dead, the country was going to hell. The Vietnam War was bringing death to the dinner table daily on the evening news. The generation which grew up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb was pulling away from a rotting society, unraveling like an exposed lower intestine. While women sew American flags sometime between “Year Fucking Six” and “Year Fucking Seven” of The Living Dead, Johnny and Barbara walk past a shredded flag as they enter the cemetery where their father is buried at the start of the film that started it all. The wreath is an empty gesture. Johnny can’t even remember what their father looked like.

Inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend and its film adaptation The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, Night of the Living Dead reincarnated Zombie movies. Once the realm of island magic culturally appropriated by actors like Bela Lugosi and George Zucco, zombies were now hungry legions munching on the living. Brains were not yet the delicacy The Simpsons would make them out to be. The undead are a metaphor for whatever we want to put on them. Romero is a political artist and the book is contemporary. Like the ill-equipped national response to COVID-19, we watch an unprepared society face a cataclysmic event and come apart at the seams. Similar to the effects of the quarantine, the zombie apocalypse is good for the environment. Also mirroring our times, the zombies infest a hate-filled world though they prove to be an equalizer of all classes and in the toxic racial divide.

“Someone dies, someone else learns to live,” Greer, a Black teenager who escapes an overridden trailer park in the Midwest at the beginning of the novel, is taught. Minority characters feature prominently in The Living Dead. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the year Night of the Living Dead was released. In the film, Ben, a Black character played by Duane Jones, survives the undead campaign, the tribal maneuvering of the other captive combatants around him, casual bigotry and betrayal only to be shot in the head by passing zombie thrill-killers. The final moments of the film shows photographs of men with dead zombies which look eerily similar to lynch mob photos.

Romero didn’t only use the undead as a political metaphor. They are endemic to all society. The Zombies aren’t the only brain-dead or dying characters in his films or the novel. In The Living Dead, most of the people’s minds are already infested by paranoid distrust of the news media and the hatred encouraged by social media. Luis’s life is saved at one point because he’s not flipping through his cell phone as he usually does. He actually notices the looks on the people’s faces. In Romero’s 1978 installment Dawn of the Dead, the citizenry’s minds were numbed by TV, radio and consumerism. Its biggest scene happens in a Pittsburgh shopping mall with muzak playing in the background. 

Act Two summarizes what would be the territory of 1985’s Day of the Dead (which gave zombies class-consciousness), 2005’s Land of the Dead, and Romero’s “found footage” installment Diary of the Dead (2007), but takes a turn at 2009’s western Survival of the Dead. Subtitled “The Life of Death,” Act Two spans eleven years, all of which are being recorded in “The Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World.” We learn zombies are more like us than we might wish to believe. Like modern man wastes most of its animal-based consumer products, the zombies only eat five percent of their kill. They also hold grudges. Zombies outnumber humans 400,000 to one. Camels, lions and zebras are immune to reanimation, but chimps come back from the dead.

Straightforward as they may be, Romero’s films were rarely what they seemed through the action. Subversive social commentary runs through his 1978 vampire film Martin, which was more about unfettered schizophrenia than vampires. John Amplas played the title role in a very realistic, and very violent, exploration. He drugs and rapes his victims before drinking their blood. The Crazies (1973) was more about the society struck by a military biological weapon more than an epidemic containment film. The Living Dead is more than a zombie novel. It is a bitter parable.

Act Three moves 15 years after the apocalypse as survivors try to put together a new civilization amidst an evolving zombie population. It is a planetary reset. The museums are covered in graffiti and overgrown. People begin to read books, mix paint, shoot each other in the face when agitated. The dead win. 

George A. Romero died on July 16, 2017, a relatively innocent time which, although it was only three years ago, seems very far away. Donald Trump rode a racist wave of xenophobia to the whitest White House the country has seen since President Andrew Jackson, but he was still treated as a joke. The Living Dead was written before COVID-19, the killing of George Floyd and a police force which militarized against protestors faster than the zombies could run in 28 Days Later. Romero and Daniel Kraus are visionaries who were able to make a parable of today’s times in almost real time. The news on Max Headroom came at you from 30 minutes in the future. The future legend of The Living Dead was predicted only months in advance to be delivered exactly on time.  

The Living Dead will be available to buy and read on August 4th. It is now available for pre-order.

The post How The Living Dead Completes Romero’s Zombie Legacy appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[victoriagloverstuff]

On Writing a Short Story: 'Everything is Always Happening, All the Time.'

The first time I met Jamel Brinkley, he made a remark so sharp and so true that I let out a loose holler of laughter in an alleyway. He had delivered the observation with such wry politeness that there could be no defense against it. When I opened his debut collection, A Lucky Man, I encountered that same quiet compassion and keen eye for detail. Jamel attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a prestigious creative writing fellowship from Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A Lucky Man has been on almost every Most Anticipated and Must Read List for the summer, and it’s easy to see why.

Brandon Taylor: In the opening story of this collection, “No More Than a Bubble,” we encounter a familiar scene: two young men at a house party scoping out two women. But what follows is one of the most uncomfortable stories I’ve ever read. And in later stories, there seems to be a common motif of characters encountering the most uncomfortable incarnation of their desires and wishes. Can you talk a little bit about how you court and shape discomfort both for your characters and for the reader?

Jamel Brinkley: It might be true that discomfort is one of my own primary modes of experience. So much of living has been about discomfort for me. Maybe discomfort is related to vulnerability and sensitivity, and maybe for me it’s one of the most effective ways by which a person or character can be presented with the opportunity to grow or change, or at least have their settled notions of themselves pierced to open up a space (a wound?) for self-reflection. I’m deeply suspicious of the idea that people or characters can suddenly undergo deep and genuine change, or that radical change and true epiphanies are common, but I am completely faithful to the idea that there are moments when we can be profoundly shaken.

It’s a cliché in fiction to have a dog barking in the distance, but what happens when that dog actually shows up? What happens when harmless potentialities peel themselves from the inert background, become fully animate and dimensional, and intrude on our mental and physical space? Naomie, one of the girls in ‘No More Than a Bubble,’” says, “There’s always more to what you want than what you wanted,” and generally speaking I think she’s right. What characters desire, and what we as readers desire for the characters, can be so simple and solid, but what they actually get as a result of their pursuit is complicated, unstable, and fluid, especially when those desires involve other characters and their desires and complexity. Or, what you want might be difficult or impossible to name, but it hears you calling it anyway, and it answers with full, unavoidable force.

BT: This collection contains quite a few longer short stories, which to me feel like a different breed of story. It’s not quite novella length but its maybe a little longer than the typical short story (whatever that is). What are your thoughts on the long short story?

JB: I used to teach high school English, and sometimes students would grouse about how hyper-interpretive English teachers are. It seemed silly to some of them that we could seemingly find symbolic meaning in even the most banal detail and that we were seemingly encouraging them to do the same thing. Being good at English class, some of them felt, meant being good at finding (bullshitting?) symbols at every turn. Of course their characterization of literary instruction was an exaggerated one, but I bring it up for a reason. Sometimes very tightly compressed stories can feel as though they are offering themselves up a little too easily and earnestly for symbol-hunting and other analysis of that kind. Or maybe what I’m saying is that my own unsuccessful attempts to write shorter stories have felt that way. They feel airless to me, and each sentence feels merely (and so embarrassingly) instrumental, as though it has been written in color-coded neon ink, to be read through a megaphone.

“Everything is always happening at the same time, and that truth about time is what makes life dense, confounding, rich, and haunting.”

Since a number of my stories are journeys, a greater length helps me engage and take advantage of the interesting possibilities inherent to that shape, such as detours and random encounters. Longer stories also enable me to play with time in ways that aren’t strictly limited to a vivid, central present story and a gray, subordinate back story. I like that “minor” characters are granted more room to emerge. I like that I can slow down the pace and find layers to explore. Longer stories demand the particular kinds of shapeliness and tension you find in shorter stories, but I like that they permit me to include some of the lifelike “untidiness” one is more likely to find in a novel.

BT: The way that you handle time in these stories is so complex and so delicate that at times, I found myself gasping. Short stories are often defined as the moment in a character’s life that causes that life to change. And I think what you demonstrate so deftly in these stories is how that moment is really a summation of moments. In your stories, everything is always happening at the same time. Can you talk a bit about your approach and your thoughts on time?

JB: There’s a kind of dummy version of the short story that I find myself writing against. So, for example, a short story has to take place on “the day that is different.” Well, yes, sometimes, but that model, hardened into a rule or a law, contains a theory of time, one which can mislead you into thinking that everything prior to that day is less important than or subordinate to that day. The past is permitted only insofar as it feeds into the present or “real” story. But my experience has been that the past can be as (or more!) alive, seething, persistent, and forceful than whatever is going on in the present. I’m drawn to writers, like Edward P. Jones and Alice Munro, whose stories convey the past just as vividly as the present. I’m drawn to writers, like William Trevor and Yiyun Li, who aren’t afraid to write “aftermath” stories, in which the most overtly dramatic thing has already taken place and the present story is set in its wake. I think you’re exactly right: everything is always happening at the same time, and that truth about time is what makes life dense, confounding, rich, and haunting.

BT: You’ve already spoken at great length in other interviews about the themes of masculinity that recur in this collection, but something I’m still quite curious about is the role of intimacy in these stories. We see again and again, the men in these stories trying to connect with each other and with the women in their lives who occupy an array of complicated roles. It seemed to me that collection was not interested in masculinity writ large so much as the ways in which masculinity made intimacy more difficult to achieve or maintain. Can you talk about intimacy and how you see or don’t see it operating in these stories?

JB: I want to thank you for this question. One fear I’ve had, as I’ve watched the collection emerge and find readers, is that its various concerns are being simplified and pigeonholed, stamped with the singular thematic label of masculinity. Of course that theme is in the air presently, as we engage in an important and necessary critique of toxic masculinity, and on a surface level, with male protagonists in every story, my book lends itself to that thematic labeling. But I never consciously set out to write a book about masculinity. I never began any of the stories thinking, This will be about masculinity. You’re right to point to intimacy as a concern. Vulnerability, loneliness, and privacy as well. The kinds of things that shape friendships, romantic/sexual relationships, and families. Those things feel more primary to me as felt experiences, closer to the nerves. Masculinity feels more conceptual, or it feels like it is itself made up of things that are more primary or granular, if that makes sense. To go at masculinity head-on, for me at least, would be a mistake.

But, yes, to answer your question more directly, I do think intimacy, and our confusions about intimacy, are at the heart of these stories. The ways in which we confuse intimacy and sex. The ways in which attraction might be operative in supposedly heterosexual male friendships. The ways in which the space of intimacy can feel like a violation or also become a space of potential or actual violence, especially in the case of siblings. The things people will do or accept out of desperation for intimacy. These kinds of questions are fascinating to me. I realize that, in the interest of exploring them, I like putting my characters in physical spaces that draw or force them close together.

BT: The collection also seems interested in the permutations of loss and the permutations of family, often within a single story. A family seems like a kind of ideal unit for a writer to try out different modes and effects of loss. What are your feelings about the domestic space and what are the questions you’re most drawn to regarding families in your fiction?

JB: Families and domestic spaces are great for the kind of fiction I’m interested in writing. Domestic spaces, especially the kinds of small, cramped apartments that poor and working class urban families tend to occupy, force people together in ways that court some of the elements we’ve been talking about, discomfort, intimacy, and privacy (or the lack thereof) among them. I also like that families tend to come with webs of obligation already loaded in. Desires multiply because there are multiple people, and duty can energize or make active a character who otherwise doesn’t want (to do) much of anything at all.

In terms of ideology or desire, families can be powerful because there is such a prominent and idealized notion of what a family is supposed to look like. The whole idea of the white, well-off, heterosexual nuclear family that is marketed to us. Any deviation from that ideal family can feel like a massive loss or lack. So part of why Ben is so angry in “No More Than a Bubble” is that his family has been broken. The missing father is a haunting presence in “J’ouvert, 1996.” Notions of what a real family and real home are supposed to look like have a powerful grip on Freddy and his imagination in “I Happy Am.” And so on. I’m interested in how people construct families, in life and in their own minds, out of a deep desire for them, but also, and often at the same time, how people resist and rebel against such a collectivity. I’m also interested in how families act as a profound kind of training ground for what it means to be human, and what happens when the way we’ve been trained comes into contact with entirely different notions of what it means to be alive.

BT: Finally, I’d like to know about the other forms and genres that inform your work. And the writers and artists who keep you fed, in an artistic or spiritual sense.

JB: Music and poetry definitely inform my work. Someone recently pointed out—I wasn’t aware of this—that music or dance appears in almost every story in the collection. Maybe that’s not profound or unusual, but the collection does name or allude to specific musicians: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Fugees/Lauryn Hill, Willie Colón, James Brown, Ray Charles, Antônio Carlos Jobim, T-Bone Walker, Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth, Bunny Wailer, Burning Spear, The Abyssinians, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and Donny Hathaway (multiple times!). These names give a pretty good indication of the kinds of music that inform my work and feed me, but yikes is that list male! In real life my playlist has way more women.

Good read found on the Lithub

[how2to18]

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER — the famed Yiddish writer who in 1935 moved from Warsaw to New York and in 1978 received the Nobel Prize for Literature as an American-Jewish author — made his first trip to Israel in the fall of 1955, arriving just after Yom Kippur and leaving about two months later. His relationship to Israel was complicated to say the least. He had been born into a strictly religious family of rabbis and rebetzins in Poland, for whom the land of Israel was the holiest of religious symbols. But he also lived a secular life in 1920s Warsaw, witnessing Zionism overtake Jewish Enlightenment and Bundism as a viable 20th-century political force. In more personal terms, Israel was also the place to which his son, Israel Zamir, had been brought by his mother, Runya Pontsch, in 1938, growing up in part on Kibbutz Beit Alpha and later fighting in the War of Independence. Yet Singer had always avoided every kind of -ism — from Zionism to communism — and so his perspective on the young state of Israel was largely free of the ideology and dogmatism that was prevalent during the country’s early days.

During his trip, Singer published several articles per week in the Yiddish daily Forverts, recording his visit. While these articles sometimes read like touristic travelogues, they reflect Singer’s complex relation to the land of Israel, as both an idea and a place. Israel had been in Singer’s consciousness since his youngest days as a boy growing up in religious surroundings, and it made its way into his work, including some of his earliest fiction, which was published in Hebrew. When he was still living in Warsaw, Singer wrote a novella titled The Way Back (1928) about a young man full of the Zionist dream who travels to the Land of Israel and returns five years later after suffering hunger, malaria, and poverty. In 1948, just a week before the state of Israel was declared, he ended The Family Moskat with several characters leaving Warsaw and moving to pursue the Zionist dream. In 1955, just weeks before his trip, he published an episode of In My Father’s Court (1956) titled “To the Land of Israel,” about a local tinsmith who moves his family to the Holy Land, then returns disappointed to Warsaw, but then, despite everything, goes back. In his memoirs, Singer writes that he considered moving to British Mandate Palestine in the mid-1920s, and in The Certificate (1967), he fictionalizes this in a tale that ends with the protagonist instead going back to his shtetl. As late as 1938, in a letter to Runya sent from New York, he was still fantasizing about the idea: “My plan is this: as soon as I have least resources, and I hope they come together quickly, I will travel to Palestine.” But by mid-1939, these dreams seem to pass into a different view on reality: “For me, in the meantime, getting a visa to Palestine is impossible.” For Singer, it seems, Israel remained, in both the symbolic and literal sense, the road not taken.

And yet, in late 1955, Singer made his first trip to Israel, accompanied by his wife Alma, on a ship called Artsa traveling from Marseille via Naples to the port of Haifa — not as a religious child or an idealistic young man but as a middle-aged Yiddish writer who was beginning to make his name on the American literary landscape. And his journalistic assignment was to capture the trip in short articles that would give Yiddish readers across the United States a sense of what the young state of Israel was like. His son, Zamir, was in New York working as a Shomer Ha’Tsair representative, and both letters and memoirs suggest there was no question of his meeting Runya. Singer was left to his own devices — traveling throughout Israel with Alma, but writing about it as if he were there all by himself.

¤

Singer’s peculiar perspective — with such complex personal history behind it, and such pragmatic goals before it — gives his writing from Israel its unique tone. It is always concerned with the big picture yet remains focused on the small picture. This is evident from the first moments of his trip, even while he was still on the ship. “I think about Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and the sacrifices he made to set his eyes on the Holy Land,” he writes while the ship sails from France to Italy. “I think about the first pioneers, the first builders of the New Yishuv […] How is it that there’s no trace of any of this on this ship? Are Jews no longer devoted with heart and soul to the idea of the Land of Israel?” Singer is looking for proof of the spiritual greatness that the Land of Israel represents, and he wants to see it in the people on board with him — but he soon comes to understand that Israel is not a place of imagination, it’s a place that actually exists. “No, things are not all that bad,” he writes. “The fire is there, but is hidden […] The Land of Israel has become a reality, part of everyday life.”

He begins a keen description of reality still on board the ship. Observing the younger passengers, he describes a now familiar picture: “The young men and women who sit under my window on folding lounge chairs have possibly fought in the war against the Arabs. Tomorrow they may be sent to Gaza or another strategically significant location. But at the moment they want what any other modern young people want: to have a good time.” He identifies, before even arriving on shore, the constant negotiation in Israeli society between war and freedom.

On the ship, he also identifies cultural tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, religious and secular:

There’s a tiny shul here with a holy ark and a few prayer books lying around. But the only people praying there are Sephardic Jews who are traveling in third class or in the dormitories […] It will soon be Yom Kippur, but the ship’s “Chaplain” […] told me there are only three Ashkenazim who want to pray in a quorum.

Singer becomes attached to this group of Sephardi Jews from Tunisia, following them with his eyes and ears:

On Friday evening I wanted to attend prayers. It was still daytime. I went into the little shul and there I saw a kiddush cup with a little wine left inside, and a few pieces of challah laying nearby. It seemed that they had already brought in the Sabbath. The Tunisian Jews have to eat at 6 o’clock and need to pray first.

Later, he goes again, and sees a man praying in a way that moves him. “There, in that little shul, I first came upon the spirituality for which I searched. There, among those Jews, it felt like shivat tsion — the Return to Zion.” He later watches the young Tunisian Jewish women with their head coverings down on the lower deck.

I look for the commonalities between me and them. It seems to me that they, too, look at me to see what connects us. From the standpoint of our bodies, we are built as differently as two people can be […] But as far as one may be from the other, the roots are the same […] There, in Tunisia, they looked Jewish, and for this they were persecuted.

What binds Jews from different corners of the world together, it seems, is their separate but shared experience of difference, even in their native countries.

Singer reports that the mood changes in Naples, where several hundred more passengers board the ship. Now there’s also singing and yelling — the fire he was looking for. But during this part of the trip he also meets a German-Jewish couple who complain bitterly about their life in the Yishuv.

The husband said that letting the Oriental Jews in without any selection, without any inspection, had completely thrown off the moral balance of the country […] The wife went even further than the husband. She said that, no matter how much she wished, she could not stand the company of Polish and Russian Jews. She was accustomed to European (German) culture […] she could not stand the Eastern European Jews.

Singer pushes back against her snobbery. “‘You know,’ I asked her, ‘that your so-called European culture slaughtered 6 million Jews?’” And she responds: “I know everything. But…”

Before he even sets foot in Israel, Singer identifies some of the social difficulties that its citizens face. “It’s hard, very hard, to bring together and bind together a people who are as far from each other as east from west […] Holding the Modern Jew together means holding together powers that can at each moment come apart. Herein lies the problem of the Yishuv.” This observation is less a criticism than a diagnosis. No matter how much binds Jews in Israel — the roots we all share — we have to, at the same time, navigate our differences. In this, Singer acknowledges one of the greatest challenges of a Jewish state.

What seems to really strike Singer when he finally arrives in Israel is the reality that, while built on modern organizational foundations established since the mid-19th century, the country appears as if it had been constructed out of nothing. His access to this reality is, funnily enough, street signs:

Israel is a new country, there’s a mixed population, for the most part newcomers, and they need information at every step. Signs in Hebrew — and often also in English — show you everything you need to know. […] The signs don’t just offer information, they’re also full of associations. . . Every street is named for someone who played a role in Jewish history or culture. Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Gvirol, J. L. Gordon, Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Bialik, Pinsker, Herzl, Frishman, Zeitlin are all part of this place’s geography. Words from the Pentateuch, from the Mishnah, from the commentaries, from the Gemara, from the Zohar, from books of the Jewish Enlightenment – are used for all kinds of commercial, industrial, and political slogans.

What Singer seems to like about this is that it makes even less sympathetic Jews have to face their connection to Jewish history and culture. “The German Jew who lives here might be, in his heart, a bit of a snob […] but his address is: Sholem Aleichem Street. And he must — ten times or a hundred times a day — repeat this very same name.” In these signs, Singer sees something that goes much deeper into the reality and paradox of Jewish identity: its apparent inescapability.

Singer quickly connects these prosaic thoughts with the very core of Jewish faith: “As it once did at Mount Sinai, Jewish culture — in the best sense of the word — has brought itself down upon the Jews of Israel and called to them: you must take me on, you can no longer ignore me, you can no longer hide me along with yourself.” In Israel, spirit and religion are not ephemeral feelings; they are viscerally present.

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On his way from the port in Haifa to Tel Aviv, Singer stops at a Ma’abara, or transit camp, set up to house hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees, mainly recent arrivals from Arabic-speaking countries across North Africa and the Middle East. “It’s true that the little houses are far from comfortable,” he writes.

This is a camp of poor people, those who have not yet integrated into the Yishuv. But the place is ruled by a spirit of freedom and Jewish hopefulness. Sephardic Jews with long sidelocks walk around in turbans, linen robes, sandals, ritual fringes. There’s a little market where they sell tomatoes, pomegranates, grapes, bread, buns, cheese […] It’s true that there are no baths here or other such comforts. But the writer of these lines and our readers were also not all raised in houses with baths.

The poverty in these camps does not alienate someone like Singer, who himself grew up in poverty.

Singer recognizes both the desperation and the potential in these refugee camps:

The Jews here look both hopeful and angry. They have plenty of complaints for the leaders of Israel. But they’re busy with their own lives. Someone is thinking about them in the Jewish ministries. Their children study in Jewish schools. They are already part of the people. They will themselves soon sit in offices, speak in the Knesset.

It is as if Singer could see the long and difficult road ahead of someone like Yossi Yona — the academic scholar and Labor Party politician who was born in the Ma’abara of Kiryat Ata and now sits in the Knesset.

At every step, Singer reflects on his relationship to the reality of being in the modern Jewish state: “Moses, our great teacher, did not merit coming here. Herzl did not have the luck to see his dream realized. But I, who laid not a single finger toward building this state, walk around like I own the place.” His focus, at this early point of the trip, is mainly on the unbelievability of Jewish sovereignty. The question of its sustainability — the role of Palestinian Arabs within this project and the constant threat of war — is still to come. In the meantime, Singer basks in what he sees as the Jewishness around him: the history and culture with which he grew up, persecuted for hundreds of years in Eastern Europe, had finally risen and come to reign over an entire land and people. This unimaginable reality leads him to focus not on Israel’s relations with other people or states — its Arab population, the Palestinian refugees, the enemy nations across its borders — but rather on Israel’s national relationship to itself.

“There cannot be a Kibbutz Galuyot — an ingathering of the exiles — without the highest tolerance,” he warns.

Everyone in this place has to be accepted: the most orthodox Jews and the greatest apostates; the blonde and the dark-haired, the ingenue and the pioneeress, the Russian baryshnya, the American miss, and the French mademoiselle, the rabbinical Jewish daughters, and the wives that wear wigs with silk bands, and even the German Jewish fraulein who complains that Jews stink and that she misses the mortal danger of German culture.

This sentence is perhaps difficult to swallow today, and yet the divisions in Israeli society have only grown since Singer wrote this over 60 years ago. He could not have known the place that the Ultra-Orthodox would occupy in today’s Israel, or the great split in public opinion that would develop over territories occupied in the Six-Day War, or the strong shift to the right that the Israeli population has exhibited since the late 1970s. What he saw before him were Jews from different backgrounds, in different attire, with different beliefs and convictions, all living together in a single country. He immediately realized that, without tolerance for one another, the project would be doomed from the beginning.

It is worth scrutinizing this thought. Israeli society must deal fairly with others, but Israelis must also find a way of dealing fairly with each other. Respect for the unfamiliar begins with respect for the familiar — with the ability to see oneself in other people, and others in oneself. Where anger, destruction, and violence rule, they do so both inwardly and outwardly. If Jews cannot be good to Jews, this seems to suggest, how could they ever be good to anyone else?

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In his writing on Israel, Singer also constantly contemplates religious history and personal experience. In this spirit, he writes: “Ahavat Israel, loving fellow Jews […] has a mystical significance.” Singer cannot avoid associating the place with his own religious education as a child — being a Jew in Israel also means, for him, being constantly in touch with the myriad of Jewish texts he has internalized.

Standing at the foot of Mount Gilboa, he writes:

This was where Saul fell, this was where the last act of a divine drama was played out. Not far from here the Witch of Endor, the spiritist of the past, bewitched Samuel the Prophet. I look at this very same rocky hump which was seen by the first Jewish king, who had made the first big Jewish mistake: underestimating the powers and evil of Amalek.

Looking out from the balcony of a hotel in Safed a few days later, likely at Mount Meron, he writes: “This is not a mountain for tourists, or runaway fugitives, but for Kabbalists, who made their accounting with our little world. There, through those mountains, one can cross from this world into the world to come.” He continues:

At this very mountain gazed the holy Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria], Rabbi Chaim Vital, the Baal-Ha’Kharedim [Rabbi Elazar ben Moshe Azikri], and the author of Lekha Dodi [Rabbi Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz]. Here, in this place, an angel showed itself each night to Rabbi Joseph Karo [author of the Shulkhan Arukh] and conducted nightly conversations with him. The greatest redemption-seekers looked out from this place for the Messiah. Here, in a tent or a sukkah, deeply gentle souls dreamed about a world of peace and a humanity with one purpose: to worship God, to become absorbed in the divine spirit, in a spirit of holiness, of beauty. This is where the Ari [Rabbi Isaac Luria] composed his Sabbath poetry, which was full of divine eroticism, and which had a depth with no equal in the poetry of the world.

In visiting Mount Zion, he similarly finds himself transported to a mystical past:

I look into a cave where you can supposedly find King David’s grave. I walk on small stone steps that lead to a room where, according to Christian legend, Jesus ate his last meal. […] This is another sort of antiquity than in other places. The antiquity here smells — it seems to me — of the Temple Mount, of Torah, of scrolls, of prophecy.

And elsewhere: “On this very hill there started a spiritual experiment that continues to this very day. In this place, a people tried to lead a divine life on earth. From here there will one day shine a light to the people of the world and to our own people.” And it seems that his sense of moral choice, raised by the danger of Jordanian soldiers looking down on him from the wall above, also finds expression: “What is today a desert could tomorrow become a town, and what today is a town could tomorrow become a desert. It all depends on our actions, not on bricks, stones, or strategies.” Walking through the Valley of Hinom, the historical site of Gehenna which he finds covered in greenery, he even jokes: “If the real Gehenna looked anything like this, sinning wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.” The images and symbolism of the Bible are truly present at every step.

The land as a whole has a strong effect on Singer, but his trip to Safed, as someone raised on the Kabbalah, made an especially strong impression. “I can say that here, for the first time, I gave myself over to the sense that I was in the Land of Israel.” These are moments when Singer’s sense of criticism, doubt, heresy, intellectuality, and all the other complex impulses that find their way into his fiction, takes second place to a deep sense of piety and faith. This is no less powerful in his work, where his characters achieve it rarely or partially, and, even when they do, with great difficulty.

Singer doesn’t come to this spiritual journal easily either. In Safed, he also encounters the reality of the new state. There he meets a Jew who speaks Galician Yiddish, but who is part of generations of Safed residents. “The Arabs of the past were good to Jews,” Singer quotes the man.

They let the Jewish merchants earn a living. When you bought grapes from them, they would add an extra bunch. Another man said: everything was good until the English came. They incited the Arabs against the Jews. Another man said: Well, may there soon be peace. This is atkhalta d’geula — the beginning of the redemption.

Among the mysticism and magic of the place are politics, colonialism, and history.

Later, in Tel Aviv, Singer visits a courthouse. In the first courtroom, Singer sees “a young man from Iraq who had allegedly falsified his documents in order not to have to go to the army.” In the next courtroom, a Greek Orthodox priest is taking the stand, speaking Arabic, which is being interpreted into Hebrew:

On the bench sit several Arabs […] They are suing to get back their houses, which the state of Israel took over after the Jewish-Arab War […] Jews have taken over their homes. But now the Arabs have decided to sue for their property back. They no longer have any documents, but they are bringing witnesses to testify that the houses that they own belong to them. The old Greek priest is one of these witnesses.

In a third courtroom, Singer observes a Yemenite Jewish thief who is accused of assaulting the police, but who claims the police actually assaulted him. The young thief ends up being acquitted. Ashkenazi Jews are conspicuously absent from this entire visit to the courthouse.

Singer soon observes other forms of suffering and injustice. On the southern side of the city, it is even more evident:

Here in Jaffa you can see that there was a war in this country. Tens and possibly hundreds of houses are shot up, ruined […] The majority of Arabs fled Jaffa, and in the Arab apartments live Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia. They live in single rooms almost without furniture. They cook on portable burners. […] The situation in Israel is generally difficult, but in Jaffa everything is laid bare — all the poverty, all the difficulty.

Singer is, as that passage and most of his writing suggests, almost singularly focused on the new Jewish population of the state. The former Arab tenants of these apartment buildings remain invisible to him.

Singer is so utterly focused on the creation of the new state and the new Jewish settlers, that even when faced with the Arabic population, he barely acknowledges them. He writes, “In Beer Sheva, more than in other cities, you feel that you’re among Arabs. […] Arabs are not black but also not white. […] What sticks out to the eye most is the great amount of clothing that Arabs wear on the hottest of days. […] Rarely do you see Arab women on the street.” What is striking is the degree to which Singer sees Israel’s Arab population as an impenetrable other. He seeks no interaction with them, no attempt to understand them. He puts it plainly in another text: he just wants them to let Jews live their lives. Later, when he visits Jaffa, he writes: “As long as the Arabs leave well alone, there will be building-fever here like in Tel Aviv and in the rest of the country.” This is a difficult opinion to hear, but it has actually come to bear. Jaffa, more than 60 years later, is now going through a major revolution of gentrifying Jewish construction.

There is no doubt that Singer’s story of Israel is a Jewish story. His writing can deepen our understanding of different kinds of Jewish realities, even if, when it comes to Palestinians, his opinions are thoroughly unexamined and unconsidered. Singer can contribute, however, an interesting perspective on the need for tolerance among different kinds of Jews: Sephardic, Ashkenazi, old world and new. This is especially the case when it comes to modern Jews understanding the mindset of the old world. And it sets out a path for tolerance that can then be extended beyond Israel’s Jewish population.

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“I myself want people to speak to me in Hebrew,” Singer writes in one of his earlier articles.

But as soon as anyone hears that my Hebrew sounds foreign, they start speaking to me in Yiddish, and so the result is that I mostly speak Yiddish. People here speak Yiddish at every step. […] Even Sephardim learn some Yiddish in the army. It’s also in fashion for Hebraists to throw in Yiddish words to be cute.

Over and over, Singer’s wishes and imaginings of this place bump up against the reality. Everyday life — the texture of daily reality — pushes back against the big questions that seem to always be at hand. “A good cup of coffee is rare,” Singer writes. “You can get a good black coffee, but if you like a cup of coffee with cream like in New York, you will mostly be disappointed.” He also points out that “yogurt is very popular, as is a sort of sour cream called lebenya.” And another thing: “You see balconies everywhere. People sit on their balconies, eat on their balconies, entertain guests.” He points out that there are many elegant people on the streets but that well-dressed people are a rare sight. He even spends a paragraph on trisim, the heavy shades that are meant to keep out the Mediterranean sun. No matter the history, there is always real life to negotiate.

A major part of this real life, as Singer points out, is the constant threat of war. “The enemy can attack from all sides: from north, from south, from east,” Singer writes, reflecting on his trip up to Kibbutz Beit Alpha. “But the visitor in Israel is infected with a mysterious bravery that belongs to all Jews in Israel. A kind of courage that’s difficult to explain.” On Tel Aviv, he writes: “The enemy is not far. If you in New York were as close to the enemy as we are here, you’d shiver and shake and try to run away. But in the streets where I find myself there reigns a strange quiet, a serenity having something to do with the physical and spiritual atmosphere.” In Jerusalem, he again has the same thought: “It’s hard to believe that you’re close, extremely close, to the enemy.” And on the way up to Mount Zion, he again points to the mysterious courage: “I’m no hero, but I have no fear. I’d would say that Israel is infected with bravery. In any other country, this kind of walk, next to the very border of the enemy, would arouse fear in me.” Violence is a reality that Israelis face at all times — and there is no doubt that over the decades it has affected and perhaps also infected our society, both how Israelis treat non-Jews and how we treat each other. But the fact remains that, to live here, we all need an inherent kind of bravery, toward outside threats no less than our own neighbors.

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In one of his articles, in which Singer considers all the people he met during his trip, he tells the story of Benjamin Warszawiak, an old friend from Bilgoraj who moved to Israel. Benjamin found life difficult, moved for a time to South America, but eventually came back to live out his life working on a kibbutz. His story is sad, and yet Singer sees a redemptive aspect to this man’s life — that there is nowhere else but the Jewish state for him to live. “You don’t have to necessarily be an extraordinary person to have deep spiritual needs,” he reflects. “Simple people often sacrifice their personal happiness to improve their spiritual atmosphere. Israel is full of such people, and you find them especially in the kibbutzim. I can say that almost all of the kibbutzniks are in their own way idealists.”

Ultimately, Singer suggests, the paradox of Jewish life in Israel lies in the heart of the Jews who continue to make Israel their home. “Faith in this place, like the Sabbath, is somewhat automatic and instinctual too,” he writes. “The mouth denies, but the heart believes. How could people live here otherwise?”

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David Stromberg is a writer, translator, and literary scholar based in Jerusalem.

The post Faith in Place: Isaac Bashevis Singer in Israel appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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