#AND STEINBECK IS STILL AT LARGE | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xx-vergil-xx · 16 days

Note

god Verg I love a Structure so much, it’s gonna be “despicite, dei, gaudete” for the WIP game & I would love to hear more about the said structure if you feel like sharing it!

hello!! an excuse to talk about my project? yes please thank you <3

so it’s three “layers” which are entangled (maybe laced is a better word — i’m still ironing out final structural presentation, but the core is there)

1. sopwith, a book published in 1950 about pilots in WWI — aiming for an american modernism style, steinbeck influences (god i love steinbeck) with a dash of the faintly surreal, though i wouldn’t call it experimental. presented in standard book style, not terribly long

2. the life of sopwith’s author, who was himself a pilot in the second war, discharged after a serious plane crash — sopwith is published after his stint in the air force and he spends the last six years of his life in a new york hotel (based on the chelsea) obsessively redrafting a second edition of sopwith and filling a horde of journals, which themselves are published 50 years later as an academic text (though the second edition of sopwith never sees the light of day). told in journal passages

3. the efforts of a lit studies doctorate to piece together what it was sopwith’s revised version (never published) was really trying to say while she struggles with her own psychiatric health and her relationship to literature and the world at large. told in footnotes on sopwith, journals, and letters to her brother.

that’s the simplest sort of breakdown — the lit. studies doctorate ends up living in the same hotel the author lived in while she’s working and enters a psychological spiral where she becomes entangled with those last years of the author’s life and the thing he was trying to excise via his book, so the lines get a little blurry as the whole thing progresses. there are lots of throughlines about doubling/communication/the effort of people to corral the world with the written word/etc — inspired a lot by jorge luis borges and also house of leaves. i’m still in the glorious haze of Throw It All On The Page so i expect there’ll be some. refinements? (please god)

despicite, dei, gaudete is the first thing the author ever wrote and published — it’s a novella about an odd family myth a grandmother is telling her grandson, but taking a borges tact what we read instead of the actual novella is the lit doctorate’s essay about it, an excerpt from the middle of which i shall offer you here :)

thanks much for the ask my friend <3 <3

The seemingly obvious moral is twofold: old gods are infinitely cruel, and splitting up in strange forests is a terrible idea (a fact any B-list horror film will readily remind us of). Little chou hears this story, and when the telling of it is over, we discover that chou is now an old man, telling the tale to his granddaughter, and we have been hearing the telling of a telling, itself impressed upon by dimly-recalled circumstance and the erosion of an old man’s memory. Now we see why the impressions of intermediate narrative — a family dinner, a bedtime, a certain firelit drawing room — are so loosely sketched, so half-filled and yet so elemental. They are the memories of a child.

Most take Despicite as Witten’s first establishment of in loco, absentia on the basis of the fact that the real narrative concealed within is the life of chou, understood to us by the particularity of the details he does remember: his mother’s hand vividly recalled, posed mid-stir over a soup pot, thought by many to imply both her early death and chou’s pursuit of the culinary arts; the flames in the hearth and the strange vision chou has of the stones blackened, suggesting at one time that the house burned down; chou’s exquisite ekphrasis of the ceiling in his childhood bedroom, so vivid one cannot help but think that this is where we find him now, perhaps confined to the same quarters he slept in as a child, an old man at the end of his life. Legion readers have pointed out the obvious Biblical influences, the echoes of Cain and Abel (raised as a Protestant in his hometown of Valentine, Nebraska, it’s no small wonder that Witten’s works tend to touch on Christian themes). The first brother, killed and then dismantled by the second, plays our ready Abel, and the second our more hapless Cain, whose inciting sin is perhaps his abandonment of his brother to the dark wood in pursuit of his own reckless belief. He then attempts to “hide” his sin by rectifying it, collecting his brother in an attempt to reverse his transformation into earth. It’s no great leap. Our Cain, of course, is not condemned to wander, but instead condemned to a miserable stasis, from which he similarly does not escape.

#writing #fiction #god only knows #i’m having so much fun writing all this nonsense and i expect it’ll carry me through the next several months #vergil says hello #vergil says things #thanks very much for stopping by and indulging me my friend <3 #<3 <3 <3 <3 <3

7 notes · View notes

starlightshadowsworld · 1 month

Text

I do find it interesting that Fitzgerald chooses to make a deal with Atsushi and his terms are wanting Yosano to heal Margaret.

Because Fitzgerald still wants the book, he's still searching for it. But he's trying to make money so that a large scale investigation can be held.

So it seems like Fitzgerald's decided he will find it himself without using Atsushi to do so.

And given Steinbeck wants to destroy Fitzgerald's ambitions, I wonder if he'll stand in his way to get the book.

#bsd atsushi #bsd fitzgerald #bsd steinbeck #bungou stray dogs #bsd

16 notes · View notes

santacarlatourism · 1 year

Text

JD x Kevin x Reader Reading/Book Headcanons

J.D.

Musical J.D. is canonically a Baudelaire-quoting bad boy, and I think movie J.D. would honestly enjoy Baudelaire’s work too. I know this because I’ve made an entire Google doc about the things I think J.D. would enjoy reading.

Aside from Baudelaire I think he would also enjoy e. e. cummings and-- ironically enough given the Heather Chandler situation-- Sylvia Plath. I think that he enjoys reading her because her poetry about her depression and suicide, like “Lady Lazarus,” is something he’d read to try and make sense of his mom’s death and it would help him feel more connected to her in some ways.

On the non-poetry side of things I think he reads a lot of philosophy. He reads Nietzche and Foucault and draws... interesting conclusions from their works. Maybe fuels his god complex along the way. I think he’d also enjoy The Catcher in the Rye, duh, and also Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.

He’s definitely a philosophy bro. I definitely think that should J.D. have gone to college he would have ended up majoring in philosophy or English simply because i think he would have taken a lot of classes in those two, needed to declare a major, and saw that credits wise those would make the most sense for him.

Overall J.D. is someone who enjoys reading and enjoys feeling smart and superior to the Kurts and Rams of the world so you very often will see him with a book in his hand.

He’s tried to get Kevin interested in his books a couple of times, but he’s largely given up. J.D. is a quick learner and he quickly picked up that trying to make Kevin interested in something was a futile task.

Still, that does not save Kevin from having to listen to J.D. break down random philosophical theories and it’s always unclear if Kevin is somewhat appreciative of how smart J.D. is, or if he’s considering choking him. J.D. assumes it’s the former as he hasn’t been choked yet.

If you like to read though, he loves to discuss books with you. He is the type that literally cannot read anything and “just enjoy” it everything is going to get analysis even if that analysis is utterly trashing it if he disliked it.

Will always take your book recommendations but won’t always finish them if they don’t interest him

Kevin Khatchadourian

The only thing you are going to catch this guy reading of his own volition is Robin Hood

It‘s not just that he found the act of writing school essays about books trite and boring, but he finds reading-- when not for a specific purpose-- boring as well. He’ll read internet articles about hacking and he’ll occasionally read books with very disturbing contents but you won’t often find him simply reading for pleasure or relaxation like you’ll find J.D.

He does, however, enjoy watching J.D. read to you. You with your head in J.D.’s lap, trying to act like you don’t notice the way J.D.’s tone gets a bit more invested when he’s reading about murder and vigilante justice. The way you squirm is something he enjoys much more than reading most books.

One day, if you’re sick, and just so happen to be sick when Kevin is in a good mood, you may wake up to find him entering the bedroom with his copy of Robin Hood, which he starts reading to you with zero explanation. It’s always hard to tell Kevin’s motivation for anything, but you’d like to think that it’s a very rare glimpse into the fact that he does care about you (and J.D.) in his own certain way.

#jd x kevin x reader #jd x reader #kevin khatchadourian x reader #by santacarlatourism #post: hcs

109 notes · View notes

kunikidas-lost-glasses · 1 year

Text

BSD college!AU headcanons - Study group on friday

TWs: Slight mention of OCD, Slight mention of heart palpations, slight mention of SH? I think? It's Fyodor's finger biting/hurting them in the process if that's triggering to someone.

It's all very slight though

Obviously thier mental health isn't as fucked up as in the canon universe here.

Also Oda is alive in this.

---------------------------------------------------

Usually, Dazai, Kunikida, Chuuya, Fyodor, Nikolai, Shibusawa, Sigma, Ranpo, Poe, Mushitaro, Yosano, Atsushi, Akutagawa, Higuchi, Bram, Gin, Lovecraft, Steinbeck, Louisa and sometimes even Jouno and Tecchou meet every Friday in the little Cafe close to their college in order to study together, do homework or just gossip about the day

They are all either majoring or minoring in literature so the all know each other in some way

It all started with Atsushi frequently joining Dazai, Chuuya and Kunikida after their lectures in order to study together with them because he dislikes studying alone.

Besides this, Dazai literally was his tutor for quite some time and still helps him out with homework sometimes (Atsushi still has to do a lot of convincing most of the time)

Atsushi actually picked the café because Lucy works there and he can see her more often now

Atsushi then told Akutagawa about their study sessions and begged him to come with him next time which he eventually did

Akutagawa then told Gin, Gin told Higuchi and so on

Dazai on the other hand once begged Fyodor to join them at the café once for whatever reason and Fyodor dragged Nikolai, Shibusawa and Sigma with him. Sigma told Bram, Bram told Lovecraft, and Lovecraft told Steinbeck

Ranpo is there because Yosano, who knew about the study group from Chuuya, convinced him to come too and he decided to drag Poe and Mushitaro with him.

Poe also told Louisa and Louisa was surpringly thrilled about coming with them to the café since her girlfriend works there

Jouno and Tecchou once decided to study at the café after their military training one day and saw the large group studying the same stuff as them and so they scooted over to that table to exchange some informations and to compare what they've written.

Since then, they sometimes join them once or twice a month

They don't just do their work for their literature course there. Fyodor is mainly coding something on his laptop for his coding major, Nikolai is revising his plays or makes Sigma read out the other roles while he revises his lines and Ranpo is whining about criminology being too easy and that college is unnecessary

Usually thier meetings are 50% studying and 50% gossiping

Thanks to Louisa, Lucy let herself get convinced to let them stay in the café even after it's closing time during the exam season

Bram and Lovecraft doze off nearly every hour so Steinbeck has to wake them up again all the time

Lucy coming to thier table, sitting down next to Louisa and chatting a bit during her short breaks is a thing

Her making sure that Louisa is doing fine and isn't overworking herself, kissing the top of her head and praising her but also roasting all the others for choosing to study and now suffering every few months because of exams while she decided to start to work instead of torturing her with even more school is a thing too

Ranpo often wears noise canceling headphones when the café is too crowded

They all grew kinda close to each other, some more some less, after some time. After all, they studied and talked together for hours every single friday

They also found out a lot about each other there

Bram found out that Dazai suffers from chronical pain aswell and now always keeps some less intense pain killers like the ones he has to take with him in case Dazai forgot his ones again with him

Sigma and Chuuya found out that the other suffers from OCD as well and now they always keep an eye on each other and comfort each other when it gets too bad

Dazai nearly always blasts pop music from 2010/2011 over his headphones

He is also always chatting with Fyodor for literal hours.

They don't get a change to chat for long super often due to Fyodor having afternoon classes and usually working until late at night while Dazai takes morning classes and works in the afternoon so those Fridays are great to finally talk with his best friend again

All of them bitching about the amount of work they have to do is a thing too

Atsushi loves the study sessions extremely much. He feels super comfortable in that group, even though he is admittably a bit scared of Nikolai, Shibusawa and Fyodor

Sigma and Atsushi always chat. Just like Dazai and Fyodor they see each other rarley during the week so this is a great opportunity on catching up on how the other is doing

The Perfect crime trio always orders an concerning amount of coffee

The tables which they shoved together to one big table are usually cluttered with laptops, papers, worksheets, books, plates with pasteries, headphones, cutlery, pencils and pencil cases, different kinds of folders, phones and a ton of cups

Due to this, Dazai, who only drinks his coffee decaf with sugar and not hot but warm, once accidentally blindly grabbed Fyodor's cup of hot black coffee and took a big sip while he was writing on essay on his laptop

Needless to say, he spit it out and dramatically complained and whined about the taste as well as about accidentally burning his tongue with the hot drink while also judging Fyodor for drinking such disgusting things

Fyodor just listened with a small amused smile and the judged Dazai for drinking decaf

Dazai complaining about literally anything is a thing too

Mostly he is complaining about studying

He can complain and whine about not wanting to do the work for college for hours

Chuuya and Kunikida are the complete opposite tho. They can work for hours without an break and especially Chuuya always works past his limits so Dazai has to keep an eye on them and especially on the redhead so that he won't end up horribly overworked and dizzy again

Shibusawa working quietly most of the time, only occasionally sliding his sketchbook over to Fyodor, Nikolai or Sigma, asking them what they think of his designs

He always has his one little lunch box with apple slices with him for some reason. He eats them when the employees of the café aren't looking

It's diffrent when he has an art/design block though.

He is in a horrible mood then most of the time, sketching sometimes only to skribble wildy over it again or he isn't even touching his sketchbook and is complaining about everything being so boring and every design looking dull then

Dazai "helping" Akutagawa with the latters tasks only to tell him the most cursed shit and giving him wrong answers is a thing

Usually Atsushi overhears it though or see the notes Akutagawa made and proceeds to lecture Dazai

Atsushi likes Dazai, that's put of question. He admires the older. But he's also so done with his shit like 80% of the time

Especially when he is messing with Akutagawa again

When Chuuya finds out, he usually smacks Dazai's head, scolding him for messing with Akutagawa (Chuuya took Akutagawa under his wing after and became his tutor after Dazai dropped him so by now he cares a lot about the younger student in a mentor/big brother kind of way)

Ranpo could technically help nearly everyone with their tasks but he only helps when he recrives payment in form of candy or other sweets. The more difficult the task or the more the work, the more candy he demands

Usually you get roasted about not being able to solve such an easy task too

So asking Ranpo for help is something you usually do if there is litarally no other solution

Ranpo or Mushitaro often hold Poe's hand under the table if the café is very groweded and they sense that he's becoming nervous again

During exam phases, everything is a tiny bit different and everyone looks pretty done with life

Dazai once even arrived to the café in his pyjamas during the exam phase

It actually made Fyodor laugh for the first time that day even though he tried not to laugh about it at first

The russian didn't looked any better though. He wore comfortable pants, a lavender zip up hoodie, had his hair tied up in a messed low pony tail and looked like he hadn't slept since days

His fingers were covered in colorful band aids for kids which Nikolai put on them after Fyodor bit them all bloody and wound again

No matter how long Dazai and Fyodor knew each other, it still felt weird to see him in other clothes than the black, white and lavender silky, a bit old fashioned but elegant looking clothes which he usually worse

Atsushi also looked like he hadn't slept since years, Yosano had wine in her water bottle, drinking it like water and looked like she was close to loosing her mind (she studies/majors in medicine), Chuuya had been overworking himself since the past week, Sigma had probably been through five panic attacks since Monday and Bram was just sleeping it off

It's not like for example Dazai and Fyodor think the topics are hard to understand and can memorize it in a matter of two days but it's the sheer amount of work which tires them out

Thier part time jobs, lectures, studying, it's all just a lot

Lucy supports them with regularly bringing them new coffee, tea and their favorite pastries to thier table (They happened to have them in stock. She absolutely didn't order them to made especially for them because she knew they were in the exam phase.)

Fyodor just dozing off on the table is a thing too then

Nobody dares to wake him though. For different reason

Some fear his anger, some are just happy that he finally gets some sleep

Poe and Nikolai usually bring thick plush blankets with them during that time and completely wrap themselves up in said blanket for comfort

Shibusawa once brought his sewing machine, sewing tools and fabrics with him and finished a whole outfit which he started sewing at his dorm at the café, completely unbothered by the stares he got by some costumers

Lucy keeps an emergency kit in a storage room ever since the study sessions became a regular thing

Chargers, tissues, pain killers, scotch tape, band aids, lavender pills, pens, ear plugs, pads, bandages, iron pills, you call it.

She often overhears them forgetting stuff so she made that emergency kit

She then, happened to have the needed item there by coincidence

She'd rather die than to admit she buyed stuff to help them

After the exam phase is over, Lucy opens the café for exclusively them on Saturday so that they can celebrate

Ranpo often simply snatches Mushitaro's tablet away from him when he notices that Mushitaro is close to getting a migraine again or when his heart palpations which are always acting up when he has a lot of stress, are acting up again so that he can't continue working on his tasks since he knows that Mushitaro is prone to work past his limits

When someone can't come to their study sessions, at least one of them, will send a long report about today's meet to them, usually with some solutions to some tasks attracted to the message

Sometimes Oda and Ango who happen to come to the café during their breaks, stroll over to the group, greet them and chat a bit with Dazai who's always excited to see them, already waving to them from his seat as soon as he sees them entering the café

26 notes · View notes

clood · 1 year

Text

on this day of me making all of the posts, i opened up east of eden to remember i had stopped on this specific page to talk briefly about the following paragraph:

“What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be human. One would be a monster.”

this is from john steinbeck’s east of eden, published in 1952.

in reading these lines for the first time i felt so disappointed and alienated, and then for a moment i was like, “oh well. this was published in the 50s!”

the trouble is, the sentiment toward asexual folks and asexuality still remains largely the same: we are told we are not normal, we are weird, some might even go so far as steinbeck did and call us inhuman. and shit like this hurts!! whether you see it in a book by an author you love or on your dash in the year of our lord 2023.

to my fellow ace friends, we’re fine just the way we are. we’re wonderful, even!!

idk why i’m really even making this post but like. i had to stop and read the paragraph out loud and process it and feel it, so i guess you do too??? support your ace and aro friends.

#anyway. ace folks are awesome #we are not monsters #asexual #asexuality #clood speaks #another mostly pointless post from yours truly lmao #still wanting to enjoy east of eden though i hear the whole book is insane #but still incredibly disappointed in this attitude

17 notes · View notes

murderballadeer · 1 year

Text

the thing abt steinbeck & sex work is that on the one hand i want to give him credit for writing about sex workers as fully realized & complex human beings and not writing narratives about them being saved from their life of sin by a man or by finding jesus or whatever but there's also stuff like cathy's whole arc in east of eden where it's implied that she was always destined for sin & evil and that her turning to sex work is part of that. and i don't think it's necessarily just a function of the way he tends to portray women bc by and large his novels usually do have complex female characters... even within the same novel abra does have an inner life, and most of the hamilton women also have quite a bit of nuance to them. and in other novels it can be hit and miss (of mice and men, in dubious battle and the winter of our discontent all come to mind as examples of novels that don't really account for women's lives) but i don't think that by and large it's an issue of "men can't write women correctly"... i think maybe the issue with cathy is more to do with the way the novel is structured since with the exception of cal, the characters that she's primarily linked to (cyrus and charles) are also not given a huge amount of depth, and cathy does occasionally have her sympathetic moments, so i do kind of wonder if maybe the part where sex work is linked to her "impurity" is just a function of how a big part of the novel relies on the characters' belief in 19th and early 20th century moral values – cathy has to do something that will make adam never want to mention her to his children and in fact tell them their mother died, and that will upset aron to the point of becoming suicidal when he does find out about it, and it's true that sex work fits that description pretty perfectly. and i still have issues with the general thing where she's portrayed as inherently evil and impure, but again it's also the structure of the novel where that's also true of cyrus and charles. it's just unfortunate that with cathy specifically it takes on a sexual dimension that feels degrading in a way.

#soapbox

7 notes · View notes

closedcoffins · 2 years

Text

for those not familiar with my guild lore ( as i presume most people aren’t ), my version of the guild sees it split into three factions. fitzgerald acts as the overall leader with melville as his vice and louisa as his personal strategist, but below him are 3 tiers of operations.

tier 3 deals with the high society members, either filthy rich people or widely recognized personalities. in my guild rewrite, the leader of this part of the guild is actually zelda fitzgerald ( because come on there was so much potential there come ON ), who has a number of apprentices within the tier. mostly tier 3 deals with the white collar part of guild operations, helping to cover up its existence from people without abilities, considering their movements are highly restricted. many of its members are also there for strategy; this tier is also home to edgar allan poe, who spends much of his time helping the stray dogs.

tier 2 is for people who, while not being in the public eye necessarily, are people who might still be well-known in certain communities. tier 2 deals mostly with recruitment and reporting--they’re the ones who would know if a problem related to ability users or only able to be solved by ability users popped up. this tier is led by nathaniel hawthorne with margaret mitchell as his sole apprentice, set to take over when he retires from his position.

tier 1 is fondly known by its members as the “stray dogs”, a tier filled with people who have no better place to go and nobody they’re attached to. they’re the combative part of the guild who do a lot of the dirty work that the more upstanding members can’t do without exposing the existence of the organization. because ability users generally have difficult lives, this is the most populous tier. its current leader is mark twain, with both lucy maud montgomery and my au!atsushi nakajima as apprentices set to take over should anything happen to twain. both steinbeck and lovecraft are new recruits in this tier.

after the informal dissolution of the guild after fitzgerald’s fall from the moby dick, this three-tier system has largely dissolved, since members of tiers 2 and 3 are able to independently support themselves without guild related income; john steinbeck is currently leading mostly members of the stray dogs. there’s not a lot of them left though because frankly the employee benefits both fitzgerald and twain offered were fuckin insane.

#out of character

1 note · View note

fromafarblog · 4 months

Text

Literary Tour of NorCal (Part I): John Steinbeck

I roadtripped through Northern California in December 2023 to learn more about some of my favorite authors, including John Steinbeck, Jack London, John Muir, and Jack Kerouac.

Day one of my literary tour of Northern California started off beautifully. Snaking down Highway 37 and the Pacific Coast Highway, the magnificence of Northern California's coastline and redwoods took me by surprise. I nearly crashed my car multiple times attempting to document my drive.

Blurry views of the coastline from PCH.

Finally, I arrived in beautiful Salinas California. Turning off the highway onto Salinas Rd, I had to pull over to take in the beauty of the Long Valley. The mountains of Salinas appeared in front of me just as they had been described in Steinbeck's novels.

I had to pull over to take in the beauty of the Long Valley.

Oldtown Salinas itself is modest, with a large movie theater and a few shops and restaurants neighboring the National Steinbeck Center.

The Fox Theater opened in 1930.

The National Steinbeck Center was a fantastic place to spend a few hours learning about Steinbeck's origins, as well as interact with replicas from some of his novels.

At the National Steinbeck Center, which sits right at the beginning of Oldtown Salinas' Main Street, I learned about the author and his books. The exhibition hall offered visitors the opportunity to interact with life sized replicas of scenes from Steinbeck's books. The museum was certainly a good way to learn more about Steinbeck, but I preferred to walk around Salinas and venture down to Monterey to see if I could learn more about the streets and scenes that Steinbeck saw in his life.

The Center's guides suggest visitors start with a movie to learn more about the author.

Monterey has obviously changed a lot from the days when Steinbeck would hang out at Ed Ricketts' lab and patronize the Wing Chung grocery store. However, some parts of Cannery Row are still around.

The Monterey Canning Company headquarters, like most storefronts on Cannery Row, is now a shopping mall.

An ad for Portola Sardines still remains on the walls of the Monterey Aquarium.

Signs read "Formerly Wing Chung Market" and "TELL 'EM YOU SAW IT ON CANNERY ROW...AT THE OLD GENERAL STORE".

Banners line Cannery Row with images of some of the book's real life characters.

Pacific Biologic Laboratories still remains.

A mural on the beach recalls a time before Cannery Row was lined with t-shirt sellers and ice cream shops.

0 notes

sowingseedsandshootinghoops · 6 months

Text

The Worshipping of Success

Note on the text: I used John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent as published in 1961 by the Viking Press

Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today (dedication page).

Steinbeck is my personal favorite American author, and what I loved most about this book is the way in he dissects the American attitude towards success.

Strength and success- they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be: the only punishment is for failure. In effect, no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught (186).

Americans worship at the altar of success. We pray the prayer of “the American Dream” and crafted the mythology of America being a place where anyone can achieve anything in service of this god. We praise people (athletes, singers, etc) for being successful regardless of what they are successful for or how they achieved that success. Not only do we want to be successful ourselves, but we want others to see us as such. It’s the 20th (and 21st) century version of “the ends justify the means”. So long as you are successful, especially financially, nothing else really matters. Or do we still have values we, as Americans, want to stick to regardless of how “successful” it turns out to be? That is the question that Steinbeck is interested in exploring here.

Ethan is a lowly store clerk in a general store when we first meet him. He is a solidly middle class man who earns on honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work. It isn’t glamorous but he is able to afford to feed his family and is, by all accounts, a really good, honest, and virtuous man. In fact, most of us would be proud to be the kind of person that Ethan is. Yet neither his wife, Mary, nor his two children, Allen and Mary-Ellen, seem to be particularly proud of their dad’s moral character. They are more interested in his ability to help them keep face with the neighbors. “It wouldn’t be so bad if you were a lawyer or in a bank or [something] like that” Allen says when Ethan asks him about why other kid’s tease him. Mary is also so desperate for her husband to “be somebody” that she gets her fortune read at the beginning of the book and repeats what the fortune teller all throughout the book: “you are going to be a big shot, did you know? Everything you touch will turn to gold- a leader of men” (17). It’s not enough that he be a good man who can offer them a comfortable, middle class life. They want him to be something more.

Ethan himself also struggles with that question. He’s not sure if it’s enough for him to just be a simple, good man, who just goes to work in a grocery store and goes home: “would my ancestors be proud to know that they produced a goddamn grocery clerk in a goddamn wap store in a town they used to own?” (2).

No where is this worship of “success at all costs” seen more clearly than in Allen’s essay writing contest. Allen has competed in, and won, a national essay competition on “why do you love America?” However everyone soon discovers that he plagiarized the essay and he is disqualified from the competition. When Ethan confronts him about it, Allen says

who cares? Everybody does it. It’s the way the cookie crumbles. . . . Don’t you read the papers? Everybody right up to the top- just read the papers. You get to feeling holy, just read the papers. . . . I’m not going to take the rap for everybody. I don’t care about anything” (277).

Everyone else is doing it, so why can’t I is essentially his response. He doesn’t think that there’s anything really wrong with what he did. It was all about getting first place and the problem is not that he cheated but that he got caught.

Now in the middle of this truthful, if somewhat cynical, critique of America, comes the character of Alfio Marullo, the Italian owner of the grocery store that Ethan works in, and an underhanded, sneaky, defense of idealism. Blink and you’ll miss it.

Early on in the story, Ethan refused a bribe from a competing store to sell out his boss. When Mr Marullo finds out he says that Ethan is a “good fella” and gives some money and gifts (including some expensive Easter eggs) as a reward and later decides to sell him the store when he goes back to Italy (96). Now Mr Marullo is just as corrupt and cynical and anyone else here (in fact it’s heavily implied that he came to America illegally). He is looking for his piece of the American Dream and he doesn’t particularly care how he gets it. More than that, he doesn’t even seem to particularly like Ethan. Every time they talk, Mr Marullo always speaks to him in a gruff and dismissive way. Even after he finds out how much of a “good fella” Ethan is. So everyone is surprised when he decides to sell Ethan the store, including Ethan. So when Ethan asks another character, Richard Walder, why he thinks Mr Marullo would treat him that way and give him the store anyways, he’s surprised to hear Richard tell him that he suspects Mr. Marullo was trying to figure what was Ethan’s “racquet, and he discovered that your racquet was honesty. . . [and] he [probably wanted] to make you [into] in a kind of monument to something he believed in once” (227). Despite Mr Marullo’s cynicism and seemingly Machiavellian drive for success, he actually believes in the importance of being a good and honest person. The reason he pays and rewards Ethan for being a good man is that he thinks it will inspire Ethan to continue being a good person. He wants Ethan to be a good AND successful person.

We do something similar with our heroes. It’s not enough that our heroes be successful at doing what they do, we need them to be moral too. It’s not enough that Abraham Lincoln be a great president, he has to be the most honest too. It’s not enough for George Washington to be a successful general who helps found a country- he has to be “unable to tell a lie”. Because despite our cynicism and obsession with success at all costs, we are always a highly idealistic nation. Somehow, deep inside, as much as we want to be seen as successful, we also want to be seen as moral. It’s an interesting dichotomy. Despite all our efforts it seems like we can just give up the fight for morality. How does the saying go?: “You are obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it”.

Which is what Ethan realizes at the very end of the book. By the end of the book he has become so disillusioned by the sheer volume of immorality that surrounds him that he has resolved to kill himself. But as he reaches into his pocket to get his knife he accidentally grabs a little token, what he calls a talisman, that his daughter Mary-Ellen gave him. In that moment he is reminded of all the good people that he has known who have managed to do some good despite all of the evil in the world, and how it’s every individual’s responsibility to keep fighting the good fight and encourage each other to keep doing the same no matter what:

Marullo’s light still burned, and Old Cap’n’s light, and Aunt Deborah’s light. It isn’t true that there is a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely one. . . . I had to get back- had to return the talisman to its new owner [i.e. his daughter] [or] else another light might go out (280-281).

It was his responsibility not just to keep on shining, just as others before him had done, but to pass it forward by encouraging his daughter to keep doing the same.

We do value success highly in our society and Steinbeck is right in critiquing us the way he does. But he’s also right in reminding us that morality still matters and that we would be remiss to forget that. That, in the end, the ends might not justify the means as much as we would like it to.

#johnsteinbeck #morality #theendsjustifythemeans #thewinterofourdiscontent

0 notes

sarah-aliterarylife · 1 year

Text

Monarchs, Steinbeck and Matthew Perry : My To Be Read List

Working my way through the list of period dramas on the BBC IPlayer, I began thinking about the books on my To Be Read list. Believe it or not, there are still a few titles that continue to evade me as the years go by!

Time, work commitments and life in general have all meant that I’ve not yet found time to read the following :

1. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

My literary journey has led me to make the acquaintance of many extraordinary women – Jane Eyre, Bathsheba Everdean, Elizabeth Bennett – but Becky Sharpe is not among them. I actually own two copies of Vanity Fair (a large paperback and a free Kindle copy, bought in what was probably a senior moment a few years ago, not realising I already owned it). Clearly a sign that I need to read one of them at some point!

2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Whilst I very much enjoy a Great American Novel from time to time, I’ve never quite made it round to the Joads and their story.

3. The Complete Works of Charles Dickens

If I was ever lucky enough to be a guest on Desert Island Discs, this would be my book choice. To be fair, a desert island would be the most likely setting for my ever completing such a mammoth task. If you have attempted to read a Dickens novel, you will know that his complex prose requires NO DISTRACTIONS. Don’t read Dickens on a train, or with the television blaring out beside you. I personally find total peace and quiet, a clear head and an unlimited amount of time the optimum conditions to get stuck in. Not easy things to find in today’s world.

So far, my journey through the complete works of Charles Dickens amounts to Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House and a Tale of Two Cities. I struggled massively with the latter two – I’m not sure what that says about my intelligence level – and I haven’t touched Dickens since. Perhaps one day I’ll take myself to a desert island and complete the rest.

4. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Watching the BBC adaptation of this novel recently prompted me that the book itself has been sat on my shelves for far too long. For a moment, I couldn’t quite work out why I had never read it. And then I remembered.

This book scares me. It’s nearly 1500 pages long!! My doorstop copy has been sat in my house for a good 5 years, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve considered reading it many times but have never quite worked up the courage or inclination to give it a go. Truthfully, what may be stopping me is that I attempted to read Vikram Seth’s Two Lives a few years ago and struggled with it. It was well written, but I couldn’t connect with the plot and couldn’t finish it. I am told that A Suitable Boy is his best novel though, so perhaps one day I’ll give it a go.

5. Friends, Lovers, and The Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry

I am massive Friends fan and have been itching to read this since it was published last year. A good summer holiday read perhaps. (Although probably not, given some of the subject matter!)

6. A biography of every British monarch since William the Conqueror

Yes, I am aware that a) doing this would probably take me the rest of my life to complete, and b) I’m not even certain that a biography of every British monarch exists. So far, my progress amounts to biographies of Elizabeth I, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII (sensing a pattern here?) and Charles II. So I’m getting there! (Sort of)

7. Maya Angelou’s autobiographies

Maya Angelou, the American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, lived a long and fascinating life. In fact, she was a woman who lived several lives, having been a writer, friend of Martin Luther King, single mother, dancer, singer and even a prostitute. Her first volume of autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, is considered to be one of the foremost texts on the black experience and racism ever written. Maya Angelou’s courage, her fearlessness and her wit and humour in the face of her struggles have inspired me for much of my adult life. I began reading her 7 volumes of autobiography shortly before her death in 2014 and made it through the first two books, but life intervened and I never revisited them. Having recently listened to the BBC’s radio dramatization of these wonderful books (and the lady herself on Desert Island Discs), I felt a new pull towards Maya Angelou’s writing, and am now regretful that I didn’t finish them. Another one to add to my list!

What’s on your To Be Read list?

#book blogs #books and literature #books and reading #to be read #literature

1 note · View note

biglisbonnews · 1 year

Photo

By Air, Land, or Sea, Tiny Microbes Transform Our World Excerpted and adapted with permission from Slime: A Natural History, by Susanne Wedlich. Published February 2023 by Melville House. All rights reserved. A haboob is a dust storm. It’s an Arabic word for a phenomenon that struck the American Midwest like a plague of biblical proportions just under a century ago. This storm was not the work of God’s chastising hand, though; it was the worst man-made environmental catastrophe the United States has ever seen. East of the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains extend like wide corridors all the way from Mexico to Canada. The land is dry and naturally covered by a community of robust plant life—primarily prairie grasses—whose dense root networks stabilize the soil beneath. But then the humans came. The government knew the plains were not arable land and that, at best, only large farms with complex irrigation systems might be able to make a living there. Little family farms without adequate capital, however, would not be able to survive. Nevertheless, the land was advertised intensively into the 1930s and allocated to settlers free of charge as fertile land requiring little more than a “tickle” with the plow to unleash its productivity. The railways, needing to pay off their newly laid network of tracks, joined in the propaganda for the “Nile of the New World.” In the decades to come, around a third of the Great Plains would be transformed into green grassland and pastures, worked intensively with horse and plow, which disturbed the dense root network of the original plant life. As we now know, essential biological glues were lost. Another of the government’s promises was that the rains would follow the plow, but what actually followed was, in essence, the apocalypse. The exposed earth grew drier and hotter, losing its stability, and became subject to droughts and erosion. This was followed by a rare weather phenomenon, reversing the jet stream which usually carried clouds and rain towards the Midwest. Now the rains stayed away, the harvests withered and vast clouds of dust loomed like a black rock face, kilometers high. In 1933 alone there were more than 50 haboobs, which swept across the landscape. Images from this period show houses and farms submerged as if beneath a gray flood, waves of dust and earth washing as high as their roofs. Contemporary witnesses spoke of fine grains grating against the skin like sandpaper, blinding people, suffocating cattle and leaving children sick with the “brown plague,” a type of pneumonia caused by dust, as described by Timothy Egan in his award-winning book The Worst Hard Time. There was no escape. In the evenings, families sealed their windows and doors with damp towels, yet they would still find themselves shoveling dust out of their homes and cottages come morning. The dust in the air muffled the voices of crowing cockerels and the sun hung blood-red in the sky. By afternoon it would be dark again, and anyone out and about in the dense haze would tie a rope around their middle so as to be able to find their way back. The dust was carried from the Great Plains as far as Chicago, and all the way to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. It left a brown coating even on ships at sea. April 14, 1935, “Black Sunday,” brought the mother of all haboobs, during which, according to Egan, twice the amount of dust went swirling across the country in a single afternoon as had been dug up over seven years to build the Panama Canal. For most farmers, there was no longer a possibility of making a living in the Midwest. The photographer Dorothea Lange became famous for her portraits of careworn and gaunt migrants and their rag-clad children making their way westwards. Like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, they were following another empty promise, that there would be work in the big cities of California and elsewhere, a promise thwarted by the global economic crisis which shook the 1930s. Those who stayed behind had little more luck, as the meager harvests were destroyed by devastating blights and, in any case, the land did not recover from the destruction it had suffered. The consequences are not always so catastrophic when dry soil loses its stability and is exposed to erosion. But even little changes can jeopardize our food supply if they occur on a sufficiently vast scale: if, for example, entire areas of land are exposed to higher temperatures and lower levels of precipitation due to climate change. Most at risk here are the biological soil crusts, ecological communities often unseen or mere millimeters tall which cover the ground in deserts and dry regions, but are also capable of growing on and underneath stones. Where and whether they form depends on precipitation, temperature, and the agricultural use of the land. They are particularly prevalent in deserts, as well as steppes and savannas, especially in southern Africa, Australia, and Asia, and in the American Southwest. They are seldom found in temperate zones, such as those in Central Europe, where vascular plants like shrubs and trees completely cover the ground. According to a study by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, led by Bettina Weber, biological soil crusts cover up to 12 percent of Earth’s surface, corresponding to 40 percent of actual land mass. Biological soil crusts are Earth’s living skin, a protective barrier. Yet they also accumulate and transform nutrients and play a key role in larger biogeochemical processes, such as the global nitrogen and carbon cycles. “Earth’s crusts are dry, hard, and, well, crusty,” says Weber, “but there’s also a certain sliminess.” Cyanobacteria are pioneers of soil crusts, setting things in motion by secreting exopolymers which will build a slimy matrix. It’s sticky enough to glue particles in the soil together, protecting it from erosion. This hydrogel also binds and stores the small amount of water that is present—for example, after rain—before it evaporates or trickles away. Biological soil crusts are complex ecological communities which science categorizes according to their developmental stages. Cyanobacteria are the vanguard, paving the way for other microbes like bacteria, as well as archaea or fungi, which join the young community, doing their part by breaking down organic matter. These might be followed by lichen and mosses, possibly even by worms, slugs, snails, or springtails, and other arthropods as well. It can take years or even decades for a soil crust to become this diverse, potentially boasting many hundreds of different species. However, there are differences between these communities in the crust, not only in regard to the level of maturity they achieve over time, but spatially too: Soil crusts are separated into layers. Strongly pigmented fungi and all photosynthesizing organisms, such as cyanobacteria, generally colonize the top layer because they require and can tolerate UV radiation, while shadier characters live lower down in the ecosystem. They must all be able to survive long periods of drought. Specialists in this area include, for example, the tardigrade, which can enter a state of dormancy before quickly reactivating as soon as water is available. These days, however, biological soil crusts are under threat. According to Weber’s calculations, up to a quarter of this protective coating could soon disappear. Climate change is as much a factor as population growth, which requires the expansion of arable land to include dry and previously unused strips, hitherto covered by biological soil crusts. This development could have consequences across the globe, affecting the nitrogen cycle, among other things. Nitrogen is present in the ground and the atmosphere but cannot be taken up directly by plants. Plants rely on soil microbes which fix nitrogen, making it available for plants to use. Weber has calculated that as much as half of this essential service may be provided by soil crusts. Disturbances to the structure would hit many ecosystems in nutrient-poor regions particularly hard. But the loss of the soil crusts would also expose the ground to intensified erosion by water and wind, enriching the atmosphere with the tiniest of particles. It doesn’t need another dust bowl like that of the Great Plains in the 1930s to pose a risk to human health, and not just for people with allergies and hay fever. The notion of miasmas transmitting fatal infections such as malaria (from mal aria, bad air) has been put to bed. Yet the air around us is filled with microbes, pollen, and other particles which have the potential to cause us harm. The great microbiologist Louis Pasteur was the first to prove that open wounds could be infected with germs from the air. In a sense, this made him the founder of aerobiology, a discipline which witnessed its first and—to date—last golden age in the 1930s, when farmers in the Midwest were facing a global financial crisis, devastating haboobs, and plant pathogens thrown in for good measure. Fred C. Meier of the U.S. Department of Agriculture happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time. A tremendously charismatic man with a pilot’s license, he hoped to discover how the deadly rust fungus—or its spores—was spreading, and to what extent weather and the atmosphere were contributing factors. To this end he recruited American aviation’s shining stars, including Amelia Earhart. She was joined in her aerobiological efforts by a celebrity couple, the Lindberghs. Charles Lindbergh’s pioneering flight across the Atlantic overshadowed his wife’s success somewhat, though Anne Lindbergh was one of the first female pilots in the U.S. and steered the plane on their joint flights as well. In 1933, the couple flew from the U.S., over Greenland, and as far as Denmark. As discussed with Meier beforehand, they used “sky hooks” as airborne traps. Charles had constructed them himself out of a metal cylinder containing oily, sticky glass slides which would catch solid particles in the air. In fact, a kilometer above Greenland they found spores of exactly the same rust and other fungi that were growing on the ground thousands of miles away, causing vast agricultural damage. The findings were clear: These spores were nomads that traveled by air, high up in the planet’s atmosphere. And they were not alone: The Lindberghs also collected grains of pollen, fragments of fungal mycelium, single-celled algae like diatoms, insect wings, volcanic ash, and glass particles in their sealed traps. Like the microbes of the deep biosphere in Earth’s crust, other bacteria and spores define the limits of life high beyond the clouds. The living inhabitants of the air, which drift with the wind and cannot fly themselves, are sometimes referred to as aeroplankton, inspired by the ecological communities which float through the oceans. We already know, to some extent, where these airborne microbes come from, or at least where their journey begins. They can find their way from the ocean into the atmosphere when air bubbles rise through the water and burst at its gel-like surface, which is densely populated by microbes. Even the leaves of plants can be a starting point for propelling matter into the air. Many pathogens that affect humans are transmitted via the air we breathe, or via coughs and sneezes, as the coronavirus pandemic has taught us all too well. This is known as droplet transmission. Lydia Bourouiba at MIT demonstrated that plants spread pathogens in a similar way, with fungi, for example, traveling via spattering droplets of rain. They cover themselves in a slimy coat of mucilage, which protects them and prevents them from being carried high up into the air on the wind. If a raindrop strikes an affected leaf, the water splashes off, carrying the pathogen with it, maybe to its next host. Pseudomonas syringae is an economically devastating pathogen, infecting hundreds of plant species, which also specializes in life in the air. This bacterium is present across the world, including in water, but can also survive for several days in the atmosphere, where it is thought to live on fragments of plant matter swept up into the air. Spanish researchers have shown that microbes can travel ensconced in atmospheric dust, even between continents. Their vehicles of choice are iberulites: dust particles made from different minerals that reach considerable size and are glued together by bacterial slime. These kinds of aggregates from mineral and biological components occur all over the world. The ones that were studied in detail this time were found in the city of Granada but held dust grains and microbes from the Sahara. In the atmosphere they had been caught in a water droplet as a bioaerosol and had then taken on the characteristic shape of iberulites, a little like a dented cannonball. Some strains of P. syringae, however, produce a protein that causes water to freeze at unusually high temperatures. Like other microbes and particles, this bacterium acts as a crystallization point for ice formation. One hypothesis is that P. syringae may be able to return to the ground inside a self-made hailstone or snowflake when conditions at altitude become too uncomfortable. Thanks to its freezing proteins, a harmless version of the pathogen is also used to make artificial snow. A harmless version of the pathogen is also used to make artificial snow. Soils, and especially their biological crusts, are closely tied to aeroplankton, too. And they’re equally threatened by disruption through climate change. The expansion of agriculture is another danger, and even smaller damage can have lasting effects. Shoes, hooves, and tires are capable of destroying these fragile biocrusts, which may take decades to regenerate—if they ever get a chance. To lose them would mean losing what were probably evolution’s first ecological communities. Not only do they occur on all continents and in all climatic zones, but they were probably the first ecosystems to venture onto dry land, forming along the edges of bodies of water before moving further inland. They still play a vital role in shaping the habitat of many other organisms, by fixing nitrogen and binding carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also important for weathering processes, breaking down mineral underlayers. Since the cyanobacterias’ slimy matrix stores the little water there is, the soil-crust community and higher plants benefit, even on grazing land. Sometimes, however, less is more. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places on Earth. Very few bacteria, algae, fungi, and lichen are able to survive here, in the soil crusts or as part of the soil microbiota. When the first rainstorms for decades made their way across this region in 2017—a consequence of climate change—it seemed that the born survivors which inhabit this area would finally be granted a well-deserved embarrassment of liquid riches. In fact, the episode culminated in a microbial massacre as the unprecedented excess of water caused the organisms to burst. Of the microbes which normally occur in and on top of the soil in Atacama, only a handful of species survived. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/aeroplankton-soil-crust-microbes

#Susanne Wedlich #Atlas Obscura

0 notes

singeratlarge · 2 years

Text

ALBUM OF THE WEEK—SNAPSHOTS https://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/album/snapshots-live-half-plugged-expanded-reissue ...Cappuccino and novel reading fueled SNAPSHOTS, an album of songs extracted from TV shows, concerts, and the studio. I released this in 2003 when I earned the tag "The Tasmanian Devil of the coffee house set." Part of my audience wanted a raw, acoustic album, hence SNAPSHOTS—a mix of blues, California pop, roots rock’n’roll, and gospel standards ("Workin' on a Building”). Live cuts include energetic covers of Patti Smith’s "Dancing Barefoot" and a Staples Singers-styled remake of "For What it's Worth” (Buffalo Springfield) performed on slide 12-string guitar.

Writers are outsourced in the Beatle-esque "Unresolved (Graham Greene's Script for Laurel and Hardy)" and "Desert Ruby" is a semi-autobiographical "Los Angeles allegory," with images from The Bible and Raymond Chandler. SNAPSHOTS also has 2 of my personal favorites, The Beach Boys-influenced “Like a Father a Son” and "Steinbeck Found the Valley"—an instrumental with accordion, cellos, piano, and trombones by Richard Marriott.

I’ve reduced the list price of my SNAPSHOTS CD to $5 AND I’ll sign your copy &/or you can download it: https://johnnyjblairsingeratlarge.bandcamp.com/album/snapshots-live-half-plugged-expanded-reissue

#snapshots #pattismith #buffalospringfield #stephenstills #staplesingers #Beatles #grahamgreene #laurelandhardy #BeachBoys #JohnSteinbeck #RichardMarriott #TheBible #RaymondChandler #accordion #trombone #cello #blues #Californiapop #rootsmusic #rocknroll #folkrock #gospel #12stringguitar #JohnnyJBlair #singeratlarge #tasmaniandevil #coffeehouse

1 note · View note

earlgreydream · 3 years

Text

take care.

| loki x reader | smut | fluff |

anon requested: ok so he makes the reader come until she physically no longer can and then f l u f f where he takes care of her afterwards🥺

here’s some loki overstim for you, angel 😘

You walked through the castle, ignoring the bows and respectful addresses from the maids, staff, and others wandering around. Your mind was elsewhere, and you were only focused on making it back to your chambers. You stepped through the large golden doors, seeing your lover on the balcony that hung off the huge bedroom.

Loki turned upon hearing you come in, walking back into the bedroom to meet you. He noticed the frustration that had turned your mood dark, and his long legs carried him to you.

“What’s wrong, darling?” He asked, and you shook your cloak from your body, tossing it over a lounger in the corner, unintentionally avoiding his grasp.

“I can’t make everyone happy! Everyone expects so much from me, and I’m just not enough for anybody!” You were yelling, and Loki put his hand on your face, making you turn to look at him.

“You’re everything to me. You’re more than enough.” He said, soothing some of the overwhelmed frustration you held. He pulled you into a kiss, and you melted into his touch, letting the anger fall away. You murmured a soft, I love you, and he said it back between kisses.

“How can I make it better? Tell me what you need.” Loki smiled at you, willing to do anything to please you.

“I need to let go,” you sighed to yourself, and a mischievous smirk adorned his face. You looked at him nervously, knowing exactly where this was going, and there was a moment of silence before you broke into a run. You didn’t even make it to the doors, a shriek leaving your lips as he wrapped his arms around your waist, dragging you back against his chest, his large hand wrapping around your throat, keeping you pinned to his body.

“Now, now, little one. Don’t run from me,” he laughed darkly, kissing along your jaw. You looked up the god, excitement sparking through you like a live wire.

You squirmed in his arms, but he held you firmly, dragging you backwards to the bed. Escaping him was the last thing you wanted, but you wanted to play and get him worked up, and you knew he loved to chase you.

“Loki!” You squealed, trying to climb away as you were tossed onto the bed.

“Are you going to be good, or am I going to have to restrain you? This is for your benefit.” He asked, holding your ankles so you couldn’t get away.

“I’ll be good,” you sighed, relaxing against the duvet and looking up at him as he leaned over you.

“That’s my girl.” He leaned down and kissed you, lightly brushing his nose against yours.

He snapped his fingers, and your clothes were gone in a shimmer of green. His were too, and he laid back against the pillows, lounging in all of his glory.

“Come here, darling.”

You moved between his legs, your back on his chest so you were laid out in front of him. He kissed the side of your head, trailing his hands up and down your sides before moving up to palm your chest. You moaned as he rolled your nipples between his fingers, working to arouse you, knowing you were sensitive. He had your body and all of your pleasures memorized, and he knew exactly how to get your body to respond to him. He was determined to make you forget about all of the reasons you had to be stressed, and you were more than willing to let him.

He kissed your neck, and you moved to allow him more access. He moved your legs over his so you were spread open below him, pushing away your shyness. Loki never made you feel like you had to be embarrassed, and he was careful to never embarrass you himself.

You squirmed as he dropped his hand between your legs, teasing you with light touches.

“Can you please just get me off?” Your voice was impatient, and he raised his eyebrows.

“Of course”

You immediately regretted it upon hearing the tone of his voice, the one reserved for schemes and mischief. You were about to be victim to his torture in some form, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care as his fingers rolled slow circles on your button, teasing it until it swelled. You preened, leaning your head back against his shoulder, letting him get you off.

A moan escaped as he worked two fingers into your slick sex, finding your g-spot expertly.

“Loki!” You arched your back off him as you felt your muscles tighten deep in your belly. You didn’t wait for permission before coming, the orgasm rolling through your body.

“Y/N, hold still for me,” he protested your attempts to squirm away from his touch. He’d given you a small break, but now he was back to stroking your clit directly, sending shocks through your nerves.

“What’re you doing?” You asked, fighting to relax and be good for him.

“Giving you orgasms like you wanted, darling.”

“I didn’t mean-” you rolled your hips against his hand, making him laugh, your body betraying your needs, despite your hypersensitivity he was exploiting.

“Shh, darling,” he hushed you, moving his free hand over your mouth when you yelped from him pushing his fingers back inside of you. He kept stimulating you with his thumb while pumping his fingers inside of you, the filthy sounds making your head spin. You whined against his hand, and he hushed you gently, though his voice dripped with devious amusement.

You neared a second orgasm, and you tried to fight it off, your thighs twitching.

“Let go, y/n,” he encouraged you, and you came again with a scream.

You sighed in relief as Loki climbed out from behind you, letting you lay on your back on the bed. Your eyes fell closed, your body twitching from the aftershocks of the pleasure that ignited all of your nerves.

When you felt his soft hair brush the inside of your thighs, you instantly tried to close your legs, your eyes snapping open. Loki turned his head and bit the inside of your thigh, pulling a yelp from your lips.

“I can’t take another, m’so sensitive!” You whined, but Loki wasn’t finished with you yet.

“You can, darling. Don’t you trust me?”

Your fingers tangled into black locks, pulling at his hair as he attached his mouth to your core, giving you head. Normally, you’d be ecstatic for him to expertly eat you out with his silvertongue, but now you were overstimulated and his touch felt like fire. You blinked back tears, the pleasure and ache overwhelming you as his tongue pushed through your muscles, and back up to your clit.

Loki tore a scream from your throat as he lightly pulled your clit between his teeth, his laughter vibrating through you. The coil in your belly snapped, and you came on his face. You writhed and screamed as he didn’t let off of you, pleading with him for relief as his overstimulation became painful after your third powerful orgasm.

“You’re so good for me, Y/N,” Loki hummed, kneeling between your legs, watching you struggle to catch your breath.

“Loki, Loki!” You protested as he positioned himself, rubbing his head against your heat, making you shudder.

“What did I say about having to restrain you?” He asked as you pushed against his chest.

“I can’t!”

“You can give me one more. One more, then I’ll bathe with you, sweet girl,” Loki promised, and you writhed when he so much as brushed against you. You didn’t say no again, and he eased into you, letting you stretch around him with a weak sob.

His hips rolled against yours, and he was already close from having his head between your thighs. You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him against you as you came for the fourth time, squeezing him like a vice and crying his name. Feeling you contract around him sent him over the edge, and he painted your insides before slowly pulling out.

“No more,” you begged, and he nodded, kissing your cheek.

“No more, Y/N,” he repeated, making you sigh with relief. You were barely conscious as he carried you to the massive bathtub, sinking into hot water up to your shoulders. You jerked at the heat on your raw sex, and he kissed your shoulder, praising your resilience.

He massaged vanilla-scented soap into your sore muscles, his touch soothing you. He washed your hair, glowing at his success, making you forget about all your stress and frustration. You were thankful, though you were already devising a plan to get him back for his brutal torture... at a time when you weren’t exhausted.

“I love you, darling.” Loki’s kind voice filled your heart with butterflies, and you kissed him sweetly.

He helped you out of the bathtub, and you dried off, shivering in the cold. Loki smiled sympathetically, pulling you into his arms and kissing you deeply.

“I’ll start a fire,” he told you, leaving you to dry off in the bathroom. You pulled one of his shirts over your head and walked unsteadily back to your bedroom, crawling onto his lap. He was on the lounger in front of the fire, your favorite novel in his hands.

He knew that listening to him read was your favorite thing, and you pulled a blanket over the two of you, picking up a cup of steaming tea that Loki had magicked to you. He allowed you to get comfortable and settle against him before snaking an arm around your waist, resting his head on top of yours. He began to read to you, and you drifted off to the sound of his voice, feeling safe and relaxed in his arms.

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid anymore.” Loki’s voice reading aloud Steinbeck was the last thing you heard before sleep consumed you.

2K notes · View notes

ladyeliot · 3 years

Photo

Are you happy? [2/2] +18

Part One

Pairing: Ex!Chris Evans x Fem!Reader

Summary: After almost two years without seeing each other, fate brings you together again, each of you has your own reason for the reunion, which brings your feelings to the surface again.

Warnings: Angst. Sentimental confusion. Infidelity. Unprotected sex.

Word count: 3975

A/N: Sorry for my spelling and grammatical mistakes, English is not my native language, I am learning.

John Steinbeck once said 'One can find so many pains when the rain is falling', you had never understood that phrase, never until that very moment. The drops seemed to descend fiercely, crashing firmly against your face, you hardly realised at what point the intensity of the rain had become so extreme, as you continued to be completely blocked from contemplating the face before you, and time never stopped.

The red brick of the Victorian houses, decorated with colourful flower boxes, seemed to create an idyllic scene of which you two were the protagonists in that narrow alley, but neither of you noticed. Words that could not now be erased from your mind had come out of his mouth, a mouth that was at that moment half-open as if it wished to express something else, but did not. You had had to deal with enough events in your life to know how to deal with any new moment that came your way, at least you thought you had, but you would never have thought you would have to face this. A dilemma opened up in your mind, but also in your heart, you were sure that you loved Chris with all your heart, you had loved him for as long as you could remember, he was your childhood friend, you never knew when your feelings became romantic, he didn't know either, but you had your assumptions.

Anyway, that love had never gone away, and it was never going to go away, it was going to be there for the rest of your lives, but things were not as simple as they might seem. Your love might have worked during your adolescence, during your youth, but when things got serious, somehow or other the relationship didn't move forward. There were no third parties, no cheating on either side, just different paths. Each of you had your own dreams that pushed you further and further apart, so far apart that you decided to end the relationship, which was not in the most amicable way possible.

The last two years were difficult for you, your smile had vanished from your face, but Garret appeared to give it back to you. You believed again that love was possible, and of course, although you always used to keep Cjris in mind, for which you used to blame yourself all the time, life seemed to be much simpler. Partly because of that, and because you loved him, you had accepted Garret's hand a month ago, but unfortunately you couldn't help imagining Chris the moment you said 'yes, I want to marry you'. And now there he was, Chris, in front of you, telling you that he was still in love with you and you could barely say a word because you had no idea how you felt, you didn't want to hurt anyone, you didn't want to suffer or anyone else to suffer because of you, but apparently it was too late.

Raindrops slid down your face, wiping away tears that you barely realised were flowing from your eyes, which were staring into Chris's. The radiant rays of sunshine had disappeared, bringing gloom to an autumnal morning, only the sound of the thunderstorm could be heard. The radiant rays of sunshine had disappeared, offering the gloom of an autumnal morning, only the rumbling of the storm could be heard. Chris finally lowered his face, nodding to himself, as if he had assumed defeat by not saying anything in the situation.

"Alright," those words came from inside him with a sigh. "I guess there's not much more to say," there was a moment of silence, in which he offered you one last chance to speak, but you could not. "All the best Y/N."

The lump in his throat that had been present since Chris had left his feelings open was massified when you heard your name forming on his lips. Before he turned away and continued on his way through the alleyway, he returned his eyes to yours in the hope that you would take control of yourself and stop him, but again you didn't. So you stood there, letting the rain wash over every part of you. So you stood there, letting the rain wash over every part of your body, watching as his figure gradually disappeared until he turned the corner and you lost him, lost him completely.

You had lost track of time since you left that coffee shop, you were stopped in that place for minutes, until your lower limbs mechanically carried you back to the car, where you remained silent for fifteen minutes. Your senses didn't seem to react, perhaps because you didn't want to feel, because you knew that if you felt you would be capable of doing something crazy, which would surely hurt someone a lot and you didn't want that to happen. His words played over and over in your brain, you glimpsed the blue of his eyes, the smile as you entered the cafeteria, his scent flowing into your nostrils, and his touch as you snuggled into his arms. It was like an internal torture that you couldn't get rid of, that you didn't really want to get rid of. Because who would want to get rid of the love of their life?

It was when the moisture on your face dried up that you realised that the wateriness of your eyes was not because of the raindrops but because you were broken. That revealed a large part of your feelings, your true feelings, which you had kept hidden, you loved him, with all your heart, as you had never loved anyone else, you had loved him for as long as you could remember, how could you not continue to love him?

A click made you connect again and brought you back to the real world, maybe your emotions were running high, but for once in your life you decided to act in the moment, leaving rationality aside, which had not allowed you to act before. You started the engine of the car, you knew perfectly well which direction you were going to take, you had travelled that road so many times that you hardly had to think about how to get to his house, where you hoped he would be. Your heart was racing and your adrenaline was pumping, but your hands around the steering wheel reminded you of that engagement ring on your left ring finger, causing you to slow down and stare at it. What the hell were you doing? If you did what you had in your mind two options were open to you, one was to make the biggest mistake of your life, the other was to win back the love of your life by breaking Garret's heart. Whichever you chose, someone would lose out.

Cars overtook you on the left as you kept wondering what to do, while the sky was still overcast and the rain was pouring down. Time became your enemy again, causing you to arrive in front of Chris's house without clearing your mind. You felt like you were back in the coffee shop, wondering whether or not to go in, whether or not to confront Chris. You turned off the engine of the car and dropped your forehead on the steering wheel, you could hear the drops falling hard on the roof of the car, which seemed to help you relax, strangely. You turned your face, staring at the front door of the house through the window, completely wet. The cafeteria had been a neutral place, this house was not, too many memories enveloped those four walls to go inside and not be affected by it. You were lost if you went in there, you knew what was going to happen and that you were going to let your feelings take you.

As if you wanted to give it one last chance you looked at the engagement ring that Garret had given you a month ago, you hoped that something would tell you that the best thing to do was to start the engine of the car again and get away from there as soon as possible, but it didn't. So you played your last trick. So you played your last trick, a very dangerous one, you asked yourself the same question that Chris had asked you and that you had answered systematically without thinking, were you happy, does Garret make you happy? Then you knew. The next thing you did, you did it with all the pain in your heart, but you needed to think about yourself, the future you wanted, who you wanted to spend it with and most importantly, you wanted to be happy, so there was only one possibility.

Looking at the ring you slowly pulled it off your finger, your eyes started to water, you wanted to do it differently, but Garret was thousands of miles away, so you did what you felt at that moment. Again the rain came down on you as you stepped out into the open, but you didn't care at all, your gaze was fixed on that white door that was going to open the way to your past. As you walked steadily you let the air invade your lungs giving you the strength to face what was about to come. A faint light came through the curtains of the window that overlooked the living room, that erased the doubts that invaded you in case he wasn't at home, and without knowing why your heart skipped a beat.

There you were, a metre between you and his door, a single gesture away from letting him know you were there, and you did it, your index finger approached the doorbell, a squeaky melody sounded inside the house, and you took a step back, marking a distance for when the door opened. You looked down at your hands and fiddled nervously with your fingers, which were dripping from the rain. It was thirty-six seconds before you heard the lock turn and the door open, presenting the figure of Chris before you. You looked up nervously, not knowing what gesture you were going to get from him, but what you could glimpse was a state of confusion and hope mingled in his eyes. You parted your lips, still playing with your fingers.

"I..." was the only thing you could say before a lump rose in your throat and your tears wandered and mingled down your cheeks.

You turned your face and placed the palm of your hand on it, as if to hide the fact that you were crying. At that very moment, arms wrapped around your body and pulled you inside the house, making their body heat and that of the interior of the room cover your body. You broke down emotionally, you knew it was one of the things that could happen, too many emotions to keep them all hidden inside you. So soft sobs began to come out of your throat, you kept your eyes closed and your forehead resting on Chris's chest as he wrapped his arms around you, pulling you closer to his body.

"It's okay," he murmured against your head, letting out a sigh. "I'm here. I've got you."

After those words he placed a kiss on top of your head and then rested his hands on your cheeks, pulling away from you a few inches to search your face with his gaze. That was the last thing you wanted to do, because you felt confusingly embarrassed about the situation that was happening, he knew it, he knew you hated crying in front of people, but it was him after all. Chris gently lifted your chin to force you to look at his face, where there was a longing smile on his lips, but you averted your gaze, causing his smile to widen and he moved closer to your forehead to kiss it before he hugged you again.

"You're completely soaked," he whispered. "Come with me, the fireplace is lit, I'll get you some towels and some dry clothes."

Again the proximity was broken, but not the contact, Chris intertwined his fingers with yours, realizing something, you saw how he looked at your intertwined hands and then stared at you with his lips parted as if he wanted to ask, but he didn't, he preferred to ignore it. Your steps took you to your memories, when you entered the living room it was inevitable not to think about the times you both had occupied that sofa, or the times you had made love on that carpet next to the fireplace, it was an open diary.

"Make yourself comfortable, I'll be right back," he said, unlacing his fingers and heading upstairs via the staircase.

Your decisive mood with which you had left the car had collapsed at the mere sight of him, the little plan you had improvised in your mind had been cut short, putting you back on your own in the face of destiny. But what you were really sure of was what you felt, at least it was something you were sure of, it was him, only him, at that moment looking carefully all around you you realised that you never wanted to live again without him in your life, in whatever way it was, because in truth you were also in love with him, although you had tried to erase him from your mind during those two years.

His footsteps coming down the steps made you alert again, Chris entered the room holding two folded towels in his hands along with a sweatshirt you knew perfectly well and a pair of sweatpants, he stood in front of you.

"You can go and change in the bathroom, or if you prefer in the bedroom," he said offering you the set of items, "you know where everything is... if you want to give me your coat, I can put it in the dryer."

You nodded softly, still looking into his eyes, the warmth of the fire in the fireplace to your right washed over you, and the shadows created a pleasant ambience against the darkness outside. Slowly you undid each button of your coat and removed it from your body, offering it to Chris who took it in his free hand. You didn't know what happened in that instant, whether it was the intensity of your gaze, or the silence that was only broken by the raindrops and the sparks from the firewood, but you didn't stop. Just as you had undone the buttons on your coat you began to undo the buttons on your blouse, Chris's eyes shifted from yours to your hands and every movement they were making. As you finished you let the soaked blouse fall down your arms and onto the carpet, exposing your bare skin, covered only by a black bra.

In those moments, Chris's limbs seemed to be locked as he continued to hold the clothes and towels in his arms, still looking at your body with a look on his face that you couldn't describe. You offered him a few seconds of time to see how he reacted, but he said nothing, your hands slowly moved to the button of your trousers which you undid without looking away from his face, unzipped the fly and pulled your legs out through his thighs, leaving him again next to the blouse. That was the moment when Chris let everything he was holding fall from his arms and without a second thought he wrapped his hands around your body, pulling you closer to him, breaking the tension of the moment, wrapping your lips around his, kissing you as if his life depended on it. A gasp came from inside you as if the physical contact you were having wasn't enough, as if your chest was going to explode from one moment to the next. He brought his hands to your face pulling you away from him, needing to look at you to make sure that what was happening was real and not one of the fantasies wandering through his head.

"Don't stop," you murmured feeling weak as he pulled away from you.

As if on direct order Chris closes the distance again, but this time gently, caressing your lips tenderly, but the wetness of his lips and the roughness of his beard causes a moan of need to be reborn within you. His hands roam over your bare shoulders, gently down your arms, resting on your hips, as yours rested on his neck, preventing him from pulling away from you again. You felt small shivers of pleasure with every touch of his fingers on your skin, you knew that the situation would go as far as you wanted it to, that at that moment you had the reins, but really you had already lost them a long time ago. You dropped your hands until you reached the top of his sweatshirt which you pulled up indicating your need for him to disappear from his body. Chris acted, exposing his body to you.

Your fingertips scanned every nook and cranny that you thought you had lost, that you thought would never be yours again, but there they were before you. Chris brought his lips to your neck, making you lose your reason for being again, as he caressed your back and took the liberty of unclasping your bra, causing it to fall to the carpet. You knew then that you would never tire of the fluidity of his tongue running along your collarbones until it came to rest on your breasts.

A contraction arose in your intimacy making you realise the need you were exploring for him at that moment. Without hindrance you took it upon yourself to undo the button of his jeans that slid down his legs revealing his need for you.

"You can't imagine how many times I've thought about this moment," he mumbled against your lips, undoing his trousers as best he could.

His arms curved to grasp your thighs and encircle his hips, letting your naked bodies collide, that movement alone an action that brought you to lie on the woollen carpet. The softness of his fibres and warmth enveloped your back, as Chris's lips trailed across your belly while your panties trailed down your thighs until they disappeared from the scene. The shadows wandered between you, the fire seemed to want to be part of the moment and you appreciated it, it was warm, but no more so than his lips resting on your centre, sliding his tongue between your folds, making you lose your composure, letting him know the pleasure you were feeling at that very moment. The throbbing in your core began to intensify as his tongue brushed against your clit, until you could take no more and became a prey to your own pleasure, calling out the culprit's name over and over again.

But before you could even relax, before the throbbing could stop, you felt Chris want to be a part of it and gently thrust inside you, causing a deeper moan from both of you to fill the room. It had been too many years together, you knew to the millimetre the sensations the other person experienced, what made them feel the most pleasure, what they liked. Chris loved to feel your throbbing when his tongue made you orgasm around him, and that was a sensation he extrapolated. Inside you, however, he just felt you around the stiffness of his member, he barely made any movement, he just kissed your neck, lying on top of you, waiting for the calmness to take over and transport you back to paradise.

"Move, please," you begged, hoping to prolong the moment of pleasure you had just experienced, preventing him from leaving at all.

His movements began delicately, keeping himself propped up on his elbow while his other hand cupped your hip. Having him on top of you, the two of you lying on that carpet which had been part of your love on so many occasions felt like you had travelled through time. His ragged breaths came against your face, you wrapped your legs around his waist so that the depth of his member was greater. You could feel the rapport between the two bodies, the need to have each other again. Nothing seemed to matter in those moments, you felt his movements erase all the worries that were present in your mind, the only thing that mattered in those moments were the two of you.

His lips were pressed to yours, letting out gasps as his movements increased in speed. Your fingers were lost in his hair, as you kept your eyes closed, exploring how the pleasure continued each time his member slapped against your inner wall. And you felt it, his stiffness swelled inside you, you knew that's what it meant, he was close. You opened your eyes to find that his gaze was focused on you, that he was waiting for some sign from you that would prevent him from carrying out his release, but you merely trapped his lips between yours and placed a hand on his hip to keep him going.

A much smaller free fall than the first one you had felt engulfed you next to him, his moans projecting your name into the inside of your head, his movements becoming irregular and deep, making your bodies move across the carpet.

Calm, after a few minutes, came over you, making you feel the burn of your back from the rubbing of your nakedness against the carpet, making you feel the dampness of your hair still present and the flush of his cheeks from the heat of the fire in the fireplace. After Chris came out from under you and settled right behind you, you curled up sideways facing the fireplace. You felt his lips kiss every part of your reddened back and his arm went around your waist pulling you to him.

"Are you okay?" he asked as he placed a kiss on your bare shoulder.

"I think so," you replied contemplating the sparks from the firewood.

Fortunately you didn't have to project your feelings, he knew how you might be feeling right now, though he didn't get half of what you were really going through.

"I think you know that," he began in a soft tone that matched the atmosphere, "but I need to tell you that I love you," there was silence, as your torturous feelings came over you. "I know your head will be a complete mess right now, I don't want to burden you, I just want you to know that I'm here, that I'm still in love with you and that I intend to never part from you, if you'll let me."

Vulnerability came over you as you heard those words, you felt like you were a child again and you were faced with a decision you weren't capable of facing, you just wanted to feel protected, so you turned your body and came face to face with Chris. His legs wrapped around yours, agreeing to an even more intimate moment if that was possible. When you looked up into his face his smile was waiting for you to relax, to make you see that he was there with you, that everything was okay.

"Everything will be fine," his voice was confident, warm, his voice denoted the future.

Taglist Open (DM)

MAIN MASTERLIST

304 notes · View notes