What will it take? A flood over Europe, a fist in the face, or what?
I don't know what I am supposed to feel about the new national low of three mass shootings in seven days. I don't mean that facetiously or disingenuously; I know two people who didn't get shot in different cities by sheer chance of timing and it doesn't feel very different than knowing friends who work at synagogues or kids who go to school, but it also feels as though it should: the circle is tightening. It is not normal; it's already normal, it keeps happening. It serves a purpose. And it's not exactly a shock to me that the rest of the planet seems to be imploding to keep time, but I find the news out of Kashmir terrifying. I spent almost all of today working, not even looking at the news. Have some unrelated links.
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gwynnega linked me to a clip of John Hurt as the Fool in a 1983 Granada King Lear. He's marvelous: dark, quick, nervous, shape-changing. I see the production also contains people like Diana Rigg, David Threlfall, and Laurence Olivier, but I want to watch the rest of it just for Hurt. I am still not reconciled to his loss.
2. It fits with awkward neatness into the conversation I was just having with
asakiyume about the tilt toward Confederate narratives in movies of the American Civil War, but I am dearly hoping this movie is good, because there is still not exactly a surfeit of f/f (or nb/f) historical romances on film: Union (2019). Also I might as well re-read
selkie's The Covert Captain (2018) because "Sweet Polly Oliver" is not getting out of my head any time soon.
3. I am trying to keep the message of this sampler in mind; it's true.
P.S. Courtesy of
spatch: elephant's toothpaste. I was not expecting it to achieve liftoff.
1.
2. It fits with awkward neatness into the conversation I was just having with
3. I am trying to keep the message of this sampler in mind; it's true.
P.S. Courtesy of

no subject
I've heard about that! I'm really looking forward. Tubman is one of the earliest historical figures I can remember seeing dramatized, in a production by the Underground Railway Theater when I was in elementary school that I still have vivid memories of.
I have a hard time feeling like what we need right now is a story about how Union soldiers murdered a child and a Confederate woman joined up in a war that didn't seem to involve black people at all.
That's much of what I mean about hoping it's good: historically-narratively as well as representationally. The alternative would be illuminating in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of acceptable American narratives, but I would be much more sad.
(I did not watch the trailer; I really don't like trailers. I try to avoid them unless they are actively recomended to me—cf. recently The Lighthouse. Captain America remains an outlier and should not be counted.)