Dialogue and industry and August in the thirties
A handful of links, while I recover from yesterday's party. Warning that one of them is serious.
1. The man interviewed in this article is my brother's oldest and closest friend; he is family. I've known for years what he's dying of and how badly the VA handled it. I didn't know how unique his case wasn't. Strength to his arm: "What's killing Staff Sergeant Wesley Black? The VA doesn't want to talk about it."
2. For fans of the apocalyptically unclassifiable Millennium (1996–99), there is now a documentary revisiting the series: Millennium After the Millennium (2020). At the moment it only appears to exist on iTunes, but maybe a DVD will come along and improve my life.
3. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust: I love this triptych of goddesses, but especially the Hel-faced rendering of Melinoë. When I wrote her mythology into a scene of the unfinished (and at this stage likely never to be finished) sequel to "The Mirror of Venus," I did the same thing myself.
4. Speaking of the ancient world,selkie asked for my opinion on yonic hamantashn. My opinion was uh. The etymological connection between the names of Esther and Ištar is not contested. (Ask me about the Greek variants attested in the catacombs of Beit She'arim!) Neither is the fact that hamantashn very likely have nothing to do linguistically with Haman. I can't seriously accept the notion of the hamantash as the secret matriarchal cookie of the great mother goddess without a lot more baked continuity between the Babylonian Exile and eighteenth-century Germany. The ritual cakes presumed from the Old Babylonian Mari molds would make more compelling antecedents if they were shaped like pubic triangles instead of whole voluptuous women. The association of poppy and other seeds with the holiday is not halachically attested until the thirteenth century CE. And I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absolutely everything about rabbinic Judaism leads me to believe that if we'd had hoo-ha-shaped Purim cakes since antiquity, someone would have argued about it in the Talmud. The entire thesis reminds me a little awkwardly of D.H. Lawrence and the significance of the duck and is the sort of thing that leaves me wondering if I overreacted to someone's joke, except it really didn't read like one. Anyway, I am about fine with the placement of Carthage on this alignment chart.
5. I was reminded by this article that I read several of Gene Stratton-Porter's novels as a child: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) made the most impression on me, but I also remember The Harvester (1911) and The Keeper of the Bees (1925). The latter may in fact have furnished one of my early models in genderqueerness in the character of the tough, affectionate, assertively androgynous "little Scout": "The only definite conclusion [Jamie MacFarlane, the protagonist] arrived at was that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes she was a girl." Asked point-blank, the little Scout declares, "If you can't tell, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference, does it?" Inevitably the novel does answer the biological question, but at least does not demand that the character give up doing any of the gender-non-conforming things they love. I didn't know until this article that "Gene" was short for "Geneva"—I knew two Genes growing up and both were male. The article mentions that she had to be wrestled into dresses at age eleven; that as an adult she could be often found in pants. She made her own reputation and money. In 1886, she married and kept her own name. It is probably facile to think of the little Scout as a self-insert, but it did suddenly jump out at me that when Jamie finally learns their name, it clears up nothing because it's "Jean."
1. The man interviewed in this article is my brother's oldest and closest friend; he is family. I've known for years what he's dying of and how badly the VA handled it. I didn't know how unique his case wasn't. Strength to his arm: "What's killing Staff Sergeant Wesley Black? The VA doesn't want to talk about it."
2. For fans of the apocalyptically unclassifiable Millennium (1996–99), there is now a documentary revisiting the series: Millennium After the Millennium (2020). At the moment it only appears to exist on iTunes, but maybe a DVD will come along and improve my life.
3. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: I love this triptych of goddesses, but especially the Hel-faced rendering of Melinoë. When I wrote her mythology into a scene of the unfinished (and at this stage likely never to be finished) sequel to "The Mirror of Venus," I did the same thing myself.4. Speaking of the ancient world,
selkie asked for my opinion on yonic hamantashn. My opinion was uh. The etymological connection between the names of Esther and Ištar is not contested. (Ask me about the Greek variants attested in the catacombs of Beit She'arim!) Neither is the fact that hamantashn very likely have nothing to do linguistically with Haman. I can't seriously accept the notion of the hamantash as the secret matriarchal cookie of the great mother goddess without a lot more baked continuity between the Babylonian Exile and eighteenth-century Germany. The ritual cakes presumed from the Old Babylonian Mari molds would make more compelling antecedents if they were shaped like pubic triangles instead of whole voluptuous women. The association of poppy and other seeds with the holiday is not halachically attested until the thirteenth century CE. And I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absolutely everything about rabbinic Judaism leads me to believe that if we'd had hoo-ha-shaped Purim cakes since antiquity, someone would have argued about it in the Talmud. The entire thesis reminds me a little awkwardly of D.H. Lawrence and the significance of the duck and is the sort of thing that leaves me wondering if I overreacted to someone's joke, except it really didn't read like one. Anyway, I am about fine with the placement of Carthage on this alignment chart.5. I was reminded by this article that I read several of Gene Stratton-Porter's novels as a child: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) made the most impression on me, but I also remember The Harvester (1911) and The Keeper of the Bees (1925). The latter may in fact have furnished one of my early models in genderqueerness in the character of the tough, affectionate, assertively androgynous "little Scout": "The only definite conclusion [Jamie MacFarlane, the protagonist] arrived at was that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes she was a girl." Asked point-blank, the little Scout declares, "If you can't tell, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference, does it?" Inevitably the novel does answer the biological question, but at least does not demand that the character give up doing any of the gender-non-conforming things they love. I didn't know until this article that "Gene" was short for "Geneva"—I knew two Genes growing up and both were male. The article mentions that she had to be wrestled into dresses at age eleven; that as an adult she could be often found in pants. She made her own reputation and money. In 1886, she married and kept her own name. It is probably facile to think of the little Scout as a self-insert, but it did suddenly jump out at me that when Jamie finally learns their name, it clears up nothing because it's "Jean."
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You're welcome! I am all for finding ways to connect meaningfully rather than rotely with tradition, but I don't like people doing it with bad history.
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Thanks for the article on Stratton-Porter! I loved A Girl of the Limberlost as a kid, and still liked it quite a lot upon a recent reread. Your description of Scout makes me want to pick up The Keeper of the Bees.
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May I ask how? I don't think I ever read it. [edit] I am also interested in the oddity of The Keeper of the Bees. I have not read any of these books in years, although I am now thinking I should.
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That's a really fair point.
Your description of Scout makes me want to pick up The Keeper of the Bees.
I cannot vouch for the rest of the novel—I had to double-check my quotations from memory against Google Books—but I can say that as a reader who hated with the passion of a thousand suns whichever one of the Great Brain books involves T.D. Fitzgerald trickily domesticating the local tomboy into dresses, it probably means something that I remember the little Scout fondly.
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I am very sorry. I don't remember screaming racism from any of her other books that I've read, but even if it's the only one, it still sucks.
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(a) HARRY, IT SUCKS.
(b) I understand why the author of the Smithsonian article called it "puzzling." There's a passage in The Keeper of the Bees that is entirely against that idea of the beleaguered white minority. I saw it when I was searching earlier. It's still very pro-American and very pro-melting pot and I don't think it'd take any prizes for racial writing nowadays, but it's pointedly inclusive; that was what struck me about it.
There came pouring down the embankment at his left the most surprising aggregation of humanity he had ever seen collected in one crowd. Little Mexico with straight black hair and black eyes, with rosy cheeks and red lips and shining teeth. Sober little Yaqui with blue-black hair, with square, narrow face, with wide mouth and shining eyes and red lips. Little Italy, the prettiest sight, with tumbling curls and olive cheeks and always the lips of red and the white teeth. Little Spain was there wide-eyed and lovely; and China and Japan and Greece, and shiny little copper-coloured Indian faces with the straight hair, deep-set, watchful eyes, the high cheek bones and sober faces, with lean, flat bodies and the prideful lift of head of the proudest race that ever walked the earth.
As this amazing combination poured over the embankment around him, Jamie noticed that each youngster either carried a small basket or clasped a small package. Some were boys, some were girls. All of them were shining eyed, all of them were young, all of them were beautiful, each in its own way, beautiful with the beauty of a perfect thing in the flower of youth.
. . . Away back on the beach in a sedate circle, mute and wide-eyed, with their lunches gripped tight, waiting the command from their beloved teacher, were the little brown and red and chocolate and copper-coloured children, born in the United States, products of our soil, entitled by our laws and our Government to be educated with our children, to live with them, to love with them, to fight with them, to die with them, all free, all equal before the law.
I am sorry she wrote the other thing.
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You're welcome. It makes me think of Dickens and the difference between the Jewish characters in Oliver Twist (1839) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), but I don't know if the explanation is the same. People are complicated, but also WTF.
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Do tell.
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So the catacombs at Beit She'arim date from the second through the fourth centuries CE and are full of funerary inscriptions in Greek and Semitic letters, including names originally from one language rendered in the alphabet of the other and instances of the same person identified by both Greek and Semitic names. The name we know as "Esther" is variously rendered in Greek as Εἰσθήρ (Eisthḗr), Ἰσθήρ (Isthḗr), Ἀσθήρ (Asthḗr), and Ἀστήρ (Astḗr). That this last variant is the same as the Greek word for star might be as niftily coincidental as "hamantashn" sounding like "Haman" except that one of the dual-named burials is a woman identified as Ἰσθήρ ἡ κὲ Ἀμφαίθα—Esther also known as Amphaitha. Ἀμφαίνω is poetic for ἀναφαίνω, shine forth, give light. The entire complex of goddesses which includes Inanna, Ištar, ‘Aštart, Aštoret, Tanit, Aphrodite, and Venus is associated with the planet that functions as the morning and the evening star. I should probably not push this point as far as noting that the Greek morning star was Φωσφόρος (Phōsphóros), the light-bringer, especially since that leaves the evening star Ἓσπερος (Hésperos) out in the cold, but the conjunction of Esther/Amphaitha still looks remarkably like an equivalence of the two names. Moving outside of Beit She'arim, there's a first-century Latin epitaph attesting to a woman identified as "Claudia Aster." She was taken as a slave from Jerusalem; her second name is assumed to have been originally "Esther." There are star-links all over this web. Talmudic commentary itself connects Esther with Ištar, with aspects of both beauty and lightbringing explicitly underlined. I got into this entire K-hole of research because a friend wanted to know why we use the transliteration Esther for אֶסְתֵּר. As far as I could tell, the answer was: lots of viable options to choose from, no standard orthography, the Septuagint went with Ἐσθήρ (Esthḗr), and here we are.
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You're welcome! What is the use of knowing these things if they aren't shared?
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in the years before Gutenberg, she was out of print except for at the museum in Indiana - it was a great treat to get a new-to-me copy of one of her books when my parents came back from visiting my uncle who lived nearby.
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You're welcome! The copies I read as a child were also ancestral.
- it was a great treat to get a new-to-me copy of one of her books when my parents came back from visiting my uncle who lived nearby.
That's a neat thing, to have an author that localized.
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Edit: I was going to make it a separate comment, but OH I HAVE SOME TOPICAL ITCH CREAM FOR THE VA HEALTH FOLKS.
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Per Wikipedia:
"The name 'Mordecai' is of uncertain origin but is considered identical to the name Marduka or Marduku (Akkadian: 𒀫𒌓), attested as the name of officials in the Persian court in thirty texts (the Persepolis Administrative Archives) from the period of Xerxes I and his father Darius, and may refer to up to four individuals, one of which might have served as the prototype for the biblical Mordecai."
I'm mostly getting hits on Biblical studies, but I've found a couple of independent confirmations of the name. I miss the days when I could search corpora of cuneiform inscriptions from my computer.
But it all seemed so tidy and... I dunno, as I said, even harmless fake news is too much fake news.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as harmless fake news. There are mistakes, but then you try to correct them. The other thing hurts the world.
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;(
but absolutely everything about rabbinic Judaism leads me to believe that if we'd had hoo-ha-shaped Purim cakes since antiquity, someone would have argued about it in the Talmud.
< nods >
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At least we're arguing about it now!
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If what he's doing with the time he has left is whistleblowing, I am going to amplify him. But it is awful and I hate it. I've known Wes since he was . . . six? It is not right that he should survive a war and his government should let it kill him anyway.
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That sounds good to me.
(Honestly, the Assyrians are in a similar predicament re Jock/Nerd. Our high schools don't have a lot of stereotypes for people with brain-melting amounts of paperwork and also the Standard Inscription of Aššurnaṣirpal II.)
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I suspect them of being the PTA.
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The one at the top - I'm very sorry this has happened to your brother's friend. That's awful.
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You're welcome! I knew nothing about her as a person prior to that article, which made it fascinating to me.
The one at the top - I'm very sorry this has happened to your brother's friend. That's awful.
Thank you. I'm glad he's speaking out.
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Then there’s Gene Tierney, the actress, but I think I read somewhere she was named after an uncle.
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I didn't know about her until I was much older!
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You're welcome!
I read and loved A Girl of the Limberlost at age 11 when on a road trip with my aunt and cousin, and remember being sad that I didn't quite get to finish it. I then forgot if for years, but reread it a couple years ago thanks to someone on Dreamwidth (I think osprey_archer).
I'm gathering that that one holds up, which makes me happy. I will very likely re-read it in the near future.
I had never heard of The Keeper of the Bees, that sounds fascinating.
I really remember just about nothing else about the novel except that the protagonist is a veteran with troubles who takes up beekeeping, but the little Scout stuck with me.
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I got lost less than halfway through the post on yonic hamantaschen. I don't know whether the author was going for an elaborate joke or not, but it's definitely painfully seld-conscious writing.
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I want a country that takes care of people. I keep hearing it's an important thing to do.
I got lost less than halfway through the post on yonic hamantaschen.
That's damning even without academic takedown.
Millennium After the Millennium
The blu-ray is certainly available. I ordered it from here
Re: Millennium After the Millennium
Thank you!
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Reading the article, I was hit by a choking wave of "you told me, Mom, you told me," because I was raised by people who remembered what quagmire means and know one when they see one--and know the aftereffects too. And that there's a kid in your social circles who's going to have to deal with the next generation equivalent of what my friends who had parents with Agent Orange exposure dealt with is...
I will eventually get to alignment and Porter and all the other things. But first just this, first only this. So much sympathy. So much solidarity.
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Thank you.
*hugs*
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Ah, Frank Black!
And probably a tradition of jokes about eating them, and archaeological graffiti.
I would have guessed Geneva falls in the Celtic Guinevere/Jennifer group, but on googling apparently it's in the Germanic Jenever/Gin group instead ;) (it's the old Germanic for Juniper). And having looked that one up I checked Gene/Eugene, assuming it would match one of them, whereas instead it's literally Greek for good people.
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Ugh on what your friend's story reveals. I was less than impressed with General Petraeus in that article.
Yes. If you are in a position of real power, you can't claim you did your best by fretting.
Ah, Frank Black!
I love Lance Henriksen so much. I still think that show is the only leading role I've ever seen him get.
And probably a tradition of jokes about eating them, and archaeological graffiti.
Exactly!
I would have guessed Geneva falls in the Celtic Guinevere/Jennifer group, but on googling apparently it's in the Germanic Jenever/Gin group instead
That's neat, and makes sense. (I am familiar with the etymology via the liquor jenever.)
And having looked that one up I checked Gene/Eugene, assuming it would match one of them, whereas instead it's literally Greek for good people.
That one I knew from studying Greek, although these days it's awkward because it is also where we get eugenics.
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I was familiar with Jenever through Poul Anderson's Nicholas Van Rijn stories.