Is this enough? Is this enough to replenish me?

[sovay]

I have been fighting with user interfaces all afternoon. Before that I was having nightmares about trying to wake up. Have some links.

1. How awful has this entire administration (not just the pandemic it failed to head off and fanned and disclaims all responsibility for, please, may it burn and consume them) been for the individual sense of time? Two years ago I saw it announced that the more than twenty-five hundred field-recordings of Yiddish folksong collected by Ruth Rubin after WWII had been digitized by YIVO and made available online and then I forgot until I ran across the Ruth Rubin Legacy Archive of Yiddish Folksongs last night. Anyway, please enjoy this amazing time sink.

2. I really love this poem and the way it weaves among its archival images: Oli Rodriguez, "Papi, Papi, Papi."

3. I recommend to anyone who like cats, but especially anyone who likes black cats, this extract from the diary of the young Emperor Uda: "Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat." I read it aloud to spatch and he responded with Christopher Smart.

4. Everything about the bear-ridden failure of the libertarian Free Town Project reminds me of those conversations which observe that if you really want to thrive in the post-apocalypse, you don't need an arsenal, you need people who can do textiles and plumbing.

5. The finale of Lovecraft Country (2020) seems to have foreclosed my interest in what had until then sounded like a painful but brilliant show: "On Lovecraft Country and the way the narrative presents queerness." tl;dr the pernicious shadow of the Motion Picture Production Code is something of a Lovecraftian horror itself and I would totally have watched a spinoff about a blueswoman criss-crossing 1950's America "singing very sad blues songs about falling in love with a white devil once."

Comments

[asakiyume]

I'm not yet finished with the article on the collapse of the libertarian intentional community (schadenfreude? what schadenfreude?), but this line made me laugh out loud: a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it.

And Emperor Uda and the cat--surely an inspiration for Lloyd Alexander's Japan chapter of Time Cat!

[sovay]

a quixotic quest to secure tax exemption while refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the IRS to grant it

Self-inflicted catch-22's are the most impressive.

And Emperor Uda and the cat--surely an inspiration for Lloyd Alexander's Japan chapter of Time Cat!

Yes! (Which now I want to re-read. It has been in a box since our own black cats were small.)

[muccamukk]

Yikes on the Lovecraft Country finale. I don't remember any of that from the book! I guess the next season can fix it, but for now my graveyard is full up, and we're not taking a waiting list, so I'll pass on catching up, I think. Too bad. I had enjoyed the first episode.

[sovay]

Yikes on the Lovecraft Country finale. I don't remember any of that from the book!

I got the impression as it was airing that substantial changes were made between book and TV, such that I believe the book exists metafictionally within the world of the show, but the show is meant to be taken as the reality; which was fine right until the finale, because I don't want the queer TPK to be what's real.

I guess the next season can fix it, but for now my graveyard is full up, and we're not taking a waiting list, so I'll pass on catching up, I think.

Ouch your metaphor, but also that's about where I am. Earlier today I was having a conversation about the line where violence done to marginalized characters feels reasonable for the setting vs. feels gratuitously imported. I ended up citing Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire as an example of the former—any number of queer characters come to bad ends in that trilogy, but since the cast is majority-queer, it doesn't feel orientation-targeted, it feels statistically reflective of the hazards of living in an authoritarian state that prosecutes an eternally expanding sphere of war and runs its magitech on human torture and sacrifice. There are also any number of queer characters in the hexarchate who live/thrive/change the world/deal with too much paperwork/have hilarious alien biology/just kind of exist. It's not Bury Your Gays. I can still understand if there are readers who just don't want to encounter another queer character dying no matter the context. I'm not there, but Lovecraft County still sounds like it exceeds my current tolerances. If there is a second-season fix-it, I may reconsider.

[muccamukk]

Especially for it to have been Ruby who gotten it. I'm going to pre-emptively nope the hell out on that one.

[selkie]

Do we know that the bears came to them and that they weren’t some of them turned into bears? Brutes is brutes.

The Ruth Rubin archive has ALL OF THEM, I am not even through B. (I would like to find a nice one with 1775-1790 attestations, for book reasons, but this is immense and amazing.) I think also I forgot to tell you the other night that Chaim Grade’s papers will be fully digitized by spring! No one needs them, but it took ten years and someone probably got secondhand tobacco poisoning from scanning them! Bless Tanteh Fini z”l and her sharp, bear-trappy sense of vengeance.

Editing because someone else should have this image that will please me until forever: picture me exactly thirty inches tall, five years old, and impressively-eyelashed, in double braids and squeaky shoes, in a velveteen dress that has that going-different-ways look from having come up into the Bronx(!) in a car(!), staring up at a person at least sixty inches tall with black hair drawn into a bun so tight it alters the arc of her eyebrows, in an orange tweed two-piece suit, smoking a cigarette in a gold holder she stole off Gloria Swanson. “You certainly are a child, one supposes. You may call me Tanteh Fini, child, because I am certainly the last thing he ever gets. Glezl tea?”

[minoanmiss]

that is a glorious image.

[selkie]

Thank you! Please supplement with a smoker's vocal cords and an American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee Yiddish accent.

[sovay]

Do we know that the bears came to them and that they weren’t some of them turned into bears? Brutes is brutes.

"The black bears in Grafton were not like other black bears."

Explains it as far as I'm concerned.

I think also I forgot to tell you the other night that Chaim Grade’s papers will be fully digitized by spring! No one needs them, but it took ten years and someone probably got secondhand tobacco poisoning from scanning them!

You did not mention! Except for the secondhand nicotine poisoning part, I am delighted to hear it!

Bless Tanteh Fini z”l and her sharp, bear-trappy sense of vengeance.

There's living well and all that, but the right people in your family remember to go above and beyond.

“You certainly are a child, one supposes. You may call me Tanteh Fini, child, because I am certainly the last thing he ever gets. Glezl tea?”

DEFINITELY BLESS.

[selkie]

I mean, aside from making me really the gayest a 5-9 year old could be, she taught me many relevant things from life experience, and not least that you can be caustic to protect stories when one of those stories is your own, that it is okay to defend oneself and brew tea as strong as one likes it and sink your sharp teeth in as long as it takes, until you've won. She was only in her fifties when I knew her, which I know now isn't old.

[kore]

At one point the author suggests toxoplasmosis! Bears are also apparently just really smart, plus there were non-funny things happening like drought and an earlier bear repopulation scheme and people living in small rather rickety houses buried in the forest, instead of nice safe brick multi-story apartment buildings in the crowded urban jungle where all you have to worry about are other, armed humans. (Srsly some of the descriptions of what bear claws can do....)

[kore]

That is the best image!

[dhampyresa]

"Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat."
MOOD as the kids these days say

tl;dr the pernicious shadow of the Motion Picture Production Code is something of a Lovecraftian horror itself
Aw boo, I was looking forward to Lovecraft Country. Might still watch it -- forewarned is forearmed, right?

I would totally have watched a spinoff about a blueswoman criss-crossing 1950's America "singing very sad blues songs about falling in love with a white devil once."
I wonder if there are any Robert Johnson covers that would work to fill this need a bit?

[sovay]

MOOD as the kids these days say

I type this reply with Autolycus sleeping on one of my hands, making it actually somewhat difficult to type.

Aw boo, I was looking forward to Lovecraft Country. Might still watch it -- forewarned is forearmed, right?

I am one hundred percent not going to tell you not to! Everyone's mileage varies. And it is also possible to get a lot out of a narrative before it hits a wall, falls over, and sinks into a swamp. I have some TV like that. (I still haven't watched the second-season finale of Torchwood. Everyone is staying alive in my head. For some assorted given values of alive.)

I wonder if there are any Robert Johnson covers that would work to fill this need a bit?

There were totally queer black blueswomen. I should find out.

[ethelmay]

Today in useless knowledge recently acquired: when C.S. Lewis was getting rid of his father's books, he sold a series of famous trials to Forrest Reid. In his will, Reid left what was presumably the same set to his friend Knox Cunningham, who doesn't sound to me like a very nice man. Most of Reid's estate was left to his friend Stephen Gilbert, who sounds much nicer.

Oh, he also left Cunningham a silver Owen Ramsay spoon (and a silver Owen Ramsay bowl to E.M. Forster). I suppose Ramsay must have been a silversmith/designer, but I can't find anything about him.

[sovay]

Most of Reid's estate was left to his friend Stephen Gilbert, who sounds much nicer.

I keep forgetting that Reid's Stephen Gilbert is the same Stephen Gilbert whose novels I keep meaning to track down! Handily, it looks as though Valancourt has reprinted him. (This publisher is a treasure for me.)

Oh, he also left Cunningham a silver Owen Ramsay spoon (and a silver Owen Ramsay bowl to E.M. Forster). I suppose Ramsay must have been a silversmith/designer, but I can't find anything about him.

I've never heard of him, although I doubt that's meaningful. Where did you run across this information?

[ethelmay]

The will info is at https://studylib.net/doc/7279809/forrest-reid-s-will--in-proni-

whee off I go on a tangent

[kore]

several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could

OMFG PEOPLE BEARS ARE NOT PETS. I remember my dad taking me on a camping trip through California's national parks when I was about 14? and even then there were idiots feeding bears and posing their KIDS with them to take pictures. That guy sounds right to call out a certain amount of victim-blaming in poor rural areas, but at the same time, the locals know: you don't feed the bears! You don't try to pet the raccoons! Or in the immortal words of the nurse welcoming all the tenderfeet (tenderfoots?) to St John's in Santa Fe, warning them about not playing with rabbits and other cute wildlife: "If it's slow enough for you to catch it, it's probably sick." (Which in NM, means potential bubonic plague.)

(This book looks interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Do-Not-Feed-Bears-Yellowstone/dp/0700614583)

Re: whee off I go on a tangent

[sovay]

That guy sounds right to call out a certain amount of victim-blaming in poor rural areas, but at the same time, the locals know: you don't feed the bears!

Except for the occasional overnight with the Girl Scouts, I was not taken camping as a child, but my mother spent much of her childhood and adolescence camping in various national parks of the American Midwest and West and just in case it ever became relevant, she was extremely clear that you do not feed the bears! (Although on one trip where the fishing was particularly dismal, she remembers her younger brother looking wistfully at some idiot tourists feeding the bears and asking wistfully, "Do you think if I pretended to be a bear, they'd feed me?")

Re: whee off I go on a tangent

[kore]

//cracks the fuck up

I mean, of course a raccoon is not a bear, altho they have always reminded me of miniature bears when I see them walking on the ground, but when we first got to Seattle and lived in the suburbs, people would set out food for them. Like, aww! Altho then the raccoons would eat all the food left out on the porch and then go in through the cat flap and eat all the sacks of dry pet food and sometimes fight with the household pets. That person quoted in the article about looking into the bears' eyes and thinking it was completely alien -- a bear coming into your HOUSE sounds terrifying, but at the same time, yes! they have their own existence as wild creatures, and that's a different world.

All that ranted, I love stories of libertarian fuckups and the book sounds hilarious and I must have it instanter.

Re: whee off I go on a tangent

[ethelmay]

I remember reading about idiot tourists feeding bears in L'Engle's The Moon by Night.

[anna_wing]

I saw my first raccoon in Washington DC while staying with friends. It was breaking into their dustbin, bold as brass in the full glare of the security lights. I remember thinking, They have opposable thumbs!!!?? (not quite, but little finger and thumb can meet, so for all practical purposes...).

I would not ever mess with a raccoon, let along anything bigger.

That is a fabulous extract about the cat! This bit caught my attention:

I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.

It took more than a month to persuade Lapcat to keep his collar on when he was still Lapkitten. It took him about half an hour to work out the correct angle at which to apply pressure, to make it pop open....

[sovay]

I saw my first raccoon in Washington DC while staying with friends. It was breaking into their dustbin, bold as brass in the full glare of the security lights.

I believe that is the behavior that earns them the taxonomically inappropriate and probably impolite but evocative nickname of "trash panda."

That is a fabulous extract about the cat!

I also loved the observation that when it lies down and curls up, its feet disappear.

It took more than a month to persuade Lapcat to keep his collar on when he was still Lapkitten. It took him about half an hour to work out the correct angle at which to apply pressure, to make it pop open....

I am glad you have such a clever Lapcat! Ours did not have collars until they were two years old; we had tried once when they were kittens and it went poorly enough that we held off until they were living somewhere that made it necessary. They have worn them just fine ever since, although every now and then usually Hestia will remove hers and run around the apartment, singing triumphantly, as NAKED CAT.

[kore]

Pandas are spotted black and white though! Are there any bears that are grey-brown and sort of stripey?

[sovay]

Pandas are spotted black and white though!

People used to think pandas and raccoons were related, is part of where I think it comes from. (And they do look much more like red rather than giant pandas.)

[kore]

Just wanted to say, now I'm reading Libertarian Walks Into a Bear and enjoying it!

[sovay]

Just wanted to say, now I'm reading Libertarian Walks Into a Bear and enjoying it!

Hooray!

[brigdh]

I saw a shorter version of Emperor Uda's praise for his cat on twitter, but I could always use more, so thank you to the link to this version!

The article about libertarians and bears has been making the rounds in my social circle, and it is everything I could possible want out of a story that begins with libertarians overtaking a small town.

tl;dr the pernicious shadow of the Motion Picture Production Code is something of a Lovecraftian horror itself and I would totally have watched a spinoff about a blueswoman criss-crossing 1950's America "singing very sad blues songs about falling in love with a white devil once."

I have to say, for all that I was disappointed in the way the Ruby/Christian plot ended, it was one of my favorite parts of the show, and I would still recommend the series overall very highly. There are problems with many parts of Lovecraft Country, yes, but there are moments of absolute brilliance too, brilliance in how it uses Black history, in how it uses horror tropes, and in how it combines them – a James Baldwin speech read over the images of a trio of Black characters traveling through Jim Crow America; Emmitt Till told by a Ouija board not to take his upcoming trip; a little Black girl haunted by a cursed doll, slowing turning into a caricature of a pickaninny; racist cops torn apart by shoggoths; Dahomey female warriors fighting Confederate soldiers in another dimension – just a few examples off the top of my head of moments that have stuck with me. And the Ruby/Christian plot is really, really good – complicated and twisted and dark and the sort of f/f relationship that I don't see often, about two ambitious women who do not trust one another. Also it is just really hot! Here's a clip from their first sex scene (skip to 3:20, I mean, unless you want to watch a longer scene! And note: Christian possesses a spell that allows her to temporarily change bodies, which is why she appears to be a man here; Ruby also makes use of the spell later on).

And (speaking as only one queer woman, of course), I didn't feel like I'd call the ending Bury Your Gays. It felt more to me like the show was trying to juggle too many plotlines, and unfortunately they cut at least one important Christian/Ruby scene in the finale for time reasons. But I do think it needed only one or two more scenes to be very satisfying.

[sovay]

Somehow this comment slipped through the cracks of my e-mail, but—

I have to say, for all that I was disappointed in the way the Ruby/Christian plot ended, it was one of my favorite parts of the show, and I would still recommend the series overall very highly.

—I appreciate you weighing in! It's useful information. I had read several people who were really burnt by the Ruby/Christina outcome.

(And you are welcome for the link to the Emperor Uda: I hope he wasn't terrible at his job, because based on his feelings for his cat I am inclined to like him.)