My dream house is a negative space of rock
My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.
I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.
I got at least three songs stuck in my head from this card.
I really appreciate the inclusion of the bog body.
Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.
I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but
thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.| early all in the morning | On the highway | Pen and ink | Silver screen | There are worlds out there... |
| A wilderness of water | Haunted | sailing is a dance and your partner is the sea | Supernatural | No harm ever came from reading a book |
| The road goes ever on and on | Phoenix | FREE SPACE | Fever | a tangled mess of wild |
| Cold blows the winter wind | no mortal man his life could save | The sea always in my ear | Apocalypse | Transformations |
| Candlelight | through smoke and fire | Encrypted | Sundial | Jet |
I got at least three songs stuck in my head from this card.
| ... in SPACE | Rust | Tied up in a ribbon |
| the woods are lovely dark and deep | FREE SPACE | Faerie law |
| Secret agents | Parsley sage rosemary and thyme | Bog body |
I really appreciate the inclusion of the bog body.
Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.
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You're welcome!
Though I haven't seen the Ehle and Firth P+P (access reasons), I think that some of that (over)thinking, angled appropriately differently, makes it into Firth's portrayal of Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones.
That's very neat. I actually saw Bridget Jones' Diary shortly after it came out with a partner who was taking a course at the time on Jane Austen and since I had neither read Pride and Prejudice nor seen the 1995 adaptation, I have a record that Firth's was my favorite character and was totally unequipped to read him in context.
Bridget Jones
Re: Bridget Jones
I remember that sweater!
(And your suggestion matches what Firth says about Austen's Darcy: "People often ask whether Darcy changes in the course of the story or whether we find out what he is really like. I think it is a mixture of the two. His housekeeper talks affectionately of him and reveals that he has always looked after his sister and taken care of his household in a very kindly way. He hasn't suddenly turned into a good man; I think that he has always been a good man underneath that stiff exterior . . . His real crime, I think, is silliness. I know that's a terribly undignified way to look at him, but I believe his failing is foolish, superficial, social snobbery, and that's the bitter lesson he has to learn. And I think in that sense he does change.")
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Thank you! I am thrilled by the downtown tentacles.
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Thank you!
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And there are so many bingoes in those personalized cards, damn.
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Thank you!
And there are so many bingoes in those personalized cards, damn.
I would like the time to write some of them!
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I'll do my best! I had noticed it has a ridiculous cast.
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You're welcome!
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Thank you! I think some of them may be narratives as-is.
Slavery in Massachusetts
https://catalog.minlib.net/Record/.b20046248?searchId=56619535&recordIndex=1&page=1&referred=resultIndex
I grew up in the South, and there was a not uncommon response when people from the North complained about slavery that it had happened in the north too. Not that that would excuse anything, of course, and duration differed a lot.
I had an exchange a long time ago with a British bellringer who claimed to be confused about why people on this continent went to the extreme of importing people all the way from Africa for slavery purposes. I pointed out that the first enslaved Africans came here with their English "owners" in 1619. He seemed to have forgotten the extent of such slavery in England. (enslaved in the sense that came to be common in America. There were free and enslaved people of African descent in St Augustine before that, but the slavery system under Spain was different).
Re: Slavery in Massachusetts
I don't think I've ever seen that book. (I had heard of its subject.) I had a slightly idiosyncratic education and graduated high school in 1999. I can't remember a formal lesson on it, but I would have known in elementary school that slavery had existed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of the presence of Tituba in my reading about the Salem witch trials, at the same time that we were taught "Follow the Drinkin Gourd," which regardless of its historicity as a guide-song is part of what went into the poem. Other information I picked up over the years, as often as not from fiction, e.g. M. T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (2006–08), but I didn't know until 2019 that the ownership of people had endured as close to home as the estates of Somerville and Medford. I don't know what anyone else of my generation and location was taught.
I grew up in the South, and there was a not uncommon response when people from the North complained about slavery that it had happened in the north too. Not that that would excuse anything, of course, and duration differed a lot.
Just for the record, I wasn't worried you were about to reopen a civil war in my comments. The point for me isn't whether I should feel worse for not having known, or worse after finding out; it is what's true.
I had an exchange a long time ago with a British bellringer who claimed to be confused about why people on this continent went to the extreme of importing people all the way from Africa for slavery purposes. I pointed out that the first enslaved Africans came here with their English "owners" in 1619. He seemed to have forgotten the extent of such slavery in England.
It's not like there's Turner paintings about it or anything. (But people want to forget. I feel like my entire adult life has been a lesson in the hatefulness of historical memory to most people when I think it is what we have to hang on to or there's nothing to put the future on.)
[edit] I literally went over to the Guardian to see what was going on in the arts this morning and saw this book.
Re: Slavery in Massachusetts
Thanks for the book rec. I just this morning put myself on the hold list at the library for Dorothy Brown's new book about reparations, a subject that interests me a lot.
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Thank you!
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Also the tentacles are amazing & I hope you get to see them in person.
I got at least three songs stuck in my head from this card.
Ha, well, then my decision to snaffle lines from my English Book of Folk Songs was not in vain, then. I may have got a tiny bit carried away with the "find random sea quotes" part of the program though! XD
<3
I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.
Aww, cool, because despite the annoying popularity, it is very good indeed. I even managed to watch it in my first year at uni, when I had to go over to the common room, which was far too much of an ordeal when it came to everything else. Although I see someone was before me in saying that of course the true attraction is not Colin but Benjamin Whitrow, playing Mr Bennet as if he had waited all his life for the chance. (I enjoy most (all, I think?) of the other versions of P&P I've seen one way and another, but there is Only One True Mr Bennet, even if Edmund Gwenn comes very close).
Btw, for reasons (presumably that they had acquired the rights to show it) when the UK Freeview channel Drama started up, they launched themselves with a terrifying giant wet Mr Darcy in a river somewhere. Possibly he is trying to escape some tentacles! As one does... XD
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Thank you!
Also the tentacles are amazing & I hope you get to see them in person.
I will certainly endeavor to bring back pictures if I do. It will be an expedition.
Ha, well, then my decision to snaffle lines from my English Book of Folk Songs was not in vain, then. I may have got a tiny bit carried away with the "find random sea quotes" part of the program though!
No such thing possible!
lthough I see someone was before me in saying that of course the true attraction is not Colin but Benjamin Whitrow, playing Mr Bennet as if he had waited all his life for the chance. (I enjoy most (all, I think?) of the other versions of P&P I've seen one way and another, but there is Only One True Mr Bennet, even if Edmund Gwenn comes very close).
That's delightful. I'm glad he was able to achieve the Platonic archetype.
Btw, for reasons (presumably that they had acquired the rights to show it) when the UK Freeview channel Drama started up, they launched themselves with a terrifying giant wet Mr Darcy in a river somewhere. Possibly he is trying to escape some tentacles! As one does...
I just cracked up.
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I have a vague feeling the thing is still hanging around somewhere, or was for quite a few years after. XD (Had Colin Firth been able to foresee that, I imagine he would have stuck to his guns on refusing it, lol).
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The bingo cards are excellent! And congratulations on the poem acceptance :-)
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Don't come this weekend, but definitely come! I also like the bison observatory.
The bingo cards are excellent! And congratulations on the poem acceptance
Thank you!
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And congrats on the poetry sale!
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You're welcome! I love that kind of subcutaneous acting. It accounts for a lot of people I enjoy.
And congrats on the poetry sale!
Thank you!
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I may have said this before, but I realized a while back that for me, it's the actors who manage a kind of full-body presence and physicality. I can forgive shortcomings of the facial and vocal acting if everything from the neck down is selling the part.