דער פֿאשיסט, ער ציטערט הערט

That moment when you put on the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" to get it out of your head (where it got stuck via the transitive property of "The Great Boston Molasses Flood" after reading the recent research about the molasses flood in question) and then, because of the way your iTunes is organized, realize a few songs later that you are listening to Partisans of Vilna: The Songs of World War II Jewish Resistance and, all right, you probably love Hirsh Glik rather more than the next person thanks to beta-reading A Verse from Babylon more than ten years ago, but don't you think he would have been all right with anti-fascist songs not being so directly relevant again? Yes, I know he didn't write "Yid, du partizaner"—that was Shmerke Kaczerginski—but he's got two songs on the album and "Zog nit keyn mol" is still on mental rotation. This even before I found out that a protest to which I am strongly thinking of going on Wednesday has a Jewish resistance faction. That's cool. (Even if I can tell I am not their target demographic by the fact that I didn't type it out "#JewishResistance" because it makes no sense to me to use hashtags in contexts where they do not actually function as metadata.) I hope somebody has already made a golem sign. These days I am rather in favor of golems that protect as many kinds of marginalized people as needed.

It's amazing what a girl can do with half a heart

I thought I was over this weekend's illness, but then I walked home from Union Square in the rain this evening and I was wrong. Assuming I do not feel like a damp rag tomorrow, I am still planning on the afternoon's protest, which is proceeding despite the withdrawal of Steve Bannon on the grounds that having Kellyanne Conway speak at the conference as if she were just another campaign manager is one of those things that is not normal and should not be treated as such, and then if I continue to be mobile, I would like to hear what Mayor Curtatone has to say about Somerville in the age of Trump; in general he has said pretty awesome things in the past. So that will be a very political day. Or I'll feel terrible and get to neither of these things and will find something else to do with my time. On account of the ACLU having matching donations today, I gave them money. That's something a person can do while stationary.

In straight-up good news, Jane Yolen has been named the newest Damon Knight Grand Master of SFWA. Her Commander Toad in Space (1980) was not the first non-picture book I read as a child, but it's one of the earliest I can remember and I loved it decades before I got any of the in-jokes. Sister Light, Sister Dark (1989) and White Jenna (1990) shaped a lot of the ways I think about narrative (and almost certainly influenced me to study archery at the earliest possible opportunity, along with T.H. White and various retellings of Robin Hood). I don't believe The Devil's Arithmetic (1988) was the first Holocaust literature I read, but since I associate it with third or fourth grade, it must have been early. The film of Merlin and the Dragons (1991) was definitely one of my formative pieces of Arthuriana. And I get to say all of this while she's alive, which is the really nice part. The thing where I have poetry in some of the same magazines she does still blows my mind.

I really like these photographs.