Rabbit, rabbit. I would love for this to be a good month, but I am feeling really weird about the future right now.
Today was centrally characterized by a doctor's appointment, but afterward I had late lunch with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and my mother at Mamaleh's and discovered (a) they will make you a tongue and chopped liver sandwich if you ask for it (b) a tongue and chopped liver sandwich may be one of my favorite things on a plate. Then I came home and discovered that ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yhlee had sent me, as an early Christmas present, a deck of Dame Darcy's Mermaid Tarot. I liked the fish-tailed Fool, leaping through a hoop off a cliff into the sea, but I love the drowned sea-captain of the Emperor holding the frozen wheel with a mermaid's hand clasped over his own, the scallop-shelled Chariot drawn by two dolphins, the Wheel of Fortune which is a ship's wheel with a bird-winged siren in the clouds above it (two different kinds of sphinx and a wyvern below), the Hanged Man in his sailor's bell-bottoms and white cap dangling from the yard like an acrobat. Death in tattered pirate's regalia rides a seahorse, flies a flag whose device is a compass rose made from bones, a blue-lipped sailor in chains leaves a bubble trail beneath them. The Tower is toppling in a tsunami. The Moon shows an emerald-scaled, silver-haired mermaid from behind as she dances with her hands to the full moon, black-and-green tentacles swaying from the waves to match her movements. The suits are just as good as the arcana. The King of Cups is dressed like a Roman general of the seafloor, toasting a dolphin which holds another goblet of red wine between its jaws. The Ace of Pentacles wears strings of pearls, starfish in her hair, the five-pointed star disk in her hands as she muses over a table of live shells and fish and seahorses. The Four of Swords apppears to depict a woman staked down in a waving kelp bed. The Five of Wands is an oar battle between as many mermaids. I had been familiar with Dame Darcy's work primarily from the endpapers and illustrations from Caitlín R. Kiernan's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers (2002); something about the composition and coloring of the Tarot images makes them resemble tattoos as much as anything. The mermaids are of various ethnicities. There are tridents. It's good stuff.
I feel like I've been reading nothing but political news for days, even though it isn't true; at present I am enjoying Heathcote Williams' Forbidden Fruit (2011), a collection of plainspoken, political poems on scientific themes, I bought it for the title poem about Alan Turing and I regret nothing, and Deborah Cadbury's Princes at War (2015), whose American edition better have won a prize for dramatic subtitling—The Bitter Battle Inside Britain's Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII—but which is actually very good and providing me with a lot of information I didn't know, even if occasionally I want to reassure the author that I will understand the gravity of the situations even if she dials back the pitch of her prose. I think I am saving Mick LaSalle's Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) as comfort reading for some future date.
I am reading a lot of political news, though. This journal would turn into nothing but links if I tried to discuss all of it right now. (Most of it's terrible! The phlebotomist I saw this afternoon likened the next month and two-thirds to the last palmy days of the Cretaceous before the extinction event. Then I think he was worried he had upset me, which was not the case. It was an apocalyptic comparison I had not heard before.) Thing I am still thinking about a couple of days later: while different news sources decide how to handle the use of the term "alt-right," it does interest me that the catalyzing event for committed self-identification or distancing appears to have been the Nazi salutes. I guess that iconography is not as totally denatured as I had feared. That makes it worse that so many people now unironically appear to embrace it.
The HFA has put up a page for the series Busby Berkeley Babylon (it is not the HFA's fault that my brain automatically substitutes Bloom County Babylon), with descriptions of each film. I appreciate the synopses that warn for blackface, having occasionally been unpleasantly surprised. (Swing Time (1936)! Fred Astaire, wanting to perform a tribute to seminal rhythm tap dancer—and your one-time teacher—John William Sublett was a wonderful idea. Your decision to perform it in blackface could have used some work!) I am also strangely pleased that their attempt to grapple critically with The Gang's All Here (1943) starts out reasonably enough and then disintegrates into appropriately Lovecraftian raving: "The mundane, ubiquitous polka dots have become stars, existing not just in the sky but everywhere on Planet Berkeley." I am so looking forward to seeing this movie again.
I like this visual poem: Fatimah Asghar and Eve L. Ewing, "From."
Today was centrally characterized by a doctor's appointment, but afterward I had late lunch with
derspatchel and my mother at Mamaleh's and discovered (a) they will make you a tongue and chopped liver sandwich if you ask for it (b) a tongue and chopped liver sandwich may be one of my favorite things on a plate. Then I came home and discovered that yhlee had sent me, as an early Christmas present, a deck of Dame Darcy's Mermaid Tarot. I liked the fish-tailed Fool, leaping through a hoop off a cliff into the sea, but I love the drowned sea-captain of the Emperor holding the frozen wheel with a mermaid's hand clasped over his own, the scallop-shelled Chariot drawn by two dolphins, the Wheel of Fortune which is a ship's wheel with a bird-winged siren in the clouds above it (two different kinds of sphinx and a wyvern below), the Hanged Man in his sailor's bell-bottoms and white cap dangling from the yard like an acrobat. Death in tattered pirate's regalia rides a seahorse, flies a flag whose device is a compass rose made from bones, a blue-lipped sailor in chains leaves a bubble trail beneath them. The Tower is toppling in a tsunami. The Moon shows an emerald-scaled, silver-haired mermaid from behind as she dances with her hands to the full moon, black-and-green tentacles swaying from the waves to match her movements. The suits are just as good as the arcana. The King of Cups is dressed like a Roman general of the seafloor, toasting a dolphin which holds another goblet of red wine between its jaws. The Ace of Pentacles wears strings of pearls, starfish in her hair, the five-pointed star disk in her hands as she muses over a table of live shells and fish and seahorses. The Four of Swords apppears to depict a woman staked down in a waving kelp bed. The Five of Wands is an oar battle between as many mermaids. I had been familiar with Dame Darcy's work primarily from the endpapers and illustrations from Caitlín R. Kiernan's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers (2002); something about the composition and coloring of the Tarot images makes them resemble tattoos as much as anything. The mermaids are of various ethnicities. There are tridents. It's good stuff.I feel like I've been reading nothing but political news for days, even though it isn't true; at present I am enjoying Heathcote Williams' Forbidden Fruit (2011), a collection of plainspoken, political poems on scientific themes, I bought it for the title poem about Alan Turing and I regret nothing, and Deborah Cadbury's Princes at War (2015), whose American edition better have won a prize for dramatic subtitling—The Bitter Battle Inside Britain's Royal Family in the Darkest Days of WWII—but which is actually very good and providing me with a lot of information I didn't know, even if occasionally I want to reassure the author that I will understand the gravity of the situations even if she dials back the pitch of her prose. I think I am saving Mick LaSalle's Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (2002) as comfort reading for some future date.
I am reading a lot of political news, though. This journal would turn into nothing but links if I tried to discuss all of it right now. (Most of it's terrible! The phlebotomist I saw this afternoon likened the next month and two-thirds to the last palmy days of the Cretaceous before the extinction event. Then I think he was worried he had upset me, which was not the case. It was an apocalyptic comparison I had not heard before.) Thing I am still thinking about a couple of days later: while different news sources decide how to handle the use of the term "alt-right," it does interest me that the catalyzing event for committed self-identification or distancing appears to have been the Nazi salutes. I guess that iconography is not as totally denatured as I had feared. That makes it worse that so many people now unironically appear to embrace it.
The HFA has put up a page for the series Busby Berkeley Babylon (it is not the HFA's fault that my brain automatically substitutes Bloom County Babylon), with descriptions of each film. I appreciate the synopses that warn for blackface, having occasionally been unpleasantly surprised. (Swing Time (1936)! Fred Astaire, wanting to perform a tribute to seminal rhythm tap dancer—and your one-time teacher—John William Sublett was a wonderful idea. Your decision to perform it in blackface could have used some work!) I am also strangely pleased that their attempt to grapple critically with The Gang's All Here (1943) starts out reasonably enough and then disintegrates into appropriately Lovecraftian raving: "The mundane, ubiquitous polka dots have become stars, existing not just in the sky but everywhere on Planet Berkeley." I am so looking forward to seeing this movie again.
I like this visual poem: Fatimah Asghar and Eve L. Ewing, "From."
