There are new complications in the insurance situation, which feels a lot like saying that Cthulhu has grown some extra tentacles. I am very tired of feeling that I am being asked to prove repeatedly that I am worth the state's magnanimity of keeping me alive—and we are not even going through the worst of what this country has to offer. Yesterday there was a rally on Boston Common protesting the separation and detention of immigrant children from their families, a brutality of policy which the White House is now defending as a matter of Biblical law. I guess that whole you must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt business is only for obsolete Jews, not Evangelicals ascendant in secular power. I want these people smashed and gone. I don't want the rest of us in radioactive dust for it. I worry about that. But I want their names to remain only as cautionary tales; I want nothing of what they've built to last, not laws, not murals. In the meantime, I really want to be able to see my doctors again.
Have a bunch of links.
1. I am in two of the anthologies and one of the Kickstarter projects recommended by Maria Haskins in "13 Queer Speculative Short Story Collections and Anthologies to Read Right Now": Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, GlitterShip Year One, and Women Up to No Good. That is objectively cool. If you have to make a choice, please donate to the last of these; I really want my contributor's copies. I'm not proud. Or tired.
2. I first read about Corridor of Mirrors (1948) in Andrew Spicer's "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British Stardom," but Imogen Sarah Smith's "Corridor of Mirrors: The Eternal Return" makes a strong case that I should see it more or less right now. I like how she writes about Portman: "Though he could be a supercilious villain, as in his role as a true-believer Nazi officer in Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), his trademark—captured in the same team's A Canterbury Tale (1944)—was a strain of wistful madness, a twisted idealism that drives him to violence, but gives him a certain pathos and delicacy as well. All these qualities are on display in Corridor of Mirrors, where he manages to be attractive, sinister, tragic, and faintly foolish all at once." I have been thinking about the actor and especially about his part in A Canterbury Tale on and off for eleven years now; those last four adjectives are right on.
3. I like this article both because it is an intelligent examination of Lupino's years at Warners and because it looks seriously at a movie that I screamingly bounced off of: Kristen Lopez, "The Woman Trapped: The Lens of Ida Lupino." I still need to see the films she directed herself.
4. I have been following David Schraub on American Jews and Israel with interest and some pain. I was born in the Diaspora and I will die in the Diaspora and I pray for rain in Israel, but I was raised to carry my home with me rather than locate it on particular ground; that does not mean that I like reading and agreeing with positions like "Second-Class Jews and the Future of the Jewish State." My first images of Israel were the pomegranates my grandfather photographed in Jerusalem in the early '80's. They made it into this poem. I would have liked to feel welcome looking for their descendants someday.
5. I was introduced to Angélique Kidjo's reimagining of Talking Heads' Remain in Light (1980) with her joyous video for "Once in a Lifetime," but "Born Under Punches" appears to be haunting me.
6. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rfmcdonald: Adam Gopnik, "Voltaire's Garden." It gets Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow" stuck in my head, but this part seems useful: "But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one’s garden. By 'garden' Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, 'We must cultivate our garden,' is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action . . . He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn't enough, but it was something." My God, we're back to ethical artichokes.
Have a bunch of links.
1. I am in two of the anthologies and one of the Kickstarter projects recommended by Maria Haskins in "13 Queer Speculative Short Story Collections and Anthologies to Read Right Now": Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, GlitterShip Year One, and Women Up to No Good. That is objectively cool. If you have to make a choice, please donate to the last of these; I really want my contributor's copies. I'm not proud. Or tired.
2. I first read about Corridor of Mirrors (1948) in Andrew Spicer's "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British Stardom," but Imogen Sarah Smith's "Corridor of Mirrors: The Eternal Return" makes a strong case that I should see it more or less right now. I like how she writes about Portman: "Though he could be a supercilious villain, as in his role as a true-believer Nazi officer in Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), his trademark—captured in the same team's A Canterbury Tale (1944)—was a strain of wistful madness, a twisted idealism that drives him to violence, but gives him a certain pathos and delicacy as well. All these qualities are on display in Corridor of Mirrors, where he manages to be attractive, sinister, tragic, and faintly foolish all at once." I have been thinking about the actor and especially about his part in A Canterbury Tale on and off for eleven years now; those last four adjectives are right on.
3. I like this article both because it is an intelligent examination of Lupino's years at Warners and because it looks seriously at a movie that I screamingly bounced off of: Kristen Lopez, "The Woman Trapped: The Lens of Ida Lupino." I still need to see the films she directed herself.
4. I have been following David Schraub on American Jews and Israel with interest and some pain. I was born in the Diaspora and I will die in the Diaspora and I pray for rain in Israel, but I was raised to carry my home with me rather than locate it on particular ground; that does not mean that I like reading and agreeing with positions like "Second-Class Jews and the Future of the Jewish State." My first images of Israel were the pomegranates my grandfather photographed in Jerusalem in the early '80's. They made it into this poem. I would have liked to feel welcome looking for their descendants someday.
5. I was introduced to Angélique Kidjo's reimagining of Talking Heads' Remain in Light (1980) with her joyous video for "Once in a Lifetime," but "Born Under Punches" appears to be haunting me.
6. Courtesy of
rfmcdonald: Adam Gopnik, "Voltaire's Garden." It gets Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow" stuck in my head, but this part seems useful: "But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one’s garden. By 'garden' Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, 'We must cultivate our garden,' is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action . . . He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn't enough, but it was something." My God, we're back to ethical artichokes.
