He took to drinking ratafia and thought upon Miss Bailey

I felt that for years I had been unfair to the Kingston Trio, since I grew up knowing them for a handful of songs—"Tom Dooley," "M.T.A.," "The Merry Minuet," "The Shape of Things"—and otherwise mostly as the bête noire of the Limeliters, the mid-century folk trio I actually grew up listening to. So when I saw that Lou Gottlieb of said Limeliters had in fact worked with the Kingston Trio on their album Here We Go Again! (1959), I figured it would be a reasonable compromise to start with. About half the album was playlisted on YouTube. Okay, close-harmony, collegiate-polished pop-folk. I wasn't not enjoying it, but it wasn't the Limeliters and it wasn't the Chad Mitchell Trio. And then I hit "The Unfortunate Miss Bailey."

By the fifteen-second mark, I had already decided to post the song because I heard the opening plink-out of "Rule, Britannia" and then an affectedly dry-academic voice announced that "In 1742 it was customary in the township of Halifax for a gentleman to partake occasionally of ratafia—" and I stopped the recording and stuck my head into the other room to yell delightedly at spatch, because there was Lou Gottlieb, albeit in the voice of either Dave Guard, Bob Shane, or Nick Reynolds, or as it turned out all three of them as the line was handed off by turns; no one else from the late '50's through the mid-'60's could hold a candle to him for nasal meta-pedantry except Tom Lehrer. And then I started the recording again and at the thirty-three-second mark I gave up completely because the first verse begins—

A captain bold in Halifax who dwelt in country quarters
Seduced a maid who hanged herself one Monday in her garters

—and I was reading those lyrics last night on the train from New York because they are the "English ballad" that Hannibal Sefton is singing, not necessarily badly, but really, really drunkenly, when he makes his spectacularly failbucket entrance in Sold Down the River (2000) which concludes with him quoting Latin and passing out. It's a genuine early nineteenth-century song. I'd never looked it up before, but it's first attested in an 1803 musical farce by George Colman called Love Laughs at Locksmiths, gains a popular life of its own on both sides of the Atlantic, and eventually has its tune stolen for Andrew Jackson's campaign song "The Hunters of Kentucky," which in context of New Orleans in 1834 probably makes it funnier that Hannibal's singing the bawdy-parody original. The liner notes for Here We Go Again! credit it to "Trad., Gottlieb" and he seems to have altered the lyrics only mildly in the process of arranging it for the Kingston Trio; its particular style of folk sendup (a seduction, a suicide, a ghost—now add bribery) aged remarkably well. I'm a little sorry the Limeliters themselves never recorded it. I presume I now know where Barbara Hambly got it.

Anyway, this entire rabbit hole finished with me listening to a lot more of the Limeliters, so I think my original project failed completely, but I'm still delighted. Plus hearing their "Rumania, Rumania" and "Zhankoye" again after a season of singing Yiddish makes me listen to their pronunciation differently. I wonder if Gottlieb did know the language. "Well, there's a good deal of ethnic solidarity out tonight . . ."

Once again the bullshit's here 'cause history moves in circles

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has a really good thread on the history of the Star of David and its two-thousand-year use as a Jewish symbol, not merely a symbol of the modern State of Israel.

The explanation is necessary because of the D.C. Dyke March, which yesterday I heard had followed the 2017 Chicago Dyke March in banning Jewish pride flags under the defense of anti-Zionism. Currently they seem to be stating that what they have really banned are "nationalist symbols," a category which appears to fold the Star of David at any more visible scale than a necklace automatically into "pro-Israel paraphernalia." Which is historically ignorant and logically inconsistent, especially since pride variants of the Palestinian flag are explicitly welcome on the grounds that its limited recognition as a nation-state means Palestine by definition cannot express nationalism, but neither of these factors matters if the point is to strain only the right kind of Jews into your march, not just the ones who might be, you know, dykes.

I find this situation upsetting and also sheerly exhausting. It is not a distraction; it's not smoke and mirrors if people are getting hurt; but it's the same almost inarticulate fury I feel at things that are wrong. They are fighting from false premises. People are tearing themselves apart over lines drawn around strawmen. I don't see the Christian cross being called out as a symbol of historical oppression unfit for representation in a radically inclusive queer space even though the track record of Christianity on queerness is just about as dreadful as its history of crusade and genocide across any number of nations, including the one we're all embedded in right now. "Nationalist" symbols only, which filters the overlap of iconography and identity to one ethnic group handily. Hence the necessity of Ruttenberg's thread. I wish it didn't feel like arguing with shifting goalposts, premised on quicksand.

I had a terrible night already. I couldn't fall asleep until it was light out; then I couldn't fall asleep because it was light out. When I finally did manage to achieve unconsciousness, I had nightmares about being caught up in some contemporary suppression of dissidents (I should be that important) and was woken within the hour by two phone calls, one of which was a wrong number from a man who didn't appear to understand how wrong numbers work. (Him: "Can I speak to Lauren?" Me: "There's no Lauren at this number." Him: "Okay, I'll call back.") I have too much work to do before the week is over and not enough time to think and I can't help but wonder if I were more plugged in to Boston Pride, would I be hearing the same kind of one-of-the-good-ones gatekeeping from the city I live in? I'm thinking of a line written last week by Keith Kahn-Harris, which shouldn't be a radical suggestion: "Anti-racism should not be a reward for being culturally interesting or politically sympathetic; it should require no justification." More and more I feel there are people for whom it will never be justified and while I worry less about them shooting up synagogues or burning down rabbis' homes, I worry very much that they will stand with folded hands and look sorry and do nothing, nothing at all.