The comforts you defend

For my mother's birthday observed, my father organized her a surprise party. It went beautifully. She knew to expect my father's youngest brother and his wife and maybe me and spatch; she was not expecting eighteen friends and family and enough food to feed several small armies, seriously, Redwall levels of provender, which my father had been secretly preparing in a friend's kitchen all week. The cake would have maybe had a firmer grasp on structural integrity had it been composed of only four layers of meringue, whipped cream, and strawberries instead of five, but it slid sideways so majestically after the first two slices were taken out—and was eaten just as delightedly whether in slices or scoops—it was worth it in performance art. People gave her scarves, sculptures, cards, books; my father had scanned pictures out of photo albums and printed them out to decorate the house. He had promised not to let my mother host her own party and although it took a little enforcement, I actually saw her sitting down and eating and talking with my godmother and some of her grad school friends. Guests helped heroically with the dishes. My niece hugged her Fox-cousin goodbye so hard at the end of the night, she lifted him off his feet. My mother's actual birthday is Monday and I think the plan is to just make her waffles.

Dialogue and industry and August in the thirties

A handful of links, while I recover from yesterday's party. Warning that one of them is serious.

1. The man interviewed in this article is my brother's oldest and closest friend; he is family. I've known for years what he's dying of and how badly the VA handled it. I didn't know how unique his case wasn't. Strength to his arm: "What's killing Staff Sergeant Wesley Black? The VA doesn't want to talk about it."

2. For fans of the apocalyptically unclassifiable Millennium (1996–99), there is now a documentary revisiting the series: Millennium After the Millennium (2020). At the moment it only appears to exist on iTunes, but maybe a DVD will come along and improve my life.

3. Courtesy of handful_ofdust: I love this triptych of goddesses, but especially the Hel-faced rendering of Melinoë. When I wrote her mythology into a scene of the unfinished (and at this stage likely never to be finished) sequel to "The Mirror of Venus," I did the same thing myself.

4. Speaking of the ancient world, selkie asked for my opinion on yonic hamantashn. My opinion was uh. The etymological connection between the names of Esther and Ištar is not contested. (Ask me about the Greek variants attested in the catacombs of Beit She'arim!) Neither is the fact that hamantashn very likely have nothing to do linguistically with Haman. I can't seriously accept the notion of the hamantash as the secret matriarchal cookie of the great mother goddess without a lot more baked continuity between the Babylonian Exile and eighteenth-century Germany. The ritual cakes presumed from the Old Babylonian Mari molds would make more compelling antecedents if they were shaped like pubic triangles instead of whole voluptuous women. The association of poppy and other seeds with the holiday is not halachically attested until the thirteenth century CE. And I know that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but absolutely everything about rabbinic Judaism leads me to believe that if we'd had hoo-ha-shaped Purim cakes since antiquity, someone would have argued about it in the Talmud. The entire thesis reminds me a little awkwardly of D.H. Lawrence and the significance of the duck and is the sort of thing that leaves me wondering if I overreacted to someone's joke, except it really didn't read like one. Anyway, I am about fine with the placement of Carthage on this alignment chart.

5. I was reminded by this article that I read several of Gene Stratton-Porter's novels as a child: Freckles (1904) and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909) made the most impression on me, but I also remember The Harvester (1911) and The Keeper of the Bees (1925). The latter may in fact have furnished one of my early models in genderqueerness in the character of the tough, affectionate, assertively androgynous "little Scout": "The only definite conclusion [Jamie MacFarlane, the protagonist] arrived at was that sometimes he was a boy and sometimes she was a girl." Asked point-blank, the little Scout declares, "If you can't tell, it doesn't make a darn bit of difference, does it?" Inevitably the novel does answer the biological question, but at least does not demand that the character give up doing any of the gender-non-conforming things they love. I didn't know until this article that "Gene" was short for "Geneva"—I knew two Genes growing up and both were male. The article mentions that she had to be wrestled into dresses at age eleven; that as an adult she could be often found in pants. She made her own reputation and money. In 1886, she married and kept her own name. It is probably facile to think of the little Scout as a self-insert, but it did suddenly jump out at me that when Jamie finally learns their name, it clears up nothing because it's "Jean."