sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2017-07-03 12:29 am

Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight

I saw Jean Renoir's The River (1951) at the HFA tonight with my mother and [personal profile] nineweaving. I have loved that movie since the first time I saw it in 2011, and I have never written properly about it. Have this highly disparate collection of links instead.

1. The long-persecuted, fiercely endogamous Yazidi religion has changed its traditions to welcome back Yazidi women trafficked by ISIS/Daesh. The current wave of persecution has been recognized by the UN as genocide. If you are interested in supporting survivors or the Yazidi community at large, Yazda looks like the place to start.

2. Eric K. Ward of the Southern Poverty Law Center writes on a subject I have been thinking a lot about lately: "Skin in the Game: How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism."

3. For reasons both fun and deadly serious, John le Carré recommends learning German: "You can make up crazy adjectives like 'my-recently-by-my-parents-thrown-out-of-the-window PlayStation' . . . Those who teach language, those who cherish its accuracy and meaning and beauty, are the custodians of truth in a dangerous age."

4. Double-checking that I had transcribed its lyrics correctly from the recording I have by Bellowhead, I found a fantastic page about the origins and variants of the nautical folk song "Across the Line."

5. This dialect quiz from the New York Times placed me, by regional English, in New York City, Yonkers, or Jersey City. Back to the drawing board, Henry Higgins. [edit: It correctly located [personal profile] spatch in western Massachusetts and also Boston. "Weirdly prescient." But also Yonkers. We're not sure what's up with Yonkers. "Maybe there's a bunch of expatriates."]

Following the whole adventure with RKO's Girl of the Port (1930) and John Russell's "The Fire-Walker" (1929), I really feel I should read some actual indigenous Pacific writers. Any recommendations?
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 05:24 am (UTC)(link)
I got New England/Boston, not unmixed with Yonkers. What gives?

I so hope you will write about The River—I would love to read that review.

Nine
rosefox: Green books on library shelves. (Default)

[personal profile] rosefox 2017-07-03 05:34 am (UTC)(link)
That article about the Yazidi broke my heart and reforged it. Thank you for sharing it.
movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2017-07-03 06:30 am (UTC)(link)
I got Boston/Worcester/Providence. This is alarmingly correct.
movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2017-07-03 06:39 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not sure! Fireflies? Highway? Aunts and lawyers? I had never thought about the aunt-in-general vs the Aunt So-and-So thing, but that's the way I say them.


Even more alarming, at this very moment, while taking the quiz, I have beans (Great Northerns/molasses/dry mustard/salt pork) baking in the oven for the cookout on Tuesday.

nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 06:46 am (UTC)(link)
They didn't ask me about lightning bugs, damn it.

Nine
movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2017-07-03 06:54 am (UTC)(link)
I think the "what's the word for a drive-through liquor store" question must be one of the reliable regional telltales. None of the options used "packie" and the only way I would refer to that would be "a drive-through liquor store, what were they thinking".
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 06:56 am (UTC)(link)
Took it again. New questions were on lightning bugs and soda. This time I got Boston/Yonkers/Newark——with "sneakers" cited as the key word for all three. The hell? This quiz is broken.

Nine
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 07:08 am (UTC)(link)
The survey appears to have drawn on this larger study.

Nine

movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2017-07-03 07:09 am (UTC)(link)
Imagine a triangle with those three places as the points. What do you think you ought to read as?
movingfinger: (Default)

[personal profile] movingfinger 2017-07-03 07:26 am (UTC)(link)
Huh.

What happened to hosey? It's a good, useful word! Kids these days...
rinue: (Default)

[personal profile] rinue 2017-07-03 07:42 am (UTC)(link)
I didn't love that quiz, largely because it wouldn't let me select multiple things. I don't use the same word all the time. It's therefore silly to ask me which one I use. More confusingly, although two of my selections, per the frequency maps, are used only in the Dallas area (and one of them sometimes in Houston, pill bug; the other is beer barn) it's confusing that it didn't peg me as having spent time in Dallas but instead put me in Tennessee somewhere - and did it on the basis of "y'all," which is widespread across the South.
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 07:43 am (UTC)(link)
It would interesting to work out the branch points. The first time, I answered "you guys"; the second, "you." My usage depends on context.

Nine
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2017-07-03 07:44 am (UTC)(link)
I had to look "hosey" up. Never encountered it.

Nine
isis: (Default)

[personal profile] isis 2017-07-03 09:07 am (UTC)(link)
Yonkers, New York, Philadelphia. I am from DC-area Maryland.
lemon_badgeress: basket of lemons, with one cut lemon being decorative (Default)

[personal profile] lemon_badgeress 2017-07-03 01:22 pm (UTC)(link)
The majority of my spoken-linguistic influences are New Mexico (north and south) and Iowa.

My triangle is Salt Lake City, Fresno, and....Anchorage.

*contemplates this*

It's not Yonkers! :D
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)

[personal profile] skygiants 2017-07-03 02:02 pm (UTC)(link)
I enjoyed Celestine Hitiura Vaite's Breadfruit, and have been meaning to read more of her books! They're essentially linked short stories set in Tahiti.
choco_frosh: (Default)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2017-07-03 02:22 pm (UTC)(link)
Dialect Quiz: I came up with Boston/Worcester/Providence, with the rest of New England listed as a possible. Mostly on the basis of calling it a Yard Sale: I think the rest of my responses confused it.
(This is probably what happens when one side of your family is native New England and the the other half is more-or-less midwest and your mother is an English teacher who studies Anglo Saxon, so you pronounce everything a great deal more "correctly" than any sane person, at least when you have time to think about it.)
choco_frosh: (Default)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2017-07-03 03:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I really wanted an option for 'everyone'.

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