Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight

[sovay]

I saw Jean Renoir's The River (1951) at the HFA tonight with my mother and 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 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?

Comments

[nineweaving]

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]

That article about the Yazidi broke my heart and reforged it. Thank you for sharing it.

[movingfinger]

I got Boston/Worcester/Providence. This is alarmingly correct.

[nineweaving]

The survey appears to have drawn on this larger study.

Nine

[rinue]

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.

[isis]

Yonkers, New York, Philadelphia. I am from DC-area Maryland.

[lemon_badgeress]

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]

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]

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.)

[gwynnega]

The dialect quiz situated me in Fresno, Oakland, and Long Beach. At least it figured out I'm in California?

[cyphomandra]

I feel cheated that I was unable to select "slater" for the woodlouse question (I think it's the Scottish variant that for whatever reason got used here). I am either from Anchorage, New York, or Pembroke Pines.

I read your journal heading yesterday and thought, “Wait, I know Dusky Sound!” – that lyrics origin piece is great,. I’ve actually just seen (but failed to yet write up) Kororāreka: The Ballad of Maggie Flynn, which is a theatre piece about a pākehā/Irish convict who ends up in the whaling town of the title, also referenced in the song (it was known rather notoriously as the Hellhole of the Pacific for some time) .

Pasifika works –my recs are biased towards those who live/work in New Zealand. Samoan - Tusiata Avia’s poetry collection “Wild Dogs Under My Skirt” was also done as a performance piece, and I think some of them are up on Youtube. Oscar Kightley is great – he’s part of the comedy troupe Naked Samoans, and co-wrote/acted in Sione’s Wedding, about four Samoan feckless men who have to shape up in time for a friend’s wedding, and he’s been in various other things (Moana, Hunt for the Wilderpeople), although my favourite piece of his was a play (Eulogy) about the German Samoans interned in NZ during WWII, which amongst other things featured a fabulous sock puppet version of Othello. Albert Wendt (a lot of Samoans have German names/ancestry) is the grandfather of Samoan literature, but I’ve only read a short story collection that was assigned during a class that tended to focus on relentlessly depressing literature, and it wasn’t an exception.

For Fiji – Toa Fraser has a couple of plays and films - No. 2 (film of the play) is about a Fijian matriarch choosing her successor, and I haven’t actually seen it but I loved his play Bare, a two-hander with two people playing 15 characters. Madeleine Sami , who was in the production of Bare I saw, is a Fijian Indian actor/comedian; I love her theatre work. She has a tv series (Super City) where she plays everyone and I haven't seen it, which is less the show and more the fact that I currently have trouble watching most tv.

I can’t give you anyone for Tonga (or the Cook Islands, or Niue) but I am fascinated by their ‘Atenisi Institute, which is Tongan for Athens – this is a <a href="https://overland.org.au/2012/12/tongan-ark/ >review </a> of a film about it. I can come back and do Māori literature/theatre/film – have run out of time and probably comment space!

[kore]

I get....Anchorage, AK; Aurora, CO; and....Pembroke Pines in southern FL. I've never been to these places.

I broke it? Or something?

(Frontage road, garage sale, water fountain, traffic island, pill bug....)

[kore]

WTF, I tried again with some slightly different questions ("how do you say been," mountain lion, &c) and got

Aurora, CO (again?); Madison, WI; and YONKERS.

[movingfinger]

Yonkers is becoming the new Beetle Bomb...

[asakiyume]

I highly, highly recommend the poetry of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands. She has a volume of poetry available:

Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.

They are wonderful.

[brigdh]

That "Skin in the Game" link is excellent. Some really great ideas in there. Thank you for linking it!