sovay | Mind you catch the turning of the tide

rushthatspeaks and I took Fox to the Museum of Science for the first time this afternoon. We had planned on Revere Beach, but the clear skies and sun of the last two days suddenly turned into bucketing rain, so we went for something indoors instead. Apparently what Fox at this age likes is Van der Graaff lightning, newly hatched chicks, and parabolic mirrors. These all seem like good things to me. They do not like being in the stroller, or at least they like it much less than being carried by their parent or me—facing forward, so that they can see everything I am looking at, which is absolutely not the way Autolycus wants to be held when he climbs into my arms and rests his chin on my shoulder and purrs with guilt-tripping soulfulness. I adapted.

The good thing about this week is that I spent large portions of it out of the house. The bad part is that I spent most of my time inside the house working, as opposed to writing any of the things in my head. These are links.

1. The latest issue of Poetry (now with revamped website!) is dedicated to the "individual  and cumulative practice" of everything that can be defined as "Asian American poetry." The table of contents is huge and all worth reading, but at the moment I am most struck by Aimee Nezhukumatathil's "Sea Church," Hayan Charara's "The Prize," Larissa Lai's "SPLEEN 3: Supreme White," Bryan Thao Worra's "Ecce Monstro," Tishani Doshi's "Monsoon Poem," Craig Santos Perez's "A Whole Foods in Hawai‘i," Rajiv Mohabir's "Coolie," Brandon Som's "Chino," Joseph O. Legaspi's "Feasting," and Wang Ping's "Lao Jia 老家."

2. This is a very specific point to take away from an article about 45's pretty damn white nationalist speech in Poland, but I feel increasingly that the word "Judeo-Christian" should be retired from the language, full stop. Interfaith allyship is great; Evangelical supersessionism can eat a brick. Steve Bannon invoking some shared religious bulwark against Islam? A lot of bricks. I know the historical usefulness of the word: it was a means of defusing American anti-Semitism by incorporating Judaism into the Christian national ideal. But it's like the process of becoming treated as (contingently, not universally, always revocably) white: there are better ways to affirm that people have the right to be part of their nation's identity. Anyway, it makes me twitch.

3. I understand that this photo by Josee Houle is called "The Experiment," but it sure looks like some kind of Symbolist sphinx to me:

Give it up, Oedipus. You won't find the answer to the riddle that way.

Mind you catch the turning of the tide

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