A heart's not open until it's broken
I wish I could report that I returned from Providence and promptly caught up on sleep, but in fact the last two days have been extraordinarily sleepless thanks to the progression of earth-shaking crack-of-dawn construction on the other half of the duplex. The concrete for the new front walk was finally poured today, so I have a fragile hope that tomorrow there will be no reason for jackhammers or bandsaws or heavy chunks of concrete crashing like stage thunder into the aluminum bed of a pickup truck, but I'm sure there is some last loud finishing touch I haven't thought of. Nonetheless, the combination of near-total sleep deprivation, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch encouraging me to bed early last night, and only having to deal with a cement mixer this morning added up to something like eight hours of sleep and I'll take it.
Everything I've dreamed for about a week straight has been nightmare, but last night I got one of those dreams that should come with program notes when you wake up: modern art, small-town avant-garde, nuclear anxiety, a museum heist, a switchbacking plot of which I can remember just fragments and a prevailing tone somewhere between courtroom drama and caper; my taste remains consistent across dreams and fiction because the character I remember most clearly is the local lawyer who looked like a cross between John Lithgow and Alastair Sim in a three-piece suit and an overcoat that was last fashionable during a world war, flat on his back on his office floor among a future avalanche of books and briefs, exclaiming with great happiness and no pretense of sobriety, "I love this state! Even a mediocre lawyer can win a case!" (I think we were in upstate New York. I have no idea how this was legally relevant. It was a good thing that he had won the case, and he hadn't had it handed to him, but no one else had expected him to pull it off, either.) I was not surprised when he turned out to have a terminal illness; it's harder to make TB plausible these days. The fictional modern art was full of bright blocks and black spaces and somehow looked like excerpts from a narrative while not actually being figurative at all.
Please enjoy some links.
1. I discovered Connie Wang's "I've Written About Cultural Appropriation For 10 Years. Here's What I Got Wrong" and eshusplayground's "The thing I hate most about Good Jew vs Bad Jew is that it denies Jews the ability to respond to complex issues Jewishly" right around the same time last night and they chimed similarly for me. Everyone wants a simple, satisfying, one-size-fits-all response to ethical quandaries. That doesn't make one exist. That doesn't make the quandaries not worth talking through.
2. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: "The Fading Battlefields of World War I." One of the many unforgivable side effects of this current presidency is the way that, at least in the U.S., the commemoration of World War I has been lost in the shuffle of general horror and chaos. It was not a blip in the twentieth century. It was a defining event and its dead are worth remembering. There will never be another centennial; the new century seems bent on reenactment, not recognition. This government is not interested in honoring rather than desecrating the past.
3. Courtesy of another friend who is not on Dreamwidth: the scanned original edition of Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919). Eliot never included sheet music among his modernist fragments.
If through his sluggish watery sleep come dreams
They are the blue ghosts of king-fishers.
4. Lost Under Heaven's "Bunny's Blues" joins the growing list of witchcraft music videos which started whenrushthatspeaks sent me Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart," "Seven," and "When I Grow Up." For the record, that is a hell of a set to put in your brain all at once.
5. Courtesy ofbrigdh: seagrass mermaids.
I will be spending this Saturday participating in representative democracy at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention, where the contested nominees will include the Democratic candidate for state governor. Forward the ethical artichoke.
spatch encouraging me to bed early last night, and only having to deal with a cement mixer this morning added up to something like eight hours of sleep and I'll take it. Everything I've dreamed for about a week straight has been nightmare, but last night I got one of those dreams that should come with program notes when you wake up: modern art, small-town avant-garde, nuclear anxiety, a museum heist, a switchbacking plot of which I can remember just fragments and a prevailing tone somewhere between courtroom drama and caper; my taste remains consistent across dreams and fiction because the character I remember most clearly is the local lawyer who looked like a cross between John Lithgow and Alastair Sim in a three-piece suit and an overcoat that was last fashionable during a world war, flat on his back on his office floor among a future avalanche of books and briefs, exclaiming with great happiness and no pretense of sobriety, "I love this state! Even a mediocre lawyer can win a case!" (I think we were in upstate New York. I have no idea how this was legally relevant. It was a good thing that he had won the case, and he hadn't had it handed to him, but no one else had expected him to pull it off, either.) I was not surprised when he turned out to have a terminal illness; it's harder to make TB plausible these days. The fictional modern art was full of bright blocks and black spaces and somehow looked like excerpts from a narrative while not actually being figurative at all.
Please enjoy some links.
1. I discovered Connie Wang's "I've Written About Cultural Appropriation For 10 Years. Here's What I Got Wrong" and eshusplayground's "The thing I hate most about Good Jew vs Bad Jew is that it denies Jews the ability to respond to complex issues Jewishly" right around the same time last night and they chimed similarly for me. Everyone wants a simple, satisfying, one-size-fits-all response to ethical quandaries. That doesn't make one exist. That doesn't make the quandaries not worth talking through.
2. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: "The Fading Battlefields of World War I." One of the many unforgivable side effects of this current presidency is the way that, at least in the U.S., the commemoration of World War I has been lost in the shuffle of general horror and chaos. It was not a blip in the twentieth century. It was a defining event and its dead are worth remembering. There will never be another centennial; the new century seems bent on reenactment, not recognition. This government is not interested in honoring rather than desecrating the past.
3. Courtesy of another friend who is not on Dreamwidth: the scanned original edition of Hope Mirrlees' Paris: A Poem (1919). Eliot never included sheet music among his modernist fragments.
If through his sluggish watery sleep come dreams
They are the blue ghosts of king-fishers.
4. Lost Under Heaven's "Bunny's Blues" joins the growing list of witchcraft music videos which started when
rushthatspeaks sent me Fever Ray's "If I Had a Heart," "Seven," and "When I Grow Up." For the record, that is a hell of a set to put in your brain all at once.5. Courtesy of
brigdh: seagrass mermaids.I will be spending this Saturday participating in representative democracy at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention, where the contested nominees will include the Democratic candidate for state governor. Forward the ethical artichoke.
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Do you have a way to get to said convention? I have another commitment, but I can reschedule if you're desperate.
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Thank you for asking! I have a ride scheduled with one of my mother's friends (who is also attending the convention) if I can get up at eyebleed o'clock, which I will just have to. If this plan falls through between now and Friday night, I will let you know.
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I am in love with this character already.
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I am pleased to report that he did not actually die of anything over the course of the dream. I was very fond of him. Also I'm pretty sure he got us out of jail.
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I love this guy.
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I am sorry I can't show people my dreams!
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Maybe it's something about the full moon in May. It likes modern art.
(That's really excellent.)
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help
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Oh, yikes, can I offer you a lot of blankets and maybe a circle of salt?
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/has strict rule against watching Fever Ray videos after dark ever
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I woke up feeling kinda like I had HAD crops and cattle, and they were in fact unblighted, but now I had never had them. O_o;
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I still need to see The Love Witch. You made it sound great. Does "Bunny's Blues" use much of the same iconography?
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The place where I mostly wrestle with cultural appropriation is in services of my syncretic religion (UU):
We have a small-and-vocal Jewish UU contingent within our congregation and celebrate various Jewish holidays, often-but-not-always with their direct participation. So Jason, for example, has sounded the chofar on a Sunday when we're celebrating Rosh Hashanah. A woman raised in the Jewish tradition lit a menorah during our Candlelight Services on Christmas Eve and it was very moving for me to hear a dozen or more voices join hers in singing the prayer. And at least one of my Jewish friends finds this really disturbing and appropriative.
Or there's the time that I ended up writing a calling of the quarters (which we do on the Sundays closest to the equinoxes and solstices) evoking the directions with the names of Irish god/saints for St. Patrick's Day.
Or the time that we sang a song popular among African American soldiers in the Civil War--that one made a lot of us question whether it was okay for us to sing as an almost exclusively white congregation.
And then there's the experience of sharing worship with members of a local Sikh gurdwara. They brought songs which our choir rehearsed and sang with them and one of their leaders preached for us and was reportedly really excited that we weren't asking for a talk on "what is Sikhism," but an actual sharing of a spiritual message.
It's all complicated. We keep wrestling with it.