So we move in between and keep one step ahead of yourself
There are new complications in the insurance situation, which feels a lot like saying that Cthulhu has grown some extra tentacles. I am very tired of feeling that I am being asked to prove repeatedly that I am worth the state's magnanimity of keeping me alive—and we are not even going through the worst of what this country has to offer. Yesterday there was a rally on Boston Common protesting the separation and detention of immigrant children from their families, a brutality of policy which the White House is now defending as a matter of Biblical law. I guess that whole you must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt business is only for obsolete Jews, not Evangelicals ascendant in secular power. I want these people smashed and gone. I don't want the rest of us in radioactive dust for it. I worry about that. But I want their names to remain only as cautionary tales; I want nothing of what they've built to last, not laws, not murals. In the meantime, I really want to be able to see my doctors again.
Have a bunch of links.
1. I am in two of the anthologies and one of the Kickstarter projects recommended by Maria Haskins in "13 Queer Speculative Short Story Collections and Anthologies to Read Right Now": Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, GlitterShip Year One, and Women Up to No Good. That is objectively cool. If you have to make a choice, please donate to the last of these; I really want my contributor's copies. I'm not proud. Or tired.
2. I first read about Corridor of Mirrors (1948) in Andrew Spicer's "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British Stardom," but Imogen Sarah Smith's "Corridor of Mirrors: The Eternal Return" makes a strong case that I should see it more or less right now. I like how she writes about Portman: "Though he could be a supercilious villain, as in his role as a true-believer Nazi officer in Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), his trademark—captured in the same team's A Canterbury Tale (1944)—was a strain of wistful madness, a twisted idealism that drives him to violence, but gives him a certain pathos and delicacy as well. All these qualities are on display in Corridor of Mirrors, where he manages to be attractive, sinister, tragic, and faintly foolish all at once." I have been thinking about the actor and especially about his part in A Canterbury Tale on and off for eleven years now; those last four adjectives are right on.
3. I like this article both because it is an intelligent examination of Lupino's years at Warners and because it looks seriously at a movie that I screamingly bounced off of: Kristen Lopez, "The Woman Trapped: The Lens of Ida Lupino." I still need to see the films she directed herself.
4. I have been following David Schraub on American Jews and Israel with interest and some pain. I was born in the Diaspora and I will die in the Diaspora and I pray for rain in Israel, but I was raised to carry my home with me rather than locate it on particular ground; that does not mean that I like reading and agreeing with positions like "Second-Class Jews and the Future of the Jewish State." My first images of Israel were the pomegranates my grandfather photographed in Jerusalem in the early '80's. They made it into this poem. I would have liked to feel welcome looking for their descendants someday.
5. I was introduced to Angélique Kidjo's reimagining of Talking Heads' Remain in Light (1980) with her joyous video for "Once in a Lifetime," but "Born Under Punches" appears to be haunting me.
6. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rfmcdonald: Adam Gopnik, "Voltaire's Garden." It gets Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow" stuck in my head, but this part seems useful: "But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one’s garden. By 'garden' Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, 'We must cultivate our garden,' is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action . . . He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn't enough, but it was something." My God, we're back to ethical artichokes.
Have a bunch of links.
1. I am in two of the anthologies and one of the Kickstarter projects recommended by Maria Haskins in "13 Queer Speculative Short Story Collections and Anthologies to Read Right Now": Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, GlitterShip Year One, and Women Up to No Good. That is objectively cool. If you have to make a choice, please donate to the last of these; I really want my contributor's copies. I'm not proud. Or tired.
2. I first read about Corridor of Mirrors (1948) in Andrew Spicer's "The Mark of Cain: Eric Portman and British Stardom," but Imogen Sarah Smith's "Corridor of Mirrors: The Eternal Return" makes a strong case that I should see it more or less right now. I like how she writes about Portman: "Though he could be a supercilious villain, as in his role as a true-believer Nazi officer in Powell & Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), his trademark—captured in the same team's A Canterbury Tale (1944)—was a strain of wistful madness, a twisted idealism that drives him to violence, but gives him a certain pathos and delicacy as well. All these qualities are on display in Corridor of Mirrors, where he manages to be attractive, sinister, tragic, and faintly foolish all at once." I have been thinking about the actor and especially about his part in A Canterbury Tale on and off for eleven years now; those last four adjectives are right on.
3. I like this article both because it is an intelligent examination of Lupino's years at Warners and because it looks seriously at a movie that I screamingly bounced off of: Kristen Lopez, "The Woman Trapped: The Lens of Ida Lupino." I still need to see the films she directed herself.
4. I have been following David Schraub on American Jews and Israel with interest and some pain. I was born in the Diaspora and I will die in the Diaspora and I pray for rain in Israel, but I was raised to carry my home with me rather than locate it on particular ground; that does not mean that I like reading and agreeing with positions like "Second-Class Jews and the Future of the Jewish State." My first images of Israel were the pomegranates my grandfather photographed in Jerusalem in the early '80's. They made it into this poem. I would have liked to feel welcome looking for their descendants someday.
5. I was introduced to Angélique Kidjo's reimagining of Talking Heads' Remain in Light (1980) with her joyous video for "Once in a Lifetime," but "Born Under Punches" appears to be haunting me.
6. Courtesy of
rfmcdonald: Adam Gopnik, "Voltaire's Garden." It gets Bernstein's "Make Our Garden Grow" stuck in my head, but this part seems useful: "But Raffel is wrong, surely, in thinking that by cultivating one's garden Voltaire meant anything save cultivating one’s garden. By 'garden' Voltaire meant a garden, not a field—not the land and task to which we are chained by nature but the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, 'We must cultivate our garden,' is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action . . . He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn't enough, but it was something." My God, we're back to ethical artichokes.
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Thank you. They should eventually, but we have to fight to make it happen and in addition to being exhausting, it just feels wrong. They screwed up. We are being punished for it. It's not this complicated with any other business. People's welfare shouldn't be a business in the first place, but since right now it is, it should at least behave like a decent one!
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Thank you. It is both ridiculous and awful. It should not be this difficult. It has no reason or right to be.
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You're welcome! I'm sorry.
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I resent more than I can say the fact that while in a near-constant state of suicidal ideation I am being made to fight for my life. It just feels anvillicious.
(Not having insurance has, of course, prevented me from seeing my therapist since last month.)
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Thank you for this offer. I am reluctant to say yes because I have no way of repaying a loan and I have no idea how long this process is going to drag on: it has now blown past several assured deadlines (most recently, last Monday turned into last Friday has now turned into next Monday) and I have no desire to become a kind gesture that turns into a drain. We're going back to the office in person on Monday. I will let you know what goes on.
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That is a wonderful thing to imagine, even if not necessarily feasible. Thank you. I like the idea of a tentacle posse very much.
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I hope the bureaucracy monster at least submits for a bit after this...
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Thank you. I would be delighted if it hibernated for a couple of decades.
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That's very anti-American.
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No, I don't think so, but I think you're right to worry about his nationalism; the film worries about it. I wrote about him the last time:
"The antiquary of Chillingbourne cannot be wholly in the right, even if his motives are eventually forgiven by his fellow-pilgrims. Nationalism is nostalgic; that's its strength and its danger and while the historical continuity that Colpeper cherishes is certainly part of an England worth fighting for, his ideas of defending his country's memory risk putting him in opposition to its present ideals. Accepting Alison as a kindred lover of the land—accepting women as equal heirs of England's past and stewards of its future—means accepting the earthquake, submitting to the ongoing movement of time. It is not immediately apparent that he can do it. It is not automatically expected that he should. Portman would become a star of British noir in the postwar period, but during the war he was already building a repertoire of sympathetic but troubled or outright antiheroes. Audiences of A Canterbury Tale might well have seen him last as a Nazi spy in Lance Comfort's Squadron Leader X (1943) or remembered him from a similar part in Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (1941), trailing equally nationalistic, much less savory echoes into Colpeper's bee-in-the-bonnet zeal."
And I stand by that. He does make the leap; that's his miracle. But he still has to do penance for the rest.
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The other day I was having one of those "if you had to flee the U.S., where would you go" conversations and noted that being Jewish gives me Israeli citizenship if I want it. The person I was speaking with (also Jewish and American) said, "But would that really be better than being in the U.S.?" And I had to say, "Probably not." I can't shake the feeling of they don't want my kind there—which is exactly the feeling that the State of Israel is supposed to mean Jews don't feel anymore!
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Yes. I do think about that part, too. I don't feel I have anywhere to go.
*hugs*
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Amen.
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You're welcome!