Give out the password to thoughts between my eyes
Good news: I slept five or six hours last night. It was sticky, tangled sleep, but it was sleep and at this point I'll take it.
Weird news: I dreamed about secrets of elemental magic contained in children's books, crumbling first editions of a British series that came out in the '50's or '60's and I was looking for them in a library or one of those mostly vanished used book stores like warehouses full of out-of-print treasures and astonishing trash, but the whole milieu felt much more M. John Harrison than J.K. Rowling, right down to the fringe of people who already knew the magic and the character who cried in my arms because he was running from something out of one of the books, not that he could describe it or even tell me which book it came from for fear of attracting its attention. The plot of the dream went to fragments as soon as I woke up, but I think I managed to keep him from dying. I can't say the same about everyone else in that chase.
Bad news: RCN has temporarily broken my e-mail.
Please enjoy this collection of links while I leave the house.
1. The Atlantic profiles Mel Brooks at 92. I like how David Denby writes about Brooks' comedy, which the man himself once famously described as rising "below vulgarity": "The larking sadism still makes one wince—the joke hasn't lost its sting—but in the end the effect is liberating: Brooks pushed the gloom of Jewish history over the brink into black comedy. The Jews had survived; the Nazis and the inquisitors were sufficiently dead to laugh at."
2. The New York Times profiles the policing of mothers. Looking at the list of normal parenting decisions that self-righteous strangers are apparently willing to call the cops on women for, I began to wonder how much of so-called helicopter parenting is really a matter of anxious apron strings and how much is just a reaction to society-wide, racially-stacked, gender-stacked concern-trolling. It would fit nicely alongside all the other damned-if-you-dos-and-don'ts: either you can be the bad mother who neglects her children or the bad mother who smothers them and either way, however they turn out, you did it wrong. Not to mention that once again we see the police functioning as a personal one-stop-shop paramilitary for the reactionary on the street. Whatever this form of micro-swatting is called, there must be a way to legislate against it. At least on the state level I have a chance of the government agreeing with me about who to punish and who to protect.
3. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brigdh: jade-green icebergs.
4. Elizabeth Alexander writes about marrying into a family of refugees: "'I don't want the children to be refugees,' my husband would say, and we'd share a dark, knowing laugh. 'But I do want them to know what we refugees know: that you can make your life from scratch. I want the children to have the strength and wile of survivors.'"
5. I just like these paintings of Greek goddesses and nymphs. I wish I could buy a print of Amphitrite.
6. David Schraub re-reads Albert Memmi, still bitingly relevant to the interaction of Jews and left-wing politics today.
7. Courtesy of eshusplayground: the many different things it can mean when a Jewish person says they are a Zionist/not a Zionist/an anti-Zionist.
8. I cannot see either financially or logistically how I am to get to both of these shows this summer, but there appear to be stellar revivals of Carmen Jones (reconceived by John Doyle, starring Anika Noni Rose) and Fiddler on the Roof (directed by Joel Grey, in Yiddish!) going on off-Broadway and while I am slightly biased toward the Folksbiene, I could just use a teleporter.
9. The title overstates like most clickbait, but the article has a point about meta-messages: "With James Gunn's Firing, Disney Destroyed the Message of 'Guardians of the Galaxy'."
Weird news: I dreamed about secrets of elemental magic contained in children's books, crumbling first editions of a British series that came out in the '50's or '60's and I was looking for them in a library or one of those mostly vanished used book stores like warehouses full of out-of-print treasures and astonishing trash, but the whole milieu felt much more M. John Harrison than J.K. Rowling, right down to the fringe of people who already knew the magic and the character who cried in my arms because he was running from something out of one of the books, not that he could describe it or even tell me which book it came from for fear of attracting its attention. The plot of the dream went to fragments as soon as I woke up, but I think I managed to keep him from dying. I can't say the same about everyone else in that chase.
Bad news: RCN has temporarily broken my e-mail.
Please enjoy this collection of links while I leave the house.
1. The Atlantic profiles Mel Brooks at 92. I like how David Denby writes about Brooks' comedy, which the man himself once famously described as rising "below vulgarity": "The larking sadism still makes one wince—the joke hasn't lost its sting—but in the end the effect is liberating: Brooks pushed the gloom of Jewish history over the brink into black comedy. The Jews had survived; the Nazis and the inquisitors were sufficiently dead to laugh at."
2. The New York Times profiles the policing of mothers. Looking at the list of normal parenting decisions that self-righteous strangers are apparently willing to call the cops on women for, I began to wonder how much of so-called helicopter parenting is really a matter of anxious apron strings and how much is just a reaction to society-wide, racially-stacked, gender-stacked concern-trolling. It would fit nicely alongside all the other damned-if-you-dos-and-don'ts: either you can be the bad mother who neglects her children or the bad mother who smothers them and either way, however they turn out, you did it wrong. Not to mention that once again we see the police functioning as a personal one-stop-shop paramilitary for the reactionary on the street. Whatever this form of micro-swatting is called, there must be a way to legislate against it. At least on the state level I have a chance of the government agreeing with me about who to punish and who to protect.
3. Courtesy of
brigdh: jade-green icebergs.4. Elizabeth Alexander writes about marrying into a family of refugees: "'I don't want the children to be refugees,' my husband would say, and we'd share a dark, knowing laugh. 'But I do want them to know what we refugees know: that you can make your life from scratch. I want the children to have the strength and wile of survivors.'"
5. I just like these paintings of Greek goddesses and nymphs. I wish I could buy a print of Amphitrite.
6. David Schraub re-reads Albert Memmi, still bitingly relevant to the interaction of Jews and left-wing politics today.
7. Courtesy of eshusplayground: the many different things it can mean when a Jewish person says they are a Zionist/not a Zionist/an anti-Zionist.
8. I cannot see either financially or logistically how I am to get to both of these shows this summer, but there appear to be stellar revivals of Carmen Jones (reconceived by John Doyle, starring Anika Noni Rose) and Fiddler on the Roof (directed by Joel Grey, in Yiddish!) going on off-Broadway and while I am slightly biased toward the Folksbiene, I could just use a teleporter.
9. The title overstates like most clickbait, but the article has a point about meta-messages: "With James Gunn's Firing, Disney Destroyed the Message of 'Guardians of the Galaxy'."
no subject
Our downstairs neighbor, L, has a child who doesn't live with him but visits periodically in the summer; the kid, whose name I never manage to catch, is about seven and really likes playing with Kit. L encourages him to play on his own in front of our house and periodically glances out through the open door to check on him. At one point my partner and Kit wandered around the corner and L's kid followed them while I stayed hanging out on our front steps. The next time L came out, he looked a bit alarmed to see no seven-year-old there, but I said "He's around the corner with Josh and Kit" and L nodded and relaxed and went back inside. We never discussed that we feel like whichever adult is around is responsible for all the kids; that's just how it is. And it's how it is up and down our entire street.
I was a city kid who was running errands to the supermarket three blocks away as soon as I was old enough to safely cross streets on my own—maybe age seven or eight?—and taking the subway alone by the time I was 12. All this alarmism about unsupervised kids is so weird to me.