...and on a (somewhat) lighter note...

Got a book from the library recently, The Best of R.A. Lafferty. Some of the stories I've read before. Some are in Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I have in paperback, somewhere or other. Others I'm reading for the first time now.

Each story has an introduction by another writer. Lafferty's tales don't really need introductions, but it's a nice gesture. Neil Gaiman wrote the introduction for the whole collection, and two stories besides. One of them is called "Ride a Tin Can", which I did read here in fact for the first time. It's got Lafferty's wild humor, but also kind of hurts. Two folklorists are sent to an alien planet in order to find out more about the goblinlike natives. One of them goes native. But the real problem is the agenda of the sponsors of their trip.

These are my notes on the very sticky business. They are not in the form of a protest, which would be useless. Holly is gone, and the Shelni will all be gone in the next day or two, if indeed there are any of them left now. This is for the record only.

And another quote from the man, from the introduction to another of his stories:

Every expression in art or pseudo-art is a crutch that a crippled person makes and donates to the healthy world for its use (the healthy world having only the vaguest idea that it even needs crutches). 

False prophecies

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father, which is in Heaven; for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

It's a difficult ideal, but a very clear one. Christ doesn't only call on us to care for our friends and family, or for other Christians, or even those we believe to be good. He calls on us to care for everyone.

One of the more distressing aspects of the Israel/Palestine conflict, outside of the battlefield itself, has been seeing how easily many Christians―some quite prominent―either discard the idea of Christian charity altogether or restrict it only to favored groups. If our governments respect the rights of the Israelis but not the Palestinians, well, who are we to argue?

Someone like John Hagee is bad enough, but he's an obvious peacock. But seeing a humble and up-until-now decent-seeming English vicar declare that it's always sad when innocent people must be killed in an ethnic cleansing but―hip hip―one must simply get on with it is dispiriting almost beyond belief. In fact I had to read it over twice to make sure Fraser actually said what I thought he was saying.

Should hasten to say that there are honorable exceptions, and the pastor being interviewed in this podcast seems to have kept his head. But overall the faith is not being really well represented now.

Board meeting

Here's an interesting overview of the famed seance accessory, the Ouija board. Originally spawned from the nineteenth century's Spiritualism craze, it gradually got to be decried as an instrument of Evil. It's been depicted this way for about 80 years now, figuring in numerous horror movies. I think a recent one is just called "Ouija", although I haven't seen it.

Of course it's a mass-produced and mass-marketed item now. For me that makes it doubtful that it would provide much of a genuine mystical experience, for good or ill. I do like, though, the tidbit that James Merrill used one to compose poetry. He was a very nifty poet, and I might have to highlight his work here later on.

FM sometime in the AM

The other night I was woken up by my clock radio going off. 

OR WAS I?

I was lying in bed when I heard blaring music. It was still very much in the night stage of the AM hours, so I wondered why it was going off. But the immediate priority, of course, was turning it off. But I found it hard to turn over. Really hard.

This difficulty in moving is usually a sign that I'm not fully awake. And in fact once I did make it over to the clock radio, I tooled with it for a few seconds but found that it was just sitting there silently. The blaring music had been a dream or something hypnagogic. In my head, either way.

So I turned over and went back to sleep, which was uneventful for the rest of the night. But it just made me think, "weird."

Aldo arid Slav

This is a painting by Salvador Dali. He entitled it "Neo-Cubist Academy (Composition with Three Figures)." The name is a little puzzling. It's a very striking picture. What it's not is a cubist picture. Not, at least, if you're expecting to see something like Picasso in his best-known Cubist phase, or Georges Braque. Maybe Dali meant that he was reducing the amount of visual information in a comparable way. It makes for drama and beauty here.

Roadside assistance

I saw the above bumper sticker earlier this evening, on a car that matched it alarmingly well. It raised a couple of questions for me.

1. Where did this "bestie" thing come from? It sounds kind of mockney to me, although I've no confirmation it's of British origin. The Merriam-Webster website dates it to 1991, but I've only started hearing it in the last decade.
2. How good a friend do you have to convince other drivers you are in order to keep them from T-boning you? Is that where we're at?

The empire strikes back

Nikki Haley. The name, appropriately enough, ends in a "Y." Because, you know, why?

But there's a reason she's rising. Trump taking the nomination in 2016 was a shocking populist uprising. However well or poorly, it centered something aside from tax cuts and forever wars. Some Republican state leaders followed suit. Including Ron DeSantis, although in his Presidential campaign he's seemed hard-pressed to remember.

So there was a statement coming from rank-and-file conservatives that they weren't going to take shit from their corporate overlords anymore. And promoting Haley is a way of saying "Oh yes you will!" That's appealing to someone. A lot of someones with deep pockets.

Further dystopias

The Aldi store in East Providence was located next to a mattress store. Not too long ago the mattress store closed. They decided to buy the vacated property in order to expand their own storefront. 

The store remained open through the early stages of construction. Then they closed for, I'd estimate, about six weeks. 

Before the expansion they had four checkout stations, with one being in use during light business and two when it gets busier. Now, with the increase in space, they just have two. Two that staff might work at anyway. There are a good eight or ten miniature self-serve stations. So if the hope was that they were going to bring on more employees, I guess not.

The trio

I just today finished reading Leanda de Lisle's The Sisters Who Would Be Queen, a book about Ladies Jane, Katherine, and Mary Grey. It covers many of the same events as Allison Weir's The Children of Henry VIII, which I also read not too long ago. One difference is that Weir's book was focused on the Tudors proper. It was primarily about Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth. Lady Jane Grey was its fourth subject, as she undeniably had an effect on the aforementioned monarchs. Weir didn't really say anything of substance about Katherine or Mary, while de Lisle does.

Jane can still fairly be called the first among equals in this book's telling, exactly because she was the shortest lived of the sisters, or rather because of the reasons she died so young. She's a troubling figure in some ways. She was serious, humble given her social position, an avid reader. She was also, by any objective standard, a religious zealot. Her vision of Protestantism was markedly similar to what the Cromwells would promote the better part of a century later. Elizabeth I was no sweetheart, but she did bring some kind of religious equilibrium to England during her reign. It's hard to imagine Jane doing the same.

Even given more attention than I've seen them get before, it's harder to get a read on Katherine and Mary. Lady Katherine Grey could have potentially become queen if Elizabeth's bout of smallpox in 1562 had gone worse for her. And at that point it was pretty much Katherine's only hope for freedom. What kind of queen would she have been? Unlike her older sister she hadn't made any big political or theological statements. She loved her husband Edward (like bunnies, I tell you), she loved her two baby sons, and she loved dogs and monkeys. As queen she might have deferred to Edward, but even he was more of an upper class striver than an aspiring ruler.

Then there's Mary. Like Katherine, she had married without Elizabeth's knowledge or permission, and was punished for it. An odd match, as she was a borderline dwarf and husband Thomas Keyes was a borderline giant, but they seem to have clicked on some level. While she was at the top of the succession chart after Katherine's death, she plainly had no great interest in usurping the throne. Elizabeth eventually realized this and freed her. Sadly it wasn't too much later that she was struck down by the plague.

The book is a triumph for de Lisle. She makes her mostly lesser-known historical figures come to life.

Pet

 

It's called Cockatoo and Corks, dating from 1948. The artist is Joseph Cornell, who was from New York State. He specialized in these little boxed assemblages. This is a jaunty little interior. The bird is there, ready to greet you when you get home, and honestly a little overwhelming.

Now in stereotype

There's an extensive review here of the Censored Eleven. These are a selection of Looney Tunes shorts that have been officially kept out of sight. This is partly because of legal and rights issues, but also because their depiction of black characters is now an embarrassment. Remember, it was a less enlightened time, when the South was still segregated and Nazi apologists couldn't even write for the Jewish Chronicle.

While these particular cartoons seem to have been buried since before I was born, a couple nonetheless sound familiar. Familiar as types anyway. The syndication packages did include shorts featuring mammies and tours of "Darkest Africa." And needless to say, the less said about, say, Chinese characters the better.

Did these cartoons make me racist? No, and I doubt that by themselves they did so to any of my peers or the kids who had come before. As the song in South Pacific says, you have to be carefully taught. The animators, writers, and voice talent at Warner were entertainers, not careful teachers. If some of their entertainment doesn't pass muster now, that's just part of the win-loss ratio.

Also thanks to Coagulopath for providing a still from The Black and White Minstrel Show, a British variety series that was still running during the early years of my lifetime. The blackface on it is almost too divorced from reality to be offensive. Like, what are you supposed to be?

Little friends

In my judgment this is a fetching little puppet show. Despite the title they seem to be rod puppets rather than marionettes. They have a refreshing handmade quality, whatever you want to call them.

My French isn't good enough to tell what the kids are saying. Did you catch it?

Communiqués

Special election tomorrow to replace Representative David Cicilline, also the former Mayor of Providence. And you know what that means. Yes, at-home robocalls. Oh what a thrill. I've gotten two today on behalf of Democrat Gabe Amo and one on behalf of Republican Gerry Leonard.

In the Leonard call he talks about his 30 years in the US Marine Corps and promises to "fight extremists" and we get it already. One of the two for Gabe Amo features the voice of Barack Obama and I wonder if he actually recorded it or if they have an AI for that now.

Dogs and cats living together

My downstairs neighbor has a cat. A rather large tomcat, as I've seen, and one she dotes on. My other downstairs neighbor recently got a puppy. Small―at least so far―excitable and adorable. The cat must have at least heard the dog. How he's adjusting I'm not sure, but he will. Anyway, they both add something to the building's ambience. 

Like clockwork

One aspect of modernization is the increased interest in measuring time. While there's always been day and night, the four seasons, etc., a precise account of the time of day wasn't always a priority. Now we measure fractions of seconds. 

This transition isn't an unmixed blessing, but one has to appreciate the craftsmanship that has gone into clockmaking. The clock in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Strasbourg (not Paris) is one example. The numerals are brightly done, and it comes with an astrolabe.

There's a legend that the clockmaker was blinded when his work was done to keep him from creating an equally stunning clock for someone else. The author of this article notes that the same story has attached itself to almost every European clock of note. Well, I can see why.