Occasionally I’ll randomly select a movie from TCM to watch. Sunday I scored when I watched Stranger on the Third Floor. Not a good movie by most measures, but great German expressionist lighting and sets, and weird postures by the actors (‘throwing shapes’ I think Vince Noir calls it).
Today’s choice was amazing in its own way. I could tell it was a special kind of cringeworthiness when it started with an upbeat tune about the awesomeness of slavery (or slav’ry as they call it).
I was struck by the casual brutality of the following passage. This is how the soldiers treated other soldiers.
“[February] 29th [1836]—Buried another Louisiana volunteer, named Gray. On his arrival at Tampa Bay, he had become extremely ill, and was left behind on the sick list, when General Gaines marched; soon after, his malady turned to madness, which was, I fear, confirmed by the treatment he received. Instead of being properly attended to, he was chained by the leg, outside the Fort, with nothing whatever to shade him from the burning sun. He was kept in this state several days; he was at length admitted into the hospital, but it was too late; he died soon after. Poor fellow! He perished far from his friends and home, the victim of the grossest negligence and brutality. Such conduct in the medical department should not be overlooked.”
Barr was in Louisana in January 1836 when he decided to volunteer to travel to Florida and fight the Seminoles who didn’t want to be forcibly removed. Initially his company was assigned to guard Fort Brooke, so the first part is just reporting on what is going on around the Fort.
“On the 12th, I received the unwelcome intelligence that my company had been selected to remain in the Fort, to guard the sick and baggage, and to my great mortification was compelled to march inside the piquets.”
Barr’s regiment left Florida at the beginning of May, so this brief diary covers February, March, April of 1836.
Today I started Taste of Marrow by Sarah Gailey, the second of the River of Teeth series.
I loved the first novella River of Teeth and recommended it to anyone I thought would enjoy an alt-historical America where gender-bending cowboys rode hippos instead of horses. Well, maybe not cowboys, but definitely hippo riders.
“In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true.
“Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.
“This was a terrible plan.
“Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo wranglers from around the globe. It is the story of Winslow Houndstooth and his crew. It is the story of their fortunes. It is the story of his revenge.
“A few months ago, Winslow Houndstooth put together the damnedest crew of outlaws, assassins, cons, and saboteurs on either side of the Harriet for a history-changing caper. Together they conspired to blow the dam that choked the Mississippi and funnel the hordes of feral hippos contained within downriver, to finally give America back its greatest waterway.
“Songs are sung of their exploits, many with a haunting refrain: “And not a soul escaped alive.”
“In the aftermath of the Harriet catastrophe, that crew has scattered to the winds. Some hunt the missing lovers they refuse to believe have died. Others band together to protect a precious infant and a peaceful future. All of them struggle with who they’ve become after a long life of theft, murder, deception, and general disinterest in the strictures of the law.”
These books are definitely part of the ‘cozy weird’ genre I’m loving right now. You can get the two novellas in a single volume titled American Hippo.
Last year I read Upright Women Wantedabout queer librarians in what seems like the old west US, but is actually the future. That had a similar cozy feel, but I don’t know if all of Gailey’s work is that way. I kind of suspect not, given the description of The Echo Wife.
My current escapist lit is Defekt by Nino Cipri. I read Finna over the summer and when I saw there was a…well, not sequel exactly, but another work in the same world…I picked it up without hesitation.
These are novella length (or possibly just short novels), and I found them to be well-paced comforting weirdness. Is that a genre? Cozy weirdness? That’s the genre I want. This might be what Charlie Jane Anders has in mind with the term ‘sweetweird‘.
“Derek is LitenVärld’s most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick day, his manager calls that loyalty into question. An excellent employee like Derek, an employee made to work at LitenVärld, shouldn’t need time off.
“To test his commitment to the job, Derek is assigned to a special inventory shift, hunting through the store to find defective products. Toy chests with pincers and eye stalks, ambulatory sleeper sofas, killer mutant toilets, that kind of thing. Helping him is the inventory team — four strangers who look and sound almost exactly like him. Are five Dereks better than one?”
“When an elderly customer at a Swedish big box furniture store — but not that one — slips through a portal to another dimension, it’s up to two minimum-wage employees to track her across the multiverse and protect their company’s bottom line. Multi-dimensional swashbuckling would be hard enough, but those two unfortunate souls broke up a week ago.
“To find the missing granny, Ava and Jules will brave carnivorous furniture, swarms of identical furniture spokespeople, and the deep resentment simmering between them. Can friendship blossom from the ashes of their relationship? In infinite dimensions, all things are possible.”
BLOGGING PROGRESS REPORT: Today is day 25 of 100 days of blogging. So far I’m enjoying it. Sometimes it’s challenging to find something to write about, or something I want to point to. This has led me to evaluate my own information diet. Why am I not finding more cool stuff to share or to think about?
FAIRY UPDATE: I’ve made substantial progress into the fairy research. I have a pretty solid outline and today I spent quite a bit of time working on the first draft. I’ve kind of had May as a loose deadline, and after today’s work I think I might have a first draft by then (or maybe a 0th draft I can start turning into a presentation).
SCHOLARLY WRITING THAT COULD BE POETRY: This is the opening paragraph of a chapter titled “The Invisibles: Toward a Phenomenology of the Spirits” by David Abram in the book The Handbook of Contemporary Animism edited by Graham Harvey.
“To live is to dance with an unknown partner whose steps we can never wholly predict, to improvise within a field of forces whose shifting qualities we may feel as they play across our skin, or as they pulse between our cells, yet whose ultimate nature we can never grasp or possess in thought. To affirm our own animal existence, and so to awaken inside the world, is to renounce the pretension of a view from outside that might some day finally fathom and figure every aspect of the world’s workings. It is to acknowledge the horizon of uncertainty that surrounds any instance of knowledge, to accept that our life is at every point nourished and sustained by the mysterious.”
THE LIMITS OF SERENDIPITY ON THE INTERNET: To me, serendipity seems harder than ever on the internet. Since my attention is a commodity and is constantly being directed by commercial forces, it feels less likely than ever that I’ll stumble across something weird and unexpected that sparks my curiosity. That stuff is still out there when I specifically look for it, but part of the joy of serendipity is discovering stuff I never knew existed, much less could ask for by name.
(Horace Walpole in writing about “The Three Princes of Serendip” captures the meaning of serendipity – “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”)
NO ATTRIBUTION: An article I’m reading quotes the following, but doesn’t provide attribution. (I couldn’t find anything on Google, but I suspect it’s probably Yeats). I love the conciseness of this —
“The mind changing changes all.”
(100 Days of Blogging: Post 025 of 100)
Here’s the David Abrams paragraph from above broken into a more poetical-looking format:
Here’s a news report about a project some friends of mine are working on.
Crab Devil is the overarching organization. The Peninsularium is the immersive art experience. The Crab Devil space (when it opens) will include a craft brewery (Deviant Libation), an art gallery (Tempus Projects), and the Peninsularium.
At lunch the other day the topic of country music came up and someone asked me what country music I liked.
I couldn’t really think of much at the time, so I thought tonight I’d put together a country and country-adjacent list. I don’t know if this is my “favorite” but this is what had me grooving tonight.
What is the discipline that studies the asking of questions?
I mention the following occasionally in my work presentations:
“A large majority of recent graduates from top U.S. universities and colleges reported that they felt that college failed to prepare them to ask questions of their own.”
Fister’s essay came out only a few days ago, but I read the research to which she’s referring in 2016.
It occurred to me this morning because I was considering writing a longer essay (series of blog posts?) on question asking.
Perhaps instead of teaching children for twelve years to answer questions, we should be teaching them how to ask better questions.
If you want to know what I do with my days during February (and September) the section “No Question About It” (in the Principled Uncertainty article) captures it perfectly.
“College instructors are likely to say they assign inquiry to encourage creativity and original thought. In practice many research assignments are designed primarily to expose students to preexisting scholarship and to promote familiarity with library resources and academic writing conventions.”
I’m the librarian that explains library resources.
The whole essay is well worth reading.
That said, it never really gets into the question of how do we ask better questions. How do we teach students to ask better questions? How do we teach ourselves to ask better questions? If I were going to put together a syllabus on asking better questions, what would be on that syllabus?
In this same vein, a few years ago danah boyd gave a talk reflecting on how information/media literacy’s mantra of “do your own research” helped feed today’s abundant crop of conspiracy.
“It’s one thing to talk about interrogating assumptions when a person can keep emotional distance from the object of study. It’s an entirely different thing to talk about these issues when the very act of asking questions is what’s being weaponized. This isn’t historical propaganda distributed through mass media. Or an exercise in understanding state power. This is about making sense of an information landscape where the very tools that people use to make sense of the world around them have been strategically perverted by other people who believe themselves to be resisting the same powerful actors that we normally seek to critique.”
If you like contemporary poetry and you have not read Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, I can recommend it.
/
You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there.
You think maybe this is an experiment and you are being tested or retroactively insulted or you have done something that communicates this is an okay conversation to be having.
Why do you feel okay saying this to me? You wish the light would turn red or a police siren would go off so you could slam on the brakes, slam into the car ahead of you, be propelled forward so quickly both your faces would suddenly be exposed to the wind.
As usual you drive straight through the moment with the expected backing off of what was previously said. It is not only that confrontation is headache producing; it is also that you have a destination that doesn’t include acting like this moment isn’t inhabitable, hasn’t happened before, and the before isn’t part of the now as the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going.
/
When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists a medical term — John Henryism — for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the build up of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.
/
When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.
He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.
Now there you go, he responds.
The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.
/
A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. And yes, you want it to stop, you want the black child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet and be brushed off, not brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself.
The beautiful thing is that a group of men began to stand behind me like a fleet of bodyguards, she says, like newly found uncles and brothers.
/
The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. What are you doing in my yard?
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
Encouraged to visit to help with his chronic lung problems, Trafik Kabinet fell in love with Florida immediately and bought land south of Fort Brooke in the small settlement of Abdera.
Kabinet was raised in Lithuania and Berlin and traveled throughout Europe when he was young. Inspired by the monasteries he visited in his youth he decided to build a retreat for those with similar lung problems who might seek a place to recuperate in contemplative quiet. Kabinet also developed a philosophy of “miscellaneous spirituality” through his discussions with the guests. By 1846 Kabinet’s monastery had become a quite popular retreat and the attendees styled themselves as Kabinet Monks.
The monastery flourished briefly until Kabinet’s untimely demise in 1851. Within a year the only monk remaining was a man who referred to himself simply as Ismail from Tortosa.
For twenty years after the death of Trafik Kabinet his last remaining disciple, Ismail from Tortosa, dug himself a grave every morning and filled it in every night. Otherwise he was noted for his beekeeping, and most knew him by the name Honey.
On October 31, 1871 Ismail’s neighbors used his own grave to bury him. Death records read simply: “Kicked by horse. Deceased.”
Not long afterwards the monastery was bought, remodeled and opened as the Tarloff Sanatorium.
(“Abdera Miscellany” is a collection of half-baked ideas about Abdera, Florida.)
