Two Poems, Saturday

Most importantly, it is now safe for me to wear the fedora, because I have had my hair dyed very bright colours. That is why we pay the hair wizards good money, and get up at 5.50am to trek intercity to boot. I have also seen the Magnificent Mr Mercury, who doesn't want to cuddle, he wants to wiggle and bite and put his claws in things. His sister Tiddlywinks is much better behaved, while Chester is now also a fiendish fussfresserchen. The hole in my sock is bigger than it was before it met Chester.

Prisoner's Cinema with Saints Catherine and Lucy
Susannah Nevison

“Prisoner’s cinema” is the term given to visual hallucinations reported by prisoners confined to dark cells and by others kept in darkness for long periods of time.

Lit by a million specks of light,
    all your dust turns holy.
What’s rotten in you burns

    and burns. You, a shadow-
you, gone glowing
    Catherine wheel, a spoked

gloaming. You know lead can lodge
    into an animal’s skull, turn
the skull into a lit temple

    of its wanderings, and this is how
you understand the fabled bowl
    a saint carries, its hollow lit

by the eyes it cradles and the saint
    eyeless and God-filled. You are not
eyeless and God is nowhere

    to witness how you become
the wheel and the body it breaks,
    a spectacle of light you cannot fathom

until you fathom it—flooded
    as you are with shadow, darkness
taut as an animal’s shank

    until it ripples at your touch. Pools
in the bowl your hands make.
    Then breaks.

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I also recommend, but will link to rather than copy out because its topic, Black grief for untimely Black deaths, is A Lot right now, Starr Davis - Mourning Sex.

Weekend Listening Post

Music:

Bethel Steele has failed to grab me, although continues to be pleasant background noise. Meanwhile, I bought Rhiannon Giddens' (formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops) new album sight unseen, and... I don't know what I expected but it's not that! It's GOOD, but it's not country - a fascinating mix of celtic, classical/operatic, blues, all sorts of things. The common thread is laments - loss of place and loss of people.

The album closes with one of the loveliest versions of Amazing Grace I've ever heard:

Watch on YouTube

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Podcasts:

Not much, of late - more Paradise Lost, another episode of Unwell.

Plus, via the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, Persephone of the Crows. A good story.

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Links, Miscellaneous:

Peter Kurth (Salon, 1999), "The Trouble with Normal" by Michael Warner. Review / synthesis of some queer theory I've not read but which had me punching the air going 'yes, this'.

Beth Nguyen (The New Yorker), America ruined my name for me: so I chose a new one

Mellissa Febos (NYT), Prologue to "Girlhood". (CN: needles, drug use)

Charmaine Chua (own blog), Slow Boat to China, The quiet port is logistics' nightmare and Landlessness and the life of seamen. Three episodes in an old blog series about the authors' anthropological research as an observer on a mega container ship.

Frida Damani (Jeune Afrique), Tunisie : « Michel Foucault n’était pas pédophile, mais il était séduit par les jeunes éphèbes ». To find this investigative piece, which debunks Sorman's claim by checking with the residents of Sidi Bou Saïd (TL;DR Foucault certainly slept with young people, but older teenage boys who were absolutely considered adults by their society. Yes, orientalist sex tourism; no, not pedophilia) I had to read this piece in Lundi Matin (in English), which is justifiably critical of Sorman but also, like, thinks that people taking the Foucault accusations seriously is because of #metoo and a culture of excessive victim-believing? When the whole point of the Jeune Afrique piece is that no victims, or any North Africans at all have made this claim.

Patrick McKenzie (own site), Falsehoods Programmers believe about names. I've read this before, and perhaps so have you, but it's always good for a re-visit.

Ed Cumming (The Guardian), Catterpillar wars. I don't usually repost links to current affairs, but this whole Colin the Catterpillar thing was SO BIZARRE, and the article is amusing.

Gareth Millward (AHA Perspectives), Vaccine hesitancy is a 21-century phenomenon. Not because no one had reservations, but because until eradication became the goal, a small number of avoidant people didn't need persuading - time was better spent on increasing *access* for those who struggled to prioritise vaccination.

Robbins Libraries / Margaret Sheble, Reclaiming the death of a beautiful woman: a digital exhibit on women's art of the Lady of Shallot.

breathedout Many endings can be happy, you know?. Big mood.

Mark Mazower (TLS), Revolutionary reckonings: Greek independence, 1821 and the historians. I do not know enough about Greek independence, clearly!

Jeffrey Wasserstrom (TLS), The Good China Story? Literature as a nation’s lifeblood. Review of multiple books, and a sort of stock-taking of a the current moment in Chinese (domestic and diaspora) literature. Fascinating. I also don't know enough about early 20th c Chinese revolutionary movements.