O Brave New World...

I don’t have a whole lot of really early memories. It’s a question I pose once a year to my middle school students – “what is a strong very early memory you have – and if you have family photos of it, it might not be your memory, but your family’s”. But many of my early memories are of my father.

Possibly the first strong memory I have is when I was three or four. We lived on West Main Street in Madison, Wisconsin, and the first floor flat was tiny – a living room, a kitchen, and one bedroom and a bathroom. I slept in an iron-barred crib, separated from my parents’ bed by a green and white India print improvised curtain.

I think this may be a memory of something I did more than once. I remember that after I learned to climb over the bars down to the floor, on nights that friends and fellow activists were over, I would sneak out of my crib and go stand quietly in the entry to the living room, concealed, mostly, by another India print curtain, and I would eavesdrop on the grownups and especially on my daddy and his passionate positions on the anti Vietnam War movement, on tactics and ways to build the antiwar movement. Eventually I would be caught, claim I needed a glass of water, and be returned to my crib.

My father frequently said that he was never wrong. I both waged an endless battle to find something he WAS wrong about, and implicitly believed it. He was never wrong, about anything. I built the highest, most polished, most ostentatious pedestal ever and placed him on it – to the point that even he finally tried to tell me to cool it, once I was a freshman in college. But I don’t think I recognized until my early thirties that no one at all, ever, should be on a pedestal, and that every single human being has feet of clay. So I know that he was not ALWAYS right… but he was still right an awful lot of the time, from his phenomenal memory for facts of all kinds to his instincts for politics, tactics, and strategy.

Children often become not what they are told to be, but what they see modeled for them. PQ never TOLD me I should be a socialist, stand up for unions and ordinary working people, look at how the world could be made fair and equal for all, regardless of difference. But he lived that life, and my sister and I absorbed it.

I remember that on the nights that my mother worked late, my father would make up a bedtime story before tucking me in. In 1970 those stories featured heroes like Che Guevara, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a leader of the Nationalist struggle for Civil Rights in the North of Ireland, and Tony Benn, a radical, maybe revolutionary leader in the British Labour Party. I was very surprised, once I was in my 20s, in Britain, to find that Benn was not a long-haired radical militant, but a white-haired Labour MP. He even went to the trouble of researching Russian revolutionary history to try to find (or invent) a Russian princess who sided with the Bolsheviks. I have no idea if this person was real, or not.

Possibly he was thinking of a real woman from the Russian upper class who was a revolutionary in the ‘teens, Inessa Armand. He named our black cat Inessa, anyway. My dad loved cats, and he always gave them interesting names – Inessa, for the revolutionary woman who had an affair with Lenin; Clio, for the Muse of History, Philo for Philo Judson, one of the founders of Evanston, Illinois, who laid out the streets and served as a Census Enumerator. Judson, also for Philo Judson. Three Burmese cats he bought as a gift for a friend were returned because Lee Steinberg’s parrot was scared of them. So the Burmese went on a second plane flight and he took two of them and gave my mom the other – He named one Exley after one of his favorite authors, Frederick Exley, one Frida after Frida Kahlo, and one Malcolm, after Malcolm X. His last little female Siamese was actually named by Mary – Jerusha, the wife of Philip Maxwell, one of the early notables in Lake Geneva. But PQ, having a very strong sense of aesthetics, enthusiastically endorsed the name

I also remember less political moments, like Sunday mornings in Madison when I was five or six years old and my dad would put me up on the back of his old black bicycle (no child seat – I would just carefully stick my legs out, and clutch his belt) and cycle off to look for a Sunday paper and occasionally go out to Sunday breakfast in a cafe on Williamson Street… not the Willy Bear Cafe – that opened later. Then he’d cycle back to Dickinson Street, a Sunday ritual observed. I remember one time, he bought a coconut and brought it home. He got Rachel and me to inspect it, feel it, smell it, thump it, shake it and hear the sloshing. Then he took a literal machete, whacked it open on the kitchen floor, gave us pieces of coconut, and finished his performance by telling us to look at his bicep and squeeze it, noting that it was the same size as the coconut.

Not long after that, he got laid off and blacklisted from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and while he was applying all over the place for jobs, he also got day work at the labor hall as a construction worker. He’d been trained by his uncle (and used as forced labor) as a kid, but if he was lucky enough to be chosen to work that day, he would be doing the unskilled heavy labor. Every night when he came home, I would unlace his work boots, tug them off and put them away, hang up his yellow hard hat, and then get a beer and popcorn for him while he sat, exhausted, in his black vinyl armchair, watching the evening news.

I remember him talking about how much he wanted to follow where the Rand McNally maps showed the highways going when he was a little kid in Lake Geneva, but how he never traveled further away than Chicago and Milwaukee, for baseball games, until he was in high school and went on his senior trip. He was determined that my sister and I would learn about the United States and about other places in the world through travel (I mean, as much as he could afford). We went on long car vacations every August from when I was a toddler until my parents’ split. By 1978, we had traveled to 38 states and most of the Canadian provinces, and one of the two remaining French territories in Canadian waters, St. Pierre. Otherwise, he introduced us to the idea of other cultures by having us go out to eat almost every Friday night to a different cheap storefront restaurant in Chicago, each time a different cuisine. Yes, Chinese and Italian and Mexican and Greek, but also German and Polish, El Salvadoran and Puerto Rican, Korean and Vietnamese, Japanese and Thai, Cambodian and Irish, Portuguese and Persian, Lebanese and Pakistani and Indian.

My dad had a mania for getting us to memorize facts like the fifty states and their capitals, quizzing me relentlessly. He would ask both of us random fact questions all the time – making us into excellent takers and passers of standardized tests. And almost every Christmas gift he gave me was educational – a globe, an enormous illustrated dictionary, a one volume children’s encyclopedia which I was still using sometimes in middle school. He crowned this when I was a sophomore in college, leaving for England to do my Junior Year Abroad – I went two months before the October start of the school year, and just before my departure, he gave me a six week Eurail pass, which I used to travel, by myself, to Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Gdansk in Poland, Paris again, Parma and Venice, in Italy, Paris again, Oviedo in Spain, Lisboa in Portugal, and finally back to England.

My dad thought his daughters were the most brilliant, the most beautiful, the most political, the most everything. He was overwhelmingly proud of us – and later, of his granddaughters, also the most brilliant, the most beautiful, the most political, the most everything.

One of my dad’s friends in Mexico, Peter Gellert, quoted the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht to describe PQ’s life:

“In Praise of the Fighters”
There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all of their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.”

I would add one more Brecht poem, illustrating the attitude to history which PQ passed on to his daughters and granddaughters:

“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the name of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
And Babylon, many times demolished.
Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
Of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? Great Rome
Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song,
Only palaces for its inhabitants? Even in fabled Atlantis
The night the ocean engulfed it
The drowning still bawled for their slaves.”

When Patrick Quinn said that he believed the wave of genealogy sparked by Alex Haley’s Roots offered the bricks and mortar of a new social history, he was also echoing his belief in the strength, worth, and future of working people:

“Nothing’s too good for the working class”

... by Isabel Wilkerson.

I thought I'd read this before, but I think I bought it and then mentally collapsed it into the collection of all the primary sources, historical monographs, and fiction I HAVE read on the topic -- Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Hortense Powdermaker, W. E. B. DuBois, Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, the papers of the Louisiana Central Lumber Company.

Anyway, I'm reading it now, and it is as excellent as I thought it would be. I want to read Caste, too. And then watch Ava DuVernay's Origin.

One thing it makes me remember is the anomaly of my grandmother's poetry notebook I found after her death, hand-typed in the early 1930s when she was in the only year she had of community college (at least I think it was one year? I know she didn't actually finish... add it to the dozens of questions I wish I had asked her and will never be able to ask her now).

She had typed copies of the poems she particularly liked, to which I assume she was exposed in Kansas City, Kansas around 1933 or so. The icon for this entry is a photo of her in KCK sometime close to then.

The poems were an eclectic mix, but the ones that caught and held my attention were the ones from the Harlem Renaissance, STILL UNDERWAY. How did a young white woman encounter and love these poems? Who was the professor at whichever junior college this was? I don't even know which college she went to for a year or two before marrying her high school boyfriend Dick Miller.

Countee Cullen -- there were at least two of his. Langston Hughes, too. Arna Bontemps.

It's another bit of evidence that complicates the expectations of history of race, and for that matter, gender. My grandmother's future sister-in-law was a lesbian (known to her family), living with her partner in Kansas City, by the late 1930s. Was my grandmother aware of Countee Cullen's or Langston Hughes' rumored (more than rumored in Cullen's case) sexuality? On the other hand, that same future sister-in-law, my great-aunt Billie Miller (actual name Willanore, a combination of her grandmother's and grandfather's names) was herself a horrific racist. Her family was in fact the first exposure I had to racist white people in my life, when I met her sister and more, her sister's husband, in Springfield, Missouri when I was four. Aunt Pat gave me my first Barbie, in fact, during that visit. I named the doll Malibu, which was the style of Barbie she was. Such a tangled weird tapestry.

There was (for California, for the Bay Area) a tremendous storm, last night. My phone weather app claimed it was a thunder storm, but I heard none and saw none. It WAS relatively torrential rain and a lot of loud wind that freaked Devlin out about as much as hearing a pack of coyotes howling freaks her out.

I love rain, the heavier the better. Living in England for a year, I did not mind one bit the fact that it was grey and rainy for weeks on end. Months on end? Lots of rain and mist and clouds, anyway...

I have my Celtic music list playing on shuffle. There are only 160 songs on it (which seems weird, my folk favorites list is maybe four times that (though it probably contains all of these songs too, and the Bollywood one is also maybe three times as big...). But two holidays are coming up that were big in my youth: International Women's Day, this coming Friday, March 8th, and St. Patrick's Day, which was also my mom's birthday. The Celtic music (Irish and Scots, mostly) is in honor of the latter, and also just because I love every song on this list. I haven't listened to enough music recently.

When I was a teenager, the trio of causes that were always yoked (can you yoke three things, or only two?) were South Africa-the North of Ireland-Palestine.* Still true. National struggles are so fucking difficult. Part of me yearns towards Marx's condemnation of the idea of nationalism as dividing the workers of the world. But atavistically, I am glad I am mostly Irish by descent, and I understand how people cling to their national and ethnic identities, especially in light of the only other cultural option that seems to be on offer for ypipo -- undifferentiated whiteness, especially of the Usian variety.**

Normally our weekly staff meeting discussions of race (yes, this is a weekly agenda point at my teaching work place) are guilt-fests that bug the shit out of me, because I've done every anti-racist training ever, multiple times, and did a lot of it as theory in grad school as well, and fucking BELIEVE it, and try to live that belief, okay? But this Friday, it was actually a good discussion prompt for which we were split into duos or in my case a trio -- what has gone into our own racial experience? The two women I was grouped with both had interesting stuff to say, and were clearly actually thinking very seriously about the prompt and their own lives and formative experiences around their own race. One (white) woman grew up in Palo Alto and because her non-bio grandfather was Jewish and there is a big Jewish community in Palo Alto (bigger than around here, anyway) she thought she was a Jew when she was little. The other woman is Filipina and had thought a great deal about the very disparate ways that Filipinos identify. My childhood was basically Race Traitordom, so this was an interesting topic for me, from age 3 to grad school and The Wages of Whiteness. And the general discussion after the small group ones was also interesting as people got into it. I salute Dr. Saheli (our boss, who is not exactly a principal, because he is head of equity, etc. for the District, as well as Student Services (trying to prevent expulsions, basically), as well as the head of the alternative program I now work for) for coming up with this idea for discussion.

Oooh, I love this Planxty song, "Sweet Thames Flow Softly".

I am reading three novels with my students -- the 8th graders are doing one of my favorite books, Dragonwings by Laurence Yep; the 7th graders are doing Freak the Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick; and the 6th graders are reading Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt. One of the very, very many things I love about the latter is that the mother who disappears right at the beginning of the novel had always sung to her four kids, and on their long slog to a new home and safety, they self-soothe by singing various folk songs. I am making a Google Slides show to illustrate this book (I always do this unless I am unenthused about the book [sorry, Freak the Mighty... I already read The Midwife's Apprentice with the 7th graders, and I DO love that one and have a very long Slides show for it...] -- anyway, for some bizarre reason I had not yet made one for Homecoming... I guess I haven't taught it as often as I would like. Though god knows I've read it probably more than 30 times.

In the Slides show, which I am nowhere near done with, some of the things I am putting in are a couple of videos -- so far three folk songs the mother is said to have sung, which the kids also sing together -- "Pretty Peggy-O", "The Riddle Song", "Who Will Sing for Me?" so far -- with "The Water is Wide," and a couple more to come. Also a YouTube video of how to dig clams, which the kids do at one point.

Man, I love making curriculum stuff.

Look at this, an actual entry.


* A random note on this... my older niece Ruby is two-fisting Palestine demos today, one in downtown Oakland and the other immediately afterwards in San Francisco. In some ways she is having a good 20s right now, in that last night's activity was a Nicki Minaj concert. In other ways, it fucking SUCKS, because she is so, so, so depressed by how little effect mass protests have on intransigent FUCKERS in the US, Britain, and Israel. I try to talk to her about historical periods and the impossibility of voluntarism and substitutionism, but that shit is hard to hear when you are in your 20s. She had a crap experience in YDSA, and now doesn't want to join DSA because she cannot imagine being in the same political group as her dad (she asks me in utter disbelief how **I** could do it... it never occurred to me that it was weird to be in the same political group as my mother, my father, my stepmother, and at one point my sister and brother-in-law.)

** Also... when I read Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time the first time, sometime in high school, I think... there were two things that I had real difficulty with (difficulty in the first place that was only resolved when I finally embraced feminism in college, with the reading of Comrade and Lover: the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches edited by Elzbieta Ettinger) -- the idea of separating reproduction from biological sex, and the idea that anyone could choose their ethnicity/identity. I still have issues with the latter. How can you choose to "be" Black (Rachel Dolezal), or another oppressed nationality, without having generations of that lived oppression? I think it was Piercy's attempt to deconstruct nationalist liberation politics, but...

1. In your life do you find that it works better to plan ahead or go with the flow?

I'm more of a go-with-the-flow person, I think. Even if I carefully plan things, I tend to change my mind as whatever it is gets underway, whether it is a list of chores, or an outing or longer trip somewhere. I think I might even feel a little hemmed in if I adhered perfectly to a pre-set plan.

2. Do you trust your intuition?

I might have good intuition -- but I think it is a little hard to tell because the one strong intuition I easily remember having -- that this person I met from Craigslist and was having breakfast with at a cafe next door to where I used to live in Oakland was an arrogant ASSHOLE and I absolutely should not go out with him again -- I fucking ignored, and overrode, and it led to the worst relationship I ever had and one I still regret and one I am mad at myself for entering, especially since I HAD THIS DAMN INSIGHT that it was -- that HE was -- a terrible idea.

3. When is the first time you felt like an adult?

I FELT like an adult, mostly, the time I visited Montreal on my own -- staying with family political friends who we didn't really know all that well, especially since for the first part of the trip, it was with a woman my folks really didn't know at all. I was fourteen, but I looked a lot older (if you look at my Freshman Year photo, taken that summer before my Freshman year, I look like a secretary at a law firm or something). Louise Proulx spoke English, but it wasn't her preference, and most of the Quebecois she knew and introduced me to didn't speak English at all, either because they'd never learned or because they didn't want to, politically. So it was a great (and terrifying, at first) immersion opportunity. I was away from my family for three weeks, basically only hanging out with adults, who didn't care that I wasn't in my twenties, and in a lot of cases didn't know. I loved the separatist politics, which I equated to the North of Ireland, and Palestinians, and maybe a little to the case of South African Blacks in their own country. Although I loved my family, it was great to be on my own -- it felt like free fall, and like freedom.

4. In what areas of your life are you most successful?

Gah. I have never liked thinking about being successful, or not, I guess because I don't feel particularly successful. When I was a teenager, I would have thought being a revolutionary leader on the barricades was successful, even though I knew that in practical reality the barricades were unlikely. I never thought about success being having a well-paying job or fancy belongings -- being a teacher is a stable union job, and I did aspire to THAT. I have a mortgage, which is some gauge of American early 21st century success, but I wouldn't if it weren't for my dad. I never feel good enough as a teacher, so it's hard to think of myself as successful in that. I'm not in a relationship, but I don't seem to be minding that, so I don't know that I would measure success or not on that basis. Confusing, all around. I don't feel like a FAILURE, at least.

5. What is a skill you have that you’re proud of?

To Microbie: isn't "detecting patterns" basically the Ur way to measure intelligence? The test they give to see what kids' potentials are involves nothing BUT seeing how well they perceive and predict patterns.

Hm. For me, I have a lot of skills that I enjoy, but the one I am I guess proud of is French, and language-learning in general. But French especially, and my ability to imitate sounds.

6. Are there any social events that you don’t enjoy?

I used to be a much bigger fan of social events, where now I feel a lot of anxiety around them beforehand, even small or family ones. Once I am actually there, they are usually enjoyable, but social events in general, oy.

7. What is something you grew out of that meant a lot to you at the time?

Man, so often I can just quote Microbie's actual words: "Various friends over the years (or they grew out of me)" -- I watch my nieces adopt and adore various bits of pop culture or literature or enthusiasms, and then watch as they sometimes grow out of those same interests in what seems a very short space of time, to me. But there are some that persist, for all three of us. Art, or drawing. Reading and writing.

Something I used to care about but don't so much any more? Hmm... nostalgia means not much -- I continue to value things I knew and did in the past. But is there something that fits that category? You know, honestly, I can't think of anything. I am more accretive, in general.

I risked buying a box of [Stash extra spice] chai flavored teabags, and the results are... adequate. Not really much like actual chai, which I love, and which is messy to make (get Assam leaf tea, one teaspoon per intended cup, plus one extra; put it in about one to two cups LESS than the intended cups' amount of cold water, with say two cinnamon sticks, several green cardamom pods, some powdered ginger and maybe a couple of cloves; bring it all to a rolling boil, and then add in the missing cups [one or two] of liquid in the form, for me, of half-n-half, though you could use whole milk, too, and bring THAT to a boil. Watch it carefully, and the minute it starts to foam, take it off the heat and pour into a pot. Use a strainer to pour it into cups. Mmmmm. So rich. So good. I do not like sugar in mine, but many people do).

Anyway, this has the spices right, though it doesn't have the richness or the sort of ... boiledness of the half-n-half. Acceptable, if you don't want to put in the work, sigh.

I am about to make my dinner to go with this tea (well, and with a pot of normal tea, which is more to the point with this particular dinner. "Dinner"?) A couple of sandwiches. Both on Beckmann's sourdough bread, fresh. One will be English seedless cucumbers and Dubliner cheese, on butter. The other will be Branston's pickle and Dubliner cheese, on butter. There are vegetables in this dinner! Maybe I can remove the scare quotes.

I am slowly trying to cook a little more than I have for ages. Ages = years, basically. On weekends, like tonight. Over the Winter Break, I made two soups while my father and stepmother were staying with me (for four weeks; they stayed with me for about four weeks... it was much nicer than I expected it to be in my anxiety beforehand... more on that in a bit). I made my old family standby, as I changed it from my mother's version: Bean-cabbage soup, which I've detailed in this blog before, a long time ago. It's the easiest soup in the world, and could certainly be vegetarian if you omitted the ground turkey.

Basically: brown about a pound of ground turkey with about an onion (or more, if you like them, which I do) chopped up, in olive oil or any oil, really, with a bay leaf. Then pour in one to two cans of chopped tomatoes, three to four cans (or more, depending on if you want it to be vegetarian, to make up for the turkey protein) of cannellini beans, one can of which should be mashed up with its liquid (but include all the liquid from the cans); as much chicken or vegetable stock as you want -- enough to cover the finely chopped head of cabbage. Add some salt, maybe some thyme and oregano. Cook it down for a good hour or more. Then, when it seems done for you (the cabbage should be soft), make a bagheer of cumin (that is, heat canola or some other non-olive oil in a small pan, and put in several heaping teaspoons of cumin until they start spattering, and then dump the whole thing in the soup and stir. It will make an impressive sizzling near-explosion.)

I love that soup. Extremely satisfying on a cold rainy day, which we have had plenty of in the past month. My mother's version was beef and kidney beans, and no bagheer.

But I also made a soup new to me that I have no idea why I never did before. I love pea soup -- it was a standard, when I was a kid, and it's easy as hell. This is almost the same but for some reason entirely different. The taste of yellow split peas is ... so different! And the savory. My father denied that that was an herb -- he's hilarious when he opines on shit he knows absolutely nothing about.

This was habitant soup -- yellow split pea soup, with ham shank (again, obviously one could leave that out). God, it was good. I have the ingredients to make it again this weekend, and I might.

If I get my fucking grades done. I am far, far, far behind on them, especially given some stupid tech fuckery to do with Canvas (a learning platform I hate very very much), and they are due on Wednesday. So I really have tomorrow and Sunday to do them. Gah. I am a world famous procrastinator, so I am hoping that those skills of last minute single-minded focus will come to the fore.

I will say, this sandwich is delicious. It works best when the bread is very, very fresh, as this is. Best of all would be a home loaf from a British bakery. That bread is incredible and I never, never, never see anything remotely like it in the US. I mean, sure, baguettes are nice and all, but honestly I prefer British baking.

Let's see. Xmas was nice. I wasted a lot of emotional energy being anxious about having my dad and Mary here from TWO WEEKS before I got off work for break to the day after New Year's, but in fact, it was really nice to have them in my spare bedroom -- as well as PQ (that's my dad, referred to by his initials as were we all, from childhood on) monopolizing the (really very large) balcony to smoke his pipe, and also monopolizing the dining room table to lay out all of his daily STUFF on. My apartment/condo, whatever I am supposed to call this place, was crowded but also very... comfortable. I mean, the apartment is comfortable. But it was nice having constant company, especially since PQ has ants in his pants and cannot stay in one place terribly long, so he and Mary borrowed my car for daily jaunts to various habitual haunts (e.g., a Starbucks up in Oakland by an old quarry that they like, and where Mary gets her daily NYT, my sister's house in Oakland, even though RQ and Tim were not usually there -- not at all, the first week, since they also were still working... Any of several Bay Area bars he has been going to since 1965...) I didn't even mind watching his endless, endless NCAA football Bowl Games, as well as the briefly resurgent Packers (though, it must be said, we all fucking hate Aaron Rodgers now, asshole anti-vaxxer idiot that he is). Or the daily news shows he is addicted to: CBS (I think, god if I actually know, though I watched it a lot with them) with some woman anchor they like, and the PBS News Hour, every week day, and 60 Minutes. As a Christmas present, I'd gotten him a month of Hulu + so these things were possible. I quit it the day he left.

I think I am finally, after these years of the pandemic, getting somewhat lonely. I was super outgoing and extroverted as a teenager and into my twenties and even thirties. But I retreated a lot in my forties and now. It's seemed fine to be quite introverted, but I am finding it less so recently. It's hard to know what to do, given my general difficulties with walking or standing. I have a travelscoot, but it's really hard for me to put it in my car. If I had a lot of money, I might get a car that had a high hatchback, like maybe a used Suburu Outback? I don't know. A used Honda Fit? But I don't have a lot of money, unless I raid my savings, and I don't want to do that.

It might seem not-exactly-perfectly-aimed, as a strategy to feel more connected to people, but I think I will try to write more often in Dreamwidth (lord, I still think that is a stupid name). The not many of you who read these entries are people I care about and would like to be closer to (What the hell is Devlin hearing outside my door; she's like a sentinal cat, but also extremely scared if anyone she doesn't know actually enters -- I don't think it's anything, actually. Silly girl.)

I might let LiveJournal lapse, too. I still go to the effort of posting here, and then copying and pasting and posting there, but it seems dumb -- and the Russians sent me a weird email saying my payment had failed... but that my "Professional Packet" (Professional what? Fanfic writer? I am not, though my older niece implores me to try it, I guess as an easing in to actual writing? Also because she worries about me being depressed, something she is familiar with) will expire... in January 2024. Uh. What? Did I pay two years in advance or something? It's hard to care about LJ. I did check to be sure DW has archived my NINETEEN years of entries (that is so bizarre... I started in November of 2003) and comments, and my first entry included the fact that I was far, far, far behind on grading and they were due that Monday. Ha.

I've been teaching my students words like "coup" and "putsch" and "astroturf". I have never hidden my politics at school*, and have had many discussions on wars being prosecuted, on Black Lives Matter protests, on gender and sexuality, and so on. But this is so freighted with history. With our Plague Year and with this storming of the Capitol Building, these kids are living through immediate history that their grandchildren will probably hear about.

In DC, those dumbasses were chanting "1776! 1776!" as they followed the red velvet rope-demarked path into the Senate (or House, I dunno) chamber or Rotunda, after breaking windows to get in. Like the women who stormed Versailles (it pains me to make that comparison, because obviously fuck these wankers) they looted and shat and pissed all over the place. It's weird because I think of the at least seven or eight huge protests in DC that **I** fucking fundraised for coalition bus tickets to a 17 hour exhausting ride through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland to DC -- all of which were in the 100,000 to 800,000 range, and these komedy klowns had "thousands". Thousands of deluded wannabe brownshirts and "patriots" waving the Confederate battle flag and that stupid piece of red and white stripes and stars on a blue field and that "Don't Tread on Me" Gadsden (?) flag -- with one of the wavers of that flag literally being trampled to death which is some fine, fine level of irony (? Or Morissettian sarcasm? Despite being an English teacher, I never know). "Thousands", when claimed by right wing assholes to me means about 3,000 to 5,000 tops, but I haven't seen any hard counts.

I grew up hearing about Selma (which my father and my stepmother were both at, though they didn't meet for another fifteen years) and the many Spring Mobilizations against the Vietnam War, including the Moritorium. I went to my first national demonstration in DC when I was thirteen, with my uncle who was in the Workers World Party (its youth group was called Youth Against War and Fascism). The demo was against the resumption of the Draft -- it was very likely one of those where the WWP and its various fronts and separate coalition called a SEPARATE demo from the one called by a larger group... that was always happening. But my parents, in the opposition faction within the Socialist Workers Party couldn't take time from work to go to the majority anti-draft demo, and my uncle could. It's not even listed in Wikipedia's sorely scanty and incomplete list of US Protests! Not in the list of the biggest ones and not in the overall list. Neither is the second Solidarity Day labor protest march, which had around 500,000, and I went to both of those anti-Reagan marches. Nor are the Central American solidarity demos I went to in DC. All of them were undercounted in the press, because the press always accepted police estimates. All of them trained their own marshals in crowd control, as Fred Halsted of the SWP had pushed for in the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam.

My high school group Students for International Understanding (a name forced on us by the teacher sponsors, one of whom was a closeted full on CPer**) organized a rental van (which none of us were old enough to drive, so we had a Maoist adult do it) from my high school in 1982 to New York City to the Nuclear Freeze demo which is, I think, still the biggest demonstration in one city. These were grassroots movements, which took sweat, organization, fundraising, etc.

A cousin on Facebook just posted that Clarence Thomas' wife funded 70 buses with her own (or his, how do I know?) checkbook. George Soros never funded SHIT on that scale, afaik. I need to find more articles I can cite with those sorts of facts.

I have never been one for conspiracy theories -- capitalism is enough on its own for its remorseless logic to grind this shit out -- so I was able to reassure kids in my classes last November that no, shit wasn't going to burn down around them (in the Bay Area!) because Trump supporters would go rogue if they thought they were losing. So these events ARE shocking, to me. The prospect of a rump of the Republican party base founding something like "The Patriots' Party" with exactly these quasi-fascist politics... I mean, Godwin's law was sort of hung up for the duration after 2016, but this is... bierkeller Reichstag WANNABE territory, and it IS fucking scary. I don't think these bozos have the social weight or training to do what was done in 1930s Germany, but more than before I think they'd like to. When a fucking Illinois Representative can unabashedly approve Hitler's way with indoctrinating the Youth (Mary Miller) and double down in a perfectly Trumpian double-tongue way? Fucking A.

Whither the United States?



*This was less of a potential problem when I taught in Oakland, CA, which is a district riddled with lefty teachers and even former Maoist administrators. It is potentially a problem in my working class small district south of Oakland, where there are certainly Trumper parents (more over the hill in Castro Valley than right here) but more and more non white families -- Asians and Pacific Islanders, Latinx, and maybe 10% Black families. I COULD be narked on here, but our new Superintendent (who will crush us in terms of wages and working conditions, no question, any chance he gets) has put out a letter encouraging us to talk about it... and put out a good video in early June right before the first helping of distance learning was done... he started his video with his usual boring hoo hah, but then almost broke down about how he was having trouble dealing with the upsurge in BLM protests after George Floyd -- he's Black -- and he put up a silent Slide show with the names and descriptions of hundreds of Black men, women, and children murdered by the police. It made me cry. So I have hopes that if I AM narked on, the district will defend me. I never HAVE been narked on for my open politics, even TAing at the University of Missouri, where my teaching evaluations often decried my politics but said despite them, their white asses didn't feel oppressed.


**She and I did not mutually discover our respective Stalinism and Trotskyism until a party for the SIU at her house in Winnetka just before the founding members graduated. Her house was full of Eastern European conference posters and Cuban political/tourist posters from the 1970s and the lightbulb went off... She'd struggled with my harder left attitude for three years -- I pushed anti-apartheid stuff with Dennis Brutus, a South African poet then at Northwestern, and Central-American solidarity demonstrations (which the CP hated) and circumvented her to get a translator and a masked Sanctuary guy from El Salvador who was living underground with the local Mennonites to speak at school -- to a captive (and huge) audience of kids in detention. Anyway, I maliciously somehow dropped the info that my parents were in the SWP and her face drained of all color and she almost dropped a tray with glasses of lemonade. It was pretty funny, though no one but us got it.

I know I suck at blogging, anymore. Sigh. It's some mixture of feeling like I have a boring life (not particularly because of the 'Rona, really) and ... well, what is or are the other component(s)? The echo chamber of LJ? I think a lot of it is a deep shame at my physical state. My mobility is really bad now. I own a travelscoot -- the lightest battery powered seat-scooter that exists, as far as I know. But it's hard just to walk around my apartment. This asshole computer guy who was here (masked and gloved, I hasten to add) last week did a double take when I responded to him asking me to come look at something on my computer's zombie corpse (more in a bit on that). And although I have actually not faced much of that kind of judgmental bullshit, it's still hard. Every decision about going somewhere is based as much on my calculations about how difficult it will physically be as it is on danger levels of Corona infection. It doesn't seem to matter that I (hope I) internalized fat liberation politics -- or maybe that it is that I really didn't? -- I am deeply ashamed of weighing whatever it is I weigh. Every summer for the past many, many years, the end of the school year and summer break has led to me being ever yet less mobile and heavier, more subject to edema and the strains of torquing myself around. It's hard to be comfortable sleeping, much less walking.

So here I am. Shame is such a useless, fucked up, self-sabotaging emotion. Like guilt.

In other areas... the lockdown has not been at all bad for me, mostly because I am so lucky that my sister and nieces are in my pod, so I have seen them regularly. Rosie slept over Friday night. My friend Dani has also masked up and hung out once or twice, once with gem's toddler (are they still toddlers at three? Juniper seems close to pre-school-ness rather than baby, now). I find Juniper a little stressful, tbh. They are very intelligent and precocious, but ... Dani never says no. About anything. Dani always cleans up after Juniper's ravages, but it's still stressful. I love Dani, but I would like to hang out with gem by gemself. I like Dani's choice of pronoun, though I am not always perfect about remembering to use it. Juniper still has not announced their gender, which is what Dani and River set as the expectation, from birth.

Another reason the lockdown has not been that difficult for me is that my school district is still fully distance learning. That may change in January with second semester, but oh, how I hope it does not. I need to get my Kaiser doctor to write me a right robust letter explaining my underlying conditions, etc. If there is a vaccine by then, does that cancel out the letter? I guess, "widely available vaccine". Or maybe just "available to those with underlying conditions".

I ... I actually really like teaching from home. I don't feel alienated from the kids, using Zoom daily. We're much more organized with it, this Fall, than we were last Spring. Our union did a pretty good job of negotiating our Memorandum of Understanding rider to the current contract -- though of course now that that is done, the district is pressing every opportunity to make our work lives worse, if they can. Before I get to that... so, my super power as a teacher has always been curriculum and lesson planning, and my kryptonite has always been classroom management. The very term makes me ill -- MANAGEMENT. I have never wanted to be the cop of the classroom, and some fundamental part of me feels that you should be able to help all kids naturally love learning, without bullshit. And that you can lead a horse to water, but not make them drink. And distance learning is kind of the apotheosis of that. Kids can't really fuck too much up for EACH OTHER in Zoom. They can zone out themselves, and we're trying all kinds of ways, individually and collectively, to combat that. But they can't interfere with the majority of a class's ability to learn.

My district has said from the beginning (though NOT all teachers have practiced it) that we cannot demand that kids turn on their cameras. Many teachers hate this, and push kids to do it anyway (though they're not allowed to bribe them with points... which is another thing I hate, hate, hate about teaching, anyway: the gross economy of grades, where learning is transactional and monetized by points. Ugh.) Me, I'm not that bothered by it. At the beginning of the year, I wanted kids to make a Bitmoji of themselves and use it as their avatar/profile pic for Zoom. Some protested that other teachers were insisting they use a photo of themselves. I said, fine, do that if you have to, and if you don't, you have a choice between your selfie, and your Bitmoji. I like how kids change their selfies and their Bitmojis. A lot of classes start with me reacting to new Bitmoji cartoon scenes, or new selfies.

Kids are also super NICE this year. Now, that is quite possibly just the tendency of this year's group -- but some of it may be the slack we are all giving each other in these weird times. Kids are patient with Zoom fuckups. Kids share tips, with me and with each other, on hacks and fixes. Kids put questions in Chat eagerly. Kids write me constant emails and comment constantly in Google Classroom. My rate of work return (for "asynchronous assignments" as we now call them) is pretty steady around two-thirds... which is not that much worse than face2face, tbh. Relying solely on Google Classroom for assigning work and grading work is better than I thought it would be. I may keep to that once f2f returns, really. Except for some notes and classwork. I definitely comment much, much more in feedback with G Classroom. Which makes grading take a long, long, long time. I guess I can only really keep to it if the district ends up giving the checked out Chromebooks to students. I fucking hope they do. They can buy more for the schools, so it's one-to-one at school AND kids all have them at home. There's nothing else (along with school funded hotspots) that even approaches the beginning of equity not only during this lockdown but IN FUCKING GENERAL.

So, I've been trying to digitally adapt the work I habitually give every year, the assignments I am wedded to. The most difficult part for me is working in art, which I do naturally in the f2f classroom. But I am getting there. In seventh grade Social Studies, we are coming to the end of the European Middle Ages, for instance. I spend most of the time on life for peasants, and we read Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice in English/Language Arts, to go along with it. (And there were some fun assignments getting them to illustrate the book from the internet, and a final project where they cast the book as a movie and put internet heads of actors on the cartoon figures I supplied in a Google Slides show, and found appropriate text quotations for each main character OR wrote a three-or-so-slide sequel, imitating Cushman's literary style). But now we are on to the 1% -- knights, lords, ladies, kings, and queens. For this, I rely on William the Conqueror, a quick descent of his family tree, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. I kind of fell in love with Eleanor of Aquitaine when I was given a paper doll of her, from a book of Famous Women in History paper dolls (the kind of present I was always being given by my parents) around age ... 11? Maybe 13? Not sure. But I colored it in, and was fascinated by her (I didn't realize until I just found on the internet a photo of that paper doll book's Eleanor of Aquitaine page that it actually had primary source quotes about her by Marie de France! That's hella cool, since I use Marie de France as a historical personage in my culminating assignment).



Anyway, the culminating project for the Middle Ages is to have the students write an Illuminated Manuscript Letter from one of Eleanor's circle to another -- they can be or write to Eleanor herself, too. The historical personages I use, with a little historical fudging: Eleanor, Louis VII (her first husband), Henry II (her second husband), Marie (eldest daughter), Alix (next daughter, both with Louis VII), Young Henry (eldest surviving son with Henry II), Matilda, Richard, Geoffrey, Young Eleanor, Joan, or John (all children with Henry II), Sir William Marshall (a knight and eventual Earl who served Eleanor, Henry II, Young Henry, and Richard I and John I), Petronilla (Eleanor's younger sister... sadly actually dead by the year I decree the letter must be written in... but oh well), Rosamund Clifford (Henry II's most flaunted mistress), Abbess Marie of Shaftesbury, whom some identify with Marie of France, and who many historians believe is a half sister of Henry II, and Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen, who there is no RECORD of as a correspondent of Eleanor's... but who knew Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and who left literally hundreds and hundreds of letters behind in one of the treasure troves of the medieval period.

In the classroom, we spend a fair amount of time learning techniques for creating the illuminated initial letters and borders -- I teach them a bunch of Zentangle doodling, and provide parchment paper for the final drafts. I was depressed to lose this project... but then I figured out that I didn't have to use a clunky Google Doc (it is no fun to try to manipulate images in one) but could change the size of a Google Slide, in Custom, to 8 1/2 by 11. So now kids could Google image search initial letters and various frames or parts of Celtic interlace, etc.

Now all of that is replaced by feverish Google Image searches, flipping, resizing, rotating, and cropping. I will not know how theirs have come out (in terms of the LOOK... I've given feedback on their rough draft CONTENT already) until after Thanksgiving. I did two this year as models to show them what I mean.





and





They're very different from one of my handmade copies of years past...





(I think this is now the longest entry I have written, or illustrated, in a long, long time)

I wish I had my last year's model at home with me, but apparently I did not take a photo of it, sigh. It was Abbess Hildegarde to Eleanor, and I illustrated it partly with medieval herbal drawings, kind of like the Voynich manuscript, but real.

This project is a lot of work for kids, but I have gotten some really, really cool projects in the past. Some beautiful art work, and some amazingly thoughtful letters. One of the best broke the rule that the letter had to be set in 1175, two years into Eleanor's castle captivity. The student made an illuminated manuscript with fake blood spatter, written by Thomas à Becket to Henry II in 1170 AT THE ALTAR as he is interrupted by being assassinated. Hat tip to you, past student. I will admit that I do a Google Slides show as we start the project of a TON of images from the medieval world of manuscript illumination, starting with initial letters and ending with a) cat cartoons in margins (the cat memes of their day, no kidding at all) and b) true medieval crime, with multiple images of Becket's murder from different medieval times and places. Next time I do a handmade model, I am totally working at least one cat in.

I was going to write about the computer mess and also folk music. But this entry has been long. Maybe I will actually do another sooner than nine months from now.

Our third quarter ended yesterday and our grades for it are due by March 31st. Here is my terrible, fraught situation with regard to that:

(God, CAN'T Dreamwidth fucking manage to let us just directly import photos? Photobucket is giving me attitude these days, like my storage is overfull, when I haven't uploaded shit for months, possibly almost years... certainly only a few photos in that time) Well, I'll add the picture in Livejournal, I guess. I mean, I am trying to log in to photobucket right now, and even that is not working. Stupid photohosting.






The photo is my cat, Devlin, happily sleeping on part of a spilled pile of Weekly Warm-ups to be graded.

ANYWAY.

I hate grading. I far prefer lesson planning, even with this weird twist of doing it long-distance and relatively low tech (nothing synchronous, at least not so far; Google Classrooms and as far as possible not requiring internet -- which is already bullshit, once the hard copy packets were handed out last Thursday, because now if kids have to access new work two weeks from now, it will have to be via Google Classroom, so where's your equity NOW, motherfucker?).

It's really hard not to go open my work Outlook, and see whatever email I am getting on this weekend. I know kids and parents will email me now, on the weekend. But if I cave and do that, I will be on it all day and ugh, no. So I will try to stay strong and avoid it until 7:45 Monday morning or maybe a bit earlier, because I know we have some Google hangout meeting at 8 AM sharp.

I got to see my nieces briefly today, as they came in to deliver me a crucial piece of mail that got delivered (with no notification to ME) to a local FedEx Walgreens instead of my door... and some greatly appreciated tea and half and half, which are the only supplies I was really worrying about.

They stayed six feet away from me and didn't stay long, but it was so good to see them. Ruby, my older niece, thinks she should be good to actually hang out about another week from now -- it was possible she was exposed to a guy with symptoms, the boyfriend of the roommate of her best college buddy. But she's been on lockdown for more than a week now.

So. I'm finding that my dad's OCD sort of grows in me, bit by bit. One way I am reacting to this whole Shelter-in-place/Stay-at-home thing is by listing. A LOT of listing.

I'll save the worst for last, but here are some samples:

a list of people I am getting in touch with/staying regularly in touch with via internet and phone

a list of students I've successfully contacted; students I have not been able to contact yet; and students who seem not to have internet access (still incomplete)

a list of To Dos, both work and personal (this already takes up two full pages of the notebook I am using to contain these lists)

a list of groceries that I worry about running out of (really, that's tea and half and half, I swear)

a series of recipes I want to make, including one I've made -- lentils and fennel and sausage stew. It would probably be great without the sausage, for those who don't eat animals. I liked it a lot, and it had a great effect on my blood sugar.

a list of media I want to watch (not read, yet, because I have lots and lots of books I am reading on my Kindle app)

Here's that list, in case anyone wants to critique or, better, ADD ideas:

The Devil Wears Prada (bold = I've watched it)
Who Killed Malcolm X? on Netflix, apparently
Hidden Figures
Downton Abbey: the Movie... I started this a few weeks ago and trailed off...
Mary, Queen of Scots
Anne with an "E" despite the way it veers outside of any universe L. M. Montgomery would recognize, even during season 1 (but I love the casting of Anne and Marilla and Matthew so much!)
Series 3 of Babylon Berlin, this Netflix German-produced noir set in Weimar Republic Berlin... SO GOOD. Well, the first two series were. Actually, I am also (first) going to rewatch the original series, with a friend.
possibly a re-watch of The Wire
Get Out, except I really need my nieces for that; I am not good at watching horror movies alone
Jo Jo Rabbit when it becomes available
Kind Hearts and Coronets
The Belles of St. Trinians, though I don't know if that is available...
Dreamgirls
Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga
The English Game... dunno much about this, but it's upcoming on Netflix.
The Breadwinner, if I can find it -- an animated movie of the Deborah Ellis story about a girl passing as a boy in war torn Kabul.
Influenza 1918, an American Experience documentary, 51 minutes long, from PBS, and streaming free on their website.
The Repair Shop a Netflix show just hyped by a friend on FB
Star Trek: Discovery
Picard

That's it so far. I am watching fairly slowly, really.

So. The worst thing of my listing is that I am morbidly interested in the rate of coronavirus infections... which is really more accurately stated as the rate of coronavirus positive tests, so not at all reflective of reality. But there's a website which updates frequently. A commenter on FB said that it was very likely a shitty racist right-wing site, because it also has a population counter. I am trying to ignore that knowledge. It's just so fascinating to watch the numbers a few times a day, to watch exponential growth in almost real time. And to marvel at the countries where the numbers are even more bullshit than the rest of the numbers. Russia and India, for example.

This is not something that would be amazing for anyone in their 40s and younger, I bet. But for me, it is somewhat astounding that I have successfully made and posted to YouTube (and, this evening, after my sister has seen it will post to Facebook) a video of photos of my mom over a soundtrack which is her singing a Christy Moore song called "Unfinished Revolution", which I wrote about a couple of entries ago. I've never made a video, even of just still photos. I feel accomplished when I fucking make Google Slides shows, though I do that probably once a month or more often, at school.

Tech comfort levels are on such a continuum! My father and stepmother are visiting for Xmas, and they cannot even manage to stream ANYTHING from my computer to my TV (which is how it is set up; I don't have cable... or TV... except that now I do because my father's insatiable appetite for sports and TV news is such that last year I got Xfinity Streaming, so although I never look at it in between his visits, here it is...) Honestly, Mary cannot even think to use Google to search up... oh, anything. The weather. A map. Any fact whatsoever. Is that really how all seventy-plus year olds are? My dad has made the giant leap to being able to like posts on Facebook. He also doesn't comment publicly anymore, thinking that he is writing privately to the OP. But that is the extent of his expertise in technical matters.

Once RQ has seen and approved the video, I'll add it to this unprecedented second entry in one month.



We are having Fakemas today... my sister and her family went to LA for Xmas and got back yesterday, and we're going to do our own present opening this evening here at my house (which is a first; usually it's at RQ's but she seemed please to move it here this year). 5 PM ish. My presents for people this year are... I dunno. I like them! They're pretty political/tchotchke based, though. Bernie action figures, Radical tea towels, prints by a local artist from my sister's and my childhood, a Jacobin subscription, and art supplies. Oh, and some cute blue and white fake Willow ware tea mugs -- my dad is into blue and white decorating accents (I am not kidding about this; he has a frustrated interior designer inside... who a) likes to arrange all their hoarded tchotchkes, and b) has already put three of MY decorative objets into a small-to-big order that satisfies his semi-raging OCD) and tried to steal an old mug from my childhood claiming it should have been his in the divorce. Um, no. So I got him (and my nieces) a "Calamityware" tea mug with what at first looks like a classic Willow ware pattern, but when you peer more closely, has aliens and zombies and dinosaurs mixed in. "Things Could Be Worse!" is the advertising slogan. I kept one for myself, too, as well as the matching small teapot (having already gotten college niece a teapot and electric kettle for her dorm room, in September). I also gave myself one of the Bernie action figures.

I've spent a lot of this summer so far feeling crappy and angry at myself, but I don't feel like that right this second, so I thought I might do something zany and post an entry on LiveJournal (uh, and Dreamwidth, which I still don't really believe in).

My reasons for being proud of myself are silly and fleeting, but so the fuck what; they feel good right now.

1) I spent some money this summer. Ordinarily I only spend money (which is not to say I am at all frugal; I'm NOT) on groceries and lots, and lots, and lots of Amazon e-books. There's something about being able to carry probably almost 2,000 books around in my purse that is deeply rich-feeling. Book security. ANYWAY. Things I have bought with money this summer:

* a knife block. A good one -- I think? I mean, I read a lot of reviews of various blocks in the price range I thought I could stand. This one is Chicago Cutlery, with the knives forged, all one piece. It has a serrated bread knife, which I've been lacking for several years now; an in-block sharpener; nice, hefty knives including hella sharp steak knives which I'll barely ever use, and a good butcher knife.

Tangent: my mom had a couple of venerable pieces of kitchen ware that for some reason hold a lot of childhood memories for me -- a really old glazed bowl, some linen dishtowels from England, mostly, brought back by my grandmother, some melamine dishes and glasses that were my grandmother's (I really like melamine, and my mom and I would always check at Target to see if they had any pretty patterns, and buy, like, one small plate each... I like having mismatched, colorful plates, as well as a set of plain grey ceramic IKEA plates & bowls...) -- and, point of this aside, an old butcher knife that was practically black, whose tip had been broken off sometime in the early 60s. That butcher knife was weirdly talismanic to me -- nothing worked as well as it; my mother would carefully get down on the floor to roll it sharp in one of those little rolling sharpeners; it was perfect for smashing garlic... anyway, I have no idea where that butcher knife went to after she moved out here. But my new one seems good, so far. Maybe I'll cook more? I mean, that's the point.

* several pairs of stretchy black pants and "swing tee-shirts" in different colors. I have beloved black stretchy pants, but they all have many, many holes in them, and I've defiantly worn them to work anyway, which sends my sister into a disapproving tizzy. So these not-as-nice, not-as-soft jersey trousers are my new effort. We'll see. Swing tee-shirts have a seam down the back so they are loose and don't cling, and damn, they're lovely. I bought some gorgeously intensely colored cotton ones last summer with my sister at a very expensive store, but these are just mostly oil-based cloth cheapish ones from Lane Bryant. Still comfortable and pretty, though.

* Because no spending frenzy for me would be complete without more books, I got five books that have been deaccessioned from various libraries, i.e. ordered used hard backs of historical fiction by one author that are all long out of print, and do not exist electronically. The author is Gillian Bradshaw, and I have just really enjoyed everything I've read by her -- people compare her to Rosemary Sutcliff... they both often write about Roman Britain, for example -- but she's less detached than Sutcliff. I'm really looking forward to reading them.

-- Dark North, about an African Roman official who visits Britain in the waning days of the Empire.

-- The Bearkeeper's Daughter about Byzantium and an Empress.

-- Imperial Purple an early Christian weaver, murex (the purple shells that create imperial purple), and the Byzantine emperor.

-- Alchemy of Fire 672 CE, Byzantium -- Moslems threaten Constantinople, a woman struggles to raise her daughter, some alchemist is involved.

-- Horses of Heaven 140 BCE in Afghanistan (Ferghana)... um, this one doesn't sound as good as the others now that I read a different description of it... and it has magic. Hmm. I think it's one of her earlier efforts. She published her first novel right out of college, and it was the start of a Celtic Arthurian trilogy that is A LOT like Sutcliff. I'm reading that now, but I took a break. I'm not all that into Arthurian retellings. One year, when I was twenty, THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE sent me, as a birthday gift (in England; I was there for my Junior Year Abroad) Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Honestly, even though she is absolutely a fucking nut (though not an abuser, unlike Bradley), I prefer Patricia Kenneally "Morrison"'s Arthurian trilogy, The Hawk's Grey Feather, The Oak Above the Kings, and The Hedge of Mist.

* a new comforter set for my mom's bedroom... I gave the old set away to my friends R. and D., who slept over with their toddler J. last week over the Fourth of July... they were escaping, for the second year in a row, the extravagant neighborhood insanity of Oakland's 4th of July. The new comforter was pretty online; it's not on the bed yet, so I don't know how it feels and looks in real life yet.

2) My house is clean, my dishes are done, the last load of laundry is drying, I have a pot of tea and toast, my cat is here between me and the keyboard as it should be.

3) My nieces and sister and bro-in-law get home from the Midwest tomorrow, and I will get to hang out with Ruby and Rosie. Ruby's going to be a freshman at Cal in a little more than a month! Insane!

4) I bought a tape-into-digital device and software months ago, and FINALLY used it (and am still searching through the tapes) to make digital recordings of my mom singing. She did not leave very many examples of her voice behind, but Mary brought me out some tapes with handwritten labels. Most are just junk -- things my mom recorded from records... but a couple had her singing and playing guitar. I've transferred five so far, and although they still make me cry, it's so good to hear her voice, and to hear her singing and playing. One is a song I'd never heard, which she wrote herself, about her brother and father's suicides.

5) Adam and Lucie (his new wife) are coming to stay over this Thursday; it will be really nice to see him. We chat online as often as we can, but the time difference with Saudi Arabia, where he teaches at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, is wretched. I'm looking forward to meeting Lucie; we've Skyped, and she seems hella sweet. But I will be glad to actually meet her. I just read this thing a nihilistic-kid posted on FB about how scientists may have cracked the problem of cat allergies with some kind of egg-powder coating for... I didn't really get that part... a pill? Everything you eat? (That won't work) and I wish it was in circulation NOW! Adam is allergic, though he takes antihistamines when he visits...

So. None of those are earthshaking things, none of them are political, but whatever. LJ feels like a fucking echo chamber these days, so I decided to try to add a teaspoonful of written noise.