Activity from Kattullus
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"I had a bag with me with my boy clothes so I was dressed in girl mode"
Eddie Izzard talks about growing up trans and coming out in the 80s at the 2022 Utah Equality Allies Gala.
An essay about errors in Ulysses by James Joyce
For students of tone, it’s interesting to see how long the editors can keep a straight face as, soberly and diligently, they write entry after entry, using a printed source for each and acknowledging the help of many named Joyceans. At times, you can almost hear a sigh or muffled laughter. In the Cyclops episode, there is a long, long list of saints, the majority only too real, that includes ‘S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous’. The annotation tells us: ‘Not actually saints.’–Arruginated by Colm Tóibín, with an accompanying podcast discussion.
“Digging through some of the best music ever made”
Digging the Greats is a YouTube channel by bass player and DJ Brandon Shaw, with 10-20 minute videos with musical analysis of individual songs and albums, mostly hip hop, but also soul, R&B and whatever takes his fancy, and how they fit into music history. Shaw’s explored The Roots’ Dynamite, the story of Native Tongues, the album Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, how J Dilla’s timefeel works, Daft Punk’s Discovery, Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. and dozens more. He’s also got a separate channel for long-form interviews, which are also released in podcast form.
All across the globe people have looked at the night sky and seen myths
Figures in the Sky by Nadieh Bremer, astronomer and data visualization designer, shows how stars have been grouped into constellations by different “sky cultures”, ranging from the familiar modern ones, to those of the Sardinian, Norse, Hopi, Hawaiian, Chinese, Boorong, Arabic and 20 others. You can read a bit more on Bremer’s page for the project.
Same place, different songs, half a century apart
Asking for Love was a music video made by Egill Eðvarðsson in 1973 for a song by Jóhann G. Jóhannsson, who was filmed walking backwards around downtown Reykjavík, and then reversed to make it seem everyone else’s walking backwards. Now, fifty years later, Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Ívar Kristján Ívarsson have recreated the video with singer-songwriter Árný Margrét, walking the same route backwards, for her song Waiting.
“They had no unique economic function: They were Europeans.”
The rumour about the Jews is an essay by Prof. Francesca Trivellato about how Jews expelled from France in 1394 were falsely credited with inventing the bill of exchange. She was interviewed at length on this subject by Nachi Weinstein for the Seforim Chatter podcast. The historiography of Jews and finance was the subject of Prof. Julie Mell’s The Myth of the Medieval Jewish Moneylender, which she summarizes in a brief radio interview with the Carolina Journal. For a more in-depth interview, you can listen to Scott Ferguson interview her for the Money on the Left podcast (incl. transcript) or read the three critiques in a forum on the book hosted by the Marginalia Review, and Prof. Mell’s response.
Can you remember an indie song with the refrain “it is murder”?
On the new Blur album there’s a song called Barbaric. It always triggers a memory of another song, a mid tempo indie tune sung by a female singer which had as its refrain, or part of its chorus, the phrase “it is murder” or “it’s a murder”. Can you figure out what song this is?
“a tacitly racist game of telephone”
The Rotten Science Behind the MSG Scare by Sam Kean is a brief history of the MSG scare, when a single letter by Dr. Robert Ho Man Kwok to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, led to a racist reaction that touched off decades of panic around the seasoning monosodium glutamate. Over the decades, two men claimed to be the authors of the letter, Dr. Kwok and a Dr. Howard Steel. The latter even told his story to a professor at his alma mater, Dr. Jennifer LeMesurier, who had written a detailed journal article tracing the history of the racist myth. However, Dr. Steel’s story fell apart when reporter Lilly Sullivan looked into it for This American Life.
“So powerful! So vulgar! So sublime! So incredible!”
That Old Seaside Club is a short story by Japanese SF writer Izumi Suzuki, who died in 1986 at the age of 36. As Amanda Demarco explains, her much mythologized life has threatened to overshadow her work, which has only just started appearing in English translation. Genie Harrison writes about the discovery of Suzuki by English-language readers, and so far two short story collections have been published, Terminal Boredom, reviewed by Lee Mandelo for Tor.com, and Hit Parade of Tears, reviewed by Stephanie LaCava for the Daily Telegraph [archive link]. Both books are available from the publisher, Verso Books.
“What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good”
We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you.–Where be your jibes now? is an essay by MeFi’s own Patricia Lockwood about David Foster Wallace.
“A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life”
I got to know a man willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers. “I write, I don’t speculate about what I’m writing,” he reminded me a bit sharply after an interpretative question. For Delany, decency entails remembering that the author is dead even when he’s sitting across the table.–How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City by Julian Lucas.
Where should I make my webzine?
I’m making a webzine with a friend. We have some, but limited, web design skills, so would like to use some website hosting platform that makes things relatively easy, such as Wordpress, Squarespace, and the like. Our requirements are simple, we’re aiming to publish four issues a year, with four stories in each issue. We’d like the website to look simple and minimalistic, with no ads. Ideally we’d like to offer the option to download the stories as epub and mobi files, but that’s not a dealbreaker. What hosting platform would you recommend?
“Renton says it’s a miracle that he made it out of adolescence alive.”
He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak. A long article by Christopher Mathias about Renton Sinclair. [CW: attempted suicide, conversion therapy]
Did Elvis tell his father: “It doesn’t matter, it’s just money”?
When I was nine or ten I was told an incorrect story about Elvis Presley’s last words. The story was that Elvis had dropped an expensive watch which had broken, and that his father had started to pick up the pieces. Elvis was then meant to have said: “It doesn’t matter, it’s just money.” I know these aren’t his last words, but I’m curious if there’s any truth to this story. Did Elvis ever say something like this to his father? If so, in what circumstances?
“Don’t speak of how women can’t become heroes”
Qiu Jin was a Chinese feminist revolutionary [archive link] beheaded by agents of the Qing empire in 1907, becoming a martyred hero to her cause. She was also a poet, and Canadian translator (and SF writer) Yilin Wang has been publishing new translations of her poetry in various venues. For more about her approach, you can read her essay about translating. These new translations have been widely appreciated, including by the British Museum, who stole them and published without attribution or compensation.
"a practice school exercise undertaken by a novice scribe"
The Best Known Old Babylonian Tablet? is an essay by Janet L. Beery, introduced by Frank J. Swetz, about leading students through a mathematical problem preserved on a nearly four thousand year old Babylonian tablet, which happens to demonstrate that the Babylonians knew the square root of 2. The cuneiform tablet is kept at the Yale Babylonian Collection under the catalog number YBC 7289, and has been scanned in three dimensions and can even be 3D-printed for classroom use. The Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage released a short video where curator Agnete Lassen describes YBC 7289 and Chelsea Graham explains how it was digitized.
“There is no more bond. It’s not you that’s breaking it. They broke it.”
The Last Gamble of Tokyo Joe by Dan O’Sullivan is the story of Ken Eto, who grew up the son of a fanatical Christian convert in California, was sent to a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and after getting involved in illegal gambling, rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob. And then his story really started.
Name that film: Soccer fan on a date at the opera or ballet
A while back, I’m guessing in the 90s, I saw a film on TV that stuck with me. Or rather, a scene has stuck with me. A man is on a date at a ballet, or an opera, but is surreptitiously listening to soccer on the radio through earbuds. When his team scores he jumps out of his seat in joy, to the surprise of his date and the bougie audience, at which point the man pretends that he was overwhelmed with emotion at the performance on stage and starts applauding, which impresses his date. Does this scene sound familiar to you?
“It’s better than nothing”
The Stopgap is a new website edited by Danny M. Lavery and Jo Livingstone. The two editors were interviewed by Laura Hazard Owen about their idea for the site and it’s future.
How do I save a Wikipedia article from deletion?
A Wikipedia article I created way back when about Once Upon a Time…, a long-running French animated series, has been proposed for deletion for lack of notability, but the linked notability guideline for television doesn’t seem to apply to it at all. I would like to do what’s required to save it from deletion, but I’m confused why it’s been proposed for deletion for lack of notability. How do I go about saving this Wikipedia article from deletion?
"Azt mondja, hogy az angyalok a mennyországban magyarul beszélnek"
Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it. Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.—The Angel's Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life by Australian writer Gerald Murnane.
"the problem was Romania had run out of episodes of Columbo"
In 2021 a video featuring Peter Falk talking about the time he stopped a revolt in Romania went viral. This led Romanian YouTuber Radu Pericol Tiganas to do research, finding evidence which seemingly confirmed large parts of the story, recounting it in a Romanian-language video. Slate's Willa Paskin became interested, and found out that it was all a bit more complicated than it first appeared, laying out her findings in a pair of episodes of the Decoder Ring podcast which together are about the length of a single episode of Columbo.
The Darkness at the Heart of Chuck E. Cheese
Last Squeak Tonight is a special web-only episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a nearly half hour exploration of the Chuck E. Cheese chain of pizza parlors with singing animatronics, from its strange, off-kilter beginnings as way for Nolan Bushnell’s Atari to make money off arcade machines, to its depressing, soulless present. Even if you’ve never set foot inside a Chuck E. Cheese, it is a grimly fascinating watch.
“Who are these insects, the Beetles?”
The Beatles at Stowe School is a 27 minute BBC radio feature by Samira Ahmed about a 1963 concert played by a just-about-to-be-huge Fab Four at an upper class all-boys boarding school in England. While reporting the story, Ahmed found out that one of the pupils, John Bloomfield, had taped the whole thing on an old open reel recorder, the oldest recording of a full performance by the band in the UK. Ahmed gives the backstory behind the feature on her personal blog.
“No one must know or they’ll kill us and destroy the book.”
The Sarajevo Haggadah has been kept in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina off and on since the late 19th Century. It is a medieval Hebrew codex, made to be read at the Passover Seder, and is beautifully illuminated, with a focus on the story of Joseph. The Haggadah has inspired plenty of art, including The Sarajevo Haggadah: The Music of the Book, by Bosnian composer and accordionist Merima Ključo, here performed with the CityMusic Cleveland Chamber Orchestra (with a panel discussion afterwards), which itself drew inspiration from Geraldine Brooks novel, The People of the Book. Brooks recounted the history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, and its incredible rescue by Islamic scholar Dervis Korkut during World War Two in a 2007 New Yorker article called The Book of Exodus.
“the ‘aliens’ destroying this world are us”
“Heat Death” might not at first reading strike the reader as science fiction at all. It contains no bug-eyed monsters, interplanetary flights, postapocalyptic worlds, or technological marvels. It focuses not on outer space as much as it does inner space—notably that of a woman—and the geography of the mundane—that of the home and the supermarket—rather than the fantastic or extraordinary.– A Space of Her Own by Mary E. Papke, is an essay about Pamela Zoline and her 1967 science fiction story The Heat Death of the Universe.
"Every picture tells a story"
Dyson gripped the top of a stone bollard; Wagner continued to look away. The film caught a stance that suggested majestic indifference to the poorer boys at their side, as though these boys were subjects as well as spectators. The moment passed, the morning moved on. The photographer and the local boys disappeared and the Wagner car at last rolled up. The match began.—Five boys: the story of a picture by Ian Jack [archive link] is an essay exploring the history of the famous 1937 photograph Toffs and Toughs by Jimmy Sime, and the lives of the five boys in it.
"investigations of astrophysics and quantum mechanics"
PBS Space Time is a long-running series of videos about high-level physics, ranging from about five to twenty-five minutes long. It was hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz and is currently hosted by Matt O'Dowd. The videos can be watched both on YouTube and the PBS website. With 300+ videos it's hard to know where to start, but they've sorted them into over thirty playlists, such as Futurism and Space Exploration, Standard Model Lagrangian Playlist and Dark Matter and Dark Energy Explained.
“We kept hoping the statue would be restored, but it never was”
In the 1950s, the Met began acquiring pieces from Robert E. Hecht, an American-born antiquities dealer who spent decades running afoul of authorities and was ultimately tried on charges of antiquities smuggling in Italy. In 1959 and 1961, Italian prosecutors charged Hecht with antiquities smuggling, and in 1973, they issued an arrest warrant for him that was later revoked. But the Met kept buying from him.–In search of stolen gods at the Met, the latest in a series on looted statues by the Nepali Times, focuses on the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns “at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes”.
“Since 1995 Ai Weiwei has raised his middle finger to bastions of power”
Do you want Ai Weiwei to flip the bird at major landmarks, or anywhere else that’s findable on Google Maps? Here is his middle finger extended at the Kremlin. At the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At Mar-a-Lago. At Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík. At some guy on the South Pole. At a statue of a moomintroll in Tampere, Finland. Try it yourself and then read about the project here.
"You came with a bunch of records to see if it worked or not"
De La Soul is available for streaming everywhere for the first time ever. This is a bittersweet development, as rapper Dave Jolicoeur, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, passed away just three weeks ago. Kelvin Mercer and Vincent Mason, the surviving members of the group spoke with Ben Sisario of the New York Times [archive]. Several artists and fans who were influenced by De La Soul reflected on their legacy for the Gothamist.
“One day, Také stopped, too tired to go any further.”
Three short essays by Japanese poet Hiromi Itō about her aging, beloved German Shepherd named Také. Each essay, translated by Jeffrey Angles and his students, portrays Také at different stages of life, from puppyhood to her final days.
How were the visual effects at the end of Sleepless in Seattle made?
After the final scene in Sleepless in Seattle there are some visual effects, starting with a seemingly computer rendered Empire State Building, which then zooms out to a map of the US. I’ve tried to find information about how they were made, but haven’t struck on the right search terms. Do you know where I could find out more?
“I pray you, if it please you, fine amours”
Trobairitz: The Lady Composers of Medieval France is an introduction to the female troubadours of Occitania by Sarah Berry. Only one whole song, music and lyrics, attributed to a trobairitz survives in whole, the Comtesse de Dia’s A chantar m'er de so qu'eu no volria (here in the rendition of Ensemble Céladon and Paulin Bündgen, but many versions exist). Here is another poem by her in Magda Bogin’s translation. About twenty other trobairitz are known by name, and a number of anonymous poems show hints of female authorship. Claudia Keelan published a book of her translations, which she discussed in an essay including some translations and you can see her read dialogue poems with other readers. Finally, here is a translation by Samantha Pious of Bieiris de Romans’ love poem to a woman.
“many of our beloved fairy tales were first told as brave flirts”
Young women were the true originators of the Grimms’ Tales is a short essay by Christine Lehnen about the tellers of the stories that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published, most of whom were not the old wives of popular imagination, but young women of their acquaintance. A Case Study in Editorial Filters in Folktales: A Discussion of the Allerleirauh tales in Grimm [pdf] by Cay Dollerup, Iven Reventlow, and Carsten Rosenberg Hansen, is a scholarly comparison between the version by one of these women, Dorothea ‘Dortchen’ Wild, and other versions. Wil is also discussed extensively in an interview with author Nick Jubber on the Grimm Reading podcast [Apple Podcasts link]
“The real question is why he decided, at age 33, to learn”
‘What’s up! I can’t read.’ O.C. resident goes viral after schooling left him functionally illiterate by Sonja Sharp for the L. A. Times, is a profile of Oliver James, whose TikToks chronicle his daily progress in learning to read. The article goes into why it was that he never learned to read before, but he also tells his own story in this short video.
Why does Windows 10 only recognize one gamepad at a time?
My son asked for gamepads as a holiday gift to play games on my computer with friends. Both connect just fine to the computer on their own, through both USB ports. However, when they're both connected, Windows 10 only accepts inputs from one gamepad at a time, whichever one was plugged in first. If both are plugged in, and I unplug the one that's working, Windows immediately starts accepting inputs from the other one. I thought maybe that Windows was only turning one USB port on at a time, so I went into Device Manager and turned power management off for the USB ports, but that didn't work. How do I solve this?
“a fleeting little treat in the middle of another shitty winter”
A Show for Christmas by English comedian and playwright Daniel Kitson, is “a story about possibility and magic and grief and hope and tradition and toffees. Which is to say, Christmas. Basically.” It is an audio adaptation of a stage show he did in 2014 for the Battersea Arts Centre. The hour and a half running time is mostly narration by Daniel Kitson, but it also features Isy Suttie in an acting role. It is available online until January 1st.
“I'd like to take you now, on wings of song as it were…”
Last month Tom Lehrer put all his songs online for free streaming or downloading, and relinquished all rights to them. You can browse them by album, title or category, and also download the sheet music for each song. But get those songs fast, because the website is only staying up for a limited time yet.
“there are ghosts in our machines and that our house pets have claws”
The Witching Cats of New Jersey is a short essay by artist and historian Kazys Varnelis about the fashion among the 19th century New Jersey merchant class of commissioning portraits of their cats in the guise of witches’ familiars, most of whom are now kept at the Germantown College Archives. This then becomes an essay about AI generated art, for obvious reasons.
Airport Books and the Bad Ideas They Create and Spread
If Books Could Kill is a podcast where Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri discuss and critique books that capture the public imagination. The first episode is about the infamous shitshow Freakonomics, and other staples of airport bookstores will follow in subsequent weeks. It is currently only on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, but the plan is that it will be available everywhere.
“under my leadership, the M.A.S. became a Marilyn solidarity cell”
It’s a funny thing: ever since my mother died, now almost three years ago, I have been fixated on other women who were, like her, impossible, hilarious, horny, suicidal, bookish, and intermittently threatened with psychiatric confinement. First, it was the feminist revolutionary Shulamith Firestone; now, it is Marilyn.–Some Like It Hot, Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society by Sophie Lewis, an essay which considers Marilyn Monroe, feminism, her mother, BimboTok, misogyny and a lot else. [Internet Archive link]
“It is great rotating food, and that is all there is to say about it”
Another Gallery of Rotating Food GIFs has 420 mesmerizing images of spinning food. Though it is undoubtedly the finest of the Internet Archive’s six galleries devoted to spinning food items, the others are worth perusing too. [via Depths of the Internet Archive]
The 2022 Nobel Laureate is Annie Ernaux
The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature to Annie Ernaux. You can read recent article about her in The New Yorker, London Review of Books and The Guardian.
On Sept. 16th a young Kurdish Iranian woman died in a Tehran hospital
The death of Mahsa Amini [Wikipedia article] after being held in custody by the Iranian morality police has led to a wave of protests in Iran that have spread around the country. The Iranian government has cracked down hard, with at least dozens dead [archive], and taken steps to limit internet access in Iran. The morality police, or Gasht-e-Ershad, and the laws they enforce have been the target of the protesters' ire, though the government as a whole is feeling under threat. Meanwhile, protests continue, documented in videos that circulate online.
It pairs well with garum.
This miracle plant was eaten into extinction 2,000 years ago—or was it? is an article in the National Geographic by Taras Grescoe [previously] about the potential rediscovery of the favorite herb of the Romans, silphion, [prev & iously] in Turkey by Prof. Mahmut Miski. Grescoe put a bit more info in a Twitter thread, and if you have access, you can read Miski’s scholarly article here.
“This is not a soccer podcast; this is a euphoria machine”
22 Goals is series of 19 podcast episodes, each focusing on a single goal (sometimes two) scored at a men’s World Cup, but ranging widely, hosted and written by Brian Phillips. Each episode can also be read as an essay. So far there have been four episodes, on Diego Maradona’s two goals against England in 1986, Ronaldo’s World Cup final double in 2002, Kylian Mbappé’s goal in the 2018 final, and Dennis Bergkamp’s goal against Argentina in 1998.
Fiat divisa panem
The utterly delightful site dedicated to classifying plastic bread tags is an article by Annie Rauwerda about The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group [previously], or horg.com (horg.org is squatted upon), where John Daniel classifies occlupanids, or plastic bread tags, with biological rigor, taxonomizing the 208 types into 17 families, as well as discussing pseudo-occlupanids.
“Everyone knows that he goes around with the devil and was a werewolf.”
An English translation of the transcript of a trial of a 17th Century werewolf held in Swedish Livonia, modern Latvia. The defendant, a peasant known as Old Thiess, claimed to be a hound of god, fighting the devil to safeguard the Earth’s fertility. The judges, Bengt Johan Ackerstaff and Gabriel Berger, were perplexed. This case has fascinated historians, and two of them, Carlo Ginzburg and Bruce Lincoln, discuss the trial of a Latvian werewolf on Susannah Lipscomb’s podcast, Not Just the Tudors, where a couple of years ago Jan Michelsen discussed the trial of a teen werewolf in 17th Century Basque Country.
“How could there be only one method?”
The Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing by S.L. Huang is a long, historically grounded critique of creative writing workshops that follow the University of Iowa model. While the examples Huang takes come primarily from the science fiction and fantasy workshops, her criticisms and proposals are widely applicable. Over the next few days Huang will be sharing various facts and observations she had to cut out of her essay on her Twitter feed, starting with this thread.
“We played with no rules or conventions”
Strike! How 80s post-punk band Lining Time crystallised a moment in feminist protest history by Tayyab Amin is a profile of the early 80s all-woman band from Totnes in Devon, whose only album, Strike!, has been reissued on Bandcamp and is available in full on streaming services, including YouTube Music. The reissue of the album was at the behest of Les Amis de Cathy Josefowitz, an organization devoted to safeguarding the artistic legacy of one of Lining Time's founding members, the others being Claire Bushe, Cathy Frost, Lisa Halse and Mara de Wit.