Activity from Kattullus
Displaying post 100 to 150 of 1085
“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.
“none are really about history, they're always a fight over the present”
Battling History is a series of five long articles in Coda Story about contentious areas of history in Europe. Isobel Cockerell writes about Nazi labor camps in Alderney, one of the British Channel Islands, and Spain’s vast tomb to fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Daiva Repečkaitė writes about struggles between Lithuania and Belarus over a shared medieval history. Caitlin Thompson writes about unsolved murders and unexamined atrocities in Northern Ireland. Katia Patin writes about resistance to official Polish narratives surrounding the Nazi occupation.
“Have you ever wondered what happens to the things you leave behind?”
Found in a Library Book is an online collection of scanned items that people have left in library books in Oakland, California, including art, notes, lists and stuff by kids. [via Annie Rauwerda]
Hundreds of Polish films and cartoons online for free
35mm Online is a website where you can stream over 150 classic Polish feature films, with English subtitles, as well as cartoons, documentaries and old news reels. And it's all funded by the European Union and the Polish government. There are films by well known directors, such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Andrzej Wajda, but it also has work by pioneers like Wanda Jakubowska and Danuta Halladin. [Note: A few films seem to be geolocked, and you need to register to access age-restricted material]
“I’m telling you, it was a little cursed, the movie.” – Jodie Foster
‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’ is an oral history of the making Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film Contact. Come for the description of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan having the idea, stay for the many different ways people attempt to describe how hot Matthew McConaughey was, bail out emotionally at the end when David Morse talks about meeting a father and daughter after the film had been released.
“The potato is inertial”
Potato physics with a knife is one of many videos made by Texas A&M University, featuring Prof. Tatiana Erukhimova, to have gone viral on TikTok. You can also find videos of Erukhimova on the Texas A&M physics and astronomy department’s YouTube channel, including such gems as Break a Ruler With Atmospheric Pressure, Pulling a Tablecloth with Inertia Physics and Will It Break? Egg Drop.
“Jonah told me that he could talk to ghosts.”
Jonah disappeared in the early 2000s. When I say disappeared, I mean vanished: No sightings, no social media, no work history, no criminal record, no glimpses of him in the background of a party photo. His family went to great lengths to find him; they found nothing. I have been searching for the past five years, on and off; what I haven’t tried, they tried first.Rage USA is an essay by Jude Doyle about their high school friend who vanished, and what it’s like to live and grow up queer in the US, and is a part of their Twelve Genders, Full Moon Mixtape series.
The History of Modern Linguistics
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences or hiphilangsci to its friends, is a podcast about linguistics, from its earliest stirrings as a science. It is hosted and produced by James McElvenny, and tries to cover all major intellectual currents in linguistics, from a historical perspective. The associated blog is co-edited by Chloé Laplantine, and has evolved to feature long video interviews and a book series.
Phoneboxes Georg
At their peak, in the mid-1990s, the British population of phone boxes was about 100,000. Now, there are just over 20,000 working boxes left, which still sounds like quite a lot, given it’s hard to imagine anyone actually using one. And yet, they do. According to Ofcom, 5m calls are still made from phone boxes annually. Five million! It seems impossible. A number so surprisingly large it made me think there must be a lone guy in a box somewhere obsessively making one-minute calls all day to random numbers.—The last phone boxes by Sophie Elmhirst (audio version).
"Poetry went places/Where there isn’t place for poetry."
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine is a 2017 anthology edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky of Ukrainian poetry by sixteen poets, for example Oksana Lutsyshyna, Serhiy Zhadan, Kateryna Kalytko, Vasyl Holoborodko, Lyudmyla Khersonska, Yuri Izdryk and Lyuba Yakimchuk. There is a preface by the editors, an introduction by Ilya Kaminsky and an afterword by Polina Barskova, two of the roughly thirty translators involved. There are also glossaries of terms and places, as well as video readings of several poems. You can purchase the book from various websites or recommend that your library order a copy. The title of the thread is from Not a Poem in Forty Days by Borys Humenyuk
“I’m Joy”
I was in my mid-twenties and I had been stuck on the gerbil wheel of frustrated self-definition since childhood. “I’m ‘Jay’,” I’d say, when I introduced myself. No one heard the quotation marks, no one recognized that the body, biography, and male roles toward which my first-person pronouns pointed weren’t what I meant by “I”. In fact, until I read Dickinson’s poem, I didn’t think anyone else knew, or that language could represent, the hell of uncompletable self-definition. Dickinson, I realized, with a rush of gratitude that still brings tears to my eyes, had used the very inadequacy of the language of self-definition to articulate what her speaker and I meant by “I”.— Supposed Persons: Emily Dickinson and “I” by Prof. Joy Ladin.
M. A. Numminen sings Wittgenstein
The Tractatus Suite consists of six songs, each in a different style, composed and performed by Finnish singer-songwriter, author and national treasure M. A. Numminen, using phrases from philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. UbuWeb doesn't have the sixth song, A Proposition Is… but it is available on YouTube. You can also watch him perform Wovon man nicht sprechen kann in a television studio and also live accompanied by orchestra (who are desperately trying to keep a straight face).
"A Lamb Has Harnessed a Wolf"
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been going on for nearly a month. According to most analysts, it has not gone according to plan, and Russia has begun preparations for a long war. The most horrific battle has been in Mariupol, a port city devastated by shelling and fighting. Meanwhile, live in the capital, Kyiv, is almost calm. In occupied cities, Ukrainians hold daily protests, and across the Western border, Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova. The name of this thread is from a painting by Maria Primachenko.
"to dwell on the mysteries of feeling and memory"
Soul Music is a long running BBC radio series. Each episode focuses on a particular piece of music, concentrating less on the artists behind it, but on the way the music has affected its listeners. Recent episodes have featured songs by Massive Attack, John Denver and Nina Simone. Besides pop songs, it covers classical, hymns, folk, jazz and more. The music is mostly drawn from the Anglophone world, but it ventures further afield too, like Finland, Japan, Wales, France, and South Africa. Hua Hsu wrote about Soul Music for The New Yorker in a piece called The Anti-Explainer Insight of “Soul Music”.
"I'm a stuck-a-saurus"
Four year old girl snowboarding while wearing a dinosaur costume and narrating her journey (single-link tiktok video).
“behind my stories is a nexus of language”
Nowhere and Back Again is a series of essays by Christine Kelley on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, for the Eruditorum Press blog. Kelley uses the geography of Middle Earth as a jumping off point for reflections on Tolkien’s writings, e.g. Dorwinion and wine, the Southeast and racism and Lake-town and democracy. Kelley finished Book I, focusing on Mordor, last autumn, and is now in the middle of Book II, which explores Rhovanion, also known as Wilderland.
Vinyl Album of the Week
Vínill vikunnar is a weekly radio program on Iceland’s state broadcaster RÚV. The idea is simple, the play a whole vinyl album from start to finish. Each album is introduced in Icelandic, before playing side A, and the presenter speaks in the middle while they turn the record around and play side B. The picks range from canonical albums from the 20th Century ( Billy Holiday, David Bowie and Lauryn Hill), to world music (Osibisa, Umm Kulthum and Mulata Astake), to indie classics ( Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees, P. J. Harvey and The Pixies), to the overlooked (Alberta Hunter, Alice Coltrane and Maki Asakawa), and of course Icelandic music (Einsöngvarakvartettinn, Björk and Ellý Vilhjálms). There’s lots more to choose from, and shows are streamable for a whole year.
Short story where people send messages to their high school selves
Do you remember a science fiction short story where people can send images of themselves back to their high school selves? I read it about twenty years ago or so.
“how we arrived at today’s view of our world”
A Century of Science is a website by Science News, where they delve into their vast archive of scientific news articles to present an overview of major developments in science over the last hundred years. Among the subjects covered are plate tectonics, by Carolyn Gramling, epidemics, by Aimee Cunningham, and worlds outside our solar system, by Lisa Grossman. But that is only a sampling of what’s on offer. You can also explore the articles through a timeline and the categories language, new areas of research, and unsung characters.
A friend in Brooklyn has Covid, what can I order to have sent to her?
A friend in Brooklyn has been diagnosed with Covid and will be isolating in her apartment for the next 10 days. What nice and useful thing could I have delivered to her house? Preferably something local. She lives in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.
“17th Century Iceland was a cruel place”
The long and underappreciated history of male witches – and the countries where more men were prosecuted for witchcraft is a short article by historian Dr. Kate Lister. The country with the most lopsided ratio of male to female witches was Iceland, where 20 out 22 executed witches in the 17th Century were men. Though a colony of Denmark, whose king was an anti-witchcraft fanatic, burning witches came late to the island. The Icelandic Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft has a good overview of the subject. And if you want to go deeper, Prof. Suzannah Lipscombe interviews fellow historian Dr. Ólina Kjerúlf Þorvarðardóttir, a specialist in what Icelanders refer to as “the burning century”, on the Not Just the Tudors podcast, and explains why Icelandic witches were mainly men.
“This company proposes to operate a metaverse”
What The Hell Is This Company The 76ers Just Partnered With? by Maitreyi Anantharaman and Chris Thompson for Defector, is an investigation info basketball team Philadelphia 76ers’ newest partner, Color Star, whose CEO, sir Lucas Capetian, almost certainly doesn’t exist.
parmessiah, chantonym, spelunkiss, journocrat, beekeepress, sneerature
Portmanteaur is a portmanteau generator.
No knowledge of German required
Since its first release in 1961 the hymn “Danke” by Martin Gotthard Schneider has been one of Germany’s most popular Christian songs. But in 1993 comedian and theater director Christoph Marthaler made it a comic centerpiece of his popular play Murx den Europäer, often reprised. Marthaler’s version has itself been covered, such as by the Hafnarfjörður Brass Band and the male choir Voces Masculorum.
"why he might just be the forgotten Shakespeare for our times"
John Lyly: The Queer Shakespeare is an episode of the Not Just the Tudors podcast where Dr. Suzannah Lipscomb interviews fellow historian Dr. Andy Kesson about the Elizabethan playwright John Lyly, who was "even more keen than Shakespeare on genderbending characters and unconventional love affairs". On the Before Shakespeare website, Kesson has written a lot about the works of John Lyly, as well as a book and several journal articles. He's also working with theater director Emma Frankland on a staging of Lyly's best known play, Galatea. They, and other people involved in the production, talk about the play and performing it in the 21st Century, through trans, queer, deaf, and other lenses, in a series of videos.
“I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t love a beautiful thing”
A Miracle of Abundance as 20,000 Whimbrel Take Refuge on a Tiny Island is an article by Scott Weidensaul about Deveaux Bank, a tiny barrier island in South Carolina that serves as a roosting spot for twenty thousand whimbrels, as they migrate from their South American wintering grounds to the arctic, where they breed. This was discovered by biologist Felicia Sanders, who got help from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to document the whimbrels. The Cornell Lab has made two videos, one introducing the place and the birds in all their beauty, and the remarkable Deveaux Bank: Reflections of a Cultural Ornithologist, featuring Dr. J. Drew Lanham.
"looking at the lives and voices of women in medieval literature"
Encounters with Medieval Women is a four episode series of the London Review of Books podcast where scholars Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley discuss four medieval texts by or about women: St. Mary of Egypt, Julian of Norwich, the Wife of Bath, and Margery Kempe. Each episode page has a full transcript.
France is a monarchy that undergoes a succession crisis every five years
La Campagne is a newsletter about the upcoming French presidential election by French economist Manu Saadia (best known for his book Trekonomics). He was fed up with the inaccuracies of English language coverage of French politics, and decided to remedy that. He started with the basics, explaining voting procedures and why it is that French politics are so dominated by the office of the presidency. He's also written about the legacy of French defeat in Algeria, Covid's effect on the campaign and the rise of far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. The newsletter will continue until the election and its immediate aftermath.
“Garum has long been considered the dodo of gastronomic history.”
Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment is an article by Taras Grescoe about recent attempts to recreate the Roman Empire’s most beloved sauce, garum (previouslies on MeFi). In Spain and Portugal, you can now buy it in stores, but the problem is that it’s “liquamen”, one of two different garum sauces, while the other, “garum sociorum”, remains a mystery. Grescoe posted a Twitter thread on how to make homemade liquamen. [via Cheryl Morgan]
“mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life”
The point is that longtermism might be one of the most influential ideologies that few people outside of elite universities and Silicon Valley have ever heard about. I believe this needs to change because, as a former longtermist who published an entire book four years ago in defence of the general idea, I have come to see this worldview as quite possibly the most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.–Against longtermism by Phil Torres, an essay about the dangers of a philosophical movement that prioritizes all future potential humans over actual living ones.
Norsing around the Atlantic
While just published evidence based on the rings of trees felled by Norse people in Canada has largely confirmed what we already know about medieval sailing in the North Atlantic, two recent finds have changed what we thought we knew. A recently published paper by medievalist Paulo Chiesa shows that knowledge of Labrador had reached as far south as Genoa and Milan in the 14th Century. And in a recent paper by ecologist Pedro Raposeira, evidence has been found of human habitation in the Azores before the archipelago’s discovery by the Portuguese in 1427, backing up findings from 2015 of Norse visitations of the Azores and Madeira from an unlikely source, mouse DNA. Biologist Jeremy Searle talked about the biological evidence with archaeologist Cat Jarman on the Gone Medieval podcast.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Abdulrazak Gurnah
Abdulrazak Gurnah is a novelist from Zanzibar who lives in Brighton, England. He is best known for his novel Paradise, but has published several novels. Anders Olsson, chairman of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee has written an essay about Gurnah, which has a good overview of his work. You can also read about him on the British Council's website, watch a long on-stage interview with him from 2013 at Writers Make Worlds, or read an essay about Gurnah as a post-colonial writer by Samir Jeraj.
How do I open a PKPass file on iPad?
I have an important travel document that I need to use next week. It is only available as a PKPass file. I need to open it on my iPad. Every guide I’ve found online tells me to open it in Apple Wallet, but it isn’t available for iPad, it seems. I have tried three different apps, but I can’t send the PKPass file from Files or Drive or Dropbox to any of them. How do I open a PKPass file on iPad?
“the alchemy of total opposites”
Soprano Jóna G. Kolbrúnardóttir sings Jóhann Jóhannsson’s “Odi et Amo” from the album Englabörn, accompanied by the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Usually when the piece is performed, the Latin poem by Catullus is sung by a computer and played off a tape.
“places where Real Life unfolded”
Anthony Veasna So explored what it was like to grow up as a queer son of Khmer refugees in Stockton, California. Last year he died suddenly at the age of 28, just after correcting the proofs of his debut story collection, Afterparties. Four of the nine stories can be found unpaywalled online, The Monks, Superking Son Scores Again, The Shop and Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts. He also wrote essays, including Manchester Street, about being sent to Khmer language classes as a kid, and Baby Yeah, a heartbreaking account of his friend who committed suicide and their shared love of the band Pavement. Equally heartbreaking is the reminiscence by his boyfriend Alex Torres about their relationship.
"archival practices have not changed much in over 4,000 years"
Ebla, the Official Site of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Syria gives details about the excavation of Ebla, the capital of a bronze age empire in what is now northern Syria which flourished in the third millennium BCE. Archaeologist Paolo Matthiae first explored the Tell Mardikh mound in 1963, but the site didn't receive global attention until 1975, when the discovery of Ebla's state archives was announced, an ancient library with over seventeen thousand clay tablets, casting light on life in Ebla. Outside the Ebla website, besides Wikipedia, there is historian Trevor Bryce's short overview of the history of Ebla, an interview with Matthiae from 1978 by Tor Eigeland, and archivist Greg Bradsher's essay about the Ebla archive and how it compares to modern archives.
"overlapping Earths along whose linking axis a person can somehow move"
In 1977 at a science fiction convention in Metz, France, Philip K. Dick delivered a lecture about his concept of orthogonal time titled "If You Find This World Bad You Should See Some of the Others". The audience was described as leaving the auditorium looking like they'd been hit with a hammer. The event was filmed, and you can see the whole thing complete with French interpretation (except for a sentence or two at the end) or a version with the translator cut out (and missing a bit of the intro). Or you can read the longer, unexpurgated essay online. On an episode of their podcast Weird Studies, J. F. Martel and Phil Ford put the lecture in context of Dick's life, and larger currents of thought. Finally, a comparatively normal interview with Dick was filmed in Metz (transcript here).
Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog archive is back online
“In 2010, at the age of 81, Ursula started a blog. 2017's No Time to Spare collected a selection of her posts into a book, and for a time, those posts were unavailable online. They've now been restored.” Here’s Le Guin’s introductory post. [via]
“The addition to your edition”
The TLS relaunched their podcast at the beginning of last winter, with hosts Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas. Usually the format is two interviews about an article each in each week’s issue, bracketing a couple of shorter items. Among the subjects covered are Christina de Pisan, Vivian Gornick and Dungeons & Dragons, Agatha Christie and the return of live opera and Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon’s relationship and Arsène Wenger. A word of warning, if you’re prone to buying books, every episode is like a trap set before you, just last Friday I ordered The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero which was discussed on last week’s episode, along with William Blake.
“English spelling is ridiculous”
These norms in the literacy of English speakers today are so well entrenched that simple adjustments are very jarring. If ai trai tu repreezent mai akshuel pronownseeayshun in raiteeng, yu kan reed it, but its difikelt and disterbeeng tu du soh. It just looks wrong, and that feeling of wrongness interrupts the flow of reading.–Typos, tricks and misprints is an essay by linguist Arika Okrent about why English spelling is so damn weird.
"The volcano… is not performing today."
Tom Scott tried to film an Icelandic volcano and it was a complete disaster (Fagradalsfjall eruption previously). Tom Scott is no stranger to Iceland, having made a number of YouTube videos there, including when he went to check whether the northernmost part of Iceland was still above water, why you can't swim between two continents, and that submerging yourself in power plant wastewater is sometimes a good idea.
Women Make SF Across the Media Universe
#WomenMakeSF is a project by Dr. Amy C. Chambers, where she intends to watch and review every feature film, short film and TV show created or co-created by a woman. She introduced the project in the blogpost Women Make Science Fiction: Gender is not a genre. There's also a podcast, cohosted by Dr. Lyle Skains, with eight episodes so far, which are most often discussions between Drs. Chambers and Skains about a small set of movies and a related topic. They have had two guests, Katie Heffner in a conversation about women in SF fandoms, and Cheryl Morgan, discussing trans representation across different forms of science fiction.
How widespread are shortages in groceries in the UK?
I saw an English journalist tweet about nearly empty grocery store shelves in the UK, and went looking for more news about it, and found this BBC report about its causes, as well as some news reports about industry worries. But I haven't found any reporting online about how widespread the problem is. I asked my sister who lives in London, and her local shop has been stocked as normal, except for certain fruits. Is this only a problem in some parts of the country, or is this a nationwide problem?
"We're not trying to say that the Matrix sequels are perfect"
The Matrix Sequels Are Good, Actually is a nearly two hour video essay by Eric Sophia and Sarah Zedig.
“It’s a bit harder with cats, because they’re made entirely out of cat.”
When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a few weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, so Adam initially took her garb to be a sign of precautionary vigilance. In fact, it was a disguise. “It’s so the crows don’t recognize me and—no offense—start associating me with you.”–The Crow Whisperer, by Lauren Markham.
“Welcome to a book guardian’s world”
A 20 minute documentary about the Reykjavík downtown library by Jiaqian Chen, who interviews staff and patrons, including a child, a musician, and a homeless person, and films various activities taking place on the first day the library opened after the latest Covid lockdown in Iceland. The interviews are in English, the narration is in Chinese, and everything is subtitled in English and Chinese.
“I’m past anger. I’m … I’m a little overwhelmed by the horror.”
Colette is a 25 minute documentary by Anthony Giacchino and Alice Doyard about a visit made by 90-year-old Colette Marin-Catherine, to the Nordhausen concentration camp where her brother died. They were both members of the Resistance. She is accompanied by 17-year-old history student Lucie Fouble. The film won the Oscar for best documentary short this year.
"I glanced back one more time, and that's when I noticed his legs moved"
Danny Stewart, 34, was late for dinner with his partner, Pete Mercurio, 32. The couple had met three years earlier through a friend in Pete's softball team. Later Danny had moved in with Pete and his flatmate, but on this summer evening he had been back to his sublet apartment in Harlem to pick up the post. As Danny was hurrying out of the station something caught his eye. "I noticed on the floor tucked up against the wall, what I thought was a baby doll," he says.– 'We found a baby on the subway - now he's our son' by Lucy Wallis. BBC Outlook episode on this story.
“In internet terms, UbuWeb is antediluvian”
Your hat sucks is an essay by Gill Partington about the venerable web repository of avant-garde literature and art, UbuWeb, and its founder Kenneth Goldsmith. She discusses and expands on her essay in a wide-ranging podcast interview with Thomas Jones.
The History of English Literature from Sumeria Onwards
Literature and History is a podcast by Dr. Doug Metzger about the literature of the English speaking world from the year 2000 BCE until … well, in the five years since he's now up to 300 CE, and in about a year's time, in episode 100, he'll get to the first Anglo-Saxon books. The plan is to cover all the major influences on Anglophone literature, and the main influences on those influences, before diving into literature written in that language. The episodes are generally between an hour and two hours and half long, and leaven serious literary history with jokes and silly songs. All episodes have transcripts and quizzes available, and if you've listened to all the free episodes, 84 so far, you can also buy some more. [via Emma Hine in The Paris Review]