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"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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
"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]
Hebrew recital of the Scroll of Cham-Steam in the manner of the Megillah
Megilat Ḥam-Ed — the Scroll of the Steamed Portions of Cham — And this scroll, the Scroll of Cham-Steam, was written and sealed by the hand of Isaac Harel son of Jael and Abraham Meir the priest, in the thirty-second year of the family of the sons of Simp. May the lord be unto us a help, a help!
"the more elusive aspects of human experience"
Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos by Aisling McCrea is an essay exploring how, in contemporary society, people want explanations that are "materially and logically and scientifically true", and ignore "non-literal or non-rational parts of our understanding of what is true: rituals, customs, superstition, storytelling, art, and transcendent experiences". She especially focuses on people's relationship with art, quoting Dan Olson's video essay Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor to explain how you can miss the deeper meaning of a piece of art, if you seek to explain everything logically.
A Chinese Gazetteer of Foreign Lands
This country is filled with light and is where the sun goes down. In the evening, when the sun enters the city, it makes a rumbling sound louder than thunder. So they always station a thousand men at the city gates to blow trumpets and beat gongs and drums to drown out the noise of the sun. If not, then pregnant women and small children would die of fright upon hearing the sun.—From the Zhufan Zhi, a geography of Asia, the east and north coasts of Africa, and bits of Europe, written in 1225 CE by Zhao Rukuo. Part one has been translated by Prof. Shao-yun Yang of Denison University.
"she makes a bid for her sanity, one sentence at a time"
Maeve Brennan was a writer on staff at the New Yorker for three decades from 1949 onwards, but remained almost entirely unknown in her native Ireland, until years after her death in 1993. Her belated return home started with an article by Fintan O'Toole in 1998, reviewing the short story collection The Springs of Affection, then recently published in the US. Eighteen years later, that collection was republished in Ireland, with an introduction by Anne Enright. A biography, a novella, and a collection of her Talk of the Town pieces have been published in the last couple of decades, and now she's slowly entering the Irish canon.
“She do the bereaved in different voices”
A Part Song is a poem by Denise Riley about the death of her son from cardiomyopathy in adulthood. Poet Ange Mlinko wrote an essay about Riley in the latest issue of the London Review of Books, which she discussed with Joanne O’Leary on the LRB podcast, in a conversation that ranged from Riley’s poetry to their personal experiences of losing loved ones. You can listen to Riley read A Part Song either in the first link or on the LRB podcast.
Poems in a Scottish Setting
The Poetry Map of Scotland has more than 350 poems, each linked to a specific place in Scotland. The map is a standard Google map, and you can zoom in and click on the title of poems, which takes you to the poem itself. The map is a project of the Stanza Poetry Festival, and the poems have been submitted by living poets.
“The blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds.”
50 years ago today, it was decided that half a ton of dynamite was the best tool to deal with the carcass of a Pacific Gray Whale that had washed up on the beaches of Florence, Oregon. The famous “exploding whale” news report from KATU has been remastered and put on YouTube in 4k. [previously]
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Louise Glück
American poet Louise Glück is the Nobel Laureate for 2020. You can read her poetry in various places online, such as at the website of the Poetry Foundation and the New Yorker. Dan Chiasson profiled her for the latter in 2012. Modern American Poetry has a couple of interviews with her online.
The World Is Finally Ready for Beverly Glenn-Copeland
[Glenn-Copeland] also belongs […] in the tiny group of people whose lives could be a realistic inspiration for a young, queer artist today. I wanted to know how he did it: How did he make it to 76 years old so completely unjaded? As a young person, he explained, “I was very independent of what other people thought. I didn’t really care.” It was only in his teens that he learned psychiatrists considered queer desire “to be an emotional disease.” But he “never gave it two thoughts. I just considered they were out to lunch.”– From a biographical essay about Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his music by Josephine Livingstone.
"a fascinating and uncelebrated ancient people the world has forgotten"
In the Land of Kush by Isma'il Kushkush, with photos by Matt Stirn, is an essay about the kingdom on the Nile that was the southern neighbor of Pharaonic Egypt. If you want to see more photos, Valerian Guillot has put pictures from his 2016 trip online. The Kushites spoke Meriotic, which had two scripts. Ibrahim M. Omer's Ancient Sudan website has a wealth of information about the history, people and the land of Kush. Archaeological excavations keep unearthing new material. Charles Q. Choi wrote about a recent find of Meroitic inscriptions and in 2009 Geoff Emberling wrote about the race to explore sites which were submerged when the Merowe Dam was constructed.
Master KG – Jerusalema (feat. Nomcebo Zikode)
In February, Fenomenos do Semba, an Angolan dance studio, posted a video of members line dancing to the track while carrying their plates of food and eating. The video gave the song a whole new lease of life as a pan-African African pop anthem. The Angolan clip kicked off the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge across the continent and soon beyond from nuns and monks in France, to a bridal party in Zimbabwe, and a flash mob in Germany–How South Africa’s “Jerusalema” became a pan-African hit, then a global dance favorite by Norma Young. Here is the video for Master KG’s and Nomcebo’s Jerusalema, and here is Burna Boy’s remix. [via Chisomo Kalinga, PhD]
“I know you’re going through sorrow, but babe, there’s always tomorrow”
Since April of this year Neil Sedaka has been posting mini-concerts nearly every day to his YouTube channel, and has recorded over a hundred videos of himself playing the piano and singing. Besides that, he did a parody version of one of his best known songs, Masking Up Is Not Hard to Do.
"the mighty builders, perished and fallen"
Fall of Civilizations is a podcast by historian and novelist Paul M. M. Cooper about societies which collapsed. So far he's taken on Roman Britain, the Bronze Age, Ancient Mayans, the Norse in Greenland, the Khmer Empire, Easter Island, the Songhai Empire, Sumer, the Aztecs, the Han Dynasty and Byzantium. Besides the usual places for podcasts, the first eight episodes are also available on YouTube as video documentaries.
“People didn’t need neighbors anymore … now they had money“
Most people now described themselves as Falkland Islanders first and British second, but it was hard to say what that meant. Britishness was easy to proclaim—the Union Jacks, the red post boxes. Symbols were enough because everybody knew what Britain was, and there was too much of it to capture, anyway. But what a Falkland Islander was, was harder to describe.– How Prosperity Transformed the Falklands by Larissa MacFarquhar, with photos by Maroesjka Lavigne.
Hunnu Rock
Wolf Totem and Yuve Yuve Yu have racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube, which isn’t bad for Mongolian folk metal band. The HU released their first album, The Gereg, last year. Their YouTube channel has all kinds of content, from a benefit concert for Covid-19 relief in Mongolia, to HU’s in the Kitchen, a series of food-making videos by various members of the band and crew. The band sings in Mongolian and aims its message at a Mongolian audience, but interpreters in the west have wondered about their politics. Mongolia experts Niels Hegewisch and Julian Dierks did a deep dive on that topic (tl;dr not fascist). For a good introduction to The HU, read Katya Cengel’s NPR piece and an interview with the band by Jim Farber in The Guardian.
“Tell your friends that the Vikings are gay”
Vikings Are Gay is a podcast about Norse culture and history from a queer perspective by Old Norse scholar Amy Jeffords Franks. Besides an introductory episode, so far she’s touched on the subjects of bottom shaming and female magic, Odin’s gender, Thor having to act the role of the bride, and an episode in response to Black Lives Matter about the links between Viking studies and white supremacy.
“Deceit is my life-partner, the only one I need”
Number 1 tops the chart in a ridiculously strong year for music releases
The 100 greatest UK No 1 singles is a Guardian listicle ranking songs that reached the top of the UK singles chart from the 1950s until today. But there is much more than just the list, including essays by Guardian critics about each track in the top twenty.
“For those with a taste for the peculiar”
The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is the blog of curator and art historian, Dr. Chelsea Nichols. The collection includes such treasures as sexy weasels in Renaissance art, how to scare children in the 1920s, and hidden mothers in Victorian portraits. There are also occasional guest posts, on topics including Ivan Bilibin’s Illustrations of Russian folklore by Claire Atwater, Robert Liston, a surgeon and a showman by Mike Crump, and a make-your-own-bat-colony activity sheet by Alice Fennessy.