mhuzzell: (Nasher)
O hai LJ. Sorry I've been away so long. I've even failed in my stated intention to mirror the things I post up on mhuzzell.wordpress.com. I'll catch up on that at some point soon (though I'll probably back-date them, so I don't know whether that would put them in your feeds or not).

In the meantime, here's a half-formed set of musings about a film I watched a month ago, pulled from the clutter of half-formed writings that are currently languishing all over my desktop:

I have finally (finally!) watched 'Mononoke Hime', and I have a lot of Thoughts and Feelings about it )
mhuzzell: (Default)
Having listened to Maddy Prior & June Tabor's album 'Silly Sisters' several times at work the other day, I found myself with their version of Geordie stuck in my head -- only, annoyingly, I couldn't remember all the words, so had just snippets. Thinking to exorcise it through fuller knowledge, I opened up a songbook, Rise Up Singing, that I knew to have a version of it, to scan the lyrics.

Now, I am no stranger to folk music; I'm well aware that there are about a bajillion versions of every song, especially older ones, and that they vary considerably in both words and music. This, however, was a broader divergence than I ever would have expected. The very story changes dramatically! The basic story of a man called Geordie being condemned, and then his wife coming to beg for his life is the same, but they diverge in almost evey other aspect. And I know they are supposedly the same song, as well, since the songbook lists the 'Silly Sisters' album as an example recording!

In Prior & Tabor's (which turned out to be this version, originally transcribed by Robert Burns), Geordie was a nobleman framed for the murder of another. His lady rides to court and is told his life will be spared if she collects a ginormous ransom, which she does, and so buys his freedom. In the Rise Up Singing version -- as in most other, especially English versions, it turns out -- Geordie is a poacher, and when his wife comes to beg for his freedom, she is turned away, and he dies. Talk about alternate endings!

A musician, identified only as 'Ian' in this Mudcat thread describes his own recording of the song as "an English song about a disproportionate punishment for a crime which evolved from a Scottish song about a frame-up". The Scottish versions do seem to generally pre-date the English ones (though they also seem to have become less common), and I guess changing the condemned man to reflect a common-ish crime in your area, for which the punishment is widely seen as vastly unjust, does make a sort of sense. As, given the former, does having him actually die rather than get ransomed at the last minute. But at this point, is it even still the same song? Could there have been some other English song (or several) that got morphed into this one because the tune was catchy and the story was distilled and familiar?

Oddly, this recording by Ewan MacColl seems to combine elements of several versions, but seems mostly drawn from this one, known as Gight's Ladye. Geordie's wife is still a noblewoman of some sort, but Geordie's crime is poaching. She isn't turned away out of hand, though, and goes through with the begging for ransom money as in the other Scottish versions. However, it seems to me that her success in this is left ambiguous while the narrator is distracted by telling the tale of her verbal harrassment by a bawdy lord. Though, granted, my impression of ambiguity could merely be from an inferior understanding of Scots; it's certainly not ambiguous in the 'Gight's Ladye' version given on Mudcat. But why this "Bog o' Gight" stuff? Well, a little googling proved illuminating: 'Bog-Of-Gight' is an old name for Gordon Castle, and the earliest historical event to be associated with this song/set of songs was the story of a George Gordon, who would have been lord of said castle at the time -- although the actual events of his life, at least as given on Wikipedia, don't quite line up with the song, and they CERTAINLY don't line up with the 'Gight's Ladye' version, though at a stretch they could be described by Burns' 'Geordie'.

So what is going on here? It seems unlikely that an earl -- who'd have his own hunting preserves, after all -- would be brought up for poaching. Yet the 'Gight's Ladye' version preserves an awful lot of specific names and places, far more than Burns' 'Geordie'. Could the crime have been changed to make the song more populist in one area, while in another the events were recorded more faithfully even as the names all dropped away? It's nearly impossible to tell. Though for those who feel like making minute comparisons between versions (woefully void of any information about where or when or how they were collected), it turns out Wiki has transcriptions of all of Child's collections.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the Burns/Child A version. In it, Geordie is framed (or blamed for the death, anyway, regardless of guilt), and his lady, upon receiving the news of his captivity, rushes to Edinburgh with all of her men. Later on, after she's made her tearful case to the king, but before the aged lord suggests a fine instead of death, we get this verse, which on first listen seems to break the pattern of the story considerably:

The Gordons cam and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady;
And ay the word amang them a'
Was, Gordons keep you ready.

Then we see the king's advisor suggesting that a fine might be the wiser course of action. Because this lady brought a freaking army with her to "beg" for her dearie's life. Conclusion: the 'fairest flower o' woman-kind' is a lot more badass than you might expect.
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I was born in the '80s, which means I was a child during the '90s. I remember them, but with the perspective of a child; I saw things on the news; I overheard grownups and parroted their opinions. I didn't start to become politically aware in my own right until the early '00s, and didn't start to become an 'activist' until midway through university, by which point the "Coalition of the Willing" was deeply entrenched in Iraq. My first exposure to the broad Left, then, was the Stop the War movement. (I was also involved, actually rather more heavily, in an Injustice of the Day student campaigning group, but as they were mostly of an age with me, they didn't have the depth of campaign experience that is relevant for what I want to discuss here.)

StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the 'Identity Politics of the '90s', which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the '90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like 'political correctness' and 'affirmative action' were forever on everyone's lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word -- their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like "The End of History".

However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn't there in the '90s, and therefore can't really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women's safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like "let's not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the '90s did", I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the '90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The '90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other "yes that's what I've been saying all along" fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren't a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn't really "there".
mhuzzell: (Default)
Day 22 – Favorite book you own

I'm afraid my answer here is unavoidably sappy. In 10th and 11th grades I had an English teacher who I really liked and looked up to, and also a teenagey obsession with Hamlet -- and one year she gave me a book of Hamlet criticism as an out-of-the-blue Christmas gift. Poem Unlimited, by Harold Bloom, inscribed to my "happy future scholarship". Of course, since I didn't actually pursue that line of scholarship, I don't know things like 'where it is situated in the body of criticism', but I enjoyed reading it and have cherished it as a sentimental physical possession, even as I grew out of my Hamlet obsession.

Honorable Mentions go to:

- Another book that I was given as a surprise present, but told not to mention on certain parts of the internet. ;-)

- The Knot-Shop Man by David Whiteland. It came out shortly after Harry and I finished one of his earlier projects, Planetarium (more commonly known in this journal as 'the best thing on the internet'), so despite the expense of being four hardbacks in a small print run, we decided we had to buy it. Then, Harry being who he is and Davide Whiteland being who he is, and they both being in London at the time, Harry arranged to pick up the parcel from him in some elaborate detective-costumed exchange in a museum, rather than getting it posted. Which is just awesome, as is the book.

Upcoming Days )

Kalea is back in Scotland for like three days, so today we're making a long-planned day-trip to St Andrews, and the weather looks like it's going to be awful. Gusty, cold and drizzly all day long. However, looking at the weather, I was amused to see the temperature forecast jump up a degree for every leap north made on the map. Edinburgh: 11 °C; Leuchars: 12 °C; Dundee: 13 °C.
mhuzzell: (Default)
Day 13 – Your favorite writer

As seems to be the case with most of my answers, I'm not sure I really have one. I like a lot of different authors a lot, and there are certainly some I could name as favourites in particular areas. David Foster Wallace has my favourite prose style. Katharine Kerr does my favourite world-building. Joseph Heller provided my favourite neologism / metaphor for my frequent angst. &c. But an overall favourite? That is tough.

I mean, should this be the person whose work I have most consistently enjoyed (the oft-mentioned David Whiteland), or the author of the book I like the most? And if the latter, how on earth do I pick from my full two-hands-ful of favourite books to select a favourite author? Well, I think I might have a guess. I'm gonna say: John Steinbeck. Even though I don't love, or even like, all the things of his I've read -- and, he having been so prolific, haven't read even close to everything he wrote -- but because:

a) He's the only author who has written more than one (fully two) of the books I consistently name when asked to list my favourite books

b) Looking ahead in the meme, those are going to be the books I'll want to name as answers to later questions, for consistency's sake. Because apparently I care about intra-meme consistency now.


Upcoming Days )

In non-book-meme news, it seems to have become autumn now. The festivals are over, Edinburgh is breathing a collective sigh of relief, the previously-mentioned buddlejas have retreated their pretty purple blossoms from their long brown fingers that poke (now ominously once more) over the walls of abandoned lots, and the weather has turned cold again. Not cold-cold, to be fair, but pretty damn nippy. And it is still August, at least for the rest of today. WTF, Scotland?

There are some ways in which central NC weather and east-coast lowland Scotland weather are not that different. In both cases, winter is short and changeable and generally only lasts from December to January. Autumn stays autumnal well through November, and the winter breaks and things start blooming in February. However, while NC summer lasts from about March through October, Scottish summer lasts from about July to July (if that). Just a long long spring and a long long autumn. Some years, the winter's so mild and the summer's so cool that it feels like the years just fade from spring to autumn and back again.

... I have more Thoughts about the weather, but I have to go to work -- lucky you!
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
There's been some recent patter over at [livejournal.com profile] aberwyn's journal about cultural ideas of male and female sexuality and the differences therein, &c., where she characterised evolutionary psych as follows:

"The method is simple: find a characteristic you want to define as Male or Female. Make up a plausible story to explain it. Make sure you set your story so far in the past that it's impossible to prove or disprove it. Write a book about it! Must be real then."

So, the game! Take a characteristic typically seen as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Now switch genders, and make up a plausible-sounding explanation for why we "evolved" such a trait. Here's some I prepared earlier:

- Female promiscuity is an evolutionary adaptation, because the male that makes the best caretaker is not necessarily the one that will provide the strongest & best genes for her offspring.*

- Men tend to have a higher linguistic and emotional intelligence than women, because while hunting in a group it's important to have tight social cohesion; whereas women tend to have a higher spatial/mathematical intelligence, which in our prehistoric past helped them remember where to gather plants.

- Men naturally prefer pink, because of the pinkening of female lips and vulvas which indicates sexual arousal and therefore availability. Women naturally prefer blue because it is calming to their histrionic temperaments.**

* I've seen this argument advanced to explain the extramarital affairs of usually-monogamous birds -- but this recent study on zebra finches indicates that it's probably just that the genes responsible for a greater tendency towards promiscuity are heritable by both sexes.

** That last bit's a joke, obvi. (I mean, all of this is a joke, but still), but OMG you guys do you remember a few years ago when some British evolutionary psychologists proposed that women "naturally" prefer pink because of gathering berries, while men "naturally" prefer blue because of hunting under an open sky? THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS. AND IT GOT IN ALL THE PAPERS. And then a whole bunch of historians/anthropologists/people from non-Western cultures were like "Um, guys, you know that particular set of general colour preferences is very specific to your place and time, right? And it doesn't hold true around the world and it was even reversed in your own culture a hundred years ago, mmkay? Yeah? No, evidently not."
mhuzzell: (Default)
After an overnight drive down from chilly Massachusetts, I am back in North Carolina for a week, and oh my goodness it is lovely. Not just because the weather right now is comparable to a warm summer day in Scotland, but to be back among the trees at what must be their most beautiful time of year. I've written at (possibly excessive) length, in the past, about how much I miss being around trees all the time. It's hard to describe most of the time, but with their added aspect of seasonal beauty, it suddenly seems easier.

Autumn trees are lovely everywhere you go, of course, but in many places they're a view you come upon exceptionally: pretty little stands of trees on suburban lanes and in city parks and gardens. The UK countryside is stripped almost bare. Here, though, you can look in any direction, anywhere you go, and unless you are looking at some particular human edifice, or the ocean, you will be met by a stunningly beautiful array of orange, yellow, and dark red leaves, picked out by the dark green of loblolly pines and the light green of deciduous leaves that have not yet turned. Everywhere you look. Even in the awful awful suburbs, most of the time.

Even in the awful awful suburbs, though, there are little forest parks. The city of Raleigh has exterminated nearly all of its woodlands, but on the grounds of its newly remodeled art museum, it has put down trails and interspersed art installations among some of its remaining trees. My dad and brother and I went and walked around them yesterday. It was very pretty, although most of the installations were unremarkable -- with two exceptions. In one, the artist had painted designs inspired by European floral patterns (as usually seen in cloth) onto the pavement of the paths, and according to the sign, beneath the final obscuring coat of paint they'd written out the names of all the invasive species of plants now local to the area.

The other was more remarkable, if somewhat less thought-provoking. Named the "Cloud Chamber", it was a low hut set under a fairly open stand of trees, small and round, with nothing inside except three benches set against the white-painted walls. We entered by ducking through a small door, and upon closing it found ourselves in what seemed like total darkness, but for a pinprick of light coming in from the peak of the roof. As our eyes adjusted, though, we began to see the shadowy impressions of leaves and branches on the walls, which brightened and sharpened as our pupils dilated further. They were the branches high above, refracted down through the tiny hole like the exposure in a pinhole camera. It was, to put it simply, really, really cool.

We had not intended to go into the museum itself, but ended up going in briefly, towards the end of our visit. I hadn't been in since it was remodelled, and it was weird to see the collections of paintings and statues I'd grown up visiting and was so accustomed to seeing in their older, more traditional settings set around the new, very modern, brightly lit, open-plan museum. I was also interested to see a new collection they'd added (a "generous donation from the Hearst family"), which consisted of several artifacts of various antiquity from western and central Africa -- interested not just in the objects themselves, but in how they were displayed.

It seems customary for most American and European museums, when displaying items whose specific origin is unkown, to merely list the geographic and temporal origins of the piece. These provided this information, but on every single piece, using the same format as the info cards accompanying the modern paintings and sculptures, in the space for the artist's name they'd written 'Artist Unknown'. Explicitly displaying each piece, then, not as a cultural artifact but as a piece of art, the work of an individual, albeit an uknown one.

I was reflecting happily on this* when I turned the corner to find a display of the museum's older collection of ancient Greek and Roman statues, and saw that they had not been similarly labelled -- their info cards merely stated the name of the statue and what was known of its geographic and temporal origins. This is, of course, quite usual, as mentioned, but in a museum that was making such and effort to mark out the forgotten artists in its other collections, the double standard was jarring. Is it simply that "everyone knows" that a marble statue will have been sculpted by an artist, and thus the fact of the artist's existence, and our ignorance of their identity, need not be mentioned -- yet the artists themselves are a forgotten element in the shaping of the captured artworks we've looted from the places we've conquered? Probably so. But I can't help but think the point would've been driven further home by including the 'artist unknown' label on the pieces of murky European antiquity, and not just African.

* Though with qualifying thoughts about the veneration of 'the artist' and concepts about "what makes art art". 'Art' as 'item produced by an artist' (as opposed to, e.g., and artisan or lay person), for example. But that is another story.
mhuzzell: (Default)
I'm visiting the US in November, almost on a whim (or, on an urge as whim-like as a transatlantic trip can ever be, which except perhaps for the very rich is not very). I'm getting more and more excited the more I think about it. Not just to see my family, but also because I realised that I haven't been home in autumn in years.

It was always my favourite season, back home. Here, where there are few trees and the summer is bright but intermittent and cool, autumn feels like little more than a closing down of the most recent year's attempt at fecund verdancy -- and even that is confused by the fact that the grass, which accounts for a large part of the greenness, stays bright green all year 'round. Autumn is a season for bracing, for withdrawing, for sloping down the long dark hill of winter.

But in a temperate forest, autumn is glorious. Early autumn, in particular -- when the trees are just starting to turn and the summer berries are still left hanging, overripe or shrivelled on the bushes after a long hot summer -- feels restful and welcome, like lying down after a heavy meal. And the leaves are beautiful, and the woods smell wonderful.

Oddly enough, just thinking about how nice a forest autumn is has me focusing on the beauty of the few trees around me this year, and actually enjoying the season rather than dreading it as in past years. I'm going to miss the early autumn at home, but I can at least enjoy it here. There's a cycle path near my house that's set down in a shallow ravine, with trees on either side, where you can almost pretend you're in a forest. I find it immeasurably restorative; I miss forests so much.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
Growing up, the idea of this holiday always bothered me. Something about a day of feasting devoted, even according to its own mythology, to celebrating the initial generosity of a group of people who were later systematically exploited by the very people they'd helped just never sat quite right with me.

Then, when I was fourteen, I went to a hippie school who I thought might take a similar viewpoint to mine, and maybe boycott the whole affair, but instead they made an even bigger fuss over Thanksgiving than any other group I'd yet encountered. Their view of it was more abstract; not much to do with the history of the holiday, and a lot to do with being thankful for various things. It was essentially a harvest festival, which made a lot of sense for a community that grew most of its own vegetables.

My next school (which, incidentally, also produced a lot of food for itself) took a similar view, and by this time I was happy enough to go along with it -- but since graduating, I've slipped back into my old views of things. It helps that I've spent every Thanksgiving since graduation in the UK. I just can't separate the holiday's meaning from exploitation and genocidal wars in my mind, and so I've mostly done my best to ignore it.

All the same, I've been feeling the lack of a harvest festival. Especially here, where by November it gets SO DARK SO EARLY, and the sun rises so late. They say that mid-winter holidays like Christmas are important because of the light levels and the turning of the year and such -- and to keep people's spirits up through the cold dark winter -- but I find November far bleaker than December. Sure, December is the darkest month, but it's also the month when things start to turn and become light again. November is just a rapid decline into darkness.

That, and I'm homesick. I miss my family, and I miss the food of the US at this time. I've been having cravings for gourds that simply aren't available here -- the vast arrays of heirloom squashes and such that are so readily available back home. Pecans. Sweet potatoes. Sure, the latter are available here, but they're somehow not quite as nice when divorced from the context of family and feasting. It seems like there ought to be some sort of celebration happening to stave off the cold and darkness. Maybe not Thanksgiving, but something.

Rambles

Oct. 6th, 2009 02:09 pm
mhuzzell: (Default)
I'm in London -- or rather, Loughton -- visiting Harry at East 15. He's in classes from 10-4, and for what feels like the first time in my life, I have literally nothing I need to be doing. (Apart from looking at jobs websites, of course, but I check those at least every other day anyway, and new vacancies are not going to disappear within 24 hours of being posted.) But no reading, no coursework, not even any activisty things, since I'm still new enough on the Edinburgh scene that I wasn't able to take on any of the recent tasks that needed doing, since they all required some local logistical knowledge I don't yet have.

Sadly, freeing though I suppose it is, I'm just a bit bored. Not that I haven't been feeling the same listlessness up in Edinburgh -- that's primarily why I haven't been posting much -- but at least up there there are always minor life details that need attending to, so I am seldom so completely at a loss. Here, I would walk in the forest (beautiful beautiful Epping Forest, old lovely REAL deciduous forest! Trees like I've missed with the whole of my being) but it's been too rainy. It was sunny on Sunday, and Harry and I took a little walk through the edge nearest his house, but we had to cut it short to head into London to catch a play.

I've a book I could read, too, but that feels lonely, and I crave at least imagined interaction. Hence my coming to the East 15 computer lab to suckle onto the warm breast of the internet. Such was my intention, anyway. In reality, as I write this, I'm sitting in Harry's room on his internetless laptop; I'll USB the file and upload it when I go, but for now I'm waiting for the rain to die down. For most of the morning, the sky had been clear-misting in that funny sort of way where it's not really raining but everything gets wet (there's a Scottish word for that -- of course there is -- but I've forgotten it), but about five minutes before I meant to set out, it started really pouring. I suppose it's a good thing, since otherwise I'd have been caught in it, but it still places me here and dry rather than wet and online (to be honest, I'm not sure which one I'd prefer).

The other option, of course, is to be writing something. I'm writing this, of course, but I mean writing creatively. Or at least thoughtfully, in some structured way and for more than a few paragraphs at a time. Lately the only writing I've done has been on message boards, and since that's usually spontaneous and discursive, it tends to be less structured and less well thought-out, and thus has only served to make me hyper-aware of all the flaws in my style, without necessarily highlighting any way by which I might improve it. That is, I can see what I'm doing wrong, or over-doing (and I can see it here!) but short of picking throuh every single sentence, I'm not sure how to improve it. I use far too many linking words; while I believe in beginning sentences with conjunctions where appropriate, I do it all the freaking time. I think I've been using it as a crutch, and I'm tiring of it. I also include far too many parenthetical asides, right there in the sentences rather than tidied away into their own sentences -- and I write, with or without these asides, such long and unweildy sentences. Seventeenth-century sentences, or maybe Eighteenth, sprawling out along the page, so over-gorged with clauses they can barely stand on their own twelve feet.

What, though, can I do to stop myself? (And you see that 'though' is another of those not-strictly-necessary linking words, stitching up my prose with a complex overlock, when all it really needs is a little tacking to hold it together. And there again is that unnecessary 'and', which is two faults in one; and there again, and here. And this whole three-sentence point is itself parenthetical.) Do you notice it, Dear Readers*? Or have you suddenly been made hyper-aware of my flawed prose, like I am? Are you now looking over this whole passage thinking 'oh yeah, I see what she meant there, oh and there she did it again'? Or am I just whinging into an overly self-critical void, and making myself boring in the process?

The sun's come out. Maybe I'll go take a walk in the forest after all.


* A pretentious (if ancient) convention in itself, though in this case a self-conscious one. I like it. It helps me to simultaneously imagine that vast numbers of unknown people are reading this (thus making it worthwhile) and, by its very over-the-top pretentiousness, that my entire audience is actually imaginary, despite all evidence to the contrary, thus making the whole exercise of writing this journal unintimidating enough for me to actually do it candidly.

Travelin's

Jul. 2nd, 2009 10:52 am
mhuzzell: (Default)
I'm in Brugge, on a congratulations-on-graduating holiday with my mother (who also just graduated, finished her MBA), and my little brother. Enjoying the hell out of the weather. There's been a heat wave all across Europe, which in Scotland translates to t-shirt weather (mostly) during the days, and not-so-chilly-as-usual at night. But here in Belgium, it's actually properly hot, and I don't even need a coat at night! I have been trying to buy a pair of sandals; I've lived so long in the cold that I don't even own any anymore. Still haven't acquired them though, since as usual I fail at shopping.

I'm loving the sights as well. The medieval architecture, yes, and the canals, but also the cultural elements. I have seen several fantastic beards and moustaches, so many that I am wondering if there is some sort of convention happening. We took a touristy boat ride, and the French tourist across from us in the boat had an excellent handlebar moustache, and, as though to emphasise it, wore a shirt featuring a silhouetted longhorn steer. Yesterday we passed a sex shop on the high street, and then a few doors down saw an apparently unrelated chocolate shop whose window display featured three sets of life-sized chocolate breasts.

At the Groeninge Museum, they had a special exhibition about Charles the Bold and the 15th-Century Burgundian court, where I marvelled at the ideology in the information plaques as much as at the displays and artifacts themselves. The descriptions of the extravagant clothes and jewelry were almost more anthropological than historical, describing how the nobles used extravagant displays of wealth to 'legitimise' their power. Most of the descriptions were subtly critical of the legitimacy of monarchal rule in principle, though I'm not sure I could explain precisely how. In a way it seems like that's what one should expect from any modern display of late medieval artifacts, but most that I've seen have simply celebrated the splendour.

The whole thing reminded me of a D&D campaign I've been playing lately, in which the DM is a medieval history scholar and has set our party in Eastern Europe in the same period. We are a party of nobles, and our character alignments ranged from Neutral to Lawful Good (I am playing a Paladin) -- but the whole campaign has emphasised that the life of the nobility is inherently characterised by evil acts. Our characters have been sent out on campaigns to sack towns (on Christmas Eve!) and murder whole monasteries, and thus have grown steadily more Evil until we were railroaded into becoming vampires. In our splendid clothes and shining armour. Oh yes.
mhuzzell: (Default)
I turned in my dissertation on the 17th. I turned in my final essay last Wednesday. So while I am not quite free as a bird -- I still have classes and tutorial readings, of course, and later there will be exams -- I am not nearly so stressed as I have been most of the year. Also, my sister is visiting, and we've been going to Halfcut and plays and things for the last few days of the On the Rocks festival.

The days have been gorgeous, too -- today is chilly, but I will forgive it. The weather is always a bit changeable at this time of year. Spring here seems almost as long as winter, brimming up in fits and starts in late February then dipping and wandering up and up until we pass the equinox, and the weather begins a slow but steadier warming turn. Right now we're entering yet another phase of blossoming. In our scruffy little garden this means another flush of daisies, along with phlox and something thick little bell-shaped things that may or may not be some sort of bluebell. Elsewhere, lilacs have started blooming, joining azaleas and violets and big red tulips, and several other garden flowers I can't identify. Along the burn, the trees have all turned white with blossoms and are dropping petals everwhere. Yesterday morning I saw a pair of ducklings nestling under their mother, the first I've seen all year.

On which note, you should all check out this comic, which is the sweetest thing I've read in a long while.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
Yesterday something happened to me that I don't think is supposed to happen with internet conversations. Though, on consideration, maybe it should.

See, St Andrews has this unofficial online message board for its students. It's called 'The Sinner' in reference to our student newspaper, 'The Saint', but the name is apt enough for its general contents. Besides hosting a few boards for practical things like finding accommodation or buying and selling kicknacks and appliances, its main purpose seems to be as an outlet for the pedantic misanthropy of our overly conservative, overly nerdy student population. I'm sure many of the people who post regularly there, even the more trollish ones, are lovely(ish) people in real life -- indeed, I know several of them personally -- but the standard modes of discourse on the main message board have a way of turning even the politest and most civil people into snide assholes. Myself included, apparently.

An acquaintaince, J, and I had both been posting on a very long and heated thread regarding the recent Gaza Solidarity occupation. I'd posted something in response to one of his posts, which had then progressed into a dialogue between me and another person. He had then made a snarky post reiterating his former points, and referencing the invervening dialogue only in such a way as to totally misconstrue it. I made a snide comment in response.

The next day, passing through the stairwell doors in the library, I saw him face to face. He looked hurt; he blanked me. Later that evening, looking at the thread again, and the timestamps, I saw that he'd made a reply to my snide comment only a few minutes before passing me on the stairs.
mhuzzell: (Crabby)
This year, all of H.P. Lovecraft's work came into the public domain, eliciting a flurry of geekery among, well, the geeks. Harry took the opportunity to stage the first-ever play of 'Call of Cthulhu', and filled the house with Lovecraft paraphernelia, including various radio plays which he aired for our general enjoyment. I hadn't read much Lovecraft before, but it wasn't long before the themes common to most of his stories became glaringly apparant. In almost all of the ones I read or listened to, some curious person delves just a little too deeply into some secret knowledge of the ancient horrors of the world, and concludes that it were better they were never known.

It seems a bit cowardly to me, this approach. To say that just because something is horrible, it is better that it never be known; surely the opposite is true? It is like taking up the floorboards in your house, to find them damp and festering with rot and maggots underneath -- and then rushing to lay them back down again because the sight is too horrible to contemplate. Or high-risk investment banking running the global financial system down to the wires, then the public governments rushing to use public money to bail them out, because the sight of their failure is too terrible to look upon, and the idea of a fundamental change to the system is forbidden to even contemplate. Cowards.

And yet, in 'Call of Cthulhu', we hear of a sailor going mad -- instantly mad -- at the mere sight of the full spectre of the great sea monster in his ancient underwater city. I feel similarly when trying to contemplate the systems that capitalism has constructed for itself, this great imaginary city of justifications, a R'lyeh of contorted philosophies, where the geometry is all wrong. These capitalists, the CEOs, the ruling classes at the top, traded back and forth between corporations and the IMF, cannot possibly see the damage their actions are creating. They just can't. I don't believe that any person, much less a whole class of people, could be so coldly evil. No, I think they must simply be deluding themselves with the justifications -- socialised into us all from birth, after all -- that prop up capitalist modes of production. The idea that, somehow, the private greed and massive prosperity of a few can bring happiness and prosperity to all. The rising tide that lifts all boats. The 'trickle-down' effect. "Reaganomics." They must genuinely believe it all, somehow.

'Call of Cthulhu' begins by stating that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." Surely, surely, it is only through such mechanisms that those with power can keep up such actions. Unfortunately, unlike Lovecraft's secret ancient horror knowledge, in this case it would certainly be better if all involved could see just what is going on.
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
Now that the election is good and over -- now that the Almighty Barack Obama has been officially accepted as Saviour Elect, and the faithful across the world lift their voices to the sky to sing His praises -- and, more importantly for my purposes, now that North Carolina has finally called its very close race in favour of Obama, I can share this bit of news that brought me great pleasure, even a little pride, a few days ago.

I had been surfing the news sites (breaking several promises to myself), looking for articles on the election. I stumbled onto this article, which describes how the columnist's Obama-stickered car was keyed outside a gym. Its tone was optimistic, saying that such petty intimidation tactics indicated a sort of juvenile desperation on the part of Obama's Republican detractors. The commenter linked his experience to an apparant wave of anti-Obama vandalism, detailed here.

However, the events detailed in the second article tell a very different story to the one presented by the Guardian journalist. Because, although the majority of the vandalism was undoubtedly from right-wingers, the only incident mentioned with an explicit political message (if the naive innocence of the bear-cub students is to be believed, which I hope to God it is), was the graffiti on the Obama campaign headquarters in Winston-Salem. It read: "Free Palestine" and "liar".

This in a state where my radical contact on the ground claims that "there is no Left in America anymore". Well, maybe not. But I still have the audacity to hope.

Oh! On a final note, something I've been wondering for the last 20 damn months: Honestly, why would the Religious Right back someone whose name means 'Son of Cain'? Don't they read their Bibles? No, don't answer that. We already know what they think 'traditional marriage' means. Apparently it means enough to constitutionally ban homosexual civil rights in three different states. And so the faithful, 'round the world, lift their voices to the sky and sing His praises.
mhuzzell: (Trace)
I cannot abide a heavy wind. Not a wind like today, with all the little trees and bushes blown halfway upside-down, and smaller plants and grasses just holding their roots for dear life. It's terrible to try to move in it, having to fight all the time just to keep going on your own trajectory -- like you're swimming through the air, but without any of the grace of actual buoyancy. Even inside, it drives me crazy. It gets into my head, whooshing and buzzing around the corners of the house, creeping into all the cracks. I can't concentrate with all this hollow, sibilant, constant but erratic noise rushing around the house all the time. It sets my nerves on edge.

Too, I can't seem to figure this wind out. It's actually fairly common, here, to have these driving winds that go on for hours and often days at a time. But while, back home, a heavy wind was an almost certain indicator of Big storm a-comin' -- or, indeed, simply occured during said storm -- around here it seems to indicate nothing at all. Just that it is windy. I've been trying to figure out the weather patterns here for the last three years, and I am about ready to give up.

I suppose that, despite my 3 years of paying attention to the local weather and learning its ways, something in me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, in a wind like this. It keeps me uneasy, anyway, and I hesitate to go out lest I get caught in it. Or possibly that's just an excuse for my increasing reclusiveness. It was certainly a factor in my decision not to go to Dundee today, after all, where I had planned to attend a philosophy talk that may or may not have pertained to my dissertation. Then it was all of my reason, having decided against leaving town, not to go to our local campaign group meeting instead. I am spending more and more of my life secluded in my house. And I am okay with that. But I am not sure if I am okay with being okay with that.
mhuzzell: (Icarus)
I came to a realisation today, cycling to town in the bright autumn of penetrating sunshine and dazzling cold: this is not my place.

This time three years ago, I was so happy to finally be out of the US that I fell utterly in love with Scotland, and was sure that I would want to live here forever. For most of the last three years I hadn't even considered that I might return. Now I'm so homesick I can't stop thinking about North America.

The tricky thing is that I don't miss the US in the slightest. It's the land itself that tugs me like a magnet. The flora and fauna. I miss forests, and individual trees. I miss whole species: cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, hummingbirds; sweetgums, red maples, tulip poplars, even fucking loblolly pines. Someone on our road has planted goldenrod in their front garden, and when I first noticed it, I actually stopped dead in my tracks just to touch it. Even the air here seems foreign to me, sometimes, for all that I'm actually pretty acclimatised. I can feel it deep in my core; I miss my homeland with my whole body.

Then, of course, there's my family. I guess I was lucky, in this century, to have grown up so close (geographically and emotionally) to such a large extended family. But that kind of strength of 'home' really gets into your bones. I think the idea of it sustained me, somewhat, when I first left. But these days, I just want to get back to my family, my forests, my roots. Except that I really, really don't want to return to the United States.
mhuzzell: (Default)
It's surely a sign that I am both a history nerd and a Southerner that I have not only a broad and subtle (if not particularly detailed) understanding of Civil War politics, but also fairly strong and nuanced opinions thereon. However, responsible scholar that I am, I'm quite aware that the perspective from which I study the events and symbols of the past is very much my own -- and I am as much 'of my time' as anyone else. Everyone needs a little reminding, though.

Last night I was wandering through Wikipedia (as you do), and stumbled across the Confederate State Flag of North Carolina. The left side is a vertical rectangle with two dates framing a large white star. The upper date was May 20th 1775; I didn't recognise the significance, but it was clearly marking some date from the Revolution. The lower date, May 20th 1861, is North Carolina's secession date.

Now, of all the states in the Confederacy, North Carolina had the most latent Unionist political sentiment. It didn't secede until all of the states surrounding it had also seceded, and, as though insecure in its independence, suckled on to the Confederacy the very next day -- a good 6 weeks before its brassier neighbour Tennessee joined up. Though, to be fair, Virginia was already in the CSA by the time North Carolina seceded, so this was strategically and politically canny; Tennessee still had a long border with Union states so could afford to sit on the fence, but North Carolina was surrounded. But the point is, despite a lot of hot-blooded excitement, especially among the young, one gets the sense that North Carolina's transition of political sovereignty from the USA to the CSA was one of deep reluctance.

The point is, seeing a flag with a vertical rectangle containing a date from the American Revolution followed by the date of secession reminded me of nothing so much as a tombstone. 'Here lay our collective citizenship in the United States of America: 1775-1861.'

... But of course, a closer investigation into the significance of those dates -- and, more tellingly, of the dates shown on the current flag, which replaced it in 1885 -- reveals much more a spirit of memorial than of mourning. 'These are the significant dates of our birth: first our independence from the British Empire, then from the United States.' May 20th, 1775, was the (supposed) date of the much-debated Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, when a group of concerned citizens of Mecklenburg County, NC, apparently declared their independence over a year before the Continental Congress got around to doing so. The other date on the current flag, April 12 1776, is that of the Halifax Resolves, which gave the state's delegates in the Continental Congress the go-ahead to join the swelling parliamentary movement towards an official declaration of independence.

In other words, the current state flag commemorates two events of Very Important Local Significance to do with the formation of the state as it was to become: as part of the United States. It's reasonable to assume that the older flag intended to do the same for its formation and birth into the Confederacy. Yet, at first glance, it still looked like a tombstone to me.

Getting By

Jul. 17th, 2008 03:03 pm
mhuzzell: (Monty Python)
One of these days I will get 'round to making real entries again, but for now you will just have to content yourselves with my commentaries on things what I have recently seen in the news these days of late.  Today, it's The Independent's investigation and campaign on tipping, and the unfair practices and pun opportunities thereof.

The article describes how many restaurants are fleecing the customers and fucking the staff by keeping large percentages of tips for themselves, or else using tips to top up wages to comply with the legal minimum, when the poor dear customers thought the service charge was all going to that nice 'server' who'd waited on them.  

Now, I currently work as a chef in a small café, where tips are collected in a dish on the counter and shared out between all staff at the end of the day.  It's never much -- usually £2 or £3 each, seldom more than £4; certainly not enough for the manager to consider using it to top up wages -- but it is fair.  

However, the last restaurant I worked in was much fancier.  Food prices, and therefore tips, were much higher, and were not shared out by the waitstaff.  I was making $7/hr. washing dishes, and the chefs made only two or three dollars per hour more than me.  The pinches meseras* (technical term), meanwhile, made only $2.35/hr in wages, but still made far more than any of us in the kitchen.  To have had them on minimum wage, as The Independent would call for, would be grossly unfair to the kitchen staff, unless they were to pool and share out their tips -- but then, this is another practice that The Independent's campaign seems rather critical of, since it is the primary means by which managers and owners are able to steal tips from staff.

The only really fair way to handle things, as far as I can tell, is the way I hear they do it in Australia: that is, not doing it.  They don't have a tipping culture, staff are paid much higher basic wages, and any tips on top of that are simply incidental, or for particularly good service, and not to be expected or relied upon.  Like the jar on our café's counter.  Seriously, what kind of bullshit system is this?


* In a recent conversation on how we tend to get pigeonholed in summer jobs, based on whatever experience we happen to have, a friend told me he had only ever been barstaff.  I replied that I had only ever worked in kitchens, to which he said "ah, then you are my natural enemy!"  If you don't get it, then go get a real job, you hippie.
mhuzzell: (Trace)
It's midnight: the witching hour. It feels like it, too, since we've just watched a David Lynch film, all cuddled up on the floor, propped up on giant hippie pillows and nuzzling under the Our Lady of Batik sarong. I like this house.

It's Kalea's place, technically -- a top-floor flat in one of the taller buildings in town -- but she just got back yesterday. Harry and I have been living here for two weeks already, pottering around in a weird sort of domesticity. He's been my housewife, asking me about my day and offering me cups of tea when I come home from work, making me dinner. He even showed me how to use the washing machine.

From the windows in the kitchen and living room, I can see the roof of the top-floor flat I lived in last summer. It's very close, if one were to fly, but by the roads it's a few minutes' walk, separated by several flights of stairs. Down and then up again. Last summer, when Kalea lived alone in this flat, and I lived mostly alone, or with a succession of mostly-absent, transient flatmates, I thought of us as two eagles, or similar great solitary birds, nesting above the town in its eastern curve (the social and architectural 'top' of the old city, nearest the castle and ruined cathedral), surveying it from our lofty aeries.

In reality, it's only this flat that actually surveys the rooftops of the town. Last year my view was of a sweet little garden on one side, and Younger Hall -- the ugliest building in town, a great hulking monolith chiseled into painfully clashing chunky-victorian and neo-classical styles; the Reichstag of St Andrews -- on the other. It blocked the north side, so, it being summer, we never got to see the sun rise or set.

It does both of these in the north at this time of year. It comes up early in the northeast, swoops up around the southern peak of the sky and then back down into the northwest. Dusk lasts for hours, slowly tapering from a pale blue-grey to a dark one. Looking south, there is some illusion of night, especially if it is cloudy. But looking north, the horizon moves imperceptibly from the last gloom of twilight to the first stirrings of the pre-dawn glow. Even now, in the darkest part of the almost-night, I can see the yellow salvo of the coming morning.
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