spatch

When I went to Leticia in April, I brought some presents, and one of them, for my tutor, was this book, Todo el mundo, a Spanish-language translation of All the World (2009).

cover of a picture book: two kids w/backs to you, facing a cloud over the ocean

cover of a picture book: two kids w/backs to you, facing a cloud over the ocean

I'm gratified to say that my tutor loved the words and pictures as much as I do. She read the title and immediately translated it into Ticuna. And then she paged through the book.

"Beautiful," she said. "I'm going to translate it into Ticuna."

And my friends, she did.

Here are some sample pages from the book...

text says un caracol que guardar: child hands a parent a shell

text says un caracol que guardar: child hands a parent a shell

text says todo el mundo es ancho y profundo (shows ocean and coast)

text says "colmena, abeja, alas zumbido, hojas, mazorca ..."

And here are her notes that cover the text on those pages:

a list of phrases and words in Spanish and Tikuna

I am so, so excited about this! I told her I will try to get it published, with her as the translator. I have a small press in mind; I have the author's agent's information bookmarked.

It would be so, so wonderful, if there could be a Ticuna-language edition of this book. (I mean, best of all would be Ticuna-authored and -illustrated books in Ticuna, but there's room for good things that aren't the best thing.)

I do recognize and honor the fact that Ticuna has basically been an oral language for a culture that passes stories and knowledge orally. But I believe you can maintain those traditions and also utilize and enjoy the technology of writing when you want. The world is wide and deep, and I would love to make picture books in Ticuna a thing in this wide, deep world.

Current Music: Lido Pimienta: Hoy Por Ti

lauradi7dw

I went to see Christopher Nolan's take on The Odyssey yesterday at the Somerville Theatre because the timing was pretty good (although I had to leave after 150 minutes to get to Korean class on time), it was 70mm, and I want to support the theater. I've been going to movies and shows there (on and off) since 1974 and I worry about them.

I laughed, I gawped, I was easily distracted. I don't know that anybody else laughed, but while I support a free translation, shall we say, some of the lines were a little silly and some things were too on the nose for right now, which might say something about the human condition or the value of literature as speaking truth to power, I guess. The acting was good. There were a lot of actors and they were all well-cast. If you need to see white people, there were some in every scene, IIRC. The Viking boat acting as a Greek boat was OK after I quietly giggled when it first appeared.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thisviking-longship-crossed-the-atlantic-before-starring-in-christopher-nolans-odyssey-as-odysseus-greek-galley-180989137/
I had decided to ignore the clothing decisions in terms of accuracy and just judge them on appearance. Having done that, I had no problem with it.
Lots of really beautiful scenery, lots of light, although my favorite part of the whole thing was the first couple of seconds of the film, in the dark. The story-teller in Penelope's (the castle's) hall had a big staff that the banged down on the floor to attract attention, and for emphasis. Before we saw anything of the movie (after the studio logo), BANG BANG BANG BANG, in the darkness. I jumped. It definitely attracted my attention. Speaking of light, though, I did have a moment of wondering whether Lupita Nyong'o was in Blackface makeup, as her natural skin is dark but not *that* dark. I decided that maybe it was part of the ongoing problem (especially in fashion photography) of mis-lighting Black people.
O's men kept doing stupid things on the trip back in order to eat meat, even when they were told not to. They were on the wine-dark sea most of the time, for crying out loud. Why didn't they just eat fish? What's up with that, Homer? Didn't you live in a fish-eating society? I was pleased to see some fruit while they were eating in Circe's home, though. Scylla and Charybdis were not at all the way I imagined but it's possible I wasn't paying attention when I learned about them. My first memory of most of this was in elementary school. There was publicity for a TV show (probably not a National Geographic special, but of that ilk) that traveled around showing places that might have been the inspiration for the famous scenes in the Odyssey. We were assigned to watch it and then discussed it in class. I remember the cave that would have fit a Cyclops, but mostly I remember the discomfort of one of my classmates. One of the other kids, a boy she didn't like, lived in a TV-free home, and her family kindly invited him over to watch. The show was late in the evening for most of us, and she was already in pajamas. She was creeped out. I don't remember either of their names, 60 years on.
In terms of teaching the Odyssey to children, many people have referenced the Wishbone version and a skit done by schoolfriends in the animated Arthur series.
Only Odysseus could see/interact with the actual Athena (as opposed to graven images) so Zendaya and Tom (who played Telemachus and wore a really nice shirt near the end) never were in a scene together, but they both were so good that I am considering going to see the forthcoming Spider-man movie, even though I've mostly tired of the MCU.

PS When speaking of acting quality, I unjustly neglected the dog. Here are Tom and Matt discussing it
https://youtube.com/shorts/Cq_vRLF5L1M?si=UmUu8REKdR845wpC

sovay

This week is starting off terribly, but a neatly overstuffed envelope of tiny, brightly jacketed chapbooks of poetry by Romie Stott—Love, Witness, Today, Going Under, Prompt, Offline, Political, Splinter, in shades of cone-orange and map-blue and mint-green—arrived in the mail and even without being absolutely the best thing in the last couple of days would be pretty great.

Current Music: Felled, "Ember Dream"

lauradi7dw

Call your senators at 202-224-3121 and urge them to support Senate Bill S. 4814 to extend Haitian TPS for another 3 years.

moon_custafer

Friday night’s paintings of cat food and Beatrice.

A tie-dye experiment with a thrifted linen jumpsuit went awry when I realized the zipper in the side meant I probably shouldn’t microwave it as per the instructions, and would instead have to let it sit twenty-four hours before putting it through the wash. Popping it in a white plastic bag from the kitchen, I told myself “of course I won’t mistake this for a bag of garbage and throw it down the chute when I clean the bathroom tomorrow morning.”

You can all guess what happened.

I find my chief regret is that I’ll never know if the design turned out.

Air quality was much improved today, so we went down to the boardwalk. Did a sketch and took some photos, all of which I plan to work upinto paintings at the next session.

I’m also planning to go to this poster-making session Thursday for No Jets T.O.

Big thanks to

sovay for posting where one can donate to Namaygoosisagagun First Nation Response in the wake of the community having to up and flee from the wildfires.

moon_custafer

In which I try to figure out if the sign-painters’ apostrophes that annoyed me in this transcription of Marc Bolan’s The Warlock of Love (1969) were errors that had crept in, or part of the original text. Spoiler—they’re Marc’s fault; and/or the galley proofreader’s. That said, the weird pagination style seems to have come from the 1992 reprint by the Tyrannosaurus Rex Appreciation Society.

Still thinking about the poems themselves. Like T. Rex’s songs, I find them uneven, sometimes terrific and sometimes corny. I prefer the ones that read like Bolan didn’t reach for his thesaurus:

The vanquished Sun
Is like the withered yolk
Of a weathered egg.

Or the ones where there’s a punchline to cut through the gilding:

Sleek Andromeda swirling in an undershift,
a pimple temple like on her portcullis longship
lip. I dance on her gliding stomach of fibs and
erect my many coloured mast in her belly-button.
Take a cheekbone, any cheekbone, lay it pastely
on a furnace brasier and look for sand. Marrow
melts, mud squelches and belches over my
handsomely haunted hand but no sand.
A beach I whimper I need to bask upon a sun-dipped
dripping moon of beach. My face feels the draft now,
my shaggy face lags like a quilled pig — my bones
burnt and not a seed of sand remains only a high
forked pitch of light cine-marly sailing my sagging
dripping wood-wild skipping face.
And now reader I have only half a head.

lauradi7dw

The removal of historical panels about slavery from the "president's house" in Philadelphia has had a lot of press, although every time the government is forced to remove the lies, they put them back up.
This is from February
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/explainer-why-the-presidents-house-slavery-exhibit-was-removed-and-what-happens-next

I saw on the web yesterday that the photographs of Emmett Till were removed from the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Here is an article about the importance of the photo (and the photo) from several years ago.
https://meridianstar.com/2020/08/31/see-the-photo-emmett-tills-mother-wanted-you-to-see-the-one-that-inspired-a-generation-to-join-the-civil-rights-movement/
I haven't found a confirmation of this (I only looked briefly) but just in case I am wearing a t-shirt from the museum. If anybody asks, I'll tell them why, but I can't imagine anybody will ask.

sovay

With the disclosure that I have not myself seen Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) despite it doing numbers at the Somerville Theatre in 70 mm, I read the kind of glowing profile of the film and its maker that leaves me wondering what he valued in it at all beyond its ability to be retold to his specifications:

"We broke the fragile bonds between men," he says after the massacre, essentially repeating the words he uttered about his earlier shame. "And for centuries of darkness to follow, the stories of Troy will only be sung." [. . .] And in case we haven't gotten the message, Odysseus delivers one final prophecy. When Penelope asks him why the stories of Troy will only be sung, he says, "Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write." (At the collapse of the Bronze Age, written language was lost for centuries; we have no evidence of writing from this period. Surely nothing like that could ever happen again.) "A new dawn will break over the darkened world," Odysseus says. But his prediction isn't a happy one. He adds, "And all our mistakes will once again be forgotten." In other words, history will repeat itself. Again, he's talking to us.

There is indeed a lacuna of known literacy in the Greek language. By the eleventh century BCE, the syllabary of Linear B had ceased to be used to write Mycenaean Greek and it would take until the eighth century for inscriptions in the contemporarily recognizable Greek alphabet to start to show. (Elsewhere in the Mediterranean we find no comparable rupture in the record. Hittite cuneiform does conk out after the Late Bronze Age Collapse, but Luwian trucks right on through the Greek Dark Ages and Akkadian which got its start in the third millennium will persist in the written record as late as the first century CE. The Phoenician alphabet which provided the Greek template will run down through the destruction of Carthage into the Christian fourth century of Sirte. Sumerian may be too far east and inland to count for purposes of this parenthesis, but Egyptian hieroglyphs are close to four thousand energizer bunny years. There was not some kind of global, apocalyptic forgetting of the concept of writing. The Cypriot syllabary, in use into the Classical period, derives from Minoan Linear A.) It still feels breathtakingly culture-bound to conclude the retelling of an oral tradition by lamenting it as a means of transmission—the post-technological leftovers, second best of a fallen world, no real substitute for the hard historical fact of fixed and impartial, implicitly more civilized text. Those of us who could write. The ones who mattered? Who should have been telling the story? As if the Odyssey were not full of singers of tales from Demodokos to the Sirens to Odysseus himself and so much of it concerned with the shaping of stories, of histories, of memory beyond a punch line. As if the improvisation and reperformance of an epic tradition were inherently naïve and mendacious, larding rosy-fingered glasses of gods over the brutal truths of burnt walls. As if we're all still stuck at Hisarlık with Schliemann and its archaeological accuracy is the most important thing about an epic poem. Of course, what was lost when the lights went out over Hellas was exactly what we would have mourned most. What you should grieve is the impossibility of never hearing a passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey or any of the rest of the Epic Cycle as it would have been sung in those so-called Dark Ages, never twice the same around the formulae, a living story instead of its papyrus-fossilized bones. I am a text-oriented person, terrified by the current popular indifference to reality, and I was primed from early childhood to respond favorably to stories that disappear into their own meta: and, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it. Assuming an accurate report of this one, hell, no. How can you spend so many years with a story and still miss how it worked in its world? It makes a good mic drop. It's just a silly thing to say. Anyway, they'll remember you through the vase paintings, too.

Current Music: Felled, "The Sentinel"

sovay

This afternoon the sky has lost its pest-fire sickliness in the intermittent washout of rain, but we are into the red blobs on the map and I am using my inhaler. I dreamed of a supporting character from Winterset (1936) as if during the prologue to the plot. I feel brainless and abraded.

Because I had Felled's "Fire Season on the Outer Rim" (2017) on my mind after this ash-fall week, I was reminded that I had never gotten hold of their sophomore LP The Intimate Earth (2021) and behold, there's another bog body in "Sphagnum in the Hinterlands."

I put another pin in the awfulness of the last two years by the fact that I missed the existence of Emmett Nahil's From the Belly (2024), which looks rather barnacle-crusted to my interests. I am not sure I even agree with the author's assertions about the foundations of nautical horror, but I like his passionate championing of Melville over Lovecraft. I never recomended Avi Burton's "We Are All in the Same Boat" (2026).

I meant to grab a copy of M.A. Knight's Feverchain (2026) while I was still at Readercon, but after a lovely and too-brief interaction with the author and the designer in between panels I never made it back into the dealer's room. If we shared the same social media, I could ask if they would be at NecronomiCon.

I would cheerfully read further adventures of this psychogeographer in Albuquerque, but this one stands as an excellent one-shot for anyone who cares about land, water, and the Situationist International: Rath Mercury, "Herkimer Inquiries" (2026).

Yesterday the most complicated thing I did was take a walk, read two novels, and reconstruct my long-lost favorite burger from Christopher's with pepper jack, avocado, and homemade chipotle mayo on an English muffin. I watched a movie for the first time in ages, even if I do not seem possessed of the intellect to do anything about it. It was nice. I am tired of the most boring people in the world doing so much to harm it.

Current Music: Felled, "Sphagnum in the Hinterlands"

sovay

I saw earlier this evening that the man in the White House is threatening to increase tariffs on Canada for the wildfire smoke, reminiscent of Leo Rosten's celebrated definition of chutzpah except specifically with arson. I can wish him the same luck with his lungs as with his reflecting pool. In any case, it is how I saw that Namaygoosisagagun First Nation has been entirely burned out by said wildfires and all donations toward emergency response and community recovery should be vectored through the Anishinabek Nation 7th Generation Charity. I hope my state is sending firefighters, as we have done in the previous fire seasons that start to char into one long combustible drought. I am not even sure we are getting to the healing of the world at this point, but it's better than further burning it down.

Current Music: Car Seat Headrest, "Beach Death"

lauradi7dw

https://eplanning.blm.gov/Project-Home/?id=D949F582-402D-F111-8341-001DD804183B

Revoke the withdrawal is the kind of thing that makes me have to rephrase it in my head, but what it really means is that they are planning to revoke protection for the area
https://environmentamerica.org/newmexico/center/updates/greater-chaco-canyon-area-to-be-stripped-of-protections/

lauradi7dw

Last week I went to the local movie theater to see the documentary David Hockney at the Royal Academy
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7661952/
I was telling people about it yesterday and they told me that DH died in early June. I had no idea. Until I looked up the link, I didn't know that the film was from 2017. It was new to me, which doesn't mean that it was new. My cluelessness in this matter doesn't really affect anything.

sovay

Five days from the end of Readercon and seven days after a confirmed contact for COVID-19, I have tested multiply negative for pandemic and may even have dodged regular old con crud, seeing as my sore-throated wheezing of the last few days is equally consistent with wildfires blowing into town. Today we are in a clearer patch and there is birdsong in the yew trees. Huzzah for paranoia and the N95.

Meanwhile,

spatch has shingles.

Current Music: Circle Takes the Square, "A Crater to Cough In"

asakiyume

Look at me posting three times in a week as if it's 2011 or something.

I, like a lot of people on my friends list, read this because of an excellent review by

rachelmanija. It really was everything Rachel and others have reported. And it's very short. As I think

sabbotabby says, you can read it in like 15 minutes.

To repeat what Rachel summarizes, it's the memories and dreams of a group of now-adult Chilean classmates who were young adolescents during the Pinochet regime, memories and dreams about a classmate who left the school in the midst of the turmoil of those years. No one ever saw or heard from her again. (Just read Rachel's review! It's short!)

For me, the story had an immediate impact that then just got stronger and stronger. Two things especially: One is how (most) children accept their situation, whatever it is, as normal--how your life is, is normal. The attitudes around you are the attitudes you accept. You do things because other people are doing them. And then gradually, you become more aware of *more*. Your perspective broadens. You question things. You realize things. And the second, drawing on the first, is that sometimes that realizing things can be devastating.

Nona Fernández does this so lightly, so simply. She just taps the tuning fork and it keeps vibrating.

( a personal reason it affected me )

Current Music: Ana Tijou: Todo Lo Sólido Se Desvanece en el Aire

lauradi7dw

sovay

Acting on a suggestion from

phi, I have successfully regained access to my files within Microsoft Word. It is less of a solution and more of a deferral than I would have liked, but since it enabled me to resume control of my own work without forking over any further monies to a corporation that just kicked the goalposts over onto the cross-country track, I am counting it as a species of victory and dreaming of arson. That the process was complicated by a glitch within one of Microsoft's own tools feels like one of those choices between malice and incompetence that there's no point in trying to make.

Yesterday I had to dash out into the sulfuric sunset to collect my interlibraried copy of Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) from the Malden Public Library before it was shipped back out of reach again, but then I left with the predictable armful of books I had known nothing about prior to venturing into their multifarious stacks. Winston Graham's Woman in the Mirror (1975) trips over the rake of its own twist in the last two pages, but learning that it was revised from his earlier novel The Giant's Chair (1938) has made me curious whether the original more successfully stuck the Gothic landing. I have already lent my mother the Ghost Box-styled The Magic Valley Travellers: Welsh Stories of Fantasy and Horror (1974) for its unexpectedly sweet inclusion, under an alternate title, of John Wyndham's "Chinese Puzzle" (1953). The hallucinogenically mediated time travel of Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand (1969) looked in line with the strangeness of her short fiction. Joseph Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) may be in the public domain, but I hate reading novels off screens. For

spatch I obtained histories of Penn Station and Sesame Street and we coughed our way back out into the 16 mm evening. The strip-mall hole-in-the-wall of Fresco's may have served me the largest and one of the most delicious roast beef sandwiches I have ever ordered in my life.

I checked out early on the fifth column shenanigans that make up the action of J. E. Harold Terry and Lechmere Worrall's The Man Who Stayed at Home (1914), but emotionally it is another radiation of the Scarlet Pimpernel, this time on the home front of World War I, and as such fascinates me with its fidelity to the drawl and the eye-glass, among other conventions of the silly-ass mask: "Hello, everybody! By Jove, I say, isn't it a jolly mornin' for the war, what?" Tonight's adventures in college car radio have included Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'" (1966), Frog Eyes' "The Akhian Press" (2004), and James Chance's "The Devil Made Me Do It" (1983). If I do not get some kind of time to myself before this month ends I may explode.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "The Akhian Press"

sovay

I can't participate in the poll itself, but I spun the wheel of Greek mythological figures as dictated by this meme and got Achilles trying to kill me and Odysseus trying to protect me and considering their respective hit rates on those fronts I think I'm just going to hang out in lyric poetry for a while.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Candlebox"

lauradi7dw

The consensus of the Korean class on Monday was that the World Cup officiating has been bad and that we were all of the "anybody but Argentina" mindset. We were speaking English, before class started. I know the word for soccer but couldn't have managed the rest of the conversation. During the time of the world cup, I've been following on twitter as people give geography trivia, and someone has done fun flag posts (The Norwegian flag can be cut up into the flags of many nations, for example). The map of the world the other day had the Argentinian flag on Argentina and the St George flag everywhere else. I got my Mind the Gap
t shirt down from the attic, trying to be supportive, because I couldn't find the Virginia Woolf shirt.

Nobody at knitting group this morning remarked on the shirt at all. It doesn't seem to be helping. Argentina just pulled ahead at minute 90.
Trevor Noah and friends have been doing livestreams and recaps for weeks. I have the TV on Telemundo and the Trevor show streaming on the phone while I am typing here. Meanwhile, I am constantly being creeped out at the color of the light, sometimes trying to avoid looking out the window. I was (of course) wearing an N95 mask outdoors this morning but it doesn't mean I am not feeling like things are not broken beyond repair.

sovay

All day the light through the wildfire smoke has looked like a pair of Ray-Bans. It tints sulfurously through the windows like Eliot's fog or Gilman's wallpaper. Our house is not airtight and everything smells rasping and bitter. I have a wheeze and a nosebleed and we are nowhere near the epicenter. It is not even the metaphor of the trash fire; it is just the burning world.

Hestia did her winsome and inexorable best to collect six days' worth of back petting when I finally got home last night. She planted herself on the hall runner with her small paws foursquare and then disposed herself upon her side like an impatient odalisque. She interposed herself in every doorway so that I could not pass without ostentatious rudeness to cat. She ran under my hands as I unpacked and coiled her tail over my wrist and swatted peremptorily in the same spot so that I carry yet another red-scratched mark of the loving claws of kitten. She purred like a two-stroke engine. Just now she yawned her pink and particolored mouth and I petted her between her soft alert ears which smell so much sweeter than the surrounding air. It is a good thing to be in the same house as a small predator. She blinks slow gold.

I dreamed of Tarot cards and a stage show by a queer contemporary artist whose music did not exit the dream with me: electrochemical, the aesthetics of vintage video games. At the moment the balance of Readercon is still holding at worth it.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn, "The Mountain Is Burning"

nineweaving

I hate Microsoft on principle and in practice (with the honorable exception of Word 5.1a, may it rise again). Nonetheless, my editor tells me I will need Word 365 to work with her comments. Yikes. Given the digital thuggery they've just pulled on

sovay , and my dread of invasive AI, I am terrified. Wouldn't Libre Office work as well?

Nine

A Ticuna translation

Spoilers? Why didn't they eat fish? (The Odyssey)

A mycelial vixen trailing autumn as she roams

action opportunity

Weekend Report II: The Weekening

Weekend Report

a t-shirt is not a protest

No bones stacked by the hearth, no ghosts on the heath

I arrive as if a ghost, sphagnum flesh tinder-dry

So I took a vacation to another station and I took pictures of the ground

comment/action opportunity

Not entirely alert

O Moon, thou pluckest me out, O Moon

Space Invaders, by Nona Fernández (trans. Natasha Wimmer)

comment/action opportunity

I wish I was the mother of an engineer to be

Whole team full of Roman accountants at their desks the day Hannibal crossed

watching

The cause and effect never met

Oh dear

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