As I was looking up Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, (I think that’s the whole text of his Treatise on the heathen superstitions that today live among the Indians native to this New Spain), I found this paper on the Social Reproduction of Late Postclassic Ritual Practices in Early Colonial Central México, with a curious diagram showing the clandestine circulation of ritual texts in a single town, including a superimposed schema depicting kinship between the individuals involved. And just so you know, the ritual texts included sets of incantations for things like inducing sleep before theft or rape (fine, yes, that’s the most salacious incantation, everything else is for stuff like carrying heavy objects); as well this paper on family structure in pre-Columbian Nahua culture. It sounds as though the idea of nuclear family didn’t really exist on it’s own, but rather as part of a directly nested structure that ranged from husband-wife-child unit to “ethnic states.”
In Defense of Eye Candy. Thanks Stephen P. Anderson. I heave a great sigh of relief that someone bothered to stitch this all together so elegantly. I have to confess to being far too impatient at this point in my career to defend this in loving detail ever again (and again and again). I just march in assuming that everything must be beautiful and steamrolling anyone who wants to sit down and debate at length lovely versus crappy… And speaking of crap, though only the noun, Virginia Gardiner is making all sorts of things out of poo. But the really interesting thing is the GCH4 toilet she’s working on. The mechanics still sound a bit fuzzy (though maybe that’s just what’s available online) but the idea is to capture the methane output from human waste as fuel. I am curious to see where this goes. At least to hear more about the proposed process/program. And while we’re at it, have The Humanure Handbook.
A conversation with Jan Fabre, the guy responsible for Heaven of Delight, the installation of bazillions of iridescent green scarabs in a glowing mosaic in the Royal Palace in Brussels.
The lovely work of Ackroyd & Harvey at PechaKucha Daily. And some more, and more.
Early the other Saturday morning we were waiting at Union Square for the 6 train, arms full of awkwardly mismatched bags of eggs and leafy things from the green market when I saw a guy wander right off the platform on to the tracks. It happened very quietly and very quickly. He lay there on his back in the black water between the tracks for too long, ignoring the knot of people holding their arms out to him from the platform. Finally he pulled himself up and reached unsteadily for the hand of a woman in a white hat, who’d been yelling at him. She continued to shout– falling down in the tracks, what do you think you’re doing and nobody going over there to help you what on earth are you thinking, you could have been killed, just get up now, and you’re fine, what were you thinking, what kind of a world is this? as she and a man in the black and white uniform of a busboy pulled him back up on to the platform. He stumbled over to the bench and sat down next to me, staring straight ahead. I wondered if he was in shock, but realized after a minute that he was high instead. He didn’t look homeless, but his clothing was filthy and drenched from the fall. He boarded the train with us. We sat down and he leaned back against the door and appeared to go to sleep, dripping a vile puddle on the floor. One hand was bleeding a little. He continued to sway, eyes shut, against the door as we rolled into the next station. I thrust the baby into V’s lap and half stood to yank him forward just as the door opened behind him. The woman who’d pulled him from the tracks met my eye and shook her head. I sat back down and he edged in to stand in front of me. He began to sway above me, mouth working, eyes closed again. Every so often his hand would slip from the bar above my head and he would lurch down toward me, arms suspended, hands half closed around nothing, dripping onto my knees. After a while, we got up and moved to the other side of the train. The woman in the white hat said, I was wondering how long you were going to stay there. Everyone in the train watched him in anxious silence until, with surprising decision, he opened his eyes and got off the train at 59th Street.
I just got 2666 in the mail. I bought the paperback, three volume set. It is bew-ti-ful! I’m saving for when I’m inconsolable at the end of Moby Dick.
Henry T. Cheever
Miriam Coffin
I have auto-da-fe and archiepiscopacy scrawled on my arm, and what do you know, when I looked up the first, I found the second. It’s like a scavenger hunt where someone else is just ahead of me leaving clues.
Who was Rondelitius? He, or someone of the same name, is referenced in Moby Dick (the section on whales), The Compleat Angler, The Naturalist’s Library, The American Cyclopædia (which attributes to him a “dull religious drama, Judas Redivivus”), and The English physitian: or an astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this nation. The last of which looks like some good reading, especially the Directions for making Syrups, Conserves, Oyls, Oyntments, &c. of Herbs, Roots, Flowers &c. Oh boy, there’s a whole list of these texts online! Huh. Forget Rondelitius, I want to know about a Plain and easie method for preserving (by God’s blessing) those that are well from the infection of the plague : or any contagious distemper in city, camp, fleet, &c. and for curing such as are infected with it ; written in the year 1666.
Miranda July talks about how at some point she decided to pretend that other people understood what she meant and act as though it were true… I could write a cheerful manifesto on this. (Wait! What’s this?) It’s like karate chopping at the air in a dense fog. If you flail hard enough, every once in a while you swirl the air around you enough that someone else will think they saw something and wave crazily back. They might mistake you for someone else or think you meant something else entirely, but it doesn’t matter.
Jane, on writing poetry—saying she didn’t used to believe she had anything worthwhile to say, so she wrote what she did as obliquely as possible, hoping, by eliding what she actually meant, to say it without calling attention to it. I used to do this too, though more because I was intimidated by the weight of Literature. (Another reason I was able to write in a history-less medium. It wasn’t Writing. Things change fast though, that’s over with, though I pretend with all my might it’s not.) I think I was afraid that if I referred directly to what I meant or to something I wanted particularly, I might have to agree if anyone declared me pantless.
Listening to some more interviews with Miranda July (who takes flax seed oil, which is a good thing) made me feel better about worrying about offending everyone and not being able to be too starkly critical. It was a good reminder that it’s okay to be want to provide encouragement, to want to take care of the people who will be looking, to keep them safe. That’s really the only way the collaborative misunderstandings I spend my life looking for can ever happen in the first place. Fear of seeming foolish makes people jittery and small and unadventurous. Nothing made me happier today than knowing that the author of the flash photo of under her bed won a grant. What a fine world.
I completed LTLYM assignment #70 last night. It was a fairly contented set of goodbyes to a lot of things that are simply over whether I like it or not, along with a few things I hope are gone for good. I wrote it very fast and it made me pleased.
Late winter vegetable inspiration from Culinate.
And finally: a bookslut article on Murakami.
