"some things'll scare you so bad, you hurt yourself" --Molly Ivins

A wise and funny story--a favorite of mine from Molly Ivins (via Mother Jones)––whom I've never stopped missing--a story that I'm posting, below, in part to piggyback on an article OCA posted from historian Timothy Snyder on terrorism, with this insight:

"I won’t claim to know what Hamas expects from Israel, nor what Israel should do. That would be a matter for people with the languages and expertise…

My point is that it is always worth asking, in such situations, whether you are following the terrorist’s script.
If what you want to do is what your enemy wants you to do, someone is mistaken. It might be your enemy. But it also might be you."

--From Snyder's article "Terror and counter-terror: A reflection on Hamas and Israel", October 10, 2023

BELOW—This is the story Molly Ivins told, which she heard from her friend  Johnny Faulk. Johnny Faulk, she says . . .

“…used to tell a story about when he was a Texas Ranger, a captain in fact. He was seven at the time.
His friend Boots Cooper, who was six, was sheriff, and the two of them used to do a lot of heavy law enforcement out behind the Faulk place in south Austin.
One day Johnny's mama, having two such fine officers on the place, asked them to go down to the hen house and rout out the chicken snake that had been doing some damage there.

Johnny and Boots loped down to the hen house on their trusty brooms (which they tethered outside) and commenced to search for the snake. They went all through the nests on the bottom shelf of the hen house and couldn't find it, so the both of them stood on tippy-toes to look on the top shelf.

I myself have never been nose-to-nose with a chicken snake, but I always took Johnny's word for it that it will just scare the living daylights out of you (which this one did.)
Scared those boys so bad that they both tried to exit the hen house at the same time, doing considerable damage to both themselves and the door.

Johnny's mama, Miz Faulk, was a kindly lady, but watching all this, it struck her funny. She was still laughin' when the captain and the sheriff trailed back up to the front porch.

"Boys, boys, " said Miz Faulk, "what is wrong with you? You know perfectly well a chicken snake cannot hurt you."

That's when Boots Cooper made his semi-immortal observation.
"Yes ma'am," he said, "but there's some things'll scare you so bad, you hurt yourself."

——

[end Molly Ivins story] 

What Bear Is Reading

This bear on my desk is a wind-up toy bink gave me (from her 1960s childhood).
Here's a 4-second video of Bear in action, reading to the others.
I think it makes up new stories to go with the pictures every time.

(Darn, I get an error message... Is it playing for you? If not, you can watch it here on my Instagram.)

You can see Squash the Squirrel and Hana, the gofun doll.

The Better Story: Vaccine First, Then Dolls

Oh, oh, oh---look! New dolls for meeeee . . . FREE, on Fb marketplace! To be picked up Saturday morning.

Covid Shot First

I would go after work today--they're only 4 bikable miles away--but I'm going with my coworkers to get our Covid shots.
Yay!
We're carpooling to some clinic, a half-hour drive away.

I'd been so relieved the executive director had lined these shots up.... and then last night my clinic messaged me that I could get mine there as soon as Saturday.

I thought about doing that instead--it's a lot closer, and I wouldn't have to coordinate with others.

I decided it'd be better to go on this Field Trip with my coworkers.
I'm not feeling very fond of my coworkers at the moment, but we're living through this epoch together. So.

Plus, Penny Cooper said, It's the better story.

This actually isn't a very Penny-Cooper-thing to say. I thought she'd say, Take the shot that is soonest.

I heard you say it, she said.

Huh, yeah, I do say use "the better story" as a measuring stick.
(I think I heard it somewhere once?)

It's a helpful guide, for encouragement . . . or reassurance––most especially when things are frightening, but interesting. Like, every day since Trump got elected in 2016.

Most of my older coworkers already got shots, or don't want them––especially (but not only) some of the Black guys.
A customer who heard one of them saying they wouldn't get one said to me, "I have no patience with such stupidity."

Well. That's making an assumption, which is itself a stupid thing to do.
The customer didn't ask my coworker why.

I was glad to have a quote to hand––something I'd just read:
"You'd have to be crazy not to be paranoid as a black person in this country." (The US, that is.)

That's from the essay "Hole in the Head" by Ross Gay, a Black man, about a medical experiment with radiation that left a little Black boy with a hole in his head.
It's in Gay's collection The Book of Delights (2019), which is mostly about delightful things, but some not. (Thank you, Art Sparker, for sending me this.)

Anyway, back to the new dolls

They were originally listed at $25 for both. I might have paid that, but definitely was swayed by them being free.

I browse on FB for Madeline dolls sometimes, but they're always ridiculously expensive--more than eBay.
Yesterday amidst the expensive junk were these two Japanese dolls--listed as Ichimatsu:
"little girls or boys, usually with . .  glass eyes. The original Ichimatsu were named after an 18th-century Kabuki actor, but since the late 19th century the term has applied to child dolls. Since 1927... a solemn, gentle-looking little girl in elaborate kimono."

These are solemn, gentle-looking little girls. (The girl on the right looks a little frightened, but I wonder if she's actually singing.)
I think they would like to have their pictures painted too. By Saturday, my watercolor pens should have arrived!

Movies I Walked Out Of: Fastest Yet

I spent most of yesterday, Christmas Day, with Mz. 

For a late breakfast, we had scrambled eggs and toast made in her new toaster (I'd gotten it at the thrift store), which she'd left here. Then we walked around the lake and went to see a new movie--

Vice about vice president Dick Cheney.

In record time, it joined my list of Movies I Left.

It starts with a notice, yellow words on the black screen:

This is a true story.

Then, below it, come the lines, something like:

At least as true as it could be, given that

 Dick Cheney is the most secretive politician ever.

And another line:

But we tried our fucking best.

OMG. Is this supposed to be daring and clever?
Are you twelve? Or, do you think we are (twelve, not clever)?

I turned to Mz and whispered, "Is this going to be a bad movie?"

She said, "Let's wait and see."

Four minutes later, she whispered, "Yes, this is a bad movie,"

and we got up and left.

We hadn't even finished our popcorn.

During that five minutes, another banner came on the screen: 

"Watch out for silent men. They wait, they listen, and then they strike." --Anonymous

ANONYMOUS???
You just made that lame quote up! 

And there was an almost constant voice-over, explaining everything. It was very odd. Everything signaled that this movie was badly made, despite a stellar cast, who I was almost sorry to leave.

 

The thing that made me eager to leave was that awful things flash on the screen with no warning. For instance, Cheney is walking down a hall and you see a second or two of a naked prisoner cowering (in Abu Ghraib?). 
Administering random shocks is not a substitute for story-telling.

I don't think I've ever walked out of a movie so quickly.

We looked up reviews afterward, and lots of people confirmed that the movie does not get better after five minutes.

We went back to my place, ate leftover pot roast (even better the next day), and watched an episode, "The Sound of Her Voice" (1998), of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It came recommended on a "Best of DS9" list.

Most of the episode is simply different crew members talking (on "comlink") to an offscreen starship captain who is marooned alone on a barren planet. She has enough air to survive five days, and it's going to take our crew six to reach her, but they try anyway.

Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), talks with the marooned captain

They, and we, never see her face.

Like most of Star Trek, this episode looks kind of cheap, the acting is uneven, and it's not particularly well written––but it has a gripping central idea.
It provided such a contrast to Vice: 
a good story, simply told, wins by a mile over high-production quality and flashy editing.

"Make Up a Story"

I. Transmission

I've never cared much about Bob Dylan one way or another, but he's always been there, in the background of my life.
When I was little, I was intrigued by the cover of his Freewheelin' album--I imagine my parents bought it when it came out in 1963, when I was two--anyway, it was always in with our other records. 
I don't remember listening to it, I remember sitting on the floor next to the wood-and-bricks bookshelf--records are heavy, so they go on the bottom--staring at it. 

This Dylan looks like a child to me now, but then the photo represented, I think, an adult leading some form of desirable adulthood. 
The whole aesthetic of it--including the VW van--was an advertisement for the sort of life where you could walk around free and happy on a weekday afternoon--but was it sort of mysterious, even ominous, too--the cold street, the dingy color? Not like the bright Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I also would also stare at a lot, and like way more.

I didn't set out to learn Dylan's lyrics, like I did Sgt. Pepper's, and his songs didn't touch me personally, the way, say, Carol King's album Tapestry did when I was ten, but looking at the tracks on this album, I still know most of them. 

Dylan's stories are part of my soundtrack of my life. 
"Blowing in the Wind" is, to me, like Frankenstein--something so ubiquitous, it seems it comes from folk culture, and you're surprised to realize or remember it has a specific author. (I even looked the song up just now, to double-check he wasn't reprising an old standard. But no, of course he wrote it, in 1962.)

Because Dylan has never meant much to me, I wouldn't have bothered to read his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance lecture except that Michael at OCA quoted some good lines from it this morning. 

So then I read it, and it made me cry, the way he simply gives tribute to telling stories, by retelling stories, and setting them side-by-side with other stories, starting with the story of how he saw one of Buddy Holly's last performances, and how Holly transmitted something to him:

"Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn't know what. And it gave me the chills."

Pointing to the storyteller, and the transmission of stories--that's what Toni Morrison and Doris Lessing do in their Nobel lectures too.

II. Toni Morrison

Pretty much most of Toni Morrison's Nobel acceptance lecture in 1993 is her telling a story about an old, blind woman, "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and lives alone in a small house outside of town."

A group of young people approach the woman with a question, and she gives them a sophisticated, show-offy answer, more about her than them.
So they say to her,

"Why didn't you reach out, touch us with your soft fingers, delay the sound bite, the lesson, until you knew who we were? . . .
"Don't you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?
. . . 
"Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong?
You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story.'"

III.  Doris Lessing

I've quoted from Lessing's  2007 Nobel lecture elsewhere on this blog, and I even put it in my fandom book:

“Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. . . .
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”

IV.
Lately I've been thinking about the transmission of culture. It was a surprise to me when I was a young adult to realize that the culture I grew up with was not stable and everlasting. 
There were little signs--not just the visible changes in refrigerator colors and the width of pants legs, but changes to things I hadn't even realized were fashions, like types of wine. Burgundy used to be the red wine my parents and their friends drank, then it disappeared and my friends drank meant Merlot (until it was disparaged in the movie Sideways, anyway), then... what now? Cabernet ("cab"), I guess?

And big signs, like how rock-n-roll got relegated to the oldies radio stations, and then radio stations themselves morphed into personalized custom music streaming services (is there shorthand for this?).

Some stories are transmitted continuously, like, while it's waxed and waned in white mainstream culture, there's been ongoing concern for racial equality my whole life, it seems to me (and an ongoing need for it), while other story-lines got dropped––like feminism, which was even repudiated in mainstream culture for a time (I wouldn't say the need for it dwindled, but its popularity sure did)––and these then have to get reinvented--a messy business.

I recently watched a documentary about the beginning of the second wave of feminism (1966-1971), which hugely shaped my childhood: She's Beautiful When She's Angry. 

It includes footage from the time and follow-up interviews with participants. One woman comments that the United States doesn't preserve its history of radical activism and activists' successes (aside from the American Revolution, but then, those victors became the Establishment). In the 70's, she said, feminists didn't know the long history of first wave feminism that won women's suffrage fifty years earlier. 

When I was working at a collectively run restaurant in 1980, we had meetings every Tuesday afternoon. I remember us talking about how we didn't know how to work collaboratively--even as we studied the theory, what there was of it, it wasn't bred in the bone, right? It wasn't the unquestioned norm we grew up with, and so we shouldn't be so downhearted that we weren't very good at it, which we weren't.

One thing I especially remember is the vicious in-fighting that arises among people supposedly on the same side. It's like if a dog's been chained up and mistreated, the person it's going to turn on is the person who gets close enough to try to help it, not the person who chained it up in the first place, who's nowhere near.

And now, some fifty years after second-wave feminism, I see (on Tumblr, for instance), some of the same self-defeating dynamics among gender and queer revolutionaries.
It's disheartening, but predictable, I suppose, since the theory and practice of Social Change isn't taught in school, isn't transmitted the way business practices are, for instance.

If you want to go into business, it's expected you'll get an MBA or something--there're so many smart tricks, strategies, and actual scripts for doing Capitalism; there's so much wisdom out there about how to establish checks-and-balances and how to run a workplace (not that it's always wisely practiced! ha!); if you want to run a war, there's military training (again, not to say that's applied well!); but if you're a social-change activist, you and your colleagues make a lot of stuff up as you go along, and that's problematic. 

I know there is some continuity and some intentional training among social change folk, but mentoring isn't offered free every Thursday at the library, like Business Training is.

Oops. It's noon and I have to get going so I'm going to leave this half-baked... It's something I've been thinking a lot about lately, so maybe I'll return to it again. 

Till then, make up a story, eh? :)

1001: Staying Put

This is my 1,001st post!

And here's my latest Infinity Café micromovie:
Unbroken Circle: Winter Ends (52 sec.)



"Will the Circle Be Unbroken," (1908) hymn written by Ada R. Habershon with music by Charles H. Gabriel. Cover by Randy Travis
_________________

I. Staying Put on Earth

There are two ways to be a pilgrim:
leave, and start walking along the round surface of the world;
or, stay, and watch the universe turn around you.

I'm mostly the second sort.
People here in the Northland often talk about moving someplace warmer, but I don't want to. One of the things I love most here is how I don't have to do anything or go anywhere:
If I sit in this room, due to the angle of this bit of Earth, I get a slow but amazing show as we spin through space.

Sometimes the show speeds up, like now, near spring equinox.
All of a sudden people are exclaiming, with shock and delight, as if we didn't believe it would happen (and maybe we didn't):
"Isn't it wonderful?! The days are getting sooo l o n g again!"
Yesterday it got up to 42°F (5.5°C), and we all lost our minds with joy.

II. Staying Put with Pain

Somewhat similarly, the ability to stay put, emotionally, is something that helps me deal with emotional pain, which comes and goes like the weather.
After years, I finally realized it hurts less if I don't struggle.

One evening, maybe ten years ago, I was walking home and a wave of awful loneliness hit me. I clicked through my options to avoid it--call someone up, go to a movie, have a drink, etc.--when it came to me that maybe I should just go home and sit with loneliness.
And you know? it was very comforting. At least now I wasn't lonely and something else (socially overloaded, poorer, drunk).

(This reminds me of the scene in the original The Producers:
Gene Wilder is having a panic attack, screaming, "I'm hysterical, I'm hysterical!"
and to calm him down, Zero Mostel throws water on him.
There's a pause, and then Wilder screams,
"I'm hysterical... and I'm WET!"
Oh, here it is--I think one of the funniest things on film:

I'm Hysterical!



The Producers
— MOVIECLIPS.com

"Don't hit, it doesn't help: it only increases my sense of danger."
Genius.
______
OK, so, recently I wrote about wanting to learn to live with physical pain, the way I've already learned to live with emotional pain. NOT to say I've mastered that. Ha! But I at least get the idea.
I was thinking physical pain might be a whole different thing,
but RR told me:

"On a neurological level [emotional] pain experienced lights up the same circuitry as pain of a physiological origin.
Pain is pain."
And she sent me a link to this BBC article:
"How Emotional Pain Can Really Hurt".

This is encouraging, because if the brain processes emotional and physical pain in the same place,
maybe, then, I can re-cycle the "stay with it" tactic I've already learned.

The thing is, pain is inevitable.
But how much we increase it by our reactions is negotiable. Not easy, maybe, to recalibrate the default setting that tells us to struggle, but not impossible.

And while we're sitting here, we may as well keep telling stories, like Scheherazade. It might even save our lives.

LEFT: Costume design (1910) for Rimsky-Korsakov's Ballet Russe "Scheherazade," by Leon Bakst. More here.

"The Imagined Relationship to Reality"

The folks who contributed to the blogging meme I posted a couple days ago mostly seem to be humanistic science [-fiction] techy types, so I decided to keep checking their blogs.
And, as these things go, one thing leads to another.

Big Dumb Object led me to Gerry Canavan, who posted this:

Essential Weekend Viewing: Kim Stanley Robinson's Talk, “Science, Religion, and Ideology”, (you can watch the whole talk here, plus read some transcriptions).
This is just terrific; it even influenced my dreams after I watched it last night.

This is Part 1 of 7 of the talk. ( That's Canavan giving the intro--he helped organize the event.)



K. S. Robinson, a sci-fi writer, touches on about a million things I've been wondering about as I look at Star Trek and design-
-especially utopianism: the belief that another world is possible, which connects with my attempts to understand what it means to say Star Trek (TOS) was optimistic.
KSR's wry humor proves he believes in "the possibility of comedy" too.

Robinson says history and technology have accelerated to the point where he sees little difference between sci-fi and realism anymore:
"We are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on."

I want to quote every other thing he says, but if you find this sort of thing exciting, you can watch his talk yourself.
I'll just stop here with his definition of "ideology" (science is an ideology, he says as much as religion and politics are):
"Ideology is an imagined relationship to a real situation."

How do we map our lives?

I admitted to Annika that I'd never realized how close Berlin is to Sweden. (I thought it was farther south.) "You'd never know I work with geography from my knowledge of maps," I wrote.

At the end of a long e-mail in reply, she wrote:
"P.S.: Geography isn't really about maps, is it?"

Right, not to me. To me, geography is another story, a way of talking about living in the physical world. It's a cousin to those other maps of our lives: religion, or poetry.

— Excerpt from an interview with Jack Gilbert, talking about Story almost as if he were talking about Earth's tectonic plates:

"Your actual being is changed. My heart, for instance, was partially made by the songs of Frank Sinatra and by movies I went to when I was growing up. My heart was shaped by stories, by pictures, by songs.

"I believe we are made by art, art that matters. Not what’s ingenious, clever, or hard to read. Not a mystery puzzle.

"I think if a poem doesn’t put emotional pressure on me, I don’t feel uncomfortable in the sense of feeling more than I can feel, understanding more than I can understand, loving more than I am able to be in love. Real poetry enables me for that. I think it’s about putting pressure on me. If it doesn’t put pressure on the reader, what’s it for?"

[image of geography book from pillipat's flickr]

Telling the Same Story

"... at times, one might almost believe that from the first dawn of consciousness throughout the ages, mankind has constantly been telling itself the same story, though with infinite variations, to the rhythm of its breath and pulse."
--Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize acceptance speech

I just learned from Darwi about the author Ivo Andric, the Bosnian recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1961 (the year I was born).

I am endlessly interested in writers discussing writing--why do we do it? What's the point? And what is it, anyway? 
(We bloggers discuss this as much as any writer, I think.) Andric's speech has some good stuff on this topic.

What he says sounds a lot like what Doris Lessing said in her Nobel speech * . They say eloquently and unabashedly what I fumble toward expressing --hesitantly, sometimes, because it's so much more romantic than the cool academic criticism I was taught:

That we write because we are human, and that to weave words is human, like dancing. And while some of the stories will encourage fear and ignorance, others will help us endure the devastation arising from them--I don't say overcome or even, alas, avoid them, though one can hope. And try. 

The strands of stories are woven together, and we're not wise enough to censor them, so it's best not to. We need the rope.

I can imagine, like Doris Lessing, a scraggly group huddled around a fire on the continent of North America, after some possible future horror (god forbid). 
Someone will be telling stories about, say, how we used to immerse ourselves any time we wanted in tubs full of hot water. And how we worried about eating too much. And bought pet toys. Some will sigh, some will laugh, the children will disbelieve, and we'll all carry on, scratching in the dirt with sticks.

While I suppose it will be stories as much as anything that get us into the mess--stories we tell ourselves, for instance, that we can turn anything we touch to gold--it will be stories that comfort us afterward--eliciting laughter or sadness or wonder, or other true things--when we sit among piles of golden rubble, chewing on our shoes.

More importantly, because we are a short-sighted species, stories matter because they address the everyday horrors of our individual lives. 
Who gets through life without breaking what we love, or being broken? And everyday hopes happen too, one hopes. When we read old stories, we see the breakage and the longing look the same as ours, though with infinite variations, and the stories do too.

While this can be disheartening--do we have to keep doing this stuff over and over?--it's cheering too. 
If something good survived this, this fall of empire, this broken heart, this plague, maybe I, maybe we, can too. Or maybe our stories can.
Or, if the stories don't survive (blogs without electricity don't exist), so what?
People will tell new ones, and--funny thing--they'll sound the same.
 __________________________
* Doris Lessing Nobel Lecture:

"The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."

Death in the Afternoon

Adios to Ricardo Montalbán, who died last week (Jan. 14). 

Left, in his native Mexico, in a 1945 role as a matador.
The Spanish word matador comes from matar, to kill.

Montalban's most splendid role as a killer was, of course, Khan in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed" and the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.



 __________________

"Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you."

--Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway's nonfiction book on bullfighting