Cimorene

I did finish The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, and I did get quite interested in the romantic plots and depictions of women fighting in war therein, which certainly do seem to have inspired LOTR. But another issue fascinated me alongside it, namely the orcs.

For context, my opinion, prior to my recent reading of and about these two Morris books, of the whole issue of orcs and goblins in LOTR was that they are essentially racist. I think any attempt to portray a humanoid fantasy species that are inherently evil would be inevitably (with the possible exception of a hypothetical situation where exploring and deconstructing that exact issue was the whole point). I had garnered the impression that the dehumanification of orcs was done with the intention of making it less agonizing/harrowing/tragic, to allow the Good characters to be fighting and killing a depersonalized Evil, but that Tolkien himself (eventually?) even was aware of (? or uncomfortable with?) the implications. (I set aside the film portrayal, which made it worse, but I'm just discussing the books here.) But I haven't investigated that issue or the scholarship about it that I recall, just read posts and essays in fandom and online about it. (I know there is scholarship about it, but I haven't looked.)

Recently I did a websearch about William Morris's HOTW/ROTM and discovered (as mentioned in a couple of previous posts) some indications that these books, specifically, had inspired bits of LOTR, and my curiosity determined me to finish wading through the boringness/rhyming poetry of HOTW in order to finally read ROTM. And I read it! Part of what I found in that websearch was the Wikipedia article called William Morris's influence on Tolkien, which is a bit of a grab bag but included this:

Morris describes the Dusky Men as "long-armed like apes", "as foul as swine", fighting with crooked swords, and forming "a stumbling jostling throng".[24] Massey comments that their nature is dehumanised, so they can be slaughtered "with impunity", and that Tolkien modelled the Orcs on them.[24]

[24] Massey 2007, pp. 130–132.

Massey, Kelvin Lee (2007). The Roots of Middle-Earth: William Morris's Influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien. University of Tennessee (PhD thesis).

And then also, in Graham Seaman's 2003 Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains (also mentioned in a previous post), this: ( Read more... ) Therefore, I started reading the book after these two passages with the impression that the "Huns" or Dusky Men of Morris's ROTM were going to be a fantasy race: definitely not human - acting like zombies, incapable of breeding with people (and also inherently evil). Please note: I do not unquestioningly accept that quote from Jordanes and what it is apparently arguing, but I wanted to investigate the matter further myself. But even if I didn't swallow the argument whole, I did still expect this passage to be factual - that is, for the Dusky Men to actually be unambiguously, in the text, a fantasy race, not just human beings, who are inherently evil and all that jazz.

But they aren't.

Surprise!

So now I have to deal with what they actually ARE in the text before I come back to whether Jordanes, et. al. absolves Morris and Tolkien, or to what it could mean.

Are the Huns unambiguously inhuman fantasy monsters? No. Are they like orcs, goblins, or zombies? No. They are described as ugly, short-necked, small-eyed, etc., but none of the physical descriptions go beyond the standard anti-Asian racism discussed so extensively in Said's Orientalism. They are guys who are not as smart or good at fighting as the heroic germanic tribesmen - that's why they formed a stumbling, jostling throng in that quote: because they weren't all drilled and prepared to take up orderly formations and obey the orders of their commanders. They were just panicking. Can they interbreed with humans? Yes. And they do. Are there half-breeds to deal with? Yes. They are either raised as Dusky Men or murdered as infants by them. So, then, is it possible that they are actually human? Again, not really, if you take the testimony of the various characters who relate exposition about them as true (and it is true within the story, I would say), but I don't think that's intentional. Here is a small selection of the most relevant quotations about them:( Read more... )

So to sum up: ROTM's Dusky Men are an all-male, all-warrior parasitical society. All its citizens are warriors who do no other labor, and they keep a proportionally massive enslaved population, whom they abuse egregiously. Their natural children by their captives usually resemble their fathers but not always, and are not infrequently born with severe cognitive disabilities; of the apparently healthy offspring, the male ones are raised as Dusky Men and the female ones murdered. They travel in groups, but they are not nomadic: they look for a comfortable place they can exploit and move in there to stay. Further groups of Dusky Men arrive over time, but this seems to be the result of having exhausted natural resources or grown too numerous for their previous residences, or from being driven out in war.

They very definitely aren't the historical Huns, because they don't fight on horseback, and don't even seem to move their people on horseback, and they don't arrive with herds of livestock. (Also we know the Huns didn't practice universal female infanticide.) (If Wikipedia is to be believed, Jordanes wrote about the Hunnic Altziagiri tribe's summer and winter pasturage in Crimea, so this lack of herding is a deliberate departure on Morris's part: he puts quite a lot into emphasizing the Dusky Men's refusal to do any labor at all, which is certainly his socialism showing. More on this later.) They also very definitely aren't a possible depiction of any other real civilization in history, because of ( Read more... ) But given that the Victorian English reader would not find these circumstances implausible, I think they are still compatible with intent to portray a race of people, not a race of orcs or monsters. ( Read more... )

When you consider that ROTM is a novel from the point of view of the Goths, it is easier to accept that some parts - like the accusations of ugliness - might represent racism on the part of the characters, and not necessarily the author. In other words, the Dusky Men might be intended as a portrayal of a plausible human society of total assholes, whose assholery is in their behavior - enslaving and oppressing other people so that they can be the idle rich, and also sadism and cruelty - and whose appearances are described in all the classic racist cliches from Said's Orientalism because that is, realistically, how medieval central European societies repeatedly described people from Asia. The descriptions are xenophobic and reflective of the worst traditions of Orientalist racism, but they are completely in character for his text, which is essentially a fictional medieval history - it poses as the kind of history composed on the basis of oral folklore, with many appeals to what the fictional oral tradition says, with levels of detail comparable to epic poetry. (Morris was a huge fan of epic poetry and translated a lot of the prose Edda, some of the poetic Edda, Beowulf, and various medieval French romances into English.) Roughly, this book seems to be answering the question, "What if there existed a bundle of orally-transmitted song and poetry about the length of the Iliad about this bit of the history of the Goths (that particular racist one from Jordanes up above, I mean) and the bits around it, and somebody had translated it into graceful and beautiful prose, what might that look like?"

This has accounted for sources and motivations behind a lot of choices here, but it hasn't really settled why his Dusky Men differ in the ways they do from what you might expect of the, you know, horrible enslaving Asian conquering horde in the middle ages. And the answer to all of those whys is probably ultimately "Morris's passionate socialist beliefs", although the connection between those beliefs and the outcome on the page is open to multiple interpretations.

The enslaving Dusky Men's monstrous refusal of labour - which isn't just about becoming social parasites, but is a choice which was inherently destructive of one's moral character and happiness, according to Morris's worldview - is clearly related to socialism. We can detect reflections of growing capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, the oppression of the English working classes, etc. But it's harder to diagnose the universal female infanticide. Is this a choice driven by titillation, essentially - an attempt merely to make them more alien, more horrible? ...No. Spoiler: it's probably because for Morris, socialism includes and implies female equality.

Morris is not a perfect feminist, but his novels, his nonfiction, and his actions as a business owner and political activist were all strongly in support of what we would today call feminism. He believed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals, and his vision of a future socialist utopia is one of full gender equality. In his socialist fantasies women and men share equally in the joyful, physically and morally edifying physical labor of agriculture and figure equally as masters of all the arts and crafts; in his medieval pastiche novels women figure as heroes, warriors and decision-makers, though not always to the same degree. So. That's probably why. Maybe I'll have figured out a theory to explain the connection better by the time I've written the other essay I need to write about the women warriors and politicians in this book.

Golden Age detective novels from the 1920s and 30s occasionally betray an obviously widespread societal meme, because the casualness and briefness with which it's invoked imply that it would be easily recognized and understood by the audience: that jazz isn't "real" music.

Take this representative example from Bats in the Belfry by the prolific and popular Golden Age author, ECR Lorac (Edith Caroline Rivett), wherein a young woman thinks that a stuffy old uncle has done his best for her because he's "done what he could to teach her to read, to appreciate literature and despise trash, to listen to music as well as to jazz, and to speak English instead of schoolgirl slang."

This is interesting because this is exactly what a certain large subset of people thought was witty to say, and other people would sincerely and angrily say, about rap music in the 1990s.

Of course, it's not like it was a secret at the time that this claim was just racism, but there were always plenty of people who didn't know it, like other things that are well-known to be just racism like the 'blue lives matter' movement, or welfare cuts, or "bad neighborhoods".

But the point is that jazz not only sounds completely different from rap to the neophyte (I'm aware this is ignoring the musical traditions that connect them and plenty of sophisticated music analysis), with the main feature that connects them being their Black roots and their associations with Black culture; jazz has also now attained a venerable status as a genre, spoken of in the same breath as classical music.

Anyway, the pattern makes it even clearer, doesn't it? It's the exact same preposterous criticism.

In pursuit of time to darn socks and to finish knitting a hat for my dad and the ill-fated purple hoodie I first started in 2019:

• Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998). 5/5. The concept is pretty similar to Snatch, though. It's just fitted together more neatly. Some great performances. Very funny. An almost total lack of female characters, but given how unbelievably stupid the criminals in question are, it doesn't seem implausible or unfortunate. Bonus for the ending.



• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. 5/5. I had heard that this movie was both award-winning and fantastic and also depressing, but I had NOT heard that it was based on an award-winning play written in 1982, so I was still surprised. It feels, from the start, like an original and incredibly good response to an exam question about the titular song, and as a fan of the period and early jazz who has a lot of accumulated trivia but not expert knowledge and not particular knowledge of Ma Rainey, I was excited by everything. But it doesn't do what I expected from the title. Knowing it's a play and that's when it's written, though, the title makes perfect sense. You would notice that it was a play, inevitably, before the end of it anyway; it's very theatrical. As for being depressing, the history of blues and jazz is inextricable from the history of Black people in America( Read more... )
  . It's not a grueling portrayal of racist violence or anything like that: it's a long day of recording in a mostly-white city, backstories and social issues in dialogue, some white men who probably think that they aren't racist but whom you want to throw in the lake; and it's also an unflinching look at how the cruelty and tragedy of being Black in America penetrated every facet of their lives and what that looked like at this moment in time. It does have its own little dash of tragedy and one character death onscreen, but it succeeded in driving home the point that the little tragedy pales next to the bigger injustices.
  
  ...And also this is off topic, but I also can't fail to mention how incredibly good the hair, makeup, and wardrobe are. You may remember that these aspects in historicals are a bugbear of mine, and may know that the 1920s are my favorite historical era and perhaps the one I know the most about, so I was so over the moon about how incredibly fucking good it was that the plot got quite a bit less of my attention. Every single aspect of that issue that I could think of was perfect. I saw makeup on Viola Davis here that I've seen in vintage photos and paintings and never seen in a single after-the-fact reenactment before because it's been considered unflattering since. Even the hair, and it was BLACK hair, on multiple women and multiple men! Seriously, I know they actually won the Oscar for makeup, but it wasn't enough.



• Pitch Perfect 2. 2/5, almost didn't finish. There were plenty of good jokes, but I don't really like pop mashups and medleys very much to begin with, a lot of the humor was very uncomfortable for me, and then there's the wealthy suburban white stereotypical college experience discourse as a genre and how it makes my blood boil. Not For Me.



• Their Finest. 4.5/5. Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Rachel Stirling. A woman hired to help add a woman's touch to the British propaganda films during the bombing of London helps make a successful movie. I like this period of film. The costumes were good - so many knits, so well chosen, an I wanted several of them! - and the visual design overall was better. I barely stopped yelling "LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE LIGHT FIXTURE" the entire time. Plot was engaging, London under bombing was very vivid, and Bill Nighy made me cry twice. Also the ending of this movie was SO WEIRD and took me completely by surprise, in that Whoa, thought I knew what I was watching!-way. Um, another character death warning, but you know, ww2 and all that.



• Death in Paradise - the pilot. I've been meaning to give this a try for a while. It was a good time and I'll probably watch more later, but wasn't blown away. A lot of modern murder mysteries try to fake being in the classic Golden Age genre - a la Christie -, but it's just window dressing if you can't properly seed clues. If there's just a series of clues and then the detective pulls a genius solution out of his hat that the viewer never had the chance to suspect, it's not a classic mystery, it's more of just... a show about a detective. Not only are you the viewer (reader) not solving the mystery in this case, you're not even "solving the author" (which occurs when you can spot all the clues and you're just trying to guess if it's a red herring or a double or a triple bluff) - you're not solving anything, you're just watching a magic trick. But the lead is kind of a comedic character, and that's something. Plus the setting is, obviously, the big draw.



• Never Have I Ever, Mindy Kaling's new teen sitcom. 5 or 6 episodes? It had a lot of good jokes, but when I stopped watching and took a step back I didn't have any desire to keep going. There was nothing to find out, no real plots or arcs, just... a long series of jokes. It was a likeable setup with lots of cute and interesting characters, but ultimately it was too much an American sitcom.



• The Pelican Brief (1993). Working our way through Grisham movies. This one was unintentionally hilarious, because it's all about all these people killing everyone to avoid a breaking scandal that the president's primary donor owns a business that had a lawyer and two Supreme Court justices assassinated - but the closest link to the Republican president is that they've been photographed at a hunting lodge - no suggestion he knew anything! Nobody would even blink at that! Russian oligarchs are still financing most of the Democrats AND most of the Republicans after we all watched Russia literally illegally steal the '16 election and set an asset in the Oval Office! I mean now that scandal would MAYBE sink the business, but more likely some scapegoat would go to jail and the CEO would claim to have not known about it. The President asks the FBI chief to back off of the guy, which probably could lead to indictment, but is no more than any other Republican president in the last few decades would've done. And they're trying to sell the idea that the admin would all unanimously be like "we're never gonna be re-elected now, better not try"? Oh, sweet summer children.



• The Trip to Spain. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I've seen a lot of Rob Brydon on Would I Lie to You and a few other British panel shows, and actually was a little fuzzy on who Steve Coogan is, which I gather from this movie is unusual. But I see why they get along so well and am quite sure I wouldn't want to go on a road trip with either of them. It was fun to watch, but I'm totally bemused about a movie that is a fake documentary: they're playing themselves, without the names changed or anything, but all the other roles in their lives are played by actors. I can't think of another time I've seen that done.



• Rewatching TNG for the first time in about 10 years - eps 2 & 3. 2 is the ripoff of TOS The Naked Time, which is funny and has some memorable bits but overall not as good. 3 is "Code of Honor", and it's got such a high level of Yikes that I could barely watch. I don't know how I had forgotten this! It's a thinly-veiled reference to Arab culture, and they're all literally dressed in shiny lamé turbans and harem pants, but the supposed-aliens are all played by Black people, like that is supposed to somehow counteract the stereotypes? The plot revolves around the chieftan of this "primitive culture" kidnapping Yar for a wife and then refusing to deal with the Federation for a life-saving vaccine if she won't fight a challenge to the death with his current #1 wife. REALLY? I'm just like... what did the non-white, non-male people around Roddenberry SAY about stuff like this?

As he now went up the weary and perpetual steps, he was daunted and bewildered by their almost infinite series. But it was not the hot horror of a dream or of anything that might be exaggeration or delusion. Their infinity was more like the empty infinity of arithmetic, something unthinkable, yet necessary to thought. Or it was like the stunning statements of astronomy about the distance of the fixed stars. He was ascending the house of reason, a thing more hideous than unreason itself.

—GK Chesterton, The Man Who was Thursday

( Commentary )

stultiloquentia posted: Mansfield Park and Slavery

Austen isn't exactly writing an overt screed against the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. What she IS doing is inexorably LINKING the moral corruption of slavery with the moral corruption of the patriarchy. Largely through a series of subtle but crucial language choices and situational comparisons.

This post is an excellent read, and would have made a welcome intro to the editions of Mansfield Park I read as a child and teenager, because I completely failed to get that stuff. The bias in the American school system is well known, so it's probably unsurprising that the focus in my education was on the North American side of the politics of slavery and abolition, although of course the English role is integral - but mostly the English actions which affected the US directly, like the abolitionist movement and the outlawing of the trade there - I didn't learn anything about Lord Mansfield and the judgment that rendered all people free when they set foot in England until Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I don't think, even though we did Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre at the same time in high school.

Anyway, tl;dr, but this makes me determined to reread MP again with some additional historical background this time. And it accords entirely with my general view that Edmund is terrible and undeserving of Fanny. (Edmund: THE WORST Austen Hero? DISCUSS.)

So, until this point, the most offensive Star Trek episode I remember was probably that time that displacing an entire planet of NDN colonists turned out to just be the B-plot device for illuminating Wesley Crusher's manpain and allowing him to walk off with the Traveller into the space/time continuum.

And actually that one is probably still worse, to be fair, because at least Chakotay is an NDN character and was allowed to be the main character of this ep.

But so anyway, what happens in Voyager 2x02 "Initiations" is that Chakotay's shuttle is attacked by a 13-year-old Kazon alien who wants to kill him for infringing on their territory. (The Kazon are a tribal culture who wear lumpy foreheads and are painted red, and whose hair is in fuzzy afros with things sticking out of them.) The kid, who is played by the guy who played Nog, fails to kill Chakotay, who saves his life, and then they both get captured by the kid's tribe. The kid, because he failed to kill his designated coming-of-age prey, can now not become a man in his tribe.

The Kazon chief comes down and has a shouting match with Chakotay, who is trying to say that Voyager doesn't want to be these guys' enemy, and utters lines like:

"Everything you are is a threat to us... the Kazon fought long and hard for their independence from uniforms like yours"

and

"Your uniforms... your laws... your technology... you are not welcome here."

Then Chakotay, THE SINGLE NDN CHARACTER IN THE SHOW (who is actually played by a Mexican American guy) and also a former ANTI-FEDERATION Maquis freedom fighter, is made to stand for the enlightened colonial culture in a split-screen nose-to-nose faceoff... with the angry anti-colonialist violent savage played by a white man in LITERALLY RED redface.

Chakotay thinks 4 small children approximating the ages of the kids from the Sound of Music have been called to the bridge to witness his execution, but it was actually to witness HIM killing the child who failed to kill him. He refuses and escapes, offering the kid the opportunity to flee with him rather than be executed, but the Kazon shoot down their shuttle and they land on the moon and have to stay overnight before being rescued by Voyager. (Chakotay offers the kid the opportunity to kill him in order to gain his adulthood but the kid decides to shoot the chieftain instead and everyone goes away happy except the dead chieftain.)

So anyway, I was thinking that the standoff between the redfaced 'savage' chief and the civilized Federation Chakotay was done deliberately - still gross, but it would have been making an attempt at commentary. However, then I looked the episode up on Wikipedia, and it seems that wasn't the case at all.

Executive producer Michael Piller was displeased with the depiction of the Kazon in Biller's first draft of the episode; where they were supposed to be analogous to street gangs in Los Angeles, they were instead "coming across as warmed-over Klingons." In addition to J[e]ri Taylor's already extensive notes on the draft, Piller suggested Biller get in touch with actual gang members or a police officer who could better clue the writer into street gang culture for the episode. Instead, Biller picked up a copy of Monsta, a book by convicted murderer and former gang member "Monsta" Cody. The book's insight into gang life and culture was a guiding light for Biller's second draft, which he worked up with Piller, endeavoring to set the Kazon apart "from Romulans, Cardassians, and Klingons."[8] wikipedia

(This is probably the source of the symbolic coming-of-age kill, the shifting territories, and the emphasis placed on signs and insignia at the beginning of the episode.)

And then

Michael Piller commented, "Here we were, on the first day of prep and Ken started rewriting that script based on my feelings that we had to get to the guts of what drove the Kazon and they had to be different from Romulans and Cardassians and Klingons." Piller concluded, "It was a choice of settling, or doing what I considered excellent work. The bottom line is we had a better show, because Ken did research."

[...]

This episode's story itself was a problematic one for director Winrich Kolbe. He explained, "Storywise it was not the most interesting show I've ever done. It was a push. My problem with the Chakotay character was that I wanted to forget the Indian aspect and make him the Maquis that he was supposed to be. I knew Chakotay would have to eventually cooperate on the ship, but I hoped he would do it unwillingly most of the time. I talked to the writers about it, why we weren't playing that conflict. They went with the Indian thing, which was kind of intriguing, but in my opinion, never paid off because it was done too subtly." memory alpha

(...Subtly?!)

I still find it hard to believe that the transposition of the NDN character - especially when the director explicitly underlines that they were "[going] with the Indian thing" - with the Kazon's anti-colonialist speech was accidental. But maybe emphasizing the word "uniforms" repeatedly was supposed to suggest encounters with police (which wouldn't make sense because the uniformed people the Kazon encounter aren't police with authority over them...)? But apparently the producers and writer regard their attempts to make the Kazon into street gangs as successful, and the episode simply an opportunity to develop Chakotay's background and give him some action scenes.

I... well. I don't cry easily, but I did lie limply on the sofa moaning "whyyyy is Hollywood" for a while.

These were thoughts I was having that didn't really fit on Twitter. I was all baffled and frustrated until I remembered I have a blog specifically for longer thoughts.

Anyway, this post is not a review, and not spoilery, because I haven't actually seen the new X movie (I don't watch Holocaust stuff; it's a thing), and that's not really my point anyway. But this morning I read the much-linked E! online movie review, Magneto and Professor X Had Sex at the Movies This Summer—Did You See It?. (That is a review. And it is spoilery.)

Basically the review contends that:

1. X-men has always been an allegory for American race relations and civil rights, with Xavier representing Martin Luther King, Jr and Magneto representing Malcolm X (not going into a debate, but suffice to say I'd include the Black Panthers on Magneto's side of the allegory);
and


2. the new movie deliberately shifts the allegory to the struggle for gay rights instead.

I think she's right about the movie and its intentionality. She's also probably right that Xavier's "idealistic" position aligns with wanting to live in the closet, although obviously not exactly since he doesn't want to explicitly keep the X-men's powers a secret, while Erik's cape and helmet do certainly argue for her comparison to drag.

The thing is, the movie's set in the 1960s, when closeting was a not-unreasonable life choice, but it's speaking to today's civil rights struggle. And today the argument that out and proud would be harmful to the gay agenda our cause is a bit ludicrous.

I've seen state after state legalize gay marriage in the last 10 years; I'm out and I've gotten gay married in the state where my mom spent ½ her childhood. In a world where polling shows more than half of Americans support gay marriage and nobody but the Pentagon and McCain supports Don't Ask Don't Tell, the administration has just gone to bat against DOMA, and it was Republicans who pushed through New York's new gender-neutral marriage laws, the idea that we need to sit down and shut up and put away our Rupaul's Drag Race and our pride parades and prove we're just like them to get equality is not just obsolete; it's offensive. And Professor X is nothing but one giant tone argument.

So today Magneto's out-and-proud looks a lot more reasonable than Charles's quiet collaboration (admittedly 'kill them all' never looks reasonable, but 'full equality now or fuck you' probably shouldn't really be equated to 'kill them all'). Today, it's the Charleses in the Finnish government who were willing to sit down and coalitionize with the Christian Democrats at the price of promising no new rights for gay people who have dirty hands and I hope guilty consciences. They're the ones I couldn't see my conscience clear to working with or living with, not the Eriks who throw glitter on Newt Gingrich at book signings.

Which rather makes me even less sympathetic to Charles's position than I already was thanks to a) his enormous privilege, b) his douchiness, c) his moral flexibility combined with sanctimoniousness, and d) the fact that in the past movies Magneto's position was always the one aligned with observable reality and events.

- I've noticed that Tumblr is really white. If I were talking about its userbase, that would be okay, because of course sociologically speaking social networking sites grow via extant social networks. To put it another way, it's quite possible that only the really-really-white social network is present there thus far. (The fact that it seems to be all young anglo and francophone and Spanish-speaking hipsters supports this.) Anyway, that's one thing, but the problem is that, in its full-time reproduction of pop culture imagery, the userbase tends to whitewash pop culture even further. To take an example, images of successful young actresses and fashion models are everywhere on Tumblr, yet black fashion models are severely underrepresented, even those who are far more famous and successful than many of the white (or mixed-race or latina but styled as white) models whose images proliferate. There's a blog called "fuckyeahvsmodels" which posts a wide variety of pictures of Victoria's Secret models, but almost none of Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell, two of VS's most famous models of all time (not to mention the younger black supermodels who have walked for them in recent seasons).

+ Has inspired me to search the internet for more images of said black models and actresses starting with the ones whose absence I immediately noticed (after the success of "Telephone", Tumblr's been inundated with a fresh stream of images of Lady Gaga, who's been on tour in Australia and caught in candids most days and in on-stage snapshots most nights; but while the image stills of Beyoncé from the video are being reproduced enthusiastically, it hasn't led to a huge wave of other pictures of Beyoncé, who is one of the most successful women in American entertainment today, and whom there are plenty of images of. This is fairly contrary to the way Tumblr typically works, where buzz about current movies and tv shows drastically affects the level of picspam about people). Anyway, the plus side is that I've discovered tons more gorgeous models and my "girls" image directory is bursting at the seams.

On vacay my cousin Amanda took us to a favorite gift shop, the Kansas City Area ten thousand villages, a non-profit volunteer-staffed store selling fair trade objets d'art from third world countries. A lot of it was much like what you'd find at the Riverkids Shop (they even had the same recycled Vietnamese fishfood bags, of which I already own one), but the store's bigger - a wall of scarves and bags, two color-grouped walls of jewelry, and a big showroom full of everything from musical instruments and umbrellas of recycled aluminum cans to big carved wood and steel drum sculptures. I'd quite like to have one nearby.

The staff was of middle-aged church fete ladies in stiff halos of hair straight out of one of those space-helmet salons, dowdy matchy-match pantsuits and fair trade accessories, as if the Women's Group of an aging Unitarian Universalist congregation were meeting behind the counter (not unlikely, in fact). The whole time we were shopping, the gentle hum of their debate over sparkly third-world Christmas ornaments for display burbled along behind us.

One lady in particular, however, kept breaking in with the others to ask them, "Is this ethnic?" "So do you think this one is ethnic?" "Is it ethnic, do you think?"

I'm not sure precisely what it was that gave me such a strong feeling of revulsion - some variant of Nice White Lady syndrome perhaps? - aside from the build-up of lip-biting that nearly resulted in my telling her, "EVERYTHING IS ETHNIC IN YOUR EXOTICISING, 'ETHNIC' SHOP, YOU PRETENTIOUS YUPPIE." Because, I mean, I'm glad the Nice White Ladies are volunteering there and would happily shop the fuck out of that store. But still. Can't they have a consciousness-raising or something?

As always, read naraht for the comprehensive linkage.

• sami: Back to Patricia Wrede and the Thirteenth Child: You Haven't Read This Post! "And in any case, you can get all you need from the author's description of the premise and her motivation for it[...] further verification isn't really needed, because you can get it from Wrede's own statement."



• spiralsheep: In which it's rarely a good idea to tell me to shut up about social justice "'Can We NOT Do Racefail Again, Please?' "We"? I'd be only too happy if there was no more racefail. In order to achieve that the racefailers need to stop failing so we can all stop having to deal with the consequences of their fail. Which is presumably what your post is going to be about, right? I mean, you wouldn't turn around and ask anti-racist activists to be silent about racism for your own personal convenience, would you? Oh, wait...."



• gwailowrite: Ah, the racefail continues on "It's too hard to include Native peoples because then I'll actually have to deal with them. I don't like the stereotypes but it's just to damn haaaaaaaaard to do anything about those stereotypes. Ya know, I could write about them honestly, counter the stereotypes, and actually include Native people in my magical mystery tour of the early U.S., but that's so haaaaaaaaaard! [...] Oh, and while we're at it...why not get rid of that whole pesky slavery thing. It was like wrong and I like hate it and all, but, ya know, it would be haaaaaaaard to actually address it."



• holyschist: Assorted thoughts on MammothFail '09 "catmoran said this: 'There are only two reasons I can think of to eliminate an entire race of people from alternate history fiction: to explore the impact it has on everything else, or because the author is a racist ass.'"