ada_hoffmann

Rabbit, rabbit! January really came apart toward the end, but we are catching just enough of the nor'easter to snow February in and I have just learned of the existence of the cobalt crust fungus, which looks like scales of lapis on dead wood. Hestia has been dealing with the sub-zero wind chill temperatures by means of aggressive basking.

History, what do you mean that Folkways Records was founded by the son of Sholem Asch who, as one last trick after the scandals of Jewish lesbians and Christian novels, wrote a version of the Nativity recorded for his son's record label by Pete Seeger? What kind of concatenation is that to drop on an unsuspecting person? And is there a reason no artist is credited with the pen-and-ink illustrations depicting the story in 1963 even as the prose sticks to its historical setting, which are maddening me with their sketch-expressive familiarity, although perhaps only because my grandmother had that kind of loose, scribbly, ink-washed line? Ben Shahn at least had the decency to sign his album art. The Claibornes' "Listen, Mr. Bilbo" could have had the luck to lose its relevance since 1946. History, the other kind of convergence was more fun. Listen while I tell you that the foreigners you hate are the very same people made America great.

Mailing our census form back to the city turned out to be slightly more of a Shackletonian trek than I had prepared for, not because I had failed to notice the maze of sidewalks and driveways tunneled out of the snow-walls on our street or the thick-flocked snowfall that had restarted around sunset, but because I had expected some neighbor to have snowblown or at least shoveled the block with the post box on it. It stood amid magnificent, inviolate drifts. I waded. At 18 °F and wind chill, my hands effectively quit on me within five minutes, but even between their numbness and my camera's increasing preference not to, I did manage to take a couple of pictures I liked.

( Laughter doesn't always mean. )

JSTOR showcased Laura Secord with the result that I had to listen, thanks these aeons ago to ladymondegreen, to Tanglefoot.

It is a sign of how badly the last three years in particular have accordioned into one another that my reaction to discovering last year's new album from Brivele was the pleased surprise that it followed so soon on their latest EP. I am intrigued that they cover the Young'uns' "Cable Street" (2017), which has for obvious reasons been on my mind.

I can find no further details on the secretary from the North Midlands who appears in the second half of this clip from This Week: Lesbians (1965), but if there was any justice in the universe the studio should have been besieged with letters from interested women, because in explaining the problems of dating, she's a complete delight. "Well, that's the difficulty. In a way, it means that I have to keep making friends with people because I can't find out unless I make friends with them and then if they are lesbian, there's hope for me, but even then there isn't hope unless they happen to take to me!"

It is always a beautiful day to yell at God, but while you are waiting to take a number for that extremely lengthy line, you might as well stand with Minnesota. Maine, too. I had thoughts about Stolpersteine and Fugitive Slave Acts, but in terms of coherent expression I spent most of my day reacting to the wave of something like scented detergent or dryer sheets that rolled out of the heating system around nine in the morning and stopped me sleeping or particularly breathing well.

I have been re-reading my second edition of Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2010/13) which remains a wealth of otherwise inaccessible information with a close eye to the complex interplay of his biography and screen persona. I still disagree frequently with her criticism, but the detail of her research does things like offer a potential reconciliation between the family stories that Leslie was shell-shocked out of the First World War and the absence of his name from any records of active service in France: toward the end of his short stint as a second lieutenant with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry in the spring of 1916, his regiment was billeted with various divisions at Harponville, Ypres, and Arras, where it would have been possible to be officially non-combatant and still, in the immortal words of Frederic Manning, shelled to shit. Leslie himself never claimed to have seen combat, confiding in one of his broadcasts in 1940, "I am willing to let you figure out the degree of my senility by telling you that during most of the last war I was a very junior officer in a cavalry regiment. However, long before I got anywhere near the battlefront, everybody had settled down into trenches, and as horses are practically useless in trenches I found myself near Divisional Headquarters, pretty bored but pretty safe." His daughter records in her memoir A Quite Remarkable Father (1959) that his violent nightmares which could wake anyone within earshot were understood by his family to be connected to his war. She does not seem to have wondered the same about his self-admitted knack for dissociation or his rare but explosive losses of temper. Eforgan follows her in attributing his conviction of heart trouble to hypochondria; it occurred to me that pre-DSM, a person who regularly woke himself shouting and dreaded traveling alone, especially by train in case he shouted his fellow passengers awake with him, could be forgiven the common confusion of a panic for a heart attack. I found Leslie Ruth Dale-Harris née Howard through some cross-checks on Eforgan and the interstitial material contributed by Ronald Howard to Trivial Fond Records (1982) and her portrait of her father is fascinatingly the most fragile of the three, especially since much of what she regards affectionately as his eccentricities and his foibles looks very little out of the ordinary to me, e.g. a capacity for effortless, spellbinding charm right up until his social meter ran out and he had to leave his own party to fall asleep. A droll sense of humor on his own time, a steel-trap comfort with last-minute rewrites and improvisations, and he couldn't tell a formal joke to save his life without cracking himself up over it or lie without self-conscious same. Fifteen years after his death, his daughter still seems amazed that her famously disorganized father, the same nervous mess who had forgotten the ring at his own wedding and needed reminding of everything from call times to the necessity of food, a regular Menakhem-Mendl of the British film industry if she had just acknowledged his Jewishness—like his non-monogamy, it is elided with mid-century tact—threw himself so obstinately and intently into the war effort even when it ran him directly against the prejudices and proscriptions of the Ministry of Information and the BBC. He doesn't just start to look his age in the last years of his life, he looks recklessly burning himself to make his films and his broadcasts and his tours and his connections that Eforgan documents with the Free French and SOE. About a month into the Blitz, he noted with characteristic self-deprecation that after his London flat took a direct hit, "I decided to heed the exhortation of the popular song and 'get out of town'. In fact, I got out of town with a quite undignified haste, arguing to myself that one can prepare a film for production just as well in the country." He continued to travel weekly into London for work until his final tour for the British Council in 1943 and I don't know what he dreamed for any of it. R.I.P. ADH2*2, three cocktails put him literally on the floor.

I seem unable to think about movies except in this secondhand fashion, but I wrote another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. This year it's a lot of noir.

My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.

I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.

( These sisters waiting to wear their own clothes. )

Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.