The German language has quite a few animalistic verbs:
fuchsen ("to fox") = to annoy
hechten ("to pike") = to dive
reihern ("to heron") = to puke
dackeln ("to dachshund") = to walk slowly
aalen ("to eel") = to bask
vögeln ("to bird") = to have sex
einigeln ("to hedgehog in") = to curl up
hamstern ("to hamster") = to hoard
schlängeln ("to snake") = to wriggle
stieren ("to bull") = to goggle
unken ("to toad") = to gripe, augur doom
tigern ("to tiger") - to walk tigerishly
Animaljoy our language!
Today’s read is @mjohnharrison ‘s Nova Swing.
Its predecessor, Light, gently gutted me a few years ago. I had come to identify with aspects of the furious intelligence, Seria Mau, once human, now a space ship, who is cut free from her physical form in the final pages.
“In the micro-cameras she saw herself for the first time in fifteen years. She was this small, broken, yellowish thing, its limbs all at odd angles, curling and uncurling itself feebly against the pain of the open air.”
At that exact moment in my life, this was a #trans allegory, and the resolution had me sobbing quietly in the dark.
Mira Bellwether, author of Fucking Trans Women, died today. The world is poorer for her absence.
People make fun of vi because it’s hard to get out, but it says right there: “esc : w q”. Whereas getting out of emacs apparently requires the gradual realization over the course of decades that all of your heroes are monsters and the ideological basis of the liberatory movements you championed in your youth are inherently flawed, and they are futile exercises
In celebration of #PublicDomain day, someone needs to make a To the Lighthouse video game. The ultimate goal will be making to the lighthouse (obvs), but intermediate levels would include Trying to Get to Z, Making the Boar Skull Appear and Disappear, Cooking the Boeuf en Daube, and Having Your Vision. Watch out for the Time Passes level, Mrs. Ramsey!!!
Zoë Heller on Shirley Hazzard:
“The portrait of the permissive era that emerges from these stories is a rather somber one. Eros is less the bringer of carnal fun than a dark and rather dangerous force on which men and women (but mostly women) pin their romantic hopes at their peril. Hazzard’s female characters are not constrained by conventional sexual morality, inasmuch as they engage in premarital and extramarital sex without compunction or shame, but they evince none of the antic libertinism or experience-gathering curiosity of, say, Mary McCarthy’s women. Sex remains for them a solemn rite, a significant act of surrender, and their inability to divorce the act from higher feeling leaves them horribly vulnerable to the emotional sadism and moral carelessness of men.”
“Meanwhile, Brenda’s corporate clients were self-satisfied knowing they had not replaced their phone lines with a customer-service bot. What they were using, instead, was cutting-edge AI backed by PhDs in literature.”
Latter-day Austro-Hungarian civil servant; THE WARM SOUTH, 2020 Northern Calfornia Book Award (https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781948072038/the-warm-south-a-novel.aspx); web developer; lapsed academic; bad at Zen; 🏳️⚧️