Engine Summer

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-Second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow,
‘I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work’,
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
to the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

-- W. H. Auden, 1939

Right, I'm having a lousy day and I don't post here enough, so I figure I'll write up something nice that happened to me once-- the most memorable experience I've had of a stranger's dog. Not most meaningful, or, necessarily, weirdest, but every few months I remember this and smile.

It was New York City, which means I was automatically cranky and aggravated, and it was high summer, and there is nowhere I have been like NYC for sheer viciousness of summer. It's not vicious because it's the hottest or the driest or the most humid, but because it seems as though it ought to be reasonable, and then after you've been out in it for a couple of hours you realize that summer's jaws have clicked closed and you are being slowly digested by a combination of every bug in the borough, sunlight like the kind of strobe they cannot use on television, and your own persistent sweat. I was on an edge of Central Park, vaguely near the Met but not close enough to make it reasonable to go in for a bit of a cooldown. I was waiting for a bus, which never helps.

There was a fountain a ways back from the sidewalk, one of those two-or-three-tiered affairs with a statue of something not very distinguishable, and in the fountain there were, as is usual on such days, two or three small children, and also a dog. The children were all small enough to have parents who were sitting on the fountain rim and holding them by the hand. The dog was a free agent.

I have never seen an uglier dog outside of photographs. It was a bulldog, a full-sized bulldog, which means fifty or sixty pounds. It looked like a Chinese lion statue crossed with a Chinese dragon statue. It looked like-- you know how there are some species of bat which look like puppies? This dog looked like one of the species of bat which doesn't actually look like a dog. If I had been informed that that dog was some kind of weird eldritch monster being passed off publicly as a dog for camouflage reasons, I would have nodded and moved on with my life.

It was romping, and a fifty to sixty pound dog can get up significant romping momentum. Grinning so widely I thought its head was going to split in half, and with a couple of yards of lolling tongue. There was no obvious owner present, but the probably thirty people who were variously waiting for the bus, running a hot dog cart, sitting on the fountain rim, etcetera, had not yet gotten to the point of being concerned about this, because the dog was not particularly bothering anybody-- was in fact projecting absolute joy to the heavens-- and also this was New York City.

After I'd watched the dog romp for maybe ten minutes, which was long enough for me to start becoming vaguely concerned about the lack of visible owner (I am not from New York City), but not quite long enough for me to feel that I ought to do something about it, a jogger ran in from stage right. He was only wearing jogging shorts and sneakers, and he was holding a leash with a perceptible lack of dog on the other end, and he was maintaining a reasonable jogging pace despite being absolutely dripping with sweat. He was also looking worriedly to either side of him and calling and whistling, but, because he was moving quickly and looking away from the path directly in front of him, he did not see the fountain containing the dog until he was only about fifteen feet from it.

His dog saw him, all right.

I remember the dog as actually bouncing off the second tier of the fountain on its way outward and upward, but that may be the exaggeration of fond recollection. What I am absolutely certain about is that the dog brought a vast quantity of water with it, in a literal wave, and that when it landed on its owner both the dog and the water splash were chest-high and rising. I also recall that it hit his face tongue-first.

I was worried for about half a second, because of course the guy went over backwards, but by the time he bounced on his rear end he was already laughing as hard as the other thirty-odd people in the vicinity, all of whom had immediately lost it. Both the guy and the dog were down for a while, the guy because he was laughing too hard to stand up and was also trying to wrestle on the leash, and the dog because it had found out the one correct thing to be done about this sort of weather and was clearly trying to transfer as much cool water as physically possible onto its human before letting him up. Both of them were transcendently, perfectly, radiantly happy.

Then my bus came.

I didn't have a camera, but I really hope someone in the near-crowd around that fountain that day did. As I said, every so often I think back on it and smile. I wasn't close enough to get splashed, but it pretty well handled that heat wave for me anyway.

Somewhere in the quite large pile of Samuel R. Delany's criticism-- I'm not going to look up where because all of my copies are in a storage unit (and anyway it is probably in more than one place)-- he talks about pornography as a discourse.

If you're into postmodernist theory this says a great deal, but to unroll that a little for everyone else, what he means is that pornography, like, say, horror, or slapstick comedy, can be a genre but is more and other than a genre: it is a set of tools an author (and by extension reader) can use within a piece of fiction to examine certain questions or cause certain effects.

I find this to be a much handier way of looking at the eternal arguments of genre in general than the ways I usually see genre discussed. I wish that instead of the infinitely iterated panel at many SF cons about the difference between science fiction and fantasy as genres we instead had a few on what a work being science fiction or fantasy means that it is able to do, and how the effects a work produces with the reader (this is postmodernism; I am not going to say on the reader) differ based on the readers', editors', marketers', and critics' views on whether a book is science fiction or fantasy. But that's a whole other can of live bait.

Anyway, Delany points out that for much of the history of Western art and literature (the branch he knows well enough to discuss), there's been a structure of categorization similar to this:

Art <----- || -----> Porn

wherein you might as well call that middle separation the Line of Respectability, and never the sides shall meet. If you view pornography as a discourse, i.e. as a set of tools for working within texts, those tools comprised of the various devices people use and have used to talk about sex and eroticism with at least some purpose of evoking or inciting same, this structure immediately becomes completely ridiculous. Shutting out an entire set of tools and saying that it is impossible to make art with them is ridiculous in any context. The Line of Respectability-- that if you use these particular tools, beyond a certain point people start looking at you funny, ostracizing you, and eventually not publishing your work and perhaps outlawing it, and perhaps outlawing you-- becomes the major relevant point. Delany, a person who, by reason of having various marginalized identities, was never going to default to being on the 'respectable' side of that line as said line is applied various places in what we can amorphously call the world of arts and letters, considers that line a social artifact to duck under and over, avoid, ignore, flout, ironically make much of, and in other ways play with. To him, one of the interesting things about pornography as a discourse is how much, in using it, you have to take that line into account, and how many of your tools work directly with or directly on that line and its presence in peoples' heads.

Delany is, of course, a pornographer of great intellectual capacity and wit, who has spent the last several decades writing books which combine porn with fantasy, with historical fiction, with roman à clef, with picaresque, with science fiction. All of his porn uses the tropes of porn in ways which mean that his books would not work without being porn, but in which porn is not, in itself, a genre, but the thing which enables the book to more fully explore the questions of its overall genre. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is an SF novel in which the SF conceit would not work without the book being porn; Phallos is a historical-philosophical fantasy in which the main philosophical concept could not be expressed without the book being porn. It is still worthwhile reading these books even if one is not aroused or is outright repulsed by the sexual content involved, because that sexual content is, as well as being sufficient to itself, working towards larger goals in the context of the overall work. Delany talks about how much he'd like to see people doing similar things with pornography and other genres and discourses-- mystery! thriller! epic!-- now that we are starting to get to a point, especially with the internet, where this kind of work can overcome the distribution and censorship issues which previously made it extremely rare.

Anyway, I read a lot of porn (I only read it for the articles /s) (you are now reading one of the articles) and, as with most genres and/or discourses, Sturgeon's Law applies and ninety percent of it is terrible. This implies, of course, that every so often one stumbles across something that isn't.

In this case, and the reason I'm writing this, because I have legitimately never seen this before, I stumbled over a pornographic high fantasy. And by high fantasy I mean the kind with numinous, evocative magic and worldbuilding that suggests everything Tolkien talked about as Faerie, and by pornography I mean explicit, extremely, um, squelchy sex approximately every three pages, and this in a visual medium. And it could not be the first without also being the second.

Legit didn't think that was possible. Have been frantically analyzing it ever since.

I Roved Out In Search Of Truth & Love, a webcomic by Alexis Flower (whose pronouns, by the way, I do not know and cannot deduce), describes itself as "a warmly pornographic fantasy saga", which is absolutely accurate. There is no sexual coercion, sexual violence, or the threat or thought of same anywhere in it. I think this is one reason why it works, and is certainly the reason I am willing to keep reading it if/when the sex it showcases is not to my interest, because at least the people involved are being nice to each other. It is visually very technically competent and can be stunningly beautiful, and the sex passes the basic tests of revealing character details about everyone and of being relevant to the overarching plot.

One of the worldbuilding things it does, one of the ways in which it has to be porn in order to be high fantasy, I find myself thinking of tentatively as 'the Elden Ring strategy'. Fromsoft, the makers of the Dark Souls series of video games and most recently of Elden Ring, realized that in high fantasy, just as in horror, showing your hand can decrease the effect. There are no worldbuilding infodumps in these games, no helpful prophecies; you piece together everything you know about magic and metaphysics and history from correlating things people say to you and the descriptions on your items. The plot is revealed by your own guesswork as you scramble to make sense of things which were going on before you, are going on around you, and can proceed without your input or knowledge... though how well things will turn out for you and the world if you do not inject yourself into events is debatable. (As is how well they will if you do.) There is a lot of time and a lot of work between the pieces of solid information you encounter, and each new thing feels hard-won. It especially feels hard-won because some of the most brutally difficult fights in all of video games are standing between you and the knowledge, increasing the time between revelations, your investment in the world and in the revelations, and the beauty of acquiring even one more piece of answer. If one were flat-out told some of the interesting things in Elden Ring, I don't think they'd have half the emotional impact, but when they emerge from a sea of other theories and confusion, when you've finally correlated something with something else with a set of other things that seemed totally unrelated and then that set of things grows big pointy teeth and turns into your next boss fight, the game can start evoking legitimate awe and terror.

In I Roved Out, instead of difficult fights and a lot of wandering around locating stuff and piecing it together, there is sex.

Seriously. All of the characters know all of the worldbuilding stuff perfectly well, after all; they live there. So you get told what is going on in little pieces after the sex, or between sexual encounters, or sometimes during the sex, but, and this is perfectly reasonable, none of the characters is going to be thinking primarily about the plot while they are having sex. This can get a little frustrating-- there's at least a couple of sequences where I swear the plot is taking place, like, just over to the left a smidge, if only literally anyone would consent to pay attention to it-- but a) overall it really does have the same effect as the Elden Ring infosearch thing, and b) the narrative does lampshade the protagonist's ditzy inability to think with her brain on most occasions (she is at more than one point literally hauled places because other people are aggrieved that she has not yet caught up with the plot). (Okay, it can be very funny.)

And I Roved Out also follows Elden Ring's example in another direction, one which is difficult to do in both epic fantasy and horror, but which pays off immensely when well-executed: when information gets pieced together correctly, when the reader finally has that shock of understanding, the narrative has to deliver. In both works, what you find is better-- more beautiful, more numinous, more frightening, funnier, stranger-- than you were expecting, or could expect from only the pieces you have.

So that's one way I've never seen the discourse of pornography used before. But if that were the only way, while it would still be neat, it wouldn't be as neat as this comic is, because you will note that this particular device only uses the sex as an obstruction. Like, a fun obstruction! A witty and cute and warm obstruction! (If a bit sloshy for me personally.) But an obstruction nevertheless, an obstacle in the way of more interesting things.

The other thing I see this comic doing with the discourse makes the sex interesting in and of itself, and is also something I haven't seen high fantasy do so easily or beautifully before.

This is not a perfect metaphor or categorizing system (and that's an understatement), but it will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Let's divide narrative/character expression in fantasy into three modes: the vulgar, the everyday, and the high/allegorical.

Here is an exemplary incident in each mode: a character stubs their toe. It hurts.

In the vulgar: Character says something along the lines of "Motherfucker, I've just hurt my fucking toe!" They move on about their business, continuing to swear under their breath. This kind of thing happens all the fucking time.

In the everyday: Character closes their eyes for a moment, and says "Ouch," softly, but with feeling. They are briefly distracted from whatever else was going on.

In the high/allegorical: Character realizes that they have stubbed their toe by the grace of the gods, because they were about to be struck by a snake which has been lurking nearby if they had moved even one more step. Character enters honorable battle with the snake.

This is of course totally overexaggerated and overdetermined, but the distinction I'm trying to make here is between the nitty-gritty, the everyday, and the numinous chivalric. (I say nitty-gritty and vulgar instead of, say, bawdy, because there is not necessarily a distinction between bawdiness and filth and the numinous chivalric. There is a distinction between everyday blech and the numinous chivalric.)

It's difficult to yank your narrative from one of these modes to another quickly, and it's easier to get to either vulgar or chivalric from the everyday than from each other. In fact, many narratives stay primarily in the everyday, jumping to higher or lower registers for dramatic effect when necessary. But every really three-dimensional character is capable of existing in all three modes, as is every actual human.

These three modes can feel irreconcilable, or as though one cannot be reached from the others no matter what-- and certainly there are stories that leave one or more of them out. But I've heard people complain both about high fantasy in which everything is so numinous that the logistics vanish into smoke and air, and about the kind of novel which insists that everything interesting in the world is a mistake or an illusion.

The thing that I Roved Out does which is so brilliant is that every character exists in all three modes, and sex is the thing which allows them to move between them instantly. Because, in real life, sex can do that-- move from ridiculous to sublime and back within literal seconds.

This is a work in which both the protagonists are high Elven champions, one literally a princess, both knights of great valor and cunning and wisdom, and also completely sex-mad lust-driven bimbo sluts who are going to prioritize fucking everyone they meet over the literal necessities of survival, and it is never out of character for them to behave either way at any given time. In fact, the sheer amount of sex they have, and again the narrative lampshades this, emphasizes how out of human reach they are as Elven champions: mortals cannot keep up. The sex itself moves through all three modes, sometimes work-a-day kind-of-dull we-were-in-the-same-place, sometimes friendly exercise or comradely comfort, sometimes religious-numinous as a way of interacting with the literal gods, and the characters move within all three modes within that, and so the writer has many more character directions available most of the time than many other writers would in the same circumstances. And takes full advantage of them.

And that's the part I found so impressive that I had to write this entire essay, that this comic has high fantasy characters who cannot be as epic as they are, as unhuman and not-of-this-world and magical and downright wise, without also being airheaded fuckbunnies. The porn and the high fantasy have crashed together to make something beautiful and strange.

I hope Mr. Delany knows that people can write this sort of thing, now; that people do write this sort of thing, now. He probably does, he's far more widely read than I am. I appreciate having the critical tools to pin down why I'm happy with the reading experience, and I hope I keep stumbling across this sort of thing in the future. Still rare, I suspect. I doubt this comic would have been published by a brick-and-mortar publishing house, even though it's certainly well beyond technically accomplished enough.

But this comic, and other things like it, are a real sign of hope for those of us who want art to use all its possible tools, without worrying about that Line of Respectability.

Thanks to kathmandu's link in the comments of my last entry, I was able to get a PCR test this afternoon. And they sent the results within like three hours, which I was not expecting, but okay.

Negative.

This means that I probably have the flu, then, given the body aches and fever, and that smell and taste are okay. It's supposed to be an early and bad flu season, and I hadn't had a shot yet because it really is still early and I've been busy. (I suppose it could still be covid, since I do know people who've clearly had it and never tested positive, but Occam's razor here suggests flu.) Glad to know this, as it affects the timing of getting my next booster, among other things.

I feel better about my mask protocols probably working, since flu is readily transmissible via surfaces. I mask at all times when within six feet of someone not in my bubble and whenever indoors somewhere not the house of someone in my bubble, period, and I have been hoping that that will be enough, especially since I also minimize being inside with people not in my bubble. But there was a certain amount of being indoors around strangers that was just unavoidable with the move. Also the movers said that masks would significantly impede their work capacity, so I wound up spending most of the move on my outside porch away from them and letting them not mask. Honestly, I can see how masking would impede heaving around hundreds of pounds of stuff-- my lifting capacity is decreased enough by masking that I have to take careful account of it in day-to-day life-- but I've been second-guessing myself about it. I think they'd have masked if I insisted, but the move already went like eight hours over the original time estimate, and if it had taken them much longer I wouldn't have been able to pay for it... this is the kind of calculus I hate having to do.

Anyway, next step is getting a flu test from my primary care physician to see about Tamiflu. Hopefully I will start feeling better soon, one way or another.

Twenty-four hours later, between this journal and my other social media, I've reached my goal.

I can rent a storage unit tomorrow, and I don't have to worry about paying the movers, and I am so, so relieved I don't know how to say it.

Thank you, everyone who sent me money, and everyone who sent me well-wishes, and everyone who is wrapped up in their own day-to-day stuff because everything is a lot right now but spared a thought. I hope I can be half as helpful to you someday as you've been to me. I am feeling way less terrible than I was a day ago, and I have a plan of action now, and I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.

Thank you again.

Salman Rushdie on a ventilator after being stabbed repeatedly at a public event.

I have worried about him since I was a child, but had relaxed somewhat about it during the 2000s as it seemed less and less likely to be an issue. But certainly extremism has been getting steadily worse lately...

I have not read The Satanic Verses, though I have long owned a copy out of principle. I guess it's next on the reading list, then.

which is actually a decided improvement from earlier in the day. Of course, upstairs it is worse.

The problem with it being so hot that the cat has melted into a puddle on the floor is that, being a cat, she is something of a drama queen, but also, she is a long-hair, so I worry. I suspect her of having anxiety, as even in this weather she will only drink 1) from the bathroom sink, in a slow trickle, if 2) I am in the room with her, because she has to know what I'm doing if I'm elsewhere, but 3) I must not be watching her drink, because I might be a predator. So it is now part of my routine to drift into the bathroom and stare vaguely into the shower for a few minutes once an hour or so. I'd hang something up to look at, but it's a shower.

She came to us from a household with eleven children, and if that doesn't give a cat hypervigilant anxiety, I don't know what would.

I have been offering her cold packs and damp towels and ice in her bowl, but she would prefer not to. I'd assume this means she's all right, except that she is a cat, and therefore not only a drama queen about the tiny things but brilliant at hiding any major ones. The internet claims it shouldn't be a problem until it's 90F or over, but I can't help worrying.

I'm doing all right; I take a wet towel to bed with me. And it's not (yet) ever broken 95F, which is where I stop being able to eat or think. I can't eat anything hot, or cook, at this temperature, but there's plenty of tasty food that doesn't require that. Not looking forward to August, though.

I've been having a lousy last while, and one of the effects of that-- this has been true since the pandemic started-- is that sometimes I simply cannot read or watch fiction. Like, at all. Even rereads. It is extremely frustrating, but I do not have the bandwidth. I have always read a fair amount of nonfiction anyway, but I have never before had to depend on it emotionally the way that I have had to learn to do recently.

Which is to say I have been reading a lot of Hanif Abdurraqib.

Abdurraqib is a poet, and a damn good one; an essayist, and a great one; and probably my favorite currently writing music critic.

Also, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio, in the nineties, as did I.

Sometimes his pieces have the shock of familiarity: I was not imagining that time, that place, those people, the way everything worked. Sometimes they have the shock of realizing that things were different one block over, one freeway interchange over, one neighborhood down. The similarities and the differences both ring so bell-true that I occasionally have difficulty continuing, because I left Columbus as though my shoes were on fire, at the first opportunity I got, and I do not go back, and I am in touch with no one who knew me before the age of eighteen.

But not all the memories are terrible.

Here's Abdurraqib:

I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn't have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. [...] The trick was recording from CD to cassette. Recording from cassette to cassette was an option, but only for the desperate, because the sound quality in that transfer would drop significantly. But if you had a good CD recorder-- as we did in my house-- you could set your tape to record songs straight from a compact disc, which not only improved sound quality but made for fewer abrupt stops in the process of recording. I would get CDs from the library near my house, which allowed you to take out five at a time in seven-day bursts. If you were particularly strapped for time or feeling especially confident about an artist or a group, you might just set the CD to record for the entire length of it, copying a whole album's worth of songs and then sorting them out later.

-- from Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.

I no longer own a cassette deck-- or a CD player for that matter-- but I still have the tapes with my scrawled, cramped handwriting all over the labels. I still remember swearing under my breath as I tried to catch a specific song from the radio (which did not transfer well), or from my dad's record player (worse than the radio), and the deep relief of discovering that specific library hack. Because the library had basically any music I could want, if I knew I ought to look for it.

Abdurraqib talks about the trust he had in A Tribe Called Quest, such that he could just curl up at the back of the schoolbus around their first album on his homemade tape and leave his hands in their gloves, before the third album wasn't good enough for him to do that anymore. I remember the biting cold of those winters; I have never been so cold again in my life. My high school had a uniform and it had tiny little skirts, even in winter, though they were a heavier fabric in winter, as if that would help when they were inches above the knee. I never had gloves, because my parents are my parents, and I remember curling around the tiny warmth the Walkman put out, in that very back bus seat, trying to maintain the complex positioning which kept my hands grasping each other inside the sleeves of my coat. No, one could not waste songs. The last two years of high school, I had Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, from my library dub, and I played it until the tape was watery and wavering like the sound of sleet on the roof of the bus. If you want it hard enough, music can be your life. Or save your life. Or at least give you something to maintain until you can make a life.

There's an essay I've been wanting to write, trying to write, which this isn't, and it's about why Abdurraqib had A Tribe Called Quest on repeat whereas I had the Talking Heads.

The answer is racism, pure and plain, and I wish I had the brain to better analyze it, better explain, but the pandemic has eaten that for the time being. I turn out to love A Tribe Called Quest, and I would have loved their music in high school, but I never heard of it.

There are two reasons I had never heard of it, and both of them involve racism. The first is the newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. It was my principal source of learning about new art, about the movies coming out and the theatre coming through town and the gallery shows and the concerts and the albums, because this was before the internet, so yes, I read the newspaper. And the arts section of the newspaper never reviewed rap. What they did do was gossip items about the lives of famous rappers. They never said a thing about Tupac's music, but they had a line item about his death. They never said a thing about the music of Dr. Dre, or Snoop Dogg, but they made sure to tell us every disagreement the two had, or might have had. Celebrity gossip about white people was about marriages, pregnancies, paparazzi taking inappropriate pictures. Celebrity gossip about rappers was about death, domestic abuse, and drugs.

Did I notice this at the time? The hell I did, I was like twelve when I started reading the arts section daily. This is hindsight, hindsight on the air I breathed, the bias I never had the tools to complicate, the Nice White Suburban WASP sense that somehow rap was... Not Quite Nice. Which is to say, not white.

And that leads into the second racist factor: I was not allowed to listen to rap music. No teenager I knew personally was, no matter their race. Unless we could argue for it being socially relevant. No, really, I mean that literally, there was a season when the only rap track anyone I knew was allowed to play was Coolio's 'Gangsta's Paradise', because the Social Relevance was obvious. I still remember the knock-down, drag-out, frustrating-all-around four-hour argument my entire youth group had with our adult supervisors when we attempted to argue for the social relevance of Arrested Development's 'Tennessee', which got shot down for being too angry and too radical.

The irony is that this youth group was an anti-racism activism group. We were a racially mixed bunch from all over Ohio who got together to go to small towns in the middle of nowhere and do dance and theatre about anti-racism. Usually our venues were churches, some white and some black; sometimes county fairs; sometimes just parks and a permit and a boombox. I was kind of sort of dating a black guy from Cincinnati who I met through the group (kind of sort of because I was kind of out and kind of not, it was complicated, and he was friendly and beautiful, and I was lonely), and we would hold hands walking around these little towns, as did other mixed-race couples in our group, and people would throw eggs and tomatoes at us. Our adults had stories about the sixties, where they'd generally started protesting, and about the endless work of protesting ever since-- that we could tell things were changing and had changed because they threw eggs and tomatoes, but they never threw stones.

This was the group for whom 'Tennessee', with its verse about the inextricable memories of lynching as part of the roots of black America, was too angry and too radical.

My parents didn't understand my Talking Heads obsession, didn't understand any of my music when it came down to it, you have never seen two people so confused by the very concept of They Might Be Giants, but most of what I listened to they groaned and put up with, or else ignored. They put up with the Sex Pistols, they put up with Hole, and they ignored the months I spent with the soundtrack to Trainspotting on endless repeat (still a solid album, mainly about heroin, as the film was), but when I bought the Fugees album I had to insist that it was a gift from a dear friend who was moving out of town, and that I wanted it for sentimental reasons as an object and wouldn't play it, in order to be allowed to keep it at all. Then I had to play it at three a.m. on the very lowest possible volume, huddled around my CD player, the same way I'd watched my library copy of Trainspotting three inches from the television, always holding my breath, ears perked to hit stop if anyone else in the house stirred.

Rap music was, by definition, to the adults in my life, all of them, rated R, not to be played by those still living with their parents. Because, dear, it... Wasn't Quite Nice, was it? Never mind that I literally used to go to concerts at the Al Rosa Villa, the local heavy metal biker bar, as a sixteen-year-old who presented female and was usually wearing my itty-bitty uniform skirt. But the metalheads were ninety-five percent white.

This is where I wish I had some analysis for you about the way forces both conscious and unconscious shape what kids have access to and what teenagers go out of their way to find, but most of what I have here is a grateful appreciation that Abdurraqib is giving me something like the soundtrack I should have had in those years, the funny, angry, sexy, not always political but always politically aware work we were not permitted to share. I hope to fuck it isn't like this for kids anymore. (I have no idea whether black kids were kept out of white music the same way.) It feels as though the internet should have helped with this sort of thing, at least somewhat. I hope it has.

'Go Ahead in the Rain', by A Tribe Called Quest, turns out to be one of the great songs about making art when everything sucks, about putting one foot in front of the other and making art anyway. I wish I'd been able to sit next to Hanif Abdurraqib, on a freezing bus back seat, and hand off my Walkman with the Talking Heads' 'Once in a Lifetime', and get back 'Go Ahead in the Rain'. At least I can listen to it now, when I am putting one foot in front of the other again, and cannot see more than the immediate path ahead.

So thank you, Mr. Abdurraqib. For getting it right, but more than that, for the music.

The world and my life are both trash fires I don't have the energy to discuss, which is why I haven't had much to say. I am still reading peoples' journals and commenting when I can. I'm still here, I'm just completely unable to do or engage with most things.

Anyway, it's being a pretty good anime season. So far my favorite show is the season's surprise hit. Spy x Family, which is great, is the season's completely expected hit, but no one saw Paripi Koumei/Ya Boy Kongming! coming, or at least no one I've been able to locate. There's a manga, but I haven't heard much talk about that either.

The show has a premise which makes me think of yhlee: Zhuge Liang (courtesy name Kongming, which is pronounced Koumei in Japanese), the great strategist of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, lies dying, seeing that all of his hard work will vanish in the future. On his deathbed, he wishes to be reincarnated somewhere different. Somewhere peaceful.

He is promptly dropped into Shibuya, circa present day, in the middle of a massive, public Halloween party.

While getting his bearings, he hears a young singer giving a performance to not all that many people, and is enraptured by her voice. He decides to take over as her manager and agent, and applies his knowledge of war strategy to advance her music career.

The singer, Eiko, is charming, the milieu is lived-in and interesting, the manager of the bar she works in is a giant and hilarious Three Kingdoms nerd, and Kongming vacillates between being a fish out of water and being smarter than anyone else in the business, sometimes in the same five seconds. It's a show about the ways having a talent does not necessarily mean knowing how to run a career, the ways that social media does and does not accurately represent somebody, and, as of episode five and the season's funniest single scene so far, the unspeakable horror of being trapped in a laundromat with someone you believe to be an extremely devoted cosplayer.

I want to shake hands with whoever translated 'Paripi Koumei' as Ya Boy Kongming!, because it is not precisely accurate, but it captures the vibe so perfectly that mere accuracy would have been far less well suited. (Titles have really been on point recently-- I'm also still delighted by whoever translated last season's Sono Bisuku Doru wa Koi o Suru as My Dress-Up Darling, again not literal but better than literal would have been.) In general, I sympathize with the translators, who are doing the best they can with the impossible dilemma that is translating rap. I'm not sure parts of it work, but I'm also not sure it could be done better.

The music, which is of course of utmost importance in this kind of show, does work. I'm not all that into EDM, but the soundtrack is never less than good, even though they didn't have the budget to animate full sequences for some of it, which is the most major quibble I have with the series. And there is, of course, the thing which skyrocketed this show into becoming a major international hit:

the single catchiest opening song and sequence since I don't even know when. It entered the anime openings pantheon immediately upon release, and I expect it to be one of the songs that gets played at all anime events for the rest of my life.

I mean, look at this: Ya Boy Kongming! OP. I have had this stuck in my head for five weeks now. I suspect it will be stuck in my head well beyond the current season. And I don't mind, despite the title of the song literally being 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'.

So yeah, fun show, you should watch it. Other stuff I've been watching lately and also recommend includes Spy x Family (information about this is everywhere), Bofuri (Itai no wa Iya nano de Bougyoryoku ni Kyokufuri Shitai to Omoimasu/I Hate Getting Hurt, So I Put All My Skill Points Into Defense) (a charming and low-key fantasy like a warm fuzzy blanket), Ishuzoku Reviewers (the fantasy interspecies brothel review show), Danmachi (Danjon ni Deai o Motomeru no wa Machigatteiru Darou ka?/Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?) (despite its title a solid show more on the heroic fantasy than harem end of things), and Zombieland Saga, which is probably the show I've loved most in the last couple of years while being about zombies and idol singers, two things I actively dislike. I'll cheerfully elaborate on any of that, but I don't have the brain to write much else about anything at the moment.

I recently exchanged some homemade candy with minoanmiss, and it was so great-- she has a balcony, and so we could talk for a bit while maintaining a reasonable distance. Meeting someone new and cool in person is not a thing that I have done since the pandemic started, and since I was also picking up nineweaving at the house of one of her old and dear friends in western MA, I got to do it twice in one day.

Also, I made candy corn for the swap, and realized that although homemade candy corn is a thing I make, I have not written up the process/recipe before.

Homemade candy corn is an interesting thing. I have never liked the commercial variety, and I always assumed that the candy corn we get in stores is, as with many candies, the mass-production version of a home original, which explains things like the quantity of carnauba wax in it. However, when I looked it up, I discovered that actually candy corn was invented in the 1880s for industrial production, and the recipe has always been based around carnauba wax and corn syrup. Therefore, any homemade version is an attempt to recapture the taste of the original in a form that can be made without needing giant machines.

I use Alton Brown's home recipe, and it's shockingly good at doing that. It tastes like candy corn, except that I like it. (Well, under normal circumstances. The batch I made for minoanmiss was a little different, because it turns out that the vanilla and almond extracts in my kitchen are made by the same company, in the same kind and size of bottle, and were sitting right next to one another. Were. They are not now. I am not sure the result had the candy corn nature, but I thought it was quite a good almond candy. I note that almond-flavored commercial candy corn does not appear to be a thing; maybe someone should try it. I also note that when I Googled to see whether almond candy corn is a thing, I discovered that some people use a sweetened almond flour dough to make cobs to stick candy corn into, which sounds cloying and appalling but also as though it satisfies the deep, atavistic craving to, somehow, just sit down and eat an entire corn cob, an urge I cannot possibly be alone in having fought off my entire life. More pondering needed.)

I would call this an easy recipe to make and an advanced recipe to shape. I am frankly not good at shaping and cutting it. But the taste does not suffer by the presentation.

Homemade Candy Corn

Ingredients, according to Alton Brown:

4 1/2 ounces confectioner's sugar (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/2 ounce nonfat dry milk (about 6 1/2 teaspoons)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
3 1/2 ounces granulated sugar (about 1/2 cup)
3 3/4 ounces light corn syrup (about 1/3 cup)
2 1/2 tablespoons water
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 or 3 drops each yellow and orange gel paste food coloring

I have never actually used kosher salt for this; you can substitute standard table salt with no trouble by halving the quantity (so 1/8 teaspoon). I generally spring for the good butter, though, because you really can tell. I have always worked by measurements instead of by weight, and seen no issues. Also, while gel paste food coloring may be more efficient, the liquid kind absolutely works-- this is not one of those applications where liquid color just disappears into nothingness or makes your dough grey. And of course you can use whatever colors you want. My most recent was blue, orange, and white.

Equipment, according to Alton Brown:

food processor
2-quart pot, with lid
candy thermometer
silicone spatula
sheet pan
silicone baking mat or parchment paper
knife/slicer/bench scraper/pizza cutter

According to me: YOU DO NOT NEED A FOOD PROCESSOR.

Alton Brown's first step is to combine the confectioner's sugar, nonfat dry milk, and salt in a food processor and pulse it four or five times, until smooth and well-combined. You can use a fork in a bowl. I legit don't know why he recommends a food processor, because mixing it by hand enough not to be lumpy takes about five minutes.

Anyway, then you put the granulated sugar, corn syrup, and water in the pot over medium heat, cover it and let it cook four minutes. Then mix in the butter, put in the candy thermometer, and let it cook without stirring. You want to get it to 230F, which is soft ball stage, i.e. a drop of the syrup will form a soft ball in cold water but flatten when taken out. When it hits soft ball, take it off the heat.

Add the dry ingredients and the vanilla, and stir hard and continuously with a silicon spatula until combined. You DO need a silicon spatula, because otherwise your stirring implement will be very difficult to clean.

Mr. Brown then tells you to pour the mixture onto a sheet pan lined with baking paper or a parchment mat, but honestly? You don't need a sheet pan. I just pour it onto baking paper on a clean, flat surface.

Let the dough cool ten to fifteen minutes until you can handle it, and then divide the dough into three even pieces. Leave one white. Put two or three drops of food coloring on each of the others, and knead it in until the color is dispersed evenly.

This next part is where I start having trouble; Mr. Brown wants you to roll each piece of dough into a strand eighteen inches long or so, which is easy, but then he wants you to cut each strand in half and roll each half into a strand 1/2 inch thick and twenty-two inches long, and in my experience you need two people for that. It's long enough that it becomes awkward and droopy to hold, and tries to stick to you and everything else, even if you have sugared and/or oiled your hands and other surfaces. Unless I have help, therefore, I consider the whole thing rustic and artisanal and just leave the strands eighteen inches long.

Then you put the strands next to each other, shoving a little so they stick, and cut them into pieces. You can use your hands or a bench scraper to shape them into, theoretically, a candy corn shape; again, I am not very good at this.

Let it cool at least an hour-- note that as soon as you have finished shaping it, you can put it in the fridge if you want to speed up the cooling.

Store in an airtight container (Ziploc bags are fine) with baking paper between each layer. Makes eighty to one hundred commercial-sized candy corn pieces, or, if you're me, twenty to thirty much larger ones.

I've never had any stick around long enough to go bad, but since it has butter, I would expect it to go off eventually despite the massive quantities of sugar. (Sugar is, after all, a preservative.) I think I'd start putting it in the fridge after about two weeks, and start suspecting it after about a month, but that's entirely based on my personal intuition.

People who do not like candy corn may well like this; people who do like candy corn will. It goes very well at parties, as it feels seasonal but is a little fancier than the standard candy corn bowl.