Even though made of a patterned silk, I decided that the yellow roof was too plain.
I like it better now.
Finn says hello and it’s raining. No snowing. No raining.
A few short term goals: delete a few thousand photos from my phone; mend a frayed cuff on one of my favorite zip-up sweatshirts; tend to some correspondence; get a decent hair cut (I might go short again).
What are some of your short term goals?
Today’s idiosyncratic tour of racism, reactions to racism, and/or the history of racism swings through a twitter thread.
Yesterday a WW (that’s “white woman” from now on) posted her horror at learning that, at some point, George Washington killed all his slaves’ dogs. Her tweet is circled in yellow below.
Here’s one possible source for this fact — a Frontline episode on PBS.
Even though I’ve read about some of the most horrific forms of torture employed by slave owners and have had to really think about the heartless mercantile interests of slave owners trafficking in Black bodies, I also recoiled at the dog-killing.
Does this mean I care more about dogs than about the enslaved?
Of course not.
I thought Washington’s dog-killing was an extreme and sadistic act meant to deprive his slaves of the comfort and companionship of their pets. The Frontline article though seems confirming of the tweeter’s assertion — that he was acting out of economic self-interest. The dogs were killing his livestock, perhaps?
Anyway, I didn’t spend a lot of time reading the comments because I knew the dumping on the WW would, in this instance, bother me. It’s NOT EITHER / OR.
And BTW, sometimes it’s evident that people DO care more about pets than the people involved. Take the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
It seemed then that there was a lot of attention paid to the stranded animals and maybe not enough attention paid to the ravages of New Orleans’ largely Black parishes. Also, that the recovery effort was so botched could have been viewed through a lens of racism and generally wasn’t.
Another EITHER / OR that I’m thinking about and will come back to post about sometime soon is: how the fact that race is a scientific fiction across the board (not just for white people, in other words) can coexist with our profound acknowledgment that race as a social construct is profoundly and persistently problematic.
Collages are 2022 creations made to visual prompts from Paris Collage Collective.
I have a bunch of collage books. They’re generally not art books but rather something between pattern studies and wish lists for interior design.*
There’s a freedom in cutting and pasting without worrying too much about the results.
I pulled a notebook out yesterday that’s falling apart. This intersection of picture-edge and coil failure is probably my favorite shot from the book.
I used to use rubber cement. It often fails with time. I like the marks it leaves behind too.
You’ll notice some themes: barns and fabric, angels and antique maps of the heavens, flowers. Death and ghosts. Love and more flowers.
The peony/Browning poem with a picture of D as a young boy is a copy from another Sketchbook Project, the one I cannot find on the site. The theme was : Jackets, Blankets, and Sheets.
Rubber cement mark on lower left.
Sometimes the order of the images matters. I like the way the three above relate to each other.
And sometimes (often?), the collages reveal that I was thinking about my novel, like the ones below.
In the period that I wrote about (1737 to 1744), many of the enslaved had just been kidnapped from Africa. They were called “saltwater slaves” or “comyahs” (as opposed to “binyahs”) (say those two words aloud and they’ll make sense). In other words, in the early colonial period, some slaves were born here and some in Africa. I’ve thought a lot about what it would have meant to have memories of home, to have been ripped away from a coherent society and family, to be force marched in coffles, warehoused in disease-ridden pens, and then shipped to these shores — landing into lives of brutality, abject humiliation, and privation.
These geographical and soul wounds can be viewed through the lens of indigo. Eliza Pinckney was an early innovator, but the slaves who harvested, aerated, and acidified the batches of dye may have had very specific memories about the crop, not to mention expertise. I learned about the Tuaregs of the Sahara, also known as “the blue men” for their intense deep indigo blue turbans — cloth which when unwrapped would leave blue shadows across their foreheads. I learned that in some areas of Western Africa cloths were woven with indigo threads to swaddle babies at birth. The same cloths would be worn at weddings and then used as shrouds at the end. Also, I learned that men tended to be the weavers.
I could say more about all of this but will leave it here for now.
* Exceptions: The Sketchbook Projects, collected collages done under Acey’s direction, and two books of Paris Collage Club works (one done, one in progress).
I dreamt I was on a cooking show. I couldn’t find a spoon or a bowl or eggs and I had to make Yorkshire Pudding. Time kept sliding past. I had nothing to show. I can’t get an F, I thought. I’ll make a sandwich!
One of THoSe dreams.
Maybe the dream was informed by a stretch of intense editing. I deleted two more chapters. I’m back to tracking word count. Recently, sliced out nearly 1,000 words.
Time keeps sliding past.
Some pretty snowflakes are falling right now, but yesterday was rain, rain, rain. There’s been a lot of rain falling this “winter.”
I found out that The Sketchbook Project’s library is closing its doors in Brooklyn. There’s a narrow window in which one could sign in, pay a fee, and request the return of your booklet. I submitted two, years back.
I couldn’t even sign in. Had the right everything. I know it. When I can’t sign in somewhere I usually don’t have that confidence.
I may try again but if I can’t get in, eh. I gave them up once, it shouldn’t be that hard to let the status quo reassert itself.
This link may or may not work.
https://www.sketchbookproject.com/library/S132182
I had to copy it into my search bar. ALSO, there’s a Sketchbook Project tag on the sidebar.
Usually, I lie in bed and light up my phone. I flex my spine some and read first, Heather Cox Richardson* and then scroll around twitter for forty minutes or so (saving wordle and Spelling Bee for later).
But now that the House is governed by corrupt cretins who call themselves republicans but are really anti-government Christo-fascists or straight-up nihilists, I’m gonna have to set limits.
There will be a lot of gaslighting. Pissing in the wind. Obstruction. Projection. Faux outrage. Performative legislation — and by that I mean the passing of bills that will die in the Senate and that they KNoW will die in the Senate (well except Boebert who may not understand how a bill becomes a law).
Great use of our tax dollars.
Remember how they passed a bill to dismantle the ACA — what was it? Seventy times? Even seven times would have been disgraceful. And THAT, my friends was a version of the GOP that today would be considered “reasonable.”
Let the jerks huff and puff and mischaracterize everything they do. One hopeful friend believes their bogus Ben Ghazi-style investigations will backfire big time, screwing them in 2024.
Is “bogus Ben Ghazi style” redundant? Of course it is.**
I’m mostly worried about the debt ceiling. If it isn’t raised, the U.S. will default on its loans. Established in 1917, the debt ceiling has been raised nearly 100 times and almost always without a fuss. However, the extremist-GOP reps plan to use the vote to extort concessions such as cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
I haven’t delved into what exactly those repercussions would be both because I kinda don’t want to know and because my brain shuts off when I hear words like “currency” and “interest rates.” But it’s pretty clear that defaulting would be catastrophic.
Once upon a time, we could assume that such a maneuver was a bluff. No more. This right-wing extremist party is prepared to burn it all down.
Time to learn about yet another arcane government procedure: the discharge petition.
Anyway, all of this is by way of saying, right now (and maybe for the next two years), I cannot listen to as much news.
Jim Jordan — a walking jabberwocky of bile. MTG — puffed up with her newly exalted status and perhaps benefiting from a consult with a stylist — but still a dumb Nazi. McCarthy! Trump ass-licking shameless SINO (Speaker In Name Only) empowered (briefly?) to do shit that will hurt us all. There are too many more sickening folks to name. I don’t want to hear from any of them.
So today, I left my phone off initially. I tossed treats around the backyard for Finn to find. We do this “nose work” most mornings but unlike most mornings, I joined him outside. Drank coffee under an umbrella. It was almost 60 degrees.
Phone went on later and it was to listen to a talk by a Buddhist nun.
I will leave you with a minor but pleasing piece of synchronicity. A couple of days ago, I discovered the account RacialEquityInsights on Instagram. Took a screen shot to remind myself to go back later and take a listen. A few hours later, in an email listing out the “homework” for my call-group’s next anti-racism conversation, there were a handful of videos listed from this very site. Ta-dah!
Now you can check them out too.
* Heather Cox Richardson’s daily letters to an American, if you don’t already know, are excellent summations of the day’s news. She’s a historian too, so whenever something relates to events before, during, or after the Civil War, for example, she makes concise and informative comparisons. If you were to listen ONLY to HRC, you’d stay informed. I have a couple of friends who safeguard their mental health by doing exactly this. You can pay for her Substack publication but I get a daily email that I don’t have to pay for. It is more than sufficient.
** The GOP’s plans to investigate anything and everything Biden is why, by the way, I am celebrating Garland’s appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the documents that recently surfaced in Biden’s former office and his Wilmington home. The House will NOT have access to info regarding an ongoing investigation (no matter what they say).
https://instagram.com/racialequityinsights?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=