December 27, 2020
friends
Lee Smith was a Go-Go dancer
I found this in a Woolf Society PDF.
A Factoid Regarding Virginia Woolf in Popular Culture: Discovering the 1960s Virginia Woolfs Rock Band
Lee Smith, author of multiple works including the novel Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), the memoir Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (2016) and the novella Blue Marlin (2020), earned her bachelor’s degree at Hollins College in Hollins, Virginia. As her official biography states,
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine’s in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. Perhaps because life in Grundy [the town in Virginia where she grew up] had been so geographically and socially circumscribed, Smith says when she entered Hollins she “had this kind of breakout period–I just went wild.”
She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. It was 1966, during her senior year at Hollins, that Smith’s literary career began to take off.
During Smith’s college years—the 1960s!—Virginia Woolf was already a nascent and intriguing presence in US culture even though, as J. J. Wilson notes in “From Solitude to Society Through Reading Virginia Woolf,” “Woolf’s books were nearly all out of print” in that decade (14)
J. J. Wilson (with Vara Neverow)
Works Cited Smith, Lee. “Official Biography.” LeeSmith.com. www.leesmith.com/ bios/bio.php. 2016. Web. 22 December 2020. Wilson, J. J. “From Solitude to Society Through Reading Virginia Woolf.” Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow. Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace UP, 1994. 13-18.
December 27, 2020
capitalism
How Xmas Was Tamed
The following article from today’s WSJ sounds plausible to me. (Sorry for sending such a long article, but it’s behind a paywall.)
I couldn’t help wondering as I read it if Carnaval had a more violent past? If so, did turning it into “Carnaval” help tame it?
I also wonder if commercialization has or might change Carnaval? Will capitalism figure out how to make more money from it, perhaps by exchanging gifts?
The quote I liked best:
In the 16th through the early 19th centuries,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
"merry" was a synonym for "drunk." That
connotation still lingered when, in Charles
Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (1843), two men
"wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of
grog."
The Capitalists Who Saved Christmas
— How gift-giving rescued the holiday from riots and street gangs
by Jason Zweig. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. 26 Dec 2020: B.4.
Everyone seems to complain about how Christmas has been commercialized. But without the business of gift-giving that sprang up in the 19th century, Christmas might still be what it once was for many people: a riotous bacchanalia in which drunken gangs brawled in the streets and bashed their way into houses demanding money and alcohol.
With the hard work of the harvest behind them, December was downtime for Americans, as it had been for Europeans as far back as the raucous Saturnalias of ancient Rome. The Puritans were so offended by the disorder surrounding Christmas that celebrating the holiday — by feasting, “playing either at cards or at dice,” or even just taking the day off from work — was illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681. The fine was five shillings, roughly $50 in today’s money.
In England and much of Europe, “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule,’ a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity,” wrote Stephen Nissenbaum, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts, in his book “The Battle for Christmas.”
Think of paintings by Bruegel and other early Dutch and Flemish artists showing peasants carousing amid the snow and ice, or Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night,” in which cross-dressing characters binge on cakes and ale.
In the 16th through the early 19th centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “merry” was a synonym for “drunk.” That connotation still lingered when, in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), two men “wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog.”
In the 1800s, at Christmastime in cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, gangs of drunk young men, dressed in outrageous disguises, marauded through the nighttime streets, often setting off firecrackers, lighting fires or shooting guns in the air.
The mobs sometimes vandalized Black churches and beat Black parishioners with sticks and ropes. Carrying pikes and swords, muskets and spears, sometimes riding donkeys or horses, they swarmed throughout the season, even on Christmas Day itself.
These gangs were called “mummers” and “fantasticals” for their flamboyant costumes or “callithumpians” for the rough music they banged out on pots, pans and other makeshift instruments. Rampaging from house to house, the mobs might smash windows, tear down fences or wrench the handles off doors if homeowners wouldn’t let them in.
Once inside, they helped themselves to food, commandeered alcohol, spit tobacco on the carpets and wiped their greasy hands on the curtains. Not even the watchmen hired by local residents could deter them.
When a bitter cold snap kept the callithumpians off the streets, the Philadelphia Press noted on Dec. 26, 1870, how quiet the city had been on Christmas Eve. So few young men had gotten drunk or been arrested, the newspaper marveled, that “a stranger passing through our city would not for a moment think that Christmas was so near at hand.”
In a different kind of home invasion, down the chimney to the rescue came Saint Nick. Santa Claus was popularized in the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” probably written by the New York patrician Clement Clarke Moore in 1822 and published a year later.
“’Twas the night before Christmas” when Santa Claus arrived with the same terrifying clatter as the callithumpians. He was “all tarnish’d with ashes and soot” and “look’d like a peddler just opening his pack.”
However, Santa Claus burst into the household not to take, but to give — reassuring the poem’s narrator that “I had nothing to dread.” Santa wished the family, “ere he drove out of sight,” not an alcohol-drenched “Merry Christmas” — but a “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
“As soon as Santa Claus entered the picture,” says Prof. Nissenbaum, “people had to go shopping.” Santa Claus was part of a broader movement to domesticate the holiday by creating a warm, comforting family event centered on giving gifts to children. Mayors, merchants and the middle class all wanted to get the violent Christmastime gangs off the streets.
“There’s a general taming of the holiday that goes on throughout the 19th century,” says Penne Restad, author of “Christmas in America” and a retired historian at the University of Texas, Austin. The mass marketing of Christmas gifts, she says, was “a way of creating boundaries.”
As the holiday became about giving gifts to family and friends, rather than about seizing food and drink from strangers, the seasonal street gangs faded away. The rise of department stores in the mid-19th century enabled even the poor to become consumers by giving — and receiving — gifts.
Newspapers, eager to attract advertising, rhapsodized about the virtues of Christmas giving.
“Who is there, who is not ground into the very dust by biting poverty, that would hesitate, at this hallowed season, to bestow a souvenir?” asked the New York Morning Herald in 1839. As department stores began keeping holiday evening hours, the streets had to be kept safe for a new kind of mob: Christmas shoppers.
As memories of Christmastime gang violence faded, many people turned indignant about the commercialization of the holiday.
In 1912, J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne co-founded the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, whose members were known as Spugs. The group, which at one point included President Theodore Roosevelt, sought to “eliminate…the custom of giving indiscriminately at Christmas” and to foster “unselfish and independent thought, good-will, and sympathetic understanding.”
In 1928, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay published a sonnet, “To Jesus on His Birthday,” that began:
......
For this your mother sweated
in the cold,
For this you bled upon
the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon
bought and sold;
A paper wreath;
a day at home for me . . .
......
Such complaints continue today. Capitalism can rub people the wrong way by seeming to turn everything — even the most spiritual holidays — into a transaction. But the commercial takeover of Christmas was a large part of what rescued it from anarchy and made the holiday safe to celebrate.
December 23, 2020
hierarchy tags
Hierchical tabs
An interesting discussion in Outliner Software…
I’m thinking about posting this
I don’t recall seeing any images here, so I’ll try to describe what I see in Bear’s “hierarchy”:
I have three notes:
Note 1 with #tag2
#tag2
Note 2 with #tag1/tag2
#tag1/tag2
Note 3 with #tag2/tag3
#tag2/tag3
Bear takes these three notes and creates this tag hierarchy in the left column:
# tag1
# tag2
# tag2
# tag2
# tag3
I would expect tag2 to be associated with all three notes since each one contains it. Instead each instance of tag2 in the left column selects a different note.
# tag1 > # tag2 > # tag3
# tag2 > # tag1
# tag2 > # tag3
I realize that hierarchical tagging is a very difficult problem, in particular because it can result in recursion. As my example stands, you should (I think) have a path # tag1 > # tag2 > # tag3
If I simply change the tag in Note 1 to #tag2/tag1,
# tag1
# tag2
# tag2
# tag1
# tag2
# tag3
then I have infinite recursion although Note 3 will end it.
# tag1 > # tag2 > # tag1 > # tag2 ....
If Bear simply checked to see that no tag appears twice in a path, then we have these possibilities, which I think is what I want (do I really know?):
# tag1 > # tag2 > # tag3
# tag2 > # tag1
# tag2 > # tag3
December 21, 2020
I replied to a FB post by Becca
link
Becca links to this article by Rawan Abdelbaki so I want to learn something useful from it. I didn’t.
I had trouble with the parts I could read. My head starts to explode somewhere around the paragraph beginning, “More troubling is the subtle implication that…” This paragraph follows one where Abdelbaki seems to argue that Black communities couldn’t possibly NOT want defunding because Black women started the movement (and presumably the slogan). I don’t see why both statements can’t be true.
Other passages are certainly rousing, e.g.,
But it is the response from certain pockets of the Left — encapsulated in this segment of an unfortunate launch episode of a new Jacobin series — that has emerged as one of the most reactionary [pockets?], entirely cowering to the same facile liberal denigrations launched by the Democratic establishment that many of us so deeply despise.
I listened to the Jacobin video, especially here: and I need Abdelbaki to explain to dense people like me just how it is so reactionary and cowering, etc.
In the video Vivek Chibber says that a slogan that has to be explained is a poor one.
Yet Abdelbaki goes ahead and explains it:
Although many might find the phrase “defunding the police” jarring, this sense of unease emerges when the choice put forth — as mainstream media, Conservative, and most Democrats have done — is “only police” or “no police.” But no one is actually making this argument.
Just as a linguist might analyze a sentence like “John saw Karen and spoke to her” by replacing the pronoun with “Karen”, it’s easy to substitute “Defund the police” back in place of “this argument”. Guess what do you get?
Abdelbaki alliterates that …
…it is difficult to imagine any engaged Leftist would harbor confusion about the demands put forth by abolitionists in this moment of cacophonous crises.
Are “engaged Leftists” the only people we need to talk to? And do “engaged Leftists” really NOT mean “defund”?
I dislike articles like this if for no other reason that I find them poorly argued and confusing. (Many of them sound really good, I do admit.)
But what really troubles me is the constant arguments I see among “left” groups. Leftists trashing Obama in the most derisive terms. Leftists trashing people who think that “Defund the police” is harmful and was harmful our last election? (I wish I had more evidence about that, but I think it’s very hard to find.) Why not direct your energy against the rightwing of our country? Is Abdelbaki a Russian?