The commandeered past

Here's a tangent on the way to my post. 

When caring for my mother was at its hardest, my respite was usually going to movies. I have this list of movies I saw then, where I had thoughts but never wrote about them. I was not able to blog much then. 

Whether I ever get to the rest or not, here is one:

Dunkirk (2017)

It wasn't from the movie itself, but from the articles that were coming out about the subject matter.

What they were saying is that there is this collective English memory of the country's WWII experience as the stiff upper lip and "Keep calm and carry on", but in fact the majority of the people were very against involvement initially.

A large part of that change in mindset is due to Winston Churchill and how he framed his speeches, essentially telling the people how brave and patriotic and good they were more than how good they needed to be.

For some perspective, the United Kingdom and France combined declaration of war on Nazi Germany was September 3rd, 1939, in response to the invasion of Poland.  

The Dunkirk evacuations took place from May 26th through June 4th, 1940, with June 4th also being the day of Churchill's "We will fight on the beaches... " speech.

July of 1940 is when people really started turning on Chamberlain; at least it was becoming more public. 

A lot of that was feeling that they were inadequately prepared for war by his actions. Maybe part of the shift was an acceptance that the war was happening -- maybe it had been inevitable -- so that's why you carry on with the stiff upper lip.

They really didn't give a lot of details on that, but what stuck with me at the time was that a narrative gets shaped, and that is what people remember. Stories are easier to remember, but also, history is written by the victors.

That tangent brings me to what I wanted to get to.

It started with In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet. 

It wasn't my favorite of the relevant books, but one point it made pretty clear was that we think of witch trials as part of the Dark Ages, but they came after that, related to Renaissance and Enlightenment and all of that growing modernization. 

Much of it was due to economic competition, as men moved into industries typically dominated by women. Some of it was just about control. 

Somehow, "enlightenment" -- such as it was -- came with some serious misogyny.

This was reinforced by The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant, but it was especially important in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

What is more, you can see that it wasn't always that way.

It sent me to another book that had been on my reading list for a long time: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

There is so much that we get wrong. 

You might think... Dark Ages; life is "nasty, brutish, and short", right?

Well, that was written by someone in the 17th century. Yes, life could be hard earlier and there were lean times, but there was a calendar that allowed for many holidays and there were resources in the commons, and there are ways in which moving forward was not progress.

Then there was this article:  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-rare-artifacts-tell-medieval-womens-stories-in-their-own-words-180985317

Women had more contributions and more power than we readily acknowledge. 

How did that happen? Men's increased repression was very successful. Then they got to convey the mindset that supported them.

Shockingly, the other changes happening at that time led to a consolidation in wealth and unequal changes in the standard of living, even among men. I suspect this is not a coincidence.

Here's the thing that is so important about it -- and Federici's book is the one I recommend the most -- when we don't look at what is happening with women, we don't truly understand what is happening with the men.

Let me add more to that: inasmuch as there is a dominant race, focusing on them where the oppression of other people goes unnoticed, will eventually spread up to that dominant race. It sure doesn't start at the top top.

There is so much that could be mined here, but this is a long post. 

I believe this topic will be revisited (and I hope to spend some time on artifacts that male archeologists could not figure out until they got a woman's input), but first I am going to spend some time writing about music.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-witches.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/book-messiness.html

How are you coping?

Personally, I am struggling.

The specific thing that is happening is that I will see things, feelings of anger and hopelessness will rise up, and it then makes it hard to concentrate, mostly on schoolwork, but other things too.

Where I am feeling it most is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and that even a unanimous Supreme Court decision doesn't seem to be helping. Do you know how messed up something has to be for even Thomas and Alito to have a problem with it? 

And Trump told Bukele to build five more prisons.

Some people have suggested tuning out the news.

I suppose the argument in favor of that is that there probably isn't a lot I can do about some of these issues.

I have seen that enough time spent angry and hopeless can lead to people becoming hard-hearted and directing their anger at the people suffering instead of the cause of the suffering.

I still can't turn away in good conscience. I may not know if we are going to get to vote again, but if I do I want to do it with full knowledge of the reality; I wish more people had done that before.

Plus, it's not just a horrible government, but you can't see stories about them without also seeing comments from people that are terrible, and often delusional in surprising ways.

That is depressing.

I need to stay grounded.

I also really want to graduate though. I want to read books and get things done.

I will have to find my way to do that.

One thing I have thought about is whether I can get my schoolwork done before seeing any news. 

That is really hard to do. If I open a web browser to look something up, there will probably be headlines. 

If I open any social media, there will be headlines, and more of that than social interaction lately.

I haven't worked it out. 

I do know that there are not going to be Wednesday and Thursday posts this week. I don't know if that will be permanent, but I am making a push to get some schoolwork done, and that is part of my facilitating of that.

I also know that our care for each other matters. We can't lose that.

So yesterday and this morning I wrote out a bunch of cards to touch base with people, and this post is also touching base with you.

How are you doing?

Can I help? 

Spooky Season: Hodgepodge and hereafter

The problem with the hodgepodge part of this post is that there are only two books left: 

Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish

The Skull by Jon Klassen 

(For quantity, the "hereafter" part will make up for it.)

The Skull is a variation on the story where a traveler needs to spend the night in a haunted house. For younger readers, it's a good bridge between a picture book and a comic book, as well as being spooky but not too scary.

Hunting Monsters is really good, but something that will be hated by its target audience. It turns out that the harder you look at various famous cryptids, the less likely it is that they exist. 

If that doesn't surprise and dismay you (so, if you are more Scully then Mulder), then some of the history and psychology and even zoology can be really interesting. At times the thoroughness borders on pedantic, but overall I was glad that I read it.

(For a story that covers a lot of the same material on the Loch Ness Monster specifically, but with a more believing nature, visit https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obsessive-life-and-mysterious-death-of-the-fisherman-who-discovered-the-loch-ness-monster?utm_source=pocket_shared.)

Remembering that it took me two years to get to where I could write about this spooky season, it may be foolhardy to predict too much about the next one. I will try anyway.

Sometime around last Halloween (October 2024), teachers of small children were looking at various seasonal but also age-appropriate picture books. One of the coworkers of one of my sisters remembered a book, but not the title.

In it, a girl believes her house may be haunted, but at the end you see shoes sticking out from under a sheet that made you suspect the girl's mother was behind the haunting. Did that sound familiar?

Not at all, but I did try some searches to see if I could figure it out.

While that did not work, I stumbled across another thread that helped someone find Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I totally remembered reading that! Wait, was that the one with the owl with love in its eyes? No! There are some common threads, but that was The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John. 

In searching for those, there was this list of best middle reader spooky books. It back some fun memories, but did not answer the original question.

Together, they made me really want to explore both picture books and middle reader books with spooky themes.

There are lists (and memories) for the middle reader books, but I wasn't sure how to choose the picture books. There is still a hope that I can find the one that started all this.

If you search the Washington County library system for picture books with the keyword "ghost" there are 272 results. 

When I found that out, I saw that there were also about 27 weeks until Halloween. I could do ten a week.

No, I am not going to read every single one. There are some that are familiar and some that are parts of franchises that I am not really interested in. It will still be a lot.

I am not adding them all to Goodreads. Many of them are fine, and I may pass many of them on to my sister, but I will only be reviewing them in Goodreads if there is something memorably good or bad about them.

So far that is mainly Ghost Cat by Kevan Atteberry, which hit home hard so I made both of my sisters read it and we all felt that one. 

I don't know if it will work for finding that one; that will depend on whether it is in the Washington County library system.

I do know that there will be lots of ghost books coming in and out. 

Boo! 

(There will also be the continuations of the series mentioned in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html. So if it does take me another two years, that will be why.)

Dire

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

The articles heralding the return of the dire wolf are already being replaced by articles saying that they aren't really dire wolves, so that is interesting, but not really my issue.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colossals-de-extincted-dire-wolf-isnt-a-dire-wolf-and-it-has-not-been-de-extincted-experts-say/ar-AA1CBYQB?ocid=BingNewsSerp 

The story did originally make me think of Jurassic Park, and not just as a matter of whether or not someday these cubs will kill someone. 

Yes, I thought about the could/should thing, but there was also something in the first article I read about how they might eventually be helpful with current endangered species. That was treated when Hammond found the scientists less than enthusiastic and said if it had been California condors they would have been fine with it.

No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam.

That particular conversation also mentioned them not knowing enough about the ecosystem. That part might be less of an issue with the dire wolves, who existed much more recently than dinosaurs. It should not be an issue at all for currently endangered species. However, the reasons for them being endangered are generally habitat loss. Poaching and over-hunting played factors, and toxins in the environment that concentrated as they went further up the food chain... those have played roles, but you cannot minimize the importance of habitat loss.

When we got to a situation where the last male white rhino died, that might be a situation where cloning could be beneficial. It being beneficial would still require the issues that led to the sever habitat loss being resolved.

Here's something not from Jurassic Park:

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before. The first day, 25 September, I saw 10 river dolphin carcasses. That was a shock. Then two days later I saw 70 carcasses along the lake.’ One dolphin, swimming in circles, was in agony and struggling to survive. ‘We didn’t know what to do or how to help it,’ he told me. ‘If you try to rescue an animal that is already hurt, it can die from the extra stress.’

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear 

That is about Amazon pink dolphins not doing well with the rise in river temperature. Let's say you clone them, where are you going to put them?

That requires a completely different kind of effort. Amazing scientific knowledge can be helpful, but not nearly as necessary as people actually becoming committed to the health of the planet and the value of species, sometimes at the cost of not maximizing profits.

I suspect they don't really care so much about restoring endangered species as they care about doing something cool; that was probably just something they said to sound better. 

What does this give us?

First of all, you have pack animals who don't really have a pack or parent animals to teach them how to behave. 

Apparently the process is really hard on the mother. I imagine that has to do with issues of size and anti-immune responses, and I don't like the thought of that. There may be animal research that has enough of a benefit to be justifiable, but we need to be really careful and ethical about how we treat living things. I can't imagine that those criteria can possibly be met here.

Introducing them into the wild sounds like something that can only go wrong, so what do you do with them?

There will certainly be people who would pay for the exotic pets, imagining themselves as Stark children I suppose. Bound to go badly.

I imagine there will also be people who would pay a lot to hunt them. Gross.

Theme park attraction? That just sounds revolting.

No, it's not the cinematic levels of mayhem that were imagined with an island full of dinosaurs -- I guess we can be grateful for that -- but it still feels wrong.  

Nature loving us

Going back even further than the 2013 ICAF, there was a 1994 movie that captivated me: The Secret of Roan Inish.

Set in Ireland after World War II, war-time evacuation took a family away from their island home. In the process, one of the children was lost. 

During the evacuation the gulls and seals were very upset to have the family leaving; that is why they took Jamie and kept him with them. Of course, there was a selkie ancestor, so the seals are really all kin and Jamie was a "dark one", so more seal-ish.

Okay, that is fiction, and folklore. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of connection to place. The people were tied to the land and the sea in a mutual way that seemed lost for our time and place.

I remember discussing it with a friend. Part of it seemed to be that these were people whose living was more tied to nature. Jamie's family were primarily fishers, so were going out onto the sea all the time, needing to be aware of the weather and changes and how it works. 

You could have similar ties with hunter-gatherer societies, and even farmers, but there are different ways of farming. If you are sowing genetically modified corn that goes straight into High Fructose Corn Syrup, it might be hard to feel connected to that.

(King Corn from 2007 could be relevant here, but that is a very different movie than The Secret of Roan Inish.) 

Here are things that I am thinking about in conjunction with the movie:

There are some plants that do better when harvested, which may include wild populations. This includes sweetgrass, as mentioned in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and camas, as mentioned in the following article:

https://www.vox.com/climate/377249/climate-solutions-traditional-indigenous-foods-water-potato

While selkies themselves are from Celtic and Norse lore, various Native American groups have many stories of people being adopted by or marrying or spending time living with animals, as well as other stories focusing on the relationship between them and plants or animals that are a food source. It would be easy to write them off as folklore, but that would be missing the point: different lifeforms are intimately connected and we need each other.

Some of the recent reading has been about economic changes and the rise of capitalism, where we also see the trend toward urbanization. In some ways, the estrangement from the means of production was really estrangement from nature.

Now, this probably seems like a good launching point for just going off on capitalism. I am not ruling that out.

However, there is a really recent story that is all kinds of wrong, and I think I am going there first.

Connected to nature

This is going to be one of those times where I am going to tell a lot of different stories that may not feel cohesive. You will have to decide for yourself the level of relevance.

Twelve years ago the International Comic Arts Forum held its gathering in Portland. I was able to attend quite a bit. I wrote several posts on it at the time.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/06/international-comic-arts-forum-source.html

While there were people who traveled to be there, Portland has a wealth of local comics creators (largely because of the presence of Dark Horse). One vivid memory that wasn't really about comics was a panel of writers who lived locally but were transplants, talking about coming to the Pacific Northwest.  

I remember someone talking about how beautiful it was, but also the coldness. That was not as a matter of temperature, but that nature doesn't care about you.

I believe a big part of the reason that stuck with me was because other people were nodding along, while I was like, "What are you talking about?"

I didn't contradict anyone there. I am not sure how I would have. It didn't sound right to me, but trying to argue that nature does care about you would also be weird. I don't think I could convey verbally a logical explanation for why I feel that is wrong.

(This is where you will need to figure out relevance and meaning for yourself.)

I will tell you another, kind of similar story.

A former coworker was with her family, and they noticed a flower child type of person literally hugging a tree. 

Her brother went up and hugged the tree too. He asked "Doesn't it have the best energy?" 

The flower child was all in agreement, but it was a funny story for them. I don't believe it was mean-spirited, but the brother was nonetheless teasing the flower child.

I have hugged trees. It's not something I do often, but there have been times when I have felt connection and closeness, and like maybe with that embrace we could share strength.

Now, I would also like to point out that I have never felt I needed to hug multiple trees. With what I know now about how they connect through the ground and canopy, maybe I was onto something.

Okay, I sound hippy-dippy. Well, the more I talk about fighting this administration, the more hippy-dippy I sound; that may just be what it takes.

I don't know why I feel that connection. Sure, we camped and hiked fairly often in my childhood, and a lot of my early jobs were picking berries and weeding and things, but I am not sure that's how it works.

I am currently reading Lost Woods, a collection of lesser-known writings by Rachel Carson.

She always felt that interest in nature, and she expresses her fascination with it beautifully, 

I can say that for me there was always that desire to know what that sound was or what that plant is named, so there was looking and observing and wondering. Maybe that's how the connection was built.

I'm not saying the plants were looking back, but maybe there was just an openness on their end, and if you stepped into that you became part of it. And if we're talking animals...

Here's the other thing I remember from that panel. Back when he was new to the area, one of the members remembered talking to someone who was saying it was pretty good out here, but "every now and then, a woman goes missing."

I think the timing would have put it around the height of the Green River killings. Of course that wasn't the only serial killer to hit the area, and there are women who disappear in less notorious ways all of the time.

I suppose I remember that because there seemed to be a coldness to the way the guy said it that perhaps matched the perceived coldness of nature.

Let me close with this from Carson when she addressed the Sorority of Women Journalists in the spring of 1954: 

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy -- no panacea. But I do believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Book messiness

In case it was not obvious, I am usually reading from multiple lists at a time. While I have been reading for Spooky Season, I have also been reading for Native American Heritage Month.

There have been three NAMH books that could be considered a little spooky, two of which seem to be series.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Now, Moon of the Crusted Snow is the only one that actually has a sequel out (Moon of the Turning Leaves), though Elatsoe has a prequel, and I believe there will be others.

Moon was something I read specifically during this time, because I had seen it described as Native horror and I thought it would fit. 

If I were writing about these books now for real, I would argue that Bad Cree fits the category better, and that Elatsoe does not, despite the presence of ghosts and vampires.

I am not writing about them now because there are different things I want to say about them. Besides, there is one viewpoint from which it might makes sense to treat Bad Cree and Moon of the Crusted Snow with Braiding Sweetgrass

I mention this because I had thought that Native Horror could be the bridge for ending Spooky Season and moving into Native American Heritage Month. It could, except that there are ways in which there is an equally good bridge between Native American Heritage Month and some science reading I have going on.

That seems like it could work too, except part of that relates to the reading associated with Caliban and the Witch. Okay, I already wrote about that, except there are aspects of it that sent me down paths I didn't expect. I had not expected to be looking at any medieval studies, yet there I was.

This is a big part of why I am always behind in my reading, but that isn't just me being easily distracted by potential knowledge.

It is also how much of this knowledge connects to other knowledge. It is the patterns that we are constantly repeating, with not nearly as much variation as you would hope and certainly not the desired learning.

Next Friday I am pretty confident that I will write about the last couple of books that were read for Spooky Season.

After that, well, I could start with Science or things we misunderstand about the past or I might take some time to berate James Comey, though with those last two they might end up escaping the Friday posts and happening as part of the earlier writings in the week.

I will probably not start writing about Native American Heritage Month until I do some of those, but I am not positive. 

There will be more writing about music too, so there's that.