A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

SOB, SOB by Kerry James Marshall “For this too is what W. E. B. Du Bois might have us think of as the gift of black culture, the gift of blackness: the great chain of being come undone, life itself unfettered and moving in all directions, a window into the worlds that thrive at the underside of modernity." — Joshua Bennett , Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man [brief note]   i stealth edit posts all the time. this is a personal blog and im prone to typos + weird phrasing. god has already forgiven me for this. ive edited this post a lot tho, like much more than i normally would, and will probably keep working on it so its only fair that i make some mention of these frequent changes somewhere. ill do a second post if it gets bad enough, promise. we're all about works-in-progress here at A Most Majestic Fly Whisk! dictated. not read. — the management Hey y'all, hope everyone's been having a happy and restful (in that order) holiday season. My nieces j...

Little says more about the soul of America than the fact that one of its greatest painters was briefly  an anarcho-McCarthyist Sometime towards the beginning of the year, I came across an interesting counterpoint to some of the reconsiderations of lore and its functions that bloggers had been posting about in an anonymous blog comment. It was a little more elaborate (and a lot more insulting) but the heart of the argument went something like this: things like conventional gazetteers are useful for providing the same contextualizing depth that historians rely upon when studying or writing, without this you can't have a truly grounded world of play. The actual argument being made is not interesting imo - it's already been dealt with by Sandro's post above . What makes this idea worth exploring to me is that historians themselves are often unclear or weird or both about what they mean when they say "historical context." Maybe even unclear or weird in ways that so...

  The Triumph of Fame “We learn bodily. The social order inscribes itself in bodies through this permanent confrontation, which may be more or less dramatic but is always largely marked by affectivity and, more precisely, by affective transactions with the environment…The most serious social injunctions are addressed not to the intellect but to the body, treated as a ‘memory pad.’ The essential part of the learning of masculinity and femininity tends to inscribe the difference between the genders in bodies (especially through clothing), in the form of ways of walking, talking, standing, looking, sitting, etc. ” - Pierre Bourdieu,  Pascalian Meditations I have no evidence to back this up but recently it feels like more and more folks have been talking about how “hollow” the thought-worlds of a lot of fantasy and sci-fi stuff can be - the sort of disquieting insubstantiality that flows from an unwillingness to seriously engage with alterity on its terms. The impetus for sta...

  Illustration for the EAPH combined reprint of Song of Lawino/Song of Ocol  by Frank Horley "The royal councillors were stunned at this answer, and stood in amazed silence, convinced she had known this by some supernatural power. For them, it was a miracle, and something to be taken seriously. Father Bernardo appeared less impressed and continued his questioning. 'Who are you?" he asked her. She replied gravely, as if every word were a serious matter, and slowly, as if carefully considering each remark, 'I am Saint Anthony, come from Heaven.'" - John K. Thornton's  The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian movement, 1684-1706 BOOKPOSTING IS BACK !! I've always loved this style of blogpost and now I have a blog to participate with. Helps that it's kinda low-intensity on a day like Ashura. Pour (a non-alcoholic) one out for Husayn, y'all. 1. “To Awaken the Soul’s Water”: Shared Systems of Communal Recollection in t...

Supporters of the  Malagasy Uprising are forced to annul their pledges to the rebel cause in a cattle sacrifice staged by the French military, 1948 "Any fool can get into an ocean/But - - it takes a Goddess/To get out of one."   Hello, I hope everyone's doing ok. Mostly alright myself, though these past few days have been pretty rough at times. Kinda feel like it might help to write about my feelings here before I get to the post proper. Skip down to the next bold heading to avoid hearing about some intense stuff.  One of my cousins is missing - the serious kind of missing, not just the habitual itinerancy and spotty communication you come to expect from migrant family abroad. This isn't the first time it's happened to us, losing people to dangers of the road or the Med itself, but it is the first time that I've been old enough to be brought in on the news  (the modern clan network - mark of adulthood to be entered into your subsubtribe's Whatsapp groupch...