A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

  Abdoulaye Konaté - Vert Pour Sidy How are y'all? At least OK, I hope - OK is about where I'm at myself. Kinda a weird vibe today; had to spend a couple hours in a disciplinary committee to try and keep a kid from getting suspended for throwing ink on people (makes no more sense in context), then keep myself from strangling a Ph.D student in my modern historiography seminar who seems hellbent on misinterpreting Trouillot in the most braindead of post-2015 Austin liberal ways (UHHH DOES THE RECORD OF SILENCES TAKE INTO ACCOUNT DIGITAL ARCHIVING STRATEGIES s2g gonna leave a record of violences on your face), but yesterday I got to meet Romanian darling of the litfic world Mircea Cărtărescu at a talk he gave on his cool new book Solenoid so the week is balancing out. Ramadan is def nailing me harder than I expected this year when combined with everything else. Slowly moving beyond the need to apologize for inactivity here but I will never get past allowing other people's p...

Luba anthropomorphic headrest from the 1800s, produced by the workshop of the anonymous artist called The Master of the Cascade Headdress by art historians. Steal it from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels for a unique Valentine's gift that your imperial prince/ess will adore. Hello, everyone! Taking a break from thinking about the Lakelands for Dungeon23 (I just figured out a thing for the setting that was vexing me, thanks to  Sandro's fantastic recent blogpost , so I'll prob break my own rule and post about that + some favorite bits from these past 20 days soonish) by doing some more writing. This one is set in my Kubalubalundaland Cent. African fantasy world like the fauxtales from last time, but it's more conventional in form.  Four Kids in a House  Rivers of rain slid down the leaf-and-sapling roofs of the house, becoming waterfalls when they reached the eaves and made a six-foot drop to the ground. Despite the weight of water it was carrying, only a...

 Mulugeta Tafesse - The medicine man 1  New job, finals, and now prepping for dungeon23! Stress! Lots of stuff going on, so I've been finishing up some older writing as a relaxation thing.  These two stories are in-universe "texts" from my Kubalubalundaland setting (the name is being workshopped but it gets a little closer to being official every day) focused on the Forest Peoples. They're roughly contemporaneous - both are told during the iron-hearted years of the Many-Quilled Paramount's incessant wars. The first is taken from the long claw of the Recollection Society elder From-The-Village-Of-Wealth, a kind and curious memoryman who came of age during the Hunter Paramount's reign; the Forestophile fad at court back then was more than a fad to him. Village-Of-Wealth doesn't quite get it but he's pretty close for someone born an aristocrat. The second is a story told by Isn't-It-Obvious-To-You, a Forest Woman scholar (all the people of the Forest ...

  A Hunting Scene , from Sammy Baloji's Hunting and Collecting Working on both my " A Dance -" readalong and a post about three related books on Malagasy cultures that I think make a compelling basis for a setting, but I've been having an INTRUSIVE (gaming) THOUGHT. I recently read some good advice from the maestro Nick Whelan on how to banish these from their hiding places in your brain: So that's what I'm doing.  Currently at a crossroads for a thing: I've been running a NooFutra game set in the current day DR Congo. This was another setting that grew out of a triad of books - Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession by Thomas Hendriks, The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in the Eastern DR Congo by James Smith, and Health in a Fragile State: Science, Sorcery, and Spirit in the Lower Congo by John Janzen - and it's been so much fun. The main draw of Noofutra imo besides the general traits of Mothers...

  Figure invested by the matrilineal ancestors of the Hemba-Tabwa chief Lusinga lwa Ng’ombe. Taken with his skull to Belgium as a prize of war by Émile Storms.   I love A Dance of Assassins . There are dense informative books and there are beautiful heartbreaking books and every so often there are books that are both. Allen F. Roberts makes it look effortless, all the more stunning in a field where the writers aren't typically known for the elegance of their prose. Now that I've written the story below, I'm going to do a notes + review of the book very soon to contextualize it, but as a brief summary: Roberts draws on his expertise in Central African art history and explorations of precolonial Tabwa culture to provide new ways of looking at one particular event - the beheading of transcultural chieftain and nascent empire-builder Lusinga Iwa Ng'ombe (called a "sanguinary potentate" in the writings of at least one colonial observer) by Belgian officer Émile St...