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4 shades of blue captured in a single image in Antarctica

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Tumblr just applied a mature content label to a pair of ink swatches I posted. I will never understand how the AI filtering works. First Van Gogh's boats, and now ink swatches. So stupid.

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monemvasia

© 2024  Yiannis Krikis

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There is this thing about small children, your three and four year olds, the ones who aren't toddlers anymore, but only just, the ones who are running around and talking, but for whom the world is still big and weird, and utterly incomprehensible. When they fall down, or run into something, or otherwise suffer a painful accident, they are automatically convinced someone is to blame. They look around, see the closest other child, and they insist that this other child pushed them. They're hurt, and it's the other child's fault.

And, to be clear, this is something that the hurt child believes with all their heart. They aren't lying. They are not doing this on purpose. This is just something that their brain at this stage in development, is doing to them. This is just a thing that happens with children at that age, as their brains are growing, and they are learning how the world works.

All this means that a huge part of what a preschool teacher does is stop fights from breaking out because X child fell and hurt themselves and is convinced Y child did it, and Y child did not do it and is really upset by this accusation. And a lot of the time, Y child was the closest child, and therefore the one getting accused, because they ran over to help. You do a lot of talking through it with X child and talking about how you saw the whole thing and you tripped over the curb, I promise, or Y child was over here and couldn't have pushed you, etc. There is nothing you can do about this, you just got to keep working through this with every kid, until their brain grows a little bit more, and they can figure out that sometimes they're hurt, and it's nobody's fault. Sometimes we just trip and fall.

So this is something I have noticed happening in internet fights. I see a lot of X person, who is genuinely hurt, assigning blame to Y person or group of people, and they believe this wholeheartedly, when really Y person or group was just close by, and is really upset by this accusation. And yes, I am saying that I see a lot of grown adults acting like small children online, but also I am seeing a lot of people acting like hurt and afraid small children online, and I think maybe we never entirely grow out of trying to hold somebody responsible for our pain.

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Mi Al Har Horev: The Earliest Recorded Jewish Music and the Norman Convert who Saved It for Us

Out of all the obscure and fascinating coincidences of the Cairo Genizah, this is one of my absolute favourites.

Amazingly, among the documents of the Genizah were found seven leaves from an autobiographical memoir (of sorts) of a convert named Obadiah, and scholars were able to piece his life story together. He was born around 1070 in Norman Italy to a noble Christian family, and was originally named Johannes, son of Dreux. Although he received religious training in a local monastery and was a serious student of the Christian Bible, he was drawn to Judaism from his early teens, and eventually converted in 1102.

Leaving Europe, he made his way to Jewish communities in Aleppo, Baghdad, Damascus, and eventually, Fustat [Cairo], having mastered by this time both Hebrew and Arabic, and having survived several harrowing encounters with the soldiers of the First Crusade… It was here that he made his great contribution to the history of Jewish music.

For decades, scholars had been puzzled by another set of fragments found in the Genizah: Hebrew piyyutim [devotional poems], clearly written in the handwriting of 12th-century Levantine Hebrew script, i.e. somewhere in Egypt, Syria or Baghdad… But each line was also written out with the neumes of medieval musical notation — specifically, in the 12th-century southern Italian School of “Lombardic” or “Beneventane notation.” How was a Levantine Hebrew piyyut recorded with a system of musical notation that was at this time confined to Christian monasteries in southern Europe?

It was only in 1964 that the scholar Norman Golb saw the musical manuscript and recognized that the handwriting was identical to the script of Obadiah’s memoirs which he was preparing for publication. And thus the mystery was solved: Obadiah had taken the piyyutim of the Jewish community around him and recorded them with the musical notation he had learnt in his youth in Italy. It seems that in some cases he was transcribing the traditional tunes, and in others he was setting the words to music of his own composition in a Gregorian-Italian style.

Of course, since specialists are able to read this style of medieval notation, Obadiah’s melodies can be recovered (although obviously not perfectly) and performed today. You can see Prof. Royal B. MacDonald’s transcriptions into modern notation at the end of the document here, and Israel Adler’s notations here. I cried when I first heard this beautiful recorded interpretation, performed by vocalist Meirav Ben-David Harel and Nima Ben-David on the viola da gamba. To be able to hear medieval Jewish music, reaching through the centuries, preserved through the happenstance of the Genizah and the tenacity of an Italian convert… This is why I study history.

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A story in two screenshots. Alt text added.

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august light and birdsong

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I mean, I'm aware, my data is flawed. For one thing, there were less than 40 votes, and also I went into this with the assumption that most people voting had not read House of Many Ways. I was using the poll to make a point, not to gather data. I was virtually certain as to how this poll was going to go when I made it. And I chose House of Many Ways to make my point, both because it was a particularly awful example of antisemitism in children's fantasy, and because it was a remarkable combination of being written by a well known and respected author, the sequel to a popular and beloved book, and being itself not that widely read. I was, in short, expecting and even relying on people having not read it when I made the poll, in part because I think that a large chunk of my audience would and have picked up on the antisemitic tropes in House of Many Ways, had they read it, because, for one thing, the audience for my blog is disproportionately Jewish.

House of Many Ways is illustrative precisely because most people haven't heard of it. It isn't an infamous example of antisemitism in chidren's fantasy, and it's not because no one ever read it. As a sequel to beloved fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle, it got a fair amount of publicity when it came out, and it was widely reviewed. Those reviews were mixed, because antisemitism aside, it's just not that good, but there was no outcry from the children's fantasy critics and reviewers, or from librarians and teachers, communities of smart, well educated people who understand how children's literature works, and who care deeply about it.

You don't hear about that terrible antisemitic sequel to Howl's Moving Castle that we all pretend doesn't exist, and that is important. It's also important that nobody much listened to Jews talking about the antisemitism in the Harry Potter books until they had other reasons to hate J. K. Rowling. The point I wanted to make when I made my poll is that we hear about the horrible horrible antisemitism in the Harry Potter books. They get treated as outliers for how bad they are on that front. They are not, and when we treat them as outliers, it does damage to any potential discussion around the pervasiveness of antisemitic tropes in children's fantasy.

Quick poll for children's fantasy fans:

Only the books in the series itself are being counted, no movies, no merchandise, no video games, no "expanded universe", just the words on the page of the books in the series. So the Harry Potter series is being judged only on the seven novels in the series itself, and Howl's Moving Castle on the three novels in that series.

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I am genuinely baffled as to why you made this reblog and what you wanted my reaction to be. Are you okay?

Quick poll for children's fantasy fans:

Only the books in the series itself are being counted, no movies, no merchandise, no video games, no "expanded universe", just the words on the page of the books in the series. So the Harry Potter series is being judged only on the seven novels in the series itself, and Howl's Moving Castle on the three novels in that series.

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Fossil Fish Teapot by Bruce Gholson, Bulldog Pottery, Seagrove, NC

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"Flowing Kelp"

This CUPOTY-shortlisted photo by Sigfrido Zimmerman shows giant kelp drifting in the current. At the base of each blade is an inflated bladder that helps keep the algae buoyant.  (Image credit: S. Zimmerman/CUPOTY; via Colossal) Read the full article

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A pair of corvids are observed perched silently atop a street light during a misty morning in coastal California. ♡

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Lake Gosau, Austria *by eberhard

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Eventually, we’re going to have to have a serious conversation about the right-wing cesspit part of jumblr. I felt that a lot of us agreed not to engage with or give them any platform, but apparently not.

And to be clear I'm not doing "everyone ever so slightly to the right of me is Evil"- it’s about not tolerating hateful, exclusionary ideologies in a space that’s supposed to be good faith

That includes the “religious” homophobia and transphobia that gets excused or ignored, and the ongoing demeaning of non-Orthodox Jews, btw

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Gone fishing!

Kingfisher at our pond.