Okay. Let's talk "snuggle pupping."

It's hard to believe, now, the hardship and deprivation of teenagers lives before and during WW1. Which is to say, they were treated as adults and expected to get jobs. (Generalizing, but not inaccurately). No room given for maturation.

1/

https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1649971613197307904

Imagine being 14, 15, and expected to work full time.
(This is the world the GOP wants to bring back). Meeting potential romantic partners, learning how to socialize, etc--not allowed. It's not a wonder that late teens and twentysomethings were unhappy with their lot.

2/

Hello! Good morning! Happy New Year, for those who are celebrating!

It’s #publicdomainday. The following thread is a descriptive list of all the characters from the pulps who were created in 1927 and thus fall into the public domain starting today.

1/ Note that I’m using “pulp” in the Barthesian way, as a “metaphor without brakes:” anything that is pulp (by my definition) in character is included, regardless of whether or not it appeared in a pulp, a film, a novel, or whatever.
2/

“The Vikings weren’t white. So what were they?”
THREAD!
Yes, one final thread from me before Elμ drives the Twitter bus through the guard rails and into the ravine below. And, of course, since it’s me, the thread is about Vikings. Dance with the one that brung ya, I say.

1/49 (A warning, though: this thread goes some ugly places. Tweets 27-31 are about some evil, evil stuff, and twitter warnings for sexual assault are appropriately attached to the tweets).

2/

Who wants to hear about cosmic horror, folk horror, and where they overlap?
I have some thoughts on the similarity between the two seemingly opposite concepts of cosmic horror and folk horror, so I thought I’d share.
1/ Before I begin, though, I need to set out some definitions.
Cosmic horror – my last thread (

https://twitter.com/jessnevins/status/1580955182820913153

) was about this. In it I quoted Vivian Ralickas’ definition, which I like:

https://twitter.com/jessnevins/status/1580960740210376710

2/

A little something today. Nothing major, but of interest if you’re interested in Joel Chandler Harris and/or H.P. Lovecraft and/or some of the roots of cosmic horror.
Thread!
1/35 You’ll be asking, who’s Joel Chandler Harris? This guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Chan… . “Journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for the Uncle Remus (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Rem…) stories.” Brer Rabbit stories, too.
Yeah. That guy.
2/

QE2 died, so we only have one significant antiquated serial killer whose death all moral people root for: Henry Kissinger. Yet based on the reactions I’ve seen to mentions of his name, it seems that a lot of people don’t know why to root for Kissinger’s death. Here’s why:

1/26 Kissinger emigrated to the US in 1938, when he was 15, as a result of Nazi harassment of his Jewishness. Once here, Kissinger shunned those icky anti-Nazi leftists and found a mentor, Fritz Kraemer, who criticized Hitler from the right, Kissinger’s preferred position.

2/

Last week I asked you what you wanted to read from me next, and “Gender Politics in Occult Detective Stories” was the winner. So, as promised—
--but let’s take a small detour first: not everyone knows what an occult detective is, so let’s start by explaining what they are.
1/38 “Occult detectives” are those investigators, usually amateurs rather than professionals, who specialize in cases involving the supernatural/psychic. The first occult detectives appeared in the 19th century, but occult detective fiction was very much a 20th century phenomenon.
2/

This article on Vikings and the discourse of Eurocentrism is great, but it's twenty years old, which is forever ago in Viking Studies. Someone needs to write an updated version of this. This I did not know:

Y'all know about how Bjarni Herjólfsson and his followers landed at "Vinland" somewhere on the North American coastline, right? And how they encountered some indigenous people, possibly Inuit or Beothuk, who they called "skraelingjar" ("dried skins")?

1/

Gather ‘round, comrades, and I’ll tell you a story about a Chinese immigrant who worked his way up from nothing to become the most feared detective in his city.

Nope, not Zhèng Āpíng, a.k.a. “Chang Apana.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_Apa… . It's someone you won’t have heard of.

1/ Liu Tang Sin Shin (c. 1845-1902) was born in China and taken to Peru in 1866 to work as slave labor. Okay, “indentured contract laborer,” but it was slavery under another name. From 1849-1870 roughly 100,000 Chinese were involuntarily relocated to Peru for the slave trade.

2/

I...well, yes, but...no one wants another Viking thread from me this soon, do they?

I've got Thoughts about what Eggers is saying here.

https://twitter.com/kn8/status/1515003071662800901

I'll keep it brief.

The Vikings as a group, and generally the Scandinavian cultures as a whole during the Viking Era, were--kinda--obsessed with fate, yes. But one thing you notice while reading the sagas is that the Vikings/Scandis have a very dark humor about fate and death.

Okay, since there's interest:

Western frontier gay slang, a thread.

(Needless to say, if this sort of thing offends you, go read someone else's posts). "acorn calf" = a weak or runty calf, or a cowboy perceived as femme
"the acquisitive," as in "Got me some acquisitive this weekend" = booty, plunder, or sex
"ajee" = gay
"airish" = frigid

All respect to Sam Elliott, but...the Western frontier was a lot queer. Gay cowboys are/were the historical reality. Don't make me whip out the cowboy slang for various sex acts, Mr. Elliott.

Hello! Good morning! Happy New Year, for those who are celebrating!

It’s #publicdomainday, and the following is a list of the best characters from the pulps who were created in 1926 and thus fall into the public domain starting today.

1/78 Note that I’m using “pulp” in the Barthesian way, as a “metaphor without brakes:” anything that is pulp (by my definition) in character is included, regardless of whether or not it appeared in a pulp, a film, a novel, or whatever.

2/78

Reading about Texas feuds today, because Reasons, and ran across this, from the Baltzell-Brantley feud.

The start: William Baltzell whips one of John Brantley's slaves. (No one knows why). Brantley seeks satisfaction. Baltzell kills him. Leading to many more murders and--

1/ Brantley's brother Arnold Brantley, a Confederate "secret agent", confronts one of William Baltzell's allies, a planter named Green, in Jackson MS.

Green expressed glee over John Brantley's death & tells Arnold "for a quarter, I'd just as soon see you in the ground as well." 2/

By request—yes, someone actually asked me to do this!—a little discourse on the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

You remember: King Friday XIII, Henrietta Pussycat, X the Owl, Daniel Striped Tiger, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, and all the rest?

1/45 Now, you may not remember this, but Big Bird appeared once in the Neighborhood; as Wiki says, “he came to deliver his entry to the ‘Draw the Neighborhood’ art contest.” ()
2/45

More #novemberhorror:

Lygia Fagundes Telles (Brazil; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lygia_Fag…) is a highly decorated novelist whose stories & novels are more horror-inflected than pure horror. She writes psychological stories with dreamlike, nightmarish, or hallucinatory atmospheres.

1/4 Telles' characters—usually women—are customarily alone and experience misunderstanding, conflict, disillusionment, deceit, fear, and death, with conflicts not being happily resolved and the narrative tension not being relieved.

#novemberhorror

2/4

What people don't understand is that Big Bird is a represenation of Veðrfaðir, who sits atop Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse Myth, and quarrels endlessly with Níðhǫggr, the dragon who gnaws at Yggdrasil's roots. In this essay I will describe the allegorical meaning of

1/256 Big Bird, whose kindliness sweeps across Sesame Street the way that the winds caused by the flapping of Veðrfaðir's wings sweep across Miðgarðr, and Oscar the Grouch, who as the parallel of Níðhǫggr gnaws at the foundation of Sesame Street with his grouchiness.

2/256

More #novemberhorror:

Jonathan Aycliffe (UK; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Mac…) is a respected academic who writes think-pieces and thrillers as well as horror. I’m of the opinion that his horror is better than the rest of his work, despite those being more popular.

1/5 Aycliffe works in the Gothic mode, relying on psychological complexity, atmosphere, and setting to terrify the reader rather than overt horror or the suggestion of or appearance of the visceral or cosmic.

#novemberhorror

2/5

Enough people expressed an interest in this, so here I am, about to tell you one of the ways to write Superman correctly. There are any number of ways to write him. This one is mine and is how I’d write him if I ever got the chance.

1/34 Not surprisingly, Alan Moore is my main influence in this, but not based on “Whatever Happened to the Man Of Tomorrow?” No, Moore summarized my approach to Superman in this sequence from WILDCATS #26:

2/34

Thinking about my undergrad alma mater, Bates College, which is currently going through a scandal about the administration censoring something that appeared in the student newspaper.

I wrote an opinion column for that newspaper, back in 1988. 1/3 I've been smug in thinking that the administration didn't censor us in the old days--but I remembered this morning that that's not true.

I wrote a column pointing out (naming w/out naming) the date rapists on campus and the frat-like house of students where date rapes occurred.

Last time, we finished up the text of “English Jack.” Now, some notes & thoughts.
Although story paper serials were always patriotic, the quality of the patriotism and the range of feelings about the Empire and about foreigners varied depending on the years.
1/31

https://twitter.com/jessnevins/status/1448703112361959435

During those years when the British public and policy makers felt relatively sanguine about the Empire, the story papers produced what was for the time a relatively diverse set of heroes whose interaction with foreign cultures was comparatively tolerant.
2/31