有辱斯文 - or - A disgrace to scholars

perclexed has mostly been posting on bluesky these days, but I suggested that she cross-post here. She's in a difficult financial situation and could use some help:

Hi. Been a while, eh?

The past few years you would’ve found me mostly on Twitter, and when that basically went tits up I was one of many who migrated over to Bluesky. Where I still am today, posting away about my current hobby obsessions (still knitting, even if I’ve lost my mojo for a couple of months, and most recently tea). And the state of me.

TL;DR: I have surgery in three weeks and at least $350 in expenses for which I do not have the money. I need to have this surgery. And I could use some help to get everything covered.

Toss something in the hat if you can, pass it on if you can't.

Purrcy finds a little taste from the bathroom faucet is one of the finest of vintages worth one of the cutest of bleps.

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Purrcy was settling down to nap just where the precious, slanting rays of winter sun crossed the bed. Savoring every one.

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We celebrated Dirk's 70th birthday early, on Tuesday (because that's when E&P could come), and this time we plotted to give him Major Presents:

- E&P got him a DVD/blu-ray player (plus cords)
- I got DVD or blu-ray sets of all New-Who Doctors

Take THAT! Disney/BBC, which have between them ensured that no New Era Doctor Who (except Gatwa) has been available to stream outside the UK for months running now, leaving his money just sitting there on the table, and have now contrived to *lose it forever* because he's never going to pay to stream it again. Also, the sets turn out to have all kinds of extra material he's never seen before, he's super happy.

Disney continues to shoot themselves in the foot inexplicably: the Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea just finished in the UK where it got really high ratings, Disney has the rights in the US, they haven't shown it & haven't said when they will. Dirk is very respectful of IP generally speaking, but I've DLed the eps via UK friends and am just waiting for him to snap and say Fuck Disney.

Beth decided she didn't want to go in on the big Doctor Who present, she bought him a trilobite fossil to keep on his desk. Excellent choice, also made him super happy and feeling very Time Lord-y as he plays with it while watching Doctor Who commentary during work breaks.

We don't really give presents anymore, because it stresses me out so much: it always took so much of my time and mental energy through the fall, it always made me very anxious, the payoff just wasn't worth it because I couldn't relax completely when enough to appreciate what I was given. Dirk's happiness this time *almost* makes me want to reconsider ... almost.

My brother came Christmas afternoon, had a simple dinner with us, hung around and chatted on Friday, ended up sleeping on our sofa instead of at his nearby hotel because the roads were so icy by 6:30. We didn't get the weight of snow we'd been expecting, but the ice was BAD. Fortunately his drive back to NYC in the late morning was OK. And now the temperature is on a steady rise and everything will wash away tomorrow.

Purrcy had stretched up to look out the window & chitter his teeth at a bird that had been teasing him, *personally*, by flitting around the porch looking for spider eggs & frozen insects. But then! It flew to another window!



Purrcy has a very pink NOSE and set of TOEBEANS. For your edification and comfort.

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I avoided reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones for a long time because I don't really read or watch horror, it's usually too scary for me.* As we got into the yearly-roundup, what-did-I-miss, pre-Hugo nominations part of my reading cycle, it was showing up on too many lists for me to ignore it any longer, so I buckled up and took the plunge.

All the lists are right. It IS that good, great even. It's structured as a mostly-epistolary story, with an outer 1st-person narration by Etsy Beaucarne, a present-day white woman Communications Prof who's transcribing letters and diary entries written by her ancestor Arthur Beaucarne in 1912. Many of the diary entries transcribe a set of interviews with a Piegan Blackfoot Indian vampire, Good Stab. (Yes, I saw what Jones did there, with interviewing a vampire. I'm sure he meant to do it.) Some of the horror is vampire-related horror, but a fair bit is historical horror, especially related to the Marias Massacre.

For me, a wimp about horror, the epistolary form & the interview within it gave me enough insulation that I could read without being overwhelmed. (The lack of insulation is why visual horror is pretty much always a no-go for me, it gets too far into my brain & won't get out.) I think Jones used this structure to ease the (presumptive) white reader, though tougher than me, into the Indian POV. First we have the present-day white POV, then a blatantly racist, foolish past white POV we can easily treat as an unreliable narrator**, which makes the reader work to figure out what really happened with Good Stab, as we get his story filtered through Arthur. And because we the readers have to do so much work to piece the story together, it acts as an enthymeme: a story or argument that's more persuasive because the audience has connected some of the dots themselves.

I started to write more, but deleted it because so much of the pleasure of a book like this comes from connecting the dots yourself, from following the author's clues to get a picture of their world- (& monster-) building.

I haven't seen "Sinners" (Too Scary For Me), but the parallels are interesting. Was there something in the air? Is there something about vampires, that makes them the ideal metaphor?

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*e.g. reviews of Jones' previous book, The Only Good Indians, make me pretty sure it's Too Scary For Timid Me.

** this is a *really hard sell*, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I consider Lolita to be fundamentally a failure as a work of literary communication, because Nabokov didn't realize how many readers would never stop identifying with Humbert.