I couldn't find my bottle of gojuchang sriracha, which is delicious

[conuly]

so I put a new bottle in the Amazon cart to remind myself to get one if I couldn't find it. Jenn, kindly, ordered it.

The very next day, which is today, it fell on the floor and the bottom cracked.

Luckily, we have so many small jars!

Unluckily, I think my sister cleaned those out.

Luckily, I found the first one and was able to save about half the second bottle by decanting it. Whew!

Unluckily, my kitchen now looks like a crime scene. I can't seem to find any spray bottle that doesn't smell like lavender.

**************************

The Mystery of Mistletoe’s Missing Genes

Empire of fantasy

Playing With Matches: Sexy, Silly 1930s Ads That Went Up in Smoke

Cracking the Malaria Mystery—from Marshes to Mosquirix

The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate a Warming World

The Mysterious Link Between COVID-19 and Sleep

‘Mom’s worth it’: US holiday travel surges despite outbreak (They can all drop dead.)

Why Millions of Americans Still Can't Get Coronavirus Relief Funds (Yes, let's penalize people who pay their taxes.)

How Cities Lost Control of Police Discipline

Dying inside America's jails

Comments

[heron61]

Tolkien articulated his anxieties about the cultural changes sweeping across Britain in terms of ‘American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass-production’, calling ‘this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying’ and suggesting in a 1943 letter to his son Christopher that, if this was to be the outcome of an Allied Second World War win, he wasn’t sure that victory would be better for the ‘mind and spirit’ – and for England – than a loss to Nazi forces.

Wow, I've disliked Narnia for a very long time, but dear gods that's horrifying. I suppose it makes sense and isn't all *that* surprising, because the heart of way too much Western fantasy is the sort of nostalgic monarchist pastoralism that I've never been comfortable with. I'm overjoyed to both see far more recent fantasy set in industrial (or magitech equivalent) urbanized settings. I'm also happy that my own interest in fantasy came from reading everything by Andre Norton at a young age, and while I enjoyed Tolkien's work as a pre-teen, it never had the impact on me it had on many people.

[conuly]

I'm not sure which reading of your first sentence is correct - that you disliked Narnia but didn't subject LotR to the same analysis, or that you mistakenly typed Narnia when you meant to type LotR.

[heron61]

The first - I could never get past the Christianity in Narnia - before I was pagan (which started in college) I simply regarded all religion as superstition people would be better off without, and could never get past all the Christianity in Narnia. I was never wild about Tolkien, but I didn't have anything remotely like the same repulsion for LoTR.

[calimac]

That letter was published 40 years ago, and in all that time nobody has found it that horrifying because nobody before Cecire has chosen to read everything that Lewis and Tolkien ever said with such determined malignancy. I won't bother to try a more nuanced reading of the letter because I doubt anything would change your mind now.

[conuly]

Hold up - have you read the full letter or not? Because if you haven't then I don't really see the point in accusing the reader of making up something to object to.

It is often the case that when people say "nobody complained before now" they're, frankly, wrong - lots of people complained, the person saying nobody did just doesn't know that because those people were ignored.

[calimac]

First of all, it may not be 1983 (1981, actually), but it's a lot closer to ... 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, in all of which time, as I noted, this interpretation has not been mooted. First and a half, if it's horrifying, it would have been as much so back then as it is now.

Secondly, of course I've read the letter. I've been well familiar with it since 1981, and easily found it in my copy of the book to double-check the wording. Second and a half, I didn't accuse either Cecire or Heron61 of "making something up." I said that Cecire read it, and everything else she cites, with "determined malignancy." Her interpretations are defensible, which is why I'm not prepared to argue the point. I'm just pointing out that they're way, way, WAY over at the edge of the spectrum of how Lewis and Tolkien have been read.

[calimac]

OK, you changed your comment after I started my reply.

People have tsk'd at some of the contents of the letter before now. (Not necessarily the same points that Cecire made.) I cannot speak to what may have been said in blog posts, on Usenet, etc. But in terms of professionally published material, like Cecire's, I can say pretty confidently: no, it's not been read with such extreme unction as this. (And I'm not speaking of this specific letter so much as the general sweep of Cecire's reading of Lewis and Tolkien.) How can I say that? Because I've read virtually everything that's been professionally published about Tolkien in all that time. That's my job.

[conuly]

Yeah, I saw that and decided the best thing was to wait for you to catch it too. Sorry about that.

[kshandra]

And now I have Remy Charlip illustrations dancing in my head.

[wpadmirer]

ARGH!