Greetings from Hobbit Holes

I did some sorting of clothes and freecycling in the morning, then after lunch I worked on my Star Trek Tarot deck -- once I started researching companies that print decks, I realized I needed to add margins to every card. It was very hot until late afternoon storms blew through, after which we took a walk and saw a deer for the first time in our neighborhood. My DS9 group watched "Prophet Motive" -- which I absolutely despised when it first aired, but now the Bashir storyline resonates because of things the show hasn't even revealed about him yet, and I'm just going to assume we only see the Prophets through Ferengi eyes so they're completely distorted. 

The Orioles game was such a disaster that we had the Nationals-Red Sox on before it ended, then we watched The Sheep Detectives, which is very enjoyable, has adorable animals, has fun with the English murder village tropes, and lets lots of good actors baaaaa. Now I'm watching more fourth season Discovery, in which the Trill really need to shape up their anti-rejoining laws because if Dax couldn't date Lenara since their previous hosts were married, there really should be a rule against dating someone who shared your symbiont and now has an artificial body and you're psychologically linked. Tougas Family Farm's goats have Hobbit holes and overhead bridge walks:

Poem for Monday and Rhode Island Elephants

An Elephant in the Dark 

By Jalalludin Rumi 

Translated by Coleman Barks 

Some Hindus have an elephant to show.

No one here has ever seen an elephant.

They bring it at night to a dark room.

One by one, we go in the dark and come out

saying how we experience the animal.

One of us happens to touch the trunk.

A water-pipe kind of creature.

Another, the ear. A very strong, always moving

back and forth, fan-animal. Another, the leg.

I find it still, like a column on a temple.

Another touches the curved back.

A leathery throne. Another the cleverest,

feels the tusk. A rounded sword made of porcelain.

He is proud of his description.

Each of us touches one place

and understands the whole that way.

The palm and the fingers feeling in the dark

are how the senses explore the reality of the elephant.

If each of us held a candle there,

and if we went in together, we could see it.

-------- 

Most of my Monday involved chores, as usual -- laundry, bathroom, kitchen because the stupid sugar ants keep coming no matter how much dusting and how many bait traps -- plus the start of the semiannual photo migration because I organize my photos in folders dated by half-years. That reminded me that I had scanned the Tarot deck Paul made for me for our anniversary in the early 1990s but never cleaned up the card images, so I started doing that, too, while we were watching the Germany-Paraguay World Cup game in Boston that the latter unexpectedly won. 

I missed the start of the Orioles game because the soccer went into sudden death penalty kicks after being tied for a long time, and then I didn't watch the end because the top of the final inning turned into such a disaster. In between we ate dinner and took a walk once it was finally cool outside and the bunnies started emerging, though the strawberry moon still isn't fully up. I'm watching the start of the fourth season of Discovery hoping it's better than the third season, and my laptop's 8/* key isn't working right, which is driving me insane. Here are the elephants at the Roger Williams Park Zoo:

Greetings from Saima Park

Sunday was the annual Kesajuhla (summer festival) at the Finnish Center at Saima Park in Fitchburg, which is not far from where Adam and most of his in-laws live. Hildy, Cindy, and Solveig were playing and singing with the Fitchburg State Community Orchestra at the event, and Hildy was also performing with the Finnish dancing group. So we spent several hours there watching the performances with Tom, walking through the little market, and hanging out with various relatives and their friends.

 

We did a little shopping on the way home, did some watering and pruning of the lilac bush in front of the house when we got there, and took a walk to see bunnies when it got cooler. We watched the always-fabulous Vampire Lestat after dinner and I loved all of it but I screamed when Lestat told Daniel he was saving all his energy for Wor-chester, Massachusetts, then argued insisting that that's the correct pronunciation. Now we're watching late season three Discovery, and the stupid, it burns.

Greetings from Hartford

I had a very nice social Saturday starting with a morning drive to Shrewsbury, which was having its annual Scandinavian Midsummer Festival at a park there. Hildy was dancing with her Finnish dance group, and there was a Midsummer pole-raising, a Viking encampment and combat demonstrations, a marketplace with crafts and food, a Frozen moonbounce, and live music on several stages. 

We came home in the afternoon to feed the cats and get organized, then we drove to the Hartford area for dinner with Kristen and Doug, who had just adopted a dog! Laurie and Hal were there too, everyone brought food, we mostly hung out in the gorgeous weather out back and watched the dog and birds and ate bean salad, local cheese, veggie quiche, hummus and muhammarah, and brownies.

Greetings from Broad Meadow Brook

It was chilly Friday morning, so much so that Katniss curled up in the Hobbit bed for a while. I did some cleaning up of my social media accounts, read some more King Rat, ate half a bagel, and watched the France-Norway World Cup game being played in Boston. 

In the late afternoon we went out to a hardware store to get gardening shears, then to nearby Siam 9 for curry, drunken noodles, and Thai basil tofu. We stopped at Shaw's on the way home, then took a walk to look for evening bunnies (saw at least six) and the snapping turtle. 

We caught most of the Orioles win over the Nationals, then we watched Sugar, which I wish had more old-movie cuts but is really well done, and Star City, one of the darkest hours of television I've ever seen. Flora and fauna at Mass Audubon's Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary:

Greetings from Elm Park

I had a quiet Thursday getting things done -- I actually sewed something for the first time in ages (don't get excited, it was just a little pouch). And I did some computer work and read some of Mieville's King Rat, his first novel; I've read the rest, I figure I may as well read the beginning. 

It was warmer today but not too hot by the time we took a walk. I had chat after dinner, and since then we've been watching the US play Turkiye in the World Cup in L.A. (Norway plays France in Boston tomorrow). We saw this family of squirrels chase each other all over Elm Park last weekend:

Greetings from Hollis Hills

After two days of rain, Wednesday was a warm day. I did chores in the morning, then after lunch my usual chat with my high school friends got canceled because all the rest of them were busy with family stuff so I did some reading and wrote what was supposed to be a short Facebook post that turned into a longer blog rant. 

Kristen and Laurie and I watched some second season Good Omens, including the whole episode with Job and then Aziraphale thinking he's a fallen angel, which is my favorite of the whole series. Then we took a walk in the late afternoon and had frozen pizza for dinner during the unfortunate end of the Orioles game. 

We've been spending the evening watching the rest of the second season of The Agency, which has been excellent, although I wanted more Fassbender and Turner-Smith; the cast is all superb, it's surprisingly emotional for a spy story, there's no contemporary BS politics. From last weekend, animals and scenery at Hollis Hills Farms:

Temper Tantrums

I was recently talking about the Star Trek: Voyager episode "State of Flux" with someone, and that made me go look up the retro review I wrote of it in 2015, after a long and delightful conversation on Facebook mostly with the people with whom I originally watched the show in the 1990s. On that rewatch, I had discovered that Tuvok used the phrase "defined parameters" in a conversation with Chakotay in this first season episode -- a phrase that any Janeway/Chakotay fan can tell you is extremely loaded because of the second season episode "Resolutions", in which Janeway tells Chakotay that they need to "define some parameters...about us" and Chakotay responds by telling her the Angry Warrior story. There is no way to read it other than a love scene, even if you decide that love is not romantic. It made me think about all the ways the Voyager writers had seemed very deliberately to be setting up a Janeway/Chakotay relationship that was more than platonic, which they scrapped and sabotaged in later seasons in ways that seemed not only just as deliberate but deliberately nasty, particularly toward Janeway and a lot of her female fans. (Certainly there were some fans who wanted Janeway to be proudly asexual or celibate, and others who wanted to see her in a relationship with Seven of Nine, and the writers seemed even more determined to upset the latter, but that's a different rant.) It all made me remember how Trek "professionals" had often treated shippers, long before "shippers" was a fannish term -- particularly the original Kirk/Spock fans, whom the pros had spent years ridiculing, insulting, and belittling in print. One of the biggest examples of that trend occurs in David Gerrold's book The World of Star Trek. Gerrold is most famous for having written the original series episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" when he was quite young, and he spent many years coasting on his fame from that and some interesting but not genre-shaking sci-fi novels. In The World of Star Trek, he wrote about "a disturbing phenomenon...among a group of female Star Trek fans" who "entertain themselves by writing stories in which Kirk and Spock are homosexual lovers." (He footnotes this with "I am not making this up. Honest.") Gerrold adds that "their projection of their own sexual fantasies onto Star Trek has at times been a nuisance for those who actually have to produce the show" and claims that Roddenberry had to "acknowledge their unwelcome invasion of the universe he had created" with a footnote in his novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Now, the Roddenberry footnote is a topic of discourse by academics as well as fans. Suffice to say that Gerrold is not only summarizing it incorrectly, he is actively sabotaging the way Roddenberry presents Kirk/Spock and the possibility of a romantic relationship. It's worth quoting the footnote in full:

Editor's note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t'hy'la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock's recollection (from which this chapter has drawn) is that is that it was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t'hy'la can be used to mean lover, and since Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has led to some speculation over whether they had actually indeed become lovers. At our request, Admiral Kirk supplied the following comment on this subject:

'I was never aware of this lovers rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself, although I have no moral or other objections to physical love in any of its many Earthly, alien, and mixed forms, I have always found my best gratification in that creature woman. Also, I would dislike being thought of as so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.'

This footnote -- look up the discussion on Fanlore, it's worth it -- accomplishes several things that do the opposite of presenting Kirk/Spock speculation as an unwelcome invasion. First, it indicates that the phenomenon is significant enough that it has come to the attention of the creator of Star Trek and he finds it worth addressing in a lighthearted manner in an official novelization. Second, it leads to the invention of a Vulcan concept that COULD mean Kirk and Spock were lovers to fans who might never once have considered the possibility before. Third, it gives the supposed final word on the subject to legendary horndog James T. Kirk, who does not say anything like it's ridiculous or it never happened -- quite the contrary, he suggests that he's open to all forms of consensual love, that he has tried enough to find that women are most likely to give him what he wants physically, and that his primary source of embarrassment about the rumor with Spock is that people might believe Spock is only really into him once every seven years. Roddenberry could hardly have written anything in an all-ages novel to suggest more directly that Kirk and Spock might have been lovers at some point before the events of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Gerrold, however, wrote in The World of Star Trek, "When you start messing around in other people's universes...you have to follow the rules of the local creator. If nothing else, it's good manners." (That doesn't seem to have applied to Gerrold's own Star Trek writings, which include "The Cloud Minders" in which Spock goes along with a woman's description of herself as a work of art instead of noting what an illogical description that is, but that's really neither here nor there -- I'm all in favor of professional writers pushing the boundaries of source material just as much as fan writers.) A lot of fans took umbrage to Gerrold's last statement even if Kirk/Spock wasn't their particular interest. Once a fictional universe is on our TVs and in our books, it's ours to interpret and play with as we wish, whether we want to imagine new alien species stranger than the strange new worlds of the show or to think about how Star Trek characters would interact with Doctor Who. So Gerrold got asked about these quotes repeatedly, and he often got cranky replying. At one point Gerrold reportedly wrote that the fact some people saw the K/S relationship as gay was "equally as disturbing" as an incident where a fan committed suicide. Ten years ago, he wrote a post on his Facebook page slamming female viewers with whom he did not agree, calling two of them -- Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, who like him have published professional Star Trek fiction -- fubba-wubbas ("fat ugly broads with unbelievably bad attitude"). He said similar things at conventions and writers' conferences before he codified this in print. Anyway, when I was reviewing "State of Flux", I was thinking about all the ways in which fans read shows, and how many of them, particularly shippers, have been dismissed and insulted by so-called professionals. So I wrote, "The experience of how [a] relationship plays out is significant to so many fans I’ve known over the years – particularly women – and I don’t care how many tantrums people like David Gerrold throw about how the creators’ statements about the characters are more important than the fans’ perceptions; the creators are not allowed to tell viewers that their lived experience of a story is invalid." (See: Viggo Mortensen on how every reader shares a secret with The Lord of the Rings when they see it, or Daniel Radcliffe on how what readers find in a Harry Potter book is private and sacred no matter what bigoted things the book's author may later say.) By the time my "State of Flux" review went live, I knew better than ever to go back and read the comments on it, let alone to engage with such comments. So it wasn't until my very recent conversation about the episode that I discovered David Gerrold had found and commented on my review: "Nice cheap shot. But I don’t throw tantrums. I respect fans. I celebrate the enthusiasm of fans. I continue to be amazed and astonished at what fans are creating that keeps the Star Trek phenomenon alive even half a century later...I’m as big a fan as anyone. I’ve been a Star Trek fan longer than most. And I really believe in the original vision — that we can be better. So even when I’m misquoted, misinterpreted, or simply lied about, I still don’t throw tantrums. I just raise an eyebrow and say, “Fascinating.” (signed) David Gerrold" You all will have to excuse me if I disbelieve him when he says he respects fans and complains that he's been lied about. In fact, if I were David Gerrold, I would look at my 2016 fubba-wubba comments, apologize profusely, and say yes, indeed, that was a temper tantrum. Because if I look at the things he wrote and accept them as deeply thought out rather than spur of the moment annoyance, I have to conclude that he's deeply misogynistic and does not, in fact, respect fans in the least. But, if the latter is the case, then, belatedly, I'm the one who must apologize for accusing Gerrold of throwing a tantrum; it's possible that he just does hate Star Trek's most devoted viewing audience, and all independent-thinking women who don't let male creators 'splain how they should view the world and imagine the future, that much. Unfortunately, the comments on my review were closed years ago, so I can't say this to Gerrold there. But I can say it to the rest of fandom here.

Greetings from the Flamingos

Tuesday was just as rainy as Monday. I spent the morning doing chores with a break to run out and catch Squawkabillys, then we had lunch and in the afternoon I talked to Chris for an hour and a half. Then we went for a walk as the drizzle slowed before dinner. My DS9 group watched "Destiny" -- I love the Emissary episodes though I don't love Kira in this one, and I love that the smart Cardassian scientists are all women and really want peace. 

Apart from baseball, the rest of the evening has been watching some episodes of The Agency, which I wish had more Martian and Samia, though I enjoy Gremlin's story (I can't say I like her -- she's a sociopath, whereas Martian's weaknesses as an agent are also what make him sympathetic). I love when I go to a zoo and a wild animal has snuck into an exhibit, so here is the groundhog swiping food in the flamingo exhibit at Roger Williams Park Zoo: