haplessness, consumption, and brevity
Oct. 20th, 2015 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pondhopThe Cubs are inflicting the usual dose of October heartache/heartburn, so I'm going to pickle carrots instead. (There's also work to get through, but staying away from monitors for the next few innings seems like a good idea.)
There seems to be no escaping Thoreau today, albeit in texts that address the mythologizing of him. In Mark Caldwell's The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862-1954, his death from tuberculosis is presented as an example of a 19th-century tendency to cast such deaths as gentle, pure goings-into-the-good-night -- an erasure of what one could argue were the victims' true personalities (vigorous, worldly, earthy) when they were healthy. And Dawn Potter relays Katherine Schulz's observations about Thoreau, including thought-provoking comparisons of Walden to Prospect Park (neither being all that off the grid) and Thoreau to Laura Ingalls Wilder (fictional vs. real isolation).
(An extra layer to this, which I only just remembered: I'm attending a wedding later this year in Prospect Park... and the groom and the officiant and I participated together in a mock trial about thirty years ago where I was drafted to portray Thoreau. "But I haven't read any Thoreau." I forget how our classmates persuaded me that a quick trip to the library would give me enough to improvise with, but I vaguely recall them managing to make contrarian-ness sound like a compliment, and they later reassured me when my Thoreau turned out to be a terrible witness on behalf of Socrates [who was once again sentenced to death], because what I'd said as him was in character.)
Signal boost: 7x20 is seeking tweet-sized pieces by women and writers of color. Non-paying market.
On a related note, I'm the featured poet at 7x20 this week. So far:
Code Name Taurus...
Persian calligraphy
*peeks at scoreboard* FFS, Cubs. OK, I'm off to do some violence to root vegetables.
This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/395158.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.
There seems to be no escaping Thoreau today, albeit in texts that address the mythologizing of him. In Mark Caldwell's The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862-1954, his death from tuberculosis is presented as an example of a 19th-century tendency to cast such deaths as gentle, pure goings-into-the-good-night -- an erasure of what one could argue were the victims' true personalities (vigorous, worldly, earthy) when they were healthy. And Dawn Potter relays Katherine Schulz's observations about Thoreau, including thought-provoking comparisons of Walden to Prospect Park (neither being all that off the grid) and Thoreau to Laura Ingalls Wilder (fictional vs. real isolation).
(An extra layer to this, which I only just remembered: I'm attending a wedding later this year in Prospect Park... and the groom and the officiant and I participated together in a mock trial about thirty years ago where I was drafted to portray Thoreau. "But I haven't read any Thoreau." I forget how our classmates persuaded me that a quick trip to the library would give me enough to improvise with, but I vaguely recall them managing to make contrarian-ness sound like a compliment, and they later reassured me when my Thoreau turned out to be a terrible witness on behalf of Socrates [who was once again sentenced to death], because what I'd said as him was in character.)
Signal boost: 7x20 is seeking tweet-sized pieces by women and writers of color. Non-paying market.
On a related note, I'm the featured poet at 7x20 this week. So far:
Code Name Taurus...
Persian calligraphy
*peeks at scoreboard* FFS, Cubs. OK, I'm off to do some violence to root vegetables.
This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/395158.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.