36 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/26/24 I’ve Been Yeeted, Been Mistreated, When Will I Be Faunched”

1. Good evening, tonight I’m beginning to listening to Always Coming Home which being an ethnographic work as Le Guin often described it, does makes sense as it is really I believe a set of interconnected narratives and not really a novel.

   As a listening experience , it’s almost exactly a day long. I will no doubt be drinking a lot of tea.

2. #10 – It’s worth noting that Sturgeon’s movie novelizations were also very good. Unlike most people, who just add some action and description to the script and call it a novel, Sturgeon dug deeper into the characters and wrote an actual novel.

3. (3) I’m really glad Premee Mohamed got included. She is having an absolute breakout year, and it’s justly deserved. And it’s always neat to see someone I think of as a local writer gaining broader attention

4. (1) Congrats, esp. in these parlous times. And the scammer trying to make money on buying a book? They’re all over. A couple of years ago, some jerk was telling me that the price on my first novel was too high, I should lower it. He didn’t seem to understand that I had a publisher, and they control the price.
   (3) I might need to pick that up. sigh I spoke to several Canadian publishers at Pemmi-Con, and was going to submit a novel (my editor at my current publisher just doesn’t like the PoV character)… then I lost their card. Tried emailing the con, and get no answer.
   (5) Is there a clause that if it doesn’t generate that much tax revenue above what would have come in, in x years, that they get to pay the taxes? I’ve seen reports that sportsball stadiums don’t.
   (13) sigh Would have seriously impacted US passenger travel, given that I would think you could run it over existing tracks… and the reason Amtrak’s so slow in most of the country is that it has to lease trackage outside the northeast corridor, and the rail lines only maintain the tracks to slower freight standards (if they maintain them…)
   (14) More than slightly suspicious.
   (16) If I had anything to do with a moon lander, I would suggest three or four arms to right the damn thing when it fell over.

5. (1) Congrats!

   (8) Rats! I have a couple of their anthologies— and have more in my wishlist.

   (10) In high school, my English teacher (and faculty supervisor of the Unicorn literary journal) gave all Unicorn staff members with paperbacks with unicorn themes. I got “E Pluribus Unicorn,” and that was my introduction to Sturgeon. I liked the well-known stories but also really liked some of the lesser-known ones.

   I remember learning of his death from a Locus magazine just a few years later. And reading the tributes during a slow summer day while visiting a farm.

6. (10) One fave of mine has long been “When You Care, When You Love,” which has a twist at the end that isn’t a twist at all, so much as a sudden shift in perspective.

7. (10) “The Widget, the Wadget and [Boff]” has to be one of my fave Sturgeons. Alien observers subject a selected group of humans to a particular set of stresses to see what happens. Told with great humor and compassion. Haven’t read it in ages, but I do remember quite a bit of it, and think about it frequently.
   (`15) Beavers appear to be the Next Big Thing in coverage of popular environmental reclamation! I’m just about done reading “Eager,” which is a celebration of beavers (though I admit I skimmed the chapters describing the massive slaughter of them in the 19th-20th Century) and features many of the projects they’re working on in restoring wetlands all over the US, the UK, and some in Europe. Looks like I’ll check out “Beaverland” next.

8. (1) Happy anniversary!

   I’m laughing at the guy who apparently doesn’t understand he’s provided Don with the proof that he did receive the book.

   (14) Vending machines don’t need to be “smart.” And they don’t need facial recognition.

   (15) Beavers are Friends of the Planet.

   I am currently trapped in the year 6121, which is quite a surprise!

9. It’s scrolls and pixels I recall
   I really don’t know files at all

10. 16) Maybe we should start sending Weebles to the moon.

11. As I recall MARY POPPINS, the Admiral makes this comment about Mary Poppins, the children, Bert, and the chimney sweeps who are doing the “Step in Time” dance on the rooftops. Since that’s the reference group for the remark, the Admiral is making racist reference to a bunch of Englishmen (and women). No Africans were referenced in the making of this insult.

    By the same logic, THE WIZARD OF OZ is equally unsuitable due to Bert Lahr’s singing the line, “What makes the Hottentot so hot?” in his song, “If I Were King of the Forest.”

12. Thanks for the Title Credit!

    (4) I’m glad they’re trying to compensate folks.
    (10) More than Human may be the book I’ve gotten the most people to read.

    “Sweet Palpatine, Dark Side never Filed so good”

13. 1) I’m glad to see him rise above both the assholes who burnt the original Uncles down and the bureaucrats who seemingly were bent on preventing him from re-building. I’ve got some good memories of those stores.

    9) Have to justify your salaries somehow, I guess.

    10) ‘Amok Time’ is one of the top five original Star Trek episodes. The others being, in no particular order, ‘Balance of Terror’, ‘Mirror, Mirror’, ‘Space Seed’ and despite Ellison’s howls of contempt, ‘City on the Edge of Forever.’
    Honorable mention for one of my personal favorites, ‘Battlefield’ the episode where The Riddler gives us all a lesson in racial harmony in all of it’s ham handed, subtle as a half brick to the skull glory.

14. (17) Matt Mitchell, aka AL Ostrich, is a southern GEM! If you want to get an inside view of how southerners deal with the South, and sometimes the rest of all y’all, subscribe to his channel.

    See y’all at the Dollar General!

15. mark on February 26, 2024 at 7:31 pm said:

    (13) sigh Would have seriously impacted US passenger travel, given that I would think you could run it over existing tracks…

    According to https://pueblorailway.org/roster/rocket-cars/the-grumman/ it needed a special guideway. (There is a picture of it running on the guideway built at the Pueblo rail testing site.)

    Even if it could run over existing tracks, running something that fast would eat up an enormous amount of “paths” as everything else would have to be shunted aside for it.

16. Lew:
    The word in question was “Hottentot.”
    It is racially insensitive term for the Khoekhoe, an indigenous group in South Africa.

    Oddly, I haven’t heard a similar change in rating for “The Wizard of Oz,” in which that same word is used by the Cowardly Lion in the song, “If I Were King of the Forest.”

    “Courage! What makes a King out of a slave?
    Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave?
    Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk, in the misty mist or the dusky dusk?
    What makes the muskrat guard his musk?
    Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder?
    Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder?
    Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the “ape” in apricot?
    What have they got that I ain’t got?
    Courage!”

    To those indigenous people, that word is as offensive as the “N” word here in the US.

    Personally, I’m still a little perturbed that, in “The Lone Ranger,” Jay Silverheel’s moniker was “Tonto,” which I later learned was Spanish for “stupid.”

    Everyone should have the right to exist, and not to be denigrated or diminished by being called offensive names.

17. @Lew Wolkoff — Actually, from a certain point of view, the situation is worse than if they’d been actual Africans. It’s a bunch of White people in blackface, being addressed by the racist term.

18. 8) If you like weird fiction, look up Handheld Press in your search engine. They have published quite a number of anthologies of early weird (British general weird, women writers’ weird, archaeological) and single author collections (Algernon Blackwood, for example) as well as bringing back into print sf by both British and American writers (Vonda McIntyre’s “The Exile Waiting”). They’re currently my favorite small press. (The rest of their list stands out for biographies, WW II British novels, LGBT books, mainly but not entirely by women.)

19. (10) Theodore Sturgeon wrote far more than he’s credited for.
    As part of the Agatha Christie Project (watching EVERY AC film, including international ones), we saw Studio One’s 1952 adaptation of “They Came to Baghdad”.
    Despite what IMDB claims, according to the film’s credits (which we watched) Theodore Sturgeon wrote the script.
    Yet it’s not listed anywhere, including on the semi-comprehensive website devoted to him whose name I can’t remember.

20. Yeets of Eden

21. @Dan’l
    “Actually, from a certain point of view, the situation is worse than if they’d been actual Africans. It’s a bunch of White people in blackface, being addressed by the racist term.”
    They are chimney sweeps with soot on their faces. Blackface is the application of dark makeup to indicate one is portraying a stereotypical black person. There is a difference.

    To put the sweeps into the same category as Amos and Andy is ridiculous.

22. They are chimney sweeps with soot on their faces. Blackface is the application of dark makeup to indicate one is portraying a stereotypical black person. There is a difference.

    Blackface is the point of the gags in Mary Poppins, both film and book versions. She, the kids and the chimney sweeps all get soot on their faces and jokes are made about race. Here’s part of a 2019 story in the New York Times examining the subject:

    This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.

    The 1964 film replays this racial panic in a farcical key. When the dark figures of the chimney sweeps step in time on a roof, a naval buffoon, Admiral Boom, shouts, “We’re being attacked by Hottentots!” and orders his cannon to be fired at the “cheeky devils.” We’re in on the joke, such as it is: These aren’t really black Africans; they’re grinning white dancers in blackface. It’s a parody of black menace; it’s even posted on a white nationalist website as evidence of the film’s racial hierarchy. And it’s not only fools like the Admiral who invoke this language. In the 1952 novel “Mary Poppins in the Park,” the nanny herself tells an upset young Michael, “I understand that you’re behaving like a Hottentot.”

23. @CaseyL: Since my dreamwidth Reading page is titled “Widgets, Wadgets, and Boffs”, you know I agree!

    You may argue about which ST:TOS episode is the best, but I think “Amok Time” may be the most influential. We would probably still have had Kirk/Spock and slash fandom without Pon Farr, but that’s the episode that sealed the deal.

    When we showed it to our kids as more-or-less adults their jaws dropped and they said, “how did THAT end up on screen?!?”

    “Ted Sturgeon,” we explained.

24. @Bill: The words “from a certain point of view” were important. Obviously, you do not hold that point of view. Nor do I, but I understand it.

25. When our children were born I picked up a copy of Mary Poppins, having vague memories of reading it at some young age. Fortunately we always vetted books before sharing them with the kids, even old classics. I think I got about three chapters in before I Noped the hell out of there. That book got stashed away with the copy of Little Black Sambo some possibly well-intentioned old relative gave us and the kids never saw hide nor hair of it.

    The blackface jokes were absolutely intended. They were not innocent coincidence.

26. @rcade — happy to agree that the books have racist elements. I haven’t read them but the excerpts tend to bear that out. Happy to agree that Admiral Boom was an idiot and a buffoon (but am not ready to label him racist based solely on his use of a term that was not generally seen as racist in either 1964, when the movie was released, or in 1910, when it was set). But the discussion I’m engaged in is about whether soot on a chimney sweep’s face counts as “blackface”. If the sweeps spoke in faux negro dialect, or sang “Mammy”, or did any of the other things that would clearly associate them with minstrelsy, there might be a case for the position. Not every instance of white people with dirt or dark makeup on their face counts as “blackface”. Context matters, and intent matters. An academic writing in the New York Times doesn’t change that.

    @Dan’l — I could have been more clear that I was disagreeing with the argument, and not you.

27. Bill:

    (but am not ready to label him racist based solely
    on his use of a term that was not generally seen
    as racist in either 1964, when the movie was
    released, or in 1910, when it was set)

    Even in 1910, the term “Hottentot” was clearly derogatory — see historical notes below.

    Are you, then, ready to label a society in which that term was not generally seen as racist, as itself being racist?

    Historical notes:
    (1) The word “Hottentot” appears to come from a root meaning “stutterers,” and originally applied to the Khoekhoe, a people whose language uses a lot of clicks and pops.
    (2) By the 1600s, it was used to refer to all Black people, more or less synonymous at the time with Kaffir.
    (3) In 1737, Lord Chesterfield denigrated Samuel Johnson by referring to him as “a respectable Hottentot.”
    (4) By 1910, let alone 1964, the term was generally in use to mean “wild” (God help us for that term) Africans.
    (5) As a comparative point of reference, when I was a very young child in the early 1960s, indeed about the time that Mary Poppins was being made, I was taught (by my maternal grandfather, for what that’s worth: a New York cop who, as I remember him, probably thought John Wayne was a bit too liberal) that there were two kinds of (American, though that seemingly didn’t need to be said) Indians: “good” Indians, and “wild” Indians who were, by implication, either “bad” or “evil,” depending on how you parse “good.”

28. @Bill soot on someone’s face is obviously not inherently blackface. That would be a rediculous stance and no one has suggested it. If that’s your entire question then it’s clearly answered.

    What’s racist is that the narrative treats it like blackface. The Admiral Boom scene is racist not because the chimney sweeps are covered in soot, but because them being covered in soot causes Admiral Boom to use racial terms towards them. And shoot at them!

    If white characters fall in mud and then jokes about them being black are made, it’s the jokes and (potentially) the narrative that are racist, not the falling in mud per se. Just like the chimney soot

29. All this about Hottentots… what’s your response to Huck Finn, long considered the first great novel from America?

30. @mark–

    All this about Hottentots… what’s your response to Huck Finn, long considered the first great novel from America?

    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book written for the express purpose of highlighting the hypocrisy and evil of the racist attitudes and practices that American chattel slavery made a lasting part of American society.

    A bit different than Mary Poppins, which accepted the racist attitudes of early 20th century Britain as entirely normal and not something that should be looked askance at.

31. All this about Hottentots… what’s your response to Huck Finn, long considered the first great novel from America?

    I think it’s a great novel indeed, and one of the things it’s about is racism. Twain depicts the treatment of Blacks in general, and Jim in particular, in a way that … well, honestly, it sugarcoats it just a little bit, when you compare it to (say) Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly: and even that doesn’t go far enough in depicting how unbeliveably cruel and brutal racial enslavement really was.

    But to compare that to Mary Poppins is like comparing The Phantom Tollbooth to Twilight. Different age audience, for one thing; and for another, huge difference in basic quality.

32. @rcade — My statement about how the term was generally used came from looking at how the word was used by the writers in major newspapers like the Washington Post, LA Times, NY Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, etc. in the Proquest archives. In the vast majority of cases, it was used simply as a label for the group of people better known now as the Khoekhoe, or for other native Africans of that region. Similar to how words like Bantu, Apache, or Eskimo were used. This is not to say that no one used it with racist connotations, but that it was still a word that could be and was used in polite society without animus.

    As far as your historical notes, I don’t disagree that it has been used as a slur — any name for a group of people who are “other” can be and has been used that way. But I maintain that it generally was not used or seen that way in standard English until sometime after 1964. You can confirm this for youself by looking at the entries for “hottentot” in the dozens of dictionaries of the late 1960s that can be found on the Internet Archive.

    And your etymology for the word is by no means generally accepted. The Oxford English Dictionary mentions it, but calls it “uncertain and disputed “.

    @Ryan H. — I’ll concede that shooting at people because you think they are black is racist.

    And Huckleberry Finn is one of the great American novels. If not the great American novel.

33. If the sweeps spoke in faux negro dialect, or sang “Mammy”, or did any of the other things that would clearly associate them with minstrelsy, there might be a case for the position.

    I see you aren’t going to give any ground on definitions. If white people’s faces are darkened and they are treated as Black for comedic ridicule, it’s blackface.

    The link I provided talks about how author P. L. Travers engaged in minstrelsy in the first Mary Poppins novel.

    She addresses Mary Poppins in minstrel dialect and invokes the convention of blacking up: “My, but dem’s very white babies. You wan’ use a li’l bit black boot polish on dem.”

    It gets worse for Travers from there.

    Why did you go to the trouble of looking up the author of the New York Times piece — so you could dismiss them as an “academic” — instead of just reading the link in full and taking them seriously? That academic is an expert on blackface. You couldn’t find a better source to illuminate this discussion.

34. I’d appreciate it — Bill and rcade — if we could shut down the Poppins discussion at this point. While it makes sense in the context of the argument to cite examples, I regret that I end up literally hosting these kinds of statements.

35. I didn’t consider that. It’s OK with me if the examples I quoted from the Times are deleted. And I’ll drop it from here.

36. Pingback: Pixel Scroll 3/2/24 Yeets of Eden - File 770

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.