šš Read The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy by Verlyn Flieger (Literary Hub)
Dr. Flieger says:
š Read Ten Years Out of Academia by Anne Helen Petersen.
I’m 3 years out from my doctoral defense and 6 months out from holding an academic job. I told an internet friend:
Right now it feels like librarian is the identity that was always really mine and academic was borrowed.
I watched the documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man yesterday. I found it incredibly moving. I re-read Austin Kleonās Steal Like an Artist frequently and just before watching the documentary, I was listening to the audiobook. One of the sections in the book urges you to āclimb your own family tree,ā picking a creative whose work you admire and learning about the work that influenced them. I often struggle with this part of things, with choosing who has influenced me.
But watching the documentary, I distinctly saw the influence of Henson and his collaborators, especially writer Jerry Juhl and performer/director Frank Oz, on my own artistic and comedic sensibilities. Hereās an example:
This structure, wherein Fozzie gives Kermit instructions that Kermit then follows far too literally, with Kermit increasing in his manic energy and Fozzie increasing in his frustration, is the bedrock of at least 50% or maybe more of my bits as an improv performer. A parallel structure:
Both of these are Henson and Oz, both with Oz as the straight man and Henson as the manic player. I adore this dynamic. So. Jim Henson. Thatās the creative tree branch Iāll climb first.
The documentary itself is lovely. If youāre a Henson nerd (as I am), youāll be delighted that thereās Sam and Friends and advertising footage that I donāt think you can find anywhere else. The narrative thrust is that Henson was a figure not unlike Lin Manuel Mirandaās interpretation of Alexander Hamilton, an artist with incredible drive and the sense that there would never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do, so he had to be doing work all the time. It does a good job honoring the importance of Hensonās work while honestly portraying the cost this had to his family. His son Brian Henson talks about the very different experience of being his son at home versus being his colleague working on Labyrinth.
A lot of the time narratives about Henson talk about the critical failure of Labyrinth destroying his confidence, but this documentary did a great job emphasizing that even in the face of that failure, his work continued: in the years after Labyrinth he created Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and The Jim Henson Hour.
Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of showing that Henson was an ambitious artist with an incredible legacy and was, at the same time, just a human. I found it incredibly moving.
Here are a couple of fun links about Hensonās Kermit Car:
Here are a pair of blog posts that ended up in conversation with each other in my brain because I read them both this morning in quick succession.
CJ Chilvers asks, āWhatās with the hostility towards personal publishing?
And itās almost as if Seth Godin answers, āThe Coney Island problem.ā
Chilvers says:
our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to become a trusted individual right now.
and Godin points out:
Weād like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. Weād like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isnāt for usā¦ And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well. It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that theyāre simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, theyāre drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.
Where does this leave personal publishing and blogging? Iām not sure. But I think itās an interesting question and an interesting thing to think about. I suppose a lot of it comes back to that old question, why blog? Are we doing it for ourselves or for our readers? I find that even when I donāt mean to, I tend to blog for my future self. And future me would rather hear what past me has to say from me, rather than an LLM trained to sound like me and everyone else. That said, I am intrigued by the idea of training an LLM on my own diary and journal entries and blog posts and then having a conversation with my younger self, like Michelle Huang did. In fact, I think Iāll try it now.
edited to add: I tried it, but because I don’t have a payment method in OpenAI it didn’t let me do it. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to extrapolate from old blog posts and LiveJournal entries what a younger me would have said.
Iām typing this blog post in Google Docs, because of its autosave feature. Thereās probably a better way, but oh well. I kind of want to just type it in the Micro.blog compose box but Iām so afraid of losing it.
Why am I so afraid of losing it? If I have to re-write a blog post, isnāt that kind of a feature rather than a bug? I donāt know. Maybe another day Iāll try typing directly into Micro.blog.
I thought about writing my blog posts over at 750words but some days I might want to write fewer than 750 words and I shouldnāt let the desire or need to write less get in the way of writing at all.
I look a three hour nap today. I lay down, set an alarm for when I needed to be awake to drive safely to pick the kid up from camp, and then told myself if I got up earlier, great, and surely I would get up earlier.
I did not get up earlier.
Lindsay Mack sent out a special email about Solstice Medicine with a Tarot spread for the solstice for artists, and I think Iāll do that spread in a little bit. I think Iāll use both the Moonchild Tarot AND the Ocean Dreams oracle deck maybe? Iām not sure.
I might just do it with Ocean Dreams, even though itās not a Tarot deck. Maybe Iāll try that and then see if I also want to pull out the Moonchild Tarot.
Iāve decided that today is the day to handle All the Things related to my sisterās baby shower, which will be a week from tomorrow. I did a tour of the venue (which Iāve been to before both for a party and because itās part of the site where M did preschool & kindergarten). Iām talking to my co-host and hopefully weāll settle activities and food. Iāve got an Amazon cart full of decorations and tableware. The theme is Baby Dragons. The decor is adorable. I wonāt be sad when itās over. Party planning for more than 12 guests is apparently more than I feel good about these days.
Itās the summer solstice and tomorrow weāll have a Strawberry Moon.
Here are some rambling thoughts on things that have captured my attention lately.
I was saddened to hear of the death of Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, whose book Blue Mind I purchased as an impulse buy in the South Carolina Aquarium gift shop. The book is great and I look forward to reading the tenth anniversary edition when itās released. I canāt figure out where I put my copy of it.
Back in May I put a hold on the library copy of Adam Higginbothamās book, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. I picked it up today.
Iāll write a longer post about the book later, but I watched the failed Challenger launch out of my bedroom window. I was four years old. I remember the visual. I was in the habit of watching shuttle launches out of that window, and there were a lot of launches in the early and mid-80s. I lived about 34 miles away from Cape Canaveral as the crow flies. I donāt remember any other launch, of course.
That launch has shaped my psyche in ways Iām still unpacking almost 40 years later, and when I saw that this book had been published and was well-reviewed, I wanted to read it because I wanted answers, answers beyond the technical, about what contributed to this event that has so shaped my thinking. Spiritual answers, even.
About 30 pages into the book, I am seeing the beginnings of those answers, which tend to be the answers when we ask these kinds of questions about any human-made disaster: greed and hubris. Greed and hubris are the forces that bring about these kinds of disasters.
More on this and my memories of Challenger after Iāve read more of the book or finished it if I decide to finish it. (Itās a doorstop and my attention span for non-fiction is limited lately.)
I really like chocolate. Iām waiting to hear from some headache specialists that my doctor faxed a referral form to but itās been many weeks, maybe even a couple months, so I might start looking for other options to discuss with her the next time we talk.
I love my kid, my heart is so full, and seven-year-olds have big, big feelings,
I feel like Iām only talking about stuff that isnāt the most fun here, but I am still loving reading romance, deriving great joy from the Fated Mates podcast and its Discord server, and Iām enjoying playing Harvest Moon for the SNES.
š It’s Juneteenth! The National Museum of African-American History and Culture interviewed the museum’s curators about Juneteenth and shared what they had to say in three posts:
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Hey Internet in general and Micro.blog specifically! I was on vacation and away from much of the Internet from 6/8 - 6/15. Is there anything I missed that you think I should know about?
