Sunday Sun Day Son Day
Do we need all those "sundays?" We do.
All right, fair enough. I suppose you know your business.
-Waylon Smithers, novice truck-pull broadcaster, The Simpsons
For the first time in several days (feels like several weeks, but I know that’s not true), the clouds have cleared and the skies are blue. I’m seated by a window at a local coffee shop, with my headphones in. “Sunny Day” by Blue Claw Jazz on Bandcamp is remarkably effective at blocking out the recently divorced douchebag spouting sexist Bible puns.
“It says in Leviticus that you can have sex with your wife after the 8th day of her period. So ‘date night’ is ‘day 8 night’ — get it?”
Yeah, I get it. You’re a douchebag. See what I did there?
Also the other old farts humoring him, until he left, at which point they turned on him in absentia and played odd-man-out. Which was, to me, pretty funny.
NLightning Films
Two related documentaries, Caesar’s Messiah and Creating Christ, speculate that Jesus is a recycled sun god, a greatest-hits compilation of the Greek Apollo, the Persian Mitra, the Egyptian Horus, and several others. That’s not surprising, because the mythological correspondences are many, but they go further. They think the Roman emperors Vespasius and Titus deliberately created Jesus out of whole cloth, as a propaganda exercise against the Jews of Palestine, who had a nasty habit of rebelling against their hand-picked governors, the Herods. If it weren’t for those meddling kids who buried the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, they’d have gotten away with it, too.
The Sun Queen
This was a neat episode of American Masters about a driven woman physicist obsessed with solar power. She focused mostly on heat over electricity, but otherwise she did it all: heating and cooling houses, distilling water, cooking food. She filed 20+ patents.
The problem was that she was swimming against a tide of cheap oil. That, and her lifelong habit of pissing off the people she worked for.
I posted the above short story last week for the Lunar Awards about a metaphorical battle between alternative views of economics, set in NYC. I did not know at the time that documentary filmmaker Karen Kramer would be here for our little literary festival. Scuppernong Books showed The Renegade Legacy of Bleeker and MacDougal on Friday night. It was about the Beat poets as a historical group, but also about their influence on more contemporary groups.
As an aside, I never knew where that tradition of applauding by snapping your fingers came from. According to the film, it started in one specific coffee house where the upstairs neighbors were especially sensitive to noise through the vents. Though the Internet says it goes back to Rome at least.
The exact beginning of applause is a little uncertain, but we know it was first documented in the third century B.C., with the works of Roman playwright Plautus ending with the word plaudite, a directive for the audience to applaud or clap. A performer would announce to the audience at the end that it was time to applaud. Applauding consisted of hand clapping and finger snapping. As time passed, the practice followed into politics. In first century A.D. and beyond, audience members would clap for politicians speaking in the theater. These politicians would gauge their popularity based on how much applause they and their opponent received.
Those tricky Romans. They did everything.
But What About the Books?
Oh, yeah, right. The book festival. I spent the whole day there, except for lunch and coffee breaks at nearby LeBauer Park, where they were setting up for the 37th Carolina Blues Festival.
I love a good panel, the same as I love a good lecture, for edutainment purposes. They are also advertisements, of course, but not particularly annoying ones. Most authors recognize that readers are a soft-sell sort of crowd. There were a few things I’d be interested in seeking out,
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/katherine-e-standefer/lightning-flowers/9780316450355/
https://chanaporter.com/ (The Thick and the Lean)
though I’ll probably get them from the B&N with my wife’s discount. I laughed self-consciously that one of the fantasy authors in my last panel of the day, Veronica G. Henry, finds it cheaper to buy copies of her own books from Target than from her publisher. Go ahead, tell me how awful I am . . .
For me the highlight of the day was the brilliant pairing of dissident UNC law professor Gene Nichol with freelance reporter and essayist Abraham Josephine Reisman, who previously wrote a well-regarded biography of Stan Lee called True Believer and has now launched into a two-book series on Vince McMahon — North Carolina native, celebrity wrestling promoter / announcer / villain . . . and (I learned) close, close personal friend of Donald J. Trump. The first book, Ringmaster, includes a zine.
The pairing was brilliant for their superficial cosmetic contrasts and their deeply complementary views of our current political situation.
Nichol got up from his appointed spot on the couch / stage to stand at the podium and deliver a thunderous 10-minute sermon of an excerpt. It might have been from Indecent Assembly, his catalog of every shitty thing the legislature has done to its supposed constituents over the past dozen years or so. One reviewer / interviewer said, and I quote, “It reads like an indictment.” Or it might have been from the more recent book, Lessons from North Carolina: Race, Religion, Tribe, & the Future of America. I don’t know. I haven’t read either one, because I’ve been here the whole time.
You can just get a hint of the flavor from this local news piece. In person, he’s more impressive. Even as a self-described “old man,” he’s built like the football player he once was, and his body language reeks of the easy righteousness that comes from being big, but not too big (not scary big, like Andre the Giant). I’m not big, but I am tall, and relatively old, compared to my students, and they sir me all the time. Even when I ask them not to, some of them still do. I try not to let it bother me.
Riesman, on the other hand, was trying too hard, holding up her book while talking, mm-hmming into her mike during pauses in Nichol’s speech, which as I said above was a straight-up reciting of grievances. Riesman’s thesis was far more intellectually interesting, that Vince McMahon’s deliberate blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality as a business model for pro wrestling — his creation of fandom as a hall of mirrors where you can choose your own reality — led directly to Trump and Qanon. In other words, McMahon’s method was Trump’s method.
Neither author made any specific call to political action, and given the nature of the small crowd (a bunch of book-readers), I wouldn’t have expected them to. They both seemed pretty cynical about the idea of progress within the existing two-party system. Nichol mentioned some recent upset candidates, and Riesman did talk briefly and metaphorically about “building better lifeboats” to help our immediate communities better weather the rising tides of chaos.
The venue for that session, the Greensboro History Museum, has an ongoing exhibit called Eleven Elections that I need to get back to. It includes a room of games, supposedly including a VR gerrymandering simulation where your goal is to destroy democracy.
I left the festival thinking about Martin Luther and his 95 theses, and the printing press, and Thomas Paine, and this article by Thomas Pueyo here on Substack.
I don’t know where it’s all going, but I’m grateful to you, my subscribers, for tagging along on this drunkard’s walk through the world of ideas. There are 99 of you now.
Greensboro Bound 2023
This history / economics documentary uses di Modica's bull statue, as well as the little girl statue later placed in front of him as meta-commentary, though they don't explain the imagery; they just use it as an attention hook.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/age-of-easy-money/