Gilgamesh to Iraq

A looted tablet with a crucial part of the Gilgamesh story, once displayed at Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible, is returning to Iraq. Here is a Christie’s brochure about the tablet, with photographs and a translation — and a false provenance. More about the tablet’s history here.

Related reading
All OCA Gilgamesh posts (Pinboard)

Welty and Hurston and a pear tree

Another passage that made me think about Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God :

Eudora Welty, “Moon Lake,” in Thirteen Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965).

There it is, thought I, Janie Crawford’s pear tree again. But in One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty recalls this rhyme as appearing in a book from her childhood. Here’s one possible source:

From Our Boys: Containing Over Two Hundred Pages of Entertaining Stories, Hymns, etc., Told in Simple Language by Popular Authors (Akron, Ohio: Saalfield Publishing, 1914).

And now, when Janie Crawford lies beneath a pear tree, wondering where the bee for her blossom might be, I wonder whether Hurston, too, might have known and repurposed this rhyme.

A related post
Trees: chinaberry, peach, pomegranate, pear

[Other likely sources for the pear-tree scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God: the birds and the bees, and blues metaphors. See Memphis Minnie and Bertha Lee.]

Pinboard tags

After more than ten years using Pinboard to tag blog posts, I’ve finally discovered that links to Pinboard tags — for instance,

pinboard.in/u:M.Leddy/t:Nancy

— only work if a reader is signed into a Pinboard account. Without a Pinboard account, that link is useless. You’ll just get a 404 page. Why didn’t I know that before now? Because I’m always signed into my Pinboard account. I assumed that the results were available to anyone.

But there is a way to make Pinboard useful for non-users, by searching for a word or phrase or name instead of a tag:

pinboard.in/search/u:M.Leddy/?query=Nancy

So I’m now adding that kind of link to some posts. The disadvantage: searching finds text as well as tags, so a post that mentions, say, Nancy Reagan, will turn up. (Not that there is one.) The advantage: searching finds text as well as tags, so a word or name or phrase without a tag of its own is findable too. Like, say, Aunt Fritzi’s name.

*

September 19, 2021: Pinboard now appears to be working as I always thought it’s supposed to, returning results for tags regardless of whether I’m logged in. I must have encountered a temporary (weeks-long? months-long?) glitch. Never any word from the developer in response to my e-mails about how links to Pinboard tags are supposed to work.

The final four

Ephemeral New York takes a look at the last outdoor telephone booths in New York City. They were there in 2009. They were replaced by new booths in 2016.

I find it cheering that each booth has a mailbox or postal relay box at its side for companionship.

Related reading
All OCA telephone booth posts (Pinboard)

[The booth at 100th Street and West End Avenue, not pictured in the Ephemeral New York post, also has a mailbox.]

Mary Miller, outcast

Chris Welch, the Illinois House Speaker, is in Washington to raise money and meet with members of Congress. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

There are five Republicans in the Illinois congressional delegation. Welch said he will try to meet with four of them — but not freshman Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., whose husband is state Rep. Chris Miller, R-Oakland. Both of them are strong Trump loyalists. “She’s not on my schedule,” Welch said when I asked if he would seek her out. “With regards to the Congresswoman, I just don’t know if there’s any issues that can bring us together because she’s been focused on such extreme, extreme items.”

Mary Miller has tweeted or retweeted eighteen times today. Her latest tweet boasts about being fined $500 for not wearing a mask in the Capitol.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

We heard what we heard

On CNN, earlier this evening: “And who will be getting the first penis from the January 6th committee?”

She said “subpoenas.” But we heard what we heard, the two of us.

Slow down, CNN. Diction is everything.

“The Invention of ‘Introvert’”

A new episode of the podcast Word Matters, with help from Science Diction : “The Invention of ‘Introvert.’”

Related reading
All OCA introversion posts (Pinboard)

“So smooth and clear”

To his much younger wife Livvie, Solomon looks “a different and smaller man” when he’s lying in bed, even when he’s awake.

Eudora Welty, "Livvie," in Thirteen Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965).

For me “Livvie” is the most interesting story in this volume, a Welty variation on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. No pear tree, but there is a chinaberry tree in a dream, and a peach tree and a pomegranate tree in the front yard.

Useful reading

A ten-point checklist from Samuel L. Perry, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma: How can we spot #ChristianNationalism in the wild?

My representative in Congress, Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15), hits on at least eight of ten. I don’t know enough to decide about nos. 4 and 8.

No. 7 seems especially appropriate to consider today. Miller is in the news now as a co-sponsor of legislation to deny federal funding to colleges and universities that provide mifepristone and misoprostol (“the abortion pill”) to students. But also:

Do vaccines work?

This completely undercuts the message to get vaccinated over the last 8 months. https://t.co/hqIm4KSRW7

— Congresswoman Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) July 27, 2021

Here’s Perry on no. 7, “Culture of death”:

This one’s tricky cuz CN will be strongly anti-abortion. But CN will also be pro-guns, pro-military, pro-death penalty, anti-mask, anti-precautions, and anti-healthcare for the poor. The abortion stance is authoritarianism, not concern for the vulnerable.

Truth

“You’re downplaying an event that happened to the country itself, to democracy, to the rule of law”: Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, a few minutes ago, commenting on those who would minimize the events of January 6, 2021.