Memorial Day and Platinum Jubilee Day fucking up my week and plans. I have to move fast on a couple of work things. Planning to write something about my free weekly newsletter and its move to Buttondown, but that will have to wait. Thirteen-hour work day.
Top headline: Solar Orbiter’s pictures of the sun are every bit as dramatic as you were hoping
Listening:
It is the Japanese microseason of The Safflowers Bloom.
You Still Owe Us One Dream – “(Del) Close’s Prankster credentials were impeccable...”
Do Self-Reproducing Probes Dream Of Electric Cats – phildickian
A Confirmed Hallucination: HELGOLAND, Carlo Rovelli – “Sighted sentience reinterpreted as dreaming meat.”
Comms And Time Radio: A Dream Protocol
COLD BLOW MARSH, Polly Wright – “It’s a book of the life of the haunted marshes…”
Following on from: Is It Still An EDC If You Don’t Leave The House? The key point from that, I think: “The whole point of EDC… is to have as little friction as possible between the thought and the act.”
This is a work in progress. I still can’t find some of my tools, which have doubtless gotten scattered into dark places in my house over the last couple of years. But this is what I’m working with right now.
Maxpedition Fatty Pocket Organizer (link)
Tombow “Fudenosuke” Soft Brush Pen – Black (link)
Pilot Black Frixion Rollerball Erasable Pens Pen 0.7mm Nib Tip 0.35mm Line (link)
Pigma Micron Pen 03 Black 0.35mm (link)
Sharpie Permanent Markers | Fine Point (link)
BIC Ecolutions 0.5mm ReAction Mechanical Pencil
eGear Jolt USB Mini Rechargeable Flashlight (link)
Victorinox Explorer Knife, Red, Medium (link)
Moleskine Classic Ruled Paper Notebook, Hard Cover and Elastic Closure Journal, Color Black, Size Pocket 9 x 14 cm, 192 Pages (link)
Field Notes notebook
Kindle Paperwhite – this one is 7th Generation, which they don’t make any more (link)
Work in progress. Will add tools as I find them lurking in the dark corners of the house. The intent is to surround every work problem without having to hunt all over the place for the thing I need (or can adapt for use) to solve them.
Here’s a thing I didn’t know:
(via)
Children’s Guide To Séances & Cuddly Demons – a new micro-Scarfolk post to start the day.
Would It Sound Just As Bad If You Played It Backwards? – compilation of recordings created at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
Louise Bourgeois’ paintings – I was very struck by “Femme Maison”
Listening: voice of gaia, Jim Butler
Billions of Fireflies Light Up an Indian Wildlife Reserve
Status: rain
On deck: I have someone’s entire outline to process and do notes on before I can write up full versions of the two ideas I landed over the weekend.
Listening:
Still to do: I get most of my books through the Kindle Daily Deal and this is my reminder to eventually look at today’s. Process and clean up the boards, clear email, figure out the week’s specific goals, do a pass at removing some more apps from the phone.
In the Japanese microseason calendar, we are in Silkworms feast on mulberry leaves.
Robin Hood…mutilates the face with “an Irish knife” and then “He took Sir Guy’s head by the hair / And stuck it on the end of his bow.”
Many years ago, I planned to write a graphic novella about Robin Hood, combining my own research and speculation with material from the early recorded stories. This is probably why ROBIN HOOD: A TRUE LEGEND by Sean McGlynn caught my eye. When I was little, I stood inside the Major Oak, a vast thousand-year-old oak tree in Sherwood which, according to folklore, was the shelter for Robin and his men. It’s supposedly the biggest oak tree in Britain, and probably the only one that could provide cover for the Merry Men, who were said to have been 140 in number.
They were, of course, not that merry:
When Robin’s men hear of his capture, Little John takes charge and seeks revenge against the monk; on finding him he “Struck off the monk’s head”. This is standard fare for a medieval tale, but more shocking is that John’s companion also decapitates the monk’s young page who is accompanying the monk.
And:
In 1416 and 1417, a royal writ was issued twice for the capture of a gang leader going under the nom de guerre of Friar Tuck. His armed gang was causing havoc in the forests and parks of Sussex and Surrey; game was stolen and the dwellings of foresters and warreners (servants of the crown) burned down. The friar was never caught, but his name was revealed in a pardon of 1429 as Robert Stafford, a chaplain of Sussex.
Robin being a diminutive of Robert at the time.
This slim, amusing book is a synthesis of other people’s research, but that’s not always a bad thing. Being able to put discoveries and suppositions side by side is useful. I will warn you now that the editing of the text is questionable in places – if that bothers you, then a few moments will make you nuts. It doesn’t bother me.
The book brought me details on names I knew but had never really looked into, like:
Eustace the Monk is one of the most colourful characters of the entire Middle Ages. A flavour of his life can be summed up by the title of a popular talk I regularly give on him and of a forthcoming book I am writing: Eustace the Farting, Foul-Mouthed, Cross-Dressing Monk and Notorious Medieval Pirate. But even this does not do him justice.
(Add “necromancer” to that.) But these are side snacks in pursuit of the source and breadth of the Robin Hood legend, and how the name “Robin Hood” was used:
In 1441 in Norfolk, we encounter a gang of yeomen and labourers who set themselves up on a road to attack travellers, vowing to kill a local member of the gentry. Their chant was: “We are Robynhodesmen – war, war, war!”
Norfolk is a goodly ways south from Sherwood Forest. Or Barnsdale Wood, the other contender for Robin Hood’s patch. They knew him further north, too, into Scotland – where they also knew Little John, in separate stories. And, from sorting all this material together, one of the author’s points is this:
...the most famous characters – Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and probably Little John – are all likely to have originated in stories of their own.
The fusing of different characters with their own separate traditions in this manner was a common medieval practice.
A modern way to understand this is to consider the remarkable ongoing cinematic successes of American comic book superheroes. In 1963 Marvel Comics initiated the Avenger series by bringing together a group of superheroes who were already established in their own comics: Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man and the Incredible Hulk...
The Robin Hood legend as we know it may in fact be a team-up.
Anyway, the author takes us through an enjoyable little tour of what we know about Robin Hood and the various possible sources of the legend, before landing on a name I didn’t know, which the author taps as the true root of the Robin Hood story.
William of Cassingham, also William of Kensham, also Willikin of the Weald. The Weald is in the south of England – where the surname Robinhood was most prevalent — but the king he was loyal to was based in Nottingham. As McGlynn notes:
As one of the leading commanders of the resistance, and one of the few actually named in the sources, William would have been known in Nottingham. The propaganda value of his exploits would have been invaluable
I haven’t actually spoiled the book by mentioning this, I don’t think — it’s not a cliffhanger, and I’ve only scratched the surface of what Sean McGlynn presents here, and, in unrolling the tale of Willikin of the Weald, it’s amusing to see previously mentioned real characters show up.
Anyway. Poorly edited, to be sure, but educational and a great deal of fun. I can see myself reading it again with notebook in hand, to follow up on many and various threads. Who knows, this may actually goad me into finally writing that graphic novella after all.
ROBIN HOOD: A TRUE LEGEND, Sean McGlynn
It’s been a busy old day here at the hermitage station.
In 2017 MAZE gave a stunning interpretation of Jitterbug at the Tactile Paths Festival in Berlin, full of subtle detail and fluid energy. That they have returned to the work now – and have also created this beautiful realization of bayou-borne, for Pauline – is something for which I am deeply grateful.
Both works draw on improvisation and are guided by graphic imagery: of a river system in Texas and of rocks from the Continental Divide in Montana.
Bayou-born, for Pauline (2016) is dedicated to Pauline Oliveros and was composed with her passions in mind. She was born in Houston, Texas, so I created a graphic score from a map of the six bayous which flow through the city to Galveston Bay, thinking that she would have known one or all of those rivers intimately as a child – swimming, wading, river mud between her toes. She was a superb improviser, so it is scored for six improvising musicians with each player reading one of the rivers as a guide. Their lines move independently at first, coming closer together at the confluences to form duets and trios, before converging at the red star, the whole sound darkening as they approach Houston in memory of the devastation and deaths caused by Hurricane Harvey… in 2017.
The full liner notes on that site are fascinating, as is the music.
The Sound Mapping Project is one of my favourite things in the world right now.
Since the end of the 1970s, industrial music has stood out as one of the most vital and innovative forms of all the popular culture of the 1900s. In Italy, industrial and post-industrial have generated one of the most interesting and popular music scenes on the international scene. The reasons for this success are to be found in the cultural matrix and in the inspirational models that underlie this artistic phenomenon. Unlike what happened previously, the roots of industrial did not sink into US and UK rock. Influences from various artistic avant-gardes of the last century converged in the so-called grey area: futurism, Dadaism, situationism, performance, body and mail art. One of the main merits of the industrial scene was precisely that of translating the most radical aesthetics of research art into music, without leaving the context of popular music, in terms of distribution and market. This choice led, from the beginning, to the creation of a musical environment that did not derive from Anglo-Saxon cultural models.