Early December

More night than day. A point emphasized by last week's 24-hour blackout as cement-shod trees cracked and crashed following the snowstorm. We part and greet in darkness, awaken to darkness and wait an hour until the first shifts of gray. The first rays of light appear, confusingly, on the far side of the lake, where the sunsets glouwer all summer, it will take another hour for the light to cross the lake and touch the shadowland of out lake-edge slope. Still across the light, the sunlight is wan, a peaches-and-cream delicateness that is discomforting. A glimpse of fragility to the unendurable strength of the cosmos.

A risible thought to all the briskly-paced denizens of this shadowy slope experiencing the life-ceasing frigid grip of the universal, their features sanded-down by heavily-rounded inflated feathers and fur. Food, territory, predation - life's adventure continues. A nut-hatch stares me in the eye as he hostlers his shotgun and adjust his bandana, before grabbing a peckful of suet and vanishing into the grey-shadowed pines. The pigeon couples looks up at me with all too human amber-eyes. The cement icing at the top of the pines turns peaches-and-cream, many of the tree still leaning severely under the snow's stone-like burden. The hawthorne copse is so bent-back I stand taller than it, a fearful experience, my mind worries about any damage suffered by bowed hawthorns, my body worries about all the potential kinetic energy stored in those wickedly-thorn'd plants. The very springiness of haw wood that drives wine-red thorns through jean, leather and flesh, will serve it well when the beetling snow is shed.

Such little daylight means a few hours of passing cloud can spell days of shadow and night, but not today, creamy light streams from the south illuminating hills and birches. The nuthatch's dangerously swole cousin, the white-breasted, arrives; curious ravens test the perimeter with low-flying sweeps of midnight; squirrels bounce and spring across fields of barren snow. And apparently the prism I set a-dangling in the kitchen window casts its mid-winter beams diagonally into the wood stove, giving the appearance of strange fires, sometimes ghostly red-glowing coals - an illusion that first fooled me and I tried to fool others with, then is a twist, a surreal rainbow-fired furnace.

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glouwer = https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/glower

rainbow-furnace - this occurs around 9:10 am during the first days of December.

Raking timber shreds in the dawn-light. A small hawthorn has already shaken off its snowy straight-jacket. The forested slope on the far-shore glows pale peach then a layer of ennui-grey claims the day.

[...]

Listening to Dr Who commentaries when cleaning. The creation of the show is more fascinating than the show itself. And the actors..... Tom Baker is obsessed with sex and death, speculating on which male actors are dead and which actresses had 'lips meant for kissing'. Some sort of Catholic, he discusses talking to the Devil, wanting to entitle his autobiography "Every Friend Betrayed', and his urge to suckle at his mother's teat as an adult. Right now he's discussing a dying friend's final words: "His wife said his final words were 'Well, I suppose it's all been rather wonderful,' and he died. His wife said it was the 'suppose', he wasn't even certain...." All said in his great deep voice, "Well, yessss... look at that! ... hmmmmmmm .... yeah, yeah, yeah"

All the actors on the commentaries are charming from the companions (Jamieson, Slaten) to the supporting cast. The egos are so large in studio but so vulnerable on the screen that a thick layer of well-practiced wit and politeness enhance their natural charisma. I enjoy having a gaggle of actors chatting away as I chore, telling anecdotes and reminiscing,  but they are also spooky in their arch English bathos, but Dr. Who's core silliness and that 1970s camaraderie smooths much, and even old enemies, like Baker & Jamieson, flirt - or is flirting the arena of aggression? I feel like a kid amongst older teenagers...

It is also interesting to learn about producer Philip Hinchcliffe's tastes, a Cambridge-educated, dapper-dressed BBC boy-wonder his tastes were towards "boy's own adventure... featuring a gentlemen-hero adventurer type" (his words) and and associates himself with the same nostalgic "pulp" trend that produced "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and would have taken the show in that direction. Hinchcliffe also mentions going to an early preview of Star Wars which was described to him as "swords & sorcery", the exact words Tom Baker later uses to describe Hinchcliffe's own tastes. The overlap between  "boy's own adventure", "swords & sorcery" and SF in the mid-70s is the offspring of the 'pulp revival' that began in the mid-60s, and Dr. Who was part of that. Hinchcliffe also had a deep fondness, another 60s era trend, Gothic tales, and produced some of my favorites.

There are also comments that suggest Hinchcliffe's liberalism, and that of main writer Robert Holmes', is best defined as "sarcasm to authority." I guess that's the limit of MI5-approved criticism, but Robert Holmes,  another cop-turned-SF writer like Gene Roddenberry, wrote the most radical Dr Who arc I've seen with his final script 'The Sun Makers' being....

Robert Holmes - Sun Maker (1977) wrote:
Doctor: Don't you think commercial conquest is as bad as military imperialism?
Ursious: We tried war, but use of economic power is far more effective.
(LASERSHOTS and MOB sounds)
Doctor: Ahh, the revolution is getting nearer. What's the company policy on that?

Like much 'pulp' the critique of capitalism blurs into broad anti-jewish tropes but 'Sun Makers' remains the high-water mark for radical politics in Dr Who.

---NOTES---
One of the best source on Dr.Who is a discontinued BBC website that can take some digging to find: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/
It is a great resource that openly states what sources each arc is paying homage, has sections on myths, goofs and humour and ends by re-printing (possibly copyright-infringing) reviews. It has a bluntness and humour uncommon in media resources.

Also one British pronunciation I keep hearing is 'schedule' as 'sed-u-wal' with absolutely no attempt to pronounce the 'ch', whereas I'd say 'schegd-u-wal'. That British pronunciation is just too French for this Canadian, but I prefer the softer British/French pronunciation of 'niche' (neeshh) to the vulgar American version (nitch). Also I add 'u's to colour and labour when writing but drop them if I use those words in coding (i.e <COLOR_1>).

As a logophile I pride myself on having a pretty good vocabulary. [The fact that Firefox tried to change 'logophile' into 'Anglophile' sums up the modern world to me]. Reading dictionaries is fun - especially etymological ones - but a week of more academic reading has stumped me a few times...

Contumacy?
Censitary?
Hegira?


'Contumacy' is my favorite, meaning 'contempt-tumorous' or swollen with contempt.

'Censitary' is more technical, meaning that voting is restricted to those on the census/property-owners.

Hegira is the most exotic being Latin transliteration of Arabic 'Hijra' meaning "departure" refering to "the pilgrimage of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina" (and thus the start of the Islamic calendar). I wonder if this is connected to 'hajji', a honorific used for Muslim who completed a pilgrimage to Mecca?

Liberalism: A Counter-History - "I'm an aristocrat too busy penning odes to Liberty and Profits to reply to all these critiques from the dirty, weak childish masses of non-whites, poor people, and liberty-interfering kings!  But anyone does listen to them will drown us in blood & chaos (or create a overly orderly society), drag us back to the Middle Ages (or drag us into a sterile modernity), and destroy organic community through individuality (or smother the individual in socialist community). Needless to say, ignore them and embrace my moderate, scientific liberal plan, which will see slavery largely eliminated by 2700 AD. Now, fetch my servant and tell him to bring my whip and brandy, my blood is up and I would like to engage him in the terms of the contract betwixt him and myself, a private contract securely beyond the reach of society or state...."

I burst into laughter when the author wrote, "We are clearly dealing with a rhetorical strategy" on page 209! That should have been the f'ing title of the book: A Genealogy of Liberal Rhetoric. Untangling all the hypocrisy is tiring but it gives a wide-view of the subject.

Predatory Bureaucracy It begins with insane ranchers wanting to replace all the bison and wolves in North American with cattle. Mostly this involves mass-shooting buffalo and lacing their corpses with strychnine to kill dozens of scavenging wolves. Eventually the US goverment steps in to stop the ranchers  .... by centralizing and nationalizing the wolf extermination process. Very grim but the author has a eye for telling details. I'd re-title this one 'Kill the Pups'.

I will let the ranching Senator from Colorado damn himself and his culture with his own words from 1920, "I do not believe there is either a moral or any other claim upon me to postpone what nature has given me, so that the next generation or generations yet unborn may have an opportunity to get what I myself ought to get!" of as the French Aristos used to say, "après moi le déluge." Boomers got nothing on ranchers and aristocrats.

Reading so much traumatic history leaves me sensitized in weird ways.

It prompted me to remember the time I spent in palliative/cancer wards and the boiling rage I would feel in returning to the 'outside' world full of giants ads, iphone-addicts (closer to celphone/walkman/gameboy addicts in my era) and jerky bumperstickers. It was so vulgar, arrogant and disgusting I just wanted to burn it all down and start again. I had to drop the rage, but I never considered it wrong or invalid, just impractical to social living.

That might be why I'm avoiding all modern mass media these last months. The gap between the trauma of history and the posturing of this culture is absolutely damning. Too many skinned wolf pups and broken humans in my landscape to get all horny and sentimental about nihilistic consuming and celebrity gossip.

You have to be careful reading about atrocities because your shadow-side might grow to enjoy them.

Think about all the Christians obsessed with abuse narratives from "CIA child sex-slaves". What is the line between reading 'child porn' (that's what those narrative are) and investigating pedophiles?

Historical atrocities have a dark wonder about them: cities laid waste, peoples slaughtered, genocide, extinction, slavery. It can be intoxicating. The D&D project has shown how deeply Americans are still erotically fascinated by slavery.

Yet, the opposite can be true. Reading the savagery of history makes you aware of how much sadism is inherited by culture and ourselves. Reading 300 years of liberal-capitalists declaring poor whites, non-whites and animals as "machines" meant for brutalization is the background needed to understand 'neo-liberalism'.

The full moon last night was wild. It began around 4 o'clock when I first spied a massive white-shining disc through the grating of bare trees. Rising in the far east, it snuck behind the forest trees for two hours before emerging to perform its usual southern arc. The quick dark and emaciated trees gave a rare view of this. Once it emerged it was a high-beam spotlight that flooded the nightscape into a bright dimness with sharp shadows. Shades had to be pulled if sleep was to come, but the vibrant moonlight wouldn't let me go. The frigid airmass cracking the house and moon-blasted pale earth got under my skin, like a magical dimension was briefly aligning with our own, only to fade by dawn.

Using 'google' to dig through R2N archives I found some (but not all) of my earlier moon reports. In 2015 the full moon was right on Christmas, this year we'll have the opposite - a new moon of the 25th.