June 13 2022 Journal (Patreon)

Told you I could still write! We've gotten two Mirkwood pieces out! And we have another one about Dol Guldur coming on Friday! Then we have only two more Mirkwood essays (yes, there are five. Writing is complicated). Sometime in the interim I'll be working on a commissioned VALIS essay, and possibly some short stories.

I've been busy as hell lately. Partly with work, but also with my own research. I've been on a genealogy kick lately and I've learned a lot about my biological family through it. It's something else to read your double-great grandmother's death certificate, see that it's signed by her daughter-in-law, and realize the former must have died at their house when my grandfather was a teenager.

It's also something to find immigration records for my Czech ancestors, and find out what English and French kings I'm distantly descended from. And to learn that I'm a not-even-disant cousin of George Washington and *shudders* General Robert E. Lee. 

I have to say, as a white American Southerner it was sobering to find my fifth great grandfather James McBride's will where he bequeaths his plantation and his slaves to his wife. Reminds you how soaked in white supremacist bloodshed this country is.

Another way of getting in touch with my Czech background has been revisiting Tom Stoppard. The dude has the dubious honor of being my favorite living right-wing writer, someone whose reactionism is at least textured and interesting. His theatrical trilogy The Coast of Utopia is a stunning feat of drama, and it's far more sympathetic to Mikhail fucking Bakunin than a Tory bastard should be capable.

Anyway. I'm tired and stressed, so here are the headlines:

Newsday profiles trans people in Long Island.

Historian David Kertzer has uncovered that Pope Pius XII had a secret backchannel with Hitler.

The great Julee Cruise of Twin Peaks fame passed this last week.

The State of Texas is still persecuting trans people.

On the bright side, a lot more trans kids are coming out.