To read pile: Research on Kurdish fairytales + oral traditions
The shifting borders of conflict, difference, and oppression: Kurdish folklore revisited Christine Allison, University of Exeter [x]
Cambridge Semetic Language and Culture: Neo - Aramaic and Kurdish Folklore from Northern Iraq (Vol 1 + Vol 2), Geoffrey Khan, Masoud Mohammadirad, Dorota Molin and Paul M. Noorlander
Kurdish Folklore, The international Kurdish studies [x]
Enthroned Serpents: Gender-Affected Dualism of Serpent Symbol in the Myths of Zahhāk and Shāhmārān, Taylor Nasim Stone [x]
From Dengbêj to Modern Writer: Heritagization of the Kurdish Oral Tradition and Revitalization of the Kurdish Language in the Works of Mehmed Uzun and Mehmet Dicle, Joanna Bocheńska [x]
Mîrza Mihemed / Mirza Pamat, The Tales of the Fabled Hero in Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic Oral Sources, By Alexey Lyavdansky [x]
A Neo-Aramaic Version of a Kurdish Folktale (Zêrka Zêra/Stērka Zerá), Charles Haberl, Nikita Kuzin, Alexey Lyavdansky [x]
The Fable of the Beetle in Contemporary Aramaic and Kurmanji (kêz/keze), Charles Haberl, Sergey Loesov [x]
‘Gan qey bedenî yeno çi mana’ (What the Soul Means for the Body): Collecting and Archiving Kurdish Folklore as a Strategy for Language Revitalization and Indigenous Knowledge Production, Joanna Bocheńska & Farangis Ghaderi [x]
Victims of the Saksakiyeh massacre in southern Lebanon, where an Israeli strike destroyed a building sheltering displaced civilians: Khadija Awada, Hani Fahs, Youssef Fahs, Rola Nasser al-Din, Mohammad Fahs, Ali Fahs, Fatima Fahs, Janna Fahs, and the child Maryam Fahs.
An entire family was wiped out.
In Gaza alone, nearly 7,000 families have been wholly or partially erased by Israel’s war.
hi h.! random q, but do you have a reading routine? do you read physical books/use an ereader/read on your devices? do you have a favorite reading spot/time of day? just thinking about your impressive reading stamina + the importance of physical & locational cues for habit forming :-) ok that is all. kiss
hi my love! i read hm maybe 70/30 ebook to physical books? reading ebooks is absolutely essential to my reading speed, because it is not so much habit as reading constantly. if i’m in the checkout line at the grocery store, i read a few pages of an epub or pdf on my phone. obviously i still do a ton of dicking around on the internet, but try to steadily increase the amount of time i turn to this as my time burning activity. another key thing is reading many books at once, and turning to whatever is interesting me at that moment - this really increased my speed, as opposed to forcing myself on through one book whether i was feeling it or not. i know people who can only read one book at a time, or who find that works best, but it totally grinds me to a halt. often i am enjoying a book, it isn’t that i should drop it, but i just have a very fickle attention span, and i try to let it lead.
in my early adulthood, i was living in a city - soooooon - and so read a ton on public transport commutes. and i got into the habit of this so strongly it became actively weird and wrong to go a day without reading. and even though circumstances change - i am condemned to my loathed car and can’t enjoy audiobooks :( - it did ingrain a habitual impulse. in periods where i’ve had full time jobs - again, hopefully soon - i was a big fan of “read an hour before bed.” again about trying to inculcate a relation with my phone where that is where books can live, and that’s what i’m going to do with phone-in-bed time, was more productive for me that segmenting it and sticking to physical books. i read markedly faster on a screen. i’ve definitely read so much the last few years because i was a graduate student and didn’t have a nine-to-five, so i always want people to realize that and not be too daunted! but when i was working my email jobs, i was reading 60-70 books a year by the same method: listening to my own interest, weaving it into the fabric of my life, and reorienting phone-in-bed time toward reading.
I don't get why LGBT advocacy and anti-imperialist advocacy are so disconnected like, it's always two different people handling two different issues, and leftist organizing in a lot of places just ignores LGBT stuff entirely
Happy Pride month to all of my fellow Queer people, and also to my fellow Queer Muslims!
I assure you that your faith and your queerness are not opposites running in different directions. You are not a contradiction, nor are you a hypocrite. We all have the right to be our truest selves and keep our faith. I love you and I am forever rooting for you!!
i hope all of these girls have a great day and i love the girl who forgot her wig but the sis with the hijabi damn near made me cry sob i love this <3333333
Another thing abt this video: nearly every beauty involved is Indigenous or Black, the two minority groups of trans women that frequently get left out of discussions when it comes to highlighting trans women and their beauty, and the two groups at the highest risk of violence while trans. These women deserve love and praise just like y’all’s favorite white women do. Show up for Black and Indigenous trans women.
people on here love to be like "well actually its a symptom of the system/its a symptom of Power" and then not say what the system entails, what interests people in power protect, what ideologies characterise existing systems as opposed to others that could theoretically exist, &c &c &c
The first frosts of the year made me think, of course, about Jack Frost. Train of thoughts incoming.
Jack Frost being an "Anglo-Saxon entity" it makes sense that I got introduced to him through a British fantasy series - Pratchett's Discworld of course. It was through "Hogfather" that I discovered the existence of Jack Frost, which in the Discworld proper should not be confused with the many other wintery entities like the Wintersmith or the Ice Giants.
The very name "Jack" betrays his origins, since it is well-known that Jack is the by-default male name in British folklore. Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the giant-slayer, Jack and Jill, Jack-in-the-green, Jack o'lantern, Jack-be-nimble and so many more... "Fables" is the comics that is usually credited, at least in American pop culture, with making people aware of Jack as an archetypal character with multiple identities ; and it tackles his "Jack Frost" persona at one point. By showing that Jack, the character of folktales and fairytales, briefly became "Jack Frost" when becoming the lover of the Snow Queen (from the Andersen fairytale) and inheriting her powers - before the role was inherited by the son of Jack and the Snow Queen, who became the "official" Jack Frost. (I will hold onto this for a later comment)
Everybody agrees that Jack Frost is supposed to be a sprite of some sort. An elvish or impish thing. Usually it was done by showing him as small, tiny, and/or as young, child-like (doesn't help that Jack is supposed to be a "mischievious" entity, which has youthful connotations). And it reached its summum in the kid-loving and kid-protecting teenager that is Jack Frost in "Rise of the Guardians" (who was the "Tumblr boy" for quite a while).
And this "youth" of Jack Frost is quite interesting when you compare it to the fact other frost embodiments are usually... old. When it comes to frost-spirits, outside of Jack the most famous one is the Russian Ded Moroz, aka "Grandfather Frost", Slavic fairytale character turned Soviet holiday figure. A white-bearded old man. People have theorized and considered that Jack Frost as a character was actually derived from the old English figure of "Old Man Winter", who never became a defined character like Jack but was very present in expressions and imageries (and might have in turn be influenced by Boreas the North Wind of Greek mythology). There is a true duality here. Discworld's Jack Frost does not explore it, but it is very present with Tiffany Aching's "Wintersmith", where the titular Wintersmith appears in folk-images and popular culture as an old man, yet manifests in-story as a handsome and youthful prince.
This duality of the "old and the young" also manifests in modern fiction. Through Jack Frost making a pair with Santa. It seems to be quite of an American tradition... Dating back all the way to L. Frank Baum's "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus", where Jack Frost (presented as a prince, son of the Frost King) has an ambiguous relationship with Santa Claus, who likes him for being a "jolly rogue" but also distrusts him because he knows he can be too mischievious and end up endangering the life of children. More recently people are quite familiar with the "Rise of the Guardians" movie listed above (I won't bring the original books here because it is too complicated), where among the Guardians of Childhood Santa Claus ("North") and Jack Frost are allies and the two "wintery guardians" of kids - with Santa Claus embodying "Wonder" whereas Jack represents "fun".
And of course, opposite of it there is The Santa Clause franchise, where Jack Frost is pitted against Santa Claus in the third movie as a greedy, jealous and attention-seeking winter entity that tries to steal Christmas for himself (in a plot that is not without recalling Shrek 4...). The plot itself is actually no new thing - a jealous Jack ruining everything was already depicted in Frosty's Winter Wonderland, and even before this all the way back to "The Frost" by Hannah Flagg Gould. No, what is actually interesting with this movie for my talk is that it brings (by accident but still), an old legendary motif... (Am I going to do some mythologization of a Santa Clause movie? You bet I will) Because it is well-known by folklorists that in Christmas rituals and beliefs the gift-giver and his dark companion embody a fundamental duality between reward and punishment, light and darkness, heaven and hell, life and death. And this duality is brought up by the movie through Jack Frost being presented as the reverse of Santa Claus. Cold and blue where Santa is warm and red, thin and materialistic where Santa is fat and generous...
[An interesting subversion of this recurring mediatic duality would be the Rankin/Bass Santa origin-story "Santa Claus is comin' to town" where instead of a younger Jack forming a duo with an older Santa, a youthful Santa is pitted against the elderly Winter Warlock... Who, just like Jack Frost in the Santa Clause movie, ends up having his heart "melting" to make him a better person.]
And if we pull onto the mythical rope... We can go back all the way to the Kalevala.
The Kalevala shows us many sorcerers doing great feats of magic - and one of them is the "taming of the frost". As the hero Lemminkäinen is sailing to the dark northern realm of Pohjola, its witch-queen Louhi decides to stop him by summoning Pakkanen to freeze the waters of the ocean and thus trap his boat. Pakkanen is not a real character in himself, he is a personification. His name is merely the word for "cold" or "frost", he is a sentient natural force, yet he is also a semi-character that is treated as Louhi's son and servant, the same way the Greek goddesses were said to sent various forces (like Madness or Hunger) to curse their enemies (which resulted in various translations naming him Great-Frost, Dark-Frost or Frost-Fiend to clarify we are not dealing with a mere freezing spell here). As the waves are petrified, Lemminkäinen decides to battle the "dark frost": being a wizard (and the Kalevala magic relying on oral jousts, storytelling and supernatural songs) he unleashes an occult speech on Pakkanen, listing what the "frost-fiend" is allowed or forbidden to do, describing by the detail his behavior and habits, describing his birth - for in Finnish epics the knowledge of one's family tree or something's origin is in truth a powerful magic that allows to bind entities or gain power over beings. And thus, Lemminkäinen can terrify and banish Pakkanen, the Cold personified, by describing how he was conceived by the willows bordering Pohjola out of two evil parents (Louhi and the North Wind, Puhuri), then nursed in the marshes by adders and snakes until he became the wicked spirit he is today. (Threats of throwing fire at him and locking him in eternal forges also help)
Speaking of the Frost as the agent of a female power and as having a genealogy... It is interesting how frost embodiments often have a female entity by their side. I pointed out before how, in the Fables comics, the two successive Jack Frosts are the lover and the son of the Snow Queen. The Snow Queen is also involved in a famous French fantasy novel - La Sève et le Givre (Sap and Frost) by Léa Silhol, which can be described as "Tanith Lee's Tales from Flat-Earth, but with British fae lore rather than Orientalist fantasy". This book has among its fairy royalty a "Prince Frost", leader of the Winter Host. He is not called "Jack" but he is very obviously inspired by the figure if only thematically - and he is presented as the son of the Snow Queen, ruler of the Winter Court (a neutral fairy court standing between the Light and Dark of the Seelie and Unseelie). The Snow Queen herself (Gaemred is her name, though she is based on Andersen's character) being but the daughter of the Cailleach, the hag presented as the very "spirit of winter"... From winter is born snow from which is born frost. [Though the end of the novel reveals the line started with a male entity, Grianan the "small sun", the winter-sun that fathered the Cailleach]. The Russian Ded Moroz also has a woman by his side, or rather a girl - his granddaughter (or daughter if "Grandfather" becomes "Father"), Snegurochka, the Snow-Maiden. Riordan's Heroes of Olympus reminded everybody that Boreas the Greek North Wind had a daughter named "Chione", "snow". The original Jack Frost himself is sometimes given a wife in the person of Suzy Snowflake, born out of the song of the same name... Somehow, be she a daughter, a lover or a mother, there is always a female snow spirit by the side of the male frost entity.
There is one iteration (one! at least so far) of Jack Frost which is not bound by a form of heterosexuality. It would be his recent incarnation in the Wonder Woman franchise, thanks to the story "Frosti Reunion" published in DC's "Legions of Bloom" (a springtime special). Here he is presented as a "descendant of frost giants" who had a past romance in Asgard with Wonder Woman's version of Siegfried. However not even there can Jack Frost evade the presence of women, as ultimately it comes to Persephone to put him to sleep as a spring goddess, and she says she had to end his mischieviousness many times before... [One can recall the famous "Little Jack Frost" of Sangster where it is said Dame Nature must chase away the prankster Jack Frost every spring]. What is also interesting in this iteration is that "Jack Frost" is presented as the "Midgard" (human world) version of the entity's true name, "Jokul Frosti", who is the son of a certain "Kari" that is said to be "reborn" under a springtime form at the end of winter... All of this makes sense if you know a bit about the genealogies of Norse mythology.
For you see, many people on the Internet (maybe elsewhere but I only saw this on the Internet) connected "Jack Frost" with a Norse mythology character that is either known as "Frosti" or "Jokul" depending on the texts. It was never "Jokul Frosti", just one or the other. This character was said to be the son of Kari, who is the embodiment of the wind for the Old Norse. Kari himself was part of an elemental trinity, the three sons of an old jötunn by the name of Fornjot. He was the father of Logi (fire, who is famous for being the member of Utgard-Loki's court that defied Loki, the god, in duel - and later all three characters were mashed into one), Hler (the sea, that later was identified as being the same as Aegir the jötunn of the sea), and Kari (the wind). Kari was then said to have a son, named either Jökul (which means "ice") either Frosti (which means "frost"). This icey fellow was said to have had a son himself named Snaer (snow) who proceeded to have one son and three daughters all named after specific types of snow-phenomena (Þorri, "frozen-snow", Fön, "snowdrift", Drifa, "snowfall", Mjöl, "powdered snow"). And from Þorri was born, according to the sagas, Norr the founder of Norway... (Because this elemental genealogy was historicized into being the line of kings and princesses that led to Norway's current royalty, as well as Swedish since it was said Vanlandi gave birth to Visbur by sleeping with Drifa... But that's a whole other story).
This genealogy, of course, makes us think back about the birth of Pakkanen in the Kalevala... The Cold born from the Wind. Another interesting detail out of the "Kalevala" would be the description of Pakkanen's (or Pokkanen depending on how you write it) actions... He does a bunch of things you'd expect the son of the North Wind to do (freezing lakes and rivers, covering fields and forests with snow, making trees explode, destroying stalks and blossoms), but he also is specified to do (and be able to): eat the leaves of the woodlands (or stripping all the leaves of the forest), remove the verdure of the pastures and rob the flowers of their colors. Pretty standard frost behavior however it becomes fascinating when you link it to how Jack Frost started out not just as a winter entity... But also as an autumn one responsible for modifications in plants as summer ends. First and most important of which was the changing of the color of the leaves - as he was the one who painted trees red, brown and golden (continuing the metaphor of Jack Frost as an artist, since he also "draws" or "paints" the ferns on the winows). It was a notable part of his characterization in Margaret T. Canby's "The Frost Fairies" story (part of "Birdie and his fairy friends") - a story which also got famous for the plagiarism-that-is-not-but-is-still-wait-she-was-just-eleven-years-old case of its rewrite almost twenty years later by Helen Keller as "The Frost King"). This story breaks the trend of showing Jack Frost as a prince or youth, since here he is the king of winter spirits, "King Frost"... And for once, women are fully gone here, since he is presented as stuck between two male neighbors: Santa Claus, with whom he shares gentleness and a love for children, and King Winter, who is the cruel and nasty embodiment of the season...
I could go on and on but maybe here is a good time to stop. Here are some other continuations of the Jack talk I did not have time to talk about:
Jack Frost's apparitions in "Little Nemo in Slumberland"
The imagery of Jack Frost during the American Civil War
Rankin/Bass' Jack Frost - which had parallels drawn with Andersen's Little Mermaid and Pratchett's Wintersmith.
And speaking of Wintersmith, the connections of Jack Frost to the snowmen, from the Discworld's use of snowmen to the Frosty the Snowman cartoons passing by the dual "Jack Frost" movies (the horror comedy and the family melodrama).
Archie's "Fear of Frost" (Archie's Weird Mysteries issue 11), where Jack Frost has a female sidekick to cause winter but it is not a snow-themed one, it is rather "Wind Jill".
