Weeknotes: 10/31/26-11/06/26

This Week:

• In FLP102, we talked about collecting bodies, specifically trophy collecting during the US Civil War, and Museum and Archaeological collecting of Indigenous bodies, as well as the movement to get those bodies returned.
• I drove out to Western Massachusetts to return some material that the Museum had repatriated to the descendants of the Lenne Lenape tribes.
• I did a lot of work publicizing and spreading the word about DJ White’s presentation at the Museum next week.
• Good Things:
  • I finished reading Cassandra Khaw’s violent and gory “The Library at Hellebore.” It’s a story about a school for children with magical abilities, but unlike the more popular version, the magic pulsing through these teenaged children is wild, messy, and violating, and most of them have to come the school (or been kidnapped) because their presence in the world constitutes a mortal danger to themselves or others. On top of that, the instructors at the school are capricious and menacing, with no real interest in training the students. I liked the surreal apocalypse of “The Salt Grows Heavy” and Khaw’s lush prose is put to good use in describing impossible monsters and ongoing bloody evisceration or dismemberment. I didn’t much care for the alternating chronological jumps of the chapters, but overall it was a fun, wild book.
  • For Bandcamp Friday, I was in a metal mood. I picked up Bosse-de-Nage’s weirdo opus All Fours and Myrkur’s Spine.