I have a head cold, which I am blaming for the following weirdness.

mirrorthaw put in Peter Gabriel's greatest hits album, Hit, this evening, and as I always do when I hear it, I thought, "Man, 'Solsbury Hill' so has a story in it." But this time, the other songs ganged up and gave me one.* It's a YA sf semi-dystopian thriller/romance/bildungsroman (reluctant psychics! teenage soldiers! true love!), and my question to you is:

Poll #1476892 Blame the head cold
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 251

Should the romance be:

Of course, I reserve the right to ignore the poll results completely, but I'm curious.

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*For the record, the playlist is:

"Jeux sans frontiers"
"Shock the Monkey"
"More than This"
"Solsbury Hill"
"Burn You Up, Burn You Down"
"Digging in the Dirt"
"Growing Up"
"Don't Give Up"
"Sledgehammer"
"More than This" (reprise)

1. Am sitting up like real person today! This cold has totally kicked my ass.

2. It is not, however, swine flu (thanks for the thought, Bear). Had fortuitous doctor's appointment yesterday (scheduled weeks ago on account of getting prescriptions renewed, like a person does), and he said it's just a cold. Added that if it was swine flu, I'd feel like I'd been hit by a truck, and yeah. I only feel like I've been hit by a go-kart.

3. Apparently, "swine flu" is a phrase that attracts typos like honey attracts ants. I had both "swing flu" and "swine flue" in the previous paragraph.

4. Coughing is not romantic. Either that, or all those tubercular Victorian heroines knew something I don't.

5. Being sick is boring. Boring boring boring. And in conclusion, boring.

This may become a Continuing Series, as I am, in fact, still sick. However.

Yoe, Craig. Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2009.

( cut tag behind which there is a slight rant )

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And now, just to give you whiplash:

Morgan, Edmund S. The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England. 1944. Revised and expanded. New York: Harper Torchbooks-Harper & Row, 1966.

This is a low-key book, sympathetic to its subject matter as many books about the Puritans are not. I found it useful for explanations of a number of things about the Puritans' conception of the family which I had not known (matociquala tells me this is because I didn't grow up in New England); it dovetailed nicely with Entertaining Satan in clarifying certain aspects of Puritan communities.

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Starkey, Marion L. The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry into the Salem Witch Trials. 1949. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1989.

Although I don't agree with Starkey on many points, The Devil in Massachusetts makes a good point at which to begin one's reading about Salem. It is interested in forming a narrative of the witch trials, which means that it is clear and easy to read and compelling in ways that, for instance, Salem Possessed is not.

That said, I do disagree with Starkey, and if you begin with The Devil in Massachusetts, you would be ill-advised to end there. Starkey forthrightly blames the afflicted girls, and she does so with a misogyny that I find distinctly repellent. Moreover, making a narrative out of history inevitably warps the history around the narrative and encourages the selection/creation of heroes and villains.

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Allert, Tillman. The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Gesture. 2005. Transl. Jefferson Chase. New York: Picador-Henry Holt & Co., 2008.

This was one of those frustrating books that I agreed with but was not convinced by. Which is to say, I completely agree with Allert's thesis that the Hitler salute both reveals several very important things about Nazi culture and was (a very small) part of the formation of the culture of indifference in Germany which (again in part) allowed the Holocaust to happen, but Allert never showed me the links between his evidence and his ideas in such a way that I really believed him.

His evidence is fascinating. It includes Hitler figurines with movable right arms; illustrations for Sleeping Beauty in which the prince salutes Beauty as he wakes her; pictures of vacationers saluting a sand-portrait of Hitler, of a vaudeville performer teaching his chimpanzee the salute, of Richard Strauss caught in a moment of miserable ambivalence. He has wonderful anecdotal evidence of how the salute permeated German life. And I think he could have done a good deal more with why the Nazis imposed their salute on Germany (I found myself thinking about that more than once while reading The Psychopathic God [see below]). But he never manages to persuade me that his evidence connects to his abstract and abstruse sociological theories about the meaning of greetings.

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Vinogradov, V. K., Pogonyi, J. F., and N. V. Teptzov. Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB. London: Chaucer Press, 2005.

This is a collection of primary source material from the Russian investigation into Hitler's death, including the reports from the soldiers who found the bodies and reports of the interrogations of various witnesses. I found it almost more interesting for the insights into the Red Army's bureaucracy than for its ostensible subject matter.

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Waite, Robert G. L. The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. 1977. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.

This book has the defects of its virtues and vice versa. It is also very definitely a product of its times, as Waite's careful, literal, by-the-book Freudian psychoanalysis shows. I don't think anything he says about Hitler's childhood can be trusted (except that, yeah, the household of Alois Hitler was seriously weird), whether it's his speculations about the "primal scene" he thinks Hitler witnessed or his speculations about Hitler's monorchism or his putatively Jewish grandfather or any of the rest of it (including the coprophilia). Freud is least useful when you take him literally. But Waite's analysis of the adult Hitler I found very enlightening, in particular his [Waite's] patient refutation of Hitler's lies about his years in Vienna and the connections he makes between Hitler's private neuroses and his public performances.

back from mpls
with many books and a terrible
head cold

thank goodness for air conditioning

DO NOT WANT.

The same applies to the house centipede lurking along the ceiling in the bedroom. Also to the doctor's appointment I have this afternoon. (Which is unrelated to the con crud. Checkup, Annual: see above re: Boring Health Problems.)

Therefore, if you have something good or interesting or fun you want to tell me about (this includes general burbling about Fourth Street, if a person felt like it), the comments to this post would be a superlatively appropriate place.



And I found something interesting on my own even! A nifty article about the intelligence of octopuses, via jaylake.

Also, dd_b's snapshots of Fourth Street.

The WisCon plague felled me on Tuesday. I'm better, but still well below the Mendoza line. I owe emails and apologies to a great many people, and in fact if I talked to you at WisCon and promised to do something, you'd better email me to remind me of it--you know how if you shut your computer down "improperly," you get chiding error messages about information not being saved and possible corruption and damage (dogs and cats! living together! mass hysteria!)? Yeah. Like that.

::reels::
::writhes::
::faints in coils::