I have learned what a rat king is and now must tell you that “the strange expression ‘rat king’ is traditionally applied to a rare phenomenon—a group of rats whose tails are tied together.” This definition comes from the article “Rat kings in Estonia” which includes this as its Figure 1:

Here’s the story behind this remarkable (is that the right word?) specimen:

On 16 January 2005 farmer Rein Kõiv discovered a huddle of squeaking rats on the sandy floor of his shed in Saru village, Mıniste parish, Vıru county, Estonia. The animals were unable to escape, and the farmerís son killed them with a stick. After that a cluster of 16 rats were excavated from the frozen sand. Their tails were tangled in a knot that contained frozen sand. At the time of discovery only about 9 of the rats were alive. Obviously the animals tried to dig themselves out of the narrow tunnel, and the first rats buried the last ones under the sand. The crater in the sandy floor could still be seen even two months later.

The farmer knew nothing about rat kings. Nevertheless, the find seemed curious and he put the rats on a pile of planks where neighbours and chance visitors could observe them. It was only about two months later that Mr. Evar Saar, a relative of the farmer’s wife and a local reporter, ran across the animals and asked zoologists for comments. After that an avalanche of reports followed in Estonian journals and newspapers, and on the radio and television.

I can’t say I recommend reading the Wikipedia page for Rat king. It has all these upsetting passages where the term rat king is used as if it were a discrete thing that is either “alive” or “dead” rather than a collective made up of discrete beings. For instance:

On 20 October 2021, a live rat king of 13 rats was found in Põlvamaa, Estonia. The rat king was taken to Tartu University and euthanized due to the rats having no way of freeing themselves. Before that, scientists were able to film the rat king alive.

This term/phenomenon struck some extra fear into me because as soon as I read it, I half-remembered using the phrase “rat king moves” in one of my stories, to describe a character’s climbing a fence. Reader, I had not meant this kind of rat king. I just meant, you know, in the manner of the king of the rats!

I just went back and checked the story, and I’m happy to report that the term I used was slightly, crucially, different.

I climb three-quarters up the chain-link, king rat moves, but then I grab some barbed wire by the barb. Bleeding, cold, I clink back down. Suck on my palm.

Today’s installment of Chartbook is vital reading for anyone who cares about schools and universities. He starts with the term scholasticide and goes into current instances in Sudan and, on an exponentially more intense level, in Israel. The details are riveting and painful—and also insightful, placing these actions in the context of precious genocides:

As in other cases of scholasticide, this is not just frenzied looting or vandalism in the heat of conflict; we can see pleasure taken in the burning of the enemy’s books and libraries, because the political, cultural value is recognized. In one social media clip, an IDFsoldier standing in the rubble of al-Azhar University says, “To those who say why there is no education in Gaza, we bombed them… Oh, too bad, you’ll not be engineers anymore.” Israeli forces used over 300 mines to destroy the huge al-Israa University, near Gaza City, last January, having first used the building as a military base in the war’s first months.

Tooze draws attention to this interview with Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, the vice president of al-Israa University. Here’s a selection from the larger quotation:

So many mosques, hundreds of mosques, hundreds of schools. Every single university was hit somehow. Some of them partially damaged, some of them totally destroyed. Schools are all mostly gone. Mosques, hospitals, medical centers. Even, like I said, libraries, the oldest library — Gaza City Library — also was destroyed. I don’t know, what else can you explain [about] this? It is what it is. It is a destruction of everything Palestinian. They want to make Gaza unlivable and they want to destroy its history.

One can know this is happening and still be shocked to remember, to notice again, to grapple again with the immensity of the destruction, the violence, the erasure. Even as we confront attempts to dismantle the state here in the U.S., it’s our tax dollars (under the previous regime) that have bought so many of these bombs.

Most of all, I think this provides another way into understanding and resisting the genocidal actions of Israel. As Tooze puts it,

Folks outside the conflict who have professional attachments to Universities and education have every reason to be horrified and to protest.

Today while researching the 1960s-era Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, I encountered the work of the photographer Danny Lyons, who embedded with them for a chunk of the 1960s. He’s still active on Instagram. I started scrolling his page and found his stridency on a bunch of issues (Jimmy Carter, fascism, the fires in Altadena) notably eloquent and unashamed.

This post and picture particularly stopped me short. I don’t necessarily agree with Lyons, but I think this bitter paragraph captures a deep rage that crosses a lot of our self-spiting nation today:

FREE LUIGI. Link in bio:Heroic Corporate assassin surrenders. McDonalds customer rats him out. The Russian Revolution was proceeded by waves of assassinations of the instruments of the Czar. Our young hero’s target was corporate greed. Greed, a deadly sin, is destroying our country and destroying Mother Earth. Malcolm said “The Ballot or the Bullet”. The ballot has failed us for decades. The gap in income is unprecedented and off the charts. A clerk at my Walgreens just said, “Why do they want so much money? When they die they will all burn in hell”. Good idea. The picture is from I Like to Eat Right on the Dirt.

I found this copy of The King of the Golden River, or The Black Brothers by John Ruskin in my stepdad’s workshop. Written in 1841; this edition printed in 1889. A handsome, battered old book.

The story concerns three brothers—the elder two pure evil, the youngest with a heart of gold—who find their fates through several encounters with fairies. It’s short, beautifully written, with all the pleasures of a fable where each character gets his just deserts. (There are no female characters.)

I happen to be reading Little, Big by John Crowley right now, a book from 1981 with a similar emphasis on the little folk. The two books even nearly share a character—Crowley has Brother North-Wind while Ruskin has Southwest Wind, Esquire. Coming across source material is always interesting. I will say that Ruskin’s fairies—there are just two in the story—are strange and eerie in a way not always matched by Crowley’s much more multitudinous but also more mysterious and evasive fairies.

The strangeness of the story is enhanced by the artifact quality of the book. Look at the marriage of engravings and typesetting, and the now-ancient repairs.

This edition belonged to my step-grandma, Pat, who passed away in 2022. She was given it by her own grandma’s boyfriend, in 1945, about nine months before the end of the Second World War. At the time, this edition was already 46 YEAR OLD, as someone helpfully noted on the frontispiece. It is now 128 years old.

And it has a peculiar ADVERTISEMENT before the text. Ruskin wrote this for a 12-year-old Effie Gray, who he later married when she was 19. (He was 21 when he wrote this book for her.) This seems bad but is slightly complicated by the fact that when they divorced both parties insisted they had never consummated the marriage—he had refused her. He went on to be perhaps the most famous art critic in English language history. She went on to be one of the greatest pre-Raphaelite models, as well as a writer herself.

Tomorrow I’m posting the first installment of a new project—a short daily podcast called You Know What’s Good? I don’t know what it will be. Good? I hope so.

I’ve recorded a week’s worth of episodes so far. (I’m releasing them on a one-week delay.) The daily labor—five minutes or so—feels sustainable. But will it be?

Will it be a brief experiment? A year-long adventure? Something more? I have no idea. And I don’t know if anyone will like it. From my end, so far it’s turning out to be intimate, unpolished, fun, funky.

Today I remembered this post I made on January 2nd of last year:

With white supremacists successfully bullying the first Black (+ 2nd female) president of Harvard into stepping down just six months into her tenure on the pretense that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, 2024, America’s decision year on whether or not to turn towards fascism, is hard out of the gates.

The rest of the year did end up having as two of its big themes “Black women: should they lead?” and “Criticizing Israel: antisemitic?” And of course, the turn towards fascism has been something to behold! The richest man on earth sieg heiling at the inauguration!

One takeaway for me: people are still in denial of how much hatred Black women face in our society. The intersection of sexism and racism—talk about meeting the devil at the crossroads.

I knew we were in trouble when in the spring someone I love texted me a picture of a barn in Virginia, the side of which had been painted in ten foot tall letters with the slogan, JOE AND THE HO. Despite being basically liberal, they thought it was pretty funny, really. They struggled to understand why I flinched in horror.

I don’t know what the way forward is. I do believe that the work we have to do is heart work.

Who doesn’t love a book with a cover like this?

Energy Secrets of Glastonbury Tor by Nicholas R. Mann (“in Moscow”) is a surprisingly good read, for the genre. The genre being, I guess, self-published-looking New Age books. Often too full with mumbo jumbo, this one has a long disquisition on the hydrogeology of the tor and the sources of the red and white springs that I found lucid and rather convincing. Still, the book’s third appendix, “Dragons,” has no right at all to be this good:

Dragons are alluded to in several places in this book and it is helpful to briefly describe them here. A dragon is the name given to a multi-dimensional being that exists, transforms and moves in vortex formations. Dragons are the energy ‘behind’ forms in much the same manner as the Devas described for example, by W. Tudor Pole, Dorothy Maclean and by other writers from Findhorn. Dragons are at once visible and invisible through their ability to be present in the elements yet command the energy vortices that form those elements. They can ‘shed their skin’ to move through the many dimensions of the universe, the limits of which for us are determined by the speed of light. Dragons are therefore masters of the time, space and matter continuum. They are capricious, humorous, benign, malevolent and indifferent. They can be seen with the non-localised vision of the soul, but they will not willingly admit to it, preferring to remain in mime. Magicians have learnt to recognise and command them, but as dragons prefer to command themselves the practice is inadvisable. However, gardeners, foresters, acupuncturists, hydrologists and sailors, for example, work with them all the time. Animals are also acutely aware of their presence and will adjust their actions accordingly. Observation of the in-turning and out-turning nodes in air, fire and, best of all, in moving water, provide excellent reference points for deeper meditation on the nature of dragons. Acquiring an understanding of the nature of dragons is extremely useful in developing the practices necessary for the enhancement of energy vortices.

As an avid reader of Kottke.org, I appreciate that he’s added in comments sections for some posts, though I rarely feel called to leave one of my own. One post from earlier today got my goat, though. Here’s Jason Kottke’s brief post and my reaction:

The post

Provocative from Tim Carmody: David Lynch was America’s greatest conservative filmmaker. “There is an assumption that great artists, especially subversive ones, live radical lives and embrace progressive politics. But Lynch…”

My comment

I also found this unsatisfying—less a provocation than a swing and a miss. I think it would have been useful for Carmody to define what “conservative” means to him. Instead he mostly gives definition by subtraction. For instance:

And though he clearly had a great sense of humor, there’s very little that’s insincere or campy about Lynch’s attitudes toward either his country or his films’ subjects.

I think his definition of a liberal/progressive artist is… John Waters? I just don’t see how insincerity and campiness neatly track onto politics. What’s campier than a MAGA hat?

Ultimately, Carmody seems to be arguing that having a strong sense of morality makes you a conservative, which just seems wrong. Here’s his line on this:

For all his comfort with ambiguity and fascination with evil, Lynch turns out to be a profound moralist. In one of Lynch’s last acting roles, his character Gordon Cole in 2017’s revival of “Twin Peaks” half-shouts, “Fix [your] hearts or die.”

This had me tearing out my hair! How can you bring up that line WITHOUT MENTIONING THAT IT’S DIRECTED AT ANTI-TRANS BIGOTRY! That’s not just argumentative malpractice; the elision totally distorts what’s going on here. Gordon Cole’s line is about morality, for sure—but in our society it’s a decidedly progressive take on the moral. Not Reaganite “family values” but a vision of bodily autonomy and freedom of self-expression that would put Lynch to the left of not just today’s Republicans but also many “centrist Democrats.”

The biggest problem with this take, though, is that I just can’t see how it’s useful or expands our understanding of the man or his work.

But where liberals look for solutions and progress, Lynch finds ambiguous fragments of dead futures.

Man, that’s not a difference between liberals and conservatives—that’s the difference between a politician or pundit and an artist. Lynch was always tight-lipped about what his work meant, and he also didn’t go out and get involved in political campaigns. That was a choice he made, and for me at least it’s more than a touch sacrilegious to try to pin him on a 2-d political spectrum when he spent decades exploring territory that was so far beyond such fantasies.

I really enjoyed Amy Kurzweil’s interview with the comics artist Gene Luen Yang from the Fall 2023 Believer. (I read it in print but here it is online.) I loved the bits about the physical effects of being a cartoonist, plus I just loved Yang’s sensibility and sense of humor. Here’s a favorite exchange:

BLVR: What was the family dynamic? Did both you and your brother feel the pressure from your father to, like the Level Up character, become a doctor or something?

GLY: The Level Up character is loosely based on my brother. My brother is a doctor. He’s four years younger than me and he was always better at video games than me. He just had better hand-eye coordination. I remember him telling me all these crazy stories about the stuff he would have to do in med school, like dissecting human cadavers and labeling hemisected human heads. The way video games and medicine connected for me was him telling me that for one of his assignments, he had to do a colonoscopy on somebody. And after that, he decided to be a gastroenterologist. When he was a kid, he was super squeamish. So I was like, “You used to feel like throwing up when you saw dog poop on the street. Why would you want to be a gastroenterologist?” And he said, “Because a colonoscopy is like playing video games up somebody’s ass.”

BLVR: [Laughs]

GLY: I was like, “That’s a graphic novel.”

Gotta read it.

Why isn’t all chocolate sold as gelt? What happy Scrooges we become as we listen to a handful’s muted clinking, carefully pick out the first one to eat, find the foil seam, peel one side back, then peel back the other, see each bas relief twice—always first in metallic gold, then in chocolate—place the coin in our mouths, bite down, chew, swallow. Economists call this deflation; I call it bliss. Edible coins are the only currency I trust.

Rachel Aviv’s latest, “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” should not be missed. In her book Strangers to Ourselves and in her many New Yorker pieces Aviv often explores how different-minded people experience the world, and her preternatural technique is to do so without pathologizing or psychologizing but just observing and accumulating fine details and contradictions until the subject’s way of being almost gleams. Here she takes the vexing question of how Alice Munro could create such powerful and emotionally perceptive works of fiction while also defending and living with the man (her second husband) who had raped and abused her daughter Andrea, starting when Andrea was nine. By the end of the piece, the contradiction has emulsified. And the reader’s understanding Munro’s work has been transformed.

Also: Aviv writes so strongly herself. I particularly love the way she ends to each section, with some detail or story or quoted dialogue that sets all that has come before to ringing.

Take, for one example, this section, which my partner had warned me about before I even read this piece. “Wait till you get to the section where she quotes Margaret Atwood,” she said. “It’s like a whole Margaret Atwood novel, in one paragraph.” And it is:

The writer Margaret Atwood, who had been friends with Alice since the late sixties, told me that she didn’t know about Andrea’s abuse, though she was aware that Alice had unexpectedly ended up in Comox. At the time, Atwood said, few men would put up with a middle-aged woman who was an accomplished writer. But Andrea’s revelation would have changed the power dynamics in the relationship. “After Alice found out,” Atwood wrote me, “she had the moral upper hand.” She now had an “ace-in-the-hole ‘You-have-been-a-bad-person’ card.” She added, “I’m not saying it’s a good thing—I’m just saying it’s a fact. For somebody of her generation who had been brought up to believe that women were lesser and that their opinions and feelings and desires did not count, it would be quite something.”