31 May of the Year Eight...

It's not Walpurgisnacht. It isn't. Walpurgisnacht is May Eve, 30 April. But somehow all through my days as a vur' petite little long-eared desert hedgehog I kept thinking that 31 May was Walpurgisnacht. I have no idea why. Did I misread something in some horror story I read as a vur' young little hedgehog? Nonetheless--- May Eve, not the end of May.

Walpurgisnacht is Valborg in Sweden. I wonder if Deserie at eyelines celebrated it this year... Were there bonfires for her to walk past there at midnight? Lissy at emigree was in Sweden in early spring, but too early for Valborg night. She did have an Encounter in Stockholm, but that's never as good as offering oneself to strangers by bonfire light on Valborg. I do offer that image to her for her own fantasies...

31 May has no celebrations that I know of. Lammas Night won't be 'til 1 August; Nadaam and O-Bon will be in mid-summer. So the best I can hope for tonight is single-malt on my balcony. I can look out at the lake and imagine myself looking out across the sea from the Aomori shore, or watching the stars above the Orkneys.

I know that anthropologists and ethnologists have no use for him any more, but...there's something to be said for reading Frazer's "The Golden Bough". It's lovely writing, and the idea of the Year King has lent itself to many a novel. It's like Weston's "From Ritual to Romance": however outmoded its scholarship may be, it gave birth to Eliot's "The Waste Land".

I'm not terribly fond of archaeologists and anthropologists right now. The release of the latest Indiana Jones movie saw any number of academic archaeologists writing scandalised op-ed pieces about how this isn't "real" archaeology and how archaeology isn't about "treasure-hunting". Now--- I do have a PhD in History. Things like Oliver Stone's "JFK" made my little hedgehog quills stand up in outrage--- just like neo-Confederate/palaeoconservative readings of the Civil War or Holocaust revisionism. So I can understand a bit of professional exasperation by archaeologists. But somehow the op-ed pieces attacking poor Indy just struck me as silly. Apparently certain professional archaeologists never saw any 1940s action serials. And there seems to be an attitude out there in the culture in the Year Eight that's hostile to fiction as such, that expects all films and novels to have a clear didactic goal.

[Note: isn't that what's happened in various literary scandals recently? No one reads stories labelled as fiction, whatever their merits, so authors re-label them as memoirs. The memoir is taken as inherently superior to the novel. Why and how did this happen?]

Professional archaeology has been corrupted by both scientism and by post-colonial moralising. Archaeologists want to be scientists and to distance themselves from a past of mere "treasure-hunting". There's a tremendous amount of contempt for the idea of the museum as such. All artifacts, the current belief goes, must ever and always be left in the ground to be cataloged, even if the items will be destroyed or lost. Context is all, exposition is nothing. There's no sense of the beauty of objects; there's no sense of emotional connection with the past. And there's all that post-colonial guilt about taking any object back to museums--- even though London or NYC or Paris is likely to be a place where objects can be studied, preserved, and made available to view, as opposed to Tegucialpa or Tashkent. Anthropologists do the same, of course. How many modern anthropology texts are full of craven and hysterical apologies about the very idea of other cultures as objects of study?

I was trained as an historian. I want to know What Really Happened as much as one can. I have no problem with applying all the sampling and dating techniques one can bring to bear on a site or a question. But there's an emotional connection to the past that's out there, too. A Dacian sword in a dealer's shop or a small museum in Bucharest or Milan isn't "meaningless" because it's an artifact with "no context". It's real and has a value based on its beauty, based on its emotional connection to a time and a place. A Mycenaean burial mask has value there in a tomb--- date, location, manufacture, associations with other grave symbols. But it's also a thing of beauty. Away from a tomb in the Morea, in a vitrine in Chicago or Cambridge, it's still a thing of beauty. And it touches something very emotional: "I have looked this day upon the face of Agamemnon", Schliemann telegraphed the king of Greece. There's a sense of the past and a sense of beauty that professional archaeologists seem to have forgotten. Archaeology used to understand that the past had an emotional power. Too many archaeologists have lost that--- thus the annoyance that the Indiana Jones films aren't documentaries and moral guidebooks to doing scientific archaeology.

I do want to find photos of Vantaa Airport. It's not a place I'll ever be, but it's worth considering as a setting for erotic fantasy. If Lissy at emigree is going to imagine having risky sex there at Vantaa, then what niches and corners and passages would she choose? How would she plan it out? I'll never be at Vantaa, and I'm not quite clear where it is. But I'd like to be able to compare Lissy's fantasy choices to my own--- what places there in the terminal or the parking garage would I choose? The same is true of train sex. How would my visions of how and where to do it compare with bella_sumision's or Ioana at winterbymorning's? How do Lissy's Adventures in solo sex aboard a train compare to the way I'd want to see a lovely girl do that, to the way I'd film it or write about it? I do want to be able to compare and critique, and to understand the reasons behind lovely girls' choices...

Ms. Chang and her husband have bought a twenty-two foot sailboat. They're re-doing the cabin thesmelves. I do envy that. They plan to sail around the Keys and perhaps venture out a bit further into the Gulf. Libet is thrilled with the idea of sailboat sex, of suntanning naked there on open water. I envy her the ability to sail, the ability to handle a boat. I've wanted to learn to sail since ever I read Wm. Buckley's "Airborne" when I was at New Haven. Having a beautiful and wicked Chinese-Cuban girl topless on deck has a lot to be said for it, but what I want, what I really really want, is just to be able to sail, to seek out the Green Flash, to see open water and wind in the sails as a way to escape, to leave all this behind.

I suppose I must read Adam Nicolson's "Sea Room".

Today I'll go to the Zeppelin Pilots' Club for lunch and spend time reading "Tender is the Night" at the bar. That's not a bad way to spend much of my afternoon. I do need to sit by my apartment complex pool--- I'm far too ghost-white. But I want to spend some time reading Fitzgerald and drinking period cocktails.

I did write Lissy at emigree to ask about her subway station sex fantasies. I know the outline--- sundress, sunglasses, sandals, panty-free, catching the eye of a stranger (or a group of strangers) and going down into a tunnel or onto a deserted platform for pure, wordless sex. I know the outline... But I do want to hear her Details for the fantasy... After all, It does matter exactly what the sundress looks like-- and whether the sandals are heeled or just thin little flip-flops. And it certainly matters how many partners she'd choose--- and if she'd hope for an audience.

Tomorrow night is the season finale of "The Tudors"--- the execution of Anne Boleyn. Circa regna tonat... Natalie Dormer is lovely and hot and has incredible blue eyes. She'll be missed. But what occurs to me is that Henry VIII allowed Anne to be executed by sword rather than burnt for adultery and incest. They shipped an executioner over from Calais to get it all done right--- the first execution of a queen of England. And they used a sword--- reserved for high nobility, more honourable than axe or rope. I'd like to know more about the sword--- shape, history, and (most especially) what was inscribed on the blade... I really want to know what was etched into the blade.

Summer and I never do well together. I need ways to escape my flat. Even thoroughly swept and dusted, my flat still still gives me sinus/allergy problems late at night. I can go to the Zeppelin Pilots' Club, or to the university coffeeshop. What I'll need is books--- books and music for the summer. I'm always open to book suggestions. It's easier for me to find autumn and winter books--- all that Russian history and culture I studied, all those years of imagining myself inside autumn and winter worlds. Autumn and winter are my homes. Summer has always been alien to me. So I'm open to summertime suggestions for books and music... I'll order up Pimms No. 1 and lemonade this afternoon and read Fitzgerald. But what else should I be reading?