Witchy Things

Yesterday at the dentist an old man coughed at us. When I was retrieving my stolen car at a compound the person who had my car told me to not wear my mask. The first day I moved here someone drove up to me in my apartment parking and coughed on me as well.

Before my girlfriend and I moved we were living at her parents in a red state. It was a bad situation and her parents lied to us when they had Covid. We both got it right before we had to leave. We’re still feeling the long term affects in our chronic illnesses.

What we face as disabled people is an onslaught of aggression for our existence because able bodied people are scared to be like us. They tell us we are crazy so they can go about their lives like we don’t exist or the dangers that threaten our well-being don’t exist.

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.

I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.

But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.

And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.

It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.

But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”

Do you closely follow Lolita’s fate? I feel obliged to keep up with the destiny of Lolita. After all, people stop me on the street and ask me to comment on opinions. So I have to know what is being said about me. Lolita is an indictment of all the things it expresses. It is a pathetic book dealing with the plight of a child, a very ordinary little girl, caught up by a disgusting and cruel man….But of all my books, I like it the best. The last bone always tastes best.

Nabokov…predicted: “Those who keep looking for spicy bits will not find them. They will not be able to read the book through—they will get bored too soon. The only thing that might be attractive is the diary H.H. keeps. And then, who would be attracted by a 12-year-old girl?"

Vera Nabokov…refilled his glass. “Tell them about the child,” she said. “Oh, yes. I am rather bitter about this. I am in favor of childhood—in fact the very first book I ever did was a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. Anyway, a few nights ago, on Goblin night, a little girl—she was 8 or 9 I think—came to the door for candy. And she was dressed up as Lolita, with a tennis racquet and a pony tail, and a sign reading l-o-l-i-t-a. I was shocked.”

This may be at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta.

In pre-modern Ireland, like in many other cultures, the power of the gaze held immense significance. Practices and customs associated with the evil eye were passed down through generations, and many were collected in The School's Collection in the 1930s.

The School's Collection has proven to be an indispensable asset in my exploration of Irish paganism. However, it can be quite a task to read, classify, and integrate all the materials on any given topic. The following are my notes from what I've encountered searching the records, but I hope they'll prove useful to others.

What is the evil eye in the Irish folk tradition?

In Irish folk traditions, the evil eye was believed to possess an otherworldly power, capable of causing illness, misfortune, and even death.

It was believed that those who possessed the evil eye could knowingly or unknowingly project this baneful magic onto others simply through their gaze. The evil eye could affect many aspects of life including people, livestock, and crops.

This ability is often referred to as "overlooking" or "blinking" in the Duchas records and the terms can be used interchangeably.

In this locality, long ago, it was a common belief, that if people met with any reverses, or suffered any loss of property, the misfortune was due to "the evil-eye," meaning that some person supposed to have an evil eye "overlooked" their property, and that was considered the reason for the particular piece of ill-luck. If a person with an "evil-eye" took particular notice of any animal, for example, the animal would either do himself an injury or pine away gradually. Usually, the possessors of the "evil eye" were not aware that they had such a particular kind of eye, or were connected with other people's misfortunes. Duchas.ie

What causes the evil eye?

There are numerous things that could cause someone to be born with the evil eye (people are generally considered to be born with it rather than acquiring it later in life). Some of the reasons recorded are:

Having the surname Marrinan 1, 2, 3 or Kingfisher 4.

Being born on Whit Sunday (the seventh Sunday after Easter) 5, 6 or on June 29th 7

Babies returning to breastfeeding after being weaned 8, 9

Babies seeing their baptismal towel before it was washed 10

Your Godparents omitting a word during your baptism 11

Prevention of the evil eye

To protect themselves from the ill effects of being overlooked, people developed customs and rituals, the most popular of which included:

Waiting to light their fires on May Day so that the evil eye did not take their luck and profit for the coming year 12

Placing St. Brigid's crosses around the home (and outhouses) 13, 14

Nailing a donkey's shoe to the threshold of the home (this also helped to guard against the Good Neighbors) 15

For animals, placing a Gauldoron Garragh knot on their back would provide protection 16

Using red items (usually cloth) to distract the evil eye 17, 18, 19, 20, 21

Asking God to bless the person or thing being talked about after you suspect an overlooker (a common term for those who possess the evil eye) has spoken about them 22, 23, 24, 25

Jumping through the flames at midsummer 5

Cures for the evil eye

If all your preventative measures failed, there were several cures that could be tried.

For a baby born on Whit Sunday or another unlucky day, the cure was to place green sod over them three times 4, 6, 8

A cure commonly used with animals thought to have been overlooked was to write the overlooker's name (if known) or the entire alphabet (if the overlooker's name is unknown) onto a piece of paper or other burnable material and burn it under the animal's nose so that it inhales the smoke 26, 27, 28, 29, 30

A piece of thatch from the overlooker's house, or even a piece of their clothing can also be burned under an animal or person's nose (or burned and then the ashes put into a drink) to cure the evil eye 27, 28, 29

Water from a place where three townslands meet can cure when sprinkled on the overlooked animal or person, but the person who gets the water must not speak to anyone on their way there and back 30

Forge water can also be used in the same way 31

Painted Brigid because ofc

I've set this up (first time doing this)

I've set the bar pretty high, just to make sure all bases are covered.

And then there's the accents that you guys choose to mock and it's a mixture of traditional London cockney (which I don't mind being mocked too much, it's a dick move because it's very working class but not as bad) and MLE or Multi Cultural London English. MLE is a fascinating dielect but the reason it's such a dick move to mock it is that it's our version of AAVE and because of that is often on of the main targets of being ironed out in schools because... Racism. It's not a complete parallel to AAVE, they have different orgins and influences and white people speaking in that dielect is less weird than it would be for a white person to speak in AAVE but it's rooted in Jamaican Patios. So yeah it's a pretty dickish move to mock that especially when you use the excuse of it being ok because of everything britan did during the empire because that the language primarily of immigrants who were victims of it.

Mock the UK all you like, mock our horrific history, our food, our culture in general and I'll absolutely laugh along but when you're mocking British accents you're stepping on a really sensitive area without understanding that history. I doubt if people understood the weight of mocking MLE you'd still do it.

So a lot of this is from my english langauge a level that had whole modules on accent discrimnation, as well as MLE and its relation to race. These are both like entire fields of study in lingistics so anything i send is going to be very much an introduction but heres some useful places to start.

This is a brilliant anayisis about the historical context of MLE

Also as im cross refernceing I did notice i made an error in only mentioning it jamacian patois roots. It also takes a lot of infulence from a TON of different cultures

Im also going to just link the wiki page because while taking wikipedia with a grain of salt is important, to my knowlege its pretty acurate and its going to be a good jumping off point

Im also drawing inspiration from my own experiences growing up in the english school system. I'm white and MLE isnt my dialect, my knowlege is more from an academic standpoint, but I can vividly remeber other students using features of MLE in their speech and immedietly being reprimanded for it. But you can see that exact attitude regually validated in newpapers. I had to read the article referanced here for my course but it seems to have been taken down but this responce gives an idea of its contents

Heres a link to a forum post to show this is a pretty widely held view of MLE not being sutible in an academic setting

This article is a good place to now talk about accent discrimation as a whole

Here's Eccleston discussing his experiences with accent discrimiation

this is him talking about it directly in relation to doctor who though this again was very much a rumour

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/04/15/christopher-eccleston-reveals-why-his-stint-on-doctor-who-was-short-lived/

This article references a study that shows 45& of employees in the uk have faced some form of ridicule for their accent in the work place

This is from an organisation working to help fight against accent discrimation and sites a 2006 study claiming 76% of employers admit to discrimating based on accent. They have a lot of citations on the site but admit more research needs to be done

This is another good article

Heres a good article

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00311.x

This one actually found it wasnt an issue in courts but was still used as vehicle for other kinds of discrimation. Accent Discrimation is fundamentlly tied to racism, xenophobia, and classism. These are all connected and need to be viewed of as such

And here is accent Bias britan's citation list which is excellent