👾 The Greedy Goblins List #1: Gertrude Stein + Ezra Pound with the Fascists; Gloria Steinem + CIA; Elephants Have Funerals, Too; Dorky Play

👾 The Greedy Goblins List #1

Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.

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Table of Contents:

1. 👾 What is The Greedy Goblins Series?

2. 👾 The Greedy Goblins List #1:

   1. ✔️ Gertrude Stein’s surprising relationships with fascists

   2. ✔️ Ezra Pound was a Fascist and Anti-Semite

   3. ✔️ Gloria Steinem’s (covert)(?) relationship with the CIA

   4. ✔️ Death, Burial, and Mourning

      1. ⛓️ Non-Human Animals Also Mourn

      2. ⛓️ Sky Burial

      3. ⛓️ Excarnation

      4. ⛓️ Burial Tree

      5. ⛓️ Reef Burial

      6. ⛓️ Death + Burial + Mourning Notes in Past Newsletters

3. 🛝 Dorky Play

1. 👾 What is The Greedy Goblins Series?

From this newsletter:

Sometimes, I am completely overwhelmed with how to start a sentence when a bunch of greedy goblins (tangential thoughts) are volleying for my attention. I am returning to the list form to relieve myself of the pressure of narrativizing or “making a point.” And speaking of my tangent goblins — creatures that I picture as purple blobs with octopus-like suction cups covering their bodies and puppy dog eyes that weaken my resolve. I make lists because I have poor sensory gating, which means I often take in a lot of stimuli and need to place them… somewhere.

We have a storage issue! These lists are offloading rogue thoughts so I can get back to my other rogue thoughts!

2. 👾 The Greedy Goblins List #1

This first 👾 The Greedy Goblins list feels like gossiping about writers and politicians, but I do not pick what my brain latches onto! We also have some fun random facts about non-human death rituals and mourning.

✔️ Gertrude Stein’s surprising relationships with fascists:

Her playful and innovative writing seems to anticipate much of postmodern thought. Her open, unapologetic, same-sex partnership with Alice B. Toklas belongs more to the liberal world of 2012 than to 1912. And yet throughout her life Stein hewed to the political right, even signing up to be a propagandist for an authoritarian, Nazi-dominated political regime.

[…]

Yet surprisingly, most of Stein’s critics have given her a relatively free pass on her Vichy sympathies. Others have tried to ignore or justify equally inexplicable events: for example, Stein’s endorsement of Adolf Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934, or her performance of the Hitler salute at his bunker in Berchtesgaden after the Allied victory in 1945. Until recently, in fact, the troublesome question of Stein’s politics didn’t really figure in debates over her legacy—as opposed, for example, to the vehement debates surrounding Mussolini supporter and modernist poet Ezra Pound.

Source: The National Endowment for Humanities (2012)

Other Sources: The New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket 2 — 1 and 2 and 3, Jewish Currents, John Hopkins University Press

✔️ Ezra Pound was a Fascist and an Anti-Semite:

There is another problem with Pound, which is that he was a Fascist. The term gets abused freely in discussions of modernist writers, a number of whom were reactionaries—Gay calls these “the anti-modern modernists”—and some of whom were anti-Semites, but very few of whom were actually Fascists. Pound is one of the very few. His obsession with the Jews (there are some anti-Semitic passages in his early prose, but nothing systematic) dates from his interest in the views of the founder of the Social Credit movement, Major C. H. Douglas, around 1920. (Social Credit was an economic reform movement aimed at the elimination of debt—hence Pound’s attacks on usury and on Jews as moneylenders and financiers of wars, a classic type of anti-Semitism.) Pound’s infatuation with Mussolini dates from a concert given by Olga Rudge, a violinist who was Pound’s longtime mistress, at Mussolini’s home, in 1927, where he came up with the idea of enlisting Mussolini as a patron of the avant-garde.

Source: The New Yorker (2008)

Other Sources: Journal of Modern Literature — 1 and 2, The Nation, The Harvard Crimson, The Literary Hub, Journal of American Studies

✔️ Gloria Steinem’s (covert)(?) relationship with the CIA:

So what, exactly, was the N.S.A. useful for? This is where things get murky. According to Paget’s account, the N.S.A. was apparently not used for what the C.I.A. called “political warfare.” The agency did create a front organization called the Independent Research Service (inventing titles that are as meaningless as possible is part of the spy game) for the purpose of recruiting American students to disrupt Soviet-controlled World Youth Festivals in Vienna, in 1959, and Helsinki, in 1962. The person in charge was the future feminist Gloria Steinem, who knew perfectly well where the money was coming from and never regretted taking it. “If I had a choice I would do it again,” she later said.

Source: The New Yorker (2015)

Other Sources: USC Public Diplomacy, CIA Reading Room, CIA Reading Room (Washington Post), CIA Reading Room (CounterSpy), KPFA Radio Show, Berkeley Barb, Off Our Backs — 1 and 2, The Nation, The New York Times — 1 and 2

✔️ Death, Burial, and Mourning

Leila Haseba Shaban

— this list is for YOU!

⛓️ Non-Human Animals Also Mourn:

• When Animals Mourn: Seeing That Grief Is Not Uniquely Human

• Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) grieve over the loss of a conspecific

• The Five Animals that Grieve

• The Depths of Animal Grief

• Animal Grief Shows We Aren’t Meant to Die Alone

• The Truth Abount Animal Grief

• Pet Grief: When is Non-Human Life Grievable?

• "Until death do us part." A multidisciplinary study on human- Animal co- burials from the Late Iron Age necropolis of Seminario Vescovile in Verona (Northern Italy, 3rd-1st c. BCE)

• Death Rituals in the Animal Kingdom

• Chapter 2 - Non-Human Animal Responses towards the Dead and Death: A Comparative Approach to Understanding the Evolution of Human Mortuary Practices

• Primate thanatology and hominoid mortuary archeology

⛓️ Sky Burial

• Sky Burial is “a funeral practice in which a human corpse is placed on a mountaintop to decompose while exposed to the elements or to be eaten by scavenging animals, especially carrion birds like vultures and corvids.”

⛓️ Excanaration

• Excarnation “(also known as defleshing) refers to the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial.”

⛓️ Burial Tree

• A Burial Tree, “or burial scaffold is a tree or simple structure used for supporting corpses or coffins.”

⛓️ Reef Burial

• Reef Burial “are a type of ‘green’ or ‘natural’ burial considered by some to be an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burial. Cremation ash is mixed with concrete to form objects that are placed on the seafloor to encourage wildlife in areas where sea life has been diminished.”

⛓️ Death + Burial + Mourning Notes in Past Newsletters

• QR Codes on Tombstones

• Grief Tech + AI

3. 🛝 Dorky Play

I think a lot about neurodivergence, dorkiness, and socializing. I have seen this thing online a lot—people getting together to do slideshow presentations about something that interests them. I want to start a presentation club where folks get together online (and maybe IRL?) to give 20-minute presentations about a topic they are deeply fascinated by. Between each presentation, there will be a short word game or puzzle. More on this soon!

I was at an event, well it was my opening, and I was hiding a bit 🤣, and I remember speaking to someone there about social events. We both agreed that sometimes we need an event agenda or event stations at parties for when you want to be around other people but don’t necessarily want to talk to them 🫠. In the most recent season finale of Abbott Elementary, Janine hosts a party with stations tailored to all of her co-workers' interests and quirks! Having also been a K-12 educator, it felt like Janine planned a party like she planned her instruction: differentiation! I might use this clip for instructional coaching this year! Anyway, I yelped and said: “if I were to throw a party, I would have stations and a loose agenda to scaffold the social experience.”

Thank you for reading,

Kameelah 👽

Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at USD 70 :)

How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL