Reading Page

Rogan: okay guys, I am throwing in the towel on this one, but there is a pluralstories read of historical importance that I just cannot get through: Peter Ibbetson, by Gabriel du Maurier. If one of YOU want to take a crack at it, it’s long in the public domain; have at it! https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9817

Looking at that summary, you might be wondering why this fiction book you’ve never heard of from 1891 is of research interest to me. Well, like His Dark Materials inspired daemonism, and Steven Universe popularized gem-style fusions, Peter Ibbetson inspired at least TWO completely separate and unrelated people to use its techniques for “dreaming true.” Ida Craddock (the woman harassed to death for marrying an angel in 1902) loved this book and references it specifically in her diaries, and Celia Green in the 1960s mentions a lucid dreamer using the same technique successfully, which is in turn cited by Benjamin Walker in 1974.

Needless to say, it’s shockingly rare to see something like this mentioned from this early period. I REALLY want to read this book! I just... can’t get through it. So now I'm telling y’all about it.

Guys! The Russian government is really cracking down on Livejournal. If you haven’t imported or downloaded LJ stuff, now is a good time!

We cannot do it today, because we have our month-start work and inventory/tax-prep to do, but we plan to go make local back-ups of the long-defunct plural communities we were (and technically still are) members of, though it’ll have to be done manually. We already lost the soulbonding comm, and the only reason our LJ account still exists is because of these comms.

If there are others you think of archival note, please let me know if you plan to archive them! Let’s pool info so we don’t redo each other’s work!

An anonymous reader sent us this cool thing:

I found a historic Brazilian example of plurality and wanted to share it with you. In the nonfiction book "Samba" by Alma Guillermoprieto, she describes Seu Malandrino, a dead man who sometimes possessed a favela-dwelling woman. Here's an excerpt from pp. 110 — 111:

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On Mondays, Celina’s body was often on loan to a scoundrel by the name of Seu Malandrino, who wore her chunky, comfortable flesh with a menacing swagger, spit obscene words out of the corner of his mouth, straddled her only chair horseback-style, and kept his face wreathed in a halo of cigarette smoke.

The first time I saw him, while poking my head in Celina’s door and running directly into the stare from his dirty yellow eyes, I found him very frightening indeed. It took a couple of seconds before I recognized a face under the white boater hat with red trim and babbled an apology for the intrusion. “I’m sorry, Celina,” I began, and was cut short. “Celina isn’t here. My name is Seu Malandrino.” The voice was gravelly and sinuous… “Let the gringa come in!” he said to a frightened young couple sitting on the sofa, and to me, “Sit in that corner and shut up!”

Due to switching webhosts for healthymultiplicity.com, our email is down and probably has been since Christmas. We are working on getting it up and going again.

Until then, if you have our phone number or the old email for the Greenough Hall MSTers Club, you can contact us through those. Sorry for the inconvenience; among its many failings, the old webhost has given me no sign of whether the emails I sent in the past week went out or not; on my end, it’s been acting buggily normal, and I’m having to guess it no longer works purely because nothing has come in for so long.