shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
shadaras ([personal profile] shadaras) wrote2025-06-12 05:14 pm

(no subject)

1.
The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar, is very beautifully written and really is a love letter to fairy tales and sisterhood, all of which I knew it would be going into it. It is also a novella I am turning over in my head because I am trying to figure out if my "I think it should've been longer" is a genuine structural thing or just the side-effect of the print volume being ~130 pages long, only 99 of which are the titular story. (the other 30 pages are a short story teasing her upcoming short story collection.)

This is not a long story! Reading a doorstopper novel, something like Priory of the Orange Tree or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell (neither of which I ever finished, hah), being off in your estimations of length by 30 pages is unlikely to matter to the overall pacing of the book or what you expect from it.

It is almost a quarter of these printed pages.

That is a very significant amount of difference! I think about structure and pacing as I read. It's not always conscious, but I know that the number of pages remaining matters to me and my expectations. Sure, there's often some number of pages that aren't narrative at the end of a novel, but: scale, again, and also the sort of book that has extensive end notes/an appendix/etc is visible from the start, where it probably has a map and/or dramatis personae as well.

All of this is to say: I liked this story quite a lot! Which is why I'm spending so many words squinting at the way it was presented and poking at it like "you could've done better to prepare me for how this story was going to pace so that I wasn't surprised when it ended". (Because it is a gorgeous volume, with beautiful illustrations and clear care given to how it appears as an object, so why—)


2.
I taught kids class for aikido last night, because my friend who usually lead teaches wasn't feeling well, and used this as an excuse to teach the kids a very basic forward roll technique. They're all good enough at forward rolls to take one, and this throw done at their level just guides them into the position to take a forward roll; there's no force behind it, just form. (If done with the right timing and angle, it is very effective at forcing a roll! But that's much more advanced and very hard to do unintentionally.)

They did great with it, as I knew they would, and idk why this is the first time they've been taught a forward roll technique other than "my friend didn't want to teach it yet".

Next on my agenda: making them do the ikkyo pin. We'll see how long it takes to get there. (This is more likely to be something I can be like "hey what if we taught this" about and get "oh, yeah, sure" in response.)


3.
I talked to my mom on the phone this weekend. [insert 1k of deleted words about family stuff here, which tbh boil down to: I really should figure out finding and seeing a therapist. (this is not a new thought.)]


4.
I've started watching The Apothecary Diaries, an anime that I have been "yeah I'd probably like this" about since I first heard of it, and: surprise! I do like it quite a lot, as I like most stories about women and their politics and also weird girls with specialized knowledge using that knowledge to solve mysteries and help people. Maomao, the protag, is a 17yo apothecary who loves poison, does not notice people flirting with her, and thinks about how pretty the women surrounding her are all the time. (Also there's a dude who's in love with her in part because she's the only woman who goes "ew, leave me alone" instead of mooning over him, because heterosexuality must be gestured at and dudes need representation too.) (There are other men in the show; that guy, who also has interesting plot reasons for existing and doesn't actually exist solely to moon over Maomao, is just the only one other than Maomao's dad/teacher who really matters.)

I'm 10eps in and having fun. Truly just one of those things where sometimes everyone going OMG IT'S SO GOOD makes it hard to give stuff a shot, and going "y'know what I want to try something new and this has always sounded fun" is a lot easier to make happen.


5.
In other thoughts about tv shows and structure/pacing. So. Okay. I have a terrible fondness for Hearing About Sports while also often having zero interest in watching sports. (Sometimes [personal profile] tavina liveblogs sports at me and I adore this, it's very fun, please tell me about your investment in an event and explain to me why you have feelings about it; I love to go !!! over things I only just heard about and learn about underdogs I will promptly root for on principle. or about Your Team doing well at things when I have no investment about rooting for anyone in particular but like it when my friends' investment is rewarded!)

So there's the netflix sports shows, which I'm pretty sure started with Drive to Survive, which is about F1. There are a number of seasons. My twin got me to start watching them like. Three years ago...? Something like that. It's a good series, and that's in large part because in its first season it understood a very important fact about sports tv:

You need to give the audience enough context about the sport that they know why they should be invested in it.

It's not enough to present a charismatic and/or attractive person who wants to win (and probably won't) and say "look! root for this person!". You gotta know what the sport is, and what makes it dramatic, and what it takes for someone to be good at it, and then you need to show the people you're following being good at that sport! It's okay if they fail, or fuck up, or whatever not being perfect looks like; you just also gotta show when they do things right, when they get close to victory, when they have the stuff that makes it interesting to root for them. And that means the audience needs to know what that is, and what it looks like, and see that happening.

A startling number of mediocre Netflix sports reality shows do not understand that the first thing I want from a sports reality show is: the sport

perhaps I am unusual for this, but, like

if you want to get people into your sport... I think they need to be given the tools to understand the basics of how your sport works... and see that sport being performed/played in competition...

also your show can't just be "look! women can do this too!" and generally spend more times on the lives of the women than on the women actually doing the thing. like, yes, I know people find that inspiring, but wow it's more inspiring to see people doing thing than to see them crying with their families about having fucked up, couldn't you have used that time to show some people doing cool stuff instead. show me their training. their actions. not their failures to the point where I'm like... where even was the cool victory stuff... you were too focused on humanizing them and forgot that being visibly good at shit is part of the story of "I want to be one of the best in the world at this activity" too...
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sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-06-12 11:24 am
Entry tags:

Minneapolis

It's very poignant to be here again. I'm in Minneapolis so rarely that I can still distinguish each visit, but the overall sense is one of extended memory, that is not just of my own, but of anecdotes from my mother and grandmother about their lives here, my grandmother as a (very) young adult, and my mother as a kid.

Not all the memories of mine are good--the week we spent in Bloomington ranged from weird to horrific, the axis we kid spun around was the sound of my mother crying in the bathroom when my bio grandfather started his daily drinking and turned into a monster. We kids at least escaped with his bio kids (our age, his second marriage) but mom couldn't escape--we had the car.

The city that was best to them all (though mom only got to visit, never got to live there) was Red Wing. I adore that place! There's something so peaceful about Red Wing. And extended memory is very complete, as we heard ALL the stories about life on the farm, etc. But it wasn't idyllic--my grandmother and her older sister had to go--that was the conditions my great-grandmother accepted when she remarried in order to save the farm, around 1930, with the Depression really digging in. The man said he could abide the two younger girls but the sixteen year old (my grandmother) and her older sister had to get out and find their way on their own. Which they did, in Minneapolis, waiting tables.

Anyway I'm here for a con. I came a day early, knowing that getting in at one in the morning would leave me a zombie for a day. The weather is perfect--cool and cloudy. I think I'll go out for another walk.
asakiyume: (yaksa)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-06-11 10:19 am

Wednesday reading: Belle-Medusa, by Manuela Draeger*

It's a cold, surreal post-apocalyptic world, plagued by meteor showers, crumbling apartments patrolled by tigers, one where former tar-spreading technicians repurpose themselves as morning soup sellers. Bobby is wakened by a knocking at his door. He doesn't open it, but he's told, through the closed door, that Belle-Medusa, an immensely huge jellyfish, needs his help. Belle-Medusa has a library of scents in her memory, but they're mainly ocean scents. She wants Bobby to collect and convey land scents to her:
In truth, she only had one passion anymore: she collected smells. Aromas, perfumes, whiffs, and scents of all types. She numbered them and she put them in tiny special cases in her memory, in a classification system that nobody, apart from herself, was able to understand.

For this purpose, Belle-Medusa has already "plugged into" Bobby. There are various ways he can convey the scents to her, but the way he settles on is to plunge his face into water and speak them.
I had my cheek pressed against the windowpane. Just under my nose, fed by the steam that escaped from my mouth, the frost drew branching ice wisps, which imprisoned the dust. If I had had to specify the smell that lingered on the surface of the glass, I would have spoken of a dusty ice floe, of frozen goose down, of dark sherbet. Wait, I thought, maybe I could send that to Belle-Medusa, in order to check that the communication between us is well established.

I left my observation post. I groped my way to the bathroom and I filled the sink with what flowed from the faucet, water that carried with it cubes and needles of ice. Before immersing my face, I had to stir it with my hand so as not to use the end of my nose to break the film threatening to form ... I sank my head into it to my ears.

"It's me, Belle-Medusa," I said.

Heh, this got long. Let's put in a cut. )

It's a strange and wonderful story, and I recommend it. I read it in an anthology called XO Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer and published in 2013. The anthology was lent to me by a friend who had picked out that story especially for me to read because (I'm flattered to say), they said it reminded me of the story of mine they'd read--and also, I suspect, because the story's important to them: it's entered their vocabulary. They talk about their scent library. The other stories in the collection look promising too; while I'm borrowing the book, I think I'll read some more.

It also exists as a 64-page standalone publication, but only in its original French, as Belle-Méduse. For the anthology, the translation was done by Sarah and Brian Evenson.

*Manuela Draeger is a fictitious author, a librarian whose stories are intended as distraction for children in containment camps. The author of her world is Antoine Volodine ... which is in turn a pen name of the writer Jean Desvignes.
mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-06-09 01:35 pm
Entry tags:

The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is the first book in a duology, and it's the kind of duology that's really one book split into two volumes. The end of this book is merely the stopping point of this book, not in any way an ending. If that bothers you, wait around until the other half is out.

Honestly I can't tell you why I didn't love this book. I wanted to love this book. It's a secondary world fantasy where one of the central relationships of the book is an aunt and nephew, and that kind of non-standard central relationship is absolutely up my alley. It's a fantasy world where magical environmental contamination is a major threat, which is also of great interest to me. Sensitive yet matter-of-fact handling of trans characters, check. Worldbuilding that deviates from standard, check. And there wasn't anything that made me roll my eyes or say ugh! It was just fine! But for me, at least, it was just fine. Honestly if this is your sort of thing I kind of wish you'd read it and tell me what you think might have been going on here, or if it's just...that some books and some people are ships passing in the night.

asakiyume: (glowing grass)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-06-08 03:15 pm

the rambling rose and all her beguiling promises

This is the season when Rosa multiflora, the indomitable conqueror of roadsides and wastelands, the one who can render a pleasant meadow into an impassable, laceration-producing wall of arching, spreading, canes, puts out its flowers. Everywhere there are curtains and drifts of small, white-and-yellow blossoms, with a fragrance so intense that you breathe it in and begin to float. The whole rest of the year it's thorns and You Shall Not Pass, but right now it's Come To Me And Stay Awhile My Love.

"It's worth a little blood, isn't it? You can cede a little ground, can't you? To enjoy this moment with me now?" says the rambling rose.

rosa multiflora

rosa multiflora
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bloodygranuaile ([personal profile] bloodygranuaile) wrote2025-06-08 12:25 pm

Very like a whale

My May entry in the Year of Erics was the only reread of the bunch: Eric Jay Dolan’s Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. I bought this on my senior year field trip to the New Bedford Whaling Museum at the end of my Moby-Dick capstone seminar in fall 2009, and read it the first time around in 2011, after a little of the whale trauma had worn off. Now, nearly 15 years later, I a older/wiser/sadder/fatter/etc. and my love-hate relationship with Moby-Dick has turned into a whole-hearted and unironic love of it, and I would give anything to go to three-hour seminars about it at the quite reasonably late-starting hour of 9 am on Wednesdays. (Youth is wasted on the young, etc. etc.).

I decided to include this book in my Year of Erics reading because 15 years is a long time, certainly plenty of time to forget most of the stuff you read in a nonfiction book. This, I think, was a good decision! I had, indeed, forgotten quite a lot of stuff, and there were many fun anecdotes about American whaling, plus some information on Norwegian whaling that some steampunk author or other really ought to incorporate into something. Also, even though Salem was never a big whaling port, the additional 15 years in New England coastal cities makes reading New England maritime history more fun than it was when I had only lived a few years in landlocked Worcester.

The book covers not just the golden age but truly the entire timeline of American whaling, including what little we know about pre-Columbian native whaling practices, and then from the very earliest drift whaling/scavenging of the English in what they would turn into New England up until the very last wooden American whaleship, the Wanderer, left port from New Bedford in 1924, which promptly wrecked on Cuttyhunk Island in Buzzard’s Bay. Whoops.

In the middle we learn about drift whaling, shore whaling, open-sea whaling, wartime raiding upon whaleships, the discovery and exploitation of various fisheries, and some whale anatomy. There are silly political cartoons and tales of battles and mutinies where people say all sorts of insane things to each other, because people have always been people. There are not really heroes although there are occasionally villains. Fun anecdotes are enjoyably woven through a narrative that does trace the overall rises and falls in fortune of the industry and explain how it shaped American life and commerce.

I am glad to have brought this old friend off the shelf for a little bit, and now I am going to put it back on the shelf of Boat Books where it will soon be joined by some new friends as summer lakeside reading season gets started.
shadaras: A phoenix with wings fully outspread, holidng a rose and an arrow in its talons. (Default)
shadaras ([personal profile] shadaras) wrote2025-06-08 07:41 am

(no subject)

To nobody's surprise, I once again had the best grades in my apprentice cohort. (More entertaining: first/second/third for my year was the exact same people in the exact same order, and the other two were fighting over second place because they figured I'd get first again.) Apparently this means I'll get to go to the regional competition again next year, since the way that's structured is "the people who do best each year get to go and we figure out what category each of you is in along the way (and also the one TAB guy goes)". We'll see! (This means two of us will need to do something we don't do for work. Curious to see if the guy who did architectural last year will do it again this year. Very curious who gets asked to do welding.) It'll be in Boston next year, so that's an easy drive, something to look forward to.

The last day of school, where they announce this, is also a potluck provided by the instructional staff. There was. Functionally nothing I could eat, between "cannot eat cheese/dairy" and "does not eat pork/beef". I know why I expect better in general even if my reaction is weary disappointment and "yeah, of course". (I have explained these food restrictions multiple times and nobody thinks about them anyway.) (they are not hard to avoid)

Work is work. It continues. It's very funny any day that everyone's just sort of like... "we are doing obnoxious things that are not hard but are time-consuming and make us wonder what the people who told us to do this were thinking, and also it is hot, how much time can we spend talking instead".

Obligate Diurnalism continues to rear its head as we approach the solstice. Probably I am not getting as much sleep as I should most nights! Oh well. I am getting enough sleep, overall, and my body will force me to bed earlier if I actually need it.

in non-irl things:

Murderbot show continues to be good! Very fun to watch! Has some divergences from the book, in large part because of being a different medium I suspect, but that's not making it any less fun to watch. Everyone's facial expressions are fantastic. The in-universe media is a joy. They made a theme song for Sanctuary Moon and it's so cheesy and good.

I have been spending a truly impressive amount of time talking to [personal profile] hafnia about a specific AU for our D&D blorbos (which started out as iddy kink nonsense but then GREW PLOT), which is so canon-divergent we're just like "this is basically original work with D&D filling in the worldbuilding that's not important". It is such a joy to wake up in the morning to see more of it turned into prose and be like "oooh YES :eyes:" and have feelings about things that I already knew were going to happen because we've talked out like the vast majority of what's going to happen. xD But it's DIFFERENT when it's in narrative prose instead of flowing between rp and brainstorming, y'know?

However also I need to write more things that are not about the D&D campaign that is my primary fandom brain thing right now, due to having exchanges etc that uh I did agree to do and do care a lot about but also I did most of those sign ups before (*checks*) the beginning of the month (50k later and we are at "gotta clear up the curse before we can get to the really iddy kink nonsense, but that shouldn't take too much longer!"). So. Can't plan for "I have been CONSUMED"?

...it's fine I can write enough words in the time available, I just need to drag myself away from going "HEY SO WHAT IF" or "OH NO: A THOUGHT" all the time. xD

(I am having SUCH a good time with this though <3)
skygiants: Autor from Princess Tutu gesturing smugly (let me splain)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-06-06 08:18 pm

(no subject)

A while back, [personal profile] lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.

For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.

As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that [personal profile] lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.

Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.

Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.
jazzfish: Owly, reading (Owly)
Tucker McKinnon ([personal profile] jazzfish) wrote2025-06-06 08:03 am
Entry tags:

bookbookbook

Going through my books, because it's been a couple years since my last serious purge. Pick up The Fortunate Fall. Note that it's under the author's deadname. Ponder what to do about that: sticky-label on the spine? Shelve it under R?

Open it up. Note that my copy is signed (under the author's deadname). Flip through. Read two and a half pages. Realise I've just booksniped myself. Put it firmly back on the shelf.

Next up, I guess. I was gonna read some of my unreads to see if they're worth keeping / hauling but sometimes the bookshelf speaks.

(I believe Cameron Reed's second novel will be out this fall. FINALLY. I am excited.)



Just finished Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter. It's ... the trappings are I guess "industrial fantasy." I think Abby described it as nihilistic. I can see where she was coming from but to me it's more about, mm. The process of outgrowing nihilism, maybe.
DONNY: Are these the nazis?
WALTER: No, Donny, these men are nihilists. There's nothing to be frightened of.

Currently reading the sequel, The Dragons of Babel, which starts off in the same nihilistic vein but quickly takes a turn for the at least somewhat more cheerful. I remember liking this one an awful lot when I read it. Looking forward to the third volume after this.
skygiants: Jane Eyre from Paula Rego's illustrations, facing out into darkness (more than courage)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-06-04 08:47 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

Over Memorial Day weekend [personal profile] genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by [personal profile] genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.

As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that [personal profile] coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!

My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."

Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.

The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.

The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.

However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'

The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((

Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in huge spoilers )

Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.

NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.
asakiyume: chalk drawing (catbird and red currant)
asakiyume ([personal profile] asakiyume) wrote2025-06-04 01:57 pm

driveway art: song sparrow

We have some sunny days, and I finished the job I was working on, so I drew a song sparrow. The song sparrow is found throughout most of North America, "continuous from the Aleutians to the eastern United States," says Cornell Ornithology. They're small everywhere bird with a lovely song. Both their song and their plumage varies across the continent.

Song Sparrow - chalk on asphalt

Song Sparrow - chalk on asphalt

Song Sparrow - chalk on asphalt

Scientific name "Melospiza melodia." You can hear samples of their songs here. (The ones around here sound most like the fourth recording down.)
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sartorias ([personal profile] sartorias) wrote2025-06-04 01:02 pm
Entry tags:

Northwards

I was taking to a felow customer when I stopped for sandwiches while strolling around downtown Albany last night, and when I commented on the deepeness of the verdure around me--I can't get enough of it--he said that it's been a very wet season here.

I took a walk along the Hudson, stopping at a little side canal, or whatever they are called, when I saw a bridge and inviting shadows (the sun was overly warm and the hair humid and kind of dirty). I snapped this shot:



If it works right, and you embiggen, look just above the top branch of the fallen tree. I'd spotted a pair of geeze swimming toward it, and thought they'd make a splendid shot framed by the two branches. But they never emerged from behind the top one, some twenty feet below me and upstream. I could see the ripples from them paddling, but no sign of the geese.

When I looked closer, I just spotted a black and white goose head peeking at me from beyond that branch. They were clearly waiting for the monster to lurk somewhere else.

And now I'm on my way northwards toward Montreal, which I should reach this evening.
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
Tucker McKinnon ([personal profile] jazzfish) wrote2025-06-02 07:42 pm
Entry tags:

i've made enough of my own mistakes on my own

I'm home. I'm pretty well caught up on classwork; mostly what remains is a big group project and a final exam. And I need to finish writing the final report on my practicum. Weird to think this will all be in the rearview in three and a half weeks.

I'm still jobhunting, which remains a reliable depression trigger. Not worth talking about other than to note it's ongoing, on all counts.

Mr Tuppert has decided that what is best in life is to demand scritches/pets from the cat-mat next to the laptop spot on the table, while I'm eating and reading ye internette. Sometimes he also gets brushed, which he generally ... somewhere between tolerates and enjoys. Eventually he decides that he's had enough company and isn't it time for me to go be somewhere that's not in his space? He expresses this through the medium of lightly biting my hand. Not ideal but one works with what one has. Treats can redirect him away from being cranky, but that is not really a road I want to go down.

For now I keep sending out resumes. If I continue to get no bites by the end of the month I will have to regroup. In the meanwhile it's threatening to be early summer out there. Things as they currently are aren't so bad.
mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-06-02 07:09 pm
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Fourth Street Schedule

 

Fear, Loathing, and Transcendence in the Great American Road Trip. Friday, June 13, 4:00. Beth Cato, Marissa Lingen, Alec Marsh, Arkady Martine, Reuben Poling. Whether we like it or not, we are currently in the United States of America. The particular fantastic resonance of this country, and the continent it occupies, is often evoked by that great American literary tradition – the road novel. There’s an undeniable magic to traversing this huge landmass, with all its relatively open spaces. The brutal process of colonization that produced this country, and the unusually truncated history delineated by that process, add texture and horror to the magic of the open road.

Books like Max Gladstone’s Last Exit or Rebecca Roanhorse’s Trail of Lightning take the American road novel a step or ten further into the fantastic, including unflinching consideration of the bones beneath the highway. What other possibilities can fantasists encounter out on the interstate, and what can they throw in the trunk to bring along into other worlds than these?

I'm Only Happy When It Rains. Saturday, June 14, 2:00. Elizabeth Bear, Anthony W. Eichenlaub, Marissa Lingen, Arkady Martine, Caroline Stevermer. The weather’s weirder lately. Or at least out here in the regular world it is – but the weather’s been weird in fantasy for a long time now. Sometimes it tries to kill you (like in McCaffery’s Pern novels or Elizabeth Bear’s The Steles of the Sky), sometimes it makes you really miserable and then it tries to kill you (CJ Cherryh’s 40,000 in Gehenna, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather), and sometimes you try to kill it and that doesn’t go so well (every story about terraforming or cloud seeding or propitiating the weather gods for mercy). Is the weather really just an excuse for an author’s indulgence in pathetic fallacy? Or can the environment become a live actor in fantasy storytelling?

mrissa: (Default)
mrissa ([personal profile] mrissa) wrote2025-06-02 06:55 pm
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Books read, late May

 

Yukito Ayatsuji, The Labyrinth House Murders. The first of two books I read this fortnight whose ending made me actively quite angry. The ending did not work for me at all, leaning hard on two twists one of which frankly did not work for me logistically. Yuck.

Peter Beinert, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. This is a great example of a time when it's good to be aware that I am not the target audience for everything, because I think Beinert's main target audience is the overlap of his fellow Jewish people (I am not) and people who need convincing that being concerned for Jewish safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) and being concerned for Palestinian safety in the Middle East (and elsewhere) do not have to be opposing concerns (I already believe that). It was still interesting to see how he approached this topic writing to people who are not me, and it's a very short book, but it's not any more cheerful than you might think, especially as he is willing to discuss recent deaths in this region from both/several groups in some detail.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Complete Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. It is what it says on the tin: all her stories, arranged chronologically. They are the sort of slice of life vignettes (and somewhat longer sometimes) that I don't often like, and I liked these enough to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of them. Why? I'm not sure. I think because the slicing of life was done with a firm, wry hand? I think most people would enjoy this more in small bites, and maybe I would too, but I was traveling and had limited book supply, so this is where we landed.

Chaz Brenchley, Radhika Rages at the Crater School, Chapters 25-26. Kindle. This is the end of this book, and it has an ending entirely in keeping with its genre, so it likely won't surprise you if you parcel out the reading like this, but it will satisfy inasmuch as the boarding school story can satisfy you. If you're not a boarding school story fan, this is definitely not the story for you.

Adrienne Maree Brown, Ancestors. I can verify that it's okay to read this without the two that precede it in its series because that's just what I did. You'll get all the incluing you need about what has happened (a plague, Detroit being enclosed behind a wall) and who these people are (a diverse bunch of people with intermittent super-ish powers), and their personal problems entwine satisfyingly with their science fiction problems. Also there is a bunch of sex and gender, in case you want some. Also, and importantly, there is a quite good dog.

Willa Hammitt Brown, Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack. This is lavishly illustrated though a bit repetitive--it's definitely for the general/casual audience. (We live in a time when a book interrogating the masculinity of lumberjacks can be for the general/casual audience. What a world.) I learned some things that apply to my own ancestors as well as more general things about the lumber camps and their later mythologization, so that was interesting.

Stephanie Burgis, How to Write Romantasy. Kindle. This only gets categorized as "books" because it was an individual ebook. What it is actually is an essay, and I picked it up because I am not fond of romantasy as a category but am fond of Steph's work and the work of a few others I know she also enjoys, and I thought I would learn more from someone doing it in a way I like and respect than from people whose work doesn't connect with me. This did turn out to be the case--there were thoughts about subgenre and relationship arc that are useful to me even as I write things that are definitely not romantasy.

A.S. Byatt, A Whistling Woman. Reread. This is the wrong end of the series, this is starting at the ending, but I still find these characters fascinating, and this is the one I could--with some joy--find used, that I was missing. (I still need a copy of the first one but I can reread the middle two any time I like.) Midcentury women struggling to lead meaningful lives, love to see it.

Antonio Carbone, Epidemic Cities. Kindle. A quite short monograph on the various handling of different plagues by different cities, probably will not be much new if you think about this topic a lot but a good intro.

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Kindle. I said sarcastically to my niblings, "You'll never guess how it ends." But there's a lot that comes for the archbishop before death, wandering around the American Southwest in an era that...look, Cather doesn't have what we'd call modern consciousness of colonialism, but she has better awareness of Native people as people than I would have feared for this era.

Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang, eds., The Way Spring Arrives: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators. Kindle, reread. Reread this for my book club, glad to discuss the stories in more detail with other interested people.

C.S.E. Cooney, Saint Death's Herald. Second in its series, and just as lovely in its writing and characterization and combination of whimsy and seriousness, no one else is quite like Cooney in that combination. Very happy to have this, you might be too.

Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. This contains comparisons of art/archaeology to literary portrayal in this era, which is interesting, but also you will know just from the title whether you are the audience for this book or not. It is an absolutely lovely thing that it is, but it's not some other secret thing that will surprise you. I got it off a shelf labeled "history of WHAT???," and you will know whether that shelf is your heart's home or not.

Francis Dupuis-Derland and Benjamin Pillet, eds., Anarcho-Indigenism: Conversations on Land and Freedom. A series of interviews with people who have very different relationships with this term--gave me a lot more questions than answers, which is I think a good sign in this kind of book, especially when the people being interviewed have more writings available elsewhere.

Elizabeth Fair, A Winter Away. Reread. Unfortunately I was not immediately aware that this was a reread and more or less didn't notice, because it was not particularly notable either time. Had I read this already, or was the plot and characterization that predictable? We now know the answer, but at the time either seemed plausible. (Again, traveling. Limited book supply.) It's not offensive, it's fine, it's just...gosh I hope to remember not to read it a third time.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth. Kindle. This is my least favorite Gaskell novel so far. This is the sort of book that you read and think, ah yes, we had to go through this to get to where we are, but...unless you're a Gaskell superfan (which, fair, hi, hello), I feel like a book whose thesis is "maybe we should treat women who have sex like they are fellow humans rather than demons from the lowest pit of hell, at least if they're otherwise completely angelic" is--hmm, I wanted to say that it's not something most of us need any more, but I think what I would rather say is that it's unlikely to reach those who need it in quite this form these days.

Bill Hayton, A Brief History of Vietnam: Colonialism, War, and Renewal: The Story of a Nation Transformed. On the up side, this introductory history of Vietnam contains a great deal of pre-20th century stuff that sometimes gets skipped over in Anglophone histories, and it's a quick read. On the other hand, it's an entire country, you may well find yourself dissatisfied by a treatment this short, and it surely was not consistent about things like providing pronunciation or defining terms, sometimes doing so repetitively and sometimes not at all. I hope there's a better starting place for this.

Mohamed Kheir, Sleep Phase. A short dreamy novel (yes) about emerging from being a political prisoner in Egypt in this century, readjusting to life outside and its changes. Glad I read it but will not want to reread it.

David Kirby, The Baltic World, 1773-1993: Europe's Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. So on the up side, Kirby is very solid about paradigm shifts like Sweden sometimes being central Scandinavia, in political terms, and sometimes being the northwest corner of the Baltic. Unfortunately his focus of scholarship (I've read his history of Finland) and the timing of this book (basically right at the end date in the title) tipped the balance towards him being one of the people of that generation who felt the need to come up with explanations for why it was inevitable or just or...something, why it made sense for the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia to be conquered when Finland was not...without reference to bloody geography for heaven's sake get it together my dude if your explanation does not lean heavily on "Finland is a frozen swamp and the others less so," what are you even doing. Ahem. Okay. Anyway, it's in some ways a useful historical reference and in other ways a cautionary tale for not trying to make history more just and sensible than the world actually is. (Please note that I say "frozen swamp" with the deepest of affection.) (It's just, look, I know you all wanted to have impeccable reasons why it couldn't happen to you, but it could bloody happen to you, of course it could, that's why we had to let the entire Baltic into NATO ffs, it could happen to you any day of the week, victim blaming for your own comfort is not a reasonable worldview thank you and good day to you.) (The thing is that not a lot of people read Baltic history with no strong feelings about the Baltic, I think, and I am no counterexample.) (If more of this book had been about the Winter War, would he have...no, he's an historian of FInland, he ought to already have.) (Harumph.)

Ann LeBlanc, The Transitive Properties of Cheese. Kindle. A delightful novella about the lengths a genetically modified cheesemaking clone will go to in order to protect outer space's most perfect cheese cave. I had a good time with this.

Rose Macaulay, Told By an Idiot. Kindle. This is a family novel that follows its characters from the late Victorian period through the postwar period although since it was published in 1923, it's not very far into the postwar period. It's got her characteristic humor and observations of humanity and its foibles, and she's very explicitly talking about how The Young Generation is perpetually being credited with all sorts of new traits that have in fact been in humans the whole time. I love her, and this was a fun one for me, albeit with somewhat less plot direction than some of her others.

Charlotte McConaughy, Wild Dark Shore. This was the other book I read this fortnight with a catastrophically disappointing ending. It was going so well with climate change and botany and repairing families, but the ending upset and frankly really offended me--this is not an "I don't like sad endings" problem, this is an "I don't like what the shape of sad ending once again implies about the worth of women" problem. Not recommended despite copious botany and several seals.

Tashan Mehta, Mad Sisters of Esi. Discussed elsewhere.

Candace Robb, A Gift of Sanctuary. I managed to finish this medieval mystery novel without attaching to any of the characters even a little bit. There was a lot of "which one is he? oh right that one" going on in my head. I finished it, I left it in a rental apartment, I can't say I recommend it but it probably won't do you any harm.

Rosália Rodrigo, Beasts of Carnaval. Discussed elsewhere.

Silky Shah, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. Kindle. Explorations of how the carceral criminal justice system feeds the carceral immigration system, sure-handed and angry where it needs to be.

Vivian Shaw, Strange New World. The fourth full-length book, fifth story, in the Dr. Greta Van Helsing series, and this one goes to the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell for its monster medical drama, and also to [gasp] New York. I would not start here, because there are character implications and because the previous ones are still in print, but I actually think you could. But also the previous ones are still in print.

Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire. This was brilliantly done, pointing out that even the histories of the Age of Revolution that make an effort to include people of color are mostly still extremely focused on the Atlantic world, and things of interest were absolutely going on in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as well. Interesting, well-written, hurrah.

A.G. Slatter, The Path of Thorns. A very classically formed governess novel but with a ton of magic stuff in it. Yay, enjoyed this.

Sarah Suk, Meet Me at Blue Hour. A sweet novel about two Korean-American teens in Korea coping with the results of a memory removal clinic while one of them has a grandfather in the early stages of dementia.

Sunaura Taylor, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert. I've read several of this genre of book, which is case study of an ecological region and the humans who live in it being ravaged by particular companies who know exactly what they're doing and attempt to lie about it. This is probably the best one I've read so far, as it has very solid grounding in both disability theory and ecology, as well as the politico-historical chops for the research, and also the personal disabled/community connection to the subject, so if you only read one in this genre, read this one. (And hey, read one in this genre sometime, maybe, huh? You might think you already know how bad it is, and I promise it's worse.)

Sienna Tristen, Hortus Animarum. Kindle. A glorious collection of botanical poems paying tribute to loves that are not necessarily sexual or romantic but are definitely queer. One of the best indices I've seen in years, for friends who are index hounds.

Mai Der Vang, Primordial. The saola, a rare bovid native to Vietnam, is Vang's central metaphor here about the Hmong refugee experience. Some of the poems about it are stunning, brave, and vivid, but the whole is rather more monofocus on the one image (the saola) than I prefer in a collection of this length.

Elizabeth von Arnim, The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight. Kindle. This is a very silly book about a German princess who runs away to live in England in a little cottage and learns to appreciate being a princess. At no point does anyone consider that she is not inherently superior to all who surround her. It's briskly written and got me through waiting for an airplane, but I can't say it was wonderful enough that I recommend it more generally.

Neon Yang, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame. Okay, so there are books where the twist is the point, and there are books where you see the twist coming from a mile away and the journey is the point. This is definitely more in the latter camp, but unfortunately it meant that I started to find the protagonist frustrating for not also seeing the twist coming. Possibly this is because it's much harder to be in a fantasy novel than to read one. If you want a well-written sapphic knights-and-dragons story and don't much care about the plot, here you go.

 

genarti: ([tutu] dance your own story)
genarti ([personal profile] genarti) wrote2025-05-31 12:08 am

A couple of recent theatrical experiences

1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet

This was incredible???

More rambling about that )

If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.

(ETA: [personal profile] skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)

2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players

Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.

More thoughts (briefer) )

...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.
skygiants: Rue from Princess Tutu dancing with a raven (belle et la bete)
skygiants ([personal profile] skygiants) wrote2025-05-30 11:23 pm
Entry tags:

(no subject)

The Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.

we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )
cyborganize: (fan voy spectacle)
cyborganize ([personal profile] cyborganize) wrote in [community profile] wiscon_vidparty2025-05-30 02:24 pm

Wiscon Vid Party 2025 complete playlist with warnings

Surprise! By a heroic effort of [personal profile] eruthros, a virtual Vid Party happened at this year's Wisconline.

Here is the playlist for the whole show, including warnings/notes and links to watch the vids.

I want to highlight one Premiere: Deep Space by [personal profile] garrideb

If you check out and enjoy any of the vids from this show, I know the creators would really appreciate a comment!