sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
[personal profile] sovay
Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt. [personal profile] spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

Minneapolis

Jun. 12th, 2025 11:24 am
sartorias: (Default)
[personal profile] sartorias
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.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
I got home to find the day's mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #83, containing my poem "Below Surface." It is a poem of empire; I wrote it at the start of the third week in January after shouting, "I ran out of curse tablets!" It bears about as much relation to the realities of the Emperors who died at Eboracum as the medieval Welsh legends of Constantius and I see no reason that should impair its efficacy. The issue it belongs to is gone, showcasing the elusive fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Christian Fiachra Stevens, J. M. Vesper, Vincent Bae, and more. John and Flo Stanton contribute interior art as well as the reliable spirit photography of their front and back covers. You might as well pick up a copy before it disappears.

I photographed some ghost windows. I bought myself some white chocolate peanut butter cups. [personal profile] selkie's gift of tinned mackerel with lemon did not survive the night.

(no subject)

Jun. 11th, 2025 01:31 pm
loup_noir: (Default)
[personal profile] loup_noir
 Much to my surprise, I have finished all of the Duolingo German exercises.  After all of that, do I speak German?  Nein.  Ich spreche Deutsche nicht so gut.  I do understand a lot more words, and I can read quite a bit.  While I hadn't expected to be fluent, I expected, I dunno, more?  There's a daily "refresh" that I can work through, but it's clear that there won't be much new information to absorb.  It's time to cruise the 'net and find a different course, maybe one that actually addresses grammar.  That'd be nice.

I had my much-awaited trip to Germany mostly planned out for this fall.  There's a lot that I want to see that's new and a few places I wanted to go back to.  I gave up on revisiting Berlin, a city I fell in love with back in 2010.  Just seeing all the museums would take about a week, and then there's all the wonderful architecture, the parks, the ostolgie to check out, and, well, Berlin.  A three-week trip ought to work out about right for my plans.   Unfortunately, the WBH does not want to go with me.  I haven't traveled by myself for more than a few days in over forty years.  Also, I'm more than a little worried about what's going on here. 

Status:
back: mostly normal.  Still a bit hesitant to do much labor that requires periods of bending over.  I'd pulled so much grass before this annual back stupidity that it'll take me another day or so to get that rounded up and taken to the compost mountain in the meadow.

reading: nothing.  Much sadness.  However, my beloved library just sent an email that says there's a book awaiting me.  

knitting: during summer?  Ha!

concerts: the '25-'26 season is coming together.  I'd be happier, if the funding for PBS and NPR hadn't been cut.  Query sent to my local radio station to see if I ought to finish booking musicians.  

mental state: absofuckinglutely worried about what's going on in my country.  

I'll never see my mom's guitar again

Jun. 10th, 2025 02:47 pm
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Under the circumstances, I had different weird dreams than I would have expected: writing a poem, watching some incredibly threadbare film noir with no waking equivalent, hearing a performance from a musical theater star ditto. I am beginning to think the pop culture of my dreams actually is the hell of a good video store next door, leavened in the last few nights by dreams of re-reading real-life authors currently in storage like P.C. Hodgell or Joan D. Vinge. I remain physically fried, news at nowhen. At least the rain seems to have kept off the neighborly leafblowing which perforated so much of yesterday. The news continues to feel like stupidly lethal cosplay, which I remember from the last round of this administration, which doesn't make me hate it less.
larryhammer: floral print origami penguin, facing left (Default)
[personal profile] larryhammer
A c-novel recommendation: I Am Average and Unremarkable, a xianxia by Yue Xia Die Ying (“butterfly shadow beneath the moon”). I’ve enjoyed four other novels by the author, including serious historical romances and the lighthearted xianxia Ascending, Do Not Disturb. If you like the latter, you will likely enjoy this, as it has much the same sense of humor—and more of it.

Our Heroine, Jiu Hui, is a young yao, a word that can mean anything from spirit to monster to demon, but in this world, spirit comes closest—in this case, she’s a plant spirit, specifically a garlic chive spirit. (Yes, that’s a lol.) Other yao in this world are animals and sometimes plants that have absorbed enough power to attain sentience and, for the more advanced, the ability to take human form. Most humans, however, believe yao are inimical monsters as dangerous as demons (also present in this world), so she always presents as human.

The story starts with Our Heroine seeking to join a human cultivation sect because she’s reached the limit of what her remote yao village can teach her about human-style cultivation. Because the larger righteous sects are very into being righteous scourges of both yao and demons, she joins a small, relaxed sect. (Very small: five masters and ten disciples.) This turns out to be an excellent fit, as her apparently weak sect emphasizes evasion and deception techniques, and its interactions with other sects are best characterized on a sliding scale from mooching to grifting—and she, too, is very much a trickster figure. The story doesn’t use the term, but I think of them as specializing in the Dao of Shamelessness, though like many literary Tricksters, they stand with what’s right when it counts. Meanwhile, her Junior Sect Brother, recruited at the same time, turns out to be, ah, let’s call him socially awkward—as in, not well socialized—and he is hardly the only character with a background that is not simple.

It’s a fun book, rolled out with solid pacing. (The author notes are hilarious.) It also has a carefully laid plot that’s the spine of a surprisingly serious thematic core for a xianxia—it examines, from multiple directions, the question of when a sacrifice for the greater good, both willing and not, is morally acceptable. That there’s a literal Omelas situation is only one thread of this. Deep spoilers for the ending in rot13: Gur puvyq va gur onfrzrag vf na vzcbegnag punenpgre, naq gur abiry pyvznk vf onfvpnyyl Bhe Urebvar tbvat ‘jub gur shpx frg hc guvf ohyyfuvg gebyyrl ceboyrz’ naq qrslvat gur urnirayl qnb sbe orvat hawhfg.

I highly recommend this to anyone who’s already read a couple xianxia—it’s probably not a good starter story for the genre, as it leans heavily on convention to avoid explanations, even more so than Ascending, Do Not Disturb. It doesn’t help that the fan translation is a little wobbly (the translator particularly has trouble with verb forms). But if you have the background and can tolerate imperfect prose, this is a great read.

---L.

Subject quote from Teardrop, Massive Attack.

The Witch Roads, by Kate Elliott

Jun. 9th, 2025 01:35 pm
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

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.

Helpful

Jun. 9th, 2025 05:21 pm
shewhomust: (Default)
[personal profile] shewhomust
This morning's post brought a book I had ordered (through Abebooks). It was wrapped in a black plastic bag.

On the bag was the encouraging information: "This bag is made from a minimum 30% post consumer waste plastic and can be recycled again if dispased of correctly."

But don't despair: there's a clue: more information at https://www.recyclenow.com/what-to-do-with-plastic-film. I muttered, naturally, because that's quite a lot to type, and it would be easy to make a mistake, but I copied it very carefully.

I got a 404, of course.

(The bag does have a triangle recycling symbol with a 4 in it, and the letters LDPE, which enabled me to search the website and find an assurance that I could take it to the supermarket with my other plastic bags. Good. But coldn't they just have said that?)

Thinking About Camping

Jun. 9th, 2025 08:15 am
hrj: (Default)
[personal profile] hrj
One of the things I treated myself to in retirement was a lifetime National Park Pass (because of the senior discount). Which, of course, is only useful if I actually use it. I've been thinking about getting back to doing the occasional short car-camping trip. (Short enough to leave the cats to their own devices, so mostly fairly local. But with some light cat-checkup I could get as far as Crater Lake.)

First step will be to pull out all the camping gear to check that it's clean and in good working order. I have a set-up for the back of the Element with an elevated platform bed with gear stowed underneath. I can take a bicycle, but not the recumbent (which is a good argument for keeping the fold-up Brompton).

At one point I bought a pop-up so that I can set up a larger "living space" off the back of the vehicle, which I haven't ever used yet. So I need to do a test set-up. My plan is to use some of the canvas from my old pavilion to create walls for it, so that I can use it for changing. (Changing clothes while wriggling around in a sleeping bag is for the young and flexible.) So I need to do that.

And then, of course, there's the issue of scheduling reservations, though mid-week availability will help there, I imagine. I haven't found a similar program for state parks -- there's a senior discount program, but it isn't as generous. But state parks are more numerous, of course.
larryhammer: a wisp of colored smoke, label: "softly and suddenly vanished away" (disappeared)
[personal profile] larryhammer
For Poetry Monday:

One word is too often profaned,” Percy Shelley

One word is too often profaned
    For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
    For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
    For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
    Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
    But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
    And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
    Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
    From the sphere of our sorrow?


Another poem Shelley wrote in 1822 that was posthumously published with the editorial title “To ——.” In this case, —— was Jane Williams, with whom he did not in fact have an affair—he wrote several poems to her, all professing deep friendship, but he seems to have truly kept things at that level (with his history, that’s not a given). Jane Williams and her common-law husband, Edward, were close friends with both Shelleys, and Edward died in the same boating accident that killed Percy. The word is, of course, at the end of line 9.

(That rhyme of accept and reject gets a side-eye.)

---L.

Subject quote from My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own, Connie Francis.

All that skin against the glass

Jun. 9th, 2025 05:11 am
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.
sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
[personal profile] sovay
Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

Queen of the May

Jun. 10th, 2025 06:09 pm
shewhomust: (Default)
[personal profile] shewhomust
Sunday was (would have been) Frances's birthday; ten days ago was her funeral. Her (three, adult) children had found a note, handwritten in pencil, listing a number of small bequests, and saying that she wanted a full requiem mass followed by a celebratory wake: so that's what we did.

It was a good funeral: it met that essential test, that the celebrant had known the deceased, so that Frances's personality shone through the entire ceremony, the parts conducted by the church which had been such an important part of her life, as well as the contributions of her friends and family. Good, too, in that so many of those friends and family managed to be there.

I don't think I'd ever been to a Catholic funeral before, and was ready for all sorts of unfamiliar ritual. In fact, there was much that was very familiar: a niece read the 23rd Psalm, rather unsteadily; a graddaughter read from Proverbs:
Who can find a woman of noble character?
She is worth far more than jewels...

Not the translation I know, which my father was fond of quoting, the price of a good woman is above rubies... (my mother's name, which she rarely used, was Ruby), but the change from the familiar words making it easier to hear this portrait of an entirely domestic paragon, and see it as at least a partial portrait of our friend.

But I wasn't ready to find myself not recognising the hymns. I learned afterwards that they had been chosen from those Frances's children had sung at school: does that explain why two of them were entirely Marian? Yes, I know this is a thing, but I've never met it in action before. The one which provided the title of this post has the refrain:
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May,
O Mary! we crown thee with blossoms today,
Queen of the Angels, Queen of the May.

This is something I wouldn't have been surprised to encounter among the Victorian parlour ballads which make their way into folk clubs. Contrariwise, I was surprised that the final hymn of the service was one - at last - one I knew: Sydney Carter's Lord of the Dance. I shouldn't have been: I think of Carter as a writer of (often political) folk songs, The Crow on the Cradle and Sing John Ball, but his Guardian obituary opens with the popularity of his songs with school assemblies. Afterwards I asked the left-winger of the family whether this was his choice, but he was completely unaware of this connection: Lord of the Dance had been his mother's choice. Another sign of a good funeral, that you learn something new about the deceased.

Later at the wake I learned something else. There was all the pleasure of a reunion of old friends, who had known Frances since our university days when several of us baby-sat for her. The introduction was made by someone who came from the same village as Frances's mother-in-law, and I assumed they had met there, but no: she explained that she had run into her neighbour in Marks & Spencer's in Durham, and had both exclaimed in surprise "What are you doing here?" The same day, Frances had phoned to invite her to dinner. Well, of course she did.

It's morphogenesis

Jun. 7th, 2025 06:12 am
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
[personal profile] sovay
As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

Jun. 5th, 2025 11:13 pm
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.
jacey: (Default)
[personal profile] jacey

Narrated by Wil Wheaton
Fantasy, science fiction or pure absurdist literature? You’ll need to make your own mind up about that. It’s probably all three. The premise is that the moon, all of a sudden, turns to cheese. What kind of cheese? Not sure, but because cheese is less dense than rock and because the moon’s mass has not altered, it’s suddenly bigger and brighter and everyone notices. Rather than following one main character this book works as a series of interspersed stories as people from different walks of life react differently. First we meet the staff of a museum which holds a piece of moon rock; rock until it isn’t. Then there’s an academic turned pop-science author, a bunch of NASA astronauts whose dreams have been shattered, three retirees who meet in a diner to put the world to rights, a young girl who simply wants to write her great fantasy novel, and a tech-bro billionaire who manages to stowaway on his own rocket -- not to mention the American top-brass and the president of the United States. This is quirky and absurd. Wil Wheaton’s reading is at once serious and funny. Maybe this isn’t for everyone, but I enjoyed the listen.


jacey: (Default)
[personal profile] jacey

Audiobook narrated by Humphrey Bower.

The final book in the Chaos Walking trilogy whicfh follows Todd and Viola, sometimes together, sometimes apart, as they get sucked into the politics of New Prentisstown and a manufactured war with the Spackle. Whether he wishes it or not Todd gets semi-adopted by the mayor (now President) Prentiss, and begins to follow a dark path even though he resists as much as he can. Viola is swept up in a rebellion of sorts as the women healers go on the rampage, using terror tactics against the mayor and his army. Add to that the arrival of a new scout ship with two of Viola’s old friends, and the impending arrival of thousands of settlers with no other option but to make the planet their home. Complicate all this with the mayor’s mental powers, and the ‘noise’ that all men acquire on exposure to the planet, and this is an excellent conclusion to the trilogy. Humphrey Bower’s reading is excellent. He switches accents and voices seamlessly. There’s a bonus short story, Snowscape, tagged on to the end of this recording.


(no subject)

Jun. 5th, 2025 05:15 pm
loup_noir: (Default)
[personal profile] loup_noir
 At my age, you'd think I would know better than to keep working after my wonky back said stop.  I never learn.  The grasses and weeds are driving me crazy.  All that bending and pulling was my first mistake, and the next mistake was listening to Past!me say I could jump back into the fray while still rather broken.  Back to floor time, heating pad, and more Ibuprofen than I like to take. 

About the only accomplishment I can claim is finishing reading "The Searcher" by Tana French.  American cop retires to rural Ireland in hopes of a new life and discovers he's still a cop.  French can craft sentences that stop the eye and require re-reading to enjoy them at their fullest.  Now I'm suffering a book hangover.

Life, it's all about back and birds right now.  The grass has to wait until maybe next Monday.  


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