weirdquark | Reading

Apparently I can no longer re-toast myself a signature half pastrami, half corned beef sandwich from Mamaleh's without spending the rest of the evening singing the same-named hit from a 1917 American Yiddish musical. The Folksbiene never seems to have revived it and if the rest of the score was as catchy, they really should. (I am charmed that the composer clearly found the nickel conceit tempting enough to revisit in a later show, but that line quoted about the First Lady, didn't I just ask the twentieth century to stay where we left it?)

At the other end of the musical spectrum,

spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?

Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.

P.S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.

Current Music: Bruce Adler & Joanne Borts, "Fifty-fifty"

rachelmanija

After a wet-bulb heat wave kills thousands in India, the UN forms an organization, the Ministry for the Future, intended to deal with climate change on behalf of future generations. They're not the only organization trying mitigate or fight or adapt to climate change; many other people and groups are working on the same thing, using everything from science to financial incentives to persuasion to terrorism.

We very loosely follow two very lightly sketched-in characters, an Irish woman who leads the Ministry for the Future and an American man whose life is derailed when he's a city's sole survivor of the Indian wet-bulb event, but the book has a very broad canvas and they're not protagonists in the usual sense of the word. The book isn't about individuals, it's about a pair of phenomena: climate change and what people do about it. The mission to save the future is the protagonist insofar as there is one.

This is the first KSR book I've actually managed to finish! (It's also the only one that I got farther in than about two chapters.) It's a very interesting, enlightening, educational book. I enjoyed reading it.

He's a very particular kind of writer, much more interested in ideas and a very broad scope than in characters or plot. That approach works very well for this book. The first chapter, which details the wet-bulb event, is a stunning, horrifying piece of writing. It's also the closest the book ever comes to feeling like a normal kind of novel. The rest of it is more like a work of popular nonfiction from an alternate timeline, full of science and economics and politics and projects.

I'm pretty sure Robinson researched the absolute cutting edge of every possible action that could possibly mitigate climate change, and wrote the book based on the idea of "What if we tried all of it?"

Very plausibly, not everything works. (In a bit of dark humor, an attempt to explain to billionaires why they should care about other people fails miserably.) Lots of people are either apathetic or actively fighting against the efforts, and there's a whole lot of death, disaster, and irreparable damage along the way. But the project as a whole succeeds, not because of any one action taken by any one group, but because of all of the actions taken by multiple groups. It's a blueprint for what we could be doing, if we were willing to do it.

The Ministry for the Future came out in 2020. Reading it now, its optimism about the idea that people would be willing to pull together for the sake of future generations makes it feel like a relic from an impossibly long time ago.

js_thrill

In this post, a follow on to this recent one, I'm going to reflect on the middle three anthologies we read:

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
Dark Matter v. 2: Reading the Bones
Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

Dark Matter Volume 1
separation anxiety, Evie Shockley (2000) — This is a story set in a dystopian world where people (particularly ethnic minorities, who are the characters in the story) live in highly segregated and controlled communities that are walled in and allow for some in- and out- migration, but only with permission of the white government. The main characters are siblings who have a strong attachment to each other, but the primary protagonist wishes to pursue life beyond the walls of this controlled community, and her sister does not. Several times that we would come across sibling dynamics in other stories or later volumes, I would be reminded of this story, and how it managed to portray affection, closeness, and conflicting perspectives, all along with the story's nuanced treatment of the societal/racial issues shaping their conflict. This may be the story I've referred back to most in relation to other stories we've read in later volumes. Shockley is principally a poet (something that was true of a number of contributors to the Dark Matter volumes, iirc), and, unfortunately, has not written any other short stories.

Greedy Choke Puppy, Nalo Hopkinson (2000) — This is a story about a soucouyant (a creature from caribbean folklore), and as I was reading it, I had the distinct feeling I had read it before. I am not sure when or where I would have, but I don't think I was just predicting how the story would turn out, it really felt like I was remembering the ending. Maybe we read it in an English class in college? At any rate, Hopkinson's prose is excellent, and she manages to create very effective tone/atmosphere, as well as a compelling story. "Hopkinson can write a good story" is probably not news to people, but it was definitely one of the stories that stuck with me.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Octavia Butler (1987) — Again, "Octavia Butler is good at writing" is not something to stop the presses over, and I had definitely read this story before, because I had read virtually everything she had written over the year or so prior to the book club getting to this volume (I started with Mind of my Mind, and then just kept going). The primary threads in the story that connect with other of Butler's work (in my view) is a) her interest in situations where one has internal conflict between what you might call biological or other subconscious compulsion to behave one way, and one's conscious identity (in this case, there is a genetic disorder that manifests a number of behavioral compulsions for those who have it, and which have traditionally uniformly led to serious self-harm, but we also learn that it is responsible for other behavioral tendencies in our protagonist, some of which she is unhappy to accede to and does not initially want to embrace), and b) groups that don't naturally fit into existing social structures successfully, and the social structures that they would adopt if given the reigns.

Gimmile's Songs, Charles Saunders (1984) — The rare instance of one I am including that stuck with me because of how much I wound up disliking it. This is a story that had a ton of potential. It's a sword and sorcery story, we have an awesome protagonist—Dossouye—who is riding some sort of cool animal companion, and dispatching enemies with ease (you can tell from my affinity for that CL Moore story, and Russ's Alyx story, that I am totally a sucker for this genre), but the story is basically about her running into a guy with roofie magic (via music), and then when the roofie music wears off, she is like "oh that's totally cool, because I would have been down for that anyway." And like, what I would give to be an editor who could go back and make this be a better story/series, because ugh, why squander such a cool protagonist on such misogynist garbage?

Dark Matter Volume 2
The Glass Bottle Trick, Nalo Hopkinson (2000) — I don't want to flood with Nalo Hopkinson, but I definitely remember our discussion of this piece. It's a retelling of a bluebeard and it has a lot of nice subtle things going on with the presentation and the prose.

Jesus Christ in Texas, WEB Du Bois (1920) — Some of the stories we read are doing subtle things, but this one is not being subtle. A very effective piece and also a piece with a fairly clear and loud message ("confront your prejudice, and live up to your own professed tenets"). As we read these books, we often wondered why certain pieces were included and then we also wondered about why pieces were arranged in the order they were. With The Future is Female volumes, the answer was clear for the latter, the pieces were in chronological order of publication. Sometimes we had interesting thematic juxtapositions and maybe that reflected something about the time period those pieces came out in, but it might also have just been noise emerging from the random sample of two pieces chosen by the editor. As you can see from this sequence of stories, Dark Matter was not organized chronologically. So, why were the pieces put in the order they were? Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes adjacent stories would have thematic similarity, but often not. This is another place where editorial apparatus is helpful. If we had notes from the editor saying "I chose to include this story because" it would give the reader a way to place the stories into that kind of context instead of just grasping for it. (Not this particular story, but I mention it here, because it's sort of an odd one out in terms of the stories that stuck with me).

Maggies, Nisi Shawl (2004) — Having looked over the rest of the stories, this is the only other ones that really stuck with me at all. It was a story about a child's relationship with the genetically engineered (iirc) nanny that lived with the family in a terraforming colony situation. The story does a good job with the relationship dynamics but leaves a lot of the worldbuilding underdeveloped.

Overall, I think the second Dark Matter volume was not as strong of a collection as the first (though both had several good stories including some I didn't mention here). One notable feature is that both had entries that either were poems, or were short fiction/flash fiction that bordered on being poems, which, while interesting to read, were definitely less plot oriented than I tend to prefer.

Wandering Stars
Trouble with Water, Horace Gold (1939) — A second entry in the "stuck with me for bad reasons": this story was just so goofy. The Wandering Stars volume had a lot of unfortunate stereotypes crop up throughout the stories (nagging wives? you betcha!), but this story really felt like a silver age Jimmy Olsen Comic (the era when he routinely turned into, e.g., a giant turtle, or similar), the premise is a guy who offends a water imp and gets cursed to not be able to touch water, and so the water moves away from his body whenever he would come into contact with it. This is played for...shenanigans mainly? Like, his concession stand is going to go out of business because it won't rain near him (maybe? I have trouble remembering the actual details). So it's not horror like "oh no, how will he drink? Will he die of thirst?", it's more slapstick, like "but how can he take a shower without making a mess". It's not a good story, but it is the one I am most likely to think of and giggle about, I guess.

Paradise Last, George Alec Effinger (1974) — In a future where people are strongly discouraged from being openly Jewish, the protagonist's relationship to his grandfather leads him to retain his Jewish identity, at the cost of being shipped off to a super remote planet. He winds up being assigned a more activist jewish wife (who is unhappy about this diaspora-based approach to undermining Jewish identity), and coming to to resist the authoritarianism somewhat. I think this is the piece in the volume that I spent the most time thinking about, and probably the character that I identified the most with.

Jachid and Jechidah, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1964) — I have probably read some Singer before this, but I don't know specifically what. I liked this piece a lot. It has a folkloric quality to it, and a somber beauty to the prose and the story.

Overall, this volume was not my favorite of the things we read (though, not my least favorite, either), and I wonder if that's because I didn't have enough distance from the subject matter, or if it's just that the anthology is somewhat dated, and a more recent, more comprehensive anthology would have landed better for me? I am still glad we read it, but I think partially, if I had just read this one on my own, I would have gotten a lot of the same things from it that I got from reading it with the group, whereas, reading the other books with the group has generally been more eye-opening and informative about the stories, other stories that are doing similar things, reasons why the stories might not be working for me, that aren't just "the story isn't good" (or the situations in which we all sort of agree "nope, that story just isn't very good").

Okay, in a couple of days, I'll retrospect the other three volumes that we read, and maybe decide whether these stories have been about man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, or man vs. Donatello

sovay

At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.

Current Music: Paul Westerberg, "Dyslexic Heart"

nineweaving

A week ago, I was visiting an old friend on the edge of the Berkshires, at her central-chimneyed, chestnut-framed, wide-boarded house, coeval with the Boston Tea Party. It was just after the first of December and there was deepish snow, so I had “Sweet Baby James” running through my head. Sadly, we couldn’t go play in it or even slip out to look at the Milky Way on a crystal-clear night, as the temperature was about 0F, with a fierce wind banging in the chimneystack. We would have been slashed to stiff ribbons in an instant.

So we stayed in and looked at her cabinet of curiosities. She’s always had one: leaves and pinecones; playing cards and antique marbles; Qing china. Now her passion is for pocket stones. They are jade, lapis, jasper, malachite, pyrite, hematite, and quartz—oh, and hundreds more I couldn’t name, though she can. They are striped, starred, clouded, marbled; they are tabbied, tessellated, blackworked, eyed and islanded and archipelagoed like antique globes of exoplanets; they’re like phoenix eggs. She has Archaean banded rocks three billion years old, and a little heap of unset opals, flickering with inward fire. It’s all about the pattern and the play of light. She kindly gave me two Nine-colored opals for my birthday. They are tiny—pinky-nail and pomegranate-seed—but they flash with momentary Pleiades.

Nine

js_thrill

Back in June of 2023,

ambyr and I started a book club because we had both purchased Library of America's "The Future is Female" 2 volume short story collection, and, at least for my part, I figured I would be more likely to get down to reading it if there was some structure around my plans to do so. We invited

mrissa and some other folks from the scintillation discord to join us (apologies for not tagging everyone, I don't remember everyone's DW tags offhand), and found a time that seemed to work, and for the most part have met every other week since then.

Early on, we wound up settling on reading 4 stories per meeting (mostly based around how many would be good to discuss per meeting, rather than how much people could read between meetings, though I am sure some folks appreciate only having a smallish batch to read each session).

We have now read NINE short story anthologies (though some of the anthologies are sometimes a little bit confused about what qualifies as a short story), and have renamed the group "Sci-Fi Outside the Spotlight" (rather than the original uninspired name "The Future is Female" chosen simply because that was the first two books we were reading).

The anthologies we have read so far are:

The Future is Female: Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women v. 1
The Future is Female: Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women v. 2
Rediscovery: Science Fiction By Women v. 2 (1953-1957)
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
Dark Matter v. 2: Reading the Bones
Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction
The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Visionary Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators
Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction and Fantasy
A Thousand Beginnings and Endings: 16 Retellings of Asian Myths and Legends

So, having nine anthologies under our belts, and having a desire to avoid some other work this morning, it seemed like a good time to reflect a bit on the book club! Also, if you want to read really good reflections on the stories for anthologies four through 7 and 9,

pauraque has been sharing notes and thoughts on the stories and meetings.

Prior to this book club, I think my exposure to short stories was Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House, and the book Characters in Conflict (this can't be the version we had in my class, because it doesn't contain To Build a Fire, but it does have the same cover image as the version we had).

One thing I forever associate with this book is that there are four conflicts. Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Self, and the one I can never remember. Maybe man vs. machine? Man vs. Society? Let's say man vs. Protein.

So you could say that I was fairly new to the genre of short stories, when we started. And it's not like I'm an expert now or anything. But I am a fan! And I know to be insulted when people put book chapters in my short story anthologies! DON'T DO THIS. IT IS RUDE!

What I want to do is look back over the Table of Contents from these volumes and highlight some stories and authors that stuck with me. Some of them may be "oh, of course, Lewis, everyone knows that story/author is good" type mentions, but that's just something that you all have to deal with due to my being a relative newbie.

The Future is Female Volume 1
Space Episode, Lesli Perri (1941) — This story sticks with me as one that benefitted from being read in a book club setting. I read it and thought "okay, it's a pretty simple space adventure they're on a ship a thing goes wrong, they snap to action, etc.", and it was only due to the group discussion that I saw how it was undermining some gender stereotypes without being flagrant or in your face about it. My understanding of the story really shifted from pre-discussion to post-discussion, even though, ultimately, it is not the deepest or most innovative story we read.

Created He Them, Alice Eleanor Jones (1955) — This is a very effective bit of horror that I have written about a couple of times before, I won't belabor it now.

The Barbarian, Joanna Russ (1968) — Joanna Russ can write. Not a surprise to anyone, I am sure. This collection also contained a CL Moore story "The Black God's Kiss" which was absolutely riveting until a very deflating ending, and it was very puzzling why that story was in a sci fi collection, but it did sort of make sense given how much Jirel of Jory seems to be an influence on Russ's Alyx stories.

The Future is Female Volume 2
Frog Pond, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1971) — This story of ecological degradation and conflict between urban and rural outlook was unsettling in a good way. It made me want to read more by Yarbro (though, to my chagrin, most of what Yarbro is known for in her other writing is a very long vampire series, and not this kind of subtle eco-horror)

When It Changed, Joanna Russ (1972) — I guess I am going to play favorites a bit, here: if I learned one thing from these volumes it is that I needed to be reading more Joanna Russ. I have begun to remedy this.

The Screwfly Solution, Racoona Sheldon (1977) — I don't think of myself as one for horror, but the ones that stick with me seem to be disproportionately horror-heavy. There is a not so great but not terrible Masters of Horror episode that adapts this story, but i think the story does a better job at the tone than a movie/tv episode can do.

There are some really good stories that I've note mentioned, and some stories that were really interesting to discuss but not very good as stories which I've not mentioned here, but that's about all the time/space I have for these volumes now.

Rediscovery Volume 2
Why did we only do volume 2 of Rediscovery, I hear you ask. Well, it is the fault of the series, since volume one covers 1958-1963, volume 2 covers 1953-1957, and volume 3 covers 1964-1968. Does that make any sense, organizationally? No. It does not. Anyway, we started with the chronologically earliest volume.

The overarching takeaway from this volume is that there is a danger in having third parties write afterwards to the stories in an anthology which seek to both provide author bios and story context. Often those afterwards will include frustrating, inaccurate takes on the stories, and the wrong ratio of author bio to story discussion. So, just as we say "don't put chapters of books in your short story anthology", you really only have three sensible choices for who provides commentary on the stories: 1) the authors themselves, 2) translators, if there has been translation, or 3) the editor of the anthology, as the person who has the bird's eye view on the whole anthology.

Captive Audience, Anne Warren Griffith (1953) — This was an interesting story that dealt with ubiquitous advertising, and had a gendered take on roles and resistance in a corporate consumer dystopia.

The Piece Thing, Carol Emshwiller (1956) — This story is about an alien infant reaching out to humans it encounters. Emshwiller had a piece in the first Future is Female volume that I had also liked (and which featured a POV dog, iirc), but this one I think showcases her ability to capture alien POV. I wouldn't say this is the most innovative piece (though I guess I don't know how well worn this territory was in 1956) but it does what it is doing well.

The Queer Ones, Leigh Brackett (1957) — One which definitely stuck with me. The story is about aliens getting noticed in a rural-ish setting, who, if I remember correctly, are identifiable for being redheads, maybe? But also have like the wrong number of ribs or some such. The story is playing off of communist scare tropes and has a sort of detective story vibe, but is mostly about this journalist tracking down the father of these mutant kids and then eventually helping the aliens escape persecution.

Okay, this has taken longer to type up this much than I anticipated, so maybe I'll break it into three parts, and do three anthologies at each go.

Remember kids: if you are making a short story anthology: the contents of your anthology should be short stories!

rachelmanija

An Icelandic horror novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal! I had no idea she's fluent in Icelandic.

Iðunn experiences unexplained fatigue and injuries when she wakes up, but is gaslit by doctors and offered idiotic remedies by co-workers. (Very relatable!) Meanwhile, she's being semi-stalked by her ex-boyfriend/co-worker, her parents refuse to accept that she's a vegetarian and keep serving her chicken, and the only living beings she actually likes are the neighborhood cats that she's allergic to.

After what feels like an extremely long time, it finally occurs to her that she might be sleepwalking, and some time after that, it finally occurs to her to video herself as she sleeps. At that point some genuinely scary/creepy/unsettling things happen, and I was very gripped by the story and its central mystery.

Is Iðunn going out at night and committing all the acts she's normally too beaten down or scared to do while sleepwalking or dissociating? Is she having a psychotic break? Is she a vampire? Is she possessed? Does it have something to do with a traumatic past event that's revealed about a third of the way in?

Other than the last question, I have no idea! The ending was so confusing that I have no idea what it was meant to convey, and it did not provide any answers to basically anything. I'm also not sure what all the thematic/political elements about the oppression of women had to do with anything, because they didn't clearly relate to anything that actually happened.

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

This was a miss for me. But I was impressed by the very fluent and natural-sounding translation.

Content note: A very large number of cats are murdered. Can horror writers please knock it off with the dead cats? At this point it would count as a shocking twist if the cat doesn't die.

sovay

As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.

( We know by now that time does not take sides. )

With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.

Current Music: Brandi Carlile, "Human"

js_thrill

When I was in junior high, my RPG and board game friends introduced me to a card game called Illuminati: New World Order, in which players (each taking on the role of one particular "illuminati" group: the Adepts of Hermes, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Bermuda Triangle, the Discordian Society, the Gnomes of Zürich, the Network, Servants of Cthulhu, Shangri-La, the UFOs, the Society of Assassins, and the Church of the SubGenius), seek to take control of the world by taking control of various organizations/agencies (the CIA) celebrities (Ross Perot, Saddam Hussain) locations (Japan, California, the Moonbase). This game, or at least, elements of this game, were heavily inspired by The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. I mean, I have never verified that, but I was told it at the time, and it would be very surprising to learn otherwise. And being the particular sort of nerdy kid that I was, I decided to read the Illuminatus! Trilogy, so that I would understand more of the jokes and references in this card game.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is "a satirical, postmodern, science fiction–influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati" (thanks wikipedia!). It was a very weird book to be reading for young late junior high school/early high school me, and, at the very least, a couple of orders of magnitude weirder than the most similar thing I had read to that point: Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

This post is not about the Illuminatus! Trilogy. It is, instead, about a perhaps weirder book referenced in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. And that book is a bizarre short putative religious text called Principia Discordia. When I first read the Illuminatus! Trilogy I sort of assumed that the religion of discordianism and the texts from it were made up for the book, but then learned that they were not, and so I eagerly tracked them down at weird bookstores in Chicago. The edition I have is the one with the yellow cover.

A yellow rectangle reading Principia Discordia or how I found the Goddess and What I did to Her When I Found Her, The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger

I was surely out of my depth in the 90s in junior high and high school reading 60s and 70s acid-soaked novels and religious tracts, and I think the main upshot of my reading these things was a brief infatuation with zen buddhism which had clearly influenced some of the contents of the text, but obviously the things we read during these formative years linger and percolate and then then the other day, FIFA awarded Donald Trump a peace prize.

And obviously a lot of people reacted to this with the expected array of emotions. After all, it is one of the more absurd things to have happened in an increasingly absurd period of public and political life. And somewhat suddenly, I was reminded of this book which more or less begins with five commandments, several of which are intentionally self undermining:

a list of commandments, including a commandment to joyously eat a hot dog, one to abstain from hot dog buns, and one not to believe anything you read

Anyway, this was all pretty exciting when I was 11-14, but my mind has been returning to it now because we live in a world where an international soccer organization invents a peace prize to appease a warmonger. Both the novel and this religious...zine (I guess) took Emperor Norton to be an important historical figure and/or patron saint. Simply put, Norton lost all his money when the boat bearing a rice shipment that he had heavily invested in sank, and that sort of radically altered his behavior. He declared himself the Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico, and Defender of the Jews. A colorful character in San Francisco, he started issuing his own currency, and due to some combination of charity/sympathy/good spirit, folks in San Francisco played along and honored Norton-bucks. He also apparently stared down a mob that was planning to do violence against Chinese immigrants one time by loudly reciting the lord's prayer at them. The discordians like him because his way of going about these things sort of illustrates the socially constructed nature of things like money and political authority. Was he just a guy off his kilter or was he really an Authority in the area? Did those Norton bucks have monetary value? Well, local businesses seemed to treat them like they did, and what more is required for money to have value than for you to be able to exchange them for goods and services.

Looking back over the Principia Discordia, a lot of it is pretty cringe, though I can see why I thought it was cool and exciting as a junior high kid. But one of the fundamental things it is on about seems worth stewing on as we are ushered through this era of absurdity. There is reality as it is without our imposition of labels and categories, and then there is the world as we describe and categorize it, and there is distance between the two.

an illustration of five small circles arranged pentagonally, with text asking whether they really form a pentagon, or whether it is our mind that forms the pentagon

When I sat down to start writing this, I thought I'd have more of a point at the end, but I realized if I keep waiting to have a good point to write things on Dreamwidth, I'll keep never writing things on Dreamwidth, so, meandering thoughts on a book from my junior high years it is.

oracne

My Xmas Playlist on YouTube. (ETA: I fixed the access.)

sovay

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

Current Music: Big Thief, "Incomprehensible"

oracne

Anybody have any recommendations for recent Romance novels focused on holidays, specifically winter-type holidays?

sovay

After years of not even being able to pirate it,

spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.

This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."

I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.

Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.

Current Music: MGMT, "Electric Feel"

sovay

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with

rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Current Music: Annie Bartholomew, "Mountain Dove Song"

sartorias

I need to remember to mention these (rare) things in case one or two of you have free time at 9:00a.m. Pacific time Sunday the 7th. B Cubed Press Sunday Brunch, on Youtube, hosts a live chat. Tomorrow I'm to be included, for what will begin as a chat about preparing for readings, but might go in any direction.

sovay

Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser.

spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.

( Twenty-four hours every day. )

We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.

Current Music: David Byrne, "What Is the Reason for It? (feat. Hayley Williams)"

sovay

spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Fishing Boat"

rydra_wong

Largely the same as before:

Currently trying to support a friend in a Very Bad Situation and it's desperately anxiety-inducing and my brain is trying to eat itself, which also makes me less useful as support, which is bad.

So if anyone would like to ask or discuss anything about Prophet or Dark Souls or IWTV or climbing or, you know, any of the somewhat cheering topics I sometimes ramble about, PLEASE DO. "More of a comment than a question" questions also very welcome.

I cannot guarantee replies in a timely or consistent manner (because of the Situation and also the bad state of my brain) but it would be deeply appreciated nonetheless.

Except that THANK FUCK my friend is now out of the Very Bad Situation (and please let him remain so, please please please).

My brain is just trying to eat itself because it's prone to doing that and it's been a very very hard year (and I'm having yet another IC flare-up, joy).

sovay

Once again the Malden Public Library comes through with Kate Dunn's Exit Through the Fireplace: The Great Days of Rep (1998), a capacious, irreproducible oral history of repertory theatre in the UK. Its timeline of personal recollection runs from the 1920's into the decade of publication, documenting a diverse and vivid case for the professional and communal value of regional theatre without rose-glassing its historically shabbier or more exploitative aspects; its survey includes the subspecies of fit-up theatre which flourished primarily outside of England and devotes chapters to stage management, design, and directing as well as acting and the factor of the audience. It's a serious chunk of scholarship from a writer who is herself fourth-generation in the theater, which must have helped with assembling its roster of close to two hundred contributors. It's just impossible to read much of it without cracking up on a page-by-page basis. Despite the caution in the introduction not to view the heyday of rep as a perpetual goes wrong machine, the cumulative effect of thrills and tattiness and especially the relentless deep-end pace of getting a new play up every week writes its own Noises Off:

Howard Attfield was another actor who was caught on the hop. He remembers, 'I was playing an inspector, I forget the name of the murder thriller, and it was a matinée day and very hot and I remember standing in the dressing-room and I was having a shave, and I thought I had all the time in the world because my first entrance wasn't until the ending of the first act. The inspector comes in, says his lines and ends the first act. So I was standing there quite happily in my boxer shorts having a shave when I heard my call, which I could not believe, and I went absolutely wild. My costume was a suit, an inspector's suit, and a sort of a trench coat and a hat. Anyway, I thought I'd best put on something, the least possible, so I put on trousers and I remember putting on shoes without socks, then I put on the trench coat, did it all up as I'm flying out the door, grabbed the hat and went charging down the stairs, saying, "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming," and I made it on to the stage just in time, but as I went on someone in the wings said, "Shaving foam, shaving foam!" and I realized that I'd got halfway through this shave and I hadn't wiped it off. Luckily it was on the upstage side, as I was coming on from stage right. So instead of looking at the audience, I did everything looking from stage right to stage left, and the upstage bit was foam in my ears and right round my face. I delivered the line and the curtains came down and I collapsed on the floor half naked and half shaven.'

Persons in this book set themselves on fire, fall out of their costumes, get flattened by scenery, fuck up lines, props, entrances, exits, sound cues, lighting cues, scene changes, the sprinkler system. The number of actors who started their careers as assistant stage managers appears to have been part of the apprenticeship quality of rep; the number of actors who were abruptly promoted because a lead had flanicked screaming into the night feels more telling. "It wasn't till many years later that I got into the truly creative side of acting. In those days it was a question of learn the lines and don't bump into the furniture." It is a tribute to the book's scope that so many of its names are unfamiliar to me when my knowledge of older British actors is not nil; it's not just a skim of national treasures. For every Rachel Kempson, Bernard Hepton, or Fiona Shaw, there's an actor like Attfield whose handful of small parts in film and television has barely impinged on me or even one like Jean Byam who was so strictly stage-based that it would never have been possible for me to see her in anything. At the same time, thanks to its compilation from personal histories, I have been left in possession of some truly random facts concerning actors of long or recent acquaintance during their repertory careers, e.g. Alec McCowen corpsed like anything and at one point became convinced that he could telepathically cause a fellow actor to forget their lines. Richard Pasco had such reliable stage fright that the manager of the Birmingham Rep would knock him up five minutes before curtain to check whether he'd been sick yet. Clive Francis had a stammer so bad it made him the bête noire of the prompt corner at Bexhill-on-Sea. (Robin Ellis did not have a stammer, but found it a lifeline during one particularly non-stop season to play a character with one because it gave him the extra time to reach for his next line.) Bernard Cribbins does not name the production for which he was required to transport a goat—an actual goat, from a farm on the moors—by bus to the theatre, leaving unexplained the reasons it had to be a real one. Of course it was medically possible in the '60's, but it is still n-v-t-s to me that Derek Jacobi got smallpox doing panto in Birmingham. That art was produced by this theatrical system as opposed to merely peerless anecdotes absolutely deserves celebration. As a resource for writers as well as theatre historians and actors, the book is a treasure. Details about interwar digs and mid-century tea matinées would not be out of place in Angela Carter. The less farcical side of all the blowups and breakdowns is the assertion by more than one interviewee that rep provided, if not exactly a safe, then at least a survivable space for a growing actor to fail in ways that were essential to their confidence and their craft: "If you didn't become a great actor in weekly rep, at least you learnt to control your nerves. Despite all the throwing up on a Monday, one seemed to be ice cool on stage, because you knew you mustn't give anything away and you mustn't make your fellow actors look bad." But also one night at the David Garrick Theatre in the late '40's Lionel Jeffries lost hold of a lettuce leaf that sailed out into the stalls and splatted itself dressing and all onto a member of the public and that Saturday a packed house came to see if he'd do it again. Opening the book at random is almost guaranteed to yield a story of this nature. Fortunately I was not onstage at the time, and nobody cared how much I laughed.

Current Music: English Teacher, "This Could Be Texas"

rachelmanija

Thirteen-year-old Ali gets a chance to spend the summer with her aunt Dulcie and five-year-old cousin Emma at the family's long-abandoned lakefront property - over the strong objections of Ali's mother, who hates the lake. Ali is delighted to babysit Emma and get out from under her mom's over-protective thumb. But why do both her mother and Dulcie act so weird about the lake and their past there? Who's the mysterious girl who was ripped out of old family photos? And what's up with Sissy, the strange girl who hangs out at the lake and encourages Emma to behave badly and blame it on Ali?

Sissy's real identity won't come as a surprise to any readers over the age of 10, but there are some genuinely chilling moments and Hahn's trademark realistic family dynamics and exploration of guilty secrets and how parents' childhood trauma gets passed down to their children. I actually got stressed out reading about Ali trying to protect Emma while Dulcie blames Ali for all the weird stuff going on and accuses Ali of refusing to take responsibility for anything. (In fact, Dulcie and Ali's mom are the ones who are failing to take responsibility and projecting it on the kids.)

A good solid middle-grade ghost story with unusually complex family dynamics.

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weirdquark

April 2017

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Page Summary

sovay - אַ ניקל פֿאַר זיי, אַ ניקל פֿאַר מיר
rachelmanija - The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
js_thrill - Sci-Fi Outside the Spotlight Book Club Reflections (Part 2)
sovay - Is this your name or a doctor's eye chart?
nineweaving - Stones
js_thrill - Sci-Fi Outside the Spotlight Book Club Reflections
rachelmanija - The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir
sovay - And they won't thank you, they don't make awards for that
js_thrill - Principia Discordia
oracne - If You're Into It....
sovay - But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder
oracne - Holiday Romance Recommendations?
sovay - Put your circuits in the sea
sovay - Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight
sartorias - Sunday Online Chat
sovay - What does it do when we're asleep?
sovay - No one who can stand staying landlocked for longer than a month at most
rydra_wong - Please give me excuses to talk about my hyperfixations (again)
sovay - And in the end they might even thank me with a garden in my name
rachelmanija - Deep and Dark and Dangerous, by Mary Downing Hahn

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