( One step over the line. )
I am still watching almost nothing in the way of movies, but
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spatch and I are enjoying the introductory riffs on weird New England in Widow's Bay (2026–). The series so far feels more like a collection of strange stories than a puzzle-box, off-kilter without tipping as far as spoof. I hope it can hold. I'd had no idea I should have been following Matthew Rhys for his powers of +10 mortal fear. In other art, I had missed the gloriously angular revival of the Pylon Reenactment Society's Magnet Factory (2024). I believe moon_custafer that this musician is doing his impressive best in the absence of his natural frog form. The doom-folk of Jim Ghedi's "Wasteland" (2025) once again suggests a Cloudish cinema.Days 1-15
Still looking for a volunteer to split hosting duties for May! If no one else is available, I'll split the month with
dswdiane, but I want to put out the call one last time…My check-in: Some rewrites to the beginning of a story that I might use for a charity auction fill.
Day 29:
china_shop, sanguinity, trobadoraDay 28:
acorn_squash, badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, sanguinity, the_siobhan, trobadoraDay 27:
badly_knitted, carenejeans, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme( More days )
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thefridayfive, and it is not Friday, but these questions seemed kind of fun.These questions were written by
nondenomifan.1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?
the one with Y2K in the middle of it
2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?
3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?
I do not regularly listen to music of my own choosing, but if I remembered, I probably would. The best college music was the 80s music that was played at parties/dances.
4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?
My long wavy hair either down, in a braid, or in a ponytail. No styling products except conditioner because I didn't really understand that those were allowed until I was working full-time. In college I experimented with dying a streak blue and then dying it black when that faded to uncomfortable blonde. I liked how shiny the black dye made my hair but otherwise I'm pretty attached to my natural hair.
5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?
I learned at a high school reunion after we'd all finished college that the "cool thing to do" in high school had been wild parties at the apartment of the kid whose parents had moved back to Florida and left her all by herself. However, when I was in high school, I was completely oblivious to this and thought the cool things to do were stick paper googly eyes on the history teacher's faux marble pillars, write my younger sibling's silly short stories on all the blackboards in the school, and fold the glossy college flyers into unit origami that I returned to the college counselor. Fortunately he was enough of a math nerd to appreciate the transformation.
It's also about what's wrong with the Prime Directive, namely, that once you're watching a thing, observing a thing, you're party to it, part of it. Your act of watching changes reality. Like with photons, or whatever. Schrödinger Heisenberg etc. If you weren't there, then yes, things would just unfold however they were going to unfold, but you are there, and so if you decide not to get involved, then it means you're permitting whatever bad things might happen that you might be capable of stopping.
Don't get me wrong: messing around and getting involved can be equally bad. All I'm saying is that once you're there, you ARE involved, and doing nothing is as much of a game changer as doing something.
Nyr is the resource-having character, assailed by depression because he's realized, upon being wakened from his most recent cryo-sleep, that his society back on Earth has likely died off, that he is the last of his people. He's woken by Lynesse Fourth Daughter, to whose lineage he made a promise some great grandmothers ago, when he last woke up and broke the Prime Directive by helping out said great-great (etc.) grandmother. This time, there's a demon to fight...
And the story unfolds. It was very fun to see Nyr from Lynesse (and her ally Esha)'s point of view, and to see them from his. The demon (it can't be a demon, Nyr thinks to himself, but in fact for all intents and purposes it IS a demon, very Stranger Things-ish) is suitably awful and scary.
There were two ways (to my mind) that the story could have ended for Nyr, and I definitely preferred the ending that Tchaikovsky chose, which goes along with his general outlook as I know it from the Children of Time books. About the only niggle I have with the story is that I'm not very satisfied with the finality of the demon vanquishing. I was kind of expecting more exploration/explanation of what it was, which would then let me believe in the permanence of its defeat, but as it's an eldritch horror from the Upside Down, pretty much, ehhhhnnnn, I feel like it might find its way back? But it's gone for now, and that'll have to do.
What I read
Finished The Tunnel (Pilgrimage #4).
Finished Tehanu.
Both of these were put aside to gulp down two of the honestly least memorable of Robert B Parker's Spenser thrillers, Double Deuce (#19) (1992) and Thin Air (#22) (1995) (I even skipped the inset passages from kidnapping victim's viewpoint) which was basically the equivalent of needing a stiff drink after wrestling with the 'prove you are a real person with verified identity' app last week.
Also read classic noir by William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), as having been wanting to do so since we watched a movie version some while ago. Very bleak - and the central character is profoundly unsympathetic even by noir standards.
Also another Parker, Back Story (#30) (2003), a bit less dire - part of that subgenre that was going around at the time in mysteries/thrillers, whereby something that happened in the heated days of the 60s/70s has repercussions or case is reopened or whatever.
On the go
Back to Ursula and Tales from Earthsea.
Up next
Maybe continue with Earthsea, maybe not.
Stir it Up! Ramin Ganeshram
A Trinidadian-American girl wants to be a celebrity chef. It begins with a recipe for "two cups of love, a pinch of sharing," etc. BARF.
Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley
Hawley is a TV writer/creator who did a show I loved (Legion) and a show I liked (Fargo). The premise of this book - a man who, along with the young boy he saves, is the sole survivor of a plane wreck and starts investigating the victims to find out if it wasn't an accident - really appeals to me. Unfortunately, it's written in a style I can only describe as "Middle-aged white dude writes New Yorker fiction." Not for me.
Guns in the Heather, by Lockhart Amerman
In a fast-moving tale of international espionage, Jonathan Flower is lured by a false telegram from the school he is attending in Edinburgh. With his father, he is involved in a grim hunt in which they are stalked by a ruthless band of foreign agents.
The plot sounded fun but was actually kind of tedious. The best part was the author amusing himself with the dialogue. I am recording some for posterity:
Tommy is a fat, jolly sort of character who likes to talk jive with a Glasgow accent. This is purely so he can say stuff like "We dig it, mon, but good."
Her voice and her person both reminded me of the Scots adjective "soncy." This is purely so she can say stuff like "There's a bit sandwich forby - under yon cover."
"Wullie's awee the dee?" (His accent was what we call in school "pure Morningsayde.")
"We're teddibly soddy, of course. It's so fearfully dismal to be doodly with a gun."
My new band name is Doodly With A Gun.
Posting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.
K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.
Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.
Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.
E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.
Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.
David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)
Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.
Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.
Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?
D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.
Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.
Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.
It was soon after nine o'clock, and the dazed air was staggering under the booming and banging of the bells of Westminster Abbey; for Devil's Acre was right next door to God's front yard. In fact, you could have heaved a brick out of the Abbey and hit the Devil right in the eye—if he'd happened to be on his property at the time instead of sitting in Parliament and making the laws.
As a novel, it's short, sweet, and satirically edged, a fairy tale of Victorian London in the right key of droll color to social rage. In need of a dad to sponsor them into the charitable advantages of the Blewcoat School and the genuine article no closer than a child's dream of Kilkenny, the raggedly resourceful Young Nick and his sister Jubilee locate an expedient substitute in the amiable, if not precisely upstanding person of Mr Christmas Owen and share his horror when it develops that he will have to stand as their father for more than the morning if all three of them want to keep out of trouble with the law. It is all but inevitable from this set-up that their inconvenient imposture should convert with time and responsibility into the real thing, but it happens by awkward, inadvertent degrees, without much in the way of schmaltz or saccharine, and without losing hold of the social thread. The win conditions of a reformation are not riches or even middle-class respectability. Gainfully employed and integrated into a community, Mr Owen and his chicks still belong to the rookeries of London, living half in the pockets of their downstairs neighbors and busking for their suppers the rest of the time and because it matters that children are cared for and adults act like it for once in their aimless lives, it feels like a triumph rather than a concession that the narrative concludes, modestly but meaningfully, in the none more Dickensian unity of carols at Christmastime. On the slant of a punch line or a prophecy, Young Nick's wishful, signature boast even comes true: "Our dad's a big feller, big as a church!"
When you go shopping for a dad, you got to be careful. You don't want any old rubbish . . . You got to try the bottom end of the market, where there's always a chance of picking up a bargain among the damaged goods.
As a re-read, it was one of those dual-layered experiences because the title meant nothing to me, I recognized the text from the second page, and not having read it in at least thirty-five years kept remembering the events of future chapters while simultaneously discovering all the details in the story that I had not originally been able to appreciate or even recognize. Please not to look surprised that at any age I was gone for quirky, rackety Mr Owen with his absentminded snapping-up of trifles and his rueful habit of sighing, "Sharp as pickles!" whenever the children catch him out in a cheat, as unprepossessing a father-figure as ever rocked up half-lit to an admissions interview. He looks half the size of his voice that can soothe a wakeful tenement and gets himself epically pasted in a barroom brawl. The text which slips conversationally between the wry omniscience of a nineteenth-century narrator and the near stream-of-consciousness of the children has him tagged with the antiheroic epithet of "old parrot-face." Watching his makeshift kindness deepen into real concern would have won me over as much as his fallibility, but then I did not have, like Young Nick, the dog-eared, partly fantasized memory of an ideal parent to interfere with accepting the imperfect reality of one, an embarrassing and surprising adult with their own charms and crotchets and fears who may need rescuing from the locked wilderness of a park one night and risk their freedom for the sake of one of their formerly burdensome charges the next. "Our dad!" Jubilee names him more readily, captivated by his ballads and thrilled that he started a fight he couldn't finish over her very first handkerchief. She herself could go toe-to-toe with any feral heroine out of Aiken or Hardinge when she beats up a bigger boy with a fish; it pairs her classically with the more anxiously adult Young Nick, who after all landed them with a new dad through fretting over a dowry for his sister at the age of ten. It may occur to the grown reader that the sooner he can let go of the expectation of heading the family, the healthier. Mutual rescue need not be confined to romances and I like its involvement in the bonding of the eventual Owens. It will still probably never be a good idea to lend anything to the dad if six months later you don't want to have to ask for it back.
Then he give Jubilee the violin and the bow and, after a scrape or two, she starts rendering The Ash Grove all over again; and it were very queer, what with her being only nine, and the fiddle being a hundred and fifty, how well they got on together!
It were different from them other fiddles. It were very sweet and strong; and, as Jubilee stood in the middle of the room, with her fingers fluttering and trembling like white butterflies, and her face nestled into the golden brown of the old fiddle, like a flower asleep, nobody moved nor said a word.
It were something wonderful, you had to admit it. If she'd gone fishing for a husband, she wouldn't have needed no more dowry than her earrings and the old violin. She'd have caught a king!
Language-level, it's a pleasure, careering from sentence to ironic, high-flown, argumentative sentence as if the story is tumbling out through a visit to a long-razed slum. Garfield has the historical knack of pinpointing his time without obvious references like battles or coronations: the smattering of cant in the richly demotic narration helps, but so does the slight distance in habits of mind as well as the plot winding through charity schools and one-man bands, marginalizations of class and nationality and a baby named Parliament Smudgeon. Jubilee's own appellation is the result of "the Pope having done something wonderful in the year she was born," while her brother's diminutive distinguishes him from the Devil. I take Mr Owen's uncommonly Christian name as a seasonal consequence à la Christmas Evans, but the fact that he's a pickpocket—a popular trade around Onion Court—is not an encouragement to the reader to follow the casual bigotry of the police who treat Taffy was a Welshman like forensic gospel. The law in this children's novel is a primer in ACAB, an unappetizing mass of "bluebottles" buzzing fawningly round their social betters with their truncheons at the ready for anyone below. "Real life ain't like a beanstalk, lad! Climb up out of your proper station, and you'll just get knocked down again!" Whereas Mr Owen may need a stiff belt of gin to face a schoolmaster, but as soon as he learns that Young Nick has a head for figures and Jubilee's as musical as his own child, he's determined to support them in their talents. I had a better ear for his own this time around: in the seven-to-ten range I knew a different set of English lyrics to "All Through the Night," but I wouldn't hear "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" until high school or "The Ash Grove" until college and I still couldn't render you "The Bluebells of Scotland" without listening to the Corries first. As I kept hearing the folk songs arranged by Stephen Oliver, however, I have ended up showing the 1982 RSC The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby to
spatch. The double bill works. I hadn't read enough Dickens in elementary school to know.But it turned out to be a dirty lie as it wasn't the little 'un in the story what got thumped and had to be helped out of the boozer with a nose like a bee-cluster that didn't go down for a week!
Movie I watched: Persuasion (2007)
Series I finished: The Other Bennet Sister (2026)
Book I finished: The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco (2024)
Book I bought: Cards of Grief by Jane Yolen (1984)
Book I received as a gift: Not sure, I've had a "Dear God, I have too many books already!" standing comment on gifts for some years now.
Food I ate: Okonomiyaki.
Meal I cooked: Same as above.
Drink I had: Other than water, coffee with cream. If alcohol, rum and orange juice a couple days ago.
Song I listened to: "Everything's Going to Be Alright" by Beverley Knight.
Album I listened to: J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations by Angela Hewitt.
Playlist I listened to: I don't really playlist.
Concert I went to: Lennie Gallant last fall? Maybe?
Game I played: Civilisation IV: Beyond the Sword
Person I talked to: Nenya.
Person I texted: A neighbour lady.
A bit more about the kitties: my late wife, Jana, and I adopted them from Feline Rescue back in 2009. They are/were rescue Egyptian Mau mixes so we named them Shu (Egyptian god of dust storms) and Ma'at (goddess of justice). They were bonded and absolutely gorgeous with white under fur and patterned black tips and random spotted patterns on their tummies. Shu was the smartest cat I've ever lived with (Ma'at is a smart kitty too, of course) and clocked in at an impressive 20 pounds. He adored pets and belly rubs and play time and liked to sleep wrapped around my ankles. He made it to 17 before his health began to fail and I had to send him over the Rainbow Bridge.He went out purring and content, but I am still bereft. Here's hoping Ma'at and I are able to adapt to the new normal soon. She is trying, poor little tyke, in her own way.
I lost another friend, this time to cancer, a couple of weeks ago. Rebecca Hranj was one of Jana's students and I met her after I moved Jana into assisted living. She helped me organize and clean out a lot of Jana's studio stuff and we got to hang out a bit around the time she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She fought the good fight and we went out to dinner, chatted on line occasionally and a few months back, I picked her up from an appointment and plied her with cardamom coffee and treats. I really, really wish we'd had more time to get to know each other. 2 years was way too short a time and she deserved better, as did her family and other loved ones, than to go out right before her 44th birthday. RIP to a good one.
What else is going on? I'm starting the spring grant review cycle this week (one of my side gigs) and am working on some stories and articles I have due later this year and of course, the novel. Everything this moving along, if not as zippily as I would like. I've done two bookselling events this month, hosted a yard sale and worked Independent Bookstore Day at DreamHaven. So it's been a very full month, One of my best friends is moving out of the country so I need to tackle mountain of paperwork (she's my emergency contact, among other things) as well as being sad that I won't see her much in a few weeks. I am working on making some new friends and meeting new people so not sitting around weeping into my tea or anything, but it would be nice if everything wasn't always literally or emotionally on fire at the same time. On the bright side, still pretty healthy and on year 2 of Not Being PreDiabetic. Or Diabetic, for that matter.
And, ack, just realized that I forgot to post that Queen of Swords Press has just released Joyce Chng's terrific Sailing the Golden Chersonese! This includes 4 stories about a trans masc pirate and his/their lady love sailing on a fantastical version of the South China Sea, complete with magic, Naks and romance. The cover is by the amazing Dhiyanah Hassan and the interior work is by Terry Roy, who has done most of our interior designs. It is the most beautiful little book!
And with that, back to work on sundry projects.
Days 1-15
We're looking for a second volunteer to share May! Is anyone up to host half the month?
My check-in: Some sentences over lunch.
Day 28:
china_shop, sanguinityDay 27:
badly_knitted, china_shop, cornerofmadness, dswdiane, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilmeDay 26:
badly_knitted, china_shop, dswdiane, sanguinity, sylvanwitch, the_siobhan, trobadora, ysilme( More days )
When you check in, please use the most recent post and say what day(s) you’re checking in for. Remember you can drop in or out at any time, and let me know if I missed anyone!
--I was a passenger on a motorbike multiple times!
--I swam in a river! (Not The river, but a river)
-- I saw a pink river dolphin and many gray ones!
--I made asaí juice!
--I did a craft project with the kids of one of my friends and played chase games with them!
--I made the acquaintance of a truly grandísima ceiba!
--I visited a shelter for stray dogs run by a friend of one of my friends!
--I saw a parade for the 159th anniversary of Leticia's founding!
But probably the thing that people would most enjoy seeing at this point in time is... an encounter with a pet capybara. He was a sweetie ^_^
fandom: Heated Rivalry
vidder: here’s luck
music: MUNA
summary: I won’t even notice.
Also on: AO3 | Tumblr
If YouTube is being difficult, you can also try this Vimeo link.
As I said over at the AO3, the club scene in 1x04 is brilliant, and also, with all love and respect to Jacob Tierney and Scotty Taylor (the show's music supervisor), I wanted to see Ilya Really Going Through It set to a song by actual lesbians. (Tegan & Sara, being Canadian, were the obvious choice, but, uh, I have some prior associations there.)
So when I got stuck on a different vid, I pulled one of the new MUNA sad bangers into Premiere and started throwing club scene clips over the chorus to entertain myself. And then I wanted the rest of the vid. So I made it.
Big thanks to
sisabet for beta, kouredios and kass for cheerleading, and sdwolfpup for providing encouragement even though she seriously could not care less about Heated Rivalry. ♥Though I went and looked up that Love Among the Butterflies Victorian lady who had a very close relationship with her dragoman and that was based on diaries discovered in the 1970s, so very much an outlier.
And possibly Jane Digby does not qualify as a lady explorer? though she covered a lot of ground as well having a really spectacular love-life.
(And do we in fact have to invoke Wollstoncraft even if she did publish a travel journal???)
Article tends to argue that it was partly in the cause of maintaining an aura of the feminine in spite of their masculine pursuit and partly in order to dissociate from the shadow of Wollstonecraft (which also loomed among suffragists, do admit).
Maybe.
And maybe they were invested in being Not Like Other Gurlzz and therefore not identifying with the Struggles of Their Sex.
Or maybe they were doing that thing whereby if a lady-person does something notable in one sphere, she had to balance that out in some way by not being an all-rounder, or doing careful respectability-maintenance, or whatever. (Translating Greek and being able to cook....)
Also, surely C19th British women explorers (wot no Isabelle Eberhardt?) were a very small group - not enough for a subset to be designated 'many'? Do they include e.g. missionaries or those women like Isabel Burton who followed their husbands?