landingtree | Reading

Sometimes I think that if I ever gain full comprehension of the various upheavals and rapid-fire political rotations that followed in the hundred years after the French Revolution, my mind will at that point be big and powerful enough to understand any other bit of history that anyone can throw at me. Prior to reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, I knew that in the 1870s there had briefly been a Paris Commune, and also a siege, and hot air balloons and Victor Hugo were involved in these events somehow but I had not actually understood that these were actually Two Separate Events and that properly speaking there were two Sieges of Paris, because everyone in Paris was so angry about the disaster that was the first Siege (besiegers: Prussia) that they immediately seceded from the government, declared a commune, and got besieged again (besiegers: the rest of France, or more specifically the patched-together French government that had just signed a peace treaty with Prussia but had not yet fully decided whether to be a monarchy again, a constitutional monarchy again, or a Republic again.)

As a book, Paris in Ruins has a bit of a tricky task. Its argument is that the miserable events in Paris of 1870-71 -- double siege, brutal political violence, leftists and political reformers who'd hoped for the end of the Glittering and Civilized but Ultimately Authoritarian Napoleon III Empire getting their wish in the most monkey's paw fashion imaginable -- had a lasting psychological impact on the artists who would end up forming the Impressionist movement that expressed itself through their art. Certainly true! Hard to imagine it wouldn't! But in order to tell this story it has to spend half the book just explaining the Siege and the Commune, and the problem is that although the Siege and the Commune certainly impacted the artists, the artists didn't really have much impact on the Siege and the Commune ... so reading the 25-50% section of the book is like, 'okay! so, you have to remember, the vast majority of the people in Paris right now were working class and starving and experiencing miserable conditions, which really sets the stage for what comes next! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not working class. but they were in Paris, and not having a good time, and depressed!' and then the 50-75% section is like 'well, now the working class in Paris were furious, and here's all the things that happened about that! and what about Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet, our protagonists? well, they were not in Paris any more at this point. But they were still not having a good time and still depressed!'

Sieges and plagues are the parts of history that scare me the most and so of course I am always finding myself compelled to read about them; also, I really appreciate history that engages with the relationship between art and the surrounding political and cultural phenomena that shapes and is shaped by it. So I appreciated this book very much even though I don't think it quite succeeds at this task, in large part because there is just so much to say in explaining The Siege and The Commune that it struggles sometimes to keep it focused through its chosen lens. But I did learn a lot, if sometimes somewhat separately, about both the Impressionists and the sociopolitical environment of France in the back half of the 19th century, and I am glad to have done so. I feel like I have a moderate understanding of dramatic French upheavals of the 1860s-80s now, to add to my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1780s-90s (the Revolution era) and my moderate understanding of French upheavals in the 1830s-40s (the Les Mis era) which only leaves me about six or seven more decades in between to try and comprehend.

mrissa

We've all heard it a million times: baking is precise and cooking is loose. Cooking is jazz, baking is classical. Cooking has room to improvise, but with baking you have to follow the recipe to the letter.

This is, of course, nonsense. For one thing, you can't control every variable every time. If baking required everything to be utterly precise, it would never work, because air temperature, pressure, and humidity all vary; you have to be able to work around those major variables. If it was true, you'd never see experienced bread bakers frown and throw another handful (or three) into the recipe. And most importantly, if this was true......how would we ever get new baked goods?

I think this is a mistake we make too often when we're thinking about bringing light into dark times for each other. We think of it has having to be precise and perfect for it to work. If we're not winning every struggle, we must be doing something wrong and should just quit. If we can't come up with the perfect phrasing to offer comfort to worried or grieving friends and neighbors, why even try? Maybe tomorrow we'll be warm and witty and precisely right. Or someone else can do it. Surely someone else has the right answer, and we can just use that.

So yeah, the lussekatter--you know what day it is--rose despite the plummeting temperature (and with it the plummeting humidity, oh physics why do you do us like this). They rose and rose and rose. Friends, they are mammoths. They are lusselejon this year. I forgot the egg glaze--I told you last year that I shouldn't mention that remembering it was unusual, and ope, it was an omen, I did not put egg wash on. They are still great. They are still amazing. What they are not--what they don't have to be--is perfect.

Last week one of my friends wrote to me to say that she'd made calzones but they'd turned out denser than usual. And you know what I thought? I thought, "Ooh, her family got calzones, I should make calzones one of these days!" And not in the "I'd do it better than that loser" way, either. Just: yay homemade calzones, what a treat. I watched her doing it. I remembered that I can do it too. Dense or not. Egg washed or not. Perfect or--let's be real, perfect isn't available, what we have is imperfect, and it turns out that's what we need. Lighting one imperfect candle from another, all down the chain of us, until the light returns.

2024: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=4078

2023: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3875

2022: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3654

2021: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=3366

2020: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2953

2019: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2654

2018: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=2376

2017: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1995

2016: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1566

2015: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=1141

2014: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=659

2013: https://marissalingen.com/blog/?p=260

2012: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/840172.html

2011: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/796053.html

2010: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/749157.html

2009: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/686911.html

2008: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/594595.html

2007: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/2007/12/12/ and https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/502729.html

2006: https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/380798.html — the post that started it all! Lots more about the process and my own personal lussekatt philosophy here!...oh hey, this is the twentieth year I've posted about this. Huh. Huh. Well, isn't that a thing.

skygiants

The Ukrainian fantasy novel Vita Nostra has been on my to-read list for a while ever since

shati described it as 'kind of like the Wayside School books' in a conversation about dark academia, a description which I trusted implicitly because

shati always describes things in helpful and universally accepted terms.

Anyway, so Vita Nostra is more or less a horror novel .... or at least it's about the thing which is scariest to me, existential transformation of the self without consent and without control.

At the start of the book, teenage Sasha is on a nice beach vacation with her mom when she finds herself being followed everywhere by a strange, ominous man. He has a dictate for her: every morning, she has to skinny-dip at 4 AM and swim out to a certain point in the ocean, then back, Or Else. Or Else? Well, the first time she oversleeps, her mom's vacation boyfriend has a mild heart attack and ends up in the ER. The next time ... well, who knows, the next time, so Sasha keeps on swimming. And then the vacation ends! And the horrible and inexplicable interval is, thankfully, over!

Except of course it isn't over; the ominous man returns, with more instructions, which eventually derail Sasha off of her planned normal pathway of high school --> university --> career. Instead, despite the confused protests of her mother, she glumly follows the instructions of her evil angel and treks off to the remote town of Torpa to attend the Institute of Special Technologies.

Nobody is at the Institute of Special Technologies by choice. Nobody is there to have a good time. Everyone has been coerced there by an ominous advisor; as entrance precondition, everyone has been given a set of miserable tasks to perform, Or Else. Also, it's hard not to notice that all the older students look strange and haunted and shamble disconcertingly through the dorms in a way that seems like a sort of existential dispute with the concept of space, though if you ask them about it they're just like 'lol you'll understand eventually,' which is not reassuring. And then there are the actual assignments -- the assignments that seem designed to train you to think in a way the human brain was not designed to think -- and which Sasha is actually really good at! the best in her class! fortunately or unfortunately .... but fortunately in at least this respect: everyone wants to pass, because if you fail at the midterm, if you fail at the finals, there's always the Or Else waiting.

AND ALSO all the roommates are assigned and it's hell.

Weird, fascinating book! I found it very tense and propulsive despite the fact that for chapters at a time all that happens is Sasha doing horrible homework exercises and turning her brain inside out. I feel like a lot of magic school books are, essentially, power fantasies. What if you learned magic? What if you were so good at it? Sasha is learning some kind of magic, and Sasha is so good at it, but the overwhelming emotion of this book is powerlessness, lack of agency, arbitrary tasks and incomprehensible experiences papered over with a parody of Normal College Life. On the one hand Sasha is desperate to hold onto her humanity and to remain a person that her mother will recognize when she comes home; on the other hand, the veneer of Normal College Life layered on top of the Institute's existential weirdness seems more and more pointless and frustrating the further on it goes and the stranger Sasha herself becomes. I think the moment it really clicked for me is midway through Sasha's second year, when ( spoilers )

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.

osprey_archer

Continuing my Christmas quest with a rewatch of White Christmas! This is one of my all-time favorite movies. I wrote Yuletide fic for it (Bob/Phil ofc), I’ve seen it on the big screen with the whole theater singing along at the end, seen it in general more times than I can count. (Despite this, I still have to check Wikipedia for the character names. I know who the characters are and how they pair off! I just can’t remember which name goes with which!)

So yesterday when I was taking a sick day, I figured another rewatch could only be good for my health, and of course I was right. Just such a fun movie. I love the song and dance numbers, and pine for the day when Hollywood would just straight-up stop a movie for a musical interlude. Why must everything “advance the plot” or “further character arcs”? Is it not enough sometimes just to watch Vera-Ellen taptaptaptaptap her toe real fast?

Also pour one out for Mary Wickes, who steals the show as General Waverly’s housekeeper Emma. I think my favorite single bit in the movie is the part where Emma overhears (because of course she’s listening in on the extension) that Bob and Phil are bringing their show to the empty ski lodge to rehearse (thus bringing in some much-needed income). She tells Phil and Bob that that’s just the nicest thing she ever heard and then kisses them both, and Bob is like “wowza” and is just about to go in for more when Phil drags him off.

I still love Bob and Phil’s chemistry, and I do kind of ship it but in a way where it also doesn’t bother me that the movie’s whole plot revolves around getting them together with girls. Phil and Judy have fantastic chemistry too, although possibly more shenanigans chemistry than romantic chemistry. (They might be able to work as a marriage, though.)

I don’t love Bob and Betty as a couple, mostly because their big misunderstanding is so movie-contrived. This really is a case where Betty could just say what’s bothering her and Bob could explain and they could sort it all out without Betty running off in a huff to the Carousel Club in New York! Since this is a big part of the story you’d think it would sink the movie, but everything else works so well for me that when we get to this bit I always sigh “ho hum” and wait patiently for the big “White Christmas” finale. Simply a perfect ending tableau.

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

cathrowan

Multiple appointments this week for various kinds of body work:

Monday - blood draw for Vitamin D levels
Tuesday - pedicure
Wednesday (today) - physio for strained calf muscle
Thursday - deep tissue massage

Nothing (yet) for Friday

I want to be as physically prepared as I can be for two days of dancing at Borealis' Yule feast this weekend. There's a social dance on Saturday and an extended dance practice on Sunday. I'm looking forward to the event!

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.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ngaio Marsh’s Tied Up in Tinsel, which is actually a reread, which I realized fairly early on when the foppish country house owner explains that he’s staffed the place with murderers who have served their time. Just oncers, no more dangerous than the average man on the street, and anyway how else is he supposed to staff a country house given the servant problem in 1970s Britain? But I kept going, because Ngaio Marsh is always a good time, and also this book prominently features Troy who just happens to be at the country house to paint said foppish owner when the murder occurs… A Troy book is always especially a good time.

Maud Hart Lovelace’s The Trees Kneel at Christmas is set in Park Slope, where one of my friends lives, so every few pages I was shrieking “I know that place! I’ve crossed that street!” So naturally I loved the book, haha. Our heroine Afifi hears a story from her grandmother about how the trees kneel at Christmas back home in Lebanon, and becomes determined to walk to Prospect Park at midnight on Christmas Eve to see if the trees kneel in America, too.

I checked out Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1953 American Folksongs for Christmas purely because it was illustrated by Barbara Cooney, but found it unexpectedly fascinating. Seeger (stepmother of Pete Seeger) was, among other things, a collector of folk music, and this book is full of songs I’ve never even heard of, from the tradition of all-night Christmas Eve church singalongs, often in the South, where people would gather and sing till dawn.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve started Tasha Tudor’s Take Joy, which is a compilation of Christmas stories/poems/carols etc illustrated by Tudor. The second story is Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the world’s saddest pine tree. In the woods, the pine is too entirely focused on growing bigger (big enough to be a Christmas tree!) to ever feel happy. Then it’s cut down to be a Christmas tree, and it’s taken to a house and covered with ornaments and candles, and it’s all very strange and confusing, but the pine tree thinks that it will be able to enjoy these celebrations once it gets used to them… except of course its life as a Christmas tree lasts for just one night, and then it’s tossed in the attic and dried out for firewood.

What I Plan to Read Next

As I feared, I’m already running low on Christmas chapter books. However, Christie has a Poirot Christmas book and a Miss Marple that’s set at Christmas (although not perhaps a Christmas Book), and I have been meaning to to a Miss Marple, so…

If you have any other classic mystery Christmas recs, let me know!

oracne

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

osprey_archer

Naturally I’ve decided that this is the year to rewatch some best-beloved Christmas movies, so I kicked off the season with The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring Dan Stevens as a charming but moody Charles Dickens as he scrambles to write A Christmas Carol in time for the Christmas rush in order to save his tottering finances.

This is such a fun movie. I always love a period piece, and I love Dan Stevens, and I love movies about creating art of any kind (if it’s well done, which it isn’t always…), and this one has such a good balance of seriousness and humor.

On the serious side, we have the demons of Dickens’ childhood coming back to haunt him, especially in his difficult relationship with his father, to whom he is far too similar for comfort. He inherited his father’s charm, his taste for the high life, his gift for performance - and he’s afraid he’ll follow his father’s example by running his family into debtor’s prison with his extravagant spending. A new house! All remodeled! A crystal chandelier and a mantelpiece of Carrera marble!

Unlike his perpetually sunny father, Dickens also has darker moods, where the charm gives way to abrupt outbursts of rage. He stalks around his study in the middle of the night making a racket when composition isn’t going well, apparently unaware that he’s keeping the whole house up. He snaps at his wife, sends away a long-time friend, fires a servant girl - then in the morning demands to know why the servant girl is gone. “You have no idea,” Mrs. Dickens tells him, on the verge of tears but displaying all the self-control Charles lacks, “how hard it is to live with you.”

(I’m happy to report the servant girl shows up again, and is of course rehired. I sort of suspect that the housekeeper keeps these impetuously fired servants in an out of the way corner for a day or two just in case Dickens didn’t really mean it.)

But this is not a grim study of a historical figure’s dark side. There are so many wonderful funny bits, too. In his good moods, Dickens is incredibly charming and funny - you can see why all these people put up with his darker side, just because the lighter side is such a delight.

I love Trollope as the guy in the club who always comes over to commiserate (gloat) when someone receives a bad review. Those cruel reviewers, claiming that Martin Chuzzlewit was “dull, vapid, and vulgar” (which Trollope quotes from memory). “I didn’t think it was vulgar,” Trollope assures Dickens, who is looking for an exit, but fortunately Trollope sees someone else who just got a bad review and scuttles off to crow. I mean sympathize.

And I loved how the Christmas Carol characters start appearing to Dickens. As he gets deeper into composition of the book, they start following him around. There’s an especially funny bit where Dickens looks out a window - he’s trying to avoid the book because he’s struggling with the ending - and the characters are all standing in the street below. Mrs. Fezziwig waves a handkerchief at him.

Also, I covet Dickens’ book-lined study, with a little half-staircase up to a mezzanine level with more books. Why is the study built like that? Who can say? Possibly on purpose to be charming, and charming it absolutely is.

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"

cathrowan

I usually buy only milk and yogurt. Last week I bought a little carton of coffee cream (18%). This morning I enjoyed cream both in my coffee and on my oatmeal.

It's been a pretty good six months. I probably won't get around to trying to write a summary. I've been intermittently reading you all, although not commenting.

Here at latitude 53 sunset is at 4:15 pm today. I don't enjoy the long nights. Only two more weeks to the solstice!

oracne

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

osprey_archer

Picture book Advent is going strong! Since I usually don’t have a whole post worth to share about a single picture book, I’ve decided to do a wrap-up post each Monday with quick notes on each of the preceding week’s picture books.

Christmas, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney: a retelling of the Nativity story, with excursions into the origins of various Christmas customs: Saturnalia as the source of the Lord of Misrule, Odin walking the world morphing into St. Nicholas giving gifts. (Hadn’t heard that one before!)

The Remarkable Christmas of the Cobbler’s Sons, written by Ruth Sawyer, illustrated by Barbara Cooney: an unexpected gem! Left alone on Christmas Eve, the three sons of a poor cobbler are visited by an incredibly grumpy elf/gnome-type creature who kicks them out of bed and makes them turn cartwheels - only for oranges and Christmas cookies and gold and silver coins to pour from their pockets! Delicious. A new story to me, and I’ve read so many Christmas stories that it’s always impressive to find something new.

I Saw Three Ships, by Elizabeth Goudge. Actually not a picture book, but a novella for children, a quick charming story about young Polly in a seaport who insists to her elderly aunts that they have to leave the doors unlocked on Christmas Eve for baby Jesus. The aunts refuse, but Polly manages to open a window regardless, and of course quasi-magical Christmas happenings follow.

An Angel in the Woods, written and illustrated by Dorothy Lathrop. Another banger in the vein of Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus. A toy angel, left on the windowsill with a candle on Christmas Eve, flies into the woods to bring presents to the animals.

The Animals’ Santa, written and illustrated by Jan Brett. More Christmas presents for the animals! One thing I love about Brett’s illustrations is that you often have the main story in the big illustrations, but also a little B-plot taking place in the borders. In this case, the main story is the animals discussing who might be the animal Santa (a bear? A moose? A wolf?), while the side story features adorable little mice in little red hats and green sweaters making little Christmas presents using forest goodies like acorns.

The Twelve Days of Christmas, illustrated by Jan Brett. The main illustrations are the various presents for the twelve days of Christmas (the seven swans a-singing etc.), while the borders show the tale of the singer and her true love heading into the forest to get a Christmas tree, then decorating it with her family. So charming. Each border has “Merry Christmas” in a different language, and then the illustrations reference that national theme, so for instance on “eleven pipers piping” the language is Scotch Gaelic and the pipers are bagpipers in kilts.

Christmas Folk, by Natalia Belting, illustrated by Barbara Cooney. Did you know that Christmas also used to be Halloween? Okay, not exactly, but Christmas used to be the holiday where people got dressed up in costumes, went door to door demanding sweets, and set off fireworks, all customs that Belting describes in this story. (Cooney’s firework illustration includes a little girl with her hands over her ears. What a great detail!)

Profile

landingtree

November 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Page Summary

skygiants - (no subject)
mrissa - Exactly what we needed
skygiants - (no subject)
rachelmanija - The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
osprey_archer - White Christmas
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
cathrowan - Chassis maintenance
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
osprey_archer - Wednesday Reading Meme
oracne - If You're Into It....
osprey_archer - The Man Who Invented Christmas
sovay - But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder
cathrowan - A little treat
oracne - Holiday Romance Recommendations?
osprey_archer - Picture Book Advent, Week One

Style Credit

Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Dec. 13th, 2025 10:26 pm