landingtree

Most of the time when I read book reviews in The Atlantic, I think “Mmmm, glad someone else read this so I don’t have to.” But when I read their review of Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, I was like “I need this in my eyeballs NOW.”

The Director (translated from German by Ross Benjamin) is a novelized biography of G. W. Pabst, one of the most important directors in the post-World War I German film scene, most famous today for discovering Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. (Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks is the one floating in my vague “I’d like to see that one day” mental cloud.)

After Hitler rose to power, Pabst left Germany and looked for work in Hollywood. He struggled to find work in America, returned to Europe not long before the outbreak of war, and ended up making films in Nazi Germany.

These are the basic outlines of Pabst’s life, and they’re a matter of historical record. From here on out, I’m going to be referring specifically to the Pabst of the book, who clearly has some points of divergence with the real Pabst. For instance: book!Pabst has a son of military age, who is clearly standing in for the experience of the Average German Youth, while the real Pabst’s baby son was born during the war.

Now clearly the central question of the book is, how do you go from hating a regime so much that you flee to another country to uneasily collaborating with it? Part of the answer being that Pabst, in his own mind, is not collaborating: he’s not making propaganda films, he’s making non-political films! And he just happens to be making them in, okay, Nazi Germany, but does making art under an evil regime necessarily make that art evil?

And, okay, yes, technically his films are funded by the Nazi film ministry because that’s the sole source of funding in Nazi Germany. But what if you’re taking the funds from the Nazi film ministry and making a film like Paracelsus, which has what might be taken as an anti-Nazi message…? The whole sequence where a madman starts dancing, and everyone else starts dancing in time with him……?

But, I mean. Is that an anti-Nazi message, or is that just Pabst fans trying to come up with a justification for why “made films for Nazi Germany” is not quite as bad as it looks?

And then you have Pabst’s next film, his lost Molander, based on a book by a Nazi party hack named Karrasch. (There’s a hilari-terrifying scene where Pabst’s wife finds herself in a book club entirely devoted to Karrasch, who sounds like Nazi Nicholas Sparks). The subject matter is foisted on Pabst, but he digs beneath the surface of the story till he can make the script his own, then heads to Prague to film it.

The city is being continually bombed, and the Soviets are getting closer every day. Pabst’s assistant Franz comments, “Don’t you find it strange, Pabst, that we’re making a movie like this in the middle of the apocalypse?”

“Times are always strange,” Pabst tells him. “Art is always out of place. Always unnecessary when it’s made. And later, when you look back, it’s the only thing that matters.”

They’re supposed to get a battalion of soldiers for extras, but the battalion is called away to the front right before they film. So - Pabst turns to the local concentration camp.

I should say that this is not a spoiler - we learn it in the first chapter - and also that Pabst’s concentration camp extras, specifically, are historical speculation. There really were directors who used concentration camp inmates as extras (famously Leni Riefenstahl), but there’s no evidence if Pabst used them in Molander, as the film really was lost. But that’s what everyone was doing to make up labor shortages. It’s plausible.

And Pabst tells his assistant, “All this madness, Franz, this diabolical madness, gives us the chance to make a great film. Without us, everything would be the same, no one would be saved, no one would be better off. And the film wouldn’t exist.”

Only in the end, the film is lost. So it doesn’t exist, after all.

nnozomi

While I’m thinking of it: December’s coming up and about time for me to think about sending New Year’s cards. You know the drill: if I haven’t sent you a card before and you’d like one, DM me with a name and address to send it to, likewise if your name/address/etc. has changed, or if you’d rather not get one this time around.

Silly language stuff: I realized the other day that I’d inadvertently done a Tom Swifty in the thing I was writing, along the lines of “he was making tea adroitly with one hand.” (Of course, it could have been his left hand! But still. I guess in that case he would have been making tea gauchely, or else sinisterly… .) Also, I keep seeing people refer to the well-known dictionary as “Miriam Webster,” and now I want to work a minor character with that name into a story somewhere, just for fun. I always liked the name Miriam.

While Y is not what I would call fannish per se, he is sort of fannish-aware thanks to a long history with manga, anime, and games, plus he looks tolerantly on my fandom-related hobbies (“oh, is it time for the Christmas transformative-creation event already again? good luck!”). He texted me the other day to say “there are two girls in archery-club gear sitting in front of me on the train canoodling like nobody’s business, pure yuri!”

Jiang Dunhao song of the post: 赫马佛洛狄忒斯, an enormous transliterated mouthful of a title that renders down to “Hermaphroditos” (nicknamed 小赫马 by fans). The lyrics, by the pseudonymous 沃特艾文儿 (“Whatever”), always strike me as really surprisingly queer for a mainstream Chinese song, when you put together 每个名词都分男女，标签贴给我也贴给你，可仍有人坚信不疑牵手同行就能做情侣 (all the nouns are divided between male and female, with labels stuck on me and you, but there are still people who never doubt that you can be a couple if you hold hands and journey together) and 愚人的眼光里才没彩虹悬挂天际 (it’s only the fools who can’t see the rainbow hanging in the sky) and 世界是个什么东西，是个巨大的柜子而已…容纳谁都容纳不了你 (what is the world, it’s just a giant closet…no matter who they enclose, they can’t enclose you) and 深知爱就该百无禁忌 (deeply knowing love means having to ignore all taboos) and 我爱你是你，只因你是你 (I love you being you, just because you’re you). All that aside, it’s also a just plain good song with an irresistible rhythm in the chorus.

In ongoing architectural exploration, we went to see another Vories building, the Osaka Church, which is very simple and very lovely, although I have to say if you’re going to have a rose window I want it to be stained glass, not plain. Planned down to the angle of every pew. Old-fashioned portative organ in very beautiful wood sitting next to a modern piano, plus a pipe organ up in the loft. The church is open to visits on condition that visitors attend a service first, so we sat through half an hour of a noonday service: organ music (a Messiaen piece and something from the Messiah, I forget which one, and one I didn’t know), hymn-singing, the Lord’s Prayer (having spent six months in my youth attending a CoE school for reasons, I found I could still back-translate from the archaic Japanese to the “hallowed be Thy name” version), and a short sermon by a young woman pastor, possibly Chinese or Korean from her first name and very faint accent, wearing an immaculate trouser suit. No proselytizing of the visitors, much appreciated; if I lived nearby I might even visit the services regularly for the organ and the windows.

Because I do some volunteering for the local YMCA (very long story), I spent a day as a volunteer interpreter for…how can I explain this succinctly…a group of professionals (social workers, pastors, farmers, teachers, etc. etc.) from various developing countries who are spending several months in Japan studying to become “rural leaders.” They were visiting the day laborers’ district here, with a tour in the morning and a lecture and discussion in the afternoon.

All of them speak some amount of English but very little Japanese (although they had all picked up “daijobu”), so interpreters were needed. There was me and a younger American woman and two older Japanese women, one a high-school English teacher and one a sometime tourist guide, as well as two adorable high school girls. My group for the morning tour was me and the former-guide lady and half a dozen of the rural leader students (from India, Indonesia, Zambia, Cameroon, Vietnam and I forget where else), as well as the Japanese tour leader; I ended up doing all the interpreting (I urged the other lady to jump in but she just said “oh I couldn’t possibly)," which was not bad because I already know the district and its history quite well (a friend wrote a book about it that I might translate some day).
For the lecture in the afternoon, five of us switched off interpreting: it was clear that the two high school girls could only get through with constant help and even so managed only a sketch of the original lecture, while the American girl and the older Japanese lady did okay but missed some of the nuances in each direction; to brag unrestrainedly, I think I was the clearest and the most stable and accurate of the five. And really I should be ashamed not to be, after all, being the closest to a professional among them (although interpretation and translation are very different).
I had fun—interpreting is always exhausting, but almost always exhilarating as well—and enjoyed getting to interact with the visiting students a little (a very serious woman from Vietnam with a series of complicated questions, a Cameroonian pastor with a long beard and shorts, and so on). I was also really annoyed (typical, I’m afraid) at the way the whole thing was run. Mostly the people in charge of the event just sort of sat there looking hopeful rather than doing anything useful, and the group discussion was particularly badly run (the discussion questions were TERRIBLE, and I signed on to be an interpreter, not a facilitator. Although I did get to explain to a doubtful Zambian guy just why the Japanese birth rate hasn’t gone up in sociopolitical terms, with an Indian lady cheering me on). Also, in theory I am absolutely in favor of giving high school kids a chance to try out interpreting, but if the participants are actually going to get anything out of the event, the interpreters have to have more or less professional-level skills even if they’re not getting paid even professional-level peanuts.)

Translation work can give you a lot of access to other people’s family privacy. I felt very bad for the little girl whose documents passed through my hands the other day, to the tune of her baby immunization record, second- and third-grade report cards (it’s always a little surreal to translate report-card comments like “She paid attention in class very well this year, but needs to work on forgetting fewer things”), and her parents’ divorce and custody agreement. Then there was another little girl of similar age, transferring from a prestigious private elementary school in Kyoto to a similar one in Tokyo, maybe a professor’s child subject to the whims of university employment. Also a family register in which the date of marriage preceded the first son’s date of birth by only six months, making me wonder as always where it actually fell on the range from 100% shotgun to “well, we’re getting married soon, why wait.”
One of the other issues with this kind of work is that young children in particular tend to have far-out names, and the clients usually don’t advise you how to pronounce them. Japanese is (I think) unique this way, in that a) the writing system is mostly not phonetic and b) while there are standard character readings, most characters have multiple standard readings plus you can basically decide to pronounce them any way that comes into your head, which is the way a lot of parents name their children, presumably without considering that the kids will have to spend their whole lives explaining how their names are pronounced and spelled (speaking from personal experience, albeit through a different process). So all you can do with names is take a wild guess. Place names are just as bad, since they are often distorted by long history into weird forms; I had hundreds of addresses to transl(iter)ate lately and had to look up almost every single one, just to be sure. I think the worst offender this time around was a place called 福谷, which could be Fukuya or Fukutani or Fukudani just in normal terms; in context it turned out to be Ukigai, God help me. Places like this constitute regional shibboleths of sorts; a couple more I’ve come across personally include 酒々井 and 柴島, where you just have to know how to read them or you’ll never guess.

Photos: Lots of seasonal fruits and leaves. Persimmons usually look much nicer than they taste, but we recently received bounty from my father-in-law’s kumquat bush and the fragrance is wonderful. Also the railway at sunset, and Kuro-chan the elder who noticed me passing by and stopped me with an imperious meow, in order to make use of me as a heating device usefully equipped with a mofu-mofu function (not a good picture, but my other hand was occupied).

Be safe and well.

sovay

I had a small but very successful Thanksgiving with my parents, with both of my husbands, and with

nineweaving. I have been supplied with all the ingredients for a turkey terrific and a whole lot of apple crumble that doesn't need to be reconstructed into anything except me. My mother taped the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I leaned back into

rushthatspeaks while we talked books and movies and theatrical stories. The photo was taken by

spatch for

selkie in condolence for the stressors of her holiday for which she was not the responsible party. The Sallust is from 1886, but I work with what I've got.

Current Music: Molly Donnery & The Ciderhouse Rebellion, "The Kilmacthomas Girl"

cyphomandra

I ploughed onward through FFVII Remake and ultimately platinumed it, woo hoo, although it’s definitely thanks to Optinoob’s combat guides. His strategy for the final Sephiroth boss fight (which comes after a series of other fights, so you have to manage your characters very carefully to have enough MP etc left) boiled to down to block, counter stance, block, with Cloud, switch briefly to another character once they show up for heals and barrier etc, then back to Cloud (as Sephiroth will instantly target the character you’re playing) and keep blocking/countering until you can get him with a limit break before he unkindly drops Meteor on you - Optinoob when describing this started imitating Sephiroth going “Cloud, why won’t you attack me?” :D

After that I played chunks of FFVII Intergrade (the Yuffie DLC) on hard mode and I haven’t finished it but I jumped back into FFVII Rebirth. I’m still on chapter 12 of this in hard mode, which is exactly where I was storywise in March, but I have now gone back and done all the side quests I’d missed earlier that you have to repeat on hard mode to unlock more character progression, as well as some of the mini games (aargh the mini games. There are too many and I don’t know if I’m ever going to get through some of them, like the pirate’s gallery shooting one and the gambit & gears hard mode games and, omg, the PIANO). Where I am now, though, I really need to unlock Götterdammerung to be able to make it through the next fights, and it’s locked behind a series of excessively tricky boss fights - the six Brutal Challenges. I have done four, again heavily relying on Optinooob, and they were painful slogs.

As a change of pace from repeated party wipes, I picked up Blue Prince, which is a puzzle-solving rogue-like centred around a mysterious mansion, and not only is it great but I have not yet died even once. You are the presumptive heir to the mansion, but to prove you deserve it, you have to find room 46 - the house is a 9 by 5 grid, every day you start in the entrance hall on the middle of the bottom row, and when you open a door you get a choice of possible floor plans to fill the next space - some of the rooms are dead ends, some have items or hints you need, some require specific resources to select them, some interact with other rooms, and some actively punish you by removing resources or limiting your subsequent choices. When I first got a PC, the game I totally fell for was Myst, a puzzle-solving world-building lore-heavy game with (for the time) amazing graphics, and I spent hours on it, not least because this was largely before the WWW and I had no easy way of finding out puzzle solutions. The creators of Blue Prince credit Cyan (who made Myst), and it brings back that same feeling - there’s a massive amount going on here, with intriguing hints of story as well as fantastic puzzles, and it’s very satisfying when something finally works. Last night I entered room 46 (on day 28 of game time) but there’s a surprising amount left to do! It is a terrible game for the “just one more day” because a day can be over in 20 minutes if you have bad luck drafting rooms or can take nearly two hours if you find a lot of stuff, and I also now have all these notes about hints and clues and possible solutions to pore over. Recommended.

sartorias

Wishing those who celebrate a warm day with plenty of good things to eat in company you cherish.

osprey_archer

On one of

troisoiseaux’s recent posts about a nun memoir, someone linked an article about a different nun memoir: Monica Baldwin’s I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World after Twenty-Eight Years in the Convent.

As Baldwin went into the convent in 1914 and emerged in 1941, I knew instantly that I had to read it. What an absolutely huge period of social and technological change to miss! Baldwin is astonished by modern underwear, the wireless, wartime shortages, and masses and masses of people who have become famous since she went into the convent: Greta Garbo, Picasso, D. H. Lawrence… Right up to the end of the war she keeps clanging up against her ignorance of so many things that everyone else takes totally for granted.

However, as interesting as I found all the details about social change, the parts I found most fascinating were Baldwin’s descriptions of life in the convent. I’ve read about early twentieth-century social changes before, although not quite from this angle, but the convent was totally new, in a “I wouldn’t make it five minutes as a novice” kind of way. Bells, bells, bells, ringing at intervals all day and all night, telling you to move from one occupation to another, stopping mid-stitch if that’s when the bell rings, lengthy sung prayers every day, every scrap of behavior governed by the Rule. There’s a correct way to sit, stand, eat, speak, and presumably breathe.

It’s particularly interesting because, although Baldwin left the convent, she still has faith in Catholicism and the concept of monasticism. She’s outside the convent but still “inside,” if you will, the belief system, so she’s particularly good at explaining the ideas behind an enclosed convent: humans were created to adore God and that therefore a life spent in adoring God is profoundly unselfish and also useful, because usefulness doesn’t mean first and foremost serving other people but serving God.

Unfortunately for Baldwin, most of her interlocutors aren’t willing to listen. It’s not just that they disagree (I certainly was going a bit bug-eyed over this order of priorities), but that they’re not even interested in trying to understand. And she’s never the one who brings up the whole nun business! People just tell Baldwin, the ex-nun, their opinion that nuns are selfishly hiding away in convents when they should be getting married or having families or building careers or CONTRIBUTING to the world.

Even if you think that, why would you tell this to an ex-nun unprompted? Were these people born in barns? But maybe they think that Baldwin, having left the convent, will agree.

But Baldwin does not, and she tries to explain the theory of the cloistered nun. Her interlocutors “listen” (read: sit in silence without taking any of it in) and then reiterate their original opinion.

So if Baldwin still believes, why did she leave the convent? Well, she believes in God, and Catholicism, and the concept of vocation, but has realized that she personally does not have a vocation. As she explains it, when she first decided she wanted to be a nun, she didn’t stop to ask herself if she actually had a calling. “I wanted to be a nun; it followed, therefore, as the night the day, that God must have chosen me.” (Some of my students who want to be doctors have the same attitude, insofar as you can have a thoroughly secular version of this belief.)

All through the year of her noviceship, and the five or six years of probation that followed, she continued in this willful confusion between “wanting to be a nun” and “being called to be a nun.” Only after ten years in the convent does she realize she’s made a horrible mistake.

And then she stuck it out for eighteen more years! The same pigheadedness that led her to decide wanting to be a nun meant she must have a vocation also kept her from throwing in the towel for nearly two decades after realizing she didn’t.

The tone of the book is generally pretty sprightly, a sort of quizzical madcap adventure, an Edwardian Rip Van Winkle awakens in World War II. But there is an undercurrent of tragedy, too, which sometimes breaks the surface in a brief lament. If Baldwin had left the nunnery at 31, when she realized she had no vocation, she might still have built a life for herself. But in staying so long, she missed everything: marriage and children, yes, but also the chance to build a career, or even just acquire the job skills that would suit her for any kind of war work.

As it is, she can only bumble from war job to war job. After the war she retires to a cottage in Cornwall, which is certainly a happy ending of a kind. But what a shame she didn’t change direction at once when she realized she was on the wrong path.

sovay

Despite my best intentions of routine insomnia, I was awake too late because I fell into a 1990 BBC Radio 3 production of Michael Frayn's Benefactors (1984) which I had never read and barely heard of and if I had a nickel for every play by Michael Frayn which dips in and out of the fourth wall of the timestream as its characters post-mortem how it all went wrong in those complicated spaces between them so many years ago, I still wouldn't be able to afford a cup of coffee at these prices even if I could drink it, but since I've seen two productions of Copenhagen (1998) and heard a third, I still think it's funny. Benefactors is harder-edged as its Brutalist architecture, more pitilessly patterned, the structure of a double-couple farce where every door slams bleaker: still a memory play of ideas without answers, still the lacuna of human actions radiating at its heart. "But then you look up on a clear night and you'll see there's only a dusting of light in all creation. It's a dark universe." If I have to be thankful for something at this miserable moment of history, the accessibility of art is a strong contender. Also cats.

Current Music: Lake Street Dive, "Call Off Your Dogs"

jjhunter

Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and tell me about it in the 5-7-5 syllables of a haiku.

=

Signal-boosting much appreciated!

landofnowhere

Jacques and His Master, Milan Kundera, based on the novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître by Denis Diderot, English translation by Simon Callow. Readaloud. I'd read the Diderot novel some years ago, in French, in the Project Gutenberg version; I'm pretty sure some of the subtleties were lost on me. The play felt structurally a lot neater than the book, but I maybe just didn't appreciate the structure of the book? Like the original book, this adaptation was meta, but being a play it expressed its meta-ness in different ways. It played up the male-gaze-y aspects of the book in ways that were not so fun. However, I got to read the Innkeeper, who is the only female role with agency in the whole play, and had a blast with it.

The Strength of the Few, James Islington. A warned me that the book was not as good as The Will of the Many, and he was right. Adding fake-Egyptian and fake-Celtic plotlines to the fake-Roman story from the first book meant that the worldbuilding overall felt shallower. However I'll keep reading and hope for more payoff in later books. (Also I grumble that in this fake-Roman worldbuilding, words ending "us" pluralize to end in "ii", e.g. "stylii".)

The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake, Margaret Todd. I finished this, and enjoyed it; it is very much a Victorian Biography, but I like that sort of thing. (There is one modern biography of Sophia Jex-Blake, which I may try to track down for extra context.) I enjoyed watching Sophia come of age, visit the US to get a sense of the state of women's education, and finding her way to her calling as a doctor and an advocate for women's medical education. It's delightful seeing just how much of a Charlotte Bronte fan Jex-Blake was; she's so determined to emulate Lucy Snowe from Villette that she shows up at a school in Mannheim which has already rejected her application to be a teacher there, to persuade them to take her on in whatever capacity they can, which ends up being as an unpaid substitute teacher.

After that, we get a blow-by-blow account of Jex-Blake's long endeavour, not just to get a medical degree that will allow her to practice in the British system, but to clear the path for other women to do the same, becoming a minor celebrity in the process. (There's a funny bit about a letter than a young Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his cousin, saying, roughly, "Jex-Blake is clearly on the right side of history, but I wouldn't marry her". Jex-Blake, who preferred women, learned about this letter many years later, and her reaction was "LOL, I clearly admire Stevenson more than he admired me, but I never had the slightest desire to marry him!") This is sometimes dramatic, as Jex-Blake and the rest of the "Edinburgh Seven" are admitted to the University and then have to deal with angry male classmates and a lukewarm administration that chickens out on them midway through, on top of their regular coursework; but it also gets a bit dry at time.

The closing section, about Jex-Blake's final years in retirement, has a special warmth; Margaret Todd is writing from memory, having lived with Jex-Blake through that time, though she has completely effaced herself from the narrative. It would be easy to blame Todd for not better documenting her own life and Jex-Blake's, except that her own story is itself so sad; as I understand it, she had become depressed and isolated after Jex-Blake's death, and died, possibly of suicide, just months after this book was published.

troisoiseaux

The 2025 NYC Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night is available online (via PBS) through the end of the year, and is tremendously fun! Such a stacked cast— with Lupita Nyong'o as Viola/Cesario (and her real-life brother as Sebastian), Sandra Oh as Olivia, and Peter Dinklage as Malvolio— it's genuinely hard to pick a stand-out performance?? I will say that Dinklage is probably my favorite Malvolio of the three I've seen within the past year, although he plays it both less campily and less sympathetically than the Folger's recent production or Tamsin Greig in the 2017 production on National Theatre at Home; I'll also say that Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Sir Andrew Augecheek stole every scene he was in, but honestly, "Sir Andrew was a hoot" was my takeaway from all three productions and so I think it might just be a really fun role. (On a less expected note, Orsino's entourage was also a hoot, especially with the recurring bit of one guy who kept laughing out of turn and then dropping into push-ups when Orsino looked at him. Also, fantastic Orsino, with kind of "manly man who's secretly a softie" vibes that made for an appealing take on the character— although, until the Drag Race runway vibes of the final bows, I would not say that this was a particularly gender-y version of Twelfth Night, overall?) In assorted other details: this staging had Nyong'o (actually, both Nyong'os) occasionally slip into Swahili, including the initial dialogue between Viola and Sebastian when they reunite, which was a cool touch; I didn't know what to think of the backdrop of giant letters reading WHAT YOU WILL, at first, but it earned its keep as a set-up for the punchline in the scene where, as Sir Toby and co. spy on Malvolio, they all hide behind smaller/portable/individual letters spelling out TREE.

rivkat

Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth: The thing about land is that they aren’t making any more of it, and although you can make more farmland (for now) from forests, it’s not a good idea. This means that agriculture is hugely important to climate change, but most of the time proposals for, e.g., biofuels or organic farming don’t take into account the costs in farmland. The book explores various things that backfired because of that failed accounting and what might work in the future. Bonus: the audiobook is narrated by Kevin R. Free, the voice of Murderbot, who turns out to be substantially more expressive when condemning habitat destruction.

Tony Magistrale & Michael J. Blouin, King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King (feat. Stephen King and Charles Ardai): Treads the scholarly/popular line, as the inclusion of a chapter by King and a “dialogue” with Ardai suggest. The book explores King’s noir-ish work like Joyland, but also considers his horror protagonists as hardboiled detectives, trying to find out why bad things happen (and, in King’s own words, often finding the noirish answer “Because they can.”). I especially liked the reading of Wendy Torrance as a more successful detective than her husband Jack. Richard Bachman shows up as the dark side of King’s optimism (I would have given more attention to the short stories—they’re also mostly from the Bachman era and those often are quite bleak). And the conclusion interestingly explores the near-absence of the (living) big city and the femme fatale—two noir staples—from King’s work, part of a general refusal of fluidity.

Gerardo Con Diaz, Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World: This book is literally not for me because I live and breathe copyright law and it is a tour through the law of copyright & the internet that is aimed at an intelligent nonlawyer. Although I didn’t learn much, I appreciated lines like “Back then, all my porn was illegally obtained, and it definitely constituted copyright infringement.” The focus is on court cases and the arguments behind them, so the contributions of “user generated content” and, notably, fanworks to the ecosystem don’t get a mention.

Stephanie Burt, Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift: ( longer )

Kyla Sommers, When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: Extensive account of the lead-up to, experience of, and consequences of the 1968 riots after MLK Jr.’s assassination. There was some interesting stuff about Stokely Carmichael, who (reportedly) told people to go home during the riots because they didn’t have enough guns to win. (Later: “According to the FBI, Carmichael held up a gun and declared ‘tonight bring your gun, don’t loot, shoot.’ The Washington Post, however, reported Carmichael held up a gun and said, ‘Stay off the streets if you don’t have a gun because there’s going to be shooting.’”) Congress did not allow DC to control its own political fate, and that shaped how things happened, including the limited success of citizens’ attempts to direct development and get more control over the police, but ultimately DC was caught up in the larger right-wing backlash that was willing to invest in prisons but not in sustained economic opportunity. Reading it now, I was struct by the fact that—even without riots, fires, or other large-scale destruction—white people who don’t live in the area are still calling for military occupation because they don’t feel safe. So maybe the riots weren’t as causal as they are considered.

osprey_archer

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Sachiko Kashiwaba’s The Village Beyond the Mist, translated by Avery Fischer Udagawa. A delight! The book inspired Spirited Away, and it very loosely shares the same premise: ordinary girl visits magical town where she has to find work. However, The Village Beyond the Mist is a much lighter take. Our heroine Lina is never in danger of being trapped in the spirit world, and her work is much lighter than Chihiro’s, consisting largely of helping the quirky townsfolk organize their shops: a bookstore, a maritime store, a toy store. (A bit disappointed Lina didn’t get to help out in the sweet shop. I would have loved more descriptions of the treats!)

A lovely bit of light magical fun. Just don’t go into it expecting Haku or yokai, and enjoy it for what it is.

What I’m Reading Now

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Long Live Evil, which I’m enjoying so far, although given the amount of time that our heroine Rae (isekaid into the body of the villainess Lady Rahela) spends musing about the double standard, I want her to go ahead and bang some of the hot bad boys already. Behave in a way unbefitting of a pure heroine! Get down and dirty with someone who is not your one true love!

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided to go FULL CHRISTMAS this December: all Christmas books and nothing but Christmas books until December 25. I’ve often thought this would be an interesting thing to try, and this year I’m going in!

troisoiseaux

Read Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest by Nick Mamatas, which is mostly a sci-fi retelling of The Tempest in which the Caliban character is the last "free-range", un-augmented human, living on an island off of post-apocalyptic California under the thumb of the Master and his daughter M, who owe their tech-implanted immortality and wizardry to the inventions of Kalivas' mother, known as the Sorceress of Silicon Valley before the aforementioned apocalypse. ( ... ) Shades of Piranesi, mostly in the sense of being a narrative from the POV of a character who - let's say - describes recognizable things in an unrecognizable way (although Kalivas' world is distinctly more off-putting than Piranesi's beloved House) and also in the sense that Piranesi itself reminds me of The Tempest;

sabotabby drew comparisons to Jenny Hval's Girls Against God, which I can also see, particularly in the novel(la?)'s last section, at which point the story doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange, as it were. (Sorry, I think I'm funny. The last section is, like, a semi-separate story in the form of a meta script? In a completely out-of-context #spoiler: Charlie Chaplin is there, kind of?)

Currently reading The Tatami Galaxy by Tomihiko Morimi, also weird: in four different timelines, a disaffected Japanese college student joins four different clubs, finding himself equally disappointed in each one. (Presumably? I'm only through the first two.) This really clicked for me when, in the second section/timeline, I caught that characters, scenes, and even specific sentences were repeating from the first; I also really like how, as a book in translation, it has a narrative voice that's recognizably idiomatic, even as the actual idioms sound unusual in English— "a rose-colored campus life" and "a black-haired maiden" are repeated a lot.

cyphomandra

Spent, Alison Bechdel
Rivals, Jilly Cooper
Appassionata, Jilly Cooper
All of us murderers, KJ Charles
Never flinch, Stephen King
One day everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad
Unwritten rules, KD Casey

Spent, Alison Bechdel. Her latest memoir/fictionalised autobio, this one significantly more fictionalised than previous (or at least apparently more!) as the DTWOF cast show up as neighbours to the fictional version of Alison (whose personal memoir has become an HBO-like big budget TV show, Death and Taxidermy, that is starting to veer wildly from her original vision) and her pygmy goat-rearing imminently viral partner. I think Bechdel does a great job working in this odd liminal space of fiction and memoir, and it was great to see the DTWOF cast again; Sparrow and Stuart have never been my favourite couple, but I like what Bechdel does with their kid and the younger (now adult) generation. Also, the cats in this are fantastic. I would happily read anything Bechdel did about cats.

Rivals, Jilly Cooper. I was sorry to see she died, because I’ve always loved her books. Sure, after those first golden four (Riders, Rivals, Polo, Appassionata) there were some clunkers, but even in the very murky depths of Score! there were still some golden moments. Anyway. This is not my favourite because I do not like Rupert and I think Taggie could do far, far, better, but it still becomes totally compelling and I find myself strangely concerned about television franchises in the Home Counties. I should track down the TV series that was made of this recently (I should, but given my issues with ever watching TV I will probably not. Maybe if it's on a plane.)

All of us murderers, KJ Charles. Gothic (set almost entirely in Lackaday House, a great name), dodgy family, and murder. Zev is summonsed back to his estranged family only to discover that not only is his former lover, Gideon, now working there, but his cousin Wynn has decided that whichever potential heir marries his young ward will inherit everything; chaos and murder ensue, the house is cut-off by fog (it’s on the moors) and tension mounts. It is perhaps unfair to Charles that any books she writes set largely in a single country house will mainly make me pine wistfully for Think of England, and yet it’s unavoidable; this was okay but in no danger of displacing the earlier book’s hold on me. The writing for our modern sensibilities is a little too evident here (of course the evil ancestor made his pile in the slave trade and of course Zev would then totally repudiate it) , and after the initial set-up I really wanted more tension between the leads. But I still galloped through this.

Never flinch, Stephen King. Holly reluctantly takes up a job bodyguarding a controversial women’s rights figure; meanwhile, someone upset with the outcome of a recent (rigged) court case is killing innocents in the place of the misled jurors. This is entirely thriller, with no supernatural elements that I spotted, and while King is as always excellent on building tension, the book itself doesn’t really work. King says as much in his afterword, where Tabitha told him the first draft didn’t work, and he went back over and over, but was also working on it during hip issues and eventually decided it was good enough. It’s still a competent thriller but it does feel like it was set up for the (admittedly great!) moment where two separately motivated killers scrap over the same victim - the set up looks increasingly rickety the more you stare into it. I still like Holly, but I don’t think I’ll hang on to this one.

Appassionata, Jilly Cooper. I am much fonder of horses than of classical music but this and Polo are still my most favourite Coopers. Starts with Rupert and Taggie in Bogota, where they’ve gone to adopt a baby as Rupert’s too old for them to adopt in the UK (Rupert, still blindingly awful much of the time but once again I will grudgingly admit he has his moments (I think it’s in Rivals that he (as an MP) suddenly votes against the Tory party line on capital punishment and finds himself with all the liberals), is forced to help out at the orphanage to prove his parenting skills and falls for an abandoned disfigured boy that is not the sweetly pretty baby the nuns have picked out for them; they end up adopting both), and then cheerfully charges into the world of classical music via Abby Rosen, a highly strung American violinist who is being exploited and manipulated by her dodgy agent. Abby is also terrible - she’s impulsive, she fails to think about others’ feelings, she bullies people when she’s feeling insecure - but she is compelling and believable, talented, works incredibly hard most of the time (first as a violinist and then, due to events, as a conductor, fighting prejudice and rebellious musicians), and it’s impossible not to feel for her - and she’s only one of an expansive cast. Also has an m/m romance as one of the main three romantic arcs (featuring Marcus Campbell-Black, Rupert’s oldest son, a brilliant pianist, massively lacking in confidence and closeted, terrified that his father will disown him) but many, many more. She is great at having people be self-obsessed, even cruel, and yet also capable of compassion and growth. And I have no ability to assess Cooper’s writing about music but it genuinely makes me want to listen to the pieces her musicians perform in the hope I’ll share her emotional experience.

One day everyone will have always been against this, Omar El Akkad. Part memoir, part indictment of the West and its unobserved idealism, part witness; it’s good and I am glad I read it but it only made me feel worse about humanity.

Unwritten rules, KD Casey. Once again I bravely ford into the uncharted waters of m/m sports romances that are not about hockey. Second-chance baseball romance by someone who obviously loves baseball; this has a lot of good stuff in it (such as interesting, well-thought out characters, who actually feel like sports athletes - there’s good cultural representation, with one hearing impaired Jewish lead and one first gen Venezuelan) but the balance between their first relationship/breakup and the get back together felt too heavy on the past. I have got her other two on hold.

sovay

I had just been thinking about Jack Shepherd because he was one of the founding members of the Actors' Company which had sparked off in 1972 with Ian McKellen and Edward Petherbridge, whose memoir I was re-reading last night. He'd left the company by the time of their adaptation of R. D. Laing's Knots (1970) and thus does not appear in the 1975 film which seems to have been their only moving picture record, leaving me once again with strictly photographic evidence of this sort of reverse supergroup experiment in democratic theater. (Shepherd at far right resembles a pre-Raphaelite pin-up in jeans, but I like to think if I had Caroline Blakiston's arm round my shoulders I wouldn't look that brooding about it.) Then again, I missed most of his film and famous television work, too: my reaction to his death is derived entirely from his astonishing Renfield in the BBC Count Dracula (1977), who holds more than a candle to the icons of Dwight Frye or Pablo Álvarez Rubio, a heartbreakingly weird and human performance of a character who may not be entirely sane in a world with vampires in it, which doesn't mean he's not to be trusted about them. I loved how much of his lucidity slides between his Victorian hysteria and his careful impersonation of a reformed lunatic which is not always and for good reason convincing. I loved his kiss of Judi Bowker's Mina, not his master's initiatory drink, but a damned soul's benison, the offering of his life. Not just because he became my default horror icon on this site, I thought about him more than any other character from that sometimes surprisingly faithful adaptation. His bare wrists, his shocked hair. His actor had such a knack in the role for the liminal, death seems on some level too definite to believe.

Current Music: Jeff Tweedy, "Enough"

rivkat

Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right: ( it's always racism )

Corinne Low, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours: ( self-help from an economist )
Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It: ( Doctorow in fine form )
Tim Wu, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity: ( Another account of enshittification )

Kim A. Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History: ( written by the victors )

Mary Roach, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy: ( strange but true )

osprey_archer

All of Gene Stratton Porter’s books are An Experience, and The Harvester is no exception. At the beginning of the book, the Harvester has just posed to his dog (his sole companion) his yearly question: shall I get married this year?

He is appalled when the dog signifies a resounding YES! So he sits on his stoop, staring over the lake and sulking about how he’ll have to go COURTING and put on clean CLOTHES and she probably won’t like his CABIN, when out of the moonlight on the water a vision appears: a beautiful girl, glowing in gold, who floats across the lake to him, plants a kiss on his lips, and disappears.

Charged with this vision of the Girl, the Harvester begins to build a proper house for her. “Going to get married?” the builders ask. “Yep!” says the Harvester, who has not yet met the Dream Girl in the flesh.

(A sidenote: the Harvester and the Girl do eventually get names, but the narrative mostly refers to them as the Harvester and the Girl and so will I.)

The Harvester, by the way, is named for his profession of gathering medicinal herbs from the woods. Over the past decade, he has slowly transplanted to his woods medicinal herbs from the surrounding area, so the whole forest is one great medicinal garden where these plants can grow to their full medicinal potential in natural conditions.

But to return to our story. A few months later, the Harvester at last catches sight of the Girl at the local railway station! After a protracted search, he finds her staying at the home of her uncle, the Harvester’s most perfidious neighbor. To rescue her from this uncle (and after suggesting various other solutions to the problem of getting her away from this uncle, like sending the girl who is very ill to the hospital), the Harvester asks the Girl to marry him.

“YES we are going in for some FORCED PROXIMITY” I shrieked, and OH BOY ARE WE. The Girl moves into the Harvester’s house! The Harvester promises that she shall be free until she comes to love him! The book is about as forthright as a book in 1911 can be that this means the marriage will remain unconsummated until the Girl feels a reciprocal, passionate sexual love for the Harvester.

But the Girl’s ill health catches up with her. She is sick with Fever, that convenient early-20th century literary disease so conducive to hurt/comfort. In her delirium only the Harvester’s touch can soothe her. (GSP knows what the people want and she is GIVING it to us.) He strokes her hands and tells her of the beautiful life of the woods, tethering her to this world with the sound of his voice! When medicine gives her up for dead, he cures her with a natural elixir made from the medicinal plants grown on his land!!!!

The Girl is now passionately attached to him, and during her convalescence there’s lots of cuddling and hand-kissing. But she’s still not sexually attracted to him. At this point her mother’s relations conveniently appear, and she’s whisked off to a round of Society in Philadelphia, at which point the Harvester wearily confides to his friends that she loves him but she doesn’t LOVE love him, at which point they roundly scold him: doesn’t he know that a good girl won’t LOVE love him till after the wedding night? It’s up to him to teach her what passion is!

This is a common nineteenth-century idea, and GSP both kind of embraces and repudiates it. On the one hand, there’s all this cuddling and hand-kissing and face-kissing and that times the Harvester gives her a single passionate kiss on the lips just to show her the difference between that and the kiss of sisterly affection she gave him, and what can you call that but coaxing along the growing tendrils of the Girl’s sexuality?

But in the end, the Harvester’s decision to let her go and see if absence will make the heart grow fonder is vindicated. The Girl does come back to him from Philadelphia: she did realize, on her own, that she now passionately loves him, and it does give her that flush of warm sensation that he tried to describe. She comes to him through the moonlight, sitting by the lake, and at last plants her kiss on his lips.

sovay

Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.

I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.

Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to

spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.

I really appreciate

asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and

ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.

Current Music: Hen Ogledd, "Scales Will Fall"

rivkat

Hugh Howey, Wool: ( underground dystopia )
Stephanie Burgis, Wooing the Witch Queen: ( meet cute )

R.F. Kuang, Katabasis:( hell is other academics )

Qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division: ( fighting a war you can't remember )

Mia Tsai, The Memory Hunters: ( memory and mushrooms )

John Scalzi, R. F. Kuang, Peng Shepherd, Kaliane Bradley, Olivie Blake, P. Djèlí Clark, The Time Traveler’s Passport: ( short stories )

Francesca Serritella, Ghosts of Harvard: ( ghosts or just mental illness? )

V. E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic: ( world hoppers )

mrissa

I've mentioned here before that one of my big projects this year is my involvement with The Vertigo Project, which now has a webpage so the rest of you can see what we've been doing. Earlier today I facilitated the first creative therapy-style writing workshop through that group, and it was really lovely--and is just the tip of the iceberg on what this group is doing.

Specifically, you can now read all the new work they've commissioned from me! Friends, it's a lot. It's journaling prompts for people who would like to use writing to process some of their own vertigo experiences. But also it's the following stories and poems:

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (story), safe conduct through strange new worlds

Club Planet Vertigo (poem), this is not the dance I wanted to do

Greetings from Innerspace (poem), my orbits are eccentric

The Nature of Nemesis (poem), me and Clark Kent know what's what

On the Way Down (poem), falling hard

Preparation (poem), sometimes we're just literal, okay

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (story), when the waves hit you even on dry land, it's good to have someone who's willing to swim against the current for you

The Torn Map (story), rewriting the pieces of the former world into something new

The main page also has links to some of the other aspects of the project, which includes a nonfiction book, dance, puppetry, a podcast with a physical therapist, and more. Please feel welcome to explore it all.

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November 2025

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Reading

Book Review: The Director

Rambling about translation, interpretation, and so on

I'd marry her this minute if she only would agree

Gaming Update

Thanksgiving

Book Review: I Leap over the Wall

This is what I get for being civilized

How Are You? (in Haiku)

wednesday books forget to add a title

Twelfth Night (Delacorte Theater, 2025)

Nonfiction

Wednesday Reading Meme

Reading Wednesday (on Tuesday)

Books read, October

Is your heart hiding from your fire?

Nonfiction

Book Review: The Harvester

Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken

Fiction

The Vertigo Project: new work!

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November 2025

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