Reading

Current Music: Lord Huron, "Watch Me Go"

And where the arrow leads, you never know

As part of my birthday month,

spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.

I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "Exit Simulation"

Trying my best to arrive

This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from

foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.

Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

I went to Somerville this morning for a fasting blood draw, to repeat the blood glucose test from a few weeks ago. She also ordered an A1C test and, apparently, a basic metabolic panel. I don't remember Carneb mentioning the basic metabolic panel, but I asked the receptionist to check whether I'd already had one recently, and he said I hadn't, so sure. I can spare an extra test tube of blood, I just didn't want to have to fight an insurance company about it.

From there, I took the bus to Arlington, hoping to order new glasses, but the optician's office was closed, with no sign explaining why. (It's a one-man shop, so if Ron is sick, there's nobody else to open the office or post a sign explaining when he'll be back.) Before making another trip, I'll call and confirm that he's open; it's an easier trip from Davis Square than from here in Brighton.

The timing worked for me to stop at Lizzy's Ice Cream on the way home; I bought pints of black raspberry, black cherry, and blueberry, which was listed as a seasonal flavor.

I may have overdone things, but when I woke up this morning it seemed like good timing for the fasting blood draw.

Anyone in Tucson? Anyone know anyone in Tucson?

An excellent used bookshop in Tucson, The Book Stop, may be closing down unless the current owner, who is retiring, can find someone to take it over. Her contact info is on the "contact" page.

Anyone want to run a used bookshop in Tucson? It's really great and has an excellent location. I can vouch that being a bookshop owner is the best job ever unless you want to make lots of money.

Feel free to link or copy this.

Entry tags:

I know this train has long left the station....

But I am so, so fed up of people who use 'silver bullet' when they mean 'magic bullet'!

Silver bullets kill things, werewolves, mostly, right; or just generally Bad Guys when fired by the Lone Ranger.

Magic bullets Do Good - like curing sifilis, thank you Ehrlich and Hato, they are targeted remedies.

Also, however hyperliterate I am myself and have been from a young age, I don't think it's the panacea proposed here: There is a silver bullet for childhood happiness: a love of reading.

Just because she (and I and I daresay many of you who are reading this) found our happy place in reading, doesn't mean it's going to be that for all children.

I am entirely there for emphasising the role of pleasure in reading, for

meeting children where they are. It means allowing children to read books that might be perceived as too old and too young for them; it means relishing your child’s love for comics and heavily illustrated books

and not gatekeeping and niggling about what they are reading.

But I don't think this is For Everyone any more than Going Out and Playing In the Nice Fresh Air.

And on that, I really liked this: Children should have a right to play in the streets, alleys, pavements and car parks of their neighbourhoods. Refers to a letter about children playing in streets, etc, rather than in designated playgrounds and parks:

It assumes that children should be “taken” to designated play spaces, rather than allowing for the possibility that children should be able to access playable space without adults. And, finally, it fails to acknowledge that parks and other green spaces afford only certain kinds of play, and that children demand – and deserve – diverse spaces for diverse forms of play, not just ball games, swings and slides.

Entry tags:

meme,
poetry

“they say that time heals a broken heart / but time has stood still since we’ve been apart”

For Poetry Monday:

“This is the first thing,” Philip Larkin

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

I assume he means both senses of wood.

---L.

Subject quote from I Can’t Stop Loving You, Ray Charles.

Possessed

It's been a hot minute. I feel like I've been possessed. I picked up that story thread ~~four~~ six weeks ago and then just didn't stop. It's been a wild ride and I hit 73k ~~this~~ yesterday morning and a fairly firm "the end."

73k over 42 days... that's an average of 1,700 words a day or pretty much the pace you're expected to maintain during NaNoWriMo. I haven't been able to write that fast/consistently since college, easily. I remember trying to write TPA at NaNo pace, oh, nine Novembers ago (hahah omg what) and barely managing 500/day. And that was with only one kid and while on parental leave. TBF, CG was a lot as a newborn, but I probably had the same amount of plot in the beginning and a tight deadline.

I did squeeze out a workable draft of TPA in three months, which wasn't bad at all. And since then, I've been lucky if I can write a draft in six months.

It's been so much fun to write freely again. Very similar to my halcyon days of staying up way too late to write 1000s of words of fanfic. Chasing that high until I either had to go to sleep or go to school, but daydreaming about the story all day anyway. Of course, it does make me wonder if when I re-open that word doc in a couple of days/weeks, it'll be that level of bad. ^^()

I'd honestly thought I'd left that level of writing joy behind, so if anything it's just... nice to know I can still capture it as an adult. Not saying that I otherwise didn't have fun writing these past mumble twenty mumble years, but certainly not in the same all-consuming way.

Which... to be fair, was a bit much. I kept waking up earlier and earlier, not because I'd set an alarm or anything, but because my brain was a cat at the door, scratching and wailing "Write now??" And I might have skivved off work a early a few times / taken longer lunches because I couldn't stop. By midway, it felt very much like I just needed to get this story out so I could breathe again.

So even though I kept telling myself there was no deadline, I didn't need to hit a 2k/day pace, I couldn't slow down.

But now it's done, as drafty as it is. I already have ideas for revisions, and I'll probably go through it at least once before deciding what to do with it. It might only serve its purpose of having given me joy in writing again. Proof that I can Do The Thing. That would be 100% fine.

It might be good to have an urban fantasy in my back pocket, in case I don't get any agents with the fantasy masquerading as scifi but secretly horror WIP. Or maybe I'll use it to test the waters of self-pub.

I don't know. I don't plan on finding out any time soon. I do plan on submersing myself in books and breathing again, though.

Entry tags:

Reading Is Educational: thanks, Naomi!

In 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a story called "So Much Cooking." I really love it, even though it's a hard read these days. It's about a pandemic, and about making do, and about taking care of each other. One of the recurring plot points is that the narrator, a food blogger, doesn't have some significant ingredients for any recipe they try, so they improvise and this teaches the readers of their food blog useful tricks to get by when supplies are uncertain, partial, patchy. It was the account of making cookies without eggs or oil that made me think of possibilities. And the Sven-Saw cleaning actually went better than I expected.

It happened because there does not seem to be either mineral oil or mineral spirits or WD-40 or any other semi-plausible things around the house. This does not usually matter for me on a daily basis, but the Sven-Saw needed to be cleaned, and it was going to be a bigger than usual job for ADHD reasons. As is true of so many things around here.

It would be one thing if it were just the abundance of resin that the smallish tree stump I needed to saw was dispensing with every stroke. That might not have been too bad, but it got more difficult because as I was assessing what to do about this, I got distracted and had to attend to something, and then realized that meds were overdue, which meant fixing something quick to eat so the meds didn't bounce, and the Sven-Saw sat in the kitchen, patiently waiting.

I don't know if it was patiently waiting or what. It might be patient.

I try not to anthropromorphize everything, because some things don't like it.

Anyhow, it may or may not be patient. What it definitely was was resin-laden. And the distraction took long enough that the resin was doing its best to dry on the saw blade, and this is not the way a person is supposed to take care of their tools. Which set me looking for the right thing to use, and not finding either right things or wrong-but-maybe-worth-a-try things... until I realized that this was possibly solvable by the peanut butter trick.

The peanut butter trick is a thing someone taught me to remove glued-on or stuck-on labels from glass containers. When soap and water doesn't work because the adhesive in question doesn't care about soap or water, you take a very small spoonful of peanut butter, and you generously coat the label you're trying to remove with it. Go out beyond the edges some, because having it soak in at the edges is a win. Put it down and ignore it for at least fifteen minutes. Then come back and look at whether the peanut butter has at all soaked into the label. It probably has. And the now-altered label may well have changed its mind about soap and water. Try some soapy water and a scrubby or a rag or whatever you've got. Chances are, the label and its adhesive will now come right off.

I did have peanut butter, and I knew the peanut butter trick would probably work, but there wasn't all that much peanut butter, and what there was, I had plans for. So I tried an alternative.

Friends, I am here to report that it is quite possible to clean semi-dried tree resin off a Sven-Saw with mayonnaise in place of peanut butter. I did do some additional work on some recalcitrant bits with some dry baking soda, but honestly, some of those marks might have already been on there before I started. I'm pretty sure the Sven-Saw blade is shinier than it was.

But we probably should either lay in some of the usual remedies, or figure out where they have got to if we already have some, as is sometimes the case in this here palace of ADHD.

Anyhow, reading is educational, or a least good for jogging the memory, the saw is clean enough to put away until tomorrow, when I'll take up work on that stump again, and I am a relieved saw caretaker, because whew.

Have you used any interesting substitutes in household problem-solving lately?

Entry tags:

books

Weekend reading

Read What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher, the third novella in a sort of Ruritanian horror series, although this one is set mostly in West Virginia rather than the fictional European country of Gallacia, when main character Alex Easton - a culturally-third-gendered "sworn soldier" who has, against kan will, become something of an expert in dealing with horrifying supernatural phenomena - is asked by an American friend to investigate the disappearance of his cousin, last in touch from an abandoned coal mine where he'd seen a mysterious light far underground. (I'd apparently completely forgot about Easton's American friend who was, allegedly, a significant character in the first book— just a total blank space where that guy should be?) Interesting concepts, underwhelming execution, but a fun, lightly creepy read.

Currently reading Midnight Sun, Stephenie Meyer's 2020 rewrite of Twilight from Edward's POV, which is conceptually way more interesting than Original Flavor Twilight - by virtue of having a mind-reading vampire as its POV character and seeing the Cullen family at home, away from prying human eyes - but also everyone comes across as way more insufferable. To be fair, this has already resolved some of the more glaring questions about the original: why would an immortal being want to spend his one wild and precious second life attending high school? He doesn't, it's so boring he considers it the closest he gets to sleeping and/or punishment for his sins, at least until he has Bella to obsess over. Why is he so obsessed with this one random not very interesting girl? The same "her blood smells good and she's the only mind he can't read" explanation as the original book, but it's more persuasive from his POV. (Although, interestingly, apparently he also can't read Bella's dad's mind— only impressions instead of words, as for everyone else.) Recurring theme of references to Hades and Persephone, because of course there is.

Entry tags:

Yard Work as Technique for Easing Agoraphobia

The Sven-Saw is my friend. Even so, getting the muscle memory back to work is going to take a little while. And this particular stump is going to take a little while and then a longer while. After all, I haven't used it for about... whoah, thirty-some years? Eeep. But it's fall yard work season, and needs must.

As someone who has recently gone through the first intake session with a professional counselor for agoraphobia and for grief (which are the two things my GP requested I be seen for), I am now at least technically under care for these things, but anyone who's been through it knows that intake sessions are not quite getting-work-done sessions. They're more like is-this-therapeutic-pairing-going-to-work? sessions. (Signs point to yes. This is a relief.) I look forward to finding out what we can do about various things. In the run-up to this, I have been doing what I can to combat agoraphobia (or more like confuse and distract it) and hopefully lessen it with the strategic use of yard work. During the spring and summer, my goal was "get out and spend seven minutes at least in the yard improving something." It did help some. Also our yard looks better, which probably relieves some of the neighbors.

The Sven-Saw, a marvelous tool made here in Minnesota, enters the picture because there are some saplings that need to be cut off and the little stumps painted with stump-killer before winter. All of them are pretty much broomstick size or smaller, but there is one that's four to six inches wide depending on how you measure it. It's this stump that needs the Sven-Saw, because the stump killer wants a fresh cut to work on.

The biggish stump is inconveniently placed, and I have trouble getting at it. Part of that is pre-existing mobility and agility difficulties. The stump cannot be picked up and put on a convenient cutting frame; it has to be cut off horizontally a few inches above the ground. This is because of where it is: at the corner of the garage where the parking pad meets the alley. Our garage door is perpendicular to the alley. There is a small strip of land along the alley side of the garage which some long-ago person enhanced with a concrete-walled raised bed. It's not very tall, but it's tall enough to get in the way at the corner when I'm trying to get at this stump. It (the stump) is tucked in to a little notch of bare soil at the corner of the garage, where the alley-side raised bed strip ends before the length of the garage does. It (the raised bed strip with little concrete walls) stops early because some sensible person thought ahead, and designed it so that it is nearly impossible to run over the little concrete corner of the raised bed when trying to park. (I suppose someone might manage it, but they'd probably sideswipe the whole alley wall of the garage and then be too far in to successfully maike the turn into the parking pad.) Anyway, there's a little postage stamp of bare earth at the alley corner of the garage that runs a foot or so along the alley side of the garage before the concrete wall of the raised bed kicks in. And that's where the stump is.

Because of the concrete, I can really only get at the stump from one angle. While I can go at the cut from either side, it's all in the same cut, with a total variance possible of maybe fifteen degrees. Maaaaybe. This is due to the slight slope and where the pavement of the parking pad is. It's a tricky spot. Add in my mobility and agility difficulties, plus the dizziness and balance issues that have recently been added to my character sheet, and the necessity of bending over and trying to saw horizontally, and it turns into a two day job with a lot of breaks for resting while my gyroscopes reset.

All the other bits needing cutting and then painting with stump-killer will be much easier, barring one or two that are doing creative things around some pipes outside the house.Take the hard one first, get it out of the way. That's the plan. And it's a good plan.

It's just going to take a little longer than I thought.

Have you done yard work lately? If so, how has it gone? Any stump issues or adventures?

Entry tags:

Chainsaw Man Movie

A friend of mine from my D&D group (Nick) suggested that we go see Chainsaw Man: The Reze Arc together.

After my experience with Psycho-Pass: Providence, I suggested we see the subtitled version even though that meant seeing it in IMAX and at 10:30 pm. The tl;dr of the link above is that, because I tend to watch my anime in Japanese with subtitles, I actually had a hard time telling who was speaking when I watched a dubbed movie of a franchise I am super familiar with. I was surprised how many scenes required me being able to know who was speaking---when a character was on the phone or had their back to the audience--and how similar English-speaking voice actors seem to be in terms of regional accent and vocal range. I feel like, even though my understanding of Japanese is minimal, I do subconsciously detect Kansai dialect when I hear it and so even when Japanese VAs vocal ranges are similar, I know who is who. Anyway, you can read my whole rant about it linked above, if you want.

Back to last night's movie...

I am a moderate fan of Chainsaw Man. I reviewed the first couple of volumes of the manga in January of 2022 and found it decidedly OKAY. Denji's boob obsession kind of turned me off on the page. But, when it became super popular and the anime came out in December of 2022, I watched it and sort of understood the hype. Although I will say that Mason and I were also watching Jujutsu Kaisen at the same time as Chainsaw Man, only we had a break in between seasons of Jujutsu Kaisen because we were watching together and he had this pesky thing called a college education, and when we returned to Jujutsu Kaisen, I was often like, "Yuji? I thought his name was Denji." (To be fair to me: both demon hunters who are aligned with demons themselves, both kind of stupid boys, both in funky little trio poly situations with a dark-hair dorm mom-boy.)

Given my inability to distinguish between these two mega hits, I was grateful for the fact that the movie wouldn't be starting until late because that gave me a chance to rewatch a lot of the series. Crunchyroll has this condensed version you can watch which is good because it seemed clear to me from the trailer that I was going to be expected to remember who was who and what had happened previously. I actually got through most of it before Nick showed up. He showed up early, actually, so we sat and watched a half hour or so on the porch.The original anime doesn't exactly end on a cliffhanger, but I was glad we reviewed it because I'd forgotten about the shark demon, Beam.

The movie was... FINE. I mean, I was telling Mason this morning when he asked about it, it didn't really feel like a continuation of the story in a if you don't watch this, you're missing something sort of way. He said, "So more of a character development piece?" I nodded, but added, "In so much as Denji has a personality beside boobs. This movie his character development can be summed up as: which is more important? The boobs I imprinted on, or NEW boobs? (And both sets of boobs want to kill him.)"

But it was fun to go out. The IMAX wasn't standing room only, but it was decently packed for a 10:30 pm movie. The crowd was all otaku, of course, and at least one person cosplayed Denji. (I mean, the nice thing about cosplaying any of the Public Safety Division is that they basically dress like salarymen so all you have to do is pull of anime hair.) It's been a while since I've been in a crowd that young.

For reasons known only to AMC Roseville, there were a RIDICULOUS number of previews before the movie. Like a dozen? It was far more than what I've come to expect, and I LIKE movie previews! Only a couple of them were for other anime movies, so think they were sort of scattershotting the crowd hoping to lure some of us back with something, ANYTHING.

Nick is someone I've known since college. He used to be one of my best friends, but we grew apart benignly, unintentionally. We struggled a bit to land on any subject to explore deeply in part, I think, because Nick has latched on to the fact that we have anime in common. And, as discussed here previously, saying you have anime in common is a little like saying you have TV in common. Finding the places where the Venn Diagram overlaps can be difficult, even among very voracious fans. I'm a tough one to match up with, too, because I tend to read more manga than I watch anime and some of the stuff I loved as manga never had an anime made! And these days, of course, a lot of anime are being made from light novels or are entirely studio produced. (To be fair, Psycho-Pass was entirely studio produced and that didn't stop me from loving it, but the number of people who have seen that is small and so the Venn Diagram doesn't often connect there.)

Nick is very self-consciously fond of magical girl series, too, which is not a genre I often connect with. I do... sometimes, but I'm more often knee deep in shounen (see above.) But, we had a nice time doing that thing that fans will sometimes resort to wherein, since we have only the meta-genre/format in common, he told me the plot summaries of his favorites and I did the same for him.

A good night out, all and all.

Entry tags:

may not get as much reading done as i was planning though...

I feel like I'm moving into zombie mode right now. Hopefully that will help me fall asleep on time??

I had a lovely weekend, though. The Augustinian no-longer-youths were as delightful as ever, we had some interesting talks, it felt like the time absolutely zoomed past while at the same time not all that much happened... and it's just never long enough. We talked in the end-of-gathering session about how nice it would be if there were more of these, maybe in different places, and then all of us who had any involvement in planning this one were like "but who is going to do it" because even with half-a-dozen people working on what is deliberately a very low-key event, it was pretty exhausting. But it WOULD be nice.

One of the parishioners who came along this year is someone I've known for probably thirty-five years, whose kids were very much in my peer group in the parish, and it was really good to catch up with her; she has thirteen grandchildren now! Although she did have six children, five of whom have children, so that's not quite as unreasonable as it sounds. I haven't seen most of them since probably the mid-nineties, so it's a bit disconcerting to find that they're married with three children, but that is how it goes.

Now I'm at Mum's; I've set up my work station (where I am currently typing this while she blocks crochet squares on the other half of Dad's table) and unpacked my belongings and generally done my best to make ready for the week. We have also come to a detente where I have agreed to spend more time chatting with her if she turns the TV off, or at least mutes it while I'm in there. I 100% cannot filter out "ambient" TV (a cause of suffering to me in waiting rooms!) because my attention gets yanked to it, over and over. I think it's probably because I don't watch much of it, so I haven't learned to ignore it, but either way it's very off-putting. I have run away now, though; there is only so much socialising I can handle in a day, and between the Augustinians this morning and multiple hours chatting with her already, I am pretty much tapped out.

Entry tags:

cooking,
recipes

Culinary

I thought last week's bread was holding out pretty well until it suddenly sprouted mould - however there was still some cornbread left + rolls.

Having been out for lunch on Friday I was not feeling like anything much for supper but made partner a Spanish omelette with red bell pepper and had some fruit myself.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, strong white flour, turned out v nice.

Today's lunch: Crispy Baked Sesame Tofu - not sure whether there should not have been some actual sesame seeds somewhere in the mix? also thought maybe I was a bit cautious with the amount of tamari in the sauce - and didn't think this turned out particularly crispy....; served with sticky rice with lime leaves, baked San Marzano tomatoes and mangetout peas stirfried with star anise.

Entry tags:

color,
stitchery

current stitching

For me, the Sundial project is a fun exercise in balancing contrasts among yarn colorways, a few at a time, while using lightweight remnants (mostly US fingering weight, UK 4-ply).

Hadn't occurred to me till taking this picture, but the scarf-thing has begun inadvertently with the cover hues of Alif the Unseen, 01 and 02 below. Some remnants below are already used up; others may recur.
( smol pic, then yarn colorways )

Arabilious: Anthology of Arab Futurism

Arabilious: Anthology of Arab Futurism edited by Francesco Verso was excellent.

This contains 9 sci-fi short stories from Bahrain (2), Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine (2) and Syria. Some of the recurring themes are climate change and technological evolution. One of the stories also includes fantasy elements.

There's a bi male protagonist, with some m/f, m/m/f and m/nb.

Entry tags:

(no subject)

ME, THREE CHAPTERS INTO SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: I often experience powerful sad pet emotions in books about humanoid robots so I think it's unfair for Luminous to also contain actual dead pet emotions
MY BEAUTIFUL WIFE: if it helps I don't think there are a lot of sad pet emotions in the rest of the book, I think you've hit the worst of it! the robots are not really sad pets
ME, WITH AN EMOTIONAL HANGOVER AFTER FINISHING SYLVIA PARK'S LUMINOUS: well, broadly speaking, you were right about the robots, but you were absolutely wrong about hitting the end of the sad pet emotions --

So Luminous, as you may have gathered, is a book that made me feel emotions; also a literary science fiction novel about humanoid robots; also a near-future cyberpunk noir; also a bittersweet children's adventure; also, or perhaps most of all, a family saga about three estranged siblings in post-unification Korea:

Jun, the middle child, a transmasc army veteran turned robot crimes cop whose war injuries have resulted in a VR addiction, an unsurmountable amount of debt, and a messy combination of gender euphoria and dysphoria about his new mostly-cyborg body
Morgan, the baby of the family, a successful MIT graduate with a well-paying tech job in robot design and a secret illegal off-the-books robot housekeeper-slash-personal-assistant-slash-boyfriend designed to help her get over her miserable insecurities, a task at which they are both Unfortunately Aware that he is Not Succeeding
and Yoyo, oldest and forever youngest, the advanced prototype child robot designed by their brilliant roboticist father who entered Jun and Morgan's lives as children and played the role of big brother for a few critical years, leaving them both haunted by his absence and his ghost

Where is their brilliant father now, aside from living rent-free inside his children's brains? Great question. For mysterious reasons he's decided he no longer wants to work on humanoid robots and has bounced offscreen to Boston to work on designing robot whales and tigers and so on, a project that museums love but which most serious roboticists think is rather silly.

Where is Yoyo now, aside from living rent-free inside his siblings' brains? Also great question! Two of the book's plotlines (cyberpunk noir) follow Jun investigating the increasingly troubling case of a missing child robot, and Morgan working on the launch of a new next-gen child robot, Boy X. (Crimes against robots are not illegal broadly except as theft, but crimes against child robots are illegal in the same sort of way that child porn is illegal.) In the third major plotline (bittersweet children's adventure), classmates Ruijie and Taewon -- a bright girl from a wealthy family with doting parents and the best high-tech leg braces for her advancing neurodegenerative disorder, and a bitter North Korean refugee boy more-or-less under the care of his criminal uncle, respectively -- find a strangely advanced child robot abandoned in a junkyard ...

(In this near-future Korea, btw, reunification was brought about by an event that propaganda cheerfully characterizes as "the Bloodless War" because it was mostly fought by robots. The experiences of several of the characters beg to differ with this characterization.)

There's a massive amount going on in this book, and all of it is complicated and none of it maps onto simple metaphors. For all the POVs that we get in the book, for all the fact that unexpected robot actions are frequently driving the plot, we're never in the heads of any of the robots themselves: all we can really know is what the various characters project onto them, an endless sea of human emotions about gender and disability and parenthood and childhood and societal expectations and trauma and grief.

On a plot level, I'm not at all sure it fully comes together at the end -- there's so much going on that 'coming together' seems almost impossible, tbh -- or that I actually understood all of what had, technically, happened, per se. On an emotional level, I will reiterate that the book made me feel feelings!! laudatory!!!

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

finisterre,

rivka and

taelle!

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "The Architect"

The earth is too smart for us to break through

I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.

Current Music: Olivia Dean, "Nice to Each Other"

So can we say we'll never say the classic stuff, just show it?

In fairness to June Lockhart, the first time I ever saw her she was sharing the same episode of Babylon 5 (1994–98) as Londo's card-sharping tentadicks and the latter seared themselves rather more indelibly into my brain, but with less than five minutes of her own in T-Men (1947) she stole far more of the film for me, so much that even knowing that a century is a graceful point to depart from, I am still sorry the world no longer contains her and all of her time. She moved from film to television so early that I always wondered if she had been blacklisted like Marsha Hunt, but the answer looks like not. I loved finding out about her tastes in rock music and my experience of her most famous and long-running roles was almost nil. It means I remember her, perhaps unfairly, twenty-two years old and looking like the fair-haired avatar of all the white picket fences in the world, coming effortlessly up to speed on their shadows. She should have worked with David Lynch.

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Last night

genarti and I took advantage of Skirball Theater's remote Halloween production, a virtual Phantom of the Opera broadcast live every night for the next two weeks from a tiny apartment in New York City with a handful of actors, a variety of very small sets and very large cardboard props, and a lot of neat visual/camera tricks.

As a bonus feature, you can see exactly how most of the visual/camera tricks work because there's a second camera set up from the front of the apartment that shows the broader view of the cast and crew rushing around to cram themselves into the tiny sets and lurk in front of walls to cast dramatic shadows and so on. As a viewer, you always have the option to toggle between the main, intended view and the backstage view to see how they're doing whatever they're doing -- tbh this in itself made it worth the price of admission for me, as a person who loves practical effects. See Carlotta's entry evoked by a giant high-heeled foot and then toggle over to the crew member carefully dangling the foot into the frame! Superb!

The production itself evokes the aesthetics of German expressionist film, with an operatic organ soundtrack and most of the dialogue conveyed by classic silent film inter-, sub- or supertitles. It's a shock when the Phantom speaks out loud to Christine, and she speaks back to him. When Raoul says he heard someone in her dressing room, Christine looks understandably baffled by the way this breaks the rules: how could a silent film man hear an angel speak?

Christine can also break the silent film framework to sing, as trained, and, eventually, talk out loud about the Phantom as well as to him, but not about anything else. I love this conceit and I think it's probably the coolest thing the show does thematically.

genarti remarked while watching that she'd also never seen a Phantom with this much actual opera in it. The production is definitely interested in Opera qua opera -- trying to say something about Art and the temporality of all artistic media and the fact that opera itself is a dying form, and tbh I'm not sure that it fully landed for me. However this may have been because these Themes were mostly conveyed in a big speech by the Phantom actor at the beginning as he puts on his makeup, and the biggest technical problem with the show (at least on the night that we saw it) was that the Phantom actor's mic was way out of balance with the background music and he was always kind of hard to hear. Which perhaps is thematic in and of itself!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience, worth my $20 to sit on my couch with the lights out and toggle between a Spooky Silent Phantom and a tiny apartment full of theater professionals moving tiny sets back and forth to make Spooky Silent Phantom happen, would recommend.