murumatsu | Reading

mrissa

As Safe As Fear, Beth Cato (Daikajuzine)

In the Shells of Broken Things, A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld)

The Name Ziya, Wen-yi Lee (Reactor)

Barbershops of the Floating City, Angela Liu (Uncanny)

Everyone Keeps Saying Probably, Premee Mohamed (Psychopomp)

Lies From a Roadside Vagabond, Aaron Perry (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For, Cameron Reed (Reactor)

Laser Eyes Ain't Everything, Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots)

Unbeaten, Grace Seybold (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War, Caroline Yoachim (Uncanny)

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

mrissa

Syr Hayati Beker, What a Fish Looks Like. Discussed elsewhere.

A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden. Weirdly I had read books 2-4 of this series and not this one. It worked perfectly well that way, and I think for some people I'd even recommend it, because this one is substantially about teachers attempting (and often succeeding) in sleeping with their teenage girl students and a mental health crisis not being responsibly addressed. All of it is very period-appropriate for the early 1950s, all of it is beautifully observed and written about. It still had the "I want to keep reading this" nature that her prose always does for me. And Lord knows Antonia Byatt was there and knew how it all went down in that era. It's just that if you want to do without this bit, it'll be fine, it really is about those things and it's really okay to not want to do that on a particular day.

William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. This is largely How Buddhism Transformed the World and a little bit of How Hinduism Transformed the World. There is a tiny bit about math and a few references to astronomy without a lot of detail. If you're looking for how Ancient Indian religions transformed the world, that's an interesting topic and this is so far as I, a non-expert, can tell, well done on it. But I wanted more math, astronomy, and other cultural influences.

Robert Darnton, The Writer's Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Comparing the economic situations and lifestyles of several writers of the era--how they lived, how they were able to live, how they wrote. Also revisiting some of his own early-career analysis in an interesting way I'd like to see more of from other authors. Should this be your first Darnton: no probably not. Should you read some Darnton and also this: quite possibly.

J. R. Dawson, The First Bright Thing. Reread. Still gut-wrenching and bright, superpowers and magic circus and found family, what we can change and what we can't. Reread for an event I'll tell you about soon.

Reginald Hill, Arms and the Women, Death's Jest Book, Dialogues of the Dead, and Good Morning, Midnight. Rereads. Well into the meat of the series on this reread now. The middle two are basically one book in two volumes, which the rest of the series does not do, and also they feature a character I really hate, so I kept on for one more to clear the taste of that character out of my brain. Still all worth reading/rereading, of course; they also have the "I just want to keep reading this prose" quality, though in a very different way than Byatt. Really glad we've gotten to the part of the series with contrasting younger cop characters.

Vidar Hreinsson, Wakeful Nights: Stefan G. Stefansson: Icelandic-Canadian Poet. Kindle. This is the kind of biography that is more concerned with comprehensive accounts of where its subject went and what he did and who he talked to than with overarching themes, so if you're not interested in Stefansson in particular or anti-war/immigrant Canadian poets in the early 20th more generally, will be very tedious.

Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age. Recently retired assassins discover that their conglomerate is attempting to retire them. Good times, good older female friendships, not deep but fun.

Clay Risen, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Very straightforwardly what it says on the tin. Recognizes clearly the lack of angels involved without valorizing the people destroying other people's lives on shady evidence.

Caitlin Rozakis, The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association. When Vivian and Daniel's daughter Aria gets turned into a werewolf, they have to find another kindergarten to accommodate her needs. But with new schools come new problems. This is charming and fun, and I'm delighted to have it be the second recent book (I'm thinking of Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, which is very different tonally and plotwise) to remember that schools come with grown-ups, not just kids.

James C. Scott, In Praise of Floods: The Untamed River and the Life It Brings. You know I love James C. Scott, friends. You know that. But if you're thinking a lot about riverine flooding in the first place, this does not bring a lot that's new to the table, and there are twee sections where I'm like, buddy, pal, neighbor, what are you doing, having the dolphin introduce other species to say what's going on with them, this is not actually a book for 8yos, what even. So I don't know. If you're not thinking a lot about watersheds and riverine ecosystems and rhythms in the first place, probably a lovely place to start modulo a few weird bits. But very 101.

Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records. You'd think she'd have had me at "Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza are two of the major characters," but instead it just didn't really come together for me. The speculative conceit was there to hang the historical references on, and in my opinion this book's reach exceeded its grasp. I mean, if you're going to have those two and Du Fu, you've set the bar for yourself pretty high, and also a cross-time sea is also a firecracker of a concept, and...it all just sort of sits together in a lump. Ah well.

Katy Watson, A Lively Midwinter Murder. Latest in the Three Dahlias series, still good fun, the Dahlias are invited to a wedding and get snowed in and also murder ensues. Not revolutionizing the genre, just giving you what you came for, which is valid too.

Christopher Wills, Why Ecosystems Matter: Preserving the Key to Our Survival. "Did the author have a better title for that and the publisher made him change it to something hooky?" asked one of my family members suspiciously, and the answer is probably yes, you have spotted exactly what kind of book this is, this is the kind of book where someone knows interesting things about a topic (population genetics and their evolution) and is nudged to try to make its presentation slightly more grabby for the normies in hopes of selling more than three copies. It's interesting in the details it has on various organisms and does not waste your time on why ecosystems matter because duh obviously. If you were the sort of person who wasn't sure that they did, you would never pick up this book anyway.

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.

conuly

( Season finale spoiler )

During the Christmas episode we saw the firm's acapella group, which might have just been an excuse to highlight one character's amazing singing voice. Anyway, they were singing White Winter Hymnal, and I'm going to just post two quick videos, the original version and a different acapella cover:

Watch on YouTube

(Those lyrics can't be entirely right - surely the pack is swaddled in their coats, not swallowed?)

Anyway, you'll notice that in the first one they weirdly pronounce "the" with a "long e" (the vowel in pee) before the words "white snow". Does that strike anybody else as a weird place to do that?

conuly

I was looking up fictional law firm names and you know how Angel has the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart? Apparently NCIS has Wolfram, Hart and Donowitz. No word on if they're evil. Are they evil?

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sovay

As I hollered after the inapposite license plate of the SUV that had blown through the crosswalk without even thinking about stopping while we were in it, "Psalm 23? With that driving?" I am informed by

spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.

(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)

Current Music: The Heavy Heavy, "Feel"

conuly

The set and costume designers heard about blue-and-orange color schemes and just decided to run with it. I swear, they bought out everything blue in the store. Even the post-its are blue! And what isn't blue or teal is orange, or tan, or gold.

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conuly

There don't appear to be details on flowers etc. yet.

conuly

How is it that we literally are talking on the internet, we have access to all the information, and people are still saying whatever bullshit they made up in their heads instead of taking a minute, a second even, to ask themselves "Wait! Is this even true?"

On a happier note, the newest episode of The Strange Case of the Starship Iris answered a question I thought we'd never get answered, which is "How on earth did Brian get a price on his head from three different mafias?" and - wow, beware the quiet ones, I guess.

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sovay

After many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.

My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.

Current Music: Soul Asylum, "Somebody to Shove"

pegkerr

For the last week I have slept on the futon in my office because my bedroom had been emptied so that it could be replastered and painted. I hired a contractor to do the plastering, and they did a great job (badly needed, as the wall was full of a bunch of long, meandering cracks). I opted to do the painting myself to save money.

The painting got delayed because it was so hot last weekend. I managed most of it over two or three days but then (total klutz that I am) I stumbled over a painting extension pole and managed to break a toe, making it increasingly painful to get up and down off the floor, just when it was time to paint the baseboards. To make things worse, I suddenly started experiencing arthritis, this time in my right hand. Suddenly, the painting job was getting to be a bit too much.

Rather desperately, I sent out a call for help to my family text thread, and one of my nephews gracefully came through. He showed up and put in several hours putting the second coat on the baseboards and window frames and finishing up the closet.

I love my bedroom's new look. I have to get new linens and curtains and put up artwork. But I'm really pleased with how it looks so far.

I found a light switch cover with a tree of life on it, which is a much-appreciated touch.

Image description: Two views of a freshly painted bedroom. Lower half: view of a bedroom with blue/green walls. Upper left corner: a small chair and side table in a corner, where dark green and light blue/green colors meet. Upper right corner: a light switch plate with an ornate botanical tree of life.

Painting

25 Painting

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

Current Mood: creative

sovay

Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.

I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway,

spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).

The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.

Because I had showed

spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).

Current Music: The Chats, "Smoko"

conuly

And don't even ask me about my email!

Also: Comicsrss got a cease and desist from Gocomics, so now all my gocomics feeds are borked. I should see if I can find those comics hosted somewhere else and get their RSS feeds, but ugh.

Also also: What to know about the COVID variant that may cause ‘razor blade’ sore throats

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conuly

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

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Link

conuly

He's the patron saint of gardeners, and also taxi drivers (unofficially). See, an early and popular cab stand was at Hôtel de Saint Fiacre in Paris, and the carriages themselves began to be called fiacres, and it just spiraled from there.

What makes this even stranger is that he's an Irish saint.

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mrissa

New story out today in Lightspeed magazine: All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt. Visit the space gift shop trade convention and learn who's most likely to try to ruin things for all of us (hint: it's Earth people, UGH).

Don't miss the Author Spotlight discussing the story afterwards!

sovay

Returned from the optometrist's, I have nocturnal eyes and mirrorshades. When

spatch informed me that Zohran Mamdani is Mira Nair's kid, I remarked that it was a little like discovering that Madhur Jaffrey the author of cookbooks and children's books is the actor who introduced Ismail Merchant to James Ivory. I feel I really should have seen this video coming.

Current Music: Mr. Cardamom, "Nani (feat. Madhur Jaffrey)"

conuly

Ooof, I do not know how people do it who do this for early voting as well!

conuly

but I still wasn't prepared to pop into a pizza shop on my lunch break only to find that it was cooler in the pizzeria than the outside. If that's not terrifying I don't know what is.