lesser_celery | Reading

My poem "The Burnt Layer" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It's the one with the sky axe and α Draconis: stone-time, star-time. It's been looking for a home for a while and I am very glad to have it bedded here.

As the currently compiling issue is still looking for more fiction: story-writing people of my acquaintance, please send it in! The website remains temporary, the 'zine remains its black-and-white, saddle-stapled, nearly forty-year-old self. There's nothing like it out there in any of the fields.

I am off to the doctor's, which is a lot less the kind of journey I enjoy making.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert Macfarlane, "Burial Blessing"

sovay

It was sunshowering most of the afternoon, so without doing anything as sensible as looking for rainbows, I went for a walk with my ancient digital camera which now turns itself off at regularly inopportune moments and still managed to capture some rain-dusted flowers.

( We all live in the sun and in the rain. )

The latest fruit of college radio has been Mona's "Kiss Like a Woman" (2018) and the all-ages cute queerness of its video. Since I had just been talking to

spatch about Charles Mee, I was extremely happy to see that the (re)making project is still online. The shell-shocking student production of The Trojan Woman: A Love Story (1994) which I saw at Brandeis in 2002 had been substantially, correctly rearranged from the original text. It triggered short fiction of mine directly and I still think about it.

Current Music: Mona, "Kiss Like a Woman"

sovay

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.

Current Music: JVK, "My Own Man"

asakiyume

On Mastodon they have various hashtags with various writing-related questions, and today, a question on one of the hashtags was "On a scale of from 1 to 10, how safe is your world?" (by which they meant the world of your writing project).

Several people pointed out that you can't really average out safety over a whole world, and still more people pointed out that safety is always going to be a matter of "for whom?" No matter what genre you're writing, if you have multiple characters, they can't all have the same level of safety. A bacterium is a different level of threat depending on the strength of your immune system; oppressive politics always have a favored exempted few, etc.

And I had to laugh at our current age's fascination with quantification. On a scale of 1 to 10, sure.

My tutee has a green card. This makes her situation a lot safer than that of the dozen new employees I was in the company of the other day who were from Haiti. They all have a card showing temporary protected status. ... We know how secure that status is ... But for the time being at least, it makes them safer than people with no legal status at all.

I love what people do with the power of imagination: we create all sorts of things; we can create elaborate shared worlds called things like "the economy" or "nation-states." We joint-roleplay these so intensely that it becomes our reality. It's like a picture book I remember from childhood called Conrad's Castle, where a boy throws a stone up in the air and it sticks there, and then another and another, and soon he builds a whole castle up there. It all falls down when a hater says "Hey, you can't do that!" ... But then he says "I can too," and rebuilds it.

The larger shared worlds we imagine, like the various nation-states or the rule of law, or principles of humanitarianism--they can fall down just like Conrad's castle, and suddenly your status changes. We know this. We're seeing it all the time. For the shared worlds we want to flourish, we have to keep saying "I can too." As for the ones we don't like so much, we can maybe take out the stones one by one to build something we prefer.

Current Music: Deus King: Why

sovay

I seem to have been the member of my family to introduce my niece to the Atlantic off Cape Elizabeth where I learned to swim. Since

spatch and I had the honor and the fun of driving her back to her father, we took the opportunity to stop off in Kittery for fried summer foods, York Beach for body-slamming waves and salt water taffy and soft-serve, and then Two Lights for climbing all over the ledges she kept making sure were not petrified wood before handing the tall child back at Kettle Cove where she had waded out to gather wet-shining lumps of quartz. I forgot to pack swim trunks and the cuffs of my jeans are full of sand.

( As we haul away to harbor. )

At Kettle Cove, I walked barefoot over the springing beds of knotted wrack and the emery bite of barnacles. I told my niece about the invasive tiny green crabs her father and I used to catch, which even under capitalism it is now ethical to consume. I dislike so very much of the wrench of the world, but I love that my niece has turned out to love the sea.

Current Music: Patrick Wolf, "Hymn of the Haar"

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This collection featured stories I'd read--and very much liked--before as well as stories that were new to me. I read extensively in short SFF, so that's not unexpected for any collection these days. What's less typical is how consistently high-quality these stories are, across different tone and topic.

There is a rootedness to these stories that I love to see in short speculative fiction, a sense of place and culture. It doesn't hurt that Campbell's sense of place and culture is a northern one--not one of my parts of the north but north all the same. And forest, oh, this is a very arboreal book. There's death and transformation here--these stories are like an examination of the forest ecosystem from nurse log to blossom, on a metaphorical level. I'm so glad this is here so that these stories are preserved in one place.

sovay

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.

Current Music: Janis Paige, "Body and Soul"

gwynnega

My poem "portrait of the artist as a young gorgon" is up at Penumbric! It started out as a short story, loosely inspired by the Hammer film The Gorgon. Then it turned into a poem. Maybe one of these days I'll try to finish the story.

sovay

It feels like such a cheaply sentimental connection that I must not have allowed myself to see it for years, but the first film of any lasting meaning that I saw after the dislocating and disposessing move from New Haven which marked the end of my academic career and with it the whole pattern of my life to date was A Canterbury Tale (1944), that touchstone of continuity and exile. I got up in the morning to watch it off TCM. It gave me déjà vu as if I remembered some of its strongest, strangest images, even though it seemed after the fact impossible that I should have had any previous chance to see it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger and I immediately set about tracking down as many of their films as were available in my country as I had never done with any filmmakers before—I could explain it as finding something to study after suddenly having for the first time in twenty-odd years nothing assigned, but then I could have dedicated myself to just about anything encountered in those three-ish weeks including for God's sake M*A*S*H. I had just written the most Christian poem of my Jewish life and so was perhaps more than ordinarily primed to accept Emeric's cathedral. I had forgotten that the only time in my life I was in Canterbury, I had written about its layers of time, Roman roads, the scars of the Blitz, I had linked it with the archaeological eternity of DWJ's Time City. I could have imprinted on any of the characters with their griefs and doubts of lovers and livelihoods and I went straight for Colpeper, the sticky-fingered magus in his panic of losing the past, his head so far up his home ground that he has not yet learned the lesson of diaspora, how to carry the tradition wherever you go, including into the future. I had heard it myself since childhood and never had to put it so much to the test. I loved the film at once and desperately and it still took me years to see how like time itself nothing can really be lost in it, the lifeline I called it without recognizing what it held out. I keep coming back to it, still excavating that bend in the road. It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

Current Music: Martha, "1848, Yawning Discreetly"

mrissa

Good news, fellow humans! My short story A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places, which appeared last year in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, is a finalist for the WSFA Small Press Award for short fiction.

I am seriously chuffed about this for a number of reasons. One, you know how everyone always says it's an honor just to be a finalist? You know why they say that? Because it is in fact an honor just to be a finalist. So many wonderful stories come out in this field every year that--well, you've seen my yearly recommendation lists. They're quite long. Winnowing them to any smaller group? Amazing, thank you, could easily have been a number of other highly qualified stories by wonderful writers, I am literally just glad to be on the team and hope I can help the ball club. Er, programming staff.

But here's another reason: if you've read that story--which you can do! please do! it's free, and it turns out people like it!--you will immediately see that it is a story about a disabled person. That disabled person is not me, does not have my family or my career or anything like that. But it is my disability. I put my own disability into this story. I gave someone with my disability a story in which they do not have to be "fixed" to be the hero. And...this is not a disability-focused award. This is just an award for genre short fiction. So I particularly appreciate that the people who were selecting stories looked a story with a disabled protagonist whose disability is inherent to the story without being the problem that needs solving and said, yeah, we appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate you too.

sovay

I seem to be continuing to sleep more than has been my steady norm for months into years, albeit at peculiar and inconvenient hours that leave me feeling like some sort of crepuscular mammal. I have never been able to nap in my life without it making me feel worse than when I conked out and now it just seems to be an irregularly scheduled part of my day. I am operating on the theory that I will eventually evolve a circadian rhythm. I had one in college, I think.

It would never have occurred to me that the house style of 20th Century Fox was historical megaflops, but Wilson (1944) is the third to cross my radar after Cleopatra (1963) and The Big Trail (1930): it lost its $5.2 million shirt at the box office and Darryl F. Zanuck died mad that it didn't win Best Picture. In the first edition of John Gassner and Dudley Nichols' Best Film Plays of 1943–44 (1945) which

spatch picked up from the carrel outside the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas in 2017, Zanuck is the only producer to have a preface devoted to his published screenplay and it's all on the defensive, primarily against charges of unnecessary expense and boosterism for FDR. It is not majorly concerned with the historical accuracy of the script by Lamar Trotti, which is fine because regardless of whether it has its names and dates in order, it reads like a political fairy tale. How appealing it is to imagine the twenty-eighth President of the United States as a shy dry stick of a boffin animated by an almost supernal honesty and a self-deprecating sense of humor as underestimated as his perseverance, untarnished by failures of civil rights and never so impaired by his stroke that he can't share the joke with his wife of her letting him out of his presidential responsibilities. A kind of sacrificial king of American idealism, broken across a vision that the world is too fallen and fragmented to match him in, classed by the opening titles with the national saints of Washington and Lincoln. Probably it could only have been trounced by the Catholic super-treacle of Going My Way. Hollywood gonif!

Pursuing some details about Wilson with the fervor of a person who really does not want to have to watch the damn movie, I found a profile of Alexander Knox by James Hilton in the February 1945 Photoplay and blew a gasket that I hope registered with Harry Cohn's ass:

Knox belongs to the new generation of Hollywood stars who shape so oddly into the category that they are already on their way to changing both Hollywood and the star system [. . .] Indeed, the only possible thing to say is that he's an actor, and that the fame he has secured in "Wilson" neither enforces nor precludes any particular kind of thing he will do next.

In support of this argument one has only to glance at his previous motion picture roles to gather some notion of the man's range. His first Hollywood film was "The Sea Wolf" with Edward G. Robinson, in which he played the shipwrecked author, a man of physical fear but mental courage. After that there were the memorable moments in "This Above All" as the gentle clergyman and in "None Shall Escape" as the fanatical Nazi leader which in Knox's hands had the sharpness of a steel engraving.

So Knox is a star, but like many of the newer stars, he doesn't fit into the star system; and when enough people don't fit a system it is the system that has to be changed.

I don't disagree with Hilton—about either the actor or the system—but if the latter had changed to accommodate the former in the mid-'40's, I wouldn't have spent these last ten years of my semi-professional life banging my head against the exact intractability of classical Hollywood to know what to do with its actors of whatever gender who couldn't be easily typed or ticky-tackied into marketable components of the dream machine, which are naturally the kind it seems reasonable to me to like best and inclined to be frustrating to follow. In the same way that it fascinates me to encounter criticism of the Production Code at the time of its enforcement, it's useful for me to know that my feelings about the limitations of the traditional star system were shared by its contemporaries, but then it's even more maddening that its operations would not shift meaningfully until the '60's. Justice for Jean Hagen, basically. In other news, I am charmed that Knox was into motorcycles. So was William Wyler around that time; I am glad they never collided.

I forgot to mention when the three robin nestlings fledged and launched, but the current monarch count stands at one chrysalis and four caterpillars. The moon is still wildfire-stained.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Don't Delete the Kisses"

asakiyume

I let a lot of milkweed grow in my yard. In part it's for the monarch butterflies, in part it's so I can harvest the fibers, in part it's because I like the scent of the flowers. I've also enjoyed eating the young pods (carefully cooked) sometimes.

This year, the milkweed's been afflicted by a bright orange-yellow aphid called the oleander aphid.

( beneath a cut in case seeing a whole lot of aphids isn't your thing )

My approach to minor infestations of things has been to try to wash them off, but these guys had determination and numbers on their side. I looked at online communities, and it was interesting: the people who grow milkweed aren't farmers growing it for a living; they're by and large people who are growing it for the butterflies. And if you're growing it for the butterflies, you don't want to do anything that's going to endanger the butterfly eggs or the caterpillars, so you're not going to use pesticides or even indiscriminate washing. So most people were saying they just left the aphids alone. "They don't kill the milkweed," someone wrote. "Predators like ladybugs end up finding them," someone else said.

Do nothing is my favorite advice, so although I didn't like the look of the aphids on the plants, that's what I did. Sure enough, ladybugs appeared.

( a suite of three ladybugs )

The aphids have most definitely not disappeared. This live-and-let-live approach wouldn't work for something you're depending on for your own survival--your own subsistence crop or your livelihood--but that's not my situation, so it's been interesting to see it all unfold. The milkweed hasn't died, the ladybugs did arrive, and the monarch females have been floating around, visiting lots of plants and, presumably, laying eggs. And hopefully the fibers still end up being good, in spite of the aphids.

Current Music: Os Mutantes: Hey Boy

sovay

Apparently if permitted to sleep, my body thinks it should be allowed to do it again. I napped this afternoon and am contemplating further adventures in napping this evening. It's inconvenient in terms of a day, but on the other hand my sleep debt was old enough to vote in the last election. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of

moon_custafer: Keith Moon fills in for John Peel in 1973. The musical choices are clever and more surf-inflected than I would have guessed and the interstitial sketches are deranged. Eleven out of ten, no notes. "Here it is once again, for those of you listening, in color."

2. Courtesy of

selkie: clips from this weekend's semi-concert performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl starring Cynthia Erivo as Jesus. The effect is not unlike Nina Simone's "Pirate Jenny" (1964). Also queer af.

3. With incredible timing, the Harvard Film Archive has just announced this winter's series of Columbia 101: The Rarities, meaning that anyone in the Boston area who actually wants to hit themselves with None Shall Escape (1944) will have two chances on 35 mm including the first night of Hanukkah. I plan to be there. Several other titles of interest I have never seen, or never seen in a theater. Especially since this spring took my plans for Noir City Boston out at the knees, wish me luck.

4. Of the minimal amount of television I watched as a child, nearly all of it was brought to me by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you. My mother has begun to refer to the incumbent of the White House with epithets as out of Homeric epic, of which "starver of children" is currently the strongest: bodies, minds, future. The earthquake swarm around Akrotiri subsided earlier this year, but everyone I know feels like Thera and counting.

5. A whole lot of people sent me the newly published Sumerian myth and it does make me very happy.

Current Music: Bellowhead, "Betsy Baker"

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! Thanks to the aftermath of out-of-town relatives, last night's dinner of lobster and brie and crepes was the most decadent meal I had eaten in ages. Seven monarchs which eclosed all in the same afternoon took flight into the late blue sky.

Overnight adventures with ants and asthma notwithstanding, I managed to sleep nine hours. I am informed by my mother that four more monarchs have taken flight. Two more repose in chrysalis and another two are still mowing their way through the milkweed, storing up for their wings.

Current Music: Bellowhead, "Roll the Woodpile Down"

mrissa

William Alexander and Wade Roush, eds., Starstuff: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Celebrate New Possibilities. This is that rare thing, an anthology of MG SF. Even rarer, the authors in it are generally experienced at writing for children but were not giving us (or the kids) a pile of tie-in stories, rather doing SF that works as short stories. Count me in. There were several favorites here with new work--Fran Wilde and Carlos Hernandez stood out.

Elizabeth Bear, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and Ink and Steel. Rereads. One of the strange things about having been in this business this long is that I can now have the entirely new experience of rereading something that a peer wrote twenty years ago, that I read when it was new. That's basically what I'm doing with the Promethean Age series, and it's fascinating to be able to see not just how a person might do some things differently but how my friend, specifically, definitely would. A person would not have someone's female mage title be Maga in 2025 (ope); but I've been there the whole time for how my friend handles writing about trust and betrayal and other themes like the ones in this book, and...she wouldn't do it the way she does now without having done it the way she did then. Looking forward to finishing the series reread when I've made a bit of a dent in my birthday books.

A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Reread. What's interesting to me about the structure of all this on the reread is that Byatt sets it up for herself so she never has to make Frederica's marriage work on the page. Frederica was married after the previous book, and by the time this one starts, the marriage is already absolutely ghastly. So we never have to live through the "oh, this is why she picked this guy, I see it now" moments. We can go with accounts, summaries...which are never the whole story. I also feel like it's clearer to me on the reread that the level of domestic violence that had to be involved to be sure that the reader would take Frederica's side was absolutely appalling. Which is not to say that level of domestic violence doesn't happen, just...well. This is very well done, and I will want to reread it again but not often, oh lordy not often.

Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy. This sure is a murder mystery by Agatha Christie.

Alexa Hagerty, Still Life With Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains. Oh gosh, this was extremely well done, one of the best books I've read lately, and also of course harrowing. Of course. The title tells you what you're getting--specifically, the author did forensic anthropology on mass gravesites in Guatemala and Argentina--you should not be surprised at what is in here. And indeed I was not, because shocked and surprised are not the same thing, especially not in 2025. I think the thing that I found notable, that I have been turning over and over in my head as a speculative fiction writer for the last several years and not finding solutions to, is that there were very clear examples of how the people who are wrong--who are very wrong, morally wrong, villains of history wrong--very often do not have a point where they change their minds and see that they are wrong. And I think that we are ill equipped for shameless wrongs, and I am probably going to be thinking about that for many years more.

Barbara Hambly, Murder in the Trembling Lands. This is the latest Benjamin January mystery, and it leans on the complexities of family structure (emotionally as well as socially) in Louisiana in the early 19th century when the different sides of the family were racially differentiated. Which is an interesting thing to do, and I am still enjoying this series twenty-some books on.

Kat Lehmann, No Matter How It Ends a Bluebird's Song: A Haiku Memoir. There is a whole spectrum of how nitpicky you are about what does and does not make a haiku, and if you are (as I am) toward the nitpickier end of that spectrum, you will find that many of these things are not haiku. They are brief, fragile, fleeting, fascinating. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether they're exactly haiku. (Also sometimes it might.)

Elizabeth Lim, A Forgery of Fate. This is an East Asian-inflected Beauty and the Beast retelling wherein the Beast is a water dragon and Beauty is an art forger. That part was great, and I find Lim's prose compulsively readable. What was less great for me is that it featured the trope that if someone is being mean and unpleasant it means that he secretly likes you and is doing it to protect you from something something who cares. BIG NOPE from me, people who are mean and act like they don't like you probably do not like you and should not get to have sex with you. (There is not a great deal of actual sex here. This is a YA. But still, message remains the same.)

Molly Knox Ostertag, The Deep Dark. The twist was very telegraphed for me, and I'm not sure that the author stayed fully in control of the metaphor throughout, but it was a fun coming of age self-acceptance magic comic that I will probably give to a young person in my life.

Victor Pineiro, The Island of Forgotten Gods. Discussed elsewhere.

Helen Scales, What the Wild Sea Can Be. This is nonfiction (title could go either way!) about marine life and how it is adapting (or not) to climate change, and it was very cool and full of a wide range of sea creatures. I like sea creatures. Yay. Also Scales was very conscious of walking the line where she reported accurately but did not inculcate despair, which in climate writing is crucial.

Ashley Shew, Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement. This is very short and pithy, and probably people who are not disabled and spend less time with other disabled people than I do need it more than I do, but also it was a fast read and well done, good to know that I have this as a resource to recommend. Also kudos to our librarians for putting it on the Disability Pride Month display, which is where I found it. Also kudos to our librarians for having a Disability Pride Month display in this year of 2025.

Jennie Erin Smith, Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure. This specifically deals with the families in Colombia that have strong clear lines of genetic tendency toward Alzheimer's: how they have suffered, how they have been involved in Alzheimer's research, the ways in which that has not been handled very satisfactorily by people with more resources and power. Smith interacts with these families as individuals and groups, as real people, and it is a correspondingly difficult read, and also a correspondingly worthwhile one.

Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, eds., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond. Kindle. This is a series of papers mostly about the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire, with several that venture beyond that to historical parallels. It's interesting stuff even if you aren't someone who thinks about Rome all the time, definitely worth the time, and as with many of this type of collection, if you don't find one paper particularly interesting, another will be along in

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A Stranger's Tear

June 2025

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A Stranger's Tear

Reading

Be my hand on the oar to row to eternity

Here we are in the summer rain again

I'm the left hand ticking on the timeless clock

Temporarily Protected and other statuses

To cormorant to samphire to plover

The Other Shore, by Rebecca Campbell

You're on, music master

poem up at Penumbric!

Hope and anger in the ink and on the streets

Back on pilgrimage

Rewriting old excuses, delete the kisses at the end

a tiny ecosystem

At last she got acquainted with a rambling mad playactor

That fine girl of mine's on the Georgia Line

Books read, late July

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June 2025

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