Reading

Current Music: Spoon, "Chateau Blues"

If it's a moment in time, how come it feels so long?

Last night on a snow-salted suburban road I saw a deer bound suddenly through the splash of the headlights, followed a moment later by what must have been a pair of coyotes because it's been centuries since there were wolves in this part of the world. It was so folkloric, I expected to see riders the next moment, or the moon. After days of sleepless free-fall and headache it hurt to breathe through, I spent much of this afternoon unconscious, which was terrible for my exposure to daylight but produced vivid dreams only occasionally suggesting a surrealist facsimile of same, such as the second-story view onto a green quadrangle where a policeman was bleeding out milk. Hestia is trying to climb through my arms as I type in her best doctorly fashion. In nearly half a lifetime of chronic illness, I don't think I have ever felt this daily-basis bad.

Out-Heroding Herod

In which I take my bathysphere into th’abysm of Hamnet.

Warning: here be spoilers.

I was of seven or eight minds about seeing this flick. The reviews have been ecstatic, not to say hysterical. “Tore my heart out and stomped on it in spike-heeled boots” does not appeal. I don’t like being bullied into pity and terror. Having plunged, I can report that Hamnet goes well beyond tear-jerking all the way to snot-fracking. Even the falcon dies. As the lights went up, a woman kept repeating piteously, “But I just came to see Jessie Buckley.” And indeed, her acting is spectacular, full-on Euripides. If you like it raw, this is one for the statues.

And the movie? A real curate’s egg, well acted, well shot, and ill founded. I have serious problems with the whole conceit, the authenticity, the script—which, given that the novelist Maggie O’Farrell shares writing credit with the director Chloé Zhao, is somewhat troubling. It’s badly worldbuilt.

To begin with, there’s that damned red dress.

Agnes (pronounced “Ann-yes” here) wears it everywhere: to hawk in, to hoe muck, to bloody well give birth in, in an earthy cavern in the woods. In its designer’s stated vision, it’s the color of a scab, the color of menstrual blood. (Can you say, period piece?) My take is, oh my goddesses, right there is a fortune in imported cochineal, a crime against the sumptuary laws, a color for a countess or a cardinal. And she’s wearing this unwashable illegal finery without a smock to keep it clean. Which in Elizabethan mores is unspeakable. She does own a smock, because she wears it when she’s forced to bear her twins indoors, with unwanted women’s aid, instead of in communion with the greenwood-sidey-O.* (In the weirdest error in this movie, the boy pops out without a cord to cut.) Otherwise, she goes about like Mad Maudlin in prigged petticoats, barefoot and bareheaded, with her hair tumbling down her back in elflocks.

That is because she is a “forest witch,” conceived as a sort of noble savage or a woo woo Mary Sue, the only splash of vivid color in a world of dour browns and faded blues.

And yes, I get it, I get the strong desire to let the radical woman be powerful, the (oddly Copernican) center of this world. I would applaud it in another story. But this is also Hamlet's story, a creation myth. Couldn’t they have allowed poor Will a bit of inward, answering fire? Let her strike it in him? They might have let him be as good with words as she with mugwort. But no: he scritches with his quill and crumples, howling. He’s even rather inarticulate, poor soul, though he does get to tell her Orpheus and Eurydice: not brilliantly, but still.

It’s a badly-needed moment of Elizabethan-ness. Mostly Hamnet feels oddly like a modern problem play, backdated: a marriage breaks down over the tragic death of a child and the husband’s absence at work. The dialogue is flatly modern. It’s as if these people were strangers to their own world. Getting on for 20 years into their marriage, she doesn’t know what a play IS (did he never talk about his day job?); he calls her falcon a “bird.” This guy is supposedly Shakespeare. He could have talked varvels to her.

Of course, the Thing about Hamnet—the central conceit—is that Shakespeare’s son’s death was his inspiration for Hamlet. This is, to say the least, reductive. It turns Hamlet, in all its complexity and wit and rage and glory, to a form of couples therapy. And it plays hell with the actual timeline of its creation. On all the evidence, Shakespeare spent the years 1596-1600 writing festive comedies and Falstaff. Yet the film shows him living monkishly in London (no lovely boy, no Gwyneth Paltrow), at the point of breaking from his grief and guilt. He wasn’t there for his family, he wasn’t there. It even—oh, good gravy—has him looking down one midnight on the Thames beneath a cloud-wracked moon, about to jump, reciting (or composing?) “To be or not to be.” That’s when I slunk down into my seat and covered my eyes. If they’re not ashamed of that, I am.

What scraps we get to see of Hamlet are severely cherry-picked, distortions and excisions. There is no place here for fratricide, incest, antick madness, or revenge, no room for Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, alive or dead. This is not a Hamlet that I long to see in full. Indeed, I don’t see that Zhao had a vision of the living whole in mind: she’s sampling.** What we do get (besides that bathetic soliloquy beside the river) are the bits that O’Farrell can use to back her thesis: “Get thee to a nunnery” (self-loathing); the tettered Ghost, who so far forgets himself as to kiss his son; the duel, to echo Will’s teaching his boy swordplay; Claudius’s murder (daddy issues with John Shakespeare); “the rest is silence.” Hamlet falls far downstage. And Hamnet’s mother, reaching from the yard, takes his dying hand.

You could say, that is all the Hamlet Agnes can see; but all the audience sees it too, in a wave of catharsis rolling backward through the groundlings into the galleries. All reach out. A lovely moment built upon two hours of contrivance.

Well, I didn’t spend quite the whole thing gnashing my teeth.

So what did I like?

The casting of brothers, Jacobi and Noah Jupe as Hamnet and Hamlet.

Anything with the children, who did beautifully. I liked the three little boys chanting Latin to the tutor’s inattentive ears. (But then, I always did like John Aubrey’s note that Shakespeare had been “a schoolmaster in the country.”) I liked Susanna (“witty above her sex,” as her epitaph says) reading Sonnet 12 aloud, as if she’d had it in a letter from her dad. I really liked Hamnet and Judith’s gender-swap, foreshadowing their bed-trick with death. I could believe this as the genesis of Twelfth Night, with its death and resurrection of the brother twin. But no, it had to be Hamlet: tragedy not romance. The three of them—Susanna, Hamnet, Judith—playing at the wyrd sisters was charming if wildly anachronistic.

I liked Emily Watson’s small part as Mary Shakespeare.

I smiled at Shakespeare’s Chandos-portrait earring.

They found a really lovely forest of Arden. Welsh, I think.

That was a convincing Stratford, both in sunshine and pathetically fallacious rain. Indeed, most of the settings were good, though the Globe within was shockingly rough-hewn and unpainted. More of the drab aesthetic: only Agnes is allowed to be a splash of color in the crowd, though by this time, her old red dress has faded to a rustier vermilion. The very few gentry in view wear black. Even the players, the peacocks of the age, are in dreary colors, and Hamlet in what looks like faded denim. And really, there was no reason to have a forest backcloth at Elsinore, except that the Arden icongraphy required it.

I’d be shocked if a prestige piece like this didn’t win Oscars, which is one in the eye for the Oxfordians. Or perhaps, seeing what a tarradidle this makes of Shakespeare’s life, they’ll smirk.

Nine

* Leaning her back against an oak. I wonder if this is a deliberate inversion of the ballad, the Cruel Mother turned Hecuba?

** This will be taught in schools: it matters.

Current Music: Tom Lehrer, "Alma"

It's time to change partners again

On this particularly bright and sleepless morning which began with a formal call from the career center, events otherwise known as

radiantfracture and Existential Comics having conspired to bring the Tractactus to the forefront of my mind, I have decided that the most cursed translation of Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen is "I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."

Current Music: Takénobu: Toki Doki

Entry tags:

My Kyoto

Not to be all Youtube recs all the time, but the same mutual who shared the Greensleeves video shared this tribute to the city of Kyoto via a compilation of anime clips set in Kyoto, to the tune of "Toki Doki" by Takénobu, which has the chorus "boku no Kyoto" (my Kyoto), and I loved it very much.

Since several of my Dreamwidth friends have been to Kyoto and are fond of the city, I had to share. You can also go to the AO3 location and leave the creator some kudos if you're inclined :-)

Watch on YouTube

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bookses precious

Books read, early December

Eleanor Barraclough, Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age. Material goods/archaeological evidence in the study of this period. It's slightly awkwardly balanced in terms of who the audience is--I have a hard time that people who need this much exposition about the era will pick up a book this specifically materially detailed--but not upsetting in that regard.

Elizabeth Bear, Hell and Earth. Reread. Returning to my reread of this series in time to still have all the memories of what's been going on with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare and their connections to faerie realms; as the second half of a larger story, it goes hard toward consequence and ramification from the very start of the volume.

Jerome Blum, In the Beginning: The Advent of the Modern Age: Europe in the 1840s. I feel like this is trying for more than it achieves. It goes into chapters about Romanticism and the advent of science and some other things, and then there's a second section with chapters about major empires. But what it doesn't do is actually talk about Europe in this period--it's fairly easy to find material about England, about France, even about Russia, but there's nothing here about Portugal or Greece or Sweden. It's not a volume I'm going to keep on the shelves for the delightful tidbits, because it's not a tidbit-rich book. Also some of the language is '90s standard rather than contemporary. So: fine if this is what you have but I think you can do better.

Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism From Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet. Good ground-up Third World environmentalism thoughts.

Victoria Dickenson, Berries. One of my friends said, "a book about berries, Marissa would love that!" and she was absolutely right. It is lushly illustrated, it is random facts about berries, I am here for it.

Emily Falk, What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change. Interesting thoughts on working around one's particular brain processes--the third "c" that did not make the title is "connection," and there's a lot about how that can be used to live lives closer to our own values.

Margaret Frazer, Heretical Murder. Kindle. One of the short stories, and possibly the least satisfying one of hers I've read so far: there's just not room for questions, uncertainty, or even a very human take on the life experiences of heretics in this milieu. Oh well, can't win them all.

Jonathan Healey, The Blood in Winter: England on the Brink of Civil War, 1642. If you're an English Civil War nerd, this book on the lead-up to it will be useful to you. I am. It is.

T. Kingfisher, Snake-Eater. A near-future desert fantasy that was creepy and exciting and warm in all the right spots. This is one of Kingfisher's really good ones. Also Copper dog is a really good dog--I mean of course a good dog but also a well-written dog, a dog written by someone who has observed dogs acutely.

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Lyrical writing about gardening in the face of more than one apocalypse at the same time. Laing loves many of the same reference points as I do, in life, in literature, and in botany, so I found this a warmly congenial book.

L.R. Lam, Pantomime. This is very much the first volume in a series; its ending is a midpoint rather than an ending per se. It's a circus fantasy with an intersex and nonbinary protagonist, and it was written just over a decade ago--this is one of the books that had to exist for people to be doing the things with intersex and/or nonbinary characters that they're able to not only write but get published now.

Ada Limón, Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Glorious. Some favorites from past collections and some searing new work, absolutely a good combination, would make a good present especially for someone who doesn't have the prior collections.

Daniel Little, Confronting Evil in History. Kindle. This is a short monograph about philosophy of history/historiography, and why history/historians have to grapple with the problem of evil. I feel like if you're really interested in this topic there are longer, more thorough handlings of it, but it was fine.

Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive? Really good analysis of how we parse things as alive and having rights, and also how riverine biology, ecology, social issues are being handled. Personal to the right degree, balanced with broader information, highly recommended.

Lars Mytting, The Bell in the Lake and The Reindeer Hunters. The first two in a series of Norwegian historical fiction, not more cheerful than that genre generally is but more...active? relentless? I really like this, they're gorgeous, but people will die sad deaths, that's how this stuff does, it's just as well that I'm taking a break before reading the next one because too much of it can make me gloomy but just the right amount is delightful. The symbolism of the stave church and its bells and weaving and all the weight of rural Norway hits in all the right ways for me.

A.E. Osworth, Awakened. This queer millennial contemporary fantasy is not rep of me, it's rep of the people I'm standing next to a lot of the time, and that's powerful in its own way. Many of you are that person. This does things with magic/witch community that feel very true and solid, and it's a fun read.

Lev A.C. Rosen, Mirage City. The latest in the Evander Mills mysteries. This one takes Andy to Los Angeles and his childhood home, in pursuit of missing (queer) persons. Some of them turn out to be perfectly well, some of them...a great deal less so...but the B-plot was focused on Andy's relationship with his mother, whose job turns out to be something he didn't know about--and will have trouble living with. The last line of the book made me burst into tears in a good way, but in general this is a series that has a lot of historical queer peril, and if that's something that's going to make you more unhappy than otherwise, maybe wait until you're in a different place to try them. I think they continue to stand reasonably well alone.

William Shakespeare, King Lear. Reread. Okay, so at some point in early October I earnestly wrote "reread King Lear" on my to-do list for reasons that seemed tolerably clear to me at the time. Things on the list tend to get done. Somewhere in the last two months I forgot why this was supposed to get done. If there's a project it's supposed to inform, reading it has not helped me figure out which project that is. I'm not mad that I reread it, it still has the bits that are appalling in the most interesting ways, but...well. A mystery forever I suppose.

Martha Wells, Platform Decay. Discussed elsewhere.

Entry tags:

bookses precious

Platform Decay, by Martha Wells

Review copy provided by the publisher.

I got this in the mail today and immediately read it. Now, yes, it is December and my TBR is perilously small. But also: new Murderbot! Yay! Still delighted to see more of this series.

In this episode: Murderbot has installed code that allows/requires "emotion checks" periodically, so we get to see the self-awareness process evolve with that (and sometimes devolve...). Murderbot is also assisting with the extraction of several humans, including juveniles and an elder. Juvenile humans do all sorts of things that alarm, annoy, and in some cases terrify Murderbot. This is all to the good.

("Terrified" is never the response to an emotion check. Obviously. Like the kid in The Princess Bride, Murderbot is sometimes a bit concerned, that's all. Definitely only a bit concerned.)

Unfamiliar systems, unfamiliar humans, what else could be called for here...oh, wait, is it the consequences of Murderbot's own actions? WELP. Lots of fun. Still recommend. Don't start here, it's mid-ramification.

Current Music: Bruce Adler, "Hu-Tsa-Tsa"

אמתע מעשׂה, אמתע מעשׂה

For the first night of Hanukkah, my mother accompanied me to None Shall Escape (1944) at the Harvard Film Archive. It snowed into the late afternoon, silver-dusting the unsanded streets. The wind chill feels like zero Fahrenheit.

spatch and I lit the first night's candle for strength.

Current Music: Greensleeves!

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The Greensleeves Project

A mutual on Mastodon shared this mind-blowing Youtube video about creating a dress based on the earliest surviving version (1564) of the ballad "Greensleeves." It was fascinating for all the details about Elizabethan dressmaking (and also food--there's a verse about food, too; 18 verses in all). The way the expert creators researched their piece of the overall outfit (silk smock, crimson stockings, pumps as white as milk, gown of grassy green), the decisions they made (e.g., in the whole inventory of Elizabethan garments, there is no extant silk smock or record of one, so they interpreted the lyric as meaning a linen smock embroidered with silk), and then the techniques used to create the items were just fascinating.

So here's that video--long! But worth it, I thought. There are guinea pigs with ruffs! It was filmed at a stately home in Dorset!

Watch on YouTube

They also made a music video--also long! (almost 10 minutes), in which you can seen Lady Greensleeves gradually acquiring her costume while still rebuffing the suitor. Here's a link.

Current Music: Bruce Adler & Joanne Borts, "Fifty-fifty"

אַ ניקל פֿאַר זיי, אַ ניקל פֿאַר מיר

Apparently I can no longer re-toast myself a signature half pastrami, half corned beef sandwich from Mamaleh's without spending the rest of the evening singing the same-named hit from a 1917 American Yiddish musical. The Folksbiene never seems to have revived it and if the rest of the score was as catchy, they really should. (I am charmed that the composer clearly found the nickel conceit tempting enough to revisit in a later show, but that line quoted about the First Lady, didn't I just ask the twentieth century to stay where we left it?)

At the other end of the musical spectrum,

spatch maintains it is not American-normal to be able to sing the Holst setting of "In the Bleak Midwinter," which until last night I had assumed was just such seasonal wallpaper that I had absorbed it by unavoidable dint of Christmas—it's one of the carols I can't remember learning, unlike others which have identifiable vectors in generally movies, madrigals, or folk LPs. Opinions?

Thanks to lunisolar snapback, Hanukkah like every other holiday this year seems to have sprung up out of nowhere, but we managed to get hold of candles last night and tomorrow will engage in the mitzvah of last-minute cleaning the menorah.

P.S. I fell down a slight rabbit hole of Bruce Adler and now feel I have spent an evening at a Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side circa 1926.

Entry tags:

holiday cheer and thumping

Exactly what we needed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Current Music: Paul Westerberg, "Dyslexic Heart"

Is this your name or a doctor's eye chart?

At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.

Stones

A week ago, I was visiting an old friend on the edge of the Berkshires, at her central-chimneyed, chestnut-framed, wide-boarded house, coeval with the Boston Tea Party. It was just after the first of December and there was deepish snow, so I had “Sweet Baby James” running through my head. Sadly, we couldn’t go play in it or even slip out to look at the Milky Way on a crystal-clear night, as the temperature was about 0F, with a fierce wind banging in the chimneystack. We would have been slashed to stiff ribbons in an instant.

So we stayed in and looked at her cabinet of curiosities. She’s always had one: leaves and pinecones; playing cards and antique marbles; Qing china. Now her passion is for pocket stones. They are jade, lapis, jasper, malachite, pyrite, hematite, and quartz—oh, and hundreds more I couldn’t name, though she can. They are striped, starred, clouded, marbled; they are tabbied, tessellated, blackworked, eyed and islanded and archipelagoed like antique globes of exoplanets; they’re like phoenix eggs. She has Archaean banded rocks three billion years old, and a little heap of unset opals, flickering with inward fire. It’s all about the pattern and the play of light. She kindly gave me two Nine-colored opals for my birthday. They are tiny—pinky-nail and pomegranate-seed—but they flash with momentary Pleiades.

Nine

Current Music: Brandi Carlile, "Human"

And they won't thank you, they don't make awards for that

As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.

( We know by now that time does not take sides. )

With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.

Current Music: Big Thief, "Incomprehensible"

But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder

It feels like cheating for the air to taste so much like the sharp tin tacks of snow when the sky is so clear that even through the white noise of the streetlights Cassiopeia comes in like pointillism and Polaris as bright as a planet. I saw none of the phi Cassiopeids, but the Geminids peak at the end of the week, with any luck on a night that cloudlessly doesn't make my teeth feel about to explode in my mouth. On that front, may I commend the attention of people in frozen boat fandom to this early twentieth century hand-painted stained glass window depicting Shackleton's Endurance? I spent my afternoon on the phone making sure of our health insurance in the bankrupt year to come: the customer service representative was a very nice science fiction person who agreed that it was time to reset this worldline on account of stupidity and for whom I apparently made a pleasant change from all the screaming and breaking down in tears, even more so than usual this year that never need have happened. I've been sent photographs of some really neat letters. Two cards arrived in the mail. My digital camera is showing further signs of deterioration, but a few evenings ago I caught one of those scratch-fired sunsets it's hard to wreck. I am aware of the collapses in the world, but I don't know what else to love.

Current Music: MGMT, "Electric Feel"

Put your circuits in the sea

After years of not even being able to pirate it,

spatch and I have finally just finished the first series of BBC Ghosts (2019–23), during which he pointed out to me the half of the cast that had been on Taskmaster. I recognized a guest-starring Sophie Thompson.

This article on the megaliths of Orkney got Dave Goulder stuck in my head, especially once one of the archaeologists interviewed compared the Ring of Brodgar to sandstone pages. "They may not have been intended to last millennia, but, now that they have, they are stone doors through which the living try to touch the dead."

I wish a cult image of fish-tailed Artemis had existed at Phigalia, hunting pack of seals and all.

Any year now some part of my health could just fix itself a little, as a treat.

Current Music: Rema & Selena Gomez: Calm Down

Entry tags:

a scattering of images photographic and verbal

Still not as online as I'd like to be, but here are some easy things to share. First, tendrils!

I planted some seeds from a passion fruit and got some seedlings, and I noticed the other day that they'd started sending out tendrils. Here one tendril is reaching round a ginger leaf:

passion fruit tendril reaching round a ginger leaf

passion fruit tendril reaching round a ginger leaf

I broke off a dried asparagus fern skeleton from the outside garden and brought that in for the passion fruit to climb on instead:

passion fruit seedling curling round a dried asparagus fern skeleton

passion fruit seedling curling round a dried asparagus fern skeleton

And then I thought everyone could enjoy "Nope," demonstrated both by enlarged emoji and by Little Springtime. It was in my old hometown's public library for a display of picture books about saying no to stuff.

little springtime and nope sign

Now the verbal images. I was at R's place because I was going to take her and her kids to get green card photos, and I'd taken off my boots in the apartment. The boots are tall--they go to my knees. Her younger son looked at them standing by the door and said, "They're like military boots," and demonstrated marching. Which, wow. You compare a thing to things you're familiar with. I've been told the refugee camp these guys were in was close to active fighting.

And this last isn't so much an image as a metaphysical something-something. Or a failure of Google Translate. Or both. At a different point in the day, R and I were waiting in my car for her kids to get off the bus, and she typed a question into Google translate. I could see the English words change and rearrange themselves as she rephrased and added to the Tigrinya. The final result was:

How do I know what I don't know?

I wrote back, That's a very big question!

I think, based on her efforts to narrow down what she was asking, that she wanted to know about cars, about eventually getting a car, but the 10,000-foot-level question was a great one.

Current Music: Annie Bartholomew, "Mountain Dove Song"

Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight

Crossing recent streams, tonight I participated with

rushthatspeaks in a reading of The Invention of Love (1997) in memoriam Tom Stoppard with a Discord group that does a different play every week. I was assigned Moses Jackson, the straightest himbo ever to play a sport. I consider it a triumph for the profession that I did not catch on fire enthusing about field athletics.

When I read in passing that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) had begun life as a one-act comedy entitled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear, I went to fact-check this assertion immediately because it sounded like a joke, you know, like one of the great tragedies of the English stage starting out as the farcical Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter and then a ringing sound in my ears indicated that the penny had dropped.

Speaking of, I have seen going around the quotation from Arcadia (1993) on the destruction and endurance of history:

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?

Stoppard was not supposed to have known the full extent of his Jewishness until midlife, but it is such a diasporic way of thinking, the convergent echo of Emeric Pressburger is difficult for me not to hear. I keep writing of the coins in the field, everything that time gives back, if not always to those who lost it.

Current Music: David Byrne, "What Is the Reason for It? (feat. Hayley Williams)"

What does it do when we're asleep?

Realizing last night that I have for decades thought of myself as a full year older than I chronologically can have been for my first real job—I was fifteen—led into a crumble-to-dust reminiscence about the number of bookstores once to be found in Lexington Center, which gave me some serious future shock when we walked into Maxima while waiting to collect our order from Il Casale and it occupied the exact same storefront as my second job, also as a bookseller; it was perhaps the one form of retail to which I was natively suited. My third job was assistant-teaching Latin, but my fourth I accidentally talked my way into by recommending some titles to a fellow browser.

spatch's anniversary gift to me was a paperback of Satoshi Yagisawa's Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (trans. Eric Ozawa, 2010/2023). It was teeth-shockingly cold and we all but ran with our spoils back to the car.

( Twenty-four hours every day. )

We had set out in search of resplendent food and found it in polpette that reminded us of the North End, a richly smoky rigatoni with ragù of deep-braised lamb, and a basil-decorated, fanciest eggplant parmesan I have encountered in my life, capped with panna cotta in a tumble of wintrily apt pomegranate seeds. Hestia investigated delicately but dangerously. After we had recovered, Rob showed me Powwow Highway (1989) right before it expired from the unreliable buffer of TCM because he thought and was right that I would love its anger and gentleness and hereness, plus its '64 Buick which has already gone on beyond Bluesmobile by the time it is discovered in a field of clunkers and a vision of ponies. It has no budget and so much of the world. As long as we're in it, we might as well be real.

Current Music: The Mountain Goats, "Fishing Boat"

No one who can stand staying landlocked for longer than a month at most

spatch and I have been married for twelve years. A round dozen of anniversary gifts looks as though it adds up to the woven road of silk. Here we are still, intertwined and traveling.

Entry tags:

publishing

2025 in writing (my stuff)

I'll be doing my usual recommendations for short stuff other people have read at the end of December, when I've had a chance to read the things that are still coming out in December, but I think I've seen the last of my new publications for the year, so here's what I've been up to!

...a year turns out to be a long time. One of the reasons I think it's good to do these year-in-review posts is that the sense of "oh wait, was that this same year???" is strong. I feel like my tendency to put things I've accomplished in the rearview and focus on the next thing is generally really useful to me, but it does tend to lead to a "what have you done lately" mindset. When it turns out that what I have done lately is a pile of stories. There were more SF than fantasy stories, which surprised me, it didn't feel that way...more on why I think that is in a minute. In any case, here's the 2025 story list:

The Year the Sheep God Shattered (Diabolical Plots)

Her Tune, In Truth (Sunday Morning Transport)

If the Weather Holds (Analog)

Disconnections (Nature Futures)

The Things You Know, The Things You Trust (If There's Anyone Left)

All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (Lightspeed)

Things I Miss About Civilization (Nature Futures)

A Shaky Bridge (Clarkesworld)

What a Big Heart You Have (Kaleidotrope)

And Every Galatea Shaped Anew (Analog)

The Crow's Second Tale (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Advice for Wormhole Travelers (The Vertigo Project)

She Wavers But She Does Not Weaken (The Vertigo Project)

The Torn Map (The Vertigo Project)

So yeah! Stories galore! And with a very satisfying variety of publishers, with the exception that The Vertigo Project was a focus of a lot of my attention this year. Which makes sense! It's a pretty big deal. All the poetry I had published this year was with The Vertigo Project as well, although I have a couple of poems ready to come out in 2026 from other places. Here's the list of poems:

Club Planet Vertigo (The Vertigo Project)

Greetings From Innerspace (The Vertigo Project)

On the Way Down (The Vertigo Project)

Preparation (The Vertigo Project)

The Nature of Nemesis (The Vertigo Project)

I only had one piece of nonfiction out this year, The Stranger Next Door: The Domestic Fantastic in Classic Nordic Children's Literature (Uncanny). But it's a topic that's very close to my heart, and I'm glad I had the chance to wallow in it. Er, I mean, share it with you.

I suppose the other thing that could be considered nonfiction is that I wrote journaling prompts to help people with vertigo process their vertigo experience through creative writing. I also wrote a group workshop format for the same general ideas, and I ran the first of those workshops in November. It was lovely and seemed to be very meaningful to the people involved--and that's one of the things that's nice about the facilitator (that is, me) being someone with vertigo, it meant that I was talking about our experiences rather than their experiences. The Vertigo Project has been the gift that keeps on giving all year, and there will be more of it yet in 2026. What a great thing to get to be involved with. I'm so pleased to have done this work with these people.

I was also a finalist for the Washington Science Fiction Association's Small Press Award, for one of 2024's stories, A Pilgrimage to the God of High Places. I got to go to Capclave and hang out with a bunch of friends and enjoy being a finalist.

I think the main reason that I felt like I was doing equal parts fantasy and SF this year is that I wrote approximately half each of two novels, one fantasy and one SF. Both are still going strong. We'll see where they take me. I'm also working on some more short work in both categories. While I published a lot more short SF, my biggest news in recent months is that I sold a fantasy novella to Horned Lark Press. A Dubious Clamor features harpies, politics, operettas, pastries, and complicated friendships, and it's forthcoming in 2026. A lot done this year, a lot to look forward to!