Reading

Current Mood: full
Current Music: Mets pregame

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she's wind through wild thyme

Today's poem:

The Other Woman

as I picture her
she has no basil
no cumin
no sun-hardened hyssop
nor sage around her eyes

she never catnips
but laughs comfrey
tansy with a primula smile

as I think of her
she's angelica
foxglove and jasmine
somewhat peppermint
not letting you see
all her saffron at once

one day I’ll meet her
that rue woman
that wild indigo teasel
somewhere neutral
free of woodruff and of dropwort
some summer savory

she's the nose
set to lavender
eye full of sesame
ear ringing rosemary

she's wind
through wild thyme

--Twyla M. Hansen

*

(no subject)

Took the day off for what amounts to a 15-20 minute knee doctor's appointment at 2:40pm, the commute to it will take longer - well that and the wait time. Although, according to the PT - my knee doctor is world-renowned or nationally renowned, and people come from all over to see him. (Probably explains why he sees 30 patients a day.) No, the knee isn't really getting that much better. It's less painful. But still problematic.
And PT asked if I was okay with doing the knee exercises for the rest of my life, every day?

Look, I just want to be able to occasionally walk a three-five miles without pain, and go up and down eight flights of steps. It's not like I want to run a marathon or play tennis or anything. Just do floor exercises, hike, kneel, and dash to the train.

**

Discovered this singer on Instagram:

Labor by Paris Palomar

You have to listen to the live version to get it. Also once you hear the final choral lyrics - it's hard to get them out of your head? Talk about earworms - although this is one - in a good way?

It's a female primal scream at our toxic society. I can relate.

***

4. Are there opportunities to go walking where you live? Do you take advantage of that?

Yes. I walk everywhere. I don't own a car, nor take any. I walk and take the subway. There's two large parks nearby, with lots of green space.

5. Pineapple on a pizza – yes, or no?

Ewww. No.

6. Is there a fashion or style from your youth that you wish would come back, or are you happy with how people dress these days?

I don't care that much about fashion, and don't really pay attention to the trends. When it comes to clothing - I just want to be comfortable and presentable. Fashion makes no sense to me - why unnecessarily hurt yourself to look pretty?

7. It’s National Robotics Week – if you could have a personal robot, what would you like it to do for you?

Laundry. (I already have two robot vacuums - that handle vacuuming.) Also dusting would be nice.

8. Have you ever played card games? If so, what’s your favourite game?

Yes. I don't remember them after I play them well enough to answer? I don't even remember the names of them.

9. It’s National Garlic Month – are you a fan? If so, what’s your favourite recipe using garlic?

Yes. I don't remember or really follow recipes? I just add garlic to stuff - when it suits me? I'm an intuitive cook.

10. Do you often see wild birds in your backyard/garden/nearby open spaces? What are the most common ones you see in your area?

pigeons. doves. cardinals. and sparrows. Also a handful of robins.

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Possibly I read too much crime fiction....

Because when I read this, I had Further Questions.

London pub thief sold £2.2m Fabergé egg and watch set to buy drugs

I am going, hello?

Enzo Conticello, 29, took the Givenchy bag belonging to Rosie Dawson as she stood in the smoking area of the Dog and Duck pub in Soho, London, on 7 November 2024.
Inside the £1,600 bag was an emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set belonging to Dawson’s employers, the Craft Irish Whiskey Company.

So, she had these items in her HANDBAG (going full Flora Robson as Lady Bracknell) and

went to the Dog and Duck pub in Soho. She was outside the premises in the designated smoking area, she put her handbag on the ground in between her legs, and a few minutes later she noticed her handbag was no longer there.

We observe that this was a £1,600 Givenchy bag, and while I do not think London is quite the crime-ridden hellhole some social media depicts, I might hang on to this a bit more carefully in Soho even did it not contain my employer's Fabergé.

Dawson had the Fabergé items because she had taken them for display at a work event earlier that evening.

Surely there ought to have been some kind of security procedure involved, like, 'take a taxi and put them back in the safe'?

(Am trying to think of any circumstances in which, in former days, would have been taking precious unique archival and manuscript items out of the building in the first place. When we had them out on display for visiting groups, they got put away pronto.)

I probably read too much crime fiction, but this reads like 'set-up for heist/insurance scam that went pearshaped'.

Current Mood: calm
Current Location: Munich

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The Testaments (1.01 - 1.03

The first three episodes of The Testaments have been dropped in my part of the world on Disney +. It's an adapatation of Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, which is a decades later written sequel to her famous dystopian classic The Handmaid's Tale; when it was published, I reviewed it here. Just to make their lives more complicated, though, the show is also a sequel to the tv series The Handmaid's Tale. The first (very good) season of which I watched, but not the later ones, as word of mouth about diminishing quality and lack of time have detained me, but I did osmose this presents a problem because not only is the backstory the showin its later seasons developed for one of the central characters (Aunt Lydia) very different from her backstory in the novel, but the timeline of another central character is different as well. With this in mind, my spoilery reaction to the first three episodes is beneath the cut. Above cut: those first three episodes are well acted and produced and make some interesting choices re: adapting the source material - and I don't mean "interesting" as a euphemism for bad -, but haven't revealed yet how they'll solve the Lydia problem.

( The perils of being a female teenager in Gilead )

(no subject)

Happy birthday,

schemingreader!

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(no subject)

Made a extremely silly decision this past weekend, which was to break up our long drive to and from Philly by Exactly long enough to see one (one) show in NYC on the way down, and another on the way back. Literally put the car in a garage by the theater, went into the show, got the car out of the garage, and kept driving. And to make matters even sillier the show that we saw on the way down was Bad -- and we knew it was going to be! Or at least we had a reasonable suspicion! But were we not going to go out of our way to see Norm Lewis play Villefort in a Count of Monte Cristo musical? Of course we were. The path before us had simply been prepared.

Q: When you say it was bad, do you mean it was a bad musical as a musical, or a bad adaptation of Count of Monte Cristo?
A: Oh, both! Absolutely both.

Q: What made it a bad musical?
A: Well, the music. And the lyrics. They hit exactly every beat on the Musical Sheet while constantly feeling like less subtle knockoff versions of other songs you might know slightly better. The song you might know slightly better is not a subtle one, you say? Well, I guarantee you that songs such as "Dangerous Times," in which the full cast explain that they are living in dangerous times, and "How Did I Get So Far Away [From Me]," in which Mercedes sadly wonders how she has gotten so far away from herself, are less so. When the best you can say of a song is that it felt like pallid diet Frank Wildhorn -- as in, lacking the noted power and vibrancy of real Frank Wildhorn, composer of such deathless works as Death Note: The Musical -- then you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And that's not even mentioning the frenetic stream of mediocre jokes.

Q: And what made it a bad adaptation?
A: I mean I know there are probably people in the past who have said that Edmond Dantès literally did nothing wrong but I want you to understand: in this show, Edmond Dantès literally does nothing wrong. His backstory takes up the entire first act, and by the time we hit intermission I was already like "huh, there's not going to be a lot of time in here for revenge schemes," but I didn't actually understand how dire the situation was going to be until ( this part of the Q&A gets into quite detailed plot spoilers )

Q: So do you regret your objectively silly decision to go out of your way to see this musical?
A: No I do not, not in the least, and I would have regretted missing it. There is something very nutritious in bad theater, I think. It forces you to consider what good theater might look like. Also, the surprise appearance of Lucrezia Borgia was one of the funniest things I experienced all weekend.

Current Mood: coughing, still

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you do the math, you expect the trouble

Today's poem, for which I had to turn on the rich text editor and still couldn't get the spacing quite right sigh:

Seaside Improvisation
by Richard Siken

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't
want them, so I take them back
and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists. The yard is dark,
the tomatoes are next to the whitewashed wall,
the book on the table is about Spain,
the windows are painted shut.
Tonight you're thinking of cities under crowns
of snow and I stare at you like I'm looking through a window,
counting birds.
You wanted happiness, I can't blame you for that,
and maybe a mouth sounds idiotic when it blathers on about joy
but tell me
you love this, tell me you're not miserable.
You do the math, you expect the trouble.
The seaside town. The electric fence.
Draw a circle with a piece of chalk. Imagine standing in a constant cone
of light. Imagine surrender. Imagine being useless.
A stone on the path means the tea's not ready,
a stone in the hand means somebody's angry, the stone inside you still
hasn't hit bottom.

*

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Graphic Novel Favorites From My Recent Reading

After years of struggling to read new-to-me fiction, I’ve recently entered a phase of reading graphic novels and comics and I’ve been reading so much! (It helps that I accidentally got into a comics-based fandom via stress-reading fic late last year.) It’s only April yet I have already read more books this year than I have in any year since 2020, it's truly wild. I haven’t had this much fun reading in ages!

I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying, so I thought I’d write a rec list. I find graphic novels easier to focus on when I’m stressed than prose novels, and I also love getting to see so much art. I’ve been mostly reading MG and YA works – it feels like there is a lot going on in that space right now! Plus it’s a space where there tend to be many stories focused on friendship, which I really enjoy. I’ve also been choosing more lighthearted things to read. The world is stressful and I can’t deal with stressful reading at the moment.

( Read more... )

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Hedjog versus THE MACHINE

So dr rdrz will be aware of my recent problems with printer, so I finally bit the bullet and after consulting Which Best Buys and so forth, went for an Epson Eco-Tank from John Lewis.

Which arrived at lunchtime today.

And I had anticipated spending hours if not days whining and stressing and beating my head on the ground and wrestling like until Jacob with the Angel to get the thing talking to my system and actually printing/scanning/copying.

Behold me sat sitting here having achieved getting it connected to the Wifi (the Wizard, though, is crap because it assumes that your password is a word rather than numeric, fortunately there was an alternative route), appearing under printers/scanners in my desktop computer settings, and copying, scanning, and printing.

There was a little hassle with printing which turned out to be due to Advanced Printer Settings turning out to have weird Paper Size as default rather than A4, which given that A4 is supposed to be their standard size, was bizarre.

This is positively uncanny, do admit.

Current Mood: still coughing
Current Music: Mets losing to the Dbacks

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but I sit silent and burning

I was taken with the need to do an Orphan Black rewatch and there's so much I forgot! Tatiana Maslany is so good, which you all knew, and the supporting cast is *chef's kiss*. It makes very few missteps, and watching in marathon fashion means even storylines I disliked originally (CASTOR) work much better. It's on Netflix, so if you are in the mood and don't mind the grossout body horror, it's a good watch.

And this poem seemed fitting:

This Poem Will Get Me On Some Kind of Watchlist
by Jessie Lochrie

I'm dancing at a nightclub
when someone behind me
places a hand on my shoulder.
I assume it's a friend until
the hand slides down my chest.

Boiling with gin and rage
I grab his wrist, whip around,
and punch him in the jaw.
It doesn't land well—
I've never hit anyone before—
so I punch him in the gut,
just for good measure.

I look at him doubled over and spit
Never do that to a woman again,
and then I run. My friends laugh in the cab:
You punched a guy!
but I sit silent and burning.

In Crown Heights, in Union Square,
in South Williamsburg: men leer and
whistle and smack their lips.
I ignore them, or flip them off,
or tell them I'm married.

When they purr que guapa
I yell callate and they all laugh.
I can't tell if they're laughing at me
for being a white girl speaking bad
Spanish, or at the idea that anything
I say might actually shut them up.

In my impotent rage I dream of a world
where I am not public property. I would
start wars for my right to walk down a street
unafraid, a thousand wars for a single day
in which my body belongs to me alone.
An army raised against each cat call. A bullet
for every man who ever told me to smile.

***

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Wednesday saw the return of the heron, catching A FROG

What I read

Finished Never Had It So Good, and while I am less whelmed than I was on first reading it 50 years ago (aaarrgh), and consider that as panoramic social novel of provincial life, does not quite reach the level of South Riding, yet, that is the comparison one thinks of. I also mark up Mr Jones in contrast to The Angry Young Men who were his contemporaries over a whole range of issues.

Finished Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore, which was fascinating, and very readable, but has not somehow inspired me to rush off and do a re-read.

Then thought I should really read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017), for forthcoming in-person book group.

In hopes of a change from that - it's grim - read Marion Keyes, The Mystery of Mercy Close (Walsh Family, #5) (2012), a recent Kobo deal, which was itself not entirely the most cheerful read.

On the go

Amazon helpfully alerted me to Kindle-only publication of Alexis Hall, Never After, currently in progress, also not really bringing the delicious froth - opium-addicted Victorian rent-boy rescued from homelessness on the streets by clergyman (unexpected and unwanted 3rd son in aristo family, put him into the church) with his own backstory baggage.

Up next

There's a new Literary Review.

Also I had a mad binge on Kobo the other day, mostly Dick Francises which had come down to promotional prices, but I also finally succumbed to the most recent Edward St Aubyn which has been tempting me. The previous one was so much less gruesome than the Melrose sequence that perhaps this will be the change of pace I'm looking for?

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!need_tag

New Vid: First Man Fan Video - Walking On The Moon

Title: Walking On The Moon
Fandom: Ryan Gosling
Movie: First Man
Music: Walking On The Moon by Ruelle
Length: 3:56
Streaming/download at: DW | Tumblr

Current Mood: coughing
Current Music: Mets vs Dbacks on tv

Entry tags:

each nonetheless keeps the perfect arc of his distance

Today's poem:

An Epistemology of Planets
by Annie Dillard

Mercury

A brook runs on all night;
a book, shut,
still tells itself a story.
So you, out of thought,
you, forgotten Mercury,
still spin and spend the circles of your fury.

Venus

Evenings, after I've eaten
dessert, you rise, you wear
your barest, shining skin.

Later, mornings, you up
and do it again.

Do you think I've forgotten so soon?

Earth

Planets, alone, and grieving,
look who you're running with:
look at our baby-blue planet the earth
and all of the people, waving.

Mars

Mars keeps its dignity,
its networks of cool.
Certain photographs reveal
an air of longing, still.

Jupiter

Swings, spattered
by shadows of Jovian moons:
Io, Europa, Callisto,
the giant, Ganymede.
Companionable, each

nonetheless keeps

the perfect arc of his distance.

Saturn

         It is to you I come in my dream,
you, dancing alone in the dark, light-heart,
       asleep inside your spinning hat!

Uranus

Uranus, cold face,
old rock and ice,
remembers a song
and sings it once
round the dark, twice.

Neptune

Banished, Neptune,
luminous, green,
sleeps, and dreams of the sun.
Awake, he holds her round
as tight as he can.

Pluto

Spends twenty years
wandering in Cancer,
that old celestial
crab. Takes years to touch
carapace, jointed foot
on jointed leg; nudges
mandibles, roving, awed,
in every season.
                          Getting to know
you, still, I find you clear-eyed,
cloistered, clawed.

***

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Some of the earliest known examples are in fact called 'Confessions'....

Personally I suspect Blake Morrison has either not read terribly deeply in memoirs of the past, because I could probably without too much struggle come up with instances which were not at all about being 'a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers)', but one sees that this is a position he has to take up in order to make his case about Ye Moderne Confeshunal memoiring.

‘Enough of this me me me’: Blake Morrison on memoir in the age of oversharing

(Harriette Wilson would like a word, just saying, for starters.) (We can so imagine dear Harriette on social media, no?)

I'm not sure he's really got an argument there rather than some vague blathering about published memoirs vs social media and blogs, especially given the, er, thinness of his historical grounding (though in some cases past memoirists prudently arranged for the work to published posthumously).

And as for people being somewhat lax with the truthiness of their memoirs, how about this chap: The schoolteacher who spawned a Highland literary hoax:

The book’s author and narrator, Donald Cameron, describes his early life in Blarosnich, a remote hill farm in the Western Highlands in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book presents a Brigadoon-like spectacle of an agrarian community seemingly little touched by modernity, populated by pious women, elderly aristocrats and lusty farm lads.
....
Donald Cameron was, in fact, a pseudonym of Robert Harbinson Bryans, an itinerant bisexual schoolteacher turned travel writer who was born in Belfast in 1928 and died in London in 2005. Also known as Robin Bryans, his name is now largely forgotten apart from among students of plots and conspiratorial claims.

He is not, I think, the only instance of totally faked autobiography taken as searing insight into a lost way of life.

heated rilvary fic rec- NEW FIC BY TAFKAR!!

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

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Guest Review: Empathizing with the Abuser: The Poet Empress by Shen Tao

Please welcome our anonymous reviewer!

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao is a debut Chinese-inspired fantasy centered on a poor village girl who rises from a concubine to the empress-in-waiting to an abusive prince heir. In a bid to save the kingdom from the tyranny of his reign, Wei decides to kill him in the only way she can, by writing a magic poem. Only deathly poems have to be love poetry, and only by knowing him well enough to love him can she kill him.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: awake

Entry tags:

everything was strange without being threatening

Today's poem:

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

--Alden Nowlan

*

Current Mood: groggy

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About to exit the weekend, much as I'd rather remain (headache + foodstuff + a bit re blood sugar)

Easter Monday. I slept pretty badly (repeatedly waking, and not taking ibuprofen when I first woke with a headache; I've absorbed the notion of "if possible, don't take ibuprofen if you're going to be lying down right afterward" and this tends to result in this exact situation of "wake up in the night with headache, tell self you'll go back to sleep and it'll go away [which never works], wake again later with no reduction in headache, take ibuprofen when about to lie back down anyway").

I had slightly larger, albeit still small, ambitions for today prior to the bad sleep, but we ventured out briefly on an unsuccessful quest for scones (we verified the shop was open and I even called ahead to try to make sure they had scones, but I got voicemail and no one returned my call, so we gambled and lost). Ah well.

( all the rest is various food talk [with a bit about eating + blood glucose aggravation] )

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Assorted things

A concatenation of things Relevant To My Research Interests (I guess), or, well, I feel I ought to keep up with this sort of thing....

Exiles of love?: uncovering lesbian voices in interwar Czechoslovakia, by someone I know, or at least, whose partner I know and whom I know by association.

Confining yet Convenient: Using Gender Norms to Defend Oneself in Cases of Rural Spousal Violence in Post-Independence Ireland: because that sort of thing could happen, using the system (see that book on 'economic divorce from deserting husbands' in late C19th England).

Review of Pious and Promiscuous: Life, Love and Family in Presbyterian Ulster, which is again, about how the system allows of certain flexibilities.

***

How to piss off historians: Drought, Conflict and the Use of Historical Data and Methodologies in Interdisciplinary Palaeoclimatic Research:

Norman et al. argue that historical sources support their conclusions that drought contributed causally to the ‘barbarian conspiracy’ of 367CE and to other late Roman conflicts. Although historians have developed rigorous methodologies for effective analysis and interpretation of surviving texts, the authors outline no methodologies for dealing with the textual evidence. Further, there are issues with the historical ‘conflict’ and numismatic datasets and with their interpretation.... the textual evidence discussed by Norman et al. does not, and cannot, support the authors’ assertions.

Swing that codfish!

***

Is this not lovely news? posthumous work by Vonda McIntyre forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in May

Entry tags:

pillowfort

Pillowfort Anniversary Festival

There's a party going on at Pillowfort from April 3-13 to celebrate its 10th anniversary. It's hard for me to believe I've been there for 8 of those years already.

Like Dreamwidth, Pillowfort is a small owner-run site with responsive staff that stays afloat via premium services. It functions like a combination of Tumblr and Dreamwidth. For those using Dreamwidth, two advantages I've found enormously helpful are the easy photo hosting/posts and the fact that improved reblogging exists, thus making it very easy to share content to communities. In practice, I find these two sites complement one another.

The atmosphere there is both welcoming and helpful. In my time I've had the occasional unpleasant encounter, but have found it quite chill. Apparently I'm not the only one, as this recent Tumblr refugee reported.: "Signed up yesterday. Decided this morning that I was gonna hang out on here and see what it was like. And... I've had the best time? (I don't mean to sound surprised; I'm just used to the normal horrible state of the modern internet.)..Where has this corner of the internet been for the last several years??? I'm so happy I've found y'all."

Given the "state of the modern internet", we definitely need more boutique social media site alternatives, not fewer. Pillowforter DoktorHobo has been tracking signups to Pillowfort for several years and noted that it has maintained a steady average of around 50 new people per week. I've never taken much notice of total accounts on a site because the vast majority are always inactive, and many more are sporadically active. But steady growth does tell a story.

For anyone interested in trying Pillowfort out, here are some starting points: ( Read more... )

If those don't answer your questions, feel free to ask away here about the site or its workings. There is also a community there for Dreamwidth users. It's been very inactive but I know that a number of people on Pillowfort do have DW accounts or have used it before. And if you just want to see what's going on with anniversary stuff there's a community collating it.

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