Tuesday

Sep. 30th, 2025 03:22 pm
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
Woke up early this morning thinking of The Wild Guys, a play from the 1990s that (fairly gently, iirc) satirized mythopoetic men’s retreats, which were a Thing at the time. Eventually I had to go look up Iron John: A Book About Men and Women Who Run With the Wolves to see who’d written them (Robert Bly and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, respectively).

As someone in SFF fandom, I don’t know how to feel about Jung-based movements. I get that some stuff is hard to convey except by analogy, or by constructing some kind of initiation ritual that puts people into a context where the thing you’re trying to tell them is more likely to make experiential sense. And of course I’m likely being unfair to Bly and Estes, whose writings may well be more down-to-earth than their popular image. Bly, at any rate, seems to have had a sense of humour, if this poem is anything to go by. 

The advantage of fiction, and art and music, is that you can explore and play with these same kind of potentially-useful ideas without asserting them.

Meanwhile in my own mythopoetic life, I’ve spent the past couple of days trying to figure out if I’m having those menopausal hot-flashes people talk about, or if it’s just the late-September weather—the temperature has been swinging between twelve and twenty-four degrees here. Either way, I’ve spent so much of my life too cold that this, whatever it is, kind of feels like unlocking superpowers. Flame On!

Left you breathless in the brine

Sep. 30th, 2025 07:15 am
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
For so very few people will I haul myself out of bed before the mourning doves have even woken up, but since some of them live in the D.C. metro area, I am once again watching the world in dawn-flashed geometries of catenaries and crossties slide past me from a rear-facing seat of the Northeast Corridor. There were some excellent mussel-streaks over the Mystic and the brick-boxed windows are gilt-glinting even now. A milk of mist is actually hovering over the green spaces. I still feel a teleporter would be healthier on my sleep schedule.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
I forgot to bring my camera when I left the house to walk around the block this evening, but I saw a white hibiscus growing through a hedge and bees clustered around some brilliantly Halloweenish orange flowers. I have not had my head in the sand despite being under quite a lot of rocks this month, but I am still demoralized that an international friend's postcard could not reach me because of the intimidation theater of the tariffs. Nor am I thrilled that last week I had an unexpectedly bizarre interaction with a medical professional about Tylenol. I am much more cheered by the existence of ghost ponds and the renascent fern, not to mention the eleven-million-year-old asteroid no one knows yet where it hit. The Draconids peak on the eve of my birthday this year. Last week was still too many doctors, but I have hopes of fewer in the week to come. At least I managed for the first time on this new regimen to write about a film.
sovay: (Mr Palfrey: a prissy bastard)
[personal profile] sovay
Every time I watch Heat and Dust (1983), I want to write about its beautifully patterned expectations and ironies, its women who confront or evade them, its last extraordinary melding of time done with nothing more than a window that contains one decade and reflects another while the snow-flanked mountains stand behind them both, and it seems that I am writing about Harry Hamilton-Paul.

I shouldn't be surprised. In a film much concerned with cultural codes and transgressions, he's the most liminal character, the oddest man out, the last living memory of the scandal that rocked the Civil Lines at Satipur in 1923 when British India was the jewel of the never-set Empire of which he was most definitely not a builder. He's the storyteller, partly narrating the past thread of the film from his future as a tobacco-tanned old India hand who can't resist giving the same colonial advice about water and fruit and salads that he never heeded in his youthful days as—a meaningful, veiled word—the guest of the Nawab of Khatm. His presence at diplomatic functions is ambidextrous, dinner-jacketed at a state banquet, turbaned at a palace durbar, as likely to be found on his own time in an angarkha as a tennis shirt, belting out enthusiastically amateur selections from Pagliacci and acidly losing at cards to the ladies of the zenana. His role in them is blatantly unexplained. Nickolas Grace gives him such an arch, pointed face, his eyes ironically lidded even when flat on his back in a fever of homesickness and his serious statements edged like light comedy, he's impossible to imagine as even a one-time appendage of the repressive civil service which in any case considers him to have rather disgracefully let the side down, but neither does he seem, like his secretarial antecedents of E. M. Forster or J. R. Ackerley, even pretextually employed at the court of the Nawab. The British colony pronounces the censorious last word: "No Englishman has any business living in that palace." But of course he does, if a man as brilliantly virile and vulnerable as Shashi Kapoor's Nawab wants him there. Like a kinder revision of Cyril Sahib in Autobiography of a Princess (1975), Harry admits the possibility of queerness into the double-tracked heterosexuality of the plot. Bonding over the absurdities of imperial ritual with Greta Scacchi's Olivia Rivers, he drops the courteous hairpin of complimenting the playing-fields-of-Eton looks of her assistant collector of a husband, but his cynically comfortable company offers more than a diversion from the crashing propriety incumbent on a junior officer's wife: he's the dangerous proof that a sojourn in the subcontinent doesn't have to be circumscribed by casually racist platitudes and the insular summer exodus to Simla, that she too might meet something of the less tamely glamorous, princely India under the veneer of the Raj in the reciprocal person of the Nawab, for whom she is no more the typical memsahib than Harry is anything other than "a very improper Englishman." What she cannot see in her reckless innocence is the difference in the risks they run, how much more inflammatorily her cross-cultural desires intersect with the implacable conventions of both sides of the colonial project. Harry's situation is sufficiently ambiguous that the Nawab can claim him as if with the bridal cliché that his mother has gained rather than lost a son, but Olivia's unchaperoned visits to the palace set the rumor mill grinding even when their ostensible object is her heat-stricken countryman, reading all the London-fogged Dickens he can get his hands on. No political value is set on his virtue. And yet for just a little while before the tide of empire engulfs Khatm and strands its principal players in a flat in Park Lane, a chalet in Gulmarg, the denuded ghost of the palace left like a rain-stained shrine to its ruler's deposition, the triangulation of the friendship between Olivia and Harry and their mutual importance to the Nawab makes the three of them look like a ménage across borders, the charmed space of a triad not so totally unlike the tripartite composition of their writing-directing-producing team. The appeal of a hand on a shoulder, a fumble with unfamiliar undergarments. "We've left British India. Now you're in my power, like him. I'm only joking."

The production that broke them out on the international scene, Heat and Dust was model Merchant Ivory, produced by Ismail, directed by James, and closely and imaginatively adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own 1975 Booker winner with a cast as sumptuous and astringent as its dual-layered portrait of India. As the captivating Nawab, Kapoor gets to strike evasive, reflective, funny as well as mouthwatering notes, while Christopher Cazenove's Douglas Rivers may be a dutiful empire-builder, but we meet him first weeping for his wife: Scacchi's Olivia with her blossoming, owl-boned face moves against her colonial obligations out of defiance as well as naïveté and it suits a film so attentive to the limits of female autonomy that the resolution of her predicament should lie with Madhur Jaffrey as the regally chain-smoking Begum. By dint of wrapping itself around a mystery, the 1982 thread can't help feeling like a frame story even when interwoven with deliberate, blurring touches like a municipal office suddenly faded out of a bungalow, but Julie Christie and Zakir Hussein give the affair of Anne and Inder Lal enough of its own casual chemistry that it makes a contrast, although Ratna Pathak as Ritu is just sketched as the spouse this time around; the film seems more curious about the would-be sanyasi of Charles McCaughan's Chid, whose dead-end self-actualization lightly tweaks the latter-day colonialism of cultural appropriation. Walter Lassally shoots painterly set-ups and candid camera streets with equal assurance, including the introductory shot of Olivia looking straight out through the fourth wall of the letters to her sister that started Anne off on the whole quest to retrace her great-aunt's scandalous footsteps, whose bookend is an elegantly enigmatic, portrait-like moment where record and recollection have run out, leaving only the woman herself. The fact remains of my affection for Harry, who bridges the threads of time and when faced with the turmoil of dacoits and riots and the murky intrigues of the man he loves, admits frankly, "Well, when all these kinds of things happened, I just gave up and ran away to Olivia's house and begged her to play some Schumann." Fortunately, he and his film are prolifically available on various forms of streaming and more than one region of Blu-Ray/DVD. It only took me since before the last glaciation to get around to them. This indiscretion brought to you by my improper backers at Patreon.

Saint Death's Daughter

Sep. 25th, 2025 08:43 am
asakiyume: (yaksa)
[personal profile] asakiyume
What a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.

It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … But just certain select pieces! Because the other thing about the world of Saint Death’s Daughter is that it’s cheerfully vicious and merciless—not always and everywhere by any means—but plenty enough. Take the fact that our protagonist, Miscellaneous (Lanie) Stones, comes from a family of assassins and torturers. And there are similar people in high places throughout the story. But the folks Lanie’s drawn to are nothing like that at all. We’re more than our family history, and we can make different choices—that’s the grounding hum that vibrates through the story. Lanie sets herself to make amends for the harm her family’s done: tries, fails, and tries again, all while growing into a powerful necromancer with a deep devotion to Doédenna, Saint Death.

There's so much! This is just scratching the surface )

So those are some of my reasons for loving Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s doing so much that it’s impossible to cover it all in a review. Lanie eventually learns to speak with more than one voice at once, with a surface voice and a deeper one (kind of like throat singing, where you sing more than one note at the same time, only Lanie’s deeper voice isn’t audible in the usual way of things). The novel is like this too: it’s speaking in a surface voice and in many other voices as well. It’s broadcasting on many frequencies; you can hear many, many things.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."

probably peak peeping

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:01 pm
lauradi7dw: (bee in bush)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
For much of the Route 2 trip to Greenfield to visit Flo et al, the deciduous trees seemed pretty much at peak color. Not all, and it's not just West - the maple tree in Flo's yard has a few sad-looking yellow leaves, otherwise green, but a lot of the viewing was lovely, even in today's drizzle on the way back. Also, the redtop grass along the edges looked genuinely reddish-purple a couple of weeks ago but today it was looking pink.
Goal for tomorrow is to wash the various baby body fluids out of my skirt. Spit(up), urine. Fortunately not poop or blood, so not the full panoply. Everybody's fine.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #84, containing my poem "The Burnt Layer." It's the one with the five-thousand-year-old sky axe and α Draconis; it is short and important to me. The flight issue is a powerhouse, showcasing the short fiction and poetry of Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Zary Fekete, Gretchen Tessmer, Francesca Forrest, and Patricia Russo among no-slouch others. I love the warping truss bridge and the birdflight of the covers courtesy of John and Flo Stanton. You can read a review, pick up a copy, submit work to the next issue and I recommend all three. This 'zine is a seasonal constant. It even feels autumnal at the right time of the year.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.

Balance

Sep. 22nd, 2025 11:59 pm
nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
I like that the New Year and the equinox are in balance. May this year bring peace.







Nine

the universe gave me a bus

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:02 pm
lauradi7dw: (abolish ICE)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
I hustled out of Korean class to make sure I'd be at Alewife in time for the 7:55 PM #62. As it happened, I was there 9 minutes early. A 76 pulled up. I asked if it was really a 76. Yes. He said are you getting on or not? I said yes and did. I asked if he was very late with the scheduled 7:35. He said no, it was a special extra service. We didn't chat anymore, but I am curious. Rosh Hashanah? The equinox? Something happening at Hanscom or Lincoln Labs? I was the only passenger, possibly because nobody expected a bus at an unscheduled time.

Ich lach mich tot

Sep. 22nd, 2025 06:22 pm
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
TIL the cemetery in Vienna has tons of merch, much of it featuring their little grim reaper mascot.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
The status of the yontif this year is that my mother and I made honeycakes, but it is autumn and the head of the year and we are still here, the important thing. A sweet year, a safe. L'shanah tovah, all.

Is this what multi-tasking means?

Sep. 21st, 2025 11:04 pm
lauradi7dw: (Default)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
A few weeks ago I posted a worry that we're about to invade Venezuela. In the meantime we keep murdering civilians in boats.
https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/985525.html

I think it's ever more likely that Trump is about to start a war in the region, but in the meantime I'm dwelling on how many members of three kpop groups I follow have September birthdays.

(no subject)

Sep. 21st, 2025 11:37 am
moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
[personal profile] moon_custafer
On the way to the coffeeshop, saw two guys go by in what I can only describe as a tin lizzie, or perhaps a flivver. At any rate, it looked like the kind of minimallyrebuilt-from-an-old-Ford-chassis that Archie used to drive in the comics.

Still wasn’t quite as memorable as the Model T I once saw that was painted lime green, adorned with various accessories including a pair of bull’s horns mounted on the hood, and driven by a man who looked like the ghost of Stag O’Lee.

A video I forgot to link to last night: two of the spiders that live in our bathroom. Unsure if this was a territorial dispute, or courtship.

That time again

Sep. 21st, 2025 07:32 am
lauradi7dw: me wearing a straw hat and gray mask (anniversary)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
2020


He did a series of these.
The tap teacher has had the song be the beginning of the warm-up all month, and now we're finally here.
I don't know that I was actively listening to Earth Wind and Fire in 1978 (more folkie at the time) but it must have been in the air.
The autumnal equinox isn't until tomorrow afternoon, if you're keeping track of other special days (and then Rosh Hashanah starts at sundown).
lauradi7dw: fountain pen in hand with paper (writing)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
The Ig nobel awards are based in Cambridge, where I will be later today. I hadn't been paying much attention, but saw a summary of the award a Japanese team of researchers got for painting zebra stripes on a cow (it reduces the number of flies who land). I saw this on twitter, in Korean (I clicked to get it translated), reported from a news consolidator that got the story from a news source in Japan, which seems to report it straight, no explanation of the background of the Igs. Hard to know what I'm missing in the (presumably automatic?) translation
https://www.newsis.com/view/NISX20250921_0003337204

Here's the Ars technica article with the same photo and more explanation of the other winners
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/meet-the-2025-ig-nobel-prize-winners/

I like objects

Sep. 20th, 2025 09:48 pm
lauradi7dw: (Greenfield head)
[personal profile] lauradi7dw
Defying the philosophy that one would be happier without so much stuff, I have acquired several new self-indulgences lately. The one that is making me the happiest today is this



It's a pot holder sewn to be slightly bowl shaped. You put a bowl (or in the photo, a Pyrex container) into it, then into the microwave, so that when you pick it up the bowl won't be hot on your hands or the table you set it down on. I already was doing something like that with a regular flat potholder, but this is made specifically for the purpose. And it's pretty, and I got it at a crafts fair. All good.

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