Get out the vote. Dog. Costume. Parade.
It's a language that allows unlimited adjacent nouns, apparently.
All dogs tolerated the costumes for the duration. Some dogs were friendlier than others. My dog had best eyebrows (as usual). Many photos were taken (not by me).
This post's theme word is festucine (adj), "of a pale yellow or straw-like color." The festucine retriever was named Layla?
There is local context which justifies this lawn sign, but I prefer to consider it as an intrusion from Welcome to Nightvale:
It doesn't feel cosmically fair that I can work all day on getting stuff done and arrive home, tired, to have my phone remind me that I haven't actually finished enough tasks today. And yet yesterday, when I effortfully tried to finish the tasks my phone reminded me of, I ended the day with an inbox full of reminders of the things I hadn't done yet. This is a Kafkaesque whack-a-mole where no amount of work, poured into the gaping maw, can sate its hunger. Someone needs to rake the yard. Someone needs to cook dinner. Someone needs to fill out insurance paperwork.
I am calming myself with breathing exercises and philosophical musings on how I might prefer alternate modes of living. My car insurance is reminding me I haven't installed their spyware on my phone yet, and that is a task that I immediately failed. I soothe myself with the tasks released on the wind like dandelion seeds. The buck does not stop with me, and I watch assigned busywork responsibility slip from my fingers.
The soft animal of my body wants only to exercise, go on dog adventures, and solve math puzzles. I am epsilon close to an optimally good life, but like Xeno I will not ever... quite... get... there.
This post's theme word is wrackful (adj), "ruinous." The completionist mindset is wrackful, woeful, and wretched.
An uphill slog. I set a timer to ring every 30 minutes so that I kept moving between tasks and not getting stuck on any time sink. More tasks got done, phone calls answered, service people scheduled, emails queued to send on Monday morning. Baked cookies for the end of the week.
End of day email tally: personal 108 (argh), work 70.
This post's theme word is euryphagous (adj), "eating many foods." Euryphagous humans live with dogs whose diets are quite the opposite.
Diverting waste often involves sorting it at the point of disposal. I've seen 5 genres of numbered of plastic, the Japanese burnable/non burnable unrecyclables, and of course there is the waste/recyclable/composting trifecta. But specific situations call for specific solutions. I had never seen a pizza-box specific waste receptacle before.
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| pizza boxes, recycling, waste |
... but now I have. I can only guess that this on-campus location is particularly susceptible to pizza consumption.
Grading, calling the insurance company, dog agility class, dog bath + blowdry. Drafted some work documents. Bemoaned the state of emails and my laggard queue for friendly snail mail.
End of day email tally: personal 65, work 68.
This post's theme word is agnoiology (n), "the study of ignorance or the investigation of the unknowable." Improving my pedagogy is an exercise in agnoiology.
More home maintenance, this time with a helping dose of "let's not flood or incinerate the basement by delayed repairs." I'm on-track to meet my rowing goal for October. Did more laundry (trying to churn up all the lingering summer clothes for storage) and got reminded that my closet storage system relies on some clothing being in the laundry at all times. I probably need to cull disfavored clothes to reclaim closet space. Paid some bills. Haircut. Very long dog walk, in the dark, contributing to the Ika fitness campaign.
Halloween decorations abound. Neighborhood favorite lawn flamingos have dressed up as the Cheshire cat and Alice:
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| "flamingo" is a fairly inaccurate translation of "velociraptor" |
End of day email tally: personal 55, work 68.
This post's theme word is ablute (v), "to wash or bathe a part of the body." One must carefully ablute after a haircut to eliminate all the tiny offcut hair pieces.
Grading (typical pastime). Cleaned the floors, did more laundry. Executed a closet update: summer clothes into storage, winter clothes out of storage, all-season clothes folded and sorted by color. Did not actually finish any task, so it's a bit demoralizing to end the day and not be able to cross off any item from my Grand To-Do List for Fall Break.
End of day email tally: personal 83, work 73.
This post's theme word is agon (n), "conflict, contest, or struggle." Ignoring the siren song of the unreplied inbox message is a continuous agon.
It's not really a break, of course. The power was out at the office, so I stayed home and dissassembled a heat pump. Then cleaned it with a toothbrush. Party time over fall break!
Very little actual work got done, but a lot of bureaucratic and maintenance tasks were accomplished. Laundry. Cooking a big pile of escarole. Rainy dog walks. Waiting on phone tree queues for customer service agents. Tickets closed.
End of day email tally: personal 87, work 81.
This post's theme word is verisimilar (adj), "having the appearance of truth or reality." The verisimilar dream meant that I actually cleaned the heat pump twice today.
John Scalzi's Starter Villain is a sweet standalone fiction novel. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck everyman, currently feeling sad about his divorce and scraping by with substitute teaching. When his longtime-estranged uncle dies, he hears about it first on the news and then in a very real way when his uncle's estate reaches out to ask him to host the funeral... and then sucks him into the wacky, fast-moving world of a series of comedy and action-adventure tropes. It turns out that his uncle was a supervillain, and he stands to inherit a vast empire of cool/profitable/evil(?) companies.
Scalzi is excellent at writing zippy dialog and action scenes. This book was an easy and fun read (it distracted me from three days of migraines). I'd recommend it as summer beach reading, particularly for cat lovers.
This post's theme word is pecksniff (n), "a person who pretends to have high moral principles." The convocation of villains featured many pecksniffs.
Ray Nayler's novella The Tusks of Extinction follows the consciousness of a scientist fighting elephant poaching, in her life before and after getting her brain scanned, archived, and eventually downloaded into an un-extincted mammoth. She is given the task of imparting mammoth culture to lab-grown mammoths cultured from recovered ancient DNA.
This was short and fairly bitter in outlook. The humans in the story are driven by capitalism, by environmental and social collapse, and by a lack of options. I'd describe this as a dark near-future science fiction, and I wouldn't recommend this to myself, although I can see why this joined my reading queue: the author also wrote a book about conscious cephalopods, The Mountain in the Sea.
The novella contained many tightly-written and resonant observations on the human condition. This excerpt (pages 95-96) reminded me of the kind of academic navel-gazing involved in grad school:
When Damira had been here last, she had simply been herself. But now, it felt like there were two of her---one sitting with her mother, eating in silence. And another watching them eat. As if she had stepped out of her own life. ...
Damira realized what it was in that moment, as her fork scraped the bottom of her bowl. It was an effect of education. She was looking at everything. Analyzing it. Processing it. Her life wasn't just how things were anymore---it was only one possible way for things to be. And there were other possibilities, now. She had ceased to be trapped here, in this stuffy room. Ceased to be trapped inside her life, yes, but she had also ceased to be able to live her life without analyzing it. Without taking everything apart to look inside.
Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.
This post's theme word is abulia (n), "the inability to make decisions." The goal of an education is to encourage both outward curiosity and introspection, but to stop short of intellectualized abulia.
Emily M. Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines tells a deliciously convoluted and self-referential set of nested stories. The first layer of story takes place in 1902, on the site of a girls' boarding school. Subsequent layers happen in the same location but in modern times, when the property seems cursed as several people (historical and modern) have died mysterious deaths. Are they explicable? Is this a novel where magic is real? The author plays coyly with the reader about this in a very clever way.
The author also winks at the modern reader throughout. On page 111,
In the language of the day, Mrs. Brookhants was a young widow and Miss Trills was her devoted companion. Her very, very dear friend. Her confidante.
Her bestie.*
*But, like, with benefits.
Bonus layers come from the modern plotline, which features a modern novelist writing about the girls of 1902, and then some modern actors caught up in their own re-enactment of pieces of the novel's retelling of history, while also ensnared in their own mysteries in the old building and on the grounds, and caught up in the layers of storytelling and fabrication that they are subject to and producing themselves. There is a historical book associated with the original deaths, a modern book retelling the historical deaths, and the very book you hold in your hands. The brain spins. The modern actors are caught up in performing the historical actions, often even off-camera as they hand off the book and tell each other secrets and sneak around the boarding school buildings. This is a mystery book where the characters have cell phones with battery life, internet connection, and live social media, and the mystery manages to persist!
The creepiness and uncertainty about danger elevated this novel from a cleverly-constructed meta-question-raising book, to an unstoppable single-sitting-read. It's 617 pages long, so this consumed an entire day. I probably couldn't read it again, because I'm not a fan of creepiness and also now I know how the novel chooses to resolve the various mysteries, weird occurrences, deaths, and bizarre behavior.
Weird and recommended.
This post's theme word is "gifnotized", as on page 82:
That's the GIF, the whole thing--- Harper grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and being mic'd, grinning and tucking and... forever. This particular incarnation had 23,266 notes. It also had a string of attached commentary.
"Hello?" Harper said.
Merrit had been momentarily gifnotized. She pulled out of it and said...
Melanie Gillman's Other Ever Afters is a cute collection of graphic short stories. Maybe fables? They are not as heavy-handed as traditional fables, and they center feelings and belonging. The back copy describes the book as "original, feminist, queer fairy tales" but the queerness is a light touch because they are fairy tales, so the important bits are things like "there is a giant outside our village" and "the goose-keeper lives outside the castle". The drawings are bright and softly round-edged and lovely.
It's overall cute, and a quick little collection of stories.
This post's theme word is pussivant (v. intr.), "to meddle, fuss, move around busily." The villagers pussivanted around the square in an attempt to find the yearly sacrificial maiden.
Off Book: The Improvised Musical podcast had a delightful exploration of the impish Salvador Dalí, an incredibly successful cat rescue, and how Zach and Jess manage to convey "sucked into a pocketwatch and deposited in another universe" in a shared glance and series of unexpected stage direction executions. Overall the night was a delight and I'm so glad that I got the chance to see a performance in-person (and overcame some weather-related travel setbacks to make it).
Five stars, zero regrets about my years of subscribing to the free podcast and paying to support the joy that these performers bring into the world.
This post's theme word is magniloquent (adj), "characterized by lofty, grandiose, or pompous speech or writing." The plot was resolved by a magniloquent soliloquy from an unexpected character in the final few minutes.
I adored Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf and was curious to read her earlier novel, The Mere Wife, which draws on the story of Beowulf. In several reviews I see that The Mere Wife has been described as a "modern retelling" of Beowulf from womens' perspectives; to me, the entire book was vague and ethereal in its storytelling, so I could not be sure that it was "modern", as opposed to simply a different setting with more glass windows and trains than are strictly described in Beowulf.
The setting begins with a vagueness about the specifics of Dana Mills --- what year is it? what middle-eastern country is she a soldier in? is this meant to be modern reality or just to draw on elements of modernity? --- and the book never provides answers or clues or these questions. How did she come to be pregnant? If she is realistically hungry and afraid of starving and being attacked by other humans, then how did she manage to give birth alone (to Grendel) in an abandoned train tunnel, with no apparent difficulties? Probably I read this book in the wrong frame of mind, as I kept trying to puzzle out these logistics even though the prose flowed poetically and only suggested the shape of descriptions, durations, feelings, logical connections.
Some of the vagueness comes from details and story explorations beyond Beowulf. Parts of the book focus on Willa, the wife of Roger Herot, son of the founder of (planned and gated community) Herot Hall. In the Willa chapters, the vagueness and dissociation of the prose seemed to be a reflection of her isolation and emotional coldness, and the ways in which her expected role limited her freedom of movement, dress, what to eat, how to act, what to say. This was effective and skillful writing but I found myself looking for a moral, or a scrap of redemption, or even a suggestion of feminism and empowerment. This left me feeling as cold as Willa, and it seemed like the story had been written --- or perhaps constrained by the original Beowulf --- to close all avenues of imagining a different or better life for the women of the community.
And on occasion, the women got first-person-plural chapters to spin their own mythology directly to the reader. Chapter 21 is only 3 pages long (pp 153-155). It begins "Hark! We slap the bell on the front desk of the police station." This is deliciously close to the structure of some more traditional translations of Beowulf and I appreciated that. This perspective is delivered in first-person-plural, from the perspective of the nameless and amorphous group of neighborhood women. "There's a long tradition that says women gossip, when in fact women are the memory of the world. We keep the family trees and the baby books. We manage the milk teeth. We keep the census of diseases, the records of divorces, battles, and medals. We witness the wills. We wash the weddings out of the bedsheets." (page 153-154) This is delightfully close to Alice Frasier's repeated joke (paraphrased from memory): "History is a record of what men do while women are busy maintaining civilization by keeping everyone fed, clean, healthy, and alive." Frasier's original is more pithy.
Chapter 21 ends, "We will not surrender. We will not back down. Soon, soon, the mountain will be covered with men in uniforms, hounds, cars moving fast, people telling and yelling. Soon, soon, we will have what is ours." (pp 155) Sinister, creepy, skin-tingling, excellent. The follow-up chapter 29 uses the same creepy first-person-plural telling and reframing of the entire story, and ends (pp 206), "We're the ones who make the world, the warriors who stand watch, the women on whose wrong side you would not want to walk. What do you get the women who have everything? You get them more."
Contrast this with Dana's perspective, late in the book (pp 212-213), "Who's the monster now? ... No one even looks at me. You don't really own anything. Nothing is yours forever, not your body, not your youth, not even your mind." Her perspective is grim and dismal throughout, even when contemplating how to care for her son. "Here's the truth of the world, here it is. You're never everything anyone else wants. In the end, it's going to be you, all alone on a mountain, or you, all alone, in a hospital room. Love isn't enough, and you do it anyway. Love isn't enough, and it's still this thing that everyone wants. I see what he wants. I know him better than I know myself. I know his whole history, and I don't know my own."
The coldness of the chorus of women is a sinister weight that oppresses both Dana and Willa and drives the story on to the bloody conclusion of Beowulf (pp 268):
We question Willa. She tells us that Dana Mills is back and Ben Woolf is deranged, and we believe her. Murderer not dead? Check. Monster not slain? Check. Hero not heroic? Check.
We take over.
Everyone thinks all we've been doing, for thirty years, is planting award-winning begonias. It's always the mothers who are hated. The fathers are too far away, home at 5:30, off the train, perfume on their jackets. The mothers are the clay pigeons children want to shoot out of the sky. Imagine being a target for fifty years, from your moments of first nubility to moments of humility, when your skin feels like paper and you stop sleeping forever, unacknowledged as being the armed guard of civilization.
Creepy and overwhelming.
Overall this was a weird one. Familiarity with Beowulf made me keep looking for clues and connections, differences and editorial decisions. This was at odds with the tone of the book, which was more of an ungrounded meditation on women's feelings of pressure and social isolation. If I were looking for a book that focused on a character secondary to the main plotline, I would prefer to reread Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, which is vague but gives clues about a substantive plotline (and has more sarcasm and female characters who are allowed personal agency).
This post's theme word is proscription (n), "a prohibition or the act of prohibiting." Eating more calories was not proscribed, and yet every housewife avoided it and policed her peers to enforce the unstated limits.
Finbar Hawkins' novel Witch tells the story of teenage Eveline, who sees her mother murdered by witch hunters and struggles to keep herself and her younger sister safe in an English countryside rife with suspicion and mob violence. The story is set in 1646 and the novel is dedicated to the men and women persecuted by the witchfinding craze.
Hawkins tells a fascinating story and manages to draw in the reader. Most of the book is balanced on the delicate question: is this a historical fantasy where the story is based on historical facts and magic is real, or is this a historical fiction where the story is based on facts and magic is not, as far as anyone can reproducibly demonstrate, real? As a modern reader I found this balancing act superb, an act of authorial skill that is like watching someone juggle while also riding a unicycle. It made the story feel real and emotionally accessible in a way that hit me differently than a direct fantasy-world-where-magic-is-definitely-real.
This post's theme word is ruth (n), "compassion or contrition." The community is held together by the ruth we hold for each other.
Galaxy: The Prettiest Star is a graphic novel by Jadzia Axelrod and Jess Taylor. It's a joyful, colorful celebration of lines and active drawings; also, incidentally, it is a metaphor for trans-ness. The main character is a vivid alien princess, in disguise as a normal human highschool-age boy. There is also a playful supervisory robot corgi.
The story explores attempts to blend in at high school, experimenting with self-presentation, the malleability of friendships and social pressure and how high school feels very high-stakes. Plus there is a charming corgi! (I've recently met a corgi puppy who lives a few blocks away and is a charming ball of energy.)
The story is straightforward works really nicely. It holds up for me as a way to discuss masking, coming out, being yourself, and transition. Always feeling watched and surveilled on personal presentation. Some parts are definitely fantasy and I was left bemusedly trying to figure out if anything lined up with the secret radio transmissions, or the eternal space war.
This post's theme word is reck (n), "care or concern." The entire basketball team had little reck for the prom night dancing kerfuffle.
Accumulated on various scraps of paper, which apparently is my brain's preferred mode of operation.
D: "I'm not just a talking head for delivering CS and sarcasm."
D (during a lecture): "What do we know --- he asks rhetorically --- about the properties of cosine?"
A cool note that I'd never thought of, from D: "Testing only tells you if bugs are there. It can't guarantee that bugs are not there."
"We expect furniture to migrate... quite a bit, in my experience."
Grocery checkout clerk: "What's your maximum carry weight? ... are you shopping for an army?"
Me: It took 5 weeks, but we've run out of symbols. How do you feel about the Greek alphabet? Hebrew?
Student: Hmm.
Me: I sometimes use hieroglyphics. Stork times alpha!
Student: That's awful.
(conclusion: we used Greek, plenty of letters there)
This post's theme word is besom (n), "a bundle of twigs attached to a handle and used as a broom." The marketing department recommends that flying besoms be replaced by modern flying broomsticks.
Diana Wynne Jones' novel Howl's Moving Castle is a fun fantasy novel. It was adapted into an animated Mikazaki film but the adaptation changed many of the text-rendered delights of the story. The book sidles up to a sort of genre-savvy knowledge about fantasy stories. Protagonist Sophie is the eldest of three daughters, so she inherently understands that any choice she makes will go wrong in order to better frame the improved choices of her younger sisters; the youngest, of course, will make the best choice of all and have great fortune in life. Sophie understands everything in her life in this light --- working in the family hat shop, living in a provincial town, avoiding the maidens'-heart-devouring wizard Howl whose wandering castle emits puffs of steam as it haunts the fields outside her town.
The narrative voice here is joyful, and Jones is a master. (I read this book after having it strongly recommended, years ago, and that recommendation absolutely holds up!) All narration is in limited third-person and we mostly follow Sophie, but the reader is allowed to witness and notice things like hints being dropped and then named as hints by other characters in the scene, or Sophie's own magic which she denies having but frequently uses. The biggest and most fantastic reveal is (spoiler) that the wizard Howl, whose actions seem disjointed, fickle, and mysterious to Sophie, is actually a 27-year-old Welsh grad student who escaped into this fantasy world to (probably) avoid defending his thesis. I admit I filled in some of that invention, but most of it is actually right there in the novel.
This was a quick read and I'd recommend it. My edition had some Q&A with the author in the endnotes, which only increased my enjoyment of the story.
This post's theme word is hierophant (n), "an interpreter of esoteric knowledge." The skills of a wizard and a Ph. D. student are both obtained from close study with a hierophant and years of diligent work.
Diana Wynne Jones' Charmed Life is a children's fantasy book (apparently it is chronologically the third in a series of six! although it was the first published and is the recommended entry point).
This book is a joyful play on common children's fantasy ideas. The protagonists are a sister and brother, orphaned in the first few pages, and we follow them on their next steps. Gwendolen is a gifted witch, whose future is foretold to bring her great power, and she drags her magic-less little brother Eric along with her as she takes determined steps towards her destiny. She is stymied by the usual barriers: orphans have no adults advocating for them, magic is hard to learn, and the adult world runs on opaque and mysterious rules that children must obey (or discover by transgressing and being punished).
I came to the story with the usual Grown-Up Fantasy Genre Questions: how does magic work? how does one learn? what are the rules? ... and I was delighted that all of these questions were absolutely diversions from the way the story wanted to go! Gwendolen is a bit stubborn and direct --- as are many girl protagonists --- but when facing punishment from adults, things went completely off the rails and my expectations were entirely subverted.
A quick read, suitable for many ages, and cheery. Recommended to me, and I pass along this recommendation to others.
This post's theme words and contexts come from the novel:
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is N. K. Jemisin's debut novel. The fantasy novel setting features a large empire where gods are real, personified beings that it is possible to interact with. The protagonist is suddenly bumped up from an estranged-former-heir-to-a-throne to a politically-relevant-yokel-swept-to-the-capital and has to navigate all new relationships, power structures, politics, alliances, and so on.
The book was good (I read it awhile ago) but not enough of a draw that I continued to read the rest of the trilogy. I really loved this author's Broken Earth trilogy (previously 1, 2, 3) and recommend those books as very emotionally powerful and a really interesting fantasy world.
This post's theme word is hyaline (adj), "like glass; transparent or translucent." This post displays my hyaline intent to work through my tall to-be-read and to-be-blogged stacks of books.
