Other Ever Afters

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.

The Mere Wife

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.

What is the most useless technology ever invented?

 I take attendance by having the students answer a question (previously 2019).

What is the most useless technology ever invented?

By popular vote, the general category "social media" is the winner (6 votes). Some people voted more narrowly tiktok (4 votes) and snapchat (2 votes) were singled out for specific contempt. Other physical debris got votes: electric toothbrush (3 votes), smartwatches (2 votes), and furby (1 vote).

Some votes went to other things, some explicable and some not:

• bombs :(
• nukes :/
• shoes
• chat GPT trying to identify word count
• everything
• it's hard to tell
• none :(
• sundials
• wheel

I think the "everything" and the "none" person should compare notes.

This post's theme word is Momus (n), "a carping critic" (the Greek god of censure!). The tech journalist was a Momus at the product launch.

Wolfwalkers

 Wolfwalkers is an animated film from the same director as The Secret of Kells. It has a similar sort of art and line style, with movements easily flowing across the screen in a way I found very aesthetically pleasing. You can read the plot summary on Wikipedia, so I'll just give some viewing notes:

If possible, you should view this on a bedsheet in a neighbor's backyard.

Cover your delicious blood with skin, and cover that with clothing, then bugspray. (You will still be bitten on the face, and hands, and through your socks. This is the destiny of the delicious. Your itchy discomfort will be offset by the bug-free experience of neighbor kids.)

At the appropriate time --- and trust me, you will know the appropriate time --- you should absolutely howl along with the onscreen wolves. Everyone else, on their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, will absolutely do this, especially if < 7 years old.

Five stars, highly recommended. Not entirely historically-accurate.

This post's theme word is eidolon (n), "an idealized form" or "a phantom". The animation smoothly showed transition between physical humans, eidolon scents and spirits, and wolves.

The Twisted Ones

T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones is a novel in a genre I don't like --- maybe "haunted gothic American mid-South"? --- and it is not a good book to read alone in a quarantine. It's creepy, but the narrator's voice is reasonable and well-written. So I read it for that reason, and because it was recommended to me, and because the narrator immediately disavows the entire narration and publicly disclaims that it's going to be an unreliable-narrator sort of deal. The narrator is also a professional editor, so the tangents that she wanders off into are direct comments on the text she is writing, or on the words and punctuation she encounters in the world, and that was interesting.

There was one interesting clue early on: the use of the word "voorish" (p. 92), which I had to look up, and which led me down a rabbit-hole of references to Arthur Machen's "The White People", a horror short story which included enough clues that it was obvious that The Twisted Ones is derivative/referential and exists to reply to "The White People" in the same narrative universe.  I found this discovery comforting, as reading the summary of the short story gave me a hint about what horror might be hinted at in the book.

BUT I don't like being creeped out. I didn't like this book, but I read it to the end so that I could expurgate the tension from my brain. Otherwise it would inhabit my brain and claim brain-cycles worrying about when a haunted reanimated deer-skeleton would knock on the windows of my house late at night for unspecified creepy reasons.

Not recommended! Too creepy.

This post's theme word is numen (n), "a divine presence." "I believe them to be some kind of spirits, perhaps the numen of a place, expressed in physical form." (p. 175)

Proper system revision documentation

Dear readers,

If you can read this, then an incredibly unlikely sequence of steps has succeeded. Huzzah!

There is currently some sort of eldritch alignment of planets whose main influence is to rewrite critical boot sectors of all my hard drives. (Perhaps concomitant with finishing a semester?) Alas! Time to reformat and reinstall, in every operating system known to man. If one more computer fails, I'll be reduced to publishing tweets via carrier pigeon. This blog post may have been written via telegraph STOP

This means I get to start a new "installation notes: what I did" file. And so I am revisiting my past logs, little missives from my past self, to make sure I set up all the bells and whistles just right. (Keyboard shortcuts are the main way I interact with these light-boxes I relentlessly stare into.) Usually these logs are curt and useful, but sometimes they range into quite colorful and narrative tales, for example (details and lengthy intro expurgated to prevent your eyes from bleeding):

After fiddling with [hardware], I find that [software flag] is again disabled. Augh. The following commands did not work to re-enable it: 

sudo [heinous and expurgated set of commands]

This time, banging around wildly on [list of unusual keyboard keys] and crying openly into my hands worked.

... it's important that every log includes instructions for how to replicate the steps that ultimately led to a successful setup. Apparently at the time I felt that the strange wizardry that made my keyboard commands work included crying, and included the notes necessary to replicate it.

Don't worry, I have extensive notes on which "fiddling with [hardware]" caused this weird thing, and I am very carefully not reproducing that. Also, according to the logs, I have not solved any computer problem by weeping since 2012. My streak continues!

Writing to you from the edge of known OS support forums,
 --- Lila

P.S. While writing this post I jinxed my wifi card and it refused several times to maintain a connection. Go figure. I also managed to get exactly the perfect alt-tab behavior, so it's a wash.


This post's theme word is lazaretto (noun), "a medical facility for people with infectious diseases", or "a building or ship used for quarantine", or "on a ship, a space between decks used as storage." I fear my brain is the lazaretto between different computer systems.

The Concrete Jungle

Charles Stross' overtures to the Laundry universe continue in The Concrete Jungle, joined with The Atrocity Archives (previously) to make book one of the series. Yet again we join Bob Howard, IT monkey and hapless geek-thrown-into-fieldwork-of-a-rugose-and-squamous-nature. The bon mots are frequent, the silliness is pervasive, there are blood-pumping action sequences interspersed with tedious buzzword-filled officespeak.

This novella features:

1. smart, good-aligned nerds who are bad at bureaucratic-politics-navigating skills,
2. technologically inept bureaucrats who shine in the paperwork-'n'-politics realm, and
3. an eldrich explanation for why DRM won't die.

Every story seems to involve some civilians being exposed to the Real Lovecraft Underpinnings of the Universe, and thus being forcibly enrolled in the Laundry, the British government's branch that deals with suppressing and controlling the same. At this rate of expansion, it's no wonder that the bureaucracy is sprawling, inexplicably ramified, and variously inept (applying inappropriate "solutions" to nonexistent problems, or worse, to very serious and existent problems).

The idea of a bureaucracy so thorough, ruthless, and unflinching that it can execute a near-real-time paperclip audit (justifying every use and tracking each deployment) is as frightening as any of the mundane, merely Lovecraftian horrors that feature in this novella.

It is a joyful, sarcastic romp.

In the afterword/author's note, Stross goes into detail about the alignments of various elements that hummed resonantly in his brain and caused him to create this universe and its stories. I want to quote the entire thing, but I'll limit myself to this quip from p. 301:

The metafictional conceit that magic is a science has been used in fantasy --- or science fiction  --- several times. ... There is something about mathematics that makes it seem to beg for this sort of misappropriation: an image problem deeply rooted both in the way that the queen of sciences is taught, and in the way we think about it --- in the philosophy of mathematics.

This post's theme word is mumpsimus, "a view stubbornly held in spite of clear evidence that it's wrong" or "a person who holds such a view." The accountant was such a mumpsimus that he stepped into the summoning circle, even after the runes had started to glow and the scent of brimstone filled the air.

Pinion

Elizabeth Bear's Pinion tells the story of people on a shipwrecked generational starship, and their struggles with each other and the starship's fragmented AI to try to escape their own demons (as well as the star system, whose binary star is about to have an explosively destructive event).

The book is permeated with biblical imagery and metaphors, as well as quotes from the "New Evolutionist Bible," which bears a certain thematic resemblance to the New Testament, although its contents and subject matter is different. The various AIs title themselves "Angel of X", as in: Angel of Death, Angel of Life Support Services, Angel of Knives, Angel of Memory, Angel of Electricity, Angel of Communication, Angel of Wires, Angel of Stars, Angel of Voids, Angel of Poison, Angel of Biosystems, Angel of Propulsion, ...

The humans, and their enclosed habitats, are not quite familiar --- they are the result of centuries of advanced bioengineering tinkering, a project whose original goal was to improve en route to the destination, and whose proximate goal has been to self-modify and selectively breed and improve in order to survive stranded in space. The biblical theme continues here, as many humans have wings, or space-hardening adaptations, or perfect memory, or echolocation, or other senses not easily tersely-summarizable.

The book is great, enjoyable, well-written. The characters are interesting, sympathetic without being helpless, smart without being geniuses, weak without needing rescuers, crafty without relying on deus ex machina. They each have limited knowledge, as do the AIs, as do we the readers, and Bear handles these deftly, gradually unfolding a comprehensive picture of what is happening throughout the (enormous, interstellar!) spaceship, as well as throughout the ship's remaining infosphere, and at a social and interpersonal level (and even internal, psychological level) with and between the characters. It is self-aware without being trite, or exploiting dramatic irony, but readily acknowledging the various points of the book that are internally consistent, but nonsensical to the reader, for example (p. 150):

Primogeniture is a stupid way to run a starship.

This post's theme word is ruction, "an insurrection" or "a disorderly quarrel." A starship ruction is no small thing, mere "mutiny" is an insufficient descriptor.

Santa's path

For the convenience and delight of local children, Santa's appearances on the Champs Elysées are prescheduled and at a fixed location.

He gets a boost up to the sleigh (by ladder/elevator scaffollding), and then traverses the sky, pulled by reindeer (and rigging). For maybe 20 meters. Then he disembarks and descends, and probably meets his adoring fanbase. I didn't stick around for the crowds at the appointed time and place.

I did think about what kind of toy-workshop capers could be executed in the designated absence of the boss.


This post's theme word is agrement, "formal approval, especially one given by a country to the proposed diplomat from another country," or "grace notes: notes applied as an embellishment on a piece of music." Mr. S. Claus received his agrement and entry visa to France in early December.

Friday night I: Palais Garnier

I live a life of sumptuous luxury. (Alternating with canny poverty, so that it all averages out.) Last night was a brief dart into the extravagant, rococo Palace Garnier to see a double-feature opera, Bluebeard's Cast-Bleue and La Voix humaine.

Palace Garnier's entrance hall is a masterwork of frothy carvings and trompe l'oeil paintings imitating the same.

Built for the opera, as a stage and centerpiece to impress audiences, with the surrounding blocks and roads shaped to make way for it, Palace Garnier is extremely palatial, though it was never a royal home. The lights are now electric but give a decent impression of dim, warm gas-lights.

This is the zone where fancy alcohol is offered beforehand and during intermission. I think the Phantom of the Opera lives in this wing somewhere.

The curtains are real, but there are also painted-on curtains. Real windows, and painted. Real arches, and fake. The sky is real, but the ceiling blocks it with a painted sky; it is always sunny, with fluffy clouds, inside the opera hall. Real cherubs, real half-naked or all-naked nymphs, flitting around the ceiling like birds trapped in a train station. I took some mandatory blurry, ill-lit selfies [not pictured here].

Nimble, pert women --- mostly naked, some bewinged --- crowd about the corners of the ceiling, as if searching for the source of the heavenly music.

If rococo ever makes a comeback, I will gladly count myself among its devoted followers. Modern buildings' off-white walls and grey architectural features, the devotion to sheer flat surfaces and huge reflective windows, forces far too much introspection and beggars the imagination, offering no fodder for daydreams. Much better to beggar the purse, I think, in gilding intricate details so hidden in the ceiling that they are invisible from the floor.

An aura of elegance and refinement is subtly and unsubtly reinforced by the Louis XIV-style gilding of anything stationary.

The music was lush and vibrant, although it did not match the rococo theater, and the set and direction was minimalist, stark, and unsettling. Even in the nosebleed seats, where knees and shoulders are jostled together and there are no aisles, it was a wondrous spectacle to behold. (Plus, we were close enough to the ceiling to count the feathers on cherubs' wings and wonder if the sconce-supporting nude maidens' metal arms ever tire.)


This post's theme word is cosset, "to fondle, caress, pet, indulge, pamper." The cossetting dark embraced the audience of the opera house.

Le Tout Nouveau Testament

Le Tout Nouveau Testament (The Brand New Testament) is a film nicely established by its first line: "God is real, and he lives in Brussels." The premise is extended by the stipulation that God lives in a top-floor apartment, which he has never left since the beginning of time, with his wife and 10-year-old daughter (his son having snuck out in a well-documented episode and Gotten Into A Bit of Trouble With The Romans). He runs everything through an outdated computer in his bigger-on-the-inside home office. And "runs everything" really means everything: we see him devising weather disasters, the rule that "the other line always moves faster", and managing individuals' lives, all through this computer.

God is also kind of horrible, true to the Old Testament version of things. Corporal punishment, strict rules, no empathy with suffering. His daughter sneaks into his office, SMSes everyone on the planet with their exact date of death, changes the root password, and then escapes the apartment (Jesus told her that the washing machine has a secret tunnel down to the Earth!). When God (of course) follows her, to try to retrieve (1) his daughter, and (2) access to his omnipotent computer, he is confronted with the unpleasantnesses of the world that he devised. To great comedic effect. The directors, editors, and writers clearly want God to be an unsympathetic character, and they are successful. His sympathetic daughter, of course, seeks apostles while on Earth and has a scribe (homeless man) following her, writing a new testament. She does some miracles, just light ones --- doubling a sandwich, walking across a canal. Nothing showy, but played for laughs in contrast with God's clear lack of powers (he plunges into the canal, and is hungry, dirty, and eventually deported).

It was a neat movie, although it didn't contain as many laughs as I expected from the premise. Many of the apostles' stories (interwoven, of course, throughout the film) were lonely and bleak, and invited serious reflection in the audience. (The color palette, dominated by greys and rain, echoed this.) These were intercut with cute "news" segments showing ridiculous things, but the overall tone was more somber than expected. (I think I expected something more silly, like the tone of Amélie.)

I recommend.


This post's theme word is naches, "emotional gratification or pride, especially taken vicariously at the achievement of one's children." Not much naches is on display here.

The Atrocity Archive

Reading a book by Charles Stross is like having my brain gently massaged by a socially well-adjusted hybrid of Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow. It is smart, and respectful, and snarky. It is wonderfully fun, and relaxing in the way that creates a buzzing energy and the desire to go do something [smart and snarky, in all likelihood].

The Atrocity Archive is a novella that cheers.

It uses the trappings of serious academic geekery (Turing is mentioned all over the place, plus the names of specific problems and techniques of my subfield!) without abusing it like an incantation or some sort of flavortext dropped in to add appropriate nerd-spice to your novel (à la John C. Wright's The Hermetic Millenia, etc.).

It blends in a dash of Lovecraft for horror, but most of the horror comes --- ironically and in terrifying earnest --- from having too many bosses, filling out paperwork, scheduling meetings, staring at org charts, and discussing internal politics on time-delayed memoranda. It is gut-clenchingly fear-inducing horror for adults, who have seen the world and know that zombies and eldrich horrors are survivable, while an audit may end you.


This post's theme word is brisance, "the shattering effect of a high-energy explosion." Page 171 quoth: "... the gunk is a high-brisance explosive and it cuts through the reinforced steel door like a blowtorch through butter."

Odd buildings

These funky buildings in northern Toronto are curved in a way that looks vaguely human and alive.

As one drives on the highways approaching them, the roads' gradual curving approach makes the buildings appear to undulate and twist.

It is unsettling.

They appear to have weird organic corners... maybe "elbows" is a better term? And spine-like protrusions. And maybe they are offset from plumb. They look like a cluster of skew mushroom-arms, twisting and writhing upwards.

I wonder what the original design goals were, and whether the architects achieved the necessary balance of sleek modernity, marketable balcony-space and window-views, and appeasement of Lovecraftian Elder Gods with the unspeakably twisted rooftop temples (unphotographable, not documented here).

This post's theme word is stele, "the central core of the stem or root of a vascular plant" and usefully also "a funerary or commemorative stone slab." The skyscraping steles stretched upwards, their hapless residents ignorant of the unsettling past, the warping present, and the horrible future.

Merry piranhamoose

Merry Christmas, says the piranahmoose! Joy, absurdism, holiday lights, a delightful hat, and rows of sharp teeth that can rend flesh from bone in seconds! --- all in a holiday spirit.


This post's theme word is weasand, "esophagus." There's a weasel stuck in the weasand of that piranhamoose.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! I hope you are enjoying a vacation day, wherever you are, in whatever way you most prefer.Even cultural institutions as innocuous as a benevolent chubby man who uses a massive slave-labor force to manufacture and distribute candy and gifts can be eldrich, when viewed properly. (GIF from Tor.com.)



This post's theme word is Caganer, "a nativity figurine depicted in the act of defecating." No nativity scene is complete without a Caganer; I shall have to find one to add to my family's set.

Christmas ornaments of nightmares

This is a bizarre mannequin is the eldrich, strange stuff of modern Lovecraftian nightmares.

I do not understand how a naked ornament-headed elongated alien -- in a festive red scarf -- can possibly help a department store sell more items. Is it meant to encourage my purchase of a giant ornament? or a giant collection of ornaments? or scarves, to help my head swell and my limbs lengthen somehow?

This post's theme word is fossorial, "adapted for digging" (like limbs or feet). The anomalous alien's head is hypothesized to be fossorial.

Regarding uterus rent and the rapture

Why be nice to your mother?

Mother: "It's interest on the uterine rent!"
Father: "I don't think you're paying down that principal at all."

These are the things we discuss on the day that the Rapture was foretold, at 6pm, respecting time zones across the world:

M.: "At what point do people stop listening to the guy who can't get the calculations right?"
L.: "Well, he's calculated that, and he's still within the safe margins."

Later that day, as a possible reprimand from On High for my insolence, my rapturously delicious food was raptured right out of me, via violent vomiting, leaving me behind, queasy and sinful. Apparently the Rapture gives me food poisoning. I'm still here and still blogging; wherever you are, you're still reading, too.


This post's theme word is gotterdammerung, "the complete destruction of an institution, regime, order, etc." That saag executed a gotterdamerung on my digestive process yesterday.

Happy Easter!

Real rabbits don't have ovipositors, although the Easter bunny, with his proclivities for walking like a human, chocolate, and hiding candy for children, has enough weird habits that maybe his species does have ovipositors.


This post's theme word: gravid, "in an advanced stage of pregnancy," although I've also seen it used to mean "in an egg-laying phase" when applied to insects. As in, "The gravid rabbit-like alien extended its slimy ovipositor into the helpless victim's abdominal cavity."
This post written like James Joyce.