Ancillary Justice (again)

An excellent book. Still. On this reread (previously), parts of it --- where, despite the genderless society and advancement-by-merit, everything is nepotism and in-group and out-group prejudices anyway --- were so true to life, so precisely fictionally parallel to injustices in reality, that they infuriated me. I had to put the book down, my blood boiling, and wait to calm down, to remind myself that the point of the book is to upset this ruling-class hierarchy. And that I already know how things turn out (in this novel at least), and that some of the most hateful characters are duly punished by the authorial hand of justice.

It doesn't feel very just, though. Which I suppose is one aspect of the pointedly polysemous title.

I am in complete awe of Ann Leckie for producing such a perfect jewel of a book, fully-formed, springing from her mind like Athena from Zeus'. Of course much work and development surely went into it, but still: Ancillary Justice is a novel of consummate perfection. It works on so many levels, it is a space opera and a manifesto on gender and privilege and interpersonal relationships and the meaning of trust and life goals. No one is too small to matter, and no one is too big to have flaws.

Read it already! I'm rereading it to work my way up to the third piece of the trilogy, which has floated to the top of my queue. So, you know, expect to hear about Ancillary Sword soon.


This post's theme word is posset "a drink of hot milk curdled with ale." Brought to you by China Miéville's Kraken, p. 127. The specialty of frozen planet Nilt's beverage selection is essentially posset --- warm, fermented milk, repeatedly described in the most unpalatable terms.

Opera master class

I just saw a master class in opera conducted by Philippe Jordan. Four students presented three pieces, sang through them with various interruptions and corrections, picked up in the middle, made small changes. It was fascinating to see the tiny details of instruction that could have a big impact on the performance. And it was nice to know that the education I received in my Literature & Arts B course on opera --- part of my broad-spectrum liberal arts education, from which cocoon I've emerged an extremely specialized species of math-butterfly --- was spot on. The lines and motifs and dynamics we took apart, meticulously, even pedantically, in the class on opera, were exactly the details that the singers and pianist and conductor also deconstructed.

Perhaps we're all just a product of the same music-studying machine, churning out adoration of Mozart's every trill and embellishment. But at least we match!


This post's theme word is apophenia, "the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data." Opera is the antithesis of the apotheosis of apophenia: the culmination of connotation, in every gesture, word, costume, and backdrop.