Reading

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Trapped, by Michael Northrop

Seven teenagers get trapped in their high school during a blizzard when they miss the bus that evacuated the rest of the school.

This was easily the worst book I've read all year, and I've read some doozies. I read it because I'd bought a copy for the shop for the niche of "children's/younger YA survival books for kids who've already read all of Gary Paulson and "I Survived."" I am going to return it to the publisher (Scholastic, which should be ashamed of itself) forthwith, because it is AWFUL.

Why is this book so bad?

1. It's incredibly misogynist. The narrator, Scotty Weems, is constantly thinking of girls in a gross, slimy, objectifying way.

The two girl characters, who get trapped in the high school along with five boys, never do anything useful. One's entire personality is "hot" and every time she's mentioned, it's with a gross leering description of her body. The other girl's entire personality is "hot girl's friend."

2. The characters have exactly one characteristic each, and even that one often gets forgotten, to the extent that I kept mixing up "normal boy" with "mechanically inclined boy." The others are "dangerous boy" and "weird boy." The latter gets downgraded to "not actually weird, just funny" (as in makes one supposedly humorous comment once.) We get no insight into them, their backstories, their home lives, etc, because none of them ever really talk to each other about anything interesting despite being trapped together for a week!

3. SO MANY gross descriptions of pimples, peeing, and pooping.

4. The book is boring. No one does anything interesting on-page until the second to last chapter, when it FINALLY occurs to Scotty to make snowshoes. Most of the book is Scotty's inner monologue about pimples, pooping, peeing, and hot girls. The kids barely interact!

5. The kids keep saying that help won't come because no one even knows they're missing, but that makes no sense. Every single one of them was supposed to get picked up. It's never explained why SEVEN DIFFERENT FAMILIES wouldn't notice that their kids never came home.

6. The incredibly contrived scene where Best Friend Girl comes staggering in screaming and disheveled, repeating, "Les, Les!" This is the name of Dangerous Boy. One of Indistinguishable Boys assumes Les sexually assaulted her and runs out and attacks Les. Best Friend Girl recovers enough to explain that she went to a room and it was dark and cold and she got lost, and she was trying to say there was LESS light and heat there. Because that's what you'd naturally gasp out when freaking out, instead of, say, "Dark! Cold!"

I feel like the existence of this scene in a PUBLISHED BOOK lowered the collective intelligence of the universe by at least half a point.

7. No interesting use is made of the school setting. The kids open their own lockers to get extra clothes and snacks, find pudding and canned peaches in the cafeteria, and spend the rest of the time silently huddled in classrooms, occasionally checking their useless cellphones that don't have any signal. Toward the end, they start a fire, and then, OFF-PAGE, construct a snowmobile (!).

Things they don't do: Break into other kids' lockers in the hope of finding useful stuff. Attempt to cook the cafeteria food. Search the library for survival tips. Get mats from the gym so they're not sleeping on freezing floors. Search classrooms and the teacher's lounge for useful stuff. Have a pick-up ball game to keep warm. Find ways of entertaining themselves without cell phones. HAVE GETTING TO KNOW YOU CONVERSATIONS - WHAT IS THE POINT OF DOING THE BREAKFAST CLUB WITHOUT THIS?

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Truly terrible.

ETA: I just discovered that it went out of print soon after I purchased it (GOOD) and so is not returnable (DAMMIT).

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podcasts

podcast friday

Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.

* Don't.

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Hominids, by Robert Sawyer

A Neanderthal from an alternate universe where Homo Sapiens went extinct and Neanderthals lived into the present day is sucked into our world due to an experiment gone wrong. The book follows his interactions with humans in one storyline, and the repercussions in Neanderthal World in another.

I picked up this book because I like Neanderthals and alternate dimensions that aren't about relatively recent history (ie, not about "What if Nazis won WWII?"). The parts of the book that are actually about Neanderthal World are really fun. It's a genuinely different society, where men and women live separately for the most part, surveillance by implanted computers prevents most crime, mammoths and other large mammals did not go extinct, there are back scratching posts in homes, they wear special eating gloves rather than using utensils or eating barehanded, etc. This was all great.

The problem with this book was everything not directly about Neanderthal society. Bizarrely, this included almost the entire plotline on Neanderthal World, which consisted of a murder investigation and trial of the missing Neanderthal's male partner (what we would call his husband or lover), which was mostly tedious and ensured that we see very little of Neanderthal society. The Neanderthal interactions on our world were fun, but the non-Neanderthal parts were painful. There is a very graphic, on-page stranger rape of the main female character, solely so she can realize that Neanderthal dude is not like human men. There's two sequels, which I will not read.

It got some pretty entertaining reviews:

"☆☆☆☆☆1 out of 5 stars.
No. JUST NO.
I am sorry, but the premise of inherently and innately peaceful cultures with more advanced technology than conflict-driven cultures is patently absurd. Read Alistair Reynolds' Century Rain for an examination of how technological advancement depends on strife: necessity is the mother of invention, and the greatest necessity of all is fighting for survival. I will not be lectured for my male homosapien hubris by a creature that would never have gotten past the late neolithic in technology."

Hominids won a Hugo! Here are the other nominees.

1st place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
2nd place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)
3rd place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
4th place: The Scar by China Miéville (British)
5th place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)

Amazingly, I have read or attempted to read all of them. My ratings:

1st place: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick (American)
2nd place: The Scar by China Miéville (British).
3rd place: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson (American)
4th place: Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian)
5th place: Kiln People by David Brin (American)

If I'd voted, it would be very close between Bones of the Earth and The Scar, both of which I loved. I made a valiant attempt at The Years of Rice and Salt. Like all of KSR's books, I'm sure it's quite good but not for me. I know I read Kiln People but recall literally nothing about it, so I'll give Hominids a place above it for having some nice Neanderthal stuff.

The actual ballot is a complete embarrassment.

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The Journey, by Joyce Carol Thomas

This is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. And if you've been reading my reviews for a while, you know what a strong statement that is. Here's the buries-the-lede back cover:

The town's teenagers are dying. One by one they are mysteriously disappearing but Meggie Alexander refuses to wait in fear. She and her boyfriend Matthew decide to get to the bottom of all the strange goings-on. And they discover a horrible secret.

Now someone is stalking them - but who? There's only one thing that can save Meggie now - the stories a tarantula told her as a baby.

Bet you weren't expecting that, huh?

This was a Scholastic novel from 1988. I'd seen other Thomas novels in that period but never read them, because they all looked like depressing historicals about the black experience - the one I recall seeing specifically was Touched by Fire. I sure never saw this one. I found it in the used children's section of The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.

Any description of this book won't truly convey the experience of reading it, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a prologue in omniscient POV, largely from the POV of a talking tarantula visiting Meggie soon after she's born, chatting and spinning webs that tell stories to her:

"I get so sick and tired of common folk trying to put their nobody feet on my queenly head. Me? I was present in the first world. Furthermore," the spider boasted, squinting her crooked eyes, "I come from a looooong line of royalty and famous people. Millions of years ago I saw the first rainbow. I ruled as the Egyptian historical arachnid. I'm somebody."

As I transcribe that, it occurs to me that she shares some DNA with The Last Unicorn's butterfly.

The prologue ends when Meggie's mother spots the spider and tries to kill her, believing her daughter is in danger. Chapter one opens when Meggie is fifteen. Briefly, it feels like a YA novel about being black and young in (then)-modern America, and it kind of is that, except for the very heightened writing style, including the dialogue. Thomas is a poet and not trying to write in a naturalistic manner. It's often gorgeous:

She ended [the sermon] with these resounding words falling quiet as small sprinklings of nutmeg whispering into a bowl of whipping cream.

The milieu Meggie lives in is lived-in and sharply and beautifully drawn, skipping from a barbershop where customers complain about women preaching to a quick sketch of a neighborhood woman trying to make her poor house beautiful and not noticing that its real beauty lies in her children to Meggie's exquisitely evoked joy in running. And then Meggie finds the HEADLESS CORPSE of one of her classmates! We check in on a trio of terrible neighbors plotting to do something evil to the town's teenagers! The local spiders are concerned!

This book has the prose one would expect to find in a novel written by a poet about being a black teenager in America, except it's also about headless corpses and spider guardians. It is a trip and a half.

( Read more... )

I am so glad that Thomas wrote this amazingly weird novel, and that someone at the bookshop bought it, and that I just happened to come in while it was on the shelf. It's like Adrian Tchaikovsky collaborated with Angela Johnson and Lois Duncan. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again. Someone ought to reprint it.

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I went to art school semi-on-purpose. Which is to say I always loved art, loved drawing, but was it my passion? Who knows what a 13-year-old's passion is? I was nerdier about other things. But I was bullied in grade school and wanted only to get away from my tormentors when I finally graduated, and so I auditioned for the art school as an escape. I was good at drawing, good enough that they plucked me out of my boring town and away from everyone I hated. There I had teachers who truly were passionate about art, and art history, and I fell in love with not just the paintings and sculpture and architecture but the stories and personalities behind them. We scrimped and saved so that I could go on the school trip to Italy and there I got to see the art, and fall in love with Florence in particular, and walk in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and it was the most incredible thing to happen to me in my life thus far.

So anyway reading this book was like reliving that, only—as Ada Palmer says throughout the book—"Ever-So-Much-But-More-So." Because there is more history than I knew, or learned since, more stories, more people, about 100 pages of footnotes, and it's contested history, histories complicated by someone who loves this era even more than I do. Despite the book's heft, it's a very fast read. Also I cried a l'il. Fight me. But read it.

Currently reading: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a re-read of my favourite SM-G book For Reasons and my God, Meche is even worse than I remembered. I love her. Ahaha. What a nightmare child.

Current Mood: sad

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I made myself sad again.

YouTube video: What event in your life still messes with you to this day? | Askreddit

I left this comment there:

My best friend ever, who I was in an on-again, off-again romance with because it took me ages to realize I'm basically asexual, died in 2019. I've never been the same since. I already had chronic depression long before that, and she was a massive bright light in my life. So bright that I moved halfway across the country to be with her after years of us being online-only friends. The move was the best thing I ever did in my life, it made my quality of life go up dramatically because I was able to be myself and be free in Portland, since I couldn't be that in Iowa. Having Lily there with me as well, super close friends the entire time whether we were dating or not, made it even better. She was unerringly, kind, compassionate, accepting, loving, intelligent, interesting, delightful, and her weird matched mine perfectly and balanced out many of my character flaws. (Such as my being a pessimist who is distrustful of strangers, and her being an optimist who trusted people easily.) Every discussion we had was fascinating and engaging, her laugh was like an antidepressant that worked instantly, we could spend hours entertaining each other with bad puns and worse jokes.

When she died, unexpectedly in her sleep from a seizure (she had epilepsy), an important part of my spirit died with her. Despite having not been much of a crier since before puberty, I couldn't go more than an hour without something reminding me of her and setting me off crying. I had to stop listening to my favorite musical artist because Lily had introduced me to them, and so music that used to comfort me when I was overstimulated would make me start crying uncontrollably even in public, and I hate crying in front of other people because I used to get bullied mercilessly for being a crybaby. I used to be a very spiritual person, not religious, but I would sing as a spiritual experience and even dance around for the same reason. I haven't done much of either since Lily died. Even writing this, now, I have to fight back tears. Without her brilliant positive nature, my negative nature just keeps pulling me in deeper, making me a more miserable person, and the rise of fascism in my country is just making it even worse. I feel like I could maybe be coping and more hopeful in these trying times if she had never died.

I still have dreams about her, where she has either come back from the dead or never died to begin with. I still fight tears when I wake up from these dreams, because it's almost like losing her all over again.

A few weeks ago, just when I thought it couldn't get worse, I found out the answer to a mystery that had plagued me ever since she died: how can a seizure kill someone? Well the answer is simple: flailing around in bed from the seizure, the victim can suffocate in their bedding. Given Lily was prone to sleeping on her stomach under a massive pile of blankets and comforters, I'd say it's 99% likely she suffocated in her sleep because of the seizure. And that just messed me up even more than before.

I've been coping a bit with my writing. I have a whole arc for this one character who, like me, loses her best friend ever very suddenly (her friend was murdered) and even almost a decade later, she's still a wreck about it in various ways. So I explore my grief through that character. But it's a bandage on a gaping wound. A wound that's scabbed over, but any picking at the scab makes it open up again. I do it sometimes anyway.

I've also named characters after her, and gave one new character epilepsy in her honor. One of the more prominent side characters in some of the books has a variant of her personality. Wait, correction: two of them do.

The worst part? I didn't even get to go to her funeral. Her mom didn't invite me or tell me where it was, and I still don't know why. I'm basically taking everyone who was there at their word that she died, which is probably why I keep having dreams that she's still alive... like my brain still can't quite believe it because seeing is believing. Though at the same time, I don't know if I would feel better or worse if I could have seen her body. Probably a lot worse, though.

I get through it by walking through the world with proverbial blinders on, dissociating when it's too much to bear. I do laugh, quite often; it's another coping mechanism, one I learned from years of depression. Laughter is a lit match against the darkness, bright but fading fast.

~ End quote ~

The character who's dealing with the grief of her best friend being murdered: One of Vedya's multiverse doubles, Sarah's double being the murder victim. This double first appears briefly in book 4, and becomes a major character in book 5. She goes by the nickname of Naga.

The two characters who have variants of Lily's personality: Acorn Bonewits (a wood nymph) and Caligo (a kind of faery in the story called an Aeventyrichor). I think it's fitting that they're both faeries. I guess there's also a bit of Lily in Cally (Calandra Metaxas, a human).

The character I gave epilepsy to: Mia "Lenore" Green, one of Ashkii's friends, also human. She also has some of Lily's personality in her. Ashkii's first encounter with her is her having a seizure in art class. I only just now realized that her preferred name, Lenore, is canonically named after a famous dead woman from Poe's writings. Like, even in-universe that's true, since she's a major Poe fan.

Current Mood: angry
Current Music: Otep - Confrontation

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Was I optimistic?

As yet unpublished, years ago I wrote a book ("Ressa Akamai and the Bridge Not Crossed," #4 in my Ravenstone Family series) taking place in an alternate universe where the date was 2029 AD. Donald Trump was President For Life Donald Trump, FEMA had been turned into work camps for the homeless and disabled, & ICE camps were full-fledged death camps for various other undesirables.

It's also a fantasy novel with magic and witches, so other things going on were that magic had been exposed, faeries were routinely attacking major cities and rendering them to ruins, Trump was having law enforcement arrest witches and trying to turn them into Janissaries for the US military, and the universe was ending.

Apart from that last part about the universe ending, which had nothing to do with Trump, I now fear I may have been optimistic.

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Trump isn't even trying to pretend not to be fascist now

Donald Trump is trying to use the National Guard to take over Washington DC, and now he intends to go after Democrat controlled cities and states. So he's full on Hitler at this point, he's not even trying to pretend otherwise now. Here is the link: https://shorturl.at/ssaPb (It goes to Yahoo News)

If you are in the National Guard and you follow this extremely illegal order from the fascist orangutan infesting the white house, you would be a traitor to your country, and the punishment for treason in the US is execution. Be a true patriot, refuse any and all illegal orders from Fuhrer Trump. Then please arrest Trump and arrest everyone in the Supreme Court and his cabinet and every other government facility who has been helping him, so that we can convict them all of treason.

Current Mood: angry

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YouTube wants your data to sell to other companies.

You should sign this petition to protest YouTube's new AI-powered age verification system. And here's why:

AI has proven again and again that it doesn't work right, and the ways it can mess up can be horrible. AI based age verification, which has no transparency at all, is going to hurt a lot of people. Customers and content creators alike are going to be kicked off for unknown reasons, reasons which may include "user is not white," "user looks younger than they actually are," "user has facial scars or burns," "user is disabled in a way that affects their face," "the AI just glitched," and many other reasons. We should boycott YouTube until they stop this nonsense.

Furthermore, companies are already finding that it's easier and cheaper to hire humans to do things rather than AIs, because AI keeps failing in weird and expensive ways. Recently, an AI being used as a programming tool deleted petabytes of the programmer's data for no apparent reason, data which was unrecoverable. What if YouTube's AI glitches and deletes entire channels for no reason?

Then there's the privacy issue. Companies like YouTube have far too much data about us as it is already, and now they want even more, including your face, credit card information, and maybe videos of you naked in your home. They aren't satisfied with the billions of dollars they're making in ad revenue, so they're trying to make you a product they can sell.

"But I have nothing to hide!" Of course you do. Data leaks are a weekly phenomenon nowadays. Do you really want to risk your nudes, your credit card information, your home address, or other important data being leaked online by giving that information to a service that is supposedly ad-supported and thus supposedly free to use? It's bad enough when that stuff happens to sites where you paid money for something; we can't let it happen for free sites like YouTube.

And lastly, YouTube already has a special version of their site aimed specifically at kids, where comments are disabled. They claim they're doing this data mining to protect the kids, but they're lying to you. This age verification won't work properly, it won't protect kids, it won't even keep kids out of places they shouldn't be. And why are we giving that job to corporations like Google anyway? That's meant to be the parents' job.

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Troubled Waters, by Sharon Shinn

Zoe Ardelay and her father have lived in exile in a small village since he, a former courtier, had an argument with the king. At the opening of the book, her father has just died of natural causes. Then Darien, the king's advisor, shows up and announces that Zoe has been chosen as the king's fifth wife. Zoe, immersed in the drifting, passive phase of grief, sets out with him for the capital city she hasn't seen since she was a child. The story does not go in any of the expected directions after that, starting with the conveyance they use to get there: a new invention, a gas-powered automobile.

This small-scale fantasy is the first of five "Elemental Blessings" books, but stands alone. It does end up involving the politics and rulership of a country, but it's mostly the story of one woman, how her life changes after her father dies, and the relationships she has with the people she meets. It's got great characters and relationships, focuses on small but meaningful moments in a very pleasing manner, and has outstandingly original worldbuilding. Most of it is not set in court, and involves ordinary poor and middle-class people and settings. The vibe is reminiscent of early Robin McKinley.

Welce, the country it's set in, has two aspects which are crucial to both plot and character, and are interestingly intertwined. They may seem complicated when I explain them, but they're extremely easy to follow and remember in the actual book.

The first aspect is a system of elemental beliefs and magic, similar to a zodiac. The elements are water, air, fire, earth, and wood. Every person in the country is associated with one of those elements, which is linked with personality characteristics, aptitudes, aspects of the human body, and, occasionally, magic. This is all very detailed and cool - for instance, water is associated with blood, wood with bone, and so forth. We've all seen elemental systems before, but Shinn's is exceptionally well-done. The way the elemental system is entwined with everyday life is outstanding.

How do people know which element is theirs? Here's where we get to the second system, which I have never come across before. Temples, which are not dedicated to Gods but to the five elements, have barrels of blessings - coins marked with symbols representing blessings like intelligence, change, courage, joy, and so forth. Each blessing is associated with an element. People randomly pull coins for both very important and small occasions, to get a hint of what way they should take or, upon the birth of a child, to get three blessings that the child will keep for life. The blessings a child gets may or may not show their element - if they don't, it becomes clear over time based on personality.

The blessings are clearly genuinely magical and real, but often in subtle ways. I loved the blessings and the way they work into the story is incredibly cool. Same with the elements. Zoe's element is water, and her entire plot has a meandering quality which actually does feel like a water-plot, based on the qualities ascribed to water in the book.

I would recommend this to anyone who likes small-scale, character-based fantasy AND to anyone who likes cool magic systems or worldbuilding. It's not quite a cozy fantasy but it has a lot of cozy aspects. I can see myself re-reading this often.

There are five books, one for each element. I've since read the second book, Royal Airs. It's charming and enjoyable (and involves primitive airplanes, always a bonus) but doesn't quite have the same lightning in a bottle quality of Troubled Waters.

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hiatory

"Dying Georg"

I keep hearing people -- even people who are supposedly history educators -- saying that people only lived about 40 years back in the day. That is NOT true! That is a MYTH caused by a failure to understand how averages work! Yes, the average life expectancy was about 40 back then, but that was because so many children died back then, it drove the average down. Very few children made it out of childhood alive, which is a large part of why people used to have so many kids. If you didn't count the kids when doing the averaging, people generally lived just as long as they do now once they made it to adulthood, assuming they didn't die in a war.

Or put into meme speak: "Old timey kids were the 'spiders georg' of dying back in the day, and 'should not have been counted.'"

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The watercolor-making project goes on...

...or: more fun with chemistry. I have to do something useful with my skills after all! XD So, here's my newest color, "Living Tree".

Living-Tree-2025-08-kl

This time, it's supposed to look like leaves - with a bit of granulation to make botanical painting more convenient. I can already predict I'm going to use this color quite often. Maybe the next project is going to be a sky blue - then I have an (almost) complete landscape set!

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Super Boba Cafe # 1, by Nidhi Chanani

A middle-grade graphic novel about a boba shop with a secret.

Aria comes to stay with her grandmother in San Francisco for the summer to escape a bad social situation. Her grandmother owns a boba shop that doesn't seem too popular, and Aria throws herself into making it more so - most successfully when Grandma's cat Bao has eight kittens, and Aria advertises it as a kitten cafe. But why is Grandma so adamant about never letting Aria set foot in the kitchen, and kicking out the customers at 6:00 on the dot? Why do the prairie dogs in the backyard seem so smart?

This graphic novel has absolutely adorable illustrations. The story isn't as strong. The first half is mostly a realistic, gentle, cozy slice of life. The second half is a fantasy adventure with light horror aspects. Even though the latter is throughly foreshadowed in the former, it still feels kind of like two books jammed together.

My larger issue was with tone and content that also felt jammed together. The book is somewhat didactic - which is fine, especially in a middle-grade book - but I feel like if the book is teaching lessons, it should teach them consistently and appropriately. The lessons in this book were a bit off or inconsistent, creating an uncanny valley feeling.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

Fantastic art, kind of odd story.

Current Location: Ташкент, Узбекистан

Entry tags:

события

Свежие новости@

(или Давненько я сюда ничего не постил)

Начнём с того, что мы с Машей теперь есть на сайте Изба-читальня. Наткнулись на него случайно, решили опробовать. Сайт немного глючный, но там гораздо больше возможностей чем на Прозе.Ру. Я (вот он я) перетащил туда всё, кроме статей, с Прозы.Ру, а Маша (вот она) – некоторые свои стихи. Словом, расползаемся потихоньку.

Символ «@» в заголовке этого поста – это в знак протеста против предстоящей блокировки мессенджеров в России. По крайней мере, со вчерашнего дня этот символ стал знаком протеста. Если вы против того цифрового концлагеря, в который всё больше превращается Россия – присоединяйтесь.

А теперь – новости краудфандинга. Артур Хусаинов, за велоприключениями которого я в последнее время активно слежу, всё-ж-таки добился своего и доехал на велосипеде до Владивостока и даже чуть дальше (на остров Русский). Сейчас он отдыхает после своего полуторамесячного путешествия и готовится отправиться в обратном направлении (на этот раз – при помощи одного из более традиционных видов транспорта). Под катом – оставшаяся часть его маршрута, начиная с моей предыдущей сводки.

( Смотреть сводку (много картинок) )

Проект иллюстраций к венку сонетов Максимилиана Волошина Corona Astralis неожиданно собрал нужную сумму денег (я уже, честно говоря, не надеялся), так что – ждём теперь издания артбука.

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podcasts

podcast friday

Today's post is ICHH's "Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting." Gare and Mia take a deep dive into what is, superficially, a comparatively minor issue—that of conspiratorial thinking on the left. They take as their jumping off point a tweet from the Gestapo featuring John Gast's "American Progress." It's an overtly fascist tweet because the artwork itself celebrates the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the text reinforces that the poster thinks that this genocide is a good thing, and also because an overtly fascist organization that is currently carrying out a genocide tweeted it. If they'd tweeted a picture of kittens, it would still be a fascist tweet, because it is a fascist organization posting on a platform owned by fascists. Nevertheless, certain segments of the extremely online left and liberals have convinced themselves that there are also secret fascist messages in the tweet.

The basic thesis of the episode is, "no, you fools, they don't need to dogwhistle anymore because they are in power and doing fascism." But there's another, even more important point here, which is that we're all still basically stuck in 2016-7 and we need to be updating both our thinking and our strategies. I feel a certain way about this because for all that I mocked it back in the day, conspiratorial thinking worked very well for the right, and I sort of disagree with Gare and Mia that it won't reach a particular type of low-information voter who likes to feel privy to exciting secret knowledge. But also, it is counterproductive and has people who might otherwise be useful and productive chasing their tails playing numerology on X, the Everything App.

At any rate, it's an interesting psychological insight and as someone who is not immune from Extremely Online Thinking, it's a useful check-in.

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The Bog Wife, by Kay Chronister

The Haddesley family has an ancient tradition: when the patriarch dies, the oldest son summons a wife from the bog. Now living in Appalachia, the current patriarch is dying and a new bog wife must be summoned soon, but their covenant with the bog may be going wrong: one daughter fled years ago to live in the modern world, the last bog wife vanished under mysterious circumstances, the bog is drying up, and something very bad has happened to the oldest son...

Isn't that an amazing premise? The actual book absolutely lives up to it, but not in the way that I expected.

It was marketed as horror, and was the inaugural book of the Paper & Clay horror book club. But my very first question to the club was "Do you think this book is horror?"

The club's consensus was no, or not exactly; it definitely has strong folk horror elements, but overall we found it hard to categorize by genre. I am currently cross-shelving it in literary fiction. We all loved it though, and it was a great book to discuss in a book club; very thought-provoking.

One of the aspects I enjoyed was how unpredictable it was. The plot both did and didn't go in directions I expected, partly because the pacing was also unpredictable: events didn't happen at the pace or in the order I expected from the premise. If the book sounds interesting to you, I recommend not spoiling yourself.

The family is a basically a small family cult, living in depressing squalor under the rule of the patriarch. It's basically anti-cottagecore, where being close to nature in modern America may mean deluding yourself that you're living an ancient tradition of natural life where you're not even close to being self-sustaining, but also missing all the advantages of modern life like medical treatment and hot water. I found all this incredibly relatable and validating, as I grew up in similar circumstances though with the reason of religion rather than an ancient covenant with the bog.

The family has been psychologically twisted by their circumstances, so they're all pretty weird and also don't get along. I didn't like them for large stretches, but I did care a lot about them all by the end, and was very invested in their fates. (Except the patriarch. He can go fuck himself.)

It's beautifully written, incredibly atmospheric, and very well-characterized. The atmosphere is very oppressive and claustrophobic, but if you're up for the journey, it will take you somewhere very worthwhile. The book club discussion of the ending was completely split on its emotional implications (not on the actual events, those are clear): we were equally divided between thinking it was mostly hopeful/uplifing with bittersweet elements, mostly sad with some hopeful elements, and perfectly bittersweet.

SPOILERS!

( Read more... )

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books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Nothing, this book is 768 pages long.

Currently reading: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. It's so good. The middle of the book tells the story of 15 Renaissance figures, both famous and obscure, on various sides of factional political fights, theology, and modernity. After a sympathetic look at Lucrezia Borgia (who did nothing wrong), I just finished the chapter on Michelangelo, which despite being one of the longer chapters (I am weirdly relieved whenever we hit someone I like who didn't die horribly and prematurely) and focusing on the political infighting of the time, didn't even cover his imprisonment. To be fair, he did a lot of stuff, and it covers his love life admirably, which is juicier. She uses it in part to talk about the degree to which art was wielded as a weapon of political influence, often at the expense of the artists and craftspeople themselves, and also the complex history of queerness in the era.

There's a particularly good exchange between Galeazzo Sanseverino (the lover of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who lived openly with him along with his wife Beatrice) and Francesco Gonzaga, husband of Isabella d'Este. Sanseverino had challenged Gongzaga to a duel, to which Gonzaga replied, "Prù—this is a fart sound I make with my mouth with the addition of a fuck-you gesture and a fig sign," and that when he had gay sex, "I do it at the door of others while you do it at your own." (I.e., he was a top.)

Anyway this book is great. I'm only highlighting this because it was the last thing I read before I passed out last night. It's all like this, though.

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Making more watercolor because it's fun.

My newest watercolor-making experiment! Producing this stuff at home is a lot of work, but hey, it gets me some colors not commercially available, so... XD

Living-Earth-watercolor

I wanted a supergranulating multi-pigment color that unmixes when you use it very wet, and I think it worked just fine! On rough (Torchon) paper, it creates these interesting effects. I think I'm going to use it a lot in landscape sketches!

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Today's quote (and oops)

I'm getting into Very Strange Territory in some of my reading at the moment, and sometimes my interpretations of what I'm reading are going a bit sideways*. To whit, I read the following two sentences:

Children have different developmental needs depending on their age and personality. One-year-olds eat more books than they read, which is why the sturdy board book material is so important.

and my first thought was "because they need more fibre in their diet?"

*I have until Thursday--by which I am interpreting that to mean Very Early Friday, because the supervisor said they will read it Friday--to write a page of methodology, and exactly what methodology (not methods, I have Ideas for that) is going to be applied to the children's books section of the project is giving me grief. I would very much like to have a paragraph on my methodology and why I think it is useful by bedtime tonight, and not have bedtime be after 11pm.

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random thoughts

(no subject)

Gobbledy-goddamned-gook.