Reading Wednesday

Mar. 25th, 2026 06:01 pm
troisoiseaux: (reading 7)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Read Bog Queen by Anna North, a well-pieced-together pocket watch of a novel about the discovery of an Iron Age bog body in the West Midlands, England, in 2018, split between the perspectives of a forensic anthropologist determined to figure out how this woman died while navigating the competing interests of local environmentalists who want to rewild the bog where she was found, the peat company that owns it, and the relative of a 1960s murder victim believed to also be buried there; of the Iron Age woman, a young druid growing into her role during a time of shifting alliances and growing Roman influence; and, interwoven between the two in brief vignettes, the bog (or rather, the moss?) itself.

Read Diary of a Cranky Bookworm by Aster Glenn Gray (DW's own [personal profile] osprey_archer!), which was a delight. On a general note, this is a fun and thoughtful coming-of-age YA novel in which the characters are great both at being characters and at feeling like people; on a personal one, this was very fun to read as a book about a bookworm by someone who I became friends with over books, because protagonist Sage's literary landscape felt immediately and intimately familiar. :)

Am I one of those human beings?

Mar. 25th, 2026 04:27 pm
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
The train bears [personal profile] selkie southward again: we have affirmed that the important part is not the leaving, but the coming back. This visit was somewhat more flying than usual and complicated by just about everyone on both sides having run out of running on fumes some time last year if not the previous decade, but we had celebration and I was finally able to give her the shells and stones I had collected for her five months ago on Cape Cod, reminders of northern Atlantic. [personal profile] spatch and I have decided never again to pay attention to his phone when driving into Brookline. Making our way home from South Station, I was so pleased to see that the superstructure of the Northern Avenue Bridge has not yet been demolished and still stands as an installation of rust-flaked trusses, permanently perpendicular to its successor's flat concrete. What I would have called the new North Washington Street Bridge has been designated the Bill Russell Bridge since I first glimpsed it in miniature of the Zakim, a parabolic stickleback of white fish bones. We parked in the lot of Bill & Bob's for the first roast beef sandwiches of the season, so early the picnic tables had not been set up, and were introduced by WERS to the total delight of They Might Be Giants' "Wu-Tang" (2026) as we wound past the un-iced Mystic. Two days after a snow that stuck to all the branches, it is short-sleeved catkin spring, drive-with-the-windows-down weather. We watched the Charles and the Fort Point Channel scatter the same reflective blue as the sky.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
My poem "ἀγκυλοθάλασσος" has been accepted by Strange Horizons. I am indebted to [personal profile] radiantfracture for his Twine prompt generator designed to produce scientific-sounding compound adjectives and nouns, in this case the irresistible "ankylothalassic" from ἀγκύλος "crooked, bent" and θάλασσα "the sea." I rendered it back into classical Greek and José Esteban Muñoz and Twelfth Night got in there along the way. It was written on New Year's Eve.

While I was out of ambit of the internet for almost all of yesterday, Reckoning: It Was Paradise hit the digital shelves. It is the special issue of the journal of environmental justice on war and conflict and contains a poem of mine which will go live on the internet in a month, or you could pick it up now with the rest of the shatteringly topical e-book if you don't feel like preordering it in print. I wrote it last summer after the—first—U.S. strikes on Iran. I taught myself a small amount of Elamite cuneiform for it. It should not have come around to such relevance again.

The designer of the Paleontological Research Institute's long-running pre-saurian Paleozoic Pals has just branched out into Pleistocene mammals with a Kickstarter for Cenozoic Snuggles. I have put in for a Glyptodon.

I may have slept nine hours. I just heard Rabbitology's "The Bog Bodies" (2026).
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
[personal profile] selkie's birthday was duly observed with my parents and my husbands, a meal of much carnivory, and an apricot marmalade cake doused in whipped cream, strawberry sugar, and candles that burned like driftwood salts. Many deeply goofy photos were taken of various combinations of us. So much is wrong with the world and it is still true that my family for an evening is happy. A photogenic snow began to drift the streets as I drove everyone home.

sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
I must have slept ten hours. Hestia appears to be watching the rain with almost as much interest as the birds sheltering from it. May it and the recent snowmelt amend the drought. Tomorrow, of course, it is forecast to snow again.

[personal profile] selkie was safely collected from the Penn Station-alike that South Station has done its best to inhume itself into since her last visit, provided with an appropriate quantity of local barbecue for an obligate carnivore, and even successfully checked in to her hotel despite the mishegos attending every stage of her conference even before it started. At no point in this process did we apparently remember to take any pictures of ourselves.

My dreams seem to be branching out in terms of media, since last night's featured a youngish Alec McCowen starring in the radio version of a Tey-like crime novel as the ambiguously poor relation of an upper-class family who is not actually Kind Hearts and Coronets-ing his way through them, but needs to figure out who is before he's so handily scapegoated for the accidents escalating to murder ever since his arrival; he is, naturally, keeping a secret from the family, the authorities, and even the inattentive reader, but it isn't that. I was very pleased to find that a recording had survived, because the original novel had just been reprinted by the British Library Crime Classics. There were images mixed up in it in the way of dreams, but it was definitely on the Internet Archive.

Outside my head, I have been recently listening to Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (2020), Jake Blount and Mali Obomsawin's symbiont (2024), and Huw Marc Bennett's Heol Las (2026), which I found through its ghost-boxish "Cân Gwasael (Wassail Song)." I like that I do not have to dream their remixes of folk and futurism and time.
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
The afternoon's mail brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #86, containing my poem "Northern Comfort." I wrote it out of my discoveries of the ghost-ground that has been directly underfoot all my life and longer, from King Philip's War to Pomp's Wall, and this administration and its murderous terror of history. It shares a page and an issue of emptiness with a precisely targeted incantation by Gwynne Garfinkle as well the equally hollowing fiction and poetry of Kris Schokrowsky, Penny Durham, Carsten Cheung, Jennifer Crow, and more. I almost referred to the covert art by John and Flo Stanton, obscured by shattered webs of negative space or the rust-light of abandoned industries. Subscribe! Contribute! Make the right kind of strangeness in this world. I am off to South Station to collect one north-traveling seal.
sovay: (Silver: against blue)
[personal profile] sovay
On the way back from the MRI, in accordance with the local observance of the hundred and twelfth birthday of Wendell Corey, I found and talked to a dry stone wall.

Shaking off the echoes of yesterday

Mar. 20th, 2026 11:58 am
sovay: (Haruspex: Autumn War)
[personal profile] sovay
How has this month been going? I woke up to spring and didn't even realize. It looks the part: the occasional crocus, a faint fluff of clouds in a harebell sky. Hestia is absorbing the sun-flood from my desk. I will be celebrating the equinox with an MRI. My major accomplishment of yesterday was successfully wresting a permit from the Parking Department. I am filing a request for an intercalary year.

more stumbling through ancient poetry

Mar. 19th, 2026 09:48 am
radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
As usual, true scholars, please forgive my dilettante's sense of discovery over things you have always known.

When searching for some examples of "pleasing the heart" as erotic joy, as per [personal profile] sovay's information, I arrived at this (in the ETCSL).

A love song of Shu-Suen )

§rf§

1. Well, a balbale, but the immediate internet is of limited use in defining this except as a form that uses variety in repetition.

2. For those interested, the transliterated Sumerian given for this phrase is dcu-dsuen cag4 dmu-ul-lil2-la2-ke4 ba-ze2-be2-en-na-ju10.

I assume the subscript numbers refer to different versions of the cuneiform character. I dunno about the superscript d.
sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
[personal profile] sovay
I can't believe I dreamed an entire opera whose closing performance by a small local outfit I was all set to attend before it was canceled at the last unavoidable minute. It was a Gian Carlo Menotti from 1948 and had never before received a Boston premiere. I had read its libretto for years because it was full of sand and sea-haunting: No body that presses its mouth to the shore closer than your mouth to mine. No eye that fades into the haze of the sun more fixed than your eye to mine. No ship of a letter that crosses the seas faster than my hand to yours, unless it has foundered, unless it has torn on the black rocks of the heart. It had one of his terse, enigmatic titles, The Visitor. The company that had put it up was called Marmalade and Gold, an allusion whose meaning did not escape the event horizon of waking, and specialized in bare-bones, slightly more than concert performances of oddities or undeserved obscurities of the twentieth-century opera world: I remember perusing the catalogue of previous seasons on their website and approving of their choices, all of which I suspect of not existing outside of the hour or so I was asleep. Erich Wolfgang Korngold did write a bunch of operas, mostly before—very popular choice—leaving Germany, but I do not believe a 1932 Der lahme König was among them. I am having a terrible week for which the external world offers nothing in the way of respite and even if I didn't get to hear any of its music, I appreciate the inside of my head attempting to furnish a break of art.

Weekly reading (etc.)

Mar. 17th, 2026 10:09 pm
troisoiseaux: (fumi yanagimoto)
[personal profile] troisoiseaux
Read The Stranger by Albert Camus and spent the entire time thinking about the Ben Affleck smoking meme, or perhaps a little cartoon man smoking a cigarette and muttering bah in a French accent, which is to say I had a deeply unserious reading experience. I found this book to be surprisingly (darkly) funny, because the main character/narrator, Meursault, just floats through life— including his own trial and forthcoming execution for murder— by responding to everyone and everything with abrupt and odd statements about how nothing matters, actually. Promotion at work? It's all the same to him; nothing matters. His girlfriend wants to get married? Sure, if she wants to; it's not like anything matters. The blurb describes this as the "story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach," which led me to expect that Meursault would be an accessory to murder, or perhaps framed for a crime he didn't commit— especially as, early on, a shady acquaintance has him (Meursault) write a threatening letter to his (the acquaintance's) ex— but no?? He literally just shoots a random guy multiple times at close range for no reason?? Because Life Is Absurd And Nothing Matters, Actually????

In a rare (and only very, very loosely book-adjacent) movie update, I saw The Bride! (2026, dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal) last weekend and it was SO much fun. It is not a particularly coherent movie— it does feel like a sort of Frankenstein's monster in itself, cobbled from about three different premises ("what if Bride of Frankenstein was Bonnie & Clyde?"; "Frankenstein 2: Mary's Revenge, A Feminist Retelling", etc.)— but as a fan of campy horror and classic Hollywood I felt incredibly catered to. I also watched National Theatre's Ncuti Gatwa-led The Importance of Being Earnest, which is in fact as absolutely delightful as it looks. (It's available on YouTube through tomorrow, the 18th, and streaming on National Theatre at Home after that.)
sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
[personal profile] sovay
For Saint Patrick's Day, I had a foreign body removed from my eye and was immunologically shot in the shoulder. Who needs booze?

radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)
[personal profile] radiantfracture
This comes from Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (2025, Ed. Holly Mason Badra), which I am reading and getting much from.

Object Exercise

First you must gather the objects.
Open the polish and polish each object
until every object is coded in polish,
a thin film that takes on the shape
of the object. Then dissect every
object with a circumstantial blade.
When the object is fully dissected,
remake it, but more in your image.
Then use concise scissors to prune
the object, removing what wilts
or yellows. Turn up the object
sound. Then dissect again. Hold
each piece to check for resistance:
if it withers, it's an object.
If it's shudders, it's a subject.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
[personal profile] sovay
The wall-to-wall crowd of the memorial from which I have just returned testifies to the love poured out and returned by the guest of honor, but I would still rather have been in the worldline where they were present to be celebrated in more than memory.
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Happy Saturday!

I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!

If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.