kenjari | Reading

The construction turned out not to be on an adjacent street; we were misled by it not being roadwork. It is the re-roofing of a house diagonally across our street and we have no idea how many days it will last except two is already more than enough. I can't believe we are still afflicted with construction, it just changed levels. I wanted to do anything with my brain this evening and fell asleep instead. On the bright side, it occurred to me to look into the current whereabouts of the members of my beloved Schmekel, the short-lived and brilliant, all-trans, all-Jewish klezmer-punk band that gave the world such gems as "I'll Be Your Maccabee" (2010)" and "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur" (2011) and discovered that while the keyboardist has remained a musician, the bassist went into the medical profession, the guitarist became an award-winning game designer, and as of last year the drummer is the rabbi of a congregation in western Massachusetts, which is great. Any mention of Martin Buber will to this day instantly earworm me with "FTM at the DMV" (2013).

Current Music: Schmekel, "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur"

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

There's a gorgeous windstorm going on. Beautiful for listening to, not so great for trying to hear the UPS truck.

Like a fool who thinks it's 2015, I ordered clothing online from the United States and have been fretting about it ever since. All shipping interfaces were as incoherent as you might expect.

But Blamo was having a deep-discount flash sale and I have been drooling over this non-species-specific sock-animal onesie for... a long time.

Sadly, that magnificent garment was not on sale and incidentally profoundly impractical. So I ordered this Completely Normal Cardigan(tm) instead:

... it happens to have this hood:

(Not sure why the resolution is so crap here.)

There did end up being tariff charges, but not that bad.

I... feel more whole as a person.

§rf§

PS I swear it did not have to be a rabbit.

sovay

As part of my birthday month,

spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.

I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.

Current Music: Lord Huron, "Watch Me Go"

sovay

This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from

foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.

Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "Exit Simulation"

troisoiseaux

Read What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher, the third novella in a sort of Ruritanian horror series, although this one is set mostly in West Virginia rather than the fictional European country of Gallacia, when main character Alex Easton - a culturally-third-gendered "sworn soldier" who has, against kan will, become something of an expert in dealing with horrifying supernatural phenomena - is asked by an American friend to investigate the disappearance of his cousin, last in touch from an abandoned coal mine where he'd seen a mysterious light far underground. (I'd apparently completely forgot about Easton's American friend who was, allegedly, a significant character in the first book— just a total blank space where that guy should be?) Interesting concepts, underwhelming execution, but a fun, lightly creepy read.

Currently reading Midnight Sun, Stephenie Meyer's 2020 rewrite of Twilight from Edward's POV, which is conceptually way more interesting than Original Flavor Twilight - by virtue of having a mind-reading vampire as its POV character and seeing the Cullen family at home, away from prying human eyes - but also everyone comes across as way more insufferable. To be fair, this has already resolved some of the more glaring questions about the original: why would an immortal being want to spend his one wild and precious second life attending high school? He doesn't, it's so boring he considers it the closest he gets to sleeping and/or punishment for his sins, at least until he has Bella to obsess over. Why is he so obsessed with this one random not very interesting girl? The same "her blood smells good and she's the only mind he can't read" explanation as the original book, but it's more persuasive from his POV. (Although, interestingly, apparently he also can't read Bella's dad's mind— only impressions instead of words, as for everyone else.) Recurring theme of references to Hades and Persephone, because of course there is.

sovay

I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "The Architect"

sovay

In fairness to June Lockhart, the first time I ever saw her she was sharing the same episode of Babylon 5 (1994–98) as Londo's card-sharping tentadicks and the latter seared themselves rather more indelibly into my brain, but with less than five minutes of her own in T-Men (1947) she stole far more of the film for me, so much that even knowing that a century is a graceful point to depart from, I am still sorry the world no longer contains her and all of her time. She moved from film to television so early that I always wondered if she had been blacklisted like Marsha Hunt, but the answer looks like not. I loved finding out about her tastes in rock music and my experience of her most famous and long-running roles was almost nil. It means I remember her, perhaps unfairly, twenty-two years old and looking like the fair-haired avatar of all the white picket fences in the world, coming effortlessly up to speed on their shadows. She should have worked with David Lynch.

Current Music: Olivia Dean, "Nice to Each Other"

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

sovay

I can't listen to podcasts. It's the same problem as audio commentaries. They are difficult for me to extract information from. I make the occasional effort for friends or colleagues and otherwise read transcripts where available.

I have just discovered that Bill Nighy has a podcast. Apparently it launched on my birthday. It is the half-hour ill-advised by Bill Nighy. I am as we speak listening to the first episode which I selected at not very random considering there are only three so far:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. Welcome to ill-advised by Bill Nighy—and the clue is in the title, particularly on the first word. The risk of getting to my age is that you can not infrequently be mistaken for somebody who knows what's happening or how to carry on, and you only have to take a quick look around the world to see how that's going, and how my generation are managing the planet, for instance. I mean, you may have picked up a few things along the way which might be of use, like, I don't know, parking, or online shopping, or not taking cocaine, obviously. But other than that, in all the big important things, I remain profoundly in the dark. But I try and keep a straight face when people start acting weird.

After which he immediately begins to tell the listener about his recent eye operation. It does eventually pertain to the nature of the podcast, but frankly it was such an ideal segue for a programme that bills itself as "a podcast for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do . . . a refuge for the clumsy and the awkward . . . an invitation to squander time" that it won me over to treating it as an audio drama whose laconically anxious and slightly acid narrator has a very good fund of self-deprecating stories that wind their way around to some species of advice, defined by Nighy as "not actually making things worse." He sounds unsurprisingly the way his interviews read. The difficulty of extracting information does not improve just because I like the speaker, but apparently I will now make the occasional effort for actors, too.

Update: the parking is a lie. Nighy spends most of the introduction to the second episode explaining that he cannot and never could park successfully. "I'd drive miles to find somewhere where you didn't actually have to park, you could just leave the car." Well done, Reginald?

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "Unsympathetic Parts 1 & 2"

sovay

I had a run-off-my-feet day, but I love the newly revealed cover for Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and shortly forthcoming from Psychopomp, in whose liminal mosaic is reprinted my queer, maritime, ice-dreaming story "Twice Every Day Returning." I am looking forward to that table of contents for myself. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of

isis: British Airways' "May We Haveth One's Attention" (2024) may be the most charming safety video I have seen since the legendary "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012). My only excuse for missing it last year is that I can't remember sleeping that month.

2. Courtesy of

moon_custafer: James Cagney, Chester Morris, and Edward G. Robinson on a Ferris wheel in 1934. The dark glasses donned by Mr. Morris are doing him no favors whatsoever except that he's making enthusiastic eye contact in the sun-flooded overhead shot.

3. Courtesy of

fleurdelis41: "The thread about the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen; a force of very doubtful military significance." The caricature of "Mr Dundas" with his beaver hat and spectacles reminds me irresistibly of an Edward Gorey character. The overenthusiastic lighting of the beacons actually made me laugh out loud.

4. I discovered the inimitably named Blackbeard's Tea Party some years ago with the furious drumbeat of their "Ford o' Kabul River" and then almost immediately lost track of them again, but as they seem to have come out since with the whaling EP Leviathan! (2018) and the nightmare siren song of "Mother Carey," we're still good. Since they closed their first album with "Chicken on a Raft," I am delighted that their recorded repertoire now also includes "Roll and Go."

5. I meant last week to link the Divine Comedy's "Invisible Thread" (2025), especially since it was my father who found it after I had sent him another song from the same album.

Her memory for a blessing, Darleane Hoffman who studied transuranic elements and still got to die at ninety-eight. She was not unstable.

Current Music: Blackbeard's Tea Party, "The Diamond"

sovay

We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

Current Music: Dreamer Boy, "Lavender"

sovay

I liked so much of T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025), I just wish it had leaned as sfnally into its premise as it had the scope for.

( Or a fear that forces us to displace our identities? )

In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to

rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "Consolation Prize"

$radiantfracture: Beadwork bunny head (Default)$

radiantfracture

Kate Beaton had a sore throat after hitting two major festivals before dropping into Munro's Books, but she was every bit as fierce and funny as you would expect, and more.

So glad I dragged my sorry carcass out of the house for this.

Surreally, I missed about 15 minutes of the Q&A because I felt a coughing fit coming on and went to have it out in the street. But it was still great. (Leftover hyper-reactive cough reflex, not continuing illness.)

§rf§

troisoiseaux

Finished Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, which I enjoyed SO much— I don't know what it says that much of the media I've been enjoying lately has shared the premise of "darkly whimsical depictions of Hell" (e.g., Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss), but the version that Kuang's two rival grad students descend into/dungeon-crawl through to rescue their inconveniently deceased dissertation advisor is cleverly drawn as a funhouse mirror of a university campus: ( ... )

It's not first-person POV, so this doesn't feel quite accurate, but I don't know how to describe main character Alice except as an unreliable narrator: her advisor is clearly an awful person, both in a garden-variety if extreme "toxic/predatory professor" way and an "unethical magical experimentation" way, but she spends most of the book bending over backwards to justify his actions (but he's a genius! he's not a bad person, just tragically flawed!); she is so, so deeply messed up and yet convinced that she's completely fine, actually, stop pitying her, GOD, and also all of it was her own fault anyway. ( ... )

Anyway, this appealed to me in a lot of the same ways as the Locked Tomb books, The Magnus Archives, and - of all things - The Phantom Tollbooth. I probably would find some nits to pick if I hadn't finished it in a three-day blur of just deeply vibing with it, but as it is, 10/10.

sovay

The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

( Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and

spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

Current Music: Dropkick Murphys, "Longshot (feat. The Scratch)"

troisoiseaux

I hadn't planned on reading Katabasis by R.F. Kuang, both because I hadn't really clicked with any of her previous books and because I've seen mostly negative reviews of Katabasis specifically, but it was available as a short-term/lucky/skip-the-line loan on Libby and who am I to look a gift book in the mouth. I'm really enjoying it! Two rival graduate students of Analytical Magick descend to the underworld to rescue their dissertation advisor so they can graduate with his valuable recommendation; it's great for spooky season, with vivid descriptions of the very nasty ways one can die from doing magick wrong and something darkly whimsical about the version of Hell that they navigate with the ambiguous aid of the different accounts of underworld journeys (Orpheus, Dante, etc.) as filtered through alternate translations and theories of interpretation and academic technobabble. ( ... )

Back to the theme of Bad Times on Boats with Into the Raging Sea by Rachel Slade, a nonfiction account of the 2015 sinking of an American cargo ship after capitalism led it to sail directly into a hurricane. Technically focused on unfolding the narrative of a specific event (the loss of the El Faro in Hurricane Joaquin) but throws in a bunch of stuff for context, such as how hurricanes are formed and measured, the history of U.S. shipbuilding and shipping industries, etc.

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

sovay

The oldest gravestone still extant in the Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth dates back to 1698, but I did not encounter it as I photographed a small selection of winged death's heads and lichen. Afterward I went back to the salt marsh where my camera with unnecessary aptness apparently died.

( Wood and whisky, time and tar. )

Judah Thacher d. 1775 had a rather bland angel at the top of his gravestone, but some unusual stars and curlicues down the sides and above all both fancy lettering and the best memento mori I saw in the entire burying ground:

Reader ﬅand ﬅil & Spend a Tear
Think on the duﬅ that Slumbers he^re
& When you think on yͤ State of me
Think on yͤ glaas that runs for yͤ

I just side-eye my camera taking it to heart.

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "No Hero"

sovay

Having somewhat wiped out my reserves with the glories of Corporation Beach, I only made it out to the salt marsh for about an hour between low tide and sunset, which was still great. I saw the copper-glaze glint of fiddler crabs in their burrows in the crenellated banks of mud. I saw the dark-fringed silhouette of an osprey sailing over the green-rusted brushes of cordgrass and salt hay, where they nest with the encouragement of the Callery Darling Conservation Area which includes the wetlands around the Bass Hole Boardwalk. The engine noise floating over from Chapin Beach turned out to belong to a powered paraglider who so annoyed me by effectively buzzing the boardwalk that I let all the other sunset viewers with their phones out enthusiastically take pictures of him. The long-billed, long-legged, unfamiliarly tuxedo-patterned shorebird stalking the deeper edges of a sandbar looks to have been a vagrant black-necked stilt. With the tide so far out, I am afraid there was little chance of another seal.

( Take a little comfort from the little you've done. )

After which I ate dinner, read a little, and passed out for about an hour and a half. Family and friends have been sending me pictures of No Kings, the necessity of which I hate and the turnout of which I cheer. My mother told me about her favorite sign she did not carry: a photograph of the butterfly, the only orange monarch we need. I loved everything about the spare, specific exploration of marginalized languages and historical queerness in Carys Davies' Clear (2024) until the slingshot of the ending as if the author had lost a chapter somewhere over the side in the North Sea. Since the Cape is still autumnal New England, I am drinking mulled cider.

Current Music: No Hero, "Comfort"

sovay

The very first thing that happened when I climbed over the huge barnacle-scaled chunks of granite and weathered pilings that form the breakwater at the western edge of Corporation Beach was that I saw a seal: sleek, dulse-dark, bobbing its head in the waves not more than two breakers offshore. It looked at me. I sang it the seal-calling song learned from Jean Redpath. If I had just spent the afternoon till sunset sitting on the breakwater and watching the tide come in serpentine-green under thick foam and burst into spray that showered me to the shoulders of my coat, it would have been a wonderful time.

( Penny on the water, tuppence on the sea. )

Being now officially unemployed after an internal ten and really fifteen years at the same job and having Robert Carlyle on my mind, I should probably just rewatch The Full Monty (1997). Tomorrow I plan on a salt marsh.

Current Music: The Watersons, "Hilda's Cabinet Band"

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kenjari

October 2025

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sovay - And I'm sorry that I forgot that binders don't go in the dryer
radiantfracture - Cardigan nights
sovay - And where the arrow leads, you never know
sovay - Trying my best to arrive
troisoiseaux - Weekend reading
sovay - The earth is too smart for us to break through
sovay - So can we say we'll never say the classic stuff, just show it?
mark in dw_maintenance - Database maintenance
sovay - Cigarette, Alka-Seltzer, career to the back of the place
sovay - The rose will grow on ice before we change our mind
sovay - I can see the alchemy
sovay - Is it the lustre of immortality?
radiantfracture - Hark, a Signature
troisoiseaux - Reading Wednesday
sovay - Did karma do you justice when you're down and out and lost?
troisoiseaux - Weekend reading
alierak in dw_maintenance - AWS outage
sovay - Distant as a northern star
sovay - You don't have to fly into the sun
sovay - And deregulate the couple at the bottom end

gletschergenossen

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