kenjari | Reading

$radiantfracture: All is not well (Ian's Eye)$

Happy book birthday to Rachel Ash Rosen's Blight, second in the Sleep of Reason trilogy.

I am excited to see this book in the world! The author is Known to Me as a fine stylist and a word-puncher on behalf of this often desperate global conspiracy we call trying to keep our human hearts alive.

(I consulted on the future aquatic subduction of my home city for this series and have no regrets.)

What is this book about? I will quote:

anti-fascism, revolution, queer longing, and like, giant fucking bone tentacles.

Would you like to read about a different end to the world? One in which, the characters, like you, have survived and find ways to make meaning and keep fighting after unimaginable loss?

Maybe you will like it, in that case.

(I was tempted to remove the "maybe" there, but my training tells me not to alter the sense of a quotation. Anyway. You will like it.)

Places to order Blight:

From the publisher

From the big river with all the books

From Books2Read

§rf§

sovay

Being left to my own devices this week with a pile of unfamiliar Agatha Christie, I naturally read them one after the other. I have nothing especially to note about Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1934) or The Sittaford Mystery (1931) except that it turned out to be a duplicate of the US-titled The Murder at Hazelmoor and I swapped it out for Dolores Hitchens' Cat's Claw (1943), but Christie's They Came to Baghdad (1951) is a reasonably wild ride of a novel which mixes several different flavors of spy thriller with a romance conducted on an archaeological dig at Tell Aswad, which I didn't even need to bet myself had been excavated by Max Mallowan. Minus the nuclear angle, its global conspiracy is right out of an interwar thriller—Christie to her credit defuses much of the potential for antisemitism with references to Siegfried and supermen instead—as is its Ambler-esque heroine gleefully launching herself into international intrigue with little more than her native wits and talent for straight-faced improvisation, but its spymaster is proto-le Carré, the chronically shabby, fiftyish, vague-looking Dakin, a career disappointment rumored to drink who never looks any less tired when dealing with affairs of endangered state. He gave me instant Denholm Elliott and never seems to have recurred in another novel of Christie's, alas. I made scones with candied ginger and sour cherries and lemon tonight.

Current Music: Fontaines D.C., "It's Amazing to Be Young"

sovay

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt.

spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

Current Music: Nation of Language, "Inept Apollo"

sovay

I got home to find the day's mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #83, containing my poem "Below Surface." It is a poem of empire; I wrote it at the start of the third week in January after shouting, "I ran out of curse tablets!" It bears about as much relation to the realities of the Emperors who died at Eboracum as the medieval Welsh legends of Constantius and I see no reason that should impair its efficacy. The issue it belongs to is gone, showcasing the elusive fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Christian Fiachra Stevens, J. M. Vesper, Vincent Bae, and more. John and Flo Stanton contribute interior art as well as the reliable spirit photography of their front and back covers. You might as well pick up a copy before it disappears.

I photographed some ghost windows. I bought myself some white chocolate peanut butter cups.

selkie's gift of tinned mackerel with lemon did not survive the night.

Current Music: Billy Bragg, "A Pict Song"

troisoiseaux

Emily Burns' new adaptation of Frankenstein at the Shakespeare Theatre Company is phenomenal— I've been struggling to explain it in a way that a. doesn't undersell how well it works and b. isn't just the Jenny Slate Drunk History meme, but trust me, it's so good. It's a reimagining of Mary Shelley's original plot— the first half takes the events of Victor's return to Geneva and re-centers it on his foster sister/fiancée(!) Elizabeth, and on Justine, the servant framed for the murder of Victor's younger brother; the second half departs from the book entirely, but has more than a little of Mary and Percy Shelley's history in its DNA— with a distinctly contemporary voice, but it weaves in Mary Shelley's original text in ways that carry new meanings: ( ... ) The dynamic between Victor and Elizabeth is messed up in a way that makes for delicious theater— Victor is the worst, in an "abusive boyfriend learns therapy words" way that, I swear, you could feel the audience (which, at least where I was sitting, skewed towards younger women) mentally screaming for Elizabeth to throw the entire man out; this play leans into the Gothic faux-cest vibes with flashbacks to the pair of them sniping like siblings— and the main theme is one of parents and children, explored through three different plot threads: obviously, that of Victor Frankenstein's refusal to take responsibility for the creature he created, which hangs over most of the play as an unspoken but omnipresent rebuke; the undercurrent of grief (mutual), resentment (Victor's), and guilt (Elizabeth's) over the fact that Victor's mother died because she'd nursed Elizabeth when she was ill; and ( spoilers! )

Also saw The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical at the Signature Theater, having finally wised up to the fact that if a new musical is being produced in DC it's probably on its way to Broadway, so I might as well see it now. (Cheaper tickets! Potential bragging rights!) This is exactly what it says on the tin - a rock musical by Joe Iconis about writer Hunter S. Thompson, father of Gonzo journalism in the 1960s-70s - and certainly timely; to lean into the inevitable Hamilton comparisons, Hunter...'s Burr is Richard Nixon as a so-sleezy-it's-camp psychopomp haunting Thompson's final hours as he runs through his life story, and the parallels to, you know, that other guy are about as subtle as a bonk to the head. Very meta, overall: as it goes on, the other characters begin to confront Thompson over his version of events and demand to speak for themselves. There was a frequent use of puppets, including a peacock, a baby that could make a fight the man! fist and flip the bird, and a giant Nixon head. (Yes, in addition to the actor playing Nixon.) I enjoyed this a lot!! The only downside of seeing such a new show is that I've had random snippets of lyrics and melodies floating around in my head for days and there's no cast recording to listen to. (ETA: There is an official trailer, though!)

( ETA #2: found some individual songs online )

sovay

Under the circumstances, I had different weird dreams than I would have expected: writing a poem, watching some incredibly threadbare film noir with no waking equivalent, hearing a performance from a musical theater star ditto. I am beginning to think the pop culture of my dreams actually is the hell of a good video store next door, leavened in the last few nights by dreams of re-reading real-life authors currently in storage like P.C. Hodgell or Joan D. Vinge. I remain physically fried, news at nowhen. At least the rain seems to have kept off the neighborly leafblowing which perforated so much of yesterday. The news continues to feel like stupidly lethal cosplay, which I remember from the last round of this administration, which doesn't make me hate it less.

Current Music: The Lumineers, "Same Old Song"

sovay

It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.

( Nervous, tired, desensitized. )

tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.

Current Music: Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, "Idiot Box"

troisoiseaux

Read Real Ones by Katherena Vermette, discovered via

sabotabby: a novel about about two adult sisters, who are Michif/Métis on their dad's side (this is important), grappling with the public exposure of their estranged mother's false claims of Indigenous ancestry, which she's used to build a career as an artist. I feel like most of the novels I've read tackling race-faking for profit/clout/??? in academia/the arts are biting satires - R.F. Kuang's Yellowface, Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation - and even Louise Erdrich's The Sentence uses supernatural elements to express the violence of white people appropriating Indigenous identity; this one feels... subtler, maybe? It's very much grounded in the family drama of two sisters being betrayed and disappointed yet again by a self-absorbed mother who's betrayed and disappointed them over and over for as long as they can remember, this time playing out with a Greek chorus of op-eds and Twitter takes on a scandal now so weirdly familiar that Vermette tends to reference them obliquely rather than in detail. Really good; I especially liked how distinct the two sisters' voices were, as alternating POV characters.

Read With a Bare Bodkin by Cyril Hare, which fell short of Hare's Tragedy at Law, imo, but honestly, what wouldn't? This one had some fun concepts— set against the backdrop of a minor government agency housed in some sprawling pile for the duration of WWII, the plot kicks off with a conversation about how one of the civil servants is a mystery novelist on the side and everyone going "oooh wouldn't this office be a great setting for a murder mystery?", so it's got quite a crossover of tropes— and also the distinction of being one of the few mysteries where the author pulls a "clearly signaling something as A Clue by having the main character realize that some detail is Significant" and I actually immediately twigged to the discrepancy being hinted at and remembered where to cross-reference the detail earlier in the book, although, to be fair, this was not exactly subtly dropped, either in context or by the author to the reader.

sovay

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

Current Music: Clover County, "Ultraviolet"

sovay

For the seventy-first yahrzeit of Alan Turing, I have been listening to selections from the galaxy-brained fusion of Michael Vegas Mussmann and Payton Millet's Alan Turing and the Queen of the Night (2025) as well as the glitterqueer mad science of Kele Fleming's "Turing Test" (2024). Every year I discover new art in his memory, like Frank Duffy's A lion for Alan Turing (2023). Lately I treasure it like spite. The best would be countries doing better by their queer and trans living than their honored and unnecessary dead.

Current Music: Kele Fleming, "Turing Test"

sovay

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Current Music: Lucy Dacus, "Most Wanted Man"

sovay

As my day centrally involved a very long-awaited referral finally coming through and foundering immediately on the shoals of the American healthcare system, it wasn't a very good one. The CDC called for my opinions on vaccination which it turned out I was not permitted to state for the record without a minor child in the house. Because the call was recorded for quality assurance, I said just in case that I had children in my life if not my legal residence and I supported their vaccination so as to protect them from otherwise life-threatening communicable diseases and did not express my opinion of the incumbent secretary of health and human services and his purity of essence. I got hung up on before I could tell my family stories from before the polio vaccine and the MMR.

Of course the man in the White House used the Boulder attack to justify his latest travel ban. Burned Jews are good for his business. I appreciate this op-ed from Eric K. Ward. I hope it reaches anyone it's meant to. I thought I was jaundiced about people and now I think I'm just in liver failure.

It would never have occurred to me that a video for Talking Heads' "Psycho Killer" (1977) should have anything to do with psychological realism, but Saoirse Ronan seems to have had a great time with it.

Current Music: Sam Fender, "Tyrants"

sovay

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls

spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

Current Music: Frog Eyes, "A Library Used to Be (Black Hole and Its Concentrated Edges)"

sovay

I just had my hand dipped in paraffin for a therapeutic procedure and it was so cool. After four immersions in the bracingly hot, clear, slightly soft liquid which reminded me of candle-making in elementary school, it formed a dully livid, slowly malleable coating in which I could see instantly the possibilities of practical effects, although what I actually said as I carefully brought my mannequin hand over to the table where it would be wrapped in plastic and insulated with a towel was, "It's fascinating. I must be quite flammable." The heat lingered much longer in the paraffin than I had expected from the quick-hardening dots and puddles of candlewax and cooled to room temperature without brittling. It had to be rubbed through to be removed. Tragically it did not peel off like a glove into an inverted ghost hand, but it could actually be worked off my wrist and fingers in a coherent thick wrinkle and took none of the small hairs off the back of my hand with it, like its own Vaseline layer. "Your skin is going to be so moisturized," the therapist promised me. I am still getting a referral to a hand specialist, but it was such a neat experience and like nothing I have experienced at a doctor's. It did not trip my sensory wires and made me think of Colin Clive in Mad Love (1935).

Current Music: Jade Bird, "Dreams"

sovay

It improves my mood considerably that I can listen to the Drive's "Jerkin'" (1977) because not only is the song itself a brilliant example of stupid rock, the band existed for a grand total of seven months during which it managed to release one un-radio-playable single, manufacture a scandal, blow an important gig, and implode in a puff of 20/20 hindsight, which sounds like a none more punk biography to me. Any myriad of such one-not-exactly-hit wonders would have bubbled through any scene with a critical exposure to Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols—in this case it was Dundee's—but this one left enough traces that I can, thanks to one of the better functions of the internet, experience all six and a half minutes of their total musical record and read for myself their history according to their lead singer, who really should feel proud that so much pleasure can be transferred through a song about masturbation. It has a two-guitar solo! DIY that slide! The persistence of thrown-at-the-wall weirdness makes me feel better about the world. On that note, because I had recent occasion to, as it were, drag it out, Lou Rand Hogan's The Gay Cookbook (1965).

Current Music: The Drive, "Jerkin'"

sovay

All praise to the makers of Bar Keepers Friend, which enabled me and

rushthatspeaks to de-blue the shower tonight after he had re-dyed his hair. It took us four tries to find a restaurant that wasn't dark Mondays, but eventually El Vaquero came through with, in my case, a spectacularly stuffed burrito de lengua which did its best to be bigger than my head. I am not at the top of my health and feeling more than a little disintegrated about current events. Have a picture from a window of MIT.

Current Music: Wolf Alice, "Bloom Baby Bloom"

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kenjari

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gletschergenossen

Reading

A book, a Blight, a light in the deep and obscure night

Perform the ritual that puts me in the part

Wish they'd drop the knife in the peep-show parking lot

And then we shall dance on your graves

Recent theater

I'll never see my mom's guitar again

All that skin against the glass

Recent reading

I stay quiet, but I'm seeing ultraviolet

It's morphogenesis

Finally, time to write the book on you

On Fortuna's wheel, I'm running

I know it made your head spin, what we did with money

But now I'm a villain, I'm a killer, a dying light

Ever since I met you, honey, I just want to get laid

Every flower needs to neighbor with the dirt

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June 2025

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