Chucky (TV)
Jun. 10th, 2025 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scaramoucheDespite following the Chucky TV show closely in season 1, I never got around to catching up with the later two seasons before it got cancelled. But the show has dropped on (our) Netflix! Only the first two seasons, but that's still given me the kick to rewatch season 1 before finally checking out season 2.
I just finished season 1, and I have to say that bingeing it feels really different from the anticipation and build-up of watching week to week, plus it makes the mild swerve at the back half of the season feel more of the swerve that it is. I love the lore of the franchise, and the arrival of Tiffany, Nica, Andy and Kyle was SO exciting back then, but in this rewatch I got annoyed by it because it took time away from the new characters, and all the great character work that we got at the start of the season thins out to make way for the amped-up shenanigans.
Which is all the more a shame because although they organically got the story to a point where it makes sense for Jake and his bully Lexy, and his crush Devon, to work together and trust each other, I felt there they needed one or two more scenes to acknowledge that growth and what Lexy especially had learned about herself. There was even an opportunity for it when Lexy, who has gone through a hero arc, confronts Junior, who has gone through a villain arc, at the end and they could've both expressed how they'd gone on different journeys and are seeing each other from new vantage points.
Also, Devon doesn't get as much as the other two to work with, innit. He's the Perfect Crush and then the Perfect Boyfriend, and despite being a teenager he always knows the correct sensitive thing to say at any given moment, even when he sadly backs away from helping out. They don't explore what should be his fascinating headspace, as a boy who has a widowed cop for a mom, and is deep enough into true crime that he has has a competently-made podcast. Devon doesn't even really get to react when his mom dies, I was so startled by that! That said, a sincere and cute youthful gay romance, especially in a horror franchise, is special in itself, so my guess is that a black boy like Devon being smart and desired is more subversive than if he were not, regardless of the lack of depth in the character himself. (Which also results in spiffy gender dynamics among the teen characters, where the "Smurfette" is the bully that needs redeeming instead of the love interest.)
I just finished season 1, and I have to say that bingeing it feels really different from the anticipation and build-up of watching week to week, plus it makes the mild swerve at the back half of the season feel more of the swerve that it is. I love the lore of the franchise, and the arrival of Tiffany, Nica, Andy and Kyle was SO exciting back then, but in this rewatch I got annoyed by it because it took time away from the new characters, and all the great character work that we got at the start of the season thins out to make way for the amped-up shenanigans.
Which is all the more a shame because although they organically got the story to a point where it makes sense for Jake and his bully Lexy, and his crush Devon, to work together and trust each other, I felt there they needed one or two more scenes to acknowledge that growth and what Lexy especially had learned about herself. There was even an opportunity for it when Lexy, who has gone through a hero arc, confronts Junior, who has gone through a villain arc, at the end and they could've both expressed how they'd gone on different journeys and are seeing each other from new vantage points.
Also, Devon doesn't get as much as the other two to work with, innit. He's the Perfect Crush and then the Perfect Boyfriend, and despite being a teenager he always knows the correct sensitive thing to say at any given moment, even when he sadly backs away from helping out. They don't explore what should be his fascinating headspace, as a boy who has a widowed cop for a mom, and is deep enough into true crime that he has has a competently-made podcast. Devon doesn't even really get to react when his mom dies, I was so startled by that! That said, a sincere and cute youthful gay romance, especially in a horror franchise, is special in itself, so my guess is that a black boy like Devon being smart and desired is more subversive than if he were not, regardless of the lack of depth in the character himself. (Which also results in spiffy gender dynamics among the teen characters, where the "Smurfette" is the bully that needs redeeming instead of the love interest.)
Book Review: Little Dancer Aged Fourteen
Jun. 9th, 2025 01:52 pmosprey_archerThe university where I work happens to have a bronze cast of Degas’ “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, so before I read Camille Laurens’ book of the same name (recommended by troisoiseaux), I went to have a good long look at the sculpture.
It’s less than life-size - perhaps two-thirds, one-half the size of the actual fourteen-year-old dancer. You can see the bronze creases in her stockings at the ankles and knees, the places where socks begin to wear out. Her forehead slopes back sharply, more sharply really than I think the human forehead can. Her hair hangs down her back in a rope braid, which is tied with a golden satin ribbon. A real ribbon, fabric rather than bronze.
She wears, too, a cloth tutu, and the curator told us (when I visited with my parents months ago) that the tutu has to be replaced every now and then, always to great debate about exactly how it should look, as the tutu on Degas’ original statue (wax, not bronze) was long gone when collectors decided to make a metal cast. How long should it be? What color? What kind of fabric?
The one at my university is about knee-length, much pleated, creamy pale layers of some fabric that might be tulle, the outer layer purposely frayed for the bottom quarter inch or so. The dancer’s feet are in the fourth position, but her hands are behind her back, and seem rather large for her size.
Thus prepared, I dived into Camille Laurens’ Little Dancer Age Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece, translated by Willard Wood. Laurens is attempting to write a biography of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the famous sculpture, but as there is very little material about Marie, it becomes a hodgepodge of other things, including a partial biography of Degas (and indeed it’s filed under his name at my library).
The book is also about the historical conditions of the young dancers at the Paris Opera, who were called rats and generally assumed to offer sexual favors on the side, giving the ballet a scandalous vibe that most 21st century viewers probably don’t pick up from looking at Degas’ pictures, since nowadays ballet is seen as a refined high art. (Is a picture, or a sculpture, worth a thousand words? Or can it tell us anything that we don’t already know?)
And it’s about the initial reception of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which more or less universally appalled viewers when it was first exhibited. Was it because Degas modeled the sculpture’s head to fit what was then considered the physiognomy of criminals? (Hence the sharply sloping forehead.) The association of ballet dancers with prostitution, which perhaps becomes a little queasy-making when you look at this flat-chested statue of a child?
Or the fact that the original statue was modeled in grayish wax, so the little dancer must have looked just a little corpse-like? A completely different viewing experience than the bronze cast I studied so carefully.
Degas, Laurens notes, was upset about the restoration attempts on a famous painting in the Louvre, a Rembrandt if I recall correctly. It was not the quality of the attempt that he objected to, but the fact that an attempt was made at all. Art, Degas thought, is a living thing; and like all living things, an artwork has its time to die.
troisoiseaux), I went to have a good long look at the sculpture. It’s less than life-size - perhaps two-thirds, one-half the size of the actual fourteen-year-old dancer. You can see the bronze creases in her stockings at the ankles and knees, the places where socks begin to wear out. Her forehead slopes back sharply, more sharply really than I think the human forehead can. Her hair hangs down her back in a rope braid, which is tied with a golden satin ribbon. A real ribbon, fabric rather than bronze.
She wears, too, a cloth tutu, and the curator told us (when I visited with my parents months ago) that the tutu has to be replaced every now and then, always to great debate about exactly how it should look, as the tutu on Degas’ original statue (wax, not bronze) was long gone when collectors decided to make a metal cast. How long should it be? What color? What kind of fabric?
The one at my university is about knee-length, much pleated, creamy pale layers of some fabric that might be tulle, the outer layer purposely frayed for the bottom quarter inch or so. The dancer’s feet are in the fourth position, but her hands are behind her back, and seem rather large for her size.
Thus prepared, I dived into Camille Laurens’ Little Dancer Age Fourteen: The True Story Behind Degas’ Masterpiece, translated by Willard Wood. Laurens is attempting to write a biography of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for the famous sculpture, but as there is very little material about Marie, it becomes a hodgepodge of other things, including a partial biography of Degas (and indeed it’s filed under his name at my library).
The book is also about the historical conditions of the young dancers at the Paris Opera, who were called rats and generally assumed to offer sexual favors on the side, giving the ballet a scandalous vibe that most 21st century viewers probably don’t pick up from looking at Degas’ pictures, since nowadays ballet is seen as a refined high art. (Is a picture, or a sculpture, worth a thousand words? Or can it tell us anything that we don’t already know?)
And it’s about the initial reception of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, which more or less universally appalled viewers when it was first exhibited. Was it because Degas modeled the sculpture’s head to fit what was then considered the physiognomy of criminals? (Hence the sharply sloping forehead.) The association of ballet dancers with prostitution, which perhaps becomes a little queasy-making when you look at this flat-chested statue of a child?
Or the fact that the original statue was modeled in grayish wax, so the little dancer must have looked just a little corpse-like? A completely different viewing experience than the bronze cast I studied so carefully.
Degas, Laurens notes, was upset about the restoration attempts on a famous painting in the Louvre, a Rembrandt if I recall correctly. It was not the quality of the attempt that he objected to, but the fact that an attempt was made at all. Art, Degas thought, is a living thing; and like all living things, an artwork has its time to die.
Book Log: The Queen's Thief reread & read (part #3)
Jun. 9th, 2025 09:28 amscaramoucheOnward, to Thick as Thieves! Which feels a little like hitting on the breaks after the momentum of the previous books, but I think makes sense for the series as a whole because it's a return to its roots with a road trip underpinned by a lie Eugenides has set into motion from the beginning, plus as a breather of sorts before the final book. I think I was a little impatient with the book the first time I read it, despite very much enjoying Kamet and Costis's dynamic, but this time round I relaxed myself into the worldbuilding and set up for the open confrontation with the Medes that was obviously going to happen in the final book.
Then, FINALLY, Return of the Thief. I've only read it once but I think I'll read it one more time before I arrange the whole series properly on my bookshelf. I enjoyed it a lot but it's such a bittersweet read for having to say goodbye to the characters and the world, and by necessity this book had to be more straightforward in tying all the plot threads and set up together.
I said in a previous post that The Queen of Attolia didn't work for me as much because although it has so much happening plot-wise, the lack of a strong POV to hook our emotions onto weakened it for me, and here! Return of the Thief does EXACTLY what I wanted QoA to do, by introducing a compelling new character to follow and to be the eyes with which we view the plot, and Pheris SO GREAT. I love him, what a good boy, and amazingly Turner has made yet another new POV character that's distinct and different from everyone who's come before, especially in terms of interrogating the series' thing about unreliable narrators by having a character who is at pains to notice and make sense of the world's truths, even the awful ones, and good gravy is his personal story tough to get through.
( A little crit behind the cut )
Then, FINALLY, Return of the Thief. I've only read it once but I think I'll read it one more time before I arrange the whole series properly on my bookshelf. I enjoyed it a lot but it's such a bittersweet read for having to say goodbye to the characters and the world, and by necessity this book had to be more straightforward in tying all the plot threads and set up together.
I said in a previous post that The Queen of Attolia didn't work for me as much because although it has so much happening plot-wise, the lack of a strong POV to hook our emotions onto weakened it for me, and here! Return of the Thief does EXACTLY what I wanted QoA to do, by introducing a compelling new character to follow and to be the eyes with which we view the plot, and Pheris SO GREAT. I love him, what a good boy, and amazingly Turner has made yet another new POV character that's distinct and different from everyone who's come before, especially in terms of interrogating the series' thing about unreliable narrators by having a character who is at pains to notice and make sense of the world's truths, even the awful ones, and good gravy is his personal story tough to get through.
( A little crit behind the cut )
Book Review: Midwinter Nightingale
Jun. 8th, 2025 03:43 pmosprey_archerJoan Aiken finished the last two books in the Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence just before her death in 2004. The penultimate book, Midwinter Nightingale, has certain flaws that indicate a rushed or weary author, but before I discuss these flaws I do want to state that I’m very glad Aiken did write these books, as it seems right and proper that the series should come full circle with Dido and Simon at the end.
The main flaw in Midwinter Nightingale was the pacing, which is usually Aiken’s strong suit: in most of her book she packs so many happenings into a chapter thatlittlerhymes and I struggled to discuss all the developments. But here, the characters spend the first half of the book wandering more or less aimlessly before the plot really kicks off.
Also, this is petty but I just have to complain, Aiken offers three separate and incompatible lengths for the time that has elapsed since King Dick’s coronation. It happened 15 years ago, as it coincided with his marriage to his (second) wife Princess Adelaide. (As it turns out, Prince Davie who died in the mines was the son of King Dick’s hitherto unmentioned first wife, which means Davie was a teenager when he went to investigate the mines, which is better than going off to investigate at the age of about five as I first thought.)
But it also happened six years ago, because that’s when Dido said she first got back to England, and as we know Dido saved the ceremony which otherwise would have been interrupted by St. Paul’s Cathedral rolling into the Thames. But then Dido mentions her adventures on the island of Aratu, which happened before her return to England, as occurring “two or three years ago.” WHICH IS IT, AIKEN? Please just stop giving us numbers.
However, it is lovely to be back with Dido again. Is is fine but she’s just not the same. I enjoyed the reappearance of Aiken’s trademark ferocious creatures in the form of a moat filled with man-eating fish and crocodiles (although I’m still so sad they killed spoiler redacted and spoiler redacted!), and also the unexpected plot point of two completely non-ferocious bears. They just want Simon to give them head massages to help them cope with the wet cold of England! Who among us has not dreamed of a bear friend?
The next (and last) book is very short, and was in fact published posthumously. I envision Aiken writing it on a legal pad in her hospital bed, and will not hold it against her if it occasionally devolves from prose into a list of bullet points.
The main flaw in Midwinter Nightingale was the pacing, which is usually Aiken’s strong suit: in most of her book she packs so many happenings into a chapter that
littlerhymes and I struggled to discuss all the developments. But here, the characters spend the first half of the book wandering more or less aimlessly before the plot really kicks off. Also, this is petty but I just have to complain, Aiken offers three separate and incompatible lengths for the time that has elapsed since King Dick’s coronation. It happened 15 years ago, as it coincided with his marriage to his (second) wife Princess Adelaide. (As it turns out, Prince Davie who died in the mines was the son of King Dick’s hitherto unmentioned first wife, which means Davie was a teenager when he went to investigate the mines, which is better than going off to investigate at the age of about five as I first thought.)
But it also happened six years ago, because that’s when Dido said she first got back to England, and as we know Dido saved the ceremony which otherwise would have been interrupted by St. Paul’s Cathedral rolling into the Thames. But then Dido mentions her adventures on the island of Aratu, which happened before her return to England, as occurring “two or three years ago.” WHICH IS IT, AIKEN? Please just stop giving us numbers.
However, it is lovely to be back with Dido again. Is is fine but she’s just not the same. I enjoyed the reappearance of Aiken’s trademark ferocious creatures in the form of a moat filled with man-eating fish and crocodiles (although I’m still so sad they killed spoiler redacted and spoiler redacted!), and also the unexpected plot point of two completely non-ferocious bears. They just want Simon to give them head massages to help them cope with the wet cold of England! Who among us has not dreamed of a bear friend?
The next (and last) book is very short, and was in fact published posthumously. I envision Aiken writing it on a legal pad in her hospital bed, and will not hold it against her if it occasionally devolves from prose into a list of bullet points.
(no subject)
Jun. 6th, 2025 08:18 pmskygiantsA while back, lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy.
Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.
For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.
As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history thatlirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.
Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.
Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.
lirazel posted about a bad book about an interesting topic -- Conspiracy Theories About Lemuria -- which apparently got most of its information from a scholarly text called The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy. Great! I said. I bet the library has that book, I'll read it instead of the bad one! which now I have done.
For those unfamiliar, for a while the idea of sunken land-bridges joining various existing landmasses was very popular in 19th century geology; Lemuria got its name because it was supposed to explain why there are lemurs in Madagascar and India but not anywhere else. Various other land-bridges were also theorized but Lemuria's the only one that got famous thanks to the catchy name getting picked up by various weird occultists (most notably Helena Blavatasky) and incorporated into their variably incomprehensible Theories of Human Origins, Past Paradises, Etc.
As is not unexpected, this book is a much more dense, scholarly, and theory-driven tome than the bad pop history that
lirazel read. What was unexpected for me is that the author's scholarly interests focus on a.) cartography and b.) Tamil language and cultural politics, and so what she's most interested in doing is tracing how the concept of a Lemurian continent went from being an outdated geographic supposition to a weird Western occult fringe belief to an extremely mainstream, government-supported historical narrative in Tamil-speaking polities, where Lost Lemuria has become associated with the legendary drowned Tamil homeland of Tamilnāṭu and thus the premise for a claim that not only is the Lemurian continent the source of human origins but that specifically the Tamil language is the source language for humanity.Not the book I expected to be reading! but I'm not at all mad about how things turned out! the prose is so dry that it was definite work to wade through but the rewards were real; the author has another whole book about Tamil language politics and part of me knows I am not really theory-brained enough for it at this time but the other part is tempted.
Also I did as well come out with a few snippets of the Weird Nonsense that I thought I was going in for! My favorite anecdote involves a woman named Gertrude Norris Meeker who wrote to the U.S. government in the 1950s claiming to be the Governor-General of Atlantis and Lemuria, ascertaining her sovereign right to this nonexistent territory, to which the State Department's Special Advisor on Geography had to write back like "we do not think that is true; this place does not exist." Eventually Gertrude Meeker got a congressman involved who also nobly wrote to the government on behalf of his constituent: "Mrs. Meeker understands that by renouncing her citizenship she could become Queen of these islands, but as a citizen she can rule as governor-general. [...] She states that she is getting ready to do some leasing for development work on some of these islands." And again the State Department was patiently like "we do not think that is true, as this place does not exist." Subsequently they seem to have developed a "Lemuria and Atlantis are not real" form letter which I hope and trust is still being used today.
(no subject)
Jun. 6th, 2025 09:53 amcahnI know I owe a bunch of comments/replies, sorry, I will get to them; I have spent all my time this week (including time I should have been working... took a nontrivial amount of vacation time this week) on the following:
- looking around at schools for A in case his school gets utterly consumed by the drama (yep, third teacher did leave, now we are screwed unless the Head can find someone really quickly, which to be fair he is working SUPER hard at), unfortunately all my friends who have kids at the local public school were like "if it were ten years ago we'd recommend it, but now we are telling you not to go there"
- talking (and TALKING) to people who are affected by the drama, or who are not directly affected but still angry about the drama, or who are in some cases causing the drama. There is some mean girl stuff going on and it is like, uh, we are all in our 40's and 50's, this is STUPID?? I have been on the phone A LOT this week, to the extent that E has to write a poem for Spanish about a member of her family and told me she was thinking about writing about her mom and how she was on the phone all the time.
- helping E with her final papers/projects in English and Media Arts; for the latter she sometimes needs someone to say things like "if you are making a commercial you probably need a script for it" and for the former she needs someone to be more like, "so... your thesis is made up of two sentences that seem unrelated, and also the way you're structuring this with all your lemma examples and then all your other lemma examples does not really flow very well, and also you begin several sentences in a row with 'This shows'" (some of these are the limits of approaching a paper like a proof, I guess)
Her teacher lets them rewrite after grading multiple times but does not give them any comments on their draft except for the ungraded rough draft, which means that E is on Rewrite #3 and counting, we have worked on drafts every night this week except last night, as her teacher has not graded #3 yet, which I am hoping is a good sign but might just mean that her teacher is tired of her turning in rewrites
(I do like that her teacher is a bit harsh on grading but lets them rewrite -- Rewrite #3 is quite a bit better than her original graded paper, and I think she's learned a LOT about writing a literary analysis paper, admittedly quite a bit more than I knew at her age. But more feedback would have been really nice, and then maybe she could have done fewer rewrites.)
She also has another final project in English with involves writing and illustrating a kid's story about racism, only using animals or objects or shapes instead of people. Of course when "shapes" were mentioned E jumped at that option. Her story is really sweet and involves tessellations of triangles, squares, and hexagons, but she is definitely a "tell not show" kid and also is having trouble with the part of the assignment that directs them to use descriptive language, which just goes to show you that she is legitimately D's and my kid.
In conclusion: ugh, drama. The only good things about all the drama:
- I may actually finish the crochet blanket for E that I've been working on for uh two years but have been making lots of progress on during all these phone calls? (Also getting lots of time to work on it during tutoring E, but at least that has other good things about it besides the blanket.)
- man I appreciate the other non-dramatic parts of my life a LOT more now! Including DW and all of my non-dramatic friends (the vast majority of them!) but I've also been thinking a lot of my church which is my other big social structure. There was one day where I just looked at my phone texts I'd gotten that day and half of them were school-related and were all drama, and the other half were from my church and things like "Hey, can you play piano for us?" and "I haven't forgotten about the D&D group we were talking about with E!" <-- dude and wife had a BABY last week -- and my favorite, this sweet older lady that we are friends with texting me that she went to her eye appointment and they said everything was great, and she was just happy about that. That totally brightened my day <3 And this morning they had the "morning seminary" party (these kids go to 7am scripture study five days a week -- E does it 3 days a week) and these people just give SO much <3
(edited bc cannot do math)
- looking around at schools for A in case his school gets utterly consumed by the drama (yep, third teacher did leave, now we are screwed unless the Head can find someone really quickly, which to be fair he is working SUPER hard at), unfortunately all my friends who have kids at the local public school were like "if it were ten years ago we'd recommend it, but now we are telling you not to go there"
- talking (and TALKING) to people who are affected by the drama, or who are not directly affected but still angry about the drama, or who are in some cases causing the drama. There is some mean girl stuff going on and it is like, uh, we are all in our 40's and 50's, this is STUPID?? I have been on the phone A LOT this week, to the extent that E has to write a poem for Spanish about a member of her family and told me she was thinking about writing about her mom and how she was on the phone all the time.
- helping E with her final papers/projects in English and Media Arts; for the latter she sometimes needs someone to say things like "if you are making a commercial you probably need a script for it" and for the former she needs someone to be more like, "so... your thesis is made up of two sentences that seem unrelated, and also the way you're structuring this with all your lemma examples and then all your other lemma examples does not really flow very well, and also you begin several sentences in a row with 'This shows'" (some of these are the limits of approaching a paper like a proof, I guess)
Her teacher lets them rewrite after grading multiple times but does not give them any comments on their draft except for the ungraded rough draft, which means that E is on Rewrite #3 and counting, we have worked on drafts every night this week except last night, as her teacher has not graded #3 yet, which I am hoping is a good sign but might just mean that her teacher is tired of her turning in rewrites
(I do like that her teacher is a bit harsh on grading but lets them rewrite -- Rewrite #3 is quite a bit better than her original graded paper, and I think she's learned a LOT about writing a literary analysis paper, admittedly quite a bit more than I knew at her age. But more feedback would have been really nice, and then maybe she could have done fewer rewrites.)
She also has another final project in English with involves writing and illustrating a kid's story about racism, only using animals or objects or shapes instead of people. Of course when "shapes" were mentioned E jumped at that option. Her story is really sweet and involves tessellations of triangles, squares, and hexagons, but she is definitely a "tell not show" kid and also is having trouble with the part of the assignment that directs them to use descriptive language, which just goes to show you that she is legitimately D's and my kid.
In conclusion: ugh, drama. The only good things about all the drama:
- I may actually finish the crochet blanket for E that I've been working on for uh two years but have been making lots of progress on during all these phone calls? (Also getting lots of time to work on it during tutoring E, but at least that has other good things about it besides the blanket.)
- man I appreciate the other non-dramatic parts of my life a LOT more now! Including DW and all of my non-dramatic friends (the vast majority of them!) but I've also been thinking a lot of my church which is my other big social structure. There was one day where I just looked at my phone texts I'd gotten that day and half of them were school-related and were all drama, and the other half were from my church and things like "Hey, can you play piano for us?" and "I haven't forgotten about the D&D group we were talking about with E!" <-- dude and wife had a BABY last week -- and my favorite, this sweet older lady that we are friends with texting me that she went to her eye appointment and they said everything was great, and she was just happy about that. That totally brightened my day <3 And this morning they had the "morning seminary" party (these kids go to 7am scripture study five days a week -- E does it 3 days a week) and these people just give SO much <3
(edited bc cannot do math)
Adventures in DVDs
Jun. 6th, 2025 08:11 amosprey_archerI’ve never owned my own TV before, but one of my friends had an extra which became mine when I moved into the Hummingbird Cottage. A Target gift card had just come into my possession as a housewarming gift, so I traipsed off to Target for a DVD player.
“I didn’t know we sold those anymore,” the bemused clerk informed me. (Target does, however, have a large record selection. Also WiFi enabled record players. What a time to be alive.)
Undeterred, I made my purchase, and drove home happily dreaming of all the new movies and shows I would watch.
I did in fact manage to watch a couple of new movies: Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle, a wordless movie about a man marooned on an island who ends up marrying a turtle who turns into a woman (as turtles are wont to do), and Werner Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which is a fascinating documentary about trappers in the taiga, although it does keep saying things like “These trappers are almost untouched by modern civilization” as the trappers zoom off in their snow mobiles. I mean. Maybe a little touched by modern civilization?
However, what I’ve mostly been doing is rewatching old favorites. I rewatched the Romola Garai Emma and the pre-Raphaelite miniseries Desperate Romantics (both of which I own), and contemplated borrowing the 2006 Jane Eyre and 2008 Sense and Sensibility miniseries from the library before deciding that no, it was better to wait till I could find them used somewhere, and therefore enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
(I have not yet found either of those miniseries, but on my last visit to Half Price Books I DID find a copy of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries for a mere $10!!! which was instantly stolen by a friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Which is fair enough I guess.)
I did get the first two seasons of The Vicar of Dibley from the library, and have now started in on their Poirot collection, and was disconcerted to discover that with Poirot in particular I have barely any memory of the show. Things like the bit where Miss Lemon says “Poirot looked middle-aged even as a baby,” yes. The solutions to the mysteries? No. Gone. Might as well have never watched the show. Which is convenient for a rewatch, admittedly.
As much as I’m enjoying my rewatches, however (season one of Downton Abbey next?), I would like to stir a few new-to-me things into the mix as well.
1. I’ve started the 1981 sitcom A Fine Romance, because (a) it stars Judi Dench, and (b) the episodes are half an hour long. (I’m a sucker for shows with half hour episodes.) It’s cute, but I’m not totally sold yet. Will give it a few more episodes and see how I feel.
2. On the topic of half hour shows (actually 22-minute shows), I’ve heard Abbott Elementary is fantastic. Yes? No? Maybe so?
3. Given my love of Poirot, I was looking thoughtfully at the Miss Marple adaptations. But alas they’re all two hours long, and I turn into a pumpkin at about 60 minutes.
4. Has anyone seen Flambards? Would you recommend it? I’m considering it because it’s on the shelf at the library and I have a vague memory of someone, somewhere, gushing about it, except maybe they were gushing about the book that it’s based on and not the show.
5. I attempted to watch a Vanity Fair miniseries, by which I mean that I got a copy out of the library and then never even put it in the DVD player because the thought of watching Becky Sharp be mean to people while smiling sweetly was too stressful. Strongly suspect I would feel the same way about the classic 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, which is unfortunate as it would be the perfect capper for my George Smiley readings.
6. However, as a general rule, I do enjoy book to miniseries adaptations, especially if they’re period pieces and the episodes are less than an hour long. So please let me know if you have recs!
“I didn’t know we sold those anymore,” the bemused clerk informed me. (Target does, however, have a large record selection. Also WiFi enabled record players. What a time to be alive.)
Undeterred, I made my purchase, and drove home happily dreaming of all the new movies and shows I would watch.
I did in fact manage to watch a couple of new movies: Studio Ghibli’s The Red Turtle, a wordless movie about a man marooned on an island who ends up marrying a turtle who turns into a woman (as turtles are wont to do), and Werner Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, which is a fascinating documentary about trappers in the taiga, although it does keep saying things like “These trappers are almost untouched by modern civilization” as the trappers zoom off in their snow mobiles. I mean. Maybe a little touched by modern civilization?
However, what I’ve mostly been doing is rewatching old favorites. I rewatched the Romola Garai Emma and the pre-Raphaelite miniseries Desperate Romantics (both of which I own), and contemplated borrowing the 2006 Jane Eyre and 2008 Sense and Sensibility miniseries from the library before deciding that no, it was better to wait till I could find them used somewhere, and therefore enjoy the thrill of the hunt.
(I have not yet found either of those miniseries, but on my last visit to Half Price Books I DID find a copy of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries for a mere $10!!! which was instantly stolen by a friend who hasn’t seen it yet. Which is fair enough I guess.)
I did get the first two seasons of The Vicar of Dibley from the library, and have now started in on their Poirot collection, and was disconcerted to discover that with Poirot in particular I have barely any memory of the show. Things like the bit where Miss Lemon says “Poirot looked middle-aged even as a baby,” yes. The solutions to the mysteries? No. Gone. Might as well have never watched the show. Which is convenient for a rewatch, admittedly.
As much as I’m enjoying my rewatches, however (season one of Downton Abbey next?), I would like to stir a few new-to-me things into the mix as well.
1. I’ve started the 1981 sitcom A Fine Romance, because (a) it stars Judi Dench, and (b) the episodes are half an hour long. (I’m a sucker for shows with half hour episodes.) It’s cute, but I’m not totally sold yet. Will give it a few more episodes and see how I feel.
2. On the topic of half hour shows (actually 22-minute shows), I’ve heard Abbott Elementary is fantastic. Yes? No? Maybe so?
3. Given my love of Poirot, I was looking thoughtfully at the Miss Marple adaptations. But alas they’re all two hours long, and I turn into a pumpkin at about 60 minutes.
4. Has anyone seen Flambards? Would you recommend it? I’m considering it because it’s on the shelf at the library and I have a vague memory of someone, somewhere, gushing about it, except maybe they were gushing about the book that it’s based on and not the show.
5. I attempted to watch a Vanity Fair miniseries, by which I mean that I got a copy out of the library and then never even put it in the DVD player because the thought of watching Becky Sharp be mean to people while smiling sweetly was too stressful. Strongly suspect I would feel the same way about the classic 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, which is unfortunate as it would be the perfect capper for my George Smiley readings.
6. However, as a general rule, I do enjoy book to miniseries adaptations, especially if they’re period pieces and the episodes are less than an hour long. So please let me know if you have recs!
Scratching Itches
Jun. 5th, 2025 08:37 amlirazelI have made many a post about how no other writer scratches the same itch that Robin McKinley does, but here is another one, expanded out to talk about other writers who scratch very specific itches.
I am skeptical of the BookTok/GoodReads "readalikes" conversation, because I don't think there are any writers who actually readalike--every writer is distinct--and also I hate the tendency of book copy to compare books to other books/writers ("for readers of...") mostly because the comparisons are usually bad comparisons! Book B is nothing like Book A actually! Why did you even say that it was? Have you, person who wrote the copy, actually read both books? Etc.
However, I do think that thoughtful comparisons of writers can be helpful is the conversation is very specific about what you're actually comparing. For instance: if you ask for writers like Austen and someone suggests Heyer, that could work really well if what you're looking for is "romance set in Regency England written by someone who isn't just writing about Regency England via osmosis of reading a thousand other Regency novels" but it would simply be frustrating if what you're looking for is "gorgeous early 19th century prose and keen-eyed commentary on human foibles and social expectations." See?
So I'd like to have a discussion about what itches particular writers scratch that are difficult to find in other writers' works. That's not elegantly phrased, but maybe examples will help.
I'll probably make several posts about this featuring a handful of favorite writers or perhaps favorite books and I would be VERY interested to hear what itch-scratchers you're always looking for, whether in the comments or in your own posts. And if you can think of any writers or specific books that hit any one of the points I'm looking for below, please, please share recs! Recommendations are my love language!
When I say that I want more books like Eva Ibbotson's (adult) books (and Star of Kazan), what I mean is one or some combination of the following:
+ golden descriptions of pre-WWII Europe (particularly Hapsburg territory, particularly Vienna) with its sense of how diverse Europe was with dozens of different cultures all jostling with each other
+ colorful, eccentric, specific characters (mostly these are supporting characters in her books, not the leads, but I am happy whenever they arise) evoked through amazing details
+ beautiful writing about love for the arts, including moments of transcendence and grace in the midst of sorrow
What I'm not talking about:
+ the romances, which I find only partially convincing most of the time
When I say that I want more books like Robin McKinley's, what I am saying:
+ close attention to the domestic details of life from baking to raising newborn puppies to creating fire-proof dragon-fighting gear
+ an atmosphere that is warm without being saccharine--there's sorrow, pain, loss, etc. alongside the coziness
+ wonderful evocations of magic
+ wonderfully realized female characters (Beagle's Tamsin did this for me, if you want another example)
What I'm not talking about:
+ any particular one of her settings--I like them all but I don't go searching for them
+ fairytale retellings--these can be good! but often are not
When I say I want more books like Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series, what I mean is:
+ vividly evoked specific historical settings, a strong sense of place, settings that are rare and not over-visited (look, I love Victorian London as much as anyone, but sometimes I'd rather have a story set in Central Asia or the Incan Empire or something)
+ close attention to how power affects how people move through the world (without getting preachy)
+ focus on how marginalized people find agency and build lives despite the limits enforced on them by those forces of power
+ depictions of people trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to build relationships across those societally-enforced lines
What I'm not talking about:
+ historical mysteries, necessarily (I love historical mysteries when done well but SO many of them just do not work for me)
When I say I want more books like Susanna Clarke's, what I mean is:
+ magic that is beautiful but untamable, wild and fey
+ delightful footnotes or digressions
+ love for scholarship, history, books, etc.
+ a sense of wonder
+ a sense of the writer's deep understanding of the literature and history of the era she's writing about
What I'm not talking about:
+ conflicts between men wielding magic in different ways
+ Regency-era fantasy, necessarily (again, most of this does not hit for me)
I am skeptical of the BookTok/GoodReads "readalikes" conversation, because I don't think there are any writers who actually readalike--every writer is distinct--and also I hate the tendency of book copy to compare books to other books/writers ("for readers of...") mostly because the comparisons are usually bad comparisons! Book B is nothing like Book A actually! Why did you even say that it was? Have you, person who wrote the copy, actually read both books? Etc.
However, I do think that thoughtful comparisons of writers can be helpful is the conversation is very specific about what you're actually comparing. For instance: if you ask for writers like Austen and someone suggests Heyer, that could work really well if what you're looking for is "romance set in Regency England written by someone who isn't just writing about Regency England via osmosis of reading a thousand other Regency novels" but it would simply be frustrating if what you're looking for is "gorgeous early 19th century prose and keen-eyed commentary on human foibles and social expectations." See?
So I'd like to have a discussion about what itches particular writers scratch that are difficult to find in other writers' works. That's not elegantly phrased, but maybe examples will help.
I'll probably make several posts about this featuring a handful of favorite writers or perhaps favorite books and I would be VERY interested to hear what itch-scratchers you're always looking for, whether in the comments or in your own posts. And if you can think of any writers or specific books that hit any one of the points I'm looking for below, please, please share recs! Recommendations are my love language!
When I say that I want more books like Eva Ibbotson's (adult) books (and Star of Kazan), what I mean is one or some combination of the following:
+ golden descriptions of pre-WWII Europe (particularly Hapsburg territory, particularly Vienna) with its sense of how diverse Europe was with dozens of different cultures all jostling with each other
+ colorful, eccentric, specific characters (mostly these are supporting characters in her books, not the leads, but I am happy whenever they arise) evoked through amazing details
+ beautiful writing about love for the arts, including moments of transcendence and grace in the midst of sorrow
What I'm not talking about:
+ the romances, which I find only partially convincing most of the time
When I say that I want more books like Robin McKinley's, what I am saying:
+ close attention to the domestic details of life from baking to raising newborn puppies to creating fire-proof dragon-fighting gear
+ an atmosphere that is warm without being saccharine--there's sorrow, pain, loss, etc. alongside the coziness
+ wonderful evocations of magic
+ wonderfully realized female characters (Beagle's Tamsin did this for me, if you want another example)
What I'm not talking about:
+ any particular one of her settings--I like them all but I don't go searching for them
+ fairytale retellings--these can be good! but often are not
When I say I want more books like Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series, what I mean is:
+ vividly evoked specific historical settings, a strong sense of place, settings that are rare and not over-visited (look, I love Victorian London as much as anyone, but sometimes I'd rather have a story set in Central Asia or the Incan Empire or something)
+ close attention to how power affects how people move through the world (without getting preachy)
+ focus on how marginalized people find agency and build lives despite the limits enforced on them by those forces of power
+ depictions of people trying (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) to build relationships across those societally-enforced lines
What I'm not talking about:
+ historical mysteries, necessarily (I love historical mysteries when done well but SO many of them just do not work for me)
When I say I want more books like Susanna Clarke's, what I mean is:
+ magic that is beautiful but untamable, wild and fey
+ delightful footnotes or digressions
+ love for scholarship, history, books, etc.
+ a sense of wonder
+ a sense of the writer's deep understanding of the literature and history of the era she's writing about
What I'm not talking about:
+ conflicts between men wielding magic in different ways
+ Regency-era fantasy, necessarily (again, most of this does not hit for me)
Book Review: A Legacy of Spies
Jun. 5th, 2025 08:16 amosprey_archerI went into John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies with a certain trepidation, as the book is a late-career novel that retreads the events of Le Carre’s first break-out hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Years after the events in the earlier book, Smiley’s right-hand man Peter Guillam finds himself the focus of a legal investigation into what exactly went down during that mission.
Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature ( spoilers for all the Smiley books )
Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.
Frankly, the premise struck me as a tired rehash of an earlier success. But this is not a fair assessment of A Legacy of Spies, in which Le Carre cheerfully twists a few knives that he had hitherto left untwisted in the general Smiley saga. As such, this review will feature ( spoilers for all the Smiley books )
Despite my doubts, a perfect end to the series, really. Brings the story full circle, updates us on all the most interesting characters, continues the exploration of Le Carre’s favorite themes. Were we the bad guys? - by “we” meaning not England, or Europe, or the West, but the international brotherhood of spies.
(no subject)
Jun. 4th, 2025 08:47 pmskygiantsOver Memorial Day weekend genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren.
As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens thatcoffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!
My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."
Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.
The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.
The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.
However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'
The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((
Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )
Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.
NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.
genarti and I were on a mini-vacation at her family's cabin in the Finger Lakes, which features a fantastic bookshelf of yellowing midcentury mysteries stocked by genarti's grandmother. Often when I'm there I just avail myself of the existing material, but this time -- in increasing awareness of the way our own books are threatening to spill over our shelves again -- I seized this as an opportunity to check my bookshelves for the books that looked most like they belonged in a cabin in the Finger Lakes to read while I was there and then leave among their brethren. As a result, I have now finally read the second-to-last of the stock of Weird Joan Aikens that
coffeeandink gave me many years ago now, and boy was it extremely weird!My favorite Aiken books are often the ones where I straight up can't tell if she's attempting to sincerely Write in the Genre or if she is writing full deadpan parody. I think The Embroidered Sunset is at least half parody, in a deadpan and melancholy way. I actually have a hypothesis that someone asked Joan Aiken to write a Gothic, meaning the sort of romantic suspense girl-flees-from-house form of the genre popular in the 1970s, and she was like "great! I love the Gothic tradition! I will give you a plucky 1970s career girl and a mystery and a complex family history and several big creepy houses! would you also like a haunted seaside landscape, the creeping inevitability of loss and death, some barely-dodged incest and a tragic ending?" and Gollancz, weary of Joan Aiken and her antics, was just like "sure, Joan. Fine. Do whatever."
Our heroine, Lucy, is a talented, sensible, cross and rather ugly girl with notably weird front teeth, is frequently jokingly referred to as Lucy Snowe by one of her love interests; the big creepy old age home in which much of the novel takes place is called Wildfell Hall; at one point Lucy knocks on the front door of Old Colonel Linton and he's like 'oh my god! you look just like my great-grandmother Cathy Linton, nee Earnshaw! it's the notably weird front teeth!" Joan Will Have Her Little Jokes.
The plot? The plot. Lucy, an orphan being raised in New England by her evil uncle and his hapless wife and mean daughter, wants to go study music in England with the brilliant-but-tragically-dying refugee pianist Max Benovek. Her uncle pays her fare across the Atlantic, on the condition that she go and investigate a great-aunt who has been pulling a pension out of the family coffers for many years; the great-aunt was Living Long Term with Another Old Lady (the L word is not said but it is really felt) and one of them has now died, but no one is really clear which.
The evil uncle suspects that the surviving old lady may not be the great-aunt and may instead be Doing Fraud, so Lucy's main task is to locate the old lady and determine whether or not she is in fact her great-aunt. Additionally, the great aunt was a brilliant folk artist unrecognized in her own time and so the evil uncle has assigned Lucy a side quest of finding as many of her paintings as possible and bringing them back to be sold for many dollars.
However, before setting out on any of these quests, Lucy stops in on the dying refugee pianist to see if he will agree to teach her. They have an immediate meeting of the minds and souls! Not only does Max agree to take her on as His Last Pupil, he also immediately furnishes her with cash and a car, because her plan of hitchhiking down to Aunt Fennel's part of the UK could endanger her beautiful pianist's hands!! Now Lucy has a brilliant future ahead of her with someone who really cares about her, but also a ticking clock: she has to sort out this whole great-aunt business before Max progresses from 'tragically dying' to 'tragically dead.'
The rest of the book follows several threads:
- Lucy bopping around the World's Most Depressing Seaside Towns, which, it is ominously and repeatedly hinted, could flood catastraphically at any moment, grimly attempting to convince a series of incredibly weird and variably depressed locals to give her any information or paintings, which they are deeply disinclined to do
- Max, in his sickroom, reading Lucy's letters and going 'gosh I hope I get to teach that girl ... it would be my last and most important life's work .... BEFORE I DIE'
- Sinister Goings On At The Old Age Home! Escaped Convicts!! Secret Identities!!! What Could This All Have To Do With Lucy's Evil Uncle? Who Could Say! Is Their Doctor Faking Being Turkish? Who Could Say!! Why Does That One Old Woman Keep Holding Up An Electric Mixer And Remarking How Easy It Would Be To Murder Someone With It? Who Could Say That Either!!!
- an elderly woman who may or may not be Aunt Fennel, in terrible fear of Something, stacked into dingy and constrained settings packed with other old and fading strangers, trying not to think too hard about her dead partner and their beloved cat and the life that she used to have in her own home where she was happy and loved .... all of these sections genuinely gave me big emotions :(((
Eventually all these plotlines converge with increasingly chaotic drama! Lucy and the old lady meet and have a really interesting, affectionate but complicated relationship colored by deep loneliness and suspicion on both sides; again, I really genuinely cared about this! Lucy, who sometimes exhibits random psychic tendencies, visits the lesbian cottage and finds it is so powerfully and miserably haunted by the happiness that it once held and doesn't anymore that she nearly passes out about it! Then whole thing culminates in ( huge spoilers )
Anyway. A wild time. Some parts I liked very much! I hit the end and shrieked and then forced Beth to read it immediately because I needed to scream about it, and now it lives among its other yellowing paperback friends on the Midcentury Mysteries shelf for some other unsuspecting person to find and scream about.
NB: in addition to everything else a cat dies in this book .... Joan Aiken hates this cat in particular and I do not know why. She likes all the other cats! But for some reason she really wants us to understand that this cat has bad vibes and we should not be sad when it gets got. But me, I was sad.
Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 4th, 2025 04:25 pmsinealaWhat I Just Finished Reading
Marie Javins, Iron Man: Extremis Prose Novel: Extremis is an Iron Man arc I have read a lot, and I read this prose adaptation because I was interested in comparing the two; novelizations often flesh out the stories with additional details and I wanted to see what additional material was in here and what it was like.
(Also I promised myself I'd read one book a month and I finished this on the 31st in, like, an hour. I had a lot of migraines last month.)
The answer is that it's... weird. There is a lot of MCUification -- Tony has an arc reactor, a public superhero identity, and an AI named JARVIS, as well as a massive crush on Pepper -- but then it's also very comics -- Tony is sober, is clearly a working superhero and has been one for many many years, has a human butler named Jarvis who still works for the Avengers (who are clearly Tony's longtime friends), and has undergone at least a few of his bigger comics storylines, like being drunk and losing his company to Stane and being broke and living on the streets. You know. That one.
So I'm not really sure who this is for, because it's gonna annoy die-hard comics fans. I guess it's for fans who want to read some Iron Man and don't care much about continuity. Also, if you want a whole bunch of body-horror details about how Extremis works that are even more body-horrific than canon (like, Tony is conscious, mostly lucid, and blind and paralyzed and in pain the entire time he's in the cocoon and he is aware that Maya is talking to him) then I guess this is for you?
Also, weirdly, one of the ongoing themes is basically that it's Sexual Humiliation Hour for Tony? The first page of this book wants to tell us that there are tabloid stories about how Tony can't get it up, and the big Extremis reveal features Maya making fun of Tony because his dick's not bigger. I, uh. Okay? Yeah? Wasn't expecting any of that.
What I'm Reading Now
Comics Wednesday!
( Doctor Strange of Asgard #4, Imperial #1, Ultimate Spider-Man Incursion #1, Ultimate Wolverine #1 )
What I'm Reading Next
IDK. All my Not Having Migraines time is going to finishing this exchange fic and not reading.
Marie Javins, Iron Man: Extremis Prose Novel: Extremis is an Iron Man arc I have read a lot, and I read this prose adaptation because I was interested in comparing the two; novelizations often flesh out the stories with additional details and I wanted to see what additional material was in here and what it was like.
(Also I promised myself I'd read one book a month and I finished this on the 31st in, like, an hour. I had a lot of migraines last month.)
The answer is that it's... weird. There is a lot of MCUification -- Tony has an arc reactor, a public superhero identity, and an AI named JARVIS, as well as a massive crush on Pepper -- but then it's also very comics -- Tony is sober, is clearly a working superhero and has been one for many many years, has a human butler named Jarvis who still works for the Avengers (who are clearly Tony's longtime friends), and has undergone at least a few of his bigger comics storylines, like being drunk and losing his company to Stane and being broke and living on the streets. You know. That one.
So I'm not really sure who this is for, because it's gonna annoy die-hard comics fans. I guess it's for fans who want to read some Iron Man and don't care much about continuity. Also, if you want a whole bunch of body-horror details about how Extremis works that are even more body-horrific than canon (like, Tony is conscious, mostly lucid, and blind and paralyzed and in pain the entire time he's in the cocoon and he is aware that Maya is talking to him) then I guess this is for you?
Also, weirdly, one of the ongoing themes is basically that it's Sexual Humiliation Hour for Tony? The first page of this book wants to tell us that there are tabloid stories about how Tony can't get it up, and the big Extremis reveal features Maya making fun of Tony because his dick's not bigger. I, uh. Okay? Yeah? Wasn't expecting any of that.
What I'm Reading Now
Comics Wednesday!
( Doctor Strange of Asgard #4, Imperial #1, Ultimate Spider-Man Incursion #1, Ultimate Wolverine #1 )
What I'm Reading Next
IDK. All my Not Having Migraines time is going to finishing this exchange fic and not reading.
Wednesday Reading Meme
Jun. 4th, 2025 10:52 amosprey_archerWhat I’ve Just Finished Reading
I feel that I ought to have something intelligent to say about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but honestly I don’t have a lot to say intelligent or otherwise. Woolf is one of those writers where I respect her skill as a prose stylist, but almost never connect with her work outside of A Room of One’s Own. I thought it might be a fiction/nonfiction thing, where I didn’t vibe with her fiction but liked her nonfiction. But then I read a book of her essays and also wasn’t feeling it, so maybe A Room of One’s Own was just a one-hit wonder for me.
I also finished Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison’s Johansen’s Ood-le-Uk the Wanderer, a 1931 Newbery Honor winner written by two sisters. (The Alison sisters are one of three sibling pairs to win Newbery recognition, the others being brother-sister pair Dillwyn and Anne Parrish and brothers James and Christopher Collier.)
Ood-le-Uk is a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy who is swept out to sea on an ice flow, eventually landing in Siberia where he is taken in by the Chukchi and nearly human-sacrificed by the shaman, only to be saved at the last minute by the talisman he wears: a cross in a little wooden box that washed across the sea to his home in Alaska. Does he later meet a Russian Orthodox priest who changes his life by telling him about Christianity? One hundred percent.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve just started an Alice in Wonderland reread, in the copy given to me by my friend Micky, with a note in the front that assures me that the book is just as “chaotic and confusing” as the story my friend Emma and I wrote in sixth grade. It occurs to me that this may not have been a compliment to our magnum opus.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going in with Fanny Burney’s Evelina.
I feel that I ought to have something intelligent to say about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but honestly I don’t have a lot to say intelligent or otherwise. Woolf is one of those writers where I respect her skill as a prose stylist, but almost never connect with her work outside of A Room of One’s Own. I thought it might be a fiction/nonfiction thing, where I didn’t vibe with her fiction but liked her nonfiction. But then I read a book of her essays and also wasn’t feeling it, so maybe A Room of One’s Own was just a one-hit wonder for me.
I also finished Alice Alison Lide and Margaret Alison’s Johansen’s Ood-le-Uk the Wanderer, a 1931 Newbery Honor winner written by two sisters. (The Alison sisters are one of three sibling pairs to win Newbery recognition, the others being brother-sister pair Dillwyn and Anne Parrish and brothers James and Christopher Collier.)
Ood-le-Uk is a fifteen-year-old Inuit boy who is swept out to sea on an ice flow, eventually landing in Siberia where he is taken in by the Chukchi and nearly human-sacrificed by the shaman, only to be saved at the last minute by the talisman he wears: a cross in a little wooden box that washed across the sea to his home in Alaska. Does he later meet a Russian Orthodox priest who changes his life by telling him about Christianity? One hundred percent.
What I’m Reading Now
I’ve just started an Alice in Wonderland reread, in the copy given to me by my friend Micky, with a note in the front that assures me that the book is just as “chaotic and confusing” as the story my friend Emma and I wrote in sixth grade. It occurs to me that this may not have been a compliment to our magnum opus.
What I Plan to Read Next
I’m going in with Fanny Burney’s Evelina.
what i'm reading wednesday 4/6/2025
Jun. 4th, 2025 08:31 amlirazelAnd we're back with book updates!
What I finished:
+ Lady of Perdition, the 17th (!) Benjamin January book by Barbara Hambly. This is one of the field trip books that's set outside New Orleans, this time in the Republic of Texas, which sounds like it was hell for anyone who wasn't a white dude, even more so than the rest of what would become the southern US later. The inciting incident of the book is so harrowing in concept (though not in actual description) I don't even want to speak of it but is very much a reality of being Black in the antebellum US.
It's also one of the ones where we meet up with a character from an earlier book, and those always make me wish I weren't reading the series so very slowly. The last time we met said character, it was back in book 7! Which I read several years ago! So I had vague memories of her and much stronger memories of the vibes of that book. But Hambly does a good job of reminding us of what we need to know without being heavy-handed.
Lots of good Ben-and-Hannibal stuff in this book, though, as always when we're away from New Orleans, I miss Rose and everyone back home. And as always with every single book in the series, I spend the whole time going, "When will Ben get a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep?????" Poor guy is in his 40s, won't someone let him rest? If you're into whump, you don't get much better than Ben. I want to wrap him up in blankets (actually, no blankets, since all the places he goes are so very hot) and let him sleep for a thousand years.
All in all a good but not standout entry in the series. A thousand bonus points for a plotline involving stolen archives, apparently based on a real occurrence! THE TEXAS ARCHIVE WAR WAS A REAL THING.
+ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, which I appreciated a lot but did not love. Tesh is a great writer, and this book has a fantastic premise--one of those dangerous magical schools books, but told from the perspective of one of the instructors. What makes this work so well is that Tesh clearly has a background in education and the book is, in many ways, an exploration of what it's like to be a teacher, both in the basic dealing with administrative tasks and finding time to grade papers and also in the struggle to connect with and inspire students. The book is suffused with real details of what teaching in a British school is actually like, and I always enjoy a take-your-job-to-ficbook take.
Our main character is, as in Tesh's last book, another strength. Tesh writes fantastic flawed characters--Walden isn't as immediately off-putting as Kyr from Some Desperate Glory, but her besetting sin is pride and it's a doozy. She's so well-intentioned and trying so hard and she's way more likeable than Kyr starts out, but also, like, LADY. So realistic in the depiction of an academic with a PhD and a certainty that her understanding of her field (in this case magic) is superior to everyone else's. The book is about her learning her limitations and to appreciate other people's insights and I liked that a lot.
We get a fun outsider pov of the four students who would, if this book was written by anyone else, be the main characters, and I must say that I would absolutely read a fic bout Will pining for Nikki. The magical system is quite fun and distinctive and lends itself well to formal study.
So yeah, I think this is a very strong book, I really liked it, but it didn't scratch any particular itches for me that would bump it up into the tier of books I love. Still, I like Tesh's writing so very much and can't wait to see what she does next.
+ Miss Silver Comes to Stay, the 15th(!) Miss Silver book by Patricia Wentworth. As usual, I don't have a great deal to say; I always enjoy a Wentworth book, but they're always doing loosely the same thing. I do appreciate her commitment to having the victim be someone we really hate.
+ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read this one since my British Gothic Fiction class in undergrad. (This was a summer semester class and there were only four other people in the class, and I think I was the only one who really wanted to be there. But I really wanted to be there, so hopefully I made up for the others' lack of enthusiasm.)
I remembered this as more of a horror story, but I think that's me confusing it with the film adaptation The Innocents, which is a banger of a movie and highly recommended. The book is also a banger, but it feels much more like a psychological thriller than a horror story imo. The fun of it is the perspective of our main character, an example of the gothic governess type, whose mind we're immersed in. Is she crazy? Is she evil and lying to us? Is everything she's describing really happening?
This is a book about suggestion and subtext, and I love that about it. More is not stated than is, which is always really effective in a ghost story. In this case, though, the things that aren't stated aren't related to the actions or appearance of the ghost/monster/killer but instead to the nature of the damage the bad guys are doing to the alleged victims. The book is more chilling than scary, which I'm into.
This was apparently James's selling out book, and I, for one, wish he sold out more often. There can never be enough gothic novels in the world as far as I'm concerned.
What I'm reading now:
+ Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie. I read most if not all of the Poirot books in middle school, but that was...over twenty years ago, so I remember nothing about this particular one. Shoutout toscripsi for mentioning it as one of her favorite Christies!
What I finished:
+ Lady of Perdition, the 17th (!) Benjamin January book by Barbara Hambly. This is one of the field trip books that's set outside New Orleans, this time in the Republic of Texas, which sounds like it was hell for anyone who wasn't a white dude, even more so than the rest of what would become the southern US later. The inciting incident of the book is so harrowing in concept (though not in actual description) I don't even want to speak of it but is very much a reality of being Black in the antebellum US.
It's also one of the ones where we meet up with a character from an earlier book, and those always make me wish I weren't reading the series so very slowly. The last time we met said character, it was back in book 7! Which I read several years ago! So I had vague memories of her and much stronger memories of the vibes of that book. But Hambly does a good job of reminding us of what we need to know without being heavy-handed.
Lots of good Ben-and-Hannibal stuff in this book, though, as always when we're away from New Orleans, I miss Rose and everyone back home. And as always with every single book in the series, I spend the whole time going, "When will Ben get a bath and a good meal and a full night's sleep?????" Poor guy is in his 40s, won't someone let him rest? If you're into whump, you don't get much better than Ben. I want to wrap him up in blankets (actually, no blankets, since all the places he goes are so very hot) and let him sleep for a thousand years.
All in all a good but not standout entry in the series. A thousand bonus points for a plotline involving stolen archives, apparently based on a real occurrence! THE TEXAS ARCHIVE WAR WAS A REAL THING.
+ The Incandescent by Emily Tesh, which I appreciated a lot but did not love. Tesh is a great writer, and this book has a fantastic premise--one of those dangerous magical schools books, but told from the perspective of one of the instructors. What makes this work so well is that Tesh clearly has a background in education and the book is, in many ways, an exploration of what it's like to be a teacher, both in the basic dealing with administrative tasks and finding time to grade papers and also in the struggle to connect with and inspire students. The book is suffused with real details of what teaching in a British school is actually like, and I always enjoy a take-your-job-to-
Our main character is, as in Tesh's last book, another strength. Tesh writes fantastic flawed characters--Walden isn't as immediately off-putting as Kyr from Some Desperate Glory, but her besetting sin is pride and it's a doozy. She's so well-intentioned and trying so hard and she's way more likeable than Kyr starts out, but also, like, LADY. So realistic in the depiction of an academic with a PhD and a certainty that her understanding of her field (in this case magic) is superior to everyone else's. The book is about her learning her limitations and to appreciate other people's insights and I liked that a lot.
We get a fun outsider pov of the four students who would, if this book was written by anyone else, be the main characters, and I must say that I would absolutely read a fic bout Will pining for Nikki. The magical system is quite fun and distinctive and lends itself well to formal study.
So yeah, I think this is a very strong book, I really liked it, but it didn't scratch any particular itches for me that would bump it up into the tier of books I love. Still, I like Tesh's writing so very much and can't wait to see what she does next.
+ Miss Silver Comes to Stay, the 15th(!) Miss Silver book by Patricia Wentworth. As usual, I don't have a great deal to say; I always enjoy a Wentworth book, but they're always doing loosely the same thing. I do appreciate her commitment to having the victim be someone we really hate.
+ The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I haven't read this one since my British Gothic Fiction class in undergrad. (This was a summer semester class and there were only four other people in the class, and I think I was the only one who really wanted to be there. But I really wanted to be there, so hopefully I made up for the others' lack of enthusiasm.)
I remembered this as more of a horror story, but I think that's me confusing it with the film adaptation The Innocents, which is a banger of a movie and highly recommended. The book is also a banger, but it feels much more like a psychological thriller than a horror story imo. The fun of it is the perspective of our main character, an example of the gothic governess type, whose mind we're immersed in. Is she crazy? Is she evil and lying to us? Is everything she's describing really happening?
This is a book about suggestion and subtext, and I love that about it. More is not stated than is, which is always really effective in a ghost story. In this case, though, the things that aren't stated aren't related to the actions or appearance of the ghost/monster/killer but instead to the nature of the damage the bad guys are doing to the alleged victims. The book is more chilling than scary, which I'm into.
This was apparently James's selling out book, and I, for one, wish he sold out more often. There can never be enough gothic novels in the world as far as I'm concerned.
What I'm reading now:
+ Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie. I read most if not all of the Poirot books in middle school, but that was...over twenty years ago, so I remember nothing about this particular one. Shoutout to
scripsi for mentioning it as one of her favorite Christies!Into the Archives
Jun. 3rd, 2025 03:06 pmosprey_archerAbout a year ago, I realized that some of the older children’s books that I wanted were available in the archive of the university where I work. “If only I knew where the archives were and how to request books there,” I mused, without of course making the faintest effort to acquire this information.
But I have become incrementally better at turning ideas into reality, so it took only a year before I learned where the archives are (the top floor of my favorite library, which incidentally is the library closest to my office) and how to request an appointment to read a book there. Then I traipsed over to the archives for The Little Angel: A Story of Old Rio, illustrated by Katherine Milhous of The Egg Tree, which is the real reason I wanted to read it, although I was also nothing loath to renew the acquaintance with the author, our old friend Alice Dalgliesh of Newbery fame.
The archives are not quite as fancy as the Lilly Library Reading Room: no mural of Great Thinkers in History! But they make up for it with comfy rolling chairs, and the archivists do still bring you your book on a pillow, which is the most important thing.
The book itself is in that particularly mid-twentieth century style where we’re gently drifting through some time in the life of a family long ago and far away. (Sometimes it is just long ago or just faraway, but here it’s both.) We enjoy some street festivals, meet a cute kitten named Gatinho, cheer as the daughter of the house furiously refuses an arranged marriage with a man who just tossed Gatinho across the room (Gatinho is unhurt, except for his dignity), and accept that this is not the kind of book that is ever going to interrogate the fact that this upper-class Brazilian family in the 1820s has slaves. Milhous’s illustrations are charming but not as magical as the illustrations in The Egg Tree or Appolonia’s Valentine.
Nonetheless, pleased by my success, I went back to trawl the library catalog for more books to read in the archives… and discovered they have a copy of one of my remaining Newbery books, Valenti Angelo’s Nino! What a score! So I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at lunch to begin reading.
But I have become incrementally better at turning ideas into reality, so it took only a year before I learned where the archives are (the top floor of my favorite library, which incidentally is the library closest to my office) and how to request an appointment to read a book there. Then I traipsed over to the archives for The Little Angel: A Story of Old Rio, illustrated by Katherine Milhous of The Egg Tree, which is the real reason I wanted to read it, although I was also nothing loath to renew the acquaintance with the author, our old friend Alice Dalgliesh of Newbery fame.
The archives are not quite as fancy as the Lilly Library Reading Room: no mural of Great Thinkers in History! But they make up for it with comfy rolling chairs, and the archivists do still bring you your book on a pillow, which is the most important thing.
The book itself is in that particularly mid-twentieth century style where we’re gently drifting through some time in the life of a family long ago and far away. (Sometimes it is just long ago or just faraway, but here it’s both.) We enjoy some street festivals, meet a cute kitten named Gatinho, cheer as the daughter of the house furiously refuses an arranged marriage with a man who just tossed Gatinho across the room (Gatinho is unhurt, except for his dignity), and accept that this is not the kind of book that is ever going to interrogate the fact that this upper-class Brazilian family in the 1820s has slaves. Milhous’s illustrations are charming but not as magical as the illustrations in The Egg Tree or Appolonia’s Valentine.
Nonetheless, pleased by my success, I went back to trawl the library catalog for more books to read in the archives… and discovered they have a copy of one of my remaining Newbery books, Valenti Angelo’s Nino! What a score! So I’ve got an appointment tomorrow at lunch to begin reading.
Picture Book Monday: World More Beautiful and Because Barbara
Jun. 2nd, 2025 12:16 pmosprey_archerIn the process of exploring Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre, I discovered that not one but TWO picture book biographies of Cooney were published in 2024: Angela Burke Kunkel’s World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney and Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World.
The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”
Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.
Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.
Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.
The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”
Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.
Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.
Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.
A couple of recent theatrical experiences
May. 31st, 2025 12:08 amgenarti1. Roméo et Juliette at the Boston Ballet
This was incredible???
( More rambling about that )
If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.
(ETA:skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)
2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players
Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.
( More thoughts (briefer) )
...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.
This was incredible???
( More rambling about that )
If you're in the Boston area and interested, it's open through June 8 and I highly recommend it.
(ETA:
skygiants has also written this up in a much more detailed blow-by-blow way!)2. Fun Home with The Burlington Players
Another great show, although this one isn't still going; we saw one of the last performances of the run, a couple weeks ago.
( More thoughts (briefer) )
...And I'll leave this post there, because it's already long and the hour is late. I was going to add in an art show that I had a pottery piece in (!?!?! I'm delighted and that still feels fake) but that'll get its own post, instead, in a day or two. I'm mentioning it all the same to remind myself to follow through.
(no subject)
May. 30th, 2025 11:23 pmskygiantsThe Boston Ballet production of Maillot's Romeo et Juliette has turned out to be not only my favorite Boston Ballet production that I've seen so far but also tbh one of my favorite Romeo and Juliets full stop. It is Taking Swings and Making Choices and some of them are very weird but all of them are interesting.
( we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )
( we're just gonna go ahead and cut for length )
Book Review: Butter
May. 30th, 2025 11:08 amosprey_archerRecently littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal.
This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.
Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.
They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.
Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?
In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.
The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.
Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.
This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.
And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…
littlerhymes reviewed Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, “a novel of food and murder,” to quote the cover. “Food AND murder?” I said. “Two of my favorite things in one book?” AND the book was translated by Polly Barton, who translated Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, which absolutely clinched the deal. This book is fantastic. It is a novel of food and murder, but also about the impossible demands of femininity, fat-shaming, the extent to which it is possible to be responsible for another person, the difficulty of truly embracing your own desires (starting with the surprisingly difficult task of figuring out what you even want), the brutal hours demanded by Japanese companies, the meaning of friendship, and also what the heck is UP with Manako Kajii.
Manako Kajii is in prison, convicted of murdering three men. The evidence is entirely circumstantial: she was dating all three men, having met them through a website for people looking for marriage, except instead of marrying them she got them to give her loads of cash in exchange for gourmet meals and, one presumes, sex. Unfortunately for her, three of her boyfriends died in quick succession, and although there’s no evidence she pushed one off the railway platform or snuck the other that lethal overdose of sleeping pills, people are so mad about her lifestyle that she’s convicted of the murders anyway.
They’re especially mad because Kajii managed all this while being (by Japanese standards) FAT. The siren who lured three men to their deaths is not even pretty. This terrifies everyone: men because they shudder over the humiliation of potentially being murdered by a girl who is not even a perfect 10, and women because this only strengthens their belief that what men really want is not an equal partner but a mommy-wife who feeds them, cleans up after them, and coos over their boring rants about work.
Although the book may sound like a murder mystery from the summary, it’s notably uninteresting in actual evidence about Kajii’s supposed killings. The details I mentioned above we learn almost incidentally, and our heroine Rika, a magazine reporter working on a profile of Kajii, makes no attempt to follow them up. Her interest is in the mystery of Kajii herself: what makes her tick?
In trying to figure out Kajii, Rika reads Kajii’s food blog (a lush wonderland of luxury brands and fancy restaurants), interviews Kajii, begins to learn to cook herself, falls in love with food and flavor and maybe also a little bit with Kajii, or at least what Kajii represents to her, which is the willingness to embrace one’s own desires, whether that means eating what one wants to eat or (in Kajii’s case) giving up on “employment” to be supported as essentially the mistress of a variety of rich old men.
The problem, as Rika repeatedly discovers, is that like Kajii’s old men, what Rika sees in Kajii is what she’s projecting onto Kajii. They saw her as a sweet traditional girl who just wants to please men; Rika sees her as an avatar of chasing your own desires, even if those desires are socially disruptive. Kajii herself is both those things, as well as an outspoken misogynist who longs for a daughter, a daddy’s girl who never went back to her hometown after she left at eighteen, a walking contradiction who revels in manipulation but also, perhaps, longs for the connection that has thus far eluded her.
Or maybe not. Maybe Rika is projecting that longing for connection onto a basically heartless sociopath. Yuzuki maintains all these tensions, juggling all these different facets of Kajii without ever simplifying her to one single Kajii.
This is a very Kajii-centric review, because it was Kajii who most blew me away, but I also loved Rika and her friendship with Reiko, both for their own sake and because they allow Yuzuki to develop her themes about societal expectations about femininity in so many directions that the theme becomes almost fractal. Here is a writer who has a lot to say and is saying all of it at the same time in a way that’s so engrossing that I barely resisted the desire to take a sick day just to keep reading.
And she does it all AND includes some great food descriptions, too. I was so carried away by her enthusiasm that I actually tried Kajii’s recipe for rice with butter. It didn’t have the same transformative effect on me that it had on Rika, but maybe if I used the very fancy butter that Kajii recommended…
Hummingbird Cottage Updates
May. 29th, 2025 08:09 amosprey_archerImportant Hummingbird Cottage updates! First, I am sad to report that the geese after all decided not to nest on the pond, presumably flying off in search of a larger pool. However, the pond is still frequently visited by ducks and geese, and also a red hawk which swooped across the pond and snatched something small and dark from the rocks. You go, red-shouldered hawk! Keep the small rodent population in check!
The flowers have begun to blossom. Velvety purple irises, blue-violet columbines, yellow roses, lovely gold-pink roses like a sunrise, these last outside the window of the downstairs bedroom, which at last forced me to remove the mattress blocking the window -
I have not yet told the story of the mattress. So. At a mattress fundraiser for my old high school, I bought a queen size mattress on clearance, only to discover upon delivery that my bed frame was, in fact, a full. This ended with the mattress leaning against the window for a month, until the roses forced my hand, and I took apart the old bedframe and lowered the new mattress to the floor, where it will reside till I get an appropriately sized bedframe.
(Hilariously, a week after my mattress misadventure, my former roommate bought a new mattress for a bedframe that was surely a full. But NO. That bedframe was in fact a queen.
One would like this to end with the trading of the bed frames, but Julie understandably wished to keep the charming wooden sleigh bed and therefore cut it down to size.)
The weeds are getting away from me, in particular the lemon balm (a variety of mint that is spreading all along the shady north side of the house). However, yesterday evening I did get rosemary and chives from the farmer’s market, which I planted, having cleverly come out through the garage in order to keep Bramble inside… only to look up from planting the rosemary at the sound of a happy meow. Bramble trotted past, intent on exploring the neighbor’s patio, which I must admit I’ve also been curious about, so I followed him nothing loath.
The Hummingbird Cottage is half of a duplex - all the houses in this condominium development are, except the ones that are fourplexes - but I’ve never seen the neighbors in the other half of my duplex. Nor have I heard any noise from their half of the house, seen their car, or seen a trash can pulled to the curb by their driveway.
Through the patio door as I chased Bramble (happily hiding under an overgrown bush), I saw a dining room set with a jacket draped over a chair, so someone must live there at least occasionally? A mystery.
Bramble eventually scampered down to the pond, and then apparently decided he’d had enough, as he docilely allowed me to pick him up and deposit him inside. Possibly all that water was a little alarming. I finished planting the rosemary and chives and contemplated the best place for a cherry tomato plant, but as I have not yet acquired said plant, that is a problem for another day.
Also, I found the perfect little wicker cart for my houseplants! Admittedly there is currently only one houseplant, but now that I have a home for more they will surely come into my life. The cart is currently a somewhat battered yellow and needs a wash and a coat of white spray paint, but it was only twenty dollars at the secondhand shop, and anyway how often do you see a charming wheeled wicker cart for sale anywhere?
The flowers have begun to blossom. Velvety purple irises, blue-violet columbines, yellow roses, lovely gold-pink roses like a sunrise, these last outside the window of the downstairs bedroom, which at last forced me to remove the mattress blocking the window -
I have not yet told the story of the mattress. So. At a mattress fundraiser for my old high school, I bought a queen size mattress on clearance, only to discover upon delivery that my bed frame was, in fact, a full. This ended with the mattress leaning against the window for a month, until the roses forced my hand, and I took apart the old bedframe and lowered the new mattress to the floor, where it will reside till I get an appropriately sized bedframe.
(Hilariously, a week after my mattress misadventure, my former roommate bought a new mattress for a bedframe that was surely a full. But NO. That bedframe was in fact a queen.
One would like this to end with the trading of the bed frames, but Julie understandably wished to keep the charming wooden sleigh bed and therefore cut it down to size.)
The weeds are getting away from me, in particular the lemon balm (a variety of mint that is spreading all along the shady north side of the house). However, yesterday evening I did get rosemary and chives from the farmer’s market, which I planted, having cleverly come out through the garage in order to keep Bramble inside… only to look up from planting the rosemary at the sound of a happy meow. Bramble trotted past, intent on exploring the neighbor’s patio, which I must admit I’ve also been curious about, so I followed him nothing loath.
The Hummingbird Cottage is half of a duplex - all the houses in this condominium development are, except the ones that are fourplexes - but I’ve never seen the neighbors in the other half of my duplex. Nor have I heard any noise from their half of the house, seen their car, or seen a trash can pulled to the curb by their driveway.
Through the patio door as I chased Bramble (happily hiding under an overgrown bush), I saw a dining room set with a jacket draped over a chair, so someone must live there at least occasionally? A mystery.
Bramble eventually scampered down to the pond, and then apparently decided he’d had enough, as he docilely allowed me to pick him up and deposit him inside. Possibly all that water was a little alarming. I finished planting the rosemary and chives and contemplated the best place for a cherry tomato plant, but as I have not yet acquired said plant, that is a problem for another day.
Also, I found the perfect little wicker cart for my houseplants! Admittedly there is currently only one houseplant, but now that I have a home for more they will surely come into my life. The cart is currently a somewhat battered yellow and needs a wash and a coat of white spray paint, but it was only twenty dollars at the secondhand shop, and anyway how often do you see a charming wheeled wicker cart for sale anywhere?