She knows that I'm a bigamist, a blackguard and a crook
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rushthatspeaks gave me five questions in that meme that has been going around. Ask if you'd like questions of your own. I had an extraordinarily crummy day and this was distracting.1. Your username is perfect, but if you had to change it/were signing up somewhere it was taken, what would you pick?
My pre-LJ default was Basilisk; I suspect I would try to see if it was available. Plans get hazier after that point. I have a lot of difficulty conceiving of alternate names for myself. I think of myself as having three names that are mine: the one I was born with, the one that would have been mine if I had been AMAB, and my Hebrew name; I grew up knowing all three of them. My current username has the fortune of feeling like a variation, not a complete alias. Some other character's name would not be my own.
2. Single-tail or double-tail mermaids?
Probably for reasons having to do with early exposure to Lucy M. Boston's The Sea Egg (1967), I tend to think of mermaids as single-tailed and the double-tailed kind as tritons, but let's be honest: I even like the kind that just have fins on their feet.
3. You seem to be reading a lot of detective fiction recently. Does it feel really different from SF/F?
I don't think so, but I also think I tend to select for a lot of the same qualities in whatever I'm reading: interesting language, emphasis on character, places that have personality; these happily turn out to be some of the defining traits of pulp and noir fiction, plus the kind of deliberate poking at/inadvertent revealing of societal assumptions that I enjoy. There's also the thing where, since most of the detective fiction I've been reading recently was written between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, it pulls in the quality of worldbuilding that creates a significant overlap between fans of speculative and historical fiction. I really don't think I used to read so much of the genre, but it started in tandem with my interest in film noir and neither of them has backed off yet. It feels like combined comfort reading and independent study.
4. What's something you know about the Boston area that you don't think a lot of other people have noticed?
I never have any idea how to answer questions that depend on knowing what other people don't know! There is a lost river in Boston. I have mentioned it before; its name is Millers River and what is left of it, sometimes known as the "Lost Half-Mile," now runs underneath I-93, between the hoppers and dunes of the Boston Sand & Gravel Company and the former right of way of the Boston & Maine Railroad which now carries the Amtrak Downeaster and the four commuter lines out of North Station. It was buried during the nineteenth-century industrial build-up of Cambridge and Charlestown, the last of it preserved by conservation efforts during the twenty-five years of the Big Dig. In the last few years it has acquired a public boost in the form of the Millers River Littoral Way, a footpath of public art marking its history—a memorial to its burned-down potato sheds, the depths and soundings of the landfilled river. I like visiting it and I like knowing it's there, not totally extinguished by the city that grew around it. I keep hearing about plans to uncover some of the still-buried sections and would not object. I like the waterways and bridges of Boston; it is curious to me that more people don't think of it as a city of water, especially when so much of it was barely not ocean even before our current crisis of climate change. Look at any map of Boston before the turn of the nineteenth century and it's all bays and tidal flats, inlets and peninsulas. The oldest colonial name for this city is Trimountaine, after the three hills that defined the landscape of the original Boston peninsula. Only Beacon Hill still stands, its elevation somewhat amended by the heady decades of terraforming that entirely consumed the other two: they were shoveled into the harbor in order to permit the booming, modernizing city to stretch itself out into the sea's ground. Their memory survives only in the name of Tremont Street and the landfill that sustains some of the most recognizable landmarks of Boston. Logan Airport. The Public Garden. Chinatown. The Prudential Center and the former Hancock Tower. Storrow Drive. MIT. Coves turned to railways, salt marshes to dams, all eventually to what used to be called reclaimed land, until the sea started stealing back in. There used to be an exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science which showed the city more than doubling in size, the harbor shrinking, and it's all sandy soil and rubble and gravel fill. An earthquake would liquefy it in the seismological sense. A storm surge might do the job in the conventional one. I think about it just as I think about the lost tides of the Charles River, which rose and fell until the construction in the early twentieth century of the original Charles River Dam. Permanently flooding the estuary kept the sewage-raw flats from making their twice-daily appearance; then the basin went on accumulating industrial runoff until it had become the unswimmable fish-kill sump of my childhood, whose sole point of pride pre-cleanup was that at least it never caught fire where anyone could see. The EPA rated its water A-minus as of this summer, but the sediments at the bottom are still full of heavy metals and bacterial overflow. Any proposal to restore the river's tides keeps meeting the fact that no one wants, literally, to stir that shit up. I am not so sure the sea and the moon and the storms won't be making that choice for us—Millers River might flood again without the assistance of watershed associations. We talk all the time about seawalls, but we don't build them. We might be New England's Venice before we know. I don't want to sound indifferent to this prospect, but our official elevation is nineteen feet above sea level and the majority of those nineteen feet were originally sea: it doesn't have to be the return of the repressed, just mathematics. The salt equations. (But nothing below the tide-line is ever anyone's but the sea's.)
5. What would you say your favorite restaurant is right now?
That's a tough call. My favorite restaurant in Boston is either SRV or Waypoint, for aesthetic and sentimental reasons as well as the sheer quality of the food, but neither of them is the kind of restaurant I can afford more than once a year. I am also very fond of Mamaleh's and worry about their recent decision to focus on breakfast and lunch at the expense of non-pop-up dinners. In terms of restaurants outside of special occasions, however, I think it's got to be Pikliz International Kitchen, which is a block and a half from my front door and serves exquisite Haitian fried goat and black rice and jerk chicken and fried plantains and a sort of hot cabbage and carrot slaw and braised oxtail and honestly everything I have ever gotten from them has been delicious, also affordable. I discovered them this spring via internet search after returning from a weekend in Providence and really missing Pan a Day; I was delighted. I just can't believe that I went a year and a half in this apartment not knowing that I lived five minutes' walk from curry goat.
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...n o q u e s t i o n s about the fact I think I may have thrown my phone in with the hockey laundry and just realized it now.
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1. What is your favorite kind of sea?
2. What one fact about the historical period of your work in progress do you wish more people understood?
3. Conversely, is there anything about the historical period of your work in progress that surprised you?
4. What would you be if not a seal?
5. What's it like becoming fluent in sports?
P.S. Is your phone okay?
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I love a winter sea, black-and-white more than blue, confronting more than welcoming at the start of the swim. And colder than most people can really get behind.
2. What one fact about the historical period of your work in progress do you wish more people understood?
I think there's an idea that people's lives were circumscribed and dull, and certainly they may have been intensely local, in the 1820s, in ways we'd find stultifying or peculiar; but the more letters I read, the more I realize it was just a scary time, and there were very few safe options for most people and no safety net. With a village education, you walked to London/Birmingham/York/Leeds/Liverpool to get your trade, or you took the mail coach up to town to marry; and you were in danger the whole way and in danger when you arrived, money-poor and without community and in nasty living conditions, and the milk was blue. In other words, I wish people understood it wasn't so different then than now, and that in spite of Romance Novels!, comfort was spread around thin and tranquility was a lie. It just seems small and prosaic and dull because the lenses we look through are usually those of a single person writing by hand.
3. Conversely, is there anything about the historical period of your work in progress that surprised you?
One, that if you could just get past twenty, you could live to ninety, so a Waterloo veteran could have seen the railways come in, gas light, rudimentary electrics, cheap photography, skyscrapers, Heaviside cable, paddle steamers, Conan Doyle, Maupassant, mauvine, penny ice cream.
Two, that if you can think of a community, it was already there. Immigrants, queers, POC, everyone who always is. That's huge.
4. What would you be if not a seal?
A HONEYBADGER.
5. What's it like becoming fluent in sports?
Ask me when I stop calling a Kevlar throat protector a gorget?
Seriously, it's a fascinating exercise in learning your kid is people, their dreams are far away from what you ever imagined, and the culture is both bro-centric/old-school racist-sexist and trying incredibly hard to be inclusive, to lower barriers, and to use the right pronouns, so my fluency is happening at probably the first time in history that it could.
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You should put these on your Wordpress. They're good answers.