sovay: (I Claudius)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2022-05-16 04:30 pm

You asked if I had read Apollinaire

I was supposed to have a relatively important doctor's appointment this afternoon, but right before the weekend it was suddenly canceled and rescheduled almost a month out and so now my medical plan for the rest of this month is . . . crickets? Stubbornness? I am in objectively better shape than I was two weeks ago—[personal profile] rushthatspeaks observes that while I am still coughing, I no longer sound like I need to be shipped out to a sanatorium in the Rocky Mountains—but I wouldn't call it good when I take a day out walking and then I spend two days lying around like a noodle. By my serious estimation, it has been at least nine months since I did not have to spend the majority of my time lying around like a noodle. It's boring and does nothing to release me from my obligations to capitalism. Have some links.

1. Catherine Rockwood, "Goliath by Tochi Onyebuchi." I served as a linguistic consultant for this review, but also having lived in New Haven, specifically in a building and a neighborhood that have since been surreally gentrified, the novel's portrayal of future Yale sounds about right to me.

(In the same issue of Strange Horizons, please check out R.B. Lemberg's "The broken hill and the breath." The poem is dear to me.)

2. Matthew Cheney, "The Rats in Our Walls: An Essay." On Lovecraft and irrationality, the reality of narratives and the realities of the people who make and encounter them, William Faulkner and Madison Grant and Franz Boas, eugenics and ancestor trouble, and imagination. It's great.

3. The context is, depressingly, the death of microclimates, but I was still delighted to see this headline turn up in the sidebar of another article I was reading: "Caesar's favourite herb was the Viagra of ancient Rome. Until climate change killed it off." I acquired this sort of secondhand fondness for silphium via Catullus more than twenty years ago and it's just never going away.

4. Courtesy of a friend who is not on DW: a really operatic waistcoat.

5. Courtesy of [personal profile] selkie: a good loophole.

I just want to be out in sunlight: I feel starved for it. A line of mine got used as a tag for a post quoting H.D., which does make me feel like I have arrived.
yhlee: sand dollar against a blue sky and seas (sand dollar)

[personal profile] yhlee 2022-05-16 08:38 pm (UTC)(link)
*support support*
dhampyresa: Sun from Sense8 (hugs)

[personal profile] dhampyresa 2022-05-16 08:41 pm (UTC)(link)
You asked if I had read Apollinaire
Well? Have you? (I think you'd love at least some of his stuff -- I'm thinking of Crépuscule, for one)

edit: for *hugs*
Edited 2022-05-16 20:41 (UTC)
gwynnega: (John Hurt Caligula)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2022-05-17 01:56 am (UTC)(link)
That is a great waistcoat.
oracne: turtle (Default)

[personal profile] oracne 2022-05-17 01:07 pm (UTC)(link)
That is really frustrating about the doctor's appointment.
minoanmiss: Minoan Lady walking down a mountainside from a 'peak sanctuary' (Lady at Mountain-Peak Sanctuary)

[personal profile] minoanmiss 2022-05-17 03:39 pm (UTC)(link)
Silphium!

*sends warm perseverence vibes*
naraht: Moonrise over Earth (Default)

[personal profile] naraht 2022-05-17 06:29 pm (UTC)(link)
Thank you for the pointer to "Goliath." It looks fascinating and worth reading.

And I'm very sorry to hear about the cancellation of your doctor's appointment. I hope things will get better for you.
asakiyume: (miroku)

[personal profile] asakiyume 2022-05-18 11:48 pm (UTC)(link)
The waistcoat is beautiful--my mother made pretty ones like that for my dad ^_^

And RB Lemberg's poem is beautiful; I like the tree metaphor very much--I really rode the drama of it and was happy for the hopeful ending.

You are always arriving, but present perfect is good too.
nineweaving: (Default)

[personal profile] nineweaving 2022-05-19 05:31 am (UTC)(link)
O my! That's a beautiful wristlet of links.

Hope your road leads upward into air and light.

Nine
Edited 2022-05-19 05:33 (UTC)
nodrog: (auto_da_fe)

[personal profile] nodrog 2022-05-25 11:56 am (UTC)(link)
So it's been determined that climate change extinguished silphium.  Last I heard, no one really knew the cause.