![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Do you believe a person should be some kind of answer?
102 °F, said the forecast this afternoon. 106 °F, said the car when I got into it. I have no difficulty believing it felt like 109 °F. The sun clanged. The electric grid of the Boston metro area was not designed to run this many air conditioners at once.
I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.
Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.
I followed Ally Wilkes from her short fiction into her debut novel All the White Spaces (2022) and I mean it as a recommendation when I say that I came for the queer polar horror and stayed for the bildungsroman. Externally, it follows the disintegration of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition over the austral year of 1920 as it comes under the traditional strains of weather, misfortune, the supernatural, mistrust. Internally, it follows the discovery of its seventeen-year-old trans stowaway that masculinity comes in more flavors than the imperial ideal he has construed from war cemeteries and boy's own magazines, that he can even invent the kind of man he wants to be instead of fitting himself fossil-cast into a lost shape. No one in the novel describes their identity off the cutting edge of the twenty-first century; the narrative resists an obvious romantic pairing in favor of one of the less conventional nonsexual alliances I enjoy so much. I am predictably a partisan of the expedition's chief scientific officer, whose conscientious objection during the still-raw war casts him as a coward on a good day, a fifth columnist on a bad, and makes no effort to make himself liked either way. It has great ice and dark and queerness and since I deal with heat waves arctically, I am pleased to report that it holds up to re-read.
Kevin Adams' A Crossword War (2018) is a folk album about Bletchley Park, a thing I appreciate existing.
no subject
Well, I'm sold! Hold placed at the library!
no subject
Sweet! Enjoy!
no subject
(Feeling like 109 °F is just unfair.)
no subject
It really impressed me! And I really enjoyed it. I have not yet continued to her second novel Where the Dead Wait (2023), partly because it sounds more closely inspired by the Franklin expedition, although I understand the impulse.
(Feeling like 109 °F is just unfair.)
(It is climatically bullshit.)
no subject
Nine
no subject
I take my glacial where I find it!
no subject
The Bletchley Park folk album and All the White Spaces sound neat!
no subject
It is supposed to continue through tomorrow and it is not reasonable. All of these cities were built for winters we don't get anymore. I miss them.
The Bletchley Park folk album and All the White Spaces sound neat!
I ran into the album by chance last night! It turns out to be part of a whole archive of historical song cycles, which I find extremely cool.
no subject
That's positively Australian.
no subject
Then I should be in Australia!
no subject
no subject
Deeply appreciated.
(It's thirty-five degrees, but close enough.)
no subject
no subject
I would like you also not to melt! We are approaching all-time record highs in Boston and it is very definitely uncool.
no subject
no subject
You note I asked what he was reading lately! It is not a YA novel despite the age of its protagonist, but as long as he's just reading novels, I am inclined to try it on him. By genre, it has a lot of logistics of wildernessing.
no subject
no subject
Excellent.
no subject
That's over 40° Celsius! Dear lord! When it's over 25° it's already bad enough.
no subject
Today it has only been in the 35–36 °C range and it actually registers as an improvement, which is terrible.