2016-12-04

sovay: (Rotwang)
Today I got my contributor's copy of Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, edited by A.M. Dellamonica and Steve Berman. I am really pleased about this anthology and the inclusion of "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?" in it. I am looking forward to reading a lot of lesbian fiction tonight.

Also today, parts of East Cambridge were on fire. My mother and I ran an errand unknowingly on the periphery of the area around five o'clock in the evening—power out for blocks, fire hydrants open, blue-and-red emergency lights flashing everywhere. We assumed fire, but were not in a position to see flames and must have been upwind of the smoke, because otherwise I think I would have noticed it on the street. We thought perhaps a transformer had blown. I texted [livejournal.com profile] derspatchel when I got back in the car and heard different. So far no one appears to have died, but dozens have been displaced and homes destroyed; firefighters and other first responders were coming from Arlington, Newton, Wakefield, Chelsea, miles. The Mayor of Cambridge has set up a fire relief fund, now accepting checks and online donations. I did not know there were such things as ten-alarm fires.

A few days ago I wrote to the Forward to express my disappointment in their otherwise fluff piece about the favorite kosher recipes of the Trump-Kushner family, because I don't care if Ivanka and Jared keep a kosher kitchen, the Forward has no business treating them like just another celebrity couple, and now it turns out the broccoli kugel recipe featured on Ivanka's website wasn't even hers and I just want to talk about why people are referring to this wholly unnecessary episode as "Kugelgate" because when I look at a panful of baked eggs, light mayonnaise, and broccoli, I might think "Frittata?" and also ". . . ew," but definitely not kugel. Are there noodles? Is there cheese? Do you want to step outside about the raisins? It's not kugel!

(I didn't know I had opinions about kugel, but it turns out I really do. I may have to make some in order to cope.)

These are the three political pieces that have stuck with me the most recently: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Now Is the Time to Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About," Moira Weigel's "Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy," and Masha Gessen's "Trump: The Choice We Face." I am not entirely sure how to classify the story of Heinrich Steinmeyer, but it is also sticking with me. It does sound like a YA novel. Sometimes that happens to people's lives. Anyway, now-dead one-time actual Nazi still behaving more classily than my country's president-elect.

I am not sleeping almost at all. I would like to write about things.
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
This cat picture is not mine; it comes courtesy of of [livejournal.com profile] teenybuffalo, who found it on Tumblr:

Catty


I was prepared to love this image despite its likely origin as an outsider's sendup of the suffrage movement, but then it turned out to have been an actual suffragette Christmas card, which is even better. [livejournal.com profile] derspatchel says he can see "Hestia marching, festooned with violets, hoisting a banner aloft with her tail, ready to pounce on any police resistance." Mice and roses, they sing. Mice and roses.

(The actual song "Bread and Roses" causes me to tear up for reasons I do not entirely understand, because I cannot remember ever singing it as a child or communally, but it turned up as a spontaneous and formal expression of workers' solidarity in a scene in Pride (2014) and I disintegrated.)
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