My poems "Phliasian Investigations" and "The Keystone Out of Your Arch" are now available in The Stellar Beacon: Coded. Neither has been previously reprinted from their original publications in Spelling the Hours: Poetry Celebrating the Forgotten Others of Science and Technology (ed. R.B. Lemberg, 2016) and Climbing Lightly through Forests: A Poetry Anthology Honoring Ursula K. Le Guin (ed. Lisa M. Bradley and R. B. Lemberg, 2021). The latter came out of grad school and Orsinia; the former is in slight argument with Mary Renault. They share an issue with an excellent essay by Jeannette Ng on marginalized identities in wuxia, a haunting short story by Alex Jennings, and an interrogative game by Richard Bellingham. Check it out! The price is reasonable and the illustrations very nicely chosen.
I was unnerved when the doorbell rang earlier this afternoon because our porch was full of contractors and I wasn't sure what had occasioned this departure from our previous modes of communication, i.e. conversing in passing in the driveway or shouting at one another through the front windows, but it was the mail delivering a Hanukkah present from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
boxofdelights. It is the same edition of Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955) that I bought in college and which I haven't been able to re-read for more than a decade because I lent it out and never saw it again. I loved it then and suspect I am better equipped to appreciate it now. It was reprinted by Green Knight Publishing, which I didn't until recently recognize also published Phyllis Ann Karr's The Arthurian Companion (2001) and The Follies of Sir Harald (2001), the second of which I own and the first of which I am desperately curious about; I believe they are the press that would have collected her short Arthurian fiction if they hadn't folded shortly afterward, which is a bummer to me personally because I do not have the resources to go around tracking down all of her out-of-print Kay fic. In any case, they introduced me to Naomi Mitchison and I am looking forward to renewing my acquaintance.
Last nightspatch had occasion to remind me of the existence of Small Wonder (1985–89), a critically panned and yet apparently popular sitcom about a family with a robot child. I didn't recognize the name, but it turned out to have been one of the confusing shows I encountered at other people's houses as a child—almost any television not produced by Jim Henson or the Children's Television Workshop fell into this category, but in some cases I can remember enjoying the surrealism of American mainstream children's entertainment and in others I was just nonplussed as to its existence. (The Real Ghostbusters (1985–91) is an amusing edge case because the one episode I am confident of having seen was written by J. Michael Straczynski and I spent the entire half-hour objecting to its depiction of Ragnarök.) Small Wonder I found almost painfully offputting. It may just have been that bad, but conversation with Rob suggested the possibility that I may have been its anti-target audience in that much of its comedy seems to have derived from the robot doing human badly. It really is true that I do not interact with narratives primarily by finding where I fit into them, but in elementary school I was already being told by other children that I wasn't human: to my face, that I must be an alien or an automaton because no real person could read as fast as I did, because I didn't have the right reactions to jokes, because I found so much of my age-mates' behavior bewildering and/or cruel. I didn't believe them, but I didn't need stories that reinforced that mine were the wrong ways to be a person. Much more useful to me was something like Splash (1984), where the nonhumanness of the protagonist is not the whole of the joke or even necessarily a joke at all. Looking to the tidal clock of her shape-change, her English half echolalia from learning it off TV in an afternoon: "Six fun-filled days . . . And the moon is full."
My father used to tell stories of sharing plates of spaghetti with Hendrix, the Siamese cat with whom he lived in New York and who really did end his life as a barn cat upstate, last seen heroically freeze-framed like Newman and Redford in mid-air pursuit of an owl. When I made myself a liverwurst sandwich after we got back from the vet, nothing seemed more natural than to share a slice with Autolycus, who made his little porcupine noises into his bowl, growling over something exquisite.
I was unnerved when the doorbell rang earlier this afternoon because our porch was full of contractors and I wasn't sure what had occasioned this departure from our previous modes of communication, i.e. conversing in passing in the driveway or shouting at one another through the front windows, but it was the mail delivering a Hanukkah present from
boxofdelights. It is the same edition of Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (1955) that I bought in college and which I haven't been able to re-read for more than a decade because I lent it out and never saw it again. I loved it then and suspect I am better equipped to appreciate it now. It was reprinted by Green Knight Publishing, which I didn't until recently recognize also published Phyllis Ann Karr's The Arthurian Companion (2001) and The Follies of Sir Harald (2001), the second of which I own and the first of which I am desperately curious about; I believe they are the press that would have collected her short Arthurian fiction if they hadn't folded shortly afterward, which is a bummer to me personally because I do not have the resources to go around tracking down all of her out-of-print Kay fic. In any case, they introduced me to Naomi Mitchison and I am looking forward to renewing my acquaintance.Last night
spatch had occasion to remind me of the existence of Small Wonder (1985–89), a critically panned and yet apparently popular sitcom about a family with a robot child. I didn't recognize the name, but it turned out to have been one of the confusing shows I encountered at other people's houses as a child—almost any television not produced by Jim Henson or the Children's Television Workshop fell into this category, but in some cases I can remember enjoying the surrealism of American mainstream children's entertainment and in others I was just nonplussed as to its existence. (The Real Ghostbusters (1985–91) is an amusing edge case because the one episode I am confident of having seen was written by J. Michael Straczynski and I spent the entire half-hour objecting to its depiction of Ragnarök.) Small Wonder I found almost painfully offputting. It may just have been that bad, but conversation with Rob suggested the possibility that I may have been its anti-target audience in that much of its comedy seems to have derived from the robot doing human badly. It really is true that I do not interact with narratives primarily by finding where I fit into them, but in elementary school I was already being told by other children that I wasn't human: to my face, that I must be an alien or an automaton because no real person could read as fast as I did, because I didn't have the right reactions to jokes, because I found so much of my age-mates' behavior bewildering and/or cruel. I didn't believe them, but I didn't need stories that reinforced that mine were the wrong ways to be a person. Much more useful to me was something like Splash (1984), where the nonhumanness of the protagonist is not the whole of the joke or even necessarily a joke at all. Looking to the tidal clock of her shape-change, her English half echolalia from learning it off TV in an afternoon: "Six fun-filled days . . . And the moon is full."My father used to tell stories of sharing plates of spaghetti with Hendrix, the Siamese cat with whom he lived in New York and who really did end his life as a barn cat upstate, last seen heroically freeze-framed like Newman and Redford in mid-air pursuit of an owl. When I made myself a liverwurst sandwich after we got back from the vet, nothing seemed more natural than to share a slice with Autolycus, who made his little porcupine noises into his bowl, growling over something exquisite.
