Rise if you're sleeping, stay awake

[sovay]

The snow must have delayed the mail, because it wasn't until we got home from dinner that I found my contributor's copy of Coping, the annual not-Not One of Us publication, containing my poems "Clear" and "Defixio." The first was written over midnight of All Hallows' Eve, inspired by a photograph; the second is a straightforward curse. (My parents' house was broken into last February. None of the objects stolen, some of great actual and memorial value to my family, has ever been recovered.) As the title promises, everyone in these stories is getting by, if not necessarily in the ways anyone else would have envisioned for them. I'm doing the best that I can. That's a motto I understand.

derspatchel and I had planned to attend the Burns Supper at the Skellig for his birthday, but Waltham called a snow emergency and the supper was rescheduled, so instead I took him to Spoke. Their sign is an illuminated word balloon and that's faintly precious, but their food is sound and delicious and I defy anyone who eats meat not to appreciate a pair of merguez sliders with chickpea fries, rolled slices of rabbit porchetta over a kind of small gnocchi and white beans, and farro risotto with mushroom and egg, savory-smoky as if it contained bacon when we know for a fact it did not. Their drinks and desserts are also substantially weird, as proof of which I will mention a cocktail called Sleepytime with absinthe and chamomile and a sheep's milk panna cotta with blood orange (both the sunset-pink segments and the candied peel). I wore the vest ladymondegreen gave me on Saturday, which turns out to go with several of my turtlenecks. Rob wore one of his good shirts and his '62 sweater, but I have no pictures, because the light levels were lower than Cuchi Cuchi and we barely got an abstract out of that birthday dinner. Because of the snow and Rob's crutches, we took a taxi both ways: and both times got the same taxi driver, who talked to us about food. I must say that the idea of pan-fried rabbit marinated in wine sounds fantastic to me. rushthatspeaks, he also recommended Sarma.

I have not yet finished Tim Pratt T. Aaron Payton's The Constantine Affliction (2012), but it's gonzo steampunk and it's doing a surprising amount to examine assumptions of gender in the genre: the "affliction" of the title is a genderswap virus, reputedly transmitted by the offstage, English-born, one-time resident of Constantinople Orlando—and as the novel is explicitly intertextual with Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), even if rumor lies, I have no difficulty picturing Tilda Swinton meandering this London with its clockwork whores and districts quarantined by alchemical fire and uneasy compromises between physical sex and legal gender. A female journalist needs to camouflage her feminine name behind a first initial even as Constantine-transformed peers of the realm put on their false moustaches and play that nothing has changed in an Empire where even the sex of the Queen's own consort is not immutable. A woman who is still legally a man makes a marriage of convenience with her oldest friend, himself unaffected by the life-overturning plague until his latest investigations begin to lead back its way. It could all still fall in on itself in the last chapters, but as of the halfway mark I'm having a terrific time.

I am in fact very amused by this.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Okay, I have bought the ebook of the Payton although who knows when I will get to it. But it sounds very interesting.

[sovay]

Okay, I have bought the ebook of the Payton although who knows when I will get to it. But it sounds very interesting.

It ends more conventionally than I was hoping (I actively dislike the very last chapter, which is by way of resolving a thread among the supporting cast; it makes a point of including mitigating factors, but I much preferred the complete overturn of its particular trope as seen earlier in the book. The resolution of the main plot is, I think, more subversive than I originally gave it credit for, as it's a conventional act that signals the beginning of a societal sea-change. I still hope to see even more destabilization in the next book, if there is one), but I think there's a very good chance that you'll enjoy it. There's a late, left-field turn that introduces even more gonzo into the already inflammable plot mixture, which I was not expecting and rather liked. It's the kind of weird historical that makes me wonder how many in-jokes I'm missing for every allusion (Orlando, Adam, the Air Loom) I can recognize. In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Pratt credits K.W. Jeter, Tim Powers, and John Dickson Carr as formative influences, but I thought its closest relative might be Elizabeth Hand's Pandora's Bride (2007), which also felt faintly to me as though it failed to take full advantage of its premise—I maintain that any book with that title should have had about eighty percent more lesbianism in it than Hand's novel did—but still managed to endear itself to me with a combination of inspired historical lunacy and mashing up a bunch of things I love. The Constantine Affliction is more original characters and less Kim Newman metafiction-braiding, but they're recognizably related species. Anyway, I liked it. I would cheerfully read more stories about the world, especially if they focused on Winifred, who stole pretty much all her scenes and a lot of the finale. I have no idea, of course, if it's even meant to be part of a series.