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Vote for Walter A. O'Brien—fight the fare increase
I have a Charlie Card! After my physical therapy appointment this morning, I met ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks in Davis Square and we headed out to Downtown Crossing to replace my expired card and their stolen one. It was a surprisingly painless process. Rush was handed a new pair of cards straight off. I took a number and waited in line and after about five minutes was handed my new card by the MBTA employee who had transferred the stored value from the old one. We were out of there in the time it took to try to remember the RKO films of Val Lewton. (We missed three.) We concluded it was because we'd gone bracing ourselves for an afternoon of administrative hell à la DMV, therefore the law of best-laid plans dictated it was no big deal. If we'd gone in casually and optimistically, the process would have been crowded and awful and taken the rest of the day.
To reward ourselves anyway, we went to the Eldo Cake House in Chinatown and bought the best pork buns. I discovered sadly that the preserved egg in my lotus bun was slightly denser than I wanted to bite, but the lotus paste reminded me how much I just want to make some. It doesn't look astronomically more difficult than azuki bean. Note to self: possibly most inexpensive lunch in months, as well as one of the best. A person really has to work to spend ten dollars in that bakery. We tried to visit the ICA to see Nick Cave's (no relation) Soundsuits, but they're closed on Mondays. At least we found out the new cards work. We repaired to Porter Square Books, whence Rush went home withgaudior and I went home with a book, stopping first at ex-Shaw's to pick up a variety of dairy products. derspatchel and I made a hybrid form of noodles and cheese tonight: Annie's shells, hot dogs, cheddar-and-spiced-breadcrumb topping. Our toaster oven is mighty. I ate coconut-milk ice cream and finished the book.
Here's a story. In a war-locked border town where a prizefight is the only ticket out, an adolescent girl trains to take down the champion who killed her brother in a rigged match. Here's another story. In a demilitarized zone that has lost its name, a gang of church orphans resurrect the legend of the town's patron saint to avenge the abuses of the occupying soldiers and the local families that enable them. Here's another. In a future of pandemic flu and unstable nations, the "Lost Boys" were bred to be super-soldiers—fearless, fast-burning—but some of them wanted nothing more than freedom and family, and none of them knew they could leave children behind. All of these stories are Santa Olivia (2009), the first non-Kushiel novel I've read by Jacqueline Carey and far and away my favorite. Did I mention the queer coming-of-age romance? It's that, too. The book is at least three different genres of pulp all gloriously spliced together with overtones of superhero mythology and the noir-ish kind of B-picture where the girl who thought she was a gold-digger falls for her hard-luck true love after all. And it's not any kind of pastiche: it is a very solid, near-future science fiction novel whose protagonist is named Loup Garron not because she is actually a werewolf (under which circumstances, no) but because the tabloids called her father and his kind "wolf-men," though no one knows for sure what the non-human parts of them were. One of the lovely, characteristic touches of the book is that she never finds out and it doesn't matter. I suspect it was a difficult book to market; I don't think it's YA, although the majority of the story takes place during Loup's adolescence, and it's not at all paranormal in either the technical or genre senses, although the design tries its hardest not to give that away. The cover, which shows a slender, backlit figure in tight boots and a billowing cutaway coat, is about as one hundred percent wrong for this novel as it could have been without whitewashing. (Loup's mother is Latina, her father Haitian-born. Loup herself is brown-skinned—the text does use "caramel" a couple of times—with her father's natural hair. Her half-brother is fair-haired, blue-eyed, an American soldier's son. Santa Olivia was part of Texas before it became plague-wasted Outpost 12 in the cordon between warring Mexico and the United States.) Personally I am not sure why everyone doesn't want to buy a novel with all the elements I have described above, especially the matter-of-fact queerness, especially the boxing, especially the varied cast of characters mostly of color, especially the setting which is dystopian only if so are many army-patrolled places in the present day, but I do not work for Grand Central Publishing. Sadly, I am informed that the sequel is not worth pursuing; fortunately, the book ends like it doesn't need one. Ignore the back-cover text, which is of the species strictly speaking accurate, misses everything about the book, and enjoy.
P.S. I have just realized that what Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" reminds me of most is Siouxsie & The Banshees' "Strange Fruit." I was listening to Through the Looking Glass (1987) and those swaying, bell-tolling chords were suddenly familiar. They're not congruent songs, but something in the sound. I can never tell if this sort of thing is just my brain or not.
rushthatspeaks in Davis Square and we headed out to Downtown Crossing to replace my expired card and their stolen one. It was a surprisingly painless process. Rush was handed a new pair of cards straight off. I took a number and waited in line and after about five minutes was handed my new card by the MBTA employee who had transferred the stored value from the old one. We were out of there in the time it took to try to remember the RKO films of Val Lewton. (We missed three.) We concluded it was because we'd gone bracing ourselves for an afternoon of administrative hell à la DMV, therefore the law of best-laid plans dictated it was no big deal. If we'd gone in casually and optimistically, the process would have been crowded and awful and taken the rest of the day.To reward ourselves anyway, we went to the Eldo Cake House in Chinatown and bought the best pork buns. I discovered sadly that the preserved egg in my lotus bun was slightly denser than I wanted to bite, but the lotus paste reminded me how much I just want to make some. It doesn't look astronomically more difficult than azuki bean. Note to self: possibly most inexpensive lunch in months, as well as one of the best. A person really has to work to spend ten dollars in that bakery. We tried to visit the ICA to see Nick Cave's (no relation) Soundsuits, but they're closed on Mondays. At least we found out the new cards work. We repaired to Porter Square Books, whence Rush went home with
gaudior and I went home with a book, stopping first at ex-Shaw's to pick up a variety of dairy products. derspatchel and I made a hybrid form of noodles and cheese tonight: Annie's shells, hot dogs, cheddar-and-spiced-breadcrumb topping. Our toaster oven is mighty. I ate coconut-milk ice cream and finished the book.Here's a story. In a war-locked border town where a prizefight is the only ticket out, an adolescent girl trains to take down the champion who killed her brother in a rigged match. Here's another story. In a demilitarized zone that has lost its name, a gang of church orphans resurrect the legend of the town's patron saint to avenge the abuses of the occupying soldiers and the local families that enable them. Here's another. In a future of pandemic flu and unstable nations, the "Lost Boys" were bred to be super-soldiers—fearless, fast-burning—but some of them wanted nothing more than freedom and family, and none of them knew they could leave children behind. All of these stories are Santa Olivia (2009), the first non-Kushiel novel I've read by Jacqueline Carey and far and away my favorite. Did I mention the queer coming-of-age romance? It's that, too. The book is at least three different genres of pulp all gloriously spliced together with overtones of superhero mythology and the noir-ish kind of B-picture where the girl who thought she was a gold-digger falls for her hard-luck true love after all. And it's not any kind of pastiche: it is a very solid, near-future science fiction novel whose protagonist is named Loup Garron not because she is actually a werewolf (under which circumstances, no) but because the tabloids called her father and his kind "wolf-men," though no one knows for sure what the non-human parts of them were. One of the lovely, characteristic touches of the book is that she never finds out and it doesn't matter. I suspect it was a difficult book to market; I don't think it's YA, although the majority of the story takes place during Loup's adolescence, and it's not at all paranormal in either the technical or genre senses, although the design tries its hardest not to give that away. The cover, which shows a slender, backlit figure in tight boots and a billowing cutaway coat, is about as one hundred percent wrong for this novel as it could have been without whitewashing. (Loup's mother is Latina, her father Haitian-born. Loup herself is brown-skinned—the text does use "caramel" a couple of times—with her father's natural hair. Her half-brother is fair-haired, blue-eyed, an American soldier's son. Santa Olivia was part of Texas before it became plague-wasted Outpost 12 in the cordon between warring Mexico and the United States.) Personally I am not sure why everyone doesn't want to buy a novel with all the elements I have described above, especially the matter-of-fact queerness, especially the boxing, especially the varied cast of characters mostly of color, especially the setting which is dystopian only if so are many army-patrolled places in the present day, but I do not work for Grand Central Publishing. Sadly, I am informed that the sequel is not worth pursuing; fortunately, the book ends like it doesn't need one. Ignore the back-cover text, which is of the species strictly speaking accurate, misses everything about the book, and enjoy.
P.S. I have just realized that what Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" reminds me of most is Siouxsie & The Banshees' "Strange Fruit." I was listening to Through the Looking Glass (1987) and those swaying, bell-tolling chords were suddenly familiar. They're not congruent songs, but something in the sound. I can never tell if this sort of thing is just my brain or not.
no subject
I have both of the Santa Olivia books, and it's true that the sequel lacks many of the elements of the first book that you mention as being particularly awesome. It spends a lot of time talking about the band Loup works for, which I enjoyed, but it does make the second book a whole lot more All About The Men than the first one, and it doesn't do anything new or interesting to make up for it.
Speaking of not new or interesting, Carey's Agents Of Hel series (currently two books) is neither. It's like her publishing company told her she had to jump on the bandwagon of 'Quirky Small Town Girl Who Does Supernatural Stuff' and she deliberately wrote something that pinged all the requirements of the genre, while being dull as dust, just to spite them. If it weren't for the author's name on the cover, I would never, never have pegged it as a Jacqueline Carey novel; it reads like she was already planning to disown it as she was writing it.
no subject
Talk to me about the second and third? I don't know if I'll read them, but I'm curious for enthusiastic viewpoints. In some ways I feel like my mistake with Kushiel's Dart was imprinting on Anafiel Delaunay, who turned out not to be a major character after all.
It spends a lot of time talking about the band Loup works for, which I enjoyed, but it does make the second book a whole lot more All About The Men than the first one, and it doesn't do anything new or interesting to make up for it.
Check. I'm not hearing that reading Saints Astray ruins Santa Olivia, which is very important (Children of God, I'm looking at you), but I'm also not hearing a compelling reason to search it out. I am a little sorry, because Santa Olivia was just that awesome, but at least it exists as it is.
It's like her publishing company told her she had to jump on the bandwagon of 'Quirky Small Town Girl Who Does Supernatural Stuff' and she deliberately wrote something that pinged all the requirements of the genre, while being dull as dust, just to spite them. If it weren't for the author's name on the cover, I would never, never have pegged it as a Jacqueline Carey novel; it reads like she was already planning to disown it as she was writing it.
That's really sad. That's not even a genre that needs more authors, you know?
no subject
So. The Kushiel's Legacy trilogies. I always preface any discussion of these books with The Disclaimer: Yes, I understand that these are problematic books. No, that doesn't prevent me from enjoying them. Yes, I am probably interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, because the perspective from which I'm interrogating it is "Does this work for me as a story?"
Parts of it really do work for me, and a lot of those parts are in the second trilogy. The first trilogy left me wondering about that whole "Love as thou wilt" thing. One of the things I wondered was how that can possibly work in a society where political marriages are clearly necessary from time to time. Another thing I wondered was whether Terre d'Ange was really such a utopia that no one was ever abused in any way (other than negotiated D/s and/or kink)--and, if it's not, what happens to abuse survivors. Does their pain
magicallygods-giftedly vanish once they stumble upon the right kind of healing sex?The second trilogy answers, to some extent, both of those questions. Carey doesn't flinch away (much) from the reality of Imriel's childhood abuse and how he subsequently survives adolescence and adulthood in a highly sexualized society. And pretty much the entire plot of the second and third books of the second trilogy center around what happens when two people who are in love can't be together for political reasons; they break the "Love as thou wilt" commandment, and Extremely Bad Things happen. As storytelling, it works for me.
(The first book of Imriel's trilogy, by the way, does spend a fair amount of time at the University of Tiberium, where Imriel learns the same superspy stuff that Anafiel Delaunay learned earlier--and we find out more about how Delaunay learned it and what kind of stuff he got into at university. Plus, this book has a section where one of Imriel's agemate friends gets possessed by the ghost of his own grandfather while they're fighting an alterna-Roman clan war. It's a neat sequence.)
The third trilogy skips forward about a hundred years, conveniently removing the need to deal with any of the characters from the first two trilogies. It features a first-person-narrator protagonist I find less appealing than Phedre or Imriel, and in general this trilogy appears to be overstocked with unlikeable characters. Also, the third trilogy is, for me anyways, where the Skipping Lightly Among Whatever Alterna-Cultures Jacqueline Carey Thinks Sound Sexy And Mystical thing jumps the shark. I'm not qualified to discuss whether it's Racefaily, but IMHO it's really kind of boring in spots.
As storytelling goes, the third trilogy's main asset is that it's an outsider's perspective on Terre d'Ange; the protagonist, Moirin, is the daughter of a d'Angeline father and a Alban mother, and is raised among her mother's people until her teens.
A lot of folks with whom I've discussed the series online are huge Moirin fans, but their reasoning often boils down to "Yay Awesome Ladies! Moirin kicks ass! She's awesomer than that boring whore Phedre!" which, needless to say, doesn't encourage me to continue the conversation further.
Finally, regarding Delaunay, Wikipedia tells me that one of the George R.R.Martin-Gardner Dozois anthologies (Songs Of Love And Death) contains a story called "You And You Alone" which is basically The Story Of Anafiel Delaunay And How He Got That Way.
...yeah, I kind of have thoughts about these books.