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Under the brine, you won't notice the dark
So the launch for Caitlín R. Kiernan's Agents of Dreamland was a lot of fun. I had never before interacted with the Lovecraft Arts & Sciences Council; it turns out that they are both a fantastic tiny bookstore and art shop in the Providence Arcade and the people behind NecronomiCon Providence, the biennial convention of the weird coming up in August. They had set up an open tab for the authors with New Harvest Coffee & Spirits, a lovely and generous idea; I completely failed my free booze check and instead just ordered some ginger-lemon tea with an extra slice of lemon and a ridiculous amount of honey so that I wouldn't lose my voice during the reading. There were people in attendance whom I hadn't seen since last year's Readercon. I read a short selection of poems including "Being Providence" and "An Obedience Experiment" and most of my short story "The Creeping Influences," forthcoming from Shimmer. Caitlín read the first two chapters of Agents of Dreamland and a lengthy, poetic, frequently hilarious excerpt from her novel-in-progress Interstate Love Song. I appreciate her and Spooky dropping me back at the train station afterward, because by that point the weather had gone from misty to gross; I caught the last commuter train out of Providence, finished reading Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016), started reading Grace Lin's When the Sea Turned to Silver (2016), did not commit violence either physical or verbal upon the nearby students who seemed to be engaged in an experiment to determine all possible inflections and volumes of the word "bullshit." ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel met me at South Station and after discovering that the internet was wrong about a restaurant being open (for Boston definitions of) late, we fetched up at jm Curley's for very late dinner and it all worked out fine. Today I am quite tired, but I am also baking bread with my father, which is low-key and going to be tasty, and the excursion to Providence was one of the nicest reasons I've had to get out of the house in months. Seriously, most of the rest have been protests. I would enjoy having a social life that is not 100% activism. I wish that didn't feel irresponsible to say.
1. O bel(le) inconnu(e) who sent me a DVD of Pimpernel Smith (1941) but did not include a card, thank you! If I were the sort of person who used multiple exclamation points in sentences, there would be a lot at the end of that preceding line.
2. I don't know how I spent the last fourteen years unaware of British Sea Power's "Carrion," butashlyme has kindly remedied this lack. Can stone and steel and horses' heels ever explain the way you feel? From Scapa Flow to Rotherhithe, I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide. Oh, the heavy water, how it enfolds, the salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow. Always, always, always the sea.
3. Bill H.97 is dead; long live Bill H.1190.teenybuffalo did some calling and discovered that this bill, which like its died-in-committee predecessor was drafted by Representative Kay Khan to prohibit the practice of so-called conversion therapies on queer and trans minors in Massachusetts, will get an as yet unscheduled public hearing at which members of the public can speak to its importance and the necessity of getting it passed. If you would like to participate in this process, call your state legislators, contact Representative Khan or her office, express your support for the bill and ask to be notified when its hearing date is set.
4. I took two silly quizzes last night: on Boston slang and political affiliation in 1917 Russia. (The latter is entirely in Russian, but the preceding page provides translations if necessary.) Apparently I am a centrist Social Revolutionary with a 100% command of Boston slang. I'm so confused about both of these.
5. I've been meaning to post this for days: Yoon Ha Lee talks about gender, representation, win conditions, and math.
6. This is also no longer current events, but I found it beautifully and intelligently written: "On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America's New Right," published right as the conservative mainstream was proving with their jettisoning of Yiannopoulos that their former championing of him had nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with normalizing hate speech. "This is not liberalism winning the day. This is the victorious far right purging the brownshirts."
7. Please enjoy these pictures of Eartha Kitt with kittens.
My mother will be watching the Oscars tonight. She has been listening to Hamilton all day and wants to see Lin-Manuel Miranda become the youngest-ever winner of the EGOT. (Or since he has a Pulitzer already, perhaps EGOPT.) I have decided that I would like to see Barry Jenkins' Moonlight win, even though the odds are against it. Failing that, though I did not find it flawless, I think Denis Villeneuve's Arrival. It didn't have stupid science, which almost never happens onscreen.
[edit, shortly after midnight, frenetic recourse to Facebook and Rob's Twitter feed, and a clarifying phone call from my mother who watched the entire ceremony] Good grief, that happened. Mazel tov, Moonlight!
derspatchel met me at South Station and after discovering that the internet was wrong about a restaurant being open (for Boston definitions of) late, we fetched up at jm Curley's for very late dinner and it all worked out fine. Today I am quite tired, but I am also baking bread with my father, which is low-key and going to be tasty, and the excursion to Providence was one of the nicest reasons I've had to get out of the house in months. Seriously, most of the rest have been protests. I would enjoy having a social life that is not 100% activism. I wish that didn't feel irresponsible to say.1. O bel(le) inconnu(e) who sent me a DVD of Pimpernel Smith (1941) but did not include a card, thank you! If I were the sort of person who used multiple exclamation points in sentences, there would be a lot at the end of that preceding line.
2. I don't know how I spent the last fourteen years unaware of British Sea Power's "Carrion," but
ashlyme has kindly remedied this lack. Can stone and steel and horses' heels ever explain the way you feel? From Scapa Flow to Rotherhithe, I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide. Oh, the heavy water, how it enfolds, the salt, the spray, the gorgeous undertow. Always, always, always the sea.3. Bill H.97 is dead; long live Bill H.1190.
teenybuffalo did some calling and discovered that this bill, which like its died-in-committee predecessor was drafted by Representative Kay Khan to prohibit the practice of so-called conversion therapies on queer and trans minors in Massachusetts, will get an as yet unscheduled public hearing at which members of the public can speak to its importance and the necessity of getting it passed. If you would like to participate in this process, call your state legislators, contact Representative Khan or her office, express your support for the bill and ask to be notified when its hearing date is set.4. I took two silly quizzes last night: on Boston slang and political affiliation in 1917 Russia. (The latter is entirely in Russian, but the preceding page provides translations if necessary.) Apparently I am a centrist Social Revolutionary with a 100% command of Boston slang. I'm so confused about both of these.
5. I've been meaning to post this for days: Yoon Ha Lee talks about gender, representation, win conditions, and math.
6. This is also no longer current events, but I found it beautifully and intelligently written: "On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America's New Right," published right as the conservative mainstream was proving with their jettisoning of Yiannopoulos that their former championing of him had nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with normalizing hate speech. "This is not liberalism winning the day. This is the victorious far right purging the brownshirts."
7. Please enjoy these pictures of Eartha Kitt with kittens.
My mother will be watching the Oscars tonight. She has been listening to Hamilton all day and wants to see Lin-Manuel Miranda become the youngest-ever winner of the EGOT. (Or since he has a Pulitzer already, perhaps EGOPT.) I have decided that I would like to see Barry Jenkins' Moonlight win, even though the odds are against it. Failing that, though I did not find it flawless, I think Denis Villeneuve's Arrival. It didn't have stupid science, which almost never happens onscreen.
[edit, shortly after midnight, frenetic recourse to Facebook and Rob's Twitter feed, and a clarifying phone call from my mother who watched the entire ceremony] Good grief, that happened. Mazel tov, Moonlight!
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I'm never sure if the next line is (as I've seen it written) "brilliantine mortality" or "brilliant immortality."
I believe BSP traditionally end their concerts with an extended version of "Carrion," which segues into "All In It" as the audience join in and someone comes out on stage in a bear costume and high-fives everybody.
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I heard the latter—and it makes the most sense to me, both lyrically and in terms of pop-vocal permutations—although I can see how the latter would have gotten mondegreened from the sound. Are there no official lyrics in any of the band's releases? The third verse is where I start to break up in terms of confidence in my transcription, but I don't like going by the internet unless it's copying from word of God. I will never forget the time I found the last line of Red Hot Chili Peppers' "This Is the Place" rendered as "Another poppin' Jay who thinks he's got something to say," which is a perfectly accurate rendering of the syllables if you have never heard the noun "popinjay."
I believe BSP traditionally end their concerts with an extended version of "Carrion," which segues into "All In It" as the audience join in and someone comes out on stage in a bear costume and high-fives everybody.
I am delighted to hear this.
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I think that's also drawing on the fallacy that bisexuality doesn't count unless a person is demonstrating and acting on attraction to both sexes equally and simultaneously, as if a bi person is really straight when they're with a member of the opposite sex and really queer when they're in a same-sex relationship and can only toggle back and forth between the two options rather than simply being bisexual no matter the gender of their partner, including non-binary. So the only way to be really bisexual is to be polyamorous, at which point you'd get the promiscuity stereotype or the charge of being unable to make up your mind thrown at you if it hadn't happened already. There are a lot of garbage ways to think about bisexuality.
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A friend of mine once got in trouble because, while she had expressly told her fiance that she was, and intended to remain, bisexual, she had apparently NOT communicated that, to her, that included *acting* on it. He thought he was signing up for monogamy. I drew her attention to the analogy of Catholic priesthood, where a priest might have a variety of potential sexual appetites, but would be expected to be celibate regardless.
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Yeah, that sounds like a failure of definition: gender of partners and number of partners are two different axes. My mother had a friend whose husband justified the discovery that he was cheating on his wife with the explanation that it didn't count because he was bisexual and his extramarital partners were all men. It was impressed upon him in turn that it was still cheating, because he hadn't told his wife about any of it. You don't get to claim poly when you're lying to your partners; that's just garden-variety being a jerk. (I consider the no-such-thing-as-a-monogamous-bisexual idea a fallacy, in any case, even when espoused by people who are themselves bi.)
Dd your friend and her fiancé work things out?
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You remind me of friend2, who was in an "open marriage", and yet, her spouse still managed to cheat on her to an astounding extent. I am still baffled by this, but it happened.
Both of these friends ended up divorced. I fell out of touch with friend1, but friend2 has a happy second marriage now.
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Unless you're being facetious, it seems pretty clear to me. Socialist Revolutionary SOUNDS extreme, but they were the ones who wound up supporting the provisional government (and shooting Lenin). And the slang quiz was kinda obvious, and also, you DO hail from (Greater) Boston.
< actually looks at 1917 quiz >
OMG chibi revolutionaries!
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I did not expect to get 100% on the slang quiz because every time I take one of those quizzes which claims to diagnose your regional dialect from your everyday vocabulary or your recognition of slang, I never get Boston or even New England. This never surprises me, because I think all a person has to do in order to fool one of these tests is read beyond their immediate surroundings, but does mean that I don't assume I know my local dialect better than others I've encountered through literature. I did not expect to turn out a Social Revolutionary because, watching my own answers go by, I figured I was headed for "You're really far removed from any of the political forces in 1917 Russia." Nope!
OMG chibi revolutionaries!
(I got it on Facebook from Jeff Mankoff.)
So who did you turn out to be?
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You're very welcome.
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Congratulations!
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Nine
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Thank you!
(I take it you are not my mysterious benefactor?)
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Nine
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That was very sweet of you! Thank you for the idea.
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I'm so happy about Moonlight winning,, but I feel like I dreamed it.
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I was not expecting it!
I'm so happy about Moonlight winning,, but I feel like I dreamed it.
It's the sudden reversal with La La Land. Rob was tracking the ceremony on Twitter while I was following on Facebook; he read out to me that La La Land had won just as a friend of mine posted in disappointment; then the internet exploded. I find the whole thing tremendously satisfying. No one I knew was happy to hear that La La Land had won Best Picture, just unsurprised. And then there was much confusion and rejoicing.
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One of Rob's friends on Facebook commented, "Something I'm pretty sure I've never said before: I am so glad we kept watching the Oscars til the very end."
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I enjoyed it a lot. Because it starts with the director of a Canadian Shakespeare festival whose life suddenly explodes after the fashion of the play he's working on at the time, I had some trouble thinking of it separately from Slings & Arrows, but I thought the setting of Shakespeare in prison worked really well for the dual layers of retelling and both contained a number of conceits I had not seen before and really liked (and can discuss if desired). It's certainly the novel of Atwood's I've enjoyed most. I bounced off her Penelopeiad to the point where it almost put me off the Canongate Myths. (Fortunately that did not happen.)
I normally love retellings, especially Shakespearean ones, but I was disappointed by the other book I read in that Hogarth Shakespeare line, so I'd decided to pass on it so far.
Which one? I had mixed feelings about Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name overall, but I loved its central conceit of a present-day Jewish father with a difficult relationship with his daughter haunted by the ghost of Shylock, who gives him terrible parenting advice. That's the only other I've picked up so far.