eye_of_a_cat | Reading

I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C, which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.

I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.

My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with the other stories I had grown up hearing.

I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.

Current Music: The Kooks, "Four Leaf Clover"

mrissa

Review copy provided by the publisher.

This is a bit like if The Book of Ash had a massively repeating time loop and was explicitly anti-fascist, and clocked in at almost exactly 300 pages.

So...not a lot like The Book of Ash actually. Ah well. It does have a scholar/historian, it does have examination of the legends of the past and how they serve the goals of the present. It does have complicated human relationships, and it does have about as much blood as something this full of swords should by rights have.

There's a love story at the heart of this, possibly more than one depending on how you read it, but structurally it is definitely not a romance. It might be the older kind of romance, with knights fighting for their honor, with strange and wondrous events. Time loops certainly qualify, I should think. But the characters have a real tinge to them--they are explicitly not the stained glass icons some of them see from time to time in the text. If I had one complaint it could be my common one with time loops: that it's hard to get the balance right so that repetition and change are harmonized in just the right way. But I'd still recommend the way Harrow is determined to examine how the stories we tell serve ends that may not be our own--and what we can do about that.

purplecat

Cover of Doctor the Matrix by Robert Perry & Mike Tucker. Sylvester McCoy surrounded by four tardises.

silver_chipmunk

Got up at 7:45 at

mashfanficchick's. Showered and dressed, and walked to Starbucks for coffee. Then Ubered over to the eye surgeon.

The surgery was really not bad. They gave me 10 mg of Valium beforehand, and filled my eye with lidocaine, and there were no problems.

Then after it was all over, it was only around 10:30, so instead of waiting in the area we Ubered back to zer place where I slept for two hours.

Then at 3:00 we took the bus back over and got there with enough time to have lunch at the halal restaurant next door.

Finished in time for my appointment, and went back over to the surgeons. Everything looked good, they took off the eye shield though I have to wear it at night for a week. I also have sunglasses I have to wear for a month,

Went back to

mashfanficchick's and took another small nap.

Then the Mets game was delayed by rain in Kansas City so I Teamed the FWiB while we waited.

The game was going by the time I finished, and I watched til 11:00 and then Ubered home.

Fed the pets, put in an eye drop, and started here,

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2.

mashfanficchick

3. The surgery went well.

4. Air conditioning.

5. Naps.

6. Bed soon.

Current Mood: chipper

extrapenguin

July is half gone already, and just yesterday I got a flyer from the town hall about "summer events in [my locale]".

Me: But summer is almost over???

(But for real, people taking their summer vacations in August feels so wrong, like wishing someone Merry Christmas in February. Summer is over! Schools are starting! Except here they aren't. Also the sun has kept setting, so emotionally I've had a May that's three months long.)

Also I'm about to disappear into

battleshipex for two-three weeks. Good luck everyone, have fun, sign-ups are over but you can still drop a prompt or twenty if you want.

silver_chipmunk

Posting from my phone. Spent the day at

mashfanficchick's place. We watched the last of The Lincoln Lawyer. I called Middle Brother, he's fine. We had halal food for dinner. I briefly Teamed the FWiB. Spending the night to go to my eye surgery tomorrow.

Current Mood: good

olivermoss

* Murderbot season 2!

I still need to finishing S1. During one of the episodes a lot of people are talking softly and like... I cannot get my computer to turn up enough. I need to finish it out wearing headphones. My laptop has good audio, but some Apple TV shows are just quiet.

I assume if they are doing an S2, they are probably doing more because it makes sense to film sort of concurrently due to the way characters pop in and out of the narrative. If they want to keep the actors, concurrent filming and maybe some 'meanwhile back on PresAux' moments. They dropped the first person POV, and again, that might be part of why, figuring out how to make it a viable project to continue.

* I got D&D in an hour. I don't have time to check if the new episode Worldcon drama is legit or not, dammit.

sovay

It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

Current Music: Michigander, "Giving Up"

purplecat

I see I thought yesterday was Thursday and posted a "Throwback Thursday" post. So for today have a post from my "list of things to be posted"

Grace from Doctor Who, smiling

Grace from Doctor who in blue opera gown, running down corridor.

Grace from Doctor Who - close up of face.

Grace from Doctor Who chewing pencil next to microscope.

Snagging is free. Credit is appreciated. Comments are loved.

shewhomust

I collected my new glasses from the optician yesterday morning. They are as close in appearance to my old ones as I could find: I was happy with what I had, so why change it? But of course fashion means that you can never get exactly the same as last time, so these are subtly different: slightly larger, slightly darker, slightly heavier, slightly more angular in shape, almost hexgonal. I wore them to the pub quiz last night, and C. noticed at once: "New glasses?" she asked, and

durham_rambler wondered how she knew - had someone seen us leaving the opticians? No, we explained, she knew because she could see that I was wearing them.

The real question, though, is: do they improve my vision? Too soon to say.

I left my other pair - that is, the mid-distance pair that I use at my desktop - with the optician. These are the ones whose frames I really like, so we will try fitting the new lenses into the old frames, and hope they don't shatter. I should find out in a week or so.

soricel

I love Terry Hope Romero's cookbook Salad Samurai, especially some of the recipes in the "Summer" chapter. Here's one of my faves:

Polish Summer Soba Salad

Salad ingredients:
1/2 pound uncooked beets, peeled and diced
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon olive oil, divided
1/4 teaspoon celery seeds
Pinch of salt and a few twists of freshly ground black pepper
6 ounces soba noodles
2 scallions, green part only, thinly sliced
1 English cucumber, peeled and sliced into thin half-moons
1 cup cooked white beans
3 tablespoons chopped roasted walnuts

Dill dressing:
1/2 cup finely chopped dill
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt

1.) Preheat the over to 400 and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spread the diced beets on the parchment paper, drizzle with 1 tablespoon of oil, celery seeds, salt, and pepper and toss. Roast for 20 minutes, or until tender and easily pierced with a fork.
2.) Prepare the soba noodles according to package directions, but slightly undercook them to al dente. Drain, rinse with plenty of cold water, and transfer to a mixing bowl.
3.) In another mixing bowl, combine the scallions, cucumber, and white beans. Whisk the dressing ingredients together in a glass measuring cup or bowl, pour half over the bean and vegetable mixture, and toss. Add the remaining dressing to the soba noodles and toss.
4.) Divide the soba noodles among serving bowls and twirl into a mound in the center of each bowl. Spoon the bean and vegetable mixture over the soba, garnish with roasted beets, and sprinkle with roasted walnuts.

silver_chipmunk

I got up at 10:30ish and had breakfast and coffee, then showered and dressed, and headed over to

mashfanficchick's place.

I got there by 1:00, and the movers texted at a bit after that they would arrive by 2:30. So a bit before 2:00 we Ubered over.

The movers got there, and they moved everything into the storage unit. There was much more room left than I expected, truthfully I am puzzled. But that's OK. It is done.

So

mashfanficchick and I took the bus to the subway and then ate at Chipotle which was very good. Then we took the subway back to zer apartment and settled in.

I skipped my D&D game, which was cancelled anyway, so that's OK.

We watched five I think, episodes of The Lincoln Lawyer. Then I Ubered home.

Now it's time for bed.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB, didn't Team but emailed.

2. Oldest Brother's stuff is moved.

3.

mashfanficchick

4. The Kid thinks she did good on her job interview today.

5. Good TV.

6. Fresh cherries.

Current Mood: rushed

cahn

Via

selenak, of course :) This was a very interesting and somewhat odd historical fiction book about Francisco Goya, the painter, and his life and times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the book begins with the Spanish court talking about Marie Antoinette's recent death -- so ~1793 -- and ends around 1800). I must admit that Spain is a big hole in my already-very-spotty knowledge of Europe, although opera fandom and salon helped a lot by filling in at least a couple of gaps about Philip II, the Escorial, and the Duke of Alba (and Philip V who thought he was a frog, but who does not appear in this book at all). Now, of course, Philip II was a couple of centuries too soon for this book (even I knew that!) but he's namechecked a couple of times, as is Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Third Duke of Alba), again centuries too early but the forerunner of the Duchess of Alba in this book, who is a major character (María Cayetana de Silva; her husband Don José Álvarez de Toledo is a minor character).

Goya I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I knew he was a painter, and I knew (hilariously, from a Snoopy cartoon) he'd painted a kid with a dog (Google tells me this is his famous "Red Boy" painting). One of the really cool things about the book is the way it functions as an art guide (and one with a whole lot more context than usual art guides) to some of Goya's famous paintings. I only started following along with the wikipedia list of his paintings once I hit the middle or so (I read the first half on a plane and during a retreat), but I wish I'd done that the whole time! I know so little about art that it was helpful to have the "interpretation" of it right there (Feuchtwanger often includes the reaction of various people to the art piece, as well as Goya's feelings about it).

Indeed the book is dictated by the art, to a certain extent: if you look at Goya's pictures in chronological order (as I have now done), he does these sort of nice standard pictures until... about 1793, when the pictures start getting more interesting (and indeed the book starts with Goya making a breakthrough in his art). And then around 1800 is when he starts doing these crazy engravings that start looking much more modern -- like, you can totally see them as an artistic bridge between Bosch (namechecked in the book) and Dali (who obviously was yet to come far in the future) -- his book of engravings, Los Caprichos, is what the book ends on (and the title is taken from that of the last Caprichos engraving, Ya es hora).

It is curiously missing in any real sort of character arc -- I mean, Goya keeps talking about how he's progressed in life and thinks about things so differently now, but really he seems to me to be pretty much the same at the end as the beginning, except more battered by life. It's his art that has progressed, though. Instead of a character arc we have an art arc, I guess!

The book also cheerfully uses all the most sensational theories about Goya and the Spanish court possible, with the effect that it is quite compelling but does veer a bit into "wow, this is Very Soap Opera" at times. Basically, everyone is having torrid love affairs with everyone else, and all of that becomes totally relevant to all the politics that's going on. Some of this is attested historically, and some of it is less so. On one hand, Manuel Godoy, the Secretary of State, does appear to have had a close relationship with Queen Maria Luisa (Wikipedia, at least, does not think that there is any direct evidence they were lovers, but at least it's clear there were rumors). But as far as I can tell from Google, Maria Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, did die mysteriously, buuuuut there isn't any evidence at all that she died as a result of a botched abortion of Goya's baby. (Did I mention Very Soap Opera?? Yeah.)

It's sort of shocking to me that the book ends before any of the War of Spanish Independence, which happens just a few years later (which again, since I know zero Spanish history I just found out about while reading various wiki articles after reading this) or Goya's resulting engravings on The Disasters of War (ditto), although I guess all the signs are there as to what's going to happen -- it's not that different from what Feuchtwanger did in Proud Destiny, where even I know that the French Revolution is going to happen, but he doesn't show it in the book.

Requisite Feuchtwanger things: 1) protagonist is irresistable to the ladies and has multiple women who are crazy about him, check 2) small child dies, check.

Ranking in Feuchtwangers: I think the Josephus trilogy is still my favorite, and Jud Süß is still the one I'm most impressed by, but I did like this quite a bit, especially when I had the visuals to go with it.

sovay

Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

Current Music: Haim, "Down to Be Wrong"

mellowtigger

During our daily stand-up meeting online yesterday, before the meeting got started, our newest addition (still in training) to the team mentioned closing their eyes after work "for just a few seconds" then suddenly it was a few hours later. And they still had no problem getting back to sleep on schedule later.

Some voice (I'm not sure who) in the meeting responded with those 5 magic words that I keep using too. "This job is a lot."

It's not just me being old or inflexible. It's definitely the job that's stressful and tiring.

shewhomust

According to last night's news, on his visit to the Palace, President Macron was served a cocktail of English gin and French pastis. This was reported to demonstrate the entente cordiale, but it sounds medicinal to me.

Also, gin? Isn't that traditionally from Holland?

silver_chipmunk

Last night Stone and Sky, the new Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London became available, so I downloaded it to my Nook.

Then I had very broken sleep (especially considering I got to bed at 3:30ish). I got up at 10:00 and put in my first dose of the eye drops I need before my surgery Friday, then went back to bed. But I finally got up, around 12:30, had breakfast and coffee, and meant to get my laundry together and take it down.

But it was over 90 degrees out, and felt like 102, so I decided no, stay in and read.

So that's what I did, I read Stone and Sky, in the bedroom with the ac on. I had gotten a call from the movers who are bringing Oldest Brother's stuff to the unit that they would bring it between 2:00 and 4:00 tomorrow, so later I called

mashfanficchick and told her and we made plans.

At 6:00 I got off and puttered online, and emailed Ricky since I never heard back from him about picking me up from the train station, and asked him straight out. Waiting for an answer.

At 7:00 I Teamed the FWiB, We talked til it was time for my meeting at 8:00. The meeting was just me and M. So we ended early, and I had dinner, then went to read again until pet feeding time. Then I fed the pets, and did today's third drop in my eye.

And now it's time for more reading.

Gratitude List:

1. The FWiB.

2. Good books.

3. The delivery tomorrow isn't in the early morning.

4. Air conditioning.

5. Surgery Friday.

6. Able to stay in.

Current Mood: chipper

sovay

Probably because it has been weeks since I slept more than a couple of hours a night and months since I had what would be medically termed a good night's sleep, I spent at least ten hours last night unconscious enough to dream and it was amazing. Under ideal circumstances I would devote my afternoon to reading on the front steps until the thunderstorms arrive. Under the resentful circumstances of realism I have already devoted considerable of my afternoon to phone calls with doctors and will need to enact capitalism while I have the concentration for it. I may still try to take a walk. I have a sort of pressure headache of movies I managed to watch before I ran completely out of time and would like to talk about even in shallow and unsatisfactory ways. I heard Kaleo's "Way Down We Go" (2015) on WERS and am delighted that the video was shot in the dormant volcano Þríhnúkagígur. I will associate it with earthquake-bound Loki. My brain thought it should dream about nonexistent Alan Garner and what I very much doubt will be the second season of Murderbot (2025–).

[edit] Taking a walk informed me that the sidewalk of the street at the bottom of our street has been spray-painted with a swastika, visible efforts to scrub it out notwithstanding. The sentiment is far from shocking, but the placement is rather literally close to home.

Current Music: Kaleo, "Way Down We Go"

wychwood

I have indeed played lots of ME:A (up to 34% completion, apparently). Also done many other things but all while lacking any desire to put any effort into documenting them! However, I have visited the Stourbridge Glass Museum with Miss H last Thursday, which felt more art-gallery-ish than really museum-y to me, but did have some lovely glass things. There's a big historic gallery, which has lots of... glasses and vases and things, mostly in categories by technique and with plaques that talk about the local connections and the like, and a big 20th century and contemporary gallery with lots of cool and fun modern art glass, with some glasses and vases and the like as well. They also have a "hot shop" with actual glassmakers working, which was my favourite part. I bought a ladybird suncatcher which is hanging on my window and looking very cheerful even behind the slatted blind.

Then on the Saturday we went to Thinktank, the science museum, to see the Space Vault exhibition and also TWO shows in the planetarium because we are suckers for a planetarium. Unlike the Leicester Space Centre we did not get to vote on any trivia questions, but we did learn about summer stars and also the Artemis project. The exhibition itself was full of space-and-astronaut objects that mostly weren't actually very exciting (a piece of broken insulation! a manual! some gloves!) but they did a good job of contextualising the artefacts and adding audio and visual components (although the audio was frankly not loud enough to actually listen to, given the volume in the rest of the floor) and I enjoyed myself. Although, as with last time I went to Thinktank, it was obscenely hot and humid, so I started dragging fairly quickly; possibly I am cursed.

Otherwise I have mostly been preparing for GRADUATIONS, mostly the part where I have to be on campus every day. I made what eventually turned out to be twelve portions of pasta bake, now largely filling my freezer, to be eaten for lunches etc, and attempted to mentally adjust to the prospect. Today was the first day, and so far I have done one ceremony (the first of the season!); I'm signed up for a second already, so we'll see how it goes...

purplecat

Two Doctor Who companion outfits for your delectation and delight! Outfits selected by a mixture of ones I, personally, like; lists on the internet; and a certain random element.

( Outfits below the Cut )

Vote for your favourite of these costumes. Use whatever criteria you please - most practical, most outrageously spacey, most of its decade!

Voting will remain open for at least a week, possibly longer!

Costume Bracket Masterlist

Images are a mixture of my own screencaps, screencaps from Lost in Time Graphics, PCJ's Whoniverse Gallery, and random Google searches.

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eye_of_a_cat

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Page generated Jul. 12th, 2025 10:26 pm

I must say that in the right light, you look like Shackleton

Reading

Paperback novelette still open and the door is closed

The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow

Random Doctor Who Picture

Eye surgery

(no subject)

Just fast

(no subject)

If life is what we make it, then why's it always breaking?

Grace Icons

New glasses!

Sunshine Revival challenge #3

Storage unit

This Is the Hour (Feuchtwanger)

But I lost my heart and the future's gone with it

yep, it's the job

I just don't get cocktails

Reading day

'Cause they will run you down, down to the dark

i might get a manned moon flyby for my birthday!

Costume Bracket: Round 4, Post 5

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