sovay: (Morell: quizzical)
[personal profile] sovay
The swallows have returned to Capistrano: last night there were three student parties on our street alone and a fourth around the corner. We are waiting to see if this weekend will bring a new installment of upstairs neighbors.

I opened the refrigerator door and the Brita pitcher fell off its shelf and disintegrated itself in several gallons across the hardwood, so the first thing I did within two minutes of getting up was essentially wash the kitchen floor. I spent the afternoon drying a load of towels and drinking cans of seltzer.

It jarred out of my head too much of the dream I had just woken up from, the slippage of a kitchen sink drama written by a less commonly revived playwright than Shelagh Delaney: a teenage girl and her father who was just about the same age when she was born and still has such a fecklessly fox-boned, adolescent look himself, the two of them as they knock about town, him getting into more fights than holding down jobs, always telling the secret histories of their city which sound half like industrial legend and half like he just made them up, are more often mistaken for a couple than his actual girlfriend with whom he seems to interact most in the form of sincerely less successful apologies. They are clearly each other's half of a double star, a nearly closed system without jealousy, only the exhilaratingly irresponsible habit of dodging the adult world as if it were the two of them against it. It is unsensationally apparent to the audience long before it would cross any other character's mind that in addition to his total improvisation of parenting, he is doing his damnedest not to pass on the next generation of his own implicitly incestuous abuse, which does him credit and gives him little help in figuring out how to support his daughter through a transition he never quite managed himself. Toward the end, it started to flicker between stage sets and the plain world, between rehearsals and history. "I won't meet you," I had to tell the actor, standing in between scenes outside the year of the original production, the same fragile shoulders and thistle-blond hair of his photographs in the role: he would be dead decades before I heard of the play, much less managed to track a copy down. I could tell him that his children had gone into the arts. Onstage she was outgrowing his frozen boyishness and if he could catch up to her, he would still have to let her go.

[personal profile] asakiyume linked Residente's "This is Not America (feat. Ibeyi)" (2022) and it made me think of Elizma's "Modern Life" (2025), both of which should come with content warnings for current events.

I have discovered that BBC Sounds became region-locked about a month ago, which means that one of my major sources for randomly discoverable audio drama seems to have spiraled down the drain. I am completely indifferent to podcasts. I am a simple person and just wanted to listen again to Lieutenant Commander Thomas Woodrooffe being just as lit up as the fleet.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

More spoons!

Aug. 25th, 2025 08:43 pm
sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
[personal profile] sonia
Long ago and just up the hill, I went to an estate sale for someone I wish I had known while she was alive. Her shoes fit me. Her pants fit me. I got a great silverware set I'm still using to supplement the set of 8 each that weren't quite enough.

Her set had 16 each of knives, forks, and tea spoons. I didn't need that many, so I stashed away 8 of each, wrapped up in a piece of fabric, deep in the back of a cabinet. Recently, I was drinking enough tea with honey that I was running out of spoons between dishwasher runs.

Yes, I could and did hand-wash spoons, but where were the backup spoons? I could clearly visualize them in the back of a cabinet - in Portland. Had I gotten rid of them? I looked through all the kitchen cabinets I have now, and didn't see them. I must have passed them along when I got rid of so much stuff before moving.

I did some internet research to see if I could buy some matching spoons, but didn't see anything I wanted to order. Back to hand-washing.

Yesterday, I was looking deep in a kitchen cabinet for a container - and there was the fabric-wrapped bundle of backup silverware. Behold the extra spoons! Now that it's summer I'm not drinking as much tea, but it's good to know the whole set made the move with me. And maybe it will give me more spoons (in the spoonie sense).

A while ago I was looking everywhere for the small black folding umbrella that I use about once every 3 years. (I'm a hooded jacket kinda gal. Umbrellas don't work with bikes.) I dug through various drawers full of outdoor stuff and backpacks, looked everywhere it should and shouldn't be, and didn't turn it up. I guess I got rid of it? I liked it, though. A rarely used umbrella should be tiny and unobtrusive. I finally bought another small-ish black folding umbrella and put it where the first one should have been, in the bin of hats and scarves.

Today I got out a backpack I hadn't used in a while. It felt oddly heavy, so I felt around in its depths. Oh! The umbrella! Completely hidden down there. I put it with the other one in the hat bin. Maybe I'll have a guest who needs to borrow an umbrella someday.

At least I hadn't replaced the spoons. So far, past me didn't get rid of anything I really regret. I've always been good at remembering where things are, but I did lose track of some things in the big move.

August by Dorothy Parker

Aug. 24th, 2025 11:57 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.


******


Link

Fic in a Box Letter

Aug. 25th, 2025 12:14 pm
rachelmanija: (Default)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Full letter to come!

Thank you for writing for me! If you have any questions, please check with the mods. I am a very easy recipient and will be delighted with whatever you write for me. I have no special requirements beyond what's specifically stated in my DNWs. I'm fine with all POVs (i.e., first, second, third), tenses, ratings, story lengths, etc.

My AO3 name is Edonohana. I am open to treats. Very open. I love them.

I like hurt-comfort, action/adventure, horror, domestic life, worldbuilding, evocative descriptions, camaraderie, loyalty, trauma recovery, difficult choices, survival situations, mysterious places and weird alien technology, food, plants, animals, landscape, X-Men type powers, learning to love again or trust again or enjoy life again, miniature things or beings, magic, strange rituals, unknowable things, epistolary fiction, found footage/art/creepy movies/etc, canon divergence AUs anf alternate versions of characters. And many other things, too, of course! That list is just in case something sparks an idea.

Opt-in Tags )

General DNWs )

Caught in Crystal - Patricia Wrede )

Dark Tower - Stephen King )

Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey  )

Marvel 616 )

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke )

The Stand - Stephen King )

Si quiere' mi machete te muerde

Aug. 25th, 2025 12:15 pm
asakiyume: (Kaya)
[personal profile] asakiyume
I went to a show the sea spirit (spouse of the tall one, mother of my little grandson) was in (show was a queer BIPOC group--the sea spirit's piece was about being nonbinary but claiming the title of mother), and before the show, there was music playing, and one piece had this really powerful chorus:

Aquí estamo', siempre estamo'
No nos fuimo', no nos vamo'
Aquí estamo' pa' que te recuerde
Si quiere' mi machete te muerde

(We're here, we're always here
We haven't left, we're not leaving
We're here to remind you:
If you want my machete it'll bite you)

I looked it up when I got home. It's by the Puerto Rican artist Residente and is called "This Is Not America" (at one point in direct conversation with Childish Gambino's "This Is America," with the line "Yes, Gambino my brother, this IS America" and the same point-blank head shot as in his video).

It was pretty overwhelming. Big fat content warning on the video--but also, if you're feeling strong, it's just. Wow, very powerful with its images, and I don't mean the violent ones. A politician Jair Bolsonaro [I didn't know it was him! I see very little visual news] eats a meal and wipes his mouth on the Brazilian flag. Indigenous children in traditional garb reject Amazon-McDonalds-Starbucks.

But the ones that spoke to me the most were a set relating to immigration, detention, deportation ... and families, and love, and physical closeness.

Detainees on one side of a wire fence, including a father with a crying baby in a sling:

many people, including a crying baby, are on one side of a wire fence

The mother, on the other side, approaches and nurses the baby. Through the wire fence.
through a wire fence a woman nurses a baby held by man

The couple lock hands...
two hands hold on to each other through a wire fence

They touch foreheads....
a man and woman lean touch foreheads through a wire fence

The baby holds the mother's breast, looks up, nurses...
a baby nurses through a wire fence

Through a wire fence. As Residente says, Esto sí es America.

Newbery Project Q&A

Aug. 25th, 2025 08:02 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
As the Newbery Project draws to a close, I’ve been preparing some posts about my reading, and I thought I’d start out by answering a few… well, I can’t exactly call them “frequently asked” questions, as the only one people have actually asked is the one about dead dogs. But, anyway, these are questions with important background information.

What is the Newbery Award, anyway?

Every year since 1922, a committee of librarians has selected “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” to receive the Newbery Award. The first prize winner gets the Newbery Medal, while the runner-ups have since the 1970s been called Newbery Honor books. It’s the most prestigious writing award for American children’s literature. (The counterpart award for illustration is the Caldecott.)

What’s the Newbery Project?

The Newbery Project started when I was about eleven and decided to read all the books that had won the Newbery Medal. (The Newbery is the highest award in American children’s literature. It was first awarded in 1922 and has been going strong ever since.) The project eventually fizzled out, as children’s projects do, but in my mid-twenties I resurrected it and completed it.

Then it occurred to me that I could extend the project to include all the Newbery Honor books, which is the name given to the books that are the runners-up to the big medal. A few years, there were no runners-up, and some years there were as many as eight. Most years there are three to five runners-up. I had read a pretty good number of them as a child, so I had about 240 Newbery Honors books left to read.

Two hundred and forty books! Who wants to read two hundred and forty books about dead dogs?

(For my non-American readers, the Newbery award is famous in America as the dead dog award, because there have been a few very famous winners featuring the tragic death of pets and/or best friends. Bridge to Terabithia may have been partially responsible for the fizzling of the first go-round of my Newbery project.)

Actually, the dead dogs are fairly recent. The first dead dog in a Newbery winner appeared in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller in 1957, but that was an outlier. Until 1970, pretty much everyone lives, both dogs and relatives. After 1970 it’s open season on friendly animals and sickly grandparents until the 2000s, at which point the Newbery awards focused more intently on dead relatives.

Two hundred and forty books is still nuts. Why did you do this to yourself?

Because I love children’s books and history, and it turns out that reading the Newbery books are a fantastic way to explore both. The Newbery committee has consistently selected a lot of historical fiction and historical nonfiction (especially biographies) since the beginning, and of course the earlier books are fascinating historical artifacts in their own right at this point.

Are there any overarching themes among the Newbery books?

Beyond history in general, the Newbery awards are particularly interested in American history and more generally the construction of American identity. There’s also an ongoing interest in the history of liberty, the latter of which means, for instance, that two separate William Tell retellings have won Newbery Honors.

There’s also a strong and ongoing interest throughout the history of the award in tales of children from around the world. This reflects both children’s tastes (before children’s literature became its own category, travel narratives were a recognized favorite reading material for children), but also a reflection of the ideal of the “Republic of Childhood,” popularized in American literature by Mary Mapes Dodge in St. Nicholas Magazine, which argues that children in all times and all places are similar to and interested in each other, purely by virtue of their shared childhood.

(no subject)

Aug. 24th, 2025 01:59 pm
skygiants: the princes from Into the Woods, singing (agony)
[personal profile] skygiants
Once upon a time, I read Exiled from Camelot, the novel-length Sir Kay angstfic by Cherith Baldry that Phyllis Ann Kar politely called 'one of the half-best Arthurian novels that I have yet read,' and then launched it off to Be Experienced by [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] troisoiseaux.

Now my sins have come back upon me sevenfold, or perhaps even fifteenfold: [personal profile] troisoiseaux has discovered that, not content with the amount of hurt and comfort that she inflicted upon Kay in exiled from Camelot, Cherith Baldry has written No Less than Fifteen Sad Kay Fanfics and collected them in a volume called The Last Knight of Camelot: The Chronicles of Sir Kay.

This book has now made its way from [personal profile] troisoiseaux via [personal profile] osprey_archer on to me, along with numerous annotations -- [personal profile] osprey_archer has suggested 'drink!' every time Baldry mentions Kay's 'hawk's face,' which I have not done, as I think this would kill me -- to which I have duly added in my turn. I am proud to tell you that I was taking notes and Kay only experiences agonized manly tears nine times in the volume. That means that there are at least six whole stories where Kay manages not to burst into tears at all! And we're very proud of him for that!

The thesis of The Last Knight of Camelot seems to be that Kay is in unrequited love with Arthur; Gawain and Gareth are both in unrequited love with Kay; and everyone else is mean to Kay, all the time, for no reason. [personal profile] troisoiseaux and [personal profile] osprey_archer in their posts have both pulled out this quote which I also feel I am duty-bound to do:

"Lord of my heart, my mind, my life. All that I'll ever be. All I'll ever want.”

He had never revealed so much before.

Arthur leant towards him; there was love in his face, and wonder and compassion too, and Kay knew, his knowledge piercing like an arrow into his inmost spirit, that his love, this single-minded devotion that could fill his life and be poured out and yet never exhausted, was not returned. Arthur loved him, but not like that.

He could not help shrinking back a little.


However, I also must provide the additional context that this tender moment is immediately interrupted by the ARRIVAL OF MORGAUSE, TO SEDUCE ARTHUR, TO MAKE MORDRED, leading me to believe that Baldry is suggesting that if Kay had instead seized the chance to confidently make out with Arthur at this time, the entire doom of Camelot might have been averted. Alas! instead, Arthur dismisses Kay to go hang out with Morgause, it all goes south, Arthur blames Kay for Some Reason, and Kay spends a week on his knees in the courtyard going on hunger strike for Arthur's forgiveness until he collapses on the cobblestones and wakes up to a repentant Arthur tenderly feeding him warm milk.

If the stories in this volume are any judge, this is a pretty normal week for Kay. I also want to shout out

- the one where Lancelot and Gaheris set up a Fake Adventure for Kay to prove his courage, which destroys Kay emotionally, and kitchen-boy-squire Gareth runs after him and tries to swear loyalty to him and ask Kay to knight him, but Kay is like "you cannot AFFORD to have Kay as a friend >:(( for your knightly reputation >:(((" and Gareth shouts "you can't make me your enemy!!" and then Lancelot finds them arguing and is like 'wow, Kay is abusing this poor kitchen boy' and sweeps the lovelorn Gareth away, leaving Kay's reputation worse than before
- the one where Arthur gets kidnapped by an evil sorcerer who demands Excalibur as Arthur's ransom, and then Kay decides to try and trick the evil sorcerer with a Fake Excalibur even though Lancelot is like 'FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE,' and then Kay rescues Arthur from being magic-brainwashed by pure power of [brotherly?] love, and as soon as their tender embrace is over Arthur is like 'wait! you brought a FAKE Excalibur? that's a LIE and DISHONORABLE'
- the one where Kay is accused of rape as a Ploy to Discredit Arthur and has to go through a trial by ordeal where he walks over hot coals while on the verge of death from other injuries and Gawain flings himself into the fire to rescue him but it turns out it's fine because Kay is So Extremely Innocent of the Crime that they both end up clinging together bathed in golden light that heals their injuries

Again: FIFTEEN of these. Baldry is truly living her bliss and I honestly cannot but respect it. The book is going to make its way back from here whence it came, but if anyone else is really feeling a shortage of Kay Agonies in their life, let me know; I'm sure an additional stop would be welcomed as long as whoever gets it pays the annotation tax.
sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
The close to eleven hours I slept last night may have exceeded the sum total of the week that preceded it which did not even have the decency to be hallucinatory as opposed to just blurringly strung out. I feel as though the sole things of value I accomplished were reading a new novel and writing about a movie. One night we walked for ice cream to CB Scoops.

Razing the ecosystem of our back yard seems to have produced a monoculture of black swallow-wort. [personal profile] spatch and I planted a medley of butterfly-supporting wildflowers while the yard was still a burnt-brown wasteland and I just hope any of them can survive the invasive cuckoo. I am not sure there is anyone we could even call to extirpate it. I still miss the rose and the mulberry trees.

Last night I showed him Portrait of Jennie (1948), which I had not seen since high school when my mother showed it to me. I had not understood then that it was so much stranger about ghosthood and time than any of its Hollywood contemporaries to the point where it would have been much more normal as a venture into the Twilight Zone or an ITV production in the '70's. It doesn't even look like its decade: its cinematographer shot it with lenses of the silent era for that extra shimmer of time-slip and died before it reached the screen. I just don't see that many films out of classical Hollywood I would call Sapphire and Steel in on. I can't remember if the 1940 Robert Nathan novella struck me as so formally as well as tonally weird. On a more mundane note, I love that the production picked up David Wayne because it was shooting in New York in 1947 and Finian's Rainbow was on Broadway. I had remembered an uncharacteristically quiet shot of his face screened through harp strings when I had forgotten the tidal crash of the Graves Light, tinted in luciferin-green as if the very film stock and not just its characters have washed back into 1925.

If Alexander Knox did introduce Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, I can blame him in a partial, positive way for the first film I ever saw in theaters, which was *batteries not included (1987).

(no subject)

Aug. 23rd, 2025 09:40 am
skygiants: C-ko the shadow girl from Revolutionary Girl Utena in prince drag (someday my prince will come)
[personal profile] skygiants
[personal profile] genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

Beth found the pace and tone of plotting very Joan Aiken-ish and I have to admit I agree with her.

BETH: But I understand that The Hearing Trumpet is like this because Carrington was a surrealist. Is it possible that Joan Aiken was also a surrealist this whole time and we've simply not been looking at her work through the right lens?
ME: I don't think her life landed her in quite the right set of circumstances to be a surrealist properly ... I think she was a little too young when the movement was kicking off .... but I do think that perhaps she believed in their beliefs even if she didn't know it ....

Anyway, The Hearing Trumpet is in some ways has elements of a classically seventies feminist text -- she wrote it while deeply involved in Mexico's 1970s women's liberation movement, and the whole occultist nun -> holy grail -> icepocalypse plot has a lot of Sacred Sexy Goddess Repressed By The Evil And Prudish Christian Church running through it -- but Marian Leatherby's robust and and opinionated ninety-year-old voice is so charmingly unflappable that the experience is never in the least bit predictable or cliche. My favorite character is Marian's best friend Carmella, who kicks off the book by giving mostly-deaf Marian the hearing trumpet that allows her to [selectively] understand the things that are going on around her. Carmella plays the role often seen in children's books of Friend Who Is Constantly Gloriously Catastrophizing About How Dramatic A Situation Will Be And How They Will Heroically Rescue You From It (and then I will smuggle you a secret letter and tunnel into the old-age home in order to avoid the dozens of police dogs! etc. etc.) which is even funnier when the things that are actually happening are even weirder and more dramatic than anything Carmella predicts, just in a slightly different genre, and then funnier again when Carmella shows up towards the end of the book perfectly suited to surviving the Even Newer, Weirder, and More Dramatic Situations that have Arisen.

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 

Review copy provided by the author, who is a dear friend.

Margaret and Riven solved all their problems in A Marriage of Undead Inconvenience, didn't they? Sure they did! They realized their true feelings for each other, they found a method to cope with Riven's vampirism, set Margaret up to do the academic research she loves and found a lost artefact, and even overcame the forces of inheritance law! What more is there to say?

About that.

Their honeymoon is supposed to be calm and quiet, in a remote inn. But they're not the inn's only guests--and having a mainstream human like Margaret on the premises can be disturbing for other supernatural beings who are hoping for peace and acceptance. Margaret and Riven were hoping to have some time to get to know each other better--a traditional honeymoon for an untraditional couple--but instead they're drawn into the problems and puzzles of the people around them--and the remote forest in which they live. The search for Reflection's Heart is on!...with one or two interludes of honeymoon sweetness along the way.

This sequel novella is a sweet, fun adventure with themes of acceptance. It's perfect for days when a little smidge of escapism is just what you need.

Washer's busted

Aug. 23rd, 2025 09:10 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
The money comes in and then it falls back out again.

*******************


Read more... )

Well, you can't tell much from faces

Aug. 22nd, 2025 03:10 pm
sovay: (Jeff Hartnett)
[personal profile] sovay
It is no discredit to a warhorse of crime fiction like The Gaunt Stranger (1938) that its ending surprised me the most Doylistically. From my twenty-first-century vantage, it may be even more delightful than it would have played at the time.

My chances of coming to it unspoiled then, of course, would have been basically nil. It was the third screen and second sound version of its popular source material, the 1925 Edgar Wallace novel of the same name which had been definitively rewritten following its smash stage run as The Ringer (1926), so called after the alias of its central figure, the elusive master of disguise whose legal identity of Henry Arthur Milton has never helped Scotland Yard get a fix on his movements, his intentions, or his face. "Don't they call him the Ringer because he rings the changes on himself? Why, in Deptford they say he can even change the color of his eyes." What they've said for two years at the Yard is that he died trying to outswim a bullet in Sydney Harbour, but recently his reputation has disconcertingly resurfaced in the Karswell-like card accompanying the delivery of a wreath of lilies to a caddish crook of a London lawyer: "R.I.P. To the Memory of Maurice Meister, who will depart this life on the seventeenth of November. —'The Ringer.'" Copycat or resurrection, the threat has to be taken seriously. The smooth solicitor who doubles as an informer and a notoriously uncaught fence has on his hands, too, the suicide of the previous in his string of pretty secretaries, the Ringer's own sister. The forty-eight-hour deadline runs out on the anniversary of her death. Even if it's just some local villain trading on the scandal to raise a scare, the authorities can't take the chance of not scrambling round-the-clock protection for the victim-elect, devoting their slim margin for error to trying to outthink an adversary they have only the sketchiest, most contradictory clues toward, pointing as much to a runaround as to the unenviable prospect of the real, shape-shifting Ringer, who like all the best phantoms could be standing quietly at the elbow of the law all the while. "King Street! He'd walk on Regent Street. If he felt that way, he'd come right here to Scotland Yard and never turn a hair."

Properly a thriller rather than a fair-play detective story, The Gaunt Stranger has less of a plot than a mixed assortment of red herrings to be strewn liberally whenever the audience is in danger of guessing right; the tight cast renders it sort of the cop-shop equivalent of a country house mystery while the convolutions build to the point of comedy even as the clock ticks down to a dead serious stop. Christie-like, it has an excuse for its slip-sliding tone. Decent, dedicated, even a bit of an underdog with this case landed in his lap by divisional inconvenience, Detective Inspector Alan Wembury (Patrick Barr) sums up the problem with it: "If the Ringer does bump Meister off, he'll be doing a public service." The most extra-diegetically law-abiding viewer may see his point. With his silken sadist's voice and his smile folded like a knife, Meister (Wilfred Lawson) is the kind of bounder of the first water who even in nerve-racked protective custody, distracting himself from the pendulum slice of the hours with stiff drinks and gramophone records of Wagner, still finds time to toy with the well-bred, hard-up siblings of Mary and Johnny Lenley (Patricia Roc and Peter Croft), cultivating the one as his grateful secretary in brazen reprise of his old tricks and maneuvering the other into blowing his ticket of leave before he can talk his sister out of the trap. "Have you ever seen a weasel being kind to a rabbit?" Offered a year's remission on his sentence if he helps the police out, sarkily skittish second-story man Sam Hackett (Sonnie Hale) wants no part of this farrago of arch-criminals and threats from beyond the grave just because he once happened to share digs with the Ringer and drew the short straw of catching a more or less unobstructed view of the man; it accords him the dubious honor of the best lead on the case and he makes sure to state for the record as he resigns himself to the role, "Give my kindest regards to the Ringer and tell him I highly recommend rat poison." The audience might as well sit back and genre-savvily enjoy the ride. Should we trust the credentials of the glowering DI Bliss (John Longden), freshly returned from Australia on the supposed track of the Ringer's widow and grown such a mustache in his five years abroad that even his former collar doesn't recognize him until he's flashed his badge? Since the order for the funereal flowers was cabled from her stateroom aboard the liner Baronia, should we presume that Cora Ann Milton (Louise Henry) smuggled her living husband into the country or that she's the real mastermind of the plot against Meister, effectively impersonating her dead man to avenge his sister? The entrance she makes at the Flanders Lane station is as striking as her dark, insouciant looks or her American accent, too shrewd to be written off as a mere moll; stepping out of the mirror-door that leads so conveniently for a receiver of stolen goods down to the brick-arched river, she gives the locked-in lawyer the shock of a revenger's ghost herself. "Don't worry. I'm alone." Not only because one of his cherished classical records has played instead an ominous bulletin from the Ringer—a cold theatrical voice, as impossible to trace as greasepaint—the proceedings begin to take on a haunted-house quality, not unbefitting a film whose most important character heading into the home stretch is still Schrödinger's dead. At 71 minutes and fluttering out fast, rest assured it will not sober up too much for break-ins, fake-outs, or the dry commentary of Dr. Anthony Lomond (Alexander Knox), the division's irreplaceably cantankerous amateur criminologist who was introduced waving off a request for his medical opinion with the time-honored "Och, Wembury, I'm not a doctor, I'm a police surgeon. Call me in when he's been murdered." Grey-spry, he has a catlike habit of tucking his feet up on unexpected furniture, briar-smoking like a fumarole. Tragedy tomorrow, eccentricity tonight.

You're the only doctor I've met who puts his faith in patent medicines. )

Despite its programmer values, The Gaunt Stranger has a quirkily important pedigree: in the clever titles of theatrical posters caught in a passing constable's torch-flash, I spotted Sidney Gilliat as the author of the fleetly tangled screenplay and Ronald Neame as the DP who made more out of low light than the studio sets, but did not realize until after the fact that it was the very first film produced at Ealing under the auspices of Michael Balcon. I had known it was the first screen credit of Alex Knox. I don't know what about his face made casting directors want to stick a mustache and at least ten years' worth of stage grey on it, but he was playing middle-aged again when he reappeared for Ealing in a small, astringent, bookkeeperly role in the next year's Cheer Boys Cheer (1939), now regarded thanks to its plot of a small traditional brewery wilily outwitting its heavier-weight corporate competitor as the forerunner of the classic post-war Ealing comedies. By 1940 he had been collected by Hollywood from Broadway and I don't see how not to wonder if under less transatlantic conditions he might have continued with Ealing into the '40's and their splendidly weird array of wartime films. Or pulled a John Clements and stuck for most of his life to the stage: I have been calling him a shape-changer because it was obviously one of his gifts and his inclination—and in hindsight, something of a joke on this movie—but it makes it very difficult to guess seriously where he could have ended up. In any case, the existence in this timeline of The Gaunt Stranger on out-of-print Region 2 DVD makes me all the more grateful that someone just stuck it up on Dailymotion. It's a modest B-film, not a mislaid gem, but any number of movies of that class have infinitely improved my life. The title pertains in no way to the action. "And don't be so darned sure there's nothing to be afraid of at Scotland Yard." This shadow brought to you by my pretty backers at Patreon.

Book Review: The Golden Compass

Aug. 22nd, 2025 01:12 pm
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] littlerhymes and I have for years tossed around the possibility of a buddy reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which I have resisted because I hated The Amber Spyglass so much. However, I finally cracked and we reread The Golden Compass, and it turns out that it’s just as flawless as I remembered it. How? How is it so good? Nothing should be ALLOWED to be this good, particularly not something that is going to go on to have disappointing sequels.

First of all, the worldbuilding is just so good. The daemons are a stroke of genius: what child DOESN’T want to have an adorable companion animal who is with you at all times and adores you and also changes shape until you reach puberty, at which point it will assume a shape that reveals your True Nature? And of course we all imagine having cool daemons who are cats or foxes or hawks or whatnot, not boring dog daemons like servants have.

(Pullman: not a dog person.)

But the daemons are only one part of Pullman’s deliciously crafted world. Over the course of the story Lyra moves through a variety of different environments, the stately masculine luxury of Jordan College in Oxford and the homey gyptians boats and the wildness of the North, and they all feel real and well-developed and lived in, with little hints thrown in about life in other parts of the world (like Lee Scoresby’s Texas) that make you feel that here indeed there is a whole world that extends in all directions, and Lyra is just moving through a small part of it.

Also, the plot moves along at a good clip. Pullman accomplishes all this rich, lush worldbuilding so economically, because we’re only ever spending a few chapters in one place before we rush on. I remember the Jordan College section going on forever! But it’s just the first four chapters or so, and then Mrs. Coulter whisks Lyra off into high society, another section that I remember lasting forever (in a good way, I should add; I remember these sections lasting forever because I never wanted them to end), but it’s only a couple of chapters before Lyra’s on the run, having realized that Mrs. Coulter is the head of the dreaded Gobblers who have been kidnapping children for who knows what nefarious end?

And from that point on, the action never lets up. She’s on the gyptian boats, she’s going north with the gyptians to save the kidnapped children, she becomes lifelong friends with an armored bear by telling him where to find his stolen armor, and and and one event after another, yet the pace is not breathless, each event gets just enough time to develop its full impact (the scene where Lyra learns what the Gobblers are doing!) and then we move on.

Excellent worldbuilding, excellent plotting, and amazing characterization, too. Lyra is such a fantastic heroine: lively, cunning, a natural leader, rough around the edges and yet with a great compassion underneath. Her daemon Pantalaimon is a perfect foil, cautious if Lyra is taking needless risks, but indomitably brave in the face of struggles that daunt even the usually fearless Lyra.

But it’s not just Lyra. The secondary characters are so well-drawn too, and as with Jordan College and Mrs. Coulter’s flat, I was often surprised how swiftly their sections passed. For instance, Serafina Pekkala only shows up in one chapter! (Of course, she’s talked about far earlier than that.) She’s so vivid in my memory that I was sure it was more than that. Farder Coram, Mrs. Coulter, Lord Asriel: the book is packed with startlingly vivid characters who have stuck with me for years.

I was, I must confess, hoping just a little to see signs of the flaws that would become so apparent in the later books in the trilogy. But no, whatever went wrong went wrong later on. The Golden Compass is pretty close to flawless. Perhaps its only error lies in ending on a sentence that any sequel would be hard-pressed to live up to. What book could possibly capture the possibility inherent in “she walked into the sky”?

(no subject)

Aug. 21st, 2025 11:27 am
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[personal profile] conuly


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Read more... )

Book Review: The Fairy Circus

Aug. 21st, 2025 07:54 am
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[personal profile] osprey_archer
I saved Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus for the final book in the Newbery project because I had a suspicion that it would be a high note to go out on, and I was 100% correct.

At the beginning of the book, the fairies witness a human circus when it sets up on their field. Enchanted, the fairies decide that they simply MUST have a circus of their own, and the rest of the book is about how the fairies through a circus with the help of the woodland creatures.

The spiders spin a trapeze and a tightrope! The chipmunks are the tigers, but they keep forgetting to be properly fierce! The squirrels are the lions (carefully bunching their squirrels around their heads for manes) and they are SO fierce that they spring on the lion tamer, who flies away just in time! Thrillingly terrified, the fairies “went flitting over the arena looking for anything a little less exciting than lions. They even sat down at the farther end of the arena and let themselves be amused by the clowns! They had been as scared as all that!”

The fairy queen shows up, and the fairies have a grand parade in her honor, with tortoises as elephants and mice as horses. And the whole circus is illuminated by fireflies. And… and… and…

An enchanting book. Perfect for fans of Borrowers-type stories about tiny people (in this case tiny people with wings!) making use of the materials at hand to make their own tiny world.

wednesday books are all over time

Aug. 20th, 2025 07:16 pm
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[personal profile] landofnowhere
V. busy right now preparing for upcoming travel, but I did not post last week and probably will be too busy the next two weeks also, so I should catch up on books.

Bartholomew Fair, Ben Jonson. I read this in college, and all I can remember of the experience of reading it is that I was on the bus home from Thanksgiving. As with all public domain plays, I was reading this with half an eye as to whether it would make a good readaloud, and I think the answer is probably not; I suspect it actually works best on stage with actors who can get the characters across.

A Tale of Time City, Diana Wynne Jones. Hugo Award winning (!) podcast Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones released its episode on this book over the weekend. At some point I should actually try listening to the podcast, but I'm a text/instant gratification person, so I started reading, and midway through when they moved from the part of the book that is mostly setting to the part that is plot, decided I should reread the book before continuing, and fortunately realized that I had a copy in a box of books I hadn't unpacked. Things that struck me this read around: it is so very much a Diana Wynne Jones book, both in writing style and in themes. Vivian gets to be physically aggressive with the butter-pies, and I feel uncomfortable reading that. This is the sort of time travel book that doesn't fuss much about language barriers (as [personal profile] lannamichaels would say, everyone has the metaphorical fish in their ear); we know that Time City has developed its own writing system, which mainly exists for the purpose of the one hilarious translation scene, but everyone in Time City and the various bits of history we see is talking recognizable English.

A Nursery in the Nineties, Eleanor Farjeon. I know Farjeon as the author of Morning is Broken, and of Cats Sleep Everywhere, and for her novel The Glass Slipper that I read when I was about 8 or 9. Recently I was listening to a classical album with a track by her brother Harry Farjeon, and that caused me to look the entire family up on wikipedia, and they are incredibly fascinating. This is Eleanor's book about her family history and childhood.

The story so far: Benjamin Farjeon, Eleanor's father, ran off from his Orthodox Jewish family to make a fortune in Australia and New Zealand. After having set himself up there as a successful newspaper man, he receives a kind rejection letter from Charles Dickens and takes this as a signal that he should move back to England and start a literary career, which is remarkably successful (despite Dickens dying too early to be of any help). Meanwhile, Margaret Jefferson, Eleanor's mother, descended from a long line of popular actors, grows up in the US around the time of the Civil War. As a young woman she reads one of Benjamin's books and decides it is the best book ever -- now she is about to go to England where they will presumably meet and fall in love!

Soooooooo

Aug. 20th, 2025 06:49 pm
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[personal profile] conuly
How does one compose an email to say "I got a job offer that seems just on the cusp of too good to be true, but as you and your company appear to actually exist I thought I should contact you and see if it *is* legit before I delete it"?

Wednesday Reading Meme

Aug. 20th, 2025 09:29 am
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My second-to-last Newbery book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, which is also my second Newbery George Washington biography, which should tell you everything you need to know about the importance of American history in the Newberys. (Maybe that should be a Newbery post in itself.) I don’t actually remember the other one that well, but I’m fairly sure that it didn’t feature George Washington’s tragic doomed lifelove for the already-married Sally Fairfax nearly as prominently, or possibly indeed at all, as I was quite surprised to hear about it in this book.

(Eaton’s Daughter of the Seine also dwelt on Madame Roland’s tragic doomed love for a man not her husband, so this may just have been an Eaton thing. Admittedly, there was no tragic doomed love in her Gandhi biography, except perhaps Gandhi’s unrequited yearning for a united India?)

I also finished Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. I really enjoyed the ancient Roman Britain stories in the middle of the book: truly they are so Sutcliff! Or rather, Sutcliff is so Kipling!

But then the last story is Kipling’s attempt to create an inclusive vision of England by making the Jewish people an integral part of the story of the Magna Carta, by having a Jewish moneylender force the king to terms by refusing to lend him any more money, and “by refusing to lend him any more money” I mean our hero actually tosses an entire gold treasure into the sea.

I believe that Kipling is trying to be anti-anti-Semitic here, but he also has the moneylender character describe sitting under a table as a child listening to Jewish moneylenders decide which king shall rise and which shall fall, so, like, maybe he needed to workshop this one a bit.

What I’m Reading Now

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened to an audiobook version of this a few years ago and really didn’t like it, but had a suspicion that it might be due to the narrator’s gravelly monotone, so I bought a copy and am reading it with my two eyes and now I’m loving it! An important reminder that an audiobook reader can make or break a book.

I just finished the Almanac portion of the book, which are just monthly musings on plants and animals in the environs of the sandy farm Leopold owned in Wisconsin. It makes me want to write a Hummingbird Cottage almanac. Maybe I’ll do monthly posts next year starting in January.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been intending to read Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat ever since I read Max in the House of Spies, but despite the fact that I’ve loved the other two MacIntyre books I read, I keep putting it off and off and off. Why is it sometimes so hard to read a book that you really do want to read?

(no subject)

Aug. 19th, 2025 09:22 pm
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[personal profile] skygiants
The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

A Sorceress Comes to Call is a sort of Regency riff; it's also a bit of a Goose Girl riff, although I have truly no idea what it's trying to say about the original story of the Goose Girl, a fairy tale about which one might have really a lot of things to say. Anyway, the plot involves an evil sorceress with an evil horse (named Falada after the Goose Girl horse) who brings her abused teen daughter along with her in an attempt to seduce a kindly but clueless aristocrat into marriage. The particular method by which the evil sorceress abuses her daughter is striking and terrible, and drawn with skill. Fortunately, the abused teen daughter then bonds with the aristocrat's practical middle-aged spinster sister and her practical middle-aged friends, and learns from them how to be a Practical Heroine in her own right, and they all team up to defeat the evil sorceress mother and her evil horse. The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. At no point is anybody required to feel sympathy for the abusive sorceress mother or the evil horse. If this is the sort of book you like you will probably like this book, and you can stop reading here.

ungenerous readings below )

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