gaudior

We begin Hornblower and the Hotspur with Horatio Hornblower standing at the altar with his blushing bride Maria, desperately informing himself that they’re not married just yet! There’s still time to run for it! Only he can’t bring himself to commit the cruel act of leaving her at the altar, so instead he stands there like a lump and gets married.

This is one of the most inexplicable marriages I’ve ever encountered in fiction. It appears that Maria confessed her love for Hornblower and Hornblower was unable to think of any response except “Will you marry me?”, despite the fact that he doesn’t love her, in fact doesn’t think he should ever marry, and lives in dread of passing his temperament on to his children. (I should note that he is in no way honor bound to her before the wedding: she’s not pregnant with his child and he didn't seduce her. He didn't even flirt with her! He just existed in her general vicinity and she fell for him.)

He then spends the rest of the book asking himself “What would a good husband do?” and then enacting the part of a good husband, in much the way that he sometimes enacts the part of a good captain.

littlerhymes and I discussed many possible explanations for Hornblower’s behavior, none of which were entirely satisfactory, but to be fair, what WOULD be a satisfactory explanation?

1. Hornblower is a deeply closeted gay man who is marrying Maria for reasons of social pressure. However, there seem to be plenty of bachelors in the Navy, so it’s unclear how much social pressure he would actually be experiencing, especially since he seems to have no family clamoring for grandchildren/an heir.

(Whether or not he’s gay, there is alas little evidence here that he sees Bush as more than an excellent lieutenant, although Bush is clearly still nuts about Hornblower. The bit where Hornblower fails to mention his own act of heroism in a letter to the Gazette and Bush is like “It isn’t RIGHT, sir.” And also the bit where Bush is tells Hornblower he’s worried about Hornblower’s health and Hornblower is like who cares about this SACK of MEAT that is my BODY.)

2. Hornblower is SO deeply repressed that he can’t cope with the fact that he is experiencing the weakness of having a human emotion (“love”), but actually does love Maria on some level. He keeps feeling surprising upswellings of tenderness for her. Also, he castigates himself severely every time he DOES experience an emotion (or also human weaknesses like “sleepiness” or “hunger”), which I feel has probably damaged his ability to recognize emotions at all.

But even if he loves her, he clearly doesn’t have a lot of respect for her. Might love her purely in the sense of feeling an animal attraction, and also gratitude for the fact that someone cares about him? He muses at one point that it’s strange to be going to sea with someone on land who gives a damn about him.

3. Hornblower doesn’t think that he deserves nice things, so he marries Maria to make sure that he will have a wife who is ill-suited to him, as he deserves.

Oh, also there are some sea battles and stuff. Hornblower is sent with the fleet to capture some Spanish ships carrying a fortune and then has to hare off chasing another ship at the opportune moment so he doesn’t get a share of the massive amount of prize money. But then the Crown takes the money anyway so he actually would have gotten nothing even if he had been there.

I’m pretty sure these Spanish treasure ships formed the basis for a similar incident near the end of Post Captain, only you better believe Jack Aubrey was on hand to win his part of the prize money. I finished Post Captain confident than Jack could pay off his debts and marry Sophie, but now it looks like maybe he won’t be getting the money after all…?

We will find out in HMS Surprise, but not for about a week, as I am setting off on a trip to Massachusetts on Wednesday!

littlerhymes and I will resume our sailing voyages once I return.

conuly

And there's an increase in mortality with every change of the clocks.

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( Read more... )

sovay

For various reasons not limited to the overhead activity of children in the mornings, last night was the first real time all week that I slept and have thus spent most of the day in a vague state of hibernation despite the warmth of the air. There was a mauve overcast around sunset that turned out to belong to a volcanic wall of gold and bougainvillea over an agate-blue cloud-band. Have some mostly musical links.

For the more than twenty years since

lesser_celery made me a CD of Peter Gabriel's Melt (1980), I have assumed that the eerily voiced French refrain of "Games Without Frontiers" was either the singer's own falsetto or pitch-shifted vocals. It turns out to be Kate Bush. I would never have identified her on my own, but then I thought about "Army Dreamers" (1980).

I grew up on Arlo Guthrie, but my favorite version of "City of New Orleans" (1971) is almost certainly Steve Goodman himself in 1970, where he reminded me unexpectedly of a Chicago-accented Stan Rogers. It's driving me nuts that I would swear the first person I heard lead "The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over" (1977) was Pete Seeger and I can't figure out where.

WERS has been playing nothing but female artists for International Women's Day, which means everything from Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" (1978), Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine" (1983), and Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl" (1993) to Tegan and Sara's "I'll Be Back Someday" (2019), Orla Gartland's "Little Chaos" (2024), and Arlo Parks' "2SIDED" (2026). I had a moral obligation to let my father know when Rickie Lee Jones came around.

Video quality regardless,

sholio's "Waking Up in Vegas" (The Greatest American Hero) remains one of my all-time favorites of their vids.

Current Music: Orla Gartland, "Little Chaos"

sovay

For her eightieth birthday observed, we celebrated my mother with a three-tier almond cake layered with marzipan icing and raspberry and rose hip preserves, frosted in rose-toned whipped cream, and decorated with pâtes de fruits into the central one of which was socketed the candle to grow on. It looked like a charlotte russe from the Geometric period in slices. We gave her books, cards, balloons, a banner of cats, a pendant like a bronze-pronged sun of creamy golden sapphire on a leather cord. My niece ran around all day with the twins. I am not ready for Daylight Saving Time. I have enough trouble with the regular kind.

Current Music: Universal Hall Pass, "Six-Step Dragon"

conuly

I'm worried I lost my kindle when I misplaced my red bag in which everything is. Well, not everything, but perhaps my kindle. Or maybe not. My kindle might be under my bed. If it's not under my bed, I'll have to replace it sooner or later. I'm a bit wary of looking and finding out one way or another.

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asakiyume

We eat rice almost every night, so I buy it in 20-pound bags--Goya medium-grain rice. For us, it's pretty much as good as Japanese short-grain rice and less expensive. (Sometimes we have different rice--basmati or jasmine or wild rice, or any style of brown rice, but generally it's white Goya medium-grain rice.)

I like the look of the bags, and I thought it would be fun to use an empty bag as a bag ... and finally I got round to making one:

Here's the front, with a fold-over flap

woman modeling a long-strapped bag made from a 20-lb Goya rice bag

And here's the back

woman modeling a long-strapped bag made from a 20-lb Goya rice bag

Might take it grocery shopping with me next time I go!

Current Music: Gitkin: Night Tripper

skygiants

Sometimes you read a book at exactly the wrong time, and you're like 'god this stupid big fat fantasy novel. Why are you six hundred pages. Why is everybody Sexy. What's the point of you. I'm tired' and sometimes you read a book at exactly the right time and you're like 'thank god! actual worldbuilding!! somebody had a good time getting weird with this! please tell me more about how weird you're getting!!' and I think I could easily have gone either way on Tessa Gratton's The Mercy Makers depending on the four books I'd read just previous as well as the time of the moon. But as it happened, at the point I read it I was really hungering for something, ANYTHING that felt like it actually cared about depicting a unique and distinctive society with characters that felt like they actually belonged in that society, and The Mercy Makers gave me that in spades, so I ended up really high on it! I had a great time! Please understand that I mean it lovingly when I say that it felt like a visual novel high fantasy dating sim!

-- this is a bit disingenuous for me to say, I haven't actually played more than a bit of any of the long visual novel high fantasy dating sims I'm thinking of, but I have read extensively through

alias_sqbr's write-ups of them and the book profoundly reminded me of something like [

alias_sqbr's description of] My Vow To My Liege, where a player character has to play a lot of really dramatic political games to decide the fate of the kingdom, while surrounded by Hot People, and different elements of the plot will play out depending on which Hot Person she's closest to --

Okay, so we are in a fantasy empire that is built around a central religion that values Balance and forbids Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques. Our heroine Iriset, of course, is an atheist who's wildly gifted with Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery and Medical Techniques, and is also the daughter of a criminal mastermind. Iriset and her father have carefully crafted a secret identity illusion so that everyone thinks that someone else is the Heretical Magical Plastic Surgery Mad Scientist Genius and that the famous criminal mastermind's daughter is just a nice girl who's not really involved, so that when her father eventually gets arrested -- as indeed is the inciting incident of this book -- Iriset can hopefully stay free and rescue him instead of also getting arrested herself as a famous magical heretic.

For some reason, however, after her father's arrest, Iriset -- whom everyone knows is a criminal heiress but, once again, thinks is a nice and sweet criminal heiress who's not really involved, rather than an amoral heretic mad scientist -- is sort of non-consensually invited to become one of the handmaidens of the Emperor's hot sister as part of complex political schemes, so she spends the rest of the book in the palace, where she meets the following hot people:

- the Emperor, an earnest and well-intentioned young man who is really devoutly religiously dedicated to maintaining the Balance of the Status Quo
- the Emperor's sister, Iriset's boss, whose job as per official tradition for the Emperor's sibling is to be a priestess who placates the religion's divine devil-figure by going and being really sexy at a shrine every day, but has political visions and ambitions for the Empire far beyond her Sexy Role
- the Emperor's fiancee, a very sweet princess from neighboring island kingdom, who is a fundamental element of the Emperor's sister's overarching plans for an empire that expands through marriage alliance instead of conquest
- a mysterious, suffering, untrustworthy fairy sort of creature who has been publicly imprisoned behind the Emperor's throne for the past several hundred years and is now just sort of a standard part of the decor

In addition to these obviously romanceable characters, Iriset also has an existing criminal boyfriend on the outside of the palace who she's attempting to get in touch with and coordinate with about Operation Rescue Her Dad, and she also meets a palace maid and a fantasy-nonbinary magical architect (uses one of several archaic gender forms) who in the dating sim version of this would probably be secret or hidden routes.

The first, like, two hundred pages or so of this six hundred page book are mostly just Iriset wandering around the palace, trying not to be too obviously a heretical mad scientist, building various schemes for father-rescue and trying not to get distracted by much she would quite like to bang any or all of these hot people. And, again, at another time I might have gotten bored, but at this point in time I was really just enjoying the slow rich worldbuilding. It's weird! It's interesting! Everyone always wears elaborate masks and facepaint except for the foreign princess who's confused by the whole system, and we've reinvented a different kind of four humors system so everybody's like 'well of course she would act this way, she's got too much ecstatic force in her system', and the political conversation about marriage reform refers to the law that forbids conquered peoples within the Empire from marrying within their own ethnic group for a certain number of generations, and there are several archaic genders that are no longer used and people have chat about how actually we should bring them back because two is an imbalanced number and four would be much more balanced -- what I'm trying to get at is that it feels like the people in this book think in ways that are shaped by their world, and not by ours. The plot in its actual happenings is constantly contriving itself so that Iriset will be pushed into a position where, eventually, she'll have to Rebel Against Empire, but the thought patterns that get us there feel distinctive and grounded in the world and setting that Gratton has built.

But eventually, of course, we are going to have to get some plot and it is obviously going to have to involve Chekhov's Heretical Plastic Surgery and messy identity porn. ( the rest is spoilers )

sonia

Birbs and Borbs Birds with queer flags. I'm eyeing the bisexual oystercatcher sticker. Pride is resistance!

Resist and Unsubscribe. Unsubscribe from services that support fascism. Every little bit helps! I didn't subscribe to any of these things in the first place, so I guess I've been resisting all along.

Taking action against AI harms by Anil Dash. Speaking can help get businesses off X and schools off ChatGPT.

conuly

(or ever) but I also don't want to not do it, so here we are I guess?

In order to make this a normal post, let me say that my Robert Moses counter is incrementing up again. It has now been 0 hours since the last time somebody brought up Robert Moses, but it's my fault for reading an article about walkable cities and then scrolling to the comments.

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sovay

Diameter of mental blast crater not diminished. Outside is absurdly springlike following the double-tap of winter that required me to shovel my mother's car out twice, once for the unexpected four inches of snow and then for the glacial swamp the succeeding sleet turned the driveway into. In the process I seem to have inherited the Bat, the stupidest motorcycle jacket I have met in my life. It doesn't have sleeves so much as it has patagia. It is covered with snaps that open into flaps and none of them into pockets. The total design suggests that it may be so heavily constructed because otherwise in a sufficiently stiff gust of wind its owner could achieve accidental unpowered flight. It looks like an opera cape with ambitions of fetish night. My mother insisted on it because I had run out to shovel the first time in my flannel shirtsleeves and the second time my corduroy coat was obviously not adequate to the slush-fall, but it was a present to my father from my grandparents about forty years ago and it looks functionally mint because he has spent most of that time avoiding ever wearing it. In its defense, it is extremely warm and also I look like a tire. There will be no photographs.

Current Music: PJ Harvey, "Memphis"

osprey_archer

A wild episode of Books I’ve Abandoned appears! I kept on slogging through Maeve Binchy’s A Few of the Girls on the grounds that it’s a short story collection and therefore might eventually cough up a story I like, but finally decided it was just too many downer stories about people in bad friendships and bad marriages and bad adulterous relationships.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Getting my St. Patrick’s Day on with Eve Bunting’s St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning, which I actually picked up on account of the illustrator, Jan Brett. This was one of Brett’s earliest books and the publishers clearly gave her a very limited palette to work with, just black and white and yellow and green (and a yellow saturated to the point of orange for the Irish flag). She does the best with what she has, but how fortunate for us all she has more colors to work with in her later books!

But her characteristic attention to detail is still visible here: the stone walls in the green fields, the multitude of toothsome sweets in the Mrs. Simms’ Half-Way-Up Sweetshop, the sleepy boy and his sleepy dog curled up in the rocking chair once they’ve walked all the way up Acorn Mountain and all the way back in their very own St. Patrick’s Day parade.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve begun E. Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods, and am happy to report I find the Bastables much less stressful than the children in The Phoenix and the Carpet, possibly because the Bastables don’t have a magic carpet that might just strand them in Outer Mongolia. Capable of getting up to plenty of mischief without magical aid however! They are about to fill a lock to float a barge, under the impression that this will be a good deed, but I strongly suspect that the barge is simply going to float away downstream.

What I Plan to Read Next

My coworker lent me John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis.

julian

Hey, if anyone's close to Minoanmiss and hasn't heard recent news and wants to, let me know.

asakiyume

I was so shocked to hear you have left us,

minoanmiss. You are a fountain of art and fic and joy at making babies smile. You've sent me poems, you've sent me stickers that have decorated letters I've sent people. When the pandemic hit and I posted about the Japanese amabie, you made a fridge magnet of one. She's on my fridge above your Minoan dancers.

photo of fridge magnets

Do you remember when you sent me a postcard for a pine tree, and I took it there?

You made magic happen.

I will think of you every time I see someone making a baby smile. I will talk to that pine tree about you. Maybe it has your forwarding address, and I can send you a postcard.

conuly

And, incidentally, freaked the fuck out of my sister

I did tell her there was a fox!

conuly

and on the packaging it says:

"This product is not a toy and is intended for collection or use by individuals aged 14 or above"

They're superhero stickers! 14 and above! What do they think kids are doing, eating them!?

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conuly

But not for the East Coast, not really. So whatever.

asakiyume

In 2018, Wakanomori and I went for the first time to Colombia. We went just as an election was happening. We were in Bogotá, and we ended up walking through rallies for both candidates--the progressive ex-guerrilla and the conservative son of privilege. We ended up with some of the flyers for the progressive guy--they were bright and optimistic, and I made them into postcards:

We didn't know much about Colombian politics at the time, but we hoped he'd win:

But he lost. The conservative candidate, Iván Duque, won.

But then in 2022, the progressive ex-guerrilla won. And that's Gustavo Petro, who's in office now. So you know ... change does happen.

( My microfiction for today was partially inspired by the memory of picking up those flyers. )

Current Music: Grupo Bahia: Vamo' a levanta'

sovay

Rabbit, rabbit! To inaugurate the spring month, it snowed flurrily all yesterday morning. This afternoon we are flooded with freezing sun. I can't believe Purim is already upon us. So many names need to be blotted out.

As of the start of the month, I seem to have had over a hundred-dollar drop in my Patreon membership without any notification of a mass die-off in subscriptions. Any suggestions on interpreting this deficit would be appreciated since it is my only steady source of income at the moment and we are so broke.

I am still feeling in something of a mental blast crater about the news. I have spent my afternoon on the phone.

rushthatspeaks who also spent his afternoon on the phone is coming over and we are going to lie on the couch and complain about doctors and lawyers. And business executives.

Current Music: The Pack a.d., "Haunt You"

mrissa

New story out in Clarkesworld: Person, Place, Thing! This was such a fun voice for me to fall into writing, and it ended up surprising me with how many Muppet references it wanted. Usually I am opposed to "I am but a servant of the muse" claptrap from writers, but when that muse is demanding aliens who have very earnestly learned from mid-to-late period Henson...well, what am I to do?

askerian

TOTAL: 2500 words

POSTED: nuthin.

IN PROGRESS
-cherry wine (madatobiizu ABO) (1070 words, of which i might well discard all of them. attempted a new start for the chapter and it didn't work either.)
-BNHA - post war dabihawks silliness (224 words, barely the intro and even then it's too clunky)
-bleach suburban ot4 (103 words. hgbvksjbvtstvsbts.)
-SVSSS cosplay fic (1036 words)
-bleach bloodsport (67 words)

wrote so little in january i forgot to track it. barely better in february tbh. all i did was edits and snippets that died as soon as i started them. i also still haven't done my yearly wordcount but honestly i dun wanna. just... not a good season.

( teasers )

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gaudior

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Reading

Book Review: Hornblower and the Hotspur

Daylight Savings is such a waste of time

Took a left, hit a nerve, took a right, hit the curb

Keep mending broken lines

As one of life's petty problems goes

Goya rice bag bag

(no subject)

Links: Small steps to resist

I don't really want to make a regular post now

In Memphis, on Valentine's Day

Wednesday Reading Meme

Minoanmiss stuff

miss you

Fox went out on a chilly night, prayed to the moon to give him light

I ordered some stickers

The blood moon rises once again

live to fight another day...

Just like a bad plot, I won't tell you why

I speak fluent human

monthly word count - jan + feb

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