The better part of my afternoon was spent sitting on a park bench with rushthatspeaks in the classically balmy sunshine, watching a classful of kindergarteners shriek and clamber all over the climbing structures, the fountain, and the swings. One edged his way over to us with his school tablet on which he showed us the groups of things he was learning. I saw another with a pinwheel, another with a fanny pack, another with a baseball cap made of duct tape, crouching with a friend to pry open a maintenance hatch in the fountain with a stick. We agreed that we miss tire swings and feel nostalgically toward metal slides which had to be insulated from thigh-scalding summer with pieces of cardboard or brown paper bags. FiDO Pizza turns out to deliver all the way from Allston and while I recognize the garlic honey and chili zing of the richly soppressata-studded Doc, the anchovy-forward collards and kale of the Braised Greens over Parmesan cream tasted like an entire kelp forest and I ate it like one. We had cookies left over from Pesach for dessert. Especially at the end of a scrambled week, it was a low-key, springlike, lovely time. We have made plans in the newly discovered directions of All She Wrote Books and Dani's Queer Bar. In the evening we saw that Artemis II had safely splashed down.
Current Music:Holly Humberstone, "To Love Somebody"
Edit: fuck, I forgot to include Smallville! Uh, vote for that as the last option I guess.
1. Results will be non-binding
2. I will not watch anything starring anybody who then went on to perform in the God's Not Dead franchise. This isn't even about their abhorrent beliefs, it's about their apparently low artistic standards. I only am barely including Xena on this list because we can just skip crossover episodes. Please do let me know if I accidentally listed a Big Mistake in that regard
I'm sticking pretty close to home these days. Lots of garden work/prep for the season. The greenhouse has been emptied out of half of its contents and new plants have taken their place. A lot of the tomatoes are in the garden already, more are waiting to be planted. Gave Pete D. three trays of stuff which he was glad to have as he always plants a LOT of tomatoes. A couple years ago he had 100 tomatoes in the ground. He shares with neighbors and his farm crew members. I was very glad to get the little tomatoes out of the greenhouse, I was watering twice a day and not keeping up. The first Iris opened a day or two ago. Its name might be Total Recall.( Read more... )
No, I didn't really. I drifted off into sleep from half-dreams about packing, and what I needed to remember to bring with us, and how much of the lurking washing-up I'd be able to clear before we set off. It wasn't until I was clearing away the breakfast things that durham_rambler pointed out that yesterday had been the 50th anniversary of the death of Phil Ochs - I knew that the date was approaching, but my mind had been elsewhere... So:
I dreamed I saw Phil Ochs last night Alive as you and me Says I to Phil "You're ten years dead" "I never died" says he "I never died" says he
Not ten, fifty. Fifty! How is this possible? If there's one songwriter I've been turning to lately, it's Phil Ochs - and I'm not the only one.
Anyway, packing was completed, and we set off - as much as packing is ever completed. But it wasn't until we were crossing the high Pennines that I gazed at the misty landscapes of Cumbria and realised I had forgotten to bring my camera. Yes, I am very annoyed about this. But I have my phone, and durham_rambler has offered me the use of his camera, so it isn't the end of the world. Later on I thought I should probably have brought some olive oil, too, but it shouldn't be hard to buy some.
We lunched at the ice cream parlour in Brough, though we did not go overboard on ice cream (I had a single scoop of biscoff, which was fine). We had planned a stop for a cup off tea and a recharge of the car, but the place where we had intended to do this never presented itself, so we carried on to our destination.
We are spending a week in Little Cowhouse, a converted barn near Chirk, which is in Wales, though we are just across the river which forma the border, in Shropshire. We have a view down onto the bridge: the border, says our host, is right across the middle of the bridge, with the result that neither country fixes the potholes. On Monday the Bears will join us (travelling by train) and we shall have fun together.
and despite the fact that this is coming out to more than projected we didn't need to ask them to split it into two bills and I still have enough money for groceries!
“If and when aliens make first contact, who should answer? Maybe humankind should turn to people like me, translators of science fiction. We’ve already thought through this kind of problem.”
Those are the opening sentences of my essay “When Star-Stuff Tells Stories: Translating science fiction as a metaphor of technology and wonder.” You can read the essay here.
It was originally published by Calque Press in 2024. In it, I explore the development of human language and the challenges it poses to translation here and now, and how the lessons learned from translation and from science fiction can help us if we come into contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Whomever we find, wherever they are from, they too will be made of star-stuff, and that should be enough to let us find a way to know each other.
anthimeria or antimeria - (rhetoric) n., the use of a word from one part of speech as if it were another.
In English, most commonly using a noun as a verb, as in "Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle" -- Shakespeare, Richard II, act II, sc.iii, l.95. Indeed, many of the 1500+ word coinages that Shakespeare is credited for were anthimeria. In linguistics, the more common term is zero derivation, deriving a word from one of another part of speech without modification. Like most terms from rhetoric, this is from Ancient Greek, from antí, opposite + méros, part.
And we can barely pay it if we don't pay for a few other things. Maybe they'll let us write two checks.
On the other hand, if the USA decides drop nukes during the installation, probably the company won't trouble themselves too much about payment. We'll be home free! Well, assuming nobody retaliates on NYC specifically....
Entirely apart from it now apparently being business as usual for my killing joke of a government to start wars in whatever sovereign nations it feels like and threaten the annihilation of entire civilizations on capricious deadline, I have had a weird and fairly scrambled week in which I was not able to avoid talking to doctors after all. I can feel suitably noir-poisoned for recognizing some location shooting in The Rockford Files (1974–80) from Desert Fury (1947). The sky this afternoon suggested that it was trying to be autumn.
Made a extremely silly decision this past weekend, which was to break up our long drive to and from Philly by Exactly long enough to see one (one) show in NYC on the way down, and another on the way back. Literally put the car in a garage by the theater, went into the show, got the car out of the garage, and kept driving. And to make matters even sillier the show that we saw on the way down was Bad -- and we knew it was going to be! Or at least we had a reasonable suspicion! But were we not going to go out of our way to see Norm Lewis play Villefort in a Count of Monte Cristo musical? Of course we were. The path before us had simply been prepared.
Q: When you say it was bad, do you mean it was a bad musical as a musical, or a bad adaptation of Count of Monte Cristo? A: Oh, both! Absolutely both.
Q: What made it a bad musical? A: Well, the music. And the lyrics. They hit exactly every beat on the Musical Sheet while constantly feeling like less subtle knockoff versions of other songs you might know slightly better. The song you might know slightly better is not a subtle one, you say? Well, I guarantee you that songs such as "Dangerous Times," in which the full cast explain that they are living in dangerous times, and "How Did I Get So Far Away [From Me]," in which Mercedes sadly wonders how she has gotten so far away from herself, are less so. When the best you can say of a song is that it felt like pallid diet Frank Wildhorn -- as in, lacking the noted power and vibrancy of real Frank Wildhorn, composer of such deathless works as Death Note: The Musical -- then you know we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. And that's not even mentioning the frenetic stream of mediocre jokes.
Q: And what made it a bad adaptation? A: I mean I know there are probably people in the past who have said that Edmond Dantès literally did nothing wrong but I want you to understand: in this show, Edmond Dantès literally does nothing wrong. His backstory takes up the entire first act, and by the time we hit intermission I was already like "huh, there's not going to be a lot of time in here for revenge schemes," but I didn't actually understand how dire the situation was going to be until ( this part of the Q&A gets into quite detailed plot spoilers )
Q: So do you regret your objectively silly decision to go out of your way to see this musical? A: No I do not, not in the least, and I would have regretted missing it. There is something very nutritious in bad theater, I think. It forces you to consider what good theater might look like. Also, the surprise appearance of Lucrezia Borgia was one of the funniest things I experienced all weekend.
Paul Robeson was born on this day, April 9, in 1898. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem about him and it's one of my favorites.
Paul Robeson
That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. The major Voice. The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond. Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other’s harvest: we are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond.
18-year-old Evelyn is on a plane, transporting her father's ashes, when there's an announcement of turbulence. A passenger gets up from her seat, then collapses in the aisle. The plane begins to nosedive, and everything goes white. Then Evelyn is back on the plane, which is no longer nosediving. There's an announcement of turbulence. A passenger gets up from her seat, then collapses in the aisle. The plane begins to nosedive...
Evelyn quickly realizes that she's in a 29-minute time loop. She tries to figure out why the plane is crashing and how to stop it, but gets absolutely nowhere. She talks to other passengers. She steals their food and eats it. She watches every movie on the plane. She learns everything about everyone, except the handsome sleeping teenage boy who never wakes up during the loop. She goes through 400 loops and almost loses her mind. And then, on one loop, the boy wakes up. And on the next loop, he also realizes that he's in a loop...
Like the last novel I read by Reiss (Out of Air, the one with the teenage scuba divers), this book has a great premise. I enjoyed how Evelyn makes herself free with everything on the plane while trapped, and I also enjoyed how she and Rion, the sleeping boy, work together once he wakes up to figure out what's going on. However, it had an issue that more-or-less ruined the book for me. Rion suggests something that somehow Evelyn failed to try in 400 loops, which is to follow one person on the plane at a time, and observe everything they do. It never occurred to Evelyn to watch the flight attendants, and watching one of them reveals exactly what's causing the crash. They try to prevent it in several ways that don't work. Then Rion figures out a clever plan that saves the plane and fixes the loop.
The author clearly wanted to have Evelyn be alone in the loop for a long time. I can see why she wanted that - we get a vivid sense of her frustration and despair - but it makes Evelyn seem useless when she spends ages watching movies and so forth, and then Rion figures everything out almost immediately. This is exacerbated when Rion also comes up with the plan to fix things. This wouldn't have been a problem if they'd been in the loop together much earlier - then they could have bonded while investigating, taken breaks and done the fun stuff that she did alone, and mutually figured stuff out. It would have been more fun to read and felt less sexist, which I'm sure was unintentional but is inevitable when the girl fails at everything for ages, then a boy shows up and both solves the mystery and fixes the problem.
I'll be interested to see if Reiss's third book also has a three word title that rhymes with "care."
balefire (BAYL-faiuhr) - n., a funeral pyre; a beacon fire; a bonfire.
And with fire, we cross the limit of what my pure ASCII pronunciation guide can handle -- only those dictionaries that use IPA can render that bizarre triphthong well. I've given the meanings out of the usual order to match the word's history -- this goes all the way back to Old English bǣlfȳr, where pyre was the primary sense, but even back then it also held those other meanings, as did the element bǣl, which itself meant funeral pyre/blaze, and reaching back its PIE root *bʰel- meaning blaze/burn/glow/shine, giving us cognates fulgent and flame, both via Latin. The sense of balefire meaning an extremely powerful fire or magical attack is a creation of modern fantasy stories and games.
Early spring in Vermont is a lot like winter, but with less snow. We can see the ground, but the trees are still completely bare, grass hasn't grown, and the only flowers yet are the occasional bloodroot and optimistic crocuses. On one hike I got excited to see some green on a hill, but it turned out to be last year's ferns, all squashed flat. There are still many days that hover around freezing, alternating between rain and snow. Earlier this week I had to drive in a sudden aggressive windy snowstorm that didn't stick but made visibility near zero.
But the important question: How are the birds doing? Migratory species keep showing up one by one. We saw our first Double-crested Cormorant of the year flying over Lake Champlain while we were visiting the waterfront. Eastern Phoebes are also back, including the one who makes its summer home in our yard. Several mornings I've seen it in the tree out my bedroom window, doing its characteristic tail-bob. And I heard my year's first Wood Duck before I saw it on the river—they don't quack, but let out a distinctive squeal.
We're on the edge of the year-round range for White-throated Sparrow and I have seen them here in winter before, but they're much more common in the spring and I've been hearing their ohhh sweeet caaaaanada song. Red Crossbill can supposedly be here in the winter too, but I saw my first of the year this week.
It's also getting easier to see waterfowl now that some of the smaller lakes and ponds aren't completely frozen over. Hooded Mergansers can be seen on the non-frozen parts of Lake Champlain in the winter, but now they're back on our local pond too.
We also get species briefly passing through while headed elsewhere on their migration routes. I was excited to spot a pair of Northern Shovelers on the pond in late March, which was a little early for them to show up here—the eBird app prompted for evidence when I reported them, so I attached this very non-aesthetic but at least diagnostic photo. They're both in this picture, but the brown female is much harder to see!
I think I was the first to see them, or at least my eBird report was first. I felt kinda special scrolling through all the subsequent reports as birders flocked to take a look. I also saw a pair in the same spot last year in the first week of April; I wonder if they're the same birds.
And the year-rounders who have been here all winter are shifting into breeding mode. Every day the American Goldfinches at our feeder are a little yellower, their breeding plumage showing up in scruffy patches. Black-capped Chickadees are a constant as always, but I'm hearing more territorial yooo-hooo calls as well as the eponymous chick-a-dee-dee-dee. The little Brown Creepers are singing instead of just buzzing, and I spotted one darting in and out from behind the peeling park of a tree, immediately after I saw a video explaining that that's where they nest!
So that's 53 species for me in 2026 so far. Countdown to warbler season in a couple of weeks!
At the end of Iliad 16, Patroklos dies. As Patroklos himself puts it in his final speech, Hektor was merely the third responsible for his death, after Apollo, and Euphorbos (16.850). Euphorbos, who is introduced in book 16 for the first time in the epic as “the son of Panthoos who excelled his age group in the spear, horsemanship, and swift feet” (16.808-9).
There’s little information about Euphorbos—a scholion reports that his brother is Polydamas (which makes this pairing with Hektor weird). He is also described in book 16 as a “Dardanian man” (Δάρδανος ἀνὴρ, 16.807), which seems to have caused some consternation to ancient scholars who assert that “In Homer, Troy is one thing and Dardania is another” καθ’ ῞Ομηρον γοῦν ἄλλη ἐστὶν ἡ Τροία καὶ ἄλλη ἡ Δαρδανία, schol. T ad Hom. IL. 15.449-551b) and elsewhere that Panthoos is a foreign ally. Euphorbos echoes Paris’ role in Achilles’ death. In some traditions, the philosopher Pythagoras claimed that he was Euphorbos in an earlier life.
Those details aside: Eurphorbos does not linger for long in the Iliad. In book 17, he faces Menelaos and follows Paris into the gloom. What interests me about this passage is the simile that follows the death and an explanation of it.
Homer, Iliad 17.61-69
“That’s the way the well-limbed son of Panthos, Euphorbos, was When Atreus’ son Menelaos killed him and took his weapons” “As when a mountain lion bred in the mountains and trusting in its own strength Seizes a cow from a grazing herd, whichever one is best. It takes her and breaks her neck with his strong teeth, first And then gulps down all her blood and organs as he rages. Around him the dogs and men, the shepherds wail aloud but standing from afar because they do not wish to stand in his way—once pale fear overcomes them. In that way, the heart in no man dared to stand and face glorious Agamemnon.”
Menelaos and Hector fighting over the body of Euphorbos. Middle Wild Goat style. 600 BCE
Lion similes abound in Homer. The image of a single lion surrounded by humans or domesticated animal is common, and it can mark extreme danger to an isolated hero (surrounded by hunters) or, conversely, a moment of surpassing glory as a hero is described as a lion having its way among defenseless animals. The language is fairly formulaic to start—the mountain-bred lion who trusts in his strength marks Menelaos out as preeminent at this moment.
But, as with many other similes, the tenor (the thing compared) and the vehicle (the comparison) shift as the image unfolds. The narrator’s gaze moves from the attacking lion to the act of despoiling Euphorbos’ weapons, compared to the lion breaking and consuming the hero as other animals (dogs) and humans (shepherds) watch in horror from a distance. While the narration is visual, we can’t forget the verb ἰύζουσιν is rare in Greek literature and seems to correlate to animal or animalistic sounds (although a scholiast is sure to let readers know that the dogs are actually barking, οἱ δὲ κύνες ὑλακτοῦσι).
When the narrator leaves the simile, the “pale fear” that overtakes them, that prevents them from facing the rampaging lion, seems to be compared to the heart in each of the Trojan warriors that will not allow them to face him. The concatenation of images is dizzying: the Trojans are at once other cattle, dogs, and humans witnessing the lion who began as the focal point of the simile. Menelaos’ eventually abortive despoiling of Euphorbus’ corpse leaves almost a vivid crunching sound, even though it never happens.
This simile creates a narrative space within epic that is like a fantasy within a fantasy. I have discussed similes a few times before (Patroklos crying like a girl; Hektor as a beast; Hektor as a snowy mountain; the similes of Iliad 12). As I mention in several points, I think that the way similes unfold echo the associative and unpredictable ways that narrative blends unfold in our minds. In a talk I gave in 2024 at Vanderbilt University (presenting part of Storylife), I compared similes to the bounded forms of ring composition. These parenthetical structures have also developed a cooperative function of inviting audiences to think about the characteristics of the speech in a particular way. Similarly, similes are bounded by “just as” and “just so” statements that separate narrative or speech from comparison, directing audiences to follow through the comparison both at its beginning and end. These comparisons are rarely 1:1 and perfectly clear, they often shift and move from one element inside the simile (a vehicle) to a different corresponding element outside the simile (the tenor).
Before getting into a few details, I want to offer an exam type analogy: the tenors and vehicles of Homeric similes are to each other what external audiences and epic are outside of the poem. That is, they replicate pars pro toto the blending and movement that happens when audiences hear and begin to interpret the stories. Two things I would like to emphasize in the similes I have selected are the slippage or blending of detail between the domains of tenor and vehicle and the movement within the simile from the initial comparison to include a greater part of a world than one might expect. Two examples help show this.
Iliad 6.503‑514
“Paris did not then linger in his lofty halls, But, once he had put on his shining weapons, inlaid with bronze, Then he hurried through the city, fully trusting his swift feet. As when some cooped up horse, fully fed at the manger, Breaks his bond and rushes out, luxuriating in the field, Glorying in his habit of bathing in the fine-flowing river– How he holds his head up high and his hair darts Around his shoulders, and as he trusts in his glory, His light limbs carry him to the hangouts and pasture of mares– That’s how the son of Priam, Paris, went to the top of Pergamon, Shining in his armor like the shining sun Exulting, and his swift feet were carrying them….
The first example is about Paris finally dressed to go to war in Iliad. The verbal repetitions link the tenor and vehicle for us, and the effect of comparing Paris to a show-horse is comedic and pointed. But what I find interesting here is the bleedover of human-traits to the horse in the simile: the horse’s extravagant hair evokes as much a dandy princeling tossing his hair as that of a stallion. The bathing, the swift feet, the jaunting off for mares, all speaks to a horse compared to Paris as much as a prince compared to a horse. The bleedover is, I think, a species of the very kind of cognitive blending that happens when we absorb any narrative and try to process it through the language and experiences that are familiar to us
Iliad 7.1-7
So he spoke and shining Hektor rushed out of the gates And his brother Alexandros went with him. Both of them Were truly eager in their heart to go to war and fight. As when a god grants a wind to sailors who are just Waiting for it, after they have worn themselves out By driving their smooth oars into the sea, and their limbs have been wearied, That’s how these two appeared to the Trojans awaiting [them].”
Simpler, but no less interesting is the simile from book 7: When Hektor and Paris leave the gates, we are not sure what the relationship between the tenor and the vehicle is: we start out, perhaps wrongly, thinking that they are the sailors but find out as we move through the simile that the tableau of them returning to battle is being seen by the Trojans, who are the at first unexpressed tenor to the simile’s sailors. Hektor and Paris are the favorable wind sent to relieve them. This shifting, this re-blending of space through the unfolding of the narrative, aims our mental gaze first at the princes returning to war, then to an imagined vessel, then to the Trojans altogether, moving us through the narrative and to a new place in the tale. The details left unexplored may strike different audience members: the inversion of Trojans as sailors, the emphasis on the toil of their work, the implication of divine agency, so crucial throughout Hektor’s characterization from this moment until Achilles’ return. The simile refracts and bends, leaving listeners to recompose its meaning. All of this occurs in a way that is deeply akin to the cognitive blend proposed by Mark Turner in The Literary Mind.
Ancient testimony indicates that similes like this have caused audience confusion over time.
Schol. Ad Hom. Il. 17.60-69 ex
“Everything [in the simile] is compared to everything [without]: the mass of the Trojans is the herd of cattle; Eurphorbos who us the best is compared to the best of the cattle. The poet acknowledges that he is the best earlier [Il. 17.80]. Menelaos [is compared] to the lion as he kills him and the uselessness of the best of the Trojans [is compared] to the cowherds and dogs who are not able to defend [the cow].”
The takeaway, I think, should be that devices like this in Homer follow organic growth rules rather than the rigid structures of parallels and allusions that dominate literate/literary art. The images move where the inspiration takes them, adding ideas (paratactically) to create complex layers of meeting that respond to diverse perspectives and invite audiences to disentangle them. They are less puzzles to be solved, than landscapes to be explored and worlds to inhabit.
We just had a blackout! For what looked like blocks around! It lasted exactly as long as it took spatch to light a candle in a yahrzeit glass and me to find a utility bill to call and report the outage. Briefly, stars were visible.
(Today was concerned primarily with taking Hestia to the vet, falling over afterward, and thinking unavoidably about geopolitics.)
And the water doesn't seem to want to turn off for the heater - it *is* lefty loosey, righty tighty, isn't it? - so I may have to get it for the whole house overnight.
Carobeth Laird, Encounter with an Angry God: Recollections of my life with John Peabody Harrington (1975)
Skimmed, partial---amidst the readings for one of my classes, I was reminded that an undergrad prof had mentioned Laird years ago. The prof said that Laird's book made Harrington sound both brilliant and "like ... not just a piece of work, but a pile of work."
I'd say that from Laird's text, it seems that Harrington was firmly neurodivergent, unable to connect with Laird, apt to project his mother ineffectually onto her (without understanding that he was doing so or that his repeated errors were painful for Laird), and lucky in benefiting as a white man from the work others did for him and around him. Yes, also quite bright, but the inability alongside it to balance schedule disruption and the undertaking of basic self-care, including regular meals, is awfully familiar from at least one person I've dated previously. He didn't "have to" learn it because others sort of handled it, until they didn't.
Laird downplays her own brilliance in the text, though it's clear that she knew herself. She managed to secure a divorce from Harrington in an era when her father could appear in court on her behalf.
The long-ago undergrad prof was a person with a teenaged child, at the time, and had recently divorced a husband who was a piece of work. Harrington's work was amazing, she said, though a lot of "Harrington's work" is only attributed to him---often by him, unfairly. She had been working on Harrington's work, including his letters, and--- The classroom full of students interested in Celtic studies blinked at her, she realized she'd hared off on a tangent, and we went back to how the late Romans wrote about, or misattributed stuff about, continental Celts. What Harrington worked principally on, and what the undergrad prof doubled in, was indigenous languages, mostly in California.
Last entry I mused on the mystique surrounding the Jack of Hearts. Is it just me? I asked. sartorias and pamaladean referred me to the Bob Dylan song "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," which absolutely is right on target with what I was feeling, and Wakanomori pointed out to me that the Jacks are also known as Knaves, which also goes to the mystique. But best of all was when smokingboot shared this song she'd written about each of the jacks. Truly marvelous! And she said I could feature it here, so, without further ado ...
The Jack-of-Hearts song, or maybe better called, the Jacks song, since it's about all of them, by smokingboot!
Jack o'Hearts oh, Jack o'Hearts oh, Each maiden you charm My hopes you have broken And my heart you disarm If you swear you love me I'll count that no harm Jack o'Hearts oh, Jack o' Hearts oh, Each maiden you charm!
Jack o'Diamonds, Jack o'Diamonds You bagman you thief You promise such plenty It beggars belief Then you wink at a penny And bring all to grief Jack o' Diamonds, Jack o' Diamonds You bagman you thief!
Jack o'Clubs oh Jack o'Clubs oh Work hard and you'll gain, The world gladly gives you much gold and more fame If you risk it on a ticket For sure you'll know shame Jack o' Clubs oh, Jack o' Clubs oh Work hard and you'll gain!
Jack o' Spades oh, Jack o Spades oh, You cutthroat you knave! More blood on your hands than a barber's worst shave, and if you ain't at the funeral You're right by the grave. Jack o' Spades oh, Jack o spades oh You cutthroat you knave!
Four Jacks oh Four Jacks oh Most sly in the land, Whatever's to come oh It won't be as planned. Box clever my darlin' And keep close your hand, Four Jack oh Four Jacks oh Most sly in the land!
whimbrel (HWIM-bruhl, WIM-bruhl) - n., either of two curlews (Numenius phaeopus and N. hudsonicus), breeding in northern subarctic regions and having a long, downward-curving bill.
That one being the Hudsonian whimbrel that breeds in North America, the other being the Eurasian whimbrel, which breeds in, well, Eurasia. The name is attested to the 1530s but its origin is unknown, though the whim- part is speculated to be imitative of its cry (though it's not a close rendering).
My short story “To Defeat Water” has been translated into Spanish as “Derrotar al agua” and published by Microficciones y Cuentos. Lealo aquí/read it here.
The site is run by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is one of the founding fathers of Spanish-language science fiction, and his novels have won major awards.
I often translate other people’s work from Spanish into English, and it’s an honor to have my work published in Spanish, especially by someone as prominent as Sergio. ¡Gracias!
If you want to read the story in English, it was originally published here by The Lorelei Signal.
Has anyone here gotten volume 1 of The Creator's Grace and/or volumes 1 and 2 of At the World's Mercy from Rosmei yet? If so, what do you think of them?
(the ETA for ones ordered via Yiggybean is sometime in May, so it will be a while until I get mine)
Has anyone here gotten volume 1 of The Creator's Grace and/or volumes 1 and 2 of At the World's Mercy from Rosmei yet? If so, what do you think of them?
(the ETA for ones ordered via Yiggybean is sometime in May, so it will be a while until I get mine)
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