Russel and his wife Karen called and came out this morning to cut wood. They are such nice people! I showed them several options including a huge tree that is down right next to the road. There is a lot of grass trying desperately to go to seed in my garden. Grass is supposed to start in Nov-Dec, grow only a little until early March and go to seed in late April or May. Instead there is grass 2 feet tall now, in January. A lot of grass has already been pulled out of the garden and added to the compost. All that nice high-nitrogen grass has brought the compost up to a toasty 130F. At that temperature there are millions of little microscopic organisms happily chomping away at the pile, aided and abetted by fungi. I went down to Winter Quarters today, got Firefly and gave her a good grooming. We had a short ride in the arena to review leg and weight aids. Afterward, back in Winter Quarters, I stopped to chat with Glenn who was there to exercise two horses. Such a nice person! Firefly had a little lesson in standing around waiting for me to finish talking. She is getting ever so much more patient. Before I let her loose I gave her a dose of worm medicine, it is past time to do so. The wormer was apple flavored which helped a little (horses often object quite forcefully to having nasty paste squirted into their mouth). Firefly barely put up any resistance. All the other horses on the place are getting their doses as well. Throughout everything Firefly was really good. She even stood quietly next to the fence as I crawled on her. (For non-horse riders: horses are smart. If they decide they don't want to be ridden they will step away from the fence or mounting block until trained to stand by it quietly. Horses that are ridden with kindness and sensitivity learn that they don't need to dislike being ridden - it might be nice or even fun!) Tomorrow the plan is to take the tractor down and groom the arena. Also spray the edges again. Once that is done it will be time to hook up the post hole digger and see if it will dig some holes for me. Some places may be fine, others may have too much rock for the auger to work. Finger seems to be healing nicely so far. In this case the no-antibiotics approach appears to have worked well. The nurse at the hospital cleaned the wound with a stream of saline solution, about 3 cups of it. The stitches were top dressed with a dab of Neosporin and a bandaid. So much better than automatically giving a week's worth of oral antibiotics to absolutely everyone.
I've borrowed the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 artbook. I've not finished it yet, but the art is very pretty so far. The writing, however, is fucking unreadable on account of being white on matte gold.
I saw some comm members expressing an interest in a read-along of The Beauty's Blade over on the cnovels comm, so thought I'd put up an interest check.
Please let me know in the comments whether you'd be interested, and what kind of format you'd like this to be in. Most people seemed to want something casual — let me know what mode/level of participation you'd like and would be happy with. Feel free to DM me also if you don't want to comment publicly.
I'll leave this post up for a couple of weeks or so and then decide :)
Writing Bloodhunt Academy was an achievement for me, considering I wondered whether I could ever read or write again at some point before it. I can't just let it languish. I've started cutting the chapters into smaller chunks and uploading it to Royal Road (link!). It was not meant to be a web serial so I don't know, but I'm going to just continue expanding it instead of making Book Two separate. For the people who bought the book from the Zon upon release, and the ARC readers who indicated they wanted to read Book Two, I'm planning to send a free e-copy of the completed expanded version. If you bought the book, DM me with the email you'd like me to send it to and I'll save it on my ARC reader spreadsheet.
A consequence of the indie author dream fizzling out is that I'm having to terrify myself trying to figure out ways to have hope for the future. Trying to believe I won't live and die in this house. I'm having to face the prospect of jobsearching again and trying to stave off the depression that rises whenever I do.
My friend Venky sent me a job posting he saw that he thought I'd be interested in, and he was right. I applied for it, but the fact that I actually want this job, as opposed to thinking that something or the other will have to do, has made the tenterhooks another kind of torture. The employer responded to my application email saying they will get back to candidates within a certain timeframe. I waited for double of that timeframe to pass, with no word from the employer, before sending my followup email a few days ago, asking them for the status of my application. I hate how the process has played havoc with my mental health throughout. I'd probably go insane if I didn't have the tarot. Although I use tarot predictively, I don't usually do timing readings, because my success with them has been mixed. But not knowing how long I should wait or whether I was going to be ghosted entirely for a job I actually want was kind of destroying me, so I did a timing reading. I used one of my Thoth decks, the Parrott Tarot, because the Thoth system is less scenic and more symbolic which works better for timing.
Based on my reading, I'm assuming I'll hear from them next week. If next week passes by and I don't hear from them I'm going to stop waiting. The thought of not getting this job terrifies me. The thought of what to do if I have to stop waiting, give it up, find some other path somehow, terrifies me. I'm assuming I'll hear from them next week and, according to a predictive tarot reading I did that reassures me, I'm assuming I'll get the job.
Beginning in late November and escalating through early January, the Trump administration has sent 3,000 ICE and CBP agents into Minneapolis–St. Paul. For comparison, the “Operation Midway Blitz” surge in Chicago deployed about 300 federal immigration agents. The Chicago metro area’s population is roughly 2.5 times the size of the Twin Cities’, so the Minneapolis–St. Paul operation has sent about 10 times as many enforcers into a much smaller population center.
The most heartening thing about this deeply disturbing moment is seeing how consistently and forcefully Minnesotans of all demographics have been pushing back.
In response to the killing of Renee Good and the ICE invasion, the Minneapolis labor movement has issued the nation’s first citywide general strike call in nearly 80 years
You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.
If You’d Like to Donate Money Contact Your Senators/House Rep Write a Letter to the Editor Hassle ICE-Supporting Businesses To Learn More About What’s Going On in Minnesota, Read Minnesotan News Sources Push Back on Disinformation Send Words of Encouragement Get Ready For This Bullshit to Come to You Talk About Immigration, and Make it Clear You Think It’s GOOD
On a theory, I believe, of sustaining me on literature, my parents very unexpectedly presented me with my own copy of Leslie Howard's Trivial Fond Records (ed. Ronald Howard, 1982), which seems to have shipped from the UK as if the international post just worked.
Well, here we are, the 29th of July, 1940. What have we done with all the years since 1918? Armistice night in Piccadilly Circus is so vivid in the memory, it seems like last Wednesday week. What did happen to all those years – and what have we done with them? It seems we are back where we began. Anyway, there it is on the calendar, July 1940, and this war has been on for eleven months. And I am in London speaking these words, and when I am finished talking to you I shall go out of this building, past sandbags and bayonets, into streets of medieval blackness. As I hunt for the two pin-points of light that represent a taxi it will be about two a.m. here, which is nine in the evening your time, and I shan't be able to resist a thought of the dazzling glare which at that moment is lighting the sky above New York's Great White Way. I daresay there isn't an Englishman alive who is more familiar than I with Broadway at nine o'clock on a summer's evening.
Yesterday I got in the car and went to San Francisco. Donald and I sorted through clothes, and boxes from closets. We loaded lumber, boxes and a small amount of clothing into the car. We had some lunch and I headed home. Total driving time about 5 hours. As a treat I stopped at Dharma Trading Company and purchased a few dyes we were short on for tye-dying, and some other supplies. Eventually I got back home. While fixing some salad as a late dinner the knife I was drying (having washed it) slipped and cut me across the top of my left index finger. It bled a lot. So at 9:45 I got ready with a bit of extra coffee and water; and headed to the emergency room for a few stitches. I truly do not trust the hospital in Ukiah, and my insurance is through Kaiser in Santa Rosa. I arrived just before 11. It took 3 hours to be seen, which I kind of expected. I was very low on the priority list. Turned out that the cut was nowhere near as bad as I feared. In fact it was borderline for needing stitching. Since I'm so active the (very nice) doctor put 3 stitches in it. I got home at 3 am and had to be up at 6:30 to feed the horses. Pretty slow moving today.
For Shawn Thompson, curiosity is a way to live in a deeper and more fulfilling way. That’s what he explores in his podcasts. He wondered how I found a way to write from the point of view of a plant in the novel Semiosis, so we had a chat about the craft of imagination in writing, curiosity, first contact, and alien intelligence.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the most important parts of book 11 is when Nestor tells a long story to Patroklos that seems result in Patroklos volunteering to take Achilles’ place in battle. As we learn from Zeus’ speeches, this is an essential part of re-targeting Achilles’ rage toward Hektor and completing the plot of the Iliad. Whether or not persuading Patroklos is Nestor’s goal has at times been a hot topic of Homeric scholarship. Karl Reinhardt would not be the first or the last scholar to sense something insidious in Nestor’s story.
Nestor’s speech in book 11 provides the longest persuasive story from myth (a paradeigmata) in the Iliad, longer still than Phoenix’s story of Meleager. Julia Haig Gaisser does a great job of laying out the structure of the speech (9-13) and emphasizes the difference in style between the somewhat confusing story he tells and the relatively direct advice he provides at the end.
But on what criteria to we base an evaluation of Nestor’s speech? I have posted before about persuasive examples in Homeric speeches—so-called paradeigmata—and have argued that they rarely result in what the speaker intends. This helps to demonstrate to external audiences that narrative often goes awry and that its effect on the world and listeners can be unpredictable because audiences bring experiences and knowledge to the story that the teller may not anticipate. As I discuss in post on Iliad 9, one cognitive approach to literature can be useful in helping to understand what is going on here.
A heroic blend: Original artwork by Brittany Beverung
In his book The Literary Mind, Mark Turner argues that when we hear (or read) a story, we cannot experience the narrative created by the teller of the tale. Instead, the story unfolds in a cognitive blend in a space between the world of the narrative and the reader’s mind. What this means, in effect, is that our actual mental picture of narrative blends our own experiences and memories with the sketches we receive from stories and generates a new thing, a tale wholly in our own minds.
My general approach to all of the stories told by Homeric speakers is to try to understand that tension between the story that is told and the reaction it elicits by imagining how other characters might mis-read or re-read the story they hear based on their own perspectives or desires. At the same time, however, if we are thinking about Homeric characters telling stories, we also have to think of the way they blend traditional elements with their current circumstances and their own desired outcomes. This tripling and then doubling again of perspectives in turn provides really useful lessons in how to read Homeric poetry which is a prolonged adaptation of received material in particular contexts for diverse and changing audiences.
Let’s get to Nestor: he is positioned by the Iliad as an effective if not an ideal speaker. He has previously used paradigmatic narratives to persuade his audiences to different outcomes. In book 1, he fails to reconcile Achilles and Agamemnon; in book 7 he shames Achaeans into standing up to face Hektor’s challenge. When Nestor speaks to Patroklos, he takes a personal approach: he dismisses Achilles’ concern and provides a catalogue of the wounded Greeks. His opening assertion—that Achilles has no concern for the Greeks—is then balance by a wish to be young again the way he was during some cattle wars. He tells a story of a cattle raid in his youth that led to the Epeians attacking Pylos following the seizure of herds to make up for some stolen horses. Neleus, Nestor’s father, would not allow him to go to war, but he did it any way and killed many men, earning glory for himself.
Nestor moves from his long story to dismiss Achilles as someone whose bravery is only for himself—he “toils for his virtue alone” (αὐτὰρ ᾿Αχιλλεὺς / οἶος τῆς ἀρετῆς ἀπονήσεται, 11.763). Nestor then reminds Patroklos of his own father Menoitios who advised Patroklos to calm Achilles, to advise him. So Nestor asks him to try to persuade Achilles to return or, if Achilles is holding back for some secret reason, to go to war himself and provide some respite to the Greeks. The narrative lets us know that Nestor “raised the spirit in Patroklos’ chest” ( ῝Ως φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ὄρινε,) with this speech. Stanley Lombardo translates this line as “This speech put great notions in Patroclus’ head”.
Before thinking about Patroklos, I think it is useful to focus first on how Nestor is adapting this story. The scholia have a few summaries of the events contextualizing Nestor’s tale:
Schol. D ad Hom. Il. 11.672
“Neleus was the son of Poseidon was the best equestrian of his time and he sent horses to Elis for the contest conducted by Augeas. When those horses were victorious, Augeas became envious and took them. He sent the charioteers off untouched. When Neleus learned of this, he maintained peace. But Nestor, his youngest child, gathered an army and attached Elis. He killed many people and regained the horses. They also took more than a little booty from the enemy. Pherecydes tells this story.”
I am not sure how much this little narrative does for us! (and if you want much, much more on this, I think Doug Frame’s Hippota Nestorwill never be surpassed) I do think we can see the opening and closing of Nestor’s speech as instructive. He focuses on responsibility, friendship, and community in framing his narrative: then, he tells a story about individual glory that seems to redound positively on the community. The most important detail that jumps out is his selection of a particular course of action against his father’s wishes. (Indeed, Patroklos as somehow a child to Achilles, despite his older age, is important to the opening scene in book 16 where Achilles compares him to a little girl tugging at her mother’s apron strings).
Nestor’s request/advice near the end is couched in the caveat: unless Achilles has special knowledge. I think if we remember book 9 correctly, we have no reason to believe that Nestor knows Achilles has sworn an oath not to return to battle. Patroklos, however, certainly knows this. Given his own experience of Achilles’ character and Nestor’s story plus the option of leading the Achaeans to battle, we have to imagine Patroklos as accepting that advice as the only option.
Victoria Pedrick usefully contextualizes this speech in the scholarship of paradeigmata and addresses the question of the ‘lesson’s’ target. According to Pedrick, Nestor’s speech in book 11 differs from other persuasive speeches: She notes that “The absence of both command and direct comparison is not normal in paradigmatic speeches and it makes Nestor’s exhortation in 11 unusually indirect” and suggests that “The implicit character of Nestor’s exhortation can be explained by the fact that Nestor is talking not to Achilles, but to Patroklos. The observation is obvious, but it ought to be emphasized”(59). This interpretation, as she implies, is not fully in accord with the situation: Nestor’s long description of his own accomplishments in battle amount to an aristeia that may be scene as an example of heroic behavior for Achilles. The lesson, Pedrick concludes following Karl Reinhardt, is for Patroklos, or, at least he takes it as a model. One of the difficulties in this argument for me, is following the conclusion (67-68) that Achilles has “misread the situation” and expects an appeal from the Greeks. Achiles has perhaps correctly read the situation, he just does not expect Patroklos to appeal to him and make the request he does.
One of the bugbears stalking this debate is to what extent Nestor adapts or innovates in the telling of his tale and, to make it more complex, how much we can imagine the Homeric narrator adapting and innovating in positioning Nestor to do so. There was a time in Homeric scholarship when some argues that innovation or ‘ad hoc’ invention was difficult to imagine for traditional poetry. This is where cognitive approaches have been helpful in showing how narrative moves and changes based on the audience. Elizabeth Minchin’s article on this speech is especially good: she concludes that “his episode reflects the narrator’s skill in turning traditional material to communicative advantage” (285). Nestor is shown here arguing for two possible outcomes: Achilles returns and receives glory through his aristeia (not through goods, as Phoinix argues), or, if he cannot return for some reason, Patroklos takes his place and wins glory too, providing a break to the Greeks.
Rather than being a trick or insidious, Nestor is hedging his bets. He is clear about the problem, offers potential solutions, and uses himself as an example of winning glory in messed-up situations. We, as the audience, think there is something off here, because we know (1) what Achilles asked of Zeus (to punish the Achaeans) and (2) that Patroklos’ death will bring Achilles back to war.
Gaisser, Julia Haig. “A Structural Analysis of the Digressions in the Iliad and the Odyssey.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969): 1–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/311147.
Louden, D. Bruce. “Iliad 11 : healing, healers, Nestor, and Medea.” Yearbook of Ancient Greek Epic, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 151-164. Doi: 10.1163/24688487-00201005
Minchin, Elizabeth. “Speaker and listener, text and context : some notes on the encounter of Nestor and Patroklos in Iliad II.” Classical World, vol. LXXXIV, 1990-1991, pp. 273-285.
Pedrick, Victoria. “The paradigmatic nature of Nestor’s speech in Iliad 11.” TAPA, vol. CXIII, 1983, pp. 55-68.
Karl Reinhardt, Die Iliad und ihr Dichter (Gottingen 1961) 258-64;
Roisman, Hanna M.. “Nestor the good counsellor.” Classical Quarterly, N. S., vol. 55, no. 1, 2005, pp. 17-38. Doi: 10.1093/cq/bmi002
Strauss Clay, Jenny. “Iliad 1.282-284 and Nestor’s rhetoric of compromise.” Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 67, no. 6, 2014, pp. 987-993. Doi: 10.1163/1568525X-12301444
Willcock, M. M. “Ad Hoc Invention in the Iliad.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 81 (1977): 41–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/311110.
Some things to read on paradeigmata
Andersen, Øivind. 1987. “Myth Paradigm and Spatial Form in the Iliad.” In Homer Beyond Oral Poetry: Recent Trends in Homeric Interpretation, edited by Jan Bermer and Irene J. F. De Jong. John Benjamins.’
Barker, Elton T. E. and Christensen, Joel P. 2011. “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.” MD: 9–44.
Brenk, F. 1984 “Dear Child: the Speech of Phoinix and the Tragedy of Achilles in the Ninth Book of the Iliad.” Eranos, 86: 77–86.
Braswell, B. K. 1971. “Mythological Innovation in the Iliad.” CQ, 21: 16-26.
lignify (LIG-nuh-fai) - v., to turn into wood or into woody tissue; to become rigid or fixed like something wooden.
Can be transitive (turn something else into wood) or intransitive (turn one/itself into wood). Biologically, this is caused by formation and deposit of lignin in cell walls, which in certain plants can happen during secondary growth. I can see this being used in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, when the butler's face lignifies as the young cad prattles on, not realizing he's given himself away. This was coined in French as lignifier, from the Latin root līgnum, wood.
Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!
Thank you to everyone who create fanwork, comment/kudo work, make rec lists/newsletters/etc, organize events, discuss the canon, or just generally have fun in fandoms! You all are awesome!
If you're actually writing for children, especially young children, then I guess you don't want to scare them off - but if you're writing for adolescents or adults you can afford to be honest.
So here's the thing. Every book or story in which a character gets glasses for the first time - or the second if their first pair is painfully out of date - emphasizes how clear everything is and how they can see so much detail that they had no idea they were missing. And yes, that's a thing. None of them point out that it's a thing that can be less "wondrous" and more "disorienting and distracting" until you've gotten used to seeing that much detail.
None of them mention that if your prescription is strong enough - especially if there's astigmatism involved - your perception will be wonky and you'll have a hard time judging how close and far things are for a day or two.
Definitely none of them mention that you will absolutely get eye strain every time you get a new prescription, and possibly headaches or nausea to accompany it. It goes away, again, in a day or two, but until it does you'll feel like you're cross-eyed at all times. (And with children, every year is a new prescription. They grow, which means their eyeballs grow, and just like that growth is unlikely to suddenly give them perfect vision if they already were nearsighted, it's also unlikely to keep them exactly where they were before.)
Absolutely none of them point out that if you've never worn glasses before you'll have to spend the aforementioned day or two learning how to not see the frames. This is also true if your old frames were much bigger than the new ones, but that, at least, is less likely to apply to children - their faces grow along with the rest of them, necessitating larger frames, so even if they choose a smaller overall style with the new pair the fact that it fits properly may even out.
Moving past the realm of accurate fiction writing, children really should have their first optometrist appointment, at the latest, in the summer before first grade (so, aged 5 or 6 years old). Ideally, they'll have it before they start school, at age 2 or 3, but you can't convince people on that point. They should have a new appointment every year until the age of 20 or so, or every two years if every year really is unfeasible, even if you don't think you see the signs of poor vision. They won't complain that they can't see, because they'll just assume that their vision is normal. This is true even if they wear glasses - you never notice how bad your eyes have gotten until you get a new prescription, and then it's like "whoa".
The screening done at school or at the doctor's office is imperfect at best. You really want the optometrist.
In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking — they were both walking — north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and a woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved.
I realized as I was approaching the end of this book that it is the third unfinished series sapphic SFF centering the machinations of an empire that I've read lately (the others being The Locked Tomb and The Masquerade). A Memory Called Empireis the first book in the Teixcalaan series by Arkady Martine (narrated by Amy Landon in the audiobook) and tells the story of Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat from an as-yet-unconquered satellite state of the Teixcalaanli Empire entering her role as ambassador for the first time--after the previous ambassador went radio silent.
For fans of fantasy politics, I highly recommend this one. Mahit enters a political scene on the cusp of boiling over and is thrown not only into navigating a culture and society she's only ever read about, but having to piece together what her predecessor was doing, why he was doing it, and what happened to him. It's a whirlwind of not knowing who to trust, what to lean on, or where to go.
Martine creates such an interesting world here in Teixcalaan and the mindset of a people who pride themselves on being artists above all and yet exist as ruthless conquerors within their corner of space. Furthermore, Mahit herself is in a fascinating position as someone who's been half in love with this empire since childhood, and yet is all too keenly aware of the threat it poses to her and her home. Mahit does well in Teixcalaan--she loves the poetry and literature they so highly prize, she's able to navigate Teixcalaanli society and see the double meanings everywhere, and she's excited to try her hand at these things. And yet--if she plays her cards wrong, it will end with her home being gobbled up by Empire, and as Mahit herself says: Nothing touched by Empire remains unchanged.
I really enjoyed her characters too--3-Seagrass stole the show for me--and they all have believably varied and grounded views and opinions, with the sorts of blind spots and biases you would expect from people in their respective positions. There's character growth and change too, which is always fun to see, and I'm excited to see how that progresses in the next book.
If I had a complaint, and it's a minor one, it's that the prose is sometimes overly repetitive and explanatory, as if Martine doesn't quite trust her audience to remember things from earlier in the book, or understand what's being implied, which occasionally has the effect of making Mahit look less intelligent than her role would demand. However, it didn't happen often enough that I was truly annoyed, and I think the book gets better about it as it goes on.
On the whole, a fun, exciting read (although it takes its time to set up--expect a slow start!) that left me actually looking forward to my commute for a chance to listen to more. Already checking to see if my library has the next book available.
My poem "Northern Comfort" has been accepted by Not One of Us. It was written out of my discovery over the last few years of the slaveholding history of Massachusetts literally under my feet and my more recent anger at the murderously terrified fragility of the current administration. Half my family turns out to be wound into these vanguards of American colonialism and I don't waste my time pretending that the other immigrant half bullied me into demonizing them to death. At this point I am moving past hundred-year tides and into glaciers.
I cannot promise at this stage to do anything more than admire them, but thisbluespirit made me a pair of personalized bingo cards.
Having entirely missed the existence of Winteractive these past three years, I can see that I will have to visit the Kraken Crossing before the end of March. In even more belated fashion, I have managed to go more than thirty years without seeing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice partly because nearly everyone I knew in high school was fainting over it and my reactions to most expressions of romance at that time could be described as allergic and bemused, but this interview with Colin Firth has gone a long way toward convincing me that when my brain has reverted to media capability, it too should go on the list.
While looking at hood patterns, I found a free-to-use DROPS pattern (Jan 2025) on which another designer seems to've based a mystery knit-along, fall 2025. Making a pattern tougher to knit does not constitute an individual contribution worth charging money for. I've decided not to link.
Pattern design generally, or sometimes "design," has become a rather crowded space in the video-influencer micro-era. Here's a random video in which someone gives the spotlight to free patterns that bear close resemblance to 15 PetiteKnit patterns.
The hood search and current events have reminded me, however---there is one hat pattern that hasn't been awful to wear. I knitted it for my uncle almost 10 years ago, before my last visit, and since he and I were not so different in size (I'm taller, he had heavier bones), I tried it on while modifying the pattern to fit him despite thinner yarn. I bet I could make myself one. Not the same silhouette as the ice-melting toques people are promoting, which evoke a specific moment, but more practical for my head shape.
Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, by Julian Walker, Matthew Remski & Derek Beres
The central idea of this book is that the underlying principles of New Age philosophy and consipracy theories are very similar: Karma = "nothing happens by accident"; Illusion = "nothing is at it seems" and Interdependance = "everything is connected". An interesting and well-argued read.
I read this book early in 2025, at roughly the same time as The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care, by Rina Raphael (it was fine) so I'm not sure which of the two -- or even the Decoding the Gurus podcast I was bingeing at the time -- had this additional tidbit: part of the appeal of alternative medicine is the personalised aspect of it. You're not special, getting the same vaccine as everyone else, but this homeopathy is tailored to you specifically/this diet aligns with your astrological chart/etc.
Canada Reads 2026 short list is out. Thoughts? Feelings? I've only read one book and didn't like it. Very excited that Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers is a champion. I could stare at her face until I die.
Cinder House by Freya Marske This was getting hyped up by someone at my bookclub, and I probably should've known better (not because they don't have great recs, just that I'm more miss than hit on fairytale retellings), but it was a novella, so I thought I'd give it a go. I indeed should've known better.
It's a cute idea: the step mother murders both Cinderella and her father on the first page, and the rest of the story is about Cinderella's ghost haunting the house. I appreciated a lot of the little twists on the story (which seemed pretty closely linked to the Disney version, but I also haven't read a tonne of other versions, so maybe not). There's some neat worldbuilding around how society treats magic, and the author did a good job incorporating the history and politics of the country without info dumping. I liked how the glass slippers worked.
Unfortunately, I had a difficult time connecting with it, and I'm trying to work out how to describe why. The story had a certain smugness to it, maybe? Like it was aware that it was telling the version of the story that would appeal to someone who thought a bisexual ghost polycule was the solution to every love triangle, where of course the other woman was a secret badass, because this is the kind of story that has Awesome Women who Subvert Tropes. Which is something that I ought to enjoy, and have enjoyed in other contexts, but not here. Maybe it was just that it should've been a novel with a few more subplots to hold it up, but either way the emotional beats never felt all that earned to me. What should've been crowning moments of awesome kept feeling like they were happening because this was the kind of story where they had to happen? It's all very clever, but never felt like it had any grounding in real emotion.
I thought this was a first outing, but it looks like Marske has written a bunch, so maybe she's just not my thing.
Leave Our Bones Where They Lay by Aviaq Johnston Found this in a library display of books advertised as short reads to help you make your year-end goal, which made me laugh.
Short stories set inside a framing device: every season, an Inuit man travels into the wilderness to meet with a monster, and every season he must tell the monster a story. As he grows older, he struggles to find an heir to continue the tradition, but his immediate family is shattered, and won't go, so he ends up leaning on a young granddaughter. The stories are a mix of twists on traditional Inuit legends, and contemporary snippets of life in the high arctic, with or without supernatural elements.
The chapters are also interspersed with line art of traditional Inuit tools, and beautiful full page black and white photographs of lichen. It's physically a really beautiful book.
Both the frame and the stories examine how colonisation has affected Inuit society, and the ways families and individuals figure out how to recover their culture and even thrive. There's a mix of horror, humour, and quiet sadness. Johnson had originally published some of the short stories independently, so there isn't an explicit connection between the stories and the frame. However, they are arranged so that the stories fit with who's telling them, and match the tone of the frame story, so it never felt cludged together.
I loved the conclusion, and finding out who the monster was, and why we were telling it stories, and the tender relationships between all the characters. Really beautiful, hope Johnson keeps publishing.
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold, narrated by Kate Reading Third time through this (maybe fourth?), and I still get new things out of it every reread.
Our heroine is middle-aged mother who has recently been freed from a curse, and now has to figure out if she's going to take another shot at having a life, or if she's just going to sink back into helplessness (which is a valid choice, considering how the rest of her life has gone!). She goes on pilgrimage, mostly to get out of the house, and then the gods get involved.
It's all about trying to figure out how to make choices, especially when your history with making them has been utterly catastrophic. It's also coming to understand that the narrative of your life has been told by other people, and maybe they didn't have your best interests at heart, even when they said they did. I also love how unrepentantly horny our heroine is. She hasn't gotten laid in a good twenty years, and is starting to think she should do something about that.
There are also a handful of beats about how women navigate in a patriarchal society, for good or ill, that largely avoid the way that a lot of books in these settings shame women for wanting power. Some characters we initial dismiss turn out to be capable of heroism, if someone thinks to ask it of them.
I just really love this duology.
Wounded Christmas Wolf by Lauren Esker (Know the author disclaimer.)
A new series, with slightly different rules for the shapeshifters, which I enjoyed, and am interested in seeing how it builds out in future books.
I enjoyed how cheerfully over the top the set up was, with a family matriarch who was so into Christmas that the kids all have Christmas-themed names, and there's aggressively Christmas-themed cabins on the property, which is also a Christmas tree farm. And that the natural reaction to the relatively normal-person hero is, "Holy cow, this is all a lot." Which it was, and all the characters admitted it was, but we're just rolling with it now.
We have a classic Esker hero who's not sure where his place is in the world, or if he has one. He's got a whole traumatic backstory to heal from, and just falling in love isn't going to be enough to fix him. (I thought the fire theme could've used a little more set up). And a heroine who's also at loose ends and second guessing herself. The sparking romance built naturally around their foibles and hesitations, and was really sweet. I liked what we met of the rest of the family, especially the heroine's dad, and look forward to them getting their own books.
A teenage boy, Ambrose, wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. OS, the AI programmed with his mother's voice, reminds him that he's on a mission to rescue his sister, who went to Titan two years ago and sent out a distress call. And also, he has a surprise companion on a journey he thought would be solo: Kodiak, a teenage boy from the rival nation, who is ensconced in his own quarters and refuses to come out.
Ambrose, who is a typical teenager in lots of ways apart from being a genius and an astronaut, manages to coax Kodiak out and immediately starts thinking lustful thoughts about him. Kodiak, whose country is much more austere and militarized than Ambrose's, very gradually warms up to him.
And then what I thought was going to be a slow-burn gay YA romance in a science fiction setting takes a huge left turn. To be fair, it does still centrally involve a gay YA romance. But the science fiction aspect isn't just there as a cool background. It's actually a YA science fiction novel that has a romance along with a plot that goes in multiple unexpected directions, and is very moving in a way that's only possible because of the science fiction elements.
If you're a stickler for hard science fiction in which everything is definitely possible/likely, this probably has at least one too many "I don't think that's likely to work that way" moments for you. But if you'd like to read a fun and touching science fiction adventure-romance that will probably surprise you at least once, just read the book without knowing anything more.
serophobia (ser-uh-FOH-bee-uh) - n., fear of, dislike of, or prejudice against people testing positive for a given pathogen, especially HIV.
So commonly HIV that many dictionaries give only that in their definition. Coined from sero-, combining form of serum (from Latin serum, whey) + phobia, fear of (from Ancient Greek phóbos, fear). And some day I need to dive into that whey > serum connection in more detail.
Ms. Marcus says that an occasional poem is a poem written about something important or special that's gonna happen or already did. Think of a specific occasion, she says—and write about it.
Like what?! Lamont asks. He's all slouched down in his seat. I don't feel like writing about no occasion.
How about your birthday? Ms. Marcus says. What about it? Just a birthday. Comes in June and it ain't June, Lamont says. As a matter of fact, he says, it's January and it's snowing. Then his voice gets real low and he says And when it's January and all cold like this feels like June's a long, long ways away.
The whole class looks at Ms. Marcus. Some of the kids are nodding. Outside the sky looks like it's made out of metal and the cold, cold air is rattling the windowpanes and coming underneath them too.
I seen Lamont's coat. It's gray and the sleeves are too short. It's down but it looks like a lot of the feathers fell out a long time ago. Ms. Marcus got a nice coat. It's down too but real puffy so maybe when she's inside it she can't even tell January from June.
Then write about January, Ms. Marcus says, that's an occasion. But she looks a little bit sad when she says it Like she's sorry she ever brought the whole occasional poem thing up.
I was gonna write about Mama's funeral but Lamont and Ms. Marcus going back and forth zapped all the ideas from my head.
I guess them arguing on a Tuesday in January's an occasion So I guess this is an occasional poem.
In the midst of everything, we still have birthdays, and for spatch's fifty-first I took him to Porter Square Books and on the roundabout way home we collected dinner from Il Casale. It started to snow on the way back, the light salting flakes of an all-day deep-freeze. I have my fingers crossed for an Arctic explosion this weekend.
I have written another fill (AO3) for threesentenceficathon. WERS played Dave Herlihy's "Good Trouble" (2025) and I had to get home to trace his voice to Boston's own post-punk O Positive. I wish I could call the hundred-year tides against the people who have no right to the streets of my grandparents' city. Failing that, it still matters to be alive.
Still chugging away at the tie-dye project. The whole tie-dye kit looked exactly like what it was: the end result of someone who was doing small scale commercial tie-dye who stopped suddenly. She had all kinds of poorly labeled stuff, things she had purchased from other people at a very low cost, and stuff that a single person doing the dying would know, but not an outsider. Huge bottles of dye with the label almost completely washed off, application bottles that were not washed out with two or three names on the bottle. Dyes in dozens of identical containers with only the tiny print on the front to identify them. Dyes for which there were no swatches and swatches which there were no dyes. I can't function very well in that kind of chaos. I'm methodically cleaning everything, labeling things with easy to read labels, making swatches for the colors that are missing them, and so on. I may do a couple more shirts, mostly for M, to use up the dye I have mixed. When I'm done everything will be clean, labeled and sorted into boxes by color family. It is cold today and overcast after a string of beautiful sunny days. Tomorrow isn't going to be much warmer, but the sun is supposed to be out. I plan to go down and groom the arena to kill all the tiny grass plants that are trying to come up in it. While I'm there with the tractor I'll hook up the post hole digger and try to put in a couple of posts on the new fence line at Winter Quarters. My burn permit finally arrived. Sadly today is not a burn day. I'd like to dispose of the brush from that tree we cut up a couple of days ago.
This is my second post about As the Earth Dreams, though these are the first stories in the book. I missed the book club meeting when they were discussed, so I'm afraid you'll only be getting my thoughts on them.
I also read the introduction and learned that it offers a one-sentence synopsis for each story, so I guess I can use those when I can't come up with a better one and/or don't understand a story's plot.
Once again, you curse the gods of literature: Your “short story” turned out to be the first chapter of a novel, and you really wanted a short story. How do you keep things short? Try to limit the number of important characters to two or three. Use one point of view. Keep the conflict simple, the way that postage stamp artwork is memorable but simple. Compress the time frame. Aim for a single effect. Include only the most essential information. If you need a short story idea, here are a few.
• This is a fantasy story in which a gem broker becomes obsessed over a new kind of stone that appears at a roadside market.
• This is young adult story in which a panic-stricken alien learns self-defense from a dog.
• This is a competence p0rn story about an incorrigible lunar pioneer who endangers the settlement by sloppy habits that introduce lunar dust, which has damaging and dangerous sharp edges, into living and working quarters.
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Cinder House by Freya Marske
