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Wednesday, August 27th, 2025 06:31 pm
Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes and the paid time! I appreciate it so much! <333

books: Smith, Kingfisher, Smith, Abulafia, Herron, Tierney) )

home
So glad to be home. Though I came home just in time to discover chigger bites up my legs from repotting mom's new money tree...which at least weren't a mosquito or spider in my bed like I first thought they were? (The bites take 2-3 days to appear, so I was confused.) I didn't make it to yarn group Sunday thanks to a vicious migraine that took forever to pass, even with meds. Frustrating.

dirt
I lost a few plants from being out of town so long, but they were already in fragile shape so I'm not that surprised. The bougainvillea is blooming in the sweltering heat. I need to get the spider plants planted into the Buddha head planter. The drainage hole is unexpectedly small, so I'm pondering the planting mix. I would redrill it, but it's concrete and I don't have a bit that large.

healthcrap
splitting headaches all too frequent, inc today. I called the pain clinic finally and got an appt set for more botox. Stupid head/jaw. I'm so impatient to feel better.

#resist
Labor Day: Monday, 9/01: Workers over Billionaires (#5051)

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333
Sunday, August 24th, 2025 01:59 pm
Once upon a time, I read Exiled from Camelot, the novel-length Sir Kay angstfic by Cherith Baldry that Phyllis Ann Kar politely called 'one of the half-best Arthurian novels that I have yet read,' and then launched it off to Be Experienced by [personal profile] osprey_archer and [personal profile] troisoiseaux.

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

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

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

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

He had never revealed so much before.

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

He could not help shrinking back a little.


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

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

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

Again: FIFTEEN of these. Baldry is truly living her bliss and I honestly cannot but respect it. The book is going to make its way back from here whence it came, but if anyone else is really feeling a shortage of Kay Agonies in their life, let me know; I'm sure an additional stop would be welcomed as long as whoever gets it pays the annotation tax.
Saturday, August 23rd, 2025 09:40 am
[personal profile] genarti and I both recently read Leonora Carrington's 1974 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, about a selectively deaf old lady whose unappreciative relatives put her into an old age home, where various increasingly weird things happen, cut in case you want to go in unspoiled )

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

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

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

The end-note explains that Carrington based Carmella on her friend Remedios Varo, a detail I include as a treat for the Varo-heads but also as an illustration of how much the novel builds itself on the connections between weird women who survive a largely-incomprehensible world by being largely incomprehensible themselves. Carrington herself was in her late fifties when she wrote this book, but she too lived into her nineties; her Wikipedia article describes her in its header as "one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s." It's hard not to inscribe that back into the text in some way, which is of course an impossible reading, but one does like to imagine the ninety-year-old Carrington with just as much presence as the ninety-year-old Marian.
Thursday, August 21st, 2025 08:54 pm
The weather has abruptly decided that it's autumn. It's still August! It's too early! But schools go back next week, and it's getting dark earlier, and I'm getting up for the office before sunrise now, and while I don't quite believe the person who mentioned that late October is only two months away, we're definitely at the end of the summer now. I very nearly wore a jacket for choir yesterday, and am looking forward to temperatures where I will want it and therefore have access to my many pockets on a regular basis.

For some reason I'm having a bit of a decluttering moment. I was discussing it with some friends this evening, and the other day found myself making a list of things that need decluttering in the longer run so that I stop thinking about them. My space isn't bad, there's not really anything urgent that needs doing, but periodically I remember e.g. the box of random electrical cables under the spare bed and decide yet again that I really ought to do something with them. Maybe it's the change of seasons; I know it's supposed to be a spring thing, but perhaps I'm getting ready to nest for the winter!

And next week I'm on leave again, so perhaps I will do all sorts of exciting domestic things! Or then again, perhaps not. Although I am going to visit [personal profile] toft for an afternoon, which is pretty exciting if not very domestic. Plus the new mattress arrives next Friday. St Augustine's Day on Thursday, Miss H's birthday brunch, a visit to the dental hygienist, choir and SF Readers' Group and singing at St N, it's all go around here.
Wednesday, August 20th, 2025 03:33 pm
birthday
Sunday was my birthday & I had a nice time visiting the family.

books: Abulafia, Tierney, Painter x 3, Abulafia )

media
sloooowly, I'm catching up on Murderbot. I know, it's been weeks, and yet the reading kick is (still) defeating my viewing obligations. Also on the watch list: the new season of Strange New Worlds, all of Lower Decks S5, um. Something else I've forgotten. But the Tumblr set shots of S3 Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat are feeding my soul. <333

dirt
for my birthday, I got a Buddha's head planter, which I intend to put spider plants in to give him green and white spiky hair. Very fun!

#resist
Monday, 9/01: Workers over Billionaires (#5051)
In Texas, there are lots of local protests, esp in Austin, re the gerrymandering thing. Freaking GOP. :(

I hope all of y'all are doing well! <333
Tuesday, August 19th, 2025 09:22 pm
The last of the four Hugo Best Novel nominees I read (I did not get around to Service Model or Someone You Can Build A Nest In) was A Sorceress Comes to Call, which ... I think perhaps I have hit the point, officially, at which I've read Too Much Kingfisher; which is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much. But it's enough to identify and be slightly annoyed by repeated patterns, by the type of people who, in a Kingfisher book, are Always Good and Virtuous, and by the type of people who are Not.

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

ungenerous readings below )
Monday, August 18th, 2025 01:32 pm
Obviously this is officially old news now but of the novels on the Hugo ballot [that I read], the one I personally would have best like to see win is Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay -- in contrast to The Tainted Cup, which felt to me like a novel of craft but not ideas, Alien Clay felt like a book where the science fiction worldbuilding on display was really skillfully and inventively married to the broader themes and ideas that Tchaikovsky wanted to explore in the book.

Alien Clay is a science fiction gulag novel; the protagonist, Anton Daghdev, is a dissident academic who's been life-sentenced to work on one of the few planets reachable by humans so far discovered to harbor alien life -- and, as Daghdev learns when he arrives, even possible evidence of ancient alien civilizations, though none of the planet's present inhabitants seem particularly sentient.

Pros:
- Daghdev has devoted his life to the alien studies and now he has the opportunity to do the most compelling, cutting-edge work in the field!
- also, unlike the other two options, Kiln's atmosphere will not immediately kill a human experiencing it without protective gear

Cons:
- it's a gulag
- with a correspondingly high fatality field fatality rate
- many of the other people in the gulag, arrested before Daghdev, are suspicious that he might have been the one that sold them out to the regime
- although Kiln's atmosphere will not IMMEDIATELY kill a human without protective gear, Kiln's weird, vibrant and enthusiastic ecosystem is extremely eager to find a foothold inside human biology, and what happens to the human body after it becomes exposed to Kiln's various [diseases? symbionts? parasites? TBD] seems Extremely Unpleasant
- and -- perhaps worst of all -- a major cornerstone of the regime's philosophy is the notion that humanity is the highest form of life in the universe, and all alien life will, eventually, by divine destiny, tend inevitably towards a bipedal humanoid form, which means that all the compelling, cutting-edge scientific research that's being performed on Kiln will inevitably be warped and transformed into a shape that suits the regime before anyone else can ever see it

Through the course of the book, Daghdev's attempts to figure out what's going on with the Kiln aliens and their hypothetical and hypothetically-vanished Civilization-Building Precursors on a planet that seems antithetical to human life intertwines with his attempt to survive and find solidarity in a penal colony that seems, well, antithetical to human life. I think readers will probably vary on how relatively depressing they find this experience. [personal profile] rachelmanija thought it was pretty bleak; meanwhile, [personal profile] genarti was impressed by how fun it was to read, All Things Considered. I'm more of [personal profile] genarti's mind on this one -- for me, Daghdev's own profound intellectual fascination with the world of Kiln counterbalanced the grimness of the gulag and gave even the most depressing parts of the book a needed spark -- but I do think it really depends on personal taste and calibration. Either way, the whole thing ends in a one-two punch of a solution that I found really satisfying on both a speculative-biological and thematic level.
Sunday, August 17th, 2025 07:52 pm
I have had a nice restful weekend, in which I caught up with perhaps 1/3 of the chores that I intended to. Oh well. I added a new book to my bedside pile, and then read it; between that and the realisation that my next book group meeting is approaching, I was then inspired to read at least a chapter of each book in the pile, which was nice. I set myself a to-do list target a few months ago of reading at least one chapter of each per week, which would keep me actually moving through even if I didn't then end up picking anything up and reading more of it.

Unfortunately mostly what happens is that the overdue item sits there and stares at me on the list. It's annoying, because I do in fact! want to read all of these books! and also most of the ones on the to-read shelves in the spare room. I just somehow don't. However, I've not been in much of a computer game mood in the last few days, and that's freed up some time for reading that isn't fanfic (not that there's anything wrong with that!).

Basically there is too much stuff in my life that distracts me from reading, and if only I didn't need to e.g. earn money I could finish more books. But then I wouldn't be able to go on book-buying sprees, and that would be sad.

In other news, I ordered my new mattress, just as my old one started causing me actual back issues, so good timing me. It's not due until the end of the month, and I'm very impatient.