plinythemammaler

Scorched Earth is described on its website as a piece of dance theater about a detective reopening an Irish cold case, a description which fascinated us so much that we made a second patently absurd decision to once again park in NYC just exactly long enough to see a show before continuing on our multi-state travel.

If you'd forced me to describe what I expected from this show, I would have hazarded something like 'Tana French book, adapted as a ballet?' Not at ALL correct. The cold case is not a mystery, not full of twists: we've got one detective, one suspect, one victim, one piece of land (and one ambiguously metaphorical donkey.) The ninety-minute show begins with a series of projected documents explaining the history of Irish Land Dispute Murders before establishing a more-or-less regular pattern: short interrogation scenes between the detective and the suspect, interspersed with bursts of emotion and memory, some dramatized and some in dance.

Sometimes -- often -- this worked extraordinarily well. The land under dispute is represented, personified, by a dancer in a ghillie suit who slithers in and out of the central interrogation/morgue table* like a giant muppet, or the Swamp Thing and dances a violently romantic duet with the suspect -- and it could have looked so silly, as I'm describing it it sounds silly, and instead it was haunting and evocative, perfectly elucidating the narrative themes of the show while also just being a gripping and powerful piece of performance.

*remarkable piece of set design, that table; afterwards we all agreed it was the hardest-working table in show business

Other times, the balance felt a little off; the dialogue would tell us something and then a duet would be danced and I'd think, well, you didn't need to tell us both ways, one or the other would have worked fine. Or I'd start to admire the dialogue for its spareness in suggesting the complexity of a dynamic -- who's from here, who isn't, who has rights to land, who doesn't, what's worth punishing on behalf of the community, what isn't -- and then it say it again more explicitly and I'd be like, well, okay, but you didn't have to. What I'm saying is that I think the show probably could have been just as powerful at sixty minutes as at ninety minutes. But I wasn't at all unhappy to be there for ninety minutes! I was compelled the whole time! If the show sometimes told me things about the situation more times or more explicitly than I needed to hear them, it did an admirable job of not telling me what to think about them, and trying to decide what I did think about them left me plenty to occupy my mind.

A lot of the creative team seem to have a history with Punch Drunk and have worked on Sleep No More explicitly, and it was interesting for me to compare/contrast -- the style of expressive choreography is notably similar, but Sleep No More is a piece of theater that has almost no dialogue, that draws a lot of its power from being oblique and ambiguous to the point of fault. Finding that exact right point of convergence for dance and theater seems to be an ongoing challenge and point of interest for the people coming out of the Punch Drunk school and I'm very curious to see other explorations of it.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

chestnut_pod

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Current Mood: chagrined
Current Music: Sylvia Act 3 Variation-Valse - Léo Delibes (Paris Opera Orchestra)

chestnut_pod

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hamsterwoman

Taskmaster is back!!

Taskmaster s21 interviews – I like the format a lot better this series than the last couple – it’s probably one of my favorite gimmicky ones (I had also liked s17’s, but mostly I feel like the format detracts rather than adds to the interview on the other recent ones; OK, s20’s table tennis was not too bad, but I thought the table tennis was too disruptive to the chat, in a way texting was not really). ( First impressions, before watching the episode )

Episode itself: Taskmaster s21e01 – oh, this was FUN! ( spoilers )

*

I caught up on the Christmas 2025 House of Games, which had what is probably my favorite lineup ever: Mathew Baynton, Mel Giedroyc, and Harriet Kemsley (and a fourth non-Britcom/non-Taskmaster person I didn’t know, but he was fun, too). ( spoilers )

*

I finished watching James Acaster’s Repertoire on Netflix – a 4-part stand-up show which I found really interestingly constructed but enjoyed less than the shows by the comedians it turns out I really vibe with, like John Robins or, based on a smaller sample size, (Lesser) Tom Cashman or Pierre Novellie. Also, it really is a single four-part show, even though the first three parts are fairly stand-alone, and I did not have 4 hours to watch it all the way through – nor do I really think that’s a reasonable, like, aliquot for standup. And I was still able to appreciate it watching it in several chunks over a matter of weeks, but not as well – by the time I got to the last part, which calls back to the previous ones a lot, and loops around to the first one, there were definitely details I had forgotten – I could tell from the audience laughing at things that were clearly callbacks but ones I did not recognize. But I did recognize some inter-episode callbacks, and even within each episode (Recognise, Represent, Reset, and Recap) there are callbacks and loop-arounds.

If I had to describe Repertoire in one word, it would be ( intricate )

skygiants

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.

rachelmanija

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."

blotthis

Louise Fitzhugh's The Long Secret is not a sequel to Harriet the Spy. This is the only thing I knew about it, when I picked it up; I'd put it on my TBR list because Lemony Snicket had mentioned it in Poison for Breakfast, and it had sounded interesting. Could I remember what sounded interesting? No I Could Not. But it was available as an audiobook at my local library, and I needed a new one, and the last Snicket-recommended kids book had gone well, so, why not, I guess? (More on that tomorrow, probably.)

The good news is the reader was phenomenal, so that was a win immediately. The book takes place in Water Mill, Long Island, where Harriet and her friend Beth-Ellen ("Mouse") are spending the summer with their families. There are a several sources of friction:

Harriet and Beth-Ellen aren't really friends during the school year, and their summer friendship is clearly one of necessity. Their personalities, from time to time, definitely make each other Worse;
Beth-Ellen wants to go look at the middle-aged piano player at the hotel, Bunny, while Harriet wants to spy on the newcomers to town and write stories;
Someone Is Leaving Pointed Notes in Red Crayon for the people of Water Mill. We're introduced to this when the mean grocer gets one that says "Jesus doesn't love you," and she goes into hysterics. Harriet is consumed by finding out who is doing it. Beth-Ellen could not be less curious;
The town newcomers, the Jenkinses, are Southern, poor, and very religious, and extremely capable at bless-your-heart-ing Harriet into an apoplexy;
What Is Religion, Actually?
Beth-Ellen's flighty, socialite mom, Zeeney, is coming back from Europe with her new husband. Beth-Ellen has not seen her mom since she was a baby. Beth-Ellen Would Prefer Not To.

At first, I didn't know what Snicket meant when he said this book is not a sequel. Harriet is there! She's trying to solve a mystery! I don't remember very much about Harriet the Spy!

But it became clear that not only is Harriet not the protagonist, I'm pretty sure the pacing and tone of the book is markedly different than that of Harriet. We spend some time with Harriet, and in Harriet's mind, but the book is Beth-Ellen's, and Beth-Ellen is deliberate and unsure; polite and reserved. Harriet, through Beth-Ellen's eyes, is bluster and explosions. Harriet yells at her frequently. Topics include but are not limited to: not being curious; for taking too long; for wanting to be a housewife; wanting to go see Bunny; saying that she (Beth-Ellen) goes to Sunday school when Harriet didn't know that; making fun of Harriet with Jessie-Mae Jenkins; and that Beth-Ellen (12) gets her period when Harriet (11) has not.

Harriet, experienced this way, is excruciating. It's a really affective portrait of a certain kind of friendship! Even as I cringed every time Harriet talked over Beth-Ellen or told her how to feel or not to feel, I felt appreciative of 1) a companion book that is like hey remember our fun protag? she kind of sucks; and 2) the close observation of how children can relate to each other. Beth-Ellen shrinks from Harriet; she gets mad at her; I think I remember her saying she hates her; and she also articulates her tremendous gratitude for Harriet's bluster and the kind of peace it gives her; she takes Harriet's opinions and questions seriously, particularly about what she should do with her life; and there are two distinct ways, toward the end of the book, where Harriet offers Beth-Ellen much needed support. I feel as if one could as easily imagine Beth-Ellen and Harriet remaining good friends for the rest of their lives based on this shared history as one could imagine them drifting apart once they didn't share proximity. Both possibilities feel live.

The book, published in 1965, is at least in conversation with the problem novel if it isn't one itself. (I do not read enough 1960s books to know for sure.) It's certainly intended to be instructive, and some of the Instructive Scenes are the least successful, I think, particularly the menstruation conversation, when Fitzhugh has Janie (in town for the weekend), tell Beth-Ellen and Harriet to Remember That the Older Generations Thought Different Things Than We Did (But Lord Above There Are No Rocks in Your Uterus); and the conversation Beth-Ellen, Harriet, and Jessie-Mae have with the Preacher, a Black, southern ex-preacher who lives on his own in the woods, about religion as a tool that can fail.

In that second, it's not so much that I disagree, as that it's a little funny in context. Both Beth-Ellen and Harriet think about their relationships to religion a lot, particularly Harriet, who hasn't been raised with any. In fact, one of my favorite scenes in the book is her asking her dad about it; their conversation, notably about religion, does a tremendous job of being about marriage and about childhood, in terms of the things Harriet's dad says and what Harriet hears. A feast of doing three things at once! But it's notable that Harriet's dad doesn't have religion and doesn't know whether her mom prays. Her mom, when Harriet asks, says she does, and she believes in God, but since neither she nor Harriet's father are church-going, they decided to let Harriet make her own decision about it as she got older. They're good scenes. I just do find it Revealing that Fitzhugh has the ex-preacher explain to Jessie-Mae, who is planning on starting her own church, that he lost his job as a preacher down south because religion stopped being enough for people. Again! I do not! Disagree! I just also think! Fitzhugh! Has a particular take! That is largely individual-forward!

The book's ending fully executes on the promise of Beth-Ellen and Harriet as foils, and I liked it very much. (I was surprised by who was leaving the notes.) That said, the book's pretty atrocious about fat people, and its depictions of the poor and the One Black Person in the Book are mixed at best.

blotthis

Well, I guess. March??? I haven't read anything other than Duncan the Tall getting his shit wrecked literally, sexually and metaphorically by various nobles for a like a week, which is because I Couldn't Read while I was trying to write about reading... Still not Ideal. May switch approaches for April/May. I have a few ideas, but. We'll see. The search for a sustainable and rewarding approach continues.

In the meantime, feel free to request thoughts on the following. Liked a lot of things last month better than I expected to.

( 10 books, 2 comics, 4+ albums, 1 tv show )

littlerhymes

Enter a Murderer - Ngaio Marsh
Hornblower and the Hotspur - C. S. Forester
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown
Midnight Timetable - Bora Chung, transl. Anton Hur
Diary of a Cranky Bookworm - Aster Glenn Gray
Ghost Cities - Siang Liu
Land of Milk and Honey - C Pam Zhang
HMS Surprise - Patrick O'Brian
Nightwing Vol 1: On with the Show - Dan Watters, Dexter Soy, Veronica Gandini
Absolute Batman Vol 1 : The Zoo - Scott Snyder, Nick Dragotta, Frank Martin

( march reading )

rachelmanija

Click on my Ruth Chew tag to see what sort of books she's known for: small-scale children's fantasies focusing on magic-infused everyday objects and creatures in Brooklyn. This is her hard-to-find first book, which is not a fantasy.

The main characters are a brother and sister who were left, along with their never-seen younger brother and sister, in the care of their grandmother who feeds them canned tomatoes - yuck! They leave a note saying they're doing a long sleepover at a friend's house, then run away to the site where they often went camping, buy a cheap boat, and live on an island.

This is entertaining enough on its own, but mostly of interest because it shows how she course-corrected in her fantasy books: the flaws in this book are corrected, and she melds its strengths (likable kid characters, a focus on the practicalities and small details of both the human and natural worlds, a friendly old woman) with excellent small-scale magic. In all the rest of her books, there are just two kids - no unnecessary and off-page younger siblings. There are no mean kids or bullying (this book has two mean bullies who just drop out of the story). The parents are around but the kids' adventures take place out of sight, so there's no implausible runaway plots. And the old ladies are witches, which makes them even better!

moon_custafer

In which Hanna calls in a favour, and plays lawyer.

blotthis

After the success of listening to Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Fairies, I was genuinely hopeful that Sarah Beth Durst's The Spellshop (for door) would also serve. The premise is silly--a city librarian returns to her childhood home on an island with a bunch of spellbooks, starts a shop, falls in love. That's okay! That's fine! I'm ready to put a silly premise aside! I'm ready to accept the givens, in return for a well-told story!

Ah. A problem arises...

Well, first. The book opens on Kiela, literally sorting books as fantasy!Rome burns. She's dismayed when her assistant, Caz, a sentient, talking spider plant, sprints through the stacks to tell her the library is on fire. All the other librarians left days--or weeks--ago. Kiela has been filling crates of books and putting them on a boat, in case of disaster, but the disaster won't really come. The revolutionaries--she read this in the paper--wanted to bring the knowledge in the library--which contains all the spellbooks in the Empire--to the people! She'd vaguely thought that seemed nice and stopped worrying. How could they be burning the library? She throws as many books as she can into her open crate; she and Caz take the elevator through the burning building to the docks; Caz tries to convince her to leave the crate behind; Kiela refuses; they load it onto the boat; they sail away. (The empire is a collection of islands.)

Imagine me fist-pumping. Here we have a book-person whose obsession with books has not only made them self-obsessed and blind in a way that's decent Romantic Comedy Fodder for a new relationship, but whose blindness to others has gotten her entangled in a messy political situation! How fun. I wasn't overly hopeful that the political undercurrent of the book would be very subtle, but I hoped that it would do something with the thorny knot of intention versus execution.

I didn't expect it to basically disappear. More fool me. Fine! Fine. I gritted my teeth through Kiela finding her way to her parents' home; finding it basically habitable after 18 years or so, including furniture; finding her mom's clothes--also wearable--after same; Why didn't they sell or take these things?? shhh, shhh, you're the one who picked up a "cozy" novel, shhhh now; through Kiela meeting a baker who says something like anyone who likes butter is a friend of mine; through Kiela noticing the baker has no jam-based pastries; none???? no one makes jam on the WHOLE ISLAND? you've mentioned fruits a couple of ti--through Kiela deciding to open a jam shop/secret spell shop--ah; through Kiela making pounds and pounds of jam and not sealing them. Fine. The book doesn't make economic or culinary sense. Fine. From skimming reviews of other cozy novels, The Spellshop's chosen boutique shop niche was less ridiculous than others, and in either case, I was sincerely ready to let it slide.

I was also disappointed but not surprised by that I still don't know what Larran, Kiela's love interest, sees in her, even though they do have a shared background. They were children on the island at the same time, and Kiela helped save a seahorse he was tending when they were children... But 1) she didn't know he was tending the seahorse; 2) she wasn't particularly trying to save it; 3) she doesn't remember him at all, and she tells him all these things. Despite this, and despite Kiela being very rude to him for most of the book, he resolutely brings her cinnamon rolls, fixes her house, builds her bookshelves, and takes her out riding seahorses. How hot is this woman.

The straw that broke the camel's back, for me, was the sheer number of unforced errors. Kiela, in the library, sensibly articulates that if the revolutionaries have gotten to and started burning the library, 1) the empire has other problems; 2) no one will know; 3) she's saving treasures. Once she gets to the island, she's obsessed with that she's stolen the books and is going to be turned into a statue in punishment. Now, this is how anxious people think! This would be so easy to sell! All Durst would have to do is have Kiela reflect for a moment that well, maybe, she could convince people she'd been saving the books! If she then was like no one would ever believe me, the empire is sososo cruel, at least we would have acknowledged that at any point Kiela thought something else. But no. It's like that framing of taking the books disappears. To write a less-accurate version of anxiety?

THEN IT COMES BACK BUT IN THE SAME WAY. KIELA CONVINCES HERSELF SHE CAN DO MAGIC BECAUSE NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW. DOES SHE WORRY ABOUT HAVING STOLEN THE SPELLBOOKS AND BEING TURNED INTO A STATUE? SHE DOES NOT. what? what? what? what? simply do not worry about it. What Kiela thinks about her own life and situation is driven by what is plot-convenient.

To make matters more excruciating, Kiela is constantly rehashing her own thoughts. She does it with the above, multiple times a problem-arc, but also with anything she thinks about. To the extent. Sorry this one makes me insane. To the extent that after spending a minute or two, so at least a page or more of the book, ruminating on how she now feels at home on, and connected to the island, Kiela turns from one grove of trees to see a vista, or her house, or something, and is like "home! wait, when did she start thinking of the island as her home?" TWO PAGES AGO? TWO PAGES AGO. YOU WERE. LITERALLY. JUST TALKING ABOUT IT------------------

I called these unforced errors, but I am afraid that they were added on purpose. Without any direct proof, I suspect that this book is suffering from the same malady as many contemporary TV scripts, where the writers are being asked to repeat themselves so that people who are cooking, or calling their friends, or listening at 2x speed, or whatever, can follow the story without paying attention. Fine. The unfortunate side effect, of course, is that if you do it the courtesy of paying attention you end up wanting to scrape out somebody's eyes with a spoon.

The book's plot is. Fine. A person shows up, says she's a magic inquisitor from the empire. Will she catch Kiela? Is she an inquisitor? Will Larran like her better? Who could say!

I enjoyed more of the book than this makes clear; it's about a 3.5 stars, if I had to rate it. Some parts of it are cute. I just can't recommend it for more than a skim read, whatever a skim read might look like for you.

moon_custafer

Yesterday’s was a trip to Taylor’s Bell Foundry where Anthony and Sam, a pair of large cheerful men who look as though they probably have the upper-body strength of medieval long-bow archers, cast and re-cast church bells while discussing what kinds of cheese everyone would be if they were cheese (“I asked Josh. He’s mozzarella.”)

blotthis

April second, no problem. Ok. Diana Wynne Jones's Dogsbody, for

pauraque and door. I had vague intentions of writing this up before I listened to the Eight Days episode about it, but time very obviously intervened. So, for a deep dive into the book's Actual Summary, as well as its reflections on sex, the Troubles, and Welsh myth, among other terrific insights, check that out.

Things I thought about Dogsbody:

Wow, death enters this book early. It technically enters at the beginning, as Sirius is on trial for murder, sticks around, obviously, in the deaths of Kathleen's dad and in the Actual Literal Figure of Death (probably), but it's the puppy drowning that sticks with you. By you I mean me. It strongly seems that for DWJ, cruelty to animals is one of the real unforgivables, which is born out throughout the book, but it's the closeness of the experience that shocked me and interests me as an introduction to Sirius's life-as-a-dog. Actual thoughts about how the closeness of this experience is or is not born out throughout the book? How it relates to book openings or books for children? Not in this post!
I really need to read the Mabinogion... I liked the figure of death/the hunted and his rolling hills, but even though I could identify him as a death-figure, it was clear to me there was Something Else Going On, and I want to know what it is. Was. Might've been. I could have spent much more time with him, although it would have pulled the book out of shape----
On that note, there's a lot of being stuck in close, dark spaces in this book. I don't know where, if anywhere, this takes one, but from the sack thrown in the river, the fox den, and death's abode, they're there, and they're at key points, and they don't all feel the same. One could certainly say something about wombs, but I'm not sure I would.

And now, obsession time. Give me a DWJ book, and I will examine it looking for an example of a loving-Other situation. It shows up a lot, in DWJ, from Spellcoats to Eight Days of Luke, and it shows up again here, between Sirius and Kathleen. I'm fascinated by this thread. I'm fascinated by how DWJ returns to it like an old scab/fountain. I've talked about it before at length when I wrote up Luke, but I am about to talk about it again---

Not true voice: There's something in the end of Dogsbody that is the end of Howl, stretched thin. Powerful and emotional supernatural man is taken care of by a practical young woman who loves him. Dogsbody isn't Howl, of course. It's not a romance; it's not half as funny, and it doesn't mean to be. Its project is both more earthy and empyrean than that, although Sirius certainly hopes it's Howl. But there's something in this particular shape that DWJ comes back to, time and again. Sometimes it's semi-tragic, as here, and sometimes it's triumphant...

Unfortunately, I don't think this comparison particularly illuminates either book. I'm mostly just adding them to my red string board about loving-Other in DWJ. I think the most interesting thing to come out of this instance of rumination is this comment Becca made when we were chatting about the book at the time: "I do think she believes in her heart that loving things unlike yourself is a lifeline when what you have known is not designed to teach you how to love. If you can't love yourself then where do you go from there. Well--"

I think this is true, and I think it's such a good lens through which to view Dogsbody... Obviously, this applies to Sirius. But I'm honestly most interested in how it applies to Kathleen. How does Kathleen learn how to love, because of the events of Dogsbody? How does the experience of having loved and lost shape her? This is the most hopeful I've been that Kathleen won't become Sirius's Companion. She's already learned from you, sir, and lost the Other that could not stay. Maybe. Crossing my fingers.

None of this more than obliquely answers pauraque's question about what it was like to encounter this book for the first time as an adult. Interesting! I read it in a day; I enjoyed it; the workplace comedy, close-up depiction of abuse, and extended rumination on death as haunting/present/inescapable/pursued by living didn't quite hang together for me as an adult, although I like them separately, and I think Jones thematically makes a good case for their coexistence. I didn't really care for the MacGuffin... Dogs are not my animals, so I don't know if I'd have attached desperately to this book as a child, but it's also impossible to say. I could see myself having gone apeshit for the under the earth Death scene.

blotthis

I also thought I'd like Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (for several) and then felt something rather different about it. I did quite like parts of the novel, but not at all in the way I expected.

It's possible that reading several versions of the Scottish border ballad beforehand didn't set up the read fairly. I found the ballad surprisingly short and unexpectedly punchy. And Dean's novel is ... not that.

Tam Lin is set at a fictional Minnesotan liberal arts college in the 1970s. Our protagonist, Janet Margaret Carter (Dean: did you see I used both extant names used for this character in the ballads, O, the cleverness of me), is the daughter of an English professor and starting her first year of undergrad. Wow! I thought. Wow! Starting your book in September when the fairy procession happens on Halloween! Wow! What a choice! It's all going to happen in two months! Wow!

No.

( How the hell is this book structured. Spoilers! )

rachelmanija

Camille is a tradwife influencer, living in near-total isolation from all humans but her awful and mostly absent husband Graham and her nosy neighbor Renee. She directs her own life like it's a perfect Instagram post, constantly obsessing over the perfect shade of beige and how her followers will react if she disagrees with a more successful tradwife influencer's insistence on a folic acid-free diet. The best way to get followers is to get pregnant, and she and Graham haven't managed that yet. But there's something lurking in the dark, deep well near the dark, deep woods that might be able to solve that problem for her.

The first quarter or so of this book is so repetitive and anvillicious that I might have DNF'd it if I hadn't been reading it for the horror book club. However, it picks up once Camille has sex with the creature in the well. (Camille tells herself it's an angel but can't stop calling it "the creature;" its actual nature is pleasingly ambiguous.) Her extremely weird pregnancy and increasingly desperate efforts to conceal its weirdnesses from Graham, Renee, and her online followers had me glued to the pages, and once her baby is born, I went from being entertained to actively loving the story. I don't want to give away too much about the baby, but I think it's the first time I have ever gotten deeply attached to a fictional baby. Of course, it helps that the baby isn't quite human...

The story is predictable but in a good way once you're past the interminable first quarter; you can't wait for certain things to happen. It gets increasingly batshit and darkly, gleefully funny as it goes along. It's a good female rage book, and has some quality monsterfucking scenes. Despite the rough start I really enjoyed this.

( Read more... )

Content notes: Very gory.

Incidentally, there are at least three novels called Trad Wife or Tradwife released this year. One by Sarah Langan is coming out in September.

skygiants

I have a stack of library books and used bookstore buys looking at me accusingly but instead I have been lured into doing a massive McCaffrey read. I know. I don't respect my choices either.

My other problem is that once I am embarked on a Text I have a hard time stopping it, so when all the library offered me in ebook was an omnibus of Dragonflight - Dragonquest - The White Dragon I was always going to be reading all three. And, you know, it did start out quite well! Rereading Dragonflight a very funny experience because it's like

Dragonflight: and here's where Lessa washes her hair
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: I LOVE LESSA I LOVE IT WHEN SHE GETS TO WASH HER HAIR 🥹
Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
Me: tiny Becca what do you think about this
the inner tiny Becca: who's F'lar

But actually with very few actual memories and a lot of informed knowledge from the twenty years since the last time I read these books I truly expected F'lar and the central romance plot in general to be ... worse? Like yes it's 1968 and yes there's the dubcon dragonsex of it all and yes F'lar's whole mission in life is to convince the world that you Cannot stop feeding the military-industrial complex even after four hundred years of peace or you Will be eaten by mindless alien hordes [On Which More Later]. But the thing that the dubcon dragonsex actually does, narratively speaking, is it fully displaces the emphasis of the romance away from 'when are they going to have sex' to 'when are these two assholes who trust themselves very much going to learn to trust each other.' They're having sex all through it; the dragons have taken care of that, so the sex is no longer the point. The partnership and the problem-solving is the point, and it is fun to watch them solve problems and increasingly know which problems they can rely on the other to solve. Which I think is interesting and purposeful and honestly pretty bold, for 1968! I'd like to see more romances do that now! Also the problem-solving is satisfying, and haunted mission back in time plot that I had completely forgotten is quite effectively creepy. I ended Dragonflight like 'you know what, as Of Its Time as it is, in many ways this book actually does really work. Maybe ... Pern is good?

Then on to Dragonquest and The White Dragon and it turns out Pern unfortunately is not good, although both of these books are real would-be-good-if-they-were-good situations.

Dragonflight: and here's where F'lar sends F'nor on a haunted mission back in time
me: Dragonquest what do you think about this
Dragonquest: what haunted mission

No, Dragonflight is kind of a mess of a book but what I do think is interesting about it, thematically speaking -- to come back to the military-industrial complex of it all -- is that the end of Dragonflight is a lot of people going 'to be manly and heroic is to fight forever on a cool dragon, we've reached peacetime and it's dull so we're going forward in time so we can continue fighting forever on a cool dragon' and the beginning of Dragonquest is like 'actually I have reconsidered my thinking about this and it turns out fighting forever is perhaps bad for you, psychologically? maybe instead of heroic forever war we can look at some alternate pursuits that are also heroic and manly but less lethal and traumatizing. Like space exploration! Did anyone watch the Moon Landing? Wasn't that pretty cool?' (

genarti when I was talking with her about this also pointed out that at the time Dragonquest came out we were also several more years into Vietnam.) Obviously McCaffrey is all in on the Pioneer Spirit and the wistful terra nullius of it all but I appreciate that she's actively revising her thoughts on the military and its relationship to the populace it theoretically protects as she's writing it, and it's interesting to see the evolution. Really really funny to see F'lar go from the 'SEND TITHES LIKE YOU DID IN THE DAYS OF YORE' guy to the 'I'm your progressive candidate for Weyrleader and I think this military appropriationism has gotten a bit out of hand' guy. I love the end of the book where it's like 'well we've actually solved the problem of Thread but unfortunately our solution is not cool and sexy, so we need a dragonrider to do something that is cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless to get everyone else to buy into it.'

(E who dragged me into this: plausible reading that the grubs are a feminised solution. we must put our hands into mother earth and urgh it's all moist and gooey
me: i love that you went there because my first thought is that the solution is lower class. the humblest tillers of the land
E, determined: thread is being absorbed by a planetary vagina dentata which also has life-generating properties)

Anyway, F'nor does some spaceflight, in a cool and sexy but ultimately completely useless way, which is making up I suppose for the other cool and sexy thing that F'nor absolutely does not get to do which is challenge dragon biological essentialism. F'nor/Brekke is not a particularly successful or interesting romance plot but nonetheless I truly was on the edge of my seat for this -- I remembered that Brekke's mating flight ends in Tragedy but I thought F'nor might at least like succeed a little bit in proving that it's hypothetically possible for a brown dragon to mate with a queen? But no! he doesn't even get to try! Having raised the question of 'what does dragon gender really mean and how much does it bind us' Anne cannot bring herself to answer it. Have you instead considered that spaceflight is cool and sexy.

And The White Dragon is even more a book of 'having raised the question, Anne cannot bring herself to answer it.' Not much actually happens in The White Dragon, we're making a number of mountains out of molehills, but it's all whirling around the central anxiety point of 'if my soulbonded dragon falls out of standard dragon color/gender categories and moreover is definitely ace then what does that make me?' And the book's answer is '....a guy. A manly guy who successfully achieves all of his society's standards of masculinity. Do not worry about it.' Well, I wouldn't have been worrying about it, Anne, if you hadn't been telling me to worry about it, and then you gave me the most boring answer possible.

There is more to say about The White Dragon -- not least the way that every woman in the book seems to have gotten a hefty splash from the misogyny fountain -- but I am running out of time so we'll call it here. Am I done? No! I am now halfway through Dragonsdawn. More on that anon.

blotthis

We're going to try our best, sport. CMAT's Euro-Country for

littlerhymes and Rosalía's Lux, for same and

recognito .

Both these albums are full of incredible musical hybrid vigor. That's not a fair use of the term, as plenty of genre mashups are bad. These are not. These are so, so good. I'm grateful for the chance to talk about both, because I love them. I haven't done much research into their making, or even CMAT and Rosalía themselves, and I know next to nothing about music theory so my understanding of both albums is limited, I just really like them.

I really like all of Euro-Country, but I think it might be easiest to talk it via two of my favorite songs on the album, "When A Good Man Cries," and "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station." "Good Man" is a country song. It starts out with a country fiddle. It has a swing on it. Thompson croons twangily while taking herself to task for making a guy cry. And then, in the last third of the song, as the production thickens, she starts wailing, against her own voice in descant, Kyrie Eleison! It about knocked me out of my seat. In a country song? In a COUNTRY song? And it sounds absolutely at home. Even with the descant, which is pulled straight from Catholic mass, it sounds at home. It makes me crazy. What a fucking bridge. What a fucking ending.

"The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" is formed much in the same way, in that it builds from a clear thesis (she was at the Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, and god she hates him, but okay, don't be a bitch, the man's got kids and he wouldn't like this) to an inescapable musical explosion that blows my head off. But through all this she's doing crazy little things with rhythm--the FEAR and the FREEdom of BEing RE/leasedagain to FEEl svnTEEnagin--and also being really lyrically and logically hard to follow. She's got this incredibly clear thesis in the chorus, and then she keeps saying things like "Let me explain though," and "This is making no sense to the average listener," and "I'm still not explaining myself very well at all, let me try, let me try, let me try," and the whole thing's build suddenly is not about having a mantra about not being a bitch for no reason, it's about needing one, about feeling like you're flying apart at the seams where there aren't seams, and that's what the drums are doing. It rules.

The whole album slides in and out of this kind of legibility to self and listener and illegibility to self and listener, and most of them are doing more than one thing at once. I really really want to see her live, if I can.

Rosalía, however, I've probably lost my chance. I could theoretically see her in a stadium sometime, but I don't really care for stadiums, so. Alas. This is a very tortured transition. Anyway!

God I love Lux. The first time I listened to it, I stopped what I was doing by like the seventh song to just lie on my bed and cry due to being Artistically Moved. I looked up several publications' best albums of 2025, and I was shocked that it wasn't in almost anyone's top 10. I still don't know how that's possible. I can't listen to Lux and do other things because (Jenny Slate voice) it makes me too crazy.

Much has been made of the number of languages featured on Lux, (Rosalía sings in 13), but it's not just the languages. It's the styles. (puts face in hands and screams) Sorry. Sorry. I'm trying to be normal, I just keep listening to the tracks to have something clear to say and it's not actually helping----god. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The range of this fucking album. It's got house music. It's got flamenco. It's got Italian arias. It's got Wagner. It's got spoken word. "Berghain," the one that Bjork is on, is the first track I heard and an incredible example. It comes right after the Italian aria and starts with an orchestra, like being slapped in the face. Then we get the Wagnerian chorus sung by an actual chorus, chanting in German that his fear is my fear, his rage is my rage. Like being slapped in the face. Then Rosalía comes on in possibly the highest soprano we've heard from her, and her descant is another slap. Bjork and Yves Tumor's entrances to the song are no less shocking and no less successful. It is an incredible feat of operatic maximalism and it is still somehow in conversation with a pop song. And it's not even my favorite song on the album!!!!

I also love "La Perla," the slower, somehow-playful breakup ballad that follows "Berghain" and which is such a change of tempo and performance it's like what the FUCK; "Reliqia," a sparkling, somehow triumphant-sounding piece about losing pieces of yourself and becoming a holy relic; "Mio Christo Piange Diamanti," the aforementioned Italian aria she wrote at least in part for her classical-music-loving Grandmother, and in which she uses her ability to span trembling pianissimo to firm vibrato; "Dios Es Un Stalker," a chamber-pop-salsa depiction of love from the divine's watching eye... It's a good album, Brent.

moon_custafer

By my standards, a luxurious social whirl.

I’d found out earlier in the week that the Yorkdale Mall has a sushi concession, so I stopped on the way home Friday and, after wandering past enormous stores well out of my price range (props to the shopper I saw wearing Gucci wellies, though), eventually found the food court.

Saturday I did my usual trip to the coffee-shop, then the thrift store. Found several nice things, the best one being a 1970s-style three-quarter-length green print dress that makes me look like a murderous guest-star on Columbo. In the evening I had a weed gummy and painted, while Andrew watched a couple of episodes of Columbo.

Sunday Andrew wanted to go to the Scribe bookshop on the Danforth, and we arranged with Don to meet at the pub afterwards. As it turned out, Line 2 was down and we had to reroute, stopping at another bookshop on College—which ended up being a good thing because Scribe turned out to be closed— they were down at the Old Paper Show & Sale instead. Andrew’d already found a Robert E. Howard hardback for thirty dollars, though, so the only downside was having to wait fifteen minutes for the pub to open (turns out The Auld Spot doesn’t open till 2pm, at least on Sundays). I let Andrew have at least one cider more than he should have had, and we taxied home with Don in tow for more conversation.

I checked oceanofpdf in the hope of finding Lou Rand’s The Gay Detective (1960). No dice, but they do have his non-fiction work The Gay Cookbook.

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plinythemammaler

April 2023

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plinythemammaler

Reading

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The case of the missing notifications

August Bournonville's La Sylphide (San Francisco Ballet)

Frederick Ashton's Sylvia (ABT)

Taskmaster s21 and other Brticom rabbit hole things

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Seconds to Spare, by Rachel Reiss

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March books

Baked Beans for Breakfast AKA The Secret Summer, by Ruth Chew

Meadowville, chapter 10

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YouTuber Tom Scott is posting videos again

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Trad Wife, by Saratoga Schaefer

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Weekend Report

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April 2023

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