susansugarspun's Journal
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
susansugarspun's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Friday, August 26th, 2011 | | 5:35 pm |
| | 5:22 pm |
| | Saturday, August 20th, 2011 | | 6:29 pm |
| | Friday, August 19th, 2011 | | 5:30 pm |
friday reading roundup.
Today, I’m re-reading The Lions of Al-Rassan; it’s an unusual kind of comfort reading, I think. It’s just such a beautiful book, and I think it highlights Kay’s strengths–respectful and complicated treatment of both history and religion, fabulous characters (including a few very impressive women), and in so many ways a story about restraint and restriction. I really do think that’s one of the things Kay does best, creating these huge personalities and putting them in societies that force them up against constraints.
I finally gave up on the other book I’d been reading this week, City of Darkness, City of Light by Marge Piercy. It was the only Piercy available as an e-book download from the Brooklyn Public Library, and I haven’t read it in years, so I figured, sure, why not. But I kind of think it’s just not that good. Some of Marge Piercy’s books have been (literally!) life-changing for me, books like Braided Lives and Woman on the Edge of Time. Some of the others just leave me bored, and this is one of the “bored” ones. It’s the story of the French Revolution, using a set of actual historical figures (ranging from an obscure feminist activist named Pauline Leon to Robespierre himself) as point-of-view characters, and I can’t help but feel that she’s hurt the story by tying herself too closely to real people. (I might re-read Gone to Soldiers next, which is another Piercy historical, set during WWII and (if I remember correctly) not using actual people as pov characters. It’s been a while since I re-read that one, but I remember loving it.) It’s mostly just that it’s boring, though, which isn’t a problem I usually have with her books.
And then, finally, Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde, which really probably deserves its own post, but I’m going to shoehorn it in here. This was lent to me by a coworker who I like a great deal, and as a result I feel a little bad about finding this book so frustrating. (AMONG OTHER THINGS. It’s the first in a series, a fact totally not indicated anywhere on the book cover, and so when the conclusion was totally non-conclusive and followed by a page stating that “for more adventures of Brunswick and De Mauve, check out Shades of Grey Volumes Two and Three!” I was absolutely irritated.)
And it’s not like it was a bad book. It was a totally engaging read–I never got bored, although I did spend a lot of time rolling my eyes at all of his little Fforde-isms. This is why I never got into the Thursday Next books, because they were just cover-to-cover “clever” and not any substance. I think Shades of Grey has substance, and it’s certainly got stellar cool concepts. It’s sort of a far-future dystopian-ish Britain, sort of like a post-collapse scenario, except that (Fforde being Fforde) the social collapse is only vaguely alluded to as the “Something That Happened”. So at some point, six or seven centuries in the past, Something Happened and society collapsed. It was rebuilt, apparently, around the weirdly restrictive social codes set down by a man named Munsell who had an Epiphany. So there’s a rigid caste system that’s based around color vision, and how much color you can see (and what color) determines your social standing, and every couple of years the government outlaws certain technologies and everyone has to adapt to having fewer and fewer luxuries, and the government also controls where you live and when you can travel and what you can do for a living. And there’s a black-market trade in spoons, because god help him, Jasper Fforde can’t resist.
That’s all worldbuilding, not story. The story concerns a young man in the Red caste who’s trying to negotiate his way into a marriage with a lower-rank Purple lady when his father, a kind of doctor, is temporarily re-assigned to a village on the far outskirts of civilization (i.e., Wales). Our intrepid hero falls in love with a sassy servant girl, runs badly afoul of corrupt village officials, and tries to solve the mystery of who killed the doctor his father is replacing.
I’m being too snide, I think, because I really did enjoy reading the book. Most of the time. When I wasn’t frustrated. I think I’m just the wrong reader for this book, because I couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the ride, I kept wanting to know how this happened. How did this society come about? It’s clearly a descendant of our own society, so how did we get from Point A to Point B? What happened in the Something That Happened that essentially created a variant subspecies of humans who have extremely limited color vision and (as is revealed late in the book) lost the ability to dilate their pupils, robbing them of night vision entirely? And what the eff is going on that these people can all see artificial color even while they have such a limited range of perception for natural color? Why do colors produce actual physiological effects? (That’s the basis of the medicine in the books–showing people swatches of certain colors produces a range of physical effects, shown in the book to range from curing the common cold to causing ovulation to bringing about euphoria and/or death. I called Our Hero’s father a kind of doctor, but his in-book title is Swatchman.) The world of the book shows traces of the pre-collapse society having society that’s -way- more advanced technologically than our own, including self-repairing roadways that are still fully functional more than five centuries after their creation. What is that about? How far in the future is this anyway?
You see what I mean about me being the wrong reader for this book? The ending of the book was actually not that unsatisfying, if you can take the book on its own terms. In many ways, it’s a pretty clever comedy of manners, complete with Regency-echo marriage markets and Our Hero’s growing revelations about social injustice and class consciousness. But I couldn’t stop waiting for the answers to the questions -I- wanted answered, which are clearly not questions Fforde feels like answering, and so even though it was a pretty good book (again: fun and engaging read, clever enough and entertaining) I just was, well, frustrated.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Thursday, August 18th, 2011 | | 2:31 pm |
| | Wednesday, August 17th, 2011 | | 3:19 pm |
| | Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 | | 3:15 pm |
| | Monday, August 15th, 2011 | | 6:46 pm |
in the bleak midwinter.
I can’t even talk about the last few weeks–hitting the midpoint of August, it feels a bit like this summer was lost time. I can say, though, that I’ve spent a lot of time reading. I wish I’d been keeping more of a book log as I was going, because I’m not sure I could reconstruct all of it.
I do know, though, that I have been tearing through the Clare Fergusson / Russ van Alstyne mysteries by Julia Spencer-Fleming. There are seven books in the series so far, starting with In the Bleak Midwinter. The series is set in a small upstate New York town, and I’m having a lot of trouble describing it without sounding like marketing cliches. (He’s the chief of police, she’s the Episcopal priest. Together, they fight crime!) But I kind of love everything about these books.
The heart of it, for me, is that Julia Spencer-Fleming has beautifully solved the villain problem, which routinely drives me crazy in fiction. Across all genres and media, the question of why the bad guy is the bad guy seems to be a really difficult thing for fiction to deal with. Fantasy and paranormal fiction often sidesteps the question by invoking supernatural forces, which can work, but can also end up feeling hollow. (Anyone remember Tin Man? That was a particularly egregious example.) Most of the time you just get lazy answers–the bad guy was greedy and narcissistic, or the bad guy is crazy, or the bad guy had a bad childhood and doesn’t know how to act. And most of the time it doesn’t matter so much, I guess? Because the motivations of the bad guy aren’t usually at the center of the story–the bad guy needs to swan around acting badly, so that the good guys can have some tension or obstacle over which to triumph.
But these books by Julia Spencer-Fleming, they’re mystery stories that are framed around intricate portraits of people who get into bad situations through very human means. Every one in a while, some piece of the mystery can be explained because the bad guy was one of those entitled bastards who thinks he can get away with anything, or because the bad guy seems to be mentally unhinged. But that’s only once in a while. Most of the time, the bad guy isn’t actually a bad guy. He (or she) just got caught up in an avalanche of those good intentions that lead to bad outcomes, and then make bad decisions in complicated situations, and deal badly with the consequences of those decisions. These books contain a series of character studies of people overwhelmed by circumstance and not knowing how to do the right thing.
That theme, of people trying to do the right thing, is actually wholly central to the series. The two central characters, Clare Fergusson and Russ van Alstyne, are entirely framed by the question of making good choices in bad situations. As I said before, Clare is the new Episcopal priest in town and Russ is the chief of police. He’s about fifteen years older than she is, but they start off with a shared connection of military service (he served in Vietnam and then had a career as military police, she was an Army helicopter pilot before finding her call to the priesthood) and as they work together to deal with some of the problems in their small town, they find that their friendship is deepening into something more like love. But Russ is married, and even though he and his wife have some problems, he’s not someone who can walk away from a marriage, and Clare isn’t someone who can be party to breaking those vows. There’s something really impressive about how Spencer-Fleming writes this relationship–it’s not a sassy-sparky sexual tension kind of thing, it’s two people who are trying very hard not to have the connection that they have. Both of them are trying to do the right thing, but you can feel it, reading the book, how “the right thing” isn’t a fixed point so much as a ground that shifts beneath them.
So these books. I read through the entire series just about as fast as the Brooklyn Public Library could get them to me, and now I’m wishing that I’d just gone and bought them, so that I could work through the series again.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Tuesday, June 14th, 2011 | | 5:26 pm |
planning.
Summers in college, when we’d go to the beach, I sometimes felt like I was playing the role of “group mom”. I wasn’t the one who had the car, or the one who knew the route to Crane Beach, or the one you’d trust to pick out the music for the drive. I wasn’t the one who suggested that we take the detour to check out the fresh-baked cider donuts. I also wasn’t the one who brought the frisbee or who started the escalating dares about how far people could submerge themselves in the freezing ocean.
What I was, I was the one with the giant totebag. I was the one with the sunscreen (in three different SPFs, just in case) and the aloe gel (for the people who scorned the sunscreen). I had an extra beach towel, and an extra hat, and extra sunglasses. I had a stack of trashy magazines, People and Cosmo and US Weekly, even though people made fun of me for bringing them along, because I knew that by mid-afternoon the trashy magazines would be in high demand. I had the hairbrush and the stack of paper napkins and the Advil.
It’s not that we needed all this stuff, you know? My friends were competent people who didn’t need my extra sunglasses or spare hair elastics. They might borrow the trashy magazines, but there was no demand for the four or five extra mass-market spy novels that I crammed into the bottom of the bag.
I just liked packing it. I took an unreasonable amount of joy in that “prepared for any contingency” feeling.
This is on my mind tonight because I’m making a Shakespeare in the Park attempt tomorrow. The packing-and-planning process feels very similar. I’ll be hanging out in Central Park, queueing for “Measure for Measure” tickets, for about seven hours, and I need to be prepared. I’ve got blankets and beach towels, to make sitting on the ground marginally more comfortable. I’ve got a notebook, a Nook, a couple of books, sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses, my phone, my lunch, some snacks. I’ve got a Plan. This Plan may not actually result in theater tickets, but a girl can dream.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Sunday, June 12th, 2011 | | 9:39 am |
scenes from fort collins.
We were a large migrating herd, particularly at lunch. One thousand people came to Fort Collins to grade AP World History exams; even with staggered lunch breaks, we’d still have a crowd of close to three hundred people moving to lunch together, following trails across the plain, as it were.
I don’t know if other people were as overwhelmed by the lilacs on our migration path. Every day, at a few corners and intersections, it felt like walking into an invisible lilac-scented fog, heavy and rich.
**********
The beds, in the dorm room, were made up just with sheets and a flimsy polyester bedspread. We were also given blankets–thick, scratchy, grey wool blankets that felt like nothing so much as industrial moving pads.
Halfway through my stay in Colorado, I woke up in the middle of the night and found that the industrial wool blanket had slid clean off the bed, pulling the slippery polyester bedspread down with it. Fumbling in the dark, I retrieved and rearranged my bedding. Separating off the wool blanket and smoothing the bedspread, my hands raised static electricity sparks down the length of the mattress, my own miniature lightning storm.
**********
We had a real storm, the night before leaving Colorado. Hail this time, thunder and lightning and the sound of an avalanche of stones pouring down against my window. By morning, no trace remained, just a wet ground and a light drizzling haze.
**********
The week was marked, mostly, by work and isolation. We had fun, working, but because I was grading confidential questions, I can’t share the best jokes or stories. I did appreciate, being in the alternate-exam room, that they treated us like grownups. I don’t know if it’s because we were a specially-selected group (all of us with a track record of speed and accuracy in grading) or just because we were a small group (you can say things to a group of 30 that you might not say to a group of 200, after all), but whatever the cause, we were given more information than I had expected. We got regular updates on our pacing (were we in danger of finishing too early?), our accuracy numbers, and our correlations to expected essay scores. We were asked to help select essays that would be used as samples of typical score ranges, and we were allowed to vent our frustration with the scoring standards and guidelines. There’s a near-inevitable process of infantilization that happens in these large-scale work settings, but we were treated like professionals, and I appreciated that.
**********
As a general rule, I don’t like to make definitive statements about the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t want to lock Future Me into anything. That said, I don’t, at this time, expect that I’ll be doing any future AP World gradings. This was the last year in Fort Collins; next year, the grading is in a convention center in Salt Lake City.
For me, attending the AP grading is a difficult balance. On the plus side: it’s decent money, it provides a valuable perspective for teaching an AP course, there’s something satisfying about the work (especially if I get to stay in the alternate-exam room), and I enjoy the experience of being in Fort Collins. The accommodations are comfortable and the food is very good, but it’s more than that. It’s walking from breakfast to the scoring center in the morning under that wide-blue mountain sky, taking morning break out on a picnic table surrounded by banks of flowers, watching towering thunderclouds sweep across the sky. There’s a whole experience there.
On the minus side: I find the AP system frustrating, and it’s hard to suppress that frustration for an entire week. Also, when I go to the AP grading, I miss all of the end-of-year stuff at school–I missed graduation this year, and the year-end wrap-up department meeting and faculty meeting. I missed all of the opportunities to say goodbye to the graduating seniors, and goodbye-until-next-fall to my colleagues. This is one of those squishy factors, hard to quantify, but attending the AP reading takes away my chance to feel like I’ve really ended the school year–things feel artificially stopped, unfinished.
This year, the plus outweighed the minus. Next year, when you take away the pleasant experience of a week in Fort Collins and replace it with a week in a hotel and convention center–sharing a hotel room, eating convention-catering food, living like mole people shuttling between hotel and ballroom–the balance gets harder to justify. We’ll see.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Saturday, June 4th, 2011 | | 5:05 pm |
roger hahn.
I heard this week that Roger Hahn, one of my professors from Berkeley, has died. I want to say something, some sort of goodbye, but it’s hard to know what to say.
Roger was my first advisor at Berkeley, and my first mentor as a historian. He and I didn’t work together very much after my first year in graduate school–my research didn’t come very near his areas of expertise, and in any event he was on his way to retirement and distancing himself from advising grad students. But in that first year, I think Roger was the person who first taught me how to think like a historian. How to be a historian, really.
I started a history Ph.D. program with no prior background in history, is the thing. I was a psychology major as an undergraduate, and it’s almost by accident that I found myself gravitating towards studying the history of science. (Or maybe not so much of an accident–psychology, more than many sciences, is obsessed with its own history.) My first semester as a grad student at UC Berkeley, I took Roger’s introductory seminar on the early history of science. (Ancient history through Newton, loosely inclusive.) Faced with a seminar full of first-year graduate students, none of whom actually had formal training in history, Roger’s approach was the equivalent of throwing us into the pool and giving us feedback on our swimming styles. Every week, each student in the seminar was assigned a different book to read, and every week we each had to write a critical analysis of our assigned book. I remember being absolutely terrified by this–I didn’t know anything about the topics these books were discussing, how on earth was I supposed to come up with an intelligent critique? But it worked. Over the course of the first few weeks, I managed to push past being afraid of my own ignorance, and I started to learn to see the shape of historical arguments. By mid-semester, I felt comfortable evaluating the structure of the argument, identifying strengths and weaknesses, even if I still didn’t feel confident in my evaluation of the content.
It was a start, and a pretty solid one. Roger helped me start building an analytical toolkit, and he also helped me understand that history isn’t so much a set of facts as a set of processes. Being a good historian isn’t about knowing all the facts, it’s about understanding how to ask the questions and how to find the patterns. His teaching (and mentoring) style didn’t work for everyone, but it was immensely valuable for me.
I was actually just talking about Roger a couple of weeks ago, with another graduate from my department at Berkeley. Specifically, we were discussing Roger’s absolutely maddening habit of telling the story of how he got hired at Berkeley to graduate students who were in the throes of job-search desperation. (The short version, as he told it: when Thomas Kuhn was leaving Berkeley for Princeton, he called Roger for advice. Roger was at that time a graduate student, and had met Kuhn at a conference somewhere, and Kuhn thought Roger seemed like a bright young man who could give him a list of newly-minted Ph.Ds who worked in the same field as Kuhn. Roger gave him a few names, but when Kuhn called those guys, all of them already had jobs, so Kuhn called back and offered the job to Roger. He’d tell us this story at department receptions or post-colloquium dinners, and he’d laugh, like “oh, things were so crazy back then”, and we’d all be gritting our teeth.)
Mostly, though, Roger was good people. He cared a lot about developing the next generation of historians, both intellectually and professionally, and he’ll be missed.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Friday, June 3rd, 2011 | | 6:29 pm |
the ap experience.
So the nature of this “AP scoring” thing is that I can’t actually talk much about what I’m doing during the day. The exam questions are freely available, and later on, after the scoring guidelines are publicly released, exam scorers can talk about them. While we’re here, we’re not supposed to. My situation is even a little more extreme–I’ve been assigned this year to grade the alternate exam, the one given to kids who miss the regular exam for some reason. Those exam questions aren’t released to the public, ever, and so I had to sign additional confidentiality documents.
I’m pretty sure, though, that I’m allowed to talk about, like, the experience of being an AP reader. Which is kind of intense. But when I started writing about it, I realized I was boring even myself with the mountain of detail. I’m reverting back to my old friend The Bullet Point in the hopes that it keeps me more concise.
- The work day is (more or less) eight to five, with time for lunch and a couple of other breaks.
- During that whole eight-to-five stretch, I’m sitting at a table with a bunch of other history teachers, reading student essays and making little checkmarks on scoring checksheets and filling in bubbles on scoring scantrons. And we do this for six or seven straight days. (Oh, hello, Friday! You mean less to me right now, because I will be working through the weekend.)
- I signed paperwork yesterday reminding me that I should not talk about what student essays with any degree of specificity. I’ll give you this, though–seventy-five percent of the kids who take this exam are in tenth grade, and another ten to fifteen percent are in ninth grade. Most of the essays I’m reading were written by fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds. Take a guess, any guess, what these essays are like to read, and you’re probably going to be right.
- On top of my regular workday, I’ve got a second-shift task. My regular students, the ones who are m responsibility year-round, they took a final exam earlier this week. Those grades are due by Monday morning. So after a long day of grading anonymous AP essays, I go back to my dorm room and grade ninth-grade final exams.
- It’s really not that bad, though. There’s a good sense of camaraderie among the exam graders, and the AP people put a lot of effort into making sure we’re happy and well-treated. And it’s not like I’m clocking in or anything–if I want to get up and get some water, or take a quick walk to clear my head, I can do that even if we’re not on a scheduled break.
- On that point: I like Colorado State, as a conference facility. I’ve got my own dorm room, and it’s surprisingly comfortable–when I stayed in the dorms at my ten-year college reunion, everything was terrible, from the sad mattress to the temperature control to the hallway bathrooms. Here, it’s all very pleasant.
- One problem with how nice they are to us? SO MUCH FOOD. They’re constantly feeding us, and the food is good.
- In other news, I’ve plotted out a very long route back to my dorm at the end of the day. By the most direct route, it’s a ten-to-fifteen minute walk from the dorm to the place where we do the grading. My end-of-day route takes just over half an hour. I love it. After a long day sitting and making checkmarks, it feels good to stretch a little, and the campus is actually really pretty. I walk past a few big banks of lilacs, too, and the scent makes me happy all the way home.
So there’s that. This is my life for the next week or so.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 | | 6:14 am |
hello, airport.
Yay, another airport!
We got back from Wisconsin on Monday night, and here I am, after a thirty six hour turnaround, back at the airport to fly to Colorado. (I’m grading AP exams–more on that later, most likely.) I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get airport wireless working, and there’s a woman asleep in the seat directly in front of the only power outlet in this gate area, so I may not have a lot of internet time here at lovely LaGuardia.
I want to say that I’ll write more about WisCon in the next few days, but realistically, I’ll be grading AP exams from 8am to 4pm every day and then grading my own final exams in the evenings, so who knows? So here are some pre-emptive bullet-points about the last week or so.
- Picking up my registration packet on Friday, it occurred to me that having Mary Doria Russell behind the reg desk is one of those “only at WisCon” kind of moments.
- The “using sf/f/ in the classroom” session, which was kind of an experiment this year, was absolutely totally a success. I told myself I’d call it a success if we had more than three people there, but we had about twenty, and they were all really smart and interesting. We’re definitely doing it again next year. (I may run a separate session for the science teachers next year, though. My sense was that the history and English and other humanities/social-sciences people got a lot out of the discussion, but the science teachers have a very different set of needs, and they didn’t quite get what they were looking for.) Victor Raymond recorded the session, and we’ll have both the audio track and a transcription available on the WisCon website soon, I hope.
- Genderfloomp was absolutely fabulous. Preparing for Genderfloomp, I had the sudden realization that drag events aren’t actually a common part of most people’s college experiences, even though they were a common part of mine. More on this later, I think.
- WisCon felt very low-key this year, although maybe it’s just that I was feeling very low-key? But I mostly didn’t have the same “oh my god, I need to spend as much time as possible with absolutely everyone” feeling that I sometimes get. I also kept going to bed too damn early, though, which means that I missed out entirely on most of the late-night fun.
- Unrelated to WisCon but related to the low-key observation: my reading in the last few weeks has also been very low-key. I’m partway through a couple of very good and very smart books (The Little Drummer Girl and The Inheritance of Rome) and have a number of other wonderful-looking books on deck (Mechanique and The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine top among them, but I’d also love to be keeping up with Niall’s read of A Visit From the Goon Squad), but I don’t have the brains for them at the moment. Instead, I spent most of the last few weeks working my way through the entire Jennifer Cruisie back catalog. Having completed that, I’ve moved on to working my way through the entire Miles Vorkosigan series. Again. (I just read them all for the first time last fall.)
I am not totally convinced that this Colorado trip is a good idea–I’ve gone to the AP reading once before, and I enjoyed it, in a sort of perverse way. (When I described the AP exam grading experience to my students, one of them asked “So really, how bad is it, on a scale of zero to sweatshop?”) But I’m missing graduation, I’m missing Word’s Embassytown event tonight (China Mieville interviewed by Lev Grossman, followed by a dance party. And I’m going to be in Colorado. SERIOUSLY PEOPLE.) and did I mention the thirty-six hour turnaround between the last trip and this one? Anyway. Whether it’s a good idea or not, I’m off.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, May 25th, 2011 | | 9:55 am |
wiscon! yay wiscon!
Somehow time keeps getting away from me–eventually I’ll stop apologizing and we can all just assume that I will disappear from the internet at certain points in the school year.
In any event, WisCon! I’m leaving for Madison, what, tomorrow? That can’t be right, I haven’t even thought about packing. But I think it’s right. We’ll be arriving in Madison probably around dinnertime? It’s amazing, after two years of rushing and getting in late on Friday, to think that we’re getting in on Thursday, having a lesiurely evening, having all day Friday to hang out and see people and it all feels very luxurious.
I am on a few panels.
- “Science Fiction in the Classroom: A Conversation for Teachers.” Saturday, 10am, Conference 3. I put a note about this in the newsletter over the winter, asking if anyone would be interested in a discussion like this, and I got enough positive responses that we added it as a programming item on the academic track. So if you teach, and if you’re used SF/F in the classroom (or just would like to) and want to trade ideas on effective use of science fiction and fantasy in teaching contexts, come on by.
- “Reading with a Squint: Addressing Prejudice in Editorial Choices.” Saturday, 4pm, Senate B. My first thought about this panel was that I’m not sure we need two SH editors on this panel, but I think Jed and I come at this problem differently, so maybe we do? Anyway.
- “The Personal is Political Revisited.” Sunday, 10am, Capitol A. Examining the intersection between ideology and personal choices. I’m curious to see how this panel goes–it’s something I’ve been struggling with, on and off, for a couple of years now.
- And, of course, the Strange Horizons Tea Party! 3-4:30, room 629, same as the last ten years. Come for the tea, stay for the good company and the stand-on-a-chair fundraising pitch! Everyone’s favorite.
Other things on the agenda: I know I’ll be at the Ratbastard Karaoke Extravaganza, and the Genderfloomp Dance Party (feature Ms Meghan McCarron as DJ Buckminster Fuller). Other than that, I expect to doing a lot of hanging out and relaxing and having fun.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Friday, May 6th, 2011 | | 7:30 pm |
friday reads: the gone-away world.
Oh, oh. So. The Gone-Away World. I picked this up, what, a year and a half ago, for the Word book club. The first time I read this book, I think I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with it. I liked it, and I kept wanting to recommend it to people, but I was also confused. I think at the time I was describing it by saying that it was like a different book every chapter–a post-apocalyptic ragtag-band-of-heroes adventure, a bucolic British boys’ adventure, a surrealist mime-punk fantasy, a gritty wartime romance, a genuinely science-fictional dystopia, whatever. It kept changing gears, and I liked all of the gears (although I was skeptical of the mimes), but I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
In any event, I picked it up again last week, and reading it a second time, I don’t know what I was thinking the first time. It’s a fricking brilliant book, and the different pieces fit together beautifully, creating this insane and ambitious mosaic. It’s a book that’s mixing these complicated ideas with deceptively simple and readable writing, and it’s just plain fun, as well as a little bit heartbreaking.
One thing I will say, though–it’s a book that’s based, at least in part, on a bone-deep distrust of corporations. I bring this up partly because the author is John Le Carre’s son. There’s nothing about this book that feels like a Le Carre book, in terms of content or style, but this anti-corporate paranoia is a theme that I think Le Carre has been working in his post-Smiley books, and Harkaway is, to some extent, playing the same song, although in a very different style.
So anyway. The Gone-Away World. Highly recommended, if not least because I want someone I can talk to about it.
———-
I finished The Gone-Away World halfway through my commute home (some of the final scenes making me actually laugh out loud on the subway, and some of the others holding my attention so thoroughly that I almost missed the stop for my train transfer), and finally got around to starting The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham, recommended by Dr Nic for my Medieval Europe reading list. I’m barely past the introduction, and already this book is everything I was hoping it would be–the introduction is all about the historiography of the early Medieval period, and I’m totally intrigued. But then tonight we went to the launch party for Mechanique (featuring, as promised, absolutely amazing aerialist work on trapeze and silks) so now we’ve got a copy of that in the house, and I may not get back to medieval Europe just yet. We’ll see.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 | | 6:58 pm |
random collection.
- If you haven’t seen this essay on the last surviving veterans from the First World War, you really ought to read it. (It feels particularly apropos to me because I’m teaching WWI this week, but I think it’s amazing in any context.)
- Does anyone remember The State? Because every time I see an episode of the current ANTM cycle, I’m reminded of their Monkey Torture sketch. ”First, you get a model. Then you torture the hell out of it.”
- Another television note: The Killing. I’ve been enjoying it, but I’m running out of patience. The dialogue in this last episode was killing me (no pun intended), especially when the police were interviewing Bennett’s neighbors. That is not how you write in the vernacular, and that is not how you act in the vernacular, I MEAN REALLY PEOPLE. Also, while I appreciate that Michelle Forbes is acting the bejeezus out of this part, I really need her to start doing something other than crying.
- One more thing! Two weeks ago, the ever-fabulous Word Books held a birthday party for Carol Emshwiller. They had stage magic (where, god help me, I was pulled up on stage to be a magician’s assistant) and then Matt Cheney interviewed Carol. Matt notes that there’s now video of the interview available!
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 | | 7:02 pm |
observation on jaime lannister.
One quick note on the Game of Thrones television adaptation: I love what they’re doing with Jaime. One of the real joys of reading the last two books was watching Jaime grow into a real (and awesome) character. In the teevee show, I’m seeing right from the beginning the Jaime that I only saw revealed slowly in the books.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Monday, May 2nd, 2011 | | 6:18 pm |
strange horizons, first week in may.
May! How did it get to be May? That’s ridiculous.
In any event, this week’s fiction at Strange Horizons is “The Thick Night” by Sunny Moraine. The foreign aid workers bring a helper android to Mkali’s village, and into Mkali’s home.
It goes to work in the field beside the house, chipping away at the hard earth. It would go easier if there were water, it says, its eyes shining. Mkali nods. Yes, it would. But the well is over a mile away. No matter, it says. Provide me with a tool and I will dig you a well for your field.
Also, a few weeks ago, we published a story that I’d been waiting -weeks- to tell y’all about. ”Items Found in a Box Belonging to Jonas Connolly“, by Laura Price. Found objects, research notes, and a man discovering that his mother might have once been mixed up in a story involving airship pirates. It’s wonderful.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Sunday, May 1st, 2011 | | 1:05 pm |
where i’ve been.
I have this unfortunate problem of starting craftsy projects that I never finish.
I have this quilt, for instance. I started it last summer. It was going to be this big awesome project–I’ve made baby-sized quilts, as gifts, but never a full-sized quilt, and never one for myself. So that was the project. I plotted, picked fabrics, and within a couple of weeks I had a full and complete quilt top. And then the project entirely stalled, somewhere around early August. Okay, so I had an excuse, getting married and all, but still. So over spring break I said to myself, here’s a plan for your vacation, finish the damn quilt. I marched myself up to City Quilter, spent a pile of money on a backing fabric and a binding fabric and a quilt batting, bought some embroidery floss to tie the quilt (actually quilting something of this size being a bit beyond my skill at this point). And… and, well. During the two weeks I was on vacation, I managed to get the backing fabric assembled, pin-baste the whole monstrosity, and start tying before I got overwhelmed by the scope and gave up. A few weekends ago, I took an entire afternoon to work on the tying, and I estimate that I’ve got just under one-quarter of the quilt tied. In the process, I got bits of embroidery floss all over the house and scratched myself so badly on the basting pins that I’m surprised it’s not scarring. This quilt is REALLY BIG and kind of intimidating.
Anyway. My husband, in his infinite patience for (and intimate knowledge of) my ways, got me a book for Christmas, instructions for knitting smallish stuffed animals. These could be small projects, he said, and maybe I wouldn’t find them so frustrating. And they’re totally adorable.
I’ve just finished my first. It took about two weekends of work (weekends in which I also did other things, of course) and wasn’t too hard, although as you’ll see from the picture, it’s very clearly a beginner’s attempt.
Some of the problems I know how to fix (the body is weirdly shaped because I didn’t put in enough stuffing) and some I don’t (my seams are all messy and I have no idea how to do them better). But this is the first project I’ve completed since, god, since the quilt I made for Ursula, I guess. So I’m pleased.
The tiger isn’t the only thing I’ve been up to in the long blog absence, of course. But the rest is probably pretty predictable–working a lot, reading a lot, watching a lot of television I’m embarrassed to admit to, that kind of thing. I miss all of you.
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. | | Sunday, April 10th, 2011 | | 6:11 pm |
you know what, stuart, i like you.
Busy weekend, largely away from the internet, but with a couple of serious highlights. Most notably: seeing the Dead Milkmen last night.
The Dead Milkmen! Playing at Warsaw, in Greenpoint, which was, I don’t even know what to say about the venue. I loved it. It’s the Polish National Home, a.k.a. one of those immigrant-group meeting halls that were a big thing at the turn of the last century, and it’s been converted (part-time? full-time?) into a concert venue, but it’s still an old-school meeting hall. The main room where the bands play, it’s got one of those proscenium stages with beige-gold velvet backdrops. It almost felt like watching a show in the grade school gymasium, right down to the worn wooden floor with what looked like ball-court markings, except that my grade school gymnasium didn’t have fifteen-foot-tall oil paintings of famous scenes from Polish history flanking the stage. The side rooms, off the concert hall, had giant grey squares of linoleum on the floor and a scattering of institutional-looking cafeteria-style fourtops. The bar, in one room, had cheap Zywiec beer on draft; the “bistro”, in the other, served pierogi on small paper plates. It kind of reminded me of the Christmas parties we went to, once or twice, at the Knights of Columbus hall. I loved the whole place.
And the show was fabulous. (I even liked the opening acts! Which is totally not a given, since I like punk, but don’t, like, love it enough to like every single noisy angry band that calls itself punk. But the first opening band, the Party Photographers. They had this amazing big menacing reverb-y sound, and the lead singer had this phenomenal voice control, and, I don’t know. They were awesome.) It feels anticlimactic to not say more about the Dead Milkmen at this point, but they were great, right? What else can I say? They’re fun and awesome and quite possibly crazy, and it was a great show. (And yeah, “Punk Rock Girl” is as good live as you think it would be.)
Originally published at west of the moon. Please leave any comments there. |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.6){kind=small}
susansugarspun's journal
