Weather's cooled down a bit, that's nice
Jul. 5th, 2025 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyMoonpie's foot looks better, we didn't end up having to take her for an x-ray at all.
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conuly
You think one plus seven seven seven makes two
Jul. 2nd, 2025 04:55 pmsovayI was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip torushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.
"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.
Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.
If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to
rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on."Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.
Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.
A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz
Jul. 3rd, 2025 05:00 pmconulyOn the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
***
Link
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
Link
The Way Up is Death, by Dan Hanks
Jul. 2nd, 2025 01:39 pmrachelmanija
In a prologue that's very Terry Pratchett-esque without actually being funny, an enormous floating tower appears in England, becomes a 12-hour wonder, and is then forgotten as people have short attention spans. Then thirteen random people suddenly vanish from their lives and appear at the base of the tower, facing the command ASCEND.
I normally love stories about people dealing with inexplicable alien architecture. This was the most boring and unimaginative version of that idea I've ever read. Each level is a death trap based on something in one of their minds - a video game, The Poseidon Adventure, an old home - but less interesting than that sounds. The action was repetitive, the characters were paper-thin, and one, an already-dated influencer, was actively painful to read:
Time to give her the Alpha Male rizzzzzzz, baby!
The ending was, unsurprisingly, also a cliche.
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Jeremy Greer
Jul. 1st, 2025 09:25 pmradiantfractureOf all the things to be grieving right now, this is a weird personal parasocial one. You have been warned.
( Jeremy Greer )
§rf§
( Jeremy Greer )
§rf§
J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large
Jul. 1st, 2025 03:58 pmsovayRabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:
I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.
I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,
rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.Readercon 2025 Schedule
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:50 pmoracneMy schedule is finalized! I didn't list participants in case there were changes.
Who will I see at Readercon next month?
The Works of P. Djèlí Clark
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 1:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor P. Djèlí Clark rounded out his first decade as a published author with a Nebula and a Locus for his fantasy police procedural novel, The Master of Djinn, and both those awards plus a British Fantasy Award for his monster-hunting novella Ring Shout. His short story "How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub" is short-listed for the Hugo this year. As a History professor at University of Connecticut, he investigates the pathways leading from West African storyteller/poets (griots, a.k.a. djèlí) to the American abolitionist movement. Help us celebrate the works of our honored guest!
The Purposes of Memorable Insults in Sci-Fi and Fantasy
Salon I/J Friday, July 18, 2025, 5:00 PM EDT
Some of the most quotable lines in science fiction and fantasy are zingers. Wit can do a lot to build a character, a world, and a universe, and has the ability to either support or undermine reader expectations. This panel aims to explore and elaborate on the use of wit—and especially takedowns—in literature, exposing how a verbal jab can serve as more than just a punchline.
Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
Salon G/H Friday, July 18, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
It's becoming increasingly common to hear of authors whose self-published work was so successful that they were picked up by a traditional publisher. But what of the authors who have gone the other way, by turning their backs on traditional publishing and going into self-publishing? Panelists will survey the varying reasons for making this transition, how authors have navigated it, and what this might say about the state of publishing overall.
Kaffeeklatsch: Victoria Janssen
Suite 830 Friday, July 18, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
Meet the Pros(e) party
Salon F Friday, July 18, 2025, 10:15 PM EDT
Program participants are assigned to tables with a roughly equal number of conferencegoers and other participants, and then table placements are scrambled at regular intervals so that everyone gets to meet a new set of people in a small-group setting. Think of it as a low-key sort of speed dating where you need never be the sole focus of anyone's attention, and the goal is just to get to know some cool Readerconnish people. Please note that this event will include a bar and is mask-optional, unlike most other programming.
The Works of Cecilia Tan [I'm moderating this one]
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 12:00 PM EDT
Our Guest of Honor, Cecilia Tan, has a publication history that spans Asimov's, Absolute Magnitude, Ms. Magazine, Penthouse, and Best American Erotica, among others. Writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy, especially as they intersect with erotica and romance, she is also the founder of Circlet Press, an independent publisher that specializes in speculative erotica. Her own writing earned a Lifetime Achievement for Erotica in 2014 from Romantic Times magazine. She also contributes to America's other pastime, baseball, in her role as Publications Director for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). Come hear our panel discuss Cecilia's many talents and accomplishments.
Un-Kafkaesque Bureaucracies
Salon I/J Saturday, July 19, 2025, 7:00 PM EDT
In fiction, bureaucracies are generally depicted as evil in its most banal form, yet many of the actual bureaucracies that shape our lives exist to protect us from corporate greed. How can—and should—we tell other stories about bureaucrats and bureaucracies, particularly as the U.S. stands on the precipice of disastrous deregulation? And might fantasies of bureaucracy (such Addison's The Goblin Emperor and Goddard's The Hands of the Emperor) be the next cozy subgenre?
The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction
Create / Collaborate Saturday, July 19, 2025, 8:00 PM EDT
In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how "2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides." Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?
(no subject)
Jun. 30th, 2025 01:06 pmaurumcalendulaI discovered yesterday that the 2023 movie Phantom is now on Viki! (I think it might've been there since Spring, but I only noticed now) It's one of the many adaptations of The Message and the most actiony and texually queer of them.
Speaking of fictional lawfirms, we finished new Matlock
Jun. 30th, 2025 04:29 amconuly( Season finale spoiler )
During the Christmas episode we saw the firm's acapella group, which might have just been an excuse to highlight one character's amazing singing voice. Anyway, they were singing White Winter Hymnal, and I'm going to just post two quick videos, the original version and a different acapella cover:
(Those lyrics can't be entirely right - surely the pack is swaddled in their coats, not swallowed?)
Anyway, you'll notice that in the first one they weirdly pronounce "the" with a "long e" (the vowel in pee) before the words "white snow". Does that strike anybody else as a weird place to do that?
During the Christmas episode we saw the firm's acapella group, which might have just been an excuse to highlight one character's amazing singing voice. Anyway, they were singing White Winter Hymnal, and I'm going to just post two quick videos, the original version and a different acapella cover:
(Those lyrics can't be entirely right - surely the pack is swaddled in their coats, not swallowed?)
Anyway, you'll notice that in the first one they weirdly pronounce "the" with a "long e" (the vowel in pee) before the words "white snow". Does that strike anybody else as a weird place to do that?
Crossover time!
Jun. 29th, 2025 07:48 pmconulyI was looking up fictional law firm names and you know how Angel has the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart? Apparently NCIS has Wolfram, Hart and Donowitz. No word on if they're evil. Are they evil?
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I don't change, I don't even notice the scene
Jun. 29th, 2025 09:52 pmsovayAs I hollered after the inapposite license plate of the SUV that had blown through the crosswalk without even thinking about stopping while we were in it, "Psalm 23? With that driving?" I am informed by spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.
(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)
spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)
(no subject)
Jun. 29th, 2025 10:40 pmaurumcalendulaI had fun with Escapade 35.5 even though I mostly just caught the vidshow stuff.
I apparently have a distinctive vidding style. Considering the amount of time I spend pulling my hair out over songs, it was really nice to see multiple people saying nice things about my song choices. Also, I'm delighted that Kandy Fong said the song I used for 'Can't Help Falling in Love' fit the vid so well!
I apparently have a distinctive vidding style. Considering the amount of time I spend pulling my hair out over songs, it was really nice to see multiple people saying nice things about my song choices. Also, I'm delighted that Kandy Fong said the song I used for 'Can't Help Falling in Love' fit the vid so well!
Been watching new Matlock with Jenn
Jun. 28th, 2025 07:49 pmconulyThe set and costume designers heard about blue-and-orange color schemes and just decided to run with it. I swear, they bought out everything blue in the store. Even the post-its are blue! And what isn't blue or teal is orange, or tan, or gold.
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Misc Books: Helene Hanff, Lauren Tarshis, Stuart Turton
Jun. 28th, 2025 01:12 pmrachelmanija
A sweet epistolatory memoir consisting of the letters written by a woman in New York City with extremely specific tastes (mostly classic nonfiction) and the English bookseller whose books she buys. Their correspondence continues over 20 years, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It's an enjoyable read but I think it became a ginormous bestseller largely because it hit some kind of cultural zeitgeist when it came out.
The graphic novel version! I read this after DNFing the supposedly definitive book on the event, Dark Flood, due to the author making all sorts of unsourced claims while bragging about all the research he did. The point at which I returned the book to Ingram with extreme prejudice was when he claimed that no one had ever written about the flood before him except for children's books where it was depicted as a delightful fairyland where children danced around snacking on candy. WHAT CHILDREN'S BOOKS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
The heroine of I Survived the Great Molasses Flood is an immigrant from Italy whose family was decimated in a flood over there. A water flood. It's got a nice storyline about the immigrant experience. The molasses flood is not depicted as a delightful fairyland because I suspect no one has ever done that. It also provides the intriguing context that the molasses was not used for sweetening food, but was going to be converted into sugar alcohol to be used, among other things, for making bombs!
My favorite horrifying detail was that when the giant molasses vat started expanding, screws popped out so fast that they acted as shrapnel. I also enjoyed the SPLOOSH! SPLAT! GRRRRMMMMM! sound effects.
A very unusual murder mystery/historical/fantasy/??? about a guy who wakes up with amnesia in someone else's body. He quickly learns that he is being body-switched every time he falls asleep, into the bodies of assorted people present at a party where Evelyn Hardcastle was murdered. He needs to solve the mystery, or else.
This premise gets even more complicated from then on; it's not just a mystery who killed Evelyn Hardcastle, but why he's being bodyswapped, and who other mysterious people are. It's technically adept and entertaining. Everything does have an explanation, and a fairly interesting and weird one - which makes sense, as it's a weird book.
JFC
Jul. 2nd, 2025 12:14 amconulyHow is it that we literally are talking on the internet, we have access to all the information, and people are still saying whatever bullshit they made up in their heads instead of taking a minute, a second even, to ask themselves "Wait! Is this even true?"
On a happier note, the newest episode of The Strange Case of the Starship Iris answered a question I thought we'd never get answered, which is "How on earth did Brian get a price on his head from three different mafias?" and - wow, beware the quiet ones, I guess.
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On a happier note, the newest episode of The Strange Case of the Starship Iris answered a question I thought we'd never get answered, which is "How on earth did Brian get a price on his head from three different mafias?" and - wow, beware the quiet ones, I guess.
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Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone
Jun. 27th, 2025 09:22 pmsovayAfter many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.
My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.
My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.