Just a note.

Hello.

I’m currently working on a couple things for the Zen reboot, which I’m hoping to at least make a start on in time for NaNo (or, if I decide to not do NaNo, at least get enough done so I could start it in November if I wanted to).

My Safari tabs open right now include the Wiktionary entry for λέξις, the Online Etymology Dictionary, a Wikipedia article on Greek and Latin roots in English, and the third declension in ancient Greek.

I’m pretty excited for this fall, is all I’m sayin’.

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I should also mention that I’ve started a Tumblr for little things I stumble on that don’t quite merit a blog post, and hopefully a casual continuation of that photo-a-day project. Not much on it right now, but I’m working on having a bit More Brain this summer, which should hopefully also result in More Content.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Right, this book. I’ve been meaning to write about this book for a while now, but there was the finals, and the moving out, and now that particular braindeadness that comes from being home without anything in particular to occupy you, and it just didn’t happen.

I really have to be more proactive with this blog.

Anyway. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. N.K. Jemisin’s been on my radar for a little while now – Escape Pod and Pod Castle have featured her work a couple times – and while I enjoyed her stories they never quite grabbed me the way, say, a Pratchett novel tends to. (Although I realize this is a horribly unfair standard to hold anyone to; my love of the Discworld is by this point bordering on addiction.) The voice and craft were all great, but there was something a little… slow about them, I suppose. Not necessarily in pacing, just in tone. They knew where they were going and they got there in good time, but they did not exactly leave me breathlessly wondering how or when.

I started to realize my opinion of her work was somewhat flawed around the time I found “The Effluent Engine”, which I completely and unreservedly adore. Granted, though, there was always the possibility that this was a fluke – not only was it intentionally written with camper-than-usual sensibilities, but it was lesbian steampunk, and the day I am not overjoyed at the mere idea of lesbian steampunk is the day you will have to drag me to the crematorium because I will be dead.

In any case, I finally picked up 100KK near the end of April in a last-ditch attempt to distract myself from finals and terrible, terrible Early Review novels. And, well. It was not a fluke.

This is probably the point at which a normal review would start in with the plot summary, but I really don’t think there’s any way I can write one that would do it justice. This is partly just because I’m awful at summarizing (ask me what RafeDraft’s about someday, if you are a cruel and inconsiderate person), and partly because when you try to explain it, a lot of the plot sounds really, really cliché. The fish-out-of-water in a rigid aristocracy; the mortal/dangerous immortal romance thread; the warrior matriarchy; Yeine’s moral outrage at Arameri culture; the end, oh gods, everything about the end. But what’s spectacular about it is not so much that it creates something fresh and believable from old tropes, but that I didn’t even notice they were tropes until I’d finished the book. All of it has a reason, and all of it flows so naturally from the rest that there’s never a point that makes you stop and snort and say, “Oh, of course a god is interested in the Spunky Female Protagonist™.” You don’t have to. Because, 1. Yeine is far from just a Spunky Female Protagonist™, and 2. it just makes sense.

The one thing I was a little miffed about is that Nahadoth, a major character and the god of chaos, was – according to a blog post from the author – supposed to be essentially genderless. Or, all at once. That sort of thing. There was a perfectly good reason ey always appeared male in the novel (mainly, that Itempas is a jerk), but I don’t recall eir prior gender-fluidity ever being mentioned, and that’s the sort of thing I’d like to have been mentioned. There’s sequels in the works, of course, and I can only hope that they’ll find the time to delve a little deeper into that aspect of em.

A final point: the name of the series is “The Inheritance Trilogy”. It is now a dream of mine that someone, someday, will wander into a bookshop looking for Eragon and get epic political god-bothering fantasy instead. It probably won’t ever happen, but it would be fantastic.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

I am reading a book right now. I have been reading a bunch of books, actually, one of which I utterly adored and really need to write a proper review of, but right now, I want to talk about The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.

Dexter Palmer. This will be important. Give me a minute.

I got this book off of the Goodreads giveaway program, without much more than a glance at the summary because it was steampunk, okay, who isn’t going to spring for free steampunk. Good god, if you just want some good solid serious-business steampunk, don’t read this. Don’t even think about it. Go get The Difference Engine or something. This is not that kind of book.

I actually started to read it a couple months ago, when it first got mailed to me, and I almost immediately put it down, because the introduction was so incoherent and rambling and didn’t even try to make sense. I picked it up again a couple days ago more out of a sense of responsibility than anything else (Goodreads gives you more chances in the giveaway if you post reviews) and it did get slightly more coherent after that, enough that I managed to cover a good bit of narrative ground in between frantic attempts at figuring out how predicate structure worked.

And then, suddenly, out of nowhere:

“And this,” Astrid says, gesturing at a wiry gentleman wearing eyeglasses and a houndstooth suit in need of pressing, standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, looking slightly uncomfortable, “is Dexter Palmer, and he’s a—what?”

“I,” says Dexter Palmer. “Um.”

“He’s a novelist,” Astrid brays, and Harold looks at Dexter, at his right arm rubbing his threadbare left elbow. Harold sees the oaken trunk in the corner of Dexter’s filthy downtown loft with an enormous padlock on it, sees the tens of thousands of pages of handwritten manuscript that fill it. He sees the stub of the tallow candle on Dexter’s rickety wooden desk, purchased for a dollar-fifty at a rummage sale. He sees the short leg of the desk propped up with a seven-hundred-page study of phrenology, printed during the age of miracles. He sees Dexter’s eyes going bad by candlelight, a whole diopter lost with each late night. “Zounds, I am working on my masterpiece,” Dexter Palmer yells hoarsely, disturbing the neighbours. He slings a cup half-full of tepid chamomile tea at the wall, where it shatters.

“He’s writing a novel,” Astrid says brightly.

This is immediately followed by an incredibly long italics-filled spiel from a straw feminist about how science is patriarchal, interspersed with narrative mentions of how on the other side of the party Dexter simply cannot shut up about his novel and I think, honestly, if I did not find the whole thing so bizarrely endearing, I would have to hate this book to a degree previously reserved for Christopher Paolini and Heart of Darkness.

This may not be the best metaphor I have ever come up with, but this novel is what I have decided to think of as Tom Waits literature. Let me explain. Tom Waits has this thing where he writes songs that, by any reasonably objective standard of music, should be incredibly awful. At least half of them don’t even have tunes. He writes lyrics in gibberish faux-German or about men with faces on the backs of their heads, and alternately screams, growls, and mutters them over accompaniments that as often as not consist primarily of banging on whatever junk he had lying around. If anyone else tried this, no self-respecting record label would touch it, but Tom Waits knows exactly what he’s doing and makes no attempt to dress it up for anyone else, and somehow the sheer audacity of it all drags the whole thing out of “nonsense” and into “genius”.

I wouldn’t say Palmer goes that far, but the similarities are there, at least. Perpetual Motion by all rights should be a terrible book. The scenes are disjointed, there’s no indication of an overarching plot besides the fact that the same couple of characters keep showing up, and it simultaneously spells out its themes with the subtlety of a dead cat and makes absolutely no effort to indicate what it’s actually supposed to be about.

But it is, fundamentally, what it is, and it makes no attempt to hide that. It doesn’t try to make you like it, and paradoxically, that makes it a hell of a lot easier to. I can’t in all honesty recommend it; rather like Tom Waits, I’m not even sure if I’m enjoying it or just taken in by the novelty. But it’s certainly an interesting read.

Constance Miller vs. Juin Baize

This may be sort of redundant by this point, but apparently not redundant enough. Everyone has been talking about this whole Constance McMillan thing in Mississippi, how she was banned from her prom because she wanted to take her girlfriend, how there was a huge internet campaign about it, how they sent her to a fake prom but apparently she had tons of fun there so sort of a happy ending, yay!

Meanwhile at the exact same school a transgendered student named Juin Baize managed to attend for a grand total of four hours in female clothing before being tossed out.

I don’t want to say the Constance McMillan affair is not important or tragic, because it is. To a certain degree. But Constance McMillan was barred from her prom. Juin Baize (who reportedly prefers male pronouns) was barred from his school. As of this writing, the phrase “Constance McMillan” (with quotes) brings up 22,100 hits on Google, along with 295 news articles; the phrase “Juin Baize”, also with quotes, gets 1,290, and no news at all.

Barred from prom; barred from school. Media frenzy; no media at all, and indeed most of the hits that do come up are very recent and explicitly referencing the utter lack of notice for what happened to Juin compared to Constance. His mother has had difficulty finding work thanks to the suspension, and the harassment he got was so bad he couldn’t go out of the house. To top it off, the ACLU isn’t taking action because Juin doesn’t actually live in Mississippi anymore; he’s staying with friends of his mother in Florida, because the family they were staying with made him move out. Not all of them. Just him. His mother is still trying to get the money together to join him.

Dan Savage’s post includes a link for donations to help fund the move, but if you can’t do that, it’s just as important in this case to tell people. The most effective way to keep trans people oppressed is to be silent. If the internet is really so outraged about Constance’s prom, then there is absolutely no excuse for Juin’s suspension not to get the same response.

Update: Excellent post on Bilerico about Juin vs. Constance and why this shows – yet again – how transphobia and homophobia are intertwined. (Don’t read the comments.)

Pushing Daises

I keep wanting to do reviews here, and I keep realizing that I am epically bad at them. Reviewerspeak is a foreign tongue to me, and not one I enjoy – my way of explaining why I like something usually consists of enthusiastic swearing and gesturing, which is not a particularly professional way of getting the message across.

However, I do seem to be very good at picking out one small element of a work, and then going on a lengthy philosophical tangent about it. And so: Pushing Daisies.

To give a brief and general summary, I had not gotten five minutes into the first episode of this show before the enthusiastic swearing part began. Holy Jesus it is beautiful. It’s become something of a dead horse now to complain about your favourite shows being cancelled but this is one of those that really is a genuine tragedy, because I have not seen or heard of another show that did anything quite like Pushing Daisies did it.

But what really makes me happy – besides Lee Pace’s facial expressions and the eerie parallels to Zen and Lex – is that it is the only explicitly ace-friendly media I have yet encountered.

By “ace”, I mean “asexuality”, which may be odd because Pushing Daises does not actually say anything explicit about asexuality. What it does say, explicitly and entirely unequivocally, is that love is infinitely more important than sex, which is pretty much the most ace-friendly statement you can make.

I do realize that it’s heavily implied that Ned and Chuck, despite not being able to touch, have managed to have at least a kind of a sex life, but that’s not the point. The point is Chuck being more alarmed by the fact that she can’t hug Ned if he needs it than that she can’t kiss him. The point is Ned saying he doesn’t need everything he wants to be happy, just Chuck. The point is Alfred Aldarisio’s speech to Olive:

If I loved you… Then I would love you in any way I could. And if we could not touch, then I would draw strength from your beauty. And if I went blind, then I would fill my soul with the sound of your voice and the contents of your thoughts until the last spark of my love for you lit the shabby darkness of my dying mind.

I’ve seen people consider splitting off a perfectly good friendship just because they want some romantic contact and the other person doesn’t, and I think that’s the most impossibly stupid thing you could ever do, but it’s hard to really feel that when you’re surrounded by a culture that thinks sex is the ultimate expression of love, instead of one of many. Ned and Chuck are aware of this concept, and quite clearly believe it to be silly. So, Pushing Daisies, for fighting the trend and for making me happy in ways I didn’t even know I had the capacity for: thank you.

Now everyone has to go buy the DVDs this minute.

Oh, Amanda Palmer

Somewhere in my giant list of Very Abstract Posts That Never Happened, I had a thing about how Amanda Palmer was my new Marilyn Manson. Marilyn Manson was incredibly important to me when I was around fourteen years old, largely because he was one of the first out-of-the-mainstream things I ever got into (yeah, not far out of the mainstream, but keep in mind I grew up listening mainly to boybands). He was a gateway to a hell of a lot of things, including but not limited to crossdressing, Floria Sigismondi, a general appreciation for creepy shit, and – well – a whole lot of better music.

And then somewhere along the line he turned into a pretentious douchebag who thinks an album including “If I Was Your Vampire” is the pinnacle of artistic achievement.

So I thought, hey, Amanda Palmer! She’s rather like Marilyn Manson, in the whole wearing-scary-makeup-and-being-edgy department, and she is currently writing music that I like, and she says intelligent things a lot of the time! Clearly she is fit to fill the void in my life left by Manson and his artsy posturing.

And then this happened.

And just when I was willing to believe it had all been a benevolent misunderstanding, and Amanda Palmer is really listening to all of us and cares about minorities – this happened.

So, in true ironic form, Amanda Palmer really is my new Marilyn Manson. Complete with absurdly personal feelings of betrayal and post-artistic-breakup blues. I would mention Tom Waits here but that would probably cause him to say something absurd about gay people next week, and I’m not positive I could survive that kind of heartbreak.

Any way the wind blows

Just now, as I was walking out of the dining hall, I realized that it was uncommonly, almost eerily, quiet. No traffic, no student traffic, even though the sun was actually out today and the temperature was appreciably over zero.

Someone in the nearby dorm was playing piano. For maybe half a minute or so, I just stood and listened while they picked out, carefully and rather clumsily, the chord progression of what I eventually identified as “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

They reached the end of the first instrumental section. There was a pause.

And then a car drove past, and a few students came out of the dining hall behind me, and the usual noises of campus at noon returned. The anonymous piano player started in on the Scaramouche verse but it was harder to follow now, too quiet to compete with the rest of it.

I haven’t been having a great couple of weeks, but every so often I remember that things could be a lot worse, overall.

What I am doing.

The short version of this post: Nothing.

The long version of this post: Still nothing, but with added self-effacement and excuse-making!

What may now be obvious is that I’ve dropped off this photo-a-day thing rather a lot. The thing about photo-a-day is that my camera is, in fact, very inconvenient to carry around. I’m pretty sure I can fix this with a replacement lens cover – I lost one several months ago, and I’ve been swapping the leftover between both lenses when I change them out, but this means I can’t actually have all three components (body, main lens, telephoto) disassembled without leaving something open to the elements – but I have not yet managed to make the [eight-block] pilgrimage to the camera store to make inquiries, so for the most part my camera has been languishing at home.

I have also been reevaluating my original reasons for doing the challenge in the first place. (This may or may not be Alan-speak for “waaaaah this was more work than I thoooouuught”. I’m actually not sure.) In essence: I have not had the brain to make any of my obnoxiously abstract post ideas coalesce into something useful, and it’s rather depressing to come to my blog and only see post after post of what was just supposed to be a side project, and frankly, the way my life is right now I have an extremely small pool of available, interesting subjects to work from.

Basically, I would like to make more use of my camera, but I would also not like to fill up my blog with A Bunch Of Pictures I Took Because I Needed A Picture Today. Hopefully I will start putting a little more effort on getting Stuff in here, but I would like it to be Interesting Stuff I Am Doing Because I Like It, rather than, well… what I just said.

I was going to end this with some kind of “Stuff at least once a week!” promise but then I realized that was pretty dumb considering what I just said. So, anyway. I suppose what I can say is that I will make an effort not to be quite as much of a totally avoidant weirdo where my blog is concerned.

In the meantime, here’s Mika singing “Poker Face”.

Photo-a-day, Feb 12-18

Mnh. Reading week. One of these days I will recover enough brain to do an actual post about something but for now, here’s some photos.

February 12. Apparently I failed to take a photo today because I was busy helping classmates with their phonology assignment and watching Trigun. I can accept that.

Photo-a-day, Feb 5-11

February 5. I really need to clean up.